MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by adrian_b | 2026-01-01 10:05:14+00:00
Even when you use the exponential e^x and the hyperbolic logarithm a.k.a. natural logarithm (which are useful only in symbolic computations and are inferior for any numeric computation), you never need to know the value of "e". The value itself is not needed for anything. When evaluating e^x or the hyperbolic logarithm you need only ln 2 or its inverse, in order to reduce the argument of the functions to a range where a polynomial approximation can be used to compute the function.

Moreover, you can replace any use of e^x with the use of 2^x, which inserts ln(2) constants in various places, (but removes ln 2 from the evaluations of exponentials and logarithms, which results in a net gain).

If you use only 2^x, you must know that its derivative is ln(2) * 2^x, and knowing this is enough to get rid of "e" anywhere. Even in derivation formulae, in actual applications most of the multiplications with ln 2 can be absorbed in multiplications with other constants, as you normally do not have 2^x expressions that are derived, but 2^(a*x), where you do ln(2)*a at compile time.
by kennywinker | 2026-01-01 10:05:40+00:00
> Israel unilaterally disengaged from GAZA in 2005

There were over a thousand gazans held without charges by the israeli military on oct 7th. That is not what disengagement looks like.

Israel has military bases in cities.

> No, protecting your people from terrorist is not apartheid

I’m quite sure a white south african could have said this same sentence pre-1994.
by CrzyLngPwd | 2026-01-01 10:05:42+00:00
Drone tech will adapt, as it has been in the russia/ukraine conflict.

A small, fast, autonomous drone flying between trees and buildings, avoiding obstacles and not flying in a straight line could destroy such an expensive system with very little explosive.

Or a cloud of such drones.

Or launch your attack on a foggy/rainy day.
by dragonwriter | 2026-01-01 10:06:21+00:00
> specifically paying into a ubi fund whenever human jobs are replaced by ai.

Then existing firms will just go bankrupt, and new firms which never had human employees will use AI, and you’ll have the same job losses but no direct replacement and no payment into the UBI fund. Instead, just tax capital gains and retained corporate profits more than currently (taxing the former the same as normal income, with provision for both advance recognition and deferment of windfalls so that irregular capital income doesn't get unfairly taxed compared to recurring income), and fund UBI with a share of that is initially basically the difference between status quo taxes and the new rates. That realigns the incentives, such that an increased share of the economy being capture by capital (a natural consequence of goods and services being produced in a more capital intensive, less labor intensive way) drives more money into the UBI fund, without needing a specific job-level replacement count to drive the funding.
by bostik | 2026-01-01 10:06:46+00:00
I'll drop in from the sidelines, with the massive track record of having written one (1) book.

The prestige probably isn't what you'd expect. Having an ISBN to one's name carries ~zero weight for the people that actually matter for your career (it may mildly impress some future coworkers in a decade's time, though). The real value of having written a book is that then you have written a book.

Having a publisher carries one extra benefit that was merely implied in the post: you get assigned a professional editor. If you're lucky (I was), the editor has a really good understanding of how to wield language and the lessons you get from the editing process are going to far outweigh any direct financial benefits. When I wrote mine, I had been doing freelance writing for a large IT magazine for nearly ten years - and as a direct result had been taught how to use written language as a weapon by a good number of old-guard journalists. The year I spent on the book project taught me a LOT more still, because I was assigned an editor who herself was studying (in a university) to become a language teacher.

The skills I picked up from that process are with me to this day, and ironically have been the single most valuable asset I have as an engineer and/or engineering leader. Being able to write well to a varying audience is a superpower. You also learn to appreciate professional authors, because what they do is decidedly not easy.

In the end my book sold well enough to earn out its advance, so I guess it was a non-failure for the publisher as well. I also picked up a lesson for all aspiring authors:

Writing a book is easy. You sit down by the keyboard, slit your wrists and pour it all out.
by solidsnack9000 | 2026-01-01 10:09:59+00:00
It's been possible for a long time.

