MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by dang | 2025-04-16 16:45:52+00:00
That's an inaccurate perception. HN has had a high number of political threads on the front page in recent months, and most (nearly all, in fact) have been critical of the current administration.

If you find that hard to believe, see these lists:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43227619

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43168527

They are a couple months old now, but the point hasn't changed: the most-discussed (by far!) topic on Hacker News gets perceived as totally-suppressed-and-silenced by the passionate portion [1] of the audience that wants more of this material. I call this the "nobody goes there anymore, it's too crowded" theory of HN threads. [2]

This is not a new phenomenon [3]. Here's an example of the same thing from 5 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23624962. That was me responding to someone complaining that the most-discussed-by-far topic on HN was being "aggressively removed from discussion".

Meanwhile, the audience that wants less of this material perceives the site as being completely-overrun-by-politics. To these we have to give the inverse of the current explanation. You can see from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17014869 how far back that goes.

Both of these perceptions are wrong. Both are consequences of the fundamentals I listed in the GP comment. And both are special cases of a more general phenomenon: for anyone passionate about topic X, the HN front page never contains enough X.

The most passionate users rarely express their preference as "I would prefer more X on HN". Rather they say: "It's unbelievable how X is completely and utterly suppressed and censored on HN".

[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... I use 'passionate' or 'passion' a lot to describe these segments of the audience (on any topic and/or side). This is not intended disrespectfully. People have legitimate reasons for feeling passionately, and often the topics are far more important than most stories on HN. However, mitigating the power of these passions to shape HN is critical to keeping this the kind of site that it's supposed to be. If we didn't do this, HN would turn into a current affairs site overnight.

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

[3] The reason this is not a new phenomenon is because of what I said in my GP comment: it follows from the fundamentals of the site.

p.s. The thread you linked to spent 15 hours on HN's front page. That's a lot.
by ch4s3 | 2025-04-16 16:45:57+00:00
The early European hunter-gatherers uses something like dugout canoes, and examples dating back 7k years have been found in Italy. Experienced paddlers with good wind and current conditions could cover 60 miles in about a day. The 90 miles form Sicily to Tunisia is also possible to cover in such a canoe, and DNA form skeletal remains does indeed show that people made the journey.
by jonnycomputer | 2025-04-16 16:46:23+00:00
This confuses me greatly. Comparing your link, I can find the repos in that screenshot in the archive snapshot, but as you say, the NxGenBdoorExtract repo is not there, and the repo where it would be is a tinder-react-native clone (updated Sep 20 2020)...

I'm trying to think through this:

1. if the screenshot is not doctored, then the implied ordering of last updated would have had it last updated before January 20, 2021; which would mean it has nothing to do with what is alleged in the article.

2. But in the archive.ph snapshot from 2/28/25 doesn't have it at all anywhere.

3. Archive.org's 3/21/25 snapshot shows the same thing as archive.ph

4. The article states that after this tweet (https://x.com/SollenbergerRC/status/1895609294810464390) dated 2/28/25 (the date of the archive.ph 2/28/25 snapshot), Berulis noticed NxGenBdoorExtract in the repo: "After journalist Roger Sollenberger started posting on X about the account, Berulis noticed something Wick was working on: a project, or repository, titled "NxGenBdoorExtract." Wick made it private before Berulis could investigate further, he told NPR.

Of course, if it really only was public for a very brief moment then it might not be in the snapshot, and the article isn't clear exactly how long after that tweet that Berulis supposedly discovered this.

All I can say is this: I can't figure out for the life of me what all this adds up to.
by beeforpork | 2025-04-16 16:46:36+00:00
This is not actually that much of a sensation -- the judges have made it clear at the very beginning that it is not their place to define what is sex or gender. The only thing they do is clarify how the words "woman" and "man" are to be interpreted in existing laws that have been made to protect women (e.g., and usually, from men).

And the result is: it is the judgement that those laws are referring to the biological sex (which it itself is recognised as being subject to some debate, too, so the judgement refers to another common definition).

