MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by pineaux | 2025-05-14 20:05:16+00:00
I love these confident claims! It sounds like you really know what you are talking about. It's either that or you are projecting. Could you elaborate? I for one find the level of intelligence quite real, I use AIs to do a lot of quite complex stuff for me nowadays. I have an agent that keeps my calendar, schedules appointments with people that want meetings with me, summarizes emails and add these summaries to notion and breaks them up in todo-lists, answers questions about libraries and APIs, writes most of my code (although I do need to hold it's hand and it cannot improve by learning from me).
by spongebob_sh | 2025-05-14 20:05:28+00:00
I finetuned gemma 3 12b using RL to be an expert at gaslighting and demeaning it’s users. I’ve been training LLMs using RL with soft rewards for a while now, and seeing OpenAI’s experiments with sycophancy I wanted to see if we can apply it to make the model behave on the other end of the spectrum..

It is not perfect (i guess no eval exists for measuring this), but can be really good in some situations.
by btilly | 2025-05-14 20:05:59+00:00
Hilbert's hopes, of course, were dashed by Gödel. However Hilbert's philosophy, named Formalism, became dominant in mathematics.

In this philosophy, mathematics is just a formal game played by formal rules. When we say that something exists, for instance, we are just saying that from some set of axioms, we can prove a statement about existence. It is irrelevant to us whether the axioms are true or the thing "really" exists. All that matters is that we successfully followed the rules of the formal game.
by dahart | 2025-05-14 20:06:23+00:00
Do you have any links from 1990ish that show use of “HDR”? I am interested in when “HDR” became a phrase people used. I believe I remember hearing it first around 1996 or 97, but it may have started earlier. It was certainly common by 2001. I don’t see that used as a term nor an acronym in the Cineon docs from 1995, but it does talk about log and linear spaces and limiting the dynamic range when converting. The Cineon scanner predates sRGB, and used gamma 1.7. https://dotcsw.com/doc/cineon1.pdf

This 10 bit scanner gave you headroom of like 30% above white. So yeah it qualifies as a type of high dynamic range when compared to 8 bit/channel RGB, but on the other hand, a range of [0 .. 1.3] isn’t exactly in the spirit of what “HDR” stands for. The term implicitly means a lot more than 1.0, not just a little. And again people developing HDR like Greg Ward and Paul Debevec were arguing for absolute units such as luminance, which the Cineon scanner does not do.
by dilipdasilva | 2025-05-14 20:06:31+00:00
Static typing lets you build very large rigid structures where types ensure constraints. However, these constraints get in the way of moving quickly. If you change a signature of a function, you have to first change every piece of code that calls the function. You then have to compile, restart your program, rebuild the whole rigid structure, and confirm the change works as expected. This whole process can take many minutes. The claim is that catching these errors at compile time results in more reliable code.

Dynamic typing has no such constraints to help you catch errors at compile time. Dynamic typing allows you to build organic structures that more fluidly change. If you change a function signature, you don't have to change every piece of code that calls the function. You can change the function and test it in a running application without restarting the application. Doing this takes seconds. Dynamic typing allows you to iterate 100x faster. Being able to rapidly iterate often means better tested code and more reliable code.

Both are valuable. Dynamic typing is valuable during development when you need to iterate rapidly and build a prototype when requirements are often changing. Static typing is valuable when code need is more mature, changing less frequently, and code needs to be put in production.

Ideally you have both. More mature parts of the program are statically typed and more fluid parts of the program are dynamically typed.
by joe_the_user | 2025-05-14 20:06:51+00:00
i did some digging, and it turns out messages from 5 digit shortcodes often aren't supported over wifi calling. sometimes they are, but in her case they're clearly not.

This seems like a rather specific problem that isn't related to mountain people as such but services blocking "shortcodes" apparently for a variety of reasons. It is true that text and call reliability is becoming a real problem generally where you have these authentication issues. I myself in the mountains and have dealt with reliability issues.

