MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Nevermark | 2025-08-30 07:44:18+00:00
My comment is on whether the total class of reals are in nature.

Given the theme and title of the article.

Given one of the primary (but often not emphasized) properties of the class of reals, is that it contains and is actually dominated by the un-constructible reals, an argument that the total class of reals isn't represented in nature seems unremarkable to me.

Un-constructible reals are a highly exotic abstract concept. You can never actually identify or operate on one.

I do believe all the constructible reals (what most people think of when they think of real numbers), are likely to be found in nature/reality.

It is a mishap of terminology, that the larger class, which is unnecessary for middleschool math, or any math most people will ever encounter, has a pithy name "real".

While the practical concept, that directly correlates with arithmetic, algebra, calculus, diff eq, etc., has the unwieldily title of "unconstructible reals".

So in order to avoid having to talk about constructible vs. unconstructible numbers to kids who shouldn't need to care, we use the pithy term and actually throw unconstructible reals into the mix, where it wasn't necessary at all.

We tell kinds how the reals have a higher-order uncountable infinite cardinality, relative to integers. Which is true, but gives the impression that cardinality is somehow a concept necessarily linked to algebraic and other practical numbers that we introduce at the same time, which it is not.

The set of constructible reals has the same countably infinite cardinality as the integers.
by ljosifov | 2025-08-30 07:45:18+00:00
I already share lots of my data with Google. I have Gmail where a lot of my online life is reflected. I have Photos, Gmaps, Gdrive. Also Google knows about my YouTube viewing, my Android phone use. So no matter what I say - with my actions, my revealed preference is - that I trust Google. So far - Google have not betrayed my trust, afaics. So I actually want for Google to adapt Gemini to me, either via the context, or even with a thin layer of LoRA. If Google treats me like a complete stranger it knows nothing about, then Google, and plenty of other people, make use of my data, but I, the creator (and nominal owner) of my data - don't benefit from their knowledge of me?? That sounds the worst of the possible options to me.
by Moru | 2025-08-30 07:45:28+00:00
This is why we only had ascii in the start. You don't need those other characters anyway. (For english...)

Meanwhile there are a lot of languages and cultures. Somewhere all those characters were useful for something. My Atari had a very fun utility that gave you a compose-key that could combine just about everything on the keyboard to access all those weird characters of the extended ascii table. <compose>+ao would give you "a" with a ring on top (å), <compose>+ae gave the danish welded together character that I can't even type any more on windows.

The idea came from some unix thing I believe.
by sublimefire | 2025-08-30 07:46:37+00:00
Taxes as various European states and US states are sometimes on par. Everyone pays for somebody’s health problems, Americans as well, through insurance, it is just health insurance is mandatory in Europe. The other stuff boils down to effective use of tax money, it is easier to do it in a smaller state compared to US or Canada or similar. Individualism has an effect but at this day and age it is about lobby groups politicising any topic they do not like. FYI nobody likes to pay taxes.
by Symbiote | 2025-08-30 07:47:21+00:00
Enable the Compose key and you'll get even more easy symbols, and they're reasonably guessable.

Compose ` e produces è " a produces ä v s produces š v S produces Š a e produces æ C = produces € l - produces £ - > produces → ( 1 ) produces ① ^ 1 produces ¹ _ 1 produces ₁ 1 8 produces ⅛ - - - produces — - - . produces – . . produces … . - produces · | - produces † | = produces ‡ " < produces “ x x produces × m u produces µ > = produces ≥

See /usr/share/X11/locale/en_US.UTF-8/Compose for the list and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compose_key

I have also configured Shift+Compose to send the code 'dead_greek' using ~/.Xmodmap:

keycode 135 = Multi_key dead_greek Multi_key Multi_key

Then I can type α, β, γ, Δ, Ε, Ζ easily, although I hardly ever need this nowadays.
by randomtoast | 2025-08-30 07:48:19+00:00
I mean, you can have your own opinion on whether I shift the narrative or move the goalpost, and that is fair enough.

But if you scroll all the way up to my first comment I said:

> In Germany, you are generally not allowed to film law enforcement. If someone feels they have been treated "unfairly", good luck to prove that in court when two officers present a completely different version of event ...

