MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by 9rx | 2025-06-13 20:04:36+00:00
> I have 0 idea what Cunningham's Law is

You had no idea what it is. Now you know thanks to you the lie you told.

> choosing to lie doesn't mean you want the truth communicated.

But you're going to get it either way, so if you do lie, expect it. If you don't want it – don't lie, I guess. It is inconceivable that someone wouldn't want to learn about the truth, though. Sadly, despite your efforts in enacting Cunningham again, I don't have more information to give you here.

> I apologize that it comes across as aggro

It doesn't. Attaching human attributes to software would be plain weird.

> I think I can safely assume you're old enough to recognize some deleterious effects of lying

Time and place. While it can be disastrous in the right context, context is significant. It makes no difference in a place of entertainment, as is the case here. Entertainment has always been rooted in tales that aren't true. No matter how old you are, even young children understand that.
by jama211 | 2025-06-13 20:04:44+00:00
Very well said, people here are lacking _serious_ perspective. People don’t understand this, they protest every change. I remember someone saying in 2008 that YouTube’s old design was perfect and they shouldn’t have ever changed it and they were going to fail because of their stupid design change. They weren’t alone in this opinion. Imagine if youtube still looked like it did in 2007? Hahaha

Sheesh.
by sneak | 2025-06-13 20:04:44+00:00
> In augmented reality, interface elements must coexist with the physical world. They can't be opaque rectangles that block your view. They need to be translucent, layered, and contextually aware.

This isn’t true. You’re never going to want your browser, editor, or Slack window to be translucent.

…or your movie playback window, or Instagram, or your ebook reader, for that matter.
by arp242 | 2025-06-13 20:05:50+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.)

I know that in Go doing string operations "manually" is almost always faster than regexps. In a quick check, about 10 times faster for this case (~120ns vs. ~1150ns for 100 chars where the last is a vowel).

Of course Python is not Go, but I wouldn't actually expect simple loops in Python to be that much slower – going from "10x faster" to "2x slower" is quite a jump.

Perhaps "yeah duh obvious" if you're familiar with Python and its performance characteristics, but many people aren't. Or at least I'm not. Based on my background, I wouldn't automatically expect it.
by skissane | 2025-06-13 20:06:14+00:00
> What fraction of people who "know" that there are more reals than natural numbers, do you think really understand that this is not an eternal verity of mathematics, but only a conclusion that follows from a particular set of rules that we're playing the mathematics game with?

The claim that there are more reals than naturals holds given classical ZF(C) set theory. But there are alternative set theories in which the reals are countable, e.g. NFU+AxCount. These alternative set theories ensure all reals are countable by rendering Cantor’s diagonalisation argument invalid, since their axioms are too weak to validate it. But, they contain all the same reals as the high school mathematics concept of “reals”. So, there are many reals, and that some of them are countable and others are not are indeed “eternal truths” (it is an eternal truth that whatever axioms have the consequences they do), but the everyday (non-expert) concept of reals isn’t any of them in particular - and it is unclear if the dominance of classical notions in mainstream professional mathematics was historically inevitable or a historical accident - maybe, on the other side of the galaxy, there exists some alien civilisation, in which different foundations of mathematics are mainstream, because their mathematics took a different evolutionary course from ours - maybe for them, reals are classically countable, and uncountability is an exotic notion belonging to alternative foundations of mathematics
by dang | 2025-06-13 20:06:16+00:00
Related. Others?

