MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by williamtrask | 2025-09-03 08:45:14+00:00
If truth is defined as beliefs which lead one to make decisions that cause you/your society to thrive, this is a good thing (that the Old Testament has similarities to other major works). Implies a kind of evolutionary algorithm for truth. Likely implies these stories are more true because they’re more tried and tested. Societies who believed them became strong.

If truth is about repeated experimentation or journalistic records (a very new concept in history of writing - less than 500 years), then perhaps this is of concern.

I accept both definitions, but when they’re in conflict, the former tends to be more end-to-end, while the latter tends to overfit to the moment. Mostly because data is scarce and life is a very complex distributed system. On the other hand, the former changes slowly while the latter perhaps keeps up with the pace of change.

Except the point of life is probably to thrive more than to collect a list of facts. So when in conflict, I lean towards the former. Personal choice tho. I expect most of HN leans the other way.
by sunnyam | 2025-09-03 08:45:29+00:00
I have the same opinion, but my worry with this attitude is that it's going to hold me back in the long run.

A common thread in articles about developers using AI is that they're not impressed at first but then write more precise instructions and provide context in a more intuitive manner for the AI to read and that's the point at which they start to see results.

Would these principles not apply to regular developers as well? I suspect that most of my disappointment with these tools is that I haven't spend enough time learning how to use them correctly.

With Claude Code you can tell it what it did wrong. It's a bit hit-or-miss as to whether it will take your comments on board (or take them too literally) but I do think it's too powerful a tool to just ignore.

I don't want someone to just come and eat my cake because they've figured out how to make themselves productive with it.
by grues-dinner | 2025-09-03 08:46:09+00:00
Well, if you say the energy stored is the 100MWh from the headline figure, and say you can arrange release every joule of all at once by flashing high-pressure water to steam at 1 atm that's about 0.1kT.

So quite a bang - allegedly this is 200lb, so about the same: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZDgvar7ON54
by versteegen | 2025-09-03 08:46:42+00:00
> the language allowed the aliasing of any chunk of memory to a variable of any type, either a scalar or an array of any rank and dimensions.

Wait a minute, I've seen it stated many times that a primary reason FORTRAN can be better optimised than C is that it doesn't allow aliasing memory as easily as C does (what that means, maybe you can say), and that's why 'restrict' was added to C. On the other hand, C's "strict aliasing rule" allows compilers to assume that pointers of different types don't alias the same memory, which allows optimisations.
by orliesaurus | 2025-09-03 08:48:37+00:00
Is it just me or the new Amazon/AWS is giving off some serious early-Satya Nadella Microsoft vibes. Kiro, Q....

Think back to when they (MSOFT) were putting out tools like TypeScript, WSL, and VS Code. It looks like Amazon is doing something similar now, building cool tech for developers without plastering the AWS brand all over it.
by testdelacc1 | 2025-09-03 08:49:58+00:00
I don’t think that ballpark estimate is that far fetched? Usage isn’t a reflection of the merits of the two languages. Rust is simply older. It reached 1.0 10 years ago, and it is further along the adoption curve. Zig is yet to reach 1.0 and has mostly early adopters like bun, TigerBeetle and ghostty. I have no doubt that usage will substantially increase once Zig reaches 1.0.

To give you a sense of Rust’s growth, check out this proxy for usage (https://lib.rs/stats). Usage roughly doubled each year for 10 years. 2^10 = 1,024. It’s possible Zig could manage a similar adoption rate after reaching 1.0, but right now it’s probably where Rust was in 2015.

> CIs don’t scale with the number of users

Each Rust release involves a crater run, where they try to compile every open source Rust repo to check for regressions. This costs money and scales with the number of repos out there. But it is true, this only happens once in 6 weeks.

But I think the factor that makes a bigger difference is that Rusts code bases are larger and CI takes longer to run on each commit.
by hvb2 | 2025-09-03 08:50:04+00:00
> What matters is I manage to finish projects that I would not otherwise if not for the AI coding tools, so having them is a huge win for me.

I think the problem is in your definition of finishing a project.

