MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by fsckboy | 2025-11-03 07:46:07+00:00
>that they export the junk cheese to the US and keep the good stuff

people who produce and sell stuff follow profit maximization. Colombia sells its best coffee on the export market because there it will command the highest prices. The people who live in wine growing regions (agricultural) do not have the disposable income to afford expensive wines, so they are shipped to cities. Great croissants are sold locally because they don't last long being shipped. It's not more than profit maximization.
by a-saleh | 2025-11-03 07:46:21+00:00
I think I mostly liked those type-systems that lean towards dependent, but not go all the way.

Purescript might be favourite? Even by default you get more power than i.e. vanilla Haskell, with row-types. But then you can get type-level list, typelevel string, even typelevel regex! And you use these through type-classes in a kind of logic-programming way.
by BiteCode_dev | 2025-11-03 07:46:31+00:00
I throw a 200+ persons party every year at halloween, and I concur with every points on this list.

I'll add: if you need money but don't want to ask for it upfront, you will need to have someone to ask for it individually to each person mid party.

Just having a box to collect it somewhere, or a sign with a qr code, doesn't work nearly as well.

It's annoying to do, but if your party is good people react surprisingly well to this.
by ralferoo | 2025-11-03 07:46:35+00:00
It does seem to be the inevitable consequence, but often privatisation is required too.

Publicly run services and utilities often suffer from inefficiencies because there's no incentive to change the processes and lots of government funded agencies suffer from the "we must spend our entire budget or we'll get less next year" syndrome.

Privatisation replaces the leadership with people who are incentivised to make the organisation as efficient as possible, but the actual quality of the services delivered matters if people are stuck with a now privatised monopoly and they have no choice of provider (or e.g. energy companies where the choice doesn't really make a meaningful difference anyway).

Probably the sensible middle ground is for the government to maintain a sizeable but minority share in everything that gets privatised, with a general policy of never exercising the voting rights unless it's against a course of action that is clearly detrimental to public interest. Probably even the threat of being able to vote out key personnel would be enough to keep them focussed on serving the public better. And with something like a 40% share, the shareholders have enough incentive to keep profitability high, and the government would also share in the profits of the previously public entity.
by mercer | 2025-11-03 07:46:37+00:00
wouldn't that still add a lot of value, where the person in the loop (sadly, usually) becomes little more than the verifier, but can process a lot more work?

Anecdotally what I'm hearing is that this is pretty much how LLMs are helping programmers get more done, including the work being less enjoyable because it involves more verification and rubber-stamping.

For the business owner, it doesn't matter that the nature of the work has changed, as long as that one person can get more work done. Even worse, the business owner probably doesn't care as much about the quality of the resulting work, as long as it works.

I'm reminded of how much of my work has involved implementing solutions that took less careful thought, where even when I outlined the drawbacks, the owner wanted it done the quick way. And if the problems arose, often quite a bit later, it was as if they hadn't made that initial decision in the first place.

For my personal tinkering, I've all but defaulted to the LLMs returning suggested actions at logical points in the workflow, leaving me to confirm or cancel whatever it came up with. this definitely still makes the process faster, just not as magically automatic.
by sebastiennight | 2025-11-03 07:46:52+00:00
I was looking for this comment.

Creating a group chat with everyone invited is a terrible idea because of the snowball effect of the first "Sorry, can't come, but have a good time for me!" message triggering a neverending stream of similar cancellations until sometimes the entire event ends up cancelled on the day of.

People are way less flaky if you invite them 1-on-1 (even if you copy/pasted the invitation message) vs. a group chat.
by taneq | 2025-11-03 07:47:09+00:00
I was trying to remember if it was "do cats eat bats" or "do rats eat bats." Turns out it was cats, and once again reality is stranger than fiction. :D

“And here Alice began to get rather sleepy, and went on saying to herself, in a dreamy sort of way, 'Do cats eat bats? Do cats eat bats?' and sometimes, 'Do bats eat cats?' for, you see, as she couldn't answer either question, it didn't much matter which way she put it.”

