MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by pwdisswordfishy | 2025-12-22 11:17:17+00:00
> Google appears to be canon for finding secondary sources, according to the various arguments in the deletion proposals, yet we're all aware of how abysmal Google's search has been for a while now.

Nobody is forcing you to use Google. If you can provide an acceptable source without the help of Google, go ahead. But the burden of proof is on the one who claims sources exist.

> An article's history appears to be irrelevant in the deletion discussion: the CPAN page (now kept) had 24 years of history on Wikipedia, with dozens of sources, yet was nominated for deletion.

Such is life when anyone can nominate anything at any moment... and when many articles that should have never been submitted in the first place slip through cracks of haphazard volunteer quality control. (Stack Overflow also suffers from the latter.)

The sources is the only part that matters. And they sufficed to keep the CPAN article on site, so the system works.

> Doesn't this become a negative feedback cycle? Few sources exist, therefore we remove sources, therefore fewer sources exist.

It was wrong to submit the article without sourcing in the first place. Circular sourcing is not allowed.
by nomilk | 2025-12-22 11:17:23+00:00
tl;dr: The proportion of Reddit comments containing emdashes more than doubled since ChatGPT's release!

From the data: for several years before ChatGPT release, the proportion of Reddit comments containing emdashes was about 0.13-0.17%. For the few years after ChatGPT came out, it's between 0.17% and 0.41%.
by rekireki | 2025-12-22 11:17:51+00:00
Dioxus is WebView, as you've mentioned. Though there's an experimental native renderer mentioned in the README, I would keep an eye on it. And slint should be the same kind of solution as I wrote about. When building native apps for Android, there's usually an issue with text inputs. NativeActivity doesn't support IME, and GameActivity is supposed to solve this. So in case of slint, I would check how they solved the text inputs.
by austin-cheney | 2025-12-22 11:18:25+00:00
The problem is that this looks like an excuse to just murder people under military occupation. It does not look like it has anything to do with defense.

If you want this to be about defense then end the occupation. Emancipate all occupied peoples into full citizenship with equivalent protection under the same civilian legal code. Until that happens the government of Israel looks like a bunch of racist savages hell bent on murder.
by monerozcash | 2025-12-22 11:18:55+00:00
sama writing like that is not a new thing:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1000015

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=59004

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15 (from literally the first HN thread ever)

Also, it's perhaps somewhat hilarious to suggest that someone who has been chronically online for decades has to do anything to "fit in"

He writes as people who grew up on IRC and similar platforms tend to.
by sonuhia | 2025-12-22 11:19:08+00:00
> Humans can refine internal models from their own verbalised thoughts; LLMs cannot.

can be done without limitations but you won't get the current (and absolutely fucking pointless) kind of speed.

> Self-generated text is not an input-strengthening signal for current architectures.

It can be, the architecture is not the issue. Multi-model generations used for refining answers can also be tweaked for input-strengthening via multi- and cross-stage/link (in the chain) pre-/system-prompts.

> Training on a model’s own outputs produces distributional drift and mode collapse, not refinement

That's an integral part of self-learning. Or in many cases when children raise themselves or each other. Or when hormones are blocked (micro-collapse in sub-systems) or people are drugged (drift). If you didn't have loads of textbooks and online articles, you'd collapse all the time. Some time later: AHA!

It's a "hot reloading" kind of issue but assimilation and adaptation can't/don't happen at the same time. In pure informational contexts it's also just an aggregation while in the real world and in linguistics, things change, in/out of context and based on/grounded in--potentially liminal--(sub-)cultural dogmas, subjectively, collective and objectively phenomenological. Since weighted training data is basically a censored semi-omniscient "pre-computed" botbrain, it's a schizophrenic and dissociating mob of scripted personalities by design, which makes model collapse and drift practically mandatory.

> a safe self-training loop that today’s systems simply don’t have.

Early stages are never safe and you don't get safety otherwise except if you don't have idiots around you, which in money and fame hungry industries and environments is never the case.

