MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jacquesm | 2025-09-04 07:31:34+00:00
> I'd be totally fine with another country drone striking American gangs.

You mentioned weddings. The moment you say 'gangs' you are assuming more knowledge than you can reasonably be expected to have. Unless of course presence on a boat is proof of being in a gang.

> "Due process" is a legal concept in Anglo law that describes the legal process required for the sovereign to deprive a subject of life, liberty, or property. The Anglo concept has no applicability to what the military can or cannot do to foreigners.

You may have noticed this - or not, you're a lawyer, after all - but ordinary people have this thing called 'ethics' that gives them a hint about what is and what isn't right or permitted. It's crazy, I know, they don't even need laws to be able to do so. On average people have a pretty good idea what is right and what is wrong even when there are no bits of paper and togas involved. And bombing foreigners off the coast of their own countries or in international waters without provocation is very much wrong - at least in my book.

A good test if you think something is wrong is to try to meditate on what you would feel like if the situation were reversed. If it was you and/or your family members on a boat off the coast of your own country and some other country decided to bomb you.

> And I'm not aware of any western nation having an equivalent to due process that applies to military action.

Absent due process you exercise a thing called 'restraint'. It is why for instance Ukraine isn't indiscriminately bombing the Russians, and because they don't have it is is why the Russians are indiscriminately bombing the Ukrainians. It shows that Ukrainians value the life of people in general, whereas the Russians appear to care only about the life of people with their own citizenship (and even then, plenty of times they do not but they appear to at least have some difference).

What you can do and what you should do is a massive difference.

> The U.S. didn't provide anything resembling "due process" before it nuked Hiroshima or Nagasaki or bombed Dresden.

Indeed, they did not. It may surprise you that this leads to mixed feelings in many places.

> It makes no sense to use the word "right" to describe what the U.S. as a sovereign state can or cannot do to foreign actors on foreign soil.

We are not discussing capability here. Nobody doubts the US has that capability.

> The U.S., as a sovereign state, can do whatever it wants because nations exist within a state of anarchy as to each other

International law is actually a thing, but if we for the moment ignore that what you are describing is not anarchy, it is war.
by GistNoesis | 2025-09-04 07:32:27+00:00
Minesweeper is a probabilistic game, that's why you should use probabilistic tools to solve it.

For example you can use a particle filter to approximate the distribution of mines. Every time you obtain new information you update the filter so that only distributions compatible with constraints remain.

Once you have an approximation to the distribution of mines you can calculate the probability of each spot being a mine. You can also calculate statistical indicator like the Information Gain of each action.

A good strategy is therefore to play low mine probability with highest information gain. But there is a trade-off, when the mine probability is non-zero. So you need to look-ahead.

Fortunately thanks to the mine distribution approximation you can also simulate any actions and their consequences, because you can use your approximation of the distribution to predict which number will be revealed upon a click.

So an even better strategy is to unroll the game tree for the best few candidate moves based on some heuristics, and calculate the cost gain probabilities after a few moves.
by Mikhail_Edoshin | 2025-09-04 07:33:51+00:00
Tognazzini wrote a magazine column with all the downsides: overly funny, non-academic, etc. I think Tog meant something like selecting commands from a menu vs using a command line across a range of applications. Anyway, studies like that must be somewhere in Proceedings of CHI, I guess. (Just checked bibliography in "Tog on interface", but nothing seemed to match. Found a comparison of different types of menus, but that's different. But also relevant: I guess most people would say using pop-up menu right at the mouse cursor will be faster than a fixed one at the top of the screen, yet the experiment shows the opposite.)

Mousing implies things are visible and you merely point to them. Keyboard implies things are non-visible and you recall commands from memory. These two must have a principal difference. Many animals use tools: inanimate objects lying around that can be employed for some gain. Yet no animal makes a tool. Making a tool is different from using it because to make a tool one must foresee the need for it. And this implies a mental model of the world and the future, i.e. a very big change compared to simply using a suitable object on the spot. (The simplest "making" could be just carrying an object when there is no immediate need for it, e.g. a sufficiently long distance. Looks very simple and I myself do not know if any animals exhibit such behavior, it seems to be on the fence. It would be telling if they don't.)

