MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by michalpleban | 2025-06-15 08:56:00+00:00
An addendum: the way you would program the CIA registers to pull the NMI low would most likely be to set up one of its timers on a very short count period (IIRC four system clock cycles is the lowest the chip can do) and make it generate the underflow interrupt. The chip holds the interrupt line low until you acknowledge the interrupt by reading the interrupt source register. If you never get to read it, the interrupt line stays low forever.
by saghm | 2025-06-15 08:56:56+00:00
To me, the first paragraph you quoted seems to be describing the modules themselves in the abstract, whereas the latter is about the university testing environment. There are plenty of things that I could do given ample time and the ability to look things up but would struggle to answer detailed questions about in a timed context without any notes or access to the internet. l think it's a fairly well-established concept that actively restating something you already know helps with recall later, like how the act of writing notes is considered to be useful even independent of studying them later. In the outside world, if you already know these concepts, you'll be able to refresh yourself about them easily enough whenever you end up needing to use them, but when you're getting tested in school, you need to do the refresher beforehand, and going through the exercises as they're intended is a pretty reasonable way to do that.
by t43562 | 2025-06-15 08:59:09+00:00
So far in my career, such as it is, I have been on lots of rewrite projects and not one of them was a good idea.

There were one or two outright failures (new code abandoned) but the more subtle ones were just efforts that took so long to deliver value that the whole market opportunity was lost.

In every single case it was possible to take the existing system and gradually morph it towards something better - but the desire for revolution prevented evolution and forced everyone to live with shit in the hope of a future that didn't arrive.
by oblio | 2025-06-15 09:00:06+00:00
I didn't say it was easy. And I'm not talking about individual action. Governments should incentivize and force different things. Conceptually simple example: construction projects should require sustainability and aesthetics reviews, including, for example, use of better materials and green and walkable spaces. For example I find the butt ugly and cheap American solutions for sidewalks (I think continuously poured concrete cut into slabs with circular saws) much worse than the European ones (paving stones, often natural stone). The US is the richer country and it frequently looks cheaper and poorer.

Beauty matters.
by ohxh | 2025-06-15 09:00:10+00:00
> Here, I don't think it's even useful to look at this problem in electronic terms

I always thought this problem was a funny choice for the comic, because it’s not that esoteric! It’s equivalent to asking about a 2d simple random walk on a lattice, which is fairly common. And in general the electrical network <-> random walk correspondence is a useful perspective too
by palmfacehn | 2025-06-15 09:02:28+00:00
...And from the other side of doomsaying, we're being bombarded with reports that NGOs, the CIA, the CCP and/or supranational orgs are funneling money into an ongoing protest movement.

Everyone seems to have an interest in presenting things in the most alarmist terms. Even if either side's claims were sober reporting sans spin, I would personally appreciate less alarmism. People are already on edge. Partisans everywhere are at each other's throats.

We need more compassion and less insinuation of malice.
by moralestapia | 2025-06-15 09:02:48+00:00
It's not, the guy is just making stuff up.

A lot of what's behind that "selection" there is still unknown; in principle all sperm are, more or less, the same.

There's also so many external effects in play that no single sperm cell may actually have a significant advantage over others; e.g. the behavior of the seminal fluid (ph, viscosity), the physical location of the egg, etc.

The cartoonish image of sperm swimming towards the egg is pretty much that ... a cartoon. In reality, they're pretty much drifting and their movement is much more like brownian motion than anything else [1].

Reminds me of this sperm race thing that took the spotlight a month ago, after watching the videos [2] ... come on, man.

Only someone who is extremely ignorant and/or is lacking severely on their mental abilities (bordering on idiocy), would believe that thing was true.

1: When the sperm is really close to the egg, however, there seems to be a hormone gradient that guides the sperm, preferentially, towards it.

