skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Inequality in our world is definitely tearing society apart..."

This is a false narrative that is not supported by the data or by economic realities. Allow me to get on my soap box for a moment...

Inequality is a concept that is economically (not psychologically, unfortunately) inconsequential to a world that has seen a dramatic DECREASE in poverty in the past 50 years. We live in the best of times.

https://poverty.ucdavis.edu/faq/what-current-poverty-rate-un...

The ratio of one person's "wealth" to another's (inequality) has little or no bearing on anyone's wellbeing unless the person of less wealth chooses to make it so.

In other words, Elon Musk (for example) is not keeping anyone from being able to afford things just because he has great wealth. That wealth was created out of enterprise value--it was not stolen from anyone.

There is no great "source of wealth" that only certain people have or can control access to. Wealth is created, not hoarded. This forum is ostensibly about this very topic: commercialization of technologies and value creation.

In a free society and economy, individuals are capable of building ventures that have enterprise values that are "invented" out of thin air through economic contracts.

LeBron James, for example, is very wealthy because he has a contract to get paid for his talent. That contract was valued through economic negotiations. He grew up in poverty, and now he is wealthy.

This is where wealth comes from: the creation and monetization of something of value. It happens in the stock market every minute of every trading day.
Superhabitability around K-class Stars
You think there is a risk of them pivoting from this project to providing redis as a service?
> I live in the US and for us the concept of two Christian factions being in conflict is just so foreign.

Foreign? Christian factionalism is deeply ingrained in american culture.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Catholicism_in_the_United...

Mostly directed towards catholics and mormons.

> You drive around just about anywhere in the US and you will come across Protestant churches right next to Catholic ones.

Anywhere? No. Most catholic churches are in catholic areas and protestant churches in protestant areas. And I'm pretty sure most protestant churches official stance is that the catholic pope is the anti-christ. At least it was when I went to church not too long ago. Not sure what the catholic stance is nor do I really care.

Also, these "religious" conflicts are deep down ethnic or political conflicts. We don't have religious factionalism because our politics is pretty much controlled by one political party (republican-democratic party). Once that political stranglehold gets broken, we'll probably ethnic and religious factionalism.
One of the things I like about the Python community is the overall lack of drama (compared to other languages of similarly high profile).
From that little demo looks like a lot of fun to develop.
Elsewhere in the thread I argue why efficient market hypothesis arguments are unlikely to fully apply in this case.
There exist websites like https://builtwith.com so the answer to your question is yes.
An unknown measurement isn't a measurement value its a statement of (lack of) knowledge about a measurement, that doesn't tell you what the measurement is. Knowledge about a measurement is as different from the measurement as the measurement itself is from the thing measured.

Whether two unknown measurements are the same is unknown.
HOLY MOLY THIS IS IT! You're my hero! Forever!

The one I saw was dubbed in English but yes, this is it!

I'd forgotten his flying horse and that's the title! HA!

THE MAGIC PONY!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l0pY1P8Cw5o

I also didn't remember it as being an hour long. This is so exciting! Thank you!

> EDIT: so, I just plugged your description into ChatGPT and it gave the exact same answer, including an identical timestamp! Weird.

In my defense I pasted my post into chatgpt before posting it so that this wouldn't happen, and it suggested "The King's Daughter and the Three Cauldrons" and "The Three Brothers".
Completely agree, but obviously you relied on the state machine being sufficiently separate and having a formal specification for it.

State machines are quite common, in aerospace software, where the requirements even specify the states and transitions. If you can formally verify them, I believe, you absolutely should, as often there can be a lot of subtlety going on there, especially if you have a distributed system of state machines sending messages to one another.
i think you've got it backwards- the xenophobia of so called 'high trust' bigots are holding back the global society of our future, and their low homelessness is in reality an unfair burden on other more troubled countries
Ships must practice celestial navigation
I don't know why anyone would want to code with a language that isn't statically type safe at compile time in this day and age.
The claim is "there are no pure cultures".

Is this claim falsifiable? Yes. One could disprove it by demonstrating a culture that never had any mixing.

This claim is very different from the claim "nothing new about that", which is a classic straw man.

The author offers some evidence for all this mixing. One can argue about the quantitatively nature of it, but not the qualitative. Human cultures qualify for what can be described as intermixed. Again, all we need to do to disprove this claim is present one pure culture.

So, yeah, there's a lot that changed from newspapers to phones, but there is also an undeniable trend that connects them. That's why it's not a falacy per se, but similar claims could be falacious. Trying to come up with a falsifiable scenario for the _specific claim_ is what settles the matter.
It is more likely AI is the perfect excuse to layoff people or outsource to other countries. Particularly for those who overly hired during pandemic.

