MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by practal | 2025-05-24 08:49:31+00:00
I've summarized my opinion on this here: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.15118670

In normal programming languages, I see static type systems as a necessary evil: TypeScript is better than JavaScript, as long as you don't confuse types with terms...

But in a logic, types are superfluous: You already have a notion of truth, and types just overcomplicate things. That doesn't mean that you cannot have mathematical objects x and A → B, such that x ∈ A → B, of course. Here you can indeed use terms instead of types.

So in a logic, I think types represent a form of premature optimisation of the language that invariants are expressed in.
by AStonesThrow | 2025-05-24 08:50:01+00:00
These commenters who say a service “cost” $X or they paid $Y amount: I am concerned for your negotiation skills.

I once incurred a $30,000 hospital bill while putatively uninsured. As soon as I was discharged, I went on alert for a statement. As soon as I obtained the numbers, I began to negotiate.

I contacted my prior insurance carriers. I carefully read the CFPB documents on debt collection and I downloaded their letter templates. I tracked every account and claim and payment and provider in a custom Google Sheet.

I filed for retroactive Medicaid. They determined me eligible and granted retroactive coverage through my month of hospitalization. Medicaid attempted to disavow this.

I produced the documentation sent from the Medicaid office. They gave me the wrong claims office address. I worked with claimants to correct it. The statement still reflected $30,000. I held my ground, and insisted that coverage had been obtained.

Not long after these exchanges, one day, my balance was $0.

They wiped out my entire debt.

They wrote off the whole thing.

I was absolved of responsibility.

Because I played their game and kept my purse-strings closed.

Never believe a creditor’s bill at face value. You should never pay a medical bill on receipt from a provider without checking all portals, all statements, and asking questions. Payment plans often carry no penalty and no interest. If they offer you a 60-month plan, offer them 72 months. Uninsured? Ask for “self-pay plan”. Search their website for Financial Assistance Program forms, fill out the PDF, file it with all the documentation they requested. Get busy on FAPing. Go back to the hospital, find their billing department, and burst into tears once you’re comfy in their office. Turn over bank statements, no matter how wet they got.

Your insurance carrier should always be responsible for receiving every bill, negotiating prices, and estimating how much you ultimately need to pay.

Don’t be a sucker.
by sigmoid10 | 2025-05-24 08:50:16+00:00
You are just rephrasing things without using terms commonly used in research. I used "surprise" because it is a) true (if not complete) and b) easy to understand for people outside of the field. The correct term you are looking for is "arousal" (not necessarily sexual). There is tons of research on the fact that arousal enhances memory formation that would otherwise need many, many repetitions. But it also inhibits memorisation of nearby events. So you either need a very particular emotional state to remember a specific thing or massive repetitions to remember many new things. There's no way to cheat the sample inefficiency of your own brain. And for LLMs we have only figured out the first one, at least without external algorithms.

[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/nrn1052

[2] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26151918/
by gregthelaw | 2025-05-24 08:52:17+00:00
Undo founder here. We've been at this for getting on 20 years now. Originally it cost $295 for a perpetual license. Eventually we understood that the majority of developers (actually employers of developers) will pay $0. But some are happy to pay for tooling, as long as they're confident they'll get a many multiples return-on-investment. Hence our pricing. Happily, enough do that we can run a modest but profitable business (40+ people). Customer churn is practically zero.

Why do people pay for Undo when they can get rr -- which is also really good -- for free? Those whose code or environment is big enough and complex enough that rr doesn't work for them, and they understand how powerful time travel debugging is. If rr works for you, you should use it. This includes most independent developers.

If rr can work for you and you're still not using any kind of time travel debugging, you have effective tied one hand behind your own back! If you're independent (incl student or academic) and rr doesn't work for you, get in touch -- we give free licenses for academic and certain other use cases.

There is a wider thing here about software companies paying for dev tooling. So many companies over the years who made really cool things who couldn't make their business work.
by jillesvangurp | 2025-05-24 08:52:18+00:00
Unsurprising because unlike Linux, almost no games work on steam for mac. There's barely any point in running it on a mac. It's actually a pretty high percentage if you consider that.

