MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by dragonwriter | 2025-10-30 15:26:33+00:00
> Shouldn't an operator on incompatible types return undefined? ;)

NaN is a value of the Number type; I think there are some problems with deciding that Number is not compatible with Number for equality.

We just need another value in the boolean type called NaB, and then NaN == NaN can return NaB.

To complement this, also if/then/else should get a new branch called otherwise that is taken when the if clause evaluates to NaB.
by toomuchtodo | 2025-10-30 15:26:35+00:00
Solar PV panels are as cheap as plywood at this point (sometimes cheaper, depends on your market as always). The cost is mostly soft costs (permitting, etc), labor, and the frame. Rooftop residential solar is still 3x-5x more expensive than ground mount, commercial is somewhere in between due to scale. Ground mount total cost is ~$1/watt, residential solar ~$3-5/watt.

Easiest wins are code to require large commercial and industrial buildings to meet load requirements for future solar installs, parking lot canopies that are solar ready (or solar installed at time of canopy install), and in the case of residential, ground mount with low regulatory overhead and minimal to no shading.

Related:

NREL: Solar Installed System Cost Analysis - https://www.nrel.gov/solar/market-research-analysis/solar-in...

Cheap DIY solar fence design - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45597198 - October 2025

Great comment from that thread on cost breakdown (Alaska): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45692595
by DefineOutside | 2025-10-30 15:27:11+00:00
I find Cursor's tab completion to be distracting enough with multi-line changes that I just disabled it, while I use IntelliJ's tab completion regularly.

Cursor's tab completion is better, but it doesn't seem to have a concept of not trying to tab complete. IntelliJ is correct half the time for completing the rest of the line and only suggests when it is somewhat confident in its answer.
by OldGreenYodaGPT | 2025-10-30 15:27:12+00:00
Definitions: denom(b) = (b^b - b^2 + b - 1) / (b - 1)^2 num(b) = (b^b(b - 2) + 1) / (b - 1)^2

Exact relation: num(b) - (b - 2)denom(b) = b - 1

Therefore: num(b) / denom(b) = (b - 2) + (b - 1)^3 / (b^b - b^2 + b - 1) [exact]

Geometric expansion: Let a = b^2 - b + 1. 1 / (b^b - b^2 + b - 1) = (1 / b^b) * 1 / (1 - a / b^b) = (1 / b^b) * sum_{k>=0} (a / b^b)^k

So: num(b) / denom(b) = (b - 2) • (b - 1)^3 / b^b • (b - 1)^3 * a / b^{2b} • (b - 1)^3 * a^2 / b^{3b} • …

Practical approximation: num(b) / denom(b) ≈ (b - 2) + (b - 1)^3 / b^b

Exact error: Let T_exact = (b - 1)^3 / (b^b - b^2 + b - 1) Let T_approx = (b - 1)^3 / b^b

Absolute error: T_exact - T_approx = (b - 1)^3 * (b^2 - b + 1) / [ b^b * (b^b - b^2 + b - 1) ]

Relative error: (T_exact - T_approx) / T_exact = (b^2 - b + 1) / b^b

Sign: The approximation with denominator b^b underestimates the exact value.

Digit picture in base b: (b - 1)^3 has base-b digits (b - 3), 2, (b - 1). Dividing by b^b places those three digits starting b places after the radix point.

Examples: base 10: 8 + 9^3 / 10^10 = 8.0000000729 base 9: 7 + 8^3 / 9^9 = 7.000000628 in base 9 base 8: 6 + 7^3 / 8^8 = 6.00000527 in base 8

num(b) / denom(b) equals (b - 2) + (b - 1)^3 / (b^b - b^2 + b - 1) exactly. Replacing the denominator by b^b gives a simple approximation with relative error exactly (b^2 - b + 1) / b^b.
by diegogatling | 2025-10-30 15:27:17+00:00
The Gatling AI Assistant for VS Code accelerates how developers create, explain, and optimize performance tests.

Generate Gatling simulations in JavaScript, TypeScript, Scala, Java, or Kotlin, directly from your IDE. Understand and refine existing code with AI-powered insights. Stay in full control with a BYO-LLM model, supporting OpenAI, Anthropic Claude, and Azure OpenAI. Fast. Transparent. Developer-first.
by mothballed | 2025-10-30 15:28:13+00:00
I wouldn't believe anything the military tells you about justice.

