MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by calf | 2025-04-24 23:18:37+00:00
That carryover is because Turing machines and Lambda calculi are equivalent models of computation, and not because "busy beaver" is some special concept. It's a function whose definition is about computational phenomena, so there's a version of it for any Turing-equivalent concept (like lambda, or Post Correspondence, or the Recursive Functions)

So there should be no confusion there, the "big four models of computation" are all equivalent and we first encounter/learn this in undergrad TCS class.
by sargstuff | 2025-04-24 23:21:09+00:00
Very open ended questions. Geeks for Geeks loosely organized around computer science topics of study : https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/

nit-pick details:

Ignoring hardware differences, "performance" comparisons can be based on differences between algorithm(s) used vs. how algorithm is implimented. For a given language, "algorithm implimentation performance" can be defined as the trade-offs on how a a given algorithm is implimented in a language (compared to other programming languages, but also easy use/flexibility based on 'language generation level -> https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/generation-programming-languag... )

----------------------

1) General computation language specialty 'modules' not withstanding; "languages" are built/optimised around core algorithmic concepts / anticipated area/concentration of targeted professional environment. aka opencl (gpu), R (statistics), Lisp (engineering design), C (OS level), sql (data selection), jasper reports, cobol (business), etc. Languages tend to be 'popular' because of the ecosystem provided around/for a given language.

snarky side note -> can always write a more standard language that compiles to an esolang & provide appropriate emacs/vim/sed/spacemacs ide support.: https://esolangs.org/wiki/Main_Page

LLM's are very useful at curating information and recognizing/summarizing "statisical" relevance. aka apl is great for engineering mind set, not so good for business use cases aka cobal. LLM might recognize a language for a given user that combines commonly used 'apl' aspecs of user and commonly used 'cobal' aspecs of user and recommend a language(s) with suitable commonalities for given user.

2) Search engine topic 'coding challenges' 'algorithmic coding challenges' brings up many types of answers/sites for honing one's coding skills (various languages, beginner to expert, etc). Coding 'algorithms' vs. coming up with algorithm(s) to code is sort of a side aspect. Also differences in 'competition' challenges vs. 'technical challenges' (aka 512 c64 vs. 1 raspberry pi) ; vs. "computer science coding challenges" vs. 'computational genomic challenges'

?? how easy / hard based on 'profession' aka artist vs. software designer 20 years experience programming in scheme; environment -- NASA vs. google vs. insurance company. ?? from scratch : https://synoptek.com/insights/it-blogs/10-challenges-every-software-product-developer-faces/ ?? based on industry standards ?? ; just trying to keep skills honed ??
by Kon-Peki | 2025-04-24 23:21:25+00:00
You can buy and sell them just like stocks.

But each one has a maturity date. If you still own it on that date, it goes away and you get your $1000 deposited into your account, which you can use to buy a new one. Or not.

If all you own are the bills, that means that none of them will last a long time before they turn into cash - they aren’t as risky (if you think owning US Treasuries are risky).

A Treasury bill matures in 1 year or less from when it was issued. A Treasury note is more than 1 year but up to and including 10 years. Treasury bonds are anything more than 10 years.
by paxys | 2025-04-24 23:21:50+00:00
Shitty move (as expected from Microsoft) but I don't see the bigger issue. The beauty of open source is that you can always roll back to a version that did work. Of course continued developement and support from there on is your problem, but Microsoft never owed that to you anyways. Cursor, Codium and all the other VS Code forks have unlimited VC funding and are worth tens of billions of dollars combined. They can afford to contribute back to the ecosystem.
by Guthur | 2025-04-24 23:21:50+00:00
I think ultimately we're mostly just not as clever as we think we are, which I think unfortunately we must accept.

Where this has become increasingly problematic is rampant materialism and corporatism.

If the only real motivator in town, especially for the powerful, is material gain then there is nothing to constrain wanton greed. This becomes even more pronounced with corporations because their overtly stated purpose is not but greed, so even if the individual actors have some transcend moral compass they will be in conflict to their programmed imperative to "do their job".

