MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by cogman10 | 2025-06-13 20:55:12+00:00
Still makes me sad. I partially think a major reason for the demise was that it was simply constructed too soon. Compiler tech wasn't nearly good enough to handle the ISA.

Nowadays because of the efforts that have gone in to making SIMD effective, I'd think modern compilers would have an easier time taking advantage of that unique and strange uarch.
by hartator | 2025-06-13 20:55:19+00:00
Yeah, 8 weeks is nothing.

I feel if he was able to read news about the situation, he should probably have reached out to try to salvage the situation.

Or he should have people, processes in place, and company vision that supports all of this outside of himself.

I remember loving Palm for so long, but they were playing catching up after the iPhone. Same fate as blackberry. Both should have double down (clean, focused work via stilus) and keyboard-based workflow instead of rushing things.

He seems the author wants to talk shit about Leo Apotheker while trying to get some traction for his new side business.
by chimeracoder | 2025-06-13 20:55:52+00:00
> That's quite a rewrite of history considering Windows Phone and Microsoft's Metro interface launched a full three years before Apple's move to a flat design in iOS 7.

Even Android had moved to a flatter design pattern 1-2 years before iOS. While Material Design wouldn't be released until 2014, you can see them moving in that direction from Gingerbread to Jelly Bean, particularly when looking at the system components and first-party apps, since this was before the concept of a unified design language across third-party apps had been formalized.

At the time Apple introduced their flat design in June 2013, they were the odd ones out. In fact, I remember a Daring Fireball article posted in spring 2013 (a few months before WWDC) praising Apple for leading the pack in flat design, and HN excoriating it for making what was at the time a clearly preposterous claim.
by skissane | 2025-06-13 20:56:04+00:00
> "Cantor's diagonalization argument" is best understood as a mere special case of Lawvere's fixed-point theorem. Lawvere's theorem is really the meat of the argument, and it's also the part that is very easy for exotic systems to "accept", since it's close to a purely logical argument.

Okay, but can you prove Lawvere’s theorem in NFU+AxCount?

And even if you can, since NFU+AxCount proves that the reals are countable, if NFU+AxCount proves Lawvere, then (to echo what btilly says in a sibling comment) NFU+AxCount+Lawvere couldn’t entail the countability of the reals, since that would render NFU+AxCount trivially inconsistent, and we know it is isn’t trivially inconsistent (as with any formal system, consistency is ultimately unprovable, but if a system is taken seriously as an object of mathematical research, then any inconsistency must be highly non-trivial.)
by CactusRocket | 2025-06-13 20:56:17+00:00
> We desperately need an open source engine that can compete with Unity and Unreal

I think this is a pipe dream. There's a lot of money behind Unity and Unreal, that buys a lot of developers.

Actually I think it's amazing how far Godot has come, and what kind of amazing and big updates they regularly do given how little money they get, and being open source.

It's seeing a lot of active development, so it's definitely not in its final form yet. It can still grow to be serious about filling that role...

> As it is it’s clear Godot’s team is more interested in reinventing wheels for fun than in making a real contender.

This is just a bad faith attack on the Godot's team, and not very much appreciated I'm sure.
by evanextreme | 2025-06-13 20:56:41+00:00
As a visionOS user (somewhat) what is so funny about all of this is that the translucency effects in visionOS are significantly toned down compared to liquid glass for this specific reason. The glass is heavily diffused, you can maybe get an idea of what is behind (a person moving, a television thats turned on) but nothing even close to the level that I have experienced in the iPadOS beta
by andsoitis | 2025-06-13 20:56:42+00:00
> Sam Altman, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and others may have slightly different goals and ambitions in the near term, but their grand visions for the next decade and beyond are remarkably similar. Framed less as technological objectives and more as existential imperatives, they include aligning AI with the interests of humanity;

If we view AI/AGI/ASI as a child of humans, then they're going to learn some pretty bad behaviors from us. They are more likely to mimic what we do than to do what we tell them to do.
by timewizard | 2025-06-13 20:56:50+00:00
We say all of this on top of a mountain of open source software. This isn't about market love of "indie developers." It's the basic software economy we've known and understood for decades now.

