MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by LiKao | 2025-06-02 08:40:58+00:00
I still think that the distinction is very important. With standard math (e.g. real numbers) we obviously have 0.9999... = 1 and this is actually very easy to prove using the assumptions that you are taught during high school math.

However, in higher math you are taught that all this is just based on certain assumptions and it is even possible to let go of these assumptions and replace them with different assumptions.

I think it is important to be clear about the assumptions one is making, and it is also important to have a common set of standard assumptions. Like high school math, which has its standard assumptions. But it is just as possible to make different assumptions and still be correct.

This kind of thinking has very important applications. We are all taught the angle sum in a triangle is 180 degrees. But again this is assuming (default assumption) euclidean geometry. And while this is sensible, because it makes things easy in day to day life, we find that euclidean geometry almost never applies in real life, it is just a good approximation. The surface of the earth, which requires a lot of geometry only follows this assumption approximately, and even space doesn't (theory of relativity). If we would have never challenged this assumption, then we would have never gotten to the point where we could have GPS.

It is easy to assume that someone is wrong, because they got a different result. But it is much harder to put yourself into someones shoes and figure out if their result is really wrong (i.e. it may contradict their own assumption or be non-sequitur) or if they are just using different assumptions. And to figure out what these assumptions are and what they entail.

For this assumption: Yes, you can construct systems where 0.9999... != 1, but then you also must use 1/3 != 0.33333... or you will end up contradicting yourself. In fact when you assume 1 = 0.999999... + eps, then you must likely also use 1/3 = 0.33333 - eps/3 to avoid contradicting yourself (I haven't proven the resulting axiom system is free of contradiction, this is left as an excercise to the reader).
by Flemlo | 2025-06-02 08:41:11+00:00
The AI hype also made voice to text and text to voice a lot better.

It's not just chat. But I really enjoy the Claude or chatgpt chat UI.

I'm not sure what your problem with that UI is tbh?

I don't think there will be any crash soon. I'm hoping for lower prices but I can't imagine not having these tools available anymore.

I'm also waiting for better and cheaper support for local development and inferencing.

I'm waiting left and right for a lot of smaller things. Like cheaper Claude, Hardware LLM chips, secure integration of my bank account and other personal data. More capacity for the beta projects of coding agents.
by zmgsabst | 2025-06-02 08:41:35+00:00
Your last point is what I was trying to get at — eg, reasoning just about your math expressions.

https://herbie.uwplse.org/

I think that FM (beyond basic typing) is best used sparingly to address particularly sensitive cases — eg, floating point stability in modeling.

But our discussion usually doesn’t include incremental or partial usage, unfortunately.
by paganel | 2025-06-02 08:41:36+00:00
> It was the same in Russia, until West pulled the plug

The thing is that the EU is not a political monolith, just look at Poland which has just elected a pro-US and anti-EU president. The anti-US policy comes mostly from France, part of Germany (I'm pretty sure a big chunk of the CDU still sides with the Americans out of the public eye) and from the Nordics, maybe the Dutch, too, but I don't follow them all that closely. Also, Italy has got Meloni who's a lot more buddy-buddy with Trump than with any bureaucrat in Brussels.

People here in Eastern- and Central-Europe are fully aware that if push were to come to the proverbial stove and a hot-war against Russia were to start then none of the Western-Euros would do anything consequential to make it go our (Eastern Europeans' way), just look at Poland in '39, for the simple reason that said Western-Europeans don't have the means of doing that anymore and will probably never be able to do it ever again. So the Americans are the only reliable counter-weight against Russia.
by rob_c | 2025-06-02 08:41:48+00:00
You never evaluate symbols until your giving a numerical equivalent.

Sure if a question asks for the escape velocity from Jupiter this has an approximate numerical value, but you don't just start by throwing numbers at a wall, you get the simplest equation which represents the value you're interested in an then evaluate it once you have a single equation for that parameter.

Yes sqrt(2)*pi has a numerical approximation but you don't want that right at the start of taking about something like spin orbitals or momenta of spinning disks. Doing the latter compounds errors.

