MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by CuriousRose | 2025-07-30 03:42:06+00:00
I'm building a fairly large SaaS product that will have global users and show financial reporting across different regions. Nothing gives me more anxiety as a relatively new developer than storing and recalling date/time values from my Postgres database, being converted to/from/being displayed in my app.

I have all records stored in timestampz(3), but I have no idea if what I'm doing is best practice or how to audit said functions. Using luxon at the moment, but a guide or blog post for best practices would help put my mind at ease if anyone has one. I know dates as a library are complex, but the UX managing them isn't much better.
by deathanatos | 2025-07-30 03:42:24+00:00
I usually just tell people.

> "Which button do I press"

The Big One.

> focus

It's automatic. (If I'm handing a stranger my camera.)

> zoom level

This is maybe the hardest one, I guess, … but I do think most people have seen enough TV cop dramas to instinctively know. Or, they can just take the photo at the zoom I've handed them, and it won't be a big deal. Walking forward a few steps is also like zooming.
by ants_everywhere | 2025-07-30 03:42:56+00:00
Go back and look at the history of AI, including current papers from the most advanced research teams.

Nearly every component is based on humans

- neural net

- long/short term memory

- attention

- reasoning

- activation function

- learning

- hallucination

- evolutionary algorithm

If you're just consuming an AI to build a React app then you don't have to care. If you are building an artificial intelligence then in practice everyone who's anyone is very deliberately modeling it on humans.
by donatj | 2025-07-30 03:44:35+00:00
I miss the days when our best minds developed protocols instead of products. The last 15 years has been just the commodification and destruction of everything the previous generation has built.

I'm frankly surprised email has stood up as well as it has, even if it is nearly impossible to run your own email server these days.

In the mid-to-late teens IRC was making something of a comeback and then Slack EEE'd it.
by mmasu | 2025-07-30 03:45:56+00:00
yesterday I read a paper about using gpt 4 as a tutor in italian schools, with encouraging results - students are more engaged, get through homework by receiving immediate and precise feedback, resulting in non-negligible performance improvements:

https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.15981

it is definitely a great use case for LLMs, and challenges the assumption that LLMs can only “increase brain rot” so to say.
by gnabgib | 2025-07-30 03:46:49+00:00
You're over doing the submissions

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44706380

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44643037

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44580462

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44557009

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44480405

> Please don't use HN primarily for promotion. It's ok to post your own stuff part of the time, but the primary use of the site should be for curiosity.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
by disconcision | 2025-07-30 03:47:06+00:00
i feel it's not quite that simple. certainly the changes you suggest make the paper more straightforwardly defensible. i imagine the reason they included the problematic assertion is that they (correctly) understood the question would arise. while inserting the assertion unsupported is probably the worst of both worlds, i really do think it is worthwhile to address.

while it is not realistic to insist every study account for every possible objection, i would argue that for this kind of capability work, it is in general worth at least modest effort to establish a human baseline.

i can understand why people might not care about this, for example if their only goal is assessing whether or not an llm-based component can achieve a certain level of reliability as part of a larger system. but i also think that there is similar, and perhaps even more pressing broad applicability for considering the degree to which llm failure patterns approximate human ones. this is because at this point, human are essentially the generic all-purpose subsystem used to fill gaps in larger systems which cannot be filled (practically, or in principle) by simpler deterministic systems. so when it comes to a problem domain like this one, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that humans provide a convenient universal benchmark to which comparison is strongly worth considering.

(that said, i acknowledge that authors probably cannot win here. if they provided even a modest-scale human study, i am confident commenters would criticize their sample size)
by bediger4000 | 2025-07-30 03:48:05+00:00
I'm excited to read about scams and thefts. They all seem so ingenious, requiring all kinds of knowledge. The Axie Infinity Ronin Bridge seems like a great example, but the introduction of new terms like "rug pull", which has a specific meaning, implies that there's a lot of innovation in the scam and heist fields.
by AdieuToLogic | 2025-07-30 03:48:48+00:00
>> I think a better "lesson learned" in this case is to remove all ambiguity from datetime types ...

