MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by didibus | 2025-06-17 17:25:16+00:00
I think we are all working without data here, it's all conjecture.

I went with OP's hypothesis that you are not faster, you throw things at the wall, wait, and see if it sticks, or re-throw it until it does. This reduces your cognitive load, but might not actually make you more productive.

I'm assuming here that "you are not more productive" already accounted for what you are saying. Like in a 8h day, without AI, you get X done, and with AI you also get X done, likely because during the peak productivity hours of your day you get more done without AI, but when you are mentally tired you get less done, and it evens out with a full day of AI work.

There's no data here, it's all just people's intuition and impression, not actually measuring their productivity in any quantifiable way.

What you hypothesize could also be true, it the mental load is reduced, can you sustain a higher productivity for longer? We don't know, maybe.
by therealmarv | 2025-06-17 17:25:17+00:00
not according to Aider leaderboard https://aider.chat/docs/leaderboards/

I use only the APIs directly with Aider (so no experience with AI Studio).

My feeling with Claude is that they still perform good with weak prompts, the "taste" is maybe a little better when the direction is kinda unknown by the prompter.

When the direction is known I see Gemini 2.5 Pro (with thinking) on top of Claude with code which does not break. And with o4-mini and o3 I see more "smart" thinking (as if there is a little bit of brain inside these models) at the expense of producing unstable code (Gemini produces more stable code).

I see problems with Claude when complexity increases and I would put it behind Gemini and o3 in my personal ranking.

So far I had no reason to go back to Claude since o3-mini was released.
by jmj | 2025-06-17 17:25:37+00:00
Invariant is the property that is preserved on every iteration. Proof of termination in imperative languages can be done by proving that a natural number decreases with every step.

Dafny implements this at the compiler level (and a curly braces syntax!).

Coq uses other methods more tailored towards recursion.

You are right that if every loop must terminate, it is not Turing complete. So some valid programs will not compile.

There are some interesting programs that potentially never terminate (like servers, daemons, OS, games, etc) formal methods can be applied too. For instance to prove that they preserve certain property or that they don't terminate or terminate only under certain conditions.

I find the theory extremely elegant and pleasurable, but it´s obviously not everyone's cup of tea, as shown by its lack of widespread use.

LLM's might create a revival in the coming years for the following reasons:

1) cost of formalization goes down 2) cost of proving goes down 3) cost of programming goes down 4) provable code quality becomes a differentiation among a sea of programs
by naet | 2025-06-17 17:25:44+00:00
I actually have a ton of toy cameras and I love them, so I bet I would love that Fuji too. It's right up my alley in terms of what I like: something a little silly and fun that is easily portable and can take pictures.

The only thing is price is way too high for what it is. As much fun as I would have with it, $800 is too much for what it is. And that is definitely too high for something you're handing to your kids. Anyone with kids knows that kids tend to break things or lose things pretty frequently.

I have a "camp snap" camera that costs something like $50 (was even less when I bought it) and operates similar to the Fuji in that it's one button to take a picture, no screen so you don't see it until later. Yeah, the quality isn't as high as your $10,000 body only Leica M11... but as it says here "the sensor is too small, but the kids didn’t care".

I also have a thermal print kids camera that my two year old son loves to carry around, although he more or less just snaps random photos of the ground and doesn't point it at anything. It's a blast for me to take out with friends sometimes too, since the cost of receipt paper makes it maybe two cents for an instant printed photo with a nice black and white dithered look. The battery does go pretty quick when the printer is on but the camera was less than $20.

For a more adult camera, you can get a decent something used for maybe $200 that will take fairly high quality photos (much better than the Fuji in question).
by jfengel | 2025-06-17 17:25:47+00:00
It seems a weird argument to make. I don't think that ranked-choice voting will actually help all that much, but it's absurd to say that it's "not democracy".

Elections are always ambiguous when there are more than two candidates. Ken Arrow won a Nobel Prize for proving it, but it's pretty intuitive even without the proof. A majority is clear, but with more than two candidates you're not guaranteed a majority. Strategic voting will cause you to vote for somebody other than your favorite.

