MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by dang | 2025-12-23 22:36:18+00:00
You might want to use a more accurate word like 'obscure' in that case.

At this point I'm not sure what you're accusing us of, other than HN not being a different kind of site. The mandate of this place is clear (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html), and it simply isn't primarily to feature political/sensational/outrage stories. That's the root issue. The mechanics of voting, flagging, etc., are in service of that.

From my perspective, you're arguing for a health food store to devote its shelf space to chocolates and pastries. Or, if you prefer the other way round, for a confectionery to devote itself to turnips.
by zozbot234 | 2025-12-23 22:37:03+00:00
1440p and 2160p is a total waste of pixels, when 1080p is already at the level of human visual acuity. You can argue that 1440p is a genuine (slight) improvement for super crisp text, but not for a game. HDR and more ray tracing/path tracing, etc. are more sensible ways of pushing quality higher.
by georgefrowny | 2025-12-23 22:37:22+00:00
You don't "write off" the full value, you fiddle the amortization so they go to zero accounting value exactly when you want them to. They're playing this exact game with datacentre GPUs right now.

You can still have a tax implication when you sell the fully depreciated item but in theory it should only be a benefit unless your company has a 100% marginal tax rate somehow.

Of course it can cost more to store the goods and administer the sale then you recoup. And the manufacturer may do or even require a buyback to prevent the second hand market undercutting their sales. Or you may be disinclined to provide cheap hardware to your competitors.
by alexdowad | 2025-12-23 22:38:18+00:00
> Quite impressive...

Yes, quite! Monsieur Bellard is a legend of computer programming. It would be hard to think of another programmer whose body of public work is more impressive than FB.

Unfortunate that he doesn't seem to write publicly about how he thinks about software. I've never seen him as a guest on any podcast either.

I have long wondered who the "Charlie Gordon" who seems to collaborate with him on everything is. Googling the name brings up a young ballet dancer from England, but I doubt that's the person in question.
by eterm | 2025-12-23 22:38:30+00:00
I like this article, I think it taps into something real.

I find myself scratching real itches that would otherwise have gone left un-scratched, because the hurdle to just getting started on something was too damn high.

For example I had need for an image contact-sheet. I'm sure there exist a lot of contact sheet generators out there, but I was able to just as quickly get claude to write me a set of scripts that took a bunch of raw images, resized them down to thumbnails, extracted their meta-data, and wrote a PDF (via Typst) with filenames and meta-data, in date order.

I got lost perfecting it, hand-picking fonts etc, but it still only took an hour or so from start to finish.

It's perfect for my need, I can customise it any time I want by simply asking claude to modify it.

Did I need to be a developer to do that? Arguably yes, to know the capabilities of the system, to know to ask it to leverage image-magick and typst, to understand what the failure-modes looked like, etc.

But I dind't need to be programmer, and over time people like the OP will learn the development side of software development without learning the programming side.

And that's okay.
by hypercube33 | 2025-12-23 22:39:08+00:00
I did something similar after sitting two days on the phone trying to get support for backup exec. this was a million years ago and I ended up looping through everyone there. they offshored support and no one could help me but not because they didn't try.

I documented everything and my frustrations with their software not working or supporting modern operating systems and sent it over to people who seemed high up - email, twitter or reddit.

later got a call asking if they could show it to the board because as employees they had the same frustrations and I said sure. next day they announced that their president was fired...

Good ol backup exec - if it errored it was working and no errors meant nothing ran.
by fatbrowndog | 2025-12-23 22:39:16+00:00
The model only uses 1, 2, and √5.

Uses √2, not just 1, 2, √5

Uses 4⁶⁴ = 2¹²⁸ (huge power, not "simple")

Uses mp (measured value as input)

It derives ... alpha (0.005 ppm).

CRITICAL ERROR: He's confused about what he's doing.
His formula: α⁻¹ = S - α/24
This is circular - α appears on both sides! You can't "derive" α from an equation containing α.