Currently many of the powerful are materialistic and materialism can bring worldly power. Other political paradigms may come to the fore but as it takes a form and gravity it will likely come into some dialectic conflict with the prevailing materialistic status quo. That may be a peaceful resolution, but I'd not be certain of that.
by karaterobot | 2025-04-24 23:22:18+00:00
I just checked, and my old standby, "create an image of 12 black squares" is still not something GPT-4o can do. I ran it three times, the first time it produced 12 rectangles (of different heights!), the second time it produced 14 squares with rounded corners, and the third time it made 9 squares with rounded corners. It's getting better though, compared to 3.5.
by feoren | 2025-04-24 23:22:52+00:00
The fact that Turing machines are abstract and infinite is a simplification. Turing machines are an attempt to create the simplest possible model of "computation", without compromising on what "computation" means. It's a way to prove statements about the nature of computation, that's all. A model of computation that is finite, concrete, and/or physical is less useful because it contains unnecessary details that are secondary to the nature of computation. If you're not trying to prove fundamental things about computation, you probably never need to care about Turing machines.

Most cases where infinity is invoked are done to simplify things. Forget whether infinity exists in the real world or not: ask only whether it's useful. After all, does the number 17 really exist? All models are wrong; some models are useful.
by bob1029 | 2025-04-24 23:23:10+00:00
> distributed software system

What if the business demands a certain level of serialized transaction throughput that is incompatible with ideas like paxos?

You will never beat one fast machine at a serialized narrative, and it just so happens that most serious businesses require these semantics.

How much does downtime cost you per hour? What are the consequences if your services become unavailable?
by anon7000 | 2025-04-24 23:23:54+00:00
It's tradeoffs all the way down. VSCode remains one of the best intro editors, because it's free, has next to zero learning curve, and a robust extension ecosystem. I mean, what even is the argument here? That it's not completely open in every possible way? Do we feel so strongly about the heaps of paid IDEs that are completely closed source?
by ACS_Solver | 2025-04-24 23:24:16+00:00
Yes, there are few reasons to go to a Swedish bank branch, and they've been closing branches, too. Almost everything is done online - really goes for most things in Sweden, not just banks.

You don't even visit a branch to become a customer as long as you have an account with some other bank, which gives you BankID, a digital ID/signature system that's ubiquitous in Sweden. I have accounts with three Swedish banks. Of those, one doesn't have physical locations to visit, and a second I never visited. It's surely been ten years since I went to the third, my main bank, in person, and the branch office I went to closed years ago. Looking it up, my main bank only has one office left in the city, it's only open for three hours a day and requires a prior appointment for any services.

Cash is only handled by a few bank branches (not all banks) and even then by prior booking - cash has been pretty much gone from society for a while now. Your card gets sent to you by postal mail. If you need to talk to someone at the bank, they'll suggest telephone or video calls, and will only see you in person as a last resort. Safe deposit boxes have also been largely discontinued as a service.
by elashri | 2025-04-24 23:24:18+00:00
At least I know one alternative that is on bar (even better according to some people) for the C++ MS extension. What I am worried more about is the Jupyter Notebook MS extensions. I cannot find a suitable alternative and sometimes I am not being able to use it on windsurf/VSCodium (manually installing vsix). I am surprised by that taking into consideration how Jupyter notebooks relevance in data science and ML.
by benoau | 2025-04-24 23:24:34+00:00
Functionally all any of these companies want is faster work for a fraction of the cost, and since they are dependent on conforming to this plan for the sake of investment you should start considering your future employment.

The lack of roadmap etc, welcome to the wall between technical lead and executive. They have a roadmap, you do not get to see it. I mean you might survive, but they're probably going to reduce their dev headcount significantly and offshore most of them too.
by m463 | 2025-04-24 23:25:29+00:00
I kind of wonder if without this, results would be minimal.

What if your amazon search for neoprene shorts said: "there are only 3 available in your size, all only available in plaid."

What if netflix told you: "you watched all the good scifi movies"

but we could dream right?

I would love for the amazon search results to have sidebar checkboxes that had a 3-way toggle.

