MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Vivarium: The keeper of a lab's animals stumbles onto a secret [fiction]
by jsomers | 2025-04-16 21:46:10+00:00
I thought the HN crowd would appreciate this story I wrote about the keeper of a university's lab animals. In reporting articles about science, and being a biology-watcher generally, I’ve had an uneasy time squaring my enthusiasm for cutting-edge biomedical research with the fact that this research so regularly involves breeding animals just to give them diseases and kill them. This is done as humanely as possible, of course.

The contrast hit me most vividly during the pandemic when I was writing an article about the immune system. [1] One of the scientists I spoke to told me about putting hamsters on warming plates, picking them up gently — in general, caring for and about them — and then feeling grief at their deaths. But of course understanding the immune response during infection with covid was a worthy cause. I felt no judgement towards this scientist; they are in a difficult position.

There was another more direct bit of inspiration, when I read this article [2], in 2023, about the toll that caring for laboratory animals could take on people’s mental health:

> Besides the symptoms Sessions experienced, those who handle lab animals may face insomnia, chronic physical ailments, zombielike lack of empathy, and, in extreme cases, severe depression, substance abuse, and thoughts of suicide. As many as nine in 10 people in the profession will suffer from compassion fatigue at some point during their careers, according to recent research, more than twice the rate of those who work in hospital intensive care units. It’s one of the leading reasons animal care workers quit.

That left an impression on me, and also armed me with a character: the forgotten-about, somewhat miserable vivarium worker.

The story obviously takes many liberties with fact — it is fiction — but I also tried to ground it in reality, and stuff that you might think I made up (the guillotine, the crazy VR sphere in the first paragraph), I did not.

I hope you enjoy! If nothing else I expect you’ll appreciate the illustrations, done by my friend Ben Smith [3].

[1]: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/11/09/how-the-corona...

[2]: https://www.science.org/content/article/suffering-silence-ca...

[3]: https://www.stephenbonesproductions.com/
by woodruffw | 2025-04-16 21:46:13+00:00
> I think their point is that a hypothetical connection-specific cert would make it difficult/impossible to compare your cert with anybody else to be able to find out that it happened.

This is already the case; CT doesn't rely on your specific served cert being comparable with others, but all certs for a domain being monitorable and auditable.

(This does, however, point to a current problem: more companies should be monitoring CT than are currently.)
by FjordWarden | 2025-04-16 21:46:56+00:00
Dunno, at least not for me. But is it not dubious that literally the one font that everyone has been conditioned to dislike through the power of memes is then magically the one that then must be helpful for dyslexics? Like why not any one of the other terrible fonts that shipped with Windows XP like Papyrus. Feels like magical thinking to me.

Even designing a study to find the "right" font for dyslexics would sit strange with me. I remember not liking to read certain text because of the way they where printed, but this had more to do with me being unfamiliar with the typeset and not necessary its inherent qualities. These days it is much easier for me to pick up new skills because I know so much already, but for someone with a learning disability it is hard to acquire more then one skill at a time. So my advice, pick one font and stick to it.

Actually maybe this is bad advice. Perhaps focus specifically on learning to read many different fonts. I found my education to be very paternalistic and intellectually unstimulating. It is hard having an asymmetric IQ, with the verbal IQ of an average person, combined with the spatial intelligence of a genius and the motor skills of a moron.

I think you can say about dyslexics what I've heard said about autism, that it is not a spectrum but a constellation of different neurological phenomena that are hard to classify on a single axis. Is Pluto a planet with a moon that is bigger than itself or just some random trans Neptunian object we like to obsess about.
by cut3 | 2025-04-16 21:46:59+00:00
Why do i get downvoted. Who can downvote? sad figma ceo?

go look at the hundreds of similar posts of everyone dumping figma to cook code while you downvote and become irrelevant

figma is a bottleneck now

ill get you started: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/activity:73182383440883...
by jcranmer | 2025-04-16 21:47:05+00:00
In the US, it's not an open question. Feist v Rural holds that any work needs to possess a minimum spark of (human) creativity to be able to be copyrighted; data collected by the "sweat of the brow" is explicitly not allowed to be copyrighted. Thus things like maps and telephone books aren't really copyrightable (they do retain a "thin copyright" protection, but in the present context, you're going to say that the code has copyright but the model weights do not). Most European jurisdictions do recognize a "sweat of the brow" doctrine, and they could be copyrightable there.

