MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by cardanome | 2025-10-30 16:56:10+00:00
> 80% of the people only need 20% of the features

Yes, but those 80% all use a different subset of the 20% of features. So if you want to make them all happy, you need to implement 100% of the features.

I see the pattern so often. There is a "needlessly complicated" product. Someone thinks we can make it simpler, we rewrite it/refactor the UI. Super clean and everything. But user X really needs that one feature! Oh and maybe lets implement Y. A few years down the line you are back to having a "needlessly complicated" product.

If you think it could easily be done better, you don't understand the problem domain well enough yet. Real simplicity looks easy but is hard to achieve.
by bdesimone | 2025-10-30 16:56:11+00:00
Posting a coworker’s deep dive on the nuance of health checks that actually represent readiness. If you’ve had pods say "ready" while still failing traffic during rollouts, this will resonate.

Happy to answer any questions about the finer points of readiness checks in Pomerium, Envoy, and in general for systems running in systems like k8s, systemd, and so on.
by ho_schi | 2025-10-30 16:56:46+00:00
Capitalism itself is a rather modern idea around 1800. And greed is maybe rooted in human nature, within the need to keep a buffer of food.

But we’ve brains and are social entities. I don’t think greed is necessity. But greed of other harm our needs. And we need to get greedy to get enough?

Examples: I want a nice bicycle. I need small house or nice flat. I enjoy good food from time to. I’m rather sure I don’t need a super-yacht, no swimming pool and no villa. I think stuff which I cannot keep myself clean is too much. If I cannot keep it clean myself it was greed?

But we’ve big dreams?

For the big dreams I would probably consider a cooperative society. These airliners are so expensive and suffer from not being used. Sharing them would be nice? Like…like owning airline stocks. Without the enforcement to gain money. Maybe some people enjoy flying it around, other maintaining it and others care about safety and passengers. Others maybe want fly to the moon. And others enjoy ships. Maybe sharing them deliberately makes sense?
by gopalv | 2025-10-30 16:57:12+00:00
The useful part is that duckdb is so easy to use as a client with an embedded server, because duckdb is a great client (+ a library).

Similar to how git can serve a repo from a simple http server with no git installed on that (git update-server-info).

The frozen part is what iceberg promised in the beginning, away from Hive's mutable metastore.

Point to a manifest file + parquet/orc & all you need to query it is S3 API calls (there is no metadata/table server, the server is the client).

> Creating and publishing a Frozen DuckLake with about 11 billion rows, stored in 4,030 S3-based Parquet files took about 22 minutes on my MacBook

Hard to pin down how much of it is CPU and how much is IO from s3, but doing something like HLL over all the columns + rows is pretty heavy on the CPU.
by protimewaster | 2025-10-30 16:57:17+00:00
My concern is that they grabbed some random driver signed by a random person and just assumed it was trustworthy enough to be included in a project. That's not the behavior I associate with how "extremely trustworthy" projects should be run. I understand others may not agree, though. I also understand that this is a different project, but that behavior kinda makes me feel like any project with those people involved shouldn't be viewed as extremely trustworthy. Are they also running randomly grabbed code on the build machines and assuming it's safe to do so?
by mritchie712 | 2025-10-30 16:57:50+00:00
I've been looking for this exact thing. A couple questions:

Are your agents good at testing other agents? e.g. I want your agent to ask our agent a few questions and complete a few UI interactions with the results.

How do you handle testing onboarding flows? e.g. I want your agent to create a new account in our app (https://www.definite.app/) and go thru the onboarding flow (e.g. add Stripe and Hubspot as integrations).
by Der_Einzige | 2025-10-30 16:58:17+00:00
Why do people not believe that LLMs are invertible when we had GPT-2 acting as a lossless text compressor for a demo? That's based on exploiting the invertibility of a model...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23618465 (The original website this links to is down but proof that GPT-2 worked as lossless text compressor)
by left-struck | 2025-10-30 16:58:21+00:00
I think GUI tools lend themselves more to being able to discover functionality intuitively without needing to look anything up or read a manual, and especially so if you’re coming back to a task you haven’t done in a while. With CLI I constantly have to google or ask an LLM about commands I’ve done many times, whereas with a gui if I do it once I can more easily find my way the next time. Anyway both have their place
by dredmorbius | 2025-10-30 16:58:21+00:00
Causality is complicated and probably impossible to untangle, but the vast decreases in both infant/early child and maternal mortality played a huge role here.

