MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by krisoft | 2025-04-11 19:00:45+00:00
> very few people have any real interest in driving a car at 200 MPH

I agree with that.

> but Ferraris, Lamborghinis and Porsches are widely understood as desirable cars

I agree with that too.

> because the people who are into cars like those marques.

I think that is not true. I don’t care about cars. Never had one. Don’t even have a driving licence.

The reason why i think Ferraris, Lamborghinis and Porsches are desirable cars is because they look cool, and they sound cool. They were designed to be like that. If i see one on the street i notice it. I couldn’t care less about the opinion of gearheads. If a car would come out looking like my grandpa’s skoda, but all the car lovers would love it I wouldn’t even hear about it.

It is all about flashyness of the industrial design. And rarity of course.
by WarOnPrivacy | 2025-04-11 19:00:46+00:00
The [State] department ... will work with an administration-wide task force to collect information "involving anti-religious bias during the last presidential administration" and will collect examples of anti-Christian bias through anonymous employee report forms.

This aligns with the WhiteHouse' order to eradicate attacks on all faiths, as long as they are Christian.

https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/02/erad...
by dang | 2025-04-11 19:01:01+00:00
This is in the FAQ: see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html#whyrank ("Why is A ranked below B even though A has more points and is newer?"). But here's a longer answer.

In the case of a story like this, which has significant new information (SNI) [1] on a major ongoing topic (MOT) [2], and at least some hope of a substantive discussion, moderators sometimes turn off the user flags on the story [3] so that it can spend time on HN's front page.

In such cases, we usually adjust the degree to which we turn off the flags so that the tug-of-war between upvotes and flags isn't affected too dramatically. Usually the best way to support a substantive discussion is for the story to remain on HN's front page, but not in the highest few slots, where it would burn much hotter.

Since upvotes and submission time are public data but flags aren't, it can appear like a story is being downweighted when in fact the opposite is the case, as with this thread. That's not a rule, though—we do also downweight stories sometimes. That's why the FAQ explains that you can't derive rank from votes and time alone.

The reason moderation works this way, btw, is that HN is a curated site [4] (and always has been—here's me explaining this when I took over HN 11 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7494621).

Moderators' job is to jiggle the system out of the failure modes [5] it would otherwise end up in if the software were running unattended. Turning off flags on certain stories, and adding downweight to other stories, are two examples. The goal is the same: to support substantive discussion on interesting stories, and (as a necessary condition for that) prevent the site from burning too hot if we can.

[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

[3] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

[4] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

[5] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
by FloorEgg | 2025-04-11 19:01:05+00:00
This seems accurate to me. They are destroying many US institutions, and what replaces them may be better or may be worse. I am not sure anyone can tell right now.

This wouldn't be happening if everyone was happy with the status quo, if the US was in a golden era, but it wasn't. Many things clearly weren't working. Sometimes it's easier to tear something down and rebuild it than fix it (not always, but sometimes).
by mrguyorama | 2025-04-11 19:01:11+00:00
>Itself triggered by poorly thought out public policy.

No. There was no policy that required Ford and Chevy marketing to encourage customers to associate "8 ft high front end" with "better truck".

Pedestrian deaths are related to vehicle grill height, not weight. We could have the same modern monster trucks with a lower grille and have fewer pedestrian deaths.
by mdp2021 | 2025-04-11 19:01:16+00:00
Somebody having for their own reasons flagged the other post, I will have to write it again: this article was submitted as this input from the current adminstration seems relevant in those times when attempts at knowledge engineering (in the form of LLMs) are greatly concentrated in the USA.

As written in the other post, aspects of the action in question seem to suggest a potential for the reduction of "debate" to low standards. It is a drive that could be concerning not just in general, but especially in light of the historic efforts abovesaid.

The original post should be still visible for most - it just says the same in other terms. (Note: it was already heavily hit before I encouraged the silent attackers to grow speech and fingers - then it got flagged.)

--

Addendum: furthermore, a factor with consequences will remain a sense of distrust towards the institutions. Very rightfully, as the article said, one part notes that «targeting anyone for their religious beliefs is discriminatory and is contrary to the Constitution». But other parts will be afraid that «in reality, it will weaponize a narrow understanding of [etc.]». There have been many signals that bring to doubt that matters will be treated with all respect to complexity - point that was strongly made in the original post.
by bri3d | 2025-04-11 19:01:23+00:00
I think one thing that the linked article (which I think is great and I generally agree with!) misses is that libraries and abstraction can patch over the lack of composability created by heterogeneous systems. We see it everywhere - AI/ML libraries abstracting over some combination of TPU, vector processing, and GPU cores being one obvious modern place.

