MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by audunw | 2025-11-29 23:12:14+00:00
He’s probably thinking of robo taxi self driving. So that would be e.g. Waymo.

I don’t think anyone has better self driving for consumers out atm, but you could argue that’s because other companies are not using their customers as beta testers. I’ve seen demos that may indicate Mobileye has tech that’s just as good if not better. But they don’t release it to end users until it’s fully ready.

I don’t think Tesla has any special sauce, and that when the tech is actually ready for unattended full self driving in a consumer car, other car makers will come out with solutions around the same Tesla. One difference is maaaybe Tesla will be able to update old cars (probably with a hardware update). While I think others will only support it on new cars.
by api | 2025-11-29 23:12:23+00:00
In the debate between self made and team effort my opinion is “both.”

Nobody starts from zero. Everyone builds on the work of others with help from others.

At the same time, individuals can make unique contributions and are not just interchangeable parts. You see this over and over again in art, music, engineering, science, literature, etc., or really anything requiring skill. People aren’t interchangeable.

I think both positions, when argued exclusively, lead to a false devaluing of most human life. The “great man” theory leads to the idea that 99.999% of humans are mediocre at best and we all exist to serve a tiny number of greats. The “it takes a village” theory leads to the view that everything is a collective product and nobody is unique or special in any way. So you get the idea that 100% of humans are an undifferentiated mass of aggregate labor. That makes people just as disposable as if we are mere peons existing to serve the greats.

I think the reality is that we are an interdependent network of unique contributors.
by bitwize | 2025-11-29 23:12:29+00:00
Clippy was the beginning of today's dark era, not a relic of some past golden age. With Clippy, users were conditioned to accept computers attempting to anticipate, guide, and shape the user's actions rather than responding to user commands.

For close to 3 decades we've been locked in a philosophical war with Microsoft (vendors in general) over what these stupid machines should really be doing for us, that parallels the exchange between Dr. Gibbs and Ed Dillinger in Tron (1982):

Us: User requests are what computers are for.

Microsoft: Doing our [specifically Microsoft's] business is what computers are for!

If I had a YouTube pfp, I'd change it to Tron—not Clippy.
94% zero-shot in a shifting gridworld, no retraining
by heavymemory | 2025-11-29 23:12:49+00:00
Key door puzzle. Grid: 8 by 11. Two rooms. One key somewhere in the left room. Two coloured doors in the wall. Goal on the far side.

Train PPO or DQN on one layout and it solves that layout. Shift the key, add or move a wall passage, alter the distractor key setup and performance collapses. The usual story of memorising geometry instead of the rules.

Instead, I train a small set of skills, like find the correct key, go to the passage, open the correct door, reach the goal. Each skill trained once, then frozen. When the layout changes, nothing updates. It retrieves the right skills from longterm memory and composes them.

State space is already large if treated symbolically. Roughly 50 reachable cells for the agent, 50 for the key, 4 door configurations, multiple passage layouts, 3 inventory values, 4 headings. Around 360,000 distinct logical states from conservative counting.

At composition time, the system only reuses states it actually encountered during skill training. No gradients. No online policy adaptation.

Benchmark: 2500 zeroshot episodes with randomised keys and randomised passages. No retraining. Solve rate about 94%.

Frozen skills. New layouts. Still works.

So here's the real question: If hierarchical RL should solve this, why does it still struggle with such a tiny, structured world unless you train it across every variation? Or am I wrong?

And what’s actually being learned when a system generalises to layouts it has never seen?

I'm interested in that discussion. The gap between, this looks trivial and most agents don't generalise, feels like the interesting thing here.
by chongli | 2025-11-29 23:14:30+00:00
Clippy is a mascot for the trillion dollar companies. It's emblematic of the beginning of the end of user-centric computing. It marks the new era of intrusive business-centric computing.

