MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by nettlin | 2025-08-29 01:26:38+00:00
Discussed at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19668161

I found it surprising that the slide in the article uses Calibri, a typeface that wasn’t publicly available at the time. The original discussion confirms that the slide in the article is a recreation of the original one:

> The slide in the article has the same text, but is a recreation of the original (The Calibri typeface used wasn't part of PowerPoint until 2007).

> The original slide can be seen in the full report linked in the article:

> https://www.edwardtufte.com
by EthanHeilman | 2025-08-29 01:27:22+00:00
I was thinking of making a "the other Agrippa" reference since with half my friends if you say Agrippa will think Camillo and the other half will think Henrichus Cornelius. I've only read Camillo Agrippa, I've been meaning to read Henrichus. Is he worth reading? What do you recommend?

> H.C. Agrippa's work is still considered authoritative in its fields: the numbers represent the ideas, which were both created in the first moments by God.

That does sound like the computability idea of numbers being programs.

``` In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made. ```

The "Word" in Greek is translated from logos which also means logic, rational, metric.

``` In the beginning was the Number, and the Number was with God, and the Number was God. ```

Looking around on the internet, there is a lot here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rationes_seminales
by ModernMech | 2025-08-29 01:27:34+00:00
The practice of software engineering and language design have improved considerably after the realization of two important facts:

1) If something is technically possible, programmers will not only do it but abuse it.

2) You can't enforce good programming practice at scale using norms.

Linters and as the sibling points out the addition of a recent compiler flag (which is kind of an admission that it's not not an issue), is the opposite approach Rust takes, which is to design the language to not allow these things at all.

> you didn't check an FFI call properly, but that happens in Rust too)

Which is why FFI is unsafe in Rust, so nulls are opt-in rather than opt-out. Having sensible security defaults is also a key learning of good software engineering practice.
by throwmeaway222 | 2025-08-29 01:29:57+00:00
There are many reasons why a person would do that.

I can tell you that when you're married or have people that depend on you, the equation DRASTICALLY changes.

In fact it changes so much that if God came down and said... well this sucks but I'm giving you a choice: you and your family and 3 of your favorite friends will be saved but EVERYONE in the world dies, horribly painfully - OR - if you chose to not go that route, YOU and your family will die. You have 1 minute to decide.

I know what most people would choose to kill everyone else.

But yeah, there's always a few
by MilnerRoute | 2025-08-29 01:30:06+00:00
Here's another article with some comments from the new documentary's director - and from unsung Python hero Paul Everitt. (Everitt hired Guido van Rossum and all the other core developers in the late 1990s -- while keeping Python open source, and voting the nonprofit Python Software Foundation into existence.)

https://thenewstack.io/guido-van-rossum-revisits-pythons-lif...
by gjejcjekdnfnwja | 2025-08-29 01:30:12+00:00
The slide in the OP is a completely standard way of commumicating information in the aerospace industry. If the NASA personnel had problems understanding this slide, then they also had problems understanding virtually every other piece of technical info that was ever communicated to them by a third party. College level reading comprehension means being able to understand nuance, which this slide conveys.
by codedokode | 2025-08-29 01:30:31+00:00
GTK uses a C emulation of OOP, and the code gets very verbose (and functions have names like "gtk_event_controller_get_current_event_device", so you cannotfit more than one call in a line). I do not recommend to use GTK (or anything from Glib) with C, use bindings for a better language, and you save 2x-3x in code size.
by reisse | 2025-08-29 01:31:13+00:00
I also want to add here because a lot of people either mention Tor as a succesful solution, or mention why Tor is not a solution but state completely wrong reasons. And I have a good soapbox to stand once in a while.

Number one reason why Tor is dead is Cloudflare.

Let me digress here. In my opinion, Cloudflare does a lot more censoring than all state actors combined, because they singlehandedly decide if the IP you use is "trustworthy" or "not", and if they decided it is not, you're cut off from like half of the Internet, and the only thing you can do is to look for another one. I'd really like if their engineers understood what Orwellian mammoth have they created and resign, but for now they're only bragging without the realization. Or at least if any sane antitrust or comms agency shred their business in pieces.

