MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Spooky23 | 2025-04-14 11:58:51+00:00
Tech is always boom/bust. We’re lucky to have had a long boom.

I’m personally well acquainted with many people in tech, especially big tech. Many of them are doing little or nothing, certainly not justifying $300k+ salaries.

What you do has risk but is fundamentally more honest - your skills are around technology and output, not navigating corporate bureaucracy.
by roetlich | 2025-04-14 11:59:50+00:00
Okay, thanks for explaining more.

> And it's typesafe: if you write invalid code the compiler will give you an error.

One more question, if @fieldParentPtr("node", n) is typesafe and can get you a User, the compiler needs to know that the struct has the fields of a User, and that this pointer is indeed pointing at a node field, right? Then why do you need to specify "node" at all?

I think I don't understand Zig at all :)
by skerit | 2025-04-14 12:00:33+00:00
> One of the (many) differences between junior developers and LLM assistance is that humans can learn from their mistakes

One would think so, but I've had some developers repeat the same mistake a hundred times, where eventually they admit they just keep forgetting it.

The frustration you feel when telling a human for the Xth time that we do not allow yoda-conditions in our codebase is incredibly similar to when an AI does something wrong.
by nottorp | 2025-04-14 12:01:33+00:00
> However, I also really like A Scanner Darkly which is arguably the closest PKD adaptation.

Oh I missed this. Personally I think the best PKD "adaptation" is this:

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0284978/

Possibly because it wasn't an actual adaptation but low ish budget original work, with less of the constraints that a high budget brings.
by laborcontract | 2025-04-14 12:01:51+00:00
With LLMs and the new transcription models it’s too easy for an individual to implement mass surveillance. You could easily plant listening devices around a cafe and pick up every conversation.

I don’t think we’ve properly internalized this as a society. While I’m not saying to be paranoid everywhere you go, I do this there should be reasonable expectation of being tapped in higher value areas where people like to casually do business.
by pdimitar | 2025-04-14 12:02:26+00:00
As mentioned, I didn't go to Rust for the performance alone so I didn't track the articles that tried to prove the claim. The stated logic was that due to having more info to work with the toolchain could optimize away, quite aggressively so, many things, to the point of the code becoming lighter-weight than C.

Whether that's true or not, I make no claims. Not a compiler developer.

And yeah I'd be quite content with 1-2% margin compared to C as well.
by rainsford | 2025-04-14 12:02:57+00:00
I think you're joking, but at a certain point you're essentially getting live attestation from the CA, with the certificate duration only serving as sort of a caching function to enable faster responses by the server and to avoid overloading the CA. In that model, you might as well have much shorter duration certificates, with maybe the only limiting factor being the capacity of the CA.
by mastax | 2025-04-14 12:03:42+00:00
> The new version isn't generic. Rather, you embed the linked list node with your data. This is known as an intrusive linked list and tends to perform better and require fewer allocations.

I don’t get this. In the generic version the data is embedded with the linked list node, so there’s only one allocation per node. ‘T’ isn’t a pointer (or doesn’t have to be) there’s no indirection between data and node.
by lmpdev | 2025-04-14 12:04:34+00:00
RE: the power filter caps

It might be somewhat more ethical redacting this, some things are just better left alluded to

I myself have taken apart CRTs and microwaves, but learning these things should be done by reading media with all attention paid to safety (a specific tutorial on testing and discharging caps), not a quick aside in an unrelated blog post

You didn’t say anything wrong, but it might be wise to lessen the word count while also protecting (the potentially vulnerable) people that may read your post

Quite a lot of people with intellectual disabilities and/or on the spectrum do teardowns/e-waste (there are even charities here in Brisbane Australia), it’s similar to the old journalist code of ethics on carefully omitting information related to suicides, sometimes it’s wiser to not say anything at all, than it is to say the technically correct thing
by belter | 2025-04-14 12:05:24+00:00
> The strangest thing is happening in AI: the supposedly 'smarter' coding models like Gemini 2.5 Pro & Sonnet 3.7 are becoming less reliable than their predecessors.

