MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by sgarland | 2025-05-22 13:15:01+00:00
> The units are implied by the context.

This is the absurd part. There do exist other ratios that masquerade as units, e.g. specific gravity, and its meaning also changes depending on what you’re using it for - liquids are compared to pure water at 4 C, gases are compared to air at 20 C. As the parent comment points out, you can get used to things with experience. That doesn’t make them any less absurd. Look at Fahrenheit, for example. I’m American, and I still think it’s absurd, but because I’m extremely used to it, it feels natural.
by nyeah | 2025-05-22 13:15:09+00:00
It makes perfect sense that the sliders start at 0dB and go down to -inf. Maybe you don't understand it, but it definitely makes sense. Everyone who uses dB has also tried a % scale with 100% as 0dB, and then later made a conscious choice to figure out how dB work.

Maybe they're all in a conspiracy to make things needlessly complex. But that's not the only possibility.
by davidivadavid | 2025-05-22 13:15:16+00:00
Having tinnitus for a couple decades at this point, I can tell you for a fact "absolute silence" is definitely a very clear memory for me. I would lie in my bed before sleep, and enjoying the experience of complete silence was almost part of my go-to-sleep routine. I'm quite surprised people in this thread seem to assume everyone always has some low-level hiss. I certainly didn't.
by bamboozled | 2025-05-22 13:15:33+00:00
healthcare, education, law, banking, insurance, real estate, X as a Service, marketing, engineering design, sales, trucking

Basically all of things are more profitable because of Chinese inputs though? Remember what happened during Covid when most of the world ran out of PPE except China?

So USA healthcare might be more productive, but it's more productive and therefore more lucrative because of China's productivity boosts.
by v1nc33n7 | 2025-05-22 13:15:42+00:00
If you’ve ever wanted to route all macOS traffic through Tor, this guide walks through a practical method using a lightweight Alpine Linux VM and QEMU. No extra hardware (like a Raspberry Pi) required.

What’s inside: 1. Configuring Tor as a system-wide proxy on 2. Creating a virtual router with QEMU and Alpine Linux. 3. Redirecting DNS and TCP traffic via iptables rules.

The approach avoids relying on macOS’s system proxy settings (which many tools ignore) and instead mimics a physical router to enforce Tor routing. Includes commands for terminal enthusiasts and troubleshooting tips.

Useful for developers, privacy advocates, or anyone experimenting with network anonymity.
by Joker_vD | 2025-05-22 13:17:06+00:00
"I don't know how many of you have ever met Dijkstra, but you probably know that arrogance in computer science is measured in nano-Dijkstras." — Alan Kay

Just a quote from a review of the GREEN proposal:

> They first explain the introduction of new types with "type weight = integer; type length = integer" which "define the new types "weight" and "length" as different types, both distinct from the predefined type "integer" although they have the properties of "integer"." That is a very obscure sentence: if the new types have all the properties of the old type, how can they differ?

Why, in the same way that two equal (sorry, congruent) triangles are still two different triangles. Hopefully this is not a novel concept for someone with background in maths and theoretical physics?

And this attitude of his where you can't quite pinpoint if he honestly couldn't understand something actually quite plain and simple, or just pretended not to and nitpicks, runs through almost all of his writing. The effect is that he either comes off as dim while pretentious, or just as an asshole.

And his remarks vis. statement terminators vs. separators, oh god. First of all, we sort of do have explicit statement initiators: the "function/block body begins here" token plus separators/terminators are exactly this, if you look at them from the right angle. Second, separators are just annoying for mechanistic code changes: if you switch two statements' places, but one of the was the last one in the block, you will need to also shuffle that pesky semicolon; and code generation also harder since you need to explicitly bother to not emit the separator after the last statement. And if Dijkstra has no problem with that, well, most other programmers are not him, and they do have problem with that. Not that he ever had much respect for tastes and opinions that differed from his own.
by smokel | 2025-05-22 13:17:28+00:00
TIOBE is a famous benchmark, but it is also completely useless.

There is a lot of legacy code out there that skews the benchmark, making the index an unreliable indicator of a programming language’s current popularity or the volume of active development in that language.

