MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by lr1970 | 2025-04-06 22:15:21+00:00
In this 2003 article Warren Buffett proposed a clever mechanism of ICs (Import Certificates) instead of blunt tariffs to deal with trade imbalance. IC is a "soft" control variable that effectively transfers money from importers to exporters and helps to balance the trade. I wish POTUS implemented such a mechanism instead of blanket tariffs that have huge blast radius.
by ianbicking | 2025-04-06 22:15:43+00:00
I love that this is more art piece than serious software... more like offering someone an expedition than a product.

(Though I'm not sure I'll get on the expedition, I am a little worried about sandboxing and setup and getting distracted...)

If I was to start the expedition, I'd probably try to overshoot by describing a site that I could not myself fully imagine, or using attributes that lacked a single meaning. Like, "the artist's interactive portfolio, as though the artist is looking over your shoulder, the artist keeping a carefully neutral expression while seething inside." Then I'd probably continue, imagining just the outline of some site that satisfies some unarticulated desire, putzing around as I see a concrete articulation of that idea, as much reforming the idea in my head in response to those results to an equal degree that I am articulating the idea in more detail.
by archagon | 2025-04-06 22:16:04+00:00
Building industrial plants close to residential housing has led to an extortionate amount of pain and suffering over the years: cancers, fertility issues, etc.

Sure, the people who owned that land knew what to do with it. They wanted to manufacture chips as quickly as possible, which involved (intentionally or inadvertently) dumping chemical waste into the ground. Guess that's the free market for you.
by buzzm | 2025-04-06 22:16:25+00:00
Of late I have grown fond of ... brace yourself ... RDF in turtle format for config files. Supports comments, multiline literals, built-in support for references, and rich typing via xsd casting when necessary e.g. ex:subject ex:createdOn "2002-01-24T12:00:00.000Z"^^xsd:dateTime ; You can have no namespace (:subject :name "foo") or one or more to help separate metadata and structure (the config structure) from actual config data (ex:myInstance config:logfile "pathname to file"). And of course, all the metadata itself is labelable and can carry comments and descriptions so the config is essentially self-documenting. Or at least there is a standard, straightforward way to extract and organize the labels and comments if time has been taken to add them.
by disambiguation | 2025-04-06 22:16:42+00:00
Ignoring the fact that this is basically eugenics with extra step, I'll engage with the sci-fi elements.

There's a difference between using gene editing to repair imperfections of nature versus using it to over-clock biological machinery in non-deterministic ways. It's Chesterton's fence but with millions of years of evolution. Yes we have the technology to edit genes today, but it will take whole lifetimes to "prove" anything in a truly scientific sense.

The cherry on top is the off the rails justification that this is all very urgent and necessary because of the imminent arrival of "digital gods."

LLMs have more self awareness than you do, and (ironically) you won't disagree with me.
by tucnak | 2025-04-06 22:17:50+00:00
> inferior product

Tenstorrent p300 is coming at 64 GB and 1 Tbps but that's not the point; even p150a with plenty of bandwidth (512 GB/s is fine for inference) and four 800G ports. But hardware is not the problem: even if they had the hardware, they wouldn't know what to do with it. Privacy is a hobby to most people, making you feel good.
by os2warpman | 2025-04-06 22:18:03+00:00
Yandex only became a Russian company fairly recently, after over 20 years of being based outside of Russia.

It was sold, below market value, to a group of Russian investors last year for the specific purpose of controlling it and suppressing free speech.

Nobody, not a single human being in the entire history of humanity, has ever died because they couldn’t pirate a children’s film.

Many people have died, and continue die, because of Yandex’s cooperation with the FSB in shaping opinion, controlling the dissemination of information, and directly reporting users to the FSB for problematic searches.

Pirating children’s films and controlling the availability of news articles are different tiers of free speech.
by wongarsu | 2025-04-06 22:19:39+00:00
It's useful to have something that does the job of "as", but I dislike how the most dangerous tool for type conversions has the nicest syntax.

