MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jdhwosnhw | 2025-10-30 19:00:42+00:00
A slightly stronger (and more relevant) statement is that the number of mutually nearly orthogonal vectors you can simultaneously pack into an N dimensional space is exponential in N. Here “mutually nearly orthogonal” can be formally defined as: choose some threshold epsilon>0 - the set S of unit vectors is nearly mutually orthogonal if the maximum of the pairwise dot products of between all members if S is less than epsilon. The statement of the exponential growth of the size of this set with N is (amazingly) independent of the value of epsilon (although the rate of growth does obviously depend on that value).

This is pretty unintuitive for us 3D beings.
by bluGill | 2025-10-30 19:00:48+00:00
There is a massive amount of compromise in a UI. Adding features adds complexity. If you need that feature you have to accept the complexity that goes with it, and generally you are happy to. However if you don't need that complexity you don't want it. The average person uses 5% of the features of there word processor - but there is very little overlap between any two random users, and each wants the other 95% they don't use hidden (or perhaps 90% as there is another 5% they will need or think they will need) Gnome seems to be focusing on the 1% of features that are common to everyone, which means you can't get your 5%.

Note that I've always been a KDE user...
by BrenBarn | 2025-10-30 19:00:56+00:00
Yeah, it's sort of like saying the ear doesn't do "a" Fourier transform, it does a bunch of Fourier transforms on samples of data, with a varying tradeoff between temporal and frequency resolution. But most people would still say that's doing a Fourier transform.

As the article briefly mentions, it's a tempting hypothesis that there is a relationship between the acoustic properties of human speech and the physical/neural structure of the auditory system. It's hard to get clear evidence on this but a lot of people have a hunch that there was some coevolution involved, with the ear's filter functions favoring the frequency ranges used by speech sounds.
by derefr | 2025-10-30 19:01:20+00:00
To push back against this sentiment: “chasing AI money” isn’t necessarily their thought process here; i.e. it’s not the only reason they would “switch to a freemium model trying to get you to subscribe to AI.”

Keeping in mind that:

1. “AI” (i.e. large ML model) -driven features are in demand (if not by existing users, then by not-yet-users, serving as a TAM-expansion strategy)

2. Large ML models require a lot of resources to run. Not just GPU power (which, if you have less of it, just translates to slower runs) but VRAM (which, if you have not-enough of it, multiplies runtime of these models by 10-100x; and if you also don't have enough main memory, you can't run the model at all); and also plain-old storage space, which can add up if there are a lot of different models involved. (Remember that the Affinity apps have mobile versions!)

3. Many users will be sold on the feature-set of the app, and want to use it / pay for it, but won't have local hardware powerful enough to run the ML models — and if you just let them install the app but then reveal that they can't actually run the models, they'll feel ripped off. And those users either won't find the offering compelling enough to buy better hardware; or they'll be stuck with the hardware they have for whatever reason (e.g. because it's their company-assigned workstation and they're not allowed to use anything else for work.)

Together, these factors mean that the "obvious" way to design these features in a product intended for mass-market appeal (rather than a product designed only "for professionals" with corporate backing, like VFX or CAD software) is to put the ML models on a backend cluster, and have the apps act as network clients for said cluster.

Which means that, rather than just shipping an app, you're now operating a software service, which has monthly costs for you, scaled to aggregate usage, for the lifetime of that cluster.

Which in turn means that you now need to recoup those OpEx costs to stay profitable.

You could do this by pricing the predicted per-user average lifetime OpEx cost into the purchase price of the product… but because you expect to add more ML-driven features as your apps evolve, which might drive increases usage, calculating an actual price here is hard. (Your best chance is probably to break each AI feature into its own “plugin” and cost + sell each plugin separately.)

