MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by saghm | 2025-05-30 00:03:54+00:00
At what point in the process does it stop being food? Is cornmeal with oil and salt still food, even though there's not a "cornmeal with oil and salt" plant? I think the point of the parent comment is that it's not clear that there's a single place to draw the line between "food" and "not food" in a way that everyone will immediately agree on.
by al_borland | 2025-05-30 00:04:45+00:00
You have to invert the order of how most people plan travel.

Typically people plan in this order:

1. Where to go

2. When to go

3. Check airfare

Flip it on its head:

1. Keep an eye out for cheap flights from your home airport

2. Pick one of those destinations

3. Choose when to go

Not exactly inverted, but the flight goes from last to first.

I had Ireland in my head for my next trip, but then Italy showed up last week. That sounded pretty good, so I checked the dates and found a flight that fit in my schedule, and booked it.

It’s not great for getting a flight around a conference, wedding, or some other event you are planning around. But when you know you want to take a vacation to somewhere and sometime this year, it can cut flight costs in half.

A single flight ends up paying for the cost of the subscription 10x over, and then some.

Also, it could be somewhere near where you want to go. I had tickets to Croatia about 5 years ago, but hand to cancel due to the pandemic. I didn’t know anything about Croatia when I booked, but I figured the worst case scenario was I catch a quick ferry or flight over to Italy once I’m there. Once you’re over there it’s cheap to go one country over. That flight to Croatia was $289, that cheaper than a flight to Nashville for me, which is only about an 8 hour drive.

I did the same thing when I booked a flight to Sweden. I didn’t know if I’d like it there, so from there I booked a connection to Copenhagen for next to nothing. I spent a week in Copenhagen, but then ultimately did go back to Sweden for week, which I ended up loving. I’m glad I didn’t spend the whole trip in Copenhagen.

Another deal I got that stood out was to Tokyo. I think I paid around $550 give or take. A coworker of mine has family there and goes on a regular basis, he was floored by that price. He always pays over $1k, and usually closer to $1,500.

Ultimately it’s just an alert service for flights that are abnormally low. If you have a specific destination in mind, Google Flights is pretty good at showing when the cheapest time to travel is, giving a booking date of today. Of course it fluctuates over time, which is where the alerts come in.

It’s saved me thousands. Though I probably would have only taken about 20% of the trips I have without it.
by hughw | 2025-05-30 00:05:22+00:00
I realize I'm talking about C++ not C, but coincidentally just today I ported our 7 year old library's Swig/Python interface to nanobind. What a fragile c9k Swig has been all these years (don't touch it!) and the nanobind transformation is so refreshing and clean, and lots of type information suddenly available to Python programs. One day of effort and our tests all pass, and now nanobind seems able to allow us to improve the ergonomics (from the Python pov) of our lib.
by jpdb | 2025-05-30 00:05:22+00:00
You should be able to get this done with OBS.

Set OBS up so your streaming a window of this application.

Go into OBS settings and go to "Stream" and set it to custom.

For server use "srt://127.0.0.1:7777?mode=listener&timeout=50000&transtype=live"

Then in VLC, open a network stream for srt://127.0.0.1:7777.
by robocat | 2025-05-30 00:05:49+00:00
> Short of some sort of cultural pushback from developers or users

Corporations create great code too: they're not all badly run.

The problem isn't a code quality issue: it is a moral issue of whether you agree with the goals of capitalist businesses.

Many people have to balance the needs of their wallet with their desire for beautiful software (I'm a developer-founder I love engineering and open source community but I'm also capitalist enough to want to live comfortably).
by kalleboo | 2025-05-30 00:05:53+00:00
Another example of a really well-done J2ME app was Google Maps. It had GPS and street view support at the same time as iPhone only did tower location and Google wouldn't license them Street View.