It's not about data or technology at all. It's about property rights. User-centric computers (ideally) don't do anything their users don't want them to do. Business-centric computers don't care about what the user wants; they serve the interests of business (either the manufacturer or the user's employer).
by hshdhdhj4444 | 2025-11-29 23:14:35+00:00
Let’s not forget the Japanese who decided they didn’t want to compete in EVs because they couldn’t use that platform in some of their heavy machinery so decided to get the Japanese government to push hard on hydrogen, at a time Nissan was making a nice push in EVs, which led to Nissan having to back out of EVs as well.
by Atlas667 | 2025-11-29 23:14:44+00:00
"Society does not consist of individuals but expresses the sum of interrelations, the relations within which these individuals stand." - Karl Marx

My last few comments on this site have been precisely about these ideas. These ideas, in my view, are inherent flaws of philosophical liberalism, of which modern liberalism and conservatism stem. This ideology places itself at the forefront of morality, but can't even seriously analyze the conditions of the individual.

A rich heir is self made, but a poor man is morally and spiritually bankrupt. This is how far this modern ideology goes. Totally unscientific and is also the birthplace of modern racism.

This is how far the equality goes, that is, not very far at all. The liberal revolutions of the last ~400 years must be called the aristocratic revolutions. One where the organized aristocracy came into power, and so did their morals.
by atbpaca | 2025-11-29 23:15:50+00:00
I don't think it is a problem with Scala 3 itself. Scala 3 brought a lot of improvements, one of them is using semantic versioning. People used to complain a log about binary compatibility between versions in 2.x. Now it's here. I think that the slow adoption of Scala 3 is mainly due to one of its most successful projects: Apache Spark. To this day, Spark only supports Scala 2.13 although Scala 3 has been around for years now. This is both disappointing and frustrating because a lot of people were introduced to Scala thanks to Apache Spark.
by mc32 | 2025-11-29 23:16:03+00:00
Not all land was stolen. Much of it was bartered and sold. Tribes also vied for the pelt trade and would drive competing tribes out. The land we took from Mexico was only Spanish and Mexican on paper. Either one had as much control over the Apache/Comanche territory as Russia had over Alaska. Also the Apaches were driven out and nearly exterminated by the Comanche who remembered that they were nearly exterminated by the Apache when they got some stray horses and learned to ride them a century or so prior. The Mexican govt, wanting a buffer against Comanches, invited colonists from eastern states to colonize Texas in order prevent the raiding the Comanches were doing.

That is most of the territory was not under any tribe’s permanent control, nor was land in the west under control of Spain or Mexico before the Americans colonized it. Also lots of tribes were sworn enemies with each other and more than happy to collaborate with Europeans to drive out their enemy tribes with fewer losses to themselves.
by vel0city | 2025-11-29 23:16:04+00:00
Different government subsidies, different manufacturing costs, different regulatory requirements, and different markets have different market competition.

Think about this concept. It costs you $1 to make a widget. It costs your competitors $1.25 to make a similar widget. They sell theirs for $5. Do you sell yours for $1.50 or $4.75? Obviously, other things could be in play for the market for widgets, but if you could sell all your widgets for $4.75 wouldn't you do that?

If the cheapest car in the US is about $20k and is a complete POS, why would you sell your better car for $10k when you could still sell it for $22k and still sell just about all the ones you build?
by raw_anon_1111 | 2025-11-29 23:16:05+00:00
Not Medicaid, subsidized ACA. I know a lot of young healthy people that just take the chance of not having health care. Worse case you can’t squeeze blood out of a turnip if you have to go the emergency room.

I don’t think my older (step)son has had insurance since he got off our plan at 26 over two years ago.
by einpoklum | 2025-11-29 23:16:30+00:00
> Past a certain size, you have to make peace with the fact that a lot of people in your org are going to be frustrated with you, and you're going to have no idea why, and you may not going to be able to fix it.

This view of things can easily be used as an excuse to behave poorly, or otherwise, opaquely, with no transparency and accountability, and claim that there is no problem.
by tavavex | 2025-11-29 23:16:42+00:00
Is there such a thing as anti-rose-tinted glasses? I feel like this is an example of that.

