MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by hilbert42 | 2025-11-24 03:49:36+00:00
So far, I've only had a brief look at this book and what I've seen I like very much.

Many of us—especially those of us who aren't mathematically gifted—learn mathematics in ways that mostly involve procedures, rules and mechanical manipulation rather than through a rigorous step-by-step theoretical framework (well, anyway that's how I leaned the subject).

Somehow I absorbed those foundations more by osmosis than though a full understanding as my early teachers were more concerned with bashing the basics into my head. Sure, later on when confronted with advanced topics I was forced into more rigorous thinking but it wasn't uniform across the whole field.

What I really like about this book is that it confronts people like me who've already learned mathematics to a reasonably advanced level to review those fundamental concepts. The subject of 'What is Calculus?' doesn't start until Chapter 6, p223, and 'Differentiation' at Ch 8, p261. Those first 200 or so pages not only provide a comprehensive and clearly explained overview of those basic fundamentals but they ensure the reader has good understanding of them before the main subject is introduced.

I'd highly recommend this book either as a refresher or as an adjunct to one's current learning.
by gsf_emergency_6 | 2025-11-24 03:50:07+00:00
Minor typo. Paper:

>17.5% of the measured value for Terbium-Gallium-Garnet (TGG) at 800 nm [NIR], and up to 75% at 1.3 µm.

Note there's almost no effect on transmission, which may explain why nobody noticed until now..

transmission plot (UV-IR)

https://www.samaterials.com/terbium-gallium-garnet-crystal.h...

What it looks like IRL

https://www.photonchinaa.com/tgg-terbium-gallium-garnet/

Relevant? Intrinsic Gilbert damping (2009) https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/51819
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-11-24 03:50:22+00:00
> They could just go after Medicare fraud (committed largely by extremely wealthy corporations in extremely detectable ways), get an easy $100B or so under their belt

My impression of the 2025 feud between Musk and Trump is that Musk actually wanted to do stuff like that and Trump wouldn't do it.

And they should do it, but this year's deficit is ~$1.8T despite federal receipts pushing the record high in real dollars per capita (as usual) and consistent with historical norms as a percent of GDP.

So what about the other $1.7T?

> We have a process for this. It's called appropriations. It happens in Congress.

We also have some strong empirical evidence that the outcome of that process is huge deficits, so something has to change if it's not to stay the same.
by pyuser583 | 2025-11-24 03:52:00+00:00
I suspect it’s not just a context limit.

I suspect, but can’t prove, that model trainers deliberately steer models away from creating tests and worksheets.

The reason being that when a human asks a written question: “who president of the US in 1962?” it’s very likely to be a part of a worksheet.

Novels don’t contain many questions like that, nor do non fiction. They’re mostly paragraphs. Most text is mostly paragraphs.

Naked question usually means worksheet. AIs know this, so their if you ask it a question like: “who president in 1962?” It responds which the most likely next sentence, a related question: “How was the Cuban Missile resolved?”

So there’s a huge discrepancy between the next most likely sentence based on training, and what a user likely wants. If I ask, “Who was president in 1962?” I don’t want another question, nor does anyone else.

But that’s what the training data provides.

So model trainers have to bias it away from worksheets. This isn’t hard to do, and is a normal part of model training.

I’ve personally seen this behavior in poorly parameterized or trained models. They love answering questions by assuming they are in worksheets. It’s a huge pain.

Interestingly it never happens with top-line models like ChatGPT.

Carefully hyperparameterizatiin helps, but I think you’ll have to adjust the weights too. But that likely makes it harder to make actual worksheets.

This is just a guess. But I suspect models are weighted to discount pedagogical materials because of how different they are from what the users often expect.
by gsf_emergency_6 | 2025-11-24 03:52:16+00:00
Seems to be a minor typo . Paper:

>17.5% of the measured value for Terbium-Gallium-Garnet (TGG) at 800 nm, and up to 75% at 1.3 µm.

Here's what the crystal looks like

https://www.photonchinaa.com/tgg-terbium-gallium-garnet/

Here's transmission plot (UV-IR)

https://www.samaterials.com/terbium-gallium-garnet-crystal.h...

