MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by KronisLV | 2025-06-13 19:39:24+00:00
> The price was likely too high, though that is debatable.

To me it feels like even in the modern day, products that would be considered okay on their own are more or less ruined by their pricing.

For example, the Intel Core Ultra CPUs got bad reviews due to being more or less a sidegrade from their previous generations, all while being expensive both in comparison to those products, as well as AMD's offerings. They aren't bad CPUs in absolute terms, they're definitely better than the AM4 Ryzen in my PC right now, but they're not worth the asking price to your average user that has other options.

Similarly, the RTX 5060 and also the Intel Arc B580 both suffer from that as well - the Arc card because for whatever reason MSRP ends up being a suggestion that gets disregarded and in the case of the entry level RTX cards just because Nvidia believes that people will fork over 300 USD for a card with 8 GB of VRAM in 2025.

In both of those cases, if you knocked off about 50 USD of those prices, then suddenly it starts looking like a better deal. A bit more and the performance issues could be overlooked.
by HappMacDonald | 2025-06-13 19:39:51+00:00
Reading this message on a 4k (3840x2160 UHD) monitor I bought ten (10) years ago for $250usd.

Still bemoaning the loss of the basically impossible (50"? I can't remember precisely) 4k TV we bought that same year for $800usd when every other 4k model that existed at the time was $3.3k and up.

It's black point was "when rendering a black frame the set 100% appears to be unpowered" and the whitepoint was "congratulations, this is what it looks like to stare into baseball stadium floodlights". We kept it at 10% brightness as a matter of course and still playing arbitrary content obviated the need for any other form of lighting in our living room and dining room combined at night.

It was too pure for this world and got destroyed by one of the kids throwing something about in the living room. :(
by btilly | 2025-06-13 19:40:25+00:00
I believe that you're fine with it, simply because that is what you're familiar with. And if you'd grown up with a different way of thinking about these problems, then you wouldn't be fine with it.

Personally, I can work with either system. But, to me, formalism really does feel like a game. And the more that I have thought about the foundations of math, the more dissatisfied I have become with this game. And now I find myself frustrated when people assert the conclusions of the game as truth, instead of as merely being formal statements within a game that mathematicians are choosing to play.

Here is something that I believe.

We owe our current understanding of uncountability to Cantor's metaphor, about figuring out which group of sheep is larger by pairing them off. We would today have a very different kind of mathematics if Cantor had instead made a more careful analogy to the problem of trying to count all of the sheep that have ever existed. Even if you had perfect information about the past, you're doomed to fail because you can't figure out where to draw the line between ancestral sheep, and sheep-like ancestors.

This second metaphor is exactly parallel to uncountability within the computable universe. For example we can implement reals as some kind of Cauchy sequences. For example as programs for functions f, where f(n) is a rational, and |f(n) - f(m)| <= 1/n + 1/m. This works perfectly well. But now Cantor's diagonalization argument clearly does not demonstrate that there are more reals. Instead it demonstrates the limits of what computation can predict about the behavior of other computations.

In other words, I just described a system operating on a notion of truth that is directly tied to the reasoning required to establish that truth. And in that system, uncountable is tied to self-reference. And really doesn't mean more.

I don't know how to really formalize this idea. But I'd be interested if anyone actually has done so.
by mkfs | 2025-06-13 19:40:25+00:00
The more countries with nuclear weapons, and the more unstable or extremist they are, the greater the likelihood of an eventual detonation, even if accidental. 40 years ago, everyone understood this and agreed nuclear proliferation was bad, the US and USSR committed to reducing their stockpiles, and Reagan himself expressed a desire for complete nuclear disarmament, in part because of the near-catastrophe of the Abel Archer incident--a catastrophe only narrowly avoided despite the US and USSR both being stable superpowers led by rational actors. Anyone encouraging nuclear proliferation for every tin-pot dictatorship or gay-lynching theocracy to make the world safer is insane.

