MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by lordnacho | 2025-06-02 09:37:22+00:00
Judgement and technical skill go hand in hand. Technology merely moves the boundary of what is considered judgement, and what is considered technical skill.

I know someone who wrote programs in the punch-card era. Back then, technical skill meant being diligent and thoughtful enough that you avoided most bugs when writing the program. If you screwed this up, you had to wait for another time slot. What does this mean for the complexity of programs you could write? Well, it means you are quite limited. You can't build judgement about things above what is now considered a very basic program.

I learned to program before the AI era that seems to be nascent. Technical skill means things like being able to write programs in python and c++, getting many computers to work together, being able to find hints when something goes wrong, and so on. Judgement now covers things like how a large swarm of programs interact, which was not really in scope for punch-card guy.

Now AI arrives, and it appears that we are free from technical skill problems. Indeed, it does fix a lot of my little syntax issues, but actually it just moves the goalposts. There's soon going to be no excuse for spending time working out the syntax for a lambda function, you'll be expected to generate a much more complicated product, for which you will need an even higher overview to say you are providing judgement.
by spwa4 | 2025-06-02 09:37:23+00:00
You should keep in mind that Down syndrome is "not really" a congenital disease. Yes, it's a DNA problem, but it's a problem that happens during conception in the logic of recombining DNA, not in the DNA itself. Down is "Trisomie 21". Which makes it very weird: it a congenital disease, but not hereditary (perfectly healthy parents can have a Down syndrome kid, especially if the mother is older, Down syndrome parents have normal offspring)

So there are congenital diseases ... and there is Down syndrome. They follow an entirely different logic.

Btw: down syndrome parents have HUGE issues, but in fact these issues arise because the kids are healthy. Expectation is such kids will exceed their parents' intelligence at age 6-8 and be 2 standard deviations above their parents intelligence by age 10-12. You can imagine how that goes.
by the_mitsuhiko | 2025-06-02 09:37:44+00:00
> The problem isn't relying on inode numers; it's inode numbers being too short.

It's a bit of both. inodes are conflating two things in a way. They are used by the file system to identify a record but they are _also_ exposed in APIs that are really cross file system (and it comes to a head in case of network file systems or overlayfs).

What's a more realistic path is to make inodes just an FS thing, let it do it's thing, and then create a set of APIs that is not relying on inodes as much. Linux for instance is trying to move towards file handles as being that API layer.
by tgsovlerkhgsel | 2025-06-02 09:38:19+00:00
And as a user, I have absolutely no way of distinguishing this from a device that had all secure features removed, and is running a random Android that proxies the NFC or chip data to a real reader, siphoning off what they can, while my PIN gets proxied by a human typing it into the real reader in real time. All I'd notice is a second or so of latency.
by cwillu | 2025-06-02 09:38:49+00:00
“Cutting power” is a thing because current computers require a periodic (and rather frequent) refresh to maintain the state of the system (primarily, but not exclusively, RAM). And indeed, one useful tactic to maintain that state when you need to cut the power for some reason is to supercool the ram so that it doesn't dissipate its charge as fast, basically making the system approach that ideal world.
by eth0up | 2025-06-02 09:39:51+00:00
I have always thought the only reasonable way when capable is as a vegetarian. But I feel less well, unambiguously so as one, which is part of why I'm not one.

When I was one, I'd make a few exceptions each year. At the time, I was a serious competitive chess player with a well obscured tendency for occasional brilliance. But mediocrity was my primary trait. On every occasion, without failure, these carnivorous exceptions would lift my mediocrity into formidable respectability. Every time.

Killing and salivating on animals for the sake of a board game is macabre. Though it was not only chess. For me, much else is affected by the absence or presence of this mysterious substance.

I wish we had figured out the true reasons for this by now, because protein supplements never quite matched or equalled the results of a properly ingurgitated beast chunk. I still wonder. I certainly want to change it.

This is a good opportunity for prayer, to ask or beckon the seemingly aloof mind of the aether for wisdom and express a will for something better. To ponder.

Crickets.

