MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by NamTaf | 2025-07-16 17:15:38+00:00
I had my backpack - with (work) laptop, both passports, wallet, house keys, etc. - stolen from a pub in Euston a couple of years ago. All that remained in my pockets was my phone & power bank, and airpods. It was stolen by a guy who went into the pub we were at, sat at an adjacent table, pretended to study the menu, deposited a dummy backpack to the communal pile under our table when we were standing to greet people, then picked up the heaviest one (mine) and walked out. Unlike the author, I wasn't black-out drunk, we were just distracted and someone was able to do a sleight of hand when we weren't paying attention.

The author is very lucky to get theirs back. I had to replace it all. As they say, replacing the UK one wasn't too bad - though I hadn't been in the UK for 2 years by that point so I had to get extra guarantors to sign photos and write a declaration. The other one was a nightmare, and by pure luck the embassy could look up my last application and pull the birth certificate reference number for me. Again, 2 guarantors and I was very lucky to have a friend from that country visiting.

I reported it as stolen, hoping that they'd steal the laptop and wallet and then ditch the rest. Unfortunately, either nobody found it or nobody turned it in. Of course, the CCTV that was in the pub was 'too blurry' to be of any use. CCTV has a funny tendency of being useless in that regard.

In my case, I crashed at a friend's place that evening, and then went down to my local makerspace for lack of wanting to pay a locksmith £fuckloads to unlock my door on a Sunday. By pure luck, there was a lockpicking nerd there and they came and slipped my door for me. Thankfully, that was enough to help offset a lot of the negativity of the whole affair. I felt like I got off lucky a bit, and didn't dwell so much on it as a result.
by zby | 2025-07-16 17:16:17+00:00
The novelty part is a hard one - but maybe in many cases we could substitute something else for it? If an idea promises to beat state of the art in some field - and it is not yet actively researched - then it is novel.

But most promising would be to use the Dessalles theories.

Here is 4.1o expanding this: https://chatgpt.com/s/t_6877de9faa40819194f95184979b5b44

By the way - this could be a classic example of this day dreaming - you take two texts: one by Gwern and some article by Dessalles (I read "Why we talk" - a great book! - but maybe there is some more concise article?) and ask LLM to generate ideas connecting these two. In this particular case it was my intuition that connected them - but I imagine that there could be an algorithm that could find this connection in a reasonable time - some kind of semantic search maybe.
by drfuchs | 2025-07-16 17:16:25+00:00
The RPC-4000 (the "big brother" of the LGP-30) had each instruction specify the next instruction address. I believe this was to allow for optimizing your program such that the next instruction would always be right under a read head on the drum when the processor was ready for it, because if you missed it, it took a whole revolution of the drum to get back to it (kind of like a cache miss).

In any case, it seems that while Mel wrote lots of code for the LGP-30, the actual hack in the story involved code that Mel was porting from LGP-30 to RPC-4000.
by bko | 2025-07-16 17:16:27+00:00
The most insane python feature is that for loops keep their intermediate variable.

for x in [1,2,3]: print(x)

x sticks around! So you'll always have these random variables floating around, and hope you don't use the wrong one.

And to add insult to insult to injury, if you're using mypy for type checking you'll get a nice error if you try to reuse x with a different type:

for x in ['a', 'b', 'c']: print(x) << Incompatible types in assignment (expression has type "str", variable has type "int") [assignment]

And the types I can never trust. I've used all the tooling and you still get type errors in runtime. It's also ridiculously slow.

I would also like optional chaining (e.g. foo?.bar?.baz) and a million other features that other high level programming languages have.
by aristofun | 2025-07-16 17:16:43+00:00
You obviously can take it too far both ways. I guess Amazon took it too far in one direction.

But is taking it to the opposite extreme (no reviews, no ratings, no measurement) - a good longterm solution?

What does that mean really? That everybody are equally good at their job, nobody deserves to be fired or promoted?

