MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Neywiny | 2025-10-04 20:01:13+00:00
I think really the problem is that packages like pytorch take so long to import. In my work I've tried a few packages (not AI stuff) that do a lot of work on import. It's actually quite detrimental because I have to setup environment variables to pass things that should be arguments of a setup function in. All things considered a python module shouldn't take any noticeable time to import
by barthelomew | 2025-10-04 20:02:29+00:00
Yep. The paper was written last year with GPT-4o. Things have become a lot better since then with newer models.

E.g. https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.20047 Tab 1, we compare the performance on text-only vs SMT-only. o3-mini does pretty well at mirroring its text reasoning in its SMT, vs Gemini Flash 2.0.

Illustration of this can be seen in Fig 14, 15 on Page 29.

In commercially available products like AWS Automated Reasoning Checks, you build a model from your domain (e.g. from a PDF policy document), cross verify it for correctness, and during answer generation, you only cross check whether your Q/A pairs from the LLM comply with the policy using a solver with guarantees.

This means that they can give you a 99%+ soundness guarantee, which basically means that if the service says the Q/A pair is valid or guaranteed w.r.t the policy, it is right more than 99% of the time.

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/minimize-ai-hallucinations-...
by oezi | 2025-10-04 20:02:53+00:00
Berlin lost over 1.5m inhabitants in the time since 1945 to its lowest point after reunification (due to being a divided city without much industrial jobs).

At it height 1 in 5 apartments were empty in Berlin which pushed rents down below 4 EUR per square meter. A 3 bedroom apartment for less than 500 EURs a month. This was de-gentrification the parent mentioned.

Since 2010 population grew and now Berlin has housing shortages like every other capital in Europe. Rents now top 20 EUR per sqm.
by YZF | 2025-10-04 20:03:01+00:00
The questions/results: https://images.jacobinmag.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/120...

I find this format (ranking) a bit confusing.

I read the article and the Wikipedia article about "Democratic Socialism" and I still can't quite understand what exactly this means, Marxist Democracy? Anti-Capitalism?

From the survey: "A democratic socialist elected official in your town or city, whose agenda is primarily focused on how to make life more affordable for working people in your community by bringing down the costs of housing, groceries, and electric bills."

So this is the definition of a "democratic socialist"? Doesn't every politician say they'll bring down costs and make things more affordable? The question being how? How is this elected official going to do that?

"Democratic socialists believe that the government should take a more active role to improve Americans' lives." -> Is this a survey or a sales pitch?

"What is your familiarity with the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA)? " -> 4% I am a DSA member, or personally know DSA members, 20% "familiar with the organization"

What would be an example of a successful country that where government is more or less based on these principles? Scandinavian countries? China?

Obviously(?) these trends are driven by social media?

"15% of Donald Trump voters prefer democratic socialism to capitalism. These voters tended to be younger and non-white." -> Does your average person even know what these mean?
by khamidou | 2025-10-04 20:04:20+00:00
> What's the use case for Zig? You're in that 1% of projects in which you need something beyond what a garbage collector can deliver and, what, you're in the 1% of the 1% in which Rust's language design hurts the vibe or something?

You want a modern language that has package management, bounds checks and pointer checks out of the box. Zig is a language you can pick up quickly whereas rust takes years to master. It's a good replacement to C++ if you're building a game engine for example.

> Either a language lets you prove the absence of certain classes of bug or it doesn't. It's not like C, Zig, and Rust form a continuum of safety. Two of these are different from the third in a qualitative sense.

Again repeating my critique from the previous comment – yes Zig brings in additional safety compared to C. Dismissing all of that out of hand does not convince anyone to use rust.
by chowells | 2025-10-04 20:04:23+00:00
Reduce cannot calculate literally anything, in the sense you mean. It corresponds in computational power with primitive recursion. And quite famously, there are problems primitive recursion cannot solve that general recursion can.

