MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by luizfelberti | 2025-06-19 16:45:56+00:00
Feels like the complete opposite s-expressions which are the easiest possible thing to parse, this sounds like a complete nightmare to write a parser for.

It might even be easier to treat the input string as a 2D grid than as a sequence and have a parsing head that behaves like a 2x2 convolutional kernel...

This would make for either a great Advent of Code, or a nightmare interview question, I love it.
by rich_sasha | 2025-06-19 16:46:28+00:00
I think they're also doing things that are very, very hard, but they set the expectations very, very high.

Hard things fail from time to time. When you aim for something really at the edge of human enginuity, it might work or it might not, and if it works, it will probably still be a close call.

But somehow years ago already SpaceX and it's followers convinced everyone that Starship will definitely happen. And it still might, but if it does, I still think it will be a rocky road.

I would say SpaceX has been extraordinarily lucky for years (not in the sense that they fluked it, but rather that they achieved so much and made it look easy), and this is just reversion to the mean.
by strangescript | 2025-06-19 16:46:43+00:00
Who said I wanted my outcomes to be deterministic. Why is it that the only way we accept programming is for completely deterministic outcomes, when the reality is that is an implementation detail.

I am a real user and I am on a general purpose e-commerce site and my ask is "I want a TV that is not that expensive", then by definition the user request is barely deterministic. User requests are normally like this for any application. High level and vague at best. Then developers spend all their time on edge cases, user QA, in the weeds junk that the User does not care about at all. People dont want to click filters and fill out forms for your app. They want it to be easy.
by dcminter | 2025-06-19 16:46:47+00:00
Extreme eagerness to disavow accusations of cultishness ... doth the lady protest too much perhaps? My hobby is occasionally compared to a cult. The typical reaction of an adherent to this accusation is generally "Heh, yeah, totally a cult."

Edit: Oh, but you call him "Guru" ... so on reflection you were probably (?) making the same point... (whoosh, sorry).
by dnautics | 2025-06-19 16:46:58+00:00
One of the creators of posits here (I came up with the name and i think ES is my idea, did the first full soft versions in julia, and designed the first circuits, including a cool optimization for addition). my personal stance is that posits are not great for scientific work precisely because of the difficulties with actually solving error propagation. Hopefully i can give a bit more measured insights into why the "parlor tricks" appear in the posits context.

John's background is in scientific compute/HPC and he previously advocated for using unums (which do fully track errors) and there is a version of posits (called valids) which do track errors, encouraging the user to combine with other techniques to cut the error bounds using invariants, but that requires algorithmic shift. Alas, a lot of examples were lifted from the unums book and sort of square peg/round holed into posits. you can see an example of algorithmic shift in the demo of matrix multiplication in the stanford talk (that demo is me; linked in OP).

as for me, i was much more interested in lower bit representation for ml applications where you ~don't care about error propagation. this also appears in the talk.

as it wound up, Facebook took some interest in it for AI but they nih'd it and redid the mantissa as logarithmic (which i think was a mistake).

and anyway redoing your silicon it turns out to be a pain in the ass (quires only make sense in the burn-the-existing-world perspective and are not so bad for training pipelines, where iirc kronecker product dominates), but the addition operation takes up quite a bit more floorspace, and just quantizing to int4 is with grouped scaling factors is easier with existing gpu pipelines, even custom hardware too.

fun side fact: Positron.ai, was so-named on the off chance that using posits makes sense (you can see the through line to science fiction that i was attempting to manifest when i came up with the name)
by saurik | 2025-06-19 16:47:10+00:00
The "choice" people want is the ability to easily mix and match a patchwork quilt of software from different parties, each adding one tiny behavior. Wayland doesn't do that: it makes it so almost every behavior people want must be added to the compositor.

The magic is in finding what the right point in the abstraction is: what will be centralized and what will be decentralized. Both of your examples--systems and Wayland--made the same decision: the patchwork quilt of behaviors was complex for many users to get working, and even then often didn't work 100% always. It was also slow and a bit insecure (if you don't trust your software).

So, both systemd and Wayland took the same approach of pushing forward the boundary of abstraction and merging together most of the things people would have had to configure. This means that that one core component in the middle -- and sure: in Wayland you can have multiple implementations, and those can even share a library, but you can't MIX AND MATCH -- must do all of the things people want.

The reality is that no one wanted to maintain multiple X11 servers... but we also didn't want to! What we do want is to to be able to mix and match compositors and macro systems and window managers and all of the fun little behaviors that make a computer feel like it works for us, and now we can't, as we have to find and select a single giant ball of behaviors that happens to be close enough to what we wanted.

Theoretically, some day, someone could make a really advanced and capable display server for Wayland, one that will be extremely general and will have a number of protocols for how to extend its behavior. It will be the one display server to rule all display servers, and even ecosystems like Gnome and KDE could just interoperate with it, and we could get back the glorious ecosystem that people are killing...

