skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Hi all, author of the website here (I'm https://johannes-bader.com/). Wow, thanks for the reactions and many good suggestions! I thought I'd add a bit of context here.

As has correctly been pointed out, Tree Calculus was developed by Barry Jay! The "Specification" page links to his book. And a preview of his PEPM 2025 paper (hi chewxy!) can now be found here: https://github.com/barry-jay-personal/typed_tree_calculus/bl...

Compared to how long Barry has been professionally researching this, I entered the picture yesterday and joined the effort to help. Potential mistakes on the website are mine, not Barry's, but I do firmly believe in some of the "ambitious" wording there. Blog posts and more concrete demos or details to come!

Just for the curious, here is my angle in all this:

I happened to (hobbyist!) research tiny, yet practical, languages for over a decade (see e.g. https://lambada.pages.dev/). In that work I started noticing that the Iota combinator (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iota_and_Jot) is not a combinator in the most traditional sense: It is usually defined as behaving like "\x x S K", but like, how can we just refer to a lambda in the definition of a logic? One could write reduction rules such as "Iota Iota x -> x", but now Iota appears on the left hand side, in argument position! Doesn't that allow reflecting on arguments? Horror! I just started realizing that, while SK is perfectly Turing complete and sane, forcing down the number of combinators from 2 to 1 magically forces some amount of intensionality! Curious, isn't it?

And that's when I came across Barry's work and book! A calculus that embraces intensionality. So I reached out to see if I can help. How can I be most useful? Barry has been figuring out theory, professionally, before I could think. So I felt like helping spread the word, maybe to a less academic developer crowd, would be a more effective way to contribute. I spent my entire career building developer tools, so I have some ideas what could be useful and what might be necessary to convince various kinds of developers. That's how the website came to be, and it is very much a work in progress. We sync regularly, for instance Barry had excellent ideas for demos and I suggested slightly tweaked reduction rules at some point (not more powerful in theory, just more convenient in practice), see "triage calculus" in typed_program_analysis.pdf
Maybe it’s just my own bias because I love prototyping… But I feel in software engineering there’s a fifth D that combines the first and last items on this spectrum. (Sort of like magenta is a color that’s produced by the mix of wavelengths at the opposite ends of the visible spectrum.)

Designing by Doing can cut through a lot of wasted time. If a principal engineer builds a working prototype, it can immediately move the discussion past the “Is that even possible or realistic” stage where lots of ideas go to die.

Leading by doing is often a much better use of an experienced engineer’s time than promoting them to an architect role where they produce diagrams that nobody barely looks at. Design isn’t a panacea.
I'm genuinely curious while skimming Jay’s book, I couldn’t help but notice parallels with LISP-based approaches, which are also tree-structured. How does this differ from those?

Additionally, I have another question: where is this theory [potentially] applied, even if only in niche areas?

Finally, I think there is a glitch in [1] where define "false = t, true = t, etc" I think they meant false = f ? I was mesmerized by a tree representation of not though.

[1] https://treecalcul.us/specification/
Ah, relief
I agree that's why they do it.

I happen to think that some states will want to prosecute people who publish realistic-looking AI generated images without making it explicit that they're generated. I'm wondering if watermarking could be an effective tool for that.

(If I was on a bad mood, I would say that we should make it explicit when images are too heavily photoshoped, too ; but that's an other debat, because tools like Sora make manufacturing lies several order of magnitude cheaper.)
On the other hand by making public what technologies capabilities are - doesn't it stop the problem of people having this tech in secret and using it before anybody is aware it's even possible?

ie a company developing this tech, keeping under wraps and say only using for special government programmes....
Back in the T9 days, it was not uncommon for Japanese to be faster on a cellphone than on a keyboard.

The input algorithm used in Japan wasn't T9, but very similar to the kana-keyboard available on iPhones today, and the prediction (both kana-to-kanji and next word) was quite good as far as I remember.
No kidding.. I didn't think parenthesis hell could get worse than Lisp
> With a gasoline car, dump water and foam onto the wreck and that's it

Well yes, but you need a lot of water. Fuel fires are not something you can tackle with a domestic hose.

