MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by somenameforme | 2025-11-02 17:02:49+00:00
The MIC influence doesn't come from money, but power. As our soft power has been dying for decades and is verging on non-existent, the main way that the US exerts influence worldwide is by threatening to attack you, threatening to give weapons to somebody else who will attack you, or by threatening to no longer give you weapons imperiling your ability to attack people. And this is all 100% fueled by the military industrial complex. Without the military industrial complex US influence on a global level would rapidly plummet. And this influence also plays a major, if indirect, role in economic matters by helping to, amongst other things, maintain the USD.

When the entire government is dependent upon you for such a critical role, it's basically inescapable for them to end up with an amount of influence that can't be overstated. This is precisely what Eisenhower tried to warn us of. Well one among a few things, all of which he ended up being completely, and unfortunately, correct on. [1]

[1] - https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/president-dwigh... (scroll down a bit for transcript)
by vincent-manis | 2025-11-02 17:03:55+00:00
One thing I discovered during decades of teaching at university. 18-year olds have little skill planning. Our first-year course had one-week assignments, but one more in-depth two-week assignment. This was at a time when students used computer labs, rather than their own equipment. During the first week of the bigger assignment, the labs were empty. About three days before the due date, the labs started getting busy. The night before the due date, students were waiting all night to get at a computer, and a delegation of students went to the Department Head to demand much bigger labs.

The following year, we used the same bigger assignment, but demanded that the students hand in the work for the first half of the assignment by the end of the first week (the markers were told just to check that it had been handed in, but not to mark it). Due date came along, and the overwhelming part of the class handed in acceptable work on time.

One thing that four years of university, perhaps including a study skills course, teaches you is how to manage multiple due dates with several concurrent projects in various stages of completion.
by jeroenhd | 2025-11-02 17:04:10+00:00
That's not a Rust problem, that's a sequoia problem.

As for why, probably the same reason the dependency tree for gnupg (generate with `debtree -R -b gnupg` but grepping out all the gcc/mingw dependencies) looks like this: https://static.jeroenhd.nl/hn/gnupg.svg There's probably a good reason why I need libjpeg62, libusb-1.0-0-dev, and libgmp3 to compile gnupg, though they're hidden away from the usual developer docs in the form of transitive dependencies; complex software just tends to include external dependencies rather than reinventing the wheel.
by panick21_ | 2025-11-02 17:04:37+00:00
Its kind of funny, in a history panel of Intel they badically talk about how they lost this generation. The Z80 and 6502 were beating them almost everywhere. Logically IBM should have used the Z80 but they didn't most likely because Exxon was at that time trying to attack IBM and Exxon was a major investor in Zilog.
by thelastgallon | 2025-11-02 17:04:48+00:00
This is not a bad idea. EVs can charge during the day, go home fully charged, connect to the grid and supply power to the grid. EV batteries are humongous and a large number of them will become an energy reservoir. All excess production during the day (which is being curtailed now) can be stored in Evs and reused later throughout the day.

The best thing is that EV owners can be paid during the day for providing demand and paid again in the evening and at night for supplying.
by mavamaarten | 2025-11-02 17:05:14+00:00
Exactly this. The perfect example is Google Assistant for me. It's such a terrible service because it's so indeterministic. One day it happily answers your basic question with a smile, and when you need it most it doesn't even try and only comes up with "Sorry I don't understand".

When products have limitations, those are usually acceptable to me if I know what they are or if I can find out what the breaking point is.

If the breaking point was me speaking a bit unclearly, I'd speak more clearly. If the breaking point was complex questions, I'd ask simpler ones. If the breaking point is truly random, I simply stop using the service because it's unpredictable and frustrating.
by SoftTalker | 2025-11-02 17:06:24+00:00
Yeah I use a web app regularly for work where they have implemented their own "back" button in the app. The app maintains its own state and history so the browser back button is totally broken.