It was 30% commission for the time frame we are discussing and an investment in hardware tools and desktop software on top of all that. It used it's own proprietary system which required additional effort to adapt to and increased your workload if you wanted to release on multiple platforms.

So users don't get to use their own device unless a corporation can smell money in creating that software for them? What a valueless proposition given everything we know about the realities of open source.

You've fallen into the same trap. This is a computer. There's nothing magic about it. The lens you view this through is artificially constrained and bizarrely removed from common experience.
by halflife | 2025-06-13 20:57:11+00:00
I was working at HP during that time.

They sent a company wide email asking people to develop applications for the OS, and receive a Palm Pre for free.

I created an app that simply turns off the screen, and called it a mirror app (because you could see your reflection). I really enjoyed my free Palm Pre.

I tried resurrecting it a few years ago but couldn’t find a replacement battery after the original died.
by NoOn3 | 2025-06-13 20:57:24+00:00
Quote from Max Tegmark book Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence: “In his 2007 book Farewell to Alms, the Scottish- American economist Gregory Clark points out that we can learn a thing or two about our future job prospects by comparing notes with our equine friends. Imagine two horses looking at an early automobile in the year 1900 and pondering their future.

“I’m worried about technological unemployment.” “Neigh, neigh, don’t be a Luddite: our ancestors said the same thing when steam engines took our industry jobs and trains took our jobs pulling stage coaches. But we have more jobs than ever today, and they’re better too: I’d much rather pull a light carriage through town than spend all day walking in circles to power a stupid mine-shaft pump.” “But what if this internal combustion engine thing really takes off?” “I’m sure there’ll be new new jobs for horses that we haven’t yet imagined. That’s what’s always happened before, like with the invention of the wheel and the plow.”

Alas, those not-yet-imagined new jobs for horses never arrived. No-longer- needed horses were slaughtered and not replaced, causing the U.S. equine population to collapse from about 26 million in 1915 to about 3 million in 1960. As mechanical muscles made horses redundant, will mechanical minds do the same to humans?"...
by panzi | 2025-06-13 20:57:39+00:00
AFAIK it applies to everyone. But you don't get automatically fined, someone has to sue first. Maybe there has to be a business relation between the user and the web site? And yes, with HTML you need to still use all the right tags and attributes to make it accessible. Firefox has a nice accessibility tree view in its dev tools that you can use for debugging. Is there something like that for this toolkit? Is it somehow exposing an accessibility tree? Replicating everything in DOM for accessibility?
by furyofantares | 2025-06-13 20:58:27+00:00
I really hated all the liquid glass screenshots, and had a bad reaction when I first updated my phone to it. I also updated my macOS, and had a MUCH better reaction to that. And after a few days I really dig it on my phone too.

I thought there was supposed to be a way to add a tint to it though, which I haven't found a setting for, and think I would do if I could find it.
by peterlai | 2025-06-13 20:58:59+00:00
About a year ago, I watched this 3Blue1Brown LLM tutorial (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eMlx5fFNoYc&t=367s) on how a model’s self-attention mechanism is used to predict the next token in a sequence, and I was surprised by how little we know about what actually happens when processing the sentence “A fluffy blue creature roamed the verdant forest.”

A year later, the field of mechanistic interpretability has seen significant advancements, and we're now able to "decompose" models into interpretable circuits that help explain how LLMs produce predictions. Using the second iteration of an LLM "debugger" I've been working on, I compare the hypothetical representations used in the tutorial to the actual representations I see when extracting a circuit that describes the processing of this specific sentence. If you're into model interpretability, please take a look! https://peterlai.github.io/gpt-circuits/
by munificent | 2025-06-13 20:59:15+00:00
The paper this is based on [1] does a good job of spelling out:

The instantaneous distribution of money among the agents of a system should not be confused with the distribution of wealth. The latter also includes material wealth, which is not conserved, and thus may have a different (e.g. power-law) distribution.