My point was that volunteers got quite far getting steam and many games running on macs with decent framerates. The main person driving this recently moved on from working on that. Likewise, Asahi linux is getting quite capable at running steam and lots of games. That too is being driven by a handful of people.

Supporting stuff like that doesn't sound like it should break the bank for Steam. Basically sponsor a few people; maybe hire a few more to support them. It's basically all working at this point, it just needs a bit of love and attention. This wouldn't take years of additional development. And once steam runs properly on macs with thousands of games running smoothly, a lot more people might be using steam on their macs.

Yes, they'd be picking a fight with Apple. But as Epyc (Unreal engine) is showing, those fights can be won if you have deep pockets. And Apple is under a lot of pressure to moderate their anti competitive behavior. Perfect timing for Valve to make some money of all this with a minimum of investment.
by SkiFire13 | 2025-05-24 08:53:47+00:00
> How is this substantively different than using an ApplicativeError or MonadError[0] type class?

If you're limiting yourself to just a single effect there's probably not much difference, however once you have multiple effects at the same time then explicit support for them starts to become nicer than nesting monads (which requires picking an order and sometimes reorder them due to the output of some functions not matching the exact set or order of monads used by the calling function).
by nowittyusername | 2025-05-24 08:54:06+00:00
I've read the paper before I made the statement. And I still made the statement because there are issues with their paper. The first problem is that the way in which anthropic trains their models and the architecture of their models is different from most of the open source models people use. they are still transformer based, but they are not structurally put together the same as most models, so you cant extrapolate their findings on their models to other models. Their training methods also use a lot more regularization of the data trying to weed out targeted biases as much as possible. meaning that the models are trained on more synthetic data which tries to normalize the data as much as possible between languages, tone, etc.. Same goes for their system prompt, their system prompt is treated differently versus open source models which append the system prompt in front of the users query internally. The attention ais applied differently among other things. Second the way that their models "internalize" the world is vastly different then what humans would thing of "building a world model" of reality. Its hard to put it in to words but basically their models do have a underlying representative structure but its not anything that would be of use in the domains humans care about, "true reasoning". Grokking the concept if you will. Honestly I highly suggest folks take a lot of what anthropic studies with a grain of salt. I feel that a lot of information they present is purposely misinterpreted by their teams for media or pr/clout or who knows what reasons. But the biggest reason is the one i stated at the beginning, most models are not of the same ilk as Anthropic models. I would suggest folks focus on reading interpretability research on open source models as those are most likely to be used by corporations for their cheap api costs. And those models have no where near the care and sophistication put in to them as anthropic models.
by johnnyanmac | 2025-05-24 08:54:06+00:00
>Parents telling kids in this world to "go work 24/7 on the treadmill without being able to save" should wonder if having kids wasn't something selfish they did like having a pet.

Like I said, it's cultural. Some parents literally need extra income just to keep the roof over their heads, and having an adult dependent at home is still an expense. . Some parents simply don't want to facilitate a full on NEET lifestyle and want to encourage a proper work ethic.

I agree that a kid won't just figure everything out the moment they turn 18, but I can empathize with a child also needed to leave their nest one day. Uniersity was the perfect environment for that transition, but we decided to cut funding for decades and move the costs to the 18YO's with no financial sense. A "party school" just doesn't make sense anymmore so if we don't treat it as a vocational school, you may as well have saved money and let them be a NEET for 4 years.
by oliwarner | 2025-05-24 08:54:30+00:00
Acetylcysteine isn't magic though.

It needs to be administered within 12h and 5% will have a severe anaphylactic-type reaction with risk of respiratory arrest. And the liver can still have been irreparably damaged due to other factors.