Here's a discussion of this specific problem with T-mobile: https://www.reddit.com/r/tmobile/comments/ardcnc/aargh_final...
by clpm4j | 2025-05-14 20:06:53+00:00
The means of suicide are probably too much for the average person to succumb to even in the face of a very hard life. The fact that assisted suicide is broadly illegal in the US is something that I've always found ridiculous. No one asked to be brought into the world, and we should be able to check out on our own terms (in planned, thoughtful, assisted way) without resorting to painful/tragic means.
by dns_snek | 2025-05-14 20:06:57+00:00
I'll have to strongly disagree, the turnout is way too high if anything. Voting for the "lesser" evil just legitimizes an institution that doesn't deserve it.

There isn't an asterisk next to your vote that says "this person disagrees with this candidate's platform". No, your vote will be used to legitimize that candidate's platform to other people, future generations, and the history books.
by j45 | 2025-05-14 20:07:36+00:00
I was quoting the article there about JSON/YAML, not making that claim myself.

Did you take a look at the article I linked? It shows visual examples of hand-coded PDFs that demonstrate the structural similarities I am talking about.

Thanks for the clarification on terminology. I could have been clearer and more precise. I referred to "DOM-like structures" as an analogy for the hierarchical nature of PDF objects, not to claim HTML is DOM.

My core point wasn't about the technical definition of markup languages, but about the structural similarity between PDF's object model and hierarchical formats.

When coding a PDF document by hand, you work with nested structures using delimiters like "<<" and ">>" that create hierarchical relationships between objects - which has practical parallels to working with nested elements in other formats.

The forest vs. trees metaphor was to acknowledge that while PDFs aren't primarily markup formats (the trees), they do share structural characteristics with hierarchical formats (the forest) based on my hands-on experience with manual PDF creation.

Hope that helps clarify things a bit.
by macspoofing | 2025-05-14 20:07:58+00:00
>pub transit degrades bc now it shares service with competition that operates under an entirely different model.

Public transit degrades because bus lanes are now congested with people taking mass transit instead of single cars ... and we don't want this why?

The goal is to get people into taxis/uber, buses, subways, bicycles ... basically anything except a car.
by StefanBatory | 2025-05-14 20:08:44+00:00
"Rather than receiving the work-until-you-die news as a prison sentence, a healthier message is one of a change in perspective: Working until you die can be a gift of a lifetime if your work is meaningful."

"So when you hear the news that you must work until you die, you can become relieved and overjoyed that you are free from the slavery of saving money to procure an illusory freedom. Furthermore, it is doing nothing that hastens death. Many who have already retired find themselves bored and detached from life if they are not doing something that is meaningful."

I think this speaks for itself without need to comment.
by coldpie | 2025-05-14 20:09:21+00:00
KeepassXC is a good client that lets you handle your data how you want. I wrote a pro-Passkey blog post here[1] that explains how to do your own syncing, though I later discovered Passkeys are explicitly built to support proprietary software vendor lock in and had to revoke my support. If you are concerned about being able to control your own data outside of the big tech ecosystem, I strongly recommend avoiding passkeys entirely. It is possible for now, but they are not built for that and the spec authors are actively hostile to you managing your own data.

[1] https://www.smokingonabike.com/2025/01/04/passkey-marketing-...
by tonyarkles | 2025-05-14 20:09:34+00:00
I agree with you wholeheartedly and just want to add one more aspect to this: it also allows you do handle the case where the subject is moving slowly relative to the camera. Easy example is taking long exposures of the moon from a tripod. If you just open the shutter for 30 seconds the moon itself is going to move enough to cause motion blur; if instead you take a series of much faster photos and use image processing techniques to stack the subject (instead of just naively stacking all of the pixels 1:1) you can get much better results.
by tippytippytango | 2025-05-14 20:10:15+00:00
This article captures a lot of the problem. It’s often frustrating how it tries to work around really simple issues with complex workarounds that don’t work at all. I tell it the secret simple thing it’s missing and it gets it. It always makes me think, god help the vibe coders that can’t read code. I actually feel bad for them.
by quesera | 2025-05-14 20:10:25+00:00
Twilio has a lookup API, which returns the subscriber name and carrier.

