MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by msm_ | 2025-04-21 12:19:44+00:00
Since Evernote died, I've been looking for a thing to replace it with. I've tried dozens (not exaggregating) note-taking solution.

Right now I've reverted to the good (?) old "plain markdown files in a git-synced repository. Of course it comes with its own set of downsides, but after migrating (and sometimes leaving behind) my notes so many times I like how portable and universal plain-text is.

(I want to give a shout-out to Tiddlywiki. It stands out among the plethora of solutions I've tested, and I still sometimes use it for my mind-maps or designs).
by Ygg2 | 2025-04-21 12:19:58+00:00
> The goal is not to measure the level of evil in the hearts of <hamas> or <isreali government>. That’s impossible.

The goal of thought experiment wasn't to measure evil or good. It's to determine if the lines between good and evil are that far apart.

If Ukraine was way stronger than Russia, would it try to annex Kursk and other non-Ukraine regions? Would it commit as many atrocities? No. It would be constrained by its desire to join EU. Could it do it if it had 30 more people, more nationalistic populace, and near infinite ammo supply? Probably.

But a litmus test, just tells you rough acidity, not exact pH either.
by Zambyte | 2025-04-21 12:20:30+00:00
> Most opensource licenses are that you are required to publish your changes

This isn't true either. You can privately fork AGPLv3 software without violating the license. You only have to provide the source (on demand!) to people who you provide the software to in executable form (where "executable form" includes network based access to the services executing the software in the case of the AGPL).
by bazoom42 | 2025-04-21 12:20:59+00:00
> I tend to prefer to write out the procedural code, even if it is (much) longer in terms of lines.

This might work for you, but in general the amount of bugs is proportional to the amount of code. The regex engine is alredy throughly tested by someone else while a custom implementation in procedural code will probably have bugs and be a lot more work to maintain if the pattern changes.
by SnazzyUncle | 2025-04-21 12:21:07+00:00
> Can you link me to the evidence you have for this person having been convicted? Because she wasnt, the case was immediately over turned on appeal and the lower court volunteer judge basically reprimanded.

I am aware of this and I deliberately used this as bait, quite predictably you defended what took place.

You must have missed the bit where the police literally go looking for offensive words on social media. They literally have software that flags up speech.

It matters not that later on it was "corrected". The reason it was "corrected" I suspect was because of the amount of pressure put on politicians after it was featured in the media.

* There should not be entire police departments dedicated to prosecuting things said on social media.

* There should not be software that flags up the fact that you said naughty words.

* This should not have never even got to court in the first place.

> Just reflect a moment on what the major actions of the UK gov. involving social media have been over the last year, and which of those have resulted in actual convinctions. HINT: ones involving plots to murder people by the far right.

Argh yes the terrifying "far right".

The fact is that the government point at scary people like the Islamic Extremists (I am old enough to remember that), the neo-nazis, homo-phobes and other generally nasty people to sell these awful laws and then they are (mis)used against normal people.

> Hmm... who exactly has been talking about all these "free speech" cases? Coincidence?

Why does it matter? If Adolf Hitler/Francisco Franco/Mussolini/Stalin/<insert despot> rose from the dead tomorrow and was making valid criticisms of the various laws in the UK that stifle speech that doesn't mean that they are incorrect about those facts. It would make them hypocrites, but not incorrect.
by noduerme | 2025-04-21 12:21:21+00:00
I appreciate what you're saying, but plausibility is a funny way to put it, since such a motivation would not have been plausible prior to Oct 7. Before that, I was a curious minority, and they liked to congratulate themsleves on welcoming minorities. Since no one had any problem with me before Oct 7th and then within days of seeing a lot of Jews killed, they apparently all got the bloodlust, I can only conclude that what makes this "plausible" is that they innately have some quantum of racism that, having been forced to suppress themselves so long and not criticize anyone, they're overjoyed to find a group of people to unleash it on. Particularly if they can call those people "white" like themselves, as a way to offset the shame they've been taught. Of which external group I'm probably the only one they've ever met. My only other Jewish acquaintance in the area - who is an absolute pacifist - has also been almost equally shunned out of every place. Except again, strangely, the Arabic-owned places. He works at one.

So if by "plausible" you mean that, yes, you can imagine someone doing that, then you're right. If "plausible" means that you think it's justified, then that's another issue.
by pron | 2025-04-21 12:21:22+00:00
It is novel to the point of being revolutionary. As I wrote in my comment, "the novelty isn't in the feature itself, but in the place it has in the language". It's one thing to come up with a feature. It's a whole other thing to position it within the language. Various compile-time evaluations are not even remotely positioned in D, Nim, or C++ as they are in Zig. The point of Zig's comptime is not that it allows you to do certain computations at compile-time, but that it replaces more specialised features such as templates/generics, interfaces, macros, and conditional compilation. That creates a completely novel simplicity/power balance.

