MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ivan_gammel | 2025-08-09 18:48:32+00:00
It cannot. It doesn’t reason. Gambling and winning (1-10^N)*100% times is not the same as reasoning and providing accurate answers the same amount of times. If you reason about something, your errors fall into certain categories of fallacies often related to incomplete information. LLM hallucinations are easy to spot with reasoning, they are of statistical nature.
by belter | 2025-08-09 18:49:33+00:00
> No groundwater for data centers!

It's worst. They use tap water.

"...For the purposes of cooling, data centres mainly use potable water (water that is safe to drink or use for cooking, free from harmful contaminants). .." - https://www.twobirds.com/en/insights/2025/cooling-the-cloud-...
by gorgoiler | 2025-08-09 18:49:38+00:00
Congratulations!

Debian has been the stable footing of my Free computing life for three decades. Everything about their approach — from showing me Condorcet, organising stable chaos, moving forward by measured consensus, and basing everything on hard wrought principles — has had an effect on me in some way, from technical to social and back again.

I love this project and the immeasurable impact it has had on the world through their releases and culture.

With all my love, g’o xx
by adrian_b | 2025-08-09 18:49:52+00:00
While you are right, "magenta" is just a fancy synonym for "purple". It might have been chosen instead of "purple" because the traditional word could be applied to colors having various proportions of red and blue, while "magenta" is intended to convey that the amounts of red and blue are equal. However all the traditional color names, like "red", "green" or "blue" refer to wide ranges of hues, not to a precise hue, so there was really no good reason for the use of the word "magenta".

"Cyan" is a very bad word choice caused by confusions in the translations of Ancient Greek texts made by philologists ignorant of chemistry and mineralogy. In Ancient Greek, "cyan" meant pure blue, not blue-green. More precisely, it was the color of the ultramarine blue pigment, the most expensive blue pigment at that time, which was imported from the present territory of Afghanistan and for which the name "ku-wa-no" was already used by the Hittites, a millennium before the Greeks. Nowadays ultramarine blue is still used as a pigment, but it is made synthetically, so its cost is a small fraction of what it was before the 19th century.

Before the use of "cyan" has started, the color name "blue-green" had been used for a very long time. Similarly, "orange" is a relatively new English word, but the color had been mentioned for many centuries, as "red-yellow" or "yellow-red".

So the awareness of distinct hues is not necessarily limited to the set of simple color words, because most languages have used compound words to name the hues for which they did not have a simple word.

Other languages have used the names of well-known colored objects to distinguish the hues that did not have distinct names. For instance, in Latin the word for "red" was used for both red colors and purple colors. When Latin speakers wanted to specify whether something was red or purple, they would say "red like the kermes (red) dye" or "red like the purple dye" (the word "purple" as a color name comes from the latter expression). Similarly, in Latin the word for green meant either green or blue-green. To distinguish the 2 colors, a Latin speaker would say "green like grass" or "green like leaves" or "green like emeralds" for expressing "green" and "green like the littoral sea" or "green like beryls" or "green like turquoise gems" for expressing "blue-green". So they were well aware about the differences between these colors, even if they did not have distinct words for them.
by bigyabai | 2025-08-09 18:50:01+00:00
I'm shocked to see almost zero discussion of CUDA and the Nvidia GPU architecture's role in this. There's been no about-face from the industry related to Nvidia's success, just a reinvestment in the same broken raster architectures that are fast becoming a second-class citizen.

It's doubly funny, because Nvidia never expressly tried to stop them either. Working with Khronos, Nvidia proved they weren't afraid to build the next CUDA-killer, even in collaboration with the industry. But we'd sooner get working SPIR-V, because gaming is a much more important market than democratized compute.

