MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Wilsoniumite | 2025-05-24 09:17:58+00:00
Yes and no. People also exhibit these biases, but because degree matters, and because we have no other choice, we still trust them most of the time. That's to say; bias isn't always completely invalidating. I wrote a slightly satirical piece "People are just as bad as my LLMs" here: https://wilsoniumite.com/2025/03/10/people-are-just-as-bad-a...
by _flux | 2025-05-24 09:20:39+00:00
Personally I would enjoy if TLA+ would have types, though, and TLA+ belongs to the land of logic, right? I do not know how it differs from the abstraction logic referred in your writing and your other whitepapers.

What is commonly used is a TypeOK predicate that verifies that your variables have the expected type. This is fine, except your intermediate values can still end up being of mis-intended values, so you won't spot the mistake until you evaluate the TypeOK predicate, and not at all if the checker doesn't visit the right corners of the state space. At least TypeOK can be much more expressive than any type system.

There is a new project in the same domain called Quint, it has types.
by constantcrying | 2025-05-24 09:21:17+00:00
There is nothing Steam OS will give you that isn't available right now.

Use any low maintenance Linux distro and install Steam through flatpak and you got the exact experience you want. There is no difference. You are waiting for something which might never come out so that installing might be 10 minutes faster. That is totally absurd.

Steam OS ist not more maintenance than any other low maintenance distro.
by hnlmorg | 2025-05-24 09:21:28+00:00
They have an interest in keeping real humans consuming content because they’re the ones watching the adverts. The creators are just a byproduct of the pipeline.

If YouTube could replace humans with AI, and thus reduce all that annoying overhead that comes with dealing with creators, and do so without reducing the number of ads that are watched, then I bet Google would be ok with it.
by mindcrime | 2025-05-24 09:21:36+00:00
3) go back to school and study something that isn't done entirely on a computer and requires human physical presence (for now). Learning plumbing, electrical wiring, welding, etc. are options. Even if you don't make that your primary path, it never hurts to have a fallback plan JUST IN CASE some of the buzz around AI-fueled job displacement turns out to be valid.

Or, if you believe there may be some merit to "AI is coming for your job" meme, but really don't want to do blue collar / skilled trades work, at least go in with the mindset of "the people who build, operate, and maintain the AI systems will probably stay employed at least a little bit longer than the people don't". And then figure out how to apply that to deciding between one or both of your (1) and (2) options. There may also be some white collar jobs that will be safe longer due to regulatory reasons or whatever. Maybe get your physician's assistant license or something?

And yes, I'm maybe playing "Devil's Advocate" here a little bit. But I will say that I don't consider the idea of a future where AI has meaningful impact on employment for tech professionals to be entirely out of the question, especially as we extend the timeline. Whatever you think of today's AI, consider that it's as bad right now as it will ever be. And ask what it will be like in 1 year. Or 3 years. Or 7 years. Or 10 years. And then try to work out what position you want to be in at those points in the timeline.
by jll29 | 2025-05-24 09:21:43+00:00
LLMs are part of soft-computing, i.e. contrary to traditional (algortihm-based) computing sometimes things won't get the right result (or, just as bad, the right result in the wrong format). Engineering solutions with LLM is a lot of fiddling, which is experimental rather than analytical/logical.

It is worth getting use to that mind-set, and then use LLMs as a tool (they are likely here to stay, because big tech have started to integrate features based on them everywhere, for better or worse). So this is your option (2.). Personally, I prefer software I use NOT to be smart, but to be 100% deterministic.

But already my favorite LaTeX authoring environment (Overleaf) has a button pop up called "fix this" that auto-resolves syntax errors, many of which overwhelm my doctoral students that no longer read books end-to-end (here, to learn LaTeX).

Gradually, you may dive deeper into the "how", driven by either need or curiosity, so eventually you will probably have done both (2.) and (1.). - in the same way that you will have first learned SQL before learning how replication, transactions, data buffers and caches, or query optimizers are implemented.
by xg15 | 2025-05-24 09:22:53+00:00
Kinda surprised of that, actually. Sure, I get that research interest in any if the "traditional" ML methods (SVMs, markov models, decision trees, that kind of stuff) is probably essentially dead right now, but I had thought interest in neural networks and "understanding" what LLMs do internally to be ballooning.

