MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by EvanAnderson | 2025-04-10 17:48:46+00:00
Nearly the same thing here. We're scheduling for our daughter who, as she's getting older, has increasingly more scheduled events, too. If we're out of the house and my wife hasn't brought the paper calendar with her we simply can't commit to any plans. It's excruciating.

The cobbler's children go barefoot, so I haven't come up with a good solution for us... >sigh< It almost makes me want to hitch my wagon to a hosted product/service. Almost.
by vollbrecht | 2025-04-10 17:49:09+00:00
You can find a general overview for the language at hand in "The rust reference"[1]. For a more formal document, you can have a look in to the ferroscene language specification list of undefined behaviour[2] section. From there you can jump to different section, and see legality rules, and undefined behavior sections for each.

The ferroscene language spec was recently donated to the rust foundation.

[1] https://doc.rust-lang.org/reference/behavior-considered-unde... [2] https://spec.ferrocene.dev/undefined-behavior.html
by akshayshah | 2025-04-10 17:49:15+00:00
Sure, but AFAIK S3’s multi-region capabilities are quite far behind GCS’s.

S3 offers some multi-region replication facilities, but as far as I’ve seen they all come at the cost of inconsistent reads - which greatly complicates application code. GCS dual-region buckets offer strongly consistent metadata reads across multiple regions, transparently fetch data from the source region where necessary, and offer clear SLAs for replication. I don’t think the S3 offerings are comparable. But maybe I’m wrong - I’d love more competition here!

https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/storage-data-transfer...
by fc417fc802 | 2025-04-10 17:49:22+00:00
The clickbait is the "What does it mean?" format.

"Researchers are trying to work out why."

"Here's what 4k researchers think."

It's possible that clickbait is technically the wrong term but it's a pattern that I strongly associate with those practices. It's an idiocracy-esque development. Learning that it has spread to the likes of Nature is saddening.
by adrian_b | 2025-04-10 17:49:44+00:00
Solar energy can be captured only by living beings that have reached a relatively high complexity after a long evolution.

In places with so little solar energy, living beings might never develop means for capturing it.

For the appearance of life, a source of internal heat for the planet or satellite is a necessary condition.

As another poster has mentioned, in the big satellites of the giant planets such a source of internal heat exists, because of the tidal forces which cause internal friction.

For the internal heat to be able to provide energy for life forms, there must exist some kind of volcanism that cycles matter between the interior and the exterior of the satellite or planet, so that substances that were in chemical equilibrium at higher temperatures are brought to lower temperatures, where they are no longer in chemical equilibrium, which can provide the energy for the synthesis of complex organic molecules.

(On Earth, the principal source of energy for the bacteria that do not depend on solar energy has its origin in the iron(II) ions from the mantle and lower crust of the Earth, which are brought by volcanism at the surface, where they are no longer in chemical equilibrium with water, so they are oxidized by water to Fe(III) ions, i.e. rust, liberating elemental hydrogen from the water, which can be consumed by bacteria and combined with carbon dioxide into organic substances, without needing any other source of energy. When rocks are recycled by subduction into the mantle, because of the high temperatures the iron ions are reduced again to Fe(II) ions, completing the cycle by consuming a certain amount of internal heat.)
by psunavy03 | 2025-04-10 17:49:47+00:00
COBOL was the best attempt that they could get to in the 1960s. It's the entire reason COBOL has things like paragraphs, things end with periods, etc. They wanted as much of an "English-like syntax" as possible.

The reason it looks so odd today is that so much of modern software is instead the intellectual heir of C.

