MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by matheusmoreira | 2025-09-22 14:31:09+00:00
Discussion here is generally of higher quality because of the people who come here. Lots of developers of all kinds, tech company employees, insiders, people who invented the algorithms you read about in the books, people who invented the programming languages we use.

I for one ignore the articles and go straight for the comments. I care a lot more about what smart people think than the articles themselves. The news that get posted here are just provocation to get them to post their opinions. Chances are any truly important information will be directly quoted by HN comments anyway.
by fingerlocks | 2025-09-22 14:31:33+00:00
That’s just a C enum interfaced in Swift. You can’t instantiate it, and it has no methods or any kind of functionality. It’s effective a list of numbers.

What are you expecting the documentation to say here? It will make more sense when you find where it’s used.

Edit: First link on the bottom explains exactly what it’s used for. https://developer.apple.com/documentation/avfoundation/retri...
by marginalia_nu | 2025-09-22 14:31:40+00:00
Yeah I mostly agree with this. I'm mostly talking about git the model, rather than git the tool when I say git has solved the problem of asynchronous decentralized collaboration.

For local-first async collaboration on something that isn't software development, you'd likely want something that is a lot more polished, and has a much more streamlined feature set. I think ultimately very few of git's chafing points are due to its model of async decentralized collaboration.
by jjcob | 2025-09-22 14:31:51+00:00
It's not a technical challenge, it's a fundamental problem.

When multiple people work on a document at the same time, you will have conflicts that will become very hard to resolve. I have never seen a good UI for resolving non-trivial changes. There is no way to make this merging easy.

The only way to avoid the merge problem is to make sure that the state is synchronised before making changes. With cloud based solutions this is trivial, since the processing happens on the server.

The local first variant of this would be that you have to somehow lock a document before you can work on it. I worked on a tool that worked like that in the early 2000s. Of course that always meant that records remained locked, and it was a bit cumbersome. You still needed to be online to work so you could lock the records you needed.
by griffzhowl | 2025-09-22 14:32:15+00:00
Writing proper is a correspondence between marks and sounds to represent speech.

Early Sumerian symbols depicting kinds of goods (wheat, sheep, beer, etc.), and marks next to these to indicate quantities, are classed as proto-writing.

There's also more general use of symbols to represent ideas or groups, like a cross representing Jesus or Christianity, for example, which aren't classed as writing
by alexisread | 2025-09-22 14:32:16+00:00
Have you tried looking at Sectorforth?

In most languages branching is a fundamental construct, it's created here (with comments)

https://github.com/cesarblum/sectorforth/blob/master/example...

Effectively IF compiles a 0= ie. If false and then a dummy target address. THEN (aka ENDIF) compiles the real target address over the dummy one, which is the address after THEN.
by virgilp | 2025-09-22 14:32:30+00:00
It does fall back to "core values" though - kinda' like with math & axioms. The "why" chain of questions will inevitably lead to something like "because there's inherent value in human life", and this is the point where it breaks down because there's no logical reason to say that. You can probably postulate the contrary and end up with a completely different set of morals that may still be internally coherent but would be very alien to you. Just how you can say "in a plane, through a given point not on a given line, there is no line parallel to the given line" and end up with a weird, non-Euclidean but coherent geometry.
by bwfan123 | 2025-09-22 14:32:37+00:00
> aside from the obvious slop related costs to review

Code-review tools (code-rabbit/greptile) produce enormous amounts of slop counterbalanced by the occasional useful tip. And cursor and the like love to produce nicely formatted sloppy READMEs.

These tools - just like many of us humans - prioritize form over function.
by lisper | 2025-09-22 14:32:37+00:00
> Programming languages, like all languages, exist for communication between humans.

That is manifestly false. Machine language and Brainfuck are both programming languages, and they are not designed for communication between humans. To the contrary, Brainfuck is deliberately designed to confuse humans.

Programming languages exist to describe processes with sufficient precision that they may be carried out by a machine. You might want a programming language to also serve the secondary purpose of communicating something to a human that reads it, but the vast majority of extant languages are not designed with this goal in mind.