This will all be very confusing and hard to explain to people in the future. Why was Nvidia rich? Because nobody else wanted the money, I guess.
by cheeseomlit | 2025-08-09 18:50:12+00:00
So all its gonna take to end capitalism is matter replicators, FTL travel, interstellar colonization, and unifying under a one world government after a decade of horrifying eugenics wars fought between genetically enhanced supermen- And after all that Picard gets to live on a nice vineyard in France while thousands of voyager doctor clones toil away in the dilithium mines
by vintagedave | 2025-08-09 18:50:22+00:00
Although I would argue with you that the communist governments were socialist -- they were not, at least under our current understanding of socialism (says one person contradicting another on the internet, this is opinion, I know :)) -- you're right about the intellectual blindness about other possibilities.

I find Chesteron's distributism an interesting one, and personally really admire cooperative societies.
by simonw | 2025-08-09 18:50:30+00:00
Those all appear to be thinly disguised sales pitches for their Tramlines product.

They also look to be selling the kind of filtering/guardrails solution that I argue in my talk doesn't actually work. (Update: that's a little unfair, I had a look and a bunch of their rules are at least deterministic, like making sure DELETE isn't present in a call made to a database MCP.)

If you're looking for credible sources on MCP and prompt security that aren't my blog, I strongly recommend https://embracethered.com/blog/
Ask HN: Would you still recommend SICP in 2025?
by dondraper36 | 2025-08-09 18:50:38+00:00
SICP = Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs

I have read that even the authors of the book admitted regrettably that modern universities have to be focused on jungling black boxes so the course is less relevant.

That said, with all your current experience and knowledge, would you still recommend SICP to a reasonably experienced developer?

Are there better alternatives?
by mc32 | 2025-08-09 18:50:41+00:00
There are many self-employed people in the third world who do not earn "living wages" what do you propose they do?

Never was minimum wage equivalent to a living wage. A living wage is an ill-defined term. Does it mean I can afford the smallest apartment and afford just enough food to survive or are we adding small luxuries to this?

None of the Nordic countries have a minimum wage --on the other hand they don't have a large undercurrent of illegal labor undercutting the minimum natives will accept as a minimum wage.

That said, I don't have a horse in this fight. I don't think business have a "right" to cheap labor and if they can't survive without it, then so be it. Of course people have to understand their services and goods will go up in price and they should be okay with that. Maybe they stop depending on someone else doing and making things for them and start making their own stuff at home.
by toomuchtodo | 2025-08-09 18:51:19+00:00
You can complain about societal values but you cannot change them, as you have no leverage or influence on them at their scale. You can choose where to live though. Live where your values align with those of others. If I want to live in a Mad Max hyper individualist environment where I can max comp and economic success while not caring about those around me, I can choose to be in the US. If I want to live more collectively around people who sacrifice some ideas of what Americans believe to be freedom (firearms, speech in your examples) for the collective good and harm reduction, I can choose to be in Europe. When you ask why, the answer is straightforward: your experience is a function of political governance and what each electorate has collectively chosen. If you want to look at the data, it tells the objective story with regards to outcomes of political governance choices.

No disparagement intended, this is a rationalist opinion and mental model. My intent is not to be unkind or dismissive, it is to communicate "Live where you will be happy based on your mental model and belief systems under the assumption that you have no ability to change the system you exist in during a human time horizon."

(part time resident of both the US and Europe, high empathy and a desire to leave the world a better place through collective action even at the diminishment of self, so I lean towards Europe)
by Hobadee | 2025-08-09 18:51:25+00:00
In addition to this, there will always be 2 sets of "primary" colors for a given eye: Additive and Subtractive.

Additive primary colors are necessary when you have no light, and need to create color. Think a black screen, and you are creating colors with RGB pixels.

Subtractive primary colors are necessary when you have full-spectrum (white) light and need to filter down to a single color.

Other "primary" colors, such as the red, blue, yellow pigment primaries we learned in Kindergarten exist because pigments historical couldn't be created perfectly, and those "primaries" are the best way of getting the most colors, but still have a very limited (by comparison) gamut.
by extra88 | 2025-08-09 18:51:48+00:00
I think you jest but I think you can actually dictate text and finger-write notes on it.

