MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mothballed | 2025-09-26 17:42:35+00:00
>Court interprets the law, invalidates the law. You can't have the POTUS sign, execute, interpret, and invalidate laws.

see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45388993 as to why it takes all three branches agreeing on the constitutionality of a law for it actually to be put in effect and why that doesn't create the kind of dictatorship you're envisioning.

>is every time a new executive comes in, he can invalidate not just the executive orders but all laws passed by the previous administration, on a whim; without review, evidence, or argument he can shut down agencies and choose not to enforce any laws that are politically expedient.

POTUS is bound by constitution, even if SCOTUS thinks following the constitution is unconstitutional. This doesn't create an unchecked executive -- the legislature can also check the executive by impeaching him if he violates the constitution.

>You'd have to go back to 1929 to see that kind of spending level. Since then, we went through a great depression and got a New Deal for America, which means the Federal Government has a larger role. We can surely revisit that role, and that's kind of what's happening right now. But it's wrong to say that the spending levels circa 1930s are somehow ideal of more constitutional without presenting more evidence.

Yes exactly, it was circa the 30s when the apparatus of the state really cranked up to exceed the constitutional constraints of the federal government. The courts would create a more lasting correction to the problem, but that doesn't mean POTUS isn't also bound to stop executing all the unconstitutional laws. A lot of this stems from fraudulent portrayal of intrastate commerce as interstate commerce, which means a great deal of the actions of DEA, ATF, FDA, EPA, etc cannot legally be funded nor most of the wildly unconstitutional provisions of the cherished tyrannical civil rights act.
by ojosilva | 2025-09-26 17:42:44+00:00
Sure!

Yeah, definitely it's a coding agent zoo out there. But you can actually notice the polish in CC. Codex looks promising, a more naked look, I hope they invest in it, it's OSS and built in Rust, nice.

Qwen has that same jumpy scrolling as Gemini, and too many boxes, but it works well with Cerebras.

Coding agent product managers out there: stop putting boxes around text! There's no need! In Gemini, the boxes are all of different sizes, it's really ugly to look at. Think about copy-paste, multiline are all messed up with vertical box lines. Argh! Codex, which only has delicate colored border to the left, has a ctrl-t shortcut that is mandatory in TUIs: transcript mode, a ready to copy-paste print out totally togglable.

Another area of improvement is how fast and usable tooling can be. File read/write and patching can really make a difference. Also using the model for different stages of tool calling in parallel, specially if they all get faster like Cerebras. And better compression algos!
by aprdm | 2025-09-26 17:42:48+00:00
Yep. I worked in a famous-big-company that had a 15 years old service that was dogslow, systemd restarts would take multiple hours.

Everyone was talking about C++ optimizations, mutex everywhere etc - which was in fact a problem.

However.. I seemed to be the first person to actually try to debug what the database was doing, and it was going to disk all the time with a very small cache.. weird..

I see the MySQL settings on a 1TB ram machine and they were... out-of-the-box settings.

With small adjustments I improved the performance of this core system an order of magnitude.
by switchbak | 2025-09-26 17:43:26+00:00
When a byline starts with "coders need to" I immediately start to tune out.

It felt like the analogy was a bit off, and it sounds like that's true to someone with knowledge in the actual domain.

"If a company, eager to offer a powerful ai assistant to its employees, gives an LLM access to untrusted data, the ability to read valuable secrets and the ability to communicate with the outside world at the same time" - that's quite the "if", and therein lies the problem. If your company is so enthusiastic to offer functionality that it does so at the cost of security (often knowingly), then you're not taking the situation seriously. And this is a great many companies at present.

"Unlike most software, LLMs are probabilistic ... A deterministic approach to safety is thus inadequate" - complete non-sequitur there. Why if a system is non-deterministic is a deterministic approach inadequate? That doesn't even pass the sniff test. That's like saying a virtual machine is inadequate to sandbox a process if the process does non-deterministic things - which is not a sensible argument.

