MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ninetyninenine | 2025-09-28 13:53:39+00:00
Typescript types (and Idris) are Turing complete. You can actually get typescript types to run doom.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0mCsluv5FXA&t

Idris on the other hand is SPECIFICALLY designed so types and the program live in the same language. See the documentation intro: https://www.idris-lang.org/pages/example.html

THe powerful thing about these languages is that they can prove your program correct. For testing you can never verify your program to be correct.

Testing is a statistical sampling technique. To verify a program as correct via tests you have to test every possible input and output combination of your program, which is impractical. So instead people write tests for a subset of the possibilities which ONLY verifies the program as correct for that subset. Think about it. If you have a function:

def add(x: int, y: int) -> int

How would you verify this program is 100% correct? You have to test every possible combination of x, y and add(x, y). But instead you test like 3 or 4 possibilities in your unit tests and this helps with the overall safety of the program because of statistical sampling. If a small sample of the logic is correct, it says something about the entire population of the logic..

Types on the other hand prove your program correct.

def add(x: int, y: int) -> int: return x + y

If the above is type checked, your program is proven correct for ALL possible types. If those types are made more advanced via being programmable, then it becomes possible for type checking to prove your ENTIRE program correct.

Imagine:

def add<A: addable < 4, B: addable < 4>(x: A, y: B) -> A + B: return x + y

With a type checker that can analyze the above you can create a add function that at most can take an int that is < 4 and return an int that is < 8. Thereby verifying even more correctness of your addition function.

Python on the other hand doesn't really have type checking. It has type hints. Those type hints can de defined in the same language space as python. So a type checker must read python to a limited extent in order to get the types. Python at the same time can also read those same types. It's just that python doesn't do any type checking with the types while the type checker doesn't do anything with the python code other than typecheck it.

Right now though, for most typecheckers, if you create a function in python that returns a typehint, the typechecker is not powerful enough to execute that function to find the final type. But this can certainly be done if there was a will because Idris has already done this.
by codedokode | 2025-09-28 13:53:52+00:00
No. If you masquerade as HTTPS you can set your SNI to trump.example.com or republicans.example.com and nobody would dare to slow down this traffic. If you have a custom, detectable protocol then you already lost the game.

There is not only censorship, but traffic shaping when some apps are given a slow lane to speed up other apps. By making your protocol identifiable you gain nothing good.
by ImPostingOnHN | 2025-09-28 13:54:28+00:00
More likely, based on the evidence, is more lies by the administration on the pile of tens of thousands, and another example of actual censorship by the administration historically most famous for it.

For an administration which claims that their primary goal is removing bureaucracy and making the government more efficient and effective, these whistleblower reports describing the exact opposite are pretty damning, and the objective is clear to all.
by goku12 | 2025-09-28 13:55:04+00:00
> Wind power is bad, and "clean coal" is good.

Can somebody explain the psychology behind these beliefs? I'm pretty sure they know how coal is mined. They must surely have heard about the black lung disease and COPD. Where does this 'clean coal' concept come from? And if that's about the products of coal burning, is it too hard to imagine breathing in hot air containing soot, fly ash, some obnoxious oxides, some unburnt VOCs and some extra CO2? Where have they seen perfect combustion of coal?

Ultimately, what is their motivation to reject their own experiences and endorse such wishful thinking? Why do they choose ideas that harm them? I'm looking for an answer that doesn't assume that they're stupid or insane.
Ask HN: Is frontal lisp "s" the new cool?
by mandown2308 | 2025-09-28 13:56:30+00:00
I was watching Youtube and couldn't help but notice the narrators would use frontal lisp to pronounce "s," in two completely unrelated videos.

1. https://youtu.be/0aSBk5bKG3U

2. https://youtu.be/zV9v0RIE-iI

Is this the new cool that I'm not aware of? Or some kind of social programming?
by lioeters | 2025-09-28 13:57:01+00:00
> Non-Centralisation

I imagine this term was used because it was before everything got centralized, so there was no need to "de-"centralize yet.