And in my last comment about the matter I said:

> Imagine your word against two or more officers. Who will the judges believe? Most likely the officers, unless you have very strong proof, such as video evidence. I hope my point is clearer now ...

I would say this pretty much matches very well, YMMV
by isaachinman | 2025-08-30 07:48:41+00:00
You are indeed quite rude, but I'll give you an answer.

The selling point is that it's IMAP primitive, as the blog post mentions.

Thunderbird is nice, but it's not cross-platform. Superhuman and Notion Mail are nice, but they only support Google and Outlook.

Apple Mail is truly awful.

There's a gap in the market, and as I said we're building it for ourselves.
by jeroenhd | 2025-08-30 07:48:52+00:00
I'm not sure if things are as fine as you say they are. Certificate authorities were practically unheard of outside of corporate websites (and even then mostly restricted to login pages) until Let's Encrypt normalized HTTPS. Without the openness of Let's Encrypt, we'd still be sharing our browser history and search queries with our ISPs for data mining. Attestation providers have so far refused to revoke attestation for known-vulnerable devices (because customers needing to replace thousands of devices would be an unacceptable business decision), making the entire market rather useless.

That said, what I am missing from these articles is an actual solution. Obviously we don't want Cloudflare from becoming an internet gatekeeper. It's a bad solution. But: it's a bad solution to an even worse problem.

Alternatives do exist, even decentralised ones, in the form of remote attestation ("can't access this website without secure boot and a TPM and a known-good operating system"), paying for every single visit or for subscriptions to every site you visit (which leads to centralisation because nobody wants a subscription to just your blog), or self-hosted firewalls like Anubis that mostly rely on AI abuse being the result of lazy or cheap parties.

People drinking the AI Kool-Aid will tell you to just ignore the problem, pay for the extra costs, and scale up your servers, because it's *the future*, but ignoring problems is exactly why Cloudflare still exists. If ISPs hadn't ignored spoofing, DDoS attacks, botnets within their network, """residential proxies""", and other such malicious acts, Cloudflare would've been an Akamai competitor rather than a middle man to most of the internet.
by ksimukka | 2025-08-30 07:49:23+00:00
That is a great question and I would be happy to share.

Varnish Software had a job posting in Norway and I asked them if they would consider a US candidate. At that time I was living in the US and was looking for opportunities to immigrate to Norway (or Finland).

After I accepted the position they helped with the “skilled workers visa” process.

Moving abroad has a lot of logistics. Depending on your situation in the US, I suggest to sell, rent, or store your belongings in the US and only bring what you can as luggage on the Airplane. In my case, we had an estate sale, asked family to hang on to sentimental items, and gave away everything else. When we left the US to fly to Norway, we had 5 suitcases of what we needed/wanted.

My partner (at that time) and I had a 6mo old child.

We started with an Airbnb in the Sagene area of Oslo. After landing we rented a car and drove to the Airbnb.

That turned into a 6mo rental (outside of Airbnb) as we explored the area for either an apartment to rent or buy. Again, it helped to have minimal possessions as we moved around to find the area that suited us and our family. Eventually we settled in an area called Torshov.

June or July is a great time move, the city is calm and almost everyone is on summer holiday.

It can take several months before you are in the banking system to receive your salary, so in advance you will need to have a buffer of savings and to keep a bank account in the US.

Forward all your mail in the US to family, friend, lawyer, or service to keep you informed. Forwarding mail to Norway is possible, but it will be delayed by at least one month, which can be a problem for any bills that are due.
by raggi | 2025-08-30 07:49:37+00:00
fsync is rarely truly durable in the sense the article describes. it does help with loss ordering in a lot of cases, and flushes often do some work, but true durability, the idea that after fsync there will not be any rollback or tail loss unless there's catastrophic failure, sorry, nope. everyone in the chain ends up in the hot path being the hotspot, then they break it because y'all are addicted to spamming syncs then they move it to a new api, then slowly the syncs come back on the new api, then everyone moves again layer by layer. somewhat common examples in recent years are nvme vendors who implement nvme flush in terms of just pushing the write cache down, but won't always also finalize and flush in flight or scheduled ftl operations due to the insane worst case latency costs associated. weren't apple also caught doing the same in recent years, in part because their ftl shared memory, bus and privilege with the higher exception levels? there's also the rumors people say about enterprise drives being better here, but not doing so is even a saleable product in those environments: https://www.atpinc.com/technology/ssd-flush-cache-technology and some other vendors just have arbitrary firmware patches to compete (that is: you could buy "enterprise grade" hardware second hand and be entirely unaware of the actual command behavior).
by matthewsinclair | 2025-08-30 07:52:08+00:00
It's worth quoting "Gall's Law" [0] here:

> “A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over with a working simple system.”

