MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by tacticalturtle | 2025-04-22 14:04:08+00:00
This has been the plan for months, even during the Biden administration - the plan was to restart in 2025:

> “Involuntary collections will not occur before 2025," a White House spokesperson said in a statement. "Defaulted borrowers won’t see collections until 2025.”

https://subscriber.politicopro.com/article/2024/10/biden-adm...
by simonw | 2025-04-22 14:04:23+00:00
> Do you think that this practically limits the usefulness of an LLM "agent"?

Yes, I do. I think it limits the usefulness a lot. Sadly it's the best option we've seen in 2.5 years for building AI "agents" that don't instantly leak your private data to anyone who asks them for it.

I'd love it if someone could come up with something better!
by pmags | 2025-04-22 14:04:58+00:00
Here are some other facets of the new glorious new MAGA/MAHA "vision" at NIH:

• NIH bans all future grants to universities with DEI programs or Israel boycotts -- https://www.statnews.com/2025/04/21/trump-nih-grants-draft-r...

• NIH freezes funds to Harvard and four other universities, but can't tell them -- https://www.science.org/content/article/nih-freezes-funds-ha...
by tboyd47 | 2025-04-22 14:05:24+00:00
Just anecdotally, I've found the recommendations of AI in interpersonal and social areas to have a sociopathic bent. For example, AI tends to recommend indirect ways of influencing others, i.e. nudging and slow-walking people to a desired outcome instead of just being straight up and forthcoming. I've also found heavy AI users to act that way.
by dfxm12 | 2025-04-22 14:05:28+00:00
Even before the takeover accounts could be "unverified", which makes a mockery of the concept of verification.

Why? Accounts can be sold/hacked, and there is a lot of that on social media. A verified account may even be a higher value target for some of the reasons you're bringing up, like algorithm boosts, verifications being considered an endorsement. In either case, unverification not only makes sense, but should be expected.
by fnordpiglet | 2025-04-22 14:05:47+00:00
None of these are free or cheap, and I’ll wager bottom dollar the majority of debt holders went to a public school of some sort. In fact student debt is most pernicious for people of lesser means and fewer opportunities, and who most need the debt to make it possible to go to school. These are also the people who are most incentivized to leverage public schools. (Quick google shows 62% of debt is held by public school attendees)
by iamleppert | 2025-04-22 14:06:13+00:00
The US department of Education took my tax return one year for a remaining balance on a loan of less than $1,000. I never knew about it, and had thought I paid everything off. Well, turns out they took almost $4,000 with all their fees, interest such that had been just building and building for several years. No one had ever tried to contact me via phone, email, etc. for years.

The US Department of Education is known for their aggressive collection tactics, including garnishing of wages, taking tax returns and seizing homes and cars. I even heard of a single mother who had her child support taken away because she owed money to a fraudulent vocational school.

The US government is openly hostile to those who do business with them, and to their citizens and should be avoided at all costs.
by imiric | 2025-04-22 14:06:26+00:00
> Good font rendering

A large part of the charm of these 90s UI recreations is precisely the lack of antialiasing and other niceties we expect of modern UIs. There was another project recently on HN that uses modern font rendering with a Windows 9x look, and it's just not the same, IMO. SerenityOS comes closer to what I remember, though it still doesn't quite match the look of MS Sans Serif(?).
by staunton | 2025-04-22 14:06:26+00:00
> "Research institutions" but for what kind of research?

Quantum computing research. I'd guess a big chunk of revenue will come from universities and research institutes. Some companies might also pay for it, e.g. quantum computing startups in need of anything they can show before they have hardware, or startups that aren't even planning to build their own hardware.

There are people working on finding useful problems that these devices might help with and how to best make use of them, how to build "infrastructure" for it. It's useful for them to have something to play with. Also, many organizations want to be (seen as) at the forefront of quantum computing, know the current capabilities, strengths and weaknesses of the various platforms, train and educate people about quantum computing and quantum technology in general, etc.
by ionwake | 2025-04-22 14:06:59+00:00
I actually disagree with being polite to LLMs.

