MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by praptak | 2025-07-01 09:07:37+00:00
This says you can't fix what you don't notice. This is obviously true. But then it jumps to the moment where you jot the impulse down. There's a gap here - to write something down you gotta notice it first too.

Anyone working with awareness and attention will probably tell you the missing components: intention and positive reinforcement. You can't directly make your awareness notice things. You can do two things which work indirectly. The first is cultivating intention. Remind yourself to notice your mental states whenever your conscious mind happens to remember to. Consciously check in on your mental state - again, whenever your conscious mind remembers to. This primes awareness - it tends to notice things that you previously consciously focused on.

The second component is positive reinforcement. Whenever your awareness works by drawing your attention to the trigger ("whisper"), pat yourself mentally on the back. This trains your awareness to notice this more often.
by greggsy | 2025-07-01 09:08:01+00:00
I did this with some rando soil sensors on clearance from my local Jaycar (very popular store in Australia, similar to Tandy, Dick Smith, or Radio Shack when they were still around).

Anyway, it wasn’t in the library of known devices in RTL433, but I was really impressed that I was able to get it up and running with community tools and doco to parse and reformat the transmissions.
by ryanhooooo | 2025-07-01 09:08:24+00:00
Hey HN, I built Zookish,

https://app.zookish.com/

a “voice orb” that lets your website talk: visitors ask questions in plain English, book demos, search resources all with no forms. We’ve seen a 25% engagement lift on beta sites. I’d love your quick thoughts:

Is voice navigation a gimmick or game-changer?

Which use cases or industries excite you most?
by ljf | 2025-07-01 09:08:53+00:00
I used to paraglide and I was very vaguely looking into options for getting wind and other weather data from sites - back in the 00's it was still pretty complex, and I got as far as prototyping a very simple set up which was simply a LCD weather station in a box, with a symbian smart phone pointing at it. If you sent it a text message, it would snap a picture and send it back via MMS or email. I barely got it working, but never tried it in anger - most of the sites I flew didn't have 3g at the time.

Amazing to see what options are possible now, I really should get a weather station going again, I wonder if I could get the signal from the beach near my house, as that would be more interesting than my garden.
by noirscape | 2025-07-01 09:09:22+00:00
Same here with Dutch: you could pretty much watch i18n degrade real time by observing the quality of the dutch translations for all major sites and tech products over the years.

Back in the 2000s, dutch wasn't very common but it usually was pretty good (my understanding is that one of the things that helped is that everyone followed the Microsoft style guide for dutch translations?)

Nowadays you get overly literal translations (meaning some form of MTL), translations that don't care for the length of the text (so it gets cut off with ... at the end for interface buttons) and so on and so forth. It all just reeks of automatic translation with little care put into the presentation. This is pretty much a universal experience across every single system I've ever used and why I usually just set all my devices to English. - It's simply not worth it to deal with the botched translations to try and figure out what was actually meant.
by torginus | 2025-07-01 09:10:18+00:00
I kinda feel differently - it's more like how nowadays you have access to high-quality power tools at cheap prices, and tons of tutorials on Youtube that teach you how to do woodworking, and even if you can't afford the masterwork furniture made by craftsmen, you don't have to buy the shitty mass produced stuff - sure yours won't be as good, but it will be made to your spec.

Moving on into a concrete software example, thanks to AI productivity, we replaced a lot of expensive and crappy subscription SaaS software with our homegrown stuff. Our stuff is probably 100x simpler (everyone knows the pain of making box software for a diverse set of customer needs, everything needs to be configurable, which leads to crazy convoluted code, and a lot of it). It's also much better and cheaper to run, to say nothing of the money we save by not paying the exorbitant subscription fee.

I suspect the biggest losers of the AI revolution will be the SaaS companies whose value proposition was: Yes you can use open source for this, but the extra cost of an engineer who maintains this is more than we charge.

As for bespoke software, 'slop' software using Electron, or Unity in video games exists because people believe in the convenience of using these huge lumbering monoliths that come with a ton of baggage, while they were taught the creed that coding to the metal is too hard.

