MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Nevermark | 2025-05-22 17:41:25+00:00
> Appears quite bold. What sense-relays inform us about infinity or other mathematical concepts that don't exist physically?

A great point. A fantastic question.

My guess is:

1. We learn useful patterns that are not explicitly in our environment, but are good simpler approximations to work with.

Some of these patterns only mean something in a given context, or are statistical happenstance.

But some of them are actual or approximate abstractions, potentially applicable to many other things.

2. Then we reason about these patterns.

Sometimes we create new patterns that reveal deeper insights about our environment.

Sometimes we create nonsense, which is either obviously nonsense, fools those who don't reason carefully (i.e. bullshit). And some nonsense is so psychologically attractive that it helps some of us pose and believe we are special and connected to higher planes.

And sometimes we create patterns that offer deeper insights into patterns themselves. I.e. abstractions, like counting numbers, arithmetic, logic, and infinity.

--

It is worth considering, that the progression of abstractions, from unary counting, to more scalable number notations, zero as a number, negative numbers, etc. took a couple hundred thousands years to get going. But once we got going, every small new abstraction helped progress compound faster and faster.

At the level of abstract thinking, I view humans as intelligent as a species, not as individuals. Even the greatest minds, a very small proportion of us, had to stand on innumerable inherited abstractions to make significant progress.

Now many people contribute to new abstractions, but we have inherited powerful abstractions about abstractions to work with.

Erase all that accumulated knowledge for a new generation of humans, and very few would make much or any accumulated progress in explicit abstractions for a very long time.
by Joker_vD | 2025-05-22 17:41:47+00:00
And the other is the bug, whose number is being include in the commit message. So the commit is tied to the bug it addresses (whatever "addresses" may mean) by including the ID of that bug in the commit message.

Also, just to clarify, you can have several commits that refer to the same bug, and also commit message may (and likely should) contain some other text in addition to the bug number.
by nico | 2025-05-22 17:41:58+00:00
I think it really depends on how you use it. Are you using an agent with it, or the chat directly?

I've been pretty disappointed with Cursor and all the supported models. Sometimes it can be pretty good and convenient, because it's right there in the editor, but it can also get stuck on very dumb stuff and re-trying the same strategies over and over again

I've had really good experiences with o4-high-mini directly on the chat. It's annoying going back and forth copying/pasting code between editor and the browser, but it also keeps me more in control about the actions and the context

Would really like to know more about your experience
by wolrah | 2025-05-22 17:42:51+00:00
I'm not an electrical specialist but there are three major reasons I'm aware of that AC "won" at normal household/commercial power levels:

1. Switching. If you go look at your favorite part supplier you can find a bunch of switches that are rated to switch 250 volts AC and pass 16 amps, enough for basically any standard household outlet anywhere in the world. Those same switches are only rated for 24 volts DC. Why? Because of arcing. AC voltage passes through zero twice a cycle, which means that any arc that may be formed will self-extinguish within a hundredth of a second. DC doesn't do that, so the arc potential has to be limited either by reducing the voltage or increasing the size/complexity/cost of the switch/relay/contactor itself. This also applies to any connectors that may be unplugged under power like wall outlets. If you want to do the same amount of work with DC as you do with AC you basically get the choice between doing it at lower voltage with thick expensive wires or doing it at higher voltage with expensive switches, relays, outlets, etc.

2. Motors. Synchronous AC motors are EVERYWHERE. They're simple, cheap, efficient, and as long as they're not overloaded they run at a consistent speed determined by the number of magnetic poles in the motor and the AC frequency. If you have an appliance or power tool that runs on mains power and does not offer motor speed control (or only offers two or three speed settings) it's likely one of these. Native DC motors are also cheap and simple but but have very different performance characteristics, no native mechanism for precise speed control, and flow current through the rotor which requires brushed contacts that wear out over time. "Brushless DC" motors are actually AC motors paired with a controller which is more or less a DC->AC inverter, adding cost and complexity that may not be otherwise necessary or beneficial to the application.