I don't know that. But I do know, for example, that german cars are not a pinnacle of engineering or reliability anymore (for many years now).
by Beijinger | 2025-07-16 17:16:52+00:00
"For the time being, the most likely interpretation of the dodecahedron is as a cosmic, all-encompassing symbol," Guggenberger wrote, with "a function comparable to an amulet."

Great theory. But as you can see in the picture:

1. This thing is very carefully crafted.

2. The holes have different sizes.

I don't think this is by chance. There must be a reason for this and the explanation, be it coin counting, knitting or whatever, has to take this into account.
by hmry | 2025-07-16 17:17:12+00:00
People don't complain about DX portability because Windows has first-party support for Vulkan and OpenGL, unlike macOS. Also, since the XBox also uses DirectX, you get two birds with one stone. And third, you aren't forced to use Microsoft hardware to develop for DirectX (these days, you don't even have to use Windows.)

Basically, people are mad that you need to buy Apple hardware, use Apple software (macOS), Apple tooling (Xcode), just to develop graphics code for iOS and macOS. At least you don't also need to use Apple language (Swift) to use Metal, though I don't have any first-hand experience with their C++ bindings so I can't judge if it's a painful experience or not.
by lumbroso | 2025-07-16 17:17:16+00:00
Disposal8433, I am not unsympathetic to your point, but I think that bad managers and CEOs are bad managers and CEOs.

For instance at Boeing, the fault of software problems lies entirely on the managers: They made the decision to subcontract software engineering to a third party to cut cost, but also they didn't provide the contractor with enough context and support to do a good job. It's not subcontracting that was bad — because subcontracting can be the solution in some circumstances and with proper scoping and oversight — it was the management.

The MCP protocol is changing every few weeks, it doesn't make sense (to me at least) to professionalize a technical demo, and I appreciate that LLMs allow for faster iteration and exploration.
by dao- | 2025-07-16 17:17:28+00:00
Drop the hyperbole for a second. It was a choice screen, a far cry from force-feeding. I'll grant you, somewhat wide adoption is almost a given when putting this kind of UI in front of all users, but that still doesn't mean that it was a mistake or a net loss to give folks who wouldn't normally customize Firefox a chance to do so. So, what's your point?
by _DeadFred_ | 2025-07-16 17:17:46+00:00
Non-American born parents sacrifice for their kids. Put every penny into their children's future, pick up a second job if they have to. Let their adult kids live at home, not kick them out. And when those kids succeed, they often give back building on the help they were given. Success compounds when you're part of a team.

My dad threw me out at 18. Spent my whole childhood bragging about how he couldn't wait for that day. Why? Because he was a hippie boomer and that's what he did at 18 (though his version of 'independence' came with parents who helped him buy multiple houses). He cut his own parents out of our lives, called it freedom, making it so I couldn't turn to them for help like he had. Not for money. Not even for emotional support.

Maybe kicking your kids out at 18 and making them do it all alone is a bad cultural habit. Or maybe the immigrant families who stick together/support each other are the problem.
by throwaway328 | 2025-07-16 17:18:48+00:00
The fact that LLMs haven't come up with anything "novel" would be a serious puzzle - as the article claims - only if they were thinking, reasoning, being creative, etc. If they aren't doing anything of the sort, it'd be the only thing you'd expect.

So it's a bit of an anti-climactic solution to the puzzle but: maybe the naysayers were right and they're not thinking at all, or doing any of the other anthropomorphic words being marketed to users, and we've simply all been dragged along by a narrative that's very seductive to tech types (the computer gods will rise!).

It'd be a boring outcome, after the countless gallons of digital ink spilled on the topic the last years, but maybe they'll come to be accepted as "normal software", and not god-like, in the end. A medium to large improvement in some areas, and anywhere from minimal to pointless to harmful in others. And all for the very high cost of all the funding and training and data-hoovering that goes in to them, not to mention the opportunity cost of all the things we humans could have been putting money into and didn't.
by jplusequalt | 2025-07-16 17:19:16+00:00
>It's only intuitive if you don't realize just how huge the gap is between dispatching a vertex shader to render some triangles, and actually producing a lit, shaded and occlusioned image with PBR, indirect lighting, antialiasing and postfx. Would you like to render high quality lines or points? Sorry, it's not been a priority to make that simple. Better go study up on SDFs and beziers.

