MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by colechristensen | 2025-04-24 06:39:37+00:00
Yes many futures are not "cash settled" but settled in the actual commodity.

This is why in rare occasions the price of a thing goes negative because trading in that thing you are contractually obligated to take delivery and people trying to unload that obligation sometimes can't find buyers until they are paid to take delivery. It happens when nobody really wants to buy a thing and there is no capacity left to store or ship. When you buy a futures contract and you don't want delivery you have to sell it to close your position, and rarely you have to give people large sums of money so you can close.
by eesmith | 2025-04-24 06:42:27+00:00
I'm saying that <1% is not the right way to look at things, but the real point is "You can both pay for a service and be the product."

You won't call them an ad company until it's 50% of revenue. I understand that.

But if Alphabet were to buy UnitedHealth Group, so that Alphabet's ad revenue were under 50%, Alphabet would still be an ad company.

The newspaper which I subscribe to is also an ad company, because they sell ad space.

The radio station I listen to most is not also an ad company, because it's a volunteer-run, listener-funded station.

My company is not an ad company because it only gets revenue from product sales and consulting services.
by Dor_Elbaz | 2025-04-24 06:44:14+00:00
That’s a fair question. I’ve chosen to pursue this work independently because, in my experience, the academic environment I’m currently part of tends to be quite conservative when it comes to unconventional research — especially from undergraduates. I felt the work might not be given fair consideration internally due to its nontraditional model and the fact that it challenges a major open problem.

Instead, I’ve focused on making the argument as rigorous and transparent as possible, including formal proofs, a detailed appendix cross-validating the claims, and a public release for community scrutiny. I’m actively reaching out to experts in the field and submitting the work to appropriate venues.

If it becomes necessary to route through institutional channels — for example, to access formal peer review or academic endorsement — I’ll consider that step as well. For now, I’m hoping the merit of the argument will invite critical engagement on its own.
by mchusma | 2025-04-24 06:45:06+00:00
Copyright for most (if not all) fonts seems like something that just shouldn’t work. We want things in the public domain, like Shakespeare, and we want derivative works protected. Fonts are tiny differences on public domain work that 90% of people can’t tell. You wouldn’t want Disney to claim every pencil stroke difference on Mikey’s to be subject to different copyright terms, it would become a kind of perpetual copyright strategy. If there are true technical improvements to the way we represent letters, they should be covered by patents, with their shorter terms.
by seec | 2025-04-24 06:45:24+00:00
Charitable interpretation is that you are naive, but more realistically it's an incredibly stupid belief.

Apple has played the marketing game around some high-profile cases because they got some incredibly juicy free promotion for it but they collaborate with many governments on a daily basis.

I don't have the link but there is a page out there showing all the requests for data access that are fulfilled by big tech companies. Apple is very much collaborating in the EU, without making a single noise about it.

It's all about marketing and keeping their power. If Apple had any principle they wouldn't even being able to operate in China...
by Hackbraten | 2025-04-24 06:45:51+00:00
See statement [1] and tracking issues [2] [3].

[1]: https://github.com/EclipseFdn/open-vsx.org/issues/3805#issue...

[2]: https://gitlab.eclipse.org/eclipsefdn/helpdesk/-/issues/5924

[3]: https://www.eclipsestatus.io/incident/549796
by pjmlp | 2025-04-24 06:47:35+00:00
Yes, it changed my point of view that it is about time WG21 goes back to the old ways of only standardising existing practice, or at very least proposals without preview implementations shouldn't even get discussed in first place.

The problem is that with the new wind C++ got with C++11, its role in GCC and LLVM, and domains like HPC, HFT, GPGPU, WG21 got up to 300 something members, everyone wanting to leave their name on a C++ standard, many proposing features in PDF form only.

And since in ISO driven languages, what gets into a standard, does so by votes, not technical implementation merit, it is about doing a proper campaign to get the bases to vote for your feature, while being persistent enough to keep the process going. Some features have more than 20 revisions on their proposal.
by amatecha | 2025-04-24 06:47:45+00:00
I started using Twitter in 2007 and eventually got up to around 1400 followers. Indeed, it was amazing for a while, and I had many experiences that were only possible due to my connecting with many people on there. Unfortunately it had been getting worse and worse, even before it was taken over and renamed and so on.

