MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by steve_gh | 2025-10-14 07:11:09+00:00
Of course the Mercantor projection gets country sizes wrong. All map projections get something wrong, because they are projections of a 3d sphere onto a 2d plane.

The trick is to pick the right projection for your purpose. Mercator is good if you want to plot a course when sailing. As it preserves directions. But by doing so it messes up area sizes. Other projections get Areas right but mess up directions.

The trick is to pick the right map for your use case.
by alsetmusic | 2025-10-14 07:12:39+00:00
We have an AI promoter here. AGI isn't the future of anything right now. It could be. But so could a lot of things, like vaccine research (we're making promising development on HIV and cancer). Try saying those people would own the future in the 1980s-1990s. Sure, that'd be an obvious outcome, but it wasn't on the horizon for the people in the field at the time (unless your family owned the company).
by queenkjuul | 2025-10-14 07:13:01+00:00
Then go back and read my original comment again lol.

Protests are not war zones, nor are they "burning the city to the ground" nor are they even starting fires (and you did use the word fires).

My point is that the administration is lying about what's happening in Portland, and you don't seem to care. The things you're describing are not the same things the administration is describing.

And again, I don't know much about the protests in Portland, but Trump keeps saying the ones in Chicago are violent when they are not, so unless you can show me that Portland is different, it'll continue to assume you, like the president, are making things up
by hinkley | 2025-10-14 07:13:25+00:00
> You mean the scientific journal editors?

It’s died down lately but there has been a lot of spleen venting here about how shit article titles are compared to their contents. Often implying the exact opposite of the contents. The usual explanation is that editors pick the titles. And then there is a lot of uncharitable speculation about what exactly editors are good for given they are so overwhelmingly awful at titles. Which I am all too happy to participate in.

What’s interesting is the policy here used to be no editorializing on titles. But the title of this thread has been changed to something more like the paper and less like the article describing it. Seemingly in violation of that old policy. I hope that means I’ve missed a shift in policy happening.
by atleastoptimal | 2025-10-14 07:13:35+00:00
My argument is based on

1. The first company to get AGI will likely have a multitude of high-leverage problems it would immediately put AGI to task on

2. One of those problems is simply improving itself. Another is securing that company's lead over its competitors (by basically helping every employee at that company do better at their job)

3. The company that reaches AGI for a language-style model will likely do so due to a mix of architectural tricks that can be applied to any general-purpose model, including chip design, tactical intelligence, persuasion, beating the stock market, etc
by dchuk | 2025-10-14 07:14:31+00:00
I’ll update this comment in the morning when I’m not tired and I actually have something on GitHub, but I’ve been vibe coding a rails engine (don’t worry, I know how to build things in rails, I’m just time poor with a job and kids) that is a sophisticated rss feed subscription engine. Has niceties like adaptive polling based on posting frequency, user managed auto scraping capabilities if the feed doesn’t provide the full content, and all sorts of other nice features. I have a couple other project ideas that are based on a foundation of ingesting rss content at scale so I’ve been meaning to build this for years, and AI coding tools finally make this possible because otherwise this would have taken me months
by cyberax | 2025-10-14 07:14:48+00:00
The article is just wrong. Before Docker, there was OpenVZ and Virtuozzo. They were used to provide cheaper "dedicatd machine" hosting back around 2005.

Then the technology from OpenVZ slowly made its way into the mainline Linux, in the form of cgroups and namespaces. LWN called it a "container puzzle", with tens of moving pieces. And it was largely finished by early 2010-s.

I built my own container system in 2012 that used cgroups to oversubscribe the RAM, with simple chroot-based file namespaces for isolation. We even used XFS projects (raise your hand if you know what this is!) for the disk quota management. I remember that I had to use systemtap to patch the kernel to be able to find out which process died as a result of the OOM killer, there were no standard ways to do that.

