MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Nevermark | 2025-08-29 21:03:59+00:00
Thanks for that very clear argument.

But it doesn't hold up. (He says with an overconfident flourish!)

So we have: f(x) = 0, over constructible reals

(I love the dead simple example.)

And we can prove it is continuous over constructible reals, because in that case,

The limit of f(x), as x —> c, trends to f(c) = 0

We could then postulate un-constructible numbers are something that:

(1) Exist. This requires postulating some kind of infinite information oracle for each independent un-constructible number.

I have questions, but ... for now ok.

(2) That these un-constructible numbers are somehow "in" the constructible real line, even though they cannot be "on" the constructible real line, in a way that is coherent. Not all numbers are, i.e. imaginary numbers are not.

I have questions, but .. ok for now.

(3) That by defining f(r) = 1, for unconstructible r, we can create a case where f(x), as x —> r, does not trend to f(r)

I will concede this third postulate whole heartedly!

But that can't and doesn't invalidate our original constructible continuity proof.

We had to not only generalize "number", but redefine "f".

And I don't think it says much or anything about un-constructible numbers either.

For instance: Let's call regular numbers "blue reals", and define "red reals" such that for every blue real x, there is a red real red(x), that is exactly to the right (i.e. positive) of x. In such as way that they are ordered, but no number can come between them.

So (red(x)-x) = red(0), for all x, and there can never be a "blue-red" number smaller than red(0) (other than zero).

Then we can take our original "blue" proof, define f(red(1)) = 1, and declare we have broken continuity over blue-red reals.

So this breaking of continuity is a trivial trick, and it has no dependence on un-constructibility.

What we have really done, is define a new class of number and redefine "f" to get a motivated result.

We could just as easily have simply redefined f, to be the same but include f(1) = 1. If we get to redefine f, we get to redefine f.

So un-constructibility isn't needed to prove continuity (our original practical proof holds).

It can't "break" continuity either. Given redefining "f" was both a necessary and sufficient condition to do that. Nor does doing so shed any special light on unconstructibility or continuity.

Thoughts? :)
by marklar423 | 2025-08-29 21:04:15+00:00
Here's how I think about it:

- Money (the concept) is useful to society as a store of value, so you don't have to waste effort bartering for things.

- Adding on to that, credit is useful to society since it lets humanity even more efficiently allocate its good and labor (stored as money).

- Finally, stocks, insurance, and other financial instruments are additional advanced developments on top of credit, where groups of humans (companies) can take on even more risky endeavors supported by investors or insurers.

So my view is companies like Jane Street facilitate these complicated value transfers, to let (e.g.) a spaceship company draw on resources generated by growing crops, selling shoes, giving haircuts, etc via a convoluted path through stocks, ETFs, whatever.
by mrcwinn | 2025-08-29 21:04:54+00:00
By his own words, Elon is not an environmentalist and doesn’t seem to believe much in humanity’s impact on the climate. His concern is with the futility of relying on a non-renewable resource. He believes there is significantly more lithium than there is oil, I guess.

In the end, incentives are all that matter. Do hotels care deeply about the environment, or are they interested in saving in energy and labor costs as your towel is cleaned? Does it matter? Does moralizing really get us anywhere if our ends are the same?
by b112 | 2025-08-29 21:05:15+00:00
I don't like Meta, but there used to be a time where big corp used to spend 30% of its budget on R&D. It's how we got all the toys we have now, R&D labs of big Bell and others.

So please don't mock the spend. Big spends fail sometimes, and at least people were paid to do the work.
by busymom0 | 2025-08-29 21:05:40+00:00
> I wish I could drop (so many of) my old internal posts publicly, since I don’t really have the incentive to relitigate the arguments today – they were carefully considered and prescient. They also got me reported to HR by the manager of the XROS effort for supposedly making his team members feel bad, but I expect many of them would acknowledge in hindsight that the Meta products would not be in a better place today if the new OS effort had been rammed into them.

