MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jandrese | 2025-04-21 20:24:03+00:00
The Obama administration tried, but it was too little too late and they were raked over the coals by Republicans for "choosing winners".

But fundamentally solar cell production was (is?) pretty dirty and US environmental regulations were always going to be a stumbling block. One used to be able to spot Chinese solar factories on satellite maps by looking upstream from deadzones, but apparently that has been enough of an embarrassment that even the CCP has started cracking down.
by starkparker | 2025-04-21 20:24:04+00:00
if you can run a web server on a C64, you can in theory run one on the NES, but you'd have to find a way around the NES's relative RAM constraints

you can run a C64 OS on the NES because of the shared CPU features, with limitations: https://github.com/calcwatch/nes64

which means you can port C64 LUnix NG to NES by adding the Famicom Disk System, which adds more RAM: https://hackaday.com/2024/02/11/running-unix-on-a-nintendo-e...

LUnix NG comes with an experimental web server: https://github.com/ytmytm/c64-lng/blob/b76b0470e28ec20d08c37..., https://github.com/ytmytm/c64-lng/blob/b76b0470e28ec20d08c37...

So in theory you could serve HTTP 1.0 from a NES. ("to whom" would be the big next question)
by wkat4242 | 2025-04-21 20:24:14+00:00
There should have been an off switch from the beginning though IMO, though perhaps there already is? But the number of corporates messing with the kernel for their own purposes greatly outnumbers the number of independent developers. That gives big tech a big influence. And the Linux Foundation is there to cement that influence.

I much prefer grassroots projects. Made by and for people like me <3 That's why I moved to BSD (well there were other reasons too of course)
Ask HN: Is there any programming language that doesn't have WTFs?
by behnamoh | 2025-04-21 20:24:55+00:00
After reading this page:

https://github.com/satwikkansal/wtfpython?tab=readme-ov-file#-needles-in-a-haystack-

I wonder if there's any language that thought about all edge cases and avoided exceptions and such gotchas at the design level.

JS is notorious for such WTFs but even Python—which I've used for over a decade now—has surprised me countless times.

Is Haskell also like that? How about Lisps (CL, Racket, Clojure, Scheme, etc.)?
by orwin | 2025-04-21 20:25:02+00:00
Because he read DOGE "engineers" profile, and likely either recognized himself in some of them, or knew people like them, and the likehood of self-important script kiddies having compromised hardware is close to like 60%.

Especially for those older than 16 i've noticed. You have like an inert dunning kruger effect (you start midly arrogant, your arrogance grow and grow until you trule learn some skills and your arrogance decrease, slowly.) I like my red team friends in general, but if you just graduated from script kiddy to a real job: people mostly entertain/endure you because they know you will grow out of it, but the faster you do, the better.
by porridgeraisin | 2025-04-21 20:25:17+00:00
Correct me if I'm wrong, but if you use the below syntax

"bar" |> await getFuture()

How would you disambiguate it from your intended meaning and the below:

"bar" |> await getFutureAsyncFactory()

Basically, an async function that returns a function which is intended to be the pipeline processor.

Typically in JS you do this with parens like so:

(await getFutureAsyncFactory())("input")

But the use of parens doesn't transpose to the pipeline setting well IMO
by JohnFen | 2025-04-21 20:25:18+00:00
Well, first, there's no way that such a mandate could work. In that day, there were no standardized forms of media storage for the consumer. Disks themselves were very, very rare (and expensive) and most disk systems couldn't read disks written by a different one. Most consumer software was distributed on cassette tape or in the form of printed listings.

Second, why would this sort of mandate even be desirable?
by trelane | 2025-04-21 20:25:35+00:00
The key is that "permissive" is passive voice. It's more permissive for corporations in that they are allowed to use it to tie their customers even tighter to them. Compare this with "restrictive" (for corporations) AKA "copyleft" which ensures that users' freedom is maintained, by restricting how corporations can limit them.

