MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by RHSeeger | 2025-11-21 05:26:43+00:00
> The article is about a company trying to make an electric "converter dolly" that improves the fuel efficiency of diesel trucks by essentially turning them into hybrids. What actual harm and considerable negative impact on society in general are you referring to in this context?

For almost any regulation, no matter how important it is and how much good it does, there will be some things it does not allow that it should. A regulation will either need to let the bad stuff through, not let the good stuff through, or some mixture of the two.

Now consider that many individual regulations get added; the vast majority of them for good reasons. But since each one has some cases it fails for, the combination of them has a combination (generally larger than the sum of it's parts) that it fails for.

But that mean that regulations are bad in general. It means that making rules to protect society is HARD. Like REALLY hard, staggeringly so. And even doing the best you possibly can (which is a stretch for most government), you're still going to wind up with things that can't be done... but should be able to.

The solution isn't to get rid of (all) regulations... it's to try to figure out how to make them better.
by eucyclos | 2025-11-21 05:27:01+00:00
I'm probably ignorant of how indexes work at a nuts-and-bolts level, but intuitively this seems like a good idea for certain situations. E.g if we want to keep entries in a specific order but don't know ahead of time how many entries will be added between two existing ones. House numbers in areas with a lot of development are an example of the kind of problem this seems ideal to solve, when there's a clear 'order' based on geography but no clear limit on the number of addresses that could be added 'between' existing addresses.
by throw310822 | 2025-11-21 05:28:15+00:00
> AIPAC is the least offensive influence since it’s just private American citizens donating, rather than a foreign head of state bribing the president or controlling domestic news media.

Lol. American citizens donating to lobby for whatever a foreign country demands. With almost complete control of the media, finance and politics. Trump doesn't even need to be bribed, his son-in-law and advisor is Netanyahu's best friend.
by vunderba | 2025-11-21 05:29:00+00:00
It's an admittedly obscure reference to a cheating technique used in the Star Wars card game sabacc, which allows a player to surreptitiously switch out a card. I’m pretty sure I picked it up from one of Timothy Zahn's Thrawn books when I was a kid.

But I didn't know it had a meaning in Norwegian, so I guess TIL!
by rich_sasha | 2025-11-21 05:29:03+00:00
I suppose there are few talented, hard working people who want to teach, and they command a premium. Education is expensive and underfunded.

As a parent/carer you probably are much more motivated than an underpaid teacher who wanted to do something else anyway, and you don't have to motivate yourself with money.

By extension, IME, motivated and talented teachers in any school (good or bad) can do wonders. There just aren't that many. And as you say, school environment tends to be a race to the bottom - if Johnny can watch Tiktok during maths, I'll do the same.
by meowface | 2025-11-21 05:29:32+00:00
>All their tech companies would have been bought out by larger foreign tech companies.

That's not necessarily true.

>When china does it, it's "authoritarianism". When "the west" does it, it's fighting against misinformation.

What's the "it", here?

>Not the neverending misinformation, disinformation and propaganda directed against it.

Talk to any pro-democracy Chinese citizen and I think they will probably agree with me.
by krackers | 2025-11-21 05:29:42+00:00
I always like to think LLMs are markov models in the way that real-world computers are finite state machines. It's technically true, but not a useful abstraction at which to analyze them.

Both LLMs and n-gram models satisfy the markov property, and you could in principle go through and compute explicit transition matrices (something on the size of vocab_size*context_size I think). But LLMs aren't trained as n-gram models, so besides giving you autoregressive-ness, there's not really much you can learn by viewing it as a markov model
by codedokode | 2025-11-21 05:30:56+00:00
Logs should be limited by size. One could also use quotas in a filesystem. Also, what if some other application, like npm cache, uses the space for a database? Do you suggest allocating a partition for every program?

