MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by alabastervlog | 2025-04-24 19:25:46+00:00
> Outside of PBS, do you have evidence for this claim: "News is/was paid vast sums by the government to tell a certain story"?

Yeah, they wouldn't have to rely so much on Madison Avenue if they were just paying the news agencies to report whatever they want.

Incidentally, I'm not sure I'd characterize even PBS' government funding as "vast sums", either absolutely or relatively (to the rest of their funding).
by seabass-labrax | 2025-04-24 19:25:55+00:00
I wouldn't say it's that different from how the Royal Mail currently recommend one write the address:

https://help.royalmail.com/personal/s/article/How-to-address...

My father writes the address staggered; that is, each subsequent line being indented a centimetre or so relative to the previous line. Were you taught to stagger the address at your school in the 90s?
by viccis | 2025-04-24 19:25:59+00:00
Reddit is SO MUCH WORSE than most people understand. Ignoring for a moment that peoples frontpage Best sort uses engagement metrics rather than upvote/downvotes since 2021, the moderators there have an iron grip over what is allowed.

r/redditminusmods used to track this. Every 12 hours they'd take a snapshot of the top 50 posts and then check ones from the previous 12 hour snapshot to see what percentage had been deleted. When it started, it was averaging 20% or so. By the end, it was at 50/50 or 49/50 deleted almost every single 12 hour period.

Of course, reddit couldn't allow this level of scrutiny, so they banned that subreddit for unstated reasons, and now the only good google result for it actually leads back here. See for yourself how bad it was: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36040282

That only goes to two years ago. It feels like it's gotten even worse since then. That's not even going into some subreddits (worldnews, politics, etc.) creating the illusion of consensus by banning anyone with an opinion outside of a narrow range of allowed ones.
by mjevans | 2025-04-24 19:26:23+00:00
"""

United Kingdom

The Royal Mail stopped selling IRCs on 31 December 2011[26] due to a lack of demand. United States

The United States Postal Service stopped selling international reply coupons on 27 January 2013.[27]

"""

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_reply_coupon#Uni...

That explains why I was confounded in my efforts to search within USPS results.
by pjmlp | 2025-04-24 19:26:44+00:00
One of the reasons I kept around Java and .NET ecosystems on my toolbox, regardless of their lack of coolness by modern coffee shop coding standards, is exactly the traces of Smalltalk/Lisp development experience that somehow are part of the tooling and runtime capabilities.

By the way, it is relatively easy to plug a debugger into a running container in a Kubernetes pod.

Yeah too many folks pretending their systems are UNIX in 1980's, and not aware of what is available.
by ben_w | 2025-04-24 19:26:50+00:00
> I think you've misunderstood me. I wasn't arguing against risk in any general sense - quite the opposite.

Ah, noted.

> My only position is that "and then the AGI killed everyone" is so oversimplified that it makes children's bedtime stories look sophisticated.

Yes, but I don't know how they can be otherwise. Yudkowsky's chess metaphor: I can say Kasparov would beat me despite (indeed, because) I'm unable to name a single move he'd make.

That said, Yudkowsky's chess doom metaphor seems to assume a jump to suddenly more competent AI — I'm p(doom) ~= 10%, because I expect an approximately continuous improvement to capabilities, and consequent risks, where an AI not quite competent enough to kill everyone, causes enough harm that we either cannot make the AI which could kill everyone (tech/industrial regression), or we decide not to (Butlerian Jihad).

> Physical hardware is relevant because unlike computer programs results aren't instant. The supply of materials, manufacturer, and deployment are all slow processes. Opponents generally have time to react, and if AGI is an opponent then I think it's safe to assume that it also has to contend with other AGI.

Agree completely. This is why I expect any AI to take about three years to go from it running on a high end GPU or TPU to being economically disruptive. (Also: world electricity supply is currently a limiting factor, as it's only 250 W/person).

> Opponents generally have time to react, and if AGI is an opponent then I think it's safe to assume that it also has to contend with other AGI.

