MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by lossolo | 2025-06-17 15:19:55+00:00
You’re still mixing up two different things.

Sample space, how many distinct labels sit on the die/in the jar (100) Event space, did the guess match the ground-truth label? ("correct" vs. "incorrect").

Knowing there are 99 wrong labels tells us how many distinct ways we can be wrong, NOT how likely we are to be wrong. Probability lives in the weights you place on each label, not in the label count itself. The moment you say "uniformly at random" you’ve chosen a particular weighting (each label gets 1⁄100). But nothing in the original claim required that assumption.

Imagine a classifier that, on any query, behaves like this:

emits the single correct status 50 % of the time.

sprays its remaining 50 % probability mass uniformly over the 99 wrong statuses (≈ 0.505% each).

There are still 99 ways to miss, but they jointly receive 0.50 of the probability mass, while the “hit” receives 0.50. When you grade the output, the experiment collapses to:

Outcome Probability

correct 0.50

wrong 0.50

Mathematically and for every metric that only cares about right vs. wrong (accuracy, recall etc.) this is a coin-flip.

Your jar contains 99 black marbles and 1 red marble and you assume each marble is equally likely to be drawn. Under that specific weight assignment

P(red)=0.01, yes, accuracy is 1 %. But that’s a special case (uniform weights), not a law of nature. Give the red marble extra weight, make it larger, magnetic, whatever, until P(red)=0.50 and suddenly the exact same jar of 100 physical objects yields a 50% success chance.

Once the system emits one label, the grader only records "match" or "mismatch". Every multiclass classification benchmark in machine learning does exactly that. So:

99 wrong labels -> many ways to fail

50% probability mass on "right" -> coin-flip odds of success

Nothing about the count of wrong options can force the probability of success down to 1 %. Only your choice of weights can do that.

"Fifty-fifty" refers to how much probability you allocate to the correct label, not to how many other labels exist. If the correct label soaks up 0.50 of the total probability mass, whether the rest is spread across 1, 9, or 99 alternatives, the task is indistinguishable from a coin flip in terms of success odds.

EDIT: If you still don't understand, just let me know and I will show you the math proof, that will confirm what I said.
by HeyLaughingBoy | 2025-06-17 15:20:32+00:00
I also live about 40 miles outside Minneapolis (SW). They should check if fiber is available. A few years ago the state apportioned a chunk of money to roll fiber out to rural communities and it's well underway at this time. I finally got hooked up a few months ago. We're in an unincorporated township, but it looks like the towns & villages got connected first.

One of my neighbors is apparently using Starlink since I see a Starlink router show up in my Wi-Fi scan.
by overfeed | 2025-06-17 15:20:48+00:00
> How many developers here are aware that this is a bad pattern?

I've been around the block and I think dev/staging/prod is a great pattern! Anyone telling otherwise may be cargo-culting hyperscalers who:

1. Can't replicate their prod environment without spending tens/hundreds of billions in capex

2. Have spent an aggregate of billions investing in developing tools, processes, core-infrastructure teams, and specialized SREs to monitor and keep prod healthy.

2.1 Have tools supporting gated release to a fraction of their users with automated anomaly detection. FANGs can easily test changes against 0.01% of their userbase and get meaningful data back.

If you're not constrained by (1) and don't have the benefits of (2), dev/test/prod is an excellent strategy you should use instead of testing in production for no reason.
by AstroBen | 2025-06-17 15:20:52+00:00
> not having to expend brain energy to solve problems, and they're mistaking that for productivity

Couldn't this result in being able to work longer for less energy, though? With really hard mentally challenging tasks I find I cap out at around 3-4 hours a day currently

Like imagine if you could walk at running speed. You're not going faster.. but you can do it for way longer so your output goes up if you want it to
by notarobot123 | 2025-06-17 15:20:57+00:00
Nihilism, not even once. It's a hell of a drug that'll wipe out all meaning and purpose from life leaving you cold, detached and suicidal.

Meaning is emergent and constructed from our experience of being physical beings in the real world. Just because that's mediated through our thoughts and senses doesn't suddenly strip it of existence or relevance.

