MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jmye | 2025-05-23 02:55:36+00:00
If Republicans believe they will never lose the Senate, they can easily bypass the filibuster without 60 votes. To date, the adults in the room prevented either party from doing this for short term wins, but a) there are no adults in the room and b) it’s arguable the Senate will never again have a non-Republican majority (demographically, not a conspiracy theory).
by amluto | 2025-05-23 02:56:43+00:00
In case anyone ever seriously contemplates a new design, here's an anecdote:

Quite a few years ago, when Flatpak was a brand new project, I met some of the original developers. I tried, and failed, to convince them to change one particular fundamental part of the design. In the original design, and today, an installed Flatpak has a name, the permissions are bound to that name, you run that Flatpak and it has its assigned permissions, and, if anything else talks to it, it talks to it by that name. If I install a VSCode Flatpak as my UID and grant it access to my Documents directory, then VSCode, running as me, has access to Documents.

I argued that this was the wrong design. If I install VSCode as me, then there should be an installed copy, and that should have approximately no significance. If I run VSCode, then the running instance should have some id (possibly ephemeral), and that instance should have a set of permissions. If I want to run VSCode with access to ~/project_a and another instance with access to ~/project_b, it should just work and the instances should not be able to access each other's data, even if they're running at the same time. If I want to run two Tailscales, it should work. If I want to fire up an ephemeral instance of Firefox, that should work, too.

However many years later, I still think I was right. Flatpak gets this wrong, MS and Apple's App Stores get this wrong, Mac OS gets this (very very) wrong, etc. There's plenty of opportunity to do better.

(This is important from a bug-mitigation perspective: a LibreOffice document that achieves RCE should not be able to access my other documents. It's also important frmo a vendor-doesn't-care-at-all perspective: VScode has basically no security to begin with, and VSCode inside Flatpak ought to have a degree of real security courtesy of Flatpak.)
by jazzyjackson | 2025-05-23 02:57:08+00:00
Why would an AI want to do any of that? What's missing from all the conversations anthropomorphizing AI is an explanation for where desire and goal making comes from. I'm sympathetic to asimovian paradoxes where the AI is trying to follow it's main directive and that has unforeseen consequences, but where does this idea come from that an artificial mind - with no body no mortality no sex no taste - would ever come up with its own pursuits?
by GolDDranks | 2025-05-23 02:57:09+00:00
Two problems:

1) Writing a high-performance memory allocator for a game engine in Rust: https://github.com/golddranks/bang/tree/main/libs/arena/src (Still work in progress, so it's in a bit messy state.) Didn't seem to understand the design I had in mind, and/or the requirements and goes on tangents and starts changing the design. In the end, coded the main code myself and used LLM for writing tests with some success. Had to remove tons of inane comments that didn't provide any explanatory value.

2) Trying to fix a Django ORM expression that generates unoptimal and incorrect SQL. Constantly changes opinion whether something is even possible or supported by Django, apologizes when pointing out mistakes / bugs / hallucinations, but then proceeds to not internalize the implications of the said mistakes.

I used the Zed editor with its recently published agentic features. I tried to prompt it with a chat style discussion, but it often did bigger edits I would have liked, and failed to share a high-level plan in advance, something I often requested.

My biggest frustrations were not coding problems per se, but just general inability to follow instructions and see implications, and lacking the awareness to step back and ask for confirmations or better directions if there are "hold on, something's not right" kind of moments. Also, generally following through with "thanks for pointing that out, you are absolutely right!" even if you are NOT right. That yes-man style seriously erodes trust in the output.
by ethbr1 | 2025-05-23 02:57:13+00:00
I believe it was Kurzweil who had the quip that only novel utility differences drive rapid mass adoption.

The reason mobile devices scaled so rapidly is that calling a specific person (wherever they are) is so much more useful than calling a physical location.

If OpenAI wants to create a successful device, it needs to have that utility delta over an existing smartphone.

(While Google and Apple throw not insignificant resources into competing, with the help of mature mobile ecosystems)
by throwaway219450 | 2025-05-23 02:57:28+00:00
Yes ish, see my other comment.