Much easier to avoid trying to set a one-time price based on lifetime OpEx, by just passing on OpEx as OpEx (i.e. a subscription); and much friendlier to customers to avoid pricing in things customers don’t actually want, by only charging that subscription to people who actually want the features that require the backend cluster to work.
by BinaryIgor | 2025-10-30 19:01:30+00:00
Interesting perspective, agreed 100%; having UDP available in the browser would open up a plethora of interesting new use cases - games, video/audio calls without WebRTC overhead - and techniques to use. Ohh wait - we will soon have it! https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/WebTranspor...
by SoftTalker | 2025-10-30 19:01:40+00:00
I don't like the convertible analogy. It doesn't have anything to do with reliability.

I'd compare it to the mail. UDP is regular first-class mail. You send a letter, it probably gets to the address on the envelope. But it might get delayed, or even simply lost, and you'll never know.

TCP is like certified mail. It is sent by the same physical systems, but it is tracked and you get an acknowledgement that the recipient received it.
by godshatter | 2025-10-30 19:01:41+00:00
I have aphantasia and cannot hear sounds or music in my head. I can't taste or smell things either, but I've also been going through life assuming most people can't either. From reading about it, it seems that some people can do hear things but not see them and probably various other combinations.

I have no abstract canvas to write anything on that I've ever seen.
by TimorousBestie | 2025-10-30 19:02:11+00:00
I actually think Typst should ignore the design of TeX and LaTeX more—and especially the well-meaning advice of LaTeX veterans who have only ever known one way of typesetting.

The situation reminds me of how Julia’s evolution was guided in some aspects by some opinionated and vocal {Python, R, MATLAB} developers who never had any intention of transitioning to Julia, whether or not their advice was implemented.
by truncate | 2025-10-30 19:02:26+00:00
>> technology the cult of the exit rules all

Technology also moves fast, highly competitive and expensive. I'm definitely sad about this, but I can't blame founders for this. I've never founded any company myself, but I can imagine after decade of working on same product as a relatively small shop, it can be tiring, exhausting and probably new priorities (personal life, health etc ...).
by microtonal | 2025-10-30 19:02:29+00:00
I'm sad (buyer of both v1 and v2). Being a paid app as opposed to require a subscription was the main selling over the Adobe Suite. A lot of users migrated to Affinity for that reason. As the free version will get more and more crippled as they move to pushing subscriptions, why not switch back to Adobe?

I hope somebody else will try to crack this market like affinity did a decade ago.
by jghn | 2025-10-30 19:03:17+00:00
You said: "When I got Covid later, it was slightly worse chills for 3 days. By the 4th time I got Covid, it was just chills for a day. If I knew that would be the experience, I'd probably have skipped it."

I'm saying that's not an apples to apples comparison due to the growing evidence of how much long term damage a COVID infection can cause.
by jandrese | 2025-10-30 19:03:46+00:00
> maintaining poles, transformers, and wires

The things that PG&E has notably been neglecting, resulting in highly destructive wildfires?

The idea that it costs every single ratepayer $100/month to maintain the infrastructure is ludicrous. It's just attempting to deflect blame from PG&E's horrible mismanagement to environmentalists.

In places with honestly run utilities that cost is closer to $5-$10/month per household.
by delichon | 2025-10-30 19:03:49+00:00
I wish it was a huge scandal that the Democrats failed to act to restrain executive authority between Trump administrations. His excesses demand legislative responses to claw back their powers.

For one thing, Trump's Executive Order 14257 for the tariffs explicitly relies on the International Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977 (IEEPA). Instead of voting to terminate specific declared national emergencies, they should be voting to repeal IEEPA, or to at least shackle it thoroughly.

Every Kingly excess should be met with the same pattern of working toward explicit revocation. Otherwise they're just angling to get their hands on it.
by TeMPOraL | 2025-10-30 19:04:18+00:00
Ah, the good ol' "run it on Windows 95 in a VM" approach. It's pretty common in industrial applications and adjacent small businesses, which often rely on decades old software that has no modern alternative, or (more often) suffered from extensive enshittification. You keep running the software on old hardware, and once you run out of options for old hardware, you virtualize it and continue indefinitely.