...but that's effectively what X11 is, right now, and by the time you get that--with a ton of protocols that are old enough to be widely used--all of those behaviors will have aged and ossified and the code will be built by people who are gone in a language that isn't fun using conventions that are out of date, and some A-hole will point out that the stack is difficult to maintain and user's experience is variable and throw the entire thing out to start over :/.

Like, I dunno... I honestly do not understand how you are saying Wayland is doing the thing people wanted from systemd: the issue isn't that I wanted to be able to replace systemd, the issue is that I wanted systemd to not be a single giant C program because I really liked the patchwork of scripts and behaviors and alternative parts that were built up in the ecosystem.

And again: everything tends to end up with some central thing in the design somewhere... but you have to make that thing be so boring that no one has any interest in innovating on it, and X11 was that: while I do think we should have multiple implementations for robustness, we would expect every one of those implementations to work as close as possible to 100% identically.
by qualeed | 2025-06-19 16:47:31+00:00
Even as a big privacy advocate, I don't see much reason to be especially concerned.

The fact that the DNA can be carried off to locations you've never physically been to pretty immediately puts a stop to any use in court and usefulness in any sort of tracking.

Not to mention it seems easily game-able by bad actors. Simply setting up an air filter at work for a few hours, then shaking out the air filter in a park or whatever, would contaminate anything gathered from the park. I would argue this technology is less worrying in the context of privacy than the standard DNA collection we already do.

There are a lot more non-hypothetical attacks on privacy that are succeeding and causing (probably) more damage than this technology theoretically could.

It seems mostly useful as was described in the article, like identifying the presence of an endangered animal within X distance and Y time.
by RandomBacon | 2025-06-19 16:47:37+00:00
I have a Dell XPS that I bought in 2020 and still use daily, the only issue I've had was the rubber feet/lines needing to be replaced. I still have my previous laptops (only two, because I don't need to buy many when they last forever when you take care of them) and they all work perfectly (just outdated specs, so I use them when I just need to do a presentation or something).

I do notice that most people tend to abuse their laptops; I believe my laptops are outliers because I don't abuse them.

Your laptop performance should not be degrading if you don't allow it to overheat.

In addition to physical treatment, the software that you allow to run on it, makes a difference. (Software maxing out the CPU constantly is going to cause it to overheat and degrade.)
by pyman | 2025-06-19 16:48:07+00:00
I think big tech companies take risks, calculated ones, and they're masters of prioritisation. Pushing AI to devices was a smart move by Apple. They're great at giving developers cutting-edge tools to keep an edge in app quality.

I just hope Tim's gamble pays off and we start seeing some amazing apps soon. Because Siri was a massive flop (cool tech, but completely useless), the camera software feels outdated compared to some Android phones, and the 3D emojis felt like a bad marketing idea to get kids playing with their parents phones and hooked on Apple (just like McDonald's did with Ronald the clown).
by cgriswald | 2025-06-19 16:48:30+00:00
We don't really see that with calculators, though. We see that people who already don't do mental math are enabled to do more math. Those of us who can do mental math can benefit from calculators but don't lose the skill we've learned. As far as I know (which could easily be out of date), arithmetic is still taught sans calculators in most places.

"Vibe coding" is primarily being done by people who already weren't learning to program. If programming was taught as ubiquitously and early as arithmetic, they either wouldn't be vibe coding or they were never going to program in the first place because for whatever reason they were unable or unwilling to develop the skill. So you could see this as a loss of potential, but I suspect it is far more of a democratization of programming.

If we're looking at parallels, we should be looking at WYSIWYG webpage creation tools rather than calculators. Did that destroy knowledge of HTML and CSS?
by zamadatix | 2025-06-19 16:48:43+00:00
The only value kernel mode anticheat manages to bring on Windows is that it puts up a significant work barrier to both modifying the kernel and doing so in a way that doesn't trigger the kernel mode anti-cheat detection. With a kernel made to be easily customized by end users and no kernel mode anti-cheat protection trying to detect such modifications then any verification the kernel could provide would be meaningless.

It's not actually the message from the kernel that provides the value, it's the work needed to fake such a message.
by ryukafalz | 2025-06-19 16:49:08+00:00
This is very cool! Love to see the Commodore 64 style of keyboard computer come back.

I got the Viture Pro recently and this would be fun to add to that. Ultimately I think this is a very nice form factor both for portable use with XR glasses, and for use with a USB-C dock at home. The XR glasses on the market are still a bit rough, but the nice thing about this kind of setup is that you can replace the computer and the glasses independently, so as the glasses improve (especially looking forward to glasses with high-quality waveguides) you can upgrade.
by deadbabe | 2025-06-19 16:49:20+00:00
Life is too short. There is a narrow window in life, if any, when you will probably care about this.

