MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by theandrewbailey | 2025-05-25 10:57:04+00:00
Since Windows 11 is such a dumpster fire, a few months ago I decided to delete Windows 10, too. Glad to know I'm not the only one. I've been dabbling in Linux for about 20 years, and have been running it pretty much everywhere (including my laptop) for maybe 15 years. Since Valve has been doing the Lord's work in porting everything to Proton, I decided that it's finally time to pull the trigger. As expected, it's been remarkably great.
by StopDisinfo910 | 2025-05-25 10:57:18+00:00
> You're "pulling priors out of thin air" whether you realize it or not

No, you are not. That’s an argument I often seen put forward by people who want the Bayesian approach to be the one true approach. There are no prior whatsoever involved in a frequentist analysis.

People who say that generally refer to MLE being somewhat equivalent to MAP estimation with a uniform prior in the region. That’s true but that’s the usual mistake I’m complaining about of reducing estimators to MLE.

The assertion in itself doesn’t make sense.

> Of course, Bayesian statistics also often involves assigning "uninformative" priors out of pure convenience

That’s very hand wavy. The issue is that priors have a significant impact on posteriors, one which is often deeply misunderstood by casual statisticians.
by Disposal8433 | 2025-05-25 10:58:26+00:00
That's why I'm not involved in the LLMs nowadays. I'm waiting for the whole thing to cool down, and when they have a real local and useful solution for sensitive or regulated industries, I may use it but I'm not in a hurry and I don't believe the FOMO around it.

Its like Google Search. They sold a lot of books for a technology that you could learn in 5 minutes.

The fact that I am not disgusted by those new glasses is worrying me more. Privacy is really dead outside my house and there is nothing I can do about it.

At least it replaced every Google and Apple devices I own with Linux and custom OSes that I fully control, it gives some peace of mind as long as you remember to spend a few minutes to backup your stuff every week.
by mort96 | 2025-05-25 10:58:53+00:00
> Note that textual numbers are surprisingly complex to handle, so any formats with significant number uses should just use binary.

Especially true of floats!

With binary formats, it's usually enough to only support machines whose floating point representation conforms to IEEE 754, which means you can just memcpy a float variable to or from the file (maybe with some endianness conversion). But writing a floating point parser and serializer which correctly round-trips all floats and where the parser guarantees that it parses to the nearest possible float... That's incredibly tricky.

What I've sometimes done when I'm writing a parser for textual floats is, I parse the input into separate parts (so the integer part, the floating point part, the exponent part), then serialize those parts into some other format which I already have a parser for. So I may serialize them into a JSON-style number and use a JSON library to parse it if I have that handy, or if I don't, I serialize it into a format that's guaranteed to work with strtod regardless of locale. (The C standard does, surprisingly, quite significantly constrain how locales can affect strtod's number parsing.)
by sethaurus | 2025-05-25 10:59:27+00:00
These days that's pretty well-supported in the base language:

const updated = { ...existing, someKey: someNewValue };

You mention nesting. That starts to look messier:

const updated = { ...existing, someKey: { ...existing.someKey, ...someNewValue } };

There's a whole cottage industry of little libraries to make this ergonomic/fast in the general case (copying immutable objects with nested changes). `immer` is a popular choice. But the reality is that it gets complicated to do this generically; in my view it's usually better to just use the base language where possible, even if it means sprouting some util functions for the various kinds of updates you end up doing.
by jampekka | 2025-05-25 10:59:33+00:00
p-value testing is problematic, but frequentist CIs typically map to credible intervals with uninformative priors. In practice in Bayesian analyses tend to use so weak priors that they are essentially uninformative.

Maximum likelihood also tends to be equivalent to MAP with uninformative priors.

I find a lot of Bayesian analysis is a bit of cargo culting and frequentist/ML formulations are dismissed with tribalism.
by snvzz | 2025-05-25 11:00:04+00:00
idk about the pain. IMHO it's pure FUD. Generally speaking, it just works. Literal plug and play.

