MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by nchmy | 2025-05-18 08:27:21+00:00
Likewise. And, yet, I've thought about this for a while now and looked up a bunch of articles and I still think that "thing" is completely - if not more - appropriate.

I fully understand and use "think" as a noun - eg have a think - but when I say "you have another thing coming", there's no expectation or implication that they're going to rethink anything in the future. People often don't do that. Instead, I'm simply implying that reality is going to turn out to be very different (and probably negative/unfavourable for them) than they think/expect.

It's the equivalent of saying "watch out - youve got something else/other than you expect coming to you".

In fact, it even shifts the rethink from sometime in the future to now - "rethink this now, as it's not going to turn out how you expect" And, moreover, it's often said as a final warning "I'm doing you a favour right now by warning you - it's the only generosity you're going to get from me in this matter".
by chneu | 2025-05-18 08:27:37+00:00
This is a thing that I've noticed that some folks just can't understand: Nobody is going to leave an inside job for an outside job.

At least not a meaningful amount of people.

I now have a great office job but I grew up farming, ranching, doing construction, roofing, worked at dairies so I've seen first hand who is working these jobs.

It's not white Americans. This is something some people just can't understand. They just don't seem to grasp that the folks doing these jobs are either temporary labor brought in from other countries or illegal immigrants. The reason is because there isn't enough domestic labor willing to do these jobs.
by oersted | 2025-05-18 08:29:14+00:00
This actually seems rather usable! It is rare that an esolang focused on aesthetics is so readable and relatively easy to use.

And this idea can probably be applied for any Lisp-like, any stack based language or array language.

With the right structured editor, it could be used for legitimate programming, it might even be more compact and readable at a glance than some code.
by numpad0 | 2025-05-18 08:29:50+00:00
Disclaimer: the following is bad medical advice, do not follow.

VR/AR/MR headsets aren't precisely focused at infinity, it's usually 10ft or so. They also have lower resolution than human eyes(~60 px/deg or 1MOA) while at it. This combined means you don't need full correction, I personally use -3 for both eyes, and it seem to work for me in VR.

YMMV.
by procaryote | 2025-05-18 08:30:36+00:00
I've tried a few different home automation things including Home Assistant and OpenHab. I feel all of them are overly complicated and you're pretty much trying to code using configuration, which worst case is YAML

A lot of the complexity seems to come from being clever around performance, so the thing only reacts to new events or commands and doesn't do more work than it has to. This just seems like a lot of over-engineering. If you don't have thousands of devices, or run your controller on battery, performance shouldn't be an issue.

I ended up using an existing home automation thing just as a bridge to smart devices, and wrote a service to control what should be happening when. Every incoming event or every 60s, I just rerun a my thing that determines the desired state, diff it against the known state and emit commands to make them match

So my home automation ended up being stuff like "if someoneIsAtHome() and time > XXX and time < XXX, these lights should be on: "

Add a frontend for overriding the default and I have a system where I can just change my code if I want the behaviour to change.
by ValdikSS | 2025-05-18 08:33:17+00:00
To be honest, I think the Alternate Devices in a form of a _new smartphone_ miss the point. All current Android smartphones could be dumbified to the same level with the matter of installing appropriate software, no need to buy anything special (and usually rather expensive). I see only an attempt to earn profit in such devices.

What I would like to see is a feature phones with the essential functions of a smartphone: proper messengers, proper maps and navigation, but many different form factors and 1+ week of a battery life. This is all possible with the current-generation 4G chips, which have sufficient performance (1GHz ARM core of Unisoc T107/T117/T127 for example).

If you're just tired of checking the phone when the notification comes in to understand whether it is important or not, you're looking for so-called 'calm technology device' — just buy a wristband like Xiaomi Band and it will send the notifications to your wrist, you won't need to touch the smartphone, which is especially helpful on the street or in a crowded place.
by hosting | 2025-05-18 08:35:09+00:00
The article itself is great but I like how everyone is jumping into diminishing people's degrees here. What are we even comparing them to? Influencers? People selling scams (courses)? Somebody doing the same thing every day for 15 years?