What's not clear is whether or not the model weights infringe the copyright of the works they were trained on.
by Dwedit | 2025-04-16 21:47:54+00:00
https://www.theverge.com/2023/4/25/23697532/microsoft-edge-b...

It's the "Show suggestions to follow creators in Microsoft Edge" feature.

But that's not the only time Edge has been caught with a feature that sends all your URLs to Microsoft:

https://x.com/scriptjunkie1/status/1152280517972299777 - "Anonymous" statistics sends your Windows SID along with the URL visited for the smartscreen feature

https://www.reddit.com/r/browsers/comments/147rdv4/microsoft... - an Image Enhancement feature sends image URLs to Microsoft

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskNetsec/comments/96nwgd/microsoft... - With search suggestions enabled, search suggestions and URLs entered into address bar go to Microsoft regardless of which search engine is selected (Really, typing http: or https: ought to mean no suggestions generated at all)
by MattSayar | 2025-04-16 21:48:03+00:00
I set up a Project in Claude, used the Github integration to point to the Python example code [0], threw in my API docs, and told it to go forth and create. It was a workable start. Very much just a prototype, but it worked out of the box.

[0] https://github.com/modelcontextprotocol/python-sdk
by hn_throwaway_99 | 2025-04-16 21:48:31+00:00
Uh, I think it does. A lot of people, myself included, have major problems when "overactive DEI" leads to race being a primary, if not the primary, factor in hiring and admissions decisions. This isn't something one should just "roll their eyes over" and move on.

FWIW, that was my original approach, and I thought that the worst excesses of "wokeism" were just caricatures that the right was using to paint all on the left with a broad brush, so I was pretty dismayed when, over time, I felt that a lot of this "race first" thinking had infested many areas of elite universities. Many university professors (ones who would not have in any way identified with being "on the right") who I deeply respect have spoken out about this, sometimes at great professional cost.
by littlestymaar | 2025-04-16 21:49:15+00:00
press X to doubt

o3-mini wasn't even the second place for non-STEM tasks, and in today's announcement they don't even publish benchmarks for those. What's impressive about Gemini 2.5 pro (and was also really impressive with R1) is how good the model is for a very broad range of tasks, not just benchmaxing on AIME.
by dflock | 2025-04-16 21:49:20+00:00
I want this too! I discovered a really esotieric way to get this: https://duncanlock.net/blog/2024/01/04/super-fast-reader-mod... - but it would be really nice if there was just a way to switch reader mode on permenantly in modern browsers. Apparently Safari can do that, but afaik no other browsers support it.

I really wish browsers were more modular - if the rendering engine and network fetching were easily separable - and you could insert your own steps into that pipeline, you could do all sorts of neat stuff. If I could insert some code of my own in between the fetch and the render, that would be ideal - strip out all ads and malware, optionally remove all scripts or css, run it through readability, etc...
by mooreds | 2025-04-16 21:49:21+00:00
Yes! It's a proxy that might modify results on the way in or out, which proxies can do.

Could also be called a gateway, which feels a bit more accurate.

The same way API gateways perform additional services like rate-limiting and authentication and billing, an MCP gateway abstracts the services behind it and adds context such that an LLM can more easily interact with them.
by kragen | 2025-04-16 21:49:24+00:00
There's some truth to that, but I think you're overstating the case. The vast majority of software we run on a day-to-day basis doesn't use any of the stuff you mentioned, so nothing is stopping it from moving to platform-agnostic bytecode, except that that bytecode doesn't exist yet.

For example, 2-D graphics acceleration hardware (whether in the form of character generators or in the form of blitters and line drawing) was really important for usability up to the 01990s. This is a major reason the X-Windows protocol is so big and complicated: it needed a way to expose the acceleration capabilities of the hardware to applications so they could draw with it. This was, as you said, "limited and inefficient and limited compared to the hardware". But basically, as CPUs got faster, we gave up on all that stuff around the turn of the millennium, and now most 2-D applications really just want to fill up pixel buffers and swap the displayed buffer between screen refreshes. It's a very, very simple interface (you might say "inefficient abstraction layer").

