MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by altruios | 2025-10-30 19:07:58+00:00
Try the crossed eyes 'find the difference' technique. Which is crossing your eyes such that a third image (a blending of the two images: one from each eye) appears between those two images.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qvdVBzuGWr4

You can easily understand where the difference is because the data is different between the eyes. The difference appears 'ghostly'. In a similar way, data from the mind's eye is different from data from the physical eyes when those two 'streams of data' are blended.
by fxwin | 2025-10-30 19:08:23+00:00
In a field with as much public visibility as this one it is naive to only think of the academic target audience, especially when choosing a title like this. As a researcher you are responsible for communicating your findings both to other experts and to outsiders, and that includes choosing appropriate titles. (Though i think we fundamentally disagree about the role of researchers here) It's like writing a title that says "drinking only 200ml of water a day leads to weight loss" which is technically true, but misleading.
by t43562 | 2025-10-30 19:08:48+00:00
venvs try to economise on space by symlinking to the existing python where possible....but of course there is a way to do a full copy.

python -m venv --copies .myvenvdir

You can scp this but the destination machine should be using the same version of python and have whatever modules you're using from the system install in it's own system install.

There's nothing nice about this but it does protect you from a lot of issues where it might seem to work and then behave unexpectedly. e.g. if you had a different python on the destination.

Docker doesn't just help with scripts - it also manages the problem of binary compatibility with C and C++ (and whatever) libraries. You may not have had this problem with C/C++ code so you might imagine it's all about python but I can only say it's a misery that the C/C++ crowd have been suffering with for a very long time. How does one support 3 distros each with a different version of libffmpeg installed when you're making a media player? Sometimes there's a lot of "#if FFMPEG_MAJOR > 3" in the code to cope with it.

The distro developers build each package with a bunch of patches to adapt them to the distro they're in.

It's bad enough for the distro developers to curate all this when it's their job but with python devs are living in a more minimally curated world and in some applications like ML are now dealing with wide and deep dependency trees that rival a distro.

IMO perhaps "someone" should come up with some new distributions where they make everything work together.
by bell-cot | 2025-10-30 19:09:17+00:00
It's a nice little bit of math...but the underlying problem is one of real-world operational competence, not clever 2-dimensional geometry.

When Notre Dame caught fire, the fire alarm worked fine...but it was more than half an hour between that alarm sounding - internally - and the on-duty staff figuring out the actual location of the fire, verifying it, and calling the fire brigade. Add in 10 minutes for the fire brigade to arrive, 300 steps to climb up to the attic where the fire was...yeah.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Notre-Dame_fire#Fire

(The article mentions that the museum's alarms sounded as they should.)
by TheTon | 2025-10-30 19:09:17+00:00
As a kid, I was marginally decent at competitive math. Not good like you think of kids who dominate those type of competitions at a high level, but like I could qualify for the state competition type good.

What I was actually good, or at least fast at, was TI-Basic, which was allowed in a lot of cases (though not all). Usually the problems were set up so you couldn’t find the solution using just the calculator, but if you had a couple of ideas and needed to choose between them you could sometimes cross off the wrong ones with a program.

The script the author gives isn’t a proof itself, unless the proposition is false, in which case a counter example always makes a great proof :p
by doublerabbit | 2025-10-30 19:09:22+00:00
UX is the biggest debt.

You're making application for yourself and somewhere down pipeline you decide that it could benefit others, so you make it open-source.

People growl at you "It's ugly UX but nice features" when it was originally designed for your own tastes. The latter, people growl at you for "not having X feature, but nice UX".

Your own personal design isn't one-fits-all and designing mocks takes effort. Mental strain and stress; pleasing folks is hard. You now continue developing and redesign the foundations.

A theming engine you think. This becomes top-priority as integration of such becomes a PITA when trying to couple it with future features later.

That itself becomes a black hole in how & schematics. So now you're forever doomed in creating something you never desired for the people who will probably never use it. This causes your project to fail but at least you have multiple revisions of the theming engine. Or you strike it lucky and gain a volunteer.
by deanCommie | 2025-10-30 19:09:33+00:00
YES, but let's also not ignore that the market is cold right now and the tech industry isn't really growing like crazy like it did during ZIRP.

