MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by pilaf | 2025-07-17 07:22:07+00:00
This is tangential, but I recommend Katsushiro Otomo's (of Akira fame) dystopian take on large-scale automated construction, the short movie Construction Cancellation Order, part of an anthology known in the west as Neo Tokyo[1], released in 1987 (Akira was released in 1988).

I won't link to it here, but it seems someone uploaded it to archive.org (most likely illegally).

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neo_Tokyo_(film)
by Aeolun | 2025-07-17 07:22:32+00:00
> Making life is a normal part of life, and it's quite sad that we don't acknowledge the capacity of young adults.

I think it’s more that we’re all just faking it. The thirty or fourty year old that thinks they know better than the 20 year old is deceiving themselves. The differences between individuals are much larger than the differences between the averages at those ages.
by FeepingCreature | 2025-07-17 07:23:39+00:00
Man's scale is Earth.

You know, I think you have no evidence for any of your claims of "impossibility" either. And I'd argue there's a ton of counterevidence where man, completely ignoring how impossible that's supposed to be, effects change on a global scale.

You're comparing two dissimilar things. On the one hand slowing it down (which contrary to your claim that I'm moving the goalpost, is at sufficient investment effectively equal to stopping it), on the other, "contributing" to safe co-existence, which is trivially achieved by literally doing anything. I'm telling you that if we merely "contribute" to safe co-existence, we all die. The standard, and it really is the standard in any other field, is proving safe coexistence to a reasonable standard. Which should hopefully make clear where the difficulty lies: we have nothing. Even with all the interpretability research, and I'm not slagging interpretability, this field is in its absolute infancy.

"It can't be prevented" simply erases the most important distinction: if we get ASI tomorrow, we're in a fundamentally different position than if we get ASI in 50 years after a heroic global effort to work out safety, interpretability, guidance and morality.
by volemo | 2025-07-17 07:24:30+00:00
I know I can’t claim to be “the norm”, but all I want is a smaller phone with 1–2 day battery life. I don’t need a better screen, a better camera, or ever more compute. (It’s a freaking smartphone, not a game console!) All I need my phone to do is run a web browser, messaging apps, maps, my banking app, and random little apps some organisations force you to use – like my university’s app, my city’s public transport app, or half the restaurants here. Things that could easily be done with 10–15 year old hardware. Sadly, the industry chose to keep the power consumption constant increasing while computational power, instead of focusing on smaller devices and longer battery life with the same power.

Again, I’m not angry that current phones exist; I’m just sad there aren’t (good) alternatives – at least that I know of.
by eszed | 2025-07-17 07:24:56+00:00
> not at all convinced the acquittal wasn't the correct verdict

I agree with you. I followed it closely at the time, and thought acquittal was the correct verdict based (only) on what the jury saw. We court-watchers, of course, saw everything that the defense managed to exclude, and came to a different (and I do believe more accurate) conclusion, but the jury got it - from their (deliberately constructed by the defense) point of view - right.

It was a formative episode in my civic understanding.
by deathanatos | 2025-07-17 07:25:00+00:00
> String types

It's a byte string.

> rune is the set of all Unicode code points.

We copied the awful name from Go … and the docs are wrong.

Five different boolean types?

Zero values. (Every value has some default value, like in Go.)

Odin also includes the Billion Dollar Mistake.

> There seemed to be an anti-DIY approach in the community that finally drew me away.

It's a "let a thousand flowers bloom" approach, at least until the community knows which design stands a good chance of not being a regretted addition to the standard library.
by BrandoElFollito | 2025-07-17 07:25:08+00:00
There are many countries that refuse to take back their citizens (despite the international law).

In that case you either need to kep them detained in your country with the problem of space, protests, haggling with the recipient country; or outsourcing the problem, possibly ultimately cheaper.

We have the problem in France: convicts are not accepted by their country. Being a lawful country we are basically stuck.
Show HN: Quick Info on Cursor – Hoverless Tooltips for Keyboard-Only Coding
by developerjhp | 2025-07-17 07:26:36+00:00
Are you a keyboard-driven developer who hates reaching for the mouse just to see a function signature or variable type? Quick Info on Cursor is a VSCode and Cursor extension that displays hover tooltips automatically when your cursor rests on a symbol — no mouse needed.

