MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by layer8 | 2025-09-02 02:33:28+00:00
> Two ('full') space characters were added because of (tele)typewriters and their fixed width fonts

I could never agree with this, because monospace fonts are already adding extra space with the dot character, which is much narrower in proportional fonts. That fact alone makes the visual gap already similarly wide as it would be in typeset proportional text. Adding a second space makes it much too wide visually (almost three positions wide). It looks like badly typeset justified text.

(I understand why people are doing it, I just don’t agree on aesthetic grounds.)
by lorenzohess | 2025-09-02 02:33:49+00:00
> Link layers allow you to link external image files as a layer in your project. For instance, you might add an SVG image file as a link layer, make changes to it in Inkscape, and see it instantly updated inside GIMP! You can also non-destructively scale and rotate the link layer without impacting the quality of the original image.

This is great
by chowells | 2025-09-02 02:33:50+00:00
In line printers, a line feed moves the paper forward one line. A carriage return moves the print head back to the start of a line. You can do interesting things by making them separate commands, like bold text (overstrike) or underlining, so they were independent commands for talking to a line printer.

ASCII standardized on a character set containing control codes for line printers, so it included CR and LF separately. It's a bit weird that some terminals changed the semantics of those control codes, but I guess things never stay static in time.
by buu700 | 2025-09-02 02:34:46+00:00
Putting aside the claim that "LLM output [...] is almost always not worth reading"[1], the whole issue here is that this supposed ability of determining whether or not content is AI-generated doesn't exist. Is it really a valuable life skill to decide whether or not you want to read something based solely on its density of em dashes?

Of course there are cases where you can tell that some text is almost certainly LLM output, because it matches what ChatGPT might reply with to a basic prompt. You can also tell when a piece of writing is copied and pasted from Wikipedia, or a copy of a page of Google results. Would any of that somehow be more worth reading if the author posted a video of themselves carefully typing it up by hand?

1: You're assuming a specific type of output in a specific type of context. If LLM output were never worth reading, ChatGPT would have no users.
by jampa | 2025-09-02 02:34:46+00:00
I remember working at a company where we used a vendor extensively in their mid-tier plan. We wanted an enterprise plan with more features, so we reached out to buy it.

So, their salesperson was shooting a penalty with no goalkeeper: All they needed to do was send an offer, and we would negotiate and close the deal.

Instead, they called my CTO multiple times, all at awkward times, like during his lunch. When he didn't pick up, they started calling HIS WIFE. The CTO eventually unplugged the vendor, and we had to find an alternative.

Ironically, another competing vendor we contacted did the same: they never stopped calling, they never wanted to schedule a proper meeting by email, and when you picked up, they didn't want you to hang up, even when you were busy.

I don't know how sales in tech can be so bad. Not even car dealers are like that. If I see a form stating, "Contact us for pricing," I am never doing it. I don't want to be grilled for 30 minutes on BDE calls: "Can you even pay us?" and then another hour of death by PowerPoint until they finally give you a price. That is, if they don't spam calls first.
by llamavore | 2025-09-02 02:35:37+00:00
I 100% agree. I hear a lot of pushback from em dash lovers on the semicolon; if you can learn to love an em dash, you can learn to use and love a semicolon.

Remember, meaning is based on common usage, so now em dash is slop-nonymous, semicolons can take on a more casual vibe.

For example: I love pizza — it's my comfort food.

Can just become: I love pizza; it's my comfort food.

For asides: I love pizza — especially pepperoni.

Can just become: I love pizza (especially pepperoni).
by kayson | 2025-09-02 02:35:51+00:00
Cheaper / smaller? I would say not likely. There is already an enormous amount of market pressure to make SRAM and DRAM smaller.

Device physics-wise, you could probably make SRAM faster by dropping the transistor threshold voltage. It would also make it harder / slower to write. The bigger downside is that it would have higher leakage power, but if it's a small portion of all the SRAM, it might be worth the tradeoff.

