MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ux266478 | 2025-10-17 03:58:08+00:00
> they actually define what they mean in a formal way.

Sometimes yes. The big stuff is usually exhaustively formally defined down to the axioms. The further you get away from the absolute largest, most well-tread ground... the wood grows dark quite fast. Math, especially on the cutting edge, is intuitive like anything else and filled with hand-waives. Even among the exhaustively defined, there are plenty which only achieved exhaustiveness thanks to later work.

> "Programmers" generally don't.

On the contrary, all programming languages are formal grammars. I think the best way that I can underline the difference is that mathematicians are primarily utilizing formal grammars for communication to share meanings, and almost exclusively deal with meanings that are very well-defined. Programmers on the other-hand are often more concerned with some other pressing matter, usually involving architecting something unfathomably massive with a minute fraction of the man-hours used to construct ZFC, often dealing with far fuzzier things and with outright contradictory axioms which they have no control over.

They are as different as trophy truck rally and formula 1. As someone who lives in both worlds, I'm endlessly disappointed by shitflinging and irrational superiority contests between the two as though they even live in the same dimension.

> There is in fact some benefit in having consistent names for things

There is, in some contexts to some ends. Those are important and influential contexts and ends, and so the relevant math should be studied and well understood on an intuitive level. But they form a minority in both fields. I've known many mathematicians outside of programming contexts, and none of them have any grasp of category theory, type theory, the lambda calculus, etc. They might have heard of category theory, but they look at it with the same suspicion as you might expect from some fringe theoretical physics framework.

There is also the problem that these "consistent names" are built on a graveyard of previous conception. Mathematics is a history of mental frameworks, as are all ancient fields. As I underlined in my previous post, the formalization of mathematics gutted the idea of the function and filled it with straw. There's nothing wrong with how functions are defined within ZFC mind you. I just vehemently disagree with projecting it as a universal context, showing it any degree of favoritism.
by somenameforme | 2025-10-17 03:58:47+00:00
A man is accountable for his own actions. That's true for Nazi grunts and most certainly for a US President. Nixon had already been wiretapping journalists since his first months in office. [1] The guy was paranoid, anti-media, and then invited the media into permanent residence at the Pentagon. It's not hard to see the ulterior motive because the ulterior motive was the only motive.

As for the impact of the papers directly on Nixon, he could have been honest and immediately come forth with the truth when entering office. He chose not to, which made him complicit in the lies of previous administrations. This is also why if you ask somebody who's war was Vietnam? Most of everybody is going to say Nixon.

You can see strong parallels with Trump and Ukraine in modern times. It's obvious the government is not being at all honest about their assessment of the situation over there, yet Trump continues to 'play along' with the lies and indeed this is a big part of the reason why Ukraine will likely go down in history as 'Trump's War.'

If the 'Ukraine Papers' were leaked, Trump would certainly first try to pin it on Biden, but in reality nobody cares about Biden anymore - and instead the papers would mostly just reveal his own lies and complicity.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nixon_wiretaps
by cosmicgadget | 2025-10-17 04:00:12+00:00
> In June, Kennedy hired Delany to be the HHS’s director of MAHA implementation. But Delany was fired in early August, reportedly due to in-fighting with other Kennedy devotees.

Well certainly after that little dust up this guy will have no pull with the administration

> In an April 28, 2025, appearance on Dr. Phil Primetime, an audience member asked Kennedy what he would do about “stratospheric aerosol injections,” which she claimed are “continuously peppered on us every day.” Kennedy responded: “It’s done, we think by DARPA [a research agency in the Department of Defense] and a lot of it now is coming out of the jet fuel. … I am going to do everything in my power to stop it.

Gdi.
by MountDoom | 2025-10-17 04:02:31+00:00
HN as an aggregator of geek news is exceptional. It's not the first of its kind - Slashdot was quite similar - but perhaps because it's associated with the SF Bay Area, it managed to stay relevant while Slashdot withered away.

