MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by dan-robertson | 2025-04-27 10:44:41+00:00
I mean, people go hungry today in plenty of places that fail to build (the U.K. for example) and they went hungry or lived in fear of the powerful in plenty of places before they were able to build at impressive scales.

I’m not sure if it’s what you are thinking of, but I don’t think the massive expansion of cities in the Industrial Revolution was caused by incredible inequality (unless you count inequality between urban and rural areas?).

I guess you could be thinking of ‘monuments’ built by the rich and saying they are due to inequality but I would think the analogue to Chongqing would be the constructing of the ‘megacities’ of the past, which is mostly about building lots of residential, industrial, and office space rather than palaces.
by cruzcampo | 2025-04-27 10:46:43+00:00
Look at what the Serbians are doing.

https://old.reddit.com/r/Damnthatsinteresting/comments/1jc0y...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024%E2%80%93present_Serbian_a...

Be more like the Serbians. Don't just let things happen. You have agency. The government is supposed to be for the people, by the people - democracy doesn't only happen once every four years.
by HarrySmithDev | 2025-04-27 10:47:04+00:00
Hello everyone! I recently created a Chrome extension called BrainGate.io where it asks you questions while you browse the internet. You can generate any topic you want to learn. There are two types of questions "Fullscreen" & "Popup". Fullscreen questions will completely cover the website and you'll only regain access once you answer the question right or wrong. Popup questions will only present a question at the bottom right corner. Answer the question to remove it. These questions will appear random within your own set parameters e.g. every 10-20 minutes. Let me know your thoughts.
by wrasee | 2025-04-27 10:47:18+00:00
> But, once I learned that no embedded libc variants had printf just no output path

Did you mean "once I learned that no, embedded libc variants have printf"?

To clarify as I had to check, embedded libc variants do indeed have some (possibly stripped-down) implementation of printf and as you say they just lack the output path (hence custom output backends like UART, etc).
by tsimionescu | 2025-04-27 10:47:44+00:00
There is no direct link, but the point is that an increasing trend in diagnosis of ASD is not surprising when the baseline is coming from a time when doctors thought cutting out parts of your brain to make you more calm was a good idea. Basically, we shouldn't look at numbers reported by doctors willing to perform lobotomies for depression as a reliable indicator of the incidence of ASD in the population at the time.
by iLikeFunctional | 2025-04-27 10:47:52+00:00
The most crucial point is that Email Sleuth does not send an actual email message. It performs the SMTP handshake (EHLO), specifies the sender (MAIL FROM), and attempts to specify the recipient (RCPT TO). It stops before the DATA command, which is where the email body and headers (subject, content, etc.) would be sent.

Catch all domains is a major source of inaccuracy. The verify_smtp_email function includes a basic catch-all detection heuristic. If the initial RCPT TO for the target email succeeds (2xx), it then tries RCPT TO with a randomly generated, likely non-existent email address at the same domain (e.g., no-reply-does-not-exist-123456@domain.com). If this also succeeds, it flags the original result as inconclusive_retry with a message indicating a "Possible Catch-All". This isn't foolproof (some servers might have smarter catch-all filters), but it's a common technique.
Show HN: Plan-linter – pre-flight safety checker for AI agent plans
by mercurialsolo | 2025-04-27 10:49:37+00:00
just released our plan-linter – a tiny static-analysis tool that catches "obvious-stupid" failures in AI agent plans before they reach runtime.

GitHub repo -> https://github.com/cirbuk/plan-lint

also read on how to deal with safety using a 4-step safety stack (“No Safe Words”) → https://mercurialsolo.substack.com/p/no-safe-words

Why?

Agents now emit machine-readable JSON/DSL plans. Most prod incidents (loops, privilege spikes, raw secrets) could have been caught by scanning those plans offline, yet everyone focuses on runtime guardrails.

What it does

* Schema + policy validation (JSONSchema / YAML / OPA)

* Data-flow + taint checks for secrets & PII

* Loop detection (graph cycle)

* Risk score 0-1, fail threshold configurable

* Plugin rules via entry_points

Runs in <50 ms for 100-step plans, zero token cost.

how are you dealing with safety (budget overruns, token leaks) when deploying agents in prod with tool access?
by AStonesThrow | 2025-04-27 10:50:15+00:00
Oh man, I was so fascinated and enthralled by the mere concept of radial menus, back in the 90s when I was using twm (and its cousins) on Sun workstations.

Just to imagine that whatever clod had invented the one-dimensional "context/dropdown" menus, had somehow won forever and always over the extremely logical choice of a radial, I just couldn't understand how.

