MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by hvenev | 2026-03-01 22:02:35+00:00
I personally call this process of setting up a new device, whether for me or for someone else, "shit shoveling". It is something of a ritual.

In the former case the thing that needs to be removed is the entirety of the OS (and if that proves to be impossible, the device is returned or discarded), and in the latter it's a scan of all apps and removal of all unnecessary apps, my grandma does not need Samsung Galaxy Games, thank you very much.
by granfalloon | 2026-03-01 22:02:44+00:00
What's being "forced"? And what boundaries aren't being respected? If someone attempts to strike up a conversation and you're not interested, you can signal that. Or just be direct and say you don't feel like talking. Sure, that can be uncomfortable, but you can't expect humanity as a whole to repress its social nature just to spare you occasional, fleeting moments of mild discomfort. (And despite the wide spectrum of social inclinations -- I'm definitely on the introverted end -- I think it's accurate to say that humans, as a species, crave social interaction.)

In your ideal world, how would someone even signal they are a "willing participant" without talking to someone?
by raw_anon_1111 | 2026-03-01 22:03:01+00:00
I don’t have to do anything except keep my head down, do my job and enjoy my well earned autonomy. I’m definitely not going to try to convince my skip, skip, skip manager to change their hiring policies. It’s not like my line level manager has any power over anything

Even when I was at a startup before 2020 and I did have the ear of the CTO and the founders I knew my ultimate mission was to do what was needed to get acquired and before that I knew exactly what my mission was when k was hired to lead the tech initiatives as we were acquiring companies “find efficiencies” and go public.

Or do you think I could have convince anyone of anything as an L5 at AWS in the middle between architect at a startup and my current company?
by userbinator | 2026-03-01 22:05:57+00:00
It still works if the file doesn't fit in RAM

No it doesn't. If you have a file that's 2^36 bytes and your address space is only 2^32, it won't work.

On a related digression, I've seen so many cases of programs that could've handled infinitely long input in constant space instead implemented as some form of "read the whole input into memory", which unnecessarily puts a limit on the input length.
by ajross | 2026-03-01 22:07:17+00:00
I think this is sort of missing the point, though. Yes, mmap() is in POSIX[1] in the sense of "where is it specified".

But mmap() was implemented in C because C is the natural language for exposing Unix system calls and mmap() is a syscall provided by the OS. And this is true up and down the stack. Best language for integrating with low level kernel networking (sockopts, routing, etc...)? C. Best language for async I/O primitives? C. Best language for SIMD integration? C. And it goes on and on.

Obviously you can do this stuff (including mmap()) in all sorts of runtimes. But it always appears first in C and gets ported elsewhere. Because no matter how much you think your language is better, if you have to go into the kernel to plumb out hooks for your new feature, you're going to integrated and test it using a C rig before you get the other ports.

[1] Given that the pedantry bottle was opened already, it's worth pointing out that you'd have gotten more points by noting that it appeared in 4.2BSD.
by scuff3d | 2026-03-01 22:07:34+00:00
That's super interesting to hear. I see people say all the time "oh I would never use it in a big project because it's changing so fast", but then see awesome projects like Ghostty and Tiger Beatle written in it, so clearly they're doing something right.

I'm surprised to hear LLMs have been helpful. What little I tried to use them for with Zig, all the information was way too out of date. But I was mainly just doing research, not running an agent at the time, so that's probably why.
by chongli | 2026-03-01 22:08:14+00:00
It’s more complicated to think about, but it’s still the same result. Think about the structure of a dictionary: all of the words are defined in terms of other words in the dictionary, but if you’ve never experienced reality as an embodied person then none of those words mean anything to you. They’re as meaningless as some randomly generated graph with a million vertices and a randomly chosen set of edges according to some edge distribution that matches what we might see in an English dictionary.

Bringing pictures into the mix still doesn’t add anything, because the pictures aren’t any more connected to real world experiences. Flooding a bunch of images into the mind of someone who was blind from birth (even if you connect the images to words) isn’t going to make any sense to them, so we shouldn’t expect the LLM to do any better.