I could imagine that even those "ancient" techniques might some day make a comeback. They're far inferior to LLMs in terms of expressive power, but they also require literally orders of magnitude less memory and computation power. So when the hype dies down, interest in solutions that don't require millions in hardware cost or making your entire business dependent on what Sam Altman and Donald Trump had for breakfast might have a resurgence. Also, interestingly enough, LLMs could even help in this area: Most of those old techniques require an abundance of labeled training data, which was always hard to achieve in practice. However, LLMs are great at either labeling existing data or generating new synthetic data that those systems could train on.
by keybored | 2025-05-24 09:23:09+00:00
> Childhood mortality is only one factor, and I think at this point we're all aware that the "life expectancy was 40 years" statistic has a huge asterisk next to it.

No, people who say that they “died extremely early relative to modern humans” mean the bunk dying at 40 due to old age myth. Not dying at 65 rather than 80.

Your link seems to show graphs going up but not why.[1] The medical breakthroughs have been, like first of discovering hygiene, vaccines and antibiotics. Which does exactly nothing to debunk what the OP[2] called “appeal to ancestry fallacy”. That we know medicine now (like hygiene, antiobitics) do not discredit claims like, you should eat like a hunter-gatherer or something like that.

[1] This seems typical of “data” outlets.

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44078093
by jillesvangurp | 2025-05-24 09:23:18+00:00
None other than ticking boxes and shutting up the people that keep asking for such things to be produced. Who then invariably don't have the attention span to do anything with the diagram. That's literally the only reason I have for creating them. Otherwise it's a tedious activity that gets in the way of developing, slows me down, and just interrupts my creative process. I usually have better things to do.

And as you might understand from what I just said, I rarely produce any diagrams. I've been active as a developer since before UML got popular and then peaked and then faded into obscurity. I still have a signed (by Martin Fowler) copy of UML distilled on a shelf somewhere gathering dust. First edition and everything. I don't think it's very valuable. Waste paper basically. But contact me if you feel otherwise. It's in pristine condition because I never did much more than thumb though it and shelve it.

25 years ago, any self respecting architect had expensive licenses for things like rational rose or visio. And they'd be fiddling with those tools for hours to produce detailed class and other diagrams. And those diagrams were as useless then as they are now. Epic waste of time. People stopped buying and using those tools. This was once a very big industry that has now imploded to next to nothing. Nobody is buying, very few people waste budget on this crap. It's a niche market with some niche revenue. Tens of millions of developers ignore these tools.

What do plantuml, mermaid, and other OSS diagramming tools have in common? The people that make them don't eat their own dogfood to document how their own software works. You can have some fun looking for diagrams in OSS projects. With few exceptions, this is not a thing (devops people seem to have a weird obsession with diagramming. And overengineering). I'm not aware of many serious OSS project where developers have bothered to document even a tiny fraction of their software with diagrams. Including all the major OSS UML diagramming tools.

The documentation for these contains plenty of examples of course (typically very simplistic). Just not any that document how the tool is designed or works. I'm not judging. I wouldn't bother either for reasons that I articulated above. But I find it ironic that even diagram tool developers don't seem to feel an urge to use diagrams for their own stuff. Makes you wonder why they bother creating the tool? You'd have to be passionate about diagramming tools but not so that you'd want to use them for your own software.
by seanhunter | 2025-05-24 09:24:47+00:00
Good questions. How I knew I was doing it right is the same as for the rest of my practice, which is I would often record myself and listen back. It’s pretty cringe inducing but you’ve got to do it if you want to get good and better to listen to yourself sounding bad on your practice recording than to hear yourself sounding bad on playback in a studio when there are a lot of other folks there and time is money. A lot of people who are serious also video themselves practicing tyo fix bad habits although I never really did that.