And yeah, the "skill cap" of describing things is theoretically infinite. My point was this has been tried before and we don't yet know how the actual limitations of an LLM come close to that ideal. People have been trying for decades to describe things in English that still ultimately need to be described in code for them to work; that's why the software industry exists in the first place.
by mort96 | 2025-04-10 17:50:07+00:00
Hm, is it so much easier to write an LLVM back-end than a GCC back-end? I haven't looked into GCC's code gen infrastructure that much, but I looked into making a new back-end to LLVM some time ago and it seemed extremely complex and entirely undocumented. All guidance I found on it basically amounted to, "copy an existing back-end and bang it against a rock until you've made it generate the machine code you need". And it certainly wasn't a case of having clean and simple enough code to make documentation unnecessary. It would honestly surprise me if GCC is more difficult to add a back-end to.
by davikr | 2025-04-10 17:50:29+00:00
> For some situations this can be problematic because it can cause leakage from VDDCR_SOC to VDD_MISC and force VDD_MISC outside of the electrical design guide specifications. On some designs this will trip the over voltage protection feature (OVP) of the voltage regulator module, but it could cause APU damage as well.
by hylaride | 2025-04-10 17:51:05+00:00
> You can study histories and interviews from the late Cold War about just how much of a bloodbath the NATO militaries expected a Russian invasion of West Germany to be.

*With the full benefit of hindsight*, most experts that I have read seem to agree that (ignoring nuclear weapons and staying completely conventional) the Russians were as a whole stronger on land in Europe than the west up until the mid-1970s, when western technological advancements started to remove the numbers advantages and were hard for the economically stagnating communist countries to keep up with. By the mid 1980s, the only real direct advantage the soviets had was a closer supply line than the bulk of NATO's power, which was the USA.

There are records showing the shock that Soviet military experts had at the effectiveness of the western stealth and jamming equipment that was used in the 1991 Gulf War (that was waged right at the tail end of the USSR's existence). It's much more regarded now that had a full blown NATO/Warsaw pact conflict occurred in the 1980s, the Soviets would have likely lost had they not effectively destroyed NATO's air power early on, though to be fair most experts in the west weren't as sure just how effective their kit would end up being.

Even taking air power out of the equation, the armoured kill ratios would have favoured NATO if it was even 1/4 the ratio it was against the Iraqis. Again here, the only advantage the Soviets would have had was if they got complete surprise before NATO could mobilise.

> NATO would have been fighting them AND the entire Warsaw Pact (East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Poland et al).

There are mixed signals in the archives we have access to about how well (or more accurately reliable) a good chunk of the Warsaw Pact would have been if the cold war turned hot. Half the Red Army's presence in these countries was to threaten them and keep a lid on any revolutions that cropped up (as they did inCzechoslovakia and Hungary as hard violent examples, and Poland in the early 1980s as a soft one). It was very nebulous with Romania in particular that it would participate in anything other than an full "unprovoked attack" from NATO.

> The Soviets wouldn't have had 30+ years of Russian societal decay and would have had the advantage of sheer mass.

There was already decay by the 1980s. Corruption was rife in the Soviet army, especially during and after the Afghanistan conflict. There are many documented cases of Soviet officers in Europe selling fuel earmarked for the army to local civilians, among other things. Many also participated with opium smuggling from Afghanistan to Europe as Soviet officers had some freedom to move around western parts of Germany unmolested, in particular West Berlin.
by Someone | 2025-04-10 17:51:12+00:00
> Was even more surprised to learn that there is no great definition for what constitutes an Emoji. The term doesn't seem to have much meaning in Unicode

The definition is messy, but the list of Unicode emojis is defined. Starting points: https://www.unicode.org/reports/tr51/, https://unicode.org/emoji/charts/full-emoji-list.html
by Muromec | 2025-04-10 17:51:40+00:00
>Citizenship and residency have both benefits, but also obligations. GP moved to France without a good grasp of the local language.

It's an interesting one. I guess it's a requirement to learn French to naturalize as a French citizen, but there isn't an obligation to speak it if you already are a citizen. It's pretty subtle difference.