Existentially, I oppose this universe. It's magnificence aside, there's something shameful about its role as a giant digestive system where its every component is eating itself, fastidiously vying for energy exchange ever malcontent. Stars eating stars, beast eating beast, particles eating waves.... An insatiable auto cannibal, a meandering mongoloid ouroboros, a mockery of the inevitable perpetual motion device that birthed it billions of years ago.

I protest this frothing stolid bang of intractable drooling entropy. I wish it would leave the chickens and everyone else alone.
by nprateem | 2025-06-02 09:41:39+00:00
[Spoiler-ish] It's just a shame the show largely fails to build emotional connection with the characters. When bad things happened I mostly felt nothing.

The other thing that has always plagued SW is the fact they can travel through hyperspace, have the tech to destroy planets, but largely lack CCTV, autopilot, effective homing missiles, HD displays, etc. It's a weird mix of 70s tech and super sci-fi.

It's like, if you were leading a rebellion, would you have your secret base rigged with remotely detonated explosives, or need to go back and cackhandedly manually destroy your comms, etc?

Suspension of disbelief is stretched to breaking point sometimes.
by hsn915 | 2025-06-02 09:42:00+00:00
The "It's just JavaScript, so the frontend guys can work on the backend" line has never made any sense to me.

I think it's aimed at HR/recruiting.

Companies tend to think in terms of specific skills when hiring. Something like: We use PostgreSQL, so we will write "3 years PostgreSQL experience" in the job description for a senior backend engineer position.

Unless engineering is explicitly involved in the hiring process, HR will drop your resume automatically if you say "5 years of MySQL and SQLite experience" with no mention of Postgres.
by jorvi | 2025-06-02 09:42:02+00:00
List of results with some slight inferences where needed:

On median, SD cards will experience:

- first error at 1450 r/w cycles

- failure at 3100 r/w cycles (total failure or 0.1% of sectors)

SD card endurance:

- 5* Big name brand 'Endurance' / 'Industrial' series - 2* Adata - 4* Amazon Basics - 4* Delkin - 1* Gigastone - 5* Kingston - 4* Kioxia (Plus and G2 only) - 4* Lexar - 1* onn. - 4* OV (terrible read/write performance) - 4* PNY - 1* Sandisk (after WD acquisition) - 1* Silicon Power - 4* Transcend
by quietbritishjim | 2025-06-02 09:42:08+00:00
> std::list to std::vector should be the big one

That is not a "C++23 best practice", which is what I was replying to. It doesn't even need C++11! And one use of this type uses pop_front() so std::vector is not obviously a good choice here.

> std::map to std::unordered_map could be next.

Again, I called out C++11 as possibly making a difference - sure this could help but it doesn't need C++23.

> then, really ranges/constexpr/std::move could make a difference, hard to say definitely.

How? Ranges are a nice syntax but what would they speed up here? There doesn't seem to be anything evaluated at compile time so what's the benefit of constexpr? (Even std::move doesn't have an obvious use in the benchmark code but that's C++11 anyway.)

> Beyond these, Modern C++ would have most definitely led to much shorter code as that was a metric for comparison.

I agree that would be interesting, but I'd be surprised if the code was much shorter. I'd guess something like 10%.
by tsimionescu | 2025-06-02 09:42:12+00:00
It's important to understand that this was a non-trivial question for thousands of years. The ancient Babylonians would have probably believed this to be false (their best known approximation had pi ≈ 25/8, which is too small). The right way to approach this problem from first principles would be to construct some geometrical objects that have these lengths and try to compare them (for example by taking the perimeter of a square inscribing a unit circle and a square inscribed in a unit circle as the upper and lower bounds for pi, though that may not be good enough for this particular problem).

When you're doing something like pi + sqrt(2) ≈ 3.14159 + 1.41421 = 4.5558, you're taking known good approximations of these two real numbers and adding them up. The heavy lifting was done over thousands of years to produce these good approximations. It's not the arithmetic on the decimal representations that's doing the heavyh lifting, it's the algorithms needed to produce these good approximations in the first place that are the magic here.

