MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by usefulcat | 2025-05-31 23:34:32+00:00
Many trading strategies operate on very thin margins. Most of the time it's less than one cent per share, often as little as a tenth of a cent per share or less.

A different example: let's say that you're trying to buy some security, and you've determined that the maximum price you can pay and still be profitable is 10.01. If you mistakenly use an order price of 10.00, you'll probably get fewer shares than you wanted, possibly none. If you mistakenly use a price of 10.02, you may end up paying too much and then that trade ends up not being profitable. If you use a price of 10.0199999 (assuming it's even possible to represent such a price via whatever protocol you're using), either your broker or the exchange will likely reject the order for having an invalid price.
by DavidVoid | 2025-05-31 23:35:08+00:00
It matters for reproducibility between software versions, right?

I work in audio software and we have some comparison tests that compare the audio output of a chain of audio effects with a previous result. If we make some small refactoring of the code and the compiler decides to re-organize the arithmetic operations then we might suddenly get a slightly different output. So of course we disable fast-math.

One thing we do enable though, is flushing denormals to zero. That is predictable behavior and it saves some execution time.
by seanmcdirmid | 2025-05-31 23:35:17+00:00
In China at least, toilet paper wasn’t soluable for a long time and sewer plumbing wasn’t up to standard, so you used the waste basket for your TP. You would also bring your own TP to public bathrooms and they had no idea if your TP was soluable or not (lots of cheaper kinds aren’t). These days, toilet paper is universally soluable and plumbing is much better, you can totally flush it (and I always do when I’m there) but so many people grew up being told not to that they still have and use waste baskets.
by stinkbeetle | 2025-05-31 23:35:45+00:00
> For context, the 0.1 rem yearly dose to the patient is about 1/6th of the average background dose we all get every year.

Wouldn't you be more concerned about dose rates in tissues near the device though, rather than whole body dose? At the surface of the pacemaker it would be about 90 rem / year.
by GarethX | 2025-05-31 23:36:33+00:00
I’m intrigued by the potential of Linear agents to help with product development, especially the grunt work.

Asking around, some of the agents being worked on by folks I know include agents that:

- auto-update issue statuses based on GitHub activity.

- post daily summaries of Linear changes to Slack.

- discusses product requirements with you and creates Linear issues

- listens to Sentry error stream and auto creates linear issues for new crash signatures

- interprets GitHub events such as pull requests and deployment reviews, and propagates that context back to related Linear tickets
by mschuster91 | 2025-05-31 23:36:52+00:00
> I realize that verification can often be wrong (especially now with the ubiquity of LLMs), but I think the view that employers are simply looking for "cogs" and avoiding "artisans" is an arrogant and cynical take on what a degree is supposed to indicate.

Look at how many basic paper pusher bullshit jobs these days require some sort of academic degree (often enough, it's literally any academic degree). It's obvious that the true intention is to violate the ADA and other anti discrimination laws in spirit without violating it in a legal sense, because it's pretty obvious that minorities and those with any kind of disadvantages have markedly lower chances of acquiring an academic degree.

And even leaving that aside, "academic degree" is a good proxy for "doesn't use drugs to a degree he can't function, doesn't have too bad ADHD or other issues, is likely able to fulfill duties somewhat on time and has an attention span of larger than 30 seconds". This is stuff that companies had to risk hiring (and firing) on their own dime, so by requiring an academic degree they offload that cost onto the prospective employees.
by hansvm | 2025-05-31 23:36:58+00:00
It's the same sort of bug that killed that Mars mission and the same reason some people insist on keyword parameters instead of ordered parameters. People make mistakes, and implicit conversions allow those mistakes to silently propagate. Given how easy it is to strongly type everything and use explicit conversions, the default for most nontrivial software should be closer to TFA rather than allowing implicit conversions or overloading the semantics of a type.
by mschuster91 | 2025-05-31 23:37:45+00:00
> Taking algorithms, theoretical comp sci, discrete structures - these transformed me from a code monkey to a real programmer.

That's what I meant! Companies don't want "real programmers". They want cogs who mindlessly implement what some "architect" dreams up, no questions asked.

Land the architect role and you're set for life (or at least until AGI appears), but everything else is just destined to be either moved off to AI or be replaced by some sort of offshoring venture.
by ivansavz | 2025-05-31 23:38:56+00:00
> do you still intend to publish a guide to statistics?

Yes! Very much so. I'm in the final stages of cooking it right now, hoping to make it available for sale in the coming months.

Statistics is by far the hardest subject I've had to write about, as I had to (re)learn pretty much everything. I did several rewrites (working on tis book for the past seven years!), but now it's finally ready to ship. You can check out the notebooks from the book here: https://nobsstats.com/ and a detailed outline here https://docs.google.com/document/d/1fwep23-95U-w1QMPU31nOvUn...

ETA July for digital download, then one round of copy-editing, and September for first print version.
Show HN: The Daily Quandary
by rjhackin | 2025-05-31 23:40:30+00:00
Some backstory: For over a decade, I have created many side projects but never published it online, failed to finish or lost interest.I am sure there are many in this spot.

