MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ggm | 2026-01-14 06:06:19+00:00
I have been exposed to these kinds of games, and there is (in my experience) always a second-order-effect in playing them: Somebody is asserting dominance, usually the person making up or applying the to-be-found rules.

It's still capable of being fun, but it's also capable of being hazing, bullying, or exclusion. I tend to think it usually is one or more of these, more than the game but that may reflect being the youngest of 4, and exposed to the older sibs and their friends.

I'm in my 6th decade. if I approached a game like this now I'd be interested if I could formalise the inductive reasoning but I would also be on the lookout for the 2nd order effects.
by alephnerd | 2026-01-14 06:06:26+00:00
> The way these regimes have changed was by people collectively realizing they don't want it, without foreign interference

Not really.

Every single regime change has happened because a veto player decided to withdraw support for the incumbent regime. This has been documented for decades by Kuran, Karelian & Peterson, Ulfelder, and Hummel.

Once the incumbent regime begins shooting, they have no choice but to double down because statistically incumbents in an authoritarian regime will not continue to retain their positions if they back down.

For incumbents, you either do a managed transition (eg. Pinochet) or you double down on repression (eg. Deng). Vacillating in the middle ends up leading to mass mobilization and shows internal stakeholders that there is little downside to defecting to the protesters side. And that was the mistake Gorbachev, Husak, and Honecker made.

I have family in VN and go there fairly often, and given the nature of business in Asia have often bumped into their decisionmakers often. Much of their leadership was in Czechoslovakia, GDR, and Poland from 1986-91 on internal security or military scholarships, and the primary takeaway they took was to

1. Sustain economic growth to buy support and increase the revolutionary threshold by adding an increased economic cost

2. Dramatically expand the size of internal security bureaus (most Warsaw Pact members had 0.01-0.25% of their population be members of internal security organizations, but states like Iran and Vietnam are trying to maintain a 0.5-1% population ratio instead)

3. Double down on repression once the bullets start flying. My SO grew up in the Central Highlands during the ethnic tensions turned protests in the 2000s [0]. Once two protesters died after arrest, the BCA decided to double down. They began summarily executing protesters on the street, ambushed protesters in side streets and opened fire, hunting protestors using unfed dogs, and openly distributing small arms and ammunition to trusted party members and US-Vietnam and/or Sino-Vietnam War veterans, and giving them a blank check to enforce "discipline". That said, she was from a Bac 76 family so they were in a better position.

I guarantee you Iran's leadership thinks the same way. And from the looks of what is happening in Iran, their leadership is using the exact same playbook.

> There is decent amount of research that shows that nonviolence is a more reliable way to change regimes towards democracy.

Yes, but this is because an authoritarian regime allowing non-violent protest to occur means they have lost control, becuase the revolutionary threshold has been hit such that mass mobilization by civil society has happened and does not have a high cost - thus implying their grip on power and monopoly on violence has decreased. This is what Kuran highlights.

[0] - https://web.archive.org/web/20041222095607/http://www.abc.ne...
by snvzz | 2026-01-14 06:07:36+00:00
>Clearly the Windows NT kernel is older than 25 years, and is still making money.

Not the one from 25 years ago.

>Seems like a million years ago I wrote some games. The source code is long gone. (Well it's on 5.25 floppy disks in my garage for 30 years, so functionally gone.)

Legal requirement would have ensured great care in preservation of said source.

>I'm sorry to say, but making laws for old software is basically pointless.

If it's pointless, then copyright should expire much earlier.
by exidy | 2026-01-14 06:07:52+00:00
Disclaimer: I'm a non-smoker

As mentioned upthread, Australia has been running a similar strategy of trying to tax smoking out of existence and all that's happened is they've rediscovered the Laffer curve as well as pushing otherwise law-abiding citizens towards illegal tobacco.

There's a limit to how much sin tax people are prepared to put up with. Either its legal to consume or it's not, and vapes are far less objectionable to be near by than traditional cigarettes. It bemuses me that Aus, NZ, Singapore etc have gone down the path of trying to ban vape usage when the alternative is far worse.

