MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by vorpalhex | 2025-10-31 13:27:15+00:00
Do we, a democratic society, have a right to pick your breakfast?

Can we force you into a career?

Can we force you to right a book?

What if you work with a few people? Can we compel you to right a book then?

What if you work with a lot of people, a few thousand? Can we make you write a book in that case?
by Kaibeezy | 2025-10-31 13:27:38+00:00
Chartjunk. It took near-zero effort to find better ones all around this interesting and heavily researched topic, and their real papers too, per standard HN preference.

- https://www.zianet.com/wrucker/the%20energetic%20cost%20of%2...

- https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S258884042...

- https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms1350
by notepad0x90 | 2025-10-31 13:28:30+00:00
Care to provide an example? Just trying to be objective.

Historically, nearly all states have been surveillance states (including early America). all that has changed in the last ~30 years is technology (capability), and public attitude.

Mail snooping has been around as long as mail has been around. Warrantless wiretaps on telphone lines were around in just about every country that started having telephones, including the US. AT&T's NSA listening room (the company that invented telephones) isn't unique or special. Book ciphers were invented because snooping courier's messages was so common.

The NSA didn't build a Yottabyte-scale datacenter for no reason either.

I'm not disagreeing with your view, I'm just saying that the anti-surveillance sentiment is particularly unique to the cultural "West", and to the post-WW2 generations.
by acdha | 2025-10-31 13:29:02+00:00
The problem is consistency: AI tools usually produce output which _sounds_ like the top 10% but you have to read it carefully to find the bottom 10% parts. We’re not used to that because human performance isn’t that inconsistent and we use history and social factors: someone’s performance goes down when they’re really drunk, but they rarely show up to work in that state and it’s obvious enough that other people recognize that they shouldn’t be trusted.
by Tade0 | 2025-10-31 13:29:07+00:00
The first language I gained any proficiency in was Logo which, as an educational tool, was translated to my language and that felt to me like a 1960s understanding of communicating with an AI.

I learned English via immersion as I was thrown into an international environment at age four and to me it radiated confidence as the few native English speakers there were obviously much more proficient in the language.

I have a problem with the word "robot", as it's essentially a loanword from my family of languages, but I was unaware of that initially and once I've made that connection, the "coolness" faded somewhat.

Strangely French to me has this same air of confidence, displayed in, among other, the French word for "computer". Truly the French copy no one, nobody copies the French.
by ethersteeds | 2025-10-31 13:30:57+00:00
It is, but it's your reduction.

The discussion is about a novel whose main appeal is described as "scenes one can imagine themselves in" with "more style than substance". That's a valid thing to enjoy, but not for everyone.

The idea that it appeals to boys and not girls was conflicted with further nuance: while girls might be hard pressed to see themselves in it, so too would some boys.

While one can make the argument that the beats' values and writings are at least complimentary to misogyny, that wasn't the discussion happening here previously.
by jostylr | 2025-10-31 13:31:25+00:00
In EPR, it is critical that it is the same measurement. Bell explores doing different measurements. For EPR, they assumed that if you can predict with certainty what happens in a space-like separated region, then there must be a fact of the matter about it. Not being probabilistic was very important for that. Bell then showed that there cannot be a fact of the matter without there also being some nonlocal means going on in order to account for the QM predictions. It is critical to appreciate the two separate pieces of arguments, how they differ, and how jointly they do lead to some kind of nonlocality. Tim Maudlin has a, now old, book exploring these different levels of nonlocality in quantum mechanics.

I recently heard a talk from Tim Maudlin where he mentioned that foliations are the easiest and most natural structures to use to provide nonlocality and, if there is such a thing, maybe there is a clever way of using it to actually communicate and discover the foliation in some sense. He mentioned there is current research on using arrival times which are experimental results outside of the operator formalism, as far as I know. I found an article describing the research:

https://www.altpropulsion.com/ftl-quantum-communication-reth...
by deltarholamda | 2025-10-31 13:32:00+00:00
I've been a paying Affinity customer for a while. I did not like the Adobe subscription model, even though pricewise it more or less the same as what I paid for software upgrades to Adobe products, ~$600/yr. So I looked for alternatives and Affinity was "good enough", and over time got significantly better.