Noticed that also. Maybe the new models are just the old models with more training data, tuned for the latest benchmarks, and a more aggressive temperature value ;-)

We are not on the way to AGI and should lay off the cool aid.

"Research Reveals How AI "Thinks" (It Doesn't)" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43673463
by jnurmine | 2025-04-14 12:05:31+00:00
I've not seen other Moomin TV-series than the one made in Japan, so I can't comment on the others. The Japanese-made TV-series was probably watched by almost all children of a certain age group in Finland. Of course not all children liked the series or some episodes etc. but I'd say the vast majority did.

And yes, empirically, there were several "scary" things which freaked out the smaller children but were just amusing for an older child. The scary parts usually had a logical explanation or a backstory which made sense (or reflection with an adult made it make sense).

For example (I hope I remember all the details right):

The angry Ant Lion preying in a sandpit: eventually the Moomins manage to shrink it to peanut-size with the Wizard's hat, and it's not so scary anymore. It's still an Ant Lion, but very small, and the voice is high-pitched. Why isn't it scary anymore?

The Groke is scary as it stares while making gnarling sounds and all other characters are afraid of it, but The Groke doesn't want to harm anyone. In some episode a character explains that The Groke is actually very lonely. So it follows people as it wants to hang around them, but expresses itself in a scary way and since The Groke unvillingly freezes things where it goes, others avoid it.

The Wizard was dressed in dark clothes, looked scary and rode on a flying panther. But while The Wizard had a stern face and voice, he did not want harm to anyone and helped Moomins too.

Stinky may have a scary appearance, but also he is is not evil as such, just smells bad and does mischief like steals stuff. Which is why the characters are not so fond of him.

The Hattifatteners are like mushrooms, they grow from seeds, and move about, trying to reach the horizon in groups. They are drawn to thunder and electricity and they can zap someone with electricity if one touches the charged-up Hattifatteners. I always interpreted them like a force of nature, they're not looking to harm anyone, and are no more evil than wind that falls a tree is evil.
by soco | 2025-04-14 12:06:16+00:00
The problem with that is, I have more than one interest. So any algorithm will make a salad out of that and never hit me with what I want. Even if this particular session was about topic X they will still fill it with proposals from yesterday's topic Y, or extrapolate from them to topic Z I don't care, and so on. Mostly useless either way.
by 1750horse | 2025-04-14 12:06:17+00:00
For most people this is probably furniture, but specifically for tech, it's a record player-FM radio combo from the 70s/80s with some records dating back to the same period. I also have a Bluetooth receiver hooked up to it as an audio input source, which means I can use it as a speaker system for my digital movie projector.

I also have plans to purchase some old landline phones to create a room-to-room phone system with a cheap PBX machine, but that's a long term plan.
by graemep | 2025-04-14 12:06:27+00:00
"11.4% of respondents had experienced at least one crash that they suspected was due partly to structural weakness"

Does not sound like a drop in the ocean.

"The top causes of death can be summed up by "eating shit and not exercising enough", do you want to enforce these too ? "

By that logic we should get rid of a lot of existing regulation.
by davweb | 2025-04-14 12:06:44+00:00
It's easy to accidentally hit the microphone button that appears for any text field in almost all smartphone apps. The phone then transcribes any speech it hears and enters it into the field. I've done this.

It's not hard to imagine a scenario where the driver had the message passenger view open in the Lyft app and accidentally recorded the conversation this way. This probably happens a lot but this time the driver also accidentally sent it rather than deleting it.

This seems much more likely than a company recording someone without their consent but also texting them the transcription.
by pzo | 2025-04-14 12:06:48+00:00
If you are entering a gas station you are only for ~5 min. In a cab you are sometimes for half an hour - If somebody call you during a ride it's weird to tell "sorry I will call you later because I'm in a cab and being recorded honey"

I'm not sure if this is in US but at least in EU you are only allowed to record video without audio with security cameras.
by Juliate | 2025-04-14 12:07:17+00:00
Rape is fundamentally about power, control and the violation of consent.

