MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by metalman | 2025-05-22 10:59:32+00:00
This is a good reminder of how law is actualy created and works, and the what our legal foundations are, including the laws governing our rights and responsibilitys. The real thing to understand is that all law is arbitrary, and whatever possible balance and measure is included in existing law, and discussions about change and reform are always predicated on some imagined "justice" to be had, but no matter how "just" or logical a law, someone still has to impliment and administer it, and there in lies the trap, so sticking to an ancient precident speaks volumes about the form that those laws will follow, and how to function inside that legal system. Another recent hint, was an article, here?, about ancient water pumps scattered about greater London, digging there will likely reveal that those pumps have and represent a primary right to water that can not be removed......or ignored...much like the many scattered temples and shrines in Japan where fantastic acomodations in modern building and construction have been made in order to build around, but not over, these structures that have precidence.
by jononor | 2025-05-22 11:01:20+00:00
When referring to sound in the physical world, "decibel" mean dB SPL (sound pressure level). Which is defined as the ratio to the smallest perceivable sound pressure level. Unfortunately that is still a bit underspecified, it may be measured with a frequency weighting like A weighting. And then there is the integration time or other temporal aggregation, but that is separate from decibel/log.

When in analog audio, it usually means dbV, relative to a reference voltage.

And in digital audio, usually dBFS - relative to the maximum amplitude that can be represented.
by chriswarbo | 2025-05-22 11:01:26+00:00
Yeah, I've seen several packages for doing this, e.g. QuickCheck has modules for basic "monadic testing", and there are more elaborate packages like quickcheck-lockstep, etc. I'm sure they're useful to someone, but I've not found them compelling, compared to just writing these as "normal" properties.

(For context, some "stateful" things that I've tested using ordinary PBT include browser automation (Hypothesis + Chrome + ChromeDriver), window manager scripts (QuickCheck + polysemy + Yabai), and a dynamic binding implementation for the JVM (ScalaCheck + a bespoke DSL for testing that it works correctly with Futures))

There's a good discussion of stateful property testing at https://stevana.github.io/the_sad_state_of_property-based_te... but personally I'm more interested in the parallel/concurrent/linearisability aspect that's also discussed.
by maratc | 2025-05-22 11:01:45+00:00
That's the British system working as designed. If there's a law, no matter how ancient, the British should comply. If a law needs to be changed, that's the Parliament's job.

Even the British courts, in sharp contrast to many other places, "deliver the law as it is, and not as we wish it to be" -- see for example [0] or [1].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashford_v_Thornton

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Owens_v_Owens
by smileybarry | 2025-05-22 11:08:15+00:00
If Signal uses the Windows Data Protection API for saving/encrypting the key (and some data online suggests that it does), then it’s trivial to fetch it back with the same APIs if you’re running as the same user. (I use `keyring` on Windows to access the key(s) VMware Workstation uses to encrypt Windows 11 VM vTPMs)

It’s kept secure by a chain of keys that may be backed by the TPM, but the security boundary is the user, not the app identity. IIRC Store/UWP apps may get their own boundary for credentials (due to how .appx is implemented).
by stef25 | 2025-05-22 11:08:21+00:00
It might sound unbelievable but if you write in multiple languages and mix languages in the same message or sentence, often spell check doesn't work properly. Which is only normal.

I regularly send messages in 4 different languages (living in a bilingual city + frequent use of English and lots of Spanish friends). Sometimes even using 3 languages in one sentence.

Whatsapp kind of improved it now in that you can "activate" two languages at the same time. Apart from that I'm not sure there's much else that can be done.

It's not even that much of an edge case. Brussels is the one of the most international cities in the world, street names exist in 2 languages, a lot of slang and expressions get borrowed from other languages.
by squigz | 2025-05-22 11:10:07+00:00
> the more mods you have the more difficulty you will have upgrading, the more they conflict with each other,

The point is you don't quickly reach this point these days.

> consumer hardware cannot handle the load.

My GPU is 10 years old, my CPU is 6 years old, and I only have 16GB of RAM. I'm not even sure I can name a game that is easily moddable that might overload even a middle-of-the-road system.

