MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by grayhatter | 2025-12-31 20:32:48+00:00
> there's no way to "fetch all the data" up front.

this is incorrect

I assume there's more nuance and complexity as for why it feels like there's no way. Probably involving larger design decisions that feel difficult to unwind. But data collection, decisions, and actions can all be separated without much difficulty with some intent to do so.

I would suggest caution, before implementating this directly: but imagine a subroutine that all it did was lock some database table, read the current list of pending top up charges required, issue the charge, update the row, and unlock the table. An entirely different subroutine wouldn't need to concern itself with anything other than data collection, and calculating deltas, it has no idea if a customer will be charged, all it does is calculate a reasonable amount. Something smart wouldn't run for deactivated/expiring accounts, but why does this need to be smart? It's not going to charge anything, it's just updating the price, that hypothetically might be used later based on data/logic that's irrelevant to the price calculation.

Once any complexity got involved, this is closer to how I would want to implement it, because this also gives you a clear transcript about which actions happened why. I would want to be able to inspect the metadata around each decision to make a charge.
by crazygringo | 2025-12-31 20:32:55+00:00
> Preheat watery vegetables in the microwave

There's actually a lot of stuff you can halfway-heat in the microwave.

Air frying frozen <anything>? Nuke it for 2 min and air-fry for 3 min, instead of air-frying for 12 min.

Ice cream rock solid? Nuke a pint for 15 seconds. It won't melt, just soften.

Cold ketchup in a dipping bowl? Nuke for 5 seconds to bring it to room temperature, so you're not putting cold ketchup on warm food.

But the best? You know how tomatoes get a mealy texture when kept in the fridge, which is why everybody says not to keep in them in the fridge, even though they last so much longer that way? That's only as long as they're chilled. Nuke for 10 seconds to bring back to room temperature. The texture returns 100% to normal.
by lo_zamoyski | 2025-12-31 20:32:59+00:00
Just because something can and will be circumvented doesn't make it useless.

People will continue to murder other people. That doesn't mean that criminalizing and punishing murder is pointless.

Now, whether the above scheme is prudent or workable, that's a separate question. But the counterargument to the scheme cannot be "It's all or nothing".
by umanwizard | 2025-12-31 20:33:03+00:00
I am sure that they will not lead to “Christian theocratic values in public policy” in France. That value system is fringe in France, one of the most irreligious and historically anti-clerical cultures in the world.

Among people who identify as Christian in France, the ones who could be described as radical or fundamentalist are a very small minority.
by anal_reactor | 2025-12-31 20:33:04+00:00
A very important part of the system is a nationwide program of sending homeless people to concentration camps so that teenagers wouldn't bribe them to buy TittyTokens.

Like seriously, do you really think that if currently minors can buy tobacco and alcohol using unlawful means, then your TittyTokens will somehow be magically immune to the same problem because you really really wish they would?

You can't patch this without creating some form of a central database of who exactly buys how many TittyTokens.
by skywhopper | 2025-12-31 20:33:39+00:00
Because the people who decided where to locate it and the people in government who could do something to stop it make decisions about how much they care based on those folks’ skin color. If those generators were placed near a rich white neighborhood, the government response would be wildly different.

Mississippi in particular is well known at the state government level to actively choose not to enforce environmental regulations in areas where its Black citizens live.
by probably_wrong | 2025-12-31 20:33:50+00:00
I believe that's incorrect - the article quotes Meta as saying "By cleaning those ads from search results, the company is also removing them from its systems overall".

The real problem as I understand it is that they didn't stop the ads from entering the system, but rather identified the words used by regulators and only deleted those ads (after an unspecified amount of time online) from the system.
by butlike | 2025-12-31 20:34:07+00:00
An LLM gives AN answer. If you ask for not many more than that it gets confused, but instead of acting in a human-like way, it confidently proceeds forward with incorrect answers. You never quite know when the context got poisoned, but reliability drops to 0.

There's many things to say on this. Free is worthless. Speed is not necessarily a good thing. The image generation is drivel. But...

