MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by 0x264 | 2025-11-02 09:55:59+00:00
The secretary problem is a bad way to formalise the problem of dating and the stopping rule doesn't work in that context, for a very simple reason.

The secretary problem is a solution to the problem of having to make repeated choices. In essence it's a solution to the problem of having to choose a secretary every morning for the day. You can even say it's a solution to the problem of a computer process spending a few seconds consuming an infinite stream at the top of every hour for the next hour. It's not a solution to the problem of making a (hopefully) unique choice.
by cyberax | 2025-11-02 09:56:01+00:00
OSM uses a hundred nanodegrees as the grid resolution ( https://github.com/openstreetmap/OSM-binary/blob/32c3e921665... ). It gives a bit more than 1cm precision.

> The point I'm trying to make is that there are more important sources of error before you get to tectonic movement and GPS drift...

You can absolutely measure tectonic drift on the OSM maps! They've existed long enough for it to be actually significant in a lot of places if you download the old data.

This also comes up all the time when trying to overlap data from local agencies onto the OSM maps. You end up with parcel boundaries visibly off.
by throw-qqqqq | 2025-11-02 09:56:52+00:00
No need to wait for that! The official name is not ChatControl, it is CSAR: Regulation to Prevent and Combat Child Sexual Abuse

Denmark has the EU Presidency and is currently pushing ChatControl hard (objecting HEAVILY to the moniker/nickname). They try to sell it as “for the children” and “to fight terrorism” here already…
by Razengan | 2025-11-02 09:57:13+00:00
> How would you imagine an AI system working that didn't make mistakes like that?

I mean, if the user says "Use the latest APIs as of version N" and the AI thinks version N isn't out yet, then it should CHECK on the web first, it's right there, before second guessing the user. I didn't ask it whether 26 was out or not. I told it.

Oh but I guess AIs aren't allowed to have free use of Google's web search or scrap other websites eh

> iOS 26 came out on September 15th.

It was in beta all year and the APIs were publicly available on Apple's docs website. If I told it to use version 26 APIs then it should just use those instead of gaslighting me.

> LLMs aren't omniscient or constantly updated with new knowledge.

So we shouldn't use them if we want to make apps with the latest tech? Despite what the AI companies want us to believe.

You know, on a more general note, I think all AIs should have a toggle between "Do as I say" (Monkey Paw) and "Do what I mean"
by nsoonhui | 2025-11-02 09:57:37+00:00
Not sure why you are being downvoted, but you are exactly right.

The October 7 massacre passed with barely any notice in much of the Western world. Yet the moment Israel responded to recover the hostages—if not earlier—there were already demonstrations everywhere against so-called Israeli “atrocities.” It appears the world only pays attention when Jews are involved.

An estimated 500,000 children have died from malnutrition alone since the Sudan conflict began in 2023[0]. Do you see people in Paris, Washington, or New York demanding an end to that conflict? We have not even accounted for deaths caused directly by the fighting.

Even with regard to the war in Gaza, Hamas’ use of human shields[1] has resulted in significant civilian casualties, yet all condemnation is directed at the IDF, which attempts to avoid civilian deaths, including by dropping leaflets before airstrikes[2]. No one seems to care that Hamas—the elected government of Gaza—is deliberately placing civilians in harm’s way in a war it initiated. Instead, the criticism overwhelmingly targets Israel for civilian deaths caused by Hamas’ human-shield strategy.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Famine_in_Sudan_(2024%E2%80%93...

[1]: https://stratcomcoe.org/cuploads/pfiles/hamas_human_shields....

[2]: https://edition.cnn.com/2023/11/16/middleeast/israel-leaflet...
by thomasmg | 2025-11-02 09:58:22+00:00
I agree. The main advantage of Fil-C is compatibility with C, in a secure way. The disadvantages are speed, and garbage collection. (Even thought, I read that garbage collection might not be needed in some cases; I would be very interested in knowing more details).

