MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by glkindlmann | 2025-06-18 01:28:24+00:00
Sure, but noticing a difference between the images and the real world also happens with us trichromats too, e.g. colors online don't match those in the real world if the illuminant isn't correctly controlled. The intrinsic difficulty of color reproduction is not the same as detecting tetrachromacy. The nuance here is in generating stimuli that reliably and specifically detect the difference between projecting from an infinite-D space of spectra down to 3D (via metamers like the "keef" and "litz" described in the paper linked above), versus projecting down to 4D.
by LegionMammal978 | 2025-06-18 01:28:34+00:00
> Did Shakespeare not write it?

No. Shakespeare wrote nothing of the sort, at least not in his surviving works. (You can just search for it [0].)

Also, the "better than a master of one" version is most likely a modern invention, given its apparently-complete absence among 20th-century books [1]. (In contrast, real sayings tend to show up all over the place, with how much old almanacs and magazines loved using them to fill space.)

[0] https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/100/pg100-images.html

[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=better+than+a+master+of+one&...
by dinosaurdynasty | 2025-06-18 01:29:22+00:00
A well done PWA will absolutely beat SSR on a shitty connection if it's actually an app.

Cache-control immutable the code and assets of the app and it will only be reloaded on changes. Offline-first and/or stale-while-revalidate approaches (as in the React swr library) can hugely help with interactivity while (as quickly as possible) updating in the background things that have changed and can be synced. (A service worker can even update the app in the background so it's usable while being updated.) HTTP3/QUIC solves the "many small requests" and especially the "head of line blocking" problems of earlier protocols (though only good app/API design can prevent waterfalls). The client can automatically redo bad connections/requests as needed. Once the app is loaded (you can still use code splitting), the API requests will be much smaller than redownloading the page over and over again

Of course this requires a lot of effort in non-trivial cases, and most don't even know how to do it/that it is possible to do.
by anon-3988 | 2025-06-18 01:29:46+00:00
If you already don't care about security, whats stopping you from running 10 year old software and never updating it? Its not like Wayland is going to ruin your older software and hardware.

I don't get why its such a big deal that software that:

1. no one wants to develop 2. is completely free 3. no longer being developed

is such a problem, its free. if its so important to you, why not contribute yourself? Should these people be forced to contribute to projects that they want to be free of against their will?
by lenerdenator | 2025-06-18 01:30:41+00:00
> Do you see an out for Khamenei et al? They can’t credibly dismantle their nuclear deterrent and expect to keep their heads. Israel and America cannot accept it, particularly now that its conventional defences have been shown ineffective

Honestly, I don’t think the American people have the stomach for another Middle Eastern war, and Israel has shown in the past that if you recognize their right to exist in some form, they’ll leave you the hell alone - see Egypt, Jordan, etc.

So if he pulled back from those two rivalries, I doubt that hurts him much. I’d see it as riskier because of internal power struggles and possibly from regional rivals, but who knows.

Guy’s in his mid 80s and there’s a decent chance Mossad knows exactly where he is. He’s got one foot on a banana peel and the other foot in the grave regardless.
by fc417fc802 | 2025-06-18 01:32:01+00:00
This is such a ridiculously cynical interpretation. I'm sure there at least a few people out there who behave as you describe but that is not normal. Greeting people before launching into a topic is a social norm. Even if you make a reasonable case that it is outdated in the context of instant messaging that doesn't change the reality of it.

Someone doing something that you consider outdated or inefficient does not imply that he is malicious.
by eru | 2025-06-18 01:32:13+00:00
I wonder if this will be temporary?

As AI systems improve, and especially as they add more 'self-play' in training, they might become really good at working in any language you can throw at some.

(To expand on the self-play aspect: when training you might want to create extra training data by randomly creating new 'fake' programming languages and letting it solve problems in them. It's just another way to add more training data.)

In any case, if you use an embedded DSL, like is already commonly done in Haskell, the LLMs should still give you good performance. In some sense, an 'embedded DSL' is just fancy name for a library in a specific style.
by teleforce | 2025-06-18 01:33:01+00:00
>Like, there is no "system". I had read that "it's a protocol" but I hadn't fully internalized it. I'm honestly a bit surprised anyone has adopted it. It almost feels like a scam.