Linus built a kernel that's now powering most of the internet as part of his Master degree project. I have built massive prototypes (nowhere close to Linux) in record time just to be able to test and publish work.

I went through the study programs of some universities and they look decent. If I am to hire somebody, I always put people with degrees on top.

I get that some people aren't that good for certain things but it's lazy to assume their degrees are the problem.
by aaomidi | 2025-05-18 08:36:47+00:00
https://www.nrc.nl/nieuws/2025/05/14/zeven-gerenommeerde-wet...

It is one. Literally the experts in this field agree that it is one.

At this point, not using that term by the average person is genocide denial.

You may have an opinion that it’s not genocide. However you should be ready to take on the people who have made studying genocide their life work.
by hinkley | 2025-05-18 08:36:47+00:00
A function that asks a question with one function call and calls another based on the answer isn’t doing any work or asking any questions. It’s just glue code. And as long as it stays just glue code, that’s barely any of your code.

Asking for absolutes is something journeymen developers need to grow out of.

The principle of the excluded middle applies to Boolean logic and bits of set theory and belongs basically nowhere else in software development. But it’s a one trick pony that many like to ride into the ground.
by pests | 2025-05-18 08:37:54+00:00
> I suppose chefs don't eat most of what they make. Most wood workers don't have a house full of only furniture they've made.

I have to disageee with you here. Chefs are definitely tasting their food throughout, even if not enjoying the final creation. And many many many woodworkers I know have the random hodgepodge of bespoke furniture spread throughout their property.
by SafeDusk | 2025-05-18 08:38:09+00:00
Instead of connecting to a server with 1000(s) of tools, I'm going the opposite direction and claim that you only need <10 sharp tools/small function for most use cases.

As an example, today I re-implemented Google's AlphaEvolve with <7 tools (https://toolkami.com/alphaevolve-toolkami-style/).
by microtonal | 2025-05-18 08:38:56+00:00
Honestly, the problem is, in most of the cities, people who drive almost never bike.

That's true, but you have to bootstrap it. People will also not bike if it's not safe or attractive to do. In the city I live in, the city center was pretty unsafe for pedestrians and cyclists until the end of the 70s. Two persistent politicians decided to pretty much ban cars from the city center [1], which led to a lot of protests. They persisted and in 1977 the switch was flipped on a single day. Nowadays everyone here is in favor of this and other cities have made the same change, because people realize now that a city center without cars is much nicer: you can walk around much more carelessly, the air is cleaner, etc. Also, it made biking far more attractive, because you can get from the outskirts of the city to some shop much faster by bike than by car.

Since then, the cycling network has been continuously optimized to be able to travel between different points in the city as possible as quickly as possible and with as few interactions with cars as possible. And there are other amenities like traffic light that increase priority for cyclists when it is raining (to encourage people to cycle even when it is raining).

The same is true outside the cities, where there is a dense cycling network, largely separated from car roads. Both for fast work <-> home routing and for recreational cycling. The latter is the so-called fietsknooppunten network that prefers nice routes through nature, etc. over short routes [2].

[1] Article in Dutch: https://www.aanpakringzuid.nl/actueel/nieuws/verhalen/straks... , Google translation: https://www-aanpakringzuid-nl.translate.goog/actueel/nieuws/...

[2] Fietsknooppunten: https://www.fietsknoop.nl/planner
by ninjin | 2025-05-18 08:39:30+00:00
These are different people:

https://arxiv.org/search/cs?searchtype=author&query=Nguyen,+...

Wikipedia mentions that up to ~40% of the Vietnamese population (~40,000,000 people) carries the name Nguyen:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nguyen

For the paper itself, as someone working in the field, I find it interesting enough to consider reading at some point (I do not read that many analysis papers recently, but this one looks better than most). As for your accusation about it claiming that large language models are simply n-gram models, read the abstract until you realise that your accusation is very much unfair to the work.
by montebicyclelo | 2025-05-18 08:40:31+00:00
Edit: increased the validation to 10,000 life grids for 100 steps, (taking 16 minutes to check), which is hopefully somewhat more convincing. That's 1,000,000 life steps computed without errors in total. Plus 32,000 steps computed without error during training.

