MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Etherlord87 | 2025-09-12 10:30:18+00:00
From just scanning through the article quickly, I don't see there the mantissa similarly easily explained, but there is a very intuitive way to think of it. Because the mantissa (like everything else) is encoded in binary, the first explicit (because there's implicit 1. at the beginning) digit of it means either 0/2 or 1/2 (just like in decimal the first digit after the dot means either 0/10 or 1/10 or 2/10...), the next digit is (0/2² = 0/4) or 1/4, third digit is 0/8 or 1/8 etc. You can visualize this by starting at the beginning of the "window", and then you divide the window into 2 halves: now the first digit of the mantissa tells you if you stay at the beginning of the first half, or move to the beginning of the 2nd half. Now whatever half you picked, you divide it into 2 halves again, and use the next bit of mantissa to tell you if you should advance to the next half. So you just keep subdividing, and so the more bits in the mantissa you have, the more you can subdivide the window, and if the exponent (after applying bias) is equal exactly the number of explicit bits in the mantissa, the smallest subdivision cell has length equal exactly 1. Incrementing exponent by 1 will now double the window size, and without additional subdivision each cell has length equal exactly 2 meaning each next float number now increments by 2.

(keep in mind there is a subnormal range where there's implicit 0. at the beginning of the mantissa instead)

To reiterate, increasing the exponent by 1 doubles the window size, so the exponent describes how many times the window size was doubled while the number of bits of mantissa describes how many times you can do the reverse and "half" it, hence the exponent to mantissa bits relation.
by Liftyee | 2025-09-12 10:30:25+00:00
At some point when second-hand folding phones decrease in cost I'd like to get one as a second device just as a compact pocketable datasheet/PDF reader for engineering/electronics work. I think having a tablet sized screen without the bulk would be a huge bonus.

I recently tried an old industrial head-mounted display (Realwear HMT-1), but the display resolution is not good.
by fjfaase | 2025-09-12 10:30:25+00:00
I have always understood that 'Mercury’s perihelion precession' is explained by Albert Einstein's General Theory of Relativity (GTR). The article suggest an alternative explanation, which seems to imply that the GTR is not true. The GTR already has been well established through the observation of many other physical phenomena. Which seems to nullify the alternative explanation provided by the article.
Ask HN: What's the weirdest rule your workplace ever had?
by jamessmithe | 2025-09-12 10:30:33+00:00
I want to know some of the very awkward and weird rules at your workplace which irritated you. For me, at my old office, we weren’t allowed to drink water at our desks. Had to walk to a hydration corner like it was a video game quest. What is it like for you?
by theshrike79 | 2025-09-12 10:30:35+00:00
My theory is that it's #2.

EU has defined Apple (but not Google(!)) as a "digital gatekeeper" and thus Apple has to comply to pretty much any part of their system being replaced with a 3rd party alternative.

So if they bring this system in, something which is listening to people real time and using online AI models to translate things, EU might force them to let _any_ 3rd party AI replace it.

And when someone installs TotallyHonest Co. AI to replace it and there's a massive data leak where they just stored every conversation as-is in an open S3 bucket, who gets the PR flak on HN? Apple, EU or TotallyHonest? The headlines will have "Apple" in them to drive clicks and TotallyHonest is maybe mentioned in the 3rd paragraph, which nobody will read or remember.

The only winning move is not to play.
by southernplaces7 | 2025-09-12 10:30:39+00:00
Professional joy can be about a lot more than just making as much money as possible. If anything is sad it's that someone fails to understand this basic thing. We're thinking, often fantastically creative beings, and our lives need not focus only on family, love and friends. They can also be partly absorbed by our external pursuits, professionally, as an outlet for all that cognitive power inside us.

Should the creator of the WWW be sad that it gave him joy? Or the scientists who programmed the Apollo missions, because they also made money off these things or worked for others while doing so at times? Or in a different direction, should a Picasso or Anthony Hopkins not take enormous pleasure from a life time of professional creation? Much more banal examples are just as valid, as long as they gave sincere happiness to those living them.