Also, databases usually store data in /var so it won't even help. Also, mysql simply hangs instead of shutting down in this case.
by shoo | 2025-11-21 05:31:26+00:00
Worth putting implementation to one side for a moment and thinking about who your typical ideal customers would be. OK, a restaurant: how many employees, how many locations? How much revenue do they do every year? If they have too few employees, not much value to add from optimisation, no matter how good it is, vs how much it would cost you to sell to them and support them. On the other hand, if they're big, there's a fair chance they're already using some competing solution that offers scheduling as but one of many features.

Sometimes podcasts like business breakdowns can have insights about what a successful company did early on to get traction. I remember listening to one about a company that was selling to restaurants, it may have been the episode about Toast [1], maybe worth a listen. IIRC there was at least one anecdote in there about something they needed to change early on to start getting a foot in the door and have fruitful conversations with restaurant owners / managers.

You might not have much luck reaching potential customers here - HN users are mostly folks who have day jobs messing with software.

See if you can get a warm introduction to restaurant owners/managers through your existing network - friends of friends or family, etc. Or try knocking on some doors!

[1] https://joincolossus.com/episode/schreiber-toast-the-restaur...
by vunderba | 2025-11-21 05:31:41+00:00
That's because, for the most part, I'm not:

"A comparison of various SOTA generative image models on specific prompts and challenges with a strong emphasis placed on adherence."

Adherence is the more interesting problem, in my opinion, because quality issues can be ameliorated through the use of upscalers, refiner models, LoRAs, and similar tools. Furthermore, there are already a thousand existing benchmarks obsessed with visual fidelity.
by meowface | 2025-11-21 05:31:57+00:00
This worldview is so bizarre and uncharitable that I'd be rather concerned to hear what any of your takes on politics might be.

I've played with Antigravity for the past 48 hours for lots of different tasks. Is it revolutionizing development for me? No. Do I think they want it to do that and are working extremely hard to try to achieve that? I think the answer is very obviously: of course. Will it maybe get closer to that within a few months or a year? Maybe.
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-11-21 05:32:13+00:00
> What rules "aren't actually necessary" is a matter of opinion.

To begin with, no it isn't. There are a lot of existing regulations that serve no legitimate purpose. Some exist solely at the behest of incumbents and are enacted under a false pretext by corrupt government officials; no one supports them who isn't being disingenuous. Others aren't even wanted by anyone and are simply regulatory errors that failed to account for something that actually happens, but the people impacted don't have the political influence to correct it.

Moreover, what if there are some regulations that people differ on? Should we keep the ones only a minority of people think are a good idea, just because they already exist?
by DontForgetMe | 2025-11-21 05:33:25+00:00
Awesome, a search engine with an LLM / AI!

I hadn't been sure about Kagi before, but this has really swung it for me, I'm off to sign up post haste. It's a revolutionary move that really shows how fast ahead of the competition Kagi is, how dexterous their fingers at the pulse of humanity, how bold.
by dluan | 2025-11-21 05:33:41+00:00
There are 100 million members of the party, and these people vote directly for their local representatives, who then go onto vote for the village, town, city, province, etc representatives, all the way up to the Standing Committee which includes Xi. There are 3000 members of the National People's Congress that directly selects the Standing Committee. In rural areas or special administrative provinces, often anyone can vote, including union members who aren't officially party members. Comparatively, in the 2024 US election, 150 million people voted. So there's roughly the same amount of votes happening.

Maybe you don't agree that not being able to pick the head of state is not a valid definition of democracy. In that case I'd argue that having a twice-indicted convicted felon is not valid democracy either. In any case, feel free to keep your version.
by RHSeeger | 2025-11-21 05:34:06+00:00
Yeah, this whole argument sounds a lot like

company> These regulations are preventing us from selling our product

government> We have a set of standards that your type of product must meet; because we believe not meeting them is dangerous to society.

company> But, our products don't meet those standards, and we can't sell them... and since selling them is what our business plan is, we're going to go out of business

government> And? I'm not seeing the problem here.

