MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mallowdram | 2025-09-13 19:59:52+00:00
Wait until "world models" fail to work along these lines. Models are always wrong. They're useful only as interpretations, they can never reproduce, reference, or mimic the events in question.

Another great example is Tansley's ecological systems model that he worked on for over many years with influence from Forrester only for the Odums to develop models, attempt to reproduce them in controlled environments and watch them fail miserably.

The cybernetic, computational, systems, world models are illusions all. AI has the same limitations simply because the infinity of tasks can never be modeled or automated.

Most of the ideas in the article can be seen, very clearly and cleverly narrated, in Curtis's best series "All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace" particularly episode 2.
by zahlman | 2025-09-13 20:00:41+00:00
I was talking with a friend about this and came to the conclusion that people in certain lines of work should be held to a higher standard when it comes to situations like this:

* government officials (as you say), members of federal agencies, civil servants etc.

* journalists

* healthcare workers and emergency services personnel

* educators

There may have been more on my list, but it doesn't come to mind at the moment.

All of these are places where a mindset that glorifies or justifies political violence and death seems like it would be an impediment to actually doing the job properly, which is the only thing that would make me accept "cancel culture". Others may be morally unjustified in "crossing the line", but should not lose their jobs for it.

For me, the line is drawn where anyone proposes that anything a person said justifies or excuses killing someone. The "stochastic terrorism" argument is especially insidious: it attempts to launder "speech" into "violence" (and thus justify "an eye for an eye" etc.) by hand-waving at some vague notion of, basically, extremely non-imminent incitement. The idea is that convincing a wide audience of people to have a more negative impression of a group stochastically increases the number of members of that group that will die to violence. But none of the dots are ever actually connected in this argument; and taken seriously and applied even-handedly, it would make basically any form of political discourse impossible.

Initially, I thought Matthew Dowd's comments (I had very little exposure to them) didn't fall into that category — that they were simply made in incredibly bad taste. But I looked up some more of the transcript and, yeah, I can't excuse that. Certainly he wasn't as aggressive about it as, say, some Bluesky users. But part of it does fundamentally boil down to making the "fuck around and find out" argument, and "finding out" is just not supposed to involve being shot and killed.

This is fundamental for me; see e.g. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/svuBpoSduzhYjFPrA/elements-o... .
by piokoch | 2025-09-13 20:01:57+00:00
Well, I hoped too. The problem is that "lightweight" are not that lightweight, as they need garbage collection. So, in theory, one can create 100K threads on one machine, but in practice that's going to keep burning processor for GC cycles.

Another thing is what those lightweight threads are doing? If they play with CPU that's ok, you pay GC penalty and that's all. But if they access limited resources (database, another HTTP service), etc. in real application you face the standard issue: you cannot hit the targeted system with any data you want, this external system will backfire, sooner or later.

The good thing in reactive programming is that it does not try to pretend that above problem does not exist. It forces to handle errors, to handle backpressure, as those problems will not magically disappear when we switch to green threads, lightweight threads, etc. There is no free lunch here, network has its restrictions, databases has to write do disk eventually, and so on.
by AnEro | 2025-09-13 20:02:00+00:00
Sorry if you misunderstood, it is a nuanced take, I'm saying acknowledging one as a terrible person in response to flowery embellishments of their life isn't celebrating that death. My statement wasn't about political violence, rather, we shouldn't be punishing people for pointing out the false depiction of the dead. I think ideally we all should be mature enough to both mourn the loss of a human and also acknowledge who they really were.
by BrenBarn | 2025-09-13 20:02:26+00:00
> The change to STAR is something the states can do themselves and some states -- notably California with its large population -- have referendums. Put it on the ballot until it passes.