And then yes I was ok when I started to really focus on reading but I was very serious about getting good in general so was practicing a bunch of scales, arpeggios, learning other people’s lines, etc. on bass (and guitar) when you play a lot of scales you develop a lot of mechanical memory so you have like a plan in your mind of the entire fingerboard and you can decide where best to shift position etc. I used to come up with studies for myself to practice what to do if I wss in an awkward spot (eq starting low with the tonic on my little finger etc). That stuff ends up helping your reading a lot because you can get yourself our of any kind of jam generally.
by godelski | 2025-05-24 09:25:11+00:00
> We do not mean that as hyperbole. We are not exaggerating for effect. We think that is the most direct extrapolation from the knowledge, evidence, and institutional conduct around artificial intelligence today. In this book, we lay out our case.

Take us seriously, buy our book!

We're real researchers, so we make our definitely scientific case available to anyone who will give us $15-$30! It's the most important book ever, says some actor. Read it, so we all don't die!

For Christ's sake, how does anyone take this Harry Potter fanfiction writer serially?
by npoc | 2025-05-24 09:26:08+00:00
> This is irrelevant to the conversation — even "lost" bitcoin are still included in the marketcap calculation of an asset.

If assets are destroyed or forever lost, they essentially no longer exist and so have no effect on the market cap.

If all but 1 bitcoin were lost, the total supply would then be 1 bitcoin. From then on, the 21M figure would just be an arbitrary number with no relevance to real world supply and demand. The world would be fighting over 100M sats.

> I accept your premise, but IMHO bitcoin is still just getting started.

Agree completely. It's clear from this website alone (filled with people of above-average technical knowledge and intelligence) that most of the world has no idea what it really is yet (they think they know). People who understand both the inherent flaws of Keynesian economics and the technological aspects of bitcoin are few and far between. But both are becoming increasingly obvious as each year passes, along with bitcoin's robustness for which time is only true test.
by danso | 2025-05-24 09:26:14+00:00
fwiw YouTube has an experimental “Ask about this video” button. This is the verbatim output:

Here's a summary:

• The charger was donated by a viewer and stopped working despite seemingly good construction. 0:02

• It has two USB-C ports (100W each) and one USB-A port (12V, 22.5W). 0:25

• When plugged in, none of the ports output voltage. 1:00

• The outer box is filled with resin, making it difficult to open. 1:10

• Open, the charger reveals several circuit boards in a sandwich-like design. 2:57

• A shorted rectifier bridge (3:49) and a shorted capacitor on the USB-C output control circuitry (7:20) were initially suspected. 3:49, 7:20

• Further investigation with a thermal camera pinpointed a specific communication/voltage conversion chip as the source of the short. 13:11

• This chip controls the gate of the MOSFETs used in the synchronous rectifiers and DC-DC converters. 14:00

• The main transformer is a hybrid flyback design with a unique AC input and half-bridge rectifier. 17:15

• The short was traced to the capacitor's pins on the same side of the board, suggesting a potential multi-layer board issue. 12:19, 12:41

• The video ends with a cross-section view of the transformer and measurements of some donated 18650 battery cells. 18:46, 20:35

Essentially, the video demonstrates a complex charging circuit and troubleshooting process, highlighting the potential for multiple failure points in high-power chargers.
by manmal | 2025-05-24 09:29:17+00:00
My problem with 5. is that there are many unknowns, especially when it comes to agents. They have wildly different system prompts that are optimized on a daily basis. I’ve noticed that Gemini 2.5 Pro seems way dumber when used in the Copilot agent, vs me just running all the required context through OpenRouter in Continue.dev. The former doesn’t produce usable iOS tests, while the latter was almost perfect. On the surface, it looks like those should be doing the same thing; but internally, it seems that they are not. And I guess that means I should just use Continue, but they broke something and my workflow doesn’t work anymore.

And people keep saying you need to make a plan first, and then let the agent implement it. Well I did, and had a few markdown files that described the task well. But Copilot‘s Agent didn’t manage to write this Swift code in a way that actually works - everything was subtly off and wrong, and untangling would have taken longer than rewriting it.

