MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by MisterTea | 2025-04-01 05:15:38+00:00
> but of course plan9 makes it a file system instead of some RPC.

Actually, Plan 9 does IPC via 9P, the RPC based file system protocol. The protocol serves a tree of named byte addressable objects which are composable per process. The Plan 9 kernel is a VFS multiplexer. It *only* speaks 9P. All disk file systems,e.g. ext4, are served via user space micro services the bell labs people called file servers. Unlike clunky Unix and it's copies there are no special files or character files nor ioctl(). It's all via the foundational concept of how people organize resources into "files" and folders (directories) via path names. All this is transparent over the network by default.

The reality is the OS is a very portable light weight channel based container host, the container being the process. Each with it's own namespace which means it's own collection of mounted resources composed of 9P mounts and binds organized into a tree of named objects. Those objects are protected by Unix-like permissions: user/group/everyone-RWX served from as m yet another micro service using the same protocol. A process can rfork() more with flags to share resources and control it's file system view to only what the child container needs to see. Those containers then fork off more. You can keep firing off boxes with CPU and RAM and whatever what is hanging off via pxe and instantly have access to that compute and resources. 9P is architecture independent so file servers running on arm are no different than any other arch like x86, mips, risc-v, etc. anyone can mount any other hardware. It's a light weight cloud ready micro service host that was stated in the 80's by the same people who made Unix and c. It's friggin wild.

I highly encourage people try to really understand how it works. It's pretty damn eye opening and refreshing. It sorta blew my mind when I saw the process as the container that can fork off more and more with the ability to control the system view of each one. And you can understand the code. Like all of it.
by levocardia | 2025-04-01 05:16:17+00:00
I had no idea we have NAFTA to thank for avocados (in the USA). Seems like neoliberals and free-trade advocates should be trumpeting that one from the rooftops. Sounds like that was a win-win; Americans are rich so they can afford to buy avocados, which tasty and healthy; sweet American dollars improve the quality of life for Mexican avocado-growers. Fittingly, with the new tarrifs, we all lose.
by fulladder | 2025-04-01 05:16:41+00:00
UX. Cursor is fundamentally no different from going to ChatGPT and asking it to write some code, but the Cursor UX is very nice. Shows you colored diffs of what it wants to change with accept/reject, chat window to flesh out ideas, etc. They get all the small UX details right (assuming you like a VS Code style experience).
by pugio | 2025-04-01 05:17:30+00:00
> The second thing we need to figure out is how we can compress voice input to make it faster to transmit. What’s the voice equivalent of a thumbs-up or a keyboard shortcut? Can I prompt Claude faster with simple sounds and whistles?

This reminds me of the amazing 2013 video of Travis Rudd coding python by voice: https://youtu.be/8SkdfdXWYaI?si=AwBE_fk6Y88tLcos

The number of times in the last few years I've wanted that level of "verbal hotkeys"... The latencies of many coding llms are still a little bit too low to allow for my ideal level of flow (though admittedly I haven't tried one's hosted on services like groq), but I can clearly envision a time when I'm issuing tight commands to a coder model that's chatting with me and watching my program evolve on screen in real time.

On a somewhat related note to conversational interfaces, the other day I wanted to study some first aid stuff - used Gemini to read the whole textbook and generate Anki flash cards, then copied and pasted the flashcards directly into chat GPT voice mode and had it quiz me. That was probably the most miraculous experience of voice interface I've had in a long time - I could do chores while being constantly quizzed on what I wanted to learn, and anytime I had a question or comment I could just ask it to explain or expound on a term or tangent.
by cdrini | 2025-04-01 05:18:10+00:00
Completely agree, voice UI is best as an augmentation of our current HCI patterns with keyboard/mouse. I think one of the reasons this is, is because our brains kind of have separate buffers for visual memory and aural memory (Baddeley's working memory model). Most computer use takes up the visual buffer, and our aural buffer has extra bandwidth. This also means we can do things aurally while still maintaining focus/attention on what we're doing visually, allowing a kind of multitasking.

