MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by svat | 2026-01-09 18:33:06+00:00
The book Concrete Mathematics started as course notes for a class whose textbook initially was the (dense) "Mathematical Preliminaries" chapter of The Art of Computer Programming (Chapter 1 and roughly the first half of Volume 1), so it can be seen as an expanded and leisurely (and even more delightful, because of all the student jokes and other marginalia) version of that chapter. This is mathematics that Knuth needed for the rest of TAOCP.

So it's more "mathematics for the analysis of algorithms" (incidentally the title of another book by Greene and co-authored by Knuth), and so probably most applicable to the field of "AofA" rather than physics or computer science in general.

Lovely book, very few math books fill one with as much joy as this one.
by fellowniusmonk | 2026-01-09 18:33:06+00:00
This is really all an issue of mapping.

A business maps org structures to reflect the problem spaces topology.

Code maps to reflect the topology and ontology of the problem spaces trying to be solved.

Spaghetti code is where there is no structural mapping, where every workflow/pipeline/process exists as if it is the only one and any code that fulfills that specific request will do.

Ain't nothing wrong with Spaghetti code... except, horrifyingly bad unintended consequences. Race conditions, data corruption, security holes.

Is your code a mountain where every drop of water that falls on it has a deterministic path to the base and little channels and protrusions can be dug or filled in locally and with ease, or is it a poorly knit sweater where any single thread failure, or need to change the pattern, causes unraveling and so altering the sweater requires massive disruption.
by mike_hearn | 2026-01-09 18:33:39+00:00
Why should we aim to increase portability? There's a lot of unstated ideological assumptions underlying that goal, which not everyone shares. Large parts of the industry don't agree with the goal of portability or even explicitly reject it, which is one reason why so much software isn't distributed as web apps.

Security is similar. It sounds good, but is always in tension with other goals. In reality the web doesn't have a goal of ever increasing security. If it was, then they'd take features out, not keep adding new stuff. WebGPU expands the attack surface dramatically despite all the work done on Dawn and other sandboxing tech. It's optional, hardly any web pages need it. Security isn't the primary goal of the web, so it gets added anyway.

This is what I mean by saying it was vague and unclear. Portability and security are abstract qualities. Demanding them means sacrificing other things, usually innovation and progress. But the sort of people who make portability a red line never discuss that side of the equation.
by grayhatter | 2026-01-09 18:33:47+00:00
> it is a totally unnecessary political statement which fragments their userbase and introduces a political dimension to any procurement decision involving Cloudflare.

My take was, If you need help from the current State Department, or the current administration, (and I assume they do) it absolutely is a necessary statement. And then, this is them trying very hard to suck up, as is required, without pissing off everyone.

Perhaps I'm wrong, and this is actually a form of honesty, instead of performative theater. In which case I would probably agree with you. It's unfortunate. But I default to the assumption that people aren't children by choice.
by armcat | 2026-01-09 18:33:49+00:00
I have a 5070 in my rig. What I'm running is Kokoro in a Python/FastAPI backend - I also use local quantized models (I swap between ministral-3 and Qwen3) as "the brains" (offload to GPT-5.2 inc. web search for "complex" tasks or those requiring the web). In the backend I use Kokoro and generate wav bytes that I send to the frontend. The frontend is just a simple HTML page with a textbox and a button, invoking a `fetch()`. I type, and it responds back in audio. The round-trip time is <1 second for me, unless it needs to call OpenAI API for "complex" tasks. I am yet to integrate STT as well and then the cycle is complete. That's the stack, and not slow at all, but it depends on your HW.
by exe34 | 2026-01-09 18:34:15+00:00
I don't focus on quality because I like quality. I couldn't give a flying toss.

