MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by cdavid | 2025-09-12 12:03:55+00:00
Maybe I am too mathematically enclined, but this was not easy to understand.

The ELI5 explanation of floating point: they approximately give you the same accuracy (in terms of bits) independently of the scale. Whether your number if much below 1, around 1, or much above 1, you can expect to have as much precision in the leading bits.

This is the key property, but internalizing it is difficult.
by machiaweliczny | 2025-09-12 12:05:30+00:00
AI coding diffuses the knowledge of common 80% of programming. So it should make programming more accessible actually. As it can remix well it basically can extract for you any implementation it has seen on github which I believe is great for humanity progress.

Examples of bit harder things I can do thx to AI: * write code in less known languages * do research about things to implement i had no clue about * vibe code games - this is good example of what I say below. At the moment you need to iterate: write feature, optimize code, write feature, optimize code - because it takes crappy implementation that does job but then is totally capable of fixing it

If someone would ask me for example if for python I prefer UV or AI I would tell UV for now but python had ultra bad tooling.

I believe that LLM have more potential than they currently show. As someone explained they don’t use knowledge links properly due to prediction objective. Eg they don’t attack problems from “tangents” just go in straight line, RL somewhat fixes that but it’s not there yet - it still just trick with perhaps, let me consider etc. This might get improved upon IMO and some new aproaches add tree search on top.
by imtringued | 2025-09-12 12:06:14+00:00
Figuring out the meaning of the acronym "LP"s will be for the archeologists to decipher, I suppose.

EDIT: Future archeologist here (3 minutes after posting). It stands for "Live Performance", which is an unnecessarily obscure way of saying something that isn't obvious from the context alone.

EDIT2: Or it's this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LP_record
by wscott | 2025-09-12 12:06:37+00:00
For reference here is the cppreference page the OP is trying to improve: https://cppreference.com/w/cpp/compiler_support.html

Personally I am not not sure the live search on this new page saves me time, but perhaps if you added the ability to only show missing features it could be useful. For example if I could pick that I am interested in c++23 and earlier and that I use gcc-14 and clang-16 it should list the features that won't work for me. That would be useful compared to trying to scan the full list.
by skeezyboy | 2025-09-12 12:07:42+00:00
> It was a major clash between the idealistic vision of building global interconnected communities and the financial reality of companies wanting to optimize everything for their own profits.

I think its even simpler than that. HTML et al was a nice idea but its largely ignored in the pursuit of making web pages seem like apps.

Berners Lee had this idea of documents like pages in a book, nothing like the full-fledged applications in the browser we get today, yet that legacy Berners Lee cruft still remains whilst people find ever more inventive ways to overcome it
by jpfromlondon | 2025-09-12 12:08:49+00:00
1. Nobody suggested we exclude inconvenient intelligence organisations.

2. Irrelevent because:

3. Low confidence, but probable merely implies plausibility, at least a somewhat higher likelihood than a wild previously unencountered zoonotic.

Based on all publicly available information it does seem more likely, the CIA will be better informed than the public, if they (and others) concur then I don't see why we need to dismiss it.
by jacknews | 2025-09-12 12:09:27+00:00
I think many people don't want to pay anything, but I think a part of that is that it's still just a big hassle to pay online, and that's doubly true if they have to get corporate approval or whatever.

It seems like a free trial period with clear pricing is the way to get paying customers, and any free plan needs to be monetized with ads or whatever.
by olau | 2025-09-12 12:09:29+00:00
Some years ago I bought a little pamphlet with a few mental exercises by Rudolf Steiner, known for the Waldorf school system.

One of them was about building a habit. You find a small meaningless thing to do, it must have no purpose at all, and then you do it once every day for as long as it takes to become a habit, probably a month or two. E.g. you could fill a glass with water and throw it out.

I did the exercise (I would kneel for a few seconds when taking a bath) for a couple of months, and I think it worked for me. I've recently used the same tactic to build a useful habit.