One thing I will note is that I'm not sure I buy the example for voice UIs being inefficient. I've almost never said "Alexa what's the weather like in Toronto?". I just say "Alexa, weather". And that's much faster than taking my phone out and opening an app. I don't think we need to compress voice input. Language kind of auto-compresses, since we create new words for complex concepts when we find the need.

For example, in a book club we recently read "As Long as the Lemon Trees Grow". We almost immediately stopped referring to it by the full title, and instead just called it "lemons" because we had to refer to it so much. Eg "Did you finish lemons yet?" or "This book is almost as good as lemons!". The context let shorten the word. Similarly the context of my location shortens the word to just "weather". I think this might be the way the voice UIs can be made more efficient: in the same way human speech makes itself more efficient.
by snickell | 2025-04-01 05:18:37+00:00
It definitely knows what GTK4 is, when it freaked out on me and lost the code, it was using all gtkmm-4.0 headers, and had the compiler error count down to 10 (most likely with tons of logic errors, but who knows).

But LLMs performance varies (and this is a huge critique!) not just on what they theoretically know, but how, erm, cross-linked it is with everything else, and that requires lots of training data in the topic.

Metaphorically, I think this is a little like the difference for humans in math between being able to list+define techniques to solve integrals vs being able to fluidly apply them without error.

I think a big and very valid critique of LLMs (compared to humans) is that they are stronger at "memory" than reasoning. They use their vast memory as a crutch to hide the weaknesses in their reasoning. This makes benchmarks like "convert from gtkmm3 to gtkmm4" both challenging AND very good benchmarks of what real programmers are able to do.

I suspect if we gave it a similarly sized 2kloc conversion problem with a popular web framework in TS or JS, it would one-shot it. But again, its "cheating" to do this, its leveraging having read a zillion conversion by humans and what they did.
by chihuahua | 2025-04-01 05:20:36+00:00
I've always been baffled by the British charity thing: You want to ride your tricycle from John O'Groats to Ffestiniog? Fine, do it. You want me to donate to this charity? OK, maybe I'll do it. I just don't see the connection between the two. Please explain the connection to me. You don't actually want to ride your tricycle? But if I donate to some third party, you're going to do something you hate? So you're saying I want you to suffer? I'd rather donate if it doesn't cause unnecessary suffering.
by ifrosted | 2025-04-01 05:21:09+00:00
I believe this one is limited to MAC OS only my idea was that it should be available almost every where regardless of which OS we are using. And i am also planning to launch a dedicated app on appstore as well as play store when i have some more time. If you want to be notified about when i launch next set of updates feel free to follow my product hunt launch here -> https://www.producthunt.com/posts/noteux

And any feedback given there would definitely be added fast :)
by dapperdrake | 2025-04-01 05:22:12+00:00
There are things like floating point exceptions (IEEE 754) and subnormal numbers (close to zero, have less precision than the small approximation error "machine-epsilon"). The idea is to degrade gracefully. These additional features require additional transistors and processing which raises latency.

If you really know (and want to know) what you are doing, turning this stuff off may help. Some people even advocate brute-forcing all 2^32 single floats in your test cases, because it is kind if feasible to do so: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34726919
by sadmanca | 2025-04-01 05:22:15+00:00
Previous discussions:

- 2024 (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39897355)

- 2023 (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35401226)

- 2022 (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30878480)
by BhavdeepSethi | 2025-04-01 05:25:08+00:00
15 years ago, the first start up I worked for provided APIs for music streaming in India. One of the founders who managed all infra was in US, and so the servers (bare metal) were in LA. I still find it amusing, that it was cheaper (and faster) just to fly to India, buy bunch of portable hard drives, upload the media, fly back to US and upload the data to the file server, than uploading the media directly from India to the US server. Obviously only applies when data is in order of TBs. Later saw the same thing with AWS Snowball and Snowmobile.
by TFYS | 2025-04-01 05:25:22+00:00
The trouble with this is that a criminal that has enough capital to back him/her can use the media to make it seem like it's a political hunt even when it isn't. Supporters of a corrupt criminal will benefit a lot from getting them elected, whereas the opposition needs to spend a lot of money just to keep things as they are. Usually these people are friendly to capital as well, and the opposition are the "little people" who can't organize enough money to campaign against these liars and their backers. I can't see better options here other than to use the state to protect themselves.
by refurb | 2025-04-01 05:27:12+00:00
But what is gained from barring people convicted of a crime from holding public office?