> client/server model

The original design of the WorldWideWeb application was a web browser and editor, which I think implies that anyone using it could run a server as easily as browsing other people's servers.

Edit: Not totally sure, but it does seem there was an HTTP server bundled with the browser/editor.

How to make a WWW server (1992) - https://www.w3.org/History/19921103-hypertext/hypertext/WWW/...

WWW Daemon user guide - https://www.w3.org/History/19921103-hypertext/hypertext/WWW/...
by ninetyninenine | 2025-09-28 13:57:14+00:00
No too my knowledge nothing is strict about a proofing system because like I said it becomes hard to do. It could be useful for ultra safe software but for most cases the complexity isn't worth it.

But that doesn't mean it's not useful to have this capability as part of your typesystem. It just doesn't need to be fully utilized.

You don't need to program a type that proves everything correct. You can program and make sure aspects of the program are MORE correct than just plain old types. typescript is a language that does this and it is very common to find types in typescript that are more "proofy" than regular types in other languages.

See here: https://www.hacklewayne.com/dependent-types-in-typescript-se...

Typescript does this. Above there's a type that's only a couple of lines long that proves a string reversal function reverses a string. I think even going that deep is overkill but you can define things like Objects that must contain a key of a specific string where the value is either a string or a number. And then you can create a function that dynamically specifies the value of the key in TS.

I think TS is a good example of a language that practically uses proof based types. The syntax is terrible enough that it prevents people from going overboard with it and the result is the most practical application of proof based typing that I seen. What typescript tells us that proof based typing need only be sprinkled throughout your code, it shouldn't take it all over.
by zbentley | 2025-09-28 13:57:15+00:00
Sure, but that is as vacuously true as saying “router keeps getting hacked? Just unplug it from the internet.”

Huge numbers of businesses want to use AI in the “hey, watch my inbox and send bills to all the vendors who email me” or “get a count of all the work tickets closed across the company in the last hour and add that to a spreadsheet in sharepoint” variety of automation tasks.

Whether those are good ideas or appropriate use-cases for AI is a separate question.
by 1dom | 2025-09-28 13:57:34+00:00
> In contrast, email has been more successful thus far at resisting being walled off.

The point of e-mail was electronic mail: instantly sending text multimedia digitally. It's not necessarily been "walled off", but I think the wide spread adoption of things like Whatsapp, Facebook Messenger, Snapchat, MSN, ICQ and even SMS all happened because e-mail wasn't really convenient enough for instantly sending multimedia digitally at the time.

Now though, it would be an interesting experiment to force all chat/messaging apps to become fancy e-mail clients for e2e encrypted e-mails that they can't access.

The Web has fared better than e-mail IMO: it's far easier to find a website than it is to find an e-mail address, and people are far likely to go to something other than e-mail for the things e-mail can do.
by sunshinesnacks | 2025-09-28 13:57:53+00:00
Voc is just the open circuit voltage measured at the terminals (plugs). “Nameplate” Voc is at standard test conditions (STC) of 1000 W/m^2, 25 deg C cell temperature, and a standard are mass/spectrum. The combo of 1000 W/m^2 and 25 C cell temp is not common in the real world in most climates, but still happens. Even relatively hot climates can have times in winter that exceed nameplate Voc if inverters turn off (making the panels go to open circuit).
by adrian_b | 2025-09-28 13:59:54+00:00
Coil antennas can have thousands of turns.

It is not the number of turns that matters to distinguish coil antennas from motors, though indeed a high number of turns in both motors and antennas leads to a high inductance, which ensures that any resonance frequencies will be low, so a received radio signal of high frequency will not be amplified by a resonance.

The magnetic circuit of a coil antenna has a very big air gap, because its ferromagnetic core usually has the form of a cylinder or of a prism and the magnetic circuit closes through the air between the opposite ends of the core.