As usual, these contrived analogies are taken beyond any reasonable measure and end up making the whole article have very little value. Skipping the analogies and using terminology relevant to the domain would be a good start - but that's probably not as easy to sell to The Economist.
by hitekker | 2025-09-26 17:43:28+00:00
You can't talk about messes without talking about Garbage. When a mess is inevitable, maybe even on purpose. Landfills, toxic waste dumps; every organization has them, needs them.

I once worked in a department that was a dumping ground for failed projects. A 10 year long mess; it was both constant garbage and an essential scapegoat. A mess that everyone can blame, from the C-suite, to peer organizations, to even the people who worked inside the org.

Wikipedia has a great primer on the topic, which I think is more incisive than the OP's holistic framework https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garbage_can_model
by Tobs40 | 2025-09-26 17:43:36+00:00
Author here!

Yes, if Gurobi and my code run as intended and I did not mess up any thinking while simplifying my chess model, then what I did is proof that the maximum number of legal moves available in a chess position reachable by a sequence of legal moves from the starting position is 218 (upper and lower bound). Gurobi proved the entire search space as "at most as good" using bounds, basically.
by zahlman | 2025-09-26 17:44:21+00:00
> in large part dictated by market forces.

Yes. As long as currency exists, that's making it up. Because there's no intrinsic reason for the notes to be worth what they are. Which is to say, market forces can drive a ratio like, say, (GDP / M2) according to current level of trust in government or the level of economic activity etc., but when we measure the numerator and denominator in "US dollars"[0], there's no intrinsic reason for that unit to be the size that it is.

A simpler way to see this is to note that we could just as easily measure both in "US cents". Or in "Lincolns" (a unit equal to 5 USD)[0]. Or whatever, as long as we're consistent.

We just don't.

[0] I'm Canadian actually; this is an attempt to make the post more relatable to a larger number of HN readers.
by dang | 2025-09-26 17:44:33+00:00
[stub for offtopicness]

All: "Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting."

It's not that these things aren't annoying—it's that they are annoying, and that drives tons of dyspeptic, offtopic discussion that in the end drowns out anything that's actually interesting. Since that's a bad outcome, we need to refrain from driving the thread there.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
by siegecraft | 2025-09-26 17:44:37+00:00
It's frustrating that their entire analysis is based on the claim that cheating occurs in maybe 1 out of 10,000 games; they got this from a quote in an interview with the deputy president of the World Chess Federation after he had been beaten in a charity match by someone who admitted cheating. To their credit they also ran the analysis assuming cheating is 1/500 and the odds rose to 7%. I suppose it makes sense that they are merely rebutting the accusations based on the same methodology but it's still frustrating.
by toomuchtodo | 2025-09-26 17:44:45+00:00
"Government is spending the amount required for developed world jobs to build buses." would be a better title than "US cities pay too much for buses." The macro of deflationary globalization due to enormous surplus labor in the developing world are mostly over.

Someone's comment said "why not let China subsidize US bus deployment?" I think that's a fine argument, as long as we're still spending to keep the US manufacturing muscle strong. The cost is the cost to have domestic skilled manufacturing labor at the ready, and someone is going to have to pay it, because you're not going to be able to buy warships from China for war with China. No different than the US auto and aerospace industries retooling from civilian to military production rapidly during previous world wars.

Corporate America cares about quarterly profits, not capability readiness. This is an incentive alignment and capital efficiency issue requiring policy improvement.
by sltr | 2025-09-26 17:45:03+00:00
Data - All data is saved to %localappdata%/Linklever (Windows), ~/.local/share/Linklever (linux), and ~/Library/Application Support/linklever on macOS. (I see the inconsistent capitalization - will amend). There is a sqlite db and a logs folder.

Import/export - I have not added any import/export. Not to restrict you, it's just not implemented. The db file is an ordinary unencrypted sqlite db, so you have open access to that in the meantime.

Portable editions available for Windows, macOS, and Linux at https://linklever.net/download.