HN as a commenting community is markedly more hit-and-miss. We often comment without reading the articles, we are sometimes gratuitously negative for the sake of negativity, and there isn't any other place where I've seen so many people being confidently wrong about my areas of expertise. I think we'd be better off if we were more willing to say "this is okay and I don't need to have a strong opinion about it" or "I'm probably not an expert on X, even though I happen to be good with programming".
by quickthrowman | 2025-10-17 04:03:16+00:00
Gypsum board is the term for a type of wall covering, which itself is part of a partition.

A partition is an interior wall assembly typically consisting of framing, (optional) insulation, and a wall covering (like gypsum board, but this could be anything: wood, shiplap, masonry, lath and plaster, etc.)
by dangus | 2025-10-17 04:05:41+00:00
I never said non-city people all need to move to cities. In fact, small towns predate automobiles by thousands of years, and are not examples of urban sprawl. Furthermore, there are examples of suburbs and small towns that are well-served by transit, don't waste land wildly, and don't force you to own a car. [1]

I'm just saying that American zoning and regional planning should be adjusted to use land better and be more focused on humans than vehicles. I'm not saying that everyone needs to live in a studio apartment, nor that the government should use eminent domain to re-develop vast swaths of land and displace people. But simple things like zoning law changes can impact the direction of the future.

You've done a lot of talking about freedom, facscism, and dictatorship of being forced to live in close quarters. I would submit that the opposite has its own aspects of this "dictatorship." For example, you are forced to buy an automobile from a corporation (and most of them sold today track your every move and sell data to insurance companies [2]). You are forced to risk personal injury to drive that vehicle on the road rather than a safer alternative like walking, biking or transit. You are forced to change your job or lifestyle or home if you ever lose the ability to drive yourself by age or disability.

You say that the non-city people will never move to the city, but that has literally already been happening in the past 20 years or so.

Finally, I will point out that cities are already making themselves more attractive in exactly the way you describe. Crime has been plummeting in the last 30 years, city streets are being reconfigured to favor livability, blight is being redeveloped, and more housing is being built. For example, downtown Cleveland, Ohio has more people living downtown now than at any point in history, since before urban flight and regional population decline ever occurred.

I would also submit the idea that it's something of a misconception that cities don't have any family-friendly housing. Sure, NYC isn't a great example, but many other cities have plenty of suitable dwellings at affordable prices. Just because they aren't square footage maxxing doesn't mean they are inadequate.

I also think that many suburbanites visualize themselves as living in "small towns" when they really live in somewhat large cities in their own right that really could be entirely traversed by walking, cycling or taking financially sustainable transit like a modest bus system if they weren't made up of haphazardly parceled off farmland with winding streets rather than an easily traversed grid that has some level of long-term planning rather than a haphazard piecemeal development plan based on which farmers are selling.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ztpcWUqVpIg

[2] https://www.mozillafoundation.org/en/blog/privacy-nightmare-...
by tempodox | 2025-10-17 04:09:59+00:00
Wonderful, I want one! Say what you will, the French have good taste.

Naturally, this also poses some serious questions:

- Will this lead to more croissants being eaten? Everyone within reach of such a stamp could be affected. Will bakeries have to brace themselves?

- How will this affect the stamp collector scene? Will they flip upside down to get one of these? Will they eat more croissants?

Only time can tell!
by ch4s3 | 2025-10-17 04:10:01+00:00
Any time you collect a bunch of plants, dehydrate them, and pulverize them you’ll end up with a powdered concentration of whatever was in the plants. Since many plants can fix lead and because lead is everywhere you’ll get a little lead. It won’t be much, barely more than 1000x lower than the safe level, but some. Also cadmium probably.
by skopje | 2025-10-17 04:12:43+00:00
...yeah but it is a pain in the ass. i end up with a percentage of unspent money every week that i have to coalesce into new bills of useful denominations. that leftover screws up my accounting system and takes extra work to put to use. i'd rather have every transaction i make tracked by visa to make my accounting cleaner and not need to futz with the whole process. the downsides you list i've never really encountered since 1992, you need better evidence of failures (unless you live in some underdeveloped nation?).
by dnautics | 2025-10-17 04:13:09+00:00
> The idea that Phoenix is also mostly macros does not hold in practice

no, but the Framework does push you into using them. A good example is the `use MyAppWeb` pattern. That's a macro that nests other macros. the good news is that you can pretty much excise that and everything works fine, and LLMs have no problem even! (i think they slightly prefer it)

a few cognitive pain points with phoenix macros:

plug: (love it dearly) but a bit confusing that it creates a conn variable out of whole cloth. a minor complaint. worth it, otherwise.