The main nail in the coffin is accountability. I can't trust my work if I can't trust the output of the machine. (and as a bonus, the machine can't build a house. It's single purpose).
by summa_tech | 2025-12-31 20:34:11+00:00
In theory, that's true.

In practice, any unexplored corner of the field will contain surprises; these will require extra theoretical development to cover.

Usually things like imperfect understanding of materials get in the way. Pretty much the reason you need both theory and experiment to make progress in every single area of matter-based technology (i.e. not software).
by mikkupikku | 2025-12-31 20:34:52+00:00
I had an hour long argument with ChatGPT about whether or not Sotha Sil exploited the Fortify Intelligence loop. The bot was firmly disagreeing with me the whole time. This was actually much more entertaining than if it had been agreeing with me.

I hope they do bias these things to push back more often. It could be good for their engagement numbers I think, and far more importantly it would probably drive fewer people into psychosis.
by crote | 2025-12-31 20:35:43+00:00
> It could be in a locked basement, it could be in a sealed off cage in a data center, it could be a private research area at a university. We don't know.

Yes, and that is exactly the problem. They didn't write "a large university/company/government institute which wishes to remains anonymous has graciously donated space in their ISOwhatever certified in-house hosting facility", they wrote "physically held by a long time contributor".

It is written as if it is just Some Guy's Mom's Basement, with a guarantee of Trust Me Bro. If it is indeed hosted in a professional environment, why don't they say so?

People are assuming the worst because it isn't their first rodeo, and they've seen it go wrong time and time again. If F-Droid wants to be taken seriously Just Trust Us isn't good enough - especially with their main selling point being "you can't trust Google"!
by levocardia | 2025-12-31 20:35:44+00:00
Disagree, a blog that gets tens of thousands of unique visitors could clear huge numbers on KDP. Maybe your niche is too narrow (probably, given your TAM is in the thousands) but this post is about "timeless programming projects" and is going to be extremely broad. The number of hits to the blog is itself an indicator of a very big and very eager potential market.
by zcw100 | 2025-12-31 20:35:59+00:00
I've found the blue tape and a sharpie to be a game changer. It helps me keep my fridge tidy without having to go through everything and guess if it's still ok. I find I actually waste less food when I throw things out regularly because I know that if it's in there it's good to eat and it doesn't get lost among old leftovers that aren't any good anymore anyway.
by compsciphd | 2025-12-31 20:36:02+00:00
So I've recovered a lot of damaged DVDs and I think in my research it showed that DVDs also do ECC across larger than the 2048 data blocks (maybe 16 of them?)

So when I used ddrescue, I would read in that block size (instead of just 2048) as if I would get lucky and get a good read (or enough signal that ECC could repair it on the large block).

This was very effective at recovering DVDs with repeated reads vs when I had previously done it with 2048 byte reads only I would end up with 2048 byte reads scattered all over (which if ECC is done on 16x2k 32k byte block size, means there was a lot of data I was leaving on the floor that should have been recovered on those reads).

Ddrescue was also good for this in the sense that if I was trying to recover a DVD (video) from multiple damaged DVDs, as long as they were not damaged in the same location, i was able to fill in the blanks.

Perhaps you can correct me about the 16 block mechanism, perhaps it was just random that it worked and my understanding at the time was wrong.
by chollida1 | 2025-12-31 20:36:05+00:00
> Is it? So you can what? Buy exotic vehicles? Buy extra houses? Buy surgeries? Buy expensive experiences?

Buy freedom to chose what to do with your life. I've never sold a company and netted 9 figures but i have been lucky enough to work for a hedge fund and make enough that I and my family can do what ever we want from the age of 30 onwards.

That is an incredible amount of freedom and one that I wish most people would have.

You seem to think only in materialistic ways.

But having enough money to not have to work again allows you to be a better and more available parent. To be able to provide your kids and nieces and nephews with schooling to put them apart from other kids.

Its not always about owning another home, Just knowing that my kids are set for life before they start their own lives in case something happens to me was enough for me.