― Lewis Carroll Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland / Through the Looking-Glass
by komali2 | 2025-11-03 07:48:29+00:00
> 1. Do intro circles:

I'm an extrovert, and my assumption has always been, maybe introverts appreciate this kind of thing because otherwise they won't meet anyone?

But, I've never, in my life, met someone that enjoys this kind of thing, other than the person subjecting everyone to it. So, unless I'm way off base here, why has nobody learned that everyone hates these and that they're useless?
by sebastiennight | 2025-11-03 07:49:18+00:00
> We tend to calculate "people at percentages", ie: 2 adults, 2 kids, 50% chance of showing up rates as an attendance-load of 1.5 virtual people (for food calculations). > > Then sometimes you need the "max + min souls" (seats, plates), and account for what we call "the S-factor" if someone brings an unexpected guest, roommate, etc.

I made myself a "food and drinks amount" calculator for weekends/week-long party events a few years back and it was eerily accurate once you take in unexpected plus ones, flake rates, hangovers and other computable-at-scale events into the formula!
by objectcode | 2025-11-03 07:49:27+00:00
The phone selects a RAT (radio access technology) and frequency for each SIM slot.

After selecting, each SIM slot is subject to inter freq / inter RAT reselection / handover.

Both are controlled by messages received from the tower (e.g. on 4GLTE, for reselection, System Information messages), though there is an additional constraint: what's supported by/enabled in the phone.

Perhaps one SIM slot was in the connected state and the other was in the idle state at one point. So the reselection logic applied for one and the handover logic applied for the other. There is for example a problem called ping pong handover. Once a phone is switched to a different frequency or RAT, the tower may have the phone be sort of stuck in the new frequency, until the conditions of the previous RAT or frequency improve substantially, in order to prevent the phone being like a ping pong ball between the two. This frees resources that would otherwise be spent on repeated handover-related messages.

Each frequency has its own signal strength (free space path loss, transmit power, one frequency might be on one tower and another might be on another, etc).
by stevan | 2025-11-03 07:50:54+00:00
> Proof by reflection is accomplished by running some arbitrary program during proof checking that has been proven to only return a "true" result if the goal is true. You can do the exact same thing in an LCF system, and in fact that's arguably what a complex LCF "tactic" amounts to in the first place.

I think the difference is that in a type theory you can prove the soundness of the decision procedure to be correct within the system?

From "Metatheory and Reflection in Theorem Proving: A Survey and Critique" by John Harrison, 1995:

> "No work on reflection has actually been done in HOL, but Slind (1992) has made some interesting proposals. His approach is distinguished from those considered previously in two important respects. First, he focuses on proving properties of programs written in Standard ML using the formal semantics to be found in Milner, Tofte, and Harper (1990). This contrasts with the other approaches we have examined, where the final jump from an abstract function inside the logic to a concrete implementation in a serious programming language which appears to correspond to it is a glaring leap of faith. [...]"

Proving that your LCF-like tactics are sounds using the (informal) semantics of the tactic language (ML) seems cumbersome.

Furthermore I believe proof by reflection crucially relies on computation happening at the logical level in order to minimise proof checking. Harrison concludes:

> "Nevertheless it is not clear that reflection’s practical utility has yet been convincingly demonstrated."

This was from 1995, so fair enough, but Paulson should be aware of Gonthier's work, which makes me wonder if anything changed since then?
by clort | 2025-11-03 07:50:59+00:00
So, its a long game - make it generally irritating for people to use other services. Every time they introduce a feature, make it opaque and difficult to implement. Other services, other MUA's have a hard time keeping up. The users get frustrated that things dont work: "I don't get these stupid emails in Outlook" "LibreOffice doesn't display my document the same" "Firefox doesn't show the page properly" => "Can we just use Outlook/Word/Edge"
by lynx97 | 2025-11-03 07:51:35+00:00
I am blind. So no eye contact with drivers. And I am still alive, despite usually going alone as pedestrian. However, I guess I benefit a lot from the austrian "Vertrauensgrundsatz", which basically translates as "principle of trust". When acquiring a drivers license, you are drilled to take extra care of disabled or obviously incapacitated pedestrians. That basically means, if you hit a blind person, or even an obviously drunk person, you are at fault, no matter what.
by komali2 | 2025-11-03 07:51:38+00:00
One time I swiped a shitload of girls on Tinder and just invited a bunch of them to a party I was throwing where I had the same issue. I told them what I was doing and said bring whoever.