If half your children didn't die by age 20 (or 5), it was possible to have much smaller families. Industrialisation and urbanisation made children net liabilities rather than household assets (providing labour even at a very young age). Financialisation of real estate along with the rest of the economy made earning and saving money critical, and made non-cash or low-cash lifestyles highly marginal (self-sufficient existence or providing many goods and services through the home directly). All that in combination with improved adult lifespans meant that the demographic pyramid consolidated at the bottom and expanded at the top. There are still countries where this isn't the case, most notably now in sub-Saharan Africa, particularly where HIV/AIDS remains endemic:

Contrast Tanzania and Italy, for example:

<https://www.indexmundi.com/tanzania/age_structure.html>

<https://www.indexmundi.com/italy/age_structure.html>
by PaulHoule | 2025-10-30 16:58:30+00:00
Whenever some new development in software development comes around people remember this classic Fred Brooks essay

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

which points out that software development involves many different tasks, let's say

20% requirements gathering 20% design 20% coding 20% test 20% deployment

let's say that some huge innovation cuts the time to code down to 0. You still have to do 80% of the work! If a "no code" system is going to radically improve the situation it has to take a big chunk out of all of those things.

We don't have a failing video game industry or disasters like iOS 26 because low-level coders are making little mistakes, we are having them because of poor productivity and quality in the area of deciding what software gets made and what characteristics that software has. If you were able to: (a) fire everybody at Microsoft except for Satya Nadella or (b) fire Satya Nadella, (b) would be the change that would impact what gets made, I'm sure Satya Nadella could come up with the bad ideas on all his own in case (a).

---

The bright spot is that there's a certain kind of person who could make AI-enhanced software for their own personal or for small group use. If you can get the business out of it entirely, AI software development could be revolutionary. If the goal is to make polished software that serves the needs of a wide number of people you run into all the old business problems (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification)
by cdiamand | 2025-10-30 16:58:38+00:00
This is something I have found missing in my current workflow when reviewing PR's. Particularly in the age of large AI generated PR's.

I think most reviewers do this to some degree by looking at points of interest. It'd be cool if this could look at your prior reviews and try to learn your style.

Is this the correct commit to look at? https://github.com/manaflow-ai/cmux/commit/661ea617d7b1fd392...
by GlibMonkeyDeath | 2025-10-30 16:58:47+00:00
>Physics can't claim domain over the study of reality and then say that reality can only be studied using mathematical rules.

I never claimed that physics claims domain over all studies of reality - in fact I quite limited the domain of physics to finding the "best set of mathematical rules" that gives a certain probability of events happening.

>Otherwise you're just precluding the conclusion of what you're supposed to be studying, that reality can be described by mathematical rules.

Just the quantifiable part of reality - the "metaphysics" parts (e.g., why are we here? Is that a sensible question?) aren't the purview of physics (although physicists generally have their own opinions, as does Prof. Rovelli...)

>So we should hide reality under a rug if it could possibly lead to harm? I never said hide it - I said such metaphysical beliefs could lead to harm. So be aware that the popular interpretation of there being no "objective reality" (which relies on interpreting something mathematically rigorous in physics) can be twisted into justification for nearly any action.
by CapsAdmin | 2025-10-30 16:59:02+00:00
Last week I tried to make a bootable usb with windows 11. I tried using dd on macos, and that seemed to work, but the windows installer errored about "not finding drivers for the hdd". This threw me off because I thought something was wrong with the nvme.

Turns out you can't just dd a windows iso onto a usb drive.

You have to format it to fat32, then manually copy all the files. However there is one big installer file which is above 4gb, so you have to get some tool (also provided by Microsoft) to split the file into multiple files less than 4gb. The windows installer will recognize the split files and use those instead.

