MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by vintagedave | 2025-04-21 08:27:39+00:00
From his statement yesterday:

> May the principle of humanity never fail to be the hallmark of our daily actions. In the face of the cruelty of conflicts that involve defenceless civilians and attack schools, hospitals and humanitarian workers, we cannot allow ourselves to forget that it is not targets that are struck, but persons, each possessed of a soul and human dignity.

Yes. I agree with you and hope so too.
by ChrisMarshallNY | 2025-04-21 08:28:07+00:00
I’m of the opinion that the best error handling, is to not encounter the error, in the first place.

That means good UX, intuitive interfaces, good affordances, user guidance (often, without requiring them to read text), and simplicity.

When an error is encountered, then it needs to be reported to the user in as empathetic and useful manner as possible. It also needs to be as “bare bones” simple as can reasonably be managed.

Designing for low error rates, starts from requirements. Good error reporting requires a lot of [early] input from non-technical stakeholders.
by tetris11 | 2025-04-21 08:29:19+00:00
> I express my closeness to the sufferings of Christians in Palestine and Israel, and to all the Israeli people and the Palestinian people. The growing climate of anti-Semitism throughout the world is worrisome. Yet at the same time, I think of the people of Gaza, and its Christian community in particular, where the terrible conflict continues to cause death and destruction and to create a dramatic and deplorable humanitarian situation. I appeal to the warring parties: call a ceasefire, release the hostages and come to the aid of a starving people that aspires to a future of peace!
by pyfon | 2025-04-21 08:29:37+00:00
Also percolation method (ristreto vs. espresso) and roast date.

Some people say grinder too (I haven't really got into the conical vs. flat)

This is assuming the basics are right i.e. machine temperature and pressure, dialing in, good grinder.

Then if you add milk the provenance and we'll keptness of that is a factor.
by hliyan | 2025-04-21 08:29:59+00:00
I wonder whether we will have another Jesuit Pope. Jesuits are supposed to be generally very education focused, more progressive (especially w.r.t science) and stand less on ceremony. I know nothing about how the College of Cardinals work, but if they're anything like other political voting bodies, one of two outcomes are possible: a swing to the Right (and toward tradition), recognizing the current balance of power in the world, or a swing even further Left of Francis, again recognizing the current trend but as a counterweight.
by edsko | 2025-04-21 08:30:58+00:00
(Author of falsify here.) You are absolutely correct that the empty string isn't always the best counter-example. The goal of shrinking is to shrink to the _simplest_ possible value (this is true for all approaches to shrinking). What constitutes "simple" is very much domain specific. It would certainly be possible to write a generator that would shrink to, say, "foo", as the canonical "simplest" example of a simple string. Indeed, since we are working in a lazy language, you could (with a bit of effort) shrink to `undefined` if the other arguments are not used at all.
Ask HN: Any way to not use meeting bots to get real time transcription in gmeet?
by aniket_tenali | 2025-04-21 08:32:11+00:00
I have been using Meeting Bots inside the Gmeet to get transcripts from meetings and generate summary and proivide real time answers for my users. I want to not maintain the meeting bots as it is a overheard and one person has to literally work on that all the time. I tried other tools but they are too expensive and hard to break even with them. I am using puppeteer to run the bots atm. Making an app is not feasible at this moment for our company. Company is tenali ai.
by masklinn | 2025-04-21 08:34:05+00:00
> However, I have a hard time imagining any developer who would both make such fundamental errors with f-strings currently and also switching to this option when it ships.

t-strings are a different type (both static and dynamic), f-strings are not. So t-strings can be mandated at the API level, forcing the developer into "proper" usage.

That is, you need third-party tools to differentiate between

some_call("safe literal string")

and

some_call(f"unsafe dynamically created string")

That is not the case when it comes to t-strings, `some_call` can typecheck internally that it got a t-string, and reject regular strings entirely.

Although some space probably needs to be made for composing t-strings together in case of e.g. runtime variation in items or their count. Facetting for instance. I don't know if that's a native affordance of t-strings.
by lelanthran | 2025-04-21 08:34:11+00:00
Rust prevents classes of bugs by preventing specific patterns.

