MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ysofunny | 2025-08-29 22:27:46+00:00
the rationals are 3 naturals with in a "2,1" structure.

the first 2 naturals form an integer.

that integer and a 3rd natural constitute a real (but this 3rd natural best be bigger than zero, else we're in trouble)

what I choose to focus after observing the "unphysical" nature of numbers. is the sense of natural opposition (bordering on alternation) between "mathematical true" and "physical true". both are claiming to be really real Reality.

in the mathematical realm, finite things are "impossible", they become "zero", negible in the presence of infinities. it's impossible for the primes to be finite (by contradiction). it's impossible for things (numbers or functions of mathematical objects) to be finite.

but in the physical reality, it's the "infinite things" which become impossible.

the "decimal point" (i.e. scientific notation i.e. positional numeral systems) is truly THE wonder of the world. for some reason I want something better than such a system... so I'm still learning about categories
by socalgal2 | 2025-08-29 22:27:52+00:00
> inventor of the wiki

It's interesting you gave that example. Before my first use of a wiki I was on a team that used Lotus Notes and did project organization in a team folder. I loved that Notes would highlight which documents had been updated since the last time I read them.

In the next project, that team used a wiki. It's simpler. But, the fact it didn't tell me which documents had been updated effectively made it useless. People typed new project designs into the wiki but no one saw them since they couldn't, at a glance, know which of the hundreds of pages had been updated since they last read them.

It was too simple
by griffzhowl | 2025-08-29 22:28:15+00:00
I'm saying that abstract entities only seem to have an independent existence because of a misconception that words function by referring to independent entities. Some of them do, but some also get their meaning from the part they play in a procedure, like the number words in the procedure of counting, and by extension the mathematical concepts built on these. There are reasons these particualr concepts are useful, but these reasons have to do with the structure of the concrete physical world and human activities in it, not an independent platonic reality. Wittgenstein writes on this theme quite a bit.

The fact that something has been discussed for thousands of years also has nothing to do with whether there are good reasons for believing it, e.g. the Earth being flat or stationary at the center of the universe. People can be wrong for thousands of years
by didericis | 2025-08-29 22:29:01+00:00
> I can't imagine the vendor lock in of that.... You have the source, but it is in such a state that no human can maintain it?

It’s much worse than that.

What happens when the erroneous output caused by model blind spots gets fed back into the model?

Those blind spots get reinforced.

Doesn’t matter how small that error rate is (and it’s not small). The errors will compound.

Vendor lock-in won’t matter because it will simply stop working/become totally unrecoverable.
by KTallguy | 2025-08-29 22:30:00+00:00
I’ve been using Artemis ever since it was posted here earlier this year. I love it because there is very little pressure to read everything and it updates infrequently so I don’t impulsively check it. Great product.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42471913

https://artemis.jamesg.blog/
by sodapopcan | 2025-08-29 22:30:05+00:00
This is the classic misunderstanding where software engineers can't seem to communicate well with each other.

We can even just look at the title here: Do the simplest thing POSSIBLE.

You can't escape complexity when a problem is complex. You could certainly still complicate it even more than necessary, though. Nowhere in this article is it saying you can avoid complexity altogether, but that many of us tend to over-complicate problems for no good reason.
by 1718627440 | 2025-08-29 22:30:18+00:00
> In Germany, you can't even legally say somebody did a bad job at your company in a recommendation letter. Companies created a whole subtext to workaround that, it's crazy.

I don't think it's just about legality. Whether the recommendation letter is included in the application is at the distinction of the applicant. When you want it to reach the next company, you must write is so, that the former employee considers it to be a good recommendation.
by bigstrat2003 | 2025-08-29 22:30:43+00:00
That is exactly why I hate "allowlist", "main" instead of "master", and so on. The reason they were proposed is because some people were trying to play dominance games with grievance politics. We should attempt to resist such bad faith tactics, not propagate them. And yes, unfortunately that means I have to take a stand on something that is otherwise inconsequential. But such is the price of pushing back on self-righteous prigs who are trying to police terms of art.
by tw04 | 2025-08-29 22:30:54+00:00
You do, and then at some point, likely during a late night ketamine binge, he went full redpill on twitter and decided the only thing that matters is “owning the libs”.

