MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by matt_d | 2025-09-13 06:33:25+00:00
Announcement:

https://mathstodon.xyz/@andrejbauer/115191725004191889

> This week I gave a lecture series at the School on Logical Frameworks and Proof Systems Interoperability. I spoke about programming language techniques for proof assistants. The lecture slides and the reference implementations of a minimalist type theory are available at:

https://github.com/andrejbauer/faux-type-theory

> The repository has three minimalist OCaml implementations of a simple proof checker:

> 1. A basic one showing how to implement bidirectional type checking and type-directed equality checking, using monadic style programming.

> 2. An extension with rudimentary holes (meta-variables) and unification.

> 3. A version that implements "variables as computational effects", using native OCaml 5 effects and handlers.
by nine_k | 2025-09-13 06:34:36+00:00
There are things that are compact but build an interoperability ecosystem around them. Various compression algorithms, cryptography algorithms, communication protocols benefit from having a permissively-licensed implementation. Producing a closed-source fork won't make much sense, and where it does, won't damage the ecosystem. If I invented a new image compression format, I would like to see it supported everywhere, including all possible closed-source software.

There are things that are complex enough, and build an ecosystem on top of them. Producing a closed fork may split the ecosystem, and strangle the open branch if it. These things should use a copyleft license, or maybe dual strict copyleft + commercial license. Linux, Python, Postgres, Grafana, Nexcloud are good examples.

WordPress did it almost right, it uses GPL v2. But to force contributions from hosters, they should have used AGPL, which did not even exist at the time.
by csomar | 2025-09-13 06:34:56+00:00
Unless you have very strong backlinks, then the answer is yes: Google will prioritize sites like Instagram, Linkedin and Facebook. You are lucky, I guess, that these are your very own pages but it could be worse.

There isn't much to do about it unless you want to play the backlinks game and pay to play. There is a reason top brands pay ads when you search for their very own name and that is to make sure they are priority funneled.

Google is just a huge gate keeper these days.
by lolive | 2025-09-13 06:35:10+00:00
I discovered by pure chance the vast ecosystem of iOS synths apps. And I was absolutely blown away. 90+% of the synths of the past century are available for ~5-20€ each. Connect that to a basic KORG MicroKeys Air [extra cheap, but includes Bluetooth]. And you are the next Jean-Michel Jarre.

[Note: and the amount of tutorial videos on YouTube is huge.]
by AlecSchueler | 2025-09-13 06:36:04+00:00
I'm really curious how this kind of writing will be perceived in the coming years. It's "good" long form writing but a lot of that also feels like journalistic padding for the sake of the form, as if you asked an LLM to "write in the style of a long form journalist."

Easy example:

"...dismissed as “disappointing,” “unfair,” and—my favorite—“a gimmick”..."

Is it really important for me to know Clare McNear's favourite? A couple of years ago I wouldn't have thought anything of it but now I'm so sickened constantly by LLMs adding so much needless cruft to everything they write I'm reading this thinking "just tell me the story, for the love of humanity!"
by vwem | 2025-09-13 06:36:28+00:00
It's been awhile since I've read it, but it does offer a similar approach in the sense that it's an easy read. Bret does a good job of making the various topics fun and interesting, even in areas I normally wouldn't be interested in.

As a side note, I've read some interesting critiques on Diamond's theories. But I did find the whole book to be an interesting perspective, even just thinking about things North America lacked such as animal husbandry that may have drastically changed the way it developed.
by rocqua | 2025-09-13 06:36:45+00:00
This blog series by Bret Devraux keeps bringing me back to the black death, and how that reformed labor relations.

I have heard about that a few times now. But this series really emphasizes how much surplus labor the rich could extract. And hence shows how much social impact it had when that labor reduced, and could suddenly negotiate.