Is Copilot just bad, and I need to use Claude Code and/or Cursor?
by tmsh | 2025-05-24 09:29:24+00:00
Hot take: based on how fast models are accelerating and replacing large parts of the development process (my two cents in https://x.com/TomHarada1/status/1926193211678023953), I think more and more you want to work backwards from a world where AI does 90% of things. Script kiddies : prompt engineering :: current engineering :: future of engineering. Either path makes sense - going deep in research or development. One is a kernel and one is the rest of the egg.
by practal | 2025-05-24 09:30:59+00:00
Practically, in abstraction logic (AL) I would solve that (AL is not a practical thing yet, unlike TLA+, I need libraries and tools for it) by having an error value ⊥, and making sure that abstractions return ⊥ whenever ⊥ is an argument of the abstraction, or when the return value is otherwise not well-defined [1]. For example,

div 7 0 = ⊥,

and

plus 3 ⊥ = ⊥,

so

plus 3 (div 7 0) = ⊥.

In principle, that could be done in TLA+ as well, I would guess. So you would have to prove a predicate Defined, where Defined x just means x ≠ ⊥.

[1] Actually, it is probably rather the other way around: Make sure that if your expression e is well-defined under certain preconditions, that you can then prove e ≠ ⊥ under the same preconditions.
by comrade1234 | 2025-05-24 09:32:34+00:00
> Idiocracy was released as scheduled but only in seven cities (Los Angeles, Atlanta, Toronto, Chicago, Dallas, Houston, and Mike Judge's hometown, Austin, Texas),

When they say “Los Angeles” I think they mean some random theater in the middle of nowhere north of the Los grapevine canyon.

I lived in Ventura when idiocracy came out and a friend happened to be driving San francisco to San Diego that weekend so we met and saw the movie in that theater. There were only a couple of other people there - but it was a mid-afternoon showing.

It really felt isolated. Maybe on the edge of Santa Clarita.
by roryirvine | 2025-05-24 09:34:30+00:00
On top of that, BSD had a standalone 'dired' in the late 80s and Linux moreutils (not quite a standard, but certainly widespread) contains 'vidir' - which, despite the slightly misleading name, allows you to visually edit a directory with whatever your EDITOR env var points to.

As you say, none of them do anything that can't be done with find and xargs (and perhaps a little awk and sed), but they're occasionally handy for one-off operations.
by weird_trousers | 2025-05-24 09:36:41+00:00
Reducing costs in Xbox and development partners, the state of the Xbox games submission (and the SDK... as a game engine developer it is the worst and the buggiest of all three major consoles), and finally all the communication and the investment in (crappy) AI from Microsoft and the large reduction of investment in gaming from them.

I know this comes from the Microsoft management side, and not from the devs.
by diggan | 2025-05-24 09:37:14+00:00
Noticed that all the boids lifetime seems to be the same, so you go from "a flock" to "nothing" very quickly if the lifetime been hit. What I've done before with "crowd simulations" like these, is add another params, something like "random lifetime interval" where if set to say 100, it'll set the actual lifetime to be randomly chosen between $LIFETIME - 100 and $LIFETIME + 100, so things die a bit less predictable. Helps stabilize the simulations too when you're doing reproduction too.
by exceptione | 2025-05-24 09:38:54+00:00
> But in a logic,

I am not sure if I misunderstand you. Types are for domain, real world semantics, they help to disambiguate human language, they make context explicit which humans just assume when they talk about their domain.

Logic is abstract. If you implied people should be able to express a type system in their host language, that would be interesting. I can see something like Prolog as type annotations, embedded in any programming language, it would give tons of flexibility, but then you shift quite some burden onto the programmer.

Has this idea been tried?
by tauoverpi | 2025-05-24 09:40:38+00:00
I'm sorry if I seem completely out of the loop as I haven't used windows at all for at least a decade at this point.

> This is a case of whether the device should be secure by default or if the user should have to opt in to security. Microsoft has chosen the position that account security should be there by default which is why it's not opt in for using an Microsoft account. I think this is a reasonable design decision to make.