What he actually does:

python# Iterative solution (not derivation)

α₀ = 1/S

α₁ = 1/(S - α₀/24)

α₂ = 1/(S - α₁/24)

# ... converges to self-consistent value

Verdict: He fundamentally misunderstands the difference between:

Self-consistent equation: α⁻¹ = g(α) ← He does this

"Alpha / 3 represents vector equilibrium in 3D space"
Let me parse his explanation:

"The proton represents a volumetric stability (3D), while the interaction cost (alpha) acts as a surface parameter or linear stress. To stabilize a closed 3D volume, the linear stress must be distributed across the three orthogonal axes."

Translation: "I needed to divide by something, and 3 is the number of dimensions,

so α/3."

Problems:

α is dimensionless - it's not a "linear stress"

"Distributing across 3 axes" → if true, should be α³ or α/√3, not α/3

No mathematical derivation provided

Post-hoc rationalization

α/3 lacks geometric justification

"Vector equilibrium in 3D space" sounds sophisticated, but the mathematical

connection is unclear. Why α/3 specifically, not α³ or α/√3? The factor 3 appears

to be chosen because it gives the right answer, not because it emerges from a

geometric principle.

(There's even more Gemini stated, I think I can go on and on and on...)
by azalemeth | 2025-12-23 22:39:18+00:00
I'd be interested to know what the material differences are between the US DoD standards and FAA/ICAO standards (the article hints that there are) - and also what the difference is between these and a "landing zone" where I imagine it's a grass strip somewhere distant. That's a scenario that naïvely to be seems to be more likely to be temporarily made and therefore in need of standards documents...
by doganugurlu | 2025-12-23 22:40:05+00:00
You heard of outlawing? It works so well. People immediately stop doing things that are outlawed.

(You are talking about deterring from legal immigration as you have explained in a sibling comment as well, and I am recommending outlawing legal immigration)

I am not against immigration. Though I am not for illegal immigration, nor do I see the need to spend so much money and energy on deportations, while destroying innocent lives, where a standard border many countries maintain every day would suffice.
by Arainach | 2025-12-23 22:40:09+00:00
> “It’s irrefutable,”

Such absolute language is generally reserved for overconfident people who have jumped to conclusions, not people with experience in statistics and analysis. In particular, substitution ciphers on short strings have a significant number of possibilities. This theory is one, but it is VERY far from "irrefutable", even paired with other circumstantial evidence.
by JCattheATM | 2025-12-23 22:40:22+00:00
> I agree piracy isn't the same as theft, but it's extremely close still.

No, not really. Most of the time nothing is lost.

> If an author works on a book for 10 years and then the publisher copies it and sells it without paying them, is that okay because copying isn't technically theft?

If people genuinely like the book, people will support the author. If the author isn't being supported, that's an issue with their relationship with their publisher.

For most of history, the ideal of stealing content would have been rightfully viewed as ridiculous.

"piracy" is the natural state of things, and eventually it will become the norm again just as it has been for most of history.
by inejge | 2025-12-23 22:40:32+00:00
> I feel like Lua is absolutely underrated.

This sounds like an offhand Youtube comment, I'm afraid. Underrated how? Its principal strength, easy embedding with the ability to work as an extension language, is well known in the circles where it matters. The authors never gave an impression that they'd aim to make it a language to bury all other scripting languages, which I find refreshing in the winner-take-all culture of programming language discussion. Lua is modest and works well for what it is. No need to go all grandiose.

> I just wish one of the mainstream browsers actually puts their foot down and starts supporting Lua as scripting language.

I sincerely hope not, that would be a very counterproductive dilution of effort. Browser authors already have their plate full with all other web platform problems.
by unfocused | 2025-12-23 22:40:38+00:00
Adobe Pro, when used properly, will redact anything in a PDF permanently.

Whoever did these "bad" redactions doesn't even know how to use a PDF Editor.

We have paralegals and lawyers "mark for redaction", then review the documents, then "apply redactions". It's literally be done by thousands of lawyers/paralegals for decades. This is just someone not following the process and procedure, and making mistakes. It's actually quite amateurish. You should never, ever screw up redactions if you follow the proper process. Good on the X-ray project on trying to find errors.

I just want to add, applying black highlights on top of text is in fact, the "old" way of redaction, as it was common to do this, and then simply print the paper with the black bars, and send the paper as the final product.

