MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-04-07 20:59:21+00:00
> a difference between genocide and war

It's frankly unclear to me that there is. The definition of genocide seems to have expanded from its historical roots, and I haven't seen the pro-Palestinian faction in America make a credible claim that Israel is fighting this war materially differently from how every other war has been fought in the past decades by each of the U.S., Russia and China. I think the war should stop. But because war is horrible, not because it's in a special moral bucket.

But! I haven't done extensive research on this. So I'm really not claiming to know one way or another, just that I've put the whole thing into the same bucket as the Uyghurs, Sudan, Eritrea, North Korea and the other horrific places on the planet that I don't have much control over.

> calling it your “pet” war shows you aren’t serious

I mean, yes. I'm also about as serious about it as these folks were. Namely, I haven't had much of a tangible effect on either war for years. It's not a pet war if you do something effective about it.

(I did help with getting some...erm...stuff into Ukraine in 2023, but that's two years ago. I'll also dare to say that's a hell of a lot more I did for that war than someone mouthing off at a conference has done.)
by mediaman | 2025-04-07 20:59:34+00:00
Your comment seems to suggest that you don't see any difference between "capital efficiency" and "having capital."

The terms mean very different things. Capital efficiency is measured by metrics such as the cash conversion cycle. It's possible to design a business model in such a way that you have negative cash conversion cycles, which cause you to actually generate cash as a function of growth (even when unprofitable by GAAP!), which is the opposite of most VC funded businesses whose burn rate is roughly a function of their growth rate.
by johnnyanmac | 2025-04-07 20:59:48+00:00
>prison guards unions advocating for harsher laws so that prisons stay full.

People in America always vote in attorneys who are "hard on crime though". I simply see that as unchecked reflection of the people's will. To double down on it, my state had a recent proposition rejected that would have addressed some prisoners rights regarding treatment and compensation. The bluest state you can imagine and we still can't properly say that prisoners aren't slaves.

The only people America trusts less than authority is their own people, apparently. If they vote in people who want to lock more people up instead of focusing on rehabilitating: well, that's they get what they vote for, huh?
by dfabulich | 2025-04-07 21:00:29+00:00
> A React application can be thought of as modeling a state machine. Each render takes a state and produces the UI for that state. This is the famous UI = f(state) mental model of React. But, for complex applications, formally enumerating a transition table is often not feasible. When the number of possible states is not finite, a table will not suffice and we must instead define a mapping: a conceptual function which takes in a state and returns the set of valid transitions for that state.

Not really, though. While you can model any program as a state machine, doing so typically adds nothing to your understanding of the program.

State-machine diagrams are especially useless. A diagram is only useful if it has about a dozen things in it, maybe two dozen, maximum. But that doesn't mean you can model a dozen states in a state-machine diagram; in these diagrams, the transitions, the arrows between the states, are at least as important as the states themselves. So the diagrams are useless when the number of states + the number of transitions between them are greater than a few dozen. Typically that means state diagrams are only with a handful of states with a few transitions hanging off of each.

But, if your problem is simple enough that you can represent it with a handful of states with two or three transitions each, then you have a very trivial problem, so trivial that the state-machine diagram likely added nothing at all to your understanding of it.

This is why no popular UI frameworks actually do model UI as a set of states with transitions. It's easier to model the state diagram as a function and then just forget about the state diagram.

That's what React is all about! A pure function, UI = f(state). It's better than a state diagram.

This article is saying: "Hey, you could think of React, something conceptually simple, as something unnecessarily complicated, instead!" Gee, thanks?
by MomsAVoxell | 2025-04-07 21:01:00+00:00
luarocks is easy to use, once you understand the importance of —-local all-the-things.

Anyway, luarocks is easy to use, and is perfectly easy to integrate into most modern build and distribution tools.

However, Lua is everywhere, so of course: ymmv. Disclaimer: I’ve been using Lua for decades now, its Just Great™ in my opinion.
by xdennis | 2025-04-07 21:01:27+00:00
> Tariffs are going to bring in huge amounts of money. Which in turn can and should result in lowered taxes.

Tariffs are taxes. Are you really going to be happy if you pay less in taxes but make up for it by paying tariffs?