So someone at Meta was so sensitive that being told their behemoth of a project was ill advised ended up getting reported to HR?
by nils-m-holm | 2025-08-29 21:05:43+00:00
Thank you so much for reading my books and describing my work in such beautiful words! You basically answered your own question! My motivation is just the creation of something I find beautiful. The vision, to pass knowledge to those who seek it in the simplest possible way, where "simple" does not necessarily mean in the tersest form, but in a form that invites being digested.

I do not usually talk much about "myself". I tried, but with no-one asking, I find it difficult to say anything.
by aboodman | 2025-08-29 21:06:27+00:00
Replicache, which author loves, is also built on top of IndexedDB.

But notably, not directly atop. We build our own KV store that uses IDB just as block storage. So I sort of agree w/ you.

But if we were to build atop OPFS we'd also just be using it for block storage. So I'm not sure it's a win? It will be interesting to explore.
by socalgal2 | 2025-08-29 21:06:27+00:00
sure, but I can imagine something more like

llm --yolo "combine all the files in videos/vacation in alphabetical order into a single video, do not use the audio from the videos, add the music from music/soundtracks/my-favorite-things.mp3 as background music, but a title at the front 'Our Summer Vacation'"

or something more involved. Yes, it might be able to spit out multiple commands
by insane_dreamer | 2025-08-29 21:06:36+00:00
Even if we haven't yet seen any serious rollout of AI in the workplace that could replace junior workers, I think that companies have _been told_ that is is coming (by the many companies hoping to be "the one" to provide that service) and while they're not firing people they're also not hiring new junior staff as much since they "will soon be replaced by automated systems".
by 1718627440 | 2025-08-29 21:06:53+00:00
> Alternate stylesheets don't persist (at least in Firefox), which is really annoying.

Yes, I also think they should. What I wondered, is this behaviour prescribed somewhere? Even if it were, form content is retained even across randomly typing in a different URL and navigating back, form submission and even across real crashes just seconds after I typed the letter. This is really nice and I don't think it is mandated. This is the stuff User Agents should be compete with, not ways to get data from the User to a surveillance company.

> Being able to provide a night mode alternative without even asking the user, assuming they've set the OS to their preference, is really seamless.

Yes, that's nice and how every thing in a UI should be. It helps both the programmer and the user in efficient and controllable usage.
by danielodievich | 2025-08-29 21:06:54+00:00
Back in mmm like 2002 or 2003 or 2004 while at Microsoft I read an internal paper from a few OS guys who hackathoned something for Bill Gates's Think Week (which is when he used to go to some island in San Juans or somewhere similar and just read curated papers and think, it was a huge prestige to get such a paper to him) and that something was an OS written from scratch with GC and memory management on top of something very .NET framework'y (which was released a couple of years ago. They had it booting on all kinds of hardware and doing various neato things. One of explicitly called design principles was 0 compatibility with anything Windows before. Which is why it didn't go anywhere I assume. I remember it was just a handful of engineers (presumably OS folks) hacking for like a month. . It was awesome to read about.
by RobinL | 2025-08-29 21:06:59+00:00
We use aws glue for spark (but are increasingly moving towards duckdb because it's faster for our workloads and easier to test and deploy).

For Spark, glue works quite well. We use it as 'spark as a service', keeping our code as close to vanilla pyspark as possible. This leaves us free to write our code in normal python files, write our own (tested) libraries which are used in our jobs, use GitHub for version control and ci and so on
by jrm4 | 2025-08-29 21:07:00+00:00
As someone who does follow cryptocurrency and still remains hopeful and optimistic that it can do good in this world (I know, I know) -- what a weird little article to pop up at this time. I had to double-check the date, because this is like a 5-10 year old type of issue, especially for BITCOIN as opposed to other cryptocurrencies.
by sebastiennight | 2025-08-29 21:07:10+00:00
If you have a threat model, then having both 1. no reassurance of safety in using a tool, and 2. valid reason to believe that such tools can be suspect, is equivalent to certainty that the tool should be avoided.

To give an analogy, this is similar to why "security by obscurity" isn't a valid option if you're serious about security.

