MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by rob_c | 2025-12-09 07:50:33+00:00
> a philosopher turned science journalist,

Interesting, I read it as the other way round.

I wonder which of the many worlds is correct :p

The moon example is painful, but I was assuming to be a "if the tree falls in the forest... yada yada yada..." Example to justify words on a page. Although at the time my brain was screaming about things like tidal forces and gravitational effects, asif I was about to start discussing the retrograde motion of Venus with a flat earther who doesn't actually want to learn anything with rigour...

Personally I'm more worried by the comparison of Planks constant in the small to c in GR. Yes they represent asymptotic limits in many regards but are certainly not equivalent imho.
by anal_reactor | 2025-12-09 07:50:38+00:00
MacOS was never fun. I've been using MacOS at work for five years and it's never been fun nor intuitive. I always explained this to myself "that's because I grew up with Windows" but three months ago I switched to KDE on my private machine and it's miles ahead of MacOS. Just a week ago I got a new company Macbook and the UX is even clunkier than before. Shit just doesn't work.
by b112 | 2025-12-09 07:51:11+00:00
" Training or not, it's just spewing predictive, relational text."

If you're responding to that, "so do we" is not accurate.

We're not spewing predictive, relational text. We're communicating, after thought, and the output is meant to communicate something specifically.

With AI, it's not trying to communicate an idea. It's just spewing predictive text. There's no thought to it. At all.
by dsego | 2025-12-09 07:52:25+00:00
Imaginary numbers are strange, basically i * i = -1. So it's a square root of negative one. It's imaginary because well, you need some imagination to come to terms with this. But they are useful to show things on a 2d plane, one axis is the real numbers -1 to 1, and the other -i to i. And then multiplying by number i will rotate in circles: i × i = -1, -1 × i = -i, -i × i = 1, 1 × i = i. And then there is this wonderful property that e ^ iπ = -1, which somehow combines the euler constant, number pi and the imaginary number, and it somehow works. And then also the related formula e^ix=cosx+i sinx, and so to rotate by x you just multiply with e^ix, where x = 2π × frequency. It somehow all fits in neatly, even though none of it is essential for the mechanism described. At least that's my uneducated understanding (my math background is also not that great, that's why I tried to explain this to myself with a more intuition based approach).
by cycomanic | 2025-12-09 07:52:58+00:00
MDs are just another example of Sony screwing it up by making things proprietary and keeping it to themselves instead of creating an ecosystem (memory sticks were another example, although they didn't offer quite the same advantages). It's really a shame, I think if Sony would have gone about this differently they likely would have put off the emergence of MP3 players for a long time.
by davnicwil | 2025-12-09 07:53:05+00:00
Thanks, you got it before I could reply!

But yeah, I need to make the formatting and shortcuts available much clearer somehow. Thanks for the feedback!

Just for reference in case anyone else finds this comment, we have

action: []

bullet: - at the start of a line

indent: tab and shift tab

bold: cmd+B / ctrl+B

emojis: type : and it brings up an autocomplete selector

image: just paste one in

---

You can also highlight any word to bring up a small popup panel with all these options too.
by rob_c | 2025-12-09 07:53:15+00:00
Outside the realm of the testable isn't worth discussing to experimentalists so might as well be a non quantifiable field.

Although sociology is perfectly quantifiable and measurable. Even though arguably the underlying relationships between the measurements are extremely difficult to extract.

A better example is pure philosophy and maths rather than sociology to particle theory. But then again, nobody ever accused QFT of being too simple, so maybe I'm arguing against my own point there.
by pjmlp | 2025-12-09 07:53:40+00:00
Not really.

You are right if talking about the efforts improving C# and CLR, taking the lessons out of Midori, Blazor and Aspire.

Regarding F#, VB, and C++/CLI, the poor souls are on a lifeline that makes CLR nowadays stand out for C# Language Runtime, instead of the original Common.

And the chaos that reigns on Windows Forms, WPF, WinUI, MAUI certainly isn't helping.

Finally they are constrained in what they can put into C# DevKit as means to not canibalize Visual Studio and Windows sales, it can only be good enough, not great and feature parity.