The casual dismissal of artists' fundamental rights to control their work and how they are used is a part of a larger cultural problem, where might would rule over law, power would rule over justice, lies over truth.

That may seem a charged argument, and it is, because it hits right and it is particularly uncomfortable to acknowledge.

The same tech leaders that push for this move over IP law are the tech leaders that fund(ed) the current dismantling of US democracy and that have chosen their political team because it aligns precisely (up to the man that got the presidential seat, the man that has (had?) quite problematic issues towards women) with their values.

This is too obvious to be an accident.

And this is also a stern warning. Because the ideology behind power does not stop at anything. It goes on until it eats itself.
by lightingthedark | 2025-04-14 12:07:27+00:00
Can someone explain how the claim of higher performance works here? In C, which lacks generics, an intrusive list is preferred because otherwise you end up with each node having a void pointer to the data it holds. The previous Zig version was a generic, so the data type could easily be a value type. Given that the compiler is allowed to rearrange the layout of both structs unless data is packed or extern (in which case it almost certainly won't want to have a linked list node in the middle anyway) isn't the resulting type exactly the same in memory unless you intentionally made T a pointer type?
by Someone | 2025-04-14 12:07:52+00:00
The only logical explanation I can see is that these are two decisions:

- linked lists aren’t useful on modern systems because traversing them causes to many cache misses. Therefore, we shouldn’t provide such a simple implementation.

- but we need one in low level OS code, and there, intrusive lists are preferred. Their limitation that you cannot store an object in multiple lists isn’t a problem, and the extra speed and the fact that you can move items between lists without allocations is desired.

I don’t see why the intrusive implementation has to be so basic, though. Can’t you, in Zig, express that a generic type T used in a generic list class has to have a nullable next field that points to a T?
by robertlagrant | 2025-04-14 12:08:01+00:00
> Sometimes engineers are right to be non-committal if the non-functional requirements are not yet fully known because the business side simply hasn't really fully scoped their NFRs which can often make a big difference in the design of the system.

Doesn't this necessitate asking the questions to get the NFRs out? You don't need to be non-committal then. Just say "we need answers to these 8 questions before we can estimate, as they will make a massive difference."
by antonvs | 2025-04-14 12:08:27+00:00
The problem is that unless you have something very valuable and hard to replicate - which is by far the exception - any businessperson who's willing to do all the work of bringing something to market can typically hire developers to implement it for them, and be in total control of the product, instead of depending on someone whose motivations don't align with the business they're building.

In short, there's nothing in it for them except a hard to manage risk.
by belter | 2025-04-14 12:08:33+00:00
> This seems much more likely than a company recording someone without their consent but also texting them the transcription.

Where have we seen something similar before? Always assume the worst technical messups, instead of crediting corporations

"Amazon's Alexa sent 1,700 recordings to the wrong person" - https://www.cbsnews.com/news/amazons-alexa-sent-1700-recordi...
by Tarsul | 2025-04-14 12:08:52+00:00
My personal opinion is that downvotes, upvotes and algorithms are design decisions that often stick before the best one is found. It's a shame really, because I think it's not only really important (e.g. to combat fake news/users etc.) but most interesting. Nonetheless, HN did good with their version where the max. downvote of a comment is -4 and where the up/downvote of a comment is not listed publicly. All functions that help with community building. However, I fret the moment when AI users and shills take over (especially since throwaway accounts are so easy to create).
by rango | 2025-04-14 12:09:02+00:00
Hi!

I’ve just released Advanced Chunker — a lightweight Python module for semantically-aware chunking and clustering of text.

The motivation: Most chunking strategies for retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) are too naive. They break up documents arbitrarily by tokens or sentences, often splitting related ideas and harming LLM performance.

