MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by gus_massa | 2025-06-17 20:21:33+00:00
Mathematician here. A standard trick is to look for counterexamples as simple as possible. A usual joke is that if the professor ask a question in a class, the answer is 0 or 1. (In physics, it's 0 or infinity.) If the very simple counterexample fails, you try to understand why and make a new counterexample that is slightly less simple and solves the problem. And then you iterate until you run out of counterexamples and has proved the theorem.
by Defletter | 2025-06-17 20:21:43+00:00
Just jumping in to say that while I absolutely agree that app developers engage in hostile dark patterns, the end-users are nonetheless NOT infinitely blameless. We often forget, those of us here on Hacker News, that we are not the average end-user.

jeroenhd is absolutely correct that people, generally speaking, do not care about fine-grained permissions. We try telling them to use different usernames and passwords, to use pseudonyms, to only give the minimum required access, etc, and yet it just keeps happening. This isn't an access to education issue, it's a stubbornness issue: they don't care to learn it. And in fact, they will look at us weirdly for caring about it so much: I've seen people say that anyone with a protonmail email should get their harddrives checked because only paedos would want that kind of service.

This doesn't AT ALL absolve the app developers for engaging in hostile dark patterns. But I do have to agree that even if the permission system was fixed to be perfect, it wouldn't matter for the vast majority of people because they'll allow everything anyway.
by simonw | 2025-06-17 20:21:43+00:00
The standard for "agents" is that tools run in sequence, so no need to worry about concurrency. Several models support parallel tool calls now where the model can say "Run these three tools" and your harness can chose to run them in parallel or sequentially before passing the results back to the model as the next step in the conversation.

Anthropic are leaning more into multi-agent setups where the parent agent might delegate to one or more sub-agents which might run in parallel. They use that trick for Claude Code - I have some notes on reverse-engineering that here https://simonwillison.net/2025/Jun/2/claude-trace/ - and expand on that in their write-up of how Claude Research works: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Jun/14/multi-agent-research-s...

It's still _very_ early in figuring out good patterns for LLM tool-use - the models only got really great at using tools in about the past 6 months, so there's plenty to be discovered about how best to orchestrate them.
by jmkr | 2025-06-17 20:22:28+00:00
A few weeks ago I was looking into `XReparentWindow` because certain things use it (DAW Plugins). I don't think Wayland can do something similar (but I guess XWayland works), GTK and Qt both seem to have their own version.

Looking more into plugin libraries, a lot of it is based specifically on X, I don't think that's going to be rewritten anytime soon.

I've felt for a while stuck between X and Wayland. Same with Pipewire and Jack/Pulse.
by reify | 2025-06-17 20:23:07+00:00
https://www.academia.edu/129737240/_My_Newest_Patient_Cannot...

clinically grounded self-check!

I'VE HEARD IT ALL NOW. WHERE IS THE EVIDENCE?

Yet these systems still issue fluent but unfounded answers-"confabulations" that erode trust and, in embodied agents, can pose direct safety risks.

fluent but unfounded answers, really?

No supervision needed then?
by zelphirkalt | 2025-06-17 20:24:05+00:00
Personally, I don't want to give them my e-mail address. I don't want them to sell my e-mail address to the next bidder, to make some cash to run their platform, or leak it in the next database breach or whatever. Personally, I don't use gmail or similar any longer. But then all kinds of people put their mods on NexusMods and thus beyond reach for me, without being aware of contributing to an ecosystem, that extorts users e-mail addresses.

Personally, I am also not frequently in the mood to solve shitty captchas, especially not from big brother Shoogle.

Well, it would have been nice to play some mods, but this price is too high to pay for me, so I guess then I just have to treat it as not available on the Internet.
by ajross | 2025-06-17 20:24:09+00:00
FWIW, the core assertion here isn't even LLM-specific. DSL design leans heavily on the idea of an expert author who understands the underlying data model well already. That is no less true in the meatspace world than it is for an AI.

DSLs look great if they let you write the code you already know how to write faster. DSLs look like noise to everyone else, including Gemini and Claude.

