MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by TheOtherHobbes | 2025-07-21 10:18:39+00:00
Until now computing was running on a completely different model of implied reliability. The base hardware is supposed to be as reliable as possible, software is supposed to mostly work and bugs are tolerated because they're hard to fix. No one is suggesting they're a good thing.

LLMs are more like something that looks like a text only web-browser, but you have no idea if it's producing genius or gibberish. "Just ignore the mistakes, if you can be bothered to check if they're there" is quite the marketing pitch.

The biggest development in tech has been the change in culture - from utopian libertarian "Give everyone a bicycle for the mind and watch the joy" to the corporate cynicism of "Collect as much personal information as you can get away with, and use it to modify behaviour, beliefs, and especially spending and voting, to maximise corporate profits and extreme wealth."

While the technology has developed, the values have run headlong in the opposite direction.

It's questionable if a culture with these values is even capable of creating a singularity without destroying itself first.
by disgruntledphd2 | 2025-07-21 10:19:08+00:00
Depends on what you're doing, to be fair. R would probably be a better choice as it's more likely to have all the statistical stuff in SAS. Python might make sense if you want to integrate it into web/other systems.

It's definitely not an easy lift and shift though, as the OP made it out to be. Particularly when you're integrating with other departments it's vital to have perfect compatibility as otherwise you'll break the other departments workflow.
by incorrecthorse | 2025-07-21 10:19:47+00:00
I think the common confusion boils down to:

> The moment of capturing a measurement is known as a metric event

Which suspiciously reads like a log.

In practice, a metric is an aggregate of events (the "metric events") when you're not interested in the individual event but, but in the aggregate itself. For practical reasons this is not implemented with logs but with more primitive technical events emission.

This is not fundamentally incompatible notions. If you do an electrocardiogram, you might be interested in your BPM, but it is deduced by the full log of each beat. The segregation we do in computing is more practical than fundamental.
by user_7832 | 2025-07-21 10:20:54+00:00
Unless I'm very mistaken, this 1.5 degree delta is between the hot side (the condenser at almost your room temp) and the cold side (evaporator inside the fridge).

That is, if you want to chill your cabbage to 4.3 degrees C, your room temp should be not more than 5.6 degree C. Or... if it's 25 degrees outside, in an ideal case your cabbage is 23.7 degrees cool.

Btw, max theoretical COP increases rapidly as T'hot - T'cold shrinks to zero. Your practical AC or fridge delta T is much more than that, depending on the weather.
by anenefan | 2025-07-21 10:22:09+00:00
Article at [1] and interestingly proposed 5 years ago. [2]

[1] https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.ads4779

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24133568 (5 years ago re possibility of using phones to do this, article link is no longer alive.)
by firesteelrain | 2025-07-21 10:22:39+00:00
No it’s not nested JSON.

This is nested JSON:

{ "id": 123, "message": { "text": "hi", "meta": { "flag": true } } }

In the above example, The value of "message" is a string, not an object.

That string happens to contain text that looks like a JSON object on the surface but it’s not.

It is just characters inside a string. No different from a log message or a paragraph in a document.
by LtdJorge | 2025-07-21 10:22:50+00:00
Documenting every piece of logic just because, I believe, is a code smell. However, look at Rust's documentation (or public crates, at varying levels), all the documentation is extracted from the code, with internal links and even external links between crates thanks to cargo doc (which I think is many times better than doxygen and what the Java and C# guys use, and let's not talk about the nonexistent alternative for JS/TS). Code examples in Rust docs can be made to reference the actual code in the crate, and the code block can be marked as "it compiles", "it doesn't compile", etc. And the compiler guarantees that's true. A block that doesn't compile is used as an example of incorrect code.

In the Unity game engine, they use docfx, and I heard from one developer that their system is done in a way that the code examples in the documentation import the actual code and the documentation fails a build if the code doesn't compile, similar to Rust.
by donatj | 2025-07-21 10:22:56+00:00
At my first job, our most senior developer and my mentor was huge on Flex and instant it was going to be the next big thing.

