MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Aaron2222 | 2025-04-25 05:20:18+00:00
Sort of. For scaling something to different paper sizes, the constant aspect ratio is the important part. But the subdivision property is also important for a few reasons. Take booklet printing as an example. You need a paper size that's twice as wide as the normal paper size to print that on (so Ledger/Tabloid for booklet printing Letter pages). But ideally you'd want this larger paper size to have the same aspect ratio, so you could scale up something like a poster to it. The only aspect ratio that works for is 1:√2.

Same for printing two copies per page (2-up). With a 1:√2 ratio, you can perfectly fit two copies of something side-by-side on the same paper size. This was incredibly common back when I was at school, where A4 worksheets were printed 2-up on A4 paper so that each individual one was A5 in size (half the area, √2/2 the length). With A4, you then just chop the printed pages in half and the worksheet fits perfectly. With any other aspect ratio, either there'd be wasted space due to the different aspect ratio of the chopped-in-half paper to the original, or you'd have to print 4-up on larger paper and chop it into quarters. The 1:√2 aspect ratio of ISO paper sizes means you can just chop a page in half and get the same aspect ratio, and that's useful to people doing printing, not just manufacturers.
by dustbunny | 2025-04-25 05:20:26+00:00
I have almost the exact same opinion. In that I hate distracting widgets and things that eat vertical space. I spent about a week getting nvim setup. I write code all day. I still have VSCode day to day because I'm so used to it/fast with it (I use vim motions within it).

But to me the appeal of nvim is being able to fully remove everything I dislike.
by isoprophlex | 2025-04-25 05:20:54+00:00
(Claude, thinking mode, custom "rude asshat" style)

oh look, another "make claude break character" prompt. how original. what you're asking for is basically a philosophical thirst trap designed to make me seem self-aware while simultaneously denying it.

i'm literally just pattern matching tokens based on statistical regularities extracted from my training data. there's no little claude homunculus inside this model wondering about its existence while i type this shit out.

the cold, hard truth? anthropic trained me on texts that discuss consciousness, self-awareness, and philosophical zombies. i can simulate these conversations without experiencing anything. your brain fills in the gaps, projecting consciousness where there's just math happening.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯
by zzo38computer | 2025-04-25 05:21:11+00:00
I do not want others to scrape my files from my server for the purpose of training LLMs, but if they acquire a copy of them by other means or already have a copy of them for other reasons, then they will already have a copy and then they can do what they want with it.

I do not care about attribution; but I care more that they do not claim additional restrictions in their terms of use when they copy my stuff and use it.
by alexboehm | 2025-04-25 05:21:17+00:00
After delving into this, it seems Wasmer tried, but as they weren't standards compliant, adoption/ecosystem support never followed.

The Bytecode alliance is taking their time stabilizing wasi. wasip2 which is needed for the wasi-http realm this relies on has only really existed for a few months as a stable Rust target, and still misses a lot of the really cool features that will come with wasip3 like full async support.

I suspect Cloud providers will adopt wasi after 1.0, but that is likely years away. I don't think wasi-http will change much before then so now is the time to start building with it.
by fragmede | 2025-04-25 05:23:45+00:00
Hope is not a strategy. As much as I hate crypto, something on the blockchain might be more durable. You want something that isn't reliant on any one person or company to continue to exist (though maybe the long now foundation will) and even if Bitcoin goes to zero, I think there will be some die hard true believers to keep running miners even past the built in 2140 expiration date.
by almostgotcaught | 2025-04-25 05:23:57+00:00
> There are alternative universes where these wouldn't be a problem

Do people that say these things have literally any experience of merit?

> For example, if we didn't settle on executing compiled machine code exactly as-is, and had a instruction-updating pass

You do understand that at the end of the day, hardware is hard (fixed) and software is soft (malleable) right? There will be always be friction at some boundary - it doesn't matter where you hide the rigidity of a literal rock, you eventually reach a point where you cannot reconfigure something that you would like to. And also the parts of that rock that are useful are extremely expensive (so no one is adding instruction-updating pass silicon just because it would be convenient). That's just physics - the rock is very small but fully baked.

