MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by yorwba | 2025-10-08 10:55:06+00:00
Imagine you're in a hilly landscape and want to go down as far as possible, but you can only see a small area around you, so you can't just directly go to the lowest point, because you don't know in which direction it is. Gradient descent is based on the idea of looking at which direction your local area is sloping upward (the gradient) and jumping in the opposite direction (i.e. down) a distance proportional to the strength of the slope.

This works well when the slope near the lowest point gets flatter and flatter, so that gradient descent makes smaller and smaller jumps, until you reach the bottom and stop. But if you end up on a very steep wall, you would make a very large jump, maybe so large that you overshoot the target and end up on an even steeper wall, make an even larger jump in the opposite direction and so on, getting farther and farther from the goal.

So one idea is to make sure that your jumps are always small enough that even the steepest wall you could possibly encounter won't throw you into a vicious cycle of increasing step sizes. For example, if you pour water on the ground, the water molecules make truly tiny jumps flowing down to the bottom, and in the article they call this path the gradient flow.

But what they show is that gradient descent typically splits off from this smooth gradient flow and instead gets into an area where the jumps get bigger and bigger for a while, but then the cycle is broken and they get smaller again. That is surprising! Even though it seems like the jumps can only keep getting farther, somehow they must've gotten close enough to the goal to calm down again.

So what the authors did is to remove the direction in which the jumps get bigger and look at what happens in the middle. You can imagine this as a valley with steep walls and a river smoothly flowing down at the bottom, and the jumps go back and forth across this river.

They call this river the central flow and show that it doesn't only flow along the direction of the gradient, but also a little bit in a direction where the steepness decreases. So when the jumps cross the river, they're also moving downriver a little, until they get to a point where the valley isn't so steep anymore and the jumps get smaller again.
by lupusreal | 2025-10-08 10:55:43+00:00
Customer support who are happy to leave customers high and dry and rinse their hands of the problem are basically soulless already; they care more about their own immediate convienence (while still on the clock!) than they do about the human being on the other end of the phone line.

Now, it's probably inevitable that many of them will be this way, but what I'm saying is keeping these customer service reps satisfied with easy dismissals isn't actually the lifeblood of the company. Happy engineers who derive satisfaction from the quality of their work on the other hand are extremely important to the long term viability of the company. If you tell the engineers that you're compromising the utility of the product they worked so hard on, to screw over paying customers, for the convienence of the soulless customer service reps who just want to play solitaire on their computers instead of helping people, the company has a real problem.
by mrtksn | 2025-10-08 10:55:49+00:00
I got a feeling that there's a bunch of European politicians having a FOMO and are way too influenced by AI influencers that post stuff like "It's over", "Bye Bye Hollywood", "17 hours ago OpenAI launched it and this changes everything".

I recall bunch of those also having a FOMO for NFTs and having NFT events in the commission premises.

Probably its O.K. as long as they don't spend consequential money on this stuff. They should just watch the US more closely, keep announcing 600B Euros investment every few weeks and do nothing about it. Make VW invest 5B Euros for AI self driving in Mistral then Mistral buying shares from VW with that money, do some questionable self driving demos etc.

Eurocrats are clueless, they are trying to have something that very small number of people show interest in. What they should really do, IMHO, is to reduce friction induced by bureaucracy and that's it. Contrary to the popular narrative EU is a force for reducing bureaucracy, as the Brits found out when left EU. The idea is that EU coordinates the 27 states to create ruleset that are more or less aligned so there's not too much paperwork when trading between those 27 countries. Unfortunately this is still not good enough and they are working to create the 28th regime which is supposed to be something like streamlined ruleset that bypasses the local ones so that companies can grow in a market of 27 countries without dealing with 27 set of laws. That's when EU can have an actual AI thing because the current state of AI is just bunch of capitalists juggling money and credit among themselves to keep alive this interesting technology that looks promising but doesn't actually accomplish something yet. If EU will have anything of this sort they need a place to hold these capital gymnastics.

