MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by klabb3 | 2025-04-20 00:59:05+00:00
> If you desperately need guaranteed money, don't build an app expecting it to sell; get a job.

Technically true but a bit of perspective might help. The consumer market is distorted by free (as in beer) apps that does a bunch of shitty things that should in many cases be illegal or require much more informed consent than today, like tracking everything they can. Then you have VC funded ”free” as well, where the end game is to raise prices slowly to boil the frog. Then you have loss leaders from megacorps, and a general anti-competitive business culture.

Plus, this is not just in the Wild West shady places, like the old piratebay ads. The top result for ”timer” on the App Store (for me) is indeed a timer app, but with IAP of $800/y subscription… facilitated by Apple Inc, who gets 15-30% of the bounty.

Look, the point is it’s almost impossible to break into consumer markets because everyone else is a predator. It’s a race to the bottom, ripping off clueless customers. Everyone would benefit from a fairer market. Especially honest developers.
by borski | 2025-04-20 00:59:39+00:00
No, please don’t misunderstand me. My goal wasn’t to mischaracterize your viewpoint, but to point out what I thought was a bad argument.

I do not need a PhD in Accessibility Studies to know that the same tones and messages were played as normal, plus the message from “Elon” or “Bill”

Even the hearing aid connectivity was left intact; my dad has one.

So no, I don’t have an intimate knowledge of the field. And I don’t think you need one for this discussion.
by AndrewGaspar | 2025-04-20 01:00:43+00:00
What you want isn't really "output C++ code that is pedantically equivalent to this Fortran code but with the array indexing fixed up", it's usually more like "translate this Fortran module into something that I can offload to a GPU using CUDA/ROCm/etc. with the same high level semantics, but GPU-friendly low level optimizations", and the exact composition of those low level bits probably don't look exactly like a loop-by-loop translation.
by econ | 2025-04-20 01:01:04+00:00
The worse part of tiktok, like much of the web, is that it clips up your attention span into such tiny chunks that the consumer can NEVER feel the joy of thinking or talking. You can never voyage into someone else's mind deep enough to bee truly terrified or blown away, never see how they are fundamentally different from you nor why. All other complaints are a mere distraction by comparison.
by K0balt | 2025-04-20 01:01:30+00:00
Unless you live in the USA, in which case that sound meter now costs X+$100 if it gets here before June, x+$200 if it gets here in june or later lol.

But that’s fine, you can get an American made one for about ….hmm. Can’t seem to find one actually made in the USA that doesn’t say “contact us for a quote” or something like that.

I’m all for repatriating manufacturing, and a good plan might very well involve tariffs rolled in progressively over several years, giving businesses a predictable time table to shift supply chains and invest in manufacturing capacity to fill those gaps.

But all that has happened is the price of American innovation just went through the roof for small companies and startups, while big businesses will barely be affected because the cost of gadgets and parts is negligible as a fraction of their R&D budget. For many startups it’s nearly 100 percent.

Chaos is not good for business and multiplies risks at their root, which gets magnified by orders of magnitude in financial terms when looking at investment and finance.

100:1 bets with 1000:1 odds just becomes 100:1 bets with 100:1 odds, a bet no longer worth taking.

Sad.
by CommenterPerson | 2025-04-20 01:02:00+00:00
Compare learning math to learning to bicycle. There is some some sweat and struggle that needs to be put in, before one "gets it". After this it can become enjoyable. I encouraged my daughter with practice exercises from a young age, but tried to avoid making it a drudge. She built up confidence and did well with it. She is also very hands on creative. She decided to study engineering and is working towards her PhD.
by vlovich123 | 2025-04-20 01:02:11+00:00
Converting a QLC chip into an SLC is not planned obsolescence. It’s a legitimate tradeoff after analyzing the marketplace that existing MTBF write lifetimes are within acceptable consumer limits and consumers would rather have more storage.

Edit: and to preempt the “but make it an option”. That requires support software they may not want to build and support requests from users complaining that toggling SLC mode lost all the data or toggling QLC mode back on did similarly. It’s a valid business decision to not support that kind of product feature.
by pazimzadeh | 2025-04-20 01:02:14+00:00
> Death isn’t a state of being. It is the absence of being. When something dies, it ceases to be

Huh? What about things that were never alive? They never existed?