LLMs can help with that, and show people that they can do bespoke from scratch (and more importantly teach people how to do that). Claude/o3/whatever can probably help you build a game in WebGL you thought you needed a game engine for.
by tialaramex | 2025-07-01 09:10:23+00:00
One concern here is that proofs don't necessarily prove what we intuitively think they do. So we need to be very careful to understand what we actually proved.

The TLS 1.3 "Selfie attack" is an example of a gap between what we did prove and what we intuitively understood.

The formal proof for TLS 1.3 says Alice talking to Bob gets all the defined benefits of this protocol, and one option is they have a Pre-shared Key (PSK) for that conversation. They both know the same key, in that sense it's symmetric.

But the human intuition is that we're talking about an Alice+Bob key, whereas the proof says this is an Alice->Bob conversation key. If we re-use the same PSK for Bob->Alice conversations too we get the Selfie Attack, the formal proof never said we can expect that to work, it was just our intuition which confused us.
by pistachiosPower | 2025-07-01 09:10:25+00:00
You are already the second case in two weeks that have abandoned ROS for industrial purpose(and not university), preferring to build something of their own. I agree that the build system is more complicated than it should be,but I was unaware of the problems related to the resources used by the nodes.

Your comment gave me a lot to think about, thank you.
by mcherm | 2025-07-01 09:10:54+00:00
The specific behavior of the hash function (including the salt you chose). Choosing a different hash function (or a different salt) would result in a different breakdown into chunks.

In principle, if your data were specially crafted to exploit the specific hash function (and salt) you could get an aberrant case like 1 million entries in a single b-tree node or a million b-tree nodes with just one entry. But unless you intentionally exploit the hash function the chance of this is vanishingly small.
by silisili | 2025-07-01 09:11:09+00:00
Xfinity is the worst service I'd ever used.

I'm boring. I want a pipe, like a water pipe for data, and I'll do the rest. This makes them actively combative.

Ignoring the whole TV/landline stuff they keep pushing as that's too easy a target, they are actively hostile about just using internet.

It was way cheaper to use their modem. About $15/mo. Why? Because they want a huge hotspot network in every house. They swear it won't affect speed, but as I never got close to advertised speeds, I didn't believe that. They also act as their 'cell network' that they try to push, and basically call you an idiot for declining. In fairness their cell network is pretty cheap, but I'm just not interested.

I chose to pay more to use my own modem, and they absolutely hounded me, stopping just short of calling me stupid about once a month. Maybe it was commissioned sales people searching for people like me as a given, and getting mad when I rebuffed.

And let's not even talk about data caps. Which, by the way, using their modem exempted you. Why? I naively assume because they can't differentiate hotspot data from yours. Maybe I'm wrong.

The whole service is dystopian. I moved since luckily to a rural, middle of nowhere area that does their own fiber. It has zero of those issues, and costs about half as much for twice the speed. It makes you realize how scummy they really are.
by chartered_stack | 2025-07-01 09:11:47+00:00
That's a fair point.

I use English while using any YT client so I didn't notice it as much. So I changed the language on my browser to German, went to a couple of American channels and now I get some of the outrage on this thread. Weirdly, some videos get their titles translated and some don't. Not only the titles but also the descriptions get translated. Honestly, I'm surprised they aren't translating the comments at this point.

I still do understand and like the feature a lot. It's a good way to push the engagement rates I guess. A simple solution would be to show a dialog with languages where the users can pick what they speak, not touch videos in those languages and translate everything else.
by grues-dinner | 2025-07-01 09:11:59+00:00
Maybe this is my millennial spoiled-for-choice nature, but that seems very strange to me. Though certainly it was (is?) similar in older generations here (overheard in the 80s: "pasta? no, no, we don't eat that foreign muck, it's meat and two veg in my house").

But if I lived somewhere where there are noticeable varieties of rice with local characters, it seems more fun to at least be open to trying them rather than stick with one for my life. Same with fresh pasta variations, olives etc in Italy, say.

