MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jerlam | 2025-07-06 20:03:24+00:00
I bought a Logitech wireless mouse called the Marathon which boasted an amazing three-year battery life on two AAs. I initially thought it was broken; it had a maddening delay where the sensors turned off after a short idle time, so when I wanted to use the mouse, it didn't register the first movements since it had to "wake up".

This delay wasn't present on the Logitech gaming mouse I previously used, probably a combination of a high polling rate (500Hz) and a much longer idle delay. The battery life was also much shorter, only 250 hours on high-performance mode, but I just recharged a set of AA batteries every week so it was never an issue.

I ended up returning the Marathon mouse.
by simonw | 2025-07-06 20:03:33+00:00
Use this as your shebang line:

#!/usr/bin/env -S uv run --script

https://treyhunner.com/2024/12/lazy-self-installing-python-s...

I don't think requiring all CLI tools to be "native binaries" makes sense. Plenty of popular CLI tools are not compiled binaries. The Python and Node.js ecosystems run on those.
by jonathanlydall | 2025-07-06 20:03:36+00:00
Very cool.

Something I recommend doing for the mouse cursor on mobile is to make it work like Microsoft’s Remote Desktop on iOS (possibly Android too, but I’m an iPhone user so don’t know for sure) where the cursor isn’t where you tap on the screen, but you kind of pan anywhere on the screen which proportionally moves the cursor which is somewhere not under your finger. It’s a bit hard to explain, you just need to try using RDP on Microsoft’s free Windows App on your mobile device.
by ndsipa_pomu | 2025-07-06 20:04:14+00:00
Surely containers make it far easier to deploy/distribute maintained software as it makes it so much easier for people to switch to a newer version without needing to worry about incompatible versions of libraries etc. that can break something else. It can be used for pinning a specific older version of software for "reasons", but I think that's less common.

Consider people using a containerised NgINX webserver as a reverse proxy - it's so much easier to keep it up to date compared to using a distribution's version of NgINX.
by stevesunderland | 2025-07-06 20:04:29+00:00
SEEKING WORK | USA | Remote

Developer + Designer

I'm a graphic designer and web developer who creates websites, brand identities and marketing material for a variety of companies including startups, agencies and non-profit organizations. In addition to my design skills, I am also a full-stack web developer.

DESIGN: websites, apps, UI/UX, mobile, logos, marketing material, trade show displays, packaging, photo retouching, book covers

DEVELOPMENT: HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Vue, Angular, Python, Django, SQL, PHP, Bootstrap, Foundation, REST APIs, Wordpress, Webpack, Jekyll, Hugo

PORTFOLIO: https://sunderland.studio

LINKEDIN: http://linkedin.com/in/stevesunderland

CONTACT: stevesunderland@gmail.com
by const_cast | 2025-07-06 20:05:38+00:00
> You do understand that those who paid into it earlier get much more out of it, right?

No, I don't, because this is all theoretical. Sure we've made some policy changes like raising the retirement age, but the idea that SS will be insolvent is just a conservative wet dream. So, I'll treat it as such.

People on the right have been saying SS will be insolvent since the moment the pen left the paper. Take it with a grain of salt. Please remember these people are practically salivating at the idea of privatizing SS and taking their fat slice. So try to remember their incentives and why they might spread the propaganda they do.
by ghusto | 2025-07-06 20:05:42+00:00
I don't disagree, but this is just one symptom of what the video game industry has become.

As someone who hadn't played video games since his youth back in the late 80s, 90s, I was astonished when I tried to get back into it a few years ago.

Kernel-level DRM, online checks, €80+ price tags, incomplete games that require DLC, and all this for rushed unfinished broken games. You keep paying though, so the game companies keep pushing ("if they'll put up with this, what else can we get away with?").
by ayaros | 2025-07-06 20:06:53+00:00
Yes, sticky menus arrived much later. I put the extra effort to add them here because everyone's so used to them now. Both options work - you can single-click to keep a menu open, or you can hold down the mouse and drag to open a menu which closes when you release the mouse.

