MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by btilly | 2025-08-17 22:39:58+00:00
The distinction between the space A and the tangent space of A becomes visually clear if we consider a function whose domain is a sphere. The derivative is properly defined on the tangent plane, which only touches the sphere at a single point. However in the neighborhood of that point, the plane and sphere are very, very close together. But are inevitably pulled away by the curvature of the sphere.

Of course that picture is not formally correct. We formally define the tangent space without having to embed the manifold in Euclidean space. But that picture is a correct description of an embedding of both the sphere and the tangent space at a single point.
by leviathant | 2025-08-17 22:40:18+00:00
>I don't want to sound mean but these are reachable with just another day at it. They really are.

Semi-related, understanding Sketchup took a couple of false starts for me. The first time I tried it, I could not make heads or tails of what I was doing. I must have spent hours trying to figure out how to model a desk, and I gave up. Tried again a year or two later, and it just didn't click.

The third try, a couple years later, it suddenly made sense, and what started as modeling a new desk out turned into modeling my room, then modeling the whole house, and now I've got a rough model of my neighborhood. And it's so easy, once you know how - there's obviously a rabbit hole of detail work one can fall down into, but the basics aren't bad.
by beering | 2025-08-17 22:40:40+00:00
> Does "career development" just mean "more money"?

Big companies means more opportunities to lead bugger project. At a big company, it’s not uncommon to in-house what would’ve been an entire startup’s product. And depending on the environment, you may work on several of those project over the course of a few years. Or if you want to try your hand at leading bigger teams, that’s usually easier to find in a big company.

> Is it still satisfying if that software is bad, or harms many of those people?

There’s nothing inherently good about startups and small companies. The good or bad is case-by-case.
by al_borland | 2025-08-17 22:40:55+00:00
I don’t have the energy to build anything outside of work. I spend all of my free time trying to mentally recover. I’m left drained after work. If I’m going to do extra “work”, I always think I should do more work stuff, to attempt to get ahead on some project and reduce the stress of things than have been hanging over my head.

The only time this shifts is when I have a couple weeks off. During that period I will inevitably start some kind of project, but I have to keep it small, because I know it will die as soon as I start back to work again.
by pas | 2025-08-17 22:41:11+00:00
What people want is critically important, yet they are heart wrenchingly unaware how (web1.0) technology cannot give it to them.

And on a fundamental level - ie. as an information security problem - preventing copying by bots is logically incoherent with being open and free in the usual way.

The way to make progress on this problem is to realize this, and then let people either find alternatives to publishing on websites, start a movement to stop machine learning, campaign for accountable AI, work on getting political power and getting compensation from these companies, etc.
by klelatti | 2025-08-17 22:41:38+00:00
Thanks for the quote which is very interesting. Not being pedantic but this isn’t quite what your original comment said. Sophie is saying ‘same type’ of results and not having to use assembly for certain applications which doesn’t imply that BASIC on ARM would be faster than 6502 assembly just that it was fast enough for their purposes.

I think it’s possible that some applications would be faster - floating point for example due to the ARM’s 32 bit registers and the 6502’s lack of even 16 bit arithmetic - but probably not in general.
by bigyabai | 2025-08-17 22:42:25+00:00
FWIW I'm a 3D modeller (hard surface Blender modelling, ~10yrs) and I've been reading your comments for a while now. Reality wasn't disrupted quite as far as you suggested, most of the naysayers that advised restraint under your comments have largely been proven right. Time and time again, you made enormous claims and then refused to back them up with evidence or technical explanations. We waited just like you asked, and the piper still isn't paid.

Have you ever asked yourself why this revolution hasn't come yet? Why we're still "on the cusp" of it all? Because you can't push a button and generate better pornography than what two people can make with a VHS camera and some privacy. The platonic ideal of pornography and music and film and roleplaying video games and podcasting is already occupied by their human equivalent. The benchmark of quality in every artistic application of AI is inherently human, flawed, biased and petty. It isn't possible to commoditize human art with AI art unless there's a human element to it, no matter how good the AI gets.