We sold it as a part of our biotech startup to Illumina. Then we sold it again to Amazon as a part of another startup :)

The genius of Docker was the layered overlayfs-based image building. This one simple innovation made it possible to build images in a constructive way, without having to waste half an hour for each minor change. I was floored with its simplicity and power when I first saw it.
by surajrmal | 2025-10-14 07:14:58+00:00
You seem to be framing this as if it were a business decision to curtail competition. I and likely the team pushing these changes only see the security benefits for users through these changes. People have tinted lenses to assume malice when Google does things, but if you've actually ever been close to the decision making process internally it's never anything close to what people seem to imagine. People are overestimating how problematic these changes will be in practice.
by DeH40 | 2025-10-14 07:16:25+00:00
That’s a common misconception, but it's factually incorrect. European companies can, and do, acquire and control companies in China.

The legal framework and the reality on the ground show a very different picture.

1. The Law Explicitly Allows It: China's Foreign Investment Law (effective since Jan 1, 2020) clearly states that foreign investors are permitted to acquire the shares, equity, or other similar interests of domestic Chinese enterprises.

2. The "Negative List" System: China uses a "Negative List" model. This means any industry not on the list is fully open to foreign investment, often up to 100% ownership. This list has been shrinking every year, opening up more sectors. For instance, all restrictions in the manufacturing sector were removed. While there are still restrictions in very specific strategic areas (like news media or rare earth mining), this is not a blanket ban by any means.

3. Real-World Examples of European-Controlled Companies in China:

You don't have to search hard to find major Chinese operations controlled by European firms. Here are just a few high-profile examples:

Automotive: German automaker BMW raised its stake in its Chinese joint venture, BMW Brilliance Automotive, to 75%. This is a landmark case of a European company taking majority control of a major automotive manufacturer in China. Similarly, Volkswagen owns a 75% stake in its EV-focused Volkswagen Anhui venture.

Chemicals: Germany’s BASF is building a massive new Verbund site in Guangdong. It's a €10 billion project that is 100% owned and operated by BASF.

Retail & Consumer Goods: All IKEA (Sweden) stores in China are operated by its wholly-owned subsidiary. French beauty giant L'Oréal and luxury groups like LVMH and Kering all operate through wholly foreign-owned enterprises in China.

Finance: German insurer Allianz established Allianz (China) Insurance Holding, the very first 100% foreign-owned insurance holding company in the country.

So, the idea that a European company "wouldn't be allowed" to buy a Chinese company is a myth. While the process involves regulations (just like any country), it is legally possible and happens frequently across many industries.
by atleastoptimal | 2025-10-14 07:16:50+00:00
Even if you could cure cancer or HIV with a vaccine it would have a relatively negligible impact compared to AGI.

There are far more signals that AGI is going to be achieved by OpenAI, Anthropic, DeepMind or X.ai within the next 5-10 years than there were of any other hyped breakthrough in the past 100 years that ultimately never came to fruition. Doesn't mean it's guaranteed to happen, but to ignore the multitude of trends which show no signs of stopping, it seems naive in Anno Domani 2025 to discount it as a likely possibility.
by hinkley | 2025-10-14 07:18:02+00:00
Once you understand a thing, you know what it’s capable of.

A lot of my early expertise in performance analysis was heavily informed by my SIGPLAN membership. Many of the improvements showing up in compilers and interpreters would show up in some form there, and of course those developers were either involved in the papers or had access to the same research. So when some new version came out with a big explanation of what it did, I already had a reasonably good notion of how it worked.

It was a dark day when they got rid of the paper proceedings.
by DarkNova6 | 2025-10-14 07:18:37+00:00
There absolutely lies value in studying programming language, but maybe not when reinventing ideas of the past.

> I encourage everyone to create the most absurd, implausible, and impractical languages. Chasing the measurable is often useful, expressing the expressible is insightful, but never forget the true goal of language design: to explore and create what isn’t.

Sorry, but this sounds more like an artsclass to me. Don't get me wrong, there was a point in time where exploration of the unknown was the only way to move forward. But these days we would need greater insights into higher-level language semantics and inherent tradeoffs to guide language-design and language evolution.

There is plenty to choose from and one can learn already so much just by reading up on the Java-EG mailing lists. Brian Goetz has a true academic mindset and I frequently feel inspired when I read his reasoning which is both highly structured and accessible.

