MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by foldr | 2025-12-22 20:54:34+00:00
> What should or shouldn’t be a wh-island" is literally a statement of "what words might come after some other words"!

This gets at the nub of the misunderstanding. Chomsky is interested in modeling the range of grammatical structures and associated interpretations possible in natural languages. The wh-island condition is a universal structural constraint that only indirectly (and only sometimes) has implications for which sequences of words are ‘valid’ in a particular language.

LLMs make no prediction at all as to whether or not natural languages should have wh-islands: they’ll happily learn languages with or without such constraints.

If you want a more concrete example of why wh-islands can’t be understood in terms of permissible or impermissible sequences of words, consider cases like

How often did you ask why John took out the trash?

The wh-island created by ‘why’ removes one of the in-principle possible interpretations (the embedded question reading where ‘how often’ associates with ‘took’), but the sequence of words is fine.

> Chomsky never proposed anything capable of that; but that just means his models were bad, not that he was working on a different task.

No, Chomsky really was working on a different task: a solution to the logical problem of language acquisition and a theory of the range of possible grammatical variation across human languages. There is no reason to think that a perfect theory in this domain would be of any particular help in generating plausible-looking text. From a cognitive point of view, text generation rather obviously involves the contribution of many non-linguistic cognitive systems which are not modeled (nor intended to be modeled) by a generative grammar.

>the paper linked below

This paper doesn’t make any claims that are obviously incompatible with anything that Chomsky has said. The fundamental finding is unsurprising: brains are sensitive to surprisal. The better your language model is at modeling whether or not a sequence of words is likely, the better you can predict the brain’s surprisal reactions. There are no implications for cognitive architecture. This ought to be clear from that fact that a number of different neural net architectures are able to achieve a good degree of success, according to the paper’s own lights.
by fuzzylightbulb | 2025-12-22 20:54:42+00:00
Have you ever gone fishing? Did you catch all the fish?

Often it is more impactful to address one major/tangible player in a particular space than it would be to "boil the ocean" and ensure that we are capturing every possible player/transgressor. I agree that some of the video was overly breathless, but if that's what wakes people up to the dangers of unsecured cameras/devices then so be it.
by rsync | 2025-12-22 20:54:45+00:00
There's an interesting idea here that is tangentially related to "common carrier" regulations ...

Specifically:

If a flock (or similar) camera is deployed on public land/infra there should exist default permission for any alternate vendor to deploy a camera in the same location.

I wonder how that could be used and/or abused and, further, what the response from a company like flock would be ...
by breakyerself | 2025-12-22 20:54:56+00:00
Sweden is worried about a hostile neighbor. They're freaked out enough that they joined NATO after generations of non-alignment.

Who are we afraid of? If ICBMs are incoming to the Continental United States the world is ending. Regardless of whether we prevent wind farms in any of the 12,000+ miles of coastline.

Are we expecting missiles to come from the Gulf of Mexico? People always bend over backwards to justify this administration. It's tiresome.
by stego-tech | 2025-12-22 20:55:00+00:00
Replying to myself probably breaks some sort of rule somewhere (ye olde double-posting), but I think it's warranted here given the volume of responses this comment of mine has received.

I deliberately left out specific guidance because I wanted exactly the kind of responses we've seen here: a healthy mixture of takes from different backgrounds and perspectives, as well as the opportunity for fatalists to out themselves with the well-tread "just how it is"/"nothing we can do" schtick these sorts of posts tend to encourage. The discussion was the point, and I love seeing the back-and-forth folks have engaged with here over a very broad opinion of mine.

What I'll leave everyone here with is something that's kept me afloat during my own dark times, far, far darker times than we see now:

Just because everything works that way today, doesn't mean it'll work that way tomorrow. None of today was inevitable yesterday, and none of tomorrow is written in stone today. One individual can't fix the world, but enough of us together, focused on a glut of smaller changes, targeting specific problems, acting in concert despite being individuals? That is what drives meaningful change. That is what defines tomorrow.

Don't fret that you can't overturn colossal problems alone. Stop worrying that things have grown too complicated to fix easily. Focus instead on building a community, a movement, an orchestra of change towards causes you believe in. Build more things and share them with others. Do things specifically because you find value in them, even - and especially - if "free markets" or VCs don't. The more you build that you can share, the wider the audience you can reach with your passions, the easier it is to change things for the better.

Immiseration, complexity, monopoly, centralization: they're choices, not inevitabilities.
by ctoth | 2025-12-22 20:55:02+00:00
Ah! So it's my responsibility to teach you how to program properly! I must now police every possible new tutorial, framework, library release, and if the author didn't include accessibility I should ... Make my complete alternative version of that thing! With Accessibility included! This is ... super Scalable!

