MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by john_the_writer | 2025-04-20 01:37:29+00:00
Yeah that blows my mind. Of all places I'd not expect a cartoon to be. There are so many books kids could read. I don't see how a librarian can view a screen as anything they'd allow in their building.

My kids daycare added a TV. The "teachers" said it was allowed by law. I said sure and pulled them out. Sucked because they'd just replaced most of the staff and the new staff was pro-tv while the old staff had never once turned on a TV.
by testing22321 | 2025-04-20 01:38:25+00:00
> As you say, by the time you specify everything, you've written the code

Sadly not when it’s a 2000 page word document with a million formatting quirks and so many copy-paste versions you don’t know if you should trust “reqs_new25”, “reqs_new25v1” or the x number of other copies floating around.
by stevenAthompson | 2025-04-20 01:39:02+00:00
> People aren't watching TikToks while video gaming.

I'm aware that the plural of anecdote is not data, but I can say from personal experience that most of the people I know pick up their phones whenever an unskippable cut scene appears on screen. Many, many people no longer have the patience for narrative in any form and as a consequence literacy rates have been declining for years.

> Libraries are reinventing themselves in many places

They have no choice. People can't read anymore. Fifty four percent of Americans now read below the sixth grade level.
by t-writescode | 2025-04-20 01:40:13+00:00
And I think that *horribly* muddies the definition because programming and getting a bit of AI help here and there (since it's read the docs better than you have, and scanned Stack Overflow for common problems and mistakes more thoroughly than you have) is, imo, a very, very valid way to program; but you're still very much in the driver's seat. It's not creating whole design patterns, etc, for you.

I wonder if maybe some people have been trying to jump on the "I have also tried vibe coding" train without being willing to hop as far as the term initiator defined it.

I definitely still stick to the "Vibe Coding is when you don't read / grok the code" definition.
by stego-tech | 2025-04-20 01:41:00+00:00
I mean, this reads as I expected it to: SSDs as cold storage are a risky gamble, and the longer the drive sits unpowered (and the more use it sees over its life), the less reliable it becomes.

Man, I’d (figuratively) kill for a startup to build a prosumer-friendly LTO drive. I don’t have anywhere near the hardware expertise myself, but I’d gladly plunk down the dosh for a drive if they weren’t thousands of dollars. Prosumers and enthusiasts deserve shelf-stable backup solutions at affordable rates.
by godelski | 2025-04-20 01:41:03+00:00
As someone who's done a lot of computer vision, it is insane to skip it. And it's sad because what everyone missed from that viral Mark Rober video [0] was not the Looney Toons wall hit but the fucking kid in the smoke. Add all the cameras and AI you want, you ain't changing the laws of physics: visible light doesn't penetrate smoke. But radar does. Every (traditional) engineer knows that safe systems have redundancy. That safe systems have redundancy through differing modalities. Use cameras, but also use radar, lidar, and even millimeter wave. Using just cameras isn't just tying one hand behind your back, it's shooting yourself in the kneecap afterwards

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IQJL3htsDyQ
by hamstergene | 2025-04-20 01:42:06+00:00
I can't help but notice how these studies always ignore that one's presence on the market changes the market. Past data without your bids is a slightly different data set than the same data with your bids. Every trade you would have got would mean someone didn't get it and instead tried some other trade, which isn't in the data set that is being trained on. Or maybe it would be your strategy that would fail a desired trade: market isn't a grocery store, bids are not guaranteed to be fulfilled. The difference is more and more the bigger amounts of money one flexes.

Perhaps this effect is ignorable if one trades insignificant volumes, but then, one can't get rich on trading insignificant volumes, so what's the point.
by stevenAthompson | 2025-04-20 01:43:16+00:00
There are more books now than ever, and we've been producing books in vast numbers for hundreds of years. Even if the vast majority were garbage there would still be more great books available than could be read in several lifetimes.