I feel you. I was there before and after Wayland. I was there when they promised you toward the promise land of the year of Linux Desktop and allegedly X11 is the main hurdle.

X11 is a proper system and protocol, and it seems the Wayland folks just ignore this. The two main reasons were given by them at the time were X11 has archaic architecture (reverse client and server concept) and, the X11 code is ancient and a mess. I'm kind of sold on their first idea of Linux need a clean windowing system so we can have something nice like RDP in Windows. But their second points on the codes debt is rather off. It did occur to me at the time it will be much easier to come up with a clean room implementation of X11 system and protocol rather than come up with entire new windowing system, than hope entire people and industries will use them. After all Linux basically is a clean room implementation of Unix.

I think the main problem is that at the time there's no authoritative figure like Linus on the non-kernel Linux part or what I called Linux user environment. At the time there was Miguel de Icaza of Gnome fame but at the time he seems too much involved with another promise land of Windows .Net and Linux people cannot come to term with the idea of we should just use Win32 as other comments have suggested here. It's proven later that .Net is an eventual failure as expected and Miguel reputation suffered because of that. Strangely to be honest I have never read Linus comment on Wayland but why would he? He's laser focus on the kernel and he's happy to admit using Fedora in the middle of the Red Hat Fedora bruhaha.
by kulahan | 2025-06-18 01:33:11+00:00
This feels so much like a totally obvious question, I was surprised this was even the actual topic of discussion rather than a lead-in to another, actually questionable idea.

This is a major part of why I cannot stand software devs (I am loathe to call them “engineers”). Of COURSE YOU SHOULD design for an iffy internet. It’s never perfect. Thank the LORD code monkeys don’t build anything important like bridges or airplanes.
by 0_____0 | 2025-06-18 01:33:18+00:00
The US still has an incredible pool of talent and a vast industrial base, but we're losing a lot of ground. The development in China's industrial base is the result of decades of technocratic oversight and continuity of policy aimed at creating exactly what we see now.

The US leadership by comparison can't decide whether to wear its pants back to front, or front to back, and changes its mind every 2-4 years.

I was mulling today that it seems like the political institutions in China seem to value the strength of China in the world foremost. Not to say that anywhere is completely free of corruption or individual political maneuvering. The US political elite by comparison seem to value a very specific type of economic freedom that happens to also enrich the very same elite, and secondarily 'philosophy of life and values' sort of stuff that doesn't really have much to do with running a healthy and economically stable country.
by panzi | 2025-06-18 01:34:23+00:00
Doesn't writing to /dev/uinput require you to be root? That's way worse security wise than faking X11 inputs. Also you can't direct the inputs to a specific window. That is bound to create problems where events go to the wrong process.

Also PipeWire is an audio interface. A replacement to PulseAudio. That has nothing to do with accessing screens.
by vkou | 2025-06-18 01:35:23+00:00
Sure, I can also avoid putting chemicals on my body by washing my hair with apple cider vinegar and baking soda, and I can also churn my own butter by hand, and if mom wants to hear from me, she can cross an international border and drive for five hours, with her travels being logged by countless security and traffic cameras, gas station payment processors, and no less than two governments, so that she can converse with me in person in my RF-shielded, copper-lined[1] Faraday-cage basement.

There's social media use and there's social media use. Hacker News, Reddit, Facebook, Instagram, Whatsapp, EMail, and my phone's SMS systems all serve dramatically different purposes, and all of them are a varied mix of pros and cons and risks.

---

[1] Any Arcanist worth his salt knows that copper has no name, and thus cannot be turned against you.
by aspenmayer | 2025-06-18 01:36:20+00:00
I didn’t ask for info, I asked for your views. I gave you all the info anyone has publicly, so you have enough to comment.

I suspect that it was a limited hangout self-own by Meta to claim that they aren’t responsible, and then they are doing research on a leaked LLM that they developed, but then was leaked, so they can claim that the subsequent research is not tainted by the fruit of the poisonous tree legal doctrine. Or, their torrent client or other software on the same machine had 0-days and they got hacked by someone on the Books3 swarm or knowledgeable of what IPs were connecting to it.