> There is no ambiguity.

The ambiguity I referenced was regarding program logic, not how `Date` operates when given only the year/month/date part of an instant. Perhaps I should have said instead:

I think a better "lesson learned" in this case is to remove all ambiguity when using datetime types by internally using only UTC representations for calculations ...

And, yes, I do see the irony in this. :-)
by efreak | 2025-07-30 03:49:09+00:00
Not on Windows 11 you can't. They removed that for...reasons. They also removed the lovely hosted network that was added with 7 (Vista?) so now you can't network two modern Windows devices without something else (physical cable, or a non-Windows or older Windows device for hosting a network). Stuck with a low speed Wi-Fi router and USB 2 cables? It's gonna take you hours to make that one-time 200gb transfer, unless you wanna drag it down the stairs (the only USB 3 cables I own are mini USB 3 cables for use with an older external hard drive that I no longer own, all my USBC cables are USB 2/PD only...I think...).
by tossandthrow | 2025-07-30 03:49:30+00:00
> part of its treatment structure is subsidized by Americans through what they pay for the same to the same companies

How can that be? As an American you must understand that everyone negotiate for themselves with no external or global consequences.

Ofcausr you can have higher salary without it affecting your neighbor - it is just you working higher!

And ofcause you can negotiate better deals with the medicine industry without it affecting you neighbor - you are just a better business man!
by tim-- | 2025-07-30 03:50:12+00:00
This is power vs. energy.

The Richter Scale is a logarithmic scale, based on shaking measurements (think of the old pencil-based seismograph!). Power. (10^1).

The Moment Magnitude Scale (the more modern/replacement of Richter Scale) is based on energy. Geological organisations reporting on an earthquake will usually show this as "M <number>" or "Mw <number>".

Richter works well for small-to-medium earthquakes, and it's not accurate for really large or distant earthquakes.

The energy released in an earthquake increases exponentially, not just linearly.

EDIT: The Moment Magnitude Scale is where the "10^1.5" figure is coming from. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moment_magnitude_scale
by VintageCool | 2025-07-30 03:51:03+00:00
I remember in 2015 watching this great tsunami video at a harbor. It was about 11 minutes long.

At the start, there's just a white line at the horizon. Then the fishing boats in the harbor start rocking and jangling. Then water starts pouring over some walkways and sea walls.

Eventually the cameraman backs away and starts climbing a concrete tower; water starts to flood over the area where they had been standing. I think they climb a couple stories and are safe up there.

I haven't been able to find the video in years, but I remember being fascinated by it and I'd love to watch it again.

Edit: I never expected to find that video again, but here it is. A little more terrifying than I remember.

https://youtu.be/PvJs2iWQuFs
by __mharrison__ | 2025-07-30 03:51:30+00:00
I have magnetized adapters for most of my USB C devices. I've had a USB C port fail on a phone in the past.

They are very easy to use and have a satisfying snap when the cord connects.

My only issue with them is that we were recently at Great Sand Dunes National Park and my phone fell into the sand. The magnetic adapter was covered with sand (which wasn't too hard to clean) and very smart metallic bits that stick to the magnet. They were difficult and annoying to remove and prevented the adapter from connecting.

I guess on the plus side they protected the original port. I was able to remove the magnetic adapters and charge the phone with classic USB C.

I guess I do have two issues. The adapter on my MBP is very particular about the cable I use. And the adapter, that supports high speed data transfer and charging, appears to be directional. Although the plug seems to be symmetric, in practice it doesn't work on both sides.
by BalinKing | 2025-07-30 03:52:37+00:00
A̶F̶A̶I̶C̶T̶,̶ ̶N̶T̶V̶ ̶i̶s̶ ̶r̶e̶p̶o̶r̶t̶i̶n̶g̶ ̶t̶h̶a̶t̶ ̶3̶m̶ ̶w̶a̶v̶e̶s̶ ̶h̶a̶v̶e̶ ̶j̶u̶s̶t̶ ̶s̶t̶a̶r̶t̶e̶d̶ ̶t̶o̶ ̶h̶i̶t̶ ̶J̶a̶p̶a̶n̶.̶

EDIT: Apologies, I misunderstood—a reply to this comment said they were just predictions. (I saw in this video[0] that the first waves had arrived, and assumed the heights would've therefore corresponded to actual measurements. But it's still in the "predictions" section, and I should've noticed that before posting....)

