MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by debugnik | 2025-05-11 13:34:56+00:00
Your last two links are fake. And you can check on your own Wikipedia link that for Spain's direction signs, only proper nouns are capitalized: full uppercase on conventional roads for historical reasons, otherwise the usual capitalization rules such as on highways or town roads. Whereas full lowercase is reserved for service directions (e.g. service road, airport, hospital, beach). The exceptional capitalized service directions are really old town signs.
by Zambyte | 2025-05-11 13:35:10+00:00
In my opinion, the most useful way to use LLMs for learning (anything, but including programming) is to have it explain things in terms of what you are familiar with. You can give the model context of things you know are relevant that you do understand (or at least have a functional understanding of), and ask it to explain things that you don't yet understand, building on what you know. For example, asking things like "I am familiar with object encapsulation and mutating state over time in object oriented programming. If pure functional programming does not allow for mutation, how to you manage the state of objects over time?" or "Help me learn about Kubernetes. I am familiar with using docker, docker compose, and virtual machines for deploying my applications."

The problem is when you're learning something completely foreign like learning to program in your first language, you don't really have enough context to ask meaningful questions. In that case, it is simply better to do things like read manuals and bang your head against the problem.
by ksec | 2025-05-11 13:35:14+00:00
I am wondering if I am the only one complaining about Public Wifi UX. Since I complained about it on twitter about how Apple hasn't solve it ( That was many years ago ) and I was blocked by Ryan Jones, Ex-Apple Employees.

5 - 8 years later it still sucks. WiFi is still no where near as good as 5G. WiFi Assist still doesn't work. WiFi and 5G is still not seamless.

5G-A / Stand Alone deployment is a bit late due to COVID and Huawei issues. But I wonder at what point do we just give up on WiFi as public usage and embrace 5G.
by antonchekhov | 2025-05-11 13:35:17+00:00
Then what did your second sentence ["These are not scientific observations in any sense. What does the author do to confirm or refute her psychological theories about others?"] intend?

> She's very good at telling stories, but these stories feel like fiction, not hard fact.

There was no claim of objective fact. This is a Substack piece, not a peer-reviewed submission to "Nature" journal.
by SAI_Peregrinus | 2025-05-11 13:35:23+00:00
Yeah, the key exchange portion is secure. The resulting shared secret in RAM, on the other hand, is only as secure as the computer it's on. The moment you're out of the quantum realm by measuring the exchanged quanta, you lose the 100% security guarantee of the quantum portion of the key exchange. The Q part of QKD is actually secure, it's just that it's also useless and QKD as a whole exists mostly to fleece investors. It's a nerdy party trick, not a serious security mechanism.
by anton-c | 2025-05-11 13:35:51+00:00
My goodness I clicked a link to Fandom on accident the other day - most external links on tvtropes go to Wikipedia.

A sidebar opens automatically, there's a pop-up at the bottom, tons of distracting design and things showing up asking me to take a poll. What a mess. And I have adblock ofc... can't imagine what it really looks like.

I am saddened whenever an IP I've just discovered has their knowledge hub on fandom.
by inglor_cz | 2025-05-11 13:36:29+00:00
I would say that people cannot be "other than themselves". You will just see their other side when they are drunk. And it is quite often the darker, more primitive, violent side, which they suppress under normal conditions, knowing well that other people won't like it.

There is a sentence in some Stephen King's novel (and King is a recovered alcoholic to boot) about the main hero. IIRC it sounds like this:

"There was a dangerous dog in his mind. Sober, he could keep that dog on a leash. Drunk, the leash disappeared."

Maybe you are observing the leash disappearing.
by jargnar | 2025-05-11 13:37:29+00:00
A few years ago, I read a book called "Postcapitalist Desire: The Final Lectures". It was the first book I've ever read that follows a very enjoyable format -- a series of conversations between a professor and his students. It made me feel like I was in their classroom too. I enjoyed this format so much back then.

I'm a long time programmer, and recently I've been doing some iOS programming. It suddenly occurred to me today that it'd be great if there was a book-novel which simulates an engaging classroom, and takes you into that world of professor interacting with students.

So, I asked the latest Gemini to write me one. I'm still reading it myself, but I got so excited about it that I'm sharing it here! :-)
by Draiken | 2025-05-11 13:38:44+00:00
> the model is not driven by "maximising eyeballs/time/purchases/etc".

Do you have access to all the training data and the reinforcement learning they went through? All the system prompts?

I find it impossible for a company seeking profit to not build its AI to maximize what they want.

Interact with a model that's not tuned and you'll see the stark difference.

