MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by nine_zeros | 2025-09-28 15:34:48+00:00
I don't know why this is being down voted. The white Christian nationalist movement absolutely is willing to burn America to get what they want - they are willing to be corrupt, elect corrupt, forget their religion, hurt the out-group, and lie to give plausible deniability while doing exactly that.

Downvoters: Prove that this administration is not corrupt and not hurting people instead of downvoting - or just accept the truth.
by CamperBob2 | 2025-09-28 15:35:02+00:00
It also depends on how panicked people are. Covid was never going to spread like ebola, for instance: it was worse. Bad enough to harm and kill people, but not bad enough to scare them into self-enforced isolation and voluntary compliance with public health measures.

Back on the subject of AI, I think the flat part of the curve has always been in sight. Transformers can achieve human performance in some, even many respects, but they're like children who have to spend a million years in grade school to learn their multiplication tables. We will have to figure out why that is the case and how to improve upon it drastically before this stuff really starts to pay off. I'm sure we will but we'll be on a completely different S-shaped curve at that point.
by mahirsaid | 2025-09-28 15:35:14+00:00
The whole idea of polarized opposite parties in the U.S. has gotten out of hand. like science is needed for humanity to further progress. To say the left needs to do this, and the right needs to do that is delusional in its own right. The joint effort comes first or should come first along with logical decisions not based on whether you like the opposite party or not. its about the nation as a whole.
by theptip | 2025-09-28 15:35:25+00:00
Right, this was my thought.

Can’t you just use a typing.Protocol on __getitem__ here?

https://typing.python.org/en/latest/spec/protocol.html

Something like

from typing import Protocol class Indexable(Protocol): def __getitem__(self, i: int) -> Self: ...

Though maybe numpy slicing needs a bit more work to support
by dragontamer | 2025-09-28 15:35:30+00:00
This is a discussion about the linked tutorials, is it not?

Look at the tutorials. Do you not see the lack of strategic discussion? Its evident from the outline.

There's no strategy here. There's no Joseki theory. There's no movement tutorial. There's no middle game, direction of play or other such tutorial.

---------------

Like read the tutorials I'm trying to describe. They're full of sound tactical advice but any beginner who only uses this set of tutorials will have difficulty on the strategic aspects of their game. I think Joseki theory would help them very much (as well as many other kinds of tutorials or discussion).

There's nothing wrong with one online tutorial to focus on tactics. But its also important that any reader (especially the beginners who come into this discussion) realize what they're missing. Joseki is perhaps the most obvious missing element from this set of tutorials.

IE: Every beginner coming in here won't know what to do for their first move of a real game even if they complete this set of tactical tutorials.

------

What's your idea of the readers coming into here? My mental model is that this is Hacker News, and that very, very casual beginners on the order of ~30kyu are going to start reading these tutorials and maybe start playing Go.

I think my advice from the first post is helpful to them. If you complete this set of tutorials, definitely study something like Joseki (or other ignored topics).

--------

Go isn't a game like chess. In Go, 80% of your pieces will often survive into the endgame. You don't need "strong" tactics because in the vast majority of cases, you can survive. The difference between "strong" tactics vs "weak" tactics is only a few stones or points of territory.

In contrast, the difference between playing in the correct direction of play and not is easily worth 20+ point moves, as you capture large swaths of territory. Maybe you as a ~single-digit-kyu or low-dan player have forgotten these kinds of mistakes. But I assure you that double-digit kyu / beginners will make these mistakes all the time.
by eagleislandsong | 2025-09-28 15:35:46+00:00
> weaponizing that against their adversaries

I understand your skepticism, but here is an interview from April 2025 with the founder of VYRIY, a Ukrainian drone company: https://militarnyi.com/en/news/vyriy-founder-compares-accura... According to him, Russian drones are far superior. "In terms of [Ukrainian drone vs Russian drone] quality, well, like 10% vs. 80%. It’s not even comparable,” Oleksii Babenko sums up.
by jhbadger | 2025-09-28 15:36:04+00:00
>Carl Sagan just might be my favorite non-fiction author. As Richard Dawkins said, he was incapable of constructing a bad sentence.