Lots of us think of others before ourselves.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-12-31 20:36:10+00:00
> Every censorship system you build, even if it seems “good”, will eventually censor you and the things you care about

Nobody is being censored. We regulate who can buy alcohol or tobacco, gamble at casinos, or operate a motor vehicle without it turning into a slippery slope.

Politically, the free speech argument might have had a point if Silicon Valley’s most-visible “free speech” advocates hadn’t lined up behind an authoritarian who’s creating diplomatic tension (and thus domestic political capital) the world over.
by mariusor | 2025-12-31 20:36:12+00:00
I'm smelling a troll here if you can't distinguish between a UN official acting in an official capacity being sanctioned, vs. private individuals who proselytize and engage in propaganda for a populist regime which, albeit unofficially, is "The Enemy" for the whole of Europe at the moment.

Also the decisions are not outside any legal process. To quote the agenda for the decision[1]:

> On 18 July 2025, the High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy (‘the High Representative’) published a statement on behalf of the Union, in which she strongly condemned the persistent malicious activities posed by Russia, which form part of broader, coordinated and long-standing hybrid campaigns aimed at threatening and undermining the security, resilience and democratic foundations of the Union, its Member States and its partners. The High Representative stressed that Russia’s malicious activities had escalated further since the beginning of the war of aggression against Ukraine and were highly likely to persist in the foreseeable future.

[1] https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/PDF/?uri=OJ:L...
by mikestorrent | 2025-12-31 20:36:50+00:00
> it is already normalized (in America at least) that liquor and weed stores will ID even the elderly, and scan the barcode on the ID into their computer

Then why are y'all so against Digital ID? We don't make you do that in Canada, it's just the clerk eyeballing your ID if you don't look old enough. I can't believe people are letting their ID get scanned and associated with vice purchases. Is it mandatory? Land of the free, eh?
by svantana | 2025-12-31 20:37:13+00:00
> At some level, the simplest thing to do is to give up and crash if things are no longer sane.

The problem with this attitude (that many of my co-workers espouse) is that it can have serious consequences for both the user and your business.

- The user may have unsaved data
- Your software may gain a reputation of being crash-prone

If a valid alternative is to halt normal operations and present an alert box to the user saying "internal error 573 occurred. please restart the app", then that is much preferred IMO.
by ryandrake | 2025-12-31 20:37:15+00:00
I just don't understand the mentality of the author. 9 figures is generational wealth, potentially perpetually with good multi-generational money management plan. With that kind of money invested, you have beaten the game, and can literally do any side quest you want to do, forever. This is the biggest no-brainer ever. What the fuck are you waiting for?

Similarly, I don't understand why the CxOs in my current (BigTech) company still work. You're done. You can do anything you want and yet you voluntarily continue to amass more?
by mikkupikku | 2025-12-31 20:38:09+00:00
Federal IDs are a political landmine for reasons mostly unrelated to privacy. The American public doesn't understand privacy issues, unless maybe you frame it as "ThE NUmBer OF ThE BeASt" oooo-oo spooky! Otherwise, most Americans just get stupified and say they have nothing to hide.

My point in all of this is that we should not delude ourselves by theorizing about ways this could be implemented in a privacy preserving way, because even if that's technically possible, its unlikely for things to work out that way.
by mikestorrent | 2025-12-31 20:38:09+00:00
This is how it should be. If you happen to be 16 and look 19, well, fuck's sake, your body's old enough to drink now. People get so hung up on this kind of think-of-the-children crap like as though every generation before now didn't have plenty of underage drinking and debauchery. I'm more worried about people being shutins and not having any fun than I am about some kid having a beer.
by fc417fc802 | 2025-12-31 20:38:24+00:00
Agreed about the conflation. But that drives home that there isn't some historic commonly and widely accepted definition for AGI whose goal posts are being moved. What there was doesn't match the new developments and was also often quite flawed to begin with.

> LLM models, ... outdo any current self-driving car

How would an LLM handle computer vision? Are you implicitly including a second embedding model there? But I think that's still the wrong sort of vision data for precise control, at least in general.