And it would be just as easy to compute this if I told you that pi ≈ 314159/100000, and sqrt(2) ≈ 141421/100000, so that their sum is 455580/100000, which is clearly larger than 4553/1000.
by Huxley1 | 2025-06-02 09:42:59+00:00
I’ve been learning more about how AI systems actually work, and one thing I keep wondering is how much energy it all uses.

This idea of reversible computing was new to me. I didn’t know it was even possible to run computations “backwards” to save power. It’s interesting that slowing things down might actually save more energy in the long run. I’ll definitely be reading more about this.
by aspenmayer | 2025-06-02 09:44:03+00:00
Not who you're replying to, but I remember his face and probably remember it from one or the other of these Talks at Google from a bit ago. They were each to talk about his new books at the time.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jNLP88aTg_8

> Author George Lakoff discusses his book "Whose Freedom?: The Battle over America's Most Important Idea" as a part of the Authors@Google series. This event took place Thursday, July 12, 2007 at Google headquarters in Mountain View, CA.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=saDHFomGW3A

> The Authors@Google program was pleased to welcome author and professor George Lakoff to Google's New York office to discuss his new book, "The Political Mind".

> George Lakoff is Richard and Rhoda Goldman Distinguished Professor of Cognitive Science and Linguistics at the University of California at Berkeley and Senior Fellow at the Rockridge Institute, a think tank in Berkeley, CA. He is author of "Don't Think of an Elephant!", "Moral Politics", "Whose Freedom?", and coauthor of "Thinking Points: A Progressive's Handbook", as well as many books and articles on cognitive science and linguistics. In this talk Professor Lakoff speaks about his latest work The Political Mind: Why You Can't Understand 21st-Century American Politics with an 18th-Century Brain. In "What's the Matter with Kansas?", Thomas Frank pointed out that a great number of Americans actually vote against their own interests. In "The Political Mind", George Lakoff explains why.
by metalman | 2025-06-02 09:44:36+00:00
any and all arguments about infinity must include the word "believ", anything else is bombastic hubris I believe the universe to be infinite, that notion fits my own observations, and is comforting, the notion that there is more, in how ridiculous all the squabling about this and that, the who's and why's, is, and my own reduction of the idea of infinity is that in a universe with infinite, time,space, energy and matter, probability does not exist,everything must happen. Perhaps not right here and right now, I hope, as that would be a bit much, but perhaps that is a hint, and all we are is filters, tuned to the whatever it is that we talk about so much.
by brazzy | 2025-06-02 09:44:40+00:00
> Having early success is daunting (what if I never reach that level again?!) but can also be liberating.

Reminds me of a "where are they now?" article I read about a football team that won the world cup. They had achieved the highest possible success in their sport, most of them in their 20s.

One managed to go to a world cup again as a coach and reach the final. Some of became TV commentators. Many became coaches, often in lower leagues.

Only one left the sport entirely, invested his money and lived in Florida.
by BoxOfRain | 2025-06-02 09:45:03+00:00
My A-level chemistry teacher liked to paint it onto door frames and in the hallways. Apparently one day he'd left some out in his lab in preparation for this prank, then the school had a surprise inspection. He had to teach his class in front of the inspectors while being constantly interrupted by small purple explosions.

He also liked to let off expired fire extinguishers at his sixth formers out of his window, and he once attempted to use them to propel a pupil sitting on a wheely office chair. Very memorable teacher!
by flohofwoe | 2025-06-02 09:45:55+00:00
AFAIK the entire Blender UI (not just 3D preview) runs on top OpenGL.

I don't know if compute shaders were the reason for the GL 4.3 requirement, but from own experience, having to support different GL versions in the same code base isn't exactly trivial without resulting in a granular #ifdef-mess.

The cleanest solution is to have different backends for different GL versions, but that means a lot of duplicate maintenance effort and code.

But tbh, any cheap laptop made in the last decade should be able to run GL 4.3.

The only exceptions I've seen so far are VMs and the Raspberry Pi.
by eru | 2025-06-02 09:46:42+00:00
> From a certain pedantic perspective, it still is a regular language, since there is a finite (implementation dependent) upper bound on nesting depth, and balanced parens with a finite upper bound of nesting is regular.