Something similar happened with sound. In the 80s and 90s our sound cards did square and sawtooth waves, LFSR noise generation, envelopes, FM synthesis, wavetable synthesis, etc. Different sound cards had different instruments! Now all I want to do with my sound card is send it a sequence of samples, maybe get back a sequence of samples from the microphone, maybe choose from among multiple outputs. Another very, very simple interface.

3-D games do still use 3-D acceleration, of course. That's not a simple interface. They also depend pretty heavily on SIMD instructions. The same is true of video codecs.

But my SSH client, my mail server, my IRC client, my text editor, my compiler, my filesystem, my Game of Life simulator, my system logger, my Sudoku game, my circuit design program (KiCad), my PDF viewer, my audio editor (Audacity), and so on — those aren't using "graphics cards, video acceleration, sound, and AI accelerators", except through the very, very simple interfaces we're talking about above. Most of them don't even use floating-point math! They could easily be in platform-agnostic bytecode because they already do ignore most of the subsystems in my computer.
by AI-Essay-Grader | 2025-04-16 21:49:37+00:00
An AI-powered tool that automatically grades essays. It evaluates things like grammar, structure, and clarity, providing instant feedback on written content. This could be a useful tool for teachers and educators looking for quick assessments, but I’m curious about its accuracy and how well it captures things like creativity or deeper analysis in writing, and I am looking for feedbacks.
by gnabgib | 2025-04-16 21:49:39+00:00
Discussions in:

2023 (342 points, 129 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38396345

2021 (301 points, 54 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27030504

2021 (399 points, 73 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26504661

2015 (102 points, 46 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9001931

2014 (93 points, 20 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8777705
by kmeisthax | 2025-04-16 21:50:43+00:00
As someone who has actually tried scraping Wikimedia Commons for AI training[0], they're correct only in the most literal sense. Wikitext is effectively unparseable, so just using the data dump directly is a bad idea.

The correct way to do this is to stand up a copy of MediaWiki on your own infra and then scrape that. That will give you shittons of HTML to parse and tokenize. If you can't work with that, then you're not qualified to do this kind of thing, sorry.

[0] If you're wondering, I was scraping Wikimedia Commons directly from their public API, from my residential IP with my e-mail address in the UA. This was primarily out of laziness, but I believe this is the way you're "supposed" to use the API.

Yes, I did try to work with Wikitext directly, and yes that is a terrible idea.
by iambateman | 2025-04-16 21:50:57+00:00
Really cool! Looking forward to checking this out.

I really like my IDE (PHPStorm) but I want Cursor-like functionality, where it’s aware of my codebase and able to make changes iteratively. It sounds like this is what I need?

Excited to give this a go, thanks for sharing.

Btw one of the videos is private.
by lelandfe | 2025-04-16 21:51:43+00:00
Similar specs here. Here's a full load in a Chrome guest window with resolution constrained to an iPhone SE: https://imgur.com/a/xRjKWNb

In the left panel, at the end of the video you'll see two important numbers: 28.5MB transferred, 40.7MB resources. "Transferred" is the (compressed) size of everything downloaded over the wire, 40.7MB is the ultimate (uncompressed) size of those.

I don't show it in that video but you can filter by "initiator" to see that the video files are the lion's share of this.
by elcritch | 2025-04-16 21:52:50+00:00
That attitude sounds like a college grad with a fresh credit card they keep spending on.

Their parents warn them that if they keep spending on it there will be major issues. But hey, they still have like $10k of credit and they can get another card! They’re just old and predicting catastrophe all the time.

Until one day they they have no more credit left and all their income goes to paying credit card interest not even paying off the debt.

In the 70s the debt was negligible. Now the debt is nearing 100% of the US GDP [1]. Historically once countries reach 120% hyperinflation occurs. The dollar being the global reserve currency buffers it a bit but not indefinitely.

