MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ToucanLoucan | 2025-04-17 12:46:15+00:00
> But let's say a smart Zimbabwean figures out a way to genetically modify Chlorella or Spiroulina which only need sun and no particular climate or fertile land and he produces so much olive oil that it's price collapses to nothing.

That's a hell of an industrious Zimbabwean, firstly.

Secondly though, while I understand where your metaphor is aiming, it just doesn't really work. There has never been a "business with a competitive advantage" on the scale of human creative output vs. AI. I would argue even this example you've cooked up which already strains belief on several points doesn't truly capture it.

AI in your example wouldn't be one person in one place that can make a product at unbelievable scale; I think it would be more analogous to everyone on Earth suddenly having a machine on their countertop that produces Olive Oil by itself, of low quality, for free, forever. And I think the effects would be similar: any producer of less than fantastic olive oil would go bankrupt, because they're effectively competing with a free product (not unlike the Netscape Navigator vs Internet Explorer problem) and most consumers who are fine with a low-grade oil have zero reason to buy more when they can just buy access to the infinite olive oil maker. You would also then have producers of food both industrial and restaurants who would begin advertising that they use real proper olive oil, many of which would doubtlessly be using the shitty stuff from our imaginary machine or perhaps a blend of both to cut costs, but nevertheless, this hurts the producers of the good stuff too, because again, they are competing with a free-at-point-of-use product.

And like, on balance, all of this is just a net negative for everyone:

* A lot of the olive oil is worse now, for everyone, seemingly permanently absent regulations

* People are now losing a lot of counter space to the machine

* We've obliterated an entire agricultural sector and farmers who have done nothing but this their entire lives have to retrain jobs and/or their land has to be used to grow something else

* One company that made the infinite olive oil machine now has billions and billions of dollars, that they have earned by making the other three things happen

And just... why? Why is this a good thing for humanity? Put aside the stupid game with the made up money and line go up and justify to me why we've now done this, because it seems like everyone has lost a little bit, some have lost a lot, and a vanishingly tiny minority have won big, explicitly at the expense of everyone else.

And before you start with "well the market chose-" no, it didn't. The market followed incentives established by the market and those who regulate it. That's not a choice anyone or anything made, any more than it's a choice if a river floods it's banks and destroys a bridge.
by queenkjuul | 2025-04-17 12:46:15+00:00
To be extra pedantic, any app following Apple guidelines will quit on Cmd-Q, it should never (and I've never seen it so) only close a window, and alt-F4 isn't any different than clicking the close button with your mouse.

Really the point being, modern GUI applications (hell even not-modern 90s DOS applications) almost universally follow a common set of guidelines that were established many decades ago and have been more or less consistent across multiple platforms for many people's entire lives, vs the land of Vim and emacs and screen et. al. where every app has its own bespoke method of operation.

I think there's a benefit to the former even in TUI apps. If i remote into a client's system, or jump on my coworkers laptop, or am setting up a new system, it's good to know how it's going to work.
by croola | 2025-04-17 12:46:17+00:00
summarized via LLM

In her essay "Why I Cannot Be Technical," Cat Hicks, a psychologist specializing in software environments, explores the structural and social dynamics that define the label "Technical" in the tech industry. She argues that despite her expertise in human-centered aspects of software development—such as behavior, culture, and organizational change—she is often excluded from being considered "Technical" because the term is narrowly defined to prioritize engineering and coding skills.

Hicks emphasizes that this exclusion is not due to a lack of capability but stems from systemic biases related to gender, class, race, and professional roles. She notes that the designation of "Technical" often serves as a gatekeeping mechanism, determining who is deemed legitimate within tech spaces. This legitimacy is frequently withheld from those whose work focuses on human factors, regardless of its complexity or impact.
by omnee | 2025-04-17 12:46:37+00:00
I can't emphasize this strongly enough. Recently, I had the pleasure of eating at a fine dining restaurant that grows a number of vegetables and herbs, and they presented an amuse bouche with a number of raw vegetables and herbs for us to taste. Their flavours were so elevated compared to the usual counterparts that I get from supermarkets, that I questioned whether any artificial addititives were used - obviously not. The difference is like going from being short sighted but able to complete daily activites with some difficulty, to wearing glasses that makes everything crystal clear and easy.
by neogodless | 2025-04-17 12:46:51+00:00
So both-sides then?