And Cloudflare by default makes browsing with Tor unusable. Either you're stuck with endless captchas, or you're banned outright.

Number two reason why Tor is dead is all other antifraud protections combined. Try paying with Stripe through Tor. There is quite a big chance you'll get an "unknown error" of sorts on Stripe side. Try to watch Netflix in Tor - exit nodes are banned.

Everyone kept shouting "Tor bad, Tor for criminals", and it became a self-fulfilling prophecy. It's really hard to do just browse web normally in Tor, because all "normal" sites consider it bad. The "wrong" sites, however, who expect Tor visitors...
by kazinator | 2025-08-29 01:31:14+00:00
Do this thing in 3 ways, do that one in 4, do another one in 2 and you have 3x4x2 = 24 combinations which are entirely gratuitous compared to the 1 combination that exists if all three things are done one way each.

Oh, you don't have to test the combinations because the code is bug free, is that the argument? Which is because of some good organization?

Those things are nicely isolated so 3 + 4 + 2 unit tests, and we are done?
by dcre | 2025-08-29 01:31:16+00:00
It is not about the present and future value of AI at all. It is about the present and future value of things other than AI. Here is the full quote:

"There is nothing else after generative AI. There are no other hypergrowth markets left in tech. SaaS companies are out of things to upsell. Google, Microsoft, Amazon and Meta do not have any other ways to continue showing growth, and when the market works that out, there will be hell to pay, hell that will reverberate through the valuations of, at the very least, every public software company, and many of the hardware ones too."

I am not doing some kind of sophisticated act of interpretation here. If AI is very little of big tech revenue, and big tech are posting massive record revenue and profits every quarter, then it cannot be the case that "there is nothing left after generative AI" and they “do not have any other ways to continue showing growth” — what is left is whatever is driving all that revenue and profit growth right now!
by kev009 | 2025-08-29 01:31:57+00:00
I was a big fan of python between 10 and 15 years ago for similar reasons, it felt "cleaner" than other scripting languages while also having rich standard and extended libraries.

With no real recent experience (I fell deep down the hole into C/kernel etc), I wouldn't have any authority to judge how it's adapted to time. But the most common complaint I've observed at companies of all size and sophistication is "the deployment story is a disaster". But it also seems like uv allows people to do all the "I want this specific version of such and such and I don't want $OS to know about any of this" well?

Re math/ai it's an interesting comment because a language is one part the syntax/stuff you receive, and one part the community that tells you to do things a certain way. I'd guess that Python has become such a big tent it is a little hard to enforce norms that other languages seem to have. This somewhat reminds me of Bjarne Stroustrup discussing scaling/evolving a language.
by kayodelycaon | 2025-08-29 01:33:16+00:00
You might want to read the entire article. His depiction of bipolar is completely accurate. In fact it is so precisely accurate in every detail, and conveyed with no extraneous information, is indicative of someone who knows the disorder very well.

When I write fiction or important emails, I am precise with the words I use. I notice these kind of details. I’m also bipolar and self-aware enough to be deeply familiar with it.
by 627467 | 2025-08-29 01:33:19+00:00
Having restarted using rss in the past months (after probably 10+ years of not using it) i am now starting to remember why I stopped using it: lack of a personal "algorithm" that made hundreds (if not 1000s) of unread daily items to be manageable.

I know part of it is on me. I need to let go, unsubscribe aggressively, etc... but this is... work?

Im not a regular iOS user, but on it I have feeeeds which actually seem to have a sane personal "algorithm" of sorts that doesn't force ALL feeds items onto me, and also isn't purely chronological.

