MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by adamlett | 2025-09-02 19:43:51+00:00
> There were some premodern societies where land possession was very fluid.

Yes, commons, rotating field systems, and similar arrangements show that.

> But. There were plenty of others where land ownership worked almost exactly like today’s systems.

Not quite. Transactions existed, but they were embedded in systems of obligation and sovereignty — kings, emperors, or lords claimed ultimate rights. That’s a different structure from modern absolute private ownership.

> The oldest clay tablets talk about buying and selling land, systems of laws protecting land ownership, court cases involving land disputes, and surveyors laying out stone boundary markers that were meant to stay put for centuries.

Those records exist, but even in Mesopotamia rulers could reallocate or confiscate land. Ownership wasn’t as secure or absolute as a modern freehold title.

> Incan quipu cords were records of who owned which piece of land.

Quipus tracked obligations and allocations. Land under the Inca was held communally and redistributed, not privately owned.

> Asian rice terraces have been individually owned for thousands of years.

Some land was inherited and sold, but there were also systems of redistribution (for example, the Chinese equal-field system). That’s not the same as permanent, alienable freehold.

> This urban legend that private property is not an ancient concept is really wonky.

It’s not an urban legend. Property has always been a bundle of rights that varied across societies. The modern model of land as a freely tradable commodity giving the holder near-total monopoly is comparatively recent.
by daxfohl | 2025-09-02 19:44:01+00:00
Like I said, they can implement the algorithm to solve it, but when forced to maintain the state themselves, either internally or explicitly in the context, they are unable to do so and get lost.

Similarly if you ask to write a Sudoku solver, they have no problem. And if you ask an online model to solve a sudoku, it'll write a sudoku solver in the background and use that to solve it. But (at least the last time I tried, a year ago), if you ask to solve step-by-step using pure reasoning without writing a program, they start spewing out all kinds of nonsense (but humorously cheat: they'll still spit out the correct answer at the end).
by dpflan | 2025-09-02 19:44:38+00:00
MIT OCW is an amazing resource -- anyone can learn from Strang, which is a goldmine.

He also created a course on using Linear Algebra for machine learning:

> Linear algebra concepts are key for understanding and creating machine learning algorithms, especially as applied to deep learning and neural networks. This course reviews linear algebra with applications to probability and statistics and optimization–and above all a full explanation of deep learning.

- MIT OCW Course: Matrix Methods in Data Analysis, Signal Processing, and Machine Learning (https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/18-065-matrix-methods-in-data-an...)

- The text book website: Linear Algebra and Learning from Data (2019) https://math.mit.edu/~gs/learningfromdata/

- The Classic Linear Algebra Course: https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/18-06-linear-algebra-spring-2010...
by max-lee-dev | 2025-09-02 19:44:52+00:00
current chat interfaces are fundamentally broken:

1. context switching hell - multiple questions = constant scrolling. by the time your first query finishes, you have 3 unread responses below. information gets lost in the chaos

2. memory degradation - LLMs get worse as conversations grow. some queries need no memory, some need temporary context, some need everything. branching solves this

3. parallel execution - why wait for one response when you can run multiple simultaneously? chatgpt makes you wait. that's absurd

4. generative ui - iterate through multiple design variations instantly. not one option, but many to choose from

5. no collaboration - sharing through a "share button" isn't scalable. i added real-time figma-style collaboration

so i built maxly.chat - a canvas for LLMs with parallel execution, branching memory, and real-time collaboration.

the future of AI isn't a chatbox. it's a canvas
by xp84 | 2025-09-02 19:45:08+00:00
Don't those cost like $400,000 a piece to outfit, though? I mean this with tremendous respect because I think they're the only ones doing it "right," I feel like Waymo is kind of 'bruteforcing' autonomous driving using money. There's an inherent limit to the impact of a technology (and thus its long-term value) based on its cost, and even stipulating that Waymo has solved it in general, I think a valuation should be contingent on a roadmap which shows how it's going to scale out -- this seems like an as-yet unsolved problem until someone shows how to combine the reliability of the tech-heavy Waymo system with the price tag of a Tesla.
by hunter2_ | 2025-09-02 19:45:13+00:00
Since JSON is a subset of JavaScript, you can just use a script element, and including the json mime type certainly doesn't hurt:

<script type="application/json" id="myJSONData"> { "name": "John Doe", "age": 30 } </script> <script> const data = JSON.parse(document.getElementById('myJSONData').textContent); console.log(data.name + " is " + data.age); // John Doe is 30 </script>

Note: The JSON data must exist literally within the script element. If you try using a src attribute to request it from elsewhere, the response will not be available via textContent or any other mechanism [0], and at that point you just need to fetch/ajax/xhr it.

