skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
100% agree

This was painful, because like software development, he didn't bother to read the manual at all first before estimating how long it would take :)

It's like saying

"i'm going to use the following pieces of software in my app:x,y,z. All previous times someone else has built all scaffolding for me, so i've never had to start from scratch. Here i'm going to start from scratch, but i'm not going to read any of the getting started guides or look for examples before estimating how long it will take me to make this scaffolding or app. I'm also not going to ask anyone who might have greater knowledge than me. Instead, i'm going to assume it took them zero time and zero knowledge to build the scaffolding i used to use and proceed apace."

I would be totally and completely shocked if the washer did not have complete instructions on connections. I just looked, and every bosch manual i can find includes directions on how to do the hookups. If he spent 1 minute looking at which hookup he had, it would have been obvious that:

A. there was a cap on the hookup
B. the hoses could not reach

etc

The only one that is probably not as documented is the pvc inside cap - but these exist on everything and are required by code. Any good DIY book will tell you about them.

They've also got the reason wrong there. Or at least one of them. It's also done so they can test the system for leaks effectively.

You can't really test for leaks if you have a holes that go to nowhere :)
A large amount of mostly inconclusive evidence!

I don't know why the people running red light studies hate control groups so much. If you do that many studies, varying wave length and intensity for some of them should be trivial. Yet somehow they almost never do that.

So: 90W mask or 1500W panel? Infrared, red light, or does yellow work just as well, maybe?

The people doing near-UV therapy for skin conditions managed to do all that. There's a know effective wave length (it's always 311nm), there's dosage plans. There's licenced medical devices doing the irradiation. IR people seem less interested in all that.
This web app reminds me of the manifesto https://rosswintle.uk/2024/02/a-manifesto-for-small-static-w... , which I think is a good thing!
I'm not arguing it's right. Frankly, I think it's stupid the way things are. But I can understand why some people make such choice.

I guess my argument mainly is that people who take their luggage are not stupid, instead their behavior may be highly rational, however we have the means to change it with by making such choice irrational and I wish we will.
I'm very impressed with the writer's willingness to head out more than once. I have a decently-equipped hardware store a 15 minute walk away, and I would not make more than two trips!
I remember people getting beat up for wearing Google glasses in public. What a difference 10 years makes.

https://www.businessinsider.com/i-was-assaulted-for-wearing-...
That's a pretty good take. Would make sense for a whole range of apps focused on 1 user or client. Accounting software is personal, company A doesn't need to query/join with data of company B.
I can't see how SICP is better than Nand2Tetris. To be clear: none of them are better than the other simply because these are two completely different books, both in their approach style how explain things and their contents. You are basically comparing apples to oranges. If you know nothing about computers Nand2Tetris and Code by Charles Petzold are two books that will make you clearly understand how a computer works in a constructively way. SICP starts with an already running Scheme, so the computer and the language are already there.
You knew a decade ago that a million 150 year olds were collecting social security and nothing came of it?
And I have never been charged with a murder so we can conclude that murder is in fact allowed.
Sure, but is the difference between being 2 and 4 really that profound? It's not like the memories that are lost are just of the womb.
The killer app is entertainment. Since LLMs emerged people have consistently loved getting them to say whatever they want or roleplay with them. Once integrated into games, it will be very fun to have natural conversations with the inhabitants of game worlds. Imagine a goomba talking to Super Mario before he stomps its head or delivering your pithy one liner in response to some final boss’s villainous monologue.
Realistic applications can be mostly per-user data, but with a residue of global data (e.g. the tables that list all those beautifully segregated users). Even if per-user databases work well and can be managed simply (e.g. doing backups by briefly taking them offline when idle and copying entire files) the global part usually has more requirements (e.g. cannot be shut down for maintenance, requiring "live" backups) and requires greater complexity (for example sharing it through a traditional DBMS network server or through application-layer services).
While it’s clearly wrong to drag your bags out, I try to give people doing this some leeway.

They are in shock and acting on instinct. I’d like to believe I’d do better but who knows.
What about putting it to the side at a 60 degree angle?
Who is MJD, and what video?
Say you reduced their revenue to only that application. Would it be sustainable? Would it be worth the billions upon billions of dollars that have been shoveled at it? Would it add more than the billions upon billions of dollars in the end?

By your logic I could claim a quantum computer with qubits on the scale of the mass of the sun is a killer app for doing RSA encryption breaking. And I would be making an equally useless statement.
[LightGBM,] does not converge regardless of feature order.