This particular "Apply AI" strategy seems to stem from the idea that AI does some great things and EU industry should adopt it to increase productivity and not fall behind. Pure FOMO, considering that studies show very limited gains through use of AI so far.
by benterix | 2025-10-08 10:56:01+00:00
> There is so much framework stuff, when I started coding I could mostly concentrate on the algorithm, now I have to do so much framework stuff, I feel like telling the LLM really only the actual algorithm, minus all the overhead, is much more "programming" than today's programming with the many many layers of "stuff" layered around what I actually want to do.

I was wondering about this a lot. While it's a truism the generalities are always useful whereas the specific gets deprecated with time, I was trying to get down deeper on why certain specifics age quickly whereas other seem to last.

I came up with the following:

* A good design that allows extending or building on top of it (UNIX, Kubernetes, HTML)

* Not being owned by a single company, no matter how big (negative examples: Silverlight, Flash, Delphi)

* Doing one thing, and being excellent at it (HAproxy)

* Just being good at what needs to be done in a given epoch, gaining universality, building ecosystem, and just flowing with it (Apache, Python)

Most things in JS ecosystem are quite short-lived dead ends so if I were a frontend engineer I might consider some shortcuts with LLMs because what's the point of learning something that might not even exist a year from now? OTOH, it would be a bad architectural decision to use stuff that you can't be sure it will be supported in 5 years from now, so...
by louthy | 2025-10-08 10:56:03+00:00
You're literally describing dynamic range. The volume is the same in the show and the advert, but the perception of loudness is completely different. You perceive the adverts as louder because of the reduced dynamic range, even though they're not actually louder at all. This reduction in dynamic range is done by pre-processing the audio [in the advert] with a compressor. It lifts the quieter sounds (reducing the dynamic range), which creates more of a 'wall of sound' but the overall decibel levels are the same.

https://www.uaudio.com/blogs/ua/audio-compression-basics
by visarga | 2025-10-08 10:56:51+00:00
Is "vibe engineering" a correct term for this? It's not vibe based when you scaffold constraints around the agent: automated testing, planning in advance, comprehensive documentation, automated formatting and linting, and manual QA.

Don't get me wrong, I started vibe coding after reading Karpathy's post. I got the memo - don't review every line of code, don't stop it when it stumbles, let it recover on its own, trust the process.

But after some experience I realised I need to Constrain the model, it is like a karting track, those tires put around it keep the carts inside and safe. It's our job to set the constraints. So maybe it's "constrained agent work" not "vibe coding".

I go as far as saying the constraint harness around the agent is the new code, we can remove the code and regen it from the constraint harness and docs. What matters now is to build tests and constraints around AI work.
by queenkjuul | 2025-10-08 10:57:08+00:00
I remember a few numbers from before i got a cell phone--my parents' landline, my grandma's landline, my high school friend's number (we're still friends and he still has the same number, but there's no good reason to actually still remember it)

Lately I'm working on memorizing a couple emergency numbers in case i here arrested at a protest without my phone
by Ciantic | 2025-10-08 10:57:46+00:00
First example doesn't work though:

const greeting = pipe('hello') | upper | ex('!!!') await greeting.run() // → "HELLO!!!"

If you look at the tests file, it needs to be written like this to make it work:

let greeting; (greeting = pipe('hello')) | upper | ex('!!!'); await greeting.run();

Which is not anymore as ergonomic.
by onli | 2025-10-08 10:59:09+00:00
>> Even public libraries aren't free!

> Because they aren't public. They are provided by a company.

If you are talking actual libraries here: Hm? Public libraries are provided by the city - all I have ever seen in Germany. They usually cost a member pass, though I have seen completely free ones, but it's either a one-time payment or a yearly recurring fee. Small numbers though, can be as little as 5 Euro.