When the attention grid is manually computed (to be equivalent to 3 by 3 conv), the model can be trained to be 100% perfect, verified by checking all 3 by 3 grid states. (And this manually computed attention matrix means that once the tokens reach the classifier layer, each token contains only the information of the relevant 3 by 3 grid, and the whole thing is deterministic as you say.)

However, when the model is computing the attention grid itself, just checking all 3 by 3 sub-grid states crop up is not enough, because the position of the sub-grids can impact the attention matrix, and also the state of other cells can impact the attention matrix. So as shown in the post, it does approximate 3 by 3 conv, but if it doesn't get the approximation quite right, there could be errors. But I would say that it's still computing the Game of Life algorithm in an interpretable way, it's just that maybe it has struggled to create a perfect 3 by 3 convolution via attention in that particular case. (To exhaustively check this, would require checking all 2 * (16x16) grids.)
by anovikov | 2025-05-18 08:41:34+00:00
Why not just introduce a competitive, market-based system and let the market decide? Give a monthly subsidy to every woman for having a child until the age of 18, regardless of marital status and number of children, and fund it by a flat per-head tax (flat as in, in $, not %). Adjust amount of subsidy as the birthrate changes to keep it at the optimum level, locking it in (inflation adjusted) till kid reaches 18. Poor women will be compelled to have kids because they can't afford the tax. Because they can have many of them, easily 5-6, and it will immediately become competitive as subsidies fall as the market is saturated (we all know too well how any market with no entry barriers and guaranteed pay works - it is immediately inundated by supply, see Upwork) - the resulting fee will be very low. People who refuse paying tax claiming no income - send them to work (women) or military service (men). In a poorer country that could result in mass emigration, but Norway is rich and no one in a sane mind will escape it.

Problem solved.
by usrusr | 2025-05-18 08:42:15+00:00
> It seems like when the cars are going slower -- and there are fewer of them -- there are fewer crashes

Yes, because the throughput of that fast, high density road is so much bigger. Subjectively it feels like it has something like 2x the amount of cars, and when we look at accident density we may very well correct by that factor, but in reality the difference in throughput is much bigger. Number of cars present at a given point in time x speed. That quiet road, it's close to having no car throughput at all compared to the big one, but it still sees the occasional accident.
by tails4e | 2025-05-18 08:43:18+00:00
RISC-V is not immune from license fees, unless you want to design a high performance core from the ground up. If you want something as capable as an M4, there is years of R&D to get to that level. I'm sure a big player could do just that in house, but many would license Si-Five or similar. It will be interesting to see if Qualcomm and the like would make a move towards RISC-V, given their ARM legal issues
by nis251413 | 2025-05-18 08:43:41+00:00
Yeah I also have amblyopia and am curious about this. How does it work with the two lenses/screens? I assume if eg one with normal binocular eyesight closes one eye, they are able to see the screen on the open eye side normally? In some sense I would imagine it should be just minus one problem to solve this way (the vergence accommodation) if one does not care about stereoscopy.

I tried once the apple vision pro and it seemed fine, amblyopia-wise at least. It was too briefly though to know for sure how it would be like using it for longer.
by card_zero | 2025-05-18 08:43:47+00:00
Dungeons and Dragons was different, because it encouraged the confusion of fantasy with reality. But in the case of algorithm-driven social media feeds the difference is different, I take it?

The scale is bigger, I think that's the key thing. I can vaguely imagine an alternate history where D&D is as popular as TikTok, and then Russia and China are publishing their own Monster Manuals full of propaganda, and laws start to appear limiting it to over 18s due to the potential for brain rot as proven by studies.
by Neikius | 2025-05-18 08:43:48+00:00
In my opinion the biggest problem is people who design roads/infrastructure don't bike. When they bike they will know what to do and how to pay attention.

