MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by kragen | 2025-05-10 23:16:59+00:00
The 31-byte demo "Klappquadrat" by T$ is based on this phenomenon; I wrote a page about how it works a few years ago, including a working Python2 reimplementation with Numpy: http://canonical.org/~kragen/demo/klappquadrat.html

I should probably update that page to explain how to use objdump correctly to disassemble MS-DOG .COM files.

If you like making fractal patterns with bitwise arithmetic, you'll probably love http://canonical.org/~kragen/sw/dev3/trama. Especially if you like stack machines too. The page is entirely in Spanish (except for an epilepsy safety warning) but I suspect that's unlikely to be a problem in practice.
by aaronmdjones | 2025-05-10 23:17:00+00:00
Yeah, $25k seems really really low. My fully-comprehensive insurance was renewed for 12 months recently for just under £400, and I'm covered for third-party liability up to £20M, except at specifically-defined hazardous locations (nuclear installations, power stations, refineries, railways, etc), where it is only £1.2M.
by bsder | 2025-05-10 23:18:14+00:00
> This is probably why having some churn with the outside world, and also understanding what is the periphery of the outside, unbiased opinion is, is very important.

Maximally efficient is minimally robust.

Squeezing every penny out of something means optimizing perfectly for present conditions--no more, no less. As long as those conditions shift slowly, slight adjustments work.

If those conditions shift suddenly though, death ensues.
by bitwize | 2025-05-10 23:18:23+00:00
Even then, the Commodore Plus/4 could do some pretty sophisticated gaming, even without the dedicated sprites of the VIC-II -- simply because the CPU was about twice as fast as the C64's. An example: https://psytronik.itch.io/pets-rescue

Anyway, that's blasphemy to a Commodore fan, especially an Amiga fan, to whom good system design consists of having amazing custom silicon for which the CPU is a mere mediator. After all, if a faster CPU were really all you needed, the PC wouldn't suck as much as it does!

This school of thought won out in the end, as most of the compute in today's high-performance applications (like AI) is done on the GPU, the CPU's role being to transfer programs and data to the GPU, basically a front-end processor to the actual computer which is made by NVIDIA.
by marvinborner | 2025-05-10 23:18:23+00:00
Very cool! This basically encodes a quad-tree of bits where every except one quadrant of each subquadrant recurses on the parent quad-tree.

The corresponding equivalent of functional programming would be Church bits in a functional quad-tree encoding \s.(s TL TR BL BR). Then, the Sierpinski triangle can be written as (Y \fs.(s f f f #f)), where #f is the Church bit \tf.f!

Rendering proof: https://lambda-screen.marvinborner.de/?term=ERoc0CrbYIA%3D
by overfeed | 2025-05-10 23:18:30+00:00
> it’s clear the goal is to reduce inbound volume from the world.

This is painting the bullseye around the arrow - while this was entirely predictable, when did anyone in the administration state that this[1] was the goal? This goal is obviously is contrary to another stated policy goal of lowering inflation.

1. Initially, the stated goal was to make trade imbalances "fair"
by dialup_sounds | 2025-05-10 23:18:30+00:00
It's not a technicality, it's literally what the claim was: "Seattle's marine cargo terminals were empty and international vessels had stopped calling into the port as of April 29, 2025, due to the U.S.'s newly imposed tariffs."

The fact that the terminals are not empty doesn't mean the economy isn't fucked, so there's no reason to argue about it either way.
by gazpacho | 2025-05-10 23:19:05+00:00
I agree. At risk of being totally off base because I have not been keeping up with the details of the legal matter it seems to me that the solution isn't to kill Google's core business but rather to force it to sell off some of these branches, with thought and strategy. E.g. one of the comments below pointed out that Google Flights competes with other sites / businesses. Seems like a good candidate to spin off: it could probably be a profitable business in it's own right. Android? Chrome? Idk about those: who / how are they going to be funded? Each piece needs to be analyzed and a deal needs to be struck that's not based on principles as much as it is on what is pragmatically the right balance that benefits people (the American people in particular) the most in the medium to long term.
by 0xbadcafebee | 2025-05-10 23:19:09+00:00
You're only thinking of consumers. That's still not small potatoes - Google Workspace has 3 billion active users every month (37% of the planet). Office365 has 270 million.