3. Voltage conversion. AC can use simple wound transformers to efficiently trade voltage for current or vice versa using nothing but wire and metal. You might have used or even built one in a middle-school era science class. DC voltage conversion on the other hand, the simple methods are inefficient and the efficient methods require high-frequency electronics which only became inexpensive enough to go mainstream in the last 50ish years.

None of these are insurmountable problems of course, especially these days when switch-mode power supplies, inverters, VFDs, etc. are cheaper than ever but they still make things more complicated and require going against in some cases multiple lifetimes of industry inertia to purchase equipment produced in much lower volumes which means higher costs, and especially for home applications where size and weight are not the biggest deals it can often be easier/cheaper to just run a larger solar/battery setup to counteract the efficiency losses.

In the RV and boat worlds where size and weight matter you'll find a lot more DC appliances, but those are also generally smaller capacity than a household equivalent.
by turtleyacht | 2025-05-22 17:43:43+00:00
Commits are invisible. Sometimes, it may be good to "productize" one's work. To participate in deployment announcements, even if it's internal and narrow in scope.

Not only patching and enhancing existing products, but looking for entrypoints where we can contribute named artifacts--which may yet live past us, but linger on the utterance of others.
by temp0826 | 2025-05-22 17:43:53+00:00
A little surprised to see the sadness regarding something that seemed to be universally scorned whenever it was brought up. I never tried it and don't really have an opinion, but why couldn't this functionality be created as an extension (possibly connecting to a 3rd party service? I don't know why that would be necessary. Can extensions throw stuff into firefox sync?)?
by lxgr | 2025-05-22 17:44:36+00:00
With web search being available in all major user-facing LLM products now (and I believe in some APIs as well, sometimes unintentionally), I feel like the exact month of cutoff is becoming less and less relevant, at least in my personal experience.

The models I'm regularly using are usually smart enough to figure out that they should be pulling in new information for a given topic.
by robertpateii | 2025-05-22 17:44:50+00:00
> to see what an individual is working on, what they’ll be working on next, *and what they done recently.*

This last bit is useful, but tricky to get reports on in a single assignee system. Say it’s the end of the week and I want to show off myself or my team. The system would need to track assignee at resolution or at re-assignment, or let me filter all of one user’s activities down.

Does any single-assignee system handle this well? I’ve always had to manually take note of bug IDs mentioned in standups to achieve a good list of who did what when only using one assignee at a time.
by 9dev | 2025-05-22 17:44:51+00:00
Actually, I think the opposite: Upgrading a project that needs dependency updates to new major versions—let’s say Zod 4, or Tailwind 3—requires reading the upgrade guides and documentation, and transferring that into the project. In other words, transforming text. It’s thankless, stupid toil. I’m very confident I will not be doing this much more often in my career.
by segphault | 2025-05-22 17:45:03+00:00
I was a user for so long that I was on it before it even rebranded as Pocket. I finally gave up on it last year, mostly due to frustration with the terrible 2023 redesign of the mobile app. When Mozilla made the unfathomable decision to become an internet advertising company, I figured it was just a matter of time before they had to put Pocket out to pasture. A product that's designed to strip ads from content for readability doesn't align with their new direction.

I'd probably be applauding the decision to shut this down if I thought they were doing it to free up resources to increase their focus on the browser, but Mozilla seems to be institutionally committed to chasing its own demise, so I'm sure they will instead focus on AI integration and other stuff that nobody asked for.

Meanwhile, Firefox is still missing proper support for a bunch of modern web features like view transitions and CSS anchor points that are available in every other browser.
by madeofpalk | 2025-05-22 17:45:04+00:00
iTunes Ping https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITunes_Ping. I never trusted Apple after they got rid of that /s

Apple's problem is they'll often leave products to be stagnant. Existing, but on life support. Like basically all their Mac Apps. A lot of hardware products like this as well, like HomePods.