This means it rejects, by definition alone, bug-free code because that bug free code uses a pattern that is not acceptable.

IOW, while Rust rejects code with bugs, it also rejects code without bugs.

It's part of the deal when choosing Rust, and people who choose Rust know this upfront and are okay with it.
by KrishilSheth | 2025-04-21 08:34:16+00:00
1) Is your algorithm better than alternatives for 256-bit multiplication (or 384/521 bits)?

Yes. RPF consistently outperforms Karatsuba and other classic methods (including Toom-Cook and even some FFTs) in the 128–800 digit (approx. 400–2600 bit) range. Specifically, at 256, 384, and 521 bits, which are critical for elliptic curve cryptography, RPF is faster in squaring — both in raw integer mode and when enhanced with GMP.

We observed:

Lower execution times than Karatsuba starting from 150–180 bits onward.

Better scaling, meaning performance advantage widens as bit size increases.

2) Can your technique be combined with Montgomery multiplication?

Yes, and this is one of RPF’s strong points.

Karatsuba and Montgomery are hard to combine efficiently due to their recursive and carry-heavy nature. RPF, however, has a more linear and structured squaring layout, making it much easier to wrap inside Montgomery’s reduction loop.

In initial tests, we were able to:

Integrate RPF inside a Montgomery-style multiplication framework with minimal change.

Maintain a performance lead compared to Karatsuba-integrated approaches.

We’re exploring even more optimized coupling with Montgomery reductions for modular cryptography applications.

3) Does your technique work in binary fields GF(2^k)?

RPF can be adapted to binary fields.

Since GF(2^k) squaring operations have specific bit-level behaviors (like lack of carry propagation), the base version of RPF designed for integers won’t directly transfer. However, we are working on a variant of RPF optimized for GF(2^k) that leverages:

XOR-style operations instead of additions,

and efficient bit-splitting to emulate RPF’s structure in binary logic.
by stavros | 2025-04-21 08:35:21+00:00
> It only bothers US consumers, who are used to more privacy and solid property rights.

Which US are you talking about? The one I know is a capitalist free-for-all, where the word "regulation" is anathema. The vast majority of Us-based products and services spy on the consumer to make an extra penny, and nobody cares.

It really baffles me to hear someone say that the US isn't under perpetual surveillance, when the NSA literally piped all phonecalls to their servers twenty years ago, before they realized they can just make companies give them all the data.
by TekMol | 2025-04-21 08:37:21+00:00
Will this allow neat SQL syntax like the following?

city = 'London' min_age = 21 # Find all users in London who are 21 or older: users = db.get(t' SELECT * FROM users WHERE city={city} AND age>{min_age} ')

If the db.get() function accepts a template, it should, right?

This would be the nicest way to use SQL I have seen yet.
by hnlmorg | 2025-04-21 08:38:03+00:00
I’m with the GP on this on. WhatsApp should absolutely be covered under the same umbrella here due to it being owned by Meta, who have a long history of breaking promises regarding privacy.

And since a lot of people do keep in contact via WhatsApp group chats, it’s hard to ignore the social implications of WhatsApp too. It’s as much a social platform as the others albeit with a different broadcast model.

As a parent, I have to monitor my child’s WhatsApp groups to check they’re safe, just like I would their YouTube and Instagram feeds. And I have to check they’re also being safe with the stuff that they share on WhatsApp, just like you would on any other social network.
by carlos-menezes | 2025-04-21 08:38:10+00:00
https://www.vaticannews.va/en/pope/news/2025-04/pope-francis...

> According to Archbishop Diego Ravelli, Master of Apostolic Ceremonies, the late Pope Francis had requested that the funeral rites be simplified and focused on expressing the faith of the Church in the Risen Body of Christ.

