MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by godelski | 2025-07-18 05:40:09+00:00
> I don't think a universal language is implied by being able to translate without a rosetta stone.

Depends what you mean. If you want a 1-to-1 translation then your languages need to be isomorphic. For lossy translation you still need some intersection within the embedding space. The intersection will determine how good you can translate. It isn't unreasonable to assume that there are some universal traits here as any being lives in this universe and we're all subject to these experiences at some level, right? But that could result in some very lossy translations that are effectively impossible to translate, right?

Another way you can think about it, though, is that language might not be dependent on experience. If it is completely divorced, we may be able to understand anyone regardless of experience. If it is mixed, then results can be mixed.

> The example I was thinking of was word2vec

Be careful with this. If you haven't actually gone deep into the math (more than 3Blue1Brown) you'll find some serious limitations to this. Play around with it and you'll experience these too. Distances in high dimensions are not well defined. There also aren't smooth embeddings here. You have a lot of similar problems to embedding methods like t-SNE. Certainly has uses but it is far too easy to draw the wrong conclusions from them. Unfortunately, both of these are often spoken about incorrectly (think as incorrect as most peoples understandings of things like Schrodinger's Cat or the Double Slit experiment, or really most of QM. There's some elements of truth but it's communicated through a game of telephone).
by tomasGiden | 2025-07-18 05:41:01+00:00
This! When you are doing something simple (as in there are known best practices) you do want people to have the same formal education. They’ll talk the same language and everything will be smooth. Nobody wants a self taught surgeon or pilot on the team. There is a best practice for washing your hands and you want your surgeon to know it.

But when you are in the complex domain (as in there are no known good practices), what you want is many different viewpoints on the team. So getting people with different backgrounds (different academic background, tinkerers, different cultures, different work experience etc) together is the way to go.

Same with the discussion about remote work. People do not seem to get that they’re no best way but it depends on the type of work. If it’s simple or complicated, let people stay at home to concentrate. If it is complex, give them the opportunity, and the knowledge it’s good, meet up by a whiteboard. And what’s best may of course differ from day to day.
by pluto_modadic | 2025-07-18 05:41:15+00:00
a simple example of partial homomorphic encryption (not full), would be if a system supports addition or multiplication. You know the public key, and the modulus, so you can respect the "wrap around" value, and do multiplication on an encrypted number.

other ones I imagine behave kinda like translating, stretching, or skewing a polynomial or a donut/torus, such that the point/intercepts are still solveable, still unknown to an observer, and actually represent the correct mathematical value of the operation.

just means you treat the []byte value with special rules
by jonathanlydall | 2025-07-18 05:43:31+00:00
More accurate to say it’s a dock than a hub, but I’m using a Dell 2427DEB monitor[0] with my Dell work notebook and a second monitor daisy chained from it on the DP out port.

My work laptop has just a single USB-C cable plugged into the monitor for everything making it super trivial to plug it back in when I use it away from my desk (which I do regularly).

My personal desktop has a single DP and also a USB A to B cable. The monitor has KVM capability so I can super conveniently switch between them even with the two screens.

Cables are completely minimized with this set up, I’m very happy.

The only thing that’s unfortunate is that I occasionally work on a MacBook Pro 16” M4 and it can’t drive the second monitor over the same USB-C cable as Apple CBA to have support for DP MST on even their premium priced hardware. So I have to also plug in an HDMI cable to the second monitor.

Also unfortunate with the MacBook Pro is that macOS UI scaling doesn’t allow ratios like 125% meaning the UI elements aren’t quite at my preferred size. My Windows 11 handles this perfectly.

[0] https://www.dell.com/en-us/shop/dell-pro-27-plus-video-confe...
by nxpnsv | 2025-07-18 05:43:42+00:00
It looks great out of the box, has fancy colors (if you want them). It is easier to configure than logging and you don't need a lot go get_logger stuff. It does log rotation, and you has lazy formatted {} comments `logger.info("x={x:.2f}", x)`. It is better for threading/multiproc, handles exceptions better. And it is fast. I like it on appearance.
by kalleboo | 2025-07-18 05:47:09+00:00
SMS is limited to 140 characters, but there has been a standard to send multiple messages in a row and have the receiving phone concatenate them automatically since about the year 2000. For older devices that that don't support it, they will get multiple messages and just show it as "(1/2)" etc (I had a Panasonic phone that didn't support it during the transition so I remember it well)
by sam-apostel | 2025-07-18 05:48:20+00:00
Something similar happened in Belgium in 2021. The Flemish government launched a compensation scheme for solar panel owners via a site called tellercompensatie.be. I registered the obvious typo variant: teller-compensatie.be right after the tv and radio announcements, added a visitor counter and a link to the real site. It got ~20k hits in a few days, my second most popular project thus far.

