MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by alganet | 2025-10-18 07:49:05+00:00
Thing is, it sounds like more than I could take. I mean, formal math, not TypeScript.

For TS I really just need some solid notion about sets, maybe some experience with generics, and patience to deal with how other people annotated their types if I want to use their code. It's not that big of a deal.

Math on the other hand, has lots of stuff formalized. Personally, doesn't feel like I can just jump in into one of those formal systems and thrive. It's way more than sets.

Perhaps the post is not for me. It's for people above me in math skills. In fact, I'm sure of it! But maybe there's some curious people that know TS and could be led to believe formal math is also just annotating types and doing sets, when I know that it's not! Analogies can be tricky sometimes.
by hdgvhicv | 2025-10-18 07:49:24+00:00
How many years/miles does the average new ev last and how much does it cost to own/operate for that time.

How many years/miles does the average new ice cost and how much does it cost to own/operate.

I tend to buy the bottom of the market. My last cost £1100 and has lasted 3 years/9k miles so far and seems reasonable.

I didn’t buy electric because they are far more expensive. That’s seems to be at odds with the claim they deprecate more.

There are 57 electric cars under 3k for sale and 30,000 petrol ones on auto trader.

At any price the ratio is about 10:1 rather than 600:1.

Second hand EVs are more expensive than second hand petrol cars.
by bjornsing | 2025-10-18 07:50:24+00:00
I ran a small ISP around the same time that used this behavioral pattern to bring down the customer acquisition cost to near zero. Essentially we sold ADSL connections with Wi-Fi and a second SSID where anybody could connect and sign up for internet access. If too may signed up we sent out personal offers for ADSL service to some of them and wired up their homes too. Fun project, but stressful and not very profitable.
Ask HN: What background color among white or black preferrable for websites?
by avivallssa | 2025-10-18 07:51:09+00:00
These days, it is very common to see websites with dark backgrounds.

I ran a poll within my company and it seems like many love the dark background of our Website.

Www.hexarocket.com

But while speaking to a few folks within my professional network, they say it's better to choose the light background.

Does one really care the background color of a website ?

Or one would just skip reading because of the background color ?
by inglor_cz | 2025-10-18 07:52:49+00:00
I think it is a bit intellectually lazy to pull the "capitalism bad" at every occasion.

I would blame our monkey brains instead. India has no shortage of traditional sweets that predate capitalism (Indians even knew sugar far before Europeans did), but in the previous crushing poverty that lasted millennia, only a tiny fragment of the Indian population had the opportunity to eat themselves to gout, diabetes, obesity etc. Now, almost every Indian can eat to satiety and beyond, for the first time in history. And the aftereffects show.

Capitalism is fairly efficient at providing people what they want. If our monkey brains crave sugar, sugary treats it will be.

We need to get our monkey brains under control, and not just with regard to sugar. At least some HNers are probably working on digitally addictive products, and then there are the old-fashioned drugs like alcohol and opiates, too.
by miduil | 2025-10-18 07:53:26+00:00
Nice to see that the parent Philippines holding company (Music Tribe) which went on a massive acquisition spree and bought a bunch of specialized audio companies still allows things to be free & open sourced.

(Though just read up that the CEO/Founder of Music Tribe is Uli Behringer)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_Tribe
by altairprime | 2025-10-18 07:53:29+00:00
That’s why payment of wages in company scrip was made illegal! Previously, the next step was to pay people in a made-up currency that had no market value outside of the company store, so that workers could be effectively held prisoner at the destitution line by disabling their ability to save up money to leave. The corporation can buy the goods at a heavy discount in bulk from another corporation and no profits need be paid out to workers, nor to retention efforts.

This cycle, gig work and part-time hours are exploiting the health care gap to ensure that people are paid just barely enough money to show up to work the next day, but not enough money or hours so that they can afford to voluntarily quit being exploited. Universal healthcare and basic income at a national level would crater involuntary employment numbers and likely cause a banking crash when consumers default en masse on their credit debt balances.