At the time I thought it was inflexible to style and felt very non-native.

To be fair, it had its moment, moreso in desktop applications than on the web. I seem to remember a lot of installers being developed in Flex. The iPhone showed up just in time to kill it before it ever got its footing on the web.
by mrob | 2025-07-21 10:23:01+00:00
I don't understand it at all. As I child, I once visited Futuroscope[0] in France, a kind of cinema theme park. It has many different projection systems, e.g. 3D, dome screen, ultra-wide screen. The one that impressed me most was the Showscan[1]. This is analog film running at 60fps. I liked it so much I watched both Showscan movies they were showing twice. 60fps is by no means high frame rate, but even that was an enormous improvement over 24fps.

I'm not aware of any movies shot in non-interleaved 120fps (AFAIK all the movies advertised as "120fps" are 2*60fps stereoscopic with the frames interleaved between the eyes). Considering how much better games look in high frame rate compared to 60fps I'd love to see a non-interleaved 120fps movie.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Futuroscope

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Showscan
by rbanffy | 2025-07-21 10:23:16+00:00
Terrible palettes were a thing (the Macintosh II was the first Apple computer able to correctly display the Apple logo) in other platforms as well, as were rectangular pixels. Macintosh was the first Apple computer designed to have square pixels (even though the II came close for its original HGR modes, but that was gone with the /// and //e higher resolution modes).
by dirkc | 2025-07-21 10:23:18+00:00
I've personally felt this way about many proprietary tech ecosystems in the past. Still do. I don't want to invest my energy to learn something if the carpet can be pulled from under my feet. And it does happen.

But that is my personal value judgement. And it doesn't mean other people will think the same. Luckily tech is a big space.
by aziaziazi | 2025-07-21 10:23:33+00:00
Fruits mostly contains soluble fibers, only their peel contains a bit of the insoluble one. For your next try consider instant mashed lentils/slip peas (flakes) or lots of mushrooms if you're rich enough. Adding a fair portion of hemp or nutritional yeast also increase the protein ratio. And tempeh is really a game changer. I wish the best for you.
by latexr | 2025-07-21 10:24:17+00:00
As someone who has been writing shell scripts for a few decades (though not as long as you), I’d instead recommend “learn what your tools are appropriate for and use them that way”. There are plenty of cases where shell scripts are the right tool for the job.

I can’t even tell how many times I’ve seen multi-line Python scripts which could instead have been a shell one-liner. Shorter and faster.

I have also written shell scripts with hundreds of lines, used by thousands of people, which work just fine and would be more complicated and slower in other languages.

I firmly disagree with the all too pervasive blanket statement of “there are better languages”. It depends. It always does.
by Eisenstein | 2025-07-21 10:24:29+00:00
I'm curious why you find it surprising?

In my view, language is one of the basic structures by which humans conceptualize the world, and its form and nuance often affect how a particular culture thinks about things. It is often said that learning a new language can reframe or expand your world view.

Thus it seems natural that a system which was fed human language until it was able to communicate in human language (regardless of any views of LLMs in an greater sense, they do communicate using language) would take on the attributes of humans in at least a broad sense.
by wahnfrieden | 2025-07-21 10:25:02+00:00
The photo showed a 5.5" vertical gap which doesn't seem level or minimal to me

> 14th Street–Union Square northbound 4 trains have a 5.5-inch vertical gap, 59th Street–Columbus Circle northbound B trains have a gaping seven-inch horizontal gap, and Times Square–42nd Street eastbound 7 trains have both: a 5.5-inch vertical gap and a five-inch horizontal gap

https://www.curbed.com/2022/10/mta-subway-platform-gaps-laws...
by Certhas | 2025-07-21 10:25:49+00:00
Why do you think that what I wrote implies they are static?

I didn't say that recursion and caching are the opposite of dynamic, I said they are essentially orthogonal concepts to it.

Generally speaking, dynamical systems are systems that have some sort of dependence on time [1]. In dynamic programming we have an optimization/decision problem in which time plays an essential role. The optimality is measured with respect to the whole time evolution. Bellmann showed that you can break this intertemporal optimization down into individual time steps.

