MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by martin-t | 2025-11-03 20:34:31+00:00
I don't think fighting back is shitty in any way.

a) Either there is no objective morality and then anyone can do anything they can justify using their personal moral system, as long as it's internally consistent (it blatantly isn't for most people and perhaps subtly isn't for the rest)

b) or there is objective morality and then anyone can dispense punishment (for example by fighting back) because there's no reason the objective morality would favor a given person over any other.

The idea that people should not solve their own problems or other people's problems stems from:

- People in positions of power wanting to justify their power, thus indoctrinating everyone into believing they need protection. The more authoritarian the state, the more restrictive guns laws. Authoritarian teachers demanding absolute order and children punishing each other is disorder.

- The difficulty of ascertaining who the original aggressor is and who is just fighting back.

- The likelihood of people making mistakes and punishing the wrong person of overshooting the level of appropriate punishment.

- Internal conflict weakening the whole groups, making it more susceptible to outside aggression - better to punish both sides fighting to keep order and appear strong.

All of these have some merit in some situations and to some extent but IMO none of them justify their logical conclusion - total submission to a supposedly unerring position of power.

---

But back to fighting back:

I've seen two groups of children - those who were encouraged to fight back and those who were encouraged to endure it or ask teachers for help.

You don't see the first group bullied much so you might not even identify the group as a target of (potential) bullying.

Meanwhile I have never seen the second group's strategy working out - the bullying always escalated until a breaking point.

Additionally, from what I've seen, when the second group changed strategies to fighting back, the bullying stopped.

---

Finally, another pattern I see emerging from personal experience is that the parents of the children involved often know each other because they went to school with each other, even if not necessarily one class. And the parents of aggressors ("bullies") behaved the same way. The behavior absolutely is transmissible and I don't believe it's solely through social means. Some anti-social personality traits have a large genetic component and these traits are often a major cause of the need to hurt others.
by tailrecursion | 2025-11-03 20:34:37+00:00
> I was daunted by making the jump to C, then c++ and python. Only over time did I overcome the nerves and move on with Java, [...]

It sounds as if you did skip C++ and moved to Java instead. If so you serendipedously avoided the one language that's likely to cause problems. C++ doesn't work like the rest of the languages on your list, and it really is as full of land mines as people say - even though, with a good process, evidently it can be managed.
by tayzer | 2025-11-03 20:34:46+00:00
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by eszed | 2025-11-03 20:34:46+00:00
I'd sign up for this without a second's hesitation. I actually had the thought of "how could I volunteer?" while reading the article. My personal primum mobile is learning - I'm curious (to some extent) about (nearly) everything - and along with that goes an urge to help satisfy other people's curiosity.

I'm curious about my death, too! I've sat with people who are very close to that edge, and I realize it's the last experience I'll ever have, the last lesson I'll ever learn, and find it poignant that I won't be able to tell anyone else about it. Being part of an experiment like this would be... satisfying, somehow. It feels like it would give meaning to my death.

I respect that you have a different point of view, but I hope that helps you understand what would motivate someone to do something like this.
by irigarae | 2025-11-03 20:35:09+00:00
Location: Belgium

Remote: Yes, or hybrid

Willing to relocate: Yes, depending on the offer

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Résumé/CV: on request

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by IAmBroom | 2025-11-03 20:35:32+00:00
My solution was quicker and faster: buy luggage that is not black.

It now is recognizable at 100 yds against a pile of luggage. OK, a minority of luggage is also non-black, but there's a range of colors. Mine is a medium blue, and so false positives are about 1%, and false negatives are nil.
by nebula8804 | 2025-11-03 20:35:38+00:00
Implementation still varies between car to car. Example: Mach-e interrupts the song playing and takes many seconds before it resumes. Sometimes this leads to multiple driving instructions preventing the song from resuming for a long time.

Other implementations (looking at you Hyundai) crash requiring you to pull over, disconnect the phone, reboot the infotainment and then re-enter your navigation destination.

The best implementation is no carplay: instead use an AUX port and mount the phone on the dash.

