MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by constantcrying | 2025-04-16 11:50:22+00:00
>The input to this was "1.5~3 x 0.9~1.0 x 0.1~0.4 x 0.1~1.0 x 0.1~1.0 x 0.1~0.2 x 304~10000" - every single range was positive, so regardless of what this represents, it should be impossible to get a negative result.

Every single range here includes positive and negative numbers. To get the correct resulting distribution you have to take into account the entire input distribution. All normal distributions have a non-zero possibility to be negative.

If you want to consider only the numbers inside the range you can look at interval arithmetic, but that does not give you a resulting distribution.
by simpaticoder | 2025-04-16 11:50:58+00:00
>I hope it goes remembered.

It won't be. Willful ignorance is a cornerstone of the movement. You can't lie about what you don't know. You can't have a bad take if you don't know. Upton Sinclaire said in the 1930's: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it." Now add to "salary" "identity", "relationships", "sense of belonging to the group". This is why critical, independent thinking, speaking truth to power, must be separately honored and encouraged by a healthy culture, because these attributes are by default mercilessly punished. (Physical courage and heroism are honored by a healthy culture for similar reasons.)
How to Optimize Cursor?
by barrel_of_lube | 2025-04-16 11:51:48+00:00
What is the best model, i haven't kept up much with the gemini-2.5 and claude 3.7 going bonkers drama, i have sticked with 3.5 sonnet as i only make it do tedious tasks, but i'd like it if was just a tad bit smarter.
by pseudalopex | 2025-04-16 11:52:05+00:00
> "A system’s function or purpose is not necessarily spoken, written, or expressed explicitly, except through the operation of the system. The best way to deduce the system’s purpose is to watch for a while to see how the system behaves. Purposes are deduced from behavior, not from rhetoric or stated goals.” —- Donella Meadows

The purpose of a system is what it does.[1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_wha...
by clbrmbr | 2025-04-16 11:52:39+00:00
I received a METS edition of the Prose Merlin as a kid. Lots of fun reading that book. Indeed the arbitrary and self-inconsistent spelling was initially a turn off, but now I see it as more of a fuzzy orthography.

I like alternating between reading in a made up Middle English accent and reading as if it were modern English, which works because its prose not poetry where the rhyming and metre be all off.
by sharpshadow | 2025-04-16 11:52:41+00:00
The transport of the turbine was accompanied by sanctions and each party didn’t wanted to get punished, awaiting exemption documents for delivery. As the article already states in the headline and further acknowledges in the content Russia was not refusing to get their turbine back but waiting for documents themselves which the article beautifully conceals with the little word ‘apparently’.

The unusual low gas storage reserves at the beginning of the year 2022 in Germany with 45% compared to usual 75% while Nordstream 1 is delivering at full capacity could be related to the sanctions which lead Poland to stop transit through the Jamal pipeline and other transit routes through Ukraine and possibly gas market trade activities. Having just the ‘economic weapon’ argument is lacking, especially in regard that Russian gas is still to today reaching Germany and it is in the interest of Russia to deliver.
by stavros | 2025-04-16 11:52:51+00:00
Please stop correcting them, maybe then all my friends will come back and do research here instead of in the US.

One of my friends, who is a tenured professor in a top 10 US university, already switched our Signal messages to expire after 24h the other day. I asked him why, and he said "you never know what the current administration might use against you".

So yes, I'm all for having our people back if the US voted that they don't want them.
by corimaith | 2025-04-16 11:53:49+00:00
People were using "Based" and Gigachad in the late 2010s for years before the mainstream picked it up in the 20s.

Also for indie video games, many do find their attention and early fanbases on /v/ before they spread out to twitter. Largely because /v/ is very information sensitive and will pick up primary news usually minutes after they arrive.
by mytailorisrich | 2025-04-16 11:54:08+00:00
Supply is somewhat constrained and demand is also artificially inflated (at national level it is 100% caused by immigration, which is kept high by the successive governments).