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YbRCvDZO5Zk
by crystal_revenge | 2025-07-30 03:53:40+00:00
I'm surprised so many people don't understand what tsunamis are. It's a "wave" created by a sudden shift in the Earth's crust. Imagine, suddenly, water on each of side of that split is now at different heights and has to equalize. It's much closer to just removing a dam that is holding back water equal in height to the new difference between the sea floors.

What you get is not a "wave" but a wall of water.
by KennyBlanken | 2025-07-30 03:53:40+00:00
The Lightning connector is superior for everyday use. It's exeptionally reliable, tolerant of debris, and difficult to damage. It was designed to last, unlike every single USB device port ever made, which was designed to fail so you'd need to replace the cable and device eventually. MiniUSB, MicroUSB, and USB-C. It's all trash.

Lightning has a perfect mechanical design. The pins phone-side are nearly possible to damage because they're well supported and only poke out in a bump shape that can't hook on anything. The cable side is the same way - no pins to catch on anything. The port is easy to clean out. The cable end is trivial to clean. The retention mechanism doesn't rely on anything that can wear out or break.

Meanwhile the USB-C connector puts a fucking thin wedge of plastic in the middle of the connector and even worse, there are pins around that center thin wedge and they're easily broken/damaged because they have no protection whatsoever and poor mechanical support. Oh, and the retention mechanism sucks just like it has in every

The USB-C port on my airpods is contactly getting fucked up while once in a blue moon I need to tick a toothpick in and rummage around a little to get some lint out of my phone's Lightning plug, and it's good for a couple more months...and that thing lives in my pocket, whereas the Airpod case spends most of its life sitting around on tables.

It's also a substantial plus that Apple tightly controls the cable spec. Just go look at the pages where people document USB-C cables that are so shitty they'll destroy the electronics in one or both devices.
by Arelius | 2025-07-30 03:54:26+00:00
I'm actually not sure the Northridge earthquake was cited in the Richter scale, most references I see have it as about a 6.7, which based on the USGS catalog, was it's moment magnitude 6.7 Mw

https://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/eventpage/ci3144585/...

And today's earthquake for comparison:

https://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/eventpage/us6000qw60...

And some information of Magnitude types: https://www.usgs.gov/programs/earthquake-hazards/magnitude-t...

I think it's probably safe to assume, that today's earthquake is much more energetic at least.
by Dylan16807 | 2025-07-30 03:54:34+00:00
>The way to allow them or ban them is via remote attestation. How else would they be able to do that?

The first check should be if it's their device. If the device has the correct key to show it's theirs, they could allow it right there. Or they can go further for extra security, to ask for remote attestation of their device.

If the device claims to be owned by anyone else, they should not ask for remote attestation. Why would they need it? They already have all the information they need to decide whether to allow or block. "My washing machine (unrooted)" and "claims to be my washing machine (rooted)" should be treated exactly the same by them. Allow both or ban both, depending on the purpose of the network.
by thisoneisreal | 2025-07-30 03:54:41+00:00
The point about task variability being normal, and attempts to reduce variability being destructive, is explained exceptionally well in "The Principles of Product Development Flow." Metrics folks want software engineering to have units of work so that it can be measured like an assembly line, or sales, or any other number of things that make sense to quantify. But the reality is that we build and make adjustments to interconnected systems, and that just can't be reduced to arbitrary units. Tasks are heterogeneous and work on different scales. When you try to cram them all into the same sized box, you are actually creating friction and making the problem worse.
by alisonatwork | 2025-07-30 03:54:42+00:00
This recently happened to me on Booking.com and... I ended up not using Booking.com to book a hotel. So long, genius status, or whatever.