Even reflecting on the nature of consciousness is contingent on so many other more fundamental lived experiences and mental abstractions. It's turtles all the way down and meaning is found/constructed in every layer.
by larodi | 2025-06-17 15:21:03+00:00
My mother used to program this DB when she was pregnant with me in the 1980s. But it was a stolen version for the communist block, known as ДАИМС, and they actually shipped an EHCR system, which must've been like 40 years ahead of its time. Then СССР collapsed and all dev went down. Sadly, she didn't continue pursuing a careering in programming.
by scotty79 | 2025-06-17 15:21:54+00:00
> It takes me at least the same amount of time to review code not written by me than it would take me to write the code myself, if not more.

Even if that was true for everybody reviews would still be worth doing because when the code is reviewed it gets more than one pair of eyes looking at it.

So it's still worth using AI even if it's slower than writing code yourself. Because you wouldn't have made mistakes that AI would made and AI wouldn't make mistakes you would have made.

It still might be personally not worth it for you though if you prefer to write code than to read it. Until you can set up AI as a reviewer for yourself.
by cogman10 | 2025-06-17 15:23:02+00:00
The problem the OP is talking about is renewable islanding.

To be clear, this is a renewable problem, not a rules problem.

The problem, put simply, is that renewables don't want to be reactive power sources. It requires additional equipment to properly determine what the frequency of the grid should be (some rely on flywheels, for example) and getting it wrong can be disastrous for the grid and equipment. Effectively, if renewables get it wrong they become a load on the grid rather than a reactive power source. Compounding an active problem.

So, what renewables do instead is follow the voltage wave. If the frequency drops, they cut power to avoid causing damage to the grid and other power suppliers. The thing more traditional spinning disk power suppliers will do is simply power through the down voltage. The disks have momentum which means even if they wanted to, they could just stop producing power. This somewhat self corrects a large reactive power surge.

Grids do not like doing this. This is why they'll charge more to industrial power users that add highly inductive loads (think electric motors, like a saw). They'll even incentivize having these businesses install capacitor banks to avoid adding inductive loads.

The solution is rules, but rules renewable producers have to follow. That's mandatory islanding equipment installs rather than just shutting down power.
by bevr1337 | 2025-06-17 15:23:11+00:00
Complex cases are indeed complex! Data viz is an interesting example since visuals are often misleading and time sinks regardless of ability. It's less effort to provide an HTML table or CSV export than gluing D3 and React together (or whatever stack your team uses).

I try my hardest to push back on canvas viz so we're not reinventing every wheel. SVG is easy to extend and make interactive
by radicality | 2025-06-17 15:23:54+00:00
Haha, oh yeah it’s completely fake, just meant to imitate how ridiculous and hard to understand normal git manual and settings are, you’re not alone.

With the ‘pre-AI’, just wanted to give context that I found it long ago and that afaik it’s made with some simple markov generator. Nowadays you could ask an llm to keep generating for you bogus git manpages.
by rus20376 | 2025-06-17 15:24:03+00:00
Yes, absolutely!

At one point it made sense for everyone to learn Perl because it was the de facto scripting language for server side components of the, then brand new, World Wide Web. Nowadays backend software development and other Perl niches like shell scripting are crowded with competitors. But that does not invalidate Perl in the least! Indeed, Perl is still the best "power tool" available to a systems programmer, system administrator, or anyone working in the realm of "shell scripts".

Learn Perl because it is the most powerful way to write scripts on Linux (or any other Unix like operating system).
by jauntywundrkind | 2025-06-17 15:24:05+00:00
Are there any existing examples of partial render offload to the cloud?

Crazy good insight here: splatting is largely a search problem, and that can be offloaded to the cloud.