Can you support said code, can you extend it, are you able to figure out where bugs are when they show up? In a professional setting, the answer to all of those should likely be yes. That's what production code is.
by ahartmetz | 2025-09-03 08:50:13+00:00
I really like flying. I've flown gliders as youth and young adult, so I'm a small-time aviation enthusiast, and all the plane's movements make sense to me. I remember when they didn't.

My favorite flight was to Gran Canaria - the pilot did a visual approach as if he was landing a glider. Engines completely idle (very quiet!), plane over the ocean, airport parallel to the right. Turn right a few km after passing the airport, straight for a few seconds, turn right again, glide down.

An exciting one was an aborted takeoff when already pretty fast, but comfortably before decision speed.
by chambers | 2025-09-03 08:50:56+00:00
Statsig's core value is their experimentation platform— the automation of Data Science.

Big Tech teams want to ship features fast, but measuring impact is messy. It usually requires experiments and traditionally every experiment needed one Data Scientist (DS) to ensure statistical validity, i.e., "can we trust these numbers?". Ensuring validity means DS has to perform multiple repetitive but specialized tasks throughout the experiment process: debugging bad experiment setups, navigating legacy infra, generating & emailing graphs, compensating for errors and biases in post-analysis, etc. It's a slog for folks involved. Even then, cases still arise where Team A reports wonderful results & ships their feature while unknowingly tanking Team B's revenue— a situation discovered only months later when a DS is tasked to trace the cause.

Experimentation platforms like Statsig exist to lower the high cost of experimenting. To show a feature's potential impact before shipping, while reducing frustrations along the way. Most platforms will eliminate common statistical errors or issues at each stage of the experiment process, with appropriate controls for each user role. Engs setup experiments via SDK/UI with nudges and warnings for misconfigurations. DS can focus on higher-value work like metric design. PMs view shared dashboards and get automatic coordination emails with other teams if their feature is seen as breaking. People still fight but earlier on and in the same "room" with fewer questions about what's real versus what's noise.

Separating real results from random noise is the meaning of "statsig" / "statistically significant". I think it's similar to how companies define their own metrics (their sense of reality) while the platform manages the underlying statistical and data complexity. The ideal outcome is less DS needed, less crufty tooling to work around, less statistics learning, and crucially, more trust & shared oversight. But it comes at considerable, unsaid cost as well.

Is Statsig worth $1B to OpenAI? Maybe. There's an art & science to product development, and Facebook's experimentation platform was central to their science. But it could be premature. I personally think experimentation as an ideology best fits optimization spaces that previously achieved strong product-market fit ages ago. However, it's been years since I've worked in the "Experimentation" domain. I've glossed over a few key details in my answer and anyone is welcome to correct me.
by spwa4 | 2025-09-03 08:51:33+00:00
If that is a good start, then how do you explain hamas' immediate reaction to Israel respecting Gaza borders in 2006, which they then respected until about a month after Oct 7, 2023.

You see, hamas' reaction was to immediately commit a massacre on Palestinian civilians, and then to start building a rocket arsenal and attacking Israeli civilians with them. So recent history teaches: if Israel were to take your advice, the conflict would become worse. A LOT worse. Immediately.

I'd ask you why this won't just occur again? But hamas has already publicly declared (shouted, in fact) they will go on another massacre and rebuild rockets "the second" this conflict ends. So I feel like that clears up the question.

The fact of the matter is that Palestinians, especially their billionaire "leaders" get a LOT of money, but only if this conflict continues. Until you change that, best of luck. Oh and changing that has a slight problem: neither Gaza nor WB have the slightest chance of making it economically on their own. Despite hamas and PA stealing over 90% of aid, the average income in Gaza and WB is a LOT higher than in Jordan or (especially) Egypt. This is because of aid. Unemployment benefits in Gaza are higher than hospital director wages in Egypt. War pays well for Palestinians, and for "Palestinians" (both hamas and PA give Palestinian passports to whoever asks, in fact, regularly to people who never asked. Last year, suddenly, everyone with an address in the old city in Jerusalem got a Palestinian passport in the mail. And even the muslims (who are pre-civil-war Syrians, whose families got massacred by Palestinians) didn't want them). In fact it pays orders of magnitude more than what they'd make otherwise. And before you say "but people die". Yes, people die. But if you go and actually look at even the claimed hamas-sourced numbers, you'll quickly conclude that less people die in this conflict than in traffic accidents, on average.