The US military told people whatever they needed to tell them to follow orders. That's why they follow unlawful orders like those to extrajudicially blow up non-combatant US citizens abroad, and imprison people in Guantanamo for decades without trial, assist the disarming of innocent US citizens in NOLA in the aftermath of Katrina, blackball soldiers in Vietnam that reported war crimes, and all manner of other things that hardly anyone seems to be held to account for.
by zipy124 | 2025-10-30 15:28:18+00:00
for 768 dimensions, you'd still expect to hit (1-1/N) with a few billion samples though. Like that's a 1/N of 0.13%, which quite frankly isn't that rare at all?

Of course are vectors are not only points in one coordinate axes, but it still isn't that small compared to billions of samples.
by an0malous | 2025-10-30 15:29:02+00:00
> Physicists are in the business of finding the best set of mathematical rules that describe "If the conditions A exist, then B happens [with a certain probability]."

Physics can't claim domain over the study of reality and then say that reality can only be studied using mathematical rules. You can either say physics is the study of mathematical physicalism and stick to your mathematical rules, or you can say physics is the study of reality and be open to alternative ideas outside of mathematics to describe reality. Otherwise you're just precluding the conclusion of what you're supposed to be studying, that reality can be described by mathematical rules.

> Taken to its metaphysical conclusion, though, "there is no objective reality" can lead to harm.

So we should hide reality under a rug if it could possibly lead to harm? The truth is the truth, your objective as a scientist should be to follow the evidence not police morality. History shows that the truth tends to lead towards a better world anyway. I'm sure the Church was afraid of the decay of morality from atheists if they learned that God doesn't keep the planets in motion.
by fwlr | 2025-10-30 15:29:04+00:00
From quickly messing around in the playground, it seems (in math mode) Typst treats multiple spaces identical to single spaces. A simple, consistent, flexible, and probably-not-majorly-breaking-old-documents rule would be “anything with no spaces has higher precedence / tighter binding than anything with one space, anything with one space has higher precedence / tighter binding than anything with two spaces”, etc, and then - only within each spaces category - you apply one of the precedence rulesets described in the article. Any confusion or surprise can be solved intuitively and without thought by mashing spacebar.
by WillAdams | 2025-10-30 15:29:58+00:00
For folks who are curious about this sort of thing and want an approachable starting point, I would recommend:

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/44882.Code

It would be way cool to see an actual application which wanted this sort of speed optimization --- the last significant assembly language program I can recall using was WriteNow, which was ~100,000 lines of assembly and to this day is my favourite word-processor (well, the NeXT version --- the Mac, even v2.0 suffered in comparison for not having access to Display PostScript and Services).

Really wish that there was a writeup of it at folklore.org --- unfortunately, it only gets a single mention:

https://www.folklore.org/The_Grand_Unified_Model_The_Finder....

(or that there was an equivalent site for the early history of NeXT)
by d--b | 2025-10-30 15:30:07+00:00
To those who "meh" it:

Board games suffer a lot from lack of progression and narrative compared to video games.

Take Mario 1, there are so many different worlds, and enemies, it's a constant wow.

In comparison, board games are always the same. I play a fair amount of board games, but as much as I like the 'IRL' experience, the game play just doesn't compare.

Some board games try to replicate this with level bags and legacy things and what not. But make a Final Fantasy that can be played on a board with my kids, and I am definitely in.

This has huge potential.
by mexicocitinluez | 2025-10-30 15:30:43+00:00
> The statement was made in TruthSocial.

And now he's saying it when being asked by reporters.

https://bsky.app/profile/atrupar.com/post/3m4g67chzo226

> Q: What prompted you to announce you're resuming nuclear testing right before the meeting with Xi?

> TRUMP: They seem to all be nuclear testing. We have more nuclear weapons than anybody. We don't do testing. We halted it many years ago, but w/ others doing testing I think it's appropriate we do also

I think he's pretty explicitly saying that he wants to start doing testing we aren't currently doing.
by mchr3k | 2025-10-30 15:31:15+00:00
All the choices you have to make can be very daunting. I was very lucky to have a colleague at work who gave a talk at the right time in my life with some plausibly right choices.