There's at least one Mac extension I know of that lets you use sticky menus on earlier versions of Mac OS, like System 6. I figured I'd backport that feature a little further, so to speak...

EDIT: Also, forgot to mention it in this reply, but you double click the titlebar icon to close the window.
by simonw | 2025-07-06 20:08:11+00:00
I think an important skill to develop as a software developer (or any other profession) is learning to learn effectively.

In software these days that means learning from many different sources: documentation and tutorials and LLM-generated examples and YouTube talks and conference sessions and pairing with coworkers and more.

Sticking to a single source will greatly reduce the effectiveness of how you learn your craft. New developers need to understand that.
by tickettotranai | 2025-07-06 20:08:18+00:00
If you define quality as "layered and meaty" there are many much better books.

Roadside picnic (and its less Russian counterpart, Annihilation), left hand of darkness, Solaris are all excellent.

If you want culturally influential, surely Starship Troopers, Stranger in a Strange land, anything by HG Wells, 1984/Brave New World, Frankenstein (duh)

The characterization in Hail Mary is just so damn weak, even space opera stuff like Bujold
by bobbob27 | 2025-07-06 20:08:27+00:00
The cost to improve training increases exponentially for every milestone. No vendor is even coming close to recouping the costs now. Not to mention quality data to feed the training.

The R&D is running on hopes that increasing the magnitude (yes, actual magnitudes) of their models will eventually hit a miracle that makes their company explode in value and power. They can't explain what that could even look like... but they NEED evermore exorbitant amounts of funding flowing in.

This truly isn't a normal ratio of research-to-return.

Luckily, what we do have already is kinda useful and condensing models does show promise. In 5 years I doubt we'll have the post-labor dys/utopia we're being hyped up for. But we may have some truly badass models that can run directly on our phones.

Like you said, Llama and local inference is cheap. So that's the most logical direction all of this is taking us.
by Retric | 2025-07-06 20:09:18+00:00
I’m not sure it’s really about skill transfer outside of very related areas. You need to be genetically lucky to hit the very top of a physical or mental field and the odds you have similar gifts in a field with slightly different demands is far higher than average.

Similarly having the drive to actually dedicate yourself to some narrow area could be considered a skill but I think it’s more a personality trait.
by ttoinou | 2025-07-06 20:09:19+00:00
I agree but we're using functions for different things here. Yes some specific families of functions can be treated as vector spaces. In this article it seems like the author is pretending to take all real->real functions and treating them as if they are a vector space, whatever the content of the functions, quote :

we’ve built a vector space of functions

and later he admits it is impossible

Ideally, we could express an arbitrary function f as a linear combination of these basis functions. However, there are uncountably many of them—and we can’t simply write down a sum over the reals. Still, considering their linear combination is illustrative:

They are uncountable because they are aleph1
by WalterBright | 2025-07-06 20:09:37+00:00
> Even assuming that’s true

Read a transcript of the words used in a typical TV show. Then read a book written for adults (not the pulp fiction ones).

I sometimes discover that I mispronounce words. The problem is I'd only read them, and assumed they were phonetic.

> language requires much more than just vocabulary

The vocabulary is all you need to "get along". I did not claim that makes you a native speaker, or enables subtlety in word order. I've traveled in foreign countries, and make an effort to learn a few words. It's surprising how far you can get with just a handful. (P.S. making an effort to communicate in the local language wins lots of friend points! I highly recommend it.)

Pick up one of those phrase books for various languages. They aren't that deep, and they work.
by doctaj | 2025-07-06 20:09:45+00:00
All corporate media have the same problems (ie: getting peoples' attention, money, advertising, etc. -- to stay alive). All corporate media have their own internal politics (like all businesses), a historical track record, a reputation, and individuals that have their own biases. However, not all corporate media blatantly lie to their users (that is... tell people incorrect information to get their point across). Fox News blatantly lies to their viewers -- that is, the intent is to give them false information. It IS different from the norm.
by const_cast | 2025-07-06 20:10:19+00:00
Why are investors so stupid? I mean this genuinely. Every time I hear about investors and what they want, it seems to me like they make dumb decisions that implode on themselves.

