skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
why is one physical iPhone identical to another physical iPhone of the same model?

It probably wouldn't be if human beings had to drill holes in the PCB by hand, place and solder components by hand, and hand-machine the case.

different from my friend’s Xbox controllers even though they were the same model and supposedly manufactured the same.

This could be things like slight changes in the sourcing of, say, springs for an analog stick, composition of rubber used under other buttons, and actual wear on components of the assembly line, like the molds used for injection molding of something with a pebble texture. Not to mention, obviously, that each controller will break down differently over time depending on use.
I don't know if she is a fraud, but she has definitely greatly amplified Rage Bait Farming and talking about things that are far outside of her domain of expertise as if she were an expert.

In no way am I credentialing her, lots of people can make astute observations about things they weren't trained in, but she both mastered sounding authoritative and at the same time, presenting things to go the most engagement possible.
JPMorgan Says Quantum Experiment Generated Truly Random Numbers
Something around 75 years ago, the journalist Jimmy Cannon said that if he had a son who wished to become a boxer, he would tell him to become a burglar instead. It is a damaging trade, very few boxers make real money, and even fewer hang on to it.
I thought this was going to be a prompt engineering SaaS to rewrite people’s technical blog posts. Glad it wasn’t.
Patch Package OTP 26.2.5.10 Released – Erlang News
Exactly. Education has a long long way to improve, but the alternative to mediocre public schooling is better public schooling, not homeschool which is even worse than a mediocre school.
> I have seen how dangerous it can be when inexperienced developers take it as a gospel and try to implement everything at once

This book explicitly tells you not to do this.

> Similarly, service layers and unit of work are useful when you have complex applications that cover multiple complex use cases; but in a system consisting of small services with narrow responsibilities they quickly become overly bloated using this pattern. And don't even get me started with dependency injection in Python.

I have found service layers and DI really helpful for writing functional programs. I have some complex image-processing scripts in Python that I can use as plug-ins with a distributed image processing service in Celery. Service layer and DI just takes code from:

```python

dependency.do_thing(params)

```

To:

```python

do_thing(dependency, params)

```

Which ends up being a lot more testable. I can run image processing tasks in a live deployment with all of their I/O mocked, or I can run real image processing tasks on a mocked version of Celery. This lets me test all my different functions end-to-end before I ever do a full deploy. Also using the Result type with service layer has helped me propagate relevant error information back to the web client without crashing the program, since the failure modes are all handled in their specific service layer function.
I care less about public privacy than about how these things are also invading private spaces. Surveillance piggybacked on all the modern tech that we allowed into our homes.
https://archive.ph/KYUmg

Link to the Nature paper: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-08737-1
when was this age where people created content for the sheer fun of it?
He lives in the utopia protected by the public army and opines via the network invented by public research.
The search ecosystem is broken now because google is focused on LLMs
Up to 16k tokens. Or a million tokens of a code base. After that, effiency goes down to... zero-ish?
Some web development advice I remember from long ago is to do most of the styling after the functionality is implemented. If it looks done, people will think it is done.

LLMs did the "styling" first. They generate high-quality language output of the sort most of us would take as a sign of high intelligence and education in a human. A human who can write well can probably reason well, and probably even has some knowledge of facts they write confidently about.
No argument is even necessary. They take payments, not donations. It is a commercial enterprise.

https://support.signal.org/hc/en-us/articles/360057625692-In...
Being Useful Now – Quantum Computers and Scientific Discovery
Respectfully, this is naive and doesn't consider defacto judicial process. Basically, defendants are getting railroaded unless they have resources to mount a defense, and charges are inflated to incentivize plea bargaining.
New vaccine targets sugar molecules to protect from Covid, MERS, and Common Cold
our friends in the academy and in the press have been paid a lot of very good money to pathologize the notion that conspiracies exist
There's no better substitute to getting people with authority in whichever of your clients is most profitable a little tipsy and asking them about what they think the problems around them are, but it takes people skills and the opportunity to meet suitable persons. I really got good at it after I read the entirety of Ribbonfarm, but you gotta carefully consider if that kind of workload is right for you.
The way we're thinking about breaking changes is silly
That's not "evolving". That's "nuking".

I had high hopes from the headline that they might actually be doing something real. Genuine DEI is hard, and most organizations made a hash of it. But at least giving lip service to the problem acknowledges that there is a real problem.

Nah. They're just trashing their existing programs and not replacing them. They bury the alternatives at the end because they are vapid and pointless, full of hedging words and nonspecific, non-binding "commitments".
> it isn't a perfect superintelligence that understands everything perfectly?

it isnt ANY form of intelligence.
That's exactly what happened – I called the OpenAI API, using custom application code running on a server, a few hundred million times.