Opponents have to notice. It is not a priori clear if an AI attacker or defender will have an advantage; even if an attacker had the opportunity to consider what is hard to detect, this may go either way, as I think someone will announce smart dust that's genuinely dust-sized before the end of the decade.
by camel-cdr | 2025-04-24 19:27:01+00:00
> The argument for vector width agnostic code is seems predicated on the proverbial “sufficiently advanced compiler”.

A SIMD ISA having a fixed size or not is orthogonal to autovectorization. E.g. I've seen a bunch of cases where things get autovectorized for RVV but not for AVX512. The reason isn't fixed vs variable, but rather the supported instructions themselves.

There are two things I'd like from a "sufficiently advanced compiler”, which are sizeless struct support and redundant predicated load/store elimination. Those don't fundamentally add new capabilities, but makes working with/integrating into existing APIs easier.

> All the complexity and cost is in specializing for the capabilities of the underlying SIMD ISA, not the width.

Wow, it almost sounds like you could take basically the same code and run it with different vector lengths.

> The benefit of fixed width is that optimal data structure and algorithm design on various microarchitectures is dependent on explicitly knowing the register width

Optimal to what degree? Like sure, fixed-width SIMD can always turn your pointer increments from a register add to an immediate add, so it's always more "optimal", but that sort of thing doesn't matter.

The only difference you usually encounter when writing variable instead of fixed size code is that you have to synthesize your shuffles outside the loop. This usually just takes a few instructions, but loading a constant is certainly easier.
by cortesoft | 2025-04-24 19:27:21+00:00
How would that work for something like legalize gambling? The default state would be for gambling to be legal (since a law is required to make it illegal). So in a few years when the `legalize gambling` law was up for review, what would happen?

Which policies would be up for review? Everything? Do we have to re-outlaw murder ever 5 years?
by Jordan-117 | 2025-04-24 19:27:26+00:00
It reminds me of Voat.co, a social news aggregator that promoted itself as a free-speech haven in an attempt to pick up disaffected Redditors during a series of moderation crackdowns circa 2015. It was initially pretty normal:

https://web.archive.org/web/20150501033432/https://voat.co/

But then they instituted karma-based throttling on participation:

https://web.archive.org/web/20170520210511/https://voat.co/v...

That, plus the influx of racists and misogynists chased off of Reddit, led to a snowball effect where the bigots upvoted themselves into power-user status and censored anyone who stood against them, which discouraged normies from sticking around, which further entrenched the bigotry. Within a few years, virtually every single new post on the site was radically right-wing, blatantly racist/sexist/antisemitic neo-Nazi shit:

https://web.archive.org/web/20200610022710/https://voat.co/

The site shut down by the end of 2020 from lack of funding.

You can see basically the same thing happening on Xitter, it's just slower because the starting userbase was so much larger, and Elon (for now) can continue to bankroll it.
by fnordpiglet | 2025-04-24 19:27:42+00:00
I’ve seen a lot of anti-Israel stuff but I’ve never seen holocaust denial on the far left. What I have seen is an assertion that the holocaust is one of many horrendous genocides that continue to this day, and comparisons between early holocaust actions by nazi germany (ghettos, destruction of the ghettos, resettlement, etc) against the Jews and Israel in Gaza. Personally I think it’s all absurd. The holocaust is uniquely horrific, and every horrific thing doesn’t have to be comparable or have parallels to be horrible. In fact each genocide is its own unique horror, be it in Armenia, Cambodia, etc. Israel and Gaza is also its own situation and the relationships to the holocaust is irrelevant other than in the space of fallacy. The comparison helps no one - left, right, Jew, Palestinian. Every tragedy is its own tragedy and can and should be examined in itself for the lessons they teach, and anyone who uses violence at scale is wrong no matter what happened prior. Perpetuation of industrialized horrors should shame everyone as human beings. But, I was raised Quaker, and we’ve always been persecuted in some way for believing and standing up for the fact you shouldn’t hurt others.
by mvdtnz | 2025-04-24 19:27:47+00:00
His difficulty was finding postage stamps for the self-addressed return envelope, and clearly the author is not American. Do you think it would be quite so easy to "buy envelopes and stamps" if you had to send a stamped return envelope to Nepal or Manila? Is that a "basic life skill" or would you have to do a little research to figure out what you'd need?
by panic | 2025-04-24 19:28:24+00:00
TextMate language grammars, the de facto standard for syntax highlighting, are defined in terms of regular expressions that must be matched using Oniguruma's engine for compatibility—TextMate itself used Oniguruma, and its quirks have become an implicit part of the standard. I wonder if the project will be forked to fix things like security issues given its wide use in this context.
by bigbuppo | 2025-04-24 19:28:36+00:00
The big problem is that everything in IBM-z world is negotiated, and often covered by NDAs. The pricing is complicated by which operating systems and what sort of workloads you'll be running, and what service level guarantees you need. The only published pricing in the entire life of the IBM 360/370/390/z-series line was the Linux One when it was first released... Hardware plus OS, excluding storage, was $70k on the low end.

