MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by lefra | 2026-02-15 07:58:47+00:00
There's several ussues with this argument:

- If the interference pattern was explained by diffraction by a semi-infinite plane, why don't I see it when using only one finger? I only see a blurry shadow. The second finger is needed to make the pattern appear.

- All formulas that are used compute the light intensity projected on a screen. In the actual experiment, we're looking at the slit through a lens (our eye or a camera). That's not the same thing.

- The fact that this is white light interference is handwaved away. To model it correctly, you'd need to compute what happens at each wavelength, then integrate the resulting spectrum multiplied by CIE's x, y z functions at each point, and finally do a bunch of math to bring that in the sRGB color space if you want to display the model's result on a screen.
by archagon | 2026-02-15 08:01:14+00:00
Reminds me of a project idea I had. You'd get a little Raspberry Pi style board with BTLE and battery power (ideally lasting for weeks at a time) and stick it in some communal location, e.g. a cafe or library. Then you'd have it run some local-only forum software and disseminate instructions for connecting to it. The point would be to have a local-only digital community, confined to a particular location by design. Kind of in the vein of Community Memory.

It's probably too impractical, but I think it would be neat to have a digital space that you have to actually go to in the real world.
by aix1 | 2026-02-15 08:01:46+00:00
I am sure this is true. On the flip side, as someone who is addicted to learning stuff, I've been finding LLMs to be amazing at feeding my addiction. :)

Some of my recent use cases:

* foreign languages ("explain the difference between these two words that have the same English translation", "here's a photo of a mock German exam paper and here is my written answer - mark it & show me how I could have done better")
* domains that I'm familiar with but might not know the exact commands off the top of my head (troubleshooting some ARP weirdness across a bunch of OSX/Linux/Windows boxes on an Omada network)
* learning basic skills in a new domain ("I'm building this thing out of 4mm mild steel - how do I go about choosing the right type of threading tap?", "what's the difference between Type B and Type F RCCB?")

Many of these can be easily answered with a web search, but the ability to ask follow-up questions has been a game changer.

I'd love to hear from other addicts - are there areas where LLMs have really accelerated your learning?
by ozgrakkurt | 2026-02-15 08:02:01+00:00
I was calculating timings and compression ratio for each array with each algorithm. Then I would save the “best” one to use for next chunks of data.

But it is hard to decide how to judge the cpu vs disk/network tradeoff like you explain in the article.

I was a bit curios if I could make an API so on the top level user enters some parameters and the system can adjust this calculation according to that.

But had some issues with this because the hardware budget used by all parts of the system, not only by the compression code.

As an example network is mega fast in data center but can be slow and expensive when connecting to a user. The application can know which case it is executing but it is hard to connect that part of the code into the compression selection stuff cleanly.

Also on network case. It might make sense to keep data large but cpu time low until I hit the limit but nothing matters when I hit the limit.

Would be cool to have a mathematical framework to put some numbers in and be able to reason about the whole picture
by VorpalWay | 2026-02-15 08:02:09+00:00
Other good examples: Linuxthreads to NTPL (for providing pthreads), XFree86 to Xorg.

I was using Gentoo at the time, which meant recompiling the world (in the first case) or everything GUI (in the second case). With a strict order of operations to not brick your system. Back then, before Arch existed (or at least before it was well known), the Gentoo wiki was known to be a really good resource. At some point it languished and the Arch wiki became the goto.

(I haven't used Gentoo in well over a decade at this point, but the Arch wiki is useful regardless of when I'm using Arch at home or when I'm using other distros at work.)
by FrinkleFrankle | 2026-02-15 08:03:35+00:00
Just because a calculator will only ever be used by a subset of the population to type 80085 and giggle, doesn't mean it can't also be used for complex calculations.