The problem here is that they've implemented an application navigation feature with the same name as a browser navigation feature. As a user, you know you need to click "Back" and your brain has that wired to click the broswer back button.

Very annoying.

Having "Refresh" break things is (to me) a little more tolerable. I have the mental association of "refresh" as "start over" and so I'm less annoyed when that takes me back to some kind of front page in the app.
by constantius | 2025-11-02 17:06:26+00:00
Indeed, this might have been laudable if a lifestyle company that makes CRMs did this, but some sectors and companies are, for lack of a better word, nefarious to society, and some of the most insidiously nefarious are also adept at hiding it. How many on HN/in hacker communities boycott Meta products vs the general population, how many despise OpenAI?
by cassepipe | 2025-11-02 17:07:12+00:00
Well, I think this would be a great response. You can basically say the same thing but the first sounds like "it's like your opinion, man" whereas the second one hits harder

“You know those problems you’re pointing out? Well if you listen to the people in charge they are saying they aren’t problems" is much better than "Duh, what did you expect ?"

No matter how obvious you think the context that led to your conclusion is, it's always worth it to share it along, especially in times of information bubbles
by AndrewKemendo | 2025-11-02 17:07:41+00:00
Stated simply: Ignore any philosophy or ideology that fails at universal-infinite timescales

Basically if someone is using the “current” state of the world as the comparative model for existential fulfillment then it’s not even a model, it’s a conclusion based on a point sample

In the case of this article, “Everyone should learn to code” was never correct and nor is “everyone should learn a craft”

It fundamentally overfits a narrow, highly available novel concept, rooted in the epistemology of “individual fulfillment” in the context of the current state of the world

Therefore in the implied context of the existential question “what should I do with my life?” , which is something that has been asked in every period that humans and proto-humans have lived, it’s totally ignorant to think that we can reduce it to the intersection of global transactions and individual contributions to such.
by somenameforme | 2025-11-02 17:07:57+00:00
I rather appreciate that they're not even bothering to try to make some big lie of it. The drug stuff is the most half-hearted messaging I have ever seen. Rare is going to be the person who truly believes we're invading a country, which has the largest oil reserves on the planet, to stop drug smuggling.

I think it's difficult for people to understand the war machine when the messaging is effective. When we make it reasonably clear what's happening, you have a more informed electorate. And I think that's a very good thing.
by tsenturk | 2025-11-02 17:08:32+00:00
The 1953 Ford X-100 was basically a "car from the future" that Ford built just to show off. It wasn't ever sold, but it's famous for packing features that were decades ahead of its time. We're talking stuff like heated seats, a rain sensor that automatically closed the roof, and even built-in jacks. It was wild for the 50s, but pretty much previewed a ton of tech we see in our cars today.
by thelastgallon | 2025-11-02 17:08:41+00:00
The complete sentence for context:

"Here in the US, we’re proving that out, too – the Northwest Fire District in Arizona partnered with Standard Solar to build a conceptually similar, 657 kW solar carport system across 12 parking lots (shown, above) that delivers more than 1.23 million kWh of clean, emissions-free power annually and offsets the equivalent of 185,000 vehicles’ worth of harmful carbon emissions."
by silexia | 2025-11-02 17:08:45+00:00
For all the folks on the left who dislike this sort of thing: would you agree with trying to make sure that this cannot happen again? If that is the case, we need to work together to massively shrink the federal government. You can still have states that basically set up socialist policies, but if the federal government has enough power to set up socialist policies, it can also set up pseudo dictator policies, right?
by nothrabannosir | 2025-11-02 17:09:03+00:00
I dug into this and it turns out there's an active, multi year effort underway to solve exactly this, along the exact ways you´d expect, with references to guix and bootstrappable.org etc, making steady progress: https://discourse.haskell.org/t/what-s-needed-to-bootstrap-g...

Reading through that thread gives me a very different idea of the state of haskell than I got from reading your comments.
by fnordpiglet | 2025-11-02 17:09:22+00:00
I graduated high school and went out to the valley immediately in 1995. I did well but I eventually got to a point where the natural language and machine learning stuff I was doing required more advanced math and statistics than I had the ability to teach myself. I went back to college leaving my successful career to “memorize random subjects.”

