skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Thanks for posting that story, I hadn't heard of it before!

Another take on the AI Halting Problem.

Stanislaw Lem's Golem XIV describes a series of super-intelligent computers that just suddenly decide to stop communicating.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golem_XIV

https://cannonballread.com/2021/05/golem-xiv-blauracke/

https://readsomethinginteresting.com/acx/34

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25741124

tialaramex on Jan 12, 2021 | parent | context | favorite | on: Superintelligence cannot be contained: Lessons fro...

Check out the Stanisław Lem story "GOLEM XIV".

GOLEM is one of a series of machines constructed to plan World War III, as is its sister HONEST ANNIE. But to the frustration of their human creators these more sophisticated machines refuse to plan World War III and instead seem to become philosophers (Golem) or just refuse to communicate with humans at all (Annie).

Lots of supposedly smart humans try to debate with Golem and eventually they (humans supervising the interaction) have to impose a "rule" to stop people opening their mouths the very first time they see Golem and getting humiliated almost before they've understood what is happening, because it's frustrating for everybody else.

Golem is asked if humans could acquire such intelligence and it explains that this is categorically impossible, Golem is doing something that is not just a better way to do the same thing as humans, it's doing something altogether different and superior that humans can't do. It also seems to hint that Annie is, in turn, superior in capability to Golem and that for them such transcendence to further feats is not necessarily impossible.

This is one of the stories that Lem wrote by an oblique method, what we have is extracts from an introduction to an imaginary dry scientific record that details the period between GOLEM being constructed and... the eventual conclusion of the incident.

Anyway, I was reminded because while Lem has to be careful (he's not superintelligent after all) he's clearly hinting that humans aren't smart enough to recognise the superintelligence of GOLEM and ANNIE. One proposed reason for why ANNIE rather than GOLEM is responsible for the events described near the end of the story is that she doesn't even think about humans, for the same reason humans largely don't think about flies. What's to think about? They're just an annoyance, to be swatted aside.
Show HN: Tiny library for more beautiful Python outputs
Just a few super minimal conveniences, in case anyone finds them useful.

It was one of those cases where the standard libs seem to make things too complicated so you write it yourself.
> What requires a label is the theory that there’s an independent civil service insulated from the President and political appointees.

The "executive power" is what's enumerated in Article II — most notably the All Other Officers Clause and the Take Care Clause. (It's been often said that it was no accident that the Framers put Article I first.)

So: If both houses of Congress pass a bill saying that Agency X is insulated from the president and political oversight — and the president signs the bill into law — then that should be the complete and utter end of the discussion until Congress and the president agree to change the law.

Those folks who've been bootstrapping a unitary-executive monarchy are engaging in ... let's just say, "creative lawyering" (spelled: making it up out of whole cloth). At least Marbury v. Madison has some policy grounds underlying it (the least dangerous branch and all that); the unitary-executive fantasy is devoid of such advantages.

BTW, just because Trump hasn't yet done all the things a monarchist could do, doesn't mean he's not a monarchist; saying otherwise is atrociously illogical.
Kalman Filter in Kotlin with Interactive Calibration Support And Visualization
There are many myths surrounding Kalman Filter implementation and its practical usage. In reality, Kalman Filter source code is widely available in well-known open-source projects like Apache Commons Math. However, the real challenge often lies in tuning its parameters to fit specific application use cases— a process that typically involves extensive trial and error.

To address this, I’ve open-sourced a repository designed to provide interactive and extendable tools for system modeling calibration. My goal is to help the Android/Kotlin community apply Kalman Filters more effectively to their custom use cases.

https://github.com/allengotstuff/Kalman-Filter-in-Kotlin
To take a face value such a blatant generalization like "I really believe you did not understand the article or my comment" you might want to give an example?

I did not find the article illuminating one bit. I agree with some of the criticisms wholeheartedly, mind you, but the article is just a rant.
It's one thing if a city already has one. But what advantage does the city bring to creating and operating power facilities? That requires many specialists with years of experience, in addition to great leadership. Without that, I assume the government is just a wallet to be taken advantage of.