For new code, I would not use Fil-C. For kernel and low-level tools, other languages seem better. Right now, Rust is the only popular language in this space that doesn't have these disadvantages. But in my view, Rust also has issues, specially the borrow checker, and code verbosity. Maybe in the future there will be a language that resolves these issues as well (as a hobby, I'm trying to build such a language). But right now, Rust seems to be the best choice for the kernel (for code that needs to be fast and secure).
by oefrha | 2025-11-02 09:59:02+00:00
The question was whether Claude Code's better than GHC. "They may release a new version that bridges the gap any moment now" is a completely useless answer to that. And your argument is "people either have never tried it, or tried it a long time ago when it was something else", and I told you I'm comparing it right now, and have done the same a year ago, and many points in between, and GHC is inferior at every single point, and it's not slight. Cursor etc. wouldn’t have been this big if GHC was only slightly behind when it has such a huge early mover advantage and enormous backing.
by jdthedisciple | 2025-11-02 09:59:15+00:00
> It needs to check if that value is less than that for every other alternative to 'queen'.

There you go: Closest 3 words (by L2) to the output vector for the following models, out of the most common 2265 spoken English words among which is also "queen":

voyage-3-large: king (0.46), woman (0.47), young (0.52), ... queen (0.56) ollama-qwen3-embedding:4b: king (0.68), queen (0.71), woman (0.81) text-embedding-3-large: king (0.93), woman (1.08), queen (1.13)

All embeddings are normalized to unit length, therefore L2 dists are normalized.
by bytefish | 2025-11-02 09:59:21+00:00
If you are using SQL Server, then SQL Server Database Projects are an amazing tool to work with. I found them to generate high-quality migration scripts and it makes it easy to diff against an existing database.

ORMs are good up until the point you need to include SQL Views, Stored Procedures, Functions, User-defined Types… which is usually the point the ORM abstractions begin to crack (and every SQL Server database I use include them).

For PostgreSQL I usually hand-write the scripts, because it is easier, than fighting against an ORM.

I heard the Redgate tooling is also great to work with, but I’ve never used it personally.
by StopDisinfo910 | 2025-11-02 10:00:49+00:00
Can someone explain to me the concept being Helix? I never got it.

From a casual reading, it looks like vim with no text objects and no support for ed commands so basically vim stripped of two of the main things that makes it good.

I understand it wants to be a more rational successor but while I got how sam tried to achieve that by breaking the limit on line editing, making clever use of mouse selections and switching ed for a new non line limited syntax (how I wish ssam had replaced sed), I don’t get the Helix value proposition.
by atoav | 2025-11-02 10:00:55+00:00
Yes sure, but you got to engage with the arguments on the other side as well. The argument on the other side is that a rewrite is worth it because it prevents entire classes of memory leaks that are still to this day leading the exploitable CVE lists.

We could now pretend their position is: "Oh, we got this shiny new language that magically makes everything 100% safe and thus we need to rewrite everything." But that is not the position. Most of them are aware that a rewrite is always a trade-off. You could reintroduce old bugs etc.

As I said, I program languages on both sides on the divide and if I had to write and maintain secure software that my life depended on I would certainly prefer to write it in Rust. Memory safety would be just a tiny part of that. The other factors would be the strict type system (can be used to enforce certain guarantees that contributers cannot easily fuck up) and the tooling (the builtin testing is stellar).

The future of tooling is going to be written in the language people of the coming generations like to write. There was a time when C++ or even C was the new shiny thing. Why can't we just write all software in assembly like in the good old days? Because there were some actual tangible benefits to doing it in C and that's the language people with the ability of doing the job chose.

I am not saying a Rust rewrite makes sense in every case, but if you check the past decade of CVEs on a project and half of them would have been prevented by the vanilla Rust compiler maybe that's the rational thing?
by chii | 2025-11-02 10:01:31+00:00
> your car is non-deterministic

it's not as far as your experience goes - you press pedal, it accelerates. You turn the steering, it goes the way it turns. What the car does is deterministic.

More importantly, it does this every time, and the amount of turning (or accelerating) is the same today as it was yesterday.