Of course, this is only workable if you can live with using your program through a special machine that's dedicated only to it, and/or are willing to pay the price of increasingly sophisticated hacks needed to integrate it to the rest of your workflow, because the security world never sleeps and keeps inventing ways to break things that used to work perfectly fine.
by toast0 | 2025-10-30 19:04:22+00:00
> its a buggy method, considering canada also uses +1, and a bunch of countries look like they use +1 but dont, like barbados +1(246) using what looks like an area code as part of the country code.

You are correct that ITU code is not specific enough to identify a country, but I'm sorry, +1 is the ITU country code for the North American Numbering Plan Area. 246 is the NANPA area code for Barbados (which only has one area code) but as a NANPA member, Barbados' country code is +1, same as the rest of the members. There is no '+1246' country code.

There's not a lot of countries that are in a shared numbering plan other than NANPA, but for example, Khazakstan and Russia share +7 (Of course, the USSR needed a single digit country code, or there would have been a country code gap), and many of the former Netherland Antilles share +599, although Aruba has +297, and Sint Maarten is in +1 (with NANPA Area code 721)
by jonathanstrange | 2025-10-30 19:04:31+00:00
The practice would be easier to tolerate if the unfree thing had reasonable pricing. Alas, it is always subscription-based and the monthly fee is crazy high, in the range of re-buying a traditional download product every four months. I understand that professional users might have more money to spend but it still seems to me that those companies overestimate what potential customers are willing to pay as running costs.
by munk-a | 2025-10-30 19:05:02+00:00
I think it makes a lot of sense to build out if the construction and remediation costs are born by a persistent entity that can amortize all those expenses appropriately. It makes almost no sense to build out if your entire energy market is privatized into small entities and you lack the regulatory willpower to ensure proper cleanup funds are reserved and thus open up a loophole for companies to run with minimal costs after construction and disburse funds internally freely. Such was the case with Vermont Yankee and it is very possible (likely even) that it'd be repeated.

If you have a strong central governance authority that can ensure proper maintenance and remediation then they're wonderful... France and China have these advantages - Japan was often held up as a paragon of this approach until massive internal mismanagement was revealed with Fukushima.

I am excited to see my country (Canada) investing more into Nuclear energy as we have a track record (ignore our uranium mining please) of doing this responsibly. I don't think America could safely manage this especially with the destabilization the current administration and lack of legislative backbone has demonstrated is possible.
by Narushia | 2025-10-30 19:05:11+00:00
> it’s nothing like dreaming.

That's interesting. When I close my eyes and imagine "seeing" things, I would actually describe it as pretty much exactly like the sensation I have when I "see" stuff in dreams. To me, this similarity is especially clear when I wake up in the middle of a dream, then close my eyes while awake — I can continue where I left off, and it "looks" exactly the same as in the dream.

But I agree that it doesn't feel like "sight", as in the physical act of seeing with your eyes.
by WorldMaker | 2025-10-30 19:05:21+00:00
> By bringing those eyeballs onto your cloud console, you're creating infinitely more opportunities for branded interaction and discovery of your other cloud products - you could even quantify these eyeballs as you would ad inventory! There should have been an arms race for each cloud provider to have the best log-tailing and log-searching and log-aggregation system imaginable. OTel could have been killed before it began, because Honeycomb and its other originators would have been acquired years ago and made specific locked-in value-adds for each cloud.

I think that's what Application Insights has always been, Azure's free-to-start, suggest-out-of-the-box Honeycomb. App Insights had a long slow road away from Microsoft-specific log and metrics ingesters that weren't OTel, but it is hard to argue that standard ingestors are a bad idea. App Insights still downplays that it can be "just a Honeycomb" using only OTel sources and still encourages "secret sauce" ingestors in addition to OTel ones. App Insights is a small moat (around a data lake; to mix metaphors). That said, it's also a standards-supporting tool now as well.