Even for things like bread and coffee, I'll usually buy different kinds just to mix things up. Sourdough and Columbian today, rye and Ethiopian next week. I don't really have a "usual" of anything much that I'd be disturbed by changing to an alternative. Sometimes you get hits and occasionally misses, but that just means the you appreciate the hits more!
by thaumasiotes | 2025-07-01 09:13:58+00:00
It's a terrible example of why you should strive for independence.

>> Langley died first. He was crushed by one of his own booby traps - a makeshift tunnel of newspapers and debris - while attempting to bring food to his paralyzed brother Homer.

An independent paralytic is a dead paralytic. You can't be independent and paralyzed.
by StochasticLi | 2025-07-01 09:14:26+00:00
I don't think it matters. Here is why I would pay 10x more for using Apple devices than other devices:

1. The ecosystem is just much better, ie. the quality of apps is in another league compared to apps on Android or Windows.

2. Many amazing apps that are at the core of my company's workflow simply don't exist on other platforms at all. With no comparable equivalents.

3. We get many apps earlier. Even up to a year earlier. Example: Clubhouse. Running a company, my marketing team can't afford to be late to a new social media platform, risking that it becomes the new status quo. I can name a dozen apps that were 6 to 12 months late to Android vs. IOS :(

If these change I would happily move to Linux, or Windows (once they make the OS usable).

We use Linux servers for running Python/Node Scripts, and APIs.

We use 1 Windows machine to use a very specific data science app that only exists for Windows.

Before anyone says I'm a fanboy. I'm here to generate revenue for my company. I don't give 2 sh*ts about AAPL.

---

But this is just me.

Why it won't matter to the public: The kids don't care. The want an iPhone.
by mrkeen | 2025-07-01 09:14:33+00:00
They are consistency boundaries too.

> This problem is usually caused by a leaky abstraction; the ORM, or whatever database abstraction you are using, can’t anticipate that it would need to send N queries, so it can’t automatically optimize this down to a single query.

If you do an if-statement with an ORM before doing an update-statement, the result of the if-statement is already stale before the update occurs. If you skipped the ORM and put your if-statement as a where-clause, it's less of a problem.

> However, this only works since Haskell is declarative / pure; the low-level operational semantics (like evaluation order) are abstracted away from the programmer, and as such are amenable to optimization.

What else is declarative / pure? SQL. Not ORMS.
by gherkinnn | 2025-07-01 09:15:34+00:00
Yes, I know Sundar is Indian. This doesn't stop Google from being one of the worst major tech companies I use at internationalisation and localisation.

Date formats, start of the week, 12/24h clock, auto translations, localised search results, language detection, it is all rubbish and clearly US-centric.

For all their (former) diversity dances, that company has very little to show for it.
by dinfinity | 2025-07-01 09:18:04+00:00
> Language is literally an abstraction of sensory inputs and cognitive processes.

Language can exist entirely independently from senses and cognition. It is an encoding of patterns in the world where the only thing that matters is if anybody or anything wielding it can map the encodings to and from the patterns they encode for (which is more of a sociological/synchronisation challenge).

Does C, or Java, 'make no sense' because it 'ignores lower level cognition'?

There are many parts of non-programming languages that similarly have nothing to do with embodiment. Some of them are even about incredibly abstract things impossible in our universe. One could argue that for many fields genius lies in being able to mentally model what is so foreign to the intuition our embodiment has imbued us with or to be able to find a mapping to facilitate that intuition. Said otherwise: the experience our embodiment has given us might limit how well we can understand the world (Quantum Mechanics anyone?).

Again, embodiment is interesting and worth pursuing, but far from a requirement for far-reaching intelligence.
by judofyr | 2025-07-01 09:18:29+00:00
The opposite of probabilistic is not deterministic in this context. This is not about «drawing a random number», but rather that balancing is dependent on the input data. «With high probability» here means «majority of the possible input data leads to a balanced structure».