Also regardless of the reasoning behind it, having TypeScript rewriten into C# instead of Go would have been a great opportunity to make C# more relevant outside Microsoft shops, instead anyone looking to contribute to TypeScript compiler will be learning Go instead.
by trymas | 2025-12-09 07:54:07+00:00
Since the beginning of the year - USA is just a shell of market economy. Small government indeed…

Also some say it’s “flawed democracy”, IMHO - for last ~3 decades (or even more) it’s just a charade of democracy. Probably soon you won’t even have that.

First-past-the-post two party system, bizarre primary elections, electoral college, land votes instead of people (how many senators are from california and how many from wyoming, they also say it’s “to balance the tyranny of majority”), abhorrent and disgusting gerrymandering (so states could also force tyranny of the minority in congress too :) ), voter suppression (voting on Tuesdays, employers can control if you can go vote that day, voting booth count is getting smaller, voter registration shenanigans in marginalised communities), etc.
by raw_anon_1111 | 2025-12-09 07:54:31+00:00
I hate to be mean. But you never will earn a place as a one man unknown developer to be an offering at my company and be a place where we put all of our information for both confidentially reasons and we wouldn’t trust the long term viability of your company.

We already use Lattice for performance notes, peer to peer feedback and it’s a place where we put notes for our 1:1s. It integrates with Slack to remind us to enter topics before the meeting, etc.

Even with all of those objections, you won’t get anywhere in corporate America with your product unless you offer SSO. It’s not that hard to do.

I have recommended a one man SaaS once in my career to something that was critical to what I needed for a large company critical initiative. But we got lawyers involved and negotiated our own instance and the code be put in escrow with a third party that we would get access to under certain circumstances. We were going to be 70% of his post sign in revenue and growing.
by bjoli | 2025-12-09 07:55:03+00:00
I had Nvidia up until a year ago or so. Every single time I had to do any kind of maintenance it was because of their drivers.

Since I don't play any more games than Minecraft and don't really need a fancy gpu I have switched to intel. Now I have two things which I buy intel only. GPUs and WiFi. I have had one glitch with opengl under a VM, but I am not sure that is intel only since it also had issues with my Nvidia card.
by ssl-3 | 2025-12-09 07:55:16+00:00
Professional supply houses are usually that way, too.

Graybar[1], for instance: There's a counter with bar stools, and behind that counter are people who know their inventory very well.

I just walk in and tell them what I want. They write it all down on paper faster than I can say the words and then disappear into the back to fetch it while I help myself to a free ice cream sandwich from the freezer over on the right that one of the local trade unions provides.

[1]: Graybar is a US-based electrical supply place. The companies I work for have accounts there, but as far as I know anyone can walk in and buy stuff. They also have some datacom stuff. If I'm in the middle of Nowhere, Ohio and need, say, a single-mode patch cord today, then there's probably a Graybar less than an hour away that has one in stock. Otherwise, they'll have one for me tomorrow before 7:00AM.
by ndsipa_pomu | 2025-12-09 07:55:45+00:00
I did muck around with using "sed" to process the "man" output to find a relevant long option in a one-liner, so it wouldn't be too difficult to implement.

I did something like this:

_command="sed" _option="n" man -- "${_command}" | sed --quiet --expression "s/^ -${_option}.*, //p"

Then I realised that a bit of logic is needed (or more complicated regexp) to deal with some exceptions and moved onto something else.
by Saline9515 | 2025-12-09 07:55:49+00:00
If you speak French (or ask an native french speaker "indigenous" to translate), you can have an ultra-orthodox Israeli explaining how to steal land in the West Bank.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=rwmE9JDZbTE

Here images of a "house-jacking": https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=5D5-0bKtwuY
by augment_me | 2025-12-09 07:55:51+00:00
I think the paper in general completely oversells the idea of "universality".

For CNNs, the 'Universal Subspace' is simply the strong inductive bias (locality) forcing filters into standard signal processing shapes (Laplacian/Gabor) regardless of the data. Since CNNs are just a constrained subset of operations, this convergence is not that surprising.