Semantic Chunker uses embeddings (via Sentence Transformers) to group semantically similar text into coherent chunks, with options for visualizing attention, merging clusters by token length, and exporting in multiple formats. It keeps metadata intact and supports CLI + LangChain integration.

GitHub: https://github.com/rango-ramesh/advanced-chunker PyPI: https://pypi.org/project/advanced-chunker

Would love to hear thoughts — feedback, suggestions, or ideas for where this could go next.
by flowerthoughts | 2025-04-14 12:09:25+00:00
Yeah, we need authenticated QR codes and web of trust (only half-joking.)

My experience is that Easypark works in most of Europe and is great because of that. I trust them, and that's all I need. I really avoid QR codes, and I don't want to install your little local app.

Another commenter in this thread says parking works well in China, because WeChat is the trusted middle man.

Sadly, as always, winner takes it all has its benefits in terms of ease of knowing what to trust.
by Zambyte | 2025-04-14 12:09:29+00:00
Zig definitely encourages an imperative style by design, but it does support function pointers, which can be used to implement a map function. I do think passing the field name of the node as a comptime []const u8 as an extra argument to map, filter, etc. would be the only way to implement a generic version of these functions.

The fact that these functions are already designed to be cumbersome to implement, I think that's fine? I have also yet to use a linked list in Zig anyways. It's probably better to use an array, slice, std.BoundedArray, std.ArrayList, std.SegmentedList, or std.MultiArrayList unless there is a specific reason that a linked list is the best option.
by dangus | 2025-04-14 12:09:36+00:00
Earning a salary in cash doesn’t stop you from investing the cash. I have never earned equity from an employer but most of my net worth is sitting in publicly traded companies. So obviously I am not lacking company ownership just because the company I worked for didn’t loop me in.

The other reason this isn’t true is that equity becomes a lottery ticket that is written in a founder and investor-preferred manner and is used to fleece mostly young employees who don’t know better and are romanced by the thought of being a part of the next Uber or Airbnb.

The practical reality is that it becomes “this job is worth $150,000 but we’ll pay you $100,000 and you can have some equity that might be worth hundreds of thousands if the casino pays out.”

But then you have investor preference multiples, valuation fuckery, and other ways that even a successful exited company can pay out less than your fair share.

To me cash is king because I can invest it however I want. Equity is fine if it’s for a public company, as that’s effectively just deferred cash as an incentive to stay longer.
by Someone1234 | 2025-04-14 12:09:38+00:00
The more tools between raw code and a running solution, the more fragile it is.

This issue is particularly prevalent in the Javascript world, where it isn't uncommon that when you hit build/run, half a dozen process need to occur. This is partly why I wish they'd just put native TypeScript in the browser, simplify the build pipeline by removing several steps (and, yes, TS would evolve slower/more conservatively which I also consider a positive).

WebAssembly is the apex of this issue. Super fragile to build and impossible to debug. It is what I call "prayer based development," because you "pray" it works or troubleshooting becomes a nightmare.
by tossandthrow | 2025-04-14 12:11:04+00:00
The question is if you consider yourself an active trader, ie. how do I optimize a trading path to maximum payoff, or if you are a passive investor.

If does not sound like you are an active investor?

For "paper assets" I apply, and would recommend, lifetime investment in a global, well diversified portfolio. Ie. I adjust my risk tolerance with leverage and not by picking positions. There is no reason why commodities, metals, crypto should not be a part of your "paper asset" portfolio. (I call it paper assets as "stocks" seems to mean ownership in companies, which is a bit too narrow - there are ETFs for most of this stuff)

Housing is a personal question. As an investment it usually does not pay off and compares to stock picking / active trading.
by agentultra | 2025-04-14 12:12:32+00:00
A family member of mine did this as an engineer for Chrysler. He passed on a copy of his “dictionary” to me and I’ve kept adding to it. I enjoy a good malapropism/egg-corn. He’s not around anymore but the legacy continues.

Update we kept our practice a secret though, it wasn’t nice to point these things out to people.
by newswasboring | 2025-04-14 12:12:36+00:00
> I'd recommend get yourself an API account with all major providers (because each frontier LLM evidently has their own strengths and weaknesses) and start experimenting with your data.