If it was not probabilistic then the balancing would be guaranteed in all cases. This typically means that it somehow stores balancing information somewhere so that it can detect when something is unbalanced and repair it. In this data structure we’re just hashing the content without really caring about the current balance and then it turns out that for most inputs it will be fine.
by sfn42 | 2025-07-01 09:19:46+00:00
I use lots of libraries and it works fine. Popular libraries are usually written by competent developers, some times they will even tell you the time complexity of a function in the documentation. Most of the time library code won't be a problem.

It really seems to me like you don't understand the advice about premature optimization. This is it, this is what Knuth is talking about. Profiling everything, optimizing everything. That's premature optimization.

Mature optimization is when you have an application and you see that part of it is slow. You investigate, for example with a profiler. Maybe you write benchmarks. Then you try a different approach and benchmark that as well (either with an actual benchmark library or just by running the code locally) and see if the new solution is faster.

I like to refer to what I do as macro optimization. I don't spend significant time worrying about performance, I just write code and kind of just keep complexity, IO and such in mind, avoiding badly scaling algorithms if I can. I don't care if the badly scaling algorithm might be slightly better than the one that scales, because that difference is nearly always negligible.

Like you said in your other comment, some times the constant can make the O(n^2) algorithm faster than the O(n) one for small inputs. But that difference is nothing, it's gonna be like one runs in 5 nanoseconds and the other runs in 10. So you saved 5 nanoseconds and nobody noticed nor cared. Then the input grows and now your badly scaling algorithm runs in 2 hours whereas the scaling one runs in a few milliseconds. That's why you use the best scaling algorithm by default. Even if you think the input will never grow you might be wrong, and the consequence of being wrong is bad. So you have a high risk and low reward.
by gyomu | 2025-07-01 09:19:52+00:00
The complex emergent narratives people love in Dwarf Fortress or Caves of Qud aren’t branching stories though?

If the argument is “let’s build games that tell character stories as complex as Last of Us with the world building techniques of Dwarf Fortress”, it might be worth considering why 1) it wouldn’t be feasible and/or 2) it wouldn’t lead to a game that’s as fun/compelling as a more narratively linear counterpart.

The narrative in Last of Us is compelling because it’s tight and focused and authored by the authors to be told in a very specific way.

The “emergent narrative out of raw world simulation” argument sounds like filming thousands of hours of security camera footage and expecting Citizen Kane to come out of it.

I mean again, I would be pretty receptive to a “this game had the right idea, we should push it further” argument, but the “I’m a visionary game designer who hasn’t shipped a game that embodies my vision AND the thousands of other game designers are clueless, but everyone will see how clever I was in 3 centuries” argument rings pretty hollow.

For what it’s worth, Chris Crawford’s tool (http://storytron.com/) is a branching story editor, and one that seems much less powerful than what is used in the industry (eg articy).
by Nullabillity | 2025-07-01 09:20:37+00:00
> A better solution would be a ‘blacklist’ of languages you understand—so YouTube only auto‑translates from languages you don’t speak, and always leaves familiar languages in their original form.

A better solution would have been to just not ship this disaster of a "feature" in the first place.

I wouldn't want my browser to automatically translate every page I go to (without my consent!) either, and that would've been a much easier job!
by fleischhauf | 2025-07-01 09:21:00+00:00
except the area is so hugely popular with people who unfortunately lack the rigor or curiosity to ask for this and blindly believe claims. for example this hugely popular repository https://github.com/x1xhlol/system-prompts-and-models-of-ai-t...

where the authors fail to explain how the prompts are obtained and how they prove that they are valid and not a hallucination.
by rsynnott | 2025-07-01 09:23:53+00:00
_Actual_ centre parties can work, in multi-party democracies, and are kinda seen as the _default_ in some countries. Both the CDU and SPD in Germany are fairly centre-y, say (normally categorised as centre-right and centre-left respectively), and one or the other (or sometimes both) have ~always lead the ruling coalition.

Two problems:

- The US is not a multiparty democracy and has no realistic route to becoming one, given the near-impossibility of fixing its voting system.

