MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by nailer | 2025-09-11 20:48:20+00:00
> Happiness is not a single metric you can use to determine what is best.

If you mean happiness is not the only metric, we're agreed.

> Sacrificing to have a rewarding, independent life without children ... is definitely not an any way inferior to a “happier” one raising kids.

In the way that it makes makes most people less happy, it is.
by xdennis | 2025-09-11 20:48:37+00:00
What is so surprising to us who know history is that the Irish are supporting the colonizers. Jews are in their homeland. It's the Arabs who are colonizers.

There are 38 million Americans who identify as Irish. Is America the Irish homeland? No, it's Ireland.

To those who say Jews are colonizers: where is the Jewish homeland?

I've heard people say Poland, where Auschwitz is, thus revealing their true colors.
by sevg | 2025-09-11 20:48:44+00:00
Long-time (Neo)Vim user, tried Helix for a few months but just couldn’t get on with it.

It felt too inflexible (not just from lack of plugins), and there were numerous annoyances like save always changing file ownership to the current user, the buffer not reloading when a file is changed externally, no way to highlight (only) trailing spaces, dot repeat doesn’t always work (because the motion/selection comes first) etc.

But mostly I much prefer the way Vim does selection and motions and actions etc.
by nailer | 2025-09-11 20:48:48+00:00
> What part is the Socratic method?

This part:

> A quick example: Someone says they don't believe in objective morality. He responds with "do you think hitler was objectively evil?".

> B) yes, and now you have conceded.

Yes, it makes the person look silly because the only answer that seems correct is yes, because there is obviously objective evil.
by tlaverdure | 2025-09-11 20:50:09+00:00
> Another implication of having just one single server: there is only one place for network requests to go.

> In the dream SQLite plus LiteFS world, you have all the advantages of SQLite and all the advantages of a fully replicated multi-writer database setup. Any individual server can go down without causing any downtime for the application as a whole, and every user has a full copy of the application and all its data, running extremely close to them.

These are some of the problems I’m working on solving with Litebase (alpha), which runs on SQLite and distributed storage. Most SQLite solutions rely on replicating data between nodes, but I’m taking a simpler approach by using distributed storage for durability, availability, and replication, combined with a lightweight consensus system between primary and replica nodes.

https://litebase.com

I’m working on getting a public alpha ready, but you can check out the project so far. I’ll create a thread on Hacker News once things are ready.
by MBCook | 2025-09-11 20:50:20+00:00
I heard a stat the other day in the Dithering podcast, I’m not sure from where, that said that foldable phones are something like 1.7% of the market in the US.

If that’s close it’s not why Samsung‘s market share increased so much. That was for ALL foldable phones of all brands. That wouldn’t make statistical sense.

There are people who like foldable phones. Apple does not have them. And Samsung‘s market share went up.

Thats all we know. The rest is a catchy headline.
by LinXitoW | 2025-09-11 20:50:29+00:00
Which facts? Do you have some facts that explain why Apple did this move? Because all the facts I know of paint a picture of Apple throwing a massive tantrum at any kind of consumer protection rulings they might be subject to. They would ABSOLUTELY make their products worse in the EU to make uninformed voters and consumerist victims blame the very government agencies protecting them.

This feature happens on the phone, not the AirPods. There is no reason at all why this shouldn't be available in the EU, except the consumer friendly need to provide the API for the feature to other device manufacturers.
by mothballed | 2025-09-11 20:52:31+00:00
>Imagine that defense

There is no need to "imagine" -- many of them were found not guilty, and their defenses are openly available. You can pull up the cases, and I think the situation was a little beyond a sort of one liner defense or anything like that. Brandon Caserta also was featured in several interviews and commented on it, for a briefer view of his situation.

Either way I think we should be concerned that the government is generating violent conspiracies against the government while intentionally trying to drag 3rd parties along with it. I also just kind of object to calling something "foiled" when the entity foiling it appears to have likely been the one generating it in the first place.
by nick_ | 2025-09-11 20:53:10+00:00
I'm also Canadian. Your interpretation of Kirk's "mission" is curious.