phoenix.router: is a plug but isnt quite a plug.

anyways that's it! the rest is ~fabulous. i think to find a framework where you have two minor complaints is a blessing. remember how activerecord automagically pluralized tables for you?
by exoverito | 2025-10-17 04:13:41+00:00
I appreciate where you're coming from, but you risk making the perfect be the enemy of the good. What's worse, being paid less than a 'living wage' or being unemployed? The problem with a minimum wage is that if it's set to 20/hr, but some people are only worth 10/hr, then they become unemployable and have 0 income. Price controls result in shortages. In this case it's a shortage of jobs. Same phenomenon results from rent control, you will get a shortage of space at the enforced price level.

The main solution is to increase economic freedom and reduce regulatory burdens. Allow people to build. Too often they are prevented by restrictive zoning laws, absurd environmental reviews, everything-bagel mandates for diverse contractors, etc. Ironically, big corporations and billionaires often love regulation because it raises the barrier to entry and reduces competition.
by kaladin-jasnah | 2025-10-17 04:14:03+00:00
This seems to place interest and talent as equivalent. The issue is that while I might be talented at TypeScript, I have zero interest in it. I know this because I got paid an unreasonbly high amount of money as an undergrad to write async TypeScript code and do full-stack development.

The conclusion is that I would not be an "overall happier person" from this, even if I could be great at it. Besides, long-term, I would not be great at it, since my lack of interest implies a lack of motivation to succeed at it. And it was a real waste of time when it came to my goals in systems.

Interest plays a big role beyond talent. I would feel more fulfilled being a mediocre dog-killer than an excellent something-else. Either way, interest feels almost equally as important as talent to me. Interest can sometimes make up for what I lack in talent. To succeed at what I want to do, I am more than happy to put in twice the time as someone with natural talent.
by mgh95 | 2025-10-17 04:14:53+00:00
I did it for my own startup. Messed up the whole "how do we break down what constitutes a tenant" thing in the initial design at 0 customers. Made me really feel the whole "experience is reading your own code from 5 years ago and wondering what idiot wrote that" thing.

Worked out OK in the end, but took substantial effort to fix.
by egeozcan | 2025-10-17 04:15:15+00:00
I agree. I use repomix with AI Studio extensively and never found anything (including the cli agents) that's close.

I sometimes upload codebases that are around 600k tokens and even those work.

Repomix also lets you create a config file so you can give it ignore/include patterns in addition to .gitignore.

It also tells you about the outlier files with exceptionally long content.
by mopsi | 2025-10-17 04:15:35+00:00
There's a problem with this narrative. Everyone links the "What Gorbachev Heard" article from the NSU, but there was no reason to speculate, because Gorbachev and his team were still alive when the article was written in 2017.

Some others did reach out and ask them directly. Gorbachev, his minister of foreign affairs, and his minister of defense all publicly refuted it. It would have been a major commitment, yet there is no trace of it having been discussed internally in Moscow or with other Warsaw Pact countries. Furthermore, according to the USSR's foreign minister at the time, the speculation of such assurance is anachronistic, because the Soviet leadership did not expect the Warsaw Pact to dissolve and therefore had no reason to discuss anything like this.
by drewbug01 | 2025-10-17 04:15:35+00:00
> The people elected the politicians who appointed the Supreme Court justices (the governed giving their consent).

I seem to recall a recent instance where a Supreme Court seat was stolen from the politician with the right to appoint them. But, sure, we all consented to these specific justices. Sure.