If the moon were only 1 pixel - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39686916 - March 2024 (1 comment)

If the Moon Were Only 1 Pixel (2014) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32936581 - Sept 2022 (108 comments)

If the Moon Were Only 1 Pixel (2014) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27573172 - June 2021 (69 comments)

If the Moon Were Only 1 Pixel (2014) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21735528 - Dec 2019 (82 comments)

If the Moon Were Only 1 Pixel – A tediously accurate map of the solar system - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13790954 - March 2017 (81 comments)

If the Moon Were Only 1 Pixel – A tediously accurate map of the solar system - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13217129 - Dec 2016 (11 comments)

If the Moon Was Only 1 Pixel - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12038584 - July 2016 (4 comments)

A Ridiculously large accurate scale model of the Solar System - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10330303 - Oct 2015 (1 comment)

If the moon were only 1 pixel: a scale model of the solar system - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7551423 - April 2014 (17 comments)

If The Moon Was Only 1 Pixel - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7341690 - March 2014 (178 comments)
by gaborcselle | 2025-06-13 20:06:29+00:00
Key quotes:

“The radio waves that we detected were at really steep angles, like 30 degrees below the surface of the ice,” said Stephanie Wissel, associate professor of physics, astronomy and astrophysics who worked on the ANITA team searching for signals from elusive particles called neutrinos.

“My guess is that some interesting radio propagation effect occurs near ice and also near the horizon that I don't fully understand, but we certainly explored several of those, and we haven't been able to find any of those yet either,” Wissel said. “So, right now, it's one of these long-standing mysteries, and I'm excited that when we fly PUEO, we'll have better sensitivity. In principle, we should pick up more anomalies, and maybe we'll actually understand what they are. We also might detect neutrinos, which would in some ways be a lot more exciting.”
by btilly | 2025-06-13 20:06:39+00:00
My understanding of how Hilbert meant it is summed up in this quote from him: "Mathematics is a game played according to certain simple rules with meaningless marks on paper." I think that in part because I read Constance Reid's excellent biography Hilbert! It traces in some detail his thinking over his life, and how he came to formalism. His thinking about the nature of existence was particularly interesting.

If you think that he meant something else, please find somewhere where he said something that didn't boil down to that.

As for what most people think about the philosophical implications, nobody should be expected to have any meaningful philosophical opinions about topics that they have not yet tried to think about. I know that I didn't.

After you've thought about it, you may well have a dramatically different opinion than I do. For example Gödel thought that mathematical existence was real, since mathematics exists in God's mind. This idea made it important to him to decide which set of axioms was right, where right means, "These are the axioms that God must have settled on, and that therefore exist in His mind." This lead to such ironies as the fact that after proving that the consistency of ZF implies the consistency of ZFC, he then concluded that that the construction was so unnatural that Choice couldn't be one of God's axioms!

I don't agree with Gödel. For a start, I don't believe that God exists. And after I thought about it more, I realized that what I want existence to mean, isn't what mathematicians mean when they say "exists". I'm willing to use language in their way when I'm talking to them. But I'm always aware that it doesn't mean what I want it to mean.
by sensanaty | 2025-06-13 20:06:46+00:00
It's interesting for me as I'm Serbian but grew up in Indonesia. In Serbian we very much have honorifics (I think honorifics is the wrong word, not sure what the correct one is) and rules like "Younger always addresses the older with vi instead of ti, and vama instead of tebi etc. unless you're relatives or are close", but it also applies generally for strangers, so even if you're the same age or even if you're older, it's more polite to use the formal forms.

In Indonesia nobody really cares too much, and I called my teachers everything from "Ibu X" (Ibu meaning ma'am/miss, but also mother) to their first names or a mixture like "Ibu FirstOrLastName". At best you'll get a "bapak/ibu" which is basically just sir/ma'am, but I've been called "kak" (lit. translated it's something like "little sister/brother", it's a very asian concept and a lot of cultures have the same, like oniichan).

I always struggle when I go back to Serbia, 'cause I wasn't really brought up with the importance of honorifics. It feels weird when I get a kid using honorifics with me, feels like I'm 60 (I'm in my 20s), and likewise people look at me like I just spat in their face if I don't use the honorifics sometimes.

Language is truly fascinating!
by hunterirving | 2025-06-13 20:07:43+00:00
Wild World was actually the first Animal Crossing game I played! Back in the day, I remember using a browser-based pattern creator, then tapping it out by hand paint-by-numbers style with a DS stylus (which could easily take the better part of an hour). I think past me would let out a sigh of relief knowing future me finally automated it :-)
by cvoss | 2025-06-13 20:08:05+00:00
> there is a single countable list that includes all things that might possibly have any mathematical existence at all.

