skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Post-1974, however, D&D has been extremely reactive in its design. It largely does not innovate, but its massive gravity means anything it refines is reflected back into the industry in a massively disproportionate way

D&D is in an interesting position where if it innovates too much in its game design and mechanics (4E?) then (some) people complain that it's not D&D anymore, but if it doesn't innovate enough then (other) people complain that it's stale and old-fashioned. Which is a bit like complaining that Shakespeare is full of cliches.

Personally I'm happy with 5E+ being similar enough to other versions of D&D to be familiar, but with some clarified and refined rules, along with lots of options and classic flavor.

Many of D&D's most wonderful contributions aren't necessarily in rules proper, but in flavor and world-building. I have spent a lot of my RPG life, both computer and tabletop, in the Forgotten Realms.

(And to open a can of worms, I would also say that the original d20 System SRD and OGL, which spawned an ecosystem of compatible RPGs from multiple companies, was an important innovation – at least until Hasbro/WoTC sabotaged themselves multiple times.)
Same here, most of the pictures look really dark and not orange at all.
Does anyone have a variant on this meta rule file that isn't React specific?
> How do you know we’re not just completing the next token

Because we (humans) weren't born into a world with computers, internet, airplanes, satellites, etc

"Complete next token" means that everything is already in the data set. It can remix things in interesting ways, sure. But that isn't the same as creating something new

Edit: I would love to hear someone's idea about how you could "parrot" your way into landing people on the moon without any novel discovery or invention
If you were ok with such a basic editor like nano you'd be just fine using it in those server cases, it still wouldn't justify the need to use a worse option universally, but also gui text editors have been light enough to work on even less powerful hardware of decades ago, so the one doesn't justify it either
>Their goals are similar.

This isn't then your previous comment that the results are similar.

Goals aren't nearly as important as results.

Also, to dive deeper, what goals and how many are similar, and how similar?

If you mean they are both supporting Israel, then yes, but the Democrats exert more control over their actions. For example Biden was limiting the bomb size that Israel could purchase and Trump removed that.

So if you want to help the Palestinians one side is the better than the other. It doesn't matter if the goals are similar or even the results. There's still a difference and as you can see voter apathy only helped Republicans
Thanks! I originally was going to just call it Compute but I resonated more with Compute!'s Gazette from my own personal experience and it's going to be all brand new content anyway. Plus, I like the idea of a "gazette" and it just seemed to fit. Personal preference I guess.
In the US, the standard course sequence (e.g. at a good state university) is two years of calculus, diffeqs, and linear algebra (all taught as on-paper computation) concurrently with a course in discrete mathematics. The discrete mathematics course often doubles as an introduction to proof (as is apparently the case at UCI). Year 3 typically covers proof-based analysis, algebra, and linear algebra and some electives. Year 4 is typically electives.

At a fancy school, you can often take proof-based honors versions of Year 1-2 courses but you still may not get to skip over all of Year 3. Think: calculus using Spivak and real analysis using Rudin.

At Harvard, you can take Math 55, which is essentially Year 3 above (plus complex analysis) in Year 1.
MCP is great for when you’re integrating tools locally into IDEs and such. It’s a terrible standard for building more robust applications with multi-user support. Security and authentication are completely lacking.

99% of people wouldn’t be able to find the API keys you need to feed into most MCP servers.
Rather than looking at different letters, perhaps look at different font families. Clearly sans-serif I-beams are structurally much worse than avec-serif I-beams.
> Solving hard math problems requires understanding the structure of mathematical reasoning

Not when you already know all of the answers and just have to draw a line between the questions and the answers!
I’ve implemented Norvig for a couple languages as a learning tool.

One thing I do that he didn’t before dropping to brute force though is the m squares with m possibilities check. If two squares in a row, column or group only have two possible values, then you can eliminate those possibilities from all of their siblings. Same for 3:3, 4:4 and 5:5.
> The Momentum framework calls on Amtrak and commuter rail agencies to […] shift their focus from increasing the geographic coverage and capacity of their rail services

> When making changes to rail infrastructure or services, state and local railroad agencies often must negotiate with the freight railroad companies that own most of America’s track network. These companies [are] reluctant to allow more frequent passenger service that could reduce the amount of time their freight trains have access to track.