Or, you know, if you say "This is how you make a UI library" maybe you could think about ... what a USER INTERFACE actually is? Because blind people are users? and we need to interface?
by zephen | 2025-12-22 20:55:05+00:00
> [conflicts in virtual environments are] most likely our problems, but we aren't the users that python is made for. We're support for those users.

Maybe? I mean, if people aren't noticing these issues and you are, how are they relying on your support?

> It's winning because its audience is not code specialists, but other kinds of specialists which sometimes need to use code. Their work often has a sort of immediate importance that ours often doesn't. It's not evaluated based on whether the techies like it, it's evaluated based on whether the scientists, the analysist, the students, and the {non-computery-engineering} Engineers like it.

There is no bright line. I'm a code specialist. I use Python as a tool to help build other code. I don't have any venv problems because my git repo has everything I need in it.
by tsoukase | 2025-12-22 20:55:06+00:00
Two book series that hit the nail for us are the series of Enid Blyton, like Famous Five, (we read to them at age 8-9) and Jeff Kinney's Diary of a Wimpy Kid (they read by themselves). Especially the later is a masterpiece for (pre)puberty age. Days upon days of intellectual and emotional satisfaction.
by vasco | 2025-12-22 20:55:19+00:00
If I put my machine near the main clock signal, I have one clock signal to read from. The comment above was asking about how to average across many different clocks, presumably all in different places in the globe? Unless there's one physical location with all of the ones you're averaging, you're close to one and far from all the others so how is it done without the internet?
Show HN: Native Mobile App Framework for WordPress – BbApp
by thebbapp | 2025-12-22 20:55:32+00:00
In the age of blogging, WordPress made it easy to put up a site and post. Many years later, nothing quite like it came for apps.

I made the BbApp framework to let you skip months of pain on the repetitive parts of building a very expensive app for WordPress.

It includes an XCode project template and dozens of frameworks to tie them together ready for review by the app store.

You can use BbApp with WordPress alone or BBPress. To enjoy a fully-featured native app just download, build in XCode, and publish.

It also includes open-source PHP libraries that make it easy to integrate your existing native mobile application with WordPress.

Features

- Instant post loading
- Guest push alerts for new posts and comments
- Infinite scroll
- Guest posts + comments (BBPress only)
- Guest comments (WordPress and BBPress)
- Multiple post categories (WordPress only)
- Offline mode
- Mark read/unread
- Dark mode
- Deep links
- "Install" website app banner

Platforms

- iPhone, iPad (iOS)
- Macbook, Mac Mini, iMac (macOS)
- Apple TV (tvOS)
- Android (planned)

What's included

- XCode template project
- 40+ Swift 6 and @Observable XCode Frameworks with API documentation
- Plugin for WordPress (PHP 7.2.24+)
- 20+ lightweight and modular PHP Libraries
by mint5 | 2025-12-22 20:55:36+00:00
“10-15 minute walk”

A quaintly American complaint. A 10 minute walk being an issue is very a learned helplessness my fellow Americans suffer from.

But unfortunately the 10-15 min walk is only possible in a couple cities. most Americans day to day experience of public transit is spaced out buses that don’t work well for single family sprawl and strip malls parking lots where walking is treated as undesirable. Car oriented rather than people oriented urban planning (or lack thereof) is the original cause.
by vablings | 2025-12-22 20:55:38+00:00
Nuclear is insane levels of expensive likely due to overregulation.

It is important for base load power and overnight power and should always be the backing of the grid frequency. Total loss of grid frequency is much more difficult to recover from with synthetic inertia.

A healthy grid should have all of the following
- Nuclear base load that keeps the grid stable and pick up from low solar

- Gas plants for surge power and base load when
nuclear/solar/wind cannot take up the slack

- Battery storage for surge/storage during off peak

- Solar for very low-cost cheap energy during peak usage hours

- Wind for other power source ie when the sun isnt shining as much

source: https://grid.iamkate.com/
by josephg | 2025-12-22 20:55:56+00:00
C has numeric enums and tagged unions, which are sum types without any compile time safety. That’s idiomatic C.

Go doesn’t have any equivalent. How do you do stuff like this in Go, at all?

I’ve been programming for 30+ years. Long enough to know direct translations between languages are rarely beautiful. But I’m not an expert in Go. Maybe there’s some tricks I’m missing?