Always struck me as a simple man and that likely contributed to people liking him more when compared to his predecessors. RIP.
by jackjeff | 2025-04-21 08:38:53+00:00
Checking for errors after every line (like in Go) is the worst. Used to do that in c/c++ calling win32 APIs. Know what happened when sloppy developers come along? They don’t bother checking and you have really bizarre impossible to debug problems because things fail in mysterious ways. At least with an exception if you “forget” to catch it blows up in your face and it’ll be obvious

Sure monads are cool and I’d be tempted to use them. They make it impossible for forget to check for errors and if you don’t care you can panic.

But JS is not Rust. And the default is obviously to use exceptions.

You’ll have to rewrap every API under the moon. So for Monads in JS to make sense you need a lot of weird code that’s awkward to write with exceptions to justify the costs.

I’m not sure the example of doing a retry in the API is “enough” to justify the cost. Also in the example, I’m not sure you should retry. Retries can be dangerous especially if you pile them on top of other retries: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20051107-20/?p=33...
by johnisgood | 2025-04-21 08:38:59+00:00
I am in favor of "common decency, mutual respect, live and let live".

That is not what "social contract" is about (unless you keep playing the redefinition of words game, which many people do when arguing in favor of "muh social contract"), and no, we do not need the Government for that.

https://www.academia.edu/7185307/Libertarianism_and_Pollutio...

https://mises.org/mises-wire/why-government-pollution-contro...

https://mises.org/mises-daily/libertarian-manifesto-pollutio...

Among others... Please do ask if you want to read more about it. I personally like to read a lot of things with what I disagree.

Please reply to the other person's comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43748473), too, I wonder what you'd come up with. :)
by jeffhuys | 2025-04-21 08:39:05+00:00
And you all made place for guys like me; I don’t get booed away by 90% of the users anymore when engaging in discussion, more often I get an actual discussion out of it. Before that it was just a highly toxic “noo my opinion is the right one and I’m rigid on that and you’re an idiot” ambience.

Funny how things shift like that. Also never engaged with political stuff.
by nabla9 | 2025-04-21 08:40:01+00:00
"With or without religion, good people can behave well and bad people can do evil; but for good people to do evil - that takes religion." – Steven Weinberg, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steven_Weinberg

Catholicism is full of good people. Fortunately Catholicism has mostly lost it's grip of people in the developed world, but it still wrecks havoc in the Africa. The tried to correct the course a little bit, but not really. He should have spoken ex cathedra to make waves, but he never did so. Even the most conservative Catholics only believe what they already believe and it would have just created schism. "Catholic God" speaks only to protect the institution, not the people.
by torginus | 2025-04-21 08:40:35+00:00
I was shat on multiple times by throbbing-brain architecture guys for this, but what I've done multiple times that worked in prod, was to start with a single monolith with dependency injection, and run all services in the same process.

Once the compute and robustness demands mandated we should scale the thing across multiple machines, both horizontally and vertically, I would replace most DI services with proxies that wrapped the original functionality and called out to a remote host.

So for this scaled up version, I would only need to change how the DI container got started, which could either be in 'Manager' mode (meaning a high level functionality, with the submodules injected as proxies calling out to services on client machines), 'Worker' mode (meaning it served the proxy requests on said worker machines) or 'Standalone' mode (meaning the DI container actually injected the actual fat versions of the services, that allowed the whole thing to run in a single process, very useful for local testing and debugging).

The was only a single executable which could be run in multiple 'modes' selected via a command line switch, which made versioning and deployment trivial.
by codetrotter | 2025-04-21 08:40:58+00:00
> I have a feeling it’s the kids’ fault.

Look at how broad the definition on Wikipedia is.

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

I don’t think that’s the kids fault.

Also, from that Wikipedia article:

> Depending on interpretation, other popular platforms that are sometimes referred to as social media services include YouTube, Letterboxd, QQ, Quora, Telegram, WhatsApp, Signal, LINE, Snapchat, Viber, Reddit, Discord, and TikTok.

The broad interpretation that includes Reddit would also categorise HN as social media which I think is fair.

I think the problem actually is the adults that are not being specific about which problems they want to stop when they broadly say that social media is bad.

Like you say, the problem is specifically things like algorithms that are tuned for engagement, which results in all kinds of negative effects.