I appreciate your posts and I am replying to you to humbly ask you to post more. :P
by eru | 2025-06-18 01:38:13+00:00
Speaking of US-specific situations is fine. Or in general, speaking of any specific institutions.

I objected to the '[...] and nobody is financially invested in software from AI anymore.' That's a rather dubious claim of a universal consequence for a change that only affects the US.

If the comment was 'I can't wait until Section 174 changes are repealed and nobody in the US is financially invested in software from AI anymore.' I would have nothing to complain about.

To critique the content more specifically and explicitly, and not just the form: people and companies all around the world have plenty of incentives to invest in AI. A tax change in the US might change the incentives in the US slightly. But it won't have much of an impact on the incentives in Europe, China, etc.

And even in the US, even with that suggested tax change, I doubt it'll lead to 'nobody [in the US being] financially invested in software from AI anymore.'

Basically, the original comment was hyperbole at best and BS at worst.
by tkgally | 2025-06-18 01:38:38+00:00
> It is hard to convey just how important it is to be able to ... ask follow-up questions, and reason about the text.

Great ideas. I'll think about adding those features to the system in my next vibe-coding session.

What I automated in the MVP I vibe-coded yesterday could all be done alone by a human user with access to the LLMs, of course. The point of such an app would be to guide people who are not familiar with the issues and intricacies of translation so that they can get better translations for their purposes.

I have no intention to try to commercialize my app, as there would be no moat. Anyone who wanted to could feed this thread to Claude, ask it to write a starting prompt for Claude Code, and produce a similar system in probably less time than it took me.
by acdha | 2025-06-18 01:39:24+00:00
> Elected at the state level, sure. But it was against the will of the national electorate and they knew it.

Surveys have shown for many years that most people nationwide want a legal path to immigration for law-abiding workers. Sanctuary laws exist solely because a minority of the population has been able to game the Congressional structure to prevent immigration reform while also shielding the businesses which depend on cheap, exploitable workers from punishment.

I suspect that you would complain strenuously if the United States changed from a republic to the direct democracy you are arguing for in this case, or many others where unpopular policies are maintained due to the odd structure of our government.
by bitwize | 2025-06-18 01:39:47+00:00
It's a lot like X11 vs. Wayland. The current graphics developers, who trend younger, don't want to maintain the boomer-written C code in the X server. Too risky and time-consuming. So one of the goals of Wayland is to completely abolish X so it can be replaced with something more long-term maintainable. Turns out, current systems-level developers don't want to maintain boomer-written GNU code or any C code at all, really, for similar reasons. C is inherently problematic because even seasoned developers have trouble avoiding its footguns. So an unstated, but important, goal of Rust is to abolish all critical C code and replace it with Rust code. Ubuntu is on board with this.
by saurik | 2025-06-18 01:40:16+00:00
I mean, I hate a lazy "citation needed" FUD attack as much as (really likely way more than) anyone, but with a bit more context I do think a citation is needed, as the correct citation in the other direction is (as someone else noted) Jevon's paradox: when you make it easier to X, you make it so people can use X in ever more contexts, and you make it so that the things which previously needed something way harder than X are suddenly possible, and the result -- as much in software development as any other field: it seems like every year it becomes MUCH easier to do things, due to better tools -- always seems to result in MORE demand, not less... we even see the slow raising of "table stakes" for software, such that a website or app is off-putting and lame to a lot of users if it isn't doing the things that require at least some effort: instead of animated transitions and giant images maybe the next phase of this is that the website has to be an interactive assistant white-glove AI experience--or some crazy AR-capable thing--requiring tons of engineering effort to pull off, but now possible for your average website due to AI coding. Meanwhile, the other effects you are talking about all started before AI coding even sort of worked well, and so have very little to do with AI: they are more related to monetary policy shifts, temporary pandemic demand spikes, and that R&D tax law change.
by colechristensen | 2025-06-18 01:40:55+00:00
It reminds me of the Wizard of Oz, color was new and being done poorly. Now Oz is nostalgic so it gets a pass because of its uniqueness, but new films that look like that would be a little absurd.

