MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by megous | 2025-05-22 11:26:46+00:00
Ratio is just a single number. 4:3 can be expressed as 1.3333~ and it just says how much bigger one number is compared to another.

RE: Yes, I was able to read and understand the article. I also have 8 years of EE. Ratio is still a single number in the end. You can have an actual size of a monitor 1600 x 1200 and the ratio of sides is 1600/1200, which is just a single number. You can express it in multiple ways. You still need at least one size + understanding of what the aspect ratio is used to describe in a particular situation (units (mm, px, ...), ...) to be able to calculate the complete dimensions of a monitor screen.

Same issue with % or ppm, or whatever.

You always need a defintition to understand what the numbers are abstracting in any particular situation.
by numpad0 | 2025-05-22 11:27:50+00:00
I just can't understand why "[specialized domain] uses these stupid wrong units, it should be [unit that no educated smart SMEs use]" types don't do their researches to understand why those are used at all. This type of weird non-SI units appear when means of measurement and unit is related to one another and has downstream dependencies.

Just look at aviation. An airplane's:

- speed is measured in knots, or minute of angle of latitude per hour, which is measured by ratio of static and dynamic pressure as a proxy. - vertical speed or rate of climb is measured in feet per minute, which is a leaky pressure gauge, probably all designed in inches. - altitude is measured in feet, through pressure, which scale is corrected by local barometric pressures advertised on radio, with the fallback default of 29.92 inHg. When they say "1000ft" vertical separation, it's more like 1 inHg or 30 hPa of separation. - engine power is often measured in "N1 RPM %" in jet engines, which obviously has nothing to do with anything. It's an rev/minutes figure of a windmilling shaft in an engine. Sometimes it's EPR or Engine Pressure Ratio or pressure ratio between intake and exhaust. They could install a force sensor on the engine mount but they don't. - tire pressure is psi or pound per square inch, screw tightening torques MAY be N-m, ft-lbs, or in-lbs, even within a same machine.

Sure, you can design a battery charging circuits in Joules, fly an airplane with a GPS speedometer, analog audio-radio circuitry in millivolts. Absolutely no one does. I think that cognitive dissonance should trigger curiosity circuitry, not rant mode.

I mean, just type in "use of decibels[dB] considered harmful" at the box at chatgpt.com. It'll generate basically this article with an armchair version of the top comment here as the conclusion.
by msandford | 2025-05-22 11:27:50+00:00
You're missing a critical piece of information. Human hearing (and vision) are logarithmic sensors.

Ears can register sounds from maybe 20-30 dB upwards of 120ish which isn't a factor of 4-6 in terms of power but rather a factor of 120-30=90 decibels or 9 bels or 10^9 or one billion.

Because your ears have absolutely enormous range you need the potentiometer (pot) to have a logarithmic taper to it. The amplifier has an essentially fixed amount of amplification so that's a fixed sound dB output. Your ears can hear a vast range. A linear pot essentially locks the entire output into the same 10 decibels as the amplifier maximum output through its linearity. Once you've turned it to 10% of the range it has precisely 10 decibels worth of range left. If you want to turn the volume down by 40 decibels you have to do that within the 0-10% part of the pot's range.

A logarithmic pot will give you maybe 40-60 decibels worth of adjustment by dividing things up differently. Every 20% of the range increases the output not by 20% but by a factor of 10 let's say. That gives you a pot with a range of 50 decibels which is enough that it roughly matches the absolutely miraculous range of the ear.
by diggan | 2025-05-22 11:27:57+00:00
> You can feed maybe 3-4 engineers with 2 Swedish pizzas

I dunno, we (Swedes) tend to do personal pizzas (1 per person), at least where I grew up. They're most likely talking about family size pizzas or something, but even then it sounds like too little, you'd feed maybe 3 people tops per family size pizza.

Or maybe me and my friends were just overly excited about our pizzas.
by intended | 2025-05-22 11:29:26+00:00
That is not clarity in a paper.

1) The whole opening segment is the literature review.

2) If you are coming up with a novel concept, then you would be explaining how it shows up in relation to known fact.

Then you would be providing evidence and experiment.

The entire structure is designed to ensure as many affordances for the author to make their case.