For DRAM, there isn't as much "device" involved because the storage element isn't transistor-based. You could probably make some design tradeoff in the sense amplifier to reduce read times by trading off write times, but I doubt it would make a significant change.
by nathane280 | 2025-09-02 02:36:01+00:00
For the lazy:

### Reduce Cognitive Load By:

*1. Simplify Conditionals*

``` // High cognitive load if val > someConstant && (condition2 || condition3) && (condition4 && !condition5)

// Low cognitive load isValid = val > someConstant isAllowed = condition2 || condition3 isSecure = condition4 && !condition5 if isValid && isAllowed && isSecure ```

*2. Use Early Returns*

``` // Nested ifs if isValid { if isSecure { doStuff() } }

// Early returns if !isValid { return } if !isSecure { return } doStuff() // Happy path is clear ```

*3. Prefer Deep Modules*

- *Deep module*: Simple interface, complex implementation (e.g., UNIX I/O with 5 methods) - *Shallow module*: Complex interface for simple functionality - Few deep classes > Many shallow classes

*4. Use Self-Describing Values*

``` // Numeric codes requiring mental mapping 401 // expired token? 403 // insufficient access?

// Self-describing { "code": "jwt_has_expired" } ```

*5. Apply DRY Carefully*

- Don't create abstractions too early - Avoid tight coupling between unrelated components

### Avoid These Anti-Patterns:

*1. Inheritance Chains*

``` AdminController extends UserController extends GuestController extends BaseController Use composition instead ```

*2. Too Many Layers*

- Unnecessary abstraction layers add indirection, not simplicity - Only add abstractions when you need actual need to

*3. Framework Magic*

- Keep business logic framework-agnostic - Use frameworks as libraries, not containers for your logic - New developers shouldn't need months to learn framework "magic"
by mitthrowaway2 | 2025-09-02 02:38:12+00:00
I'm not really confounding the issue. Banditry is entirely a function of social trust and how well the state maintains its monopoly on the use of violence. It's not a question of having armed escorts, bulletproof glass, a sidearm, a kevlar vest, and a faster transport than the bandits.

In a lower trust country, cars are the preferred target of bandit attack. Check out Russian dashcam videos to see how it's done.

And when push comes to shove, a good bandit worth their salt will disable cars in the wilderness by using spike strips.
by RandomBacon | 2025-09-02 02:38:43+00:00
^ This is a great example of an internal narrative which you could reframe (if you chose to).

Instead of framing my comment as negative, you could choose to see the positive: I give all bicyclists extra room and ask how I can even do better. Everyone should strive to learn and be safe on the road like this guy!

Note I didn't say it was to protect my property like you assumed. I've seen pictures of nasty crashes and don't want that happening to any bicyclists. Dealing with my insurance is secondary.

Notice that OP tries to make me look bad in his other comment, rather than answering my question on how I can help him and other cyclists.
by kamranjon | 2025-09-02 02:38:49+00:00
Does anyone know why this says "No javascript, no stylesheets, no trackers. Just your words."

But when you look at the github repo here: https://github.com/HermanMartinus/bearblog

It says the repo is 40% CSS and 31% Javascript? Am I misinterpreting what this means in this context?
by pglevy | 2025-09-02 02:39:23+00:00
Not an engineer but I think this is where my mind was going after reading the post. Seems like what will be useful is continuously generated "decision documentation." So the system has access to what has come before in a dynamic way. (Like some mix of RAG with knowledge graph + MCP?) Maybe even pre-outlining "decisions to be made," so if an agent is checking in, it could see there is something that needs to be figured out but hasn't been done yet.
by phendrenad2 | 2025-09-02 02:39:53+00:00
Yes. Next question.

The push to lock down the Google app ecosystem is just Google's eternal quest to lower costs.

Reviewing apps, even if automated, is expensive. A while ago they demanded that all app publishers get a DUNS number. It's obvious why they did this - they want to rely on the reputation of the company (easy, automated) rather than detect malicious apps (slow, may require manual intervention).

One important thing to note is, the threat model changes depending on the user. If a "poweruser" installs a card game app, and it suddenly pops up a screen that looks like their bank login, they're going to close the app and report it. Grandma might get confused and think she was checking her bank balance. So they need a complex set of tiers and warnings to ensure that only users who know what they're doing get apps that could do something like that.