Help me understand that. Isn't the Cantor diagonialization argument a proof that such a list cannot exist because, supposing it did exist, it could be used to construct an object not on the list? Are you proposing that your list somehow defeats Cantor here?

(Of course, we're using the word "list" loosely here. What we mean is a total function with domain Nat, right?)
by tanewishly | 2025-06-13 20:08:06+00:00
Well, to be frank, we currently have such a ship, but we're doing quite a lot to disrupt its capability of sustaining human life.

Of course, even if we stopped doing that, we'd need to figure out how to visit another place if our ship is passing close by. That also seems to pose a problem: both Voyagers are barely out of the exhaust fumes of our ship's motor, and getting so far took ~40 years.
by Yizahi | 2025-06-13 20:08:19+00:00
Physical work exhaustion also means complete mental exhaustion at the same time. You can write code for 10h/day and be completely mentally exhausted but turn off laptop and immediately go enjoy swimming in pool or running or sitting in bar drinking with friends. On the other hand you can move heavy boxes for 10h/day and the only thing that you could do afterwards is lay down half-dead. Certainly not having energy for coding or using computer in any way, or no longer than 10-15 minutes before going to sleep in the chair. At least this is how it works for me personally.
by stapedium | 2025-06-13 20:08:23+00:00
These were my exact thoughts about HPs printer division. These should be studied in bussiness schools as the definition of enshitification for the next 25 years. PC side of HP is a different story. Their high end consumer laptops are crap compared to dells xps line. Comodity/Enterprise gear is equivalent to Dell (primary competitor) at the generic box and monitor level. Maybe a bit better on the power supply and managemet side. Worse if you bought into VMWARE ecosystem. So I thought HP…meh…dying company with legendary history of innovation in the 80s and 90s. Then I bought an HP z840 workstation for homelab. This thing is a beast. Engineered out the wazoo! Three pcix16 slots, 1+ TB RAM, 40+ cores. Documentation for days. Way better than similar era Dells. At least in the late 2010s they still had it, for the right price. For sure not unusable or any where near awful…even 10+ year old kit.

Ive got no idea about gear in the last 3 years or how they will do financially going forward. But if you are looking at the used market, the enterprise workstation gear in the late 2010s has tons of value.
by ryandv | 2025-06-13 20:08:29+00:00
⁵And when thou prayest, thou shalt not be as the hypocrites are: for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and in the corners of the streets, that they may be seen of men. Verily I say unto you, They have their reward. [...] ⁷But when ye pray, use not vain repetitions, as the heathen do: for they think that they shall be heard for their much speaking. [0]

> Does the existence of more virtuous actions make these actions nonvirtuous? Of course not.

It's less to do with there being more virtuous actions than "vain repetitions" and the parroting of empty words, more to do with the fact that such signaling in the "corners of the streets" is already completely devoid of any virtue other than the immediate (and only) "reward" of merely being seen as virtuous.

> Saying the right thing is a good start.

So this is an argument in favor of calling one's self a "deep thinker" or "a good person" or "authentic" as mentioned in TFA? I mean, these are probably among the "right things" one can say about themselves, so why not start there?

[0] Matthew 6:5,7 KJV
by paxys | 2025-06-13 20:08:34+00:00
> The move from skeuomorphic design in iOS 6 to the stark minimalism of iOS 7 sparked similar debates about usability and aesthetic merit. [...] Yet within two years, the entire industry had adopted flat design principles, from Google's Material Design to Microsoft's Metro language.

That's quite a rewrite of history considering Windows Phone and Microsoft's Metro interface launched a full three years before Apple's move to a flat design in iOS 7.
by const_cast | 2025-06-13 20:09:15+00:00
Typically single one-off studies should be dismissed and shouldn't be cause for concern. Anybody can study anything and it's very, very easy to do wrong.