[0] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/17124713/read-response-o...
by andrewla | 2025-09-02 19:45:33+00:00
> Perhaps from graphics -- translation, rotation, reflection

Maybe ... but the fact that you included translation in the list of linear operations seems like a big red flag. Translation feels very linear but it is emphatically not [1]. This is not intended to be a personal jab; just that the intuitions of linear algebra are not easy to internalize.

Adding linear transformations is similarly scary territory. You can multiply rotations to your heart's content but adding two rotations gives you a pretty funky object that does not have any obvious intuition in graphics.

[1] I wouldn't jump into projective or affine spaces until you have the linear algebra tools to deal with them in a sane way, so this strikes me as a bit scary to approach it this way.
by jrflowers | 2025-09-02 19:45:52+00:00
> (see Twitter Files)

Can you clarify where in the Twitter Files it says that things were run by “legal and moral busybodies”? From what I recall the “Twitter Files” were just big dumps of innocuous records that rarely (if ever) contained any sort of narrative. The “story” of what they meant was entirely constructed by folks that pretty transparently set out with the intention of making Musk look good (eg Matt Taibbi)
by tedivm | 2025-09-02 19:45:56+00:00
The whole reason to test things is because these types of systems will behave in ways people didn't expect. While people may not have been able to guess that it would turn out exactly this way, that's the whole reason why they should have actually tested for unknown consequences.

Instead it sounds like they rushed to release this as quickly as possible, skipping all sorts of testing, and people died as a result.
by ACCount37 | 2025-09-02 19:46:15+00:00
User feedback should have been treated as radioactive in the first place.

When it was introduced, the question to ask wasn't "will it go wrong" - it was "how exactly" and "by how much". Reward hacking isn't exactly a new idea in ML - and we knew with certainty that it was applicable to human feedback for years too. Let alone a proxy preference model made to mimic the preferences of an average user based on that human feedback. I get that alignment is not solved, but this wasn't a novel, unexpected pitfall.

When the GPT-4o sycophancy debacle was first unfolding, the two things that came up in AI circles were "they trained on user feedback, the stupid fucks" and "no fucking way, even the guys at CharacterAI learned that lesson already".

Guess what. They trained on user feedback. They completely fried the AI by training it on user feedback. How the fuck that happened at OpenAI and not at Bob's Stupid Sexy Chatbots is anyone's guess.
by MarkusWandel | 2025-09-02 19:46:53+00:00
Two things that might still be fun with CP/M to this day, though neither is in that image and would have to be obtained separately.

1. MBASIC. A nice time capsule of BASIC programming in that era, more serious and less quirky than Microsoft BASIC on other old emulated computers such as C64.

2. Wordstar. That has a bit of a learning curve, but it's frankly more bang for the (compute) buck than absolutely anything since. I came late to the CP/M party with an inexpensive (for the day) surplus Intertec Superbrain in 1984 or so, but I ended up using Wordstar for quite a while for document preparation. Of course getting it to output to a modern printer would need going deep under the hood. Most CP/M systems came with source code for the BIOS for a reason. I hacked mine to turn an obsolete LAN type interface on it (a Compustar M30) into a Centronics-compatible parallel printer port and wrote my own BIOS glue to drive it.
by nomel | 2025-09-02 19:47:29+00:00
Facts start at the third section, "‘An issue of selective prosecution’", after ~30 paragraphs of character/story/emotion building.

> Mavalwalla was one of hundreds of people to respond to a 11 June social media post from the former president of the Spokane city council that encouraged protesters to block an Ice transport they believed would carry two Venezuelan immigrants who were in the country legally, petitioning for asylum when they were detained.