The matter of fact is that we have no idea what we're interacting with inside that role-play session.
by gwern | 2025-05-11 13:39:25+00:00
> Are you implying that by smoking I caused irreversible changes to my brain

Yes. Once an addict, always an addict. ('Irreversible changes to a brain' are quite common. You remember having smoked, for example...) More importantly, this was something emphasized before, and so it is irrelevant to bring it up as a supposed counterexample.
by 90s_dev | 2025-05-11 13:39:31+00:00
> My current take on this is to view Jai/Zig/Odin/etc. as attempted C forks, quite often motivated by hubris and coming with the usual inconvenience of forks, a lot of wasteful/redundant efforts put into small islands, each ruled by their own "benevolent" kings.

Didn't Rust do the same thing? We only call efforts wasteful until they become mainstream, then in retrospect we call it excitement driven prudence.

Anyway, is there an "Odin for C programmers" short guide, so I can learn it more quickly?
by Taikonerd | 2025-05-11 13:41:05+00:00
> Looking at the Titan of the industry, IGN, they barely get more that 20k views for videos they put out on Youtube

I've noticed the same thing, and it confuses me. There are massive numbers of gamers in the world, and more every day. These gamers presumably want reviews of what is / isn't worth their time.

Sure, as you mentioned, there are individual YouTubers or Twitch streamers... but one streamer doesn't have nearly enough time to review all the games that come out. Not even just the AAA titles!

So, how are gamers making their decisions about what to play next, if they're not reading reviews on a site like IGN?
by lapcat | 2025-05-11 13:41:17+00:00
My use of "scientific" was partly a play on words, because it's a natural accompaniment to "observation". But note that I said "in any sense". We don't have to don lab coats and acquire lofty job titles to take a kind of scientific approach to our own beliefs. And formulating a personal "theory of mind" is indeed necessary to navigate the social world. The crucial part is this: "What does the author do to confirm or refute her psychological theories about others?"

Painting weddings presents good opportunities to observe the interactions of strangers. On the other hand, it does not present good opportunities to come to know strangers intimately, which is the only way to confirm or disconfirm your superficial observations of them. The wedding guests are unlikely to ever become the hired hand's close friend, lover, or relative. If the article author is somehow an expert at reading people, that expertise was assuredly not acquired by painting weddings. At best, preexisting expertise could be practiced there. Reading the author's list, however, I'm quite skeptical. She appears to be someone who is judgmental and jumps to unwarranted generalizations based on anecdotal evidence.

Most of us are pretty good at reading other people. That's natural, not magical. But pretty good is fallible at best, and overconfidence in our own abilities is another natural human trait. You can easily become overconfident by having a few lucky successes. The most troubling combination is overconfidence and charisma, which allows you to deceive not only yourself but many others.
by AStonesThrow | 2025-05-11 13:41:30+00:00
I was about your age with the same interest in the system internals. I wonder if I owned the Programmer's Reference Guide. However, I decided that my programming directly in assembly wouldn't be productive or possible. I subscribed to Compute!'s Gazette, and there were plenty of type-in BASIC programs, as well as the crazy machine-language data-entry bonanzas that yielded arcade games and a word processor.

I did my own BASIC programming, and I was satisifed with experimenting at that level. It was the systems architecture that enthralled me, though. Just to peruse the diagrams of how RAM and ROM were laid out; the bank switching; registers and I/O routines; programming the SID chip; sprites and colors and fonts.

By the time I went into college I was quite well-primed for subjects like systems architecture, and the upgrade path at home from 286 to Windows PCs was bittersweet, as I left behind those raw system internals for more opacity and high-level sysadmin tasks. But I never forgot the 6502 and 6510 that started it all for me.
by avalys | 2025-05-11 13:41:32+00:00
There’s no “might” here, in a device advertised as “92% accuracy”. This device _will_ give false results, almost certainly an overwhelmingly number of false results relative to the actual heart attacks it detects. And those false results have real, guaranteed harm and cost as well.

Both false positives and false negatives are harmful. False positives will send people to the hospital for no reason and divert resources from people with real emergencies - not to mention leaving them with a large ER bill to pay. False negatives will result in people with actual heart attacks dismissing their symptoms and dying.
by MyPasswordSucks | 2025-05-11 13:41:46+00:00
It's taken as a given that Siri is inferior to ChatGPT. Both are natural language call-and-response models, but one of them is constantly in the news for diagnosing patients more accurately than actual medical doctors [1] and identifying a picture's location by the species of grass shown in a fifty-pixel-wide clump in the corner, and the other one can turn off your lights and order you a pizza when you ask it what tomorrow's weather forecast is.

Ergo, a person of average scholastic aptitude who is neither trying to ape late night talk show hosts by taking half of each single-colon-pair of an analogy, severing the other pair ends and any remaining context, and repeating the result with a well-rehearsed look of confusion; nor defensive about being called out for doing just that, can readily infer that the message being transmitted is that Kagi is fundamentally a tool very similar to Google, but which delivers inferior results.

1. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/17/health/chatgpt-ai-doctors...
by inglor_cz | 2025-05-11 13:42:03+00:00
Technically correct and yet I feel this is wrong.

"Become poorer" is the technically correct part, but imagine a person with a million dollars in their name who donates USD 100 to a cause they like.

They have technically become poorer, but it does not matter to them, neither objectively nor subjectively. On the other hand, if the donation was helpful, they may appreciate you informing them about that opportunity.

Of course that all depends on lot of variables (e.g. "the charity is not a scam, but a genuine attempt to help others), but the basic idea that giving away money is always harmful to people I cannot agree with.

I would be delighted if someone I love spent some reasonable money and/or time on worthy causes.
by nottorp | 2025-05-11 13:42:17+00:00
> Instead of picking random reviewers, stick to a few

I do. In text mode.

> that like the games you like.

But this way I'll never get to play anything new to me. Best to check varied reviewers even if i don't always agree with them.

> I can do it while doing other things, unlike reading.

Reading is much faster than even listening to a talking head though.
by haswell | 2025-05-11 13:43:44+00:00
> Except his old knife he already had with him isn't made for exploiting the flaw in the vest, so it doesn't work.

This seems like an unnecessary constraint to bolster your point instead of actually addressing what the other person is saying.

In this analogy, why can’t the old knife exploit the flaw? If the problem with the vest allows a sharp implement through the material when inserted at the correct angle or in the correct place, any sharp object should do.

To bring this back to the real world, this is all unfolding in virtual/digital spaces. The attacker doesn’t need to physically go anywhere, nor can potential victims easily leave the store in many cases. And the attacker often needs very little time to start causing harm thanks to the landscape of tools available today.
by flashblaze | 2025-05-11 13:43:58+00:00
Can you share your experience regarding marketing? Any specific courses you'd recommend, channels you tried and what worked or didn't? I have posted on Twitter, mentioned my product in Reddit comments and also "showcased" it in some Discord servers. All that amounted to around 30 signups in 1 week. But this is not sustainable, and I would like to try some other avenues as well.
by nozzlegear | 2025-05-11 13:44:41+00:00
But when you introduce yourself, do you call yourself Brazilian or American? I think almost everyone would use their nationality, not their continent, to avoid confusion. In English, the two continents are just that: two continents; North and South America, not "America."

> The only thing that is unambiguously an US thing is the concept of calling people from the Americas latinos.

Latino is a term for people with Latin American heritage, meaning those with Spanish or Portuguese linguistic and cultural roots. You're fine with calling yourself American in English but not Latino?
by jmbwell | 2025-05-11 13:44:49+00:00
It was pretty easy for orgs with affected systems to produce concrete examples for themselves. Maybe to everyone else it seemed vague, but for the people who had to deal with it, it was taken pretty seriously from top to bottom.

It was thankless work that is still glossed over and waved away today, but it was all a very big deal throughout the late 90s.
by chuckadams | 2025-05-11 13:45:50+00:00
Steve Job's irrational hatred of fans along with his micromanagement of literally every square inch of the case design didn't help the Apple III with its perennial overheating issues. He hastened the demise of the G4 cube for exactly the same reasons. My favorite fact about the III is how it became an officially-sanctioned troubleshooting technique to pick the machine up a few inches off the desk and drop it.
by globnomulous | 2025-05-11 13:47:00+00:00
> And yet this extra growth all around because of co2 means that the will be more co2? This seems incoherent.

It's not. Atmospheric CO2 increases as a result of processes external and unrelated to these forests. There's no suggestion or reason to think that plant growth would or could counteract that trend.

> Pet peeve - if the article hooks you with a line like 'visible from space' they should provide the imagery so I can see for myself. But there's no picture.

It would be nice, but I suspect it's missing for the same reason imagery is missing from so many astronomical articles, too: there aren't any images, because the findings are numerical and statistical, not visual.

The detection process that the article describes certainly sounds as thought it wouldn't be visible. To make the findings visible to readers of this article, the researcher would need to build it from effect, addin false color to an image to make it visible. And even then the differences may be too miniscule to be visible to the naked eye without considerable additional manipulation.

Those images likely don't exist, and creating them would be a lot of work for a probably small team of researchers who don't have a lot of extra labor or spare money.
by tossandthrow | 2025-05-11 13:48:01+00:00
You can retrofit today's arguments on both the oil industry and phone industry: if you don't want to pay, then don't use it. Both letter and horses where available.

De facto you don't have any choice but using ms and Google these days. Whatever you loose in doing so (if not money, then privacy)

That is a problem and constitutes a macro risk - and henceforth should be handled.

