MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jonahx | 2025-08-15 04:21:12+00:00
An example would be helpful (ironically), but I think it's because you already have fluency in many abstract concepts (rooted in a lifetime of concrete application and examples), and in this situation the abstraction is usually much faster to work with, and you're annoyed because the example is effectively a long-winded explanation.

I'm not saying a mature mathematician is wrong to ask for an abstract definition first. For them, that might work well. But it's wrong to conclude from that experience that the abstraction is somehow more primary, or that it could exist in isolation. They've just forgotten the process that got them there.
by bitcrshr | 2025-08-15 04:21:14+00:00
Well for one my editor doesn’t support plugins (yet)!. But I have found that learning my editor well enough removed my need for the pesky edits / boilerplate writing offerings of AI. Other than that, I don’t trust it to write anything big, and don’t need it to write anything small.

I’ve tried it a few times and it’s decent for writing unit tests but otherwise often made a mess of things. I understand there’s an art to it but I’m just not interested in putting too much effort into it. I’m always going to go through whatever it generates with a fine toothed comb, so I don’t see it saving me much time anyhow.

I have watched some very senior engineers really dive in with it though, and seemingly with a lot of success.
by yjftsjthsd-h | 2025-08-15 04:21:22+00:00
> Which OS allows that: MacOS or Windows or both?

Here's a way to do in Windows: https://www.autohotkey.com/docs/v1/lib/ControlSend.htm

And here's how to do it in macOS: https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/36943/how-do-i-aut...

> Doesn't sound safe.

Yes, this is the usual excuse for why Wayland is intentionally useless. Fun fact: The only difference between a11y software and really awful malware is that the a11y programs work for me, the user. If you make features impossible in the name of "protecting" me, you break things for me.
by shoo | 2025-08-15 04:21:33+00:00
Australia has another (strange?) solution: Australian public companies pay tax and issue dividends to shareholders. these dividend payments have attached tax credits ("franking credits") that can be used by the shareholder to reduce their income tax, so those dividend payments are not subject to double taxation (being subject to company tax and again to the individual shareholder's income tax).

E.g. suppose you are a shareholder and receive a dividend of $1000 from some australian public company. If the australian company is large it will be subject to a 30% corporate tax rate. If the company paid company tax on earnings before issuing the dividend, then that dividend comes with a $(1000 / 0.7) * 0.3 = $428.57 tax credit which the shareholder can use to reduce their income tax bill.

That said, in terms of the global landscape of low tax jurisdictions, Australia's corporate tax rate of 30% and highest marginal individual income tax rate of 47% make things less attractive.
by klooney | 2025-08-15 04:22:30+00:00
> destroyed all hospitals, churches, mosques and schools along the way

Hamas doesn't have an air force, and they're facing an enemy with a good air force and good intelligence. They can't have nice things like "zoning", if they stored rockets away from civilians they would all get destroyed.

So, in order to have rockets, they must be stored under targets that would cause political trouble if they were to be hit: hospitals, churches, mosques and schools.
by apt-apt-apt-apt | 2025-08-15 04:24:06+00:00
Idk, I just read the Blake Ross' (of Firefox) article [1] on having aphantasia, and identify less, rather than more, with how he describes it:

"1. Can you picture my face? >No. But it’s not personal. 2. So you don’t know what I look like? >I know facts ... If you have radiant blue eyes, I may have stored that information. ... I’m unable to project it visually in my mind because there’s no screen. 4. How about picturing something simpler, like a red triangle, or the table right in front of you? >I can’t even understand the question. I can think about the idea of a red triangle. But it’s blackness behind my eyes. Blackness next to my ears. Blackness in every nook and kindle of my brain. 5. You’re just assuming that others can actually SEE things with their eyes. NOBODY can do that, you hypochondriac. I get it. It’s a “mind’s eye.” I don’t have it."

[1] https://m.facebook.com/nt/screen/?params=%7B%22note_id%22%3A...
by tortilla | 2025-08-15 04:24:56+00:00
Really impressive if it is AI generated.