This happened on the PS3, too, later in its life: Sony released PlayStation Edge and middleware/engine vendors increasingly learned how to use SPU to patch over RSX being slow. At this point developers stopped needing to care so much about the composability issues introduced by heterogeneous computing, since they could use the SPUs as another function processor to offload, for example, geometry processing, without caring about the implementation details so much.
by andrewstuart | 2025-04-11 19:01:28+00:00
Have a frank and open discussion about things. That may clear the air and right the relationship.

As for pivoting ….. Steve Blank says, "A startup is a temporary organization designed to search for a repeatable and scalable business model."

So yes you need to be trying to find what works. Maybe try to decide together what you work on and for how long. But you do need to be actively searching.
by UtopiaPunk | 2025-04-11 19:01:44+00:00
You are assuming that there is an ethical way to use AI. There are several ethical concerns around using AI, and Adobe is perhaps concerned with one of these (charitably, respecting artists, or a little more cynically, respecting copyright).

Many would argue, myself included, that the most ethical approach towards AI is to not use it. Procreate is a popular digital art program that is loudly taking that position: https://procreate.com/ai
by wdkrnls | 2025-04-11 19:01:54+00:00
Is there a way to trace an attribute to a function? I couldn't find one, but curious if it exists. I seemed blocked by the fact that trace seemed to expect a name as a character string. Some functions in base R have functions in their attributes which modify their behavior (e.g. selfStart). I ended up just copying the whole code locally and then naming it, but for a better interactive experience I really wish there was a way to pass a function object as I can with debug.
by Sean-Der | 2025-04-11 19:02:04+00:00
I hope everyone enjoys WebRTC for the Curious (I am one of the authors). If you have any ideas on how to make it better I would love to hear :)

WebRTC is absolutely magical. Having 'Web' in the name does it a disservice. I see it used to.

* Remotely control excavators

* Security Cameras

* Connect autonomous robots in factories

* Low latency streaming from sail boats and rocket ships

* And all the use cases you expect (Conferencing, Telehealth etc..)
by adhamsalama | 2025-04-11 19:02:19+00:00
I like this book, but it doesn't contain any code examples, so it wasn't useful to me.

I ended up adopting code from the High Performance Browser Networking book and some code examples by Google that were written like 8 years ago. It was painful to replace the outdated APIs with new ones and rewrite in TypeScript, but I eventually did it.

https://github.com/adhamsalama/webrtc/

Then I used it with WebAssembly to run a distributed SQLite database in the browser for peer-to-peer collaboration.

https://github.com/adhamsalama/sqlite-wasm-webrtc

Probably the coolest projects I have ever done, and they contain almost no backend code at all (I am a backend dev).
by masklinn | 2025-04-11 19:04:04+00:00
That's part of the failure in developer mindshare: leveraging SMT for games in 2005 was difficult enough, heterogeneous multi-ISA hardware, a ring bus, and the peculiarities of the SPEs made the PS3 not really a consideration. Things might have been different if sony had provided ready-made more or less plug and play SPE applications you could use with just a little tuning for your circumstance (e.g. a physics engine or something) but as far as I know that wasn't the case. I've never heard Sony being praised for its SDKs, while the 360 had straight up directx (with more hardware access).
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-04-11 19:04:53+00:00
> United States currently deports visa holders for criticizing a foreign Jewish country

We’re deporting people for any and no reason, including a tattoo of “an autism awareness ribbon” [1].

Trump was elected to stop illegal immigration. He’s staffed his White House with idiot sycophants, however, and so can’t actually do that because it’s hard. So we get random deportations to make the numbers while the gangs probably have the freest reign they’ve ever had amidst the confusion at the FBI and in D.C.

[1] https://www.dallasnews.com/news/politics/2025/03/31/venezuel...
by fragmede | 2025-04-11 19:05:10+00:00
> The calculator did not erase math wizards

But it did. Quick, what's 67 * 49? A math wiz would furrow their brow for a second and be able to spit out an answer, while the rest of us have to pull out a calculator. When you're doing business in person and have to move numbers around, having to stop and use a calculator slows you down. If you don't have a role where that's useful then it's not a needed skill and you don't notice it's missing, like riding s horse, but doesn't mean the skill itself wouldn't be useful to have.
by snickerbockers | 2025-04-11 19:05:49+00:00
Yes but only for the sake of the business conducted in that jurisdiction. The GDPR, according to the EU, applies to anybody anywhere in the world. You can have information on an EU citizen stored outside of the EU and they can fine you under GDPR. You don't even need to have ever been to an EU member state at any point in your life-they still claim to have jurisdiction over you if you have information stored on a computer they want deleted.