How do you propose to handle the model hallucinating? What about losing its train of thought?
by fuckinpuppers | 2025-12-31 20:38:32+00:00
That’s what is insane. I called my insurance to ask if some tests were covered since preventative care is 100% covered.

They couldn’t answer if cholesterol test would count. How is that not automatically classified as preventative? It’s one of the most basic metrics.

So they want me to get the doctor to give me the ICD code and the diagnosis code. Or something. Two different codes. They’ve added so much bureaucracy and crap into the system because they can. Nobody’s stopping them and there’s too many fingers in the pie.
by igouy | 2025-12-31 20:38:40+00:00
'We read and heard many stories about confident and experienced programmers plunging into self-study tutorials, only to give up in frustration after several hours, still wondering, "Where is the application code?" The object paradigm, in which program control is distributed across a set of tightly encapsulated and high-function software objects, was alien to experts in procedural design.

… to use Smalltalk fluently, a programmer must become familiar with a huge class hierarchy and with the tools of a sophisticated interactive programming environment. New programmers often became lost in the hierarchy or spent considerable time in unfocused exploration of the interactive tools.'

"Making Use: scenario-based design of human-computer interactions", 2000, page 103

https://www.google.com/books/edition/Making_Use/s-0ZuadhBBAC...
by leptons | 2025-12-31 20:39:11+00:00
I use AI every day, and it's honestly crap. No it isn't significantly improving, it's hitting a wall. Every new model release is getting less and less good, so no, the "trendline" is not going up as much as you seem to think it is. It's plateaued. The only way "AI" is going to change the world is if stupid people put it in places that it really shouldn't be, thinking it will solve problems and not create even more problems.
by znpy | 2025-12-31 20:39:24+00:00
> > Operating System: An operating system is a collection of things that don't fit into a language. There shouldn't be one.

Squeak/Pharo and Smalltalk in general never took off (and it’s unlikely they ever will) because of this mindset.

I dabbled a bit with pharo and this mindset became evident pretty much immediately.

The thing is: for many things pharo/squeak are really shitty runtimes (think smp/threading, high-throughput or low-latency i/o, network protocols support etc). But the OS is generally great in that sense.

Smalltalk is nice but it will never get past the “toy language” phase with that attitude.

Also: in terms of object database Versant OODBMS is much better :P
by sethammons | 2025-12-31 20:39:41+00:00
I'm sorry. What?

This legislation is very much giving more power to the government over what its citizens cannot do. The real impetus is control by the powers that be. The ideal citizen for an authoritarian would be fully controllable via digital means. A digital id that is networked with services is a wet dream for authoritarians.

What does this have to do with limiting Zuck's net worth? Because less kids will see less ads? How much will this reduce his net worth? If we took licenses from kids and had them wait until 18, would you be claiming this is to prevent Musk from gaining more wealth?
by louthy | 2025-12-31 20:39:49+00:00
> Is it? So you can what? Buy exotic vehicles? Buy extra houses? Buy surgeries? Buy expensive experiences?

Regain your own time. As a former CTO who has recently exited, recovering my own time again is more valuable to me than the money (although the money means I can retain my own time going forward).

> His life has meaning, he’s of value to his employees and customers and partners.

Your work is not you and if you think that way, you're gonna be crushed when you come to retire. Even though I loved what I did for a career, it's better to do what you love for yourself, not "employees and customers and partners". Many people have other interests outside of building tech, but even if building tech is your only thing, exiting is a chance at starting something fresh and on your own terms.
Emotional Intelligence: Moving AI from Emotion Detection to True Understanding
by buttersmoothAI | 2025-12-31 20:40:14+00:00
We've discovered how to give AI true emotional intelligence through a 4-layer framework.

*The Current State:*
Most AI can detect emotions ("I see you're frustrated") but can't understand WHY, WHAT'S AT STAKE, or HOW emotions evolve.

*The Breakthrough:*
A 4-layer Emotional Intelligence Framework:

*Layer 1: Deep Contextual Modeling*
Context graph with agents, events, social dynamics, stakes, narrative arc. AI understands not just WHAT you feel, but WHY and WHAT'S AT STAKE.