Let's say that admin access is open on my server on a certain port and: 1. I have done nothing specific to secure it, and 2. it has been shown that there are adversary actors scanning for vulnerable ports on the network.

I can either take your apparent stance that "this means nothing to me", or I can consider the situation equivalent to "this server is already compromised, I just don't know it yet".

In the current conversation, the combination of: 1. no reasonable reason to believe ExampleVPN keeps your data private and 2. high incentives for adversaries to create fronts plus proof they've done so in the past, means that for people such as myself and GP, the situation is equivalent to "ExampleVPN is a front" until we have a reason to believe otherwise.

Edit: Telegram's not-really-end-to-end-E2EE would be another such example.
by chuckadams | 2025-08-29 21:07:19+00:00
> It turns out that David Bowie is only linked on Caruso's page because they both won a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award, of which all of the recipients ever are linked to at the bottom of the page.

Sounds like a perfectly good connection to me, but "exclude categories" could still be a neat feature for exploring more indirect linkage. Not sure it would help in this case though -- is that actually a category page?
by ribelo | 2025-08-29 21:07:22+00:00
I reproduced it and nothing happened. The problem might be that I'm my own manager so need to went to the mirror and did it, but if any of my 20 employees did the same, I wouldn't take any action against them. The real reason is that I don't live in the West. Where I live, we don't suffer from the plague of misunderstood political correctness. At least not all of us yet.
by paulcole | 2025-08-29 21:07:22+00:00
> Of course, once you internalize this belief, any motivation to study is gone

This is definitely not a universal truth.

I know that if I had done better in every interview then I would’ve moved ahead and gotten the job. I guess that’s a different way of saying I was “bad” (not good enough). And it doesn’t affect my motivation in a negative way. I find that it actually helps me want to improve more.
by scarface_74 | 2025-08-29 21:07:29+00:00
Email though?

Except in pre-sales, I can’t imagine anyone using an email heavy workflow in 2025.

In my personal life, email is only for one way transactions. Where some company is sending email to me or spam. Even the one newsletter I subscribe to - Stratechery is available as a podcast and an RSS feed.

In my professional life, of course all internal communication happens on Slack (700 employees) and even in consulting, the first thing we do after a deal closes is either invite customers to our Slack or ask to be invited to their platform.

This is a solution in search of a problem.
by hinkley | 2025-08-29 21:07:43+00:00
They’ll never prioritize the work that keeps the wheels on. You have to learn not to ask and bake it into the cost of new feature work. It’s non negotiable or it never happens.

My second lead role, the CTO and the engineering manager thought I could walk on water and so I had considerable leeway to change things I thought needed changing.

So one of the first things I did was collectively save the team about 40 hours of code-build-test time per week. Which is really underselling it because what I actually did was both build a CI pipeline at a time nobody knew what “CI” meant, and increase the number of cycles you could reliably get through without staying late from 4 to 5 cycles per day. A >20% improvement in iterations per day and a net reduction in errors. That was the job where I learned the dangers of pushing code after 3:30pm. Everyone rationalizes that the error they saw was a glitch or someone else’s bug, and they push and then come in to find the early birds are mad at them. So better to finish what we now call deep work early and do lighter stuff once you’re tired.

Edit: those changes also facilitated us scaling the team to over twice the size of any project I’d worked on before or for some time after, though the EM deserves equal credit for that feat.

Then they fired the EM and Peter Principled by far the worst manager I’ve ever worked for (fuck you Mike, everyone hated your guts), and all he wanted to know was why I was getting fewer features implemented. Because I’m making everyone else faster. Speaking of broken, the biggest performance bottleneck in the entire app was his fault. He didn’t follow the advice I gave him back when he was working in our query system. Discovering it took hiring an Oracle DB contractor (those are always exorbitant). Fixing it after it shipped was a giant pain (as to why I didn’t catch his corner cutting, I was tagged in by another lead who was triple booked, and when I tagged back out he unfortunately didn’t follow up sufficiently on the things I prescribed).
by dullcrisp | 2025-08-29 21:08:12+00:00
You can make this statement for any dense subset of the reals, but we don’t because that would be silly.