From what I see so far, AI has not been able to reduce work force so far, almost always they need skilled worker’s intervention on the results genAI produced.
This is just a HN personality test in disguise.
I see. Your sense of sight is in some sense 'true' in a way that a webcam feed is not?
Wow this was quite fun and impressive! Looks like it doesn't work on Firefox, I wonder why.
I think it's because our peripheral vision is able to observe movements faster.
All ideas that were popular for a while are basically guaranteed to be in some successful applications. That includes bad ideas.
The truth conditions for the sentence "The composer Johann Sebastian Bach died in 1750" are not directly accessible to me. Can I mean that, if I say it?

The truth conditions for "The god of the evangelical Christians exists" and "The god of the evangelical Christians does not exist" have, arguably, never been directly accessible to any ordinary human being. (Though some of their consequences could be accessible.) Can people mean such things, when they say them?

The truth conditions for "There are infinitely many prime numbers" are ... unclear, really, but maybe they're vacuous (there is no possible world in which there aren't infinitely many prime numbers) or they involve only abstracta (such as those numbers). How do you feel about the possibility of an AI saying that and meaning it, and why?

The first of these examples is the most directly relevant one. I have no direct access to the truth conditions of that sentence, but I think I can still mean it, have good reason to think it true, etc. The processes by which I got into that state involve ... learning things by reading about them, which is exactly what I think you're saying cannot in principle ever give genuine knowledge.

Anticipating a possible response: Of course many of the other things I know, some of which are relevant to the way I understand those words, I learned more directly. For instance, part of what "died" means is the cessation of various natural processes like breathing and having one's heart beat, and I have direct experience of breathing and having a beating heart. One could argue that real knowledge and understanding needs to be somehow traceable back to direct experience, and therefore LLM-type systems cannot have them. But that would be a different argument from the one you've made, and I think it's less compelling (though more likely to be right!) than the simpler "knowledge isn't real unless it's based on direct access to the relevant truth conditions".
Yeah but proptest / qcheck is not formal methods at all. It's randomised testing.
I always regretted that though I got a cassette copy of Pascal for the TRS-80, I was unaware of their being a patch to make it work in TRS-DOS.

Anyone, here's an example of one compiler for an 8-bit machine:

http://www.trs-80.org/pascal-80/
It's such a shame that a big successful Rails or Django equivalent never really materialized in the Node world. It's not like nobody tried. There were so many times it seemed like one was gaining traction, then it would be abandoned or zombified or commercialized, and it just never happened. I really can't understand why.
That's because TV news is an entertainment program similar to a reality TV show. It's designed to enrage you with terrible news even when the reality is quite different and things are not that dire. When I realized it I stopped watching it.

I've also stopped watching TV entirelly when they shutdown analog TV as that was a nice natural ending of the traditional TV. Continuing required a repeated action (buying MPEG2 tuners when it was obvious that newer codecs will be used in a few years) and it was very easy to just do nothing instead.
By and large, fine. I could nitpick and say that I fell while bicycle riding on New Years Day and sprained my wrist and it's not quite back to 100% yet. Or complain about having a mild case of the sniffles right this minute. But in the grand scheme of things, I won't remember either of those things a year from now. In terms of the important stuff: doing well.
So many circular arguments. The Pythagorean theorem tells you that √2 exists, but not that it’s irrational.

As for the story, it’s apocryphal, not ahistorical, but even so, it was too good of a story not to tell my students when I taught Math for Liberal Arts Majors (the version I’d heard was that the proof was presented while the Pythagoreans were on a boat and they were so offended by the idea that √2 is irrational, they threw the guy off the boat. I would guess that of all the things I said in lectures for that class, this is the one that my students would be most likely to remember).
Instead of crossing your eyes to focus in front of the image, you have to uncross them and focus on something behind the image. Put your finger about six inches in front of your face and then look at the horizon. If the horizon is in focus you should see two fingers.
Oxidative Stress Induced by Cortisol in Human Platelets
I can't overlap the images to save my life - they get like halfway there and that's it...
content marketing can demonstrate orgs you don't want to work for and can therein be counterproductive
Follow the golden rule, be the person that you would want to work with. Be valuable enough so that you have some choice in which team you join.

I don't know of any other advice to this end that would apply universally. It depends on specifics of the operating modes and types of relationships you'd develop in the companies that you would fit with.
I loved the book about Leonardo Delvecchio, the founder of Luxottica (the biggest sunglasses manufacturer in the world, owner of Rayban/Oakley/etc.)

He became an orphan at age 9.

Started working in factories at 14.

Started working in glasses factories at 16.

He built his own first at 27. Grew it from 0 to 6,000 employees.

Died while still being the CEO of the company aged 86 years old.