They have a raft of iOS apps that seemingly come out of hackathon projects that they release, never update, and then maybe quietly kill off. I thought they killed Clips, but it's still hanging out there...
by happysadpanda2 | 2025-05-22 17:45:15+00:00
I can't argue that you are wrong, but I can argue that, for myself, if I don't trust a developer to not screw me over with telemetry, I cannot trust the developer to not screw me over with their code. I can't think of a scenario where this trust isn't binary, either I can trust them (with telemetry AND code execution), or I can't trust them with either. Could you describe what scenario I am missing?
by devgoth | 2025-05-22 17:45:18+00:00
this app never reads any messages. the iMessage framework is very strict around privacy...so much so that you are unable to get user information of. This is why you will see Participate 1, 2, 3 instead of the person's name. There is no way to get this information of who the sender is! Kudos to apple for this.

The only message that is written to the chat is when you hit submit. There is no external service as all information is stored as metadata on the message itself. I did not want to have an external server (which has its own challenges, see in another message around collisions).

Your entire group can see the message but in order to interact with the poll they will need to download the app. They will be redirected to the app store if they do not have the app after clicking.
by bonoboTP | 2025-05-22 17:45:26+00:00
Sure, but if you can't articulate why those theorems and proofs are important to be pursued, how it's different from all the related works, what your unique contribution is and why that matters, what the previous works lacked or got wrong, what the impact and value of your work is, i.e. why anyone should care at all, then you'll have a hard time getting it accepted. Just because the math checks out and was difficult and took a lot of effort, it doesn't guarantee that the work is worthy of dissemination.
by jonas21 | 2025-05-22 17:46:17+00:00
This is a perfectly reasonable distribution once you consider that only a small fraction of people who really care about something are motivated enough to comment about it.

There's a small group who complain loudly about Pocket, a small group who are really sad to see it go, and probably a much larger group that either doesn't know what Pocket is or doesn't care enough to write a comment.

It's important to keep this in mind when reading online discussions in general.
by huhkerrf | 2025-05-22 17:46:18+00:00
Truth be told, my relationship with Pocket has dipped significantly over the years. According to my email, I signed up for Read It Later in March of 2011, which coincided with the release of their Android beta. It was the first thing I installed on every new browser or phone, and for many years, my end of the year recap had me at the top 1% of readers.

I'm not sure if I changed, the web did, or what, but I'm not sure I've saved anything to Pocket in 2025, and probably just a handful in 2024.

But still, to Nate and the Read it Later/Pocket team. Thank you.
by arp242 | 2025-05-22 17:46:26+00:00
So I checked on the Internet Archive; we sold the EEEPC 900 with Linux for €329, and the Windows EEEPC 901 for €409. The Linux had a Celeron M and the Windows an Atom N270, so I guess I misremember them having identical specs.

I assume the Atom is faster(?) The XP machine felt slower though.
by hinkley | 2025-05-22 17:46:30+00:00
> It’s very rare for code to allocate exactly the same type of object many times in a row, so the class of the instance local variable will change quite frequently.

That’s dangerous thinking because constructors will be a bimodal distribution.

Either a graph of calls or objects will contain a large number of unique objects, layers of alternating objects, or a lot of one type of object. Any map function for instance will tend to return a bunch of the same object. When the median and the mean diverge like this your thinking about perf gets muddy. An inline cache will make bulk allocations in list comprehensions faster. It won’t make creating DAGs faster. One is better than none.
by adrian_b | 2025-05-22 17:46:40+00:00
Parameter aliasing creates problems for "out" parameters and for "in out" parameters in any language, regardless whether they are passed by value or by reference, and regardless whether there exists a distinction between "out" and "in out".

In C/C++, where such parameters are passed only by reference, the chances of wrong behavior in the presence of aliasing are greater than in a language like Ada, where they may be passed by value and in lucky cases that may happen to produce the right result.

In general, the documentation of any function should specify whether the aliasing of such parameters is allowed. By default any good compiler, for any language, should give at least a warning whenever parameters that can be modified by a function are aliased, because without analyzing how they are used inside the invoked function it is unknown whether the function will produce the expected results.