On the other hand citizenship in question is not really French citizenship, but European citizenship. It's polite and makes total sense to learn French when living in France, but not a legal requirement. As a citizen of another member state I can just move there and have the same rights as citizens with the sole exception of not voting in the national elections.
by waynesonfire | 2025-04-10 17:52:03+00:00
I think this is ideal. You make a great point that even if you were to use .internal TLD that is reserved for internal use, you wouldn't be able to use letsencrypt to get a SSL certificate for it. Not sure if there are other ssl options for .internal. But, self-signed is a PITA.

I guess the lesson is to deploy a self-signed root ca in your infra early.
by seadan83 | 2025-04-10 17:52:08+00:00
How can we reconcile this with how much of the US and world are still living as if it were the 1930s or even 1850s?

Travel 75 to 150 miles outside of a US city and it will feel like time travel. If so much is still 100 years behind, how will civilization so broadly adopt something that is yet more decades into the future?

I got into starlink debates with people during hurricane helene. Folks were glowing over how people just needed internet. Reality, internet meant fuck all when what you needed was someone with a chainsaw, a generator, heater, blankets, diapers and food.

Which is to say, technology and its importance is a thin veneer on top of organized society. All of which is frail and still has a long way to go to fully penetrate rural communities for even recent technology. At the same time, that spread is less important than it would seem to a technologist. Hence, technology has not uniformly spread everywhere, and ultimately it is not that important. Yet, how will AI, even more futuristic, leap frog this? My money is that rural towns USA will look almost identical in 30 years from now. Many look identical to 100 years ago still.
by danaris | 2025-04-10 17:52:41+00:00
I think there's another explanation that works just as well to explain the observed behavior:

A large percentage of people genuinely buy into the "just world" fallacy, regardless of whether they consciously recognize this. They believe that if someone is in a position of power, they deserve to have that power.

Of course, many of them also believe that, variously, the world is inherently just, people are inherently good, or the world's structure is ordained by a loving God. Therefore, these people deserving power isn't just Fated, it's also because they're better people. Smarter, better leaders, possessed of the qualities that fit one to rule.

Therefore, "the people in power are smart, have the best interests of the many at heart, and are worth listening to" is effectively axiomatic for a great many people in our society.
by bglazer | 2025-04-10 17:52:52+00:00
In peripheral blood samples. That's important because they show that some of the epigenome changes are concentrated in specific biochemical pathways related to cancer. But, they don't find pathways specific to blood cancers, so I'm really not sure what to make of that. What does it mean that a white blood cell has epigenomic changes similar to those observed in a collection of other studies of colorectal cancer? Honestly, probably not a lot. I'm made even less certain by the finding that the epigenomic changes are strongly concentrated in pathways like "Bacterial infection of epithelial cells". That's quite obviously statistical noise, but there's not much you can do about that when you're doing these population scale biochemical/genetic studies.

They also report that the cannabis smoking group had a statistically significant difference in cigarette smoking, so that's probably a big confounder, along with other lifestyle choices that you might expect between people who report never smoking weed vs those who do.

It's just really really hard to make strong conclusions from a single study like this.
by astrobe_ | 2025-04-10 17:53:35+00:00
Meanwhile, I managed to roast an EEPROM that contained a assembler/disassembler for Z80 by pluging it the wrong way in a weird expansion board for a CPC 6128. It was an expensive Xmas present, I almost passed out when I realized my mistake. I don't remember how old I was when it happened, but definitely not enough to RTFM cautiously.

So I had to stick with Basic until I finally got my first PC. It was the time when one could order floppy disks preloaded with "sharewares" you selected from a catalog. The first and only I order contained A86/D86 [2] and PygmyForth [1]. I picked up a Forth because I saw ads in magazines for Forth systems featuring multitasking and other wonderful things.

I spent a lot of time with those two, and eventually started to program my own Forth interpreter as any sane person should do... I ended up writing a minimal assembler with the help of A86's extensive manual in order to be able to boot my system from a floppy, modify its source with a block editor, and recompile it from scratch, boot sector included. It's sole use ever was to prove myself I could do those "difficult" things.

