MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Q_is_4_Quantum | 2026-03-13 03:13:59+00:00
Fun read!

I have an extremely vague question; Is there one of these "stupid" ways of computing pi that doesn't involve an infeasible (to humans) infinity? I'm comparing to the "have pick people random integers and the probability they are coprime is 6/pi^2" method, which, again, to really work involves some poor people wasting an infinity of their lives. Your scheme does too from what I understand? Is this necessary?

Off topic: If you search for "quantum bernoulli factory" you will find some work I did that shows f(p)=2p is achievable if your "quantum coins" are presented as coherent superpositions instead of classical incoherent mixtures. Your work on exact sampling completely blew my mind (I'm a physicist!) while I was trying to undersantd that whole field.
by fc417fc802 | 2026-03-13 03:14:52+00:00
No, we definitely should punish bureaucrats and enforcers who act negligently. If someone in a position of authority flagrantly fails to do his job and it directly harms someone he should be held accountable. That would provide a strong incentive for future actors to take their responsibilities seriously.

If an engineer signs off on an obviously faulty building plan and people die as a result we hold him accountable. This is no different.
by chmod775 | 2026-03-13 03:14:53+00:00
You must have been reading something else, because this article includes all of that information.

> In Tennessee, she was given a court appointed lawyer for the extradition process. To fight the charges, she was told she would have to go to North Dakota.

> Officers from North Dakota did not pick up Lipps from her jail cell in Tennessee until Oct. 30 — 108 days after her arrest. The next day she made her first appearance in a North Dakota courtroom to fight the charges.

> "If the only thing you have is facial recognition, I might want to dig a little deeper," said Jay Greenwood, the lawyer representing Lipps in North Dakota.
by akoboldfrying | 2026-03-13 03:15:20+00:00
After bogo-sort, it's the most badness-maximising "solution" I've ever come across. Why bother asking for the creator's consent to copy and run the original bytes, when you could instead ask for their consent to have a robot that no one understands and could potentially do anything read a few paragraphs of text describing what those bytes do, imagine how it might work, and try to build something resembling that from scratch, using a trillion or so times more energy.
by sidrag22 | 2026-03-13 03:15:26+00:00
totally disagree, rag crafts the agent and delegates what sources should be scored/chunked in what manner, if its leaving itself open to some potential source gaming the system like this, it is a lack of preparation.

For some use cases, this is totally whatever, think a video game knowledge base type rag system, who cares.

Finance/medicine/law though? different story, the rag system has to be more robust.
by gatreddi | 2026-03-13 03:16:56+00:00
Detection is still the weak link, that part is true. But the equation is shifting. Surveys like NASA’s NEOWISE mission and the upcoming NEO Surveyor mission are specifically aimed at finding those missing near-Earth objects earlier.

The point of DART mission wasn’t that we can deflect every asteroid tomorrow. It was to prove that physics and guidance actually work in space. Now the playbook is clearer: detect earlier, then nudge early.

If you get even a few years of warning, a tiny velocity change compounds into a huge miss distance. That’s the real takeaway.
by seer | 2026-03-13 03:19:08+00:00
When I’m interviewing I never ask a question about something I know super well. I circle around what the candidate signals he has great passion and understanding at, and start deep diving into that.

If I know about it as well, then we can have a really deep discussion, if I don’t- then I can learn something new.

The aim when interviewing is to check how well / deeply the interviewee can think through a problem.

If we pick a topic that they don’t have deep knowledge - they can either stumble and freeze emotionally, or hallucinate something just to appear smart. At this point it is an examination not an interview. And sure some people are capable enough to get to an answer, but that’s more of a lottery than a real analysis.

It usually boils down to how often have they interviewed before and been in a similar situation. And “people who have interviewed a lot” is hardly a metric I want to optimise for.

Now picking something they know or have expressed interest or passion in, this means we are sure to have more signal than noise. If the interviewee’s description is more of a canned response - then I delve deeper or broader.

“I’ve managed to solve this issue by introducing caching” - “Great, are there other solutions? How do you handle cache invalidation, what are the limits? What will you do if the load increases 10 fold, would you need to rethink the solution?”
by GianFabien | 2026-03-13 03:21:42+00:00
Good on you for rising up to the ranks of Linux/BSD.

You just need to recognize that not everybody aspires to be competent with lower-levels of hardware and software that Apple makes that much more difficult. Most Apple users are content to use apps written by others and that is as far as their interest goes.

An analogy is the car market. Most people don't care how the car works, etc. They just want to get to places. If you only need to drive to the shops and do minimal errands, you don't even need a truck - a sedan will do just fine. Same with computers, lots of different market segments with distinct needs and expectations.
by d--b | 2026-03-13 03:22:06+00:00
What’s remarkable to me, beyond the total incompetence and stupidity of all the police people involved, is how incredibly aggressive the intervention was.