It's very akin to the paradox of tolerance.
by alexdanilowicz | 2025-04-21 20:25:41+00:00
That's pretty cool! Thanks for sharing. I like how Gemini used pure HTML/CSS to start.

While we certainly do constraint it, it still should be able to manage creating a Rubik cube solver (even though that is definitely not the intended use case).

There's a lot of "AI tourism" in the space and so never want to constraint it too much + random use cases like this always excite us: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43752176#43752637

I created a basic flight simulator a while back in Magic Patterns in 3 prompts: https://www.magicpatterns.com/c/xensje9nkf48syshrkcmsc

Your Rubik's cube prompt I'm going to add to our eval set :)
by jillesvangurp | 2025-04-21 20:25:52+00:00
China's coal usage is estimated to peak in the next few years and projected to start dropping there as well. Possibly a lot faster than they announced a few years ago as it seems they too underestimated their own ability to do things better and cheaper.

A lot of the story in the US is not about the amount of energy used but about the amount of energy wasted. Most of the energy used in the use is simply heating the universe without doing anything useful whatsoever. The US is very inefficient with it's energy usage. Heating/cooling barely insulated buildings, moving around in stupidly heavy vehicles, etc. Per capita, the Chinese are doing way better per kwh. They pay less for and do more with their kwh.

Cost of energy in the US has more to do with it's bloated system than with technology. Outdated/broken infrastructure, restrictive/backwards policy, inefficient equipment, obsolete technology, etc.
by FireBeyond | 2025-04-21 20:26:05+00:00
There's definitely a technique to it.

I rented a Canon 400mm/2.8 lens for SeaFair (with numerous military flybys) back in the day.

On the first pass, I was extremely frustrated as I was learning how to shoot with the lens (very fast objects, and a very heavy lens). I mistakenly tried to do it all with the viewfinder rather than keeping both eyes open so I could get good aim/framing.

The second pass I got better, and by the third and later passes I was doing pretty well.

It's still not cheap (I think I paid about $200 for a three-day rental from LensRentals, but that would give you practice time), but it could be worthwhile for the championship, playoffs, etc.
by contingencies | 2025-04-21 20:26:16+00:00
Your comment makes me think of those people who say "plants need light and water". It's expanded, sure: "plants need light, water and NPK" ... but no, that's also extremely naive. The point is, until very recently, western science knew almost nothing about botanical systems. We are only reaching the level of many traditional societies now. (If you are skeptical, check any horticultural reference for the difference in tree height observed in nature vs. "in cultivation"... often 50% height!) The reality is actually obvious: plants actually need an entire ecosystem.

Frankly, western botany used to sustain the outdated view that planting a tree in a field with full sun was "the best way" because it was "not competing".

It now turns out plants grow better with diverse friends and an ecosystem.

Aspects of this include but are not limited to insect life, fungal networks, resource exchange, and subsoil life such as earthworms as well as soil protection, wind protection, sun protection (most many recent seedlings cannot withstand full sun and deeply appreciate increased humidity).

Just adding NPK doesn't bring in insects, doesn't bring in soil protection, doesn't bring in fungi. In fact, it may very well poison these elements within an emergent ecosystem.
by tacker2000 | 2025-04-21 20:26:16+00:00
Now that you got caught you are fixing it and writing fancy PR fluff. An org the size of MS should have clear policies and processes of how to handle open source forks like this. Unless we assume “bad faith” here. This is a pretty bad look.

I wonder how many other projects are not attributed correctly. Are you checking up on them also or just waiting for the next HN post?

That said, the author of Spegel should have used another license if he wanted more “recognition” or the like.
by ajb | 2025-04-21 20:26:43+00:00
There are many theoretical astronomical risks. For example, if we happened to come into the path of a relatively nearby gamma-ray burst, it could eliminate all life. Given that life has existed on the earth for quite some time, the 'Lindy effect' suggests that the sum of these presumably-constant risks is small. We are much more likely to become extinct due to an anthropogenic cause.
by aleph_minus_one | 2025-04-21 20:27:34+00:00
> but we failed to give you the attribution you, that was a mistake and I’m sorry.