I think the difference between mousing and keying is about as big as of using a tool and making a tool. Of course, if we use the same app all day long, then its keys become motor movements, but this skill remains confined to the app.
by magicalhippo | 2025-09-04 07:34:32+00:00
> 'Additive' here means that if u(K1) is defined as the unknotting number of the knot K1, and u(K1#K2) the unknotting number of the knots K1 and K2 joined together, then u(K1#K2) ≤ u(K1) + u(K2).

Kinda like the triangle inequality[1] of knots?

I recall the triangle inequality was useful for several cases in Uni, if so I guess I can see it might be a similarity useful inequality in knot theory.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triangle_inequality
by aurareturn | 2025-09-04 07:34:33+00:00
from the most modern cities to the most distant rural regions

Because 30 years ago, the vast majority lived in villages and barely had running water/electricity. Today, these villages are mostly empty. People who live there are older people who do not want to live in cities or can't afford to. But even in villages today, they have electric cars, solar panels, ride hailing, and plenty of conveniences.
by wickedsight | 2025-09-04 07:34:39+00:00
I was watching a TV show on Prime for the past months. They introduced ads last month and I instantly returned to piracy for this specific show. I hope my main steaming service (for local content) doesn't get the same idea. I'd happily pay extra if they add 4k, but I don't like being extorted into paying (over 50%) more for the same service.
by aredox | 2025-09-04 07:34:58+00:00
Will Dig1t reply to this? Will he try to show this to the many vaccine sceptics he knows of and update us on how they reacted?

Because usually that's what happens when you "debate" with vaccine sceptics: they just accuse you of being mean/pretentious/know-it-all/arrogant/etc., they move goalposts, they switch subjects, or they completely ignore you, disappear and come back later elsewhere asking the exact same "questions" as if your discussion never happened.

Because they have reached a point where hey are so much wrong that admitting it would be admitting they have been very stupid, very unjust and very bad people. And it requires a lot of backbone to own such a personal failure. So instead they double down.
by rswail | 2025-09-04 07:35:02+00:00
The file editing is an I/O issue, not a character issue.

The I/O drivers could translate as necessary, that's the point of using an explicit character to mean "new line" as opposed to either "carriage return" or "line feed".

Effectively moving away from explicit carriage and paper controls to a character that was explicitly internal to mean to generate whatever carriage/paper controls were needed on output/editing etc.
by imron | 2025-09-04 07:35:05+00:00
> The ROI is clear if it delivers even 10% productivity gain

What if what feels like a productivity gain is actually a productivity loss?

https://mikelovesrobots.substack.com/p/wheres-the-shovelware...

(see link in the article to a study showing developers thought AI gave them a 20% gain in productivity, but measuring this showed they instead had a 20% loss)
by 4gotunameagain | 2025-09-04 07:35:21+00:00
> There is a real difference between the two; there must be because they're in different places.

That is according to our human perception. For example a single, uniform 4D object could have a projection in 3D that appears as two distinct 3D objects. I am not claiming that a fourth spacial dimension exists, only that we cannot possibly know what exists.
by dns_snek | 2025-09-04 07:36:09+00:00
That would not surprise me at all given what I've observed in a couple of people who outsource the thinking part to LLMs. One of them has dropped at least 20 IQ points and went from being able to grasp complex concepts with ease to needing an LLM to confirm that indeed, 2+2=4 (only somewhat hyperbolic).
by don_esteban | 2025-09-04 07:36:53+00:00
1) maybe it was different in 50's, 60's, when I was around, plenty of profs at the university were non-communists in 1989. The communists as a percentage of working population was always low (<11%?), so what you suggest could not have been a generally applied rule, the math just does not work. I assume if you wanted to get to a leading position in a plant/office/university, you needed to be communist. If you refused, that typically meant no promotion. You must have really pissed off the local party boss if it came to your kids could not get to good school. Never a smart move. Probably not a smart move to piss off Irwings if you live in New Brunswick, Canada, either.

