MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by roughly | 2025-06-29 23:58:00+00:00
A fun aside here: experiments in which people who’ve taken hallucinogens are placed in brain scanners reveal activation patterns which look an awful lot like what we see when we put small children in brain scanners, and this somewhat accords with the neurogenesis vs pathway pruning see-saw model of brain development.

I’ll say personally my experiences with psychedelics brought back memories of childhood - how I engaged with the world, how my mind would go off down different paths, the intensity of focus - so, you’re probably not far off here.
by hinkley | 2025-06-29 23:58:38+00:00
I will say I have worked on projects where sales and upper management were both saying the same thing: customers don't like that our product is slow(er than a competitors), and the devs just shrug and say we've already done everything we can. In one case the most senior devs even came up charts to prove this was all they were going to get.

Somehow I found 40%. Some of it was clever, a lot of it was paying closer attention to the numbers, but most of it was grunt work.

Besides the mechanical sympathy, the other two main tools were 1) stubbornness, and 2) figuring out how to group changes along functional testing boundaries, so that you can justify making someone test a change that only improves perf by 1.2% because they're testing a raft of related changes that add up to more than 10%.

Most code has orphaned performance improvements in 100 little places that all account for half of the runtime because nobody can ever justify going in and fixing them. And those can also make parallelism seem unpalatable due to Amdahl.
by arp242 | 2025-06-29 23:58:42+00:00
If you think "progressivism" is somehow on equal footing as one of the worst genocides in history then you are morally bankrupt. Several of my family died under the Nazi regime, and I'm not even Jewish or other Untermensch group. This is not unusual in Europe. There's a reason purchases dropped off a cliff after the Sieg Heil specifically, and not before when he merely had some questionable politics.
by pinkmuffinere | 2025-06-29 23:59:00+00:00
I just quit my "day job" to work on a business I've built with some good friends! We make stingray-resistant booties -- ie, if you encounter stingrays in the shallows, these greatly reduce the chance you get stung (https://mydragonskin.com/). I'll be in charge of a couple marketing efforts, helping with Youtube, and other odd things that come up!

My day job required me to go into office frequently, and I'm really feeling the reduced social connection of being fully remote in a small company. Any suggestions how to deal with this? I'm planning to reconnect with old friends, surf a lot, go rock climbing, and maybe take dance / music / other classes. Would also love if anyone wants to work together in the same place (library, coffee shop, etc). I'm in Escondido California, but happy to drive ~30 min to meet folks.
by kelnos | 2025-06-29 23:59:34+00:00
Yeah, it's frustrating that there's no syntax for this. It could even be syntactic sugar; in this case if you had:

type FooOrBarOrError = Foo | Bar | Error;

Then that could desugar to:

enum FooOrBarOrError { Foo(Foo), Bar(Bar), Error(Error), }

And it could also implement From for you, so you can easily get a FooOrBarOrError from a Foo, Bar, or Error; as well as implementing Display, StdError, etc. if the components already implement them.

I actually wonder if you could implement this as a proc macro...
by soundpuppy | 2025-06-30 00:00:14+00:00
And a singularity just in time. There will be reprucussions. Any quick change has more massive consequences than something long term, but it’s more of a shockwave of imbalance, as the AI systems begin creating butterfly effects in society that gives it regional, continental, then finally global domination over world militaries, and we give rise to an era which becomes a rollercoaster of amusement for which only AI can control over different societies to keep even small groups of three people in check, yet using tactics fabricated from timelines that other AI agents place bets on. And ecosystem of human states. That’s what we are in. and we’re just in for indescribable circumstances
by olalonde | 2025-06-30 00:01:17+00:00
First, that figure is way off. Marathon alone has a market cap over $4B and controls less than 5% of the total hash rate.

Second, the system only seems vulnerable if you ignore economic incentives. A 51% attack isn't just technically difficult - it's economically irrational. Pulling it off would cost billions, and even then, there's no clear way to profit from it. The only scenario where it makes sense is a non-economic actor (e.g. a hostile government) aiming to disrupt Bitcoin. But even then, that investment could be neutralized by a fork that tweaks the mining algorithm, instantly rendering the attacker's hardware obsolete.
by Aurornis | 2025-06-30 00:02:04+00:00
The problem with these constructions is that they’re a Motte and Bailey: As soon as anyone starts pointing out the numerous problems with analyses that assume zero-sum games and no second-order consequences (like business owners restructuring to move their companies to nearly any other country which wont seize their ownership) the person retreats to something like “I just think taxes should be slightly higher” or “Why do you hate feeding the poor” or something.
by mattkevan | 2025-06-30 00:03:05+00:00
I’m building a browser-based static site generator and CMS.

