MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by monktastic1 | 2025-07-15 17:47:07+00:00
If this were true, then why even bother to make atomic clocks? Why would an article about the "most accurate clock" be interesting to smart people like HN readers if there's no objective measure of accuracy (or if it didn't matter)? The correct answer is in a sibling comment to yours: we base it on other things we know (or believe, anyway) to be constant.
by vouaobrasil | 2025-07-15 17:47:13+00:00
I don't know if you should feel bad or not, but even I know that I have a role to play in consumerism that I wish I didn't.

That doesn't necessitate feeling bad because the reaction to feel good or bad about something is a side effect of the sort of religious "good and evil" mentality that probably came about due to Christianity or something. But *regardless*, one should at least understand that because our world has reached a sufficient critical mass of complexity, even the things we do that we think are benign or helpful can have negative side effects.

I never claim that we should feel bad about that, but we should understand it and attempt to mitigate it nonetheless. And, where no mitigation is possible, we should also advocate for a better societal structure that will eventually, in years or decades, result in fewer deleterious side effects.
by phire | 2025-07-15 17:47:19+00:00
The TV might have been 4:3, but most DVD movie releases were widescreen by 2002. So you lost upto 40% of that 27" CRT to letterboxing.

The pan-and-scan DVDs seemed to die out long before everyone had 16:9 TVs. Consumers seemed to decide they preferred letterboxing over cropping.
by reverendsteveii | 2025-07-15 17:47:29+00:00
I spent a year powerlifting and lost absolutely no weight, then spent 2 years powerlifting while restricting myself to 1800 cals/day and lost weight. If we're doing personal anecdotes.

If we're doing hard data, I think you're overestimating the impact of taking 500 calories a day off of the average American's diet, which comes in at around 3800 calories/day (https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/chart-gallery/chart-d...). Assuming 3300 net calories per day after exercise, one would have to be in the neighborhood of 400 pounds for that to be below maintenance level assuming 40 y/o moderately active based on the mayo clinic calorie counter (https://www.mayoclinic.org/healthy-lifestyle/weight-loss/in-...). Hell, I ride a bike 6 miles and lift weights every day, have done for two years, and my maintenance calories are still only in the 2200-2300 range, which means if my diet was average I'd be exercising every day and still putting on pounds rather quickly. Tldr - I think your results are an outlier because you've underestimated how much better your existing diet is than the average.
by jitl | 2025-07-15 17:47:49+00:00
Yeah, I think I'm conflating our fear of >5000 connections for our Postgres workload (read-write that is quite write heavy) with our SQLite workload, which is 99.9% read.

The way our SQLite workload works is that we have a pool of hundreds of read connections per DB file, and a single writer thread per DB file that keeps the DB up to date via CDC from Postgres; basically using SQLite as a secondary index "scale out" over data primarily written to Postgres. Because we're piping Postgres replication slot -> SQLite, we don't suffer any writer concurrency and throughput is fine to keep up with the change rate so far. Our biggest bottleneck is reading the replication slot on the Postgres side into Kafka with Debezium.
by librasteve | 2025-07-15 17:48:32+00:00
It’s odd to see such a widely adopted language as Rust only just getting some regex basics. Whereas Raku (https://raku.org) has made a strong forward step in regex syntax over PCRE, made by the same language designer with implementation of modern unicode savvy features like Grapheme and Diacritic handling that are essential to building consistent code to handle multilingual needs.

say "Cool" ~~ /<:Letter>* <:Block("Emoticons")>/; # ｢Cool｣ say "Cześć" ~~ m:ignoremark/ Czesc /; # ｢Cześć｣ say "WEIẞE" ~~ m:ignorecase/ weisse /; # ｢WEIẞE｣ say "หนูแฮมสเตอร์" ~~ /<:Letter>+/; # ｢หนูแฮมสเตอร์｣
by mmphosis | 2025-07-15 17:48:44+00:00
I fire up Mac OS X 10.5.

Lacking that I use lots of monitors, turn off window snapping, swap the ctrl and alt keys. I cringe a lot. Why can't windows store position and size hashed to monitor layout? I get that PC hardware is janky but why the random monitor layout? I never want mirroring, why is mirroring the default? Why would I want 2K resolution on a monitor that can do 4K? I could go on.