So yeah in a hot economy anything you launch grows crazy. Then you do the thought leader talk circuit.

And in a cold economy, you can stop growing, optimize for your 24/7 steady workload, and also do the thought leader talk circuit.
by renewiltord | 2025-10-30 19:09:41+00:00
I wonder what an actual survey would yield. This article is “What do people imagine is the reason why some people play their phones out loud on buses and trains?”

And I suppose that’s neat for hypothesis generation but I think a few minutes thought could come up with all of these. Perhaps next time I will try to politely ask. Wish me luck. Hope I don’t get stabbed.

Here’s my extra hypothesis: some people actually don’t know what’s going on - they stop at the top of the escalator and look around; they stand in the middle of the aisle with their shopping cart blocking it; and they don’t have a clue that the TV volume is high
by elcritch | 2025-10-30 19:10:05+00:00
It's not clear to me if it's different than Zerotier's routing design or not. Partly because ZT has their "moons" and custom network controllers. Googling about it does seem to indicate ZT doesn't support peers routing traffic directly, but you can setup your own DERP style TCP relays.

To me Tailscale is just a nicer version of Zerotier but not in different genre like ftp vs Dropbox. From a general non-power users perspective they operate almost identically.
by psunavy03 | 2025-10-30 19:10:09+00:00
> A more complicated hypothesis off the top of my head: the location of human speech in frequency/envelope is a tradeoff between (1) occupying an unfilled niche in sound space; (2) optimal information density taking brain processing speed into account; and (3) evolutionary constraints on physiology of sound production and hearing.

Well from an evolutionary perspective, this would be unsurprising, considering any other forms of language would have been ill-fitted for purpose and died out. This is really just a flavor of the anthropic principle.
by linkregister | 2025-10-30 19:10:38+00:00
This is a mischaracterization of the liability of PG&E for those fires. All of the PG&E-caused wildfires were due to inadequately maintained equipment operating well beyond its service life. The reduction of maintenance budgets to improve free cash flow and return capital to investors was a conscious decision by the company officers [1].

As you stated, PG&E was held liable for billions of dollars of compensation for the impacted people. This led to negative earnings zeroing out the profits of the previous decade [2]. Furthermore, the stock's price is far lower than it was during the hayday of deferred maintenance.

Since the involvement of California state government in PG&E operations, maintenance has improved dramatically. Furthermore, PG&E again has positive earnings, demonstrating that the long-term viability of the company is improved with adequate maintenance budgeting.

Now to address the counterfactual, "the fires would have happened anyway": no. The leading cause of wildfires in California in general, and impacting people and infrastructure in particular, is electrical equipment. This is empirical; after PG&E began cutting power during high-fire danger days, the number and severity of wildfires dropped dramatically [3].

1. How PG&E missed its chance to prevent the Camp Fire: Damning report on utility’s negligence, https://www.sacbee.com/news/california/fires/article24357122...

2. Pacific Gas & Electric EPS - Earnings per Share 2011-2025 | PCG, https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/PCG/pacific-gas-el...

3. Human-caused ignitions spark California’s worst wildfires but get little state focus: In 2019, utilities turned off electricity during high-wind events, and California had its mildest fire season in eight years. Was that a coincidence?, https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/2020/01/05/human-caused...
by drooby | 2025-10-30 19:10:38+00:00
I'm convinced I probably have aphantasia.. maybe even quite extreme. On a scale of 1-10 probably 1 or 2 vividness.

But if I take shrooms.... I can actually see objects with my eyes closed. I can rotate them. Morph them. It's so fun! Huge bummer that I miss out on stuff like this in my daily life.

What's weird is that I can still "rotate objects" and correctly predict their final state when I am sober (up to a point, of course). But I am blind to the actual visual. It's hard to explain. It's just not registering in my consciousness - but perhaps it's there behind the curtain.

