MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by kashunstva | 2025-09-15 11:16:23+00:00
> Personally I think that reporting of correlations should be dropped altogether…

It really should be a shared responsibility to report and understand the meaning of statistically significant correlation. Unfortunately, few journalists seem to have much interest in understanding it. And given that their readership likely has about average (i.e poor) numeracy and iffy understanding of probability, it’s a bad combination. The widespread misunderstanding about the iterative way that science converges on truth also contributes to this problem.

That said, I would rather know about interesting findings such as this if for no other reason than to start digging for the original paper.
by lblume | 2025-09-15 11:17:57+00:00
That really stretches the meaning of "syntactic". Humans have thoroughly evaluated LLMs and discovered many patterns that very cleanly map to what they would consider real-world concepts. Semantic properties do not require any human-level understanding; a Python script has specific semantics one may use to discuss its properties, and it has become increasingly clear that LLMs can reason (as in derive knowable facts, extract logical conclusions, compare it to different alternatives; not having a conscious thought process involving them) about these scripts not just by their syntactic but also semantic properties (of course bounded and limited by Rice's theorem).
by bubblyworld | 2025-09-15 11:18:27+00:00
It's an infinite family of metrics - you provide an n (a positive integer) and get back a metric.

So if you pick n=1 you get d(x, y) = |x| + |y|, which is the taxicab metric. You can apply this metric to a Euclidean space of whatever dimension you like, just substituting the appropriate definition of |x| and |y|. For 1-dimensional space you would use |x| = abs(x[0]), for 2-dimensional space you would use |x| = sqrt(x[0]**2 + x[1]**2), etcetera. Hope that helps.
by elric | 2025-09-15 11:18:52+00:00
I doubt that's made any kind of environmental/ecological impact at all. The cheap, flimsy plastic carrier bags contain orders of magnitude less material than the reusable kind, and had a second life as a bin liner. Now I need to buy bin liners, which are usually made out of sturdier plastic on top of having to get a reusable bag.

Most of the plastic involved in getting food from farm to home isn't the carrier bag or even the food wrappers. It's the massive amount of plastic that pallets of goods are wrapped in for shipping, which happens several times throughout the supply chain.

We should focus on the latter, instead of the former. Pretty much all we're doing is virtue signalling and maybe hoping that it'll make a tiny difference.

Heck, even a marginal improvement in fuel efficiency of trucks delivering to grocery stores would probably do more than these plastic bag shennanigans.
by ramon156 | 2025-09-15 11:19:35+00:00
Cool stuff! I can see some GPT comments that can be removed

// Increased for better learning

this doesn't tell me anything

// Use the constants from lib.rs

const MAX_SEQ_LEN: usize = 80;

const EMBEDDING_DIM: usize = 128;

const HIDDEN_DIM: usize = 256;

these are already defined in lib.rs, why not use them (as the comment suggests)
by whstl | 2025-09-15 11:20:19+00:00
Interesting. My criteria for hiring is the opposite of this, and I wouldn't have it any other way. If someone is technically great but combative in an interview, they get a "strong no" from me.

It's nothing big: especially in a startup environment there will be situations where the product manager or another engineer will ask for changes, and I expect people to adapt, or at least to argue the merits of the change. Make no mistake, a lot of those people WERE able to adapt code-wise, and I was even praising them, but they did the changes while voicing concerns and complaining that my task "was badly defined, since I didn't tell them about possible future changes". One got very annoyed verbally at a small requisite change, even though we still had only used half the scheduled time, but we were almost finished with everything.

And this HAS paid off! This happened rarely, but more than half of those people got incredibly triggered by their rejections, and a couple even demanded talking directly with the team. In one case, we had someone coming to the company. It wasn't a lot, I must have interviewed over 200-300 people there, but it was significant.
by q3k | 2025-09-15 11:22:28+00:00
The code is only a projection of someone's mental model, which is what actually allows the project to succeed, especially in the long term.

That's why codebases die when they lose maintainers and forks often don't make it past the first few months.