> We overwhelmingly voted

Ah… that is not at all how the vote went. The popular vote, as I’m sure you know, was a difference of less than 2%. The electoral college ensures that it looks “overwhelming,” but you and I both know that this administration was not elected with an “overwhelming” in any sense of the word. It’s propaganda.

The middle of your rant is just kinda filled with dog-whistles and half-truths, so I’m not going to bother with that.

> Suddenly this admin is no longer "within the strict bounds of the law," and the biggest issue you take with all of this is that your rioters, activists, and misfits spent a day in jail for civil disobedience, and that the cops are wearing masks?

They’re arresting citizens on the street with no probable cause, and publicly lying about why the arrests were made and the circumstances around them. Yes, it is a huge issue. And yes, the masks bother me: accountability matters in law enforcement.

The reason you don’t care is that you think somehow this cruelty will benefit you and people who look like you.

It won’t.
by Animats | 2025-10-17 04:16:13+00:00
I've known some people with serious artistic talent. Even if they didn't like it. It seems to be inherited. A friend who was a good graphics artist (drawings in Smithsonian) has a son and a daughter. The daughter can draw well, but doesn't use the skill much. The son grew up drawing cars, and now he draws car designs for a major car company. For both of them, it wasn't all that hard.

One unusual skill is the military "coup d'œil". This is the skill of looking at a battlefield and maps, and knowing what to do to win. Some commanders have this, and some don't. Bolger, in his "The Panzer Killers", comments on which WWII generals had it and who didn't. (Bolger is a modern US general who has commanded tank units in combat, so he has experience with this.) This seems to be a skill that does not come from training and experience - either you have it or you don't.

The US Army tries to understand this.[1] This writer claims it is a trainable skill, but the training required is long. You have to fight a lot of battles, real or simulated. Even then it may just be bringing out the ones who have the innate talent. There aren't that many good generals. Each generation has only a few greats - Giap, Patton, people like that.

[1] https://www.armyupress.army.mil/Journals/Military-Review/Eng...
by esafak | 2025-10-17 04:17:38+00:00
I don't know why SDD suddenly became a thing, but FWIF, I find value in spec files to make sure I know what I'm going to get, and to track progress when I break up projects into smaller tasks. Mind you, I don't use any tool or framework; just a simple Markdown file. I don't see value in the formalism beyond that.
by Broken_Hippo | 2025-10-17 04:18:04+00:00
This hasn't been an issue in years.

I have a bank app. It's simple and works. Before that, they had a website. It's easy to check a balance in the morning and use that to guide you.

Before the internet was widespread, banks had a number you could call to get your balance. Heck, I think my current bank still has this, despite me being in a different country now.

Once you are in a situation where these aren't as helpful, you are probably in a bad life situation (speaking both from experience and observation of folks I know).
by nighthawk454 | 2025-10-17 04:18:45+00:00
Neat! The idea is that _all_ output embeddings must lie on a given ellipse. (On a hypersphere due to layernorm, distorted to an ellipse by the final linear layer).

Since the ellipse is given by the parameters of the model, it is characteristic to the model. And, you can pretty easily verify if a given embedding (probably) came from that model or not simply by checking if it lies on that ellipse.

Recovering the ellipse without access to the model weights takes large number of embeddings, so not terribly practical.

This easy-to-verify hard-to-forge property could naturally lend itself to use for fingerprinting. Noting that they call out it’s not cryptographic grade.
Show HN: Playbot – See lyrics and artist details without alt-tabbing
by iamjk | 2025-10-17 04:18:51+00:00
Playbot is a Rust CLI + TUI that reads the currently playing track from your local Spotify desktop app and displays lyrics, artist info, album details and more — no Spotify or Genius API keys required. It caches results in a local SQLite DB for fast lookups and includes an interactive browser for searching your library. macOS only. Install with cargo build --release and run ./target/release/pb. https://github.com/after-ephemera/playbot
by Larrikin | 2025-10-17 04:19:11+00:00
There is no scale to be had at local delivery. Between various services, banks, and credit cards, I get the paid tier of all the delivery apps for "free", so I am paying the absolute minimum.