One of the best stories of perseverance, and doing hard things from nothing I've ever witnessed!
I think Roman Fischer in the thread has it right, 30 certs is a single drop of water the Atlantic. Like there's no wink wink necessary, at that scale it would be flatly irrational to do anything at all to handle being one of these revocations. We're taking about a roughly 0.00001% chance that it's you. Forget some dumb cert revocation logic I would play Russian Roulette with those odds.

But on the flip side those 30 unlucky souls are gonna be pissed. There's so many other less disruptive ways you could do this.
Jury nullification and Luigi Mangione's murder defense
Traffic has increased significantly, but everything seems to be working fine.
Hey there's some selection bias going on there! Rails is great for consistency and even better if its your jam. Its stable and high quality and still headed in a great direction. Its a great choice. Especially if you can work in it long term, and pay its learning curve only once.

...but as someone using it in Anger for a few years now, I long for the day I can say goodbye to it and never look back, for all the usual reasons.
I did use Rails :D
On reading the negative commentary here on Rodney Brooks's post, I'm realizing that besides being a rambling article, it also assumes too much background from the reader. It isn't really understandable without knowing something about the author and about the business of robots.

Disclaimer: I worked for years building robots, several of these years with Rod. I assure you, when it comes to robotics and AI, he knows what he's talking about.

Here's my perspective. Also, he wrote his original predictions six years ago in a blog post [1], which is the basis for this latest post. If you don't have the time to read the old post, I provide a short summary from it about autonomous driving below, too.

1. Rod is not just an MIT professor emeritus and a past director of CSAIL. He has co-founded multiple robotics companies, one of which, iRobot, made loads of money selling tens of millions of consumer-grade autonomous robots cleaning floors in people's homes.

Making money selling autonomous robots is a very, very difficult thing. Roomba was a true milestone. Before then, the only civilian, commercially successful mass-produced robots were the programmable industrial arms that are still used in auto manufacturing. If the author sounds self-important, maybe that's why.

Yeah, he can get a little snarky sometimes when self-important CEOs run around with VC money in their pockets making tall claims and never being held accountable. That's just his style. Try to look beyond it. You might learn a thing or two.

2. The entire purpose of his annual "predictions" posts starting with [1] was to counter the hype and salesmanship about AI and robotics that's wasting billions of investment dollars and polluting the media landscape.

About autonomous cars, he believes that the core technology has been demonstrated in the 1980s, but that instead of using it, we have squandered the decades since then. For autonomous robots, the interaction with their surroundings is critical to success. We could have enhanced our road and communications infrastructure to enable autonomous cars. Instead, we have chosen to give money to slick salesmen to chase the mirage of placing "intelligent" cars on existing roads, continuing to neglect our civil infrastructure.

[1] https://rodneybrooks.com/my-dated-predictions/
The wording is misleading:

[When you move through space quickly, you move through time slowly]

Why all the “you”? This makes it sound like you would personally experience slowness. Could be clarified to say it’s only according to the perception of others.
Happy render customer right here.
We’ve got multiple rails apps running on render.
Renders tech support team have been very helpful wherever needed also.

Should also point out the recently released Rails 8, has as key features focussed on making rails much easier to deploy to anywhere that supports Docker.
> A HTML isn't really programming your web browser any more than a .wav file is "programming your audio player".

Also not any more than a .c file is "programming your compiler" nor a binary executable is "programming your operating system" nor an operating system is "programming your hardware" nor hardware is "programming mathematics". Disclaiming HTML as a programming language when it is actually powerful for programming comes across to me as a No True Scotsman argument about "real" programming languages being used to program only in some contexts or to make only some things as the program.

I agree that it's a matter of semantics but I also understand HTML to be a programming language, semantically. It seems to me that where one draws the line for programming language is always going to be arbitrary unless one is willing to see that a language being used to program in some context is a programming language.
> going to a first-class brain surgeon is no less a moonshot than any other bio hacks I can find online

American "physicians received significantly less intensive care than the general population" at the end of their lives [1]. (Canadian physicians "used both intensive and palliative care more than nonphysicians" [2].)

The lesson seems to be yes, go ahead and pursue your moonshots, but don't let that cloud the reality of the situation and don't let the moonshots debilitate what little time you have left.

[1] https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2482318

[2] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6659139/
What Highway Numbers Mean
Theres a malaysian movie where the main premise is a hacker who uses pdf executions to steal one cent from every persons bank account. Its pretty interesting.
Half to GiveDirectly and half to a variety of local organizations near where I live (tbh, not all ones I would have selected, but it was a shared decision with my spouse).
If you want a probability flavoured statement, you will need to appeal to measure theory.
I'm not sure why all the hate. This is entirely up to your friend. If they want to spend their remaining time trying moonshots, then by all means do it, and blog the results online and share with others. Make it into something fun. It literally does only increase their chances of survival even if by some extremely small amount.