2) jokes are jokes, exxagerating a kernel of truth to the point of absurdity is what makes the joke. The truth is, the salary of prof was never anything special, but was marginally better than the salary of average worker. There were some highly (i.e. 2x, maybe even 3x?, salary scales overall were really flat) paid worker occupations, miners were one of them (maybe due to work hazard). The way to get the luxuries was not through money, but through connections (yes, mostly communistic ones).

3) shit happens (the accompanying text talks about a fire in the main/only paper-mill making toilet paper in Czechoslovakia), there were queues when the rumor spread 'there will be bananas in the local fruit&vegetables shop'. There were people panic buying toilet paper at the start of COVID also, maybe its a local specialty :-)

One anecdote I remember from my youth was people routinely taking their windshield wipers off when parking somewhere out (those were notoriously in short supply and easy to steal). So yes, there were supply problems, no rose glasses, but nothing extreme.

As with everything, there is too much polarization: some people remember only the bad stuff and it was a hell on earth for them, others remember only the good stuff and emphasize that. As always, the truth is in between.
by dmurray | 2025-09-04 07:37:03+00:00
How about a seventh: in solidarity with people who are facing censorship or oppression.

Like, if only dissidents and malcontents use a VPN (or TOR or HTTPS or E2E encrypted messaging apps) then if you want to reduce dissent, you can just round up all the VPN users and have them shot. If everyone uses VPNs for normal internet use, that becomes impractical.
by crossroadsguy | 2025-09-04 07:37:07+00:00
On the contrary so far to me only the so called non-technical users' VPN use cases have made any sense to me - "I want to access/do this site/streaming/p2p. I can't do this without a VPN. Hence I am using a VPN". That's it. No drama, no virtue signalling, no lecturing. Just a need.

It's the technical users whose myriad VPN use cases rather baffle me which in most cases eventually achieve little to none other than some sort of feeling of satisfaction or maybe placebo.
by hebelehubele | 2025-09-04 07:37:19+00:00
> Among the most egregious cases are those of an 82-year-old woman with Alzheimer’s jailed for six weeks and of a single mother separated from her young children. When the mother was released after 53 days she found the children begging on the streets.

> At that point in May Israel had detained 6,000 people under its “unlawful combatants” legislation, which allows indefinite imprisonment without charge or trial, official data released after legal appeals showed.

> “I remember [the 82-yo woman with Alzheimer's] limping badly toward the clinic. And she’s classified as an unlawful combatant. The way that label is used is insane,” the medic said. Photographs confirm his presence at Anatot at the time.

The indefinite detention under dubious justifications without charge or trial. Such a profound violation of human rights and dignity, but it's OK, because they're "animals".
by alkonaut | 2025-09-04 07:37:21+00:00
Technically, how does the "every UI action is a commit on a DVCS graph" work? Would every application that is a native étoilé app use this api to construct its UX and document formats? And every app that is not would _not_ have this?

That feels like an ambitious but perhaps misdirected invention of a new paradigm because you'd basically have a native text editor and two other utilities which use it, and then the other five dozen apps would not?
by knorker | 2025-09-04 07:37:32+00:00
So you're saying there's no right and wrong decision on whether to make your own OS because Meta has not decided whether it's a public corporation with fiduciary duty or a kindergarten for OS hobbyists to have unproductive wasteful but fun projects in?

So that's like saying there's no right or wrong answer on whether to leave your 15th floor apartment a normal morning via the stairs, or by jumping out of the bathroom window. Yes, actually, there is. Unless your goal is to go splat.

"Will this make the product better", "will this make the product deliver sooner", "will this be a net positive to the company's bottom line" are all objective, though hard, questions.

> Very related to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Is%E2%80%93ought_problem

Nonsense. The company already has many many oughts already. Otherwise words mean nothing, and the "right answer" to an interview question about hashmaps is to strip naked and start humping the trash can.

