MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by lo_zamoyski | 2025-05-16 00:25:01+00:00
> There's no definition for "color" in physics.

This is unnecessarily pedantic. Your explanation demonstrates that.

> There are no simple ideas at the top of the stack.

I don't know what a "simple idea" is here, or what an abstraction is in this context. The latter has a technical meaning in computer science which is related to formalism, but in the context of physical phenomena, I don't know. It smells of reductionism, which is incoherent [0].

[0] https://firstthings.com/aristotle-call-your-office/
by ninkendo | 2025-05-16 00:25:43+00:00
Wow, it’s funny because the last time I ran gkrellm was 23 years ago when I first started using Linux and I thought I was a l33t h4x0r…

And just today, now that I actually write code for a living and use Linux on my work machine, I found myself really wanting a good display to tell me when my memory usage was growing.[0] I was using the gnome activity monitor but it takes up way too much screen space and was always behind the window I was using. It looks like this could actually be useful for me to run now!

[0] I was running a local kubernetes cluster with an opentracing implementation, where I hadn’t quite worked out the configs for memory usage yet, and it kept spiking and OOMing when I wasn’t looking. It’s fun when your mouse cursor just stops moving and you’re wondering whether you need to hold down the power button or what…
by juliangmp | 2025-05-16 00:25:44+00:00
> When thinking about backward compatibility... keep in mind that the old code was arguably already broken. There's not a good reason to keep letting it compile.

Oh how I wish the C++ committee and compiler authors would adopt this way of thinking... Sadly we're dealing with an ecosystem where you have to curate your compiler options and also use clang-tidy to avoid even the simplest mistakes :/

Like its insane to me how Wconversion is not the default behavior.
by Karrot_Kream | 2025-05-16 00:25:52+00:00
Zooming is a bad example (because pinch zoom is just so much better than that scene hah.) Instead "go back 5 frames, and change the color grading. Make the mood more pensive and bring out blues and magentas and fewer yellows and oranges." That's a lot faster than fiddling with 2-3 different sliders IMO.
by raydiak | 2025-05-16 00:25:53+00:00
Calling a spade a spade is not condescending. You still haven't addressed the consequences of NOT doing something about Google's monopoly. You continue to ignore the fact that multiple comments from the person you were originally responding to blatantly falsified your misrepresentations. You don't care about my continued patient attempts to bring this discussion back to reason instead of personal attacks. You need some debate classes or something.

Anyway, I've done what I set out to, which is leave something for readers to think about. Changing your mind is not on my priority list, some people just can't be reasoned with. Facts are what they are, regardless of your acceptance or lack thereof. Say whatever further mean-spirited personal attacks make you feel like you "won" here, since that's apparently important to you. Go ahead and get the last word in. I'll leave you to it.
by jjcm | 2025-05-16 00:26:03+00:00
> I was on Microsoft insurance which was quite gold plated at a time

One of the biggest perks of working for Microsoft for a long time was their health coverage. I can't tell you the number of times I'd be doing initial paperwork for a doctor's appointment and the receptionist would be like, "Oh you have THAT insurance, we're going to do all of the tests." I've heard they since cut back on it a little, but it truly was gold plated.
by snapplebobapple | 2025-05-16 00:26:13+00:00
It means high enough above their perceived benefit from said taxes to strongly incentivize tax avoidance and lobbying to create loopholes. For example, the top marg*nal tax rate in my province is 49% and it is insane to me because the program choice of the levels of governments does not align with program choices i would make with that money and all the spending is conservatively inflated 15 to 20% above the cost i would be able to get if i was said programs. I am getting potholes, mediocre schools and mediocre healthcare for the cost of first class all those things.
by 20after4 | 2025-05-16 00:27:09+00:00
There is some evidence for large amounts of money disappearing into "black programs" in the defense department. Famously the pentagon has been unable to pass an audit for many years. Predictably, there has been lots of speculation about where the money goes. It's one of the favorite topics among conspiracy theorists.

