MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Flow | 2025-12-21 07:12:10+00:00
Ever thought of writing an emulator? On Reddit theres /r/EmuDev which is a nice place.

For example you could start by writing a CHIP8 emu, then a Space Invaders Emu. After Space Invaders most people write a Game Boy(almost same CPU as Space Invaders and hardware is well documented) emu, but you could try to do a 8086 PC if you want to know more about "real" computers.

There are free BIOS you can use, and FreeDOS, and then rest of the machine is pretty well documented.
by weitendorf | 2025-12-21 07:12:34+00:00
> fine tune a general purpose LLMs (somehow, as it is much cheaper than starting from scratch, idk?) to behave this way rather than instructing it all the way in

I'd love to do that too but there are basically three ways to teach LLMs how to use it afaik: with data created "in the wild" and a degree of curation or augmentation, or with full-on reinforcement learning/goal-oriented training, or some kind of hybrid based on eg conformance testing and validating LLM output at a less sophisticated level (eg if it tries to call an api that's not in the set that it just saw during discovery, the LLM is being dumb, train it out of doing that).

The thing is they are not really mutually exclusive, and LLM companies will do it anyway to make their models useful if enough people are using this or want to use it. This is what's happened already with eg MCP and skills and many programming languages. Anyway, if prompting works to get it to use it properly it validates that the model can be trained to follow that process too, the same way it knows how to work with React
by extr | 2025-12-21 07:13:38+00:00
I think people fool themselves with this kind of thing a lot. You debug some issue with your GH actions yaml file for 45 minutes and think you "learned something", but when are you going to run into that specific gotcha again? In reality the only lasting lesson is "sometimes these kinds of yaml files can be finnicky". Which you probably already knew at the outset. There's no personal development in continually bashing your head into the lesson of "sometimes computer systems were set up in ways that are kind of tricky if you haven't seen that exact system before". Who cares. At a certain point there is nothing more to the "lesson". It's just time consuming trial and error kind of gruntwork.
by pjmlp | 2025-12-21 07:13:40+00:00
Really, I have been gaming before even getting my Timex 2068 in the mid 80's, starting with Game & Watch handhelds, and I don't get "build your aquarium" culture of many PC gamers nowadays.

It is so bad that is almost impossible to buy a traditional desktop on regular computer stores, there are only fish tanks with rainbows on sale.
by vintermann | 2025-12-21 07:14:25+00:00
> Anna’s archive business is stealing copyrighted content and selling access to it.

There is not enough profit in that compared to the risk. They're also not exactly aggressive about it (there are groups which host mirrors who charge far more/finance it in the usual criminal way of getting people to install malware).

To me, there's a "motivation gap" between what they get out of this and the effort it takes, so there's some kind of "ideology". Whether it's 100% what they say it is, is another question.
by lelanthran | 2025-12-21 07:14:39+00:00
> But a citywide blackout isn’t that uncommon.

I think too many people talk past each other when they use the word common, especially when talking about car trips.

A blackout (doesn't have to be citywide) may not be periodic but it's certainly frequent with a frequency above 1 per year.

Many people say "common" meaning "frequent", and many people say "common" meaning "periodic".
by mapontosevenths | 2025-12-21 07:15:42+00:00
I think you will find that fifty percent of people are of below average intelligence regardless of where you live.

The average does tend to vary from state to state. It actually is a bit lower in the southern and midwestern states, but only by a few points.

https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/average-iq-...
by beeflet | 2025-12-21 07:17:15+00:00
As a libertarian I also dislike the "crabs in a bucket" mentality people have towards inequality because it is clearly motivated by jealousy, but the massive amount of inequality we see today seems to undermine some of the assumptions behind democracy.

I think the reason why the social contract of democracy evolves from natural law is that the basic assumption is that we all have about the same fighting power, and voting is representative of this. This assumption does not hold when some minorities have 1000x the economic power but 1x times the voting power: the majority of people will vote to redistribute wealth, while the rich will be motivated to destabilize the peace and take advantage of their disproportionate fighting power directly (killbots? [1]).

