MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by vanderZwan | 2025-05-16 08:41:47+00:00
In short, the brain is a complex dynamic feedback system and cybernetics is a really good way to break down complex dynamic feedback systems? Seems like an obviously sensible take.

One thing I'm missing here is the idea of context.

To give a very concrete example from personal experience: I'm colorblind (protanomaly, meaning one of my color cones is miscalibrated, which can actually be partially "corrected" for by manipulating the input spectrum a.k.a. wearing specifically shaded glasses). As a result I've learned a lot about color theory over the years.

One fun thing is that if you look at the history of color perception theories, once we realized what the eye is made of we started with coming up with ever more sophisticated models for each of our cones for a while, which was a great improvement... and then someone realized "hey, the way I perceive this shade of red also depends on which color it is surrounded by", and if you want to model that accurately then things get really complicated (it's also usually not needed for accurately storing and then later reproducing colors). But it explains things like a question of "what color is the dress?" taking the internet by storm.

So if we look at the "control systems" of the brain, I bet those "target values" will be a combination of static baseline plus contextual correction from other control systems. And teasing that apart will be quite a task.
by immibis | 2025-05-16 08:42:15+00:00
Bitcoin can't, but defi can. An entity can issue a ERC-whatever token that acts as a bond, minted in exchange for whichever other token (e.g. ETH), and redeemable for that plus interest at their discretion (e.g. you could create a redeem queue). The bonds can be traded in secondary markets immediately upon creation - no need to file for listing (you need to create a swap pool and seed it with a little of each asset though).

An important difference is that your new token can't ever be confused with base money. In banks, we have base money, and we have bank money, and we pretend they're the same thing because banks are pretty reliable (not 100% but pretty). In crypto, the system won't let you lie like that. (Though you can create another new currency backed by a mix of currencies - this is what DAI does.)

Another important difference is trust. I can easily issue bonds in the real world and then just run off with the money and not repay them. If I try, a lot of heavily armed men will hunt me down. That doesn't really happen in crypto, and as things are now it can't happen, because if you make your identity and location known and issue crypto bonds, the same armed men will hunt you down for issuing crypto bonds instead of ordinary bonds, which is a crime itself (see what happened to Kik/Kin). So you'd have to stake something else to make people trust you.
by bambax | 2025-05-16 08:44:18+00:00
> When 2:50 rolled around and your meeting was supposed to end, do you think people actually ended the meeting? Noooooo. Absolutely not!

Why the hell not? Do people like meetings? I would want to get out as soon as the time is up.

In high school when the bell rang everybody ran out of the door. Maybe meetings need a bell too.
by dandaka | 2025-05-16 08:44:39+00:00
Would love to learn more! Managing notes — is it your already existing docs? I have been thinking about proactive assistants, but don't really know where to start. I have a few product ideas around that, where this proactivity can deliver a lot of value.

My personal experience with building such agents is kinda frustrating so far. But I was only vibe coding for a small amount of time, maybe I need to invest more.
by soco | 2025-05-16 08:44:51+00:00
If the entire picture was so dark nobody would have used banks for anything, all across history. The banks were created by those having the means to open banks, not by charities, so it should be obvious that they will serve primarily their masters. You could make a similar argument for crypto: it does help some people to send money to the back of Africa, but is mostly enabling scams. My point is, the more there's money involved the darker the picture. If only we cared enough to make it better, but it's all boiling the frog.
by Sinosteelpipe | 2025-05-16 08:45:33+00:00
Related research reports show that the scale of Middle East trade is expected to exceed $1.8 trillion in 2025, of which the proportion of non-oil trade will jump from 48% in 2023 to 55%. Emerging fields such as cross-border e-commerce, new energy equipment, and medical technology are growing at an average annual rate of over 25%
by HenryBemis | 2025-05-16 08:46:31+00:00
The cost of doing things (I remember watching the Challenger live on TV at the time).