This new model, as of now, I don't have a problem with. Free is good, and Affinity (now Canva) already has my email address. I will be interested to see if this means that offline work is difficult or impossible. If Canva can just manage to not go insane, this should work out well for them. A $200/yr Pro license is extremely reasonable. Even though I steadfastly refuse to use generative AI in doing design, I would consider the Pro if it turns out to have some tooling that would be advantageous.
by hackthemack | 2025-10-31 13:32:03+00:00
One area that I like to have immutability is in function argument passing. In javascript (and many other languages), I find it weird that arguments in function act differently depending on if they are simple (strings, numbers) versus if they are complex (objects, arrays).

I want everything that passes through a function to be a copy unless I put in a symbol or keyword that it suppose to be passed by reference.

I made a little function to do deep copies but am still experimenting with it.

function deepCopy(value) { if (typeof structuredClone === 'function') { try { return structuredClone(value); } catch (_) {} } try { return JSON.parse(JSON.stringify(value)); } catch (_) { // Last fallback: return original (shallow) return value; } }
by darkwater | 2025-10-31 13:32:13+00:00
Oh, the FIRE community. If you trained yourself to live looking at the money you need to save to retire, your brain will most likely be wired to that behavior, and breaking free from that will be utterly difficult. On top of that, people with the FIRE mindset have probably by default already a strong (innate? taught?) bias towards enjoying optimizing their life and making it the end goal.
by westurner | 2025-10-31 13:33:13+00:00
> Surprisingly enough, GitHub Actions with read-only permissions still receive a cache write token, allowing cache poisoning, so they are not safe to run untrusted code.

What are solutions to this and their tradeoffs?

1. Disallow cache write access to read-only actions

2. Stack caches such that read only action cache writes don't affect the cache for read-write actions

edit: What else would solve?
by ramses0 | 2025-10-31 13:33:45+00:00
"Immutability" from a programming language statement perspective doesn't necessarily imply that the implementation duplicates memory or variables.

Similar to how "tail recursion can (usually) be lifted/lowered to a simple loop...", immutability from language statements can often be "collapsed" into mutating a single variable, and there may be one or two "dances" you need to do to either add helper functions, structure your code _slightly_ differently to get there, but it's similar to any kind of performance sensitive code.

Example foo(bar(baz(), bar_alt(baz_alt(), etc...))) [where function call nesting is "representing" an immutability graph] ...yeah, that'd have a lot of allocations and whatever.

But: foo().bar().bar_alt().baz().baz_alt().etc(...) you could imagine is always just stacking/mutating the same variable[s] "in place".

...don't get hung up on the syntax (it's wildly wrong), but imagine the concept. If all the functions "in the chain" are pure (no globals, no modifications), then they can be analyzed and reduced. Refer back to the "Why SSA?" article from a week or two ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45674568 ...and you'll see how the logical lines of statements don't necessarily correspond to the physical movement of memory and registers.
by wlkr | 2025-10-31 13:33:49+00:00
Thanks for responding, and, especially recognising the name, thanks for all your work on the Clojure ecosystem! To answer the question, for me personally, it would be largely full-stack web and data science tooling, but that's just me. I was moreso thinking out loud about the posted project and highlighting libraries that could be semi-official or strongly recommended by the community. The Clojure community offers many different libraries that, on the surface, are similar, even if each addresses a particular set of concerns. For a lowly idiot like me without enough time to spend writing code in Clojure, I'd love to just be directed to those used by the experts and have solid backing and anticipated longevity - 'gold star' libraries.
by ivan_gammel | 2025-10-31 13:33:50+00:00
As far as I know, their biggest problem isn’t reading chats (if device seized and unlocked, not a problem at all regardless of service and encryption level), but listening encrypted calls. This one really bothers them and WhatsApp appears to be threat number one. I don’t know anything about the scale of CSAM distribution there, but I think they don’t need ChatControl-like technology for dealing with it. ChatControl was worse than Russian surveillance state, maybe on par with Chinese tech.
by Jackpillar | 2025-10-31 13:33:51+00:00
Okay so what you're doing is contradicting the objective advantages/benefits of living near the epicenter of a specific industry with a purely anecdotal example of 10+ years experience in jobs from said epicenter, with the expendable income to travel (domestic/international) for in-person meetings, then defining networking to a disingenuously generalization because it reinforces your opinion.