Second best is Tesla's custom navigation. They do something other car companies should: use one of the million speakers in the car to focus on navigation directions while allowing audio content to continue playing on all the other speakers. Such a simple idea but so good.
by mengdotzip | 2025-11-03 20:35:38+00:00
Location: Brussels, Belgium Remote: Yes Willing to relocate: Yes Technologies: Go, OpenCL, Python, AI Infra, DevOps, Docker, Azure AD, Windows/Linux server, SQL/MySQL/Postgresql/SQLite, React, AWS, JavaScript, TypeScript, PowerShell, Bash, SCCM, Intune, ProxMox, VMWare ESXi, Windows AD, Git Résumé/CV: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1edrc2vgYfI1YjQtNprf0pXTCSlH0syVx/edit?usp=sharing&ouid=108516447659643757324&rtpof=true&sd=true Email: matyas[at]meng.zip GitHub: https://github.com/mengdotzip

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by redleader55 | 2025-11-03 20:35:43+00:00
Do you think the other ways in which people vote are better: selling your vote, picking a candidate for being presentable, picking a candidate for having the right complexion/religion/sexual orientation, picking a candidate for being married or having kids, picking a candidate because they are "smart", or poor or ... I could go on. Giving the right prompt which you find on the internet might give you a better choice than you might decide for on your own.
by vacuity | 2025-11-03 20:35:46+00:00
I find it reasonable to assume that any civilization will gradually adapt to meet demands, given whichever constraints burden it. Europe (and the US) had opportunities (partly due to colonialism) to become industrialized and prosperous, and it has taken those opportunities. So it is with China. Africa has opportunities, but colonialism has made progress difficult. In the long term, I think cultural/societal differences are not the deciding factor, so much as the geopolitical environment shapes society. The formation of mountains doesn't much care about the contemporary scale of human construction projects, either.

You seem to be saying that colonialism advanced society even for the oppressed, but the causality of history is complicated. As far as we know, you may as well say that the extinction of the dinosaurs as it happened was essential for human proliferation. Maybe the dinosaurs would've gone extinct at some point, or diminished greatly, or maybe the dinosaurs and humans would coexist. Just because a somewhat plausible scenario presents itself does not mean it is compelling. You have brought up counterfactuals, so use your imagination seriously, instead of taking the easy way out. If you have a motivating belief on the matter, it is untoward to speak as if you are unbiased and objective.
by yepguy | 2025-11-03 20:36:11+00:00
I would encourage people to consider permanent solutions to use social media more intentionally instead of taking a month off here and there. Two things that the apps really want you to do, but that you should resist as much as possible, are doomscrolling through meaningless content and compulsively checking apps or websites in case you miss out on interesting updates.

For myself, I've decided to direct anything and everything possible to my email (with plenty of filters to keep my main inbox tidy). For apps that don't offer email notifications, I use MacroDroid to forward Android push notifications to email. There are also plenty of ways to forward RSS to email.

I batch process my email 1-3x/day, and anything I don't want to see during this time is not worth seeing at all. It gets ignored, filtered out, or unsubscribed from.
by intalentive | 2025-11-03 20:36:12+00:00
Funny you say that, this write-up recalled Stephen Grossberg's Adaptive Resonance Theory for me. The same basic ideas come up when addressing the stability-plasticity dilemma.

That said, the authors are saving this for future work. Fine-tuning is cheaper, easier, faster to validate.

>Switching to a new architecture at pretraining time has a high cost, but there are reasons we might want this (besides the better scaling behavior). The main benefit is that the model can learn to organize its memory from scratch, and once we’ve already “allocated” this high-capacity memory pool, there’s a clearer path to learning on multiple tasks and corpora over time.

This means you could "fine-tune" the model on your custom corpus at ingestion time, without having to actually train via backprop. Your corpus would be compressed into model-readable memory that updates model behavior. Then different memory units could be swapped in and out, like programs on a floppy disk. I can see this concept being especially useful for robotics.
by jiggawatts | 2025-11-03 20:36:12+00:00
I never understood why anyone would prefer the H3 hex tiles over Google’s much simpler S2 system: http://s2geometry.io/

Sure, hex tiles make certain circular nearest neighbour searches slightly more accurate… but still have an error.