But on the business side, there are 6 million businesses that use Google Workspace to manage their company - their drives, documents, email, distribution lists, SSO, etc. They can't just flip a switch and migrate their entire company to another provider. It would take months to years for most companies to fully migrate. And that's for the products/services that there's an analogue for. Not every Google feature and product has a 1:1 replacement.

Back to the consumer side - it will be insane the number of things affected that nobody is thinking of. Off the top of my head, imagine the billions of people who have used Google SSO to sign up for random websites, and imagine that just stops working. And on top of that, they were all using Gmail. So now they can't login to all the websites they're signed up for, and they can't send a password reset, because their email no longer works. This is just a few of the thousands of issues there will be, for a large chunk of the planet.
by kristianp | 2025-05-10 23:19:18+00:00
What's a good book to read about the early days of Apple? I enjoy these stories but this is necessarily skipping a lot of the story of the apple I and II. A search brings up "The Little Kingdom" by Moritz, but it was published in 1984 so it may include the Mac also released in '84 [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_128K
by nradov | 2025-05-10 23:19:51+00:00
You're ignoring second-order effects. While the big pharma companies do some original drug development themselves, they also commonly acquire start-ups which have promising drugs that aren't approved yet. This is tremendously risky because many of those drugs never get approved, or don't sell very well. Most of those start-ups would never have been founded in the first place if an acquisition wasn't possible.

If we want to have new a lot of new drugs every year that meet the FDA standard for being safe and effective then someone has to put in enormous capital investments. In theory I suppose we could raise taxes and socialize the whole system but so far I haven't seen any evidence that would be a net improvement. More likely just another opportunity for graft and corruption.
by notepad0x90 | 2025-05-10 23:20:05+00:00
Google/Alphabet made a critical mistake. When the Alphabet parent company was founded, Google search and AD should have been divested. All those product lines you mentioned should have been part of separate corporations where at most Google is a minority owner in a joint venture. Google will still rip benefits including profits and some exclusivity but it won't stifle competition by directing those product to align with what benefits its AD revenue stream.

DOJ is in the wrong when trying to open up search and ad, it should simply split Google up in the way I mentioned earlier. Search and advertising should be their own completely independent company. Mostly everyone wins that way: Competitors, the public , shareholders (one product line won't sink the rest, no "all your eggs in one basket" situation) and even majority shareholders.
by nobody9999 | 2025-05-10 23:20:38+00:00
>I think their point isn't the number of people, but that a heavy weed smoker might maybe run through a few joints in a day while cigarette smokers might run through a couple dozen.

According to an expert, it's 32 joints or so a day[0], although that may be slightly hyperbolic?

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PUYUkrwjEt4
by hintymad | 2025-05-10 23:21:26+00:00
> The US is the world's second biggest manufacturing country, almost on par with China. We have lots of manufacturing -- we just rely on automation instead of people.

On overall market cap, yes. What I'm not sure about are the numbers in key industries. For instance, we rely on China on key pharmaceutical ingredients. Heck, we were even in a crisis of shortage of salient solutions when there was a supply crunch from China. China manufactured more than 90% of the ships in the world. China manufactured many types of low-end chips we use in power supplies, in cars, and etc. The cost of our custom components on airplanes and battleships have been increasing through the roof because we simply can't rely on civil factories to make them cheaply. The list can go on.
by palata | 2025-05-10 23:21:36+00:00
> And I say this because I have a large amount of evidence - from cases where I was a subject matter expert - that the overwhelming majority of these cases turn out to be ones in which the proposed duplicate was very obviously a duplicate.

I think you miss something basic here. Nobody is saying "no question should ever be closed as a duplicate". What I am saying, is that I have had many of my own questions, where I was an SME, that were closed as duplicate where in fact they were not duplicates and the answers on the "duplicate" were not even applicable. By "many" I mean "enough for me to consider StackOverflow moderation toxic and leaving.