This is bank fraud case, for god’s sake, not an armed robbery. I don’t know the scale of it, but still, no one said she was a danger to anyone. She was a suspect, not a convict, and she was held at gunpoint while babysitting young children. What in the fucking world?

The US is so fucked up lately. People should chill the fuck out.
by TheDong | 2026-03-13 03:22:11+00:00
They don't have an open source kernel. You can't recompile the kernel or build your own device drivers. I'm not sure what you mean by "learning about computers", but I personally find being able to peek into the kernel source code to be more educational than anything in the mac ecosystem.

The hardware here is incredible, but it's crippled by not adequately supporting Linux, BSD, or any other properly open source kernel you can compile and install yourself. A good learning environment doesn't put up immovable barriers like "you need a kernel signed by apple", it lets you push away barriers when you're ready, like "Are you sure you want to turn off secureboot, or install your own secureboot keys"
by jaggederest | 2026-03-13 03:22:27+00:00
This is my favorite example, from a long time ago. I wish I could record the "Read Aloud" output, it's absolute gibberish, sounds like the language in The Sims, and goes on indefinitely. Note that this is from a very old version of chatgpt.

https://chatgpt.com/share/fc175496-2d6e-4221-a3d8-1d82fa8496...
by 1vuio0pswjnm7 | 2026-03-13 03:22:45+00:00
"1. I am very technical"

What does this mean

https://ianix.com/pub/x25519-deployment.html

For example, does "technical" mean curious, enjoys learning, motivated to take things apart to understand them, ...

Does it mean likes to create accounts, signs up for websites, apps, etc., heavy social media user, terminally online,...

What does it mean
by stuporglue | 2026-03-13 03:22:58+00:00
I started college with a white G3 iBook. By the end of freshman year I had installed Yellow Dog Linux, then Suse, Mandriva and eventually Gentoo.

Now, 20+ years later all my home computers are running Linux (Debian though), and my kids grew up using Linux.

But I'm going to send my teenager to college with Windows or a Mac. They're going to be 1200 miles away, and they're going to need to get support for their computer and I won't be there.

Yes, I like Linux 1000x better than Windows or Mac, but Linux demands a different relationship with the admin. This kid hasn't wanted that relationship with tech, and will rely on friends to help get Office or Zoom or whatever installed.

I'm still deciding between Mac and Windows now. I'll probably end up getting a quality used business laptop from FB marketplace, but the Neo is interesting too.
by anupshinde | 2026-03-13 03:24:24+00:00
Just yesterday I had a moment

Claude's code in a conversation said - “Yes. I just looked at tag names and sorted them by gut feeling into buckets. No systematic reasoning behind it.”

It has gut feelings now? I confronted for a minute - but pulled out. I walked away from my desk for an hour to not get pulled into the AInsanity.
by iamnothere | 2026-03-13 03:24:29+00:00
Whatever euphemism you use, these bills are attempting to force FOSS devs into doing poorly defined and often contradictory work FOR FREE while accepting legal liability for that same work. At the same time they are opening the door for legislatures to specify how FOSS OSes should work, a truly terrifying and unprecedented event that likely violates the first amendment. The bills must be crushed, and after we crush them we must salt the earth.
by GreenWatermelon | 2026-03-13 03:25:02+00:00
> my ears, "to help me find wording that conveys my thoughts the way I want them to be understood by the reader" conveys the same meaning as "to search for a way to formulate my thoughts like I intend them to be received by the reader"

I disagree with your disagreement and subjective take. The LLM changed the meaning in a significant but not very obvious way.

Compare "I use a hammer to drive nails" to "I use a hammer to help me drive nails"

In the former the writer implies tool use, in the latter the LLM turned that into some sort of assistant relationship. The former is normal, the latter is cringe (to my ears)
by MBCook | 2026-03-13 03:25:54+00:00
> then what most young people use daily.

Most people are using Windows or phones where that isn’t an option.

Yeah you can root or change the OS but that seems outside the spirit of the comment to me.

These are Macs. They run Xcode and you can develop apps for your iPhone for free with one.

Yeah you need to pay to distribute, but a computer to do it has never been cheaper.
by pocksuppet | 2026-03-13 03:26:04+00:00
A certain amount of inefficiency or slack is necessary buffer in any system to reduce brittleness. When a problem occurs, a system that is running with 50% slack can recover more easily than a system with 5% slack.

See Germany's rail network, where almost every time-slot is occupied by a train, and then one train is delayed, and the system collapses with nobody getting to their destination on time for the rest of the day, until the overnight buffer.