Whoever did it is probably old, and may have done it thinking they were going to print it on paper afterwards!! Just guessing as to why someone would do this.
by derstander | 2025-12-23 22:40:45+00:00
Only a dabbler in Love2d here but I’d expect that update to be a bit down the line. If I’m not mistaken the current Love2d version 11.5 is (mostly) tied to Lua 5.1 because of LuaJIT, though I understand some later Lua features are backported. And the changelog for the in-dev 12.0 release talks about compiling Love2d for Lua 5.4 as if it’s an optional thing.

I don’t really follow LuaJIT too closely so I’m not sure if they’re even targeting Lua 5.4 let alone 5.5. I remember reading some GitHub issue that suggested some of the design decisions in Lua 5.4 wouldn’t really support LuaJIT goals re: performance.

With that said I’ve been enjoying Love2d even with Lua 5.1 features — as a hobbyist it works just fine for me.

Would certainly appreciate any corrections by those more in-the-know though!
by londons_explore | 2025-12-23 22:41:02+00:00
> have limited control over their encode pipeline.

Frustratingly this seems common in many video encoding technologies. The code is opaque, often has special kernel, GPU and hardware interfaces which are often closed source, and by the time you get to the user API (native or browser) it seems all knobs have been abstracted away and simple things like choosing which frame to use as a keyframe are impossible to do.

I had what I thought was a simple usecase for a video codec - I needed to encode two 30 frame videos as small as possible, and I knew the first 15 frames were common between the videos so I wouldn't need to encode that twice.

I couldn't find a single video codec which could do that without extensive internal surgery to save all internal state after the 15th frame.
by chasil | 2025-12-23 22:41:32+00:00
I was not aware that IBM copied Ada.

I was aware that EnterpriseDB developed "deep Oracle compatibility" and sold the resulting code to IBM for Db2 several years ago.

I think you are [more than] a bit behind the times?

https://www.cnet.com/culture/ibm-puts-oracle-to-the-sword-wi...
by CharlieDigital | 2025-12-23 22:41:52+00:00
> The Extended Mind Theory argues that our tools are not just accessories, but literal extensions of our cognitive process. Viewed this way, a generic tool like a one-size-fits-all app, feels like a prosthetic that doesn’t quite fit.

Three years back now, my wife and I were planning a two-week long trip and found it really difficult to simply move day-places around (e.g. shift a whole day in a schedule with all of the places planned for the day) as we were planning a multi-city route.

We started with Google Sheets (way too cumbersome), then Docs (cumbersome in a different way), then a simple app using Firebase + the Google Maps embedded API built over a weekend, and then ended up building a full blown planning app and eventually a Chrome extension[0] that hooks directly into Google Maps (our preferred tool for exploring).

We are meticulous planners so I totally get the author's sentiment here. Many people see the app the first time and feel overwhelmed, but for us, it's hard to imagine using other tools now because this one fits "just right" having been built specifically for our planning process.

[0] For anyone interested: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/turasapp/lpfijfdbgo...
by cycomanic | 2025-12-23 22:42:00+00:00
I find fascinating how the efficiency of local coffee shops differs based on country. If you go to a place with good/excellent coffee in e.g. the US or Sweden they typically have the latest and fanciest equipment, and the coffee making seems like a ritual taking forever. In contrast go to a cafe in Italy or Sydney or Melbourne and the baristas pump out coffees and a ridiculous speed all often at a quality better than those artisanal places elsewhere. I think it's mainly a function of the number and type (i.e. demanding a good coffee not Starbucks slop) of customers you serve. It really does not require ridiculous warehouse style efficiency optimisations.

Incidentally in countries like Australia or Italy Starbucks has not made significant inroads apart from some tourist areas.
by crazygringo | 2025-12-23 22:42:12+00:00
> Meaning, properly designed APIs and protocols for public use are more robust than one-off private protocols. Because there are expectations.

This is the polar opposite of my experience. Whether it's Bluetooth, PDF's, or a web audio JavaScript spec, actual products are plagued with inconsistencies and incompatibilities, as they implement the spec in different ways or brand A has bugs that brands B, C and D need to write special code for to get interoperability working. And brand C has other bugs brands A, B and D now need to also handle.