Otherwise we would just be left with another compiler class. Compiler basics really aren't that difficult.
by Gustomaximus | 2025-10-14 07:18:47+00:00
I was thinking the issue might be its much better for factories to automate sections of production over time.

It must be a huge expense with risk to design a new factory, automate it end to end and push live hoping the market expectation for the product exists and the automation is as good as planned.

Whereas if you have a manual production line you could have a massive advantage as they can automate out sections ongoing and it allows engineers to build skills in this also as they go.
by tovej | 2025-10-14 07:21:03+00:00
No? I don't think their nationality matters. And there's even a connection. All three countries have governments enacting extreme nationalist immigration policies (Poland:suspension of asylum rights, Denmark: atated goal of no asylum seekers, India: the prime minister is part of an ethnonationalist paramilitary organisation who has passed legislation blocking islamic asylum seekers from getting accepted).

Nationalism is strong in all three countries, and when nationalism is strong, so are the most extreme expressions of it.
by atleastoptimal | 2025-10-14 07:21:50+00:00
US uniquely is suited to maximally benefit startups emerging in a new space, but maximally prevent startups entering a mature space. No smart, young person in the US matriculates into industries paved over by incumbents as they wisely anticipate that they will be in an industry deliberately hamstrung by regulatory capture.

All growth is in AI now because that's where all the smartest people are going. If AI were regulated significantly, they'd go to other industries and they would be growing faster (though not as much likely)

However there is the broader point that AI is poised offer extreme leverage to those who win the AGI race, justifying capex spending on such absurd margins.
by Galanwe | 2025-10-14 07:22:05+00:00
> it's not clear to me the game plan here. Assuming the voting and election situation doesn't change, they won't be in office forever

I mean, they are in office right now, even though they already quite egregiously violated most laws in existence. It seems completely obvious to me there will be some kind of takeover for the next elections. Some new rules will be set in place that favor the current government.

And the current US track record seems to prove that it'll work. There will be outraged news articles and comments on the internet, some protests, but ultimately it'll pass.
by Joker_vD | 2025-10-14 07:23:09+00:00
> What people do with Docker is spin up a database or another service to develop or test against.

Yep. Being able to run

docker run --rm --publish=127.0.0.1:27017:27017 'mongo:3.6.8'

or

docker run --rm --publish=127.0.0.1:27017:27017 'mongo:5.0'

and then get rid of it with simple Ctrl-C is a godsend.
by littlestymaar | 2025-10-14 07:24:31+00:00
Not if you want the regulators to stop new entrants on the market for “safety reasons” which have been Dario Amodei's playbook for the past two years now.

He acts as if he believed the only way to avoid the commoditization of its business by open weight models is to manage to get a federal ban on them for being a national security threat.
by DarkNova6 | 2025-10-14 07:25:41+00:00
I don't think we have a lack of concepts, but a lack of concept connectivity.

To avoid feature bloat of unconnected pieces of ad-hoc syntax Java does the right thing and focuses on expressing easily-composable language building blocks.

As a last adopter language, Java has the luxory of cherry-picking good features of other languages but I think their line of thinking should be the reference moving forward.
by fsiefken | 2025-10-14 07:26:49+00:00
That's great and that's what I aspire, but as it's so easy and quick typing and sending a mail I just send it like that. I remember the days before when I hand wrote the occasional letter and delivered it myself or sent it by post.

Would you consider handwriting a letter and then fax2email it also an option, if not why not? Writing a letter can be much more intentional, but the sending process could be automated.

I remember I bought a german book with bundled talks/essays at the Goetheanum bookshop last year about how to relate to the digital revolution. Distracted by the internet I haven't had time yet to read the book. "Das Ende des Menschen? Wege durch und aus dem Transhumanismus" (The End of Man? Ways Through and Out of Transhumanism), edited by Ariane Eichenberg and Christiane Haid.
by utopiah | 2025-10-14 07:28:10+00:00
Maybe they meant before X/Twitter.com, before Google, before Meta, before... wait, what's left? PayPal mafia much? Anduril? Oh you meant startups? That will then be bought by those?