Comparing the flagship model to the much cheaper SE, what they're buying is:

* a larger, brighter, always-on display * additional health sensors, monitoring * can go deeper underwater * longer battery life (if you choose low power mode) * faster battery charging * more powerful processor * twice the local storage * Ultra wideband radio (enables directional device finding) * microphone with voice isolation (better sounding calls, voice recordings) * made from more recycled materials (which may make it more expensive)

I'm happy with my non-cellular SE, I do which charging was faster but I don't know the Series 10 charges that much faster and I wouldn't pay an extra ~$150 for that anyway.

https://www.apple.com/watch/compare/
by SeanAnderson | 2025-08-09 18:53:01+00:00
Yeah, this mirrors my experience trying to get FireChat to work at Las Vegas EDC years prior. Unfortunate to see progress is about the same.

Going to Burning Man for the first time this year. Some of my campmates are keen on giving mesh networking another shot through https://www.burningmesh.org/. Will be interesting to see if using dedicated hardware, rather than just software on phones, makes connectivity & communication more reliable.
by BLanen | 2025-08-09 18:54:13+00:00
As I've been saying.

MCP is not a protocol. It doesn't protocolize anything of use. It's just "here's some symbols, do with them whatever you want.", leaving it there but then advertising that as a feature of its universality. It provides almost just as much of a protocol as TCP, but rebuild on 5 OSI layers, again.

It's not a security issue, it's a ontological issue.
by the_mitsuhiko | 2025-08-09 18:55:05+00:00
> Pretty much any proprietary encryption algorithm is going to qualify as "rolling your own".

It came out of a university and was acquired.

> I hope that products manufactured post 2005 use strong publicly available cryptography.

A lot of the challenges are related to key pairing and relaying of wireless information in combating with jamming. It’s a tricky thing to secure given the circumstances.

> I don't follow?

Cars stand around 99% of the time and easy to get into. pairing protocols assume that physical access is restricted / not possible. That’s why it’s so much harder to secure car key pairing. What would make it more secure is delegating the security to a remote service which is secured. Eg: what Tesla does with their keys.
by bigyabai | 2025-08-09 18:55:44+00:00
It's not the end of the world. Both are equally "impressive" at basic Q/A skills and GPT-4 is noticeably more sterile writing prose.

Even if GPT-3.5 was noticeably worse for any of these questions, it's honestly more interesting for someone's first experience to be with the exaggerated shortcomings of AI. The slightly-screwy answers are still endemic of what you see today, so it all ended well enough I think. Would've been a terribly boring exchange if Knuth's reply was just "looks great, thanks for asking ChatGPT" with no challenging commentary.
by tptacek | 2025-08-09 18:56:45+00:00
If your city is a major US urban area, it seems very unlikely to me that "the cops are most likely to be the ones terrorizing people". They may very well be abusive; they may very well terrorize people. Those are real problems. But people are more terrorized by crime, and, if you pay attention to what people in lower-income neighborhoods --- especially Black neighborhoods --- are actually saying in neighborhood meetings, it's that the police don't respond enough, not that there's too much of them.

There's a really pernicious tendency among well-off white collar activists to instrumentalize residents of lower-income neighborhoods, activists who themselves rarely experience crime (because they tend not to live in places where it's a major problem), and project onto those residents a preference for property crime over police intervention. In the main, working class people hate crime.
by AnotherGoodName | 2025-08-09 18:57:16+00:00
I'll give a different viewpoint and it's that I hate everything about XML. In fact one of the primary issues with SOAP was the XML. It never worked well across SOAP libraries. Eg. The .net and Java SOAP libraries have huge threads on stackoverflow "why is this incompatible" and a whole lot of needing to very tightly specify the schema. To the point it was a flaw; it might sound reasonable to tightly specify something but it got to the point there were no reasonable common defaults hence our complaints about SOAP verbosity and the work needed to make it function.

