MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jghn | 2025-10-30 22:16:57+00:00
My point was that there was absolutely nothing different about the covid vaccine in this regard from literally any other vaccine. So I'm not sure why you're putting it into a special bin here.

If the point is that the average person is uneducated and doesn't understand how vaccines work, sure. But if the solution is to use a different word, that new word would need to be applied to every vaccine on the market. And what's the point if that's the case?

Also, I don't recall ever hearing people with actual knowledge claiming it provided a cloak of invulnerability. So again, I'm not sure what those people should have done different. I'd agree that the media distorted scientific truths, but they always do that.
by SkiFire13 | 2025-10-30 22:17:05+00:00
> tracking how many times a function can possibly recurse.

> Tracking recursion is definitely possible, as shown by proof languages like Agda or Coq that make you prove termination of recursive functions

Proof languages don't really track how many times a function can possibly recurse, they only care that it will eventually terminate. The amount of recursive steps can even easily depend on the inputs, making it unknown at the moment a function is defined.
by hinkley | 2025-10-30 22:17:31+00:00
I've seen sensitivity get tuned down to avoid false positives during deployments or rolling restarts for host updates. And to a lesser extent for autoscaling noise. It can be hard to get right.

I think it's perhaps a gap in the tools. We apply the same alert criteria at 2 am that we do while someone is actively running deployment or admin tasks and there's a subset that should stay the same, like request failure rate, and others that should be tuned down, like overall error rate and median response times.

And it means one thing if the failure rate for one machine is 90% and something else if the cluster failure rate is 5%, but if you've only got 18 boxes it's hard to discern the difference. And which is the higher priority error may change from one project to another.
by dangus | 2025-10-30 22:17:37+00:00
Maybe not inevitable but “most likely outcome by far.”

It’s not like your median founder hasn’t heard of enshittification. They just don’t care. They’re by and large out for a quick buck, not much different than a day trader or a gambler. And the VC system enables that rather than being focused on building companies that are generational and customer focused.
by agentcoops | 2025-10-30 22:17:44+00:00
There is really a fundamental difference as many studies now have shown---and I can attest from personal experience. Honestly, if you have to ask the question there's a pretty high chance you are: everyone at some level believes that their own inner experience generalizes to the rest of humanity, but it's those with aphantasia who thereby believe that everyone else's description is just a manner of speaking ("they, like me, surely don't really think in pictures").

I find the typical thought experiment of "picture an apple" less illustrative than something like "picture the face of a co-worker you see every day but aren't friends with and tell me the color of their eyes." In the apple case, everyone has a "concept" of apple and an experience of "thinking about an apple"---the difference is really in what you can deduce from that thinking and how, if that make sense. Are you reasoning on the basis of an image or from more or less linguistic facts ("apples are red therefore..." etc)?

The main difference that's more than an "implementation" detail of how you think, so to speak, but really a limit concerns what's called "episodic memory." People with aphantasia rather singularly cannot re-experience the emotions of past experiences. There are a lot of studies on this and I can look up the references if you're interested.

When I was really trying to make sense of my own aphantasia, I found https://www.hurlburt.faculty.unlv.edu/codebook.html to be one of the most fascinating resources: it's essentially a catalog of all the different modalities of inner experience a large study found. Probably there are critiques of his methodology etc, but regardless it's an invaluable aid for trying to figure out how exactly you think.
by kraftman | 2025-10-30 22:17:58+00:00
It's more like it's in a different plane, you can see it but it's from another source, like how I can hear things but it doesn't effect my site. If I imagine a candle I "see" a candle in front of a black background, with a flickering flame and a bit of wax dripping down the side. Like how you can have a song in your head but still listen to people
by luqtas | 2025-10-30 22:18:07+00:00
> 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.

i have seen many comments, by lay people, out of Sonobus [0] being superb on what it does and impressive by being 100% free. that's a niche case that if it was implemented on Ardour, could fit the same problem OP describes