Have you considered trying to optimize the way you discover your next read? It almost sounds like you're getting your recommendations from social media, and that it isn't really working out well for you.
by mnightcommander | 2025-04-20 01:43:42+00:00
I mostly shoot digital but own 18 film cameras; all but 2 are 35mm. I process my own black and white, too, but lately I have my color film processed without prints or scanning. Then I scan the negatives myself. Not only are my own scans better a roll of 36 exposures costs less than $7.00. Film itself can be a little pricy but this has cut my expenses way down.
by akoboldfrying | 2025-04-20 01:44:17+00:00
> To show that detM is non-zero, we can show that its 2-adic valuation is nonzero.

I think the last word in that sentence should be "finite"?

Also do I understand correctly that "face" means "maximal line segment"? (I see some other comments discussing this and concluding that "face" means "edge", but to me, an "edge" doesn't permit "intermediate" vertices.)
by gus_massa | 2025-04-20 01:44:41+00:00
Never trust the client. You must do a full verification. IIUC from another comment, you only ask the client to return the interval they tested and some token to ensure the server send them that interval.

You must ask for each number in the interval the two primes and a Primality certificate for each prime. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primality_certificate

The idea is that it's very hard to find the two primes and it's very hard to prove that they are actually primes. But if the client send you both primes and send you each primality certificate, then the verification is very fast. Also, you can store that info so people can see it.
by rufus_foreman | 2025-04-20 01:46:12+00:00
>> Just about any book you want is going to be available. This is what libraries do

There's a difference between the books that are available and the books that are on display.

I can make a request and put a hold and get a book from the stacks at the central library. That's not something the typical browser of books on a library shelf is going to do. I do it now, I never did growing up. What was on the shelves was the Overton window for me growing up. I break windows now, now I can consider any viewpoints I choose. Go get me the book from the stacks, librarian.

What librarians do today is to promote propaganda for a certain cause. It's just so self destructive of them to do that, but that's what they do.

A change is going to come.
by peeters | 2025-04-20 01:48:39+00:00
It's interesting to me, the shift I've had to co-op games over the years (both board and video games). With one group of friends, we play exclusively cooperative games, whereas another only wants to ever play competitive games. For me, co-op is just so much more relaxing. It's also far more social, whereas playing competitive games the socializing usually happens outside of the game itself. You can definitely be over-competitive in cooperative games too though.
by gus_massa | 2025-04-20 01:49:37+00:00
Some official advice in https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html

My recommendation is to find stories about a topic you know and look for comments that have questions, and then try to answer those questions.

You can also add questions or an interesting anecdote or remark, but it's little harder to know when it is a good question or remark. Try to avoid very short comments, they should have two ore three sentences at least.
by K0balt | 2025-04-20 01:49:37+00:00
Off -prem AI is just publishing proprietary or private data with extra steps. If it can’t be done on-prem with a model I can download, I’m not going to hook it into any of my workflows. Period .

Fortunately, on-prem models with agents bolted on are good enough for most things. For the rest I’ll just cut and paste into the web interface on off premises services. That way I know what I’m sharing.
by t-writescode | 2025-04-20 01:50:44+00:00
I hear what you're saying; but the implications seem ... net harmful? If you're actively hacking something together with the intent of boosting a valuation, selling your company and GTFOing before your purchasers figure out the bag of unmaintainable garbage you've sold them, that ...

You're harming:

* your customers who trusted you * the people that purchased your product

I think "grift" is a good term (GPT recommended 'predatory exit' as an alternative) for what a team that's done that has done.