Because many questions are actually duplicates doesn't mean that all are duplicates. But you don't seem to be even remotely open to the idea that it can ever happen that a question is wrongly closed as a duplicate. Again, I have had questions closed where I listed the "similar questions" suggested by SO and explained why they were not duplicates. Do you think the moderators would have discussed it with me? It felt like they didn't even read my question entirely because in some cases I can't get how someone who knows how to read may ignore my "warning: this is not a duplicate of X because [...]".
by kaibee | 2025-05-10 23:22:46+00:00
> Godless evolution suggests randomness produced all of it overtime.

Nope. Randomness _and_ a selection function. Natural selection, ie: surviving to create the next generation.

> Yet, that's never worked in anything we've built.

It works completely fine in things we've built. We don't have the processing power to simulate something on the scale of computational complexity happening a small tide pond though. But you can see 'evolution by natural selection' in a rule set as simple as Game of Life.

> Even our GA's required laws, an environment, a computer, software, and fine-tuning. Pre-existing or by intelligent design (human inventors). Without these, it produced no results.

The laws/environment/computer are the equivalent of having a universe with physical laws. If you want to claim that god created the universe and tuned the constants of the universe, well, maybe. Or maybe every possible universe exists and we're just not around in the ones that don't lead to conscious life, in the same way that Game of Life universe is too simple/constrained to evolve conscious life on the scales we can simulate.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vHb07ynsPgo
by const_cast | 2025-05-10 23:24:41+00:00
True, but the government also has more accountability.

Exhibit A: freedom of speech. Public institutions have a very high bar they have to meet to ensure freedom of speech. The private sector has nothing of the sort.

You can be banned or censored for just about anything in the private sector. So when we move really important stuff to the private sector, that can be a problem.

In action: payment processors, which provide essentially public infrastructure, censoring immoral or profane content, such as pornography.
by TMWNN | 2025-05-10 23:25:11+00:00
Quoting myself from the prior discussion (with a correction):

-----------------

Woz explains why the original Apple II (1977) doesn't support lowercase letters. That's not surprising, in retrospect; of its major contemporaries, the TRS-80 Model I does not either, despite being developed by a major corporation with substantial resources. (The Commodore PET 2001 does support lowercase, but the keyboard is so terrible that it might as well not.)

He doesn't explain why the Apple II+ (1979)—after the II's market success was proven—doesn't support lowercase letters. Even if software uses graphics mode to display lowercase letters, the II and II+'s keyboard does not have physical/electrical support for detecting shifted letters. Since graphics mode is cumbersome and slow, word processors for the II and II+ typically use reverse video to indicate capital letters, and use another key like Escape as a shift toggle. A popular alternative is the shift-key mod that fattire mentioned, which requires soldering of a wire to one of the paddle ports.

The lack of support is because the company was working on the Apple III (1980), which it expected would quickly obsolete the II series. The III has built-in 80-column text and full lowercase support, at both the character-font and physical-keyboard levels. Apple had incentive to not make the II too attractive.

Neither Woz nor anyone else at Apple expected that a) the III would quickly fail, and b) the II series would remain Apple's bread and butter. Without the III's distraction the II+ would surely have had built-in lowercase software and hardware support, or there would have been another II around 1981 with such. As it were, the III took up so much of Apple's resources that the Apple IIe did not appear until 1983, by which time the IBM PC had surpassed the II series.
by andrewmcwatters | 2025-05-10 23:25:31+00:00
I have a problem with the characterization of ADHD, because it just sounds like... children being children, or maladaptive adults not taking active control of their executive function. I acknowledge that the issues are real, but I suspect like many others that the issues patients have are ones that arise from societal requests and requirements.

I think the attempt to formally classify attention deficit disorder is mostly unscientific and one of care rather than something that can be objectively measured. The article and the professionals in it don't discuss any measurement of the condition, rather the lack thereof.