Being accepted as a social game is the cynical view that ignores that academia still works. It’s academia itself which recognizes these issues and is trying to rectify the situation.
by zmgsabst | 2025-05-22 11:30:21+00:00
But reality doesn’t care:

If half your requests are 2x as long and half are 2x as fast, you don’t take the same wall time to run — you take longer.

Let’s say you have 20 requests, 10 of type A and 10 of type B. They originally both take 10 seconds, for 200 seconds total. You halve A and double B. Now it takes 50 + 200 = 250 seconds, or 12.5 on average.

This is a case where geometric mean deceives you - because the two really are asymmetric and “twice as fast” is worth less than “twice as slow”.
by pbiggar | 2025-05-22 11:30:35+00:00
Microsoft is having a really bad time of it recently. Each of the 3 days of their Build conference was disrupted by protests of their involvement in the genocide.

They got Satya's keynote: https://x.com/NoAz4Apartheid/status/1924512658587263410

In the last one, during a security presentation, the presenter accidentally leaked private information as a result: https://www.theverge.com/news/671373/microsoft-ai-security-c...
by exiguus | 2025-05-22 11:30:56+00:00
Most good stuffed Distros do this. For example SUSE recently banned a package because of "calling home" e.g. did side-leading. https://security.opensuse.org/2025/05/07/deepin-desktop-remo...

Debian indeed does this. In release FF has disabled telemetry: https://wiki.debian.org/Firefox
by lostmsu | 2025-05-22 11:32:09+00:00
I don't understand the negativity. .NET folk(s) decided to try experimenting with AI coder. They open issues publicly, they review the PR, they ultimately decide what to do with it (looks like the bot is failing).

You can see people in comments complaining about being forced to review poor code as if someone is forcing them to do it.

You see people saying they won't use .NET because it might get crappy AI generated code, as if these poor diffs have already been accepted.

I struggle to understand either of the sentiments without assuming that people displaying them are just plain stupid, because they don't want to see new things being experimented with, and you can't have progress without doing that.
by ggandv | 2025-05-22 11:33:47+00:00
Amputees have phantom limb sensations including pain. I believe this is more than theory. Certainly medical science has collected at least some case studies over the past century about people who have had their auditory nerve severed for one reason or another. And, as I recall, the auditory system actually does behave unlike other parts of the nervous system like vision which is more mechanical and less dependent on the brain for basic functionality.
by Severian | 2025-05-22 11:33:49+00:00
I've had the same issues as you, and here are some things I've done or tried as a remedy.

Try going into Android "Developer options" and enable the option "Disable Absolute Volume". Some devices cannot handle the way Android maps the "master" volume of the system to Bluetooth. With the option enabled you will have a separate slider to adjust the Bluetooth volume, and the volume buttons will instead only control the "Media" volume.

An alternate thing to do is under the same Developer Options is instead of disabling Absolute control is to change the Bluetooth AVRCP version to at least v1.5. v1.5 AVRCP introduces the Absolute Volume control functionality.

But, it could also be what you may have are Bluetooth devices that do not support Absolute Volume, or lack AVRCP v1.5 compatibility. If none of this works, I suggest purchasing the "Precise Volume 2.0 + Equalizer" app. I use this as it gives you more fine-grained control over the number of steps in the volume slider (for example, I now have 100 steps). It also allows you to calibrate the number of steps to a specific device, so you can literally change how many steps from quiet to loud. It's worth all of the $10 it costs, and has other nice quality of life features as well.
by MukundMohanK | 2025-05-22 11:34:15+00:00
Between last April and now, swe-bench scores have gone up from 25%-70%.

Sure, they're being overfitted to the dataset. But with most performing similarly across even the hardest of 3rd party benchmarks, think frontier math back in Nov and now, we're closer than ever to a specialisation shift.