If an LLM interpreted those inputs, can you say with confidence, that you will accelerate in a way that you predicted? If that is the case, then i would be fine with an LLM interpreted input to drive. Otherwise, how do you know, for sure, that pressing the brakes will stop the car, before you hit somebody in front of you?

of course, you could argue that the input is no longer your moving the brake pads etc - just name a destination and you get there, and that is suppose to be deterministic, as long as you describe your destination correctly. But is that where LLM is at today? or is that the imagined future of LLMs?
by socalgal2 | 2025-11-02 10:01:53+00:00
All I got from this is people need to get over being naked / seen naked.

In Japan it's common to get naked with strangers people of the same sex at a hot spring. IIUC in Finland it's common to get naked with strangers of all sexes at a sauna.

In the past, in the USA it was common to take communal same-sex showers in PE class in junior high school and high school.

But sometime in the past 40 years, that seems to have changed in the USA. I've met lots of 20 somethings and 30 somethings that can't handle a sauna or hot spring because they claim they've never been naked with anyone else. WTF!
by derriz | 2025-11-02 10:02:50+00:00
That’s not the way “latency” is commonly used in my experience.

Latency numbers always include queuing time - so the measures are not related or derivable from each other.

A process might have a throughput of 1 million jobs per second but if the average size of the queue is 10 million then your job latency is going to be 10 seconds on average and not 1 microsecond.
by defrost | 2025-11-02 10:03:02+00:00
As geodetic problems go, though, this is trivial small beer stuff compared to, say, stitching together magnetic maps measured on different days or gathered in flight in different flight directions, or normalising continental scale radiometric datasets gathered across decades.

Modern digital post WGS84 mapping is a breeze compared to the days of dealing with chains under tension and stitching together across differing ellipsoids and datums.
by ecce_homo | 2025-11-02 10:05:12+00:00
Slowly but steadily, I'm building not a rocket or AI science but a boring (and reliable) IP Geolocation Service: https://ip-sonar.com

It has a rich free tier, simple API, and a client dashboard that is easy to use. I do my best to build a service that I would love to use as a software engineer.
by contrarian1234 | 2025-11-02 10:07:22+00:00
More money pretty much always helps with growth though. The argument is that they're hiring as fast as can be done (to maintain culture/quality/interview-pace) and they have nothing else they can spend money on. It's not impossible.. but it's a bit hard to imagine there is no way at all to increase your workforce productivity. But maybe they're all working 12 hours a day, making huge salaries and eating caviar while getting massages during their breaks
by gambiting | 2025-11-02 10:09:30+00:00
I can charge any battery powered appliances like that at home. Propane is only sold per bottle, not every petrol station has them(in fact - majority don't), you have to rent the bottle each time, the thing is stupidly heavy and has various restrictions on storage(can't park a car with it in an underground garage for instance, my insurance does not allow me to keep it inside my garage etc). Battery powered is just so much easier unless you're using it commercially and go through a lot of gas I guess.
by aapoalas | 2025-11-02 10:09:34+00:00
I guess one possible avenue of thought is that when I opened the linked article, I had a few seconds to start reading before I got one full screen modal dialog, followed by another 1/5th height popup dialog on top of that to click away.

Not that most websites are any better. My favourites are basically the ones that just show a default "sorry but this content is blocked in your region" text.
by gf000 | 2025-11-02 10:10:13+00:00
I'm not saying the status quo is good, but it is nontheless the status quo. Just about every machine on the cloud, mobile devices, etc all have non-source binaries somewhere, and besides some niche projects that actually have an assembly half-C compiler bootstrapping another tiny C compiler bootstrapping a real C compiler, this is not feasible for the vast software ecosystem as of today.
by keiferski | 2025-11-02 10:10:26+00:00
I am no grammarian, but I feel like em-dashes are an easy way to tie together two different concepts without rewriting the entire sentence to flow more elegantly. (Not to say that em-dashes are inelegant, I like them a lot myself.)

And so AI models are prone to using them because they require less computation than rewriting a sentence.
by nkrisc | 2025-11-02 10:11:00+00:00
People can choose to not consume crap they don’t need. They won’t, but they can.