This claim about $21 trillion is from Catherine Austin Fitts¹. She is a pretty interesting character who seems smart and informed but many of her claims seem like fantastical (dystopian) conspiracy theories. If there is any truth to any of what she says then then implications are pretty huge.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catherine_Austin_Fitts
by literalAardvark | 2025-05-16 00:27:23+00:00
The life expectancy of large appliances is 10-20 bloody years.

Who returns fridges? It's a tremendous pain in the ass to do.

But you're right, it's possible.

Logically I think I'd choose to show myself other new home related ads, or other long term appliances that are probably not bought yet or nearing end of life just like the fridge.
by kragen | 2025-05-16 00:27:40+00:00
That is a meme that people repeat a lot, but it turns out to be wrong:

https://cr.yp.to/talks/2015.04.16/slides-djb-20150416-a4.pdf (though see https://blog.regehr.org/archives/1515: "This piece (...) explains why Daniel J. Bernstein’s talk, The death of optimizing compilers (audio [http://cr.yp.to/talks/2015.04.16/audio.ogg]) is wrong", citing https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9397169)

https://blog.royalsloth.eu/posts/the-compiler-will-optimize-...

http://lua-users.org/lists/lua-l/2011-02/msg00742.html

https://web.archive.org/web/20150213004932/http://x264dev.mu...
by cheema33 | 2025-05-16 00:28:21+00:00
> Today I tried "vibe-coding" for the first time using GPT-4o and 4.1. I did it manually

You set yourself up to fail from the get go. But understandable. If you don't have a lot of experience in this space, you will struggle with low quality tools and incorrect processes. But, if you stick with it, you will discover better tools and better processes.
by actinium226 | 2025-05-16 00:28:42+00:00
For the first example:

import numpy as np A = np.random.random((100, 5, 5)) b = np.random.random((100, 5, 1)) x = np.linalg.solve(A, b)

Admittedly the documentation is a little hard to read if you just look at 'type' for b, but then it says "Returned shape is (..., M) if b is shape (M,) and (..., M, K) if b is (..., M, K) where ... is broadcasted between a and b"

So you have to make sure your b vector is actually a matrix and not a vector (if K=1 for your case).
by yeauldfellows | 2025-05-16 00:29:22+00:00
While I appreciated the author's thoughts on a canon of books I have also imbibed at an impressionalbe age, I can't help notice the strange fixation on how the author is perceived socially by consuming certain books. Sure, when one is young and emeshed in the schooling social hierarchy (and the years after one leaves school), one may care deeply of their book consumption and their mask of intellectualism.

Maybe I'm just getting old, but doesn't everyone at a certain age stop caring about which books they read, and how the reading of certain books is perceived by others?
by Retric | 2025-05-16 00:29:45+00:00
> A new car still costs around 13oz of gold.

A car or house built in 2025 is very different object than one built in 1945.

Consistent commodities like coal, rice, or silver make better points of comparison, but each give wildly different values for inflation just as gold does. Inflation doesn’t mean anything specific on very long timescales because the underlying economy fundamentally changes.

There’s really nothing suggesting gold is a more fundamental measure of value than silver which was far more commonly traded. IMO the reason people focus on gold today is its more consistent use in video games as a currency rather than say platinum. There’s just never been enough gold to use as a common medium of exchange between individuals, but in virtual worlds that’s a non issue.
by _whiteCaps_ | 2025-05-16 00:30:30+00:00
I don't know anything about gene editing, but my grandmother was a carrier of the BRCA mutation. It would have saved a lot of heartbreak in my family if that could have been detected and repaired. My aunt, mom, and brother (age 4) all died of cancer. I'm just glad that my mom didn't know she had the mutation and passed it on to her child.
by almostgotcaught | 2025-05-16 00:30:36+00:00
> Now, how do you apply it to particular dimensions of some larger arrays?

What exactly is the complaint here? If I write a function on a 2x2 array, there's no way to apply it to tiles in a 3x2x2 array? But there is - take a slice and squeeze. What's the issue?

