MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by twotwotwo | 2025-05-01 02:05:55+00:00
It's kind of weird to think that in a coding assistant, an LLM is regularly asked to produce a valid block of code top to bottom, or repeat a section of code with changes, when that's not what we do. (There are other intuitively odd things about this, like the amount of compute spent generating 'easy' tokens, e.g. repeating unchanged code.) Some of that might be that models are just weird and intuition doesn't apply. But maybe the way we do it--jumping around, correcting as we go, etc.--is legitimately an efficient use of effort, and a model could do its job better, with less effort, or both if it too used some approach other than generating the whole sequence start-to-finish.

There's already stuff in the wild moving that direction without completely rethinking how models work. Cursor and now other tools seem to have models for 'next edit' not just 'next word typed'. Agents can edit a thing and then edit again (in response to lints or whatever else); approaches based on tools and prompting like that can be iterated on without the level of resources needed to train a model. You could also imagine post-training a model specifically to be good at producing edit sequences, so it can actually 'hit backspace' or replace part of what it's written if it becomes clear it wasn't right, or if two parts of the output 'disagree' and need to be reconciled.

From a quick search it looks like https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.05426 in 2023 discussed backtracking LLMs and https://arxiv.org/html/2410.02749v3 / https://github.com/upiterbarg/lintseq trained models on synthetic edit sequences. There is probably more out there with some digging. (Not the same topic, but the search also turned up https://arxiv.org/html/2504.20196 from this Monday(!) about automatic prompt improvement for an internal code-editing tool at Google.)
by mickelsen | 2025-05-01 02:05:57+00:00
Thanks for putting this so clearly. The way you laid out the argument really helps us make our case here in Chile. Our laws are already more in line with Europe (proportionality, duty to retreat, that kind of thing...) but we do have parallels to yours like a Castle Doctrine of sorts.

The progressives' attempts to make it even more complicated, which btw started with them outright wanting to outlaw personal firearm ownership, all failed. And now that the rising crime has people crying out for order, plus their dismal approval ratings, they will be voted out this December for sure, they stand no chance.

What helps is how you framed the idea that the act of taking something by force IS the violence, which is what we’ve been trying to get across here, something that most people are indifferent to, until they experience an attack to their personal safety. Mindsets have shifted here in the last five years.
by self | 2025-05-01 02:06:05+00:00
This image says 384 KB of RAM: https://docs.espressif.com/projects/esp-dev-kits/en/latest/e...

It also says 320 KB of ROM, which seems low. Judging from the product name (DevKitC-1-N8R4) and their other products, it has 8 MB of flash.
by mrandish | 2025-05-01 02:06:41+00:00
> Windows startup is perfectly fine

No... it's not fine. I don't reboot all the time for work or run a zillion VMs, I'm just a regular user. But sometimes when I'm rebooting - I need to get to necessary information quickly. Waiting 40+ seconds is an eternity when standing at an airport immigration counter pulling up a pre-filed form that they said I did not need to bring but which they're now demanding (because their machines are rebooting).

I'm glad you feel it's fine for you. Not all of us agree. I'm especially annoyed because much of the new bloat slowing my life down during startup is stupid and unnecessary shit I don't even use much (or ever) - like initializing CoPilot, Edge, and now, Office.

Note: I even upgraded my SSD to an expensive Samsung 990 Pro, reportedly one of the fastest available. It's still >40 secs - and I've already gone through and thoroughly pruned all the unnecessary services, tasks and autoruns that I can. It's a top of the line >$3000 laptop that's less than a year old.
by snowwrestler | 2025-05-01 02:08:10+00:00
I understand people like this ruling and want Apple and Google to open up. But this is just silly rewriting of history:

> Apple and Google quickly built up their duopoly such that everyone doing anything with mobile phones has to pay them a tax.

Long before Apple and Google made phones, a huge mobile device ecosystem already existed, including app stores, and it was way more locked down and expensive than what we have now.