2: https://x.com/beyoncegarden/status/1916278740214047182
by zelphirkalt | 2025-06-15 09:05:10+00:00
As far as I know we have made very little progress on identifying which weights to what degree in an ANN are responsible for what output and as such we cannot discard information, that a user would mark as wrong or inaccurate or undesirable. The human mind however, can do this easily. We remember (though not perfectly) that something is wrong, classified as not useful, irrelevant, and we don't do that any longer and over time might even forget about that now less traveled path. An ANN has no obvious mechanism for that at least.
by andig | 2025-06-15 09:08:33+00:00
Author here. With https://evcc.io I have (with tremendous help) developed a home energy management system, originally for solar-optimised EV charging (big in Germany/Europe with users in the US or even Australia). Turning into a general HEMS proves hard. While all our current algorithms are strictly predictable, we're lacking global, multi-goal, non-linear optimisation. Maybe SAT solvers, maybe non-linear programming, maybe stochastic or ML/AI can be part of the solution. We have lots of data but no algorithm or technical approach and I'm unsure where to go next.
by unparagoned | 2025-06-15 09:09:46+00:00
I think people are overpromorphazing humans. What's does it mean for a human to "know" they are seeing "Halle Berry". Well it's just a single neuron being active.

"Single-Cell Recognition: A Halle Berry Brain Cell" https://www.caltech.edu/about/news/single-cell-recognition-h...

It seems like people are giving attributes and powers to humans that just don't exist.
by root_axis | 2025-06-15 09:11:22+00:00
> The claim is that phenomenal consciousness is fundamentally functional, making the existence of philosophical zombies (entities that behave like conscious beings but lack subjective experience) impossible.

This doesn't really address the hard problem, it just asserts that the hard problem doesn't exist. The meat of the problem is that subjective experience exists at all, even though in principle there's no clear reason why it should need to.

Simply declaring it as functional is begging the question.

For example, we can imagine a hypothetical robot that could remove its hand from a stove if it's sensors determine that the surface is too hot. We don't need subjective experience to explain how a system like that could be designed, so why do we need it for an organism?
by eisa01 | 2025-06-15 09:13:15+00:00
I had a driver commit GPS spoofing on me: I was standing outside and there were no car to be seen anywhere even though the app showed the driver was there and had been "driving" to it

I tried to report a security incident to Uber, but not sure what happened. It would likely be easier to complain today, as now all taxis (which Uber technically is in Norway) need to be part of a Taxi dispatch central
Is there interest in an informal proof that Graph Vertex 3-Colouring is NPC?
by ColinWright | 2025-06-15 09:14:25+00:00
A short time ago, in the discussion about Integer Linear Programming, I made a comment[0] about the relative hardness of Graph Vertex 3-Colouring (G3C), Satisfiability (SAT), and Integer Factoring (FAC). That got a few upvotes, but almost certainly just because it made clear and explicit the connections, and gathered together the ideas scattered through other replies.

But ... would anyone be interested in seeing a relatively complete proof that G3C is NPC?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44278725
by kkfx | 2025-06-15 09:15:29+00:00
Well... I've managed various people so far and while yes, most are simply way to uneducated/illiterate to work properly in the present world in their roles, they are still capable to learn if properly driven. I've observing that treating people like humans instead of meat-based bots do makes them much more human and a step at a time a team change.

Of course you can't transform things in a snap, but a change is possible if properly conducted. The issue is more the unwillingness of those who conduct than the reactionary ignorance of most.
by leguminous | 2025-06-15 09:16:26+00:00
On my 8-bit-per-channel monitor, I can easily see banding, though it is mostly obvious in the darker areas in a darkened room. Where this commonly manifests itself is "bloom" from a light object on a dark background.

I can no longer see banding if I add dither, though, and the extra noise is imperceptible when done well, especially at 4k and with a temporal component.
by bob1029 | 2025-06-15 09:16:55+00:00
> But for processing (and validating) various data loads and incoming data streams, by looking up matching values in existing reference tables, stored procedures can increase performance/efficiency and reduce complexity

Performing operations on data directly in the SQL provider is the peak of human enlightenment. It takes a lot of leadership or wisdom to push a modern team away from using crap like EF to process everything, but 100x slower.

In exactly 0% of cases of cycling records through code will you see a higher performance result than executing a single T-SQL or PL/SQL script against the provider.