Public libraries provided by a company are an oxymoron, I doubt that exists in Germany.
by flanked-evergl | 2025-10-08 10:59:27+00:00
On paper the EU may have strong trade barriers with China, but in practice this just does not bear out. Europe has stronger trade barriers within itself than with China.

The EU demands that goods made in Poland conforms to some standards, but also that the manufacturers in Poland conform to some standards. For goods from China they in theory demand the same standards, but in practice these standards are not strictly enforced for goods from China (see AliExpress, Temu, Shein, etc), and there are no regulation on the manufacturers. Chinese manufacturers use slave labour, they pollute, they don't give their employees similar rights and benefits.

It's also way easier and cheaper for most Europeans to buy something from China than it is to buy something from within Europe, even though the actual selling price out of the factory is not that much higher for things manufactured in Europe. I pay the same "tariffs" if I buy from Sweden or AliExpress.
by jacquesm | 2025-10-08 10:59:41+00:00
What is interesting here is that Synology leadership is quite technical and there was no acquisition or other big event that I am aware of that resulted in this strategy. It was a complete own goal and as predictable as could be. Synology apparently wasn't aware of what their brand values were as perceived by their loyal customers and that's the kind of move you make at your peril. I'll be surprised if they survive this in the longer term, regardless of the reversal they've shown they do not have their customers interests at heart at all. It's dumber that it even seems: they were raking in a substantial amount of money precisely because of this one factor, and they pretty much shot the goose that was laying the golden eggs.

I've been a loyal customers of theirs and wasn't even looking at other options but there won't be another cent of mine going to Synology. I was already miffed at their mark-up for a little bit of memory before this happened. It is a matter of time before they crash and I don't want to end up with an unsupported piece of hardware. Trust is everything in the storage business.
by throw0101a | 2025-10-08 10:59:44+00:00
> I feel like the stock market is pretty divorced from fundamentals at this point i.e. speculation makes it more like a Keynesian beauty contest (picking stocks you think other people will think are valuable).

Momentum investing is a thing:

* https://www.investopedia.com/terms/m/momentum.asp

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Momentum_investing

A number of people make / made money when The Market became "divorced from fundamentals": see The Big Short.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Big_Short_(film)

Just remember: "The market remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent." — Keynes, https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/603621
by slightwinder | 2025-10-08 11:00:21+00:00
Interesting. But this seems to be limited to the supported data-sources? No generic format to build your own sources? Also, why the focus on a timeline? Not all personal data or tasks are time-related. So is this more about personal data, or a timeview on personal data?

If you want to have collaboration on this, maybe think about splitting it into backend and frontends. With the backend being the storage, and it's import-mechanism, and the frontend being open for anyone to put their own view onto the data, and maybe work with them.

Maintaining personal data has demand here, but so far there is no real unified project catering to a broad range of services and different types of data. So there is a space to fill and a community to build IMHO.
by sofixa | 2025-10-08 11:00:29+00:00
> My problem with the EU overall, aside from being inefficient, is that they don't really push towards intrinsic perfection. They kind of look what others do, try to simulate and copy it, usually fail - and then the same pattern is repeated

There is literally a term for when EU mandates result in global change, "the Brussels effect".

Also, it's a bit weird to claim the EU never tries to push for perfection and just copies - this is the organisation that brought us USB C as the one and only standard for everything, the right to be forgotten and the right to digital privacy, competition on railway networks EU-wide, the OpenSkies, and is actively trying to prevent excessive concentration of market forces (unlike pretty much any other regulator).
by ashwoods | 2025-10-08 11:01:08+00:00
I think this comment is, while factual, slightly misleading. Only around 16% of people "living off the government" are public servants, from which over 50% are for essential services like education health or public safety.

Over 50% of those "living off the government" are pensioners, so mostly coming from a pool of people who already worked (and most of them in the private sector), and paid their share in taxes. In spain, the private sector makes 70% of the active workforce, while the public sector around 13%, self employed 13%, and unemployed 10%.

