MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by airstrike | 2025-05-31 15:59:28+00:00
Easily my favorite part

> Auto timezone

> Possibly the most requested feature, automatically setting the timezone based on the GPS coordinates was essential. However, most people don't realise how complex this process is, at least within the restrictions I'd given myself: no internet or cellular modem, nothing beyond the GPS data, and a USB port for occasional updates.

> If we had an internet connection, sure, we could just query an online service. But I don't want my clock to require wifi.

> If we had a cellular modem, we could get the time from the cell towers, which is broadcast through a protocol called NITZ. This is how phones auto-update when you enter a different timezone, but it's somewhat unreliable depending on the carrier, and overall worse than using GPS. And I really don't want my clock to have a sim card.

> I'd also like, just for the sake of it, for the clock to work anywhere in the world, even at sea.

> This means we need to keep a copy of the map data for the country outlines for the whole world. It also means we need a full copy of the timezone database, and have the processing power onboard to make use of all this.
by nwlotz | 2025-05-31 15:59:56+00:00
One of the best things I was forced to do in high school was read "How to Lie with Statistics" by Darrell Huff. The book's a bit dated and oversimplified in parts, but it gave me a healthy skepticism that served me well in college and beyond.

I think the issues described in this piece, and by other comments, are going to get much worse with the (dis)information overload AI can provide. "Hey AI, plot thing I don't like A with bad outcome B, and scale the axes so they look heavily correlated". Then it's picked up on social media, a clout-chasing public official sees it, and now it's used to make policy.
by zdw | 2025-05-31 16:00:02+00:00
I'm assuming this is a north america centric viewpoint - there are plenty of places in europe and asia where rail is far more common and has societal/political favor.

Solving the last mile by having stores that get shipments near a local train station that serves both cargo and passenger needs, and using kei trucks for small local deliveries is definitely a different set of tradeoffs.
by Neywiny | 2025-05-31 16:00:08+00:00
I'll concede I didn't make it all the way through. I always have respect for people who make a physical product, especially one to sell.

I'm not really tracking the MHz signals thing considering there's the 10 MHz oscillator. It would've been interesting to see an EMI/C report. Usually I can see SMPS frequencies as a spur (especially in PFM mode).

For the 32K, at least for the H7 they recommended a ring of ground around it for some shielding. Unsure if that would've helped here. There are also micros that can use their internal RC 32K on vbat. And ones that can do USB without a crystal. The best micro is the one you know, the second best is the one you have. Maybe that's in play here.

The LED driver variability was nifty. My first reaction to large IO with tight timing would be an FPGA, but I don't know if they'd like the variable bank supply. It would probably be fine bit the solution used is interesting and works.
by ianbicking | 2025-05-31 16:00:50+00:00
"If we had a cellular modem, we could get the time from the cell towers, which is broadcast through a protocol called NITZ. This is how phones auto-update when you enter a different timezone, but it's somewhat unreliable depending on the carrier, and overall worse than using GPS. And I really don't want my clock to have a sim card."

Just out of curiosity, what can you do with a cellular modem but no sim card? Can you get the time?
by geerlingguy | 2025-05-31 16:01:01+00:00
One of the best features of this clock (I have one and have been messing with it a while now) is the up to 100 kHz refresh rate and an analog LCD driver circuit that makes the digits not flicker even a bit, even when dimmed, with a high speed camera.

That and the fact it's the highest precision clock display I've ever owned!

It is certainly not inexpensive, but it's more of an art piece than a practical instrument, unless your eyes can see in the thousands-of-hertz range!
by boricj | 2025-05-31 16:01:08+00:00
> I designed this clock years ago, with the intention to incorporate every feature request I ever received for the previous precision clock.

My first thought after reading this statement was to add one Ethernet port to run a NTP server and have PoE capability. Completely overkill for the intended purpose, but I can't help but giggle at the thought of hanging this on a wall in a datacenter and have the clock also provide time-keeping for it.
by mcstafford | 2025-05-31 16:01:27+00:00
I took a peek at the terms of service[1] when considering signing up for an account. It seemed unusual to have them in a separate language from the rest of the site.

