MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by pron | 2025-06-13 23:40:00+00:00
> Instead, at worst, he would simply move it from the category of being a real formula, to being an ideal formula.

No. No result, either ideal or real, may contradict reality (it's just that since infinitary statements do not describe reality, they obviously cannot contradict it). You can think about it like this: According to Hilbert, a valid mathematical foundation is any logical theory that is a conservative extension of reality. ZFC, constructive foundations, and ultrafinitist foundations all satisfy that, so they would all be valid foundations according to that principle.

> For example, Euclid's geometry doesn't agree with physical reality.

It may not describe physical reality, but it doesn't contradict it.

> But the distinction between real and ideal is a question for physics. It is not a question that mathematicians need worry about. The questions that mathematicians need worry about are entirely those which are internal to the formal game.

Not only does that disagree with Hilbert's formalism, it also disagrees with constructivism. The question of the philosophy of mathematics is precisely what, if anything, does mathematics describe beyond symbols.
by chasil | 2025-06-13 23:42:20+00:00
I think Bob Colwell's account is the clearest short synopsis.

https://www.sigmicro.org/media/oralhistories/colwell.pdf

'And I finally put my hand up and said I just could not see how you're proposing to get to those kind of performance levels. And he said well we've got a simulation, and I thought Ah, ok. That shut me up for a little bit, but then something occurred to me and I interrupted him again. I said, wait I am sorry to derail this meeting. But how would you use a simulator if you don't have a compiler? He said, well that's true we don't have a compiler yet, so I hand assembled my simulations. I asked "How did you do thousands of line of code that way?" He said “No, I did 30 lines of code”. Flabbergasted, I said, "You're predicting the entire future of this architecture on 30 lines of hand generated code?" [chuckle], I said it just like that, I did not mean to be insulting but I was just thunderstruck. Andy Grove piped up and said "we are not here right now to reconsider the future of this effort, so let’s move on".'
by schiffern | 2025-06-13 23:42:31+00:00
Who doesn't love a good ghost story? ;)

People tell ghost stories, so it would be a surprise if AI couldn't. It's a funny example of life reflecting art: old TV and movies used glitching audio and glowing eyes as an artistic 'cheat' to communicate to the audience that it's an insane / evil AI, so now it's a trope that shows up in AI training data. Now AI can spit our artistic conceits back at us, and our pattern recognition brains tell us "aha, I knew it all along!"

Reminds me a bit of a certain XKCD comic,[0] but this might be called 'tropogenesis' instead.

Not sure if AI was used in the creation of this or if that's just part of the storytelling. However I did enjoy this (at least the 26 seconds SoundCloud let me hear) and Static Bloom.[1]

[0] https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/978:_Citogenesis

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RKxxXQi_HTk
by orionsbelt | 2025-06-13 23:43:31+00:00
I haven’t tried it, and I’m not sure how good it is currently in terms of actually therapeutic benefit, but I would guess using OpenAI’s advanced voice mode, and giving it a good prompt telling it to play the role of a marriage therapist, would actually work pretty well in terms of conversing with two people, listening to both, being empathetic, guiding each person to really hear the other, etc.
by fc417fc802 | 2025-06-13 23:43:39+00:00
Yeah fair enough, controlling the build environment probably ought to be optional. Sounds like I dodged the issues you ran into due to the combination of specific library plus usecase. My experience is limited to abseil as well as the full dawn stack. In all cases I'm statically linking into my own applications, building everything except glibc & co from source, network isolated environment, using the same toolchain, compiler flags, etc.
by hajile | 2025-06-13 23:45:44+00:00
I also owned a touchpad. You are misremembering if you think they look the same.

Here's a side-by-side image

https://i.insider.com/4e0cb173ccd1d561390e0000?width=900&for...

Here's a close-up detail of an ipad on top of a touchpad.

As I stated, you can clearly see sharp, flat edges on the ipad where it meets the back of the device while the Touchpad has a much more continuous rounded edge. In the side-by-side shots, you can also see how the Touchpad corners are much more rounded.