It makes no sense to me for these "scalable" companies to pick up my food, drive in the wrong direction, wait at another restaurant, then continue to drive in the wrong direction to drop off that order, and then get me my cold food that I still paid more for than menu price with an expected tip the driver can see before they even pick up my order. I gave up on the whole concept once I moved somewhere with more than two places that are walking distance. Not all of them are great but it's still a better deal than a terrible delivery from an amazing place at a huge mark up.

The worst time line is the cheap places that used to offer free delivery growing up having their delivery handled by a lightly skinned version of DoorDash.

If you think you can use a coupon for a discount you actually are just paying the full price of their delivery fee without the delivery service discount you get directly from DoorDash.
by 29athrowaway | 2025-10-17 04:21:05+00:00
Elixir was not a happy experience.

The language itself is maybe OK but the overall experience is not.

On a production build, stack traces look like Erlang code, which is the weird syntax that Elixir tried to improve upon.

Then you have macros, which make code unmaintainable at the 10k SLOC mark, and increasingly harder to maintain as projects get larger.

Running "mix xref graph" on most Elixir projects shows a spaghetti mess.

The toolchain has much room for improvement. Editing, debugging, profiling, unit testing, or pretty much any basic routine development task, involves a tool that's decades behind the state of the art. Even Borland tools from the 80s have a better toolchain.

Building a team around Elixir is hard. You have to train people on the job and they will probably not write idiomatic code that takes advantage of the language. Or deal with people that won't stop selling you how great the language is.

And the documentation for most of the projects you will use is full of noise, with few workable examples, grandiose claims of performance and fantastic treasures, and the articles are a great read if you want to waste your entire evening.

Support for massive concurrency is nice but you are realistically not going to need it. If you do need it then yes, Elixir can be a good tool for the job.
by myrandomcomment | 2025-10-17 04:22:43+00:00
I find this thread amusing. My M3 MacBook Pro just works. My family's iPhone 15s just work. My iPad Mini 6 just works. My wife's 3 year old iPad just works. Her 3 year old MacBook Air just works. My kids 3 year old M1 MacBook just works. I am an old man. My MCSE was on NT 3.51. I wrote my first code in 6502 ML. The first production network I handled used SNA. The level of Apple kit just working is a so far beyond anything I have experienced in 30+ years of being in tech.
by Franklinjobs617 | 2025-10-17 04:22:48+00:00
Wow, I can't believe how much progress we've made since I first posted this Ask HN comment a few days ago.

A huge thanks to everyone who shared their deep technical insights—especially the feedback on optimizing TXT output for RAG systems and the architectural notes on high-accuracy transcription. Your input literally saved us weeks of R&D.

I'm incredibly happy to announce that YTVidHub is officially LIVE at https://ytvidhub.com.

The core bulk downloader architecture we discussed here is now implemented. You can paste dozens of YouTube URLs and get a clean, organized ZIP file in minutes. The free tier gives you 5 daily credits for bulk operations.

We’re already focused on the next big challenge: the Pro AI Transcription feature, which will directly address the accuracy concerns raised here.

Please check it out, put the bulk workflow to the test, and let me know if it solves your specific pain points.

Cheers, Franklin
by fracus | 2025-10-17 04:25:52+00:00
This reminds me of the Mitch Hedberg joke..

"I bought a donut and they gave me a receipt for the donut; I don't need a receipt for the doughnut. I'll just give you the money, and you give me the doughnut, end of transaction. We don't need to bring ink and paper into this. I just can't imagine a scenario where I would have to prove that I bought a doughnut."
by SamDc73 | 2025-10-17 04:26:10+00:00
I had a jailbreaked kindle a while back, but did update it by mistake and couldn't make it work again (didn't try that much honestly) and I switched to boox (which is android based e-reader)

I use it with my self-hosted calibre-web where I can sync my books to both KOReader on my boox and phone with the OPDS protocol and I use syncthing to sync my progress and highlights too ..

it's a bit of work to set up but I know it will work for a very long time, where with your solution, I wonder how long before Amazon will make it harder yet again?