Opt-out security is the better model to have but I don't see how security features require a microsoft account to function. This isn't the case on any other operating system as security is not bound to having an account for some external service. Rather this seems like an artificial limitation that microsoft has created to push other microsoft services on the user as someone that only uses windows to play steam games that don't use a microsoft account have no use for one regardless if they use windows or not.

Can you point to a particualr security feature that would stop functioning and that needs to have an account and that couldn't use a hardware security key for 2FA (if 2FA is a requirement)?

> But there are plenty of people who do have a Netflix account and Netflix showing up there is helping them accomplish something they want to do with their new computer. You have to understand that most people are not that good with computers and surfacing these things in more places can legitimately help them out.

Helping users use the app store which the majority are capable of should be sufficient unless the app store is so complex that it's practically unusable for the majority. The majority are also capable of using phones to install games, netflix, and other applications without having to be tech savy to do so.

Those users which aren't capable of operating the app store (usually the elderly) either have family that help them set things up or simply aren't your customers as they don't own computers.
by mckirk | 2025-05-24 09:43:52+00:00
My favorite piece of Idiocracy trivia:

When the costume designer was thinking about the kinds of shoes the people in this 'idiotic' future would be wearing, she found a small startup that made some pretty ridiculously looking and cheap shoes that she was sure were safe to use for the movie because they were definitely not going to catch on.

Those shoes were Crocs.
by Disposal8433 | 2025-05-24 09:45:04+00:00
There was a short time around Windows 95 when people like Bill Gates were seen as nerdy gods. Steve Jobs was the last one I guess. But I've seen a disturbing trend amongst some users of LLMs, a disdain for programmers as if we were gatekeeping programming languages by making them too difficult on purpose. Now everyone wants to code without learning anything. It would be pathetic if it were not for the whole push by Microsoft and others to the CEOs of every company in the world. This lack of respect will still be there but the LLMs will stay and that's worrying.
by practal | 2025-05-24 09:45:14+00:00
I think I have a reference to Curry in my summary link. Anyways, curry-howard is a nice correspondence, about as important to AL as the correspondence between the groups (ℝ, 0, +) and (ℝ \ 0, 1, *); by which I mean, not at all. But type people like bringing it up even when it is not relevant at all.

No, sorry, I really don't have types. Maybe trying to reduce all approaches to logic to curry-howard is the very reductive view here.
by AStonesThrow | 2025-05-24 09:46:27+00:00
Certainly!

I shall describe the UI in English: good luck

First, tap on the dooblydoo to expand it.

Find the powder blue/violet, four-pointed star that represents Google Gemini.

Tap the down-chevron to expand summary.

Also take note of various “explain” lozenges outlined in multicolor. These are quick-action queries for Gemini.

Have fun!

[The production style exactly reminds me of predecessor “Play With Junk” who undertakes massive teardowns of spectacular enterprise-class Unix machines. https://youtube.com/@playwithjunk?si=4-hu0iIA7bGovnGe]
by folli | 2025-05-24 09:51:54+00:00
I think the examples should make it more clear. Thanks to the high resolution of the data, you can see subtle changes in the slope (aka relief aka microtopography) that could hint to underlying remains of human settlements (usually some suspicious geometric patterns that you would not expect in a natural terrain).

See also here for an in-depth discussion on the potential use of such data: https://www.mdpi.com/2072-4292/15/6/1569

How do you suggest to change the description to make it less confusing?
by AStonesThrow | 2025-05-24 09:53:41+00:00
> Social thing assumes expenses. Hobbies assume expenses.

Entertainment is a line item in the budget: Library + Fishing = “Free”

Libraries can be amazingly social, for eggheads. Lots of groups and events meet there in my town. It’s a full-fledged Third Space.

[Neither the library access nor fishing gear is without cost, but at least they already account for taxes.]

By the way, anyone who benefits from free stuff, for example installing ad blockers, and earns $17/hr, should seriously consider tithing 5–10% to tax-deductible donations. It’s a matter of economic justice.