Fully offline - never touches the internet EXCEPT to auto-update. You can turn it off in Settings. (Portable versions do not auto-update)
by jrowen | 2025-09-26 17:45:05+00:00
Open source has clearly won.

This is clearly a wild claim that almost undermines the rest of the argument, but to the extent that we can accept that there are open source software packages that decision-makers deep in that industry will reliably choose for their business...it's not clear how this revolution will extend to "regular people." They just want easy. Make something as easy and fun as Instagram. They don't give a crap about all this, they don't want to think about it.
by arduanika | 2025-09-26 17:45:24+00:00
Yeah, that mostly tracks with my understanding. But can both of our stories be true?

The initial obscurity of the cello suites was part of the larger disregarding of Bach's work, in the shift from baroque to classical style. But did the "re-"regarding of the cello suites happen at the same time as Mendelssohn? Or did Mendelssohn only start the process, by rediscovering a few good pieces, while other pieces like the cello suites waited another ~hundred years?
by hinkley | 2025-09-26 17:45:44+00:00
Is that bit in The Queen’s Gambit about chess players coaching each other between matches complete bullshit? Or should one expect a player to occasionally play uncharacteristically when the stakes are high because they would seek out advice which skews their play?

Also psychological games fall neatly into the scenario you describe. I play better and you play worse because I got into your head, or sent the noisy people to be across the hall from you instead of from me, so I slept like a baby and you didn’t.
by bigbadfeline | 2025-09-26 17:46:33+00:00
> People are scare of nuclear energy. Just look at Fukushima and Cernobil.

Looking... and? Compare those to the victims in Bhopal for example.

Safety studies are available and they place nuclear as one of the safest if not the safest energy sources on a TWh basis. Depending how you look at it, nuclear is safer than wind and even solar [1]

With that said, it could be even safer if we focused on the safety of nuclear rather than on killing it.

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy
by bostik | 2025-09-26 17:47:20+00:00
There's a corollary to combination of 1 & 3. Software is by its nature extremely mutable. That in turn means that it gets repurposed and shoehorned into things that were never part of the original design.

You cannot build a bridge that could independently reassemble itself to an ocean liner or a cargo plane. And while civil engineering projects add significant margins for reliability and tolerance, there is no realistic way to re-engineer a physical construction to be able to suddenly sustain 100x its previously designed peak load.

In successful software systems, similar requirement changes are the norm.

I'd also like to point out that software and large-scale construction have one rather surprising thing in common: both require constant maintenance from the moment they are "ready". Or indeed, even earlier. To think that physical construction projects are somehow delivered complete is a romantic illusion.
by ProllyInfamous | 2025-09-26 17:47:22+00:00
Much like Miss Havisham, she's even maintained her princess room, for over seven decades, in the teenaged-years house she inherited from Daddy.

The most honest, evil woman I have ever met — and we've had some conversations (and I dozens of women). If I wrote some of her Spoken Truths onto this forum... I would probably get censored [this is an extremely HNW individual, from The Silent Generation]. Hate™ is real.

If there's anything I can convey from our decade-long relationship, it's that nobody can do everything ("wear all the hats") forever. Nobody has time to know how to do everything. You are your own worst enemy.

I have known her since she was still cleaning out the gutters, herself — but obviously age has reduced her to bedside (and she still won't air condition half her properties!).

Parkinsons is doing the rest. "Why would I care about what's going on with my property? I haven't been up their in forty years!?!"

Your heirs hate what you've become, trust me I know. When you die I will be throwing most of your worldly possessions into the dumpster — which your husband, daughter, and I have already prepaid-for — just like we did when renovating your older studio, just a few summers ago... RIP you Old Bitch =D

----

The heiress affliction, e.g. also read Empty Mansions (book about heiress Hattie Clark) [0][1]

[0] https://www.amazon.com/Empty-Mansions-Mysterious-Huguette-Sp...