The magnetic circuit of a motor has only small air gaps between stator and rotor, which are required to allow the rotor movements. Because of the small air gaps, the inductance of a motor winding is much higher than the inductance of a coil antenna with the same number of turns and using a ferromagnetic core made of the same material.
by yazaddaruvala | 2025-09-28 14:00:44+00:00
Self driving cars have existed for at least a year now. It only took a decade of “1 years away” but it exists now, and will likely require another decade of scaling up the hardware.

I think AGI is going to follow a similar trend. A decade of being “1 years away”. Meanwhile, unlike self driving the industry is preemptively solving the scaling up of hardware concurrently.
by ImPostingOnHN | 2025-09-28 14:01:08+00:00
Maybe, but whistleblower reports are solid evidence on their own, multiple corroborating witness statements even moreso. That's even if they aren't going up against the administration most infamous for lying and censorship, which obviously strengthens the whistleblowers' cases.

For an administration which claims that their primary goals are removing dysfunction and bureaucracy, and making the government more efficient and effective, these whistleblower reports describing the exact opposite are pretty damning, and the objective is clear to all.

Unless we get evidence to the contrary, the most likely explanation is that the administration most infamous for censoring and lying is censoring and lying.
by mapt | 2025-09-28 14:01:25+00:00
Specific orbits (732km with a 28 degree inclination and 130 degree longitude of the ascending node), but impacts also instantaneously spread debris out over anything close to any of those numbers (700-760, 27-29, 125-135); most debris get spread not in a normal distribution but in a bimodal distribution between the orbital elements of the two impactors, with an additional perimeter of debris kicked out with some random modest dV in every direction from the explosion according to how much impact energy they absorbed. To start with.

But then, debris start to decay, and they decay unevenly, polluting all orbits lower than that. As this debris spreads to a crowded lower orbit it generates additional collisions.

Orbits are cleared to lower orbits according to mass cross section at roughly 10x the rate for every 100km altitude drop. So everything that decays from an accumulation of higher orbits has to eventually pass through a 300km circular orbit, but it's relatively safe because it spends so little time there.

Going full exponential cascade at 1000km might increase the number of impactors by a millionfold, though, which then proceed to rain down over the years on lower orbits.
by alganet | 2025-09-28 14:01:47+00:00
Fair enough, you couldn't have something like the vocalist cueing the bassist and the drummer picking it up out of thing air and doing an improvised roll, like it happens here:

https://youtu.be/eg_rgm9VDAw?t=1597

The drummer takes a little bit more than a second to react to it (higher than a lot of stream delays by the way, but I can see how the stacking could mess it up).

That is, however, a bunch of experienced jazz musicians improvising at a high level. In most jams, these conversations happen very often on the next bar (1 and 2 and 3 and 4 and you react on the next 1).

You can see a drummer using the end of a bar to cue the flourish used on the organ in this part, for example:

https://youtu.be/jhicDUgXyNg&t=587s

It takes multiple seconds for the organist to recognize the cue, that is actually for the next bar, then he joins in. This sort of stuff is actually doable just with just video chat and OBS.

Please also note that the product's example workflow is actually worse in that "reaction jammyness" regard than what I proposed:

> The performer receives the track early, and waits the rest of the delay period to play it

This is designed for recording. It sounds more like a studio arrangement in which you have to record your part than a jam session.

> The fidelity of the live stream isn't high enough to record

Seems like an incomplete product. OBS can already record multi-tracks and monitor tracks, which you can leverage to produce high quality artifact recordings. I use to sync them manually using a DAW, but with all those auto-timers, it's a surprise it doesn't do it automatically.
by fuzzfactor | 2025-09-28 14:01:57+00:00
What a co-incidence. In the USA the GDP goes up mainly from consumers spending, and business spending to a lesser extent. Otherwise not in relation to any wealth being created or value added by those people and enterprises.

If any.

Heavily weighted toward consumers, OTOH businesses have to spend a fortune before they can make a dent in GDP.

Over any one reporting period, don't worry those periods don't last forever.
by gyomu | 2025-09-28 14:02:29+00:00
> I'm pretty sure they know how coal is mined. They must surely have heard about the black lung disease and COPD

They do not, they have not, and they do not care. Those people livre purely in the world of words and rhetoric, where the only thing that matters is whether what you say gets a reaction out of people that will lead to you getting more power. Truth is what sounds good.