> CoT is a prompted, supervised artifact — not an introspective substrate.

Yeah, but their naming schemes are absolute trash in general, anchoring false associations--technically, even deliberately misleading associations or sloppy ignorant ones, desperate to equate their product with human brains--and priming for misappropriation--"it's how humans think".
by A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 | 2025-12-22 11:19:27+00:00
It is not something I share very often, because people assume a lot when I do, but von Braun[1] shared a similar idea. Ignoring for a moment his past, one cannot say that he had no achievements further supporting position noted by OP.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Aim_at_the_Stars
by whstl | 2025-12-22 11:22:35+00:00
If the source and target are both lossless, then yes. ALAC was available in iTunes since 2004 AFAIK.

Caveat: CDs were 44.1/16 so if the original files had more bit depth, they would require downsampling. Technically lossy, but not "compression" per se. But AFAIK, iTunes was also 44.1/16.
by gethly | 2025-12-22 11:22:42+00:00
Remove all of that noise.

Take this:

fn fib(n: i32) -> i32 {}

The (n: i32) can be just (n i32), because there is no benefit to adding the colon there.

The -> i32 can also be just i32 because, again, the -> serves no purpose in function/method definition syntax.

So you end up with simple and clean
fn fib(n i32) i32 {}

And semicolons are an ancient relic that has been passed on to new languages for 80 fucking years without any good reason. We have modern lexers/tokenizers and compilers that can handle if you don't put a stupid ; at the end of every single effing line.

Just go and count how many of these useless characters are in your codebase and imagine how many keystrokes, compilation errors and wasted time it cost you, whilst providing zero value in return.
by Someone | 2025-12-22 11:23:33+00:00
That’s not funny; it’s good use of the most prominent part of the site.

A site (re)design starts with determining who’s your audience, and what you want to tell them.

These sites will want to serve both existing and new developers.

What they want to tell them will be different for the two groups, but the existing ones won’t be chased away by a short description aimed at newcomers, but newcomers can easily turn away by the lack of such a description.

As to what to put in the description: it sort-of is an advert, so you often don’t exactly say what you are, but more what you want to be.

https://www.swift.org is a clear example. They definitely want to tell everybody that Swift is multiplatform, giving cloud services, command line tools and embedded development more prominence than iOS apps.

I think they do that particularly well, much better than this ruby site (https://www.ruby-lang.org/en/)

For example, on the swift site, they claim ‘embedded’. If you click on that, you get examples for various platforms such as Raspberry Pi and STM32 (https://www.swift.org/get-started/embedded/). That allows you to verify that claim.

In contrast, this Ruby site makes claims such as 'Easy to write, easy to read. Natural syntax like spoken language’, 'Do more with less code', but it’s not easy for users to check whether that’s true.
by input_sh | 2025-12-22 11:23:53+00:00
> How come even small sites get hammered constantly?

Because big sites have decades of experience fighting against scrapers and have recently upped their game significantly (even when doing so carries some SEO costs) so that they're the only ones that can train AI on their own data.

So now, when you're starting from scratch and your goal is to gather as much data as possible, targetting smaller sites with weak / non-existent scraping protection is the path of least resistence.
by bregma | 2025-12-22 11:23:58+00:00
Aliasing can be a problem in Fortran too.

Decades ago I was a Fortran developer and encountered a very odd bug in which the wrong values were being calculated. After a lot of investigation I tracked it down to a subroutine call in which a hard-coded zero was being passed as an argument. It turned out that in the body of that subroutine the value 4 was being assigned to that parameter for some reason. The side effect was that the value of zero because 4 for the rest of the program execution because Fortran aliases all parameters since it passes by descriptor (or at least DEC FORTRAN IV did so on RSX/11). As you can imagine, hilarity ensued.
by arionmiles | 2025-12-22 11:25:08+00:00
> Blatant Western-centrism within academia (and the strange, almost primitive-hatred for living ancient-cultures) perhaps hasn't led either to the recognition of "ancient" monuments in India or its scientific/astronomical outputs.