In 15 years of throwing banger parties it was by far and away the most absurdly over the top, yet somehow also the most wholesome, party I've ever thrown. Actually I'm not sure why I haven't done it again now that I think about it. And the ratio of girls to boys + enbies was like, 5:1, absolutely ridiculous.

Anyway you could try it?

Another time I threw a party on Meetup.com and had a bunch of old people show up, who ended up getting turnt the fuck up. I made a lot of good software industries connections that night and it was early in my career so that was very useful as well.
Ask HN: How long until solid decentralized alternative to Instagram?
by zanellia | 2025-11-03 07:51:49+00:00
I feel like the world very much needs a decentralized, censorship-free alternative to Instagram. I know about Pixelfed, but it doesn't seem to have gained much traction. Bluesky-based Flashes still doesn't have an Android version. Any thoughts on main blockers and near-to-medium future developments on this matter?
by gsf_emergency_4 | 2025-11-03 07:53:18+00:00
Papers:

https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5fc1dbf8116eb00e3c52b...

https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5fc1dbf8116eb00e3c52b...

https://morphingmatter.org/member/lea-albaugh

Shorter video: https://dl.acm.org/doi/suppl/10.1145/3357236.3395538/suppl_f...

Weaving and matmul https://youtu.be/oMOSiag3dxg

Inspired: https://sminliwu.github.io/projects/LoomPedals/

Related: (AdaCAD)

https://dl.acm.org/doi/fullHtml/10.1145/3544548.3581571
by pjmlp | 2025-11-03 07:54:09+00:00
Most of us coding at the time only cared about Turbo Vision, starting with Turbo Pascal 6. and Turbo C++ 3.0.

Or the other variant being TUI libraries for Clipper.

By 1994, most folks on PC were already doing Windows 3.x, and only using MS-DOS for games.

I only got to learn about curses years later.
by graemefawcett | 2025-11-03 07:54:44+00:00
If you're claiming those to be the success ratios you're having with AI assisted engineering, perhaps the phrase context in, tokens out might help. The relationship is symmetrical I have found.

In general, the more constraints you apply on the solution space via context, the more likely the correct solution is to stabilize.

It also helps to engineer the solution in such a way that the correct solution is also the easiest and this the most likely.

It takes time, but like most skills can be learned.
by dataflow | 2025-11-03 07:54:51+00:00
>>> Nobody rational would kill another person for no reason, but a soldier will bomb a village for the sake of their nation’s geostrategic position.

>> There are plenty of e.g. countries that don't bomb others, especially not for "no reason". (!)

> Show me a country that doesn’t bother other countries — ever

Do you by any chance happen to feel like you may have moved the goalposts by at least a tiny inch?
by Someone | 2025-11-03 07:54:58+00:00
And you can only hop on/hop off a cable car at predetermined locations. To keep average speed high, those tend to be spaced relatively far apart.

I’m not sure about the “takes a lot more space”, and I definitely doubt about the “costs a lot more money”. Using outdoor escalators as proxies, I suspect outdoor moving sidewalks will need lots and lots of maintenance. If you want to have some guarantee of service you’ll also need multiple sidewalks side-by-side.
by watwut | 2025-11-03 07:55:11+00:00
Spaced repetition works, but I can get that by seeing the same words repeatedly in in books or shows. I do not need precise calculated intervals over which exact word will appear when.