Here's some individual shots

Touchpad with side view

https://i0.wp.com/www.seriousinsights.net/wp-content/uploads...

https://images.anandtech.com/reviews/tablets/HP/TouchPad/_DS...

ipad with side view

https://images.anandtech.com/reviews/gadgets/iPad/introducti...

https://images.anandtech.com/reviews/gadgets/iPad/introducti...
by atmanactive | 2025-06-13 23:46:30+00:00
Thank you for understanding.

I don't use extensions as I don't trust them.

I use about 10 different browsers on my desktop and about 5 different browsers on my mobile, and, on both platforms only one of those browsers is set with the force-dark-mode, and that one is set as the default browser. Like a decontamination chamber of sorts. All interesting and well behaved sites continue on to other browsers, some even find their permanent place. Sites that do not cooperate with force-dark-mode are extremely rare, and if they happen to be of utmost importance then I can enable a desktop utility which inverts the colors for the whole screen, but this happens maybe two or three times a year.

Thanks.
by janalsncm | 2025-06-13 23:47:02+00:00
It would be great if Gavin Newsom would actually do something about this mess. He’s been talking tough in podcasts and tweets but in my mind you don’t have to be elected to office to do that. Anyone can.

An executive takes action. Call on the legislature to pass a law that anyone (marines, ICE, national guard) who violates civil rights is subject to arrest. Sign it and enforce it.

I don’t want to hear any more about tyranny this or authoritarianism that. You’re not a pundit, you hold the highest office in California. If you aren’t going to do anything with it you’re not the man for the moment.
by johnsmith1840 | 2025-06-13 23:49:11+00:00
We have no idea how to do continual learning.

Many people here are right, compute, collapse, forgetting whatever.

The only "real" way to do this would be: 1. Train a model 2. New data 3. Retrain the model in full + new data 4. Repeat 5. You still have no garuntee on the "time" aspect though.

But CL as a field basically has zero answers on how to do this in a true sense. It's crazy hard because the "solutions" are hypocritical in many ways.

We need to expand the model's representation space while keeping the previous representation space nearly the same?

Basically, you need to modify it without changing it.

Most annoying is that even the smallest of natural brains do this easily. I have a long winded theory but basically it boils down to AI likely needs to "sleep" or rest somehow.
by chasil | 2025-06-13 23:51:17+00:00
Sophie Wilson (ARM instruction set designer) was very enthusiastic over her "Firepath" architecture that had VLIW aspects.

It was targeted at DSL modems, and I think the platform has faded and is now somewhat obscure.

https://royalsociety.org/people/sophie-wilson-12544/

https://old.hotchips.org/wp-content/uploads/hc_archives/hc14...
by fazlerocks | 2025-06-13 23:51:40+00:00
honestly? teaching or coaching.

been thinking about this a lot lately and realized the skills that made me good at building products, breaking down complex problems, explaining things clearly, helping people think through decisions… those transfer really well to education.

I actually did that early in my career (2013/14/15), wrote content on frontend tech like bootstrap for sites like sitepoint. published multiple books which helped me get my o1 visa :D

there's something appealing about work that's fundamentally about humans helping other humans grow. way harder for AI to replace the relationship part of learning

been mentoring junior devs and it's honestly the most fulfilling work i do. if tech gets fully automated, at least i'd be doing something that actually feels meaningful
by johnsmith1840 | 2025-06-13 23:51:49+00:00
If it was pure compute we'd have simple examples. We can't do this even on the smallest of AI models.

There are tons of benchmarks around this you can easily run with 1 gpu.

It's compute only in the sense that the only way to do it is retrain a model from scratch at every step.

If you solve CL with a CNN you just created AGI.
by comex | 2025-06-13 23:52:08+00:00
Recently, macOS added a built-in FUSE-like API:

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/fskit

No idea what the performance is like.

However, over the last few years, Apple’s compilers have gotten even more enthusiastic than before about caching and “content addressable storage”:

https://llvm.org/devmtg/2024-10/slides/techtalk/Rastogi-Fine...

Which is normally a good thing, but may exacerbate the issue described in the post where, by enforcing isolation, you end up cutting off the compiler from its caches and making the build slower.

