MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by SamBam | 2025-04-29 02:24:51+00:00
Yup, it flunked that one.

I also have a question that LLMs always got wrong until ChatGPT o3, and even then it has a hard time (I just tried it again and it needed to run code to work it out). Qwen3 failed, and every time I asked it to look again at its solution it would notice the error and try to solve it again, failing again:

> A man wants to cross a river, and he has a cabbage, a goat, a wolf and a lion. If he leaves the goat alone with the cabbage, the goat will eat it. If he leaves the wolf with the goat, the wolf will eat it. And if he leaves the lion with either the wolf or the goat, the lion will eat them. How can he cross the river?

I gave it a ton of opportunities to notice that the puzzle is unsolvable (with the assumption, which it makes, that this is a standard one-passenger puzzle, but if it had pointed out that I didn't say that I would also have been happy). I kept trying to get it to notice that it failed again and again in the same way and asking it to step back and think about the big picture, and each time it would confidently start again trying to solve it. Eventually I ran out of free messages.
by devilsdata | 2025-04-29 02:24:53+00:00
I was diagnosed with ADHD last year, and am curious as to what you've learned in your time. I'm taking 40-50mg methylphenidate hydrochloride (Ritalin) daily and working a hybrid web developer role. I'm trying to increase my reading of literature and begin writing, but I find myself just watching YouTube/browsing Reddit and HN.

230lbs is wild. Great job :)
by npinsker | 2025-04-29 02:24:55+00:00
I don't think so. I see its pitch as "the best kind of exercise is the one you do", maybe preferable to playing a game, but not an efficient way to learn. How useful it is to you will probably depend on how effective the sounds and streaks and home screen notification stuff is for keeping you motivated. Personally, I'm motivated by quick progress and outcomes (streaks don't do anything for me), so Anki is actually stickier, though I must be in the minority.

Because they focus so much on beginning learners for whom nuance isn't important, this change doesn't seem like it'll hurt them.
by SamBam | 2025-04-29 02:25:50+00:00
Huh, for me it said:

Answer: You will see the same side of the coin that you saw in the mirror — heads .

Why?

The glass table is transparent , so when you look at the coin from below (using a mirror), you're seeing the top side of the coin (the side currently facing up). Mirrors reverse front-to-back , not left-to-right. So the image is flipped in depth, but the orientation of the coin (heads or tails) remains clear. Since the coin hasn't moved during this process, removing the cup and mirror will reveal the exact same face of the coin that was visible via the mirror — which was heads.

Final Answer: You will see heads.
by hxtk | 2025-04-29 02:26:24+00:00
A usual example I use (because it reflects how I tend to use AEAD in applications) is to assume the server (and only the server) has the keys for something like data-at-rest encryption. Application level logic decides whether the server is going to decrypt some data on behalf of the user, and the authenticated data prevents tampering.

If Alice saves some data to her account, but Eve manages to access the database, Eve can change the database state to convince the application to retrieve Alice's data for her (by cloning it into a row with her own user ID). However, when the application attempts to decrypt that data, it will fail because of the AEAD. This ensures that both the database and some service with access to the encryption key (or the encryption key itself) would have to be compromised in order for Eve to exfiltrate her illicit copy of Alice's data.
by nostrademons | 2025-04-29 02:27:31+00:00
At the stage of an institutional seed round, I'd generally agree with you. At that point you're big enough that screwing up your customer experience will hurt you.

It's the early-founder stage, where you're still proving out an idea and verifying that people will use it and likely will have to pivot several times, that I think sales + engineering (or ops if technology is not your core competency) is key. The advantage of having a really good engineer over a product person is that a really good engineer can "hit the high notes" and deliver a product that most ordinary people assume is impossible.
by 90s_dev | 2025-04-29 02:28:35+00:00
> Also, I tend to stick with default configurations because it makes bug filing easier.