As a child, you won't care.

As an elderly person on their way out, you also won't really care.

Years 20 to 30, you probably don't have anything significant to lose.

50-75, you're probably more focused on being setup for comfortable retirement.

That leaves people in their 30s and 40s, midlife crisis era, you probably have other things on your mind. Kids, hobbies, etc.

If life was may two or three times longer, you might care more since the negative consequences of people sucking DNA out of thin air might affect you for a longer duration, but it isn't. You get maybe 75 good years and that's it. Don't worry about it.
Show HN: Free dashboard for technical analysis signals (forex, crypto, stocks)
by Calibiri | 2025-06-19 16:49:46+00:00
I built a free web dashboard that shows trading signals based on predefined strategies using technical analysis. It covers forex, crypto, and stocks (organized by exchange).

Each signal is generated based on a specific strategy (swing, trend, volatility), and updates in real time. No login required, no paywalls.

It’s built for traders who want to scan the markets quickly without jumping between platforms.

I’d love your feedback or suggestions to improve it.

It’s useful for traders who want to monitor multiple assets and strategies quickly, without logging into a broker or trading platform.

There’s no sign-up, and it's totally free. I'm aiming to keep it simple and fast.

Would love any feedback or ideas to improve it!
by charcircuit | 2025-06-19 16:50:07+00:00
>Linux desktop OSes have a better security story than Windows desktops due to better software supply chain integrity.

This isn't true. And supply chain wise just look at the xz backdoor. A random person was able to compromise the supply chain of many Linux distros. Security also is not just supply chain integrity.

>Windows is designed to be able to protect the will of proprietary software publishers against the will of users

I'm not sure what you mean by this. Just because Micrsoft cares about developers, it doesn't mean they don't care about users.

>that it's a violation of freedoms 0 and 1

It's not. Freedom 0 and 1 does not give you the freedom to cheat against other players without being banned. You can be free to modify the game client, but you aren't entitled to play with others using it.
by lelanthran | 2025-06-19 16:50:09+00:00
> Use informal English on the surface, while some of it is interpreted as a formal expression, put to work, and then reflected back in English? I think that is possible, if you have a formal language and logic that is flexible enough, and close enough to informal English.

That sounds like a paradox.

Formal verification can prove that constraints are held. English cannot. mapping between them necessarily requires disambiguation. How would you construct such a disambiguation algorithm which must, by its nature, be deterministic?
by K0balt | 2025-06-19 16:50:48+00:00
Money has never been the problem for homelessness. It costs cities more money to deal with homeless people than it does to build public housing if the city provides the will to do so. This has been proven out time and time again.

There are many, many perverse incentives involved in keeping homeless people homeless.

At the general level, for many people witnessing exigent poverty is a calming horror. “I’m doing ok I guess”

Then, the broken healthcare system. We would need to acknowledge that we have an ill society that refuses to provide care for its victims and even its children.

Also, the homeless are a very useful spectacle to keeping people in line, a constant reminder that most people are a couple of bad months from living under a bridge. This prevents people from organizing for better pay, better conditions, better lives…. Facilitating the harvesting of all of the excess value that they can be coerced into providing for their employers.

What UBI does, as proven time and again, is empower people to risk looking for better jobs, better lives. Reduce the stress of daily life by removing the spectacle of losing your family and living in a box down by the park.

That people find the idea of this intolerable speaks volumes about the society we inhabit.
Ask HN: Should development of AI be nationalized?
by michaelsbradley | 2025-06-19 16:50:49+00:00
And…

Should the US insist that all of its allies nationalize development of AI?

For example, and for starters, the US could push for NATO membership to be amended such that all member states nationalize AI and agree to sharing all source code, training data, methodologies and results for research and development, as well details of budgets and expenditures for the same, with allowances for limited (and time-limited) non-disclosure for the sake of security.

It could be up to each nation to decide how to provide their citizens, institutions, and businesses access to models running on public infrastructure; and whether and to what extent private entities may operate and expose models on their private infrastructure.
by diggan | 2025-06-19 16:50:50+00:00
> The topics in the talk are not new.

Sure, but your initial dismissal ("95% X, 5% Y") is literally about this talk no? And when you say 'it's "in one ear, out the other" with most of his audience' that's based on some previous experience, rather than the talk itself? I guess I got confused what applied to what event.

> As for the outcome of the donut experiment, I don't know. You tell me. Apply it repeatedly at a big scale and see if you should alter the initial offer for best outcomes (as relative as "best" might be).

Maybe I'm extra slow today, how does this tie into our conversation so far? Does it have anything to do with determinism or what was the idea behind bringing it up? I'm afraid you're gonna have to spell it out for me, sorry about that :)
by gadders | 2025-06-19 16:50:56+00:00
"At this point you will overwrite all data on the computer, so have a back up of the files you want to keep."