I mean, you would think someone very rich who invests in companies would be somewhat smart. But, I'm convinced, a lot of them would do much better if they made no decisions at all and left everything up to entropy.
by dmurray | 2025-07-06 20:10:24+00:00
So there could reasonably be dozens [0] of satellites "parked at exactly 0°00'00"N 0°00'00"E". Definitely an unnecessary level of precision.

[0] A few sites give 10km as a standard minimum separation for geostationary satellites. That theoretically allows a thousand of them in the 100km cube, but I am guessing a lattice of them every 10 km in all 3 dimensions would not be manageable.
by mystified5016 | 2025-07-06 20:10:55+00:00
That's an interesting point.

The absolute hardest part (for me) about learning a language is listening comprehension. I can read, write, and speak French at a reasonable level, but I've never been able to understand a native speaker. It would take a lot of work and exposure to bring my mastery up to the level of my second-year written French. A large part of that is because spoken French is a hot mess compared to the written form, but I digress.

A written language without a spoken form is a lot easier to grok. Especially programming languages and their limited grammar. But I think there's more to it than that. One of the reasons I find it trivial to learn programming languages is that code is code is code, no matter which flavor of sugar you shovel on top. The language is simply an abstraction for a logical construct. Skilled programmers work on that logical construct directly, and the language is nothing more than a means to an end.

Also there's the fact that the written word is intransient. You have time to pause and search your memory or dictionary for a word. A spoken language requires extensive training to literally rewire your brain. You can't stop to ponder a word because it's gone before you can reconstruct a word from sounds. There's a very good reason that our brains have hardware to turn sounds into linguistic tokens. It's just too much processing to do at a conscious level at any reasonable speed.
by devjab | 2025-07-06 20:11:29+00:00
I don't think anyone ever regretted doing a test but runtime assertions are so much better because they deal with issues when they happen, rather than trying to predict potential failures. This was probably forgotten as interpreted languages became more popular, but hopefully we're going to see a return to less "developer focused" ways of dealing with errors, so that your pacemaker doesn't stop because someone forgot to catch the exception they didn't think could happen with their 100% coverage.
by alephnerd | 2025-07-06 20:11:42+00:00
Not really.

In this case it was Millenium ratting out on Jane Street (edit - other way around), but now the entire HFT (Edit: hedge funds. Thanks for the callout avvt4avaw) industry is under extreme scrutiny by SEBI as a result [0]

[0] - https://www.sebi.gov.in/enforcement/orders/jul-2025/interim-...
by ben_w | 2025-07-06 20:11:52+00:00
Ahem, you previously:

Remember, the claim I challenged is that LLMs know culture and can handle talking about them. You need to focus.

Anyway:

> The marketing is telling everyone that they're amazing PhD level geniuses. I just demonstrated that they resemble more an average internet idiot than a specialist.

First, you didn't. Average internet idiot doesn't know jack about either Western New Age ancient aliens culture or actual ancient Egypt, let alone being able to write an essay on both.

Second:

You seem to be wildly overestimating what "PhD-level" implies.

Academics do a lot of post-docs before they can turn a doctorate into a professorship.

The SOTA models are what PhD level looks like: freshly minted from university without much experience.

Rather than what you suggest, the academic response to "PhD level" is not to be impressed by marketing then disapointed with results, because an academic saying "wow, a whole PhD!" would be sarcasm in many cases: a PhD just step 1 of that career path.

Similarly, medical doctors have not been impressed just by LLMs passing the medical exam, and lawyers not impressed by passing the Bar exam. Because that's the entry requirement for the career.

Funnily enough, three letters after the name does not make someone infallible, it's the start of a long, long journey.

Academia, medics, lawyers, coders, hearing about PhD level means we're expecting juniors and getting them too.
by alephnerd | 2025-07-06 20:13:50+00:00
SEBI is prosecuting Adani now [0] (edit: correct link [1] - they are going after Adani Group's holding funds in Marutius). The previous chairperson of SEBI was unceremoniously canned this March for this incident and the Adani incident, and the current chairperson (Tuhin Kanta Pandey) cleaned up Indian SoEs during their privatization during Modi 2.