It's no different to keeping around "i"/"j" until you need to express a phase or angle as it's cleaner and avoids compounding accuracy errors.
by dominicrose | 2025-06-02 08:42:08+00:00
Smalltalk UIs used to work with only one CPU thread. Any action from the user would freeze the whole UI while it was working, but the positive aspect of that is that it was very predictable and bug free. That's helpful since Smalltalk is OOP.

Since React is functional programming it works well with parallelization so there is room for experiments.

> Especially if it involves content jumping around.

I remember this from the beginning of Android, you'll search for something and click on it and the time it takes you to click the list of results changed and you clicked on something else. Happens with adds on some websites, maybe intentionally?

> And the most annoying antipattern is showing empty state UI during loading phase.

Some low quality software even show "There are no results for your search" when the search didn't even start or complete.
by qayxc | 2025-06-02 08:42:24+00:00
So I take it you never wrote any numerical simulations or did symbolic calculations then?

Catastrophic cancellation and other failures are serious issues to consider when doing numerical analysis and can often be avoided completely by using symbolic calculation instead. You can easily end up with wrong results, especially when composing calculations. This would make it difficult to, for example, match your theoretical model against actual measurement results; particularly if the model includes expressions that don't have closed-form solutions.
by AndrewDavis | 2025-06-02 08:43:01+00:00
They definitely aren't unique even without reboots. Postfix uses the inode number as a queue id. At $dayjob we've seen reuse surprisingly quickly, even within a few hours. Which is a little annoying when we're log spelunking and we get two sets of results because of the repeating id!

(there is now a long queue id option which adds a time component)
by keiferski | 2025-06-02 08:43:26+00:00
When you go see an Anderson film, you have a pretty solid idea of what you’re going to get. The mood, character development, cinematography, quirkiness, and pretty much everything else is largely the same across his films. I think this is obvious (?) to most people. Yes, there are individual differences between films, but I don’t think my opinion is an uncommon one.

There are more genres than action and superhero. A whole world of cinema, in fact. So it would be great if Anderson took his formidable skills and tried something new. A selfish request from a viewer, sure, but I just never feel like he’s trying to improve as a filmmaker and is merely doing what is comfortable to him.
by dagw | 2025-06-02 08:43:53+00:00
When you have those sorts of problems the best way is to approach them using inequalities.

3.1415<pi<3.1416 and 1.4142<sqrt(2)<1.4143, => 4.5557<pi + sqrt(2)<4.5559 => 4.553 < 4.5557 < pi + sqrt(2) => 4.553 < pi + sqrt(2)
by dahcryn | 2025-06-02 08:44:02+00:00
sending files over email is just extremely common, staying lower than 15mb is almost a requirement to facilitate easy communication in many businesses

Also, I tend to have OneDrive sync my active projects, including the steerco and update slidedecks, to my iPad, to read on my iPad when travelling or commuting. Small decks are so much more pleasant to deal with, and can easily sync over a mobile connection
by FirmwareBurner | 2025-06-02 08:44:47+00:00
>just look at Poland which has just elected a pro-US and anti-EU president

Same with Romania, and why wouldn't they be? The US ensures our defense from Russia, not France, not Germany, not the EU. Their nuclear shield, troops, land and air bases in our country ensured our defense even before we joined the EU so of course we'd grateful for that. The US companies opening well paid tech jobs here is another icing on the cake making us wealthier and also giving the US some assets they might want to defend.

We're too small and poor to have armies that can compete with Russia and we saw how weak and toothless the western European powers are when push comes to shove, ever since they threw us under the Soviet bus in WW2. Polish people know what I'm talking about.

What help would western EU countries be to us in an actual war when in the not too distant past, under Ursula v.d. Leyen, German military couldn't even provide underwear and dog tags to their own conscripts? And besides the sorry state of their military, Germans aren't patriotic enough to stand up for their own people, how can we expect them to care about some Slavs and Eastern Europeans, when they could gladly just cut a deal with Russia for cheap gas to throw us under the bus again?

So of course we're gonna support the US.
by rvnx | 2025-06-02 08:45:41+00:00
It would feel like a regression to not have access to such tools, models like Claude are really useful on a day-to-day basis (not only for programming, but for any question you have in life where you would typically use Google and read yourself a lot of information).

We don't need AGI to have increased productivity and benefits.

