MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by kazinator | 2025-04-07 05:38:05+00:00
Lisp became incredibly popular at one point. It spawned so much productivity that it created huge programs that used lots of memory and demanded expensive hardware.

This peaked at a time when microcomputers had not reached the right affordability and power parameters.

People who were developing in Lisp turned their eyes to the microcomputer market and the business to be had there, if the stuff would only run. So there was some activity of rewriting Lisp stuff in languages like Bliss and C.

The transition from powerful workstations (where we can count Lisp machines) to microcomputers basically destroyed everything which couldn't make the jump nimbly.

The new crop of programmers who cut their teeth on micros simply had no knowledge or experience with anything that didn't run on micros.

Poof, just like that, a chunk of the computing sphere consisting of new people suddenly had amnesia about Cobol, Fortran, Snobol, PL/I, operating systems like TOPS/20 and VMS and whatnot.

Only Unix pulled through, pretty much --- and that's because Unix started on relatively weak hardware, and was kept small. Unix started getting complicated approximately in step with micro hardware getting more complicated and powerful. E.g. a Unix kernel was around 50 kilobytes in 1980. not a good fit for some Apple II or Commodore Pet, but not far off from the resources the IBM PC would have.

By the time micros were powerful enough to the huge Lisp stuff with 20 megabyte images, we were into the 90s, and starting to be overrun with crap dynamic languages.

Now Lisp people could have buckled down and worked on promoting excellent Lisps for microcomputers. There were a few fledgling efforts like that that were not promoted well.

It seems that what Lisp programmers there were, they were mostly wrapped up working on bigger problems on larger hardware, and ignored microcomputers.

It's very hard to promote anything today that most of your Generation X (now management class) didn't get to play with in the 80s and 90s.
by bruce511 | 2025-04-07 05:38:46+00:00
>>- Does open source mean that the maintainers are free to ignore single line security fixes PR

Yes.

>> Does open source mean that maintainers could plant crypto miner or malware in the project or sell to someone who might do that?

Yes

>> Does open source mean that companies could change the license and keep the product name same or remove a core functionality and migrate it to paid version?

Yes

None of the things you mentioned are restricted (or required) by the license.

You may not agree with these points, or even consider them ethical, but OSS licenses allow for any of the above.
by evrimoztamur | 2025-04-07 05:39:16+00:00
I cannot (totally can) imagine the scale of the insider trading going on. There's many plays you can do before and after the policy shocks. Before, you can stock up on puts across various major equities. After, you can buy up cheap stocks and consolidate more capital in the hands of private equity.

Trump seems to have been pro tariffs (for good reasons) since around forty years ago, so I think his misunderstood (no longer for good reasons, as globalism has since then established itself as the infrastructure) focus on tariffs is genuine.

His friends, however, probably understood the situation better and capitalised immensely on his newfound power and intent. The rich is going to continue getting richer by playing the game at tables you're not allowed to.

The true scale of the corruption and insider trading will become apparent soon enough, but we may have to wait until the next president comes along for investigations to pick up pace.
by gopalv | 2025-04-07 05:39:32+00:00
> what it actually means is that this magic battery doodad needs to provide 90-95% of the performance of its existing, mature competitor

The problem is mostly that it does the battery draw when parked.

Solid electrolytes are coming some day soon, so that we can let it freeze without killing the cells.

Right now, the Tesla is hard to use in a winter sport season unless where you're driving has a charger or underground parking near a plug point.

I can drive up hill to a nice ski resort, spend 3+ days taking the bus with all your shoes on without touching the car.

With the batteries, they'll just run down when parked, so I cannot park it for a whole week outdoors like I can do with my Subaru.

And with the low battery + low temps, it will not charge back up going downhill so the expected range drops massively by the time you're downhill.

Once you navigate to a charger, the car starts running the heater and driving down range further.