Edit: if the issue is some weird version of "why can't I apply my function to an arbitrary set of indices" (like the 0,1 in a 2x2x2 array) I'm at a loss for words (because that's a completely different shape - indeed it's the entire array).
by kulahan | 2025-05-16 00:31:15+00:00
I’m not sure of by “they just suck” you meant to imply that they’re ineffective. If that’s the case, I strongly disagree. They are not used because somehow all countries pretty much agreed they’re way TOO effective and horrific. Nobody wants it used on them, so nobody uses it on anyone else.

I cannot imagine a more effective weapon than an invisible gas that melts you alive, and there are MANY chemical and bio examples of these types of weapons.
by tuna-piano | 2025-05-16 00:31:18+00:00
If someone in the year 2050 was to pick out the most important news article from 2025, I won't be surprised if they choose this one.

For those who don't understand this stuff - we are now capable of editing some of a body's DNA in ways that predictably change their attributes. The baby's liver now has different (and better) DNA than the rest of its body.

We still are struggling in most cases with how to deliver the DNA update instructions into the body. But given the pace of change in this space, I expect massive improvements with this update process over time.

Combined with AI to better understand the genome, this is going to be a crazy century.

Further reading on related topics:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/JEhW3HDMKzekDShva/significan...

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/DfrSZaf3JC8vJdbZL/how-to-mak...

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yT22RcWrxZcXyGjsA/how-to-hav...
by zahlman | 2025-05-16 00:31:34+00:00
> And as far as I can see, it is dying.

And why are you the one who gets to make this judgment?

> So on the one hand you find it okay to delete old questions, and on the other hand you find it okay to not add new questions. But it's not dying.

Yes.

You write this as though you think there is a contradiction here. I genuinely don't understand why. There is no contradiction here.

QuickDraw wasn't "injured" when it lost 2000 lines of code, either (https://www.folklore.org/Negative_2000_Lines_Of_Code.html).

> It has never happened to me that I could not find what I wanted on SO because there were too many similar questions.

Back when I was trying to sort out the mess more actively, it happened to me daily. I distinctly recall multiple instances of spending hours at a time tearing my hair out over it, and complaining in the corresponding chat about the terrible questions, the unintentional clickbait, and the sensitivity of search engines to minor variations in the query.

> closed by people who obviously had no understanding of my question (together with its answer).

This is said by perhaps 90% of people complaining about their question being closed, and trivially shown to be incorrect in perhaps 90% of those cases.

But also, "people can't figure out what you're trying to ask" counts against your question. By design. Because questions are expected to communicate clearly. So that other people who read them don't have to waste their own time making sure they're in the right place.

Of course, there are other reasons a question might not be understood. But it's not hard to distinguish between "this person can barely write coherent English" and "I don't know anything about this technology". People are, broadly speaking, just not going around the tags for technologies they don't know about in order to close questions. What on Earth would they get out of that?

> What I am saying is that SO has become a place where even good questions get closed. By people who know better, like you.

Again: please show a link to an example of a question that you believe was unjustifiably closed, and make sure that you can clearly explain, in terms of existing policy why you believe the closure was invalid.

Do this on https://meta.stackoverflow.com, where it belongs.

Or if you have done this in the past, link me an example of that. That's fine here.
by Karrot_Kream | 2025-05-16 00:31:37+00:00
At this point in time calling a multimodal LLM an LLM is pretty uncontroversial. Most of the differences lie in the encoders and embedding projections. If anything I'd think MoE models are actually more different from a basic LLM than a multimodal LLM is from a regular LLM.