*[on my Top 10 random WTF non-fiction Human Experience books, to recommend, Reading List]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huguette_Clark
by ornornor | 2025-09-26 17:47:39+00:00
> reads intermediate commit messages

> every commit must compile

I’m in the opposite camp. Following these two practices often doesn’t make any difference but the few times it did saved me a ton of time.

Dropping commits or rebasing is much easier when you have descriptive, atomic commits. It’s also helpful when performing git blame archeology to try and understand why this code looks so weird and has no context. It’s also useful when bisecting (not so much a problem with small PRs, quite handy as they grow bigger and bigger)

As with everything it’s about context and circumstances. As you gain expérience you can appreciate and gauge when it’s required. When you don’t have the expérience then you follow rules so that you gain said expérience. That’s how I see it.
by dang | 2025-09-26 17:48:03+00:00
All: "Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting." - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

It's not that these things aren't annoying—it's that they are annoying, and that drives tons of dyspeptic discussion that in the end drowns out anything that's actually interesting. Since that's a bad outcome, we need to refrain from driving the thread there. (I've moved these complaints to a stubthread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45389100 - if anyone has an urge to reply, it would be fine to do so there)

(p.s. what look like chapter headings in the OP are in fact hyperlinks)
by koolba | 2025-09-26 17:48:12+00:00
> running a domain costs money. there's no way around that - it requires server resources to respond to dns queries, and that requires servers and electricity.

I guarantee you I can store and make available over DNS the less than 1 KiB of data for less than a penny a year.

Instead of free, charge a flat $1, put it in long term US treasuries at 5% / TIPS at 2.5% and you’ve covered your hosting costs forever. The principle will never need to be touched.
by oldsklgdfth | 2025-09-26 17:48:12+00:00
> The concept of a bubble doesn't exist anymore.

It is a reminder that economics is firmly based on behavior. Interesting to see how economics reflects on this period in time.

> gets lost in the sauce Thanks you for referencing the contemporary rap philosopher Gucci Mane [0].

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g0-F88c6Hrk
by esafak | 2025-09-26 17:48:55+00:00
> This post covers one appealing way to constrain the weight matrices of a neural network—by keeping the tensors constrained to submanifolds at each layer. This opens the door to re-thinking optimization, as we can co-design optimization algorithms with these manifold constraints. As an example, we propose a manifold version of the Muon optimizer whose weights are constrained to the Stiefel manifold: the manifold of matrices with unit condition number. We conclude the post by defining the idea of a modular manifold, which is a composable manifold that attempts to make it easier to scale up and train large networks.

Very good presentation. Projected gradient methods were popular during the convex optimization craze two decades ago. The ideas advanced here have precedent and seem sensible to me. My concern is whether it helps much. The test accuracy in figure 6b shows a marginal increase, and a gentler transition to the overfitting regime, suggesting the regularization is working. The higher LR did not translate to a speed up: "Manifold Muon increased the wall clock time per step compared to AdamW..."

More fundamentally, I am a bit skeptical that low test accuracy is the right goal in LLMs because statistical learning theory does not adequately model the macro-behavior of very large models.
by TrainedMonkey | 2025-09-26 17:50:06+00:00
> So the authors basic argument is to offshore bus production.

No, their recommendation are transit subsidies with strings attached aimed at driving domestic economies of scale. Of course, depending on how a model is defined, 100 offshore unit cap can absolutely be gamed by making a "custom" model for each city or year.

> Finally, they recommend that foreign bus manufacturers be allowed to sell up to 100 vehicles of a given model, at which point they would need to establish a US manufacturing facility to expand sales further.

> To reduce costs, the researchers suggest that the federal reimbursements for bus purchases be capped at the 25th percentile cost of similar vehicles
by ceejayoz | 2025-09-26 17:50:14+00:00
No? It's a technique that could readily be done by one person, and teams are allowed to strategize. Bluffing/deception is kosher in chess, just harder as the key elements of the game are all public.