With a high-end Sony Ericsson feature phone, I could multitask(!) between Opera Mini, a J2ME twitter client, IRC client, train timetable app, Google Maps, etc better than a Symbian S60 smartphone could (and iPhone of course couldn't multitask at all) https://kalleboo.com/linked/se_j2me_multitask.jpg
by perrygeo | 2025-05-30 00:06:37+00:00
Have you seen the studies that project the hockey stick graph of resource extraction required to continue that scaling? Have you seen the studies that show the orders of magnitude increase in mining required? Have you accounted for the fact that all of that cannot be done with solar panels? How do you assume to mine that much material from elsewhere for your own benefit, at the detriment of the communities you're extracting from?

Your plan is curiously devoid of answers to the basic questions.

"Chart goes up now, chart must go up forever" is an ideology, not a characteristic of any physical ecosystem. Certainly not an actionable plan that any serious person would follow.

Instead of an ideology, how about a real viable plan pinned to physical reality (CO2 emissions, terrawatts, acres, tons of ore, things we can measure empirically)? I keep being promised this solar future, yet fossil fuel emissions keep rising. Your ideology sounds appealing, but you've got a long way to go to make it reality.
by gdhkgdhkvff | 2025-05-30 00:06:40+00:00
I was confused when reading the abstract so I ChatGPT’d a summary and it just so happened to include this exact explanation:

1. What does a “critical regime” mean?

In neuroscience, a “critical regime” is like a sweet spot between too much order (where the brain is slow and rigid) and too much chaos (where it’s noisy and erratic). In this state:

* The brain is highly sensitive to inputs.

* It’s capable of flexible responses.

* Some researchers think this is ideal for things like learning, memory, and information processing.

BUT — that’s during waking states.

During sleep, especially NREM sleep, the brain is supposed to be less active so it can:

* Consolidate memories,

* Clear out waste (literally),

* Reset emotional balance,

* Rest and repair.
by robomartin | 2025-05-30 00:07:18+00:00
> We are nowhere close to “manufacturing nearly zero.”

In relative terms, we don't make anything. The problem is that this is largely invisible to people who are not in the business of making things. Manufacturing is crucially important to an economy. Note that I did not say "assembly". Most of what we do (US and Europe) is assembly from parts made mostly in China. That's why manufacturing output is not a measure of the gradient we've been descending.

Let me make a parallel with the Amazon third party seller story.

When Amazon opened the doors to third party sellers there was a rush of entrepreneurs looking to sell all kinds of products on the platform. Because you can't make almost anything in the US any more, this mostly consisted of people finding products in China to white label or, in very few cases, do create their own products to manufacture in China. You'd order pallets full of product, ship them directly to Amazon warehouses and you were off to the races.

Lots of people made lost of money. Millions.

At some point, their suppliers, the very same companies they sourced products from in China, realized they could list the same products on Amazon on their own. And that's precisely what they did.

The lack of barriers to entry made it brilliantly simple. Their cost basis was much lower. American and European third party sellers were decimated. I don't have statistics on how many survived. Through participation in my local business community, I happen to know many people who were selling through Amazon. They got destroyed. In many cases their suppliers came into the market with products the American companies developed (and paid for the R&D) themselves, ignoring all IP.

At a larger scale, that's the problem we are facing. We don't make anything. If a company like BYD were to be allowed to enter this market, US auto manufacturers would be destroyed within two to five years at most. Gone.

So, it isn't about making everything. It's about making enough to be resilient and actually have an industrial base. It's about being manufacturers, not assemblers deeply-dependent on China and others.
by quantadev | 2025-05-30 00:07:49+00:00
It's more like better-than-senior 99% of the time. Makes mistakes 1% of the time. Most of the 'bad results' I've seen people struggle with ended up being the fault of the human, in the form of horrible context given to the AI or else ambiguous or otherwise flawed prompts.

Any skilled developer with a decade of experience can write prompts that return back precisely what we wanted almost every single time. I do it all day long. "Claude 4" rarely messes up.
by ameliaquining | 2025-05-30 00:09:14+00:00
Have you been following Meta's work on Static Hermes? It's one of two efforts I'm aware of* to define a subset of JavaScript with different runtime semantics, by putting limitations on dynamic behavior. Their primary goal is performance, but correctness benefits also seem likely, and they share your idea that being intended for embedding in a particular application lets you get away with breaking compatibility in ways that you couldn't in a browser. And if their thing ships, and you want to reduce fragmentation, then maybe you want your "sane subset" to match theirs.

