MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Is there some way to better understand TAOCP Vol 1 by Knuth?
by justanything | 2025-06-04 20:45:32+00:00
Reposting:

Hello, I am far from a smart person but I still wanted to give reading The Art Of Computer Programming Volume 1: Fundamental Algorithms by Donald Knuth a try but I don't understand at all how MIX computer he talks about works.

Are there any other resources that make it easier to understand the contents of this book?
by ljm | 2025-06-04 20:45:40+00:00
There is a world beyond startup exits and stock options and it is a sustainable non profit public good entity. It blows my mind that HN doesn’t have this nuance but I guess the fog of war sets in outside of the Bay Area in California and nobody can see shit outside of the lingering mist of Silicon Valley.

Is it not better to be supported in your effort to do good by being able to volunteer for a stable non-profit over many years? That organisation would have a long term presence and huge influence. It could even lobby the local council or government.

In case you’re confused - the church does that and it is 100% dependent on volunteers who believe.
by akshaybhalotia | 2025-06-04 20:46:11+00:00
If the identity document mandated to be verified is one that allows not only private businesses but also the government to build profiles and use them against private citizens with no legal recourse in case of misuse (criminal or otherwise) and is trivial to obtain for an adversary, it very much is "surveillance tech". Please look up everything you can about the horrors of the identity scheme called "AADHAAR" in India.
by sanderjd | 2025-06-04 20:46:20+00:00
Yeah but you've said that the conclusion is correct by rejecting the premise of the question.

The conclusion could be correct given the premise, and also it could be moot because the premise is impossible, but those are two different claims.

Obviously I agree with you that the proposed system is unworkable because the premise is impossible. (This is a "duh" thing that really isn't worth debating, anyone who fails to see this is a fool.)

But I actually also think the conclusion is wrong even given the premise. I think it is wrong to deny people representative input into their government, even under the assumption of a perfect benevolent monarch. This is not for utilitarian reasons, but moral reasons.
by happytoexplain | 2025-06-04 20:46:23+00:00
To be clear first: The parent is being a little unreasonable.

However.

There's no need to resort to insults, nor to use a single person as an example, which doesn't make sense, regardless of whether it's their "only hobby".

Average novel reading speed is an impossible metric. E.g. WPM measurements are irrelevant to long-form reading, are irrelevant to literary reading, and don't account for processing, tangential thought, or re-reading, which are of course highly variable. And "reading time" (the subset of free time conducive to literary reading) is also basically impossible to quantify broadly. It's also difficult to categorize people by how much they are trying to read. Some people are only a little interested, some not at all. Further, this is one of those fields where the super-humans aren't actually that rare, so you get a situation where the average person reads 8 books per year despite half of all people reading half a book per year (made up numbers).

Point of all that being, "novels a year" is one of the most culturally acceptable brags, because there is no "expected" value for people broadly. It's a hidden value, so we can say things like "yeah, I read 12 books a year, not a lot I know", and people generally won't roll their eyes at risk of appearing stupid.

Look at how many people on otherwise-rational HN are saying "I used to read 30 novels a year," "I used to read a novel a week," as if that means it must be easy to accomplish in Western work and life culture. We're drunk on the ease of implicitly painting people who can't read as much as us as simply dumb modern westerners.

I think it's an easy thing to do, and we shouldn't. It's not classy.
by ata_aman | 2025-06-04 20:46:57+00:00
Yeah, here's one[0]. Obviously long ways out but using speech to run through scenarios of different simulations from pre-defined parameters would be great. You're basically applying formulas to already designed objects. If the model could run the scenario and spit out a report when it's done with summaries, it would be great since some of these simulations take hours. Then adjust the model for better sim results and iterate accordingly.

[0] https://doc.comsol.com/5.4/doc/com.comsol.help.heat/Introduc...
by robocat | 2025-06-04 20:46:59+00:00
Maybe software should be a capital asset, but these depreciation rules don't fix that issue.

The rule says if you pay someone $200k to develop software: then you now have a $200k asset that then devalues to value of $0 over 5 years (starting midyear). That's just plain weird.

