MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by thegeomaster | 2025-06-11 01:13:03+00:00
I hate to enter this discussion, but learning based on a small number of examples is called few-shot learning, and is something that GPT-3 could already do. It was considered a major breakthrough at the time. The fact that we call gradient descent "learning" doesn't mean that what happens with a well-placed prompt is not "learning" in the colloquial sense. Try it: you can teach today's frontier reasoner models to do fairly complex domain-specific tasks with light guidance and a few examples. It's what prompt engineering is about. I think you might be making a distinction on the complexity of the tasks, which is totally fine, but needs to be spelled out more precisely IMO.
by theptip | 2025-06-11 01:14:16+00:00
Right. Jevons Paradox.

The lower barrier to entry might mean the average quality of software goes WAY down. But this could be great if it means that there are 10x as many little apps that make one person happy by doing only as much as they need.

The above is also consistent with the quantity of excellent software going way up as well (just slower than the below-average stuff).
by bhouston | 2025-06-11 01:15:17+00:00
This is a little complex.

It really is just a simple interpolation between two quaternions on the sphere surface in sphere relative space. You can use the squad interpolation function with two quaternions and just reconstruct back into sphere space. It is like 15 lines of code in one function.

In more detail:

Given you want the same side of the mesh touching at the start and end, we can just convert the matrices to be relative to the sphere center using the sphere coordinate space, and then extract their relative quaternions and translations. The orientation towards the center should be the same for both relative to the quaternion orientation. Thus we really just need to interpolate the quaternion using squad interpolation (https://github.com/AcademySoftwareFoundation/Imath/blob/8456...) while reconstructing the sphere-coordinate matrix at each step and using the quaternion-relative orientation.

This is a lot simpler and faster than the proposed multi-step algorithm.

Source: I made it up.
by eru | 2025-06-11 01:15:48+00:00
I am accepting and rejecting axioms _arbitrarily_ depending on application, but not _randomly_, and definitely not i.i.d. random.

The Rado graph you mentioned does look very interesting as a mathematical object in its own right! But it has approximately nothing to do with what we discussed, exactly because it requires i.i.d. randomness.

> Crucially, we then search for the right set of assumptions, and the conviction of modern science that there is a right set of assumptions is "effective" at least.

Well, multiple sets of assumptions can be 'right' or right enough, or perhaps no set can be. Eg as far as we can tell, no clever sets of axioms will allow us to predict chaotic motion, or predict whether a member of a sufficiently complicated class of computer programs will halt. (However, we can still be clever in other ways, and change the type of questions we are asking, and eg look for the statistical behaviour of ensembles of trajectories etc.)

> In the previous century there was an attempt to identify mathematics with formalism, but it defeated itself.

I say it was extraordinarily successful! It actually managed to answer many of the questions it set out at the start. Of course, many of them were answered in the negative. But just because we can now proof that every formalism has its limits, doesn't mean that informal methods are automatically limitless. Or that there is any metaphysical 'truth'.

The 20th century saw enormous progress in terms of thinking about formalism abstractly (that's the 'self-defeat' you mention, thanks to giants like Gödel and Turing). But it's only in the last few years that we've seen progress in terms of actually formalising big chunks of math that people actually care about outside of the novelty of formalisation itself.

Btw, just to be clear: IMHO formalisation is just one of the tools that mathematicians have in their arsenal. I don't think it's somehow fundamental, especially not in practice.

Often when you develop a new field of mathematics, you investigate lots of interesting and connected problems; and only once you have a good feel for the lay of the land, do you then look for elegant theoretical foundations and definitions and axioms.

Formalisation typically comes last, not first.

You try and pick the formal structure that allows you to make the kind of conclusions you already have in mind and have investigated informally. If the sensible axioms you picked clash with a theorem you have already established, it's just as likely that you rework your axiom as that you rework your proof or theorem.

That bidirectional approach is sometimes a bit hard to see, because textbooks are usually written to start from the axioms and definitions. They present a sanitised view.
by godelski | 2025-06-11 01:16:18+00:00
The entire world operates on trust of some form. Often people are acting in good faith. But regulation matters too.