Additionally, special interest groups will lobby to protect their cash cows. An increasing amount of the economy flows through government expenditure (including tax incentives, nationalization, etc.), for example palantir, flock, openAI and others. We live in an increasingly planned economy. In the USA, we import pretty much everything and we only build for the military and real estate.

The state of inequality is also concerning considering the recent technological improvements that threaten to totally devalue all labor. There's this notion that the lives of the 1% don't matter as long as we raise the standard of living for the lower class as you suggest, but what is happening now is more like a doomsday situation where we are pulling the ladder up and consigning the working class to the chasm of liquid hot magma below [0]

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yVo1S52xdpI [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O-2tpwW0kmU
by vee-kay | 2025-12-21 07:18:57+00:00
You don't need extensions.

There are many RSS readers with inbuilt dark theme / night mode.

Even if you prefer self-hosted RSS readers, you can find RSS readers (FOSS, not Premium/Freemium) on GitHub with such feature.

https://alternativeto.net/software/feedly/?feature=night-mod...

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=github+rss+reader+self+hosted+dark...
by TobiasJBeers | 2025-12-21 07:19:42+00:00
The “50% time horizon” feels most actionable when you pair it with an expected-value model. For a given task: EV ≈ (human_time_saved × $/hour) − (p_fail × cost_of_failure) − (iteration/oversight cost). A model crossing 4h-at-50% might be hugely useful for low failure-cost work, and still net-negative for anything where rollback/debug is expensive. The missing piece is how p_fail scales with task length + how recoverable failures are.
by dpark | 2025-12-21 07:20:48+00:00
The issue with relying on gdb is that you generally cannot do this in production. You can’t practically attach a debugger to a production instance of a service for both performance and privacy reasons, and the same generally applies to desktop and mobile applications being run by your customers. Gdb is mostly for local debugging and the truth is that “printf debugging” is how it often works for production. (Plus exception traces, crash dumps, etc. But there is a lot of debugging based on logging.) Interactive debugging is so much more efficient for local development but capable preexisting logging is so much more efficient for debugging production issues.

I generally agree that I would not expect a core library to do a bunch of logging, at least not onto your application logs. This stuff generally is very stable with a clean interface and well defined error reporting.

But there’s a whole world of libraries that are not as clean, not as stable, and not as well defined. Most libraries in my experience are nowhere near as clean as standard IO libraries. They often do very complex stuff to simplify for the calling application and have weakly defined error behavior. The more complexity a library contains, the more it likely has this issue. Arguably that is leaky abstraction but it’s also the reality of a lot of software and I’m not even sure that’s a bad thing. A good library that leaks in unexpected conditions might be just fine for many real world purposes.
by theLiminator | 2025-12-21 07:21:12+00:00
I think it really depends on how it's used. It's a massive accelerant if it's just helping you stitch stuff together. Or when it helps you get unblocked by quickly finding you the missing api you need.

But when it replaces you struggling through figuring out the mental model of what you're doing, then I think you end up learning at a much more shallow level than you would by doing thing manually.
by vintermann | 2025-12-21 07:21:15+00:00
Self-supplied metadata in music catalogs is notoriously shit. The degree to which most rights owners don't give a damn is telling.

Spotify's own metadata is not particularly sophisticated. "Valence", "Energy", "Danceability", etc. You can see from a mile away that these are assigned names to PCA axes which actually correspond pretty poorly to musical concepts, because whatever they analyzed isn't nicely linearly separable.
by tgv | 2025-12-21 07:21:52+00:00
In one word: no.

In more detail: Chomsky is/was not concerned with the models themselves, but rather with the distinction between statistical modelling in general, and "clean slate" models in particular on the one hand, and structural models discovered through human insight on the other.