I used to be a big DSL booster in my youth. No longer. Once you need to stop what you're doing and figure out your ninth or eleventh oddball syntax, you realize that (as per the article) Everything is Easier in Python.
by qsort | 2025-06-17 20:24:14+00:00
I'm sorry, I simply refuse to take seriously an outlet that publishes the following:

""" Remarkably, SQL has started dropping slowly recently. This month it is at position #12, which is its lowest position in the TIOBE index ever. SQL will remain the backbone and lingua franca of databases for decades to come. However, in the booming field of AI, where data is usually unstructured, NoSQL databases are often a better fit. NoSQL (which uses data interchange formats such as JSON and XML) has become a serious threat for the well-defined but rather static SQL approach. NoSQL's popularity is comparable to the rise of dynamically typed languages such as Python if compared to well-defined statically typed programming languages such as C++ and Java. """
by jancsika | 2025-06-17 20:24:51+00:00
I'm supposing he meant that the body damage was the only damage, and that the known cost to repair the body exceeded the market value.

But OP states that, body aside, the car's condition was suitable to deliver at least two more decades of driving time. Buying a different used Civic at market value would introduce an unknown, unbound cost of repairs to reach that goal. Unless you're a mechanic it's essentially gambling. Or* it's a new vehicle-- in which case it will cost vastly more than the cost of the body repairs.

I suppose I understand why the market is relevant-- if it were $1 then it would be worth the gamble. But given OP's goals and foreknowledge of the car's condition, I don't understand why market value would create a hard limit against paying for the repairs. That foreknowledge is worth at least a few hundred dollars, probably way more if you factor in time to find another car and risk of it being in ill-repair. Edit: (Not to mention the depth of knowledge since OP had been driving it for nearly a decade already!)

Edit: Plus the fact that OP would have run this car into the ground. So while market value still plays some role, resale value does not.
by mrguyorama | 2025-06-17 20:25:24+00:00
It's NOT a complicated tradeoff at all.

The point is you either willingly spend the resources to independently test things for safety or companies WILL kill you to save a dollar.

This has been proven time and time again, big and small. We have the FDA entirely because a small company made "medicine" by buying medicine powder and putting it in a solvent that was acutely toxic that they didn't even think to give to an animal or something first. Literally just sold a random liquid to people as "medicine" and it killed a hundred people in utter agony.

Leaded gas was never a technical requirement. We could have been using Ethanol as our anti-knock/octane booster since the very beginning and never poison anyone but quite literally, the company chose instead to put Tetraethyl lead into gas because they could patent it, despite it being literally poison.

Same with PFOAs from 3M, who knew it was lethally toxic to mammals at fairly low doses decades and decades ago, but made no attempt to tell anyone or notify anyone or even reduce how much they were pouring it into waterways upstream of small communities. When they finally got sued by a lawyer who dug this all up in discovery, they finally said "Okay we will replace it" and replaced it with a nearly identical chemical that is just as toxic to mammals that they hope will break down easier in the environment, but how long will that take to demonstrate is false, and what are they going to switch to then?

Nixon made the EPA because companies would rather everyone die than change literally anything they've developed about their process or product, because they don't care about people dying. This idea of "bad press" or people will just stop using your products has demonstrably failed.

So suck it up, pay some taxes, test things for safety, and stop letting people die for such minuscule boosts in private company profits.
by FirmwareBurner | 2025-06-17 20:25:39+00:00
Where is what illegal? And how do you prove it? I just let my grandma or close friend live there. There, I found a workaround in 2 seconds. If I can, so can BlackRock and friends and your rental market is still fucked.

You can't fix a supply and demand problem with regulations. Why don't people get this?! I've never seen a place with strong tenant protections that has affordable or easy to get rents. See Berlin as one example of many.
by bryanlarsen | 2025-06-17 20:25:45+00:00
> There is no way Tesla survives this

Tesla can definitely survive this. They've got a low cost base, tens of millions in the bank, a rabid fan base, access to capital. It'll probably change next quarter, but as of right now they're still profitable.

