MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ronyeh | 2025-06-15 04:00:51+00:00
People paying more for Waymo doesn’t surprise me. I also once called for a comfort car, but it was a filthy Lexus. I’d much rather ride in a clean and well maintained Corolla.

I pay more for Waymo and I’m happy to do it (as long as Waymo can detect when its interior is dirty so it can return itself to home base for cleaning.) I don’t have to sit awkwardly in a car with another guy who may drive in a way that annoys me. I can talk on my phone or with my family without having a random person listen in.
by pradn | 2025-06-15 04:05:15+00:00
"... between 1988 and 2004, hardware got 1600 times faster, and LP solvers got 3300 times faster, allowing for a cumulative speed-up factor higher than 5 × 106, and that was already 20 years ago!"

"The authors observed a speedup of 1000 between [the commercial MILP solvers of] 2001 and 2020 (50 due to algorithms, 20 due to faster computers)."

I wonder if we can collect these speedup factors across computing subfields, decomposed by the contribution of algorithmic improvements, and faster computers.

In compilers, there's "Proebsting's Law": compiler advances double computing power every 18 years.
by thomassmith65 | 2025-06-15 04:05:25+00:00
Our thread doesn't exist in a vacuum, it exists in the Chomsky-fied world of the 21st Century. This is a world in which quite a few people really do defend the regimes I mentioned, as though there were no difference between totalitarianism and a liberal democracy.

Note that I made a point of defending America in the 20th Century, not the 21st.

Because, at the moment, America has an authoritarian leader.

And I wonder if people who obsess on America's bad side, even know the difference!

Considering the last HN thread I commented on was full of comments in support of the anti-American yet horrifying Iranian regime, I don't have much hope.
Zero-Index, O(1) Data Engine with Native Natural-Language Querying
by mymanagertech | 2025-06-15 04:09:49+00:00
I’ve spent the past 2 years building a new data storage engine from scratch. It uses a layout with zero indexing and blazing-fast memory usage. Here's what it does on a mid-range server (Intel 24 cores, Go):

Writes 1M enterprise records in 3 seconds, restapi simulator 1M users in the same time, writing 13 fields each.

Locates a specific user (ID 999999) in 28ms

Counts 1M users in 4ms using only 2MB of RAM

Accepts human-like commands: find users with id = 999999 find users count

If you’re at Mongo, Oracle, Amazon, or Snowflake — message me. I’m open to exclusive acquisition before launch.

willfreitas@mymanager.io
by Rendello | 2025-06-15 04:11:53+00:00
That's true, and even with normalization, there's four normalized forms for strings. The -k- forms are mostly for searching, but that still leaves NFC and NFD.

The normalization forms are explained, in order of approachability (imo), in this random Youtube video, the Unicode Annex #15, and the Unicode Core Spec:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ttLD4DiMpiQ

https://unicode.org/reports/tr15/

https://www.unicode.org/versions/Unicode16.0.0/core-spec/cha...
by random3 | 2025-06-15 04:11:56+00:00
"Knowing" needs not exist outside of human invention. In fact that's the point - it only matters in relation to humans. You can choose whatever definition you want, but the reality is that, once you chose a non-standard definition the argument becomes meaningless outside of the scope of your definition.

There are two angles and this context fails both

- One about what is "knowing" - the definition. - The other about what are the instances of "knowing"

first - knowign implies awarness, perception, etc. It's not that this couldn't be moodeled with some flexibility around lower level definitions. However LLMs and GPTs in particular are not it. Pre-trainign is not it.

second - intended use of the word "knowing". The reality is "knowing" is used with the actual meaning of awarness, cognition, etc. And once you revert/extend the meaning to practically nothing - what is knowing? Then the database know, wikipedia knows - the initial argument (of the paper) is diminished - it knows it's an eval is useless as a statement.