"The more you tighten your grip .. " etc.
by CableNinja | 2026-01-14 06:08:19+00:00
Scientists and engineers have fantastic senses of humor when naming things.

> The time derivative of acceleration is called jerk, and the time derivative of jerk is called jounce. One published paper whimsically named the fourth, fifth, and sixth derivatives of "snap", "crackle", and "pop" after the cartoon characters on boxes of Rice Krispies breakfast cereal.
by defrost | 2026-01-14 06:08:39+00:00
You are boldly and confidently at odds with the usual explanations of the formation of oil:

* https://energyeducation.ca/encyclopedia/Oil_formation

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petroleum

these other sources all assert that

The origin of fossil fuels is the anaerobic decomposition of buried dead organisms, particularly planktons and algae.
by canjobear | 2026-01-14 06:08:49+00:00
“who art in heaven” is a grammatical relative clause because the subject of the verb is the relative pronoun “who” which is second person in that context. You can still get this kind of thing in modern English, for example “I, who am a farmer, will be happy” is grammatical because the relative pronoun “who” is first person there. That doesn’t mean it would be grammatical to say “*A farmer am happy” and it wouldn’t have worked with art either.

Conceivably it’s grammatical if Henry is vocative and the pronoun is dropped colloquially, like “Who art [thou], O Henry?” but it’s a stretch.
by ggm | 2026-01-14 06:09:26+00:00
Hmm. I guess if their cover is blown, there's low to no risk of compromise to active staff, but I am amazed this level of interplay isn't being weaponised against people both sides of the ocean. If the stories about left wing militancy in Shanghai are to be believed, this kind of anti-soviet action might be seen as very very wrong, even if the USSR is not entirely friendly.

Chinese political dynasties last a long time. People with some power, local or national, will be related to, if not actively part of this deal. I guess in the end, if the deal was sanctioned at the top, "that makes it ok"

From the other side, cooker theorists of the dangers of the state would look at the CIA taking intel. from China and say "we knew! we knew they were part of the grand conspiracy"

Cracking good story. Reminded me of the thing about the soviets showing off space tech at a world trade fair and the US getting to do usable intelligence of the plastic fakes, and bits of space trash, to help them understand soviet capability. Showing off how good you are, has costs.
by businessmate | 2026-01-14 06:09:28+00:00
This paper defines AI Reliance Logging as a distinct evidentiary control class concerned with preserving AI-generated representations that may later become the object of reliance in governed decision environments. It explains the procedural failure mode that arises when AI outputs cannot be reconstructed at the moment scrutiny occurs, clarifies what AI Reliance Logging does and does not encompass, and situates the control within established audit, legal, and disclosure oversight doctrine. The paper is implementation-agnostic and does not prescribe a specific technical solution, focusing instead on the evidentiary obligation that emerges as AI systems increasingly mediate consequential decisions.
by vladdoster | 2026-01-14 06:09:45+00:00
Location: Nashville, TN
Remote: true
Willing to relocate: boston || nashville
Technologies: Python, Django, IaC, Terraform, Golang, CI/CD, Azure/AWS, {ba,z}sh, Lua, Springboot,
Redis, Docker, Open Service Broker, {,non}relational & vector dbs, shared services, SOA
Email: mvdoster@gmail.com

resume: https://linkedin.vdoster.com && http://github.com/vladdoster

sr. cloud software engineer @ Mastercard (5 years)

Designed and built Platform-as-a-Service for microservice workloads running on Azure and AWS
to migrate on-prem workloads to the cloud. The platform operates globally, allowing teams to
deploy to several Azure-backed regions worldwide. Helped plan and create regional landing zones
in Azure for application teams wanting to perform globally. Designed platform components using
Terraform, Go, and Node; developed support tooling using Bash, Python, and Azure CLI. De-risk the
platform by addressing security vulnerabilities and ensuring the platform is PCI compliant.

api/devops software engineer @ Harvard Medical School (2 years)