LLM-generated code might work, but it's not backed by anyone's mental model. And the industry has had a long running term for code which is there but no-one understands it nor the reason behind it: legacy code.
by Aachen | 2025-09-15 11:23:03+00:00
Sending a .zip filled with all zeroes, so it compresses extremely well, is a well-known DoS historically (zip bomb, making the server run out of space in trying to read the archive)

You always need resource limits when dealing with untrusted data. RAM is one of the obvious ones. They could introduce a memory limit parameter; require passing --long with a value equal to or greater than what the stream requires to successfully decompress; require seeking support for the input stream so they can look back that way (TMTO); fall back to using temp files; or interactively prompt the user if there's a terminal attached. Lots of options, each with pros and cons of course, that would all allow a scenario where the required information for the decoder is stored in the compressed data file
by mapt | 2025-09-15 11:23:07+00:00
There are several separate problems here.

One is "People don't like bags stuck in the branches of trees and clogging waterways in their parks". Lightweight plastic shopping bags are so thin that a light breeze can pick them up and loft them up into the air easily. They cost approximately nothing - <2 cents retail, significantly less in bulk. It is incredibly expensive by comparison to pay someone to remove them from tree branches and riparian zones - tens of dollars in wages, equipment, and liability insurance. This is a pragmatic reason why municipalities passed bag taxes or bans. Forcing people to use paper or heavier-weight plastic bags that don't blow in the wind, even if they're not in practice "reusable", solves this one. Taxing them 5 cents or 10 cents or 25 cents per bag nudges a high percentage away.
by menaerus | 2025-09-15 11:23:17+00:00
We are talking about the memory bandwidth available to the CPU cores and not all the co-processors/accelerators present in the SoC so you're pulling in the argument that is not valid.

https://web.archive.org/web/20240902200818/https://www.anand...

> While 243GB/s is massive, and overshadows any other design in the industry, it’s still quite far from the 409GB/s the chip is capable of.

> That begs the question, why does the M1 Max have such massive bandwidth? The GPU naturally comes to mind, however in my testing, I’ve had extreme trouble to find workloads that would stress the GPU sufficiently to take advantage of the available bandwidth.

> Granted, this is also an issue of lacking workloads, but for actual 3D rendering and benchmarks, I haven’t seen the GPU use more than 90GB/s (measured via system performance counters)
by jaza | 2025-09-15 11:24:23+00:00
Errr... a circle is a shape in Euclidean geometry. Pi is a property of that shape in that geometry system. The OP article steps outside of Euclidean geometry. It discusses "circles" that aren't really circles. Therefore, the "pi's" that it discusses also aren't really pi's.

My conclusion therefore isn't "we have the best pi", but is rather "we have the only pi", because pi is simply not applicable, as soon as you alter the rules of there being a 2-dimensional plane and there being real-world distance, that the definition of pi depends on.

Anyway, I am not a mathematician, maybe I'm just too stuck in the boring old real world to get it!
by kragen | 2025-09-15 11:25:02+00:00
If you want to go deeper, this is a subject with an immense number of connections. But to find them you'll probably have to know what people call them.

You can read more about the curves of Lamé plotted in this article at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superellipse. If you're in Sweden, the layout of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergels_torg is a superellipse design by Piet Hein. Martin Gardner wrote a delightful column about this in the September 01965 Scientific American: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/mathematical-game... "The superellipse: a curve that lies between the ellipse and the rectangle" which I don't have a copy of, except the slightly corrupted copy at https://piethein.com/superellipse/. It begins lyrically:

> Civilized man is surrounded on all sides, indoors and out, by a subtle, seldom-noticed conflict between two ancient ways of shaping things: the orthogonal and the round. Cars on circular wheels, guided by hands on circular steering wheels, move along streets that intersect like the lines of a rectangular lattice. Buildings and houses are made up mostly of right angles, relieved occasionally by circular domes and windows. At rectangular or circular tables, with rectangular napkins on our laps, we eat from circular plates and drink from glasses with circular cross sections. We light cylindrical cigarettes with matches torn from rectangular packs, and we pay the rectangular bill with rectangular bank notes and circular coins.