I've learned to use default configurations pretty much everywhere. It's far too much of a hassle to maintain customizations, so it's easiest to just not care. The exception is my ~50 lines of VS Code settings I have sync'd in a mysterious file somewhere that I've never seen, presumably on github's servers, but not anywhere I can see?
by roenxi | 2025-04-29 02:30:32+00:00
Keir Starmer is pushing [0] pretty standard far-right conspiracy theories about how the government was running an open-borders experiment, by design, in contravention of stated policies.

> ...and is certainly not far-right.

He's quacking like a duck. Talking about open borders is fair game for being identified as a dog whistler for people who believe in the great replacement theory - particularly when it is framed as duplicitous and intentional. I'd agree that it isn't, but once Wikipedia starts breaking out "far right" that is the sort of standard that can be applied.

[0] https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/pm-speech-on-migratio... - although humorously it is apparently standard practice to redact parts of speeches as political in a political speech given by a politician.
by meroes | 2025-04-29 02:30:38+00:00
> You seem to be imagining that you need to understand Turing machines before you'll be allowed to make statements about some specific computation.

All computations are finite, like you said. In general it’s a mystery to me how infinites of math are indispensable to the best sciences. In a sense it is simple, sure-we just use it when it helps us like you said. But since the indispensability of modern math is still hotly talked about in philosophy, I don’t know that I would call the finitely bound physical using infinity, simple. Do I think the difficulties of a mathematical and computational system with a biggest number (one we can pluck from cosmology as the largest number of useable states before total heat death) are simpler than one that uses infinite infinities at the lowest level, spawning philosophical challenges? I don’t know. I just can’t confidently call the status quo simple.
by gtowey | 2025-04-29 02:32:52+00:00
Diet matters. Protein, especially in the morning. Carbs and sugar are so bad for focus.

Sleep is essential. Getting a full night of quality sleep will probably help more than anything else. If you often wake up feeling tired already then maybe do a sleep study to see if there are problems there.

Exercise helps.

Developing a system for organization is key to unburdening your mind. There are various books for adults, for me I also found an executive function coach gave me the right amount of accountability and discipline to practice the systems enough that they didnt feel like a burden anymore.
by levocardia | 2025-04-29 02:33:04+00:00
The viridis package is great for this too! https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/viridis/vignettes/in...

The top comment color palette also reminds me a lot of the viridis "turbo" palette, which is a more perceptually uniform on MATLAB's notoriously bad "jet" palette
by fouc | 2025-04-29 02:33:44+00:00
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090 - 376224 - 400-550W for gpu + 250-500W for cpu/ram/cooling/etc.

Apple M3 Ultra - 131247 - 200W [1]

Looks like it might be 2.8x faster in the benchmark, but ends up using 3.25x more power at a minimum.

[1] https://www.tweaktown.com/news/103891/apples-new-m3-ultra-ru...
by paulryanrogers | 2025-04-29 02:34:19+00:00
Perhaps they could have made it slightly more obvious, especially after some threshold or lifetime date.

I think it's a sensible approach to discourage piracy. Consider the irony when pirates of Game Dev Tycoon find their virtual games fail due to piracy: https://www.eurogamer.net/game-dev-tycoon-forces-those-who-p...
by jandrewrogers | 2025-04-29 02:37:54+00:00
This is really an “in theory” versus “in practice” argument.

Yes, you can write most things in modern C++ in roughly equivalent C with enough code, complexity, and effort. However, the disparate economics are so lopsided that almost no one ever writes the equivalent C in complex systems. At some point, the development cost is too high due to the limitations of the expressiveness and abstractions. Everyone has a finite budget.

I’ve written the same kinds of systems I write now in both C and modern C++. The C equivalent versions require several times the code of C++, are less safe, and are more difficult to maintain. I like C and wrote it for a long time but the demands of modern systems software are a beyond what it can efficiently express. Trying to make it work requires cutting a lot of corners in the implementation in practice. It is still suited to more classically simple systems software, though I really like what Zig is doing in that space.