So right now there is this huge push in EU to make more bike infrastructure. But people making it ... don't bike. At least not everywhere. And where they don't they will inevitably make bad bike infrastructure. This could just be corners that are too tight. Bad incline on a corner for example will not be obvious to someone who never bikes, could be just a few degrees. But on a bike it's deadly! Maybe not on dry asphalt, but bring some rain, sand, whatever and people will fall.

And then we can start talking about culture.
by nonrandomstring | 2025-05-18 08:49:00+00:00
Essay touches on an important point that I also discovered along my research journey; Much of the knowledge of experts is ineffable [0]. And so here's the problem with present "AI". It contains no ineffable knowledge, because that knowledge is never symbolically expressed and cannot be inferred from what is expressed. In fact the "official" narrative often disguises the real knowledge.

This is what the analytical elicitation stage of expert systems [1] was supposed to address (a now mature but presently unfashionable branch of "AI").

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ineffability

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expert_system
by usrusr | 2025-05-18 08:50:15+00:00
> The cost of bike lanes isn't too bad. Unlike a car road it doesn't require a lot of maintenance.

Tell that to cyclists used to navigating mandatory bike infrastructure full of terribly broken up surface. If car lanes were that quality, people would put the authorities under permanent siege with torches and pitchforks, for refusing to maintain roads.

"Oh, but that road is fine, few spots where you have to step out of the car to push it". For some reason, people responsible for bike infrastructure (outside .nl or Copenhagen) tend to think that it's ok to slow down to walking speed or dismount, on main routes. Imagine similar things required from drivers.
by mantas | 2025-05-18 08:50:22+00:00
Social democracy is also capitalism.

I’d rather word that differently. High-trust societies with little expectation of privacy and valuing community tend to do well with social democracy. Otherwise people end up abusing the system and it’s hard to catch them if privacy trumps community needs.

Here in ex-USSR country people are very pro privacy and individualist. At the same time we try to copy a lot of Nordic stuff from our neighbors. It’s a shitshow how those cultures mesh. A lot of welfare abuse, hiding beyond muh privacy to avoid scrutinity.
by znpy | 2025-05-18 08:50:36+00:00
> Is data access in such a project purely from in-memory sources?

yes.

> I suspect most people shun it because database access- especially if the DB itself is over the network on a different machine- already slow enough that ZGC / zero allocation won't be noticed.

Database access, if you're talking network latency query/transaction processing time, is essentially irrespective of the language being used, so that's not a good reason to shun Java as a language/rutime anyway.
by niel | 2025-05-18 08:50:39+00:00
> In a year from now

You can get a taste of this already.

While they still call it a prototype/beta, Sentry's MCP server [0] is a model for others to follow when it comes to convenience and usefulness.

Remote-first with OAuth. The biggest hurdle to using it as-is at the moment, is that most clients don't natively support OAuth yet, so often you'll rely on a local proxy server, like mcp-remote [1], to handle auth. Clients will catch up.

[0] https://mcp.sentry.dev/

[1] https://github.com/geelen/mcp-remote
by chrismorgan | 2025-05-18 08:50:52+00:00
Among those that read and study the Bible:

A hundred years ago, everyone used the King James Version of the Bible.¹ Poorly though it reflected the common language², it was a shared experience, and things like memorisation and making and recognising scriptural allusions were straightforward, because everyone used the same words. Now, a wide variety of Bible translations are in common use, some more accurate than the KJV, some more loose paraphrases, all more understandable. There are some big advantages in this variety and modernity—but we have lost something. The shared experience had a virtue of its own, quite a significant one.

—⁂—

¹ OK, by a hundred years ago the RV and ASV were used in some areas, but it was mostly as a distant extra to the KJV, not replacing it.