And I'm not saying this randomly. I have had my OSSC for years, and I use it with ample variety of hardware, including PC8801, PC9801, Amiga, MSX, IBM PC clones (8086, 486, Athlon) and the usual console suspects.

With adjustment, it works to perfection. For the Amiga (and only the Amiga) I did input pixel perfect timings. It's easy and, on that platform, it makes a difference. These timings seem good on both OCS/ECS and AGA.

I can hardly justify it, but I love my OSSC enough that I am planning on a OSSC Pro in the future. That way I will be able to divide my hardware across two rooms.
by josephg | 2025-05-25 11:00:20+00:00
Sure; and I can encode maps and sets as entry lists. Binary data as strings and so on. But I don’t want to. I shouldn’t have to.

The fact remains that json doesn’t have native support for any of this stuff. I want something json-like which supports all this stuff natively. I don’t want to have to figure out if some binary data is base64 encoded or hex encoded or whatever, and hack around jackson or serde or javascript to encode and decode my objects properly. Features like this should be built in.
by gyomu | 2025-05-25 11:00:23+00:00
The word "capsule" (カプセル, kapuseru) is pretty established in Japan. There are capsule toy machines (also often called "gashapon" or "gacha" but those are respectively Bandai/Tomy trademarks). As another commenter pointed out there are capsule hotels; the working name for Pokémon was originally "Capsule Monsters".
by thiht | 2025-05-25 11:00:58+00:00
No need to be aggressive, I just disagree that DI frameworks streamline anything, they just make things more opaque and hard to trace.

> will be a very annoying thing to maintain as soon as you change the constructor of something widely used in your project to accept a new parameter.

That for example is just not true. You add a new parameter to inject and it breaks the injection points? Yeah that’s expected, and suitable. I want to know where my changes have any impact, that’s the point of typing things.

A lot of things deemed "more maintainable" really aren’t. Never has a DI framework made anything simpler.
by ChrisMarshallNY | 2025-05-25 11:02:06+00:00
Exactly.

To be fair, though, some of the most interesting stuff on HN, comes from “diverted” comment threads (not this one, though).

Of course, I’ve always made it easy to get in touch with me. I would assume that if someone was legitimately interested in the backstory (as opposed to some prurient interest in public grandstanding), they could contact me directly. It has happened, in the past.
by yatopifo | 2025-05-25 11:04:01+00:00
This approach seems overly mechanistic to me. You can have an election, and yet the results of said election can be completely predetermined like they have been in russia for the past 20 years or so. The US toyed with gerrymandering and disenfranchisement even before it officially embraced the current flavour of fascism. So the soil is fertile enough to take the next logic step towards a full dictatorship.
by 3036e4 | 2025-05-25 11:04:45+00:00
The Renoise DAW does that as well, except for two or three features that are disabled in the trial version (nothing too vital or that could not be worked around by anyone interested in not paying iirc). Just an offline serial number to unlock, good for an entire major version of upgrades (some 10+ years in practice, it seems).

Otherwise, at least 5+ years ago when I kept up with this, music software without annoying drm was extremely rare, seemingly worse than any other type of software I encountered, yet almost everyone (unsurprisingly) seems to use pirated versions. A sad side-effect is that cheaper alternatives like Reaper or Reason (or any free software) are not as widespread as you would expect, since most prefer to just use a pirated $2000+ application.
by incomingpain | 2025-05-25 11:05:02+00:00
It's not a surprise, if people can conceal a handgun, you're far less likely to violently attack someone if there's a potential your victim or a bystander ends you.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitutional_carry

It's called constitutional carry, gun freedoms in the usa greatly increased since ~2015 state by state. No permit required to conceal carry a handgun. The USA is rapidly switching states over without any hassle because of the immediate significant drop in violent crime.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_laws_in_the_United_States_...

Essentially a few states have had public data on violent crime for decades and the year they implemented constitutional carry on average they have a ~10% drop in violent crime.