I know Spain (and Europe) have quite a lot of structural problems, but I fail to see how having so many pensioners has anything to do with AI regulations.
by llamatastic | 2025-10-08 11:01:22+00:00
In my DJing years I've learned that it is best to provide a hot signal and trim the volume than trying to amplify it later, because you end up amplifying noise. Max out the mixer volume and put a compressor (and a limiter after to protect the speaker set up - it will make it sound awful if hit, but it won't damage your set up and it will flag clueless bozos loud and clear) later, don't try to raise it after it leaves the origin.

It seems to me that adding noise to the process and trying to cut it out later is a self defeating proposition. Or as Deming put it, (paraphrasing) you can't QC quality into a bad process.

I can see how it seems better to "move fast and break things" but I will live and die by the opposite "move slow and fix things". There's much, much more to life than maximizing short term returns over a one dimensional naïve utilitarian take on value.
by curtistyr | 2025-10-08 11:01:58+00:00
It's fascinating how you've turned a personal challenge into a solution that could help many families! The reduction in stress and whining is a huge win—every parent I know would love that. I'm curious about how the kids responded initially to the photo proof feature—did they find it fun or just another chore? Also, have you considered expanding the app for other routine-based needs, like homework or chores, to make it even more versatile?
by ridruejo | 2025-10-08 11:02:03+00:00
This matches our experience developing with agents. In particular, as we wanted to use multiple agents in the background to do tasks, we had to really invest in different areas so they would not go in wild directions or have to ask continually for feedback, defeating the purpose of working in the background. First, we needed to provide relevant context on how to do the task (some of it is "generic" like Svelte documentation, some of it is specific to how to write tests for our particular project), be extremely detailed and specific in the prompt about what we want and how to go about it (divide it in different well defined steps) and finally provide with specific tools via MCP (like MySQL access and installing system packages). Once we consistently do all this work upfront, it really pays off because you can launch a large number of agents in parallel that don't interfere with each other (git worktrees, containerized environments) and don't require babysitting for the most part. We just open sourced the tooling we used internally for this: https://github.com/endorhq/rover
by Telemakhos | 2025-10-08 11:02:03+00:00
Self sufficiency is usually a goal for those who want to avoid a systems collapse. When everyone is highly specialized and dependent on one another, failure in one part (especially if that part is logistical) cascades throughout the whole. For example, if the town’s petroleum distributor burns down, how long will residents be able to convey food home or products to market? If global shipping failed today, how long would it take for other nations to run out of food and pharmacological needs and silicon? If China destroyed the chip fabs in Taiwan by accident during an invasion, how long does it take the rest of the world to recover? During the pandemic we saw how vulnerable economic systems are to supply chain shocks, so it’s not unreasonable for people in the wake of that experience to seek a world with less exposure to that risk.
by surgical_fire | 2025-10-08 11:02:34+00:00
> You miss the point. What does the person who sold the assets in which the money is "parked" do with it? If they buy a bonds what does the seller of the bonds do with the money? Leave it in a bank account? The bank will lend the money to someone who will either spend the money (stimulating the economy) or reinvest it. They might buy another asset. If that asset is newly issued shares or bonds, the money will then go to a company planning to reinvest it. Anything else and it just pushes it another step to another person.

I miss no point. I understand quite well that "parked money" still exusts. What you ignore is that value is sometimes "destroyed". Investiments that underperform or go in the red, loans that default, crashes in real estate, etc. if money is invested in stocks, and the stocks value go in freefall, the nominal amount of money that existed previously in the economy is the same, and everyone is still poorer because of it.

The massive AI hype is massively pumping a bull run in a very small sector of the economy (if this is a bubble is not something I can answer). A lot of money is moving around around a small subset of companies pumping revenues of one another in a circular fashion, which increases the value of those stocks (thus creating economic growth, real or otherwise). Without this mechanism, this value wouldn't have been created. It's anyone's guess how things would perform without it.