Bottom line is that when folks are talking about LLM applications, multimodal LLMs, MoE LLMs, and even agents are all in the general umbrella.
by ahelwer | 2025-05-16 00:33:20+00:00
There has definitely been a focus on improving developer onboarding in the past few years! If someone's PR is rejected now that can be considered a failure of the process, something to be fixed. I think when TLA+ was mostly a product of MSR this sort of thing could kind of fly (still unfortunate) but now that we're out in the wild with a foundation it's really a survival thing to not bounce willing contributors.
by ahelwer | 2025-05-16 00:36:14+00:00
There are some proposals floating around to evolve PlusCal. Probably the most prominent is Distributed PlusCal[0]. There's a programming language lab at UBC which is also doing a lot of experimentation with transpiling PlusCal to Golang[1]. They presented a paper at the latest community event.

The PlusCal-to-TLA+ transpiler is considered part of the core TLA+ tools and will definitely keep being maintained.

[0] https://conf.tlapl.us/2020/03-Heba_AlKayed-An_Extension_of_P...

[1] https://distcompiler.github.io/
by cayley_graph | 2025-05-16 00:36:40+00:00
An absolutely terrible and tone-deaf way to phrase that thought, but the fact of the matter is that most of the world (you and I included, in all likelihood) will not get access to this sort of thing in our lifetimes. Not because modern medicine won't have been there yet, but because our lives (and those of our children) are simply seen as being worth significantly less than a rich person's desire to become richer.

How many people can even afford to get multiple opinions for a weird lump on their back? Or go to the dentist for a strange toothache? How many people can afford to get consistent exercise and eat healthy? How many lives would be saved or at least massively bettered? We already have the means to extend the life expectancy of the average person, and it's not being used. Obviously this is a wonderful medical advance, but it's depressing to wonder who it's for.
by throwaway314155 | 2025-05-16 00:37:32+00:00
> Started on an LLM app that looped outputs, saw this post soon after and scrapped it. It was better done by someone else.

If it helps, "TFA" was not the originator here and is merely simplifying concepts from fairly established implementations in the wild. As simonw mentions elsewhere, it goes back to at least the ReAct paper and maybe even more if you consider things like retrieval-augmented generation.
by simonsarris | 2025-05-16 00:37:44+00:00
I used to answer questions a lot, by around 2013 I had answered maybe ~12% of all HTML canvas questions ever asked. To me it declined a lot sooner, 2014 really does feel like the right inflection point.

There was a belief, sometimes unstated but often explicit, that no more (serious) discussion is really to be had, and further wondering how can one stop people from asking. It became difficult to discuss anything if there was even something vaguely related asked before. It was not possible to discuss something you knew the answer to, but did not know why, or wanted to hear arguments for which of 5 ways might be best. All (to me) very worthwhile technical discussions. Totally shut down.
by benoau | 2025-05-16 00:37:55+00:00
> And, for good measure, it does a wonderful job of refactoring. Periodically, I have a session where I look at the code, decide how it could be better and instruct Claude. Huge amounts of complexity, done. "Change this data structure", done. It's amazingly cool.

Yeah this is literally just so enjoyable. Stuff that would be an up-hill battle to get included in a sprint takes 5 minutes. It makes it feel like a whole team is just sitting there, waiting to eagerly do my bidding with none of the headache waiting for work to be justified, scheduled, scoped, done, and don't even have to justify rejecting it if I don't like the results.
by snapplebobapple | 2025-05-16 00:38:01+00:00
It's more that you are utterly disconnected because you associate spending more with contributing back, when spending more on failure incentivizes failure. You seem to think I don't want to contribute back when my complaint is I'm contributing a ton and seeing poor results for that contribution. My desire is for the ecosystem to be healthy and for my country and the world to thrive and throwing money in non stop and seeing it wasted is not healthy or sustainable.

Here's a refresher: What you spend is your measure of failure. What you get is your measure of success. What I get is not a whole lot (and yes I value and want to see social goods like great healthcare, education, transportation, etc, because those things are good for me and good for my business) and what I spend is at atrocity levels, which makes this a situation that incentivizes me to lobby and otherwise legally manage those expenses.
by protocolture | 2025-05-16 00:38:34+00:00
>If you try to register the copyright

Which legal jurisdiction? Because I don't have to register shit?