I love SSGs as they’re simple and fast and the sites they make can be hosted anywhere with little maintenance. But, after helping a non-technical friend get up and running with one, the UX is rubbish.

So I’m building a combined CMS and SSG called Sparktype, designed for writing and publishing. Users can create pages or collections, write and export the generated site. At the moment it exports to zip, but I’m working on connecting to Netlify or GitHub for automatic deployment.

My goal is to build something that allows people to create a publication with the ease and polish of say, Medium or Substack, but which is completely portable and will work on almost any hosting.

It’s very early MVP - the editor works, but the default site theme is rough around the edges and there are a bunch of bugs. I’m currently working on getting it good enough so that I can create its own marketing and documentation site with it.

I’d love any thoughts or feedback you might have.

https://app.sparktype.org
by TimorousBestie | 2025-06-30 00:03:24+00:00
Author falls into the trap of using “postmodern” to mean “ideas I disagree with.” Glossing postmodernism as “truth-denial” that includes CRT, DEI, racism in policing, literacy education, science funding, COVID policy, etc., etc.

Sorry, but a real intellectual should be able to draw connections between postmodernism (The writings of someone like Derrida, Foucault, Levinas, Lacan—well, all of them are long dead so that might be difficult) and the organizations or people behind each of these disparate policies.

Calling Biden “the first postmodern president” is particularly bizarre.
by Lerc | 2025-06-30 00:03:39+00:00
Ok. perhaps I need another tack here. You seem to be projecting onto me a steadfast desire to attribute abilities to LLMs. I am engaging in this conversation because it is a conversation and it is reasonable to respond to being directly addressed.

My initial point simplified down:

M = makes the wrong move, while knowing the rules. A = AI Behavior H = Human Behaviour R = Resoning Ability Assertion Q: if there exists an instance of M from X then X => !R

So if there exists an instance of a Game Mistake from an AI then it shows an AI cannot reason, but if assertion Q is true it would also follow that an instance of a Game Mistake from a human would show Humans cannot reason.

From this point down, no part of this reasoning involves Large Language models or an other aspect of AI.

Stipulation: H => R Humans can reason Assertion Q where X is H: If there exists an instance of M from H then X=>!R Lerc's premise L: There exists an instance of M from H Therefore given the Stipulation either Assertion Q is false or Lerc's premise is false.

At this point you asserted !L and ask for a Citation. I provided a link. You contested that since 1,2,3,4 does not show L that the citation does not demonstrate L.

I agree that 1. does not show L but that did not matter since 5. did show L. The other points were not addressed. I also offer other examples of L that I have observed from my own experience. When I had the thought of books about chess being written by people who have made illegal moves, I actually had in mind Levy Rozman who would freely admit that he has occasionally played illegal moves.

Then you seem to want an apology for 1,2,3,4 not meeting the criteria? I'm a bit confused as to what's going on by now. One instance of L is all that is needed when L is a claim of existence. If the citation does not meet your criteria then you can simply say so, you allude to motivations regarding LLM as motivation as if you think that LLMs are still relevant to L.

You don't have to win conversations, you can just work to clarify ideas. Your request for apology, and passive aggressive sign-offs suggests you feel like this is some sort of fight. As an attempt to resolve this I have written this extended post to make as clear as possible what my position and motivations are.

I don't want to assert abilities or lack of abilities onto AI models, my concern is with whether people making such assertions are well founded. This stands for arguments saying that AI has a capability, Arguments saying AI does not have a capability, and Arguments saying AI will never have a capability.

To go back to the very beginning where someone suggested an anthropomorphic fallacy, the comparison to humans was not a suggestion of a similarity of similar function. Humans provide and example of a set of properties that are generally accepted. It is valid to apply the implications of any of those properties equally to Humans and AI. Implying the existence of a property in an AI may be anthropomorphism, evaluating the implications of the property should it exist is not.
by nemothekid | 2025-06-30 00:04:01+00:00
I think this is a valid criticism, however I think the direction Rust went was better. It's easy in hindsight to say that the error handling system that emerged in ~2020-ish should have been baked in the library when the language was stabilized in 2015. However even in 2012 (when Go 1.0 was released), errors as values was a pretty novel idea among mainstream programming languages and Go has some warts that were baked into the language that they have now given up on fixing.

As a result, I find error handling in Go to be pretty cumbersome even though the language design has progressed to a point where it theoretically could be made much more ergonomic. You can imagine a world where instead of functions returning `(x, err)` they could return `Result[T]error` - an that would open up so many more monadic apis, similar to whats in Rust. But that future seems to be completely blocked off because of the error handling patterns that are now baked into the language.