You can handle that a lot of different ways: runoffs, instant-runoffs, alternative votes, approval voting, etc. But there's no such thing as a democratic system that always gives you a binary choice between exactly two candidates -- unless somebody is dictatorially reducing the field to two.

Primary elections are inherently multi-way, and ranked choice is as good a way to deal with that as any. It's bizarre to call that non-democratic. That sounds as if they're wishing away the problems facing any democratic choice.
by jeroenhd | 2025-06-17 17:25:48+00:00
I've been using Wayland for years and most applications will just work, either under XWayland or natively. The only problematic ones are the ones with incomplete Wayland implementations and the ones relying on the complete lack of security design on systems like X11 of Win32. The biggest blocker for me has always been Nvidia, and that problem was solved years ago. Meanwhile, whenever I drop back to X11, I'm reminded that things like multi-touch gestures are plainly broken on X11 mode in ever DE I've tried.

To be honest, I've never seen a Linux desktop that most people would call "production ready". Even in the best days, X11 and Wayland have glitches, hardware issues, and stability problems that no other platform seems to suffer from. It took until Pipewire for audio to actually work well out of the box.

As for X11, KDE and probably others will run X11 for years to come, mostly because companies like Canonical and Red Hat ship LTS versions. Whether applications will keep supporting old configurations is another question (what software still runs on Ubuntu 16.04? I wouldn't know and I bet neither do most third party vendors), but the protocol itself isn't dying any time soon. It's not allowed to by corporate contracts.

What is dying, is corporate investment into X.org and X11 targets for some desktop environments. Developers and companies that favor X11 can come together and fork those projects, or join the dev team, to ensure their desktops work like they used to. Just because IBM doesn't want to pay developers to maintain such configurations doesn't mean they suddenly stop working, just that someone else will need to apply bugfixes from then on out. The only serious attempt I've seen from people who want to keep X11 alive was that fork from that antivax anti-DEI weirdo.
by hwillis | 2025-06-17 17:26:36+00:00
Not in industry, but: rockets can be like 90% fuel by weight. All engines on 105% can lift the rocket, so if you want to land while the tanks are nearly empty you need to be able to get to less than 1/10th of your thrust. Turning off engines only gets you so far- the Space Shuttle engine could throttle between 67% and 109% of rated power but if you only have 1/3 engines on you can only get as low as 22% power.

One major reason for this is the mixing plate at the top of the combustor. Fuel and oxygen are distributed to tiny nozzles which mix together. The better the mixing, the more stable the burn. If you get unstable burning -eg momentarily better mixing in one area- it will cause a pressure disturbance which will further alter the burning power in different areas of the combustion chamber. At low throttle, this can be enough to cause the engine to turn off entirely.

Fluid simulations have made a huge difference. It's now possible to throttle engines down to 5% because mixing is much more stable (manufacturing improvements in the nozzles have also helped) and combustion is more protected from pressure variations.

The extra stability also just makes it easier to control a rocket period. Less thrust variation to confuse with drag properties, less bouncing, better sensor data.
by thrance | 2025-06-17 17:26:51+00:00
I mean... yes. I just think it's weird insisting that someone that looks like a man, talks like a man, acts like a man is actually a woman because if you take a sample of their saliva, run it through a very expensive machine for a few days and decode the results with a supercomputer you can group them with most other womens on that basis.

I feel like the "new" definition of man is just that much more natural than the "biological" one, even ignoring the intersex people which are impossible to categorize with the latter.
by delfinom | 2025-06-17 17:26:57+00:00
Window restoration was not recently released, it was put in as experimental and it'll probably be another 5 years before it's available on stable distros as a non-experimental flag protocol.

>A significant portion of the problems listed, e.g. performance, "unpredictable focus", glitches, freezes, etc., will generally be purely KiCad bugs

The issues have been looked into and they are purely Wayland bugs.

If things work on Windows, macOS and X11 without any platform specific ifdefs, the problem is Wayland ;)
by kens | 2025-06-17 17:27:18+00:00
There's some interesting history behind the world's smallest motor. In 1959, Feynman gave a talk, "There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom", which kind of invented the field of nanotechnology. He discussed how you could use tools to build smaller tools, and then smaller tools, until you could manipulate matter on the atomic scale.