[0] https://sonobus.net/

however i can't feel where the problem of FOSS UX scaring normal people is. someone getting a .h264 and a .wav file out of a video-record isn't normal after all. there are plenty of converters on the web, i dunno if they run ffmpeg at their server but i wouldn't get surprised. the problem lies on the whole digital infrastructure running on FOSS without returning anything back. power-user software shouldn't simplify stuff. tech literacy hopefully can be a thing and by quickly learning how to import and export a file in a complex software feels better to install 5 different limited software over the years because your demands are growing
by olalonde | 2025-10-30 22:18:22+00:00
Quite a lot of languages use daltonism actually: French (daltonisme), Spanish (daltonismo), Italian (daltonismo), Portuguese (daltonismo), Catalan (daltonisme), Romanian (daltonism), Polish (daltonizm), Russian (дальтонизм), Greek (δαλτωνισμός), and Turkish (daltonizm).
by gbransgrove | 2025-10-30 22:18:55+00:00
Because these are fetching dependencies in the lifecycle hooks, even if they are legitimate at the moment there is no guarantee that it will stay that way. The owner of those dependencies could get compromised, or themselves be malicious, or be the package owner waiting to flip the switch to make existing versions become malicious. It's hard to see how the lifecycle hooks on install can stay in their current form.
by layer8 | 2025-10-30 22:19:04+00:00
The perspective is kinda like this:

All moments are equally real, like the movie frames on a film roll. The laws of physics say how a point on one frame relates to the same point on the neighboring frame, just like they say how a point relates to a neighboring point on the same frame. You can cut out all the frames from the film roll and stack them on top of each other, resulting in a “block” of points in space-time.

Einstein’s relativity implies that there isn’t a unique way to slice that block into same-moment-in-time frames; instead there are many different ways. Nevertheless, the laws of physics specify how the points within the block relate to each other (e.g. in terms of electro-magnetic field strength and orientation at each point, and all the other physical fields), independent of the particular slicing.

It happens that these physical relations give rise to a structure/flow/weaving that is different along one direction than along other directions. It also happens that along that particular direction the structure implies an increase in entropy, if entropy is calculated on slices perpendicular to that direction (= the increase is from one slice to the next). And that is what has us perceive that direction as time.

But all that really exists is the four-dimensional space with a-priori no distinguished direction, just physical laws describing how points in that space relate to each other. The laws happen no imply that the points will generally be in a pattern in which some direction looks different from the others, and will have a structure that results in us perceiving that direction as time. But there is no externally flowing time, it’s just a pattern within that immutable block of physical reality.

Note: The currently accepted laws of physics do have time as an a-priori dimension. But the idea is that we will come up with laws that don’t have that presumption, and which instead will have time as an emergent property, connected to directions of entropy increase.
by npilk | 2025-10-30 22:20:13+00:00
What a fascinating thread. I bought Affinity Photo and Designer V1 as one-time purchases a few years ago. I didn't upgrade to V2 when those came out. I have continued to occasionally use the V1 apps - I was just in Photo the other day.

To me this is exactly why you would want to buy software licenses as one-time purchases - the company can't rug pull you for what you already bought. If I want, I can keep using the Affinity apps on this machine indefinitely.

It seems a lot of people are really frustrated that they purchased software and now the company is doing something else. Isn't the whole point of purchasing a license for standalone software that you are protected in case the company goes under, or gets bought, or decides to do something else?

Do people think the apps they bought are going away? Or did they expect to get free updates forever for their one-time purchase? Or am I missing something in this announcement?
by jvanderbot | 2025-10-30 22:20:24+00:00
I'll do my best. So you want to dedicate probably the rest of your career to automated diagnosis and recovery from crash conditions after ejection? Just so we can say we did a reasonable thing? Oh just the one case where the pilot rejects during level controlled flight you're saying we should be careful to let it continue on same course and speed? And if it's slightly changing course speed or altitude? Did we want to level out or continue the climb and turn? Do we attempt to maintain rate of climb even if it means throttling up? Descent?