For most everyday lay people, you should be looking at meta-analysis. We just don't have the context to hone-in on one study and examine how correct it is or what it actually means for our everyday lives.
by jama211 | 2025-06-13 20:09:33+00:00
They did, the only people who thought Apple Vision Pro devices were people who intentionally or not were taking the release in bad faith in an attempt to ridicule the device and its price.

Apple has never pretended to be anything other than a luxury goods company, they bang on endlessly about how high end everything they make is, yet people keep acting all surprised pikachu that they’re priced like luxuries and are sometimes aimed at markets that go above the average consumers head.
by kepano | 2025-06-13 20:10:00+00:00
I agree with your core sentiment but unfortunately we don't have a mass-producible display technology that allows for black pixels in a see-through optic (yet). It's going to be really hard to achieve.

Pass-through is the only AR approach that currently allows black pixels, but it has uncomfortable limitations compared to a see-through optic.

https://stephango.com/black-pixels
by MrThoughtful | 2025-06-13 20:11:46+00:00
Funny, in the comparison image the article shows for the 3 design styles - Skeuomorphic, Flat, Liquid Glass - the Skeuomorphic one looks absolutely best to me:

https://substack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com/public/images/6...

The items look so much more tangible, and the text is more readable. Everything is easy to grok visually. The flat design looks way more confusing. And the liquid glass one looks even worse.
by Centigonal | 2025-06-13 20:11:58+00:00
good point on break-even cost.

I can't consider this an art project when the creator has integrated:

- A lifetime membership fee for downloading all icons

- A sponsorship subscription option that lets subscribers integrate their own icon (ad) into the collection

- A credits system for generating new icons using AI

Nothing against creators getting paid, just saying that this is monetized to the gills and looks more like an indie hackers thing than an art project.
by xnx | 2025-06-13 20:12:45+00:00
Also, no evidence that Liquid Glass isn't a bad UI for AR too.

John Carmack writes:

Translucent UI is usually a bad idea outside of movies and non-critical game interfaces.

The early moments of joy are fleeting, while the usability issues remain. Windows and Mac have both been down this road before, but I guess a new generation of designers needs to learn the lessons anew. Sigh.

All of the same issues apply in AR as well. Outside of movies, people do not work out their thoughts on windowpanes or transparent “whiteboards” because of the exact same legibility issues.

Would you prefer a notebook of white sheets, or hundreds of different blurry image backgrounds?

https://x.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/1932521605340483607
by Someone1234 | 2025-06-13 20:12:47+00:00
I've seen this speculation a lot, but that's all it is speculation. Apple has been working on an AR concept for going on 4-5 years now, and as recently as January this year were reported to have given up yet again:

https://www.theverge.com/news/604378/apple-n107-ar-glasses-c...

Yet I see this speculation copied (TechCrunch), copied (MacRumors), copied (Substack), from one article to another with the fervor rising at each one. Yet we never approach anything close to substantive.

I read in 2023 AR is due in 24, then 24 it was 25, and now in 25 it is due in 26. AR also now has something to do with AI because of course it does, and Apple's new blurry UI is something to do with this product 1.5 years out at minimum... Sure.
by btilly | 2025-06-13 20:13:05+00:00
As I pointed out at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44271589, there are systems that can accept Cantor's argument, without concluding that there are more reals than rational numbers.

As you point out, there are many mathematical systems that contain all of the numbers in the high school mathematics concept of "reals". Since those with a high school understanding of reals do not know which of those systems they would agree with, they should not be asked to accept as true, any results that hold in only some of those systems.