With "clean slate" I mean models that start with as little linguistically informed structure as possible. E.g., Norvig mentions hybrid models: these can start out as classical rule based models, whose probabilities are then learnt. A random neural network would be as clean as possible.
by verisimi | 2025-12-21 07:24:03+00:00
Do you realise we have never had 'democracy' - we have 'representative democracy', a totally different thing. Thousands, perhaps millions of people, vote once every 4-5 years for one person to represent them on thousands of governmental decisions. That person is under no constraints to do what they said to gain your vote either - they can do the exact opposite with no repercussion.

Voting as we have it, is a highly abstract, meta "democracy", with 'the will of the people' effecting a meaningless level of force on the tiller. As per the design.
by cma | 2025-12-21 07:25:09+00:00
The merge operation in the later Chomsky modern linguistics program is similar in a lot of ways to transformer's softmax merging of representations to the next layer.

There's also still a lot to his arguments that we are much more sample efficient. And it isn't like monkies only learn language at a gpt-2 level, bigger brains take us to gpt-8 or whatever. There's a step change where they don't really pick things up linguistically at all and we do. But with a lot more data than we ever get, LLMs seem to distill some of the broad mechanisms what may be our innate ability, though still seems to have a large learned component in us.
by nine_k | 2025-12-21 07:25:41+00:00
Russia bombs a power station in Ukraine, hundreds of thousands are left without electricity.

Ukraine bombs a power station in Russia, hundreds of thousands are left without electricity.

Peaceful winter weather, no major storm, hurricane, earthquake, heat, frost, catastrophic rainfall in SF. 130k people are left without electricity.

In the former two cases, the cause is that something terribly wrong is happening for years. In the latter case, likely, too.
by visarga | 2025-12-21 07:25:44+00:00
Of course there is - if you write good tests, they compress your validation work, and stand in for your experience. Write tests with AI, but validate their quality and coverage yourself.

I think the whole discussion about coding agent reliability is missing the elephant in the room - it is not vibe coding, but vibe testing. That is when you run the code a few times and say LGTM - the best recipe to shoot yourself in the foot no matter if code was hand written or made with AI. Just put the screw on the agent, let it handle a heavy test harness.
by root_axis | 2025-12-21 07:27:45+00:00
The biggest problem with drawing conclusions from the 40% number is that THC use correlates with other well established crash death risks like being a young driver or the use of other impairing substances.

The fact that legalization did not impact the crash rates is also a strong signal that THC itself is not causing the crashes.

The presence of THC in the blood is not a reliable signal for intoxication, so further research is needed to draw any type of conclusion.

Finally, it's also been noted that there are some sample bias concerns because the data comes from fatal crashes where it was determined that a drug test should be administered after the crash.
by tripletao | 2025-12-21 07:30:31+00:00
I'm not sure what you mean? As the length of a sequence increases (from word to n-gram to sentence to paragraph to ...), the probability that it actually ever appeared (in any corpus, whether that's a training set on disk, or every word ever spoken by any human even if not recorded, or anything else) quickly goes to exactly zero. That makes it computationally useless.

If we define perplexity in the usual way in NLP, then that probability approaches zero as the length of the sequence increases, but it does so smoothly and never reaches exactly zero. This makes it useful for sequences of arbitrary length. This latter metric seems so obviously better that it seems ridiculous to me to reject all statistical approaches based on the former. That's with the benefit of hindsight for me; but enough of Chomsky's less famous contemporaries did judge correctly that I get that benefit, that LLMs exist, etc.
by somat | 2025-12-21 07:30:39+00:00
This is needlessly pedantic but postgres is not multi threaded, Or at least historically it was not I don't really know if threading is currently being added or if the cloudbased "postgres-buts" have threading. but postgres standard is a pretty good example of the traditional forking unix server, And as someone deeply suspicious of threads in general, just because we could define a shared memory execution modal didn't mean that we should have done it, I think shared memory introduces too many footguns. Sticking with a multi-process model is probably the correct choice for postgress.