In the UK I started out using https://www.charles-stanley-direct.co.uk/ and later moved to https://www.ii.co.uk/. I initially invested in https://www.vanguardinvestor.co.uk/investments/vanguard-life... which is a fund which is available on a bunch of platforms. These days I recommend https://www.vanguardinvestor.co.uk/ to some people as an easy and low fee way of getting started with Vanguard funds in the UK.

I don't know what the best trading platform options are in Switzerland - it looks like all of the ones I'm familiar with are not relevant to you.

The key thing is you want to minimise two types of fees: * Platform fees * Product fees

For example Charles Stanley Direct charge 0.3% platform fees, and https://www.vanguardinvestor.co.uk/ charges 0.15% platform fees.

Vanguard LifeStrategy® 100% Equity Fund charges 0.22%.

The bottom line is that there are lots of good choices, and the main thing is to make a choice and get started. You can always optimise/improve your choices later.
by aerostable_slug | 2025-10-30 15:31:34+00:00
You were wrong. The NIF doesn't simulate the entire chain of events of a successful detonation. Some experts have pushed for a resumption of American underground tests that exceed treaty yield limitations as a surety check on the new Reliable Replacement Warheads, so it's not like they are without utility.

More importantly, if China and Russia are cheating (which it appears that they are by masking their own tests that exceed treaty yield limitations) this gives the US a bargaining chip — back off and the US will, don't and we won't. That's what this is all about.
by sitestable | 2025-10-30 15:31:42+00:00
Interesting that TBL identifies exactly 6 platforms as "harmful" (Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, X, YouTube), but the solution of personal data wallets doesn't address why those platforms are harmful. Centralizing user data in pods doesn't solve addictive algorithms or misinformation; those are business model problems, not technical ones.
by 2Gkashmiri | 2025-10-30 15:31:54+00:00
Been using self hosted mailinabox on a cheap racknerd vps for last 4 years. Zero hiccups.

The trick is to send an email, have it whitelisted a bunch of times. Then it just works.

Once I massmailed by mistake. Google rightly spammed the emails. Had to unspam them and was back within a few days.

Outlook was worst but even that worked.

Its 100% doable
by boerseth | 2025-10-30 15:33:16+00:00
I don't think that intuition is entirely trustworthy here. The entire space is high-dimensional, true, but the structure of the subspace encompassing linguistically sensible sequences of tokens will necessarily be restricted and have some sort of structure. And within such subspaces there may occur some sort of sink or attractor. Proving that those don't exist in general seems highly nontrivial to me.

An intuitive argument against the claim could be made from the observation that people "jinx" eachother IRL every day, despite reality being vast, if you get what I mean.
by cousin_it | 2025-10-30 15:33:30+00:00
That's a valiant attempt at myth-fighting, but it doesn't fully convince me. For example, one hop to Wikipedia gives this:

> Later, in the 1970s, ARPA did emphasize the goal of "command and control". According to Stephen J. Lukasik, who was deputy director (1967–1970) and Director of DARPA (1970–1975):

> "The goal was to exploit new computer technologies to meet the needs of military command and control against nuclear threats, achieve survivable control of US nuclear forces, and improve military tactical and management decision making."
by jasonthorsness | 2025-10-30 15:33:34+00:00
Some reasons for this:

1. Free software is developed for the developer's own needs and developers are going to be power users.

2. The cost to expose options is low so from the developer's perspective it's low effort to add high value (perceiving the options as valuable).

3. The developer doesn't know who the customer is and rather than research/refine just tries to hit all the boxes.

4. The distribution of the software itself means anyone who successfully installs it themselves really is a power user and does like the options. Installing it for family and friends doesn't work.

Probably many other factors!
by ToucanLoucan | 2025-10-30 15:34:06+00:00
I agree broadly with everything you've said but I think that you're unnecessarily implying/attempting to isolate it to a single cause, and I think it makes more sense as a variety of causes, all of which can contribute to what creates an addict:

* A lot of people who have broadly good lives get into trouble because their particular blend of biology and mental health makes them vulnerable to addictive behaviors, but others use those same drugs without issues

* People with poor life circumstances (and certain mental health conditions like ADHD) are more susceptible to addiction because they have rough lives and anything that gives you dopamine, be it exercise, casual sex or drugs has the potential to cause addiction, and people in those circumstances utilize behaviors for dopamine release more frequently and readily, and also have a stronger lack of dopamine when they stop

It's a very complex subject that's still developing, but one thing I think we can say for certain is that stigmatizing addicts and addiction and treating the people struggling with it as criminals doesn't solve anything. The criminal penalties for drug use and sale have never once helped anyone. What does seem to reliably help people struggling with addiction, any addiction, is support and safe places/drugs to use. And if GLP-1s can enhance that, I'm all for it.