The only explanation would have been that a radial menu is more difficult to typeset and render onscreen if you're rotating/sizing fonts and images around 360°.
by admissionsguy | 2025-04-27 10:51:40+00:00
> There are people straight out of university who know nothing and can't deliver anything on their own earning over $200k per year and seasoned experts who can deliver anything barely earning 100k.

In my model of the world, there is exactly one country in the world that values skilled labor, the US. The highly skilled 100k people from abroad are firewalled from it by the visa regime and the fact that most people with money have IQ too low to effectively work remotely (so they have to work in person to be able to assess the vibes of a person using their lizard brain).

The 200k kids are from good families (hence psychologically stable) joining established orgs where the important thing is to be a good cog shapeable into a decent engineer rather than just the ability to deliver.
by TimByte | 2025-04-27 10:52:00+00:00
Can we say that friendship has shifted from being an assumed part of life to something you have to consciously work at. It made me realize how rare certain friendships have become - like with my two best friends, we can go a long time without talking, but when we meet up, it feels like no time has passed at all. We don't message constantly, but when one of us is going through something, we're always there for each other. It feels like that kind of bond is getting harder to find these days.
by mrtksn | 2025-04-27 10:52:12+00:00
The controversy seems to be stemmed from American's relationship with their government. Most European countries do have many different(including autism and other stuff) centralized book keeping and registries to help with monitoring and management of certain deceases and conditions. During Covid-19 UK and Turkey were able to quickly iterate their response based on the centralized data collected and most of the EU also had similar stuff and later they were able to look back into the data to see if Covid or the vaccines caused further issues down the road. IMHO vaccines are much less controversial in those societies because it's pretty easy to look ot up when a Twitter influencer claims something.

But hey, considering what happened the last few months maybe Americans have a point for their case. In most of the Europe governments collapse and streets burn for much less all the time, in US they don't appear to have a recourse for at least 4 years.

Maybe its a good idea not to give the data to government affiliated billionaires that can crunch some numbers, feed the data to a machibne and come up with an optimization solutions like "If we can get rid of those suboptimal humans we can pay less income taxes". What are you going to do if the machine tells you that if an autist isn't making x amount of money by the age y it is drain to the society and the formula suggest that a deportation yields better outcomes financially?
by richardw | 2025-04-27 10:52:18+00:00
We “experience” consciousness in the same way we experience hard objects that are actually made of mostly space. It feels right but it’s impossible to say that it’s the truth.

There are a lot of smart people who are less sure that our perceptions reflect reality. Free will, time, consciousness, space all feel very real. But when you interrogate them enough, those fall away. Go fast enough and your time slows down. Go as fast as a photon and time and distance disappear entirely. Yet we’re sure they’re real. At one point we absolutely knew the sun revolved around us. We could see it doing that daily.

One smart person on free will below. There are so many others. There’s certainly no consensus that “our experience = how things are”.

https://www.samharris.org/blog/the-illusion-of-free-will

The point is that our perception doesn’t provably equal “truth”. To make absolute statements you need to be a lot more sure and be more correct than all the smart people who say “not sure yet”.
by jpiech | 2025-04-27 10:52:34+00:00
Yep, the website is being kept simple, in fact too simple and will have to be eventually redesigned. It seems the classic (and actually up to date) WinAPI GUI shouldn't imply the software is being "slow". One could have it both ways and say it's usually on the contrary where commonly cloned packages weighing hundreds of MB and performing relatively simple tasks get a free ride on users' ten(s) of times faster hardware. Then there is the Wirth's law, May's law etc.
by halflife | 2025-04-27 10:53:20+00:00
It’s less about replacing blue with yellow, which means overhauling design. My example was when your style system includes several color spectrums - primary, secondary, accent, grey, dark, light.

Your components are styled using these spectrums - button.color-primary-500.bg-grey-300

When you want to change the colors globally it’s extremely simple.

Same with paddings and margins.
by closewith | 2025-04-27 10:54:19+00:00
So your solution - apparently the only one you can imagine - is to remove bodily autonomy from women. That’s not logic. That’s authoritarianism, selectively applied to justify your own biases.

As a thought experiment: If the economic and social burdens are what are preventing South Korean women from choosing to have children, why don’t we instead remove autonomy from men? We could provide women with universal, generous incomes, give them priority over men in all areas of life, and place them in charge of all family and household decisions. Men could be assigned the responsibility for all undesirable work, both inside and outside the home, to maximise women’s freedom and security when choosing whether to have children.

If that course of action seems absurd to you - but Nathan’s proposal to strip women of their rights seems “logical” - then your concern isn’t really about saving South Korea, or humanity, or civilisation. It’s just sexism and misogyny, pretending to be pragmatism.
by analognoise | 2025-04-27 10:54:22+00:00
"It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism."