It's similar to public transportation. Most cities don't design a system, they order it from a catalog - and they pay private consultants (similar to Oracle consultants) to tell them what to do. There is so much corruption and privatization there, but unlike power there is no business case that would make it attractive outside of public funding.
I dislike modern museums, compared to the dusty Victorian progenitors. I wrote to the science museum London complaining they were dumbing down and removing paths of self discovery for children walking through halls of scientific trash, by digesting them into teachable brief moments.

The museum wrote back asking me to cease and desist. So I did, and the trend continues. The buggers also lost a family donation in their "raiders of the lost ark" warehouse. (Early computing parts from imperial college, possibly the 5th computer in britain) they do have an archive problem. And, a lot of science trash is kind of boring. Their real live radioactive stuff, the gear used by Watson & Crick, that's not boring.

Arts et Metier in Paris is better. Lavoisiers entire gas research rig, bits of Fred Juliot-Curie's cavity accelerator magnet, the original jacquard loom, a room of 200 bizarre clockwork cog and wheel mechanisms.

Or the Rutter museum in Philadelphia, or the Teylers museum in Haarlem: lethal scale Leyden jar and van de graaf generator.

The real shit is much better than didactic panels and QR codes. I'm glad the deltic loco and V2 rocket are still on display in London, and Babbage bits and pieces, and the calculator made from meccano.
I get the ideologues here being mad… but I don’t get mad to the point where people need to pretend this guy isn’t highly intelligent. Doesn’t it make it better that there are really sharp people on the “DOGE” team.

Shouldn’t people be more mad at dummies doing it?
Emergence of collective oscillations in human crowds
'You're fired': The people Trump has sacked since taking office
On the one hand, I find this fascinating, and I am excited to see new CPython performance improvements here, with the experimental JIT work, and more.

On the other hand, sometimes, I feel like we might have missed something important. For most of its history, an otherwise skilled and experienced programmer with no specialized knowledge could read the CPython codebase front to back, and it would make sense. Then, at some point along the way, we lost that, and I think it's sad that we lost that.
Not a question of difficulty or skill. I am saying professionals can't agree what subset to use!
They are absolutely wasting a lot of money:

>$3.9 million for “LGBT causes” in the western Balkans

>$5.5 million for LGBT activism in Uganda

>$6 million for advancing LGBT issues in “priority countries around the world”

>$6.3 million for men who have sex with men in South Africa

>$8.3 million for “USAID Education: Equity and Inclusion”

The list goes on.

https://x.com/RapidResponse47/status/1887151291895267553
deno has been somewhat pleasing in this space, it's not a perfect boundary though
Why? Is the guy suddenly not sharp and talented anymore?
Also read keyboard events / do keylogging
I totally disagree. No one knows how consciousness works.

This is my same basis for completely disagreeing with the article:

"Rees: In my experience, this question is almost always grounded in a defensive impulse. A sometimes angry, sometimes anxious effort to hold on to or to re-inscribe the old distinctions. I think of it as a nostalgia for human exceptionalism, that is, a longing for a time when we humans thought there was only one form of intelligence, us."

This is just vacuous babel. To me it seems the defensive shoe is on the other foot.

All of this is making an assumption that "people" are operating under the guidance of some 17th century philosophy. Which is wrong. It also makes an assumption that anyone anywhere actually knows how intelligence works, or even what it is.

It's just kooky talk.

That fact is, the physiology of the brain, the integration with the endocrine system, and the whole distributed nervous system is so far more complex that a Von Newman computer, that to try to compare the two is just not well founded in reality.

Not one of the macro physiological subsystems mentioned above is even close to being understood. To say sequential instruction execution is performing a like function to human (or any organic) intelligence is completely ungrounded.

The description give in another article, also linked today on HN is much more hewn from reality:

https://www.pcgamer.com/software/ai/take-two-ceo-strauss-zel...

