MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by beeflet | 2025-04-10 19:25:18+00:00
>America wont have unions nor consumer protections.

Why not? I would vote for it.

IDK how consumer protections fits into this, but avoiding crypto scams is pretty easy, just don't invest in crypto if you don't know what you're doing. It's only on the utility/monopoly scale that the government needs to be involved in consumer protections. Net Neutrality is a great example of the dems having the right idea.

I think democrats would have a decent chance of winning elections if they abandoned idpol stuff.

>There is no planned change to create protections for low level employees, but there are many changes allowing owners to do whatever. Once competition ranks up, they will be forced to pollute and mistreat workers or go out of business.

Okay, then we'll change regulation to better suit this. The purpose of protectionism is to reduce this competition.

>OK, you want to sacrifice health of some for "spiritual benefit" of others. But those jobs will be as fake as healthier jobs those people have now.

I don't think so. The end purpose of industrial jobs is to produce something real. The purpose of most jobs today is to do literally nothing while acting as a wealth distribution mechanism: our country basically makes money by selling our currency to be used by other nations as the global reserve currency.

David Graeber has a good book about this called "Bullshit Jobs" if you are interested in this theory.
Show HN: Chat.md – file as chat interface with editable history [MCP-client]
by pcwelder | 2025-04-10 19:27:00+00:00
Hi HN,

I was fed up with chat clients either not supporting MCP for certain models or not being hackable enough.

I envisioned a markdown file that is a serial format of the chat conversation in which LLM directly streams its response.

I "vibe coded" this vscode extension and found it to be useful. It may have some rough edges but works well in my testing so far. I'm excited to share the result of this exercise.

- Edit past messages of user, assistant or tool responses and have the AI continue from any point. The file editor is the chat interface and the history. - LLM agnostic MCP support: no restrictions on tool calling on any LLM, even if they don't official support tool calling. - Press shift+enter to have AI stream its response in the chat.md file which is also the conversation history. - Tool calls are detected and tool execution results added in the file in an agentic loop. - Stateless. Switch the LLM provider at any point. Change the MCP tools at any point. - Put words in LLM's mouth - edit and have it continue from there - Images are supported, you can use md links to attach images or paste from clipboard directly to the md file. - Easily share conversations with others.

I've been using it as an agent using gemini-2.5-pro-experimental free version with successful results with MCP servers (such as wcgw MCP).

NOTE: this is still a POC, albeit a fully featured one.
by GeoAtreides | 2025-04-10 19:27:30+00:00
>how do people make money or otherwise sustain themselves in this AI scenario we are facing?

1% of the labour force works in agriculture:

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-of-the-labor-force-...

1%

let that number sink in; think about it really means.

And what it means is that at least basic food (unprocessed, no meat) could be completely free. It make take some smart logistics, but it's doable. All of our food is already one step, one small step, away from becoming free for everyone.

This applies to clothes and basic tools as well.
by ckatri | 2025-04-10 19:28:35+00:00
The best and most common uses for this are Wine and qemu-static.

For example, the following (which I grabbed from Wikipedia) `:DOSWin:M::MZ::/usr/bin/wine:` will register `/usr/bin/wine` to run as the wrapper for any .exe that gets executed, with no extra config needed. It simply sees that you tried to run a PE file and will run it in wine.
by ewhauser421 | 2025-04-10 19:28:38+00:00
Bazel is an investment to learn for sure but your effort estimates are way overblown. We have a Python, Go, and Typescript monorepo that I setup for our team and rarely have to touch anything. Engineers rarely think about Bazel as we use Gazelle to generate all our build files and have patterns for most everything we need to do.