To make matters worse, Palestine, both Gaza and WB, are a gateway to immigrating to Europe. You live in, say, Jordan or you're poor in Saudi Arabia. That's a terrible life. So you "immigrate" to WB (Gaza if you're Egyptian). Once you're physically there you get a (bad) apartment and a passport, and in Gaza a job offer to work for Hamas (as cannon fodder, of course, but still). Once you have that passport even the Israeli government will help you get into Europe, assuming you don't go too far in your hamas job. That's how they constantly replenish their population (same way Russia does it: attract immigrants from even worse places, send them to die fighting their "enemy").
by Ballas | 2025-09-03 08:51:46+00:00
> Can't understand why manufacturers make this hard as it sells hardware.

Because a lot of features that cost a lot of money are only software limitations. With many of the cheaper cameras the max shutter speed and video capabilities are limited by software to make the distinction with the more expensive cameras bigger. So they do sell hardware - but opening up the software will make their higher-end offerings less compelling.
by dns_snek | 2025-09-03 08:52:27+00:00
We don't know what Apple does or doesn't do. They might not be able to unlock iPhones in their normal state, but what stops Apple from instructing your device to silently install a specially crafted update which makes that possible, prior to your arrest? I don't think that there is anything stopping them.

You also said "[...] and added additional controls to make brute forcing infeasible." which isn't true as demonstrated by Cellebrite's capabilities. They can take the latest iPhone running the latest iOS and unlock it for you for a price (allegedly only with a warrant which law enforcement can always get).

> If that wasn't true, literally all iPhones would be backdoored by the Russians and Chinese lol.

This comparison also doesn't hold up because "Russians and Chinese" don't have physical access to our devices (seemingly required for most of these exploits) while law enforcement who arrested you does, and they can easily ship your device to Cellebrite's lab if need be.
by globnomulous | 2025-09-03 08:53:21+00:00
That comment was an unclear allusion to ideas I've absorbed from Jaron Lanier, plus a bit of my own elitism.

Regarding the elitism: I'm not a free-speech absolutist; I don't prize individual, positive freedom over negative freedom (Most Americans do); and I'd prefer for gatekeepers largely to restrict and control the levers of cultural power. The internet, as a market-driven radical democracy, demostrates all of radical democracy's worst excesses and vulgarity, especially its tendency to vest power in charismatic charlatans skilled in stoking the primitive, violent emotions I mentioned above.

Regarding 'open' culture: Jaron Lanier, father of VR, has written extensively on this. He'd be a much better ambassador for his ideas than I can be, and I recommend his books, essays, and interviews in the strongest possible terms.

Lanier makes a strong case that the free-and-open culture of the internet ("information wants to be free") -- exemplified, for instance, in Napster, open source, and the practice of not putting up paywalls on news websites -- has been overwhelmingly negative and destructive. To take a few examples: it has largely destroyed music as a viable career; it has cheapened information, because somethings that's free has no value; it has led directly to the advertising-driven hellscape that the internet has become; and it has served only to augment the power of the already powerful, because only the rich are in a position to marshal the kinds of resources that one needs in order, quite literally, to mine data and find profit in it. Lanier has also been a major critic of the AI craze.

Related to both of these: I'm a strong believer that the interconnectedness of the internet is dangerous, unsustainable, and by itself causing the US to drift towards the cultural and political equivalent of a nuclear meltdown, in the form of something like a fascist takeover. Connecting everybody on the internet has produced, I think, something like a feeling of cultural and political claustrophobia. People are going crazy because they're sharing mental space with too many other people.

Anyhow, that's probably more than enough, and I'm not sure it's entirely cogent or coherent. Thanks for the interest!
by Krei-se | 2025-09-03 08:53:39+00:00
Thanks for answering and: Valid point. I like about GA that it's not initially presented with the "added note" other theories are contradicting already with it which is giving me a hard time learning physics so far.