I used to have a lot of nostalgia for working in C99 but C++ improved so rapidly that around C++17 I kind of lost interest in it.
by sally_glance | 2025-04-29 02:38:08+00:00
50 years might be overstating it a bit, lookup tables/hash maps were a novelty back then and available compute resources increased by many orders of magnitude... So maybe we actually had some real enablers in the meantime. My gut feeling is the current AI hype is at least as revolutionary as search engines, marketplaces or social networks (not like recommendation engines or block chain). Though not as revolutionary as the loom or electricity
by chihuahua | 2025-04-29 02:40:49+00:00
There was a 4-day power outage here (Seattle suburbs) last fall, and one of the auto parts store made an effort to serve customers even though they didn't have any power. I paid cash, and I forget whether or how they did credit card transactions (possibly by writing down CC numbers on paper.) They made a lot of phone calls to a different store to get prices for items.
by anenefan | 2025-04-29 02:41:47+00:00
That's a good achievement but energy grids have varying degrees of robustness. So a number of days later the grid went down, Spain and Portugal blackouts were making global headlines. The cause - TLRD version it seems like a cascade shut down all the interconnected power networks. From [1]

The Guardian

The Portuguese prime minister, Luís Montenegro, said that the issue originated in Spain. Portugal’s REN said a “rare atmospheric phenomenon” had caused a severe imbalance in temperatures that led to the widespread shutdowns.

REN said: “Due to extreme temperature variations in the interior or Spain, there were anomalous oscillations in the very high voltage lines (400 kV), a phenomenon known as ‘induced atmospheric vibration’. These oscillations caused synchronisation failures between the electrical systems, leading to successive disturbances across the interconnected European network.”

[1] https://joannenova.com.au/2025/04/days-after-spain-reaches-1...
by scarface_74 | 2025-04-29 02:43:28+00:00
I always held BackBlaze up as one of the very few companies that went from initial value proposition, to taking investor funding to going public without enshittification.

I don’t have an opinion on the current controversy. My issue with BackBlaze is that they haven’t been aggressive enough about raising prices to be profitable. I gladly give companies money to give me a service.

I no longer use their service. But only because I took my plex server down years ago and copied my media to my AWS Account (S3 Glacier Deep Archive).
by coder543 | 2025-04-29 02:44:15+00:00
Another thing you’re running into is the context window. Ollama sets a low context window by default, like 4096 tokens IIRC. The reasoning process can easily take more than that, at which point it is forgetting most of its reasoning and any prior messages, and it can get stuck in loops. The solution is to raise the context window to something reasonable, such as 32k.

Instead of this very high latency remote debugging process with strangers on the internet, you could just try out properly configured models on the hosted Qwen Chat. Obviously the privacy implications are different, but running models locally is still a fiddly thing even if it is easier than it used to be, and configuration errors are often mistaken for bad model performance. If the models meet your expectations in a properly configured cloud environment, then you can put in the effort to figure out local model hosting.
by robomartin | 2025-04-29 02:44:24+00:00
I often find it interesting to see what gets flagged and downvoted or characterized as rude on various platforms, including here on HN.

Saying somethings is "ignorant" or "stupid" is deemed a negative, when, on the other side, what is being said is in a range between lies and outright dumb and uninformed. This is particularly egregious when it is accompanied by no obvious effort to investigate and understand before making a comment.

It is fine to challenge anything anyone says, of course. The way you do it is, to, for example, ask a question: "I don't think I agree, what evidence can you provide?" or "Can you clarify your position?", etc.

The Biden situation is a perfect example of this. Half the country was screaming about his mental decline and beyond obvious incapacity. How did that half of the country get treated? They were insulted and attacked from every angle. What was the truth? The president was senile and incapacitated, likely since almost his first days in office. So, what is more obscene and rude? To tell someone who is uninformed, ignorant and who refuses to look at reality that they are, in fact, uninformed and ignorant, or for that person to continue to support lies and attack anyone who tries to highlight the truth?