Most of the time I want the behavior of ".try_into().unwrap()" (with the compiler optimizing the checks away if it's always safe) or would even prefer a version that only works if the conversion is safe and lossless (something I can reason about right now, but want to ensure even after refactorings). The latter is really hard to achieve, and ".try_into.unwrap()" is 20 characters where "as" is 2. Not a big deal to type with autocomplete, but a lot of visual clutter.
by graemep | 2025-04-06 22:20:02+00:00
Its not an arithmetic error, its a conceptual error. A pretty serious one if true.

That said it makes no sense any way, and IMO high tariffs are a bargaining counter and the real reason for the formula is that it reflects how much pressure the us can put on a country by raising tariffs relative to the damage that could be done by retaliatory tarrifs.
by int_19h | 2025-04-06 22:20:09+00:00
Some of these don't strike me as particularly pragmatic. E.g. are overflow checks really that expensive, given that it's a well-known footgun that is often exploitable? Sure, you don't want, say, 10% overhead in your number-crunching codec or whatever, but surely it's better to have those cases opt in for better perf as needed, as opposed to a default behavior that silently produces invalid results?
by Xylakant | 2025-04-06 22:20:12+00:00
Rust also provides guarantees that goe beyond mere memory safety. You get data-race safety as well, which avoids certain kinds of concurrency issues. You also get type-safety which is a step up when it comes to parsing untrusted input, at least compared to C for example. If untrusted inout can be parsed into your expected type system, it's more likely to not cause harm by confusing the program about what's in the variables. Rust doesn't straight up eliminate all source of error, but it makes major strides forward in areas that go beying mere memory safety.
by bglazer | 2025-04-06 22:20:27+00:00
Yeah I’m a computational biology researcher. I’m working on a novel machine learning approach to inferring cellular behavior. I’m currently stumped why my algorithm won’t converge.

So, I describe the mathematics to ChatGPT-o3-mini-high to try to help reason about what’s going on. It was almost completely useless. Like blog-slop “intro to ML” solutions and ideas. It ignores all the mathematical context, and zeros in on “doesn’t converge” and suggests that I lower the learning rate. Like, no shit I tried that three weeks ago. No amount of cajoling can get it to meaningfully “reason” about the problem, because it hasn’t seen the problem before. The closest point in latent space is apparently a thousand identical Medium articles about Adam, so I get the statistical average of those.

I can’t stress how frustrating this is, especially with people like Terence Tao saying that these models are like a mediocre grad student. I would really love to have a mediocre (in Terry’s eyes) grad student looking at this, but I can’t seem to elicit that. Instead I get low tier ML blogspam author.

**PS** if anyone read this far (doubtful) and knows about density estimation and wants to help my email is bglazer1@gmail.com

I promise its a fun mathematical puzzle and the biology is pretty wild too
by bsder | 2025-04-06 22:20:42+00:00
Because Lispers sneered at the microprocessors of the time while everybody else piggybacked on them. And, by the time that attitude changed in the early 90s, there were already socially entrenched languages that had the "superpower" of garbage collection (Tcl for ECAD, Perl for sysadmin).

Nobody in the Lisp world ever took the time to implement stuff that people wanted on those tiny machines. Or to demonstrate to people the cool stuff it could do.

You can see this in Dr. Dobbs Journal. People are doing things like drawing graphics, writing spell checkers and controlling modems. Assembly and BASIC are normal but C and Forth are mentioned regularly. Turbo Pascal pops up in 1984. Some of the names are famous enough that you recognize them even now, decades later.

Lisp just ... gets barely mentioned in passing sometimes. And nobody of note writes anything about it. Somebody could have built a word processor, a spell checker, a chess game, a reversi game, ANYTHING ... but nobody did.
by nipponese | 2025-04-06 22:21:06+00:00
It's not timing.

His principal is simple: Buy priced fairly or underpriced businesses. Sell overpriced businesses.

The not simple part: Using 80 years of business experience to assess strengths and risks to an enterprise, and not FOMOing into something. He would say, he doesn't buy stocks, he buys businesses. How many people buying stocks have even opened a 10K?

One of the few shining examples of investor vs trader mindset.
by NelsonMinar | 2025-04-06 22:21:37+00:00
Does openrsync work?

The problem with Apple's ancient userspace is so many of the utilities are outdated and don't support things like files bigger than 4GB. So switching to a tool updated in the last 19 years may be an improvement. But then rsync is such a standard, is openrsync 100% compatible?