Watching the car battery eating its own range while driving to "Donner pass road" on your way out of Tahoe or Reno feels rather appropriately horrific.
by timr | 2025-04-07 05:40:06+00:00
> I'm struggling to understand the disagreement because it's not like I'm saying that markets perfectly price all available information.

You're being sanguine about the power of markets to react to short-term change. Basically, "all available information" consists, at this time, of what I posted above. Be honest: what can you infer from it regarding the "correct" level of price change in the S&P500? But that's too ambitious: what's the correct level of price changes in, say, machine screws?

You can't know the answer. Nobody can. The best any particular expert analyst might be able to do, right now, is to speculate about the impacts of the top-line tariff rates on a given company's product prices. But they cannot:

* know if those prices are correct

* know how the pricing of other products (which they don't analyze) will materially affect those pricing models.

* know what compensating strategies the company might employ

* know the costs of those compensating strategies

* know the impacts of the price change on the market demand for the product(s)

* know the impact of the price and demand changes on margin

...and so on. There are so many unknowns here. Even the most informed analysts are just wildly guessing based on headlines and vibes. I have 0% faith the "market" is currently providing a useful estimate of the impact of these changes, and I have 100% certainty that the people confidently asserting things (like a market projection) are fools, or simply talking their book.
by hayst4ck | 2025-04-07 05:40:32+00:00
> They are dominated by the elites from the same social circles

Education is far from elite making, maybe elite in a global sense, but not elite by American standards. Being elected to a position also makes the social circle. It might surprise you that many American politicians are real people with real non aristocracy backgrounds.

In physics your selection of point of origin determines your ease of calculation. You selected some kind of aristocracy/dynastic rule vs the people origin, which gives you a warped analysis because you are unable to find the root cause.

If you instead choose authoritarianism and unchecked power as your point of origin, the comparison to the cultural revolution is very apt. "Ignoring experts," is also directly applicable.

> In the Angloamerican West people always bring up the Cultural Revolution as a cautionary tale,

Perhaps that's a lot of indication that many people see it is a relevant cautionary tail based on their own judgement.

One populist man with unchecked power caused one of the worlds worst famines by denying experts and reality. That is applicable.
by Helmut10001 | 2025-04-07 05:40:32+00:00
> United States has transitioned more and more to information and services jobs

Perhaps this was done deliberately by Trump to weaken CA's economy and shift more power to his supporting states? CA benefits greatly from exporting information and digital services around the world, most of which do not pay taxes to those countries. If the EU (and other economies) now add tariffs on social media, Apple, Google services, etc., it will hit CA hard.
by philips | 2025-04-07 05:40:42+00:00
The photo apps really don't have a good "sorting through the shoe box" UX. It would be great if I could in Google Photos, for example:

1. Bulk favorite photos in Google Photos for long term archiving

2. Set a retention policy of months/years for photos based on metadata.

3. Have a UX to quickly sort the week or months photos via a swipe left/right UX.
by rocqua | 2025-04-07 05:41:00+00:00
The system told people, you are investing in a non-profit. Ut told the outside world 'we are acting as a non profit, for good of humanity.

Now that the donations are in, the goodwill from users and regulators have been harvested. It seems like open ai is effectively pulling the rug on everyone who acted on the assumption that open ai was a non profit. The system should, generally, prevent rug pulls.

Besides, the most charitable reading here is "if we can't distribute profits, we can't fund ourselves" which doesn't fit the 100x payput cap. It seems instead a mix of the potential profit being too juicy, and a desire to change course to less ethical operation.

It certainly isn't obvious the system should allow this. Nor is it obvious this is just 'a business deal'.
by stonogo | 2025-04-07 05:43:41+00:00
You're not getting downvoted because "people don't want facts" but because your list is misleadingly incomplete or, in some instances, wrong.

- The workers were put on paid leave pending termination, for procedural reasons (they could not legally be fired immediately).

