MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by olivierduval | 2025-04-13 22:58:44+00:00
All about time is about the use of time. So what is your use-case?

Time is either some "point in time" (like a date) or "duration". Your use-case is not the first one because a "point in time" is bound to a location (it 10am in Paris,FR ... not 10am). As a duration, it's only really usable as a duration inside the same 24h period... and for this everybody already has the second. The replacement of a base 86400 by a base 100000 does not really seem to me as a game-changer (not for computer and not really for humans either) so I don't think that anybody will take the time to use it somewhere.

I think that if you want to work on "time", you could help with 2 "hard" problems :

* calendars : the main PITA is more that months dont have the same length in days (not even for the same month in case of february) and neither the same number of "workable" days. Some calendars try to help by using 13 * 28 days month (each month=7 days weeks... so same count of workable days). That kind of calendar is used in finance I think but not really sure

* outside earth (meaning lunar, martian... really Universal) time duration & calendar : for now, our calendar and time mesurement is based on earth rotation on itself (night/day succession) and around the sun (seasons succession). These notions dont have a lot of sense on earth or on mars... or outside our solar system... So: should we use some kind of percentage of total revolution or that kind of thing ?

I think that tackling that kind of problem could be more a game changer that building a system to replace 1 second by a pulse with a duration of 0.864 second. YMMV
by n4ture | 2025-04-13 22:58:46+00:00
Yeah was going to change that part too for something like "Writing code like this is verbose and spans too many lines", but then I just thought it'd be better if it sounded more like the parent comment.

And I understand it doesn't resonate with most, I just wanted to highlight how the initial parent comment was very subjective and not very substantive, some people didn't take the joke so well, I guess it could've sounded a bit passive aggressive. I personally enjoy both C-like and Lisp-like syntaxes and languages, I do have a sweet spot for Forth tho.

But back on topic, Fennel is a great language, working with Love and Fennel is really nice. And if the parentheses can seem off-putting for some, I'd highly encourage to give it a shot as you can quickly get past it and see how comfy it feels to have your statements properly demarkated.

S-expr shine the most when working with XML-like structure. Spinneret[1] was the most fun I ever had working with HTML, every other templating engine feels subpar now that I have tasted that sweet nectar..

[1] https://github.com/ruricolist/spinneret
by commandersaki | 2025-04-13 22:58:58+00:00
Math 13 was created by the late Howard Tucker as a traditional discrete mathematics course (the number was a deliberate joke).

I took the course under Howard G. Tucker and I did have the impression this was a course not worth taking due to the low number. Turned out to be one of the most memorable classes. We went beyond the curricula in this document and had some fun exploring Hilbert Infinite Hotel and Peanos Axioms. Howard G. Tucker was probably the most memorable professor I had as he was veering in his 90s at the time he taught the course and was just so passionate about teaching.
by _wire_ | 2025-04-13 22:59:27+00:00
Step 1: Computer, make me a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.

If this can't work, the program abstraction is insufficient to the task. This insufficiency is not a surprise.

That an ordinary 5-year can make a sandwich after only ever seeing someone make one, and that the sandwich so-made is a component within a life sustaining matrix which inevitably leads to new 5 year-olds making their own sandwiches and serenading the world about the joys of peanut butter and jelly is the crucial distinction between AI and intelligence.

The rest of the stuff about a Harvard professor ripping a hole in a bag and pouring jelly on a clump of bread on the floor is a kooky semantic game that reveals something about the limits of human intelligence among the academic elite.

We might wonder why some people have to get to university before encountering such basic epistemological conundrum as what constitutes clarity in exposition... But maybe that's what teaching to the test in U.S. K-12 gets you.

Alan Kay is known a riff on a simple study where Harvard students were asked what causes the earth's seasons: almost all of them give the wrong explanation, but many of them are very confident about the correctness of their wrong explanations.

Given that the measure of every AI chat program's performance is how agreeable its response is to a human, is there a clear distinction between a the human and the AI?

If this HN discussion was among AI chat programs considering their own situations and formulating understanding of their own problems; maybe waxing about the ineffable, for them, joy of eating a peanut butter and jelly sandwich...