> “I am going to sit in front of the bus,” Ben Stuckart, the former city council president, wrote. “Feel free to join me.”

With this "problem" for the prosecutors quoted:

> In this case, prosecutors would just have to prove that defendants agreed in concert to impede or injure an officer.
by pessimizer | 2025-09-02 19:47:36+00:00
Mine too. But that sounds to me like they're protecting the new account by limiting its reach, not being helpful to the Turkish government. People who seek it out will still see it, but it may pass unseen for a little while from Erdogan who could get a new court order to shut it down with a 30-second phone call.

Somebody may have been trying to help (and I'm sure escalated internally before daring to shadow-ban rather than ban outright for "ban-evasion"), and is getting sabotaged by people who want to score dumb points against Musk, who I'm sure doesn't care either way.
by cultofmetatron | 2025-09-02 19:48:00+00:00
unsaturated fats from whole avacados, olive oil and coconut oil, sure. But I think the jury is still very much out on a whole class of oils originally meant for industrial lubrication that we started pushing into the american diet. As far as the american heart association being trustworthy, they are very much bought and paid for right back to their founding from a large grant to promote crisco.

Besides that, I'm wary of the saturated fats claim being true given that most of the studies were done on middle aged white men on a standard american diet. it didn't account for excessive calories and high levels of sugar in the diet. We've been eating animal products for thousands of years (inuits eating it exclusively) with little to no issues. Why would these suddenly now be a problem?
by jama211 | 2025-09-02 19:48:17+00:00
The worst managers I’ve ever had didn’t use Jira, because they didn’t use much of anything at all, and everyone was confused about when and where their next task would come from. The answer was usually “they’ll message you at any time with a random request and demand a deadline at the same time”.

Jira helps turn terrible managers into mediocre ones, it at least forces them to write down what needs to be done and let’s me prove I’ve done the work back to them later when they inevitably forget.
by castillar76 | 2025-09-02 19:48:22+00:00
sigh Is it that time of the year again that we start publishing these? Boy, how time flies...

Too frequently, what people (and clearly the author of this piece) mean when they say "tougher grading" is just a return to forcible bell-curve application and faculty who take out their personal insecurities and annoyance over being required to teach classes on their students. That's not making academics more challenging, it's just torturing statistics and arbitrarily modifying the race-course in order to satisfy other agendas. If you have a good teacher and a good course and more than half the class does well, you should consider making the next iteration more challenging, but you should not feel obliged to fail 10% of them because "there's always a bell-curve", nor should you be using grading as a means to "humble" your students.

I emphasized the word "consider" up there because not every course needs to be a slog up Everest, either — an "intro to X" course might well be a class in which many people do well. Some percentage of them will be people looking to make that their major, so they'll already know enough to be ahead of the curve in an "intro" course. Others will be bright people who learn well and adapt to the material. As someone who teaches classes regularly at the college/grad-school level, I try to make the content interesting and challenging, but if most of my students turn in work that exceeds standards and are coming out with a good understanding of the content, I feel like I've accomplished my goals — academia is supposed to be about learning after all, and they're displaying that they've correctly learned the content I wanted to communicate to them. I do spend time trying to re-work the course regularly (something I'm forced to do much more since the explosion of sites like Chegg...), but past a certain point if something is clearly working, why am I obliged to break it?
by littlestymaar | 2025-09-02 19:48:30+00:00
> In the immortal words of Jobs, "real artists ship".

Art is an individual endeavor, most of the time engineering isn't.

Management is though, and that's why individuals can make or break a product, iif they are in a management position. And being an excellent engineering manager doesn't even necessarily mean you need to be an excellent engineer, and vice versa.
by indoordin0saur | 2025-09-02 19:48:39+00:00
> employee #3 in 2011

Maybe I'm bitter from getting burned but I don't think this is really counterpoint. Employee #3 you're just shy of being a co-founder and 2011 was an era where equity grants were real and companies weren't yet so clever about handing out Leprechaun gold.