For antipersonnel use, guns are perfectly adequate and guns on tracking turrets have been widely deployed (for example, CIWS). The underlying technology is a ballistic calculator and a fast panning turret. Modern ballistic calculators, weather stations (a small device about the size of a cellphone), and good quality ammunition allows for incredible precision with small arms -- hitting something 25cm in diameter at 1000m is something people can do with these tools.

A weapon like this can't really "mass kill" -- it is for point targets -- but we have long had tools that can automatically track and kill. Why don't we employ them to shoot at people? We have the tagging technology, &c, as you mention.

One reason is that positive identification really does matter a lot when designing and developing weapon systems that automatically attack something.

The anti-missile use case is one of the most widespread uses for automatically targeted weapons in part because a missile is easily distinguished from other things that should not be killed: it is small, extremely hot, moves extremely fast, generally up in the air and moves towards the defense system. It is not a bird, a person, or even a friendly aircraft. The worst mistake the targeting system can make is shooting down a friendly missile. If a friendly missile is coming at you, maybe you need to shoot it down anyways...

Drones have a different signature from a missile and recognizing them in a way that doesn't confuse them with a bird, a balloon, &c, is different from recognizing missiles -- but here again, the worse thing that happens is you shoot down a friendly drone.
by tstrimple | 2026-01-01 10:10:39+00:00
> Equality is a founding value and one we still respect.

Easily stated by someone who was not a slave. Equality had fuck all to do with the founding of this country. Some people were *literaly* slaves. You *literally* could not vote unless you were a male land owner. Fuck this nonsense propaganda. Every bit of freedom in this country had to be fought for against this country and against the majority of white men. And we are still far, far from equal. Not until the vote of a Californian for President is equal in weight to someone from Wyoming. Not until the systemic structural advantage for white men in rural areas is eliminated. It's just such fucking bullshit to preach equality when our entire history has been a counter example.
by throw-qqqqq | 2026-01-01 10:11:18+00:00
Dude, when I move projects to GitHub I also often collapse everything into a single commit.

I do this to avoid having to check e-mail addresses and names in commits - maybe I mistakenly made a commit from my work account etc.

After the “initial” commit making it all public, I start to work “in the open”. I see many others doing it the same way.

That is NOT a reliable indicator of slop!
by tsimionescu | 2026-01-01 10:12:47+00:00
Yes, it is safer. Basically what we discovered in the 90s is that cannibalism (an animal eating others of its species) has a relatively high chance of leading to protein mis-folding in that animal, producing prions. Those prions can then cause additional mis-folding producing more prions, this time in a very direct way that is unrelated to who consumes the meat.

So pig > pig or cow > cow is known to produce prions. I believe it's also somewhat proven that, say, pig > cow > pig does not produce prions in the same way. However, insect digestion is very different from vertebrate digestion, so it's not necessarily safe to assume that pig > cow > pig being safe means that pig > insect > pig would also be safe. However, it does prove that pig > insect > cow > pig would still be safe - the insects don't add a risk in themselves, we're just not certain that they eliminate the risk the same way vertebrate digestive systems do.
by MORPHOICES | 2026-01-01 10:12:50+00:00
I have been thinking about how AI agents work, especially this idea of replica agents versus first principles ones. It comes up a lot in discussions like on Hacker News. The question is basically, when should these agents just copy what humans do in their workflows, and when should they kind of ignore all that and go their own way.

A lot of the agent designs out there start by asking how a human would handle the task. Like, they would open up a browser, click on some buttons, follow these standard operating procedures or SOPs. That approach seems pretty safe, I guess, because it is familiar. But it also feels limiting, like it is not pushing things forward enough.

One way to frame it that I have seen is replica agents are good in situations where humans need to check on things, step in if needed, or just trust what is happening step by step. On the other hand, first principles agents might be better when the main goal is just getting the most efficient outcome, without all the human habits getting in the way.