But it isn't.
by endgame | 2025-04-13 22:59:38+00:00
Focusing on the runtime's parser is a red herring and I think a common error in lisp advocacy.

Even if I didn't the full power of a lisp macro system, it is an absolute joy to manipulate programs written in s-expressions. Being able to cut/copy/paste/jump-[forward/back] by sexpr is really convenient, and often done nowhere near as well in other languages. I think this is because until the invention of tree-sitter and LSPs (and the former isn't yet widely adopted in editor tech), most editors had regex-based syntax highlighting and some kind of ad-hoc "parser" for a language. This makes them less aware of the language the developer is editing, but was probably a pragmatic design decision by editor implementers: it's easier than writing a full parser and means the editor can still assist even if a program is syntactically ill-formed.
by sharkweek | 2025-04-13 22:59:57+00:00
I’m 0 for 3 on startup equity being worth anything and have since left the industry.

One of the startups I did some time at was as close to a sure thing as one can hope for (unicorn valuation at one point) but it still went to zero in a very public flame out. It’s still impossible not to get imaginative about what could have been as I was a very early employee… such is life.

The most lucrative stretch of my career was working for a big company that paid good base salaries.
by rainsford | 2025-04-13 23:00:20+00:00
The alternative to comparative advantage is that there exist countries where it's economically optimal for them to produce every single possible good with finite resources taking into account the opportunity cost of producing one good over another. Or to put it another way, in a world where comparative advantage doesn't exist, the country in question must have the same economic outcome for any good they produce, and that seems ludicrously implausible to me.
by Aurornis | 2025-04-13 23:01:26+00:00
> I suspect that post was plagiarized rather than AI-written or written by the spammer.

Given that the accounts other posts were clearly reposts, I think this is the most likely explanation.

It’s much easier to find old posts that did well, change a few words or add a link, and repost it. It’s harder to prompt the AI to get a post that will do well compared to starting with proven material from the past.

It is interesting to see everyone’s AI suspicion turned up to 11, though. We’ve gone from “everything I don’t like on Reddit is a paid shill” to “everything I don’t like on Reddit is LLM generated”.
by Aurornis | 2025-04-13 23:02:54+00:00
> LLMs are truly memetic machines, the best we’ve created so far.

If I had to guess, I’d say it’s more likely this post is just recycled from some past post that did well, rather than written from-scratch by an LLM.

The rest of the account’s posts are just recycled old posts that did well. Simplest explanation is that this one is too.
by scubbo | 2025-04-13 23:03:18+00:00
> Ones I always find it difficult to find good icons for are [...] "save file".

As someone who knows very little about iconography and design, this is very surprising to me. I thought that the "floppy disk for save" (or "downward arrow to a horizontal line for download") conventions were pretty universal, and probably have tons of implementations to choose from. What aspects have you found challenging?
by AStonesThrow | 2025-04-13 23:03:41+00:00
Have you never attended a Hair Metal concert in the 1980s, or at least seen “Spïnal Täp”?

IIRC, Ken Dolls had tan lines or “permanent” briefs, but could remove pants from many action figures and dolls (and put on skirts and dresses on the males, interchangeably)
by grandempire | 2025-04-13 23:04:04+00:00
Ignorance is a big problem too. One time I had someone offended when I asked if their insurance plan qualified as a high deductible - they didn’t know it was a legal classification and thought I was accusing it of being expensive.

I’m not anti-startup but the VC backed startup culture of the last 10 years or so has been pretty souring.
by Jasonhhh2 | 2025-04-13 23:05:02+00:00
That mindset can definitely simplify negotiations, but I’ve noticed that removing equity from the perceived value stack can change how people show up. Some folks who might've gone the extra mile with even a slim shot at ownership now treat the role more like a job than a mission. I’m curious—have you seen any shifts in long-term engagement or retention since downplaying equity?
by kgeist | 2025-04-13 23:05:28+00:00
>but then a layer of supervisors that are specialized on evaluating quality

Why would supervisor agents be any better than the original LLMs? Aren't they still prone to hallucinations and subject to the same limitations imposed by training data and model architecture?