Presuming the translation was correct I would "agree to comply with Chinese laws ... [and] grant the company a non-exclusive, free, perpetual license for global use (including modification, display, and derivative development)."

[1] https://staying.fun/en/legal/terms-of-service
by skybrian | 2025-05-31 16:02:10+00:00
People sometimes talk about this as “taking the outside view” or “reference class forecasting.” [1] It doesn’t work when there are important differences between the case being considered and other members of the reference class. Nationwide statistics are especially zoomed-out and there are going to be a lot of people in the same country who are quite different from you. Worldwide statistics are even worse.

It doesn’t mean the statistics are wrong, though. If there is a 70% chance of failure, there’s also a 30% chance of success. But it’s subjective: use a different reference class and you’ll get a different number.

The opposite problem is also common: assuming that “this time it’s different” without considering the reasons why others have failed.

The general issue is overconfidence and failure to consider alternative scenarios. The future isn’t known to us and it’s easy to fool yourself into thinking it is known.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reference_class_forecasting
by immibis | 2025-05-31 16:02:57+00:00
Correction: Bitcoin is 8-digit fixed-point. But Lightning is 10, IIRC. Other currencies have different conventions. Still, it's fixed within a given system and always fixed-point. As far as I'm aware, there are no floating-point cryptocurrencies at all, because it would be an obvious exploit vector - keep withdrawing 0.000000001 units from your account that has 1.0 units.
by HarHarVeryFunny | 2025-05-31 16:03:17+00:00
Sure, you don't know how well any specific driver is going to react in an emergency situation, and some are going to be far worse than others (e.g. panicking, or not thinking quickly enough), but the human has the advantage of general intelligence and therefore NOT having to rely on having had practice at the specific circumstance they find themselves in.

A recent example - a few weeks ago I was following another car in making a turn down a side road, when suddenly that car stops dead (for no externally apparent reason), and starts backing up fast about to hit me. I immediately hit my horn and prepare to back up myself to get out of the way, since it was obvious to me - as a human - that they didn't realize I was there, and without intervention would hit me.

Driving away I watch the car in my rear view mirror and see it pull a U-turn to get back out of the side road, making it apparent why they had stopped before. I learned something, but of course the driverless car is incapable of learning, and certainly has no theory of mind, and would behave same as last time - good or bad - if something similar happened again.
by bigyabai | 2025-05-31 16:03:27+00:00
I can only imagine Apple being interested. Their NPU hardware is slower than Qualcomm's, their GPUs have been lagging behind Nvidia in all fields since launch, and they refuse to work with any industry leaders to ship a COTS solution. They don't have many options left on the table, "figuring out how to optimize Apple Silicon" has been the plan for 6 years now and no CUDA-killers have come up out of the woodworks since then.

Either Apple entirely forfeits AI to the businesses capable of supplying it, or they change their tactic and do what Apple does best; grossly overpay for a moonshot startup that promises "X for the iPhone". I don't know if that implicates Cerebras, but clearly Apple didn't retain the requisite talent to compete for commercial AI inference capacity.
by pjmlp | 2025-05-31 16:03:33+00:00
Ctrl+, followed by f filename, you will get the file.

The only reasons I use VSCode are the plugins I cannot get on VS, like Powershell, Rust, Azure tooling, and for stuff like Next.js, better use an editor that is anyway a browser in disguise.

Performance has never been a part of my decision flowchart.
by almostgotcaught | 2025-05-31 16:03:45+00:00
this is a standard thing in "mature" areas of math and it's absolutely the opposite of what's good for the student (all of the machinery being hidden in the definition instead of developed in the theorem's proof).

EDIT: if you hate "a monad is a monoid in the category of endofunctors" then you also hate "definitions should be hard and theorems easy".
by constantcrying | 2025-05-31 16:04:32+00:00
>Citation please.

The article links to the Wikipedia page, which gets it right.