> The power of modern languages come from us quickly being able to understand programs.

Again, no. The power of modern languages comes from providing higher-level abstractions that are closer to human thought processes. Modern programming languages allow you to think directly in terms of things like numbers, arrays, strings, etc. rather than forcing you to think of everything in terms of raw bits. There are many languages that are notorious for making code much easier to write than to read.

> The vast majority of bugs don't come from under-specification, but rather poor/miscommunication.

No, the vast majority of bugs come from a mismatch between the code and the programmer's mental model of what the code does, i.e. the process that the code describes. You can have bugs in code written by a single human. There is no possibility of miscommunication because there is no communication. There is just the code and the programmer's brain.
by 1718627440 | 2025-09-22 14:32:40+00:00
Sounds like a implementation problem, not a problem with voice control.

We have a 20 old navi with voice control. You can't just say free form things, but it's very deterministic. Most commands you want to say aren't free form, so this doesn't really matter. It also confirms everything, so it will never do something without you knowing. It also has the best voice I got to know. Natural, precise, short AND friendly; no clue why all these modern voices with way more compute all sound like garbage.
by dragontamer | 2025-09-22 14:33:07+00:00
Note that Intel's modern e-Core has 3x decoders per core. When code is straight, they alternate (decoder#1 / decoder#2 / decoder#3). When code is branchy, they split up across different jumps aka if/else statements.

Shrinking the decoder on Bulldozer was clearly the wrong move for Fx-series / AMD. Today's chips are going wide decoder (ex: Apple can do 8x decode per clock tick), deep opcode cache (AMD Zen has a large opcode cache allowing for 6x way lookup per clocktick), or Intel's new and interesting multiple-decoder thing.
by crote | 2025-09-22 14:33:37+00:00
Make it a comprehensive service you can rent at a fixed monthly cost. Which of course defeats the whole "self-hosting" part.

Regular people don't like the Magic Box Which Makes Things Work. They'll begrudgingly shove it in a cupboard and plug it in, but even that is already asking a lot. If it needs any kind of regular maintenance or attention, it is too much effort. "Plug in a harddrive once a month for backups"? You'll have just as much asking them to fly to Mars and yodel the national anthem while doing a cartwheel.
by desumeku | 2025-09-22 14:33:40+00:00
Why would you ever do opts.URL instead of opts.FooService.URL or opts.BarService.URL? What does ambiguity and imprecision gain you here when you can just write out from which struct you want it from? I don't even know why opts.URL would compile, it's completely unstated that you're not grabbing it from opts but grabbing it from some other structure contained within opts. Shouldn't even compile IMO, but at least I found something I disagree with Go's designers on.
by nkrisc | 2025-09-22 14:33:51+00:00
> I heard stories about how super advanced invasive surveillance let's people like Target know that you're pregnant before you actually know yourself. But I just don't buy it.

I believe it. But it wasn't super-advanced surveillance. It was, as I recall, 2010's "machine learning" basically drawing inferences about purchase history to determine what sorts of personalized advertisements to mail to you or print on your receipts, or whatever.

I believe it because I worked at another large American retailer similar to Target at the time and though I was not directly involved, I was aware that other departments in our company were working on similar things. It wasn't that advanced or outlandish, it was just finding trends in the huge amount of historical purchase data we had. I can absolutely believe that it was similar at Target. People who bought these things typically bought baby-related stuff 3-6 months later, so lets send them some coupons for that baby-related stuff in 2 months. It's unlikely the fact it was baby-related was actually relevant, it probably just sent coupons for whatever the predicted purchases were.

An individuals purchase history was probably correlated either by rewards program membership (preferred) or credit cards used. If you just paid cash and didn't use swipe your membership card, it was unlikely the purchase would be associated to you.
by asib | 2025-09-22 14:34:10+00:00
> We all, in Europe, should speak about working a bit harder. Especially those, who are not happy with where they are.