To the rest of us, his "open discussion" was clearly and obviously rhetorical. The public performances that made him famous were undoubtedly designed specifically to incite college students into making clumsy arguments they weren't prepared for. Not only is that bad faith and predatory in the context of political debate, but Steven Crowder came up with that schtick.

Blaming democrats/liberals for his death is also curious. Could you expand on how you're so sure about that? As far as I know, no suspect nor motive is known at this time.
by tptacek | 2025-09-11 20:53:11+00:00
Bing's answer, which is a prominent callout box listing East Asians at 106, Ashkenazim at 107-115, Europeans at 100, African Americans at 85 and sub-Saharan Africans at "approaching 70" is wildly, luridly wrong. The source (or the sole source it gives me) is "human-intelligence.org", which in turn cites Richard Lynn, author of "IQ and the Wealth of Nations"; Lynn's data is essentially fraudulent.

Anybody claiming to have a simple answer to the question you posed has to grapple with two big problems:

1. There has never been a global study of IQ across countries or even regions. Wealthier countries have done longitudinal IQ studies for survey purposes, but in most of the world IQ is a clinical diagnostic method and nothing more. Lynn's data portrays IQ data collected in a clinical setting as comparable to survey data from wealthy countries, which is obviously not valid (he has other problems as well, such as interpolating IQ results from neighboring places when no data is available). (It's especially funny that Bing thinks we have this data down to single-digit precision).

2. There is no simple definition of "the major races"; for instance, what does it mean for someone to be "African American"? There is likely more difference within that category than there is between "African Americans" and European Americans.

Bing is clearly, like a naive LLM, telling you what it thinks you want to hear --- not that it knows you want rehashed racial pseudoscience, but just that you want a confident, authoritative answer. But it's not giving you real data; the authoritative answer does not exist. It would do the same thing if you asked it a tricky question about medication, or tax policy, safety data. That's not a good thing!
by JodieBenitez | 2025-09-11 20:53:37+00:00
We are 68 million and between hunters and sport shooters we have 5 million firearms owners for 10 million firearms. It's not on par with the US of course but I'd say firearms are pretty common (and it's not even counting illegal ones) and frankly it's not difficult nor long to acquire a good bolt action rifle and learn to shoot an apple at 200m. Long story short: I don't think lack firearms control is the issue in the US, there must be something else.
by tempfile | 2025-09-11 20:53:58+00:00
Here was a cute idea I thought of. Divide the triangle into 4 by joining the midpoints (a "triforce" shape). The four triangles are congruent, each equal to a quarter of the larger triangle. Generate a uniform 1/4 probability event in your favourite way (flip two coins) and accordingly choose one of the triangles to contain your point. Repeat this indefinitely to get an exponentially small triangle containing your point.

I think this should be a uniform distribution by symmetry. Obviously the boundaries of the triangles never get picked but that's a measure 0 set.
by el-salvador | 2025-09-11 20:54:28+00:00
> You can come here with $3,000 in month and social security and live a very nice lifestyle. The downside is, it has begin to price out an exclude many of the citizens

It seems that every new apartment in San Salvador is being built to cater that income bracket. In the coastal region is even more. It's pricing out 97% of the Salvadorans who earn less than $3000 a month.

Judging from the instagram accounts of my friends in El Salvador, they are no longer taking local vacations. A week vacation to Mexico or Colombia, even including airfare, can be cheaper than a local one.
by A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 | 2025-09-11 20:55:09+00:00
I honestly don't know enough to share. And the stuff I do know or could share would only get me in trouble in this context. That said, none of this information is really hidden. But if you only have few months left, I would just try to enjoy it. It is highly unlikely you will get that kind of quiet time after school is over.

Fwiw, the article does actually list viable ways of bypassing some of the restrictions
by StopDisinfo910 | 2025-09-11 20:55:38+00:00
> how could the EU let there be such a stark gap between them?