> effectively uninvadable

Yet Israel was invaded during the Yom Kippur War when it had nuclear weapons, the UK was invaded by Argentina during the Falklands War, Russia was invaded briefly by Ukraine (Kursk). And Israel arguably just demonstrated that developing a survivable nuclear deterrent probably isn't as easy as many thought. (Ukraine, to a lesser extent, also with Spiderweb.)

> Supporting Israel in preventing Iran from getting nuclear capabilities is destablizing, not the opposite.

On the contrary, it sends a strong "fuck around and find out" message to any country pursuing nuclear weapons. And if Israel is capable of this kind of decapitating strike against a country's nuclear program, imagine what the US (or China) could pull off.
by jimbokun | 2025-06-13 19:41:14+00:00
Are you happy?

If so, don't change anything.

Otherwise, if the lack of doing anything productive is bothering you, search for work that

1. seems meaningful to you, 2. has enjoyable aspects to it (no job will be fun all the time), 3. renumerates you sufficiently to meet your current standard of living or at least a standard of living you can accept.

THEN you will have the sufficient motivation to be productive where looking for a system that helps you be productive could be useful.

Alternatively, there's always entrepreneurship, depending on your appetite for risk and stress.
by jama211 | 2025-06-13 19:42:05+00:00
I thought I’d try it again this year and immediately sleep was totally broken (would remake instantly to a glitched grey screen), and when I updated my release (Ubuntu) it broke my graphics drivers silently on a way that took me nearly 3 hours to “kinda” fix, with terminal commands. And I’m a software developer as a professional who’s used unix based systems for years.

I’ve long ago accepted that my dev machine will stay a Mac and my gaming rig will stay windows for the foreseeable future. Every 5 years or so I try Linux again and it’s the same deal.
Show HN: Infrabase: Natural language rules engine to manage your cloud account
by iacguy | 2025-06-13 19:42:15+00:00
Policy-as-code is one of those things that everyone knows should be done, but in practice is rarely implemented.

We believe this is caused by the combination of the following 2 factors:

- OPA [1] and tools like cloud custodian [2] are cumbersome to set up, so writing even a single policy/ setting it up in your organisation takes a lot of effort.

- Each policy project needs to start from scratch because policies aren't re-usable

Infrabase checks your infra with an LLM instead of policies directly (currently a combination of gemini-2.5-pro-preview-05-06 and o4-mini). You can write your own policies as natural language [3] prompts to customize behaviour.

This is still early: non-determinism and latency are open problems. But for most teams, “some guard-rails today” beats “perfect rego never”, and llm's are only getting better.

We'd love your feedback on it!

[1] OPA: https://github.com/open-policy-agent/opa [2] Cloud Custodian: https://github.com/cloud-custodian/cloud-custodian [3] Infrabase Rules Repo: https://github.com/diggerhq/infrabase-rules
by arghwhat | 2025-06-13 19:42:22+00:00
> Eating food in order to have energy to do things is not "disturbing"

It most certainly is. It disrupts several processes, requires significant energy and resource expenditure, spikes various hormones that may or may not be able to develop intolerances. Significant impact to the gut, pancreas, brain (e.g., reward systems).

Not all of the effects are as high profile as full on diabetes, but its most certainly very disruptive.

Even the most healthy things are disruptive and stressful. Exercise is also incredibly disruptive, causing significant continuous injury and a panic-like reaction trying to keep your body from falling apart at the seams den eject your heart through the nearest chest opening.

Living is the act of balancing on a knife's edge with every force in nature trying to knock you over. You live not because of nature, but in spite of it.
by littlestymaar | 2025-06-13 19:42:25+00:00
> It’s like if someone says “don’t pipe curl into bash to install software”, ok that may or may not be good advice. But then someone else says “yeah, I download the script first and give it a cursory glance to see what it’s doing”, wouldn’t you agree they’re marginally better off than the people who just do it blindly?

I don't agree with your comparison, in this case it's more like downloading, then running it without having read it and then every once in a while look at a snippet containing a feature that interest you.