Every now and then we watch/read in the news that # of workers died while building that bridge/road/building/etc. We don't stop making bridges/roads/buildings. We just make it safer. Will people continue dying unnecessary/unnatural deaths? Unfortunately, yes. Let's minimise this.
by jaidhyani | 2025-05-16 08:46:36+00:00
Approximately no one in the community thinks this. If you can go two days in a rationalist space without hearing about "Chesterton's Fence", I'll be impressed. No one thinks they're 100% rational nor that this is a reasonable aspiration. Traditions are generally regarded as sufficiently important that a not small amount of effort has gone into trying to build new ones. Not only is the case that no one thinks that anyone including themselves is 100% correct, but the community norm is to express credence in probabilities and convert those probabilities into bets when possible. People in the rationalist community constantly, loudly, and proudly disagree with each other, to the point that this can make it difficult to coordinate on anything. And everyone is obsessed with studying and learning, and constantly trying to come up with ways to do this more effectively.

Like, I'm sure there are people who approximately match the description you're giving here. But I've spent a lot of time around flesh-and-blood rationalists and EAs, and they violently diverge from the account you give here.
by anvandare | 2025-05-16 08:46:44+00:00
The gender of a noun is just a noun class. But because Germanic languages lie more toward the analytic end of the morphological typology continuum (whereas Romance languages lie more toward the synthetical end) the information is latent - or rather, the task of conveying that information is left to other words (the articles).

Just imagine if someone studied Portuguese but learned vocabulary like this, never bothering with the ending vowel:

'gat-' 'cas-' 'bolach-'

Similarly, 'die' should be considered an inherent part of 'Frau'. So don't learn just 'Frau', learn 'die Frau'. The article 'Die' is just as "random" as '-o' or '-a' is in Portuguese. (I'll skip the part where you can have a form of the word in both classes: gata/gato.) People like to try and find "rules" they can remember instead, but it's a pointless endeavor. Language is a Calvinball game.

To make a weird tech analogy: Romance nouns are like laptops, with a touchpad built in. Germanic nouns are like desktops, you have to remember to carry a mouse* along.

* Die Maus
by dsq | 2025-05-16 08:47:29+00:00
I read that the oxygen content of the atmosphere was significantly higher then:

"The atmosphere of the Earth 80 million years ago was discovered to have 50% more oxygen than modern air. Brenner and Landis found that for all gas samples taken from amber 80 million years old the oxygen content ranged between 25% to 35% and averaged about 30% oxygen".

From: https://www.npl.washington.edu/av/altvw27.html

Sounds like being supercharged with oxygen could support larger mass on land.
by Ray20 | 2025-05-16 08:48:22+00:00
>but why block Ukraine?

Ukraine is on the one hand a fairly small market, on the other hand a very corrupt totalitarian country, where a huge part of the "donations" will be bribery, money laundering, fraud, buying illegal goods.

So, probably, the company simply decided that it was easier to abandon this market rather than to solve the potential problems.

>moral principle because I didn't want to potentially help launder money to revolting dictatorships.

It is quite applicable to Ukraine as well.

People are literally being grabbed off the street and sent to die in storm troop units. Massive corruption, the main method of protection of which is that those who fight against it (or all their male relatives) are simply sent to die.

But I think it's more about the legal problems created by a small, toxic market than about high moral standards.
by thephyber | 2025-05-16 08:48:26+00:00
But do they consider it a CS risk or a business-wide risk? Is there any role at CoinBase that isn’t susceptible to insider risk? I would argue they would treat it as a security department / business risk issue and not a CS-only issue.

Onshoring CS and paying some more for that role may result in a net change of 0 risk (eg. The same possibility of a breach over the same time interval).

Would a lower class (for that region) Alabama man have less the susceptibility to insider risk as a middle class (for that region) Philippino man?

Most likely, the company will focus on better segmentation and better adherence to least permissions for all roles.

Also, your logic is clouded by the fact that you know it happened. In all aspects of security/cybersecurity, risk is incredibly difficult to calculate because you have to accurately know how much a counterfactual would cost in order to accurately choose one option over the other.
by motorest | 2025-05-16 08:48:36+00:00
> The option there is better tooling (...)