Whereas private protocols are much more likely to just work because there's only one implementation. There are no differing interpretations.
by willm | 2025-12-23 22:42:25+00:00
That’s pretty much it. You can bring your own agent. Including OpenCode by the way. I doubt they will mind as they still get paid for the tokens.

You get a nice UI that is only going to get better as time goes on.

It’s far better model to separate the agent from the UI. The current situation is like building a browser for a single website.
by ignoramous | 2025-12-23 22:42:30+00:00
> Paying $30-$70/day to commute is economical?

When LLM use approaches this number, running one locally would be, yes. What you and other commentator seem to miss is, "Uber" is a stand-in for Cloud-based LLMs: Someone else builds and owns those servers, runs the LLMs, pays the electricity bills... while its users find it "economical" to rent it.

(btw, taxis are considered economical in parts of the world where owning cars is a luxury)
by ChicagoDave | 2025-12-23 22:42:35+00:00
I like the post but I’d add senior is also the instinct to take risks. I was once at a client in NY with an ASP.NET code base that used the compile at runtime capability (like Java used to). The C# source was being pushed to the web server.

I ran a compile and the code was riddled with errors. So I went to the PM and explained the code needed to compile and I needed a day to clean it up.

I refactored the entire project to compile and deploy that way. After that the development went very fast.

The hilarious part was the three devs who’d gone on vacation came back and thought what I’d done was “wrong”.

But the client said we (consultants) had done in two weeks what they couldn’t do in six months.

That’s what a senior engineer does.
by zahlman | 2025-12-23 22:42:46+00:00
> because all the interface stuff comes from statically typed languages.

No, it doesn't. It comes from theory that came after the languages.

> Some* dynamic languages borrowed it, but most use "implicit" interfaces

An implicit interface is an interface, and is exactly the sort of thing I'm talking about in GP. The point is that you think about the object in terms of its capabilities, rather than some proven-up-front categorization that it fits into. What it does, not what it is.
by mmooss | 2025-12-23 22:43:10+00:00
A pretty amazing US federal government resource. It seems rigorously based, clearly explained, and covers design fundamentals and research. For example, the 'Productive' page has lots of clearly explained fundamentals I didn't know:

https://www.wbdg.org/do/productive

In private sector offices, such costs are typically, in order of magnitude:

* $200 per square foot per year for salaries
* $20 per square foot per year for amortized bricks and mortar costs, and
* $2.00 per square foot per year for energy.
by pandaman | 2025-12-23 22:43:37+00:00
>There is already lots of surveillance and was even before modern technology.

Do you mean that all the people who are installing Flock cameras now do that not because they think there is not enough surveillance but for some other reason? Like help a YC company to raise more money? Or help LEOs to stalk their exes? Or some other crazy reason mentioned in these threads?

Do you have a neighborhood social network (NextDoor and its kind)? If you do, check out reports of theft, they rarely have any surveillance and ones that have are very poor quality, usually not showing the perp enough to ID.

> But in any case to more directly answer your question: If the clearance rate is 15% then they have a 90% chance of being caught after ~14 crimes.

This does not follow. If your math had been valid we'd have to agree that hunting elk in a forest where 15% of animals are bears would result in 90% chance that every 15th elk would turn out to be a bear.
by fatbrowndog | 2025-12-23 22:43:40+00:00
He's now admitting mz is NOT the physical mass - instead m_φ is.

Let me check what m_φ is in his paper...

From his paper: m_φ ≈ 4.16×10⁻⁹ kg ≈ 2.5 nanograms (the "resonance mass")

My response:

The problem isn't mathematical

- it's that this prediction is falsified by existing data.

Particles at ~2.5 nanograms are extensively studied:

Dust particles in optical traps

Brownian motion experiments

Colloidal physics

Micro-mechanical oscillators

No anomalous behavior is observed at this mass scale.

