MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by simoncion | 2025-11-05 15:48:10+00:00
> Nobody I know uses 32" monitors at 36" away.

I suppose it's still true that nobody you know uses monitors of that size three feet away, but I'm very definitely one of those people.

Why on earth would you put the monitor so close to your face that you have to turn your head to see all of it? That'd be obnoxious as all hell.

> ...by staring at these monitors all day, we are slowly degrading it.

No, that's age. As you age, the tissues that make up your eye and the muscles that control it fail more and more to get rebuilt correctly. I think the colloquial term for this is that they "wear out". It sucks shit, but we're currently too bad at bioengineering to really stop it.
by pythops | 2025-11-05 15:48:15+00:00
that's why I don't like network manager and bloated software in general, they try to do everything and it always come problems

You don't need network manager for bluetooth. just install bluetoothd and there you go and use bluetui or bluetoothctl for wifi, I recommend iwd, and then you can use impala, or iwctl pick up the right tool for right purpose
by wat10000 | 2025-11-05 15:48:21+00:00
I can't speak to finance. In programming, it can be useful but it takes some time and effort to find where it works well.

I have had no success in using it to create production code. It's just not good enough. It tends to pattern-match the problem in somewhat broad strokes and produce something that looks good but collapses if you dig into it. It might work great for CRUD apps but my work is a lot more fiddly than that.

I've had good success in using it to create one-off helper scripts to analyze data or test things. For code that doesn't have to be good and doesn't have to stand the test of time, it can do alright.

I've had great success in having it do relatively simple analysis on large amounts of code. I see a bug that involves X, and I know that it's happening in Y. There's no immediately obvious connection between X and Y. I can dig into the codebase and trace the connection. Or I can ask the machine to do it. The latter is a hundred times faster.

The key is finding things where it can produce useful results and you can verify them quickly. If it says X and Y are connected by such-and-such path and here's how that triggers the bug, I can go look at the stuff and see if that's actually true. If it is, I've saved a lot of time. If it isn't, no big loss. If I ask it to make some one-off data analysis script, I can evaluate the script and spot-check the results and have some confidence. If I ask it to modify some complicated multithreaded code, it's not likely to get it right, and the effort it takes to evaluate its output is way too much for it to be worthwhile.
by RankingMember | 2025-11-05 15:48:23+00:00
Sam Ash (recently defunct U.S. musical instrument chain) infamously used a system called GERS with a TUI, the components of which IIRC were adapted from either a furniture or carpet store. Well into the 2000s, receipts were still printed in full size carbon paper (triplicate) on dot matrix printers. You'd get a gift "card" that was a literal greeting card with one sheet of that dot matrix printout stuffed in it.
by cameron_b | 2025-11-05 15:48:44+00:00
This is the sentiment completely.

My 34-year old base spec Chevrolet has digital controls for timing advance, fuel trim, and integrated Engine and Transmission Control Units. But my dash has some analog components ( fuel level is variable voltage instead of PWM ). The mechanics would all say that my truck is very simple, and "old school"

The Lay use of 'analog' is far removed from function. As long as there isn't a screen, it isn't seen to be digital. I studied photography in college and loved shooting film. I have a processing machine that is based on a 6502. When people would talk about non-digital things as analog it would bug me (One is chemical, and one is a computer).
by dfxm12 | 2025-11-05 15:49:07+00:00
There are other narratives going on in the background though both called out by the article and implied, including:

Brenda probably has annual refresher courses on GAAP, while her exec and the AI don't.

Automation is expected to be deterministic. The outputs can be validated for a given input. If you need some automation more than Excel functions, writing a power automate flow or recording an office script is sufficient & reliable as automation while being cheaper than AI. Can you validate AI as deterministic? This is important for accounting. Maybe you want some thinking around how to optimize a business process, but not for following them.

Brenda as the human-in-the-loop using AI will be much more able than her exec. Will Brenda + AI be better (or more valuable considering the cost of AI) than Brenda alone? That's the real question, I suppose.