Like if you searched for an air purifier and one of the features was wifi. It would be great if you could leave it alone, toggle it to check it (with wifi), or toggle it again to X it (without wifi)

would be great to search for dumb tvs
by arrosenberg | 2025-04-24 23:26:32+00:00
I won't discount you here, because two of the best marriages in my circle were from dating apps (albeit back when they were more useful, like 2013-2014), but far more of them are based on what I said - regular interactions, lots of small talk, and time to develop closeness. It takes longer, it's less efficient, but it gets results and I don't think dating apps are really doing it any more - it certainly didn't for me.
by paulcole | 2025-04-24 23:27:18+00:00
Read the comment I was replying to closely:

> If you want to make friends and meet a partner you need to join groups

"Need" is obviously not true. I generally agree that it is mostly true for friends but I strongly disagree that it is mostly true for romantic partners.

> people have been finding mates for hundreds of thousands of years before apps

People have been doing tons of things before apps. Eating, moving themselves from point a to point b, buying things, etc. I'm not sure your point here.

> Apps are a crutch (and imo a bad one, at that).

Why specifically is this crutch bad?

You would never say that accountants were keeping books for hundreds of years before spreadsheets and that spreadsheets (or Quickbooks or Xero or whatever) are a crutch (and a bad one at that).
by cafard | 2025-04-24 23:28:29+00:00
Do you know the expression "Speaking to Buncombe"? If not, it might be worth looking up.

Also, do you know anyone who watches Congress on C-SPAN? I live in Washington, DC, which is full of the politically obsessed--there are at least two lobbyists on my block--and I have never since the beginning of C-SPAN heard anyone refer to anything heard on C-SPAN.
by ponorin | 2025-04-24 23:28:46+00:00
> it's already free software

I'd just like to interject here for a moment. The word Free Software has a specific meaning that AOSP does not meet. The only component of AOSF that is Free Software is the Kernel, due to GPL, and aside from low-level Android-specific modules such as binder there's no secret sauce in Android kernels; even the vendor modifications are mostly gutted out in favour of Project Treble and GKI. Everything else is only Open Source and not Free Software, and even then developed privately and only published upon release. Because nobody releases a pure AOSP phone (Google Play Services alone changes the OS behaviour dramatically, punching through all the usual app sandboxes) and the source code for the modification, it's effectively proprietary with open source components.
by dataflow | 2025-04-24 23:29:47+00:00
> I couldn't stomach the TikTok-ification

This seems like such a bizarre thing to put your finger on in the middle of an otherwise seemingly sincere post. Of all the hatred people have had toward Facebook the past > decade, I don't think "it's too much like TikTok" was the cause that has kept them up at night. If anything there are a ton of people who would much rather TikTok could be replaced by Facebook, so that at least the national security implications would be less dire in their eyes.

But yeah:

> But I worked at a company and drew a considerable salary

nice to admit what everybody knew. With the kind of compensation Facebook gave, I doubt many would've behaved differently.
by gerdesj | 2025-04-24 23:30:04+00:00
"Since 2015, depressed, isolated, romantically unsuccessful nerdy young guys have regularly been emailing me, asking me for sympathy, support, or even dating advice."

You can be a bit of a well meaning dick (for the US or wanker for en_*), or you can do the right thing.

You do not paint "them" as you have done already. That's not helpful and can only be noted as "victim kicking".

You should point them towards people or organisations that can help or do or say nothing which is better than being unintentionally sarcastically unpleasant.

I am a fan of Scott A and will continue to be but this blog is not the best.

Knowing when to say nothing is just as important as saying something.
by dvt | 2025-04-24 23:30:05+00:00
> Why specifically is this crutch bad?

The data speaks for itself: people are reporting being lonelier than ever, sexlessness is up for both men and women, birth rates are down. These apps are predatory, etc., etc. I wrote a blog post about it a few years ago[1]. Approaching women in the wild is more fun, more natural, and more in line with our biological imperatives. Comparing dating apps with Excel is, imo, a category error.