It is trivial for a server to send/receive 150 requests per second to the API.

This is what I mean by instincts...we're used to thinking of developers-pressing-keys as a fundamental bottleneck, and it still is to a point. But as soon as the tracks are laid for the AI to "work", things go from speed-of-human-thought to speed-of-light.
This argument is immensely popular. It looks a bit like a warmed over Rousseau - just shake off the chains of the old fashioned education system, give kids one on one guidance for 10 years with a great mentor, and they'll do pretty well.

Let's look at a few counterpoints:

- Biologically secondary knowledge are the things that it's proposed that humans haven't evolved to naturally of. Math writing, ect. The upper middle class academics who had their mommy and daddy teach them literacy and numeracy felt stifled by the "drill and kill" explicit teaching, and provably think they'd have "flourished" if they could follow their own heart and figured it all out themselves, but only because they were privatised to have effectively a private tutor. That doesn't scale.

- Motivation. Schools do OK at teaching the things that are a priority, as long as they aren't too progressive (the preogressive education movement is older than the more modern traditional approach, but progressive educators claim they are the hot new thing for some reason). Just look at something dead easy that lots of people want to do - learning a second language. How many people can be bothered without school? (And sure, schools suck at language teaching, but only because it's not a real priority).

Like critics of capitalism, the most strident critics of modern education often have a solution they are trying to sell and it's a solution that doesn't work very well at scale in the real world.

Could schools compress the curriculum, getting kids ready for uni by year 10, then putting 2 years of uni into years 11-12 (or the trade school equivalent) so unis don't need to teach the drab basics? Yeah, probably. Middle school could probably be done in half the time if it wasn't treated as a total joke since it doesn't count for anything.

But you can't cherry pick extremely privileged or exceptional people and expect that everyone can replicated their results
Given your replies throughout this thread, I get the impression that you don't filter or curate anything and just see a few things on the default youtube feed or whatever and judge everything else based on that.

There are so many good people, making good content, on several platforms. A bare minimum effort is required, just like when you visit a bookstore you have to take a little bit of time to find the book that is appealing to you.
TIL US and A has SSA.

*had. Doge will make short work of it.
This reminds me of the old military phrase "different spanks for different ranks". The higher up in the chain of command the less consequences you have.

Any enlisted person or junior officer would lose their job and face federal charges.
Madison Square Garden's surveillance system banned fan over his T-shirt design
To be fair, as a Europoor, I like having electricity.

Europe really should have invested in fracking and nuclear power so this would never have been needed, but the Putin-funded "environmentalists" and degrowthers put a stop to that.
more here

https://skywriter.blue/pages/did:plc:llgfbjvsqkaicezsf7mzjxr...
> 95% of your focus should be on reducing the number of iterations. This is why language doesn’t matter.

And then once you've used the playful, expressive (interpreted, abstract, slow) language you enjoy using, to develop an excellent, performant algorithm... if performance still matters, write the same thing again in a performant, low-level language, and perhaps even write architecture-specific assembly.

There's a reason numpy, pandas, OpenCV, TensorFlow aren't written in pure Python, but instead let Python tell them to do things they've implemented in high performance C++/assembly/CUDA, etc.

No matter how proud the authors would be of exploring a problem space and coming up with an efficient algorithm (and blogging about it), I doubt they'd be popular numerical computing libraries if they insisted on it being written in pure Python, or Javascript.

While this is a fun blog post, I don't think it'd have the same takeaways if the author's algorithmic insights got a pure-Javascript HEVC encoder down from 1 day per frame to 3 hours per frame...
Similarly, trees like Longleaf pine, Giant sequoia, and Coast redwood have adapted to not only tolerate but thrive through fire.
Some even require fire to reproduce.
That's not fair. Only about half of the new ones have blown up.
EU has gas reserves that it does not want to exploit. It's as if it's waiting for something ...
Years are made of months.
Thanks for reading!

>I'm curious, what is the motivation for moving into the content business? I'm certainly interested in this project, and will likely buy the book, etc, but I'm also somewhat disappointed to not see you going after something bigger/harder/technical and sharing that journey. I found your previous work very inspiring.

I'm trying to find a business that lets me write about technical things that I find interesting and have it be financially viable and aligned with my readers' interests.

When I was running TinyPilot, I wanted to write about a lot of what I was doing, but the pace of the business was tough, so I had very little time to write. And after the first few months, my writing didn't have a measureable impact on the business anymore. I liked to think that it did, but it was hard to allocate so much of my time to blogging when I could have been working on other parts of the business.

And it makes sense that blogging wouldn't help TinyPilot much. I think there's overlap between people who read my blog and people who are interested in that product, but it's not super aligned. Like the people interested in running an indie business are not necessarily interested in buying a KVM over IP device.