What's very telling as well. Places like michigan, illinois, new york, california. They are holdouts on this gun freedom and they have been rewarded with having the highest violent crime cities.
by nurettin | 2025-05-25 11:06:06+00:00
You have a jar with five green, three blue marbles. First random marble you pick is green, what is the chance you get blue next? There is no use for bayes here.

Now you have two jars you can't see inside of, 5g/3b and 3b/5r. You take one jar and want to guess which one you picked. You start pulling marbles and updating your priors until you reach an acceptable certainty. Now you have to use bayes or similar.

These are tools, not ideologies. People who pit these tools against each other are demagogues.
by orbital-decay | 2025-05-25 11:06:47+00:00
I'm kind of anxious about checking the map when I'm riding a motorcycle in traffic. You can get away with much lower situational awareness in a car simply because you're far more predictable and not invisible.

Speaking of which... I'm still waiting for a bike helmet with a back-facing camera/HUD that is neither vaporware nor "smart" (read vendor-dependent and barely working), and doesn't suffer from basic usability mistakes. That would be infinitely more useful and probably easier to make than this.
by ukoki | 2025-05-25 11:07:15+00:00
> was clocked to be offset after 5.3 months of running the turbine

.. if the power would have otherwise been generated using non-renewable sources.

But even when (if?) electricity generation is switched to 100% renewable, we will _still_ need to reduce carbon emissions to reduce climate change, so reducing carbon emissions invovled in the creation and maintanence of renewable electricity seems like a good idea to me.
by ruraljuror | 2025-05-25 11:07:40+00:00
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agency_(philosophy)

This is not my idea. Yuval Noah Harari discusses it in Nexus. Gemini (partially) summarizes it like this:

Harari argues that AI is fundamentally different from previous technologies. It's not just a tool that follows instructions, but an "agent" capable of learning, making decisions, and even generating new ideas independently.

> If this agency as you define it makes it different from all other technologies, presumably it must mean something pretty serious.

Yes, AI does seem different and pretty serious. Please keep in mind the thread I was responding to said we should think of AI as we would a hammer. We can think of AI like a tool, but limiting our conception like that basically omits what is interesting and concerning (even in the context of the original blog post).
by authorfly | 2025-05-25 11:08:22+00:00
This is part of why France lost status for large events and organisations in the early-mid 20th Century until now. Quite large political swings at regular intervals and fairly ready-to-protest population = not ideal for basing stability. And it doesn't matter that France was far more stable than most countries, it was simply much less stable than America, the UK and regrettably, Germany. Frances solution seems to be not to really compete for international industry or science, but to focus on French culture and language to fit their tourism strategy.
by anthk | 2025-05-25 11:08:38+00:00
I prefer to buy books than software, especially from T3X (Zenlisp, T3XForth, Klong...) and the Eforth+Subleq guy. The software it's libre licensed but the knowledge isn't, even if I have the documents right here, a good book to introduce me on K/Klang it's invaluable.
by dmurray | 2025-05-25 11:09:16+00:00
Interesting that they're being described as "abandoned" there. I thought they might be getting sold to locals who have plausible deniability that they're using them for construction work.

Why abandon a working vehicle? Surely the construction projects on Hydra aren't exclusively worked by end-of-life vehicles. And it's only about 3km from mainland Greece so it can't be prohibitively expensive to ship them back (even if they are end of life, they should have much more scrappage value than the shipping cost).
by mike_hearn | 2025-05-25 11:11:02+00:00
Thanks for the insight! Some of these things were new to me :)

I didn't mention audits and the like because OpenAI are in the cloud, and there are obviously no audits for managed databases. That's relevant for self-hosted setups.

Both options I specced out included a replica, iirc. At least that's what Microsoft's HA option appears to be (it doubles the price, indeed).

One of the problems in comparing with Postgres is people tend to advertise mutually exclusive options, sometimes in different comments by different people so it's not their fault. Anything that requires an extension might as well not exist for most Postgres users because they want to outsource DB management to the cloud, and there the cloud provider chooses the extensions not the user. Oracle doesn't have this problem because all the features are built-in and managed databases have access to everything.

Postgres offers strictly serializable isolation indeed, but IIUC it's basically a form of read locking so will tank performance.