I found flashcards super ineffective for making myself to actually learn. And at times contra productive and brain numbing. I now see them as part of the same weird cultural instinct people today have - feeling like everything needs to be made as dry and uninteresting as possible, else it is not sufficient test or will (or something).
by almaight | 2025-11-03 07:55:18+00:00
Video games have long served as a crucial proving ground for artificial intelligence. Like the real world, they offer rich, dynamic environments with responsive, real-time settings and complex challenges that push the boundaries of AI capabilities. The history of AI in gaming is marked by landmark achievements, from mastering classic board games to achieving superhuman performance in complex strategy titles. However, the next frontier lies beyond mastering individual, known environments.

To meet this challenge, we introduce Game-TARS: a next-generation generalist game agent designed to master complex video games and interactive digital environments using human-like perception, reasoning, and action. Unlike traditional game bots or modular AI frameworks, Game-TARS integrates all core faculties—visual perception, strategic reasoning, action grounding, and long-term memory—within a single, powerful vision-language model (VLM). This unified approach enables true end-to-end autonomous gameplay, allowing the agent to learn and succeed in any game without game-specific code, scripted behaviors, or manual rules.

With Game-TARS, this work is not about achieving the highest possible score in a single game. Instead, our focus is on building a robust foundation model for both generalist game-playing and broader computer use. We aim to create an agent that can learn to operate in any interactive digital environment it encounters, following instructions just like a human.
by NoMoreNicksLeft | 2025-11-03 07:55:42+00:00
> If a government decides it wants a particular type of worker

This is because, in your head, people exist to serve their governments, and if governments didn't need people at all then there should be no people.

In mine, governments exist to serve the people, and if the people don't need a government, then there should be no government.

I don't give a shit what the government wants. It's about what I want, and other people like me want. And we don't want what's under discussion.
by PetitPrince | 2025-11-03 07:55:46+00:00
Different countries have different tastes (Coca Cola has a different syrup mixture for each countries for instance). There's a YouTube video from a franco-japanese guy who interview a Japanese cheese maker. He was trained by a Swiss person (but in the US, of all places) and softly complained that Japanese palate favored more bland cheese compared to what he experienced.

So it makes sense for a Swiss cheese maker to export a more marketable cheese, which are generally less strong and younger than the local one. Just like there's an export Guinness or Kilkenny that different from one you'd get in Ireland.

Of note: cheese label are strongly protected in Europe; you cannot legally sell an AOP labelled cheese without adhering to strict guideline about the raw material (including geographic provenance) and processing.
by kasabali | 2025-11-03 07:56:17+00:00
So you tell us Freedesktop.org people

1. Claiming XFree86 evil

2. Forking it as X.org

3. Shortly after all distros finished switching to X.org, declaring it obsolete and announcing wayland

4. stopping any major development on X.org immediately even though it's was the one and only option at the time

5. and channeling all development resources (not only on the display server, but also downstream users like toolkits, DEs etc.) to rewrite their code for a protocol that wasn't even gonna be usable until a 10+ years later

6. Depraving Linux desktop users from 10-15 years of improvements and making Linux graphis stack stuck in 2000s

wasn't hijacking the Linux graphic stack?

I mean had Steve Balmer wanted to sabotage Linux in desktop he couldn't do better
by mschuster91 | 2025-11-03 07:57:07+00:00
The usual dementia jokes aside... of all the things surrounding this administration, this is amongst the most harmless.

It may be a "presidential" power to pardon on paper, but the reality is that unless the President (or in other countries with powers of clemency to the head of state, whoever wields that power) intervenes personally for whatever reason, petitions for clemency pass through layers of bureaucracy, reviews and meetings. And sometimes, that also includes that candidates get inserted into the process by influential aides - something that has been the case for a lot of Presidents on either side of the aisle.

Of course, the issue gets a bit more spicy given Trump's derogatory nickname of "Autopen" Biden, but leaving that aside it's no surprise to me that a US President isn't involved in dealing with clemency petitions all that much.
by spookie | 2025-11-03 07:57:51+00:00
> This maybe didn't exist at the time of writing of this blog post. But this is not super difficult now a days- though it does take some time. You can use services like connectedpapers.com which will build out graphs of references and will at a glance tell you which papers are sited more. You can find the more reliable stuff .. ie the "node papers".