If that means embracing fossil fuels, so be it. Destroy the “woke mind virus at any cost”. That being said, I think he is delusional enough that he thought allowing nazi propaganda on twitter would convince conservatives to start buying teslas and is completely lost at this point.
by muppetman | 2025-08-29 22:31:23+00:00
>> And now, despite me trying many times, they won't remove it.

>Good! It's literally the Internet Archive and you published it on the internet. That was your choice.

>As a general rule, people shouldn't get to remove things from the historical record.

>Sometimes we make exceptions for things that were unlawful to publish in the first place -- e.g. defamation, national secrets, certain types of obscene photos -- where there's a larger harm otherwise.

>But if you make someone public, you make it public. I'm sorry you seem to at least partially regret that decision, but as a general rule, it's bad for humanity to allow people to erase things from what are now historical records we want to preserve.

But it's my content - it's not your content. I don't regret my decision, anything I really don't want public is behind a login. The website is still there, still getting crawled.

What really upsets me the MOST though is IA won't even reply to my requests to tell me "We're not going to remove it" - your reply (I am assuming from your wording you have some relationship with them, apologies if that's not the case) is the only information I've got! (Thanks)

[Note reply was from user crazygringo but I can't find it now, almost like they... removed it? It was public though and I'm SURE they won't mind me archiving it here for them.]
by sebastiennight | 2025-08-29 22:31:28+00:00
Everytime Liberia is mentioned, I think of two things:

1. That Mickael Jackson song

2. The time that a US president asked the president of Liberia "where he learned English" because he spoke English so well

And now I'll add to my list a third item:

3. Being one of an elite set of countries to use freedom units
by cameldrv | 2025-08-29 22:31:33+00:00
Yes, Elon is probably playing fast and loose with the rules, but his 150MW of turbines are right next to the TVA's 1100MW of turbines and a steel mill. Not surprising given that it's a heavy industrial area, it's about 4 miles from any significant number of houses. There are plenty of good reasons to hate on Elon, but IMO this ain't it.
by betterhealth12 | 2025-08-29 22:31:43+00:00
I watched this story and couldn't believe it when the actor responds to the anchor,

"That I know of that have lost money (to scammers impersonating him)? It's in the 100s...

I see people come to my appearances and look at me like we've had a relationship online for a couple of years and I'm like, no, I'm so sorry, I don't know who you are. It's so sad, and you see the devastation."

youtube.com/watch?v=ghmvOP6Daso

At 1:52:00 in this DOAC video Steven says his team spends 30% of their time sorting through deepfake ads, to the extent he had to hire someone whose exclusive job is to spot scam videos and report them to FB etc:

https://youtu.be/JMYQmGfTltY?si=ntuDgXuhMYj2fh5z&t=6706

I feel like there's a big undercurrent brewing but because the individual damages are not high enough and victims have limited recourse, nothing significant happens.
by flatline-84 | 2025-08-29 22:32:12+00:00
No, loss of license is 20-24km/h over the speed limit in a 110km/h zone (our fastest roads iirc). So 130 is sayonara license.

For every other road, 25km/h+ is instant loss of license. This is for Vic btw

https://online.fines.vic.gov.au/Your-options/Fine-amounts-an...
by toast0 | 2025-08-29 22:32:19+00:00
> You can't do it without going through their fucking app, that asks for every permissions under the sun, including GPS positioning for some reason.

If it uses bluetooth, which it might for the controller?, the permission for bluetooth on Android is fine location --- the same permission as for using GPS. That might be the same permission you need for wifi stuff, too? Because products and services exist to turn bluetooth and wifi mac addresses seen into a fine location.