"Artificial intelligence is an oxymoron, there's no such thing," Zelnick said. "Machine learning, machines don't learn. Those are convenient ways to explain to human beings what looks like magic. The bottom line is that these are digital tools and we've used digital tools forever. I have no doubt that what is considered AI today will help make our business more efficient and help us do better work"

It's a great tool, it'll find broad application. It's NOT intelligence, since, no one even knows what intelligence is, much less how it works...
I will never trust on a Google technology.
> What agenda? I do not know enough about the history to understand the implications

Traditionally, you mostly see weird names for Ireland in British media with an anti-Irish viewpoint (you saw a lot of this from the right-wing tabloids during Brexit, in particular). In particular ‘Eire’ and ‘the Irish Republic’ are red flags; ‘Eire’ has never been correct to use in English, and ‘the Irish Republic’ was never _really_ the name of the country at all. At best it comes across as ignorant (a bit like Americans calling the UK ‘England’) but in practice it tends to only be used by a certain type of publication.

(In particularly extreme cases you sometimes see ‘the Irish Free State’, presumably from journalists who are over a century old.)

> How does one unambiguously refer to the country rather than the island without saying “republic”?

Ah, well, that’s the trouble, isn’t it? In cases where it could be ambiguous, Irish media tends to say ‘the state’, but that doesn’t really work elsewhere. In practice where disambiguation is required “the Republic of Ireland” is a reasonable neutral term.
Ceramic catalyst uses sodium and boron to drive sustainable industrial reactions
You can get all the software quality you want if you're willing to pay for it.

Users have now been taught that $10 is a lot to pay for an app and the result is a lot of buggy, slow software.
The art of doing science and engineering by Richard Hamming.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Art_of_Doing_Science_and_E...
That's the first time I've seen "deepfake" used to refer to generated text, isn't that term usually used for generated imagery/audio which is passed off as real?
That doesn't solve parent's (and my) problem.

I have collections of tabs in different windows and I assign those windows to different spaces. Every time I reboot Chrome all windows are assigned to whichever space is active when I launch Chrome.

I seem to recall that Chrome used to remember these assignments, so maybe it's not a macOS problem, but rather a Chrome problem...?
absolutely wonderful, thank you
Musk's DOGE takes aim at US consumer protection agency
>Or a fancy office conference table

Even smaller order of magnitude than executive comp

>offsite team building exercises in Hawaii.

Source this actually happens to an extent that would materially affect the balance sheet?
It’s a wchar_tab.
Except most users aren't running a developper's machine and have less than 8GB of ram. I think there is also still an awful lot of laptop users with 1366x768 screen resolution as it was still the default res on cheapest laptops a few years back.
Or larger-than-they-should-be-due-to-neglecting-essential-maintenance dividends to investors.
And it reeks of not being generated by an LLM!
I have this book too! I love it.
Taking this thought a little wider, source code may become less of a strategic asset to a business in general. It could enter the realm of supplies, like paper is used by a bookkeeper, and the strategic asset is how the models are constructed and trained (if at all, and not just SaaS).

The entire ecosystem of software and open source could fall apart as Nth order consequences of a reduced need for humans to create software and collaborate on software. For decades we’ve been improving languages, platforms, libraries as hardware progresses (and contributing to that cycle), all so that humans can put together software systems “at scale”. If non human intelligence takes our place, that ecosystem is simply no longer needed, and I fear that will be a net negative for technology and open source specifically.
Almost a haiku :)
Do you keep a blog? I'd love to read it, if so.
What makes someone 'truly' belong in a country?
The full title is:

> What makes someone 'truly' belong in a country? Views differ on language, birthplace, other factors
> A mountain would be nice to shorten the length

Starting at the top of Everest (even if it were at the equator) only gives you a 0.02% head start.
It's questionable how attractive Zig really is, outside of people getting caught in the wave generated by its foundation, where there is a clear self financial benefit. A Zig language review indicates there are many questions as to its usefulness, and why it hasn't hit v1 yet, over just using C and the many available libraries of that ecosystem. Famous C programmers like Muratori, homemade hero, do not like Zig nor recommend it[1].