Everyone relies on the property market going up. Beyond the obvious reasons, another important one is that fixed rate mortgages are not fixed for the life of the mortgage but only for, usually, 2 to 5 years after which rates jump so everyone is continuously worried about remortgaging.
by skywhopper | 2025-04-16 11:54:37+00:00
You’ve been conned if you think overactive DEI was anything more than a minor annoyance in 99% of American universities. Did some people overdo it in a destructive way? Of course. But it wasn’t anything that was going to lead to major problems. The problems come from the folks who can’t just roll their eyes and move on but instead feel personally attacked and hold a permanent grudge instead of realizing that they themselves probably weren’t all that special.
by AJRF | 2025-04-16 11:54:52+00:00
NIMBYism is not unique, but the importance of house prices to the UK economy is more severe than other countries.

- The UK has a very strong household wealth affect (consumption is tied to house price growth / decline). The US and UK borrowers borrow at a rate against household wealth not seen in other nations (look at the chart on page 6 - https://www.ecb.europa.eu/pub/pdf/scpwps/ecbwp1117.pdf)

- It has had dramatic, sustained house price growth (400% real price growth since 1980) vs US (200%), France (200%), Germany (150%), Spain (Collapsed in 2008), Italy (Stagnant since 2008)

Some Links:

- https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/-/media/boe/files/working-pa...

- https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/CR/Issues/2016/12/31/Uni...
by andrewstuart | 2025-04-16 11:55:04+00:00
IMO:

1: APIs should return JSON because endpoints do often get reused throughout an application.

2: it really is super easy to get the JSON into client side HTML with JSX

3: APIs should not return everything needed for a component, APIs should return one thing only. Makes back and front end more simple and flexible and honestly who cares about the extra network requests
by kilianinbox | 2025-04-16 11:55:33+00:00
If a front figure of a big tech happens to go plant based, that simply means a good role model for Ai in this time (and humans..). I’m for a big YES. At first I wasn’t positive due to a sense of bloating the service and risking forms of leaking, but considering that most social plattforms needs more ethical thinking integrated and that social media can be done in new smart way; it’s much easier than making a AI-driven Search Engine (takes extreme compute to be as good as people likely expect without bringing a negative opinion for chatgpt as such; since high quality tailored answers will take some compute..) to make a meaningful social ’plattform’; interaction with Ai can be done much cooler than today in co-exploration :) ..
by klabb3 | 2025-04-16 11:55:41+00:00
Bingo. The secret sauce is never a sustainable long term moat. Things leak, competitors copy, or they make even better things, employees switch jobs. AI looks less vulnerable, since it’s academically difficult and expertise is still limited. But time and time again, new secret sauce ingredients last for months at a maximum, before they are exceeded oftentimes by hobbyists or other small actors.

I remember at Google they said well if source code leaks nobody is actually worried about stealing tech, the vast majority of code is open to all employees, with some exceptions like spam-, ranking, etc. It’s still protected, but not considered moat.

The moat comes from other things, such as datacenter & global networking infrastructure, marketing new products by pushing them through existing products (put Gemini in search, add chrome to Android etc). Most importantly you can use data you already have to bootstrap new products, say Gmail and calendar integrated with personalized assistants.

If you play your cards right, yes there’s some first-mover advantages, but they are more superficial than your average Twitter hype thread makes you think. It can give you the ability to set unofficial standards and APIs, like Kubernetes, S3 – (maybe OpenAI APIs?). And you can set certain agendas and market your name for recognition and trust. But all that can slip through your fingers if a behemoth picks up where you left off. They have so many advantages, except for being the fastest.
by Tech_Nomad | 2025-04-16 11:55:47+00:00
Hi HN, I made a prompt rulebook because I was personally wasting too much time fighting with prompts for ChatGPT, Claude, etc. The constant trial-and-error to get decent, consistent output felt really inefficient. My solution was to make a simple rulebook: just concise, categorized, copy-paste rules for common problems like vague answers, bad formatting, wrong tone. Stuff you can use right away, not a long course. This is an MVP. The main goal right now is just validation – seeing if this structured, rule-based way of prompting is actually useful to other people using these AI tools a lot. To figure that out, the site offers a free sample chapter covering rules for improving output quality and formatting. You give an email, you get the PDF. Simple. I'd appreciate any feedback on the idea itself, the landing page, or the sample rules if you check them out. Does this actually solve a pain point you have? Tech stack is Next.js, Tailwind, Supabase, Resend, Vercel Blob, hosted on Vercel. Happy to answer any questions.
by johannes1234321 | 2025-04-16 11:55:59+00:00
Between the four books there is a lot of paper being printed, with chemicals which have to be sources somewhere.