It doesn’t. A significant share of the EU budget actually goes toward helping the poorest members in catching up.

> You've got the data in front of you showing that outcomes are, by and large, the same across the US and Europe

Sorry but the data shows the reverse of that. I’m not wasting your time. You are in denial.

The US has high consumption but garbage metrics of approximately everything else. The GINI coefficient is extremely high. The infant mortality rate is poor. Life expectancy is bad for an OCDE country. Homelessness is so high you could believe it’s a developing country. Imprisonment rate, awful, literacy rate, very poor for a developed nation, social mobility, very low, the list goes on and on.

The USA is paradoxical in that it’s the only rich democracy which actually doesn’t take care of its population.

I’m glade you have the privilege of being rich there and I know you have been indoctrinated from birth into believe the US is exceptional, still, the numbers don’t actually look that good when you look at them.
by Syzygies | 2025-09-11 20:55:42+00:00
I coauthored the paper "Trailing the Dovetail Shuffle to its Lair" which solved the GSR model for riffle shuffling in closed form, leading to the recommendation to shuffle a 52 card deck seven times.

Your picture is a great geometric way to think about riffle shuffling. Your n-simplex represents a sorted deck of n cards. Choosing a point uniformly at random in this simplex makes the needed choices all at once to predetermine an arbitrary number of riffle shuffles. Think of k riffle shuffles as a single 2^k shuffle (as if you had 2^k hands); we can now study an "a-shuffle". Scale the n-simplex by a factor of a. Where does our random point end up? Either view all of space as tiled by your n-cubes, or reduce all coordinates mod 1. Either way the random point ends up in some n-simplex described by a different (or the same) order (mod 1) of the coordinates. That's your shuffle.

For a single shuffle of two cards, doubling the 2-simplex ("up-triangle") covers three up-triangles and one down-triangle, so the odds of reversing the cards is 1 in 4. This makes sense if you imagine two "stowaway" cards face up, placed at random in a face-down deck. Shuffling the deck, to reverse these cards they can't both be in the same packet, and being in different packets only reverses them half the time.

Increasing "a" for two cards, one sees the up and down-triangle counts converge to a 1:1 ratio. The error "fringe" looks like a numerical integration error.
by DavidSJ | 2025-09-11 20:55:52+00:00
Circling back to the original topic: at the end of the day, whether it makes sense to expect more brain-like behavior out of transformers than "mere" token prediction does not depend much on what the transformer's original creators thought, but rather on the strength of the collective arguments and evidence that have been brought to bear on the question, regardless of who from.

I think there has been a strong case that the "stochastic parrot" model sells language models short, but to what extent still seems to me an open question.
by jjice | 2025-09-11 20:56:51+00:00
That's a good question. I think I might classify that as solving a novel problem. I have no idea if LLMs can do that consistently currently. Maybe they can.

The idea that "understanding" may be able to be modeled with general purpose transformers and the connections between words doesn't sound absolutely insane to me.

But I have no clue. I'm a passenger on this ride.
by johnnyanmac | 2025-09-11 20:57:27+00:00
Debates SHOULD be about 2 parties seeking truth. In reality, it's about brining people over to your viewpoint and garnering support.

There's many ways to do that, but centuries of debate etiquette describe bad form and dishonest means to "win a debate". Despite the events here, it is generally bad form in an exchange of words to incite violence against an opponent. And that's often what Kirk does, or did.

>Facially, they're theater. But a system's purpose is what it does, and these performances serve as a venue/foundation to hone/push messaging

Yes. Before we sigsrcoated it, we just called this propaganda. Propaganda is not a debate. The most dangerous discovery in early social media was that a spewing of propaganda (aka, arguments not all based on reason nor a goal to further humanity) will still get you a following, no matter how badly you use. Becsuse saying those words rouse the thoughts of those who are either prone to propaganda, or simply embolden those who already had those thoughts but werre too scared to admit it.

A decade of refinement later, and look where we are.
by atonse | 2025-09-11 20:58:31+00:00
I absolutely loved reading this. It's such an excellent example of a situation where Computer Science principles are very important in day to day software development.