You'd be hard-pressed to find a job where you can program Fortran or Assembly Language all day. It's a lot easier to find one where you can do Kotlin or Rust.

Kotlin might not be as popular as one would hope, but that is not something you should conclude from the TIOBE Index.
by potato3732842 | 2025-05-22 13:17:38+00:00
I think you've unintentionally created a great example of how and why public discourse and lawmaking are so broken.

You invoke "safety" in the same manner that peddlers of all sorts of evil invoke terrorism or think of the children and then you cap it off with a straw man, as if there's serious money to be made with or without this mundane and niche law or comparable ones.

Bridge height postings more or less stand on their own merit and probably don't need laws to continue to exist. The fact that they are legislated at all is mostly a reflection of the fact that the state was the only entity positioned to deal with such an issue when they first became of enough value to be worth doing basically all the time.
by viraptor | 2025-05-22 13:17:53+00:00
That only works if you're already familiar with the context and system and assume other people are too and don't care about anyone new to that area. (Good luck coming to the audio equipment datasheet with no experience and figuring out what the dB means in each case) "He's 3" works because of the previous question and because everyone had experience of talking about age.

dB for anyone not already knowing the answer is like going to another planet and hearing "he's 3". Of course it's on a logarithmic scale, offset to -5 as starting point, counting the skin shedding events - clear in context and you should've known that.
by twelvechairs | 2025-05-22 13:18:26+00:00
The other side of the authors discussion is the use of 'decibels' to describe 'loudness'. The big difficulty there is that 'loudness' is a sense perception that varies between people and in different contexts. The article touches on this 'weighted to mimic human hearing...' but doesnt mention the systems to do this - DB(A) and others, none of which achieve scientific perfection.

Our senses are all like this - for the same reason we have dozens of systems to describe color. And why perfume and wine makers can never agree descriptions.
by adverbly | 2025-05-22 13:19:02+00:00
I can't tell if you're being sarcastic or not but:

1. It would be easier to use than a pin because it's connected to your hand. You can press it without anyone knowing that you are pressing it. You can presse it with a single hand in a comfortable motion. It doesn't fall around or look weird on your body. It also just be a ring because it only needs to connect over short-range to your phone.

2. Earbuds give you privacy, volume control, good mic quality, better battery life. Also again they are slightly more subtle than a large pin.

3. You don't make these stand alone hardware. You just have them talk to your phone and have it handle networking, camera, compute as needed.

Not at all comparable to humane AI pin...
by diggan | 2025-05-22 13:20:25+00:00
Not really, sometimes it forces me to apply updates on shutdown/restart, even though I don't want to do it. None of the registry hacks seems to be able to disable this behavior. I've heard some people talking about a special distribution/version of Windows where you can disable this, but don't really feel like re-installing the entire OS just so when I boot into/away from Windows I don't get forced to wait for the slow update twice (one now, another in the future when I boot Windows next time).

All because Ableton cannot be bothered to support Linux :/ I understand that though, just sucks...
by -__---____-ZXyw | 2025-05-22 13:20:54+00:00
> Apparently, the goal is to keep the dreams alive without ever actually fulfilling any of them.

A wonderful observation.

Has someone made a stab at describing these new paradigms of advertising and value? I don't think I've seen exactly this stated or named, but there's a lot of writing and thinking out there. If it strikes anyone reading this, links welcome.

Specifically, it seems like advertising may have gone from "the quality of the product doesn't matter", to "the product existing doesn't matter". Quite a big leap.
by JohnFen | 2025-05-22 13:22:36+00:00
I've never used a pseudonym, but I have always done such activities under my business name, same as when they aren't side gigs.

I don't think of this kind of activity "hustling" or "side gigs", honestly. Calling them those things implies that they are less important or subservient to being an employee, and I've found that's a problematic stance.
by jancsika | 2025-05-22 13:23:32+00:00
> The human-perceived loudness level is dB(A) and similar.

But db(A) doesn't really measure that for anything but sounds that could cause hearing damage, or test tones. You've essentially taken a newcomer's problem of underspecification and carried it into the given domain.