- Only ten were reinstated, and nobody knows why. The agency that reinstated them (NINDS) is not the same agency that issued the firing (HHS directly)

- The staff in question were explicitly told a "computer error" (quotes as such in the article) led to their termination notices.

This is not how a functioning management system works. It's also not an effective way to operate a government research program. There's no hyperbole here; it's just bad work.
by readthenotes1 | 2025-04-07 05:43:45+00:00
See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandenburg_v._Ohio

"The three distinct elements of this test (intent to speak, imminence of lawlessness, and likelihood of lawlessness) ..."

The random tweet from a random person fails 2 of the 3.

It's how Kathy Griffin can show the photo of a decapitated Trump.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2017/05/31/did-ka...
by TheDong | 2025-04-07 05:43:59+00:00
> You could call the store or your friends, no ads there.

If everyone called the store to check if they're open instead of looking on instagram, the employee would never get time away from the phone to actually serve customers, you're suggesting something ridiculous. Text and phone calls aren't replacements for each other either between friends.

> What are these apps that are required for your daily life?

The app I have to use to buy train tickets has ads in it, mostly for fashion items sold at stores within train stations.

The app for checking train schedules is full of ads, and while there are open source apps on android for this, on iPhone you can't sideload open source apps so there's no ad-free alternatives. Releasing an app on iOS costs $100/year for the developer, so the incentive is not to make free open source apps. I really miss android. The iOS app store has so much completely garbage adware, and I can't even code up simple ad-free apps for myself without buying a macbook.

The app I have to use to send support requests to my landlord (an app dedicated to just that purpose) has a couple banner ads. The corporate landlord requires using it, and will not respond to phone calls.

My cell phone company's app, which is the only way to check my plan's remaining data, has a truly incredible number of ads.

.... and that's just off the top of my head. They're everywhere.

But even if all my apps were ad-free, the billboards posted everywhere, on busses, in trains, on buildings, are inescapable.
by aisenik | 2025-04-07 05:44:32+00:00
These guys just wiped 14,000 tapes to put the government's backups and record keeping in the cloud. To "save" $1m. And bragged about it.

They aren't competent, they are malicious. Musk scraped some racist blackhat Kiwifarms posters together and is their leader in a putsch with the goal of systematically destroying the United States government.

The fact that you couldn't fathom people are opposed to his machinations suggests to me you exist within a heavily-manipulated and controlled media environment. These guys are literally white supremacist fascists plunging the global economy into depression, disappearing the populace into foreign death camps, and arming up for WW3. This is not an exaggeration.
by code_biologist | 2025-04-07 05:45:00+00:00
At risk of being annoying, answers that feel like high quality human decision making are extremely pleasing and desirable. In the same way, image generators aren't generating six fingered hands because they think it's more pleasing, they're doing it because they're trying to please and not good enough yet.

I'm just most baffled by the "flashes of brilliance" combined with utter stupidity. I remember having a run with early GPT 4 (gpt-4-0314) where it did refactoring work that amazed me. In the past few days I asked a bunch of AIs about similar characters between a popular gacha mobile game and a popular TV show. OpenAI's models were terrible and hallucinated aggressively (4, 4o, 4.5, o3-mini, o3-mini-high), with the exception of o1. DeepSeek R1 only mildly hallucinated and gave bad answers. Gemini 2.5 was the only flagship model that did not hallucinate and gave some decent answers.

I probably should have used some type of grounding, but I honestly assumed the stuff I was asking about should have been in their training datasets.
by somenameforme | 2025-04-07 05:45:30+00:00
Except it's the same in literally all of these articles. Some relatively minor mistake is taken and blown up into some huge degree of maliciousness or unprecedented incompetence. People then 'social mediaize' it all by taking it at face value, and then getting each other even more riled up - exactly like a mob.

It's easy to see where this is coming from because each writer of these sort of articles likely had colleagues and/or friends who were intentionally terminated, and so they're writing with a tremendous chip on their shoulder. But they're doing a disservice to themselves because anybody who is not particularly upset by these changes is going to completely eyeroll each time another one of these articles appears, and those who are genuinely upset are increasingly living in a world detached from reality.

