skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Very interesting read. The format of the article is weird at first, but we get used to it.

These days we rely more and more on datasets bigger and bigger, and the sheer size / apparent quality of datasets curated by machine makes them an attractive option to smaller, human-curated datasets.

This article is eye-opening about the shortcomings of such approaches.
I've only ever known cramming it inside and then crawling inside with it to try and get the duvet into place.

I grew up in a family that had (home made!) blankets and quilts, duvets were not a thing until I moved out on my own.
Question for people who are more qualified: How applicable is this to other languages? Could this approach significantly speed up garbage collection in Go for example?

Or do we run into design issues with existing languages?
I know Mario (and Pokemon) displays are Japanese, but they are still interesting given China's relationship with Japan (although the rest of the gerontocracy Asia doesn't have a particularly favorable view of Japan either).
Trees grow back. Decks are nice. Wood sourced and used in the same state is good practice.
> globalist neoliberal political agenda

Bukele pitches crypto at CPAC, so it’s frankly hilarious you think he resides outside this order.
Learning Functional Programming can provide immediate benefits. However, FP practitioners tend to be bad at teaching/explaining (to non-mathematicians) and even worse at marketing[0]. I've attached a list of good resources on FP at the end of this comment. I also wrote an article on the benefits of functional programming: https://blog.leftium.com/2023/04/more-performant-testable-co...

Functional programming is more of a spectrum; not an "all or nothing" concept. You can write FP-style programs in non-FP languages. (And you can use non-FP style in FP languages.) Understanding FP will help you write better non-FP code.

Simple example: I have switched from declaring an empty array [], then filling it via a loop to declaring the same array with values from a functional expression (like map). This has two benefits:

1. The array can be declared const, and its contents possibly even declared read-only.

2. TypeScript can automatically infer the type/shape of the array contents.

The other example usually cited is that FP will help you understand recursion better, even in non-FP languages.

FP is a paradigm that can be applied at many levels. You can apply it:

- at the code level: removing logical branching in code (https://youtu.be/GyYME8btMHE?t=1473)

- at the high-level design level: event sourcing (https://youtu.be/8JKjvY4etTY)

Although FP languages make it more convenient to write functional-style code, notice the examples above don't need "functional" programming languages. In fact, many "non-functional" languages have borrowed the best parts of functional languages (first-class (lambda) functions, map, reduce, etc)[1].

One of the most valuable, but misunderstood concepts of FP is immutability (functional purity). Grokking Simplicity[2] states it most elegantly: it's not about avoiding mutation because "mutation is bad." In fact, mutation is usually the desired result, but care must be taken because mutation depends on when and how many times it's called.

So good functional programming isn't about avoiding impure functions; instead it's about giving extra care to them. After all, the purpose of all software is to cause some type of mutation/effect (flip pixels on a screen, save bits to storage, send email, etc). Impure functions like these depend on the time they are called, so they are the most difficult to get right.

---

Here's a short list of my top introductions/explanations of FP:

- Grokking Simplicity: https://www.manning.com/books/grokking-simplicity

- Functional Core, Imperative Shell: https://hw.leftium.com/#/item/18043058

- ScottWlaschin: https://hw.leftium.com/#/item/21879368

- Greg Young on Event Sourcing: https://youtu.be/8JKjvY4etTY

- https://project-awesome.org/stoeffel/awesome-fp-js

[0]: https://youtu.be/nuML9SmdbJ4

[1]: https://hw.leftium.com/#/item/21280429

[2]: https://www.manning.com/books/grokking-simplicity
Democracy has largely worked and ushered in widespread economic and social development in the West.

The issue is that many cultures are quite incompatible with democracy, unlike the West.

Many countries are still stuck in a culture of tribalism and corruption and keep voting horrible leaders (the vast majority of Africa and a few in Asia and Eastern Europe).