> strictly speaking, when something dies, what we are left with is not a body, as only a living thing is or has a body, but the remains of what was once alive

Strictly speaking, you're confidently guessing at something you don't know and have no way of knowing.

That said, thank you for introducing me to Giordano Bruno, his ideas seems very interesting and worth thinking about
by bolognafairy | 2025-04-20 01:02:24+00:00
Yep. This is what the vast majority of “maybe later”s are about. I’ve seen decisions being made based on this fact, and I’ve seen users worried about an irreversible fork in the road.

There are of course cases where “maybe later” does legitimately mean “we’re going to ask you again in a week”. I see those myself, and I hate them.
by zamadatix | 2025-04-20 01:04:10+00:00
The article states as much but to sum it all up as just that is leaving most of the good stuff out.

Perhaps the most interesting part of the experiment series has been just how much longer these cheap drives with tons of writes have been lasting compared to the testing requirements (especially with so much past write endurance on the one just now starting to exhibit trouble). Part of the impetus for the series seemed to be lots of claims on how quickly to expect massive problems without any actual experimental tests of consumer drives to actually back it up. Of course n=4 with 1 model of 1 brand drives but it's taken ~20x longer than some common assumptions to start seeing problems on a drive at 5x its endurance rating.
by sightbroke | 2025-04-20 01:04:24+00:00
I'm not disagreeing with you.

Just an observation though:

There seems to be a world in software where "it works" well enough to grow a large user base to achieve a a large valuation and then dip out is also a viable option.

Growing/evolving the code does not matter because the product no longer matters after the founders have made a large sum of money.
by philwelch | 2025-04-20 01:05:37+00:00
Actually it's not that hard. The main legal avenue to invalidate the Biden pardons would be to argue that Biden never actually issued the pardons. He didn't sign them (the autopen did) and given his mental state there's no clear evidence that he was even aware of them. Trump, in contrast, routinely signs executive orders and pardons with news cameras in the Oval Office with him, while chatting with journalists. So it would be hard to argue that Trump was not the one actually issuing them.
by elijahwright | 2025-04-20 01:05:56+00:00
My favorite places as a kid were libraries - they provided the opportunity for exposure and enrichment that I would have otherwise lacked. They are so much oh-holy-shit important, especially if you want to advance beyond the means of whatever dinky little town you happen to live in. I am significantly different and better because I had access to lots of materials to read - not money, just access. I owe very much to a school librarian and a town librarian in Wilkes county NC - they absolutely changed my life for the better. If I thought they might still be living I would love to tell them so. (Each of them would be over 100 years old now…)
by diggernet | 2025-04-20 01:06:06+00:00
> Where did Andrej say it was "the future of software engineering"? He very clearly described vibe coding as an entertaining way to hack on throwaway weekend projects.

... And then a few weeks later, my boss' boss scolded the team for not having heard of the term, and told us to learn and use vibe coding because it's the future.
by nebula8804 | 2025-04-20 01:07:10+00:00
First of all there are population centers there but I guess if you look at a night picture they aren't large at this time: https://www.census.gov/library/visualizations/2000/geo/popul...

(Keep in mind that picture was taken when the US has 58 million less people or 17% smaller than today)

But we also have to understand that the US continent could grow to a billion people and still only have the density of France. That is not a matter of lack of land, its a matter of political will.

There have been attempts to push this idea: https://ui.charlotte.edu/story/why-not-1-billion-americans-o...

Anyway given that the land is sparsely populated it is still a fair comparison: When you have such a small population but access to such abundant resources that few others have on the planet, you are going to end up in a scenario like what the US has now.
by Loughla | 2025-04-20 01:07:43+00:00
Like I said. Yes I did and they said I failed, just like my cop friend told me they would. They were just using it to try to get me to confess.

Subsequently, it's your answers that are admissable in court, not the results. If you're ever given a polygraph, they will ask you to lie on a question or two "as a baseline." Refuse to do that. They will use it against you.
by achierius | 2025-04-20 01:08:06+00:00
> Saying that Andrej Karpathy is "an AI researcher, but not a software engineer" isn't a very credible statement.

