skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
have had this argument for library code

I have met a style of programmer who thinks, on some level, that generally reusable code is unsafe -- like the `sum` function (stupid reductive example) is not okay unless it has a bunch of business logic restricting the range of the numbers and takes a logger just in case, and the function name is eight words describing exactly what's happening, and the base and the mantissa have different types

and you end up with no general code anywhere because reusability is not even an afterthought, it is counter to the project

if you've never met this person I sound insane but I swear they exist
I feel this. When I envisioned having kids, I never envisioned having to tell them a dozen times per day to "put the book away!" I accept that it's a relatively good problem to have, but there are absolutely inappropriate times and places to be looking at a book for pleasure, absorbed to the point of losing track of time and not hearing any directions given.
I've inspected the source code [0]. There is no support for a numpad layer or VIA.

Once it becomes generally available an in people's hands, I hope someone will post a generic firmware image with just these things added.

I think it is great that it is programmable. This means also that replacement keyboards with more keys/functions is a real option. I've seen a couple projects using the Pi 400's PCB with a mechanical keyboard but those have either hooked it up separately via USB or been limited by the original keyboard's matrix.

Personally I've been sketching on an Amiga-inspired mechanical keyboard for a couple of years and wanting to put a Pi in it.

[0]: <https://github.com/raspberrypi/QMK/tree/pi500/keyboards/rpi/...>
stack pointer? offset addressing mode?
Single Crystal Lithium-Ion Batteries May Last 20k Cycles
Ubuntu 24.10 Review
Java Throughput/Latency and Power Efficiency Tuning for AMD EPYC Turin
That, Detective, is the right question.
Linux Fixing a "Hilarious/Revolting Performance Regression" Around Intel KVM
wow, interesting hn optimization. I submitted this with the title:

"Single Crystal Lithium-Ion Batteries May Last 20,000 Cycles"

and somehow the "20,000" in the title was automagically changed to "20k" :)
many of the drivers simply couldn't get back on the road. If there were a ramp instead of a drop-off, the could have, however it would have been at the extreme risk of backing into traffic. Probably due to coincidence, train tracks are the perfect height to prevent drivers from turning (to drive over the rail). Some very determined drivers have done it, but probably 1/10 of the ones who become trapped.
When you're talking to a person, though, you also have an understanding of what a human is and what your own experience is.

Its reasonable to interact with another human and expect that they are roughly similar to you, especially when your interactions match what you'd expect.

That doesn't extend as well to other species, let along non-living things that are entirely different from us. They could seem intelligent from the outside but internally function like a lookup table. They also could externally seem like a lookup table while internally matching much better what wed consider intelligence. We don't have context of first hand experience that applies and we don't know what's going on inside the black box.

With all that said, I'm phrasing this way more certain than I mean to. I wouldn't claim to know whether a box is intelligent or not, I'm just trying to point out how hard or impossible it would be today without knowing more about the box.
Show HN: Dbine – Auxiliary tools related to databases
Yes, I do this kind of thing in JavaScript, too. I actually forgot it is a feature. Not all JS projects I work on take advantage of it in this way.

"conversationally irrelevant things" - nice way of putting it. Important things, because they are there, the project is built on them but they are actually just details from a requirements or project-feature-wise point of view. Nicely said!
Russian Anti-Drone AK-Buckshot Rounds
wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_plates
Cho 55
Not sure what you mean... A NN training process can extract semantics from observations. That semantics can be then subsequently applied e.g. to robots. So it doesn't depend on humans beyond production of observations.
Modula-2 – a blast from my past. Back in the ‘80s I used it to implement a prototype distributed OS (as designed by a team at JPL) on VAXen. Logitech (!) had a really nice VAX compiler back then. One of the most productive 6-month stretches of my career. Luon looks like an answer to my unspoken prayers. Thank you!
No, it assumes "one side is smaller than the other": the labels are arbitrary, so there iss no case where b is larger than a as we can just swap the labels and get a>b again. Even though you might think there are two cases that we need to look at because we're using two letters, there's actually only on case to demonstrate because we're demonstrating a property of the inequality.