If you don't go after offenders then you create a lemon markets. Most customers/people can't tell, so they operate on what they can. That doesn't mean they don't want the other things, it means they can't signal what they want. It is about available information, that's what causes lemon markets, information asymmetry.

It's also just a good thing to remember since we're in tech and most people aren't tech literate. Makes it hard to determine what "our customers" want
by theptip | 2025-06-11 01:16:43+00:00
Watt-hours seem good right now, and rebut the current arguments that LLMs are wasteful. They might soon stop being the right lens, if your agents can go off and (in parallel) expend some arbitrary and borderline-unknowable budget of energy on a single request.

At some point you’ll need to measure in terms of $ earned per W-H, or just $out/$in.
by autumnstwilight | 2025-06-11 01:17:04+00:00
Australian here, I would absolutely characterize the support for and rationale behind our policies as having a significant component of racism (and in the case of our detention centers, a violation of international human rights agreements that we have signed).

You're talking about the same country that had the "White Australia Policy" within living memory. "Are Australian immigration policies motivated by racism?" is unfortunately not a preposterous question at all.
by rayiner | 2025-06-11 01:17:41+00:00
The tax code strives to minimize distortions (except insofar as they are deliberately introduced). That is, it seeks to minimize how much the existence of the income tax changes people’s economic conduct.

To minimize distortion, the income tax must accurately compute “income”—the actual increase in wealth. Depreciation is part of that. To compute income, the net increase in wealth, you need to subtract costs from revenue. When you buy an asset, your wealth doesn’t immediately increase or decrease—it simply changes form (from cash to an asset). The actual cost is the depreciation on the asset, which occurs over time.

Say you buy a delivery vehicle for $50,000. In the first year, you make $100,000 in revenue and have $20,000 in operating expenses. What’s your income after one year—the actual change in wealth? You have $80,000 in cash after operating expenses, plus a vehicle that you can sell for maybe $40,000. So you have $100,000+$40,000 in cash and assets in minus $20,000+$50,000 in cash and assets out, for a $70,000 increase in wealth.

Calculated another way, you have $100,000 in revenue-$20,000 in operating expenses-$10,000 in depreciation = $70,000 in income. Now, over say 5 years, you’ll depreciate the full $50,000 cost, and the total dollar amount the IRS gets will be the same. But it will get more taxes in the first year, which due to the time value of money is worth more than getting the money in subsequent years.
by eru | 2025-06-11 01:18:19+00:00
Yes, the law of the excluded middle is an interesting one to exclude. You could also try and go without certain infinities: eg you could remove induction (and things equivalent to induction) from your toolset, and see how far you can go.

There's quite a bit of ideology / philosophy about excluding the law of the excluded middle. But even if you set these aside, it turns out that 'constructive logic' without the 'excluded middle' has enormous practical applications in eg computer science.
by andreygrehov | 2025-06-11 01:20:54+00:00
Sure.

Years before Kennedy trained his focus on vaccine issues in Samoa, the small Pacific island nation had been experiencing low vaccination rates. Medical professionals attributed this to a shortage of doctors and nurses as well as demographic shifts, with more people moving to cities and away from social structures that helped promote childhood vaccinations. By 2017, only about half of 1-year-old Samoan children were fully vaccinated — far below the 95% coverage needed to prevent community spread and a steep drop from earlier rates that had reportedly reached 90%.

The situation took a tragic turn in July 2018 when two nurses mistakenly combined an expired muscle relaxant with MMR vaccine doses instead of sterile water, leading to the deaths of two children. The nurses were charged with manslaughter, and the government responded by suspending the national vaccination program for 10 months. Vaccination rates for children dropped to 31%.

[…]

In interviews, Samoan health officials told CBS News they believe Kennedy's actions were unlikely to have directly influenced what occurred.