I am adept with the mouse so I have come realize that we all have different preferences.
by ars | 2025-07-15 17:49:01+00:00
You are not actually measuring the accuracy of the clock, rather you are measuring the magnitude of the noise. The clock source itself is something physically fundamental and unchanging, but it gets mixed with noise.

For example even very small magnetic fields will change the clock speed, thermal changes will as well (so will lots of other things). So you try to shield from that, and keep the temperature stable (and of course you need to figure out every other things that could add noise).

Then you measure all those influences that you just are unable to control, and calculate what affect they have on the clock, and that's your accuracy number.

One way to directly measure that, instead of calculate it, is to have two identical clocks, synchronize them, and let them run. Then compare them, and see if they differ. (Watch out for relativity messing with time.)
by _bent | 2025-07-15 17:49:03+00:00
Custom mesh normals is huge, because this used to be a PITA.

Tugged away at the end is defining custom cameras through OSL, which is a very very interesting feature, because it allows more physically accurate lens emulation, with dramatically more interesting bokeh than the standard perspective camera model: https://www.reddit.com/r/blender/comments/1kehtse/new_camera...
by vouaobrasil | 2025-07-15 17:49:06+00:00
Of course that makes sense. But for instance, with SOME technologies, I would prefer not to use them but still sort of have to because some of them become REQUIRED. For example: phones. I would prefer not to have a telephone at all as I hate them with a passion, but I still want a bank account. But that's difficult because my bank requires 2FA and it's very hard to get out of it.

So, while I agree in prinicple that it's nice to make decisions on one's own, I think it would be also nice to have the choice to avoid certain technologies that become difficult to avoid due to their entrenchment.
by accrual | 2025-07-15 17:49:25+00:00
> also, "GPT-4o continuously listens to speech through the audio stream," is going to be problematic

This seems like a good place to leverage a wake word library, perhaps openWakeWord or porcupine. Then the user could wake the device before sending the prompt off to an endpoint.

It could even have a resting or snoozing animation, then have it perk up when the wake word triggers. Eerie to view, I'm sure...

https://github.com/dscripka/openWakeWord

https://github.com/Picovoice/porcupine
by hiAndrewQuinn | 2025-07-15 17:49:25+00:00
Oh, I have a relevant and surprisingly simple example: Binary search. Binary search and its variants leftmost and rightmost binary search are surprisingly hard to code correctly if you don't think about the problem in terms of loop invariants. I outlined the loop invariant approach in [1] with some example Python code that was about as clear and close to plain English at I could get.

Jon Bentley, the writer of Programming Pearls, gave the task of writing an ordinary binary search to a group of professional programmers at IBM, and found that 90% of their implementations contained bugs. The most common one seems to have been accidentally running into an infinite loop. To be fair, this was back in the day when integer overflows had to be explicitly guarded against - but even then, it's a surprising number.

[1]: https://hiandrewquinn.github.io/til-site/posts/binary-search...
by jodrellblank | 2025-07-15 17:49:31+00:00
blindriver: "you must own two homes and then buying a third makes you an investor"

me: "no, that would mean people who own one home to live in and one home to rent out are not investors. Owning one and investing in a second makes you an investor."

You: "you are sarcastically and obtusely arguing that being an investor requires owning 3+ homes!"

No, I'm not arguing that.

> "thereby classifying the people who are simply swapping homes like you stated as "investors""

Nobody was talking about people who own two homes while moving houses. But if we were then the choice is (people who own a second house to rent are not classed as investors just in case they get confused with people moving house) which is wrong permanently and silly, vs (people who own two homes while selling their old home are classed as investors for a while) which is wrong temporarily but not too unreasonable, then I will pick the latter.
by photonthug | 2025-07-15 17:49:45+00:00
Most platforms don't grow this feature because they can benefit from redirecting user energy into places that the platform is choosing. Or some vocal minority of the user base benefits from redirecting the platform to a place of their choosing.

Similar to nest usurpation with eusocial insects, this is by definition parasitism when the energy-redirection is unwanted or unavoidable.

