MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by unhappy_meaning | 2025-05-31 17:31:00+00:00
In almost all of SE Asia, especially Thailand, Vietnam, Malaysia, all of the toilets come with a hand-held sprayer. They also had this in the Doha airport and I'm not sure how common this style is outside of SE Asia but I'm guessing it's common. Japanese style bidets are very common in Korean households as well and I'm sure its easily a billion dollar business.

It is nice but the functionality is quite difficult for a person who's not used to this whatsoever. After you're done sh*ing, you grab the handheld sprayer and turn it upside down and reach behind you toward your butt and try as best as you can to aim it into your anus to wash as best as you can. People who have been doing this their whole lives can probably aim with a precision of a Marine Corp Sniper but to us, we look at it as alien technology. It's is quite difficult to use for a first timer and there are factors that worry us.

If its not aimed correctly, where does the splash go? If you're lucky it stays in the toilet boil. However if your aim is off, you can completely miss your anus and either shoot to much under or over which will shoot the water outside of the toilet bowl.

Also when I was using the bathroom in the Doha airport, the handheld sprayer had a soap dispenser next to it. I was curious what it was for so I YouTube'd and searched for instructions on what the soap dispenser was for and (kind-of) to my surprise it was soap to lather and clean your anus with your other free hand. After you lather and clean, you basically rinse your hand with the hose as well.
by mathgradthrow | 2025-05-31 17:31:35+00:00
Half of the work of mathematics is in correct definitions. Groethendieck referred to the division between mathematical labors as hunting and farming.

This is not my most popular opinion, but probably the most consequential invention of the last 400 years was the set. Suddenly all mathematical knowledge could be verified in one framework. Physicists had a target in which to state their models.

If you could state your hypothesis in the language of mathematics, "everyone" knew exactly what you meant by it, and how to go about testing your claims, or proving them, if they happened to be about mathematics itself.

Calculus was invented in 1690ish, physicists like to claim that this was the most important advance in physics, but quantum mechanics and relativity didn't happen until dedekind invented the real numbers, 200 years later.

It turns out that knowing what you're talking about matters.
by justsomehnguy | 2025-05-31 17:31:42+00:00
> just water I keep in my mouth if in a public place / at work

Sorry for intruding, but the water from some public place is the last thing I want in my or anyone else's mouth. May I suggest a water bottle or even a flask?

Or if you already tried that, can you explain why it didn't work for you? Just an idle curiosity. Thanks in advance.
by creer | 2025-05-31 17:31:59+00:00
> the only times I've seen them in the news

This speaks more to the news than to Waymo. If you want more viewpoints, look for cyclists speaking of their preference for encountering waymos instead of human drivers; look to reddit for videos of waymos avoiding red-light runners and balls and pedestrians in dangerous places.

Then again this very article was not about things going "horribly wrong" but about the growth in ridership: Waymo is in production mode and ramping up BECAUSE it's working well.

High speed red light runners, in the meantime, are highly present in San Francisco these days. Now THAT's dangerous. Not to mention (less frequent) people deliberately pointing their "two-ton" vehicles at pedestrians. I don't see Waymo doing that.
by mastax | 2025-05-31 17:32:59+00:00
> no attempts made to keep loop areas small

That is not correct, with a charitable reading of the text. Which is not to say it’ll have good EMI characteristics - you never really know until you get it tested.

> Artificially confining ourselves to two layers is exactly the kind of challenge I am wont to be engulfed by. The trick, if you want the board to work well, is to work on only one layer, and keep almost the entirety of the other layer as ground. It is almost always possible to do this, if you're willing to put in enough thought. I rather find that designing circuit boards is a lot like Tetris, and once I'm in the swing of it I can route things for hours on end. It can become a multi-day trance, with dreams of signal integrity and current loop area.

Though on this subject:

> In contrast, said this one PCB designer, a thin track has a higher inductance, so if you make your power supply lines thin, you'll get a free bit of extra filtering.