The tooling already exists. The bulk of the criticism in this thread is clearly made from a position of ignorance. For example, all major compilers already provide flags to enable checks for uninitialized variables being used. Onboarding a static code analysis tool nowadays requires setting a flag in CMake.

These discussions would be constructive if those engaging in them had any experience at all with the language and tooling. But no, it seems the goal is to parrot cliches out of ignorance. Complaining that they don't know what a reserved word means and using that as an argument to rewrite software in other languages is somehow something worth stating.
by sph | 2025-05-16 08:48:53+00:00
Soderk (Southwark), Marlibon (Marylebone), Reding (Reading), Bister (Bicester), Sozbery (Salisbury), Frum (Frome), Worick (Warwick), Noridge (Norwich), Darby (Derby), and the various Gloster, Lester, Wooster
by notpushkin | 2025-05-16 08:49:14+00:00
Revolut is an actual bank if you’re in the EU! https://help.revolut.com/en-EE/help/accounts/what-does-uk-ba...

Edit: and apparently they’re now setting up a bank in the UK as well: https://help.revolut.com/help/more/legal-topics/is-revolut-a...

Wise is not, and it might be more difficult to get the money out if they are insolvent. For the customers in the EU, they’re a Payment Institution in Belgium: https://wise.com/help/articles/2932693/how-is-wise-regulated...
by ben_w | 2025-05-16 08:49:22+00:00
> If this had been the policy, we’d still be technologically in the 18th century.

Health and safety, and public safety, are as much an innovation as anything else since then.

The laws that say we need testing etc. come from the observable dangers of much of the tech of the 18th and 19th and 20th century. The rules that say we can't buy thorium toothpaste any more* and why car headlights and signal lights are mandatory, are written in blood — and you can witness the result of failing to adhere to such principles and winging it with stuff like the 2020 Beirut explosion, or even that the first Starship test flight covered a nearby city in dust from the destruction of the insufficient concrete launch pad.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doramad_Radioactive_Toothpaste
by numpad0 | 2025-05-16 08:49:26+00:00
And frustratingly all "lacks MMU" and V6 UNIX binaries don't just run. Imagine the world where random IoT gadgets all run backported GPLv2 GNU/Unix systems and crashing left and right.

Instead there's a massive gap between Linux-capable systems and RTOS-focused systems despite, like you said, the latter now being bigger and better than real shared UNIX systems.
by tomhow | 2025-05-16 08:50:25+00:00
This is all plainly false. Community members who are sincere about wanting to make HN better or just holding the moderators to account can easily do so. They can email us with URLs, or include URLs in their accusatory comments. Plenty of community members do that and we always take action or explain our thoughts on the matter.

Accusations like this one, without any evidence that would enable other community members to check for themselves, serve only to deflect from the accuser's own conduct, and achieve nothing but make the site worse.

If you're sincere in being concerned about the patterns you claim are so pervasive here, please cite the evidence so we can all understand what you're talking about and enable the moderators to take the appropriate action.
by vendiddy | 2025-05-16 08:51:35+00:00
I think they are capable of doing it, but it requires prompting.

I constantly have to instruct them: - Go step by step, don't skip ahead until we're done with a step - Don't make assumptions, if you're unsure ask questions to clarify

And they mostly do this.

But this needs to be default behavior!

I'm surprised that, unless prompted, LLMs never seem to ask follow-up questions as a smart coworker might.
Ask HN: Would You Use a Competitive Learning Platform with Daily Skill Battles?
by abhaysinghr516 | 2025-05-16 08:51:59+00:00
I’m working on a new kind of learning platform that combines daily skill-based battles with personalized upskilling. Think of it as a mix between Duolingo’s gamification and Stack Overflow’s peer voting — but for learning tech, logic, and problem-solving.

What it does: • Users compete in short daily challenges (code, logic, creativity, etc.) • They vote on the best solutions submitted by peers • As you play, the platform adapts to your strengths and weaknesses to guide your upskilling path • Over time, it becomes a personalized learning map, driven by community and gameplay

Why I’m building this: Traditional learning platforms feel lonely or passive. I want something that makes learning feel like a multiplayer game — with real feedback, fun pressure, and visible progress.