So the key observation of dynamic programming is how to turn an "all times at once" problem into a "one time at a time" problem.

The reason that Hamilton's name shows up next to Bellmann here is that physicists and mathematicians (Lagrange, Hamilton, Jacobi) figured out that you can do the inverse: You can write the dynamical equations of physics as an intertemporal (all times at once) optimization problem. This has been one of the most influential ideas in theoretical physics _ever_, especially after Noether's theorems leveraged this structure to connect symmetries and conserved quantities. In many fields of theoretical physics you no longer write down differential equations to model a dynamical system, you write down a "Lagrangian", and mean that your system follows those trajectories that minimize the integral of the Lagrangian over all time. So the central ideas of dynamic programming are extremely tightly related to physics and dynamical systems.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamical_system

Edit: After reading a bit more I think I understand why people focus on this. The algorithmic examples with shortest paths sort of show the point. To me the core point of Dynamic Programming is before you start thinking about recursion or memoization. It's when you establish that you have optimal substructures:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optimal_substructure

what is dynamical is that the subproblems depend on each other, in the way that what happens at time t+1 depends on what happens at time t, or, more to the point, what is the optimal decision at time t depends on what the optimal decision at time t+1 is. If your subproblems are ordered by time, then of course you don't need recursion to solve them, you just iterate over time steps, hence my confusion.
by Thorrez | 2025-07-21 10:26:28+00:00
Assisted death is sometimes used by people who don't have a terminal illness. And there's the worry that insurance is more likely to deny treatment coverage now that a cheaper alternative (assisted death) is available.

>The nonprofit organization Inclusion Canada regularly hears from people with disabilities who are offered euthanasia, including one disabled woman whose physiotherapist suggested it when she sought help for a bruised hip, said executive vice president Krista Carr.

>“Our response to the intolerable suffering of people with disabilities is: ‘Your life is not worth living,'” she said. “We’ll just offer them the lethal injection, and we’ll offer it readily.”

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/some-health-care-workers-...

https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2024/09/16/should-e...
by rbanffy | 2025-07-21 10:27:31+00:00
> which implements all madatory primitives (i.e. system calls)

Essentially, it's a collection of device drivers.

> I implemented some tools with which this can be easily studied

Really cool. I'll check it out.

> You can even run the Smalltalk VM (or any other dynamic language) in a Unix userland and have exactly the same modifiability

That's kind of cheating. All the dynamic behavior is on the Smalltalk side, and nothing of it is on the Linux side. Apart from loadable modules, Linux doesn't change behavior at runtime (IIRC, you can't swap process schedulers after startup).
by Mindwipe | 2025-07-21 10:28:05+00:00
The law does require sites to not explicitly advocate a specific method for bypassing the checks (or to allow third parties to do so on it's platform, so it'll be interesting to see how that works for Reddit).

But I doubt this is specific enough to hit that bar - it is more of a factual note about what the law is for UK users rather than a specific call of "don't use our verification methods, use a VPN instead."
by JdeBP | 2025-07-21 10:29:40+00:00
In the FreeBSD case, far from breaking "every program" it breaks very little at all. In fact it broke 1 thing at the time. Unfortunately, that 1 thing happened to be sysinstall(8).

stdin, stdout, and stderr were already pointers rather than array element addresses, and the external symbol references to __stdinp, __stdoutp, and __stderrp did not change; compiled code using the old macros continued to work as the actual structure layout was not changed; compiled code using FILE* would have continued to work as the pointer implementation didn't change; compiled C++ code with C++ function parameter overloading would have continued to link as the underlying struct type did not change; source code using the ferror_unlocked() and suchlike function-like macros would have not needed changing as there were already ferror_unlocked() and suchlike functions and those remained.

Looking at things like https://reviews.freebsd.org/D4488 from 2015 there was definitely stuff in the ports tree that would have broken back in 2008. But that won't break now should this change be made again, and that's not base.