Did a little Googling and found some reddit posts:

https://www.reddit.com/r/NameThatSong/comments/1mhtwde/90s_j...

https://www.reddit.com/r/NameThatSong/comments/1mf16cg/can_y...

https://www.youtube.com/@sombrerobeats (youtube channel)
by defrost | 2025-08-15 04:26:11+00:00
Not a great analogy given fixed space on a bus or a train; in rush hours a fare evader occupies a seat that would otherwise be occupied by a a fare payer (presumably).

Media piracy is largely associated with either people that were never going to pay for a cinema seat or DVD, OR (and this is key) people that would likely pay for something were it available ...
by cookiengineer | 2025-08-15 04:26:14+00:00
If the BBC didn't ban the documentary, why do you think there are journalists now protesting in front of the building? What is the reason for those ongoing protests if that didn't happen?

Maybe read some world news outside Fox News once in a while, man.

The name of the documentary (obfuscated to avoid auto flags, because this is HN after all): Gaza: D0ctors under attack (2025).

I agree that the 1000% were hyperbole on my part, but you have to admit that destroying clearly labelled-on-the-outside buildings that are hospitals and houses of international organizations like doctors without borders were all destroyed. Not once, but actually more than 13 hospitals alone (just in case you play the it was a mistake part).

People literally died while the IDF/IOF was "checking" their passports, refusing critical treatment, with people literally bleeding out outside the hospital because they were not allowed to enter.

Nurses and hospital doctors were stripped naked and beaten to death, in mass interrogation camps.

This is not some misidentification issue.

This is post-Desert Storm trying to manufacture evidence, at all cost. These types of actions are absolutely disproportionate.

(Downvote me all you want, I can take it)
by insane_dreamer | 2025-08-15 04:26:33+00:00
Writing out Chinese characters definitely helped me learn to read them as well (not surprising, since engaging multiple senses helps one retain information better), even though in practice I never had opportunity to write them out because I always used either a phone or computer.

Unlike the author, I found most of the mnemonics as much trouble to learn as the characters themselves, and soon stopped using that approach. It just didn't work for me.
by w_for_wumbo | 2025-08-15 04:26:59+00:00
There are plenty of examples of children that aren't provided for, given the time or care required to prevent outcomes that we don't want. That doesn't mean that we accept child murder, we do everything we can to prevent it from happening. If a plane falls out of the sky, we do everything that we can do to ensure it never happens again. If we don't look at war and understand it, we won't ever have the tools to prevent it.
by beambot | 2025-08-15 04:27:20+00:00
I assume you mean "fare" evasion -- like riding a train or bus?

Yes, it fits. There are a finite number of seats on the train, and your gratis use of a seat (ostensibly) denies another paying customer. Even if there's excess capacity at the time of your ridership, the train operator is designing their capacity with buffer, so you're essentially stealing the capacity.

You could just as easily peg the theft to the incremental cost (electricity, gasoline, etc) it takes the train operator requires to move your incremental mass from A to B.

This is distinctly different from infinite, free copying & distribution.
by f0rk | 2025-08-15 04:27:43+00:00
Hi all,

I'm one of the co-founders at Veritus Agent. Our platform enables lenders, servicers, and collections agencies to spin up, personalize, and A/B test AI agents across voice, email, SMS, and chat, while we ensure compliance.

We’re looking for a full stack engineer who thrives at the intersection of shipping code and talking to the people who use it.

We're a small team, you'd be the third engineer joining our team.

Details here: https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/veritus-agent/jobs/cvH...
by scarecrowbob | 2025-08-15 04:28:43+00:00
There is a lot of nuance that goes into how guitar is played which might not be obvious. Offsets for string timing, minor variations on fret-board pressure, pulling strings a bit either because of the way the chords work or for pitch reasons... it's just very complex.

Playing with a plectrum (or a thumb pick, or a bow) is very nuanced. I'm impressed that this mechanism works- it's a neat thing.

At the same time the mechanism of what fingers are doing when playing is very complex in ways that even good players and teachers might have a hard time enunciating. In addition having a good understanding of nuance in instrument, the nuances of performance, the nuances of the musical pieces, and being able to formulate what that is to a student is difficult and rare.