This column is included in one of Martin Gardner's books, which is where I read it in my childhood.

Superquadrics are a generalization of the three-dimensional case (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superquadrics); Ed Mackey's 01987 "Superquadrics" screensaver is included in xscreensaver, which you can easily install if you're running Debian or Android with F-Droid: https://f-droid.org/en/packages/org.jwz.xscreensaver/

Viewed as level sets of vector norms (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norm_(mathematics)) these curves are called "balls": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ball_(mathematics)#In_normed_v.... Vector norms are fundamental to approximation theory, and because people often do math on measurements from the real world [citation needed] which are always imprecise [citation needed], approximation theory is pretty widely applicable. It's often convenient to use one of the alternative norms mentioned in Michał's article for your proofs.
by K0balt | 2025-09-15 11:25:21+00:00
It was a pretty wild ride, for an arvix paper lol. Easily as good as a provocative work of fiction, It had me questioning my marriage briefly until I rolled over and looked at my toddler, and briefly thought “holy shirt this runs deep!” (And then obviously broke out of the spell of the story lol)

Still, it’s a testament to the level of emotional damage that these scams must levy on their actual victims.
by squigz | 2025-09-15 11:25:29+00:00
An assumption I disagree with wholeheartedly. People say and do even more heinous shit in person all the time. You yourself said your locals have become more aggressive. Do you think that if we were like, "Hey, if you wanna continue to talk shit, you have to tell us your name" they'll just be like "oh okay you know what you're right I was wrong I love minorities" or do you think they'll just become even more aggressive? Do you think that'll lead to more understanding between people? Or just more violence against minorities?
by fireflash38 | 2025-09-15 11:27:31+00:00
For casual bakers, exact precision using grams can help... Or it might not matter at all. You'd need to have everything else be as precise for it to matter. Are you weighing your eggs? Do you adjust based on the humidity of the air? Do you know all of the hot spots in your oven and is the thermometer accurate?

It's science, but ya gotta realize you arent baking a sphere in a vacuum ya know?

At least a gram is a gram is a gram everywhere in the world!
by Snuggly73 | 2025-09-15 11:27:55+00:00
Congrats - there is a very small problem with the LLM - its reusing transformer blocks and you want to use different instances of them.

Its a very cool excercise, I did the same with Zig and MLX a while back, so I can get a nice foundation, but since then as I got hooked and kept adding stuff to it, switched to Pytorch/Transformers.
by aleph_minus_one | 2025-09-15 11:28:32+00:00
> We should teach/learn resisting scams in school. Far more useful than any other subject.

A lot of people actually are scammers - and this is socially accepted. What is the difference between the "everyday scams" and the scams from this article is rather the scope.

Thus, to make people scam-resistant, you have to make them insanely distrusting about everybody in society (or to express it more directly: make the people paranoid and near-schizophrenic), including the government, the politicians etc.

Since school serves an agenda, this is of course not done.
by lifthrasiir | 2025-09-15 11:29:53+00:00
It is stored in the metadata [1], but anything larger than 8 MiB is not guaranteed to be supported. So there has to be an out-of-band agreement between compressor and decompressor.

[1] https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc8878#name-window-de...
Ask HN: Costs for US sales tax compliance for a two-sided marketplace
by throway-9998888 | 2025-09-15 11:30:37+00:00
I'm consulting for a US-only startup that has approximately 2000 sellers. We don't yet facilitate payments on site because we are worried about not being sales tax compliant. But now we're thinking about biting the bullet.

Assuming we sell into all states and that our transaction volume will reach $10 million USD, what would be the cost of calculating, collecting, and remitting sales tax to the relevant states, counties, and cities?

Assume too that we only sell one type of product (i.e. we are a specialist marketplace not a general one).

It might be worth separating into setup and recurring costs.