It absolutely drives me nuts that the western world is moving to "as seen in China" login-via-callback flow. Aside from the privacy issue of forcing people to attach an email or phone number or third-party auth provider to their every account, it's just a waste of time and energy to delete our passwords and force us through this weird multi-app flow just to log in to a service we spent years logging into without ever getting hacked. Imagine if every time you wanted to get into your house you had to press the doorbell and then wait for someone to call you back to decide whether you should be allowed in. It's absurd.
by firefax | 2025-07-30 03:55:29+00:00
It makes me feel bad when I see an obituary like this. I had no idea he existed, but reading I can't question he had an impact on the world. Other corners of the internet people would shit on the hobby just because they don't share it -- me, personally, being on the autistic spectrum came with a side of fine motor issues, so I could never do the painting and prodding that the more complex kits required... it's an art form, a craft that takes skill.

It's a shame it's not as popular -- it worries me a bit that we're so... online. I was more into Legos, but I wandered into the kids section for the first time in ages the other day at the local big box retailer and it feels like the kits are simpler now, and they're often branded to tie in with movies rather than being a generic thing like space, or pirates, or... space pirates.

Anyway RIP dude -- true hacker, had a passion and pursued it.
by protocolture | 2025-07-30 03:56:07+00:00
>Hamas controls Gaza with an iron fist.

IDF controls Gaza lmao.

>Hamas didn't just steal all the aid and put it in its tunnels. Hamas exerted influence by controlling the aid and its distribution. It did also steal some of it. You are to some degree misrepresenting the Israeli concern. Israel isn't simply concerned about Hamas stealing all the aid, it is concerned both about stealing and reselling (which does happen) and about control of the aid as means of continuing to establish itself as the governing body of Gaza.

IDF is worried that if Hamas distributes the aid they might be seen as a government?

Israel doesn't like getting out humanitarianed by literal terrorists? That does sound embarrassing, but not embarrassing enough to literally kill people over.

>These are not contradictory, Hamas controlled the aid, but still the bulk of it got delivered. The problem is the control they asserted. Israel has tried, via GHF, to take them out of the loop. Nobody is disputing that when aid was flowing in it did eventually end up reaching the people (who sometimes had to buy it).

If Hamas delivers the aid as it is intended to be delivered that is fine. The issue is starvation, not who gets the credit for ending starvation. Pretending otherwise is ghoulish.
by scarmig | 2025-07-30 03:56:08+00:00
This depends on use case and who or what is actually consuming the pages. Most of the time, humans don't actually want the same list for all time (though what follows would work for them).

The only way to have a static list is to have an identifier for the state of the list at a certain time, or a field that allows you to reconstruct the list (e.g. a timestamp). This also means you need to store your items' data so the list of items can be reconstructed. Concretely, this might mean a query parameter for the list at a certain time (time=Xyz). When you paginate, either a cursor-based approach, an offset approach, or a page number approach would all work.

This is not what most human users want: they would see deleted items, wouldn't see added items, and changes to fields you might sort on wouldn't be reflected in the list ordering. But it's ideal for many automated use cases.

ETA: If you're willing to restrict users to a list of undeletable items that is always sorted, ascending, by time of item creation, you can also get by with any strategy for pagination. The last page might get new items appended, and you might get new pages, but any existing pages besides the last page won't change.
by vFunct | 2025-07-30 03:56:08+00:00
Yah you can't fix color balance from bad color cast.

ALL photos look good with direct flash. Never use bounce flash. And indirect lighting is never flattering. EVER. Fire any photographer that ever uses bounce flash. Nobody wants their muddied color.

I was also a photo editor with thousands of photographer submissions. I can always tell which ones used bounce flash. A sure sign of unprofessional amateurness.

I get that people have a desire to maintain their lazy habits, but my job was to make sure they understood they sucked at photography.
by jandrewrogers | 2025-07-30 03:57:06+00:00
I agree that it is not intuitive.