That's a silly point, because it makes all languages trivially finite, even monsters like C++. (Finity is even more of a restriction than being regular.)
by henryball | 2025-06-02 09:47:48+00:00
Hey HN,

I couldn’t find an open-source alternative to Trello that I liked so I built my own.

It’s fast, free and fully-customisable. You can self host it, or use the cloud version if you don’t want to manage your own infra.

Repo -> https://github.com/kanbn/kan

Cloud -> https://kan.bn

Roadmap -> https://kan.bn/kan/roadmap

I’d love feedback, bug reports, or any feature suggestions!
by sverhagen | 2025-06-02 09:48:57+00:00
I can agree that familiarity of the basic syntax is a decent strategy to get people over their fear of trying something new (really by making them think it isn't new at all). But it's also the lowest common denominator, and if understanding of the basic syntax is the only thing you have on offer, oh boy, are you going to meet that wall... real quick.
by bravesoul2 | 2025-06-02 09:48:59+00:00
I have always been useful not valued, worked at 8 or more places. Only people who value me are family. Businesses don't.

You find out pretty quick: suddenly on PIP, or get bullied thereafter because you phrased something slightly off in a Jira comment. If I can get paid and treated OK, I see that as good.

Don't put stock in business relationships. Try to have good ones but put stock in ... assets, family, health, etc.

Now I have seen valued people but they are rare. And if push come to shove I'm sure that bond could break.
by magicalhippo | 2025-06-02 09:49:15+00:00
I recently had a bout of this at my current work.

For a while I was struggling to pinpoint my discontent, but I ended up realizing it was because I felt I was undervalued compared to the contributions I had made over the years.

As it happened, my superiors had come to realize the same, so when I asked for a talk, they preempted my plan by announcing this.

As mentioned by the article, I've since been included in much more strategic talks and discussions to help shape the future of the company, as we're moving our products from the desktop to the web.

It's still something I'll keep an eye on, but just realizing the source of my frustration was very helpful. It also made me more aware of how I shouldn't sacrifice too much unless it's being valued, as opposed to just being more useful.
by krapp | 2025-06-02 09:50:27+00:00
It's still entirely possible to deliver content as text and hyperlinks on the existing web, and most people aren't so averse to and disgusted with the existing web that they would prefer an entire other platform and protocol.

Read any thread about the Gemini protocol and you'll discover even most people on HN (who should be exactly the kind of people to find it appealing) find it too basic and restrictive.

The Gemini protocol doesn't really offer what the old web was all about because it doesn't allow the author the degree of freedom and creativity that the old web did. It was designed under the premise that the "web" should only be a strictly textual data format with only links to other documents and that styling and layout should be extremely minimal and entirely controlled by the client. Which is not what the old web was, either technically or in spirit. It's what some people believe the old web should have been.

As such it can only appeal to a subset of even technical people, and it's probably reached its saturation point by now.
by adamcharnock | 2025-06-02 09:50:35+00:00
I was being a bit terse in my original comment. I do think there are a bunch of other situations which don't fit into what I described above.

If scaling really is on the horizon, then yes, doing k8s immediately will save you some time in the long run. If that is the case though, you could always reach for a managed K8S service first (EKS/GKE), then deploy to dedicated later. Just avoid any entanglements with other proprietary cloud services, because that will be time consuming to untangle later.
by amiga386 | 2025-06-02 09:50:58+00:00
That's a problem for programs that do recursive fs descent (e.g. find, tar) because they use st_dev and st_ino alone for remembering what directories they've been in. They can't just use the absolute path, because symbolic links allow for loops.

find:

* https://cgit.git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/findutils.git/tree/fi...

* https://cgit.git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/findutils.git/tree/fi...

tar:

* https://cgit.git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/tar.git/tree/src/crea...

* https://cgit.git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/tar.git/tree/src/name...

* https://cgit.git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/tar.git/tree/src/incr...