So many of these concepts (Big O, temporal and spatial locality, algorithmic complexity, lower level user space/kernel space concepts, filesystems, copy on write), are ALL the kinds of things you cover in a good CS program. And in this and similar lower level packages, you use all of them to great effect.
by imiric | 2025-09-11 20:59:28+00:00
I understand the risks, but just because they theoretically exist doesn't mean that they pose an active threat in all scenarios, or that they can't be mitigated.

The idea of locking the system down completely and preventing anyone from accessing it is technically more secure, but it creates many practical issues for tech-savvy people who want full control over their devices, which is the vast majority of the GrapheneOS user base.

If SELinux can mitigate the risks, then sure, let's use that. I don't really care what the technical solution is to this problem.

I'm just saying that:

a) As a user of an OS I want to be allowed full control over my device and not have babyproofed functionality because "it's for my own good". That is the realm of walled garden OSs from most major corporations which I deliberately avoid by using GOS in the first place.

b) My personal threat model doesn't involve using a bunch of untrusted applications, and I'm fine with trading some security for convenience. If the risks from choosing convenience can't be mitigated, then my OS should be flexible enough to allow me to make that choice. Other OSs can do this, so why can't GOS? I'm inclined to believe that there's no technical reason for it, but it's something that maintainers simply don't want to support. Which is fine, it's their project and their prerogative, but then let's not pretend that this is a discussion about security.
by danbruc | 2025-09-11 20:59:47+00:00
To the dead comment Israel agreed to the UN partition in 1947, and then Arabs started a war to kill all the Jews there.

You do not even understand what the UN general assembly does, it expresses majority opinions, it does not make legally binding decisions. That means the UN partition plan is only what a majority considered the best solution, not a legal decisions to divide Palestine. And the Palestinians vehemently opposed that solution and later violently its implementation.

And should one really be surprised that the Arab neighbors attacked Israel? The Jews had just occupied half of the Palestinian land, violently displaced hundred thousands of Palestinians, and established their own state on Palestinian land.
by Jun8 | 2025-09-11 20:59:57+00:00
Not fiction but I love this part in Feynman’s The Pleasure of Finding Things Out:

“When he was very small we used to rock him to bed … and tell him stories, and I’d make up a story about little people … they lived in the ventilator; and they’d go through these woods which had great big long tall blue things like trees, but without leaves and only one stalk, and they had to walk between them and so on; and he’d gradually catch on [that] that was the rug, the nap of the rug, the blue rug …”
by thinkingtoilet | 2025-09-11 21:00:02+00:00
It's funny, I can't get ChatGPT to remember basic things at all. I'm using it to learn a language (I tried many AI tutors and just raw ChatGPT was the best by far) and I constantly have to tell it to speak slowly. I will tell it to remember this as a rule and to do this for all our conversations but it literally can't remember that. It's strange. There are other things too.
by nunobrito | 2025-09-11 21:00:19+00:00
Why would I ever trust a gov agency whose expertise is deceiving their oponents when they publicly announce/leak that a specific hardware is more secure than others for them to break? That is the all the more reason to keep distance.

> Tor app which you mistakenly took to be integrated when they simply showed the app and it running on the OS

Putting the two things together and endorsing is the same as placing a knife and a tomate on the kitchen table and not expecting them to be used together.

That distro is willingly promoting that journalists and other critical crafts use a service directly created/maintained/funded by the same governments they are trying to hide from. There exists I2P which solves all those attack vectors without ambiguities, but for "reasons" it isn't adopted. Ah.. "licensing model" was the reason last time we talked.

> "GrapheneOS has long been suspicious about the revenue values it receives." GrapheneOS Foundation is a registered Canadian non profit that declares it's accounts and has filed accounts registered against them for this year and last year too. Nothing is suspicious.

Is it public somewhere? If not: that is pretty suspicious for a non-profit. Because you endorse Tor (US intelligence-sponsored tool), you endorse Signal (US intelligence sponsored tool) so why don't you go public about where your money is coming from?