Note there's almost no effect on transmission

Relevant? https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/51819
by shoo | 2025-11-24 03:52:33+00:00
the census bureau annual poverty report includes both poverty measures: https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2024/demo/p60-28...

(the most recent poverty report isn't currently downloadable due to the recent government shutdown)

Your question about why the official poverty measure is still used at all is a good one. I'd speculate that if the official poverty measure is tangled up with legislation, it may not be simple for government bureaus to update the measure and eliminate usage of the old measure without someone passing some new laws. If the poverty measure partly defines who does or doesn't receive certain benefits then changing it could be fairly political. If the supplemental poverty measure indicates that e.g. 12% not 10% of families fall below the poverty line, then that implies 20% more funding is necessary for some benefits.
by gyomu | 2025-11-24 03:52:40+00:00
I don’t. I worked on firmware stuff where unexplainable behavior occurs; digging around the code, you start to feel like it’s going to take some serious work to even start to comprehend the root cause; and suddenly you find the one line of code that sets the wrong byte somewhere as a side effect, and what you thought would fill up your week ended up taking 2 hours.

And sometimes, the exact opposite happens.
by plutonium3345 | 2025-11-24 03:53:28+00:00
Yeah, I think as agents become more capable, more isolation will be necessary. Hence, I also agree that either containers or VMs will eventually be required. We can see how tools like Cursor already have a built-in browser so that the agent can "see" (probably as text for now) what component you want to modify. In the future, I believe the workflow for an agent will be something like: [make changes] -> [get user input] -> [take a screenshot] -> [process the screenshot and user input] -> [make changes].

I doubt something like this can be implemented easily in a single environment without running into client and server port issues, etc.
by ac29 | 2025-11-24 03:54:56+00:00
Dept of Labor [0] says childcare has a median cost of $6,552 to $15,600 (least expensive county to most expensive county). The article appears to be basing their childcare assumptions on the most expensive county (where household incomes are also high), and assuming all families of 4 have two children in childcare.

Yes, childcare is problematically expensive. But one of the core numbers in the article appears to be misleading at best.

[0] https://www.dol.gov/newsroom/releases/wb/wb20241119
by gabinator | 2025-11-24 03:55:19+00:00
I visited NYC and San Francisco. It's appalling and unacceptable in this day and age.

My small northern Minnesota town is far from perfect, but we don't let our neighbors and kids become fent zombies on the main drag. That's not a lifestyle that we want to enable or perpetuate. I do not understand the mental hurdles that Berkley-educated 'scholars' jump through to rationalize letting people suffer the most potent and deadly forms of addiction. The penal system is the last net to catch these people before they die from OD or blood-borne pathogenc or the consequences of criminal activity. And the "empathetic" west coast intellectuals say "legalize the drugs". Absolute lunacy
by kelnos | 2025-11-24 03:55:26+00:00
Ah that's so neat! I've noticed some of those details before, in how some of the segments of the display are shaped in various ways that lets them draw characters with smooth edges, in ways you wouldn't be able to do with a display where the segments' shapes are homogeneous.

As soon as I saw the first photo, though, I was a little sad to realize that it was of the old-style trains that are being phased out. The author notes this near the end, but I think that the trains are actually completely phased out as of a few weeks ago, maybe even before this article was posted.
by ChrisMarshallNY | 2025-11-24 03:55:26+00:00
Most of the work in finding/fixing bugs is reproducing them reliably enough to determine the root cause.

Once I find a bug, the fix is often negligible.

But I can get into a rabbithole, tracking down the root cause. I don’t know if I’ve ever spent more than a day, trying to pin down a bug, but I have walked away from rabbitholes, a couple of times. I hate doing that. Leaves an unscratchable itch.
by QQ00 | 2025-11-24 03:55:38+00:00
What sorts of limitations you have with Obsidian? for diagrams I use Mermaid and it's work flawlessly within Obsidian. For anything fancy, advanced and customized, I use Obsidian Canvas, it's a new feature they released recently. So far, I don't need anything outside Obsidian to do any kind of note taking/writing.
by sfink | 2025-11-24 03:55:44+00:00
Disagree. Software development requires a lot of expert knowledge that executives won't and can't possess. If you're not employing that expert knowledge to benefit the company you're a part of, why are you even in the field?