For Transformers, which lack these local constraints, the authors had to rely on fine-tuning (shared initialization) to find a subspace. This confirms that 'Universality' here is really just a mix of CNN geometric constraints and the stability of pre-training, rather than a discovered intrinsic property of learning.
by dotancohen | 2025-12-09 07:56:04+00:00
> Combining quantum mechanics and General Relativity is all well and good, but there‘s one key mystery it doesn’t address: why does time only seem to flow in one direction?

Could the problem just be with us? When time flows backwards, we lose the ability to perceive the events that came after the "current" event. As it flows forward again, we have more time in our context window. We are able to perceive only those events that have occurred before the current event.

Time still flows and ebbs, we just lack the ability to sense it just like a cork in a river doesn't feel the water flowing past.
by tovej | 2025-12-09 07:56:04+00:00
I'm not sure you do, because expert systems are constraint solvers and LLMs are not. They literally deal in encoded facts, which is what the original comment was about.

The universal approximation theorem is not relevant. You would first have to try to train the neural network to approximate a constraint solver (that's not the case with LLMs), and in practice, these kinds of systems are exactly the ones that a neural network is bad at.

The universal approximation theory says nothing about feasibility, it only talks about theoretical existence as a mathematical object, not whether the object can actually be created in the real world.

I'll remind you that the expert system would have to have been created and updated by humans. It would have had to have been created before a neural network was applied to it in the first place.
by pegasus | 2025-12-09 07:56:51+00:00
Correct me if I'm wrong, but even with batch processing turned off, they are still only deterministic as long as you set the temperature to zero? Which also has the side-effect of decreasing creativity. But maybe there's a way to pass in a seed for the pseudo-random generator and restore determinism in this case as well. Determinism, in the sense of reproducible. But even if so, "determinism" means more than just mechanical reproducibility for most people - including parent, if you read their comment carefully. What they mean is: in some important way predictable for us humans. I.e. no completely WTF surprises, as LLMs are prone to produce once in a while, regardless of batch processing and temperature settings.
by jameshilliard | 2025-12-09 07:57:44+00:00
> Kinda ironic for someone defending the right of Israel to commit war crimes against civilians.

I don't recall defending anyone deliberately committing war crimes against civilians, I should note that collateral damage by itself is not a war crime of course.

> Can we talk about the massive Israeli protests on the noble topic of "we should be allowed to r+p3 prisoners"?

I'm not defending them, Israel has some issues with extremists for sure, although it's far from being as bad as Palestinian extremism which sadly tends to have surprisingly high levels of support amongst Palestinians. Most Israelis don't support these sort of things and just want to live in peace.
by me_bx | 2025-12-09 07:57:50+00:00
Congrats on launching.

It might be worth considering a feature to time/schedule each flow's animation, rather than having them run in an infinite loop, all at the same time.

UX feedback:

* The animation and the whole interface are sluggish on firefox/linux. There's about 1 sec delay after each action (like clicking on an option). * The site's CSS does not load on an old version of Chrome - v90 - (and the chart and animation don't either).
by tsimionescu | 2025-12-09 07:57:50+00:00
Libre office can mostly replace Word, Excel, PowerPoint. But Office 365 or M365 (or whatever the brand name is today) is a huge suite of cloud collaboration and administration tools, including personal and corporate-level cloud storage, app delivery, integration with enterprise accounts and other corporate tools, email, and many other more niche/obscure things. At this point, Microsoft could probably discontinue Word, Excel, and PowerPoint and still not lose many M365 customers.
by PeterCorless | 2025-12-09 07:58:03+00:00
There have been annual layoffs at RedHat since 2023. This year they just laid off more. The layoffs this year are expected to be "a low single digit percentage of our global workforce." Which will likely include hundreds of folks at Red Hat.

1. https://www.cio.com/article/4084855/ibm-to-cut-thousands-of-...

2. https://www.newsobserver.com/news/business/article312796900....
by Rogach | 2025-12-09 07:58:16+00:00
They didn't explicitly propose replacing the syntax, true. But to an outsider, it sure looked like the new syntax was a priority - all the examples and code snippets in the official docs defaulted to the new syntax, making them infuriating to read for someone accustomed to braces.