Fortunately, Mastodon has completely taken its place for me, and it actually affords me a good degree of agency over what I see. It's a linear feed of posts by the people I follow, with comprehensive filtering (and even better, people voluntarily put content warnings on their posts about potentially-difficult topics). It's actually pretty badass, even if it isn't perfect.

You can certainly keep having cool conversations with people on Mastodon, like the good old days of Twitter. That's all I do. I follow people who post about neat stuff, and they follow me cuz I post about stuff I (and apparently they) find interesting. Just people hanging out, basically. You don't need to worry about growing an audience or whatever (though I'm sure you already knew that heh :))
by fulafel | 2025-04-24 06:48:33+00:00
> However, I need basic sleep/restore to work on my laptop - and it feels like this is a Mars-mission-effort level problem for Linux to solve.

This has not been true for over 20 years. You just need to buy known good hardware.

(Anyone know when exactly we first got reliable sleep on the early Thinkpads with APM?)
by Corrado | 2025-04-24 06:49:36+00:00
I just finished watching Daredevil: Born Again[0] and this incident looks shockingly familiar to what happened in the show. I don't know how the show runners knew this was going to happen but it feels like they've been spying on the future. Do they have a time machine or are they really that good (and the current administration that bad)?

[0] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt18923754/
by amscanne | 2025-04-24 06:49:54+00:00
What are you actually expecting here?

The solution was found in a few days by the LKH TSP heuristic solver. They spent months (and decades of CPU time) using well-known techniques to bound the specific problem and prove that this was an optimal solution. It’s not something that you can synthesize to a page. They are literally announcing that they verified the heuristic-derived solution.

Consider it like any science, where folks can make shit up. But you can just run the bounding algorithms yourself, or prove they are incorrect.
by DonHopkins | 2025-04-24 06:49:58+00:00
Speaking of Cygnus:

The Worst Job in the World, from Michael Tiemann <tiemann@cygnus.com>:

https://www.donhopkins.com/home/catalog/unix-haters/slowlari...

PS: Fuck Trump supporting anti-vaxer Scott "You have zero privacy, get over it" McNealy. May he run Solaris in hell.

Scott McNealy has long been one of Trump’s few friends in Silicon Valley:

https://www.sfchronicle.com/politics/article/Scott-McNealy-h...

Former Sun Micro CEO Scott McNealy, known for his provocative quotes, says Trump is doing a 'spectacular job' amid the coronavirus crisis. That's not how many tech experts see it:

https://www.businessinsider.com/scott-mcnealy-praises-trumps...

Sun on Privacy: "Get Over It":

https://www.wired.com/1999/01/sun-on-privacy-get-over-it/
by aaron695 | 2025-04-24 06:50:32+00:00
Rockets triggering lighting with wire has been since the late 50's (M. M. Newman), what's cool about the drone is you can send back data before the strike. Obviously a kite or aerostat would work as well.

I'm sure someone in the 90's was using rockets without wires, the exhaust from the rocket made the trail. I cannot source it.

These guys charging cars shows they are not really serious, but a lot of forest fires are lightning, it's a worthy thing to control if possible.
by librasteve | 2025-04-24 06:51:28+00:00
not sure whether to laugh or cry at this ... looks like over the years python has agglomerated some of the features raku has had from day 1 (2015) in sadly inconsistent ways, often via module includes:

- multi subs & methods = "typing overloads" - named & positional args - stubs = "future annotations" - subsets = "Generics" - protocols - wrappers = "context managers" - given / when = "structural pattern matching" - my declaration = "walrus op" - short circuit evaluation - operator chaining - fmt - concurrency

If you are a Python coder and you feel the need for some of this, I humbly suggest you take a look at https://raku.org
by seansh | 2025-04-24 06:52:19+00:00
Agreed. ciechanow.ski has been a huge inspiration, as well as 3blue1brown, Bret Victor, and Chris Granger (remember Light Table?). But none of them provide a way to walk through thousands of lines of real code and show how it is built and evolves over time. That is the key problem Scrimba and CodeMic are trying to solve.