"An everywhere differentiable function g : R → R is Lipschitz continuous (with K = sup |g′(x)|) if and only if it has a bounded first derivative"

Lipschitz continuity for differentiable functions is just having a bounded derivative. The Lipschitz property suddenly becomes uninteresting as it just falls out of the assumptions, the interesting fact which allows you to use non-differentiable functions is that not assuming differentiability, but assuming Lipschitz continuity, is enough.

>Using that bound is bread and butter in convex analysis of differentiable convex functions.

It also is the bread and butter in Analysis of PDEs, but it is the bread and butter because Lipschitz continuity is a weaker property than differentiability. In the context of the article you want to talk about non-differnetiable functions, e.g. max, which you couldn't if you assumed differentiability.

The reason this is important because choosing Lipschitz over differentiable is what makes all this work.
by immibis | 2025-05-31 16:04:36+00:00
For those unaware, the "TACO trade" is when Wall Street investors trade based on the principle that "Trump Always Chickens Out". For example, buying in a tariff-induced dip on the principle that he'll probably repeal the tariffs.

Now that someone's said to Trump's face that Wall Street thinks he always chickens out, he may or may not stop doing it.
by formerly_proven | 2025-05-31 16:06:50+00:00
Despite being physically quite close to the subject, the ratio of subject-size-in-frame to distance-to-subject is usually still quite small (the angle of view for macro lenses is generally much smaller than what the focal length at infinity would suggest).

So for us, macro shots tend to have two characteristics: 1.) perspective is approaching an isometric drawing 2.) usually narrow depth of field.

These shots on the other hand were made with a very wide field of view and focus stacking produces a deep depth of field. I'm sure that if you worked out the angles and distances in e.g. the violin shot then the ratios will be basically the same as your typical 2.5 story architecture shot or subway architecture done with something in the 14-20mm FF range. Because the photographer went to great lengths to make it look like that.

There's also other cues, like the height of the camera relative to the floor and ceiling of the room, and of course the light.
by mdp2021 | 2025-05-31 16:07:04+00:00
For example, in the times of "lectures", where transmitted information was literally read (as the term says) in real time from the source to the public.

But in general, the (mis-)information that spinach could contain so much iron to be interchangeable with nails had to be a typo so rare that it would become anecdotal and generate cultural phenomena like Popeye.
by jerf | 2025-05-31 16:07:22+00:00
Performance is certainly one reason. BEAM is middle-of-the-road at best.

You also have to buy in to BEAM's data model pretty hard, which would be a big ask even today, let alone twenty years ago.

Also they were roughly contemporaneous anyhow. Asking "why not Lisp?" makes some chronological sense, "why not BEAM?" doesn't.
by immibis | 2025-05-31 16:07:27+00:00
The reality is that the process is meant to look like this:

1. Give the vaccine to everyone. 2. The disease goes away.

There's nothing deeper - they're not "meant" to make any individual stop having symptoms or stop spreading or whatever. They were just "meant" to make the disease go away, and before COVID, we'd never really looked at it in more detail than that.
by krapht | 2025-05-31 16:07:47+00:00
https://docs.python.org/3/tutorial/floatingpoint.html

Stop at any finite number of bits, and you get an approximation. On most machines today, floats are approximated using a binary fraction with the numerator using the first 53 bits starting with the most significant bit and with the denominator as a power of two. In the case of 1/10, the binary fraction is 3602879701896397 / 2 * 55 which is close to but not exactly equal to the true value of 1/10.

Many users are not aware of the approximation because of the way values are displayed. Python only prints a decimal approximation to the true decimal value of the binary approximation stored by the machine. On most machines, if Python were to print the true decimal value of the binary approximation stored for 0.1, it would have to display:

0.1 0.1000000000000000055511151231257827021181583404541015625

That is more digits than most people find useful, so Python keeps the number of digits manageable by displaying a rounded value instead:

1 / 10 0.1

That being said, double should be fine unless you're aggregating trillions of low cost transactions. (API calls?)
by lesuorac | 2025-05-31 16:07:56+00:00
> Yes it does. You can have a trial for your traffic ticket.