> Also, paid mods usually have a free version. You pay for early access for latest and greatest version, which only makes sense for specific important mods. You wouldn’t do it for all of the mods.

Interestingly, the vast, vast majority of mods I know of that offer a Patreon or similar don't offer much in the way of perks - it's mostly just a way of letting users support them if they choose. Sometimes there's early access, but that's actually fairly rare in my experience.
by renox | 2025-05-22 11:10:36+00:00
> the innovation is that formal parameters may have 3 kinds of behaviors, "in", "out" and "in out", and that the parameter behavior must be specified, but not its implementation mechanism, like in older programming languages

Great on paper, not so good in real life: so what is the specification when a parameter is aliased? That is to say passed two times to a procedure: once as an "in" parameter, the other as an "in out" parameter. I've been able to use compiler explorer to show the behaviour may change depending on the size of the parameter with GNAT, ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43001394 ).
by breggles | 2025-05-22 11:10:48+00:00
So, the full clause reads:

"When the headroom of an arch or span of a bridge is reduced from its usual limits but that arch or span is not closed to navigation, the person in control of the bridge must suspend from the centre of that arch or span by day a bundle of straw large enough to be conspicuous and by night a white light."

Does that mean the law is not being complied with, in this case, since the bales are hanging from adjacent bridges, not the "centre of that arch or span" itself?
by vbezhenar | 2025-05-22 11:11:07+00:00
The bullet should consist of several parts. Maybe it's more rocket than a bullet.

1. Part that makes it move from the gun to the target. May be ordinary powder or reactive engine.

2. Part that creates an energy when bullet hits the target. That's where antimatter would be useful.

3. Part that converts energy to damage. For example compressed gas which gets very hot, expands and pushes shrapnel to hit things around with very big speed. There are many possibilities, but you need as much energy as possible to create as much damage, as possible in the end.
by lm28469 | 2025-05-22 11:11:37+00:00
> Instead of reading 10 pages of empty water and wasting my time, ChatGPT can summarize this as

Definitely worth investing billions and wasting insane amount of energy... idk how people merge the "this is a revolution!" and "it kinda summed up a 10 pages pdf that I couldn't bother to read in the first place" without noticing the insane amount of mental gymnastic you have to go through to reconcile these two ideas.

Not even mentioning the millions of new LLM generated pages that are now polluting the web
by Propelloni | 2025-05-22 11:11:54+00:00
I'm mostly with you. However, dailies are little "dayplanners" for the team, too. For the benefit of the team as a whole, I'd suggest more context, like "I'm still on the state machine, but should be done today. After that I'll start on the DB migration. Jenny, I'll ping you then." or "Still fighting the runtime for the Box ticket. I need a second opinion."

Takes only a few seconds more. Of course, the Dev should know beforehand what he is going to say ;)
by s1mplicissimus | 2025-05-22 11:11:59+00:00
"particularly tricky situations" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here to describe situations every owner of a driving license is expected to handle routinely.

driver-not-in-vehicle is an interesting approach, but calling it "self-driving" is doing the mechanical turk without the reveal. Someone less charitable might assume intentional misrepresentation for the sake of winning an internet argument.
by svara | 2025-05-22 11:12:35+00:00
Respectfully, I'm not sure you fully understand how dB is used. The analogy to aspect ratios only works for one of multiple uses of decibel.

dB SPL and dB(A) are not ratios, they're absolute. You can derive them from a ratio and a reference level, but the former can be expressed in Pascal and the latter relates to Pascals after applying a perceptual correction function.

Similarly, dBm can be expressed as an absolute potential in Volt.

And then you've got the cases where it really just is a ratio (one of two possibilities).

You'll see all of these called "decibels".

You see why people are irritated?
by DocTomoe | 2025-05-22 11:13:18+00:00
Recently, I've been moving back to 'dedicated items' instead of 'everything on the phone'.