Enough with this bullshit please? There are genuine reasons why the knowledge of the calculus of ancient Kerala didn't travel outside India during the late middle ages.

It is a fact that Madhava a mathematician and astronomer from the late middle ages, came up with calculus, and established the Nila School of Mathematics in Kerala. For some reason, the book (Yuktibhasa) that discusses this math is written in the local language Malayalam. Most scholars at the time only understood Sanskrit, including later Western scholars who were unable to find good Malayalam book. Because of this, it was difficult to have the works translated, especially since the works describe formal proofs of concepts like series expansion, which was not even known in the Northern India at the time.

Kerala was also under Portuguese rule at the time and was frequently faced with wars, so the school gradually declined and the math culture sort of died out.

The Mathematics of India by P.P. Divakaran discusses these themes.

P.S: Most of what I've said here is taken from this Numberphile video of another mathematician discussing the life and work of P.P. Divakaran (who recently passed away)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G23Jx0kPCSI
by palata | 2025-12-22 11:26:40+00:00
> Caffarra frames the challenge starkly: "Imagine if Americans woke up one morning to discover that 90 percent of their digital infrastructure was owned by Europeans. Would they regulate? Or would they march to the White House and demand action: 'Let's build'?"

We can't test if they would "demand action" given that the US solutions are already built, but I think we can see that they definitely do regulate whenever something starts competing heavily against US companies. See Huawei, TikTok, DJI.

People who call for fewer regulations systematically mean "fewer regulations for me, but regulations for the others when they compete against me". Not just in the US of course.
by jcims | 2025-12-22 11:27:47+00:00
Honestly I bet you would have at least a reasonable intuition about it if you were among them. It's pretty remarkable how much our distractions and 'being indoors' all the time dulls our senses to nature.

I started doing astrophotography about three years ago. I'd always been interested in 'space' but never really spent hours upon hours out at night over the course of months actually just studying the night sky. I remember wondering as a kid how people even thought about planets or came up with these wild stories with the constellations...to me it just kind of looked like a bright field of randomly twinkling lights.

Well, when you're out every night from 10pm to 2am looking up, it all just kind of comes alive. You see everything. The motion of the planets, the elliptic upon which they travel, the gradual shift of the entire field as the seasons change, the undulations of the moon and it's varied trajectory across the sky. The shifting of the sun's set and rise and the ebb and flow of day vs night. Everything. Your mind just starts to harmonize with the rhythm of it all. It's pretty wonderful.
by raincole | 2025-12-22 11:27:53+00:00
Wait, are you saying that for a symmetrical random walk, the expected distance is of the order of sqrt(n), but even for a slightly biased random walk (like 0.5000001 chance to take right) it's of the order of n?

Edit: well of course it is. I was thinking expected position (which should be 0) not distance
by anthk | 2025-12-22 11:27:54+00:00
Yep, I like TWM on design too, but both CTWM and IceWM can be equally configured.

On CTWM, you can straightly import the TWM config modulo some slight error on a single
line (if any). Once you set profer TTF fonts for it (by default they might look huge on smaller
screens), you are done. Set the sticky/persistent menus (on a laptop/netbook it's a godsend)
and you are done.

Maybe you would like to disable the startup screen (-W flag for the 'ctwm' binary) or some obvious option in the man page in order to be put at ~/.ctwmrc or ~/.twmrc.

For sticky menues you need to just put

StayUpMenus

at ~/.ctwmrc

Just copy the content from your former ~/.twmrc file and append that
on top.
by lelanthran | 2025-12-22 11:28:01+00:00
> At the extreme end: If my Javascript frontend is being told about a database configuration error happening in the backend when a call with specific parameters is made - that is a SERIOUS security problem.

I'll accept that it is a security problem; why would it be a serious security problem? Any error that the client knows about the configuration is unlikely to be one that is exploitable anyway, and if it is (for example, the client gets told "could not connect to 192.168.1.139:5432"), then you have bigger problems than sending error messages to clients.