- Keeping people out with questionable character?

- Preventing crimes from being committed while in office?

Neither of those are all that convincing. Voters will be aware of the criminal past of any candidate. They can make their own personal judgement when they vote.

And I’m not sure what you mean by democracy has “worked well in that regard except for the US”.

If your goal is to ban people with criminal records to prevent corruption, there are plenty of democracies with a far worse track record when it comes to democracy than the US.
by arkx | 2025-04-01 05:28:07+00:00
I wish it supported vertical text and reading right-to-left (Japanese). It's a long-standing issue that doesn't seem likely to be solved (https://github.com/koreader/koreader/issues/4353). The relevant standard is https://www.w3.org/TR/css-writing-modes-3/, which is part of supporting ePub 3.
by latchkey | 2025-04-01 05:28:16+00:00
I think the revolution was more than just riping, it has to do with the variety. When I moved to Vietnam, I found they also had a large amount of avo's used in a lot of dishes, but they are shaped differently and taste like chalk compared with sweeter/creamier Mexico/California avo's.

Wow, just searching around, I found that I'm not the only one! It seems to be Haas vs. Booth...

https://www.reddit.com/r/VietNam/comments/uw10hw/in_the_west...
by Nursie | 2025-04-01 05:28:55+00:00
> I'm really struggling to see how you feel its wrong.

https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/uk-gdpr-guidance-and-re...

On the same page that the ICO gives guidance that "consent or pay" is legal, "take it or leave it", in which you are invited to pay with your data or go elsewhere, is not.

This seems very weird to me. Either data is a form of payment or it isn't, and I had laboured under the (mis?)apprehension that the GDPR removed it from this sort of situation - that one had a right to say "no" to invasive tracking and that shouldn't affect the service provided one way or another. This muddies the water over true consent to track and it seems the ICO agrees -

"When the only alternative to consent is paying a single price which combines access to the core product with a fee for avoiding sharing personal data for the purposes of personalised advertising, it can be difficult to demonstrate freely given consent."

> They are offering you something which takes time and money to produce. You can pay for it with money or with your data.

In this case I do pay for it with money

> I'd rather be given a choice between "we track all your data" or you can pay verses the default of tracking all data and paying.

Personally I'd rather government legislate away the tracking unless it can be genuinely demonstrated that someone opted in, with no form of coercion at all, and those who wanted to be paid to host advertising switch to a more context-sensitive rather than audience-sensitive model. And I had thought that was where we were going. This feels a bit like backsliding on that.

(I'm not going to argue this is black and white "OMG so wrong!", I can definitely see there's room for differing opinions here, and I am aware I carry an anti-advertising, anti-tracking bias.)
by DiscourseFan | 2025-04-01 05:29:00+00:00
Anyone whose done adversarial work with the models can tell you there are actually things that LLMs get consistently wrong, regardless of compute power. What those things are, it has not yet been fully codified but we are arriving now at a general understanding of the limits and capabilities of these machines and soon they will be employed for far more directly useful purposes than the wasteful, energy-sinks of tasks they are called on for now like "creative" work or writing shitty code. Then there will be a reasonable market adjustment and the technology will enter into the stream of things used for everyday commerce.
by muldvarp | 2025-04-01 05:29:10+00:00
Shouldn't your blog post then condemn the C community at large for failing to use a more "reasonable" C compiler instead of complaining about compiler authors that "despite holding the minority world view, [...] have managed to force it on us by fiat because we have to use their compilers"?