Foreign students normally enter via a non-immigrant visa (F1), or rather they are eligible to apply for that visa at an embassy, if a registered sponsor supports it. The visa permits a request for entry into the country for the purpose of study (at a port of entry). The most important document that you need day to day is a DS-2019 and you must remain "in F1 status" in the SEVIS system for the duration of your program. If you don't leave the US, you don't need another visa even if your original one expires, the university can issue you a new DS-2019 annually until your end-of-program date. That's up to 5 years dependent on the category. If you leave after your visa expires you have to renew it out of the country, which is normally straightforward (using the dropbox system).

The government has not prevented foreign people from studying or working at Harvard, they have withdrawn their ability to maintain status while at Harvard. Hence why they can transfer to another institution.
by bound008 | 2025-05-23 02:58:16+00:00
> From the team that brought you the magic of Google Search

This feels really disingenuous. Larry and Sergei are the team that brought us Google Search.

"Magic of" is trying to hide the fact that you didn't bring Google Search to fruition. The last 5 years of Google Search do not feel magical at all.

Instead, claim credit for something that you did do with Google Search.

From looking at your LinkedIn: CTO > Joined Google via acquisition of ITA Matrix and worked on schema.org amongst other very impressive things. Before that, founding team of Bing @ MSFT. CEO > Worked on search at Google from 2018 - 2024 ( 6 years )

These are impressive credentials-- so find a better way to showcase them.
by AStonesThrow | 2025-05-23 02:58:43+00:00
I would say there are hundreds or thousands of these discoveries waiting to be made throughout the world.

The end of the article notes that it is commonplace for altars to embed relics of a saint, especially a martyr. It has typically been considered mandatory through history and the Second Vatican Council. In fact, a custom developed of using an "altar stone" which would permanently hold the relics, and serve as a portable place to celebrate Mass, if the immovable altar wasn't sufficient for that.

The thing is, with Vatican II many, many parish renovations included the addition of a freestanding "table altar" which was often new construction. This would often mean that the "high altar" of sacrifice would become disused, de-emphasized and sometimes just pulled out of the wall and placed in storage.

So what they found in this school is apparently a disused "high altar", no longer in service, and forgotten in storage.

So, not surprising it contained relics, but exciting that the documentation is intact. Indeed, the practice of certifying and documenting relics is important, because who wants a fake, or a stolen one? How many burial cloths of Jesus, how many nails are there? You could build a cargo ship with all the True Cross wood in Europe.
by mattb314 | 2025-05-23 03:02:04+00:00
Super rough summary of the first half: in order to pick out random vectors with a given shape (where the "shape" is determined by the covariance matrix), MASS::mvrnorm() computes some eigenvectors, and eigenvectors are only well defined up to a sign flip. This means tiny floating differences between machines can result in one machine choosing v_1, v_2, v_3,... as eigenvectors, while another machine chooses -v_1, v_3, -v_3,... The result for sampling random numbers is totally different with the sign flips (but still "correct" because we only care about the overall distribution--these are random numbers after all). The section around "Q1 / Q2" is the core of the article.

There's a lot of other stuff here too: mvtnorm::rmvnorm() also can use eigendecomp to generate your numbers, but it does some other stuff to eliminate the effect of the sign flips so you don't see this reproducibility issue. mvtnorm::rmvnorm also supports a second method (Cholesky decomp) that is uniquely defined and avoids eigenvectors entirely, so it's more stable. And there's some stuff on condition numbers not really mattering for this problem--turns out you can't describe all possible floating point problems a matrix could have with a single number.
by dzaima | 2025-05-23 03:02:11+00:00
Even denormals and NaNs should be perfectly consistent, at least on CPUs. (as long as you're not inspecting the bit patterns of the NaNs, at least)

Irrational stdlib functions (trig/log/exp; not sqrt though for whatever reason) should really be basically the only source of non-reproducibility in typical programs (assuming they don't explicitly do different things depending on non-controlled properties; and don't use libraries doing that either, which is also a non-trivial ask; and that there's no overly-aggressive optimizer that does incorrect transformations).