I'm not surprised that a smart and talented EE might not be able to know all that in addition to their more technical domain knowledge.
by sovietswag | 2025-08-15 04:29:04+00:00
That quote about conjecture reminds me of a big point from Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. The author suggests that 'science' / 'the scientific method' don't actually account for the process by which ideas/hypotheses come into existence, science only comes into play once the hypothesis appears (from whence does it appear?). He calls that magic smoke 'Quality'. (Using the language you cited, I guess we would be asking about where the conjecture itself comes from). I'm realizing now that this is tangential to your point, sorry, but thanks for posting this interesting comment.
by theoa | 2025-08-15 04:29:13+00:00
> This is also why I believe that language is a bottleneck for thought. Most of what you remember is nothing like an approximate copy of the things you experienced in real life—even in the specific case of text, memory is not even remotely like a paraphrase of previously read words. Many of our thoughts happen in a highly abstracted and distilled form, interacting and connecting with each other as a network that simply cannot be faithfully converted into a sequence of words, however long.

Perhaps the most interesting quote in an interesting article.

Leaves me speechless or something
by energy123 | 2025-08-15 04:29:50+00:00
> AI is exceptional for coding! [high-compute scaffold around multiple instances / undisclosed IOI model / AlphaEvolve]

> AI is awesome for coding! [Gpt-5 Pro]

> AI is somewhat awesome for coding! ["gpt-5" with verbosity "high" and effort "high"]

> AI is a pretty good at coding! [ChatGPT 5 Thinking through a Pro subscription with Juice of 128]

> AI is mediocre at coding! [ChatGPT 5 Thinking through a Plus subscription with a Juice of 64]

> AI sucks at coding! [ChatGPT 5 auto routing]
by BoorishBears | 2025-08-15 04:31:01+00:00
I run a site that does something similar, but on a more granular level (prompts at the page level rather than the chapter)

I think right now we're at the point where novelcrafter is an excellent proxy for the best models for readers, because LLMs are still mostly losing engagement due to technical errors as opposed to subjective ones:

That's repetition problems, moralizing/soft-censorship, grammatical quirks, missing instructions, forgetting major plot points, etc.

Those kinds of errors are so obvious you can almost rank these models with an N=1 vibe test, and they limit how much people will consume unless you're scratching certain itches like NSFW

-

However I do think with enough post-training you can beat that level of problems and move to a stage where the writing is technically sound (and that's what I've spent most of the last year working on).

From there you get to more challenging problems that require much more feedback along some level of specialization per user (like what Midjourney does during onboarding to build up a style profile). Once you're not making technical mistakes, you now have to codify the ethereal concept of "user taste", and that will be a really interesting challenge for LLMs.
by wakawaka28 | 2025-08-15 04:31:41+00:00
That does indeed seem to be a problem but there's a flip side. If you can't afford to buy a thing, then renting it is actually preferable. Rental is normally fine, unless there is a virtual monopoly on housing that forces people to rent and manipulates prices. In the absence of a monopoly, the rental price is just the time value of the place plus a reasonable service fee decided by a free market.
by dddgghhbbfblk | 2025-08-15 04:32:02+00:00
The Star Wars project is a bit of an outlier in terms of the insane work and dedication that's gone into it.

However, in the quality-focused corners of online film piracy, it's still pretty routine for people to combine the best features of every retail release available to produce something that's better than what you can get even by just going out and buying a Blu Ray. For example, maybe the best picture quality available anywhere is from a Blu Ray that was released to the German market, but a US Blu Ray release has an extra commentary track, while the best audio track is actually from an old Laserdisc release (crazy but it's happened before).

In the live action world it's pretty rare for a video track or an audio track to be spliced together from multiple sources, though it does happen. But in the anime world it's pretty common and they'll do stuff to fix picture quality issues or localize Japanese text to English on signs or whatever (and they can do it slick enough that you wouldn't even notice).