Advertising is now just worthless noise to me because I generally don’t buy stuff anymore but what I need.

I can’t imagine why anyone would buy most of the crap I see advertised, but they do. Halloween was a recent example: how many tons of plastic shit for costumes was shipped from China only to be thrown away the next day? How much candy was bought? Even when I was 12 I started to see what a disgusting consumerist affair the whole thing was and it lost its appeal. And yet we have adults participating.

The ad machine exists because people let it be successful.
by Culonavirus | 2025-11-02 10:12:44+00:00
Google actually doesn't give a single flying fuck about AI slop because they produce it themselves and believe AI slop will feed their quarters going forward.

They sometimes pretend to care but not really. You can already stuff Google Merchant full of ai-generated slop images that have little to do with how an actual product looks like and that's something they could easily control if they wanted... but do they? Nah, they're going the other way, creating shit like Product Studio and that's just the beginning.

Make no mistake, Google is going all in on slop - search, ads, youtube, merchant, workspace, cloud, everything
by physarum_salad | 2025-11-02 10:14:21+00:00
Love this idea. One use case is actually music synthesis as digital tools like supercollider are not that aurally satisfying while making analog circuits is tedious. Software controlled analog is a nice in-between. BTW I mean use case as in "this is cool, I would like to use it" not "bzillion users and a pile of money" ofc haha.
by dvh | 2025-11-02 10:15:32+00:00
This summer I've made indoor (no direct sunlight) solar powered kitchen timer and I used STM32L011, it's winter and it's still working and voltage is stable. The power consumption is 100-150uA (28uA for display, 80uA for mcu, the rest is 1.2-to-3V boost). But it's only on when I cook (maybe 1h a day).

https://imgur.com/a/ME1tx2c
by DarkNova6 | 2025-11-02 10:16:06+00:00
It's true that currently US technology is among the forefront, but having a single economic pillar is fragile and bound to break, the same is happening with the automotive industry in Germany right now.

But a primary problem is financial. There is too much financial wealth that is desperately looking to find lucrative opportunities which do not exist. So everybody follows the hype and creates the largest bubble we have seen in human history. And those who don't invest in AI, are largely bound in private equity or real estate, which extracts wealth from everybody without giving anything in return. This makes all other businesses less competitive.

It's a huge bottom-up scheme because the incentives are wrong, lacking transparency and unchecked financial power. This is simply not sustainable and nothing but a systemic change is needed.

In the lie for search of productivity, the west didn't become more efficient. We simply outsourced lower-margin industries to Asia and we are now faced with: Lost knowledge, lacking infrastructure, vulnerable supply chains and people without jobs.

AI cannot and will not change this.

Edit: Not sure why you got downvotes, I think it is a valid question.
by a8m | 2025-11-02 10:17:01+00:00
Good point regarding ORMs - that was one of the main problems I wanted to tackle when we built Atlas (https://atlasgo.io). We added support for reading ORM definitions directly, then let you extend the "base schema" defined in them. For example, you can define your models in SQLAlchemy, EF Core, Ent, or others as a partial schema, and then extend it with functions, views, and additional objects.

From there, Atlas handles diffing, planning, and execution. This is similar to importing modules in TF, but for database schemas in Atlas. See this example: https://atlasgo.io/guides/orms/sqlalchemy

Disclaimer: I'm involved with Atlas.
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-11-02 10:18:14+00:00
"Real world data" on something driven by human behavior is basically a random number generator. People at different times and places have different preferences, laws and the economy change or are different in different countries, etc.

As an obvious example, if a place has high electricity prices, like say central Europe after Germany shut down all their nuclear power plants and stopped being able to buy Russian natural gas, then people with a car that can run on either gasoline or electricity are going to more often choose the former because the latter is more expensive. But "real world data" from the time and place where that's happening is irrelevant to some other place or time where the cost of electricity is lower.

And that's just one factor.
by t43562 | 2025-11-02 10:18:26+00:00
I was doing this months ago and have forgotten every twisty road I went down but I wanted to produce a binary package for a particular version of Ubuntu (and or Debian) and put it in a PPA so that people could use my code easily. It seemed like the rules file could be anything and I wouldn't have to implement a lot of targets that are either irrelevant or hard to understand the purpose of. So I used a script. Mistake - makefiles now seem to be the thing.

