MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by geodel | 2025-06-13 20:31:26+00:00
> At some point "management" and "executive management" started (falsely) being ...

Correct. Not just CEOs I have seen it starting from position of Director and above in technical or related companies.

To hide skill gap of leadership is the cottage industry of metrics and reports where endless summaries of performance (technical, financial ... all varieties), operations, QA, development, customer feedback and myriad others are generated on daily, weekly, monthly basis. And during leadership review sessions teams are asked for 10% improvement for next quarter.

If these reports and feedback were any good, these companies would be operating like Navy seal teams by now.
by madcaptenor | 2025-06-13 20:32:39+00:00
It's definitely on the order of sqrt(N). But it's a bit smaller than sqrt(N) typically:

(1) H is asymptotically normally distributed with mean N/2 and variance N/4 (central limit theorem)

(2) So H - T = H - (N - H) = 2H - N is ~normally distributed with mean 0 and variance N, or st.dev. sigma = sqrt(N)

(3) So |H-T| is "half-normal" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Half-normal_distribution). This has mean sigma * sqrt(2/pi) or approximately 0.8 sqrt(N).

This can be checked with a quick simulation. For example in R I run 1000 simulations with N = 10000 with the one-liner

mean(abs(2*rbinom(1000, 10000, 0.5)-10000))

which returns 79.944.

The mean square of H-T will be approximately N, though (basically we can ignore the absolute value when computing the variance).

In fact, it's exactly N. H is Binomial(N, 1/2) which has variance N/4. H - T = 2H - N has variance N/4 * 2^2 = N, and mean 0, so its mean square is N.
by mike_hearn | 2025-06-13 20:32:51+00:00
Known safe according to who? The panel of people RFK Jr just fired, or the other credentialed experts he replaced them with who say the safety wasn't actually known at all?

People who are given placebos in trials aren't "denied medication". They can always take it after the trial has ended and they're unblinded, if the trial succeeds.

> How does using an inert placebo make a new medication more effective or more safe?

Imagine - bear with me here - imagine that an unsafe vaccine got approved. It uses some technology that's unsafe. We know this happens because vaccines are sometimes pulled from the market for being unsafe after approval.

Now imagine you have a second vaccine in trial, which shares some technology with the first, and it gets tested against the first before it's realized that was unsafe. People suffer or even die but the FDA declares it to be perfectly safe because the control group are suffering at the same rate, and for the same reasons.

Now consider what happens when it's discovered by the population that the government claimed a vaccine was safe but it was actually hurting people, and those who never took it at all were better off. It destroys their trust in the system of course.

That's why you have to use inert placebos. There's nothing unethical about this. It's a standard safety precaution. The alternative, as you are now discovering, is that the entire system is torn down and one day there may be no vaccines at all - banned by constitutional amendment - because the sort of people who are pro-vaccine kept making false claims about safety due to dangerously optimistic testing practices.
by mcswell | 2025-06-13 20:33:01+00:00
One reason I use a plain black background for my iPhone--I can actually read the labels under each icon. (I could use plain text rather than icons, but that's a different gripe.)

Also, I can actually read the battery level indicator in the skeuomorphic display. I sometimes resort to getting out a magnifying glass to read it on my iPhone's current display. (Yes, I have old eyes. And I have to keep telling those Apple UI people to get off my grass.)
by seadan83 | 2025-06-13 20:33:42+00:00
I appreciate the additional insights, but the premise I'm pushing back on is whenever a SSH key is read, then the user account is by necessity compromised in order to do so. Given that level of a breach, there are myriad ways for an attacker to escalate privilege and exploit their access without worrying about a password on the SSH key. Namely, at that point, cracking the password on the SSH key is a tractable problem.

> They may be using directory traversal from something else to read a key without even necessarily being on the system.

At least on linux - to read the directory containing a SSH key requires the ability to also write to that directory, as the user. Therefore you can also write to '.bashrc' and all sorts of other places. I suspect Windows might have a larger attack surface, but nonetheless, a directory traversal that is able to read and write is also able to install a keylogger.

> They may be on a server somewhere where someone left a key they shouldn't have

Private key should never be transmitted over a network boundary. SSH key passwords can be bruteforced as well. Having a password on the SSH key, when the SSH key is somewhere it really should never have been, is closing the barn door after the horses have left.

> The attacker may have gotten enough of a secret to compromise some other secret store where the key is being held.

Again, getting access to the secret is enough to also have write access and be able to install a key logger. A password on the SSH key still does not help.