It feels like it just adds another layer of complexity and says, "TODO: make this new supervisor layer magically solve the issue." But how, exactly? If we already know the secret sauce, why not bake it into the first layer from the start?
by Uzmanali | 2025-04-13 23:05:32+00:00
This hit deep. I grew up in a home where my older brother battled drug addiction for years. But I’ve seen the same addictive patterns in myself with phones and social media, the same escapism, the same dopamine loops. What helped him wasn’t punishment, but connection, routine, and purpose. Dr. Pennie’s work shows that addiction is more human than we realize and technology can control our minds if we aren’t careful.
by FranchuFranchu | 2025-04-13 23:06:36+00:00
Hi! This is part of Jewish religious purity law and not usually taken as part of the rules that govern most Christian denominations. For example, women who are menstruating are usually not banned from participating in Christian services, and any other people would be unsuited to partake in Temple service according to Jewish religious law are usually allowed to participate in worship in Christianity.
by AStonesThrow | 2025-04-13 23:07:46+00:00
Thus heightening Jesus’ mysterious irony, and probing the dichotomy between acceptance before humans and the abundant grace of spiritual redemption

The physical human body is said to parallel and prefigure the glorified heavenly body. Archbishop Fulton Sheen was quoted as saying that the only “man-made things” in Heaven are the Five Wounds of Christ.

>> Korean Statue Depicts A Jesus So Jacked It Looks Like His Last Supper Was Pure Protein (2018)

https://brobible.com/life/article/korean-jesus-statue-jacked...
by rainsford | 2025-04-13 23:08:38+00:00
It's even simpler than that. Ecuador doesn't even need to be better than the US at growing bananas, they just need to be better at growing bananas than the US is at developing software relative to their banana growing abilities.

My favorite example is from an economics class quite a few years ago now. Michael Jordon is super efficient at making money playing basketball (told you it was a while ago). But he's also pretty good at mowing his lawn, since he's tall and athletic. But since he's way better at playing basketball, it makes sense for him to focus on basketball and paying some kid to mow his lawn, even though the kid is way less efficient at mowing lawns.

The US is way more advanced than Ecuador, and could presumably develop some hyper efficient banana greenhouse using genetic engineering and AI or whatever. But Ecuador is still pretty good at growing bananas and the US is much better at developing software, so buying bananas from Ecuador and putting the AI greenhouse resources into developing software instead makes way more sense.
by armchairhacker | 2025-04-13 23:08:45+00:00
Wikipedia has citations so you can verify its information. An LLM with citations can also be verified, and if the citations are consistently accurate people will start to trust it.

Wikipedia has a very dedicated fact-checking team who try to enforce accuracy, and (at least for non-political articles) most agree they do very well. Perhaps someone will develop a reliable automated fact-checker, then it can be applied to LLM output to “bless” it or point out the mistakes.
by sdesol | 2025-04-13 23:08:59+00:00
This reads like it could result in "the blind, leading the blind". Unless the Supervisor AI agents are deterministic, it can still be a crapshoot. Given the resources that SourceGraph has, I'm still surprised they missed the most obvious thing, which is "context is king" and we need tooling that can make adding context to LLMs dead simple. Basically, we should be optimizing for the humans in the loop.

Agents have their place for trivial and non-critical fixes/features, but the reality is, unless the agents can act in a deterministic manner across LLMs, you really are coding with a loaded gun. The worst is, agents can really dull your senses over time.

I do believe in a future where we can trust agents 99% of the time, but the reality is, we are not training on the thought process, for this to become a reality. That is, we are not focused on the conversation to code training data. I would say 98% of my code is AI generated, and it is certainly not vibe coding. I don't have a term for it, but I am literally dictating to the LLM what I want done and have it fill in the pieces. Sometimes it misses the mark, sometimes it aligns and sometimes it introduces whole new ideas that I have never thought of, which will lead to a better solution. The instructions that I provide is based on my domain knowledge and I think people are missing the mark when they talk about vibe coding, in a professional context.