More readers should have this
by a_bonobo | 2025-08-29 01:33:21+00:00
I've recently learned about Tuchman's law after I bought her A Distant Mirror at a booksale

>Disaster is rarely as pervasive as it seems from recorded accounts. The fact of being on the record makes it appear continuous and ubiquitous whereas it is more likely to have been sporadic both in time and place. Besides, persistence of the normal is usually greater than the effect of the disturbance, as we know from our own times. After absorbing the news of today, one expects to face a world consisting entirely of strikes, crimes, power failures, broken water mains, stalled trains, school shutdowns, muggers, drug addicts, neo-Nazis, and rapists. The fact is that one can come home in the evening—on a lucky day—without having encountered more than one or two of these phenomena. This has led me to formulate Tuchman's Law, as follows: "The fact of being reported multiplies the apparent extent of any deplorable development by five- to tenfold" (or any figure the reader would care to supply).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbara_W._Tuchman#cite_note-M...
by stocksinsmocks | 2025-08-29 01:33:41+00:00
The entire account department at my firm has moved to Poland. That’s nice for them, but as a US citizen it does mean the writing is on the wall. On the plus side I learned a fun fact. Malgorzata is a more common name than I had ever imagined.

IT help was outsourced to India years ago. I expect them to be replaced with AI the minute their government stops handing the firm big contracts because I’ve never spoken to anyone from that group who was actually better than a chat bot.
by SilverElfin | 2025-08-29 01:35:10+00:00
Those places have their own culture, identity, political views, and way of life. All of that gets erased and replaced with the CCP’s ideology and Han Chinese culture through a process called Sinicization (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinicization_of_Tibet). It’s a very effective way of erasing and controlling people.

Plus given that the government of China is very authoritarian and controlling and not democratic, I don’t think it’s good for the world when they get more land, resources, and economic power (which turns into military power).
by throwmeaway222 | 2025-08-29 01:35:22+00:00
Would you do that if the person was random?

I would not do that for two shrimp, since it is highly likely that those last two will not be successful in creating more.

It is also VERY likely that if we're down to two shrimp that a reasonably high number of people will have already died because for that scenario to exists (suddenly) there will be a lot of suicide, but moreso many other lifeforms in the ocean will die off fairly quickly as the ecosystem would have changed instantly.
by JohnMakin | 2025-08-29 01:35:23+00:00
Website moderation and discourse usually if not always reflects the values and beliefs of the people that own it. They don’t even have to be directly involved for this to be the case - but it’d be really silly to say this site doesn’t take a particular slant in favor of the people that own it. Whatever the cause that may be is of course a matter of debate, but pretending it doesn’t exist is silly.
by eru | 2025-08-29 01:35:45+00:00
> True. But I would not expect any programming language to do that.

Haskell (and its more research-y brethren) do exactly this. You mark your functions with IO to do IO, or nothing for a pure function.

Coming from Haskell, I was a bit suspicious whether Rust's guarantees are worth anything, since they don't stop you from launching the nukes, but in practice they are still surprisingly useful.

Btw, I think D has an option to mark your functions as 'pure'. Pure functions are allowed internal mutation, but not side effects. This is much more useful than C++'s const. (You can tell that D, just like Rust, was designed by people who set out to avoid and improve on C++'s mistakes.)
by notepad0x90 | 2025-08-29 01:36:03+00:00
But we're not talking about your devices, so long as you have alternatives. and Apple has this policy already. But unlike apple, you can use non-google-certified builds just fine and do whatever you want.

Also, how about not using android or iphones at all, support a FOSS phone with 100% control over it? This is a private business selling services to the public, taking measures to protect the public. You or anyone else has no entitlement or rights over how they provide that service. The right you have is to not spend your money on that business. Getting a phone that doesn't give you root on it to begin with is submitting to Google's (and vendor's) authority to arbitrarily decide what gets and doesn't get installed on your device.
Staying up to date on the best AI dev workflow?
by peapod91 | 2025-08-29 01:36:28+00:00
With the pace of new AI coding tools coming out, it's hard to keep up to date on best practices/tools/techniques to get the best use out of them while also staying focused on my project.

How do you all discover improvements to your dev workflow in this wild AI world?