On the other hand, I don't think I've ever seen something as recursive as Ackermann's function in real life. So it can probably solve any problem you actually mean to solve.
by kortilla | 2025-10-04 20:04:42+00:00
>LLM code output can be tested as it is generated, whereas its advice on accounting and contract law can only be tested by domain experts, who you can just pay for this advice without involving the LLM.

Assuming that passing some tests means it’s good code is as dumb as asking the LLM accounting and contract law advice.

It can be superficially correct and completely broken.
by WD-42 | 2025-10-04 20:04:54+00:00
You may be correct in theory though in practice the reason to use Async over threads is often because the crate you want to use is async. Reqwest is a good example, it cannot be used without Tokio. Ureq exists and works fine. I've done a fairly high level application project where I tried to avoid all async and at some point it started to feel like swimming upstream.
by crystal_revenge | 2025-10-04 20:04:56+00:00
> but politics plays a much smaller role

This does not align with my experience at small tech companies at all, and I've worked an many.

But the flavor of the politics is very different. At a small company as an IC you will very likely be working directly with multiple C-levels, often providing important context between them. A senior IC will need to be reaching out pretty actively across teams to make sure things are happening and you'll quickly build an internal network of "good people who get shit done fast".

Politics can seem no existent because in some cases just getting along well with leadership can be enough to make your life very easy. But you'll see how truly political these situations are if you have the opposite situation: someone in leadership just doesn't like you. One bad relationship can ruin you in a small company.

In a large company it's not too hard to just keep your head down (at least as an IC) and largely let your manager worry about politics. For managers it can seem more political because typically the "be friends with leadership" doesn't work because the hierarchy is both broader and deeper.
by Spivak | 2025-10-04 20:05:18+00:00
The different political labels are interesting but also deeply frustrating because it paints people at odds when they're not.

There's two baskets: one is a "centrally planned" economy led by government spending. One is "free market" economy led by market forces. You can't leave either basket empty or your economy crashes. The government spending keeps money moving during the busts. All we're arguing about how full each basket should be and which sectors of the economy go where. This shouldn't be some us vs them thing dammit, we all have the same vision for the economy and arguing over the details—because they are details—ought to be civil rather than territory grabbing and flag planting.
by smrtinsert | 2025-10-04 20:06:30+00:00
This is a very incorrect conclusion. Nothing about jquery prevented functional purity. If that's what you wanted, use it as such. Jquery just made browser differences much less of an issue and wrapped it in a nice way. The modern react stack is exactly what all the fp snobs raged against and they weren't wrong about it. Its been said before, there was jsf before react. Both are bad ideas. React has terrible performance is extremely heavyweight and ridiculous for what its used for. There's a reason there's a revolt nearly daily.

To me the major failing here was people over investing in faang thought leadership. Still haven't ever used react angular etc in a major project and gone wow this is great. JQuery got a lot closer. There were many other ideas coming forward around the time those frameworks came up, it was a fertileperiod for frontend. Sounds like we should cycle back.
by tialaramex | 2025-10-04 20:07:21+00:00
You can make an enum, with all 255 values spelled out, and then write lots of boilerplate, whereupon Option<U8ButNotThreeForSomeReason> is also a single byte in stable Rust today, no problem.

That's kind of silly for 255 values, and while I suspect it would work clearly not a reasonable design for 16-bits let alone 32-bits where I suspect the compiler will reject this wholesale.

Another trick you can do, which will also work just fine for bigger types is called the "XOR trick". You store a NonZero<T> but all your adaptor code XORs with your single not-allowed value, in this case 3 and this is fairly cheap on a modern CPU because it's an ALU operation, no memory fetches except that XOR instruction, so often there's no change to bulk instruction throughput. This works because only 3 XOR 3 == 0, other values will all have bits jiggled but remain valid.

