MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by fainpul | 2025-11-30 13:59:22+00:00
Opinion poll:

Python is extremely suitable for these kind of problems. C++ is also often used, especially by competitive programmers.

Which "non-mainstream" or even obscure languages are also well suited for AoC? Please list your weapon of choice and a short statement why it's well suited (not why you like it, why it's good for AoC).
by GeldiBey | 2025-11-30 13:59:22+00:00
The Emperor's New Algorithms is a phenomenological analysis of how LLMs function as "algorithmic tailors" weaving garments of probabilistic coherence that users mistake for truth.

The irony isn't lost on me: I used Claude to help formalize these ideas. The paper synthesizes Baudrillard's hyperreality with transformer architecture analysis to argue we're living in fourth-order simulacra.

Question for HN: If the analysis is correct but the method is self-referential, does that validate or invalidate the thesis?
by luanmuniz | 2025-11-30 13:59:33+00:00
In reality, nothing is perfect. Materials are never 100% one material. Rustness is imperfection, the weight and material of the ball, and the place it's attached are also consideration points, how firmly it is attached, and with which material. A "perfect" simulation of the spring itself would have to consider all these variables, and they almost never do.
by PaulRobinson | 2025-11-30 13:59:55+00:00
Disappointing.

When zigbook first appeared here, I took a cursory scan, and it looked pretty solid and a useful resource. Seems it duped me and got me good. I was even defending the use of AI a little - although the claim needed to go.

Seems they just were just trying to do over a nascent community that I'm interested in seeing growing and wasn't a member of yet.

Good riddance, then.
by chongli | 2025-11-30 14:00:03+00:00
The signalling hypothesis (of Bryan Caplan [1]) lurks within your two premises. Neither the poorly regarded party school nor Harvard add much in the way of human capital. What both do is act as honest signals of intelligence, ability, conscientiousness, and resourcefulness (including family resources). These are extremely valuable indicators for prospective employers who are otherwise prohibited (by law) from asking or testing these directly and punished (through wasted wages, training costs, benefits) for making a mistake.

In the past it was much cheaper to train people on the job because wages and benefits were much lower. Higher education has driven up wages and benefit costs (through inflation and cost disease), thus cementing higher education’s position as a gatekeeper.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Case_Against_Education?wpr...
by idiotsecant | 2025-11-30 14:00:16+00:00
They won't have to sneak in anything. On the contrary. The world is about to be deluged with a monsoon of personalized advertising the likes of which you've only previously imagined. They have the data, they have the buyers, they just so far don't have the means. All this AI hardware has to do something to justify its staggering cost and all that compute, all those datacenters, are going to be devoted to crafting personalized sales pitches. The distilled essence of all of humanity's information is going to sell you boner pulls and hair loss supplements

The enshittification of the LLM has begun and it'll be one of the all time shittiest ones.
by rainsford | 2025-11-30 14:00:16+00:00
> EV trucks aren't really good at hauling trailers over large distances, as the aerodynamics produce a massive impact on range.

Maybe I'm being stupid, but how could that possibly just be a problem for EVs? The aerodynamic physics don't care what's powering the car so the impact on range should be roughly the same.

Or is the problem that even if EV range impact is similar to fossil fuel range impact, the extra time required to recharge vs refuel makes that range impact more, uh, impactful for drivers?
by forbiddenlake | 2025-11-30 14:00:41+00:00
Sure, but lts often doesn't work for other use cases like gaming. For example the experience on lts with this year's AMD gpus will be extremely poor if it works at all.

I run Arch and my 9070 xt experience was poor for several months after release. I can't imagine modern gaming on an lts release.

Cachy being Arch based and recompiling with modern cpu flags doesn't seem to be targeting the users who want unchanging boring software.
by takeshi_sakamo | 2025-11-30 14:00:56+00:00
FLCT (Fuzzy Latent Cognition Theory) is a unified cognitive framework that explains both human cognition and LLM cognition using only two principles: (1) fuzzy latent representations and (2) biased sampling.