Worked as part of the DevOps team to manage a 15k core CentOS HPC cluster. Designed and implemented
Python-based security scanning pipeline to securely deploy & run Apptainer images via SLURM.
Coordinated cross-team emergency patching eﬀorts. Collaborated with researchers and engineers across
3-letter institutions to deliver secure research infrastructure. Built CI/CD Pipelines with GitHub, Jenkins,
to automate code builds, testing, and deployments. Wrote Puppet modules to manage configuration of HPC fleet.
Wrote custom Puppet module & Python scripts to automatically remediate Tenable findings.

full-stack software engineer @ Global Prior Art (3 years)

Used Django, Celery, Selenium grid, and AWS API Gateway for IP rotation to scrape USPTO patent PDFs,
apply CV for data extraction, and generate reports with relevant claims, saving employees 4-5 hours daily.
Wrote E2E black-box/fuzzing unit tests. Automated on-premise deployment via Github Actions and Ansible.

maintainer @ Zinit (5 years)

Develop and maintain a zsh plugin manager on Github with 4k stars. Implemented unit tests,
containerization, bug fixes, and new features.
See: https://github.com/zdharma-continuum/zinit

contributor @ Open-source documentation (5 years)

Contributed hundreds of documentation corrections and enhancements to 400+ open source projects.
by tombert | 2026-01-14 06:10:22+00:00
Bits get lost, if you don’t have protocol verification you get mismatched types.

Types naively used can fall apart pretty easily. Suppose you have some data being sent in three chunks. Suppose you get chunk 1 and chunk 3 but chunk 2 arrives corrupted for whatever reason. What do you do? Do you reject the entire object since it doesn’t conform to the type spec? Maybe you do, maybe you don’t, or maybe you structure the type around it to handle that.

But let’s dissect that last suggestion; suppose I do modify the type to encode that. Suddenly pretty much every field more or less just because Maybe/Optional. Once everything is Optional, you don’t really have a “type” anymore, you have a a runtime check of the type everywhere. This isn’t radically different than regular dynamic typing.

There are more elaborate type systems that do encode these things better like session types, and I should clarify that I don’t think that those get in the way. I just think that stuff like the C type system or HM type systems stop being useful, because these type systems don’t have the best way to encode the non-determinism of distributed stuff.

You can of course ameliorate this somewhat with higher level protocols like HTTP, and once you get to that level types do map pretty well and you should use them. I just have mixed feelings for low-level network stuff.
by NitpickLawyer | 2026-01-14 06:10:31+00:00
This is a trendy article, rehashing themes that were prevalent over the last year, and, like those themes, will age like milk.

If you look at the past 3 years and plot capabilities in 3 key areas, the conclusions will be vastly different.

Code completion was "awww, how cute, this almost looks like python" in early 2023. It's now at the level of "oh my, this actually looks decent".

Then there's e2e "agentic" stuff, where you needed tons of glue 2 years ago to have a decent workflow working 50% of the time. Now you have agents taking a spec, working for 2h uninterrupted, and delivering working, tested, linted code. Unattended.

Lastly, these capabilities have led to CTF challenges going from 0 - 80% since RL was used to train these things. The first one was ~2y ago when a popular CTF site saw the first <10s capture on a new task. Now, several companies are selling CTF as a service, with more and more competitions being dominated by said agents.

So yeah, rehashing all the old "arguments" is a futile attempt. This thing is getting better and better. RL does something really interesting, unlocking an interesting fixation with task completion. Give it a verifiable reward (i.e. capture a flag), and it will bang its head against the wall until it gets that flag. And what's more important, in security stuff you don't need perfect accuracy, nor maj@n. What you're looking for is pass@n, which usually gives 20-30% more on any benchmark. So, yeah, all your flags are belong to AI.

----

AI will compromise your cybersecurity posture, but that's because our postures have been bad all along. It will find more and more exploits, and the value in red-blue teams will be much more than the "bugs" and "exploits" LLM-assisted coding will "bring". Those will get automatically caught as well. But there's vastly more grass-fed guaranteed human-wrote good old fashion bugs out there.
by reify | 2026-01-14 06:10:42+00:00
Excellent article from a university lecturer at the coal face of education.

I learned this while spending 12 weeks in Forensic psychiatry during my psychotherapy training.

I noticed that a few of the patients were acting out the behaviours of other patients. Namely, setting fire to paper waste bins. excuse the pun, but it spread like wild fire through the ward. The fire brigade were called weekly.