I think this is a tad unfair. You're basically describing a semi-robust renderer at that point. IMO to make implementing such a renderer truly "intuitive" (I don't know what this word means to you, so I'm taking it to mean--offloading these features to the API itself) would require railroading the developer some, which appears to go against the design of modern graphics APIs.

I think Unity/Unreal/Godot/Bevy make more sense if you're trying to quickly iterate such features. But even then, you may have to hand write the shader code yourself.
by segphault | 2025-07-16 17:19:47+00:00
Custom GPTs don’t support a bunch of newer ChatGPT features like chat history and projects and they can’t be edited from mobile. There is no real advantage to using a custom GPT over adding a custom prompt to a project at this point, given that the latter doesn’t isolate you from the rest of ChatGPT’s feature set. It really seems like they stopped working on custom GPTs and just expect users to use projects instead.
by bigyabai | 2025-07-16 17:19:47+00:00
Nvidia already had a proprietary compute architecture, they were the only business in the position that could say no. Even then, they never stopped third-parties from implementing OpenCL2 in software. They simply didn't implement it themselves. In any case, if your CUDA-killer relies on Nvidia's cooperation then your plan is hopeless from the start.

If Apple is capable of subsuming Khronos' place, now is the time to do it. If not, Nvidia's still in pole position and Apple doesn't have the hardware to overtake them anytime soon.

> when AMD and Apple were pushing for Mantle/Metal instead

You wanna explain the 999 IQ reason why AMD doesn't beg for Metal IP like they did in 2014? It's pretty cut-and-dried, I'm surprised to see you highlight it as an argument.
by roughly | 2025-07-16 17:19:53+00:00
> based on no closely relevant experience

I don’t want to devolve this to an argument from authority, but - there’s a lot of trade offs to monitoring systems, especially at that scale. Among other things, aggregation takes time at scale, and with enough metrics and numbers coming in, your variance is all over the place. A core fact about distributed systems at this scale is that something is always broken somewhere in the stack - the law of averages demands it, and so if you’re going to do an all-fire-alarm alert any time part of the system isn’t working, you’ve got alarms going off 24/7. Actually detecting that an actual incident is actually happening on a machine of the size and complexity we’re talking about within 5 minutes is absolutely fantastic.
by seanmcdirmid | 2025-07-16 17:20:07+00:00
> Why is it irresponsible to have a child when you're young and financially not established?

Just imagine being the kid in that situation. Your parents are still almost kids themselves, they are working min wage jobs and had to drop out of college. Seriously, this isn't rocket science: we are having kids older because growing up in a financial stable household is just good for kids. If you have a trust fund or are somehow have enough time and money to have kids at 22, then go ahead and have kids. Just most of us didn't.

> Why is it any more irresponsible to do that than to have children at a geriatric age?

You totally ignored the "financially not established" of my statement.

> In my opinion, this idea that you have to have everything perfectly set up in life before you can contemplate having a child is ridiculous.

Did you just make a straw man? Because I didn't state an "idea that you have to have everything perfectly set up in life".
by biztos | 2025-07-16 17:20:12+00:00
Having gotten back into Python for a project after some time away, I found the solution (for me) is to automatically fix the whitespace every time I run the code.

I just have a line in my Justfile that does this. Probably would be better to format on save but I use different editors and haven’t gotten around to it.

Still doesn’t fix the creeping doubts about everything in a language conceived by people who made that whitespace call, but it removes the specific pain point.
by anonym29 | 2025-07-16 17:20:25+00:00
Some peoole beat their wives when they drink, so the state has decided that it is in everyone's best interest for alcohol to become illegal.

Some people become unproductive and hurt themselves when on drugs, so the state has decided to enact a war on drugs.

Some people injure themselves trying to procure abortions, so the state has decided no more abortions.

Some protesters cause war recruiting efforts to struggle during Vietnam, which hurts soldiers already deployed, so the state has decided no more anti-war protests.