What a bizarrely narrow definition you have of professional joy.
by FooBarWidget | 2025-09-12 10:30:55+00:00
Maybe you shouldn't be. The ad-hating paranoid HN user is not representative of the general population. Probably the exact opposite, in fact.

My wife and mother love ads, they are always on the hunt for the latest good deals and love discount shopping. When I tried to remove the ads on their computers or in the postal mail, they protested. I think they are far more representative of the general population.
by victorbjorklund | 2025-09-12 10:30:59+00:00
On the other hand, Swish is fully owned by a couple of banks together. So they have full control over Swish and also over BankID, which means that they can deny people from access or if they are down then you know we're screwed. So even if it's not relying on one single company it's relying on a few companies that work together. So instead of a monopoly it's a cartel.
by arghwhat | 2025-09-12 10:31:53+00:00
Nets sold its account-to-account payment business to Mastercard. Nets, which is itself a private company operating in many countries, has not been sold to Mastercard, nor has Dankort, MitID, or others been sold to Mastercard.

The services sold are, for example, Betalingsservice in Denmark and AvtaleGiro/eFaktura in Norway.

To be honest, my concern is that Nets is that Nets is entirely unable to competently provide any services competently and reliably, so while they shouldn't be moved to a US company, I sure do hope that we get everything they do replaced by something else.

Only Nets could somehow manage to make it much more expensive in fees to have a scheduled direct bank transaction (Betalingsservice - for reference, bank transfers are free and instant here) than using a VISA card with fees going to the US. They have also completely ruined Dankort adoption and reliability, and made MitID into a great big mess of a reliability and usability nightmare.
by exodust | 2025-09-12 10:34:37+00:00
Israel isn't committing genocide except in the minds of pro-palestine activists, many of whom refer to Hamas terrorism as "resistance" more than the more suitable description, to use your words (and the words of the UN incidently) "unspeakable horror".

Meanwhile, the ones who say they would commit genocide if given any chance at all, are the ones Israel is at war with.
by southernplaces7 | 2025-09-12 10:34:54+00:00
People are sadly out of touch and misguided for scorching an absurdly narrow definition of professional joy that categorizes all manifestations of it as the same stupid thing? Really?

None of the millions of people throughout history who have enjoyed a creative outlet for their cognitive abilities also involve professional work should be proud or happy about the things they made because someone might think they're sad, misguided, exploited fools?
by bigglywiggler | 2025-09-12 10:35:37+00:00
What I don't want is for the protocols that allow for apple's seamlesness to be opened to cheap trash. If Apple is forced to make it open to manufacturers of cheap trash and support it for manfacturers of cheap trash then it won't be economical for them to make cool stuff anymore and we won't have cool stuff anymore. I also dont want it to be easier to make devices that could maliciously take advantage of the friction removal capabilities that Apple builds into their devices. Customers already have a choice, e-waste slop garbage or apple products. The idea that they should be able to have both is quite ridiculous.
by Tepix | 2025-09-12 10:36:08+00:00
You're naively assuming that Apple will always act in your best interests,which they don't:

In 2017, Apple secretly throttled the performance of older iPhones to prevent shutdowns, without informing users.

In the butterfly keyboard years (2015-2019) Apple denied that their tech was crap and blamed users.

The 30% fee in the app store is outrageous.

The right-to-repair restrictions are clearly anti-consumer. Preventing users from using 3rd party parts for repairs, voiding warranties. $500 display repairs.

Agressive planned obsolescence. Non-upgradable components. Software updates that slow older devices down.

Sideloading restrictions, reducing user choice and security options.
by akerl_ | 2025-09-12 10:36:19+00:00
Yup, you’re correct. But in common usage, it would be weird to refer to example.com as a subdomain. Depending on the context, it would also be weird to refer to foo.example.com as a domain instead of a subdomain.

If somebody asked me what domain you’re using and you said “com”, you would technically have answered accurately but they’d be confused.
by victorbjorklund | 2025-09-12 10:36:38+00:00
I'm from Sweden, I 100% would not trust my neighbors. Sure, maybe if you live in a tiny tiny village in the countryside, but if that's the case you probably have the same thing if you're living in a tiny tiny village in a in the US too. Like that's more of an effect of living in a very small village, not anything about the country.