And Sagan was just so personable and seemingly humble. While Sagan basically agreed with Dawkins on most points as to the importance of science and reason and the dangers of magical thinking and religion, he lacked the arrogance and smugness that Dawkins has that often rub people the wrong way. I wonder what Sagan would have written had he lived into the early 21st century "New Atheism" period.
by kappadi3 | 2025-09-28 15:36:07+00:00
Puppeteer and Playwright are the main open-source options nowadays, both solid for HTML → PDF once your print CSS is sorted. Don’t forget proper page breaks (break-before/after/inside) — e.g. break-after: page works in Chromium, while always doesn’t. For trickier pagination you can look at Paged.js, and I’d test layouts in Chrome/Edge before automating.

Shameless plug: I run yakpdf.com, a hosted Puppeteer-based service if you want to avoid self-hosting. https://rapidapi.com/yakpdf-yakpdf/api/yakpdf
by pickledish | 2025-09-28 15:36:36+00:00
Agreed!

And, maybe I'm missing something, but to me it seems obvious that flat top part of the S curve is going to be somewhere below human ability... because, as you say, of the training data. How on earth could we train an LLM to be smarter than us, when 100% of the material we use to teach it how to think, is human-style thinking?

Maybe if we do a good job, only a little bit below human ability -- and what an accomplishment that would still be!

But still -- that's a far cry from the ideas espoused in articles like this, where AI is just one or two years away from overtaking us.
by jdc0589 | 2025-09-28 15:36:44+00:00
the redis average latencies are pretty surprisingly high to me, but can probably be explained by your lab setup/hardware.

1. im surprised the latencies for redis are as high as they are. single key lookup operator is very commonly <= 2ms in my experience. 2. your throughput looks pretty solid, which makes it even weirder that latencies are relatively high.

Like I said its probably just hardware though. Ive written a handful of redis backed services where the read APIs have a p99 10ms. In those instances the api infra wasn't anything too special, but it was a decent redis setup (elasticache of some middling tier).
by pbw | 2025-09-28 15:37:51+00:00
"I created the Alphanum Algorithm to solve this problem. The Alphanum Algorithm sorts strings containing a mix of letters and numbers. Given strings of mixed characters and numbers, it sorts the numbers in value order, while sorting the non-numbers in ASCII order. The end result is a natural sorting order."

https://web.archive.org/web/20210207124255/http://www.daveko...
by namibj | 2025-09-28 15:38:17+00:00
Not to mention a fail-safe MPPT would/should just crowbar the input if there's any potential for overvoltage.

Solar panels are current sources that waste their power into a long string of silicon PIN diodes that eventually reach their forward voltage and begin to eat up all that juicy current. You can just take the current and keep the voltage as low as you want, just make sure to take all the current or it's voltage will rise to let the diodes take the current you aren't using.
by MisterTea | 2025-09-28 15:39:54+00:00
This is what happens when you only talk to like-minded people and live in a bubble. There are still plenty of people I know who would reject foreign ideas simply because "pshaw. We can [do that/do it] better."

I mean I literally worked with a guy who got annoyed at the harmonized power cord I bought because it used IEC wire colors and "This is America where we use American wire colors, not that European shit. I taped the leads red white and blue!"
by beej71 | 2025-09-28 15:39:55+00:00
I was introduced to this game over 30 years ago. And since then I've been studying and playing on and off. And today I can safely say... I'm still horrible at it. :)

But, damn, this is a beautiful game. It's fun and there's no upper limit to the challenge. The way the game ends (by agreement that there are no further moves of benefit to either player) is amazing, as are the handicap rules (which make it so players of differing (to a point) strengths can still play all-out against one another).

The boards and pieces are works of art in themselves, and the game is steeped in tradition.

That said, the boards and stones can be expensive, so lots of people DIY which is also fun. There's a web page out there that talks about making boards with MDF and Sharpies. And you can buy melamine stones relatively cheaply, though if you can find glass or ceramic stones for a little more, they're much nicer.