Personally, I find a lot of appeal in having the expertise and influence to be more than a small cog, even when working as a generic staff engineer at the leaf level of my organization. I don't think there are many professions where that is possible, or at least nowhere where that degree of influence is near as feasible (apocryphal stories about janitors coming up with the next breakthrough product notwithstanding).
by bccdee | 2025-11-24 03:56:08+00:00
I think you can have the discussion, but you also have to be careful about how you have it. Markdown is a family of languages; if you want to evaluate markdown against something like asciidoc for a particular use case, you have to pick the members of the markdown family which are best-suited for that use case and evaluate those flavours individually.

Take the comparison between markdown and asciidoc. You can't say, "asciidoc has semantic structure and markdown doesn't," because pandoc markdown does have semantic structure. If you need semantics, you can use pandoc markdown, which is a very fully-featured language that suffers from none of the issues the author points out. Yes, other flavours of markdown exist too, but so what? This one has great tooling and suits your needs.

Of course, you can't use pandoc in (e.g.) Reddit comments. But you also don't really need semantic markup in Reddit comments. It's a different flavour of markdown in a different application that is solving a different problem. Or consider MDX: Yes, `Command` is a react component, but maybe it needs to be a react component. Maybe it has a "run this command" button, or it generates an interactive graph of some sort. If you mark that up in asciidoc, you need a whole separate system to attach your components to your markup. That's just using the wrong tool for the job.
by paladin314159 | 2025-11-24 03:56:15+00:00
I've been doing this a fair amount recently, and way I manage it is: first, give the LLM the PDF and ask it to summarize + provide high-level reading points. Then read the paper with that context to verify details, and while doing so, ask the LLM follow-up questions (very helpful for topics I'm less familiar with). Typically, everything is either directly in the original paper or verifiable on the internet, so if something feels off then I'll dig into it. Through the course of ~20 papers, I've run into one or two erroneous statements made by the LLM.

To your point, it would be easy to accidentally accept things as true (especially the more subjective "why" things), but the hit rate is good enough that I'm still getting tons of value through this approach. With respect to mistakes, it's honestly not that different from learning something wrong from a friend or a teacher, which, frankly, happens all the time. So it pretty much comes down to the individual person's skepticism and desire for deep understanding, which usually will reveal such falsehoods.
by PaulKeeble | 2025-11-24 03:56:32+00:00
Sometimes you find the cause of the bug in 5 minutes because its precisely where you thought it was, sometimes its not there and you end up writing some extra logging to hopefully expose its cause in production after the next release because you can't reproduce as its transient. I don't know how to predict how long a bug will take to reproduce and track down and only once its understood do we know how long it takes to fix.
by IAmNotACellist | 2025-11-24 03:56:43+00:00
>vs code is slow as a text editor due to chrome

VSCode is an IDE https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_Studio_Code

>Visual Studio is the one to compare to "any other heavy IDE"

Why? VSCode is an example of a well-made product from MSFT, unlike Explorer.

>and there are plenty of code editors with plugins that start much faster,

What IDE with plugins starts faster? And I'm not talking about the startup time of VSCode.
by Capricorn2481 | 2025-11-24 03:56:48+00:00
> Things having unsafe {...} does not make them unreliable. On the contrary, if you run into a memory issue in a rust program, you know where to look for it

This isn't true, no matter how much people keep saying it. Unsafe does not scope bugs to the block, or even where you have to look for bugs. Just having unsafe in your codebase means changing code outside the unsafe block could cause UB.

Doesn't mean I think it's worth complaining about, there's really no better way for Rust to do this without sandboxing memory.
by anon291 | 2025-11-24 03:56:51+00:00
Nah the consequences are more riders. That's a great consequence.