And then what? California already passed the citizen's redistricting thing to combat gerrymandering, and now it's being undone because it doesn't work (and in fact can be harmful) unless everyone does it. That's basically my point. Such reforms are ineffective unless they reach a tipping point, but the current system is designed mostly to preserve the status quo and prevent any such tipping point from being reached.
by int_19h | 2025-09-13 20:02:39+00:00
The reason why WHATWG was able to take over HTML like that is because all the people & companies that were actually making the browsers were onboard.

With C++, my impression is that most implementers simply aren't interested. And, conversely, most people who might be interested enough to roll a new implementation have already moved to Rust and make better use of their time improving that.
by reliabilityguy | 2025-09-13 20:03:09+00:00
> Even if he believed that himself, anyone who came to the stage to dispute him would receive death threats. Read the audience. He knew what he was doing.

This is far fetched. People who have sent the death threats are lunatics. If the number of people who are sending death threats is our new standard for the quality and importance of debates, then we should simply stop the debates. There are always unhinged people around. Where does it leave us?

> Let me document five very serious lies from him:

Sure. Some are maybe lies, some are his opinions, some are misleading claims, and the rest are his own beliefs. Still, anyone could have went in front of the mic and debated him for it. In my opinion, someone is a liar when they have a platform to lie, and no way for the public to engage, debate, and correct them. While Kirk's beliefs are very far from my own (e.g., I do not believe that election was stolen), I still think that what he did is needed today: speaking your mind, and being open to be challenged in public.
by albertzeyer | 2025-09-13 20:03:21+00:00
Why not use getaddrinfo_a / getaddrinfo_async_start / GetAddrInfoExW?

Or just use some standalone DNS resolve code or library (which basically replicates getaddrinfo but supports this in an async way)?

See also here the discussion: https://github.com/crystal-lang/crystal/issues/13619
by crazygringo | 2025-09-13 20:03:38+00:00
Google has been found to exert various monopoly behavior in certain markets like ads search. It's not a monopoly overall, like in cloud computing or office applications. And it's very much not a monopoly in hiring for these types of lower-level jobs. Not to mention these are all seemingly through contractors anyways, of which there are many, and they provide these types of services for multiple companies.

So I honestly don't know what you're talking about.
by toomuchtodo | 2025-09-13 20:03:39+00:00
Historically relevant, not legally in the current context. I sympathize with the distinction, but it is important if we are to consider that nations have borders and that will remain into the future. We should enable reasonable and tangible paths to citizenship, but a free for all is untenable. Otherwise, we arrive at the current situation where how the laws are applied changes from administration to administration.
by Retric | 2025-09-13 20:03:49+00:00
> energy per gram of fuel

That just not a metric that matters.

Fuel is north of 1c/kWh for nuclear reactors, +/- if you count various things as fuel costs, that’s inherently a big deal if you’re trying to compete with 2c/kWh solar.

> Fast reactors weren't pursued because of nuclear weapon proliferation risk

They also just have higher costs per kWh.
by wtbdbrrr | 2025-09-13 20:04:29+00:00
> assume the system will react to resist intervention

Systems don't do that. Only constituents who fear particular consequences do.

Systems also don't care about levels of complexity. Especially since it's insanely hard to actually break systems that are held together by only the "what the fuck is going on, let's look into that" kind. Hours, days, weeks, later, things run again. BILLIONS lost. Oh, we wish ...

At the end of the day, the term Systems Thinking is overloaded by all the parts that have been invented by so called economists and "the financial industry", which makes me chuckle every time now that it's 2025 and oil rich countries have been in development for decades, the advertisement industry is factory farming content creators and economists and multi-billionaires want more tikktoccc and instagwam to get into the backs of teen heads.

If you are a SWE, systems architect or anything in that sphere, please, ... act like you care about the people you are building for ... take some time off if you can and take care of must be taken care of, ... it's just systems, after all.
by zahlman | 2025-09-13 20:06:00+00:00
Dowd didn't say that it was good, but did seem to agree that it was justified:

> Dowd responded by saying about about Kirk: “He’s been one of the most divisive, especially divisive younger figures in this, who is constantly sort of pushing this sort of hate speech or sort of aimed at certain groups. And I always go back to, hateful thoughts lead to hateful words, which then lead to hateful actions. And I think that is the environment we are in. You can’t stop with these sort of awful thoughts you have and then saying these awful words and not expect awful actions to take place. And that’s the unfortunate environment we are in.”