So to answer the question: Well, i think if you come with relational database experience which is n-dim - learning string theory first is ... not that stupid. Maybe encouraging people to try this route would be better than forcing them to take the whole curriculum.

Taking discreet numbers as common ground GA provides a stable scaffolding - i think in terms of a finite state machine getting stuff on a screen it's fair to say it's the right tool for that job in this constrained environment.

I also dabbled with scattering amplitudes, but from what i understand so far it's similar to what category theory is in math: Structure before even agreeing on (countable, etc.) sets.

I'm always open for dialog on these and like digging to solid grounds, still i think it makes sense to take a look at the environment then agree on a common ground to build from.

In medicine this can be biochemistry and in computer aided rendering i think OPs "first" principles are not that far off.
by names_r_hard | 2025-09-03 08:54:31+00:00
Thanks to all who are sharing their appreciation for this niche but cool project.

I'm the current lead dev, so please ask questions.

Got a Canon DSLR or mirrorless and like a bit of software reverse engineering? Consider joining in; it's quite an approachable hardware target. No code obfuscation, just classic reversing. You can pick up a well supported cam for a little less than $100. Cams range from ARMv5te up to AArch64.
by grues-dinner | 2025-09-03 08:54:41+00:00
This is crushed soapstone, so it's mostly talc. Talc is apparently more or less stable up to about 800C, where it starts to break down into enstatite and silica: https://nvlpubs.nist.gov/nistpubs/jres/15/jresv15n5p551_A1b....

If it were pure silica sand, you could presumably get even hotter before anything changes chemically, but at the that point you start having materials issues with metal parts of the system: 500C is about the limit for ordinary steels to lose strength (and many are less than that - heat effects can often start at 300C).
by M95D | 2025-09-03 08:55:26+00:00
Why don't you send WOL directly over the internet? (You'll need to set up a permanent ARP record on the router.)

Or login into the router and send WoL from there?

Or have Raspberry always on with ssh?

Or set a power-on timer in BIOS/UEFI once a day and a shutdown/sleep in cron? (This is also a good failsafe if WoL doesn't work.)
by the_other | 2025-09-03 08:55:58+00:00
I don't see how it's different from what happens today. Google isn't an exclusive search option in any browser.

Are you saying that 'til now, Apple/Firefox _only_ took money for search default from Google due to the wording of the contract? In future, all the search vendors can pay all the browser makers for a position on a list of defaults?
by mike_hearn | 2025-09-03 08:56:47+00:00
It has been done. It's just that open source databases lag behind the state of the art.

https://docs.oracle.com/en/database/oracle/oracle-database/2...

Adaptive planning also applies to adapting the degree of query parallelism and automatic banning of query plans that take too much time.

Commercial databases have much bigger teams than Postgres does and have a lot more optimizations as a consequence. This includes optimizations that aren't in scope for an open source DB to begin with. For example, Oracle uses the Apple strategy for decades. A lot of Oracle DBs are sold as hardware not software, shipped as a full cluster rack or set of racks to the customer. The gear uses a dedicated inter-node 100Gb/sec ethernet within the cluster to give horizontal scalability of joins and other complex read/write loads. Queries and results go in/out over a separate frontend network. There are customizations up and down the stack from kernel, firmware, device drivers, database nodes and the client drivers. Nodes directly read/write each other's memory using RDMA to fetch the latest version of rows from each other or inform each other about new transactions.

https://static.rainfocus.com/oracle/ocw24/sess/1716494555804...

You could do stuff like this with Postgres perhaps, if you fork and rewrite enough of it, but it's unlikely to ever be done upstream.

Disclosure: I have a part time role at Oracle. All opinions 100% guaranteed unofficial.
by sfn42 | 2025-09-03 08:56:49+00:00
I always find it strange how people complain about features when the real problem is that they simply don't like how people use the feature.