“Chattel slavery is dead, but industrial slavery remains.” (1886)
by derriz | 2025-10-18 07:53:52+00:00
Why? The transmission system is used to span distance to bring energy from large producers to large concentrations of consumers. Traditionally power consumption was concentrated in and around cities while power generation happened away from cities.

Datacenters require relatively few people to operate so do not need to be located in or near population centers. Sites are chosen on this basis - DCs are sited close to generation or significant transmission system nodes
by jychang | 2025-10-18 07:54:22+00:00
I think the code comments straight up just help understanding, whether human or AI.

There's a piece of common knowledge that NBA basketball players can all hit over 90% on free throws, if they shot underhand (granny style). But for pride reasons, they don't throw underhand. Shaq just shot 52%, even though it'd be free points if he could easily shoot better.

I suspect there's similar things in software engineering. I've seen plenty of comments on HN about "adding code comments like a junior software engineer" or similar sentiment. Sure, there's legitimate gripes about comments (like how they can be misleading if you update the code without changing the comment, etc), but I strongly suspect they increase comprehension of code overall.
by schoen | 2025-10-18 07:55:09+00:00
The part that they're trying to avoid is the "access" in "access and substantial similarity"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Substantial_similarity

(usual factual elements in determining the possibility of a copyright infringement in U.S. law).

I agree with you that it's possible in principle that copyright infringement would not be found even when there was evidence of access. But I think the courts would usually give the defendant a higher burden in that case. You can see in the Wikipedia article that there has been debate about whether access becomes more relevant when the similarity is greater and less relevant when the similarity is less (apparently the current Ninth Circuit standard on that is "no"?).
by jasonsb | 2025-10-18 07:56:03+00:00
> To summon the vast proposed changes, PV cells' improvements need to be coincided with many other changes: grid development, battery tech, industrial re-tooling, climate policies/institutions, mining/extraction, agricultural methods, production methods... and that's without even discussing culture, which will have to evolve substantially.

What a ridiculous take. PV's are plug and play, you don't have to change anything. The only dependency is storage, so battery tech needs to keep up. However, advancements in battery tech are already progressing at a rate that exceeds the pace of innovation in PV cells.
by awesome_dude | 2025-10-18 07:56:34+00:00
I think that was my point, I generally regurgitate. A person can do that a lot in life.

That's why people are conflating LLMs for AGI.

For now, I think that the key difference between me, and an LLM is that an LLM still needs a prompt.

It's not surveying the world around it determining what it needs to do.

I do a lot of something that I think an LLM cannot get do, look at things and try to find what attributes they have and how I can harness those to solve problems. Most of the attributes are unknown by the human race when I start.
by flohofwoe | 2025-10-18 07:56:45+00:00
> why don't we have that on other cpus

Pure speculation from my side, but I'd think that the advantages over traditional big register banks and on-chip caches are not that great, especially when you're writing 'cache-aware code'. You also need to consider that the PS3 was full of design compromises to keep cost down, e.g. there simply might not have been enough die space for a cache controller for each SPU, or the die space was more vaulable to get a few more kilobytes of static scratch memory instead of the cache logic.

Also, AFAIK on some GPU architectures you have something similar like per-core static scratch space, that's where restrictions are coming from that uniform data per shader invocation may at most be 64 KBytes on some GPU architectures, etc...
by Terr_ | 2025-10-18 07:57:18+00:00
I initially read the top-of-thread HN comment as:

1. Stross is trying to tie many events to a change from fossil fuels to solar power, but stronger drivers lie elsewhere.

2. It's better-explained by population dynamics, involving medical technology, mortality and longevity, contraceptives, the shifting balance of workers to retirees, etc.

3. [Charitable-reading effort increases here] These trends involved are old and multi-generational, arguably going back to the industrial revolution. As a casual way to show a very-long-ago datapoint, there are arguments/research about a secularizing France's odd population slump back in the 1700s, which predates the widespread use of fossil fuels.

> Birth-rate-over-time changes happen everywhere and have throughout history

If you look at a world population chart (logarithmic scale, naturally) [0] it becomes clear something in the last few hundred years caused a deviation from the old trend.