But a bit more serious there are different angles to this:

One is that the formalization Knuth did, is basis for the way other research on computer science has been setup.

His work on TeX as part of writing the books has great impact on how scientific reports are being written, which themselves have consequences.

And then there is all the consequence while implementing technology. How optimisations by better algorithms enable data mining, replacing manual labor, ...

Now of course impact differs. Not everybody is building V2 rockets (as well as Saturn rockets) like von Braun did, but there are many wheels in the machinery.

I myself am a small wheel in building database engines. The software is used by sports clubs to manage their members, shop owners to manage their inventory, companies to run their ads and air craft carriers to replicate strategic data across the ship, so that if one part is damaged, the other can still operate. If I were to leave, the organisation would continue developing, but the work has impact.
by mrtksn | 2025-04-16 11:56:18+00:00
The problem with discussing politics is that it gives you the kicks. Its very easy to get into a feedback loop and take things quite far off civility. I am also guilty of it, many times.

IMHO there needs to be a mechanism for breaking the loop and then we can have civil online political discussions. Unfortunately most places just ban it or ban those who got into the loop, either way its ugly.

IRL when discussing politics and things don't go badly its thanks to 3rd party who will moderate or calm down the heated debaters.
by nbzso | 2025-04-16 11:56:19+00:00
I am shocked. Really? In the beginning of AI hype, as a product designer, I moved to my routine. Research. You don't need a PHD to find people smarter than you and experts to explain to you what 'stochastic parrots' means.

To understand how LLM's work and why the hallucination is inherent part of the tech with "AI". Maybe the core problem is implementation practices which remove critical thinking and testing? Maybe the core problem is 'fake it till you make it' ideology? I don't know. But I am sure about one thing. This as any other postmodern technology will bring more problems than solutions.
by bena | 2025-04-16 11:57:01+00:00
This may be wrong or apocryphal or a third thing:

But I recall reading that this is a deliberate affect used by those who work with nuclear material. Partly as a shibboleth, partly as a means of making the word easier to say quickly.

It came up because George W Bush would pronounce it “nucular” and that was given as the reason. All if my memory serves that is.
Show HN: Get an updated activity report of any startup investor
by daolm | 2025-04-16 11:57:41+00:00
I'm generating activity reports of thousands of startup investors in my website and indexing them in Google. For context, I've been building a massive database of startup investors (VCs, Business Angels, Accelerators, etc) of more than 50,000 investors, and adding AI wherever it can add value. One of the things I'm doing now is running an AI scraper for each investor in the database to build an independent report so people can see whether the investor is currently active or they are BS.

Are you raising and want to know if an investor is currently investing? Just type "EasyVC INVESTOR NAME", for example "EasyVC a16z" in Google and go to the investor profile. The AI report checks multiple sources (public records, databases, PR, etc) to see if an investor is actually deploying capital lately.

I've raised for my own startup and you can't even imagine how many times I've faced investors telling me they are active, then they pass "because I'm too early", you do a bit of research, and you realize they have no money to deploy...

You don't need to waste time researching them, and you get it for free!
by nlnn | 2025-04-16 11:57:51+00:00
I've found it really varies by audiobook.

Same as you, I found some I absolutely hated, especially where they added background music, sound effects, etc. - I just want the book, not a production.