If the presence of features is how we judge design, then the product with the most features would be considered the best design. Of course, often the opposite is the case. The absence of features is just as crucial for design as their presence. It's like saying that a device with a touchscreen and a physical keyboard has essentially the same properties as a device with only a touchscreen.

If a language has a mechanism that can do exactly what Zig's comptime does but it also has generics or templates, macros, and/or conditional compilation, then it doesn't have anything resembling Zig's comptime.
by giancarlostoro | 2025-04-21 12:22:13+00:00
It's also very possible they had been working on it already and wanted to compare notes, I certainly would if I were working on something internal and found a similar project, but I agree, ask them for a consultation fee. I don't see why they wouldn't pay it.

Both projects also share in license, so I have less of an issue with it personally. They're both MIT licensed.
by vasco | 2025-04-21 12:22:41+00:00
Interacting with faceless entities with the power to buy multiple countries the same way you'd interact with some interested independent young person wanting to learn.

Interesting moral proposition, I doubt you'd get many followers. I think it's perfectly reasonable to treat people differently from corporations, and random small and medium corporations differently than huge megacorps without losing any sleep.

Specially in business, charging more to those that can pay more is a very common approach.
by contrarian1234 | 2025-04-21 12:23:14+00:00
Okay.. but outside of speeches and saying nice words, are the actual policies of Francis and Benedict different? Is the church run differently?

Nice words are important but popes are not just a friendly powerless old men after all

EDIT: Looking into the topic of homosexual clergy in the Catholic church. It seems things got worse in 2005 and there has been no change since then

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homosexual_clergy_in_the_Catho...
by hyperhello | 2025-04-21 12:24:14+00:00
While the cost of power will be reduced, I think that's overly optimistic in the long run. Fixing the lines and power distribution systems when they wear out or get hit by weather is really the cost of your electricity bill. You can have a shared power grid, or not pay for it, but you can't have both. Even areas powered by hydro have to maintain cherry pickers for that.
by wolfram74 | 2025-04-21 12:24:50+00:00
No, it's definitely shifting, based on [0] the carbon emissions per kwh globally are down from 542 g/kwh to 481 g/kwh in the last 10 years, that's over a 10% reduction. Countries that are staying flat are the exception, not the norm.

[0]https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/carbon-intensity-electric...
by SnazzyUncle | 2025-04-21 12:24:59+00:00
> OK, so reflecting on the world at the moment. Do you want the police to suspend investigating all complaints involving social media, or to continue to investigate them?

Yes. I do. I want them to put resources into catch the criminals in my area that have been stealing motor vehicles instead as that actually affect me and my community. Not policing social media.
by wat10000 | 2025-04-21 12:25:42+00:00
Listen to yourself. You’re equating the destruction of an original piece of art to the horrors of buying something from eBay. It’s utterly pathetic. The world isn’t obligated to cater to your desires. “But there are scammers!” Sometimes getting what you want takes a bit of effort. Requiring you to spend more than thirty seconds obtaining the original is not equivalent to destroying it.
by nhumrich | 2025-04-21 12:25:55+00:00
This feature actually can't be a library. It needs to be able to preserve the string before the variables are passed in, which a library would be unable to do because f-strings immediately replace all the values. The whole premise of t-strings is to know which values where "hard coded" and which ones are variables. A library can't possibly know that. And a function call wouldn't have access to the local variables. The only way to do this without language support is to pass `locals()` into every function call.
by alexjplant | 2025-04-21 12:26:04+00:00
> Not everything has to be bloated with hundreds of megabytes of Javascript running on top of Node.

Is that all you think memory is for? What if somebody wants to run an MITM or DNS-based content blocker for LAN clients? I can imagine loading URL blocklists into RAM for efficient evaluation taking more than the 16-24MB RAM available in the scenario you're talking about, for instance. Or what if somebody wants to fire up a NAS with an old spinning disk and use RAM for write caching?
by testing22321 | 2025-04-21 12:26:35+00:00
We use the grid like a battery, getting a one for one credit for everything we put in. So during summer/daytime we put in enough to then use up our credit in winter/nighttime.

The power we put in even covers the monthly connection fee.

I’m just about to hit 12 months with mine, 8 Mwh generated, never paid a bill.

In our area the cost of electricity is already Confirmed to increase 5% a year forever, so this will only get better for us.
by usagisushi | 2025-04-21 12:26:46+00:00
My nerdy guess is they might be planning to integrate Android and Chrome OS to make something like Samsung DeX, especially given the recent, somewhat half-baked Type-C Alt mode support on the Pixel 8 and later models.