In the specific case of AI it's way worse than the usual suspects where everyone is effected and so everyone has to have some opinion (looking at you politics). Because even some rant about how much you hate AI is directly feeding it at least 3 ways: first there's the raw data, then there's the free-QA aspect, then there's the free-advertisement aspect when others speak up to disagree with your rant. So yeah, even people who like some of the content sometimes quickly start to feel hijacked.
by johnnyanmac | 2025-07-15 17:49:50+00:00
This isn't some niche outcry: https://www.forbes.com/sites/bernardmarr/2024/03/19/is-the-p...

And that was 18 months ago.

Yes, believe it or not, people eventually wake up and realize slop is slop. But like everything else with LLM development, tech is trying to brute force it on people anyway.
by IAmBroom | 2025-07-15 17:50:10+00:00
Why is "stable society" the end goal?

I don't even know what you mean by that. Divorce rates have skyrocketed, and likewise women trapped in DV situations unable to leave has dropped considerably.

Today is far more urban than the US I grew up in. And organized religion is far less popular.

Population hasn't been stable since at least the invention of steam engines.

Etc.

I don't want "stable"; I want "safe". I want the next generation to live in a world that is AT LEAST as safe as this one, healthwise, likelihood of war, crimewise... and really I want better on all of those. As my childhood time vastly improved on the early 20th-C when my parents were kids.
by Karrot_Kream | 2025-07-15 17:50:12+00:00
The atmosphere on the site was very different then. There was plenty of Erlang vaporware and lots of "how to grow your startup" growth spam which wasn't called growth spam yet. The community was a lot less cynical then (though obviously the middlebrow dismissal [1] tendency of the site is quite old.)

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4726248
by paulcole | 2025-07-15 17:50:31+00:00
I must be more below average than you because it's a huge improvement for me over stack overflow.

I'm doing mostly scripts (some Python but mostly Google Apps Scripts) to automate processes at a digital marketing agency. As long as I can clearly explain how our business works and what I'm trying to accomplish I'm getting working first drafts of things that would take me hours to write (a way worse version of) in 30-40 minutes – and 25-35 minutes of that is writing the prompt/documenting the automation I want made.

It's really been amazing for me.
by rufus_foreman | 2025-07-15 17:50:33+00:00
From the Uniform Commercial Code:

"'Conspicuous', with reference to a term, means so written, displayed, or presented that, based on the totality of the circumstances, a reasonable person against which it is to operate ought to have noticed it."

What are some of the ways you can tell if a term in a legal document is conspicuous? One of the ways mentioned in the UCC:

"a heading in capitals equal to or greater in size than the surrounding text"

So apparently the thinking is that if you make everything in the license all caps, it is all a conspicuous term, and thus a court will be convinced that a reasonable person ought to have noticed it.
by 65 | 2025-07-15 17:50:47+00:00
One liner you can use in a GreaseMonkey/TamperMonkey script:

[...document.querySelectorAll('.titleline > a')].filter(link => link.innerText.split(' ').find(word => ['llm', 'ai'].includes(word.toLowerCase()))).forEach(el => {const sub = el.closest('.submission'); sub.nextElementSibling.remove(); sub.remove() })

I wrote this in 2 minutes so I'm sure someone is going to reply with something better.
by hombre_fatal | 2025-07-15 17:50:58+00:00
If you're going to insult me, at least insult me directly instead saying it in a weird roundabout 3rd person caricature.

I get value from Twitter and I just acknowledged that it's quite shit, so you'll have to elaborate on what you think I'm missing. I don't like how it turns my timeline racist/political over time. I mostly follow indie gamedev chit chat. The community is on Twitter.

Bluesky/Mastodon aren't a real option. They are a splinter group who complain about Twitter all day and everything is infected with just-as-rotten political discourse.
by sashank_1509 | 2025-07-15 17:51:03+00:00
My hot take is I don’t think burn out has much to do with raw hours spent working. I feel it has a lot more to do with sense of momentum and autonomy. You can work extremely hard 100 hour weeks six months in a row, in the right team and still feel highly energized at the end of it. But if it feels like wading through a swamp, you will burn out very quickly, even if it’s just 50 hours a week. I also find ownership has a lot to do with sense of burnout
by reducesuffering | 2025-07-15 17:51:31+00:00
"Safety is actually more of a thing than you might guess if you read a lot from Zvi or Lesswrong. There's a large number of people working to develop safety systems. Given the nature of OpenAI, I saw more focus on practical risks (hate speech, abuse, manipulating political biases, crafting bio-weapons, self-harm, prompt injection) than theoretical ones (intelligence explosion, power-seeking). That's not to say that nobody is working on the latter, there's definitely people focusing on the theoretical risks. But from my viewpoint, it's not the focus."