But I agree with you that people should have a say in who leads them. If they keep voting horrid leaders, that’s a problem they brought on themselves.
I think this reduction in crime is only temporary. You still have a poor country full of desperate people, and it's only a matter of time before the criminal enterprise vacuum gets filled by the next generation. The slate did get wiped clean, but the root cause is still there.
I view transformers as like the language center of the brain. When we write or speak, especially when it's critical to get things right, we have this ability to think "that doesn't make sense" and start over. I view this recursion as more of a strength than weakness. You can get an LLM to generate an answer and when asked about the validity of the answer it would acknowledge that it got it wrong. This begs the question that if it had perfect recall and understanding why did it give the wrong answer in the first place?

I don't know how the reasoning part comes to us but if we could implant that capability to a transformer model then it would end up pretty good.
A EE in my dorm in the 70's designed and built his own CPU out of 74xx chips when he was in high school. Even the other students were in awe of that.
I live in the USA and I see duvets almost everywhere. But I presume GP uses blankets.
Sex, war and cannibalism: The impossible hunt for the Neanderthal mind
Historical humanity was nothing like what you have now, a product of generations of modern democracy which has yielded the most free, most wealthy, most prosperous places and times in the history of humanity.

For ~95% of human (homo sapien) history, we were hunter-gatherers. Everything else is a recent phenomenon. Even starting with settled, post-hunter-gatherers, democracy wasn't common at all until the last couple centries. We left that past behind for a reason, and live far, far better now.

> There might be a middle point between everybody voting and one person voting that would be more optimal.

Who gets to decide that? No doubt you would be willing to let others rule over you, taking away your freedom and power? Whoever doesn't have a seat at the table is certain to be victimized by those in power.
Honest question, what do you mean be “if you’re in the area?” Like near San Salvador or in Latam? Or what area
I would make the same bet you're making. But, is nationalization or selloff on the bingo cards? Total mental meltdown of Musk?
> The attacker in this case has full control to replace any function within ssh with their own version

Not true. They have this ability only for binaries that are linked to liblzma. If sshd were to be decomposed into multiple processes, not all of them would (hopefully) depend on all the libraries that the original sshd depended on.
Thanks, I had to dig. I read about it in [1]. Mises was concerned about the formalization of probability theory. It seems the idea appears at least as early as in his 1919 paper [2].

[1] An Introduction to Kolmogorov Complexity and Its Applications, M. Li & P. Vitnányi

[2] Grundlagen der Wahrscheinlichkeitsrechnung, R. von Mises
>as distinct from mass marketed corporate manufactured culture

From a hegemonic view, I don't. The "mass marketed corporate manufactured culture" ensures that the West retains an avenue for soft power in the country. As long as they watch american tv, play american games, and read american stories, the country is subtly primed to be more palatable to American view points.

It might not matter now, as Bukele has demonized Western influence; but as shown in Asia, Pokemon and Mario were massively effective in cleaning up Japan's image in the eyes of Korean youth. Both China and Korea were brutally colonized by Japan, but cultural influence has inverted the favorability of China and Japan in Korea. I don't see how repeating that mistake favors China interests.

[1] In fact, according to a survey published by news magazine SisaIN, China’s favorability among South Koreans reached a high-water mark in 2016 at a score of 60 out of 100—second only to the United States (73) and higher than Japan (43) and North Korea (28).6 However, by 2021, China’s score had fallen by half to 26.4

[2] I don't deny COVID could be a factor here.

https://www.americanprogress.org/article/rising-anti-china-s....
It’s not that we can’t understand it, it’s just that work to understand it is ongoing.
Again, this is all irrelevant to a simplified description of the problem.
Excel is the world's most popular programming language, by far.
> key connections and experience within aerospace and auto industry (the two often overlap)

Interesting, can you expand more on how the two overlap? This is the first time I hear about this and it might be that the overlap is happening at a different level than I operate, but I personally have not seen this.
Whoa, really? I use it all the time and love it. Why do you dislike it so much?
> If the prior is 1

That would surprise me greatly
Lesson it’s never too late to start
I'm Indian, I would seriously question anyone who considers India to be an 'economically successful' democracy. 400 million Indians still make less than many sub-saharan African nations.