However as you point out, normally the reason for a battery fire is because it's shorted, so its not/less oxygen dependent.
I used to agree. But—Part of what they’re working towards is a demonstration that librarians are gonna do stuff like this, and shouldn’t have to do defensive organizational engineering about their archival projects.
Movie stars, matchmakers, and aunties: How WhatsApp became an unstoppable force
As a counterpoint, she recently reviewed a paper in one of her recent videos and completely tore it to shreds as apparently the math was full of absolute nonsense.

This was a fascinating watch, and not the kind of content that is easy to find. Besides videos like that one, I enjoy her videos as fun way to absorb critical takes on interesting science news.

Maybe she is controversial for being active and opinionated on social media, but we need more science influencers and educators like her, who don't just repeat the news without offering us context and interpretation.
I thought it was a joke when I saw the posts on the Reddit homepage celebrating the murder and even the murderer. Partly because I thought Redditors were above that type of thing, but also because I thought it was against their TOS.

It's a real reminder of how little sympathy people can have about people who they consider the enemy or the "other". I'm almost certain nearly all of the people celebrating the murder believe that they're good people and believe in justice too. Humans are so flawed. And I'm not suggesting for a moment I'm above it. I've often noticed how I don't care as much as I should when someone I dislike is harmed or suffers injustice.
> Like I said in another comment, LLMs are cool and useful, but who in the hell asked for AI art?

I did. I started messing around with computer graphics on DOS with QBASIC and consider AI art to be just an extension of that.

On the other hand I don't care all that much for LLMs most of the time. They're sometimes useful, but while I find AI art I enjoy very regularly, using a LLM for something is more a once every couple weeks event for me.
Huh. thanks.
Because Common Lisp has a pretty strong type system. Also at least with SBCL you have some support for gradual typing. Plus REPL-driven development means you catch many errors early on anyway.

The issue with JS is weak typing. Also programmers mostly using batch style programming makes it more frustrating though the browser dev tools are decent.

Dynamic typing is not an issue. Gradual typing can be added later on to an language. JS just needs to add syntax support for type hints so you don't need to rely on JSDOC. The weak typing is a serious design flaw and can't be fixed in a backward compatible way. Maybe with an explicit opt in where you declare types strong is the beginning of your file but that would make JS engines more complicated as they would need to support both and I don't see it realistically happening but one can dream.
Wouldn't the opposite be expected, an aristocratic caste system less equal than an ostensibly democratic society ostensibly based on fairness and human rights?
This is one of those articles which I hoped would generate an interesting discussion, and hence I upvoted it on that basis.
Hi Liam,

What about dynamic websites? For example, a platform-independent chat app.
Javascript has a place, although that place would be better filled by another language. PHP... yes, PHP can be completely replaced by other server side frameworks.
The idea of making people with 19th century views actually live in 19th century conditions is extremely amusing. We could try it, sure.

On a more serious note, I don't think it's accurate or fair to say it's merely because of industry choices.

The US stretched the idea of the common carrier (ie everyone has equal access to send freight on the railroads) to things like oil pipelines and telecommunications lines. Utilities offer services under license from the government and have special rights and subsidies.

I don't think a bank account is that similar. It's essentially floating you a loan - you can cash a fraudulent check and skip out with the money, for example, and the bank eats the cost.
Yeah, I don't know if someone thought this was bad or something, but it seems like valid reasoning. We may need to give these models a sense of things that require more and less detailed reasoning and better knowledge of what they know internally, but the "research work" the model claims to be, it seems like it's doing a good job.