Here’s the problem, if you want to have a stab at it. The code in question defines a text editing operation as a list of editing components: Insert, Delete and Skip. When applying an editing operation, we start at the start of the document. Skip moves the cursor forward by some specified length. Insert inserts at the current position and delete deletes some number of characters at the position.

Eg:

enum OpComponent {
Skip(int),
Insert(String),
Delete(int),
}

type Op = List<OpComponent>

Then there’s a whole bunch of functions with use operations - eg to apply them to a document, to compose them together and to do operational transform.

How would you model this in Go?
by Aromasin | 2025-12-22 20:56:07+00:00
I worked at Altera (FPGA supplier) as the Ethernet IP apps engineer for Europe for a few years. All the big telecoms (Nokia, Ericsson, Cisco, etc) use Precision Time Protocol (PTP) in some capacity and all required clocks to be ns levels for accuracy. Sometimes as low a 10ns at the boundary. Any imperfection in the local clock directly converts into timestamp error, and timestamp error is what limits PTP synchronization performance. Timestamps are the fundamental observable in PTP.
Quantization and jitter create irreducible timestamp noise.
That noise directly limits offset and delay estimation.
Errors accumulate across network elements and internal clock error must be much smaller than the system requirement.

I think most people would look at the error and think "what's the big deal" but at all the telecoms customers would be scrambling to find a clock that hasn't fallen out of sync.
by ActorNightly | 2025-12-22 20:56:14+00:00
People need to get away from this idea of Key/Query/Value as being special.

Whereas a standard deep layer in a network is matrix * input, where each row of the matrix is the weights of the particular neuron in the next layer, a transformer is basically input* MatrixA, input*MatrixB, input*MatrixC (where vector*matrix is a matrix), then the output is C*MatrixA*MatrixB*MatrixC. Just simply more dimensions in a layer.

And consequently, you can represent the entire transformer architecture with a set of deep layers as you unroll the matricies, with a lot of zeros for the multiplication pieces that are not needed.

This is a fairly complex blog but it shows that its just all matrix multiplication all the way down. https://pytorch.org/blog/inside-the-matrix/.
by peaseagee | 2025-12-22 20:56:35+00:00
At a previous role, we needed nanosecond precision for a simulcast radio communications system. This was to allow for wider transmission for public safety radio systems without having to configure trunking. We could even adjust the delay in nanoseconds to move the deadzones away from inhabited areas.

We solved this by having GPS clocks at each tower as well as having the app servers NTP with each other. The latter burned me once due to some very dumb ARP stuff, but that's a story for another day.
by mikkupikku | 2025-12-22 20:56:38+00:00
Get out of your liberal urban centers and you'll find that in most of America the police are very popular and it has nothing to do with income or race. Low income? That means crime effects you even more, which is more reason to support the police. Live in a very white part of the country? The overwhelming amount of crime will come from other white people, and accordingly most of the arrests will be of white people. And yet the people of those communities still support the police with borderline religious devotion.

Half the people I work with aren't white, and roughly half aren't straight either. By internet stereotypes they'd be judged to be progressive liberals who want police reform but in actuality my car is one of the few in the parking lot that isn't a pickup truck with "back the blue" decals on it.

Another point of fact: When democrats trash the police they start losing elections. Even most people who usually vote democrat get demoralized and stay home when the election turns to anti-police rhetoric. The only people who really hate the police are career criminals, people adjacent to career criminal lifestyle and culture (their families, etc) and of course rich liberals who can easily afford to insure all their property, live in controlled access communities and never have to interact with the criminal elements of society except on their own terms.
by cogman10 | 2025-12-22 20:56:41+00:00
Due to some family stuff, this is something I've been investigating. My oncologist has said "this will probably be standard care in a few years". The results and studies around this have been excellent.

What this does better than pretty much anything else is it isolates the destruction of cells to just the target. The liver is a VERY "bleedy" organ. It has a ton of blood that flows through it which makes surgery extra hard. In fact, the not this surgery that's next best for our circumstances laparoscopic through the arteries to drop a radioactive pellet in the center of the cancer.

The non-invasive nature of this is going to be very good for the future of cancer treatment. Minimizing scaring and damage to tissue is the number 1 factor to better results.

The only reason my local oncologist does not have this machine is they are still pretty pricey.

When I first learned about this, I thought it was pseudo-science BS. It's crazy what can be done with just sound.
by evolve2k | 2025-12-22 20:57:02+00:00
Correct me if I’m wrong but as I’m understanding it, the processes is well underway towards moving the core systems and libraries (or whatever it’s all called) across to the new way. But that there’s a massive job of extended libraries maintained by lots of other parties and this ecosystem of libraries have been using all manner of approaches, each of which has its drawbacks and the big goal here is to get all these maintainers onboard to switch over to the new git-based workflow that this transition team (and others) have been working hard to make logical and easy enough to implement.