From https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41873650 :

> Do algorithmic outputs diverge or converge given variance in sequence order of all orthogonal axes? Does it matter which order the dimensions are stated in; is the output sensitive to feature order, but does it converge regardless?

Also, current LLMs suggest that statistical independence is entirely distinct from orthogonality, which we typically assume with high-dimensional problems. And, many statistical models do not work with non-independent features.

Does this model work with non-independence or nonlinearity?

Does the order of the columns in the training data CSV change the alpha of the model; does model output converge regardless of variance in the order of training data?
A single 3min 670nm morning exposure may be more valuable in latitudes where the sun does not rise until after 8AM.
I shouldn't of made this. Another direnv alternative for no reason
Maybe of interest to someone out there. I'm waiting to get flamed as its totally useless for many many people (I could of solved it with a simple powershell script but in the process I learnt go.. ) - but it solved my problem on my ridiculous Windows machine. Maybe someone else out there..
I had a psych professor with a similar story that she liked to share. Her prevailing hypothesis on why we don't remember our infancy was that there's typically little to no reason to recall it, so the memories either fade or morph into general feelings and emotions that often help form the bases of our early personalities.

I may be getting some of that wrong, too. I was not particularly engaged with that class since I was still a rather immature student, back then. I'm not saying I subscribe to her idea, but it's certainly interesting to think about.
This used to be the case.

However, they have published docs on their hardware. For instance, https://gpuopen.com/amd-gpu-architecture-programming-documen... Their driver is also in-tree: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/AMDGPU

It may or may not be as good as Intel. I don't have the depth of experience there right now.

It looks like AMD and Intel GPUs should be roughly similar in terms of support / out of the box experience on Linux, but AMD will have better performance.

Nvidia is still super proprietary, so it will generally have more headaches and hoops to deal with.

So, generally, I rank them by default:

1. AMD
2. Intel
3. Nvidia

Unless there is a reason (firmware or configuration differences for Intel/AMD needing to run/develop CUDA code for Nvidia) I try to stick with that. I've not yet had an AMD laptop though.
What's the solution to such high bus factors in Linux drivers? How do we encourage more devs to contribute?
New technique to eliminate signals disrupting sensitive radio telescopes
My guess is that the author was looking for a reason to use the term "temerity" and built the statement around this desire.
>Babies are also almost completely unable to move around by themselves and are constantly frustrated by their lack of agency. They are extremely vulnerable and utterly dependent on the kindness of their parents and other older humans in their environment. They lack language so have no other way of communicating than screaming, which is often also a cause of great distress because of an inability to communicate a basic need

Funny, the same things happen when you become elderly, minus the screaming mostly.
i remember i was crawling as a child
Similarly and I extended to think about a dryer with a humidity sensor; it doesn't measure time well, it measures complexity, it gets more accurate the longer it works on the task, but the last progress meter can still take significant time with significant clothes.
> I’m encouraged by people who talk about their AI setups using the same words that musicians use to talk about their guitar amps or pedalboards. This is a good sign. Obsessing over gear - not over purchasing gear exactly, but anything that feels like “how do I get a particular kind of crunch out of this preamp” is a great sign for the medium because it’s a format where you look at your own output serially over time and develop a style that you actually want.

Hmm, I tend to dismiss this idea mainly because I think it'll soon become unnecessary and also belies why most people have "custom setups". My feeling is most people are using LLMs to achieve concrete goals: How to do some basic woodworking, bake bread, get a condensed version of a college course on nuclear physics, or write code to accomplish a task.

Right now specialized setups and finely-tuned models might make sense for bridging the gap between "almost there" and "good enough", but the overall trend seems to be moving toward general-purpose LLMs becoming “good enough” to handle most of these tasks. Over time, the gap between a highly specialized model and a general-purpose one seems to
shrink for the level of expertise most people are looking for.

No doubt there may still be some customization for more novel creative applications (and the author even touches on one I expect to see-emulating the dreamlike aesthetic of early generative AI). But novel creativity is a small minority of "My AI Setup" type articles that I see at the moment.
Interesting read. Chasing perfection can be a real trap, as we are essentially trained to find flaws and improve things. That can easily turn into a never-ending cycle of fiddling with code without any clear end goal or time frame. One thing I struggle with is not overworking an issue. Setting hard deadlines can help as a form of backpressure, but sometimes it's really hard to let problems go.