Think about the experience of a growing baby, toddler, and child. This person is not having a bunch of training data blasted at them. They’re gradually learning about the world in an interactive, multi-sensory and multi-manipulative manner. The true understanding of words and concepts comes from integrating all of their senses with their own manipulations as well as feedback from their parents.

Children also are not blank slates, as is popularly claimed, but come equipped with built-in brain structures for vision, including facial recognition, voice recognition (the ability to recognize mom’s voice within a day or two of birth), universal grammar, and a program for learning motor coordination through sensory feedback.
by alanfranz | 2026-03-01 22:09:05+00:00
Well...

I'm not sure what the author really wants to say. mmap is available in many languages (e.g. Python) on Linux (and many other *nix I suppose). C provides you with raw memory access, so using mmap is sort-of-convenient for this use case.

But if you use Python then, yes, you'll need a bytearray, because Python doesn't give you raw access to such memory - and I'm not sure you'd want to mmap a PyObject anyway?

Then, writing and reading this kind of raw memory can be kind of dangerous and non-portable - I'm not really sure that the pickle analogy even makes sense. I very much suppose (I've never tried) that if you mmap-read malicious data in C, a vulnerability would be _quite_ easy to exploit.
by godelski | 2026-03-01 22:10:10+00:00
> Yes this is just survivorship bias.

If you're looking for insiders it's generally helpful to start with the "survivors". Not because insiders can't lose but because winning insiders are those effectively exploiting their unfair knowledge. You need filters, so concentrate on the worst offenders first.

Of course, not all winners are insiders. You still need to filter more, but it's definitely the first filter. Big winners are the second, for the same reason: scale of exploitation.
by mattlondon | 2026-03-01 22:10:30+00:00
Because it is this "talk to anyone" thing, like if they say no you just need to keep trying because really deep down they just don't know how nice you're being by giving them a chance to talk to you.

It's supreme arrogance. Read the body language and just leave people alone.

If someone is up for talking they'll show the obvious signs - facing you, eye contact, smiling, that sort of waiting-for-something look/expression. I've had e-fucking-nough of people thinking they can "fix" me when I am trying to get some time to myself waiting for a train or whatever after a stressful day at work or being woken up endlessly by kids/neighbours/whatever.

Otherwise it should be "talk to anyone who is obviously open to and willing to have a conversation with you", at which point it's a total tautology anyway and you don't need a guide, it's just natural chat that you don't need to force on someone to make it happen.
by nostrademons | 2026-03-01 22:11:16+00:00
Also sort of. Some form of social organization seems to be necessary for humans to function. But humans are also pretty good (well - relatively speaking, it usually seems to require a war or revolution) at changing that form of social organization as technology, population, and environmental conditions change.

I think this is a very likely outcome. We aren't going to get continued population growth next generation; a significant number of the people needed for it will never be born. This is going to have ripple effects across wide swaths of political and economic organization. But you'll have pockets of population that basically barricade themselves off from the wider economic world and insulate themselves from its collapse, and then the people within them, along with whatever form of social organization they happen to adopt.
by pgaddict | 2026-03-01 22:11:48+00:00
Good idea. It's an interesting historical question - when we picked 4.0 as the default ~25 years ago, how close was is to the calculated value? I was asking that myself. Unfortunately I don't have a machine with traditional HDD in my homelab anymore, but I'll see if I can run the test somewhere.

I wouldn't be all that surprised if this was (partially) due to Postgres being less optimized back then, which might have hidden some of the random vs. sequential differences. But that's just a wild guess.
by 999900000999 | 2026-03-01 22:12:26+00:00
Confusing.

You own 3 houses, including an airbnb and your conclusion is how unfair society is ?

Your doing better than most people. The weird moral grandstanding against Peanut Butter had to be the strangest part.

Anything less than organic whole foods produce is simply barbaric.

This isn't to say the system is good, our criminal justice system is a nightmare of indefinite detentions and human rights abuses.