True, but the aim isn't really in finding which ones are cited the most, although it does help you in the ordeal. In a sense those tools help having a macro understanding, but are very prone to an initial seed bias. It is difficult to get out of a closed sub-section of the field. This is especially the case in technical papers, which often fail to address surrounding issues. These issues might still be technical, just not within the grasp of that particular sub-group of authors.

In the end, like you said, it is very time consuming. You do need to go through each one individually and build an understanding and intuition for what to look for, and how to get out of those "cycles" for a deeper understanding. And you really are better off reading them yourself.

> The review paper is the traditional way. It's usually okay.. but very biased towards the author's background. > > If it's very "fresh of the press" stuff then you judge it based on the journal's reputation and hope the reviews did their jobs. You will have more garbage to wade through. To me recent is generally bad...

Some guidelines like PRISMA, or the various assessments of self-bias are generally good indicators the author cared. Having sections like these will help you getting the aforementioned intuition for what else to look through, given you have a recognition from the source itself of their bias (your own assessment may be biased, so some ground truth is good). Plus really thorough description of their methods for gathering the information (databases, queries, and themes they spent time on).

Agreed recent is generally bad, you need to allow some time for things to have a chance to get looked at.
by mrighele | 2025-11-03 07:58:29+00:00
My guess is that the pasta mentioned above is spaghetti "aglio olio e peperoncino" (garlic, olive oil, red pepper), so not just olive oil.

Could be the recipe with the highest ratio taste/effort you can find, something that even a drunk student can pull off a 4 in the morning, so they probably just continued their tradition from the university years
by t1E9mE7JTRjf | 2025-11-03 07:58:34+00:00
Sounds like the opposite no? Since we are going through population collapse in a time of abundance. Does make me wonder what the political dynamics were at the time, whether some could see problems but weren't in power to change things. Or maybe they couldn't understand or figure out solutions to the problems. What I'd give to be a multilingual fly on the wall throughout history.
by Sam6late | 2025-11-03 07:59:05+00:00
I drowned once in a swimming pool, the clear water tricked me that it was not that deep, 3 meters, then I was 7 and in my memory flashback, I was scared that I ran away from school, it warned me that I would be punished soon for it, it was my final thought until I regained consciousness after getting rescued by Badr the lifeguard there, and the nightmare of fear of punishment returned. It was a very hot summer day in 1968.That flashback was annoying the way it summarized everything in seconds.
by altairprime | 2025-11-03 07:59:50+00:00
Jobs excelled at saying no to people’s current needs in favor of positioning his business to master their next needs, in order to profit greatly from satisfying his customer’s future desires.

GM is sacrificing people’s needs in order to harvest their data for profit, with no apparent improvements on the table for buyers or users of GM vehicles in exchange for their gains.

GM is lying.

They simply can’t sustain growth in revenue growth to prop up their stock price without New And Innovative Revenue Sources. None of this is for their customers; it’s to reallocate a share of Google’s data revenue, and to begin generating revenue from privacy-shielded iPhone users, for themselves. Makes sense that their ex-Apple tech leader fired himself out of a cannon over their selfishness. They probably wrote the Jobs analogy to exploit his Apple connection in the eyes of the public and I bet that was the last straw.
by graemefawcett | 2025-11-03 08:00:05+00:00
I think it's still fair to call yourself an engineer while you're using a tool that might still be new. It doesn't change the principles of engineering just because you have a slightly different tool in your tool belt

You're right that we're still learning how to use them properly. If someone's purely sitting in front of an all-you-can-eat vibe coding machine and trying to one-shot themselves into a fortune with their next startup, then absolutely, they don't deserve to call themselves an engineer.

But just using AI as an assistive technology does not take away from your abilities as an engineer. Used properly, it can be a significant force multiplier