Any bloggers, YouTubers, subreddit, etc you recommend? Or just a summary of what you've currently tried and "settled" on at the moment?
by onecommentman | 2025-08-29 01:36:34+00:00
“If you are trying to create something cool and creative, at some point you are probably going to want feedback from others. I certainly do.”

Who the hell are you? I hate this assumption of chumminess. You sound like a scummy salesperson.

“Happily, we have the internet! Every minute of every day, you can show your work to people and get feedback.”

Do you like drinking water? I know I do! Don’t you? Happily we have an infinite pool of smelly toxic waste in a pond out back of the shed…
by lmm | 2025-08-29 01:37:10+00:00
> 1) If something is technically possible, programmers will not only do it but abuse it.

> 2) You can't enforce good programming practice at scale using norms.

Not quite. Programmers will take the path of least resistance, but they won't go out of their way to find a worse way to do things. `unsafe` and `mem::transmute` are part of Rust, but they don't destroy Rust's safety merits, because programmers are sufficiently nudged away from them. The same is true with unsafePerformIO in Haskell or null in Scala or OO features in OCaml. Yes it exists, but it's not actually a practical issue.

> the addition of a recent compiler flag (which is kind of an admission that it's not not an issue)

Not in the way you think; the compiler flag is an admission that null is currently unused in Scala. The flag makes it possible to use Kotlin-style null in idiomatic Scala by giving it a type. (And frankly I think it's a mistake)

> is the opposite approach Rust takes, which is to design the language to not allow these things at all.

Every language has warts, Rust included. Yes, it would be better to not have null in Scala. But it's absolutely not the kind of practical issue that affected adoption (except perhaps via FUD, particularly from Kotlin advocates). Null-related errors don't happen in real Scala codebases (just as mem::transmute-related errors don't happen in real Rust codebases). Try to find a case of a non-FFI null actually causing an issue.
by btown | 2025-08-29 01:37:50+00:00
Once one understands that a variable (in a programming context) can hold a specification for a variable (in a mathematical context), one opens up incredible doors that are at the foundation of modern AI.

When you see y = m * x + b, your recollections of math class may note that you can easily solve for "m" or find a regression for "m" and "b" given various data points. But from a programming perspective, if these are all literal values, all this is is a "render" function. How can you reverse an arbitrary render function?

There are various approaches, depending on how Bayesian you want to be, but they boil down to: if your language supports redefining operators based on the types of the variables, and you have your variables contain a full specification of the subgraphs of computations that lead to them... you can create systems that can simultaneously do "forward passes" by rendering the relationships, and "backward passes" where the system can automatically calculate a gradient/derivative and thus allow a training system to "nudge" the likeliest values of variables in the right direction. By sampling these outputs, in a mathematically sound way, you get the weights that form a model.

Every layer in a deep neural network is specified in this way. Because of the composability of these operations, systems like PyTorch can compile incredibly optimal instructions for any combination of layers you can think of, just by specifying the forward-pass relationships.

So Uncertain<T> is just the tip of the iceberg. I'd recommend that everyone experiment with the idea that a numeric variable might be defined by metadata about its potential values at any given time, and that you can manipulate that metadata as easily as adding `a + b` in your favorite programming language.
by b33j0r | 2025-08-29 01:38:10+00:00
There are two types of people who use python: those who understand statistics and those who write python.

I’m happy that python basically took over the role once filled by matlab, and I’m happy that it became the leader in AI dev instead of something worse (probably Java if gpt2 had hit 5-10 years earlier).

But you’re right. It’s not fun anymore. It feels more like a pseudolanguage for expressing tensors now, because of the influx.

I’m exaggerating only in feigned outrage. In my actions, I’ve been coding in rust, go, and zig ever since ChatGPT came out.

I think that moment made me value python less. When I think about why, it’s because python became less challenging, and the problem space shrank.

It’s been fun to go back to low-level and remember how computers actually work.
by al_borland | 2025-08-29 01:38:52+00:00
The thing that made RSS work for me is to really limit my feeds. Instead of following 10 tech news sites that have a bunch of overlap, I follow 1 that has most of what I want. A few blogs are for apps I use and want to be informed of new information, but they post infrequently, which is good.