AI in many aspects of our life is simply not good right now. For a lot of applications, AI is perpetually just a few years away from being as useful as you describe. If we get there, great.
by cs702 | 2025-11-05 15:49:45+00:00
Before Burry's bets were disclosed, Palantir's trailing price-earnings ratio (P/E) peaked at 486x. What does that mean?

I like to think about it this way: Absent growth, had a private investor purchased the business at 486x earnings, it would have taken the investor 486 years to recoup the investment.

Only crazy-fast future growth could justify that multiple.

I estimate earnings/share would have to grow 30-fold within a foreseeable time frame, like 5-7 years, to justify the peak price per share.[a]

---

[a] Back-of-the-envelope math: 486x peak / 15x long-term average P/E = 32-fold increase to justify valuation. I rounded it to 30-fold.
by phendrenad2 | 2025-11-05 15:50:09+00:00
The institutional investors operate in lock-step, so multiply the Blackrock stake by, at minimum, 3. Then take into account the massive reputational downsides to having institutional investors "pull out" of your company. I think that would make you untouchable to most of Wall Street. Just my opinion. The potential power here is enormous. Is it being abused? That's harder to prove. But when Larry says things like "you have to force behaviors" he really makes it hard to play devil's advocate.
by ethanlipson | 2025-11-05 15:50:10+00:00
For a general function F, finding the points (x, y) with F(x, y) = 0 has no closed-form solution. The entire field of mathematical optimization is largely dedicated to finding solutions to F(x, y) = 0, in one form or another.

When F has a special structure (say, low-order polynomial), we can actually find the exact solutions. More general structure (e.g. convexity, differentiability) doesn't give us the exact solution, but it lets use use clever numerical algorithms to find them. There are techniques we can use when F has little to no structure, known as "black box" methods, and they work particularly well when we have few variables. In the case of "fuzzy graphs", there are only two variables, so this software takes the approach of computing F(x, y) for every pixel on the screen. In general this doesn't work due to the curse of dimensionality, but it creates good visualizations in low dimensions :)

To answer your question directly, yes we can use differential geometry to speed up optimization. As an example, you've probably heard of gradient descent. Preconditioned gradient descent leverages the geometry of the surface to speed up convergence. In the language of differential geometry, if we're optimizing f(x), then x is "contravariant" but grad(f) is "covariant", so technically we can't just add grad(f) to x since they have different types. We first have to multiply grad(f) by a rank-2 tensor (the "preconditioner") that encodes the local curvature of f around x. This technique is used by the Adam optimizer, with the assumption that the preconditioner is diagonal.
by mapt | 2025-11-05 15:50:26+00:00
In East Germany, the Stasi had 90,000 full-time staff deciphering reports from maybe 400,000 regular informants and around 1/6th of the population as occasional informants. They used this to run a totalitarian surveillance state which abducted 250,000 supposed dissidents.

This is a horrendously inefficient system. 90,000? 400,000? In a population of 16 million? The expense! The time! The sensitivity to data irregularities! The friction which the non-dissidents must feel! This is a worse imposition than an occupying army. How many of those 250,000 were actually conspiring against the state in a meaningfully threatening way? 1/10th? 1/100th? How many actual dissidents make it through the sieve, because the security service was unable to cross-reference suspicious entries on three pages in files occupying different filing cabinets in different buildings in the complex?

The US, despite its military might, rapidly hit a manpower limit in the occupation of Afghanistan & Iraq, and was largely unable to effectively fight a collection of counterinsurgencies and "sympathizers".

In the 2020's we have much greater capability to surveil. We have electronics tracking everything, we have phones that listen all the time, we have cameras at every streetcorner, data brokers know more about us than our diary does. But manually checking these things in untargeted surveillance would be almost impossible. It would take our entire population spying on ourselves.

Enter Palantir. Proposition: "We would like to explore if we could make this possible & efficient, using modern database & machine learning techniques. We will collect, categorize, transcribe and cross-reference all the data, of every type, we will generate suspicious activity reports autonomously, we will make follow-up trivial".