The distinction between "out" and "in out" parameters that exists in Ada can only make easier the detection of suspect function invocations. It can never be worse than in C, C++ and similar languages.

On the other hand, the distinction between "out" and "in out" would have greatly simplified C++, because for an "out" parameter the compiler can use raw memory, instead of memory for which a constructor must have been invoked, like for an "in out" parameter. There would have been no constructors as a special category that must be handled differently, any function with an "out" parameter of a certain type could have been used to initialize a value of that type.

The distinction between "out" and "in out" and not specifying whether the parameters are passed by value or by reference are great in real life, because they enable the compiler to make optimizations that are otherwise impossible, as proven by the fact that nobody has succeeded to make such a compiler for the pre-2011 C++. C++ from 2011 and later has solved some of the performance issues, but only by introducing tedious and error-prone annotations for ensuring the desired behavior, i.e. the "move" semantics.

Moreover, not having to specify how the parameters are passed eliminates a huge amount of "&" and of "*" or of their equivalents from a program, also eliminating the risk of errors caused by their misuse. In my opinion, this is a great advantage in real life.
by xz18r | 2025-05-22 17:46:52+00:00
I have used Wallabag[0] for read-later articles for many years. Very happy about it. I host it on a VPS but they offer a paid instance[1] themselves for $9/y. And otherwise you can use something like Pikapods[2] which is also dirt cheap.

[0] https://github.com/wallabag/wallabag [1] https://www.wallabag.it/en [2] https://www.pikapods.com/apps
by aaronbaugher | 2025-05-22 17:47:14+00:00
Yep. Every time a platform comes out that tries to give people more control over what they see and how they share, it languishes and people keep going back to the ad-laden mosh pit of Big Social.

For instance, Yahoo 360 let you create "circles," so you could have your "work circle" and your "friend circle" and so on, and let them overlap however you wanted, and then you could post things to whichever circles you wanted and read them how you wanted. Seems like a great idea, but most people didn't want it. Too complicated, probably. Easier to just scroll through garbage looking for gems like flipping through TV channels.

And the truth is, most people posting a selfie want everyone to see it. All their friends, at least, but really, the world if possible. So they don't really want restrictions on what reaches them because they don't want restrictions on themselves.
by montebicyclelo | 2025-05-22 17:47:18+00:00
Not sure "original concept" is quite right, given it had been tried earlier, e.g. here's a 2023 attempt to get gpt-4-vision to play pokemon, (it didn't really work, but it's clearly "the concept")

https://x.com/sidradcliffe/status/1722355983643525427
by Joker_vD | 2025-05-22 17:47:22+00:00
Well, yes. The point is, just because a toaster has rusted through because you've left it on your apartment's balcony for 6 years (because you don't make toasts) — which is pretty severe — it doesn't make it your top priority to fix it. Until, of course, you mother-in-law arrives and throws a spectacular tantrum about the lack of fresh toasts, or something.
by mountainriver | 2025-05-22 17:47:29+00:00
A big discussion on this happened here as well https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44057820

There is quite a bit of evidence diffusion models work better at reasoning because they don't suffer from early token bias.

https://github.com/HKUNLP/diffusion-vs-ar https://arxiv.org/html/2410.14157v3
by exe34 | 2025-05-22 17:47:46+00:00
> Tesla's CEO bought the government and fired everybody who was investigating his companies!

I'm not sure why my comment was flagged, so I'll add the link to the evidence here: https://democrats-judiciary.house.gov/uploadedfiles/2025.02....

My point is that in the US, you don't have to follow the law. If you're rich enough, you are the law.
by chimeracoder | 2025-05-22 17:48:02+00:00
> What hosted products has Apple dropped? iCloud might stop supporting old devices but that doesn’t stop you from keeping the data on device or accessing via a new device.