That being said even this is not specific enough. HN although different is also run on an algorithm that is meant to surface the most interesting things. The site rules on HN avoid some of the bad effects, but it’s still possible to be negatively impacted in other ways like checking HN too often and too long instead of doing other things.
by blitzar | 2025-04-21 08:41:05+00:00
> At some point you have to stop and wonder whether you’re taking their childhood away.

At some point you have to stop and wonder if a great childhood is doing - music lessons, many clubs at school, several physical activities such as soccer, tennis, taekwondo etc.

They are occupied, they are trying new things, learning new skills, running around outside, interacting with their peers.
by ben_w | 2025-04-21 08:41:11+00:00
> People accuse you for being an AI based on the structure and word usage of your message, not the content of it.

If that's the real cause, it is not the reason they give when making the accusation. Sometimes they object to the citations, sometimes the absence of them.

But it's fairly irrelevant, as they are, in fact, saying that real flesh-and-blood me doesn't pass their purity test for thinking.

Is that because they're not thinking? Doesn't matter — as @sebastiennight said: "This is a battle that can't be won at any point because it's a matter of faith for the forever-skeptic, not facts."
by GistNoesis | 2025-04-21 08:42:30+00:00
I have not tried it, but lichess is open-source : so you can probably customize it for your specific use case.

More specifically modify line that allow to pick the theme https://github.com/lichess-org/lila/blob/64b6f7966c8ed48dc90...

With one of the value given here : https://github.com/lichess-org/lila/blob/64b6f7966c8ed48dc90...

ie : replace in stomSelector lila.puzzle.PuzzleTheme.mix.key by lila.puzzle.PuzzleTheme.defensiveMove.key and run a custom lichess as explained in the ReadMe
by tomhow | 2025-04-21 08:43:05+00:00
All: The topic of this thread is the passing of a significant public figure. Discussion should be primarily focused on thoughtful reflections on the life of that person, and his influence on the institution he represented and the broader world. Generic commentary about the institution, religion in general, or other public figures or issues, is likely off topic.*

Before commenting, please take a moment to consider whether your comment is within the HN guidelines [1], particularly the first two:

Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.

Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.

(*Edited in response to community feedback.)

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
by plastic3169 | 2025-04-21 08:43:18+00:00
I’ve worked in film mastering so yes I am an outlier. My point was that industry guarding the DCP makes sense as the leaked pirate versions are not the same thing. In music world everyone can buy uncompressed CD, but with moving image end user can only get what is equivalent of a mp3. This includes the illegal channels. Blu-ray is say 1:40 compressed from raw data. Good enough for sure but not the theatre experience.
by jeffhuys | 2025-04-21 08:43:29+00:00
I have the complete opposite experience. I now get the aha moments I got from reddit before its private api downfall. I get actual discussions. There’s an equal split between opinions.

I think the difference here is that you were already “in” it, and it changed. I wasn’t “in” it because I hated the vibe and fakeness and just denying of my experience, but now I get the opportunity to join in a “resetting” environment. It’s refreshing and just way more real.

I blocked a few political accounts at the start and now I don’t see that at all btw
by toofy | 2025-04-21 08:43:58+00:00
no, this doesn’t seem to be the case. more than 80% of those avoiding pregnancy use condoms, pill, tied tubes, vasectomy, iud, etc… this 80% does not include withdrawal. [0]

5.8% rely on withdrawal.

[0] https://www.guttmacher.org/fact-sheet/contraceptive-method-u...
by keybored | 2025-04-21 08:44:09+00:00
> Our entire field is premised on automating people's jobs away, so it's always a little rich to hear programmers kvetching about it being done to them.

Watch out, you’re giving your game away.

My job is about enabling analysis that was previously done ad hoc and informally. If I’m harming people then that’s something I have to take responsibility for, but it’s also caused not by my direct contribution but by the larger system that I’m working within.

I expressively don’t want to automate away work when that will just result in more profit for private owners and less income for regular working people.[1] And I also don’t want to automate work if that means shifting drudgery to some worker to fill in that freed up time.

And how does this contradict what “we” are doing and stand for!? We criticize technology on this board all the time!