In other words: there exists some responsible person at Microsoft who violated the copyright (yes, removing the attribution is also a copyright violation!) for Microsoft.

In consideration how Microsoft has been treating copyyright violators for decades, if Microsoft does not give this responsible person the same crual treatment, it should be considered an honest, clear, implicit official statement from Microsoft's side that they are perfectly fine if hackers violate all of Microsoft's copyright. In other words: it means that all of Microsoft's software now (spiritually!) will become public domain.

Also, if Microsot does not make make this responsible person pay the caused damage from their own pocket to the original author of Spegel with the same monatery magnitude as if Microsoft would sue other entities for a violation of copyyright of Microsoft's software, the same statement applies.
by detective_bosch | 2025-04-21 20:27:35+00:00
They just updated the license and attribution. https://github.com/Azure/peerd/pull/110/files . Overall, it does not sit right with me. How can you be at the position you are and make a very obvious non-attribution mistake. I want to side on incompetence and give benefit of doubt but malice (for personal gains) is on the table as well.
by vitus | 2025-04-21 20:28:02+00:00
Agreed entirely, on all those points.

Calling the extra ] a syntax error was a slight exaggeration on my behalf, but that was clearly an unintended extra character -- there's no way the author thinks "123].45].67].89]" is a valid IP address. But yes, it does compile and is interpreted as a valid regex, albeit not a useful one in this context.

The out-of-range values are not ideal but can be fixed with post-validation in code (which is cleaner than writing unnecessarily complicated regex, anyways). The missing ? leads to a bunch of false negatives, and the trailing . causes even more problems.
by staunton | 2025-04-21 20:28:24+00:00
Some organizations strongly encourage marking all commits as one of a list of categories such as "feature/fix/chore/...". The tags are then bound to loose all meaning (literal or figurative) very soon.

Unless there was some "conspiracy" to violate the license (my original comment was an attempt at playfully hinting at that possibility, though I don't find it very likely), I'm sure the person who wrote that commit message thought about it for less than three seconds.
by wesselbindt | 2025-04-21 20:28:38+00:00
The first part of your comment is completely correct. The latter is a matter of taste, of course. I think the main thing that can be said for a lot of the definitions we have in algebra is that the ones we're using are the ones that stood the test of time because they turned out to be useful. The distinction between invertible elements (units) and irreducible elements, while complicated, also gave us a conceptual framework allowing us to prove lots of interesting and useful theorems.
by vvillena | 2025-04-21 20:29:41+00:00
Of course it was a mistake. In fact, as of 20 minutes ago, the mistake appears to be sorted out, with both the main license file and the offending files sporting new copyright headers.

But corporations hiding behind their workers is a no-go. Corporations get to enjoy their successes, and it's fair to hold them accountable for their failures. Least Microsoft can do is a bit of public comms work detailing what they will do to ensure these mistakes are not repeated in the future.
by codingmoh | 2025-04-21 20:29:53+00:00
Hey, this is really cool! Curious how good the multi-language support is. Also - pretty wild that you trained the whole thing yourselves, especially without prior experience in speech models.

Might actually be helpful for others if you ever feel like documenting how you got started and what the process looked like. I’ve never worked with TTS models myself, and honestly wouldn’t know where to begin. Either way, awesome work. Big respect.
by mdp2021 | 2025-04-21 20:30:07+00:00
> Your data really isn't that useful anyway

? One single random document, maybe, but as an aggregate, I understood some parties were trying to scrape indiscriminately - the "big data" way. And if some of that input is sensitive, and is stored somewhere in the NN, it may come out in an output - in theory...

Actually I never researched the details of the potential phenomenon - that anything personal may be stored (not just George III but Random Randy) -, but it seems possible.
by Applejinx | 2025-04-21 20:30:41+00:00
Correct. I'd like the example of NYT as a verifying authority better if I trusted the Times more than I trusted some of their journalists (blessed few, mind you).