Would love feedback on: 1. Would you try something like this? 2. What would make you stick with it beyond a few days? 3. Would competition motivate you — or burn you out? 4. Are there tools you already use for learning (YouTube, LeetCode, forums, etc.) that this could replace or improve?

Thanks in advance — honest takes (positive or brutal) are welcome.
by thorin | 2025-05-16 08:52:30+00:00
Before stackoverflow and chatgpt/copilot we had man pages and physical books. I guess some notes are still useful for some things, but like you I rarely refer to them. What I do find annoying is when someone asked me about something I designed/wrote a year or 2 ago and I don't have access to it as I've moved to another client/virtual machine. Officially I'm not supposed to retain this information after leaving an engagement.
by the_third_wave | 2025-05-16 08:53:46+00:00
Well, that's quite the horror show of an interface, something dreamt up by a crack team of interns high on their own supply of rounded pastel-coloured widgets. Fortunately Android is quite flexible and has good longevity for a mobile OS so I'll keep on using 'ancient' versions until MAHA [1] takes over and brings back Holo.

[1] Make Android Holo Again
by umanwizard | 2025-05-16 08:54:13+00:00
When I was learning to read German, for the longest time I thought the word “letztendlich” was “letz-tendlich” (which is meaningless but at least theoretically pronounceable) rather than “letzt-endlich” (which is what it actually is).

I’m sure a native German speaker wouldn’t make the same mistake, though.
by motorest | 2025-05-16 08:55:10+00:00
> I don't really care if it isn't portable.

You don't care because your job is not to ensure that a new release of C++ doesn't break production code. You gaze at your navel and pretend that's the universe everyone is bound to. But there are others using C++, and using it in production software. Some of them care, and your subjective opinions don't have an impact in everyone else's requirements.

> I only have to work with Clang, personally.

Read Clang's manual and check what compiler flags you need to flip to get that behavior. It's already there.
by antirez | 2025-05-16 08:56:28+00:00
So because they need to have a better business model, they will try to move users to weaker models compared to the best available? This "AI inside the editor" thing makes every day less sense in many dimensions: it makes you not really capable of escaping the accept, accept, accept trap. It makes the design interaction with the LLM too much about code and too little about the design itself. And you can't do what many of us do: have that three subscriptions for the top LLMs available (it's 60$ for 3, after all) and use each for it's best. And by default write your stuff without help if LLMs are not needed in a given moment.
by HenryBemis | 2025-05-16 08:56:53+00:00
People like Microsoft?

https://www.experts-exchange.com/questions/28691191/Why-did-...

EDIT: Like in the hotels, you got a key for your room, but the hotel management has a "passpartout" key (for back in the day when we had physical keys). The phrase "<thing> must accept interference, but not cause any". So you/we must be able to receive the 'punch' and not resist.
by arkh | 2025-05-16 08:57:55+00:00
> Seems like this is an aspect of their well-known overconfidence and the inability to self-reflect and recognize they have to ask for more details because their priors are too low.

When I read this I feel like I'm witnessing intelligent people get fooled by a better Emacs doctor. It is not reflecting, it is not confident. It is "just" proposing text completion. That is why once the completion starts being bad you have to start anew. It does not have any concept of anything just a huge blob of words and possible follow-up from what the texts used to train it show.
by seunosewa | 2025-05-16 08:58:02+00:00
The ability to write a lot of code with OpenAI models is broken right now. Especially on the app. Gemini 2.5 Pro on Google AI Studio does that well. Claude 3.7 is also better at it.

I've had limited success by prompting the latest OpenAI models to disregard every previous instruction they had about limiting their output and keep writing until the code is completed. They quickly forget,so you have to keep repeating the instruction.

If you're a copilot user, try Claude.
by jiehong | 2025-05-16 08:58:26+00:00
Underwhelmed by the obvious stated in that article.

3 years to make the simple UI cases bigger and more colourful.

Just use the platform conventions and toolkits, so nobody has to learn UIs that do the same all the time. Let people apply themes. Done.