Their trillion dollar capitalization is highly unlikely survive, but Tesla as a company making cars has a very long runway to survive mistakes.
by gspencley | 2025-06-17 20:25:55+00:00
> Why are we toppling all these foreign governments

I don't want to speak to the other foreign governments, and I think there is a LOT of room for healthy criticism of how the USA handles its foreign policy, past & present.

But to answer the question directly with respects to Iran, specifically: the leadership has been repeatedly chanting "Death To America" for its 45 year history and have been actively trying to develop a nuclear weapon program. It calls Israel the "Little Satan" and America the "Big Satan." A mantra often repeated: "First we come for the Saturday people, then we go for the Sunday people."

Say what you want about the USA. I'll be the first to join you in criticism of many of it's foreign policy actions, including the 1953 CIA-backed Iranian coup that arguably led to the Islamic revolution in 1979 and got us the Iran we have today. And if people want to express concern for what evils could fill the vacuum if the current regime falls... fair.

But I'm certainly not going to blame any free country for responding to an enemy state vowing to destroy it while actively trying to develop the means to do so. If there is ever any moral justification for going to war - that's it. It's defensive. That's arguably the only justification for going to war.

Feel free to disagree with me about the threat that Iran poses to the western world. Maybe it's all propaganda and overstated. You're welcome to that theory. But this is the answer to the question: "Why should the USA get involved?"
by bmacho | 2025-06-17 20:26:17+00:00
The main devs, apart from being reactionary nutjobs, created enough bugs and compatibility breaks in Xorg proper by reverting a lot of X11Libre changes.[0] I guess we will see if this project survives for longer than a few months.

[0] https://www.phoronix.com/news/X.Org-Server-Lots-Of-Reverts
by arciini | 2025-06-17 20:26:35+00:00
I was pretty convinced by this article to not use TIOBE as a mark of a language's popularity: https://nindalf.com/posts/stop-citing-tiobe/

Its primary point is that TIOBE is based on *number* of search results on a weighted list of search engines, not actual usage in Github, search volume, job listings, or any of the other number of signals you'd expect a popularity index to use.

It could easily be indicating that Python articles are being generated by LLMs more than any other class of articles.
by npteljes | 2025-06-17 20:27:05+00:00
You don't need Steam OS, any major Linux distro will suffice, as the customizations are not really on OS level, but on the Steam application level. And also, you don't strictly need Steam either, because the Heroic launcher can also do the "just select a Proton / Wine version and run Win application" functionality.

Also, Win 10 LTSC is still supported until like 2032 or so. I love it because it's more bare, and LTSCs don't get functional updates. Just install, point the thing toward an activation server / massgrave it, and you are good to go for many years.
by thisislife2 | 2025-06-17 20:27:55+00:00
> How in the world do people store images / photos nowadays?

I had some high resolution graphic works in TIFF (BMP + LZW). To save space, I archived them using JPEG-2000 (lossless mode), using the J2k Photoshop plug-in ( https://www.fnord.com/ ). Saved tons of GBs. It has wide multi-platform support and is a recognized archival format, so its longevity is guaranteed for some time on our digital platforms. Recently explored using HEIF or even JPEG-XL for these but these formats still don't handle CMYK colour modes well.
by Lammy | 2025-06-17 20:28:19+00:00
> I struggle to understand the justification for other lossy image formats as our networks continue to get faster.

Because Google's PageSpeed and Lighthouse both tell people to use WebP, and a large percentage of devs will do anything Google say in the hopes of winning better SERP placement:

- https://web.dev/articles/serve-images-webp

- https://developer.chrome.com/docs/lighthouse/performance/use...
by robocat | 2025-06-17 20:28:24+00:00
I've often seen mt written as the units for metric tons.

There's some ODD behavior where people in the US want to fuck up metric units (MB being the obvious in my lifetime non-engineer renaming of the meaning of a unit). I find the MM of finance confusing (not sure of origin). Calling tonnes, metric "tons", seems to be a US confusing thing. Or spelling metres vs meters.

Or creating units that depend on something country specific like football field (is that FIFA (EU), US, Canadian, Aussie).

Actually it seems common to desire to create industry units: https://www.theregister.com/Design/page/reg-standards-conver...

