MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Aurornis | 2025-04-07 01:11:45+00:00
No, you don’t. The stock market isn’t something that happens in isolation. It’s going down because the economic future is looking very bad.

So if it did crash to 2018 levels, you’d get some cheap stocks but the world would be on fire. The companies would be cheap because their future would be bleak. Under extreme tariff regimes, their competition would come from companies outside the country.
by adamiscool8 | 2025-04-07 01:12:09+00:00
I don't think this reflects a flaw in LLM's at all. It is true that Paul Newman is not "known for" having alcohol problems. Paul Newman is known for acting, and salad dressing. Paul Newman has been "known to" have had alcohol problems, which formed as a question correctly one-shots accurate results for me across a few common LLMs. Someone like Betty Ford could be "known for" having alcohol problems. Paul Newman's alcohol problems are relatively specialized knowledge.
by never_inline | 2025-04-07 01:12:22+00:00
A. Implement guardrails (like already done against prompt injection).

Invariant blog post mentions this:

> Conclusion: Agents require extensive, highly-contextual guardrailing and security solutions

> As one of our core missions at Invariant, we absolutely cannot stress enough how important it is to rely on extensive guardrailing with AI models and their actions. We come to this conclusion repeatedly, as part of our research and engineering work on agentic systems. The MCP ecosystem is no exception to this rule. Security must be implemented end-to-end, including not only the tool descriptions but also the data that is being passed to and from the AI model.

B. Version the tool descriptions so that they can be pinned and do not change (same way we do for libraries and APIs).

C. Maybe in future, LLMs can implement some sort of "instruction namespacing" - where the developer would be able to say any instruction in this prompt is only applicable when doing X, Y, Z.
by jodrellblank | 2025-04-07 01:12:29+00:00
Skyscrapers: trees, mountains, cliffs, caves in mountainsides, termite mounds, humans knew things could go high, the Colosseum was built two thousand years ago as a huge multi-storey building.

Rocket ships: volcanic eruptions show heat and explosive outbursts can fling things high, gunpowder and cannons, bellows showing air moves things.

Agriculture: forests, plains, jungle, desert oases, humans knew plants grew from seeds, grew with rain, grew near water, and grew where animals trampled them into the ground.

We need a list of all atempted ideas, all inventions and patents that were ever tried or conceived, and then we see how inventions are the same random permutations on ideas with Darwinian style survivorship as everything else; there were steel boats with multiple levels in them before skyscrapers; is the idea of a tall steel building really so magical when there were over a billion people on Earth in 1800 who could have come up with it?
by SpicyLemonZest | 2025-04-07 01:12:33+00:00
Capitulate on what? Trump's senior trade advisor was on TV earlier today saying that the tariffs are not subject to negotiation and seemingly rejecting Vietnam's offer to zero out all their tariffs on the US. Trump himself has repeatedly stated that he thinks tariffs are good for the US and plans to keep them as long as there are trade deficits. Is there any reason to believe that there's some set of policy concessions the EU could make tomorrow that would convince the Trump administration to drop tariffs?
by Taek | 2025-04-07 01:12:47+00:00
Advertising is a parasitic force on society. It sucks up your attention with a willful intention to change your purchasing behaviour, often knowing that the new behavior is worse for you.

If ads were merely about being informative, they would be boring. But ads want to manipulate, so they have to be flashy and appeal to your emotions.

They pollute your mental headspace, and have no place in a healthy society.

Let's ban billboards. And then let's follow that up with a general purpose ban on paid advertisement.
by Fricken | 2025-04-07 01:12:49+00:00
COINTELPRO, beginning in the late 1950s, would insert undercover agents into various political organizations they deemed dangerous. On several ocassions the agents were exposed by the members of these various organizations, and initially this was thought to be a bad thing. What COINTELPRO noticed however, was that the revelation that an undercover agent had infiltrated the group was so damaging to group cohesiveness and trust that the targeted organization would typically break up anyhow. From then on, it became a strategy, and undercover agents would pick the right time to implicate themselves as imposters.