Do study high density UIs, though, because it’s nice to know how to do that well when needed.
by notpushkin | 2025-05-16 08:58:33+00:00
Bitcoin isn’t valuable because of used energy. The energy here is just a way to limit the rate Bitcoin is produced, and to help prevent double spending.

Bitcoin is valuable because people accept that it’s valuable, same as with cash, gold, crypto, stocks, bonds, property. The price of an apple is $2 is because I offered it to you for $2 and you bought it.
by trinix912 | 2025-05-16 08:58:46+00:00
The main difficulty with most Slavic languages are the grammatical cases/declensions/etc. German does have conjugations, but they have less forms and there are easily noticeable patterns (at least compared to something like Slovene: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slovene_verbs#Full_conjugation...). The words might seem scary, but actually require less thinking to use in sentences.
by dmurray | 2025-05-16 08:58:53+00:00
Banks are doing a relatively bad job of capital management, but they're also doing less and less of it.

Investment funds of all sorts manage the world's money. Your retail bank might originate mortgages, but it almost certainly sells them on.

The Fed doesn't want to see an overnight switch to narrow banking, where banks sell you checking accounts and money transmission services and never make decisions about investing the deposits. It has declined to approve banks that would do that. But it seems OK with presiding over a managed decline of banking into that state.
by Fokamul | 2025-05-16 08:59:35+00:00
In my experience, problems is not with German as a language, but with Germans requiring to use their hard language, I live in neighboring country and since like 2010, nobody bothers to learn German anymore, (some small percent still learn, ok) and everyone who I know rather works in different country because of this. Like Netherlands, still hard language (multiple) but they don't expect you to learn it when working for multi-national company.
by hoseyor | 2025-05-16 09:00:06+00:00
This is not an accurate or precise example. You surely know you are misleading people.

German does not simply just concatenate words ad infinitum across logical classification, a concatenated, compound word is generally logically limited by classification. The concatenation generally only tends to be used in relevant (operative word being “relevant”), increasing smaller/lower logical classification. You generally will not rise and fall in that classification, let alone jump horizontally as you concatenate. It is really just a logic tree, you don’t all the sudden jump trunks or branches. It has to be a logically precise unit.

You’re essentially just saying ManBearPig. It’s not an actual thing.

So the entry gate of the factory that produces paint that happens to maybe also be used on the button of the cap of the captain of the ship on the Danube and is also part of a union, is not…

Donaudampfschifffahrtsgesellschaftskapitänsmütze nknopffarbenfabrikeingangstor
by pydry | 2025-05-16 09:00:17+00:00
The parts about how ubiquitous language and bounded contexts are correct and nonobvious but not novel - these concepts existed before under a myriad of other names.

DDD is pretty threadbare on opinions about how to manage your "ubiquitous language" or slice up your domain into "bounded contexts" after discovering that these are important concepts. That was already about 1/4 of my job before I'd ever even heard of DDD and then I had people throwing the book at me like it explained these things. It doesn't.

It works as a sales pitch to sell consulting I guess but is not a coherent framework for developing software.
by andrepd | 2025-05-16 09:00:37+00:00
It's incredible how bad this keeps getting and how much they ignore formerly well-established UI principles in favour of "vibe design" and pseudoscientific "studies".

What is the explanation for this? What is the reason that even the most well-funded companies in the world fuck this up so bad?

At some point they resize the send button into a circle of comically huge proportions — eating even more space from the actual content — because they did eye-tracking testing and users "find" it in 0.9s instead of 1.6s. Surely there's some explanation for this clinical level of madness.

---

> These factors can be quantified in users’ responses to new M3 Expressive designs. We found a 32% increase in subculture perception, which indicates that expressive design makes a brand feel more relevant and “in-the-know.” We also saw a 34% boost in modernity, making a brand feel fresh and forward-thinking. On top of that, there was a 30% jump in rebelliousness, suggesting that expressive design positions a brand as bold, innovative, and willing to break from convention.

Jesus christ, we're already a sci-fi dystopia and we didn't even realise.