*Layer 2: Computational Appraisal Theory*
Goal relevance, goal congruence, coping potential, normative significance, agency. AI simulates how emotions arise from situations (like humans do).

*Layer 3: Embodied Resonance Modeling*
Perspective-taking, vulnerability mapping, emotional trajectory prediction. AI can feel WITH you, not just detect your emotions.

*Layer 4: Expressive Generation with Emotional Coherence*
Emotion → syntax, lexicon, pacing, perspective mapping. AI expresses emotions coherently in language (matches your emotional state).

*Why This Is a Game Changer:*
This isn't simulated empathy. This is structurally modeled emotional intelligence.

*For Relational AI:*
AI can now take perspective, map vulnerabilities, predict emotional trajectories, and express emotions coherently.

*For Constitutional AI:*
AI understands human needs at the emotional level, enabling better ethical frameworks.

*The Impact:*
- Better user experiences (AI understands you deeply)
- More trustworthy AI (genuine resonance, not simulation)
- Revolutionary relational AI (true emotional connection)
- Ethical AI development (understands human needs)

*The Future:*
AI that is both logically coherent AND emotionally intelligent.

This is the moment relational AI becomes truly relational.

What are your thoughts on emotional intelligence in AI? How would this change your work?
by dmurray | 2025-12-31 20:40:16+00:00
Not every piece of logic lends itself to being expressed in the type system.

Let's say you're implementing a sorting algorithm. After step X you can be certain that the values at locations A, B, and C are sorted such that A <= B <= C. You can be certain of that because you read the algorithm in a prestigious journal, or better, you read it in Knuth and you know someone else would have caught the bug if it was there. You're a diligent reader and you've convinced yourself of its correctness, working through it with pencil and paper. Still, even Knuth has bugs and perhaps you made a mistake in your implementation. It's nice to add an assertion that at the very least reminds readers of the invariant.

Perhaps some Haskeller will pipe up and tell me that any type system worth using can comfortably describe this PartiallySortedList<A, B, C>. But most people have to use systems where encoding that in the type system would, at best, make the code significantly less expressive.
by yesfitz | 2025-12-31 20:40:18+00:00
The "trend" is a reference to the sentences preceding what I quoted, in which Xi Jinping celebrates the continued integration of Hong Kong and Macau.

"Not long ago, I attended the opening ceremony of the National Games, and I was glad to see Guangdong, Hong Kong and Macao coming together in unity and acting in unison. We should unswervingly implement the policy of One Country, Two Systems, and support Hong Kong and Macao in better integrating into the overall development of our country and maintaining long-term prosperity and stability. We Chinese on both sides of the Taiwan Strait share a bond of blood and kinship. The reunification of our motherland, a trend of the times, is unstoppable!"

Given the unrest and bad optics from Hong Kong, which was a gradual, negotiated transfer of power to China, I'm hoping that the threat of invasion remains just a threat. Soft power takes longer and is more easily contested. I think 2026 will determine if America's step back is a blip or the start of a trend. I wouldn't be surprised if China and other countries are waiting to determine the same.
by pvtmert | 2025-12-31 20:40:26+00:00
Those taxes are paid by the individuals, not by the companies.

And the decision how to distribute these (corporate tax) should be done by the government. Essentially, companies evading [corporate] tax decides themselves where to distribute that money. Obviously, they make decisions that drives more profits and income, not the public good. Even if it improves living conditions (ie. delivery service would help elderly), it still requires that person to be user of the product. A layman/citizen cannot effectively utilize the benefits.
by riazrizvi | 2025-12-31 20:40:45+00:00
Anyone can have security by living very safely within their means, by learning how to be satisfied. What people really mean when they say what you are proposing, is “guarantee a certain future lifestyle”. But the appeal of future lifestyles depends on not obtaining them. Without an ability to be satisfied, acquisition is always disappointing. It’s why a pay raise in a job that doesn’t address your needs, loses its shine after a month or so.