Some people misuse privacy to commit crimes, so the state has decided that every citizen must be fingerprinted and put into a police database preemptively to prevent crime.

Some people aren't productive enough and others are forced to pick up the slack, so the state has decided to humanely euthanize the disabled to protect workers.

Trust the state, relinquish your freedoms, the state knows best and the state never makes mistakes!
by ljw1004 | 2025-07-16 17:20:42+00:00
I think our memories are rooted in time and space. "Which years did we go on our family holiday to Scotland? Can I see all my videos from when my kids were toddlers? Let's see that specific photo of sunset at the Grand Canyon, I think around 2021? What was the cafe we stopped at on our road trip? How did my flower garden change since I bought my house?"

(I put in a timeline (histogram) of photos, and keyword search, to serve these kinds of needs.)
by Pxtl | 2025-07-16 17:20:57+00:00
The things that make it tricky:

1) They're not found with wear-marks, so they couldn't have been done for anything laborious like wire-weaving.

2) They've got no size markings and don't match each other, so they couldn't have been used for anything standardized. The holes of opposing sides don't have matching sizes.

3) Platonic solids have religious significance, so they may have been deliberately impractical (but if it's a tool where's the practical peasant version of it? Like a series of plates?)

4) They're found primarily in and around Rome's Celtic holdings, not Rome itself.

5) They're expensive so they're probably not just measuring grapes.

So the first question is, beyond cultural significance, why make them a platonic solid?

It guarantees the distance between the opposing sides is consistent, while allowing you to carry 6 different hole-pairs all with that same "distance" in a single object. But it can't be a measuring tool because of fact (2).

And if there's no good reason for it to be a platonic solid, why haven't they found any non-platonic-solid versions of them?

Maybe it's the gamer in me but I think it's some kind of gambling game based on the irregularity of coinage. Roll the thingamajig, drop in a coin that goes through the top but not the bottom. I mean it was found around military camps and caches of coins, right? Casino game.
by akho | 2025-07-16 17:21:09+00:00
You installed a distro that aims to preserve suckage for future generations, and even developed an entire DE out of pure aversion to change. It’s often recommended by change-averse Linux users…

Successful Linux-based OSes have unattended atomic updates and user-friendly app installation. That includes ChromeOs and Android, as well as modern atomic desktop distributions. Fedora Silverblue, Bluefin, Bazzite.

edit: however, market share is probably coming from legacy distributions. That’s largely a sign of how bad Windows gets, and how desktops/laptops become more niche.
by m-schuetz | 2025-07-16 17:21:10+00:00
At least for webgpu, you cant wrap around some of the nonse. Like bindigs. They are an inherently bad concept and the way to go would be bindless, but you cant make a wraper that makes an API that revolves around binding into a bindless API. And there are other things like that, and I'm sure there are plenty between Vulkan and Metal.
by Nevermark | 2025-07-16 17:21:27+00:00
> You don't get honest answers without reading between the lines in these situations.

Yes, there is an art to asking people who seem to have non-sensical viewpoints to explain the reasoning behind those viewpoints.

The less apparently sensible their viewpoint is, the more likely something interesting is happening. They may have a disconnect between their conscious reasoning vs. actual reasoning, or there is communication impedance mismatch, or they have non-obvious assumptions they haven't made explicit, etc.

Their real reasoning often reveals something important (they may actually be right, they have a different communication style worth becoming aware of, they are interpreting things from a very different experience/wisdom base, ...), but it often takes patience and creativity to tease out.

And it can be a challenge to avoid coming on too strong, i.e. appearing judgmental, in a conversation whose premise is genuinely "WTF are you thinking?"
by driverdan | 2025-07-16 17:21:40+00:00
It averages something like 12mpg diesel. This is a 25' long, 16k lb vehicle. There's no way it would get 2mi/kWh. 0.7 mi/kWh sounds closer to what it'd be.