Sort of a NIH at the county level.
by btilly | 2025-06-17 20:28:40+00:00
This is Geoffrey Hinton, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geoffrey_Hinton, issuing his estimate of p(doom). He has worked in AI for a long time, and played an important role in foundational concepts such as the rise of the idea of backpropagation. So he knows enough about the subject that he should be taken seriously.

See https://pauseai.info/pdoom for a list of other knowledgeable people with their values of p(doom). Geoffrey Hinton would seem to be within the typical range, but on the optimistic side of our odds.

I believe that this should be taken seriously. Not in a Chicken Little, the sky is falling, kind of way. But we should still take the possibility of real risk seriously.
by orthecreedence | 2025-06-17 20:29:00+00:00
This is why I jumped to Wayland: laptop monitor and desktop monitor with different resolutions/scaling. Xorg choked, Wayland worked. That said, moving to Wayland broke a ton of other stuff in my otherwise peaceful workflow. I really do not like Wayland, but I need to be productive on my machine.

People have sworn up and down to me that the fractional scaling stuff is possible in X but I read probably 10 guides on how to do it and it never worked. Bummer.
by em-bee | 2025-06-17 20:29:30+00:00
You'd expect that the changes would've been reverted sooner if that was all there was to it, no? How come they're suddenly a problem?

that was my first thought too. if these commits were a problem they should not have been accepted in the first place.

was there no review process in place? and if there was no review, isn't that a sign that the project is dead? and if the project is dead what's with the sudden activity?

none of this makes sense.
by Buttons840 | 2025-06-17 20:29:35+00:00
Iran has their terrorist group proxies throughout the region. I think there's some truth to this, although the actions of some truly rogue terrorist groups probably get blamed on Iran because it's been the zeitgeist for a few decades to find reasons to attack Iran.

Whatever the case, the current Iran regime hasn't given nuclear material, chemical weapons, or biological weapons to these terror groups.

If the current Iran regime is eliminated from afar, with some fly-by bombings or whatever, what happens in the chaos that follows? Nuclear material and other weapons do not poof out of existance when the government that created them falls. Which group will control the nuclear material going forward? Roll the dice to find out.
by TkTech | 2025-06-17 20:29:39+00:00
I've been here for 13 years and I've never seen so many flagged throw-away accounts as I have in the series of threads discussing this fork. I was blissfully unaware of this niche corner of the conspiracy hive mind.

The README, their anti-vax rants, the "Make X great again!", the way they write... I'm getting Terry A. Davis (RIP) déjà vu.
by toomuchtodo | 2025-06-17 20:29:50+00:00
And batteries:

China launches world’s first grid-forming sodium-ion battery storage plant - https://www.ess-news.com/2025/06/03/china-launches-worlds-fi... - June 3rd, 2025 ("With a total investment of over CNY 460 million [$63.8 million] and occupying 34k square metres, the Baochi plant is designed for an installed capacity of 200MW/400MWh. Based on a dual daily charge-discharge cycle, it can regulate up to 580 GWh annually — enough to power 270,000 households, with 98 per cent of its energy sourced from renewables. The facility supports more than 30 local wind and solar power stations, alleviating the impact of intermittent supply and facilitating the integration of high shares of renewables into the grid.")

China Already Makes as Many Batteries as the Entire World Wants - https://about.bnef.com/blog/china-already-makes-as-many-batt... - April 19th, 2024
by ty6853 | 2025-06-17 20:29:57+00:00
I don't pretend this is an argument at all in towards the situation in Iran, so don't quote me as justifying action or inaction there in regards to this, but it is interesting to take note North Korea actually has dozens of real nuclear weapons and the death to America rhetoric and all we seem to do is laugh at them. Of course NK has no real ability to blow up the US, but they could likely nuke or at least obliterate a sizeable piece of ally South Korea no problem.
by officeplant | 2025-06-17 20:30:01+00:00
Floating roof tank> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/External_floating_roof_tank

TL:DR yes there is a seal along the roof edge and alignment poles/rods so things stay flat.