I think people who want care for ADHD should receive it, but I think the term is wildly out of date and we should have some sort of new term for the condition that doesn't have the same connotations, or just promote the societal idea that if you need nootropics to focus, that's OK.
by kragen | 2025-05-10 23:25:52+00:00
Output from `cr pascal` in GForth:

1 1 1 1 0 1 1 1 1 1 1 0 0 0 1 1 1 0 0 1 1 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 1 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 1 1 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 1 1 1 1 1 0 0 0 0 1 1 1 1 1 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 1 1 1 0 0 1 1 0 0 1 1 0 0 1 1 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 1 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 1 ok

By changing `4 .r` to `bl + dup dup dup emit emit emit emit` I get this:

!!!! !!!!!!!! !!!! !!!! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! !!!! !!!! !!!!!!!! !!!!!!!! !!!! !!!! !!!! !!!! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! !!!! !!!! !!!!!!!! !!!!!!!! !!!! !!!! !!!! !!!! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! !!!! !!!! !!!! !!!! !!!!!!!! !!!!!!!! !!!!!!!! !!!!!!!! !!!! !!!! !!!! !!!! !!!! !!!! !!!! !!!! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! !!!! !!!! !!!!!!!! !!!!!!!! ok

But this is not using bitwise AND, just the Pascal's triangle approach. (Interestingly, you can reformulate that as a neighborhood-2 2-state 1-dimensional cellular automaton pretty easily; it occurs in a couple of different guises in Wolfram's catalog.)

Here's an ASCII-art version that uses AND as Michał describes:

32 value size : line cr size 0 do dup i and if bl else [char] # then dup emit emit loop drop ; : pasand size 0 do i line loop ;

Running `pasand` then yields this:

################################################################ ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## #### #### #### #### #### #### #### #### ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ######## ######## ######## ######## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## #### #### #### #### ## ## ## ## ################ ################ ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## #### #### #### #### ## ## ## ## ######## ######## ## ## ## ## #### #### ## ## ################################ ## ## ## ## ## ## ## ## #### #### #### #### ## ## ## ## ######## ######## ## ## ## ## #### #### ## ## ################ ## ## ## ## #### #### ## ## ######## ## ## #### ## ok
by sxyuan | 2025-05-10 23:26:03+00:00
If it's about gathering our thoughts, there's meditation. Or journaling. Or prayer. Some have even claimed that there is an all-powerful being listening to you on the other side with that last one. (One might even call it an intelligence, just not an artificial one.)

There's also talking to a friend. Sure, they could also steer you wrong, but at least they won't be impersonating a therapist, and they won't be doing it to try to please their investors.
by bsder | 2025-05-10 23:26:44+00:00
VC thinking at its worst:

Me: “Why does competitor X have five times your revenue?” Entrepreneur: “We are using partners and OEMs, because we can’t build a direct channel like competitor X.” Me: “Why not? If you have the better product, why not knuckle up and go to war?”

Um, because building out direct sales means we will have to hire a bunch of people, expend a huge amount of our revenue, and have a decent probability that we will completely fail and take the company with it.

But, yeah, that's visionary!

> “If our company isn’t good enough to win, then do we need to exist at all?”

Note that "successful" has only one definition to these kinds of people. Deal with them at your own peril.
by nulld3v | 2025-05-10 23:27:00+00:00
> I doubt many people are doing things to allow Googlebot but also ban other search crawlers.

Sadly this is just not the case.[1][2] Google knows this too so they explicitly crawl from a specific IP range that they publish.[3]

I also know this, because I had a website that blocked any bots outside of that IP range. We had honeypot links (hidden to humans via CSS) that insta-banned any user or bot that clicked/fetched them. User-Agent from curl, wget, or any HTTP lib = insta-ban. Crawling links sequentially across multiple IPs = all banned. Any signal we found that indicated you were not a human using a web browser = ban.

We were listed on Google and never had traffic issues.

[1] https://onescales.com/blogs/main/the-bot-blocklist

[2] Chart in the middle of this page: https://blog.cloudflare.com/declaring-your-aindependence-blo... (note: Google-Extended != Googlebot)

[3] https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/...
by notepad0x90 | 2025-05-10 23:27:16+00:00
What are arguments for involving HTTP/streaming at all in the context of MCP?

