MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-11-21 03:59:10+00:00
> A system so complex and dynamical as human civilization is beyond our ability to correctly ascertain the outcome of interventions, especially those imposed from the top down. In other words, we're likely to do more harm than good by imposing interventions because we cannot accurately predict their outcomes. Which is why they often have paradoxical effects.

This isn't quite right. There are some regulations that have such obviously enormous benefits that even if our estimates are imperfect, they'd have to be off by a thousand miles to not be the right thing. Examples like banning leaded gasoline or asbestos, or having antitrust laws that kick in if a market gets too consolidated for any reason.

The problem is then people start making a bunch of other rules that on paper would improve things by a couple of percent, but in practice because they're not accounting for overhead or their numbers aren't perfect they're actually making things slightly worse, and then multiply that by thousands of such individual rules and you've got a huge mess.
by mbreese | 2025-11-21 04:00:24+00:00
I'm a bit late to this thread, but for posterity...

FYI - Because JAR files are specially formatted ZIP files, you can also prepend a shell script stub to the front of the file. Java reads JAR files and doesn't start processing them until it sees the ZIP magic bytes (PK\x03\x04). So long as your shell script doesn't contain those bytes, you can add whatever you want.

This is about the minimal stub script you can get away with.

#!/bin/bash exec java -jar $0 "$@" exit 1

Using this, you don't even need binfmt to execute JARs. IMHO, the better example for binfmt and Java is executing class files directly... which is also covered in your linked Arch docs.
by buu700 | 2025-11-21 04:01:55+00:00
Of course; no one said anything about experimentation. Production code is what we're talking about.

If what you're saying is that your current experience involves a lot of process and friction to get small changes approved, that seems like a reasonable use case for hand-coding. I still prefer to make changes by hand myself when they're small and specific enough that explaining the change in English would be more work than directly making the change.

Even then, if there's any incentive to help the organization move more quickly, and there's no policy against AI usage, I'd give it a shot during the pre-coding stages. It costs almost nothing to open up Cursor's "Ask" mode and bounce your ideas off of Gemini or have it investigate the root cause of a bug.

What I typically do is have Gemini perform a broad initial investigation and describe its findings and suggestions with a list of relevant files, then throw all that into a Grok chat for a deeper investigation. (Grok is really strong at analysis in general, but its superpower seems to be a willingness to churn on sufficiently complex problems for as long as 5+ minutes in order to find the right answer.) I'll often have a bunch of Cursor agents and Grok chats going in parallel — bouncing between different bug investigations, enhancement plans, and one or two code reviews and QA tests of actual changes. Most of the time that AI saves isn't the act of emitting characters in and of itself.
by comex | 2025-11-21 04:02:36+00:00
I think this is the paper in question?

https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/wk4et_v3

Clinical trials of antidepressants are weird because they're usually short-term (6-12 weeks), whereas practical use of antidepressants usually lasts years. I personally suspect that short-term trials show an exaggerated placebo effect, because the novelty doesn't have time to wear off.
by timschmidt | 2025-11-21 04:02:52+00:00
> I said aerospace community. Not NASA.

NASA doesn't build rockets. ULA (Lockheed Martin + Boeing), Northrup Grumman, Aerojet Rocketdyne, etc. do. That's what I took "aerospace community" to mean. The community of people working in aerospace. Artemis has shifted focus several times now, since before it was called "Artemis" as each political administration has emphasized different goals, and as mission planning has evolved with hardware development. Over the years I have read everything from an abstract Moon-to-Mars testbed, a 5 year deadline crash program to land "the first woman and the next man" at the lunar south pole, a sustained lunar presence, the "first woman and first person of color" on the moon, safety science and Mars prep, and latest a de-scoping of the cis-lunar gateway station and shift toward private industry. Such things are difficult to avoid under constantly changing leadership.

Given that, I don't see any problem with the way Dustin presented the situation, nor do I feel any kind of need for an apology or clarification.
by shagmin | 2025-11-21 04:03:30+00:00
You don't need to get to the 3rd age in AoE 2 necessarily, unless you're just sticking with a certain strategy or playing a certain map that warrants it. There are whole metas around going offensive in different ways at each age - drush (dark (1st) age militia units), scout rush, archer rush, tower rush, etc., before getting into the 3rd (castle) age. Usually you start with a scout, and if you're not using it for hunting then presumably you're using it for scouting and if an enemy villager strays too far from safety you can try picking them off. Better players can steal the opponent's boars or sheep, re-locate your town center with higher HP next to your opponent, etc.,.
by acyou | 2025-11-21 04:03:35+00:00
You can tell when someone is a process or chemical engineer, by how they carefully consider each of the system boundaries and the inputs, outputs and processes inside and outside each of these boundaries.

There seems to be a whole series of issues in considering system boundaries and where they can and should be drawn when considering the best course of action.