But it’s nice to have the priorities of such a prominent member on the record.

[1] But I DO want to automate work in the hypothetical society where we all own the automation and thus the only thing we are deprived of is drudgery.
by d_tr | 2025-04-21 08:45:33+00:00
You can all raise your eyebrows and appeal to authority all you want. Doesn't change the fact that as soon as I want to write a tight (or not so tight) loop to do something that is not covered by all these (undoubtedly great) libraries running underneath, I am very probably out of luck and have to use another language.

Doesn't sound like a very creative teaching environment to me.

Not to mention that, depending on what you count as "AI research", the vast majority of it is pure garbage (come on, we all know this).
by xobs | 2025-04-21 08:46:03+00:00
> endless scrolling feeds only

I've got a personal policy: No websites that have an infinite scroll. That means no new Reddit, mobile Reddit, Facebook, Instagram, or similar. This also means I can't use food delivery services, since those tend to be infinite as well.

If they're paginated that's fine, even if they're infinitely so. Infinite scrolling is just a very good touchstone as to the quality and addictiveness of a site, and I'll avoid anything that has it.

For this reason I get my news through RSS and like using Discord -- both have finite ends (even if there may be a lot of content in bursts.)
by ben_w | 2025-04-21 08:46:13+00:00
Your own comment was a movement of the goalposts.

Preceding quotation to which you objected:

> A middle schooler has general intelligence (they know about and can do a lot of things across a lot of different areas) but they likely can't replace white collar workers either.

Your response:

> Middle schoolers replace white collars workers all the time, it takes 10 years for them to do it but they can do it.

So I could rephrase your own words here as "Stop moving the goalposts closer, that you think a middle schooler might become a General Intelligence in the future doesn't mean the current middle schooler is a General Intelligence just because they use the same name".
by meekaaku | 2025-04-21 08:46:50+00:00
I don't get why people take it so negatively when a parent mandating kids to do/learn things they don't like.

But the entire notion of public education is rested upon mandating that kids wake up and go to school, sit down and learn things they don't necessarily like. I am pretty sure there isnt a single student who loved/found joy in all the subjects all the time.

Yet when a parent does it, there is backlash?

Humans respond to carrot and stick, and so do kids. To excel at anything, requires healthy mix of enjoyment, love, discipline and motivation. Some of these come intrinsically, others extrinsic.
by microtonal | 2025-04-21 08:47:02+00:00
I think the people who claim 10x-100x productivity improvements are working on tasks where LLMs work really well. There is a lot of development work out there that is relatively simple CRUD and LLMs are very good at it. On the complete opposite end we have designing new algorithms/data structures or extending them in a novel way. Or implementing drivers for new hardware from incomplete specs. LLMs do not do well on these tasks or even slow down developers 10x.

So, I think the claims of improvement in productivity and regression in productivity can be true at the same time (and it's not just that people who don't find using LLMs productive are just prompting them wrong).

I think most can be gained by learning in which areas LLMs can give large productivity boosts and where it's better to avoid using them. Of course, this is a continuous process, given that LLMs are still getting better.

Personally, I am quite happy with LLMs. They cannot replace me, but they can do a chunk of the boring/repetitive work (e.g. boilerplate), so as a result I can focus on the interesting problems. As long as we don't have human-like performance (and I don't feel like we are close yet), LLMs make programming more interesting.

They are also a great learning aid. E.g., this morning I wanted to make a 3D model for something I needed, but I don't know OpenSCAD. I iteratively made the design with Claude. At some point the problem becomes too difficult for Claude, but with the code generated at that point, I have learned enough about OpenSCAD that I can fix the more difficult parts of the project. The project would have taken me a few hours (to learn the language, etc.), but now I was done in 30 minutes and learned some OpenSCAD in a pleasant way.
by codetrotter | 2025-04-21 08:47:53+00:00
> it will crop, zoom and analyze different sections of the photo until it gets most of the time the exact coordinates of where the photo was taken.

I will give it a try myself too. But all my photos that I take with my iPhone have date and GPS location embedded in the metadata so I will first have to transfer the pictures to my computer and strip them of metadata.