That's all. It is not a redefinition or anything. I cannot really understand the enthusiasm of one side or another. It just clarifies what those laws were meant to say, and I tend to agree that anything else would most likely be an unintended reinterpretation. The judges also make it clear that if law makers want more protection for other groups, e.g., trans people, they probably need to make more laws for that.

I also find that this is a very complex topic, because it was about the question whether in sex separated prisons, it is more important to protect trans women from cis men, or to protect cis women from imposter trans women cis men. I mean -- who knows a trivial solution to that? The judges clarified basically that the original law was probably just concerned about protecting cis women from cis men, because probably no-body thought about it. And for the sake of clarifying anything, they said that "woman" probably meant "biological woman". They were tasked to decide something, so they did.

And, well, at least that's I read into this... You can have a look for yourself, maybe, before taking one side.
by visarga | 2025-04-16 16:46:42+00:00
I think you should try to get the intent instead of stumbling on surface level. The core idea is that recursion explains emergence.

A distributed system can still achieve centralized outcomes as a result of centralizing constraints acting on it. For example, matter under gravity forces leads to celestial bodies, particles under EM forces lead to stable chemical molecules, genes and species under the constraint of replication lead to evolution, language under constraint of usage leads to the evolution of culture, and brains under the constraint of serial action lead to centralized semantics and behavior. In neural nets we have the loss function as a centralizing constraint, moving weights towards achieving a certain functional outcome.

Ok, so what is the relation between centralizing constraints and recursion? Recursion is how distributed activity generates constraints. Every action becomes a future constraint. I think this approach shows great promise. We can link recursive incompressibility and undecidability to explanatory gaps. You can't know a recursive process unless you walk the full path of recursion, you have to be it to know it. There is no shorter description of a recursive process than its full history.

So what looks like constraints when seen top-down, looks like search seen bottom-up. Particles search for minimal energy, genes for survival, markets search for profit, and our actions for goal maximization. Search acts on all levels, but since constraints are emergent, search is also open-ended.
by pavel_lishin | 2025-04-16 16:46:55+00:00
I'm a moaner, but I'm not building anything.

The software my school uses to communicate with parents is fucking awful. Based on digging around their website & linkedin, I suspect they have a team of offshore developers - which is fine - but my money is that they don't actually have a team, they're paying a company that gives them supposedly-fungible engineer-hours instead of an actual cohesive team that works on the product and is proud of what they've made. They just eat requirements and shit something approximating software.

But what am I going to do? Say I build a competitor, solo, for cheap. (It can be done. The software doesn't do much. The hardest thing would be ensuring the emails actually get delivered.)

Now I get to play salesman. I have to sell it to my school. Now I have to maintain it. Our school isn't rich; a local school paid $130k for an unrelated hardware+software solution, so I'm at most going to get that, and now I'm on call 24/7, now I'm training the teachers & administrators to use it, now I'm fielding support emails, etc., etc.

Fuck it. I'll keep moaning.
by cratermoon | 2025-04-16 16:46:58+00:00
I noted the "analyze" feature didn't seem as useful as it could be because the majority of the words are common articles and conjunctions. I'd like to see a version of analyze that filters out at least the following stop words: a, an, and, are, as, at, be, but, by, for, if, in, into, is, it, no, not, of, on, or, such, that, the, their, then, there, these, they, this, to, was, will, with
by FloorEgg | 2025-04-16 16:47:29+00:00
There's been pretty substantial research done into the most effective ways to deliver feedback to students to maximize their development rate. However when it's not a student but a senior employee, manager or executive that did something they knew was wrong to cut a corner to make their job easier at the cost of making the company worse off, it's a different context and situation.

The problem is "asshole" is an imprecise word.

There is nuance in describing good leadership, and which leadership is best depends on the context. A military leader in a war should have different qualities than an elementary school principal to be the best leaders they can be, and the same is true for technology company CEOs, even with differences between companies. "Wartime vs peacetime" CEOs and all that (e.g. whether the company has intense competition or a monopoly).