Hard to say at what % but once code reviews get better its likely 2025 is the last year SWE is a sought after job * demand and supply both
by ringeryless | 2025-05-22 11:36:14+00:00
what a load of bs. i anticipated a reasonable article at the outset, i even agreed with the thesis statement that changing political mores are resulting in a decline in meritocracy, and i was directly considering Hegseth and Gabbard and RFK as ideological appointments with no competence.

instead, the article purports that diversity iniciatives are to blame, not rash MAGA ideological purges or Trumps random economic policies.

this article is garbage. gtfo
by nvtop | 2025-05-22 11:36:27+00:00
Correct, diffusion LMs can edit their intermediate predictions, so "final" tokens aren't necessarily final. This is an exciting property because it allows models to correct errors in what's generated so far -- something that GPT-like models can't.

This editing is based on the Transformer's encoder property to predict token probabilities for __every__ token in a sequence, not just for [MASK]s. So when you input a sentence of three tokens `[MASK] cat barks`, Transformer will generate a probability distribution over the vocabulary for each of the three tokens, for free.

Now you can come up with many ways of how to decide whether you want to edit token or keep it as is. In the simplest case, take a new token if its probability higher than the original by some margin. In our example, say model returns the probability of the token "cat" on the second position as p_2("cat") = 0.3, while p_2("dog") = 0.6. We may want to replace "cat" with dog, and use it in the subsequent iterations.

Actual heuristics are slightly more complicated, but the base idea is this.

P.S. In order to teach LM not to just copy input unmasked tokens but to try to find a better replacement, your training objective should include replacing some % of input tokens with some other random token. Now you have part of the input masked, and part of the input corrupted, so the model can't blindly assume that all input tokens are here to stay.
by osigurdson | 2025-05-22 11:36:30+00:00
In terms of personal impact, it looks more like a step function that starts in 2022 with incremental improvement after that. Of course, progress was being made prior to that (AlexNet, AlphaGo, Transformers, etc.) but these things didn't have much impact until ChatGPT came along. Once that landed however, things haven't perceptibly changed that much.
by desdenova | 2025-05-22 11:36:37+00:00
In the Ollama API, you use the "tools" parameter to describe the available tools to the model, then use the "tool_calls" from the response to call the functions and send the results back to the model using "role": "tool".

Most of this is handled very easily by the ollama-python library, so you can integrate tool calling very simply in any script.

That said, this specific model was unable to call the functions and use the results in my "hello world" tests, so it seems it expects a few very specialized tools to be provided, which are defined by that platform they're advertising.

Right now the best tool calling model I've used is still qwen3, it works very reliably, and I can give it any ability I want and it'll use it when expected, even in /no_think mode.
by diggan | 2025-05-22 11:37:27+00:00
Depends on the jurisdiction obviously (seems in this case Sweden/EU), but I don't think the author could blanket ban it like that, as research organisations and cultural heritage institutions have exceptions for example. I think news organizations and archivists have exceptions too, but less sure about that.

Besides, I think for it to actually have any effect, it would have to be in a machine-readable format, I'm not sure placing a notice like that in the middle of a HTML document is good enough.

> Art. 4(3) applies only on condition that right holders have not expressly reserved their rights “in an appropriate manner, such as machine-readable means in the case of content made publicly available online”. According to Recital 18, “it should only be considered appropriate to reserve those rights by the use of machine-readable means, including metadata and terms and conditions of a website or a service. […] In other cases, it can be appropriate to reserve the rights by other means, such as contractual agreements or a unilateral declaration.” In other words, Art. 4 right holders may effectively prohibit text and data mining for commercial uses by adding robot.txt type metadata to their content online.

https://copyrightblog.kluweriplaw.com/2019/07/24/the-new-cop...

But maybe the author already have the same notice in a machine readable and of course I'm not a lawyer or anything, so this is just guessing based on what I've learned about the regulations that affect me personally in Spain/EU.
by tim333 | 2025-05-22 11:37:43+00:00
The author gives the downsides but not the upside of why it is like that.

It's basically so it describes sound levels on an understandable scale with 0db being just audible and 100dB being very loud.

It also corresponds to the energy carried by the sound - 0 dB is 1 pW per square meter so it is kind of a scientific unit. It's probably easier to have a measure that is understandable by the public and let engineers do conversion calculations for signal levels in networks than the other way around.
Show HN: Embedo – Word Equation Puzzle Game
by sungchi | 2025-05-22 11:39:12+00:00
Hello HN, Embedo is a word-equation puzzle game where you guess the solution to expressions like A + B − C. After each guess you see how close your word embedding is to the correct answer, which helps you converge quickly.