I think it's pretty hilarious that the Times, of all people, count as 'trusted'. It makes me automatically distrust BlueSky verification, which doesn't sound like the intention.
by philipswood | 2025-04-21 20:31:24+00:00
OK, I hear you.

So we're talking about hints - is Anna immortal? or just very long-lived?

Assuming the weaker choice still leads to millions of HUMANS dying from the possible cures to the diseases her cohort had.

The postdoc was clearly working on curing a range of inflammatory diseases and working against age related infirmities in HUMANS based on a unified theory:

> this was clearly the work of many years. It described a theory of cellular inflammation and metabolism, “apoptosis” and DNA repair, a theory of aging, that in the author’s own telling would have extraordinary consequences if true.

When the experiment "failed" the postdoc not only stopped her own investigations, but discouraged others:

> The last and longest-running of the experiments, she wrote, had been catastrophic: the subjects had all died. The rest of the paper proceeded from that fact. Becker eviscerated her own theory. In the conclusion she practically apologized. She deemed the whole line of thinking a scientific dead end.
by nickelpro | 2025-04-21 20:31:25+00:00
> or they're not actually running the company at all

Executives are not micro-managing day-to-day implementation decisions of every team, no. They set broad strategic goals, the management layers below them decide how to best operationalize those goals, and the layers below those middle managers make specific implementation decisions to execute those operations.

If you want to think of this as "not actually running the company at all", you're free to. The point is that's how the world works.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-04-21 20:31:55+00:00
> Christianity also spread amongst the poor/common/persecuted folk first

Modern Christianity is probably closer to what Justinian codified [1] (to when the first Bibles date [2]) than earlier traditions. (Not an expert.)

[1] https://www.britannica.com/biography/Justinian-I/Ecclesiasti...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codex_Sinaiticus
by dhruvrajvanshi | 2025-04-21 20:32:11+00:00
I think you're being too unfair. People aren't dumb.

It's also about how much better.

Beyond a decent enough type system, the advantages start to flatten and other factors start to matter more.

Can't speak too much for python, but as someone who's written large amounts of code in OCaml and Typescript, the strictest compiler options for Typescript are good enough.
by zahlman | 2025-04-21 20:32:19+00:00
Natural gas is considered a fossil fuel, per Wikipedia. Unless you mean biofuels like methane, at least - but as far as I know, those are scarcely used anywhere on a large scale, certainly not the US.

"Clean" sources are generally anything that isn't burning hydrocarbons. This includes nuclear, hydro and geothermal.

Edit: See also a previous comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43755528
by munchler | 2025-04-21 20:34:19+00:00
Other good nerd-sniping math questions:

0^0 = 1? Yes, it’s simpler that way.

0! = 1? Yes, it’s simpler that way.

0/0 = ∞? No, it’s undefined.

0.9999… = 1? Yes, it’s just two ways of expressing the same number.

1+2+3+… = -1/12? No, but if it did have a finite value, that’s what it would be.
by pron | 2025-04-21 20:34:30+00:00
> But Zig's comptime only approximates the features you mentioned; it doesn't fully implement them

That's like saying that a touchscreen device without a keyboard only approximates a keyboard but doesn't fully implement one. The important thing is that the feature performs the duty of those other features.

> If you say that incomplete implementations count, then I could argue that the C preprocessor subsumes generics/templates, interfaces/typeclasses†, macros, and conditional compilation.

There are two problems with this, even if we assumed that the power of C's preprocessor is completely equivalent to Zig's comptime:

First, C's preprocessor is a distinct meta-language; one major point of Zig's comptime is that the metalanguage is the same language as the object language.

Second, it's unsurprising that macros -- whether they're more sophisticated or less -- can do the role of all those other features. As I wrote in my original comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43745438) one of the exciting things about Zig is that a feature that isn't macros (and is strictly weaker than macros, as it's referentially transparent) can replace them for the most part, while enjoying a greater ease of understanding.

I remember that one of my first impressions of Zig was that it evoked the magic of Lisp (at least that was my gut feeling), but in a completely different way, one that doesn't involve AST manipulation, and doesn't suffer from many of the problems that make List macros problematic (i.e. creating DSLs with their own rules). I'm not saying it may not have other problems, but that is very novel.