This was literally George Orwell's nightmare in 1984 - that looking back at the long history of repression and rebellion, the cycle of violence and freedom, of authority and abuse of authority, that perhaps at some point, eventually, technology gives so much power to the authority that it's simply impossible to overthrow them.
by Lerc | 2025-11-05 15:50:50+00:00
I'm interested in the idea of a clean slate hardware/software system. I think being constrained to support existing hardware or software reduces opportunities for innovation on the other.

I don't see that in this project. This isn't defined by a clean slate. It is defined by properties that it does not want to be.

Off the top of my head I can think of a bunch of hardware architectures that would require all-new software. There would be amazing opportunities for discovery writing software for these things. The core principles of the software for such a machine could be based upon a solid philosophical consideration of what a computer should be. Not just "One that doesn't have social media" but what are truly the needs of the user. This is not a simple problem. If it should facilitate but also protect, when should it say no?

If software can run other software, should there be an independent notion of how that software should be facilitated?

What should happen when the user directs two pieces of software to perform contradictory things? What gets facilitated, what gets disallowed.

I'd love to see some truly radical designs. Perhaps model where processing and memory are one, A:very simple core per 1k of SRAM per 64k of DRAM per megabytes of flash, machines with 2^n cores where each core has a direct data channel to every core with its n-bit core ID being one but different (plus one for all bits different).

A n=32 system would have four billion cores and 4 terabytes if RAM and nearly enough persistent storage but it would take talking through up to 15 intermediaries to communicate between any two arbitrary cores.

You could probably start with a much lower n. Then consider how to write software for it that meets the principles that meets the criteria of how it should behave.

Different, clean slate, not easy.
by Devasta | 2025-11-05 15:51:03+00:00
I lead a team that manage trade settlements for hedge funds; data is exported from our systems as XML and then transformed via XSLT into whatever format the prime brokers require.

All the transformed are maintained by non-developers, business analysts mainly. Because the language is so simple we don't need to give them much training, just get IntelliJ installed on their machine, show them a few samples and let them work away.

We couldn't have managed with anything else.
by arichard123 | 2025-11-05 15:51:22+00:00
I remember using a TUI for a Bank in the UK, and them switching to a web-based javascript system. Because the TUI forced keyboard interaction everyone was quick, and we could all fly through the screens finding what we wanted. One benefit was each screen was a fixed size and there was no scroll, so when you pressed the right incantation the answer you wanted appeared in the same portion of the screen every time. You didn't have to hunt for the right place to look. You pressed the keys, which were buffered, looked to the appropriate part of the screen and more often than not the information you required appeared as you looked.

Moving to a web based system meant we all had to use mice and spend our days moving them to the correct button on the page all the time. It added hours and hours to the processing.

Bring back the TUI!
by calvinmorrison | 2025-11-05 15:51:22+00:00
I'm in the distribution/manufacturing ERP vertical in the US for SMB clients... yes we see it. No - not often

Most people are running on 90s-2000s era stuff rather than TUIs.

For the most part, it works well, and is not very costly.

Check out Sage100... flexible, cheap, on prem... runs everything from job / work tickets to inventory, purchasing, financials, payroll, etc.

Aint sexy but it works!
by tern | 2025-11-05 15:51:31+00:00
I'm quite disappointed by the discourse in this thread.

We can build privacy-preserving identity. It's a huge opportunity. Go work on it!

If you're in the Bay, there's a conference on it every year where the people building the tech and setting the standards are hashing out the ideas!

When the government comes knocking, they're not coming up with stuff from scratch—they're picking up the tools we left around ready to use.
by IAmBroom | 2025-11-05 15:52:15+00:00
rogerrogerr, I suspect that stat involves all deaths, not just to passengers.

The vast majority of deaths by train involve "trespassers", which is code for "dimwits who bypassed crossing gates and got smashed by the train that couldn't stop". Usually not even the train drivers are injured, much less the passengers.