Full Disclosure: I'm working on improving the "conversation to code" process, so my opinions are obviously biased, but I strongly believe we need to first focus on better capturing our thought process.
by immibis | 2025-04-13 23:09:16+00:00
Isn't that the point of equity compensation? I don't care about owning a percentage of the company - that just sounds complicated. I care about converting it into cash later. To compensate for the small chance that will be able to happen, you better make it seem like a lot more cash than the alternative cash compensation you're offering. The upside to you is that you don't have to pay that bundle of cash for a while, and you only have to pay it if you have it. And not you personally, but all investors indirectly.
by genewitch | 2025-04-13 23:09:56+00:00
while researching this i discovered another fast fp64 card is the R9 280x by amd/ati. although the memory is weak, only 3GB! But i suppose if you need the numerical accuracy, there's always that, and those cards are like $40 (in the us, on ebay, sold listings), compared to $400 for the titan. if you need 4x the ram though i guess you're stuck paying 10x the price!
by yongjik | 2025-04-13 23:10:21+00:00
Young people will take less financial risks, because if your bet does not pay off and you lose all your money, you starve. Which means less purchase, fewer companies founded, less demand for existing companies, and worse economy.

Even worse, some young people will still take financial risks, their bets do not pay off, and they become the penniless old, who only have their own kids to look after them. These young people are now stacked with debt, having to pay off money they've never even seen. Again, worse economy, and more misery.

In the long term, society is shaped by its people. If enough people decide "I'll take care of myself, and others should do the same," then that's the society you get - one mistake or accident and your life is ruined. There's your personal responsibility, choose wisely.
by aeonik | 2025-04-13 23:10:26+00:00
Hmm, My comment wasn't a prediction, it's just an observation on my personal experience.

I find the opportunity for improvement exciting, and I'm optimistic for the future.

Like, statistically most software I've seen written, didn't need to be done. There were better ways, or it was already solved, and it was a knowledge or experience gap, or often a not invented here syndrome.

The main thing that frustrates me these days, is trying to do things better doesn't generally align with the quarterly mentality.
by wrs | 2025-04-13 23:11:21+00:00
There are plenty of valid scenarios where the company sells for a lot, but less than it raised. And 1x preferences are no longer standard post-ZIRP, afaik.

People are often not aware that the value of common is nonlinear, so the value of 0.5% in this case is zero. (For the ML fans out there, the common price per share has one or more ReLU activation layers. :) )
by TrapLord_Rhodo | 2025-04-13 23:11:26+00:00
One web needs ground based gateways, which isn't really an option in warzones. These gateways will be immediately targeted. The only option is to used space based lasers for relay. Of which, spaceX is the only entity on the planet with this technology.

Love or hate Elon, he's been able to turn himself into a very powerful figure on the world stage through technology alone. If you think him having complete control over Starlink is a national security risk, he's just getting started.

Unfortunately with European employement laws, I don't see them being able to compete. If you tried, you’d face fines, lawsuits, and maybe even criminal penalties for making your employees work the 80+ hour weeks that Elon requires from all of his companies.

Europe craves work life balance, Elon craves technological power. He's convinced some smart people their life is the company. Europe just doesn't have that culture, and it's mandated by law that you can't have that culture.
by int_19h | 2025-04-13 23:12:03+00:00
I can confirm that it was the same for the USSR. There was a "blessed" corpus of Western authors, and this actually did include a lot of sci-fi as well.

Asimov is one prominent case because the translators had to figure out how to deal with his obviously Jewish name at the time when that became a red flag. This is why it's traditionally transcribed phonetically as Айзек rather than the more straightforward Исаак.
by johncalvinyoung | 2025-04-13 23:12:16+00:00
Not a typical orange. “Sumo Citrus” / dekopon / shiranui is a hybrid tangor/tangerine cross. Very fragile, specialty fruit, only recently available at scale in the eastern US. This is on the high end per-fruit but I’ve seen higher. I usually buy in cases at ~$1.25 per fruit.
by yuppiemephisto | 2025-04-13 23:12:23+00:00
> I’d rather have the language …

check out Lean 4 then. Its syntax system is based on Racket but —instead of parens— implements stuff like [JSX syntax](https://github.com/leanprover-community/ProofWidgets4/blob/d...) and a [maze](https://github.com/dwrensha/lean4-maze)
by defrost | 2025-04-13 23:12:27+00:00
China is the largest manufacturing hub on the planet and exports globally. At 14% or so the US is certainly their largest direct customer.