Edit: cannot reply below

Indian regulators won't settle with Adani Group. They have become a political liability due to how slapshot they played AND because the Bihar Elections are coming up, so skinning some goats (balli ka bakra) is a quick win - the RJD, INC, and TMC attacks on Modi+Adani are landing in Bihar and much of the rest of India.

Every Indian government does this - such as Kingfisher Group, Sahara Group, Gitanjali Group, etc.

Treat it the same way as Truong My Lan's case in Vietnam and Wanda Group's case in China.

[0] - https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/boards-policy-regulat...

[1] - https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/boards-policy-regulat...
by jwatte | 2025-07-06 20:13:50+00:00
Python is still a 10x or more performance sacrifice for anything that's actually CPU throughput limited. Or, alternatively, your VM hosting cost will be 10x larger on Python, than something top of the line, if your workload is CPU throughput limited. Whether you're actually CPU limited, and whether VM hosting costs is your largest cost, is a totally different question :-)
by jonathanlydall | 2025-07-06 20:14:00+00:00
I’m happy with my $5 wired Logitech mouse as it’s got essentially zero lag, never runs out of batteries and unlike the high end Logitech mice has no “rubber” which tends to invariably go icky over time.

At one point I had a Razer wireless mouse (Mamba I think?) which had no discernible latency and a nice dock for recharging the mouse, I was very happy with it until one evening it just stopped working. While alone in my flat, I stepped away from using my computer for about an hour, didn’t even put it to sleep, came back, and it would no longer move but would still register mouse clicks. I tried contacting customer support asking if there was a way to reset it or reflash the firmware or something and they’re just like “nope”. Last piece of Razer hardware I ever bought.
by lordnacho | 2025-07-06 20:14:30+00:00
How often does someone produce work that is normally taught to people who are older than the person who discovered it?

Euler was 41 when he discovered his famous identity, the kind of thing people learn in school.

Even Newton was 21 when he invented calculus, the sort of stuff that you might find late teens learning.

Galois by a couple of years? He died at 20, and I suppose they teach that stuff sometime mid uni?
by chowells | 2025-07-06 20:14:54+00:00
It's how a lot of science was written, and knowing that makes strong Sapir-Whorf a really funny joke. We didn't derive our ideas about science from our language. Developing our ideas of science shaped our language so it could communicate them efficiently.

(Weak Sapir-Whorf is still a perfectly fine observation, but it's a lot less predictive as a hypothesis.)
by beezlebroxxxxxx | 2025-07-06 20:15:40+00:00
> I can’t imagine hiring them as a prof when they’re so young

Many institutions would actually jump at the chance. That's way better than a 35 or 37 year old burnt out from just finishing their PhD and getting onto the tenure track suffer-fest. Think of how many years of productive research she has in her. It used to be way more common until academia became so professionalized and bureaucratic.
by sfpotter | 2025-07-06 20:15:43+00:00
1. Numerical methods for solving differential and integral equations are algorithms for solving algebraic equations (vector solutions) that arise from discretizing infinite-dimensional operator equations (function solutions). When we talk about whether these methods work, we usually do so in terms of their consistency and stability. There is a multistage things that happens here: we start by talking about the well-posedness of the original equation (e.g. the PDE), then the convergence of the mathematical discretization, and then examine what happens when we try to program this thing on a computer. Usually what happens is these algorithms will get implemented "on top" of numerical linear algebra, where algorithms like Gaussian elimination, and different iterative solvers, have been studied very carefully from the perspective of floating point rounding errors etc. This kind of subsumes your concern about "fuzzy" real numbers. Remember that in double precision, if the number "1.0" represents "1 meter", then machin epsilon is atomic scale. So, frequently, you can kind of assume the whole process "just works"...

2/3. I'm not really sure what you mean by these questions... But if you want to do "fourier analysis with a filter preapplied", you'd probably just work with within some space of bandlimited functions. If you only care around N Fourier modes, any time you do an operation which exceeds that number of modes, you need to chop the result back to down to size.