The iPhone did not even launch with an app store, its launch concept was 100% web apps. They only added the native SDK and app store after developers and customers demanded it.

Again: I know the world is different now. But the idea that this was all some swift inexorable coup by Apple and Google is totally inaccurate. Plenty of other companies had a chance to do things differently, many with huge head starts.
by dchest | 2025-05-01 02:08:34+00:00
"In Slack communications dated November 16, 2021, the Apple employees crafting the warning screen for Project Michigan discussed how best to frame its language. (CX-206.) Mr. Onak suggested the warning screen should include the language: “By continuing on the web, you will leave the app and be taken to an external website” because “‘external website’ sounds scary, so execs will love it.” (Id. at .2.) From Mr. Onak’s perspective, of the “execs” on the project, Mr. Schiller was at the top. (Feb. 2025 Tr. 1340:4–6 (Onak).) One employee further wrote, “to make your version even worse you could add the developer name rather than the app name.” (CX-206.4.) To that, another responded “ooh - keep going.” (Id.)

I could never imagine Apple employees doing it like this. I knew they had to have discussions about the scare screen, but come on! This is pure evil.
by wpollock | 2025-05-01 02:09:08+00:00
Best advice I've heard is to never use the character type in your programming language. Instead, store characters in strings. An array of strings can be used as a string of characters. In this approach, characters become opaque blobs of bytes. This makes it easy to get the two numbers you care about: length in characters and size in bytes.

There is some overhead for this, so maybe a technique more suited to backends. Normalization, sanitation and validation steps are best performed in the frontend.

Also worth knowing is the ICU library, which is often the easiest way to work with Unicode consistently regardless of programming language.

Finally, punycode is a standard way to represent arbitrary Unicode strings as ASCII. It's reversible too (and built into every web browser). You can do size limits on the punycode representation.

BTW, you shouldn't store passwords in strings in the first place. Many programming languages have an alternative to hold secrets in memory safely.
by BriggyDwiggs42 | 2025-05-01 02:10:17+00:00
>What happened to the spirit of innovation and commerce in this country?

Manufacturing doesn’t have as much space to innovate; we moved on to greener pastures. Decoupling our economy from China somewhat could be an intelligent decision, but there’s absolutely nothing intelligent whatsoever about picking up a fucking hammer and taking it to our economy to spite the rest of the world. We could have acted against US-China trade without simply wiping it out overnight and bringing down economic hell upon the American people. Utterly ridiculous, bad faith horseshit in my opinion.
by teleforce | 2025-05-01 02:10:21+00:00
Abstract: Lossy links are one of the fundamental characteristics of wireless sensor networks (WSNs). A large amount of work has been performed on characterizing link properties of 802.15.4 radios, in particular in the 2.4 GHz band. Unfortunately, the 2.4 GHz band has the apparent disadvantage of a crowded spectrum and considerable external interference, e. g., from WiFi, Bluetooth or even microwave ovens. We therefore investigate the performance of radios operating on the alternative 868 MHz frequency band, which is basically noise-free as determined from extensive experiments on a large-scale indoor testbed featuring more than 100 nodes. Although the lack of external interference eases protocol design, our study reveals that — and characterizes to what extent — wireless links in the 868 MHz band still show large variations in performance that must be accounted for.
by WalterBright | 2025-05-01 02:10:26+00:00
> how much _do_ the exceptionally wealthy even spend when going about their daily lives?

They invest in companies. Take a look at the annual report for any public corporation. The category of "Expenses" is what gets spent on plant, equipment, salaries, interest, etc.

Roughly speaking, "Profit" is Revenue minus Expenses. Profit accrues to the investors. If the Profit turns out to be less than zero, that loss is attached to the investors.

> It isn't like they are buying millions of dollars worth of locally sourced items in their communities every day of the year.