* The other being Google's Closure Compiler, which probably isn't relevant to you as it assumes that its output has to run on existing engines in browsers.
by arp242 | 2025-05-30 00:09:21+00:00
I once tried to book a flight with the same-day return; the price for the return flight was mad expensive. The same return flight was a few hundred euros cheaper if you booked the initial flight a day earlier.

My theory is that most same-day travel is for business, and businesses are far less price-sensitive than consumers and will just pay whatever.

I suspect this is what's going on here. Most solo travellers are for business, not consumers for holidays. The price difference here is huge – almost half – which is far beyond a bulk discount, we're talking about 1 person vs 2 people.

That's also why none of this is advertised: it's not a discount, but a "we think you can pay more, so we'll charge you more" type of thing.

Is that a good/bad/ethical/predatory thing? I don't know. Leaves kind of a bad taste for me though.
by TedDallas | 2025-05-30 00:10:11+00:00
Yeah, the problem is if you don't understand the problem space then you are going to lean heavy on the LLM. And that can lead you astray. Which is why you still need people who are experts to validate solutions and provide feedback like Op.

My most productive experiences with LLMs is to have my design well thought out first, ask it to help me implement, and then help me debug my shitty design. :-)
by Buttons840 | 2025-05-30 00:10:27+00:00
I'm probably suffering undiagnosed ADHD, and will get stuck and spend minutes picking a function name and then writing a docstring. LLMs do help with this even if they get the code wrong, because I usually won't bother to fix their variables names or docstring unless needed. LLMs can reliably solve the problem of a blank-page.
by kstrauser | 2025-05-30 00:10:59+00:00
Yep. CPAN was impressive in the late 90s. I loved writing Perl at the time, other than the sigil explosion. The first time I wrote some Python (“OMG, everything is a reference?!”) was just about the last time I ever wrote any new Perl code.

I made that switch before I’d ever heard of Google, or Ruby for that matter. My experience was quite common at the time.
by jeromie | 2025-05-30 00:11:07+00:00
Gasoline degrades more quickly than propane.

When I looked at options for keeping a couple days worth of fuel around (with no gas-powered yard tools to necessitate fuel turnover), propane seemed like the more attractive option.

I was also storing said fuel in an outbuilding with venting and pretty far back on my property.

If you're regularly buying and storing gas, your math might math differently.
by netbioserror | 2025-05-30 00:14:23+00:00
Nim solves this problem by only having two explicit, restricted nullable types: Pointers and references. Pointers are manually managed, references are automatically managed, both start as nil and must have their referenced objects instantiated manually.

The entire rest of the language is built on pass-by-value using stack values and stack-managed hidden unique pointers. You basically never actually need to use a ref or a pointer unless you're building an interface to a C or C++ library. I having written a 40k line production application with no reference or pointer types anywhere. Almost any case you'd need is covered by simply passing a compound type or dynamic container as a mutable value, where it's impossible to perform any kind of pointer or reference semantics on it. The lifetime is already managed, so semantically it's just a value.
by const_cast | 2025-05-30 00:14:59+00:00
Lawyers don't even use version control software a lot of the time. They burn hundreds of paralegal hours reconciling revisions, a task that could be made 100x faster and easier with Git.

There's no guarantee a technology will take off, even if it's really, really good. Because we don't decide if that tech takes off - the lawyers do. And they might not care, or they might decide billing more hours is better, actually.
by ilaksh | 2025-05-30 00:15:02+00:00
It actually comes down to feedback loops which means iterating on software being used or attempting to be used by the customer.

Chat UIs are an excellent customer feedback loop. Agents develop new iterations very quickly.

LLMs can absolutely handle abstractions and different kinds of component systems and overall architecture design.

They can also handle requirements analysis. But it comes back to iteration for the bottom line which means fast turnaround time for changes.

The robustness and IQ of the models continue to be improved. All of software engineering is well underway of being automated.