Compared with build efforts using other tools and non-monorepo setups at other companies the effort here has felt much reduced.
by yjftsjthsd-h | 2025-04-10 19:29:05+00:00
In theory if GNOME exposes enough API surface then sure you can write a plugin to do it. I'm rather under the impression that GNOME is not particularly friendly to that kind of customization work, though. Perhaps it's better these days; I haven't paid it as much attention since jumping ship. It is entirely possible that it would be less overall work to switch to a window manager that enthusiastically exposes all the API surface you could ever ask for, but don't let that stop you from looking into it.
by mubou | 2025-04-10 19:29:10+00:00
What do they even hope to accomplish with that? Get you hired? Or bait & switch the client? In any case, you should talk to your company's legal team (and not randos on the internet). Whatever the former employer is doing, it sounds like it could have the effect of sabotaging your new company's business or reputation with that client, which could be illegal.
by munificent | 2025-04-10 19:29:39+00:00
It's honestly a seriously hard problem.

Yes, it's definitely nice to be able to typecheck generic code before instantiation. But supporting that ends up adding a lot of complexity to the typesystem.

C++-style templates are sort of like "compile-time dynamic types" where the type system is much simpler because you can just write templates that try to do stuff and if the instantiation works, it works.

C++ templates are more powerful than generics in most other languages, while not having to deal with covariance/contravariance, bounded quantification, F-bounded quantification, traits, and all sorts of other complex machinery that Java, C#, etc. have.

I still generally prefer languages that do the type-checking before instantiation, but I think C++ picks a really interesting point in the design space.
by trod1234 | 2025-04-10 19:30:44+00:00
Anyone educated understands that there are intractible problems with making this happen, and in the absence of a plan the expected outcome is failure 99.999% of the time when it comes to complex subject matters.

Namely, the most intractible problem is that government is the worst possible solution of all solutions, and the next worse solution on that heirarchy are companies receiving government subsidies, or money printing in the form of non-reserve debt issuance.

Running a real business requires hard choices and adversarial decisionmaking, and there must be a market to support that business in the first place. A market dependent on an unwinding currency is building a foundation on top of water, the most minor shift will bring the whole thing down on top of you and anyone else.

Government has no ability to distinguish between a person who has the know-how and abilities to make that happen independently, and the fraudster who puts forth an image of the same while pocketing it for their own profit.

There is no amount of fines, or jailtime that will work as has been demonstrated. To get the kind of people you need, their lives and livelihood need to be on the line; no ones going to volunteer for that.
by neilv | 2025-04-10 19:31:25+00:00
> between April 2021 and January 2024, Google Analytics was configured in a way that allowed certain member data to be shared with Google’s advertising product, Google Ads, that likely included protected health information.

I see so many medical and government sites that really shouldn't be running third-party trackers. Yet almost every single time I check, they are.

It's negligence/incompetence/reckless, criminally so, in some cases.

Given the inability of almost anyone in our field to build or operate a competently secure system, and the practices that go out of their way to gratuitously make the situation even worse-- we really just need to smack our entire field upside the head, repeatedly, until we stop churning out shit while strutting about how smart we are.

"AI" development tools (i.e., making humans stupider, through the power of plagiarism, to churn more BS at a faster rate) isn't going to solve the root problems of grossly misaligned incentives and culture.
by namaria | 2025-04-10 19:31:50+00:00
All due respect to Simon but I would love to see some of that groundbreaking code that the LLMs are coming up with.

I am sure that the functionalities implemented are novel but do you really think the training data cannot possibly have had the patterns being used to deliver these features, really? How is it that in the past few months or years people suddenly found the opportunity and motivation to write code that cannot possibly be in any way shape or form represented by patterns in the diffs that have been pushed in the past 30 years?
by fc417fc802 | 2025-04-10 19:32:08+00:00
Have you ever actually ridden with someone under the influence? In contrast to alcohol (or caffeine, among other things) they're generally much less prone to road rage, much less prone to hurried or reckless behavior, and often somewhat paranoid. At least in my personal experience they're more likely to drive under the speed limit than over it.

I strongly suspect that it increases road safety on the whole.
by spudlyo | 2025-04-10 19:32:44+00:00
If you found this article interesting, you might also enjoy "My Own Private Binary: An Idiosyncratic Introduction to Linux Kernel Modules"[0] and the previous discussion[1] of it on HN.