The companies they invest in do.
by mrandish | 2025-05-01 02:11:36+00:00
Yes, I agree. I was actually planning to retire that mobo and CPU after the GFX upgrade but that damn Haswell is so good, I didn't need to. The previous GFX card (a 1080) was the bottleneck getting 120fps reliably. I really didn't expect the i5-4590 to keep up with 120fps at low latency but got surprised.
by gamblor956 | 2025-05-01 02:12:02+00:00
You're not wrong. If the President does not follow a federal law, he is not performing an official act, and he is not immune from criminal liability.

If he chooses to continue to ignore the law, the solution isn't the courts. It's the Second Amendment, which was added to the Bill of Rights as a check on exactly this (though the Founders intended for it to be exercised through the States' militias, not the citizens directly, based on the text of the first half of the amendment).
by const_cast | 2025-05-01 02:12:45+00:00
This is largely debatable and hard to measure. The thing about creation is that it's not black or white, it's gray.

Everything relies on thousands of other things. Products and services are huge graphs that nobody truly understands and that span hundreds of years. How much is created, and how much is reused? Hard to say.

At least some of the money is taken via exploitation. For example, if you opt to outsource product X to some third-world country and you drop labor cost 10%, and that in turn grows your company, you did not "create" that growth. You systematically stole it.

Another example we see a lot today is cutting quality. A lot of goods today are produced more efficiently, but not as much as you may think, because some of the productivity gains is simply pseudo-monopolies using their market dominance to cut quality without recourse. It's just human nature that we can't perceive a, say, 1% cut in quality. But if you cut 1% every year for half a century, then congratulations, you "created" a bunch of wealth. But you didn't actually create anything.
by hapless | 2025-05-01 02:12:48+00:00
Wrecking the workstation market was easy, because workstations had small numbers of CPUs, and small pools of RAM. Intel started fucking up that market in the late 1980s.

x86 wasn't competitive on the server side until K8 (AMD) and Nehalem (Intel).

So you have a real long stretch -- 1987-ish to 2008-ish -- where proprietary UNIX on proprietary architectures owns the server side, even though the workstation market is eroding the whole time.
by kccqzy | 2025-05-01 02:13:27+00:00
Exactly. If this administration were serious about hurting China and re-shoring manufacturing, there are ways to do that correctly so as to cause factories in China to idle, cause capital and technology in China to flow to third countries on which the U.S. imposes no tariffs, cause unemployment in China to rise, and ultimately cause the weakening of China's industrial might. The current administration did nothing like that.
by anitil | 2025-05-01 02:13:51+00:00
This was an interesting read, along with the companion article about the early development from last year [0].

I feel like this is a very interesting development, but I can't quite put my finger on why. It's also interesting to compare with previous comments about Nvidia have much less available [1]. I wonder if tooling like this (along with Brendan and his team) could prove to be a competitive advantage for Intel?

[0] https://www.brendangregg.com/blog/2024-10-29/ai-flame-graphs... [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41994469
by rayiner | 2025-05-01 02:14:36+00:00
If you’re not a textualist, there is a coherent reading that it only applies to American descendants of slaves. But that would mean that it doesn’t protect asians, hispanics, etc!

A logical and factual error made by proponents of affirmative action is to start with the premise that the civil rights laws were intended to help american descendants of slaves, but then extend them to other non-whites by categorizing them as “functionally black.” This is utterly incoherent, because black descendants of slaves and native americans are sociologically and economically distinct from other non-whites. Hispanics are just time-shifted Italians and Irish: low skill immigrants that economically assimilate within a few generations. By contrast, the gaps between black descendants of slaves and native Americans and other americans are not shrinking over time. They remain as large today as in 1965.