Before computers put an end to the practice, long games used to adjourn overnight. https://www.chess.com/terms/chess-adjournment

> During adjournments, players could count on the help of other strong masters, called seconds. These seconds would analyze the position and tell the player what they should play when the game resumed.
by Implicated | 2025-09-26 17:50:24+00:00
> Is it the typical advantages of using a db over a filesystem the reason to use redis instead of just reading from memory mapped files?

Eh - while surely not everyone has the benefits of doing so, I'm running Laravel and using Redis is just _really_ simple and easy. To do something via memory mapped files I'd have to implement quite a bit of stuff I don't want/need to (locking, serialization, ttl/expiration, etc).

Redis just works. Disable persistence, choose the eviction policy that fits the use, config for unix socket connection and you're _flying_.

My use case is generally data ingest of some sort where the processing workers (in my largest projects I'm talking about 50-80 concurrent processes chewing through tasks from a queue (also backed by redis) and are likely to end up running the same queries against the database (mysql) to get 'parent' records (ie: user associated with object by username, post by slug, etc) and there's no way to know if there will be multiples (ie: if we're processing 100k objects there might be 1 from UserA or there might be 5000 by UserA - where each one processing will need the object/record of UserA). This project in particular there's ~40 million of these 'user' records and hundreds of millions of related objects - so can't store/cache _all_ users locally - but sure would benefit from not querying for the same record 5000 times in a 10 second period.

For the most part, when caching these records over the network, the performance benefits were negligible (depending on the table) compared to just querying myqsl for them. They are just `select where id/slug =` queries. But when you lose that little bit of network latency and you can make _dozens_ of these calls to the cache in the time it would take to make a single networked call... it adds up real quick.

PHP has direct memory "shared memory" but again, it would require handling/implementing a bunch of stuff I just don't want to be responsible for - especially when it's so easy and performant to lean on Redis over a unix socket. If I needed to go faster than this I'd find another language and likely do something direct-to-memory style.
by amscanne | 2025-09-26 17:50:35+00:00
You are using the "more than 200,000 people" quote to imply that the GHM estimate of 64,718 is wrong, but it is completely in line with it. There is nothing about this revelation that suggests the existing estimates are too low. I don't know what I'm supposedly cherry-picking.

More explicitly: 64,718 killed + 163,859 injured =~ "more than 200,000 people"

I don't understand what basis you (and other commenters) have to suggest that these estimates are all wrong, you merely say "we have good reason". What reason?
by jecel | 2025-09-26 17:50:37+00:00
Thanks for the link. As Ken points out at the end, "Probably the biggest objection to calling the ARM1 microcoded is that the designers of the ARM chip didn't consider it that way.[4] Furber mentions that some commercial RISC processors use microcode, but doesn't apply that term to the ARM1". My opinion is the same as Steve Furber's, though I can certainly see Ken Sherriff's viewpoint.

In theory PLAs and ROMs are fully equivalent. In practice, while the ROM can accept any possible "microcode", a PLA might have to be enlarged if you want to change some of the "micro instruction". This need to change the hardware to change the functionality of an instruction is what makes me consider this design hardwired instead of microcoded.

[EDIT] Another issue is that the ARM1 has three pipeline stages. The "microcode" here is not used for the fetch and decode stages, only the execute one. So though register to register operations take 3 clock cycles to execute, only one "micro instruction" is needed (the second line in the table).
by panick21_ | 2025-09-26 17:50:46+00:00
I think its not really aspirational so much as it is long term planning. If you 20 years ago had told people the launch rates SpaceX is achieving now people would have laughed you out of the room. And this is not from SpaceX private launch site, but a government owned launch site. SpaceX has really been the driving force behind advancing the nations launch infrastructure and launch practices.

I don't see any reason why SpaceX should not continue to plan in such an agressive fashion, as there isn't really a clear reason that anybody can point out to about how its fundamentally impossible.

Its mostly competitors and activists trying to slow down SpaceX and post like this are trying to tell people 'look these are what we are planning and it will benefit everybody'.