Can't help thinking that should be in a bigger font. It's a shame there doesn't seem to be a away to install Linux and keep your Documents directory at least. Is that due to file systems?

[Yes, yes, backup to memory stick/external drive but I'm talking about for your average person on the street]
by kubectl_h | 2025-06-19 16:51:06+00:00
Another article on this: https://archive.ph/DOCG0

Personally I think it's fair if you buy the tickets the way any random person might try to buy all the combinations, which would be to pay people to go buy combinations at gas stations.

But that's not how this worked in this case:

> The Texas Lottery Commission helped in several ways behind the scenes. Prior to the draw, it filled rush orders from the retailers requesting dozens of extra terminals — even though three had sold few, if any tickets in the previous months.

>The agency also did not challenge organizers’ method of rapidly entering millions of ticket orders into state terminals. Their use of personal iPads and preprogrammed QR codes appeared to skirt lottery regulations.

If the lotto commission is fine with groups purchasing the lottery, they should make the mechanism for purchasing the lottery equally available to everyone.
by mock-possum | 2025-06-19 16:51:22+00:00
…but that just sounds like scientific racism.

Rather than judging an individual on their actual intelligence, these kinds of statistical trends allow you to justify judging an individual based on their race, because you feel you can credibly claim that race is an acceptable proxy for their genome, is an acceptable proxy for their intelligence.

Or for their trustworthiness, or creativity, or sexuality, or dutifulness, or compassion, or aggressiveness, or alacrity, or humility, etc etc.

When you treat a person like a people, that’s still prejudice.
by 1-more | 2025-06-19 16:51:37+00:00
> in a real IDE because of all the screaming it does about "value can be null"

Yeah, when you have extra tools like that it can certainly help. The thing is that you can ignore any warning! I like it to be a compiler error because then there's no way to put that on the tech-debt credit card and still pass CI. If you are able to put those warnings into your CI so a PR with them cannot merge, then that's like 99% of what I like in my code: make the computer think of the low-hanging-fruit things that can go wrong.

With all of that said, solving for null does not get you everything a tagged union type does, but that's a different story.
by ty6853 | 2025-06-19 16:52:44+00:00
Nobody is buying this bullshit anymore, we're not going down for your campaign to dupe us into "replacing a popular one" like happened in Iraq when the USA created a power vacuum and then much of it got taken over by ISIS, much of which was left to Kurdish and other local resistance groups to flush out after your deranged "nope. Nope," propaganda of lies military campaign ended.
by A_D_E_P_T | 2025-06-19 16:52:47+00:00
Video probably isn't the right format. A lot of people (myself included!) won't want to view them. Tables, charts, images, etc. are generally better, easier for any short-attention-span person who just happened across your site and wants to skim through what you have to offer.

I think what you really need to answer is: "What differentiates my product from a good prompt on o3-pro?" Make a comparative table or a whitepaper, and use that for marketing and outreach.

If, and only if, that doesn't work, I'd suggest you offer a zero-friction free trial. Maybe one or two free attempts?
by wat10000 | 2025-06-19 16:52:50+00:00
That article is an interesting time capsule.

Microsoft (well, the Windows part) is looking more and more like the Apple and Sun in that article. It’s the #2 or #3 user-facing OS these days. The fancy new programming environment happened and most stuff moved there, but it’s JavaScript and the browser rather than C# and .NET. Running old software is becoming a niche and getting more so by the day.
by superkuh | 2025-06-19 16:53:13+00:00
Yep. Native applications are much faster, more reliable (can't change underneath you unless you let them), incomparibly more private, and generally longer lasting.

Using the web for applications forces you into behavior and situations you wouldn't accept otherwise. Web sites are best made of web pages. Not executable code. And there are still more web sites made out of web pages out there than corporate web apps. The web is huge and there's a lot beyond the top 100 web apps everyone use.

Turning off JS auto-execution helps one avoid falling into those traps as well as avoiding fingerprinting in general. And the vast majority of the non-commercial web still works just fine.
by 9rx | 2025-06-19 16:53:24+00:00
> And today the railroad system in the USA sucks compared to other developed countries and even China.

Nonsense. The US has the largest freight rail system in the world, and is considered to have the most efficient rail system in the world to go along with it.

There isn't much in the way of passenger service, granted, but that's because people in the US aren't, well, poor. They can afford better transportation options.

> It turns out that boom-and-bust capitalism isn’t great for building something that needs to evolve over centuries.

It initially built out the passenger rail just fine, but then evolution saw better options come along. Passenger rail disappeared because it no longer served a purpose. It is not like, say, Japan where the median household income is approaching half that of Mississippi and they hold on to rail because that's what is affordable.