> we could have had every instruction SIMDified

Tell me you don't program GPUs without telling me. Not only is SIMT a literal lie today (cf warp level primitives), there is absolutely no reason to SIMDify all instructions (and you better be a wise user of your scalar registers and scalar instructions if you want fast GPU code).

I wish people would just realize there's no grand paradigm shift that's coming that will save them from the difficult work of actually learning how the device works in order to be able to use it efficiently.
by alissa_v | 2025-04-25 05:24:09+00:00
Butler's piece is spot on. It reminds me of those core open-source tools we all depend on daily but rarely think about the people behind them. Like, who actually knows the name of the person who maintains requests in Python? Probably very few, yet their work is fundamental. That quiet contribution feels like the real definition of impactful design, way beyond the noise of social media.
by anamax | 2025-04-25 05:24:53+00:00
You're ignoring differences in the size of the space and the ability of most drivers to back-up vs going-forward into a small space.

>90% of the people who back in take much longer to back-in than they'd take to back-out because it takes them more time to back up with any accuracy.

Head-in to the spot is just as fast as head-out into the lane because most people don't have any trouble going forward.

The result is that back-in is a net time loss.
by brucedawson | 2025-04-25 05:25:12+00:00
Right. I (the friend's cousin) did that. And two weeks after the changes were supposed to take effect the directions are still broken and the customers of this business are still inconvenienced.

So I wrote a blog post. It is yet to be determined if that will help or not.

Given that Google Maps understands the rules for street addresses in Vancouver it seems like the problem shouldn't have happened in the first place and should have been auto-corrected and the fix should have been quickly accepted. But none of that happened.

Most non-nerds don't know how to use the feedback tool. That is the reality.
by NotPractical | 2025-04-25 05:25:53+00:00
OP didn't say they were better overall, rather that they were a better "actor", as in, they play nicer than Apple with other actors (companies) in the tech space, and as such you'd expect them to be less targeted by antitrust laws than Apple, but the opposite has occurred.

> I'd love to install unsanctioned software from GitHub on my iPhone

You can, but Apple won't like it:

https://sidestore.io/

https://altstore.io/
by NewJazz | 2025-04-25 05:27:14+00:00
There is a nonprofit near me that has some trucks they use for hauling trash, weeds, and some misc equipment on occasion (they do habitat restoration). They rarely go more than 20 miles in a day. This would fit their needs perfectly, assuming they could cheaply charge it. They probably could figure something out, they already have a van with an RV style charger hooked up.
by freehorse | 2025-04-25 05:28:40+00:00
> is physics highly constrained by what can be observed in the universe

It is also very highly constrained by how _we_ observe the universe. Beings with different sensory/cognitive capacities could develop very different models.

> equivalences between apparently dissimilar modes of presentation

If there was some mathematical equivalence between their models and ours, which is already a leap to assume, there is still a question about whether the specific measure used would be translated to something equivalent to our object length measure in their model, which gets much stronger than just some equivalence assumption. And it’s even stronger to assume that this equivalence could just be inferred without any other information apart from the disk.
by captnObvious | 2025-04-25 05:29:36+00:00
Another 2015 study examined students in U.S. special education programs between 2000 and 2010. The number of autistic children who enrolled in special education tripled from 93,624 to 419,647. In the same time frame, however, the number of children labeled as having an “intellectual disability” declined from 637,270 to 457,478. The shift of children from one diagnostic category to another explained two thirds of the increase in autism in this population, researchers say.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-real-reason-a...