"It is well documented that RFK Jnr's visit to Samoa in 2019 coincided with increased anti-vaccine sentiment, particularly among certain groups," Samoa's Ministry of Health said in a statement. "However, there is no conclusive evidence that his visit directly contributed to the decline in vaccination rates or the subsequent measles outbreak."
by Sophira | 2025-06-11 01:21:38+00:00
I've reverse-engineered a couple of programs before in order to get them to do what I want. Things like setting default options in a program that doesn't let you change the defaults, or getting older Windows programs to function correctly.

I've also patched open-source programs locally in order to get them to do what I want but wouldn't be suitable for upstreaming. For example, I've reverted the order of buttons in a "do you want to save?" close dialog when they changed in an update.

Minor stuff, but just being able to do this is amazing. The trouble is, developers - at least those of closed-source programs - don't want you to be able to do that, partially due to a lot of them relying on security by obscurity in order to earn money.

As such, it feels like the only way you're going to get developers to be on board with something like this is to be able to have them specify what people can change and what people can't change - and that's something that developers already do (whether they realise it or not) with things like INI files and the Registry.

This is why people using UNIX-based systems campaign for small programs that do one thing and do it well. Being able to combine these small programs into a pipeline that does exactly what you want? Now that's amazing.
by brysonreece | 2025-06-11 01:22:18+00:00
Arduino and, specifically, the ESP8226 (basically an Arduino+Wifi) and ESP32 (Arduino+Wifi+BT) development boards are a fantastic place to start!

For most hobbyist-level electronics, it’s just a matter of becoming familiar enough with using the Arduino IDE to flash your C(-like) code to your board, or using something like MicroPython, then following the wiring instructions freely available online for common parts like servos, LEDs, displays, etc. Every once in a while you may have to reach for something like a transistor, capacitor, or resistor, but those can also be learned in an afternoon.

Google really is your friend! I taught myself hobby electronics over 15 years ago using the same, and they still hold up!
by jncfhnb | 2025-06-11 01:23:07+00:00
Capitalized means it’s treated as an investment into an asset rather than just a cost of doing business. The reason we do this is because we want revenue and expenses to reasonably match the time period where their value comes into play.

For example, if you build 100 widgets for $1M this year, the labor and materials cost of those widgets are capitalized into inventory. Next year you sell them all for $2M.

Capitalization rules would say you had no profit or loss in the first year, and $1M profit in the second year because the cost of the inventory gets expensed when the inventory is sold.

Fixed assets like buildings, machinery, and now software have pre defined lifetimes that the expense is realized over. In the case of software, it’s 5 years.

Tech companies don’t like this because they want to front load recognition of expenses to pay less taxes today.
Show HN: Pitchine: An AI pitch judge that tells you why a VC will ghost you
by ssunboyy | 2025-06-11 01:23:15+00:00
Hi HN,

I built Pitchine, a platform where startup founders can practice their pitch and get immediate, useful feedback—before talking to real investors.

Why I built this When I was preparing for fundraising, I realized there was nowhere to safely test my pitch. Friends are too nice. Investors give zero feedback. And pitch coaching is expensive or generic.

So I built Pitchine: a space where you can rehearse your pitch, get feedback from an AI judge, and (soon) get paired with peers or mock investors to sharpen your delivery.
by gerdesj | 2025-06-11 01:23:43+00:00
You might not like what they are working on or towards but a big old firm like Google has a lot of talent, bought and paid for, on board. Its a vast organisation and therefore will, even by accident, have lots of talented employees. They certainly have plenty of dosh to entice the "best".

I call them "kids" out of habit. I'm 54, so that is probably mostly fair and unfair at the same time - sue me.
by surfmike | 2025-06-11 01:24:14+00:00
- More freeform -- just type what you ate (and add as much detail as you want) and it will log it, nothing more to select or search from after - You can log several dishes or meals in the same sentence - You can use voice

With MFP, there was always searching, then selecting the best entry, then fiddling with portion size. It usually ends up taking many times longer for me.
by yummypaint | 2025-06-11 01:25:59+00:00
I'm surprised the links work for you at all. 90+% of citations for non trivial information (i.e. not in a text book but definitely in the literature) I've gotten from LLMs have been very convincing hallucinations. The year and journal volume will match, the author will be someone who plausibly would have written on the topic, but the articles don't exist and never did. It's a tremendous waste of time and energy compared to old fashioned library search tools.
by boneitis | 2025-06-11 01:26:21+00:00
There is another can of worms hidden in plain sight right here, I feel like.