Now building a new habit is not necessarily the same as changing an old habit.

I also found out that kneeling changed my perspective. I could think about a situation with some level of tension, kneel, and then my perspective on the same situation would be more humble and appreciative. YMMV.
by astrobe_ | 2025-09-12 12:09:48+00:00
Also, mechanical stuff eventually wears out - at best with good quality ones, the product becomes obsolete before they do. For instance potentiometers [1] used for volume control on stereos rust over time and eventually become unusable. So there's a durability argument too.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potentiometer
by mallowdram | 2025-09-12 12:10:44+00:00
Beliefs do not exist, like the words we use. What we have are neat, retrofitted explanations that foot the bill. Sportscasting about those actions that never used words to get there, they just seem to.

Pretty fascinating the retro marriage of words and tech gets us here, to a kind of Gutenberg stage of restriction.

Words and narratives are low-bandwidth compression for meaning. It's simple. How did we get stuck here? We were lazy Pleistocene kids, and lazy Pleistocene kids we remain.

Think hard now, the words are being used to extinct us. How did we get stuck here? Math? Status? Money? a combination of all these.

Look at the status drive that pretends we have beliefs in this post. Read it carefully. Do we have beliefs, or do we simply have actions (neural syntax)?

Debate me, don't just downvote me, that's proving my point.

Time to rethink all communication.
by plst | 2025-09-12 12:10:57+00:00
> EU has defined Apple (but not Google(!)) as a "digital gatekeeper"

Could you explain what you mean? The following article lists Alphabet as a gatekeeper.

https://digital-markets-act.ec.europa.eu/gatekeepers_en

> 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.

If you allow the third party to do that, yes.

> 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?

I see this argument often, as often as I hear about leaks. Do you have an instance where Apple was blamed for a leak from a third party? I never heard anybody blaming Apple for Tea app leaks for a recent example, and it is still available on App Store.

Also, an alternative translation app does not have to be provided by a totally random third party vendor. Companies that to me are just as trustworthy as Apple surely will provide alternatives too - Google, OpenAI, Meta, Microsoft or Anthropic.

So I really don't see what's your point here. Don't install the alternatives if you don't trust them.
by GrantS | 2025-09-12 12:11:25+00:00
Wow, as others have said below, disabling the “Slide to Type” feature in Settings > General > Keyboard makes typing work well again on iOS. I cannot believe I put up with this awful typing experience for the past year/years. This should be broadcast more widely somehow. I’m sure many people have just assumed they got worse at typing. I am genuinely flabbergasted.
by vintermann | 2025-09-12 12:11:32+00:00
Something the fresh european patriots overlook is that the parts of Ukraine Putin managed to hold on to overlap very closely with the areas most hostile to the rehabilitation of Ukrainian nationalism/most positive to Russia (at least to some largely imaginary Russia which defeated the Nazis but wasn't really communist, i.e. Putin's Russia).

If it's that costly to hold onto areas where most people actually like Putin relatively speaking, how much more expensive wouldn't it be to hold onto areas to where people hate him?
by guappa | 2025-09-12 12:11:37+00:00
You have to understand that sweden does a lot of marketing but at the end of the day it's just marketing. Things here aren't nearly as great as everyone abroad imagines them to be.

Not claiming it's a bad place to live in or that there aren't worse places, but the high trust society thing is a myth.

I've had my wallet disappear while I fell asleep on the shore of a lake, in one of those tiny villages where everybody knows each other for example :)
by pdimitar | 2025-09-12 12:11:38+00:00
> The demand for high-power AI still exists, the products that Apple sells today do not even come close to meaningfully replacing that demand.

Correct, though to me it seems that this comes at the price of narrowing the target audience (i.e. devs and very high-demanding analysis + production work).

For almost everything else people just open a bookmarked ChatGPT / Gemini link and let it flow, no matter how erroneous it might be.

The AI area is burning a lot of bridges and has done so for the last 1.5 - 2.0 years; they solidify the public's idea that they only peddle subscription income as hard as they can without providing more value.