There’s nothing wrong with iterating fast or building MVPs. But when teams knowingly pass off a brittle mess to others, they’ve stopped building products and started selling lies.
by john_the_writer | 2025-04-20 01:51:00+00:00
I had a job interview where I said almost exactly this.. I was shown a bit of code and asked how I'd improve it. I said I wouldn't touch it. When asked why not I answered. "I'd assume the dev who wrote it did so for a reason, and that it's been through QA. If they picked this approach I'd leave it alone. Unless there was a bug." I got the job. My personal style has to take a back seat to the style of the team (even if I'm the team lead) It is better to get used to not using a turnery, if that's how the team works. Changing a standard on an older code base is silly because then you'll have a different standard in different parts of the code.
by throwaway314155 | 2025-04-20 01:51:17+00:00
I suppose I'm just a little bit bothered by your saying you "built an AI" when all the heavy lifting is done by a pretrained LLM. Saying you made an AI-based program or hell, even saying you made an AI agent, would be more genuine than saying you "built an AI" which is such an all-encompassing thing that I don't even know what it means. At the very least it should imply use of some sort of training via gradient descent though.
by roenxi | 2025-04-20 01:52:02+00:00
Another thing they have in common is having children. A group of bad people having something in common doesn't tell us anything about the thing. Obviously the motivation in their case might be a bit suspect but nuclear families with strong parental authority are nonetheless a good model for families. I'd argue an extended family is probably a little bit better, but nuclear isn't bad.

Same goes for cults, calling something a cult doesn't automatically mean it is an organisation dedicated to destroying itself. Some cults are organised by people who ultimately want their community to be successful and hold extremely worthwhile values. Too much authoritarianism will be a disaster but nuclear families are a good compromise position where there is just a dash of authority in the small.
by john_the_writer | 2025-04-20 01:53:21+00:00
I had a boss call me a tumbleweed dev (when I was much younger). I would clean up bits, but this would mean the QA had to re-test code that was already tested and in production. I never forgot that term, and now if it an't broke, I don't touch it. (even if I don't like reading it)
by gus_massa | 2025-04-20 01:55:23+00:00
Big discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42812157 (235 points | 82 days ago | 102 comments).

If you have not played it: Nice game, with a very interesting variant of the Minesweeper. It takes a while to adapt the strategies. A few spoilers in the old thread.

If you already played it: There is a new version and the classic version.
by throw_m239339 | 2025-04-20 01:56:19+00:00
> Trans men having babies is not strong evidence for cis men having less of a desire to give birth than trans women. If you have the equipment for it, it's going to happen some percent of the time.

It's strong evidence that the desire to birth child has nothing to do with gender identity, which latter will be pretty much pointless by the time science allows human fœtus gestation outside the human female body.
by Centigonal | 2025-04-20 01:56:54+00:00
Honestly, I'm too far removed from the culture in Iran to nail the second part, but I'm a big fan of the drinks at Cafe Aunja in Montreal, and Komaaj in San Francisco is wonderful too.

Sour cherry sharbat is very easy to do at home, too. You just need a bottle of sour cherry syrup (sadaf, golchin, and marco polo are all solid brands in the US). Pour a tablespoon or two into an empty glass, add water or seltzer on top, add ice, mix it all up with a spoon, and you're good to go.
by xrd | 2025-04-20 01:57:15+00:00
I'm scratching my head a bit at this one.

I already assume that the models are shifting underneath me. It's very frustrating that most non-developers just think you can ask an LLM a question and it will respond accurately each time. They are designed to make creative output and even if you dial down the temperature they still can hallucinate.

Why not be explicit about the thinking budget instead of aliasing it to a number with a term like ultrathink?

It's a cute word, and fun to know is managed on the client side, but isn't it again more imprecision to tools the are already suffering from that?
by wat10000 | 2025-04-20 01:57:17+00:00
Do you think it’s interesting to respond to a general claim with a rebuttal based on a tiny and relatively insular population? The county I live in has 3x more people than the entirety of Iceland.