AI is a tool that can accelerate learning, or severely inhibit it. I do think the tooling is going to continue to make it easier and easier to get good output without knowing what you're doing, though.
by Haven880 | 2026-02-15 08:04:17+00:00
I would expect this a 40 years adventure. Are you sure? We know Bush and Dick underestimated against goat herders and Babylon opponents without support that still inflict Americans 10T usd and 20 years of wastefulness allowing China to leap frog. Another 40 years to absolute give China the world dominance and load one 100T extra debts? What they teach at Westpoint? Maybe Putin can assist a better training syllabus.
by HDThoreaun | 2026-02-15 08:04:59+00:00
I think the seat post and the angle of the fork are issues but I just don’t think that the greatness of an image of a bicycle has anything to do with whether you can tell that the fork is a separate piece of metal from the frame. The prompt here isn’t about making an image so that an alien who has never seen a bike can make one, it’s about people recognizing that it’s a normal looking bike and the emotional response that comes from that. The emotional response the vast majority of people have looking at this isn’t “that bike won’t ride”
by palmotea | 2026-02-15 08:06:29+00:00
> I think the AI-coding skill that is likely to remain useful is the ability (and discipline) to review and genuinely understand the code produced by the AI before committing it.

> I don't have that skill; I find that if I'm using AI, I'm strongly drawn toward the lazy approach. At the moment, the only way for me to actually understand the code I'm producing is to write it all myself. (That puts my brain into an active coding/puzzle solving state, rather than a passive energy-saving state.)

When I review code, I try to genuinely understand it, but it's a huge mental drain. It's just a slog, and I'm tired at the end. Very little flow state.

Writing code can get me into a flow state.

That's why I pretty much only use LLMs to vibecode one-off scripts and do code reviews (after my own manual review, to see if it can catch something I missed). Anything more would be too exhausting.
by brabel | 2026-02-15 08:07:23+00:00
> In Java it’s called Vector / list refers to linked list

What?!! No! Vector is almost never used in Java code. When you need index-based access, ArrayList is the much more common one, and it does implement List. So I would agree with parent commenter that List is the equivalent in Java.

A List in Java is a container that allows iterating over items efficiently, but does not necessarily provide efficient random access: https://docs.oracle.com/javase/8/docs/api/java/util/List.htm...

If you care about why Vector is nearly never used: it is synchronized by default, making it slower and more complex than ArrayList. Most Java programmers would prefer to implement synchronization themselves in case multi-threading is required since it nearly always involves having to synchronize multiple list operations at the same time, which cannot be done with Vector.

It's the same reason no one uses StringBuffer, but StringBuilder.
by wiether | 2026-02-15 08:08:34+00:00
Direct webhooks have been removed but you can still use webhooks to send messages to Teams using PowerAutomate.

It's messier to set and maintain but it works as intended and also you can add more things to the workflow.

If you just want a URL to send json to, the new way is awful.
But if you want to have more control, now you can.

Sometimes I like the PowerAutomate way, sometimes I hate it...
by saagarjha | 2026-02-15 08:08:43+00:00
> A couple months ago, I found that particular bridge was next to an office building inhabited by some of my old colleagues. A start-up I had been a part of in New York. Where I was the first employee. I had owned equity. They had eventually sold for $350 million.

It is depressing easy to have this happen and even worse how many people are convinced it could never be them.
by numpad0 | 2026-02-15 08:08:44+00:00
Frankly, this sounds like some people aren't so comfortable with the sheer cost of the machine than their absolute utility. CT and MRI scan machines are something that said to cost like $1m/yr/unit that's ~$500 uninsured/$100 insured per run in Japan that China don't publish data on numbers or distributions of. That says "military grade expensive" written all over.
by echelon | 2026-02-15 08:10:43+00:00
I don't think we should cheer on one of the largest companies in the world to build a product to get them even more enterprise stranglehold.

The praise for this monopoly is misdirected. Every single one of you, unless you're a significant GOOG shareholder, should be wanting for antitrust breakup of Google. They're putting pressure on your wages and other investments, and they're contributing to a ceiling for other startups and companies.

Google engineers are brilliant, but the corporation itself needs to be horizontally dismantled into several Googles that all compete with one another. (Not simply a vertical breakup along product lines, but rather the old-school "Ma Bell" style breakup that creates companies that then have to compete on the same offerings.)