If it would be _that_ useless, half a billion people wouldn't use such tools every week (and this is not even counting Chinese users).

I think many hate LLMs because they realize that it starts to eat their bread and butter and are already taking their job and find it difficult to accept.

Investors are over-paying, because they are betting on companies that can be outpaced by others, but the technology itself is here to stay and grow, until it can do more and more tasks that are done by humans.

It doesn't mean that LLMs and other AI tools are going to run completely alone anytime soon (maybe with cars first ?), but eventually it could be.

What will be the world in 10 or 20 years from now ?
by frereubu | 2025-06-02 08:45:49+00:00
This reminds me of the Segal Method of housebuilding: https://www.designingbuildings.co.uk/wiki/Segal_Method

Two of the core ideas are that the majority of the work can be undertaken by a single person with basic carpentry skills, using readily-available materials in standard sizes so there is minimal cutting and waste.
by rob_c | 2025-06-02 08:46:08+00:00
Less approximations and more representations of complex things at times. (Just my opinion)

I prefer comparing it to complex numbers where I can't have "i" apples but I can calculate the phase difference between 2 power supplies in a circuit using such notation.

Nobody really cares about the 3rd decimal place when taking about a speeding car at a turn but they do when talking about electrons in an accelerator, so accuracy and precision always feel mucky to talk about when dealing with irrationals (again my opinion).
by patapong | 2025-06-02 08:46:33+00:00
Neat! I am jealous of people who make physical stuff with their hands, seems so satisfying. I grow some plants, which brings a feeling of joy compared to buying from the store, even though the latter is much easier.

If anyone is interested in chairmaking, I can recommend the book "The Use of Weapons", by Iain M. Banks. (/s)
by skissane | 2025-06-02 08:47:06+00:00
> But if you require your parens to be balanced, that's no longer a regular language

From a certain pedantic perspective, it still is a regular language, since there is a finite (implementation dependent) upper bound on nesting depth, and balanced parens with a finite upper bound of nesting is regular.

OTOH, one can appeal to the linguistic distinction between competence and performance, and say that regexes are irregular in pure competence, even though all (practically usable) languages turn out to be regular once we constrain them by performance as well.
by kypro | 2025-06-02 08:47:14+00:00
I'm not a mathematician, but this is always the way I've looked at it too.

We can't represent values like 1/3 precisely in the decimal number system, the best we can do is represent in a way that it's clear what's implied with minimal error.

The representation isn't really suppose to be interpreted as an infinite decimal series, and depending on how you interpret 3.333... you could argue it's a slightly different value. And that's plainly obvious – 3.333... != 1/3
by TomK32 | 2025-06-02 08:47:38+00:00
I'd doubt it. Gabon still has plenty of oil but that money goes into a few pockets only, the economy not diverse at all. If they want to get into drugs, why not all in and produce Captagon like Assad's regime in Syria? What the country needs is the Bongo family to withdraw, with empty pockets and for corruption to end. The 2023 coup was one family member against another and the last election the winner (from the dynasty of course) won 95% of the votes... Kim Jong Un is feeling envious!
by dgb23 | 2025-06-02 08:47:46+00:00
> For a good 12 hours, over the course of 1 1/2 days, I tried to prompt it such that it yields what we needed. Eventually, I noticed that my prompts converged more and more to be almost the code I wanted. After still not getting a working result, I ended up implementing it myself in less than 30 minutes.

This is very common. We need a name for this phenomenon. Any analogies/metaphors?

I generated (huh!) some suggestions and the funniest one seems to be:

> Just One More Prompt Syndrome (JOMPS)

But I assume there's a better one that describes or hints at the irony that describing precisely what a program should be doing _is_ programming.
by amarcheschi | 2025-06-02 08:47:56+00:00
>People here in Eastern- and Central-Europe are fully aware that if push were to come to the proverbial stove and a hot-war against Russia were to start then none of the Western-Euros would do anything consequential to make it go our (Eastern Europeans' way), just look at Poland in '39, for the simple reason that said Western-Europeans don't have the means of doing that anymore and will probably never be able to do it ever again. So the Americans are the only reliable counter-weight against Russia.