I feel like it'd be better to say dB(A) measures flaunkis, which is defined by the human frequency response. Then the newcomer's next question will be something like, "how do I use flaunkis to compute the loudness of a music recording?" And that's the right question to ask, because the answer is: it's complicated. :)
by aredox | 2025-05-22 13:23:45+00:00
If you ask me the result of "2 + 2", I will always give you the same answer. No randomness there.

LLM don't.

And before you try: ChatGPT and others now simply calls plugins on math equations - running code written by humans.

Without those crutches:

https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1joqnp0/top_rea...
by pavankamat24 | 2025-05-22 13:24:33+00:00
In practice, catching code smells early is key to maintainability. Simple refactorings suggested by tools can enhance maintainability and reduce technical debt. For example, automatically extracting duplicate code into a function improves readability and reuse. Automated reviews like Panto’s can pinpoint these issues immediately, so you fix them before they spread.
by klodolph | 2025-05-22 13:24:40+00:00
If you want 0 = no sound, then you can’t use a logarithmic scale. You end up with sound being measured as Pascals in the micro to unit range.

“0 dB SPL” is 20 micro pascals which is roughly the threshold of hearing. A loud rock concert at 120 dB SPL is 20 pascals (no micro). The dB figures are a lot more convenient to work with.

It’s intuitive for 0 to be silent and 100 to be full, but if you work with audio you learn that dB are more convenient. Long-term convenience for experts tends to win out over short-term intuition for non-experts. This is why musicians continue to use sheet music and all of its seemingly ridiculous conventions—and likewise, decibels only seem ridiculous to people who don’t work in audio.

I don’t know what more usable alternative there would be, to decibels.
by Majromax | 2025-05-22 13:24:43+00:00
> Many times it is very difficult to “get into” a new field if you don’t have an author known by the editors.

Although there's plenty of critique to go around about the review system, machine learning here typically uses double-blind peer review for the major conferences. That blinding is often imperfect (e.g. if a paper very obviously uses a dataset or cluster proprietary to a major company), but it's not precise enough to reject a paper based on the author being an unknown.
by freediver | 2025-05-22 13:24:55+00:00
That is the point. The difficulty of take-home assignment as a second screen is meant to increase with the number of candidates applied so that after this screen, you always end up with 4-5 that you can then interview in a meaningful way.

If only 10 candidates applied, take home could be a 5 min task. If 50 apply, you need something that will leave only those that are really commited to working at Kagi and ready to go an extra mile (and we may be looking for resourcefulness and determination as desireable traits, given how ambitious and difficult Kagi's core mission is).
by simonw | 2025-05-22 13:25:06+00:00
If anything HN is getting harder for me to get stuff on these days. Most of my self submissions of my content have failed to chart over the past few months: https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=simonw

You can see submissions from my domain by other people here: https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=simonwillison.net

It's weird what DOES make it. I had high hopes for my piece on ChatGPT memory yesterday - https://simonwillison.net/2025/May/21/chatgpt-new-memory/ - and it got nowhere. This Gemini piece was much more of a throwaway note, I mainly wanted to mark the release of an influential new model on my own site.

The reason I get content on here more than most people is that I write a LOT more than most people. So far this year I've published 45 long form blog entries and 274 short form (link blog) entries - this Gemini piece is one of those.

I try to always add something new - for this Gemini piece that was the video of it running, the references back to a similar demo from Cerebras and (updated since I first posted) a couple of quotes Hacker News comments to help explain diffusion LLMs better.

I wrote more about my approach to blogging here: https://simonwillison.net/2024/Dec/22/link-blog/

The sad truth is that very few people produce long-form writing online these days! Most people who publish regularly are doing tweets, LinkedIn posts and short-form video instead.
by colkassad | 2025-05-22 13:25:36+00:00
I love the strange "event" sound, the little bleeps and bloops of the interface, the "pew-pews" of the weapons, and the fantastic voice acting. I've had this game installed on one computer or another since I bought it retail back in '99. It's a work of art. No other Civ game ever matched it for me, no matter how far graphics have come in the last 25+ years.
by lxgr | 2025-05-22 13:25:40+00:00
> It's a bit like hating numbers, and saying "What do you mean by 'three'; what is it - three volts, three amps, three metres?