What if I were to tell you that you can make meaningful relationships and connections w/o "brown nosing/servicing" and its easier to do so in the center of a specific industry?
by Someone | 2025-10-31 13:34:22+00:00
> "unless" is also weird to me

I think that’s because it (¿almost?) always splits “is not” in two parts. Compare “If x is not y” with “if not (x is y)”.

> for some reason, "when" in ansible is also very weird

When feels weird to me, too. I think that is because “when” often implies something will happen, but you don’t know the exact time, while “if” means you don’t know whether it will happen at all (compare “when it rains” with “if it rains”). So, using when to describe a trigger is fine, but to me it doesn’t make sense as a statement in an imperative programming language.

> just reading the README felt very weird.

I had to check, and yes, there is a README.md, and no LIVREMOI.md.
by pfooti | 2025-10-31 13:34:23+00:00
Yeah, I think too many people (especially dem leadership, but also a lot of centrist Republican voters) are waiting for things to "go back to normal."

There's a kind of mental trap (Frances Fukuyama and the end of history) where you consider the modern liberal capitalist democracy an attractor state of such strength that anything like the current admin is a temporary aberration,that we can wait it out.

And just like the market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent, I think the populist demagogue class can retain power longer than the liberal institutions can endure. I certainly hope I'm incorrect about this.
by RobotToaster | 2025-10-31 13:34:30+00:00
> Find any thread about AI art around here and check out how many people have open contempt for artists’ skills.

I don't think that's entirely true, what I usually see is people that think AI art is just as good as many artists.

You can be impressed by something and still think a machine can do it just as well. People that can do complex mental arithmetic are impressive, even if that skill is mostly obsolete by calculators.
by vorpalhex | 2025-10-31 13:35:29+00:00
Wow I'm really glad they got the 15,000 illegal immigrants who had criminal charges. I'm also fine that the 16,000 people here illegally have to go back home.

Why were 30ish kids naked in an apartment building illegally? That sure sounds a whole lot like human trafficking, especially if the men arrested all had criminal records and gang affiliation.

Wow intentionally blocking a federal vehicle transporting a prisoner sure shoulds like interfering with law enforcement.

And in getting 30,000+ illegal immigrants into ICE custody, they've only detained 170 people? 130 of those were with criminal charges? That seems like a very low number.

This sounds exactly like immigration enforcement. Who are the politicians being rounded up? Who are the "political opponents" here? Not the 30,000 illegal immigrants who can't vote. Not the 130 citizens who committed a felony against agents.
by Xerox9213 | 2025-10-31 13:35:59+00:00
When you brake you generate a ton of heat.

Doing a U-turn generates less heat, but still quite a bit. The train will have to slow down depending on the radius of the curve, and even then the turn will slow it down some more.

But yeah, less heat generation means kinetic energy is conserved.

Cars have to slow down when they turn because it’s too much to ask of the tires to accelerate (throttle) and turn, since turning is in itself acceleration.
by mmis1000 | 2025-10-31 13:35:59+00:00
It won't do much though. Although it will make things a bit easier. A lot of minecraft mod requires direct modification to Minecraft's core mechanism. For example in popular mods: create, immersive portal and distant horizon all taps in minecraft's collision mechanism or rendering pipeline in a quite aggressive way that unlikely there will ever an abstraction be able to handle that.