You don't have to use their compilers. Most people do, because they either share this "minority" world view or don't care.
by simion314 | 2025-04-01 05:30:07+00:00
>As someone who actively wants Apple provide a tighter experience, this is how I feel. I have a nice garden that I'm playing in, and others have a sandbox. They like my garden because it's sunny, but they want the rules of their sandbox to apply to my garden. The grown ups let them in, and now there's nowhere to play that doesn't have sand anymore.

The laws are created for all, all people, all companies. We do not give Apple exceptions because reasons like this guy likes it as it is. When Apple decides to do business in a country it accepts the laws there, if they do not like the laws then they can just refuse to do business there.
by magicalhippo | 2025-04-01 05:30:26+00:00
While I agree overall, for me it's not as clear cut with sponsors as I do genuinely find some sponsored content very interesting and informative.

A creator might not have the means to buy the equipment, so not being sponsored would mean not making that content, which would be a net loss in these cases in my view.

That said, sponsored segments for BetterHelp, NordVPN and similar can f right off.
by rimeice | 2025-04-01 05:30:52+00:00
Individual UIs have been built for every product that has a UI with specific shortcuts and specific techniques you learn to use that tool. I don’t see why the same couldn’t apply for speech interfaces. The article does mention we haven’t figured out shortcuts like the thumbs up equivalent in speech yet but doesn’t explore that further. I can imagine specific words or combinations of words being used to control certain software that you have to learn. Eventually there would be some unification for common tasks.
by themomentumai | 2025-04-01 05:32:08+00:00
I'm working on Babla, an open-source tool that helps doctors spend less time on documentation. It transcribes and structures medical conversations automatically. What's cool is the flexibility - you can deploy it with Docker and either run it completely locally with open models for HIPAA compliance or connect to external providers. It exports to multiple formats that work with existing systems. We just launched it as free, open-source software. Now we are looking how to make it even better.

https://notetaker.healthion.dev/
by topspin | 2025-04-01 05:32:44+00:00
"Kinda feel like this is tariff bait"

Kinda looks like click bait generally. Per-capita US avocado consumption is about 9 lbs./y. That's a bit more than 1 per month of the large Mexican avacados. Somehow that's "crazy!!1"

You would think there would be some joy for all this: something Americans will happily eat that isn't "ultraprocessed" and/or meat, and a Mexican product that isn't narcotics or fossil fuel. But no. omg they're so "resource intensive!"

Luxury anxieties, safely ignored.
by DiscourseFan | 2025-04-01 05:32:56+00:00
Its not a playground for the rich, its a playground for the upper-middle class and above. No other country besides the US provides such well-paying wage labor. You can't make seven figures a year as a salary, as a worker practically anywhere else.

Life isn't about being rich, its just that if you work hard its not difficult to do well in the US and have anything you'd want at the best quality anywhere in the world. Anyone making $100,000+ a year (and that is ALOT of Americans) has a great time in the US. Yeah a lot of people don't make it but thats how it is. Without risk there's nothing interesting in life; I don't want a mediocre, boring life with a million social safety nets, I want something chaotic and crazy and constantly active, and you can't get that anywhere else.
by nottorp | 2025-04-01 05:33:06+00:00
> because after 50+ years of marriage he just sensed that she was about to ask for it. It was like they were communicating telepathically.

> That is the type of relationship I want to have with my computer!

He means automation of routine tasks? Took 50 years to reach that in the example.

What if you want to do something new? Will the thought guessing module in your computer even allow that?
by ipv6ipv4 | 2025-04-01 05:33:10+00:00
What do you think about this one, from 2017?

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/nov/08/ashamed-t...

I remember this one in particular for random reasons. But these kinds of articles aren’t particularly rare in the guardian. The guardian’s editorial policy appears to be to generate a steady stream of random human interest stories with the common agenda of finding fault with everything that isn’t British.
by thih9 | 2025-04-01 05:33:20+00:00
I still don’t get it. So they detected the usage and banned the app, what happened that made the ban disappear?