When we were starving students in junior college and first learned about the game, we went out on a country road and gathered all the relatively small, round stones we could from the shoulder. Then we went to my parents' garage and found cans of black and white spray paint to paint the stones, and some leftover wood paneling that we cut in a square and lined with a magic marker.

The set was, arguably, offensively ugly. But I still have it in my closet.
by LegionMammal978 | 2025-09-28 15:39:59+00:00
> The point is, why predict that the growth rate is going to slow exactly now? What evidence are you going to look at?

Why predict that the (absolute) growth rate is going to keep accelerating past exactly now?

Exponential growth always assumes a constant relative growth rate, which works in the fiction of economics, but is otherwise far from an inevitability. People like to point to Moore's law ad nauseam, but other things like "the human population" or "single-core performance" keep accelerating until they start cooling off.

> And note, there are good reasons to predict a speedup, too; as models get more intelligent, they will be able to accelerate the R&D process.

And if heaven forbid, R&D ever turns out to start taking more work for the same marginal returns on "ability to accelerate the process", then you no longer have an exponential curve. Or for that matter, even if some parts can be accelerated to an amazing extent, other parts may get strung up on Amdahl's law.

It's fine to predict continued growth, and it's even fine to predict that a true inflection point won't come any time soon, but exponential growth is something else entirely.
by forrestthewoods | 2025-09-28 15:40:32+00:00
End to end audio latency is sooooo bad in games. On your desktop wired headphones a lot of AAA games will have 150ms of audio latency. Effectively no one measures this.

https://youtu.be/JTuZvRF-OgE

Android audio stack is notoriously easy to make very very bad. Too many layers of software abstraction. Later upon layer of buffering. It’s all so bad. :(
by TeMPOraL | 2025-09-28 15:40:38+00:00
Yes, this is an accurate description, and also completely irrelevant to the issue at hand.

At the stage of development we are today, no one cares how fast it takes for the exponent to go from eating our galaxy to eating the whole universe, or whether it'll break some energy density constraint before it and leave a gaping zero-point energy hole where our local cluster used to be.

It'll stop eventually. What we care about is whether it stops before it breaks everything for us, here on Earth. And that's not at all a given. Fundamental limits are irrelevant to us - it's like worrying that putting too many socks in a drawer will eventually make them collapse into a black hole. The limits that are relevant to us are much lower, set by technological, social and economic factors. It's much harder to say where those limits lay.
by temp0826 | 2025-09-28 15:40:50+00:00
Very cool, we had a couple of these (along with a couple HP-UX and SGI boxes, amongst a sea of Sun workstations) at my first gig as a Unix administrator. It was such a treat to see the diversity of the proprietary *nix world when Linux was taking over (this was the late 00's when their fates were clearly written at a megacorp that kept them around mostly for contractual obligations).
by dreamcompiler | 2025-09-28 15:41:19+00:00
While we're talking about German museums, the Deutsches Museum in Munich [0] is ... astounding. They have Konrad Zuse's Z4 electromechanical computer [1] as well as a million other interesting things. Well worth a visit, but allow yourself plenty of time. Like a few days.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deutsches_Museum

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z4_(computer)
by jsnell | 2025-09-28 15:41:28+00:00
It's the only benchmark I know of with a well-behaved scale. Benchmarks with for example a score from 0-100% get saturated quite quickly, and further improvements on the metric are literally impossible. And even excluding saturation, they just behave very oddly at the extremes. To use them to show long term exponential growth you need to chain together benchmarks, which is hard to make look credible.
by rectang | 2025-09-28 15:41:59+00:00
Since the US Civil War, it has been the feds forcing the ex-slave states into granting representation for their minority populations. States don’t have the power to force fair elections in other states without the feds — so the appreciation for the feds is understandable among those who believe in equal representation.