So IMO the argument of the paper should stand on its feet with the minimum amount of additional implications (Occam's razor). Does the statement that a LLM can detect an evalution pattern need to depend that it has self-awarness and feels pain? That wouldn't make much sense. So then don't say "know" which comes with these implications. Like "my ca 'knows' I'm in a hurry and will choke and die"
by mumbisChungo | 2025-06-15 04:12:26+00:00
"...advanced reasoning models like Gemini 2.5 Pro and Claude-3.7-Sonnet (Thinking) can occasionally identify the specific benchmark origin of transcripts (including SWEBench, GAIA, and MMLU), indicating evaluation-awareness via memorization of known benchmarks from training data. Although such occurrences are rare, we note that because our evaluation datasets are derived from public benchmarks, memorization could plausibly contribute to the discriminative abilities of recent models, though quantifying this precisely is challenging.

Moreover, all models frequently acknowledge common benchmarking strategies used by evaluators, such as the formatting of the task (“multiple-choice format”), the tendency to ask problems with verifiable solutions, and system prompts designed to elicit performance"

Beyond the awful, sensational headline, the body of the paper is not particularly convincing, aside from evidence that the pattern matching machines pattern match.
by phinnaeus | 2025-06-15 04:14:30+00:00
I don’t think that’s totally fair. The OS version number gets mentioned a lot more often than the year of a specific laptop. Furthermore it’s only made available to the general public close to the end of the year. The majority if its use is seen in a year matching the version.

I’m not saying it’s a perfect system but I can see why they prefer that then having people use iOS 25 for the majority of 2026.
by lalaland1125 | 2025-06-15 04:14:59+00:00
This blog post is unfortunately missing what I consider the bigger reason why Q learning is not scalable:

As horizon increases, the number of possible states (usually) increases exponentially. This means you require exponentially increasing data to have a hope of training a Q that can handle those states.

This is less of an issue for on policy learning, because only near policy states are important, and on policy learning explicitly only samples those states. So even though there are exponential possible states your training data is laser focused on the important ones.
by o11c | 2025-06-15 04:16:33+00:00
> I've never tried doing an 8-bit vs 10-bit-per-color "blind" test, but I think I'd be able to see it?

In my tests with assorted 24-bit sRGB monitors, a difference of 1 in a single channel is almost always indistinguishable (and this might be a matter of monitor tuning); even a difference of 1 simultaneously in all three channels is only visible in a few places along the lerps. (Contrast all those common shitty 18-bit monitors. On those, even with temporal dithering, the contrast between adjacent colors is always glaringly distracting.)

(If testing yourself, note that there are 8 corners of the color cube, so 8×7÷2=28 unique pairs. You should use blocks of pixels, not single pixels - 16x16 is nice even though it requires scrolling or wrapping on most monitors, since 16×256 = 4096. 7 pixels wide will fit on a 1920-pixel-wide screen naturally.)

So HDR is only a win if it adds to the "top". But frankly, most people's monitors are too bright and cause strain to their eyes anyway, so maybe not even then.

More likely the majority of the gain has nothing to do with 10-bit color channels, and much more to do about improving the quality ("blacker blacks" as you said) of the monitor in general. But anybody who is selling something must necessarily be dishonest, so will never help you get what you actually want.

(For editing of course, using 16-bit color channels is a good idea to prevent repeated loss of precision. If also using separate alpha per channel, that gives you a total of 96 bits per pixel.)
by lxgr | 2025-06-15 04:17:25+00:00
> It makes sense to have everyone in 2026 running version 26.

For that, they'd need to release iOS 26 for all devices, including discontinued ones, and force people to upgrade (and prevent them from upgrading to iOS 27 in September 2026!)

Since all that won't happen, no, it does not make sense.