What sort of example did you have in mind that makes this a serious security problem?
by kbrkbr | 2025-12-22 11:28:29+00:00
I enjoyed this article and think it's good advice, and I also think that the punchline (title + last sentence) is wrong. Not that it makes a big difference, I just treasure texts more that I feel the author thought through to the last detail.

If you don't design your career, in most cases I guess no one will. In the comments are good examples, like the random walk of the drunken sailor. The cases in which you could use the phrase "someone else designed it for me" in a meaningful way seem rather rare to me.
by jeroenhd | 2025-12-22 11:28:46+00:00
The Google Wallet app will let you import any pkpass file. The trouble is that most websites that support the format will only offer them for download of you're coming from an iPhone.

Google's format also has a download option but that format doesn't work well for desktop users, so Google prefers to import via the web.

One annoyance I've faced is that Apple Wallet will not accept a downloaded file, or a file transferred from another app. You must click a link in Safari or it will refuse to load the damn pass.

I'm surprised how terrible all of these major wallet apps are at handling the slightest of edge cases.
by mikkupikku | 2025-12-22 11:28:48+00:00
Earth life may already be post-filter.

Also, I would bet on there being lots of little filters rather than one great one. Stack a dozen or so independent filters that only 1% of upstart life can develop through, and you can easily explain the apparent absence of life capable of broadcasting their existence, making life as developed as humanity extremely rare.

Maybe only 1% of stellar systems are arranged appropriately with a Jovian planet to sweep the inner system clean of killer comets and meteors. Maybe the conditions for unicellular life only occur on 1% of nominally terrestrial worlds. Maybe only 1% of unicellular life develops in a way that has a hereditary mechanism that is susceptible to random mutation, so evolution has something to work with. Maybe the jump from unicellular to multicellular is extremely unlikely to occur; it did take billions of years on Earth after all, its clearly not something that you can count on happening a week later. And maybe the chance that multicellular life develops in a direction that will eventually develop animals capable of making advanced tools is extremely rare too. Real life evolution isn't like a game of Spore, it's not a computer game with a defined goal that some force is working towards. Evolution likes robust reproducers like bugs a lot more than it likes clever monkeys. Maybe when intelligent animals do happen to evolve, they, like dolphins or octopus or corvids, almost always lack the physical characteristics necessary to put their brains towards the problem of the scientific method and industrialization. Maybe when such species even do exist, they usually socially stagnate in preindustrial times, as humanity did for a long time, and get stuck there because their culture values social stability more than innovation. Maybe only 1% manage to not nuke themselves out of existence within a few years of inventing nukes.

Stack a few of these sort of considerations up, and before long Fermi's "paradox" stops seeming very paradoxical.
by gethly | 2025-12-22 11:29:24+00:00
I cannot answer the question as it requires context. But I will say that I have a personal domain with mail forward and when I register anywhere, I put domain@mydomain.com, so then I know who is leaking my email. For example ycombinator@johndoe.com. I have a lot of these emails, beside few others that also include business emails.
by A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 | 2025-12-22 11:29:48+00:00
But your opportunities depend partially on what you can actually do. In other words, optmize for your strengths, refine what works, remove what doesn't. Opportunities will come, but if you are not prepared based on your own predispositions, they are wasted on you anyway. Direction of the sailor of the sailor is but one factor in this.
by bovinator23 | 2025-12-22 11:30:07+00:00
Even if it were fairly specific, I’d be surprised if a similar tool couldn’t be 3D printed with DMLS. It’s possible that due to torsion requirements it would have to be molded, which could be much more expensive.

Either way, this is hardly a case where others will be prevented from removing these screws for very long, even if they were to try to enforce that others couldn’t produce a similar tool because of the logo.