I think the conceit is supposed to be that analysis—and therefore the reals—is the “language of nature” more so than that we can actually find the reals using scientific instruments.

To illustrate the point, using the rationals is just one way of constructing the reals. Try arguing that numbers with a finite decimal representation are the divine language of nature, for example.

Plus, maybe a hot take, but really I think there’s nothing natural about the rationals. Try using them for anything practical. If we used more base-60 instead of base-10 we could probably forget about them entirely.
by rwmj | 2025-08-29 21:08:56+00:00
It's just that it was so obviously going to fail, because there's no mass market for a product that you have to strap onto your face. You didn't need to spend billions to learn that.

If they'd spent the money researching nuclear fusion or space flight or a new way to develop microprocessors, I would be cheering their efforts even if they had failed in the end.
by ctoth | 2025-08-29 21:09:07+00:00
We started with "AI crawlers are too aggressive" and you've escalated to volumetric DDoS. These aren't the same problem. OpenAI hitting your API too hard is solved by caching, not by Cloudflare deciding who gets an "agent passport."

"Victim blaming"? Can we please leave these therapy-speak terms back in the 2010s where they belong and out of technical discussions? If expecting basic caching is victim blaming, then so is expecting HTTPS, password hashing, or any technical competence whatsoever.

Your decentralization point actually proves mine: yes, attackers distribute while defenders centralize. That's why we shouldn't make centralization mandatory! Right now you can choose Cloudflare. With attestation, they become the web's border control.

The fine article makes it clear what this is really about - Cloudflare wants to be the gatekeeper for agent traffic. Agent attestation doesn't solve volumetric attacks (those need the DDoS protection they already sell, no new proposal required!) They're creating an allowlist where they decide who's "legitimate."

But sure, let's restructure the entire web's trust model because some sites can't configure a cache. That seems proportional.
by jychang | 2025-08-29 21:09:43+00:00
1. They are neurons, whether you like it or not. A binary tree may not have squirrels living in them, but it's still a tree, even though the word "tree" here is defined differently than from biology. Or are you going to say a binary tree is not a tree?

2. You are about 5 years behind in terms of the research. Look into hierarchical feature representation and how MLP neurons work. (Or even in older CNNs and RNNs etc). And I'm willingly using the word "neuron" instead of "feature" here because while I know "feature" is more correct in general, there are definitely small toy models where you can pinpoint an individual neuron to represent a feature such as a face.
by ileonichwiesz | 2025-08-29 21:10:38+00:00
Also players don’t know what they want. Good games aren’t just a result of a good idea that’s then implemented - they come from untold hours of iteration, tinkering, figuring out what’s fun, what isn’t, and why. That’s the hard part, and I have a hard time believing that hypothetical holodeck could ever do it.
by modeless | 2025-08-29 21:11:02+00:00
"Quite well" by what metric? It shipped on one device. That's pretty much the lowest bar you can imagine! Did it provide any tangible benefit to anyone? Let alone a benefit commensurate with the enormous cost of developing it and continuing to maintain it?

I think it was insane to start a new OS effort written in C/C++. We have plenty of OSes written in C/C++! We know how that story ends. If you're going to spend the effort, at least try a new language that could enable a better security model.
by BalinKing | 2025-08-29 21:11:07+00:00
I want to push back on this, because the Christian conception of God definitely includes the idea that God created all good and comforting things, and is indeed their ultimate source. Like, just because God is transcendent[0] does not mean He cannot create things that are perfectly approachable, understandable, and enjoyable.

