MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by dwohnitmok | 2025-11-24 00:50:05+00:00
It's mainly the latter, although the author makes half-hearted gestures as some sort of CAS (Computer Algebra System) being better.

It's not very credible. There are individual fragments that make sense but it's not consistent when taken together.

For example, by making reference to Godelian problems and his overall mistrust of infinitary structures, he's implicitly endorsing ultrafinitism (not just finitism because e.g. PRA which is the usual theory for finitary proofs also falls prey to Godel's incompleteness theorems). But this is inconsistent with his expressed support for CASes, which very happily manipulate structures that are meant to be infinitary.

He tries to justify this on the grounds that CASes only perform a finite number of symbol manipulations to arrive at an answer, but so too is true for Lean, otherwise typechecking would never terminate. Indeed this is true of any formal system you could run on a computer.

Leaving aside his inconsistent set of arguments for CAS over Lean (and there isn't really a strong distinction between the two honestly; you could argue that Lean and other dependently types proof assistants are just another kind of CAS), his implicit support of ultrafinitism already would require a huge amount of work to make applicable to a computer system. There isn't a consensus on the logical foundations of ultrafinitism yet so building out a proof checker that satisfies ultrafinitistic demands isn't even really well-defined and requires a huge amount of theory crafting.

And just for clarity, finitism is the notion that unboundedness is okay but actual infinities are suspect. E.g. it's okay to say "there are an infinite number of natural numbers" which is understood to be shorthand for "there is no bound on natural numbers" but it's not okay to treat the infinitary object N of all natural numbers as a real thing. So e.g. some finitists are okay with PA over PRA.

On the other hand ultrafinitists deny unboundedness and say that sufficiently large natural numbers simply do not exist (most commonly the operationalization of this is that the question of whether a number exists or not is a matter of computation that scales with the size of the number, if the computation has not completed we cannot have confidence the number exists, and hence sufficiently large numbers for which the relevant computations have not been completed do not exist). This means e.g. quantification or statements of the form "for all natural numbers..." are very dangerous and there's not a complete consensus yet on the correct formalization of this from an ultrafinitistic point of view (or whether such statements would ever be considered coherent).
by byko3y | 2025-11-24 00:50:22+00:00
It's 200% LLM used in production — like 10 hours of dialogs right before writing the article. I had much more hours of coversations with Rust fanboys and it was mostly a waste of time, they just would not try to negotiate on Rust's weak points. I would definitely not be able to write the article with only human support — it's really sad to conclude that LLM-s are much better assistants because they are neutral and objective.
by achierius | 2025-11-24 00:50:40+00:00
Looks nice! Though I have to say, you should probably avoid sbreak even for small allocations -- obviously it's slow, but even beyond that you have to deal with the fact that it's essentially a global singleton and introduces a lot of subtle failure cases you might not think of + which you can't really solve anyways. It's better to mmap out some chunk of memory and sub-allocate it out yourself.
by intull | 2025-11-24 00:50:50+00:00
If you're horrified that we are in a world and society where a 7yo has been put in a position where antidepressants help them, yeah, that's understandable. If you're horrified that a kid is taking them, that the parents sought medical intervention for "just a kid", then, I'd say you're reacting to the concept of a kid on antidepressants than actually listening to the OP and their family's history and story.

Often, people react to the concept of a thing rather than the ground reality of life and its complexities of lived experience. Most people also extrapolate (in either direction) others' lived experiences based on their learnings, understandings, pasts and future ambitions. In this case especially, there's also added stigma around mental health, antidepressants and the locus of personal responsibility when it comes to mental health issues.

The _concept_ of a child on antidepressants suspends trust in parents, that's often assumed and unquestioned depending, depending on the child's age. Maybe close to 18yo? Supportive parents. 7yo? Horrible parents. I'd argue it also tends to suspend critical thinking and introduces an unshakeable bias, that a child of 7yo _never [ever]_ needs antidepressants. Why? What makes you say that? What's your evidence and reasoning?