Previous generation machines that came off-lease used to be listed on IBM's web site. You could have a fully-maxed-out previous-generation machine for under $250k. Fifteen years ago I was able to get ballpark pricing for a fully-maxed-out new machine, and it was "over a million, but less than two million, and closer to the low end". That being said, the machines are often leased.

If you go with z/vm or z/vse, the OS and softare is typically sold under terms that are pretty much like normal software, except it varies depending on the capacity level of the machine, which may be less than the physical number of CPUs in the machine, since that is a thing in IBM-land.

If you go for z/os, welcome to the world of metered billing. You're looking at tens of thousands of dollars in MRC just to get started, and if you're running the exact wrong mix of everything, you'll be spending millions just on software each month. There's a whole industry that revolves around managing these expenses. Still less complicated than The Cloud.
Show HN: IdeaKiln – A platform to validate your startup ideas before building
by sebsanswer | 2025-04-24 19:28:39+00:00
Hey HN,

I'm Sebastian, and I just launched IdeaKiln.com — a platform to help makers, indie hackers, and founders validate their early-stage ideas, prototypes, or MVPs through community feedback.

The idea came from personal frustration. I’ve started several projects where I spent weeks — sometimes months — building only to realize no one really wanted what I made. Without a large audience or email list, it’s hard to get early signals. IdeaKiln is my way of solving that problem.

Instead of silently building in isolation, IdeaKiln gives you a place to:

- Share what you’re working on (even in rough form)

- Get early feedback and upvotes from fellow makers

- Discover whether your idea resonates before committing too much time

- Pivot or refine your direction based on real responses

There’s no need for a landing page or pitch-perfect copy. Just post your raw idea and start the conversation.

Right now, the platform is brand new and I’m looking to grow it into a helpful space for honest, early validation. If you’re working on something — or just have an idea in your head — I’d love for you to give it a try: https://www.ideakiln.com

Also happy to answer any questions, or chat about where it’s headed. Feedback is always welcome!
by Night_Thastus | 2025-04-24 19:29:25+00:00
Without checking every answer it gives back to make sure it's factual, you may be ingesting tons of bullshit answers.

In this particular answer model A may get it wrong and model B may get it right, but that can be reversed for another question.

What do you do at that point? Pay to use all of them and find what's common in the answers? That won't work if most of them are wrong, like for this example.

If you're going to have to fact check everything anyways...why bother using them in the first place?
by LegionMammal978 | 2025-04-24 19:29:25+00:00
How could a stomp allocator have possibly found this bug? The offending values are stored on the stack, in-bounds when written to, and again in-bounds when read from.

At no point is there an OOB access, just a failure to initialize stack variables. And to catch that, you'd need either MSan-style shadow state that didn't exist, thorough playtesting with fine-grained stack randomization, or some sort of poisoning that I don't think existed.
by 627467 | 2025-04-24 19:29:26+00:00
Who's overthinking? This is not an example of a bad title: the main message of the piece is that a (prosecuting?) witness is demonstrating how the alleged antitrust behavior of one of the signatory parties prevents them from operating as they see fit. Lenovo is not the one on the stand being accused of antitrust behavior. I guess perplexity could accuse Lenovo of antitrust behavior but that's not the case the article is describing, is it?
by AdrianB1 | 2025-04-24 19:29:36+00:00
There are some hills not worth die on. There are moments when a retreat is better than a worthless fight, saving people in the process.