What? Do you seriously believe that europe would not intervene in a hot war against Europe?

For the part of USA being counter weight to Russia, they're single handedly alienating themselves from Europe
by ryan_glass | 2025-06-02 08:48:45+00:00
To be honest I haven't used o3 or Sonnet as the code I work with is my own proprietary code which I like to keep private, which is one reason for the local setup. For troubleshooting day to day things I have found it at least as good as than the free in-browser version of ChatGPT (not sure which model it uses).
by LiKao | 2025-06-02 08:49:10+00:00
But you are assuming 0.3... is the representation of 1/3. We don't have to make this assumption, it's just the one we are usually taught. Math doesn't really break from making different assumptions, quite the opposite.

Let's make some different assumptions, not following high school math: When I divide 1 by 3, I always get a remainder. So it would just be as equally valid to introduce a mathematical object representing this remainder after I performed the infinite number of divisions. Then

1/3 = 0.3... + eps / 3

2/3 = 0.6... + 2eps / 3

3/3 = 0.9... + 3eps / 3

and since 0.9... = 1 - eps, we get 3/3 = 0.9... + eps = 1

It's all still sound (I haven't proven this, but so far I don't see any contradiction in my assumptions). And it comes out where 0.9... is not equal to 1. Just because I added a mathematical object that forces this to come out.

Edit: Yes, I am breaking a lot of other stuff (e.g. standard calculus) by introducing this new eps object. But that is not an indicator that this is "wrong", just different from high school math.
by theodric | 2025-06-02 08:49:30+00:00
I know a lot about this! I've been on Twitter for 18 years, post frequently, and have about 5-10 people who read my posts based on the metrics. (Significantly more followers, but they're all fake/bots/dormant). You're either posting for the love of posting/keeping a journal/getting ideas out of your head, or you're posting like it's going to the gym because you want to be an influencer. Having a searchable 18-year database of my thoughts has been helpful to me on many occasions. I also used the dataset to fine-tune an LLM to shitpost like me. Recreational narcissism!
by econ | 2025-06-02 08:49:34+00:00
I had a good few feeds that had errors that prevented them from parsing. I examine the flaws and parse them anyway. Then one day I discover a website had dropped rss support long ago but I had it in my aggregator?? I open the feed url I was using and it just redirected to the index.html took a minute to realize what was going on. If it couldn't find <item> or anything like it it would look for anything similar, if it couldn't find <link> or <guide> it would search for <a>, if it couldn't find a <title> it would take the text from the <a> or use the url and lastly if it couldn't find or parse <pubdate> it would look inf the item url had something like /2025/ in it, prerably /months/ and /day/ with it.

So that was what was going on. It could find links on the frontpage and it could parse titles and dates from those.

You apparently don't need feeds. No AI required.
by TheEdonian | 2025-06-02 08:50:35+00:00
I've read so many posts that say: Just write because you like to write, do it cause it's fun.

To me that's only part of the truth. I write because I like it sure, but it's also very unmotivating to just "scream in the void". I want to share idea because I want to hear other opinions on my ideas. I want conversations, not monologues.
by rvnx | 2025-06-02 08:50:57+00:00
Could be that some people are not familiar with the limitations of LLMs and what to expect from them, and could benefit from learning how to properly do prompting, before outright rejecting them.

The LLMs are sometimes frustrating, but over time you learn how to drive them properly, exactly like when you learn how to use the right keywords on Google.

Also, considering he is a free user, the author might be using one the default models ("auto" -> o4-mini or gpt-4o, rarely Claude Sonnet/Opus 3) in Cursor

-> Both of them are rather weak, especially with the automatic context splitting that Cursor does to save money

Claude Code + Opus 4 would likely yield better results here.
by the_mitsuhiko | 2025-06-02 08:51:06+00:00
The OpenBSD UFS documentation says this:

> The root inode is the root of the file system. Inode 0 can't be used for normal purposes and historically bad blocks were linked to inode 1 (inode 1 is no longer used for this purpose; however, numerous dump tapes make this assumption, so we are stuck with it). Thus the root inode is 2.

This is also echoed on the wikipedia page for it.