> Specifically, on the cloud side, we propose asynchronous level-of-detail search to identify the necessary Gaussians for the client. On the client side, we accelerate rendering via a lookup table-based rasterization.
by nashashmi | 2025-06-17 15:24:17+00:00
Yes, agreed on all fronts. I am familiar with Knight as well. The literal word is intoxicants, not wine. And different substances were interpreted as intoxicants later. But after being declared intoxicants, Islamic leaders would not go near it. Avicenna was a Muslim researcher and philosopher, and not religiously minded. Sufis experimented with various elements of mysticism and some experimented with substances even to this day. But there explorations were attempts to find God and perhaps understand intoxicants’ effects on the brain. I put them under the researchers’ category.
by lo_zamoyski | 2025-06-17 15:25:26+00:00
We can avoid the problem simply by employing better design and a clear understanding of the intended audience.

There is no need or moral obligation for all of the internet to be accessible to everyone. If you're not a millionaire, you're not going to be join a rich country club. If you don't have a background in physics, the latest research won't be accessible to you. If you don't have a decent video card, you won't be able to play many of the latest games. The idea that everything should be equally accessible to everyone is simply the wrong assumption. Inequality is not a bad thing per se.

However, good design principles involve an element of parsimony. Not minimalism, mind you, but a purposeful use of technology. So if the content you wish to show is best served by something resource intensive that excludes some or even most people from using it, but those that can access it are the intended audience, then that's fine. But if you're just jamming a crapton of worthless gimmickry into your website that doesn't serve the purpose of the website, and on top of that, it prevents your target audience from using it, then that's just bad design.

Begin with purpose and a clear view of your intended audience and most of this problem will go away. We already do that by making websites that work with both mobile and desktop browsers. You don't necessarily need to make resource heaviness a first-order concern. It's already entailed by audience and informed by the needs of the presentation.
by jmajeremy | 2025-06-17 15:25:28+00:00
I'm a minimalist in this regard, and I really believe that a website should only be as complex as it needs to be. If your website requires fast Internet because it's providing some really amazing service that takes advantage of those speeds, then go for it. If it's just a site to provide basic information but it loads a bunch of high-res images and videos and lengthy javascript/css files, then you should consider trimming the fat and making it smaller. Personally I always test my website on a variety of devices, including an old PC running Windows XP, a Mac from 2011 running High Sierra, an Android phone from 2016, and a Linux machine using Lynx text browser, and I test loading the site on a connection throttled to 128kbps. It doesn't have to run perfectly on all these devices, but my criterion is that it's at least usable.
by incomingpain | 2025-06-17 15:25:32+00:00
>The market is crowded, competitive, and you have no social proof or following. Getting your message through all this noise is not easy.

For me, my startup has no competitors. My "competitors" should be subscribed to as well. It's not an either-or situation. Get them all!

>2. At the end of each day, I looked back on what I had done and wrote down one thing I would improve the next day.

My most recent 'expansion' is an AI addition. Looking at it process right now, it can go another 44,000 ip addresses. Roughly 1 per second.

>If you’re in the 0 to 1 phase right now, you just have to keep going.

I know my 'product' is worthy. It's absolutely worth signing up for. At a great price for now.

My huge problem is marketing. I struggle to get anyone to https://mapleintel.ca

>And I can also say that if you don’t quit, you get to see the other side of it.

I've committed to 1 year domain registration. Once I get some customers I can expand it by the customer :)
by NoGravitas | 2025-06-17 15:25:36+00:00
> I started with termcap because I was already familiar with it through w3m. But termcap is an obsolete interface, and cannot describe the only useful attribute for modern terminals (true color). Its only benefit was "maybe it accidentally works on a hardware terminal from the 80s", which is cool but not really worth the extra failure mode.

Priorities, I guess. As long as I'm in a terminal, I'd rather have support for hardware terminals from the 80s than truecolor. But my only hardware terminal is a VT-420, so probably works for more or less anything that supports base XTerm (monochrome).
by ImPostingOnHN | 2025-06-17 15:26:03+00:00
> If a Twitter API allows me to siphon tweets off of Twitter, you can never delete them. If a Facebook API allows (user-approved apps) to view the names of my friends and the pages they like, this data can be used to create targeted political ads for those users[1].

