MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by gus_massa | 2025-05-22 14:10:41+00:00
Everybody think that the properties of a proton and an antiproton are equal. As far as we know, that is true, but it's better to confirm that experimentally, and we need more precision to detect subtle differences. Two more decimals places would be nice.

There are a few properties of other particles with like 8 decimal places calculated theoretically and measured experimentally, and they are useful to validate the current standard model.

Actually, we expect some very very tiny asymmetry between matter and antimatter, but no one has measured that. I'm not sure how it would be visible in antiprotons. Perhaps a very tiny difference in the magnetic moment. Perhaps in the 17th digit that we will never measure. [1]

In any case it's interesting to confirm that our current models are correct or not.

[1] I'm not an expert in this area, but IIRC the problem is something like there is a little chance that the antiproton emits a photon that creates a electron and a positron, then it use the week force to transform into a muon that use the weak force to transform into a tauon that use the weak force to transform into an electron that colides with the original positron that was not doing nothing interesting meanwhile. Nobody is sure if all this transformations introduces a complex phase (a complex number of modulo 1) that cause a difference when you start with a antiproton instead of a proton. So, if there is a difference, it's probably something weird with a lot of intermediate virtual particles that cause a tiny difference in the 17th digit, or perhaps in the 1326th digit.
by karmakaze | 2025-05-22 14:11:10+00:00
The context is AI in education. It argues that AI in education is a gimmick and true learning requires time, care, and the presence of humans who are willing to do difficult work together.

I don't dispute what learning requires, but I also don't exclude AI in that picture. What we have is almost a 'Young Lady's Primer' from "The Diamond Age". All we have to do is ask the right questions. If anything education should be teaching how to use the new tools well.

Funny how it also refutes that AI use is inevitable. The only debate I've heard is when not if.
by runjake | 2025-05-22 14:11:16+00:00
The vast majority of people aren’t very skilled in using LLMs, an emerging and rapidly evolving technology.

This does not make AI a gimmick.

Meanwhile, many of us use it on a daily basis and have a long list of ways it’s revolutionized our work and productivity and even lives. Excuse me while I eye roll at yet another article.
by JohnFen | 2025-05-22 14:11:46+00:00
> I'm not a fan of the idea that someone else around me brings a device that is perpetually "fully aware of a user’s surroundings and life" around me and then now my privacy is gone

This is my primary concern about these things. I'd be very likely to avoid being around people that I know are using something like this to the greatest degree I can.
by jmull | 2025-05-22 14:12:16+00:00
This is a fantastic approach.

BTW, it looks like the js engine is "QuickJS" [0]. (I'm not familiar with it myself.)

I like it because sqlite by itself lacks a host language. (e.g., Oracle's plsql, Postgreses pgplsql, Sqlserver's t-sql, etc). That is: code that runs on compute that is local to your storage.

That's a nice flexible design -- you can choose whatever language you want. But quite typically you have to bring one, and there are various complications to that.

It's quite powerful, BTW, to have the app-level code that acts on the app data live with the data. You can present cohesive app-level abstraction to the client (some examples people will hopefully recognize: applyResetCode(theCode) or authenticateSessionToken(), or whatever), which can be refined/changed without affecting clients. (Of course you still have to full power and flexibility of SQL and relational data for the parts of your app that need it.)

[0] https://bellard.org/quickjs/
by vel0city | 2025-05-22 14:12:24+00:00
> I am not

Its a direct quote from an earlier comment you made. I can scroll up a few lines and see it my dude. What's the opening sentence of the second paragraph of this comment?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44055994

> Best I can do is point back to the pharmaceutical example. I really don't care about the street dealer, they aren't what's being discussed.

That's the thing though, there's probably packages installed on your Linux machine right now that are far closer to the guy handing out pills at a concert than highly regulated drug manufacturers with third-party auditors reviewing their ingredients in the pharmaceutical example. You're acting like that stuff just doesn't exist, burying your head in the sand to the problem and assuming people are actually reviewing things. They're often not.