It's beyond me why the official windows iso just doesn't have this by default...
by AIorNot | 2025-10-30 16:59:14+00:00
Donald Hoffman, Bernardo Kastrup and other idealists have been saying this for years

https://youtu.be/yqOVu263OSk?si=M3fcLbJneZ0S5Jpq

Adivita Vedanta, Buddhism, mystics and perennial philosophers have been saying this for centuries

https://youtu.be/cwcft4auszA?si=1vYsny6jZb--IE_0

Wolfram is also taking in the same vein but in a different approach

https://youtu.be/8SD9WgPCZ28?si=t8XvVfJV8qi-K_0q

Ie something is up and spacetime is NOT fundamental
by ValdikSS | 2025-10-30 16:59:27+00:00
Most people can't comprehend that. "If it's available publicly online and has a readme, it's DEFINITELY was created for me and for all other users, right?"

This is so common, to the point that it's a FOSS misconception #1 for me. They can't get it that the developer can develop the software to solve only their specific problem and not interested in support, feature contributions, and other improvements or usecases.
by dumbledoren | 2025-10-30 16:59:54+00:00
Right. Its not like recent statistics showed that the US was the place where most of the cyberattacks originate. And its not like both the US and UK are openly saying that they are maximizing cyberwarfare against everyone as if it was something to be proud of. The country that is facilitating a livestreamed genocide in Gaza, is the 'good guys' to be trusted in cyberwarfare, for 'some' reason.

But, then again, in the Angloamerican culture, its always 'others' who are evil. Never itself.
by gus_massa | 2025-10-30 17:00:02+00:00
The other replies are good, but let's add another one anyway.

0.987654321/0.123456789 = (1.11111111-x)/x = 1.11111111/x - 1 where x = 0.123456789

You can aproxímate 1.11111111 by 10/9 and aproxímate x = 0.123456789 using y = 0.123456789ABCD... = 0.123456789(10)(11)(12)(13)... that is a number in base 10 that is not written correctly and has digits that are greater than 9. I.E. y = sum_i>0 i/10^i

Now you can consider the function f(t) = t + 2 t^2 + 3 t^3 + 4 t^4 + ... = sum_i>0 i*t^i and y is just y=f(0.1).

And also consider an auxiliary function g(t) = t + t^2 + t^3 + t^4 + ... = sum_i>0 1*t^i . A nice property is that g(t)= 1/(1-t) when -1<t<1.

The problem with g is that it lacks the coefficients, but that can be solved taking the derivative. g'(t) = 1 + 2 t + 3 t^2 + 4 t^3 + ... Now the coefficients are shifted but it can be solved multiplying by t. So f(t)=t*g'(t).

So f(t) = t * (1/(1-t))' = t * (1/(1-t)^2) = t/(1-t)^2

and y = f(0.1) = .1/.9^2 = 10/81

then 0.987654321/0.123456789 ~= (10/9-y)/y = 10/(9y)-1 = 9 - 1 = 8

Now add some error bounds using the Taylor method to get the difference between x and y, and also a bound for the difference between 1.11111111 an 10/9. It shoud take like 15 minutes to get all the details right, but I'm too lazy.

(As I said in another comment, all these series have a good convergence for |z|<1, so by standards methods of complex analysis all the series tricks are correct.)
by badosu | 2025-10-30 17:00:31+00:00
You can use some form of real extensions, e.g. the extended real line (+inf, -inf is often useful for programmers) or the projectively extended real line (+inf = -inf).

This is not about infinity in math not being a _specific_ value, it can certainly be (the actual infinite instead of potential).

It's simply about design and foresight, in my humble opinion.
by zer00eyz | 2025-10-30 17:00:39+00:00
UI != icons.

UI and UX are for all intents lost arts. No one is sitting on the other side of a 2 way mirror any more and watching people use their app...

This is how we get UI's that work but suck to use. This is how we allow dark patterns to flourish. You can and will happily do things your users/customers hate if it makes a dent in the bottom of the eye and you dont have to face their criticisms directly.
by _DeadFred_ | 2025-10-30 17:00:54+00:00
I remember a few BBSs that offered email (done via nightly UUCP so slower than people today are used to) to the common person.

Because it was new there weren't really thought out mechanism for people connecting early on, but some did.

http://www.armory.com/~spcecdt/deepthought.html
by thaumasiotes | 2025-10-30 17:01:20+00:00
> The casual user just wants a tool to crop screenshots and maybe draw simple shapes/lines/arrows. But once they do that they start to think of more advanced things and the simple tool starts to be seen as limiting.