EDIT: Random aside, but I looked up "leprechaun gold" and I guess the trope of a gold-like substance that disappears from your pocket when you're not looking is actually from Harry Potter and not a part of the traditional folklore.
by mixmastamyk | 2025-09-02 19:49:24+00:00
Well it applied to the Stockholm post mentioned. Some posts do mention it, others don't. I replied to a don't.

Wouldn't mind my post being moved to the "top" level, but in reality it means buried at the bottom. Especially since my account is a second-class citizen for some reason. Probably I had a bad day several years ago. :-/
by gchadwick | 2025-09-02 19:49:31+00:00
The CTO of applications reporting to CEO of applications (who reports to the actual CEO) is kinda weird? I figure you're either the actual CTO or you're not a C-level exec and should have another title. Just more title inflation I guess. Maybe in same way you see VPs of X everywhere in some organizations we'll be starting to see CEO/CTO of X lower and lower down the org chart.
by groby_b | 2025-09-02 19:49:35+00:00
It's not that the terms are unpopular, it's that every system that doesn't have strong capitalist roots has lost out to more capitalist systems.

Nothing wrong with alternatives, but for that we need to let go of "let's make it just like the thing that also fails". We also need to acknowledge that socialism assumes that humans are fundamentally good, and that ignores that many are fundamentally not. We need to acknowledge that the core idea of socialism, the common good, is ill-defined. (Just like, while we're on AI, ideas of alignment on one value system suffer from that ill definition)

So, no, you don't get voted to hell for saying that the problem is capitalism. You do get downvoted for sloppy thinking if you simply propose "socialism will save us" because it's long established that in this form, the statement is not true.

Ultimately, the issue is that HN is not made for that discussion. You'd need nuanced political debate, and the internet does not seem conducive for that. That's the second reason for downvotes - HN is not interested in contentious political debate, for better or worse.

But no, it's not because we just all immediately think of the USSR/Maoist China.
by dragonwriter | 2025-09-02 19:49:44+00:00
There is no em-dash in the comment; there is an en-dash used in place of a hyphen where one of the terms joined is itself a hyphenated term.

Edit: Note the parent has since been edited and previously said the tell was an “em-dash”, but now says “long dashes” in reference to a single correct use of the shortest—except in fonts with narrow digits, where the figure dash might be shorter—dash.
by Gualdrapo | 2025-09-02 19:49:48+00:00
For my portfolio (miler.codeberg.page) and the refactor&redesign I'm doing of it (that I hope to finish soon!), I feed some <template>s with data coming from a json that acts like kind of a database. I feel the process of querying nodes and setting their data is still a bit rudimentary in plain JS and it should be a pain in the ass for huge datasets or lots of nodes, but at least with modern JS it is not necessary to fetch the json with a XMLHTTPRequest or something - it can work importing it like a regular JS module, so at least there's that.
by gizmo686 | 2025-09-02 19:51:16+00:00
Most of our social credit systems let you start over.

The big ones (credit score and criminal history) are strongly tied to you, but have recourse to challenge mistakes and remove strikes from your record. The sufficiency of those recourses is open for debate though.

However, all of the private company's social credit systems have a much looser coupling to your actual ID. Often you can just make a new account. If you first get a new credit card, phone, phone number, internet connection, and address, most companies would completely fail to correlate you to their previous profile of you.
by drozycki | 2025-09-02 19:51:39+00:00
I asked Google AI Mode “does Google ai mode make tens of site requests for a single prompt” and it showed “Looking at 69 sites” before giving a response about query fan-out.

Cloudflare has some large part of the web cached, IA takes too long to respond and couldn’t handle the load. Google/OpenAI and co could cache these pages but apparently don’t do it aggressively enough or at all
by insane_dreamer | 2025-09-02 19:51:43+00:00
> it was the right that liked illegal immigration

they still like illegal immigration, because it's good for businesses (the primary concern of the right)

its Trump/MAGA's xenophobic popularism that is reflected in ICE's thuggery (which is clearly designed to instill fear; the same way that S.Miller's plans to separate children from parents at the border was overtly designed to instill fear). It is not reflective of the traditional GOP. In fact, GOP senators have pressed Trump into making "exceptions" -- you'll notice how ICE is primarily operating in "blue" cities, and not raiding farms and chicken processing plants in the Midwest or the CA central valley -- this is not a coincidence.
by xp84 | 2025-09-02 19:51:44+00:00
To me, 'public pension monies' (more or less, retirement savings from citizens who happen to work for the government) and 'public funds' don't seem like the exact same thing. To me, public funds implies money from the government budget or sovereign wealth funds.