The poster also shared in a comment https://preview.redd.it/u8vs29hq5w2e1.png?width=2704&format=... which did get the intended laugh out of me, but even that seems fair enough. I'm currently traveling in a country where most people speak a language I don't know well. You better believe I've been thinking through even trivial greetings, considering the setting, formality, appropriate follow ups, etc.
Intelligent people are not any less likely to be delusional than anyone. They are however, much better at convincing themselves and others of their delusions.

People that have logic training such as lawyers and engineers even more so.
I have a total of two publications I'd read enough to subscribe to. But as of now they don't even have a tip jar. A real shame because they also have some of the worst kinds of ads. The ones that will take up half your screen estate with an autoplay video levels of bad ads.

>I understand that this doesn’t apply to the ones of people who will reply here claiming that they would never do this.

wouldn't that be a strongly overlapping sub-group to people who take the time to complain as well? Some people just want everything for free, but I imagine a lot of this audience (on a platform to fund entrepreneurs) has higher than average empathy for business realities.
People with ebikes generally charge a .5kwh-1kwh battery indoors every day. Any spare batteries after the initial bike purchase come from Amazon. At that energy density, is there any point to trying to contain a potential fire by, say, setting the battery inside a dutch oven? Or on a stack of sheet rock? Or would it burn well-past hot enough to ignite things outside it?

(edit: Dutch Oven has some thermal mass, but too much heat conductivity. Luckily, there is an actual product for this: UL-rated battery storage/charging boxes)
You can do more than 16 videos for free on Kling per month. Let alone with their price plans. I'm sure it's not equivalent in capability, but all these models suffer from the same technical issues understanding prompts and maintaining physics / temporal coherence anyway.
As a long time IC turned EM; in my experience non-technical EMs are alright, technical EMs are great, but pseudo-technical are the most dangerous both to the company and their direct reports. It's like the midwit meme, but in real life.

Perhaps the belief is somewhat self serving, but I've seen dozens of examples of good non-technical EMs and good technical EMs, but never a good pseudo-technical EM. The pseudo-technical ones are so jaded with technical work that's palpable.

Also, reminds me of the famous Elon Musk quote[1]:

> Managers in software must write great software or it’s like being a cavalry captain who can’t ride a horse!

[1]: https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1522609829553971200
Seeing a fire truck responding to my direct neighbourhood every 10 years sounds about right.
It doesn’t really help with the origin. If the universe is infinite, any possibility will happen in some part of the universe but not necessarily in the part accessible / visible to us. So our part of the universe could have antimatter or a different part could…
isn't it obvious ? synthetic data was nice to generate an underlying distribution and avoid jumps in 'data holes', but with methods like diffusion now it's not as necessary
not relevant to the inconsistency
I am a combination Tech Lead/Line Manager. I'm at a lower position than an Engineering Manager but the problems don't seem that different.

I found that losing touch with the code is disastrous - one cannot make sensible decisions without a familiarity. I need to know how difficult it's getting to write tests and get features done if I'm to make decisions about how to simplify everything for other developers. I have to understand what's possible.

I also cannot really review code well in a PR - it's meaningless until I've worked on that code and thought "oh #$%#$%, we can't do this like this.....!!"

So the decision part of management is just not possible without some time programming. I like to do refactoring - esp of tests and bits of code where I know that people have been in a rush and done a bit too much copy/pasting. I try to make log messages more useful, simplify things that I realise can be simplified. I write scripts to make annoying bits of work trivial so other developers have an easier time. I try to punch through problems with debugging or development.

Some management tasks soak up energy:

* hiring is one. I'm new to it and I am only beginning to have ideas about how to do it more efficiently. I wanted to get my team to help choose people but this ends up taking far too long to arrange. I realise I need to man up and do more of the initial choosing and present them with a limited choice at the end - I want people who will work well with everyone else. No arseholes, however good they might be.

* helping people get their tickets done - which is good work and always worthwhile but to do it well you do need to understand the codebase a bit.