Inductance in your power supply lines is bad, but I don’t have time to get into it right now.
by soared | 2025-05-31 17:34:13+00:00
Local grocery prices. Let me upload a shopping list and allow me to optimize for cost (visit this store for these items, this store for these items) and a trail to follow through the store for optimal pathing.

Same thing for home improvement - Lowe’s in stock indicator is wildly wrong to the point that I sometimes call and ask an employee to go physically look at the item.
by eesmith | 2025-05-31 17:36:56+00:00
Further info along the same lines at https://drewdevault.com/2025/03/17/2025-03-17-Stop-externali...

> If you think these [AI] crawlers respect robots.txt then you are several assumptions of good faith removed from reality. These bots crawl everything they can find, robots.txt be damned, including expensive endpoints like git blame, every page of every git log, and every commit in every repo, and they do so using random User-Agents that overlap with end-users and come from tens of thousands of IP addresses – mostly residential, in unrelated subnets, each one making no more than one HTTP request over any time period we tried to measure – actively and maliciously adapting and blending in with end-user traffic and avoiding attempts to characterize their behavior or block their traffic.

Sourcehut (the site described) used Anubis before swithing "to go-away, which is more configurable and allows us to reduce the user impact of Anubis (e.g. by offering challenges that don’t require JavaScript, or support text-mode browsers better)." https://sourcehut.org/blog/2025-05-29-whats-cooking-q2/
by madaxe_again | 2025-05-31 17:37:07+00:00
Right - adoption was slower than people expected at the time, but it did happen, and a lot of the stuff that got thrown at the wall back then did eventually stick.

We are absolutely in a hype and market bubble around AI right now - and like the dot com bubble, the growth came not in 2000, but years later. It turns out it takes time for a new technology to percolate through society, and I use the “mom metric” as a bellwether - if your/my mother is using the tech, you’d better believe it has achieved market penetration.

Until 2011 my mum was absolutely not interested in the web. Now she does most of her shopping on it, and spends her days boomerposting.

She recently decided to start paying for ChatGPT.

Sure, it’s a fuzzy thing, but I think the adoption cycle this time around will be faster, as the access to the tech is already in peoples’ hands, and there are plenty of folks who are already finding useful applications for genai.

Robotaxis, whether they end up dominated by Tesla or waymo or someone else entirely, are inarguably here, and the adoption rates (the USA is not the only market in the world) are ramping significantly this year.

I’m not sure I get your point about smartphones? They’re in practically every pocket on the planet, now, they’re not some niche thing.
Agentic Patterns
by nkko | 2025-05-31 17:38:24+00:00
I've put together a catalog of repeatable patterns for building effective AI agents: https://agentic-patterns.com

This is a very early version - many entries are AI-assisted placeholder content that needs refinement from real practitioners. The goal is to collect the practical techniques teams keep independently rediscovering (context window management, sub-agent spawning, feedback loops, etc).

If you've built agents and recognized patterns that made them more effective, I'd love your contributions.

http://github.com/nibzard/awesome-agentic-patterns/

The criteria are simple:

Repeatable - more than one team is using it Agent-centric - improves how an AI agent senses, reasons, or acts Traceable - backed by a public reference

Inspired by the "Raising an Agent" podcast from Sourcegraph. PRs welcome for both new patterns and improvements to existing ones.
by toast0 | 2025-05-31 17:38:41+00:00
> then it would certainly be nice to use one language for everything, from front-end, back-end to distributed computing stuff.

People say this, but it's not that helpful, IMHO. Front end and backend have different concerns, usually different teams, and using anything other than the preferred language for a client platform tends towards clunky UX.

You can do some sort of core networking library that's shared between clients, and I guess there's reasons you might want that to be Erlang, but integration feels like a lot of work when you can just deal with it in another language. Client side concurrency is so much less than server side concurrency, it'll be fine.
by rendaw | 2025-05-31 17:39:40+00:00
Ah okay, fair enough. But what sort of transcendental functions would you use for HFT?