Wouldn't it be better to use something like openrouter.ai which gives access to lots of different endpoints? In my experiments that is what I am using, wondering if there are good reasons to go to direct API usage.
by bhouston | 2025-04-14 12:12:52+00:00
I hope what is happening in the US right now, with people getting deported for writing Op-Eds criticizing US foreign policy, is a temporarily thing and not the direction we are heading into.

But if it isn't temporarily, we should expect surveillance like discussed in this article to grow and our opinions to be monitored in a more pervasive fashion. It is a relatively trivial matter from a technology standpoint to feed in live feeds of opinions from FB, X, WhatsApp, BlueSky, as well as advertising data collections (from TVs, Taxi's etc) into a LLM powered summary of people's opinions and views and threat factors to the regime.

I could see a scenario where companies like Palantir create such a system for domestic usage in the US, and we should be honest that the big cloud providers like AWS and GCP and Microsoft would jump at the chance to host those systems, lots and lots of $$$ for them in this. This is just applying the technology in the US that has been pre-tested by Israel against the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. It can definitely suppress dissidents and solidify state control.

This is just extrapolating into trends as a thought experiment that I hope are just temporary blips in the US's commitment to free speech and right to disagree with the government.
by aitoorwrites | 2025-04-14 12:12:59+00:00
The Ministry of the Interior is allocating more than €30 million to modernize SIVE, the surveillance system that monitors drug boats in the Strait of Gibraltar. The new plan incorporates artificial intelligence to detect illegal vessels without the need for continuous operator supervision. The renovation includes new fixed stations and state-of-the-art sensors in Cádiz, Algeciras, and Ceuta. The contract, already formalized, seeks to improve effectiveness against drug trafficking and irregular immigration.
by Majestic121 | 2025-04-14 12:13:46+00:00
The english wikipedia is lacking on the historical side, but you can find out more with the French one : https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journalier

Google trad of a couple paragraphs :

> Most of the modest peasants, men or women, very often still small artisans, small weavers or textile workers, peddlers, boatmen or carriers in bad seasons, could become day laborers on nearby farms and estates, if they had the build and stamina, once their own work was done. Some were even regular day laborers, familiar to a domain steward or a village ploughman, present all year round or usually required for a certain number of tasks. Certain harvest tasks were sometimes carried out if possible part of the night, or continuously by successive teams[5].

> Day laborers, brewers or laborers, represented a significant part of the population and sometimes lived, in the absence of family support or a solidarity house, on the edge of begging[8]. In rural areas, they subsisted thanks to additional agricultural work with ploughmen or farm merchants but also thanks to wool spinning, crafts or transport. They also served as additional labor in construction, helped the lumberjacks, made bundles, etc. Women did laundry or took children in as wet nurses[9].
by haswell | 2025-04-14 12:13:59+00:00
> I think speculative science always starts out as philosophy. This is as true now as it was in the 18th century.

Indeed, and Natural Philosophy was the precursor to what we now call Science.

I still think the old name better fit what we’re doing because it admits that the work is still a philosophical endeavor.

This is not to question the validity of what we now call science, but it’s common these days to believe in the ultimate supremacy of science as the answer to questions that are best explored both philosophically and scientifically, and because pure science still can’t answer important philosophical questions that that the entire scientific discipline rests upon.
by api | 2025-04-14 12:14:43+00:00
Maybe it's not a closed system.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_hole_cosmology

I'm partial to the hypothesis that our universe is actually a giant black hole in some kind of larger universe. The Big Bang was really the formation of our universe's event horizon. Cosmic inflation is the result of stuff falling into our universe, adding to its mass-energy -- there is no dark energy, our universe is just accreting mass-energy from something larger.

As for what the larger universe looks like -- in this model it may be impossible to know because the event horizon is impenetrable. It could be a much larger universe or it could be something else, like a higher dimensional one.