But, we all know that the above scenario is hardly the worst thing an app can do. Thanks to mysteriously bad security, there have been all kinds of Android vulnerabilities that allow one app to spy on another app's data files. Maybe locking down the ecosystem so that only "good" apps can spy on one another is the win/win solution for them.
by hollerith | 2025-09-02 02:40:05+00:00
Investors look at how much money is already invested in a company in deciding whether to invest. I.e., investors pay close attention to market cap.

If Google's market cap were $25 trillion, practically nobody would buy Google stock (and practically everyone who already held the stock would immediately sell) because most investors do not believe that Google can ever pay enough dividends or buy back enough stock to justify such a high valuation.

A company's market cap is a collective estimate of how much money the company will to return to investors in the future. When the company is publicly-traded in an open informational regime such as the US, this collective estimate is usually quite "accurate" in the sense that it is very difficult for any single analyst or single team of analysts to improve on the estimate.

An investor can make a big bet on a small company, yes, but the market cap of a company is more than just an indication of how much money has been bet on the company: it also mean that every investor (big or small) who still holds the stock believes that the expected amount of money that company will return to shareholders exceeds the market cap: if there were a holder of Google stock that did not believe that, he would convert the shares into treasury bills or cash in the bank.
by llamavore | 2025-09-02 02:41:26+00:00
I agree with this too, I have read a lot of academic stuff with - em dashes and it reads like the author doesn't know how to write and is just translating spoken word to text.

When you are talking, an aside can make a lot of sense because you are thinking and speaking in real time. When you write you have the luxury of time to reformulate your words more precisely. Em dashes are best kept for prose that mimics speech rather than constructing logical text.

It's no coincidence that em dashes are rare in legal texts because they are too imprecise. Where as semicolons are extremely common in legal texts.

The S in semicolon stands for S-Tier. Maybe the E in em dash stands for E-Tier?

lolz
by boznz | 2025-09-02 02:41:28+00:00
I remember my first book. I spent freakishly little time working on the cover, blurb, keywords and promotion before publishing it, because, well, who needs that shit, it will obviously sell itself! So I published it and opened my newly minted Amazon author metrics page daily as I waited for it to take off. I waited, and I waited, two months I waited and not one sale! three years later I have sold a few dozen, though it does seem popular at the local library.

This is how I learnt why marketing and promotion (and I guess luck) are everything and without being an influencer or spending money to get it noticed the algorithm will forever ignore you. Great to see these amazing marketing theories but you need to get noticed first.
by soared | 2025-09-02 02:42:39+00:00
Anthropic founder described it as: if each model were a company, they be hugely profitable. It looks bad since when the model you trained in 2024 is generating net positive revenue, you’re also training a more expensive model for 2025 that won’t generate revenue until then. So currently, they’re always burning more cash than they’re bringing in, under the expectation that every model will increase revenue even more. Who knows how long that lasts, but it’s working so far.

Paraphrase is from the podcast he was in with the stripe founder, cheeky pints I think
by galaxyLogic | 2025-09-02 02:42:58+00:00
True. Personally when I write I do like to always start the next chapter or whatever is the "unit" or "task". But then stop. The units for the writer are probnably not the same as for the reader. But they serve the same purpose, taking a break, letting you think a bit about what was done and what will be done next.

There is a rhythm. We live one day at a time. We tell one story at a time. We post one HN post at a time. :-)
by gerdesj | 2025-09-02 02:43:59+00:00
There is rather more to type than the em dash, kicking off with the difference between say a typeface and a font (or fount). Why not get into leading and kerning and the other stuff? Widows and orphans anyone?

Getting your knickers in a twist over a minor typographical construction is rather contrived as an indicator of a non human author of a text. It will do for now but won't tomorrow.

I can mostly spot LLM output on sight but I can be fooled. I never use silly rules like "em-dash => LLM". That's just silly.
by platevoltage | 2025-09-02 02:44:03+00:00
I mean, I was a Hackintosher 10 years. It was nice to be able to stuff $2000 worth of components into a case that I found in a dumpster, but these days I deal with The “apple tax” to not have to put up with my OS treating me like a walking microtransaction.