1: https://econofact.org/why-is-the-u-s-debt-expected-to-keep-g...
by Azeralthefallen | 2025-04-16 21:53:46+00:00
Hi since i know you will never respond to this or hear this.

We spent almost 2 months fighting with you guys about basic questions any B2B SaaS should be able to answer us. Things such as invoicing, contracts, and security policies. This was for a low 6 figure MRR deal.

When your sales rep responds "I don't know" or "I will need to get back to you" for weeks about basic questions it left us with a massive disappointment. Please do better, however we have moved to Copilot.
by hash872 | 2025-04-16 21:54:26+00:00
Fun fact, the US has always had some of the highest wages in the world- even dating back to colonial times before 1776. Adam Smith did a detailed accounting of them, going occupation-by-occupation and noting that American colonist wages were higher than on the British mainland. (I'm excited because I literally just read this last night. I would link if I could to the specific pages in my book).

I believe the standard explanation is that most of the colonists were British (already a high-wage country at the time), and you really had to pay skilled labor to get them to leave & settle on a new continent. Plus labor mobility between the proto-state governments of the time (Virginia, Massachusetts, etc.)
by flopsamjetsam | 2025-04-16 21:54:28+00:00
We had a lab of Apollos at our uni, in the "VLSI lab" (but used by everyone). We had one with a truly enormous (in depth) 17" or 19" colour monitor. I programmed some rudimentary 3d (flat shaded) on it, using some kind of direct screen buffer. I can't even remember if they ran X Windows. This would've been in the early 90s.
by dijit | 2025-04-16 21:55:05+00:00
not really, a lot of those middleware boxes are doing some form of ASIC offloading for TLS, and the PROM that loads the cert(s) are not rated for heavy writes… thus writing is slow, blocking, and will wear your hardware out.

The larger issue is actually our desire to deprecate cipher suites so rapidly though, those 2-3 year old ASICs that are functioning well become e-waste pretty quickly when even my blog gets a Qualys “D” rating after having an “A+” rating barely a year ago.

How much time are we spending on this? The NSA is literally already in the walls.
by LegionMammal978 | 2025-04-16 21:55:36+00:00
I think that's technically possible, but you have to use a freshly allocated (and zeroed) buffer every single time, since after it's been written to once, it's 'tainted' with the effective types of the structs stored in it. (Though it looks like the ISO C2y draft finally has language to address this case, with a concept of "byte arrays" that can hold objects of other types, as long as you keep alignments in mind.)

The bigger issue with ISO C and POSIX is everything around 'struct sockaddr': you don't have any way of knowing what types the implementation is internally reading in or writing out. If you give it a casted pointer to a 'struct sockaddr_in' but it reads the sa_family from the 'struct sockaddr *', that's UB; ditto if listen() gives you a 'struct sockaddr_in' and you read the sa_family from a 'struct sockaddr *'. Or if you use 'struct sockaddr_storage' at all, that's also UB. IIRC, the latest POSIX edition just tells implementations to "pretty please allow aliasing between these types in particular!"

Of course, POSIX has nothing on Windows APIs, many of which encourage the caller to cast around pointers with impunity. As far as I'm aware, MSVC doesn't care about strict aliasing at all, and only has a minimal set of optimizations for 'restrict' pointers.
by TrackerFF | 2025-04-16 21:55:42+00:00
The only ideological rationale I've seen for this is that if the government offers a (free) tool like this, it would mean that the government also has the incentive to make the user pay more taxes - and thus, the tool must be worse for the tax payer. The whole argument rests on the gov. wanting to maximize tax income.

Whereas commercial vendors like TurboTax etc. would be incentivized to minimize taxes for the user, and thus provide a better service for the tax payer...even though it will cost something.

That is, of course, if you view the world through a right-wing or libertarian lens, where it is assumed that tax is theft, and that the government is stealing from you. This is what the conservative shills are parroting.
by danenania | 2025-04-16 21:55:46+00:00
> It seems that much like Aider, you use separate models for creating code edits and validating them.