The simulation might be a good model of how money distribution works, but it doesn't reflect how wealth distribution works. The simulation only works because money can neither be created nor distroyed (in the simulation, at least). Wealth can be so we shouldn't expect the simulation to predict its behavior.

[1]: https://physics.umd.edu/~yakovenk/papers/EPJB-17-723-2000.pd...
by dloku | 2025-06-13 20:59:16+00:00
hey man,

I totally agree with you. it's a bit a chicken and egg problem. You've got ATS systems filtering out candidates and then on the other side, you've got candidates auto-applying to a lot of unsuitable jobs.

We're trying to educate applications be more considerate and either apply where there's a fit or understand why there's no fot. If there's a fit however, then you should start building a relationship with someone first.
by dcminter | 2025-06-13 21:00:26+00:00
I must have the last good HP printer or something. Mine is the "HP Color LaserJet Pro MFP M281fdw" which is a WiFi enabled colour laser printer. It prints nicely, a set of cartridges lasts me for multiple years (low usage of course), has a built in scanner that works with the drivers available for Linux (even over WiFi), and is happily chuntering away on 3rd party cartridges. No issues whatsoever.

Honestly I'm expecting it to suddenly stop working or something given all the horror stories I hear about HP, but so far ... working just fine.

I'm a bit sad that HP are the last resting place of the Digital Equipment Corporation and that neither they nor the external company that they licensed OpenVMS to offer any VAX VMS hobbyist license, but that's for sure a niche thing to whine about.
by simlan | 2025-06-13 21:00:27+00:00
I remember looking at palm webos devices in 2010 and thinking this is cool. The docs on how things worked were really good for the time. The hardware was sleek palm pre if I remember correctly.

I was not keeping track of who bought whom at the time an why. But was surprised when webos got shut down. Android was gaining traction windows mobile on the way out. I bought an old Nokia e63 around the time because I was short on money and I loved the keyboard. The article gave me some nice nostalgic memories.
by xer0x | 2025-06-13 21:00:38+00:00
Claude's increasing euphoria as a conversation goes can mislead me. I'll be exploring trade offs, and I'll introduce some novel ideas. Claude will use such enthusiasm that it will convince me that we're onto something. I'll be excited, and feed the idea back to a new conversation with Claude. It'll remind me that the idea makes risky trade offs, and would be better solved by with a simple solution. Try it out.
by biorach | 2025-06-13 21:00:46+00:00
> Yeah but that's because they cut the price to to 1/4 of it's price!! They were offloading unsold stock at huge cost.

That's not necessarily a bad business strategy... Sometimes you take an initial loss by underpricing a product in order to build market share.

I believe MS took a substantial hit on the XBox for _years_
by LargeWu | 2025-06-13 21:01:50+00:00
This is it.

Maybe a few years ago at <$megacorp> where I work, Oracle requires, as part of their licensing, the ability to scan every machine owned by the company to make sure there is no unlicensed use of any of their software. If any offending installations were found, they would charge the company the cost of the license for every machine. So, thousands of users times $thousands per license.

Even if you had a license for a Java runtime for, say, your Oracle database instance, if that was found to be used for another purpose you'd get hit. Again, for every machine in the entire company, not just the offending one.

Needless to say, there was a huge firedrill to root out any rogue installs.
by LudwigNagasena | 2025-06-13 21:02:14+00:00
How is it different from using ZF as a meta-theory to study ZF(C)? Is there anything special about category theory vis-à-vis ZF as a meta-theory? You're not arguing about ontology or the nature of truth, because you've picked category theory as your ontology just like you could pick ZF or ZFC.
by tomp | 2025-06-13 21:02:33+00:00
I recommend anyone interested in this to check the work of Lionel Parreaux, in particular SimpleSub, which is equivalent to MLsub but substantially simpler.