The tricky part is figuring out where to draw that line. I am not totally sure myself. Like, at what point do you stop trying to automate the worker exactly as they are, and instead start solving the actual problem in a direct way. It seems like some people might have heuristics for deciding this, maybe based on the risks involved or the type of task. That is the part that stands out to me, how to make that call without overcomplicating it.

Sometimes it feels like copying human stuff is easier at first, but then you get stuck. Other times, going from first principles could miss some practical details that humans handle intuitively. I think there needs to be more on that balance. ~
by belorn | 2026-01-01 10:14:31+00:00
I disagree. The core of freedom of speech is freedom of thought, conscience and belief, without fear of retaliation, censorship, or legal sanction. Die Gedanken sind frei is older and more fundamental than the right to criticize the government.

Threats, assault, and murder is different since they represent real and substantial harm that is universal recognized. Thoughts are permitted, but the acts are not, which include threats. The line between thoughts and threats might be fuzzy, but the distinction is not.

The legal question around Kiwi Farms has nothing to do with freedom of speech and everything to do with the legal theory of assisting, and platform liability.
by fullstackchris | 2026-01-01 10:14:59+00:00
> The reason I think MCP may be a one-year wonder is the stratospheric growth of coding agents. It appears that the best possible tool for any situation is Bash—if your agent can run arbitrary shell commands, it can do anything that can be done by typing commands into a terminal.

I push back strongly from this. In the case of the solo, one-machine coder, this is likely the case - if you're exposing workflows or fixed tools to customers / collegues / the web at large via API or similar, then MCP is still the best way to expose it IMO.

Think about a GitHub or Jira MCP server - commandline alone they are sure to make mistakes with REST requests, API schema etc. With MCP the proper known commands are already baked in. Remember always that LLMs will be better with natural language than code.
Show HN: I built a tool to turn ChatGPT conversations into readable public posts
by divyanthj | 2026-01-01 10:15:29+00:00
Some of my best ideas were getting lost inside long ChatGPT conversations.

I built this tool to turn raw chats into clean, readable posts that can be shared publicly and indexed, without rewriting everything by hand.

It’s meant for people who think a lot but don’t enjoy long-form writing, and want their ideas to compound instead of disappearing in chat logs.

Happy to answer questions about how it works or why I built it.
by embedding-shape | 2026-01-01 10:15:33+00:00
> On prompts

Could you share the full sessions or at least the full prompts? Otherwise it's too much "just trust us", especially since you're selling a product and we're supposed to use this as "evidence" for why your product is needed.

> without Docker/Podman overhead

What agent tooling you use is affected by that tiny performance overhead? Unless you're doing performance testing or something else sensitive, I don't think most people will even notice any difference as the overhead is marginal at worst.
by littlestymaar | 2026-01-01 10:16:00+00:00
> 1/ AIs are terrible at Zig

Claude isn't, and the zig subreddit is actually full of AI slop projects unfortunately.

And yesterday's front page Zig project was also vibe coded (though in that case the author acknowledged it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46442792)
Ask HN: My post is not shown in "Show HN"
by planela | 2026-01-01 10:16:00+00:00
I have created the following post a few days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46409462,

However it seems like it was never shown. I cannot find it in the search as well. Am I doing something wrong? Is there any specific keyword, that maybe blocks it? Like Poker? Even though I could find multiple results related to poker.
by MORPHOICES | 2026-01-01 10:16:10+00:00
I have been thinking about this idea of reasoning visibility for AI systems, especially in places where rules are strict. Like, in regulated settings, how much do we really need to see inside the AI's thought process. ~

Failures happen a lot in those domains now. They are kind of expected, I guess. But what gets tricky is when something messes up and you have to explain it afterward. Basic stuff, you know.

What parts did the model look at. What did it skip over. And where was it sure of itself or not so much. Those questions do not always have easy answers.

I came up with this way to think about it. Accuracy is what lets a system get out there in the first place. But showing the reasoning, that is what keeps it okay with the regulators later on. It seems important.