> no drugs on the train

Nonsense. I'd rather have people carry their illegal drugs on the train and take them at home. The issue is people experiencing the effects of the drug on the train and often times making it unsafe for women, children, and men too (it doesn't really matter what your sex is when the drugged out man vomits on you). I honestly don't care if you carry your illegal drugs everywhere, as long as you make sure the effects of said drugs are dealt with privately. I have major issues with people making the consequences of their drug use other people's problem
by SilentM68 | 2025-11-24 03:56:59+00:00
I actually suffer from Autoimmune issues, i.e. Rheumatoid Arthritis. Which I could have known about that Trial, few years back though given my luck, I'd probably not be accepted into the Trial. Still, it's good to know that there might be some hope in the horizon. My Rheumatologist says there is no real cure in the meantime, so taking pills is the only solution, unfortunately.
by bval | 2025-11-24 03:57:05+00:00
Hi HN,

I work as a Cloud Architect in a consulting firm. I spend my days optimising enterprise cloud environments, yet ironically, I struggle to manage costs for my own side projects and lab accounts. I am looking for feedback on a "painkiller" SaaS idea called Billping.

The Problem I find myself logging into the AWS Console every morning just to check if my bill is trending normally. It’s "Console Fatigue."

I know AWS has native tools, but they have gaps for indie hackers and small businesses:

1. AWS Budgets are reactive: They usually alert you only after you cross a threshold (e.g., "You spent > $50"). 2. Lack of Velocity: Native alerts rarely say, "Your spend is low, but your daily growth rate just doubled." 3. Enterprise Complexity: Tools like Apptio or CloudHealth are overkill and too expensive for a $100/mo account.

The Solution I want to build a simple wrapper around the cloud API's that focuses on peace of mind.

- No complex dashboards. - Daily/Weekly digests sent to email (or Slack).

The Validation I threw together a landing page to explain the concept better and see if others share this pain: https://www.billping.com

My Question to You: Is this a real problem for you, or do you just rely on the Free Tier alerts? Would you pay a small monthly fee to never have to check the Billing Console again?

Thanks for the feedback.
by rmunn | 2025-11-24 03:57:40+00:00
Strongly smells of LLM-generated content with all those bulleted and numbered lists, and so on. I'm not one to automatically find the use of em-dashes to be an LLM "smell" — I use them all the time myself — but there are five of them in the post, adding to my suspicions.

And then looking at the rest of the site's articles seems to confirm it: the "OOP in Java vs FP in Clojure" article (linked at the bottom of the site) is just classic AI-generated "here are the parallels between these two topics" boilerplate.

B-trees are indeed cool, but I would prefer to read about them from someone who has actually written about them rather than farmed off the writing to a bot.
by dirtybirdnj | 2025-11-24 03:57:59+00:00
I agree with the hamburglar (lol) you did awesome work and you owe the internet nothing. the 3d printing community is rife with "stl please" expectations that everyone wants to share everything and it should all be free. Give it away if you can, but I think its important to have some value to the creative work like this that is done.

> I've shared it for free with every single person who has emailed me.

Excited and waiting :) I think it's going to make really cool pen plotter art
by wredcoll | 2025-11-24 03:58:51+00:00
The point of course is that it's not about whether or not guilty people escape.

It's about making people's lives better. Improving the world. Increasing the net total happiness. That sort of thing.

If you actually apply logic and empiricism with that as your goal you quickly realize that punishing guilty people is frankly orthogonal.

This is definitely something I have found to be a major divider among people, in the very literal "there are two types of people" sense.

Very frequently having some system of punishments and then applying those punishments has some useful effect towards the ultimate goal of better lives for everyone. But, as should hopefully be obvious, the point is the better life goal, not the punishment part.

People get very obsessed with the idea of people "getting what they deserve" and so rarely seem to consider any goal beyond satiating the desire for suffering.

Everyone loves the classic "moral dilemma" of torturing one child to provide for millions and similar, but perhaps instead what we should be asking is "would you let an awful evil pedophile go free if it meant a better life for hundreds of other children"? That seems like a fun way to get people's heads to explode.
by chmod775 | 2025-11-24 03:59:01+00:00
> How can he monitor what's going on between a startup's backend and OpenAI's server?