[1] https://pygmy.utoh.org/pygmyforthmanual.html [2] http://eji.com/a86/
by deathanatos | 2025-04-10 17:54:03+00:00
I guess it depends on whether the sentence is only qualified as "integer" types, but bool is sort of the same way, no? A bool must be either 0 or 1 (false or true), or it's UB.

(And I think for much the same reason, the niche optimization. Option<bool> is 1 B.)

(And for the non-Rustaceans, the only way to get a bool to be not false or true, i.e., not 0 or 1, would be unsafe {} code. Or put differently, not having a bool be "2" is an invariant unsafe code must not violate. (IIRC, at all times, even in unsafe code.))
by simonw | 2025-04-10 17:54:47+00:00
I think LLM's plugin architecture is a better bet for supporting model providers than the way LiteLLM does it.

The problem with LiteLLM's approach is that every model provider needs to be added to the core library - in https://github.com/BerriAI/litellm/tree/main/litellm/llms - and then shipped as a new release.

LLM uses plugins because then there's no need to sync new providers with the core tool. When a new Gemini feature comes out I ship a new release of https://github.com/simonw/llm-gemini - no need for a release of core.

I can wake up one morning and LLM grew support for a bunch of new models overnight because someone else released a plugin.

I'm not saying "LLM is better than LiteLLM" here - LiteLLM is a great library with a whole lot more contributors than LLM, and it's also been fully focused on being a great Python library - LLM has also had more effort invested in the CLI aspect than the Python library aspect so far.

I am confident that a plugin system is a better way to solve this problem generally though.
by wduquette | 2025-04-10 17:54:49+00:00
I suspect that the Ace would have failed quickly in the market, at least as an end-user machine, even if it had matched the ZX Spectrum for graphics and memory. It was extremely difficult to corrupt memory in BASIC unless one got too eager with POKE; but every memory set in Forth is basically a POKE.

Might have been a popular hobbyist machine, though.
by akshayshah | 2025-04-10 17:54:58+00:00
The cross-region replication I’ve seen for S3 (including the link you’ve provided) is fundamentally different from a dual-region GCS bucket. AWS is providing a way to automatically copy objects between distinct buckets, while GCS is providing a single bucket that spans multiple regions.

It’s much, much easier to code against a dual-region GCS bucket because the bucket namespace and object metadata are strongly consistent across regions.
by srvaroa | 2025-04-10 17:55:09+00:00
I'm sure many people have equated "typing code faster" with velocity, productivity, and execution speed. But I am not doing it.

I'm saying that given N developers, if they all type code faster, you get more code. From the linked text: "Will this translate into a net increase of actual value or just an accumulation of slop and technical debt? Regardless of the answer, there will be more raw code."

The argument I'm making is based on more volume of code. Not on quality, value, etc. of whatever that code is doing.

On your point about nobody having thought "my problem is that can't type fast enough". The problem "shit, I'd know what I want, I'd rather spend 10 minutes typing than 1 hour" is real. An LLM allows you to say "I want a piece of code that does X" and it hydrates that into the 500 lines of code. You materialize the thing faster.

Now. Yes we can go back to your point. Was that idea good? Is the code good enough? etc. Those are valid questions, but orthogonal to my point. My point is not about the quality of outputs etc. It's about "this thing helps you churn more code, and throw it to the systems that digest code".
by anon6362 | 2025-04-10 17:55:22+00:00
This should be a $4.99 app on a smartphone and/or desktop and doesn't take up any space.