If objects showed "anomalous inertial behavior" at 2.5 ng,

we would have seen it in:

AFM (atomic force microscopy)
- routinely measures sub-nanogram particles

Optical tweezers
- trap and measure particles from 1 nm to 10 μm

MEMS devices
- measure inertia at nanogram scales

Verdict:
His prediction is experimentally falsified. This is not a philosophical disagreement - his model makes a testable prediction that contradicts existing measurements.

The "Brute Force" QED Defense

His claim:

"12,672 diagrams is brute force. Achieving 63 ppm with one term (a_μ = α/2π + α²/12) is elegant."

This completely misses the point.

QED's 12,672 diagrams achieve 0.1 ppm agreement because each diagram contributes a calculable correction from quantum field theory. The complexity comes from precision, not failure.

His formula achieves 63 ppm - that's 630× worse than QED!
by nemothekid | 2025-12-23 22:44:33+00:00
I'm very familiar with the stack and the pain of trying to livestream video to a browser. If JPEG screenshots work for your clients, then I would just stick with that.

The problem with wolf, gstreamer, moonlight, $third party, is you need to be familiar with how the underlying stack handles backpressure and error propagation, or else things will just "not work" and you will have no idea why. I've worked on 3 projects in the last 3 years where I started with gstreamer, got up and running - and while things worked in the happy path, the unhappy path was incredibly brittle and painful to debug. All 3 times I opted to just use the lower level libraries myself.

Given all of OPs requirements, I think something like NVIDIA Video Codec SDK to a websocket to MediaSource Extensions.

However, given that even this post seems to be LLM generated, I don't think the author would care to learn about the actual internals. I don't think this is a solution that could be vibe coded.
by mdhb | 2025-12-23 22:45:02+00:00
I don’t think that actually engages with literally any of the points I’ve made but sure, I wasn’t expecting anything else. Like I said earlier it seems from where you’re sitting everything is going great and there’s nothing to answer for.

I was hoping however you could at least shine some light on the active page question… what percentage of users actually visit in on any given day? We can play semantic games about secret vs obscure but it’s not a debate about semantics.
by senderista | 2025-12-23 22:45:14+00:00
I think the article still sells formal specification a bit short in a few areas:

- A formal spec can be used to derive randomly generated tests attempting to find counterexamples to spec invariants (which the article hinted at but didn't describe explicitly)

- A formal spec can be used as input to a model checker, which will try to find counterexamples to spec invariants via bounded exploration of the model's state space

- A formal spec can be used to find spec invariant violations by analyzing traces from production systems

What all these examples have in common is that they attempt to falsify, not verify, that the spec accurately describes the desired design properties or the actual implementation. That tends to be much more feasible than an actual proof.
by markus_zhang | 2025-12-23 22:45:18+00:00
There were references of "North star" as a personal/business objective/guide before 2015. I Googled the term "My north star" and there were a book "Finding Your Own North Star" published in 2001. So it was definitely something back in 2015. There was another book published in 1997: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/66140.Finding_Your_Own_N... but I think it is the same book and Goodread might got the year wrong. But I'll take 1997.

I found another webpage from 1987 that took "North Star" with the same concept. https://reprieve.org/uk/our-history/

> This mission is our North Star when it comes to taking on new cases and moving into new areas of work. We continue to fight for justice and save lives,

Another one from 1978: https://speeches.byu.edu/talks/j-thomas-fyans/prophet-north-...

Anyway, I do agree with Raymond (if he did think so) that business slogans are annoying.
by doganugurlu | 2025-12-23 22:45:25+00:00
Surprised to see that you are unaware of the literal shit ton of rich immigrants in the US. A majority of them escaping their home countries after robbing and destroying them. This is so common that it’s an easy and repetitive plot in 2nd/3rd tier action/drama series.

And that the US populous not only despises these people, but people from both sides of the political spectrum actually want the opposite types as immigrants.
by imiric | 2025-12-23 22:45:28+00:00
> Fortunately, once you've toggled Live Plus off, you no longer have to worry about your TV screen constantly being read to see what you're watching and to give you targeted ads.

Eh, I wouldn't be so quick to let my guard down. Even if you trust that that toggle actually turns the functionality completely off, there's no guarantee that it won't be enabled again in the next update.

Just keep your TV offline, as it always should be, and use it as a dumb display for trusted devices.