The reason is soon there will come a time when people are pushing for AI to have "human" rights. This will naturally occur as poeple start to have relationships with them, and start to see them as better equals.

The problem with this is simply LLMs have no conscience. However humans will easily love them and be open to exploitation through dependance.

I believe it might even be imperative to be able to tell apart "word calculators" and animals, and keeping a line, even its through context switching to light verbal abuse to remind yourself they are not sentient, might be an important survival skill.

I am not trying to trigger anyone or be contrarian, does anyone sort of agree and or understand what I mean? Perhaps I havent explained myself well.
by mvieira38 | 2025-04-22 14:07:24+00:00
Modern catholics and protestants are the exception in regards to "understanding" their rites. For centuries religions have maintained "sacred languages" or at the very least sacred dialects, with the intention of emphasizing continuity between generations. Also, you don't really seem to understand how the Latin Mass works. The Ordo is repeated the same way every mass, so anyone that remotely cares knows what it says. The proper, including the readings, changes most days, but many are repeated throughout the year, like the mass of the virgins, and also repeats every year in the exact same way, so there's no reason for a concerned faithful not to buy a book with them if they care so much. Readings are frequently read in vernacular before the sermon, if pertinent, but they are not core to the mass so there's not much reason to care
by WorldMaker | 2025-04-22 14:08:01+00:00
> Whatever I think of whoever’s running mastodon.cloud, I have a lot of posts over there, some of which I care about. For now, they’re still there, but I’m not contributing any money to those guys, nor will I, so if they pull the plug and vanish I can’t complain. Only if they do, so do all those posts that I cared about back then and still do a bit.

"Nor will I" seems a bit strong here. This pain point seems rather self-inflicted, is it not? You get what you pay for and the ownership model of the Fediverse is you help pay for your instance (or instances). If you want ownership of your posts, become an owner of your instance.

That's one of the big reasons why I trust the Fediverse a lot more than AtProto. BlueSky is VC funded and the ownership model is hard to define and the business model is "ads now, maybe worse ads tomorrow". With the Fediverse I can own my instance like I can (and do) own my blog. I myself am not an ad company and I don't have to worry about future me injecting increasingly worse ads into my instance (and I'm free to block and defederate instances that think spam is a good idea).

You get what you pay for, and I'm happier to pay for a tiny corner of the Fediverse than try to be a sharecropper in AtProto with the possibility that Maybe Someday TM it will be distributed enough to matter (to avoid BlueSky's business model).
by MyPasswordSucks | 2025-04-22 14:08:03+00:00
I think you might as well be saying "robotics fail miserably at the very simple task of jogging around the block, so why should we trust the field to be able to accurately place millions of transistors within a 25cm square of silicon?"

His point is that the two tasks are very different at their core, and deep research is better at teasing out an accurate "fuzzy" answer from a swamp of interrelated data, and a data scientist is better at getting an accurate answer for a precise, sharply-defined question from a sea of comma-separated numbers.

A human readily understands that "hold the onions, hots on the side" means to not serve any onions and to place any spicy components of the sandwich in a separate container rather than on the sandwich itself. A machine needs to do a lot of educated guessing to decide whether it's being asked to keep the onions in its "hand" for a moment or keep them off the sandwich entirely, and whether black pepper used in the barbeque sauce needs to be separated and placed in a pile along with the haberno peppers.
by horsawlarway | 2025-04-22 14:08:16+00:00
I don't think mobile is the right comparison. Those ecosystems are explicitly operating on the assumption that they will profit through the software ecosystem (app store revenue).

Synology seems to have gone entirely the other direction here. Most of their software is given away for free, but the hardware is being monetized.

Additionally - the hardware has different operating constraints. I think the big deal for Synology is that they probably assumed that storage need growth would equate to sales growth.

EX - Synology may have assumed that if I need to store 1TB in 2010, and 5TB in 2015, that would equate to me buying additional NAS hardware.

But often, HDD size increases mean that I can keep the same number of bays and just bump drive size.