(via https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/comcast-execs-criticize-...)

To me, that's approximately as bad.
by suzzer99 | 2025-09-13 20:07:13+00:00
Here's the shooter in a groyper halloween costume that his sister says is "from some meme": https://imgur.com/XeYByuq

"hey fascist! Catch! Up arrow, right arrow, three down arrow" is a video game reference from a video game called Helldivers 2 that groypers use all the time.

Every bullet casing had a different groyper meme on it. It's either a groyper or a really elaborate groyper false flag. Those are the only two options.

Acting like it's all a coincidence is just spreading disinfo. Thankfully the bots don't make it to HN very often, or this place would be a disaster.
by restalis | 2025-09-13 20:07:15+00:00
This tendency of requirement overloading, for what can otherwise be a simple solution for a simple problem, is the bane of engineering. In this case, if security is important, it can be addressed separately, e.g. for the underlying text treated as an abstract information block that has to be packaged with corresponding error codes then checked for integrity before consumption. The UTF-8 encoding/decoding process itself doesn't necessarily have to answer the security concerns. Please let the solutions be simple, whenever they can be.
by privatelypublic | 2025-09-13 20:07:31+00:00
> Viruses are not so complex that we would trivially overlook a feature that would literally change the phylogenetic classification in a dramatic way.

You might think that, but in the past two decades theres been so many "how did we miss that?" in so many fields. I'll let field experts bring specifics up- I only know popularized examples like Roman Concrete. And the ever-easy Mars unit-conversion error.
by armchairhacker | 2025-09-13 20:07:50+00:00
I doubt things are as bleak as the author states.

People don't get cancelled for expressing any political views, they get cancelled for expressing political views outside the Overton Window. Despite what social media may suggest, cheering the murder of anyone who's not a murderer or war criminal themselves is still taboo (social media is a heavily distorted reflection of reality similar in some ways to reality TV). Consider that nobody has been fired from their job for expressing sympathy towards Charlie Kirk (or Melissa Hortman or Brian Thompson).

Although the Overton Window shifts, traditional opinions are still protected by numbers. You're highly unlikely to be fired or ostracized because of something you posted 10 years ago if some of your bosses, colleagues, and neighbors have posted similar things. Most people admire the founding fathers today even though they owned slaves, while those same people condemn slavery and directly acknowledge the founding fathers were immoral in that regard; because they accept that in their time it was normal, and they were selfless relative to others in their demographic.

Furthermore, social media is not a dark forest, as the author alludes to: many people frequently post controversial opinions under their own name. These include "smart" people like Terrace Tao (and less famous people I know personally). If cautious people with widely-accepted political opinions don't express them, the only opinions you see are the fearless, controversial ones. This is already true and will remain true unless social media fundamentally changes, because controversial opinions get more attention, and people tend to hold them more passionately (so post more frequently). But still, posting widely-accepted political opinions that you personally hold is probably an overall good idea, because they can be an "anchor" for people with similar opinions who are confused why they're uncommon, preventing them from being radicalized.

Though the author certainly gets one thing right: posting fringe opinions under your own name in public is usually a terrible idea, and although you may be safe from government reaction, you can't avoid people around you (including your employer) reacting negatively.
by ComputerGuru | 2025-09-13 20:07:50+00:00
I disagree, there are too many variables and ultimately the end user would be th one that knows best. The proper solution isn’t having the library or application dev, who has no idea what kind of network connection the user is running, the type of dns server (caching or not, lan or remote, etc) or the name servers of the target domain and their performance or availability. This is all really the domain of the sysadmin.