In the context of this being a miserable way to kill yourself, it's absolutely awful because there is very much a cut off point where you will still be suffering immeasurable pain and no amount of NAC will save you.
by nosianu | 2025-05-24 08:55:54+00:00
The mental human model that people are only what they consciously think about themselves is just wrong. Of course prestige matters, even if you were to pass a (functioning) lie detector test where you claim otherwise. You are so much more than your conscious thoughts. Your brain uses all information, and that includes the "meta" you know about things.

And...

> The people I know who went to grad school did it because they enjoyed the academic world.

What does that even mean? Where are your thoughts about the why? Why does their brain tell them those are good jobs? You have not even considered it, that sentence is meaningless in the context of your argument if you leave out such important parts. What makes things "attractive", or not, in the first place?
by masklinn | 2025-05-24 08:57:01+00:00
> Here in Sweden, a carton of 10 × 500 mg is the most you can find without a subscription. (Boxes of twice that amount is supposed to exists but I've never seen it)

That ain't much, I don't think I've seen boxes with that little around here. Normal packaging is 30~40, and you can get larger boxes, all without a script.

Are the boxes that small because sweden tends to use an other analgesic as primary culturally e.g. aspirin or ibuprofen and paracetamol is for more exceptional situations?

> Caffeine is supposed to reinforce the effect, but of course I had to avoid that to sleep.

If the goal was pain relief, you can combine ibuprofen and paracetamol. They can be staggered or taken together (in which case there's less duration coverage but some evidence that the combination works better than either separately).
by gregthelaw | 2025-05-24 09:00:35+00:00
Undo co-founder here. rr is indeed awesome. If it works for your use-case, you should use it!

Undo is mostly used by companies whose world is complex enough that rr doesn't work for them, and they understand how powerful time travel debugging is.

There has now been a LOT of engineering invested by a lot of very smart people into Undo, so it does also have a lot of polish and nice features.

But honestly, if rr is working for you, that's great. I'm just glad you're not doing printf debugging the whole time :)
by henrikschroder | 2025-05-24 09:00:40+00:00
The biggest source of communication issues around these unit systems is that in metric, you're supposed to reach for decimals when working with the units, and in imperial, you're supposed to reach for fractions when working with the units.

Which is why the imperial lovers all cry out about their fractions not "working" in metric. Yes, exactly, that is the point. They don't understand that they're reaching for a tool they shouldn't be reaching for, and then they blame the unit system for it.
by Ad3lio36 | 2025-05-24 09:00:57+00:00
On the 21st I bought a 5080 from that seller "Wundshop", today is the 24th and there is still no progress on the status of the package (nor will there be any more progress). I contacted Amazon for them to investigate or do something, but they told me to wait until the 28th (which is the last day they have for me to receive the package).

Don't they supposedly have to have the item in Amazon's warehouse to sell it?
by aaronmdjones | 2025-05-24 09:02:27+00:00
> Okay, so why isn't it done consistently? Some tools report the leading 00 and some don't.

This is probably a bug (where an unsigned integer with its high bit set is not printed with a leading 00) and should be reported.

Note that RSA key moduli generated by OpenSSL will always have the high bit set, and so will always have 00 prepended when you ask it to print them. The same is not necessarily true of other integers.

This is trivial to demonstrate:

$ while true ; do openssl genrsa 1024 2>/dev/null | openssl rsa -text 2>/dev/null | grep -A1 modulus | tail -n1 | egrep -v '^\s*00:[89abcdef]' ; done

> I don't really buy this explanation. It's a very large unsigned number. Everyone knows this.

Everyone knows that an RSA modulus is a very large unsigned number yes. Not everyone knows that every number is unsigned.

> Is there some arbitrary precision library in use that forces large integers to be signed?

OpenSSL's own BN (BigNum) library, which tests if the high bit is set in the input (line 482):

https://github.com/openssl/openssl/blob/a0d1af6574ae6a0e3872...

> Even if it were signed, or had the MSB set, it wouldn't change any of the bits, so the key would still be the same. So why would we care about the sign?