There is an ideal of SF but SV isn't SF, definitely not non-tech SF.

So... you might think of a version of SV that existed, maybe, at some point. It might even still exist as some rebellious employees of those large corporations but in practice people with the money and power in SV I believe now are pretty much with such a stance, yes, sadly IMHO.

Wind has turned, in SV too.
by hilbert42 | 2025-10-14 07:28:23+00:00
I'm hardly a gamer but I liked Leisure Suit Larry it was good fun and very entertaining. One had to find and equip Larry with various accoutrements then attempt to best guide him in his quests.

It worked rather like the original Fortran Adventure game but with very primitive graphics (by today's standards).

I reckon if I searched deep amongst my archives I'd still find the original floppy disks.
by atoav | 2025-10-14 07:29:26+00:00
Granted, but that is relevant to the point I made in which way?

In reality you will have people running different OS versions. Maybe not within one org, but across users? For sure. If you are not using containers for one reason or another uv has shown to be a very good, reliable and easy to use way of dealing with the issues like these.

Additionally it has some other benefits when it comes to dev dependecies etc. Not that you couldn't somehow manage without it, it just makes certain things so much less pain as they were.
by anupsingh123 | 2025-10-14 07:30:20+00:00
Classic "I'll be right back" moment that cost me real money.

Building justcopy.ai - lets you clone, customize and ship any website. Built 7 AI agents to handle the dev workflow automatically.

Kicked them off to test something. Went to grab coffee.

Came back to a $100 spike on my OpenRouter bill. First thought: "holy shit we have users!"

We did not have users.

Added logging. The agent was still running. Making calls. Spending money. Just... going. Completely autonomous in the worst possible way. Final damage: $200.

The fix was embarrassingly simple: - Check for interrupts before every API call - Add hard budget limits per session - Set timeouts on literally everything - Log everything so you're not flying blind

Basically: autonomous ≠ unsupervised. These things will happily burn your money until you tell them to stop.

Has this happened to anyone else? What safety mechanisms are you using?
by pjmlp | 2025-10-14 07:31:09+00:00
Indeed, however many people are too young to remember that he looked down into UNIX, as a bunch of greybeards without taste.

"Why We Have to Make UNIX Invisible."

https://www.usenix.org/blog/vault-steve-jobs-keynotes-1987-u...

"That time I had Steve Jobs keynote at Unix Expo"

> They said a Unix weenie was code for software engineers who hated what we were doing to Unix (the operating system we licensed)—putting a graphical user interface on it to dumb it down for grandmothers. They heckled Steve about his efforts to destroy it. His nightmare would be to speak to a crowd of them.

From https://web.archive.org/web/20180628214613/https://www.cake....

The value proposition NeXT found on UNIX, was the same as Microsoft (after they let go of Xenix, thanks to MS-DOS golden goose deal with IBM), a means to an end, the market of companies and universities that wanted something with UNIX in the box.

"NeXT marketing strategy video (1991)"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KRBIH0CA7ZU

Note that he wasn't at Apple when A/UX and MkLinux efforts took place.
by xenodium | 2025-10-14 07:34:02+00:00
> With agent shell it feels so much more integrated and natural.

That's great to hear.

> I wish that agent-shell-sidebar had some screenshots though so I could see what it actually does.

I nudged the package author for a screenshot. Having said that, you can see it in action here: https://github.com/xenodium/agent-shell/pull/55
by jt2190 | 2025-10-14 07:34:29+00:00
No they’re not “coming”:

NC State University: “Researchers Propose a Fourth Light on Traffic Signals – For Self-Driving Cars“ (2023) [1]

> The researchers acknowledge that AVs are not ready to adopt the new distributed computing approach tomorrow, nor are governments going to install brand new traffic lights at every intersection in the immediate future.