A breakup would be good for GOOG investors too, because there's far more value locked up in the company and far too many opportunities left by the wayside.
by a2128 | 2026-02-15 08:10:46+00:00
This is terrible for transparency and record keeping. X has also blocked internet archive access under similar concerns, but the end result was that now it's very difficult to tell who said what and when, posts can be deleted or edited, and no public figure can be held accountable for something wrong they said, or making contradictory statements over time, via a trustworthy archive.

You just have to rely on screenshots that may or may not have been fabricated, and maybe nobody's even captured a screenshot. If it's a public figure you normally trust, versus some random people's screenshots, of course you're gonna dismiss the screenshots as fake. It feels almost intentional to bring the platform into the dark ages.
by palmotea | 2026-02-15 08:11:46+00:00
> LTO tape exists and should last 30 to 50 years in good storage conditions.

Except tape is now rare-bird datacenter thing. Super expensive, and hard to find drives.

The nice thing about discs is they're a mass market consumer medium, so drives have (historically) been very readily available, and they typically have backwards compatibility with old formats.
by ggm | 2026-02-15 08:11:49+00:00
I miss russetted apples. Rough skin, go fantastic with Wensleydale or Cheshire, sharp or chalk crumb cheese.

They just don't exist in Australian fruit, as if the industry has decided not to do them. I think russetting is held to be "not what the consumer wants"

Maybe they're a speciality of the English cider industry.
by Haven880 | 2026-02-15 08:12:59+00:00
4 years with confirmed Crimea and 20% new land into Russia constitution. Tried and defeated every conventional American weapon. Assisted Iran to let them know how to jam starlink. Oreshnik? Against entire EU and standing much much stronger with 1-2M soldiers trained. Helped NKorea to be significantly stronger to pin down American troops in SKorea? Rise of Brics processing account siphoning 40% of swift volume making it now dark to western analyst? You ask anyone if that is a big lost. And take a look at Ukraine 2 generation of men gone especially the fertile one. This setup for Ukraine war 2 to finish the job 1-2 decades down the road (read how Chechen got tamed). American did that with Iraq 1 and Iraq 2 wars. I dont even know what is the outcome. While Americans drilling oil in Syria, China is deploying Thorium reactors right now. Meanwhile Americans is planning bigger sitting duck fleets that can wipe out by multiple Oreshnick that cost a few million dollars. The golden duck cost? Estimated 22B.
by shevy-java | 2026-02-15 08:13:27+00:00
The ArchWiki is indeed pretty good. I used to prefer the gentoo wiki
back in the days but I think the ArchWiki may be better at this point
in time.

It's also interesting to see that many other Linux distributions fail
to have any wiki at all, yet alone one that has high quality content.
This is especially frustrating because Google search got so worse now
that finding resources is hard. I tried to explain this problem to
different projects in general; in particular ruby-based projects tend
to have really low quality documentation (with some exceptions, e. g.
Jeremy Evans projects tend to have good quality documentation usually,
but that is a minority if you look at all the ruby projects - even
popular ones such as rack, ruby-wasm or ruby opal; horrible quality
or not even any real quality at all. And then rubyists wonder why
they lost to python ...)
by VorpalWay | 2026-02-15 08:13:55+00:00
AUR is particularly useful because Arch has really simple build scripts. They are bash with some particular function names that you need to define (like "build" and "check") and a few bits of package metadata in variables. Pretty intelligible even if you don't know the format beforehand.

Contrast that with Debian build scripts which I never managed to figure out. It's dozens of layers of helpers for "common cases" with lots of Makefile magic. Completely inscrutable if you aren't already a Debian package maintainer. Very compact though.
by light_hue_1 | 2026-02-15 08:14:45+00:00
I don't understand if you're intentionally obstinate or just oddly brainwashed? I'll try one last time, in a simple sentence.

Cannot vote for means even if the entire result is tied and it hinges on one vote, my vote does not count under any circumstances; it can't change the outcome at all.