The linux Kernel also has this comment for why it does not dish out that inode for shmem for instance:

> Userspace may rely on the the inode number being non-zero. For example, glibc simply ignores files with zero i_ino in unlink() and other places.

On macOS it's pretty clear that inode 0 is reserved:

> Users of getdirentries() should skip entries with d_fileno = 0, as such entries represent files which have been deleted but not yet removed from the directory entry
by flohofwoe | 2025-06-02 08:51:26+00:00
An example I run into almost each day: run a non-trivial build in Visual Studio which consumes all available CPU cores. Now try to use the trackpad to scroll some random window content, it just doesn't work, at best you get a UI view that jumps around instead of smooth scrolling.

AFAIK Windows is supposed to boost the CPU priority of the UI during user input, but apparently that doesn't work.

AmigaOS also boosted the CPU priority of the UI during mouse movement, except it actually worked.

PS: and instead of fixing the issue from the ground up in the OS (which admittedly is probably impossible) the VS team instead added a feature called 'Low Priority Builds':

[1] https://developercommunity.visualstudio.com/t/Limit-CPU-usag...)

[2] https://devblogs.microsoft.com/cppblog/msbuild-low-priority-...
by jezek2 | 2025-06-02 08:52:25+00:00
Yeah, whenever I read about someone having problems with microSD cards it turns out they use a sketchy power adapter.

I use exclusively the official RPi adapter with SanDisk cards (the standard ones, not any fancy variants) and had exactly zero problems.

I've been running them many years (8 highest) on multiple RPis, no special settings to make the system read only or anything. Numerous power cut offs (esp. when that's the only way how to power off or restart on the older Pis). Zero issues. I even had one RPi 3B+ failing (random lockups after some time), yet the microSD card from it was fine.
by codelion | 2025-06-02 08:52:53+00:00
We have some examples in the plugin README: https://github.com/codelion/optillm/tree/main/optillm/plugin...

E.g. This was the strategy discovered by optiLLM for solving word problems:

*Refined Strategy for Solving Word Problems:*

1. *Understand:*\n * Read the problem carefully (multiple times).\n * Identify the question (what are you trying to find?).\n * List all given information (facts, numbers, units).\n * Clarify ambiguous terms/units.

2. *Organize Information & Identify Unknowns:*\n * Choose an organization method: (e.g., table, diagram, list, drawing).\n * Clearly identify the unknowns (what you need to solve for).

3. *Plan and Translate:*\n * Define all variables with units (e.g., `p = number of pennies`, `c = number of compartments`).\n * Identify relationships between knowns and unknowns.\n * Convert units if necessary.\n * Write equations or expressions, including units, that relate the knowns and unknowns.\n * Ensure units are consistent throughout the equations.\n * Outline the solution steps.

4. *Solve:*\n * Show work step-by-step.\n * Track units throughout calculations.\n * Calculate accurately.\n * Solve for the unknowns.\

5. *Evaluate and Verify:*\n * Check if the answer is reasonable.\n * Verify the answer.

6. *Summarize:*\n * State the answer with units

Full list of strategies discovered is available here -https://github.com/codelion/optillm/blob/main/optillm/plugin...
by tsimionescu | 2025-06-02 08:53:22+00:00
I'm saying that, in the hyperreals as well as the reals, I am 100% certain that 3 × 0.33... = 1. I am not as sure that 0.999 = 1 with the hyperreals, BUT, if it's true as the author claims that 0.99... ≠ 1 in the hyperreals, then it must follow that 3 × 0.33... ≠ 0.99... in the hyperreals.
by pjc50 | 2025-06-02 08:53:27+00:00
Someone did a crude estimation dividing the value of OpenAI by the number of books plagiarized into it, and came up with an estimate of the order of $500k per book.

Of course, none of that vast concentration of investor money will go to the authors.

If the government was doing this, people would be screaming about the biggest nationalisation of intellectual property since the rise of Mao.
by Etheryte | 2025-06-02 08:55:57+00:00
You can joke about it, but there is absolutely a lot of value in the fact that you can just fire up a debugger against Electron or React or your devtools or Node itself. The "just" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here of course, but I've done all of the aforementioned at different points of my career, to reasonably good success. I don't think everything should be written in Javascript, but at times it's been very convenient that that's what's under the hood.