But airplanes are very safe - perhaps mostly because it's hard for idiots to drive in front of them.
by arandr0x | 2025-11-05 15:52:26+00:00
It's encouraging to see browsers actually deprecate APIs, when I think a lot of problems with the Web and Web security in particular is people start using new technologies too fast but don't stop using old ones fast enough.

That said, it's also pretty sad. I remember back in the 2000s writing purely XML websites with stylesheets for display, and XML+XSLT is more powerful, more rigorous, and arguably more performant now in the average case than JSON + React + vast amounts of random collated libraries which has become the Web "standard".

But I guess LLMs aren't great at generating XSLT, so it's unlikely to gain back that market in the near future. It was a good standard (though not without flaws), I hope the people who designed it are still proud of the influence it did have.
by 0hijinks | 2025-11-05 15:52:34+00:00
> So you must always factor in the amount of time before a predicted crash: the longer it takes the more money you lose.

I think the idea is, as a put buyer (market taker), this has already been baked into the option premium. The only "maintenance cost" in the sense of a cost that adds to an open position is from interest on margin loans.

There would be a maintenance cost from rolling the position into a later expiry, but I think the impression is that this is a precise single bet.

EDIT: You're spot on about opening a position being a sort of cost too, due to missing out on risk-free returns. This is especially important for hedging. Less so for a directional bet.
by boxed | 2025-11-05 15:52:45+00:00
> The only thing that I personally care about is the ability of ordinary people to build and retain wealth.

Why? Just "having wealth" isn't important in itself, it's just a number in a computer. So there is something else you are trying to get at. What is it?

> Wealth disparity doesn't grow because wealthy people are allowed to retain their generational wealth or not, it grows because the rest can't build and retain their wealth.

Disparity happens when two groups diverge. That's what disparity means. As long as the richest have a higher growth rate, the disparity grows.

> This isn't a zero sum game.

That's a different conversation though. You talked about wealth disparity, not about quality of living or something. THERE it's not a zero sum game. But in wealth disparity it is by definition a zero sum game.

> I would also not trust the government or any political body to handle income from the inheritance taxes.

But you would trust the wealthy? Ok.. but...

> So I would rather the children of wealthy people squander their wealth, than a politician transfer that wealth to their patron.

So you don't trust the wealthy either?

I don't understand what you are arguing at this point.
by egypturnash | 2025-11-05 15:52:49+00:00
You are in the Billiards Room. It's sparingly decorated, almost unfinished in its rusticness - the walls are plain, dark wooden panelling, the floor's the same. There is a billiards table here, with a few balls set out upon it. There's a bar in one corner, populated with every kind of liquor you've ever heard of, and a lot more that you haven't. The western wall has a boarded-up window. The east has a couple of framed prints next to the door. But really what draws your eyes here is the dart board, mounted on the wall of this quiet little man-cave. And what draws your nose is the faint scent of some very expensive cigar smoke, trodden into the boards of this floor by a thousand thousand footsteps your great-uncle made while circling the green field of the table with an endless succession of Men of Power.

> smell

Very expensive cigar smoke. Curiously like oranges.

> examine bar

It's a little nook in the corner of the room. Someone seems to have left a few coins there! You scoop them up and relish the jingle a few coins make in your pocket. It's scattered with the usual: a few empty glasses, a lot of bottles, three three model cars, a treatise upon the theory of panspermia written by your aunt, a statue of an elephant, and a white chess piece.

[ +5 coins! ]

> drink

Your mother made you very solemnly swear on your cherished Swim Bird plushie to not break into Great-Uncle Herbert's stash until you were married.

> drink

Your mother made you very solemnly swear on your cherished Swim Bird plushie to not break into Great-Uncle Herbert's stash until you were married. No force in the universe could compel you to break this oath.

> x chess

It's nestled among the bottles, as if trying to blend in with them. You wonder what a drink themed around a white pawn would taste like. Probably oranges. Grunkle Herbert always smelt a little like oranges, under those cigars.