The procedural SQL languages are Turing complete. SQL itself is as of recursive common table expressions. There's not any reasonable argument for not trying this if all the information is already in the SQL store.

Moving information is way more expensive than processing information that is already in place (cache). Your SQL server process can iterate on items in L1 millions of times before a packet makes it across the data center one time.
by roncesvalles | 2025-06-15 09:18:05+00:00
Uber is global, so I think most visitors and tourists default to using Uber. I wouldn't be surprised if the non-Uber players in every rideshare market attract a totally different demographic - more local, more savvy, maybe daily commuters who tend to "comparison-shop" each trip.

If this is the case then if Waymo is consistently cheaper than Lyft, it would totally suck the air out for Lyft. Whereas, Uber would still see use despite charging a little premium, for the reason I stated in the beginning.
by 7bit | 2025-06-15 09:21:21+00:00
How often do you have to recover a key? I think I did it maybe 3 times in the past 5 years.

I get your point, but a recovery/backup key? Yeah, I really rather have that human-readable, even if it means that I'll likely need a good 30 seconds to type that into wherever I have to type that in.
by sdeframond | 2025-06-15 09:22:09+00:00
> ORM feels like an abstraction on top of an abstraction. I don't trust that those who chose ORMs have studied and exhausted the possibilities of the two underlying layers, I feel more often than not they recourse to higher layers of technology without understanding the lower level.

I agree with that. However I feel that teams that choose not to use an ORM end up having one somehow reimplemeted by the seniors, and just used as you describe by the juniors.

I'd rather have the seniors master an existing ORM and spend their time elsewhere.
by topspin | 2025-06-15 09:22:27+00:00
Indeed. The market is exposing the truth here, whether that's the outcome some would prefer or not. These dense, wealthy, coastal regions are an endless fount of talk about how flyover suburbia is an unhealthy manifestation of isolation. Yet here we see that when given a choice in these same areas with their various competing taxi systems, isolation has significant monetary value.
by JdeBP | 2025-06-15 09:25:27+00:00
You should have been watching lots of SciFi, too. (-:

I have a Raspberry Pi in a translucent "modular case" from the PiHut.

* https://thepihut.com/products/modular-raspberry-pi-4-case-cl...

It is very close to the same size and appearance as the "key" for Orac in Blake's 7.

I have so far resisted the temptation to slap it on top of a Really Useful Box and play the buzzing noise.

* https://youtube.com/watch?v=XOd1WkUcRzY

Obviously not even Avon figured out that the main box of Orac was a distraction, a fancy base station to hold the power supply, WiFi antenna, GPS receiver, and some Christmas tree lights, and all of the computational power was really in the activation key.

The amusing thing is that that is not the only 1970s SciFi telly prop that could become almost real today. It shouldn't be hard -- all of the components exist -- to make an actual Space 1999 commlock; not just a good impression of one, but a functioning one that could do teleconferencing over a LAN, IR control for doors and tellies and stuff, and remote computer access.

Not quite in time for 1999, alas. (-:

* https://mastodonapp.uk/@JdeBP/114590229374309238
by TheOtherHobbes | 2025-06-15 09:25:27+00:00
At infinite scale this reduces to the bulk equation R = rl/A for a rectangular block where r is resistivity, l is length, and A is the area of the block.

Both l and A are infinite. So you get infinity/infinity, which is undefined, proving it's a silly problem and you should go do something useful with your time instead.
by WhyNotHugo | 2025-06-15 09:25:27+00:00
> "Publicly-owned" would be expensive and low quality, and would make the people running the operation filthy rich.

By publicly owned, I mean “owned by the public”, not “owned by a publicly traded company” (which is, ironically, private property). You’re thinking the latter, which counts as corporate-owned.

I used a bad choice of words. In most of the world “public owned” means the former, whereas in the US it means the latter. The exact opposite, ironically.
by 2muchcoffeeman | 2025-06-15 09:34:30+00:00
If your argument about my gravity example holds. That’s not really a good argument. Between Newtons death and the first powered flight was almost 200 years. Being all negative about gravity would be reasonable since a bunch of stuff had to happen.