There are a few different models for making money from blogging (ads, affiliate deals, paid membership). The one that appeals to me most is what Julia Evans[0] does, where she blogs about what she's interested in, but she has paid products[1] that allow readers to contribute back financially.

I'd eventually like to get back to a SaaS or some type of software product, but I'd like to see if I can make the book work, as there's a lot I'd like to teach that I don't see elsewhere.

But in general, I think educational products ("info products") have an unfortunate stigma. I've only done one, but I found it to be a great way to learn about indie businesses because it's a microcosm of the whole process of customer discovery, marketing, and sales. But it has the advantage of not being a long-term promise, so if it doesn't work out, you just move on to the next thing rather than tell all of the early customers who bet on you that you're shutting down and killing off their product.

[0] https://jvns.ca

[1] https://wizardzines.com/
I hope not... I'd rather this was indeed 6-70 with a mode much closer to 6 than 70
Intro to Alpine.js: A JavaScript framework for minimalists
Squirrels burying acorns, "wily" foxes, beaver dams, migration, etc. etc. etc.
This article is missing the point. If the price of energy is below the cost for Russia, the sanctions are working. The sanctions is that they will not pay market price for that energy.
The majority of Americans have a favorable view of the military, and I suspect it's even higher for fighter pilots (Top Gun!)

https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2024/02/01/the-u-s-mili...
A Deepness in the Sky alludes to this, if I recall - something about it being bad for your health to be around a starship's torch, but I forget the details, and anyway it's never a plot point, just world building.
Not really surprised, it's the usual mistake of any novice engineer, thinking that rewriting a system they don't like is going to solve all the issues they imagine.

With the teenagers involved in DOGE under Musk it's just going to be hilarious when they inevitably fail. They just never had the experience to actually go through a complete rewrite of something that's been alive for decades... And never bothered to read "The Mythical Man-Month" because of course they are ninja rockstars 100x developers, and lessons from history and experience don't apply to them.

Really sad that their mess will do very real harm to lots of people who depend on this system working...
The ad widget should have sent a camera perm request to your browser.
obviously the entire thing is horrific, but the complete fucking malice of the senior people, starting at trump, who act is if nothing in the world is hard or complicated, and all they have to do is be loud massive cunts and things will work out their (personal, of course - none of them give a fuck about others or indeed "America") way is just absolute poison that will destroy America.

in this particular case, we've actually already seen what happens - "Xtreme Programming" was birthed from the - failed - attempt to re-write the Chrysler payroll system in Smalltalk in the 1990s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chrysler_Comprehensive_Compens...

edit: and that was run by Kent Beck, not the National Union of Racist CS Undergrads that Musk exclusively hires from
So long as your article has a decent enough structure – which this article makes it seem is the only thing that matters – I reckon there are two ways to make blog posts that developers read and share;

1. make so many of them, you'll repeatedly hit gold eventually

2. go the extra yard with research and/or effort

The intro's "The developer had interesting insights" makes it sound like they failed blog was full of opinion pieces. Very few opinion pieces succeed, but they're the easiest to write (i.e. the first category). It might work for some people, but for us unknowns, nobody really cares. Go the extra yard and make it interesting by doing a deep dive of the subject.

I've fully focussed on the second approach. As a consequence, each article takes a lot of time to complete, so I generally don't finish more than one per month. I try to make them all something I can actually be proud of (which is quite a challenge), and then I spend a lot of time tweaking the structure, making things less verbose, and improving scanability – I rely on making sentences bold a lot for that. I try to use relevant images, but I find actually helpful ones are hard to make for developer content. While hiring illustrators is a good idea, I doubt many writers are willing to pay for that.

To make my articles more interesting, I try to make a custom component for each article to spice it up and slowly grow the component library I have available for my blog. It doesn't always work though – for my last article I spent several hours building an easter egg that only 22 people (<0.1%) interacted with it.
> [Bureaucracy] rewards compliance over creativity

Imho, this is the wrong takeaway from parent's point.

Bureaucracy rewards many things that are actual work and take time. (Networking, politicking, min/max'ing OKRs)

Creativity and innovation are rarely part of the list, because by definition they're less tangible and riskier.

A couple effective methods I've seen to fight the overall trend are (a) instill a culture where people succeed but processes fail (if a risky bet fails then the process goes under the spotlight, not the person) and (b) tie rewards to results that are less min/maxable (10x vs +5%).
A lot of people are feeding all the email and slack messages for entire companies through AI to classify sentiment (positive, negative, neutral etc), or summarize it for natural language search using a specific dictionary. You can process each message multiple ways for all sorts of things, or classify images. There's a lot of uses for the smaller cheaper faster llms
Disclosure in the UK (as it’s called) is a bit different from discovery in the states, but serves largely the same function.