I guess I understood GGGGP's comment about using fixed point for interacting with currency to be about accounting. I'd expect floating point to be used for trading algorithms, but that's mostly statistics and I presume you'd switch back to fixed point before making trades etc.
by opan | 2025-05-31 17:40:21+00:00
I have always gotten the short end of the stick with this stuff as well. Captchas are annoying, Cloudflare challenges are usually not passable, etc. For some sites I use regularly, they'll log me out and stop me logging in a few times per year and then I have to tweet at them about it, which is usually followed by something about them having just turned up their bot protection settings, but then often they'll fix whatever they did and I can get back in.

Would it be so crazy to just let it happen? When ordinary users are suffering as much or more than the "criminal" targets, maybe it's not worth it. I understand there are cases where bandwidth usage would become too much, but there's gotta be a better way. Maybe let some bots through so that fewer humans are blocked.
by aidenn0 | 2025-05-31 17:40:40+00:00
1. It's not quite trivial to statically disallow use-before-initialization, but it's definitely a solved problem if you disallow returning uninitialized variables.

2. The other option is to disallow declaration without initialization of non-nullable values. If you can't declare an uninitialized foo_vec, then the user can't ever see an invalid foo_vec.
by accrual | 2025-05-31 17:42:39+00:00
I know this wasn't meant literally, but it does make for an interesting thought experiment - under what circumstances might it be valid to dial 911 to ask for the time?

My first thought was something like a nuclear operator - "we need to shut down the core at exactly 19:00, but our clocks are down!" so they call and wait for the operator to advise when the time is reached. Obviously contrived and not realistic, but interesting to think about.
by anonymoushn | 2025-05-31 17:42:44+00:00
In SuperBPE, a fixed number of tokens are learned, and then the constraints of pretokenization are removed entirely, and then the remainder of the target vocab size is learned.

In Boundless BPE, no schedule must be chosen, because there is not any point at which the constraints of pretokenization are removed entirely. Instead, at any point in the learning process, merges between adjacent pretokens are permitted if the pretokens are each represented by a single token. There are some additional details about how the authors incorporate Picky BPE, which I will not try to repeat because I would probably get them wrong.
by chrisnight | 2025-05-31 17:43:36+00:00
Maybe it’s just me, but I don’t really see the advantage myself for touch typing. My current style of typing already reaches me 110+wpm, and it feels natural without any wrist problems, and I also can type fine without looking at the keyboard. (Perhaps the lack of wrist problems part is because of young age, but I’ve been typing for over 10 years)

When I tried out Dvorak, I learned touch typing for Dvorak, but after a while, it started hurting from having my hands in the touch typing position, so I decided it wasn’t really worth it to continue, since the point would’ve been to reduce injury.

The way that I type is a combination of knowing where keys are, having a muscle memory of common words, and knowing how to effectively flow between them.

It seems to me though that many of the advantages of touch typing, I already have gotten without it, so it doesn’t seem to be worth it?
by hansmayer | 2025-05-31 17:44:19+00:00
Well, both the web1.0 and the smartphones were major inflection points in technological development. I argue that the GenAI is not. Steve Jobs did not need to shove the AppStore down anybodys throat, the way Gemini and other crap are being shoved right now. The growth happened organically and exponentially, because everyone instantly saw value in those products. It happened through early adopters and the late majority. Here we have neither. Where are the thousands, well even hundreds of applications that the end users actually want to use? Your mum, based on your description fits more into the category of laggards, and that category never determines anything about a product/technology impact.
by Calwestjobs | 2025-05-31 17:44:41+00:00
exactly that is why we need to put electrolyzers into mix, that way we can have load on nuclear and on renewable at same time, we need insane amounts of hydrogen for chemical industry anyway.

also chemical industry needs big investment because they have to change mindset about procuring carbon and other inputs in net zero economy.