The most bizarre part of all of this, though, is that people put in all this work only for the communities themselves to be small and fiercely private, meaning it could be hard for most people to actually access the end results (though the popular stuff tends to trickle out). The best place on the Internet to download movies bar none (better than all the major streaming platforms put together) is an invite only site with under 40k members that's extremely difficult to join these days.
by WorldPeas | 2025-08-15 04:32:09+00:00
another thing I heard but never thought of that was in the video, Woz said he based the Apple I off a terminal! In retrospect, it makes a lot of sense.

> He was designing a terminal to be used with DARPANet, the predecessor to the internet. He wanted an inexpensive way to use a keyboard and TV as the display for use as a computer terminal.

https://historysanjose.org/how-we-restored-our-apple-1-to-wo...

I guess the IPhone was walking his path after all (as heretical as it may sound)
by djtango | 2025-08-15 04:32:32+00:00
Whatsapp (and IIRC Wechat) were built in Erlang. I think Discord is also Elixir/Rust

My take is that when the advantage to be gained is a superior architecture or set of abstractions that can be built by a small core of engineers then language choice can be an advantage. When the business needs to scale into the real world long tail of integrations, infrastructure, clients etc then throwing bodies at the problem can be an advantage and then ecosystem and talent pool outweigh original language gains.

Sharp tools are at their best in a smaller more focused team... But in software, building the right architecture can in some cases be all the difference
by Retric | 2025-08-15 04:32:44+00:00
There’s a lot of CGI that blends in invisibly in most movies made in the last 20 years. Sure we notice the bottom 20% of terrible CGI + stuff that’s blatantly unrealistic, but all the stuff you miss is just quietly worked.

Poor makeup, anachronistic aircraft contrails, unsightly construction cranes, etc get quietly adjusted to make everything look clean in ways that don’t stand out until you start analyzing individual frames. On top of this some kinds of CGI have gotten so common that it’s less obvious how few physical cars are used in car commercials.
by TheDong | 2025-08-15 04:34:09+00:00
> It is my choice not to use it and I am fine with that. However I also have encountered people who seem to think it is not my choice not to use it

I'm curious what the main opposing opinion you've hit there is? Is it accessibility and non-roman-alphabet input? Those are the things that kinda stand out to me as "gtk does this pretty well, and most developers who hand-roll stuff wouldn't think about it".
by philosophty | 2025-08-15 04:34:13+00:00
Steve Jobs is the reason Wozniak could give away tens of millions and still have $10M and multiple houses. Otherwise he would have been a good engineer and lived a nice quiet life, but nothing like the world-touring adventure he got.

Steve Jobs needed Wozniak at the time and it was fortunate for him, but his personality and ambition were so strong it's very likely he would have been a big deal in any scenario.
by muststopmyths | 2025-08-15 04:35:12+00:00
You are talking about the "Double Irish", which was scotched (sorry) in 2020 by Ireland.

The link under your quoted line in the TFA seems to be talking about Apple (and others) preparing for the end of the Double Irish by finding other tax havens.

"Elite tax advisers help Apple Inc. and other corporate giants skirt impacts of crackdown on 'Double Irish' maneuvers."

So, I don't see what's invalid about the TFA's point, which is about tax avoidance in general
by philosophty | 2025-08-15 04:37:44+00:00
It's morally repugnant to blame someone for their own death from cancer like this. People do it all the time with Steve Jobs as if it's okay because he could be a jerk at times.

It's absolutely not a fact that his cancer could have been cured. That is wildly incorrect. It's more than likely he would have died in any case.

Yes, of course his odds would have been improved had he treated it as early as possible but each cancer is extremely specific and no one in the world knows if he could have survived it.

Dealing with a diagnoses like pancreatic cancer, and taking a few months to gather the courage for surgery is a very human reaction and not atypical.
by pezezin | 2025-08-15 04:38:21+00:00
No, it's because Japan is a deeply conservative country, really adverse to change, because change means taking risks. If you ever had to deal with Japanese you would know, layers upon layers of convoluted procedures for no real reason.

But hey, at least now I can get the "my number card" to get my hanko certificate from the convenience store. Maybe in 30 years I will be able to use the card directly to prove my ID without needing the stupid hanko!
by jesterson | 2025-08-15 04:38:33+00:00
Normally I wouldn't dignify that with a response, but just to put a final dot I'll share a few things.