The end result is of course conflict and confrontation, which I suppose is the point. But I don't think this is something anybody would have ever wanted if we imagine how things might look in hindsight, before we get there.
by globnomulous | 2025-04-07 05:45:40+00:00
I know this isn't the kind of reply people usually offer on HN, but I do want to say: you are indeed on a roll. I've thoroughly enjoyed this and your other comments, have read them several times, and noted the authors and titles you suggested, putting them high on my to-read list. The judgments you've offered in the thread have been refreshing, sharp, and just a delight to read. Thanks again for the write-ups!
by 0xDEAFBEAD | 2025-04-07 05:45:43+00:00
Would it be legal for airlines to replace the video with a quiz, for those passengers who opt in? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43608141

I don't think the current video format is very good for retention. Putting it in the form of a quiz could help frequent travelers actually memorize the information over time, which could in turn save lives.

https://www.retrievalpractice.org/
by idle_zealot | 2025-04-07 05:45:47+00:00
Yeah, how horrible it would be if people were allowed to decide what was fair or unfair in business based on flighty human emotions. The economy must be run by pure logic as ordained by our betters and the invisible and all-knowing hand of the market. It didn't feel right that a nonprofit could hand over power it promised to steward for the benefit of all to a for-profit company designed to extract value from it, but actually that's just good business and it's more important to let the richest people on Earth do whatever they want than listen to the silly plebeians who want to hold them to their word. If they were in the right surely they'd be the ones running the company valued at $300B.
by umanwizard | 2025-04-07 05:46:01+00:00
No, open source and free software are synonyms according to proponents of both terms, including Richard Stallman, the most prominent “free software” crusader. All (or at least virtually all) Free Software Foundation-approved licenses are also OSI-approved, and vice versa.

Your misconception is very common, but you, and other people with the same misconception, are conflating a few different things. Most of the people who prefer the term “free software” also prefer copyleft licenses to permissive licenses. Which is where the misunderstanding that “free software” means copyleft licenses and “open source” means permissive licenses comes from.
by djur | 2025-04-07 05:47:08+00:00
I'm personally not even super bent out of shape about some licensing schemes that are technically not OSD-compliant being called "open source" (i.e. ones that have targeted field-of-endeavor restrictions). There's at least a debate to be had. But what this article includes in its definition -- source code tossed over the wall that you're not allowed to do anything with -- is not anywhere close to what anybody has been calling "open source" for decades.
by motorest | 2025-04-07 05:47:15+00:00
> Exaggeration isn't helpful. Whatever "this" is, you can't possibly make an assessment of that kind until years after the fact.

I don't think you fully grasp the gravity of Trump's actions.

For the first time in its history, NATO is excluding the US from arms purchase programs. This takes place at a time where the EU is scrambling to prepare for a war with Russia, which is also caused by Trump's action of abandoning it's allies,

The Trump administration is also heavily invested in annexation rhetoric targeting multiple NATO members.

Then there's the whole tarrif absurdity.

These sequence of moronic steps individually represent world-changing events. They all took place in a couple of months into the Trump administration's takeover.

This goes well beyond the suspicion that Trump is a Russian stooge. This changes the way the world was structured after WW2. The fall of the soviet union might even have a smaller impact in world history.
by mulmen | 2025-04-07 05:47:47+00:00
I largely agree with your take here but it still seems to assume that government spending is wasteful. From what I can see government spending is actually pretty efficient and held to a very high standard of accountability.

On the other hand corporate America has a terrible track record. We have Boeing and GM who exist only because the government keeps bailing them out to prevent economic ruin. Look me in the eye and tell me Sears was an efficient operation.

How many of us look at our cloud spend and think to ourselves “I’m certain we haven’t wasted a penny.”