But that's assuming you use no power. When I was living in it I was using 50% to 100% of the solar output a day.
by FiloSottile | 2025-07-16 17:22:14+00:00
Well, ML-KEM has zero assembly and was written entirely from scratch, for example, so it must be more than you'd think if you think we "reuse the same machine code for this that you'd find in everybody else's implementation." In fact, almost everyone else's was found to be producing a variable-time DIV instruction, while ours was unaffected.

Porting the assembly to higher-level generators has nothing to do with lawyers (??), the goals are stated in https://go.dev/wiki/AssemblyPolicy.

The idea that one day we'll write All Of The Cryptography Code Once And For All In The Perfect Language and reuse that across languages comes up pretty regularly, and has never panned out.
by missedthecue | 2025-07-16 17:22:14+00:00
There is currently no scientific effort to develop an artificial womb anywhere on earth. There are several well funded efforts to get the age at which premature babies can be expected to reliably survive down to 20-21 weeks. But that's not the same thing.

If you've ever seen pharmaceutical ads, they almost always advise against taking the medication while pregnant, or to advise your physician. It's because so much of human gestation is still a black box. We do not understand how it works, only that chemicals and medication can seriously disrupt it in ways we cannot yet grasp. There is so much inter-cerebral and hormonal communication between mother and fetus that is yet to be discovered and understood, and a lot of that will depend on mapping out general cerebral mechanics, something we also haven't yet done.

People act like artificial wombs are 10-20 years away, but we are so far away we don't even have a roadmap. We don't even have an understanding of all the things we need to understand. We are in a pre-renaissance of sorts, and artificial wombs are inter-galactic space travel.
by 10000truths | 2025-07-16 17:22:27+00:00
Only at great cost to penetrative power. The muzzle energy of the oft-cited subsonic .22 is a whopping 120-140 J. And that energy bleeds very fast with distance, since most of the kinetic energy comes from the velocity, and aerodynamic drag is proportional to velocity squared. A real-life Agent 47 may genuinely be better off with a crossbow.
by roughly | 2025-07-16 17:22:44+00:00
Is your external monitor working? How many checks failed, in what order? Across how many different regions or systems? Was it a transient failure? How many times do you retry, and at what cadence? Do you push your success or failure metrics? Do you pull? What if your metrics don’t make it back? How long do you wait before considering it a problem? What other checks do you run, and how long do those take? What kind of latency is acceptable for checks like that? How many false alarms are you willing to accept, and at what cadence?
by godelski | 2025-07-16 17:23:14+00:00
> In a paper that hasn’t yet been peer-reviewed, he and his colleagues predict the existence of yet another kind of magnetism, which he calls antialtermagnetism.

Can we stop referring to ArXiv papers third way? And for the love of God, just link the fucking abstract, never NEVER link the html![0] You just change {html,pdf} -> abs

We shouldn't say "not peer reviewed" because it isn't accurate. Being published in a journal doesn't mean a work is correct nor does it mean peers read it. Putting the paper on ArXiv does mean peers are reviewing it. The point of publishing is to communicate our work to others and journals and conferences can often be harmful to that process, making researchers oversell or even avoid looking in certain directions because a few opinionated peers shoot them down. It's happened to Nobel level works too.

The review process is just fucked up. It might be able to tell you if a paper is wrong but it can't tell you if it has no mistakes or is right. I mean it took two years to confirm this one, right? (Physical validation) but the way we say "hasn't been peer reviewed" implies that if it has been published in a journal then it's factual. That's not how it works and frankly that's not how it should work.

On top of that they take money from the government, gets articles for free, don't pay reviewers (meaning the universities pay for reviewers), and have the audacity to charge people to read that work. It's basically just a scheme to extract government money.

Sorry, I really just hate the publication process. It stifles innovation and wastes so many people's time

[0] https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.01607
by ibaikov | 2025-07-16 17:23:44+00:00
Someone suggested they were used to estimate distance which might be true since some modern guns like mp5 have rotating drum sights of same principle.

Another good suggestion was that it was used for knitting, there was a very cool video of this on YouTube somewhere.

And the last I like is it’s just a game.

I think it was one of the earliest multi-tools and all of these were what it was used for