And regarding the changes to the military, that is still a very small amount of people who are doing the basic conscription service.
by FirmwareBurner | 2025-09-12 10:37:07+00:00
>When it is operational, probably. But right now it is being built and most of the Korean workers were engineers and technicians specializing in installing, testing, and bringing up highly technical specialized battery manufacturing equipment from Korea.

OK good point. But then why hasn't Hyundai US management made sure to get their imported workers legal visas or that the people they hired had their visas up to date? Surely when you're running a business visa and immigration laws is another one of the things on your checklist, similar to having to follow OHSA laws, fire safety, fire drills, first aid, diversity and sensitivity training, etc and all the other stuff companies operating in the US have to follow.

Also be aware, my original comment was target that person's comment specifically, not the issues from the article.
by UomoNeroNero | 2025-09-12 10:37:32+00:00
I’m Italian, and I really struggle to rationalize this attitude. I honestly don’t understand. Maybe it’s because I’m surrounded by 2,500 years of art in which nudity is an essential and predominant element, by people (even in the workplace) who have a relaxed and genuinely democratic view of the subject — but this comment feels totally alien to me. I suppose it’s my own limitation, but I would NEVER have focused attention on this aspect. I don’t know, maybe I’m the one who’s wrong…
by palmfacehn | 2025-09-12 10:38:31+00:00
After closing the window, which is an approximation of a page, the back button does not return me to the previous page in Firefox. I can see that the address bar is changed but the content doesn't change back to that page. After clicking through to another view I can use the back button to achieve this basic functionality.

This is a cute way to build a lander. It may result in more sales because it invites the user to interact and experiment with the novel layout.
by awesome_dude | 2025-09-12 10:38:40+00:00
I have a gripe with slog - it uses magic for config

What I mean is, if you configure slog in (say) your main package, then, by magic, that config is used by any call to slog within your application.

There's no "Oh you are using this instance of slog that has been configured to have this behaviour" - it's "Oh slog got configured so that's the config you have been given"

I've never tried to see if I can split configs up, and I don't have a usecase, it just strikes me as magic is all
by chvid | 2025-09-12 10:39:40+00:00
The Brazil stuff is related to the case againt Trump-ally Bolsonaro. The European cases so far have been related to the Israel-Palestine conflict.

The US uses its so-called SDN list which in general prevents the person having a bank account in any western country. It also caused Microsoft to kill off the email account (I believe the full azure services - ie. Active Directory - rendering his work computer useless) of a prosecutor at the international criminal court:

https://www.politico.eu/article/microsoft-did-not-cut-servic...

Microsoft didn’t cut services to International Criminal Court, its president says

Chief prosecutor’s email issues have spurred fears in Europe that Trump could trigger a “kill switch” through U.S. tech giants abroad.

...

A Microsoft spokesperson said that it had been in contact with the court since February “throughout the process that resulted in the disconnection of its sanctioned official from Microsoft services.” The spokesperson added that “at no point did Microsoft cease or suspend its services to the ICC.”
by strnisa | 2025-09-12 10:41:57+00:00
Subscriptions are great for predictability, and most apps should keep them.

Small Transfers can be added to help with:

- users who dislike subscriptions - infrequent users - reducing/removing free-trial costs for non-converting users

A common pattern is hybrid pricing: pay-as-you-go (PAYG) for light/occasional use, a subscription for regular use. Similar to mobile plans, where monthly plans become cheaper above a certain usage threshold. I use this pattern for one of my services: https://unattach.com/pricing

I believe that Small Transfers also enables services that aren't viable with subscriptions or prepaid credits, e.g., a movie-suggestion service.
by cocody | 2025-09-12 10:42:19+00:00
Hi fork author here :)

I agree, the end game should be to get rid of styled-components. At Sanity we are in fact in the process of moving to https://vanilla-extract.style/

At the same time, with thousands of styled components already in use in production, it'll take a while until they're all refactored. And so it makes sense for us to make the best of styled-components and make it as fast as it can be on the React 18 and 19 baselines, to buy us time for the larger refactor that completely solves it.