I'd hope that languages/libraries providing seeded random sources with a guarantee of equal behavior across systems would explicitly note which operations aren't reproducible though, otherwise seeding is rather pointless; no clue if R does that.
by klabb3 | 2025-05-23 03:02:26+00:00
Im not really much of a flatpak user but to me it seems like permission system on top of Linux is an incredible undertaking. Solving both packaging and retrofitting permissions at the same time seems too big of a cookie to swallow. I don’t know whether the permission system is what killed the momentum and caused this seeming burnout. But it seems incredibly complex.

To me, Linux doesn’t have a granular modern permission system, and I don’t expect my package manager to solve it for me. I still run proprietary software on it, because I kind of have to. Is that an ideal situation? No. But I rather have a distribution system and vet vendors (which I’m doing anyway) than wait another decade for permissions to be perfect. Distribution, packaging and updates is the pressing need imo.
by nkurz | 2025-05-23 03:03:17+00:00
I'll take this opportunity to mention that I don't think the DHS press release should be taken as "authoritative" on anything other than the government's intentions. As you point out, the administration is being wonderfully clear that they intend to make an example of Harvard and punish those who would side with them.

I'm glad that despite being immediately being voted to a negative score and pushed to the bottom, some people like you are reading the link. If the goal is to understand what Harvard is up against, I think it's really useful to read what the government is actually claiming. I wasn't expecting that many people here would be persuaded by it!
by elcritch | 2025-05-23 03:05:22+00:00
I've been thinking for a couple of months now that prompt engineering, and therefore CoT, is going to become the "secret sauce" companies want to hold onto.

If anything that is where the day to day pragmatic engineering gets done. Like with early chemistry, we didn't need to precisely understand chemical theory to produce mass industrial processes by making a good enough working model, some statistical parameters, and good ole practical experience. People figured out steel making and black powder with alchemy.

The only debate now is whether the prompt engineering models are currently closer to alchemy or modern chemistry? I'd say we're at advanced alchemy with some hints of rudimentary chemistry.

Also, unrelated but with CERN turning lead into gold, doesn't that mean the alchemists were correct, just fundamentally unprepared for the scale of the task? ;)
by AlienRobot | 2025-05-23 03:05:45+00:00
>Flatpack is a weird extra layer on top of Linux

My brother in christ, systemd, x11 and even GNU are weird extra layers on top of Linux. Linux is just the kernel. This is exactly what "redefining Linux so it's never responsible for 99% you need to put on top of Linux to have a functional modern OS" is about.
by gmueckl | 2025-05-23 03:06:16+00:00
I don't know how the verb "to train" became the technical shorthand for running gradient descent on a large neural network. But that's orthogonal to the fact that these stories are very, very likely part of the training dataset and thus something that the network is optimized to approximate. So no matter how technical you want to be in wording it, the fundamental irony of cautionary tales (and the bad behavior in them) being used as optimization targets remains.
by khazhoux | 2025-05-23 03:06:34+00:00
> It's the difference between learning to recognise letters and learning to read words

Bebop is the best example of this for me in music. When I first started listening to Charlie Parker as a teenager, I heard only a series of notes. But it sounded great so I kept listening (a lot!) and then I heard phrases, sentences, an actual language.

Then I bought Giant Steps and again heard only a scramble of notes. It was a new language, which took some time to learn. But now listening to Coltrane and listening to someone talk, feels exactly the same.
by al_borland | 2025-05-23 03:07:55+00:00
I appreciate it, but I don't like the idea of uploading my whole bookmark file. I ended up vibe coding something with ChatGPT. It also asked to upload it, but I vetoed that and made it work. Since it is a well known file, it had data to work with.

Turns out all my exports were a waste of time, as it made it overly complicated and hard to parse, so it took the plist, extracted the reading list, pulled out the values I wanted (extracted the domain to give me that, because siteName was missing on almost everything), and gave me some clean json and a csv.