I will agree that the ram/ssd factory upgrades are horrendously priced. Other than that, I don’t see their pricing as unfair at all.
by tobiasbrandy | 2025-09-02 02:44:09+00:00
Location: Buenos Aires, Argentina (UTC-3)

Remote: Yes (comfortable with Americas/Europe time zones)

Willing to relocate: Yes

Technologies: Rust (preferred), Go, Python, TypeScript, Java, C, Haskell, Aurora PostgreSQL, DynamoDB, BigQuery, Cloud (AWS/GCP), Docker Terraform/CDK

Résumé/CV: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1zXyFtTbIhrvcrF53j6-SAq4OVAx...

CEO Recommendation Letter: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1nqeT4BbMqed-7TdhAxx5bSPlOJ9...

LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/tobiasbrandy

GitHub: https://github.com/tobiasbrandy

Email: tobiasmbrandy@gmail.com

Backend and data engineer. At Waterplan (YC S21) I grew from backend engineer to Data Engineering Lead and then Lead of Innovation. I managed a 7-person cross-functional team of five engineers and two water scientists. I built the company-wide data lake and unified analytics on BigQuery for reliable self-serve reporting. I led the development of an automated risk-analysis and water-evidence pipeline that combined expert methodology with AI. Results: over 80% accuracy and about 50% less expert effort.

Looking for a hands-on backend, infrastructure or systems role, ideally in Rust or Go. Strong in backend and data today and aiming to grow deeper into infrastructure and systems programming. BEng+MEng in Software Engineering from ITBA. Graduated first in class (Isidoro Marin Award).
by redditor98654 | 2025-09-02 02:44:37+00:00
They thought Alexa will enable users to buy more from Amazon just by voice. But most users turned out like me. I would not spend a single dollar on Amazon without actually seeing the item on my mobile or desktop. I wouldn’t even add to cart via Alexa. That’s not an ideal user for device and service that requires hundreds of millions to run.
by can16358p | 2025-09-02 02:44:52+00:00
Not to play devil's advocate here and also IANAL but:

If (as as it is) Apple is still controlling apps via notarizarion/digitally signing apps of and recognizing developers, and if the app is developed for something that would land Apple in legal trouble (e.g. it makes it easy to freely and illegally download music and Apple also has legal contracts with record labels as they have Apple Music, and not only legal but it also affects Apple's own music revenue too) as the app has passed explicit notarization of Apple (in other words: Apple "knowlingly" allowed them and greenlighted them by notarizing the app), wouldn't it cause legal trouble for Apple?

For that, it's the logical behavior for a company like Apple to stop allowing the app.

Again, I'm not supporting it, but I can imagine where it's coming from and that makes sense from a business perspective as torrenting on mobile has almost no legal use cases. We all know you have not installed it to download your favorite Linux distro to your iPhone.
by fredspace | 2025-09-02 02:45:54+00:00
I see it now. A startup could launch a massive amount of mice into space and then sell them online as astronaut mice. Or maybe sendyourshittothemoon.com where you’d just collect trashbags full of people’s random crap they want on the moon, and just build a hella big slingshot to send it in the moon’s general direction. Because the business plan is “space”.
by WatchDog | 2025-09-02 02:46:24+00:00
Some more context from the linked github issue[0], the app was removed because of European sanctions against Russia, it seems that the app developer who now lives in Malta, has a Russian background.

What is interesting is that it's Apple enforcing these sanctions, rather than AltStore.

The amount of control that Apple exercises over these alternative app stores, really does seem to be against the spirit of the DMA.

[0]: https://github.com/XITRIX/iTorrent/issues/401#issuecomment-3...
by bee_rider | 2025-09-02 02:46:48+00:00
I use them occasionally and have never been falsely accused of being an LLM.

The stakes are a bit different for students unfortunately, who who’ll have their writing passed through some snake oil AI detector arbitrarily. This is unfortunate because “learning how not to trigger an AI detector” is a totally useless skill.

