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timClicks

Re:Publish fake stats, get cited in LLMs on Tuesday October 20, 2026 @11:58AM (#50168346)
They're used by map makers to prevent other map makers from freeriding on the original work. They're less worried about personal copies and much more interested in deterring commercial reuse.
Re:Mercury 2.5 LLM hits 770 tokens per second on Wednesday September 23, 2026 @09:00PM (#49824852)
It means something, because it an iterative workflow. If you're willing to burn tokens, it's possible for weaker models to implement tasks by incrementally improving drafts.
Re:GPT-5.6 Sol Pricing Cut by 50% on Monday August 17, 2026 @10:32PM (#49340486)
Subscriptions are a mechanism to attract developers, who then advocate that their company should use the API.
Facebook used the same strategy to compete with Google Maps. The company became one of the biggest contributors to OpenStreetMap, which everyone has benefited from downstream.
Submitting projects like this to HN is a good way to get them nerfed.
Re:Are AI Labs Pelicanmaxxing? on Wednesday July 22, 2026 @05:38PM (#49013807)
If they're optimizing for SVG generation, then that's an excellent outcome in my opinion. Vector images shouldn't be "pretty niche".
Re:Qwen3.8 is launching and going open-weight soon on Sunday July 19, 2026 @07:19PM (#48972610)
It's an interesting example of the metric becoming a target. Simon started drawing pelicans because it wasn't something that existed before.
Another format that's worth investigating is Asciidoc. It supports the richness of Docbook XML but has fewer quirks than rST in my eyes.
Re:Horses: AI progress is steady. Human equivalence is sudden on Tuesday December 09, 2025 @03:13AM (#46202511)
Sorry if this is somewhat pedantic, but I believe that only US companies (and possibly only Delaware corporations?) are bound by the requirement to maximize shareholder value and then only by case law rather than statue. Other jurisdictions allow the directors more discretion, or place more weight on the company's constitution/charter.
Re:Inside Rust's std and parking_lot mutexes – who wins? on Monday November 24, 2025 @10:37PM (#46042106)
References only have a single bit available as a niche (the null byte), which Option makes use of for null pointer optimization (https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/option/index.html#representati...).

In principle, you Rust could create something like std::num::NonZero and its corresponding sealed trait ZeroablePrimitive to mark that two bits are unused. But that doesn't exist yet as far as I know.

Re:Markdown Is Holding You Back on Sunday November 23, 2025 @04:05AM (#46021925)
Asciidoc corresponds directly to DocBook XML. They're two formats with exactly the same semantics.
Re:What if you don't need MCP at all? on Monday November 17, 2025 @01:28AM (#45951274)
MCP is an example of "worse is better". Everyone knows that it's not very good, but it gets the job done.
Re:Claim: GPT-5-pro can prove new interesting mathematics on Sunday August 24, 2025 @04:17PM (#45007398)
It's been a while since I've played in the area, but is PCA still the go to method for dimensionality reduction?
Re:Ask HN: Have you ever regretted open-sourcing something? on Tuesday August 05, 2025 @11:42PM (#44807369)
This reminds me of when I provided some impressions of Erlang as a newcomer to their mailing list.

One of my suggestions was that they include hash tables, rather than rely on records (linked lists with named key). Got flamed as ignorant, and I've never emailed that mailing list again. A while later, they ended up adding hash tables to the language.

Re:The Path to Open-Sourcing the DeepSeek Inference Engine on Tuesday April 15, 2025 @05:53AM (#43690837)
There are a few commercially valid strategies.

1. Goodwill and mindshare. If you're known as "the best" or "the most innovative", then you'll attract customers.

2. Talent acquisition. Smart people like working with smart people.

3. Becoming the standard. If your technology becomes widely adopted, and you've been using it the longest, then you're suddenly be the best placed in your industry to make use of the technology while everyone retools.

4. Deception. Sometimes you publish work that's "old" internally but is still state of the art. This provides your competition with a false sense of where your research actually is.

5. Freeride on others' work. Maybe experimenting with extending an idea is too expensive/risky to fund internally? Perhaps a wave of startups will try. Acquire one of them that actually makes it work.

6. Undercut the market leader. If your industry has a clear market leader, the others can use open source to cooperate to erode that leadership position.

That's a curious remark, although I guess it doesn't look high level from the eyes of someone looking at programming languages today.

C has always been classed as a high level language since its inception. That term's meaning has shifted though. When C was created, it wasn't assembly (middle) or directly writing CPU op codes in binary/hex (low level).

Perhaps the most generous interpretation is that the authors were writing an article for people who do the naïve thing without reading the docs. There are quite a few people in that category.
Re:Obituary for Cyc on Tuesday April 08, 2025 @04:58PM (#43626390)
> The secretive nature of Cyc has multiple causes. Lenat personally did not release the source code of his PhD project or EURISKO, remained unimpressed with open source, and disliked academia as much as academia disliked him.

One thing that's not mentioned here, but something that I took away from Wolfram's obituary of Lenat (https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2023/09/remembering-doug...) was that Lenat was very easily distracted ("Could we somehow usefully connect [Wolfram|Alpha and the Wolfram Language] to CYC? ... But when I was at SXSW the next year Doug had something else he wanted to show me. It was a math education game.").

My armchair diagnosis is untreated ADHD. He might have had had discussing the internals of CYC on his todo list since its first prototype, but the draft was never ready.

Re:Public domain technical books published before 1964 on Saturday April 05, 2025 @06:25AM (#43592321)
When production took longer and costs were not optimized, there was time for editors and writers to spend time editing and writing.
Shipping highly optimized assembler for a program made to work on computers with 4KB RAM as a ~100 MB PDF is quite the flex.

I must admit that while it's computationally quite wasteful, the web page does look quite neat.

Re:A Replacement for Bert on Thursday December 19, 2024 @04:09PM (#42465708)
[delayed]
Re:Why Dumb TVs Deserve a Comeback on Sunday December 15, 2024 @03:21PM (#42425696)
My workaround is to use a computer monitor connected to a Linux box that I actually control.
Re:The Cold Email Handbook on Thursday December 12, 2024 @12:45PM (#42401394)
I've always assumed that they charge you for publishing.
Re:Functional Programming Self-Affirmations on Tuesday November 26, 2024 @02:19PM (#42248952)
I consider Rust's Result<T, E> and Option<T> to be monads. Is this incorrect?
Re:A solution to The Onion problem of J. Kenji Lopez-Alt on Tuesday November 26, 2024 @12:16PM (#42247597)
[delayed]
Re:Feds: Critical Software Must Drop C/C++ by 2026 or Face Risk on Saturday November 02, 2024 @11:02PM (#42030903)
That's the intent of the document - to reach people for guidance. The document under discussion is requesting comment from industry.
Sorry for the huge delays and also for missing the LinkedIn message.

Your support for creators is very much appreciated. There is now light at the end of the tunnel. More info here. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41907594

I'm extremely sorry about this. It's been such a huge wait for everyone who supported me. Thank you so much for holding on so long.

I finally have time to complete the material and updates will start appearing in the next few weeks.

Also, I am more than happy to issue well warranted refunds.

Re:Too much efficiency makes everything worse (2022) on Sunday September 29, 2024 @08:16PM (#41692127)
[delayed]
We justified the upfront cost by treating ours as a cheap second car, rather than as a very expensive bike. It's been an incredibly positive experience for our family.

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