I think the ideal solution would be for Bazel to somehow know about and integrate with LLVM’s CAS.

edit: although just figuring out how to do “explicit module builds” with Swift and Clang would probably get you most of the way.
by keeda | 2025-06-13 23:53:00+00:00
Beyond just the design, it was also an amazingly efficient OS. I had a cheap Lumia that had much lower specs than contemporary Samsung and iPhone flagship smartphones (500MB vs 1GB+ RAM IIRC) yet it was amazingly smooth and responsive, much smoother than the other two. Android especially, and to a lesser extent iOS, would get laggy and stutter while scrolling after a few major version updates, but Windows Phone stayed snappy even after the phone was 3+ years old.

This also made the battery life much better. (Although whenever I mentioned this, the usual retort I got was, of course the battery life would be better if there were no apps to consume it...)
by teruakohatu | 2025-06-13 23:53:09+00:00
I think it is better to be charitable. I think he does genuinely believe what he wrote is what happened. His PDF book is free and Creative Commons.

There could be many reasons he waited this long. Maybe he waited until he was retired and would not face blowback. Maybe he just has some free time.

It is very plausible that WebOS could have been an equal peer to iOS and Android. CEOs have killed off projects that might have been great commercial successes while perusing short term gains.

In a decade's time we might hear a story from inside ATI or AMD how they killed off their chance of beating CUDA for short term gains.
by caycep | 2025-06-13 23:53:32+00:00
Granted, I have heard a scientist (in an unrelated field, I think it was some astronomical NPR interview) describe science as a bit like a supertanker...there usually is some prevailing thing that everyone believes in, but as contrary evidence piles up, the direction slowly turns.

I guess my own question is whether Alzheimer's/amyloid thinking was atypically stuck on one hypothesis, vs. is this just the slow pace of progress as usual for a given field? I mean...it's not like the amyloid deposition isn't there...

I only play a AD expert on TV (haha I jest...I like to say this because I had no intention of specializing in this when I was training but, hey, in the real world, you have to treat the "market" that rolls in the door....). I work more in the Parkinson's world, and while I would say there are cliques, which do affect who gets NIH (or used to get...I have no idea what's going on there now...), I can't say there's one prevailing "cabal" that's obsessed with any one direction. the bigger issue is that current Parkinson's research is a bit scattershot in too many directions.

My other pet peeve is somewhat unrelated, where the article mentions other directions like neuroinflammation and oxidative stress; the problem is these are also vague/broad topics, that have been thrown around like panaceas for every disease from head to toe; my own superstition is that when a new drug candidate comes out for "neuroinflammation" or "oxidative stress", I'd bet a healthy bunch of nickels it won't amount to much.
Show HN: Automate final cut pro's XML language
by andrewfromx | 2025-06-13 23:53:33+00:00
Did you know the final cut pro xml import export is very powerful? Have you ever opened one of those xml files?

https://github.com/andrewarrow/cutlass/blob/main/reference/p...

That's a simple plus sign drawn with fcpxml shape language. But there's more! Way more:

https://github.com/andrewarrow/cutlass/blob/main/FCPXMLv1_13...

Almost 1000 line DTD file, you can do A LOT. And that's what "cutlass" aims to do. Open source golang project to let you slice, dice, and julienne fcpxml. Once you have code that can generate fcpxml you can do stuff like:

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

This is all the top HN stories titles read by AI with screenshots and animations.

(used https://github.com/resemble-ai/chatterbox and https://github.com/nari-labs/dia for voices)

Do you have an idea for a video we could make using the power of cutlass? Let me know!
by susiecambria | 2025-06-13 23:54:02+00:00
I don't know any tech execs and I am only remotely familiar with the military, but I am hazarding a guess that the cultures in tech and the military are not at all similar. I'm also guessing that there is a massive difference between fighting for Ukraine by using your tech skills and participating in a time-limited, no-real-skin-in-the-game learning exercise.

Not to mention that at the same time this is happening, SecDef fired a number of generals, and the military is being used for political purposes, at least according to some.
by tzs | 2025-06-13 23:54:17+00:00
Junk mail is not subsidized per se. It does often cost less than non-marketing mail, but this is because it can take advantage of some discounts that lower volume senders have a harder time qualifying for.