I’m not sure I buy your longer argument either.

I have a feeling the nay sayers are right on this. The next leap in AI isn’t something we’re going to recognise. (Obviously it’s possible - humans exist)
by nullify88 | 2025-06-15 09:36:00+00:00
Worth knowing that Uber bought Dantaxi, Denmark's largest Taxi company a couple of weeks ago. The Uber app will tap in to Dantaxi driver pool. https://www.uber.com/en-DK/newsroom/dantaxi/

I wonder if strong worker unions and regulations forced Uber to buy an existing company rather than starting their own presence.
by tialaramex | 2025-06-15 09:36:24+00:00
Indeed. The independently calculated Living Wage in my country (as opposed to the government's "Living Wage" which is just a minimum wage law with better branding) is actually very slightly higher than my average annual expenditure when I last checked.

Most people wouldn't want to live like me (I don't drink, I don't holiday abroad, I don't have kids, or expensive hobbies), but I prefer this. Also, some of the discrepancy is explained by the annoying "Being poor is expensive" where I can make choices that are cheaper over the long term but would be ruinously expensive for a poor person.
by ofrzeta | 2025-06-15 09:37:18+00:00
The incident report is interesting. Fast reaction time by the SRE team (2 minutes), then the "red button" rollout. But then "Within some of our larger regions, such as us-central-1, as Service Control tasks restarted, it created a herd effect on the underlying infrastructure it depends on (i.e. that Spanner table), overloading the infrastructure. Service Control did not have the appropriate randomized exponential backoff implemented to avoid this. It took up to ~2h 40 mins to fully resolve in us-central-1 as we throttled task creation to minimize the impact on the underlying infrastructure and routed traffic to multi-regional databases to reduce the load."

In my experience this happens more often than not: In an exceptional situation like a recovery of many nodes quotas that make sense in regular operations get exceeded quickly and you run into another failure scenario. As long as the underlying infrastructure can cope with it, it's good if you can disable quotas temporarily and quickly. Or throttle the recovery operations that naturally take longer in that case.
by ChrisMarshallNY | 2025-06-15 09:38:53+00:00
> So basically, you’re admitting key elements of your original story were made up?

Sure, and I regret it. I didn’t think it was a “key element.” The part that struck me, was the inflexibility of the driver. A real cabbie might laugh at you, but happily take more money to get out of there.

If he had refused to leave (which he did), then the driver might be legitimately worried. It sounds like the driver didn’t really understand which neighborhood he was in, or he would have been a lot more scared. A classic robbery technique against cabbies, is getting them to drive to bad neighborhoods, then robbing them.

The thing that struck me, was the complete lack of situational awareness, or customer service ethos, on the part of the driver. That seems to be an inevitable result of the Uber business model, and folks that sign up as Uber drivers, need to be aware of the dangers and responsibilities.

When you have people in your car, you have their lives in your hands, and your employer’s brand integrity, as well. The driver’s behavior resulted in some brand damage to Uber. My friend’s behavior may have resulted in a permanent ban, but he certainly didn’t care, as he’s done with Uber, anyway.

If, on the other hand, the driver had been sympathetic and helpful, he could have had three grateful, enthusiastic evangelists for Uber. Any experienced customer service person knows that having an upset customer, that admits they are in the wrong, but is also upset, is gold. It can easily be mined for the advantage of the service provider, or turned into a complete shitshow (which is what happened, here).

In the end, it sounds like it turned out OK for everyone (except Uber, who permanently lost three customers).
by motorest | 2025-06-15 09:41:48+00:00
Quantifying software complexity is still largely an open problem. There are approaches that focus on quantifying but are arguably of limited use due to their disconnect with mental models, and there are approaches that focus on evaluating mental models but can't be objectively quantified. The best output from the latter group is that they can serve as guidelines on how to make simple software systems,and how to keep them simple.
by MaxBarraclough | 2025-06-15 09:44:22+00:00
There are unit-testing frameworks for the purpose. For SQL Server there are several, [0] I've worked briefly with one called tSQLt [1] and was quite impressed. Frameworks also exist for other RDBMSs. [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unit_testing_framework...