What actually broke was libftpio, a library that was in base up until 2011, and definitely won't break now, nearly 14 years after being removed for being orphaned after sysinstall(8) itself has gone away.

* https://cgit.freebsd.org/src/commit/lib/libftpio?id=430f2c87...
by thesz | 2025-07-21 10:30:00+00:00
Arithmetic inside the types not necessarily introduces undecidability. One example is telescopes for indices:

data N where Z :: N O :: N -> N data T (n :: N) where TZ :: T (O n) TO :: T n -> T (O n)

To safely access an element in array you have to provide a proof that a telescope can be constructed for given index range.
by xlii | 2025-07-21 10:31:24+00:00
It wasn't a horror story but a simple fact that it was layer of complexity that wasn't really helpful at all.

When code volume was small, nobody noticed, and hey "it looks nice". Some time after though, when volume increased it started to get really burdensome. I used this as a part of Rails pipeline, so it was like: write some coffeescript, compile, run - something failed - usual process.

However the code was already mangled, often source code mapping didn't want to work. When source code was found it wasn't uncommon that it caused by operator precedence or code not transpiled in a way it was intended and requiring debugging transpilation process.

At some point I suggested to migrate away from CoffeeScript toward (almost plain) JavaScript and most developers happily agreed to that. We were able to migrate big chunk automatically, rest took only few weeks to clean up. Velocity increased and people were happy they don't have to deal with it anymore.

Ultimatelly it is the truth with most of the transpilers - sooner or later you get into idiosyncracies that - if technology is not popular enough - you're left alone to solve.
by Fluorescence | 2025-07-21 10:31:32+00:00
> hit with a sledgehammer

It smells like a jumped up "assaulted a police officer" charge because you shield your face from their punches. Hitting someone with a sledge hammer is a suitably scary tabloid headline but physically unlikely and entirely out of character for the accused group.

Note that Avon Police have form as lying pieces of shit.

They attacked protestors and claimed 21 injured officers specifically: "officers got broken bones, had punctured lungs, were very seriously injured" in the national media.

Journalists contacted local hospitals and found no police were treated that night. They had to retract those claims and their list of the claimed injuries included staff who never attended the scene, a bee sting and a twisted ankle getting out of a car.

I expect similar will happen here but only after this claim has been used for years to demonise protestors.
by pyman | 2025-07-21 10:32:04+00:00
What the article says is that fungi produces electrical spikes and those spikes may encode information and function like a primitive language to coordinate activity across the network.

But what if the environment was never hostile and they still avoid it? Some research hints that fungi can react to vibration, like stimuli, but there's no solid proof that mushrooms avoid trails because of it. Still, it feels worth investigating.
by palata | 2025-07-21 10:32:12+00:00
> If you leave your personal gain aside for one moment, don’t you see how that just means you’ll throw 246 of them away because you don’t need them

I didn't say I would get 250 of them, I said the price was 250x more expensive in the local store.

> These manufacturers pay taxes and employ people.

Would you buy a coke for 55$ if I told you "look, these manufacturers pay taxes and employ people"? Or do you have a notion of "this is too expensive for what it is"?

> This may not relate to your zippers immediately, but allowing vendors like Temu to exploit our economy by undercutting it has negative effects, which you are supporting with your actions.

Just like you didn't read properly that I was not actually ordering 250 zippers, you didn't read my first message properly. Let me write it again slightly differently:

I do agree that it needs to be regulated. But on the other hand, sometimes it seems so extreme that it's difficult to believe that the local store is not abusing. At this price, I just can't afford the zipper.
by adrian_b | 2025-07-21 10:32:27+00:00
Chlorophyll a, which is the pigment that actually uses solar energy to split water, absorbs red light and violet light. Thus its color is blue-green, as it can be seen in some lichens that have only symbiotic cyanobacteria.

This is most likely a historical accident, with no special meaning.

Most algae and plants have auxiliary pigments, which absorb other parts of the solar spectrum and then transfer the energy to chlorophyll a.