Part of this is the nature of XML. There's a million ways to do things. Should some data be parsed as an attribute of the tag or should it be another tag? Perhaps the data should be in the body between the tags? HTML, based on XML, has this problem; eg. you can seriously specify <font face="Arial">text</font> rather than have the font as a property of the wrapping tag. There's a million ways to specify everything and anything and that's why it makes a terrible data parsing format. The reader and writer must have the exact same schema in mind and there's no way to have a default when there's simply no particular correct way to do things in XML. So everything had to be very very precisely specified to the point it added huge amounts of work when a non-XML format with decent defaults would not have that issue.

This become a huge problem for SOAP and why i hate it. Every implementation had different default ways of handling even the simplest data structure passing between them and were never compatible unless you took weeks of time to specify the schema down to a fine grained level.

In general XML is problematic due to the lack of clear canonical ways of doing pretty much anything. You might say "but i can specify it with a schema" and to that i say "My problem with XML is that you need a schema for even the simplest use case in the first place".
by teiferer | 2025-08-09 18:57:18+00:00
The issue is not EV vs ICE. It's that things are not built to last or to be easily maintainable / serviceable. A modern car is not just like a smartphone you are sitting inside of, it's a server rack full of stuff. Of course that's outdated 1-2 decades from now and nobody is going to provide updated software anymore.

All things equal I'd even expect this to be worse with an ICE because of higher complexity, though the tech is more mature and stable at this point and the ICE manufacturing more traditionalist than the EV space.
by woile | 2025-08-09 18:57:29+00:00
Slint-ui with rust (they have bindings for cpp, Python and js).

Quite good, I've been building this Pomodoro:

https://github.com/reciperium/temporis/

I've also used nix to build the packages when possible.

One of the things I like about slint is that it has native components. They also have experimental support for Android and iOS.

The language is quite simple as well. Though it could benefit from something like flex
by thepryz | 2025-08-09 18:57:30+00:00
While a lot of people are quick throw aspersions towards Tim Cook, Gruber's is one of the more nuanced takes that really helps describe the difficult position many business leaders are in right now. I appreciate it, especially point the finger at the American people, and I generally agree that it was strategic in sacrificing Tim's reputation (or perhaps integrity?) for what they perceive is a greater good.

It's easy to say that you'd stand up to tyranny until you're in a position where the lives of thousands of people, if not more, are directly impacted by the decisions you make. I don't envy Tim and while I usually despise the whole "What would Steve Jobs Do" talking point, this is one particular situation where I think it would be immensely interesting to see whether Steve would bend the knee or whether he'd tell the Trump administration to fuck off -- only because everything I've read about Steve suggests he's the kind of person who might do so even if it had a catastrophic impact on Apple.

It' also hard not to look towards IBM, GE and other companies that helped legitimize the rise of the Nazi party in post-WWI Germany and wonder how we'll look back at this moment decades from now.
by throwaway1004 | 2025-08-09 18:57:31+00:00
Apologies for repeating myself but this directly addresses a question I posed in a sub-comment: of the total population, at the time, what proportion were considered working class?

The reason being, class distinction would only count if non-working classes were very statistically significant. Having never examined this before, I'm having a hard time getting solid information, and it appears superfically that the class distinctions of today may not quite apply.

I'm operating under the hypothesis that the vast majority of the population would have been considered "working class", probably with a variety of sub-strata within (think hobo who occassionaly works vs. prosperous sustenance farm who's a pillar of the community).

Was there an excess of places in officer school for middle class+, or did they have to compete for their place? If they couldn't break in, was it socially acceptable to choose not to fight with the troops?
by KORraN | 2025-08-09 18:57:49+00:00
No, I didn't. Maybe it's not a bad idea. I read about the issue on the internet and it seems pretty common issue that sooner or later hits most of Instincts Solar gen 1.