From the article:

You’re not affected if (and only if) You access Facebook and Instagram via the web, without having the apps installed on your phone

This is only what's observably true of a particular app under the hood from straightforwardly jacking into it with Frida or performing any other deeper analysis.

What's to say Meta/Google/OtherAnalyticsCorp/OtherMegaCorp hasn't already, on a large scale, colluded with[bought out] app developers to simply share session data out-of-band as another tentacle?

Rather, is it even reasonable to assume they all haven't been doing this all this time? (Maybe these also fall squarely under what GDPR, DSA, and DMA were supposed to mitigate? I'm not an expert here.. just my cynicism kicking in.)

I too go through fairly great pains to try to minimize unneeded apps on my device.
by skapi_api | 2025-06-11 01:26:44+00:00
One of the biggest projects developed by our team is a groupware platform. What makes it unique is that we wrote only the frontend. Every part of the backend, from data storage to authentication, is handled by our own system: Skapi. In this article, we’ll walk you through how we implement security directly from the frontend using Skapi for backend. This isn’t theory, we’re sharing what we’ve learned from real projects we did ourselves.
by eru | 2025-06-11 01:26:46+00:00
Pi very definitely does not encode infinite information. As you notice, we can write a very short computer program that will produce all the digits of pi (eventually).

In any case, you can do lots and lots of mathematics with either only finite objects, or if you allow limits as you suggest, you can do almost all of math.

Only a vanishingly small part of math deals with actual infinities in a way that cannot be re-written in terms of limits.
by no_carrier | 2025-06-11 01:27:01+00:00
It feels like we're getting very close. The recent addition of a Debian VM into Android (I believe it's even in AOSP) leads me to believe we'll be getting Linux apps on Android in the same way ChromeOS gets them. Imagine being able to run VSCode off your phone anywhere you can plug into a monitor.

I also think we'll get a more desktop ready version of Chrome. If we get these things I think it'll be a gamechanger.
by tmostak | 2025-06-11 01:27:13+00:00
We've made extensive use of perfect hashing in HeavyDB (formerly MapD/OmniSciDB), and it has definitely been a core part of achieving strong group by and join performance.

You can use perfect hashes not only the usual suspects of contiguous integer and dictionary-encoded string ranges, but also use cases like binned numeric and date ranges (epoch seconds binned per year can use a perfect hash range of one bin per year for a very wide range of timestamps), and can even handle arbitrary expressions if you propagate the ranges correctly.

Obviously you need a good "baseline" hash path to fall back to you, but it's surprising how many real-world use cases you can profitably cover with perfect hashing.
by jonplackett | 2025-06-11 01:29:22+00:00
I’m not sure - we have enough food to feed everyone on earth. We have cures to many diseases. We have enough homes for everyone.

Inequality is bad and getting worse. Big changes accelerate it because richer people can adapt and take advantage faster.

I enjoy playing around with AI for fun and find it amazingly useful. But I do not believe it can solve inequality - that’s a people problem.
by tptacek | 2025-06-11 01:29:40+00:00
I'm not sure I understand the question. He's writing from the vantage point of someone with a large oTel deployment; that's the data he has to work with. Honeycomb has an MCP server. Instead of him clicking around Honeycomb and making inferences from the data and deciding where to drill down, an LLM did that, and found the right answer quicker than a human would have.

Where's the extra expense here? The $0.60 he spent on LLM calls with his POC agent?
by atum47 | 2025-06-11 01:31:15+00:00
Any improvements to battery life? I feel like my pixel 8 pro battery is dying a lot faster now.