Stross might argue the trigger was fossil-fuels, others would argue the trigger was a change in human-capital from medicine/nutrition, perhaps a third group would argue both are inextricably intertwined.

[0] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:World_population_gro...
by nebula8804 | 2025-10-18 07:58:33+00:00
Who in Japan is good at this? I can only imagine the R&D division at maybe Playstation and thats it.

China has so many people that EE and CS are a dime a dozen, thats why they have a competitive market thats low cost. People are in a jungle trying to survive.

[0]: https://youtu.be/ljOoGyCso8s?t=101

The video is (Supposedly) EEs doing customer support roles thus allowing Cheap PCB for hobbyists, the equivalent in the US does not exist.

Side Note: I hear this is also why SASS never really took off in China. Why pay someone else for software when you can get a dozen people to make your own cheaper.
by tim333 | 2025-10-18 07:59:19+00:00
I think that kind of thing is one of the main problems with the 'AI bubble'. It's probably a misallocation of capital, spending billions on energy sucking data centers people don't especially want which leaves less money for things like paying creatives to make anime shows people do want.

In properly functioning capitalism entrepreneurs would look at what they can make a profit at due to people paying for it because they want it and invest in that but the hype wave seems to be causing an over allocation to heavily loss making activities.

And I say that as a believer that AGI is on the way but that it will come from smart computer folk designing better systems, not from more gigawatts of data centers.
by squigz | 2025-10-18 08:02:46+00:00
LLMs have their own biases.

But either way, I want people like dang to be the ones moderating and managing a community - call it "personal bias" if you'd like, but they have a vision for the space, and as long as I as a user think that that vision is of a community I want to be in, then it's fine. If I no longer think it is... I leave.
by charcircuit | 2025-10-18 08:03:07+00:00
The hype is justified. Nowadays I rarely write code directly anymore. I don't have to navigate around the codebase to trace data flow. I don't have to find mistakes causing a deadlock. The way I do my job compared to a year ago is completely different and I'm accomplishing more in the same amount of time. This isn't even including my usage in my personal life for education.

I'm skeptical the majority of tech experts are struggling to find the utility of them.
by kla-s | 2025-10-18 08:04:48+00:00
Id also add that 5) We need some sense of truth.

Im not quite sure if the current paradigm of LLMs are robust enough given the recent Anthropic Paper about the effect of data quality or rather the lack thereof, that a small bad sample can poison the well and that this doesn’t get better with more data. Especially in conjunction with 4) some sense of truth becomes crucial in my eyes (Question in my eyes is how does this work? Something verifiable and understandable like lean would be great but how does this work with more fuzzy topics…).
by throwaway-0001 | 2025-10-18 08:04:54+00:00
Your fist prompt was just biological.

So if I make an ai with an a prompt and tell him to re prompt itself every day for the rest of his life means is smart now? Or just because I give him the first prompt is invalid? I doubt your first prompt was given by yourself. Was probably in your mums belly your first prompt.

—-

I could give an initial prompt to my ai to survey the server and act accordingly… and he can re prompt every day himself.

——

> I do a lot of something that I think an LLM cannot get do, look at things and try to find what attributes they have and how I can harness those to solve problems. Most of the attributes are unknown by the human race when I start.

Any examples? An ai can look at a conversation and extract insights better than most people. Negotiate better than most people.

—-

I heard nothing that you can do more than a llm. Self prompting yourself to do something I don’t think is a differentiator.

You also self prompt yourself based on Previous feedback. And you do this since you’re a baby. So someone also gave you the source prompt. Maybe dna.
by arthurofbabylon | 2025-10-18 08:05:30+00:00
When I think of the term "agency" I think of a feedback loop whereby an actor is aware of their effect and adjusts behavior to achieve desired effects. To be a useful agent, one must operate in a closed feedback loop; an open loop does not yield results.

Consider the distinction between probabilistic and deterministic reasoning. When you are dealing with a probabilistic method (eg, LLMs, most of the human experience) closing the feedback loop is absolutely critical. You don't really get anything if you don't close the feedback loop, particularly as you apply a probabilistic process to a new domain.