Here’s a poll of Americans that includes a question about aborting fetuses with Down Syndrome. 44% of pro-choice respondents oppose it. I’m not wrong and there’s no reason to find that sentence suspect. https://www.kofc.org/en/resources/communications/polls/maris...
by hahamaster | 2025-04-20 01:57:55+00:00
I tell my kid that math is a language. You learn to speak it, just like you learn to speak any other language, slowly, by listening, understanding, speaking, intuitively recognizing patterns, rules and exceptions. When you start to become fluent you translate problems into math and solve them. At school they keep trying to make them memorize useful phrases, like a tourist that goes to Paris and learns how to say "where's the bathroom", "hello", "would you like to sleep with me", "thank you", "goodbye", etc.
by ClumsyPilot | 2025-04-20 01:59:38+00:00
This is mostly a fiction.

Nuclear family has never had primacy - look at wild, dangerous places, primacy is held by extended family, clans, tribes or mafia.

‘Nuclear family primacy’ exists only In carefully crafted stable and safe societies, and another authority must exist to organise military-age men for matters of war and survival.

Thus nuclear family can only exist as we know it, in a partially undermined condition.
by philipov | 2025-04-20 01:59:59+00:00
If the paper is attempting to express electromagnetism in terms of the metric tensor, then it is putting it into a form that makes it potentially compatible with gravity, which is also a metric tensor. Quantum theories use a completely different type of math, and trying to express gravity in that way (quantizing gravity) results in a bunch of broken equations. If both systems can be described using differential geometry, that is a step in the direction of unifying the theories, even if it's not a hole-in-one.
by disambiguation | 2025-04-20 02:00:25+00:00
Not OP but TrueNAS is a good alternative - both the software and their all in one NAS builds.

I have an unraid on a usb stick somewhere in my rack, but overtime it started feeling limited, and when they began changing their license structure I decided it was time to switch, though I run it on a Dell r720xd instead of one of their builds (my only complaint is the fan noise - i think 730 and up are better in this regard)

Proxmox was also on my short list for hypervisors if you dont want TrueNAS.
by ordu | 2025-04-20 02:00:43+00:00
You can change brightness and color of individual satellites as they move, so they would match the "pixel" they are in now. Just imagine swarm of very small emitting light bugs moving chaotically behind your screen and changing colors as they move from one pixel to an other. The only issue is to make sure that at every moment each pixel has enough bugs to get the required brightness.
by j45 | 2025-04-20 02:01:44+00:00
Forcing is kind of hopeless. So is logic, and reasoning.

How children learn (rely on the prefrontal cortex of their adults) is very different than how adults learn (no fully developed prefrontal cortex until 25-26), learning about this can help a lot.

Learning more about the Reggio Emelia approach might help parents curious about this, it has been quite surprising how much is possible naturally. One of the best things to do is to relentlessly read to and with your kids.

Also, linking a topic to their interest's radar, encouraging curiosity, play in general, and letting them potentially discover it can go a long away.

When they've got something they want, teaching math and savings is a great thing. Understanding life is a lot harder without knowing a basic bit of math, and can be made a bit easier when doing it younger.

I had a math teacher that once made it clear, some stuff can just click, others is just about doing a lot of examples to learn the patterns. Doing math is very different than being creative with being comfortable to find it.

Today, I'd probably setup a good prompt to find a way for the child to share their mine to discover how they like to learn, and how they might like to learn faster and easier by taking some shortcuts through math directly or on navigating an ontology/taxonomy perspective.
by j45 | 2025-04-20 02:02:41+00:00
Forcing is kind of hopeless. So is logic, and reasoning.

How children learn (they can't rely on a fully formed prefrontal cortex like adults) is very different than how adults learn (no fully developed prefrontal cortex until 25-26), learning about this can help a lot.

Learning more about the Reggio Emelia approach might help parents curious about this, it has been quite surprising how much is possible naturally. One of the best things to do is to relentlessly read to and with your kids.

Showing kids the math in every day things, especially things they already love is a helpful way of making it approachable, or at least aware.

Also, linking a topic to their interest's radar, encouraging curiosity, play in general, and letting them potentially discover it can go a long away.