> They're probably on a system with user-level access only and that may not be enough to "just" install a keylogger

If a person has enough access to read a SSH key, they can also install a key logger for at least that user account. They are equivalent levels of compromise, a user account having its SSH key read is already compromised.

edit: addendum: There are certainly attacks that can only read the contents of a system, with root that can read the full system. It's just odd to think about, since at that rate the SSH keys being on a prod system is already such a big no-no. SSH keys really need to live exactly just on the personal devices of the people who own those keys - EG: it should never be the case that say a SQL injection attack that gains root level read permission over everything on a filesystem can then ever read SSH keys - cause those keys should never be on the remote system to begin with. Putting a password on private keys that are then copied to servers _is_ security theater; the keys ought to never be copied to a remote server to begin with.
by californical | 2025-06-13 20:33:46+00:00
Somebody reached out to me 5 years ago to tell me that a small gesture in high school made a big difference in their life.

We’re both into our 30s now, and I never knew her very well, and hadn’t even seen (or talked to) her since I’d graduated. But I did remember the gesture - and even these 5 years later it still makes me happy to remember her thanking me! Like, it didn’t feel like I was doing anything much at all at the time, and I probably would’ve never even thought about it again.
by writernxtdoor | 2025-06-13 20:34:14+00:00
Thanks for sharing this—really valuable work! At Quranium, a Layer 1 blockchain protocol optimized for post-quantum security, AI integration, and EVM compatibility, we're working on similar challenges and recently rolled out a post-quantum-ready crypto wallet using SLH-DSA and ML-KEM, both NIST-finalized algorithms. We’ve focused heavily on real-world implementation: integrating split-key architecture for transaction signing and encrypted backups across chains like Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Solana.

Would love to hear how you’ve approached performance trade-offs, especially around key sizes and hybrid models. Also curious if you explored any post-quantum options for recovery flows or user-facing backup systems.

Great to see more people tackling this beyond government or financial sectors.
by plasticchris | 2025-06-13 20:34:15+00:00
"The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age."
by wiseowise | 2025-06-13 20:34:28+00:00
> has multiple bits that drop down to lower-level solutions to improve performance

Such as?

> VS Code is very much a special case and not the least bit representative of the typical Electron app.

And Obsidian, and Discord, and Logseq, and Notion, and Figma, and Slack, and Postman, and Insomnia, and so on, and so. Oh wait, so it's not only VS Code?
by btilly | 2025-06-13 20:34:29+00:00
It does not matter what your best understanding of Cantor's diagonalization argument is. In some mathematical systems it means, "there are more reals than natural numbers", and in others it means, "the reals encode self-reference in a more direct way than the natural numbers do".

The result is that it is possible for the acceptance of the argument to lead to very different consequences about what we then conclude.
by travisvn | 2025-06-13 20:34:34+00:00
An M4 Max with 128GB RAM? drools

What did your `it/s` end up looking like with that setup? MLX is fascinating to me. Apple made a really smart decision with the induction of its M-series.

With regard to the artifacts — this is definitely a known issue with Chatterbox. I'm unsure of where the current investigation on fixing it is at (or what the "tricks" are to avoid this), but it's definitely something that is eery among other things.

I appreciate your feedback through all of this!

Would love to have you on the Discord to keep in touch https://chatterboxtts.com/discord
by layer8 | 2025-06-13 20:34:44+00:00
To quote an old adage, the map isn’t the territory. That we can’t fully write it down (which we can’t even for countable infinities, or even something like 10^10^10 symbols) doesn’t mean that it doesn’t exist. All of the territory still exists, even if any map that we can draw will only capture certain aspects of it.

Regarding “ideas”, to me math is primarily exploration and discovery, rather than invention. That’s one way how it corresponds to the territory analogy.
by WorldMaker | 2025-06-13 20:35:17+00:00
Much (but not all) of what you are looking for exists in the reStructuredText [1] space. Sphinx [2] is an SSG focused on technical writing about software that you may find worth exploring.

Also, the scientific text community has been pushing MyST [3] which is an attempt to take some of the best ideas of reStructuredText and reapply them to Markdown-style syntax as a baseline. The MyST tools are a lot more recent and don't have the maturity just yet of Sphinx (including the larger ecosystem such as SaaS hosts like readthedocs).

[1] https://docutils.sourceforge.io/rst.html

[2] https://www.sphinx-doc.org/en/master/index.html

[3] https://mystmd.org/
by zozbot234 | 2025-06-13 20:36:29+00:00
> Look, I think that it is interesting to work with constructive axioms, but I don't think that humans philosophically reject non-constructive results.

I don't think the point of constructivism is to "philosophically reject non-constructive results". You can accept non-constructive results just fine as a constructivist, so long as they're consistently rephrased as negative statements, i.e. logical statements starting with "NOT ...". This is handy in some ways (you now know instantly what statements correspond to "direct" proofs that can be given a computational semantics and even be reused for all sorts of computer sciencey stuff) and not so handy in others (to some extent, it comes with a kind of denial about the inherently "dual" nature of the fragment of your constructive logic that contains all that negatively-phrased stuff). But these are matters of aesthetics and perceived elegance, more than philosophy.