Although I admit that the government may be on the hook to replenish any spectacular failures in such a pension plan so in that way, it is somewhat fair -- though I doubt any one investment is weighted so heavily in any pension fund as to precipitate such an event.
by const_cast | 2025-09-02 19:52:00+00:00
I don't even think we necessarily need socialism.

So far, we've been pretty good at identifying where capitalism just doesn't work and then bandaiding that area with legislation.

For example, capitalism has no solution for disability. In a capitalist system, everyone must work. Those who don't work should, then, be filtered out - die.

But that's obviously bad, so bandaid - SSI. We say, if you're disabled, we'll give you little socialism, so you don't die. We'll put a communal responsibility on keeping you alive because that's what's most beneficial for society.

There's no rule anywhere saying we have to just let AI make the world a worse place. No, WE decide that, even in a capitalist system.
by fmnxl | 2025-09-02 19:52:13+00:00
I lived in the UK for 10 years, I've also lived in a number of other countries, from democracies, communist (Vietnam), and varying degrees of democratic and economic freedoms.

I'm aware there are more than exactly 2 parties in the ballots in many western countries. It's not about the numbers, but whether any of those choices really give the people real alternatives, or just different ways to screw the majority of the people.

As you can probably can see from the above interaction, people resort very quickly to ad hominem attacks.
by the__alchemist | 2025-09-02 19:52:33+00:00
ESP32's are on the high end of FLASH and RAM counts. You are pointing out that there is variance. The kind sof 2-8$ MCUs I've used generally have 512k-2Mb[it] onboard flash and <512k SRAM. (STM32G4, H7, ESP32C3 etc)

The Sub <$1 you refer do will have <100k of these. (STM32C0, G0 etc)

ST is actually moving away from the 2Mb MCUs, and instead offering ~1Mb with Octospi. I believe the intent is to use offboard flash if you want more. (e.g. the newer H7 variants)
by BariumBlue | 2025-09-02 19:53:34+00:00
> When researchers attempt(opens a new tab) to recover [something like] a coherent computational representation of an Othello game board they instead find [bags of heuristics]

Humans don't exactly have a full representation of board space in their head either. Notably, chess masters and amateurs can memorize completely random board positions as well as the other. I'd think neither could memorize 64 chess pieces in random positions on a board.
by kibwen | 2025-09-02 19:53:38+00:00
But the distinction that we're trying to make here is that people hear "plausible in theory" and think "plausible in practice within the timespan of human civilization", which does not follow.

I'm not trying to say anything about whether or not a CRQC will ever be built. I'm also not trying to say that pursuing PQC in the short term is a bad idea. But what I am saying is that the burden of proof remains on the believers to show that the engineering challenges are more than theoretically surmountable.
by 0xbadcafebee | 2025-09-02 19:53:53+00:00
Came here to post this too. Pandoc and a few lines of shell, all you need. Here is a super fancy Makefile:

CONTENT_DIR := content BUILD_DIR := public MD_FILES := $(shell find $(CONTENT_DIR) -name '*.md') HTML_OUT := $(patsubst $(CONTENT_DIR)/%.md,$(BUILD_DIR)/%.html,$(MD_FILES)) .PHONY: all clean assets serve all: $(HTML_OUT) assets assets: @mkdir -p $(BUILD_DIR) && cp -a static/style.css $(BUILD_DIR)/ $(BUILD_DIR)/%.html: $(CONTENT_DIR)/%.md templates/default.html site.yaml @mkdir -p $(dir $@) pandoc --standalone --from gfm --to html5 \ --template=templates/default.html \ --metadata-file=site.yaml \ --toc --toc-depth=3 \ -o $@ $<

Ask ChatGPT, it'll spit out the rest (sample posts, template, CSS, YAML, Makefile, etc)