MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ndsipa_pomu | 2025-07-06 18:28:40+00:00
It was less of a counterexample and more of an inaccuracy. It wasn't immediately obvious as to whether the theory was at fault or our measurements or even knowledge of celestial objects (e.g. maybe Mercury had some nearby object that was changing its orbit).

Also, there wasn't any alternative, so a theory that explains almost everything is going to be accepted. Modern theories are also accepted if they explain things with more accuracy or over wider ranges than alternatives - often it's the shortcomings of theories that gives us clues as to a better theory. (e.g. the ultraviolet catastrophe)
by cb321 | 2025-07-06 18:28:41+00:00
Yeah. I mentioned this the other day: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44466245

Combined with the dot-com boom "general hype", I'm sure a lot of managers pushed heavyweight solutions where lightweight would have sufficed. Well, that may be an eternal problem, but maybe more succeeded in pushing them with a lot of hype. :-)

Not enough people I guess saw this as Sun trying to be the new Microsoft (which was the new IBM, which still has MVS & Cobol!), namely the company in control of The Platform, where here "The" just means the hip new thing kids learn in school and want to continue doing before they become expensive old timers.
by potato3732842 | 2025-07-06 18:29:46+00:00
>They could set a 1000% tax on the coffee produced.

No they couldn't. That'd just mint another cartel run black market that they don't control and that cartel would tax the black market coffee at substantially less.

You can kind of think of the current drugs situation as a "so big the number doesn't matter, it's a non stater" percent tax.
by oc1 | 2025-07-06 18:30:04+00:00
That in my experience is never the bottleneck, at least not for professionals. Letting Claude code is the easy part of the job. Gathering the requirements, Drafting a good story for claude, guiding claude through the endless mistakes it usually commits, reviewing the output of claude, steering the ship, this is the bottleneck. Unfortunately, no AI can't steer the ship currently, not o3 pro, not gemini, not opus 4, not any of their fancy cli agent tools, no matter how clever the md instruction files and other gimmicks. And boy, i'd be the first one to cheer if AI could do this. But currently, it's useless without fulltime attention of a senior experienced human.
by xg15 | 2025-07-06 18:30:44+00:00
Yep, fully agreed. Also finding it interesting how they kept extending and improving this and other patterns throughout the games. This particular one was used in SC1, WC3 and SC2 (and maybe others that I don't know) and you could see the improvements in each one.

(OK, just for fairness: StarCraft also has hidden features that are only reachable through modifier keys, like the entire grouping and command chaining systems - and C&C does have some feedback: They do indicate the action by changing the cursor icon. So there are flaws, but I still find Blizzard's system more consistent and information-rich.)
by cluckindan | 2025-07-06 18:30:51+00:00
Thank you for the strawmen. I will burn them at Christmas.

Do you really think ”legal” means unregulated? That, if something, is a libertarian viewpoint.

Think about how many regulations you need to fulfill to be able to legally build a house, or employ a person. Are those things completely unregulated? How about the fuel you purchase at a gas station? Ever get only water or nitromethane instead of unleaded gas? Of course you haven’t, because you are buying a legal, regulated product.

Making drugs legal would make it possible to enforce standards of quality, labeling, age limits, et cetera before the products ever got to market.

By making drugs illegal, the society has abandoned all those controls and replaced them with the threat of violence: enforcement of behavior instead of enforcement of regulations.

That does not sound like freedom to me.

(Please don’t start arguing that murder also needs to be legalized, we both know that is not what I’m arguing for.)
by saurik | 2025-07-06 18:30:55+00:00
Ruby is complex as it does the thing I said: 1) return is bottom, and so you can't have return "statement"--most people call it a statement even though it is a "void value expression"... but, like, once the type of an expression becomes sufficiently encoded in the syntax, how is it not a statement?--in a context where an expression would go; and 2) it isn't even the same thing as what Rust is doing, as it is a non-local construct that is effectively throwing an internal form of exception, allowing you to "return" from a function far up the call stack, and so it's rules are a bit more regular and useful: Ruby is coming at the notion of almost everything is an expression so as to allow expressions that look like statements, and that's a very different motivation than the syntax we are seeing here in Rust.
by CharlesW | 2025-07-06 18:31:28+00:00
> Even if this was true for neurotypicals (which it isn't) it wouldn't be true for neurodivergent folk.