I did the same mistake working for a company that went from morally sound to "almost-Enron". I thought it is a fight worth taking. The company went its way, I made no difference in the end, I just stressed myself for years for nothing. Life is too short for that.
by motoboi | 2025-04-24 19:29:37+00:00
DuckDb is missing a killer feature by not having a pipe syntax like kusto or google's pipe query syntax.

Why is it a killer feature? First of all, LLMs complete text from left to right. That alone is a killer feature.

But for us meatboxes with less compute power, pipe syntax allow (much better) code completion.

Pipe syntax is delightful to work with and makes going back to SQL a real bummer moment (please insert meme of Kate Perry kissing the earth here).
by razster | 2025-04-24 19:29:57+00:00
That dynamic of influence compounding certainly echoes the historical patterns we’ve seen with capital—those who have it can shape systems to acquire more. But it’s worth remembering that this only holds power if we choose to participate.

Personally, I’ve stepped away from anything associated with X.com or Elon Musk. I deleted my accounts, disconnected from the ecosystem entirely—and life is better for it. No doomscrolling, no algorithmic nudging, no subtle behavioral conditioning. Influence may be the new capital, but opting out is still a form of agency. Disengagement can be a powerful act.

We often forget: participation isn’t mandatory.
by imoreno | 2025-04-24 19:30:08+00:00
This focuses on case where the acquirer seeks to capture the value of the startup's business. But this is not always the case, sometimes the startup is dubious, but a cash-rich enterprise can purchase startups simply to eliminate potential avenues of competition. They may not be interested in adding a better product to their portfolio, only in quashing any nascent attempts at building the better product so they can keep selling their own mediocre one.

Also, "model innovation" strikes me as missing the point these days. The models are really good already. The majority of applications is capturing only a tiny bit of their value. Improving the models is not that important because model capability is not the bottleneck anymore, what matters is how the model is used. We just don't have enough tools to use them fully, and what we have is not even close to penetrating the market, while all the dominant tools are garbage. Of course application innovation is the place to be!
by wishfish | 2025-04-24 19:30:22+00:00
Recently picked up a Moto G Power 2024 as a cheap way to play around with Android. Never signed in with Google. Use Thunderbird / Firefox. Mixplorer for files. Most Google services & apps disabled. Use Obtanium as my main way to install apps, with a few from F-droid too. Have Aurora for anonymous Play if I need it but so far have just used it for Dropbox.

At the heart of this is Netguard. I'm using this firewall as a whitelist. Blocking network for everything except for the things I approve. So far, this seems to be working well.

It's been a great experience. Have ended up using this device more than my iPhone. Still has the stock ROM but, with the bad stuff disabled, it hasn't gotten in my way. This feels like it's truly my own device in a way that's rare these days. Main drawback is the lack of future updates.
by ianbicking | 2025-04-24 19:30:24+00:00
All these legacy answers don't really make sense for this Z17... it's a new mainframe supporting up to 64T of memory and specialized cores for matrix math/AI applications. I have a hard time believing that legacy workloads are calling for this kind of hardware.

It also has a ton of high availability features and modularity that _does_ fit with legacy workloads and mainframe expectations, so I'm a little unclear who wants to pay for both sets of features in the same package.
by alabastervlog | 2025-04-24 19:30:44+00:00
Yeah, am damn far left by US standards, keep up with actually-left sources like The Nation and Democracy Now! (I also listen to right wing nut job AM radio in the car, because I'm a masochist and a politics nerd in general—I'm "fair and balanced"!). Was involved in some left-of-Democrats political organizing in college.

I can't recall ever seeing holocaust denial from that side. I'm sure examples can be found, but I don't think it's a staple there like it is when you veer even a little off the (formerly...) best-trod paths on the right.
by flkiwi | 2025-04-24 19:31:16+00:00
Sure. Taking that perspective even begins to explain some things, like a lot of the pointless me-too developments (short form videos?) Facebook has been implementing for years: if they dilute the product by incorporating others' ideas, even if those ideas go nowhere FB can claim everybody is in the same boat.

But it doesn't make it any less ridiculous. This is like the meme of the guy shooting the other dude in the chair.
by kinow | 2025-04-24 19:31:35+00:00
My father worked for many many years at IBM Brazil with mainframes.