Broadly I agree with the two other replies: his 'day job' has not been coding in some time, so I would put him in the same bucket as e.g. a manager who got promoted out of writing code 5-10 years ago. I do want to understand where you're coming from here -- do you think that's a fair characterization?
by searealist | 2025-04-20 01:09:19+00:00
Here the first sentence of Third-wave coffee's wikipedia page:

> Third-wave coffee is a term primarily in the United States coffee industry emphasizing higher quality, single-origin farms and light roast to bring out distinctive flavors.

I also strongly suspect your definition of "decently dark" is still below a medium roast. If not, I would be interested if you could cite a "decently dark" roast you have tried from a third-wave coffee shop.
by nebula8804 | 2025-04-20 01:09:32+00:00
The point of excluding inhabited ice regions is not due to lack of population its due to lack of potential developable land. My point is to put yourself in American shoes when they developed after WW2, there was so much abundance of developable land, resources, and wealth plus this new automobile coming onto the scene, it was natural that it was going to develop the way it did.
by pyfon | 2025-04-20 01:09:58+00:00
I had a practical use to learn this: design interview prep.

In the real world some platform team does this (or AWS) and then probably one person in that team for one week implements it. Although good for everyone to understand.

You can use it to ensure a request for a user ends up generally at the same node. If that users workload creates state (even if that is cache) then you get a performance win. By using the same server on each request.
by Loughla | 2025-04-20 01:10:05+00:00
I was summoned by a detective calling me and telling me I had to come to the station. I was 16 or 17 and didn't know any better. I'm not sure it was official, but I have no idea how that works.

Witness statements are supposed to be signed. I never even saw the reports from any of the cops I interacted with. I think they were just lying the entire time.

They told me I didn't need a lawyer if I was innocent. And because I was 16 or 17, I believed them. I'm hindsight, I would've had a lawyer immediately.

It's a fucking mess, but it's pretty standard practice at the garbage police station where I grew up. I'm assuming it's like that in more places.
by K0balt | 2025-04-20 01:10:41+00:00
I typically just use agentic frameworks to make workflows using RAG. I have done some fine tuning and LORA tunes but I find that a good model with agentic prompting handles most things with a little tweaking. I’ve not done much recently as I’ve been working on hardware for a new project, but I’ve seen some really cool new frameworks out there with computer use, memory, agentic prompting, and some new forms of document digestion that I’m excited to try if I can ever finish being distracted by supply chain chaos issues.
by nevi-me | 2025-04-20 01:11:13+00:00
I mentioned neither of the things you're shouting at me about.

> I also have some old code that's in Kotlin that I'd like to move to something else.

Something else was left unmentioned because I'm not even talking about Rust. My reference to it was that I've seen the approach before where a RAG is used to aid in translating C code, and it's an interesting thing which with more examples, might be easier to non-experts like me.

Translating languages is of great interest to various communities. I have friends stuck with a Scala codebase written by geniuses who are no longer around, and they want to move it to something else that the team is comfortable with.
by CPLX | 2025-04-20 01:12:45+00:00
Yes my argument is an appeal to authority. That’s the right approach to answering a legal question.

An appeal to authority is an excellent way to argue when the authority in question has the ability to determine and define the answer in question.

Calling a company an illegal monopoly at the ci conclusion of a trial is analogous to calling a person a convicted murderer because a court says they are.

Do you have your own definition of a kilometer too?
by AStonesThrow | 2025-04-20 01:14:15+00:00
I have no idea who may receive or read his email messages.

For a long time in the early 90s, he set no password on his accounts at MIT. Anyone could, and did, log in to rms@gnu.ai.mit.edu and it was basically a "public access system".

Richard Stallman fundamentally rejects information security principles and practices. He absolutely hates it when systems are secure and impregnable. Richard Stallman is an extremist zealot; he's extraordinarily idealistic, but his ideals themselves are unrealistic for real-world operations.

Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42256409

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23421738

The GNU Project indeed itemizes a few "known security risks" in their own FAQ: https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/efaq/Sec...
A curated blog for learning LLM internals: tokenize, attention, PE, and more
by zljdanceholic | 2025-04-20 01:15:45+00:00
I've been diving deep into the internals of Large Language Models (LLMs) and started documenting my findings. My blog covers topics like:

Tokenization techniques (e.g., BBPE)

Attention mechanism (e.g. MHA, MQA, MLA)

Positional encoding and extrapolation (e.g. RoPE, NTK-aware interpolation, YaRN)

Architecture details of models like QWen, LLaMA

Training methods including SFT and Reinforcement Learning

If you're interested in the nuts and bolts of LLMs, feel free to check it out: http://comfyai.app/

I'd appreciate any feedback or discussions!
by craigdalton | 2025-04-20 01:16:15+00:00
Anyone interested in the history of English dialects will love The Story of English, BBC 1986. Some snippets of recorded speech showing the evolution of the language and proximities.Highlights include comparing an elderly Norwegian and Yorkshireman say the same sentences and hearing the descendents of East Anglian UK emigrants to Chesapeake Bay in the USA centuries later speak with a mixed E Anglian/US accent.https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLh06URz4IJQ4aI0A-xjXOtx2O...
by testing22321 | 2025-04-20 01:18:55+00:00
> If the software has to beg you with pop ups and notifications to install or enable something, chances are that it’s not in your best interests to use it, and you don’t want it. Otherwise you would have voluntarily sought it out.

I feel strongly that thinking applies to everything in life, so I have removed all advertising from my life. Adblock on the web, no TV, no radio, no magazines, no newspapers.

When I genuinely need something I go buy it. Everything else I don’t care about.
by rchaud | 2025-04-20 01:19:09+00:00
When civilians like myself say that AI feels enormously overhyped, this is just one part of what we experience that fuels this cynical outlook. If AI was so great, it would sell on its own merits, and companies (not just Microsoft) wouldn't have to jam it in everywhere, making it an opt-out nightmare.

This article talks about Visual Studio, but Copilot is running amok across Office 365 too. Outlook now blocks screen real estate with a message begging you to use "AI Coach" to "check" your email, and Word, PowerPoint and Excel all have Copilot buttons everywhere, with automatic PowerPoint "summaries", even though I'm the sole author.
by sanderjd | 2025-04-20 01:19:26+00:00
This seems like a bit of a non-sequitur, but you also correctly guessed that I think TikTok is bad.

But I don't relate to any of the reasons you listed. I think TikTok is bad for two reasons:

1. It is controlled by the government of China, and I don't trust them to avoid influencing Americans with propaganda.

2. It is bad in the same ways as all other social media.
by rpdillon | 2025-04-20 01:21:41+00:00
I agree with your emphasis on 'as' in 'as a game engine product', and I think you're making a good point.

My worry is about 'otherwise commercialise', in cases where the ability to have fan made levels is an advertised feature, as is often the case.

But I agree that this is less of an issue than I first thought, and appreciate your explanation.
by simonw | 2025-04-20 01:23:19+00:00
It's hard-coded - this isn't a weird model thing, Claude Code detects the exact string "ultrathink" and sets the thinking token budget to 31999.

I included that de-obfuscated code in my post: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Apr/19/claude-code-best-pract...
by econ | 2025-04-20 01:23:49+00:00
I prefer to focus on the technical shortcomings.

We could have people ask for software in a more convenient way.

Not making money could be an indication the software isn't useful, but what if it is? What can the collective do in that zone?

I imagine one could ask and pay for unwritten software then get a refund if it doesn't materialize before your deadline.

Why is discovery (of many creation) willingly handed over to a hand full of mega corps?? They seem to think I want to watch and read about Trump and Elon every day.

Promoting something because it is good is a great example of a good thing that shouldn't pay.
by trollbridge | 2025-04-20 01:26:15+00:00
Well, as a parent, I’d prefer my kids not be exposed to screens at the library of all places.