Somebody finally had the right idea some months ago: sub-agents. Took them a while, and it was obvious right from the start that just dumping 50 pages on your favorite LLM is never going to produce impressive results. I mean, sometimes it does but people do a really bad job at quickly detecting when it does not, and are slow to correct course and just burn through tokens and their own patience.

Investors are gonna keep investor-ing, they will of course want the paywall and for there to be no open models at all. But happily the market and even general public perception are pushing back.

I am really curious what will come out of all this. One prediction is local LLMs that secretly transmit to the mothership, so the work of the AI startup is partially offloaded to its users. But I am known to be very cynical, so take this with a spoonful of salt.
by farooqkz | 2025-09-12 12:11:58+00:00
I wanted to append [idea] but it became too long. I think there should be balance "musings" and actual work. I learned very valuable lessons in my wakegp research. Even though I haven't completed it. If the one doing this research would be me, I would go for no actual work as long as I can. And when I start to do the work, I should do as little as I can and move very slowly. Like the saying "When you move slowly, you can see the path ahead clear". After all, we should know if the next step we go forward, the ground under us is solid.
by mmmllm | 2025-09-12 12:13:08+00:00
Sure but where is the demand going to come from? LLMs are already in every google search, in Whatsapp/Messenger, throughout Google workspace, Notion, Slack, etc. ChatGPT already has a billion users.

Plus penetration is already very high in the areas where they are objectively useful: programming, customer care etc. I just don't see where the 100-1000x demand comes from to offset this. Would be happy to hear other views.
by Philip-J-Fry | 2025-09-12 12:13:20+00:00
That seems to work as expected?

The output of data is handled by the handler. Such behaviour is clearly outlined in the documentation by the JSONHandler. I wouldn't expect a JSONHandler to use Stringer. I'd expect it to use the existing JSON interfaces, which it does.

I'd expect the Text handler to use TextMarshaller. Which it does. Or Stringer, which it does implicitly via fmt.Sprintf.
by Sharlin | 2025-09-12 12:13:37+00:00
For what it's worth, here's the Rust std implementation [1] of the total (as in, makes NaNs comparable) comparison algorithm given by IEE 751:

let mut left = self.to_bits() as i32; let mut right = other.to_bits() as i32; // In case of negatives, flip all the bits except the sign // to achieve a similar layout as two's complement integers left ^= (((left >> 31) as u32) >> 1) as i32; right ^= (((right >> 31) as u32) >> 1) as i32; left.cmp(&right)

[1] https://doc.rust-lang.org/src/core/num/f32.rs.html#1348
by croes | 2025-09-12 12:14:29+00:00
Wait a minute, he spread misinformation about COVID and the „stolen“ election and reaches millions of people but I‘m the bad guy?

He has definitely caused more violence than I.

Kirk and others boost people like those here

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2S-WJN3L5eo

Show one who got influenced by me. That would be really interesting.

That I spread misinformation has to be proven.

He referenced the 50s and 60s on purpose, the good old times and he knows his peers and what the associate with that time period. So he either knew exactly what association he sent with that or he was naive. I don’t think he was naive. Given all what he said there is a clear subtext you try to ignore.
by TheNewsIsHere | 2025-09-12 12:14:49+00:00
Our service incurs direct per-customer costs from deployment to retirement, and typically requires our time, so we have no free offerings at all. We don’t even do free demos.

We learned these lessons because of an early mistake we made. Undercharging. Do not undercharge early. We did that and it made it more challenging to build a sustainable revenue stream that would actually pay all the bills we wanted/needed to pay. When we started the company we resolved to only need one capital contribution from each cofounder. When we started by undercharging that really held us back for awhile.

On the flip side, we learned that building strong relationships with customers, not being afraid to put things in writing (our customers tend to dislike phone calls as much as we do anyway), and delivering on time, meant that when we asked customers to pay more at their next renewal, they were fine with that.