There are plenty of people who are not happy with where they are despite working hard. This "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" mentality is cancer to the problem, it solves nothing.

Talking about a 6 day work week aspirationally is truly odd. There are parents of independent school kids who do not work 6 day weeks, I'd dare to wager many of them. It's foolish and naive to assume that grinding harder is the way to make up the difference.
by aubmedia | 2025-09-22 14:34:41+00:00
This is my first real SaaS :)

We run a lightweight event collector (pageviews, product viewed, basic session signals). Our model uses that event stream to infer intent and test offers with multi-armed strategies. It continuously learns which offers convert best for which segments. The heavy lifting runs on our servers (OVH), and the client script only decides which offer to show. Feedback welcome
by storus | 2025-09-22 14:34:56+00:00
I tried V3.1 but it was driving me crazy by ignoring parts of user input, which R1 never did. I had many such instances when e.g. asking about running DeepSeek 671B it instead picked DeepSeek 67B because 671B is too large to exist so I must have made a mistake etc. I concluded that despite being better in benchmarks than R1, it was essentially useless due to this characteristics and I instead started using R1 at OpenRouter. Not sure why deepseek.com removed R1 and left only V3.1 without any ability to switch back, I guess it's cheaper to run.
by fallinghawks | 2025-09-22 14:35:10+00:00
I've lived in California all my life and was in San Mateo during Loma Prieta. How close you are to the epicenter has a strong effect on what you experience (it's undoubtedly more complicated than that but distance is a big factor). Last night's was 14.8 miles away from me and although I woke up, I didn't hear earthquaky sounds and shaking was moderate. Thought my partner had just flopped over in bed harder than usual. By contrast, a few years ago we had a 3.1 centered about 1.5 miles away that really made me fear it was a big one. The house jumped and stuff swayed, and I was just thinking I'd better get next to the bookcase when it stopped.
by simiones | 2025-09-22 14:35:10+00:00
> The types say exactly what is proved.

To whom? Fully formalized mathematics is extremely dense and difficult, and few mathematicians actually practice it, especially for complex problems. Just because the symbols are theoretically unambiguous doesn't mean that any human can actually understand what they mean, and whether they accurately encode some less formal system you were hoping to study.

And this becomes much more problematic once you go from the realm of pure mathematics into other realms, like engineering or economics or anything else that is seeking to model real-world phenomena. A model can be perfectly self-consistent and still be a very bad and even useless model of a real-world thing. And it can be highly non-trivial to figure out to which extent and under what constraint a model actually matches the phenomenon you intended.

For examples of both kinds of issues, look at theoretical physics. Lots of major physics theories are only partly formalized, and rely on unproven or sometimes even known to be unsound mathematical foundations (like the Dirac delta at the time it was first introduced, or like renormalization in quantum physics). And, of course, there are still open questions on how well these theories actually model various physical phenomena (like GR and black hole curvature singularities).
by 1718627440 | 2025-09-22 14:35:23+00:00
These phones seem to have hardware isolation for the privacy sensitive sensors, so this matters less. I the user already use all the GUN programs daily. It would be nice to be able to use them on the phone. Having these in some isolation like Termux, isn't that useful, as I want to use the programs to control my phone. Not sure if ssh -X works on Termux.
by AvAn12 | 2025-09-22 14:35:33+00:00
1980s massive sci funding due to “Star Wars” defense program and funding revolutions in computer tech, pharma, public health, telecom, etc. Regan and both Bushes blew up their budgets, ran huge deficits forcing Clinton and Obama into making budget cuts to clean up their messes. So yeah, nominally the article may be true but the history is important.
by TYPE_FASTER | 2025-09-22 14:36:02+00:00
I think Apple's success at using power management data from their mobile products to make computer hardware with really good power management is highlighting just how bad computer power management has been.

When you close the lid on a laptop, there are a lot of layers that all have to do the right thing. How is Windows configured? How do the drivers installed on that laptop handle the Windows state transitions? How do all the pieces of hardware on that laptop (CPU, etc.) work together to implement the various states?