The need to install and maintain Homebrew was a big part of why I switched from MacOS to Windows. WSL is a very good Unix environment, being just Ubuntu or Debian.
by rco8786 | 2025-04-06 22:22:18+00:00
My family got a computer when I was in 3rd grade (1994-ish?) and I was immediately obsessed. A year or two went by of me just clicking every button I could find on the computer to see what happened, most of which was nothing. Eventually the idea of making my own programs hit me. I remember asking every adult I could how to "build programs". Nobody knew or at least nobody took me seriously. Eventually a family friend, who happened to be a Navy Admiral and at one point on the joint chiefs of staff, actually responded affirmatively. He showed me a small program he had written for his son that mimicked some air traffic and had callsigns on the airplanes like "Goose" and "Maverick". He sent me home with a copy of QBasic on a 3.5" floppy and a BASIC programming book. It was all downhill from there.
by bigyabai | 2025-04-06 22:24:40+00:00
> because you are a three year old child who thinks their immediate impulses and desires must be immediately satisfied or else they throw a temper tantrum.

Once it leaks online, you can't take it back. The leaker knew this, Warner Brothers knows this and the editors for Variety do too. Their responses have all been adult and controlled, the only person jumping to conclusions and demonizing anyone here is you.
by ajross | 2025-04-06 22:24:41+00:00
> Unless you're logging user input without proper validation, log4j doesn't really seem that bad.

Most systems do log user input though, and "proper validation" is an infamously squishy phrase that mostly acts as an excuse. The bottom line is that the natural/correct/idiomatic use of Log4j exposed the library directly to user-generated data. The similar use of Apache parquet (an obscure tool many of us are learning about for the first time) does not. That doesn't make it secure, but it makes the impact inarguably lower.

I mean, come on: the Log4j exploit was a global zero-day!
by LargoLasskhyfv | 2025-04-06 22:24:59+00:00
Related fun fact up to maybe a decade ago: If you had a disk labeled/partitioned in FBSDs 'dangerously dedicated' style, and tried to image that, or reading the image of that with some forensic tool called Encase (running under Windows of course, how else could it be?), this tool would crash that Windows with an irrecoverable blew screen :)

I loved that!
by refulgentis | 2025-04-06 22:25:44+00:00
AFAIK the 1st Amendment is about whether the government can prevent you from speaking, not there are 0 consequences to all speech.

When I think that, I also think, "but isn't it bad to Illegal talking decryption?"

Then I think: Law is ambiguous compared to a logical proof, and can only be seen through cases.

I resolve that I'll be the first to stand up and scream if they deport someone for simply discussing the academics of DVD decryption, and that's enough to make me feel comfortable saying it's okay the DMCA is used to prevent stealing.
by wongarsu | 2025-04-06 22:26:23+00:00
I'm a big fan of liberal use of saturating_mul/add/sub whenever there is a conceivable risk of coming withing a couple orders of magnitude of overflow. Or checked_*() or whatever the best behavior in the given case is. For my code it happens to mostly be saturating.

Overflow bugs are a real pain, and so easy to prevent in Rust with just a function call. It's pretty high on my list of favorite improvements over C/C++
by smt88 | 2025-04-06 22:27:39+00:00
> We’re literally torching two billion dollars a day on the military when we’re not at war and not under threat.

We were in a (physical) proxy war with Russia via Ukraine until very recently, and we are currently in a digital war against Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, and probably other nation-states.

Should this be under the purview of the actual military? I don't know, although that arrangement is effective for Israel's cybersecurity command.

Regardless, there is an active need for defense spending now, just not the way we've been spending it.
by miki123211 | 2025-04-06 22:28:59+00:00
Advertising is a tax on the rich.

It subsidizes basically all modern entertainment, from the filmmaking and sports industries (through TV Shows and sports broadcasts, respectively), to musicians and amateur filmmakers (through Spotify and Youtube).

The costs of advertising are ultimately passed down to consumers in the form of higher prices for products and services, not unlike a VAT or sales tax. Because rich people spend more money than the poor (citation needed), they end up paying a lot more of this "tax" while getting the same amount of entertainment for it.