But I wouldn't be so quick to rejoice. During Trump's previous term much of the money collected was given to farmers as subsidies for their losses from the counter tariffs.
by szvsw | 2025-04-07 21:01:47+00:00
As someone who wrote my first line of code in approx 2010 and used git & GH for the first time in… 2013? it kind of amazes me to remember that Git is only 20 years old. GitHub for instance doesn’t seem surprising to me that is <20 years old, but `git` not existing before 2005 somehow always feels shocking to me. Obviously there were other alternatives (to some extent) for version control, but git just has the feeling of a tool that is timeless and so ingrained in the culture that it is hard to imagine (for me) the idea of people being software developers in the post-mainframe age without it. It feels like something that would have been born in the same era as Vim, SSH, etc (ie early 90s). This is obviously just because from the perspective of my programming consciousness beginning, it was so mature and entrenched already, but still.

I’ve never used other source control options besides git, and I sometimes wonder if I ever will!
by rvz | 2025-04-07 21:01:55+00:00
Most of big tech have defense contracts with the government and the government uses that technology for their own objectives.

If you are working at the likes of Microsoft without that knowledge and disagree with the way those technologies are used by governments, maybe you should not be working for them at all, especially if you have "morals", "principles" or "ethics".

There are no angels in big tech. You know that.
by shafyy | 2025-04-07 21:02:07+00:00
Countering the argument that LLMs are just gloriefied probability machines and do not undertand or think with "how do you know humans are not the same" has been the biggest achievement of AI hypemen (and yes, it's mostly men).

Of course, now you can say "how do you know that our brains are not just efficient computers that run LLMs", but I feel like the onus of proof lies on the makers of this claim, not on the other side.

It is very likely that human intelligence is not just autocomplete on crack, given all we know about neuroscience so far.
by steveklabnik | 2025-04-07 21:02:07+00:00
I'm not an expert on this corner of git, but a guess: trailer keys are not unique, that is

Signed-off-by: Alice <alice@example.com> Signed-off-by: Bob <bob@example.com>

is totally fine, but

Change-id: wwyzlyyp Change-id: sopnqzkx

is not.

I've also heard of issues with people copy/pasting commit messages and including bits of trailers they shouldn't have, I believe.
by jmclnx | 2025-04-07 21:02:29+00:00
:)

Professionally, I went from nothing to RCS then to CVS then to git.

In all cases I was the one who insisted on using some kind of source code control in the group I worked with.

Not being an admin, I set up RCS on the server, then later found some other group that allowed us to use their CVS instance. Then when M/S bought github the company got religion and purchased a contract for git.

Getting people to use any kind of SC was a nightmare, this was at a fortune 500 company. When I left, a new hire saw the benefit of SC and took over for me :)

In the old days, loosing source happened a lot, I did not what that to happen when I was working at that company.
by clusterfook | 2025-04-07 21:03:03+00:00
I am not sure, but as a Typescripter, I think I'd find refinement types easier - https://github.com/ucsd-progsys/liquidhaskell

I am not sure if they serve the same purpose or how the venn diagrams overlap on this, but in 2000 I loved the idea of the assersion in Ada, and I love even more the idea the type system can prove your number is between 1 and 10 (etc.).

I reckon it occasionally will catch a bug, but more than that is perfect documentation. I don't want delay to be an int, I want it to be a RateLimitBackoffDelaySeconds which is between >0 and <60, for example.
by brador | 2025-04-07 21:03:16+00:00
Pasting it here:

“I think you are misunderstanding what this tech demo actually is, but I will engage with what I think your gripe is — AI tooling trivializing the skillsets of programmers, artists, and designers.

My first games involved hand assembling machine code and turning graph paper characters into hex digits. Software progress has made that work as irrelevant as chariot wheel maintenance.

Building power tools is central to all the progress in computers.

Game engines have radically expanded the range of people involved in game dev, even as they deemphasized the importance of much of my beloved system engineering.

AI tools will allow the best to reach even greater heights, while enabling smaller teams to accomplish more, and bring in some completely new creator demographics.

Yes, we will get to a world where you can get an interactive game (or novel, or movie) out of a prompt, but there will be far better exemplars of the medium still created by dedicated teams of passionate developers.

The world will be vastly wealthier in terms of the content available at any given cost.

Will there be more or less game developer jobs? That is an open question. It could go the way of farming, where labor saving technology allow a tiny fraction of the previous workforce to satisfy everyone, or it could be like social media, where creative entrepreneurship has flourished at many different scales. Regardless, “don’t use power tools because they take people’s jobs” is not a winning strategy.” - John Carmack
by cynicalsecurity | 2025-04-07 21:03:24+00:00
The company cheats by being a tightwad and by conducting an online interview (which have always been prone to cheating or embellishing, and companies perfectly know it) and the candidate cheats by using this opportunity.