BTW, Termux is awesome, but it has its downsides, like no proper thumb drive support due to Android SAF limitations. Yesterday, I went down the rabbit hole trying to access a CircuitPython virtual flash drive via SSH using Termux. (I actually opened this post hoping for something on that, but nope.)
by notepad0x90 | 2025-04-21 12:27:21+00:00
I have been experimenting with using smartphones only for phone calls, SMS messaging and services like Uber or airbnb. No content consumption whatsoever.

It's been a bliss. I don't over consume, I have more time to get things done now, and it's sort of obvious but everything feels better with bigger screens and keyboard and mouse.

Look at HN as an example, if I see a post on here that is related to some programming thing, I have my terminal right here where I can play with the concept. Even things like youtube are much nicer on a big screen.

My only pet-peeve is with web front-end designers insisting on wasting screen real-estate at the left and right margins. I wish there was a button on every such site where you can "maximize" the content div so that it takes up 100% width.
by simonw | 2025-04-21 12:28:10+00:00
When is the last time you tried using LLMs against a large, old, crufty undocumented codebase?

Things have changed a lot in the past six weeks.

Gemini 2.5 Pro accepts a million tokens and can "reason" with them, which means you can feed it hundreds of thousands of lines of code and it has a surprisingly good chance of figuring things out.

OpenAI released their first million token models with the GPT 4.1 series.

OpenAI o3 and o4-mini are both very strong reasoning code models with 200,000 token input limits.

These models are all new within the last six weeks. They're very, very good at working with large amounts of crufty undocumented code.
by jmyeet | 2025-04-21 12:28:39+00:00
Energy is a frustrating topic because people have some very entrenched but uninformed opinions about it, like hte "energy independence" argument. We're clearly energy independent but people will look to see that we still import oil and natural gas and say we're not. That's a business. Refining is a business. Making LNG is a business. Canada has no real way of exporting oil and natural gas so we buy it, process it and either use it or export it.

Another: peak total and per-capita greenhouse gas emissions in the US peaked in about 2007 and has decreased ~10% since then [1]. We still produce the most per-capita so there's a long way to go. China leads the world on renewable energy builds by a mile. It's not even close. Yet their usage of coal is still increasing as is their greenhouse gas emissions (total and per-capita) due to a still industrializing population.

Electricity costs continue to increase [2]. Some blame this on renewables. It's not. This is a longstanding trend. It goes beyond inflation though. Utilities are generally regional monopolies. For some reason we've decided that privatizing these is somehow a good idea (it's not). The need for ever-increasing profits just means things will continue to get more expensive.

[1]: https://www.wri.org/insights/charts-explain-per-capita-green...

[2]: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/APU000072610
by masklinn | 2025-04-21 12:28:58+00:00
> Fair enough. It would be nice if Python allowed to customize the formatting options after `:`

It does, the `Interpolation` object contains an arbitrary `format_spec` string: https://peps.python.org/pep-0750/#the-interpolation-type

However I think using the format spec that way would be dubious and risky, because it makes the sink responsible for whitelisting values, and that means any processing between the source and sink becomes a major risk. It's the same issue as HTML templates providing `raw` output, now you have to know to audit any modification to the upstream values which end there, which is a lot harder to do than when "raw markup" values are reified.

> rather than with some "out-of-band" logic.

It's the opposite, moving it to the format spec is out of band because it's not attached to values, it just says "whatever value is here is safe", which is generally not true.

Unless you use the format spec as a way to signal that a term should use identifier escaping rules rather than value escaping rules (something only the sink knows), and an `Identifier` wrapper remains a way to bypass that.
Show HN: Syneva – A Chatbot under 3kb that fits in a QR code
by kuberwastaken | 2025-04-21 12:29:00+00:00
Follow up post from: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43742639

TLDR: My attempts of jamming a somewhat smart conversational chatbot into a QR code (with a UI)

Here's what makes SYNEVA work:

I went with a pattern-matching approach instead of neural nets or tiny transformers (I tried that in archived versions, we DO NOT have space for this sadly). The entire system is built around our S class that's basically:

S {

constructor() { this.m = this.L() || {}; // Memory/learned responses this.v = {}; // Word frequency tracker this.c = []; // Conversation history this.h = ""; // Last message }

}

*Memory & Learning*

SYNEVA can actually "learn" during conversations! We can't use localstorage because this is a BASE64 URI but we can still use SessionStorage. When you chat, it:

Creates context keys from the last 2 normalized words Stores your input/response pairs in this.m Tracks word frequencies in this.v for relevance scoring Persists this data inside the URL hash

*Response Generation*

For responses, it uses a multi-stage fallback system:

Pattern matching against phrases/questions (the few it has) Context-based lookup from some learned responses Word frequency analysis for fuzzy matching Default responses as last resort if nothing works

This lets it seem somewhat intelligent despite the size constraints.