[1] https://dvt.name/2020/02/24/rfc-lets-disrupt-dating-apps/
by stordoff | 2025-04-24 23:30:37+00:00
GPT-4o claims "This implies she did not pay the full $20. The total cost of the balls and bats she has is less than $20, but she still has items worth up to $20.", then bruteforces an 'answer' of "Balls = 25 Bats = 13".

It also managed to get the prices of the ball/bat wrong, presumably because it's using the more typical riddle:

> Ball = x dollars

> Bat = x + $0.05 (since it’s 5 cents more than the ball)

https://chatgpt.com/share/680ac88c-22d4-8011-b642-0397a01ec3...
by wolfgang42 | 2025-04-24 23:32:07+00:00
Linking to ChatGPT as a “source” is unhelpful, since it could well have made that up too. However, with a bit of digging, I have confirmed that the information it copied from Wikipedia here is correct, though the AP and Spokane Times citations are both derivative sources; Mr. Thomas’s comments were first published in the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle, on July 11, 1988: https://democratandchronicle.newspapers.com/search/results/?...
by hayst4ck | 2025-04-24 23:32:27+00:00
If I am willing to pay 10% more for a locally made product, then a 10% tariff has no effect on me assuming that the local company has non colluding local competitors, likewise if I am not willing to pay an 85% tariff, then an 85% tariff, which is what it would take to be locally competitive according to this, would make a product I want to buy 85% more expensive or un-purchasable.

These tariffs are somewhat about consent/mandate, nationalism, and economic policy and this story aims to be a data point, although I'm not really clear what the author wants people to conclude.
by isaacremuant | 2025-04-24 23:33:03+00:00
Just because the article runs a bad experiment it doesn't mean it's conclusion is better than the critics of said experiment.

Otherwise, if I do a shitty survey and you critique it mine is better than yours because "I did something"

Every PowerPoint think tank will beat you like that.

Next time engage with a little more honesty and you might have a chance
by anthomtb | 2025-04-24 23:33:27+00:00
If you are a Reddit user r/MaliciousCompliance is full of stories* of people follow orders to the most exacting and absurd extent. Most of them are peon-level folks so I am not sure how those actions would map to a person in a position of real power.

*fact vs embellished fact vs straight fiction is always questionable on Reddit.
by karaterobot | 2025-04-24 23:33:38+00:00
> With this approach, everybody wants fentanyl.

One difference that may possibly affect the strength of your argument is that fentanyl is a physically addictive drug. Social media may be "addictive" but they aren't addictive. If you genuinely believe they're equivalent, use social media for a year, and fentanyl for a year, and see which is easier to quit.

Actually, scratch that: make it a thought experiment. But if you can see that they aren't equivalent, you can see that it's not a good comparison.
by solardev | 2025-04-24 23:33:39+00:00
Welcome. I would love to hear other perspectives too, though, especially positive ones.

Sorry I didn't say this earlier, but I think the other devs on my team do like Basecamp (or at least haven't complained about it?). They've been using it for even longer than me, since before I joined, and I don't really hear any issues about it.

Maybe I'm just super picky or old-fashioned, I dunno.
by lxe | 2025-04-24 23:34:40+00:00
Sonnet 3.7:

> tell me about the marathon crater I'd be happy to tell you about Marathon Crater. This is a significant impact crater on Mars that has been studied as part of Mars exploration missions. Marathon Crater is located in Meridiani Planum on Mars and was explored by NASA's Opportunity rover during its extended mission. The crater is named after Marathon, a town in Texas, following the naming convention of using Earth locations for features in Meridiani Planum.... etc etc
by TheNewsIsHere | 2025-04-24 23:34:52+00:00
That is a challenging balancing act, although worth it to work on mastering.

Technology is a particularly difficult place to balance those things.

When we opened our small business we took the marketing approach that (not the exact pitch) we “bring the best of enterprise” with the “agility” of not being an enterprise.

We don’t market like that anymore because it’s not a good fit for small business customers, but we still have a focus on that idea internally.

Balancing that with the realities of a small business are hard. For example, we have internally managed 3-2-1 backups of almost all customer data, replicated geographically, and persisted with credentials that can’t also mutate backup data. That is somewhat time consuming to manage on the front end.