The idea is that ambiguity is not a flaw but the structural substrate shared by humans and modern LLMs. Concepts like “blue,” subjective time, emotional nuance, atmosphere, and silence can all be modeled as fuzzy latent distributions rather than definable entities.

Human cognition: finite experience → fuzzy latent compression → biased sampling LLM cognition: embedding manifolds → ambiguous patterns → sampling bias

FLCT provides a minimal two-equation model that unifies these processes.

Japanese Original Edition (source): https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17758605

International Adapted Edition (English): https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17769131

Feedback is welcome.
by dmd | 2025-11-30 14:01:03+00:00
You do know that the 'ozone hole' got fixed, right? It's not back to baseline, but the Montreal Protocol is one of the major achievements of collaborative science and eco-politics of the late 20th century.

There is some global thinning, but it's minor. If you don't live literally at the south pole where the actual hole is, it's not a huge change compared to most other sources of skin cancer risk.
by pavvell | 2025-11-30 14:01:13+00:00
SL and SSL are very similar "algorithmically": both use gradient descent on a loss function of predicting labels, human-provided (SL) or auto-generated (SSL). Since LLMs are pretrained on human texts, you might say that the labels (i.e., next token to predict) were in fact human provided. So, I see how pretraining LLMs blurs the line between SL and SSL.

In modern RL, we also train deep nets on some (often non trivial) loss function. And RL is generating its training data. Hence, it blurs the line with SSL. I'd say, however, it's more complex and more computationally expensive. You need many / long rollouts to find a signal to learn from. All of this process is automated. So, from this perspective, it blurs the line with UL too :-) Though it dependence on the reward is what makes the difference.

Overall, going from more structured to less structured, I'd order the learning approaches: SL, SSL (pretraining), RL, UL.
by Fnoord | 2025-11-30 14:02:17+00:00
Baseball isn't popular world-wide. The most popular game here is football (that sport which USA calls soccer).

Darts would be a funny way to make the analogy. It is very much a sport performed by people from the low class, since it is relatively easy to perform and practice in pubs. But you still need to have some money to buy a beer at a pub, ie. it ain't the homeless playing. The most poor people can barely afford their rent, and work off their ass doing so. Single mother with three jobs has near 0% to start a successful business.
by rdm_blackhole | 2025-11-30 14:03:03+00:00
> The world is going back to zones of influence, and little fish will be eaten by big fishes

That has always been the case. I don't see how that would justify giving up our independence to become a province of a super state.

Secondly, using Russia a bogeyman to justify giving up our national rights is not a really convincing argument.

Russia hasn't been able to conquer a third of Ukraine in the last 3 years and it's economy is in shambles, yet we are supposed to believe that only a European super state can save us from it? That makes no sense.

But each to their own, those who want to give up their national rights, identities and shared cultural heritage should go ahead and integrate this super state and those who do not should be able to stay out of it.

I guess fundamentally we have a different view of what Europe should be.
by merlindru | 2025-11-30 14:03:13+00:00
That also means that some users will be pressured to censor illegal speech no? If you live under e.g. a regime that disallows or discourages criticism, now suddenly the onus is on you to do something about those comments because you have the ability to. If you couldn't edit the comments it's not your fault.

Either way I think it's a pretty stupid feature the way it's implemented; it should show the edit more clearly or indicate that the comment has been written by multiple people (like StackOverflow does), especially if edits change more than e.g. 10% of the original comment.
by ifwinterco | 2025-11-30 14:03:31+00:00
I agree climate change could cause wars but I don't agree with the narrative that it will somehow cause 'worse' wars because... worse than what? We've managed to have terrible wars than wipe out whole peoples, and great power competition that almost destroyed civilisation in the 1960s without any climate change required. It's hard to see how things can really get much worse on that front
by embedding-shape | 2025-11-30 14:03:36+00:00
> There is absolutely no need to make these forks.