But who knows what they do with the GPS signal after they ask for it?
by oskaralund | 2025-08-29 22:32:37+00:00
I'm not making the case that it is possible to make measurements with infinite precision. I'm making the case that the argument "It is not possible to make measurements with infinite precision, therefore we cannot tell if we live in a rational or a real world." is begging the question. The conclusion follows logically from the premise. Unless the argument is just "we can't currently distinguish between a rational and a real world", but that seems trivial.
by Havoc | 2025-08-29 22:32:44+00:00
Yeah the boring part is definitely true. It is a good path to a reasonably high paycheque with bulletproof job security. To take your Enron example - even when it turned into a smoking crater and all business stopped they still had accountants working on the wreckage years later.

Very nearly went programming (now do that as a hobby). Still not sure how I feel about that choice, especially around mental stimulation. But if we're about to hit a recession/depression then it's not a bad place to be. The space I'm in has future revenues locked in for 10+ years.
by toomuchtodo | 2025-08-29 22:33:11+00:00
What I find incredible is the perpetual motion exit scam they’ve constructed. Tesla made it into an index, which means automatic investing contributions keep pouring it towards keeping the stock price elevated (along with institutional investors holding the single named security). At the same time, insiders have cashed out while Tesla has tried to remove any corporate accountability by moving to Texas and preventing shareholders from bringing suit while clearly perpetuating fraud with FSD and robotaxi claims. Surely a business case study in the future.

Tesla’s change in bylaws to limit shareholder lawsuits slammed by New York state officials - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45069743 - August 2025
by ysofunny | 2025-08-29 22:34:24+00:00
unless you're a mathematician

then maths is really THE absolute best description available of language and nature.

but non-mathematical minds will simply wonder and be amazed at how "maths explains the world", a clear indication that somebody is not thinking like a mathematician.

> Whenever there's a mysterious pattern in nature, people have felt the need to assert that some immaterial "thing" makes it so. But this just creates another mystery: what is the relationship between the material and the immaterial realm?

the relationship between the material and the immaterial pattern beholden by some mind can only be governed by the brain (hardware) wherein said mind stores its knowledge. is that conscious agency "God"? the answer depends on your personally held theological beliefs. I call that agent "me" and understand that "me" is variable, replaceable by "you" or "them" or whomever...

oh, and I love (this kind of figurative) digging. but I use my hands no shovels.
by Marsymars | 2025-08-29 22:34:51+00:00
Sure, you can get a meaty recent-gen Intel processor and get Quick Sync and plenty of cores, it just gives you awkward dependencies - you then a) can't get a non-Intel-based system without losing Quick Sync even if they're better value/performance/performance-per-watt and b) you can't upgrade your transcoding CPU without doing a whole new build of your meaty system, which is high-cost if you've got an especially meaty system.

(You might want to upgrade your transcoding box to a newer generation processor that supports, say, AV1 encoding.)

And FWIW my Ryzen Embedded system isn't especially low-power by design, it was just the most accessible way of getting ECC memory for me.
by jiggawatts | 2025-08-29 22:36:01+00:00
Don't confuse sloppy with simple. Parsing XML with regex[1] (or a non-namespace-compliant XML parser) is not simple. It's messy, verbose, error-prone, and not in any way idiomatic or simple.

If you had just used a compliant XML parser as intended, you might not even have noticed that different encodings of namespaces was even occurring in the files! It just "doesn't register" when you let the parser handle this for you in the same sense that if you parse HTML (or XML) properly, then you won't notice all of the &amp; and &lt; encodings either. Or CDATA. Or Unicode escapes. Or anything else for that matter that you may not even be aware of.

You may be a few more steps away from making an XLSX importer work robustly. Did you read the spec? The container format supports splitting single documents into multiple (internal) files to support incremental saves of huge files. That can trip developers in the worst way, because you test with tiny files, but XLSX-handling custom code tends to be used to bulk import large files, which will occasionally use this splitting. You'll lose huge blocks of data in production, silently! That's not fun (or simple) to troubleshoot.