Needlessly pedantic because the distinction between multi process with explicit shared memory(shm) vs multi threaded with implicit shared memory probably does not really matter all that much.
by Arn_Thor | 2025-12-21 07:31:02+00:00
That's not the exact same image, though. It's a separate image, from the same time and place. The one released may have been in Epstein's possession and therefore part of the files. Either some DoJ drone just redacted all children and non-celebrities due to procedure, or it was deliberately done in such a way as to make Clinton and Jackson look suspicious. Whatever the reason, this was not a Getty stock image planted in the files.
by vintermann | 2025-12-21 07:31:55+00:00
Ad supported streams in Spotify are counted in a separate pool, and only get paid out of the ad revenue pool.

Artists can of course complain that "they're selling our music for cheap!", especially in the ad pool. But what's worth remembering is that when it comes to setting optimal price points, Spotify's interest is almost perfectly aligned with the artists. And Spotify has a hell of a lot more data than artists (not to mention financial sense, which you probably didn't become an artist if you had a lot of).
by saghm | 2025-12-21 07:33:00+00:00
It's worth keeping in mind that regardless of whether P = NP, we might never prove it one way or another. We already know from Godel that some statements can't be proven true or false in a given logical system (without introducing inconsistencies), so it's certainly possible that this is one of them. At the risk of stating the obvious, this quite different from the hypothetical you give where we definitively know that it's provable.
by ianstormtaylor | 2025-12-21 07:33:08+00:00
That wasn’t my experience, having just driven across the city and back during tonight’s outage. It was actually weirdly inspiring how well people coordinated at so many of the powerless intersections.

There was a lot of confusion, and some people took advantage of it to rush through, but for the most part it was pretty orderly. Which makes sense because in many parts of the world where there are no traffic lights or stop signs, people get on just fine.

The Waymo’s, on the other hand, were dropping like flies. While walking from Lower to Upper Haight I spotted a broken Waymo every handful of blocks. The corner of Haight & Fillmore was particularly bad, with 3 of them blocking traffic in both directions — in the path of both the 7 and 22 bus lines.
by edg5000 | 2025-12-21 07:33:18+00:00
Which MCPs do you use for banking? I was thinking to try Playwright so it can test apps more easily. So far I've restrained claude to unbouded CLI; browsers have been a real barrier. I used a janky solution where it would write a nodejs script to run puppeteer (headless chrome) and take screenshots. Not the way to go. I need it to be able to access the browser better.
by verisimi | 2025-12-21 07:36:59+00:00
> Australia’s native flora and fauna regenerates and even thrives after burns; in fact, some seeds will only germinate after a fire.

Indeed. As is the case in most places where there are wildfires. I suppose using the word "devastation" is appropriate - fires create a radical change in the local environment - but the change is a necessary one for the local flora and fauna.

Perhaps because humans like things to stay the same, and perhaps because these sorts of natural, inevitable changes aren't that common - most of us don't regularly see fires in our local environment - we label this change in an emotive way: devastating, despite the necessity of the thing.
by bigbadfeline | 2025-12-21 07:37:10+00:00
> So that local companies that have to pay for their pollution are not at a structural disadvantage against companies in other parts of the world where they can pollute for free.

Nobody should assume that there are local producers with sufficient capacity for all tariffed items, or that foreign production is polluting more per item made. China has the most installed renewable power, ahead of everybody else by far, I'm pretty sure they pollute less per item produced.

In other words, yours is not a valid purpose, what I've said before is. The EU is a customs union among other things, meaning there are already tariffs in place for "structural disadvantages" which include more than just pollution, itemizing them would require new watchdogs to measure the alleged offenses on a country by country basis. And for what? Is it at all possible? And who'd watch the watchers?

> Why are they not a tool for preventing pollution? And what is haphazard about this application?