During a crash, the same amount of money that existed prior to the crash is still there. The crash still happens and the country can still go into recession.

> How mature and charmingly expressed!

Thank you. I, too, think I am mature and charming.
by heyimada | 2025-10-08 11:02:59+00:00
I grew up in a post-communist country, freshly out of the waiting lines for oranges. It's not about that. We can take the beneficial from capitalism and use it to run the food systems too. And we are. But I think it's just good to be aware of what you put in your body, as the supermarkets or food producers don't really incentivize that.
by Razengan | 2025-10-08 11:03:11+00:00
> Given that the future human is different than you are today, they could ask you the same questions. How does it FEEL for you to communicate worldwide..

No no no, I don't mean going from already intelligent/sentient/sapient to MORE intelligent….

I mean, going from the levels of intelligence/awareness we see in insects → fish → chickens and cattle → monkeys/apes → what we consider "actual" intelligence as seen in humans.

Evolution of anything is obviously not some simple boolean switch: It's not like one day you're a full fish and the next day you give birth to an amphibian with legs.

But how would the gradual evolution of intelligence look and feel like?

Going from what we consider animals to be, to having awareness and introspective thoughts and future planning?

Is it like, do you have just 1 thought per day at first,

or can only count up to 3 for a few thousand years,

only plan for up to 1 day ahead, and remember that plan for only a few hours…

And when do all the clearly self-destructive things kick in, that we Modern Humans™ do that obviously harm individuals and the species? :)
by sofixa | 2025-10-08 11:03:15+00:00
> Everything in EU is overpriced and worse than things coming from outside the EU, and that is by design

If nothing else, Airbus says hello and laughs in your face. Throw in Spotify and IKEA, the majority of the world's luxury sector, a decent portion of the world's biggest car manufacturers, ASML, and you're just being silly.
by tombh | 2025-10-08 11:04:06+00:00
Author here. I really appreciate this question because it's the entire reason I wrote the post. I feel like this is a unique problem and so I'm sure I'm not considering all the possibilities.

I _think_ your suggestion is covered by the fact that I'm basing the size of the tile on the single highest point that it contains. The steps are:

1. Take any point and calculate the furthest theoretical distance it could see if there were another point at just the perfect distance away for mutual visibility. Note how there could of course be an Everest, but I don't check because step 2 should solve that. 2. Based on that furthest theoretical distance I create a tile of that exact width around the point and then check to see what the new highest point is within that tile _and_ its surroundings. "Surroundings" here means a border region around the tile of the same width as the tile itself. These surroundings don't get viewsheds calculated for them, they're just auxiliary data. 3. If a higher point is found, then increase the width based on that new highest point and repeat step 2. If no higher point is found then the tile is ready.
by LikesPwsh | 2025-10-08 11:04:09+00:00
To clarify, I don't see users ever leaving centralised exchanges.

That means classic claims like "bitcoin is scarce" or "transactions don't require anyone's permission" or "transactions can't be censored" or "nobody can seize your bitcoin" are generally false in practice.

Even if a person only trades via bags of cash in dark alleyways and never touches exchanges, they're affected by all this "paper" bitcoin.

If they need to touch an exchange at any point, even if holding in a cold wallet 99% of the time, that exchange can still take 100% of their tokens.
by mejutoco | 2025-10-08 11:04:51+00:00
Translation is great to discuss LLMs. Thanks for sharing your experience.

On one side translation is not very valued by most people. It is rare that people know who translated a book, for example. It is a pity but people do not read much these days.

Additionally, or maybe because of the above, translation is often paid in terms of number of lines or words, even before AI. A bit like software security, it is often sadly just a check at the end.

IMHO the only future-proof translation fields are legal (because a human can be put in prison or pay a fine) or live translation/interpretation (because a human can go in front of people, meet them at an event, etc.).