MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by swalling | 2025-04-30 00:24:51+00:00
Love this idea as a runner!

Quick feedback:

- the bottom toolbar obscures Zone 1 measurements unless you scroll. You should make it fixed (like iMessage input area or the bottom tabs for Gmail iOS) or make the toolbar hidden until on scroll

- it doesn’t seem to import my past Health data and workouts at all? Even after I approved Apple Health permissions the app looks empty

- in general the information architecture is not quite right. Setup (is this necessary btw? An onboarding splash screen might help) and info are things I would infrequently use so they should probably live as smaller icons in the title area off to the right. Then you can just let the user swipe between Zones and Workout history as two primary views, with more of a split button style tab.
by ty6853 | 2025-04-30 00:25:14+00:00
I also doubt he knew the realities of supermax. I won't debate the merits of supermax for Ted but even by prison standards there is an extreme level of isolation that is particularly psychologically damaging.

I honestly would not know how to handle knowing a family member was there, regardless of the severity of their crime. For me it would be much worse than knowing they were executed by firing squad or some maximum security prison where they can play paper chess with their cell mate all day.
by cpeterso | 2025-04-30 00:25:28+00:00
ChatGPT suggests the story is "Local Effect" by D. L. Hughes, published in 1968.

An alien named Firefoal of Swaylone observes that human physicists mistakenly believe in a constant light speed because humanity was unknowingly situated in a region of space where the speed of light had been artificially reduced. Humans discover they can modify the speed of light but find they can only make it slower.
by AngryData | 2025-04-30 00:25:33+00:00
I don't think anyone would deny that. But the question is really, would it have mattered even if some got killed? Congress sure as fuck isn't standing in the way of executive overreach right now. I don't see why we should be so overly worried about politicians getting killed, most of them are less than useless, especially considering how many citizens are killed per day already thanks to garbage political legislation that makes it legal.
by n_ary | 2025-04-30 00:26:10+00:00
> We will likely encounter world order disrupting changes in the coming decades when computer get another 1000 times faster and powerful in the coming 10 years.

Sadly for several decades, as computers got faster, only tracking and ads got more pervasive. Also as hardware became stronger, computer games, media quality improved. We also got planet burning blockchain and crypto mining for a while.

In terms of intelligence, we started with clippy, Eliza, stayed with Cortana and Siri, now have LLMs. We will move forward with LLMs for a while until something more impressive comes out and mirrors more humane nature.

Also GenZ is literally second worst off generation after the silent generation, growing up in unprecedented prosperity to be only be stunted by global pandemic following by crazy oligarchs trying to bring back techno-feudal age while their parents prepare to sell of the last glimmer of inheritance to finance retirement and healthcare. I honestly do not blame them.
by junon | 2025-04-30 00:26:12+00:00
Not CVE related directly but I had someone write a manifesto about how since I didn't implement a feature in `debug` that I'm a tyrant and that tyrants should be killed. All on GitHub. They live too close for comfort to me, geographically.

Idk. Guess it's just not how I'd rather do GitHub interactions. I'd rather explain why, so that people who have hot heads are forced to be mad at the decision rather than me. It stems back to when I was on GitHub almost 15 years ago, and the culture it used to have, and not wanting to give that up. Could be a lost cause now, though.
by Hnrobert42 | 2025-04-30 00:27:01+00:00
They are quite comparable, and it's not media industry propaganda. I'm old enough to remember life before mp3 sharing. The only way to get music was from a CD, bought or stolen. I didn't steal CDs, so when "free" mp3s were available, I didn't take them either.

Commit theft if you want, but be an adult and acknowledge it for what it is.
by HenryBemis | 2025-04-30 00:27:23+00:00
On a response from 6 days ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43769936#43770100

I even mentioned "Sam" by name.. either I am the wisest person on this planet (nope I am most absolutely definitely not), or Sam is easy to read on the department of "I got ethics.. yeah.. I do.. shut up or I will sue you because I'm a good person!!!"