For example, imagine that you learn how to recognize something hot by hanging around a fire and getting burned, and you later encounter a kettle on a modern stove-top and have to learn a similar recognition. This time there is no open flame, so you have to adapt your model. This isn't a completely new lesson, the prior experience with the open flame is invoked by the new experience and this time you may react even faster to that sensation of discomfort. All of this is probabilistic; you aren't certain that either a fire or a kettle will burn you, but you use hints and context to take a guess as to what will happen; the element that ties together all of this is the fact of getting burned. Getting burned is the feedback loop closing. Next time you have a better model.

Skillful developers who use LLMs know this: they use tests, or they have a spec sheet they're trying to fulfill. In short, they inject a brief deterministic loop to act as a conclusive agent. For the software developer's case it might be all tests passing, for some abstract project it might be the spec sheet being completely resolved. If the developer doesn't check in and close the loop, then they'll be running the LLM forever. An LLM believes it can keep making the code better and better, because it lacks the agency to understand "good enough." (If the LLM could die, you'd bet it would learn what "good enough" means.)

Where does dying come in? Nature evolved numerous mechanisms to proliferate patterns, and while everyone pays attention to the productive ones (eg, birth) few pay attention to the destructive (eg, death). But the destructive ones are just as important as the productive ones, for they determine the direction of evolution. In terms of velocity you can think of productive mechanisms as speed and destructive mechanisms as direction. (Or in terms of force you can think of productive mechanisms as supplying the energy and destructive mechanisms supplying the direction.) Many instances are birthed, and those that survive go on and participate in the next round. Dying is the closed feedback loop, shutting off possibilities and defining the bounds of the project.
by barnabee | 2025-10-18 08:07:32+00:00
I miss UIs that were native to screens and efficiently and effectively deigned to work well on screens.

What was wrong with windows and panels that actually filled square viewports, visually distinct separation between different things, use of colour to distinguish controls that are defaults, less common, disabled, etc., compact and easy to scan tables and lists, screens that display and update instantly…

It is embarrassing that GUIs have become so bad that well designed TUIs running inside software designed to emulate computers from the 1970s now regularly[0] make better "desktop" applications than modern apps and anything adhering to the braindead design fad of the day.

[0] https://github.com/rothgar/awesome-tuis
by sparkie | 2025-10-18 08:08:54+00:00
A general language feature would be fexprs, or call-by-name (which can be combined with call-by-value using call-by-push-value).

In Kernel[1] for example, where operatives are an improved fexpr.

($define! $if ($vau (condition if-true if-false) env ($cond ((eval condition env) (eval if-true env)) (#t (eval if-false env)))))

$vau is similar to $lambda, except it doesn't implicitly evaluate its operands, and it implicitly receives it's caller's dynamic environment as a first class value which gets bound to env.

$lambda is not actually a builtin in Kernel, but wrap is, which constructs an applicative by wrapping an operative.

($define! $lambda ($vau (args . body) env (wrap (eval (list* $vau args #ignore body) env))))

All functions have an underlying operative which can be extracted with unwrap.

[1]:https://ftp.cs.wpi.edu/pub/techreports/pdf/05-07.pdf
by globular-toast | 2025-10-18 08:10:44+00:00
Yeah, the result is pretty cool. It's probably how it felt to eat pizza for the first time. People had been grinding grass seeds into flour, mixing with water and putting it on hot stones for millennia. Meanwhile others had been boiling fruits into pulp and figuring out how to make milk curdle in just the right way. Bring all of that together and, boom, you have the most popular food in the world.

We're still at the stage of eating pizza for the first time. It'll take a little while to remember that you can do other things with bread and wheat, or even other foods entirely.
by prmph | 2025-10-18 08:11:33+00:00
I think you are confusing physical possibility with statistical probability.

And even physically, some things are just what they are. You can't escape death; you can't escape from a black hole, etc. You may claim these things may be possible in the future, but we are talking about what is currently possible.