I know, as a rational educated person it is terrifying to realize that there are human beings who score 0% on the “cares about science and logic and history and truth” scales, but that is the beauty and horror of the human condition - there are many, many people out there whose thinking and mode of operation will be entirely alien to you.

> Can somebody explain the psychology behind these beliefs?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Après_moi,_le_déluge
by CaptainOfCoit | 2025-09-28 14:02:34+00:00
Fun quip but doesn't seem to be true in practice (if we're talking strictly smartphones, not tablets).

PS4 specs: ~1.84 TFLOPS FP32, 18 GCN CUs @ 800 MHz, 8 GB GDDR5 @ 176 GB/s.

I think maybe some released-yesterday phone might get close on spikes/bursts, but not on any sustained loads, like gaming, nor would the beat the PS4 on image quality either.
by crazygringo | 2025-09-28 14:03:42+00:00
> Given consistent trends of exponential performance improvements over many years and across many industries, it would be extremely surprising if these improvements suddenly stopped.

I'm sure people were saying that about commercial airline speeds in the 1970's too.

But a lot of technologies turn out to be S-shaped, not purely exponential, because there are limiting factors.

With LLM's at the moment, the limiting factors might turn out to be training data, cost, or inherent limits of the transformer approach and the fact that LLM's fundamentally cannot learn outside of their context window. Or a combination of all of these.

The tricky thing about S curves is, you never know where you are on them until the slowdown actually happens. Are we still only in the beginning of the growth part? Or the middle where improvement is linear rather than exponential? And then the growth starts slowing...
by dragontamer | 2025-09-28 14:05:16+00:00
And does this set of tutorials give any idea of "best" or even "acceptable" moves?

There's no discussion of 2-point jump, 1-point jump, horse-move, diagonal move, loose play or connected/strong play in this set of tutorials. Or the value of 4th row (center-oriented influence play) vs 3rd row (edge-oriented territorial play). I'm not seeing any discussion on invasions or defense of invasions.

-------

I'm like 9kyu. I'm no expert. But I'm certainly at the level where tactical geniuses beat me in many positions, but I just wreck a lot of n00bs in the opening, and hold out until the ending.

The good news about opening theory or middle-game theory is that if the opponent is playing tenuki (ie: they ignore your most recent move and play somewhere else on the board), you're probably focused on the incorrect area.

On the other hand, if you're up vs a weaker player, YOU need to be the one playing tenuki. Its surprising how awful players are at double-digit kyu is at this. You will only see tenuki opportunities if you have superior opening/middle game skills than your opponent.
by CaptainOfCoit | 2025-09-28 14:05:49+00:00
Can't answer about China nor Russia, as I'm not very familiar with how their governance works, but in countries with democracy, the government is supposed to be representative of the population (which may or may not actually be the case, it's the idea at least).

Contrast that with companies and corporations, where the basic idea is "Company makes money, our decisions should support that".

I sure know where I'd put my eggs on who could potentially run AGI best, considering the options. But I'm also a believer in democracy, and would ever prefer autocracy by a government than autocracy run by companies.

So assuming worst case (we're all be living under AGI that steers us into fascism and autocracy), I'd still rather that be under entities (supposedly) controlled by people, rather than entities under shareholders and CEOs.
by stockresearcher | 2025-09-28 14:05:49+00:00
The Glen Canyon Dam was engineered incorrectly and is not compatible with the actual wording of the compact. It has to go.

First, the compact explicitly states that power generation is not an acceptable use of river water. If you can make it happen, bonus! If you can’t, too bad. No decision-making, no planning, nothing is allowed to take power generation into account.