Just pause your keyboard cursor over a variable or function (default: 500ms), and the tooltip appears as if you hovered it with your mouse.

If you try it out, I’d really appreciate your feedback or ideas for improvements. GitHub repository for feedback and source code (https://github.com/developerjhp/vscode-quick-info-on-cursor)
by chartered_stack | 2025-07-17 07:27:41+00:00
I'd argue it's not a choice of "let's open a campus in flyover country," but a reflection of how the industry has changed.

The "older" companies were manufacturers. Even places like Mountain View and San Jose were the working-class towns with HP factories and semiconductor plants. The concentration of engineering talent (HP/Intel/Apple/Atari) is what created the affluence, especially after manufacturing itself was outsourced globally.

The newer Web 2.0 companies don't make physical things; they make software. Their most critical infrastructure isn't a factory but a dense network of developers. They go to the Bay Area, Seattle, etc., because that's where the network is. For the parts of their business that don't require that network, like customer service, they locate in less expensive regions, just as PayPal did with Nebraska. They were even the second largest employer in Nebraska iirc.
by therealpygon | 2025-07-17 07:28:43+00:00
Your comment sparked an idea. Most ticket systems have what can become a somewhat useless “Priority” field which occasionally ends up meaning “above X or below X”. We try to select the things from every priority that seem either valuable at higher priorities or easy at lower priorities, but a lot of time can get wasted reviewing the same tickets to decide. I am thinking a second similar field of “Risk” would be a great play on this Cost of Delay concept without adding much complexity and might help with more meaningful sorting. Something may be a low priority but a high risk(maybe it isn’t important in itself, but might represent a slice of a bigger risk), or a high priority but a low risk (like something customers want, but in reality is just a nice to have and the product would be fine without it). I suspect “Risk” could be arbitrary or whatever it means to a business, as long as it is consistent.

Definitely given something to consider. Thanks for sharing.
by maxglute | 2025-07-17 07:28:55+00:00
>if bricklayers

If legit construction robots were a thing they'd be primarily trained on assembling the most automation friendly cladding systems instead of wasting time laying bricks, incidentally why brick fell out of favor.

Ironically a lot of construction robot explorations has been bricklaying / mason bots, but that's because laying bricks is computation and mechanically simple repetitive task not because it's an efficient building system. The benefit is we'll probably be able to build with bricks/masonry cheaper, the caveat being it will probably be relative more expensive relative to automation optimized building systems.
by slybot | 2025-07-17 07:28:58+00:00
> Fit an ELO-style rating system (Bradley-Terry) to turn pairwise comparisons into absolute per-document scores.

There are some conceptual gaps and this sentence is misleading in general. First, this sentence implies that Bradley-Terry is a some sort of an Elo variant, which is not true. Elo rating introduced nearly 10 years later in completely different domain.

They are two completely different ranking systems. Bradley-Terry use ratio-based, while Elo use logistic score function. Scales of the scores are completely different as well as the their sensitivity to the score differences.

Possibly, Bradley-Terry is preffered by the authors due to simpler likelihood evaluation and update doesn't depend on the order of pairwise evaluations.

There is also variants of Elo-rating that use MLE (optimized Elo) and even recently Bayesian Elo. For post-hoc time invariant scores, there is randomized Elo rating and so on.

People like Elo ratings because they are simple to understand. Most of the time, they forget why they developed specifically for chess tournaments. All variants above and dozens more try to improve (fix) one aspect of the Elo ratings, because their application has no 100% clear determination of winner, the update scale parameter is too small or large, matches are played simultaneously, different matches played and so on.

Also, let say one document is always preffered one all LLMs then it has only wins, then MLE will result in flat marginal likelihood for that where the update parameter (c) will inf.
by _flux | 2025-07-17 07:29:44+00:00
> You can use software rendering for Wayland cases too. There are even OpenGL / Vulkan software implementations.