Where money can be made, money will be made. I have been gladly spending that $20+ per month, but if ads ..sorry.. "suggestions" start rolling in I'll take my $20 and give it to someone else.
by rowanG077 | 2025-04-30 00:28:26+00:00
The point is that from a black box view they are rapidly surpassing humans in a lot of fields. You can say they do it with tools the human mind has no access to. That's probably true. The "soft effusive human way" to be intelligent is also black box, and something we aren't even close to understanding. This means it's as close to be able to be measured as string theory. "If it's not exactly like this thing we don't understand it's not fair".
Ask HN: What tech prediction do you think most people are wrong about?
by alissa_v | 2025-04-30 00:28:48+00:00
I've been hearing a lot of bold tech predictions lately - some in conversations at work or with friends, others here on HN, and others from podcasts and articles. Things like:

-LLMs reaching human-level reasoning within 2 years

-Self-driving taxis taking over major cities by 2027

-AI replacing most programming jobs within 5 years

-AI personalities becoming household names

-AGI arriving before 2030

-Apple Vision Pro doing for AR what iPhone did for smartphones (despite its current flop)

-Voice interfaces becoming the primary way we interact with computers

-The end of traditional cloud infrastructure as serverless takes over

-Code becoming mostly AI-written with humans just reviewing

-Vibe coding replacing traditional coding

-The four-day workweek will become standard across most tech companies by 2027

-Tech regulation will force the breakup of at least one major tech company

-Quantum computing will break most current encryption by 2030

Some of these are things I could see happening (or are already beginning to happen), but others seem exaggerated to me.

What tech prediction do you think most people have totally wrong and why?

I'm not looking for generic tech pessimism; I'm more interested in specific predictions you think won't pan out and why.
by xur17 | 2025-04-30 00:29:01+00:00
There is definitely some amount of that. On each training run it gets better at some things, worse at others (this is mostly limited to its lane handling more recently).

And in the 12 months I've had the car, it has gotten noticeably better maybe 2 times. Once last year, and then once in February. After the iteration last year, it drove fairly well, but I still had to intervene once or twice per trip. Now I make it through half of my trips without intervening, and when I do intervene it tends to be to avoid embarrassment vs safety (not committing, wrong lane for an upcoming turn, etc).

Given how ai is advancing, I am pretty confident they will get this working fully autonomously with just vision, it's just a question of when.
by Calwestjobs | 2025-04-30 00:29:17+00:00
No we wont. Because if you can drive car to your weekend house 6 miles away, you wont be taking Boeing 747. If you can manipulate such insane energy density you can do anything already even before you reach that capability.

Also Dyson sphere is old school idea, new more efficient idea is to make small black hole right next to star and harvest energy from that more concentrated flow. So actually black holes colliding (gravitational waves) can be sign of civilization...

Previous post with all those calculations says that you can power 4 149 473 current earths with that amount of energy. I write this with assumption that person is correct (im lazy to calculate that by my self, but it roughly has proper orders of magnitude).

My amazon joke was sarcasm.
by marc_abonce | 2025-04-30 00:29:38+00:00
> people do not have the time to deeply research this topic. [...] There are some people on YT who talk about this stuff [linguistics/pedagogy]

That's true, but the opposite extreme can be even worse. In YouTube and Reddit I see so many people procrastinating in their quest for the perfect learning method instead of just sticking with any of the good enough methods they already have. I know because I've also kind of fell for that trap myself sometimes.

In fact, I imagine that the average Hacker News user is far more likely to fail at language learning because they procrastinate on linguistics and pedagogical theory and not because they churned 10,000 hours at a slightly suboptimal learning methodology.
by runarberg | 2025-04-30 00:30:00+00:00
If you are interested I created an open source web app for learning kanji with SRS using open dictionary data.

https://shodoku.app/

I am a year into learning Japanese my self, and kind of wanted to learn vocab and kanji at the same time (and also see example sentences for the vocab which I can put into my anki deck). My method is when I start a new kanji I pick a few words that contain that kanji, bookmark them (and maybe add to my anki deck), and then when it is time for a reading review if I can remember how to pronounce those word I rate it as good.
by AngryData | 2025-04-30 00:30:06+00:00
I don't know if I can actually believe that. EVs were already coming. Yeah the rollout was a bit slower than the demand for them in established companies, but not by much. People had already been driving hybrid vehicles for quite awhile, and some electric cars already existed even if most were lower mileage/smaller battery models.