And, no. Although forge does not encourage you to use it. It also supports mixin like direct modification. It's just less polished than mixin(requires more knowledge to java Bytecode)

It's unrealistic to ask mojang to make an abstraction that you can actually change everything in the core without direct modification (let alone how do mojang know what part need to be abstracted?)
by sunir | 2025-10-31 13:36:25+00:00
Sure I agree what I am talking about is different in some important ways; I am “yes and”ing here. It’s an interesting space for sure.

Internal vs external in this case is a subjective decision. Where there is a boundary, within it is the model. If you draw the boundary outside the texts then the complete system of model, inference, text documents form the agent.

I liken this to a “text wave” by metaphor. If you keep feeding in the same text into the model and have the model emit updates to the same text, then there is continuity. The text wave propagates forward and can react and learn and adapt.

The introspection within the neural net is similar except over an internal representation. Our human system is similar I believe as a layer observing another layer.

I think that is really interesting as well.

The “yes and” part is you can have more fun playing with the models ability to analyze their own thinking by using the “text wave” idea.
by dndn1 | 2025-10-31 13:36:31+00:00
Not for the same audience but for much the same idea I made a progressive visualization of saving and compound interest in a blog post about pension saving:

https://calcwithdec.dev/posts/pictures-pensions/

I intentionally didn't include numbers at all - they are a bit more effort to interpret.

A visualization might be a nice feature for kids (but it probably depends on the kid!)
by beeforpork | 2025-10-31 13:36:34+00:00
Yes, all your points are valid for yourself. It's OK. I did not try to convince you that Python is bad. I only tried to explain why I hate it. In the hope that maybe you better understand why. It's too easy to say 'I hate XYZ', so I tried to explain myself. I am perfectly fine with you loving it. Let's see whether I can explain myself better:

> ... the Zen of Python ... > ... was deliberately written not to ... > ... Guido really didn't want ...

Yes, sure, I do not question that. I am merely saying that I hate many of the outcomes of that. I also hate discussions about that -- it is so quickly sacrilege to hate Python. I know that it's futile to discuss religion, and I am not trying to do that. But someone said that no-one hates Python -- well, I do, and this is why!

> ... explicit is better than implicit ...

Except for variable declarations, apparently. I would very much like them to be explicit, and it would be a start to fix the scoping problem.

> ... Dangerous? Not at all ...

I perceive a danger when the compiler/interpreter does not tell me that I am doing unintended things. Obviously, it cannot know what I intend. But proper and smaller scopes are generally regarded as helping humans to track the visibility of a variable. I certainly cope better with explicit variable declarations and with smaller scopes. I feel a danger that I accidentally misuse (or reuse) variables, e.g. by missing a `nonlocal` or `global` declaration or by using a variable after an `if` that was meant to be only valid local to that `if` block.

> ... Meanwhile, I'd look at C and think "I'm not sure which of my mistakes will lead to a memory leak or an exploitable buffer overflow." ...

Of course C is dangerous, that's why I cited it. But in at least one aspect, the scoping and related lack of explicit syntax to introduce new variables, I think Python is more dangerous than C. In most other aspect, C is definitely worse.

Comparing another language, and how it is possible to improve: JavaScript managed to fix scoping by introducing `let`. If you don't use `var`, then this particular problem is solved in JavaScript.

> ... the exceptions that are raised for non-exceptional cases ...

E.g., 'file not found' in open(). That's not exceptional, because it potentially happens with every usage of open(). You can never seriously use `open` without handling the case that the file is not found. Therefore, it's not exceptional, but it should be encoded in the return value.

> ... then I'd change it to not be a comprehension. ...