Look at all the VC money that was lit on fire to do food delivery and taxi dispatch. It works now but I can’t say that was financially efficient and it still isn’t affordable. DoorDash provides worse service for more money than a teenager with a used Corolla left to their own devices.

Waste is everywhere but I’m really not convinced the government is the worst or even particularly bad.
by Aeolun | 2025-04-07 05:48:19+00:00
> This is the whole reason why we should be using the term "free software" instead of "open source"

The definitions in my head go something like this:

Open Source -> Open (e.g. free and unencumbered) & Source available

Source Available -> Only source is available, restricted under some odious license presumably

Free Software -> You can download this (generally in binary form) and use it for free.
by olalonde | 2025-04-07 05:48:43+00:00
> When software is open-source, it is open-source, not necessarily free and open-source (FOSS), and even if it is FOSS, it might still have a restrictive licence. 2 The code being available in and of itself does not give you a right to take it, modify it, or redistribute it.

Hmmm, if the license doesn't allow modification and redistribution, then it's not open source — it's "source-available." Open source, by definition, includes those rights. Just having access to the code isn't enough.
by Teever | 2025-04-07 05:50:39+00:00
I've been casually watching Moderna's progress towards a herpes vaccine which IIRC was supposed to come out in 2028.

Herpes is one of those things that obviously isn't as big a deal as cancer but it would be nice to be one less thing to worry about when having sexual encounters with new people, and sufferers of it would love to have some sort of relief from infections and the elimination of the stigma around it. It's also associated with Alzheimer's disease so the cost of not producing this vaccine might be hundreds of billions of dollars and years of life and the prevention of so much suffering down the line.

It's really dismaying to know that this kind of stuff might not come to fruition because of the combination of incompetence and intentional chaos.
by KennyBlanken | 2025-04-07 05:51:11+00:00
While the market was burning to the ground on Friday he headed off to play golf and then attend multiple campaign fundraisers where it's estimated he brings in $20M per night. That doesn't count all the money he's raking in by forcing the republican party to host events at his properties, where he effectively launders campaign donation to the party into his coffers.

Between that and the crypto scams, likely insider trading going on we don't know about because nobody's home at the SEC or FBI - I would guess that his plan is simply to accumulate oligarch-level wealth so he's well positioned for the coming oligarchy.

He's also extorted his way into hundreds of millions of dollars in legal representation. I imagine that is case people in his administration find themselves facing criminal charges...or to disrupt/challenge as many elections as he can through endless legal challenges.
by roenxi | 2025-04-07 05:51:30+00:00
Mentioning philosophy on the internet is a good way to start arguments, so if you're trying to do that you'll probably succeed.

There is a more concise phrasing for the idea you seem to be trying to get at - decision theory has to consider the fact that the decision makers in the real world that we live in have finite resources. There are an infinite number of potential Roko Basilisks (all religions and all theoretically describable religions of which Roko's is one). Since the decision maker doesn't have enough resources to deal with all of them, they end up having to ignore the basilisk in practice.

There isn't really a question here about alignment in the Roko scenario, the argument falls apart a lot earlier than that. The problem is there are an infinite number of unaligned AI that would have different punishment schemes - making the threat of any given one worth devoting 0 resources to in practice. Including argument/mental consideration time, for that matter.
by d1sxeyes | 2025-04-07 05:51:53+00:00
Wine is a good example because it’s not fungible: one bottle of red wine is not like any others. If you have a domestic wine industry, it likely can’t compete on quality with French wine.

So if France can export wine at a price that’s reasonable enough, your domestic wine industry will fail, undercut completely by cheap French imports.

Tariffs in and of themselves are not all dreadful. They help level the playing field and support domestic industry.

But you can’t go from decades of offshoring manufacturing to suddenly charging punitive tariffs without making imported goods (which were the only ones your citizens could afford) much more expensive, and therefore, yes, folks might buy wine less often altogether.