Which... is great for me as a user, but bad for Synology (this almost single handedly explains this move, as an aside - I just think it's a bad play).

---

I'd rather they just charged for the software products they're blowing all their money on, or directly tie upgrades to the software products to upgrading hardware.
by kweingar | 2025-04-22 14:08:26+00:00
I learned programming from a Java 7 book in high school. When I went through the Tour of Go, I found myself shocked that anybody would want to write software in a language like this. Where is inheritance? Where is the data structures package? I couldn't even find a standard linked list. What if I have a list where I need to make lots of insertions in the middle?

My 15-year-old self would be shocked at my day-to-day as an engineer now.
by ben_w | 2025-04-22 14:09:10+00:00
Lots of things are close to Roko's Basilisk without being Roko's Basilisk, just like lots of things are close to being a safe and benevolent AI without being a safe and benevolent AI.

Or, to keep with the theological theme, how there's so many people insist on mutually incompatible variations of the Christian god (let alone the people who insist it's the same god as in Judaism and Islam).
by 9rx | 2025-04-22 14:09:24+00:00
> The idea that you need to run a study to criticize a design decision is stupid.

Not at all. Fundamentally, you do need understanding in order to criticize. "Criticizing" without understanding is merely whining. If your intent is to whine, you are certainly welcome to until your heart's content, but it will be fruitless. Without you having an understanding – and being able to articulate it – progress cannot be made. This should be obvious.

> A stack trace is ground truth

But a costly truth. Even languages that do pass around stack traces are careful to avoid them except under special circumstances, which is kind of nonsensical from a theoretical point of view. If you find them to be useful, you'd find them useful in all cases. However, it is a necessary tradeoff for the sake of computing efficiency.

With a few small changes to your codebase you can restore the automatic attachment of stack traces like the original experiments had. Stack traces are made available for you to use! But, it remains that the research showed that the typical application didn't ever use it, so it wasn't a sensible default to include given the cost of inclusion. "But, but I wish it were!" doesn't change reality like you seem to think it does.
by kbolino | 2025-04-22 14:09:45+00:00
Logical Block Addressing (LBA) by its very nature provides no hard guarantees about where the blocks are located. However, the convention that both sides (file systems and drive controllers) recognize is that runs of consecutive LBAs generally refer to physically contiguous regions of the underlying storage (and this is true for both conventional spinning-platter HDDs as well as most flash-based SSDs). The protocols that bridge the two sides (like ATA, SCSI, and NVMe) use LBA runs as the basic unit of accessing storage.

So while block remapping can occur, and the physical storage has limits on its contiguity (you'll eventually reach the end of a track on a platter or an erasable page in a flash chip), the optimal way to use the storage is to put related things together in a run of consecutive LBAs as much as possible.
by amluto | 2025-04-22 14:09:48+00:00
> Another large effect is that low return water temperatures into the boiler allow for greater condensation of exhaust gas energy to be used in the building instead of sent outside.

Correct.

> Walking by my house on a cold day, you’ll see minimal steam plume during operation. All that steam I see my neighbors emitting is energy they paid for and delivered to the outside… (They paid a lot for a boiler with a 95% or 98% sticker and run it at 80% efficiency.)

Please check your assumptions.

A boiler operating in condensing mode will produce a trickle of liquid condensate (that may well be drained somewhere that you can’t see [0]), teeny tiny drops of condensate suspended in gas (colloquially “steam”, but it’s more like fog), and some residual water vapor mixed with the exhaust gasses. You can see the “steam”, but you cannot see that residual vapor except to the extent that it condenses further as the exhaust stream cools after it exits, much as you can see some of your own exhaled water vapor on a cold day as it condenses outside your nose or mouth. The exhaust gas is saturated: it has maximum humidity and is at its own dewpoint, so there is a lot of visible fog. The droplets that form inside the boiler and escape with the flue gas do not represent wasted heat: their heat of fusion has been captured.

A boiler operating in non-condensing mode will produce no liquid condensate, and its exhaust will be well above its own dewpoint. It will contain far more water vapor than a condensing boiler, but you cannot see that vapor except insofar as the flue gas has a different index of refraction than the surrounding air and distorts the background a bit. Depending on weather, a bit of it may condense later. All of it is wasted energy.