Feed with dozens of posts per day turn into noise, especially if you have a lot of them.

By choosing one site I trust, I let the editors edit, instead of the algorithm.
by dwrensha | 2025-08-29 01:38:56+00:00
Last month, before this result came out, the question "Is Every Convex Polyhedron Rupert?" was added as a formal Lean statement to Google's Formal Conjectures repository:

https://github.com/google-deepmind/formal-conjectures/blob/1...

I wonder how feasible it would be to formalize this new proof in Lean.
by codedokode | 2025-08-29 01:39:10+00:00
> Mozilla’s foray into phones failed because they insisted on sticking to entry level devices which were both not interesting to most of the market and not powerful enough to handle a new unoptimized OS.

I think that was not a bad idea. Other open source OSes target expensive devices like Pixel and as a result many people are not buying them because paying a premium for a non-standard phone with buggy software and lacking features doesn't make much sense.
by gwbas1c | 2025-08-29 01:39:16+00:00
See in this thread:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45058480

> If you are the customer you want a bank that understands what kind of inflows/outflows you’ll typically have. The bank wants to manage the risk, and you want a bank that doesn’t freak out at what seem to you to be very mundane transactions.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45058894

> A bank account is only insured up to $250k by the FDIC.
by GianFabien | 2025-08-29 01:39:24+00:00
From my reading of the news, layoffs are happening all over the place. 10,000 here, 15,000 there, etc. All the big name firms have implemented "resource adjustments".

My guess would be that unless your skills are in a hot area, like AI/ML etc, opportunities are scarce and there are lots of folks out of jobs searching.

So it's probably not you, it's the economy.
by gnabgib | 2025-08-29 01:39:51+00:00
Several discussions 3 weeks ago:

(228 points, 237 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44861521

(160 points, 88 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44856090

(212 points, 103 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44843369
by acdha | 2025-08-29 01:40:42+00:00
They’re not part of democracy, they’re using the tools democracy to tear it down by concentrating so much power in one person to push deeply unpopular policies. Even in the deepest red districts, Republican officials are avoiding their constituents because they know what they’re doing isn’t what most people in their districts want, but they’re still more afraid of crossing Trump or Musk than listening to their own voters.

Similarly, look at the various ways that people who, yes, were democratically elected are trying to restrict voting and gerrymander districts. Again, that’s Republicans using the fact that they were at one point able to win fair elections to make future elections less fair so they can stay in power. Calling that democracy is like calling private equity looting “business development”.
by hinkley | 2025-08-29 01:40:46+00:00
I spent too much if my early career dealing with the consequences of bad decisions made on “good data”. If the presentation was so good why did they come to the wrong conclusions? It became part of my overall thesis that good design invites you to use a thing the proper way even if you failed to read the instructions.

You can’t force someone to think but you can force a lot of people not to, or you can make it difficult to avoid. It’s worth investing the energy into stacking the deck the right way.
by gwbas1c | 2025-08-29 01:41:15+00:00
> I got money, the bank is holding it, everything is going great!

Until your account is many orders of magnitude larger than the other accounts. I suspect the typical "business" account was well under a million. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45058480 to understand why this was a big deal for the bank.
by varenc | 2025-08-29 01:41:20+00:00
> In the OpenAI API, “GPT-5” corresponds to the “minimal” reasoning level, and “GPT-5 (Reasoning)” corresponds to the “low” reasoning level. (159135374)

It's interesting that the highest level of reasoning that GPT-5 in XCode supports is actually the "low" reasoning level. Wonder why.
by inopinatus | 2025-08-29 01:41:43+00:00
The drawcard for me is that I can do in a few bytes of declarative CSS things that take many lines of imperative JS to get right, with fewer weird misbehaviours, fewer framework compatibility issues, and a lower time-to-interactive. Working under noscript conditions is just a cherry on the cake.

Deep down inside, however, I miss DSSSL.