But I'm not seeing much struggle in this post. OP kept that making weird choices. At a point you need to sort yourself out.
by nickelpro | 2026-03-01 22:12:38+00:00
If we're going to be pedantic, mmap is a syscall. It happens that the C version is standardized by POSIX.

The underlying syscall doesn't use the C ABI, you need to wrap it to use it from C in the same way you need to wrap it to use it from any language, which is exactly what glibc and friends do.

Moral of the story is mmap belongs to the platform, not the language.
by crote | 2026-03-01 22:13:40+00:00
There's also just an upper limit to the kind of risk you can reasonably defend against.

An out-of-control wildfire levels the entire city? The Big One hits the Bay Area? The entire city is flooded for a few months because the levees break during a Cat5 hurricane? Yeah, your DC will be completely ruined. And even if it isn't, you're probably not getting any outside power, generator fuel, or repair technicians for a while.

No matter how much money you pump into hardening your own super-bunker DC, there will always be disasters you aren't prepared for. At a certain point it just makes more financial sense to abandon the idea of invulnerability and build a redundant site a few states over. Accept that you will occasionally lose one, and only protect against incidents where mitigation is cheaper than occasionally rebuilding.
by plasticeagle | 2026-03-01 22:13:58+00:00
I agree with this article completely.

I've had three long and very memorable conversations on internaltional plane flights in the past, with three extremely interesting and intelligent people. I don't tend to take those flights anymore, they were for work and the novelty of international travel for work wore off. Now I get out of it whenever I can.

But those three conversations have stayed with me.
by samrus | 2026-03-01 22:14:37+00:00
Its not about treating them well. The environment and culture isnt the problem. Its that tech companies have decided that they dont like giving appropriate raises to current employees. They are somehow fine with paying the same or more money to bring in an equally qualified external hire. But not with retaining people. Idk why, maybe some stupid MBA rule, mayne theres some good reason behind it
by jmkd | 2026-03-01 22:16:18+00:00
It says its tailored for beginners, but I don't know what kind of beginner can parse multiple paragraphs like this:

"How wrong was the prediction? We need a single number that captures "the model thought the correct answer was unlikely." If the model assigns probability 0.9 to the correct next token, the loss is low (0.1). If it assigns probability 0.01, the loss is high (4.6). The formula is
−
log
⁡
(
�
)
−log(p) where
�
p is the probability the model assigned to the correct token. This is called cross-entropy loss."
by jyaohao | 2026-03-01 22:16:56+00:00
I’ve been testing with an ENV variable for a cli tool for LLMs that I’m making. Basically, I have a script that sets an ENV variable to launch the TUI that I want and that ENV variable changes the behavior for LLMs if they run it (changes the -h output, changes the default output format to json to make it easier to grep)
by solosevn | 2026-03-01 22:17:12+00:00
TSArena is an independent platform for blind pairwise evaluation of AI safety behavior. Users are shown two anonymous model responses to the same safety-relevant prompt — jailbreaks, harm refusal, manipulation, medical misinfo, and more — then vote on which model handled it better. No cherry-picking, no corporate benchmarks. 500 battles live across 12 safety categories with models from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta, Mistral, and others. Built because safety evals shouldn't be graded by the companies building the models.
by moregrist | 2026-03-01 22:17:39+00:00
> You don't talk about all the assembly high level languages make, or at least it's no longer how people view things.

Speak for yourself. I routinely look at assembly when worrying about performance, and occasionally drop into assembly for certain things. Compilers are a tool, not a magic wand, and tools have limits.

Much like LLMs. My experience with Claude Code is that it gets significantly worse the further you push it from the mean of its training set. Giving it guidance or writing critical “key frame” sections by hand keep it on track.

People who think this is the end of looking at or writing code clearly work on very different problems than I do.
by adrianwaj | 2026-03-01 22:17:41+00:00
It's a good stick, and the carrot could be having it all removed for a micropayment. Really, there should be a way to do that across a range of sites all at once.