The two people I have seen who really master this are Robert Nystrom (Crafting Interpreters) and Casey Muratori (Handmade Hero). But even they are limited by the mediums they use: books and videos, which are not ideal for this kind of guided exploration.
by namaria | 2025-04-24 06:52:29+00:00
Why would you use an LLM for this? A simple spreadsheet can do this sort of calculation easily and deterministically.

Also, the assumption of '3% interest' is wrong. There are records of stretches achieving 15% returns for several years and reaching 23% in 2007, for example.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2005-01-11/harvard-l...

https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB118771455093604172

This was 2 minutes of old school search, no LLM needed.
by melvinroest | 2025-04-24 06:54:15+00:00
> The rest is boiler plate, cargo-culted, Dockerfile, build system and bash environment variable passing circle of hell that I really could care less about.

Even more so, I remember making a Chrome extension and feeling intimidated. I knew that I'd be comfortable with most of it given that JS is used but I just didn't know how to start.

With an LLM it is way faster to spin up some default config and get going versus reading a tutorial. What I've noticed in that respect is that I just read what it does and then immediately reason why it's there. "Oh, there's a manifest.json file with permissions and a few other things, fair, makes sense. Oh, so you have the HTML/CSS/JS of the extension, you have the HTML/CSS/JS of the page you're injecting some code into and you have the JS of a background worker. Ah yea, I get that."

And then I just get immediately on coding.
by dahart | 2025-04-24 06:54:40+00:00
FWIW, I can’t ever remember a time when the most widely used compilers in practice weren’t around 5-10 years behind changes in the standard. Part of the issue is that adoption takes time, and always will. A lot of people using C++ professionally don’t want to be on the bleeding edge of language changes. Some do, but a lot don’t, for good reasons.

When I was in college in the 90s, templates were new and had iffy support. In the 2000s, STL was still problematic. I remember the Microsoft Compiler spitting out error messages on STL types that were so long the compiler couldn’t handle the string length and truncated the error message so you couldn’t see what the problem was. In the late 00s and early 10s I worked in games, we wanted stability and for the code to be as non-tricky as possible (for example by banning use of exceptions, STL containers, and most casual heap allocation, among other things.) So we used older compilers by choice. My current job publishes an SDK and APIs that people have been using for many years, they need to be backward compatible and we can’t impose recent language features on our users because not everyone uses them, we have to stick to features that compile everywhere, so I still see lots of C++{11,14,17}.
by szvsw | 2025-04-24 06:55:01+00:00
On the other hand, IP addresses have crossed into the popular lexicon in exactly this manner… it’s common enough to hear people say “what’s my “ip?” or “are there any free ips?” or what are the IPs for x/y/z”.

I agree that it sounds stupid and incorrect, but that doesn’t necessarily mean using MCP as a metonym for MCP server.
by gloosx | 2025-04-24 06:55:16+00:00
A lithium-ion battery cell for a smartphone costs the device OEM somewhere between $2 to $4 ($0.10/Wh is todays rate?).

Are we seriously discussing how fast charging can lead to 1.6% degradation of 2-4$ every 100 days? Maybe it's better to discuss why to replace it at the service center costs 50$
by jillesvangurp | 2025-04-24 06:55:38+00:00
It's also going to be about diagnosing issues. "This part broke right here, explain why and come up with a solution", "Evaluate the robustness of this solution", "Can I save some material and reduce the weight", etc.

Those are the kind of high level questions that an LLM with a decent understanding of CAD and design might be able to deal with soon and it will help speed up expensive design iterations.

A neat trick with current LLMs is to give them screenshots of web pages and ask some open questions about the design, information flow, etc. It will spot things that expert designers would comment on as well. It will point out things that are unclear, etc. You can go far beyond just micro managing incremental edits to some thing.

Mostly the main limitation with LLMs is the imagination of the person using it. Ask the right questions and they get a lot more useful. Even some of the older models that maybe weren't that smart were actually quite useful.