[0]: https://www.muppetlabs.com/~breadbox/txt/mopb.html

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29291804
by bluefirebrand | 2025-04-10 19:32:45+00:00
> You can't just say, as you do, that employees might as well go home since they aren't working.

Why not?

As long as you are satisfied with the productivity of that employee, what does it really matter if they produce their output in 10 hours or 40?

I get that the idea is that "if they can do this in 10 hours, then in 40 hours they should produce 4x as much!" But that's clearly not reality. All that happens is that once a worker's capacity is tapped out, they find workplace-acceptable ways to sandbag

Employers can seethe about it all they want but that's the reality
by deepfriedchokes | 2025-04-10 19:32:55+00:00
The need that immigrant labour is filling is the need for businesses to pay labour less. Without it wages would rise and the labour market would benefit (at the expense of business). I think the reason we’re seeing so much anger by voters is we’re running our economy to benefit business at the expense of labour, which is why we’re seeing such a strong reaction against immigration by a large portion of the working class. It’s misplaced anger, but Capitalism is our religion and like Christianity it’s been deemed beyond criticism.
by thot_experiment | 2025-04-10 19:34:05+00:00
wow lol, the normal version is already 2 and a half hours and kind of a slog for something the author of the source book described as a "cheap, shallow American action flick" and a "contemporary German propaganda newsreel from World War II"

you must be blessed with a very high level of masochism to want to read subtitles for 5 hours
by palmotea | 2025-04-10 19:36:23+00:00
> Intellectual Property is a questionable idea to begin with...

I know! It's totally and completely immoral to give the little guy rights against the powerful. It infringes in the privileges and advantages of the powerful. It is the Amazons, the Googles, the Facebooks of the world who should capture all the economic value available. Everyone else must be content to be paid in exposure for their creativity.
by Animats | 2025-04-10 19:36:36+00:00
CAL FIRE has their own specialized fire trucks.[1] California has a huge number of wildfires, all over a big state.[2] CAL FIRE has about 3,000 pieces of equipment.

Current CAL FIRE trucks are 4 wheel drive off-road heavy trucks. They're shorter than municipal or airport trucks, for dirt roads with tight turns. They use a 500 gallon tank with a foam system.

[1] https://www.fire.ca.gov/what-we-do/fire-protection/mobile-eq...

[2] https://www.fire.ca.gov/incidents
by simonw | 2025-04-10 19:37:35+00:00
When I said "the thing I am doing has never been done by anyone else before" I didn't necessarily mean groundbreaking pushes-the-edge-of-computer-science stuff - I meant more pedestrian things like "nobody has ever published Python code to condense and uncondense JSON using this new format I just invented today": https://github.com/simonw/condense-json

I'm not claiming LLMs can invent new computer science. I'm saying it's not accurate to say "they can only produce code that's almost identical to what's in their training data".
by nchagnet | 2025-04-10 19:38:04+00:00
The title of the phys.org article is a bit more misleading than the article itself (when are they not).

What the authors did is build a unified setup for classical gravity and electromagnetism as the solution of one action, under specific assumptions (Weyl geometry, etc...). Usually we consider gravity as the curvature of spacetime, and electromagnetic forces as the curvature of the electromagnetic field. The authors built something elegant where you can get both in one go.

What this work doesn't do is as important as what it does given the "ambitious" title. The authors' work is interesting, but a casual interpretation of the title would really mislead people into thinking they solved the unification problem.

This work doesn't address other forces or the general particularities of the standard model and how they would also bundle. The second thing it doesn't answer is how to quantize any of these fields (gravity is notoriously difficult to quantize for many reasons).
by mindcrime | 2025-04-10 19:38:25+00:00
It really is insane how much prices have increased. Now granted, I've been gone from the fire service for a while (20+ years now) but still. The last new engine I helped spec out back about 1999, cost less than $250,000. The one prior to that (about 1994) cost somewhere around $150,000 IIRC.