I wonder if the black death, and subsequent social change, might have been the best thing to happen to the peasant class.
by antonvs | 2025-09-13 06:37:30+00:00
> A higher resolution renders text too small to read

This is a misunderstanding of what higher resolution is for. Higher resolution allows text at exactly the same size to be much sharper and crisper. I have a 34” curved 1440p, and it’s like using a monitor from the pre-HD era in terms of sharpness. Other people in this thread have observed the same thing. The idea that it’s “perfect” is unfathomable to me.
by Buttons840 | 2025-09-13 06:38:40+00:00
One day society will collapse and in the chaos people will come together to create a new constitution. The people who find themselves in a position to write that constitution will not have time to read up on psychology and systemantics and cryptography and voting theory and AI, etc, etc. There's all these ideas that may or may not have a place in writing the optimal constitution, but probably nobody is going to utilize them when the times comes.

Has anyone tried to write a constitution based on all this? Not with the expectation that it will actually be used, but as a way to teach these important theories and give a good example of how they can be applied to law?

Someone has already written a "here's how to bootstrap modern technology again if all is lost" book. We also need a "here's how to write a constitution that wont immediately be twisted into a bludgeon against the people" book.
by kjkjadksj | 2025-09-13 06:38:56+00:00
If you don’t understand that advertisement and public relations are merely propaganda, I’m not sure what to tell you beyond that. We think in terms of wholly different realities I guess. Nothing can convince you of my side and nothing can convince me against this conclusion that advertisement is fundamentally propaganda, and as long as we allow for it in politics we allow for the opportunity of malicious intent on the part of moneyed individuals.
by vunderba | 2025-09-13 06:39:03+00:00
From the article:

> The Jeopardy! match with Watson was essentially rigged due to the computer’s superhuman reaction time.

From many anecdotes I've heard from previous Jeopardy contestants, buzzer technique is more than half the battle. That's part of the reason Ken Jennings was able to go on winning as long as he did - he continuously refined and developed better intuition for when to buzz.

Many contestants (a large portion of whom likely participated in college Trivia Bowls and were seasoned trivia buffs) could answer the vast majority of Jeopardy clues with relative ease.

The reason for this is that Jeopardy, in order to have household appeal, cannot legitimately engage in an increasingly difficult arms race for its questions - it has to have a capped ceiling in terms of clue difficulty.
by llamasushi | 2025-09-13 06:39:27+00:00
Small anecdote, but back in early 2024 (like, March), I did a ton of searching for an AI helper app that would allow me to use the gemini API key from AI studio. Chatbox was one of only two that I found (can't remember the other), but even back then I was astounded by its functionality and ease of use. It supported a ton of stuff, like custom system prompts, etc. Basically recreated a lot of the lmstudio experience but on a phone.

You'd be surprised, but it was extremely difficult to find an android app that supported API key usage. Ahead of its time.
by mamonoleechi | 2025-09-13 06:40:54+00:00
>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glitch

>Television glitch --> In broadcasting, a corrupted signal may glitch in the form of jagged lines on the screen, misplaced squares, static looking effects, freezing problems, or inverted colors. The glitches may affect the video and/or audio (usually audio dropout) or the transmission. These glitches may be caused by a variety of issues, interference from portable electronics or microwaves, damaged cables at the broadcasting center, or weather.

On computers, those happens when some of the data (video, audio, image) is corrupted or lost.

Glitch art: some of those glitches create cool effects that you can see a sort of photoshop filter ; ffglitch helps you corrupt files/create those effect for artistic purpose.

You can see cool examples of glitch video art there: https://ffglitch.org/gallery/ ; they show the original clip, and then the glitched version

---

You can also have corrupted sounds, you can check 'The Glitch Mob' which is an group creating music, with samples that sounds corrupted.
by LegionMammal978 | 2025-09-13 06:46:29+00:00
One thing that I spent a particularly long time trying to get working was learning near-minimum-size exact languages from positive and negative samples. DFAMiner [0] has a relatively concise formulation for this in terms of variables and clauses, though I have no way to know if some other reformulation would be better suited for SAT solvers (it uses CaDiCaL by default).