Is that a fair general read of the situation? (I have further comments to make but wanted to check my basic assumptions first).
by aidenn0 | 2025-12-22 20:57:04+00:00
Nix definitely does not allow most things to be built offline (at least in the way Debian means it).

With Nix, any fetcher will download the source. It does so in a way that guarantees the shasum of what is fetched is identical, and if you already have something in the nix store with that shasum, it won't have to fetch it.

However, with just a mirror of the debian source tree, you can build everything without hitting the internet. This is assuredly not true with just a mirror of nixpkgs.
by mothballed | 2025-12-22 20:57:14+00:00
You presented it as a non-concrete, without an example. I don't believe this makes you a Trump "supporter" as you put it. The example you gave preceding it was of a Muslim ban working.

I don't doubt you have concrete examples of cases failing on merits, but I am only meeting you on the arena you presented.

I do very much expect people will present to cases on either side they believe are failures based on merits and ones they believe officials intentionally (or even accidently) botched. It's quite possible both have been true, in various cases. I won't make such assertions myself either way in this thread, only note that even if hypothetically what you say is true (even in the concrete) it wouldn't prove the underlying claim.
by monero-xmr | 2025-12-22 20:57:20+00:00
It would be cheapest, and 100% in our control, to construct coal plants. Coal is abundant. China builds insane amounts of coal plants to this day. That would provide bountiful cheap energy.

But we don't do this. So all else being equal, I would suggest we reorient towards other types of renewable energy, especially nuclear, if we are longer worried about price
by YossarianFrPrez | 2025-12-22 20:57:32+00:00
Per the article, this seems even better than the headline would suggest:

> Histotripsy generally seems to stimulate an immune response, helping the body attack cancer cells that weren’t targeted directly by ultrasound. The mechanical destruction of tumors likely leaves behind recognizable traces of cancer proteins that help the immune system learn to identify and destroy similar cells elsewhere in the body, explains Wood. Researchers are now exploring ways to pair histotripsy with immunotherapy to amplify that effect.
by biddit | 2025-12-22 20:58:01+00:00
> In practice, it'll be incredible slow and you'll quickly regret spending that much money on it instead of just using paid APIs until proper hardware gets cheaper / models get smaller.

Yes, as someone who spent several thousand $ on a multi-GPU setup, the only reason to run local codegen inference right now is privacy or deep integration with the model itself.

It’s decidedly more cost efficient to use frontier model APIs. Frontier models trained to work with their tightly-coupled harnesses are worlds ahead of quantized models with generic harnesses.
by tptacek | 2025-12-22 20:58:08+00:00
Ok, you're the second person to say that, and I think my point is not clear enough. That's on me.

This response would make sense if I was saying "why focus on Flock, there are so many other ALPR cameras out there" (also true, but not relevant to my point).

But this is a video that is mostly about things that are true of all IP cameras, of the kind that we've had staring out onto public streets for decades, plural decades. People celebrated those cameras, thought they were super neat, built sites indexing them. All of them do most of the same things this video says those Flock cameras did, the tiny minority of Flock cameras you can access publicly.
by beala | 2025-12-22 20:58:11+00:00
It sounds like GPS, and thus a GPS-based stratum 1 server, uses these time servers, but they were successfully failed over:

> Jeff finished off the email mentioning the US GPS system failed over successfully to the WWV-Ft. Collins campus. So again, for almost everyone, there was zero issue, and the redundancy designed into the system worked like it's supposed to.

So failures in these systems are potentially correlated.

The author mentions another solution. Apparently he runs his own atomic clock. I didn’t know this was a thing an individual could do.

> But even with multiple time sources, some places need more. I have two Rubidium atomic clocks in my studio, including the one inside a fancy GPS Disciplined Oscillator (GPSDO). That's good for holdover. Even if someone were jamming my signal, or my GPS antenna broke, I could keep my time accurate to nanoseconds for a while, and milliseconds for months. That'd be good enough for me.
by bhouston | 2025-12-22 20:58:16+00:00
A lot of high end cars get wrecked because (1) their owners want to drive them fast to test out what they paid for, and (2) their owners are not trained to drive high performance cars and (3) their owners drive them on public roads where there are a lot of hazards.

It isn't that different than the non-significant number of rich people that die in private aviation crashes (those that fly themselves, I think private jets are a lot safer.)