I think it is possible for a computer manufacturer like Framework to work with operating system vendors like Microsoft and Canonical, and hardware vendors like Intel and AMD to improve how power management is implemented in their hardware.

There is always some level of "friction" involved when you are trying to integrate across different vendors. Some of the best Windows hardware I've used was made by Microsoft. The Surface line, at least in my experience, is really good.

It will require an investment of course, but I think it is possible.
by robenkleene | 2025-09-22 14:36:08+00:00
> The merge workflow is not inherently complicated or convoluted. It's just that git is.

What makes merging in git complicated? And what's better about darcs and mercurial?

(PS Not disagreeing just curious, I've worked in Mercurial and git and personally I've never noticed a difference, but that doesn't mean there isn't one.)
by dredmorbius | 2025-09-22 14:36:22+00:00
Mid-4s is where most people start feeling quakes, though the actual significance is pretty low. You'll tend to see/hear a lot of chatter online or in media.

At mag 5 there's localised damage, most characteristically of goods knocked off grocery store shelves, with glass-bottled liquids often producing a photogenic mess.

At mag 6, pre-code construction or at-risk areas (bay fill, river bottoms, sand) may see significant structural damage. The 2014 South Napa earthquake is the most recent of these, and downtown Napa was hit pretty hard, due to terrain (reclaimed river bottomlands, bay-fill, and some old masonry construction). See: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_South_Napa_earthquake>.

Mag 7 is the scale of some of the largest quakes recorded in California, including the 1906 San Francisco quake. This would create widespread damage within 100+ miles of the epicentre. Marc Reisner's A Dangerous Place (2003) includes a detailed description of impacts of a mag 7 quake along the Hayward fault, which would extend well beyond the immediate region into Southern California due to reliance on delta and Central Valley water projects.

<https://baynature.org/article/book-review-a-dangerous-place/>

Mag 8 is about the upper bound of expected seismic activity on the San Andreas and related fault systems.
by krosaen | 2025-09-22 14:36:29+00:00
We've lost our sense making ability in our coverage of AV progress. Setting aside Elon's polarizing behavior (which is a big thing to set aside) all of these things seem true:

- Elon bullshits wildly and sometimes delivers

- FSD is far ahead of other available personally owned autonomy - no other system even attempts to drive on surface level streets. FSD works better than you would think - I've been in several flawless rides across town in conditions I didn't expect it to handle.

- FSD doesn't work well enough to rely on it yet, so what's the point for real consumers who don't want to sit there nervously hovering their hands over the wheel even if it is impressive and you might have to ride several hours before anything goes awry.

- We can't really know how close FSD is to being reliable enough because all we have is marketing claims from Tesla, fan boy clips on YouTube, and haters who can't seem to discern where FSD really is ahead, even as it falls far short of hype

What I wish we had was a common metric audited by a third party reliably published in terms of hours until disengagement or something like that across all systems in various conditions.
by tensility | 2025-09-22 14:37:13+00:00
A lie is far worse than a gap. I'd much rather see someone simply be honest about the fact that they've taken a year off to focus on their personal health due to a serious medical condition. Further, if the lie is uncovered at any point, trust is likely broken forever. This is awful advice, in my opinion, and I certainly don't want to hire anyone who agrees with it ... ever.
by glenstein | 2025-09-22 14:37:33+00:00
If I understand correctly there's still a little bit of residual hydrogen bound up in the sulfuric acid molecules. And if you added it all up close to the amount of water you'd get from one of our Great lakes in North America. (At least if you combined it with oxygen, of which there's plenty on Venus).

The article mentioned something about heavy water which I don't understand very much. But it's a problem.

The tragedy of both Mars and Venus is that billions of years ago? It seems like they both might have had abundant liquid oceans of water. Which doesn't mean they would have supported life, but they would have been so much closer to habitable and a much better starting point. Instead, it's like if you're deadbeat brother house-sat them for a weekend and threw a bender and trashed the houses, that's what we're left with now.
by hobs | 2025-09-22 14:37:37+00:00
It's like how expert athletes often watch videos of themselves or competitors (when applicable) to understand the nuances of their play - once you understand something very deeply the small things start to matter more, until they dominate the game.