EVs are a classic case, you draw the system boundary around the vehicle and get a MPG figure, and externalize the remaining costs. Might as well claim infinite MPG. Bill Gates proves himself as a process oriented guy here.

Carbon capture is another funny one. You report that you sequester this amount of carbon, but on the other hand deplete the soil. The amount of carbon in healthy soil is staggering, activities leading to soil erosion and depletion of soil nutrients have to be very carefully considered. How do you draw a system boundary around a volume of soil with biological activity extending down 500 feet and predict the carbon balance over the next 500 years? It's introducing predators into Australia all over again, people thinking they are smart and going for the course of action that is politically favorable in the very short term but ultimately ill considered.

For regulation, this is pretty much why can't we just have regulations that benefit me right now? For people with deep pockets, they ignore the regulations and pay the fines. Problem with these guys is their entire business model revolves around making money off of externalizing costs onto the rest of the economy, via environmental regulatory burden. What is unsaid in the article is the sentiment that regulators should more heavily support the EV business, the carbon capture business, etc, in general which makes sense to those invested, but not to everyone else.
by anon7000 | 2025-11-21 04:04:48+00:00
I was homeschooled and I got a fairly strong education.

What matters is your parents and how you nurture your kids and provide opportunities for them. It’s easy for homeschooling to be bad… if you don’t give a shit about your kids.

For socializing, the key part is making sure kids are involved in a lot of social activities. I never went to public school, but found my groove socially pretty quickly in college, because I had a lot of opportunities for strong friendships. I was working part time in high school too, so got some exposure to pop culture.
by jauntywundrkind | 2025-11-21 04:04:54+00:00
There's so much hot debate about how bad Wayland is, how incorrect it is. But theres something I respect enormously about Wayland which is that: it is so so so much less than Xorg.

It uses the kernel's graphics buffers. It uses the kernel's mode setting. These alone are humongous differeniatiors.

There's so many other amazing glorious ways that Wayland is less. The protocol-centricity is vastly under rated, a massive win for the bazaar that can keep seeking truth versus the (imo utterly pathetic clining) absolutionist monolith style.

It's revolting to see such persistent bitter angry low user disdain, anger. Without any acknowledgement at all. That protocols allowing multiple implementations allows constant honing in, allows for dynamic change and evolution.

Reflecting on the Hindu Trimurti, a cycle of creation/newness, stasis/pattern, and decay & rot, it's amazing how the protest no-change/stasis-only voice has such a loud undying protest going. X is never getting better, has no room to improve, cursed by its own egocentric insanity which it has recursed into far far too far: which the core devs all agree.

It's not pleasant for everyone that Wayland allows a freedom of implementation. But generally most of the protest here has fallen away: support for major features is just here, on most implementations. That competitors can compete, don't have to keep using the same base is hugely advantageous to humanity. But the protest no-change anger-only voice is so loud. Doesn't know doesn't care.

Humanity should respect systems where competition and improvement are possible. X was a single consigned fate, with no growth or improvement. The competition of Wayland is an incredible breath of fresh air, and the growth of protocol competition here is telling, to not necessarily the "everything just works and is great" desire path of the low tech-ig orant beggar class, but which has enable so much Bazaar democratic figuring shit out, that still shares the ideas while allowing innovation within, in a way that few projects have ever enabled before. We are in a magic age of so so much, such cooperative competitive improvement, and it's just so unspoken, so missed, amid the squeaky wheels offering no actual technical critiques, unable to reflect upon the different (much better) age of possibility the bazaar model has opened us into.
by stego-tech | 2025-11-21 04:05:22+00:00
Adding some personal context here:

I share an apartment with two other people. I've been in the housing market for years, but have had to repeatedly walk away from affordable units specifically because of the long tail of these sorts of regulations against tenements, flophouses, SROs, etc. Condos and neighborhoods with HOAs almost always have boilerplate covenants that arbitrarily restrict households based on blood relations and family lineage, such as barring permanent residents who aren't married or blood-related to the owner within a single generational branch (so Great Grandma can't live with her Great Grandson, for instance); if they don't, then cities often have ordinances barring cohabitation of more than two unrelated individuals outside of rented apartments.

The net result is that for the three of us to find a home, we have to look solely at the most expensive stock out there: single-family homes on lots outside of subdivisions, in a major metropolitan area.

These laws suck in the context of the current housing crisis, and we need to repeal such arbitrary bullshit. At the very least, prohibiting cohabitation based on blood relation can be incredibly queerphobic in effect, if not intent, and that's reason alone to repeal or reform it.
by lovidico | 2025-11-21 04:05:29+00:00
Rust is supported by the [seL4 Microkit](https://docs.sel4.systems/projects/rust/), which is the core framework enabling LionsOS. LionsOS can currently run components written in Rust, and there are some WIP drivers written in Rust in the seL4 Device Development framework (judging from pull requests).
by AtlasBarfed | 2025-11-21 04:05:54+00:00
I think the thousand cuts analogy applies in general to the housing crisis, specifically affordability.