The only "but what if..." would be if a=b, which has no geometric proof, but also doesn't need one because "zero = zero times anything" is (by definition) true for fields.
George Dubya Bush said it. The modern liberal has more in common with a republican president than he does with the modern voter, as evidenced by the DNC's loss last month.
My team did part of the work described in TFA, AMA.
I am the exact opposite!

If the hangout is activity-based, I find I feel forced to care about and talk about the activity, but I do not really give a flying fuck about the activity. For example going to do axe throwing? I don't care at all about axe throwing and have no interest in talking about it, I do have interest in talking about how my friends are doing, anecdotes, politics... I just want to sit down and _talk_ (a drink or meal works very well for me). Board games are hell to me, I don't care at all how many beans I can earn this round, I wanna talk about your home renovation or the trip you just went on.

For example I had a first date at an arcade. The games were actually pretty cool, but I wasn't really interested in them in the moment (I was interested in my date) and the chit-chat about the games felt very forced: I really didn't care on the moment. As soon as we took a break to grab soft drinks, suddenly conversation was flowing and infinitely more interesting.

Of course there are activities that I enjoy for their own sake and like doing with friends (eg rope climbing), but it's a very different type of hanging out which doesn't bring me the same pleasure at all.
He was fired because he was leading the for profit in a direction that was contrary to the mission of the non profit parent that was supposed to be controlling the for profit.

Those working for the for profit got $$$ in their eyes once MSFT started throwing billions at them and said fuck the mission and bring back Altman we’re going full Gordon Gekko now.
I feel like you underestimate how much effort goes into making CPUs reliable and how low level/well specified the problem of building a VM/compiler is compared to getting a natural language specification to executable program. Solving that reliably is basically AGI - I doubt there will be many humans in the loop if we reach that point.
Blasphemy! The value of pi is 3
https://religions.wiki/index.php/Biblical_value_of_pi
A Fake Uber Driver Borrowed Phones, Then Stole $200K in Cryptocurrency
The ISA is a bit complex for the simplest Virtual Computer. One Instruction computers are a thing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-instruction_set_computer#I...
Four people seems to be an interesting threshold when it comes to groups. The British special forces, for example, started doing four man teams and several units of other countries followed their example (SEALS, KSK, etc).

https://www.sasregiment.org.uk/patrol.html
Finally some well made gamified app with openstreetmap
OK, one person on this thread willing to actually have an intelligent conversation. This is very rare. Thank you.

I take your point about these papers being dated. The sad reality is that no researcher wants to touch this with a ten foot pole. Going against the political grain can be career ending, and they know it. If we do fund research to debunk some of these lofty projections, it is very, very rare.

Let's steel-man your argument: Energy becomes so cheap that it makes some of the old ideas possible.

OK.

I don't know of a single proposal that has been shown to scale outside of a laboratory environment. In other words, if we were to say: We cannot deploy this today, yet, in 50 years, with cheaper energy, will will be able to. We ignore energy issues and show it working at a reasonable scale. The world then devotes the next N years to prepare for the deployment of such a solution.

That would be sensible.

And yet, that has not happened.

We cannot construct an argument based on an imagined solution.

And then there's the other "minor" problem: Solar is a horrible source of energy when you consider the entire life cycle. The procurement of materials, mining, transportation, manufacturing, shipping, installation and operation are not without massive ecological consequences, including CO2 production. Do anything at a massive scale --at a planetary scale-- and the consequences will track with the scale.

And yet, it does not end there. I am not even going to explore the issues with energy storage technology at a planetary scale. From an ecological perspective, that is definitely unimaginable. Let's just agree that this is something significant enough not to ignore.

Yet, onece again, that isn't the entire story.

Solar technology is seriously problematic in one key metric: Operating life.

A solar panel is only good for 15 to 25 years. The electronics, if lucky, could be on a similar time scale. RoHS introduced a degree of planned obsolescence in every single electronic device on the planet. Lovely. Talk about unintended consequences.

The couple-decade lifespan of solar systems means that, if we were to install solar at the required planetary scale, the entire planet would have to rebuild the earths entire solar power generation infrastructure every twenty years or so.

That cannot be ignored. The word "cataclysmic" comes to mind.

Imagine China constantly producing replacement panels and systems for a planetary scale solar array rebuilding from here to eternity. We can't even begin to calculate just how much ecological damage this might cause. It won't be zero. It will not be trivial. It will be at a scale never before imagined.