Otherwise, if they prefer to spend their time in other ways, support them in that.

"False hope" is kind of an oxymoron. Hope is never easy to have. Fortunately it's not required. You can accept death and still find enjoyment/distraction in self-experimentation.
It’s a good thing that properly designed stereograms take this into account and don’t require you to uncross your eyes past that point.
Show HN: Freeact – A Lightweight Library for Code-Action Based Agents
Hello! We just released freeact (https://github.com/gradion-ai/freeact), a lightweight agent library that empowers language models to act as autonomous agents through executable code actions.

By enabling agents to express their actions directly in code rather than through constrained formats like JSON, freeact provides a flexible and powerful approach to solving complex, open-ended problems that require dynamic solution paths.

* Supports dynamic installation and utilization of Python packages at runtime

* Agents learn from feedback and store successful code actions as reusable skills in long-term memory

* Skills can be interactively developed and refined in collaboration with freeact agents

* Agents compose skills and any other Python modules to build increasingly sophisticated capabilities

* Code actions are executed in ipybox (https://github.com/gradion-ai/ipybox), a secure Docker + IPython sandbox that runs locally or remotely

GitHub repo: https://github.com/gradion-ai/freeact

Evaluation: https://gradion-ai.github.io/freeact/evaluation/

See it in action: https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/83cec179-54dc-456...

We'd love to hear your feedback!
HNs hug of death does not apply to Rails only
I only am familiar with formal verification in the context of a hardware class, which is like programming but the cost:benefit is wildly different (can’t fix a physical chip after it has been fabricated very easily) and the types of designs are very different.

But, the impression I got was that the rigors of the formal verifier would sort of impose a limit on the complexity of the design just based on… completing in a reasonable timeframe and in a reasonable amount of memory space. Maybe the true victory of demanding formal verification would be fixing:

> software is big and complicated and hard to get right

By making big complex programs a pain to work with, haha.
A very often ignored fact is the cultural homogeneity. I do not thing racial homogeneity is of any benefit whatsoever, but I do believe that cultural is.

When someone raised in a culture where cheating to win by any means is acceptable (most of India) or where bartering, persuading and microfrauding in trade (most of Middle east and sup-sahara Africa) is not frowned upon, it is not a stretch to imagine that the introduction of such cultural elements will lead to dilution of the overall interpersonal trust in let's say, Swedish society.
Waymo has approval to operate in San Mateo County so it’s likely coming pretty soon.
It works much better when you already know what you're doing-- so you can ask for exactly the right thing, spot the LLMs errors, and know what you need to do to fix them rather than iterating forever with the hallucinating machine.

I can't help but feel that while these tools speed everyone up they actually increase the difference between an expert and a novice rather than leveling the playing field.
One of my favorites is Sam Walton: Made In America
+1 for "How Big Things Get Done." Great book.
title text added :)
What I don't get is how he says "we think of year and month as intervals, but it doesn't make sense to think of minutes as intervals" -- and I can't help but wonder "why not?" When we say something happened at 1:35pm, we really mean it happened somewhere on or after 1:35:00pm and before 1:36:00pm. Why is this any less natural than saying "it happened in 2007" or "it happened in July"?

One of the things that intrigues me about Google's Plus Code addressing system is how it converts longitude and lattitude into "area block intervals" -- the first four digits represent a large area, the next four + three represent a small area, and if you know the large area, you can specify only the latter seven, or if the area is big enough, you could ignore the last three digits after +, or if you're talking about a ranch or a campground, you could even specify just the last three digits. The first four are analogous to "year", the second four to "month", and the last three to "day". This can even be continued into smaller and smaller intervals, just as we can divide a "day" into "hours" and "minutes" and "seconds" and so forth, we can specify smaller and smaller areas with plus codes.
In my limited experience it seems like the "why" of a proof requires a theory of mind from the perspective of the author of the proof.

What I mean is that one could choose a particular tactic to proving a lemma or even rely on certain lemma where that choice is intended for the audience the author has in mind in order to help them understand the steps better.

The context an LLM uses is limited (though growing). However its context is lacking the ability to understand the mind of the interlocutor and the proof they would expect or find helpful.

"Why this proof?" also has a more global context as well. It seems there are have been styles and shifts in cultural norms over the years in proofs. Even though the Elements stood up until the 19th century we don't necessarily write proofs in the style of Euclid even though we may refer to those themes and styles, on purpose, in order to communicate a subtle point.
Notice of termination of your A Cloud Guru lifetime course access
I guess it's not surprising that I can't get any of you lonely neckbeards to participate in any discussion that has to do with kids.
Works in Poland, but here you go:

https://web.archive.org/web/20250106112552/https://annas-arc...
you're my hero today