It's not a fork though. You can find out what a distribution is here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_distribution

> since all these distros are inevitably broken in their own weird ways

Absolute statements should probably have some absolute and undeniable proof, what exact "weird" ways are CachyOS broken today, since you apparently think yourself to be experienced enough to know this?

Maybe it's time to stop crying, and try to see some positivity in the world rather than going into a dark hole constantly.
by strken | 2025-11-30 14:05:11+00:00
As an Australian, I have the suspicion that the decline of industry in the last couple of decades has done a lot of damage to that capability.

We've lost oil refineries, steelworks, consumer car manufacturing, and we lack much shipbuilding and aerospace. We have a lot of mines, which curse us with success: it's not economically efficient to smelt ore when you could be digging up even more of it instead.
by shkkmo | 2025-11-30 14:05:44+00:00
> How exactly that relates to GDP has no relevance, whatsoever.

You are claiming that the increased spending on advertising is due to the internet. The relationship between GDP and ad spending pretty clearly indicates that the internet was not the cause of increased ad spend, except in as much as it increased GDP.

If the internet has any effect on ad spend growth, you would have seen the growth rates of GDP and ad spend diverge with the birth of the internet.

To see how clearly wrong you are consider this, part of GDP growth is population growth. You are claiming that population growth is irrelevant to ad spend growth?

> It should be beyond obvious that this has basically no relationship whatsoever to modern advertising.

Even your own numbers pretty clearly indicate that the pricing can be equivalent, which was my point.
by edot | 2025-11-30 14:05:52+00:00
If you've ever worked at a random Fortune 500 company and looked around the office at people whose pinned apps are "Outlook, Powerpoint, Excel", those are jobs that can easily be done if you're moderately smart and learn a few things on the job. You have a reasonably well-defined set of goals, projects, and meetings, and you just have to talk to other people and move numbers around in Excel, then put them into Powerpoint and set up meetings in Outlook to discuss. There are millions of these jobs, and you can get extremely senior once you just learn the business of your company (which would never be taught in college). You don't need a college degree for these. A friend of mine is a senior executive at a large insurance company and does just fine at their job with no degree. Given, they got into that job decades ago when degrees weren't required, and worked their way up, but the same could be done now if employers let people be hired based not on degree but on an apprenticeship or similar trial period.
by kachapopopow | 2025-11-30 14:06:11+00:00
Here to say that cachyos is by no means just a gaming os it's a really nicely packaged distro and works much better than KDE neon, far better than manjaro.

It also generally feels snappier for simple things like opening terminal, but I am pretty sure that was a kde neon issue.

I only use KDE so your experience might be different than mine.
by mystraline | 2025-11-30 14:06:29+00:00
An occupied territory, sure. The Japanese only attacked the occupiers (USA). They didn't go after any of the native peoples' cities.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawaiian_Kingdom

In 1887, King Kalākaua was forced to accept a new constitution after a coup d'état by the Honolulu Rifles, a volunteer military unit recruited from American settlers. Queen Liliʻuokalani, who succeeded Kalākaua in 1891, tried to abrogate the new constitution. She was subsequently overthrown in a 1893 coup engineered by the Committee of Safety (run by Sanford Dole), a group of Hawaiian subjects who were mostly of American descent, and supported by the U.S. military. The Committee of Safety dissolved the kingdom and established the Republic of Hawaii, intending for the U.S. to annex the islands, which it did on July 7, 1898, via the Newlands Resolution. Hawaii became part of the U.S. as the Territory of Hawaii until it became a U.S. state in 1959.
by baranul | 2025-11-30 14:06:29+00:00
Good points. Funding the open-source equivalents, even at a fraction of what they are spending on close-source, would have circumvented the problem of being "trapped" in the first place. Even more, the universities would be able to contribute code to the projects, if they wanted to.

It was always pretty obvious what Microsoft wanted and was trying to do. Now trying to escape, will be painful, but that's the price they will have to endure if they want freedom and data sovereignty.
by analogears | 2025-11-30 14:06:46+00:00
Tried this on iPhone - the category tabs (Sports, World News, Business) get cut off on the right and there's no horizontal scroll indicator, so I didn't realise there were more options at first. The story cards also aren't using the full screen width, leaving wasted space on both sides.