Most foreign extradition courts would laugh in their face for trying to use that, but if you have any assets in the EU (as most corporations inevitably will if they get big enough to go international) they can seize those as punishment for not following EU laws related to business conducted outside of the EU and that goes back to what OP tried to argue:

>if they don't break the law there's no way for the EU to collect the money

they actually can, because they can say you broke their law while conducting business outside of their jurisdiction that wasn't even illegal in the coutnry that actually had jurisdiction over that transaction.
by kazinator | 2025-04-11 19:05:52+00:00
Reproducible builds can improve software quality.

If we believe we have a reproducible build, that's constitutes a big test case which gives us confidence in the determininism of the whole software stack.

To validate that test case, we actually have to repeat the build a number of times.

If we spot a difference, something is wrong.

For instance, suppose that a compiler being used has a bug whereby it is relying on the value of an unitialized variable somewhere. That could show up as a difference in the code it generates.

Without reproducible builds, of course there are always differences in the results of a build: we cannot use repeated builds to discover that something is wrong.

(People do diffs between irreproducible builds anyway. For instance, disassemble the old and new binaries, and do a textual diff, validating that only some expected changes are present, like string literals that have embedded build dates. If you have reproducible builds, you don't have to do that kind of thing to detect a change.

Reproducible builds will strengthen the toolchains and surrounding utilities. They will flush out instabilities in build systems, like parallel Makefiles with race conditions, or indeterminate orders of object files going into a link job, etc.
by bcrosby95 | 2025-04-11 19:05:56+00:00
It doesn't matter if they're citizens or not if the government is skipping court thus not being required to prove it either way. Then when they oopsie you to another country they have to at least try to pretend to get you back but the courts need to show "deference owed to the executive branch in the conduct of foreign affairs".

Which is a long way of saying the executive can blackhole anyone it wants to a foreign country and no one is going to do anything because god forbid we step on the executive's role to give up people in our country to other countries.
by cyral | 2025-04-11 19:07:36+00:00
The new image generation released two weeks ago or so is a massive improvement, doesn't look like typical AI slop.

Everyone in these threads that dismisses AI needs to remember 5 years ago we didn't have somewhat human level intelligence that we could command to complete tasks in 30 seconds. There are a lot of cases where it fails right now, but imagine what it's going to look like in 5 or 10 more years. I think it's good to at least play around with it (prompt experimenting) to see what it can do, because your competitors, coworkers, etc are going to do that and get ahead whether you like it or not.
by HarHarVeryFunny | 2025-04-11 19:07:47+00:00
Really? How often are blonde-haired men referred to as "blondes" vs women, and if you really feel the need to use "blonde" as your adjective, but insist it's a sexless "person", then how about "blonde engineer" instead of "blonde dancer"?!

I've got nothing against blonde dancers, and am far from politically correct myself, but in a scientific article about language and Bonobos, couldn't they have chosen a more appropriate example such as "yellow banana"?
by nonameiguess | 2025-04-11 19:08:01+00:00
The greatest reason they need to use contractors in general, not just "consultants," is that hiring a civil servant is opening a position forever. The federal government certainly can downsize, as we're seeing now, but they rarely do, and they don't hire people for six-month contracts. They hire them permanently, and would then need to go through a layoff process to reduce staff.

So if they have a project that needs 100 people to do and is expected to take two years, they have two choices. Hire 100 people, hoping you can find something else for them to do in two years, or you can offer a two-year contract to a private company, letting them deal with the problem of figuring out what to do with the 100 people once the project is completed.

The contraints of the GS pay scale aren't real constraints. The federal government already has special bonuses paid to medical doctors to make their pay commensurate with rates in private industry, in spite of the fact that those rates are way the hell higher than anything on the GS scale. They could easily do the same for engineering labor. What they can't easily do is hire people for six months guaranteed with only conditional renewals after that, because very few people would agree to that unless you're paying them far more than they'd get in normal industry.
by theginger | 2025-04-11 19:08:20+00:00
Best part of 20 years ago, which is a long time in anything, it's a lifetime in tech. About 15 years ago I used to work on some projects for greater London authority, we seemed to mostly be squatting on transport for London servers and they seemed to have good tech and people seemed to like using it. 5 years later they couldn't get away fast enough.
by snickerbockers | 2025-04-11 19:08:31+00:00
oh man, idk if you've ever been to the metropolitan museum of art in NYC, but they have dozens, maybe even hundreds, of dead bodies that were removed from their burial sites without consulting any next-of-kin (not that you'd be able to figure out who that is) on display in glass cases. But apparently its alright since nobody's left to argue on behalf of whatever pagan religion or cult they participated in.
by jltsiren | 2025-04-11 19:09:06+00:00
It's easier to get a work visa or employment based permanent residency in most EU countries than in the US. Partly because there are no quotas for higher-end work visas or permanent residency permits. And partly because the EU does not have a large number of illegal immigrants available for lower-end jobs.

Imagine that H-1Bs would be available in unlimited quantities any time of the year, as long as you meet the minimum requirements. And that the H-1B would be extended to a green card after a few years, assuming the authorities don't find anything too bad in the background checks. That's how it works in the EU.