Generally, I don’t think we need AI detection. We need dumb bullshit detection. Humans and LLMs can both generate that. If people can use an LLM in a way that doesn’t generate dumb bullshit, I’m happy to read it.
by treetalker | 2025-09-02 02:46:50+00:00
I presumed it would be autobiographical but apparently there will be a healthy dose of religion and politics instead.

> During his chat with Kurth, Thiel shared his views on the Ten Commandments and identified which ones he believes are the most significant.

> "The Ten Commandments, the two most important are the first and last on the list. The first commandment is, you should worship God," Thiel reportedly told attendees. "The tenth commandment is, you should not covet the things that belong to your neighbor. In some ways, the first commandment is to look up, and the tenth commandment is you do not look around. And if you're too much focused horizontally on all the people around you, that's sort of the bad version you get caught up in."

Funny, but perhaps not surprising, that the billionaire Christian behind Palantir should so read the Ten Commandments and be so concerned with worshipping God and "don't touch my stuff." I'm reminded of Matthew 22:36-40: it boils down to two commandments, love God and love your neighbor as yourself.
by jauntywundrkind | 2025-09-02 02:47:15+00:00
DC is a wonderful amazing city, and you'd have to be a coward or a fool to be afraid of it.

In general crime everywhere is way down. But Americans are being cowed into fear. It's the phones, the social media, the drumbeat of insanity by the domestic Advanced Persistent Threat extremists & mal-archists & disinfoers. It's the police & their godforsaken union. It's social media always excited for salacious tales of the bad to get clicks.

Better said:

> Fear of crime: an unholy alliance between politicians that need a cudgel, local news that needs clicks, social media's ability to share viral anecdotal crime stories, police that need justification to exist, and the fact that police/surveillance tech is a multi-billion dollar industry, and racism.

https://bsky.app/profile/mguariglia.bsky.social/post/3lxskib...

Covering a Pew study on crime rates & peoples perception of crime, https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/04/24/what-the-...

Different topic, but I want to mention the National Guard keeps getting frelling hosed by the White House in this. Deployments are for 29 days, just shy of when long term deployment status kicks in, then the White House just redeploys them again. Incredible disrespect to the troops, beyond just that they have absolutely nothing to do in DC & no one wants them there. https://www.rawstory.com/trump-infuriating-29-day-orders/
by chowells | 2025-09-02 02:47:15+00:00
This is a very business-centric viewpoint. I publish a small number of open-source libraries. They are not a business. I have no interest in making them a business. In fact, the idea of making them a business is repellent. They're just code for doing some tasks more easily than starting from scratch.

I made some of them because I needed them, and had no reason to own them. I made some because I thought another library was poorly designed and I could demonstrate a better way. I didn't make any because I wanted money or recognition. I don't care who uses them, or how. It is literally impossible for a user to do anything with any of them that harms me.

I am deeply suspicious of any world view that declares it bad when people use code I have released for free. I released it so people would use it. Good for them!
by godelski | 2025-09-02 02:47:34+00:00
It's worth noting that many of those projects were the famous versions of papers, ones that were successful through scale rather than through innovation. I'll give a good example, here's essentially the same architecture as the 16x16 words ViT paper but a year earlier[0]. It's not even the first, they even mention two other works that used transformers on images. I'm all for scaling and it is important, but there's tons of papers like this that are greatly overshadowed because someone just scaled up and got a better benchmark. It's been getting out of hand...

Fuck... I'm starting to sound like Schmidhuber

[0] https://arxiv.org/abs/1911.03584
by shoobiedoo | 2025-09-02 02:47:44+00:00
Maybe. I fell in love with them after reading Death on the Installment Plan by Celine, where he crams every sentence with them (and sequences of periods that have a similar effect). I found out later that he purposefully did that as a jab at Proust's writing where he did the exact opposite-- sentences a page and a half long with only commas and parenthesis.
by ThrowMeAway1618 | 2025-09-02 02:47:47+00:00
>Might only be available in Europe & Africa though.

Yep. We just need to move Manhattan there. Problem solved.

It's crazy how some people think there's no solution when the solution is "clear as an unmuddied lake...As clear as an azure sky of deepest summer."[0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Clockwork_Orange_(film)