For anyone in finance or healthcare or stuff like that. What kind of visibility has worked in real life so far. And the parts where it just does not hold up yet. I am curious about that. It feels like some areas might be better than others, but I am not totally sure.
by adrian_b | 2026-01-01 10:16:47+00:00
Complex exponentials and complex logarithms are useful in some symbolic computations, those involving formulae for derivatives or primitives, and this is indeed the only application where the use of e^x and natural logarithm is worthwhile.

However, whenever your symbolic computation produces a mathematical model that will be used for numeric computations, i.e. in a computer program, it is more efficient to replace all e^x exponentials and natural logarithms with 2^x exponentials and binary logarithms, instead of retaining the complex exponentials and logarithms and evaluating them directly.

At the same time, it is also preferable to replace the trigonometric functions of arguments measured in radians with trigonometric functions of arguments measured in cycles (i.e. functions of 2*Pi*x).

This replacement eliminates the computations needed for argument range reduction that otherwise have to be made at each function evaluation, wasting time and reducing the accuracy of the results.
by kingstnap | 2026-01-01 10:16:57+00:00
Software demand is philosophically limited by the question of "What can your computer do for you?"

You can describe that somewhat formally as:

{What your computer can do} intersect {What you want done (consciously or otherwise)}

Well a computer can technically calculate any computuable task that fits in bounded memory, that is an enormous set so its real limitations are its interfaces. In which case it can send packets, make noises, and display images.

How many human desires are things that can be solved with making noises, displaying images, and sending packets? Turns out quite a few but its not everything.

Basically I'm saying we should hope more sorts of physical interfaces come around (like VR and Robotics) so we cover more human desires. Robotics is a really general physical interface (like how ip packets are an extremely general interface) so its pretty promising if it pans out.

Personally, I find it very hard to even articulate what desires I have. I have this feeling that I might be substantially happier if I was just sitting around a campfire eating food and chatting with people instead of enjoying whatever infinite stuff a super intelligent computer and robots could do for me. At least some of the time.
by cyber_kinetist | 2026-01-01 10:17:34+00:00
To add some context, gold was actually something backed by the US government during the Bretton Woods era (40s-70s), where 1 ounce of gold was pegged to 35 dollars. This was only possible because the US accumulated so much wealth relative to rest of the world after WWII, so they controlled the majority of the gold supply. After the golden age of Keynesian America ended with stagflation in the 70s, the US government had to stop all of their gold from fleeing the country, so this guarantee had to end. Which leads to the Nixon shock, where the dollar (and all other currencies as well) became free-floating, and we enter a brave new world where humanity hasn't lived before (neo-liberalism).

Given all that, it's easy to see why the value of gold has plummeted during the 70s - 00s. Though I could see two reasons as to why gold prices are rising during the last decade:

- Gold is actually just a part of the asset bubble (in the same group as housing, stocks, and crypto), and investment in it is aided by too much money printed by the US government not being used towards productive ends but towards rampant asset speculation.

- The current era of neo-liberalism is going to end pretty soon, and some goldbugs are rooting for the revival of late 19th-century classical capitalism, where gold was actually the international standard. I think this is very unlikely though, even if the US dollar loses its status with the end of the petrodollar system. My guess is we're going to deal with free-floating currencies for quite some time, especially when wars are going to happen and governments have to print more money to sustain their war efforts. (I think the best monetary system would be neither gold or crypto, but instead something like the Bancor (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bancor))
by goku12 | 2026-01-01 10:18:04+00:00
What are you implying? That the civilians of Germany too were involved in the Holocaust under Nazism? Sure, they hated the 'other' groups. But the Nazis had to suspend the earlier Aktion T4 after it attracted a severe revolt from the public. Learning from that experience, the Nazis took enormous efforts to keep the Holocaust out of public sight. If the German civilians had known well about it, would the allied armies have been so surprised and shocked when they discovered the concentration camps?