Interesting take, are you neurodivergent? "Masking" is basically a "get over it" approach that the parent talks about. It is exhausting, to the point that neurodivergent people wil preemptively bail out of situations if they don't feel up for it. Tools associated with stocism can be helpful for neurodivergent people when they're used to support their needs rather than diminish them, in my experience.
by codemystery | 2025-07-06 18:32:09+00:00
It's because in the leftist bay area tech scene, of which ycombinator is the absolute epicenter, no one does bias training. Among leftists, indians are the "model minority" and everyone is looking for an indian golden boy. You have no idea you are even doing it because you have implicit bias you are always crowing about. India is one of the poorest nations on earth and has many smart people, but there is an infatuation among the monied west coast left.

In a way the leftist tech scene has adopted eastern mysticism and shows how far california has moved from westernism. Hindu and Buddhism are religions that worship living humans and believe in divine incarnation. A young person might be a llama in hinduism or a tulku in buddhism. It's not to say that these tech startups are worshiping their newly discovered india programmer, but it is the culture that does not fall far from the tree.
by xp84 | 2025-07-06 18:32:14+00:00
I mean, it’s just like having an army of interns that works for (near) free. It’s a huge positive for productivity, and I don’t think we will forget how. I’m more concerned with how we make new senior/staff engineers from now on, since the old “do grunt work for a couple years, then do simple well defined work for a few years” is 100% not a career path that exists even now.
by _wire_ | 2025-07-06 18:32:40+00:00
I am surprised at how primitive this site is. In form, function or opinion this place isn't even remarkable for 1995.

The opinions are with very few exceptions 1 dimensional and arid.

As to toxic flame wars, everyone knows those are the most entertaining part of the internet; It's just less fun when people are stupid and bad at it. Well moderated flame wars are the intellectual baseline for everything else.

The moderation here is based on plain censorship, meaning the elimination of topics or contributions without justification. Anything the slightest bit controversial or arousing is simply turned off.

And the tool applying censorship is a cudgel: it's ridiculous to waste time writing a comment only to find the post has been flagged between the time you entered the submission and when you hit post. Idiocy.

For a site pandering to smart people, there amazingly little knowledge here. The structure of the site is not built for knowledge. One thing never leads to another except by the effect Brownian motion. It's not designed for knowledge and the trivial repetitions are endless. A substantial number of posts are just re-posts.

Half the posts overall are lazy attention scams, which amount to nothing more than dry links to paywall MSM that rightfully should be flagged but aren't.

If there's one thing that stands out about this tech bro RSS feed of a site: it's how corporate and uncreative this joint is. Oh, but it's a trivial mental outpost for capital, so of course...

But thank you moderators!
Show HN: I wrote a "web OS" based on the Apple Lisa's UI, with 1-bit graphics
by ayaros | 2025-07-06 18:32:55+00:00
https://lisagui.com/info.html

This is a web OS I wrote in vanilla JS that looks like the Apple Lisa Office System (1983-85), with other contemporaneous influences and additional improvements and features. It's currently in alpha and isn't remotely bug free. I had been holding off on posting this here until it was somewhat presentable and useful. Please note; the Lisa conforms more literally to the desktop metaphor than most modern GUIs - some of the important differences are mentioned in the readme.

This is a complete recreation of the UI in JS; it all renders to a single canvas element. It's not a CSS theme, and not an emulator ported to JS. None of the code is written by Apple. I'll be happy to elaborate more in the comments, but the short version is the entire UI is defined outside the DOM using JS objects. Thus, every interface element - menus, windows, controls, and even typefaces - was recreated from scratch. There are no font files - I wrote my own typesetting system, which supports combining multiple text styles and generates new glyph variants on the fly.