Monopoly is probably the closet describing term.
by bgentry | 2025-05-11 13:48:10+00:00
Modern Postgres in particular can take you really far with this mindset. There are tons of use cases where you can use it for pretty much everything, including as a fairly high throughput transactional job queue, and may not outgrow that setup for years if ever. Meanwhile, features are easier to develop, ops are simpler, and you’re not going to risk wasting lots of time debugging and fixing common distributed systems edge cases from having multiple primary datastores.

If you really do outgrow it, only then do you have to pay the cost to move parts of your system to something more specialized. Hopefully by then you’ve achieved enough success & traction to justify doing so.

Should be the default mindset for any new project if you don’t have very demanding performance & throughput needs, IMO.
by cobalt60 | 2025-05-11 13:48:24+00:00
MY ONBOARD WIFI STILL DOESN’T WORK, I had to buy an external USB WiFi adapter. Thanks for nothing DriverHub.

I feel sorry for this guy, having deviated from the original issue. Though it'd only took a couple of seconds to note the WLAN chipset from specs or OEM packaging and then heading to station-drivers.

This was also the very reason I dislike Asus, I don't want a BIOS flag/switch that natively interact with a component in OS layer.
by hocuspocus | 2025-05-11 13:49:20+00:00
Scala doesn't have operators (as in, + - * / ++ -- ... are just methods) and at some point library authors went a little overboard with DSLs using symbolic names, especially for concepts coming directly from Haskell. But those days are mostly over.

The type system is very powerful and a few concepts have complex semantics, there's no way around it. But in my experience what really hurt inexperienced developers is the mix and match of Java constructs and more functional or Scala specific ones. And in my opinion, the Kotlin ecosystem is even a bigger offender nowadays, while best practices in Scala have somewhat converged, as a direct consequence of its decline in popularity, i.e. because people have stopped trying to use Scala as a better Java.
by surgical_fire | 2025-05-11 13:49:39+00:00
> Thus, the concern is less the speech itself than the tyranny begotten from regulating the speech.

Absolute freedom devolves into tyranny super fast. If a democratically elected government cannot regulate how society operates on a base level, my only resourcento you retaining your right to be a dickhead is me retaining my right to have you swallow my fist in retribution.

I really don't want to live in such a society. Better to have some regulated basic civility.
by ndsipa_pomu | 2025-05-11 13:49:54+00:00
> Is that not a rather pernicious idea? That I may or may not be punished based on how the recipient of my speech "feels"?

I'd consider this more the issue of "consequences". If you think that your speech should be entirely consequence-free, then I completely disagree with you (c.f. shouting "fire" in a crowded cinema). It's not like there's typically any confusion around what "hate speech" sounds like.

> Why can't the rallies be permitted while policing the violence if and when it erupts?

That would be one way to deal with issues, but I'd liken it to a doctor that only treats symptoms and never pre-emptive medication (e.g. medication to lower high blood pressure, but not providing exercise/diet advice that could prevent it). There's also the issue of allowing the extremely dangerous types that motivate crowds to go and commit violence whilst never involving themselves - that would seem like a recipe for disaster.
by behnamoh | 2025-05-11 13:50:16+00:00
C is not going anywhere. Neither are C++, Java, and JS (less sure about TS).

One reason is that we've built most of the foundations of modern software already in these languages. New apps pop up all the time but they all rely on ffmpeg, etc.

The only way for a new language like Zig to cement itself is to build foundational software that other programs depend on. I don't think even Rust is moving in that direction (lots of Rust apps, but not so many libs I've had to use in my programs that were written in Rust).
by OutOfHere | 2025-05-11 13:51:23+00:00
For now, the hallucination problem is objectively only getting worse with reasoning models, and there is no solution in sight.

Technical skills will matter for the simple reason that someone will always need to supervise the output of the AI. A non-technical person can't hope to do so too well. Without this supervision, the AI's work product will have skeletons that will cause unexpected issues due to outliers. Reality is full of outliers - it's what pays half the salary.

Imagine asking an AI to design an airplane. The design passes all test flights and also software tests. Would you want to fly in it without an expert human having reviewed the ins and outs of the design?

How about a CT scan machine? Would you want to risk the 10x radiation due to a hypothetical implementation error that strikes in 1 out of 10K cases?
by davemp | 2025-05-11 13:51:53+00:00
Replacing C != coexisting seamlessly. Exposing an idiomatic C interface by default would handcuff Zig’s own design.

> Having to know the full set of Zig sources in advance due to error types

You can just catch all of the errors and translate them back into errno or whatever homegrown scheme your c project is using.

- - -

Does the zig compiler not support generating .o’s without a build.zig? I like the zig build system so much that I’ve migrated some large projects that will likely never contain a line of zig, so I haven’t felt that pain point.