If you feel so horrified by that, can you consider for a moment that the parents recognize the weight and gravity of this decision too? That they had to really think this through, pursue more thorough medical advice than usual, make a judgement call, and have to live through this decision throughout all their lives?

OP's response to multiple comments indicates that they did not make this decision lightly and without making sure that this was the better thing to do overall. I commend OP's openness and honesty in talking about it. It's certainly inspiring to see a parent care for their child's mental health, and not dismissing that to be "oh, the kid's just young and moody, they'll feel better tomorrow."

PS. We (as a society) are always learning more and newer things about mental health and treatments. It might look like we know a lot. Perhaps. But we also don't know so much!
by cyberax | 2025-11-24 00:50:54+00:00
> Ahh, propaganda again. You really are a victim of propaganda, or believe history started on Oct 7. Predictable.

Let's look at 2005, then? When Israel forcibly displaced people out of Gaza. That is, Jewish settlers. Giving HAMAS full control over the land.

Or maybe 2011, when Israel exchanged more than a thousand prisoners (convicted through a regular legal process) for Gilad Shalit.

Sorry, but in the case of Gaza it's completely black-and-white. There are really no shades of gray there. HAMAS was given free rein, and they paid back by committing the worst terrorist act in Israel's history. HAMAS did nothing to help their people, using Gazans as puppets, while funneling money to criminals.

And I actually support sanctions against Israel for their West Bank settlers and discriminatory laws that result in the displacement of Palestinians there. Israel is certainly not blameless.

> When you oppress people, it's going to backfire at some point in time.

Who exactly was oppressing Gaza? Except HAMAS, of course.

> As far as I recall, Hamas has openly called for, and encouraged, third party involvement to investigate any war crimes committed on Oct 7th and to prosecute the perpetrators. Israel? Not so much...

Links? I'm _sure_ they must have at least detained some of the estimated 6000 people participating in the raid?
by mark_h | 2025-11-24 00:52:22+00:00
About my only usage is to augment my isearch. I frequently use isearch to navigate to a place on screen, but sometimes there are so many matches it would take a lot of repeated "C-s" to get there. I have "C-'" bound to avy-isearch (from within isearch), which instantly turns that into one or two keystrokes to filter down.

(or I could pick up the mouse, I know, but that's not why we're here)
by abracadaniel | 2025-11-24 00:53:52+00:00
For someone raised around music, starting a new instrument might not sound very challenging. You could get good at twinkle twinkle little star on the recorder in under an hour. Take carpentry as another example. It’s not hard. It’s not expensive to get into. But, if you never had someone in your life who was into it, then it just never occurs to you to try it.
by godelski | 2025-11-24 00:54:50+00:00
> Most people don't need to know calculus

I don't like this line of argument. It applies to many things, many of which we'd laugh at for suggesting.

Most people don't need to know how to read. Most people don't need to know how to add. Most people don't need to know how to use a computer. The foolishness of these statements are all subjective and based on what one believes one "needs". Yet, I have no doubt all of these things can improve peoples lives.

I'd argue the same with calculus. While I don't compute derivatives and integrals every day[0], I certainly use calculus every day. That likely sounds weird, but it is only because one thinks that math and computation is the same. When I drive I use calculus as I'm thinking about my rates of change, not only my velocity. Understanding different easing functions[1] I am able to create a smoother ride, be safer, drive faster, and save fuel. All at the same time!

The magic of the rigor is often lost, but the magic is abstraction. That's what we've done here with the car example. I don't need to compute numbers to "do math", I only need to have an abstract formulation. To understand that multiple variables are involved and there are relationships between them, and understanding that there are concepts like a rate of change, the rate of change of the rate of change, and even the rate of change of the rate of change of the rate of change! (the jerk!)[2].

That's still math. It may not be as rigorous, but a rigorous foundation gives you a greater ability to be less rigorous at times and take advantage of the lessons.