I have this up on my wall and refer to it constantly (for both tech and non-tech challenges).

[0]: https://blog.prototypr.io/galls-law-93c8ef8b651e
by globular-toast | 2025-08-30 07:53:15+00:00
It depends what you are doing. Let's say your module implements a way to declare rules and then run some validation function to check objects against those rules. You can't just test every possible set of rules and object that you want to check, even though this is, of course, all that matters. You have to unit test the implementation of the module to be at all confident that it's doing the right thing.

So ultimately we write tests at a lower level to deal with the combinatorial explosion of possible inputs at the edge.

You should push your tests as far to the edge as possible but no further. If a test at the edge duplicates a test in the middle, delete the test in the middle. But if a test at the edge can't possibly account for everything you're going to bed a test in the middle.
by dragonwriter | 2025-08-30 07:53:16+00:00
> I don't understand why the Vatican is considered a country, besides as a quirk of history.

It is considered an independent state because some time after the Papal States (a much larger set of holdings that were ruled by the Pope) were annexed by Italy, the Vatican was subsequently granted independence (recognized in a treaty between the Holy See and Italy). Which is pretty typical of why independent states are considered independent states.
by SillyUsername | 2025-08-30 07:54:41+00:00
Oh this I can get behind, it's my pet hate, especially when the rental is taken away.

Some slogans used to say "to buy and keep".

- Why would you buy it and not keep it? The word "Keep" is clearly used to manipulate you into thinking it's the same as owning.

- Keeping something you buy (not rent) implies ownership as long as you want, not what they want, so this goes against its definition too.
by Voultapher | 2025-08-30 07:55:19+00:00
> Well, if you have a better way to solve this that’s open I’m all ears.

Regulation.

Make it illegal to request the content of a webpage by crawler if a website operator doesn't explicitly allows it via robots.txt. Institute a government agency that is tasked with enforcement. If you as a website operator can show that traffic came from bots, you can open a complaint with the government agency and they take care of shaking painful fines out of the offending companies. Force cloud hosts to keep books on who was using what IP addresses. Will it be a 100% fix, no, will it have a massive chilling effect if done well, absolutely.
by flohofwoe | 2025-08-30 07:55:36+00:00
The key is 'required complexity'.

This is different from adding pointless complexity that doesn't help solve the problem but exists only because it is established 'best practice' or 'because Google does it that way' and I've seen this many more times than complex software where the complexity is actually required. And such needlessly complex software is also usually a source of countless day-to-day problems (if it makes its way out the door in the first place) while the 'simplistic' counterpart usually just hums along in the background without anybody noticing - and if there's a problem it's easy to fix because the codebase is simple and easy to understand by anybody looking into the problem. Of course after 20 years of such changes, the originally simple code base may also grow into a messy hairball, but at least it's still doing its thing.
by bob1029 | 2025-08-30 07:56:26+00:00
If we were willing to abandon all of our tooling and technology tribalism, it would become feasible to replace many B2B SaaS products with a scheduled ETL job that runs on an MSSQL or Oracle box once per day. Most business processes can be modeled as extract-transform-load. The business would generally agree that fancy spreadsheets on the server is much simpler compared to a custom codebase. Especially, when granted access to this data and involved in its schema design.
by ipnon | 2025-08-30 07:56:48+00:00
It seems that in the brief era of Pax Americanus in the period between the Cold War and the War on Terror life was unequivocally best somewhere in either Silicon Valley, the Northeastern Megalopolis, London, Hong Kong or Tokyo. These places were the engines of the globalized economy enabled by the brief and worldwide peace. You could do practically anything and make money and live in liberty. But we don't live in this world anymore. So now you have national arbitrage. You make some money in the Engine Cities while you're young, maybe do 100 hour weeks at a YC startup or at JP Morgan or whatever, and then when you crash and burn at 30 you go to Milan and start wearing sandals and smoking cigarettes.