There's merit to discussing the technical impetus for improvement (which I'm always interested in discussing), but the dependent variables here seem exclusively social; humanity simply might never have a Beatlemania for AI-generated content.
by CognitiveLens | 2025-08-17 22:42:42+00:00
There are definitely projects designed with the specific intent of doing that, e.g. https://longnow.org/clock/

But there are other things, including awesome-and-dangerous nuclear waste sites, with warning messages/symbols designed to last beyond the collapse of modern civilization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-term_nuclear_waste_warnin...
by atombender | 2025-08-17 22:42:43+00:00
I love ClickHouse and use it heavily. One area where I wish CH could do better was as a primary data store.

Basically, every proposed use case for CH is based on event sourcing some data, from Postgres or logs or whatever. The implication is that the data either already exist as a "source of truth" in some primary ACID database, or at least there is an archive of raw data files, or maybe (as with logs and metrics) the risk of data loss isn't that big of a deal.

But what if you actually want to store the data in a single place? CH doesn't really offer peace of mind here. Its entire architecture is based on best-effort management of data. One of ClickHouse's best features is that it can store the data in cloud storage, to allow separation of data and compute at an incredible price point. But it can lose data.

So if you have, say, 30TB of data that is very columnar and cannot be effficiently queried in Postgres, you cannot simply store it in CH alone. You'd have to pay quite a lot of $ to have it safely guarded by (let's say) Postgres, even if it's not being used as the main source of queries. If you have heavy ingest rates, you're going to have to pay for more expensive SSD storage, too.

There are columnar databases that are ACID and focus on consistency, like TimescaleDB. But they tend to be cloud databases. For example, you can self-host Timescale, but you don't get access to the tiered cloud storage layer. So when self-hosting, you need to run expensive SSDs again, no separating of compute and data.

If CH has a better consistency story, or maybe a clustering story that ensures redundancy, I would be really inclined to use it as a primary store.
by Aurornis | 2025-08-17 22:42:48+00:00
For diabetics, Metformin is usually a net win. Having controlled diabetes is better all around than uncontrolled.

For non-diabetics hoping Metformin will bring health benefits, the subtle side effects like reducing adaptive responses to exercise ( https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6351883/ ) and other small negatives aren’t usually advertised by the anti-aging influencers who only talk about the lifespan studies (in mice)
by al_borland | 2025-08-17 22:44:28+00:00
A “quick call” usually means a re-org or a layoff in my experience.

I once had a boss who used to day, “got a second” every time he was pulling someone out to lay them off. He said it to me once and my stomach dropped… turned out he was just giving me my review. I told him to never say that to me again. He had no idea the entire team picked up on that phrase and it had a reputation.
by protocolture | 2025-08-17 22:45:26+00:00
>Presenting government ID to random entities is literally what government ID's exist for.

Wrong lmao. All forms of Government ID are PII and should be treated as sensitive.

https://www.esafety.gov.au/young-people/protecting-your-iden... Heres basic information from a government looking to enact these same laws.

>Nearly every app, social media platform or website asks you for at least some personally identifiable information. But this data can be stolen or misused. That’s why it’s important to keep it as private and secure as possible. If you have to share it, make sure it’s only used by trusted services with your knowledge and consent.

Wow thats great advice.
by bentley | 2025-08-17 22:45:34+00:00
> If they think that UK law doesn't apply to them (which seems very credible) why react at all?

If I get a speeding ticket in the mail from another state I've never been to, I'm not going to ignore it, I'm going to explain to the court why it's invalid. Ignoring legal notices, even from other jurisdictions than one's own, is generally unwise (with some exceptions). So is responding with insults instead of concrete legal justification for why this is inapplicable.
by BrenBarn | 2025-08-17 22:45:44+00:00
> Big companies means more opportunities to lead bugger project. At a big company, it’s not uncommon to in-house what would’ve been an entire startup’s product. And depending on the environment, you may work on several of those project over the course of a few years. Or if you want to try your hand at leading bigger teams, that’s usually easier to find in a big company.