We have a great deal of books in our house including ones for children but I’d like them to grow up with the curiosity had to explore the library. It’s a real pain in the neck when they have a room with cartoons in it, which kids will especially gravitate to if you limit their screen time at home (which we do).
by kmeisthax | 2025-04-20 01:26:16+00:00
P2P was practically dead on iPhone even back in 2010. The whole "don't burn the user's battery" thing precludes mobile phones doing anything with P2P other than leeching off of it. The only exceptions are things like AirDrop; i.e. locally peer-to-peer things that are only active when in use and don't try to form an overlay or mesh network that would require the phone to become a router.

And, AFAIK, you already need special permission for anything other than HTTPS to specific domains on the public Internet. That's why apps ping you about permissions to access "local devices".
by TimTheTinker | 2025-04-20 01:28:50+00:00
Have you ever seen the movie "The Island"? I'm curious what your reaction to it would be.

> If we can ever get over the societal (religious?) ick factor

I believe those kinds of "ick" factors are there for a reason - protecting us from a descent into deep dystopia or something.

Implementing new human things at scale often has unanticipated indirect negative consequences.
by godelski | 2025-04-20 01:31:55+00:00
Doesn't change the fact that the advice is still beneficial. At worst you still have a good history of the effect of these tariffs.

I'd call the tariffs the second death of hardware though. The first was when we killed all the parts stores. That was a slower death, coupled with the loss of right to repair. But we've been making big strides in that domain, so I hope we can undo that death. If we can also undo the dumb tariffs too then ironically we might have a chance to bring back hardware which somewhat seems inline with what that party (claims to/pretends to) wants.
by _bin_ | 2025-04-20 01:32:32+00:00
This is such a bad-faith reading man, I don’t know why you’re even bothering to respond. You can’t just say “well that’s eugenics” and act like that’s a sufficient reason to dismiss it. If you think it’s okay to eg have kids knowing they’ll have huntingtons or some other nasty way to die, why?

I’m not arguing that the state should forcibly implement this, which is usually the common (and legitimate) argument against this line of thinking.
by SoftTalker | 2025-04-20 01:33:38+00:00
Oh sure, I have no objection to people doing it, enough people like Starbucks coffee to keep them in business and employing people and paying taxes so it's all good in that sense. I just don't partake.

Also if I like something (e.g. Whiskey) I try to find the bargain values that are still good (e.g. Evan Williams White Label 100 Proof) rather than spending a lot more on a bottle that's marginally (if at all) better but has a name with more cachet.
by john_the_writer | 2025-04-20 01:33:39+00:00
I loved this. Though I did start with the any book any time, I faltered later when they'd pick a graphic novel for 20$, that the'd finish in the car ride home. I had to stop.. It got too expensive. (great problem to have) I had to insist on what we call "chapter books", for money reasons alone. I love graphic-novels/comics but when your kid reads 50$ of books in one sitting you've got to draw a line. Now they're both on KU.

I really loved the "let them get bored."
by ordu | 2025-04-20 01:33:53+00:00
> in the case of rotifers, if they are alive, either they are hibernating or suspended, or reanimation really is the instantiation of a new rotifer.

It is not a new rotifer. Firstly, any life is a continuation of a previous life. Tree grows from a seed, and the seed was grown on a tree. There is one likely exception of abiogenesis a few billions of years ago, but I think it will be hard to claim that roftier's reanimation is a case of abiogenesis.

Secondly, it is the same rotifer, made of the very same molecules roughly in the same places of its body. Some molecules were damaged and they are repaired, but it is the inherent property of life is the striving for homeostasis, life always do that. Cells spend ~30% of their metabolism budget on ion transport through their membranes to keep required differences in concentrations of ions between inside and outside.
by pdonis | 2025-04-20 01:37:18+00:00
Yes, but the "geometry" in question is not the geometry of spacetime, it's the geometry of spacetime plus an abstract space that's sort of "attached" to spacetime. (In the original Kaluza-Klein viewpoint, it was viewed as an extra 5th spacetime dimension, basically a circle at every point of spacetime.)

What this paper appears to be doing (although I can't make complete sense of it) is to somehow derive Maxwell's Equations (or more precisely a nonlinear generalization of them--which seems to me to mean that they aren't actually deriving electromagnetism, but let that go) as a property of the geometry of spacetime alone, without any abstract spaces or extra dimensions or anything of that sort.