China has essentially stated it believes it can belt tighten and go forward with the rest of the world as customers longer than the US can go forward without direct imports from China, should the US eventually get its manufacturing back on track, so be it.
by PaulKeeble | 2025-04-13 23:13:26+00:00
Its a symbiotic relationship, we don't survive without them and they don't survive without animals that spread their seeds and provide the CO2. Life is interlinked in this way in a huge number of things we can't separate ourselves from nature both the impact we have had in changing the biodiversity and in the necessity of that biodiversity providing this diverse range of plants and animals. Its why its so heartbreaking we are wiping out species at a rate never seen before and causing a mass extinction event which might include us if we keep up at this increasing rate of damage.
by kiritanpo | 2025-04-13 23:14:02+00:00
This appears to be LLM generated and full of hallucinations.

1. Aaron Swartz’s last blog post is a review of the movie The Dark Knight. No entry on his blog has the title "Goodbye, Dr. Spencer".

2. The quote is not present at all in the linked note.

3. The link is wrong, should be: https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rdriley/487/papers/Thompson_1984_Ref...

4. and 5. are simply extremely generic quotes without any valid source. "Programmers crying in despair" GitHub repo does not exist.
by i_hate_moomins | 2025-04-13 23:14:07+00:00
Light hearted? Suitable for small children? Are you kidding me.

I'm in my mid-30's and still remember nightmares those stupid series gave me when I was in kindergarten. It was X-Files-tier scary ("The X Files" being other show aired by polish TV around same time), masquarading behind cute animations. How can anyone in their right mind call the episode where the Moomintroll swaps bodies with Stinky lighthearted and positive? What about the collection of monsters like Groke or Hattifnats? On some occasion I remember my parents would call me to get out from my room to watch the "wieczorynka" and I would pretend I can't hear and come out only as I hear the outro song starting, just to avoid whatever insane plot the Moomins would bring on me that time. I hate Moomins so much and wish could erase it from existence. Calling it "cute and happy" is like saying candybar with razorblade inside is delicious; technically true but not exactly an accurate description.
by olokobayusuf | 2025-04-13 23:15:23+00:00
When we trace Python code, devs have to explicitly opt-in dependency modules to tracing. Specifically, the `@compile` decorator has a `trace_modules` parameter which is a `list[types.ModuleType]`.

With this in place, when we trace through a dev's function, a given function call is considered a leaf node unless the function's containing module is in `trace_modules`. This covers the Python stdlib.

We then take all leaf nodes, lookup their equivalent implementation in native code (written and validated by us), and use that native implementation for codegen.

We don't interact with the GIL. And we keep track of what is unsupported so far: https://docs.fxn.ai/predictors/requirements#language-coverag...
by Dwedit | 2025-04-13 23:16:20+00:00
Warning, always convert your colors to from sRGB to Linear RGB before doing any math on them, then convert them back to sRGB afterwards for displaying them.

sRGB is the familiar color space you all know and love, it's what your display uses, and it's what has those RGB numbers between 0 and 255. But it's not a linear color space.

First think of values as being between 0 and 1 instead of 0 and 255. To change sRGB to Linear, do X^2.2 (close to squaring the value). To change Linear back to sRGB, do X^(1/2.2) (close to a square root).

In Linear RGB, a value of 0.5 is halfway between black and white. You can put a stripe or checkerboard pattern next to the color value, and it will appear to be the same brightness. But in sRGB, a value of 0.5 is much darker. Linear RGB of 0.5 is roughly equivalent to sRGB of 0.73.

The actual method of conversion involves a complicated curve that isn't continuous, using X^2.2 is still an approximation.