Others I found that a good narrator really added to the experience, especially when they were good at changing voices/accents for different characters speaking. I found that made it a lot easier to track what was going on or who was speaking, especially in books with a large number of characters.
by thinkingemote | 2025-04-16 11:57:56+00:00
Could be similar to "I'm not trying to be offensive but ${offensive statement}" Its a kind of disclaimer but more often found in speech than on websites.

I like playing with this sometimes by saying something like "I'm not trying to be racist but have you noticed that the weather is a bit cold today"... "that wasn't racist?!" ... "yes, I said it wasn't"
by danso | 2025-04-16 11:58:41+00:00
> But, to CVE or not to CVE ... that is not the question. US deficit spending is out of control. This sort of thing had to happen some day.

I suppose more people would be more amenable to these wholesale cuts if the current administration weren't blowing through even more money than before [0]:

> The new Treasury Department data shows a deficit of $1.307 trillion for October through March, the first six months of the fiscal year 2025. And spending is $139 billion more in the first three months of 2025 compared to the same period last year, with borrowing over that period $41 billion higher.

We're currently fighting no wars and yet Trump is proposing a record $1 trillion defense budget [1]:

> “We’re going to be approving a budget, and I’m proud to say, actually, the biggest one we’ve ever done for the military,” he said. “$1 trillion. Nobody has seen anything like it.

And that's before proposed cuts to tax revenue [2]:

> Extending the expiring 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) would decrease federal tax revenue by $4.5 trillion from 2025 through 2034. Long-run GDP would be 1.1 percent higher, offsetting $710 billion, or 16 percent, of the revenue losses.

So this whole "we're just imposing much needed austerity" to justify penny-wise-pound-foolish policies is kind of laughable when the proposed increase to our peacetime defense budget alone wipes out Elon's most recent estimate of DOGE's total savings [3].

[0] https://apnews.com/article/trump-biden-budget-deficit-spendi...

[1] https://www.militarytimes.com/news/pentagon-congress/2025/04...

[2] https://taxfoundation.org/research/all/federal/trump-tax-cut...

[3] https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/14/us/politics/elon-musk-dog...
by michaelcampbell | 2025-04-16 11:59:19+00:00
I'm within months of my 60's, have been a developer since 1984, and Radio Shack is where it started. My family moved when I was 1/2 way through high school, of course in the Summer. So I had no network of friends, and wandered into a Radio Shack with the ubiquitous TRS-80 on display. Over the course of the summer, the 1 employee there and I became friends enough to where he'd boot up the BASIC interpreter, and let me type in programs.

That was my start. Went on to consume as much info as I could; lots of it from BYTE magazine, took all the programming classes I was allowed in my final 2 years of high school, continued to get a CS degree, and have been programming ever since.

But RS was the genesis.
by rsfern | 2025-04-16 11:59:26+00:00
CHIPS incentive funding is way bigger than just Intel, so it’s a bit disingenuous to write off the whole program just because of one (or even several) high profile bad actor. We should have a nuanced discussion and fix the shortcomings of our programs, but at least assess things in a balanced way.

If you check the transcript of the confirmation hearing for the current Commerce secretary, practically every Senator brags about their state’s CHIPS funded R&D hub. Lots of growth in small and medium businesses there. And CHIPS incentive funding played a huge role in bringing the new TSMC fab in Arizona

https://www.azcentral.com/story/money/business/jobs/2024/04/...
by greedo | 2025-04-16 11:59:42+00:00
<Trump merely walked through the cracks created under Obama.>

Which were dependent on the GWB administration (forced renditions, torture prisons), the Reagan administration (Iran-Contra etc), the Nixon Administration (Watergate etc), FDR's admin (concentration camps), on and on and on.

The expansion of Presidential power is non-partisan. Congress would be the logical counterbalance but other than in fits and starts has generally abdicated this role to the SCOTUS which has now been captured by believers in the unitary Presidency.
by pron | 2025-04-16 11:59:46+00:00
P.S.