Apple is a bit of a weird case because historically they've been a hardware company first and have done very little in the way of consumer services. But they're just as happy as to kill off consumer products if they want to; they just have a more limited selection to start from (which is itself another layer to the "problem" of trying to use them as a replacement - you can't rely on a product they don't offer).
by sysysy | 2025-05-22 17:48:30+00:00
Which mode of AES do you mean? AES ECB seems to fit your example, but wouldn't it still expose the incremental nature UUID v7 with enough samples (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Block_cipher_mode_of_operation, the Linux Tux image example)? Other AES modes produce way longer results, even when the ID is encoded with Base58 or the like.
by WalterGR | 2025-05-22 17:48:30+00:00
This seems silly.

How much does this save the government as a percentage of total spending?

How much will this cost the government vs. how much it saves?

How much will this cost businesses in the US in total compared to the amount saved by the government?

How much will this increase costs to consumers, given that businesses will (barring legislation) inevitably round up to the nearest $0.05?
by perching_aix | 2025-05-22 17:48:46+00:00
After putting significantly more effort than perhaps socially acceptable into this, I completely agree so far, but I'm still horribly confused about GP's point about "mega" being a "squared unit in megapixels".

That to me implies that "mega" in "megapixels" is a planar ("[pre?-]squared") scaling factor, but it's... not really? Are those even a thing?

I think this is what the debate is about at least. Mega does line up with kilo squared, but that's not because mega becomes a planar scaling factor, but because it just so happens that 1000 times 1000 is 1 million. It's kind of a coincidence? Like it's literally 1 million pixels, that's what's being meant. Just like with cm squared, the ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh
by FilosofumRex | 2025-05-22 17:49:05+00:00
> So, we’ve come full circle to symbolic AI!

Yes, but from a business point of view, NLP based GUIs have been the holy grail of marketing and customer support, especially in STEM apps market.

Case in point, Wolfram Alpha is not much more than an attempt to market Mathematica to lazy and failing college students. If that cost, and localization, can be offloaded to LLMs as the universal front end to technical software, it'd free up SWE resources to focus on core functionality.

If Magma, my favorite math/cryptography tool, had an LLM frontend, I could save time wasted onboarding new cryptographers.

https://magma.maths.usyd.edu.au/calc/
by JadeNB | 2025-05-22 17:49:30+00:00
> You’re discounting familiarity as being stupid. The real path is “it was weird but once I spent some time with it, it made perfect sense.”

I don't think either of your parent's paths say that:

> There are two paths: "it was weird but then I got used to it, you're just ignorant" or "it was weird, I got used to it, but we should improve the situation". I know which side I want to be on. Even if it takes decades like the data SI prefixes.

I believe that they're saying that, yes, experts get used to it, after which it makes complete sense (as would any arbitrary but consistent convention, once you got used to it), but, in any living field, there will constantly be non-experts looking to become experts. If there is a way to make the process easier for them while not introducing any lack of precision that would hamper experts, then why not?
by PaulHoule | 2025-05-22 17:49:45+00:00
A product I worked on turned up problems in an accessibility audit, one of them amounted to the modal <Dialog> from a major framework not really hiding the rest of the page from screen readers whereas <dialog> does that with great certainty. We are are still using older framework versions but looking at the source code, few are using <dialog> in their latest versions.

Our own <ModalDialog> based on <dialog> instead of a. <Portal> works great but we are still dealing with problems such as MUI’s <Select> computing the coordinates of the <Popover> wrong which I think is not so hard to fix but all of that adds up to people being slow to adopt <dialog> but so much amounts to the edge-triggered paradigm in React not really matching the simple ‘call a freaking method on the <dialog> API’.

That <output> would be really cool with framework support to calculate formulas like a spreadsheet.
by goku12 | 2025-05-22 17:49:46+00:00
I use KOReader [1] on my Kobo. It supports Wallabag [2]. Wallabag offers both hosted [3] and self-hosted options. There's also a standalone kobo client for Wallabag [4]. In addition, Wallabag also supports direct import from Pocket.

[1] https://koreader.rocks/

[2] https://wallabag.org/

[3] https://www.wallabag.it/en

[4] https://gitlab.com/anarcat/wallabako