The land plants and the green algae use mostly chlorophyll b as auxiliary pigment, which absorbs light in a blue band adjacent to the violet band of chlorophyll a, and in a red band that is distinct and adjacent to the red band of chlorophyll a.

Thus the addition of chlorophyll b increases considerably the amount of captured energy.

The algae that are dominant in oceans, e.g. diatoms and brown algae, have more auxiliary pigments, so that many are dark brown, even close to black.

Unlike for marine algae, for land plants, capturing more solar energy is not desirable, because they already have difficulties in avoiding overheating and excessive loss of water. So the pigments used by them are good enough for their needs.
by BoorishBears | 2025-07-21 10:32:30+00:00
It really funny reading the reporting on this because everyone is (very reasonably) thinking Replit has an actual 'code freeze' feature that the AI violated.

Meanwhile by 'code freeze' they actually meant they had told the agent that they were declaring a code freeze in natural language and I guess expected that to work even though there's probably a system prompt specifically telling it its job is to make edits.

It feels a bit like Michael from The Office yelling "bankruptcy!"

-

I have to say, instruction tuning is probably going to go down in history as one of the most brilliant UX implementations ever, but also has had some pretty clear downsides.

It made LLMs infinitely more approachable than using them via completions, and is entirely responsible for 99% of the meteoric rise in relevance that's happened in the last 3 years.

At the same time, it's made it painfully easy to draw completely incorrect insights about how models work, how they'll scale to new problems etc.

I think it's still a net gain because most people would not have adapted to using models without instruction tuning... but a lot of stuff like "I told it not to do X and it did X" where X is something no one would expect an LLM to understand by its very nature, would not happen if people were forced to have a deeper understanding of the model before they could leverage it.
by omnee | 2025-07-21 10:33:19+00:00
I want to emphasise your latter point - I have a Lenovo work laptop, Fenix head torches and various other high quality Chinese products. Any company selling into the EU needs to meet the QC and regulatory requirements, and many well known Chinese brands already do so, and so their products naturally sell at a premium to the cheapest options. A little more thought in purchasing by buyers would go a long way in helping the commissions efforts to reduce harmful goods.
by Buttons840 | 2025-07-21 10:33:23+00:00
> MathOverflow is a forum for mathematicians to talk...

When StackOverflow was new I visited frequently to enjoy the community talking about programming. For others, the goal was always to build the ultimate wiki.

The people who wanted the ultimate wiki won, and the community left, and that's where we see SO today. No community, but it is the ultimate wiki filled with programming wisdom from 2014.
by Mindwipe | 2025-07-21 10:33:23+00:00
> It seems like it would be legal for them to post a full guide for UK users on how to access their site using a VPN service.

It isn't, the Ofcom OSA act codes explicitly say that the site cannot explicitly tell people how to get past it's verification methods.

> There's literally "Best VPNs For Accessing Porn in the UK" articles, they'll be fine.

They're on journalism sites that are explicitly exempted from the law, so they aren't advocating for getting around that specific site's methods.

It will be interesting to see how this works on any social platform though. To my reading of the guidance Ofcom require Reddit, BlueSky/Twitter etc to block any posts discussing using a VPN to get around it, or at least require age verification to access those posts too.

But I think that contradicts other parts of the legislation, and Ofcom have got themselves into quite a predictable mess.
by palata | 2025-07-21 10:34:34+00:00
As I mentioned from the beginning on: I do agree that it needs to be regulated, and I do agree that some QA is needed.

However, I find it hard to believe that because of that QA, a 0.04$ zipper now costs 10$. And the fact that the 60cm zipper costs 10$ and the 70cm one costs 12$ tells me that the local stores (or whatever intermediate responsible for the price) are simply abusing.

In other words, it feels like there is a responsibility on the side of the local stores: I want a zipper, I can't afford 10$ for one, so either I don't get a zipper at all, or I get it on Temu. In any case, the local merchant is screwed. Now if I get a zipper on Temu, suddenly I see all the cheap crap I can order from there, and I presume my local merchant abuse on their price in exactly the same way (which may or may not be right). So the local merchant "pushed me" towards Temu with their abusive prices.