And then… everything else that’s inconvenient with hex tiling, like that issue that subdivisions of a cell leak into the neighbouring cells and hence don’t add up to 100% of the parent! This makes many database queries return lies, or the queries need very complex and slow(!) code to compensate.
by saulpw | 2025-11-03 20:36:22+00:00
I agree, some of the macros are very useful, and I've found myself wanting DO(n, code) as a simpler for-loop construct. In my own code, when I have some dozens of small things (like opcodes or forth words or APL operators), I specifically do want a "one-liner" syntax for most of them. The individual elements are usually so small that it's distasteful to spend 10 lines of code on them, and especially because the real understanding lies in the 'space between', so I want to see a large subset of the elements at once, and not put code-blinders on to focus on one element at a time.
by _DeadFred_ | 2025-11-03 20:36:46+00:00
When AI people point to new jobs created like the industrial revolution, they are pointing to 9 to 9, 6 days a week of the 1880s industrial revolution era. The people of that era were told reducing to 5, 8 hour days was impossible, the economics wouldn't work, etc. We only arrived at our current number after the workers literally revolted, with much violence on both sides on the way to 'the perfect number' we have today that 'makes the most' sense and that totally can't be changed.

My jobs could never spare for me to take time off, I was too valuable to the company. Yet they also survived and were able to replace me once I left. 'impossible' is mainly 'inconvenient' in company speak.
by fragmede | 2025-11-03 20:37:03+00:00
> certainly not specific to tooling ("I'm a DeWalt carpenter!")

I'm not sure that's a correct analysis of their situation. Yes, if you hand a perfectly spherical DeWalt screwgun to a Nikita carpenter, they'll know how to use it, but in practice, everyone I know in the trades has picked a team and just committed to it (to the tune of many thousands of dollars in tools). Fortunately for them, the tools are basically the same, just a stupid bit of plastic (and there are 3d printable or buyable adapters) so it's easy enough to switch teams if they had to, it's just a pile of money, unlike sw tools and materials where I mean, yeah, eventually I got the hang of Ruby, as I did C++ and C and Python and Perl and now typescript and JavaScript oh god and also Swift. (Managed to avoid Obj-C tho!)
by dvt | 2025-11-03 20:37:08+00:00
Very true. I rarely find myself "Googling" anymore. I'd rather just ask ChatGPT. Even if the enshittification (ads, etc.) will happen down the line, at least we'll have an absolutely awesome product (like Google was to Yahoo) for 5-10 years.

OpenAI is at the very least worth at least half as much as Google. I foresee Google becoming like IBM, and these new LLM companies being the new generation of tech companies.
by chaos_emergent | 2025-11-03 20:37:20+00:00
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by nh23423fefe | 2025-11-03 20:37:21+00:00
of course. dot products are a symmetric form on vector spaces. they let you compute the spheres of radius r.

given the sphere of radius r, for any pair of vectors v,w in the sphere

-r^2 <= dot(v,w)=dot(w,v) <= r^2

as w varies from v to -v the value moves from r^2 through 0 to -r^2

this is how we define parallel perpendicular and antiparallel.

the dot product is only meaningful in a geometric context. by definition it projects vectors down to scalars. fixing the scalar value finds the spheres, and for a sphere we can vary the vectors to compute cosines.
by jascha_eng | 2025-11-03 20:37:34+00:00
There are also approaches do doing the filtering while traversing a vector index (not just pre/post) e.g. this paper by microsoft explains an approach https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3543507.3583552 which pgvectorscale implements here: https://github.com/timescale/pgvectorscale?tab=readme-ov-fil...

In theory these can be more efficient than plain pre/post filtering.
by dTal | 2025-11-03 20:37:49+00:00
Meat isn't required. We could all be vegetarian.

The impact to quality of life could be minimal. Right now, today, there exist plant-based burgers (Beyond) and even steaks (Juicy Marbles) that are in every way superior to the average offal-based "meat" you get from the average fast food joint. Granted that you can't replicate the very nicest of fine cuts with plants - yet - but how often are you really eating rare sirloin for lunch anyway? Right now the plant based alternatives are more expensive than animal meats, but this is an economic artifact that would evaporate in a hypothetical world where meat consumption was de-normalized (and meat subsidies halted!).