Targeted advertising only exacerbated these dynamics. Because high-spenders are very desirable customers to have, companies can now demand more money for the ability to target them, which turns advertising from a linear to a progressive tax.

Advertising turned the internet into a sort of public commons, with no government intervention and the inevitable inefficiencies and inflexibilities that come with those. It gave us free, high-quality video and voice calls to anywhere across the world, free unlimited texting, including picture messaging and group conversations, free video hosting for everybody, regardless of scale, free music (through Youtube, Spotify and the radio), with at least some compensation to artists, free movies and TV shows (on free-to-air TV as well as through services like Pluto), excellent free educational content (e.g. 3b1b, university lecturers hosted on Youtube at no charge), as well as cheaper entertainment overall through ad-supported tiers.

I think framing things this way is important when discussing advertising regulation. Maybe we want more cheap groceries, don't care about cheaper luxury cars and don't mind less free entertainment, so maybe we should ban grocery ads and encourage more Mercedes ads. Maybe we're fine with less free entertainment if it gets us fewer alcoholics, so we ban ads for alcohol. Those are tradeoffs worth thinking about, perhaps tradeoffs worth making, but they are tradeoffs, and it is important to be conscious of that.
by 999900000999 | 2025-04-06 22:29:12+00:00
I’m thinking these responsibilities can be shifted to the states. That’s defacto what’s going to happen as the federal government keeps cutting services.

If I want to live in a high tax state with a social safety net, cool. Others can move to Mississippi pay no taxes and brag about how they have a higher GPD than Spain ignoring the actual quality of life is much worse
by WarOnPrivacy | 2025-04-06 22:29:34+00:00
The neurotoxin found in hammerhead worms, Tetrodotoxin, has shown efficacy for the treatment of cancer-related pain in phase II and III clinical trials.

ref: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10221257/

Tetrodotoxin in Zombie Powder may be responsible for persistent reports of zombies in Haiti.

https://www.harvardmagazine.com/2017/10/are-zombies-real
by casenmgreen | 2025-04-06 22:31:05+00:00
A US senator argued these are not an economic measure, but a coercive measure.

Donald now has tariffs on you; if you stay in your place, and do nice things for Donald, they will be removed on a temporary, ongoing basis.

I also read that Congress controls spending only from internal taxation; it does not control spending from tariffs. That money goes directly to executive, which is to say Donald, and he does with it as he pleases.

One possible way this is to play out is the internal taxation being progressively eliminated in favour of tariffs, as a way to apply coercion to others and to eliminate Congress.

Donald is running the country as if it were a business, which means being a CEO with absolute power. He does not seem to understand the idea of running a country, where you lead and are in power by consent. So USA now has moved a long way to dictatorship - the CEO - and we see also the enormous and soul-destroying horrors of ICE and abuses of State power.
by godelski | 2025-04-06 22:31:53+00:00
I'm guessing the authors here are referring to the fact that many places were really poorly drawn. There was high detail in regions where the map makers were local to but this got fuzzy real fast. Some would even do things like plant fake cities on their map as a means of fraud detection. A secret signature if you will. Someone who copied their map was likely to copy the fake place.

You're definitely right that this has a lot to do with early mathematics but remember that that is a small part of map making. How do you define coast lines? Rivers? Borders? The devil is in the details. With older maps the general shapes would be (usually) accurate but it could get fuzzy around the edges. Literally. It's not like they could get a picture from space, or even from the sky. It would take years to measure many things that would take us minutes now
by ninkendo | 2025-04-06 22:32:27+00:00
If they shipped a gpl3 version of bash on iOS, they would be in violation. This isn’t really a question: gpl3 requires you to not only provide the source if you use it in a product, but the ability to modify it and run your modified version. Which iOS doesn’t let you do.

Now, macOS would be fine in shipping a gpl3 bash. But not iOS. (Yes, iOS has bash. Or ar least they used to, they may be all on zsh now, I’m not sure.)

So, the question becomes to Apple, do we ship different bash versions for different devices, and treat macOS as being different, and have to worry about only using newer bash features on macOS? Or do we keep the same old version on all platforms, and just eschew the new bash everywhere? It’s a pretty simple decision IMO, especially because users can just use brew on macOS and put their own bash on there if they want.