² I understand that some of it was already becoming archaic, or at least overly formal, when it was published, such as thee/thou (singular you). The fact is, it was “appointed to be read in Churches”, and they wanted it to sound impressive. Compare it with Tyndale’s translation almost a hundred years earlier, and Tyndale’s generally reads much more easily—because Tyndale wanted uneducated people to be able to understand the Bible.³

³ “And sone after Maister Tyndall happened to be in the companie of a learned man, and in communing and disputing with him, drove him to that issue that the learned manne sayde, we were better be without Gods lawe, then the Popes: Maister Tyndall hearing that, answered hym, I defie the Pope and all his lawes, and sayde, if God spare my lyfe ere many yeares, I wyl cause a boye that dryveth the plough, shall knowe more of the scripture then thou doest.” — John Foxe, Actes and Monuments (1563), page 570.
by fud101 | 2025-05-18 08:50:55+00:00
I get frustrated when i get home and have to flip on the light swithc then find the remote to turn on the other light switch. I have a HA setup but the light/fan is controlled by some RF nonsense which I bought a RM4 PRo for that home assitant can talk to - but it doesnt, so i have to use the app for the rm4 pro.It's all bad. I dont use it lol
by chokma | 2025-05-18 08:51:03+00:00
> It’s made me realize that the sharing it with others part was always my favorite part of listening/watching and, without that, I can’t really become emotionally invested it the experience.

Perhaps this is a factor in the rise of reaction videos where people consume the content with you and react to it. A somewhat shallow experience, but someone pretending to genuinely like the same music video as I do is - in the vastness of the internet - slightly better than consuming completely alone.
by apexalpha | 2025-05-18 08:52:51+00:00
I have been playing with HA for years.

Just as everyone I started out by automating lights and other stuff...

And just like (almost) everyone I quickly found out my life really isn't structured enough for automation at the level of detail like one light in one room.

While I love the "scenes" (turn off X, Y and Z with one press) and the observability (see state of lights on 2nd and 3rd floor at one flance) I pretty much stopped automating stuff.

First time lights turn off when Plex starts? Great, like in a cinema!

7th time? After discovering 500 edge cases. Not so much.

Now I'm in the process of creating mini-dashboard per room that I put on a NFC tag next to the door. A quick tap in every room to control everything in that room and nothing more.

It's so simple even my wife uses it, usually a good indicator you've actually added some value as opposed to just doing something 'smart' because you can.
by wongarsu | 2025-05-18 08:53:10+00:00
I don't think the Berne Convention on Copyright was meant as a complete list of things where humans have valuable input. Translators do shape the space in which they generate output. Their space isn't any single language bit rather the connecting space between languages.

Most translation work is simple just as the day-to-day of many creative professions is rather uncreative. But translating a book, comic or movie requires creative decisions on how to best convey the original meaning in the idioms and cultural context of a different language. The difference between a good and a bag translation can be stark
by znpy | 2025-05-18 08:58:17+00:00
> but i really want to have atleast 96GB in notebook, tablet.

in notebooks it's been possible for years. a friend of mine had 128gb (4x32gb ddr4) in his laptop about 4-6 years ago already. it was a dell precision workstation (2100 euros for the laptop alone, core i9 cpu, nothing fancy).

Nowadays you can get 64gb individual ddr5 laptop ram sticks. as long as you can find a laptop with two ram sockets you can easily get 128b memory on laptops.

regarding tablets... it's unlikely to be seen (<edit> in the near future</edit>). tablet OEMs tip their hats to the general consumer markets, where <=16gb ram is more than enough (and 96gb memory would cost more than the rest of the hardware for no real user/market/sales advantage)
by pseudony | 2025-05-18 08:59:16+00:00
Ownership models like Rust require a grester ability for holistic refactoring, otherwise a change in one place causes a lifetime issue elsewhere. This is actually exactly what LLM's are doing the worst at.

Beyond that, a Python with something like lifetimes implies doing away with garbage-collection - there really isn't any need for lifetimes otherwise.

What you are suggesting has nothing to do with Python and completely misses the point of why python became so widely used.

The more general point is that garbage collection is very appealing from a usability standpoint and it removes a whole class of errors. People who don't see that value should look again at the rise of Java vs c/c++. Businesses largely aren't paying for "beautiful", exacting memory management, but for programs which work and hopefully can handle more business concerns with the same development budget.