News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

burpingtree

Re:Anthropic S-1 on Monday October 26, 2026 @03:28PM (#50249609)
Yes, but the argument is that the seller is under no obligation to sell you the stick of RAM originally that will incur the debt if you offer cash instead of Zelle. If you did manage to receive the stick of RAM without paying for it during the initial exchange and so still owe the $100, then yes, the seller is required to accept cash to settle that debt.
The argument in the article isn’t about whether big O notation is useful it’s about whether the n in any particular big O is relevant. In this case the algorithm’s claim is that you can multiply arbitrarily large numbers faster than n log n where n is the size of the numbers being multiplied. But that result holds only if you don’t include the cost to multiple arbitrarily large complex numbers in that n, which are assumed to be able to multiply in constant time.
Re:Food processing influences metabolism and brain activity on Saturday October 10, 2026 @08:50AM (#50032435)
Well the peanut butter I get from the store is just peanuts and salt and there is plenty of brands available. It does have to be stirred because it separates. But yes the Jiffy and Skippy that most people refer to as peanut butter is really just peanut flavored palm oil.
I don’t think you are aware of the history of math. It had nothing to do with leisure. It was all invented in the interest of commerce and military applications. This whole thread is aspirational thinking. The NSF was a poor recreation by Vanevar Bush to attempt to achieve some of the scientific breakthroughs driven by WW II. Neccessitu is the mother of invention has been proven over and over. People have these hopes that giving everyone leisure will result in all sorts of great science and art but it’s not backed up by any prior experience in human history.
Ha. I feel like you have never worked for a large company if you think they are making rational decision at all. They may “believe” this will make them money, but there is no guarantee that this isn’t just costing them money hand over fist.
Re:Demystifying Tufte's data-ink ratio – Tufte's Razor on Monday October 05, 2026 @01:26AM (#49961001)
William Cleveland is who you are looking for. He actually did studies like you are looking for on the display of information and its relation to psychological perception. His work is authoritative and predates Tufte significantly. I’m not sure why anyone pays attention to Tufte at all except that he is good at marketing himself. He is kind of the antithesis of quantitative information in that sense. All style and no substance.
Re:California is chasing wealth that has feet on Thursday September 24, 2026 @10:14PM (#49839463)
You misunderstood. The discussion was not about income qualifications for a loan but about collateral.
Is it really more expensive to not connect a water treatment plant to the internet? I can imagine the vendor selling that idea but I struggle to come up with how that could make a water treatment plant cheaper to operate.
Yes it sounds like people came in at high risk of suicide and then they gave them an app that surveyed them and would predict they were going to commit suicide. Given they were at high risk for suicide attempts, how does this compare to just predicting the people would always try to commit suicide in the following week?
Re:The jobs apocalypse is postponed. An AI jobs boom is here on Monday September 07, 2026 @05:01PM (#49602957)
I understand building data centers, but what does maintaining data centers entail? Are those going to be high paying jobs and how many of them. I don’t know much about the area but it seems like they would be low wage and not very many needed once the data centers are built.
Re:The Dunning-Kruger Effect Is Probably Not Real on Monday August 03, 2026 @08:05PM (#49162931)
It that’s the whole point that it’s just a mirage and is the same with random data. The people on the low end can’t underestimate their results as much and the people on the upper end can’t overestimate their results as much. That will come out of any correlation that is not perfectly correlated, which is why the article talks about it being replicable with random data. An interesting graph that would demonstrate a novel effect would be something nonlinear.
Re:Why Do You Suck at Juggling? on Wednesday July 22, 2026 @10:47AM (#49007700)
https://libraryofjuggling.com/TricksByDifficulty.html

All tricks sorted by difficulty with animations. You can find good YouTube tutorials on most three ball tricks.

Yes, this is slightly incorrect. The purpose of a college loan is 100% that the default rate will be low enough that the interest payments will provide a positive return for the lender. The expected default rate is given by the lendee’s expected future income. The majority of the expected income is driven by the expected job of that lender, but some of that expected income could come from other income sources such as investments especially in fields such as finance.
I’m confused. Are you saying that local news is in a better place with the demise of local newspapers. What better has taken their place?
Even beyond scams they are one of the biggest factors leading to the collapse of the local news industry that was funded by local classified ads. So it’s hard at a macro level to view them as doing it right in a global sense, but they did make Craig rich.
What don’t you understand? Those websites that defame a company are liable for that defamation. In this case Google defamed a company in its AI summary and is this liable for that defamation.
Re:Prompt Politeness Affects LLM Accuracy on Thursday May 28, 2026 @10:37AM (#48309580)
This is a very odd view to me, but seems prevalent here in this thread. I think treating a machine like a human is extremely degrading to humans. A machine should never be treated like it’s anything approaching a human.
Re:How We Broke Top AI Agent Benchmarks: And What Comes Next on Saturday April 11, 2026 @11:49PM (#47735990)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_wha...

You are misunderstanding the saying. It is entirely about unintended consequences and viewing the system for what it actually does and not any stated intentions of the designers.