MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by cogman10 | 2025-10-31 03:29:52+00:00
My problem with functional languages is there never seems to be any easy way to start using them.

Haskell is a great example here. Last time I tried to learn it, going on the IRC channel or looking up books it was nothing but a flood of "Oh, don't do that, that's not a good way to do things." It seemed like nothing was really settled and everything was just a little broken.

I mean, Haskell has like what, 2, 3, 4? Major build systems and package repositories? It's a quagmire.

Lisp is also a huge train wreck that way. One does not simply "learn lisp" There's like 20+ different lisp like languages.

The one other thing I'd say is a problem that, especially for typed functional languages, they simply have too many capabilities and features which makes it hard to understand the whole language or how to fit it together. That isn't helped by the fact that some programmers love programming the type system rather than the language itself. Like, cool, my `SuperType` type alias can augment an integer or a record and knows how to add the string `two` to `one` to produce `three` but it's also an impossible to grok program crammed into 800 characters on one line.
by alephnerd | 2025-10-31 03:30:00+00:00
The ground stop was due to an aircraft emergency [0] and lifted within 21 minutes of being announced [1].

There are plenty of reasons to call out the shutdown, but using disinfo is the wrong method.

[0] - https://pix11.com/news/local-news/ground-stops-at-jfk-due-to...

[1] - https://www.fly.faa.gov/adv/adv_list?whichAdvisories=ATCSCC&...
by donmcronald | 2025-10-31 03:30:03+00:00
> Speed running to become an actual developing nation.

That's what it looks like from the outside, but I can't understand what the gain is. Who benefits? The result of the middle class was massive advancement and an equally massive increase in standard of living for the wealthy who captured most of the gains.

What do they gain from stagnating innovation and a lack of education, services, etc.?

It makes me think of the old Olympic and sports videos. The participants basically suck because they're coming from a small pool of people wealthy enough to not need a job. Do they really want the pool of candidates competing to become doctors, etc. to be smaller which will end up lowering the overall quality for them?

Or do they think they'll simply hire the best and brightest from other countries that are investing in their citizens?
by dboreham | 2025-10-31 03:30:35+00:00
With a traditional bank you can walk into a branch and explain the situation to a human. I've had to do this several times with my large US bank, one time when traveling but thankfully to a place where they had a branch. In the end things got fixed up but not without much time and hassle expended.

I get the impression these institutions run ML software that was written by people who knew it would generate false positives but is now run by people who have been told that it is always correct. I say this having seen a bank manager call the group responsible on an internal phone line and them tell the manager that they suspect they (the branch manager) is a fraudster.
by cosmicgadget | 2025-10-31 03:31:02+00:00
> attempts to fire missiles into Russia

I was asking about Moscow.

> Russian officials have made public statements saying they know we must operate the toys we're giving Ukraine

Ah yes, in line with their leader's propaganda that Ukraine has no culture of its own and should embrace conquest. I forgot about all the American soldiers and pilots that have been captured by Russia while operating F-16s and Javelins and Patriots.

> Ukraine has also destroyed some Russian nuclear bombers and early warning radars. What do you think the Russians think of that?

Probably whatever state television tells them to think.

> Isn't it a bad thing for it to continue down this road?

Clearly Putin doesn't think so or he'd withdraw. Let's just copy his homework and keep it going.
by outlore | 2025-10-31 03:31:22+00:00
My apologies for sounding bitter.

You stated you don't care what I think. Just wanted to say though that i've admired you and your company for a long time. I participated in user interviews so I could score one of your famous hats. I submitted copious feedback. I was an evangelist for branching workflows and recommended several colleagues to your product. I watched all the talks, interviews and devrel videos.

I'm glad you are doing better now as a company, but as naive as it may be, I guess I would love to see an example of a company that consistently put people over profits, that is all
by notepad0x90 | 2025-10-31 03:33:24+00:00
What a deceptive thing to say. I don't doubt that you know very well that every US administration in the past 50 years agrees with what you said. The thing people don't like is goons dressed in military attire, and covering their faces zip-tying children, and US citizens, then disappearing them without trial or due process.