I remember sitting in group supervision in 2000 and the supervisor was warning us about the recent increases in referrals from parents asking for assessments for ADHD.

Mothers speaking outside of the school gates came to realise that children had better support if they had an ADHD diagnoses and they would have an increase in child benefits. So they were asking for an assessment for ADHD.

back to the ADHD article and looping behaviour:

To understand the complexity of the issue, it is helpful to consider the work of the philosopher of science Ian Hacking, who spent much of his life trying to untangle this sort of thing.

One of the most important lessons that Hacking taught us is that when it comes to medical diagnoses with behavioural aspects, humans are “moving targets”. This is because of what he termed “looping effects”: that when people receive a label, they respond to it by changing their behaviour accordingly. But because their behaviour has now changed, the label itself must evolve to capture the very thing purportedly being labelled. This then sets off new kinds of behaviour in those receiving the label and thus the looping continues.
by indecisive_user | 2026-01-14 06:10:53+00:00
>I grocery shopped like an American - filled up an entire cart with a week or two worth of groceries

Is that really how the average American shops though? The majority of shoppers these days are in the self checkout or "15 items or less" lines with only a single basket of stuff, at least in the stores I frequent. Granted, I'm close to a city center but the store I go to is not very walkable
by seec | 2026-01-14 06:11:06+00:00
The reason is money and control. That's it. Believing otherwise is foolish.
They don't really give a shit about privacy or whatever is the supposed agenda of the day. It's about not paying as much to the US and being able to control the infrastruscture.

I trust EU govs less than I trust US companies. At least I know that for the companies it's just about making more money and there isn't that many downsides for me outside of having to pay one way or another.
EU govs are fundamentally destructive, so whatever they end up doing you can be sure it will terrible for everyone but themselves.
by rurban | 2026-01-14 06:11:26+00:00
Similar thing happened to me at a surf competition at an anon place. People were flown in from everywhere, my surfboard arrived too late because the plane sucked.

But as me, everybody just gathered at the hot tub, nobody took part at the real sports event, we just fooled around and were happy to meet people from all around the world. Brazil, Hawaii, Germany, Canada, US. Really nice event. No idea if there even was a winner at the event. Maybe they did put something onto the web page, but nobody cared.
by lxdlam | 2026-01-14 06:12:16+00:00
I still suspect the effectiveness of plugging in a type system patch to a complete system, like typescript to javascript. We still observe so many `as any` or `as unknown as` at every corner.

Despite of the suspicion, Gleam provides a better and elegant syntax for those who are not familiar with Erlang or functional programming languages, which I loved most.
by lostlogin | 2026-01-14 06:12:23+00:00
NZ isn’t trying to ban it, not at all. Winston Peters loves tobacco. This government loves the tobacco industry, to the extent that it has them helping with legislation (industry documents mysteriously getting used to write policy). Casey Costello is a corrupt joke.

Having just spent a bit of time travelling, I think vapes are worse to be near than cigarettes or cigars.

Walking down busy street in the UK is just so gross. The sickly sweet strawberry, cinnamon etc. I’d prefer tobacco smoke.

And at least there was some etiquette around tobacco smoking. You don’t often encounter it inside, in planes, trains, theatres, malls etc. all those were going on this month.

https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/political/573271/casey-costello-b...

https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/579431/absolutely-ludicr...
by code_martial | 2026-01-14 06:13:01+00:00
I’m not sure. I keep asking the LLMs whether I should rewrite project X in language Y and it just asks back, “what’s your problem?” And most of the times it shoots my problems down showing exactly why rewriting won’t fix that particular problem. Heck, it even quoted Joel Spolsky once!

Of course, I could just _tell_ it to rewrite, but that’s different.
by ottah | 2026-01-14 06:13:07+00:00
I think there a lot of good points from others about symptom management, but I think switching off is actually pretty important too. I'm finding that fixing my procrastination and task initiation issues with medication and systems has left me more tired, as I'm doing more.

Everyone is different, but I think for ADHD people we can't be still to recuperate. I'm giving knitting a try, it's a pretty meditative activity, with a low cognitive load. My husband plays video games.