It might be an old guy finding a love for vinyl, but having a dedicated camera, a dedicated notebook, a dedicated music player ... makes making photos, writing down notes or listening to music somehow more ... meaningful to me. Maybe because I do not get distracted by the other 999 functionalities of the phone while I am trying to take photos, listen to music, or writing something down.
by johnisgood | 2025-05-22 11:13:44+00:00
This pretty much sums it up. I have found it to be incredibly useful. Others might have not, but then again, you have to approach it the right way. Feed it context, be as specific as possible, and do not expect 100% accuracy. I once a fed a conversation to ChatGPT and it missed something that I had to point out. The fact that it missed something does not make me go: "AI sucks", it is just simply not perfect, and it still can be very useful. I had better experiences with Claude than ChatGPT anyways.
by deng | 2025-05-22 11:13:51+00:00
No they don't. The formulation in TFA is a bit too generic - Debian will usually not remove any code that "calls home". There are perfectly valid reasons for software to "phone home", and yes, that includes telemetry. In fact, Debian has its own "telemetry" system:

https://popcon.debian.org/

Telemetry is perfectly acceptable as long as it is opt-in and does not contain personal data, and both apply to Go's telemetry, so there's no need for a fork.
by grues-dinner | 2025-05-22 11:14:34+00:00
It's not that arcane, it's referenced to a sound pressure level of 1 pascal. Which, yes, is still arbitrary in that it all ends up back at the arbitrary values of things like metres, seconds, kilograms, etc.

Volts per pascal might make sense in some contexts (like your input buffer power supply), but log volts per pascal makes sense in others, particularly for audio applications where you stack gains and attenuations onto an already-logarithmic domain.
by adrian_b | 2025-05-22 11:15:26+00:00
There were many useful details in the syntax of various statements and expressions, which could simplify programs.

An important feature was that Mesa was one of the few programming languages that specified a GOTO instruction in the right way.

Mesa had a restricted GOTO (following suggestions from Knuth), which could jump only forwards and only out of a block.

This eliminates all problems that can be caused by GOTO, while retaining all the benefits.

All later languages are either languages that provide only an inadequate handling of errors and exceptional conditions, or languages that provide GOTO instructions that are hidden behind different mnemonics that do not use the words GO TO.

For instance, if a language has labeled loops and some kind of exit-loop instruction that contains a loop label, to be able to exit from multiple nested loops, that instruction is just an ordinary GOTO instruction, which uses a different mnemonic, because the mnemonic GOTO is "harmful", and where the jump label is located in a wrong place, which makes more difficult to follow the control flow when reading the program.

In general, in Mesa the syntax for any kind of block or iteration could specify in a simple way both a normal exit and several exits corresponding to various kinds of errors or exceptional conditions.

The syntax used by Mesa for this was more convenient than the use of exceptions in most modern programming languages and the implementation was much more efficient, because the kind of exceptions used in modern languages is designed only for returning from several levels of nested functions that have been compiled separately. For exiting one or more levels of nested blocks inside a function much more efficient implementations are possible.

Mesa also had the kind of exceptions used in modern languages, but their use was needed much less frequently.
by twic | 2025-05-22 11:16:00+00:00
"We accelerated the antimatter to speeds of over 40 km/h!"

"Good lord, using what technology?"

"A DAF LF 180."

Although i have no idea what actual make or model they used - i was appalled to see that it was not stated in the materials and methods section of the paper. There's a photo in a news piece showing it's a small rigid-sided lorry:

https://home.cern/news/news/experiments/base-experiment-take...
by distances | 2025-05-22 11:17:27+00:00
I've had multiple times when my tinnitus has gotten noticeably worse. The path is always the same: some panic and desperation first, followed by some examinations and attempts of alleviation that do nothing, and finally familiarization and acceptance about 9-12 months afterwards that makes everything pretty much fine.

I'm sure it will happen again, and I can only hope that the acceptance phase keeps working.
by im3w1l | 2025-05-22 11:17:34+00:00
So one thing I always wondered about with audio mixing is that clipping should be random? Like if the sine waves somehow all line up the momentary amplitude could be much greater than the typical amplitude.

And this would mean that there isn't a fixed volume above which you get clipping and below which you don't get clipping. Playing tricks with phases could prevent/cause clipping.

Is -20 db then simply a rule of thumb for preventing occasional clipping?
by lm28469 | 2025-05-22 11:19:19+00:00
> These “AI is a gimmick that does nothing” articles mostly just communicate to me that most people lack imagination.