Re: cluster waits. Multi-node clusters will inevitably have failure modes a single machine doesn't unfortunately, I'd prefer to always scale up first before scaling out. One of the advantages of a managed database is that this becomes the cloud provider's problem.

Re: node list distribution. I think that's what the SCAN feature does, which is supported in the thin driver: https://docs.oracle.com/en/database/oracle/oracle-database/2...

Yes, the advanced features are typically not exposed by generic middleware and you will have to change things to take advantage of them, but this is a general issue that affects all kinds of software. Features specific to the Linux kernel are often not exposed in Python or Java either, for instance. Some features are easily enabled by just dropping in UCP, which should be an easy upgrade from Hikari. Very new stuff like tx multiplexing requires more work by the app developer to exploit currently, but hopefully with time frameworks will catch up. Point is, the support is there if you need it. Compared to the gymnastics OpenAI are going through, it's easy stuff.
by 47282847 | 2025-05-25 11:11:29+00:00
> I'm pointing out the reality to people claiming that "oh it's so easy to maintain any kind of hobbies and/or social life without spending a penny".

Not any, but a sufficiently large amount of options. You may not enjoy those, which translates into “you will need time to adapt to it“, but that doesn’t mean it’s impossible.

I meet with most of my friends der outdoors, for walks and hiking. We bring our own bottled tap water (I could never imagine to live in a place without good tap water) and snacks or cooked food, blankets, games. We usually take our bikes, or trains for longer distance trips. We throw parties in public parks. We go camping with tents on semi-illegal public areas. (The Park4night app for example is great for that.) All of this and more can be done for daily social activities and vacations at very little expense.

I’m writing this from a bakery with self-service, and there’s a family teaching chess to a girl at another table. Beautiful.

Compared with most of my social environment that decided to work full time, I think I have a lot more flexibility and voluntary social interactions. They are usually tired after a day of forced interactions; I manage to almost exclusively have voluntary interactions. I do not work with people who I don’t like. My time on this earth is too precious to waste on that.

It’s totally fine if the adjustments and adapting (not tradeoffs, because on a needs-based analysis it doesn’t require any) are not worth it for you (which raises the question of currency), but you and others in this thread make it sound like a horrible lifestyle for anyone, which is simply not the case. I would go as far as to claim it’s easier to maintain an unhealthy lifestyle with lots of money than with little. It’s just that most of us are so used to the stress that we had to stop listening to our own bodies (and often silence it with pills once it starts screaming). Spending money helps to obscure the real underlying need, and too often serves as a short-term patch. A limited budget forces you into thinking and feeling into what it is really about.

It can be inspiring to some to hear stories of people who found creative low-cost solutions to get their needs met. No need to question their ability to take care of themselves, and imply that they need to do without some crucial element of life and suffer.
by niemandhier | 2025-05-25 11:12:38+00:00
I spend the last 40 minutes revisiting definitions of democracy, to figure out if your point was valid. If have to conclude that I disagree with you.

As probably most words that are used for complex concepts, the word democracy was used to label a wide range of different definitions.

There might be a cultural divide here, but a an European and in particular as a German I use the definition of the democracy advocated by the EU, its courts, and most of European political scholars.

The EU defines democracy as a system of government where citizens participate in decision-making, either directly or through elected representatives, and where there are safeguards against the abuse of power, including a strong rule of law, protection of human rights, and an independent judiciary.

This might sound academic, but it has important implications in how we deal with member states such as Hungary that slowly erode the rule of law through actions taken elected leaders.

As said, there are many possible definitions of democracy, but I’d still call those that fail to contain a system of checks and balances less suitable.
by bartread | 2025-05-25 11:12:49+00:00
> The company’s founder Sachin Dev Duggal stepped down as chief executive earlier this year but retained his board position and title of “chief wizard”.

If only there were some signal in the behaviour of a person who calls themselves “chief wizard” that might suggest they were prone to making poor quality business decisions.