The comparison to “download the script and read it before you run it” would be to download the crate's repo, read it and then vendor the code you've read to use as a dependency, which is what I'd consider proper vetting (in this case the attacker would need to be much more sophisticated to avoid detection, it's still possible but in this case at least you've actually gained something), but it's a lot more work.
by jxramos | 2025-06-13 19:42:25+00:00
> On July 1, 2011, HP launched the TouchPad tablet running WebOS 3.0. > While Apple was selling 9 million iPads that same quarter, TouchPads were gathering dust on store shelves.

Ipad's first release was 4/2010 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPad_(1st_generation), we're talking a year later to enter the tablet market. Would folks agree that's still a pretty fresh market to enter into? What exactly differentiated PDAs from tablets?
by staticshock | 2025-06-13 19:43:04+00:00
Confusingly, the about page suggests that this is an AI-driven storytelling app: https://www.thiings.co/about. Maybe that's a vestige of prior iteration of the app, though.

The concept minds me of the million dollar homepage, where you could pay a dollar per pixel of advertisement. Here, you're paying a dollar (that's a guess; i didn't check) to get a new object listed in the potentially infinite grid, which gives you a unique URL for that object, an emoji-like reference image, and a one-paragraph description for aliens, were they to land on earth and ask what that object was for.

Basically, looks like an art project that monetizes participation.
by dang | 2025-06-13 19:43:58+00:00
It was initially killed by a software filter. Those are tuned more strictly for (some) new accounts. It had nothing to do with the content of the comment, though admittedly that is less "interesting".

For anyone who doesn't know: if you see a comment which is [dead] but shouldn't be, you can vouch for it (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html#cvouch).
by arghwhat | 2025-06-13 19:45:11+00:00
> I am not aware of any evidence in favor of this idea. It seems more likely that the only purpose of the bitter taste is to make you spit the food before swallowing it.

That would not explain why the stomach delays opening in response to bitter in the mouth, similar to preparing for protein digestion on glutamate detection.

But of course, we don't exactly have a spec sheet to work with here, so all we can do is theorize on why a particular trait might have evolved...
by stochtastic | 2025-06-13 19:45:43+00:00
This is very cool, thanks for sharing. There are many industries and academic fields where Matlab has gone out of fashion (I work in one), and my experience has been that there's a lot of over the top negativity about Mathworks products, centering mostly on the license and business model. But I think there's a lack of awareness of just how superior Matlab and Simulink are to all alternatives in some domains. All that to say: don't let the Matlab hate get to you, you're using the right tool for the job.
by ptero | 2025-06-13 19:45:47+00:00
Some math is not about the real world. This is not my kettle of fish, but I have heard of some general topology research directions that discusses properties of topological spaces that probably do not exist at all. Those (according to a friend whose advisor worked in the area) are pretty sad affairs, with only 5-10 people in the world who understand or care about this particular sliver of the math.

But some math is about providing tools (again, likely via levels of abstractions) for understanding the world and, to me, this is the "real math".

This is a personal view, not an absolute position. I started on the other side of this fence and during my pure math PhD regularly picked fights with our buddies doing physics PhD arguing that mathematics is self-sufficient and does not need any validation from other sciences. But over the next 30 years gradually went to the other side and now think that my original view leads to splintering into gazillion tiny slivers that do not care about anything else; not even about adjacent slivers. Which leads to degeneration. My 2c.
by retrodaredevil | 2025-06-13 19:46:04+00:00
Mostly I just use Picard it for initial tagging, which usually only needs to happen once. Sometimes Picard has changes it wants to do such as updating to a higher resolution cover art, or to refer to a different MBID after a merge.

Yeah, not much to maintain, but Picard does keep my tags up to date if necessary.
by Kranar | 2025-06-13 19:46:08+00:00
The two statements imply each other, they are logically equivalent:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Product_topology#Axiom_of_choi...