Silksong Daily News went from videos of a voiceover saying "There has been no news for today" over a static image background to (sometimes) being scripted stop-motion videos.
by Der_Einzige | 2025-10-30 17:01:21+00:00
LLM providers are in the stone age with sampling today and it's on purpose because better sampling algorithms make the diversity of synthetic generated data too high, thus meaning your model is especially vulnerable to distillation attacks.

This is why we use top_p/top_k on the big 3 closed source models despite min_p and far better LLM sampling algorithms existing since 2023 (or in TFS case, since 2019)
by scjody | 2025-10-30 17:01:26+00:00
I've suffered this several times over my now 25-year career, and the best answer I've found is therapy. Find a good[*] therapist and work with them, preferably every week, until you feel better.

[*] I like this definition of "a good therapist", from a book I read many years ago:

> Here’s what you should look for in a good therapist.

> Some good signs are:

> * Someone you know says this therapist has helped them with a similar problem in concrete ways.

> * The therapist offers a plan that focuses on helping you reach the goals you’ve set, and it’s clear to you how what the therapist does will help you reach your goals.

> * This therapist uses a variety of methods depending on your problem and who you are.

> * You have an ongoing sense that this therapist is more often than not helping you feel better in your life and helping your life work better.

> Some bad signs are:

> * There’s no change in your life or how you feel or what you do after four sessions, or things actually get worse.

> * The therapist seems uninterested in the concrete realities of your current life.

> * The therapist is focused exclusively on ways you’ve been damaged, instead of on your needs or strengths.

> * The therapist seems to have one all-purpose theory or “answer” that explains everything.

I hope this helps! Burnout is real, you're not alone, and I'm glad you're taking some steps towards recovery!
by asveikau | 2025-10-30 17:01:48+00:00
I had a dog bolt in front of my car once on a slow residential street. He survived. It was terrifying.

Still, this cat was on a busy stretch of 16th Street for nearly a decade and was unharmed by human drivers. I think Waymo failed pretty badly here. Some of the dismissive comments I've seen on this topic seem to me like they're making excuses.
by lawrencechen | 2025-10-30 17:01:48+00:00
https://github.com/manaflow-ai/cmux/blob/main/apps/www/lib/s...

This file has most of the logic, the commit you linked to has a bunch of other experiments.

> look at your prior reviews and try to learn your style.

We're really interested in this direction too of maybe setting up a DSPy system to automatically fit reviews to your preferences
by dannyw | 2025-10-30 17:01:48+00:00
I know, I hear you. We want to prove to be the exception to the rule. If you think about this from a macro and game-theory perspective, I hope you can see why _genuinely_ “free, forever.” is in our best commercial interests, long-term.

On a personal level, I hope we don’t let cynicism prevent mission-driven companies trying to do good and customer-positive things from succeeding.
by brudgers | 2025-10-30 17:02:15+00:00
Uh, try and be nice to people, avoid eating fat, read a good book every now and then, get some walking in, and try and live together in peace and harmony with people of all creeds and nations, and, finally, here are some completely gratuitous pictures of penises to annoy the censors and to hopefully spark some sort of controversy, which, it seems, is the only way, these days, to get the jaded, video-sated public off their fucking arses and back in the sodding cinema. Family entertainment bollocks. What they want is filth: people doing things to each other with chainsaws during tupperware parties, babysitters being stabbed with knitting needles by gay presidential candidates, vigilante groups strangling chickens, armed bands of theatre critics exterminating mutant goats-- Where's the fun in pictures? Oh, well, there we are. Here's the theme music. Goodnight.

—Monty Python, 1983
by sema4hacker | 2025-10-30 17:02:16+00:00
> We have a lot of avenues to save these days.

Consider investing your time, not just your money. In other words, do careful research, start a business, then put your labor into offering a product or service that fills a need, instead of simply working for someone else. If you fail, you'll still learn a lot for another try. And if you succeed, the payoff can be much larger and faster than anything else you might attempt.
by bigyabai | 2025-10-30 17:02:25+00:00
> And exactly nobody who has switched in the opposite direction.