Here's an example response (subscriber name redacted):

{ "data": { "name": "LASTNAME, FIRSTNAME", "line_provider": "Google/Bandwidth.com (SVR)", "carrier": "Bandwidth.com", "line_type": "landline" } }
by pavel_lishin | 2025-05-14 20:10:32+00:00
> With Boomless Cruise, a flight from LA to D.C. is 3 hours and 15 minutes instead of 4 hours and 35 minutes, and a flight from Miami to Seattle is only 3 hours and 40 minutes compared to 5 hours and 15 minutes.

That... is not the time savings I expected. I mean, I guess that's a 30% savings, but I somehow expected more.
by underlipton | 2025-05-14 20:11:04+00:00
*including

And burbclave police already exist.

Otherwise I agree. This is dumb. It also feels like a safety issue, but I can't quite articulate why. Also, private commuter busses already exist that can use bus lanes... But technically it's a service provided by the local transit authority. @uber: get in line with all the other contractors, bub.
by dheera | 2025-05-14 20:11:17+00:00
That works in cities like Zurich where there are lots of buses going absolutely everywhere and are almost always perfectly on time. I worked there for 3 months and my 8:23am city bus was there on the dot pretty much every day. It would often get to the stop at 8:21 and wait till 8:23, like clockwork. There was no payment system on the actual bus, people had to take care of payments outside the bus so as not to delay boarding.

In the US, buses largely don't need to get you where you need to go, are never on time, delayed at every stop by a line of people fumbling for how to shove crumpled dollar bills into the machine. The governments have no plans to fix any of this, so I welcome the private sector to step in and provide a bus solution in the meantime that is fast, clean, and efficient.
by _DeadFred_ | 2025-05-14 20:11:19+00:00
Goerge RR Martin did not and could not tell his stories in a 90 minute mass market movie. People are ignoring the limits of the medium. Limited to 90-120 minutes of all inclusive storytelling, must keep mass market audiences attention the continuous 90-120 minutes. Must have a payoff to the audience.

'The Road' changed things up. Technically good story telling, good movie craft. I would never watch it or another movie like it again. I felt like crap for a week after. Much success in being different and eliciting feelings, horrible at being entertainment (to me at least).
by delusional | 2025-05-14 20:11:36+00:00
> The public transit degrades because bus lanes are now congested with people taking mass transit instead of single cars ... and we don't want this why?

That would be nice. In the real world they would be congested with Uber buses that purposefully block the public option to ruthlessly "out-compete" it.

Maybe uber will start transporting their food delivery in the bus. Now you have a congested bus lane full of burgers.

> taxis > anything besides a car

kek.
by dahart | 2025-05-14 20:11:40+00:00
As I remember it, Paul Debevec had borrowed Greg Ward’s RGBE file format at some point in the late 90s and rebranded it “.hdr” for his image viewer tool (hdrView) and code to convert a stack of LDR exposures into HDR. I can see presentations online from Greg Ward in 2001 that have slides with “HDR” and “HDRI” all over the place. So yeah the term definitely must have started in the late 90s if not earlier. I’m not sure it was as there in the early 90s though.
by draga79 | 2025-05-14 20:11:59+00:00
Sure, I can say this. The person I would have called, someone very close to me, would have been extremely disappointed to learn what was happening. They were very proud of having helped, during difficult times, the very person who was now threatening me. And since this person close to me was facing serious health issues (though still had authority), I chose to avoid causing them further pain that, ultimately, would have been pointless at that moment.
by Vapormac | 2025-05-14 20:12:01+00:00
You're totally right. I think the article is just inherently too reductionist, which is like of a foundation of analysis in general, is to reduce and then reason about some process/object. However, I think a lot of analysis is (for lack of a better term) critically reductionist, and they see that as a virtue of their analysis, they toss out nuance and details in favor of studying the "structure" of some process without considering that particular nuance or detail changes the structures meaning and possibly the structure itself.
by ludicrousdispla | 2025-05-14 20:12:03+00:00
In the audio-track commentary for Angel, which is a TV series that has some very long story arcs, one of the writers mentions that they would insert superfluous details into the script (i.e names of people and places) so that they could tie future story developments back to earlier episodes and seasons, making it seem to the viewer like the entirety of the show had been worked out from the start, and that the writers had been dropping hints along the way.
by pjdbruin | 2025-05-14 20:12:28+00:00
Great to see cost-effective alternatives to Cloudera and Databricks! We’ve spent three years building IOMETE, a self-hosted data lakehouse that combines Apache Iceberg and Spark, designed to run natively on Kubernetes. We’re focused on on-premises deployments to address the growing need for data sovereignty and low TCO, with a streamlined setup for large-scale analytics. Early adopters are seeing strong results. Curious about your experience with Trino and Superset—any tips for optimizing performance at scale?
by korse | 2025-05-14 20:12:34+00:00
Two of my favorite albums are Fire in The Sky by Jordin Kare and Songs of the Final Frontier vol. 1 by Captain Corbin.