There's no guarantee the Rust team would have landed on something particularly useful. Even the entire error trait, as released, is now deprecated. `thiserror`, the most popular error crate for libraries wasn't released until 2019.
by doe9938 | 2025-06-30 00:04:08+00:00
How convenient. Getting on top of the mountain and pulling the ladder behind you. If rich countries were willing to really help those less fortunate (especially counties that they themselves looted in the past), this argument would have a lot more weight.

Is the rest of the world supposed to stay poor and desperate forever? Especially considering that rich countries still suck massive amounts of resources (and turn a blind eye to local corruption), and provide popular emigration destination for talented people who leave their homeland instead of helping develop it?
by nandomrumber | 2025-06-30 00:05:35+00:00
Chances are if it looks the same and has other matching properties like press qualities (edge sharpness, density, etc), taste, smell, waxiness, and you’re in the same general location, and around the same time, it’s probably the same batch of pills.

Knock-offs tend to turn up later, be of inferior quality physically, and have worse reviews online and in the clubs / social circles.
by em-bee | 2025-06-30 00:05:40+00:00
pretty much every project out there could use some help.

to find ideas, start with the software you are using. is there any that you like using a lot where you feel that something could be improved? you can also look at websites that you are using, see if any of them are volunteer based.

if that doesn't lead to anything, look at your skills, or skills you'd like to learn. then look for projects based on that.

and finally just browse issues of various projects, search for "help wanted" or "good first issue" or similar and simply try out fixing one such issue, then see if you like working with that project.

there also was an hn thread similar to this one some time ago where people posted projects that they need help with: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42157556

i also have a project that i could use some help with, but the learning curve is a bit high (or rather the setup work you need to do to before you can start coding): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42159045
by fortran77 | 2025-06-30 00:05:45+00:00
We're all very impressed that you're such a 1337 h4x0r that you run Arch Linux and not Windo$e.

See also

https://www.sentinelone.com/blog/macos-notlockbit-evolving-r...

and

https://blog.sekoia.io/helldown-ransomware-an-overview-of-th...
by creatonez | 2025-06-30 00:06:06+00:00
To be clear, XWayland itself has been available since 2013. Rootful XWayland is more complex and generally not desirable because it's leaving a lot of potential improvements on the table, while requiring you to implement a bunch of quirks to support things that were already adequately replaced.

You also still don't get an easy solution to much of what users actually tend to complain about -- which are the lower level components and driver support that Xorg had that wasn't matched by Wayland until recently. There's a whole entire stack of low level stuff developed over decades that made "just install linux" possible on so many PCs. The higher level components that something like XWayland or Xephyr implements is only a miniscule fraction of the Xorg codebase, that has largely remained the same since the 1980s (but is surprisingly easy to maintain on its own).
by Eduard | 2025-06-30 00:06:17+00:00
only 32 LUTs also made me scratch my head: what kind of useful things can be made with so few components?

Microchip has a web page about "CLB"

https://www.microchip.com/en-us/products/microcontrollers/8-...

It includes a creative demo where your browser apparently gets hooked up with a live video stream of an actual running toy hardware setup of a "CLB demo featuring a European traffic light". It's effectively a finite state machine with two red-yellow-green traffic lights. This minimal setup already consumes 26 of the available 32 units.

Btw: as a European, let me assure you that our intersections usually consist of more than two traffic lights, include a fault state (blinking yellow light), and feature synchronized pedestrian lights on which we mostly stand until they turn green.
by madeofpalk | 2025-06-30 00:07:44+00:00
I don't understand the ambiguity.

let mut x = 1 x = false

In TS, x is inferred as usize, second line is an error.

let mut x = if some_condition { 1 } else { false }

In TS, x is inferred as usize | bool.

Is there something specific to rust that makes this less clear that I'm missing?
by pxc | 2025-06-30 00:08:15+00:00
Art-as-job is an artifice we've instituted through the invention of copyright, whose purpose is to ensure that we live in a society rich with art. There is not and never has been any reason to believe that this system, though it may serve its purpose to some extent, actually captures or meaningfully quantifies the value of art to society. The "demand" for art is made-up in the first place, not an end in itself or a measure of an end itself.

One invented means of propping up art isn't necessarily especially legitimate or natural compared to others.
by fennecbutt | 2025-06-30 00:10:29+00:00
Omg I wish people would just shut up about mcp already.

It's not magic, it's just smashing tool descriptions into your prompt, and the implementation sucks for various reasons, including there being no standard for tool use tags, nor the mcp spec including a common way of handling function call responses.

It's literally just "json into prompt & then it's all you buddy!" batteries NOT included, lmao
by zeta0134 | 2025-06-30 00:10:42+00:00
I'm working on a rhythm game for original NES: https://zeta0134.itch.io/tactus

This is written entirely in 6502 assembly, and uses a fun new mapper that helps a little bit with the music, so I can have extra channels you can actually hear on an unmodded system. It's been really fun to push the hardware in unusual ways.