The duality concern is one that some will want to address by moving even further to linear logics (since these are "dual" like classical logic but also allow for constructive statements) but of course that's yet another can of worms in its own right.
by pron | 2025-06-13 20:37:04+00:00
I can't locate my Heijenoort right now, but here's a description from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy [1] (which points to Heijenoort):

The analogy with physics is striking... In the second half of the 1920s, Hilbert replaced the consistency program with a conservativity program: Formalized mathematics was to be considered by analogy with theoretical physics. The ultimate justification for the theoretical part lies in its conservativity over “real” mathematics: whenever theoretical, “ideal” mathematics proves a “real” proposition, that proposition is also intuitively true. This justifies the use of transfinite mathematics: it is not only internally consistent, but it proves only true intuitive propositions (and indeed all, since a formalization of intuitive mathematics is part of the formalization of all mathematics).

In 1926, Hilbert introduced a distinction between real and ideal formulas. This distinction was not present in 1922b and only hinted at in 1923. In the latter, Hilbert presents first a formal system of quantifier-free number theory about which he says that “The provable formulae we acquire in this way all have the character of the finite”

In other words, Hilbert does not require assigning any sense of truth beyond the symbolic one to those mathematical statements that do not correspond to physical reality, but those statements that can correspond to physical reality (i.e. the "real formulas") must do so, and those "real formulas" are meaningfully true beyond the symbols.

The earlier formalism (mathematics is just symbols) could no longer be justified after Gödel, as consistency was its main justification.

If anything, I think it's constructivism that suffers from a philosophical issue in requiring meaning that isn't physically realisable -- unlike ultrafinitism, for example. Personally, I find both Hilbert's formalism and ultrafinitism more philosophically satisfying than constructivism, as they're both rooted in physical reality, whereas constructivism is based on "computation in principle" (but not in practice!).

> As for what most people think about the philosophical implications, nobody should be expected to have any meaningful philosophical opinions about topics that they have not yet tried to think about

I mean people who have thought about it.

[1]: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/hilbert-program/
by karaterobot | 2025-06-13 20:37:09+00:00
When I was young, one of the things my mentor taught me is that the older people get, the more they think about their legacy. They want to believe they made a lasting difference. So, one of the best gifts you can give them is to say "you made a difference, what you taught me stays with me all the time, and you would never believe me if I told you how many people besides me have benefited from it."
by pvillano | 2025-06-13 20:38:07+00:00
I have a dream for a compiled reactive DSL for video game programming that makes replay and rollback netcode automagically, eliminates bugs in state management, and naturally expresses derived state and the simulation step/transition function, while still being performant enough for real time

The performance hit from all that indirection of registering, getters, setters, discover, traversal, and lambdas could be avoided if we could compile the dag into smartly nested ifs
by mcswell | 2025-06-13 20:38:21+00:00
I don't care about "gorgeous", and I don't know what "delightful" means. But I do know what "useable" means, and that's what I want. And translucent does not enhance useability, on the contrary.

If and when this comes, I'll be changing the setting to maximal opacity, just like I did with Windows Vista.
by cogman10 | 2025-06-13 20:38:36+00:00
> Electric heating elements aren't free nor infinite in capacity.

They are about as close to an ideal load as one could imagine.

And capacity is easily expanded with a water tower. You can scale the total thermal energy stored and the efficiency of that storage by simply building a very large water tower. You don't even need special insulation because the water insulates itself.

> You'd pay a lot of money for a rarely used asset

Assuming you've converted over to district heating and cooling, it'd be frequently used as climate control for surrounding buildings.

> that has to be replaced by something else most of the time

What? No. District heating is the most efficient way to provide climate control, bar none. The only thing that needs to happen is setting minimum and maximum temps. Maintain the minimum temp and when negative power price events hit heat to the maximum or cool to the minimum.

And if you want to get super clever, part of your storage can be sand which can store huge amounts of energy.

> because people want their heating to be reliable.

District heating/cooling is as reliable as plumbing. That's because that's effectively all that it is. It's super reliable. If the incoming water is 60C or 90C, it doesn't make too much of a difference in terms of heating a home.

It's a proven tech. Many universities use it because it significantly reduces the heating and cooling cost for their buildings. My own city uses district heating in the downtown to great effect.
by kulahan | 2025-06-13 20:38:39+00:00
Oh, you’re acting like a toddler in a schoolyard now. Okay, you’re very clever and I’m not - you’re so big brain and I’m dumb.

> A president that pardoned murderers from January 6th? A president that said there were good people in a group of neonazi rioters? A president that

Yes? Why do you think this is a gotcha? I already said they were games with serious consequences. Are you ok dude?