This article completely fails to mention the actual cause of our modern situation. Before focusing on increasing geographical coverage we would first need to focus on not decreasing geographic coverage. Check out the Abandoned & Out-of-Service Rail map of North America and you can see the result of massive corporate consolidation where newly-combined railroads abandon parts of each constituent company's former network to end up with the most track they can run for the least money. There is zero redundancy left: https://www.google.com/maps/d/viewer?mid=10akDabya8L6nWIJi-4...
This is a cool project. Related fun anecdote: I once found an application at work where just about the ENTIRE test suite was a no-op as the author (and subsequent copy-pasters) misunderstood a GTest feature. Yep, dozens of unit tests which did not actually test anything. Fortunately the application did mostly work and wasn't critical.
Experiences like these make me want to write "negative tests" to test test failure conditions.
Homophobia isn't lying, it's an opinion/ judgement

>Social security isn’t an income tax because we have a tax called the income tax.

SS tax is a tax on your income, "Income Tax" is a type of tax. Both are true
The actual population size during demographic transition looks very logistic-y. You'd be forgiven for thinking Verhulst applies. (though K is very much an empirical constant in that case, since you can't easily predict it from anything I don't think.)
Please check out the post on Math-Perturb-Hard conveniently linked to above before making a comment without responding to it.

A relevant bit:

“for MATH-P-Hard, we make hard perturbations, i.e., small but fundamental modifications to the problem so that the modified problem cannot be solved using the same method as the original problem. Instead, it requires deeper math understanding and harder problem-solving skills.”
> This kind of circuitry—to plan forwards and back—was learned by the model without explicit instruction; it just emerged from trying to predict the next word in other poems.

This author has no idea what's going on.

The AI didn't just start trying to predict the next word in other poems, it was explicitly instructed to do so. It then sucked in a bunch of poems and parroted them out.

And... the author drastically over-represents its success with a likely cherry-picked example. When I gave Claude lines to rhyme with, it gave me back "flicker" to rhyme with "killer" and "function" to rhyme with "destruction". Of the 10 rhymes I tried, only two actually matched two syllables ("later/creator" and "working"/"shirking")I'm not sure how many iterations the author had to run to find a truly unusual rhyme like "rabbit/grab it", but it pretty obviously is selection bias.

And...

I actually agree with the other poster who says that part of this stochastic parrot argument is about humans wanting to feel special. Exceptionalism runs deep: we want to believe our group (be it our nation, our species, etc.) are better than other groups. It's often wrong: I don't think we're particularly unique in a lot of aspects--it's sort of a combination of things that makes us special if we are at all.

AI are obviously stochastic parrots if you know how they work. The research is largely public and unless there's something going on in non-public research, they're all just varieties of stochastic parroting.

But, these systems were designed in part off of how the human brain works. I do no think it's in evidence at all that humans aren't stochastic parrots. The problem is that we don't have a clear definition of what it means to understand something that's clearly distinct from being a stochastic parrot. At a certain level of complexity of stochastic parroting, a stochastic parrot is likely indistinguishable from someone who truly understands concepts.

I think ultimately, the big challenge for AI isn't that it is a stochastic parrot (and it is a stochastic parrot)--I think a sufficiently complex and sufficiently trained stochastic parrot can probably be just as intelligent as a human.

I think the bigger challenge is simply that entire classes of data simply have not been made available to AI, and can't be made available with current technology. Sensory data. The kind of data a baby gets from doing something and seeing what happens. Real-time experimentation. I think a big part of why humans are still ahead of AI is that we have a lot of implicit training we haven't been able to articulate, let alone pass on to AI.
Thanks! I originally was going to go a completely different direction with the Switch writeup. By the time I finished the write up I had to acknowledge what a smart move that was for Nintendo. I just hope devs use the opportunity to bring back some more physical "stuff" with their offerings.
Really enjoyed my time using EXWM. Had to move to Wayland for a number of reasons, and really miss it. KDE Plasma has been fantastic, but I do miss the integrated scripting environment. Ironically I now use a heavily frames-based Emacs set up, and eschew most of Emacs internal window management capabilities.
I do. It is absolutely astounding for coding.
Train fares are just smoking crack and it’s so frustrating, because I want to take trains. I love everything about it but the price.
It's important to understand the argument in context.

Theoretical computer science established early that input-output behavior captures the essence of computation. The causal mechanism underlying the computation does not matter, because all plausible mechanisms seem to be fundamentally equivalent.

The Chinese room argument showed that this does not extend to intelligence. That intelligence is fundamentally a causal rather than computational concept. That you can't use input-output behavior to tell the difference between an intelligent entity and a hard-coded lookup table.

On one level, LLMs are literally hard-coded lookup tables. But they are also compressed in a way that leads to emergent structures. If you use the LLM through a chat interface, you are interacting with a Chinese room. But if the LLM has other inputs beyond your prompt, or if it has agency to act on its own instead of waiting for input, it's causally a different system. And if the system can update the model on its own instead of using a fixed lookup table to deal with the environment, this is also a meaningful causal difference.
I've had no issues with eBay, despite the fee increase. I list my stuff at reasonable prices, generally under cutting recent sold-for prices and still make a few bucks.