I googled a bit to find a decent guide and found one on the HSE’s website: https://www.hse.gov.uk/enforce/enforcementguide/pretrial/aft...

Unfortunately in real life disclosure is one of the many places that the criminal justice system tends to fail to meet its stated ideals. Disclosure is often served late or improperly on run-of-the-mill cases from what I’ve heard and read. There’s a great book called the Secret Barrister that goes into some detail about the UK’s (or England and Wales more specifically) criminal justice system from quite a critical lens.
Yes - in fact I recently uninstalled pyenv and poetry, switched to uv, used it to install python and poetry (for work projects)
Does anyone actually finish their rewrite?
I really like that concept and I’ve never heard of it. Makes me want to pay attention if people do that outside of tech.

> Images should above all never be funny

:)
I was configuring Shenandoah GC on OpenJDK 8 before COVID, so I can say for sure that it's been available for a lot longer than 18 months. However, ZGC (the other low-pause-time collector) has only been the default for a little while.
Post from elsewhere in the thread:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43505659#43506099
Access logs are meaningless when police are only accountable to themselves and unions shield them from any disciple of their wrongdoings
If it didn't officially come from the marketing department it's only sparkling overhype right?
Are they below the cost or below the market price? If they're below the cost, it would mean that Russia is just spending money to provide Europe with gas, which does not make any sense. But if it's simply below market price it means that Russia is still turning a profit on the gas, just not as much as it could have otherwise.
> This is just not a use case where the expected performance on these tasks is high.

Yet the hucksters hyping AI are falling all over themselves saying AI can do all this stuff. This is where the centi-billion dollar valuations are coming from. It's been years and these super hyped AIs still suck at basic tasks.

When pre-AI shit Google gave wrong answers it at least linked to the source of the wrong answers. LLMs just output something that looks like a link and calls it a day.
> [...] unless lesions show up differently in different demographics.

Well, first the model looks at the entire X-ray and lesions probably do show differently. Maybe it's genetic/sex-based or it's due how lesions develop due environmental factors that are correlated to race or gender. Maybe there's a smaller segment of white people that has the same type of lesion and poor detection.
Isn't the hard part of programming the requirements engineering and support after the initial release to customers?

Which of the unpaid 60+ workhours/week youths that Elon is sending in will stay on the project after shipping 1.0 ?
> Specifically, the researchers operate a transistor under what are called "punch-through conditions." This happens when charges build up in a semiconductor in a way that can allow bursts of current to cross through the transistor even when it's in the off state. Normally, this is considered a problem, so processors are made so that this doesn't occur. But the researchers recognized that a punch-through event would look a lot like the spike of a neuron's activity.

> The team found that, when set up to operate on the verge of punch-through mode, it was possible to use the gate voltage to control the charge build-up in the silicon, either shutting the device down or enabling the spikes of activity that mimic neurons. Adjustments to this voltage could allow different frequencies of spiking. Those adjustments could be made using spikes as well, essentially allowing spiking activity

> [...] All of this simply required standard transistors made with CMOS processes, so this is something that could potentially be put into practice fairly quickly.

ScholarlyArticle: "Synaptic and neural behaviours in a standard silicon transistor" (2025)
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-08742-4
The old "The place is clean, why do I need cleaners" line.

I mean, there is a chance that this might work. But I strongly doubt that it would. Given Musk's history of re-writes and deadlines, I suspect that actually its not going to happen.

But on the flip side, if you don't care about complying with the law or caring about users, its probably possible.

Don't get me wrong, the SSA needs some innovation, but innovation, not revolution.
"Road tax" is a widespread colloquial term, and that tax must be paid to be able to drive on public roads. So let's not lose ourselves in nitpicks, it brings nothing to the discussion at hand...
I was referring to 3.x, but also to “minor” releases (not sure they use semver), where standard library functions and options are being removed occasionally.

So it is both “not conservative enough”, whilst as you say being overly conservative.

The main problem with “small libraries” is supply chain risk. This is why I try to use languages with a strong standard library (and first party external packages). Python would be a lot less useful without a strong standard library.
I find it surreally dystopian: there's no more food bloggers or travel bloggers, or even enthusiasts with something to share - there's only content creators creating content for consumption. Yet noone seems to be concerned at the reduction to this creator x consumer system.
> I sold my HomePods and unsubscribed from Apple Music because Siri couldn't even find things in my library.

I have almost the opposite problem this year. I tell the HomePod to turn the office lights on, it sometimes interprets this as a request to play music even though my library is actually empty, and the response is therefore to tell me that rather than turn on the lights.

Back in the pandemic, same problem with Alexa. Except it was in the kichen, so it said (the German equivalent of) "I can't find 'Kitchen' in your Spotify playlist" even though we didn't even have Spotify.