Many of the technical decisions I made were motivated by a desire to have this look the same in every browser. That's harder to do with the DOM and CSS, and why I moved as much logic as I could to JS. Also, the only part of the project outside of vanilla JS and standard web APIs is the Gulp toolkit, which I'm using as a minification/build tool. No vibe coding was used to make this!

This is based on a UI from the 80s, and won't work well on your phone. If you insist on running it that way, turn on trackpad mode in the touchscreen settings panel of the preferences app. For best results, install it as a PWA (add it to your home screen). Also there are some odd Android bugs; the native touchscreen keyboard is currently broken, and there's an issue with the cursor when dragging windows.

I realize there's not a whole lot to do within LisaGUI right now; I've got a big list of additional features and apps I'll be adding in the future. I've been working on this project for a while, and I'm eager to hear people's feedback and answer questions about it.
by tedivm | 2025-07-06 18:33:12+00:00
When I was at Malwarebytes we had concerns that IOBit was stealing our database and passing it off on their own. While we had a lot of obvious proof, we felt it wasn't enough for the average person to understand.

To get real proof we created a new program that only existed on a single machine, and then added a signature for that application. This way there could be no claim that they independently added something to their database, as the program was not malware and literally impossible to actually find in the wild. Once they added it to their database we made a blog post and the issue got a lot of attention.

https://forums.malwarebytes.com/topic/29681-iobit-steals-mal...
by Ukv | 2025-07-06 18:34:42+00:00
> The big difference here is that you’re applying B2C terms on B2B licenses.

Both are cases of B2B licensing with the latter business then selling a product on to consumers.

> This would essentially ban enterprise B2B licenses for video game software which is insanity

I don't see how. If for instance some company develops an audio processing library, they can still license it out to a game development company for a limited time - just that the license would be "the company can no longer sell games with this technology after the license expires", opposed to anything that would prevent functioning of the already-sold games. Or rather, they could stipulate the latter in their license, but then their market would be limited to game development companies willing to patch it out after the license expires.
by miles | 2025-07-06 18:35:05+00:00
There is too much "helpful" title modification of late. The original title itself fits within HN limits:

"A 17-year-old teen refutes a mathematical conjecture proposed 40 years ago"

The site's guidelines are clear[1] but increasingly ignored by some moderators:

"...please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize."

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
by BobbyTables2 | 2025-07-06 18:35:12+00:00
At some point “more pizzas per hour” will be achieved at the cost of quality.

I’d love to seem them incentivize actually not putting a whole pizza’s worth of toppings on just 3 slices.

And also putting enough of a topping where it becomes visible. When I add “onion” to “pizza”, I don’t intend for them to add a single tiny spec to a single slice — finding it should be easier than Where’s Waldo.
by benbojangles | 2025-07-06 18:35:17+00:00
Terminal + Claude Code + a project folder it's all you need! Who knew?!

I never really enjoyed using full blown ide's anyway, setting them up was a chore, configuring QT to cross compile for various platforms was a project in itself, I always found that using a text editor and terminal the most logical combination for editing. Adding another terminal window with claude code to perform my requests while i debug, edit, test, review, i feel like i have graduated from coder-editor to project leader and there are no employee associated problems to deal with. All or my shelved side projects are complete as i wanted them and all in just a few months since March when Claude went big.
by goku12 | 2025-07-06 18:35:39+00:00
> Also, breaking changes might not be found until after the commit is pushed.

That doesn't feel right. Conventional commits is related to semantic versioning. In that context, breaking changes refer to changes that break the backwards compatibility of the public interface of the software. Such a change forces the user to modify their own code/workflow. For example, a backwards incompatible change to the public API, major change to UI, file format change, etc.