One thing I learned in college was you learn what you put into it and I put everything into whah I was doing. I learned that learning was the most valuable thing one can do because the process of learning new “random subjects” teaches you how to understand how to learn and think. Being intelligent is perhaps necessary but it is absolutely insufficient. Not a single moment I spent studying in college was a waste of my time, none of it was “memorizing.” In fact one reason I didn’t go was I was bad at memorizing - and I learned in college I could derive equations from my understanding faster than memorizing if I really understood the subject.

I graduated summa cum laude at a top engineering computer science program and dropped out of graduate school to get into quant trading at a top shop on wall street and have since done a fairly complete tour of FAANG and adjacent as a distinguished engineer, building stuff you likely use every day.

I never would have had my career had I stayed working without an education. Knowledge and wisdom and learned through education and being taught by those who have explored things you haven’t. Ability and experience isn’t just mechanical knowledge of a technical subject or intelligence.

I’ve done both paths, and I strongly recommend people to never memorize random subjects but to dive into college and learn and understand everything in total depth, then carry that into life. There is no greater gift you will ever receive in the work world than the gift of knowledge and ability to learn and appreciate life in all its complexity you will learn in college.
by Gajurgensen | 2025-11-02 17:09:53+00:00
Very interesting. My takeaway is that Dr. Paulson's answer to the question is that there is not anything necessarily wrong with dependent types, but that he doesn't believe they are necessary.

I would have liked to read more about Lean's alleged performance issues, and the issues around intentional equality. For the latter, I understand one can run into the need for heterogeneous equality (https://lean-lang.org/doc/reference/latest/Basic-Proposition...) when types are propositionally equal, but not definitionally equal. It has been some time I worked seriously in a dependently-typed language, but I recall coming to the conclusion that dependent types are best used as little as possible, for exactly this reason. If something may be stated as a theorem after the fact instead of putting it in the type, that was my preference.

Certainly there is something strongly aesthetically appealing about dependent type theory. The unification of programs and proofs and the natural emergence of independent proof objects. I am open to the idea that overly-dogmatic insistence on a type-theoretic basis to a theorem prover could lead to pragmatic issues, but I'd need to see more examples to be convinced there is a better foundation.

Anyway, I agree with Dr. Paulson's point that dependent types aren't necessary to verify interesting systems. He talked more of pure mathematics, but I am more interested in software verification. I work heavily in ACL2 which, not only does it not have dependent types, it doesn't have static typing at all! It is, however, also a first order logic and the both of these facts can sometimes be frustrating. Various libraries have been introduced to simulate typing and higher-ordered reasoning.
by linsomniac | 2025-11-02 17:09:59+00:00
Does Helix have no way to go back to the last editing position when re-opening a file? Similar to: '" in vim? That is going to be a deal-breaker for me. One reason I use vim over many other options is that I jump in and out of files a lot, having to find my last position in many cases is a chore.
by apical_dendrite | 2025-11-02 17:10:25+00:00
I've been thinking recently about Hannah Arendt's description of Eichmann. He was good at doing his job, but had no ability to understand that he was doing a job that no human being should ever do.

I think about this in the context of the DOGE goons, who are so happy to show off their technical skills in the service of dismantling humanitarian aid to starving people.

The people that Palantir hires will have tremendous power in this world. I hope that they have the ability to think critically about the impact of what they are doing and why they are doing it. Learning the humanities helps with this.
by vlovich123 | 2025-11-02 17:10:48+00:00
I can believe it’s less of an issue for primitive smaller than long/double where the boxing/unboxing can be hidden through tagged values. But long and double specifically will always end up larger and slower. But the JVM doesn’t do this - instead it caches boxed representations of -128 to 128, true and false. This means any collection of not Boolean and not short/char will inherently at least use much more ram and have overhead accessing it.
by Retric | 2025-11-02 17:10:51+00:00
Yep, a common US example of Marxism is when Farmer owned co-ops for collecting and distributing crops. That model is well aligned with protecting family farms by avoiding local rent seeking monopolies.