If they simply obtained warrants, arrested people, treated them with dignity, let them have a trial, and then deport them, then the only objection would be why $50B is being wasted on rounding up non-violent migrants, or why the business owners that hire them aren't in prison as well.

You can't claim that your goal is to enforce the law, and then find pesky little things like due process, and warrants inconvenient.
by cogman10 | 2025-10-31 03:35:00+00:00
Management is often shareholders themselves and you can bet that if the fine is lower than the money saved they'll poison the water for 1000 years.

We've had rivers catch fire because poisoning the water is profitable.

We all exist in a society. However, the people most likely to own businesses and be successful at it seem to have no moral qualms about harming society so long as it personally enriches themselves.
by hpdigidrifter | 2025-10-31 03:35:01+00:00
I've personally found wise to be more than helpful and I've changed addresses across continents, to far more red flag jurisdictions than my native Australia

So while I feel for the person they seem very unwilling to meet a provider in the middle, is it not fair to question why this business pays no electricity or either owns/rent the property?

This is very basic stuff for a business to have. Nothing more than a phone bill at that address is bit iffy.

From a pure risk perspective buying a $2 sim card and putting whatever address you want in online then sending someone the PDF saying that's where we are is not hard to do, so maybe not worth having your business if you can't provide anything else to satisfy their worries?

There's plenty of banks that have to service you by law, go to them, and pay the far higher costs.
by ineedasername | 2025-10-31 03:35:45+00:00
I’m continually astounded that so many people, faced with a societal problem, reflexively turn to “Hmmm, perhaps if we monitored and read and listened to every single thing that every person does, all of the time…”

As though it would 1) be a practical possibility and 2) be effective.

Compounding the issue is that the more technology can solve #1, the more these people fixate on it as the solution without regards to the lack of #2.

I wish there were a way, once and for all, to prevent this ridiculous idea from taking hold over and over again. If I could get a hold of such people when these ideas were in their infancy… perhaps I should monitor everything everyone does and watch for people considering the same as a solution to their problem… ah well, no, still don’t see how that follows logically as a reasonable solution.
by EdwardDiego | 2025-10-31 03:35:59+00:00
Based on the DNS records, and the Companies Office website, the blogger owns several companies.

https://www.vetta.online/

https://aorangieftpos.nz/

https://www.reliance.net.nz/

Business networking, local ISP, card payment solutions, basically. Given the blog posts about cPanel and Outlook, it tracks.

I note that the blogger lives in a small town in the South Island, so likely is focused on the local market.
by kragen | 2025-10-31 03:36:33+00:00
Rust is not very suitable for functional programming because it is aggressively non-garbage-collected. Any time Rustaceans want to do the kind of immutable DAG thing that gives functional languages so much power, they seem to end up either taking the huge performance and concurrency hit of fine-grained reference counting, or they just stick all their nodes in a big array.
by turtletontine | 2025-10-31 03:39:47+00:00
There’s no mutating happening here, for example:

if cond: X = “yes” else: X = “no”

X is only ever assigned once, it’s actually still purely functional. And in Rust or Lisp or other expression languages, you can do stuff like this:

let X = if cond { “yes” } else { “no” };

That’s a lot nicer than a trinary operator!
by linkregister | 2025-10-31 03:40:06+00:00
> The issue is that there are also other ignition sources and dead trees will eventually burn.

Please read citation number three from the parent post. This is not a certainty. Calfire and local agencies do a substantial amount of brush clearing, tree cutting, and when conditions are right, controlled burns. Anything that reduces the frequency of ignition events buys more time for fire control agencies to do this work.
by hpdigidrifter | 2025-10-31 03:40:24+00:00
Wise customer service is amazingly good though.

I'd much prefer to use a company that spends 100% of the time on 80% of customers than one that spends 80% of it's time on 20% of the customers

OP can't even provide proof from the tax office of being at that address, it's an angry rant rather than the whole picture.