I explained that above. It's only an excuse for taxing the population and more inflation. It has to be reiterated that these tariffs are a tax on the population, not on foreign businesses. If you don't know what tools are used for increasing business efficiency, you should study econ harder. Ditto if you don't know why I'm talking about efficiency.

> Not a productive comment for this website.

You mean, you've got the power to decide what's productive here and what not. Is that power limited to this website only or it applies to others too? I'm not saying you don't have the power, but your naked, argument-free claim on it doesn't provide any useful information.
by zzrrt | 2025-12-21 07:38:17+00:00
>> nothing has ever been proved by the standards of the criminal justice system

This flabbergasted me at first. Admittedly I had to refresh my memory that he died in jail awaiting trial, but he was still convicted once before that! The fact it was pre-MeToo should make it more damning, per his logic. I guess he’s saying there were no convictions after he became infamous, but there’s a caveat that he died awaiting trial, and that plus the prior conviction just makes this statement seem disingenuous or sloppy at best.
by sixdonuts | 2025-12-21 07:38:25+00:00
No doubt. Reading this thread leads me to believe that almost no one wants to take responsibility for anything anymore, even hiring the right people. Why even hire someone who isn't going to take responsibility for their work and be part of a team? If an org is worried about the "bus factor" they are probably not hiring the right people and/or the org management has poor team building skills.
by t0mas88 | 2025-12-21 07:38:50+00:00
Same setup in the Netherlands, there are right of way signs everywhere that apply when the lights don't work.

One interesting effect is that there are also often pedestrian crossings that have priority over everyone. Normally those are limited by lights, but without lights a steady stream of pedestrians stops all traffic. Seen that happen in Utrecht near the train station recently, unlimited pedestrians and bikes, so traffic got completely stuck until the police showed up.
by jen729w | 2025-12-21 07:39:32+00:00
The problem isn't the generation, it's the taste of the generators.

An earnest young lady with a guitar can already sing a light jazz version of 'Highway to Hell' or whatever. Just go to your local cafe to hear it. The objective quality is terrific.

In the past, this wouldn't have been made because the end result is subjectively banal. But now people with no taste can churn it out by the thousands of hours for free.
by breppp | 2025-12-21 07:39:57+00:00
His criticism of the Western political system was always way too simplicist and why it has immense appeal to college students.

Essentially it can be summed as any Western action must be rationalized as evil, and any anti-west action is therefore good. This is also in line with Christian dualism so the cultural building blocks are already in place.

Then you get Khmer Rouge, Putin, Hezbollah, Iran apologetism or downright support
by littlestymaar | 2025-12-21 07:40:48+00:00
> If they were to catch and jail just 1% of license-less drivers, in a visible way, it would be a deterrent to the other 99%. But the rate of being caught & punished is negligible (at least in the states I've lived in) so people know they'll get away with it.

1% is actually negligible, and would not have a deterrent effect. In fact I wouldn't even be surprised if the effective prosecution rate was somewhat higher than this already.

> I previously lived in a country where the cops set up random roadblocks to check everyone's license & registration and look for signs of intoxication.

I live in a country (France) where this is still the case, and where driving crimes are the second source of jail time after drug trafficking, yet alcohol is still the #1 cause of death on the road, and an estimate 2% of people drive without a license after having lost it (and are responsible for ~5% of accidents).
by ChrisArchitect | 2025-12-21 07:41:24+00:00
Episode 001 - Fingal Ferguson, Master Knifemaker

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eD1bI4LGobw

Episode 002 - Christophe Laudamiel, Master Perfumer

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DwyOvhRIpu4
by Wubdidu | 2025-12-21 07:42:14+00:00
Not entirely true. You can do SAP RISE on Telekom (not Open Telekom Cloud, forgot the name of the thing) and as far as I know STACKIT is currently in beta. Apparently the AWS Sovereign Cloud will be possible as well. Its just way more expensive because Microsoft and AWS use their monetary power to give SAP better offers (just guesswork obviously, its not like SAP would tell you).