No one here is saying that Microsoft was good, which seems to underlie your insistence on Clippy being so horrible - they're saying that a mistake like this one wasn't born from anti-user sentiment. Microsoft had engaged in plenty of anti-consumer action by then, but Clippy wasn't an example of it - its inclusion was misguided because the software industry was still in the exploratory phase in terms of UX, and some designers thought that putting silly faces and characters on things would make computers easier to learn and use in the rapidly-expanding market. Which is why you also see less annoying forms of character images pop up in some other Microsoft software of the day, acting as flashier textboxes.

They didn't purposefully waste CPU time by disregarding good software engineering practices (like what's happening everywhere now), they just misplaced a part of the performance budget to something that wasn't very useful. They didn't integrate Clippy as an essential part of the Microsoft experience, making it uplink your actions to Microsoft (which could have been done by then) or making Windows into the "Clippy OS". It was just an interactive help pop-up. If you didn't want it, you could have unchecked it from the very first version's install dialogue, and it would never appear anywhere. You could disable it afterwards. After a short run, Microsoft admitted their mistake and removed this feature for good, even making fun of it in a few Flash shorts and games. Nothing from this list even remotely approaches what Microsoft does today, and they will never return to the already-low-bar that was there 20 years ago.
by canyp | 2025-11-29 23:17:19+00:00
Oh, damn, I recall that motherfucker now that I look at the picture. I was a kid back then and had no context of it being spyware.

I stand corrected in my original comment.

> In 2002, an article in Consumer Reports Web Watch labeled BonziBuddy as spyware, stating that it contains a backdoor trojan that collects information from users. The activities the program is said to engage in include constantly resetting the user's web browser homepage to bonzi.com without the user's permission, prompting and tracking various information about the user, installing a browser toolbar, and serving advertisements.

Yeah, so not much different from modern Big Tech, lol.
by cglan | 2025-11-29 23:17:23+00:00
I live in a very very good area of Brooklyn and still regularly run into needles, human shit, and open fentanyl use.

LA is similar unless you never leave your little neighborhood.

DC was similar when I lived there about 4 years ago.

SF is cleaning up, but I’ve regularly walked on streets where it’s just bodies and needles

I was shocked by the Vietnamese area of Seattle. It felt like a zombie land.

I mean, if we’re talking city core yeah this it the average experience. I say this as someone who loves cities, American cities leave a lot to be desired and a lot of that comes from simply refusing to enforce basic laws that the rest of the world (including much more left countries) don’t hesitate to do.
by tux3 | 2025-11-29 23:17:49+00:00
What's the status of Landlock in container runtimes? A quick search makes it seem like CRIs are trying to define their own custom Landlock interface.

That will inevitably lag behind what the kernel supports, but more importantly I don't foresee many container image packagers, Helm recipe maintainers and other YAML wranglers getting into the business of maintaining a Landlock sandbox policy.

It makes sense for an application to use Landlock directly to sandbox some parser or other sensitive component. But if the CRI just blocks the syscalls by default, no infra person is going to take on the maintainance of their own sandbox policy for every app. The app will just see ENOSYS and not be sandboxed.

I might be missing the whole idea here, but I really don't see why we need some custom layer in the middle instead of having container runtimes let the security syscalls through?
by analog31 | 2025-11-29 23:17:50+00:00
I think what happens is when people have a routine outdoor activity, they develop a sense of their local weather, that seems like a mystery if one isn't regularly immersed in it. Also, some subtle adaptations make it easier, such as wearing quick drying clothes or having an emergency change at work.

Now, I do have the luxury of flexible hours at my workplace, but (for instance) my daughter doesn't, and she manages just fine.
by AngryData | 2025-11-29 23:18:00+00:00
Yep, so many people think hauling weight kills your gas mileage, but it doesn't really have that big of an effect unless you are hauling a massive load through stop and go traffic while in a hurry. The vast majority of people do most of their hauling of things down the highway, not through the middle of cities, and 90% of the losses from hauling load is just wind resistance against the poorly aerodynamic trailer which is a lot while at highway speeds. If someone is traveling down the highway at 70 MPH in their SUV with 1500 lbs in the back hatch, the only extra fuel it takes over the same SUV being empty is a tiny amount of extra friction in the tires that comes out to a fraction of a MPG.
by raw_anon_1111 | 2025-11-29 23:19:08+00:00
What’s even funnier when I hear that my thought is “congratulations I guess??”. They are now making less than an average mid level developer doing CRUD enterprise dev 3 years out of school in any major metro area in the US.