Second, a plain reading of the compact would say that the emergency outlets on the dam must be used even if they destroy the dam. The dam is upstream of Lee’s Ferry (barely) and the compact prohibits obstructing the allocated lower basin flows upstream of Lee’s Ferry. It also says that lower basin water claims must be taken from lower basin reservoirs as long as they contain more than 5 million acre feet of water. Lake Powell is a lower basin reservoir, so water must be pulled from it before the upper basin reservoirs can be forced to release water to get the Lake Powell water level high enough to use the intended outlets.
by LegionMammal978 | 2025-09-28 14:05:56+00:00
Many people seem to assert that "constant relative growth in capabilities/sales/whatever" is a totally reasonable (or even obvious or inevitable) prior assumption, and then point to "OMG relative growth produces an exponential curve!" as the rest of their argument. And at least the AI 2027 people tried to one-up that by asserting an increasing relative growth rate to produce a superexponential curve.

I'd be a fool to say that we'll ever hit a hard plateau in AI capabilities, but I'll have a hard time believing any projected exponential-growth-to-infinity until I see it with my own eyes.
by ninetyninenine | 2025-09-28 14:06:00+00:00
There are downsides. But the upsides outweigh the downsides.

I'm not a consumer of APIs. I've done game programming, robotics, embedded system development (with C++ and rust), (web development frontend with react/without react, with jquery, with angurar, with typescript, with js, zod) (web development backend with golang, haskell, nodejs typescript, and lots and lots of python with many of the most popular frameworks with flask + sqlalchemy, django, FastApi + pydantic, )

I've done a lot. I can tell you. If you don't see how types outweigh untyped languages, you're a programmer with experience heavily weighed toward untyped programming. You don't have balanced experience to make a good judgement. Usually these people have a "data scientist" background. Data analyst or data scientist or machine learning engineers... etc. These guys start programing heavily in the python world WITHOUT types and they develop unbalanced opinions shaped by their initial styles of programming. If this describes you, then stop and think... I'm probably right.
by IshKebab | 2025-09-28 14:06:15+00:00
> Again we can observe a similar trend, with the latest GPT-5 already astonishingly close to human performance:

Yes but only if you measure "performance" as "better than the other option more than 50% of the time" which is a terrible way to measure performance, especially for bullshitting AI.

Imagine comparing chocolate brands. One is tastier than the other one 60% of the time. Clear winner right? Yeah except it's also deadly poisonous 5% of the time. Still tastier on average though!
by somenameforme | 2025-09-28 14:06:44+00:00
FWIW this isn't a path to success in chess, at least not for a human. There's something like 31 average moves per position in chess. So calculating just 5 moves deep would be 31^10 or about 820 billion positions. In fact even just 2 moves deep would be 31^4 = about a million positions. I'm a relatively strong player and ballparking my speed by playing through the famous Morphy opera house game in my mind - I'm hitting around 2-3 positions per second, in a game I know intimately.

Progress in chess (and I assume Go) is about training your subconscious so that your mind naturally pushes you in the right direction with minimal effort. Think about something like writing. When you're writing something you aren't really thinking through each word in your vocabulary, comparing them, and picking one - it all just kind of flows without you even trying. The same thing happens with chess mastery.

This is why some people say you're not "really" playing chess before a rather high rating. Less experienced players will struggle to simply not leave material hanging. Then as they improve that will no longer be an issue but then they'll still struggle to avoid simple tactical ideas. But once you move comfortably beyond that phase, the game becomes much more about the things people want it to be about - strategy, plans, big picture stuff that's lots of fun. It's one of the way the game draws you in - it gets more and more addictive, and rewarding, the better you become at it!
by layer8 | 2025-09-28 14:08:05+00:00
Klammeraffe is a genus of monkey, called spider monkeys [0] in English. “Klammer” here means “clinging”, because these monkeys use their long tail similar to their arms to hold on to branches. “Klammeraffe” has no relation to brackets.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spider_monkey
by dcre | 2025-09-28 14:08:16+00:00
I understand that it uses ML models. My point is that it is an end-user application making use of such models. It is recording audio, passing it to the model, and pasting in the resulting text to the focused input. The fact that the middle step happens to involve an ML model is not really intrinsic to anything the app does. If there was a good speech to text program that did not use ML, the app could use that instead and not really be any different.