Would you go into business with him with nothing but a phone bill as proof?
by SlightlyLeftPad | 2025-10-31 03:41:10+00:00
It is a failed state, and we have seemingly overnight given Russia and China the biggest beautiful gift they could have asked for.

Our military is over extended, science has been flipped over and defunded, and that alone will settle it.

Now add unreasonable volatility from tariffs, and wait, give it time, wait some more until it’s impossible to unwind, then if we’re not in a major war, economy crashes, chaos ensues.
by TheDong | 2025-10-31 03:41:28+00:00
Let's look at the OSI definition since that's what people mean by Open Source (particularly when capitalized):

https://opensource.org/osd

> The license must allow modifications and derived works, and must allow them to be distributed under the same terms as the license of the original software.

> No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor

You cannot restrict selling derivatives of the software (a field of endeaver), and the derived work must be able to be shared under a similar license.

GPL does not add any restrictions counter to that. It allows you to redistribute and sell copies if you want, you just have to respect your user's freedom by also giving them the modified source code.
by jmtulloss | 2025-10-31 03:42:12+00:00
And the republicans could just vote to change the rules of the senate.

The out of power party gets a little veto power here. The republicans know the day will come they want that, so they won’t change the rules even though they have the power to do so (theoretically… there are republicans that will never compromise on this). Unfortunately they can’t get on the same page with their lame duck leader
by embedding-shape | 2025-10-31 03:43:29+00:00
> In our first experiment, we explained to the model the possibility that “thoughts” may be artificially injected into its activations, and observed its responses on control trials (where no concept was injected) and injection trials (where a concept was injected). We found that models can sometimes accurately identify injection trials, and go on to correctly name the injected concept.

Overview image: https://transformer-circuits.pub/2025/introspection/injected...

https://transformer-circuits.pub/2025/introspection/index.ht...

That's very interesting, and for me kind of unexpected.
by otterley | 2025-10-31 03:43:56+00:00
You can’t just shrink a block device any way you want. It has to be done in concert with the filesystem on top of it to ensure any allocated blocks in the space to be deallocated are relocated to a safe area in the volume. Otherwise, data could be lost and filesystem corruption could occur.

Put differently, there is no point in being able to shrink a volume if you can’t safely shrink the filesystem that uses it.

The usual solution to this problem is thin provisioning, where you put a translation layer between the blocks the filesystem thinks it’s using and the actual underlying blocks. With thin provisioning you can allocate only, say, 1GB to the physical storage, but the block device presents itself as much larger than that, so you can pretend to create a 1PB filesystem on top of it.
by freehorse | 2025-10-31 03:46:22+00:00
I don't necessarily think about JS in particular. A lot of languages have similar design and prob most have to deal with this issue in general.

In your examples, it does not make sense to have both

typeof NaB ===> "boolean"

and

Boolean(NaB) ===> false

But maybe if you had NaB it would make sense to evaluate

Boolean(NaN) ===> NaB

And maybe also evaluate `NaN === 1` to NaB?

I am not too fond of NaB because boolean is supposed to encode binary logic. There exists ternary logic and other concepts that could be used if you do not want strictly two values. Or if you want to encode exceptional values, no reason not to use int8 directly, instead of calling it boolean but actually using sth that could be represented as int8 (NaB has to be represented by some byte anwyay). In general, tbh, I think often it is not useful to encode your logic with booleans because many times you will need to encode exceptional values one way or another. But NaB will not solve that, as it will just function as another way to encode false at best, throwing exceptions around at worst.

> Similarly, NaB would represent a breakdown of true/false condition (somehow) as an exceptional case.