I like some of the choices on Mario Kart World with HDR, but a lot of it just needs to be toned down so the things which do blow out the colors are impressive but also fit instead of just everything being turned up to 11.
by kasey_junk | 2025-06-18 01:41:02+00:00
Productivity is up and labor wages are up. That’s why I asked. It wasn’t an attempt at a rebuttal it was a request for reading material as it’s a heterodox view.

The normal conversation is that productivity growth has slowed and the divide has increased, not that more productivity creates lower outcomes in real terms.

https://www.bls.gov/productivity/images/labor-compensation-l...
by insane_dreamer | 2025-06-18 01:41:14+00:00
but if you compare with another product mentioned in your link, it takes 15,000 liters of water to produce a kilo of meat and the EU produces about 6.5M tons of beef / year, which would put the water consumption at very roughly double that for chocolate; that would be only 1.3x the projected use by AI data centers.

So chocolate has a shockingly high water consumption especially for an "extra" product (much like almonds) compared to beef (leaving aside the vegetarian argument, and in terms of societal dependency only). And beef by far consumes the most water per kilo compared to other meats.

I think the main takeaway is that we should reduce chocolate consumption, and that AI data centers may consume as much or close to, all beef production.
by worik | 2025-06-18 01:42:08+00:00
> Saddam Hussain was a genocidal, fascist lunatic.

Yes.

> The world is certainly a better place with him gone. Even if America didn't handle the subsequent occupation too well, i would argue (and you are free to disagree) that Iraq was still better off.

That is mad talk. Things have been much worse, so much worse for almost everyone in and around Iraq since that war.

ISIS for one thing, was a direct result of the perfidious actions of foreigners in Iraq.

So much chaos was created, there is no way the invasion of Iraq improved the world
by jezzamon | 2025-06-18 01:42:31+00:00
I was thinking about this comparison recently along a slightly different axis: One challenge when working with translations (human or machine translations) as that you can't vet whether it's correct or not yourself. So you just have to either trust the translation and hope it's the best. It's a lot easier to trust a person than a machine, though I have had someone message me once to say "this translation of your article is so bad I feel like the translator did not put in a serious attempt"

It's similar to vibe coding where the user truly doesn't know how to create the same thing themselves: You end up with output that you have no way of knowing it's correct, and you just have to blindly trust it and hope for the best. And that just doesn't work for many situations. So you still need expertise anyway (either yours or someone else's)
by kodablah | 2025-06-18 01:44:13+00:00
I believe the definition of workflows in this article is inaccurate. Workflows in modern engines do not take predefined code paths, and agents are effectively the same as workflows in these cases. The redefinition of workflows seems to be an attempt to differentiate, but for the most part an agent is nothing more than a workflow that is a loop that dynamically invokes things based on LLM responses. Modern workflow engines are very dynamic.
by dtgriscom | 2025-06-18 01:46:32+00:00
In the late 80s I worked in a low cluster of buildings, each of which was topped with a band of vertical ridges spaced about 4" apart (sort of like a corrugated roof, but with vertical corrugations). One day a thunderstorm came through, and we discovered that the pulses of thunder, when they hit the corrugations, reflected as a quickly falling tone. The corrugations were working as an acoustic diffraction grating, with different frequencies reflecting in different directions.
by gsf_emergency | 2025-06-18 01:47:46+00:00
The proofs are not evenly distributed*, you simply have to look for them (or ask, please continue to do so :)

>on a hot, dry day, a person could feel more than 7 degrees warmer on a “cool pavement”, as the reflective roads are called, as opposed to a normal blacktop.

https://archive.fo/qEBUM#selection-3891.161-3891.318

As for your "regional sense", yes, the field of psychology ought to be called "mesoeconomics" (and why not mess-o-economics?)

*Shall we ahem, say, highly entropic?

In short, we need eink for roads :)
by bgwalter | 2025-06-18 01:49:52+00:00
This "fallacy" is from 1891 and assumes jobs that require virtually no retraining. A farm worker could ion theory clean the factory floor or do one small step in an assembly line within a week.