This is the new social contract that has replaced the old social contract, which was dad works a completely ordinary job, mom stays at home, and you can afford a house, a couple of cars and as many children as you please. The new contract is perhaps more glamorous, but personally I'd rather stop renting.
by jeroenhd | 2025-08-30 07:57:19+00:00
Several companies are looking to provide a solution for the AI bot problem. Cloudflare stands to make a lot of money if people pick their solution. But Cloudflare backing down won't make the problem go away, and someone else's bad solution will be chosen instead.

The gatekeeping described here is gatekeeping a website owner chooses. It's an alternative to pay walls, bespoke bot detection, or some kind of ID verification. Cloudflare already provides a service, but standardising the service will open up the market (at the cost of competitors adopting Cloudflare's standard).

The freedom of the open web also extends to the owners of the websites people visit.
by rcxdude | 2025-08-30 07:57:29+00:00
I think Graeber misses the mark quite substantially, in that I think to the extent that BS jobs exist, they are rarely perceived as such by the people who are doing them (in fact, the data suggests the opposite correlation: people doing important but 'shit' jobs are more likely to report that their work is bullshit than people doing work that Graeber would view as 'bullshit', like management consulting and marketing).
by awalsh128 | 2025-08-30 07:58:38+00:00
C# doesn't box value types and can be treated like an object semantically for things like generics.

IMO, we should just do away with nullability and use the optional/maybe approach as wrappers for potential values. Null shouldn't really exist ideally, especially in OO because it is a unit value and also the parent value for all objects. I appreciate nullability being introduced but it causes a fork in types by two branches at the top of the hierarchy in most cases and more conceptually just associates these optionals with this flawed concept.
by aaronlumsden | 2025-08-30 07:59:20+00:00
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by pjmlp | 2025-08-30 08:00:06+00:00
This is the famous interview where Gosling tells why he didn't add unsigned types to Java,

> Quiz any C developer about unsigned, and pretty soon you discover that almost no C developers actually understand what goes on with unsigned, what unsigned arithmetic is. Things like that made C complex. The language part of Java is, I think, pretty simple. The libraries you have to look up.
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by omnicognate | 2025-08-30 08:00:23+00:00
It's more about derivation of theorems than calculations.

Computation can only use rationals, and of course can get arbitrarily close to an answer because they are dense in the reals.

However, the entire edifice of analysis rests on the completeness axiom of the reals. The extreme value theorem, for example, is equivalent to the completeness axiom; the useful properties of continuous functions break down without it; the fundamental theorem of calculus doesn't work without it; Etc. So if the maths used in your physics (the structure of the theory, not just the calculations you perform with it) relies on these things at all, you're relying on the reals for confidence that the maths is sound.

Now you could argue that we don't need mathematical rigour for physics, that real analysis is a preoccupation of mathematicians, while physicists should be fine with informal calculus. I'm not going to argue that point. I'm just pointing out what the real numbers bring to the table.

Here's Tim Gowers on the subject: https://www.dpmms.cam.ac.uk/~wtg10/reals.html
by rcxdude | 2025-08-30 08:00:45+00:00
I think engineers like to create things. And they will tend, on the whole, to create new things when they have a chance, not because they want to justify their employment, but because they like to do it. And so, if you employ a lot of software engineers, you're going to have a lot of code. Combine that with an incentive structure (likely also created by engineers that like to make new things) which rewards making new things but doesn't particularly reward maintaining old things, and you'll have a lot of new things made, whether it's useful on the scale of the whole organization (something which is very hard to get a good perspective on as an individual contributer, anyway), or not.
by anttiharju | 2025-08-30 08:01:09+00:00
Nokia (mostly networking-related things nowadays) touts - or at least used to, haven't kept up to date - itself as one of the most ethical companies around.

> But isn't that true for every big corp, or even every public company?

So I suppose not really, no.

Additionally companies working on carbon-free energy might also serve as evidence. There are some big ones around.