As it turns out, Dolan's main contribution wasn't the algorithm (which is overly complex, as proven by Parreaux's simpler implementation), but the type language - the insight that most subtyping constraints can be removed and/or simplified to simple union and intersection types, assuming certain simplifications of the type system (namely: positive/negative types, and distributivity of union/intersection over function types).

https://lptk.github.io/programming/2020/03/26/demystifying-m...

https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3409006

Parreaux is continuing to work on this problem, and has since removed one of the assumptions/simplifications (positive/negative types) in his work on MLstruct

https://github.com/hkust-taco/mlstruct
by wunderwuzzi23 | 2025-06-13 21:02:48+00:00
Yeah, I think taint tracking was one of the early ideas here also.

The problems is that the chat context typically is immediately tainted as for the AI to do something useful it needs to operate on untrained data.

I wonder if maybe there could be tags mimicking data classification - to enable more fine grained decision making and human in the loop prompts.

Still a lot of unknowns and a lot more research needed.

For instance with Google Gemini I observed last year that certain sensitive tools can only be invoked in the first conversation turn / or until untrusted data is brought into the chat context. Then for the next conversation turn these sensitive tools are disabled.

I thought that was a neat idea. It can be bypassed with what I called "delayed tool invocation" and usage of a trigger action, but it becomes a lot more difficult to exploit.
by sedatk | 2025-06-13 21:03:17+00:00
I agree with the advice about paying it forward, but it's not mutually exclusive with showing gratitude.

Express gratitude now in the simplest way possible (like an email or a letter) than later after deliberating the best course of action. You can always do something nicer later.

I founded Eksi Sozluk, the most popular social platform from Turkey for the last 25+ years, partly because I was heavily inspired by Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series. I sent him an email about the web site when it started becoming popular, thanking him for "all the fish". He was also working on a similar, albeit a more strictly edited, web site called h2g2.com at the time. He never replied to me, and passed away a year later or so. I find comfort in assuming that he had read my email, just didn't bother to reply. I'm so glad that I was able to reach out to him before he was gone.

Similarly, Fred Brooks passed away soon after I asked his permission about quoting him in my book Street Coder. He had replied about how I didn't need his permission for that. The permission thing was a publisher requirement, but it was also my admiration for Fred that made me reach out to him. So, despite his short lesson on fair use, I love that kind of personal interaction with him, and hoping that he felt something like how his contributions affected every random corner of computer science, more than he thought before he passed away. Again, I'm so glad that I reached out to him in time.

When Street Coder came out, I sent signed copies to the people who had helped me along the way. I know they would never read the book as they weren't the target audience. But, I think the book epitomizes the result of their understanding, kindness, and generosity that made an English author out of a high school graduate self-taught programmer from Turkey. It was the perfect greeting card and very well received.

Not saying you should write a book per se, but let them see their impact, show them what you achieved. Do it now.
by dongobread | 2025-06-13 21:04:05+00:00
The corporate politics at Meta is the result of Zuck's own decisions. Even in big tech, Meta is (along with Amazon) rather famous for its highly political and backstabby culture.

This is because these two companies have extremely performance-review oriented cultures where results need to be proven every quarter or you're grounds for laying off.

Labs known for being innovative all share the same trait of allowing researchers to go YEARS without high impact results. But both Meta and Scale are known for being grind shops.
by pjz | 2025-06-13 21:04:43+00:00
The problem with the 'characters are just numbers' approach is that they're not _just_ numbers.. with the advent of unicode, they're _sequences of numbers_... so bytes thus can mean different things when part of a a sequence than when standalone.

That said, since they're numbers, we should use the most efficient checks for them... which are likely vectorized SIMD assembly instructions particular to your hardware. And which I've seen no one mention.
by roughly | 2025-06-13 21:04:47+00:00
> People do not want invasive glasses, even if they make them as small at normal glasses. I just don't see it becoming anything other than a niche product.