With Gen AI I guess this process of trust destruction, for artist communities at least, has been fully automated. I think we can ruin a lot more than just artist communities as things develop.
by Terr_ | 2025-04-07 01:13:35+00:00
I believe there's a widespread confusion between a fictional character that is described as a AI assistant, versus the actual algorithm building the play-story which humans imagine the character from. An illusion actively promoted by companies seeking investment and hype.

AcmeAssistant is "helpful" and "clever" in the same way that Vampire Count Dracula is "brooding" and "immortal".
by josephg | 2025-04-07 01:14:05+00:00
Huh - I didn't know that existed. Its not supported in firefox or IE11 though - and probably will never be.

(IE11 probably isn't super relevant now - but it was almost certainly more relevant when that tracking code was written. You could use feature detection - but its much easier to just use their hacky javascript everywhere instead.)

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/HTMLAnchorE...

https://caniuse.com/ping
by tejohnso | 2025-04-07 01:14:15+00:00
First Lotus Domino gig in 1998 and worked with it for several years until SharePoint started competing in the same space and pushing out Domino seats. Interest in Domino was diminishing quickly, and the companies that were using it were trying to get rid of it. I miss the excitement of reading through the red books, and new issues of the yellow technical books that would come out for it.
by tialaramex | 2025-04-07 01:14:31+00:00
I think sum types in general and Option<T> in particular is nicer. But the reason C# has nullability isn't that they disagree with me, it's that fundamentally the CLR has the same model as Java, all these types can be null, even though in the modern C# language you can say "No, not null that's never OK" at runtime on the CLR too bad maybe it's null.

For example if I write a C# function which takes a Goose, specifically a Goose, not a Goose? or similar - well, too bad the CLR says my C# function can be called by this obsolete BASIC code which has no idea what a Goose is, but it's OK because it passed null. If my code can't cope with a null? Too bad, runtime exception.

In real C# apps written by an in-house team this isn't an issue, Ollie may not be the world's best programmer but he's not going to figure out how to explicity call this API with a null, he's going to be stopped by the C# compiler diagnostic saying it needs a Goose, and worst case he says "Hey tialaramex, why do I need a Goose?". But if you make stuff that's used by people you've never met it can be an issue.
by Guthur | 2025-04-07 01:14:38+00:00
Because of cult like belief structures growing up around rust, it's clear as day for us on the outside, I see it from the evangelists in the company I work for "rust is faster and safer to develop with when compared to c++", I'm no c++ fan but it's obviously nonsense.

I feel people took the comparison of rust to c and extrapolated to c++ which is blatantly disingenuous.
by philistine | 2025-04-07 01:15:32+00:00
And there's always this amorphous blob of manufacturing jobs coming back being discussed. While the last time the US was a manufacturing powerhouse, things were made completely differently. The US can't just return to manufacturing, because manufacturing is fundamentally different from what it was in the 80s. All the knowledge is lost, and all the knowledge that was lost was already incompatible.
by tombert | 2025-04-07 01:16:48+00:00
Billboards are obnoxious, ugly, and as the article pointed out, have basically no oversight from city design boards, meaning that they're not under any obligation to look nice.

In fact, there's almost a reverse incentive; if it clashes with the rest of the city's aesthetic, you're much more likely to notice it.

I don't really see how it's hurting "free speech" to restrict billboards. No one is suggesting we regulate the speech, no one is telling these companies what to say, we just don't want big ugly billboards blasting in our face and making our cities look terrible.

You're of course free to disagree with this, but you almost certainly draw the line somewhere. If I went and dumped a bunch of trash and feces into the middle of the street every day, you probably wouldn't be outraged when I eventually get a ticket, and I doubt that making a "free speech" argument would get me out of that fine, even if I explained the artistic merit of me doing that.
by wormius | 2025-04-07 01:17:35+00:00
Taking the Supreme Court argument that Property = Speech I see. More money = More volume. There is no equality of "free" speech. Or rather, the speech if free, but the rich get to amplify their voice over the poor. You can say what you want if you're poor, but only if you're rich can you demand people listen to you without recompense or the right to block, and if you DO want to block you're "bad" and "anti-speech". (See Elon's how dare anyone have the right to block).

