MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by chaosprint | 2025-05-04 09:03:27+00:00
reading about Eno's ideas on organization and variety makes me want to share some perspectives directly from my experience with music performance practice, specifically in live coding.

For a long time, the common practice in live coding, which you might see on platforms like Flok.cc (https://flok.cc) supporting various interesting languages, has been like this: Everyone gets their own 'space' or editor. From there, they send messages to a central audio server to control their own sound synthesis.

This is heavily influenced by architectures like SuperCollider's client-server model, where the server is seen as a neutral entity.

Crucially, this relies a lot on social rules, not system guarantees. You could technically control someone else's track, or even mute everything. People generally restrain themselves.

A downside is that one person's error can sometimes crash the entire server for everyone.

Later, while developing my own live coding language, Glicol (https://glicol.org), I started exploring a different approach, beginning with a very naive version: I implemented a shared editor, much like Google Docs. Everyone types in the same space, and what you see is (ideally) what you hear, a direct code-to-sound mapping.

The problems with this naive system were significant. You couldn't even reliably re-run the code, because you couldn't guarantee if a teammate was halfway through typing 0.1 (maybe they only typed 0.) or had only typed part of a keyword.

So, I improved the Glicol system: We still use a shared interface for coding, but there's a kind of consensus mechanism. When you press Cmd+Enter (or equivalent), the code doesn't execute instantly. Instead, it's like raising your hand – it signals "I'm ready". The code only updates after everyone involved has signaled they are ready. This gives the last person to signal 'ready' a bit more responsibility to ensure the musical code change makes sense.

I'm just sharing these experiences from the music-making side, without judgment on which approach is better.
by Feynmanix | 2025-05-04 09:05:22+00:00
Have a look at the diagram in the accompanying blog post https://medium.com/data-science-collective/pipask-know-what-... , it explains how the process works.

In short, you can get metadata from pyproject.toml, but (a) it can still involve executing code due to PEP 517 hooks, and (b) a malicious package would use the legacy setup.py to get their code executed.
by sidkshatriya | 2025-05-04 09:06:00+00:00
The shell prompt is also a small interface. How your shell responds to tab autocomplete, provides suggestions etc. can be quite helpful. Here I just like the way fish suggests filenames, provides an underline for filenames that exist and so on.

The language is what you write in an $EDITOR. Here Elvish scripts can be nice, succinct and powerful. I like how I don't have to worry about strange "bashisms" like argument quoting etc. Everything feels consistent.
by athrowaway3z | 2025-05-04 09:06:41+00:00
That is a bit of a large ask.

There are various specs/semantics you can choose, which prescribe the implementation & required cross-cutting complexity. Security is only relevant in some of them.

To give you some idea:

- HTML load ordering is a pretty deeply held assumption. People understand JS can change those assumptions (document.write). Adding an obscure HTML tags that does so is going to be an endless parade of bugs & edge cases.

- To keep top-to-bottom fast we could define preload semantics (Dropping the linear req-reply, define client-cache update policy when the template changes, etc). Is that added complexity truly simpler than having the server combine templates?

- <iframe> exists

In other words, to do the simplest thing 75% of people want, requires a few lines of code. Either client side or server side.

To fit the other 25% (even to 'deny' it) is endlessly complex in ways few if any can oversee.
by quails8mydog | 2025-05-04 09:08:37+00:00
I wasn't even talking about enforcement, I neither pay nor fall afoul of the terms.

I can't find any evidence of BBC employees calling it "far left", all I find when searching for that is right wing people calling it far left for not agreeing with them enough as well as some more "scientific" analysis that seemed to show it having a right wing bias. Most news bias raters put BBC as centre or centre left (it probably is centre left by US standards).

Looking at the top 3 stories now, two don't have any obvious political slant, Australian elections and arrest of terrorism suspects, whereas the 3rd is about local elections and starts with lots of quotes from Reform UK about how well they're doing. Perfect opportunity for a far left org to insert criticism, downplay, or just not report on them, but seems like pretty straight down the middle reporting.
by onli | 2025-05-04 09:10:04+00:00
Okay. I have a laptop here with windows, haiku and Linux. And actually the grub (2) configuration to get haiku to start was strange. What exactly do I install best to replace grub?

Or alternatively, I have a PC with only Void Linux. Compatibility mode for booting, since uefi mode did not work (I dont know why - some secure boot shenanigans? MBR vs GPT mode? There is no EFI partition as well). What could replace grub there?
by jstanley | 2025-05-04 09:10:12+00:00
In this case I wasn't trying to say that em-dashes themselves are evidence of AI use. I was trying to say that mixing incorrect hyphen usage with correct em-dash usage is evidence of AI use.

But...

Using em-dashes is a signal. It's not a smoking gun, but text that uses em-dashes is more likely to be AI-generated than text that doesn't!