It depends a lot on _why_ you are selling your used things. I am not trying to make a ton of money on them, just trying to keep stuff out of landfills and get it into the hands of people that can use it, maybe recoup some of my initial costs while at it.

I've had okay luck with FB Marketplace, but the amount of scammers and bots on there makes it an annoying last resort for me.
Along those lines, one big thing I worried about when reading your article was whether the camera's auto-white-balancing might be throwing everything off. I'm not sure how it works on an iPhone, but I'd suspect that presence of the red bag might cause it to reduce the redness of the rest of the image. One easy solution might be to always have two oranges in each photo---one inside the bag, and one sitting on top.
Fair enough. We will see.
I don't see why it's a problem for a potential rail service for San Francisco and Los Angeles that there are no heavily populated areas between the two cities. There's no reason why you couldn't fill up a train with passengers at the start and travel non-stop to the destination, just as the vast majority of airlines operate.

Trains still have all their usual benefits including better passenger comfort and higher energy efficiency, and there is the option to build intermediate stations if the demand increases in the future.

I would also question the claim that overnight trains cannot be justified for business travel. If the cost is comparable to a hotel room - which is a big 'if', granted - this allows employees to be better rested and therefore work more effectively during the day.
Yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43667693 (84 points, 33 comments)
Did you read the spec ? Everything you said is already a recommendation.
I am generally a huge vertical sharding skeptic but there are special cases where it is beneficial. If you have a simple query pattern on one table that represents a big fraction of your entire workload you can put it into its own instance and it becomes much easier to monitor. It’s easy to see why vertical sharding is sometimes the right answer by inverting the decision: should we put two unrelated large applications on the same instance? Obviously not, there is no benefit and ops becomes more difficult.
> Whorf was an idiot. It’s not worth quoting him.

The citation is relevant to this topic, therefore use and attribution warranted.
Ban TikTok now!
It doesn't matter if one saved a lot for their pension fund, if there's not enough able people around to do all the essential work when the time comes. Numbers in an account don't go fighting a wildfire by themselves. We risk ending in a world of old people outbidding each other into utter destitution for basic services.
As someone living in a country with common law and having taking business law 101 (so certainly NAL) this sometimes ends up being a bit of a guessing game as to how a judge will interpret jurisprudence.

There's a lot of room for improvement in legal systems and they move extremely slow due to the political nature of things.
That’s not really how it works, though. The price of your options is set based on when you join the company. If the company is already valuable by the time you join, you’re essentially buying in at the current valuation with the hope that the valuation will continue to increase.

You make money on the amount the company value increases starting the day the options were granted.

(This comment isn’t 100% technically accurate, but gets the point across in fewer words)
Article title: Electric (software)
I'm sorry but this is way off-topic for HN
I like the energy of the post a lot!
Nice job.
> If a language model was just a stochastic parrot, when we looked inside to see what was going on, we’d basically find a lookup table

I disagree right away. There are more sophisticated probability models than lookup tables.

> It'd be running a search for the most similar pattern in its training data and copying this.

Also untrue. Sophisticated probability models combine probabilities based on combining all the bits of context, and by fuzzing similar tokens together via compressing (i.e. you don't care what particular token is used, just that a similar one is used.)

They're parrots, just better parrots than this person can conceive of.
In the case of MCPs, this post is indeed a quick primer. But from a coding standpoint, and despite the marketing that Agent/MCP development simplifies generative LLM workflows, it’s a long coding mess that is hard to tell if it’s even worth it. It’s still the ReAct paradigm at a low level and if you couldn’t find a case for tools then, nothing has changed other than the Agent/MCP hype making things more confusing and giving more ammunition to AI detractors.
Edit window is past but I just want to make this absolutely clear that these sorts of actions are war crimes. The people responsible for these should face consequences. I'm pretty sure they're illegal (there has been a Supreme Court ruling on these practices) and also go against IDF rules.

War crimes happen during wars. The French, the Americans, the British, The Australians etc. etc. have all committed war crimes in all their wars since WW-II (and before, that concept didn't exist). In terms of accountability in those militaries it's O(0). The IDF has on many occasions put soldiers on trial for violating rules of war. It's a core value in the IDF to fight morally. And yes, in today's Israel and today's war it's not the same as it has been but relative to western armies it's within the practiced norms. Relative to Hamas whose strategy and tactics are one big war crime there's no comparison.
> between the two cities. There's no reason why you couldn't fill up a train with passengers at the start and travel non-stop to the destination, just as the vast majority of airlines operate.

This isn't flat land. There are expansive mountain ranges that make it difficult to build and any flat land that is buildable is ALSO prime agricultural land that is worth millions.