The solution is to make it a properly non-blocking api.
by reliabilityguy | 2025-09-13 20:07:53+00:00
> But you can't just debate who lives and dies and push policy one way or another and then be shocked that the people being impacted by those opinions or decisions are going to want to cause violence towards you.

I am a bit confused. Are you saying that now we should stop debate hot topic because opinions/claims we voice during those debates can impact people and cause them to commit violence towards us?

Are you serious?
by martin_a | 2025-09-13 20:09:18+00:00
70-400 or 80-400 are "common" ranges for super telephoto lenses. Great shots are possible with them, I was able to use one for a day, it was fun switching between "rather" wide and very narrow.

Happy to read that some people out there are still going out and taking photos. My gear is sitting in a corner, is only touched once in a year when some "better pictures" are needed.

It's a shame, having a "good enough" camera in my pocket all the time really has ruined that hobby for me.
by petre | 2025-09-13 20:10:12+00:00
We don't know that yet, but it might be also driven by social media radicalization. I'm also curious of the shooter's motives. Judging from the bullet engravings he might have thought he was shooting an awful person, but still, why waste your own life like this? Their wife and kids who were at the scene and maybe some other individuals will probably become radicalized now. Why? It doesn't make any sense.
by reliabilityguy | 2025-09-13 20:11:20+00:00
> I think ideally we all should be mature enough to both mourn the loss of a human and also acknowledge who they really were.

I have a nice little trick for it: when you go to a funeral of a person in your family, or close to your family, who was an asshole, I bet you won't be saying to other people "yeah, sad, very sad. But, please remember, he was an asshole". Right? I would not -- not the time, nor the place.

Yes, Kirk is not a family (probably not yours, and definitely not mine), but the same standard of being polite and reasonable person should apply.
by looping__lui | 2025-09-13 20:12:57+00:00
As a fan of a sport that greatly relies on accurate weather forecasts with an interest in weather models my impression is that more supercomputer budget isn’t necessarily the issue (eg., more granular models can be less accurate) but the lack of data on the initial state is… Things like snow on mountains, soil conditions, vegetation, soil humidity and simply the problem of just having relatively few data-points makes stuff tricky… That stuff changes with season. I have seen some magic improvements coming from small shop companies tweaking the models here and there a bit - massively impressed. Now, running these simulations even further into the future - I have my doubt much useful prediction is gonna come out.
by fullofideas | 2025-09-13 20:13:12+00:00
Not sure about the timespan that you are referring to. Post covid hiring high, in the last 2 years or so, the hiring bar has been extremely high, in general. Not denying your experiences, may be it is even higher for you.

Personally, my experience has been that pre-covid, majority of interviewers were assessing your problem solving ability and if you can code the algorithm that you came up with. Getting the most optimal solution and fixing all edge cases for all problems in all interviews was not strictly necessary. But these days, even if you have the best solution coded up for 3 problems and missed one edge case in the 4th problem, you are not “good enough”. At one place, I was dinged for not thinking of the edge case before I wrote the program, even though I caught it while coding it up, in spite of having the write solution for the other 3 problems asked in the 2 coding rounds. It is a tough market, and probably tougher for you. Good luck mate.
by zahlman | 2025-09-13 20:13:13+00:00
> no one was fired due to their insensitive comments about her and her husband.

Who exactly made comments that attempted to justify or rationalize her death as a consequence of things she had said in the past?

And what does your article — which basically just establishes "Trump doesn't like Tim Walz and didn't consider Hortman's case as important" — have to do with that?

If you're referring to Senator Mike Lee's comment, I don't think it's anything of the sort. It comes across to me that Lee was speculating that the murderer was a "Marxist" (i.e., anyone he would consider more radical than Hortman). Political football, and offensive, sure. But not the same kind of thing. Besides which, can Senators be "fired"?
by bottlepalm | 2025-09-13 20:13:50+00:00
This is not just an accent, it’s extremely poor speaking and comprehension of English itself. Communication is painfully slow and you have to change the way you talk and your vocabulary as well.