It turns out I had over 450 items in there. I thought it was going to be half that. I would never have gotten through that in Safari. Hopefully this will make it easier to scan through and dismiss most of these, and maybe highlight the couple I might still want. I have articles dating back to 2016... yikes.
by FilosofumRex | 2025-05-23 03:08:07+00:00
I can't recommend SAT solvers enough, the CS community isn't familiar with them and don't appreciate their vast improvements in recent years. If you've the luxury of formulating your 20M system in terms of satisfiability problem, it'd well worth a try.

Unfortunately, most problems in physics(field equations), or engineering (Navier Stokes) can't be formulated as satisfiability problems.
by Duanemclemore | 2025-05-23 03:09:06+00:00
That's so strange. For some reason it gave me the link for a completely different video...

Anyway - here's

[2] https://vimeo.com/757057720

and [3] https://vimeo.com/757062988

Yeah, jenn was really rad. It's red meat to me when anyone's working on these kinds of projections.

Since without the proper explanation the whole "concentric spherical section planes" thing is unclear (and actually, they wouldn't be section "planes" in the first place), here's the paper I was referencing:

https://www.academia.edu/129490488/Visualizing_Space_Group_H...

(see pg. 3 for a visual explanation that I hope helps.)

I intersected the objects in the lattice with spheres to create lines, then projected those to the outer sphere and down to the 2d plane. In the same way, you could use concentric hyperspheres to intersect a 3d object serially, then project those intersections back to 3d space...
by adamtaylor_13 | 2025-05-23 03:09:08+00:00
That’s funny, my experience has been the exact opposite.

Claude Code has single-handedly 2-3x my coding productivity. I haven’t even used Claude 4 yet so I’m pretty excited to try it out.

But even trusty ol 3.7 is easily helping me out out 2-3x the amount of code I was before. And before anyone asks, yes it’s all peer-reviewed and I read every single line.

It’s been an absolute game changer.

Also to your point about most engineering being thinking: I can test 4-5 ideas in the time it took me to test a single idea in the last. And once you find the right idea, it 100% codes faster than you do.
by PKop | 2025-05-23 03:09:51+00:00
The context was about being power hungry and ambitious to keep making more money, building a bigger business, perhaps fame, prestige, success, accomplishment... vs selling out early if just being a simple billionaire is adequate enough. Buffet worked his entire life as you said, which was my point, and was the richest in the world for a long time. He is not a counterpoint to Zuckerberg.

And all of the billionaires donate money, I don't think that sets him apart from the others all that much.
by eth0up | 2025-05-23 03:09:57+00:00
For over a decade I used Yamasa exclusively. It's pretty typical soy sauce, but it's 1) brewed in Japan, 2) has no preservatives other than alcohol.

I know there are superior versions, but one should never be sorely disappointed with Yamasa.

In this new economy, I've adjusted my standards so that I still have something to put the soy sauce on, and have been giving Marca Pina (Philippines) a go. Not bad, but contains preservatives.

I've never had true artisan soy sauce and suspect I never will. But used skillfully, amazing work can be done with Yamasa.

Treacherous Joe's, a decade or so ago, had a pure Japanese soy sauce, but at some point cheapened it with vinegar, albeit a negligible amount.

Open to suggestions that don't require being involved in the black budget.
by dghlsakjg | 2025-05-23 03:11:55+00:00
Your clock was off. Tides advance ~30 minutes per day. But not exactly 30 minutes. Sometimes more. Sometimes less. Sometimes it doesn’t follow a semi diurnal pattern.

Water can’t pass through landmasses, and that is a huge factor. If the earth had no landmasses, the tides would be entirely as you expect. However, if you look at a global visualization of tidal heights, you will see that a small landmass, NZ is a great example, can have highs and lows just miles apart. Same in Panama, what happens on the pacific coast is wildly different to what happens on the Caribbean.

In addition, the gravity of the sun comes to factor as well. Where I am, north of the 50th parallel, we simply don’t get very low tides during the day when we are near the winter solstice. The opposite happens in the summer.

The timing of the tides for any given spot tend to be predictable (where it is semi diurnal anyway, other places are a mess). But heights are extremely variable.
by abdullah9 | 2025-05-23 03:12:36+00:00
I built habitual.site, a lightweight habit tracker that visualizes your progress using GitHub-style contribution grids. It’s a responsive web app, so it works on both desktop and mobile.