This time around, I just wanted to break the barrier and publish online the simplest version possible. The output is couple of hours of work and its the "daily quandary". I plan to add more features to this.

I hope you guys like it and any feedback/advice is greatly appreciated. Thanks!
by tomhow | 2025-05-31 23:40:38+00:00
LLM-generated comments are not wanted on HN; we want to preserve it as a place for discussion between humans.

Also, comments of the format "here's what an LLM said about this topic:" are best avoided. We don't want to normalise a style of discussing issues in which we generate an LLM output and make that the central conversation topic; we prefer original human thought here.
by AngryData | 2025-05-31 23:42:57+00:00
Yeah, if something comes wet in a package, it means it isn't going to dissolve in water, and at the end of the day is like flushing pieces of cloth down the toilet and will cause problems somewhere down the line.

Ass tons of people still do it though,and without legislation to prevent marketing it as fine, it is mostly municipal sewage, and thus everyone overall, that will pay for the additional maintenance caused by the few.
by BGZq7 | 2025-05-31 23:43:08+00:00
I think the issue is those aren't integers, they are ffmpeg expressions evaluating to integers. See e.g. this example from the ffmpeg documentation:

Draw a 2-pixel red 2.40:1 mask: drawbox=x=-t:y=0.5*(ih-iw/2.4)-t:w=iw+t*2:h=iw/2.4+t*2:t=2:c=red

Implementing type checking on this correctly would require something like a DSL.
by klabb3 | 2025-05-31 23:44:30+00:00
Intuitively I agree. In the long run, we’ll know better. But for now, nobody truly knows what the new equilibrium is.

That said: it’s one type of work that is getting dramatically cheaper. The debate is about the scope and quality of that labor, not whether it’s cheap or fast (it is). But if anything negative (errors, faults) compound, and the correction can NOT be done with the same tools, then you must still have humans triage errors. In my experience, bad code can already have negative value (it costs more to fix than rewrite).

In the medium term, the actual scope and ability for different tasks will remain unknown. It takes a lot of time to gather the experience to tell if something was a bad idea – just look at the graveyard of design patterns, languages and software practices. Many of them enjoyed the spotlight for a decade before the fallout hit.

Anyway, while the abilities are unknown, AI will be used everywhere for everything – which is only wise if it’s truly better at every general task – despite every available data about it shows vastly different ability in different domains/problem types. Many of those things will be both (a) worse than humans and (b) expensive to reverse, with compounding effects.

The funny thing is I have already seen enthusiasts basically acknowledging this but explaining that those compounding issues (think tech debt) is the right choice now because better AI will fix those issues in the future. To me, this feels like the early formations of religion (not metaphorically even). And I have a feeling that the goalpost moving from both sides will lead to an unfalsifiability deadlock in the debate.
by umanwizard | 2025-05-31 23:44:55+00:00
That’s true, but you still have to know much less information. In most cultures, most people eat the main evening meal somewhere between 18h and 23h; Southern Europe tends later in that range than most places, whereas the US tends earlier. This is still a lot simpler than each longitude having its own unique offset that can range anywhere from -12 to 12.

If you visit Spain as a tourist and eat at 19:00 local time every day, you’ll be slightly out of sync with the locals but you aren’t going to cause any huge drama. If you never even learned the fact that Spanish people eat later, you’d still basically be fine. So knowing that cultural fact about Spain isn’t absolutely essential the way it would be to learn the offset of each place in a world without time zones.
by fc417fc802 | 2025-05-31 23:47:12+00:00
Not shoplifters on a class basis "person who has shoplifted anywhere" but rather on an individual relation basis "person who has shoplifted from my business in the past".

Upon further thought my pool party example has a serious flaw that the instigator is coercing the actors to in turn coerce the third party. In a secondary boycott the instigators merely present their case along with proposed action and the consumers voluntarily coerce the third party if they are convinced. To fix my example then, I have an ongoing dispute, I inform my neighbors of this fact, I suggest (but certainly don't demand) that my neighbors might shun him if they feel similarly to myself, and the court then finds me to have violated the law.

"Vote with your wallet" is such a popular refrain when people advocate for regulation yet somehow the advocacy to organize that is what's being restricted by the courts here.

Consider an alternative example where activists call to boycott a large retailer because they have a subcontractor whose operations are acutely damaging the environment. Is that an illegal attempt to coerce market participants or is it protected speech (by the activists) followed by the freedom not to do business (by the consumer)? A union advocated secondary boycott seems substantially similar to me. (Is my example even legal in the US?)

> threatens every freedom of the guy down the street, because it threatens his survival.

That does seem like a reasonable principle to me but it appears inconsistent with how things currently work. Generalizing, it becomes the principle that market participants can only ever discriminate in directly relevant ways on the basis that survival in the modern world depends on the market. Thus advocacy to do otherwise is clearly illegal. Effectively it would be outlawing political activity carried out via market forces. In the environmental example above the activists would need to instead lobby to pass relevant regulations.