Still, in JS `NaN || true` evaluates to `true` hence I assume `NaB || true` should evaluate to true too. It is not quite the same as NaN + 1 evaluating to NaN. And as NaN (and hence NaB) functions as false when logical operations are involved for all intents and purposes, except if you exactly inquire for it with some isNaB() or sth, to me NaB is another way to encode false, which is probably fine depending what you want it for.
by lioeters | 2025-10-31 03:47:25+00:00
Consequences of Undecidability in Physics on the Theory of Everything - https://jhap.du.ac.ir/article_488.html (PDF)

> General relativity treats spacetime as dynamical and exhibits its breakdown at singularities. This failure is interpreted as evidence that quantum gravity is not a theory formulated {within} spacetime; instead, it must explain the very {emergence} of spacetime from deeper quantum degrees of freedom, thereby resolving singularities.

> Quantum gravity is therefore envisaged as an axiomatic structure, and algorithmic calculations acting on these axioms are expected to generate spacetime. However, Gödel’s incompleteness theorems, Tarski’s undefinability theorem, and Chaitin’s information-theoretic incompleteness establish intrinsic limits on any such algorithmic program. Together, these results imply that a wholly algorithmic "Theory of Everything" is impossible: certain facets of reality will remain computationally undecidable and can be accessed only through non-algorithmic understanding.

> We formalize this by constructing a "Meta-Theory of Everything" grounded in non-algorithmic understanding, showing how it can account for undecidable phenomena and demonstrating that the breakdown of computational descriptions of nature does not entail a breakdown of science. Because any putative simulation of the universe would itself be algorithmic, this framework also implies that the universe cannot be a simulation.
by aussieguy1234 | 2025-10-31 03:49:59+00:00
I've set up GrapheneOS on my Pixel with 2FA fingerprint + PIN unlock. No way will anyone be getting into it without my cooperation.

My only issue was less compatibility with my local emergency services, since they can't see me on a map for some reason if I call from a GOS phone.

My solution to that was a second Pixel as an emergency phone - one with the stock OS, that I'll swap sims with and take with me when hiking, stand up paddle bording and doing other activities that carry risk. This phone has no sensitive information in it. I also have a PLB for added protection.
by Nition | 2025-10-31 03:50:34+00:00
I see this same discussion in the audio world sometimes re Waves plugins, and one big factor there is Windows vs. Mac.

Windows users tend to be able to use old, even ancient versions forever with no trouble. Mac users on the other hand, often seem to be faced with having to either pay for a new software version that works with a newer version of Mac OS, or stay on an old version of the operating system - sometimes on old hardware as well.
by whycome | 2025-10-31 03:50:54+00:00
All you’re encouraging is for users to not acknowledge when they use an LLM. You’ll get the same stuff added to threads. Even now, humans contribute unverified slop to threads too - have we ever had a way of verifying what someone contributes other than the occasional citation?

A solution might be somewhere in the middle. LLMs aren’t going anywhere, and they will only become more invisible.
by johncolanduoni | 2025-10-31 03:51:06+00:00
I’ve done a significant amount of functional programming (including F#) and still reach for it sometimes, but I don’t think it provides substantial advantages for most use-cases. Local mutability is often clearer and more maintainable.

Also, category theorists think how excited people get about using the word monad but then most don’t learn any other similar patterns (except maybe functors) is super cringe. And I agree.
by stevage | 2025-10-31 03:51:21+00:00
In JavaScript, I really like const and have adopted this approach. There are some annoying situations where it doesn't work though, to do with scoping. Particularly:

- if (x) { const y = true } else { const y = false } // y doesn't exist after the block - try { const x = foo } catch (e) { } // x doesn't exist after the try block
by BriggyDwiggs42 | 2025-10-31 03:51:34+00:00
I hope you didn’t get the wrong impression, I pretty much agree with you entirely. The lobster thing was just because it’s pricey where I am and I’d had the wrong impression about it. My underlying point was that I can recognize fiscal constraints in the kind of food we can give away for free, and that we should be efficient, but that food sufficient to meet people’s needs should be provided for free. I certainly didn’t mean to imply that food stamps were causing food deserts, quite the opposite; food deserts are why people might be perceived as using their food stamps inefficiently. In reality they don’t have convenient options to sustain themselves efficiently because our nightmare economy incentivizes the production of the opposite conditions. I was trying to preemptively refute the arguments I expected from deficit hawks.
by NathanaelRea | 2025-10-31 03:53:10+00:00
I don't think this is the best option, there could be very hard bugs or performance cliffs. I think I'd rather have an explicit opt-in, rather than the abstraction changing underneath me. Have my IDE scream at me and make me consider if I really need the opt-in, or if I should restructure.