One particularly good/funny pair of tracks are The Designer/The Engineer from Fire in the Sky. The should be listened to in that order.

Plenty of people have uploaded this stuff on to YouTube so quite allot is readily accessible if you're looking (try searching 'Terrific Centrifugal Still').
by joquarky | 2025-05-14 20:12:44+00:00
> because the CISO is an idiot.

How do these people get these jobs?

I have 25 years of enterprise-level web application development experience. I passed the CISSP on my first try with minimal study. I read RFCs for fun.

And yet I can't even get a screening interview with an actual human (although my one AI interview asked surprisingly competent follow-up questions).
by ne0flex | 2025-05-14 20:13:22+00:00
There are studies in Japan that showed train stations with blue lights installed have lower instances of attempted suicides than stations without blue lights [1]. There are also studies that indicate time in nature is associated with lower stress levels and blood pressure, regardless of income [2].

[1] https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20190122-can-blue-lights-... [2] https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2024/02/240207120426.h...
by ProllyInfamous | 2025-05-14 20:14:13+00:00
As a forty-something semi-retired electrician, the following apply to me:

(c) I own a cell phone, but NEVER leave the house with it (effectively a landline, but less expensive). When my city recently began requiring an app for public street parking, I simply stopped paying for parking (it's only a $16 fine, unless you are handicapped == free).

(e) The only thing that causes me to update my phone is when the battery swells up (typically around eight years). Otherwise I don't even update the original OS.

(g) Flat out, I refuse to use your app

(i) Whether by business/marketing or governments, agreed
by neilv | 2025-05-14 20:14:27+00:00
I kinda like client certificates, and have made simple uses of them, for Web services and occasionally corporate-internal humans.

But with the current browser support, client certs haven't seemed viable for consumer sites. Unless the browser developers are inspired to offer better support for mass consumer users, but I couldn't make a strong case why they should.

(I'd rather most consumer sites resume making password authn work well, and then have them integrate 2FA judiciously and well. And stop with some of the counterproductive surveillance capitalism mechanisms.)
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-05-14 20:15:21+00:00
> Do you not remember when uber was subsidizing the fuck out of rides?

Sure. I'm not saying Uber's costs didn't go up. I'm arguing they haven't gone up faster than the competition. They never cornered the market to jack up rates because they never had that much pricing power. They loss lead to get a seat at the table, not to buy the whole table.
by baobun | 2025-05-14 20:15:22+00:00
For such a sensitive use case with supposed focus on user control and privacy: Why not open source with self-hosting the backend as an option?

> Family Folder uses industry-standard encryption to protect your data. Your information is private and only accessible to those you invite.

This needs further detailing - Especially since sources are not available. What data is encrypted, where, and how? Who controls keys?
by moonikakiss | 2025-05-14 20:16:02+00:00
This is really, really exciting. I see it as the “right” way OLTP and OLAP will converge.

The OP and I built an HTAP system at SingleStore. A single database with one copy of data for both OLTP and OLAP workloads. HTAP never took off [0].

What we learned was that OLTP (Postgres) should handle OLTP, while OLAP (data warehouses/lakes) should handle OLAP, with replication between them.

Designing the 'up-to-date' replication between these systems is hard.... columnar stores just aren’t built for OLTP‑style writes, and can't keep up with your OLTP tables.