I care about quality because tomorrow I still have to work with this stuff. In 10 years, I have to remember why I decided to do it this way, and I have to be able to extend it to satisfy the business needs then. I leave it in a way I won't want to find the original developer (me) and go full Law Abiding Citizen on them.
by detectivestory | 2026-01-09 18:34:15+00:00
I really like this idea. Simple interface, a single goal, it and it doesn't claim to be a full piano course. However, the user experience is incredibly frustrating for amateur players like myself. For some reason i have to hold down each previous note or else it fails? And often when I do play the right note I get no feedack to say so. Another thing is the annoying wait between listening to the piece and playing every time. It would be nice if user input immediately cut out the example piece
by themaninthedark | 2026-01-09 18:34:45+00:00
More than just a typo:

>In July 2012, LANS issued Solution Package (SP) Report-72, Salt Waste (SP #72) (Revision 1)
to address the processing steps for nitrate salt drums. This document concluded that the
glovebox procedure must be revised or replaced to ensure that the final waste mixture meets or
exceeds 1.2:1 kitty litter/zeolite:nitrate salt as specified by May 8, 2012, LANL-CO white paper.

>In response to SP #72, LANS prepared a major revision to the glovebox operations procedure.
Section 10.6 was added to provide instructions for nitrate salt drum processing. Paragraph
10.6[3] stated “ensure an organic absorbent (Kitty Litter/Zeolite® absorbent) is added to the
waste material at a minimum of 1.5 absorbent to 1 part waste ratio.” The Board concluded that
specifying the use of “organic” absorbent and the omission of the word “clay” in the WCRRF
glovebox procedure was not consistent with the direction provided in the white paper.

https://wipp.energy.gov/Special/AIB_WIPP%20Rad_Event%20Repor...

I remember at the time there was also some concern that the swap had taken place due to a green initiative to use renewable sources rather than something that was mined. there were no sources to back that up except the fact that the organic litter is a little over double the cost of clay litter.
by easyThrowaway | 2026-01-09 18:35:02+00:00
I just want to point out that AGCOM once decided to put out an "Economically Relevant Instagram Influencers Register".

They're not really... let's say, 'on the ball' for understanding how the internet works. It's a bit of a running joke in Italy that their decisions are often anachronistic or completely misunderstanding of the actual technology behind the scenes.

And for the most part they just deliberate, they have no direct judicial authority. They ask an administrative judge to operate on their decisions, which brings us to some of the favourite sentences for any italian lawyer: the... "Ricorso al TAR". ("appeal to the Regional Administrative Court", which is a polite way to say "You messed up, badly and repeatedly, and now we have to spend an eternity trying to sort this out in a court room").
by bee_rider | 2026-01-09 18:35:06+00:00
I think maybe this happens in waves? I’ve been with my SO a while, over a decade at least, so we’ve run through the backlog of stories. But there’s usually at least one or two new things to talk about from our independent lives. I guess if we were both retired, we would probably spend less time apart, and have less time to accumulate stories the other didn’t know about.

Although sometimes we just play the crossword, taking turns on one of our phones, when waiting for the waiter.
by pannolino | 2026-01-09 18:35:10+00:00
I am just translating this from https://www.agcom.it/sites/default/files/provvedimenti/delib....

"In its memoirs, Cloudflare also states that its services: “do not give rise to the transmission of content on the websites of service users; [...] do not allow Cloudflare to know, control, or modify in any way the content of the websites, which always remains available on a third-party web server regardless of its services.”"

:)))

> In addition, we are considering the following actions: > ... > discontinuing Cloudflare’s Free cyber security services for any Italy-based users
by acoustics | 2026-01-09 18:35:17+00:00
I agree that we should not provide targeted subsidies for Twinkies, Mountain Dew, or cigarettes. The whole premise of food stamps is flawed. We should provide cash instead.

If there is an objection that giving cash is equivalent to subsidizing Twinkies, I would push back. Child tax credits are in many ways economically equivalent to cash transfers, but we don't usually see arguments that this is a subsidy for Mountain Dew.
by a4isms | 2026-01-09 18:35:21+00:00
I'm not betting directly on that, but I will say that IF one-person AI-coded SaaS companies become a thing, THEN there will be a huge number of SaaS companies who suddenly find themselves competing with the AI coding tool vendors, who will "dis-intermediate" Enterprise startups by getting Enterprise customers—who already paying hundreds of dollars per seat per month—to go ahead an write their own low- and medium-stakes apps. With or without consultants.