You announce or plan some "affordable" housing in an area, or actually these days ANY housing that would increase housing units and decrease demand for existing homeowner homes, and it's like a telepathic demon takes over every homeowner regardless of Trump or Biden signs on the lawn.

The knives come out, and it gets killed.

People would rather have homeless outside their houses than any sort of project that will dilute their unsustainable growth in housing values.
by vagab0nd | 2025-11-21 04:07:58+00:00
Thoughts on photography when it first appeared:

"Not by the taking of a picture of any specific object, but by the way in which any random object could be made to appear on the photographic plate. This was something of such unheard-of novelty that the photographer was delighted by each and every shot he took, and it awakened unknown and overwhelming emotions in him..."
by into_the_void | 2025-11-21 04:08:02+00:00
Is SynthID actually running an AI classifier to decide whether an image is model-generated, or is it only checking for an embedded watermark? If it’s a classifier, the accuracy is questionable — generic “AI detection” tools tend to produce high false-positive rates. Also unclear whether it’s doing semantic anomaly checks (extra fingers, physics errors) or low-level pixel-signature analysis.
by beefnugs | 2025-11-21 04:08:53+00:00
These kinds of tests to me are not complete until they resolve the concept to full solution:

-Start just as they have here

-Keep improving the prompts in a huge variety of ways to see what improvements can be made

-start getting more and more code generated to complete more and more percentage of the work instead of textual prompting

-start fixing the worst parts with real human knowledge code/tools

-finally show fully working solution that does well, with full analysis of what kind of human intervention was necessary, and even explore what kind of prompting could lead to these human intuition-ed tooling going to whatever incredible lengths necessary to hand-hold the models in the right direction

otherwise... i don't get the points of stopping and saying "doesn't do great"
by harshreality | 2025-11-21 04:09:43+00:00
No; roughly, yes. Based on the crystal structure of the metal, fatigue works differently.

> The fatigue limit or endurance limit is the stress level below which an infinite number of loading cycles can be applied to a material without causing fatigue failure.[1] Some metals such as ferrous alloys and titanium alloys have a distinct limit,[2] whereas others such as aluminium and copper do not and will eventually fail even from small stress amplitudes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fatigue_limit
by scarmig | 2025-11-21 04:10:11+00:00
Partisan does not mean wrong.

The original article is clearly very loaded, but it's also the type of story that the mainstream media hates picking up: massive welfare fraud being used to fund terrorist groups in Somalia gores at least half a dozen sacred cows. This should receive a lot more attention, and, if true, heads should roll (and not low level managers and workers).
by yigithan | 2025-11-21 04:10:35+00:00
I love the whole Command & Conquer series. As others have pointed out, even though the graphics were 2D and pixelated, the soundtracks would really draw you into the atmosphere. I cannot describe how good it felt to play these games during school breaks, sometimes until dawn. These games were the sole reason we upgraded the RAM on our PC whenever a new one came out. I bought the bundle from EA a couple of years back and still play it occasionally. This will be my son’s first PC game too.
by marcus_holmes | 2025-11-21 04:10:54+00:00
Anecdotal: consultancy gig in the 90's, when you could still smoke in the building. My boss shmoozed their bosses, I spent most of my days in the smoking room talking to random employees. After a week we presented a report that was hailed as "brilliantly insightful" and the client was amazed at how we'd managed to grasp the problems the company was facing in such a short time, and come up with brilliant, workable, solutions.

Literally what you said: getting paid to tell management what every employee knows and has been trying to tell them for years.
by mattglossop | 2025-11-21 04:12:23+00:00
That's a great question, as complex goals are often conflicting.

Right now, each goal uses a qualitative scale to establish an initial risk budget.

In the future, we will ask users to rank all goals (like a weighted priority list). This ranking allows our dynamic allocation engine to solve the optimization problem:

Prioritization: The ranking determines the importance of each goal in the final outcome calculation.

Continuous Recalibration: The engine doesn't use a fixed risk cap. Instead, it continuously adjusts the risk allocated to each goal based on its performance and time horizon.

Risk to Maximize Probability: Goals that are far from being achieved may temporarily take more risk to increase the chance of success, while goals that are ahead of schedule will de-risk immediately to protect gains.

This ensures the total portfolio risk stays optimal while maximizing the probability of achieving your goals in priority order.
by zamadatix | 2025-11-21 04:13:30+00:00
Naturally it's why it's so much safer, but the options for air travel safety most certainly aren't uniquely only between "as safe as possible" or "not safe at all". It should be no different than how we weigh safety regulation for any other mode of travel, and this kind of "either we do everything possible or we won't have safety" instead of focusing purely on what the measured target should be and how we currently measure against it is precisely the irrationality around it.
by bonoboTP | 2025-11-21 04:13:35+00:00
> at the cumbersome payment interface and annoyed that enabling Drive is the only way to save.