India is admittedly stable. But it was very much an economic failure. Things only started turning around in the mid-90s.
Opinion: We're desperate for half-truths about human origins
>while so much time goes into code reviews to verify internal changes at most companies

Maybe at FAANGs, but I work at a massive company and code review is non-existent.
Despite the lengthy article I have so many questions and suspicions. For example:
If the elections are rigged how did he “win”
If he is responsible for the crime reduction, how did he do it in such a short time, how were the police trained so fast
If the original crime reduction was due to gangs hiding the bodies is it really that unreasonable to think that what actually is happening is that the government is more effective at hiding the bodies?
Yeah, the stainless steel panels of the Cybertruck are not stainFREE. Adding a clear coat to the base model would prevent a lot of disappointment.
It will resolve some but it will probably add additional errors like confuse bricks from previous photo with each other. You need to separate pieces and take multiple shots like in that Lego-sorter video. You can probably get away with filming the bricks from different angles, preprocessing video and using that to feed into nn.
Does this happen in the US? I have heard tons of stories of people in tens or hundred of thousands of dollars in debt (other than usual mortgage and car), but loosing their passport is never part of the story.
It’s true that there’s a precise set of circumstances that would be different for the RCE (the lack of a PAM dance prior, same process group & session, no allocation of a pseudo-terminal, etc.). My point was merely that I don’t think they are commonly encoded in rule sets or detection systems.

It’s certainly possible, but my guess is sshd is likely to have a lot of open policy. I’m really curious if someone knows different and there are hard detection for those things. (Either way, I bet there will be in the future!)
Refurb weekend: Data General/One (and the worst LCD in the world)
Harry Potter is British and Mario is Japanese...
Is it used in the same state? How much gets exported overseas?

Continuous clear cutting is bound to dry out the soil eventually.
PowerShell. Is there anything that putty do better?
Show HN: Write JSON processor queries (jq) in natural language
Hey HN! Jaiqu is an AI agent for creating repeatable JSON transforms using jq query language syntax.

Jaiqu translates complex JSON structures into repeatable jq queries. jq is a command line utility built for fast, reliable JSON queries. Jaiqu takes advantage of the LLMs for both constructing jq queries as well as using feedback to fix errors/invalid results if those queries are incorrect.

Writing code to parse JSON is super annoying. It usually involves manually reading huge JSON balls, parsing the keys in a language of your choice, and pulling the data manually. Also, you're likely to run into key mismatches (i.e. source data might have "customer_id" as a key but my table is "user_id"), so you would have to write the translation dictionaries by hand.

This struck me as a task that was analogous to the many AI "natural language to SQL" editors out there. However, there were a lot of consistency issues where the LLMs would not produce functioning code. So I wrote an AI agent that does it for me.

It only takes two args:
1. A blob of messy JSON containing data you want
2. A JSON schema formatted in the way you want

Jaiqu generates a repeatable jq query that collects the data in the exact JSON schema you specify. This way, you can run this query as many times you want or save it as a config without having to prompt LLMs each and every time.

This tool beats the standard "prompt ChatGPT for a jq query" because by and large, LLMs don't perform too well when writing DSLs like jq. Jaiqu essentially works by:
1. Fuzzy matching each key against your schema to make sure it's available to query
2. Writing individual jq queries to fetch and transform those keys
3. Compiling each individual query into a single complex jq query.
4. Feeding back any errors or data mismatches to a "self-healing" loop that adjusts the queries accordingly until it works.

Would love to hear thoughts or feedback. This has saved our team a ton of time internally, so hopefully it can help others as well.
> many cultures are quite incompatible with democracy, unlike the West

That's an old excuse of dictators, one of a series of obviously self-serving justifications for their taking power and oppressing others.

Consider the cultures worldwide where democracy has thrived: The 'West' (Western Europe/US/Canada), Eastern Europe, South Asia, East Asia (S Korea, Japan, Taiwan - the wealthiest part of China by far, per capita, despite China's constant attacks on them), Costa Rica, South America (Brazil, Chile, others), places in W. Africa (Benin, Senegal), E Africa (Kenya), etc etc.