It's not been as clear of an arms race because AWS and GCP didn't invest in it in a similar way and it mostly impacted what are often called "dark matter" teams (Microsoft shops doing "boring" stuff that rarely makes HN headlines), but I have worked in teams that absolutely favored Azure over AWS/GCP with one of the reasons being Application Insights was an easy install and powerful first-party supported tool rather than an extra third party vendor relationship like Grafana/Honeycomb/Dynatrace/etc.
by Sharlin | 2025-10-30 19:05:22+00:00
I don't think the author is referring to the C–H correspondence. Just the fact that

a) it can be actually helpful to check that some property holds up to one zillion, even though it's not a proof that it holds for all numbers; and

b) if a proof has a bug, a program checking the relevant property up to one zillion is not unlikely to produce a counterexample.
by ElevenLathe | 2025-10-30 19:05:34+00:00
Relatedly, I'm not sure I really believe people who say they think in code and can't be bothered to render their ideas in design or decision documents with actual reasoning. I can't even tell if something is a real thought I'm having /in my own head/ until I've written it down or otherwise recorded it somewhere in the consensus reality. Very often, I /think/ I've got some problem or idea all fleshed out in my mind, but the process of writing it down (in code or prose) reveals that this was all just a kind of illusion. Or maybe I really did have it all figured out but something got lost in the process of writing it down? Seems literally impossible to say.

But IMO it would be weird if all of us meat machines of the same species had radically different methods of cognition, since the empirical evidence suggests that our behavior, in the broadest possible sense, is not radically different, and neither is our thinking hardware.
by cma | 2025-10-30 19:06:01+00:00
> Can you remember what something smells like? I can recall a foul smell, but I don’t recoil because it doesn’t actually feel like smelling. Still, I have an impression of the smell. Sight works the same for me.

Can't get a foul smell reaction mentally, but if I visualize eating a bag of salt & vinegar potato chips and recall the taste I'll get extra saliva production. Not with most other foods so I think it's more mouth preparing to dilute the acid than just straight pavlov saliva before feeding reaction.
by galagawinkle489 | 2025-10-30 19:06:23+00:00
You didn't mention it explicitly or otherwise. Why lie? That's such a weird thing to do. I can read your comment and catch you in the lie so easily.

Free will is the entire point. You are saying "the choice will [be] based on what you are, and you can't change it". That is precisely an argument that our choices are determined, not free.

>other than based on either 1. what you already are, in which case it isn't really a change, or 2. Something outside of you, input.

You have just ignored what I said. You cannot say that you haven't changed your character because the change was brought about by your own choice, for the reason I already gave: you have free will, so your choices are not determined, so the results can vary.

You cannot say that A and B are equivalent states because B is reachable from A, when C which is clearly distinct from B is also reachable from A, and the choice between B and C is nondeterministic (free).

To make it more concrete, you have free will. You choose to challenge yourself or not by doing something difficult. That choice is free. It is chosen from among constrained options but it is still a choice. We make constrained choices all the time. They're still choices.

Some people can't afford to buy musical instruments. Of those that can, some choose to buy one and some do not. Of those who do buy one, some choose to practice and some do not. You cannot expect anyone to believe that that choice is free but also that the person that chooses to learn an instrument and practice and develop is identical in character to the same person if they had exercised their choice differently and instead sat on the couch and watched TV.

People make choices. Free choices. Those choices result in the development of their personalities, the development of skills, etc. Those choices are not predetermined by their existing character. There is no external input necessary for your character to change and yet clearly, logically, their character also was not already there. The potential for it may have been there, latently, but so what? Everyone has the potential to have good character. Everyone could be a better person than he is.
by monero-xmr | 2025-10-30 19:06:24+00:00
Except for years of follow-up studies to determine longer term effects, which certainly would have been applied for a novel vaccine, before forcing all of society to use it. Of course you could be fired from your job and be banned from public spaces (except in Florida) instead of taking it, but essentially you had to if you wanted to function in society.