That's not the point. I don't want imperative, I want functional. I like list comprehension. I am not complaining about imperative `for`, but I am complaining about the confusing syntax of nested `for` in comprehensions. I am complaining of being forced to use imperative `for` by the weirdly confusing syntax of functional `for`.
by Workaccount2 | 2025-10-31 13:36:46+00:00
To be fair, we don't actually know what is and isn't in their training data. So instead we just assign successes to "in the training set" and failures to "not in the training set".

But this is unlikely, because they still can fall over pretty badly on things that are definitely in the training set, and still can have success with things that definitely are not in the training set.
by ErroneousBosh | 2025-10-31 13:37:21+00:00
Okay, so for example I might set something like "this bunch of parameters" immutable, but "this 16kB or so of floats" are just ordinary variables which change all the time?

Or then would the block of floats be "immutable but not from this bit"? So the code that processes a block of samples can write to it, the code that fills the sample buffer can write to it, but nothing else should?
by alistairSH | 2025-10-31 13:37:21+00:00
Eh, not sure I agree.

Taking the Handbrake example, providing a default "simple" interface (as Magicbrake does) would be trivial to implement, maintain, and defend. The existing default "super user" interface could be just a toggle away (and make the toggle sticky so a power user doesn't have to touch it but once).

I used to work with an engineer who loved to remind us that a "perfect" interface would have a single button, and that button should be delivered pre-pushed. Always seemed like wise words to me.
by closewith | 2025-10-31 13:37:44+00:00
This is an even more absurd reply.

> Again, you are treating these terms as equal to their contemporary meaning in bipartisan US politics, when they are pretty well-defined terms for describing political ideology in general.

I’m neither American nor using US partisan definitions. I’m using the terms as they’re broadly understood in political theory and history.

> Part of that is one of the pillars of conservatism, that humans are imperfect beings and thus need institutions to guide them.

That’s a paternalist or technocratic premise, not a conservative one. Classical conservatism accepts human fallibility but trusts evolved social norms not bureaucracy to contain it. The belief that people must be centrally guided is the antithesis of that tradition.

> So i would say you’ve pretty much got it backwards. I’m not making this up, you can go and read up on this for yourself.

You might try the same. Hobbes wasn’t a conservative - he was an absolutist. Quoting him to define conservatism is like citing Marx to define capitalism.
by TeMPOraL | 2025-10-31 13:37:44+00:00
Those buttons have functions. Many of them useful. Like with every other appliance or toy, people find the minimum amount of functionality they need/like, and rarely go beyond it. Fortunately, when an interface is static - like a physical remote, and unlike the modern best practice on computers - it's easy to just ignore things you don't care about. Human visual system is great at this, it literally costs ~0 cognitive burden to ignore the 90% you don't need on a static interface.

Related problem is that software business, and through it UI/UX, is obsessed about gaining new users, so everything is designed for ease of onboarding, at the expense of ergonomics and efficiency of continued use. It's backwards and dumb, and subscriptions should theoretically prevent this, but the truth is, software products are pretty much unique (there's rarely an actual competitor to switch to with the same set of features you need), and most products die or get killed before they move past the growth phase, so incentives align to catering for first-timers instead of already paying users.

And then UI/UX gets trotted as some industrial design wisdom, and this kind of backwards approach starts infecting design of physical products...
by xxs | 2025-10-31 13:38:00+00:00
1st) you use ++def in a loop, don't be weird; 2nd) if 'abc' is to be used in the loop body, define in the loop, e.g. for (int def = 7, abc =3; ...); 3rd) this is an IntelliJ bug - both 'def' and 'abc' in the sample are always defined.
Ask HN: Does anyone else with astigmatism not like dark-mode?
by morkalork | 2025-10-31 13:38:56+00:00
It looks like dark-mode themes have finally taken off in the mainstream and become the default in many new apps and websites. The bright white text on a black background also feels like my eyes are being stabbed when reading it. Am I alone in this? Are all trendy designers kids with good vision?