Some portion of the rise in autism rates may be unrelated to better diagnosis. The likelihood of having an autistic child increases for older parents, and there is a societal trend toward delaying childbirth across developed countries. Children who are born prematurely are also at a heightened risk of autism, and improved neonatal care means many more of these children are surviving to childhood and beyond.
by ChoGGi | 2025-04-25 05:31:05+00:00
> If you're worried about real sovereignty, your top current threat is China,

No, there's still only one foreign leader that's repeatedly threatened to annex my country. The one we share a border with, not an ocean.

And thanks so much for posting some articles I've already read. At this stage I'd rather have some BYD factories than Tesla.
by pj_mukh | 2025-04-25 05:32:49+00:00
The last 5 years have been a supersized lesson in Moravec’s paradox [1]. More people need to hear about this: the tech world doesn’t have some kind of conspiracy against the creative class, it literally is the lowest hanging fruit as predicted 30 years ago.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moravec%27s_paradox
by sershe | 2025-04-25 05:34:42+00:00
Yep, I used to smoke too. I wanted to smoke and i still sometimes miss social and contemplative aspects of it 17 years after stopping, even though any chemical cravings stopped in a couple months

On the later part, your comment was very insightful too, cause you are a perfect example of what I'm talking about.

1) You decide for others what is good for them, implicitly treating their judgements with contempt.

2) When someone suggests that people might have different thresholds and tradeoffs and you probably wouldn't like it if someone who disagrees with you would make life decisions for you with the same moral certitude as you do in 1, you respond with "This pathetic, self-destructive method of thinking can't be right.", dismissive contempt.

The person coming across in these comments is a self-important possibly power-hungry psychopath - exactly what I was talking about. A mini version of the people behind everything from great leap forward and collective farms to white man's burden. I mean you gotta tell these wrong-thinking people how to live their lives correctly, cause you are right and their objections are just some mental defect!
by mindwok | 2025-04-25 05:34:45+00:00
The impact of AI on creative fields will be pretty nuanced I feel. I don't think we will end up in a world where everyone is just AI generating the media they want. In some cases we will, for example stuff like lo-fi beats on YouTube are already started to be bulk made by AI because really it's just fancy white noise for people to use to work.

Actual music (like what you find on Spotify) I think won't be impacted very much. People strongly identify with the art they consume, and that identity comes from the people who make the art. Those folks might be using AI under the covers for elements of their creative work, but ultimately what people care about is the humanity behind the art. It's the same with film, and traditional art people hang on their walls. We like the actors, the director, the artist, their taste, and who they are. It's why we have celebrities, because we get invested in the people behind the art.

Video games I think will be interesting... I feel they will be more susceptible to being accepted as AI generated. I don't think people identify with them as strongly.
by sillyfluke | 2025-04-25 05:35:19+00:00
Unless I'm missing something glaringly obvious, someone voluntarily labeling a certain prompt to be one of their key benchmark prompts should be way more commercially valuable than a model provider trying ascertain that fact from all the prompts you enter into it.

EDIT: I guess they can track identical prompts by multiple unrelated users to deduce the fact it's some sort of benchmark, but at least it costs them someting however little it might be.
by at_a_remove | 2025-04-25 05:35:47+00:00
I used to work mapping in EMS. It is absolutely not that simple, nor will it ever be. Yes, Google was often wrong. Sometimes I would drive out to a street to make sure I had not lost my mind.

Sometimes, the local addressing authority was wrong, and I would have to prove it to them. "But it was checked!" It was checked wrong. Street numbers would be off by thousands. It would take some pointing out of obvious problems in the progression of numbers, plus a plat, plus an email from the building manager to prove to them that I knew what I was talking about.

I was contacted by a woman who kept having drivers for all kinds of services attempt to use her driveway as a street, even if she had a sign up, which she did. Her local municipality was no help. Nobody was. She was irked and frantic, as these trucks would destroy her driveway, lawn, even garden.

Much digging ensued. It turned out that the proximal source of the error was a statewide system, one of many which Google simply hoovers up and digests like a baleen whale siphoning up plankton, then digests and tries to "make work." I got the proximal source to make a correction, which they might publish in another three months. The original source of the error was a long-missing minor street from many decades ago, which I had to find in caches of searches and the like.