It usually starts taking a few seconds around the ~150-variable mark, and hits the absolute limit of practicality by 350–800 variables; the number of clauses is only an order of magnitude higher. Perhaps something about the many dependencies in a DFA graph puts this problem near the worst case.

The annoying thing is, there do seem to be heuristics people have written for this stuff (e.g., in FlexFringe [1]), but they're all geared toward probabilistic automata for anomaly detection and similar fuzzy ML stuff, and I could never figure out how to get them to work for ordinary automata.

In any case, I eventually figured out that I could get a rough lower bound on the minimum solution size, by constructing a graph of indistinguishable strings, generating a bunch of random maximal independent sets, and taking the best of those. That gave me an easy way to filter out the totally hopeless instances, which turned out to be most of them.

[0] https://github.com/liyong31/DFAMiner

[1] https://github.com/tudelft-cda-lab/FlexFringe
by alyptik | 2025-09-13 06:46:42+00:00
There is a stark lack of usable REPLs for C and C++, so I decided to write my own.

You can specify libraries to link against which are scanned for function names to add to tab-completion, you can output assembly and C or C++ source code of your session, and you can view manpages from inside of the REPL.
by _kidlike | 2025-09-13 06:46:50+00:00
forget about self hosting email... I tried it for years, and even if you get it working (needs months), it will eventually stop working again. The problem is that in order to get the big boys to accept you as an email provider, you have to jump through infinite hoops, and be treated like a criminal and/or scammer in the meantime (or at best a business that is trying to send newsletters). You will never get a human to talk to, it's just an infinite loop of automated processes.

Anyway, the problem is "trust" which boils down to IP reputation. And since we are all still on ipv4, your IP was reused. Which means you need to spend months cleaning it. And you won't have a guarantee that you won't lose this IP in the future.
by colmmacc | 2025-09-13 06:47:28+00:00
H1B visas don't require employers to post jobs; this PERM process comes later when someone seeks an employment sponsored green card.

Visas could be allocated in some kind of priority order, but salary alone would probably concentrate visas to just the relatively high-paying tech sector, leaving other professions out entirely.

I'm not sure that's good; the US also needs people with expertise in science, industrial and agricultural control systems, clean power, and more. But these professions tend to earn a fraction of what a software developer makes. Other countries have gone with points systems that try to balance for this.
by abenga | 2025-09-13 06:48:23+00:00
There is no "…more likely they would prioritize…". Those are nonsense hypotheticals. I am saying that the US today has many companies that were founded and built by immigrants and the children of immigrants in the past. These companies have employed millions of American citizens and created trillions of dollars of wealth for Americans. Speaking of these things as if they are zero sum games is silly and shortsighted.
by johnisgood | 2025-09-13 06:50:06+00:00
Not everything is about the firearm itself and not even the shot, that many people focus on.

And you need more context and the training required to take such a shot and then evade the local cops and FBI, with a solid escape plan from a fuckton of witnesses and so forth. And I did not mention that most people would probably panic and mess up, let alone take the shot and escape. It is much more complex than that. When you look at the pattern fit, it no longer looks like a spur-of-the-moment act by a "typical gun owner".

They gave us some 22 years old kid as the person who pulled this whole operation, allegedly, and acted alone. Even if someone had been shooting since childhood, the rooftop selection, escape route, and casing inscriptions suggest deliberate operational planning and situational awareness, not just trigger skill. Shooting skill alone doesn't cover the logistics and environmental awareness. Plus a 22-year-old who "trained since childhood" might have technical skill, but most young adults still lack the composure and foresight to execute a high-stakes assassination with minimal mistakes, especially under the psychological pressure of killing a person in a public setting.

FWIW, some cases remain unsolved for decades because of scarce evidence, degraded scenes, or lack of witnesses, which does not come into play here at all. Modern investigations, by contrast, often benefit from immediate CCTV, cell-data, social media, and so forth.