Look I think we should disagree on fiscal and social policy, and be able to deliberate over these issues.

And have a system of government that allows for that kind of debate and representative vote.

But "one side" is dismantling everything that was still democratic about the United States and turning into a massively one-sided (even one-manned) system of control. So whatever your opinion or mine on social policy no longer matter, because it's all up to the whims of a single person, with no recourse for the rest of us.
by Etheryte | 2025-04-17 12:46:52+00:00
> A person with a PhD in human things and who deals in human problems and human solutions cannot ever be Technical no matter how dense her statistics are, how many conferences she speaks at, and how comprehensively she has given examples of generating outcomes that are often beyond engineering to generate (change over time; impacts on humans; making legible even an imperfect approximation of just one single emotion). These things can be useful, interesting, valuable, heartrending, inspiring and memorable to tech, but they cannot be legitimate.

This is clearly falsifiable, so I'm not sure what the idea is behind dragging this essay out for miles. The author doesn't feel like they're a technical person, fair enough, you do you and your labels. However there are plenty of people out there who tick all of those boxes despite you saying it can't be done. I know many people like this and they're often the best of both worlds, they bring a balanced and well rounded world view to bat.
by JKCalhoun | 2025-04-17 12:47:03+00:00
I was able to get an Atari 400 (not XL, sadly) for a firesale price. The problem with all the Atari's in my mind was that they were not dev-friendly machines.

Commodore machines came with a rather hefty serial bound book that introduced you to programming and gave you a memory map of the hardware, important PEEKs and POKEs.

Atari's came with trade secrets.
by allturtles | 2025-04-17 12:47:43+00:00
Your first link involves laws passed by Congress. But there is no relevant law that requires "viewpoint diversity" (whatever that means) or most of the other demands in the government letter, this is simply an executive diktat.

Your second link involves a change in IRS policy. But there was no such change, instead again we have an executive diktat, despite the fact that the law explicitly forbids the President or his office from targeting specific institutions for audits or investigations: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/26/7217
by roenxi | 2025-04-17 12:48:10+00:00
There is a lot to like about this article. I would not be at all surprised if the author was really enjoying writing "I am not technical" and embedding the thought in one of the least technical essays I've ever read on HN. She clearly understands dot points well and is determined to stay a safe distance from them.

I don't think there are any actual take-aways beyond an appreciation of rather well done nontechnical perspective take on what the technical world looks like. Although that is rare enough around here to make it quite interesting.
by patcon | 2025-04-17 12:48:13+00:00
No. It's a Sybil attack on subsidy to help ppl of different means equally make room for education in their lives. No one is "making money" unless they are committing fraud. They are being put on an equal playing field -- the subsidies are seemingly directed at the individual, but are terraforming [of the field] in nature, not for enrichment of the individual.

I was able to get educated with full focus on that task, because my family prioritised saving for my education. I want others, without such privilege, to have access to such opportunity.

If you choose to frame it also that "your parents paid you to consume free education", then so be it. But let's not pretend the state is doing something strange or against its core mission here
by dathinab | 2025-04-17 12:48:35+00:00
The main issue here is:

- in rust one semantic compilation unit is one crate

- in C one semantic compilation unit is one file

There are quite a bunch of benefits in the rust approach, but also drawbacks, like huge projects have to be split into multiple workspaces to maximize parallel building.

Oversimplified the codegen-units setting tells the compiler into how many parts the compiler is allowed to split the a single semantic code gen unit.