Let’s see if Databricks and Neon can pull this off

“give me up‑to‑date Postgres tables in Unity Catalog", no debezium --> kafka --> flink --> Iceberg. With Spark jobs in the back ensuring that Iceberg is an optimal state.

https://www.mooncake.dev/blog/htap-is-dead
by pjmlp | 2025-05-14 20:16:38+00:00
Hence why I am already happy with half filled cup, when considering the existence of platforms like ChromeOS, Android, Meadow, Micro/CircuitPython, or Inferno, that seldom gets love from Plan 9 folks.

It isn't the full thing, but apparently it is very hard to get mainstream interest in such approaches.

Naturally this is not the same as using Smalltalk, or the other three Xerox PARC siblings, only partially.

There were some efforts to run Squeak on the Raspberry PI I think, but eventually they runned out of steam.

https://hackaday.com/2020/07/12/making-smalltalk-on-a-raspbe...
by anal_reactor | 2025-05-14 20:17:26+00:00
> There's no universal design that would fit just any living room.

Yes. This is why any furniture store that thinks that they can just offer three designs which would cover 90% of people is going to inevitably fail, as evidenced by Ikea. It's a ridiculous idea that same three designs could be adapted to living rooms across one country, let alone entire globe.

Oh wait. Half of the word's population uses the Bestå cabinets and Nordviken chairs.
by plotlyadmin | 2025-05-14 20:17:32+00:00
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We are growing our team and hiring for the following roles:

Senior Software Engineer, Platform (Remote: Canada or US)

If interested, apply here - https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/plotly/jobs/7854147002
by hilbert42 | 2025-05-14 20:18:04+00:00
"The solution must be legislative, so there must be public interest…. There isn't the interest…"

Sometimes I despair. I recall when doing Pol. Sc. decades ago Plato's criticisms of democracy and the more I observe its dysfunctional aspects the more I agree with him. Same with Churchill's sentiments.

As they day, "God helps those who help themselves", if the electorate isn't interested and or cannot understand the problems then dysfunction will continue and bad actors will have a field day.

I'm out of my depth here, I speculate about why the electorate isn't interested in helping itself but that's more a job for sociologists and psychologists, and I'm neither.

Ah well….
by iotku | 2025-05-14 20:18:07+00:00
There's a pretty big gap between "make it work" and "make it good".

I've found with LLMs I can usually convince them to get me at least something that mostly works, but each step compounds with excessive amounts of extra code, extraneous comments ("This loop goes through each..."), and redundant functions.

In the short term it feels good to achieve something 'quickly', but there's a lot of debt associated with running a random number generator on your codebase.
by vanschelven | 2025-05-14 20:18:12+00:00
> Its “almost there” quality — the feeling we’re just one prompt away from the perfect solution — is what makes it so addicting. Vibe coding operates on the principle of variable-ratio reinforcement, a powerful form of operant conditioning where rewards come unpredictably. Unlike fixed rewards, this intermittent success pattern (“the code works! it’s brilliant! it just broke! wtf!”), triggers stronger dopamine responses in our brain’s reward pathways, similar to gambling behaviors.

Though I'm not a "vibe coder" myself I very much recognize this as part of the "appeal" of GenAI tools more generally. Trying to get Image Generators to do what I want has a very "gambling-like" quality to it.
by tadfisher | 2025-05-14 20:18:32+00:00
Ongoing sync is still possible through ACTION_OPEN_DOCUMENT_TREE [0], and using ContentResolver.takePersistableUriPermission [1] to maintain long-lived access to that directory. Enumerating files is slow but that is not a major concern when the use-case is a background sync, and you can drop down to ContentResolver APIs to reduce the number of IPC calls when enumerating.

[0]: https://developer.android.com/training/data-storage/shared/d...

[1]: https://developer.android.com/reference/android/content/Cont...
by esbranson | 2025-05-14 20:19:01+00:00
> In fact, I specifically acknowledged the draft Wayland accessibility protocol and Newton project in my previous comments, and I mentioned libei as a promising development. But acknowledging that work is happening doesn't change the fact that these features aren't ready yet, while Wayland is being pushed as the default.

We ain't sticking to X11 because of dwell clickers.