(similar thing as what some datacenter companies say they do with buying nuclear capacity)

i think most people do not want to understand, they want socialized grid payed by citizens instead of putting real energy price into pricing for goods/services.

hydrogen as energy carrier, not as transportable comodity. hydrogen as MEANS not as a goal. we need iron + water to have from 20 sec up to seasonal storage of energy in megawatts per meter cubed...

https://ethz.ch/en/news-and-events/eth-news/news/2024/08/iro...

https://www.tue.nl/en/research/institutes/eindhoven-institut...
by philipkglass | 2025-05-31 17:45:20+00:00
Robotics progress is a lot slower than progress in disembodied AI, and disembodied AI trying to kill humanity is like naked John von Neumann trying to kill a tiger in an arena. IMO we need to figure out AI safety before physically embodied AI (smart robots) becomes routine, but to me safety in that context looks more like traditional safety-critical and security-critical software development.

I'm aware of the argument that smart enough AI can rapidly bootstrap itself to catastrophically affect the material world:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Aq82XqYhgqdPdPrBA/full-trans...

"It gets an immense technological advantage. If it's smart, it doesn't announce itself. It doesn't tell you that there's a fight going on. It emails out some instructions to one of those labs that'll synthesize DNA and synthesize proteins from the DNA and get some proteins mailed to a hapless human somewhere who gets paid a bunch of money to mix together some stuff they got in the mail in a file. Like, smart people will not do this for any sum of money. Many people are not smart. Builds the ribosome, but the ribosome that builds things out of covalently bonded diamondoid instead of proteins folding up and held together by Van der Waals forces, builds tiny diamondoid bacteria. The diamondoid bacteria replicate using atmospheric carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, and sunlight. And a couple of days later, everybody on earth falls over dead in the same second."

As someone with a strong background in chemistry this just makes me skeptical of Yudkowsky's groundedness as a prognosticator. Biological life is not compatible with known synthesis conditions for diamond, and even superintelligence may not discover workarounds. I am even more skeptical that AI can make such advances and turn them into working devices purely by pondering/simulation, i.e. without iterative laboratory experiments.
by _wire_ | 2025-05-31 17:45:40+00:00
Article appears to be well meaning, but is just another exhausting example of Brandolini's law:

> Dijkstra claims simplicity is a prerequisite for reliability. According to Dijkstra, if we encounter a system that’s reliable, it must be a simple system, because simplicity is required to achieve reliability. reliability ⇒ simplicity

Begged question. Dijkstra did not reason by analytically smashing a problem's bones with Occam's axe.

This author seems to not understand anything about his premise and wildly waves his hands to a associate his begged question with attributions to authors:

> reliability ⇒ complexity Look at classic works on improving the reliability of real-world systems like Michael Nygard’s Release It!, Joe Armstrong’s Making reliable distributed systems in the presence of software errors, and Jim Gray’s Why Do Computers Stop and What Can Be Done About It?

Suggestions for how to incrementally decrease the failure modes of a system you don't understand should not be attributed to Dijkstra! He didn't think like this. He was interested in reasoning about program correctness. His concerns were why should you trust the output of a program; formally, how do you know it is correct; how can you show you understand a program. He reasoned about programming mathematically, from axioms, through theorems, to lemmas, to proofs. He did his reasoning about correctness via consideration of carefully defined problems and computing machines.

To clarify context about "computational" correctness, Dijkstra'a life spanned a time where the word computer went from meaning a human being performing a calculation— implying all the richness of human thought brought to bear on a problem— to the edge our modern world of pocket devices with trillions of parts running at billions of cycles per second.

As to any analogy of reliability taken from biology: please note that life's primary contour of fitness is expressed in death!
by vidarh | 2025-05-31 17:45:44+00:00
My clients are perfectly happy about that, because they care about the results, not FUD. They know the quality of what I deliver from first-hand experience.

Human-written code also needs reviews, and is also frequently broken until subjected to testing, iteration, and reviews, and so our processes are built around proper qa, and proper reviews, and then the original source does not matter much.