In fact, democracy's record is entirely the opposite. It's by far the greatest development in human history; and somehow, instead of pulling their weight, doing their part as our ancestors did, who sacrificed so much, so many are dallying with power-hungry dictators.
Yes, I agree. But I talked about an idea development and said variation, not necessarily addressing the same thing. The headline would be algorithmically random sequence.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algorithmically_random_sequenc...
That's quite funny - yes, not only is this a horrible wilful backdoor, it is also a GPL violation since the backdoor is a derived work without included source / distributed not in "the preferred form for modification".
I think there's a gap between the "bedroom is center of home" people and the "bedroom is for sleeping" people. For the former, they value things like changing the appearance of the bed for seasonal or taste-based reasons. For people like me in the latter category, the things on the bed are like the floor mats in my car: as long as they're clean I don't give a damn what they look like. They're purely functional objects that I don't even see for more than a few seconds a day.
Show HN: Ragdoll Studio (fka Arthas.AI) is the FOSS alternative to character.ai
This is extremely cool and exactly what I've been looking for. Looking forward to trying it out.
I have never voted, and can’t vote in the country I live in. And I’m perfectly happy with it. You could say I voted with my feet and my wallet. There are plenty of ways to wield power without voting.

I know it’s a touchy point for people, the justifications being if you’re taxed then you must be able to vote. I know plenty of people who would give up their vote to live tax free. Then there is also the draft, if you can be drafted you must be able to vote. I would rather abolish the draft.

We live in an era with many firsts so historical comparisons are not generally particularly useful. And I think it’s too early to tell if all modern decisions are good ones.

The point I’m making is people are thinking the two options are dictatorship or universal suffrage democracy and I’m saying not only does a middle ground exist but that middle ground used to be the default.
And no insurer would be willing to insure it.
The commit timestamps are not a reliable indicator of this actor's work day. It's trivial to work on a different schedule than local 9-5, or simply falsify the time stamps [1].

[1] https://github.com/jbranchaud/blog/blob/master/_posts/2013-0...
How can I tell C++ that I want to discard a nodiscard value?
Who cares about scans? Who cares if a scan comes in 4 or 6?
A worthy competitor to vlc is potplayer
For those interested in using search-augmented "reasoning", I implemented something similar in Emerging Trajectories[1], an open source package that forecasts geopolitical and economic events. We extract facts[2] from various websites (Google searches, news articles, RSS feeds) and have the LLM generate a hypothesis on a metric.

We're tracking the info forecasts to see how well this does for future events. For example, we're pitting the LLMs against each other to predict March 2024 CPI[3].

[1] https://emergingtrajectories.com/

[2] Sample code: https://github.com/wgryc/emerging-trajectories/blob/main/eme...

[3] https://emergingtrajectories.com/a/statement/28
Tell HN: XZ: Windows Potentially Affected
Microsoft expanded Explorer's list of supported archive formats in Windows 11 KB5031455 (Oct 31, 2023). See discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38084314 (the question of security has been raised)

It uses libarchive, which, I believe, depends on XZ.

To clarify, it is not affected by the specific vulnerability, but since the XZ seems to have been maintained by a bad actor for 2 years, there might be other ones.

The update in question: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/topic/october-31-2023-kb5031455-os-builds-22621-2506-and-22631-2506-preview-6513c5ec-c5a2-4aaf-97f5-44c13d29e0d4
This is a very common thing in music and I would say more the Norm than one might think.

Historically often librettists where responsible for texts.
For example in opera there the librettist was as important as the composer and his texts might have been used in multiple operas.

Among the most famous examples would be the European hymn Freude schöner Götterfunken. The text is by Schiller and the music by Beethoven.
My friend from Central America got upset when nearly everyone at a London party took turns to do coke in the bathroom. He told me a pretty harrowing story of how his family had had their lives ruined by drug gangs.