I do fire suppression builds for these tanks, so all of my equipment on the tank lid has to move up and down with it as it gets filled/emptied. So we end up with self coiling cables/hoses that have to collect themselves on the lid as it fills up. Linear heat detection wire goes all the way around the rim of the tank and also along the lid, which melts and signals the alarm/suppression system in the event of a fire. Companies with more money also have us install UV/IR based flame detection.

Same with these usually having a ladder that becomes more or less stairs depending on how full the tank is.
by WesolyKubeczek | 2025-06-17 20:30:20+00:00
I couldn't be not against Wayland in those dark times when some distributions would make it as the default, at which time the flagship Wayland DE was using XWayland for its own panels. Which made a shitshow of a blurry mess on a HiDPI screen.

I couldn't be not against Wayland when in half of the applications I used clipboard wasn't working properly.

I couldn't be not against Wayland when screen sharing would either use X11 or not work at all.

I couldn't be not against Wayland when most of the complexity shifted from X server to compositors and toolkits, and it both diluted responsibility for the gnarliest bugs (go guess if it's the compositor or the toolkit! Added fun when it's the boundary of both!) and made it possible to write GNOME-only, or KDE-only, or wlroots-only software that won't work on another compositor because it needs a private implementation of an obscure protocol.

I couldn't be not against Wayland when your window manager breaking would bring your whole session down, complete with the breakage happening a lot.

I hear that there are problems with input protocols like "your toolkit has to implement several versions of the same thing and they all are half-arsed anyway", but living in the happy land of the Unicode's Basic Multilingual Plane, I know too little of this problem to have a say about it. But I'm somehow not surprised.

There is also this thing about Unix-like systems not being limited to Linux, and the story of Wayland elsewhere is way worse.

Most of the gnarliest points are now addressed, and Plasma got super stable around 5.26 onwards, however, I'm not really happy that we now have a triumvirate of Mutter, KWin, and wlroots, and that the bar for entry for new compositors is quite high. The fact that X11 allowed a proliferation of window managers is its advantage, not the other way around.

I'm wondering if someone gets to write a compositor that will be "engine, not policy" for Wayland, on top of which different desktop environments could be built. Like wlroots, but some steps further. It will probably have a year of glory, and then Wayland will be declared obsolete, crufty, insecure, legacy, and in dire need of being replaced with something lean and simple, and maybe written by an LLM. Good thing I'm going to be too old or too dead to give a shit by the time it happens.
by rurp | 2025-06-17 20:30:26+00:00
It's clearly the latter goal, but he just needs to be able to extract money from Tesla rather than keep it going well indefinitely. He's still fighting to get his unprecedented >$50B payout (more money than the company has made selling cars in its entire history). After that he'll try to extract more 10s of billions, like he had started before the courts got in his way. Once he's sucked enough money out of the company he'll move onto other fresher pursuits.
by IshKebab | 2025-06-17 20:30:49+00:00
Well yeah just because the others are bad doesn't mean Kicad is good! I haven't tried Altium but I've used DesignSpark PCB, Horizon EDA, Eagle, Kicad and Geda.

Geda is dead now but I remember it being basically worthless.

Eagle seemed like it should be good but they've somehow screwed up every possible UX decision, sometimes in ways that I wouldn't have even thought of if I was trying. They somehow screwed up copy & paste! Look at this absolute insanity:

https://youtu.be/XHwRnunzQUE?t=35

I wonder what Tantacrul would say about that.

DesignSpark PCB is actually quite good. It's free with no limits but not open source. Has quite a dated GUI and weird zooming but other than that the UX is one of the least WTF-y I've seen.

Kicad is very powerful but the developers are clearly actively hostile to good UX.

Horizon EDA is based on Kicad's engine but fixes the UX. It's quite good but it does have a slightly confusing component model, and I have found it to be kind of slow sometimes.

I haven't tried LibrePCB yet - it does look quite good. Going to try it out for my next project.
by zzo38computer | 2025-06-17 20:31:14+00:00
> people, generally speaking, do not care about fine-grained permissions

Even if many people don't care, still it should possible if someone does want fine-grained permissions, to be able to do so (although I think proxy capabilities that I had described elsewhere, would be better than merely "allow" or "disallow", regardless of how fine-grained these "allow" and "disallow" might be).

You are right that it does not absolve app developers.