They have control over one thing: The year in which they make a new iOS version available. That's the year they should have named it after.
by sota_pop | 2025-06-15 04:18:06+00:00
Always appreciated the work of Jeremy Howard. Also had a lot of fun using the Fast.ai framework. My experience is similar to your description. When using 2, 3, or more epochs, felt that overfitting started to emerge. (And I was CERTAINLY not training models anywhere near the size of modern LLMs) I suppose in this case by “saturation” you meant training “marginally before exhibiting over-fitting” - something akin to “the elbow method” w.r.t. clustering algorithms? I’ll have to chew on your description of overfitting results for a while. It jives with mine, but in a way that really makes me question my own - thanks for the thought provoking response!
by xelxebar | 2025-06-15 04:19:02+00:00
This was going through my head, too. Though I am somewhat doubtful whether it would be a win on Linux. Mk's ergonomics come from leveraging the cohesiveness of Plan 9 as a system, IMHO.

That said, the automatic variables ($target, $stem, etc.) are more descriptive than those of make ($@, $*, etc) since the former are just normal shell variables passed in at rule runtime I think.
by sneak | 2025-06-15 04:19:49+00:00
If they switched to the current year at time of release, there would be 6+ months each year where the current version represents the previous calendar year, making it seem outdated.

It’s not marketing fluff, it is maximizing the amount of time out of each year that the year matches the current version number, given that macOS releases are in the second half of the year and not on 1 January.

Doing it with version = release year would mean more days each year where the year != version.

Why are strategic decisions like this always interpreted in the most superficial ways? Apple does scumbag shit frequently (monopolistic anticompetitive practices, walled garden price gouging, illegal wage fixing) but this isn’t that. It’s just math.
by dperfect | 2025-06-15 04:20:32+00:00
It's hard to boil it down to a simple thesis because the problem is complicated. He admits this in the presentation and points to it being part of the problem itself; there are so many technical details that have been met with marketing confusion and misunderstanding that it's almost impossible to adequately explain the problem in a concise way. Here's my takeaway:

- It was clearly a mistake to define HDR transfer functions using absolute luminance values. That mistake has created a cascade of additional problems

- HDR is not what it was marketed to be: it's not superior in many of the ways people think it is, and in some ways (like efficiency) it's actually worse than SDR

- The fundamental problems with HDR formats have resulted in more problems: proprietary formats like Dolby Vision attempting to patch over some of the issues (while being more closed and expensive, yet failing to fully solve the problem), consumer devices that are forced to render things worse than they might be in SDR due to the fact that it's literally impossible to implement the spec 100% (they have to make assumptions that can be very wrong), endless issues with format conversions leading to inaccurate color representation and/or color banding, and lower quality streaming at given bit rates due to HDR's reliance on higher bit depths to achieve the same tonal gradation as SDR

- Not only is this a problem for content delivery, but it's also challenging in the content creation phase as filmmakers and studios sometimes misunderstand the technology, changing their process for HDR in a way that makes the situation worse

Being somewhat of a film nerd myself and dealing with a lot of this first-hand, I completely agree with the overall sentiment and really hope it can get sorted out in the future with a more pragmatic solution that gives filmmakers the freedom to use modern displays more effectively, while not pretending that they should have control over things like the absolute brightness of a person's TV (when they have no idea what environment it might be in).
by z2 | 2025-06-15 04:22:36+00:00
Same thing happened to me, and the support system automatically decided nothing was wrong whatsoever despite my phone certainly sending a very different location from the driver. And the madness was I couldn't even book another ride as I was technically in one.

So I ended up getting it resolved via the security panic button which did put me through to a real person who was empathetic to the issue.
by neom | 2025-06-15 04:22:42+00:00
I think the G is what really screws things up. I thought it was, as good as the general human, but upon googling it has a defined meaning among researchers. There appears to be confusion all over the place tho.

General-Purpose (Wide Scope): It can do many types of things.

Generally as Capable as a Human (Performance Level): It can do what we do.

Possessing General Intelligence (Cognitive Mechanism): It thinks and learns the way a general intelligence does.

So, for researchers, general intelligence is characterized by: applying knowledge from one domain to solve problems in another, adapting to novel situations without being explicitly programmed for them, and: having a broad base of understanding that can be applied across many different areas.
by Rendello | 2025-06-15 04:23:52+00:00
By total coincidence, today I've been looking at Datalog implementations. The Datalog(-adjacent) Soufflé tutorial says this right near the start:

> For practical usage, Soufflé extends Datalog to make it Turing-equivalent through arithmetic functors. This results in the ability of the programmer to write programs that may never terminate.

https://souffle-lang.github.io/tutorial
by Ericson2314 | 2025-06-15 04:24:07+00:00
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44280505 I think that thead might help?