Another thing to remember is that government expenses are often investments. This doesn't only apply to health, education, law enforcement, and transportation infrastructure but also to social security. If people think they'll be left penniless at retirement, they'll spend less and save more. Borrowing to finance investment is a wise policy when the resulting growth can pay for the interest and then some, even if it means a growing debt.

If you invest well, leveraging your investment is exactly what you should do.
by aaaja | 2025-04-16 11:59:53+00:00
This is really positive news for women in the UK. Up until now there's been considerable uncertainty over exactly who, by law, can have access to nominally single-sex spaces. The Supreme Court ruling clarifies this, and probably the most immediate impact of this will be on tribunal cases currently in progress.

There are two that have been widely publicized, involving female nurses working for NHS hospitals who've objected to male colleagues being allowed by hospital management to use female changing rooms on the basis of these males calling themselves women. This ruling means that the tribunals can now be expected to judge this policy, and the punitive actions of the NHS against female employees who objected, to be incompatible with the law.

At the same time the ruling clarifies that the law still protects people who have gender identity self-beliefs from harassment and discrimination, which is also good news and a sensible middle ground for how society should regard this phenomenon.
by RustyRussell | 2025-04-16 12:01:05+00:00
> ryao 7 hours ago | parent | context | flag | on: Hacktical C: practical hacker's guide to the C pro...

cast a `struct Foo*` into a `struct Bar*` and access the Foo through it (in practice we teach this as the "strict aliasing" rules, and that's how all(?) compilers implement it, but that's not what §6.5 paragraph 7 of the standard says!)

Use the union type. Abusing it for aliasing violates the standard too, but GCC and Clang implement an extension that permits this. Alternatively, just allocate a char array and cast it as you please. Strict aliasing does not apply to char arrays if I recall.

allow a signed integer to overflow

Is this still true? I thought that the reason for this is because C left the implementation to define how signed arithmetic worked, meaning you could not assume two’s complement, but the most recent C standard was supposed to mandate two’s complement.

>> pass a NULL pointer to memcpy, even if the length is zero

> There is a reason for this. memcpy is allowed to start reading early as a performance optimization, before it does a branch that checks if reading is only.

Where did you get this idea from? It's not possible, since you can hand an address at the end of an array, and length 0. The array ends at the end of a page.

You can't read extra bytes in this case!
by achow | 2025-04-16 12:01:13+00:00
Few days back when tariff was 125% China said..

Beijing indicated on Friday that this would be the last time it matched the U.S., in the event that Trump takes his tariffs any higher.

"Even if the U.S. continues to impose even higher tariffs, it would no longer have any economic significance and would go down as a joke in the history of world economics," the Finance Ministry's statement added.

https://www.reuters.com/world/china/china-increase-tariffs-u...
by Loughla | 2025-04-16 12:01:48+00:00
After leaving when it got too shitty, I would go back once a year or so to check the racism in pol, see if maybe b was back to doing things instead of just porn, and read the plainly undiagnosed schizophrenia on the paranormal board.

Like you said, not a lot of people in my life have any idea what it is, but it does hold a special place in my heart. It started when I was trying to establish my own personality, and it provided me with a safe avenue to try out different "me's".
by ryao | 2025-04-16 12:02:41+00:00
The point of the throwaway account’s comment was to say that you should use C++ class member functions instead of C function pointers in structures, but that is impossible to do in the general case in a sane way, since there is no way to leave a member function unimplemented and then check its status at runtime.

You need to use hacks to shoehorn C++ class member functions into this. In particular, you need stub functions. Then either, call them and have them either return a special error code or throw an exception, or use a custom query function that is implemented by derived classes that lets you find out if a function is a stub or not to allow you to skip calling it. Another idea would be to use thread local storage with setjmp()/longjmp(), which is probably the sanest way of doing this insane idea:

https://godbolt.org/z/4GWdvsz6z

And the C way for comparison:

https://godbolt.org/z/qG3v5zcYc

The idea that the simplest way of approximating what you can do with function pointers in C structures via C++ class member functions is to use TLS and setjmp/longjmp shows what a bad idea it is to use class member functions instead of function pointers for optional functions in the first place.