*UI Layer*

Added a kinda retro looking green-on-black terminal interface and managed to get a typing animation!

Everything's packed into 2.8kb including HTML/CSS/JS and it's all in a QR code

Previous attempts with neural networks went upto 5.3kb even with 8-bit quantization and word-level processing. This pattern-matching approach with context awareness turned out way more efficient while still being somewhat "smart".

You can actually share your "trained" chatbot too - just share the URL with its hash, and your conversation context gets preserved :P

I'd love to know your thoughts or if you can make something better in the constraints, feel free to contribute
by toddmorey | 2025-04-21 12:29:47+00:00
That's the only environmental hope I've been able to hang onto. It's now cheaper in most places[1] for net new energy installations to NOT use fossil fuels. I knew environmentally conscious approaches could never survive being the morally correct yet more expensive option.

[1] IRENA 2023 report shows that solar photovoltaic (PV) generation was 56% less expensive than the weighted average fossil fuel-fired alternatives, despite being 414% more expensive back in 2010. Bloomberg New Energy Finance found in March 2021 that "renewables are the cheapest power option for 71% of global GDP and 85% of global power generation."
by testing22321 | 2025-04-21 12:30:15+00:00
Many parts of the US have staggeringly cheap power compared to the rest of the world.

Before all this our power bills were smack on $100 per month, so I’ve got about a 6.5 year pay off. Electricity here is 13 cents per kWh, but is confirmed to increase 5% per year basically forever. So my pay off is less than that.
by Someone | 2025-04-21 12:30:24+00:00
> but they mean “any character between the character ‘a’ and the character ‘z’”, which happens to correspond to the lower case letters in English

‘Only’ in the most commonly used character encodings. In EBCDIC (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EBCDIC), the [a-z] range includes more than 26 characters.

That’s one of the reasons POSIX has character classes (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regular_expression#Character_c...). [:lower:] always gets you the lowercase characters in the encoding that the program uses.
by Zigurd | 2025-04-21 12:31:13+00:00
The risk premium for nuclear gets left out of the discussion for a seemingly disconnected set of reasons: Cost overruns due to bad project management are not factored in to budgets because the Bad Things that happen to projects are not on the bill of materials, and decommissioning cost overruns are so far in the future that we'll all be dead by then.

Neither technology, nor economic systems can fix that. Nobody has a repeatable recipe for success.
by Zambyte | 2025-04-21 12:31:40+00:00
The AGPL requires that you publish a notice that the source is available on demand to the people who use your software over the network. The easiest way to do this is usually to just publish your changes so you can link everyone to it, but that is not a requirement of the license.

You can run derivative AGPLv3 software to service the public without distributing your changes to the source code without violating the license as long as nobody asks for the code.
by bawolff | 2025-04-21 12:32:17+00:00
Well how much electricity are you using? If you use much less electricity, then you would need less solar panels which means the system would be cheaper.

I highly doubt there is anywhere in the world where you can buy the amount of energy specified by the parent as cheaply as you said. Like i think it would work out to less then a penny per kwh

If you are not accounting for amount of generation than this is an apples and oranges comparison.
by TheDong | 2025-04-21 12:32:17+00:00
I think the better approach would have been to give the author a choice of what happens.

i.e. they could have emailed the author to ask:

1. "Would you rather us fork your project (new name), or would you rather donate your project to us under its original name, as well as give us the ability to rename it (which we will)"

2. "Would you like a $300 microsoft store gift card as thanks for writing some code we're planning to use?"

3. "Would you be open to providing a paid ($600 microsoft gift card) 1-hour consulting meeting to ramp our engineers up on your codebase? We won't actually listen since our engineers can in fact read, but we'll pay you"

4. "Also, just in case you don't know who microsoft is, we do have a careers page over here, and our team doesn't have headcount but other teams do <link>"

It sounds like microsoft didn't do any of that, which as you say is well within their right, but emailing to ask is polite.
by joistandvolt | 2025-04-21 12:32:32+00:00
I run a roofing company that installs solar shingles (not the Musk kind — these are from mainstream roofing supply manufacturers). The total cost of a new solar roof is surprisingly close to the combined cost of a new roof plus traditional rack-mounted solar panels.

There’s a small premium — maybe around 5% per watt — for going with solar shingles instead of panels. But in return, you get a few practical advantages:

Better aesthetics (they blend in)

Higher wind resistance

Simpler logistics (one contractor instead of two)

And most importantly, you’re not voiding your roofing warranty by drilling dozens or hundreds of holes into your shingles and rafters

It’s definitely not for everyone, but for people already needing a new roof, it can make a lot of sense.
by oceanailab | 2025-04-21 12:33:00+00:00
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