This really feels like one of those

”””conversations””” where the other person is in fact arguing against someone else, and I’m just a proxy for whatever you’re actually mad about.
by phatskat | 2025-06-13 20:38:54+00:00
I get the same experience on iOS using the OS web view - my guess is because iOS (and maybe android?) don’t typically play videos in “windowed mode” (for lack of a better term) outside of eg Google video snippets which seem to do some hacky stuff to keep you “in Google” while watching.

Regardless of the fullscreen aspect, and understanding you wanted something jiff-like, I also don’t care much for auto playing video. It doesn’t matter too much if it’s small (as this is intended), silent (as terminals typically are), and doesn’t hoist control of my browser.

Edit: forgot to say that this looks really cool, great work!

Editedit: also forgot to mention that the thumbnails are super blurry on my phone, and after the one video took control of the screen, all the other thumbnails went black.
by nnitiwe | 2025-06-13 20:38:59+00:00
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by scarface_74 | 2025-06-13 20:39:35+00:00
People really overestimate how much people care about indy developers or how little the 15-30% commission actually makes.

Most of the popular non game apps don’t make money directly by consumers paying for them and it came out in the Epic trial that somewhere around 90% of App Store revenue comes from in app purchases from pay to win games and loot boxes.

If the money is there, companies will jump through any hoops to make software that works for the platform.
by duskwuff | 2025-06-13 20:39:46+00:00
And its inverse, the IEA solar energy forecast: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Reality_versus_IEA_predic...

(This version of the graph is pretty old, but it's enough to get the flavor. The rate of new installations is still increasing exponentially, and the IEA continues to predict that it'll level off any day now...)
Show HN: Equity Copilot – AI-powered equity grant assistant for tech employees
by haichuan | 2025-06-13 20:39:54+00:00
In big tech, equity compensation often comes in a mix of cash, stock, and options. Most of us just accept what’s offered, without really understanding the tradeoffs—or worse, we guess.

Equity Copilot (https://equitycopilot.app/) is a tool we built to fix that. It’s an AI-based decision engine that helps new hires and employees figure out how to allocate their equity grants. You input your offer (or refresh grant), and it explains — in plain terms and visual graphs — how to think about cash vs. stock vs. options, based on your personal risk tolerance and goals.

It’s not a robo-advisor, and it’s not a calculator. It’s a guide. You stay in control, but with more clarity.

There’s no login, no tracking, and no upsell. Just an honest attempt to demystify a complex decision for people who don’t have time to become equity experts.

We’d love your feedback.
by basfo | 2025-06-13 20:39:57+00:00
worked at HP at the time. It was one of the most important companies in the world—comparable to what Microsoft or Google are today. A true tech and market leader.

First, HP bought Compaq to gain full ownership of the home computer market. That merger didn’t work out very well. Later, HP acquired Ross Perot’s EDS, attempting to enter the services business. The integration was, at best, chaotic and took several years.

It was a time of turmoil—every other morning you’d receive an email from Mark Hurd announcing layoffs affecting a percentage of employees.

Hurd’s focus was on increasing the company’s share value. He aggressively cut staff and reduced R&D investment (one of HP’s strongest traditions), essentially putting HP on life support. For example, HP-UX, which was relevant in the server market at the time, was completely abandoned.

When Mark Hurd was fired—accused of using company funds to give gifts to occasional partners (you know what I mean)—he immediately joined Oracle as an advisor, one of HP’s strongest competitors in the enterprise market at the time. Employees saw him as a traitor to the HP brand. Internally, many people hoped things would finally change.

What came next was completely unexpected. Leo Apotheker, from SAP, took over. He had this idea of transforming HP into a software and services company, essentially abandoning decades of tradition and letting one of the strongest brands in the industry fade away. He lasted only a few months—it clearly wasn’t working.

Then Meg Whitman came in. There was some initial hype around a hardware project called “The Machine,” which was supposed to revolutionize the data center by relying on memory instead of CPU power. That was never released. AWS had already emerged, and HP had no way to compete.

Whitman decided to split the company in two: HP (consumer hardware) and HP Enterprise Services (enterprise hardware and services). HP-ES eventually migrated most of its operations to India. Around that time, I accepted a WFR (Workforce Reduction) plan—since it was clear I’d be laid off sooner or later. Later, HP-ES was split again and became DXC Technology for services.

It’s incredible how a company that was once one of the strongest brands in the world—a tech giant and market leader for decades—went to hell in just three or four years. Bad management, a focus on short-term share price, and a complete lack of vision can bring even the most powerful company to its knees.

At the time, many said HP was simply too big for its own good, that it was impossible to succeed in so many markets. I don’t think that’s true. Amazon, Microsoft, Google—they all do what HP did in the 90s and 2000s, and more. It was just bad management. As always.