Is that better? 85% of Americans are literally in this situation.
by ofalkaed | 2026-02-15 08:14:57+00:00
Systemd was the end of Arch for me, my rarely used Arch install was massively broken by its first update in ~6 months largely because of systemd. With some work I got things sorted out and working again only to fall into a cycle of breaking the system as I discovered that systemd was very different from what I was used to and did not like me treating it like SysV. Going 6 months without updates would most likely have caused issues with Arch regardless of how stable it had gotten even without the systemd change, but my subsequent and repeated breaking of the system made me realize I no longer had any interest in learning new system stuff, I just wanted a system that would stay out of my way and let me do the things I wanted to use the system for.

I do miss Arch but there is no way I am going to keep up with updates, I will do them when I discover I can't install anything new and then things will break because it has been so long since my last update. Slackware is far more suited to my nature but it will never be Arch.
by shevy-java | 2026-02-15 08:15:55+00:00
I learned linux on debian first. The xserver (x11 or what as its old name) was not working so I had to use the commandline. I had a short debian handbook and worked through it slowly. Before that I had SUSE and a SUSE handbook with a GUI, which was totally useless. I then went on to use knoppix, kanotix, sidux, GoboLinux, eventually ended up with slackware. These days I tend to use manjaro, despite the drawback that is systemd. Manjaro kind of feels like a mix between arch and slackware. (I compile from source, so I only need a base really for the most part, excluding a few things; I tend to disable most systemd unit files as I don't really need anything systemd offers. Sadly distributions such as slackware kind of died - they are not dead, but too slow in updates, no stable releases in years, this is the hallmark of deadness.)
by fauigerzigerk | 2026-02-15 08:16:23+00:00
>What I do know is that I can see plainly that advertising-driven services are among the worse offenders for creating addictive products and other revenue models generally provide healthier incentives to direct development.

I can see plainly that this is not the case and I have given you a number of examples. But I guess we will have to agree to disagree on this one.

>The EU's general approach here is probably better than banning advertising since it diagnoses a clear problem

I also prefer this to a ban because a ban would be incredibly destructive and regressive while this regulation will be merely ineffective.
by twelve40 | 2026-02-15 08:19:21+00:00
yeah that was weird, it was like a cult and some coworkers of mine were religiously hunting down every comment in other people's MR's, just kinda assumed that "no comments" is a hard rule. Very strange, i had to fight many battles for my sanity. There are many cases where you may want to explain why this is coded the way this is coded, not just how.
by VorpalWay | 2026-02-15 08:19:37+00:00
I used Gentoo back in the day and the wiki was good, I even contributed to it at times. Eventually I switched distro (didn't want to spend all my time compiling), and a few years later I went to look at the wiki and it had become much worse.

Do you know what the story was there, what happened? Why was it deleted?
by Sentinel-gate | 2026-02-15 08:21:22+00:00
Encrypted in transit yes, but only between the VPN endpoints. Anything already inside the network (compromised host, rogue container, bad route) sees your queries in cleartext.
TLS on the connection itself gives you end-to-end encryption between your app and Postgres, no matter what's going on in the network in between. Same reason people moved to HTTPS everywhere instead of just trusting the corporate firewall. And with connection pooling you pay the TLS handshake once and reuse it, so the overhead is basically nothing.
Show HN: Tufte Editor – Local Markdown Editor with Tufte CSS Live Preview
by avngr86 | 2026-02-15 08:22:30+00:00
A split-pane Markdown editor that renders live preview with Tufte CSS.
Sidenotes, margin notes, epigraphs, full-width figures, and BibTeX
citations with autocomplete — all in standard Markdown extensions.

Documents are .md files on disk. Images are regular files. Exports to
standalone HTML with Tufte CSS baked in — my use case is writing essays
and uploading them directly to my personal site.

Zero dependencies, no npm install, no accounts, no build step. Just
`node server.js`. ~7 files total.