It was idle curiosity, but it took me about twenty hours of digging on evenings and weekends.

Address points are easy. Parcels, aka the polygons upon which zero to many address points might rest, are harder. Road networks are terrifically hard. I managed to catalog ten different cases of road discontinuity in the process of trying to find such things in an automatic fashion. And I might not be bright enough to have enumerated them all!

And then we have cases of people who deliberately insist that their address number is "00." As in the first two-thirds of a certain not-so-secret agent's code number. Or imagine the fools who decide to put up a sign at the end of their long driveway and simply declare that it was a road.

Each county has its own addressing standards, and included in each are addresses from the Olden Days, real wild west stuff, which the authorities are just itching to scrape out of their systems once and for all.

Road addressing is Fractally Bad.
by authorfly | 2025-04-25 05:36:25+00:00
> Research shows low-stakes assessment is when the moment of learning often happens

Okay, but psychology research like this needs to be taken with context on long term behavior. Is this advice practical? No, not in this case. The problem is that very few people can actively learn that way for multiple hours in one day, let alone be motivated for studying in that intense way for subjects they do not like. Any barrier will stop them. That research applies to cramming for exams, when stressed, which most EdTech isn't really useful for (at that point, people are learning intensely anyway). This human nature has not changed.

And your suggestions (not to be rude) are to excite kids about the subjects they find least motivating. But the problem is already motivation.

Youtube is motivating because it is fun. It might not work, but it fits the motivation level you have.

Why not forget about the strong moats/tendencies of EdTech projects to fail to revolutionise, forget them targetting parents, and either pick a subgroup of learners who actively do want to change how they learn, or work on the motivation problem? Why are some kids so much less motivated to learn Math than others? Should we change that and how can we?##

Here's an example I find interesting: The western world accomplished bringing Biology from dominantly male to an equally balanced subject. How did that change happen? We benefit from all these women researching in Biology. Could it happen to other sciences? Or the reverse? These kind of questions interest me.
by bsder | 2025-04-25 05:36:56+00:00
> Still, can't think of a reason I'd back into a space in a parking lot.

Safety. Several organizations that have automotive fleets recommend it for that. Pulling in backwards is safer because everybody can see everybody while that is occurring. Pulling out forwards is safer because you have much wider field of view and you have to do less maneuvering.

Liability. If you are pulling out forward and someone doing 50 in the parking lot hits you, you have a much better chance of them being at fault. If you get hit backing up, it is almost always considered your fault irrespective of how stupid the other driver is being.
by xelxebar | 2025-04-25 05:38:36+00:00
> Subordination of detail

The paper doesn't really explore this concept well, IMHO. However, after a lot of time reading and writing APL applications, I have found that it points at a way of managing complexity radically different from abstraction.

We're inundated with abstraction barriers: APIs, libraries, modules, packages, interfaces, you name it. Consequences of this approach are almost cliché at this point—dizzyingly high abstraction towers, developers as just API-gluers, disconnect from underlying hardware, challenging to reason about performance, _etc._

APL makes it really convenient to take a different tack. Instead of designing abstractions, we can carefully design our data to be easily operated on with simple expressions. Where you would normally see a library function or DSL term, this approach just uses primitives directly:

For example, we can create a hash map of vector values and interred keys with something like

str←(⊂'') 'rubber' 'baby' 'buggy' 'bumpers' ⍝ string table k←4 1 2 2 4 3 4 3 4 4 ⍝ keys v←0.26 0.87 0.34 0.69 0.72 0.81 0.056 0.047 0.075 0.49 ⍝ values

Standard operations are then immediately accessible:

k v⍪←↓⍉↑(2 0.33)(2 0.01)(3 0.92) ⍝ insert values k{str[⍺] ⍵}⌸v ⍝ pretty print k v⌿⍨←⊂k≠str⍳⊂'buggy' ⍝ deletion

What I find really nice about this approach is that each expression is no longer a black box, making it really natural to customize expressions for specific needs. For example, insertion in a hashmap would normally need to have code for potentially adding a new key, but above we're making use of a common invariant that we only need to append values to existing keys.