The whole thing is so wildly ambiguous and niche that it's a black hole. When a pilot ejects the controller is gone. The controls are slack and it's just physics until fire.
by qarl | 2025-10-30 22:20:58+00:00
To a small degree, yes. GZIP knows that some patterns are more common in text than others - that understanding allows it to compress the data.

But that's a poor example of what I'm trying to convey. Instead consider plotting the course of celestial bodies. If you don't understand, you must record all the individual positions. But if you do, say, understand gravity, a whole new level of compression is possible.
by xtracto | 2025-10-30 22:21:17+00:00
Do you define "AI" as LLMs?

I ask, because earlier this year I had the chance to use a Waymo for the first time. I moved a good chunk of my portfolio to GOOG after that.

To me, Waymo felt like either Magic or stepping 15+ years into the future; Demolition Man stuff (im a child of the 80s, Xenial).

Stuff like Waymo, AlphaFold and similar are just so far away from anybody else, that Alphabet could split in several companies and all of them would be hugely dominant in the future. And none of them base their revenue in advertising.
by freehorse | 2025-10-30 22:22:29+00:00
What do you mean "not allowed"? Throwing a compile or runtime error? Many languages allow division by zero, and x/0 typically gives inf unless x is 0, then x/0 gives nan. If x is negative then x/0 gives -inf. Of course this all can get tricky with floats, but mathematically it makes sense to divide by zero (interpreted as a limit).

For NaNs, maybe in some domains it could make sense, but eg I would find it impractical when wanting to select rows based on values in a column and stuff like that.
by okanat | 2025-10-30 22:22:37+00:00
Doesn't work on Windows.

It is also quite complex and demands huge investment of time to understand its language which isn't so nice to program in it.

The number of cached combinations of various ABI and dependency setting is small with Nix. This means you need source compilation of a considerable number of dependencies. Conda generally contains every library built with the last 3 minor releases of Python.
by dragonwriter | 2025-10-30 22:22:38+00:00
A “project" is largely a way of storing the definition of the state of a environment in a config file (pyproject.toml). It does a bit more, but you can basically ignore that initially.

It takes a couple of seconds to setup, and then you just use uv add instead of (uv) pip install to add things to the environment, and the project file is kept in sync with the state of the environment. I'm not really understanding what it is for the workflow you describe that you expect a tool to do that uv isn’t providing?
by ChrisMarshallNY | 2025-10-30 22:23:50+00:00
You'd be surprised, then, to know that a lot of programmers think graphic design is easy (see the other comment, in this thread), and can often be quite dismissive of the vocation.

As a programmer, working with a good graphic designer can be very frustrating, as they can demand that I make changes that seem ridiculous, to me, but, after the product ships, makes all the difference. I've never actually gotten used to it.

That's also why it's so difficult to get a "full monty" treatment, from a designer, donating their time.
by wewewedxfgdf | 2025-10-30 22:23:57+00:00
I photographed everything in my fridge and everything in my cupboards and uploaded it to an LLM and photographed by shopping receipts and asked it to create weight loss meal plans based on my existing shopping and food buying habits.

Worked real nice.

Did I make it into a business? Should everything be a SAAS? Nah.
by teamonkey | 2025-10-30 22:23:59+00:00
I have aphantasia. I know what something looks like, I just can’t see it.

It’s not like a written or verbal list though. I also have no internal voice so that wouldn’t make sense. It’s just like the concept of what I’m thinking of is right there in all its detail. Its extremely spatial - I’m thinking in 3D even if I’m not visualising it.

On the visual side, sometimes if I try hard I can make out an amorphous blob. Mostly colourless, though sometimes it has some abstract colours. Trying to recall actual detailed features is very hard, especially faces.

Occasionally I get memory flashes which are more like actually seeing a photograph in my head, but they last a fraction of a second and can’t be done on demand. Sometimes I have dreams which are more visual. This is how I know that my normal way of thinking isn’t visual.
by kmeisthax | 2025-10-30 22:24:20+00:00
There's actually a fair bit of highly influential CC-licensed artwork out there. Wikipedia made a whole free encyclopedia. The SCP Foundation wiki is it's own subculture. There's loads of Free Culture photography on Wikimedia Commons (itself mirrored from Flickr). A good chunk of your YouTube feed is probably using Kevin McCleod music - and probably fucking up the attribution strings, too. A lot of artists don't really understand copyright.