TL;DR it's better to never insert CSS at runtime and only link to a cached external stylesheet. If you have brownfield code that inserts CSS at runtime that should be refactored. Until they are refactored, they should insert CSS at runtime in the best possible way (even though it's never truly good or fast).
by immibis | 2025-09-12 10:42:24+00:00
The GPL works because you create a derived work. The legal ability to create a derived work is restricted by copyright. They grant you an exception to the default restriction of copyright, but only if you comply with all of these terms.

The most obvious way around it is to claim the thing you created is not a derived work. Nvidia probably has a good case for this because 99% of their code has absolutely nothing to do with the Linux kernel; making an adapter so you can plug that 99% into the kernel does not make it magically derived from it. Some random hardware driver doesn't have that same claim of being mostly independent of the kernel - graphics drivers are particularly complicated.

Regardless of whether the driver is a derivative work of the kernel, the combination of the kernel and the driver is obviously derivative of both its parts and so you have to comply if you ship that, too.
by bregma | 2025-09-12 10:42:51+00:00
There are a handful of commercial offerings of C++ conformance test suites. They're all generally around 40000 euro for an evaluation copy (more for an actual full licensed copy), none are 100% complete, and we continually find bugs in tests.

You're not going to find some hobbyist coming up with a useful conformance or coverage test suite for free. It's intensive, expensive, and arduous.

Such things are mandatory, however, if you are a C++ vendor targeting ISO 26262 or IEC 61508 or similar -- basically, software that could kill you if it's done wrong. It's a niche with money and motivation.
by immibis | 2025-09-12 10:44:14+00:00
Sadly, the layperson's and lay developer's interpretation of the GPL has been watered down over the years, and the GPL wasn't maximalist enough to begin with - see AGPL, SSPL for extensions created by people who saw new kinds of linking that didn't appear to be covered by the GPL. Of course big corporations preferably use these new kinds of linking that aren't covered, which is why new licenses are necessary.
by jychang | 2025-09-12 10:44:15+00:00
Because if you generate token n+1 with all 48 layers of Qwen3-Next and 80 billion params, and also generate token n+2 with the 1 MTP layer at 2bil params... that n+2 token can be much lower quality than the n+1 token but mostly correct.

Let's say you have a model that generates the string "The 44th president of the United States is ___ ___". Your model will generate "Barack" as the n+1 token, and the MTP layer probably does a good enough job to generate "Obama" as the n+2 token (even though that MTP layer is a mere <2bil parameters in size). Then you just check if "Obama" is correct via the same speculative decoding process, which is a lot faster than if you had to start over from layer 1-48 and generate "Obama" the regular way.
by dspillett | 2025-09-12 10:45:14+00:00
> > school shootings

> Gun control means no more school shootings. See Dunblane.

If you are citing Dunblane as an example of gun control not working, perhaps consider the fact that you had to go back to 1996 to find such a bad example in a country with strong controls means that while it doesn't work 100% it does work really rather well. To find a similar example (>20 dead or injured in a school or related environment) in the US you'd to go all the way back into the mists of time to… August. Before that the last large school shooting was Uvale in 2022, still only three years not 29.
by nis0s | 2025-09-12 10:45:16+00:00
How’s it not fucking clear that the gut-brain axis of fetuses isn’t mentioned in the article.

Not only that, but the effects measured in the present studies have never even considered varying titers in vaginal canals during births, at least as far as I know.

Science isn’t gospel, don’t treat it like so. The original comment is a hypothesis, but it's based on existing evidence.

Here's some information from another comment,

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45215745
by zahlman | 2025-09-12 10:45:17+00:00
First, all of this is past tense; the PEP was accepted in March.

But no, there wouldn't have been a coherent metric for "most popular", and anyway the existing designs were independently trying to solve subtly different problems without concern for anyone else. The new format was designed based on getting the relevant parties to talk to each other and figure out what would be necessary for interoperability.
by GistNoesis | 2025-09-12 10:45:32+00:00
The https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z-fighting issue is the proof you often need those 64-bits.