Because the encoding doesn't care about the context. RFC 3279 specifies that the modulus and exponent are encoded as INTEGERs:

https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc3279#section-2.3.1

... and INTEGERs are signed (which means OpenSSL has to use signedness == SIGNED):

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/seccertenrol...

Integer values are encoded into a TLV triplet that begins with a Tag value of 0x02. The Value field of the TLV triplet contains the encoded integer if it is positive, or its two's complement if it is negative. If the integer is positive but the high order bit is set to 1, a leading 0x00 is added to the content to indicate that the number is not negative.

See also the canonical specification (page 15, section 8.3): https://www.itu.int/ITU-T/studygroups/com17/languages/X.690-...

This is exactly the same way that signed integers are represented in e.g. x86 (minus the leading tag and length fields) -- if the leading bit is set, the number is negative.

You're right that it wouldn't change any of the key's bits, but it would change the math performed on them, in a manner that would break it.
by gpderetta | 2025-05-24 09:02:38+00:00
The OS and software support just wasn't there.

Steam OS is much more refined now and with proton there is significantly better compatibility.

I would be definitely interested on a Steam Deck consolle-like appliance.

Of course you can just connect the steam deck to the TV, but it seems wasteful, you could have a better CPU/GPU while not need battery and screen. Also we need a new version of the steam controller!

Maybe one day.
by reify | 2025-05-24 09:04:55+00:00
Hate is a strong word.

Using the word hate is falling into the trap that AI has feelings like humans.

AI is not human and does not have any human; personality, empathy, emotions, behaviours, thoughts, ideas, or creativity.

I do not like the manipulative hype around AI, AI is simply code and that is all.

Engineers who take the output of AI as truth need to seriously ask themselves some deep ethical and existential questions when they promote coded output as actually human-like thinking, and ascribe feelings and intentions to a computer program.

AI does not think, it does not feel, in fact it does not know sweet FA, it only responds to the code that has been fed into it!

I am a retired psychotherapist and it is laughable that people think AI can be a therapist.
by lazide | 2025-05-24 09:05:22+00:00
The issue here is that as an individual, you’re not actually going to decide fundamental policy matters.

At a certain scale, regardless of what you personally choose (unless most others in the country do exactly the same thing you do), the country is going to either ‘fall apart’ or not regardless. Think of it from an election perspective - no matter how hard you voted for anyone but Trump last election in the US, Trump still got elected.

But, you can choose if you’ll have more money or not at the end, depending on which company you choose to invest in. So for instance, regardless of how you voted, practically, it would have still been a good idea to invest in some of the companies which benefit from Trump being in office, eh?

Yes, this does lead to larger scale problems when everyone does the same math. But at the same time, the actual math is the same for everyone, eh?

Money may be the root of all evil, but how much you have also decides if you’re going to be eating cat food in retirement, or have gourmet home cooked meals eh?

Monks may sleep better at night, but that is a trade off few others are able to make.
by karafso | 2025-05-24 09:06:14+00:00
https://ourworldindata.org/its-not-just-about-child-mortalit...

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. But yes, our ancestors really did die much, much younger than us.
by SrslyJosh | 2025-05-24 09:06:45+00:00
> Positional preferences, order effects, prompt sensitivity undermine AI judgments

If you can read between the lines, that says that there's no actual "judgement" going on. If there was a strong logical underpinning to the output, minor differences in input like the phrasing (but not factual content) of a prompt wouldn't make the quality of the output unpredictable.
by gregthelaw | 2025-05-24 09:06:49+00:00
Undo founder here. I just got a slack from one of our marketing team who is thrilled you appreciate their work. :-)

Our customers are top tier tech companies and our users are among the smartest engineers on the planet. I'm proud of our marketing, but no-one is going to spend a bunch of money with us just because of that.

So there must be something else in it I guess ;-)
by mulmen | 2025-05-24 09:10:19+00:00
I think this is the right idea but I also think measuring the harm is a really hard problem. Polluters should pay for cleanup. But how much does that cost really? How do we decide? Sure we can put smart people on the problem but what solution will they choose? I don’t mean this dismissively. It’s one of the biggest questions of our time. This is what we need to solve.
by schobi | 2025-05-24 09:12:32+00:00
Thanks for sharing!