Just to recoup the cost you end up with ticket prices comparable to a flight.

> I would also question the claim that overnight trains cannot be justified for business travel. If the cost is comparable to a hotel room - which is a big 'if', granted - this allows employees to be better rested and therefore work more effectively during the day.

Yeah no. I don't want employees to come in unshowered, and they still need a place to keep their luggage. Furthermore, plenty of people like maintaining their daily routine or spending time with their SOs. Flying a couple hours, staying at a hotel overnight, getting work done, and immediately bugging out back home is the norm.
I think the author used the word correctly but explained the circumstances somewhat confusingly.

IIUC an entity engaged a service to register a domain on its behalf. So the entity did indeed register via the service, but it would also be correct to state that registration was carried out by the service. That service also happens to provide a link shortener. So instead of referring to the service as "company X" the author went with "link shortener".
Seems like that would explain why it scored 10%, not 100%, to me

A child could score the same knowing the outcomes and guessing randomly which ones go to which questions
One thing not pointed out in the article, but I would like to hear others perspective on, is what happens at the 4 year mark when all options are fully vested and exercisable. This is a scenario for employees that have been there long-term. Should requests be made for further option grants? Should employers think about further option grants to retain employees? What are people’s thoughts and experiences?
(Side note: would you mind emailing hn@ycombinator.com so I can explain how and why I edited your text here?)
> The scenario following the crash of 2008 differed entirely. In the United States, policy ambulances were on the spot immediately. Under Obama fraudulent banks and insurance companies and bankrupt automobile corporations were rescued with huge infusions of public funds never available for decent healthcare, schools, pensions, railways, roads, airports, let alone income support for the worst-off.
totally, which is why we go to a jury of peers for things
Whether you need -dev packages (for headers) depends on your operating system. I run Gentoo. All headers are always on the system. Other distributions ship the headers separately in -dev packages to save space and you need to install them. You likely can install all -dev packages for everything on your system so you do not need to get the individual ones.
I think recommendation != being enforceably part of it or being implemented.

There are a lot of great recs in the docs but I wrote this based on what I actually saw in the wild. I definitely don't think it's all on the spec to solve these.
Infrastructure can also drive development in places that it reaches. If you work in SF but fancy living in Hollister, and the train only takes 30 minutes to get there, why not?
you missed the people in extreme poverty.
also, I think most people yearn to move up to a richer group. Not all, but I would wager more than 50% in any of these "groups".
You should be getting refreshers every year. If you don't then you are either not negotiating hard enough or the company just doesn't want you around for the long term.
I suspect this will indeed be part of it, but it won't work with today's AIs on today's codebases.

Models will improve, but also I predict code style and architecture will evolve towards something easier for machine review.
It's your comment that seems to add the least, because the majority agree with the OP. The point is that ergonomics is not as good, of course there are contrary opinions. The existence of a contrary and minority opinion doesn't detract from the point.
I def agree that there is a pattern to most data pipelines:

- read from an input (source)

- perform some sort of processing

- write the data to some output (sink)

This may either be batch or continuous (stream). The inputs may change, the outputs may change.

I personally think that sql and duckdb are well positioned to do this. SQL is declarative, standardized and has decades worth of mature implementations.

The “source” can be modeled as a table.

The “sink” can also be modeled as a table.

What does a custom dsl provide over sql?

I have a side project called Sqlflow which is attempting to do something similar/

https://github.com/turbolytics/sql-flow

It’s not a DSL but the pipeline is standardized using the source, process, sink stages.
Right now the process is pure sql but the source and sink are declarative. SQL has so much prior art, linters and a huge ecosystem with many practitioners.
I had a longer comment but it was too all over the place. For me, ultimately, I think Math Academy has really helped me. That being said, I put a lot of time and effort into it, and I imagine it would be difficult for people with a lot of commitments. I sometimes reach for supplementary materials, sometimes get ChatGPT to re-explain something, but mostly I manage.

I think the article gives the impression that MA is like Duolingo, but it's not. There's no flashy animations, sound effects, or mascots, the interface is spartan like Hacker News. It can't be (effectively) done in five minutes a day. It requires total concentration and a lot of time commitment.
First, dilution should only be happening at funding events, not every time a new senior staff person is hired, and second the dilution should affect everyone equally— founders, execs, angels, VCs.

It's super unfair to give an employee "x shares" that turn out on exit to be shares of a fixed pie that is different from the one the investors have their shares in.
Consider the following LISP function that performs a transformation of an MxN matrix:

(defun transpose (matrix)
(apply #'mapcar #'list matrix))

Based on my own experience I think I can say that It isn't until one has acquired a reasonable amount of experience with the language that they can fully appreciate its power.