Generally Good:

- provide any positive reinforcement first (point out what you want them to keep doing)

- be direct and clear about the mistakes, but focus feedback on the mistakes/work and not their person

- explain why the feedback is important, always ensure the "why" is understood

- share consequences if the feedback is not followed, if there will be any (don't surprise someone with the consequences only once they are reached)

Generally Bad:

- open up with a personal attack on their character

- be vague about what they did wrong or what they should do instead

- don't explain why following the feedback is important, don't justify it with a good reason

- fire people without any warning or opportunities to correct their behavior
by idle_zealot | 2025-04-16 16:48:28+00:00
To be clear, I don't think it's chess either. I think Trump likes tariffs and wants to appear strong by slapping them around. I think some, but not all of his hangers-on are using this to push for a recession. There are multiple hands on the levers of power here, but there's a common interest in transforming the US into a Russia-style oligarchy.
by parliament32 | 2025-04-16 16:48:32+00:00
I wonder how this compares to barebones Chrome, given that they're both Chromium-based.

I don't love Edge but at work I use it almost exclusively, because of the tighter integration with the Windows identity/authentication broker -- SSO flows are much less painful (read: effectively transparent) if your org uses AAD/EntraID as an IdP.

EDIT: I tested myself and it actually is ~4.8% faster than stock Chrome, using this benchmark anyway.
by albedoa | 2025-04-16 16:48:45+00:00
I wonder if anyone remembers the K-Mart diners and cafes. This image search[0] shows various styles. Some or all of them were branded as K-Café.

The one that I and my older brother remember from our local K-Mart is the sit-down experience with the brown chairs and tables, the server greeting you with the brown coffee canister. (Brown dominated the palette.) It was removed from the store before my younger siblings could register memories of it. They thought we were trolling when we brought it up.

[0]: https://www.google.com/search?q=k-mart+diner&udm=2
by Someone1234 | 2025-04-16 16:48:53+00:00
It feels fatiguing to read; and I'm supposedly in one of their target demographics.

Personally I've always found Monospace fonts the easiest like Microsoft's Courier New or Consolas. It feels like you're time travelling back to the 1980s visually, but they're so comfortable to read because your brain can make assumptions which are accurate.
by matteason | 2025-04-16 16:48:53+00:00
If you like this kind of thing (as background ambience or whatever), the 'WJSV broadcast day' recording from 1939 is worth checking out too: https://archive.org/details/001WakeUpMusic

It was apparently the first recording of its type, clocking in at 19 hours: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WJSV_broadcast_day

I chopped up bits of it for the 'Old American radio' option on an ambient sound mixer I made called Ambiphone: https://ambiph.one/?m=1-Ambient+old+radio-bf37bi80
by sabslikesobs | 2025-04-16 16:49:01+00:00
Without the kid branding and the name "Kermit," which piggybacks off of cultural feelings for marketing, this feels more like just another font. I found the body text hard to read and didn't realize at first it was using the font.

I read a lot of books on my ereader and generally find the best comfort comes from bold text and some kind of serifs. I really blaze through my books though, so I don't know if that actually improves my comprehension or just makes it feel better to skim.
by paul7986 | 2025-04-16 16:49:45+00:00
How many Americans are dying to and will do tedious labor (not many), as well robots, automation and AI can do a lot of it and or will end up doing a lot of it.

If we want to strengthen America (military & economy) immigration reform is needed! This could be unpopular but such reform could be ...those who want to come here must serve in our armed forces for x amount of years and can bring two to four family members here that are able to start working and contributing to the economy immediately (pay taxes). Rounding up and getting of rid of these eager want to be Americans when we have adversaries with larger armies and we bang the drum on beefing up defense (and our economy) doesn't make sense to me.
by intrasight | 2025-04-16 16:50:10+00:00
I grew up on Star Trek. When I was 10 years old, I made a communicator out of paper. When I was 30 years old, I had a real communicator that looked a whole lot like the one on Star Trek, and I think the tech billionaires for that and many other improvements to the human condition.