Because your type's storage is the same size, you get all the same optimisations and so once again Option<U8ButNotThreeForSomeReason> is a single byte.
by hansvm | 2025-10-04 20:07:27+00:00
I really didn't mean to make this about Zig vs Rust. That was a mistake. My real point is that Zig is also a great language, even when you care about safety.

That said, the things you asked about:

1. I suppose you might get away with linting all of shadow_reuse, shadow_same, and shadow_unrelated. Would that sufficiently disable the feature?

2. The biggest problems with overusing `anyhow` to circumvent the language's error system are performance and type safety. Perf is probably fine enough for most applications (though, we _are_ talking about systems programming, and this is yet another way in which allocation-free Rust is hard to actually do), but not being able to match on the returned error makes appropriately handling errors clunkier than it should be, leading to devs instead bubbling things up the call stack even more than normal or "handling" the error by ignoring any context and using some cudgel like killing connections regardless of what the underlying error was.

3. Rice's Theorem is only tangentially related. Your goal, and one that Rust also strives for, is to make it so that changes to the type signature of a function require compatible changes at call sites, which you can often handle syntactically. Rust allows `let _ = foo()` to also silence errors, and where Zig normally allows `_ = foo()` to silence unhandled return values it additionally requires `try`, `catch`, or `return` (or similar control flow). You have options like `_ = foo() catch {}` or `_ = foo() catch @panic("WTF")` if you really do want to silence the error, but you'll never be caught off-guard by an error being added to a function's return type.
by beeflet | 2025-10-04 20:07:54+00:00
I don't socialize with other nerds IRL. I know what you're getting at, but I think it's at the point right now where "normal people" have paranoia of getting locked out of their google/apple accounts, because it has happened to pretty much everyone I know at least once.

They both send you through the loop of assuming you have a device, so if you lose your device you're screwed.

For example, you can even see memes like this are very popular:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pBcPOx8_YKw
by barthelomew | 2025-10-04 20:08:21+00:00
Yep, this is a genuine problem, and this is what we term as the autoformalization gap in our follow up paper. (https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.20047)

Some LLMs are more consistent between text and SMT, while others are not. (Tab 1, Fig 14,15)

You can do uncertainty quantification with selective verification to reduce the "risk", for e.g. shown as the Area Under the Risk Coverage Curve in Tab 4.
by thankyoufriend | 2025-10-04 20:09:43+00:00
I love this take, thank you.

In my reading, I came across the term "Mixed economy" which I think aligns with what you're saying. Nobody is arguing in good faith that socialism/communism would have 100% coverage of the economic system. There would be room for luxury goods to operate under roughly the same economic conditions. The key difference being that basic needs like food housing and Healthcare would operate under state control for the benefit of all citizens. We would have some vote in their operation via representatives, unlike now where we have 0 say in private operations unless we pay to play. And some people don't have the means to pay, so they don't get to play.
by kulahan | 2025-10-04 20:10:01+00:00
Don’t forget this can only happen once, really. You need it to be such a rare event that it doesn’t keep sanitizing the planet with repeated impacts, but one really perfect strike will bring what you need and allow life to form.

The number of instances where this (something unreasonably unlikely) happened in our cosmological history is kinda surprisingly high. I’m absolutely convinced there’s no advanced life (and CERTAINLY no technological civilizations) outside of earth.

One other example: we gained most of our adaptability, curiosity, and problem solving skills as very tiny mammals while dinos ruled the earth. The only way we ever took over the planet was thanks to an asteroid wiping out all those huge creatures. Suddenly, high adaptability and intelligence and resilience was what mattered, and being big and strong suddenly was a massive disadvantage.

Our intelligence exploded largely because that extinction event removed almost all major predators, turning earth into a giant survival puzzle sandbox for mammals to grow in.