Okay, so career development means "bigger projects"?

> There’s nothing inherently good about startups and small companies. The good or bad is case-by-case.

Well, maybe not, but I think the post illustrates some ways big companies are worse. I'd say that, all else being equal, companies tend to get bigger by becoming more doggedly focused on money, which tends to lead to doing evil things because you no longer see refraining from doing so as important compared to making money. Also, all else equal, a company that does something bad on a small scale is likely less bad than one that does something bad on a large scale.
by ZoomZoomZoom | 2025-08-17 22:46:02+00:00
Had almost the same situation to a tee around the same time (~2014). Decided between Rust, Nim, D and Go. Went with Rust then and quickly felt it had been the right choice since it really helped me improving my skills and got me interested in programming again after a few years away from it. Rust community was way smaller and more approachable, the language felt exciting and really delivered on its promises.

Then around 2019 Nim started to gain momentum (preparing for 1.0 release) and when I looked into it a bit deeper it became evident that for most of the code I usually write for myself Nim is just a more pragmatic choice than Rust. It gets me there faster.

Zero job perspectives both times, scratched my own itch twice though.

Glad I haven't gone with Go. Nim is not a perfect overlap with Rust, but it definitely covers everything Go can do and more and is a better design in my opinion.
by frumplestlatz | 2025-08-17 22:46:33+00:00
Serving ads to UK users does not grant the UK enforcement jurisdiction over 4chan. They have no presence, assets, or agents in the UK. If the UK still attempts to issue a judgement contrary to the first amendment, the constitution in general, and/or US law, it will not be recognized by US courts.

In short, the UK can kick rocks.
by Tmpod | 2025-08-17 22:46:42+00:00
As it is, and without the toolbar, this really reminds me of how this[0] neovim plugin renders Markdown in the terminal. One of its nice features is doing syntax highlighting inside fenced code blocks (through tree-sitter I believe).

[0]: https://github.com/MeanderingProgrammer/render-markdown.nvim
by aspenmayer | 2025-08-17 22:46:58+00:00
I can’t really put my finger on it, but I think there’s a kind of sandbagging going on on vote-weighted social media sites, where folks in favor of the status quo make really incongruous or non sequitur statements as a kind of red herring bullet sponge for corrections, because they may suspect that the good corrections will get downranked by proxy when their own comment gets downvoted.

I see similar things in sports, where leading competitors intentionally lower their performance in qualifying rounds so that they get a better seed advantage and easier competition going forward in the bracket.

Have you seen this before on HN or online generally? I’m seeing it more online lately.
by tlogan | 2025-08-17 22:47:04+00:00
Yes. And this comment illustrates the trend: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44865256

But let me say something serious. AI is profoundly reshaping software development and startups in ways we haven’t seen in decades:

1) So many well-paying jobs may soon become obsolete.

2) A startup could be easily run with only three people: developer, marketing, and support.
by calvinmorrison | 2025-08-17 22:48:14+00:00
So I work at a company that sells a product that is part of a larger ecosystem. the parent company has spent 35 years NOT having a solution to our niche. There are others like us too in the space. Some do WMS, some do EDI, etc.