Speaking of openly stating a position - sapienti sat. Can't see how more open it can be, but it's certainly not of everyones capacity to have ability to comprehend a thought. Fully aware of that.

For the rest of your comment - if you kind enough to pardon me for giving unsolicited advice - if I were you i would rather try not to manifest your insecurities but rather work on them, or at least do not show them in civilized discussions, which we all would like to have here on HN.

And certainly would be great if we can keep your fantasies like misogyny and sorts out of the discussion.

Dixi.
by discardedrefuse | 2025-08-15 04:38:41+00:00
Jellyfin if you want free, open source, and don't need special clients (like for LG TVs, Xbox, etc). Emby paid if you need the clients.

Skip Plex entirely. Their users are their product. They've partnered with media companies and push partner services over users media library. They like to claim that Plex Media Server doesn't send any information back to them, and its technically true; its the Plex clients that are sending the data back.
by vunderba | 2025-08-15 04:38:53+00:00
I spent years in Taiwan studying traditional Chinese and even at the height of my proficiency there were plenty of rarer logographs that I'd frequently stumble over - only able to draw "blurry approximations" of them depending on my familiarity.

Coming from a phonetic language with only 26 letters, it was such a surreal feeling being able to effortlessly read a character but be unable to reproduce it.
by wakawaka28 | 2025-08-15 04:39:07+00:00
There are lots of businesses eager to build houses. The trouble is overwhelmingly that we can't afford it. Angry people won't get it done unless they take up construction or manufacturing as a career in huge numbers, or else rob or enslave people who can build houses.

What we have is a general shortfall of prosperity. Housing is affected by money supply in an outsized way. Prices are at least partly going up because our economy is stagnant, and wages are going down in real terms as credit continues expanding to keep the wheels from coming off.
by AceJohnny2 | 2025-08-15 04:39:58+00:00
> Qt decided that C++ needed a more better object system

I haven't used Qt, nor C++, in many moons, but my understanding was that `moc` [1] filled a gap of run-time dynamicism that C++ didn't natively support when it was invented. Has C++ since evolved to make that obsolete? Seems like moc is still a thing.

[1] https://doc.qt.io/qt-6/moc.html
by monkeyelite | 2025-08-15 04:42:21+00:00
> "everything is about money, especially the ones that appear to have non-monetary reasons."

There are countless other incentives as tangible as money including meaning, status, security, fame, etc.

If you spend time around people with money you will find they will happily trade it to achieve these.

What this belief signals most strongly to me is your class.
by lyall | 2025-08-15 04:43:02+00:00
Yeah I agree. I way over-indexed on learning kanji (via WaniKani) at the beginning of my Japanese learning journey. I got about halfway through before realizing it was silly that I could read 健忘症 but didn't know many very basic hiragana-only words. It wasn't timed wasted but it probably wasn't the most efficient approach.

In an ideal world maybe learners could focus exclusively on listening and speaking first, then move on to kanji later. But writing is a very useful tool in learning, and having access to that tool can help speed things up.

Like most things in life, a balanced approach is probably the right one. But you have to know what your goal is. Our brains are lazy, they only get better at what we make them get better at. If your goal is to just read kanji, practice reading kanji. If your goal is to understand and speak the language, practice listening to and speaking the language. But if you want to have a balanced language ability, you'll need to practice it all.
by bluefirebrand | 2025-08-15 04:43:17+00:00
> Even if it doesn't improve from here, my job as a coder has already been changed.

This is so annoying to me. My job as a coder hasn't changed because my responsibilities as a coder hasn't changed

Whether or not I beg an LLM to write code for me or write it myself the job is the same. At best there's a new tool to use but the job hasn't changed.
by MobiusHorizons | 2025-08-15 04:43:44+00:00
I stopped pirating in college when I got a job and was making enough money to pay for movies I wanted to watch. But I miss almost every single one of the points listed so much so that I have begun purchasing dvd or Blu-ray copies of movies and shows I would otherwise stream, and ripping the content for my own use. It is an absurd amount of work, but the end result is a better experience than streaming in almost every way.

If I could legally download movies and shows (paying full price for them) I absolutely would.