Similarly, text that consistently uses correct spelling and punctuation is more likely to be AI-generated than text that doesn't.

So - yeah - if you use em-dashes your writing looks more like AI wrote it.

But that’s not a bad thing—it means your writing has the same strengths: clarity, rhythm, and elegance. AI learned from the best, and so did you.
by me3meme | 2025-05-04 09:13:03+00:00
I just selected lecture 07 to take a look: Lecture 07 is about QR factorizacion and Householder reflections. The author proves how to construct a reflection to make zeros in the first column and then he just claims that following this procedure for the other columns finish the proof. But he should prove or justify why the other reflections do not destroy the zeros of previous reflections. Also he proves that a vector v is the vector to construct the reflection (but there is a factor of 2 that was not correctly simplified, maybe a latex error), but I think that it should be more general and easier to prove that for any w the vector from w to its image f(w) is the orthogonal vector to the plane of the reflection.

I thank the author for the slides, but this little proof need some more care, I don't know about the quality of other sections or the overall quality of the slides. Anyway I like how he tries to make things easy but good work is hard.

Edited: I was wondering whether a LLM reading Lecture 7 would detect what was missing in the proof. I tried with deepseek but its first feedback on the Lecture 7 was positive, then when prompted about the incomplete proof it recognized it as a common error and explained how to complete the proof. Also I have to prompt it about the bad factor 2 for it to detect it. So it seems that deepseek is not a useful tool to judge quality of math content without very expert guidance, deepseek suggested to ask the LLM to compare this proof with another proof to detect important or vital differences.
by roschdal | 2025-05-04 09:13:13+00:00
The list of reasons for using new technology seems reasonable:

1. It should be cheaper than the one it replaces.

2. It should be at least as small in scale as the one it replaces.

3. It should do work that is clearly and demonstrably better than the one it replaces.

4. It should use less energy than the one it replaces.

5. If possible, it should use some form of solar energy, such as that of the body.

6. It should be repairable by a person of ordinary intelligence, provided that he or she has the necessary tools.

7. It should be purchasable and repairable as near to home as possible.

8. It should come from a small, privately owned shop or store that will take it back for maintenance and repair.

9. It should not replace or disrupt anything good that already exists, including family and community relationships.
by heresie-dabord | 2025-05-04 09:14:44+00:00
I enjoyed the article but it could be clearer and more concise.

In TFA, the author wrote:

Democracy, then, will be stable so long as the expectation of costs and the uncertainty of the future give the losers sufficient incentive to accept that they have lost.

The essence is that all participants must be co-operative in their education, motives, and intentions. And this requires a system of reliable information and agreed laws.

Democracy works within the tolerances of reliable information, demonstrable co-operation, and the rule of law.

The US implosion is not yet irreparable, but it is a societal failure.
by dtgriscom | 2025-05-04 09:17:41+00:00
The big question is whether there are spurious transitions from noise or EMI. Generally, the pull-up or pull-down is strong enough so that, except while switching, the raw signal will stay reliably high or reliably low. If this is true, then you can act as soon as you see the first change in the raw signal. Then you have a time constant before you will consider a change in the opposite direction to be valid. That way, no matter how quickly the user taps a button, you will a) act as soon as possible, and b) not miss a tap.
Show HN: I built VeriText – a tool to detect if content was written by AI
by PierSilvio | 2025-05-04 09:17:46+00:00
I made a tool for anyone who's ever read something and thought: "Did a human actually write this?"

It’s called VeriText — a lightweight web app that analyzes a text and tells you whether it was likely written by a human or generated by an AI model like GPT.

Here’s what it does:

Detects AI-generated text and shows a confidence score

Explains why the content was flagged

Exports a detailed PDF report

Includes a “Humanizer” to help rewrite robotic-sounding content

I built it to help educators, hiring teams, journalists, and editors who need more transparency around content origin — especially now that AI writing is everywhere.

It's early-stage (just launched), and I’d love your feedback on:

Accuracy and false positives

UX or flow issues

Edge cases where it breaks

Any features you'd expect in a tool like this

Live demo: https://veritext.luccheseenterprises.com Happy to answer any questions and share more about how it works under the hood!
by motoxpro | 2025-05-04 09:19:18+00:00
It’s just the same thing as a take profit in the stock market. Intellectually it seems reasonable but because a lot of the bets go straight down (never raise another round for that take profit opportunity) you need a higher multiple of the ones that win.

You end up taking profit at a 1.1 return and in 10 years it ends up being uber.