And, it wouldn't hurt to change our society somewhat so we have fewer people on the bottom rungs of it, barely getting by due to whatever circumstance, whom are then less likely to get in trouble with drugs broadly. And to legalize drugs, because making them illegal doesn't do anything apart from inflate police departments' budgets, and push people who want drugs into dangerous situations, addiction being among them but not the only one.
by jacquesm | 2025-10-30 15:34:30+00:00
An IPO is traditionally thought of as a way to raise capital in amounts that are not available privately, but more recently IPOs are just a way to transfer vast amounts of wealth from speculating retail and institutional investors to stakeholders. The IPO itself is the least interesting thing: if Microsoft wanted they could avoid the IPO and instead offer to buy the shares beforehand.

If the financial future of OpenAI is not as rosy as they say it is then there is a fair chance that post IPO the stock will not rise. There are plenty of signs that this is the case, including the 'erotic' version of ChatGPT slated for release in December, the strong push to monetize even the most inane interactions and the mention of advertising as a possible source of income. All of those combined tell me that OpenAI is seriously worried about their bottom line.

But Microsoft already has a bottom line and AI is the one way in which they could put one over on Google, which they've been dying to do for many years.

So the logical progression to me seems to be:

- do the IPO, everybody associated with OpenAI will be filthy rich (including MS)

- attempt to polish up the financials

- if that fails activate plan B, have Microsoft make an offer to take OpenAI private again

The hype around this IPO increases the chance the stock will drop post IPO.
by Brendinooo | 2025-10-30 15:34:36+00:00
My understanding is that, if the market generally continues on the rate of return it's averaged throughout its history (that is, if you're not a doomer), then the single most important thing is showing up to play.

People who try to time the market or wait for a perfect time or pick the exact right blend of stocks, on average, don't do as well as people who pick a boring index or mutual fund and forget about it for 40 years.
by WorldMaker | 2025-10-30 15:34:36+00:00
One of the big reasons people were upgrading to OS/2 was people that wanted a stabler/cleaner Windows 3.1. Most of the hottest apps for OS/2 were Windows apps. IBM started on the back foot in that competition. Windows 95 clipped their heels because it had the stability/cleanliness for cheaper and less of a RAM footprint.
by kragen | 2025-10-30 15:34:37+00:00
It's error-diffusion dithering. You maintain an error accumulator from one pixel to the next, which keeps track of your departure from the desired slope, and you make a diagonal rather than paraxial move when it overflows. (Or is that only DDA?) But I guess you're right that the position isn't being dithered. It's the slope.

I'm tempted to try the wobbly algorithm now to see what it looks like!
by mattfinlayson | 2025-10-30 15:34:43+00:00
Author of related work here. This is very cool! I was hoping that they would try to invert layer by layer from the output to the input but it seems that they do a search process at the input layer instead. They rightly point out the residual connections make a layer by layer approach difficult. I may point out though that an rmsnorm layer should be invertible due to the epsilon term in the denominator which can be used to recover the input magnitude
by ceejayoz | 2025-10-30 15:34:47+00:00
> Why would the US choose to cede authority to the ICC here?

For the same reason as any other treaty - the corresponding benefits.

> If the US wishes to discipline its service members, they still can and do.

That's not what the ICC is for. The ICC is for when a country won't do so when they should be.

> Under no circumstances should any country allow a foreign entity to decide what its military can and cannot do.

The US has a very long history of telling other foreign entities what they can and cannot do.
by The-Bus | 2025-10-30 15:34:56+00:00
Progression is your level of skill as you get better at a game (whether it's something simple or its chess). I've had narrative events happen in games that, because they are guided by decisions of other players, I still remember more than actual stories in video games.

The idea is interesting, but at the same cost (or more) as a console, or the cost of a dozen board games, it falls into a space where the market is going to be limited.