It's however a lot easier to force an LLM into a straighjacket of enforced linters, enforced test-suite runs, enforced sanity checks, enforced processes at a level that human developers would quit over, and so as we build out the harness around the AI code generation, we're seeing the quality of that code increase a lot faster than the quality delivered by human developers. It still doesn't beat a good senior developer, but it does often deliver code that handles tasks I could never hand to my juniors.

(In fact, the harness I'm forcing my AI generated code through was written about 95%+ by an LLM, iteratively, with its own code being forced through the verification steps with every new iteration after the first 100 lines of code or so)
by madaxe_again | 2025-05-31 17:46:16+00:00
Prepare your ship of Theseus arguments now, gentlefolk, for that mechanism does not look like a 16th century one to me.

The frame, perhaps, but the rest of it looks Victorian at the very oldest, more likely from the 1960s restoration, when people were not so much into conservation as they were into modernisation.

I don’t think this detracts from the picture of it as a very old clock, as it has almost continuously functioned as a clock since its inception - if anything, it makes for a nice palimpsest of horological technology, and speaks of a continuity of care that is markedly rare.
by vinnymac | 2025-05-31 17:46:18+00:00
It would require a blog post for me to answer this in detail, but overall it’s due to the fact that monorepos trend toward specific stacks and runtimes. They aren’t often as flexible as they’d have you believe, so you might find a low level programmer isn’t able to operate as efficiently when operating in a primarily NodeJS-based Monorepo. Plus it makes it easier to separate parts of your business that are distinct, simplifying the complexity of security, maintenance, and compliance.

I don’t think one should have 100s of them, practically speaking less than 5 should be enough to model any business today. It can be freeing though, and allows developers to take advantage of the tools that best fit there needs so they can go back to getting shit done.
by switchbak | 2025-05-31 17:46:55+00:00
Our jobs are full of a lot more than just writing code. In my case it seems like it’s helping to accelerate a portion of the dev cycle, but that’s a fairly smart portion, say 20%, and even a big impact on that just gets dominated by the other phases that haven’t been accelerated.

I’m not as bullish as some are on the impact of AI, but it does feel nice when you can deliver something in a fraction of the time it used to take. For me, it’s more useful as a research and idea exploration tool, less so about writing code. Part of that is that I’m in Scala land, so it just tends to not work as well as a more mainstream language.

We haven’t used it to help the product management and solution exploration side, which seems to be a big constraint on our execution.
by trealira | 2025-05-31 17:47:14+00:00
>their role is to give temporary (often exclusive) access that is restricted to a statically know scope, which is pretty specific and fits only some uses of some pointers/C++ references

You could have a vector of references to heap allocated data, as long as the references were parametrized by the same lifetime. You might do this if implementing a tree iterator using a vector as a stack, for instance. That goes beyond a statically known scope. But implementing a mutable iterator the same way would require a stack of mutable pointers (and therefore unsafe code whenever you dereference them), since mutable references have to be unique. That does seem like a bad limitation.
by LiamPowell | 2025-05-31 17:48:02+00:00
I didn't see that bit, but the layout image[0] shows very large cuts in the ground plane with traces running right over the middle of them, especially between U8 and U7. There's plenty of space here to add some ground traces between them, but that hasn't been done.

> you never really know until you get it tested.

I suspect they haven't given the lack of a CE marking on the board.

As an aside that bothers me a bit given that they say they sold 1000 of the last version, which would easily cover the cost of the (legally required) testing. Normally I'm of the opinion that it's fine to ignore it for some obscure hobby product where the cost of testing would be higher than any expected profits, but in this case they have the money from previous versions of the same product.

[0]: https://mitxela.com/img/uploads/clock/mk4/kicad-screenshot2....
by BlueTemplar | 2025-05-31 17:49:53+00:00
You haven't started educating people in the last ten years that it's just not acceptable to use Google any more ?

Especially when this happens ?

Google is using AI to censor independent websites like mine

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44124820

Sure sounds like we've reached the point where it's more of a liability !