To me it is like claiming without iphones we wouldn't have gotten smartphones or touchscreens until a decade later. Except PDAs and touch screens already existed, apple just got a few years jump start on a big brand model before many other companies did the math on how cheap mobile computing and touch screens were becoming.
by hxtk | 2025-04-30 00:31:42+00:00
In general, this theoretical problem is called the Kolmogorov Complexity of a string: the size of the smallest program that outputs a the input string, for some definition of "program", e.g., an initial input tape for a given universal turing machine. Unfortunately, Kolmogorov Complexity in general is incomputable, because of the halting problem.

But a gzip decompressor is not turing-complete, and there are no gzip streams that will expand to infinitely large outputs, so it is theoretically possible to find the pseudo-Kolmogorov-Complexity of a string for a given decompressor program by the following algorithm:

Let file.bin be a file containing the input byte sequence.

1. BOUNDS=$(gzip --best -c file.bin | wc -c)

2. LENGTH=1

3. If LENGTH==BOUNDS, run `gzip --best -o test.bin.gz file.bin` and HALT.

4. Generate a file `test.bin.gz` LENGTH bytes long containing all zero bits.

5. Run `gunzip -k test.bin.gz`.

6. If `test.bin` equals `file.bin`, halt.

7. If `test.bin.gz` contains only 1 bits, increment LENGTH and GOTO 3.

8. Replace test.bin.gz with its lexicographic successor by interpreting it as a LENGTH-byte unsigned integer and incrementing it by 1.

9. GOTO 5.

test.bin.gz contains your minimal gzip encoding.

There are "stronger" compressors for popular compression libraries like zlib that outperform the "best" options available, but none of them are this exhaustive because you can surely see how the problem rapidly becomes intractable.

For the purposes of generating an efficient zip bomb, though, it doesn't really matter what the exact contents of the output file are. If your goal is simply to get the best compression ratio, you could enumerate all possible files with that algorithm (up to the bounds established by compressing all zeroes to reach your target decompressed size, which makes a good starting point) and then just check for a decompressed length that meets or exceeds the target size.

I think I'll do that. I'll leave it running for a couple days and see if I can generate a neat zip bomb that beats compressing a stream of zeroes. I'm expecting the answer is "no, the search space is far too large."
by antasvara | 2025-04-30 00:32:03+00:00
>I didn't buy the premise of the movie that only that rich would be able to use them. Given they were robots, governments, hospitals, could and would make them readily available since ultimately it would massively lower their medical costs.

Given Big Pharma's current ability to get lots and lots of money for vital medicine, I'm not optimistic they'd price a theoretical medical machine low enough for a government to afford.

Plus, if overpopulation is a concern, a wealthy person wouldn't necessarily want the machine to get into the hands of everyone. Given that the creator of this machine would become very wealthy, the incentives would probably lean towards offering it to a select group.
by krackers | 2025-04-30 00:32:07+00:00
Recent events [1] should make it clear that the "golden age" of commercial LLMs is over, and that companies have moved to the advertising + engagement farming phase of the technology now. Which is sad to see since I don't get the impression limits have been reached on the core technology yet, but I suppose you can't fund things with high benchmark scores.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43815653
by sttaft | 2025-04-30 00:33:10+00:00
For what it's worth, the ParaSail parallel programming language (https://github.com/parasail-lang/parasail) supports this:

func Search(Root : Tree; Desired_Value : Tree_Value) -> optional Tree_Id is var Identifier : optional Tree_Id := null; for T => Root then Left(T) || Right(T) while T not null concurrent loop if Value(T) == Desired_Value then // Found desired node, // exit with its identifier exit loop with Identifier => Key(T); end if; end loop; return Identifier; end func Search;

I actually don't use this feature much, because usually there is a key of some sort that determines which side of the tree is of interest.
by malfist | 2025-04-30 00:33:57+00:00
I suspect you don't actually own an ev. Otherwise you might mention a specific here. I own an ev and they're marvelous. The ability to leave with a full tank of gas every morning and never have to worry about filling up is fantastic. No maintenance other than tire rotations ever 10k miles, and electricity is way cheaper than gas. And EVs are just fun to drive. The instant torque is fantastic and everyone I show it off to loves it.
by terinjokes | 2025-04-30 00:34:20+00:00
It's great this is finally seeing some love! There seems to be some limitations in Firefox 138 that leaves it feeling like it's landed a bit short:

- Missing the context menu "Open in <profile>" on URLs or pages. There's often links I want to open in different profile, and I've missed this option from Chrome.