It's kind of a chicken and egg problem where people use floats because there are FPUs available. All the engineering effort which went into dealing with floats and the problem that comes with them, would have been better invested in making integers faster.

We went onto the wrong path, and inertia keep us going on the wrong path. And now the wrong path is even more tempting because all efforts have made it more practical and almost as good. We hide the precision complexity to the programmer but it's still lurking around instead of being tamed.

The absolute GPU cluster-fuck with as many floating types as you can write on a napkin while drunk at the bar, mean that at the end of the day your neural network is non-deterministic, and you can't replicate any result from your program from 6 month ago, or last library version. Your simulations results therefore are perishable.

Inability to replicate results mean that you can't verify weight modifications to your neural networks haven't been tampered by an adversary. So you just lose all fighting chance to build a secure system.

You also can't share work in a distributed fashion because since verification is not possible you can't trust any computation that you haven't done yourself.
by inexcf | 2025-09-12 10:46:29+00:00
Where do you get all that from? Except for famous cases like the Rote Flora in Hamburg or i guess Berlin in general there's not a lot of squatting going on in Germany, or is there?

In Germany squatting laws dictate you have to openly live at a place for 30 years and the property needs to be registered to your name in order for you to be able to claim ownership.So here it can hardly be a measure anyone can take to get a cheap place to live.
by akimbostrawman | 2025-09-12 10:46:55+00:00
>most desktop users find it difficult to understand, and often have bigger problems

That is exactly the strong point of flatpaks. It's a lot easier to use toggle in a GUI for permissions than write whole new profiles. Not to mention that many even disable selinux because it is difficult.

>An outdated old package library relies on people understanding/tracking the complete OS

It takes 0 understanding to copy paste a outdated package warning and report that to the repo listed in flathub. It explicitly tells you as much.
by Etherlord87 | 2025-09-12 10:47:31+00:00
Don't worry about negative comments, yes, this is not the best way, but (if there's no error, I didn't analyze it thoroughly) it's often good enough; if it works, then it works.

I once wanted to find a vector for which Euler rotation (5°, 5°, 0) will result with the same vector, so I just ran a loop of million iterations or so which would take a starting vector, translate it randomly slightly (add a small random vector) and see if after rotation it's closer to original than the previous vector would be after rotation, if not, discard the change otherwise keep it. The script ran for a couple seconds on Python and with decreasing translation vector based on iteration number, I got perfect result (based on limited float precision of the vector). 2s would be terribly slow in a library but completely satisfying for my needs :D
by Symbiote | 2025-09-12 10:49:23+00:00
> When was the last time you rebuilt your company's postgres config from scratch?

Last year, when we upgrade to version 17.

I looked at the example/template configuration, diffed it with our configuration from PG15, and for every change decided whether to keep our version or the new setting.

I didn't use it, but Debian/APT has had a tool to do this sort of comparison for any software upgrade for as long as I can remember.

Do other people just copy the old config and shout "YOLO!"?
by Twey | 2025-09-12 10:49:25+00:00
The ‘application context’ isn't a concept that adds value, at least for the applications I've seen. For things where the application windows do need to be treated differently (e.g. patch bays that can be connected together, or widgets that can be fused into larger widgets [1]) I have more sympathy for applications that want to do their own window management. But for something like the browser just grouping Web pages together, that's something entirely unrelated to the browser functionality that should be available in the window manager.

[1]: https://wiki.haskell.org/Eros
by Liftyee | 2025-09-12 10:49:52+00:00
> the bad idea of touchscreen "convertible" laptops

Is it such a bad idea? I use a convertible Thinkpad to take handwritten notes as well as usual laptop duties. Perhaps it just doesn't fit your usecase, it seems that plenty of these laptops are still being made today.

Granted, my previous Gen 1 Thinkpad had constant motherboard and memory issues - not sure if design flaw, lemon, or otherwise. To their credit, Lenovo warranty repaired it and eventually gave an upgrade (my current device) for no charge.