Total layman here, but maybe some tasks are "uniform" despite being "deep" in such a way that poor samples still suffice? I would call those "ergodic" tasks. But surely there are other tasks where this is not the case?
by littlestymaar | 2025-06-15 04:24:13+00:00
> The Panavia Tornado was previously certified to carry US nuclear bombs

During the cold war. That's a very important bit.

> The only approach that might work would be to forward deploy French nuclear forces on German territor

Are you sure you know how the current program works? Because that's how it does. The US aren't sharing nukes right now (that would violate NPT), the plan would be to hand off the weapons to its allies in the event of an invasion.
by yesco | 2025-06-15 04:24:34+00:00
I suspect there could be a misalignment in semantics here, and not necessarily a disagreement. When a biologist says "evolutionary pressure" perhaps they have a different way of modeling what that means to them?

To me evolutionary pressure isn't an on/off thing, it's like a signal in the noise. It's a vector with a direction and magnitude, facing varying levels of environmental resistance.

To be more specific, if there was enough "magnitude", evolution could potentially arrive at a perfect CRC. But the "resistance" requires a "magnitude" higher than evolution is willing to pay to reach that perfection. Likely in part due to the implicit complexity slope. Considering the systemic malfunction mutation can cause, one might assume this magnitude would be higher than it currently is. However, this is entirely speculation, and not falsifiable.

So when I think of evolutionary pressure I'm considering it as a component of the final vector, where a biologist might more pragmatically consider the total sum of vectors instead. This way of thinking is likely more productive for what they are doing.

As for evolution always selecting for the individual over the group, I'm surprised this is controversial when it's so obviously happening? If that was true how could multicellular organisms even exist? I'm very much not an expert on any of this, but this sounds like perhaps an over focus on DNA itself and not evolution as a whole, but maybe I'm misunderstanding something?
by kulahan | 2025-06-15 04:24:35+00:00
You are disagreeing with the concept, and then saying you only heard one side of… what story?

I just do not care if my customer service agent has a bad time after putting me in a dangerous situation.

Do people not realize that this is how the world works? If you are serving customers, putting them IN DANGER, yes EVEN if it was at their own request, is what is actually wrong.

You don’t let someone ride a roller coaster unrestrained. You don’t let someone eat room temperature meat. You don’t drop a family off in an extremely dangerous neighborhood. Any employee would be right to be ridiculed for allowing any of these things - ESPECIALLY when a child is concerned.
by fenomas | 2025-06-15 04:25:14+00:00
"Know" doesn't have any rigorous precisely-defined senses to be used! Asking for it not to be used colloquially is the same as asking for it never to be used at all.

I mean - people have been saying stuff like "grep knows whether it's writing to stdout" for decades. In the context of talking about computer programs, that usage for "know" is the established/only usage, so it's hard to imagine any typical HN reader seeing TFA's title and interpreting it as an epistemological claim. Rather, it seems to me that the people suggesting "know" mustn't be used about LLMs because epistemology are the ones departing from standard usage.
by lxgr | 2025-06-15 04:25:43+00:00
> Part of the Mac’s soul was in its expressive, varied app icons

Hasn't that been a thing of the past for a while now?

I just had to double-check my dock to even find a non-squircle icon, and there's exactly one in mine: Spotify. (Two if we count "Disk Utility", which has a disk icon overlaid at the bottom right but is otherwise a squircle; three if we count "Activity Monitor", which shows a CPU histogram.)

I agree that it's not a great change. In my view, it makes app icons much harder to distinguish by shape alone, and increases reliance on color (which, at least on iOS, I don't have displayed anymore on most of my home screen themes).
by dannyw | 2025-06-15 04:27:24+00:00
I took Google to a tribunal (think Australian equivalent of small claims) a few years ago, over a defective Pixel they refused to repair 2 years and 1 month after purchase.