There’s a coherent version of affirmative action that gives a preference to descendants of slaves and native Americans but nobody else. But that bears no resemblance to the “diversity” based system that actually exists, which irrationally privileges Cubans over Bangladeshis because Indians are richer than Mexicans.
by bitwize | 2025-05-01 02:15:10+00:00
One time when I was in the Bay Area, an old, short Asian man wearing a "World War II Veteran" cap boarded the BART. I silently wondered to myself if, due to his very short height, he had sat in the ball turret of a B-17.

Year or two later, there's a blurb on the national news about a man with a Japanese last name from about the right part of California, who died at the age of 95. Turns out, he was indeed a rear gunner on a B-17 crew.

Thank you for your service, old stranger. We met only briefly and never talked, but I'm glad our paths crossed.
by const_cast | 2025-05-01 02:15:27+00:00
You spend less, proportionally, of your income the richer you are. Economic activity scales inversely with wealth.

Poor people spend close to 100% of their income on consumption, middle class people a little less, and up into the billionaires we're looking at less than 1%.

They "move money" in other ways, but I think the key here is that those other ways are just necessarily less economically stimulating.
by toast0 | 2025-05-01 02:16:12+00:00
Look, X11's lack of security is real, but I'd bet that most users don't lock down debugging between applications on the system, so anything you could get out of X11, you can also get out of attaching to other processes as a debugger.

X11 allows you to have "network transparency" and run (authenticated) malware attached to your display on a different host and read your keypresses remotely; but Wayland's network scope is limited; waypipe exists, but nobody talks about it, does it work? can you do ssh -something to setup a tunnel and run things and have it just work (at least to the standard of tunneled X)? Taking care of networked malware by ignoring networking for a decade doesn't like not addressing the user needs and then you shouldn't be be surprised when adoption is slow.
by EMIRELADERO | 2025-05-01 02:16:18+00:00
Want something even more evil? I got you.

When saurik sued Apple for antitrust reasons over Cydia[1] (which sadly ended up going nowhere), at some point a hearing was held where his lawyer accidentally read out something that was supposed to be protected/sealed. Apple's lawyer quickly interjected, but what saurik's attorney got to read before ended up in the official transcript[2], and it's straight up disgusting. From p.18:

"For example, something where -- they are talking about an iOS update that, quote, broke Cydia Impactor. Where they said, it feels too good to destroy someone's spirit. We did something else today that will kill him again with a little smiley emoticon. That, we can specifically talk about with respect to Cydia."

[1] For those not in the know, Cydia was the de-facto App Store for jailbroken iDevices, the prominent third-party marketplace before AltStore.

[2] https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/18730843/75/saurikit-ll...
by bigyabai | 2025-05-01 02:16:32+00:00
I mean, it's hard for me to act like I really care. If I wanted to piss and moan about the topic du-jour I'd make a new account and wait 2 weeks. HN only censors you if you're too vain to abandon your 500 karma profile to start a new one up.

The lapse of communication is what bothers me, and I suppose it's because the moderators know they can't justify the punishment. Preventing someone from protecting their posterity is a pretty selfishly punitive measure, even if you think they abused the edit feature (somehow). It also doesn't prevent future abuse, doesn't communicate how the user can improve and therefore results in a worse community than just banning then and flagging their comments. I don't understand what the purpose of edit restrictions are in their current form, and clearly other users don't either.

It's really my fault, for coming to Hacker News and expecting to be owed anything. I should have known better than to openly criticize the tech industry on PG's own stomping grounds.
by ethbr1 | 2025-05-01 02:17:07+00:00
There's also the time/focus limitation.

A CEO/founder can be the most brilliant person in a company, and still not be as well informed about a specific aspect as someone else, simply because they don't have time with their other competing responsibilities.

So the allure of parachuting in and fixing a problem also comes with understanding the limitations that your brief on the situation was by summarized Powerpoint.

Which is one thing that's been said about old Microsoft era Gates -- he simply worked that much harder and faster to be able to do it effectively.
by SpicyLemonZest | 2025-05-01 02:17:41+00:00
There's plenty of discussion of what to do about it, including a legislative remedy which went up for a vote just today.