* meetings about future features...which are incredibly inefficient because they're about getting everyone to understand what is wanted and trying to imagine an acceptably rapid way of doing it that will also fit in with other plans. This is very inefficient because people talk a great length then forget and have to understand it all again weeks later. On the other hand, doing work where everyone has a different understanding of what's needed is a deadly problem, so the horrendous hashing-things-out sessions generally pay off in the end. I just wish there was a better way.
It's tied to interest rates. My main concern, frankly, is that those very low interest rates will not return soon and in the meantime the IT job market will be flooded with tons of candidates which will not be absorbed by the market. So at least at the lower end of the job pyramid things will be a bloodbath, which will probably also start pressuring towards the mid-levels. So overall the IT job market will start sucking and the glory days of the 2000s (except for 2000, 2001, 2008, 2009), 2010s and early 2020s will remain behind us.
Where exactly? All I see is "Image to 3D Asset".
How to Prevent Panics in Go
I was able to use this to go from an AI generated image to 3d print. Steps documented here: https://x.com/ryanlanciaux/status/1866163343788007619
How do you get good rates for a mortgage, without a credit score?

How do you even get a mortgage without a credit score?
my experience in australia was that it was like being a fancy receptionist. stupid overtime and low compensation. im not great at selling myself but it id rather be a tradie in this country than in s/w.
> A precondition is likely that one has mainly watched CGI-heavy movies for most of one's life.

Indeed, a great (if counterintuitive) example of this is The Wolf of Wall Street. I bet a lot of people would be surprised at just how much CGI is used in that just for set/location.
I use Bun too, and I found that in many cases `bun build` is a small enough sacrifice to be able to use Typescript... after a certain size maintaining pure Javascript code becomes too difficult for me
Well. Yes, but currently there are no well tested (ie. recommended by the ITsec community) post-quantum cryptosystems as far as I understand.

https://crypto.stackexchange.com/a/61596

But ... AES is believed to be quantum-safe-ish, so with perfect forwards secrecy this exact threat can be quite well managed.

The currently best known quantum attack on AES requires a serial computation of "half of key length" (Grover's algorithm ... so if they key is 128 bit long then it requires 2^64 sequential steps)

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskNetsec/comments/15i0nzp/aes256_i...
This isn't anything parametric but I 3d printed a model from Trellis https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42375951
Microsoft Loosens Windows 11 Install Requirements, TPM 2.0 Not Needed Anymore
Location: Poland (US timezones OK):

Remote: Yes, ok with in-office meetings

Willing to relocate: Yes for epic offers

Technologies:
* Python, Django, FastAPI
* React, React Native
* Kubernetes, AWS, GC, Azure, Terraform, CephFS, GlusterFS, Proxmox, esxi
* PyTorch, Apache Spark, Apache Airflow, Kafka

Résumé/CV: https://michallech.info/static/Michal-Lech-Resume.pdf

Email: michal@michallech.info

Well rounded Full Stack Engineer (and a former CEO) who thrives in high pressure startup environments, mentor, geek and a budding ML/LLM researcher.
> So writing off the criticism

The issue I take is that the criticism is vague and outdated. "It was built in a week" is the only direct piece of criticism, which is simply no longer valid. The JS that was built in a week is long dead.

In fact, the whole article is about how TS = good and JS = bad. Except that Javascript is valid Typescript. So every wart or issue that exists in JS also exists in TS, with the exception of a layer of type safety.
It is video and it has cultivated a community of people who only care about clickbait. At least with X you usually have to write a sentence or two.
I mean, floating point numbers are easy to get wrong. And why care about semantics? This is a data transfer format, it should be able to represent data that is being transferred gazillion times a day.

Make it raw ISO 8601 { "created_at": 2024-12-10T11:20:07Z } and do not accept any other format. I know there are way smarter people than me who can figure this out at this point.

DateTimes are the number 1 reason I can not use JSON data as is (if I simply parse it into a dynamic object like JSON.parse).
If there's a LD.T instruction, it would've been the obvious choice to use that to load a character, instead of wasting an entire word on each. But maybe it didn't exist yet when that code was written.