Edit: our brains only grew big because it was the best means of survival - they’re crazy expensive, so without this “sandbox puzzle” effect, we probably never would’ve grown them.
by iLemming | 2025-10-04 20:10:05+00:00
> the format should be self-justifying

Well, it really is. Org-mode is absolutely amazing for anything that can be [even vaguely] expressed in the outline format - anything hierarchical - personal notes, todo-lists, documentation, wiktionary, dictionary and thesaurus entries, comment threads - yes, I read Hackernews and Reddit in Org-mode, file-system entries, plot outlines and story structures, presentation outlines, financial planning and budget breakdowns, travel itineraries and packing lists, maintenance schedules, decision trees, etc.

Even things like .yaml or python files - sometimes converting indent-based stuff to org-mode can give you better perspective of things, because Org-mode has numerous different ways to search and express the data - someone who's never experienced using sparse trees which work like "smart filters" temporarily hiding everything except the parts matching your search, while preserving the hierarchy, may have no idea how great it is - this entire idea of this abstraction.

It only sounds "limiting", in practice - it is supremely flexible system. It makes me really sad that I have not discovered this flexibility sooner in my life.
by fragmede | 2025-10-04 20:10:24+00:00
> People who decided to put lead additives in motor fuel had no idea that they would be causing brain disorders , generations down the road.

In that case, they totally did. The people who pushed leaded gasoline knew it was dangerous, but they did it anyway! By the 1920s–30s, it was already well known in medicine that lead caused neurological damage, especially in children. Workers at DuPont and Standard Oil plants developed hallucinations, seizures, and many died. What's abhorrent was where industry executives and some government allies downplayed or suppressed evidence of the harms.
by kylo33 | 2025-10-04 20:10:35+00:00
Yeah, this is exactly how I feel. I recently bought a new phone, and considered an iPhone for the first time. The sole reason I am still using Android is that so many of my favorite apps are only on F-droid. In my experience, open source software is far higher quality than the proprietary counterparts, but many of them are exclusively on F-droid.
by striking | 2025-10-04 20:11:04+00:00
No, we're using the OpenAI vendored version of zod-to-json-schema via https://github.com/transitive-bullshit/openai-zod-to-json-sc..., and applying it directly to the `json_schema` field of the OpenAI API. Maybe we have a subtle bug somewhere but I'd expect a 400 response if we were genuinely sending a malformed request.
by GWBullshit | 2025-10-04 20:11:42+00:00
You're not wrong, but you're in the wrong place to talk to people about low-probability events and how they multiply. Most Hacker News can't into elementary-school-level probability equations and will instead take the ostrich approach; there was some behavioral scientist dude from Cambridge Analytica who wrote about this and the TL;DR is that most "adults" have infantile minds that prefer various safety blanket mechanisms that society is more than ready to offer them just to do anything to have an excuse to not face the truth of what basic math reveals to more likely than not be true.
by seec | 2025-10-04 20:11:58+00:00
Even Flamanville is basically German industrial sabotage by the way of Siemens. Without their stupid bureaucratic "security" requirements the project would have been completed much faster and cheaper.

It seems insane to me that we agreed on partnering with a country that was aggressively against nuclear for a nuclear project.

It has been a long time since the last war now and everybody seems to have forgotten how Germans can be dangerous arrogant ideologues. The influence they yield on the EU is crazy and I don't think there is a way to properly balance it now. They are actively committing acts of war by the way of their political institutions but we do nothing. Inevitably the past will repeat itself...
by 010101010101 | 2025-10-04 20:12:00+00:00
This makes for a pithy sound bite, but that’s pretty much only possible if you’re independently wealthy to the point of being in the “fuck you money” category of wealth.

There’s no part of expecting people to hand you money that doesn’t obviously lead to your sole purpose being to please those people. Even if you’re a solo contractor you’re going to spend your time pleasing clients - sure, you can shed bad ones more easily than you can a bad manager, but you’re still beholden to someone who controls the purse. If you found a start up you’re pleasing your investors. If you’re a CEO of a large company you’re pleasing your board.

Work is just the act of pleasing other people in specific ways based on your skillset.
by abujazar | 2025-10-04 20:12:23+00:00
Those phones are still _huge_ compared to the original iPhone.