This might be an issue with your optics. I personally know at least 4 people who left MacOS for Linux in the past decade, 5 if you include myself. 2 of those people aren't even programmers, they're just sick and tired of macOS turning into Windows.

The $699 Macbook will not capture any users that missed out on the M1 Macbook Air. It just won't. We already saw Apple try pushing the whole 12" Macbook vs 13" Air shtick, not only did it fail commercially but it gave people a terrible impression of the ecosystem. I cannot imagine any world in which "quite a few" people switch from Windows to a Fischer Price operating system.
by Nevermark | 2025-10-30 17:02:46+00:00
Some problems require time.

It took me 33.5 years to solve a problem that was important to me.

A solution did exist after all. And the conceptual/mathematical walls, mazes, and unexpected territories I was forced to traverse, taught me and gave me knew ways to understand problems.

I also learned the value of luck.

I thought it would take 3-5 months. 3-5 years, at most. (Not as an occupation, but as a side quest.)

Ignorance, incurable optimism, and hope are capricious sirens.

I clearly didn’t understand the problem like I thought. And my “quest” could easily have become a cautionary Don Quixote tale.

That experience gives me great appreciation for the famous organizations and labs that gave many minds the time to pursue, and help each other pursue, hard problems. Whose breakthroughs we still benefit from. Working somewhere like that would be a dream.
by cush | 2025-10-30 17:03:05+00:00
Board seems cool, but it's not a way to consolidate your collection of euro, war or 4x games into one surface. The appeal to me is making new experiences involving physics, exciting visuals, and sound. Sure maybe you can replicate some smaller abstract games, but this would make playing TI or Gloomhaven absolutely miserable. People that don't play complex games assume that the scale and number of components is a burden, but they're carefully designed to give the ability for the players to make sense of and organize the scale and complexity of the game itself (especially in TI)
by umvi | 2025-10-30 17:03:26+00:00
Has storage been solved yet? In my experience US power companies hate crediting pushback to the grid because it all happens at the same time during peak sunlight hours and then customers get to use those credits at night and during the winter which the power company thinks is unfair. In Idaho at least the power companies were able to change the laws so that you get much fewer credits for solar panels on your roof which means they aren't great unless you can figure out how to store the generated energy inexpensively.

Personally I like the idea of an electric car doubling as a house battery but so far I think only the F-150 lightning is capable of doing that.
by mothballed | 2025-10-30 17:03:39+00:00
I used a lot of the money I could have 'saved for retirement' on a house instead. Given how fast housing prices have risen and the compounding issue of the cost of rents, I'm not sure I'm too far behind. If you look at REITs, which combine the value of housing appreciation with increased values of rents, they are beating stocks in general over the period I've been working.

You might actually be worse off saving for retirement, at early career stages. Of course, some will point out retirement savings are tax protected, but so are modest capital gains on primary residence.

https://i2.wp.com/financialsamurai.com/wp-content/uploads/20...
by didibus | 2025-10-30 17:03:54+00:00
True, but I'm not sure if that's such a problem?

Rectangle is great, Ghostty is great, I too install something to tweak the mouse speed/acceleration curve (don't remember which one).

Do we need all these bundled in? Generally a dedicated developer can make those much better than whatever they'd do in-house.

I'd say where it would be an issue is if you cannot make an app that gives you the behavior you want because the OS is missing the necessary APIs and configuration toggles needed too.
by abdullahkhalids | 2025-10-30 17:03:56+00:00
Typst has made some basic choices, which as someone who typsets a lot of math, makes it a no go.

- The use of space character to also act as the escape character (latex use backslash) [1]. Not only does it cause confusion, I have to now escape everything $F=ma$ become $ F = m a $ in typst. Complex math equations will be complex no matter what - why make simple equations harder to type to make it slightly easier to type complex ones.

- The lack of these grouping brackets (latex uses curly parenthesis).

What I want from my typesetting language is "typsetting completeness". While there might be sane defaults, I want to be able to control every decision made by the typesetter by escaping and grouping things as needed. If the language doesn't have these features, by definition, it is not complete.

[1] Latex also has to use space to act as ending delimiters. $\alpha x$ is correct and $\alpha\beta$ is correct, but $\alphax$ is not. But the solution to this is to allow $αx$ which some flavors of tex do.