About chinese devices let's be realistic: Google™ Pixel devices are also built in China by Foxconn. Reusing your argument: I'm choosing to be spied only by one side of the globe rather than both sides. Yes, my personal preference is to be spied by eastern powers rather than western ones when possible to choose between bad choices.

I'm not alone on this criticism about the hardware and you know it.
by ankit219 | 2025-09-11 21:00:21+00:00
The difference is implementation comes down to business goals more than anything.

There is a clear directionality for ChatGPT. At some point they will monetize by ads and affiliate links. Their memory implementation is aimed at creating a user profile.

Claude's memory implementation feels more oriented towards the long term goal of accessing abstractions and past interactions. It's very close to how humans access memories, albeit with a search feature. (they have not implemented it yet afaik), there is a clear path where they leverage their current implementation w RL posttraining such that claude "remembers" the mistakes you pointed out last time. It can in future iterations derive abstractions from a given conversation (eg: "user asked me to make xyz changes on this task last time, maybe the agent can proactively do it or this was the process last time the agent did it").

At the most basic level, ChatGPT wants to remember you as a person, while Claude cares about how your previous interactions were.
by tlaverdure | 2025-09-11 21:00:36+00:00
A lot of similarities but I believe Turso replicates data between nodes.

Litebase writes data to a tiered storage system (local, network, and object) for easier distribution. Using SQLite's VFS API I've also implemented a different type of storage that allows the primary to write data without full consensus with replicas. It's kind of like a multi-versioned log structured merge tree.
by pawelduda | 2025-09-11 21:01:19+00:00
So that's the new default for Rails? Seems like a new way for people to shot themselves in foot, for those who are used to the usual postgres + separate services setup. Especially that it's advertised as simpler and therefore is tempting to try out without considering such edge cases. I mean, it's the usual route (from my experience) for successful Rails apps to scale horizontally
by JackSlateur | 2025-09-11 21:02:53+00:00
Static and analytic guardrails ??

Unless you are writing some shitty code for a random product that will be used for some demo then trashed, code can be resumed to a simple thing:

Code is a way to move ideas into the real world through a keyboard

So, reading that the future is using a random machine with an averaged output (by design), but that this output of average quality will be good enough because the same random machine will generate tests of the same quality : this is ridiculous

Tests are probably the thing you should never build randomly, you should put a lot of thoughts in them: do they make sense ? Do your code make sense ? With tests, you are forced to use your own code, sometimes as your users will

Writing tests is a good way to force yourself to be empathic with your users

People that are coding through IA are the equivalent of the pre-2015 area system administrators that renewed TLS certificates manually. They are people that can (and are replacing themselves) with bash scripts. I don't miss them and I won't miss this new kind.
by rickdeckard | 2025-09-11 21:03:13+00:00
The relevant question for Apple is here:

Will those users buy OTHER headphones than Apple then, or still buy Airpods...?

From my observation the "properly locked-in" Apple user buys Airpods and mostly replaces them with newer Airpods when needed, because of Apple's artificial advantage in ecosystem interoperability (the exact reason of the dispute with the EU)
by seec | 2025-09-11 21:03:15+00:00
It's funny you say that. Renewables are "cheap" precisely because a lot of the labor cost is offloaded to cheap labor countries with low regulations. There is basically no solar panel market outside of China, and that says something. It's a very messy process and benefits largely from China's willingness to not care.

Every single big renewable project is heavily backed by government and subsidies. Wind is big in Germany, because gov pushed it very hard, not because it's naturally competitive.

So far, I see a lot of ideologues pushing the "cheaper" argument even though it hasn't been true at all, and the long-term prospect don't look very good compared to nuclear. But it has more political support, so it is made to be more "competitive" and that's basically all there is to it.

Even residential solar only makes sense when people who install it get paid a lot more than the bulk electricity actually cost, if people had to pay themselves for both panels and storage it is largely a loss compared to regulated market price for electricity in many places in Europe.