The idea was to create something simple enough to use daily, but with just enough structure to stay consistent. There’s also a daily checklist so you don’t have to scan through each grid every day.
by magicalist | 2025-05-23 03:13:29+00:00
> Trump is a fool, this new policy is even more foolish, not to mention blatantly unconstitutional - but it's unfortunately hard to deny that he has a point here.

This feels a bit like saying he has a point dooming Kilmar Abrego Garcia to an El Salvadoran gulag because MS-13 exists. You do not, in fact, gotta to hand it to ISIS.
by simonmysun | 2025-05-23 03:13:51+00:00
Please don't only start to edit the videos when you fill up the 256GB card. You would regret when you have to recover lost files from it. I've seen too many people lose irreplaceable memories due to card corruption or accidental deletion and it is even painful for me to scan and recover their >256GB cards.

Move them out as early as you can and do regular backups. Videos of your child are much more precious than a whole backup solution.
by Gigachad | 2025-05-23 03:13:55+00:00
Flatpak does have answers for this stuff but it's more the programs inside them aren't utilizing the right APIs, they are meant to use the portals api for filepickers which would use the system filepicker and securely portal stuff through the sandboxing. But many apps just don't.

Theme is also an odd one. GUI design in general has shifted away from an OS theme and more towards an app/product theme which stays consistent between the product on different platforms. Discord for example looks largely the same on Linux, Windows, iOS, and web.
by morishin | 2025-05-23 03:14:57+00:00
It's a shame to hear Pocket is shutting down. Adding another option to the mix, I'd like to share my open-source project, "ato de yomu" (which means "read it later" in Japanese). https://atodeyomu.morishin.me/

You can save web pages to read later, track your reading history, and share your lists—or keep them private. It supports adding pages via the website, iOS Share Sheet, Chrome Extension, API call and etc.

It's open-source: https://github.com/morishin/atodeyomu.morishin.me

I previously shared it on HN here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41649998

Hope some of you find it a useful alternative!
by mbreese | 2025-05-23 03:17:33+00:00
You're right. And that's something I still don't quite understand.

I'd really like to know how many workstation licenses Redhat really sells. It's been so long, I didn't even realize that they still had a separate workstation license available for purchase. When you have the same distribution setup for Servers and Workstations, it seems to me that one of those flavors is going to dominate and the other will be eventually be neglected. Who are the users that are buying and using Workstation licenses?

But, when it comes down to it, I still don't see why they would want to package an Office Suite for RHEL. Or, more importantly, why a user would want to use it. RHEL is designed for stability. It's a great server OS that's well supported. Because of this, it's also known to have older versions of libraries and programs. This is okay, because many new features and fixes get backported, but it's still usually an older (stable) version of software that's included. Why would you want to have an older version of an Office Suite? Why would they want to package a newer (and riskier) version that can be installed on a server? It just doesn't make that much sense to me... it's a fundamental dichotomy between what makes a good server OS vs a good workstation OS.

Note: this give and take has been going on with Linux on the server vs Linux on the Desktop for decades. It's probably going to keep going on for decades. The things that one wants for one use case isn't what makes sense for other use cases. This is why we have different distributions, which is a good thing. The part I don't get is why RH would want to merge the two back together. Which is why I see the idea of deprecating workstation applications (as packaged by RHEL) in favor of Flatpak versions of them as a good thing from the RHEL point of view.
by robocat | 2025-05-23 03:18:02+00:00
If tax credit incentives don't achieve lower emissions, then scrapping the credits is sensible.

I tried to find a study on whether EVs do actually decrease total carbon emissions overall in the US. Embodied carbon, low mileage (second car?), high emission electricity generation, how profits are spent, etcetera, can peversely cause increased emissions.

One figure I found was: Teslas 8,786 annual miles compared with 11,642 for gasoline cars (in their sample). In 2022, the average driver in the U.S. drove 13,596 miles. Incentivising very low mileage users with high carbon footprint manufacture would be environmentally unsound.