So yes, most people "don't need calculus" but learning it can give them a lot of power in how to think. This is true for much of mathematics. You may argue that this is not how it is taught, but with that I'll agree. The inefficiency of how it is taught is orthogonal to the utility of its lessons.

[0] Is a physicist not doing math just when they do symbol manipulation? I can tell you with great confidence, and experience, that much of their job is doing math without the use of numbers. It is about deriving formulations. Relationship!

[1] https://easings.net/

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerk_%28physics%29
by andrekandre | 2025-11-24 00:55:04+00:00
> I'd like to ask people who had been using both Ubuntu and MacOS, what would you advise? And MacOS users in particular, are you happy with the direction it has been evolving, and with that of Apple itself?

macos out-of-the-box experience is gonna be much better and smoother and more consistent than ubuntu for sure, and you get both unix environment and most desktop software (check first of course) that windows has too...

that being said, personally i am not so happy with apple's direction either, which is sliding (much much more slowly than windows) in the direction of buggy software updates, worse overall ux and more and more marketing driven changes...

i really like ubuntu and kde (kubuntu) and i feel like at some point the ux polish of it and the "de-polishing" of macos at some point will converge where i'd just install linux alongside macos and not miss much (but there are lots of reverse engineering issues remaining)...

so my idea is to stay on macos for while more while figuring out how to plug holes (such as smoother iphone integration) and getting more accustomed to kde/linux/ununtu before fully jumping ship...

idk if that is super helpful, but its where im at now in my thinking.
by rzerowan | 2025-11-24 00:56:12+00:00
To add to this , twitters algo seems primed to amplify controvesial topics to boost engagements.Why some topics always seemsto keep getting boosted while others barely trend.

Which for many enterprising trolls/grifter have seen them become SEO(TEO?) experts to push their preferred narratives for clout/profit while drowning the entire timelines in a flood of noise.
by trollbridge | 2025-11-24 00:56:34+00:00
It does seem that it should be possible to offer "free buses" without having to also offer "free hotels inside of the free buses". As an example, I can go to a local store and experience free parking or go to my nearby town and park for free downtown. I can't, however, park and sleep overnight in my car in that shopping centre or in that town.

Why can't buses be regulated the same way?
by jjj123 | 2025-11-24 00:56:39+00:00
“OK” is an over-simplified word to use here. It’s incredibly complicated. And it changes with the era and location. If it’s illegal to be gay where you are, or if there literally is no societal understanding of gayness like in the 1700s or whatever where staying a single man is not always an option, I don’t think asking someone to be celibate their entire life is reasonable either. It’s still not _great_ but I don’t blame the individual as much as I do society.

Now, the 90s are a different time than the 1700s, and I do think it’s a bit selfish and myopic to think that having affairs in a marriage is your only option. But if I’m being honest, as an out gay person who strongly considered staying in the closet forever, I understand and can empathize.
by josephg | 2025-11-24 00:58:41+00:00
> Do note that binary trees are mostly an obsolete legacy today — they are way too cache-unfriendly. I mean you could have written similar code in C++ using std::vector or std::dequeue and get the bounds checking too.

As a sibling comment said, its a b-tree not a binary tree. B-trees are - as far as I know - the fastest data structure on modern computers for the class of problems they solve.

And yes, I think if I ever go back to C/C++ I'll try this approach out. It might also work great in GC languages like JS/TS/C#/Go because there's fewer pointers to keep track of.

> Cargo is good for as long as there are few packages in there. Large projects already suffer from five versions of serde in one build and dependencies on FFI-connected libs that cargo itself cannot build. I mean look at the NPM nightmare — and they've mostly dodged FFI-s.

