MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by gowld | 2025-10-31 16:21:23+00:00
In the b=2 case, 1/1 = 1 = (b-2) + (b-1)/denom(b) = (b-2) + (b-1)/1 = 2b - 3 = (b-1)*b^1 -1 (b-1)

In base 2 (and only base 2), denom(b) >= b-1, so the "fractional part" (b-1)/denom(b) carries into the 1's (units) place, which then carries into the 2's (b's) place, flipping both bits.
by fsckboy | 2025-10-31 16:21:41+00:00
if you specialize in looking for black swans, and you've looked for more black swans than anybody ever, and all the black swans you thought you'd found have turned out to be sooty white swans, people might be interested in reading about your experience and have their faith shaken that black swans actually exist.

I'm reminded of the story of dragon sightings in Great Britain: after the printing press and newspapers and newspaper reporters chasing stories emerged, as news distribution out from city centers into rural areas increased, it seems dragons picked up and moved farther away, only being spotted in the hinterlands without news.

You apparently would keep your mind open to the idea that dragons don't like the smell of newsprint as no other conclusion could be more plausible sheerly on the basis of logic?
by Aurornis | 2025-10-31 16:22:37+00:00
A valid memory spontaneously re-entering your mind is different.

The idea of "repressed memories" was that people had hidden memories that they couldn't access, even if they tried. According to the theory, even if someone brought up the past event and tried to remind the person about it, they would be unable to recall it happening because their brain had blocked it out.

The idea was that only intervention by a therapist or some other special event could help the person "unlock" the repressed memories, making them available for remembering again.

What was really happening was that some therapists were leading people into "remembering" things that didn't happen through aggressive prompting and pushing, much like what happens when an aggressive investigator convinces a vulnerable person to falsely confess to something they didn't do.
by Simorgh | 2025-10-31 16:22:46+00:00
As someone who has worked with speech to text, I can tell you from personal experience that audio seems to be broken across the ecosystem.

Bluetooth as an example is very buggy. Siri, as a voice-to-voice intelligence, fails to work most of the time for me.

I think that developers find it hard to ensure a seamless UX for anything that uses audio.
by zephyrthenoble | 2025-10-31 16:23:33+00:00
This is super interesting to me. A lot of threads about aphantasia devolve into both sides being mildly incredulous that the other exists, I think partially because it's _hard_ for us to imagine experiences outside of our own.

But here, I feel like we have a clear delineation of the differences between experiences, in a non-abstract way... and that feels more valuable to me, somehow.

Thank you for sharing!
by FloorEgg | 2025-10-31 16:24:32+00:00
Edit: the following is incorrect. I didn't know that the change to IRC § 174 was cancelled this summer.

------

What's crazy is that with the 2021 changes to IRC § 174 most software r&d spending is considered capital investment and can't be immediately expensed. Has to be amortized over 5 years.

I don't know how that 11.5B number was derived, but I would wager that the net loss on income statement is a lot lower than the net negative cash flow on cash flow statement.

If that 11.5B is net profit/loss, then whatever the portion of the expense part of the calculation that's software R&D could be 5x larger if it weren't for the new amortization rule.
by marcyb5st | 2025-10-31 16:24:32+00:00
Fully agree. I also think we are deep into the diminishing returns territory.

If I have to guess OAI and others pay top dollars for talent that has a higher probability of discovering the next "attention" mechanism and investors are betting this is coming soon (hence the hige capitalizations and willing to loive with 11B losses/quarter). If they lose patience in throwing money at the problem I see only few players remaining in the race because they have other revenue streams
by throwaway894345 | 2025-10-31 16:24:50+00:00
> Not sure what you mean by done statically in the context of a report writer?

Statically refers to taking some metadata about the database as well as the query and being able to anticipate the shape of the output columns without needing to run a query against a Postgres database. I'm not sure what you mean about "in the context of a report writer"--I don't think that's the use case I was describing in my original comment.

> Columns are added, removed, pivoted, summed etc by the user running the report. This can’t be static but the OP was mentioning how you can’t get column meta data easily.