And on my tennis analogy, it's objective that one way or the other allows a gives player to win more games. So we can call it "better". Even though you can still argue whether you "ought" to try to win.
by JeremyHerrman | 2025-09-04 07:38:00+00:00
Pen-based handhelds designed around writing seem to gravitate to larger form factors than phones.

I'm surprised nobody's mentioned the similarity in size to the Apple Newton MessagePad from the 90s:

Original MessagePad: 184 x 114 mm (7.25 x 4.5 in)

reMarkable Paper Pro Move: 195.6 x 107.8 mm (7.7 x 4.24 in)

No comparison in thickness though, with the Newton being about 3x the thickness of the reMarkable (19 mm vs 6.5 mm).
by sergeyprokhoren | 2025-09-04 07:38:18+00:00
This is a fairly common problem. Data is often transferred between information systems in denormalized form (tables with hundreds of columns - attributes). In the data warehouse, they are normalized (data duplication in tables is excluded by using references to reference tables) to make it easier to perform complex analytical queries to the data. Usually, they are normalized to 3NF and very rarely to 6NF, since there is still no convenient tool for 6NF (see my DSL: https://medium.com/@sergeyprokhorenko777/dsl-for-bitemporal-... ). And then the data is again denormalized in data marts to generate reports for external users. All these cycles of normalization - denormalization - normalization - denormalization are very expensive for IT departments. Therefore, I had an idea to transfer data between information systems directly in normalized form, so that nothing else would have to be normalized. The prototypes were the Anchor Modeling and (to a much lesser extent) Data Vault methodologies.
by awanderingmind | 2025-09-04 07:38:48+00:00
There is a lot of focus in the comments on the authors' credentials and, apparently, their writing style. It is a pity, because I think their discussion of scaling is interesting, even if comparing LLMs to grid-based differential equation solvers might be unconventional (I haven't convinced myself whether the analogy is entirely apt/valid yet, but it could conceivably be).
by d--b | 2025-09-04 07:40:59+00:00
This is because your question is an infrastructure question, not a data engineering question.

Sure it would be better if the engineers knew about infrastructure, but they don't have to know about it.

And honestly, the weeds of physical data transfer between computers is actually very complex, and I think data engineers should leave it to the pros rather than screwing around trying some stuff that's guaranteed to fail either regarding security, performance or caching.

Data engineers should know about how to deal with data content, not data transport. If that's what your role is about, you should re-brand it.
by ryandv | 2025-09-04 07:41:35+00:00
In a dynamic language where code that produces such a side effect is admitted by the (lack of) compiler/typechecker, sure; however a static checker would probably ensure, before runtime, that said binding indeed refers to a str, now and forever.

But I realize now the point of ancestor's comment is that you don't have such a guarantee in a dynamic language - hence the tendency to lean more on REPL-oriented development, highly interactive live runtime environments, tight TDD feedback loops, etc...
by Certhas | 2025-09-04 07:41:39+00:00
Take a finite tape Turing machine with N states and tape length T and N^T total possible tape states.

Now consider that you have a probability for each state instead of a definite state. The transitions of the Turing machine induce transitions of the probabilities. These transitions define a Markov chain on a N^T dimensional probability space.

Is this useful? Absolutely not. It's just a trivial rewriting. But it shows that high dimensional spaces are extremely powerful. You can trade off sophisticated transition rules for high dimensionality.
by rswail | 2025-09-04 07:42:31+00:00
I fully agree, but we're talking history here, before Unix existed.

The confusion about "LF" (Unix) vs "CR" (Apple) vs "CR/LF" (MS/DOS & Windows) is because we didn't have an explicit "Line End" character in 7-bit ASCII.

There was "EOT" (Ctrl-D/ASCII 4/EOF in Unix) , "ETX" (Ctrl-C/ASCII 3), and other characters that were used to mean other I/O, including ones that didn't match the ASCII definition like Ctrl-S/Ctrl-Q to stop/start I/O, and Ctrl-Z to mean EOF (MS/DOS & Windows).
by dlcarrier | 2025-09-04 07:42:47+00:00
I recently came across redumper when trying to archive all of my old games, only to realize that there's no way to image the audio and data tracks into a single image with dd. I really hope that CD/DVD/BD-ROM images get better support, now that we're more likely to need them.