And that is why I don't like mathematicians telling lay audiences that there are more reals than rationals.
by joeld42 | 2025-06-13 20:13:22+00:00
Some Jam Games with web builds:

https://itch.io/jam/luxe/entries?ref=luxeengine.com

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/56/terrarium-combinarium

https://joeld42.itch.io/bridges

More jam games that I didn't make a web build for but downloads are available:

https://joeld42.itch.io/lighthouse-keeper

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/54/cargo-space

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/53/last-mile

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/51/artichoke-key

On Steam:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1836400/Mossfield_Origins...
by jama211 | 2025-06-13 20:14:15+00:00
I imagine this comment will age just as well as the comments about iOS 7 did.

I have the most controversial opinion here I think: I think it’ll be just fine. Not incredible! Not necessarily amazing! Not terrible either! Just… fine. They’ll dial it back a bit into public beta and then public release, and no one will care that much and it’ll be fine.

People getting all storm in a tea cup over this.
by al_borland | 2025-06-13 20:14:33+00:00
I thought WebOS looked great and thought it was the only real chance we ever had for a 3 platform. Much of the UI we take for granted in mobile devices today came from WebOS (such as card based app switching and swiping to close). I would have loved to see what it could become, rather than relegating it to TVs. iOS wasn't what it is today back then. It was still pretty new itself, and lacking what most would say are very basic features today.

I often wonder what HP would look like today had Léo Apotheker not been such an awful fit. The damage 1 person can do in less than a year is astonishing. He even proposed selling off the PC division. WebOS was a fairly new acquisition and very well could have been the future, but he couldn't see any vision outside of software with his background. HP was built on hardware, they did't need to pivot that hard. It seems the stockholders agreed.
by out-of-ideas | 2025-06-13 20:15:08+00:00
but isnt the point of liquid ass[1] supposed to be a universal design across all platforms[2]? that just means it should hopefully be easier to update as time changes

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44243404

2: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44226612

edit: forever formatting
by ben_w | 2025-06-13 20:15:17+00:00
I'm old enough to remember when the iPhone OS was the gentle introduction to iPad OS — all the rumour sites' mock-ups of the then-upcoming mystery Apple Tablet showed MacOS.

In retrospect, watchOS 1.0 was the gentle introduction to what became SwiftUI. At the time, I was a bit frustrated that I couldn't specify widget position and size like I was used to.

Honestly I still am frustrated by that. We already had variable size windows back in the days of Win3.11 and System 7 — we've just made it far more complicated to do the same things, and even several years into SwiftUI it feels like we've got more bugs with SwiftUI based apps than we ever had with UIKit, and I'm not sure if that's the layout stuff or the reactive stuff or both.
by gamblor956 | 2025-06-13 20:15:18+00:00
Firefox on Windows was definitely not working.

Hard disagree on the UX. Remember that it's not what you think of the UX, it's what your users think of the UX. This is basically like GIMP or Darktable; I'm sure it makes sense to power users who have invested a lot of time, but unless you want that tiny group to be your market, you need to make the UX way more user-friendly.
by samwillis | 2025-06-13 20:16:05+00:00
This would make sense if there was any indication that AR is going to happen. I would argue that there isn't even the faintest signal that it will.

People do not want invasive glasses, even if they make them as small at normal glasses. I just don't see it becoming anything other than a niche product.

It's like all the moves to voice/audio interfaces powered by AI. They simply won't take off as audio is inherently low bandwidth and low definition. Our eyes are able to see so much more in our peripheral vision, at a much higher bandwidth.

Some would argue that's an indication that AR will happen, but it's still so low deff, and incredibly intrusive, as much as I love the demos and the vision (pun not intended) behind it.

As far as I can see, the only motivation for the visual overall is that they need something to fill the gap until they have some real AI innovations to show. This is a "tick" in the traditional "tick" -> "tock" development and release cycle - a facelift while they work on some difficult re-engineering underneath. But that's not AR, it AI.
by krackers | 2025-06-13 20:16:34+00:00
I don't get those benefits: randomly generated password is by definition only going to be usable at the site it was generated for. I'm not sure what it means for a password to "encode my identity", but if it includes device-specific bits then that seems like an anti-feature. And autofill for passwords is mostly good enough as a standardized way to input passwords saved in a password manager.