If you are a master of UI/UX and you are observing a user doesn't go through the paths you've created its an opportunity - you might be able to learn something that would make your approach more successful across a host of different users that up to this point you clearly are not winning the game against.

If you take an antagonistic approach and curse the idiot for making you watch you have not even put on a jersey yet.
by benterix | 2025-09-22 14:37:37+00:00
It baffled me a bit as the rich use watches, too, and they use them a lot, and they are acutely aware of passing time. Are other articles by the same author also addressing inequality issues?

So I found this:

https://prajyoth.pages.dev/article?id=2025-01-29-building-wi...

Apart from being partly written by AI, I wonder if it was written for humans because the code formulated in terribly long lines hidden behind scrolling bars. If anybody is considering writing content in this way, please don't.
by goku12 | 2025-09-22 14:37:39+00:00
> If you want full control, install and use your own runners, which flips the responsibility to you.

It's a bit tedious to have to explain that service providers have certain responsibilities and obligations too. Corporate culture has given bigtech a blank cheque to behave the way they want. That aside, based on the way you framed your reply, let me assure you that I don't trust them with even my projects, much less the CI system or their runner. And time and again, they vindicate that decision. I have posted the full argument as a reply to your sibling comment.
by OskarS | 2025-09-22 14:38:26+00:00
No. Linguists make a distinction between "writing" and "proto-writing". Generally speaking, proto-writing involves using abstract symbols for some particular use case, historically it was common for accounting. You draw a sheep and put five tally marks next to it to indicate you have five sheep, that kind of thing. Proto-writing is considerably older than true writing, among the earliest widely known examples would be clay tokens known as "bulla" [1] from at least 8000 BCE

Proto-writing can be very complex (I remember reading a book where a linguist calls mathematical notation "proto-writing"), but it's not "true writing" until it's capable of communicating essentially any idea you can express in spoken language (it's hard to write "I miss my cat Whiskers" in mathematical symbols) in at least a partly phonetic way (all true writing languages are phonetic to some extent). The earliest examples of that is Sumerian cuneiform and Egyptian hieroglyphs from around 3000 BCE. Whatever this discovery is, it's not true writing.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulla_(seal)
by rdtsc | 2025-09-22 14:38:27+00:00
> FWIW, I submitted it as "non-developer" but a moderator seems to have changed it to "beginner developer." The author is a non-technical blogger, and she probably has to navigate lots of technical guides in order to fiddle with her website or CSS. I think a more relevant discussion would be about making website publishing easier for everyday people, or about the lack of documentation written for that particular demographic. But HN took it in a different direction, which is fine.

That makes sense, thanks for clarifying. That's why made sure to point out the difference to avoid confusion. I think folks, including myself have been on all 3 sides of the situation: as a new developer who is supposed to learn confusing terminology, non-developer who is thrown a bunch of jargon to look at from a completely different domain that's not their responsibility, and the developer who write stuff and then wondered why other can't comprehend the "easy" tutorial.
by SonnyTark | 2025-09-22 14:38:30+00:00
I didn't know what this referred to but reading some of the examples in the paper.. oh man I hate this thing with a passion. It's not just Persians but Arabs in the gulf culture too that apply this to every scenario, it's the definition of being insincere as I know they don't really mean it but pretend to.

An example from last month, I had a haircut at a new place and the guy refused to tell me how much I should pay him and insisted its on him this time, I know he's bluffing but he kept doing it. So I just guessed and gave him the money which he pretended he didn't want for the last 5 minutes, he immediately realized it was less than he wanted and asked for more!

This confusing and conflicting behavior should stay far away from any attempt to develop a standard linguistic approach to communication which I hope LLMs are aiming to achieve.

If I was chaotic neutral, I'd totally play along with their bluffing and watch them get really confused.