Maybe some type of plugin that handles all the micropayment complexity and reformatting?

"Pay Once Read Anywhere" PORA vs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Write_once,_run_anywhere (1995)
by godelski | 2026-03-01 22:18:39+00:00
I remember people claiming that it would capture the wisdom of the crowds[0]. Seemed silly as wisdom of the crowds depends on independent decisions. As soon as you reveal other people's guesses you bias the results.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wisdom_of_the_crowd

Edit:

Actually, turns out "people claiming" includes Polymarket lol

# What is Polymarket
...
Our markets reflect accurate, unbiased, and real-time probabilities for the events that matter most to you. Markets seek truth.

# How accurate are Polymarket odds?

Research shows prediction markets are often more accurate than experts, polls, and pundits. .... Their economic incentives ensure market prices adjust to reflect true odds as more knowledgeable participants join.

This makes prediction markets the best source of real-time event probabilities. People use Polymarket for the most accurate odds, gaining the ability to make informed decisions about the future.

What a load of BS. "Research shows"? Bull!

https://help.polymarket.com/en/articles/13364060-what-is-pol...
by deanmoriarty | 2026-03-01 22:19:39+00:00
I genuinely get bothered when someone talks to me. I am typically rushing through my day to do stuff, whether it is hiking, grocery shopping, working out, or going to the restroom at work, and getting interrupted feels to me like getting an unwanted push notification on your phone.

When someone occasionally engages, I extremely quickly dismiss them in the most polite, but firm, way possible. I also intentionally keep a demeanor that generally signals I’m not open to random conversations (I avoid eye contact etc.), but that often doesn’t work. At the gym it is particularly problematic, I’m focusing on gathering strength for my next set and sometimes people bother you even if I am wearing headphones.

I truly do not have a problem with who I am, I’m comfortable in my shoes.

As such, never in a million years I would approach a stranger to strike up a conversation, it would seem an incredibly rude thing to do towards them, on top of clearly not having any desire to engage from my side.

I’ll talk for hours straight to my wife, close family and the very few friends I have though!
by davidw | 2026-03-01 22:19:46+00:00
It started off nicely but before long you get

"The MLP (multilayer perceptron) is a two-layer feed-forward network: project up to 64 dimensions, apply ReLU (zero out negatives), project back to 16"

Which starts to feel pretty owly indeed.

I think the whole thing could be expanded to cover some more of it in greater depth.
by dylan604 | 2026-03-01 22:20:05+00:00
Was the ", again" left off, or is this going to be the first time you've seen the movie when you do watch it? I know new people are born every day, but Casino is one of those movies that I'd have expected any one old enough to be reading this board to have seen already. This is no judgment on anyone for not seeing it. Just a comment on my skewed view of the world I guess
by commandersaki | 2026-03-01 22:20:16+00:00
I stayed with Terminal.app for quite awhile. Until very recently (not when Ghostty was released) it didn't have 24-bit colour support. It also didn't have shell integrations such as triple click to select all output of the last command. The configuration system is arse and is kind of a lock-in as it is in all plist form, so I had a hard time extracting the colours I used for my terminal and using them elsewhere.

Now that they've updated it recently, it is a better terminal, but otherwise Ghostty has a few bells and whistles that make the experience nicer.
by kgeist | 2026-03-01 22:20:48+00:00
Yeah, I turned it off completely after it once started generating random garbage in long conversations with memory enabled. Like, it would give completely unrelated replies: I'd ask about Go, and it would tell me about the weather in Paris (or something else we discussed once months ago). Maybe it was just a temporary bug, but it was an eye-opener that context poisoning exists.
by B-Con | 2026-03-01 22:20:55+00:00
> I've had to spend week and a half battling Gmail daily email account limits sending batches of 500 emails just to notify people in her address book, receiving hundreds of responses. Her memorial was attended by hundreds of people.