Currently the first Zone of the game is rather polished, and I'm doing a big giant pixel art drawing push to produce new enemies, items, and level artwork to fill out the remainder of the game. It's coming along slowly, but steadily. I'm trying to have it in "trailer ready" / "demo" state by the end of this calendar year. Just this weekend I added new chest types and the classic Mimic enemy to spice things up.
by godelski | 2025-06-30 00:10:52+00:00
> a ‘fix it later’ approach

Oh man, I hate how often this is used. Everyone knows there's nothing more permanent than a temporary fix lol.

But what I think people don't realize is that this is exactly what tech debt is. You're moving fast but doing so makes you slow once we are no longer working in a very short timeline. That's because these issues compound. Not only do we repeat that same mistake, but we're building on top of shaky ground. So to go back and fix things ends up requiring far more effort than it would have taken to fix it early. Which by fixing early your efforts similarly compound, but this time benefiting you.

I think a good example of this is when you see people rewrite a codebase. You'll see headlines like "by switching to rust we got a 500% improvement!" Most of that isn't rust, most of that is better algorithms and design.

Of course, you can't always write your best code. There's practical constraints and no code can be perfect. But I think Knuth's advice still fits today, despite a very different audience. He was talking to people who were too obsessed with optimization while today were overly obsessed with quickly getting to some checkpoint. But the advice is the same "use a fucking profiler". That's how you find the balance and know what actually can be put off till later. It's the only way you can do this in an informed way. Yet, when was the last time you saw someone pull out a profiler? I'm betting the vast majority of HN users can't remember and I'd wager a good number never have
by jgord | 2025-06-30 00:10:53+00:00
detecting geometry from point cloud scans of buildings using ML/RL techniques :

flat planes and edges : https://youtu.be/-o58qe8egS4

semi-cylinder pipes : https://youtu.be/8fjHNDGKeu4

Aim to automate that TAM of 5Bn/yr of manual labor, growing at 12% cagr

SOM : ~100Mn
by hinkley | 2025-06-30 00:11:31+00:00
I'll never forget a coworker telling me that in a previous job hunting round he had interviewed with a pharmaceutical group that was tracking the manufacturing process for batches of drugs and comparing the little tolerance mistakes (heated a little too high or held at temp a little too long or not quite long enough) and finding a market where they can sell that batch.

You'd like to think that companies have factories with quality control laws and there are local people trying to ensure that all of their product are up to the local standards. What you don't expect is that they are binning them like Intel CPUs, where they just make a batch and hope for the best, take cream off the top until the priority orders are done and then everyone else gets whatever is left. You might get a slightly better product sometimes but not be so lucky the next time.
by underlipton | 2025-06-30 00:12:37+00:00
Again, I don't think people are shedding a tear if Thiel or any of the other nomenklatura bite it. Going further: we just had an assassination of Democratic lawmakers, and it's already almost out of the news cycle. There's a chance that years of violence and elites who don't care have deadened the American soul to the horror of the proverbial guillotine.
by big_toast | 2025-06-30 00:13:02+00:00
Eh, maybe not quite?

I think the budget day article does a good job contextualizing all its data and guides you through it intuitively. It's more like an essay that has the dashboard woven into it. In 4 months if the fees change or BTC price changes etc. the article is still relatively up to date.

So I think that project2025 website maybe does the dashboard thing that never really took off. There's lots of open data or government data sites that have dashboards but seem like they became data portals. They never became a broad format for explanation or persuasion.

A standard dashboard might be better than nothing. But the tufte-ian dashboard seems like it would have more affordances like this budget day does.
by arewethereyeta | 2025-06-30 00:13:31+00:00
There are MANY cases for such an implementation. My service [1] implements such a thing, eBPF too, and my users do it for many valid reasons such as:

- shopping cart fraud

- geo-restricted content (think distributing laws)

- preventing abuse (think ticket scalpers)

- preventing cheating and multi-accounting (think gaming)

- preventing account takeovers (think 2FA trigger if fingerprint suddenly changed)

There is much more but yeah, this tech has its place. We cannot just assume everyone has a static website with a free for all content.

[1] https://visitorquery.com/
by osigurdson | 2025-06-30 00:13:34+00:00
Let's see if we can break HN nesting algo with this thread.

>> Many things having the potential to "rock" does not imply that everything "rocks" equally, or at all

That isn't what I am suggesting. I am saying that I do not care if people use the word "rocks" to describe an impossibly spherical marble rolling on an impossibly flat surface - equal across all space and time. Or, to describe, something that is uniquely better than all others. Use the term as you see fit. Use it to describe the value 4.532341 +/- 0.00001345 if you like.