This paragraph doesn't make any sense. If you read a lot of Zvi or LessWrong, the misaligned intelligence explosion is the safety risk you're thinking of! So readers "guesses" are actually right that OpenAI isn't really following Sam Altman's:

"Development of superhuman machine intelligence is probably the greatest threat to the continued existence of humanity. There are other threats that I think are more certain to happen (for example, an engineered virus with a long incubation period and a high mortality rate) but are unlikely to destroy every human in the universe in the way that SMI could."[0]

[0] https://blog.samaltman.com/machine-intelligence-part-1
by GolDDranks | 2025-07-15 17:51:43+00:00
According to ChatGPT, the speedup factor for getting 10 cm higher is 1 + 1.09e−17. (With ΔT = gh /(c^2) The math seems to check out, but not sure if the formula itself is correct.) Surely, if the clock ticks at rate 1e-19 in a second, i.e. one tick is hundred times smaller than the dilation difference in a second, the clock would still need at least a hundreth of a second to accumulate enough ticks for the count of ticks to differ even by one tick because of the dilation.
by CamperBob2 | 2025-07-15 17:52:17+00:00
Now that is a browser I'd pay for. A genuine user agent, rather than just a browser.

It would also need to be able to "Recognize tasteless, ad-ridden, or other difficult-to-read pages, silently dismiss cookie popups and signup solicitations, undo any attempts to reinvent scrolling, remove all ads except for those on topics X, Y, and Z, and present the page using something like Firefox's reader mode."

Other requirements would include "Fill in these fields that are marked as autocomplete=off," "Use this financial site to display exactly the charts and tables that I want, in this order," "Clean up broken, irrelevant and repetitive search listings on Amazon and eBay," and so on.

For extra credit: "Maintain this persona on Facebook, this one on Bluesky, this one on Slashdot, and this one on HN. Synthesize documents needed to establish proof of age and other aspects of personal identity."
by marshray | 2025-07-15 17:52:34+00:00
It's always disappointing to me to come across some really interesting innovative new tool, like a programming language, and then find it was built on JVM.

I get it. It's all about the size of the ecosystem and the garbage collector.

Yes, there are great open source implementations. But not even Google could pull off a clean-room reimplementation without encountering unthinkable legal expense.
by Scaevolus | 2025-07-15 17:52:45+00:00
Page 5: "It emits an event, then immediately returns a response — meaning it always reports success (201), regardless of whether the downstream email handler succeeds or fails."

This is not the right way to accomplish this. If you want a Lambda function to trigger background processing, you invoke another lambda function before returning. Using Node.js events for background processing doesn't work, since the Lambda runtime shuts down the event loop as quickly as possible.
by leakycap | 2025-07-15 17:53:08+00:00
Great way to drive home the point about air pollution, and cool that AI helped you bring an idea to this stage so quickly!

I was confused by the city drop down, though. I tried entering my city and zip code and other things and then realized it is a set list of 20 cities like a map with areas one can click to explore could remove the confusion and provide a route for someone to explore data points for contextual understanding.

If someone was enjoying the buildout and wanted to build it, I could see the map details being available down to county levels, and could imagine letting AI incorporate info about local industry and regulation (or lack thereof) to see what the data shows.

Or, more focused: With the scattered coal plant shutdowns across the country over the last decade, it would be interesting to see before/after air quality reports highlighting the importance of every major emission source that is taken offline for AQ in that area (just thinking out loud, I love data stuff like this - great work!)
by dragontamer | 2025-07-15 17:53:22+00:00
Why is this being down voted?

If you are pushing vertices around to make a model, you eventually have to think of topology issues if you ever want to make a good animation.