For real: this is not a job title that would be adopted by a “serious person” - a real expert, with real insight, and a real plan to deliver. Why have investors given his company tens of millions of dollars?

I get that investors are looking for that 10x return and are ready for some failures along the way but that mindset seems to be used as cover for a lot of dumb money. Whereas the reality is that VCs and corporate backers would enjoy much better returns if they simply avoided the most obvious grifters.

People who can’t answer specific questions about delivery with concrete answers - Elizabeth Holmes, the WeWork clown, this guy, and on and on - should be avoided. And especially if they have dumb job titles.
by tankenmate | 2025-05-25 11:13:07+00:00
> or people who just want validation regardless of the scenario.

This really worries me as there are many people (even more prevalent in younger generations if some papers turn out to be valid) that lack resilience and critical self evaluation who may develop narcissistic tendencies with increased use or reinforcement from AIs. Just the health care costs involved when reality kicks in for these people, let alone other concomitant social costs will be substantial at scale. And people think social media algorithms reinforce poor social adaptation and skills, this is a whole new level.
by magicalhippo | 2025-05-25 11:13:26+00:00
All, or at least nearly all, digital camera sensors are sensitive in the IR. That's why most "normal" digital cameras have IR blocking filters. Security and astrophoto cameras have the filter removed. For astro there's also people who remove the filter manually[1].

[1]: https://camerasnipe.com/how-to-remove-the-ir-filter-from-a-d...
by zx10rse | 2025-05-25 11:13:49+00:00
I don't think it is a generational thing or a lindy effect plain, and simple greed is what is killing modern day games.

Eventually they become a never ending grind loop for battle passes, points, buy more points, cosmetics priced as full fledged titles, loot boxes, etc. etc.

There is simply nothing to it, no depth, no cool mechanics, no story nothing, and once a player spent x amount of hours realizing that, you simply boot up 20 years old game, so you can have some dopamine rush again.

It is so uninspiring no easter eggs, no special levels, secrets nothing, login buy a battle pass, and do that recursively every x amount of months.
by mwcampbell | 2025-05-25 11:15:21+00:00
I don't deny that, under the right circumstances, these tools can produce results that feel indistinguishable from magic, or like science fiction as you put it. But I don't think it's worth the costs. To me, the two most concerning costs are the unreliability, and the massive amounts of stolen training data and underpaid labor (the RLHF process) required for these models. I'm not comfortable relying on a tool built on such foundations.

My bet, and I realize this might just be wishful thinking, is that the high order bit for being an effective software developer in the near future will be skill at using more reliable and non-exploitative automation tools, such as programming languages with powerful macro systems and other high-level abstractions, to stay competitive with developers who sling LLM-generated code. So I'd better get started developing that skill myself.
by ndsipa_pomu | 2025-05-25 11:16:13+00:00
Surely if shenanigans around changing eligibility to vote and maybe a bit of tampering with vote machines (won't be detected if there's no-one around with the authority to validate voting), then it won't matter if Trump has many supporters or not.

I would expect him and his handlers to look to other authoritarian regimes to see how to safely have democratic votes without any chance of losing power.
by incomingpain | 2025-05-25 11:17:53+00:00
The arts are being crippled by the arts.

The artists outside of the 'the arts'. The people who can carve a pinapple to look like a parrot. A supercar like koenigsegg or pagani. In fact, even the new prius looks damn good.

Those are all artists doing fantastic work outside the 'arts'.
by sph | 2025-05-25 11:18:53+00:00
The recent wave of early-access indie co-op horror games is proof of that (i.e. Phasmophobia, Lethal Company, Backrooms, R.E.P.O., etc.).

They seem to pop out of nowhere, explode and rank high on Steam, and die a month later when streamers and their young followers have moved onto the next one.
by mierz00 | 2025-05-25 11:19:02+00:00
I never experienced competition like this in the Army, however I have outside of it.

The Army was competitive in a fun way. Where it’s fun to beat your friends in PT or to laugh as they trip over. But when it came down to it, we were on the same team and you would help out a friend.

Inversely, not being a team player would get you bullied.