But, the main way to understand the argument being made is: even if something is physically possible, if it is guaranteed that only say 10% people of people will achieve it, then you need to manage your expectations. It is exactly the same reason why gambling is a bad idea. In the aggregate, you are guaranteed to lose

A lot of grief arises because people ignore this basic concept. And, a lot of things in life are zero-sum: not all employees can be at the top level, otherwise that loses its meaning. Similarly, not all citizens can be president, not all people can be rich, etc.
by atoav | 2025-10-18 08:13:15+00:00
Other digital Audio connection protocols: Toslink, AES50, AES67 (Ravenna), Dante, AVB, AES10 (MADI). Then for stage connection basically every mixer manufacture has their own protocol with Allen Heaths SLink, Soundcraft’s Ultranet/SI Link, Yamaha’s TWINLANe and YGDAI, Roland’s REAC, Avid’s AVB-based Stage 64, and DiGiCo’s Optocore/SD-Rack links...

Most of them use standard CAT cables for this since that is what has been made for the transmission of network data for reasonably long distances. You can replace the RJ-45 plugs with Ethercon connectors if you need it extra rugged and reliable.

Ravenna, AVB and MADI are already existing, open standards that do even more, but I guess they are too expensive because of the ultra low latency requirements and FPGAs involved.

The use of an specialized automotive audio bus IC is interesting and probably gets the cost down, but within a car cable lengths are rarely comparable to what would happen in a concert venue. According to Behringer there is a 15m max cable distance per spec. That is.. too low for practise. Maybe for a small rehearsal room or so, but if you go from a front of house mixer to the stage 15m is nothing, especially if you can't run it the direct way.

Nice of them opening it up still.
by Xss3 | 2025-10-18 08:14:22+00:00
My partner bought a used nissan first gen Nissan leaf with 70% battery health for 5k a couple of years ago.

So far it has saved her approx 2k on petrol costs alone.

Then there is maintenance costs....No major issues. Less than 200 per year so far if you exclude the fresh set of tyres we put on it when she bought it.

99% of our journeys can be done in it. It's rare for either of us to need more than 80mi in a day.

It can get a full charge off a standard british plug socket over night too, so we dont have a fast charger installed or anything. Most days we only do 10mi, so it goes for an overnight charge once a week and thats fine.

The result? We have to remind ourselves to take the petrol car out for a spin every 2 weeks just to keep it healthy.
by derriz | 2025-10-18 08:14:56+00:00
That’s my point - reusing an existing connector type for a new and completely incompatible role will not make life easier.

I joked to a friend once that it would be far better if we just used a single connector type for everything in audio and get rid of jacks, XLR, power connectors, MIDI, etc. They liked the idea - I deadpan suggested regular mains plugs and sockets would be good - cheap, ubiquitous and sturdy.
by ta1243 | 2025-10-18 08:14:59+00:00
I can see benefits to a closed circuit camera. I've never felt the need personally.

If it's not running free software and treated in a secure fashion (camera can't talk to anything other than the server, enforced at the network level, etc) then it's not a risk per-se.

However people would rather pay up front and pay subscriptions to get outside companies to run it than run their own their own equipment. In the 90s when I was excited about tech I didn't even consider that aspect.
by JPLeRouzic | 2025-10-18 08:15:16+00:00
Given the generational discontent, likely deliberately fueled by those in power, a tax on retirees will solve the problem.

The 2026 budget proposal includes an increase in their tax burden, which may not be passed by Parliament.

I suspect this is just the beginning: more and more people between the ages of 25 and 60 are holding down two jobs, and are increasingly wondering whether they will get a substantial pension.
by flohofwoe | 2025-10-18 08:17:49+00:00
If you're using a modern Mac today, you're essentially running a modernized version of NeXTSTEP, so actually it's NeXT which has survived by 'reverse-acquiring' Apple, and the original Mac has joined the technology graveyard along with Amiga, Atari etc...

...or actually... modern Macs are a NeXT/Archimedes hybrid - the software comes from NeXT, while the hardware is of Archimedes heritage ;)