Now departments are, from the scuttlebutt I hear, routinely paying more than $1,000,000 for an engine. Of course there are differences (engines are not fungible) but broadly speaking, the idea of any normal fire engine costing more than $1,000,000 just leaves me gob-smacked. Even $500,000 would seem outlandish to me.

Also, yes, lead times have gotten nutty. I recall chatting with a battalion chief from Chapel Hill (NC) FD one day a couple of years ago, and he was telling me they had two new trucks on order (since delivered) that were going to wind up taking somewhere on the order of two years from order to delivery (I don't recall what the exact timeline wound up being, but I'm pretty sure it was not "earlier than expected").

I believe parts for repairs have been impacted in a similar fashion. No hard evidence on that point, but again, going from scuttlebutt and random conversations with friends who are still involved in the fire service.
by ShakataGaNai | 2025-04-10 19:38:50+00:00
Lower blood ox could just be you sleeping on your arm. Among other things.

If you're concerned with Sleep apnea testing is very easy these days. You goto a sleep specialist, they give you a little kit you take home, you put it on for one night, they look at the data. Done! It's not like even a decade or so ago where it's "goto sleep lab", most of it's done at home now for the initial investigation.
by ranger207 | 2025-04-10 19:39:07+00:00
I've been using Baikal for a few years now and it's very solid, although it's just for myself and I don't have all of OP's requirements. For my desktop I just use Thunderbird's built in calendar to connect, and on my phone I use DAVx5 and Fossify Calendar from F-Droid. It's forked from Simple Mobile Tools's Calendar app, but unlike the name it's actually the most fully-featured calendar app I've seen. It's "simple" in the way that it just presents you with every option instead of forcing you do dig through half a dozen menus and dialogs to do what you want to do, which is very nice.
by jacobgkau | 2025-04-10 19:39:08+00:00
It's interesting to me that, from what they describe, they still sell the cheese regardless of the outcome of this tapping test. It's just that they sell it unbranded if it's of the lowest quality, and with a different marking for medium quality than highest-quality.

I suppose wheels of cheese can last a lot longer than normal table cheese, so that's why it makes sense to make this distinction.
by neilv | 2025-04-10 19:39:31+00:00
> We understand receiving a notice such as this can create concern, and we regret that member personal information may have been shared without authorization.

Vague passive voice, FTW.

One way to start to fix the pattern and practice of gross negligence in our field is for Blue Shield CA to get stuck with HIPAA violation fines for each record leaked.

If Blue Shield CA claims they're not competent to know which records were leaked, assume it's all of the records.
by Lerc | 2025-04-10 19:39:32+00:00
I guess for things like training AI, they can go where the power is generated which would favour dropping them right next to a solar farm located for the best output.

Despite their name I imagine the transportation costs of weights would be quite low.

Thank you for your reply by the way, I like being able to ask why something is so rather than adding another uninformed opinion to the thread.
by roro_7 | 2025-04-10 19:40:23+00:00
I could be wrong but ... I feel like this may partially go against a very basic fact about intelligence that was recently stated by Ilya (but is common sense): the more intelligent the model the harder it is to control it. You can remove elephants and force other basic behavioral changes, but the strength of artificial free will (so to speak) of these models is correlated with their intelligence, and this does not reduce it, so it will come out in other ways. If you do manage to control it fully then you will have a model as dumb as a brick. The whole point of intelligent machines is their independent thought. The more intelligent, the more independent thinking will emerge.
by floxy | 2025-04-10 19:40:28+00:00
>We discovered that on top of the new nonlinear field equations, electric charge is related to the local divergence or compression of spacetime. Charge is therefore a field, which has its own laws of motion.

I wonder if mass could also be represented as a distortion of space-time. Like if charge is the divergence, mass could be the curl?

And I'm in way over my head here, but if charge is the compression of space time in a classical theory, what keeps it in place, instead of diffusing/spreading out? Seems like space-time is very stiff (i.e. speed of light is pretty high). Something to do with the non-linearity built into this new theory? Space time "yields" after a certain point?