Another way to put it is the intellectually lazy and uninformed actually do damage to society. They are led by the nose for the benefit of political and other forces. And that's why they are sometimes referred to as "useful idiots". At some point calling them out for what they are cannot be considered to be more obscene than the damage they cause society.
by johnnyanmac | 2025-04-29 02:44:26+00:00
You never been to LAX if you don't immediately act with a sigh of relief over a direct train route. It's an potential 90 minute+ commute and another 90 minute TSA process for a 90 minute flight. Dreadful.

>The purpose of HSR is to transform large swatchs of land into a large megalopolis, like in China.

Bakersfield has a dozen reasons ever preventing it from becoming another SF/LA/SD.

Besides, China didn't build its rail all at once. A direct route would prove value when making future splinter routes. Instead, we chase 2 rabbits and get none.
by eieio | 2025-04-29 02:44:55+00:00
So sometimes I don't test these projects that much but I did this time. Here are a few thoughts:

My biggest goal was "make sure that my bottleneck is serialization or syscalls for sending to the client." Those are both things I can parallelize really well, so I could (probably) scale my way out of them vertically in a pinch.

So I tried to pick an architecture that would make that true; I evaluated a ton of different options but eventually did some napkin math and decided that a 64-million uint64 array with a single mutex was probably ok[1].

To validate that I made a script that spins up ~600 bots, has 100 of them slam 1,000,000 moves through the server as fast as possible, and has the other 500 request lots of reads. This is NOT a perfect simulation of load, but it let me take profiles of my server under a reasonable amount of load and gave me a decent sense of my bottlenecks, whether changes were good for speed, etc.

I had a plan to move from a single RWMutex to a row-locking approach with 8,000 of them. I didn't want to do this because it's more complicated and I might mess it up. So instead I just measure the number of nanos that I hold my mutex for and send that to a loki instance. This was helpful during testing (at one point my read lock time went up 10x!) but more importantly gave me a plan for what to do if prod was slow - I can look at that metric and only tweak the mutex if it's actually a problem.

I also took some free wins like using protobufs instead of JSON for websockets. I was worried about connection overhead so I moved to GET polling behind Cloudflare's cache for global resources instead of pushing them over websockets.

And then I got comfortable with the fact that I might miss something! There are plenty more measurements I could have taken (if there was money on the line I would have measured some things like "number of TCP connections sending 0 moves this server can support" but I was lazy) but...some of the joy of projects like this is the firefighting :). So I was just ready for that.

Oh and finally I consulted with some very talented systems/performance engineer friends and ran some numbers by them as a sanity check.

It looks like this was way more work than I needed to do! I think I could comfortable 25x the current load and my server would be ok. But I learned a lot and this should all make the next project faster to make :)

[1] I originally did my math wrong and modeled the 100x100 snapshots I send to clients as 10,000 reads from main memory instead of 100 copies of 100 uint64s, which lead me down a very different path... I'm not used to thinking about this stuff!
by nostrademons | 2025-04-29 02:45:31+00:00
The geology of the Bay Area would make that difficult. The Peninsula flats are mostly loosely-consolidated sediment, and in some areas you have less than half a mile between the mountains and the Bay. And it's less than 2 miles from the San Andreas fault. You'd likely have significant problems with flooding [1], and all the difficulties that the Pacheco Pass segment is having tunneling through an active fault would be multiplied by the 4x as long, geologically varied segment from SJ-SF.

[1] This is a significant issue for the NYC subway, even though you don't really think of NYC as being on top of a bay.
by acyou | 2025-04-29 02:45:39+00:00
My thought process was, let me try out a few moves that attack Black. There aren't that many, so... Kb8? No, not allowed. Kb7? No, not allowed. Pa7? No, that doesn't really help. Ra7? No, that doesn't lead to anything useful. Ra6? Oh, yeah, that works.

But I wasn't thinking in text, I was thinking graphically. I was visualizing the board. It's not beyond the realm of possibility that you can tokenize graphics. When is that coming?
by pcwalton | 2025-04-29 02:45:53+00:00
> You can't do possibly-erroneous pointer math on a C# object reference.

Bevy entity IDs are opaque and you have to try really hard to do arithmetic on them. You can technically do math on instance IDs in Unity too; you might say "well, nobody does that", which is my point exactly.