I would like to trade it in for a pixel 9 pro xl, but it's kinda hard/impossible to do in Brazil.

I got a good deal from best buy but you need to have a US issued document to trade your phone in, bummer.

Any plans to ever sell it in Brazil?
by int_19h | 2025-06-11 01:32:01+00:00
In Vista/Win7, they mostly used glass background for parts of the window that didn't have any text on them. And for the few exceptions where that wasn't the case (like e.g. window titles) they added a kind of halo so that black text would always contrast with that regardless of what was below the window, or else just significantly darken the glass and use white text. All for obvious reasons.

Looking at the new iOS screenshots, I'm surprised that those reasons apparently aren't obvious to Apple designers.
by godelski | 2025-06-11 01:33:13+00:00
I'm not sure it's mostly last mile problems. A frequent problem I see is "costs now vs future costs". Worse is "costs now vs amortized future costs"

What I mean is let's say you are making something and you see an issue. You know it'll be an issue and if fixed now will cost $100, but if you fix it a year from now it'll cost $1000. Many people will choose the latter. On paper, I think most people will choose the former but in practice the latter is often hard to determine. An example might be a security risk. It only gets harder to fix as you generate more code and complexity increases. But of hacked this has high costs both through business and through lawsuits.

The amortized one is a nasty problem because it often goes unnoticed. Say a problem costs $100 to fix now but every day it isn't fixed it costs $1.00 every day you don't fix it costs 5% more (so $1, $1.05, $1.1025,...). These sneak up on you and you'll pay a lot more than that $100 by the time you notice
by eru | 2025-06-11 01:33:42+00:00
Even if you are a platonist, the conditional nature of axioms is still useful.

Eg look at group theory. It basically says, if you have a set of elements and some operation on this set that satisfies certain criteria (= the axioms of group theory), then you can draw all these conclusions.

I don't think anyone ever argued about whether the axioms of group theory are 'true' in the abstract, because everyone recognises that it depends on your application. Eg they are satisfied for the operations you can do on a Rubik's cube (especially a Platonic ideal of a Rubik's cube), but they aren't true for moves in Sokoban (even a Platonic ideal of Sokoban) nor Tetris.

More famously, look at Euclidean geometry: even setting aside curved spacetime of general relativity, even the ancients knew that Euclidean geometry isn't 'true' on the surface of a globe.
by idontwantthis | 2025-06-11 01:33:48+00:00
I think you misunderstood OP. The last mile problem was solved or being solved. Millions of lives were saved and fewer people were dying every year. It was one of the greatest successes in human history. Now we’ve stopped because our government decided to stop. Millions of more people will die unnecessarily and technology has nothing to do with it.
by UncleEntity | 2025-06-11 01:34:13+00:00
> No, a petition is a piece of paper or in verb form, lobbying politicians.

I would say that mass groups of people gathering on the streets protesting the same cause is a form of "lobbying politicians".

> Burning down cities and attacking officers does not fall under the definition.

Sure, if that's what is actually occurring. AFAICT they are mostly peaceful protests with a couple of examples of limited unlawful behavior but that's what the news is showing because burning cop cars make for good ratings.

It's not like the people of LA don't know how to put on a proper riot or anything...
by billmcneale | 2025-06-11 01:34:54+00:00
> Worth noting that denuvo causes a lot of hitching, massive load time increases and overall performance problems.

There is pretty much zero evidence that this is true and some credible evidence that it is untrue.

For example, plenty of games have had Denuvo removed after a few months by the publisher and showed zero improvement in performance.

This fake narrative is being pushed by software pirates bitter that Denuvo is being so effective at preventing them from stealing games.
by ajross | 2025-06-11 01:35:40+00:00
> Every once in a while

Pretty much what I said, no? You don't use the product and when you do, do it through a filter[1] where you only remember the bugs. Do you use other AI search products and find that they don't show this behavior?

[1] I mean, come on: framing it as "bother not ignoring" is just a dead giveaway that you aren't doing a product evaluation in good faith!