[1] https://news.ncsu.edu/2023/02/traffic-light-for-autonomous-c...
by pfannkuchen | 2025-10-14 07:35:16+00:00
Wasn’t child mortality only super high in dense population settings relatively recently? Like if you are a tribe in the middle of nowhere in Northern Europe 20k years ago, for example, you are probably not exposed to much contagious disease. Disease is a network phenomenon, and prior to modern medicine humans had increased network speeds and connectivity massively, but that wasn’t the historical norm, was it?
by abeyer | 2025-10-14 07:35:55+00:00
To my knowledge the deciding factor between which state ids were considered compliant and which were not was whether the state required disclosing and documenting immigration status to get a drivers license. In theory there are other rules, but the rest of them were pretty universally followed already anyway.

In addition, the source you linked explicitly points out that the id standards were just one part of a bill that "would repeal the provisions regarding identification documents in IRTPA, replace them with a version that would set the federal standards directly rather than in negotiation with the states, and would make various changes to US immigration law regarding asylum, border security and deportation."
by rwyinuse | 2025-10-14 07:36:49+00:00
I think major breadbasket collapses can be avoided through geoengineering. Thanks to volcanoes and emissions from marine traffic, we know for a fact that climate change can be slowed down by spraying enough stuff reflecting sunlight high in the atmosphere.

Of course some conservative US states are enacting laws against geoengineering, but thankfully they can't prevent rest of the world from doing it. I hope we'll eventually reach some kind of a solution where Trump-voting radical Christians can have the biblical apocalypse they want locally, while rest of the world continues to improve.
by gambiting | 2025-10-14 07:36:55+00:00
>>So IIUC the PS4 gamepad can be used but only for PS4 games? That is ridiculous.

It's because PS5 games can use the adaptive triggers functionality that is impossible to emulate on the PS4 controller. For example in Ratchet and Clank short pull on the trigger fires the gun, there is artifical resistance past that point, but if you pull past it it will fire the secondary weapon mode. On a PS4 controller you'd just fire the secondary mode all the time because there would be no way to find the threshold on a trigger without this functionality.

Of course games could be designed around this and support both - but Sony avoided placing such a requirement on devs so all PS5 games are presumed to be using a PS5 controller when going through cert.
by MediumOwl | 2025-10-14 07:37:03+00:00
You are right. China does not really implement free market without government interaction. Then again, neither does the US or any other country for that matter.

The US used its massive state surveillance apparel to spy on essentially every country in the world, not only for diplomatic advantage, which you might argue would be fair game, but also to steal industrial secrets and promote US companies (see e.g. https://www.mediapart.fr/en/journal/france/290615/revealed-m... for France, one of their supposed allies).

Paraphrasing you:

> The US heavily subsidize their companies and have large government bureaus that strategically guide industries over long time frames. For example, the US has been on a long, intentional path to destroying all international corn producers via subsidies, dumping, etc.

The US essentially destroyed the traditional crop growing in Mexico by a combination of subsidies and free trade agreements.

It is _true_ that China does not play a fair free trade game. It is _not true_ that the US, or any other country, does. (The reasons for it should be obvious btw, free trade only works if legislation is more or less the same everywhere, otherwise it's just stupid.)
by atoav | 2025-10-14 07:37:35+00:00
By this point I feel reminded of a former collegue I ate lunch with, who would repeatedly make jokes about how "vegans constantly need to talk about their veganism". During our shared time he brought that topic up probably a hundred times, while the single time veganism was brought up by anybody was by a female intern after she was asked by him why she doesn't like to try the meat.

This is what reflexive criticism of Rust starts to feel like. I get that this somehow grinds some peoples gears, but come on. Who cares what it is written in if it is good software. And as someone who tried all major ways of dependency management in Python I have to say it is the best. Don't like that it is written in Rust for ideological reasons? Go ahead and write it better in C¹ or whatever.

¹: Nothing against C, I regularily use it for embedded programming, but it appears many of the loudest Rust allergics come from there
by bakugo | 2025-10-14 07:38:10+00:00
In addition to the whole anti-competitive aspect already mentioned, it also helps sell the idea that LLMs are more powerful and capable of more things than they actually are.

They want clueless investors to legitimately believe that these futuristic AIs are advanced enough that they could magically break out of our computers and take over the world terminator-style if not properly controlled, and totally aren't just glorified text completion algorithms.