Now it still seems strange (as in it looks like a performance bug) that most times rust was stuck in just one threat (instead of e.g. 8).
by yhkucuk | 2025-04-17 12:49:05+00:00
Ah yes, the classic “society collapses because a TLS cert expired” scenario. I love that one.

To be fair, you’re not wrong -root CAs, DNS, cloud infra… we’ve basically built the modern world on top of a Jenga tower made of YAML files and third-party APIs. And yeah, a well-coordinated takedown of a few dozen orgs could make things very spicy.

But let’s not pretend it’s that easy. Most critical systems have failovers, redundancy, and monitoring. Banks aren’t going to fold just because Let’s Encrypt has a bad day. (Unless you’re Silicon Valley Bank… then maybe.)

Still, the scary part isn’t a single failure. It’s that all our “redundancy” loops back to like 50 companies we pray don’t screw up at the same time. It’s like putting all your backups on the same USB stick… and then losing it.

So yeah - not doomsday just yet, but definitely not great. Maybe worth more than zero attention.
Does anyone have a recent review of formation.dev?
by keytrail | 2025-04-17 12:49:09+00:00
Hey everyone, I'm an engineer with around ~3 years doing fullstack dev at a pretty well known tech consulting firm. I've gotten a lot of experience in generative ai and have been hoping to use that to break into a higher paying role at a more well known tech company. The problem is I have been struggling with interview prep as I find it's hard to grind leetcode alone.

This company called formation.dev reached out on linkedin and they seem like the perfect fit but the cost is insane, 2.5k monthly or 5k + RSA for lifetime. I found mostly positive reviews on reddit but hard to tell if they were paid for or not.

Has anyone used or heard of them?
by nerdjon | 2025-04-17 12:49:16+00:00
I can't read the article so I don't know if this is answered, but my real question is the price. Is it reasonable for the average person or is this for the rich only.

More options are great, but not if most people that need it can't afford it.

It is fascinating how quickly this space has evolved. Seems incredibly quick for medicine. That isn't a criticism, just things seem to generally move very slow.
by vladimirralev | 2025-04-17 12:49:23+00:00
Dark forest theory is about very advanced civilisations not engaging with anything around them. Limited resources are not an issue in this case. You can easily just do everything in parallel with AI or other automated control system, using stars as energy sources, including spawning whole decoy civilisations at different stages of development. Because we see so many stars we know nobody is running out of energy yet.
by ethagknight | 2025-04-17 12:49:58+00:00
The whole discussion revolves around credentialing and certification that you actually learned the stuff you claim to have learned, that you jumped through the hoops required by a given college system whose reputation you want to lever into a career.

If you just wanna learn stuff online, dive in and watch YouTube or any of the variety of online educstional services, but in reality you want a certification that says you did the work, and maybe the actual transfer of knowledge is secondary. We shouldn’t pretend that credentials should be handed out for watching YouTube videos and filling out tests with Google searches, group chats sharing answers, or now, AI.

The goal of any credentialing system shouldn’t be to lower the bar as low as possible; you just devalue the whole system. There are several major institutions, formerly reputable, that many will not hire job prospects from.

In other words… Community college should be a bit of a grind, one that produces students who are far more knowledgeable than when they started the program.
by pmarreck | 2025-04-17 12:50:08+00:00
Fair enough, but (speaking as a web developer), running a stack locally on Apple Silicon (especially if it has any "interesting" dependencies such as compiled Rust/C libs and whatnot) and expecting the same stack to run identically in the cloud on x64 can still expose differential behavior

At the very least, I could test mock deploys from the Apple Silicon side to the x64 VM running locally (over loopback) as an extra data point

I don't actually use it for this use-case but now that I'm thinking about it, I might try, because this seems useful
by airstrike | 2025-04-17 12:50:27+00:00
halloy now supports image embeds too, which is awesome given that has become "table-stakes" with how prevalent Discord is

And it's time for my biweekly shoutout to iced, the wonderful GUI library used by halloy

https://github.com/squidowl/halloy

https://github.com/iced-rs/iced
by jjice | 2025-04-17 12:51:08+00:00
Aside from the privacy nightmare, what about someone who is 18 and just doesn't have the traditional adult facial features? Same thing for someone who's 15 and hit puberty early? I can imagine that on the edges, it becomes really hard to discern.