I’ve written on HN before about how we suffered with QuickBooks and eventually moved to an ERP. Most businesses our size would scoff at that, but some things are worth the expense to integrate various processes into a single pipeline.

Part of the problem for SMBs is that you can’t scale your humans like you can scale your servers. So for every hour I spent connecting the dots, sending DocuSigns, and fighting with QB was an hour I couldn’t spend on product/service/customer. Sometimes you can buy your way out of that. Sometimes you can engineer your way out of that. Figuring out which is which is one of the hardest parts.
by kstrauser | 2025-04-24 23:35:33+00:00
> All I need is a Github Copilot clone

I'm using https://github.com/copilot-emacs/copilot.el

> good code search feature.

project-find-regexp is a nice start.

> Oh and automatic reloads of open but unchanged buffers when switching between git branches.

(global-auto-revert-mode t)

> Oh and the ssh remote extension.

I haven't compared it to Tramp.
by bryanlarsen | 2025-04-24 23:36:04+00:00
> All I need is a Github Copilot clone

or you could just use copilot through copilot.el

> and a good code search feature.

Like through helm or ivy?

> Oh and automatic reloads of open but unchanged buffers when switching between git branches.

My emacs does that, and I don't think I did anything special to get it.

> Oh and the ssh remote extension.

like tramp?
by thorum | 2025-04-24 23:36:36+00:00
I think realistic simulations of social interactions would help many people - by providing a low pressure environment for socially awkward people to practice the skills you mentioned, before putting themselves out there in groups etc. - but realism is an absolute requirement. No current AI will do that for you, they are not good at roleplaying realistic humans, and they’re too nice.

If you want a “practice date” to give you useful training that transfers to real life, your conversation partner needs to react to you just like a human would. Including negative reactions (not liking you, thinking you’re weird, faking a call from a friend to escape mid-conversation, and so on). But if you could make an AI that did all that, and it could also give you the sort of actionable feedback that is hard to get from humans, I think that has potential.
by acidburnNSA | 2025-04-24 23:37:52+00:00
My mom's area in northern Michigan got hit by a huge ice storm last month that took out hundreds of power lines and cable/internet. Facebook was the primary way the community communicated during the 5-15 day power outage. That was extremely valuable. There are a few special topic groups that are still great as well. Other than that rare situation it's been a desert.
by aoanevdus | 2025-04-24 23:38:08+00:00
In pure math at a school like Harvard, the standout kids like the ones in that quote are probably trying to become tenured math professors. There are very few such positions available. You can shoot for the stars, and if you succeed, make about the same as the average software engineer. More likely, get stuck a postdoc. So most students give up pure math at some point. If you realized you weren’t cut out for it in freshman year, you got a head start over the people who got a math phd before finding out the hard way.

This pressure didn’t exist in computer science because there were plenty of tech jobs for anyone competent (not sure if that’s still true in 2025). And you didn’t need to be a genius to build something cool.
by benoau | 2025-04-24 23:39:00+00:00
1. Remove from future API versions

2. Identify customers still using old API

3. Identify the active customers still conducting business

4. Send the active customers a migration strategy advising they update this year

5. 3 months later, set a deadline of 6 months to update

6. Send frequent reminders as deadline approaches

7. Put a 'wall' in the dashboard requiring remaining customers update before they can enter reports etc

8. 3 months later remove deprecated API and freeze accounts still using them
by boogieknite | 2025-04-24 23:39:39+00:00
here's a callous question: will it ever get to a tipping point where major businesses bail on react? is it already happening?

asking specifically because our backend is pretty much just esri and were heavily considering porting all of our web products to experience builder because of how robust it is these days. experience builder is on react, which sucks imo, but would be helpful to avoid getting the rug pulled on us
by brianmurphy | 2025-04-24 23:39:42+00:00
It's funny you say science requires a lot of honesty and trust, then point at what happened in the past 5 years.

Very few people believe "safe and effective" was telling the truth when it neither stopped someone from getting sick or from passing the virus on to other people. Now the lack of trust is spilling over into other v's that have been effective in eradicating past ailments like polio and measles. The "scientists" have no one to blame but themselves.