I also think some languages are especially prone to this kind of issue, particularly the ones focused on functional programming. I remember working with Scala and being amazed and alarmed by how many different ways you could write the same statement with increasing levels of abstraction. It wasn't uncommon for a team member to refactor a part of the codebase with a new DSL simply because it wasn't purely functional enough.
That appears to justify jail breaking or drm-free books, not screwing authors out of any kind of compensation for their labour.
Because someone else had done the work for them.

They knew nobody else had done it for them here the second they hit a single issue.

Why not step back at that point and try to understand the entire problem you may be facing?

This like people who build software by just fixing one bug they see at a time by trying to make the compiler happy or whatever, instead of stepping back and thinking about the system as a whole - what other assumptions are likely wrong if you had this bug?

Worse, here there was a very easy solution: Ask questions before you start.

Just because it's common for software developers to not bother to ask people for knowledge they don't have doesn't mean it's a good answer.
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> I see so many in the software industry cargo-culting "best practices" dogmatically, creating constant churn via useless trendchasing, that they keep reinventing - badly - new ways to do the exact same things as before.

That's why software engineering is still very immature as a science field. It's pretty much the result of so widespread software engineers' inability to even define the problem they're trying to solve. Along with the inability to demonstrate the impact of the change and provide at least some cost-benefit analysis.

And this is spreading like a cancer. Unfortunately, I see this almost everywhere and I am not sure when it all began because we were certainly not being taught such things at the University. Critical thinking seems to be lost in a signal-noise ratio.
Emacs Cursor Shapes
One of the commercial cinemas recently screened The Abyss and Seven on their anniversaries. I was too young to see The Abyss on the big screen when it released, first time was on VHS.

Both screenings were >90% full, and it was really fun getting to watch them on the big screen.

I'm baffled as to why they don't do this more often. There are tons of movies I love which I've only ever seen on TV because I was too young or somehow missed.

And the younger people who was in the audience with me might have just heard of these classics.

For example I'd love to see the first two Terminator movies on the big screen for the first time.

There is an classic movie theater here but it mainly shows more art films. There are no other cinemas showing reruns on a regular basis.
This is true except for me wanting to promote anything. I have positions that I take and like to discuss with others, nothing more. I do hope it turns out to be an audit (and it certainly seems that way), but watch it cautiously for any deviation.
A Dragonfly for Titan
Welcome to ZOMBOCOM
Umami also support MySQL as well and I do t remember having much different between Postgres or MySQl as backend.

Things would hopefully be even better once clickhouse support lands.
Isn't over-construction what triggered the financial crisis in Spain?
To each their own, but for me my woodworking shop is one place I go to get away from screens.
Have any of you software pros ever seen a fixed delivery deadline met?
The established political parties in Germany are in fact trying to silence the AfD - precisely because they are gaining support amongs the population that is no longer represented by the established parties.
I've read a hypothesis that it's because when you learn to speak, you remember things in a new way. You don't know how to access the memories you stored before you knew how to speak.
> The total addressable market for my application is about 2,500 customers, and they won't use it at all in most weeks. I'm aware that this usage pattern is very uncommon

Is it even?
Water also focuses laser plasmas;

"Innovative target design leads to surprising discovery in laser-plasma acceleration" https://phys.org/news/2025-02-discovery-laser-plasma.html

> Compared to similar experiments with solid targets, the water sheet reduced the proton beam's divergence by an order of magnitude and increased the beam's efficiency by a factor of 100.
> IIUC to serve an LLM is to perform an O(n^2) computation on the model weights for every single character of user input.

The computations are not O(n^2) in terms of model weights (parameters), but linear. If it were quadratic, the number would be ludicrously large. Like, "it'll take thousands of years to process a single token" large.

(The classic transformers are quadratic on the context length, but that's a much smaller number. And it seems pretty obvious from the increases in context lengths that this is no longer the case in frontier models.)

> These models are 40+GB so that means I need to provision about 40GB RAM per concurrent user

The parameters are static, not mutated during the query. That memory can be shared between the concurrent users. The non-shared per-query memory usage is vastly smaller.

> How much would I have to charge for this?

Empirically, as little as 0.00001 cents per token.

For context, the Bing search API costs 2.5 cents per query.
> Totally disagree here, using embeddings is much more reliable / robust, I wouldn't put much stock in LLM output, too much going on

I think both ways can be the preferable option, depending on how well the embedding space represents the text - and that is mostly dependet on the specific use case and model combination.