Not only is this already possible (I can open up twitter and press "control-P"; I can open up Facebook and see names)*, but it's already being done by those companies. If you thought Cambridge Analytica was bad, imagine what Facebook is doing with even more user data.

That indicates that the issue isn't protecting users from that sort of abuse (since they are the abusers in that sense), but to prevent business competitors from doing the same and reduce user choice (eg users who don't want to have to have their eyes bleed to read their content on these sites).

If the goal is to keep information secret from X, disclosing it to X via 1 programmatic means while restricting it via another, fails to achieve that goal.

> So a company considering creating a public-facing API must deal with the fact that:

1. It could be helping users, which is more important to users than Facebook winning some corpo-war-on-data-access. Is it more important to Facebook et al, though? Clearly not, and therein lies the ethical failing of Facebook et al.

* - "but wait" I hear some saying, "you're just a human, you can't do that at scale!" Well: the data got on my computer screen programmatically, and it's trivial to reuse those methods to get the data you want. It's just an extra step or two that frustrates legitimate users.
by 1970-01-01 | 2025-06-17 15:26:15+00:00
>(skipping over the fact that you could have a little more compassion to someone who lost decades worth of important, sentimental data)

Someone who lost *access* to decades worth of important, sentimental data. It is extremely likely that 100.000% of their data still exists in its original form. That one word makes a world of difference for my compassion levels. If it exists, access can be restored. My compassion is for the frustration level toward getting a human at MS, which is a different and weirder problem.
by rus20376 | 2025-06-17 15:26:40+00:00
100% correct!

Larry Wall, the inventor of Perl once said of Lisp syntax "Lisp has all the visual appeal of oatmeal with fingernail clippings mixed in."[1]

I would argue that Python is about the same, but without the nail clippings. Just plain oatmeal.

[1] https://groups.google.com/g/comp.lang.clos/c/edcyFOBLMeo/m/M...
by mopsi | 2025-06-17 15:26:44+00:00
Russian police are targeting migrants and draft-age men in a wave of raids on gyms and martial arts clubs across major cities, with activists describing them as part of a broader crackdown that intensified ahead of the country’s spring military draft. /-/ Similar raids have since been reported at other Spirit Fitness locations, as well as gyms in the cities of St. Petersburg, Irkutsk, Yekaterinburg and Krasnodar, according to Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty’s regional desk Sever Realii. /-/ Lawyers in multiple regions told Sever Realii that gym raids now happen at least twice a month in major cities. Russian citizens are typically sent to enlistment offices, while foreign nationals are taken to temporary detention centers. Many are ultimately deported.

https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2025/05/01/russian-police-rai...
by kgwxd | 2025-06-17 15:26:49+00:00
Death means dead. If it comes back, it didn't die. So either everyone saying they've experienced it, has no ego (what are "they" then?), or they're using the wrong word.

I've experienced all those realizations myself, but "I" am back for now. So what's a better word for it? Maybe if we didn't call it "death", it wouldn't sound so scary, or mysterious, or interesting, or even useful. Guess it'd be kind of hard to build religions around that though.
by ty6853 | 2025-06-17 15:27:10+00:00
The longer I live, the more I find most things in life are just delaying something, and ultimately just death. My teeth are shit, I fix them a little at a time and just pray they don't break down too much before I'm dead. Some of my muscles/tendons bones are getting weaker, I just baby them enough that hopefully I can keep their use to old age.

We hope to push most the bad stuff beyond or as far towards death as possible, and death as far away as possible so long as not too much bad stuff is already happening. The question then becomes at what rate we slow the delay of schizo-affective disorder or some other mental illness. It's coming for all of us, given enough time.
by bayindirh | 2025-06-17 15:27:25+00:00
I assumed the same so, but as far as I remember, the data contained serial numbers (car VIN + phone serial), speed, location and some more data.

It's probably for automated emergency notifications, better route tracking when GPS is unavailable, etc.

Apple does a lot of magick with their own software, and also there are some telemetry related things, I guess.

Maybe car related data is used for car integration, IDK. Need to watch [0].