A colleague of mine was on a flight when balloon of drugs burst inside a drug mule. They died.

Our appetites fuel a cycle of violence and depravity.
Ask HN: Research Ideas concerning HPC bioinformatics workflows
I've recently been given the opportunity to help a professor of mine port some bioinformatics workflows to an HPC cluster. I was wondering if anyone could recommend good literature on this topic and perhaps suggest some worthwhile paths of inquiry that could result in worthwhile research. Thanks.
> Supply managed diary and poultry producers are effectively given a blank cheque from the government. There is no end to how much they can spend.

Can you elaborate on this? It seems the dairy farmers I grew up with in Southwestern Ontario were living just above poverty.
Now the GitHub repo has been disabled by GitHub due to violation of GitHub's terms.
https://github.com/tukaani-project/xz
Win + Shift + S
These tangents are fairly rare on HN and it's a good idea to keep it that way due to their exceptional boringness:

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
I really enjoyed that show. I was 14 though. My tastes weren't particularly refined. Tim Curry, Terry O'Quinn, Clancy Brown - they didn't do so bad on some casting choices.
Except the gov there wasn't able to do that until recently. Haiti has zero chance of it, Mexico let it infiltrate to include the former president, and the US has been unable to largely stomp out its gangs.

I understand you were trying to make a cynical point about govs, but I don't think it's even true.
At least they have plates. I see cars driving plate-free in southern CA on a normal basis.
Nearly all spreadsheet replacement software is worse though: it’s seeming clarity comes from being overly rigid or overly difficult to configure.

I don’t get the hate for spreadsheets. It has APIs, great primitives, good automation capabilities, im-/export, and is human-readable and writeable.

This particular spreadsheet from the article might have gone bad, but for centrally tracking an 20,000 item list, a spreadsheet doesn’t seem to be completely out of place.

To improve on it for a presumably very specialised use case with recurring changes and adaptive processes that might give you an edge over competitors, they probably need their own small development team. And this can of course go bad quickly too.
xz has its own git mirror where you can see all the commits
> show don’t tell [...] she informed one writer that their “story is certainly worth telling,” but they “describe people and events from a distance instead of dramatizing them, developing scenes in which the reader discovers what kind of people they are instead of being told.”

The second part of the quote (from "developing...") seems to be saying tell don't show. Is the quote mangled or I am misparsing?
There are endless success stories: Brazil, India, much of China's economic boom came from liberalizing and moving toward democracy (a process reversed by Xi), Eastern Europe, Japan, much of Taiwan's and S Korea's boom's. Singapore was mostly (but not sufficiently) democratic.

In fact, there is no other form of government that is remotely close. All the wealthiest, most free countries in the world are democracies.

Also, we have become so steeped in nationalism that we miss the true goal and point of it all: The freedom and prosperity of individuals. Raising aggregate wealth is not the goal - as we have seen recently, that means nothing to the people it doesn't benefit. Dictators and their syncophants say, 'only we can just ignore human rights, property rights, etc. and do X'. That doesn't help their victims. Democracy ensures that everyone has a seat at the table (imperfectly, and we can do it better - and we will do it faster if you'll help).
I honestly at this point, don't feel the need to have anything auto play, if I want video, or audio, I'm well on able to click a button myself.

Auto play = auto advertisement in most cases I encounter it. I can't not see why at this day in age we are prioritizing anyone but the user making the choice of when to play something.
Thank you for the detailed write up. This made me think, why do we actually let sshd run as root?
Would it be possible to only run a very unsophisticated ssh server as root that depending on the user specified in the incoming connection just coordinates that connection to the actual user and let the server run there? This could be so simplistic that a backdoor would more easily be detected.
India's economic boom came under the democractic governments post-1990. Modi is, arguably, riding that wave.
>A very tight SELinux policy could catch sshd executing something that ain’t a shell but hardening to that degree would be extremely rare I assume.

Huh, ssh executes things that aren't shells all the time during normal operation. No? i.e. 'ssh myserver.lan cat /etc/fstab'