And that's the problem.

It is easy to say "solar and wind" and point to a solution in isolation of the realities of the idea.

It's like cleaning your floors with muddy water. The exercise does not result in cleaner floors.
> That's what people mean when they say that the entropy is not an "objective" property of a physical system: that it depends on how we choose to describe that physical system (and that description is external to the physical system itself).

I understand that's what they mean, but this is the part that I think is either trivial or wrong. That is, depending on your choice you'll of course get different values, but it won't change anything about the system. It's basically like choosing to measure speed in meters per second or in furlongs per fortnight, or choosing the coordinate system and reference frame: you get radically different values, but relative results are always the same.

If a system has high entropy in the traditional sense, and another one has lower entropy, and the difference is high enough that you can run an engine by transferring heat from one to the other, then this difference and this fact will remain true whatever valid choice you make for how you describe the system's macrostates. This is the sense in which the entropy is an objective, observer-independent property of the system itself: same as energy, position, momentum, and anything else we care to measure.
Everyone loves testing on production
This is an old rule from when structured programming was introduced. The prior state of affairs was that code would jump via gotos between functions to different labels within those functions (labels were global). The requirement that every function should have only a single entry point and a single exit point seemed like a good rule to establish sanity.

MISRA C states the following rationale:

“A single point of exit is required by IEC 61508 and ISO 26262 as part of the requirements for a modular approach.

Early returns may lead to the unintentional omission of function termination code.

If a function has exit points interspersed with statements that produce persistent side effects, it is not easy to determine which side effects will occur when the function is executed.”

Note that the MISRA C rule is merely advisory, meaning it is a recommendation and not a hard requirement (i.e. it’s a “should” and not a “shall”).
You do it 3 times, a=b, a<b, a>b.

.. now that I think about it, the "visual proof" only 'proves' the statement for a specific 'a' and 'b'. Probably there is a proof, that can handle all 'a' and 'b' pairs at once.
Then think of what it means if you have a person in their 40's that is really investing times in startups. Either they're stupid or they are committed in a way that 20 year olds likely aren't.
Impressive!

Yet, when you compile to Lua, the GC and system programming features are moot.
Show HN: personal digital memory bank (ai second brain)
The problem is not symmetric between a and b (because a-b isn't). You cannot swap them. (And even if, this swapping is not part of the "proof", so in any case the proof is incomplete.)
From Fermilab’s antimatter factory:

Antimatter is the opposite of matter, with the same mass but opposite electric charge. It's considered the rarest, most expensive, and potentially most dangerous substance on Earth. One gram of antimatter costs around $62.5 trillion

Sounds like we won’t be using antimatter for anything practical for a long time.
Keeping the index balanced is a good reason to trade stocks.
https://www.voyago.io/

We're a social travel discovery app that matches your interests with your friends for perfect recommendations.

Although there is still a little bit of AI in one portion of the app because that's how we started, our recent pivot has been focused on social mapping and review features.
> How do you fontrun orders? You can only take action after you see the order.

PFOF:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Payment_for_order_flow
> clean enough

Los Angeles after it rains (scrubs the air clean) and during the pandemic (drastically less traffic) was stunning. So, no, at least here, we’re not “clean enough”.
I find it interesting how far linguistic, and experienced based approaches have fallen out of fashion. Humans don't read character by character, even if we can it's not a standard operating mode. We have word stems and understand modifications by endings. Tokenization doesn't replicate this experience (seriously, look at the tokens that appear in LLM vocabularies), nor does character or byte encoding. Humans have multiple ways to parse words. You can grok a full sentence, read a phrase, read word by word, or sound out a new word character by character. Very few papers explicitly claim that a method is good because it replicates the way a human would perform a task, or perceive the world.