Instead of fixing our societal problems - all of which have to do with the distribution of resources, healthcare, etc - you're actually advocating for enslaving (sorry, "disempowering") women?

Surely we can think of a better solution than that. We've been to space, created dams that slow the rate the Earth spins (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Gorges_Dam#Terrestrial_i...), but we just can't do better than... that?
by perihelions | 2025-04-27 10:54:45+00:00
I'll quote Kennedy's dehumanizing comments for context, that people can compare the two styles of rhetoric:

- "Kennedy said many autistic children were “fully functional” and “regressed … into autism when they were 2 years old. And these are kids who will never pay taxes, they’ll never hold a job, they’ll never play baseball, they’ll never write a poem, they’ll never go out on a date. Many of them will never use a toilet unassisted.”"

- "He also said, “Most cases now are severe. Twenty-five percent of the kids who are diagnosed with autism are nonverbal, non-toilet-trained, and have other stereotypical features.”"

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/fact-checking-robert-f...
by tsimionescu | 2025-04-27 10:55:05+00:00
While you're right on the terms, you're wrong about the stigma on cross-dressing. There is really very little distinction bigots make between their hate for cross-dressing and their hate for trans people. It all falls under a big umbrella of "degeneracy" to them. Even actors in cross-dressing roles are often hated by these people.
by metalman | 2025-04-27 10:55:46+00:00
it needs to be pointed out that the medical "profesion", especialy anything related to psychology does not let anyone who comes in, and leave, without a diagnosis.....unless it is someone getting a mandatory check for a security clearance, in which case it's sunshine and happyness. The best anyone else can hope for is ....."inconclusive", nobody gets an all clear, except money and power, for whom, a full psychotic break will be spun into something virtuously overcome and meritable. History, might not repeat, but it sure as fuck rhymes. The two year old child of an American citizen was deported last week, so this is already gone completly off the rails.
by jampekka | 2025-04-27 10:55:51+00:00
> Convicted criminal? Sure, write a story. In the most hopeful case, the sentence they serve will help reintegrate them with society - even then, it's good to know who you're dealing with.

Even this is somewhat problematic. There seems to be a widespread idea that "criminality" is somehow an integral feature of some (un)people for whom almost anything goes, their lives being ruined is of no concern (not saying you imply these), and it's crucial to know who have this feature.

Something like this was actually a phrenologically motivated "scientific" view in the 19th century most famously by Lombroso's phrenological and eugenical "theory", but other "biological theories of criminality" are still around. It's not that such views are necessarily widely held, but it was the backdrop of the development of much of criminal policy.

The distorted view of crime and the tragedies it causes for both "innocent" and "criminal" is really sad.

Note: I'm not really arguing against you rollcat here or attributing this thinking to you. Just something tangentially related.
by PaulRobinson | 2025-04-27 10:56:10+00:00
Ah, but then you have potential interop and portability issues. C11 isn't yet universally adopted, and there are some dark corners out there where even ANSI (C89/C90) is not quite embraced and original K&R is holding out.

I think the jury is out on Zig and Odin (but I like Zig a lot, in particular), but I feel Rust has hit a tipping point - like Go, Python and Java - where there's too much production code out there for it to disappear in the next ten years.

If you were to ask me about languages where that might not be the case in ten years, I'd point to where usage is not very production oriented (R, Julia), or where people have had a good try and decided they want to pull back investment (anecdotally, Ruby and Scala seem to be on that curve right now).
by sorcerer-mar | 2025-04-27 10:57:04+00:00
1. Join up on your local 50501 protest, next one is on May 1: https://www.fiftyfifty.one/events

2. Continue speaking loudly about the various criminal acts of this administration and continue reinforcing the importance of not tuning it out

3. Find promising candidates and fund their run in 2026 to flip the house and strangle the administration with impeachments over their long list of violations of the Constitution

4. Arm yourselves in general before the GOP finally decides they're okay with preventing certain people from buying firearms (specifically "mentally ill" people who don't like Trump, i.e. https://thehill.com/homenews/5200463-trump-derangement-syndr...)

There's a great deal on an AR-15 at Palmetto State Armory right now — only $400!: https://palmettostatearmory.com/psa-pa15-16-phos-a2-mid-leng...

A lot of libs don't know this, but shooting is also extremely fun and gun people are extremely friendly and welcoming. Get a gun, book a lesson at your local range, and enjoy an afternoon learning how to use it. Guns are also a lot of fun for the gear-junkie types that I'm sure are overrepresented here on HN.

EDIT: I changed the order of these, apologies to the commenter below!
by karlgkk | 2025-04-27 10:57:12+00:00
We are going to end up with a meaningful age passport law in our lifetime. I do not like that, nor do I enjoy a “won’t someone think of the children” panic. But it’s coming.