Look at how much they are spending. Think about how HN cheered Tesla's innovation in disintermediating vehicle sales by selling direct. Now think about OpenAI or whomever selling directly to enterprises. It's the same proposition:

"That Enterprise SaaS startup adds a markup to the AI that is powering your app."

Again, this is only IF the AI-vangelists are correct that some startups will collapse to a solopreneur. I am not sure that those same startups won't vanish entirely.\

———

There are some high-stakes apps where Enterprises prefer vendors for extrinsic reasons. For example, some apps must have certain certifications, and in a vibe-coded future, the cost of certification could exceed the cost of development by multiple orders of magnitude. And it needs to be kept up. Another example would be apps where for liability reasons, it is helpful that there be an "industry standard."

But lots and lots and lots of apps are not nearly so consequential.
by theamk | 2026-01-09 18:35:30+00:00
Well yeah, 7400 needs clean power, so you need to have a good power supply. And if you are in a steel mill, you probably add an extra input capacitor or ten, few chokes, and even shield the whole thing. This is somewhat complex, but not impossible. After all, even the worst "super fast runt pulse" won't survive a simple L-C filter, as long as the filter is done correctly (say with bulkhead-type capacitor and metal shielding).

Why then author's company failed to do this? I don't know.. Maybe they didn't have anyone with the right kind of knowledge, maybe they were cash strapped and weren't ready to pay for huge metal boxes and hundreds of EMI filters. (The latter does actually sound plausible - after all the engineer was fired for messing up a single revision of 12"x12" board.. and a good oscilloscope that can see the high-frequency pulses is much much more expensive that such board.)

An example is somewhat famous AN/UGC-74 terminal, which is built on 5400 series (a higher cost version of 7400). I could not find a lot of good pictures, but there are some at [0]. Note:

- Electronics are in many individual sealed metal boxes

- One separate shielded section just for input power filtering

- Dozens of power supply filtering capacitors (small black squares, the "cpu board" seems to have ~1 per chip)

- Weights 100 pounds from all that metal, and not cheap!

I bet that one would work in the steel mill just fine.

[0] http://www.vintagevolts.com/the-an-ugc-74/
by bigyabai | 2026-01-09 18:35:35+00:00
> She warned that the Trump administration was “undoubtedly preparing a pressure campaign to force EU institutions to roll back regulation like the DSA,” urging European lawmakers to treat U.S. diplomatic engagement as an authoritarian threat rather than a policy disagreement.

With a title this atrocious, there's always someone butthurt about Europe defending itself against American monopoly damages.
by vanishingbee | 2026-01-09 18:35:53+00:00
What I see are people returning to the same categorical errors in medicine.

Drawing medical conditions from an urn occasionally yields a true diagnostic, even more so if conditions are weighed in the urn according to their prevalence in society. But disease lottery is no medical practice.

Two essential errors exist in medicine:

1. Delivering a wrong intervention.

2. Failing to deliver an intervention at the right time due to misdiagnosis.

These are the sins of harm and distraction. The metric for judging a system is not whether it gets things right on one occasion, but whether it makes those mistakes on the others.

Doctors err because people and institutions are imperfect, biology is messy, and human variability is immense. But the former can be attenuated by a plurality of opinions and greater resources (including time), while statistical systems are inherently vulnerable to the latter two.

Language models hallucinate and deliver both essential errors - all while speaking in a very confident and convincing manner. What OpenAI is advertising is a system that nudges vulnerable people to abandon, distrust, ignore, or simply avoid seeking true medical practitioners to rely on a statistical system out of an unjustified, naive trust in the machine.