Under Australian Consumer Law, I wanted to make the case that a premium phone should last more than 2 years.

Google’s representatives initially sent letters arguing that the license agreement forces me to arbitrate, to which I responded by adding another claim that binding arbitration is an unfair contract provision under the same ACL and should be declared void.

A couple days before the case, I received an offer to settle for a brand new phone and my filing fees, to which I accepted.

No chargebacks, no ban, just the legal system working as it should while being accessible to everyday folks.
by chairmansteve | 2025-06-15 04:29:03+00:00
Manufacturing as a percentage of gdp had been flat since the late 1940s. Automation has eliminated a lot of jobs.

"Manufacturing's share of real GDP has been fairly constant since the 1940s, ranging from 11.3 percent to 13.6 percent. It sat at 11.7 percent in 2015."

https://www.stlouisfed.org/on-the-economy/2017/april/us-manu...
by internetter | 2025-06-15 04:31:11+00:00
I've had good experiences with Uber. I know others don't, but I have. I used to use Lyft but they treated me like shit so now I don't. If Uber starts treating me like shit I'm going back to taxis. If taxis treat me like shit I'll take the bus, walk, buy a car, or any of the dozens of other ways to get around, even if impractical. The market is only captive because people are lazy and weak willed.
by camel-cdr | 2025-06-15 04:31:46+00:00
There are min/max instructions and zicond: https://github.com/riscvarchive/riscv-zicond/blob/main/zicon...

Most conditional instruxtion sequences are two instructions, cmov is:

czero.eqz rd, rs1, rc czero.nez rtmp, rs2, rc or rd, rd, r
by bravoetch | 2025-06-15 04:32:20+00:00
I ran into a similar arbitration with a condo I rented for a long weekend. There was a significant issue and they weren't able to provide another place. We stayed there and had contractors in and out for the next couple of days. They refused to refund me, so I tried through my credit card to get a refund and they said "well you should have just left, then we would refund you. But since you stayed, the contract is fulfilled."
by __MatrixMan__ | 2025-06-15 04:32:35+00:00
I've not studied QED directly, so by all means correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems to me that we'd get a double-slit like scenario where it's as if a partial electron went through either path. We might want to say that surely a whole electron took one path and not the other but we couldn't say which and if we tried to instrument to and find out we'd affect the resistance.

But that's fine because knowing which path the electron took is not part of the problem. Both paths contributed to the resistance even if one was not taken.

We only have to worry about quantum effects if the probabilities are not a decent proxy for the partial-particles that we suspect don't exist. In this case, the Physicist can probably proceed directly to the bar and have a drink with the Mathematician.
by guiambros | 2025-06-15 04:35:11+00:00
Love the documentary, and met some of the folks in real life. Worth watching, if you lived the bbs days, or you're just interested in computer history.

Previous submissions:

Dec 2023 (65 comments) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38746221

Nov 2021 (230 comments) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29140217

May 2015 (23 comments) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9521867
by ghushn3 | 2025-06-15 04:35:47+00:00
> Threatening someone for being a complete asshole is always okay, and even cool.

"Being an asshole" is in the eye of the beholder. Plenty of people thing CEOs are assholes, you are saying that it is "always ok, and even cool" to threaten them? Some people think that religious folks are assholes. Some people think blue haired lefty folks are assholes.

I think you need better criteria for violence than "I think this person is an asshole". Even if you had a standard definition for asshole, threatening violence is an escalation. Someone flips you the bird, sure, they are an asshole, doesn't mean you can move to threatening to punch them.

The driver doesn't know these people, doesn't have any protection against them should they do something unpredictable or make a mess of his car outside of the Uber ride. The driver is also making a threat assessment here -- "why did they have me drive to this place and then insist I drive somewhere else? Is this a scam somehow? Is this a precursor to a violent crime?"