I just went to check the “official” domain and it looks like the domain is now owned by an ad network. Classic.

A news article link ( https://www.vrt.be/vrtnws/nl/2021/01/22/compensatieregeling-...) still ises that domain name in it’s article, but now redirects to a proper gov site: vlaanderen.be/veka
by cFyrute | 2025-07-18 05:48:39+00:00
It's not a terrible mistake. A terrible mistake would have been having such power available on ports that even a reasonable person might short out by innocently connecting a USB C cable between them.

A couple 5.1k resistors add about $0.00001 to the BOM cost. The terrible mistake is on the designers of devices who try to forego these.
by adrian_b | 2025-07-18 05:49:08+00:00
They carry energy in forms that can cause problems when they represent a too large fraction of the daily energy intake. Moreover, energy from vegetable products like maize, rice, wheat or high-oleic sunflower oil is many, many times cheaper, while also having much less health risks. So eating dairy for getting energy makes absolutely no sense.

Energy as carbohydrates should consist mostly of glucose (preferably as starch, for slower digestion). Half of lactose is galactose, which like fructose cannot be used directly, but it must be converted by the liver, which may be overwhelmed when too much is ingested.

There are studies that have concluded that galactose, when eaten in excess or when the liver is worse at converting it, can lead to eye cataract. While this is not certain, based on personal anecdotes I believe that this is true, because all of the people whom I know, and who had been eating a lot of dairy for a long time, eventually have developed eye cataracts in their old age.

Energy as fat should consist mostly of oleic acid (the main component of storage fat in humans). While the effect of high daily intakes of saturated fatty acids is still debated, the overwhelming evidence is that they are harmful.

From personal experience I believe this to be true. Until about 5 years ago, I had been eating large quantities of dairy products every day. Then I have been diagnosed with incipient atherosclerosis, which scared me. Examining my habits, I could not identify any other cause, except the high consumption of dairy. Based on this assumption, I have completely changed the composition of fat that I am eating daily. Now more than 90% of my daily intake of fats comes from a mixture of oils chosen such as to have adequate proportions of oleic acid, linoleic acid, DHA & EPA and liposoluble vitamins.

About one year after this change from dairy to healthy fats, all symptoms of atherosclerosis have disappeared and there were also other very noticeable improvements in my cardiovascular health.

So now I am pretty much convinced that the fat from dairy products is harmful, at least in excessive quantities. I do not believe that eating once a week something containing milk, cheese, whipped cream or butter can cause any problems, but eating such food every day, most likely will be bad.
by postalcoder | 2025-07-18 05:49:44+00:00
It's likely you're running into "too deep into mediocre code with unclear interfaces and a lot of hidden assumptions hell" that LLMs are generally poor at handling. If you're running into an inextricable wall then it's better to do a controlled demolition.

ie, take everything written by chatgpt and have the highest-quality model you have summarize what the game does, and break down all the features in depth.

Then, take that document and feed it into claude. It may take a few iterations but the code you get will be much better than your attempt on iterating on the existing code.

Claude will likely zero-shot a better application or, at least, one that it can improve on itself.

If claude still insists on making up new features then install the context7 MCP server and ask it to use context7 when working on your request.
by queenkjuul | 2025-07-18 05:49:46+00:00
I don't play music because i hope someone else will listen to it (i mean, maybe a little, i play gigs sometimes) but i really only do it because i enjoy it on my own, i enjoy the challenge of getting better, i enjoy the process of making my fingers do on the guitar what my brain is thinking.

You can get better at writing. And i hate to say, you probably only judge your own writing so harshly because you wrote it. Songs i wrote that i didn't like ended up being some of my most popular. It doesn't matter though: other people liking it is a fantastic bonus on top of my enjoying having done it, not the point of having done it.
by chvid | 2025-07-18 05:50:08+00:00
The section you refer to is a justification for code completion and possible providing (visual) feedback for whether a various constructs are spelled or used correctly. It is fairly established that sort of thing increases programmer productivity (as in writing a Java program using notepad vs. writing it using IntelliJ).

In the old days, we used to do this by using static type inference. This is harder to do in dynamic languages (such as Python), so now we try to do it with LLMs.

It is not obvious to me that LLMs are a better solution; you may be able to do more but you loose the predictability of the classic approach.
by godelski | 2025-07-18 05:50:10+00:00
I agree with the logic, but I don't think it doesn't properly accounts for people who work very closely with wild animals.

You or I, yeah, probably not going to understand a lion pretty well. But someone who works at the zoo? A lion tamer? Someone studying lion cognition? Hell, people have figured out how to train hippos so that they can clean their teeth[0], and these are one of, if not the, most aggressive animals in the world. Humans have gotten impressively good at communicating with many different animals and training them. There's plenty of Steve Irwin types who have strong understandings about many creatures who would be quite alien to the rest of us. Which, that requires at least one side to have a strong understanding of the other's desires and how they perceive the world. But me? I have no doubt that hippo would murder me.