If they get it wrong, are you locked out? Do you have to send an image of your ID? So many questions. Not a huge fan of these recent UK changes (looking at the Apple E2E situation as well). I understand what they're going for, but I'm not sure this is the best course of action. What do I know though :shrug:.
by kretaceous | 2025-04-17 12:51:22+00:00
Not the point of the article but just two cents about the JS part:

- While not part of the ECMAScript spec, there is a Web API called structuredClone for deep copying objects. It's implemented in major runtimes like Node (17+), Bun and Deno. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Window/stru...

- I've found a total of one use case for Object.freeze until today. Since exported modules are live bindings and are mutable, exporting a global object which is not intended to change during the runtime (e.g. an application wide config) is a bad idea. Exporting the object after wrapping it in Object.freeze can help avoid unnecessary mutations to it.
by FrustratedMonky | 2025-04-17 12:51:26+00:00
As others pointed out.

"Virtue Signaling" is often a term of derision placed from the right onto the left. But is often done just as much on the other side. It's part of the 'right's vocabulary of labels for the left.

I just like to point out all the times when the 'right' take part in "virtue signaling".

Right wing , political or religious, often take part in "virtue signaling". Yet, seem unconscious of it, un-ware of their own biases, because to them they are not 'signaling' they are just speaking 'truth'.

But of course, they are not. "God is real, hence I'm not just 'signaling' when I say it to my fellow believers".
by Molitor5901 | 2025-04-17 12:51:59+00:00
That might not always work. There is a huge issue of Lyft and Uber drivers showing up the first day, passing all the background checks, etc. then selling their account to someone else to take their place. Maybe better is to show up first day, and to do random ID checks throughout the semester. It feels.. unfriendly and accusatory to do that but I'm not sure of the alternative...

.. but if we wanted to be a little Orwellian.. put cameras and facial recognition in the classrooms to take automatic attendance and to identify students who should not be there, or who may be missing for prolonged absences. That'll go over really well....
by ookdatnog | 2025-04-17 12:52:16+00:00
The AI's job as described in this article is two-fold:

- The relatively trivial task of extracting textual data from the screen.

- The task of obfuscating that they're publishing other people's work as their own.

When I clicked the article I assumed they'd try to automatically construct analysis of the game by using AI to analyze frames of the game, but that's not what they are doing. They are extracting some trivial information from the frames, and then they process the audio of the referee mic and commentary.

In other words, the analysis has already been done by humans and they just want to re-publish this analysis as their own, without paying money for it. So they run it through an AI because in today's legal environment this seems to completely exempt you from copyright infringement or plagiarism laws.
by Andrew_nenakhov | 2025-04-17 12:52:16+00:00
I owned quite a number of pets in my life, so I don't need explaining that they do have some kind of relatively high-order intelligence that allows them to do quite a lot of things. Yet, this is clear that no kind of animal on Earth but us exhibits potential to have capabilities to spread themeselves beyond home planet once it becomes uninhabitable. Moreover, signs show that once a type of species finds their niche, their intelligence levels off and does not tend to increase. In other words, modern crocodiles are no smarter than crocs from 10 millions of years ago, because they are doing mostly fine as they are.
by epolanski | 2025-04-17 12:52:50+00:00
I'm unironically convinced that vBulletin forums are to date the highest form of discussing many topics online.

Not only they are alive and the best resource for many things (modding, hardware, radio, photography, specific car brands) but I swear 99% of work-related discussions would benefit from having a forum as their central hub, instead of the split of slack/teams/jira/mails/videocalls.
by nerdjon | 2025-04-17 12:53:00+00:00
All medication is choosing between the effects of what you are treating the the side effects of the medication.