As a reminder to those concerned with healthcare accessibility, picking the wrong solution to a problem for lack of a right one does not solve the problem. That reasoning was the basis of practices such as bloodletting and lobotomy. Time after time again, medical science teaches us the limits of this kind of thinking.
by Freebytes | 2026-01-09 18:36:07+00:00
Merely choosing lines to copy and paste from one file of your own code to another is a learning experience for your brain. AI is excellent for removing a lot of grunt work, but that type of work also reinforces your brain even if you think you are learning nothing. Something can still be lost even if AI is merely providing templates or scaffolding. The same can be said of using Google to find examples, though. You should try to come up with the correct function name or parameter list yourself in your head before using a search engine or AI. And that is for the moist simple examples, e.g. "SQL table creation example". These should be things we know off the top of our heads, so we should first try to type it out before we go to look for an answer.
by Barrin92 | 2026-01-09 18:36:11+00:00
>you can't just go redefining terms until they mean what you want them to mean

Sure I can. There's obviously no one meaning of the term. The Democracy of the Greeks has very little to do with the Democracy of Rousseau, or the 21st century. The Chinese themselves consider their system democratic (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratic_centralism).

And you can make the case that a system that delivers the will of the people has a stronger claim to the term than a system that merely exhausts itself in staging democratic processes with no regards to outcomes.

This is funnily enough even happening within Western societies where people are branded pro or anti-democratic usually based on their affiliation. Laying exclusive ownership to the term is simply a rhetorical tool.
by igneo676 | 2026-01-09 18:36:12+00:00
You've been dealing with the wrong folks then because all Christians should believe what James says when we says

James 2:14-20, 26 (NET) What good is it, my brothers and sisters, if someone claims to have faith but does not have works? Can this kind of faith save him?
If a brother or sister is poorly clothed and lacks daily food,
and one of you says to them, “Go in peace, keep warm and eat well,” but you do not give them what the body needs, what good is it?
So also faith, if it does not have works, is dead being by itself.
But someone will say, “You have faith and I have works.” Show me your faith without works and I will show you faith by my works.
You believe that God is one; well and good. Even the demons believe that – and tremble with fear.
But would you like evidence, you empty fellow, that faith without works is useless?
For just as the body without the spirit is dead, so also faith without works is dead.
by SkiFire13 | 2026-01-09 18:36:17+00:00
That's what a malware can do on a rooted phone, _once it gets root access_, but that doesn't mean a rooted phone is easier for malware to attack.

There's not even that many people using rooted phones, and many are tech savvy people that are generally a bit more careful, so even if a rooted phone gets infected by some malware chances are the malware won't even be written in such a way to try to obtain root permissions through the standard procedure and exploit it.
by hopelite | 2026-01-09 18:36:18+00:00
I’ll at least give you some credit for effort, where the other CIA mush-mind just sent a link to peek CIA-brainwashing central link, but you’re clearly arguing in bad faith because you’re so mentally deranged from the life long conditioning.

But you are a well trained NPC, repeating all the installed “knowledge” you have faithfully, with no ability to even realize the inherent contradictions in your statements and beliefs, largely because what you have been conditioned with like a good mindless NPC is only what the ruling class wants you to know for a fact and then infect others with in places like Reddit. You’re a good zombie infecting and devouring those brains, lacking any ability to recognize you serve those who hate you and you say you hate.

But not matter how angry reality makes you, it does not change whether you hear it from me or not at all.

You are an inherent contradictions, just like the ruling class wants you.
Ask HN: Where are you keeping your LLM logs?
by platypii | 2026-01-09 18:36:35+00:00
LLM logs are crushing my application logging system. We recently launched AI features on our app and went from ~100mb/month of normal website logs to 3gb/month of llm conversation logs and growing. Our existing logging system was overwhelmed (queries timing out, etc), and costs started increasing. We’re considering how to re-architect our llm logs specifically so we can handle more users plus the increasing token use from things like reasoning models, tool calling, and multi-agent systems. I’m not selling any solutions here, genuinely curious what others are doing. Do you store them alongside APM logs? Dedicated LLM logging service? Build it yourself with open source tools?
by codelikeawolf | 2026-01-09 18:37:24+00:00
> Let's not go into that for the millionth time

Ok, that's fair. My goal with this question wasn't to open a can of worms. But whenever I see a strong averse reaction to JS, I assume that the person hasn't tried using _modern_ JS.