Cool concept though - the source count and "+N" spread metrics give a quick sense of which stories have legs.
by embedding-shape | 2025-11-30 14:06:52+00:00
> advertising customers will want to see metrics and reporting

You're assuming the customers who want to advertise on ChatGPT will want it to look like the typical low quality internet ads, not like billboards or "company branding marketing", something I think is much more likely.

Instead of selling impressions/clicks, they'll sell "injections" that hopefully (from their PoV) at least has some impact, like a billboard or TV ad today.
by wat10000 | 2025-11-30 14:07:11+00:00
It’s not about things improving. This isn’t a great idea that’s not yet feasible, the way ubiquitous satellite communication was. This is a fundamentally bad idea based on the physics, not the technology.

Satellites are so much more expensive than just running a wire, so why is satellite communication desirable? Because one satellite can serve many remote places for less than it costs to run a wire to all of them, it can serve the middle of the ocean, it can serve moving vehicles. These are fundamental advantages that make it worthwhile to figure out how to make satellite communication viable.

Data centers in space offer no fundamental advantages. They have some minor advantages. Solar power is somewhat more available. They can reach a larger area of ground with radio or laser communication. And that’s about it. Stack those advantages against the massive disadvantages in cooling, construction, and maintenance. Absent breakthroughs in physics that allow antigravity tech or something like that, these advantages are fundamental, not merely from insufficient technology.
by jcater | 2025-11-30 14:07:20+00:00
Well, I’ll elaborate as a Gen-Xer; what you describe about financial aid was the exact same scenario we faced.

You are conflating the “exceptional” kid coming out if HS who is offered full rides (who clearly should take advantage of that and go straight into university with that full ride) with an average student who will have to pay for some or all of college. For the latter, community college for 2 years was and still is a good idea.
by pbiggar | 2025-11-30 14:07:38+00:00
Since it doesn't say it in the article, the human rights they're referring to is that Microsoft was caught providing Azure services to the Israeli army's unit 8200, which used them to surveil millions of hours of Palestinian calls.

Microsoft, Google, Amazon and Palantir are all providing cloud and AI services to Israel which it uses it the genocide in Gaza and the continued military occupation of Palestine.

- https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/aug/09/microsoft...

- https://www.972mag.com/microsoft-8200-intelligence-surveilla...

- https://afsc.org/newsroom/unprecedented-investor-action-dema...

- https://countercurrents.org/2025/11/microsoft-ignites-protes...
by Fnoord | 2025-11-30 14:07:39+00:00
Of course it is a thing when the country of their nationality is committing genocide, and an authoritarian government.

> A valid question, but what does that have to do with the ethnic background or citizenship of the distro makers?

Allows security researchers to verify the binaries and/or find intentional backdoors.

> It seems their team is from all sorts of places, although it doesn't exactly say where in the world each of them is located

Lots of words for 'I don't know'. Me neither, that is why I am asking.
by crazygringo | 2025-11-30 14:08:03+00:00
None of this is true.

Collusion on rent is a relatively new phenomenon around RealPage and is being banned. Meanwhile, regulations like rent stabilization in NYC benefit existing tenants, not landlords.

And the taxes you describe having nothing to do with collusion. Collusion is fought using anti-collusion laws. What could possibly lead you to believe that multi-home taxes would reduce corporate collusion?

Yes, obviously RealPage should be banned everywhere. But corporate capture is not the underlying economic issue at all behind high prices. Lack of supply is.
by nkrisc | 2025-11-30 14:08:40+00:00
> Of course, only the wealthy pay full price for college, but when you ask people if college is worth the cost, they may be anchored to those prices even if their own kids would end up paying less.

They’re paying less, but they can also only afford to pay less.

I went to college with many people who were paying heavily reduced tuition rates and it was still a significant financial burden for them.