I'd love to be able to save the output of redumper into a single file and mount it, so it appears like a real drive.
by coldtea | 2025-09-04 07:42:50+00:00
>Are you saying this was already happening, just as much, under Obama, say?

Are you saying that only this particular type of government abuse matters, so if prior governments didn't do this particular thing, then they're A-OK no matter whatever else they did?

As for your strawman:

--

According to Department of Homeland Security (DHS) data from fiscal years 2009 to 2016, more than 3 million individuals were formally removed from the country during the Obama administration. Annually, between 58% and 84% of these removals were so-called "summary removals" carried out through legal procedures such as "expedited removal" and "reinstatement of removal," which do not involve a hearing before an immigration judge. On average, about 74% of removals during this period fell into these categories. https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/obama-deportations-court/

--

No police intervened for those 3 million people either (except to deport them summarily).

But the guys that took them didn't wear masks (maybe), so that's ok.
by tiniuclx | 2025-09-04 07:43:43+00:00
For us that spend a lot of time on the internet, it's easy to forget that most people are not that different from you. I believe comments online, on Hacker News on otherwise, tend to be made by people with fairly extreme views - you have to feel something very strongly to shout your opinion into the internet! But most people are, well, normal, including you. Step out of your bubble every now and then and you'd be surprised at what good may come out of it.
by baq | 2025-09-04 07:44:28+00:00
I'm just saying what Anthropic is saying: individual models are printing money. The problem is all the capital needed to get the next model before the previous ones are obsolete; investors capitalize the business because the future models are expected to print even more money, at least a few months ago. It's increasingly obvious that the new models won't print as much money as expected to justify the expenses, but if they all stopped training today they'd be swimming in cash in a couple years.
by mellosouls | 2025-09-04 07:44:39+00:00
Yes, me too - he reminds me of the iconic (UK) public school teacher, shepherding bright but wayward charges through a complicated discussion.

While he doesn't throw blackboard dusters at them, he prods and harumphs when the egos and waffle of dons has them momentarily forget they aren't doing this in class but broadcasting to the nation...
by scott_w | 2025-09-04 07:45:39+00:00
> Why must a concept be empirical and objective?

Because otherwise it's your word against mine and, since we both probably have different definitions of consciousness, it's hard to have a meaningful debate about whether bats, cats, or AI have consciousness.

I'm reminded of a conversation last year where I was accused of "moving the goalposts" in a discussion on AI because I kept pointing out differences between artificial and human intelligence. Such an accusation is harder to make when we have a clearly defined and measurable understanding of what things like consciousness and intelligence are.
by gyomu | 2025-09-04 07:45:49+00:00
> Apple seems to be abandoning its Xerox PARC influences as the old guard retires and passes away (RIP Steve Jobs, Larry Tesler, and Bill Atkinson)

Haven't those people not had any influence on Apple for a very long time now? Steve has been dead for 15 years, Larry & Bill last worked there ~ 30 years ago.

There's definitely been a "change of the guard" at Apple, but it's not from Xerox PARC people...
by bambax | 2025-09-04 07:48:18+00:00
> the characters are ethically moral

How is it ethical to drown every single human, including children, because you're displeased with what they do?

And how is it ethical to also destroy "the animals, the birds and the creatures that move along the ground" which have nothing whatsoever to do with human wickedness??

This is exactly what a Bond villain would say. Today, Bond villains are usually considered the acme of evil.
by actionfromafar | 2025-09-04 07:48:19+00:00
Elementary was/is perfectly positioned to adopt Objective C and now that Swift is open source, it too.

Ideally it would have adopted gnustep too but I understand that might have been a tall order to get working. But adopting Objective C and now Swift should have been a no-brainer, at least as a first class supported way of interacting with the APIs, if they didn't want to abandon Vala for themselves.

Instead it's become some kind of Vala Purity Contest it feels like.