For giggles, I asked chatgpt to critique the design of HN. Not bad. https://chatgpt.com/share/6809df2b-fc00-800e-bb33-fe7d8c3611...
by globular-toast | 2025-04-24 06:55:47+00:00
The problem with this is the audit log is only at the CRUD level which is often too low. Ambiguities can arise. For example if the question is "who published the article" do you look for a create or do you look for an update with published=true? It's even worse when you consider the schema can change over time, so both can be correct but at different points in time. Event sourcing is the way if you want to capture business-level events.
by asacrowflies | 2025-04-24 06:56:14+00:00
The USA has also successfully completed multiple full on genocides rivaling Nazis with their eugenics and "purity" ideals.... You act like all these good Americans blessings came from the upstanding moral character of Americans and not from overwhelming brutality and violence to steal it or have slaves build it. To this very day with prison work and minimum wage indertured servants.
by dxroshan | 2025-04-24 06:56:27+00:00
The programming interface that Hurd provide is similar to that of any modern operating system. So, it can run pretty much any program that runs on Linux or BSD, but you have to port it. Doom is no exception. If you cannot find a video of Doom running on Hurd on YouTube, it doesn't mean that Hurd can't run Doom.

Hurd is sure not a successful project, but it is a capable operating system. Linux comes with a lot of device drivers for all sorts of hardware, so Linux nowadays can run almost everywhere. But that is not the case with Hurd because only a small number of people are contributing to this project and it is largely eclipsed by success of Linux. But it is an extensible system so if you want support for a hardware, you can develop a driver for it. But nobody is interested.

If you haven't seen Hurd running a desktop, I will introduce you to Debian Hurd (https://www.reddit.com/r/linuxmasterrace/comments/18i6e94/de...). It is a Debian distribution with Hurd as the kernel instead of Linux. It comes with Xorg and you can install XFCE, OpenBox. Basically, you can install any desktop that render on CPU. Desktops like GNOME and KDE need more infrastructure. They relay on modern GPUs and uses direct rendering. In Linux, we have DRI and Mesa for this. As of now, Hurd doesn't have any such infrastructure. As I have already said before, a lot of people are contributing to Linux and only a handful of people are contributing to Hurd.
by amscanne | 2025-04-24 06:57:35+00:00
Note that the tour itself was found quickly using a heuristic solver (https://www.math.uwaterloo.ca/tsp/korea/computation.html), the achievement here and all the computation is to establish that this is the lower bound (assuming I understood correctly).

So, the heuristic solver worked pretty darn well :) Although, I’m not sure how close it would have been the heuristic algorithm you are describing (I suspect that it is considerably more advanced for good reasons, randomly picking will take too long to converge).
by imahwashere | 2025-04-24 06:57:47+00:00
Sites Clicky Noted!

The Model I am currently using is gpt-4o mini {To keep the cost down}. From my current knowledge the African languages it supports. 1. Swahili 2. Zulu 3. Xhosa 4. Hausa 5. Amharic 6. Yoruba 7. Igbo 8. Somali 9. Afrikaans

BUT! I have spoken to it in Zulu as I am able to speak in it {{and my dad gave me a dictionary so I can test its vocabulary and use of it}}, it can have a simple back and forth conversation but It doesn't do well with Zulu or Ndebele speakers {{got my mom who is very fluent to try it out}}.
by imtringued | 2025-04-24 06:58:27+00:00
>Firstly, there's no reason the trip can't be one-way, or at least, temporarily one-way.

This is the ultimate admission that it can't be done. Anyone sane would at least propose a free-return trajectory like Artemis 2. Even if you are crazy enough to sacrifice your astronauts on a one way trip, you would still need to practice a lot of free-return trajectories just to train your astronauts and test the hardware.
by drusepth | 2025-04-24 07:00:30+00:00
People say emdashes are a signal that something's from chatgpt also — yet people forget that the cliches or patterns of LLMs are learned from real-world patterns. What is common in something like ChatGPT has a good chance to also be common outside of it, and _lots_ of false positives (and false negatives) are bound to creep up frequently when trying to do any sort of pattern-based "detection" here.
by supermatt | 2025-04-24 07:01:32+00:00
> they think they had no choice

And they really don't have a choice. if you don't abide by googles terms then they will not permit you to use google mobile services. That means (at the very least):

- No "play" services (breaks lots of apps and 3rd party peripherals). - No app store (over 90% of apps are distributed solely through the play store. even major android players like samsung have tiny libraries in their own stores). - No youtube app (and no way to natively play without play services APIs, you NEED to use a crippled iframe embed in a webview!!!) - No push notifications (developers usually target the "built-in" option that is basically play services) - Missing apps and api-level integration with loads of other stuff, maps, mail, search, calendar, casting, etc - No widevine DRM (no hd/4k netflix, etc) - Loads of other insidious stuff I cant recall or articulate right now

You cant even use the word "Android" to describe the OS.