>One of many ways to express the axiom of choice is to say that it is equivalent to the statement that the Cartesian product of a collection of non-empty sets is non-empty.
by RiverCrochet | 2025-06-13 19:46:33+00:00
Windows CE is quite internally different than Windows NT. It still does support multitasking, but kernel version 5 (which was on all the CE devices of the late 2000's/early 2010's) had a maximum of 32 processes. It was a platform specifically for embedded use, though the GUI was styled to resemble Windows OSes at the time and of course numerous Microsoft things were ported over.

Windows Phone 7 moved to CE 6.0, then Windows Phone 8 to 10 were NT based.

Wikipedia says Windows Phone 8 was released October 29. 2012, which is around the time the ARM-based Surface RT was also released. A significant event for Windows NT to be on an architecture other than x86.
by timschmidt | 2025-06-13 19:47:01+00:00
I have a theory I've not read elsewhere about the HP TouchPad's abrupt cancellation and firesale. I bought one, and was slightly shocked at how faithfully it's physical dimensions copied the iPad 1. It used the same exact make and model LCD. Buttons and headphone jack were in identical locations. The TouchPad even had a gesture sensor where the iPad had a home button. It was a close enough facsimile that you could use iPad 1 cases with the TouchPad and everything fit nicely and worked.

Apple sued Samsung over the shape of their phones. I think it's at least plausible that Apple and HP's legal departments had some discussions about the TouchPad which remain under NDA to this day.

WebOS was so far ahead of it's time in terms of usability and features in the default applications that it's hard to imagine someone dense enough to opt out of owning the mobile platform over the next several decades voluntarily.

But I can imagine an emergency operation to avoid all out legal warfare with Cupertino.
by high_na_euv | 2025-06-13 19:47:08+00:00
>Second, I have to ask, why would someone think that regular expressions, a tool specifically designed to search strings, would be slower than any other tool? Of course it's going to be the fastest! (At least in a language like Python.)

Flexibly, search string flexibly.

Why you think that we cannot achieve faster search in non flexible fashion?
by MandieD | 2025-06-13 19:48:40+00:00
Same with textiles: automating weaving wasn’t the critical jump; automating spinning was.

Before the Saxony (flyer) spinning wheel was developed and spread through Europe in the late Middle Ages, about 9-10 spinners using hand spindles were required to keep one weaver in sufficient yarn (thread), and that includes the most tedious part of weaving, dressing the loom. Such was the need for yarn that most girls and women spun hours a day - possible while waiting for something to cook, watching children, walking around the village (I was able to spin while walking within a few weeks of learning)

Even with spinning wheels, there were still more people spinning than weaving. There were advances in loom technology in the early 1700s that increased the spinner to weaver ratio again. It wasn’t until Arkwright’s Water Frame that a powered device could reliably spin yarns strong enough to be warp; the Spinning Jenny that preceded it produced less-strong yarns.

Anyhow, ACOUP has a really great textiles series that shows some of that math. TL;DR - it’s all about the spinning (and the picking and combing)
by pron | 2025-06-13 19:49:08+00:00
> In what sense can a finite set exist and be finite when it is unfindable, unverifiable, and has unboundable size?

In the same sense that we could say that every computer program must either eventually terminate or never terminate without most people thinking there's a major philosophical problem here.

And by the way, the very same question can be (and has been) levelled at constructivism: in what sense does a result that would take longer than the lifetime of the universe to compute exist, as it is unfindable and unverifiable?

Look, I think that it is interesting to work with constructive axioms, but I don't think that humans philosophically reject non-constructive results. It's one thing to say that we can learn interesting things in constructive mathematics and another to say there's a fundamental problem with non-constructive mathematics.

> But formalism leads to having to accept conclusions that some of us don't like.

At least in Hilbert's sense, I don't think formalism says quite what you claim it says. He says that some mathematical statements or results apply to things we can see in the world and could be assigned meaning through, say, correspondence to physics. But other mathematical statements don't say anything about the physical world, and therefore the question of their "actual meaning" is not reason to reject them as long as they don't lead to "real" results (in the first class of statements) that contradict physical reality.