Are you saying the app is using a different scraper? This I would get. But earlier comment[1] mentions ban revocation - this is what surprises me.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43530821
by lenkite | 2025-04-01 05:33:37+00:00
The FBI even explicitly went to facebook and said you need to be aware of Russian misinformation and this story "fit the pattern". Did you really need the govt intelligence apparatus to hold a gun to media heads ? Things don't work that way as you well know - they all need plausible denial.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-62688532
by vlovich123 | 2025-04-01 05:35:28+00:00
We definitely have reason to believe that there’s universe outside the observable universe. The CMB uniformity suggests that that’s the case as do our theoretical models. The mere fact that two observers have different observable universes indicates it is indeed an illusory artifact.

Just because something is untestable today doesn’t mean it will be for all time. However, the untestability problem has started to creep much more deeply into cosmology and high particle physics in particular - our technology and models aren’t staying enough ahead to provide a lot of fertile testable ground.
by TulliusCicero | 2025-04-01 05:36:26+00:00
> I really like this as a study of healthy trade.

https://globalinitiative.net/analysis/mexicos-avocado-boom-a...

> While the European Union and Mexico are in the final rounds of negotiations towards the “modernization” of the EU-Mexico Trade Agreement (Global Agreement) our objective is to understand the dynamics of violence that accompanied the avocado boom, including organized crime activities, human rights violations, environmental crime and harm, and the potential impact of further liberalizing trade between Mexico and the EU.

> ...

> Increased international demand led to an expansion of land dedicated to avocado production, to the detriment of forest cover, resulting in deforestation and the subsequent degradation of soil, water, and biodiversity.
by gorgoiler | 2025-04-01 05:37:16+00:00
Aside, but NBC’s website is way better executed than I was expecting.

Perhaps it changed recently, or I just never noticed? I was expecting 100MB with back button abuse and retention dark patterns. Instead, it loads fast, has minimal guff, and the footer scrolled into view ending the page within sight of the end of the actual article.

Perhaps this is a reward response to not having to / be able to doom scroll?
by Boldened15 | 2025-04-01 05:37:27+00:00
That is all true but in this case she was sentenced to 2 years prison and 2 years house arrest, it's not exactly locking her up and throwing away the key for a minor infraction.

Letting judges bar someone from running for office is silly though, if French law allows that they should reconsider; if someone is popular enough to win a national election despite a reasonable criminal conviction they are popular enough to threaten the civil order if they are barred from office.
by neom | 2025-04-01 05:37:37+00:00
Well, how folks view the philosophy can be multifaceted, so I'll leave the pseudoscience and cult part aside. On the measles, Steiner was certainly skeptical of vaccination, but I think in Switzerland you have a cultural issue with vaccination. The Waldorf school I went to in Canada, everyone had a measles vaccine, but I do recall a Swiss student coming to our distinctively not Waldorf high school and there being a huge song and dance about their vaccination status, I think as a society generally...you've got some problems there?
by lelanthran | 2025-04-01 05:38:06+00:00
> Why is it acceptable for front end code to be of lower quality than the rest?

While I don't think that f/end should be of a lower quality than the rest of the stack, I also think that:

1. f/end gets the most churn (i.e. rewritten), so it's kinda pointless if you're spending an extra $FOO months for a quality output when it is going to be significantly rewritten in ($FOO * 2) months.

2. It really is more fault tolerant - an error in the backend stack could lead to widespread data corruption. An error on the f/end results in, typically, misaligned elements that are hard to see/find.
by webprofusion | 2025-04-01 05:38:51+00:00
The tone of the article is that getting AI agents to do anything fundamentally wrong because they'll make mistakes and its expensive to run them.

So:

- Humans make mistakes all the time and we happily pay for those by the hour as long as the mistakes stay within an acceptable threshold.

- Models/agents will get cheaper as diminishing returns in quality of results get more common. Hardware to run them will get cheaper and less power hungry as it increases in commodity.

- In all cases, It Depends.

If I ask a human tester to test the UI and API of my app (which will take them hours) the documented tests and expected results are the same as if I asked an AI to do it, the cost may be the same or less of an AI to do it but I can ask the AI to do it again for every change, or every week etc. Have genuinely started to test this way.