Positive skew strategies (lose a little on a lot of bets and win big on a few) are impossible to use take profits on because you need those big winners.
by irthomasthomas | 2025-05-04 09:20:22+00:00
Hi, one thing I am really struggling with in AI studio API is stop_sequences. I know how to request them, but cannot see how to determine which stop_sequence was triggered. They don't show up in the stop_reason like most other APIs. Is that something which vertex API can do? I've built some automation tools around stop_sequences, using them for control logic, but I can't use Gemini as the controller without a lot of brittle parsing logic.
by emsign | 2025-05-04 09:21:49+00:00
And the method by which autocrats and fascists destroy democracy is make people believe, that when a party loses and it's being replaced by another party, that the ruling "elite" isn't really replaced. They know what part of democracy they have to discredit. This is what the AfD in Germany is doing: they say EVERY party except the AfD belongs to the "block" of "Altparteien" meaning "old parties". There's only two parties really in Germany left, according to the AfD, the "real opposition party" namely the AfD, and then there's the other party, a hegemonial woke block of "Altparteien".

Politicians who cast such doubt into the democratic principle that a government can lose its power, those politicians are up to destroying democracy and the very principle that they have to step down.
by mindcrime | 2025-05-04 09:22:19+00:00
> Hewitt’s actor model

Hewitt's actors are arguably the earliest version of "agents" out there. But about one out of every 17,000 techbros running around claiming to be an AI expert today has even heard of actors. Much less Society of Mind, or any of the pioneering work on Agents that came out of the Stanford KSL[1] or UMBC (remember "AgentWeb"[2]?).

And don't even mention KQML, FIPA, DAML+OIL, or KIF, or AgentSpeak, or JADE...

[1]: http://ksl.stanford.edu/

[2]: https://web.archive.org/web/20051125003655/http://agents.umb...
by dagorenouf | 2025-05-04 09:24:14+00:00
I followed the same journey but was unimpressed by Rails attempt at modernization with Hotwire. Decided to give Elixir + Phoenix a try and immediately fell in love. Just like I had with rails years ago. I highly recommend people to check it out, liveview is a game changer for building modern web apps without the complexity of JS, and without the baggage of using Rails to do it. And performance is mind blowing.
by voidspark | 2025-05-04 09:28:12+00:00
> word problems

That is a good analogy, except programming languages are formal languages, not natural languages.

> they are readily mapped to mathematical models

With code we are not talking about something that is mapped to mathematical models. Code is not modelled by mathematics, it is defined by mathematics (denotational semantics and operational semantics).

"Code is math" is true in a theoretical sense. Practically, coding doesn't always feel like what is commonly thought of as "doing mathematics", but it is essentially mathematical.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formal_language

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantics_(computer_science)
by dredmorbius | 2025-05-04 09:28:50+00:00
There are a number of likely mass-extinction / life-terminating events which will occur within the next billion or so years, either deterministically or probablisticaly (e.g., increased solar insolation and plate tectonics are deterministic, massive gamma-ray burst or killer asteroid are probabalistic), of which supercontinent-formation is only one.

Wikipedia's "Timeline of the Far Future" lists several:

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_far_future>

We likely exist in the late afternoon if not evening of Earth's habitable period.
by motoxpro | 2025-05-04 09:29:08+00:00
With that argument, you should use a “real” lawyer, or coder, or designer, or strategy consultant.

Instead of an indifferent shrug, I would argue that paying attention to the fact that all of the things you mentioned are available now and people STILL are seeking this out goes to show that it’s a real problem.

As with most problems, the usual answers apply, people have made the choice already, you can either have the empathy to meet them where they are and understand WHY they are doing it, or you can dismiss it and suggest a perfect solution that is unrealistic.
by 7bit | 2025-05-04 09:30:34+00:00
> Why be responsible for other people's livelihoods if you can make it work with less people?

Because he is the fourth richest man on the planet and that demands some responsibility, which he refuses to take.

He owns 162,000,000,000 dollars. Metas net income 2024 was 50,000,000,000 dollars.
by physicles | 2025-05-04 09:31:15+00:00
I’d recommend switching to Obsidian and never looking back. And unless you have additional software that requires windows, Linux is also a lower-stress compute experience these days.

I also used OneNote for the better part of a decade before switching to Linux in 2017. Joplin is ok-ish, but Obsidian is closer to OneNote with its folder-based layout.
by Sesse__ | 2025-05-04 09:31:30+00:00
More to the point: The SQL standard doesn't talk about semijoins at all, it conceptually evaluates the WHERE clause for each and every row. So the question is whether the subquery is guaranteed to give the same result each and every time. That would presumably depend on the transaction isolation level in use, except that SKIP LOCKED (which is nonstandard, from what I know) presumably calls off all bets anyway.
by consp | 2025-05-04 09:32:35+00:00
> and barely any hierarchy of (folders etc).

One of my great hate pet peeves with all smartphone and cloud apps is the "abstraction" and reliance on search. For me folders is quicker and less error prone, and as a bonus it saves on unneeded bandwidth (to load previews) and computing costs.