So if the embedding space does not correctly project required nuance, then it's often a viable option to get the top_n results and do the rest by utilizing the llm + validation calls.

But i do agree with you, i would always like to work with embeddings rather than some llm output. I think it would be such a great thing to have rock solid embedding space where one would not even consider to look at token predictor models.
What's difficult about schema migration? Not being snarky, genuinely curious :)
and strangely in two years no one has demonstrated anything like this that people found of value. In fact for all the "entertainment" sectors it has been injected into, we have gotten poisoning of self-publishing and soulless generic pornography. Remember the twitch channels that had AI generated content? Where did those go? Surely by your rationale the market would have taken over by now. Surely there would be something.

It's almost like entertainment requires some humanity and thought and true creativity behind it.
Why the text terminal cursor is important for Accessibility?
Suggesting that people work out a few times a week and eat well is not the bad thing you are making it out to be
No I don't believe anyone voluntarily chooses to become a drug zombie. I think that if you were able to communicate with these people you would hear a lot of sob stories.
Google search example is interesting I wouldn’t care at all. YouTube or maps on the other hand…
It is equivalent to Dedekind cuts as one of my papers shows. You can think of Dedekind cuts as collecting all the lower bounds of the intervals and throwing away the upper bounds. But if you think about flushing out a Dedekind cut to be useful, it is about pairing with an upper bound. For example, if I say that 1 and 1.1 and 1.2 are in the Dedekind cut, then I know the real number is above 1.2. But it could be any number above 1.2. What I also need to know is, say, that 1.5 is not in the cut. Then the real number is between 1.2 and 1.5. But this is really just a slightly roundabout way of talking about an interval that contains the real number.

Similarly with decimals and Cauchy sequences, what is lurking around to make those useful is an interval. If I tell you the sequence consists of a trillion approximations to pi, to within 10^-20 precision, but I do not tell you anything about the tail of the sequence, then one has no information. The next term could easily be -10000. It is having that criterion about all the rest of the terms being within epsilon that matters and that, fundamentally, is an interval notion.
"I think it was somewhat reasonable for the author to assume it would be a 10-minute job when it had been that way in the previous places he lived."

I don't - in all of those, the author knew someone else had done the work for them.

It's like always having had scaffolding built for you, and then when you have to do it from scratch, assuming the scaffolding required zero time and zero knowledge to build, and being surprised when it doesn't.

Here's a fun thing that most software developers never do that works, and would have also worked here: He could have asked.

"Hey random internet people, i'm about to install a washer in my new home. All of my previous homes i was not the first owner, but here I am. What do i need to think about here?"

A quick search shows lots of people have asked on reddit and get correct answers for their situations. I don't see one where they got bad advice.

Heck, even chatgpt gets this right:
https://chatgpt.com/share/67b482dd-25c0-8008-b0be-6b1f97648a...

The fact that software developers assume it's reasonable to not bother to seek knowledge when you know the situation has changed says more about software development than it does about reasonability :)
SkySurfer Personal Aircraft
I love tools. Especially well-built, "buy-it-for-life" type tools. Love love love 'em. If I had a big enough house, I'd buy every tool under the sun. I have two festool stacks of cabinets filled with each and every screw driver, drill bit, wrench, saw, ruler, etc. I've got a little drill, a big drill, and an insanely huge SDS-max drill that I've used maybe three times, but lent to friends probably 15.

The feeling when I have the exact tool for the job is exhilarating. Realizing I have spent so much money and space on this stuff that is useless 99% of the time is a little embarrassing, so I focus on the positives.

It's an illness.
A Descent into the Vortex
I genuinely don't understand the durability concerns with foldables. I've been daily driving the Z Fold 3-6 and the only failure I've had was a software issue on the 4 that broke WiFi. Nearly 4 years of heavy daily use, countless drops, and the weak point has only been with software.
How does the calculation look like if the thing we migrate to ends up being broken way easier than classical algorithms?

Because the current plans aren't to migrate to just hybrid classical+PQC schemes, the plans are to migrate to PQC fully. Discarding both RSA and ECC.
It appears we are essentially stack-buddies (I use those exact technologies too). I have 0 issues with perf, and I love the hermetic unit tests that literally doesn’t even use disk (let alone networking).

However, I find it a bit annoying that I have to restore from backup for one-off queries and data exploration. Do you have some tooling or tricks to recommend?
India's Tata Consultancy Was Gaming the US Visa System
“You’re unique, just like everyone else”