In queuing problems, queue length (which means latency) is inversely proportional to slack time. If a network link is running a 90% capacity, on average there are 10 packets queued up and a packet that arrives will have to wait for 10 packet transmission times. At 99%, 100. At 99.99%, 10000. And if you try to use exactly 100% of your network link, the expected queue length is infinity, and the expected latency is infinity, which will not occur in practice because sometimes it will exceed available memory and packets will be dropped, even though utilization never exceeded 99.9999...%.
by dinkumthinkum | 2026-03-13 03:26:49+00:00
I see developers talking about this idea of intense and unimaginable excitement about AI. It seems orgasmic for them, like something the hardest drugs couldn't fulfill them. I find it very strange. What exactly is so exciting? I'm not disagreeing but when you say "opportunities I'm racing towards," what does that mean? This idea of "racing towards" sounds so frenetic, I struggle to know what that could mean? What I see people doing with AI is making slop and CRUD apps and maybe some employee replacement systems or something but I don't see this transcendental experience that people are describing. I could see a mortgage collapse or something like that, maybe that's what is so exciting? I don't know.
by Animats | 2026-03-13 03:26:55+00:00
If you put part of the address in the body space, you can't encrypt the entire body.

IPv6 adoption has been linear for the last two decades. Currently, 48% of Google traffic is IPv6.[1] It was 30% in 2020. That's low, because Google is blocked in China. Google sees China as 6% IPv6, but China is really around 77%.

Sometimes it takes a long time to convert infrastructure. Half the Northeast Corridor track is still on 25Hz. There's still some 40Hz power around Niagara Falls. San Francisco got rid of the last PG&E DC service a few years ago. It took from 1948 to 1994 to convert all US freight rail stock to roller bearings.[2] European freight rail is still using couplers obsolete and illegal in the US since 1900. (There's an effort underway to fix this. Hopefully it will go better than Eurocoupler from the 1980s. Passenger rail uses completely different couplers, and doesn't uncouple much.)[3]

[1] https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R-1EZ6K7bpQ

[2] https://rail-research.europa.eu/european-dac-delivery-progra...
by bri3d | 2026-03-13 03:27:41+00:00
You played in hard mode in a weird sense; more modern DDR versions are in a backwards sense "easier" if you're buying the IP, because a lot of the training has moved to boot time and is handled by the vendor IP rather than needing to be run during burn-in using some proprietary toolkit or self-test tool.

It's just as arcane and weird, but if you buy one of the popular modern packages for DDR4/5 like DesignWare, more and more training is accomplished using opaque blob firmware (often ARC) loaded into an embedded calibration processor in the DDR controller itself at boot time rather than constants trained by your tooling or the vendor's.
by lapcat | 2026-03-13 03:28:02+00:00
In my opinion, this article looks like a straw man argument, and the author appears to completely misinterpret "This is not the computer for you."

Such a statement needs to be understood in the relevant context. It's not intended to discourage kids from buying a Mac! Rather, it's intended to rebut critics who are already Mac owners and who scoff at the MacBook Neo technical specs, such as RAM. The computer is indeed not for them, people who can already afford a MacBook Pro, for example. The point of "This is not the computer for you" is the opposite of how the author characterized it: the point is that the MacBook Neo and its specs are actually fine for the people who are going to buy one.

For some strange reason, the author has invented an imaginary opponent to become offended by. We're supposed to cheer for the kids here, and I see that many people have fallen for it, but the whole schtick falls completely flat for me. The kids were never endangered or discouraged by the reviews of the MacBook Neo.
by paulddraper | 2026-03-13 03:29:08+00:00
> It specifically does it for division through zero as if it wants to be a junior grade calculator just for this one thing.

Not just division by zero.

math.sqrt(-1)

math.log(-2)

are errors as well.

I agree that using both errors and float('nan') is odd.

Tbf, C mixes errors (for integers) and NaN (for floats).
by _heimdall | 2026-03-13 03:29:25+00:00
What experience do you have working directly in the oil industry? You're making very specific and bold claims related to the fungibility of oil, oil infrastructure, transpiration, etc and they simply don't line up with my experience.

You won't replace oil pipelines or sea-based transportation by importing tanker trucks, its completely inpheasible on any reasonable timescale.

Similarly, you will never replace petroleum-based transportation at scale in any near term future with electric or other non-petroleum sources. The power to weight ratio of oil, ease of transport of liquid oil, and scale of petroleum a powered vehicles is simply unmatched. Go ahead and do the math on what it takes to replace a diesel oil tanker at sea to cross from Iran to China or the US to Europe, and don't forget to consider all the materials required to make battery storage equipment for such a trip. It doesn't work today and we aren't near a solution today that can replace oil with a viable, sustainable alternative.
by akoboldfrying | 2026-03-13 03:30:10+00:00
> but under the dynamic model every receiver is its own system boundary

I'm not claiming that it can't be done that way, I'm claiming that it's better not to do it that way.

You could achieve security by hiring a separate guard to stand outside each room in your office building, but it's cheaper and just as secure to hire a single guard to stand outside the entrance to the building.