> Linux: Trust us, here, figure it out yourself

Yeah, figure it out yourself. But don't worry, there's lots of other people looking at it for me. Except for all those times there aren't. Once again, you're assuming people are actually looking at these things without verifying it.
by withinboredom | 2025-05-22 14:12:46+00:00
This is pretty easy to refute:

> If your program runs in O(n) time, it cannot use more than O(n) memory (upper bound on memory usage.[sic]

This is clearly refuted by all software running today. Programs (especially games) clearly use more memory than there are instructions in the program.

> If your program uses O(n) memory, it must run at least in O(n) time (lower bound on time).

Memory bombs use an incredible amount of memory and do it incredibly quickly.
by ty6853 | 2025-05-22 14:13:05+00:00
I did a lot of driving forklifts, construction, moving, factory work, etc when junior in the job market after graduating near the top of my class with strong internship experience from a top 10 engineering college.

Adjusting expectations is important. If you start with the expectation that all you will have is a pot to piss in then it is all up from there.

Things may never look up, but when they do, I've found a lot of employers admire people who were willing to wipe old peoples' asses when the economy is bad rather than wale about the circumstances.
by NicoBeere | 2025-05-22 14:14:36+00:00
Hey, thanks so much for your great feedback! At the moment, it's unfortunately not possible to import existing manuals, but it’s a fantastic idea and already on our to-do list as an important future feature. In the current version, we haven't focused on it yet, mainly because it's quite a complex task. Since a clean and polished design is really important to us, we need high-performance functionality to analyze existing manuals and convert them into our style. But it’s definitely a feature we're excited about and plan to integrate soon!
by CompeyDev | 2025-05-22 14:14:41+00:00
Luau is gradually typed, so as long as you type it strictly (which is a little bit more than just defining the method with colon-notation, but there has been interest in making it simpler), it will catch this.

Unless you're using metatables, this would just be manually defining `self` with a type containing the fields you want it to represent.