After a week of that, interviewing someone who actually knows English feels like turbo charged discussion. I get through interview questions in half the time, with literally 10x more information communicated.
by martin-t | 2025-09-13 20:13:52+00:00
That's why term limits exist.

Currently, they are only used for some positions like presidency, are usually 2 terms and don't apply to other positions.

IMO:

1) We should get rid of presidents and other single-person positions altogether and replace them with groups of at least 5. Power concentrated in the hands of one individual attracts the worst individuals.

2) Term limits should apply to many more positions.

3) I am undecided whether the limit counter should be shared among all positions (i.e. if 2 terms is the max, you can serve 2 years as president, 2 as senator, or 1 as president and 1 as senator - changing position would not reset it). This would mean there would be no career politicians but also the politicians would be less experienced. The opposite is requiring people to ascend through the ranks (perhaps starting as low as a mayor of a town) but only allowing one term in each position. That way people can judge them on their past performance.
by 9x39 | 2025-09-13 20:14:31+00:00
Canon, Sony, Fuji, Nikon. Lenses map to camera system bodies, so it's hard to just recommend a particular lens to someone without context.

I personally think most brands' 70-200 f/2.8 delight more than any 55-210 'kit' lens, which is often f/3.5-5.6. This is just based on my experience and letting people who have never used an interchangeable lens camera take and develop shots.

If someone is serious and going to step up from a cellphone to do some of this, my advice is to not mess around with something cheap like the discounted old APS-C body and lens kits that are usually outperformed by a cell.

Get a recent mirrorless body with good IBIS, and buy a nice prime and a telephoto zoom. High resolution (40-60MP) bodies can enable some tremendous landscape or crop opportunities. Focus on what a dedicated camera does better than a phone - interchangeable lenses, incredible autofocus and high shutter speed action, bokeh and compression (lens dependent), etc. Full-frame 35mm vs APS-C is the primary decision you have to make, any kit you're getting is affected by it.

The physics of bigger lenses, quality of esp. the full-frame lenses, the quality of the large sensors are a real treat for even new photographers.
by jeroenhd | 2025-09-13 20:15:03+00:00
getaddrinfo_a is available, but not widely adopted (*BSD and Linux), probably because you can't guarantee it'll be available on every computer/phone/modem. This is only an issue if you're targeting POSIX rather than modern operating systems.

Windows 8 and above also have their own asynchronous DNS API on NON-POSIX land.
by montroser | 2025-09-13 20:15:22+00:00
Redirects of the 301 variety are inherently risky, since they are extremely hard to "undo". Browsers and proxies and everything else will (rightfully) cache 301's indefinitely and forevermore, since by definition, they are meant to be permanent. But "forever" is a very long time, and business objectives change, and fashion changes, and political and cultural climate changes... And so we tend to prefer to the 302 variety, even when it's a pretty sure thing.
by littlestymaar | 2025-09-13 20:15:47+00:00
> America and Ukraine both rejected the 3 point ultimatum though […]

I was going to say that you're drinking Russia propaganda out of the fire hose then I saw that:

> They have a casualty exchange ratio of 44:1 at this point

What the heck are you talking about, even Russian MoD communication isn't as ridiculous.

How do you think a country of 32 million inhabitants count withstand for three years against a country of 150M with such a grotesque figure (that's the kind of ratio you'd only see in colonial wars in the XIXth century against hunter gatherers). There was not even enough Ukrainian male in age of fighting at the start of the war to make that figure work.

> So yes, the bet is paying off.

Putin has reinforced his internal power, so yes the bet is paying off, that was the only real goal from the start. After all war is just the continuation of internal politics through other means.

> In that case events of the next year will probably shock you.

Ah yes, like the events of 2022 were supposed to shock us as well: The special military operation overthrowing the Nazi government of Ukraine by taking Kiyv in three days…