In particular, you can get discounts for pre-sorting and bundling your mailings, formatting things in a way that is easier for USPS to automate, and for high volume.
by jcranmer | 2025-06-13 23:54:25+00:00
His blog has a category just for discussing Alzheimer's, and he's been talking about ever since he started blogging. So here's a post from 2002 where he points out (somewhat obliquely) that amyloid isn't a proven hypothesis: https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/alzheimer-s-vaccin...

> This is looking like one of the crazy ideas that just might work - stipulating, for the moment, that amyloid really is the cause of Alzheimer's. . .
by lurking_swe | 2025-06-13 23:55:06+00:00
this is a solid counterpoint, i shared a similar feeling as the person you replied to. I will however say it’s not surprising to me in the slightest. Generative AI will role play when told to do so. Water is wet. :) Do we expect it to magically have a change of heart half way through the role play? Maybe…via strong alignment or something? Seems far fetched to me.

So i’m now wondering, why are these researchers so bad at communicating? You explained this better than 90% of the blog posts i’ve read about this. They all focus on the “ai did x” instead of _why_ it’s concerning with specific examples.
by the_af | 2025-06-13 23:55:09+00:00
> Is light slow? Or is the human perception of time just scaled down as a result of our rapid metabolism and infinitesimality?

It's slow for humans to explore the cosmos.

"Slow" is meaningless without a frame of reference, and "humans" seems like a good frame of reference, since it's us -- and not plants or stars -- who are writing on HN to discuss this.

Because it's us, humans discussing this in HN, the frame of reference is implied and it's not necessary to spell it out.
by diegof79 | 2025-06-13 23:56:05+00:00
My first inkjet printer was an HP DeskJet in the mid-90s. It was rock solid. At that time, HP printers were the best consumer printers on the market, with a reasonable price/quality balance.

HP also had a good brand image due to its servers (HP PA-RISC) and calculators (like the HP 48GX).

They started to go downhill when they made big acquisitions like Compaq and Palm, and the Itanium architecture failed. It's like IBM: They became so big and stretched that their best products turned into crap.
by mardifoufs | 2025-06-13 23:57:09+00:00
I think it is, but to be clear I think (from my very limited experience, just a couple of years before leaving finance, and the people with more experience that I've talked with) that c++ is still a lot more common than any GC language (typically java, since OCaml is even rarer). So it is possible, and some firms seem to take that approach, but I'm not sure exactly how besides turning off GC or very specific GC tuning.

Here is a JVM project I saw a few years back, I'm not sure how successful the creators are but they seem to use it in actual production. It's super rare to get even a glimpse at HFT infra from the outside so it's still useful.

https://github.com/OpenHFT
by dfc | 2025-06-13 23:59:40+00:00
I had a similar experience at PET in Ottawa around 2007. I felt so out of place listening to so many interesting talks and seeing all these people that I "knew" from mailing lists and IRC channels. Len Sassaman was really kind to me and included in me in hallway conversations. It was so wild I couldn't get over that rabbi was taking the time to explain things to me and listen to my questions. He definitely was not extending some grand charitable gesture, it was just genuine kindness.

I know I will never have that kind of impact on someone but I hope I have / can continue to pay rabbi back by practicing that level of kindness and consideration to others.
by marklubi | 2025-06-14 00:01:05+00:00
While similar, I think the culture more involves the attitudes that's been fostered by the company itself (likely decisions made by their board and upper management).

Most of my colleagues are really nice and friendly one-on-one or even in a group. However, the culture problem is across all departments (~500 employees).

There's a poor attitude that's a result of a perverse options and bonus incentive structure. At least for the software teams, it results in shipping a product regardless of the quality. Essentially, as long as your group ships the bare minimum of something that was planned for that quarter, you get your bonuses.

They're a software company and they don't even have a QA/Test team.

It's a toxic culture and they wonder why there's massive turnover.
by kypro | 2025-06-14 00:01:41+00:00
I also find when it disagrees with you it does so in a really patronising way.