So even if the expected value of the degree is high in the long run, the downside risk is immediate financial ruin.
by razighter777 | 2025-11-30 14:09:28+00:00
There's always a lot of caution and review that goes into a new syscall feature, because once you add a feature, there's no takebacks. All the libraries downstream from landlock rely on the kernel API being good.

There is an ongoing patch series for udp and another one for general socket control.

You can read about it on the linux-security-module mailing list.

Basically UDP is harder to hook into because it's a connectionless protocol. So bind and connect don't really work the same way.

https://lore.kernel.org/all/20241214184540.3835222-1-matthie...

https://lore.kernel.org/linux-security-module/20251118134639...
by jaybrendansmith | 2025-11-30 14:09:49+00:00
This too, shall pass, but we need to make it happen. I am looking forward to the day when we spit on their remains, destroy their ballroom, torch his painting and turn this administration into a footnote in history that future historians will hold up as an object lesson. Let's hope it happens without too much bloodshed, but we fought too hard and for too long to watch this happen to this once great republic.
by zamadatix | 2025-11-30 14:11:58+00:00
And even if you somehow included "everything" with the "perfect" equations, you'll end up with a lot of stuff which does not have a good closed form solution anyways and good luck getting that running (e.g. the dynamics around the air resistance/sound generation) via approximations both accurate enough that it looks better than "faking it" and fast enough that it's actually usable interactively.

This leads to what GP was saying: many just cut things off at "Hooke's law simulates a spring, so I'll use that, but the rest is a bit too much to fit so I won't do it" but "Hooke's law simulates a spring but adding a bit of not-physics based fluff approximates all the rest" actually gives far superior results even though it doesn't only use perfect physics equations as the former did.
by blharr | 2025-11-30 14:13:10+00:00
> The idea of electricity is a silly idea. The whole world had very little electricity just 100 years ago. and we still managed fine to make progress

This is just an argument from tradition and not even a good one. It's debatable (and maybe impossible to prove) if it's even true. 100 years ago, the global economy fell into a huge decline that led to more global safety nets. Then, were there even less safety nets 50 years ago? And did that lack of existence not hinder progress?

> you tend to try harder

Is there any actual evidence for this? If I don't have a social net, I can't do anything about it. I'm not going to try harder at my risky, innovative product. I'm going to give up and do something 'safe' that only marginally increases economic output.
by StopDisinfo910 | 2025-11-30 14:13:12+00:00
I respect the effort going into making Advent of Code but with the very heavy emphasis on string parsing, I'm not convinced it's a good way to learn most languages.

Most problems are 80%-90% massaging the input with a little data modeling which you might have to rethink for the second part and algorithms used to play a significant role only in the last few days.

That heavily favours languages which make manipulating string effortless and have very permissive data structures like Python dict or JS objects.
by sunrunner | 2025-11-30 14:13:33+00:00
My favourite "non-mainstream" languages are, depending on my mood at the time, either:

- Array languages such as K or Uiua. Why they're good for AoC: Great for showing off, no-one else can read your solution (including yourself a few days later), good for earlier days that might not feel as challenging

- Raw-dogging it by creating a Game Boy ROM in ASM (for the Game Boy's 'Z80-ish' Sharp LR35902). Why it's good for AoC: All of the above, you've got too much free time on your hands

Just kidding, I use Clojure or Python, and you can pry itertools from my cold, dead hands.
by reactordev | 2025-11-30 14:13:40+00:00
Yes, let’s go after US Steel because some guy with a gun shot up a school.

Unless Microsoft is directly supplying the software which surveils instead of just “general purpose compute” this isn’t as big as Norway would want you to believe. They can just terminate the accounts as violations of terms of service and claim that millions of users use azure cloud to serve websites and content, the dance will go on.

I don’t think punishing the steel maker for a gun maker who sold it to a distributor who then sold it to a nut job should be liable for the nut job. This is the same for tech. Sub contractors for Israel government got Azure hosting and subbed it out to Palantir to plant their platform inside (gun maker) and then sold it to Israel (nut job).

Palantir on the other hand…