Perhaps you mean it's counterfactual because you don't think it's a social norm that has a hope of being challenged. I think that's defeatist. Vegetarianism is practiced globally. You must begin from the following perspective: this is an indulgence, not a necessity for survival or even a requirement for a happy life. Raising an entire animal only to slaughter it for consumption is wanton extravagance of both physical and moral resource. Its practitioners deserve no subsidy, financial or social. Most people would be quite put off their meat if forced to viscerally confront the reality, but are carefully insulated from it - usually by simple distance and pleasant marketing, but in some places by actual legislation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ag-gag

In short, like most of the evils of world today, it's not a necessary evil. Just a lazy, can't-be-bothered-to-change, would-upset-the-current-economic-order evil.
by omnicognate | 2025-11-03 20:37:52+00:00
That was an impressive result, but AIUI not an example of "coming up with and proving (preferably numerous) significant new theorems without human guidance".

For one thing, the output was an algorithm, not a theorem (except in the Curry-Howard sense). More importantly though, AlphaEvolve has to be given an objective function to evaluate the algorithms it generates, so it can't be considered to be working "without human guidance". It only uses LLMs for the mutation step, generating new candidate algorithms. Its outer loop is a an optimisation process capable only of evaluating candidates according to the objective function. It's not going to spontaneously decide to tackle the Langlands program.

Correct me if I'm wrong about any of the above. I'm not an expert on it, but that's my understanding of what was done.
by jacquesm | 2025-11-03 20:38:02+00:00
What is really absolutely bananas is to continue to believe that United States has true freedom of speech. There are so many limitations and exceptions that the USA scores worse than Europe where they don't have such a thing enshrined in their constitution (in so far as they have a constitution to begin with):

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/freedom-of-expression-ind...

Of course, you could be pedantic and say 'but freedom of expression isn't freedom of speech' but that would be precisely the kind of thing that continues to perpetrate the myth. A theoretical freedom on some narrow issue does not do much in competition with a much broader actual freedom. And that's the 2024 version, your guess about what the 2025 edition of that index looks like, I'm thinking not nearly as good for the USA. Blackmailing universities for starters.
by snozolli | 2025-11-03 20:38:02+00:00
During the pandemic, I experimented with vaping marijuana to see if I could improve my sleep quality. It worked to a degree, but after a few weeks of nightly use, I began to experience what I think is depersonalization.

I would be walking with friends and talking about our day, while simultaneously thinking, "this isn't actually me doing this, this is just a surface-level interaction being carried out almost by automation." Between that and the realization that I "hallucinate", i.e. misremember things, overestimate my understanding of things, and ruminate on past interactions or hypothetical ones, my feelings have changed regarding what intelligence and consciousness really mean.

I don't think people acknowledge how much of a "shell" we build up around ourselves, and how much time we spend in sort of a conditioned, low-consciousness state.
by crazygringo | 2025-11-03 20:38:10+00:00
You're claiming that the thinking is just a fictional story intended to look like it.

But this is false, because the thinking exhibits cause and effect and a lot of good reasoning. If you change the inputs, the thinking continues to be pretty good with the new inputs.

It's not a story, it's not fictional, it's producing genuinely reasonable conclusions around data it hasn't seen before. So how is it therefore not actual thinking?

And I have no idea what your short document example has to do with anything. It seems nonsensical and bears no resemblance to the actual, grounded chain of thought processes high-quality reasoning LLM's produce.

> OK, so that document technically has a "chain of thought" and "reasoning"... But whose?

What does it matter? If an LLM produces output, we say it's the LLM's. But I fail to see how that is significant?
by Balinares | 2025-11-03 20:38:17+00:00
I've seen a lot more engineers self-describe as rational and pragmatic than I've seen act like it. This here website is quite a marvelous zoological gallery in that respect. (Love you folks, you are messy complicated humans the lot of you and I wish I could cogently convey how good it is to embrace that instead of pretending elsewise.)

We do pick tools in good part based on how we feel about them (especially engineers who believe themselves beings of pure rationality, tbh), and I think that's in fact okay; how we feel doesn't come from nowhere, it's informed by decades of experience often acquired the hard way. But it's still a squishy metric that can only be trusted to a point, and being aware of how this sort of decision making occurs, in yourself and in others, is highly valuable IMO.