In my experience it will always first affirm me for having my own opinions, but then go on to explain why I'm wrong as if I'm a child or idiot – often by making appeals to authority or emotion to "disprove" me.

I wish they were designed to not have opinions on things. Just give me the data and explain why most people disagree with me without implying I'm some uneducated idiot because I don't 100% align with what most people think on a certain topic.

I always thought this would be one of the benefits of AI... That it would be more interested in assigning probabilities to truth statements given current data, rather than resolving on a single position in the way humans do. Instead LLMs seem to be much more opinionated and less rationally so than most humans.
by idkwhattocallme | 2025-06-14 00:02:48+00:00
I went to this launch. I was excited about palmOS and intrigued when HP bought them. HP had a massive enterprise PC business. At the time custom apps were all the rage and Apple was killing it. But not in the enterprise. Apple didn't care about corporate use. It was famously hard to buy ipads for teams (limits on how many you could purchase at once). The most basic enterprise app requirements to for a mobile/tablet were impossible on IOS. WebOS was web based (like most enterprise apps). HP did hardware. HP did enterprise. The new CEO was an SAP guy (enterprise software). It seemed like it an enterprise OS + hardware was about to launch. I was expecting an event targeted at CIOs... But the event was targeted at consumers as an ipad competitor. It made no sense.
by tel | 2025-06-14 00:04:07+00:00
Often it's easy to construct a family of sets representing something of interest. For example, we like to define integration initially as a finite process of breaking the integrand's domain into pieces, computing their area, and summing.

To compute the contribution of some piece indexed i, we measure the size of its domain, call it the area Ai, and then evaluate the integrand, f, at some point xi within that domain, then the contribution is Ai * f(xi).

Summing all of these across i produces a finite approximation of the integral. Then we take a limit on this process, breaking the domain into larger and larger families of sets with smaller and smaller areas. At the limit, we have the integral.

This process seems intuitive, but it contains an application of the axiom of choice---in the limit, we have an infinite number of subsets of our domain and we still have to pick a representative xi for each one to evaluate the integrand at.

It's quite obvious how to pick an arbitrary representative from each set in a finite family of sets: you just go through one-by-one picking an element.

But this argument breaks down for an infinite family. Going one-by-one will never complete. We need to be able to select these representative xis "all at once". And the Axiom of Choice asserts that this is possible.

(Note: I'm being fast-and-loose, but the nature of the argument is correct. This doesn't prove integration demands AoC or anything like that, just shows how this one sketch of an argument would. Specifically, integration normally avoids AoC because we can constructively specify our choice function - for example, picking the lexicographically smallest point within each axis-aligned rectangular cell. Generalize to something like Monte Carlo integration, however...)
by snerbles | 2025-06-14 00:04:55+00:00
> [...] the four executives will all attend the Army’s six-week Direct Commissioning Course at Fort Benning, Georgia [...]

Sometimes known as "fork and knife school". I can't speak specifically for the Army, but a particular personal incident comes to mind.

When I attended AFROTC field training at Maxwell AFB, in a lot of ways it was a fairly typical boot camp experience, with roaming enlisted training instructors ready to very promptly and firmly correct any deviations from standard in a memorably expedient fashion (much less swearing than Full Metal Jacket, as it's the Air Force). One day during this fine summer camp I found myself on the receiving end of one such chewing out from a TI, for walking around the wrong side of a table in the dining facility.

It was in the midst of this comically scathing tirade (something about him threatening to crawl up my nose and living in my nightmares if I dared try it again) that this Technical Sergeant abruptly stopped, wheeled around and was about to tear into another hapless cadet that took the same detour I did. But instead, without a whit of the seething rage he was pouring out just a second before, he calmly patiently explained to this trainee that she was to take a different route, punctuating the instructions with a "right over there, ma'am". It was at that moment that I noticed that she did not have cadet insignia on her lapels, but captain's bars. It turns out she was a proper M.D., fresh from med school, directly commissioned and immediately outranking the sergeant that was giving me the what-for and her polite guidance.

So by Direct Commissioning, it is indeed direct.