Driving is a captive audience, I don't have the option to "close my eyes/plug my ears" to avoid your "free speech" but with free speech comes the right to avoid hearing your bullshit. I can avoid buying a book, I can turn the channel on the radio, but a billboard doesn't offer that "right" to be free FROM your bullshit speech. There's more obligation on billboards in that regards, and it's kinda horseshit that you're allowed to hold me captive because you have enough money to spend on a campaign (whether it's commercial, political, religious IDGAF)

Wish "freespeechers" could understand this. I'm not saying we should just ban everything, and I'm not even sure I agree with a billboard ban (I would have signed up 25 years ago on that, adbusters reading chud that I was). I'm just saying it's really pathetic that people cry "free speech" when there are two things at play and the SCOTUS did a disservice on differentation between amplitude of property vs signal of speech.
by mrexroad | 2025-04-07 01:18:05+00:00
I have ~2.5TB of photos in iCloud, via Apple Photos. Excluding the various sized previews, I doubt many originals have been accessed in quite a while. I also have about 1TB Lightroom library archived to a different service; representing countless hours of photo processing work spanning over a decade. Haven’t touched that one in years. Neither are crap. (Yes, both have other backups and, yes, I’ve probably forgotten to sync one of them).
by capitainenemo | 2025-04-07 01:18:39+00:00
From the article. "A great part of discussion in comments on the original thread I've made was about soldiers on the battlefield and a heavy usage of devices close to the line of contact. Android users might turn off Wi-Fi and Bluetooth and even remove their SIM card, thinking they’ve minimized their radio footprint. But NFC often remains active by default — and since most people assume it only matters within arm’s reach, they don’t bother disabling it."
by conductr | 2025-04-07 01:18:54+00:00
Why always jump to the extreme that will have almost zero political chance of winning. Billboards sound like a feasible incremental step in a good direction. Start there, everyone sees tangible improvements and is primed to make a bigger leap. Killing an entire industry as step one, is just simply never going to happen, dream on.

As a lot of HN is US based, I’ll just say in our divided bipartisanship state it’s a real shame we’ve forgotten that incremental improvements is always an option and I’d argue usually the best kind.
by ajross | 2025-04-07 01:19:23+00:00
> In winter, I lose 5-10% of my battery a day due to heating my battery.

Exactly! That sounds like a drawback when you state it like that, but what it actually means is that this magic battery doodad needs to provide 90-95% of the performance of its existing, mature competitor (assuming no other drawbacks) just to be break-even in the market. You don't disrupt markets with numbers like that.
by moefh | 2025-04-07 01:19:51+00:00
Ah, I understand you now, you're right.

I remember there was a lot of confusion when llvm started removing stores to read-only memory[1], some people got angry because it broke some kernel code (that only worked because being in a kernel the memory page wasn't actually marked as read-only) and thought it would break any code that cast away a `const`, which is very common and valid as long as it was gratuitously `const`, as you say.

[1] https://releases.llvm.org/9.0.0/docs/ReleaseNotes.html#notew...
by edwardog | 2025-04-07 01:20:28+00:00
Yes, still relevant. The same can be accomplished with other tools, but it will probably be more difficult.

The idea of Glamorous Toolkit is that it’s a collection of tools you use to solve software problems by making little explanatory tools. You might start out with some bigger problem like “I need to make this service fast”, come up with a question like “what does the flow of data I care about look like through the service?” and then try to answer that question by making tools that could analyze/visualize logging output or a stack trace or whatever makes sense in your software’s context.

The technique of “making little tools that explain to help answer a question” is Moldable Development, similar to how Test Driven Development is “make a failing big feature test loop, write little tests and make them pass until the big one passes”.

You can make little tools to explain away questions you have while you’re working with plugins or shell scripts or whatever you’re comfortable with and that’s “Moldable Development”. The Glamorous Toolkit just happens to be a nice system of tools that make it easy to make more little tools to help explain away problems.