Related but different better time/social management physical device for cube land would be an Arduino, a button, and an 4-7 color andon tower representing states such as:

- Working

- Lunch or errand (will return)

- Out-of-office (not returning for the day)

- Working remotely

- DND

- Open to socializing

- On vacation

And then a glossary for definitions posted prominently on the cube/office and on the intranet portal personal page. No app, no internet connectivity, no security vulnerabilities, no complexity, and <$20.
by simonw | 2025-04-10 17:55:32+00:00
Matheus Pedroni released a really clever plugin for doing that with LLM the other day: https://mathpn.com/posts/llm-docsmith/

You run it like this:

llm install llm-docsmith llm docsmith ./scripts/main.py

And it uses a Python concrete syntax tree (with https://pypi.org/project/libcst/) to apply changes to just the docstrings without risk of editing any other code.
by TeMPOraL | 2025-04-10 17:55:37+00:00
> Share the webcam link or ring them up on the telephone if we are (jokingly) going traditional.

Why not make it more convenient for them and pipe the webcam stream through a script that OCRs it on change (or on timer) and makes it available as an .ical file that others can import via a link?

Also it's 2025, you can do it fast and robust by piping it through an LLM instead, with a prompt like "turn this calendar image into an .ical file pretty please".

/s, but only a little :). I've honestly thought of doing that for real, except with a feed of my laptop screen, to sync availability (busy/free) info from my work calendar to my family one, because it's way easier than trying to argue the point with corporate IT.

(I've changed jobs since then, and now I'm using a lazy hack on top of some random Fastmail-friendly cloud app.)
by shadowgovt | 2025-04-10 17:56:54+00:00
The issue is that the other side is actual fascism. There is significantly-above-zero threat that the "reward" America will get for getting the Democrats to "learn their lesson" is that they never get to usefully vote for a candidate again.

I would have preferred if the GOP hadn't put actual fascism on the table so that people had meaningful choice over policy (and, indeed, had Trump lost, perhaps it would be the GOP who would've learned their lesson that Americans won't tolerate fascism). But since they did, and America chose the GOP choice, we're now in a situation where the best we can hope for in 2028 is a vote to reject fascism instead of something better.

I don't think that gets us pointed in the right direction, sadly.

(In the larger sphere, the problem is people thinking all they can or should do is vote for President. There's a whole four years and several Congress and state elections in which to do something effective towards desired outcomes, but Americans get very drilled-down on the President only, to their detriment. Half the reason Congress is so sclerotic is most Americans can't be bothered to know who their Congressional reps are, let alone what they stand for).
by thierrydamiba | 2025-04-10 17:57:17+00:00
Do professions really get destroyed? Or does the world just change?

I used to get paid to do OCR on tax forms. I used n gram models, BERT,etc and it took weeks to get the forms right. Now you can do it in seconds with an api.

I wouldn’t say the profession got destroyed. I just work with different tools now. Instead of running ngrams, I’m testing different apis or embedding models.

The old job doesn’t exist anymore, in many ways I am the classic example of losing your job to AI-but I wouldn’t say it destroyed the profession. People just use different tools today to get intelligence from PDFs.
by SubjectToChange | 2025-04-10 17:57:38+00:00
The problem is that "weird CPUs and embedded systems" are not mainstream platforms, nor do they have a lot of money behind them (particularly for open source development). Hence, there is little motivation and/or resources for anyone to develop a new backend for LLVM when a mature GCC backend already exists. Moreover, the LLVM developers are weary to accept new backends for niche platforms when there is no guarantee that they will be maintained in the future.
by woodruffw | 2025-04-10 17:58:16+00:00
> How do you define barks(X) (what about whimpers, growls? What about a dog that doesn't bark?)? How do you handle breeds that look very different (Chihuahua vs. Great Dane)? How do you handle seeing only part of the animal? How do you represent the overall visual gestalt? The number of rules and exceptions quickly becomes vast and brittle.

This is the dimensionality mentioned in the adjacent post, and it's true of a probabilistic approach as well: an LLM trained on descriptions of dogs is going to hallucinate when an otherwise sensible query about dogs doesn't match its training. As others have said more elegantly than I will, this points to a pretty different cognitive model than humans have; human beings can (and do) give up on a task.

(I feel like I've had to say this a few times in threads now: none of this is to imply that Cyc was a success or would have worked.)