A trial was not required for the city to issue you a ticket. You can contest the ticket in traffic court where you will _not_ get a jury of your peers.

Everything the government does can eventually be contested in court (with a judge). Even if Liu makes an appeal and it gets denied he can still turn to the courts.

> That's just false. In fact, courts overrule laws and the procedures they authorize because they lack due process.

This is a non-sequitur statement.

Courts overruling some laws and some procedures does not change the definition of "due process".

No court has overruled this law and no court has overruled cops being allowed arrest people without consulting a judge first.
by phendrenad2 | 2025-05-31 16:07:56+00:00
I'm wondering if trading systems would run into the same issues as a bank or scientific calculation. You might not be making as many repeated calculations, and might not care if things are "off" by a tiny amount, because you're trading between money and securities, and the "loss" is part of your overhead. If a bank lost $0.01 after every 1 million transactions it would be a minor scandal.
by victorasao | 2025-05-31 16:08:14+00:00
Agree, emotions I guess are more like weights or gradients of subconscious patterns. As from real vs digital I think somehow in the lines of Daniel Dennett. This is from his book " From Bacteria to Bach and back."

“The fundamental architecture of animal brains (including human brains) is probably composed of Bayesian networks that are highly competent expectation-generators that don’t have to comprehend what they are doing. Comprehension—our kind of comprehension—is only made possible by the arrival on the scene quite recently of a new kind of evolutionary replicator—culturally transmitted informational entities: memes."
by jcranmer | 2025-05-31 16:09:36+00:00
I've found fear of the use of floating-point in finance to be a good litmus test for how knowledgeable people are about floating-point. Because as far as I can tell, finance people almost exclusively uses (binary) floating-point [1], whereas a lot of floating-point FUD focuses on how disastrous it is for finance. And honestly, it's a bit baffling to me why so many people seem to think that floating-point is disastrous.

My best guess for the latter proposition is that people are reacting to the default float printing logic of languages like Java, which display a float as the shortest base-10 number that would correctly round to that value, which extremely exaggerates the effect of being off by a few ULPs. By contrast, C-style printf specifies the number of decimal digits to round to, so all the numbers that are off by a few ULPs are still correct.

[1] I'm not entirely sure about the COBOL mainframe applications, given that COBOL itself predates binary floating-point. I know that modern COBOL does have some support for IEEE 754, but that tells me very little about what the applications running around in COBOL do with it.
by pjmlp | 2025-05-31 16:09:47+00:00
Depends on which requirements one has.

If staying only on VC++ or clang latest, with MSBuild or CMake/ninja, they kind of are, on my hobby coding I have been using modules for quite a while now, check the C++ projects on Github.

Tip, for node native modules, which node-gyp probably will never support them, they are supported via cmake.js.
by yusina | 2025-05-31 16:10:30+00:00
For natural language you are right. The language came first, the grammar was retrofitted to try to find structure.

For formal languages, which programming languages (and related ones like query languages, markup languages, etc) are an instance of, the grammar defines the language. It come first, examples second.

Historically, computers were very good at formal languages. With LLMs we are entering a new age where machines are becoming terrible at something they once excelled at.

Have you lately tried asking Google whether it's 2025? The very first data keeping machines (clocks) were also pretty unreliable at that. Full circle I guess.
by AstroBen | 2025-05-31 16:10:59+00:00
I think it's more nuanced than that. The original React model of UI = f(state) is pretty simple and solved the state management issue. Building your UI with function composition isn't a massive jump in complexity

..but then they kept adding. And adding. And adding. And adding.. and now where are we? Death by a thousand cuts. 10x the complexity for an additional 7% benefit
by gommm | 2025-05-31 16:11:00+00:00
It still sees active development, they keep adding new engines regularly. One of the engine I'm excited about is Macromedia Director [1] which they added initial support for in 2.5.0. That's a big endeavour though so will take time until they add everything needed for full compatibilities with a lot of games.