I think I am the OP, right? And I think the report-writer stuff is confusing this conversation.

> By sanitised SQL I mean the query is fed to the MSSQL parser and only select & union all is allowed as far queries go(eg. no delete, drops, updates etc).

Enforcing read-only is helpful, but it's insufficient. Firstly, reads aren't always safe (e.g., reading confidential data) and secondly we also want the ability to safely generate queries that write or delete data.
by gus_massa | 2025-10-31 16:25:30+00:00
I use gmail for something similar. Sometimes it's a direct email to me (or someone else programmed to be send in the future). Sometimes is an email to my coworkers, but it has a few notes for me, so when we continue some project in the future it has a warning like:

fake quote> We careful with the matrix M because it looks like a 7x7 matrix, but it's actually a 14x14 matrix and that makes the program too slow.

because I made the mistake now and I don't want to repeat it in the future.
by tavavex | 2025-10-31 16:25:45+00:00
It should definitely be difficult, the bar for changing a constitution is high in almost any functioning democracy. However, would you agree that it shouldn't be impossible either? Given that over a third of the currently standing amendments have all been passed in the same year the document was written, it seems undeniable that the rate has slowed dramatically, and the expansion of the country combined with the culture surrounding the constitution has effectively locked it. I wasn't talking directly about abortion, it just frustrates me to no end that the #1 method for passing major legislation (especially anything concerning rights of any kind) today isn't rational examination of the situation and lawmaking to support the best outcome, but having a partisan court wrangle an old constitution into the shape most appealing to them. No justifications are needed, since the way the American public is taught, the US founders are almost demigods who foresaw every permutation of history centuries into the future, so any explanation that leans on their writing, no matter how contrived, is correct.

(Though, the difficulty of even passing laws is something I also noted, but omitted from the original comment. Why haven't they just passed abortion rights into law for those 50 or so years? Why is the judicial branch the main arm of enacting changes for the current changes, with the legislature largely choosing to do increasingly fewer things as time goes on?)

Sorry about my snarky last paragraph - the last sentence of your original comment read as partisan for me, because the unspoken implication in it, at least to my ear, was that Trump's administration was the first on the right to meaningfully engage in judicial games (after the left had been doing it for a long time), and therefore that they're getting their fair comeuppance and making the score even.
by inglor_cz | 2025-10-31 16:25:56+00:00
The article is a bit of a "dog bites man", but itsobservations are valid. False assumptions are what caused > 50 per cent of my bugs, and for bugs in production, reasonable logging is what you need. The point with going away from the computer and letting your brain process things is good too, and the point about postmortem is spot on. I hate it when my colleagues say "fixed" without explaining how the error emerged in the first place, and they mostly already learnt to supply context to correction of non-trivial bugs. (I try to lead by example and send detailed e-mails after major fixes.)
by randerson | 2025-10-31 16:26:14+00:00
I suffered chronic insomnia most of my life and seen my fair share of experts and read a few books about it. There are definitely treatments for the majority of insomniacs.

Sleep deprivation is often caused by alcohol, inconsistent sleep/wake times, high color temperature lighting (>3000K) in the hours before bed, failure to spend time outdoors in natural light in the morning, temperature too warm (68F is ideal), caffeine (or other stimulants) in the afternoon, associating the bedroom with tasks other than sleep and sex, or simply spending too much time in bed.

Following doctor's advice for the last one: Start by going to bed at, say, 1am and waking up at 6am. Follow this without fail for a few weeks. You'll be exhausted but keep at it. Eventually you should find yourself falling asleep quickly. If you wake up exhausted, pull back bedtime by 10 minutes. Do this for a week. Rinse and repeat until you are waking up at 6am refreshed. That is how you determine how many hours your body needs to sleep, and how long you should be in bed. Helped me.
by HEmanZ | 2025-10-31 16:26:22+00:00
I hope that the actual medical field starts taking note of this.

My wife still has to work 24 hour shifts with no sleep, performing emergency surgeries no matter how long it has been since she slept. During residency only a few years ago she and her co-residents were almost weekly required to do 36 hour shifts (on top of their regular 16 hours per day, 5 day per week schedule) and once even a 48 hour shift when the hospital was short staffed.