No, it’s a bit like saying “for chocolate M&Ms, 3 obviously means 9, to compensate for the fact that they’re much smaller than the peanut ones”.
by BarbaryCoast | 2025-05-22 13:25:42+00:00
This is no longer true.

Most obvious example is Firefox. The Debian Project allows Firefox to update outside the packaging system, automatically, at the whim of Firefox.

And there's the inclusion of non-Free software in the base install, which is completely against the Debian Social Contract.

The Debian Project drastically changed when they decided to allow Ubuntu to dictate their release schedule.

What used to be a distro by sysadmins for sysadmins, and which prized stability over timeliness has been overtaken by Ubuntu and the Freedesktop.Org people. I've been running Debian since version 3, and I used to go _years_ between crashes. These days, the only way to avoid that is to 1) rip out all the Freedesktop.Org code (pulseaudio, udisks2, etc.), and 2) stick with Debian 9 or lower.
by card_zero | 2025-05-22 13:25:57+00:00
I assume you also know the trick of adding the columns to test divisibility by three: 387 becomes 3+8+7, which is 18, which becomes 1+8 = 9. This works because 10 % 3 = 1, so 100 = 99+1 (etc.), with the effect that each column can be counted as if it was units.

To apply the same trick to a multiple of 7, the tens column is worth 3 (10 % 7 = 3), so 91 -> 27 + 1 -> 6 + 8 -> 3 + 4 -> 7. The value is different in the next column (100 % 7 = 2). This trick is no help at all but I still like it.

(Finished editing out mistakes now.)
by K0balt | 2025-05-22 13:25:58+00:00
A lot of appliances need >1kw.

This requires higher voltage and robust connectors.

That level of DC is quite dangerous compared to AC for many reasons.

Also, unless you want to have 60lb extension cords the size of bratwurst, you need to go high voltage. High voltage DC is its own kind of devil, and is something I would not want in my household except in very isolated, self contained places.

High voltage, high current DC is on yet another level of mortal threat, able to do cool tricks like making extensions cords burn from one end to the other like cartoon dynamite fuses. Also, absolutely the best for accidental electrocution, severe burns and flash blindness, and setting otherwise fire resistant structures thoroughly aflame.
by Vinnl | 2025-05-22 13:26:05+00:00
Oh I can do backend work, but I'll easily introduce performance issues, log too much or too little, get lost as soon as I open one of our observability dashboards, or design an inefficient database migration.

Likewise, I've seen more backend-focused people introduce horrible accessibility issues, completely misunderstand the client-side lifecycle, or produce a giant mess of intertwined global state.

It's useful to be able to wield all the tools to some extent, but I've found true full-stack to be a mess. (Where "true" already means "works on web APIs and in-browser code", i.e. still ignores large parts of the stack.)
by sgarland | 2025-05-22 13:26:11+00:00
Sure, but a. IME, volume controls with 1-10 are nowhere near log b. many manufacturers don’t even do this. A lot of car manufacturers seem to use 0-40 for the stereo volume, which seems completely arbitrary. I’m assuming they decided that’s a good balance between granularity and annoyance, but c’mon… couldn’t have at least capped it at 50? Halfway to 100 feels vaguely more intuitive.

This also doesn’t even begin to touch on frequency response curves.
by behnamoh | 2025-05-22 13:26:15+00:00
tok/s speeds in the video:

- 1st message (empty context): 857 tok/s

- 2nd message (2244 tokens in context): 727 tok/s

- 3rd message (2244+1398 tokens in context): 693 tok/s

I'm no expert in diffusion models but this looks like a drastic drop in speed, especially in longer chats (this was just 3 messages).
by dreamcompiler | 2025-05-22 13:26:34+00:00
> You still need a gas car for any kind of road trip...

In the US, I've traveled about 50k miles on long road trips in a Tesla and I haven't used my ICE car for a road trip since I got the Tesla. Long range and Tesla's excellent network of superchargers made that possible.