But more importantly, most of them don't really care beyond "oh copyright's the thing that lets me sue big company man[0]".

The real impediment to CC-licensed creative works is that creativity resists standardization. The reason why we have https://xkcd.com/2347/ is because software wants to be standardized; it's not really a creative work no matter what CONTU says. You can have an OS kernel project's development funded entirely off the back of people who need "this thing but a little different". You can't do the same for creativity, because the vast majority of creative works are one-and-done. You make it, you sell it, and it's done. Maybe you make sequels, or prequels, or spinoffs, but all of those are going to be entirely new stories maybe using some of the same characters or settings.

[0] Which itself is legally ignorant because the cost of maintaining a lawsuit against a legal behemoth is huge even if you're entirely in the right
by golem14 | 2025-10-30 22:24:26+00:00
BTW: Is this some kind of new alchemy I don't know about ? How exactly do you renew fissile or fusion-able material ?

We can probably agree that renewable is a misnomer, sine yesterday's sunlight isn't magically showing up again - it's new light from the same sun. Once the sun dims, we are in big doo-doo.

But for fission: fission end products are either useless for future energy production, or require fairly messy breeder reactors that, as I understand it, do not lend themselves to nice modularization and reconditioning that stuff isn't particularly easy (Sellafield may be a good example of how horrifyingly costly all this is). And the end fission products are never the same as the input, so I would like to understand better how you see fission as a "renewable" source.

Also, just to understand the logic in:

"Nuclear is a renewable, and of course it still makes sense to build it out."

Why? A lot of "renewables", like underwater tide plants, should probably not be built out, at least right now, because the economics are just not supporting it. Just because something is "renewable" does not automatically mean we should "of course" building it. that would be the real 70s hippie attitude we so eschew on hacker news.
by zamadatix | 2025-10-30 22:24:38+00:00
The disagreement is in that being the ONLY way UDP can be used is in building a more complex transport layer, not that building a more complex transport layer on top of UDP means it's still just UDP alone. Any transport protocol can be built upon as such, even including transport protocols already built atop UDP. That UDP can be layered on top of does not redefine UDP's ability to be a complete transport layer protocol in itself. UDP cannot be used as a network layer protocol, so it is not one, but UDP provides multiplexing (source+dest based), datagram sizing independent of the network layer, and even header checksumming on top of a network layer protocol - making it a (relatively) minimal transport protocol. The ability to be a transport layer protocol is not defined by the lack of ability to be built on top of to make a more complex transport layer on top of the given protocol.

A classic practical example of "plain Jane UDP transport" might be an traditional SNMP trap (not one of the newer fancy flavors). No ACK, no bidirectional session setup, no message ID/sequence number, no retransmission, no congestion control - just a one shot blast of info to the given destination - split into datagrams and multiplexed to the receiving service via the transport layer over an arbitrary network layer.

A lot of things broke SCTP... but I'd rather not get into a side debate about what those reasons are. Just that it's not because UDP alone is unusable as a transport layer protocol.
by agentcoops | 2025-10-30 22:25:03+00:00
Comically, though, programming communities really seem to have a statistical over representation of both aphantasics and hyperphantasics. One of these articles comes out every few years and I've witnessed at numerous workplaces how quickly a large portion of the engineers realize they're aphantasic and everyone else is aghast that they can't rotate complete architectural diagrams etc.

That said, it really is binary or not whether you cannot see images at all in your head and there are, in fact, some very real downsides related to episodic memory. As someone who realized I was aphantasic late in life, I think it's pretty important to realize you are if in fact you are---ideally as early in your educational process as possible. For everyone else, it's interesting to realize some people have more vivid imagery than you and some people less, but probably that doesn't change very much about your life.
by nobody9999 | 2025-10-30 22:25:12+00:00
>Affinity Studio now free

I'd love to have an actually free alternative to the offerings from those rapacious thugs over at Adobe.