Of course I’m sure they won’t. No one cares if doctors are over worked.
by vanviegen | 2025-10-31 16:26:59+00:00
Bullocks. Memories fade. Or do you really believe that 'subconsciously' I still know what I had for dinner today exactly 30 years ago?

The way I understand it, it's just that, unlike on disk, the deletion process is not binary. Weak connections that are not revisited regularly gradually become weaker, until they're undistinguishable from noise (false memories).
by brokencode | 2025-10-31 16:27:34+00:00
Yeah, except you can keep on squeezing these lemons for a long time before they run out of juice.

Even if the model training part becomes less worthwhile, you can still use the data centers for serving API calls from customers.

The models are already useful for many applications, and they are being integrated into more business and consumer products every day.

Adoption is what will turn the flywheel into a rocket.
by tonyarkles | 2025-10-31 16:27:45+00:00
To simplify it down even more:

- For the ML team, you need money. Money to pay them and money to get access to GPUs. You might buy the GPUs and make your own server farm (which also takes time) or you might just burn all that money with AWS and use their GPUs. You can trade off money vs. time.

- For the chip design team, you need money and time. There's no workaround for the time aspect of it. You can't spend more money and get a fab quicker.
by baggy_trough | 2025-10-31 16:27:50+00:00
You are basically saying that if the first Powerball number drawn was 01 02 03 04 05 06 that there would be no reason to suspect something wrong with the Powerball lottery process. It's random! It could happen!

Yes I understand that random trajectories could potentially be anything. But it's notable that this particular random trajectory has an unusual characteristic. It's a characteristic that an alien probe might have. That's what makes it interesting.
by embedding-shape | 2025-10-31 16:28:14+00:00
I've had good luck with GPT-OSS-120b (reasoning_effort set to "high") + Codex + llama.cpp all running locally, but I needed to do some local patches to Codex as they don't allow configuring and setting the right values for temperature and top_p for GPT-OSS. Also heavy prompting via AGENTS.md was needed to get it to have similar workflow to GPT-5, it didn't seem to pick up that by itself, so I'm assuming GPT-5 been trained with Codex in mind while GPT-OSS wasn't.
by g-b-r | 2025-10-31 16:28:34+00:00
If you're very tired you should be able to fall asleep, or at least doze off, whenever you let yourself go.

It seems likely that you'll get those flushes right after falling asleep, so a nap of a few minutes could help a lot.

In my experience, after a night without sleep even a 30 seconds nap reinvigorates you significantly.
by topadmin | 2025-10-31 16:28:43+00:00
At what level do you think American PII protection is working?

I can't go to a dentist/medical/eye appointment without the office staff looking me up or adding to some kind of unethical dark web profile.

Maybe the data at rest is secure but it doesn't really matter when the staff is leaking all the data as it is getting stored in their systems.
by hacker_homie | 2025-10-31 16:29:07+00:00
Any halo strix laptop, I have been using the hp zbook ultra g1a with 128gb of unified memory. Mostly with the 20B parameters models but it can load larger ones. I find local models (gpt oss 20B) are good quick references but if you want to refactor or something like that you need a bigger model. I’m running llama.cpp directly and using the api it offers for neovim’s avante plugin, or a cli tool like aichat, it comes with a basic web interface as well.
by HacklesRaised | 2025-10-31 16:30:16+00:00
To the extent that it will affect ONLY my opinion of the language I reserve judgement, but prima facie, I'm a little worried that this will prove to be a distraction.

If the language didn't have a std implementation of async/await, would it affect your decision to use Xig? Or are you comfortable with traditional multithreaded facilities to the extent that you require concurrency (and parallelism)?
by eitally | 2025-10-31 16:30:48+00:00
I've adopted a workflow like this:

Camera -> Photo Mechanic ingest/culling onto laptop -> edit RAWs in DxO Photolab -> export .jpg 100% for web into "Web" subfolder for event -> pick top shots for socials, export insta-optimized shape & quality into "Socials" subfolder for event -> backup RAW/Web/Socials folder hierarchy to external SSD for backup and upload "Web" subfolder to Google Photos for sharing & "JPG backup".