[1] https://tsqlt.org/user-guide/quick-start/
by verisimi | 2025-06-15 09:44:58+00:00
Have you heard of Iatrogenesis?

https://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iatrogenesis

> In 2013, an estimated 142,000 persons died from adverse effects of medical treatment, up from an estimated 94,000 in 1990.

Careful what you wish for!

And, imo, an awful lot of deaths are due to issues that cannot be classified as caused by doctors - eg dosage error over time, something that mitigates symptoms but allows the underlying to deteriorate, etc.
by chii | 2025-06-15 09:45:17+00:00
The hickey definition is from the POV of the engineer - the creation of software with simplicity. Code that is simple, doesn't necessarily result in a piece of software that is simple for the end-user.

The tellman's version is for the end user - simplicity of use, by the user, with their existing expectation, culture and pre-knowledge. It's basically describing skeuomorphism in software (but not limited to just UI). It might be enormously complicated to create for the engineer, while it remains simple for the end-user.
by lordnacho | 2025-06-15 09:46:22+00:00
First of all, how is 5 different from 4? Modelling the internal monologue of someone else is Theory of Mind, isn't it?

Next, we gotta ask ourselves, could you have substrate independence? A thing that isn't biological, but can model other level-5 creatures?

My guess is yes. There's all sort of other substrate independence.
by AlexanderDhoore | 2025-06-15 09:46:39+00:00
Can someone with more knowledge give me a software overview of what AMD is offering?

Which SDKs do they offer that can do neural network inference and/or training? I'm just asking because I looked into this a while ago and felt a bit overwhelmed by the number of options. It feels like AMD is trying many things at the same time, and I’m not sure where they’re going with all of it.
by itkovian_ | 2025-06-15 09:49:39+00:00
Completely agree and think it’s a great summary. To summarize very succinctly; you’re chasing a moving target where the target changes based on how you move. There’s no ground truth to zero in on in value-based RL. You minimise a difference in which both sides of the equation have your APPROXIMATION in them.

I don’t think it’s hopeless though, I actually think RL is very close to working because what it lacked this whole time was a reliable world model/forward dynamics function (because then you don’t have to explore, you can plan). And now we’ve got that.
by dottedmag | 2025-06-15 09:50:54+00:00
PostgreSQL server is a single process that starts in under 100ms on a developer's laptop.

In the company I work for we use real PostgreSQL in unit tests — it's cheap to start one at the beginning of a suite, load the schema and go, and then shut it down and discard its file store.

I keep thinking of moving that file store to tmpfs when run on Linux, but it's nowhere near the top of the performance improvements for the test suite.

So: no more mocks or subsitute databases with their tiny inconsistencies.
by 0points | 2025-06-15 09:51:15+00:00
> the z80 technique

Z80 is a 8-bit CPU. Why is this name in the title?

> Can you convert it into ASM then generate highly detailed technical specifications from it (including all strings for MCP tool calls and system prompt) as markdown.

I see no ASM, and I see no tech specs of any of those decompiles?

> Objective: Reverse engineer the acli binary to understand Rovo Dev AI agent functionality

> Result: Successfully extracted 100+ Python source files, system prompts, and complete implementation

Elsewhere in the blog it was discovered the acli was written in Golang:

> Language: Go (evidenced by Go runtime symbols and garbage collector references)

So, where is the decompile of `acli' mentioned in the blog? I only see some decompiled python in the repository and a bunch of prompts.

And what's with the name Z80?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zilog_Z80
by OtherShrezzing | 2025-06-15 09:55:01+00:00
I don’t think it’s unreasonable to hold GCP & co to a higher standard than run of the mill software. The platform generates around $100mn per day for Google with a 10% operating margin.

Testing all inevitable code paths which have the capacity to bring the platform down as soon as it’s deployed doesn’t seem like an unreasonable ask for a corp operating at that scale.