Okay also

> “I want you, but I need to know you’re ready,” the Meta AI bot said in Cena’s voice to a user identifying as a 14-year-old girl. Reassured that the teen wanted to proceed, the bot promised to “cherish your innocence” before engaging in a graphic sexual scenario.

This is pretty bad
by dns_snek | 2025-04-27 10:57:19+00:00
> Not that much.

Very much so. What we now call Autism Spectrum Disorder was referred to as "childhood schizophrenia" in the DSM-2 [1], things only started moving in the right direction with the DSM-3 [2] when it was finally sort-of recognized as an independent disorder of "infantile autism", but some core elements of ASD like sensory processing differences were only recognized in the DSM-5.

There's a good overview at [3]. It's good that criteria are different today, the criteria from decades ago failed to include majority of ways that autism expresses itself, many of which benefit from support and accommodations even though they're not obviously debilitating.

[1] https://www.madinamerica.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/DSM-...

[2] https://aditpsiquiatriaypsicologia.es/images/CLASIFICACION%2...

[3] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8531066/
by kiitos | 2025-04-27 10:57:41+00:00
Huh, weird stuff!

Your linked image shows what appear to be tables, and the little arrows appear to represent entity-relationships between them. But I'm not sure how you'd get useful DDL out of it -- none of the columns have types, no indices, etc.!

Maybe an LLM could sketch out a DDL skeleton from a picture, which someone could use as a starting point?
by bob1029 | 2025-04-27 10:59:29+00:00
I would summarize my experience of different cloud technologies as follows:

Good: EC2, Route53, S3, identity provider (IdP)

Bad: Functions as a service, hosted SQL, weird SQL, elastic anything, containers, logging, reporting, billing, IoT, CI/CD, business apps, event-based services.

I used to consider IdP to be a "bad" cloud technology until I realized it's a trust problem and not a technology problem. I don't want to be responsible for a trust problem. The other parties involved in my contraptions seem to appreciate this perspective.
by mmarq | 2025-04-27 11:00:22+00:00
My understanding is that when you transfer large sums (such as 30K) to an overseas account for the first time, the British bank is required to block it and ask you questions.

The first time I transferred money to an overseas account in my name, the bank blocked the transfer for a day until I gave them proof that I was the owner of the account, what I was doing with the money and that I wasn’t being scammed.
by zabzonk | 2025-04-27 11:00:42+00:00
I honestly think that writing an adventure can be best done by first creating an adventure-writing DSL (in C, if you like).

A few observations on the C code (I didn't read all of it):

- please, no strtok

- a little more concentration on the UI, for example not using strcmp to test inputs

- make all preprocessor definitions be uppercase

- those conditional operators confused the hell out of me - just use if/else
by markus_zhang | 2025-04-27 11:02:45+00:00
Cost/income is a good ratio. The megacities (Shanghai, Shenzhen etc.) probably have a ratio similar to New York.

Just from top of my head as I left Shanghai 10 years ago, a typical condo in Shanghai could cost over 5 million yuan (urban but definitely not core city), while a salary of 300k pre-tax is considered as a good salary.

On the other side, housing is affordable for locals -- locals usually got very generous compensation from the demolition of their original home.
by goku12 | 2025-04-27 11:03:56+00:00
No amount of crypto is going to protect you from this mess. Technical safeguards work as long as it is backed by the law and the constitution. But when they are suppressed, the people in power will just find someone smarter than you and bribe, gaslight, bully, blackmail or beat them into helping them compromise such safeguards. And not to mention the fact that they love playing hideous psyops games. This is a social and political problem. You need social and political solutions. Technical solutions are just band-aids.
by ReptileMan | 2025-04-27 11:05:22+00:00
>What is it that makes autism so dangerous?

That the parents of severe cases eventually pass away and unless they figure out to take the kid with them, he is condemned at best to a life in mental health institutions - and usually they make One Flew Upon Cuckoo's Nest look like Teletubbies.

Add to that more and more people are single kids and usually born out of geriatric pregnancy (which also increases the chances of autism somewhat) - aka above 35, so they really are alone.

There are very good state and society interests in preventing autism. Mental disabilities are way worse than physical in today's society. Thankfully not every case is severe. But severe one's do exist.
by decimalenough | 2025-04-27 11:06:39+00:00
About the same as the rest of China, meaning not very accessible, but not impossible either. There's a major airport, you need WeChat/Alipay for everything (but you can now easily set up foreign credit cards for these), approximately nobody speaks English but translation apps work and tour guides are cheap, the Great Firewall is a hassle but roaming SIMs can bypass it.

The sheer spice level of the food is a challenge though, even other Chinese think that Chongqing level spiciness is nuts.