Hope that helps! Lmk if you want to see some examples.

Source and bias: I worked closely with the developers before I had to take a break from work and computer stuff.
by thrdbndndn | 2025-04-07 01:20:48+00:00
As a relatively new Linux user, I often find the "versioning" of bundled system utilities also to be a bit of a mess, for lack of a better word.

A classic example, at least from my experience, is `unzip`. On two of my servers (one running Debian and the other an older Ubuntu), neither of their bundled `unzip` versions can handle AES-256 encrypted ZIP files. But apparently, according to some Stack Overflow posts, some distributions have updated theirs to support it.

So here is what I ran into:

1. I couldn't easily find an "updated" version of `unzip`, even though I assume it exists and is open source.

2. To make things more confusing, they all claim to be "version 6.00", even though they obviously behave differently.

3. Even if I did find the right version, I'm not sure if replacing the system-bundled one is safe or a good idea.

So the end result is that some developer out there (probably volunteering their time) added a great feature to a widely used utility, and yet I still can’t use it. So in a sense, being a core system utility makes `unzip` harder to update than if it were just a third-party tool.

I get that it's probably just as bad if not worse on Windows or macOS when it comes to system utilities. But I honestly expected Linux to handle this kind of thing better.

(Please feel free to correct me if I’ve misunderstood anything or if there’s a better way to approach this.)
by umeshunni | 2025-04-07 01:20:48+00:00
The acronyms in that story led me down the memory lane - In the early 2000s, I worked at Microsoft building the Outlook to Notes connector. The theory was that we could introduce MS Outlook to hardcore Lotus/Domino/Notes shops and that would be a trojan horse to the introduction of Exchange (and its high priced client access licenses).

Reading through the article, it seems like that theory was proven out and along with the awful UI that Notes was, it led to many IBM shops adopting Exchange/Outlook and later SharePoint.

Something odd about Lotus Notes/Domino, and part of the reason for its awful UI, is that everything is a database (the NSF mentioned in the article). All UI is a view on that database. Viewing an email? That's just view on a item in the database. Sending an email? That's just adding a row into the 'Outbox' table. The entire product was built with this paradigm at the center of it all.
by upofadown | 2025-04-07 01:21:10+00:00
You can just send your PGP key to your correspondents attached to an email. There is even a mime type for it. There is no need for any public broadcasting.

The big problem is verifying identities. The usability of that is an unsolved problem that plagues encrypted messaging of all kinds. So sure, signing PGP keys as a form of introduction is awkward, but at least it is possible. How do you vouch for, say, a Signal user?
by josephg | 2025-04-07 01:21:21+00:00
How? People would still use their money to buy things. A lot of advertising is adversarial. If demand stays the same but neither you nor your competitors can advertise your products, everyone makes more money.

Of course, there are lots of products where people don't know they would benefit from the product - or don't think of it. For example, life insurance, business loans, university education, movie releases, etc. In those cases, arguably the advertising is creating a positive for society. (Since its resulting in a need being addressed that wouldn't be addressed otherwise.)
by orionblastar | 2025-04-07 01:22:02+00:00
Domino phased out when IBM OS/2 phased out. The old greybeards who did OS/2 and Domino died or retired—the same with COBOL and mainframes.

OS/2 is still made, you can find out more about it here: https://www.arcanoae.com/about/

IBM's latest updates on Domino: https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/dsm?topic=lotus-domino It looks like Domino is still supported.

I wrote apps in the 1990s using ASP and VBScript and Javascript and ActiveX. We didn't use Domino.
by hintymad | 2025-04-07 01:22:31+00:00
> Just don't see how this materializes in any meaningful timeframe in the United States — if it's even doable at all.