Rust is primarily aimed at more specific use cases, evolving around memory safety and low(er) level programming. So where people might dislike the confusing syntax and difficulty of learning either Zig or Rust (among other inconveniences), its harder to make arguments against Rust's usefulness for safety, maturity (v1 plus), or present job market popularity. Zig does not have the luxury of those bonus points.

When it comes to general-purpose programming, including for hobbyists or students, there are many other alternative languages that are arguably much more attractive, easier to use, and/or easier to learn. Golang, Vlang, Odin, Jai, C3, etc...

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uVVhwALd0o4 ("Language Perf and Picking A Lang Stream" from 29:50)
So the government has hired some people to audit the government.

They have read only access to the government data.

They are posting every single recommendation they make for spending reduction on their website AND on Twitter for transparency.

What about this process do people have a problem with?

It seems like the real reason people are upset is that dollars are no longer flowing to leftist groups who were using the money to advance leftist causes.

Example:

- $3.9 million for “LGBT causes” in the western Balkans

— $5.5 million for LGBT activism in Uganda

— $6 million for advancing LGBT issues in “priority countries around the world”

— $6.3 million for men who have sex with men in South Africa

— $8.3 million for “USAID Education: Equity and Inclusion”

https://x.com/RapidResponse47/status/1887151291895267553
We actually did use booleans, I just found it easier to explain using enums, and the code would have been simpler if we'd done it that way.
oh i see, those are quite lame. i guess i was imagining a fully contained skyscraper city surrounded by national park area with trees and mountains.
Oof what a silly naming decision. Deepfake already has an established coherent meaning - it's specifically about impersonation with video/audio/images. Just writing in collaboration with a tool is not deep or fake necessarily.
Exactly. Science is a process not an ideology.
Live footage of Italian attendees at Elon's AI Startup School

https://youtube.com/shorts/zAvaGi7WS9M?si=8td7VYH2Dvh2ZWf7
C++ and C still force a usage of header files.

For whatever reason this is probably the biggest reason I've struggled with it( aside from tooling... Makes me miss npm).
In my day the new crap that wastes too much resources was the GNU software we wanted to run on the schools Solaris machines :)
Obscure clean energy metals caught in the crosshairs of the US-China trade war
"Here's one they just made up: near miss. When two planes almost collide they call it a near miss. It's a near hit! A collision is a near miss."
~ George Carlin [0]

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDKdvTecYAM
A Tiny project based todo list plugin for Neovim
I needed a tiny, lightweight, local todo manager so I could easily add reminder tasks as I'm working on work projects. I have plans to expand this into a larger management tool, but figured I would put it out there in case other people needed the same thing.

It opens a floating window that displays the current tasks for the root project used to open neovim. Currently tasks are stored in a global json file and only visible for the current project. Goals include adding the ability to browse the task groups, swap between them, and create new projects not associated with a directory.
What defines a "free capitalist system", and where does it exist?
For me, ACPI is the one thing that never seems to work quite right. Maybe I'm just doing it wrong
> On an ecological level first of all, whilst digital solutions may be less energy-consuming than paper, they’re by no means energy-free. A short email sent and received on a phone produces 0.2 grams of carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e), while an email with an image or attachment – for instance, a PDF ticket - produces 50 grams of CO2e, according to the great authority on carbon footprint measurement, Professor Mike Berners-Lee.

Ok. I need to see the math on this, or else my phone and computer is capable of some sort of physics defying magic. I can send an email with a large attachment on my modest "homelab" a few raspberry pis in, lets be absurdly generous, 10 seconds.

So 10 seconds of raspberry pi time, maxed out, 270 watt seconds (probably close to 1/10th that since it isn't maxed out). Reading it on my phone, takes a similar amount of power, realistically less. My phone is perfectly happy to charge off of 2.5 watts so lets say that receiving it takes another 10 seconds. So, being absurdly generous I'm using 295 watt-seconds. If I convert that to kWh I get 0.00008194444444 KWh.