These sorts of changes are deliberate and often carefully evaluated for the consequences they have for the user (a famous example is the Python 2 to 3 transition). If a breaking change is unexpected and identified only after a push, that is almost surely a bug that must not be published. Am I missing something here?
by xp84 | 2025-07-06 18:38:01+00:00
The exact mechanism won’t be standardized, some places fill in ballots with pen today, let the voter feed it into the machine and optically scans to tabulate, and others use a computer that tabulates and (usually?) spools a paper record that’s behind a window so the voter can see that the paper record is accurate. The important part is the actual methodology itself.
by DrillShopper | 2025-07-06 18:38:21+00:00
> And if the end result of this legislation is that videogames in EU aren't licensed or sold but are instead all streamed and you are instead just buying access to stream a game, then what?

Then the industry is honest, and I can spend my money on an indie developer that doesn't do that.

Companies that do that will likely be completely outcompeted by studios that give a shit.
by __MatrixMan__ | 2025-07-06 18:38:34+00:00
My proposal wasn't that individuals should juggle accounts and cookies in a machine-vs-human game of cat and mouse, but rather that we should rewrite the protocols we use to play that game for us. I don't think there's anything dishonest about that--it's just that making computers lie to each other is the honest work of protecting well-meaning humans from malicious humans.

Do you have a different sort of explicitly working against profiling that you had in mind?
by sjoedev | 2025-07-06 18:38:46+00:00
I play video games at a decently high level (like top ~10% in a few competitive games). To support what you’re saying, I can tell the difference between 144hz and 240hz if I’m in control. For example, if I can shake the screen around.

If I’m just watching, I’m not sure I could even tell the difference between 60hz and 144hz.
by kldg | 2025-07-06 18:40:42+00:00
I am moderately hyped for AI, but I treat these corporate intrusions into my workflows the same as ads or age verification, pointing uBlock to elements which are easy to point-and-click block, and making quick browser plugins and Tampermonkey scripts for things like Google to intercept my web searches and redirect them from the All/AI search page. -And if I can, it does amuse me to have Gemini write the plugins to block Google ads/inconveniences.
by jschveibinz | 2025-07-06 18:41:09+00:00
An engineering, signal processing extension/perspective:

An infinite sequence approximates a general function, as described in the article (see the slider bar example). In signal processing applications, functions can be considered (or forced) to be bandlimited so a much lower-order representation (i.e. vector) suffices:

- The subspace of bandlimited functions is much smaller than the full L^2 space - It has a countable orthonormal basis (e.g., shifted sinc functions) - The function can be written as (with sinc functions):

x(t) = \sum_{n=-\infty}^{\infty} f(nT) \cdot \text{sinc}\left( \frac{t - nT}{T} \right)

- This is analogous to expressing a vector in a finite-dimensional subspace using a basis (e.g. sinc)

Discrete-time signal processing is useful for comp-sci applications like audio, SDR, trading data, etc.
by mtillman | 2025-07-06 18:41:59+00:00
Certainly not inline with OP’s wishes, I read Beowulf every day from the time my daughter was born until she was 2 at which point she preferred the adventures of Fone Bone, his cousins, and their friend Thorn.

I was given the advice of someone much smarter than I am that when reading works in pre-modern English, read them aloud. This advice has worked wonders toward my enjoyment of the poems even at the risk of my wife preferring I spend early evenings at a small room on the far side of the house.
by LTL_FTC | 2025-07-06 18:42:04+00:00
This is my question as well. I am already wondering how prepared college grads will be. Getting help with programming assignments meant going to the dungeon and collaborating with fellow students while the TA made their rounds and overall just figuring it out. Today, an LLM knocks out the programming assignments in once shot, probably. And industry seems hellbent on hiring seniors mostly so where are the juniors to become seniors going to come from?

I think the talent pipeline has contracted and/or will and overcorrect. But maybe the industry’s carrying capacity of devs has shrunk.
by BobbyTables2 | 2025-07-06 18:42:31+00:00
Learning multiple programming languages is practically trivial compared to human ones.