I haven't run into the "five versions of serde" problem, but I can easily imagine it. I've lived NPM nightmares more times than I can count. But I'd still prefer that to all the problems you get from CMake, autotools and Makefiles. At this rate we're going to get self driving cars before we have a single sane build system for C.
by ggm | 2025-11-24 00:59:12+00:00
I think the situation may not reflect cost of hands and housing. But the sunk cost of Hetzner to be in Germany, compared with the break-ground cost to construct their existing model in the rest of the world: I think that part is true. Selling off services in German hosted racks is at this point, massive profit on low price because the sunk cost has already been covered. They are sweating an asset into people like us, who want cheap disk but not the 100% reliable coverage of a contract which gives us replication, offsite, 3-2-1 class services. If they took that into the US the sunk cost component would not be covered, their sell price would be significantly less profitable.

The cost of hands and housing for hands, yea thats marginal in this.
by ponector | 2025-11-24 00:59:27+00:00
Could not find there an estimated 1150000 (5%) deaths in the provided data.

50% still-born children is also fake considering fertility rate 4+ for decade after the war.

You don't need to be a russian to share RT narratives. Also that is what a russian spy will say: "I'm not an agent" because, you know, russians always lie.
by johncolanduoni | 2025-11-24 01:01:13+00:00
That’s absolutely true - I was mostly trying to stake out a weaker claim against someone who seemed to think anyone who feels bad about the fact they can’t find sex is an unsympathetic incel. And I don’t think even the people who are lonely simply due to vague social trends like fewer tight-knit communities have an unpreventable problem at the societal level. It’s just there’s not an obvious perpetrator (pet theories about the causes of social decay non-withstanding).
by rzerowan | 2025-11-24 01:01:14+00:00
On a technical note , is geolocation ever truly accurate. I guess they are doing this by IP and App store records - which are generally trivial to change. IP blocks can shift and get repuposed so thats not accurate , and app store change is just a toggle away. Is there any forum/app thats geolocked their users successfully to bypass IP recog or VPNs? I think only the national level carriers could pull of something like this , as no commercial entity would willingly restrict their global growth.
by aw1621107 | 2025-11-24 01:01:21+00:00
> I doubt you can do it in Rust.

You absolutely can. You'll need to pay attention to how things are structured and not all codebases will be equally amenable to such techniques, but those are shared characteristics with C++.

As you said, "It really depends on what you are compiling."

> In Rust there is only one model of crash: you just crash.

Hardly. Why else would catch_unwind exist?
by lurk2 | 2025-11-24 01:02:07+00:00
> They ran about half of the largest US identity focused Facebook groups (Christian/Black/etc) during the 2020 US election.

Can you provide any citation for this and the approximate date when this was revealed? I’ve been hearing about this since 2015 and the last report I looked at was entirely unconvincing.

> it's also about stoking ethnic and religious tension to try to weaken the US and destroy its ability to be a unified cohesive country.

That is likely one of Russia’s goals; it is not likely that the Russians were the origin of these political cleavages. This was the problem with the entire Russian influence narrative; it was a post-hoc rationalization for why exceptionally bad ideas like diversity and multiculturalism were rejected by a subset of the population. In essence: “If they hadn’t been exposed to these Facebook posts, they never would have had these illiberal ideas put into their heads.”

It was also impossible to take seriously because most of the elected officials promoting it were receiving campaign contributions from AIPAC.
by danielam | 2025-11-24 01:02:14+00:00
From [0] (emphasis mine):

"Bhāskara II (c. 1114–1185) was acquainted with some ideas of differential calculus and suggested that the "differential coefficient" vanishes at an extremum value of the function.[18] In his astronomical work, he gave a procedure that looked like a precursor to infinitesimal methods. [...] In the 14th century, Indian mathematicians gave a non-rigorous method, resembling differentiation, applicable to some trigonometric functions. Madhava of Sangamagrama and the Kerala School of Astronomy and Mathematics stated components of calculus. They studied series equivalent to the Maclaurin expansions of [redacted] more than two hundred years before their introduction in Europe. [...] however, were not able to 'combine many differing ideas under the two unifying themes of the derivative and the integral, show the connection between the two, and turn calculus into the great problem-solving tool we have today.'"

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calculus
by nojs | 2025-11-24 01:02:34+00:00
This looks very useful.