The fast, happy path is to start with something like System.IO.Packaging [2] which is the built-in .NET libary for the Open Packaging Conventions (OPC) container format, which is the underlying container format of all Office Open XML (OOXML) formats. Use the built-in XML parser, which handles namespaces very well. Then the only annoyance is that OOXML formats have two groups of namespaces that they can use, the Microsoft ones and the Open "standardised" ones.

[1] Famously! https://stackoverflow.com/questions/8577060/why-is-it-such-a...

[2] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/api/system.io.packa...
by estearum | 2025-08-29 22:36:24+00:00
Sure, and here's what has changed between then and now:

1. A much longer and drier dry season

2. A much larger urban-wilderness interface

3. A much more organized public apparatus to combat environmental hazards (even in cases like this which require tradeoffs against more severe future risks)

The reason this is such a challenging problem today is not because everyone living in 2025 is a moron or morally corrupt and the people in the 70s were not.
by rednafi | 2025-08-29 22:36:25+00:00
Man, who hurt you?

I certainly don’t agree with everything Sean says and admit that “picking the most important work” is a naive thing to say in most scenarios.

But writing Python in production is trivial. Why would anyone lie about that? C is different OTOH. But just because you do a single config change and get paid for that doesn’t mean it’s true for everyone.

Also, staff at GitHub requires a certain bar of excellence. So I wouldn’t blindly dismiss everything just out of spite.
by jmward01 | 2025-08-29 22:37:03+00:00
The 5 year is the real kicker. Over the next 5 years I find it doubtful that they won't keep modifying their TOS and presenting that opt out 'option' so that all it will take is one accidental click and they have all your data from the start. Also, what is to stop them from removing the opt out? Nothing says they have to give that option. 4 years and 364 days from now TOS change with no opt out and a retention increase to 10 years. By then the privacy decline will have already have been so huge nobody will even notice that this 'option' was never even real.
by toast0 | 2025-08-29 22:38:14+00:00
> If you're in the middle of trying to write a new operating system, then it's probably not helpful to have John Carmack standing over you repeatedly telling you that you shouldn't be doing it. In this case Carmack gets the last laugh. Then again, it is easy to get the last laugh by predicting that a project will fail, given that most projects do.

I mean, if you're working on a project that is likely to fail, wouldn't it be nice if someone gave you cover to stop working on it, and then you could figure out something else to do that might not fail? Can't get any impact if your OS will never ship.
by dmayle | 2025-08-29 22:38:32+00:00
I used to work at Meta (back when it was just Facebook), and I pioneered a similar effort back in 2016-2017-ish. Now, I don't know anything about the current version (which seems to offer cloud processing as well), but when I was there, the effort was entirely local to the phone.

We had caffe2 running a small model on the phone to try and select and propose photos for the user to share.

We were trying to offer an alternative sharing model that both made sharing easier, while offering the user the controls that made them feel comfortable with photo suggestions. (for those who never noticed, we launched Moments, which was an app that allowed automatic private sharing of your camera roll with a close selection of friends and family, but the experience wasn't great because it was centered around group events and sharing photos with the people who were there, not connecting with the ones who weren't)

Ultimately, it was scrapped, because we were paranoid that we hadn't come up with a user experience that made it clear that this was happening only on the phone (I think we even tried a notification model), or that we'd accidentally surface someone's boudoir photos, and we were too worried about the kind of knee-jerk reactions that you're seeing in this thread.

I'm guessing that someone at Meta either had a more successful go at the UX, or they feel that the opinions about AI have shifted enough that there will be less fear.

Upon reading the article, it looks like there are two options, one which is local-only, and similar to what we built, and a second one which tries to make better suggestions using online, and that is only enabled after asking the user.

I would suspect that the cloud processing version also runs a local model to attempt to filter out racy photos before sending them to the cloud, but I don't know for sure.

I think the article is a bit disingenuous in it's presentation, but it's possible that I'm biased because I know how a similar thing was built, but it definitely sounds like fear-mongering.
by slg | 2025-08-29 22:38:38+00:00
> I don't think this was your original argument.

I’ll be honest, I really don’t know what argument you think I’m making or that you yourself are making.