Full disclosure in the README: I'm a researcher, not a JS developer,
and the code was AI-generated. Contributions and code review welcome.
by somenameforme | 2026-02-15 08:22:43+00:00
Do you not feel you'd just be creating a utopia for criminals? You could take that data and create a program to show, amongst other things, minimum response time by area greatly facilitating crime. And then of course you'd also be essentially ending any undercover operations which are very important for breaking up criminal organizations.

I'm fully on board with bad apples in the police being held accountable, but I'm not sure this sort of idea that you're proposing would accomplish much beyond greatly easing crime and criminality.
Alexei Navalny Was Murdered
by eimrine | 2026-02-15 08:24:57+00:00
Is this fact tells us anything new about the human civilisation? It is curious that there is no politics on the Internets, because this is not a punk area any more and there is no politics any more inside of some countries as well because you may occur a subject of a top-tier assassination while being in a top-tier jail.
by pjerem | 2026-02-15 08:25:09+00:00
I do think we will, at some point, face a knowledge crisis because nobody will be willing to upload the new knowledge to the internet.

Then the LLM companies will notice, and they’ll start to create their own updated private training data.

But that may be a new centralization of knowledge which was already the case before the internet. I wonder if we are going to some sort of equilibrium between LLMs and the web or if we are going towards some sort of centralization / decentralization cycles.

I also have some hope that LLMs will annihilate the commercial web of "generic" content and that may bring back the old web where the point was the human behind the content (be it a web page or a discussion). But that what I’d like, not a forecast.
by JoshuaDavid | 2026-02-15 08:26:48+00:00
It definitely comes up if you're just reviewing an already-"completed" PR. Even if you're not going to ship AI-generated code to prod (and I think that's a reasonable choice), it's often informative to give a high-level description of what you want to accomplish to a coding agent and see what it does in your codebase. You might find that the AI covered a particular edge case that you would have missed. You might find that even if the PR as a whole is slop.
by ofalkaed | 2026-02-15 08:28:01+00:00
Arch was young in those days but I think fairly well known? we were quite vocal, opinionated and interjecting our views everywhere by the time of the Xfree86/Xorg switch. Perhaps it is just my view from being a part of it but I remember encountering the Arch reputation everywhere I went. Or maybe it is just the nostalgia influencing me.
by Nevermark | 2026-02-15 08:28:02+00:00
Definitely int for signed numbers. But I would call it "int64".

Clarity means saying what you mean. The typename int64 could not be clearer that you are getting 64 bits.

This is consistent with your (num32 -->) "int32".

And it would remain consistent if you later add smaller or larger integers.

This also fits your philosophy of letting the developer decide and getting out of their way. I.e. don't use naming to somehow shoehorn in the "standard" int size. Even if you would often be right. Make/let the developer make a conscious decision.

Later, "int" could be a big integer, with no bit limit. Or the name will be available for someone else to create that.

I do like your approach.

(For unsigned, I would call them "nat32", "nat64", if you ever go there. I.e. unsigned int is actually an oxymoron. A sign is what defines an integer. Natural numbers are the unsigned ones. This would be a case of using the standard math term for its standard meaning, instead of the odd historical accident found in C. Math is more universal, has more lasting and careful terminology - befitting universal clarity. I am not a fan of new names for things for specialized contexts. It just adds confusion or distance between branches of knowledge for no reason. Just a thought.)
by zozbot234 | 2026-02-15 08:28:30+00:00
If you buy fresh SSD/NAND media, treat it as write-once (or write to it just a few times) and fill up only a small-enough fraction of the logical space (so that the device can use pseudo-SLC "fast/caching" mode for the entirety of your data) the data on it ought to last a really long time. Especially if you avoid high temperatures during storage, and read it back every few years. Physical data remanence is much more of a concern for NAND that is nearly worn out.
by mbreese | 2026-02-15 08:29:25+00:00
There might be an institutional block in Google due to the way that Google Wave was received. Google has tried (a few times) to get chat to work. It's never quite lived up to expectations (or hype in the case of Wave). Knowing their history, I can see why they'd want to avoid trying to take on that market again. It's difficult to get enough traction with users to make it a successful product.

Not impossible, but it's not like they haven't tried before in the past.