Also stop telling me I must use your one off "feature set" of sorting and ordering which either nobody uses or copies differently. The amount of square wheels (for me I must add, ymmv) reinvented is astonishing.
by keiferski | 2025-05-04 09:34:56+00:00
As general literacy declines, one of the consequences seems to be that words with multiple meanings or variations become compressed into a single vague meaning. Not so long ago there was a common distinction between capital-D Democracy the political system and small-d democracy the process of power or knowledge being diffused through the masses. You don’t see this idea expressed much anymore, and even the expression “making something more democratic” almost always implies a reference to the political system, not the the second sense.

This distinction is useful, because one of the biggest trends of the technological age is the capital-D version supplanting and erasing the small-d version. Almost all of the institutional “defenders of democracy” have essentially no interest in small-d democratization processes, because they are themselves in the driver’s seat in the political democratic system.

This leads them to ignore or disregard the issues of everyday people, which leads to populism, which is of course the biggest global political trend of the last decade.

This is kind of a shame for tech in particular, because for the most part technology has been a democratizing (small-d sense) force throughout history. Phones, computers, cars, on and on: all examples of expensive exclusive technologies that became democratized and accessible to everyone. And yet that same force doesn’t seem to have been applied to the political system itself.
by Sesse__ | 2025-05-04 09:37:18+00:00
The output of a query absolutely will depend on the plan. In ANSI SQL you're right it cannot (up to ordering), which is why ANSI SQL doesn't have anything like random() or nondeterministic user functions. But nearly all databases support something that is outside of that standard because it's genuinely useful, and then you get into poorly-defined situations that you need to deal with ad-hoc as an implementer.

E.g., for a very simple case, in SELECT * FROM a,b WHERE random() < 0.5, would you push random() down through the join or not? To one table? Both tables? Evaluate it once at the start of a query because it depends on neither a nor b? What if it's random() < a.x? Different databases have different and often poorly-defined semantics here.
by roflcopter69 | 2025-05-04 09:37:18+00:00
Gave it a quick try and liked it so far. Of course it's still quite basic but a good start I'd say. Looking forward to seeing more features being added.

To anyone looking for a more feature packed pixel art editor, I highly recommend https://github.com/Orama-Interactive/Pixelorama which is free and made with Godot. I recently switch to Pixelorama coming from Aseprite because imo the development for the latter got a bit stale over the years while Pixelorama really seems to have a lot of momentum and community behind it. Also, Pixelorama being made with Godot is something I really love to see!
by tehbeard | 2025-05-04 09:37:53+00:00
They don't mean the absolute real distance between dongle and mouse.

They mean the mouse communicates an absolute position (relative to some arbitrary 0,0 the mouse decides upon) instead of a relative direction.

Dongle can then take latest coord packet and diff it against previous coord packet to get a relative coord to pass via HID to the system.

If the RF packets are lost, some latency occurs but the dongle still has the previous mouse coord and can make a fairly accurate correction once a packet gets thru (get's from A to D, but might skip points B+C).
by mindcrime | 2025-05-04 09:39:36+00:00
> MCP and others on the other hand are just you explaining to the LLM how you want it to format its responses.

There's a little bit more to MCP than that. Arguably the most useful part of MCP is more on the (MCP) server side, in regards to discoverability of tools. Having a standard protocol for listing tools, resources and prompts means all you need is the endpoint where the server is located, and you can just get the tool list in a couple of lines of code, pass it to the LLM and then invoke the tool(s) without hand-rolling a bunch of code.

This is probably more useful if you think in terms of using MCP tool servers written by other people. If you're only using your own stuff, then sure, you only write your own interface code once. But if you want to use tools provided by others, having a standard is handy (albeit certainly not required).

I like the way @01100011 phrased it in his analogy with Junit:

"I kept thinking it was stupid because in my mind it barely did anything. But then I got it: it did barely do anything, but it did things you'd commonly need to do for testing and it did them in a somewhat standardized way that kept you from having to roll your own every time.".
by sph | 2025-05-04 09:39:50+00:00
Funnily enough, a JS library that I often use with Elixir, Phoenix and Live View is StimulusJS (which is part of Hotwire) I also have written a hacky stimulus controller to integrate it with Phoenix hooks for full integration.

Not sure about Rails, haven't used it in more than a decade, but NextJS was a major contributor to massive burnout. Of one thing I'm certain: Phoenix is my last web framework. I love it to bits, and I hope to retire before it stops being cool.
by Amadiro | 2025-05-04 09:40:21+00:00
Is there any strong reason to use GeoParquet instead of straight up parquet if all I'm interested in is storing and operating on lat/lons?

I'm curious if it compresses them better or something like that. I see lots of people online saying it compresses well (but mostly compared to .shp or similar) but normal parquet (.gz.parquet or .snappy.parquet) already does that really well. So it's not clear to me if I should spend time investigating it...

I mostly process normal parquet with spark and sometimes clickhouse right now.