For the general audience, Gemini is the intended product, API and AI studio is for advanced users. Gemini is very easy to pay for. In Gemini, you can save all images as a regular browser download by clicking the top right of the image where it says "Download full size".
by jrflowers | 2025-11-21 04:13:53+00:00
> I don’t think there’s a metaphorical “cow” that could have helped me.

The medication is the cow for you. In this story your support system figured out what would work best for you, which was medication, and facilitated that.

It’s a story about a doctor that serves patients in rural Cambodia. Help from the local community would look different in Borey Peng Huoth, for example.
by biophysboy | 2025-11-21 04:14:18+00:00
> When asked if they are satisfied with their children's education, public school parents consistently rank last after parents who choose private schools, homeschooling, and charter schools. Importantly, among all parents of school-age children, homeschooling enjoys a 70 percent favorability rating.

This is not surprising: homeschoolers are extremely confident in their own teaching abilities and extremely cynical about the abilities of others.

> Closures also gave parents a chance to experience public schools' competence with remote learning, and many were unimpressed. They have also been unhappy with the poor quality and often politicized lessons taught to their children that infuriatingly blend declining learning outcomes with indoctrination.

Why would a parent compare a novel learning environment to the pre-covid experience? Why would a parent think that their kid will never encounter political topics if they stay at home - do they use the internet at all?
by XenophileJKO | 2025-11-21 04:15:01+00:00
The limit of a LLM "distribution" effectively is actually only at the token level though once the model has consumed enough language. Which is why those out of distribution tokens are so problematic.

From that point on the model can infer linguistics even on purely encountered words, concepts. I would even propose in context inferred meaning based on context, just like you would do.

It builds conceptual abstractions of MANY levels and all interrelated.

So imagine giving it a task like "design a car for a penguin to drive". The LLM can infer what kinda of input does a car need, what anatomy does a penguin have and it can wire it up descriptively. It is an easy task for an LLM. When you think about the other capabilities like introspection, and external state through observation (any external input), there really are not many fundamental limits on what they can do.

(Ignore image generation, it is an important distinction on how an image is made, end to end sequence vs. pure diffusion vs. hybrid.)
by sundarurfriend | 2025-11-21 04:15:56+00:00
> I've got a prescription for an NDRI on my desk, and I still won't take it. ... something about anti-depressants just doesn't sit well with me.

At first it sounded like your antipathy was with SSRIs specifically (which I largely share), but it seems like it's anti-depressants in general.

FWIW, I used to think similar to you, and roughly agree with the gist of your second paragraph, but I've come to think of antidepressants as useful in a specific way: people say "it's a crutch" as a negative thing (about a lot of things including antidepressants), but a crutch was very useful to me when recovering from a fracture, and helped me enormously with my progress; similarly, even if "depression is just a symptom of my situation", it can and does often lead to a cycle where the depression itself feeds into the situation and in turn sustains itself. An antidepressant that works for you is a good way to be able to see things more clearly, feel the motivation and insight that depression clouds out, and thus be able to break out of the cycle.

It doesn't have to be a "cure" that counters a disorder, it can be a tool that you use for its purpose and then throw away (and it does sound like you're well-motivated to do that).
by tedggh | 2025-11-21 04:16:03+00:00
The problem with OOP is that it becomes a death trap for those who like to over-engineer things. It’s like a cabinet full of booze in the house of an alcoholic. I worked with this guy, who loved to tell everyone very proudly that he was a self taught OO developer. Working on his code was truly miserable, an over-engineered mess of deep inheritance hierarchies that had absolutely no reason to exist other than make the codebase impossible to maintain. He also happened to love Regex and would write 50+ character Regex that could have been done with 3-4 lines of human readable code with zero performance penalty. But he loved intriguing one liners. Design patterns in OOP are great if you are disciplined enough to use them when they really matter. If you use them to just signal expertise with convoluted code and excessive abstractions they backfire really bad.
by marcus_holmes | 2025-11-21 04:16:12+00:00
This ignores everyone else's agency in this decision.

The top employee is probably getting noticed and headhunted by the clients.

The top employee is probably getting pissed off at the mediocrity surrounding them, and annoyed at constantly having to share credit for their hard work with their bad manager who did nothing.

The top employee quickly realises that this is a badly-paid gig, and plans to spend the minimum time doing it that will confer the necessary Resume points.

The worst employee has no other options, is scared of losing this gig because they struggle to find other gigs, enjoys being able to hide their mediocrity in the team, and will stay as long as possible. They'll probably end up being promoted.