I keep about a year's worth of RAW edits + JPGs on my laptop before periodically clearing space, and I have some of my overall top shots stored separately on my Pixieset site.
by jkestner | 2025-10-31 16:30:49+00:00
Adobe sucks, but I need CMYK to make “dead” print projects, so I got the Affinity suite.

Open source principles are nice but unlike Affinity, GIMP was not made with graphics professionals in mind. I don’t love proprietary formats but it doesn’t matter as much for print projects which have a lifespan and revenue.

People are mourning Affinity because it was a great functional tool with no strings attached. We’ve seen this story before. It’s fine; someone else will step in with an alternative when necessary.
by immibis | 2025-10-31 16:31:04+00:00
Solar is also the most democratic, as long as you can tolerate it not working at night. I encourage you to experiment with a small portable system. I did - a 30W panel, 9Ax12V SLA battery, off-the-shelf car inverter, packet of crimp connectors, spool of wire, crimp tool, the cheapest over-voltage shutoff controller I could find (just search for solar charge controller - although lead-acid chemistries are moderately tolerant to charging out of bounds, unlike lithium, which is why I suggest lead-acid).
by wubrr | 2025-10-31 16:32:27+00:00
Places where technological innovation and development happen have existed long before the internet and semiconductors. The industrial revolution didn't originate or center around the Bay Area.

> The makeup of tech companies employees doesn't remotely tell the full story...

What? You made the argument that Bay Area has some kind of special access to tech talent because of Stanford - I simply pointed out that the vast majority of Bay Area tech employees are not from Stanford (not to mention many Stanford alums leave California).

> UC system, Stanford, and other universities in CA through research that feed into SV as the leading tech hub that cannot be replicated

Really? MIT, Harvard, Yale, Georgia Tech, Waterloo don't exist?

> I mean hell, 4 UC alum won nobel prizes this year alone, one of which was the chief scientist at Google's quantum AI.

And several google/deepmind employees from/educated in UK won a nobel prize in 2024... what's your point?

> Kind of a boring insight.

Nah, the same old 'bay area cause bay area' insight is what's boring.

It was more true (but still very boring) 10 years ago, not anymore.
by netbioserror | 2025-10-31 16:33:06+00:00
In practice, it means that unlike most native-compiled languages, if you want a data-oriented approach without having to worry about system details at all, you can do that. Your program will still be strongly typed, but you're not obligated to worry about allocation, reference vs value semantics, ownership, or initialization details. For programs that shouldn't have to worry about those details, the Nim team has done a lot of work to make sure the language gets out of the way and lets you process data. Then, you get a fast binary comparable to the results you'd get from C++ (with a lot more effort).

In buzzword-speak, it's easy to write programs composed of nearly pure business logic while getting C++-level performance.
by ronef | 2025-10-31 16:33:12+00:00
+1 to Farid, great write-up! What you’re seeing is the long-standing “deriver” mismatch: fixed-output derivations can change their .drv without changing the output path. Eelco is calling it out as well in the comment below. I believe the idea behind the path forward is there but happy to hear more!

Also. Check out Farid's other posts.
by physicsguy | 2025-10-31 16:33:20+00:00
This is quite good news but it’s worth remembering that it’s a rare piece of software in the modern scientific/numerical world that can be compiled against the versions in distro package managers, as versions can significantly lag upstream months after release.

If you’re doing that sort of work, you also shouldn’t use pre-compiled PyPi packages for the same reason - you leave a ton of performance on the table by not targeting the micro-architecture you’re running on.
Show HN: Vision-Based, Vectorless RAG for Long Douments
by page_index | 2025-10-31 16:33:33+00:00
In modern document question answering (QA) systems, Optical Character Recognition (OCR) serves an important role by converting PDF pages into text that can be processed by Large Language Models (LLMs). The resulting text can provide contextual input that enables LLMs to perform question answering over document content.