That’s not even considering that the intern I mentored in 2021 is now making in the low $200s as an SA at BigTech at 25.
by larusso | 2025-11-29 23:19:29+00:00
Paired with a long lived GitHub access token that had more access than needed for this operation. GitHub Actions has some features for short lived tokens that are not stored in static action secrets. I’m not quite sure why a bot user was actually needed here. Then there is the simple fact that lots of developers over provision their environments. Every sessions hosts hundreds of env variables for all kinds of things. From docker to GitHub tokens etc. we started to oidc all the things in Jenkins and GitHub actions to guard secrets to be accessible only by certain repos and branches inside them. But the more you shut that down the more flexibility you loose. Or you need even more automation to help with access management.
by LargeWu | 2025-11-29 23:19:42+00:00
I think it's less about "individual rights" than "lower standards for disadvantaged groups", where the latter has a very broad definition. There is such an aversion to policing on the left that any enforcement of the social contract is seen as oppression.

To some degree it makes sense: Policing doesn't stop people from being addicts, or homeless, or being mentally ill, so why should the police harass these people? The part they're missing is that in aggregate, it significantly lowers quality of life for everybody else. But we're just supposed to ignore it because ...privilege?
by hshdhdhj4444 | 2025-11-29 23:20:08+00:00
That article says nothing about VW EV sales being poor in Europe. In fact it calls VW’s EVs increasingly popular.

The losses seem to be due to a tariff hit in the U.S. and due to Porsche change in strategy to focus more on hybrids and ICEs (0possibky because they’re focusing on EVs through VW?).
by jandrewrogers | 2025-11-29 23:20:48+00:00
The vast majority of this is ordinary theft, not desperation.

I've been acquainted in the past with many people who engaged in this type of crime. Perception is that it is relatively low-risk. It was mostly just a side hustle to pay for beer or drugs, people weren't doing it to put food on the table. There has been a strong underground market for stolen "scrap" metal for as long as I've been alive.

It isn't just copper or catalytic converters. Theft of agricultural irrigation piping is sporadically fashionable, for example.
by bofadeez | 2025-11-29 23:21:29+00:00
Wow, great point. Video games encourage heterodoxical thinking rather than blindly following the narrative. So you're saying we should develop and promote more Assassin's Creed type games to reduce overall gullibility, as a public service.

E.g. Being skeptical of "facts" reported by Judith Miller in NY Times that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and that US troops would be welcomed as liberators in 2003. I'm sure players of Assassin's Creed would not have fallen for that.
by mlmonkey | 2025-11-29 23:21:40+00:00
Zohran reminds me so much of the former District Attorney of San Francisco, Chesa Boudin. Chesa also had pedigree like Zohran does (in his case, both parents in prison for terrorism charges, raised by lefties).

Inevitably, people saw through the virtue signalling and ended up recalling him. I voted for him initially because he sounded good on paper ("a DA with a heart") but when it actually came to running the office, he was a disaster.

Case in point: SF is overrun with Honduran drug dealers. But Chesa was convinced that they are all victims of human trafficking and refused to enforce the laws against them! His office would either not file charges against them, or just let them walk with a slap on the wrist. Naturally, in the Hondo drug dealer circles it was a well known fact that if you ever get picked up in SF, claim that you were trafficked there and/or that you are underage.

After a couple of years people had had enough of this circue, and decided to recall him. I voted to recall him at the first chance I got.
by cglan | 2025-11-29 23:22:00+00:00
I think immigration currently is fucked up and there needs to be clean, legal avenues for immigrating. I don’t think immigration policy is too soft. It’s much too hard if anything.