But it really sucked to have such a small budget. It also taught us a lot about the value of resourcefulness and not just jumping on every trend, SaaS service, and solution that was hot or shiny. That was valuable in its own right because it’s resulted in a service we can run on just about any Linux platform.
by pjc50 | 2025-09-12 12:14:59+00:00
> anything popular that used this system seems like it'd be pretty inundated with fraud

I coined "micropayments means microfraud"; I would expect this to have similar situations to the AWS mystery bill problem, but on a tiny scale. If you can charge customers without their confirmation it's easy to run up bills. And of course the amounts are so tiny you can't afford dispute resolution.
by OzanEnginsal | 2025-09-12 12:15:46+00:00
You're spot on about needing a way for users to see the value first. I should probably make my target audience clearer on the homepage—the signals are based on daily data, so they're geared towards swing traders and investors, rather than intraday traders. My main approach for this is the 30-day free trial which gives full access to all features. I also share a lot of the statistics and signal examples on X and Reddit, which is very similar to what you're suggesting. A dedicated Telegram channel is a really interesting idea for a lead-in, though. I'll definitely keep that in mind. Thanks!
by Someone | 2025-09-12 12:16:06+00:00
As written, it is UB, yes, but certainly in C++, and, I think, also in C, using a union is undefined behavior, too. I think (assuming isn’t and float to be of the same size) the main risk is that, if you do

union { float f; int i; } foo; foo.f = 3.14; printf(“%x”, foo.i);

that the compiler can think the assignment to foo.f isn’t used anywhere, and thus can chose not to do it.

In C++, you have to use memmove (compilers can and often do recognize that idiom)
by ACCount37 | 2025-09-12 12:16:27+00:00
You want robots that can do tasks humans can do but robot arms can't - which has a way of driving the design decisions. The more you move towards "flexible, mobile, multipurpose", the more you move towards the humanoid frames.

Just look up how vehicle interior assembly is performed now. Look at all the things that are still done by humans - all the different assembly stations, all the loading and unloading, all the installation operations, all the panels and wiring harnesses and plugs and bolts.

Then try to come up with a robot frame that would do all of it - every single operation that's currently done by a human - while being significantly less complex than a humanoid frame.

The design space constraints would choke the life out of you.
by flakeoil | 2025-09-12 12:17:03+00:00
I agree. I think the reason why Rails (and Laravel) set the default to SQLite is that it makes it easier for newcomers to start. No install needed of MySQL/Postgres.

The problem with making this the default is that people then think it is the recommended way, even if it is not. It is the easiest way to fast get something up and running locally, but it is typically not the best for a production setup. Experienced users will know this, but for beginners to these frameworks, it leads them in the wrong direction.
by farooqkz | 2025-09-12 12:17:41+00:00
Thanks for the hints. Of course, it's very very difficult. But one thing I think you missed, is that I'm proposing a "byte equivalent decompilation". And after that, we should go into reading the code readable and understandable.

If we could create a program doing all this, automatically or semi-automatically, it will be great-great because then not releasing the kernel code doesn't matter. I believe if enough effort and time is put into it, there is a good chance we could see such a thing in like 5-7 years.

After that, we might be able to target the binary blobs, the propriety firmwares. Those might have some legal issue, of course. But as long as it is used only to write a FOSS alternative, that probably won't be an issue, I think.
by chiph | 2025-09-12 12:18:05+00:00
I think there are two factors that drive the purchase. Primarily - it's a status symbol. I am reminded of the scene with Paul Allen's business card...

But also that it's useful when you want a larger display surface in a more portable form. Like watching films on an airplane or reading documents without having to constantly swipe & zoom.

I agree with the other poster(s) that Apple is likely working on a folding model, even though it would sabotage sales of some iPad models.
by orwin | 2025-09-12 12:18:27+00:00
To respond to your edit, my guess people downvote you because you completely misunderstood the situation and did not care to correct you when the situation was explained so many time, and probably think you're disingenuous.