Nowadays we already have bullshit jobs that keep academics employed. Retraining takes several years.

With "AI" the danger is theoretically limited because it creates more bureaucracy and reduces productivity. The problem is that it is used as an excuse for layoffs.
by 1oooqooq | 2025-06-18 01:50:03+00:00
it's well know they track

group messages and messages (metadata),

messages to business accounts (these they can read in full as the client send to a meta owned private key),

and who forwards media to who (deduplication and cdn)

and links (thanks to previews)

and it scans and uploads your contact list in full all the time.
by ggreer | 2025-06-18 01:50:15+00:00
Hydrogen engines aren't always pink. The exhaust color depends on the ratio of oxidizer to fuel. The Space Shuttle's main engines were hydrolox, but their exhaust had almost no pink/red.

It's hard to say for sure, but I lean towards Honda's rocket using hydrogen. Honda has experience with it. They use hydrogen in their fuel cell vehicles, and their press release from 2021 mentions using hydrogen for rockets.[1]

I'm pretty sure both fuel and oxidizer are cryogenic, because when the rocket lands it vents from several areas (most likely separate tanks). That would rule out ethanol or methanol as the fuel.

I don't see any secondary exhaust from a gas generator, and staged combustion would be something to brag about (and much higher thrust), so my guess is that it's an expander cycle. Expander cycle engines require a fuel that boils easily, so it would have to be fueled by propane, methane, or hydrogen. I don't think it's propane, as the only propane/lox rocket I've seen has orange exhaust.[2] If Honda poached some engineers from Mitsubishi, I could see them going with a hydrolox expander cycle, as that's what the H family of rockets use.

The only thing that doesn't line up with hydrogen is the low thrust given the propellant consumption. Based on the claimed wet/dry mass (1,312kg/900kg), they used at most 412kg of propellant. Flight duration was 56.6 seconds, so that's an average of 7.28kg of propellant per second. If the stated wet/dry mass is correct and the rocket used up all of its fuel, then the rocket's thrust was around 13kN at the start and around 7kN near the end. Let's say it averaged 10kN. Force equals mass flow rate times exhaust velocity. So 10kN divided by 7.28kg/sec is 1.374 km/s. Divide by standard Earth gravity and you get 140 seconds, which is pathetic for a rocket. It could be that they only used a small fraction of the available propellant, or they had a poor nozzle design, or the engine was throttled very low and was therefore less efficient. If we assume the test flight only used 40% of the available propellant, then we'd get a flow rate of 2.9kg/sec and a specific impulse of 352 seconds. But that sort of assumption can be used to come up with any Isp.

Still, I think it's using either hydrogen or methane as fuel. Nothing else fits with the video.

1. https://global.honda/en/newsroom/news/2021/c210930beng.html

2. Here's a video of Isar Aerospace's Spectrum rocket, which uses propane/lox: https://x.com/isaraerospace/status/1906418985173758236
by AdieuToLogic | 2025-06-18 01:52:50+00:00
Before SQL became an industry standard, many programs which required a persistent store used things like ISAM[0], VISAM (a variant of ISAM[0]), or proprietary B-Tree libraries.

None of these had "semantic expressivity" as their strength.

> If SQL looked like, say, C#'s LINQ method syntax, would it really be harder to use?

Yes.

0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISAM
by gxnxcxcx | 2025-06-18 01:53:11+00:00
Nah, you insist on building an empire, the onus in on you to git gud at keeping barbarians at bay _at scale_.

The thing got big because it was free. They bought it, society (d)evolved together with the thing, they turned it into what it now is. Monetization is their problem and no one else's.
by recursivedoubts | 2025-06-18 01:53:20+00:00
I think a lot of “naturals” find visual debuggers pointless, but for people who don’t naturally intuit how a computer works it can be invaluable in building that intuition.

I insist that my students learn a visual debugger in my classes for this reason: what the "stack" really is, how a loop really executes, etc.

It doesn't replace thinking & print debugging, but it complements them both when done properly.