Wait, are you arguing that consumers will reject something that puts, say, a social media feed in front of their face 24hrs a day? That will allow them to just gaze at an internet site constantly without even having to think about it? That will allow them to have videos in their peripheral vision while they “concentrate” on something else?

AR headsets will not replace computers, they’ll replace phones.
by ryandrake | 2025-06-13 21:06:47+00:00
With a traditional rocket, I believe you'd need decreasing energy to maintain the same acceleration as the flight progressed, since you are carrying along with you and burning the fuel, and so the total mass (payload + fuel) that needs to be accelerated is constantly decreasing.

Of course there's the pesky problem that for every N kg of mass you want to accelerate at 1G for that kind of a trip, you're probably going to need somewhere on the order of N billion kg of fuel to burn.
by btilly | 2025-06-13 21:06:53+00:00
When you talk about the point of constructivism, do you mean currently, or historically?

For me, personally, the point of constructivism is to wind up talking about mathematics in a language that corresponds with what I want words to mean. I personally want mathematical existence to mean something that could be represented in an ideal computer. And existence in classical mathematics means something very different than that.

But historically, the point of constructivism was to try to avoid paradoxes through careful reasoning. At least that is my understanding. You're welcome to read http://thatmarcusfamily.org/philosophy/Course_Websites/Readi... and decide if that is what Brouwer meant.

Unfortunately for this historical motivation, Gödel proved that every classical mathematical proof can be mechanically transformed into a purely constructive proof, possibly of a much more carefully worded statement. With the result that if there is a contradiction within classical mathematics, there is also a contradiction within constructivism.

Luckily it has been so long since our foundations of mathematics fell apart because of someone finding a contradiction, that we no longer worry about it. (Was the set of all sets that do not contain themselves the last such contradiction? I think it might have been.)
by ahazred8ta | 2025-06-13 21:07:15+00:00
In A Fire Upon the Deep, Vernor Vinge had a post-singularity think tank using FTL comms to talk to a group on a medieval-tech planet, teaching them how to speedrun through developing an industrial-era tech tree. There was an entire academic discipline that studied the fastest ways to uplift a pretechnological society.

'Recruit a bunch of people to study rocks. Use acid and scratch tests to figure out which ones can be smelted for valuable elements. Recruit a bunch of people to study making alloys. Form an R&D team to develop precision lathes. Invent index cards and file catalogs.'
by cycomanic | 2025-06-13 21:08:52+00:00
> > So how do you thing roads are build? Is that not a subsidy? > > No? In my area, new local roads are normally built by developers and maintained by HOAs, with fuel taxes covering most state and federal road work (I think it should all be covered by fuel taxes personally). > > > Especially out in rural areas where people always complain the loudest that public transport doesn't work because it requires subsidies. >

My point is, even if roads are build and maintained by fuel taxes only (as you point out they usually are not, and in most countries much of the road network was build using other income sources), those fuel taxes are a not local (happy to be corrected though), i.e. rural roads get massive subsidies from metropolitan areas.
by rsstack | 2025-06-13 21:09:22+00:00
> HP has some enterprise division that makes stuff I'll never see and

It's a separate company now: HPE "Hewlett Packard Enterprise". He mentions them in the blog post, but if you don't know that in 2015 HP split into two companies, you might not realize. He holds stocks in both companies, HP and HPE (in 2015, it was the same number, but since then there were some splits).
by fithisux | 2025-06-13 21:10:21+00:00
People became lazy because of the "godsent" involvement of corporates.

This involvement was not free and not guaranteed because of their profit/power motives.

I think it is the time for the community to find innovative solutions for the community and to guarantee involvement by the community.

There are boards out there and x64/arm64 motherboards that can run AOSP.

Someone has to take the task of co-ordinating the efforts and maintain good documentation on how people can contribute, in a friendly to the community manner. I think it is possible.