He is not claiming to be doing that. He says what and how he's capturing multiple times. He says he's capturing what's happening in browser sessions. Reflect on what else you may to re-evaluate or discard if you misunderstood this.

> That's just not how this works. You can see the network traffic between your browser and some service.

Yes, the author is well aware of that as are presumably most readers. However for example if your client makes POST requests to the startup's backend like startup.com/api/make-request-to-chatgpt and the payload is {systemPrompt: "...", userPrompt: "..."}, not much guessing as to what is going on is necessary.

> You are not bothered by the only sign that the author even exist is this one article and the previous one?

Moving goalposts. He may or not be full of shit. Guess we'll see if/when we see the receipts he promised to put on GitHub.

What actually bothers is the lack of general reading comprehension being displayed in this thread.

> Together with the claim to be a startup founder? Anybody can claim that.

What? Anybody can be a startup founder today. Crazy claim. Also... what?

> It doesn't automatically provide credibility.

Almost nobody in this space has credibility. That could turn out to be Sam Altman's alias and I'd probably trust it even less.

In any case evaluating whether or not a text is credible should preferably happen after one has understood what was written.
by phantasmish | 2025-11-24 03:59:09+00:00
I’m done with treating willful morons nicely. The last year has turned me from a Vonnegut to a Twain, if you will. A good chunk of My Fellow Americans are just awful, and after 25ish years of serious political awareness & attention and watching what’s happened over that time my benefit-of-the-doubt tanks are dry, having been siphoned at high rates continuously that entire time. Probably I was myself stupid ever to have thought better of these dangerous dipshits. It’s not like I wasn’t pretty familiar with history, but somehow, it took watching people be extremely dumb and never learn over a long period to break through what I suppose was some kind of savior-complex ego thing that made me want to be the kind of person who believed people were mostly pretty good. How embarrassing.

They’re dense motherfuckers, and that’s the generous take. They’re a black hole of stupid. That’s the level of density we’re dealing with. And that’s just the America I’ll be living with until I die. One that’s been trashed so thoroughly by the idiot brigade that hope for actual improvement is gone for, best case, several more decades, which will amount to the rest of my life.

They’ve wrecked shit out beyond the horizon of my plausible lifespan, in all likelihood. They’ve been continuously working toward doing this my whole life. No, I’m absolutely not being too harsh.
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-11-24 03:59:24+00:00
There seems to be some indication that they hired some incompetent people and/or were prohibited from cutting some of the things that ought to be cut. And I don't think there is any question that the deadline they set for themselves was unrealistically aggressive.

Which means we need someone to go back and do it properly, not that it doesn't need to be done.
by ggm | 2025-11-24 03:59:43+00:00
Several people either in this circuit or close by made submissions to this effect to ICANN recently.

It's very hard to get traction on this story because there is a lot of "don't prod the bear" regarding things ICANN can and should ask Department of State about, and things which really have moved into "self managed, independent international body" space. The reason there are two HSM east and west coast was because of this kind of national-strategic sensitivity. It would be a low bar (only money) decision to duplicate the investment in Singapore and Geneva, two locations which ICANN has existing investment in, with good secure facilities and accepted by the wider public as "neutral" points.

When the KSK ceremonies started up, several people also pointed out that this "diverse locations" thing was a bit hokey. The response above is my re-write of the kinds of things said to me, at the time. If somebody wants to deny State or any other US federal agency influenced the decision I have no formal proof.

I should add as a declaration of interest I was at Rob's goodbye KSK event, I am a TCR, and I made such a submission this year. I have not received any indication it was understood or read, despite asking for some acknowledgement, but the process wheels in an agency like ICANN run to their own time.
by pixelready | 2025-11-24 04:00:03+00:00
Kilo’s been on my list of tools to try anyway. Good to hear you’ve got a strategy for useful autocomplete. Any idea how it compares with Supermaven both in terms of speed and quality? Supermaven really had found a sweet spot for both. I found LLM autocomplete was generally more annoying than it was worth prior to Supermaven.