- Existing about:profile profiles aren't importable, other than the initial profile. It looks like adding other profiles manually to the "Profiles" table of the new sqlite database in the "Profile Groups" directory works to add it to the list, but it's still somewhat broken.

- Not documented how to open links from other applications in specific profiles. Passing the profile name (obtained from about:support) to "-P" no longer works, but passing the full path to the profile to "--profile" does. It would be nice to pass just the friendly profile name.
by mjamesaustin | 2025-04-30 00:34:31+00:00
Yes it's straightforwardly true that road trip charging is less convenient than with gas cars.

But charging for regular use is dramatically better. Anytime you're not on a road trip, you spend essentially no time fueling. Just plug in at night like you do with other electronics.

So I'll take saving 15 mins every week avoiding the gas station, in exchange for the couple times a year I have to wait an extra 15 mins charging.
by bhouston | 2025-04-30 00:34:35+00:00
It is a weird caveat in that study that sort of makes it a tautology:

“We found that at least in men with no known fertility challenges, sperm counts are largely stable and haven't changed significantly in the last few years, which is reassuring news."

It is a weird exclusion. I response I would ask then if the number of males with fertility issues, and thus excluded, are increasing or also stable.

They answer that at the end: "“We didn't track men who were fertile who became infertile. I think based upon the literature so far, that might be the case due to obesity or environmental exposures, and more research is needed to definitively answer that question."
by catlikesshrimp | 2025-04-30 00:35:36+00:00
I don't remember hearing about any peace. I did heard about ending the war, which might mean peace for both sides, or just one.

>> One of Trump’s most audacious promises was that he could end the war in Ukraine within 24 hours of taking office — or even before.

“That is a war that’s dying to be settled. I will get it settled before I even become president,”
by bigyabai | 2025-04-30 00:36:05+00:00
People are too long on Apple - their revenue comes from increasingly fragile sources and in all likelihood their current businesses may not exist in 5 years. Tim Cook didn't skate where the puck was headed, and as a result he's operating a uniquely disadvantaged business in 2025. Their hardware margins are jeopardized by tariffs and their software revenue is mostly backstopped by an illegally monopolized App Store. In a realistic scenario where Apple is deprived of these advantages, no amount of lifestyle branding or privacy prestige can prevent them from being unprofitable.
by Roguelazer | 2025-04-30 00:36:22+00:00
Running a parser for a network protocol as root seems like a pretty unnecessarily dumb thing to do. I can't really imagine why any part of airplay would need to run as root; maybe something to do with DRM? Although the DRM daemon `fairplayd` runs as a limited-privilege user `_fpsd`, so maybe not. So bizarre that Apple makes all these cool systems to sandbox code, and creates dozens of privilege-separated users on macOS, and then runs an HTTP server doing plists parsing as an unsandboxed root process.
by HenryBemis | 2025-04-30 00:36:50+00:00
Heh, I think I get your sarcasm. The problem with "later" is that we got 1 life to live, and if "later" means that I've gotta wait 10 years, sorry-not-gonna-wait.

As for harder.. nah.. we got history books telling us how these things play out (not well).
by II2II | 2025-04-30 00:37:33+00:00
I figured out why the feature was failing on my system: I needed to enable Install and Run Studies under Send technical and interaction data to Mozilla under Firefox Data Collection and Use under Privacy & Security under Settings. I can understand why Mozilla would do that (they consider it an experimental feature).

Along the same line, the Firefox Labs section of Settings requires the same settings to be enabled. When I enabled it under about:config then opened the settings, the label would briefly appear then disappear. When I went back to about:config, I found the setting was reset to disabled. Again, I can understand why Mozilla would do that.