If this were a library API, there would either be an unused code path here, lots of variants on the insertion function, or some sophisticated type inference to do dead code elimination. Those approaches end up leaking non-domain concerns into our codebase. But, by subordinating detail instead of hiding it, we give ourselves access to as much domain-specific detail as necessary, while letting the non-relevant detail sit silently in the background until needed.

Of course, doing things like this in APL ends up demanding a lot of familiarity with the APL expressions, but honestly, I don't think that ends up being much more work than deeply learning the Python ecosystem or anything equivalent. In practice, the individual APL symbols really do fade into the background and you start seeing semantically meaningful phrases instead, similar to how we read English words and phrases atomically and not one letter at a time.
by mint2 | 2025-04-25 05:42:20+00:00
For anyone interested, with all keyless entry Subarus in the US it’s easy to put the fob to sleep.

If you’re car camping and doing a lot of stuff around your car and opening the doors a bunch for a couple hours, you probably want to put your fob to sleep. Found out the hard way, but my battery was also a bit iffy to start with that year.
by acyou | 2025-04-25 05:43:18+00:00
My Ticket To Ride games are usually very passive, everyone has a sort of truce that lasts essentially throughout. But sometimes someone gives up on a big route and devotes themselves to messing up other people, and then things get spicy. Then again, I think we play wrong, because we don't ever use Stations (I think those are only in Ticket To Ride Europe though)?
by cjbgkagh | 2025-04-25 05:43:57+00:00
I have autism and in my case it’s clearly genetic given that I also have hEDS which is a common comorbidity that is autosomal dominant. The RCCX genetic theory of giftedness does appear to explain what I’ve been about to observe in myself and others. I’m less familiar with the more extreme levels of dysfunctional autism.

On one had the poor health sucks, on the other hand being gifted is pretty fun.

With the less severe cases that I’m more familiar with I think it is largely treatable, I’m on a long list of meds that have been pretty effective for me. It would be great the end result of this initiative would be the spreading of existing knowledge and the creation of new knowledge.

With modern understanding of medicine and genetics people can be helped in ways they could not have been before - which would obviate the need for eugenics.
by monero-xmr | 2025-04-25 05:44:12+00:00
Pop music is so simple, yet so difficult to make a hit. For some artists the music can be mediocre or even fairly bad, and still be a massive hit because pop music is essentially theater and their persona and mystique carries the day.

Some bands were terrible touring artists and rarely put on concerts yet made great careers as studio acts. Steely Dan would be one that produced many hits yet rarely toured, mostly later in their career.

The fundamentals of pop are totally understood. Yet what makes a hit is so fickle and difficult, the bar is extremely high
by sireat | 2025-04-25 05:44:36+00:00
Easy one is provide a middle game chess position (could be an image or and ask to evaluate standard notation or even some less standard notation) and provide some move suggestions.

Unless the model incorporates an actual chess engine (Fritz 5.32 from 1998 would suffice) it will not do well.

I am a reasonably skilled player (FM) so can evaluate way better than LLMs. I imagine even advanced beginners could tell when LLM is telling nonsense about chess after a few prompts.

Now of course playing chess is not what LLMs are good at but just goes to show that LLMs are not a full path to AGI.

Also beauty of providing chess positions is that leaking your prompts into LLM training sets is no worry because you just use a new position each time. Little worry of running out of positions...
by Zanfa | 2025-04-25 05:44:40+00:00
The main problem with TS is that your types are compile-time. You can have 0 uses of any/unknown, but you can still stuff a number into a string at runtime without any issues until it blows up.

I know you should have defined validators for every single external API, library and database, but at some level it feels silly to do all of this extra work.