As I understand, the agent sdk/ADK can simply start a child process and use STDIO to execute MCP commands. Why not always use that approach? if some REST api needs to be queried, the child process can abstract that interaction and expose it by the same consistent MCP interface. That way, devs are free to use REST,SOAP,*RPC,etc.. or whatever they want.
by pierrec | 2025-05-10 23:27:27+00:00
It's common in graphics and audio programming. In audio, maybe you're synthesizing noise or any of the myriad synthesis techniques that require noise. In graphics you have lighting, textures, etc that can use this. And when you're doing something every audio sample or every pixel, "extremely fast" is desirable. The question of whether to use a pre-rendered lookup table or a fast algorithm often comes up (and has no universal answer... though I always go for the latter)
by aappleby | 2025-05-10 23:29:06+00:00
I'm not sure that the claim "the mix function is injective" is sufficient to support the claim "The period is at least 2^128". If the mix is reversible then it forms a permutation on 2^192, but that does not imply that it forms a single cyclic permutation.

For example, if f(0) = 1 and f(1) = 0, even if the rest of f's domain is injective the period of f is still only 2 when the initial value is 0 or 1.
by tptacek | 2025-05-10 23:29:34+00:00
I sort of don't care, as long as investor value isn't being protected abusively, by anticompetitive schemes with the patent system and exclusivity. We pay lots of money for all sorts of things, most of which don't actually matter to our lives; pharmaceuticals matter a great deal, and I'm OK with the idea that advancements are incentivized by a time-limited lane for nosebleed pricing.

(Pharmaceutical costs, all in, across the board, are a relatively small component of total health spending in the US. They're not why your health insurance is so expensive.)

This is mostly a story about anticompetitive abuses, so that question isn't super relevant to the story. I'm just answering the claim that invisible marketing/SG&A costs are why drugs cost so much. They also cost a lot because most drugs fail, sometimes after billions invested.
by const_cast | 2025-05-10 23:29:57+00:00
It's just a human geography thing. Developed countries reproduce less because they provide greater autonomy to women. Underdeveloped or developing countries reproduce much more.

Turns out if you give women a choice to have children, a lot of them will say no. They'd rather have career. Having children has, like, a lot of downsides. It can literally kill you.
by matt-p | 2025-05-10 23:30:19+00:00
AI data centres rarely actually need to resort to using water because they're using DTC and not air cooling, so we're looking at cooling 60 degree Celsius water down to ~40 which you can do compressorless with dry coolers alone. In practice many will use cooling towers instead or aswell but they still don't need to evaporate nearly as much water as a normal low density data centre would per KW.

By the way "spray the condenser" technology is very very rare because it's pretty much worst of both worlds and nowhere near as good or efficient as a cooling tower but much more maintenance than a dry cooler + compressor. Typically for high efficiency modern sites you'd be looking at cooling towers or dry cooler + compressor for water facilities or spray the water directly onto the air (direct or indirect adiabatic) for air based facilities.

To complicate things many (typically city DCs/Colos/ enterprise facilities) are air based facilities that convert to water by using heat exchangers in the datahalls.
by classichasclass | 2025-05-10 23:30:25+00:00
Yes, for two reasons. The VIC-20 used 6522 VIAs as I/O chips, and these had a notorious bug in their shift registers requiring a bitbanged IEC serial I/O routine instead. This wasn't a big deal on a system with 5K of RAM, but it was a real problem on the 64. The 64 has 6526 CIAs for I/O, where faster IEC serial communications should have been possible, but the wiring got screwed up during board design and VIC-II DMA ("badlines") caused timing interruptions at inconvenient times, which demanded slowing it down even more. (A remnant of this is UI- and UI+ to speed up and slow down loading when used with the VIC-20, but that only works on the 64 if the screen is off.)

Commodore tried to solve this twice. The first time was for the Plus/4 series with TCBM drives which connected through the expansion port. The only drive of this type was the 1551, which was very fast, but only worked with the Plus/4 family. Commodore was going to design a TCBM interface for the 64 as well, but it wasn't really necessary as pretty much everyone had a fastloader by then. The 128 has a fixed serial bus and burst mode when combined with the 1571 disk drive, which is also very fast and doesn't require using the expansion port, but by then it was 1985 and the 8-bits were on their way out.

The 1571 is way better than the 1541, IME. It's faster with the 128, it's 100% compatible, it's more reliable and less prone to alignment problems, and it can also read MFM formats. But Bob worked on the 1541, so he loves it. :)