I contacted Garmin support since I've seen that in some of the cases they offered generous discounts for newer models or even gave them for free, but in my case they offered me to pay almost a full price for refurbished Instinct Solar gen 1, that most probably would have the same issue after some time.
by fuzzfactor | 2025-08-09 18:58:04+00:00
My bad when Morningstar aligns with my observations in the entire article, and over-reacted a bit when I see people flagging related articles and downvoting, when you can't help but notice the pressure to ignore the signs.

I gave you all corrective upvotes but that didn't help much, I guess I just got carried away.

Sorry about that missing /s

In case people are not aware Morningstar has traditionally done some very respectable economic analysis, and this is one of them.
by derbOac | 2025-08-09 18:58:05+00:00
That paper is pretty misleading and flies in the face of most peer-reviewed research (I don't know that journal, for what it's worth).

My guess is because it was focused on those attending elite institutions:

"In their paper on admissions to highly selective colleges... students at each of the schools in this analysis... Students opting to not submit an SAT/ACT score achieve relatively lower college GPAs when they attend an Ivy-Plus college..."

My guess is the meaning of a high or low GPA versus standardized test changes quite a bit when you have groups very highly selected based on a wealth of other information.

The Dartmouth report has always frustrated because they, along with that other paper, selectively present conditional means rather than scatterplots, hiding the variability around points to make things look more predictive than they are. Means by predictor level are almost useless without knowing the conditional variance for each predictor level. They're basically deliberately pretending that there is no error variance in the prediction equation.

Meta-analyses suggest that both standardized test performance and GPA predict later performance. For example:

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10627197.2015.99...

In some literature, GPA is superior, and others, testing.

There are other studies from decades ago showing that when standardized tests are temporarily removed from admissions (e.g., due to a court ruling), it has almost no influence on outcomes of admitted students later, suggesting admissions committees are able to select comparable students without tests.

I'm not saying tests are horrible and should be omitted, I just think people really overstate their predictive utility and it causes a ton of problems down the road.
by x0x0 | 2025-08-09 18:58:08+00:00
It had layoffs in 2024. And Google has emitted a bunch of words about their support for Flutter, but hasn't taken the most obvious step towards solidifying support: guarantee a minimal spend level on Flutter dev for a decade, either internally or by donating to an external foundation. eg we will spend $x on Flutter until 2036. :shrug: So they've carefully retained the option to cut support at will. Which is their choice, but I recently wasn't comfortable starting a greenfield project in it for that reason.
by bob1029 | 2025-08-09 18:58:35+00:00
I think the most cursed aspect in all of this is the fact that regions where evaporative coolers work best tend to have the scarcest water resources. Evaporative cooling is unreasonably effective when water is happy to evaporate. You can cut the power consumption of a datacenter by 70-80% in these regions if you are willing to sacrifice water.

I think in this case, solar energy is the best way to run the cooling systems, even if it requires an absurd amount of power to exercise compressors, etc. in order to improve heat concentration and rejection efficiency. As long as it's all green and theres a disaster recovery plan, who cares?
by sunshowers | 2025-08-09 18:58:59+00:00
Not entirely sure what you mean (do you mean Threadripper, which some of use?), but this is purely a work machine for me. I regularly build and test our software on my Helios box.

It isn't exactly the same as our production machines (as you can imagine we have shared environments for this), but we've written in-memory simulators for most of our hardware components so it's good enough for most use cases.
by DiogenesKynikos | 2025-08-09 18:59:02+00:00
For native speakers of English, the language part of the exam is just seen as a general test of intelligence.

For non-native speakers, it's just a test of how well they learned English, and nobody in admissions expects them to score as well as native speakers.

Beyond this, there are subject-specific GREs. They're far from perfect, but they're more uniformly comparable across all candidates than grades are.
by littlestymaar | 2025-08-09 18:59:08+00:00
> Because it really seems like both are increasingly inadequate systems for handling modernity, and the obsession with defining one as intrinsically evil and the other the obvious superior option (I’ll let you choose which is which) is such a flattening, unhelpful approach

As the post-soviet Russian joke went:

everything the communists said about communism was false, everything they said about capitalism was true.