I would definitely try this if it was available at a board game cafe, just not something I need for home.
by csense | 2025-10-30 15:34:56+00:00
A few critiques:

- If you have a feature detector function (f(x) = 0 when feature is not present, f(x) = 1 when feature is present) and you train a network to compute f(x), or some subset of the network "decides on its own during training" to compute f(x), doesn't that create a zero set of non-zero measure if training continues long enough?

- What happens when the middle layers are of much lower dimension than the input?

- Real analyticity means infinitely many derivatives (according to Appendix A). Does this mean the results don't apply to functions with corners (e.g. ReLU)?
by idolevi | 2025-10-30 15:35:03+00:00
Hey everyone!

I've been working on Hephaestus - an open-source framework that changes how we think about AI agent workflows.

The Problem: Most agentic frameworks make you define every step upfront. But complex tasks don't work like that - you discover what needs to be done as you go.

The Solution: Semi-structured workflows. You define phases - the logical steps needed to solve a problem (like "Reconnaissance → Investigation → Validation" for pentesting). Then agents dynamically create tasks across these phases based on what they discover.

Example: During a pentest, a validation agent finds an IDOR vulnerability that exposes API keys. Instead of being stuck in validation, it spawns a new reconnaissance task: "Enumerate internal APIs using these keys." Another agent picks it up, discovers admin endpoints, chains discoveries together, and the workflow branches naturally.

Agents share discoveries through RAG-powered memory and coordinate via a Kanban board. A Guardian agent continuously tracks each agent's behavior and trajectory, steering them in real-time to stay focused on their tasks and prevent drift.

GitHub: https://github.com/Ido-Levi/Hephaestus Docs: https://ido-levi.github.io/Hephaestus/

Fair warning: This is a brand new framework I built alone, so expect rough edges and issues. The repo is a bit of a mess right now. If you find any problems, please report them - feedback is very welcome! And if you want to contribute, I'll be more than happy to review it!
by einsteinx2 | 2025-10-30 15:35:17+00:00
I’ll preface this by saying I’m not a lawyer, but let’s say Microsoft released an obfuscated version where the method FooBar is called FakeName instead. If I use FakeName in my mod, aren’t I hypothetically at risk of the same thing? How does the actual name matter for this argument?

Or is the argument that only source code is copyrighted, but not binaries so it only matters if the name matches the original source code? That doesn’t seem possible because it’s copyright infringement to share a retail game binary, so they’re clearly copyrighted as well.

So I’m really unclear how the risk here is any different regardless of obfuscation since the mod needs to use method names from the copyrighted binary either way.
by nyeah | 2025-10-30 15:35:23+00:00
I think that's a good answer for practical purposes.

Theoretically, I can claim that N random vectors of zero-mean real numbers (say standard deviation of 1 per element) will "with probability 1" span an N-dimensional space. I can even grind on, subtracting the parallel parts of each vector pair, until I have N orthogonal vectors. ("Gram-Schmidt" from high school.) I believe I can "prove" that.

So then mapping using those vectors is "invertible." Nyeah. But back in numerical reality, I think the resulting inverse will become practically useless as N gets large.

That's without the nonlinear elements. Which are designed to make the system non-invertible. It's not shocking if someone proves mathematically that this doesn't quite technically work. I think it would only be interesting if they can find numerically useful inverses for an LLM that has interesting behavior.

All -- I haven't thought very clearly about this. If I've screwed something up, please correct me gently but firmly. Thanks.
by Twirrim | 2025-10-30 15:35:25+00:00
We start out doing things in the CPU, create dedicated hardware for it externally, then slowly but surely bring it closer and closer to the CPU until we end up integrating the specialist capabilities into it. Often these capabilities enable other workloads to be done in the CPU, that we then build dedicated hardware for and the cycle continues.

An easy example is the 8087 maths coprocessor, from the early 80s. They were floating point accelerators, a separate chip you could plug into your motherboard, until eventually it was integrated into the CPU (386 and 486 processors had SX and DX variants, DX had the coprocessor integrated)
by gowld | 2025-10-30 15:35:45+00:00
Don't need the clutter of infinite series and polynomials:

1/9 = 0.1111... 1/81 = 1/9 * 1/9 = 0.111... * 0.111... = Sum of: 0.0111... 0.00111... 0.000111... ... = 0.012345...