The thing is, Trump's poll numbers are declining rapidly, with his support being driven by people who just don't believe the consequences of his policies will happen. So the conclusion most people reach is that protesting and talking are the most effective things to do right now. If we're 7 weeks out from empty store shelves, then we're 7 weeks out from a huge surge of discontent, and we want to be ready to tell those people that Donald Trump is clearly responsible and they can help stop him if they'd like.

A mass strike in particular definitely doesn't make sense today. You can't run a mass strike if the Teamsters aren't on your side, and they support the tariffs.
by zelphirkalt | 2025-05-01 02:18:16+00:00
The state of having married the wrong person, will always occur. To stigmatize divorce is to put people who made the wrong choice once in a worse spot.

Marriage should be made less artificially blown up with meaning and divorce should not be stigmatized. Instead, if done with a healthy frequency, people divorcing when they notice it is not working, should be applauded, for looking out for their own health.

At the same time people also should learn how to make relationships in general work.
by kazinator | 2025-05-01 02:18:52+00:00
If an LLM has only that knowledge and nothing else (pieces of text saying that heat transfer is proportional to some function of the temp difference) such that is not trained on any texts that give problems and solutions in this area, it will not work this out, since it has nothing to generate tokens from.

Also, your knowledge doesn't come from anywhere near having scanned terabytes of text, which would take you multiple lifetimes of full time work.
by 14 | 2025-05-01 02:19:56+00:00
A while back there was another article here on HN that discussed the San Andreas Fault and one of the pictures showed how far a building can shift when the earth moves. I think it said the building moved something like 30 feet laterally from where it originally was. I thought that was crazy. I didn't even think about the possibility of the earth suddenly sinking several feet below the ocean in a moments notice. That would be catastrophic!
by tzs | 2025-05-01 02:20:05+00:00
It's not that it is too complicated. It is that it is not possible.

No matter what flat amount you pick there will be people whose income is less than that.

I'm assuming you meant a flat amount because the article is about a flat amount. If you actually meant a flat rate, such as 10% of income, that is feasible.

However it is also pretty much pointless.

Many people imagine it would vastly simplify things but the difference between a single flat rate and a bracket system is a short paragraph and a table of N lines where N is the number brackets.

The complexity of the tax system is in determining what is subject to tax. To simplify the tax system you need to greatly simplify that. Once the taxable amount is determined a bracketed rate system is only trivially more complicated than a flat rate system.

Great simplification of the "what is taxable" part of the system probably requires giving up using that system to incentivize things the government wants to encourage or to discourage things the government wants to discourage. So basically getting rid of most deductions and credits.

Its those deductions and credits that lead to much of the complication. A deduction or credit or surtax is added to encourage or discourage something and it works for a short while. Then people find ways to take advantage of this in other situations. Then regulations are updated to close off those other situations. But they also end up blocking some uses that should have been allowed, so more regulation ensue. This can go on for several rounds.

Would getting rid of all that be feasible? Many, if not most, of the things the government uses the tax system to encourage or discourage are things it would still need to be able to encourage or discourage even if it could no longer use the tax system for that.

It's not obvious what other methods are available that wouldn't be more intrusive than doing it through tax tweaks. And they would likely still be complicated, so we'd just be moving the complication to somewhere else. I suspect that complication comes from having a large and diverse economy--it is a complication economy which necessarily leads to complexity in regulating it.
by WalterBright | 2025-05-01 02:21:03+00:00
I'm not upset at all. My question to you was a fair one.

You did say "less" money for the poor. That implies the wealth is being transferred from them.

> by definition there can be no wealth inequality without rich people

That doesn't all mean they are "holding" money. Money is not the same thing as wealth. Personally, I don't have any money other than pocket change.

> you're projecting so much political vitriol onto it.

Am I? I thought my statements were objective facts, and not at all political.