For our example a depreciation table might look like:

Year, %Amortized, Amount 2025 10% $20,000 2026 20% $40,000 2027 20% $40,000 2028 20% $40,000 2029 20% $40,000 2030 10% $20,000

The final effect of the 174 rule change is that you still finally end up with a software asset worth $0. However you now have taxable income of $200k in year one and expenses equalling $200k spread over 5 years. The taxes paid could be a lot: although the taxation money is really just being lent to the government for a few years at 0%. The actual financial costs are fucking complicated.

Understanding accounting and taxes are two absolutely essential skills if you ever wish to be a founder (and useful anyways).

Finding a solution to dealing with the valuation of assets is difficult. The historical solution of depreciation is broken for software, intellectual property and goodwill. In theory, taxes on dividends and capital gains taxation already deal with the issue (company taxation at x% kinda ends up at $0 because the shareholder pays y% and claims back the x% through imputation).

And remember that salaries are properly taxed.
by mystified5016 | 2025-06-04 20:47:05+00:00
If you have a less-popular CPU, compilers today can be utter trash. GCC doesn't understand the TinyAVR core and emits insane assembly. Like iterating an array, instead of putting the array pointer in the Z register and using the atomic load-and-increment instructions, it will add to the pointer, read, subtract from the pointer, loop. It also uses the slower load instruction. Overall, looping over an array in C is 4 times slower than assembly, and consumes three times as much program space. Try examining the assembly from your next program, you'll probably be quite surprised at how awful it is.

I had to implement Morton ordering on this platform. The canonical C for this blows up to over 300 instructions per iteration. I unrolled the loop, used special CPU hardware and got the entire thing in under 100 instructions.

Compilers, even modern ones, are not magic and only understand CPUs popular enough to receive specific attention from compiler devs. If your CPU is unpopular, you're doing optimizations yourself.

Assembly doesn't matter to arduino script kiddies, but it's still quite important if you care at all about execution speed, binary size, resource usage.
by trcf22 | 2025-06-04 20:47:13+00:00
I found that presenting your situation and asking for a plan/ideas + « do not give me code. Make sure you understand the requirements and ask questions if needed.» works much better for me.

It also allows me to more easily control what the llm will do and not end up reviewing and throwing 200 lines of code.

In a nextjs + vitest context, I try to really outline which tests I want and give it proper data examples so that it does not cheat around mocking fake objects.

I do not buy into the whole you’re a senior dev etc. Most people use Claude for coding so I guess it’s engrained by default.
by nine_k | 2025-06-04 20:47:24+00:00
A comprehensive implementation would be a firewall. Which CIDRs, which ports, etc.

I wish there were an API to build such a firewall, e.g. as a part of a browser extension, but also a simple default UI allowing to give access to a particular machine (e.g. router), to the LAN, to a VPN, based on the routing table, or to "private networks" in general, in the sense Windows ascribes to that. Also access to localhost separately. The site could ask one of these categories explicitly.
by mythrwy | 2025-06-04 20:47:25+00:00
How much software do we actually need though?

I'm a little embarrassed to admit this, but over the past 15 years of my career I have worked on a few products the world really didn't need at all (nor want). I was paid, and life went on but it was a misallocation of resources.

I suppose now someone can build stuff the world doesn't need a lot easier.
by hamhead27 | 2025-06-04 20:47:31+00:00
There is a sad reality and truthfulness is that you're probably experiencing that dread for nothing. Tech is moving forward but there is an underlying hype thesis that has really yet to become a reality.

The creators at these companies are making all their bets that the switch between interpolate and extrapolate will happen at sometime in the very near future.

If and when that fails to materialize (as I think you could argue some companies are already recognizing is coming, ie Microsoft), the bubble will burst.
by commandlinefan | 2025-06-04 20:47:59+00:00
Not OP, but I do a 36-hour fast once a week. I drink black coffee and water, but I mix one very small salt packet (probably no more than 1/2 tsp) in with one 8-oz glass of water around noon for "lunch". For the most part, that does well enough to stave off the next-day side effects.
by potholereseller | 2025-06-04 20:48:04+00:00
It appears to not have been enabled by default on my instance of uBlock; it seems a specific filter list is used to implement this [0]; that filter was un-checked; I have no idea why. The contents of that filter list are here [1]; notice that there are exceptions for certain services, so be sure to read through the exceptions before enabling it.