Traditional OCR systems typically use a two-stage process that first detects the layout of a PDF — dividing it into text, tables, and images — and then recognizes and converts these elements into plain text. With the rise of vision-language models (VLMs) (such as Qwen-VL and GPT-4.1), new end-to-end OCR models like DeepSeek-OCR have emerged. These models jointly understand visual and textual information, enabling direct interpretation of PDFs without an explicit layout detection step.

However, this paradigm shift raises an important question:

> If a VLM can already process both the document images and the query to produce an answer directly, do we still need the intermediate OCR step?

We build a practical implementation of a vision-based question-answering system for long documents, without relying on OCR. Specifically, we adopt a reasoning-based retrieval layer and the multimodal GPT-4.1 as the VLM for visual reasoning and answer generation.
by zamadatix | 2025-10-31 16:33:48+00:00
Do you run into hibernation/sleep issues under current mainline Linux kernels by chance? I have this laptop and that's the only thing which isn't working out of the box for me on the Linux side, but it works fine in Windows. I know it's officially supported under the Ubuntu LTS, but I was hoping that wouldn't be needed as I do want a newer+customized kernel.
by gus_massa | 2025-10-31 16:34:19+00:00
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_amnesia_effect

When I read a post about science in the newspaper, it a lot of fun to guess what is the real event behind all the errors added by the press, the university press and some times even the researchers. Then comes anger.

I assume the same level of accuracy for other topics.
by wongarsu | 2025-10-31 16:34:27+00:00
In idiomatic Rust you usually shadow variables with another one of the same name when the type is the only thing meaningfully changing. For example

let x = "29" let x = x.parse::<i32>() let x = x.unwrap()

These all use the same name, but you still have the same explicit ordering dependency because they are typed differently. The first is a &str, the second a Result<i32, ParseIntError>, the third an i32, and any reordering of the lines would provide a compiler error. And if you add another line `let y = process(x)` you would expect it to do something similar no matter where you introduce it in these statements, provided it accepts the current type of x, because the values represent the "same" data.

Once you actually "change" the value, for example by dividing by 3, I would consider it unidiomatic to shadow under the same name. Either mark it as mutable for preferably make a new variable with a name that represents what the new value now expresses
by ivankra | 2025-10-31 16:34:33+00:00
It works incredibly well with Linux VMs, my daily driver. I plug in a USB keyboard, external monitor and Can't Believe It's Not Linux. Only occasionally when I need to use the laptop screen/keyboard does macOS bother me and remind of it real self.

There's around 10-15% performance penalty for VMs (assuming you use arm64 guests), but the whole system is just so much faster and well built than anything Intel-based to day, that it more than compensates.

For Windows, it's lacking accelerated video drivers, but VMWare Fusion is an ok free alternative - I can totally play AAA games from last decade. Enjoy it until broadcom kills it.
by dangus | 2025-10-31 16:35:09+00:00
Who cares right? Maybe Apple and Google and Microsoft should just merge. Then we can just use the same operating system for everything.

Can’t think of any downside!

I’m not mourning the loss of a product, I’m lamenting the negative externalities of acquisitions. Some of them are a net positive for sure but it seems like those are in the minority.
by FireBeyond | 2025-10-31 16:35:11+00:00
Maybe they could lobby to rescind Certificates of Need, which are, at their most cynical, asking hospitals in the area if they'd be affected by having more competition in their area (ostensibly so they don't to shut down beds due to reduced revenue). I say cynical, but the original lobbyists for Certificates of Need were checks notes hospital owners...
by embedding-shape | 2025-10-31 16:35:19+00:00
> - For the ML team, you need money. Money to pay them and money to get access to GPUs. You might buy the GPUs and make your own server farm (which also takes time) or you might just burn all that money with AWS and use their GPUs. You can trade off money vs. time.

Even if you do those things though, it doesn't guarantee success or you'll be able to train something bigger. For that you need knowledge, hard work and expertise, regardless of how much money you have. It's not a problem you can solve by throwing money at it, although many are trying. You can increase the chances of hopefully discovering something novel that helps you build something SOTA, but as current history tells us, it isn't as easy as "ML Team + Money == SOTA model in a few months".