In particular, I'm intrigued by the comment in the last link:

/* With NFS, the same file can have two different devices if an NFS directory is mounted in multiple locations, which is relatively common when automounting. To avoid spurious incremental redumping of directories, consider all NFS devices as equal, relying on the i-node to establish differences. */

So GNU tar expects an inode to be unique across _all_ NFS mounts...
by imurray | 2025-06-02 09:53:35+00:00
I'm sceptical about the energy motivation, but there are multiple reasons why making invertible deep learning architectures can be interesting or useful. Cf, a series of workshops from 2019-2021: https://invertibleworkshop.github.io/

Since then diffusion models have been popular. Generating from these can be seen as a special case of a continuous time normalizing flow, and so (in theory) is a reversible computation. Although the distilled/fast generation that's run in production is probably not that!

Simulating differential equations is not usually actually reversible in practice due to round-off errors. But when done carefully, simulations performed in a computer can actually be exactly bit-for-bit reversible: https://arxiv.org/abs/1704.07715
by ViewTrick1002 | 2025-06-02 09:54:15+00:00
All you are saying is that you don't understand the time value of money.

What you are saying is that we should waste money on enormous handouts to the nuclear industry today to get a tiny bit back in 60 years time. Making us poorer for generations.

https://www.investopedia.com/articles/03/082703.asp

Base load exists on the consumer/demand side. Base load power plants has always been an economic construct. Inflexible coal and nuclear power used to have the lowest marginal costs and high fixed costs and therefore could expect to run at 100% 24/7.

That is not the case anymore since zero marginal cost renewables have entered the market.

https://reneweconomy.com.au/there-is-no-going-back-aemo-bids...

And "nuclear is worthwhile because we can cause inflation" is literally the least logical argument I have heard in a long time.

You seem to be working backwards from having decided that we need to handout untold trillions to the nuclear industry and is now trying to rationalize your position.
by thrance | 2025-06-02 09:54:56+00:00
Theoretically, a computer that never forgets anything can run without consuming any power (and thus never heating). That kind of computer would be called reversible (or adiabatic) as it would require its gates to be reversible (i.e. any computation can be undone). You would still need to expend energy to set the initial state (input) and copy the result (output).

Obviously, in real life, most power consumed by computers is lost by wire resistance, not through "forgetting" memory in logic gates. You would need superconducting wires and gates to build an actually reversible CPU.

Also, you would need to "uncompute" the result of a computation to bring back your reversible computer from its result back to its initial state, which may be problematic. Or you can expend energy to erase the state.

Quantum computers are reversible computers, if you seek a real life example. Quantum logic gates are reversible and can all be inverted.
by thaumasiotes | 2025-06-02 09:55:16+00:00
Well, for hyperreal numbers it's still true that every real number can be represented as a countably infinite string. The proof will still work fine if you say "the real number with expansion 0.9999...". In the hyperreals, given that not every value can be expressed as a decimal string, we'd need to establish what "0.9999..." meant before further commenting on the proof.

---

lcamtuf proposes treating 0.9999... as a representation of a hyperreal number in the halo of 1, which raises some notational questions. The logical extension of the notation in my mind would, given an assumed infinitesimal value epsilon, represent epsilon as 0.000000... -| (barrier between real and infinitesimal decimal places) |- ...00001 . It's not obvious to me how you'd work with the representation 0.000000... | 1000... (what's 1 + 20ε?).

But I don't think my instinct works either, because you can grade the levels of infiniteness more finely than you have room in a countable string to represent. (This is just a gut feeling.)

Going with a more formal definition, you could take the new decimal places as representing coefficients of 10^{-N}, where N is an infinite hypernatural number, but since those have no beginning or end it's not at all clear where you'd position the coefficients.

On the other hand, I don't really see the conceptual problem with treating 0.9999... as a value that is infinitely close to 1. What bothers me the most at that level is the comment somewhere in the thread asking, given the established infinitesimal difference between 0.99999... and 9/9, what's the difference between 0.33333... and 3/9? lcamtuf's derivation works the same way, suggesting that a difference exists. And you can say that it does; you could just declare that rational numbers with prime factors other than 2 and 5 in the denominator have no exact representation in the decimal system.

But there's no demand for this. People don't seem to have the same problem with the idea that 0.33333... is 1/3 as they do with the idea that 0.99999... is 3/3.