>micro services emerged to provide a way to hack Kay's actor model onto languages that don't offer the dynamicism natively

I think microservices emerged for a different reason: to make more efficient use of hardware at scale. (A monolith that does everything is in every way easier to work with.) One downside of microservices is the much-increased system boundary size they imply -- this hole in the type system forces a lot more parsing and makes it harder to reason about the effects of local changes.
by TheDong | 2026-03-13 03:30:12+00:00
Asahi linux effectively only supports the M1 and M2 chips, so even a modern macbook air won't work, and even on "supported devices" you can't use thunderbolt or a usb-c display yet.

These use the A series chip, and even supporting new M chip revisions has been enough of an undertaking that I wouldn't really expect this to get Asahi linux anytime soon....

And apple can lock down the bootloader to be closer to the iPad/iPhone at any time with no notice, and based on their past actions, it would be quite in-line with their character to do so.
by wolvoleo | 2026-03-13 03:31:01+00:00
The one thing I'd really miss here is the backlit keyboard. Too bad they cut it. And made it not even an option.

Including that omission it's very reminiscent of the surface laptop go. I'm surprised other reviews haven't made that connection. Similar price, features, the works. Even missing the fingerprint on the base model, just like the surface laptop go. The funky colours. People are acting like apple invented this class of midrange laptop but they didn't.
by t-writescode | 2026-03-13 03:31:13+00:00
It’s a reference to a famous YouTube video[0] about how to write instructions that can be followed.

One of the most important things a programmer needs to do is learn how to tell a computer how to do something. It’s a surprisingly hard skill because each step is way more complicated and has way more variables to go through.

https://youtu.be/FN2RM-CHkuI
by bri3d | 2026-03-13 03:31:26+00:00
What you're saying is true, but the OP has a point too.

What's basically happening is that as things get faster the lifetime of training data decreases because the system becomes more sensitive to environmental conditions, so training procedures which were previously performed earlier in the manufacturing cycle are now delegated to the runtime, so the system migrates from data to code.

Previously, you or the vendor would provide tools and a calibration system which would infer some values and burn a calibration, and then load it during early boot. More recently, the runtime is usually a combination of a microcontroller and fixed-function blocks on the DDR PHY, and that microcontroller's firmware is usually supplied as a generic blob by the vendor. The role of this part of the system keeps growing. The system has gotten a bit more closed; it's increasingly moved from "use this magic tool to generate these magic values, or read the datasheets and make your own magic tool" to "load this thing and don't ask questions."
by MBCook | 2026-03-13 03:32:02+00:00
I took the article as talking about the difference between reviews that say “this computer is not going to be great at X” and the reviews that say “this machine is only good for office tasks or Y“. The gatekeeping tone.

It can do most anything. It may not be amazing, but people get buy. And they may be ok with it.

I saw tons of comments in the original post about the Neo from people who talked about how they used extremely old hand-me-down/used laptops to learn to start programming and fall in love with computers.

I was just watching a video from ETA PRIME who tests lots of small computers to see how good they are for gaming.

He was playing RoboCop on it, and it ran pretty well. 45-ish FPS. It was using 11 gigs of RAM at the time. So it was obviously in swap.

Is that ideal? No. But it works.
by GreenWatermelon | 2026-03-13 03:32:12+00:00
There is also significant meaning encoded in the parent's choice of words that implies more than what's written. "Formulate", "intend", and "receive" imply the parent comes from a technical or academic background, and this is how they express their thoughts. Parent has "intentions", not mere "wants". To the parent, the act of weaving together a comment for communication constitutes "Formulating thought", which is different from just "find wording"
by necovek | 2026-03-13 03:32:29+00:00
Speed limit is only a proxy for your braking distance in case of emergency braking (at least in most cases, but also a proxy for bad road conditions in others): the point is to ensure safety, and not a particular speed.

I've driven behind drivers driving 25km/h in a 40km/h area and not stopping for pedestrians at a crosswalk with right of way (if somebody jumped out elsewhere, they'd probably just run them over at 25 km/h), whereas I always do even if I am driving at 45km/h because my foot would be hanging over the brake near areas of low visibility (like intersections) or near crosswalks or with pedestrians near the road.

Your braking distance is largely a function of your reaction time (attention + pre-prep + reflexes), and your car performance (tyres, brakes) on top of the speed, and speed limits are designed for the less than median "driver". You obviously have most of those under your control, but the speed is the easiest to measure externally.

The obvious counter is that I could be even safer if I also drove at 25 km/h, but it would take me much longer, I'd hit many more red lights, so I might stop being so attentive because I am going "so slow" and taking so long (maintaining focus is hard the longer you need to do it).

However, measuring individual performance is prohibitively expensive if not impossible (as it also fluctuates for the same person, but also road and car conditions), so we use a proxy like speed limit that is easy to measure.