European countries are generally more protectionist about working class jobs than professional jobs. If you have the education, skills, and experience, they assume that your presence would be good for the economy. And the citizens don't really complain. I guess a major reason is that the primary identities are national, while legal rights are EU-wide. If there are already hundreds of millions of foreigners who could apply for the same jobs, who cares about a small number of additional immigrants.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-04-11 19:09:50+00:00
> opposition party has no power in the US, as designed explicitly

The Republicans have shown this to be superbly untrue when they were in the opposition.

The Senate should be hellbent on delaying and disrupting. The House should be constantly throwing a spanner in everything.

Governors? Arrest the DOGE kids for breaking state law. Arrest the ICE agents defying court orders. They’ll be released, eventually. But you’ll buy time until the midterms. Ban Tesla FSD and promise to pardon people who non-violently cross the line. Ban the law firms who struck deals with Trump from state business for 20 years. Fight like the Republicans do; laws and republics don’t survive if the side defending them lays down its arms.
by __MatrixMan__ | 2025-04-11 19:10:48+00:00
I agree that NixOS/nixpkgs would not be a good a basis for comparison. Do you have an opinion about the use of nix by app devs to specify their builds, i.e. as a make alternative, not as a Fedora alternative?

Quoting the article:

> Irreproducible bits in packages are quite often "caused by an error or sloppiness in the code". For example, dependence on hardware architecture in architecture-independent (noarch) packages is "almost always unwanted and/or a bug", and reproducibility tests can uncover those bugs.

This is the sort of thing that nix is good at guarding against, and it's convenient that it doesn't require users to engage with the underlying toolchain if they're unfamiliar with it.

For instance I can use the command below to build helix at a certain commit without even knowing that it's a rust package. Although it doesn't guarantee all aspects of repeatability, it will fail if the build depends on any bits for which a hash is not known ahead of time, which gets you half way there I think.

nix build github:helix-editor/helix/340934db92aea902a61b9f79b9e6f4bd15111044

Used in this way, can nix help Fedora's reproducibility efforts? Or does it appear to Fedora as a superfluous layer to be stripped away so that they can plug into cargo more directly?
by kazinator | 2025-04-11 19:10:55+00:00
The supply chain attacks you have to most worry about are not someone breaking into Fedora build machines.

It's the attacks on the upstream packages themselves.

Reproducible builds would absolutely not catch a situation like the XZ package being compromised a year ago, due to the project merging a contribution from a malicious actor.

A downstream package system or OS distro will just take that malicious update and spin it into a beautifully reproducing build.
by averagewagon | 2025-04-11 19:11:08+00:00
I've been working on https://joni-on-micro.site - which is hosted on an ESP32-S3 using the built-in esp-httpd, with Hugo for static site generation. This is the first time I'm posting it publicly, so I'm interested to see if it'll stay up.

I love the idea of a website with constraints that users can feel - and if I ever get too many concurrent visitors, I'll naturally stop serving requests.

(Still has some AI-generated content as filler - when I'm done, it'll be strictly human-only content)
by nonameiguess | 2025-04-11 19:11:10+00:00
This is close to what I wrote myself, but the problem here isn't being able to fire people because they underperformed. The problem is what to do about temporary jobs that finish. They performed exactly as expected, maybe even exceeded expectations, but when the work is finished, you still need to get rid of the position, and they can't do that with permanent civil servants.
by brudgers | 2025-04-11 19:11:47+00:00
In US engineering practice, "I-beam" shapes are usually W's not I's. W is for wide-flange. The W's are more efficient than the I's because the flanges are wider...to the point that I's are a specialty shape with specialty shape costs...at least in terms of availability/lead-time when structural steel is sold by the ton and probably a mark-up due to non-commodity status.
by Liftyee | 2025-04-11 19:11:52+00:00
This is an interesting suggestion. I'm curious what you mean by "sending grad students to top universities": 1.) the target universities have to accept the students, right? 2.) This implies some top-level RTS-game-esque control of the grad students when, in reality, they're making independent choices (albeit influenced by many factors, including govt promotion) 3.) Seems like the rational decision for ambitious grad students is to apply to said top universities (which may just happen to be abroad).

Same for "bringing many of them back": I read it at first like it was akin to some sort of spy agent network when in reality "bringing back" probably means various incentives, not some forced thing. Carrot, instead of stick.
by b-rodrigues | 2025-04-11 19:12:01+00:00
I'm writing a package called rixpress that leverages Nix to build reproducible pipelines with targets in either R or Python

Here's the github to the package https://github.com/b-rodrigues/rixpress/tree/master

and here's an example pipeline https://github.com/b-rodrigues/rixpress_demos/tree/master/py...