My point isn't so much about would we understand the lion, but rather could we. Wittgenstein implied we wouldn't be able to. I'm pointing to evidence that we, to at least some degree, can. How much we ultimately will be able to, is still unknown. But I certainly don't think it is an impossible task.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dMoWvh2AtKk
by ivraatiems | 2025-07-18 05:50:44+00:00
I disagree with the framing of running Windows 11 on unsupported hardware as an undesirable option compared to desktop Linux, for several reasons. For context, I have several years' experience in the recycled and refurbished computer market and I regularly sell machines with Linux, ChromeOS Flex, Windows 11 on supported hardware, and Windows 11 on unsupported hardware.

The reality is that for the vast majority of people, even the simplest desktop Linux distributions are simply too high a learning curve to be useful outside the very basics. The problem is not that they're not usable when things are working right. The problem is that when things go wrong, problems rapidly begin to require levels of knowledge far outside what a layperson can reasonably acquire. A missing driver, updates that need to be installed, configuration problems - these all run rampant on Linux to degrees far beyond what one experiences with a machine designed for Windows. ChromeOS Flex is a partial solution, as many people are familiar with it, but it is useless on a lot of hardware due to lack of drivers and is not a good fit for more powerful machines.

On the other hand, if you install Windows 11 on a machine that doesn't support it, you get all security updates for the next year, and all the drivers you need are typically present in Windows Update. In situations where there is a need for legacy drivers, they usually work after a simple install. I have installed Windows 11 on systems from 2011 and 2012 and had it work flawlessly, and fast enough for basic use. Windows 11 itself isn't perfect, but moving from 10 to 11 is nowhere near the complexity of moving from 10 to Linux.

Of course, the big issue is that after that year of security updates, one has to manually download the next "feature update" and install it to get another year of updates. This isn't hard to do per se, but it's approaching the kind of complexity that the average person isn't going to navigate smoothly. I don't have a great solution for this yet, though I am thinking about one. For now, I just include disclaimers and documentation about what to do to make things easier. Even so, compared to something like a Linux major version upgrade, this is quite straightforward.

There is no legal or ethical reason not to just run Windows 11 on technically unsupported hardware to keep it alive. I think that's the best way to go.
by rachofsunshine | 2025-07-18 05:51:16+00:00
"Basically seeing if they can code" is the goal, yes.

> I don't think how far a candidate gets on this particular test determines if they're OK or if they're great.

It doesn't with certainty, but measurement of this kind is always subject to some degree of error. The point of interviewing (especially at the early stage where this interview is applied) is signal, not certainty, and we do seem to be picking up on signal:

-- # of steps completed on the coding task is the strongest single signal of success at later final interview rounds. Candidates who have gotten offers (not from us, to be clear, so this is uncorrelated error) average ~1.1 more steps completed on our coding problem than candidates who don't. That's after we filtered a lot of the weaker results out, so it's sampling biased in slower candidates' favor. This is a larger gap between offers and non-offers than any of the other nineteen individual internal scores we record for each interview, iirc.

-- # of steps completed correlates with results on the rest of the interview in a way that is aligned with reasonable psychometric measures of quality, same as most of the other parts of the interview (see e.g. [1]).

If your point here is just that interviews involve somewhat artificial work and are prone to error - well, yes. Everyone involved in testing as a field already knows that and is working around it.

To use your concrete example, creating a problem involving "sussing out all the ambiguities and contradictions" for an hour would be asking a lot more work from candidates. If we did that, I bet we'd have people complaining about the lengthy workload of doing an interview (or simply not doing it, which would be fatal to us as a business). I would also worry that that's a much fuzzier skill to measure, particularly in a cross-organizational way. It's not that, in isolation, you could never create an interview to test ambiguity-resolution, it's that (at least in my judgment), it would be impractical for us to do so given what we are trying to do.

And finally, to this:

> I posit that a great one could finish 2-3 steps and an OK one could finish 4-5.

See [2].

-------

[1] https://bsky.app/profile/otherbranch.bsky.social/post/3lpcdl...

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43006330
by tpm | 2025-07-18 05:51:16+00:00
Sometimes you get nose-blind to the scent but IMO that's not a good thing, because it means it contains something too strong.

But more interesting to me is the effect that your perception of the scent will change, like it's different to hear a piece of music the first time and later. You can find new nuances, new depth, start to like it more, or less.
by teo_zero | 2025-07-18 05:51:41+00:00
I think the opening example involving Google is misleading. When I hear "Google" I think "search the web".