When I got into IT, his first advice for me was (translating from Portuguese): "Companies do not have feelings. So do not harbor feelings for it. The moment they have to fire you, they will".

I followed his other other advices and experimented several companies and industries. No regrets so far (20+ years gone since I started).
by DFHippie | 2025-04-24 19:31:47+00:00
> Outside of PBS

How much influence do you imagine PBS wields and how much money do you suppose is in these vast sums they are paid?

PBS is mostly known for Sesame Street and nature documentaries. Their government funding has been whittled down to almost nothing over years of relentless attack from the Republicans.

Here's some discussion from PBS itself on the topic:

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/a-look-at-the-history-of-p...

A pull quote:

"The U.S. is almost literally off the chart for how little we allocate towards our public media. At the federal level, it comes out to a little over $1.50 per person per year. Compare that to the Brits, who spend roughly $100 per person per year for the BBC. Northern European countries spend well over $100 per person per year."
by classichasclass | 2025-04-24 19:32:16+00:00
As I see it, these systems have two potential markets (some natural overlap exists): the first being people like me who don't want to necessarily feed the x86-64 beast if they can avoid it, and the second indeed being people who want a completely auditable, transparent platform. In both cases to be a practical alternative the computer needs to have similar performance to what you'd get from a modern desktop, and while POWER9 is no longer cutting edge, it still generally delivers.
by hirvi74 | 2025-04-24 19:32:25+00:00
I wonder if our professors knew each other?

My classical guitar instructor was well acquainted with Segovia, and he himself, was a student of Julian Bream. However, my instructor was without a doubt one of the most angry people I think I have ever interacted with. He was somewhat better known for his arrangements and less so as a performer.

> "I should just quit now because I'll never be that good."

I never had to think about this because my instructor would often tell me this. XD
by mvdtnz | 2025-04-24 19:33:10+00:00
I just priced a stamp to send to New Zealand using that USPS website and it came to over USD$20 so that's not a realistic option. To be fair I had to take some guesses with weight (what the fuck is an ounce and how many letters fit into one?) and dimensions (they don't have units on that website, so I guess my letter is 6x3 whatevers).
by tgv | 2025-04-24 19:33:28+00:00
Fortune 500? More like Fortune 50000 (ok, exaggeration). But there are so many banks in the world, and their automation can run back to the 1950s. They are only slowly moving away from mainframes, if only because a rewrite of a complex system that nobody understands is tough, and possibly very costly if it is the key to billions of euros/dollars/...
by hoten | 2025-04-24 19:33:31+00:00
Sure the lower bound is nicer here. But when the tradeoff includes an unlimited upper bound it's not a very attractive option.

I guess the most robust code handling both performance and unexpected input would be one iteration of this (leveraging the assumption that angles are either always within the bounds, or had one frame of going out of bounds by a small amount); followed by a fmod if that assumption is just totally off.
by CamperBob2 | 2025-04-24 19:33:41+00:00
If you're going to have to fact check everything anyways...why bother using them in the first place?

"If you're going to have to put gas in the tank, change the oil, and deal with gloves and hearing protection, why bother using a chain saw in the first place?"

Tool use is something humans are good at, but it's rarely trivial to master, and not all humans are equally good at it. There's nothing new under that particular sun.
by seabass-labrax | 2025-04-24 19:33:46+00:00
Not an American but have been involved in lots of US legal things for a charity. Generally "their lawyer" refers to a lawyer (solicitor in British usage) who is 'on retainer', which means that the client either pays a monthly fee to secure the lawyer's availability, or has a deposit with the lawyer which will be drawn from if legal assistance is needed.

Funnily enough, Americans do not use the term solicitor; that's reserved for lawyers working for the government!
by 83 | 2025-04-24 19:33:51+00:00
There are two classes of highways in WI. Large, divided, 4+ lane highyways which always have game fences, and two lane 'county highways' which do not have fences. Parent is referring to the latter.

The game fences that do exist aren't really tall enough for deer, maybe 2m tall at best so deer are constantly jumping them. I've always wondered why they aren't taller - I suspect they are more for escaped cows and horses than for deer.