If I recall correctly, later they added a switch allowing one to choose between syntax versions in the online docs. But it wasn't done right from the start, and when that was finally added most of the damage was done, people already lost interest.

I understand that removing braces might feel harmless - but it really makes the code harder to read for people that use braces all the time.

If someone's brain is accustomed to seeing braces everywhere, reading code with them becomes almost automatic, handled by "low-level" parts of the brain. If the syntax is changed, then "low-level" brain areas have to pass work to "higher-level" areas, which increases energy requirements and processing latency. So reading unfamiliar syntax is literally harder.

Incidentally, that's also why many people are so picky about grammar - grammatical errors make the text noticeably harder to read.

Source: have a degree in neurophysiology.
I spent $1000 on Google Ads and here's what I learnt
by smallbusiness | 2025-12-09 07:59:08+00:00
I have a small business (service) and I ran multiple ad campaigns on Google. $1000 might not be a lot when compared to agencies or billion dollar companies but it is a very big amount for me since I am still in early stages.

During my campaigns I also spent time with Google Ad Strategists to go through my campaigns. It just seems like a fancy title for 'Sales people', and I felt that their suggestions are to make users spend more.

Here is what I learned -

Display Ads - Almost all clicks from Display Ads were invalid and it appears they come from Kids clicking on Apps/Games on phones/tablets. I generated 0 sales from these campaigns despite doing many optimizations. I did let the ad specialist know however I felt they are trained not to acknowledge this.

Performance Max campaigns - Didn't give a positive Return on Investment - It felt the campaign was optimized for me to spend more than give actual return. Part of the reason being it's running Display Ads and overbidding on many of the keywords. The campaign barely generated any sales and most of them were because the campaign ended up spending for ranking for my own brand name. Performance Max was bidding 30x-50x for my keywords so when I moved those keywords to a search campaign, I was paying only few cents.

Search Campaigns - For small business they just seem too expensive to run besides ranking for my own brand name.

Most of the suggestions by Ad Specialists during my conversation included - Increasing the budget, increasing cost per click. If my campaigns were not doing well, I am not sure how those would have helped me (considering the cost was already high enough)

No suggestions by the specialists were made on how to reduce invalid clicks for the campaigns.

No replies were received when I reported poor sales performance.

I feel like the strategists are just trained to churn through as many advertisers as possible, advise them to spend "more" for the system to learn but not focus on actual results.
by jordwest | 2025-12-09 07:59:23+00:00
I first saw this about 15 years ago and it had a profound impact on me. It's stuck with me ever since

"Don't give yourselves to these unnatural men, machine men, with machine minds and machine hearts. You are not machines, you are not cattle, you are men. You have the love of humanity in your hearts."

Spoken 85 years ago and even more relevant today
by cppfkrecast | 2025-12-09 08:00:16+00:00
I built this because the official government retirement calculators require a login (MSCA) and don't easily let you toggle variables for "what-if" scenarios. Also, many simple online estimators haven't been updated to handle the new 2025 "Tier 2" (YAMPE) CPP contribution rules.

The Tech: It's a single HTML file using React and Tailwind via CDN. No build step, no bundler, no backend. I wanted the source to be easily viewable ("View Source") so users can verify that zero data leaves their device.

Key features: Handles the new 2025 YMPE ($71.3k) and YAMPE ($81.2k) limits. Estimates the OAS "recovery tax" (clawback) if you input other income. Applies the general 17% dropout provision logic for accurate estimates. It's hosted on Cloudflare Pages. I'd love any feedback on the UX or the math logic if there are any other Canadians here! Link: https://cppforecast.ca
by AngryData | 2025-12-09 08:00:25+00:00
What makes 1950s Korea evil? You are equating North Korea today with Korea of 75 years ago, they aren't even remotely similar. You don't think your nation getting bombed to literal fields of rubble wouldn't change views and political stances afterwards?