Programming languages have a “vocabulary” of what, 20-50 keywords? And modern languages have extremely similar “grammar”…

Mastering 500 (even irregular) verbs and 500 nouns of a human language is fairly useless for interacting with other humans beyond very limited scopes.
by MoreQARespect | 2025-07-06 18:43:14+00:00
>I haven't found any team that used snapshot testing and didn't also need to change the snapshots for every little change, which obviously defeats the purpose

I dont see how this even defeats the point, let alone obviously.

If a UI changes I appreciate being notified. If a REST API response changes I like to see a diff.

If somebody changes some CSS and it changes 50 snapshots, it isnt a huge burden to approve them all and sometimes it highlights a bug.
by aquariusDue | 2025-07-06 18:43:32+00:00
It's the calculator all over again!

Jokes aside, while I'm almost sure that the ability to code can be lost and regained just like training a muscle what I'm more worried is the rug pull and squeeze that is bound to happen sometime in the next 5 to 10 years unless LLMs go the way of Free Software GNU style. If the latter happens then LLMs for coding will be like calculators and such more or less and personally I don't know how more harmful that would be compared to the boost in productivity.

That said if the former becomes reality (and I hope not!) then we're in for some huge existential crises when people realize they can barely materialize the labour part of their jobs after doing the thinky part and the meetings part.
by danw1979 | 2025-07-06 18:43:53+00:00
What are your thoughts on humans learning from LLM output ?

I’ve been encouraging the new developers I work with to ensure they read the docs and learn the language to ensure the LLM doesn’t become a crutch, but rather a bicycle.

But it occurred to me recently that I probably learned most of what I know from examples of code written by others.

I’m certain my less experienced colleagues are doing the same, but from Claude rather than Stack Overflow…
by SoftTalker | 2025-07-06 18:43:58+00:00
I guess that's the best answer. Obsessiveness is a mental disorder though, and it strikes me as similar to walking up to someone and starting off with "what are your addictions" or "what are your compulsions" as an ice breaker, which would generally be inappropriate.

Even taking it most charitably it presumes that most people are obsessed with something. I'm not, I'm not really passionate about anything either, certainly not anything I do professionally.

The last time I was at a conference, if anyone asked me why I was there my honest answer would be "my boss said I should go" and if they asked what I had enjoyed the most so far my answer would be "I skipped all the sessions yesterday afternoon and went to a gym and lifted weights for two hours." If that led to a conversation about weightlifting, I wouldn't have much to say. I don't obsess about it, I don't have a coach, I don't compete, I don't know any names of professional lifters or their latest records, it's just exercise that I do.

I guess it boils down to, I'm a pretty boring person. I generally feel like I don't have much to add to a conversation and it's uncomfortable to answer questions that reveal that. So I do generally try to keep people talking about themselves, which most people seem happy to do.
by gambiting | 2025-07-06 18:44:01+00:00
I have absolutely no idea where I'd find a "tweaker"(maybe that's a statement on where I live more than anything? and I would never have the courage to go up to them and ask to buy drugs. I imagine best case they'd laugh and ask if you're a cop, worst case they'd sell you god knows what or rob you. It's just completely incomparable to going to a store to buy a product.
by JdeBP | 2025-07-06 18:44:24+00:00
zdw mentioned an "authoritative" server, i.e. a content DNS server. CloudFlare is not talking about content DNS servers there. It cannot decide from paragraph to paragraph what it is calling the DNS servers that it is talking about, but it is talking about proxy DNS servers, that respond with the actual grunt work of query resolution done.

People like me have been recommending not running public proxy DNS servers for the entirety of the 21st century thus far, and the world has taken some notice, although more work is required, world!

* https://jdebp.uk/FGA/proxy-server-ip-addresses.html

In any case, ANY queries do not work nearly as well for amplification attacks as they used to. Many people have read RFC 8482. I, for example, changed all of the DNS servers in djbwares to respond to ANY queries per RFC 8482 back in March 2019.

The task at hand in this discussion only involves running a content DNS server, serving LOC records from some file/database or other.