I get all my electricity from hydro, but lets say that I was down the road from a coal plant. A coal plant emits 800g CO2 per KWh. That means that the devices that I used to send and receive a large email consumed a whopping 0.06555555556 grams of CO2.

I understand that there will be server farms handling my email in the real world, but those server farms are handling billions of other emails, and live and die on power costs, so I don't really think that my email is sucking down power there?

Where in the world is it 50g CO2 to send an email (or 62Wh if we convert it back)? What in the world makes you think that a paper ticket, which is literally several grams of carbon and oxygen, has less of an impact?

I'm willing to hear that there are people impacted by technology adoption. I'm more than willing to learn about carbon impact. But please don't put together an argument that anyone with any knowledge about the domain can see right through in a blink.
So now even H news are being poluted with IA.
Engineering, regardless of practice, is two things: process and measurement.

If you want to think like an engineer there are only facts and assumptions. Your assumptions will generally be wrong, often by multiple orders of magnitude. Just accept that.

In everything you do follow established processes step by step and measure absolutely everything with numbers. If you are capable of doing that you are thinking like an engineer.

Engineers, outside of software, are also subject to audits and liabilities. Evidence is your friend.
OBS merges pacing support for WHIP
Yes. the lines become distracting and constraining.
Not necessarily passed off as real, but otherwise yes.
Marketing for who? The few thousand people who care?

And they have a clear disclaimer it's a dev-focused board; if you expect a "proper laptop experience" then that's on you the basic description of the product.

"Targeted towards developers, tinkerers, and early adopters, this platform allows exploration and development within the RISC-V ecosystem. [..] This is very much a developer-focused board to help accelerate maturing the software ecosystem around RISC-V, so we recommend waiting for future RISC-V products if you’re looking for a consumer-ready experience."
There are now suggestions he buried representational subjects in the field. Suggestions his bipolar made it happen and then get buried.

I tend to think it's post hoc reasoning by bored art critics and Pareidolia.
A video or screenshot would be neat, so people can get an idea of what it looks like before installing.
Thanks! Macroexpanded:

Jackson Pollock - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37876645 - Oct 2023 (2 comments)

Jacksonpollock.org (2003) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24269430 - Aug 2020 (151 comments)
I already liked Acemoglu; this is a great article.

For background, Acemoglu won the 2024 Nobel in Economics [1] with Simon Johnson. I very much like their book "Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity" [2]. Quoting Wikipedia [3] "Power and Progress argues that technologies do not automatically yield social goods." The book also makes policy proposals which include a digital advertising tax.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41836078

[2] https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/daron-acemoglu/powe...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daron_Acemoglu#Power_and_Progr...
The article states: “They also tested the possibility that it was poor mental health causing people to stay up late, not the other way around. They tracked a subset of participants who had no previous diagnosis of a mental disorder for the next eight years. During that time, night owls who slept late were the most likely to develop a mental health disorder.”
PG&E is a private company, much of the responsibility for their wildfire costs are the result of mismanagement of the risks.

Their costs get shouldered by their customers and their stock price. (they really should issue shares to pay their bills to dilute their stock price and cause their existing investors to lose money). In any case it's not going to get very willingly picked up by the government.

PG&E's liabilities aren't going to be put into taxes.

It's not the state government taking over PG&E, it's individual municipalities leaving the PG&E network and forming their own utility to buy wholesale electricity (or make some of their own) and distribute it to their citizens... resulting in a large reduction in cost in no small part because they no longer have to pay for PG&E's liabilities.
At some point AIs will be smart enough that they might very well deserve human rights. That point's probably sooner than any of us expect.
Back online after nearly 24 hours, with no explanation.

Here’s the update from Twitter:

https://x.com/askplaystation/status/1888376843255824475?s=46