That's actually besides the point I intended, which was to provide an example how little code the X11 client actually needs. OpenGL/Vulkan software implementations are the opposite of little.

> I don't really see much value in such use case. Thin client (the reverse) makes more sense (i.e. where your side is a weak computer and remote server is something more powerful).

Yes, I can see that, e.g. remotely using a super computer. However, I think GPU-capability wise the devices people use to interact with graphical systems are quite sufficient to most any interaction task and if X11 was able to video stream just the important bits (I imagine the important bits would be large updated bitmap areas within the user interface, so video encoded server side bitmap transport would do it), it would be just as suitable for that kind of asymmetric case; while being still usable for IoT scenarios, where you have those tiny computers providing sensor data, of which there are probably hundreds of millions if not billions by now.

In principle it's also trivial to convert an X11 style display interaction with video transport (just run the X11 server in the remote end), while the inverse is impossible. So with X11 style you could choose either or, depending on your devices and needs.

> But either way, running a compositor even with software rendering should be doable even on low end hardware.

And how about video-encoding that data on low end hardware without help from hardware? And even with the help of hardware, i.e. NVidia has limited number of video encoding sessions (so number of distinct video streams) to five and not all hardware can even do that. So it's CPU time if you have multiple such sessions, and running high-quality video encoders are not a walk in the park for them.

Because the streams would be between two end points, multiple streams could be packed inside the same stream to save encoders, but I don't think anyone's doing that..

Alternatively to the number of encoders limitation it helps if you run a single stream (stream the desktop), but personally I consider per application remote use a much more flexible system, and the default provided by X11.

> Video by the mere nature or modern codecs is already very optimized on focusing only on changes to the encoded image, so it's the best option. You render things were they run, then send the video.

Surely scrolling a document by instructing the server to render a different part of the server-side bitmap to its own screen is going to be way more effective than encoding+decoding video, i.e. when considering latency, quality, energy consumption, memory usage and bandwidth?
by berkes | 2025-07-17 07:30:40+00:00
Putting often used controls (tabs, docs, menus, etc) across the long side has a solid argument going for it too, though: your mouse pointer is almost always closer to one of the long sides.

Also, if vertical screen estate is a concern, just turn your monitor 90° A lot of professionals working with paper sized documents (legal, bookkeeping, administration) do this.

As a software engineer, I've tried it, but I prefer splitting windows (tiling, or panes or such) horizontally. So my estate is limited in width more than in height.
by sailingparrot | 2025-07-17 07:31:08+00:00
> Any reasoning done in latent space is therefore human-readable as a sequence of raw tokens.

The mapping from latent space to logits (a score for how suitable the model think each possible token is to be the next one in the sentence) is one of the most costly operation of the entire LLM, so when doing reasoning in latent space you typically want to introduce some kind of recurrence somewhere before this mapping takes place, and only go through it once the model is "done" reasoning, at which point it becomes human interpretable.

> would it be possible to train a language translation model to map from latent space -> English

It's hard and expensive and slow but some progress is being made here: https://transformer-circuits.pub/2025/attribution-graphs/bio...
by LouisSayers | 2025-07-17 07:31:21+00:00
It's a Roman mailbox.

Paper was rolled into scrolls, and that's why you find them everywhere, because just like today people communicated with one another.

If you need to leave a message you write it on a scroll and insert in a hole. You could have different sized holes for different sized messages / documents.

You could basically leave the mailbox on your desk and have people put messages there for you to read (or the other way around)

The bits on the corners simply keep it a bit off of the surface - important incase of any moisture, spills etc.
by tossandthrow | 2025-07-17 07:32:45+00:00
This is exactly the point - there is a strong expectation of positive values, so just saying 1 EUR makes it easy.

IMHO this is a defect of the system as some houses has the value -50.000 EUR and should be sold on the market for that - I should get 50.000 EUR to take over the house.

In particular, as we develop building- and decomissionning codes, these impose a liability of people to decommission.