It is part of government's job to decide what is safe for society and, where something isn't safe, decide if the harm in preventing it outweighs the good in doing so.
by saurik | 2025-11-21 05:34:29+00:00
It isn't particularly easier to make your own compositor either, as you now also have to bring your own window manager. What made the X architecture much more interesting is that it avoided coupling the window manger to the compositor. Hell: there even are multiple popular compositors for X, as they also managed to avoid coupling the compositor to the display server (which would be the one part of the system that you don't find too many of -- though there were multiple implementations over the years! -- but that's not really much different than Wayland where everyone is using the same library to implement the behaviors as part of their coupled-together balls of mud.)
by ggm | 2025-11-21 05:37:33+00:00
I don't share his "optimism". The steps from 1 to 2 qbits at 2 nines reliability to a million physical qbits at 5 nines reliability to provide the necessary count of logical qbits for a non trivial shor, is enormous.

I see nothing like moores law pace of change. My neg says we're still 10+ years off.
by mumber_typhoon | 2025-11-21 05:37:38+00:00
>In February, Lorenzo Gutierrez Lugo, a driver for a small trucking company that specializes in transporting furniture, clothing and other belongings to families in Mexico, was driving south to the border city of Brownsville, Texas, carrying packages from immigrant communities in South Carolina’s low country.

If you think 'this is just a normal citizen doing good work' at first and you are breaking privacy here, keep reading.

>They unearthed no contraband. But Beltran arrested Gutierrez Lugo on suspicion of money laundering and engaging in organized criminal activity because he was carrying thousands of dollars in cash — money his supervisor said came directly from customers in local Latino communities, who are accustomed to paying in cash.

carrying thousands of dollars in cash over the US Mexico border is so suspicious that there is likely a lot more happening. The trucking company spent 20,000$ to get him out of it.

The more I think of better call Saul and breaking bad, the more I wonder whether this is one of those situations where the reality is actually much worse than television fiction.

90% of the drugs that enter US come from the south border. At 120 tons of drugs being 'seized' not the ones being distributed, I am assuming the scale of this thing is massive. [1]

[1] https://forumtogether.org/article/illicit-fentanyl-and-drug-...
by antonvs | 2025-11-21 05:38:21+00:00
> Since MDL is a distant relative of Lisp

Is it really that distant?

> The similarities between MDL and Lisp are such that in many cases a few minor changes to Lisp code will convert it into working MDL code.

I guess not.

Reading a bit of the code it looked superficially like a relatively standard Lisp but with some unusual syntax choices.
by codedokode | 2025-11-21 05:38:31+00:00
Yes the international keyboard support is pretty bad in both X and Wayland. For example, try using Left Shift to switch to layout 1 (while retaining its shift functionality) without patching Gnome. It's impossible.

Or, try making a virtual on-screen keyboard that would send characters that are not in the layout (for example, Greek character with US keyboard layout). Again, you cannot do that, and it's difficult to understand why virtual keyboard has to be restricted with characters printed on physical keyboard.

And if you want to use remote desktop from a computer with Greek layout to a computer with US layout... again, it's going to be difficult. X server-based remote apps would simply temporarily patch the layout and add non-existent keys there to be able to report the key press on a remote machine with different layout. xdotool, I think, used the same hack to input characters that are not in the layout.
by 10000truths | 2025-11-21 05:38:40+00:00
The table is a bit misleading. Most of the resources of a website are loaded concurrently and are not on the critical path of the "first contentful paint", so latency does not compound as quickly as the table implies. For web apps, much of the end-to-end latency hides lower in the networking stack. Here's the worst-case latency for a modern Chrome browser performing a cold load of an SPA website:

DNS-over-HTTPS-over-QUIC resolution: 2 RTTs

TCP handshake: 1 RTT

TLS v1.2 handshake: 2 RTTs

HTTP request/response (HTML): 1 RTT

HTTP request/response (bundled JS that actually renders the content): 1 RTT

That's 7 round trips. If your connection crosses a continent, that's easily a 1-2 second time-to-first-byte for the content you actually care about. And no amount of bandwidth will decrease that, since the bottlenecks are the speed of light and router hop latencies. Weak 4G/WiFi signal and/or network congestion will worsen that latency even further.
by cosmic_cheese | 2025-11-21 05:38:47+00:00
Opinionated design is a big one, but another that's equally as big and even more unusual in the Linux world is progressive disclosure.