For example:

```luau local Module = {} export type Module = { field: string }

function Module.Something(self: Module) print(self.field) end

return Module ```

EDIT: oops, new to this site; expected codeblocks to be a thing :p
Show HN: 8-Bit Spelling Game I Built for My Daughter Using Claude AI
by program247365 | 2025-05-22 14:14:45+00:00
I had a lot of fun with this one. She's used it several times, and I watch, to see what subtle bugs or ux issues there may be.

And when she gets on the bus I fix them quickly before work.

It's been a fun game to create where it gives here immediate feedback and she's willing to study more.

Her test is this Friday. fingers crossed that it helped her!
by dmlorenzetti | 2025-05-22 14:14:57+00:00
I don't know anything about literature.

You know what you like -- which is enough, especially if you are reading for pleasure.

In my experience, discussing a work, or reading about its context or meaning, often deepens my enjoyment of it. So maybe one "trick" is to engage with others. But at some point you can't go throwing your precious spare time into something that doesn't fundamentally engage you.

I no longer let it bother me if I don't "get" something that many others enjoy. Conversely, I have a number of favorite books (and movies and music) that I rarely recommend to others, because I've learned that few people share my personal response to them.
by vaxman | 2025-05-22 14:14:57+00:00
errbody from that era hates Ada --it was an edict that died once the promises of OOP began to be realized.

"dead things should stay dead" - Pet Cemetery, Steven King

If you want to have some fun from 1979, I highly recommend FORTH. It's really good and would have taken over the universe (lowercase u) had K&R C not dropped as part of the slow motion train wreck known as Unix (not to be confused with Linux). https://hackaday.io/project/170826/logs?sort=oldest
by andrewfromx | 2025-05-22 14:15:12+00:00
you know the story of callerID from the 1990s? The whole idea that it was a person's right to see WHO was calling them was deemed crazy. Before this it was consider your right to call people anonymously. Now when we see "Unknown Caller" no one answers. In 2030 this little orb will be so standard if someone wants their privacy back it will be seen the same way. They are the ones wanting to call someone anonymously.
by michaelmrose | 2025-05-22 14:15:15+00:00
>Most obvious example is Firefox. The Debian Project allows Firefox to update outside the packaging system, automatically, at the whim of Firefox.

It seems likely that you personally chose to install a flatpak or tar.gz version probably because you are running an older no longer supported version of Debian.

>These days, the only way to avoid that (crashes) is...

Running older unsupported versions with known never to be fixed security holes isn't good advice nor is ripping out the plumbing. Its almost never a great idea to start ripping out the floorboards to get at the pipes.

Pipewire seems pretty stable and if you really desire something more minimal it's better to start with something minimal than stripping something down.

Void is nice on this front for instance.
by RicDan | 2025-05-22 14:15:17+00:00
Can sort of confirm that. Wiped out is maybe the wrong word - they are more heavily being off-shored right now. Whilst there is some very obvious evaluations going on of replacing juniors with <insert your favourite llm>, it's quite obviously not there yet but management level interest is off the charts.

We are trying to motion against it as much as we can internally... by arguing that we can use <insert your favourite llm> as a good coaching/mentoring support for juniors to promote them quicker. But yea... We don't like where this is going, and right now it appears that not much can be done by how much money is being poured into this current LLM-based-delusion.

Edit: speaking specifically about SWE-Jr. jobs
by -__---____-ZXyw | 2025-05-22 14:15:37+00:00
Surely the people who speak of "linux on the desktop" (not me, for the record) are at least in some small sense alluding to being able to have some of the freedoms historically associated with Linux, originating in the GNU movement and all that? The right to study, share, etc.

What I mean is that I would have picked Android as quite a good example of how the technicality of running the Linux kernel under the hood means very little in terms of users being empowered, or anything of the sort.
by Nevermark | 2025-05-22 14:15:44+00:00
It is lumped in, probably because most people who do get great sleep routinely sleep 7-9 hours.

I don’t think making an issue of that helps either.

In fact, if your approach works, and people with problems achieve great sleep, it will be interesting to see if shorter time sleepers are able to revert to longer times naturally, or shorter times. Some frustrated short sleepers may achieve the bliss of a longer night’s sleep. Some longer sleepers may naturally wake rested earlier!

You could frame that as the jury is out on that one. Not that aiming for enough time is wrong. But that sleep assist may alter the simple recommended time approach.

And your hopes are to benefit everyone, including those who for practical reasons can’t allocate the recommended time, with the time deficit being less of a problem, or in the best case scenario, no longer a problem at all.

I think remaining positive but flexible about current wisdom helps. It is the result of a huge amount of effort and observation - no matter how imperfect the results.

Otherwise you are in danger of both claiming too much, and making claims that really are completely unnecessary.