So, the mind is undoubtedly capable of performing this feat. However, my brain in sober state is not wired to transfer information in this way.
by reenorap | 2025-10-30 19:11:10+00:00
Has the UN actually solved any problems in the last 40+ years? It seems like a massive bureaucracy that is absolutely ineffective. They have been completely ineffective with respect to Ukraine, Gaza, COVID, any other conflict around the world.

When the W.H.O. went into China to "investigate" the COVID virus and came back saying "Nope, nothing to see here!" was probably one of the most predictable and pathetic things from the UN.
by TeMPOraL | 2025-10-30 19:11:24+00:00
You have to board a container ship hauling containers full of modern smartphones, capable of passing remote attestation so you can work with passkeys and app push notification based auth and whatever other bullshit "security" measures get popular in the next decade.

Then you have to find out when some C-suite from the SaaS of interest goes on a cruise, board that ship, and extort lifetime accounts hard-wired to charge some cost center inside of the SaaS. Then you can sell those accounts along with the phones as something resembling "pay once use forever" box software.

Nobody said sailing the high seas in the 21st century is easy.
by galagawinkle489 | 2025-10-30 19:11:27+00:00
Why should they work for pay on free software? Nobody expects to be paid to work on the software itself. Yet artists expect to be treated differently.

If it is your job, then go do it as a job. But we all have jobs. Free software is what we do in our free time. Artists don't seem to have this distinction. They expect to be paid to do a hobby.
by mnmalst | 2025-10-30 19:11:32+00:00
I don't feel like I know better what other people experience talking about it here. :)

Just now, what you wrote for example.

> my minds eye visualization is close to photographic parity.

What does this mean? Does this mean it's literally the exact same experience as if your eyes were open and you are looking at the picture? Or is it more like you imagine it and it's somewhere popping up in the back of your head?

When I read a book for example I can imagine what I read but it's not even close to "seeing" it. It's a completely different sensation and visual fidelity. It's just not "seeing".
by gassi | 2025-10-30 19:11:38+00:00
I think the author missed an important factor: misaligned incentives.

Dating apps make money when users spend time (and money) on the platform. Users who find a partner tend to leave the platform, so dating companies are incentivized to prevent that from happening. Those companies then have more opportunities to up-sell those users on premium features, which they're more likely to purchase due to repeated failure and/or feelings of inadequacy.
by starkparker | 2025-10-30 19:11:48+00:00
Especially with v2's lack of real plugin or scripting options, and with no cross-version interchange format like IDML or apparently even partial backward-compatiblity support in v3, it's also less possible to drag v2 even slightly forward than it was with Adobe CS4/5.

If you're a freelancer using v2 and someone gives you v3 files, you can't work.
by lawrencechen | 2025-10-30 19:11:49+00:00
Good suggestions! Will make it more URL friendly.

> Adding a comment to explain why the downgrade is done would have resulted in not raising the issue?

Trying it out here with a new PR on same branch: https://0github.com/manaflow-ai/cmux/pull/809

Will check back on it later!

EDIT: seems like my comment online 62 got highlighted. Maybe we should surface the ability edit the prompt.
by pron | 2025-10-30 19:12:06+00:00
I don't think any language that's not well-established, let alone one that isn't stabilised yet, would have a strong selling point if what you're looking for right now is to write production code that you'll maintain for a decade or more to come (I mean, companies do use languages that aren't as established as C in production apps, including Zig, but that's certainly not for everyone).

But if you're open to learning languages for tinkering/education purposes, I would say that Zig has several significant "intrinsic" advantages compared to C.

* It's much more expressive (it's at least as expressive as C++), while still being a very simple language (you can learn it fully in a few days).

* Its cross-compilation tooling is something of a marvel.

* It offers not only spatial memory safety, but protection from other kinds of undefined behaviour, in the form of things like tagged unions.
by tinfoilhatter | 2025-10-30 19:12:15+00:00
I am criticizing individuals - individuals who are members of a bloodline that have historically engaged in war profiteering and have been instrumental in running the international central banking cartel. You're right that I didn't mention all Jews, because that would indeed be anti-Semitic.