So depending on the parent company, they may prefer to have a - to be a little enterprisey - set of ISVs that are better in specifc domains.
by jmward01 | 2025-08-17 22:48:21+00:00
We have been in aggressive, irrational, denial of alternative energy for my entire life but denying something doesn't make it not true. It is beyond obvious that wind, solar and battery technology are, even now, just starting to show their eventual potential and even at their current levels are far better solutions in many if not most cases than fossil fuel based options at industrial energy production (and many other uses too). We are on a hockey puck graph for all of them because they are inevitable and vastly better. The only thing our head in the sand push against these technologies is doing is ensuring that we will be decades behind China and the rest of the world in our ability to provide cheap energy to industry and emerging opportunities. You want manufacturing in the US? Create cheap energy sources. You say 'the sun only shines half the day' then build your factories to take advantage of peak availability. China knows this. They are putting so much solar into their grid that they will clearly get to a point where they have a glut of energy that will only go to one purpose, building amazing things for practically free. Meanwhile the US will keep saying 'See! This stuff doesn't work' as it actively sabotages itself just to prove the point.
by em-bee | 2025-08-17 22:48:43+00:00
i can't comment on specific examples without knowing more details about the context and what actually happened. the problem in such cases is often that crime figures are cited in isolation without comparing them to local crime figures as if there was no local crime or ignoring the fact that a lot of "crime" by immigrants is violations against immigration law. something a local can't possibly violate. i understand the same thing is happening in the US. so yes, if you twist statistics to deliberately make immigrants look worse than they are, then that is hate speech.

if that is not what you are talking about then we will have to look at he actual numbers being pointed out and the message they come with and the response to that.
by kingstnap | 2025-08-17 22:49:24+00:00
I'm kinda meh about it.

The first thing to keep in mind is the illusion of transparency. You might internally know that something is wrong or exploitable or you've made an obvious mistake, but that's generally much less obvious to others.

The second to keep in mind is that we are currently in a crisis of attention. There's too much to think about and do nowadays, and there is a gigantic lack of motivated actors to act upon that information. You could consider it the dual of the illusion of transparency, but it's the illusion of motivation. Other people, by in large, just do not give a damn because they can't and don't have time for it.

Even a nation state if they wanted to go spy on everyone's private information would immediately find themselves with too much nonsense to sift through and not enough time to actually follow through even on surface level information. Let alone leaks that actually require some sort of sophisticated synthesis over two or three disparate pieces of info.

Lastly, it's the difficulty in exploitation. You know how projects and code and stuff seem easy until you try them, and it turns out that actually, this is taking forever, and it barely works? The whole devil in the details thing.

Well, that applies to exploits as well. It's easy until you try it, and then you have this Swiss cheese model of success where random stuff doesn't line up correctly and your workflow broke.

AI surveillance btw barely changes any of this calculus.
by metalman | 2025-08-17 22:49:43+00:00
funny how the largest most modern power utility and grid infrastructur ever built is owned by the citizens who built it, in China, AND they have some realy fancy privatly owned resteraunts.........almost everywhere

then there are things like the town of Lunenburg having it's own power company https://www.townoflunenburg.ca/electric-utility.html
by nicoslepicos | 2025-08-17 22:50:04+00:00
For folks interested in options for working with teams of agents like Claude Code in parallel, we're building Magnet

-----

Magnet - The AI workspace for agentic coding

http://www.magnet.run

------

You can think of Magnet as your workspace for collaborating with your human & AI agent team mates. We let you quickly spin up Claude Code sandboxes for every issue, and we're also thinking about how AI can be more of a thought partner in building high-quality software.

We're thinking about this problem space more broadly than just trying to be a GUI for Claude Code (though that's already a great starting point).

These are a few of the themes we think about:

- How can we use AI to help you think critically about the features you're prioritizing and what to build next?

- How can we always assemble and provide exactly the right context for every issue you're working on?

- What are the best patterns for collaborating with your human & AI teammates, to ship the highest quality code?

- How can you best specify exactly what you want, and verify that it's what you hoped for?

Would love for y'all to try it, and I'll post a video of me building a product with Magnet a little later here - the tool's getting really fun to use!

We're also very open to feedback and try to incorporate learnings quickly! I spent a large part of this weekend using Magnet to fix most of the issues someone we onboarded Friday brought up
by duxup | 2025-08-17 22:50:13+00:00
I find asking questions on the internet are increasingly seen as a negative, right out of the gate, no other questions asked.