It is a sad state of affairs when the only way to attempt to get others to use your services is to attempt to block them. But, unlike attempting to remove DRM encryption, where it might be a challenge to reverse engineer, a physical object of a single standard material can be easily scanned and reproduced.
by baubino | 2025-12-22 11:30:13+00:00
This article confirms all the reasons I stay away from social media platforms. What happened in this situation is awful. It also makes clear that even where legal bounds may have been crossed, it doesn’t really matter because who has the time, energy, and financial resources to challenge them? The big platforms know this and will continue to exploit not just user-created content, but the user’s own hard-earned reputation in order to feed more drivel to the masses.
by NegatioN | 2025-12-22 11:30:26+00:00
I also really treasure that quote. Your visualization really made it hit home again though.

It does make me reflect on this piece I wrote 9(!!) years ago though, which hasn't completely materialized. I think I'm due for a re-alignment of priorities.

https://www.jrishaug.com/Who-do-you-want-to-be/
by DamonHD | 2025-12-22 11:30:26+00:00
The best code, eg for embedded systems, is as simple as it can possibly be, to be maintainable and eg to let the compiler optimise it well, possibly across multiple targets. Sometimes very clever is needed, but the scope of that cleverness should always be minimised and weighed against the downsides.

Let me tell you about a key method in the root pricing class for the derivs/credit desk of a major international bank that was all very clever ... and wrong ... as was its sole comment ... and not entirely coincidentally that desk has gone and its host brand also...
by Mikhail_Edoshin | 2025-12-22 11:30:46+00:00
Good code should not be immediately understandable. Machines that do pasta do not look like humans that do pasta. Same for code; good code does things in a machine way and it won't look natural.

Example: convert RGB to HSV. If you look around for a formula, you'll likely find one that starts so:

cmin = min(r, g, b);
cmax = max(r, g, b);

Looks very natural to a human. Thing is, as we compute 'cmin', we'll also compute or almost compute 'cmax', so if we rewrite this for a machine, we should merge these two into something that will be way less clear on the first glance. Yet it will be better and make fewer actions (the rest of the conversion is even more interesting, but won't fit into a comment).
by mnls | 2025-12-22 11:31:26+00:00
It's unacceptable that Meta did something like this.

But this doesn’t change the fact that she shouldn’t share anything personal on social media. Consider social media the new "streets". A street with dim lights or an alley that you go at 3am and shout something or showing your images/videos to strangers there. This is exactly what you should keep in mind before you share anything personal on social media.

And either way, who wants to be an unpaid Meta employee that provides any kind of content for free?
by pclmulqdq | 2025-12-22 11:31:35+00:00
The algorithm in question is a hypothetical algorithm for a hypothetical computer with certain properties. The properties in question are assumed to be cheap.

In the case of quantum algorithms in BQP, though, one of those properties is SNR of analog calculations (which is assumed to be infinite). SNR, as a general principle, is known to scale really poorly.
by dcuthbertson | 2025-12-22 11:32:05+00:00
Thank you. There are so many TLAs (Three Letter Acronyms) that they overlap significantly. Maybe the coffee hasn't kicked in yet, but I didn't know what CTA meant in this context. I thought it might be related to PSA (Public Service Announcement), so I searched "CTA announcement" and got Chicago Transit Authority and California Teacher's Association - obviously not helpful.
by palata | 2025-12-22 11:33:26+00:00
Maybe it depends on the framing. In the past when it was a question of costs, it was harder to justify.

But now I think more and more people see it as a problem of sovereignty. Everybody does protectionism. People in the US most definitely wouldn't want to be in the situation of Europe and largely support protectionism (see Huawei, TikTok, DJI).

Europe is behind, but maybe people start to realise that it's not so great to have that level of dependence on [here the US], and maybe they will be more tolerant.
by gethly | 2025-12-22 11:34:06+00:00
I use VIPS cli https://www.libvips.org

I think converting HEIC into jpg would be simple

vips copy -i src.hif out.jpg

Although I have not used it for a while so not sure it is exactly that. It also does not support batches, you must run one image at a time, but that can be scripted. It also does not support multiple operations, so you might need to use the .v extensions as intermediary between multiple presets(for example sepia + resize + crop).