While radically liberal market forces told us that we can buy land and have full control, that was never really the case, and we are waking up to the issues of irresponsible and harmful pollution.
by messe | 2025-07-17 07:32:50+00:00
Something this article doesn't mention is how the A20 gate was toggled: by writing to registers on the keyboard controller.

I was always thought this was a completely inexplicable design choice, until I started working in embedded, working with hardware engineers, and having to go through schematics myself. I now entirely understand the choice of wanting to minimize the redesign work and going with the one free pin available (our product has made similar choices too at this stage).
by 000ooo000 | 2025-07-17 07:33:18+00:00
I have a super neat one but it's on my work machine. Not strictly a one-liner but definitely a CLI QoL improvement. It allows me to type a partial command, for e.g. up to where a file path might be, hit a hotkey to invoke (e.g.) fzf, and finally have fzf's output inserted where my cursor was in the command. Uses some vars that readline exposes. I haven't taken it beyond inserting paths yet, but you could imagine you could do a lot with inserting arbitrary output into a command you are midway through typing. I'll reply to this when I have it on hand.
by BrandoElFollito | 2025-07-17 07:33:35+00:00
The eye contact thing is interesting. I hate to make eye contact because I concentrate better when not watching the other person. And then I remember I should and it gets creepy because I am staring.

This is to say that everyone is slightly different and a healthy dose of tolerance goes a long way. After all, some of your behaviour is probably annoying to others and you do not even realize it.
by vanderZwan | 2025-07-17 07:34:58+00:00
> One of Šmejkal’s favourite pieces is Horseman, a striking picture that features an elaborate, tessellating series of mounted figures. Strangely enough, it was this piece that inspired him to predict the existence of an entirely new kind of magnetism.

I find it a little annoying that they don't show the actual artwork (although they do link to a page with it[0]), and give a description that does not really capture what the image conveys. Because upon seeing it, it immediately becomes obvious how that might inspire someone who thinks about electromagnetic fields all day. Well, obvious to people with some passing familiarity with electromagnetic fields at least.

I'm assuming copyright got in the way but even then they could have added an equivalent illustration of their own.

[0] https://escherinhetpaleis.nl/en/about-escher/escher-today/ho...

[1] https://www.nga.gov/artworks/54229-horseman (alternate link in case the first one doesn't load)
by internet_points | 2025-07-17 07:35:28+00:00
> Haskell doesn't really have "loops"

weeell, you can still do stuff like this in Haskell:

import Data.Vector.Mutable ... let n = length vec forM_ [0 .. n-1] $ \i -> do next <- if i < n-1 then read vec (i+1) else pure 0 modify vec (+ next) i -- increase this value by next value

it's just in many cases the functional machinery is so accessible that you don't need to reach for for-loops.
by Aeolun | 2025-07-17 07:35:38+00:00
A 5% chance of your child dying when you give birth at age 15 and lower seems pretty reasonable to me? At least I’d have expected those number to be far higher.

At 16-17 it’s 4% and at 18-19 it’s 3%, which makes it even better, but 19 out of every 20 children surviving longer than 28 days is pretty good.
by raynr | 2025-07-17 07:36:19+00:00
I saw a post on this subject in the android subreddit back in 2019 [0] and it was clear that everyone had already accepted by then that the market was too small to sustain this. I too loved Sony's series of compact phones - the XZ1 Compact is still one of the best phones I've ever used.

It is only going to get worse. Most of us who were young adults when the iPhone was announced are in our 40s now, and presbyopia is a real thing. In a few years my daily QOL will be better served by a bigger phone and I suspect many people around my age are feeling the same thing. The "small electronic accessory I bring around" niche will be filled by smartwatches.

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/dijok5/is_there_a_... (how quaint the prices look, a mere 6 years on)
by therealpygon | 2025-07-17 07:38:17+00:00
Why not just answer the question, even if somewhat vaguely (though not sure why)? Expecting every person to email you for a super secret private explanation? That’s… not in your best interest if you actually want to find someone interested. No one wants to email you to find out you made a basic note taking app of which there are a thousand and was why you couldn’t sell it, for example. But if it is something that sounds interesting — someone might be interested.