...thus I remain skeptical.
by wenchu | 2025-09-13 06:50:49+00:00
Oh well then the Oligarchs have spoken,let the world be green, glowing green. I'm not anti nuclear but the technologies used to date have been seriously flawed. But It is the Idea that people who really have no technical knowledge of this technology its supply chain issues or its real impact on long term health are so arrogant that they believe they alone can dictate to the world, that I find offensive. We look at immediate effect but a study by a Japanese researcher after Fukushima shows the effect of irradiation may not show for multiple generations after exposure.
by ggm | 2025-09-13 06:51:33+00:00
Plays both ways. As many British kids denied low barrier entry to Europe suffer as people who saw their job value defended. And, cheap EU/shengen labour was just replaced by non EU equivalents, driving the British right wing faragists even crazier. It also dis-incented the French to stop migration transit across the channel in boats. So, Labour cost dilution happened anyway. And small business tanked with market access losses.

All of this could affect the USA. Sales of US sw and service, access to European CDN and DC markets could dry up, and startup culture see less interest in product in the wider market, as H1B displaced workers "back home" carry American models into their domestic VC market.

Tbh, I think that's less likely to work. People (not me I hasten to add, I'm past the age) want to move to an idea of America they grow up with, and VC friendly economics don't export well: people outside America hate failure.

I guess I'm saying current WH policy doesn't favour the "open market" side of this, regarding non US market access and there will be a consequent reaction in those non US markets to American labour and ideas.
by scotty79 | 2025-09-13 06:52:27+00:00
Largest nuke arsenal that they could find even one in, that they would be sure enough it works to detonate even on their own vast wasteland as the show of force?

Ask yourself why despite ample amount of scaremongering russia didn't detonate even one, just for show? If they tried and failed they'd demonstrate weakness.

And rockets? All they could demonstrate in 3 years was a single stripped down monkey patched small sort of ICBM and even that after making some very nice crater in russia on previous attempted launch.

Might of russia is mostly American PR stuck from the times of cold war.
by 916c0553e164269 | 2025-09-13 06:52:52+00:00
Clarification:

As I see it, postgresql already includes a small amount of Apache 2.0 licensed code.

So it’s not as big an issue as I originally thought.

https://github.com/search?q=repo%3Apostgres%2Fpostgres%20apa...

example:

https://github.com/postgres/postgres/blob/88824e68611a88a4ef...
by flomo | 2025-09-13 06:53:47+00:00
Ug. I'm a 'yimby' and a Weiner voter. But his take on San Francisco transit is just like really bad. Pokey streetcars and buses, doomed to fail. You build out there in those blue areas, and they are mostly all driving.

My take is you build it, and THEN they come. Put in some GOOD transit. Make sure the utilities are in place. Developers will then flock to the place. This whole thing is using inside-out logic. Have a real plan first.
by tlavoie | 2025-09-13 06:55:09+00:00
I had an amusing incident that was related, quite some years back as a CS undergrad. One prof had quite poor eyesight, so had a no-pencil rule for assignments. Typed was OK, neat pen was fine also. (My writing has always been atrocious, typed it is.) As it happened, I used LaTeX (and I knew she did also.)

She also had a rule about promptness of assignment delivery, meaning the start of class when she arrived. Fair enough!

On this one assignment, I had done all but the last question at home, and printed it off, with the hope that I could finish it at the lab and send it to a laser printer in another building. At the time, labs used shared, dot-matrix printers that were usually jammed. I got the last question done, sent it to the printer, then checked the queue. Apparently someone was printing a book, not going to get done before class.

I emailed her my .tex file, with the explanation that I'd hand in my incomplete printout in class, but would appreciate if she could mark the last section so I knew how I did. This was sent well before class, as the timestamp would show. The prof ended up printing, marking, and returning this version, and I received full marks!
by mshekow | 2025-09-13 06:55:22+00:00
oci.dag.dev is fantastic. You can also self-host it, because it's just a Golang CLI.