AFAIK, it was done that way to maintain rough congruence with historical seismic magnitude scales, which were more qualitative in nature. Modern seismic scale systems are significantly more scientific and quantitative but you can kind of retcon the historical systems if you set the exponential strength scale to 10^1.5 in the modern systems.
by thisoneisreal | 2025-07-30 03:58:11+00:00
Great reflections. Like Kent Beck said, "Software is a leverage game."

Stafford Beer would also agree with you by the way. His whole thing is that the computational complexity of any decently sized organization is mathematically overwhelming, and the way to cope with it is via organization (or as you called it, architecture). "Sphaghetti code" is basically what you get when you allow every signal the system produces to become embodied in your code base, which inevitably creates so much noise that it becomes almost impossible to modify efficiently.
by sigseg1v | 2025-07-30 03:58:15+00:00
Are you using them daily? I find that maybe 3 or 4 programming questions I ask per day, it simply cannot provide a correct answer even after hand holding. They often go to extreme gymnastics to try to gaslight you no matter how much proof you provide.

For example, today I was asking a LLM about how to configure a GH action to install a SDK version that was just recently out of support. It kept hallucinating on my config saying that when you provide multiple SDK versions in the config, it only picks the most recent. This is false. It's also mentioned in the documentation specifically, which I linked the LLM, that it installs all versions you list. Explaining this to copilot, it keeps doubling down, ignoring the docs, and even going as far as asking me to have the action output the installed SDKs, seeing all the ones I requested as installed, then gaslighting me saying that it can print out the wrong SDKs with a `--list-sdks` command.
by 0xDEAFBEAD | 2025-07-30 03:58:58+00:00
>In my definition that only happens when you start making decision that affect other people.

Not a hard line. Scientific papers often comment on the best public policies. It matters a lot to taxpayers if institutional characteristics mean that these papers will inevitably recommend left-wing policies.

Why would right-wingers want their tax dollars going to institutes that will just recommend left-wing policies and call it "science", without the sort of rigorous debate that true science requires?

>Being antiscience is the problem here not being antileft.

If scholars are following the evidence where it leads, it should be easy to give examples of them recommending right-wing policies. How many recent examples can you give of this?

Feynman said: "The first principle is that you must not fool yourself--and you are the easiest person to fool. So you have to be very careful about that."

He talks about the need for utter honesty, leaning over backwards.

"For example, if you’re doing an experiment, you should report everything that you think might make it invalid—not only what you think is right about it: other causes that could possibly explain your results; and things you thought of that you’ve eliminated by some other experiment, and how they worked—to make sure the other fellow can tell they have been eliminated."

https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/9377486-that-is-the-idea-th...

When people call themselves "scientists", yet neglect these principles, they aren't doing science. They're cloaking their ideology in the guise of science.

See this article for an in-depth investigation of how this happens in modern academia: https://www.realityslaststand.com/p/woke-academics-are-riggi...

Just because it happens in a university building, and calls itself "science", doesn't make it true science. Any more than the fact that Scientology has "science" in the name makes it true science.

"Trust the Science" and "Nullius in verba" (motto of the Royal Society) have practically opposite meanings. One of them is actual science; the other is a cargo cult which grants itself unearned credibility through use of the term "science".
by crystal_revenge | 2025-07-30 03:59:15+00:00
> Again the only correct comment is downvoted.

I seriously wonder if people brains are being cooked these days. One of the blessing of HN used to be it was full of fairly well educated, and most importantly, curious people. Sometimes with a bit too much of a focus of the technical side of things, but at least on most technical topics the comments where a great place to get a richer understanding of a whatever was being discussed.
by ziotom78 | 2025-07-30 03:59:25+00:00
Just a couple of days ago, I submitted a few pages from the PDF of a PhD thesis written in French to ChatGPT, asking it to translate them into English. The first 2-3 pages were perfect, then the LLM started hallucinating, putting new sentences and removing parts. The interesting fact is that the added sentences were correct and generally on the spot: the result text sounded plausible, and only a careful comparison of each sentence revealed the truth. Near the end of the chapter, virtually nothing of what ChatGPT produced was directly related to the original text.