I can't stop repeating it, just invite the candidate to your office. That's it, that's how simple the problem is solved.
by dukeofdoom | 2025-04-07 21:03:31+00:00
This is going to be directed at poor people, who can't afford real chocolate. It might taste better than the puke taste of hershey. But replacing Cocoa butter is just the same trend as using food emulsifiers and thickeners, and stabilizers as is done with other foods. Taking out fat and replacing it with substitutes, hasn't really corresponded to people losing weight. It probably won't be good for you.
by aap_ | 2025-04-07 21:04:11+00:00
I have a bunch of KA10 verilog that worked on a DE10-nano in the past, but it's been quite a while and i think i have a bunch of uncommitted stuff lying around as well. The verilog is based on the original schematics and I successfully ran LISP and Spacewar on it. Unfortunately simulating peripherals is always a pain, so the project currently lies dormant. But i'd like to pick it up again at some point. I just really need to rethink my approach how to do this, qsys was maybe not the greatest way to wire up the system.

https://github.com/aap/fpdpga/tree/master/ka10
by mrandish | 2025-04-07 21:04:18+00:00
I have a rather sizable collection of 1980s home computers with over a hundred different models (virtually all of the Ataris, Amigas, Apples, Commodores, Radio Shacks, Sinclairs, Amstrads, Dragons, MSX machines, etc). I started collecting them in the early 90s when most were less than $5 at thrift stores and I'd stopped collecting by the year 2000 because I basically had them all.

Collecting back when they were considered basically worthless junk by most people meant I paid no more than $30 for any one machine and most were actually given to me for free or shipping cost. I do have an Interact but it's one of the few I've never booted up as I never had one back in the day and being so obscure it wasn't one of the computers I lusted after but couldn't afford in the 80s. This article has inspired me to dig it out and fire it up. I heard from someone a few years back that apparently Interacts are quite valuable now due to their rarity (not that I'm in the market to sell any of mine).
by DrillShopper | 2025-04-07 21:04:49+00:00
> The economical fallout would be extensive.

So is the fallout from Trump's new tariffs, yet they still got done.

I don't think the government cares about economic fallout unless it affects billionaires, so you're right, advertising will never be banned because it would cut into the profits of the president's richest and most vocal supporters.
by Tuna-Fish | 2025-04-07 21:04:58+00:00
DNA in the ground has a half-life of ~500 years. After 2000 years, ~6% of the DNA remains. More crucially, there will not be a single complete chromosome left, it's all a jumbled, mixed mess of DNA fragments.

This can be reconstructed, but it requires a much larger sample than normal DNA analysis. (You need to get enough fragments to get a whole genome, with enough overlap everywhere that you can reassemble the pieces.)

The largest problem after that is that the vast majority of DNA in all your samples will not be human DNA, but DNA of the various bacteria that live in the soil. This doesn't ruin the sample, because you can just reconstruct everything and then discard all the things that are not human chromosomes or mitochondrial DNA, but it does greatly increase the workload when compared to a pure human DNA sample.

There are a lot of smaller problems that I am eliding here. But amazingly, all the problems are solvable, and the progress in this field in just the past decade is staggering. We have usable fragments that teach us new things that are >500kyr old, the oldest complete human genome we now have is ~45kyr old, and more recent samples are solving hundred-years-old historical debates, and new ones are done almost daily. We are living in the golden age of archaeogenetics, and many papers published today on it will be cited for a hundred years or more.

... but all the solutions to those problems create a lot more work, and thus a lot more cost than those $500 gene sequencing kits.
by mystraline | 2025-04-07 21:05:08+00:00
> Some people think it's perfectly normal to stretch the truth on a resume, and to lie in an interview.

So marketing works in the company's favor, and not the candidates? Its a tough pill to swallow, but bending the truth and lying seems to be the way folks get jobs now.

Perhaps not lying... But I've thought about the 1pt font white on white mega-tech-list attached to Workday resumes to get past THEIR ai-slop filters. And even had my SO get insta-rejected when whatever AI term wasn't explicitly there.

As a candidate, the market is horrific. Ghost jobs, fake jobs that gather market intelligence, scam jobs, blatantly lying candidates, AI blusters, and more. I can look at the usual places, or even HN. I've even applied to my share of HN jobs without so much as a 'no' as response.