Probably five years max where un-augmented humans are still generally relevant for most work. You are going to need deep integration of AI into your own cognition somehow in order to avoid just being a bottleneck.
by Tainnor | 2025-05-30 00:15:23+00:00
> Let F be a field, and let a,b∈F such that ab=0. There are two cases to consider: a=0 and a≠0. If a=0, then indeed ab=0 by Proposition 1.

This part is a bit weird. If a=0, then we are already done, there's no need to prove ab=0 (which was already the assumption).

The other case can also be proved in a shorter way by just multiplying both sides of ab=0 with a^(-1) from the left.
by felipeerias | 2025-05-30 00:15:45+00:00
The key of the teaching comes after that metaphor, when the disciples ask how one can be saved and Jesus answers that “with man this is impossible, but with God all things are possible.”

These words eventually became the foundation of Christian charity in an Ancient world that until then despised and rejected the weak and infirm.

Many of our modern day institutions trace their origin to that Christian charity, to those few enigmatic words.

(Peter Brown's “Through the Eye of a Needle” is a great book to know more about this process.)
by fnordpiglet | 2025-05-30 00:16:03+00:00
I feel like this ignores how LLMs work.

1) of course not they would be fed information, but as we build multi modal models that can achieve more and more world integration there’s no reason why not.

2) They’re very adaptive, by their abductive nature they adapt extraordinarily well to new situations. Perhaps too much - hence the challenge with hallucinations.

3) this isn’t necessarily true, as can be seen by some of the modern alignment in SOTA models being more and more difficult to evade. When prompted and aligned with drug seeking behavior training why would you assume they’re bad at detecting this?

4) again I don’t see why this is true. A general purpose LLM might be, but one that’s been aligned properly should do fine.

5) why do you think LLMs are not adaptive? They adapt through reinforcement and alignment. As a larger corpus of interactions are available they adapt and align towards the training goals. There is extensive research and experience in alignment to date, and models are often continuously adapted. You don’t need to retrain the entire base model you can just retrain a LoRA or embeddings. You can even adapt to specific situations by dynamically pulling in a LoRA or embeddings set for situations.

6) They have human like responses to human situations because they’re trained on a corpus of human language. For a highly specialized model you can ensure specific types of human experience and behavior are well represented and reinforced. You can align the behavior to be what you need.

All this said I don’t think anyone in this is proposing to take humans entirely out of the loop. But there are many situations where ML models or even heuristics out perform human experts in their own field. There’s no reason to believe LLMs, especially when augmented with diagnostic expert system agents, couldn’t generally out perform a doctor in diagnosis. This doesn’t mean the human doctor is irrelevant but that their skills are enhanced and patient outcomes improve with them help of such systems.

Regardless though I feel these criticisms of the approach reflect a naïveté about the ways these models work and what they’re capable of.
by zdragnar | 2025-05-30 00:17:59+00:00
There are plenty of denominations- Catholics foremost among them- who agree that good morals and works are not contributing to your redemption, but a natural consequence of having genuinely accepted Christ.

To "believe" without good morals or works entirely is to put on a false face, essentially. Therefore, some manner of effort is expected of believers. It's a bit of circular reasoning, but not much.
by bdbenton5255 | 2025-05-30 00:18:48+00:00
Love it, made me smile. The "warmth" of all this old tech is nostalgic, all the little human touches lost to history. The little bits of heart and soul that shaped the details of our lives, some nameless engineer on some forgotten afternoon implementing the little blue waves in the rain clouds. Something strangely bittersweet about it.
by jasperry | 2025-05-30 00:19:54+00:00
Thank you for this, there are a lot of nuggets to pick up from it. I don't know if anyone's still around to comment, but I sure would be interested in seeing some elaboration on the following claim:

"Structural typing drastically reduces the burden of assigning a name to every uninteresting intermediate form but more or less precludes taking advantage of Haskell-style typeclasses or Rust-style traits."
by relyks | 2025-05-30 00:20:26+00:00
Basically, caffeine is bad for sleep (learning and recovery) if taken late enough and significant amounts remain in your system at bedtime. It does note that even having a coffee first thing in the morning does have a measurable effect on deep sleep brain waves. Fast metabolizers of caffeine might be different. Don't drink coffee in the afternoon is probably the take away for most people
by mock-possum | 2025-05-30 00:22:13+00:00
Yeah in my experience as long as you don’t stray too far off the beaten path, LLMs are great at just parroting conventional wisdom for how to implement things - but the second you get to something more complicated - or especially tricky bug fixing that requires expensive debuggery - forget about it, they do more harm than good. Breaking down complex tasks into bite sized pieces you can reasonably expect the robot to perform is part of the art of the LLM.
by Caitlynmeeks | 2025-05-30 00:22:44+00:00
Before it was Flash, it was a vector drawing tool called FutureSplash.. in the early 90s i worked at fractal design corp (creators of what's now corel painter) and the Futuresplash folks were interested in selling it to us.. that was before it had an animation timeline or scripting features. I was kind of an in-house artist and the founders really wanted my opinion on whether or not it would be appealing to our customers, like how i as an artist felt about it.

My feedback was that was kind of cumbersome compared to our other tools, and didn't see the potential appeal to our user base and recommended against it, and we declined the offer.

Ultimately I'm glad Macromedia did acquire it because adding scripting and animation appealed to the already diminishing Director/Shockwave platform.

I do wonder how things might have been different had we decided otherwise and acquired Futuresplash-- there'd have been no Flash as we know it!

It's amazing how little decisions we make in the past can project out over time and have larger repercussions.
by persedes | 2025-05-30 00:22:58+00:00
Would be interesting to see how e.g sentence transformer models compare to this. My takeaway with the e.g. openai embedding models was that they were better suited for larger chunks of texts, so getting god + dog with a higher similarity might be indicative that it's not a good model for such small text?

emb = SentenceTransformer("all-MiniLM-L6-v2") embeddings = emb.encode(["dog", "god"]) cosine_similarity(embeddings) Out[16]: array([[1. , 0.41313702], [0.41313702, 1.0000004 ]], dtype=float32)
by bsder | 2025-05-30 00:23:43+00:00
LLMs are a decent search engine a la Google circa 2005.

It's been 20 years since that, so I think people have simply forgotten that a search engine can actually be useful as opposed to ad infested SEO sewage sludge.

The problem is that the conversational interface, for some reason, seems to turn off the natural skepticism that people have when they use a search engine.
by Multicomp | 2025-05-30 00:24:27+00:00
The lack of deep friendships feel like a 3-fold problem.

1. You can't ever be real, if you are real, you are likely to be recorded doing something someone somewhere on the largest stage in the world (the public web) that someone will disapprove of, and someone else will raise their own profile by mining your impiety to prove their own concern and moral superiority.

2. Everyone is so mobile and connected online, they never have to break the ice and talk to those around them in the breakroom or geographical space, so all of our social skills have atrophied at best, or were never learned at worst. We know just enough civility to not get in fights, but we don't know how to easily break the ice or become acquaintances.

3. All the people that live in the cities are not close with each other, they didn't grow up together and don't go to church / rotary club / male-only spaces any longer because we are all supposed to pretend to be cool liberated yuppies in a hookup culture. Can't have real ties or any strongly held beliefs, that would make you religious (or worse, Religious on an actual religion), those people are bad. So I'm okay, you're okay, and we all smile. And inside, no real connections are ever made.

Not to mention testosterone levels dropping, schools being geared towards women, always co-ed spaces, and a breakup of younger and older generations because of cultural differences there too...not that the old people are always nice.
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-05-30 00:25:38+00:00
> You forgot cost of fuel(this alone likely offsets your imaginary rental cost)

Does it? Toyota Highlander Hybrid gets 35 MPG. Ford Mavrick Hybrid, 38 MPG.

> higher insurance rates for trucks

This is a <$100/year difference for minimum coverage, much less $400/month, and for full coverage the car is actually more expensive:

https://www.bankrate.com/insurance/car/truck-vs-car-insuranc...

> cost of extra tires(trucks eat through tires)

Truck tires and car tires last around the same amount of time.

> If you're using a truck as a work truck it'll also need to be replaced much quicker, adding to the overall cost.

In that case the car isn't even on the table.