Yet understanding why is not the same as accepting why. If they want to promote themselves as an open and privacy preserving web browser, they should accept there are some compromises to be made when it comes down to letting users experiment and collecting telemetry.
by SuperNinKenDo | 2025-04-30 00:37:49+00:00
I was trying to understand what the lede was here, and it turns out the author assumed that PATH was something understood by the kernel, which is rather an odd assumption, but perhaps one that others make.

I did get one thing out of this though. I had honestly wondered for the longest time why we need to call env to get the same functionality as PATH in a shebang.

Ironically, thanks to either an article I read here (or on the crustacean site) recently, I already knew that the shebang is something which is parsed by the kernel, but had not put two and two together at all.

Much like the author. So goes to show the benefits of exploring and thinking about seemingly "obvious" concepts.
by josephg | 2025-04-30 00:38:19+00:00
Yeah, or just store all freed nodes in a linked list. Eg, have a pointer / index from the root to the first unused (free) node, and in that node store a pointer to the next one and so on. This is pretty trivial to implement.

In my case, inserts and read operations vastly outnumber deletes. So much so that in all of my testing, I never saw a leaf node which could be freed anyway. (Leaves store ~32 values, and there were no cases where all of a leaf's values actually get deleted). I decided to just leak nodes if it ever happens in real life.

The algorithm processes data in batches then frees everything. So worst case, it just has slightly higher peak memory usage while processing. A fine trade in this case given it let me remove ~200 lines of code - and any bugs that might have been lurking in them.
by martin-buur | 2025-04-30 00:38:25+00:00
Thank you, you're right, I should clarify that further, most features do use AI. Only the task list does not immediately use AI, the rest of the features after the initial input and you clicking submit, do use AI.

And yes, this can definitely work with a local LLM, and there's a high chance I will do that next. I've created a local LLM open-source Mac app last year (paid, but open source, so you could just compile it yourself), you can find it on my profile, so it's definitely something I am very interested in! I wanted to try to tap a broader audience this time so did not release it with a local LLM feature. But very high chance it'll come next!
by kevin_thibedeau | 2025-04-30 00:38:36+00:00
I wish they threw their own BS back in their face and demanded an explanation why the GOP no longer believes in a low regulation, pro-business government.

Why should the federal government have the power to mandate business processes that reduce transparency? They don't want income taxes automatically filed so we can see what the government is "stealing" from the public. Can't have a VAT because that's hidden. But import taxes have to be hidden?
by lurk2 | 2025-04-30 00:39:25+00:00
I appreciate the effort to be conciliatory but I think this undermines the point you were making. Anti-scientific thinking has proliferated in left-wing spheres since the mid-2010s. This was one obvious example, but you also have the rejection of psychometrics and heredity (admittedly more among academics than actual scientists), an (albeit brief) embrace of Modern Monetary Theory, and then the “Trust the experts, believe in science” mantra of the early 2020s.

I just don’t see a lot of evidence to support the idea that progressives are exceptionally rational.
by nailer | 2025-04-30 00:41:17+00:00
The lack of civility I feel is that you’re either not reading what I write before replying or not feeling the need to address the points in the comment you’re replying to.

You’re right there is a spectrum of abilities and this changes over time. However we can define a threshold. I think a self-harming stim as an adult like head banging is sufficient to qualify as profound.
by kovac | 2025-04-30 00:41:27+00:00
I work on e-paper displays. Are you looking for something built with a Kindle?

This project of mine is similar to what you described with a power down mode. The power down and wake up can be automated. I'm looking to build a small business around such projects. Not sure how viable it is.

https://www.asciimx.com/projects/e-reader/
by aprilthird2021 | 2025-04-30 00:42:12+00:00
SEO for AI? I've been saying it for a while. Get ready for "Thanks for asking about that. This answer is supported by Encyclopedia Brittanica. Only $24.99 for access to an entire world of up-to-date, accurate historical data at your fingertips! Now, to your question, King Henry VIII of England beheaded 2 of his many wives and mistresses."