Either that or different people have different views on life, tech, &c. If you're not going through life as some sort of minmax rpg not using LLM to "optimise" every single aspects of your life is perfectly fine. I don't need a LLM to summarise an article, I want to read it during my 15 min coffee time in the morning. I don't need an LLM to tell me how my text should be rewritten to look like the statistical average of a good text...
by francjp | 2025-05-22 11:19:45+00:00
OpenNebula 7.0 “Phoenix” Beta is here! We’re pleased to share the first public preview of our upcoming major release This release introduces new functionality to support VMware migration, foundational support for AI and GPU-accelerated workloads, and major improvements in hybrid cloud provisioning, including expanded support for ARM architecture.

Learn more about it: https://opennebula.io/blog/product/opennebula-7-0-phoenix-be...

OpenNebula 7.0 is on its way — stay tuned for the big launch!
by simonw | 2025-05-22 11:20:11+00:00
The core benchmark is only Python, but there is also SWE-bench Multimodal which uses JavaScript: https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.03859

And the new SWE-bench Multilingual (released a couple of weeks ago) which covers 9 programming languages - C, C++, Go, Java, JavaScript, TypeScript, PHP, Ruby and Rust: https://www.swebench.com/multilingual.html
by strogonoff | 2025-05-22 11:20:20+00:00
> My GPU is 10 years old, my CPU is 6 years old, and I only have 16GB of RAM

And a Minecraft server with 300+ mods? I doubt it.

> I'm not even sure I can name a game that is easily moddable that might overload even a middle-of-the-road system.

X-Plane, Cities: Skylines, Minecraft… Most big games will overload a machine of an average person, at least once you add a decent shader, high-poly models and high-res textures, and play on anything other than potato resolution.
by -__---____-ZXyw | 2025-05-22 11:20:44+00:00
I feel like we're talking past each other. In the interest of understanding, this is what I feel like I'm reading from you:

1. In a couple of contexts, as a non-expert, I'm getting excellent use out of these LLM tools, because I'm imaginative and creative in my use of them.

2. I get such great use out of them, as a non-expert, in these areas, that any expert claiming they are gimmicks, is simply wrong. They just need to get more imaginative and creative, like me.

Am I misunderstanding you here? Is this really what you're saying?

The holes in the thinking seem obvious, if I may be blunt. I would suggest you ask an LLM to help you analyse it, but I think they're quite bad at that, as they are programmed to reflect your biases back at you in a positive way. The largest epistemic issue they have is probably that - it is only possible to overcome this tendency to placate the user if the user has great knowledge of their biases, an issue even the best experts face!
by johngladtj | 2025-05-22 11:20:49+00:00
We absolutely should sunset those laws.

If they are needed they can be voted upon again by parliament, and will no doubt pass.

In fact I would say not only should all laws have built in expiration dates, such expiration dates should be shorter the lower the percentage of votes in parliament it too to pass them!

If you can only get a 51% majority in parliament to pass a law, that law should not exist beyond that election.
by mschuster91 | 2025-05-22 11:20:49+00:00
> jwz however is also off the rails with entitlement.

Always remember to not link to his site from HN because you'll get a testicle NSFW image when you click on a link to his site from HN. dang used to have rel=noreferrer on outgoing links, but that led to even more drama with other people...

Some people in the FOSS scene just love to stir drama, and jwz is far from the only one. Another person with such issues IMHO is the systemd crowd, although in this case ... IMHO it's excusable to a degree, as they're trying to solve real problems that make life difficult for everyone.
by relaxing | 2025-05-22 11:21:42+00:00
You should have a legitimate question as to what dB’s the amp is referring to. What brand and model is it?

First, is it actually specified as dB’s? Most amps I’ve seen display volume on an arbitrary scale, no units specified.

Second, the amp has no way to know dB sound pressure, as that depends on the rest of signal chain.

So is the displayed figure referring to dBu, dB mV, something else, or something totally bunk?
by pjmlp | 2025-05-22 11:22:04+00:00
It is certainly different, given that Kotlin is about 10% of the JVM market.

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?q=java,kotlin,scala...

https://senacor.blog/in-praise-of-kotlin-a-modern-programmin...