- It is implausible that anything run by _Elon Musk_, who is a far-right lunatic, would remotely fall under the definition. This feels more like an attempt at splintering the Republican Party. Again, this often happens in multi-party democracies, where parties fracture on a wedge issue; typically the splinter withers away, but there are exceptions. Again, it's hard to see it happening in the US as the electoral system just doesn't really support a multi-party system.
by eclecticfrank | 2025-07-01 09:25:58+00:00
It might make sense to split the car analogy into different users:

1. For the majority of regular users the best way to understand the car is to read the manual and use the car.

2. For F1 drivers the best way to understand the car is to consult with engineers and use the car.

3. For a mechanic / engineer the best way to understand the car is to build and use the car.
by fauigerzigerk | 2025-07-01 09:26:02+00:00
This argument doesn't make sense. Many developers are de facto forced to distribute their apps on iOS. There are only two mobile platforms globally. Deciding not to support one of them would be economically (and in some cases functionally) unviable for a very large number of apps.

However, the counter argument that opening iOS to other stores and payment methods would not affect users who prefer the App Store is not necessarily true either. If developers can choose not to distribute via Apple's store to avoid restrictions that are unfavourable to their business model then users would no longer be able to buy those apps in the App Store.

This is the dilemma that needs to be solved.

One solution could be to adopt a rule similar to the one for social logins. If an app supports any social logins at all then it must also support Sign in with Apple. Unfortunately, adopting a similar rule for the App Store is a lot more complex.

If an app rejected by Apple is then not allowed to be installed via an alternative app store either, Apple would once again be able to veto apps for whatever reason they want. And if developers were free to set a any price they want for each store, they could effectively make the App Store unviable.

I still feel that there is a set of rules that could make this work. The complexity is unfortunate though.
by qwertox | 2025-07-01 09:26:20+00:00
Autodubbing is probably the worst feature Google has ever implemented.

It's OK if they want to offer it, but at least let me disable it for specific languages.

And for those languages which I don't understand, let me choose a default autodubbing language. Because I assume that auto-generated translations from French to English will be far better than those from French to German or Spanish.

Also, the voices they use sound like from a decade ago.
by fainpul | 2025-07-01 09:26:43+00:00
PowerShell has everything related to argument parsing, helptext generation, tab completion, type coercion, validation etc. built-in with a declarative DSL. Many things work even directly OOTB, without requiring special annotations.

It is by far the nicest way to create CLI tools I have ever seen. Every other shell or commandline parsing library I ever tried, feels extremely clunky in comparison.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/module/microsof...
by alextingle | 2025-07-01 09:27:28+00:00
I don't imagine that the exposed state would need to be represented in the final compiler output, so the optimiser could mark the pointer as exposed, but still eliminate the dead integer load.

Or from a pragmatic viewpoint, perhaps if the optimiser eliminates a dead load, then don't mark the pointer as exposed? After all, the whole point is to keep track of whether a synthesised pointer might potentially refer to the exposed pointer's storage. There's zero danger of that happening if the integer load never actually occurs.
by Joker_vD | 2025-07-01 09:27:45+00:00
Working with function pointers is always finicky. I once had MSVC fold together

int f0(int x) { return x; } int f1(int x, int y) { return y; }

into a single function, so at runtime, (void(*)())f0 and (void(*)())f1 would compare equal. AFAIK, you are not guaranteed by the standard that functions of different signatures would, when their addresses are taken, result in different pointers, so it's not technically a bug... but it's quite surprising, and ruins certain tricks.
by throwawayffffas | 2025-07-01 09:28:57+00:00
They are doing it wrong, they are acting like they are on vacation, which obviously gets old pretty fast.

The right way to do it is to setup a regular lifestyle in the place of your choosing, rent an apartment, instead of Airbnb and hotels, work from a home office or an actual office instead of Starbucks.

Ideally learn the local language and go where the locals go instead of where the tourists go.

Obviously this can't work if you are moving every other month or so, but that too gets old pretty fast.