Formalism, therefore, doesn't require you to accept or reject any particular meaning that the second class of statements may or may not have. If a statement in the second class says that some set exists, you don't have to assign that "existence" any meaning beyond the formula itself.
by lcnPylGDnU4H9OF | 2025-06-13 19:49:09+00:00
I dunno about those rules; there are exceptions. Yttrium. Yggdrasil. Probably others, but those from off the top of my head.

I think the best way to define when Y is a vowel is when it's not a consonant. Basically, if you make the sound that Y represents in the word "yes", it's a consonant. Otherwise, it's a vowel. (At least, no exceptions come to mind.)
by phatskat | 2025-06-13 19:49:35+00:00
I really appreciated my brief experience with a Lumia - snappy UI, built in radio tuner, and a handful of apps. Not only was the UI responsive, it moved and flowed in a way that made it a joy to interact with. I’d say iPhone is the closest in smoothness, but nothing beats the windows phone UI experience - a sentiment I never thought I’d have.

I was talking to a coworker about Lumia a while ago when I was using it semi-regularly, and he told me he was friends with “the sole Windows Phone evangelist for MS”. We had already seen the signs of WP going out but it was just sad to see how little MS put into the platform. They have pockets deep enough - I saw Windows Stores in public years after I thought they would shutter lol
by majormajor | 2025-06-13 19:49:39+00:00
> Nonsense. There is a big difference between the implications of the following claims:

> 1. The specific people that are currently rich will become richer.

> 2. The people that are rich at any given instant in the future will be richer than the people that are rich at the current instant.

> "The rich are getting richer" almost always means #2, but it depends on the context. #1 may be more interesting to individuals competing for wealth, or for an assessment of individual mobility, but #2 is much more relevant when describing the aggregate conditions of a society. For example, the Gini Coefficient depends on #2, not #1.

> I don't think it's a stretch to say it's dishonest to presume the first meaning.

When I see people say "the rich are getting richer" - say, about tax cuts for high-income earners or businesses - it's always been definition 1. In the case of tax cuts, the action is expected to make the specific current rich people get richer. Or, when used as a more general idiom about the way of the world, that having money gives you a huge advantage in terms of making more money that means the gap is likely to widen over time.

Some other places interpreting the idiom that way:

https://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/the-rich-get-richer-and-... "the inevitability of the literal truth that, the richer you are the more relatively rich you become and, for the poor, vice-versa"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_rich_get_richer_and_the_po... "Shelley remarked that the promoters of utility had exemplified the saying, "To him that hath, more shall be given; and from him that hath not, the little that he hath shall be taken away. The rich have become richer, and the poor have become poorer; and the vessel of the State is driven between the Scylla and Charybdis of anarchy and despotism."[1] It describes a positive feedback loop (a corresponding negative feedback loop would be e.g. progressive tax)."

So it's hardly dishonest to assume the first meaning. Where are examples in common discourse of it frequently meaning the latter?
by Uehreka | 2025-06-13 19:50:21+00:00
> If you know someone building a better Godot let me know. I'll try it this weekend.

Three.js is better than Godot. Yes, even though it doesn’t have a real editor. Yes, even though it’s exclusive to the web. It is a useful and functional tool for building 3D experiences. It has compatibility with almost every file type under the sun. It supports modern/cutting-edge features like WebXR. It has a talented and disciplined maintainer (mrdoob) who has steered the ship for almost 15 years through many big changes while maintaining the same solid core. It has hundreds of easily browsable examples that are kept working and up-to-date.

I wish we were in a better place, but honestly this is where we’re at. If you want to build 3D games/experiences and want an open source stack, use Three.js and stick to the web. There are no good options for native.
by perihelions | 2025-06-13 19:51:41+00:00
> "I've searched high and low, and I found that x86 laptops improved a lot, but the screens barely reach 500 nits most of the times, which makes working outdoors a very unpleasant experience."

Wondering if you've compared different types of anti-reflective coating (i.e. "matte" vs. "glossy") of screen? I suspect a leading-order variable isn't how bright the display is intrinsically, rather how effectively stray reflections get excluded.

The best display in direct sunlight I know of is an e-ink screen, and it's 0 nits!