Don't get me wrong. The Nazis were evil to the core. What they did to the victims is unforgivable. But grouping the civilians with them is a convenient and nefarious justification for their massacre. How many of the thousands of kids among them were Nazis according to you?

Now talking about targeting the German civilians, check out the massive allied firebombings of largely undefended Hamburg (Operation Gomorrah) and Dresden. The attacks claimed the lives of 34K and 25K civilians respectively in a dreadful sequence of events. Horrific accounts and photos of the incidents exist to this day. The incidents were so controversial that even Churchill challenged it in the Parliament. See if you can stomach those accounts.

War is inherently immoral. You just don't fight one if you can. But if that's not an option, then both sides may end up committing horrible war atrocities. All you can hope for is the least bad outcome. And once it's over, you should be introspecting about what went wrong and how to avoid that in the future. For that, an honest acceptance of the barbarity of such atrocities is needed. If you glorify them instead, you aren't all that better than your enemies and you're just setting up the stage for a repeat of that horrible past. So yes, all civilians should be protected.
by david_shaw | 2026-01-01 10:18:38+00:00
Sure, I understand the thread's implication and I'm certainly not saying that it's never true.

But some companies have the choice of hiring, for example, one really great engineer for $500k, and one very solid one for $250k.

Another organization might want to hire three engineers for $250k.

A third, perhaps, wants to hire seven at $100k.

They're all spending the same amount of money, but not every company can "afford" that spend -- especially if they need several engineers working on unique feature sets.

I just think it's a leap to say that every company paying more than average market value is criminal.
by nradov | 2026-01-01 10:18:39+00:00
I think you might be confused by the terminology. Under the ACA (Obamacare) there are a limited set of preventive health services that are covered at no cost to the patient. These are a subset of all preventive care services that meet strict criteria for effectiveness. Cholesterol screening may or may not be included based on your age and diagnosed conditions.

https://www.healthcare.gov/preventive-care-adults/
by numpad0 | 2026-01-01 10:18:41+00:00
I suspect Feynman actually haven't been to the world of the middle-to-bottom sections of the bell curve, where that thinking becomes toxic. It only works because there's collective illusion that minority theorizations can be more correct. Absent that, or that inverted, majority becoming assumed likely more correct, not only one's explanations will be interpreted biased as likely more wrong, but acts leading to majority groups following your round-Earth hypothesis can be seen as manipulative and/or fraudulent. That kind of people(which exist) abusing versions of those lines get annoying fast.
by obdev | 2026-01-01 10:18:43+00:00
How many browser tabs you have open right now?

I find JavaScript and its ecosystem atrocious in many ways, but several browser tabs and Electron/WebView apps running just fine on an early 2010s PC I employ.

I don't see an XAML based C# .NET desktop app performing marginally better than an equivalent well-written Electron app either. In both cases, GPU takes care of the graphics rendering, JIT and GC do what they do, and you might be able to offload the pain points over to C++ through WebAssembly and P/Invoke or COM objects.
by krackers | 2026-01-01 10:19:33+00:00
Maybe slightly related, canon layers provide direct horizontal information flow along residual steams. See this paper, which precisely claims that LLMs struggle with horizontal information flow as "looking back a token" is fairly expensive since it can only be done via encoding in the residual stream and attention layers

https://openreview.net/pdf?id=kxv0M6I7Ud
by buran77 | 2026-01-01 10:20:02+00:00
> the Gazan government strategically uses humans shields

This just means Israel knows they're hitting women and children every time they send a bomb their way.

> the majority of Palestinians still support starting this war

Palestine isn't a democracy with well documented preferences. Israel is though, so why don't you say that a majority of Israelis are fine with the killing of women and children in Gaza?

elcritch, you're beating around the bush but strongly suggesting there's a reasonable justification (not just an explanation) for killing women and children if it suits someone's needs. Does this apply just to Israel killing people in Gaza or universally valid? Because I distinctly remember the US going to war over WMD that never existed. So elcritch, are you saying US women and children are fair game now?