That said, I think a relevant analysis needs to account for the various examples of chickenization from the linked article. When laborers become supposed arms-length subcontractors (of subcontractors, of ...) in name only it seems apparent that capital is also coercing market participants in ways it should not be allowed to.
by simonw | 2025-05-31 23:47:23+00:00
OK, I think I've deciphered this.

Bucket is a feature-flagging SaaS

Linear is an issue tracker SaaS

Linear Agents (also known as "app users" according to their developer docs https://linear.app/developers/agents) is a feature of Linear where you can define "agents" which can be added to issues and will then go and do something with those issues. It looks to me like Linear Agents don't even necessarily involve an LLM - they're webhook based, so you can @-tag an "agent" by name which will then trigger a webhook to a third-party somewhere (such as Bucket) who then go ahead and run custom code and interact further with Linear via their API.

(I collect definitions of "AI agents", and this is the first one I've seen in recent years that doesn't necessarily involve any LLM integration at all.)
by olivercameron | 2025-05-31 23:48:41+00:00
Hi HN, I hope you enjoy our research preview of interactive video!

We think it's a glimpse of a totally new medium of entertainment, where models imagine compelling experiences in real-time and stream them to any screen.

Once you've taken the research preview for a whirl, you can learn a lot more about our technical work behind this here (https://odyssey.world/introducing-interactive-video).
by onetimeusename | 2025-05-31 23:48:46+00:00
I don't know anyone caught personally but profs would make announcements about how they found a lot of GPT answers or plagiarism. I've heard profs say they find a lot of cheating but also students are given so many warnings and opportunities to fix it. You can choose to take a 0 on an assignment if you report yourself by the end of the quarter which probably masks it. Usually that doesn't even hurt your grade when 75% is exams. I don't know if it's true but the school bought software (unless that was a made up threat) to find plagiarism that includes sources like code from stackoverflow.

The school seems to keep it private who is caught but I also don't think anyone is punished harshly. Despite all of this I am not aware of anyone being suspended or expelled. I assume there were people who would cheat on actual exams so exams now have proctors and there are assigned seats. The school wouldn't have insisted on proctors being in the honor code without a reason.

I think the fear of getting caught/ratted out is more salient. Use of GPT is so pervasive, just in general, that there's probably more cheating than there is not. Imagine people who rely on GPT for tasks like what they should eat suddenly not using it for hw. I think most just want their A- and their degree and to move on.
by socalgal2 | 2025-05-31 23:50:15+00:00
Why do you like them? Most Japanese do not. I find them gross. I had to use one recently in Osaka waiting for the Shinkansen at Shin Osaka Station. They require much better aim than a western bowl. They'd be horrible for diarrhea. Your poop just sits there in the open air and steams until you flush it, much more stinky than underwater.
by aleph_minus_one | 2025-05-31 23:50:55+00:00
> Life pro tip: teach your children to do chores.

Before teaching your children to do chores: x hours per week for chores

After teaching your children to do chores: y hours per weeks to have annoying discussions with the child, and X hours per week cautioning the children to do the chores, and ensuring that your children do the chore properly. Here X > x.

Additional time for you: -((X-x)+y), where X>x and additionally y > 0.
by westurner | 2025-05-31 23:52:02+00:00
A Lean textbook!

Why no HoTT, though?

"Should Type Theory (HoTT) Replace (ZFC) Set Theory as the Foundation of Math?" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43196452

Additional Lean resources from HN this week:

"100 theorems in Lean" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44075061

"Google-DeepMind/formal-conjectures: collection of formalized conjectures in lean" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44119725
by BearOso | 2025-05-31 23:52:16+00:00
That situation is such a mess. Those dissolving wipes actually exist, and actually dissolve.

So what do people do? They buy the cheap, non-dissolving ones and flush them anyway. Then when they inevitably clog, they call the plumber and insist they bought the correct ones when asked. So now there's widespread confusion about whether the dissolving ones work.
by BLKNSLVR | 2025-05-31 23:54:14+00:00
There was a news article on Australia a few years ago about these wet wipes that were advertised as biodegradable and dissolved in water, but they were either outright lies or they didn't degrade / dissolve in anywhere near the timeframe that made them suitable for flushing down the toilet - hence an increase in the fatberg problem.

The news article was essentially a public service announcement to not flush those wet wipes unless you want a sewerage problem down the line.
by naikrovek | 2025-05-31 23:55:09+00:00
Please tell me you are joking. Even if it’s a lie.

Management Engine .. actually I do not have the energy to deal with paranoid people. I never had that kind of energy. I never will. You’re all so efficient at drawing energy out of conversations and killing them. You’re like conversational vampires. It’s exhausting.

I don’t even care if you’re right or wrong about Intel ME. It is just so exhausting listening to you guys because of your word choices. It’s like you try to get ignored.

I respect your opinion and all, you just need to work on your messaging or something.
by AStonesThrow | 2025-05-31 23:59:46+00:00
The protocol or scheme is the "http" or "https" keyword. The colon is a separator. The "//" introduces the "authority component" or host.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/URL#Syntax

Whatever the user is "throwing at you" if it doesn't have these things in the front, it is not a "URL". It is not even a "protocol-relative URL".