Today's puzzle: pasta + noodle − lasagna = ?

I built this for fun. Enjoy!

https://plan9.kr/embedo/
by leeoniya | 2025-05-22 11:39:38+00:00
we have a bridge near where i live that can use such a warning crash barrier. you'd think they'd install one after 65 bridge strikes in the last few years. their solution was to build a a stronger bridge, rofl.

i guess at this point it's a cherished tradition :D. there's probably a youtube mashup of all the phone-recorded strikes.

https://www.lakemchenryscanner.com/2025/05/20/box-truck-hits...
by -__---____-ZXyw | 2025-05-22 11:39:43+00:00
I hate the confident obsequious waffling. The cultural origins of the tool is evident.

If you aren't already, I suggest making sure to not forget, every 3-5 prompts, to throw in: "no waffling", "no flattery", "no obsequious garbage", etc. You can make it as salty as you like. If the AI says "Have fun!", or "Let's get coding!", you know you need to get the whip out haha.

Also, "3 sentences max on ...", "1 sentence explaining ...", "1 paragraph max on ...".

Another improvement for me was, you want to do procedure x in situation y, so you go "I'm in situation y, I'm considering procedure x, but I know I've missed something. Tell me what I could have missed". Or "list specific scenarios in which procedure x will lead to catastrophe".

Accepting the tool as a fundamentally dumb synthesiser and summariser is the first step to it getting a lot more useful, I think.

All that said, I use it pretty rarely. The revolution in learning we need is with John Holt and similar thinkers from that period, and is waiting to happen, and won't be provided by the next big tech thing, I fear.
by cb321 | 2025-05-22 11:39:57+00:00
Abbreviation confusability is relative to { in fact one might say measured by ;-) - number? entropy? etc. } the listener/reader's knowledge/exposure, much as sound levels need a reference distance.

I have heard "bare K" refer to a great many different things, not just kilobits (transmission) or kilobytes (storage) or kilograms (drug trade) or kilometers (foot races) and on & on, but pages or items or etc.

The fundamental problem is that some humans like to abbreviate while others get caught and annoyed by the necessary ambiguity of such abbreviation. Sometimes this can be the very same human in different contexts. ;-)

In fact, there even seems to be some effect where "in the know people" do this intentionally - like kids with their slang - as a token of in-group membership. And yes, this membership is at direct odds with broader communication, by definition/construction. To me this article seems to be just complaining about "how people are". So it goes!

This is the primary complaint. The secondary one about voltage and power and the ambiguity of the prefix itself was addressed in another comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44059611).
by lambdaone | 2025-05-22 11:40:31+00:00
It's a bit like hating numbers, and saying "What do you mean by 'three'; what is it - three volts, three amps, three metres? Clearly 'three' is meaningless, and we should stop using it and all the other numbers besides."

decibels are simply a dimensionless ratio, used as a multiplier for some known value of some known quantity.

In every context where decibels are used, either the unit they qualify is explicitly specified, or the unit is implicity known from the context. For instance, in the case of loudness of noise to human ears in air, the unit can be taken to be dBA (in all but rare cases which will be specified) measured with an appropriate A-weighted sensor, relative to the standard reference power level.

And similar (but different) principles apply to every other thing measured in dB; either theres an implicit convention, or the 0 dB point and measurement basis are specified.

People who assume that everyone is an idiot but themselves are rarely correct.

I look forward to the author discovering about (for example) the measurement of light, or colorimetry, and the many and various subtleties involved. The apparent excessive complexity is necessary, not invented to create confusion.
by lewisjoe | 2025-05-22 11:40:44+00:00
This is technically a CRDT. It's just that the "order of operations" to apply over the doc is now resolved using a central server. For context, this is exactly how Google Docs and Zoho Writer works currently. Except that, they use OT with central-server based reconciliation and the proposal uses CRDT-istic approach.