The truth here is that this software will overwhelmingly be used in an illegal manner. The creators knew that when they wrote that disclaimer and we all know that reading the disclaimer. Yet the disclaimer is still placed there like it has some reason for existing beyond allowing everyone to pretend something that is happening isn’t happening. Your comments here seem to just be continuing that charade.

I’m not even condemning this software or illegally pirating movies and TV shows. I’m just remarking on the silliness of the disclaimer.
by bentt | 2025-08-29 22:38:50+00:00
25 years in the industry here. Started at studios and been indie for 10.

My best advice for today:

Make something in your craft, whether it is art, a game, code/tools, music… that gets significant attention from an audience online.

If you cannot get enthusiasm for your work online, it is unlikely you are going to get a job.

In some ways, it’s never been easier to know if you are good enough. It’s never been easier to learn.

It’s never been harder to stand out. And imposter syndrome is too often confused for “you just arent good enough yet”.

So if you keep making stuff and nobody cares, figure out how to get better or quit wasting your time.
by mdaniel | 2025-08-29 22:39:13+00:00
I realized that I should have asked for an example of "too complex" because I may not be following the arguments because my definition of a thing that is "too complex" almost certainly doesn't align with someone else's. In fact, I'd bet that if you rounded up 10 users from this site and polled them for something they thought was "too complex" the intersection would be a very, very small set of things
by vlovich123 | 2025-08-29 22:39:27+00:00
> At least as long as I can afford it performance wise. Then borrowing it is. But I would prefer the default semantics to be copying.

How could/would the language know when you can and can't afford it? Default semantics can't be "copying" because in Rust copying means something very explicit that in C++ would map to `is_trivially_copyable`. The default can't be that because Rust isn't trying to position as an alternative for scripting languages (even though in practice it does appear to be happening) - it's remarkable that people accept C++'s "clone everything by default" approach but I suspect that's more around legacy & people learning to kind of make it work. BTW in C++ you have references everywhere, it just doesn't force you to be explicit (i.e. void foo(const Foo&) and void foo(Foo) and void foo(Foo&) all accepts an instance of Foo at the call site even though very different things happen).

But basically you're argument boils down to "I'd like Rust without the parts that make it Rust" and I'm not sure how to square that circle.
by itsrobreally | 2025-08-29 22:39:50+00:00
I just got a Ugreen 2800 to replace a homemade NAS, I had a Synology for a few years but it got slower and slower as the software changed so I ditched it maybe 10 years ago?

One of the things that sold me on the Ugreen was that it is basically just a garden-variety N100 box, upgradeable RAM, supports SATA and M.2, etc.

According to this installing your own OS doesn't invalidate the warranty so if I decide their software is lousy I can install Debian https://wiki.debian.org/InstallingDebianOn/Ugreen
by VirusNewbie | 2025-08-29 22:40:00+00:00
>one could also bash other "proper" engineers that can do the CI/CD but don't know shit about how to be efficient with petabyte-scale processing.

But that would be SWEs no?

I was a 'data engineer' (until they changed the terrible title) at a startup and I ended up having to fight with Spark and Apache Beam at times, eventually contributing back to improve throughput for our use cases.

That's not the same thing as a Business Analyst who can run a little pyspark query.
by xerxes901 | 2025-08-29 22:40:08+00:00
I personally know and have (tangentially) worked with the guy and none of what you’ve said is true.

> Look at his CV. Tiny (but impactful) features ///building on existing infrastructure which has already provably scaled to millions and likely has never seen beneath what is a rest api and a react front end///

Off the top of my head he wrote the socket monitoring infrastructure for Zendesk’s unicorn workers, for example.
by lokar | 2025-08-29 22:40:11+00:00
I saw the same thing at Google. A distinguished engineer tried gently at first to get a Jr engineer to stop trying to do something that was a bad idea. They persisted so he told them very bluntly to stop. HR got involved.

I even found myself letting really bad things go by because it was just going to take way to much of my time to spoon feed people and get them to stop.