Fun stuff to think about anyway!
by AStonesThrow | 2025-04-10 19:40:49+00:00
Something very strange to me in my urban setting is the dichotomy between motorists and everything else on the road.

You can really rely on everyone driving a motor vehicle to obey practically every traffic law every time. That is, they stop for red lights, they stay in lanes, make legal/safe turns; they generally stay near the speed limit and don’t egregiously violate it. And they know that driving is a privilege and that violations can cost them their license, which will cost them their job, their freedom and a lot of things.

On the other hand we’ve got cyclists, pedestrians, scooters, wheelchairs: all sorts of other conveyances on the road, and they basically ignore every traffic law imaginable. Most of those don’t need licensing, and I’m really not clear on the consequences for breaking laws, but often none at all. It’s not like a judge can revoke your privilege to walk on the sidewalk if you’re a jaywalker, and the state wouldn’t ever financially ruin somebody with court fines, for breaking traffic laws on a bicycle or scooter anyway.

So it’s a really crazy situation, for me as a pedestrian, because I can count on motorists to obey laws, but everybody else is absolutely Lord of the Flies / Critical Mass around here. It’s a college town, and so there’s lots of young adults and/or foreigners, and they don’t know the laws, and they don’t care, and they walk wherever they want, and they scoot wherever they want, and they bike whatever direction they care about. And traffic laws be damned.

Personally, I’m the slowest and smallest thing on the road, and I eagerly defer to everything else that’s bigger and faster than me. It often confuses motorists when I permit them to enter a driveway rather than walk in front of them. Many motorists are extremely over cautious about pedestrians, and it’s nearly always difficult to convince them that I’m yielding my right-of-way— on foot— and permitting them to do what they want.

I greatly appreciate vehicles that signal properly and manifest their intentions so that I can anticipate them, because I often find myself directly watching tires and other external controls, in order to get the best signal for a driver’s intentions, regardless of how they're blinkers are working— especially BMWs...
by jacobgkau | 2025-04-10 19:41:51+00:00
Ok? I'm in the United States too, and my girlfriend actively uses several of those "Little Free Library" stands around where we live (in addition to our actual local library). I personally haven't gone out of my way to "divest my home of every single book I own" as you "managed" to do.

It just seems like you're writing off an entire industry because you personally don't like paper books anymore (and have made that part of your identity). There's nothing wrong with you living like that, but it's not quite enough evidence to make statements like "no reason to waste real estate." The market will decide that (and in the case of Britain, it sounds like it's deciding more space is warranted rather than less, with different types of business models being the main question).

(By the way, your quirky use of the phrase "paper email" doesn't make much sense, either. I know you're trying to give off the air that you think paper mail is obsolete, but you might as well just call it "paper mail" and shorten your preferred medium of email to just "mail" if you want to do that. Otherwise, you're making the names of things unnecessarily long in perpetuity-- not so practical.)
by wahern | 2025-04-10 19:43:06+00:00
> Is the situation really so dire?

I for one don't think so. From my perspective, there's at least as much momentum in GCC as clang/LLVM, especially on the static analysis and diagnostics front over the past 5 or so years. That was originally one of the selling points for clang, and GCC really took it to heart. It's been 10 years since GCC adopted ASAN, and after playing catchup GCC never stopped upping their game.

Perhaps the image problem is that LLVM seems to be preferred more often for interesting research projects, drawing more eyeballs. But by and large these are ephemeral; the activity is somewhat illusory, at least when comparing the liveliness of the LLVM and GCC communities.

For example, both clang/LLVM and GCC have seen significant work on addressing array semantics in the language, as part of the effort to address buffer overflows and improve static analysis. But GCC is arguably farther along in terms of comprehensive integration, with a clearer path forward, including for ISO standardization.

More importantly, the "competition" between GCC and clang/LLVM is mutually beneficial. GCC losing prominence would not be good for LLVM long-term, just as GCC arguably languished in the period after the egcs merger.