Getting out in nature is good. Walking, biking. I bought a onewheel just for the novelty of floating around the neighborhood.
by directevolve | 2026-01-14 06:14:18+00:00
Low dose extended release Adderall. I feel completely myself. It helps me make conscious choices about transitions between tasks. I don’t get irritated by interruptions. When I transition, it’s easier to put down what I was doing before and take up the new task.

If you think you have ADHD, try getting evaluated by a clinician. It’s not hard to do. A good clinician can go over the range of behavioral and medication options and assess for comirbidities like autism.
by Grisu_FTP | 2026-01-14 06:14:39+00:00
> Just because Dunning–Kruger exists does NOT exclude the fact that people are good at judging some things.

I dont think this is about Dunning-Kruger, i think this is about the emotional attachment you build to something you created and how it clouds your judgement.

for example, if i recall correctly people liked their ikea furniture more, even tho its more work and of lesser quality, because they build it themselves and thus feel better about it.
Same thing probably extends to most things you can do yourself: Cooking, Growing plants, building a dirt hut in Minecraft
by Earw0rm | 2026-01-14 06:14:44+00:00
They can, but they're competing with assholes, you can figure out the odds.

Like there's an Olympics where everyone's on drugs but a few good folks decide to compete clean.

Want to win fair? Sure, same here. Now here come the whispers, you can just ignore them, sure, but now your girlfriend's pregnant and your bank account is looking a little thin. Good luck.
by sgillen | 2026-01-14 06:15:16+00:00
In addition to what the other responses said:

1. Share a cohesive and inspiring vision for the project.

2. Understand your skills, strengths/weaknesses etc and try to give you work that challenges you / help you grow / are interesting.

I think these are rare and can be hard to do (I'm now trying to do it myself!), but when it happens it's very motivating.
by drewsski | 2026-01-14 06:15:29+00:00
If a prototype has to wait for engineering to bring it to life, then perhaps the tools being used for the prototype are the problem, or the staff that is charged with their usage. At my company, prototyping now falls entirely on the design and product team, with occasional consultation with engineering usually to inquire about the technical feasibility of a proposed feature.

The product team has the closest proximity to end users, so they are well placed to validate ideas. The AI tools help them iterate much faster, which also translates to keeping customer focus groups engaged.

The tools will definitely get better with time, but they are still an order of magnitude improvement compared to the Figma based prototypes from the early 2000s.
by zippyman55 | 2026-01-14 06:15:37+00:00
The pre-historic creatures suffered incredible evolutionary pressures. While the meteor strike was undoubtably significant, other weaknesses challenged them every step of the way.
Early creatures were highly vulnerable when they ate, as well as when they went to the bathroom.
The early dinosaur bird, The terodactyls was extremely vulnerable to Darwinian selection pressures when the bird urinated due to the high pitched urine noise. Evolutionary pressure resulted in the development of silent urination of the pterodactyls, hence the name change and the silent “p”.
by tombert | 2026-01-14 06:16:11+00:00
I know everything reduces to bits eventually, but modern CPUs and memory aren’t as “lossy” as the network is, meaning you can make more assumptions about the data being and staying intact (especially if you have ECC).

Once you add distribution you have to encode for the fact that the network is terrible.

You absolutely can parse at ingress, but then there are issues with that. If the data you got is 3/4 good, but one field is corrupted, do you reject everything? Sometimes, but often Probably not, network calls are too expensive, so you encode that into the type with a Maybe. But of course any field could be corrupt so you have to encode lots of fields as Maybes. Suddenly you have reinvented dynamic typing but it’s LARPing as a static type system.
by nuuuwan | 2026-01-14 06:16:12+00:00
World Models are the future of AI: Why thinking machines need an inner map, not just sharper eyes.

---

Most of today's AI systems are good at recognising patterns. Show them enough pictures of cats and they will spot a cat anywhere. But they do not understand cats, or the world cats live in.

A world model is different.

CONTINUE ON MEDIUM: https://medium.com/on-technology/world-models-are-the-future...

CONTINUE ON SUBSTACK: https://open.substack.com/pub/nuuuwan/p/world-models-are-the...