Other parts of the agro sector are far more predatory, but it’s hard do co-op style manufacturing of modern farm equipment etc. Marxism was created in a world where Americans owned other Americans it’s conceptually tied into abolitionist thinking where objecting to the ownership of the more literal means of production IE people was being reconsidered. In that context the idea of owning farmland and underpaying farm labor starts to look questionable.
by forgetfulness | 2025-11-02 17:11:05+00:00
Up until a few years ago, they were buying products, signing labor-intensive contracts, laying off people, burning out the ones that remain, and not investing in its products

In 2021 they spun off the consultancy business and now seem to just sell software and hardware.

The spin off, Kyndryl, is burdened with unprofitable contacts and is still slashing and burning its workforce.

IBM doesn’t seem to be making a comeback in SaaS or whatnot, they seem to just have split their problems down the middle but not solved them.
by overfeed | 2025-11-02 17:11:17+00:00
Yes: the fame is the subtext. It's akin to mononyms; they'd be referring to famous people like Shakira, Madonna, or Beyoncé. A lot of us have first names, but the point isn't that one's family calls them "Dave" without ambiguity.

There were many unix instances, and likely multiple djb logins around the world, but there's only one considered to be the djb, and it's dur to fame.
by lacker | 2025-11-02 17:11:25+00:00
That's a good point, for example in Eigen you can do

Eigen::Matrix<float, 10, 5>

I just really want it in Python because that's where I do most of my matrix manipulation nowadays. I guess you also would really like it to handle non-constants. It would be nice if these complicated library functions like

torch.nn.MultiheadAttention(embed_dim, num_heads, dropout=0.0, bias=True, add_bias_kv=False, add_zero_attn=False, kdim=None, vdim=None, batch_first=False, device=None, dtype=None)

would actually typecheck that kdim and vdim are correct, and ensure that I correctly pass a K x V matrix and not a V x K one.
by gruez | 2025-11-02 17:12:31+00:00
>btw: "usually". Can you cite an implementation?

u2f has it: https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/224692/how-does...

>I don't see how you can prevent multiple people sharing access to one HSM.

Obviously that's out of scope unless the HSM has a retina scanner or whatever, but even then there's nothing preventing someone from consensually using their cousin's government issued id (ie. HSM) to access a 18+ site.

> Also, if the key is the same in hundreds of HSMs, this isn't fulfilled to begin with? Is this assuming the HSM holds multiple keys?

The idea is that the HSM will sign arbitrary proofs to give to relying parties. The relying parties can validate the key used to sign the proof is valid through some sort of certificate chain that is ultimately rooted at some government CA. However because the key is shared among hundreds/thousands/tens of thousands of HSMs/ids, it's impossible to tie that to a specific person/id/HSM.

> Is this assuming the HSM holds multiple keys?

Yeah, you'd need a separate device-specific key to sign/generate an identifier that's unique per-service. To summarize:

each HSM contains two keys:

1. K1: device-specific key, specific to the given HSM

2. K2: shared across some large number of HSMs

both keys is resistant to be extracted from the HSM, and the HSM will only use them for signing

To authenticate to a website (relying party):

1. HSM generates id, using something like hmac(site domain name, K1)

2. HSM generate signing blob containing the above id, and whatever additional attributes the user wants to disclose (eg. their name or whether they're 18+) plus timestamp/anti-replay token (or similar), signs it with k2, and returns to the site. The HSM also returns a certificate certifying that K2 is issued by some national government.