It basically amounts to adding lots of little power user features, but placing them ever so slightly out of the way so that newbies and less technical users don't get overwhelmed, but they're still within reach of those who can make use of them and reveal themselves as users grow and become more technically capable.

Linux desktops tend to take a much more binary approach: ultra-minimalist and stripped back so far that even iPadOS is more capable out of the box (GNOME) or everything and the kitchen sink on full display (KDE).
by RHSeeger | 2025-11-21 05:39:14+00:00
A better example might be mattresses. There are states (Kansas) where it is illegal to sell a used mattress, under any circumstances. Even if, for your specific circumstances, the "it's unsanitary" reasoning isn't valid. You, as an individual, cannot sell your "I slept in it a few times and realized I don't like it" mattress to your friend.
by locknitpicker | 2025-11-21 05:40:43+00:00
> The article is about a company trying to make an electric "converter dolly" that improves the fuel efficiency of diesel trucks by essentially turning them into hybrids.

No. The article is about someone who is whining about having to comply with regulation. But not all regulation, only the one they feel they are having trouble complying with.

There is a difference. And a nuance.

You'd be naive if you were hoping to get objective statements from what reads clearly as a promotion piece.

> Suppose that there exist regulations that are ill considered or poorly drafted and require things that are not aligned with their ostensible purpose.

You can imagine all hypotheticals you wish. We need to discuss objectively verifiable facts if you want to attack specific regulations, though. I don't see fact-based arguments being made, and that reads like a desperate straw man.
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-11-21 05:41:13+00:00
Now I'll explain why I think you're confused.

Some jurisdictions ban the sale whatsoever of used tires with less than a certain amount of tread. It's not that you can't put them on a car to drive on public roads, it's that no one can sell them to you. They prohibited the sale rather than the use, thereby interfering with the people wanting to make the purchase for a different purpose.
by mmsimanga | 2025-11-21 05:41:24+00:00
In my village there is no regulation for building residential property. You don't have title deeds either. You get allocated a piece of land by the local chief or headman/woman and you decide where and what you can build. The only regulation is you must have a toilet. Which tends to be a no brainer and one of the first things most people build. A simple Blair toilet.
by baxtr | 2025-11-21 05:41:25+00:00
This outlines the problem with most regulation:

There is no/litte discussion about the trade-offs.

You have to see the other side, then weigh all pros and cons and then make a decision.

In most cases regulation is sold as something that will improve a field with no downside at all.

That’s just a lie and people find out over time.
by ncfausti | 2025-11-21 05:41:37+00:00
I think that’s why the author put “vector” in quotes. I kind of imagine it as an ephemeral, infinite list where for some real, when we use that real value as an index into our “vector”/function, we get the output value as the item in this infinite, ephemeral list.

I think the only thing that matters is that the indices have an ordering (which the reals obviously do) and they aren’t irrational (i.e. they have a finite precision).

Imagine you have a real number, say, e.g. 2.4. What stops us from using that as an index into an infinite, infinitely resizable list? 2.4^2 = 5.76. Depending on how fine-grained your application requires you could say 2.41 (=5.8081) is the next index OR 2.5 (=6.25) is the next index we look at or care about.

I could be misunderstanding it, though.
by samdoesnothing | 2025-11-21 05:41:57+00:00
> Your position is simply unable to demonstrate to us how a blanket policy of letting whatever corner-cutting garbage slip into your food, medicine, construction materials, safety systems actually leads to globally better outcomes.

You're gonna complain about "lazy ideological posturing" and then in the same breath construct a tired, boring straw man? Was this on purpose to prove a point or something?