They've also just added support for some of the Dynamix games like Willy Beamish and Heart of China[2] which I absolutely loved as a kid (despite their rather rough edges)

[1] https://obscuritory.com/essay/macromedia-director-in-scummvm... [2] https://www.filfre.net/2018/05/the-dynamic-interactive-narra...
by spyckie2 | 2025-05-31 16:11:20+00:00
It’s not wisdom, it’s research.

It’s kind of obvious that new eras will produce faster scaling. But what if you ran the numbers and it wasn’t true?

There are plenty of times when this happens, the obvious is actually something different. This time isn’t the case but that’s the point of research, to back up common sense with evidence.

Also, it is very different to know that it is faster vs it is 5.5x faster. The 5.5x might not be completely accurate but it’s more in depth than just your intuition.

There is wisdom in simple, profound statements that open up new lines of thought. But There is also wisdom in doing research to make things you already know quantified and more concrete.

One example of research being wisdom is demographics. It’s one thing to know that there are more whites than blacks in the US, it’s another thing to know that there are 200m whites and 40m blacks. The numbers shed light into precision and also validate or clarify your thinking. For instance maybe you thought that blacks should be the second largest demographic since they have been here longest. Not so, Hispanic is at around 60m. Or maybe you knew that already. But if you wanted to argue with others about demographic growth and what is actually happening in immigration, knowing the numbers is wisdom, and going off of intuition leads to “they took my job” hot takes.
by evanjrowley | 2025-05-31 16:11:25+00:00
Cisco has a lot invested into optimizing video and voice communications in layer 2 network protocols. Does compressing this data into videos mean these network optimizations can be leveraged to speed up the delivery?

Hardware accellerated H.264 encode and decode are becoming more common in CPUs. Does this hardware accelleration benefit the general-purpose data storage in Memvid?
by icameron | 2025-05-31 16:13:11+00:00
I absolutely completely agree and do this myself. Unfortunately all of my peers and bosses don’t see the value, and the shop is overrun with trend chasing resume driven developers. React/node/next hosting on aws and containers and it will all be out of date next year. Everything we do has such low amount of users we don’t need anything but a single VPS and simple backend. Many of my apps from 10 years ago still run the same rails and jQuery just fine. Actually upgrading the rails versions and pulling out the jQuery dependencies is easy now too. It’s just so much simpler and works perfectly. But this is seen as detrimental to my career. It’s not appreciated. I sound like a dinosaur to the bosses and coworkers. But I enjoy it and my shit works fine. I’m saving so much time and hosting costs. Everything runs on a $40 VPS.
by poltomo | 2025-05-31 16:13:49+00:00
Beating pytorch and tensorflow kernels has been easy to do with ml compilers since ~2018. You typically train and evaluate your model in one of these frameworks then hand off the computation graph to a compiler like Apache TVM or your hardware vendor’s proprietary one. They should test their kernels against those kernels.

ML guided heuristic search over compute schedules is as old as 2013 (Halide for image processing)
by 1vuio0pswjnm7 | 2025-05-31 16:14:03+00:00
Perhaps this is an unpopular fact rather than an unpopular opinion. Here is an example of HN commenters trying to dismiss it:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37233321

The so-called "software engineer" may not have a university degree. They may have only worked for employers who themselves were college dropouts.

Tradespeople with only a high school education have licensing requirements; they can all themselves professionals. The so-called "software engineer" has no licensing requirements.

Using computers, software and the internet as a Trojan Horse to collect data and provide advertising services, unlike trades and other licensed professions, is mostly unregulated. The behaviour that so-called "software engineers" routinely engage in is the entithesis of professionalism.

HN commenters often express disdain for formal education. Perhaps it is too difficult for them to complete the requirements to become licensed professionals. Generally, liability for use of the "software engineer's" work product, i.e., software, is disclaimed in softwaare licenses or "terms and conditions" attached to websites or mobile apps. The so-called "software engineer" has no meaningful legal responsibility to software users.

How can software today, so-called "modern" software, be so bad and getting worse. Perhaps this is how.