I would love something similar that lets me plug in actual Claude Code/Codex with their original agent loop, prompting etc, and just handles the multiplexing, worktrees, isolation, etc automatically (it looks like this tool doesn’t support that). Because I think a lot of the power of eg CC comes from the engineering they’ve done to the tool rather than the underlying model.

How are people doing this at the moment?
by trollbridge | 2025-11-24 01:03:14+00:00
I have a close relative who is a schizophrenic. I also work with one.

Neither of them have been arrested 72 times nor convicted 15 times. Neither of them have set a random woman on a train on fire, either.

I consider someone who does that subhuman, yeah. Schizophrenics can and do experience empathy and go out of their way not to hurt others.
by gsf_emergency_6 | 2025-11-24 01:04:05+00:00
Nice turn!

>makes decisions on its own

Somehow, society making decisions on its own is a Stephen King story.. maybe direct democrats should just not use that name that always triggers. How about "civilianism"?

https://jacobin.com/2025/11/mamdani-chavez-torres-municipal-...

A participatory budget, which gave residents binding control over the full municipal investment budget.

(Contexts: upcoming Donald-Zohran meeting, Venezuela. Etc):

Current day examples (which are a bit more nuanced than in Thurow's day, but I'd argue the Gresham bug picture is roughly the same as what you said. "First-mover foot-gun"?)

-Tesla vs BYD (even though Tesla's factories in China are most productive)

-NVIDIA infra (note the optical fiber history repeating itself )

Literary case study: The villain in Snow Crash is a missing element of to-day's oligarch periodic table (Evangelical sham-futurist)

Good names are the first hard quest. To ward off Lasch's alt-institutionism
by danielam | 2025-11-24 01:04:10+00:00
From [0]:

"Laying the foundations for integral calculus and foreshadowing the concept of the limit, ancient Greek mathematician Eudoxus of Cnidus (c. 390–337 BC) developed the method of exhaustion to prove the formulas for cone and pyramid volumes.

"During the Hellenistic period, this method was further developed by Archimedes (c. 287 – c. 212 BC), who combined it with a concept of the indivisibles—a precursor to infinitesimals—allowing him to solve several problems now treated by integral calculus. In 'The Method of Mechanical Theorems' he describes, for example, calculating the center of gravity of a solid hemisphere, the center of gravity of a frustum of a circular paraboloid, and the area of a region bounded by a parabola and one of its secant lines."

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calculus
by trollbridge | 2025-11-24 01:05:32+00:00
That is not, however, what is happening. The Western world is facing a crisis where young people seem to be barely be able to find a place to live and have trouble finding a job, and are constantly being told that entry-level jobs for them will be replaced by automation or AI.

Little is being done to give them assurances they will be able to provide for themselves.
by Supermancho | 2025-11-24 01:05:44+00:00
> so is it a pitchfork idea?

What constitutes an advertisement is not a simple proposition. eg Is a paragraph describing some facts (phrased carefully) about a product or company an advertisement?

To what effect speech would have to be controlled to enforce this, is unthinkable. While some handwaving is necessary, as anyone can agree (since even the simplest legislation would be corrupted by the US political class), "banning advertising" is not a practical goal.
by intull | 2025-11-24 01:05:51+00:00
IMO, that's a common misconception. The fact that it seems this way can be attributed misunderstanding, bias in data, and perhaps a poor treatment choice. Sometimes, it's also the best healthcare can do for now.

Medical interventions for mental health issues aren't a forever-crutch. Plenty of people do taper off/change something about their prescriptions after a certain point, but we rarely ever hear those stories. What we do hear is plenty of people getting on meds/being on meds for a long time, which can bias us and make us think that most people who get on meds are on it for life.
by lemonwaterlime | 2025-11-24 01:06:08+00:00
Ive always just used C. From my recollection, there’s an avr libc library. There’s tutorials online for how to do it. The big thing is once you have that progression path with knowledge like that book I linked, you have a lot of freedom.

Some chips can use Micro Python or even Rust. I have not explored those myself.