The description confused me, as it describes the use of a real Lidar measurements to detect "change" in the terrain. But certainly, it can't be a temporal change before and after... to detect medieval settings in the data. Is the area still changing differentlybetween scans over multi year's? I don't think so.

I think this is visualization code highlighting natural VS. human train structures, at known locations of old settlements? Showing different approaches on how to visualize the man-made heights in the terrain.

But still, I'm lost how this could help finding new ones..
by antirez | 2025-05-24 09:13:03+00:00
I agree that instrumenting the model is useful in many contexts, but I don't believe it is something so unique to value Cursor such valuation, or all the attention RAG, memory, MCP get. If people say LLMs are going to be commodities (we will see) imagine the layer about RAG, tool usage, memory...

The progresses we are seeing in agents are 99% due to new LLMs being semantically more powerful.
by keiferski | 2025-05-24 09:13:55+00:00
1. We are decades away from an AI being able to livestream convincingly, cheaply enough for the average person to use it.

2. At that point, identity systems will prevent an AI from just copying another creator’s content and passing it off as their own. YouTube, Facebook etc. have an interest in keeping real humans on their platforms and not just bots.
by AStonesThrow | 2025-05-24 09:14:35+00:00
Not to detract from this lovely semi-private endeavor, but if you find yourself on the left coast instead, why not treat your family to a whistle stop at the San Diego MRM in historic Balboa Park?

https://www.sdmrm.org/yourvisit

While you’re there, you will also need to hop on the Miniature [but human-scale] Railroad that adjoins the San Diego Zoo! Cock-a-doodle-doo! https://zoo.sandiegozoo.org/activities/miniature-train

Bonus siding: roll north on Park Blvd a few miles, and get on board with Frank the Train Man, aka JA Cooley! https://www.jacooleymuseum.com/

My own grandpa was a pipe-fitter on the freight lines. He was the sole/chief machinist in his basement workshop where I vroomed around on a Big Wheel. He built for me an HO-scale figure 8 track with a locomotive that featured a functional smokestack.
by ahartmetz | 2025-05-24 09:14:37+00:00
If eight years is recent enough, Microsoft moved its German office to Munich and got the city of Munich to shut down its Linux migration in return. Not exactly dishonest, but a power move to destroy the competition that I happen to be rooting for.

Personal experience is irrelevant if the facts are not in doubt. One of these is that Microsoft was a pretty bad actor when nobody reigned them in, and I was around at the time.
by borski | 2025-05-24 09:15:27+00:00
Yes. I, too, learned this the painful way. I had many friends, or so I thought. Then I got cut out of a volleyball friend group because I was too “intense” (aka talked about things that weren’t the weather) for them. Okay. That hurt a lot.

Lots of thinking later, and I can now tell the difference between acquaintances and friends. There’s a simple test: acquaintances will be there when you want them to; friends will be there when you don’t want them to, but need them to anyway. An acquaintance would never do that.
by frumplestlatz | 2025-05-24 09:15:29+00:00
This is a very reductive definition of types, if not a facile category error entirely (see: curry-howard), and what you call "premature optimization" -- if we're discussing type systems -- is really "a best effort at formalizations within which we can do useful work".

AL doesn’t make types obsolete -- it just relocates the same constraints into another formalism. You still have types, you’re just not calling them that.
by foldr | 2025-05-24 09:17:52+00:00
It’s O(n log n). If the strings contain the same letters then you end up fully sorting both lists, and there’s no magical way of doing that in O(n) time with a general purpose sorting algorithm.

The article is just saying that the best case performance improves because you don’t have to fully sort both lists in the case where the two words are not anagrams.

There are other cases where laziness works its magic in relation to sorting, though. For example, “sort the list and then take the first element” is (with a suitable implementation of ‘sort’) an O(n) implementation of “find min/max element of list” in Haskell.