Others are pointing out that gpl3 is less tested in court and that lawyers are just more uncertain/afraid of gpl3 than gpl2, especially with respect to patents… but I don’t think these are mutually exclusive. It’s clear that they can’t ship gpl3 on 4 out of their 5 operating systems. macOS is an outlier, and from an engineering standpoint it’s a lot simpler to just keep them all the same than it is to ship different scripts/etc for different platforms. It can be both reasons.
by jcranmer | 2025-04-06 22:32:35+00:00
> The only issue I have is when companies can play both sides and in one breath claim they're neutral for the purpose of section 230 protection, and then in the next breath take part in censorship because it's better for business.

The entire point of §230 is to immunize companies for the consequences of that which you decry as censorship (i.e., moderation).
by omneity | 2025-04-06 22:33:49+00:00
This is great, congrats for launching!

A couple of ideas .. I would like to benchmark a remote headless server, as well as different methods to run the LLM (vllm vs tgi vs llama.cpp ...) on my local machine, and in this case llamafile is quite limiting. Connecting over an OpenAI-like API instead would be great!
Show HN: Shellmates – Rent bare metal and divide into VMs with firecracker
by andrewfromx | 2025-04-06 22:34:38+00:00
Hello devs, weekend passion project here. It started with this burning desire I've have for a while to rent a bare metal server from Hetzner. Sure it's all the way in Germany and I'm in the USA but the price! $34 a month for 64 GB RAM, 4 core cpu, 512 GB SSD. That's like 90% less from AWS ec2 instance of same specs.

How shellmates works:

1. Rent a powerful bare metal server from providers like Hetzner or OVH at prices starting from $34.50/month 2. We help you setup Firecracker VMs to divide your server into smaller VMs 3. Keep what you need and rent out the rest to other developers at fair prices 4. Save up to 90% compared to cloud providers like AWS while building relationships with other developers

So I'm eating my own dogfood with:

https://shellmates.andrewarrow.dev/spots/c8f3c470-f353-4804-...

Looking for someone to share the cost with me. There is a real stripe link for $18.07 a month. (Exactly half my actual cost + stripe fees.)

Learned a ton about Firecracker and Firecracker's jailer and how to setup everything with iproutes.

The homepage tries to explain everything:

https://shellmates.andrewarrow.dev

Thanks for checking it out! And I'm totally serious about sharing this server.

[video demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MNcnoMVRC68]
by jitl | 2025-04-06 22:34:54+00:00
> It also means they’re more free to lock down macOS from running your own code on it in the future, without worrying about having to rip out all the gpl3 code when it happens. Better to just not build on it in the first place.

how does locking down macOS have anything to do w/ GPL compliance? Apple is free to do whatever BS with the OS they ship in terms of terminal access, user permission level, etc regardless of GPL of any code on the device. I could ship a GPLv3 system tomorrow that disallows user root access and as long as I make the OS source freely available and redistributable, it's fine.
by leshokunin | 2025-04-06 22:35:10+00:00
At this point, HN is the only place I see positive reception of AI products. Everywhere subreddit or gaming forum or social media I follow is overwhelmingly negative. Usually characterized as slop, stealing, low quality, or stealing jobs from craftsmen.

I’m not saying AI is bad, but people are very strongly opposed to these kinds of products. In that sense, HN is the only place that seems to resonate with those.
by za3faran | 2025-04-06 22:36:54+00:00
Where is the material? "reasonable grounds" is not evidence. I'll just leave this here from the same report[1][2][3]

But the world did see how Palestinian prisoners were raped in prisons.

[1] https://imgur.com/a/TmKGadc [2] https://imgur.com/a/C6bsMp7 [3] https://imgur.com/a/ADsmgWy
by duskwuff | 2025-04-06 22:37:31+00:00
Current versions of macOS use a signed system volume [1], much like iOS - under a standard system configuration, the user can't replace system executables or other files, even as root. Unlike iOS, the user can disable SSV, but I'm not certain that's sufficient for GPLv3 - and I can't imagine Apple feels comfortable with that ambiguity.

[1]: https://support.apple.com/guide/security/signed-system-volum...