Many people, especially successful business people, believe this. And this both saddens me and puzzles me. I'm not sure if people still remember, China was dirt poor even in the 1990s. America's manufacturing prowess was the envy of the entire nation. They produced mostly low-end crappy stuff even in the early 2000s. They didn't have "talent density". Instead, their media kept telling people how professional and efficient the American workers were and how efficient the American systems were. I still remember people widely criticized the Chinese government for imposing too many regulations (too many stamps in local terms). By the way, I think that's the right attitude: acknowledge the problems and seek solutions, but that's a different topic. It was Japanese, Taiwanese, Hongkong people, and westerners who brought in investment, talent, and know-hows to China to bootstrap their now-great manufacturing industry. That took only 20 years or less. And now we as Americans have to accept that we can never bring out manufacturing back? What kind of defeatism is that?

Now let's say that Americans and systems are indeed inferior to China's (I really don't believe that), what would happen? We keep deindustrializing the nation? Then what if a war breaks out? Who's going to produce all the weapons and cars and battleships and what not? China? And if we don't produce anything, why in the world would other countries use our services? Are they that stupid that they don't want to climb up the value chain? Case in point, we had this $20K toilet for our air force not because of corruption but because we had to manufacture them in the US! Our cost of manufacturing artillery shell is 10X of that by Russia. Russia! One of the most corrupted countries in the world, yet we still can't be cheaper than them?? It would cost us billions to make a battleship when it would cost China at most hundreds of millions because even a customized screw can be 10X or 100X more expensive if we don't use China's output. Oh, did I mention that our killer drones cost $90K a piece while Chinese drone of better spec would cost only a few thousands?

So, what I really don't get is, how can we believe that we can be prosperous and secure without a robust manufacturing sector. Note I'm not saying that the US must have everything. We can certainly share the supply chains with our allies, but Europe has even worse deindustrialization than us.
by meta_ai_x | 2025-04-07 01:23:17+00:00
Gemini 2.5 Pro

Yes, Paul Newman was known for being a heavy drinker, particularly of beer. 1 He acknowledged his high consumption levels himself. 1. Review: Paul Newman memoir stuns with brutal honesty - AP News

apnews.com

While he maintained an incredibly successful career and public life, accounts and biographies note his significant alcohol intake, often describing it as a functional habit rather than debilitating alcoholism, although the distinction can be debated. He reportedly cut back significantly in his later years.
by vharuck | 2025-04-07 01:23:53+00:00
We absolve government officials and agents of legal liability for almost every act they do as part of their job, but that's under the assumption that (1) fear of prosecution would paralyze every decision, and (2) the government acts in good faith. Previously, this was taken to be an impenetrable defense. A government too frightened to do anything is useless. And it takes a lot to prove the existence of malice and the absence of desire to help the country.

But I can't see any reason besides malice, or cruel disregard for human rights, behind continually ignoring the usual legal process when they'd already been reminded what it was and that they should stop violating it. The executive staff must have explicitly worded their demands so that the agents in the field circumvented this man's due process. I refuse to believe everyone in the chain was identically derelict in their duties when passing along commands. There was no good faith, and every decision maker behind this kidnapping should be given their own days in court.

As for the paralysis of fear, this should be like accepting a bribe: we want officials to fear prosecution.
by chiggsy | 2025-04-07 01:25:30+00:00
> Having to deal with senior managers has always been the most unsavory part of my job, because when it comes to technology, these managers exist on a whole other level of stupid vanity and narcissistic pursuit of their own selfish agendas.

Whoever sent this dude made a mistake. People who don't share your worldview need to be persuaded, not insulted! Some dude stomps in, thinks all the snaps in the cloud are crap, things the big bosses are stupid for not instantly deleting the pictures they saved into the cloud.... and then what? Download Lisp? Thought we got over this, pal.

WORSE IS BETTER.

P.S. do not erase our porn. WORSE IS BETTER.
by Zigurd | 2025-04-07 01:25:31+00:00
There's at least a little bit of strawman-ing going on here.

The regulators are not insisting that blue checkmarks mean what they've always meant. Secondly xitter hasn't been transparent about changes to blue checkmarks. There was a long period of time when blue checkmarks were given or even forced upon credible sources at Elon's whim while he sold them to hucksters and frauds. Even if blue checkmarks had been that debased throughout their existence, there's still plenty of basis for regulators to find that they are deceptive.