The console I/O also seems to be dependent on external hardware to delay until the last character has been actually sent, or maybe your prototype was clocked slow enough that this wasn't necessary?

So, if the external data bus is always 24 trits, however addressing is in units of 6 trits, how does the hardware (CPU->memory interface) handle that? Is the address bus using binary instead of ternary?

What I meant by "conventional" is that other than using base 3, it isn't that different from other computer architectures, certainly not the idea you describe in the OP (that must have come later, since it isn't mentioned at all on your website). Some ternary operations might be useful for neural nets, but that wouldn't be an application for a general-purpose processor like this.

And some of the "messiness" might have been fixed, but again, there is absolutely no specification of what this architecture is supposed to be, so I was going from the one snippet of code that you have made public. And maybe you're still making changes, or do you intend to market a commercial microprocessor with absolutely no published specification?
Is the manifest avaiable somewhere in the open?

I would like to see for myself and avoid lurking in the darker corners of the internet to go find it myself. A quick search turned out nothing, but tableoid garbage enjoying the whole thing of speaking about it, but not sharing the sources.
I have a BMI of 20 so I'm not trying to avoid calories. However I do try to avoid sugar, UPFs, and so on, because what benefit would there be in putting that crap in your body.
My main concern with HSS is actually not accidental fires.

Instead, the HSS are usually all connected to the internet and receive closed-source updates. So if a malevolent actor were able to hack into one of these companies (and affect the updates) he could probably cause overheating and/or fires in all connected HSS.

Of course, the damage would be multiplied by the fact that all fires would start simultaneously.

Any opinions on this?
> the return in development speed

Solo project or very small team then? When everyone understands all code?

Of course it's faster to go type less then.

Add 4 more people and you'll end up debugging runtime errors because it was intuitive what you should send to $COLLEAGUE's functions but in reality they expect something else.

Or at best, $COLLEAGUE will document the type info in comments :)
That's one way of making sure your wrists are completely useless for any kind of work at age 30...
My theory is that he wasn’t done assassinating CEOs.

It’s the obvious answer as to why he still had the gun on him.
Neither of your theories answer the question -- how did he know that the CEO was staying in a hotel other than Hilton (conference venue) and would arrive by foot 1 hour and 15 minutes before conference opens at 8am (CEOs do not typically arrive so early in advance). The shooter was caught on camera talking on a burner phone 15 minutes before shooting. Who did he talk to? Was he acting alone or received some help? The shooter only had to wait for 15 minutes or so before his target arrives. Pure "luck" or help from inside?
Depending on which requirement they mean, that case is actually interesting. There's a good video from Not Just Bikes about it https://youtu.be/j2dHFC31VtQ ("How American Fire Departments are Getting People Killed")
Fair point. Maybe I should change the default values, I've set this ones to make sure that on a first visit, everyone would see the counter moves to help understand how the website works

Mine is set way lower than the default, a little under 200 per day and it's more about the little dopamine hit of watching the salary grow even if it’s just a few cents at a time.
I wonder what keyboard he is using? I use Thumb-Key which is a very unorthodox keyboard layout which I find speeds up things like typing special characters needed for coding. I can use vim decently well but I wouldn't develop anything that large with it.
Benefits of Increased Water Intake: A Systematic Review
The larger picture is where we're not the only player. You think not?
You raise good points. Looking at the statistics, the average doctor has significantly better compensation than the average code jockey. Most programmers won't ever get a job at $TrendyCorp, as you point out.

> Not every developer gets to work on Sora, Quantum AI chip, or CUDA source code.

> For the very vast majority, it is facing stupid PMs, MBA bosses, daily standups, and getting fired with no fault of your own.

Those two are not mutually incompatible. I saw examples of all of that while working at outwardly glamorous companies. Thankfully I didn't experience any of that personally.

> Programming is crazy cool, but the profession of Software Engineering is not always that cool.

You could say the same about medicine. It is a tough stressful job for most.