Sorry but I'm not going to kowtow to your ridiculous logic. It's perfectly fair to lob criticism at bloodlines, and if you had ever opened a history book you would readily understand that.
by hydrogen7800 | 2025-10-30 19:12:18+00:00
This describes me somewhat. I use FEA software and only recently started using it to execute jobs in CLI. I still trip over changing directories. Fortunately notepad++ has an option to open CLI with the filepath of the currently open file. I also didn't know right-click is paste in CLI. Don't use ctrl+c accidentally. But ctrl+v does work in powershell (sometimes?). "Error, command not found" is puzzling to me. Where does the software need to live relative to the directory I am using? This is all still very foreign to me, and working in CLI feels like flipping light switches in a dark room.
by bovermyer | 2025-10-30 19:12:18+00:00
Thank you for the context. I was an Affinity Suite user for a long time after I dropped Adobe.

I now use a mixture of GIMP, Krita, and Inkscape for visual things. I don't have a good alternative for InDesign - even Affinity Publisher wasn't one. Since my tabletop RPG business closed, I haven't had a need for a powerful layout application. I just use Typst or LaTeX for my personal projects that need a layout engine.
by dylan604 | 2025-10-30 19:12:54+00:00
Yeah it doesn't instill a lot of confidence in the quality of ivy league credentials when guys like this are running around spouting nonsense. I'm surprised there's not a clause in his employee handbook that says to not be an obvious troll. Kooky science is one thing but this is just the type of person the men with butterfly nets and white coats should be interested
by nikeee | 2025-10-30 19:13:20+00:00
I think a better reasoning is that NaN does not have a single binary representation but in software, one may not be able to distinguish them.

An f32-NaN has 22 bits that can have any value, originally intended to encode error information or other user data. Also, there are two kinds of NaNs: queit NaN (qNaN) and signalling NaNs (sNaN) which behave differently when used in calculations (sNaNs may throw exceptions).

Without looking at the bits, all you can see is NaN, so it makes sense to not equal them in general. Otherwise, some NaN === NaN and some NaN !== NaN, which would be even more confusing.
by bragr | 2025-10-30 19:13:24+00:00
Given the actual correlations attacks governments have done on Tor traffic, I don't think more traffic moves the needle in any appreciable way. Ultimately the Tor architecture is very vulnerable to timing and correlation attacks (never use something like IRC over Tor), and the kinds of changes that would be needed to mitigate those would probably slow it down past the point of usability.

One could argue, given the limited bandwidth of the Tor network, that by using it when you don't need it, you make the experience for those that do need it worse (looking at you everyone who tries to torrent over tor).
by jandrese | 2025-10-30 19:13:42+00:00
As opposed to their current business plan of making a burrito that is half the size and twice the price?

A decade ago going to Chipotle was a treat. You'd get a fresh and honestly gigantic burrito for a pretty reasonable price. Sometimes I would stop after work and pick up burritos/bowls for the entire family.

I went a couple of years ago and it was just sad. They didn't shrink the tortilla so I ended up with a burrito that was practically double wrapped after they skimped on all of the fillings and it cost something in the double digits. I have not been back. The only good thing was in the old days the line would be pretty long and it would be a wait, but last time I went I was able to walk right up and order.

It's not like Chipotle doesn't have plenty of competition. There's a Qdoba right down the streets from mine and a Califorina Tortilla in the other. Across town there is a Cafe Rio. It feels like some middle management dweeb thought we wouldn't notice when they tried to maximize profits.
by kaffekaka | 2025-10-30 19:13:59+00:00
Given how diffently people describe various phenomena which are easier to actually compare, I have lost most hope of quantitatively understanding aphantasia. Of course people differ in ability to visualize thing and using "the minds eye", but exactly what they mean when describing their experience is only confusing.