The site can verify the response comes from a genuine HSM because the certificate chains to some national government's CA. The site can also be sure that users can't create multiple accounts, because each HSM will generate the same id given the same site. However two sites can't correlate identities because the id changes depending on the site, and the signing key/certificate is shared among a large number of users. Governments can still theoretically deanonymize users if they retain K1 and work with site operators.
by Aldipower | 2025-11-02 17:12:38+00:00
It really does not help me as a small business if Pomelli creates (shitty) AI content, but does not open the gates to actually reach people/customers.

From the article: "..like your social media, your site and your ads..."

I failed with my platform in the sense of online marketing. Although the platform itself did not fail, it has a solid user-base, but not enough reach to make a living from it.

Why did I fail from a marketing perspective? Because my social media, blog, ad words, etc. all do not have enough reach! The human made content itself is good and never was the problem. Reach it is!

This tool would not solve my problems.
by bgwalter | 2025-11-02 17:12:41+00:00
I would like to know as well. All that is public is that a couple of IETF apparatchiks want to ban him for criticizing corporate and NSA influence:

https://web.archive.org/web/20250513185456/https://mailarchi...

The IETF has now accepted the required new moderation guidelines, which will essentially be a CoC troika that can ban selectively:

https://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/msg/mod-discuss/s4y2j3Dv6D...

It is very sad that all open source and Internet institutions are being subverted by bureaucrats.
by mitthrowaway2 | 2025-11-02 17:12:48+00:00
But Karpathy is completely right; students who understand and internalize how backprop works, having implemented it rather than treating it as a magic spell cast by TF/PyTorch, will also be able to intuitively understand these problems of vanishing gradients and so on.

Sure, instead of "the problem with backpropagation is that it's a leaky abstraction" he could have written "the problem with not learning how back propagation works and just learning how to call a framework is that backpropagation is a leaky abstraction". But that would be a terrible sub-heading for an introductory-level article for an undergraduate audience, and also unnecessary because he already said that in the introduction.
by omneity | 2025-11-02 17:12:59+00:00
Two phenomena at play, correct spellings tend to be the most common on aggregate in a large enough dataset so there’s a bias, and the finetuning step (Instruct SFT) helps the model hone down on what it should use from the set of all possible formulations it saw in pretraining.

This is why LLMs can still channel typos or non/standard writing when you ask them to write in such a style for example.
by SoftTalker | 2025-11-02 17:14:53+00:00
I mean, I don't know of any companies that are purely digital, with an AI as the CEO. Maybe that's coming, but I would not intentionally buy anything from such a company, or work for such a company, or invest in such a company.

I guess it would be like being a vegan. It might be a pointless effort in the grand scheme of things, but at least I can say that I am not contributing.
by tern | 2025-11-02 17:15:21+00:00
The people I had in mind were the ones who are just friendly, kind, loving people (think: Miyazaki film character or something), but there are certainly self-centered people who would be embarrassed to be seen on a dating app too.

I think the core difference is whether you're connected into a healthy community or not, or whether you're outgoing enough to find yourself making friends in circles outside your own regularly.
by chermi | 2025-11-02 17:15:21+00:00
Depends on what exactly the opinion is, but generally I'd say yes. If it's about their looks, maybe not.. but even then understanding the basics that determine things like not needing air intake, exhaust, the placement of batteries, etc. can be helpful.

If it's about the supply chain, understanding at least the requirements for magnets is helpful.

On way to make sure you understand all of these things is to understand the electric motor. But you could learn the separate pieces of knowledge on the fly too.

The more you understand the fundamentals of what you're talking about, the more likely you are to have genuine insight because you can connect more aspects of the problem and understand more of the "why".

TL;DR it depends, but it almost always helps.
by timr | 2025-11-02 17:15:36+00:00
There’s nothing particularly wrong with the article - it’s a superficial summary of stuff that has historically happened in the world of LLM context windows.

The problem is - and it’s a problem common to AI right now - you can’t generalize anything from it. The next thing that drives LLMs forward could be an extension of what you read about here, or it could be a totally random other thing. There are a million monkeys tapping on keyboards, and the hope is that someone taps out Shakespeare’s brain.