To motivate the development of micro-tools, Feynman offered a $1000 prize (more than $10,000 in current dollars), to anyone who could build a motor smaller than 1/64" on a side. Less than a year later, a Caltech grad won the prize, creating the motor with "a watchmaker's lathe, a microscope, and sharp toothpicks." Although the motor won the prize, it was a disappointment because it didn't use any new technologies or make any advances toward nanotechnology.

It wasn't until 1985 that Feynman's second challenge was won: scaling down a page of text by a linear factor of 25,000. A Stanford grad student reduced a page from A Tale of Two Cities to a 5.9µm square.

Links: https://calteches.library.caltech.edu/3479/1/Tale.pdf https://books.google.com/books?id=iXcmTROdA1EC&pg=RA2-PA10 https://archive.org/details/noordinarygenius00feyn/page/174/... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There%27s_Plenty_of_Room_at_th...
by arghwhat | 2025-06-17 17:28:42+00:00
> So we have two opposite claims. One from the developers of kicad in this write-up with examples and one from you above.

You have the organizations maintaining entire Linux distributions with countless applications they support giving their vote of confidence based on their experiences.

You have the organizations backing and developing Wayland.

You have all the developers of Xorg ditching it and working on Wayland instead (the person vocally claiming to pick up the slack recently had almost all their work reverted when it was found to have been completely broken).

That's a lot of people voting with their time (and in some cases, money) on Wayland and its capabilities. So no it's not my claim that Wayland works vs. KiCad devs, it's the claim of everyone that actually have skin in the display server game.

(They will also agree that some features are missing, but things like focus, graphical glitches and performance are not Wayland issues, just application bugs.)
by sergiotapia | 2025-06-17 17:28:49+00:00
Very frustrated with Windows in general. I just discovered they are throttling my computer with Efficiency Mode on processes like Brave, Bruno, Cursor, etc.

It's like that Auto Shutoff they added to cars. Helps no one, and nobody wanted it. (Thanks Obama https://www.newsweek.com/automatic-start-stop-technology-new...)

I would be on Linux today if Steam OS came out properly for desktop. I'm ready to dip.
by kjkjadksj | 2025-06-17 17:28:58+00:00
It is a rubber stamp cert. I’ve been to a continuing medical education talk. It is your bog standard visiting scholar giving a 45 min talk of their research. Lecture hall is sleepy aside from the usual suspects. Sheet pizza from the cheapest place in town is being served. People are nodding off in the back. About the only way you can tell this is a continuing medical education event is the clipboard and pen being passed around for MDs to sign their name along with a signature.

It is a far cry from actual class. Learning isn’t required only saying you were there.
by chasil | 2025-06-17 17:29:31+00:00
If we are going to be specific, 64-bit ARM (in the form of AArch64) arrived in 2011.

It would seem to me that Intel and AMD were not friendly to custom designs at that time, and MIPS was not significantly evolving.

A fast, low-power CPU that can access more than 4gb and is friendly to customization seems to me to be a recent development.
by perihelions | 2025-06-17 17:29:40+00:00
> "competition leaped directly to testing an engine they were developing for orbital launches"

SpaceX' Starhopper was an orbital Raptor engine. The *test vehicle* wasn't orbital, but, it's testing the in-development orbital engine and associated plumbing under flight conditions (which is useful, because... well you can see the various ways Starhopper failed at the start). Likewise, Grasshopper before that, in 2012-3, was a single Merlin engine (the Falcon 9 has, eponymously, 9).

SpaceX never flew a suborbital hop with anything other than an engine intended for orbital flight.