I get it to some extent, a lot of people looking to inject doubt and their own ideas show up with some sort of Socratic method that really is meant to drive the conversation to a specific point, not honest.

But it also means actually honest questions are often voted or shouted down.

It seems like the methodology of discussion on the internet now only allows for everyone to show up with very concrete opinions and your opinion will then be judged. No opinion or honest questions... citizens of the internet assume the worst if you're anything but in lock step with them.
by dghlsakjg | 2025-08-17 22:50:41+00:00
The interstate road system in the US is world class. Airports and ports are publicly owned, and seem to function very well in most cases. Education including the infrastructure and buildings is managed incredibly well in many jurisdictions. There are many, many examples of well run public infrastructure. We only notice the failures because 1. they are an easy punching bag 2. they are noteworthy because we expect them not to fail.

It is hardly a maxim that public operation of infrastructure is incompetent, and I would argue that "often" is not the right word.
by claw-el | 2025-08-17 22:53:07+00:00
> - groups get renamed for the Nth time in N years. People continue to do the same job, but now the department has an additional "Innovation", "Discovery", or "Leadership" inserted into the title

Sometimes, I wish we name the team ‘Pikachu’ and continue on working. This way, others would know the name does not really matter, so they would stop changing the name. The amount of work to change the documentation and lets others know our team changed name has caused a lot of unnecessary work.
by dlcarrier | 2025-08-17 22:53:22+00:00
If you could find me a bank (or better yet a credit union) that issues a debit card that always requires a PIN, I would be ecstatic.

Theoretically they should exist, e.g. using just interbank networks like STAR, NYCE, and Interlink, but everywhere I looked either exclusively uses the Visa or Mastercard network, or supports those networks with the same card number used on an interbank network, making PINs optional at best.
by crinkly | 2025-08-17 22:55:01+00:00
Think that’s fairly accurate.

Also like religious ideologies there’s a lack of critical thinking and an inverse of applicability. The last one has been in my mind for a few months now.

Back in the old days I’d start with a problem and find a solution to it. Now we start with a solution and try and create a problem that needs to be solved.

There a religious parallel to that but I’ve probably pissed off enough people now and don’t want to get nailed to a tree for my writings.
by dghlsakjg | 2025-08-17 22:55:04+00:00
Does the chef's menu and pricing get approved by a state regulator and prevent you from eating anything but that restaurant's food while they operate on land they don't own?

The place that your analogy falls is that electric companies are private companies operating legal electricity monopolies where much of the infrastructure in question is placed on right of ways across public and private land not controlled by the operator.
by FollowingTheDao | 2025-08-17 22:55:15+00:00
Exenatide was a very small population base. The approval for weight loss means this drug is being taken by millions of more people which leads to a larger sample size. The larger the sample size the more negative effects will be revealed. I’ll just leave this here for the future m. I have no evidence other than common sense that it is ridiculous to think that injecting a hormone randomly in your body does not lead to side effects.

Besides, who is going to be the one that links thyroid cancers and pancreatic cancers to these drugs? My father died of pancreatic cancer, no one really thought to ask why.
by frumplestlatz | 2025-08-17 22:56:12+00:00
They might care about lost advertising dollars, but the UK has no jurisdiction and judgements contrary to the constitution will not be recognized by US courts.

Their reaction puts on record the constitutional/legal barriers, preserves strategic optionality, and possibly preempts escalation that could still cause real headaches. It's strategic, not a sign that they actually think the UK has a case.
by logicprog | 2025-08-17 22:56:58+00:00
The thing is that since these models aren't actually doing reasoning and don't possess internal world models, you're always going to end up having to rely on your own understanding at some point, they can fill in more of the map with things they can do, but they can't ever make it complete. There will always be cul-de-sacs they end up stuck in, or messes they make, or mistakes they consistently keep making, or make stochastically. So, although that's rather neat, it doesn't really change my point, I don't think.