The iPhone 4 was perfect at 115mm * 59mm and weighing just 137 grams.

The 13 mini was the last bearable iPhone at 132mm * 64mm and 135 grams.

Newer phones are simply too large and clumsy, and difficult to handle with one hand even for me as a grown man with fairly large hands. I don't want a tablet sized phone, I want a fully functioning phone that doesn't feel like a brick in my pocket.
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-10-04 20:13:24+00:00
> I believe it's pretty clear that when something is a live controversy with no clear winner in a municipality like Oak Park, whatever else it is, it isn't a "red line".

Shouldn't it be the opposite? A thing is tested when it's put under stress. It's a red line because it's not to be crossed even when the temptation to do it increases.
by palata | 2025-10-04 20:13:27+00:00
> "Explaining" is a need that is sparked by both sides.

I was more refering to the need to write an article explaining why you think it's (not) always a mistake to do X.

> Just because someone is having doubts or questioning your work that doesn't mean they are automatically right

Of course not. Some discussions are constructive. And ideally one learns to recognise them with experience.

Now if you find yourself in a debate about styling or whether object-oriented programming is fundamentally bad, my opinion is that this is not a debate worth having. If it blocks PRs, then there is a problem, and someone higher in the hierarchy needs to solve it (because if there is the problem in the first place, it means that the team cannot solve it themselves). This is what hierarchy is for.
by poizan42 | 2025-10-04 20:14:56+00:00
> are considered copyrighted IP in North America.

Yes they may be, but in the Sega v. Accolade case I mentioned earlier it was decided that copying of both copyrighted and trademarked material for interoperability purposes is fair use. In that case Accolade had to literally embed "SEGA" inside their ROM and send the text to the Genesis III in order for it to boot their games. The Ninth Circuit court ruled that this constituted fair use.
Storytel Player – unofficial desktop client for Storytel audiobooks
by debba | 2025-10-04 20:15:33+00:00
I often listen to audiobooks on Storytel but missed having a proper desktop client. So I built Storytel Player, a lightweight open-source app that lets you stream your Storytel audiobooks directly on your computer.

Repo & downloads here:

https://github.com/debba/storytel-player

https://github.com/debba/storytel-player/releases/tag/v1.0.7

Would love feedback and suggestions from the community.
by StefanBatory | 2025-10-04 20:16:16+00:00
Is Jacobin a reliable source? As far as I know, while I wouldn't call it a rag, it is very ideological to the point you'd be better very careful taking anything from it for granted. It is interesting though, that's true too.

And well... As a Pole, it saddens me to see this. Mainly because it's clear that Americans don't know what socialism is, to conservatives, state existing is literally communism, to progressives, if a state has health care, it is socialism. I was reading a book recently - What Everyone Needs to know about China - and there was one sentence I remarked. Author naming Norway socialist country. In an otherwise reputable publisher.

Communism and socialism are evil ideologies, and never again. Words have their meanings, and this I fear will mangle it all up. After all, if communism is health care, it can't be that bad, right?
by em-bee | 2025-10-04 20:16:17+00:00
my license plate is only relevant if an accident happens or i violate some traffic law. in the same way that others involved in the accident will want me to reveal my identity which is not public either. in a perfect world where everyone is honest and no one makes mistakes, we would not even need license plates. but that does not mean that other information that can be deduced from the license plate, such as the time and location or my route, also my home and my workplace, should be available to anyone who asks for it.
by buran77 | 2025-10-04 20:18:21+00:00
At the time of writing he has commented 16 times on this article and not a single time with a to-the-point answer when asked point blank what's his reasoning. I'd love to not have to guess his thoughts.

We have a technology that keeps evolving to encompass more and more "protections" for the people, that happen to come with more and more control for authorities. Every step in that direction is a red flag. The red flag is the direction in which things are moving. Don't we have enough chapters in the history books about why that is?