It is also a bad look. People are always hearing “everything you have been told is wrong”, without evidence to back that up, only to hear the opposite a month or year later. It gives the impression of clickbait, a scam, or vaporware.

Until there are studies from major sleep research labs demonstrating you really do have a strong impact on sleep times, you are in danger of promising something you can’t deliver.

The simple message of higher quality of sleep for everyone is the only one you need. It is the only thing people want.

Demand for that is insane.

Stay on that simple message.

The story is a new approach, understanding practical work the brain does, creating sleep assist.

Simple gets more attention. Simple is remembered. Don’t publically fight phantoms in your mind, that are not in your customers’ minds.

You already have a good story. A major new angle on the problem.

Sticking with a simple message is especially important before revealing something people cannot yet buy.

And any real impact on hygiene, validated by credible independent studies, would make fantastic follow up post-availability PR.

You might ask yourself, why are you already “selling” something you can’t sell yet? It’s not always wrong to attempt to pre-emptively stoke demand. But your demand is already there and already enormous. It is easy to seriously undermine your reputation if your message gets ahead of reality in any way. Avoid any complication, and avoid frustrating people with unsupportable (today) claims.

You are going to genuinely have 1000 interesting viewpoints on this. Your customers rarely need more than one or zero before you ship.
by _kb | 2025-05-22 14:15:48+00:00
Because it’s not ambiguous.

If I pay for something in Australia and the bill comes to $50 this has meaning within that context.

I receive a bill in Zimbabwe for $50 this also has meaning within that context.

These values are not equivalent.

Ditto if I were to say it’s 30 degrees out. You may interpret that as either a good day for the beach, nice weather for ice skating, or we need to bear north-northeast depending on what context we share.

Language is messy.
by jmmv | 2025-05-22 14:17:09+00:00
I spent years packaging software (mostly Gnome 2.x) for NetBSD. I almost-always tried to upstream the local patches that were needed either for build fixes or improvements (like flexibility to adapt to non-Linux file system hierarchies or using different APIs).

It was exhausting though, and an uphill battle. Most patches were ignored for months or years, with common “is this still necessary?” or “please update the patch; it doesn’t apply anymore” responses. And it was generally a lot of effort. So patches staying in their distros is… “normal”.
by techpineapple | 2025-05-22 14:17:18+00:00
I imagine it might depend on perception. Like smoking has been made more and more illegal over the years, but I think public perception has moved with it - kids today think smoking is much less cool than in the like 70s/80s, something similar may be able to happen with social media.

Marijuana use has increased, because I think there’s been a general push to normalize along with making it legal; people in their gut know it’s not that bad / fun / cool etc. but I think there’s something in the zeitgeist that may help push social media this way. Kids know that they’re being harmed by it and I don’t think it’s cool in the same way.
by kjellsbells | 2025-05-22 14:17:39+00:00
That was true once, but not true now. On-prem Exchange is rapidly being squashed by Microsoft in favor of 365. The direction of travel for the Outlook client is clearly towards web (I note anecdotally that the Mac client, always a poor relation to Windows, is so laughably clunky that the Mac users I know forgo it in favor of the web client.) If the service is in the 365 cloud and the client is a web browser, who needs Windows for this discussion? We might end up in a future of terminals again for the worker bees and 'real' computers only for the people who need Excel and Word and for whom the web versions dont cut it
by RetroTechie | 2025-05-22 14:17:42+00:00
If I read that page correctly, it does this for areas with empty space between them?

Makes sense. Say you have a pattern (surrounded by empty space) that 'flickers': A-B-A-B-A... etc. Then as long as nothing intrudes, nth generation is the same pattern as in n+1000,000th generation. Similar for patterns that do a 3-cycle, 4-cycle etc.

All you'd need is a) a way to detect repeating patterns, and b) do some kind of collision detection between areas/patterns (there's a thing called 'lightspeed' in Life, that helps).
by palmotea | 2025-05-22 14:18:13+00:00
> Adjusting expectations is important. If you start with the expectation that all you will have is a pot to piss in then it is all up from there.

You're just coaching people to be passive in the face of a hostile society, and that's bad, because it lets society off the hook for providing for its citizens.

Also isn't it strange that's mainly expected of the people at the bottom? Maybe the shareholders should start to expect the number won't keep going up to the max?

If it's 2025, and you need to convince yourself that all you may get is "pot to piss in," you should be working to burn it all the fuck down to the ground. After all, isn't it "all up from there"?
by iteria | 2025-05-22 14:18:21+00:00
I graduated into a bad market and I took a shitty job 5 states away with low pay. I was basically a warm body while I waited out the clock on being considered a recent grad. I'm so lucky I had 3 internships so I could fake being an experienced junior and truly start my career.