I think you're not, so I'll try to explain:

When the technicians I work with install a new windfarm/gas plant router to connect them to electricity markets (they probably do other stuff but my job is the software part of networking, so I only know about that), we could hire a local contractor with CISCO cert, and it would certainly be cheaper than fly out 20 workers to Argentina, Australia, Romania or Mexico. We don't, because our employees will use the same technique, the same methodology each time, for every client, and we will never have to guess how the installation was done, because we know. You can put a price on trust, but it's really expensive. If we had plants in the US, I guarantee we would do the same, for the same reasons, unless the government bought our trust (which is basically reimbursing our losses if the plant fails because the installation wasn't done as our technicians would have).

Unless we hire permanent workers as we did in Romania because we took a big market share there, training someone to follow our procedure, highly personalized, for a week to a month of work is just not worth it, especially when so many specialties are needed for like one hour on one site. We do hire locals to run the day-to-day operations, but the installation, it's just not worth it. Better to fly a tech team every 5 years, that stay like a month, look around, fix shit, then leave.

For the second part: you misunderstood the situation. The workers were only there for the installation of the assembly line (and probably training for the B1s), not to work full-time.

Note that at least some of the workers have basically the same job as our technicians, network engineers, people I work with a lot and that I really respect. To see that parade, picture and video of them being taken on purpose while in chains (not handcuffed, in literal chains) to humiliate them on purpose, and seeing so many Americans cheer in front of that makes me hate most of you. Sorry, I know 'not all Americans', only a third, but still. Cheered because workers are publicly humiliated. That's what your country looks like from the outside.
by olooney | 2025-09-12 12:19:20+00:00
In 1948 Ashby wired four control units together and made a device he called the "Homeostat." What made it special is that it was "ultrastable" - if you changed the dynamics of the system, or plugged it into a completely new system then after a period of adaption it would relearn how to keep its outputs between tolerances.

Ashby gave the example of an autopilot - if you flipped the yoke controls so that up was down and down was up, a traditional autopilot would go into a positive feedback loop and crash, but the Homeostat would adapt to the new dynamics.

He postulated that this was a model for some systems in the brain and perhaps all learning (he wrote an entire book about it) and there's some evidence he was right. If you put goggles on someone that flips their vision upsidedown, they adjust after a few days... and have to readjust again when you take them off! (This was a real experiment.) YouTuber SmarterEveryDay found he could learn to ride a "backwards bike," but it destroyed his ability to ride a normal bike. You may have experienced this first hand if you've ever played a video game where the controls were flipped temporarily: it's disorienting, sure, but you quickly adjust.

Because of these phenomena, I think Ashby was right about the Homeostat being a useful model of the brain. It explains why so many apparently contradictory diets "work" - simply making a major changes resets the homeostat in your brain where it may settle into a better calibrated equilibrium eventually.

It implies a simple strategy: are you happy? If yes, we're done. If no, change something, and return to the question. (I've seen this as a flowchart online somewhere but can't find it now.)
by olalonde | 2025-09-12 12:19:29+00:00
Anyone who knowingly spreads misinformation is a bad guy in my book. If Kirk did, then that applies to him as well.

> So he either knew exactly what association he sent with that or he was naive. I don’t think he was naive.

I disagree - you're extrapolating from very little. If you take into consideration his whole life and the context of the conversation, it's very clear that he did not believe in violence and did not advocate it.

Does that look like someone who wishes violence against gay or trans people? Be real.

https://x.com/GayRepublicSwag/status/1966219378971889949

https://x.com/LuckyMcGee/status/1966207117767164362
by mirekrusin | 2025-09-12 12:19:30+00:00
We've seen several orders of magnitude improvements in cpus over the years, yet you try to do anything now and interaction is often slower than that on zx spectrum. We can easily fill in order of magnitude improvement and that's only going to create more demand. We can/will have models thinking for us all the time, in parallel and bother us with findings/final solutions only. There is no limit here really.