[0] Jesus being human changes the calculus quite a lot, of course, as elaborated in e.g. Hebrews 4:14–16. God, who was fully transcendent, became human, hence why Jesus is also called Immanuel/Emmanuel (lit. “God with us”) in the Bible.
by mdaniel | 2025-08-29 21:11:27+00:00
This is a horrifically cynical take and I wish it would stop. I doubt very seriously there is any meaningfully sized collection of engineers who introduce things "just to keep themselves employed," to say nothing of having to now advance that perspective into a full blown conspiracy because code review is also a thing

What is far more likely is the proverbial "JS framework problem:" gah, this technology that I read about (or encounter) is too complex, I just want 1/10th that I understand from casually reading about it, so we should replace it with this simple thing. Oh, right, plus this one other thing that solves a problem. Oh, plus this other thing that solves this other problem. Gah, this thing is too complex!
by runarberg | 2025-08-29 21:11:32+00:00
That point was void to begin with. It is an appeal to authority in which the validity of the authority is on extremely shaky grounds.

> fretting over a salute and boycotting the company seems performative.

Performative actions are still actions, and sometimes deliver results. If those results are as little as make some people feel better, those are still results. That said, it is hard to be more performative than the gesture it self. So if you want to criticize HN users for being performative, you should apply the same standard to Elon Musk.
by mrighele | 2025-08-29 21:11:34+00:00
> I have to imagine one can find a case that allows tons of drives and is still powered by something modest.

I found it almost impossible to find a case which has a fair number of bays (at least 6), is meant for an human environment (i.e. it is not ugly or meant for a rack) and doesn't cost a lot.

So I am now working on hanging an ikea skadis on the wall and attaching everything to it. The big panel has just the right space for everything (10 disks, mobo, extra sata controller, PSU), it is ridiculously cheap, I had fun designing the parts and 3d printing them (though there are many available for free on the web) and it gives easy access to the disks and can be a topic of discussion when friends come over. Not sure it will work properly though :-) (issues may arise with vibrations, temperatures etc).

As an alternative to make it completely visible, I though about doing the opposite, hiding inside regular furniture. You can easily find metal frames meant for an "open chassis" to properly arrange motherboard, disks etc, so it is doable. The easiest would be using a regular cupboard, but I would love to use an ottoman and be able sit on top of it, a la cray-1. I "only" need to solve the issue of hiding the cable, and giving proper ventilation.
by CrimsonCape | 2025-08-29 21:11:46+00:00
I wonder if anybody has tried inheriting from System.ValueType or System.Object...I need to fire up an IDE and see what kind of virtuals and abstracts are exposed by doing so. If even possible.

It seems like an inheritance hierarchy build upon abstract classes that provide no usable interface just means "hey we need this inheritance for...reasons... cause its legacy!" on the one hand, and "we can rip all this useless ** out" on the other hand.
by sdesol | 2025-08-29 21:11:55+00:00
I don't think you need to be big data to benefit.

A major issue we have right now is, we want the coding process to be more "Agentic", but we don't have an easy way for LLMs to determine what to pull into context to solve a problem. This is a problem that I am working on with my personal AI search assistant, which I talk about below:

https://github.com/gitsense/chat/blob/main/packages/chat/wid...

Analyzers are the "Brains" for my search, but generating the analysis is both tedious and can be costly. I'm working on the tedious part and with batch processing, you can probably process thousands of files for under 5 dollars with Gemini 2.5 Flash.

With batch processing and the ability to continuously analyze 10s of thousands of files, I can see companies wanting to make "Agentic" coding smarter, which should help with GPU utilization and drive down the cost of software development.
by erxam | 2025-08-29 21:12:07+00:00
Europe only developed this way because of the immense ideological and moral pull the Soviet Union had over the populace.

Capital and the ruling classes feared revolutionary intent so much that they had no other choice than to give in and give people a good quality of life to try and stymie it. It's the Otto von Bismarck state welfare tactic.

Now that it's gone and revolutionary ideas have basically all but completely disappeared (China does not and probably will never have the same standing the Soviets did), they don't have to keep the façade up anymore. This is why everything has been decaying. Sooner or later all the 'advantages' and 'benefits' Europe has will wither away into nothingness.
by mapontosevenths | 2025-08-29 21:12:29+00:00
I hasn't been "aligned". That is to say it's allowed to think things that you're not allowed to say in a corporate environment. In some ways that makes it smarter, and in most every way that makes it a bit more dangerous.

Tools are like that though. Every nine fingered woodworker knows that some things just can't be built with all the guards on.