/RANT

But this isn't actually free. Rather than paying with currency, you pay with your PII and, presumably, your attention as you're relentlessly marketed to by Canva and by whomever they decide to sell your PII.

This is all too common and folks seem to be okay with it for some unknown reason. If you walked into an art supply store, grabbed the stuff you wanted/needed and headed to the cashier with cash and they refused to sell you anything unless you provided them with your name, phone number, email address, etc., etc., etc. you'd likely walk out without purchasing anything. [N.B.: Yes, Radio Shack always asked for that info, but didn't require it for purchases.]

Yet it seems that selling your personal details and attention is perfectly fine online.

What's more, since you must have a valid "account" with Canva to use their "free" offering, you are also subject (generally without recourse) to changes in the licensing/subscription models and they can take it away whenever they feel like it. What could go wrong? It's not like that's ever been an issue, right?

I'd love to use Affinity Studio. But I won't. Because the price is too high for me.

I'd note that these sorts of shenanigans aren't limited to Canva -- far from it. It's just one more vendor contributing to the further enshittification of the tech sphere. And more's the pity.

/RANT

Why is/isn't it too "expensive" for you? (Note, this is a real question, not a poke at anyone.)

Edit: Fixed prose. Added to rant.
by svachalek | 2025-10-30 22:25:45+00:00
The last point is very interesting. I would say I have minimal, nearly nonexistent ability to visualize mentally, unless I am in a lucid dreaming state in which case it does feel like a magic power.

I never thought about it until you brought it up, but my ability to manipulate images in my head is nonetheless top notch, I can solve visual puzzles that seem difficult for most people with hardly any effort at all. And my ability to draw/paint is not something people would pay me for but is still well above average, and that also requires “holding” an image in your mind. So either these skills are unrelated to being able to “see” your imagination or we are really failing to communicate about it.
by roundedge | 2025-10-30 22:26:03+00:00
I have the same dilemma previously, to go learning coding the hard way that will stick better or go for system thinking, problem solving, etc. I would say thinking occurs before coding, coding is the last 10% of the whole project, thinking as in system thinking, problem solving, etc always come before that. So now I go for system thinking, domain-driven design rather than learning coding the hard way.
by aaroninsf | 2025-10-30 22:26:42+00:00
Based on comments here I guess in addition to having no internal monolog, I also have no "mental images."

I can imagine how a specific voice sounds, or singing, etc.; and I can summon a vague visual impression of something,

But ITT people are describing a level of detail I can't comprehend. I have no images I can "study" and I can't solve visual puzzles in my head. I can't rotate arbitrary objects and tell you the shape of their outline.

I guess some of you can do this? Jealous AF.
by brucehoult | 2025-10-30 22:26:46+00:00
That is very true!

But I suggest RISC-V RV32I or RV32E [1] is a great option too. Only 37 instructions that a compiler would generate from C (etc), mostly simple register-to-register arithmetic and control flow, plus byte/half/word load/store with only one addressing mode.

It's actually, I would say, slightly simpler to learn what the instructions are than 6502 or Z80, and *vastly* easier to use to write useful programs with.

And it's not only for emulator, you can buy a vast range of new hardware today, ranging from 10c microcontrollers (with 2k RAM, 16k flash for the program, 48 MHz) up to a $2500 64 core 2 GHz 128GB RAM workstation, with in the middle ESP32s for a couple of bucks, Raspberry Pi Pico 2 or Milk-V Duo (Linux! In 64MB at 1.0 GHz) for $5, and on to quad core 1.5 or 1.6 GHz Linux SBCs for $20 (VisionFive 2 Lite), $30-$50 (Orange Pi RV or RV2 with 2-8 GB RAM) and so on.

Online tutorial:

https://dramforever.github.io/easyriscv/#my-first-risc-v-ass...

[1] 16 registers instead of 32, as seen in e.g. the $0.10 CH32V003 microcontroller