Most shops that use Kotlin on the backend also do Android development, as means to do core sharing between backend and Android, and there is the whole ART is not a JVM implementation anyway.
by bell-cot | 2025-05-22 11:22:50+00:00
Subtitle: "Cats Don’t Talk"

(Yet certain birds, with far smaller brains, do talk.)

From a couple skims, the author seems unaware of the long and very disreputable histories of both the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phrenology in particular, and obsessions over human brain size in general.

It's a bit reassuring that nobody's bothered to upvote this submission.
by radiorental | 2025-05-22 11:24:26+00:00
Why a bail of straw? Reminds me of the forgotten reason why the onion was thrown into the varnish

"Primo Levi was working in a varnish factory. He was a chemist, and he was fascinated by the fact that the varnish recipe included a raw onion. What could it be for? No one knew; it was just part of the recipe. So he investigated, and eventually discovered that they had started throwing the onion in years ago to test the temperature of the varnish: if it was hot enough, the onion would fry."
by kj4ips | 2025-05-22 11:24:43+00:00
In that boat now, weak-modules means you sometimes get lucky, and can reuse. However, since it's more effort to determine if a rebuild is needed than just slap the "build all the vendor kmods and slurm" button, we tend to build for each kernel. IIRC el8 added kernel symbol signature hashes as Provide/Requires, with automation to extract them at build time, so kmods got a lot easier to deal with.
by lm28469 | 2025-05-22 11:24:45+00:00
I don't think you can "fear" something you consider a gimmick. Also good fucking luck arguing smartphones don't have massive negative effects.

If LLMs were even 50% as good as they're pretending to be we'd see huge productivity increase across the board, we simply don't, and it's been almost 3 years since chatgpt was released now. Where is the productivity increase ? Where is the extra wealth generated ?
by jacob019 | 2025-05-22 11:25:21+00:00
Ambiguity must be explicitly handled like uncertainty in predictive modeling, that can be challenging. I run into trouble with task complexity. At a certain point even the best models start making dumb mistakes, and it's tough to draw the line for decomposing tasks. Role playing to induce planning and reflection helps, but I feel that upper bound. I've noticed that the model performance declines when using constrained outputs. Last year I would go to all this trouble decomposing tasks in ways that seem silly given the current models. At the pace that things are moving, I expect to see models soon that can handle 10x complexity and 10mb context, I just hope I can afford to use them.
by rcxdude | 2025-05-22 11:25:54+00:00
It's not a case of mathematical purity, it's a case of unnecessary ambiguities. Decibels would be a heck of a lot more comprehensible if a) it was always a ratio or an absolute value with respect to an explicitly written unit, and b) it was always in that unit and not sometimes scaled differently because it's power instead of amplitude, and it would be no less useful to you for exactly the case you're talking about. (RF at least generally does say 'dBm' when talking about absolute power, but it would probably be better to way dBmW, and we could also use dbmV where it made sense without having to go 'oh, but that's divide by 20 just because').

Of course, it's far too late to easily change it now, but it doesn't make the current situation optimal.
by twic | 2025-05-22 11:26:24+00:00
Reading around this, i learn that something similar was done in 1993:

https://cfp.physics.northwestern.edu/documents/Transport.pdf

They built a trap, loaded it with electrons as a test, and drove 5000 miles from Martinez, CA (where the magnet was built) to Cambridge, MA. They mention some unexpected trouble after crossing the Rockies - the steadily increasing atmospheric pressure during the descent reduced helium boiloff rate, which reduced helium exhaust flow, and allowed moist air to flow back through the exhaust pipe, resulting in ice buildup. They cleared the blockage, but in doing so, lost the electrons!

I believe that they never repeated the trip with antiprotons. But hopefully the CERN delivery crew have learned from the experience, and won't run into similar trouble coming down from the Alps.
by maratc | 2025-05-22 11:26:42+00:00
Decent indicator of what?

It could be, to the contrary, that the legislators have come up with "straw bale" as something that simply does not belong under the bridge, in order to raise the brows of the people navigating the river, and make them wonder what's going on, all that in order to draw their attention. If so, it serves its purpose even more as straw bales are getting less common.