Any surprises in store? Or recommendations in terms of tooling or vendors?
by throwawayffffas | 2025-09-15 11:31:46+00:00
> Basically you can fill a white plastic bag with 1.25 litre water bottles to the extent no more can physically fit in the bag and it will be safe to carry and reuse 50 times.

Yeah that's not good, the way they do that is with more plastic in the bags. A single bag weighs as much as 5-10 old timey single use bags.
by ricardobeat | 2025-09-15 11:32:01+00:00
> Her cookie recipe — a box of Betty Crocker chocolate cake mix, two eggs, and ⅓ cup neutral oil

> whose cookie recipe was passed down by her mother

Sorry grandma, but that is not a recipe. A cake mix is just flour, sugar and yeast, there is little reason to use it especially for a recurrent recipe.
by imglorp | 2025-09-15 11:32:31+00:00
Ok so this is the cake pan thread.

They can shrink the amount of mix in a box but the hard limit of shrinking is the standard set of pans that everyone has. There are also bundt and springform pans in addition to the rectangulars. So if they shrink the amount in the box, as the original article mentions, they have to keep changing the recipe to increase the air and the rise so it still fits the same pans -- maybe badly. Or they just abandon the larger pans and don't offer instructions for them and it's up to the baker to buy multiple boxes and do the math?
by ashvardanian | 2025-09-15 11:32:35+00:00
Nice observation!

Took me a while to realize that Grace Blackwell refers to a person and not an Nvidia chip :)

I’ve worked with large genomic datasets on my own dime, and the default formats show their limits quickly. With FASTA, the first step for me is usually conversion: unzip headers from sequences, store them in Arrow-like tapes for CPU/GPU processing, and persist as Parquet when needed. It’s straightforward, but surprisingly underused in bioinformatics — most pipelines stick to plain text even when modern data tooling would make things much easier :(
by littlecranky67 | 2025-09-15 11:32:46+00:00
I remember, for a while Cypress had in its documentations actually a warning about POs and recommended not to use them. I got curious as to why (because I am a big fan of POs) and dug deeper - I think at some point on a sales slide I found the reason "because POs have internal state". I started then to write my POs without any internal state (which you don't need with Typescripts property getters) and have luckily scaled my app with dozens os POs and hundred of tests. Later they removed that recommendation and seem to accept that people like POs.
by gcanyon | 2025-09-15 11:33:03+00:00
For those interested in a lightweight summary, Last Week Tonight did a segment on pig-butchering about a year ago. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pLPpl2ISKTg

The interviews with the victims are heartbreaking. There's one dad/daughter pair where the dad has lost almost literally everything, is on camera being interviewed about everything that happened, and is still flipping between "it was a total scam" and "maybe if I just send them another fee payment I can get at least some of my money back" and the daughter saying, "No, dad! It's a scam, and you are not sending them anymore money!"
Show HN: Bulletty, a pretty TUI feed reader that stores articles as Markdown
by CrociDB | 2025-09-15 11:33:29+00:00
Hello HN community,

I'd like to show this project I've been working for a few months. It's yet another TUI feed reader, but a bit different from the other alternatives available. First, I wanted to have all my feed entries downloaded locally, in a way that I could decide how to store and sync those files. Second important aspect would be have it look and feel good, still running on a terminal, so I could SSH into my VPS from anywhere and run it.

So I created bulletty. It's a TUI RSS/ATOM reader written in Rust and ratatui, that is looking good and feels just right to use. Of course, all I've done so far was to fulfill my needs, but I think it's already in a good state that it can be used and appreciated by others as well.

For the feeds, I implemented something similar to an Obisidian vault. The feed categories are directories in your system and the entries are just markdown files. All your library is within `~/.local/share/bulletty`, so that you can sync and backup that the way you want.

There are so many other interesting features I want to implement in this project, such as support themes, ability to highlight and write notes on articles, display images (using kitty image protocol or sixel), a webview for the articles, etc. I'm working on it on my free time, so I'm really interested in other people's contribution. I also set it up for `hacktoberfest`, and I added some issues that I think would be good to have. If you feel you want to contribute, please do by sending Pull Requests, or creating new Issues for bugs or creating a new Discussion thread to talk about possible features or other ideas.