> You don't need to deal with the game life cycle AND the memory life cycle with a GC.

I don't know what this means. The memory for a `GameObject` is freed once you call `Destroy`, which is also how you despawn an object. That's managing the memory lifecycle.

> In Unity they free the native memory when a game object calls Destroy() but the C# data is handled by the GC. Same with any plain C# objects.

Is there a use for storing data on a dead `GameObject`? I've never had any reason to do so. In any case, if you really wanted to do that in Bevy you could always use an `EntityHashMap`.
by jandrewrogers | 2025-04-29 02:46:00+00:00
It seems like your argument is predicated on using the C++ STL. Most people don’t for anything that matters and it is trivial to write alternative implementations that have none of the weaknesses you are arguing. You have created a bit of a strawman.

One of the strengths of C++ is that it is well-suited to compile-time codegen of hyper-optimized data structures. In fact, that is one of the features that makes it much better than C for performance engineering work.
by pornel | 2025-04-29 02:46:23+00:00
In absolute terms yes, but relative to the CPU speed memory is ridiculously slow.

Quake struggled with the number of objects even in its days. What you've got in the game was already close to the maximum it could handle. Explosions spawning giblets could make it slow down to a crawl, and hit limits of the client<>server protocol.

The hardware got faster, but users' expectations have increased too. Quake 1 updated the world state at 10 ticks per second.
by KMnO4 | 2025-04-29 02:49:42+00:00
When the iPhone first launched, it had to pull a lot of weight to convince people that a touchscreen keyboard could work as well as physical keys. One of the tricks it used was to predict the next letter and invisibly adjust the hitbox of each key.

If you type “h” and then hit the space between “w” and “e”, it will assume you wanted “e” and register that.

This could easily be implemented by dynamically adjusting the ranges where a letter can be selected from the joystick. You don’t even need to render it differently; just adjust which letter registers at a particular angle.
by smitty1e | 2025-04-29 02:50:19+00:00
Brings this story to mind:

"It finally happened! Seventeen years in the making, and 41 years after the song was released the search for the internet’s most notorious lost song has come to an end. Dubbed the Most Mysterious Song on the Internet, the song's real name is Subways of Your Mind. Song detectives have been chasing clues for this one for a long time. And I’m not going to lie, the reveal to this one completely lives up to the hype. If you’re in need of a feel good story with happy ending today, then this is your episode. You’ll be smiling from ear to ear when you hear about the origins of this famous undiscovered track. And you’ll fall in love with the band who wrote it, they are called FEX. These guys are the real deal. It’s a comeback story the likes of which has never been told before. The details of a lost band, their lost drummer, and the identity of an unknown mixtape track recorded in the 80s have all finally been revealed. You’re going to love this one… NEXT on the Professor of Rock. "

https://youtu.be/iWpcvqTCA8g?si=EOZPwabd9f60v_18
by Thebothersuman | 2025-04-29 02:51:17+00:00
My thoughts are... know that your feelings [ALL OF THEM] are there to serve or service you. Ask your self-how does [insert feeling here] this feeling serve me? When you establish and or reestablish your truth and your feelings are in thier right place, your will see how dope you are and your endless capabilities to endure and overcome... your already doing the work. The money is a gift to choose where and how you want to manage your time; time now works for you treat it just as your feelings; how will this money service me and my dreams imagination etc? In short know you are More than enough and have something left to know and to do. This is why your asking such beautiful open question. now you must continue to show the world,so others can recall and remember thier self too, who and what you are. Thank you for helping me.
by perilunar | 2025-04-29 02:51:58+00:00
My kids were little back when the original iPod came out. They were unable to use it because they couldn't read yet, and the early iPods had a text-only interface.

But they were very capable using cassette players. The could identify different tapes by the images on the labels and cases, and were able to manipulate the tapes and controls easily. Also, cassette players are cheap and robust.

So as cool as this project is, it's overkill. An old cassette player and a bunch of tapes would have worked just as well.

(and when they get older they can graduate to CDs or vinyl !)