Async in C# is awesome, and there's nothing stopping you from writing sync code where appropriate or using threads if you want proper multi threading. Async is primarily used to avoid blocking for non-cpu-bound work, like waiting for API/db/filesystem etc. If you use it everywhere then it's used everywhere, if you don't then it isn't. For a lot of apps it makes sense to use it a lot, like in web apis that do lots of db calls and such. This incurs some overhead but it has the benefit of avoiding blocked threads so that no threads sit idle waiting for I/O.

You can imagine in a web API receiving a large number of requests per second there's a lot of this waiting going on and if threads were idle waiting for responses you wouldn't be able to handle nearly as much throughout.
by chris-orgmenta | 2025-09-03 08:58:43+00:00
To expand not refute,

> If truth is defined as beliefs which lead one to make decisions that cause you/your society to thrive

This is 'metaphorical truth' to be precise.

But it's only a part of the virality of memes, not the whole.

Propagation can occur not just due to usefulness, but to other factors such as simplicity/replicability, human susceptibility / 'key in a lock' etc.

If survival was purely metaphorical truth, then all surviving lifeforms would be 'the most true' (including viruses being 'true' to us). Which can be argued, at a philosophical level - But then we've expanded the definition so much as to lose relevant meaning at the pragmatic level.

Porcupine throwing quills, and all that.
by reify | 2025-09-03 08:59:01+00:00
Of course it did, in a mouse!

They refer to the mouse as a mouse model.

Created undue stress for the mouse by using a forced tail suspension test and forced swim test.

you can just imagine that poor mouse, with a multitude of electrodes coming out of its brain, to make a poxy anti-depressant for humans.

anti-depressants that are given freely to humans who suffer from a very natural case of sadness.

99% of all the clients referred to me with depression and prescribed anti-depressants, during my 25 years of practice as a psychotherapist, were suffering from sadness and didn't need any medication.

In reality a sadness that just needs to be worked through, we dont need any medication/drugs for sadness.

We have manged sadness quite well for a millennia.

makes me angry
by heliographe | 2025-09-03 08:59:22+00:00
Yes! As a software developer in the photography space, we are deeply in need of projects like this.

The photography world is mired in proprietary software/ formats, and locked down hardware; and while it has always been true that a digital camera is “just” a computer, now more than ever it is painful just how limited and archaic on-board camera software is when compared to what we’ve grown accustomed to in the mobile phone era.

If I compare photography to another creative discipline I am somewhat familiar with, music production - the latter has way more open software/hardware initiatives, and freedom of not having to tether yourself to large, slow, user-abusing companies when choosing gear to work with.

Long live Magic Lantern!
by mcdeltat | 2025-09-03 08:59:57+00:00
You have an interesting point about consistency and I'd like to provide a counterargument. While control consistency is very important, the actual image you get from a camera varies significantly between models as the manufacturers change tone curves, colour models, etc. JPGs from the camera are basically arbitrary and RAWs are not much better. The manufacturers don't provide many guarantees, it's just up to you and downstream software to figure out what looks good. Funny that so much thought goes into designing the feel of a camera yet the photo output is basically undefined...

Also another thing, Magic Lantern adds optional features which are arbitrarily(?) not present on some models. Perhaps Canon doesn't think you're "pro enough" (e.g. spent enough money) so they don't switch on focus peeking or whatever on your model.
by names_r_hard | 2025-09-03 09:00:16+00:00
There's a fun step you're missing - it's not firmware. We toggle on (presumably) engineering functionality already present in Canon code, which allows for loading a file from card as an ARM binary.

We're a normal program, running on their OS, DryOS, a variant of uITRON.

This has the benefit that we never flash the OS, removing a source of risk.
by keyle | 2025-09-03 09:01:05+00:00
Around 2020, our old lead dev, a1ex, after years of hard work, left the project. The documentation was fragmentary. Nobody understood the build system. A very small number of volunteers kept things alive, but nothing worked well. Nobody had deep knowledge of Magic Lantern code.

Sounds like a bit of a dick move. Part of being a lead dev is making sure you can get hit by a bus and the project continues. That means documentation, simple enough and standard build system (It's C after all), etc. As a lead dev you should ensure the people on the project get familiarity with other part than their niche too, so that one can succeed you.