I suspect as LLM reliance increases we'll want to align the models to our experience more closely. I further suspect this will make the errors that models make more comprehensible.
Arm needs to become more mainstream
Why not dual license it under a commercial license and something like GPL?
I don’t think it suck but you are correct about android.
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I'm wondering if the future arrived just for people of 30 years or older. The past 15 years changed very slowly compared to 15 years before. The expectations of what's futuristic for someone 25 years old today is quite different than of the ones older.
The function/mathematics in an NN (neural network) is meaningless unless there is an outside observer to attribute meaning to it. There is no such thing as a meaningful mathematical expression without a conscious observer to give it meaning. Fundamentally there is no objective difference between one instance of a NN with one parameter, f(θ), evaluated on some input, f(θ)(x), and another instance of the same network with a small perturbation of the parameter, f(θ+ε), evaluated on the same input, f(θ+ε)(x), unless a conscious observer perceives the output and attributes meaning to the differences because the arithmetic operations performed by the network are the same in both networks in terms of their objective complexity and energy utilization.
I believe this is how Yousician works.
As the saying goes... work smarter, not harder :)
Well. There is nano as well
First drop in adult obesity in a decade: from 46% in 2022 to 45.6% in 2023
I don't really understand the target audience for this. If I don't want my personal media to be in the internet I just don't put it on the internet.
Python behind the scenes: how Python dictionaries work (2021)
True, in my "third-world" nation, 98 degree water would be stupid as it would be burning hot.
Can someone explain to me the appeal of these virtual console projects? Is it like lock picking or demoscene in a sense that you need to figure how to achieve impressive things under tight constraints?
Sure - and Plato once said: "Quotation marks are always a sign of absolute truth."
>> "Formally wrong" would mean that formal mathematics is used incorrectly.

> No, “formally wrong” means that it fails formal verification.

The word "formal" has meaning in mathematics independent of formal verification. The latter builds upon the former. Agree?

> In the context of hardware and software systems, formal verification is the act of proving or disproving the correctness of a system with respect to a certain formal specification or property, using formal methods of mathematics. - Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formal_verification

Here is how I'm using the terms:

- "Formal" in mathematics refers to rigorous logical reasoning with precise definitions and deductive steps. This is the older, more general meaning.

- "Formal verification" emerged later as a specific term in computer science referring to automated/mechanical verification of system properties. This is now the standard meaning in software/hardware contexts.

So, putting these terms into use... If a human verifies a formal proof "by hand", I think it is fair to say that does not comprise "formal verification". On the other hand, if an automated system verifies the proof, then I would say "formal verification" has happened. Perhaps you will agree this is how many, if not most, experts use the terms.

Are we mostly playing language games -- or is there a key insight you think I don't understand?
Apple Reportedly Redesigning Magic Mouse
The old Rocksmith games included a bunch of guitar games. I don’t know if they were fun, but they definitely helped me learn to move around the fretboard without looking.
Sorry, but no. First, "just switch a and b" is clearly wrong, and we had multiple people propose that (Without the adjustment of sign). So not that trivial, I would argue. At least not more trivial than the underlying equality one wants to prove in the first place.
The Great Disappearing Act of the Hotel Shower Door (2020)
I Generate This Site
Your second paragraph is basically what I'm saying but with the extension that we only actually care about reasoning when we're in these kinds of asymmetric situations. But the asymmetry isn't about the other reasoner, it's about the problem. By definition we only have to reason through something if we can't predict (don't know) the answer.

I think it's important for us to all understand that if we build a machine to do valuable reasoning, we cannot know a priori what it will tell us or what it will do.
https://archive.ph/9V2Bf
My biggest challenges in building a new application and maintaining an existing one is lack of good unit tests, functional tests, and questionable code coverage; lack of documentation; excessively byzantine build and test environments.

Cranking out yet more code, though, is not difficult (and junior programmers are cheap). LLMs do truly produce code like a (very bad) junior programmer: when trying to make unit tests, it takes the easiest path and makes something that passes but won't catch serious regressions. Sometimes I've simply reprompted it with "Please write that code in a more proper, Pythonic way". When it comes to financial calculations around dates, date intervals, rounding, and so on, it often gets things just ever-so-slightly wrong, which makes it basically useless for financial or payroll type of applications.

It also doesn't help much with the main bulk of my (paid) work these days, which is migrating apps from some old platform like vintage C#-x86 or some vendor thing like a big pile of Google AppScript, Jotform, Xapier, and so on into a more maintainable and testable framework that doesn't depend on subscription cloud services. So far I can't find a way to make LLMs productive at all at that - perhaps that's a good thing, since clients still see fit to pay decently for this work.