Only the most simple and uncontroversial political claims can be counted on. Regulating lead in petrol is simple, uncontroversial, and very reasonably likely to do more good than harm. It's an example of an intervention on society that is relatively safe and easy to predict the outcome. And it's also an outlier, because most political action is neither uncontroversial, simple, or likely to do more good than harm.
by idiotsecant | 2025-11-21 05:42:33+00:00
L2 doesn't have to mean you leave the chain, it means you 'batch' transactions using this technique, generally : https://ethereum.org/developers/docs/scaling/optimistic-roll...

Not all L2 are about throughput exclusively, some are, for example, more focused on private ZKSnark based transactions. There is a huge quantity of development out there.

Generally the security guarantees on L2 range from identical to the main chain to 'good enough' to 'I pinkie promise not to take your money'. It's a permissionless protocol so that's kinda what you get.
by rich_sasha | 2025-11-21 05:44:32+00:00
It's funny. It just struck me that the EU is uniquely well positioned to develop an alternative to Android and iOS.

Start with one of the open source projects - I guess an Android derivative, sans all the Google stuff. Give them funding, maybe regulate (that always helps).

Then mandate that within X years, various key apps must provide for this system - things like bank apps, state admin apps etc. In high likelihood, development would be close enough to Android that it would not be a crazy high burden - and anyway, it seems most people use cross platform frameworks.

EU could regulate, or influence via ownership, privacy controls better tailored to European tastes.

That would give the EU a dose of digital sovereignty without doing much, and ensuring some degree of usability.

It's a shame that instead GrapheneOS seems to get sued.
by samdoesnothing | 2025-11-21 05:45:47+00:00
What data do you have to suggest that our societies are becoming less regulated? Because what I can tell, regulation is increasing throughout the western world and has been for at least the past five decades. In the US for example:

> From 1970 to 1981, restrictions were added at an average rate of about 24,000 per year. From 1981 to 1985, that pace slowed to an average of 620 restrictions per year, before accelerating back to 18,000 restrictions per year from 1985 to 1995. A decrease of 27,000 restrictions occurred from 1995 to 1996—3.2 percent of the 1995 total—and in the 20 years since then, regulation has grown steadily by about 13,000 restrictions per year. These periods do not match up neatly with any president or party; rather, regulatory accumulation seems to be a bipartisan trend—or perhaps a bureaucratic trend independent of elected officials’ ideologies.

https://www.mercatus.org/research/data-visualizations/regula...
by mmsimanga | 2025-11-21 05:47:10+00:00
Typical structures in the villages are bungalows built by people you know. Sounds like the crisis in the link you shared is from corrupt approvals and poor construction of commercial properties sold to people. People build houses they will live in in the villages and for me this is a big enough incentive to build it properly. You will have no one to blame when your own roof falls on your head. The builders are also known and it would be a business ending move to build a rubbish house for your neighbour. Word would get out pretty quick. One thing people do in the village is talk as they have plenty time. I think all these other factors make up for the lack of regulation.
by somenameforme | 2025-11-21 05:47:32+00:00
Turing computability is tangential to his claim, as LLMs are obviously not carrying out the breadth of all computable concepts. His claim can be trivially proven by considering the history of humanity. We went from a starting point of having literally no language whatsoever, and technology that would not have expanded much beyond an understanding of 'poke him with the pointy side'. And from there we would go on to discover the secrets of the atom, put a man on the Moon, and more. To say nothing of inventing language itself.

An LLM trained on this starting state of humanity is never going to do anything except remix basically nothing. It's never going to discover the secrets of the atom, or how to put a man on the Moon. Now whether any artificial device could achieve what humans did is where the question of computability comes into play, and that's a much more interesting one. But if we limit ourselves to LLMs, then this is very straight forward to answer.
by recursivecaveat | 2025-11-21 05:47:37+00:00
It is crazy to me the amount of people who are auto-completing through their education. "I don't need to learn how to code, the ai will do it for me" etc. If the only value you provide is pressing [ok] on content you don't understand, why do you think someone won't replace you with a bot? To me it's like going to pilot's school and saying you'll just have your copilot fly the plane for you.