I think if Honda had an orbital-class reusable engine at the hardware stage, that'd be flying that to test it as much as possible. I'm not aware of any of the competitors doing otherwise. This is signalling they don't (yet?) have one.

edit: Or LandSpace, whose 10 km suborbital hop last year flew one of the methane engines their orbital vehicle has nine of.
by estebank | 2025-06-17 17:29:47+00:00
I also agree that the machine doesn't go off on a puff of smoke the second the OS is no longer supported, but having an Internet connected device with an unsupported OS is not tenable. There are options, like of course running Linux instead for as long as distros support your hardware, but even then you're only buying time. At some point the avalanche of "progress" will cause software to rely on things your hardware can't do. That is a shame, because I don't really need anything from post-2000 hardware beyond pure speed increases. I have a fully functional and up to date T460 that I enjoy using, as long as you're not compiling anything big on it, running more than a handful of applications or doing anything while YouTube is playing.
by ocdtrekkie | 2025-06-17 17:29:56+00:00
The theoretical security people have gone off the deep end. The idiots in charge of browsers have decided the entire internet should break every 47 days in case someone might get a private key to a certificate, even though that's basically never been the source of a security compromise ever.

Meanwhile, advertising on the Edge start page and the top of Chrome search is the number one source of practical, working malware attacks. But those things make the browser companies money.

I no longer think big tech security people are serious.
by codingdave | 2025-06-17 17:30:06+00:00
This is one lesson we learned well living in the American southwest. Judicious timing of opening and closing windows and curtains can make a vast difference in the energy costs to maintain a comfortable temp in your home. Now that we have moved to the northern tier of states in the US, we still open and close curtains to follow the sun as the day progresses, and open/close windows based on indoor/outdoor temps. We also add and remove curtains seasonally, really bundling the place up in the cold winters. It feels like micro-management, but it becomes second nature.
by zelias | 2025-06-17 17:30:11+00:00
Not sure where else to post this, but when attempting to use any of the Gemini 2.5 models via API, I receive an "empty content" response about 50% of the time. To be clear, the API responds successfully, but the `content` returned by the LLM is just an empty string.

Has anyone here had any luck working around this problem?
Show HN: OntoCast – Extract RDF triples using LLMs and co-evolving ontologies
by acrostoic | 2025-06-17 17:30:51+00:00
OntoCast is a Python tool that extracts semantic RDF triples from unstructured documents (PDF, JSON, Markdown, text) using LLMs guided by ontologies.

It co-produces both the fact graph and the ontology, refining both through multi-stage critique and validation. This makes it domain-agnostic and useful even without a predefined schema.

Includes a /process endpoint (MCP-compatible) that returns RDF triples and ontology in Turtle. Supports entity disambiguation, semantic chunking, and KG aggregation. Can run locally or via REST, using OpenAI or local models via Ollama.

Repo: https://github.com/growgraph/ontocast

Docs: https://growgraph.github.io/ontocast
by briandw | 2025-06-17 17:30:53+00:00
Rocket engines struggle to throttle down to low levels due to combustion instability, injector dynamics, and turbopump limitations. Here are some stats on minimum throttle levels:

SpaceX Merlin 1D: ~40% Rocketdyne F-1 (Saturn V): ~70% Space Shuttle Main Engine (RS-25): ~67% Blue Origin BE-4: ~20–25%

Falcon 9 does the "hover slam" where they have to turn off the engine exactly at touch down, or the rocket starts to go back up again. Throttle is too high for the weight of the booster at that point in flight.
by dr_kiszonka | 2025-06-17 17:31:57+00:00
They nerfed Pro 2.5 significantly in the last few months. Early this year, I had genuinely insightful conversations with Gemini 2.5 Pro. Now they are mostly frustrating.

I also have a personal conspiracy theory, i.e., that once a user exceeds a certain use threshold of 2.5 Pro in the Google Gemini app, they start serving a quantized version. Of course, I have no proof, but it certainly feels that way.
by arghwhat | 2025-06-17 17:31:59+00:00
> Window restoration was not recently released, it was put in as experimental and it'll probably be another 5 years before it's available on stable distros as a non-experimental flag protocol.

That's not how Wayland protocol maturity works. Protocols of interest are picked up immediately and graduate to stable after wide adoption. The naming was also changed to "staging" instead of "unstable" to clarify this.

(Case in point, linux-dmabuf was only recently stabilized, and many protocols in mainstream use are not "stable").

> The issues have been looked into and they are purely Wayland bugs.

Bugs reproducible only with their Wayland platform code ≠ Bugs in Wayland.