US progress is based on three pillars: capital allocation, modern risk management and tech visionaries.
by toomuchtodo | 2025-04-16 16:50:30+00:00
As a manager, I disagree. It is entirely within my interest to have a direct do better; this provides me a path in the future to switch orgs when they switch orgs. If I level up or leave, I bring them with. If they level up or leave, they potentially bring me with. Team, self, org in descending order of priority. Companies are temporary, network is what carries you until the end of your career.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43698197 ("The best advice I ever got was from a mentor who told me: Your network is your net worth but only if you give more than you take.")
by ModernMech | 2025-04-16 16:51:00+00:00
I'd like to second the point made to you in this thread that went without reply: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43702895

It's true that we use tools with uncertainty all the time, in many domains. But crucially that uncertainty is carefully modeled and accounted for.

For example, robots use sensors to make sense of the world around them. These sensors are not 100% accurate, and therefore if the robots rely on these sensors to be correct, they will fail.

So roboticists characterize and calibrate sensors. They attempt to understand how and why they fail, and under what conditions. Then they attempt to cover blind spots by using orthogonal sensing methods. Then they fuse these desperate data into a single belief of the robot's state, which include an estimate of its posterior uncertainty. Accounting for this uncertainty in this way is what keeps planes in the sky, boats afloat, and driverless cars on course.

With LLMs It seems like we are happy to just throw out all this uncertainty modeling and to leave it up to chance. To draw an analogy to robotics, what we should be doing is taking the output from many LLMs, characterizing how wrong they are, and fusing them into a final result, which is provided to the user with a level of confidence attached. Now that is something I can use in an engineering pipeline. That is something that can be used as a foundation to something bigger.
by toast0 | 2025-04-16 16:51:44+00:00
There's not really a better option if you need your urls to work with public browsers and also an app you control. You can't use a private CA for those urls, because the public browsers won't accept it; you need to include a public CA in your app so you don't have to rely on the user's device having a reasonable trust store. Including all the CAs you're never going to use is silly, so picking a few makes sense.
by flohofwoe | 2025-04-16 16:51:59+00:00
The best 8-bitter video memory layout (for pixel data) I have seen is in the little known KC85/4:

The display is 320x256 pixels, organized into 40x256 bytes for pixels (8 pixels per byte) and another 40x256 bytes for Speccy-like color attribute bytes (the color blocks are just 8x1 instead of 8x8 pixels), the start address for video memory is 0x8000 with the pixels and colors in different memory banks.

Now the twist: the video memory layout is vertical, e.g. writing consecutive bytes in video memory fills vertical pixel columns.

This layout is perfect for the Z80 with its 16-bit register pairs. To 'compute' a video memory location:

LD H, 0x80 + column ; column = 0..39 LD L, row ; row = 0..255

...and now you have the address of a pixel- or color-byte in HL.

To blit an 8x8 character just load the start of the font pixels into DE and do 8x unrolled LDI.

Unfortunately the KC85/4 had a slow CPU clock (at 1.77 MHz only half as fast as a Speccy), but it's good enough for stuff like this:

https://floooh.github.io/kcide-sample/kc854.html?file=demo.k...
by st_goliath | 2025-04-16 16:52:04+00:00
> This feels like a nothingburger. There isn't even a hint of [...] a demo or anything.

The visible human project has been around for quite some time and has, in fact, accomplished their initial project goals. And they do have a demo application, complete with a "guided tour", interview snippets and everything, all on a single CD-ROM! I remember playing around with it at the local library in December 2003.
by Nevermark | 2025-04-16 16:52:39+00:00
We already know fusion has been a grind. For decades.

We already know that computation has grown exponentially in scale and cost, for decades. With breakthrough software tech showing up reliably as it harnesses greater computational power, even if unpredictably and sparsely.