[0] Filter Lists -> Privacy -> Block Outsider Intrusion into Lan

[1] <https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uAssets/blob/master/filters/...>
by Sean-Der | 2025-06-04 20:48:29+00:00
Yes we are :) When OBS merges the PR [0] things are going to get very interesting.

Before you needed to run expensive transcoding jobs to be able to support heterogenous clients. Once we get Simulcast the only cost will be bandwidth.

With Hetzner I am paying $1 a TB. With AV1 or H265 + Simulcast I am getting 4K for hundreds of users on just a single server.

We will have some growing pains, but I am not giving up until I can make this accessible to everyone.

[0] https://github.com/obsproject/obs-studio/pull/10885
by cckolon | 2025-06-04 20:48:34+00:00
I do think it’s common for managers (especially new ones) to desire too much validation from their reports. James Stockdale offered some advice here in a 1980 Proceedings article [1]

> [Leaders] must be fair and they may be compassionate, but they cannot be addicted to being loved by everybody. The man who needs to be loved is an extortionist’s dream. That man will do anything to avoid face-to-face unpleasantness; he will sell his soul down the river for praise. He can be had.

[1] https://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/1980/september/le...
by atonse | 2025-06-04 20:48:35+00:00
Oh man, can anyone imagine a non-Terminator scenario for this?

Update: I'm not saying people shouldn't develop this, we're never going to squash human curiosity. But when I see this kind of stuff, I'm deeply troubled by how bad actors (state and non-state) will use this.

I hope our security services are working hard on countering these potential threats.
by dogleash | 2025-06-04 20:48:50+00:00
That person is way too far down the rabbit hole themselves to give a decent criticism of Alexander.

When someone's #1, heavy-hitting, come-out-swinging criticism amounts to "his group is not as smart as they think they are" then they're already done. They've cooked themselves. I read that paragraph and heard it in the mean girl voice they thought they were hiding.

#2 is that his wrong ideas are immoral. #3 is that #2 draws the wrong crowd.

It's not like I don't get the point. It's just written for an audience that already deep in that corner of the blogosphere.

I'm sure they pump their fists at such a clean summing-up of why they hate him. But my eyes are glazing over.
by freedomben | 2025-06-04 20:49:20+00:00
I don't like Yarvin's ideas that I've heard, but GP has a point. There's almost no point to posting something that will just get downvoted quickly (which any defense of Yarvin certainly would), regardless of whether it makes any interesting points. Once it's dead it won't get much if any interaction. It's not about being afraid of people criticizing, it's about expending the effort to write a quality comment that won't be viewed or engaged by anyone.

I do think we on HN have gotten way too reflexively downvoting of opinions we disagree with. IMHO downvoting should be used like a moderation tool to downrank low effort/spammy or factually/objectively incorrect posts that don't contribute anything interesting to the discussion, not as a lazy way of expressing our disagreement.

> This is consistent with my expectation of the future of fascism. The appearance of seriousness but once you have a gun pointed in my face the presence of discussion will be dropped in favor of a bullet in my skull.

You could dismiss almost any political ideology with this. Certainly there's a lot of people who experienced this in the USSR, North Korea, China, and more, and those are/were hardly fascist governments.
by ChocolateGod | 2025-06-04 20:49:33+00:00
Swift seems like a really nice language that's held back by it's association with Apple.

Seems to hit a sweet spot of a fast/compiled (compared to Javascript), memory safe (compared to C++), object orientated (compared to Go) and easy to write (compared to Rust).

Doesn't seem like there's any maintained bindings for Qt though, although there are some interesting ones for GTK (e.g. https://git.aparoksha.dev/aparoksha/adwaita-swift)
by runako | 2025-06-04 20:49:41+00:00
> Americans have experienced things getting gradually better for essentially the entire duration of the American nation

More or less, I agree with this part of the thesis.