I would imagine it's even more doable in Europe since "long distance" road trips there are on the order of 100 miles, while in the US they're more like 1000 miles.
by zeroCalories | 2025-05-22 13:27:12+00:00
I regularly have to do queries. I'm trying to understand my non-trivial product to figure out what work items will have, or have had, impact. Sometimes I'm in a meeting and need to do some real time analysis. My ability to understand and use the data is actually more important than a slightly higher database bill. And I thought we were ignoring the poor performance of normalization?
by mrbungie | 2025-05-22 13:28:34+00:00
He's very good at doing startup/scaleup management, in a ruthless/snakey skill level. I think that's something everyone can agree.

But vision? I'm not so sure, he had great company and help along the way, and now that he has been left alone (arguably due to his own actions) he's selling the image of competence in areas that he hasn't demonstrated skills whatsoever. We'll see.
by Zigurd | 2025-05-22 13:28:47+00:00
I started commenting on Elon because looking at Starship made me think that's a really bullshit way to run a rocket project. It's a prime example of software people thinking they can run big hardware projects using the same techniques as a five person app team. And then cybertruck comes apparently right out of the k-hole. IIRC Elon even said they didn't no market research. Actual genius is incredibly rare. Everybody is just some guy. And if you pump up their egos enough, they do stupid things.

If you doubt the lack of correlation between genius and money, consider that the second richest person is a corporate snake who cheated founders out of their family run businesses, and jacked up his compensation at everyone else's expense. How far down the list do you have to go to find an actual genius?
by dns_snek | 2025-05-22 13:28:50+00:00
There's no "objectively better", just "objectively better given some set of constraints".

If my commute is less than 100km, I can charge at home, have free solar energy, and only go on long trips once or twice a year, would you still say that gas cars are "objectively better"?

If you regularly go on 400km+ trips or have nowhere to charge an EV overnight then by all means, avoid EVs.
by netsharc | 2025-05-22 13:28:59+00:00
Honestly, this feels as impressive as getting the correct answer to "Hey Siri, what's the weather like tomorrow?"...

I too would do it manually and begin by trawling through emails from my brother's address. Obviously just the word "Monty" means the brother probably mentioned the name somewhere else (e.g. in real life) and then just used that reference key assuming OP knows what/whom it is referred to.

It's somewhat impressive that an AI can infer that "this email's subject is a male name, and the email discusses his reading preferences, it's possible the email sender is talking about his son." (I wonder if AI would "understand" (whatever "understanding" means for AIs) that the email sender is not talking about a cat named Monty, because cats can't read).
by SketchySeaBeast | 2025-05-22 13:29:21+00:00
Which is horrifying, but also extremely questionable.

Reddit Ads as of late have been trying to sell me things I am in no way interested in, like miniature piano keyboards, ray-bans, and romance novels about a sheriff who is also a shape shifting bear. These advertisers are supposed to have incredibly insight into our very souls but they are constantly whiffing.

Although, I wonder if it's more terrifying for everyone to have belief in such a flawed system, what do we do when the "omniscient" AI starts continually gets things wrong?
by ipython | 2025-05-22 13:29:27+00:00
See page 292-294. Moratorium on enforcing any regulation/law on “artificial intelligence systems or models” for a period of 10 years after this bill is enacted.

Not sure why this is getting flagged- would AI regulations not be a topic relevant to "Hacker News"? Not making any political commentary here, just noting that this is explicitly mentioned in the bill and want to make this community aware.
Show HN: Replay Iconic HN Stories
by jasonthorsness | 2025-05-22 13:29:46+00:00
Do you remember when Dropbox was announced? Bitcoin? Go?

Hacker News remembers. It has become one of the best databases of post-2006 tech history.

I attempted to recreate the feeling of "being there" for noteworthy discussions by animating the comments as they unfold:

Dropbox introduced

https://hn.unlurker.com/replay?item=8863

Nobody cares about Chrome?

https://hn.unlurker.com/replay?item=292634

Early Bitcoin (this one is a bit of a joke. I hope you bought some, jdoliner)

https://hn.unlurker.com/replay?item=599852

Go Language Announced

https://hn.unlurker.com/replay?item=934142

Stripe Introduced

https://hn.unlurker.com/replay?item=3053883

More in drop-down on the site or enter any other item ID. Better on desktop.