I struggled over how to layout the directories in my GIT repo. The fact that I want to build from the git repo is another layer of confusion - as opposed to building from a tarfile. I'm making something unstable for other developers right now, rather than a stable releasable item.

The next bit of extreme confusion is .... where should my package's install target put the binary plugins I built. I'm not going to try to go back and check over this in detail but as far as I remember the docs were very unspecific about that as if it could be anywhere and different user docs on the net seemed to show different things.

I got to the point where I could appear to build the thing on my machine but that's not good enough - the PPA has to be able to do it and then you've got to upload, wait and hope the log explains what's wrong well enough.

I tried looking at other packages - I'm building plugins for GNU make so I tried that - but it was using the build from tar approach (IIRC) and was way overcomplicated for my very simple package which is just a few .so files in a directory.

It took me a couple of weeks of messing around with every possible option to get this far and I just ran out of energy and time. I am not a beginner at programming - only at packaging - so IMO there is a great deal that could be done for the user experience. Don't get me wrong - I'm not picking on .deb. RPM is another incredibly horrible packaging system where every tiny mistake can force a long long long rebuild.

They're obviously complicated because they're trying to offer a lot and e.g. Artix doesn't use selinux so there's one misery avoided straight away but it has a consequence.

IMO the core docs just don't prevent any of this confusion. They seem like a reference for people who already know what they're doing and enough tutorial for a very specific simple case that wasn't mine. People wouldn't bother to write their own tutorials if the docs filled the need.
by xenodium | 2025-11-02 10:19:15+00:00
Ah yes. I find the ⌘ key placement a little more ergonomic/convenient, but at the end of the day, pick whatever works for ya.

Thinking back, I prolly didn't use those two commands often enough to internalize M-| or M-% bindings, so the system-level handling didn't bother me. While I do replace things all the time, I typically use multiple cursors (I do use bindings for that). If I need querying, I just type `M-x que RET` which gets picked up by a completion frameworks (in my case ivy).

Relatedly, I also use Hammerspoon on macOS and set some global key bindings using the ⌥ key.
by czl | 2025-11-02 10:19:53+00:00
> when you have some supremely intelligent agent acting on the world, even a small misalignment may end up in catastrophe

Why not frame this as challenge for AI? When the intelligence gap between a fully aligned system and a not-yet-aligned one becomes very large, control naturally becomes difficult.

However, recursive improvement — where alignment mechanisms improve alongside intelligence itself — might prevent that gap from widening too much. In other words, perhaps the key is ensuring that alignment scales recursively with capability.
by WithinReason | 2025-11-02 10:20:31+00:00
Karpathy suggests the following error:

def clipped_error(x): return tf.select(tf.abs(x) < 1.0, 0.5 * tf.square(x), tf.abs(x) - 0.5) # condition, true, false

Following the same principles that he outlines in this post, the "- 0.5" part is unnecessary since the gradient of 0.5 is 0, therefore -0.5 doesn't change the backpropagated gradient. In addition, a nicer formula that achieves the same goal as the above is √(x²+1)
by imtringued | 2025-11-02 10:21:00+00:00
All first order methods use the gradient or Jacobian of a function. Calculating the first order derivatives is really cheap.

Non-stochastic gradient descent has to optimize over the full dataset. This doesn't matter for non-machine learning applications, because often there is no such thing as a dataset in the first place and the objective has a small fixed size. The gradient here is exact.

With stochastic gradient descent you're turning gradient descent into an online algorithm, where you process a finite subset of the dataset at a time. Obviously the gradient is no longer exact, you still have to calculate it though.

Seems like "exactness" is not that useful of a property for optimization. Also, I can't stress it enough, but calculating first order derivatives is so cheap there is no need to bother. It's roughly 2x the cost of evaluating the function in the first place.

It's second order derivatives that you want to approximate using first order derivatives. That's how BFGS and Gauss-Newton work.