> x elephant

Red jasper, the size of your fist.

> play pool

You pick up a cue and poke the balls around the baize. For a moment it's as if you're a little older, pitting your skills against Grunkle Herbert in an endless series of cozy lectures on the history of Fenn Aires, and how he made deals between its biggest players. For a moment it's as if you're him, aimlessly knocking balls around the table as he passes on his knowledge to the next generation of power. But ultimately it's just you, alone in his massive mansion, trying to piece the massive puzzle of his life back together, and wondering why you always smell oranges when you think of him.

And ultimately it was darts that he really played to win, not billiards.

> x prints

Two sparse line drawings: a raven, and a writing-desk.

> play darts

[ a dart-themed math puzzle ensues ]

----

Which parts are important? Which parts are just there to distract you? Is it important to a second-layer puzzle that this room's memories smell like oranges? Is it meaningful that there's a chess piece there? Is it meaningful that you're pretty sure this room's memories smelled like cherries yesterday?
by willguest | 2025-11-05 15:53:22+00:00
Taking it a step further, how would simple algorithms behave when viewed in this way? Rather that just the outcome, we could observe a possibility space...

Michael Levin has talked about interesting dynamics with the bubble sort algorithm, which is only a few lines of code, that have parallels in biological processes, suggesting there is a more nuanced logic to nature that we are not seeing
by locallost | 2025-11-05 15:53:28+00:00
Socialism means society owns the means of production with the goal of having more equality. Obviously not the case in America.

Why is Medicare proof of the US being a socialist country and not the existence of e.g. the US Army? The former is a formal agreement of the majority to spend money on citizens' health, the latter a formal agreement to spend money on citizens' protection from invasion by a foreign country. Obviously everyone agrees an army is needed, so why not health care?
by estimator7292 | 2025-11-05 15:54:15+00:00
Many (most?) older retail businesses still use TUIs. They're reliable, consistent, and orders of magnitude faster than GUI systems.

When I worked ar Sherwin Williams, I got good enough with the TUI that customers could rattle off their orders while I punch it into the computer in real time.

It's absolutely crazy that a well designed TUI is so much faster. It turns out that if you never change the UI and every menu item always has the same hotkey, navigating the software becomes muscle memory and your speed is only limited by how fast you can physically push the buttons.

The program had many menu options added and removed over the decades, but the crucial part is that the hotkeys and menu indexes never, ever changed. Once you learn that you can pop into a quick order menu with this specific sequence of five keys, you just automatically open the right menu the moment a customer walks up. No thought, just pure reflex.

UX absolutely peaked with TUIs several decades ago. No graphical interface I've ever seen comes even close to the raw utility and speed of these finely tuned TUIs. There is a very, very good reason that the oldest and wealthiest retail businesses still use this ancient software. It works, and it's staggeringly effective, and any conceivable replacement will only be worse. There simply is no effective way to improve it.

Edit: I will say that these systems take time and effort to learn. You have to commit these UI paths to memory, which isn't too hard, but in order to be maximally effective, you also have to memorize a lot of product metadata. But the key is that it really doesn't take longer than your ordinary training period to become minimally effective. After that, you just pick up the muscle memory as you go. It's pretty analogous to learning touch typing without trying. Your hands just learn where the keys are and after enough time your brain translates words into keystrokes without active thought.

It's a beautiful way to design maximally effective software. We've really lost something very important with the shift to GUI and the shunning of text mode.
by mschaef | 2025-11-05 15:54:45+00:00
That derives logically from the way Commodore implemented disks. If you bought a 1540 or 1541 (or any other Commodore drive) for a C-64 or VIC-20, it had an onboard 6502 to run the disk drive. The interaction between the computer and the disk drive was somewhat similar in concept to fetching a file from a network server.

This could be useful to save on costs in computer labs... my grade school used multiplexer boxes to share a single 1541 across four C-64's.