> Western Europe has proven much better at responding intelligently to the limits of growth than the US has

This is kind of my point -- we don't do the things other countries do to respond because those things would broadly be perceived as improving the lot of most citizens, and Americans do not generally believe that is possible anymore. (Also: "socialism is bad!")

But there is no reason for a country where economic measures of growth of wealth and income are so consistently strong should be so hesitant to invest in the future, and should be actively disinvesting in long-term initiatives.

What's especially painful is that some of the same policy choices we make that result in more distress for citizens are also likely to reduce the long-run growth of the economy. We make choices that hurt us now and also make things worse in the future.

(Generally not going to respond to the political dig because this really isn't a direct outgrowth of the typical left/right political divide in the US or its projections on other countries. For example, right-leaning Hungary has universal healthcare and free college tuition, but nobody is accusing Hungary of being Leftist.)
by throwaway2037 | 2025-06-04 20:50:35+00:00
You are missing the point: What generates higher ROI: (1) dev + PM (separate people) or (2) highly skilled dev who can periodically act as PM? In my experience, it is always (2). Any time that I hear a senior manager complaining about "expensive devs", I always ask them: "How do you balance cost and quality?" Most of them are stunned by this question and give a bullshit answer. The truth: Almost all orgs are better to hire far fewer devs who are very high quality, versus many devs who are lower quality. I never worked for Amazon AWS but the "pizza-sized" team thing is real -- from experience.
by Sean-Der | 2025-06-04 20:50:47+00:00
Thank you :)

When are you coming back to the WebRTC space, lots more cool stuff you could b doing :) I really loved [0] it's so cool that a user can access a server behind a firewall/NAT without setting up a VPN or having SSH constantly listening.

[0] https://github.com/maxmcd/webtty
by mmooss | 2025-06-04 20:51:00+00:00
Eventually you need new a new plane; that doesn't mean the old one is a failure.

The US has only ~20 B-2s, to go with ~60 B-52s (originally built in the 1950s), and ~40 B-1Bs (~1980s tech). Only the B-2 could survive war with a peer, afaik; that was fine after the Cold War when there was no peer threat but now that China is a near-peer threat, the US needs many more bombers capable in a peer conflict and the B-2 production line was shut down decades ago (production was discontinued when the Cold War ended). They plan to build the B-21 in much larger numbers.

Also, the B-21 was built for conflict with China, where distances are much greater than in Europe.
by wavemode | 2025-06-04 20:51:06+00:00
Data leakage is an eval problem, not an accuracy problem.

That is, the problem is not that the AI is wrong X% of the time. The problem is that, in the presence of a data leak, there is no way of knowing what the value of X even is.

This problem is recursive - in the presence of a data leak, you also cannot know for sure the quantity of data that has leaked.
by Karrot_Kream | 2025-06-04 20:51:22+00:00
When the American Left split into progressive and liberal camps in the mid 2010s, the rationalist and adjacent communities underwent a huge internal conflict. Scott and a lot of his orbit tend to stay on the liberal side which these days is called and often calls itself "centrist". The aftermath of the split has had pretty huge effects in most Western spaces. A lot of the progressive left is really angry at the centrist left wing and many centrists think the progressive left is misguided and hate on them. The hate that Scott gets is largely a fallout from this schism.
by pjs_ | 2025-06-04 20:51:38+00:00
> no way out but through

Is exactly the philosophical dead end that Nick Land and Curtis and maybe Mark Fisher arrived at. Accelerationism is like the FedEx arrow in that it’s both an unforgettable idea and easy enough that anyone can grasp it, some of the dumbest politicians of our time are ardent believers.

It’s fun to think about the possibility that belief in this conclusion was premature two decades ago when CCRU and NRx people were banging on about it but now maybe it actually isn’t premature. Which would annoyingly be a pretty compelling instance of hyperstitional time war
by nemo | 2025-06-04 20:51:42+00:00
For that you want to use BirdNet:

https://birdnet.cornell.edu/api/

https://birdnet.cornell.edu/

Merlin is trained on the same source as BirdNet.