If you wanna try it, `cargo install bulletty`! Or just check the GitHub page for more detailed instructions.

Thanks and have a good day everybody!
by mkfs | 2025-09-15 11:34:00+00:00
Could someone sympathetic explain why at least some of these people, specifically the healthcare professionals, shouldn't be fired, given that their statements reflect a lack of compassion in a field that demands it and a willingness to give substandard care to others based on their politics? Also, the school teachers: is it unreasonable to not want your children entrusted to educators who endorse political assassination?
by Aachen | 2025-09-15 11:34:39+00:00
I've also noticed this. Zstandard doesn't see very common patterns

For me it was an increasing number (think of unix timestamps in a data logger that stores one entry per second, so you are just counting up until there's a gap in your data), in the article it's a fixed value every 60 bytes

Of course, our brains are exceedingly good at finding patterns (to the point where we often find phantom ones). I was just expecting some basic checks like "does it make sense to store the difference instead of the absolute value for some of these bytes here". Seeing as the difference is 0 between every 60th byte in the submitted article, that should fix both our issues

Bzip2 performed much better for me but it's also incredibly slow. If it were only the compressor, that might be fine for many applications, but also decompressing is an exercise in patience so I've moved to Zstandard at the standard thing to use
by anal_reactor | 2025-09-15 11:36:00+00:00
Eh. While it's surprising to see someone string along someone through the internet for so long, it's not a really a new thing in the physical world. It happens once in a while that someone marries someone much richer just to file for a divorce a bit later. Heck, it's actually socially acceptable to be nice to people just because you want something from them.
by saalweachter | 2025-09-15 11:36:21+00:00
That "approximately" is too approximate.

2.125 lb / 20 is 1.7 oz, which is very different than 2 oz when it comes to eggs -- egg sizes (in the US) are by the quarter-ounce, the difference between the two is two egg sizes.

(Which is how the problem in the article was solved -- eggs are now sold by weight, indirectly, because egg sizes are determined by weight, and you now buy boxes of eggs of a specific size.)

So the average egg in 1886 in that article would be classed as "small" today.
by henearkr | 2025-09-15 11:36:28+00:00
You should really learn more about what is happening in France...

Your take of it is, at best, delusioned.

French people, the ones shouting in the streets, don't care directly about that deficit. They care about being able to have decent lives with social welfare.

Fyi, the main hard points are currently: not wanting to push the retirement age, and not wanting to eliminate bank holidays.

One of the biggest components of the recent protests' organisers was LFI. If you do your homework, you'll understand easily that LFI does not push towards less social wellfare.
by lylejantzi3rd | 2025-09-15 11:36:48+00:00
Used car prices have skyrocketed in the past 10 years. You used to be able to get a decent, reliable car for under $5k. Now that number is closer to $10-15k, which is just as out of reach for most Americans as $30k. If you're going to go into debt anyway, why not buy the new car?
by K0balt | 2025-09-15 11:36:59+00:00
There are token rewards for successes and punishments, sometimes extreme, for low productivity. If a slave is seen as having no worth to the endeavour and cannot be trafficked, they will sometimes be killed as a warning to the others that productivity is expected.

It’s a horrific and brutal scenario that pits victims against victims. In many ways, the targets have less to lose than the victims targeting them.
by wccrawford | 2025-09-15 11:37:06+00:00
It's pretty hard. There are a ton of people who can make a cake from a box, but not "from scratch". It's a really precise, easy way to get the basics done. Doing it yourself means the ratio is never quite the same as last time, even if you try really hard. Especially if one of the ingredients is a lot smaller quantity than the others, making it really hard to measure accurately.

The answer is probably to make your own "box mix" by doing a 10x batch at once, mixing it all up really good, and then storing of them in the freezer until needed. But I've never tried that, so it might have problems that I don't foresee.

It's a lot easier to make from a box.