Although I do agree with the sentiment of choosing a construct and having it optimize if it can. Reminds me of a Rich Hickey talk about sets being unordered and lists being ordered, where if you want to specify a bag of non-duplicate unordered items you should always use a set to convey the meaning.

It's interesting that small hash sets are slower than small arrays, so it would be cool if the compiler could notice size or access patterns and optimize in those scenarios.
by zermelo | 2025-10-31 03:54:00+00:00
https://www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/senate-bill/24

Passed by Congress in January 2019 and signed by Trump. " Employees furloughed as a result of a lapse in appropriations shall be compensated for the period of the lapse on the earliest date possible after the lapse ends, regardless of scheduled pay dates. "
by jfengel | 2025-10-31 03:54:38+00:00
There is only limited legal ability to fund departments outside of an appropriations law. Republicans could pass one if they eliminated the filibuster, but that's a nuclear option they haven't leaned on yet.

The executive branch is applying various tricks to keep some absolutely critical departments going but they can't just fund anything they like. At least, not according to the Constitution, which is very explicit that you can't spend money without Congressional approval. But we'll see how much of a difference that makes.
by crq-yml | 2025-10-31 03:55:01+00:00
I believe it's more nuanced than that. Artists, like programmers, aren't uniformly trained or skilled. An enterprise CRUD developer asks different questions and proposes different answers compared to an embedded systems dev or a compiler engineer.

Visual art is millennia older and has found many more niches, so, besides there being a very clear history and sensibility for what is actually fundamental vs industry smoke and mirrors, for every artist you encounter, the likelihood that their goals and interests happen to coincide with "improve the experience of this software" is proportionately lower than in development roles. Calling it drudgery isn't accurate because artists do get the bug for solving repetitive drawing problems and sinking hours into rendering out little details, but the basic motive for it is also likely to be "draw my OCs kissing", with no context of collaboration with anyone else or building a particular career path. The intersection between personal motives and commerce filters a lot of people out of the art pool, and the particular motives of software filters them a second time. The artists with leftover free time may use it for personal indulgences.

Conversely, it's implicit that if you're employed as a developer, that there is someone else that you are talking to who depends on your code and its precise operation, and the job itself is collaborative, with many hands potentially touching the same code and every aspect of it discussed to death. You want to solve a certain issue that hasn't yet been tackled, so you write the first attempt. Then someone else comes along and tries to improve on it. And because of that, the shape of the work and how you approach it remains similar across many kinds of roles, even as the technical details shift. As a result, you end up with a healthy amount of free-time software that is made to a professional standard simply because someone wanted a thing solved so they picked up a hammer.
by noduerme | 2025-10-31 03:55:48+00:00
>> only the tools that exist independent of Big Tech seem like safe bets for dissent

The problem is that those tools will never be easy for the general public to use, and the big data problem requires the genpop to be onboard. I honestly don't see a good way out of this. At a certain point in the evolution of any authoritarian state, those apps or devices which run them will just be banned and punishable to possess. In America, we're just running up against the outskirts of what hard power can do to silence and intimidate people.
by dragonwriter | 2025-10-31 03:56:30+00:00
> It’s puzzling why Python became the de facto standard scripting language rather than Ruby when the tooling was so inferior.

1. Ruby tooling wasn't superior when Python became the standard.

2. Until Rails, IIRC, Ruby had limited visibility outside of Japan, whereas Python already had deep penetration in lots of fields.

3. Ruby for quite a while, IIRC, had a pretty bad story on Windows compared to Python.