I compared it with various other registry browser tools, and it was clearly the best one. See here for more details: https://www.augmentedmind.de/2025/03/30/the-9-best-docker-re...
by snom380 | 2025-09-13 06:55:41+00:00
Arturia does that, and Korg did as well (making controller keyboards specific for emulating a synth, with the software running on a Mac or PC.

Downsides: - if the software doesn’t get updated, you’re stuck running an old OS an old Mac that supports it. - you can’t just turn on the synth and use it, you need to find a cable, connect it to the Mac, launch the software, etc
by groggler | 2025-09-13 06:56:24+00:00
> But these professions tend to earn a fraction of what a software developer makes.

Then the market says it doesn't need them. Fix market mechanics so hiring another tech worker isn't worth multiples of things people say society should value. I.e. maybe there is too much upside in software sales since copies are free to the IP owner, liability is limited, lock-in is often impractical to escape, etc.
by rjh29 | 2025-09-13 06:57:22+00:00
For some synths like Blofeld, you're paying $10-20 for something that used to sell in a box for $300. And it's the exact same synth (100% digital) often with a better UI.

The iPad is a great choice for music - you get the variety of hardware synths with none of the annoying setup (power, midi, audio routing), at a cheaper price, but it still feels more immersive than sitting at a desktop PC and a daw.
by Lerc | 2025-09-13 06:59:03+00:00
I cannot imagine not having far more ideas than I could possibly ever do. Today I was describing one to my partner and she told me the only reason I shouldn't do it is that I have too many other things to do.

The thing that makes me continually have ideas is the same thing that makes me not want to dedicate my life to implementing just one of them. It would be like picking a favourite child if I were producing offspring like a queen bee.

I think there is value in the effort to develop something and frequently implementing something well is worth as much and sometimes much more than just a simple proof of concept. Someone has to build the things, It should be the people who are good at that and feel rewarded by a job done well more than a job done differently.

I do think that there isn't enough perspective of the lives that other people lead that can cause odd side-effects. Some people keep their ideas secret, or overvalue the idea because it was the one they had. This is a perspective I find hard to relate to. Most of the creative people I know are much happier someone knowing about their creations. They're like grains of sand, each one with their own details and can be evaluated many different ways. A lot of intellectual property feels like watching a man jealously protecting their grain of sand while standing on a beach.

I believe that is why the intent of things like copyright is to not protect ideas themselves. You cannot copyright an idea, and as an ideas person (a rather horrid term) that feels appropriate. The thing that you have built around the idea is the valuable thing you have contributed to the world. I think that is why items that are copyrightable are referred to as work. The value you bring comes from the from the work you did, not the idea you had, ideas just come to you (often at inconvenient times).

Mass media causes a bit of an aberration because of this. The thing that makes someone wealthy from a popular work is not proportional to the work done to produce it or even the quality of the work. Works that can be easily reproduced and distributed receive a disproportionate reward to their quality. A median quality work in many fields can receive next to no reward. The most popular works receive a masssive reward. The mechanism allowing a control of supply to provide reward for work ends up influencing a supply demand curve that gives massive rewards to a very few and very little to the majority. There is still an element of merit to the successes, the popular things are popular for a reason, some of those things really are the best. The question is would they have still been the best if everyone who worked to create stuff were rewarded more linearly to quality, would that support enough development of ability and opportunity that the pool from which the best can be selected becomes much larger.

[this might have gone off topic, but obviously my brain has things that have to come out]
by zvrba | 2025-09-13 06:59:09+00:00
Nuclear has the highest energy density (kWh produced per km2). "Renewables" need much larger areas to produce equivalent power. This means that habitats for many species are negatively affected or destroyed.

This is an ongoing debate in Norway where local people are strongly against wind turbines because they want to preserve the nature as it is.

EDIT: Relevant poster in the picture. I once was approached by Greenpeace activist on the street who was collecting money. While I would gladly donate to WWF, I said sharp "NO" to him and explained that it was because Greenpeace opposes nuclear.