But immigration policy =/= immigration enforcement. I think ICE needs to exist and needs to enforce the laws. Do I think maskless thugs dragging people from their homes is good? No. Screw that. They need to be dressed in uniform and follow laws. But we DO need enforcement and if you’re illegal I think you’ve got to go while simultaneously we need to offer a straightforward avenue beyond the lefts idea of simply abdicating any sort of enforcement
by moralestapia | 2025-11-29 23:22:21+00:00
It is the exact same debate.

People without those things cannot play the lottery as many times as those who have them. They might not even get to play it once.

If everyone around you has all of those basic human needs met, you are the exception.

But of course people don't like to hear this, because their whole meritocracy myth (which has always been trash) comes falling down and they might be forced to admit that, please excuse me for making this outrageous statement, ... you're just an average person with slightly better luck than others.

(It is true, however, that "luck" compounds through your life and even more through generations, though. But that even detracts from the meritocracy myth even more, as the family you're born in greatly defines what you'll achieve.)
by goostavos | 2025-11-29 23:22:31+00:00
FWIW, even with the "simple explanation," I'll echo OP's statement that the README doesn't really explain what it is or what it's solving. "Generates new versions of the structures" might mean something really clear to you, but even the phrase "data modeling" is enough to trigger lots of conflicting baggage in my head. Also: it took awhile it realize it's for Scala. I initially assumed this was a Smithy-like competitor.

It looks neat (once I found your docs)! Show what it is and what it solves in your README! The structural inheritance is slick.
by Atlas667 | 2025-11-29 23:23:36+00:00
Yes, facts make it necessarily both.

But what does that mean? What is attribution? What is ownership? How does our legal framework work? How does the media speak about reality?

The reason for "great men" isn't that its true, it's that that's how our society is structured. These ideas come from how our property is structured.

If a person can own as much wealth as millions and the media is on their side; great men exist.

Like kings. Kings made sense at the time, and were great, not because they were strong, admirable, and morally good individuals, they were great because they owned all the land and could chop your head off or let you rot in jail for saying otherwise.

The reality of which you speak is not compatible with the implications of the world we live in. This truth about the world cannot exist practically, materially.
by LuckiestVenus | 2025-11-29 23:25:15+00:00
This is annoying, the effect Clippy produces in me is that I am less likely to care about the person because it feels like they will spit out a manufactured rehash of Louis Rossman's opinion. Not that I dislike him, but that's how it feels to me.

An original mascot like the ASCII Bob with his tank protesting against Google+ on YouTube comments felt a lot more alive and organic, you felt there was a legitimate movement behind Bob. Hell, just using Tux, the GNU or some other open source mascot would have worked better for this.

Also, late 90s Microsoft made the Halloween documents, meaning that Clippy likes monopolies and crushing competition! Clippy also likes to waste system resources and screen space, back when screens were pretty darn small. Horrible mascot choice.
by pshirshov | 2025-11-29 23:25:20+00:00
It's not for Scala. Currently there are Scala and C# backends, TypeScript and Python are on the way.

We did everything to make it easy to add new backends. As much as that can be considering the feature set.

> Smithy

Little bit different. Smithy is more an RPC tool. Baboon is not (or not yet), it allows you to model your data structures and derive conversions (migrations) between versions.
by wat10000 | 2025-11-29 23:25:35+00:00
I’d expect it to stratify based on the kind of business.

Typical small businesses (plumbing, HVAC, restaurants, convenience stores) I’d expect to come from poorer families. These businesses are a potential avenue to success without traditional credentials, and they’re not the sort of thing somebody is likely to start as a passion.

From wealthy families, I’d expect vanity businesses. There wouldn’t be as much motivation for the annoying aspects of a real business. And anyone who is interested in business can probably get a nice start in something their family owns or has a major stake in.

Moonshot companies I’d expect to come from the upper middle class, children of doctors and such. Not fabulously wealthy, so the potential for making millions can still be a big motivator. But comfortable enough to get advanced schooling and be willing to aim big with a chance of failure, rather than going for something mundane you know is always in demand, like fixing pipes.

Off the top of my head, Gates, Page, and Zuckerberg all fit that mold.