A lot of my peers were too good for those kinds of jobs and while they started their careers at the same time, they didn't make industry and collect paychecks while they did it, so I think I made the correct choice about how to spend those 18months.
by duxup | 2025-05-22 14:18:44+00:00
This is a good read, admittedly haven't finished it yet. I like reading about the more granular details developers decide on and why.

I will say that I sympathize with the idea that ... I don't like any audio players that I've tried, but in the world of music apps the layout of screens and UI seem almost universal across them and ... I just don't like them / don't "get it".

I feel like I'm boxing with every music app ever...

I appreciate anyone who takes a shot at making something new.
by mindslight | 2025-05-22 14:19:15+00:00
SMH, the mental contortions people will go through to rationalize and whitewash the actions of this administration. You're either honest or you're not. There's no such thing as honest if people just read every third sentence and invent their own meanings for the rest. That's called dishonest.

But even accepting your point for the sake of discussion, he is "honestly" doing what? Begging? How is that a good thing?
by erehweb | 2025-05-22 14:19:42+00:00
There are a number of industries where you may need experience to become more productive than AI, but nobody wants to hire you when AI is more productive in the first couple of years. Is there a good equilibrium for this, or does it end up with each company saying "We won't hire the juniors, just the experienced people" and then finding there aren't enough experienced people around?
by aaronbaugher | 2025-05-22 14:19:44+00:00
At one point I asked Grok, "I've heard that AIs are programmed to please the user, which could lead to prioritizing what the user wants to hear over telling the truth. Are you doing that?" It said it wasn't, and gave examples of where in its answers to me it had given objective answers (as it saw them) and then followed them up with encouragement. Fair enough. So I told it to always prioritize giving me an objective viewpoint, and after that, it started breaking answers up with an "objective facts" section and then an "opinion" sort of section.

But I've noticed recently it's started slipping back into more "That's a great idea" and "You've got this" cheerleading, so I'm going to have to tell it to knock that out again. It will definitely lean into confirmation bias if that's what you're looking for, and you don't explicitly tell it not to worry about how you'll feel about the answer.

I find it useful for bouncing ideas off of, while keeping in mind that I'm really bouncing them off myself and sort of a hive mind made up of what's been said in certain mainstream sectors of the Internet. I'm less creative than average, so I get more ideas that way than I'd get from just journaling, so that's worth something.
by stdbrouw | 2025-05-22 14:19:52+00:00
One way to illustrate some of the weirdness of dB is to look at the documentation of unit libraries, e.g.:

https://pint.readthedocs.io/en/stable/user/log_units.html

https://painterqubits.github.io/Unitful.jl/v0.7/logarithm/
by ancillary | 2025-05-22 14:20:32+00:00
> The truth is: To understand a paper properly, you need to deal with it properly, not just the 5 minutes it takes to skim the first pages and make up your opinion there already. Fifteen pages is short enough, and if you cannot commit to properly review this, for a week or so of dedicated study, just don't review it. We would all be better off for it.

Reviewing dynamics make this hard. There is little to no reward for reviewers, and it is much easier to write a long and bad paper than it is to review it carefully (and LLMs have upset this balance even further). To suggest that every submitted paper should occupy several weeks of expert attention is to fundamentally misunderstand how many crappy papers are getting submitted.
by aredox | 2025-05-22 14:20:35+00:00
>I've found a lot of employers admire people who were willing to wipe old peoples' asses when the economy is bad rather than wale about the circumstances.

That's what they'd say to your face, but statistics show that anything than a spotless carreer means you'll never recover. Once you fall behind your peers, you will never be promoted as much as them nor be paid as much.
by alephnerd | 2025-05-22 14:20:40+00:00
Mix of both.

You can't justify hiring a new grad for $130K when you can hire top tier mid-career talent in Warsaw, Cluj, or Bangalore for $50-80K and average mid-career talent for $20-40k

In fact, companies like Infosys have begun adopting coding copilots en masse to reduce their own new grad hiring by 20%, but increase utilization rates from 70% to 85%. That said, most new grads were not getting substituted by Infosys freshers - they're getting replaced by mid-career H1Bs who were laid off during COVID and returned to the CEE or India

Furthermore, a significant number of mid-career Eastern European and Indian engineers, PMs, and managers returned to the old country during the COVID layoffs due to visa status. A lot of those guys were rehired by their old companies to found GCCs abroad.

Finally, state and federal governments in India, Poland, Romania, Czechia, etc provide tax incentives that reduce hiring costs by an additional $10-20k in aggregate.
by karmakaze | 2025-05-22 14:21:19+00:00
The writing style is antagonistic like a clickbait title. I find it bothersome. I would have much preferred an organized breakdown of all the different ways dB are used and what they mean instead of a random rant. It complains about how unscientific 'the' unit is, knowing that it's not a single unit then adds little to sort it out.