> why is TS wildly successful

From my perspective, it stops me from making stupid mistakes, improves autocomplete, and adds more explicitness to the code, which is incredibly beneficial for large teams and big projects. But I don't think that answers my original question, because if you strip away the types, it's JS.

> even before that everyone was trying to use anything-but-js

Because JS used to suck a lot more, but it sucks a lot less now.
by izacus | 2026-01-09 18:37:30+00:00
> If someone steals the secrets from a rooted phone and steals customer's money the bank is on the hook, so banks do everything they can to minimize this risk.

Now that's just not true now, is it? Sure the lawyers told you that (the ones that get paid to tell you that), but nowhere in EU was a bank actually fined for not root checking a device.

They were plenty fined by being utterly incompetent with security practices and doing them poorly - like trying to inject wierd .SOs to do the root detection you're defending.
by Arainach | 2026-01-09 18:37:33+00:00
>Beautiful code only tends to exist in open source.

This hasn't been my experience at all. Beautiful code happens when strong experienced developers are present - either as the authors or as leads instilling good culture on teams. It exists where teams acknowledge that someone (maybe even them) will have to come back to this code in the future. There is plenty of beautiful code inside the non-OSS repositories of Google, Microsoft, and others.
by lostmsu | 2026-01-09 18:37:46+00:00
> Officers are trained to never approach from the front.

False. Officers are trained to avoid approaching from the front.

> Shooting a driver in a vehicle headed towards you does not stop the vehicle.

False, especially when vehicle has little momentum like in this case.

> This officer ignored all of his training

That is to be discovered

> because he wanted to kill someone

Baseless accusation.

> It's unconscionable to defend it.

Looks like what you are doing is unconscionable. I am OK thank you.
by agwa | 2026-01-09 18:37:59+00:00
2FA doesn't stop phishing unless it's WebAuthn. But SendGrid, which is owned by Twilio, only supports 2FA based on SMS or the Authy App (which is also made by Twilio): https://www.twilio.com/docs/sendgrid/ui/account-and-settings...

It seems like Twilio has a conflict of interest that prevents them from offering WebAuthn, as that would be a tacit admission that their SMS and Authy products are not actually that secure.
by lukeschlather | 2026-01-09 18:38:43+00:00
> I get that, but I do witness a lot of compassion and help directed to homeless folks. However, even if they're regularly gifted by strangers, it's likely not enough to materially change their situation.

When I've looked at the data, the majority of homeless people have been homeless less than 12 months. This means that the majority of homeless people who benefit from support will use it to get out of that situation quickly. And for the most part, if you give help it will be immediately and materially useful.
by teiferer | 2026-01-09 18:38:48+00:00
I'm normally in the camp of "why flood HN with AI crap" and if you are not a musician then I can see why this seems unnecessary. But as a musician, this is a great learning tool. Every musician should be able to play by ear (and I had to ramp up the difficulty substantially to get a bit of a challenge). AI generated or not, this is useful.
by wvenable | 2026-01-09 18:39:02+00:00
You might as well stop being a software developer. Not because you'll be out of job, but because you're directly contributing to other people being out of jobs. We've been automating work (which is ultimately human labor) since the dawn of computers. And humans have been automating work for centuries now. We actually call that progress. So lets stop progressing entirely so people can do pointless labor.

If the problem is with society the solution is with society. We have stop pretending that it's anything else. AI is not even the biggest technological leap -- it's blip on the continuum.
by JohnFen | 2026-01-09 18:40:00+00:00
I'm familiar with Venmo and Paypal, so I'd pick either of those just because they're known to me. I'm not opposed to Klarna, but I know nothing about it and so would avoid the learning curve and account creation if I had another option. I'd go with a card if I had to, but that's higher friction because I'd need to set up a temporary throwaway card to do that.