Sclerotic severe gerrymandering of every seat in the House of Representatives, enabled by the Roberts Court, though, is new.
by HeavyStorm | 2025-09-28 15:42:11+00:00
When you get a bunch of files (let's say 1000+) without leading zeroes, this is a blessing. But I get the author's frustration, the expected behavior is not there, instead, he gets magical sorting that is wrong for his use case. I'm not sure what the ux should be, and maybe the algorithm here could be smarter, but it's a trade-off.
by JimDabell | 2025-09-28 15:42:24+00:00
Take a step back and look at what you are saying:

> If someone disagrees with me (on this specific topic), it absolutely doesn't mean they are a junior. It means they lack knowledge and experience. This is a fact.

You think it’s impossible for anybody to have an informed opinion that disagrees with yours. You literally think yours is the only possible valid opinion. If that doesn’t set off big warning bells in your head, you are in dire need of a change in attitude.

This conversation is not productive, let’s end it.
by heavenlyblue | 2025-09-28 15:42:25+00:00
I mean the issue is that British people are so uptight about the government id card when a) oyster/credit card allows somebody to track all of their movement b) there's plenty of information collection that combined can be used against you c) driving license is de facto gov id at the moment. The ship had sailed, you are fighting against the wrong thing and that's why this battle will be lost.
by dangus | 2025-09-28 15:43:07+00:00
So when we all die and everyone on HN in the future grew up in a different era where all the symbols available on your keyboard are expected to be supported, will they want that early 2000s look where shit doesn’t work or is that just an arbitrary decision based on nothing?

Is YC a nostalgia-fueled organization or are they supposed to be investing in new technology?
by pdonis | 2025-09-28 15:43:35+00:00
> treating the `+` operator the same as you would an interface method

In other words, you agree that the Python type hint system does not give you a good, built-in way to express the "Addable" type.

Which means you are contradicting your claims that the type the article wants to express is "unknown" and that the article is advocating using "Any" for this case. The type is not unknown--it's exactly what I said: "doesn't throw an exception when using the + operator". That type is just not expressible in Python's type hint system in the way that would be needed. And "Any" doesn't address this problem, because the article is not saying that every pair of objects should be addable.

> "I can't express 'type which supports the '+' operator'" is an insanely esoteric and unusual case

I don't see why. Addition is a very commonly used operation, and being able to have a type system that can express "this function takes two arguments that can be added using the addition operator" seems like something any type system that delivers the goods it claims to deliver ought to have.

> unsupported in many languages

Yes, which means many languages have type systems that claim to deliver things they can't actually deliver. They can mostly deliver them, but "mostly" isn't what advocates of using type systems in all programs claim. So I think the article is making a useful point about the limitations of type systems.

> it's disingenuous to use it as an excuse for why people shouldn't bother with type hinting at all.

The article never says that either. You are attacking straw men.
by Inufu | 2025-09-28 15:43:56+00:00
Author here.

The argument is not that it will keep growing exponentially forever (obviously that is physically impossible), rather that:

- given a sustained history of growth along a very predictable trajectory, the highest likelihood short term scenario is continued growth along the same trajectory. Sample a random point on an s-curve and look slightly to the right, what’s the most common direction the curve continues?

- exponential progress is very hard to visualize and see, it may appear to hardly make any progress while far away from human capabilities, then move from just below to far above human very quickly
by amadio | 2025-09-28 15:44:30+00:00
At CERN, software stacks are created centrally and software distribution for experiments is done with CVMFS (https://cernvm.cern.ch/fs/), an HTTP-based read-only FUSE filesystem.

EESSI (https://eessi.io) has taken this model further by using CVMFS, Gentoo Prefix (https://prefix.gentoo.org), and EasyBuild to create full HPC environments for various architectures.

CVMFS also has a docker driver to allow only used parts of a container image to be fetched on demand, which is very good for cases in which only a small part of a fat image is used in a job. EESSI has some documentation about it here: https://www.eessi.io/docs/tutorial/containers/
by rmunn | 2025-09-28 15:44:33+00:00
NOTE IN ADVANCE: I'm generalizing, naturally, because talking about specifics would require an essay and I'm trying to write a comment.

Why predict that the growth rate is going to slow now? Simple. Because current models have already been trained on pretty much the entire meaningful part of the Internet. Where are they going to get more data?