When they've got something they want, teaching math and savings is a great thing. Understanding life is a lot harder without knowing a basic bit of math, and can be made a bit easier when doing it younger.

I had a math teacher that once made it clear, some stuff can just click, others is just about doing a lot of examples to learn the patterns. Doing math is very different than being creative with being comfortable to find it.

Today, I'd probably setup a good prompt to find a way for the child to share their mine to discover how they like to learn, and how they might like to learn faster and easier by taking some shortcuts through math directly or on navigating an ontology/taxonomy perspective.
by themadryaner | 2025-04-20 02:03:20+00:00
I wanted more details on how this works. For those interested, I found an English pdf describing the full system [1]. The interesting part is Article 110, which discusses how the adjustment seats are allocated. Here is my best summary:

1. Using D'Hondt [2] on every party's national vote share, determine which party should be given the next seat. 2. For every constituency which has adjustment seats available, calculate the D'Hondt quotient of the first candidate in that party who has not already been elected using the constituency vote share. So if a party received V votes in a constituency and two party members were already elected from this constituency, their quotient would be V/3. 3. Elect the candidate with the highest quotient to fill an adjustment seat for their constituency. 4. Repeat until all adjustment seats have been given away.

There's arguably a step 0 here, which is determining how many constituency and adjustment seats every constituency gets, and this is done before the election is held. This is described in Article 10. It's pretty bad. First, the adjustment seats are hard-coded. Second, unlike the US where we reapportion after every census, Iceland appears to only reapportion the constituency seats when the constitution demands they do it. This happens when there are twice as many voters per seat in one constituency compared to another. Furthermore, they only adjust as few seats as possible to get back under this limit rather than actually recalculate a fair apportionment. I'm not sure what the logic of this was, maybe to minimize how often the number of seats in each place is changing? Either way, in the 2021 election this resulted in one constituency with 199% as many voters per seat as another and no changes were made [3].

[1]: https://www.stjornarradid.is/library/03-Verkefni/Kosningar/K...

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D%27Hondt_method

[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Icelandic_parliamentary_e...
Every web application that may need scale later should be a distributed system
by doojin | 2025-04-20 02:03:28+00:00
If you know your web application will not need scale ever, then you don't need a distributed system.

However, learning distribtued system design is not that complicated unless you are an entry-level developer.

I guess people who tell others to not care about scalability for a software startup are probably marketers, hustlers, or financiers who consider product building as someone else's responsibility and are willing to discard failing products and hire developers for a new product. They typically try to fail quickly, discard companies, and start new ones. That's why these types love starting with agency businesses which don't require product development. You can learn a lot from them, but if you are a solo software entrepreneur, product development is your responsibility, and you should learn distributed system design before writing code or starting a business. You wouldn't hire entry-level engineers for your business, would you?

I think it's valuable to learn distributed system design and basic software engineering techniques like unit tests and documentation and functional programming and simplcity-oriented software design(rich hickey's simple made easy).

After you learn basic software engineering and distributed system design, you can reuse these design patterns over and over for the rest of your life and move quickly as a solo software entrepreneur.

It's a one-time cost that pays for the rest of your life. Design is cheap. Fixing a production system that has a fundamentally broken design that can't scale is very expensive. Solo software entrepreneurs should start with a solid distributed system design instead of trying to bolt scalability and solid software engineering practices onto production web applications. Many other online businesses suffered scalability issues so that you don't have to. You don't have to learn from your own mistakes when you can learn from other people's mistakes.

You can be a marketer or a hustler as a solo software entrepreneur once you learn distributed system design and basic software engineering.

Solo software entrepreneurs shouldn't try to copy marketers and financiers who have money to hire quality engineers.

I also recommend not using SaaS frameworks because the cost will snowball if you try to grow. AWS lambda isn't really free of infrastructure management. If you use SaaS, use ones that you can easily migrate away from. You don't want to be locked into specific vendors.