I will keep my laminated "Proof of Vaccination" card for life so we don't forget, wasn't allowed anywhere without it (except Black Lives Matter riots)
by nosianu | 2025-10-30 19:06:35+00:00
For me it is like a different "space" for mental vs real images. It is not the same neurons, I would guess.

The real images are (and feel) outside of myself (obviously, you may say). The mental image feels very close and kind of "inside my mental space", in a dark space. It is far from how I see with my eyes on all levels, very basic. It is more conceptual, that concept given some vague form, not "pixels" (not that the eye is like a camera sensor either, it is much more complicated, a lot of pre-processing taking place right in the retina, which developed from a piece of brain in very early embryonic development). The better I know the object the better this internal concept-image, but far from what looking at the real thing is like.

I am able to visualize, that's why I could write this, but I think my ability to do so is near the bottom. It is vague without details unless I concentrate on them specifically, and it is very dark in there.

On https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphantasia I am between apple #3 and #4 in that picture. When I read novels I develop barely any internal imagery, only barebones conceptual ones. Sometimes I look at fancy visually stunning movies, Youtube videos, or graphics sites on the web specifically to "download" some better images into my brain. Mostly for fantastical landscapes and architecture.

The Lord of the Rings movies, for example, completely replaced all internal mental images I may have had, even though I read the books long before those movies were made. People like me need graphically talented people around, or my mental images will be very much limited to drastically reduced versions of what I see in real life. (THANK YOU to all graphical artists).
by kstrauser | 2025-10-30 19:06:54+00:00
There are a million reasons why shaming someone can be bad. Ultimately, who am I to judge how people dress or decorate their bodies, so long as it doesn't harm me?

But when some asshole on the bus is yammering his sex life at high volumes, I think we've swung too far in the other direction. There's a time and place for public shaming, and being on a commute-time bus meets those requirements.
by darkmighty | 2025-10-30 19:07:08+00:00
I'd describe it as like having a second monitor in your desktop. It's not inherently "over" what I already see or anywhere physical, it's like in a different space. Sometimes it can feel like it's "behind" what I am seeing indeed (i.e. kind of over), but it can vary and I suspect that's just a learned position (I just tried and I can shift the position images 'feel where they are').

I don't see with full fidelity, I suspect that's to save power or limitations of my neural circuitry. But I can definitely see red and see shapes. Yes, it's not exactly like seeing with your eyes and if you pay attention you can sense there's trickery involved (particularly with motion being very low fidelity, kind of low FPS), but it's still definitely an image. It's not that it's a blurred image exactly, more that it only generates some details I am particularly focused at. It can't generate a huge quantity of details for an entire scene in 4K, it's more like it generates a scene in 320p and some minor patches can appear at high res, and often the borders are fuzzy. I can imagine this with my eyes open or closed, but it's easier with eyes closed.

It feels (and probably is?) that it's the same system used for my dreams, but in my dreams it's more like "setup" to simulate my own vision, and the fidelity is increased somewhat.
by daemonologist | 2025-10-30 19:07:09+00:00
These passages about reading were interesting to me as well, particularly the preceding one:

> Naturally, aphantasics usually had a very different experience of reading. Like most people, as they became absorbed, they stopped noticing the visual qualities of the words on the page, and, because their eyes were fully employed in reading, they also stopped noticing the visual world around them. But, because the words prompted no mental images, it was almost as if reading bypassed the visual world altogether and tunnelled directly into their minds.

I do not have aphantasia, but I'm not seeing mental images when I'm reading unless I'm not "in the zone" and consciously choose to do so. Good fiction especially is more direct-to-memory.
by KallDrexx | 2025-10-30 19:07:34+00:00
This is my main frustration with the push back against visibility modifiers. It's treated as an all or nothing approach, that any support for visibility modifiers locks anyone out from touching those fields.

It could just be a compiler error/warning that has to be explicitly opted into to touch those fields. This allows you to say "I know this is normally a footgun to modify these fields, and I might be violating an invariant condition, but I am know what I'm doing".