If we view AI across decades, it has reliably improved. Even through its “winters”. It just took time to hit thresholds of usefulness making relatively smooth progress look very random from a consumers point of view.

As computational power grows, and current models become more efficient, the hardware overhang for the next major step is growing rapidly.

That just hasn’t been the case for fusion.
by donnachangstein | 2025-04-16 16:52:40+00:00
Then, I'm afraid, you work in a bubble.

A static page that hosts documentation on an internal network does not need encryption.

The added overhead of certificate maintenance (and investigating when it does and will break) is simply not worth the added cost.

Of course the workaround most shops do nowadays is just hide the HTTP servers behind a load balancer doing SSL termination with a wildcard cert. An added layer of complexity (and now single point of failure) just to appease the WebPKI crybabies.
by juancn | 2025-04-16 16:52:41+00:00
The Atari judge agreed: “When the nature of a work requires intermediate copying to understand the ideas and processes in a copyrighted work, that nature supports a fair use for intermediate copying,” he wrote. “Thus, reverse engineering object code to discern the unprotectable ideas in a computer program is a fair use.”

Huh... that argument seems to apply to training an AI model.

You could well argue that the intermediate copying is needed for the model to "understand the ideas and processes in a copyrighted work".
by ASalazarMX | 2025-04-16 16:52:53+00:00
> That's antithetical to many of the foundational rules of the internet, which are core to 4chan culture.

The most foundational rule of the Internet was the sharing of information, and that's a coincidence of hackers being the first to adopt it. Being macho and emotionally stunted was never a foundational value, that's immature manchildren equating kindness with weakness.
by mrtksn | 2025-04-16 16:52:56+00:00
In my experience as a chronic immigrant, most people are nice but there are some a-holes who would want to harm you or see you get harmed but they would not act unless they feel in power.

Therefore, most of the time you can just ignore them and your experience wouldn't any different than the natives who would also encounter a-holes for different reasons. The problem starts when someone in power to affect your life is one of those but in normal times you still can push back by questioning their actions as they still seek approval from the larger society.

The case with Trump seems to be the same with the case with Brexit: Those a-holes(not everyone who support those but a subset of them who are a-holes) start believing that they are in power and the society approves them therefore they can act on their instincts or plans.

I was working in London on the Brexit referendum day, some of our Spanish developers had trouble with people from their neighborhood right after the referandum.
by Suppafly | 2025-04-16 16:53:20+00:00
I haven't really messed with Claude or other programming AIs much, but when using chatgpt for random stuff, it seems like the safety rails end up blocking a lot of stuff and rephrasing to get around them is necessary. I wonder if some of these programming AIs would be more useful if it some of the context that causes them to produce invalid results was more obvious to the users.
by polskibus | 2025-04-16 16:53:22+00:00
I got Claude Desktop to perform code review using mcp in Jetbrains IDE. I don’t know why would you prefer a cloud based pipeline with separate CR tool to it. This way I can extend the review process the way I want for example adding feature specs etc. There are other issues with llm based CR but I think mcp (or similar protocol) is the way to go.
by theturtletalks | 2025-04-16 16:54:00+00:00
Cursor was one of the first AI editors and there was no way to add those features to VSCode thru extensions at that time. Another issue was that VSCode made special exceptions and opened APIs for CoPilot, Microsoft’s product, but not for other players. Not sure if this has changed now.

Cursor took the best course of action at the time by forking but needs to come back into the fold. If VSCode is restricting access to APIs to CoPilot, forking it publicly and putting that in the Readme, “We forked VSCode since they give preferential treatment to CoPilot” would get a lot of community support.
by conjectures | 2025-04-16 16:54:09+00:00
Common pattern where a bright spark asks, 'why you all so complicated?' Proceeds to assume we're dealing with a finite graph / set.

All the complication is needed to handle the fact that the state can be a random vector of real numbers in a possibly varying dimensional space. It's not jerking off on jargon for its own sake.

Sure, there are simple cases - doesn't make the general case 'bullshit'.