[0]: https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2016/723/
by dkarl | 2025-06-17 15:27:31+00:00
That's the upside of JITs and a great way to take advantage of them. Unfortunately, not every programmer is motivated to produce simple code. Some programmers prefer to write more complex code, either because they enjoy building castles in their mind, or because they would rather not take the time to remove any of the dead ends and missteps they made while searching for a solution.

Highly optimized code being convoluted is an extreme case, for rare algorithms or exotic levels of instruction-level efficiency. The first 95% of optimization is simplifying the code, which benefits both the machine and the programmers.
by toast0 | 2025-06-17 15:27:34+00:00
> It's wild how much extra work was done to avoid coherency, yet share memory.

Having separate, non-coherent memory is status quo for GPUs. Bringing the GPU onto the die means you've got to share the path to memory, but access patterns are different.

Designing for the typical case where the addresses used are distinct is totally reasonable, it's not wild at all. After that works, you can try to maie shared use faster, too, but from the article, that didn't really happen in this design; the features are there, but the bandwidth isn't.
by lproven | 2025-06-17 15:27:50+00:00
Reverse Polish notation is every bit as easy, simple and minimal as Lispian prefix notation. They are mirror images of one another... and for most ordinary people, both are equally difficult to read or to use.

And I include myself in this.

Remember that for a lot of ordinary people, school algebra is almost impossible to follow and is the reason they stop studying maths as soon as they can. And that is simple infix notation.
by nonameiguess | 2025-06-17 15:27:54+00:00
No. People see "defense" and immediately think everything is a weapon, for some reason. The DoD is still an organization with exactly the same business functions as wherever you work. This is likely going to be something more or less like the ChatGPT for Gov thing. You ask it to summarize videos and articles, review a document you're writing, spruce it up, whatever the rest of you are doing with LLMs, but you're allowed to use it from a locked down DoD workstation that can't access public web services.
by altairprime | 2025-06-17 15:28:42+00:00
As an occasional user of either form of NexusMods, both have been worth paying for in the recent past. The last time I played through SDV I had approximately thirty mods that I hand-installed because I was patching them locally to improve weather handling and learning C# from it. I’ve also used the mod manager to do a couple other games that badly need the improvements (“Stop Wasting My Time” is the best mod ever) and that I wasn’t modifying further. In both circumstances, I paid for a membership to support them, and I ended it when I stopped playing the game I was modding. Glad they exist and will continue to pay them when I use them, especially if they continue to be opinionated along current lines.
by vanderZwan | 2025-06-17 15:28:59+00:00
> But for PDFs that have a lot of vector graphics and are over 50-100mb

I also have opened Lenovo Thinkpad manuals, hahaha. For those who haven't, it's quite amazing, really: the SVG images are exports of the full CAD model of the laptop without any culling of elements that aren't visible. And I know this because I used to see each indiduad screw be rendered slowly afer the other whenever pdf.js tried to render one of those bad boys.
by jabroni_salad | 2025-06-17 15:29:40+00:00
Why are we playing a game of informational asymmetry? Are we at war? Do they want to seize my oil?

"The Initech account is totally on fire, can you look at it?"

Yes let us save the day in jolly cooperation.

"Did you see that ludicrous display last night?"

You can wait until im done with my current thing.

"hey."

If I respond, they will wrongly believe I am available and willing. It is morally correct to ghost them.
by awongh | 2025-06-17 15:29:53+00:00
It's unclear what you really mean here, but "suffer" from "scarcity" could mean a few things.

Tech is not immune from abuses of power, but most water scarcity that causes suffering (people being literally thirsty or can't wash their clothes) is not a resource issue (amount of water available)- it's a political/infrastructure issue. Don't build a data center that takes away people's clean drinking water. Build water infrastructure where people live.

But of course that's not the problem described by the article, even though the writer would like to lightly imply that might be the case.

Edit to add: Water and water rights in the western USA is a political issue that politicians would have you believe is not up to them. It's a scam and an advertising campaign that has people buying low flush toilets when a lot of the water is wasted by big Ag companies.