For a lot of people it isn't that easy. There is a reason weight loss surgery has been a thing for a long time. I could easily see using this as a jumping off point along with making choices about what you eat and increased exercise.

There is a psychological aspect to this, you start making those changes along with something like this so you start seeing the changes you are hoping for and feeling better so you keep with it.
by edent | 2025-04-17 12:53:12+00:00
The author isn't asserting that they feel this way. They are saying that the world doesn't see them as technical.

And it is demonstrably true. Go to any (technical) conference and see how even the most technical people are denigrated or dismissed if they don't fit into the preconceived notions of the audience.

Or, to simplify, https://xkcd.com/385/
by Kye | 2025-04-17 12:53:53+00:00
It seems to be about the way "technical" and "non-technical" are thrown around with implicit assumptions in conversations in places like this as hard categories. You're either technical, or what are you doing here? Are you lost? The door is over there.

A key paragraph:

>> "This is because Technical is a structural designation that operates outside of any actual problem-solving you and I are doing together. Being Technical is about being legitimate. Or to put it more simply: it’s because you are Technical that I can’t be. We have created the identities this way. A person with a PhD in human things and who deals in human problems and human solutions cannot ever be Technical no matter how dense her statistics are, how many conferences she speaks at, and how comprehensively she has given examples of generating outcomes that are often beyond engineering to generate (change over time; impacts on humans; making legible even an imperfect approximation of just one single emotion). These things can be useful, interesting, valuable, heartrending, inspiring and memorable to tech, but they cannot be legitimate."

I'm still reading but it does seem to be about gatekeeping while avoiding any language that would set off a Technical person.
by guerrilla | 2025-04-17 12:53:59+00:00
It's insane how arrogant people can be about this. You have not accounted for all of the variables and that is blatantly obvious. The phenomenon is well known and there are multi-variable equations for it, many different models. One popular model is that NEET can decrease below the caloric deficit, meaning you still gain weight by becoming subconsciously lazier despite everything feeling equally difficult subjectively. There are several other more advanced models adding other variables, some depending on insulin sensitivity, for example. Anyway, no physics is broken, laymen are just naive to the complexity abd adaptability of biology.
Show HN: Chrome extension to show when YouTube video ends at chosen speed
by liyche | 2025-04-17 12:54:09+00:00
I watch a lot of YouTube for learning and wanted a faster way to estimate how long a video would take at different playback speeds. Mental math wasn’t cutting it, so I built this Chrome extension.

It overlays a small info box on YouTube videos (including embedded ones) that shows:

- Time you'll save (or add) compared to 1x speed - Adjusted time remaining based on current speed - Percentage watched - Works on Shorts too

It also comes with a speed controller that supports:

- Speeds up to 16x - Bigger or finer increments (e.g. 0.1) - Default startup speed - 1-click toggle between 1x and current speed - Remembers last used speed

No tracking, no analytics. Built this for myself but figured others might find it useful.

Chrome Web Store: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/djphelnkeombgogeoph...

Happy to answer any questions or hear suggestions.
by xnorswap | 2025-04-17 12:54:31+00:00
I've been thinking some more about this, and it occurred to me that you'd want to encode sentence boundaries as a pseudo-word in the n-tuples.

I then realised that "[period] <word>" would likely dominate most common pairs, and that a lot of time could be saved by simply recording the first word of sentences as their own vector set, in addition but separate to the regular word vector.

Whether this would be a stronger or weaker signal per-vector-space than the tail of words in the regular common-words vector I don't know.
by roenxi | 2025-04-17 12:55:13+00:00
Also, key point in the framing, when was it decided that Discord supposed to be the one enforcing this? A pop-up saying "you really should be 18+" is one thing, but this sounds like a genuine effort to lock out young people. Neither Discord nor a government ratings agency should be taking final responsibility for how children get bought up, that seems like something parents should be responsible for.

This is over-reach. Both in the UK and Australia.