[0] This liquid condensate is nasty stuff: it’s basically carbonated distilled water plus some impurities but not usefully buffered, and it’s rather acidic. It will quickly corrode many metals, including copper and many common copper alloys, non-stainless steel, galvanized steel, etc. Non-condensing furnaces and boilers are generally carefully engineered to avoid condensation, because the condensation would damage them. If your plumber is unaware of the degree to which boiler condensate is corrosive and uses copper pipes or metallic fittings (push-to-fit in the style commonly sold as “Sharkbite”), the system will fail. Use plastic pipes (PVC or PEX) and plastic (or maybe stainless steel) fittings such as ordinary solvent-cement PVC fittings, “engineered plastic” PEX fittings, or push-to-connect fittings with plastic wetted surfaces. John Guest makes these, and there is also the somewhat bizarre ProLock brand, which seems to be some sort of joint offering from John Guest and Sharkbite.
by butlike | 2025-04-22 14:10:33+00:00
The 'shade curve' as I call it, where one reaches a point where their actions could be considered so shady, it's automatically assumed it couldn't possibly be them.

Smoking pot in a dark parking lot with friends at night gives more cover, but smoking pot walking down your city's main street in the middle of the day gives you the cover of just smoking an innocuous "rollie," like any other person could be.
Show HN: I open-sourced my AI toy company that runs on ESP32 and OpenAI realtime
by akadeb | 2025-04-22 14:10:59+00:00
Hi HN! Last year the project I launched here got a lot of good feedback on creating speech to speech AI on the ESP32. Recently I revamped the whole stack, iterated on that feedback and made our project fully open-source—all of the client, hardware, firmware code.

This Github repo turns an ESP32-S3 into a realtime AI speech companion using the OpenAI Realtime API, Arduino WebSockets, Deno Edge Functions, and a full-stack web interface. You can talk to your own custom AI character, and it responds instantly.

I couldn't find a resource that helped set up a reliable, secure websocket (WSS) AI speech to speech service. While there are several useful Text-To-Speech (TTS) and Speech-To-Text (STT) repos out there, I believe none gets Speech-To-Speech right. OpenAI launched an embedded-repo late last year which sets up WebRTC with ESP-IDF. However, it's not beginner friendly and doesn't have a server side component for business logic.

This repo is an attempt at solving the above pains and creating a great speech to speech experience on Arduino with Secure Websockets using Edge Servers (with Deno/Supabase Edge Functions) for fast global connectivity and low latency.
by mvieira38 | 2025-04-22 14:11:10+00:00
SSPX is in no way separatist, that is severely misinformed. If anything it is reformist, as they recognize the pope as their legitimate ruler and the local bishops as the legitimate local authorities. The claim is not that Rome has failed, it is that papal authority does not extend to the banishment of the Latin Mass, a position many regular clergy agree with.
by lm28469 | 2025-04-22 14:11:11+00:00
Hate it all you want, the vast majority of "programmers" aren't working on anything novel, meaningful or hard. For the vast majority of people it's just a job, it's not a hobby, it's not a passion, it's not something they dream about, it's just a thing that they have to do 8 hours a day to make money and go do stuff in the real world. They don't want to think about it on walks, they don't want to cry about it, they don't want to dream about it and solve problems in their fucking sleep

AI is liberating them because it automatise 80% of their work, and there is nothing wrong about that. Most people work on projects that won't even exist in 10 years, let's stop pretending we're all working on Apollo tier software... Coding isn't a craft, it's not an art, it's a job in which you spend the vast majority of your time fucking up your eyes and spine to piss code for companies treating you like cattle.

For every """code artisan""" you have a thousand people who'd be as excited about working in a car factory or flipping burgers, it just so happens that tech working conditions are better
by anon22981 | 2025-04-22 14:11:20+00:00
Yeah, my and my SO have very different experiences regarding this.