>You don’t need to register for copyright in Australia. The moment an idea or creative concept is documented on paper or electronically it is automatically protected by copyright in Australia. Copyright protection is free and automatic under the Copyright Act 1968.

>It probably explicitly doesn't claim such rights

Most I have read assign everything to the user, Midjourney being an outlier because it reserves the right to distribute and remix your work without a bigger license fee.

They do this for practical reasons, they don't want to be seen to own anything that might be associated with criminal activity.

Sudowrite has their terms reproduced human readable.

> We understand it's super important for you to retain ownership over the content you create, so whether you use Sudowrite to brainstorm, enhance your ideas, or fine-tune your writing, all the writing you generate remains yours. When you input text into Sudowrite and use its features to generate or improve content, the output is based on your initial input and creative direction. This means that the resulting content, enriched or transformed by Sudowrite, is considered your intellectual property. You have initiated the creative process, and therefore, the contributions made by Sudowrite in response to your inputs are yours to own, use, and distribute as you see fit.
by thaumasiotes | 2025-05-16 00:39:01+00:00
> Unless the tutor operated on a model of, “45 minutes starting whenever we are both here”.

I would be unsurprised if that's how she thought about it, but it didn't really come up.

My sense was that, since she was the service provider and I was the customer, she felt that it was inappropriate for me to be waiting for her.
by beeflet | 2025-05-16 00:39:22+00:00
>For this reason I do not think that curying diseases will lead to designer babies.

Well, you're wrong. Where is the line drawn for what constitutes a disease? Retardation? Autism? Eventually every child below, say, 130 IQ will be considered disabled and unable to find work.

Apply this to every other trait: cardiovascular health, strength, height, vision, etc. All forms of weakness can be considered a disease. The end product of eugenics is that mankind will be made into a docile and fragile monoculture.

>If you want make your baby smarter, taller, or more handsome, it's not so easy because these traits involve 1000s of genes.

And? it's obvious that the technology will eventually be capable of this, just not all at once. It starts with single-gene mutations, then it will be 10's of genes, and then hundreds and thousands.

That is the slippery slope: there is absolutely nothing about your reasoning that prevents one step from leading to another.
by noodletheworld | 2025-05-16 00:39:24+00:00
Seems fair, but refactoring is generally tricky and:

1) replacing a func with a simpler recursive func may or may not be ideal.

2) this fills me with no joy when I read it:

> It seems easier to start from scratch as opposed to refactor it. The characterization tests above will help ensuring that the returned hash map stays the same.

Its enormously hmm… what word to use. Ambitous? Foolish? Brave?

Anyway, taking code, writing some tests for it and then rewriting the entire thing so it passes the tests you wrote only barely falls into “refactoring”.

If anyone refactored my code base by simply rewriting from scratch the parts they dont like, I would be upset.

Rewriting things is hard, and its … brave… to think you can just write a few tests and then if they all pass its all good!

That only works in very trivial examples, and really, doesnt show case the strengths of clojure at all.
by inopinatus | 2025-05-16 00:40:43+00:00
https://www.legislation.gov.uk/aep/Edw1cc1929/25/9/section/X...

now compare

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3b/Magna_Ca...

to

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/db/Magna_Ca...

There's a smudge. Of law
by yeauldfellows | 2025-05-16 00:41:15+00:00
I read Glass Bead much later in life, and had a completely different interpretation of the novel than anything I've read online. (I too have never met anyone who's read more than Siddhartha)

Isn't the whole novel a joke on the formal yet perhaps empty intellectualism of the developing modern world? The character latches onto the formal structures of the elaborate hierarchy, climbs the ladder and reaches its zenith. All the while being the expert in a game that seems like the sort of game two hallucinating LLMs would invent as a game/language to understand humans.

Spoiler. Having reached the highest in his order, he begins to see the emptiness of his order and realises that teaching the (elite) youth from the real world is the grandest aspiration one can have, and promptly dies after jumping in a lake and having a heart attack, before even giving one formal lesson to the youth.

Keeping in mind that Hesse fled Nazi Germany.