> If things work on Windows, macOS and X11 without any platform specific ifdefs, the problem is Wayland ;)

Not at all how things work, no. :)
by didibus | 2025-06-17 17:32:27+00:00
I think you make a good point. There is an issue of people talking over each other. The reality is, we don't all do the same work. It's possible my job and someone else's involves having to deliver very different code where the challenges to it differ.

One person might feel like their job is just coding the same CRUD app over and over re-skinned. Where-as I feel my job is to simplify code by figuring out better structures and abstractions to model the problem domain which together solve systemic issues with the delivered system and enables more features to work together without issue and be added to the system, as well as making changes and new features/use-cases delivery faster.

The latter I find a creative exercise, the former I might get bored and wish AI could automate it away.

I think what it is you are tasked with doing exactly at your job will also mean that your use of agentic AI actually makes you more productive or not.
by quantadev | 2025-06-17 17:32:33+00:00
> RPN is every bit as easy [as LISP]

Riddle me this then: When editing code full of parentheticals, why do devs find it helpful that IDEs can find and highlight the matching opening/closing parenthesis automatically? I mean, based on your logic, parenthesis just don't make things any easier, right? I'll leave the topic of "indentation" completely off the table too, because a single riddle is enough.
by HotHotLava | 2025-06-17 17:33:11+00:00
For me, I actually feel much more motivated to write good and accurate documentation knowing there will be at least one reader who is going to look at it very closely and will attempt to synthesize useful information from it.

Same with my old open-source projects, it's kinda cool knowing that all the old stuff that nobody would have ever looked at anymore is now part of a humanity-wide corpus of useful knowledge on how to do X with language Y.
by supermatt | 2025-06-17 17:33:19+00:00
Looking back again on the article, I can see why you are confused.

The author has outright fabricated this whole idea of chip sovereignty being a part of Jupiter. I have no idea where he (and therefore you) got this idea from, but its simply not true - and further points to him just making some excuse to euro-bash. It seems to be a sign of the times under the mad king’s reign. When facts don’t support the narrative, they get reshaped to suit the mood. This kind of editorialising, where political sentiment is passed off as technical insight, doesn’t just weaken the argument, it undermines trust in serious discourse.

FYI, the selection criteria only allocated 100 points of a total of 1100 (of which a minimum of 50 were required) to "Contribution to the objectives of the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking" (https://eurohpc-ju.europa.eu/about/discover-eurohpc-ju_en#mi...). i.e. Sovereignty was not a key objective. This is all public knowledge that you can easily find for yourself.

EDIT - link to the procurement doc: https://ec.europa.eu/info/funding-tenders/opportunities/port...
by eminence32 | 2025-06-17 17:34:00+00:00
First paragraph of the "4. Discussion and Conclusion" section

> We speculate that the participant’s fair skin and lack of hair were significant factors that reduced the attenuation of light to feasibly detect a signal. In addition to the participant wherein a signal was observed, the experiment also included trials on seven other subjects. The details of the subject pool are as follows: two females and six males; 25 to 35 years old; 14.5 to 15.5 cm head diameter; Fitzpatrick skin types: 3 type I, 4 type II, and 1 type V; hair types: 1 bald, 4 short and light-colored, and three dense and dark-colored. We did not observe any significant time-correlated signals above background noise for the seven other subjects.
by IshKebab | 2025-06-17 17:34:22+00:00
> Cursor/pointer warping: Essential for many CAD operations

Err no. I don't know why EDA guys have this weird idea that cursor warping is totally normal. DesignSpark PCB does this too - when you zoom it warps the cursor! Wtf is that?

Kicad has pretty awful UX so I guess this crazy view isn't that surprising.

> things like being able to position windows or warp the mouse cursor. This functionality was omitted by design, not oversight.

Yeah again... I'll give you window positioning, but an app should never warp my cursor. It's mine. Get your stupid hands off it.
by potato3732842 | 2025-06-17 17:35:09+00:00
The entire framing of this article fact that we don't even know the name of whoever he was trying to protect tells you a lot.

Clearly we're not meant to be upset that fed-cops can behave this way generally, we're meant to be upset that they dared treat another agent of the state, a more equal animal, the way they'd treat a common peasant who got similarly uppity. Caring about these generalities is outside our lane.