I’ve quit cold turkey several times with little problems - quit for several months or over a year, then used again for x months, then quit again, etc. (This went hand in hand with a certain seasonal job.) Apart from very slight ”I wouldn’t mind a smoke” kind of feelings it doesn’t have much of an effect of me.

My SO was miserable, depressed, craved cigarettes for months and months. For the longest time she was convinced that it isn’t possible for her to quit, since they cravings didn’t go away. (Until they did.)
by rsynnott | 2025-04-22 14:12:11+00:00
This is your mind on The Basilisk.

This has many of the same problems as Pascal's Wager (it's pretty much a variant on it); are you praying to the _right_ god? Do you correctly understand the god's motivations? Will it care at all about this, or might it instead be annoyed about you wasting tokens? Or that you didn't sell all your possessions to pay for more compute capacity?

And then of course there's the Terry Pratchett addendum to Pascal's Wager; your robo-god may resent being second-guessed:

> “This is very similar to the suggestion put forward by the Quirmian philosopher Ventre, who said, "Possibly the gods exist, and possibly they do not. So why not believe in them in any case? If it's all true you'll go to a lovely place when you die, and if it isn't then you've lost nothing, right?" When he died he woke up in a circle of gods holding nasty-looking sticks and one of them said, "We're going to show you what we think of Mr Clever Dick in these parts...”
by xnorswap | 2025-04-22 14:12:13+00:00
I knew a pedant would get me on that.

I'm talking about people, who are still verifiably the same people, becoming unverified.

Yes, where accounts have changed hands, or changed identity, they should be unverified.

That's actually one of the cases where twitter did not un-verify. Accounts "earned" the blue-check then changed identity to something else, appearing "verified" as that new identity.
by ipsento606 | 2025-04-22 14:12:31+00:00
> Phones have displaced paper money and credit cards as the preferred way to pay for a bill at the end of a meal

this is 100% unrelatable to me

I have never once used my phone to pay in a sit-down restaurant. I have only seen someone else use their phone when forced to, such as due to a forgotten wallet, and with much fussing and apologizing
by jagira | 2025-04-22 14:13:28+00:00
I love writing code. I recently tried refactoring some modules using AI agents. The amount of time it took me explaining requirements to AI, reviewing the code it generated and fixing the mistakes was not trivial. And, it didn't feel as joyful as figuring it out and coding it manually.

If AI writes majority of code, then we will stop seeing shortcomings of existing tools, libraries and frameworks and eventually stop having new frameworks or libraries.

Would there be rails if DHH vibe coded 25 years ago? Or would there be library like delayed_job if Tobi vibe coded back when he started Shopify?
by bgwalter | 2025-04-22 14:13:55+00:00
[Replying to the quoted part.]

So when it is convenient, the waterfall model is suddenly modern again?

The waterfall model didn't work, because many inefficiencies and wrong assumptions are found when writing code. This is also the advantage of Lisp and other languages that are malleable and not like a block of concrete.

LLMs are like a block of concrete in that they spit out the same (plagiarized) solutions over and over again. They remove you from the code, they impede flow state due to the constant interactions and outsource your thinking to some GPUs in California.

This waterfall rationalization is just one of the latest absurdities in the LLM blogging industrial complex.
by hiatus | 2025-04-22 14:14:28+00:00
State school attendees face lower debt burdens than private for-profit schools. I can't find the data you are referring to that 62% of student loan debt is incurred by state school attendees. By these numbers [1], only 40% of public school attendees even incurred debt.

[1]: https://www.bestcolleges.com/research/average-student-loan-d...
by LinuxBender | 2025-04-22 14:14:42+00:00
Phones have displaced paper money and credit cards as the preferred way to pay for a bill at the end of a meal.

In Europe maybe? I've never seen anyone pay with their phone. Not in big cities and not in rural areas in the US. I will never do financial transactions with my government spy device. To each their own obviously.

As for when I am ready to pay, I go to the counter and give them cash or I might use a debit card if I am picking up everyone's tab. If they give me grief then I simply do not return to that establishment and they will get negative reviews.