Just look at how crippled Amazons fork is. Or how huawei pretty much lost their entire GLOBAL market share because of a US sanction preventing them having a GMS contract.

No matter what anyone says, android IS google. It is so riddled with google specific behaviours you cant use without a license that companies have even ditched android to make their own OS - because they literally aren't allowed to favorably position their own functionality over googles in any way.
by silisili | 2025-04-24 07:01:33+00:00
I don't like general advice like this, because it's too general. For many, it's probably good advice. For others, not so much.

Anyone who has worked at a small company selling to large B2B SaaS can attest we get like 20 hits a day on a busy day. Most of that is done by one person in one company, who is probably also the only person from said company you've ever talked to.

From that lens, this is all overkill. It's not bad advice, it's just that it will get quoted for scenarios it doesn't apply. Which also apply to K8S, or microservices at large even, and most 'do as I say' tech blogs.
by danielpetrica | 2025-04-24 07:01:46+00:00
Ahh. I don't know if you're talking about revenue or clients count. I'll presume you mean revenue. I personally don't think that kind of scale can be reached in the the first 4 or 5 years, of the company. We want to go the bootstrap way at least in the beginning until we manage to create a process and find the issues that may arrive. But after that, if we are able to execute and keep growing, I think it can be achievable as that niche is very big in Italy and later Europe. we definitely want to expand out of italy after we managed to iron out the process in the Italian market first.
by throwaway290 | 2025-04-24 07:02:29+00:00
82k places in Korea include any restaurant or joint or karaoke with a license to serve alcohol. Personally I would not care to call 80% of them "bar".

So in Ohio probably everything with class C and D license. How many is not public but probably many times more than 4k.

Many actual street level bona fide bars in Seoul (which has half of all the people of the entire country and the most bars by far) are tiny rooms that fit a few people each. But you always have a "bar street" with 50 of those next to each other.
by littlestymaar | 2025-04-24 07:03:43+00:00
While LLMs are a useful tool for software development, if you try asking them the software equivalent of “Create a plastic enclosure sized to go under a desk, ok add a usb receptacle opening, ok add flanges with standard screw holes” you'll end up with the equivalent of “No the other side. No, not like that, at the bottom. Now make it 10mm from the other hole. No the other hole. No, up not sideways. Wait, which way is up? Never mind, I'll do it myself” a lot.

What works is asking them to implement micro feature that you will specify well enough at first try, not to ask them writing the entire piece of software from top to bottom. The tech is clearly not there yet for the latter.

The main difference between Code and CAD is that code is language you're writing to the machine to execute already, so it's pretty natural to just use a more abstract/natural language to ask it instead of the formal one of code, whereas CAD is a visual, almost physical task, and it's more pleasant to do a task than describe it in depth with words.
Underwater anomaly-response probe: cheap, autonomous, disruptive?
by Hi-Alex | 2025-04-24 07:03:52+00:00
Detects anomalies via onboard sensors. When triggered — it surfaces and transmits a coded signal. Primary channel: optical (laser/IR/LED). Backup: satellite (Iridium). No infrastructure needed. Weight ~2kg. Can be dropped from plane, drone, or boat. Powered independently. Modules replaceable.

Use-cases:

Provokes enemy subs to expose themselves

Large-scale activation = deception

Creates noise and false targets

Presence simulation in strategic areas

---

Question: Could this kind of low-cost, behavior-based architecture affect anti-submarine warfare if deployed in numbers?
by seec | 2025-04-24 07:04:32+00:00
In the end, locking a hardware device to an online account is just stupid. They marketed it as a tool to prevent theft (and recover if lost) but in reality, it has not prevented theft at all (if anything it has increased as the phones value has ballooned).

Apple is the only one who truly profits the most from this "innovation".

I have had an iPad stolen, and while I could track, it definitely didn't make any difference.