You can also use the iNaturalist API for visual ids, for what it's worth.

https://www.inaturalist.org
by tene80i | 2025-06-04 20:52:01+00:00
Sample of one, but I’m interested. I used to use a real camera and now very rarely do. But I also often find the iPhone blurring very fake and I’ve never understood why. I assumed it was just impossible to do any better, given the resources they throw at the problem. If you could demonstrate the difference, maybe there would be a market, even if just for specific use cases like headshots or something.
by basch | 2025-06-04 20:52:13+00:00
>Managing millions of cell towers would be diluting their focus

Somewhat disagree. If you stuck Apple and ATT into a single holding company, each company still has identical focus. Does Berkshire Hathaway buying another company dilute the focus of any other?

I am always surprised when companies want to eliminate small divisions and projects that break even as if they cant just exist off to the side, pay for themselves, and be otherwise ignored. Not everything has to contribute to corporate profit. Resources that pay for themselves aren't consumed in a way that can be reallocated if they are eliminated.
by segmondy | 2025-06-04 20:52:17+00:00
then don't. the point of open source is not to earn money or profit. it's to have the software open so people can inspect it, be inspired by it, trust it, modify it without contacting you and possibly copy it. imagine sharing your idea with the world but not wanting anyone to implement or capitalize on it. it's an impossible ask.

i'm a bald head grey beard, at least in the 90's when we shared software it was for the reasons we outlined, there was no github stars, there was no trying to line a job. it was a true gift and pay it forward sort of thing to the world. it's been almost lost due to money, if you need to earn a living, start a business, get a job and make your open source project a hobby. don't mix them together.
by vessenes | 2025-06-04 20:52:28+00:00
Sorry, I'm not being politically correct. Can I ask how many of the administration's executive orders you've read? This admin moved extremely aggressively on a such a large number of fronts that there are complaints that there aren't enough lawyers available at DoJ to defend all the lawsuits against the government. Strip all the rhetoric and attempts to dunk on the orange guy away from whatever side media you like to consume and ask yourself not what the stated goals of the admin were, but if there is a coherent and likely set of goals they had, and if they've executed on them.

From day one in the office these guys executed hard. Hundreds of executive orders. And if you read those orders, often up to half of them is calling out all the ways exec orders from 2016 were mutated or ignored and specifically banning them. They are in no way the work of dumb people. Legally and practically aggressive people? Yes. People with policies you might dislike or hate? For sure. People who are masters at engaging media and outrage? Yes. People headlined by someone who really loves self-enrichment and get-out-of-jail free rulings? Definitely.

Calling them dumb is radically misunderstanding the real situation in the whitehouse and to the extent journalists are calling them out as dumb it's because they're following the ball laid out by the street magician; watch the hands. The ball is all the sturm and drang and drama, the hands are actual practical outcomes.
by cjbgkagh | 2025-06-04 20:52:57+00:00
> China faces civil unrest and balkanizes, due to backlash against its increasingly authoritarian regime?

I've been hearing this is eminent for my entire life....

> major population shock that radically and painfully transforms their economy

Ah Peter Zeihan's evergreen bugaboo. Chinese old people != American old people, the cost of old people is completely different. While China does have a Ponzi economy, much like the US, and thus is susceptible to reverse wealth effects their corporations are run by politicians instead of the other way around. As much as I would like to be able to assume that repressive autocracies lead to political instability the empirical evidence does not seem to bear that out.
by tootie | 2025-06-04 20:53:11+00:00
I never quite put it together but Vance worked at Mithril Capital for Peter Thiel. Thiel's other ventures include Palantir, Valar Ventures and he's an investor in Anduril.

How can someone be such a diehard Tolkien nerd and endorse government by corporation? Does he think the hero was Saruman?
by wat10000 | 2025-06-04 20:53:14+00:00
It might be interesting from a philosophical point of view, but when it comes to "do we want this person to have influence over how our government is structured?" it really doesn't matter if the conclusion is wrong because the premise is impossible or because it doesn't follow from the premise.

In any case, this one fails both ways. A benevolent dictatorship might be the best form of government in the short term, but the fact that people are mortal means that it's still a bad form of government in the long term.