Otherwise, not to be mean, you’ll have a hard time finding someone who cares about another side-project dead app that couldn’t sell.

That’s just 2 cents though.
by throwaway2037 | 2025-07-17 07:38:21+00:00
> Too many bean counter CEOs during that period who did not understand the need to constantly invest in SOTA fabs.

I am not here to defend Intel, but I don't think this is the correct interpretation of events. Basically, Intel failed in their fab process R&D to keep up with TSMC and Samsung, and that is not lack of effort or money. Since their fab process R&D was going so poorly, Intel slowed down their fab construction rate. This makes good business sense to me. The truth appears to be that Intel fab process got beat fair and square by TSMC and Samsung.
by Sateeshm | 2025-07-17 07:40:11+00:00
> Everyone is talking about it, all the time, nonstop! How is that not a network?

Network effect in this context means the product is successful primarily because everyone else is using it. Not easy to compete with Instagram/Tiktok because you need most users to use your new app, not just a few. Amazon can only deliver fast because they have a huge delivery network, because most people use Amazon.

No such effect or moat exists for AI companies. In fact, it is the opposite. Same prompt will give you very similar results in any AI product.

You can't compete with amazon now, even with a better product. But you can easily kill AI companies if you have a better model.
by mcintyre1994 | 2025-07-17 07:41:12+00:00
Nice! Fun game and works well :)

- I don’t think the space bar again to submit is super obvious.

- It’d be nice if it showed the numeric score at the end too, not just in the leaderboard. It’s also not obvious how the score is calculated (I think it’s the length of both words?)

- Would also be nice to show the score for the reveal words, so I can see how close I was to the best score

- If you log in it resets the board, maybe you could put it in localstorage before redirecting?
by 0manrho | 2025-07-17 07:41:32+00:00
This is yet another example of something that's happening all acrossed tech: (Over?)Correcting for a systemic problem; due to either/both misidentifying the problem, or reaching for the wrong solution that promises to solve the issue regardless.

The Asserted problem: Labor force/expense is too high, or at least, higher than is now thought necessary.

The (IMO) core problem: Measuring professional success/skill primarily by the size of the team a person manages.

The asserted solution: AI replacing Labor to reduce inflated labor costs/pools.

While there is some inherent benefit there to reducing team sizes back down into allegedly functionally sized units, there is a lack of accountability and understanding as to why that's beneficial, as it at seems to be done either due to the lofty promise of AI (which I'm critical of), or a more brutalist/myopic approach of merely trying to make the big labor-cost number smaller to increase margin/reduce expenses. To be clear, while I'm a critic of AI, I fully acknowledge it can absolutely be helpful in many instances. The problem is that people are learning the wrong lessons from this, as they've improperly identified the issue, and why the force reduction is allegedly/appears to be working.

Obviously, YMMV on a case-by-case/team/company basis, but Intel is known for being guilty of "Bigger = Better" when it comes to team size, and their new CEO acknowledged this somewhat with their "Bureaucracy kills innovation" speech [0].

That said, what may be good for the company (even if done for the right reasons) can still hurt the communities it built/depend on it.

0: https://www.inc.com/kit-eaton/in-just-3-words-intels-new-ceo...
by throwaway7356 | 2025-07-17 07:42:09+00:00
Ah, emotionally stable adults like https://www.freelists.org/post/xlibre/Hosting-git-for-xlibre... ? Sounds about right.

I guess the Lunduke and XLibre community proudly branding preteen children as "pedophiles" after thorough "investigations" into said children is an important part of being "pedo-free"? Just as the other mail is an important part of being free of antisemitism?
by tomatocracy | 2025-07-17 07:42:13+00:00
Yes. The police have the ability to find and arrest the perpetrators pretty quickly, if they prioritise it. There was a phone theft which (unusually) turned into a stabbing/slashing a couple of years ago when the victim fought back. Perpetrators escaped on bikes before police arrived, but were arrested only 3 or 4 days later.

https://www.cityoflondon.police.uk/news/city-of-london/news/...