Unification was supported by both sides among the people, most South Koreans supported communism and 70% of them supported unification with the North. South Koreans didn't even support their own government, they were dealing with internal insurrection from their own people. The North was an industrialized nation and the South was a poor farming country and their unification would of been hugely beneficial to both. The war would have been over in another 2 weeks without intervention and a minimal amount of casualties, and it had only been 3 months from the start of the invasion. The only people not in support of it at the time was the political leaders of SK at the time because it meant they personally as individuals would lose power and wealth, and the US who was on a crusade to crush and kill anybody who dared support communism. Korea never should have been split in the first place, but the US and USSR had to be little bitches and force their will upon these people.

Killing 5 million people, most of which were innocent civilians, in the name of "fighting communism" is evil, not the idea of a unified nation of people supported by those same people.
by creato | 2025-12-09 08:00:51+00:00
The fatal mistake I see people repeatedly making is that it isn't about the system or checks and balances or whatever. It's about the people. The US had a deep bench of mostly reasonable leaders that mostly respected ideas like checks and balances or conflicts of interest.

Those people are mostly gone now. Our society used to elevate people like that, but it just doesn't now.
by iamcalledrob | 2025-12-09 08:00:55+00:00
I'm bracing myself for losing ellipses in Apple's menus too.

At least based on the trajectory of macOS's design decline.

For those who might not be aware, a long-standing design pattern on macOS is for menu item labels to have a "..." at the end when a click will take you somewhere, rather than taking immediate action. So you can click more confidently.

It's an example of the subtle quality and attention to detail you get with native UI, that gets lost when you build a web app and re-invent the wheel.

Most "web" UIs don't include this detail, as evidences by the screenshots in the article.
by ggeorgovassilis | 2025-12-09 08:01:08+00:00
The company I currently work for employs several mid-level software developers who've never worked with "the cloud". Their focus is software design, not operations (which is what the cloud is mostly about). The contact point with operations is container technologies. Their applications do REST, connect to databases etc. like they would do in a bare metal data centre. I occasionally need to remind them of low instance uptime guarantees, the need to plan for horizontal scaling, data replication and disaster recovery (I basically have to design the application architecture for them) but apart from that there's no friction in the day-to-day work.

A piece of unsolicited career advice: at the work place, continue being enthusiastic about software technologies and keep opinions on infrastructure close to your vest.
by karamanolev | 2025-12-09 08:01:35+00:00
I work in this exact space (online grocery retailer in Europe). We're profitable and one of the few companies to be so in the sector - many online divisions are losing money and being bankrolled by the parent company with physical stores. Alternatively, burning VC money.

The thing that's wrong with Ocado's technology is that it's ridiculously expensive and tailored for huge FC's (fulfillment centers). The problem with that is that it needs to serve a large population base to be effective and that's hard - in dense metros, the driving times are much longer despite smaller distances. In sparse metros, the distances are just too long. In our experience, the optimal FC size is 5-10K orders/day, maybe up to 20K/day in certain cases, but the core technology should certainly scale down profitably to 3-5K. Ocado solves for scaling up, what needs to be solved is actually scaling down.

There are a lot of logistical challenges outside the FC, especially last mile and you need to see the system as a whole, not just optimize one part to the detriment of all others.
by yetihehe | 2025-12-09 08:02:25+00:00
It is not TCP based. In Erlang processes have mailboxes. But they don't have promises, you send a message and wait for response with timeout or do something else. And TCP is only used between nodes (vm instances). But you can use any communication channel (UDP, unix sockets, tls, serial port, some other process doing funny things).

> Its' interprocess communication is TCP based in general case and because of this is faulty.

What? It's faulty because of TCP? No, in Erlang it is assumed that communication can be faulty for a lot of reasons, so you have to program to deal with that and the standard library gives you tools to deal with this.
by 47282847 | 2025-12-09 08:02:39+00:00
I would have enjoyed the read more if it was just about the three stories and the present, without the hyping. There are many more “masterpieces” that we “didn’t listen to”. It would have been interesting to read more on the background. Who came up with the three narrations? What’s their life story? Did anyone interview them perhaps? Why not try and reach out to them? Without any of that, the post is only mildly interesting.