The exponential growth part of the curve was largely based on being able to fit more and more training data into the models. Now that all the meaningful training data has been fed in, further growth will come from one of two things: generating training data from one LLM to feed into another one (dangerous, highly likely to lead to "down the rabbit hole forever" hallucinations, and weeding those out is a LOT of work and will therefore contribute to slower growth), or else finding better ways to tweak the models to make better use of the available training data (which will produce growth, but much slower than what "Hey, we can slurp up the entire Internet now!" was producing in terms of rate of growth).

And yes, there is more training data available because the Internet is not static: the Internet of 2025 has more meaningful, human-generated content than the Internet of 2024. But it also has a lot more AI-generated content, which will lead into the rabbit-hole problem where one AI's hallucinations get baked into the next one's training, so the extra data that can be harvested from the 2025 Internet is almost certainly going to produce slower growth in meaningful results (as opposed to hallucinated results).
by cdrini | 2025-09-28 15:45:06+00:00
> This perspective relies on seeing Chinese lives as worth less than American lives.

I'm not sure I follow this. If I was to summarise GenerocUsername's argument it would be "the Chinese government is less concerned with making their economy green, and if the US begins taking an economic/influence hit to make it's economy greener, it'll be yielding an economic advantage to China, which will canabalise more global industry in a non-green way, resulting in a net worse environmental outcome." They're claiming basically a fundamental ideological difference between the countries on climate change that, coupled with a claim of zero-sum international industry, means long term environmental outcomes are better if the US is a dominant international player today.

Sidestepping the argument itself which I believe has a number of key weaknesses (as outlined by others in the comments), can you go over how you're linking that to a devaluation of Chinese lives?
by zahlman | 2025-09-28 15:45:45+00:00
> Srid states his opinion on the gender survey question under a topic titled “Nix Community Survey 2023 Results”. This response, a week later (see next point below), gets moved to a separate thread and gets unlisted (meaning, nobody can reach it without a direct link) by a moderator.

The problem is that communities want to have (or at least tolerate having) these demographic surveys in the first place. The easiest way to avoid identity politics drama is to avoid identity politics, and the easiest way to avoid identity politics is to minimize and discourage mention of identity. pg was right (https://www.paulgraham.com/identity.html).

Open source is for everyone. The OSI is abundantly clear about this. For any given project this means everyone in principle; there is no obligation to check whether you have collected all the identity Pokemon. If your group is small this is impossible and if it is large then it is either inevitable or a failure is not your fault (and trying to force the issue is in fact the discriminatory thing). Besides which, the identity Pokedex doesn't exist in the first place. Why even invite the argument about the categories that need to be considered?

You don't draw a circle by adding more sides. You draw it by using a damn compass.
by hedora | 2025-09-28 15:45:47+00:00
Traditionally, these are called display ads.

They require more effort on the part of the site that produced the content, but are much more lucrative for that site.

Since most of the internet has been low-effort algorithmic slop for the last twenty years, tracking ads are more popular. They let low quality sites “steal” audience impressions from higher quality sites by displaying ads to people that happened to visit both sites.

I think personalized ads / algorithmic targeting (and even collecting the datasets that enable it) should be banned.
by jhbadger | 2025-09-28 15:46:13+00:00
>apparently Go is a bit of an old person's game in Japan

Yes. Part of the reason Yumi Hotta's manga (which the anime was based on) was written was to get younger people into the game, and it is credited in part for reviving the popularity of the game in Japan. Traditional board games like Go and Shogi have faced a lot of competition from video games over the past few decades.
by breuleux | 2025-09-28 15:47:08+00:00
> Looking at information systems as far back as the first coordination of differentiating cells to human civilization is one of exponential improvement.

Under what metric? Most of the things you mention don't have numerical values to plot on a curve. It's a vibe exponential, at best.

Life and humans have become better and better at extracting available resources and energy, but there's a clear limit to that (100%) and the distribution of these things in the universe is a given, not something we control. You don't run information systems off empty space.