Many, many people are so very imprecise with words. And we humans are generally bad at analyzing ourselves vs others.
by zucked | 2025-10-30 19:13:59+00:00
That can be a noble goal, but I wouldn't be so hand-wavy about how people understand words and their meanings. I'm firmly in the camp that the mRNA covid vaccine was a wonder of modern science, and on the whole it had net positives for society. Don't misunderstand, it was not rolled out, or messaged perfectly and wasn't without risk that we're likely to wrap our arms around some day in the future.

But we can learn from the experience. And in my view, telling a captive, emotional, and concerned audience "we have a vaccine!" and then not absolutely being a broken record about what that means was a miss.
by anigbrowl | 2025-10-30 19:14:06+00:00
The NIF doesn't need to simulate that, unless you think the mathematics of nuclear criticality and radioactive decay are changing.

if China and Russia are cheating (which it appears that they are by masking their own tests that exceed treaty yield limitations)

I remember this idea being floated a few years ago, but the evidence was tissue thin. Perhaps the Russian activity was based on intel sources (which would understandably not be disclosed), the allegations of Chinese activity were based on construction activity that might be compatible with low yield nuclear testing. Also, I don't think the US has any standing to grumble about the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty limitations, not having ratified the treaty itself - literally a case of 'do as I say, not as I do.'

I distrust Russia in general and consider China suspect where security is concerned, but the incumbent administration in the US isn't trustworthy either.
by throw0101c | 2025-10-30 19:14:15+00:00
Sadly the proliferation of middleboxes means that deploying a new Layer 4 is all but impossible:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datagram_Congestion_Control_Pr...

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stream_Control_Transmission_Pr...

Curious to know if things can every move towards a point of allowing things. I know in many firewall 'languages' do have something like "allow tcp/443" or "allow udp/53" for nomenclature: perhaps something like "allow stream/443" and "allow dgram/53" to include (e.g.) TCP/SCTP and UDP/DCCP would allow more flexibility.
by ragequittah | 2025-10-30 19:14:37+00:00
Fully agreed when it starts interfering with your life you should reassess as with anything. But honestly I see gaming as a further place to connect with kids if you enjoy them. Something like Animal Crossing, Mario Kart/Party or Jackbox Party Pack can be some of the best bonding experiences out there. And it also lets you teach your kids how to have a healthy relationship with games/dopamine.

It depends on degrees. If you're going to lose your job and your wife is about to leave you stop doing it. If you just did 12 hours of work/chores/put the kids to bed and want to relax with a bit of gaming? Some people would still feel guilty but I haven't a clue why.
by reenorap | 2025-10-30 19:14:39+00:00
> That the virus would mutate this much was not something that scientists could have predicted at that point.

The common scientific consensus has always been "Don't vaccinate in the middle of a pandemic" because it would cause more variants. This was one of the things they absolutely violated.

> The updated vaccines against newer strains still did their job at preventing death and serious illness.

No this is not true at all. Most deaths occurred after vaccinations rolled out.
by galagawinkle489 | 2025-10-30 19:14:51+00:00
And why exactly should free software prioritise someone's first five minutes (or first 100 hours, even) over the rest of the thousands of hours they might spend with it?

I see people using DAWs, even "pro" ones made by companies presumably interested in their bottom lines. In all cases I have no idea how to use it.

Do I complain about intuitiveness etc? Of course not. I don't know how to do something. That's my problem. Not theirs.
by delichon | 2025-10-30 19:15:16+00:00
Self-driving cars are constantly subject to mini-trolley problems. By training on human data, the robots learn values that are aligned with what humans value. -- Ashok Elluswamy (VP AI/Autopilot at Tesla)

If they were using my data I'd be partly responsible, due to failing to swerve around the last few suicidal prairie dogs I rolled over. I hate when that happens but I don't attempt high speed evasions. But I would if it were something larger, human or not, out of self defense. And it's never happened but I hope I'd stomp and swerve for a toddler. I'm happy with an autopilot learning that rule set, even though I've lost too many cats under tires.

You probably get more honest answers by presenting a trolley problem and then requiring a response within a second. It's a great implicit bias probe.