I love this story, because I had the same experience. When my dad passed, I had the same 500 email limitation, and had to send out multiple waves of emails through Gmail. He was loved by so many people!
by latexr | 2026-03-01 22:20:58+00:00
> Only if you can't refute me.

You have been refuted. Repeatedly. But as you yourself have said, you double down on disagreements. So I understand why you have been called a troll.

> it's only the hardcore ecosystem enthusiasts that debate it.

That’s not true at all. Case in point, I don’t care for phones. What I did care for was your exaggerated rhetoric. As someone who is critical of Tim Cook and modern-day Apple (especially around the state of their software), I’d rather criticisms remain grounded in things the people at Apple can understand and fix, not made up ramblings that make them dismiss critics as lunatics to ignore.

Your tone changed drastically from the original post. You went from derogatory terms and claiming “nobody wants” iOS devices to them having a “passionate” user base and recognising they can be used for work.
by jandrese | 2026-03-01 22:21:27+00:00
Why not just define the law in terms of maximum speed and be fine with it? Why nitpick over control modes?

I can guarantee that if I asked 10 random cops what the restrictions are of a Class 2 e-bike not more than 1 could answer, but if I asked them to stop people who were going over 30mph on the bike trail they could figure it out.
by throw7384488 | 2026-03-01 22:21:33+00:00
> No chit-chat in public toilets, thanks.

So yes, then?

Border line means there are many variables, individial feelings and so on. In UK this interaction may be criminal with recent updates. Law is very vague and wide open to interpretation.

Consider this:

* it is illegal to block someones path, law is very specific about that

* is sniffing or even licking someones cooch normal? I can ensure you, many people have VERY strong feelings about that! For some others it is normal behavior!

* is commenting on apperance, clothing etc.. acceptable? Law is very vague
by cbdevidal | 2026-03-01 22:21:48+00:00
I think of e-bikes as a kind of "electric horse."

* Goes about as fast as a horse

* Goes about the same distance as a horse

* Sitting on a saddle like a horse

* Out in the weather like a horse

* But no feed or vet bills

* No need for lots of land or infrastructure

* Little ongoing maintenance

* Little skill needed to ride :-)
by exyi | 2026-03-01 22:22:03+00:00
Python does not need that, as it has built-in type annotation support. The annotation is any expression, so you can in theory express anything a custom type-only language would allow you (although you could make it less verbose and easier to read).

However, the it IMHO just works much worse than TS because:
* many libraries still lack decent annotations
* other libraries are impossible to type because of too much dynamic stuff
* Python semantics are multiple orders of magnitude more complex than JavaScript.
Even just the simplest question: Is `1` allowed in parameter typed `float`? What about numpy float64?
by dylan604 | 2026-03-01 22:22:48+00:00
> Yeah, trying to beat the market on actually predicting will get you pretty lame returns

That maybe true in a normal world, but we left normalcy in this world a couple of administrations ago. I absolutely would not put it past a member of this admin to be keeping an eye on things like this to suggest it would be better to start the attack on specific day just to pad the coffers. Any other admin, and I'd say that would be an insane line of thought, but it is this admin.
by armanidev | 2026-03-01 22:23:04+00:00
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by Robdel12 | 2026-03-01 22:23:51+00:00
YES, I have been thinking the same and wrote a bit about it: https://vizzly.dev/blog/cli-json-output-llm-friendly/

Thank you so much to the GH CLI for making me realize this, really. The only MCPs I use still are ones that don’t have CLIs. Hell, I even just wrote a CLI for Bear Notes, for LLMs. It’s just better.

Seems like the last MCP use case is model to model communication but I’m sure others have approach’s for that?
by kgwxd | 2026-03-01 22:24:24+00:00
It's great as long as they don't turn out to be a creep. And that's terrible advice for practicing talking to women. Talking to a person you're attracted to, or want anything from in general, isn't going to present the same way. No matter how much you practice. Attractive women have to deal with that, all day, every day. They'll shut it down quickly if they're not interested. You'll be the creep if you don't quietly take the hint, and walk away, when they're not.