The articles is about getting an input encrypted with key k, processing it without decrypting it, and sending back an output that is encrypted with key k, too. Now it looks to me that the whole input must be encrypted with key k. But in the search example, the inputs include a query (which could be encrypted with key k) and a multi-terabyte database of pre-digested information that's Google's whole selling point, and there's no way this database could be encrypted with key k.

In other words this technique can be used when you have the complete control of all the inputs, and are renting the compute power from a remote host.

Not saying it's not interesting, but the reference to Google can be misunderstood.
by arun-mani-j | 2025-07-18 05:55:02+00:00
We tried making a library for GT, but as Tao says, given the very broad scope of number of games, strategies and players, etc., giving a unified and generalized interface was quite difficult for us.

We also wanted to make a library and a simulation software to make experiments easy.

But we dropped the plan after looking at the scope. :(

If anybody has a better idea on approaching, please feel free to reach out.
by edwardbernays | 2025-07-18 05:55:56+00:00
I completely believe that physics to culture is intractable given our current corpus, to the degree it's probably a nonsense claim. There are so many emergent phenomena that introduce confounding effects at every level of abstraction.

Also, why QCD? Quantum chromodynamics, the quantized theory of the nuclear strong force? There is also QED, quantum electrodynamics, which is the quantized field theory for electrodynamics, and then also QFD (quantum flavordynamics) for the weak force. Does OP seriously mean to imply that the quantum field theory corresponding to ONLY the strong force, plus gravity, explains every emergent phenomena from there to culture? Fully half of the fundamental forces we account for, in two disparate theoretical frameworks?

OP's comment is not serious speculation.
by khedoros1 | 2025-07-18 05:57:49+00:00
Mine did the opposite for a while. In the event of an issue, they'd call, tell you that they were putting you on hold for a teller, and the first thing the teller did was identify the bank and ask for personal information to verify the account.

I always made a point of telling them that they had called me, that I had no proof of who they were, and that I was going to call back from the published number.
by tom_m | 2025-07-18 05:58:15+00:00
Yea, true of many things. Anyone who has the drive and motivation to teach themself anything, usually do a good job.

Doesn't mean you'll always get everything right or that you'll be good at first or even as good as someone taught to do the thing, at first. But practice makes perfect and over time you can be as good or better than someone with training. There's absolutely no reason you can't train yourself on just about anything.
by AlotOfReading | 2025-07-18 05:58:50+00:00
They had animals to pull carts: Dogs and humans. Plains groups had large breeds for travois pulling before horses were introduced. Dogs weren't used for physical labor in Mesoamerica, but they had large breeds like the loberro that were large and strong enough. Andean cultures had their own large breeds I'm less familiar with.

The plains example is particularly illustrative here though, because horses and knowledge of wheeled transports were introduced at roughly the same time, yet only horses were immediately adopted by nomadic plains groups and used to pull larger versions of the travois they had been pulling with dogs for centuries. The wheel just wasn't that useful because there was no road infrastructure to make it viable.

And so it was with virtually all of the Americas. Eurasian style road construction largely did not exist. The few places it did exist were enormously mountainous regions where a long distance journey was not reasonable by wheeled vehicle, and in those areas wheels remained relatively impractical for transportation purposes until the industrial invention of motors. Just to give some historical examples, the conditions in northern mexico were so rough that the most common kind of wagon often needed new axles daily. Spanish colonial authorities could afford nicer wagons and built them with all sorts of durability improvements like iron-banded wheels maintained on the journey by specialist carpenters, yet still regularly lost significant percentages of caravans to the conditions even on well-maintained trails like the camino real. Is it any wonder that people largely preferred to use mules or horses?

As an aside, wheelbarrows are much less useful without shovels. The primary digging implement in the Americas was a digging stick, the most basic versions of which are exactly what they sound like. Mesoamericans would occasionally have small wood or metal paddles at the end of theirs for various reasons. Descendants survive in modern tools like the coa used by jimadors to trim agave for tequila. For a large earthmoving project laborers would have used their digging sticks to loosen soil and hands or various small implements to scoop it into baskets or hides for transport by hand.
by smokel | 2025-07-18 05:59:13+00:00
One advantage might be that you would only implement the (small) part of the library that you actually need, potentially avoiding bugs such as Log4Shell.

The risk of code duplication is a serious one though, and it would be nice if AI could automatically detect and clean this.

I guess we are in an annoying "in-between" state of things, with a pretty unsure future.
by ars | 2025-07-18 05:59:30+00:00
They tried that with Koko, it didn't work. It did not make the gorilla any smarter, it was an animal, and remained an animal.

If you read the criticism about the Koko project, it's that Patterson prompted her to make certain signs. I watched some clips of the signs, and it's very obvious that that is exactly what she did.

Animals can only communicate in a limited fashion. They do not have some "hidden" intelligence that you are trying to find.