And then when you have a good topology... Then You need to rework the UV Maps, Normals and other such data so that it's all consistent.

LLMs are not the right tool for this. I'm sure some AI retopology tool can come around but there is a HUGE difference between a model designed for stills, a model designed for animation and finally, a model designed for close up facial animations.

The topology differences alone are insane.

---------

Now maybe in the future an Ubermesh (like the Uber shader / principled shader) can be made to make these processes consistent. And then tooling can be made over the hypothetical Ubermesh. But today it's a lot of manual retopology that requires deep thinking about animation details.

Ex: an anime style mouth doesn't usually move the jawline (Think Sonics mouth: its basically a moving hole that jumps around his face). Meanwhile, western 3D animation (Baldurs Gate and the like) obviously have fully made lip sync including phhfff, eeee and ahhh sounds.

The 'Kind' of animation you want leads to different mesh topologies. It's just the nature of this work.

And people get ANGRY when you ex: animate Sonic with traditional teeth and jawline (see 'Ugly Sonic'). You can't just willy nilly pick one style randomly. You need purposeful decisions.

--------

I guess if you are a pure sculptor / stills then you don't have to worry about this. But many 3d projects are animated, if not most of them. The retopology steps are well known.

LowPoly look will almost certainly require manual effort (these topology problems tend to disappear with more triangles).
by throwanem | 2025-07-15 17:53:38+00:00
'Domination' in what sense? I could see a couple ways you might mean this, and as qe are HNers of similar "tenure" but as far as I recall more or less otherwise strangers to one another, I could see some interest perhaps in comparing our views of what's changed and how. (Hence being vague here to try to avoid putting too strong a stamp on initial conditions...)
by Terretta | 2025-07-15 17:54:04+00:00
> How can I test my website on safari without owning Apple hardware?

Arduously?

Check this very surprising thing out:

https://github.com/WebKitForWindows/WebKitRequirements/relea...

This is how Playwright has a webkit engine. An old discussion:

https://schepp.dev/posts/running-webkit-on-windows/

And this visual engine rendering compare tool leverages it:

https://github.com/niutech/splitbrowser

Separately, not sure if/when this will be a real thing for Linux:

https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2025/03/kag-orion-web-browser-co...
by johnnyanmac | 2025-07-15 17:54:10+00:00
Well, given the answers to the former: maybe we should stop now before we end up selling even more of our data off to technocrats. Or worse, your chatbot shilling to you between prompts.

And yes these are still businesses. If they can't find profitability they will drop it like it's hot. i.e. we hit another bubble burst that tech is known to do every decade or 2. There's no free money anymore to carry them anymore, so perfect time to burst.
by vel0city | 2025-07-15 17:54:31+00:00
I get what you're saying about the American love affair for SUVs, it's insane how large so many people think their cars need to be to have a car seat and a dog and groceries.

But I also think it's disingenuous to lump a car like the Mach E and Ioniq 5 in the same size class as a Chevy Suburban and Honda Pilot and Ford Expedition. They're far closer to the hatchback of yesterday than they are to any of those monsters, and yet they're both called "SUVs".

And I do wish there were more smaller cars on the market. You're absolutely right, if it's pretty much only you or maybe you + 1 with a small bit of cargo even something like a Mach E (or even the Volt) is pretty much oversized. I do think people should have more choice in right-sizing their vehicles.
by rvz | 2025-07-15 17:54:43+00:00
> Worried about how sustainable this is for its people, given the risk of burnout.

Well given the amount of money OpenAI pays their engineers, this is what it comes with. It tells you that this is not a daycare or for coasters or for the faint of heart, especially at a startup at the epicenter of AI competition.

There is now a massive queue of lots of desperate 'software engineers' ready to kill for a job at OpenAI and will not tolerate the word "burnout" and might even work 24 hours to keep the job away from others.

For those who love what they do, the word "burnout" doesn't exist for them.
by tfandango | 2025-07-15 17:54:49+00:00
Elimination of the incentives is the correct solution, yet solving the problem correctly is often harder and more time consuming than just saying you solved it. These raids are public and chaotic and easy, and then you can just claim to have solved the problem, which works just fine for them. You see, politically, the incentives are not to solve the problem because we believe the lies they tell.