That's right. To apply edits, Plandex first attempts a deterministic edit based on the edit snippet. In some cases this can be used without validation, and in others a validation step is needed. A "race" is then orchestrated with o3-mini between an aider-style diff edit, a whole file build, and (on the cloud service) a specialized model. I actually wrote a comment about how this works (while maintaining efficiency/cost-effectiveness) a couple days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43673412

And on the Docker question, it should be working well on Mac.
by dflock | 2025-04-16 21:55:57+00:00
Dark Mode, and media queries are both just options/hints - they are implemented on the client side - by the user agent.

The actual problem is that most browsers have forgotten that they're "user agents" - and have stipped away all the configurations and options that they used to have, removing control from the user.

Vivaldi is still very configurable, and still behaves like the users agent.
by chillingeffect | 2025-04-16 21:56:07+00:00
One of the neatest things I've heard demo scene people do on the 6510/6502 is a "stack machine." I don't know exactly, but fwiw I understand, it works like this:

it's using the stack page, 256 bytes from 0x100 - 0x1ff. It generally stores two-byte pointers to code. When each routine finishes, it calls RTS and the CPU automatically pulls the next 16-bit addr from the stack and jumps to it. You never call JMP, JSR, etc, never pushing your address onto the stack! And I think you can also do tricky things like throw in some code executing in that space, too. And I think it can loop around, too, so you have a basic set up of 128 slots for routines that can switch between them very quickly. You can also write to the SP (stack pointer) to jump around in the slots.

p.s. pray you don't get any interrupts while this is going on unless you absolutely know what you're doing :)

Apologies if I haven't got this right. I've never seen it, only heard about it.
by Spooky23 | 2025-04-16 21:56:43+00:00
Silly me, I’m just a customer, incapable of making my own risk assessments or prioritizing my business processes.

You’re portraying people suing CAs to get injunctions to avoid outages as clueless or irresponsible. The fact is Digicert’s actions, dictated by this CA/Browser forum were draconian and over the top responses to a minor risk. This industry trade group is out of control.

End of the day, we’re just pushing risk around. Running a quality internal PKI is difficult.
by dijit | 2025-04-16 21:57:46+00:00
as long as you only have a single server, or a DNS server that has an API.

Even certbot got deprecated, so my IRC network has to use some janky shell scripts to rotate TLS… I’m considering going back to traditional certs because I geo-balance the DNS which doesn’t work for letsencrypt.

The issue is actually that I have multiple domains handled multiple ways and they all need to be letsencrypt capable for it to work and generate a combined cert with SAN’s attached.
by LoganDark | 2025-04-16 21:58:10+00:00
> Not to mention that it will halt on signal, contrary to the goal.

Well, it's difficult not to halt on, say, SIGKILL, that's for sure. There are ways to do it, but they are cursed and I hate them (e.g. zombie processes). Though you can still usually get rid of zombie processes by killing the parent, or just rebooting the system.
by dan-robertson | 2025-04-16 21:59:24+00:00
Mostly because most people have lots of options for employment and they typically don’t take the low options. In a place with nationalised healthcare you would still be paying for it through taxes paid by the labourer but I guess the system would be a bit more progressive than in the US so lower-skill labour would demand a smaller premium for healthcare. Though I think there’s probably more than just labour costs in the US. Eg maybe it is expensive to get the right permits to install fibre optic cables.
by arp242 | 2025-04-16 21:59:35+00:00
From that article: https://www.faception.com

If I were to design a satire then it would be quite close to that. Company seems dead, but looks like it was around for a few years. Ridiculous such garbage was around in the first place and raised any amount of funds. I've seen plenty of garbage companies with garbage premises over the years, but this takes the cake.
by noosphr | 2025-04-16 22:01:21+00:00
This is starting to get into the philosophical question of what training data should look like.

From the same set of interviews I made the point that the only way to meaningfully extract the semantics of a page meant for human consumption is to use a vision model that uses typesetting as a guide for structure.

The perfect example was the contract they sent, which looked completely fine, but was a word document with only wysiwyg formatting, e.g. headings were just extra large bold text rather than marked up as heading. If you used the programmatically extracted text as training data you'd be in trouble.