4. In this context, it's really the SVD of an operator you're interested in. In that regard, you can consider trying to extend the various definitions of the SVD to your operator, provided that you carefully think about all spaces involved. I assume at least one "operator SVD" exists and has been studied extensively... For instance, I can imagine trying to extend the variational definition of the SVD... and the algorithms for computing the SVD probably make good sense in a function space, too...
by AnimalMuppet | 2025-07-06 20:16:04+00:00
A software engineer's job is to design and create programs that adequately meet their need (including performance, reliability, and maintainability). That's your job. Your job is not "type out the code".

If an AI helps you do that (all of it, including the "maintainability" part), then sure, use it. If not, don't (or only use it in limited places where it can help).

How do you know? You almost certainly have to experiment. So look at your company's push as a chance to experiment. But when you do, make sure you have your "software engineer" hat on, not your "code monkey who cranks through Jira tickets" hat.
by zzo38computer | 2025-07-06 20:16:05+00:00
> Shall we require Netflix to release server builds so that you can access their content indefinitely because you paid for a subscription at some point?

No. However, you should be able to make a copy using your own computer (onto the computer or onto an external media such as a DVD) and then you can play the movies that you have copied on your own computer (not necessarily the one used for Netflix) or DVD player. This should be possible without needing to use their software, and it does not mean that their software or their service should need to offer it as an option; it is done on your side. (They can refuse to serve the movie to you faster than the actual duration of the movie if they want to do, though, therefore making it take as much time to copy as it does to watch it normally.)

(However, I am generally opposed to copyright anyways.)
by mcv | 2025-07-06 20:17:34+00:00
I'm sure many of them weren't intended as loopholes (although I suspect some were), but the simple fact is that they do turn out to be loopholes.

A few famous examples:

If you own a large chunk of a large company, of course you don't want to sell it, so you hold onto it. This means you're never going to pay any capital gains tax over it. But if you don't sell your stock, how do you get money to buy food and super yachts? You borrow it, with your stock as collateral. And you don't have to pay tax over loans, so you're still tax free. You do have to pay interest of course, but because of the collateral, interest is likely low, and as long as stock goes up, you can always borrow more to pay that interest.

Every part of this makes sense on its own, and yet the end result is that billionaires don't pay tax, and barely have to try to avoid tax; this construction would make sense even if they did have to pay tax over it.

Another: charitable foundations. Every rich person seems to have one. And because the government wants to encourage charity, they're tax free. But they're rarely real charities and they often have poor performance as charities, because that's not their real purpose. They just let you keep your money without having to pay tax over it, and the only cost is that you're somewhat limited in how you can use that money. But billionaires have plenty of money they're not actively using.

And sometimes it's also a nice vehicle for corruption, because foreign officials can also donate money to a charitable foundation.
by walterbell | 2025-07-06 20:17:41+00:00
https://web.archive.org/web/20250519053752/https://www.bnnbl...

> Jane Street sued Millennium, Schadewald and Spottiswood in April [2024], claiming the two traders had taken an “immensely valuable” trading strategy with them. It later emerged at a court hearing that the strategy involved India options and had generated $1 billion in 2023 profits for Jane Street.
by karaterobot | 2025-07-06 20:17:44+00:00
Well, for any future archaeologists reading this, please know that This American Life was a great show that was made for a specific audience, by a specific set of creators, and it absolutely did not represent the breadth of life in America at the turn of the 21st century. This was a common mistake: thinking a rather small niche was universal because it's what you see. It led to a lot of surprises.
by chengiz | 2025-07-06 20:18:06+00:00
> The conjecture was widely believed to be true — if so, it would have automatically validated several other important results in the field — but the community greeted the new development with both enthusiasm and surprise: the author was a 17-year-old who hadn’t yet finished high school.

This article is quite poorly written. Case in point above. If the conjecture was believed to be true, refuting it would be news in itself, deserve more than half a sentence, and have nothing to do with the age of the refuter. It should have been simple to add a line about the "other important results" and not violate show not tell. AlsO I fail to see the relevance of mentioning the Spanish academy? The researcher is from Bahamas/USA, it's just the writer is from Spain?