I hadn't seen any such fresh designs in well over a decade. Now, it could be that I simply don't know enough languages, but you also haven't named other languages that work on this design principle, so I think my excitement was warranted. I'll let you know if I think that's not only a fresh and exciting design but also a good one in ten years.

BTW, I have no problem with you finding Zig's comptime unappealing to your tastes or even believing it suffers from fundamental issues that may prove problematic in practice (although personally I think that, when considering both pros and cons of this design versus the alternatives, there's some promise here). I just don't understand how you can say that the design isn't novel while not naming one other language with a similar core design: a mechanism for partial evaluation of the object language (with access to additional reflective operations) that replace those other features I mentioned (by performing their duty, if not exactly their mode of operation).

For example, I've looked at Terra, but it makes a distinction between the meta language and the object (or "runtime") language.
by acdha | 2025-04-21 20:35:20+00:00
You don’t need to teach it to a beginner. The first of learning doesn’t need more than the standard library and when you need more than that you’re either giving them the single command necessary to run or, more likely, having them use a template project where a tool like Poetry is doing that automatically.

What this usually hits isn’t that managing Python packages is hard in 2025 but that many people do not learn how their operating system works conceptually until the first time they learn to program and it’s easy to conflate that with the first language you learn.
by JadeNB | 2025-04-21 20:35:23+00:00
> One reason that 1 is often excluded from the prime numbers is that if it was included, it would complicate the theorems, proofs, and exposition by the endless repetition of "not equal to 1".

This is true and compelling as things developed, but I think it's an explanation of where history brought us, rather than a logical inevitability. For example, I can easily imagine, in a different universe, teachers patiently explaining that we declare that the empty set is not a set, to avoid complicating theorems, proofs, and exposition by the endless repetition of "non-empty set."

(I agree that this is different, because there's no interesting "unique factorization theorem" for sets, but I can still imagine things developing this way. And, indeed, there are complications caused by allowing the empty set in a model of a structure, and someone determined to do so can make themselves pointlessly unpopular by asking "but have you considered the empty manifold?" and similar questions. See also https://mathoverflow.net/questions/45951/interesting-example....)
by edflsafoiewq | 2025-04-21 20:35:23+00:00
They are the same thing though. Conceptually there's a partial evaluation pass whose goal is to eliminate all the comptimes by lowering them to regular runtime values. The apparent different "features" just arise from its operation on the different kinds of program constructs. To eliminate a expression, it evaluates the expression and replaces it with its value. To eliminate a loop, it unrolls it. To eliminate a call to a function with comptime arguments, it generates a specialized function for those arguments and replaces it with a call to the specialized function.
by JadeNB | 2025-04-21 20:36:30+00:00
> I'm sure it depends on the definition of prime. I've always been partial to "Any integer with exactly 2 divisors". Short, simple, and it excludes 1 and negative numbers.

Depending on your definition of divisor, it excludes everything except 1 and -1, whose two integer divisors are 1 and -1. But then, if you specify that "divisor" means "positive integer divisor", it no longer automatically excludes the negative numbers, since the two positive integer divisors of -2 are 1 and 2. (Incidentally, plenty of algebraists, myself included, are perfectly comfortable with including -2 as a prime.)
by orwin | 2025-04-21 20:36:37+00:00
I mostly make tooling for the blue team, so i'm not a true expert. The network part is correct, that's how you would do it, the rest i'm not competent except to judge the security practices.

It seems the witleblower is _very_ competent and the story checks out (i know only two persons that could do that alone and that quick and they are true greybeards who've seen it all). Impressive work.

So either he is very well prepared and built an extremely good lie (frankly i don't see why, his discoveries will be audited and the only stuff he did was show how good of an engineer he is), or US government systems are indeed breached, and probably because of those "DOGE" accounts. Is it by malice, greed or incompetence? Malice is out imho, my bet is on incompetence.