I agree this is more practical if your service anyway run over centralised servers (aka cloud)
by tomek_zemla | 2025-05-22 11:41:10+00:00
English is my second language so I do not create the content for the puzzles. The data comes from different publicly available sources. A quick search on Google for 'Thesaurus implode' gave me this: The thesaurus for "implode" offers several synonyms, including collapse, crumble, buckle, cave in, shatter, and fail. These words describe the act of something falling inwards or breaking apart due to pressure.
by card_zero | 2025-05-22 11:42:22+00:00
That's delightfully bad. The archeologists are dressed somewhat like the nazis in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, except I think that the hat of the one on the left is trying to morph into a pith helmet. The wooden pipe is apparently a plastic log from an amusement park ride, and their job is carried out somehow by poking it with thick lengths of dowel. It looks like those also function as measuring sticks, when not being used for the poking procedure.
by grammarxcore | 2025-05-22 11:42:31+00:00
> Many samples have an issue description that is underspecified, leading to ambiguity on what the problem is and how it should be solved.

OpenAI apparently tuned _basic discovery and refinement_ out of the tests so I don’t think this is a benchmark of anything useful. It can’t replace a human but can possibly make a human more productive.

https://openai.com/index/introducing-swe-bench-verified/
by pjmlp | 2025-05-22 11:42:45+00:00
Matt Godbolt wasn't that keen on how his content was referred to in the original article, and discussed this on his podcast.

==> And so, first of all, that was not the intention of that talk.

"C++ and Rust: Different Tools for the Job"

https://www.twoscomplement.org/#podcast/c-and-rust-different...
by jabl | 2025-05-22 11:43:32+00:00
Perhaps the cure is worse than the disease? There are several reasons to stay with a distro kernel:

- Lustre releases target distro kernels, upstream would likely break.

- Distro stays on top of CVE's etc. and provide updates when needed.

- HW likely certified for a few supported distros only, use anything else and you're on your own.
by gwd | 2025-05-22 11:44:02+00:00
Sure, and 10db means "10x more power". But:

1. 10x more power than what? It changes, and you Just Have to Know.

2. It's 10x more power; so if you're measuring power, like pascals, then 10db means 10x more pascals. But if you're measuring something like voltage, then it's not 10x more voltage, it's something else.

3. And if you're talking about sound, you may be talking about objective power; or you might be talking about how much more powerful it seems to humans.
by makeitdouble | 2025-05-22 11:44:44+00:00
> Front-end, back-end, QA, DevOps, etc. are all different concerns for the same outcome and impact.

Overall, I got the feeling that in their field business execution matters a lot more than technical knowledge or optimization. Which might be the majority of companies around, and why so many teams can get by with full generalist teams. And I suppose the money part was in line with priorization saving the business.

That's not an advice I'd give to anyone randomly. A company that is successfully growing in business and tries to tackle harder challenges along the way will benefit from going the other direction IME, and progressively push for more specialization to get better results without having to aggressively grow the teams.
by wisty | 2025-05-22 11:44:59+00:00
Yep you have dB for a ratio, and dB SPL as a physical unit. Just as the article says.

And yeah, the issue is when people forget to use physical units, like if they say it's 30 degrees outside amd not saying C F or K or latitude.

The historical context is a bit meaningless as well since the main application for the OG dB is 101 classes.
by incomingpain | 2025-05-22 11:45:22+00:00
So i probably cant help in practical because ive earnt a total of 0 customers so far. Ive had 82 views of my website so far. Clearly marketing is my weakness.

After I posted my new project/business to reddit. I got a grand total of 3 views.

Next idea proposed is email blast, but to what email list I dont have?

I do have a 1 week free trial for anyone who signs up and finds out they dont have a next gen firewall that accepts threatfeeds.

Webinars and live demos to who?

MSSP partnership? This might be a good path to approach.

Wear a tshirt with my website/brand on it to security conferences? I was maybe planning to go to a bsides event later in the year i guess.

Marketplaces like AWS or Azure marketplace? I dunno?

I guess the best I can do is http://mapleintel.ca
by simlevesque | 2025-05-22 11:47:40+00:00
I'm working on a big research project that uses duckdb, I need a lot of compute resources to develop my idea but I don't have a lot of money.

I'm throwing a bottle into the ocean: if anyone has spare compute with good specs they could lend me for a non-commercial project it would help me a lot.

My email is in my profile. Thank you.