It puts us who actually want to be honest at a pretty severe disadvantage.
by mvdtnz | 2025-04-07 21:05:42+00:00
Every time I delve into a large React codebases (and I have worked on some real monsters) I have a laugh to myself at how badly these guys tie themselves up in knots in order to preserve the supposed simplicity of the state -> UI function. When you invent something as insane as the hooks API in order to maintain purity it's time to step back and consider if you're really on the right track.
by Retric | 2025-04-07 21:06:09+00:00
Semantics and recursion aside. That separation where “ditch into the ocean” is not a listed mitigation for FMEA, but is eventually considered and added to manuals is why I’m saying it’s incomplete.

100% AI systems can be safer than human in the loop systems avoiding suicide by pilot etc, but conversely that means the AI must also deal with extreme edge cases. It’s a subtle but critical nuance.
by pmarreck | 2025-04-07 21:06:11+00:00
Isn't this basically... a Merkle Tree, the underlying storage architecture of things like git and Nix?

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

Except that instead of a GUID, it's just a hash of the binary data itself, which ends up being more useful because it is a natural key and doesn't require storing a separate mapping
by johnnyanmac | 2025-04-07 21:06:54+00:00
What if we just arrested every person who broke every tiny archaic law we can think of? What if we run out of prisons and decide to outsource them to foreign counties? What about this sort of criminal system?

I don't know why we are talking in such extreme what ifs. If you really think the government let's anyone with a pulse in you never applied for a government position. At least not one in a medium-large city. You have a lot of test taking and a process that can take months. Maybe even longer if you need clearance (at that point it's best to go private sector since they'll get you cleared while you work on non-xlearajce stuff).

Yes, there is corruption and nepotism. Can you name a single industry where there isn't? How about we setup more channels to report and hold it accountable instead of using it to dismiss the concept of a government job? We'd all win there.
by Avamander | 2025-04-07 21:07:15+00:00
> I would be happy for them to remove is the portability between providers requirement: it was essentially dead on arrival, is not implemented, and could be done away with.

Well, they actually shouldn't. There are non-EU email providers that show exactly what would happen - customers wouldn't be able to transfer out their email from that service provider. Unlucky if they won't notice that limitation in time.

> The other EU-level regulation that needs to be either removed or completely rethought (since it will clearly not be enforced in a way that makes sense) is the cookie regulation. It was well-intentioned, badly implemented, and the GDPR addresses more of the core problems, it is time to do away with it.

Or simply start handing out fines for malicious compliance.
by pmarreck | 2025-04-07 21:07:45+00:00
yeah, allow me to introduce you to the Nix whitepaper, which is essentially this, and thus worth a read for you:

https://edolstra.github.io/pubs/nspfssd-lisa2004-final.pdf

Another possibly related idea is the language Unison:

https://www.unison-lang.org/
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-04-07 21:08:20+00:00
> We're talking about it, so it seems pretty effective to me!

Talking about an issue is productive if you need to bring awareness to it. There is nobody on the planet who isn't aware that something is happening in Israel and Gaza. And when an issue is this divisive, calling attention to it mobilises both sides. (See polling following the protests at Columbia, for example. Awareness went up. But net support increased more for Israel than Palestine because people just defaulted to their priors.)
by mystified5016 | 2025-04-07 21:08:37+00:00
Tariffs are paid locally, in USD from the US economy to the government. Foreign states do not pay tariffs to the US government, they are paid by the business or entity importing the goods.

So this will not bring in more money. All the tariffs are paid from money that already exists in the domestic US economy.

Furthermore, tariffs are passed to consumers. Transitively this is an increased tax burden on consumers. Our taxes have, in effect, gone up.
by ChrisMarshallNY | 2025-04-07 21:09:24+00:00
It's more than just a file format.

The issue is that companies want control of the demosaicing stage, and the container format is part of that strategy.

If a file format is a corporate proprietary one, then there's no expectation that they should provide services that do not directly benefit them, or that expose internal corporate trade secrets, in service to an open format.

If they have their own format, then they don't have to lose any sleep over stuff that doesn't interest or benefit them.
Show HN: All-in-One Japanese Study Tool with AI + Anki
by dlee6018 | 2025-04-07 21:10:21+00:00
I've been using AI a lot lately to help me study Japanese. I can pick up a bunch of words just from watching anime, but I'm still pretty weak when it comes to speaking and reading characters. I tried using ChatGPT to practice, but it quickly got annoying bouncing between different tools — I couldn’t chat and speak at the same time, and juggling stuff like Anki, dictionaries,etc.

I built this as an all-in-one tool to do this in one place.

Figured there are probably others in the same boat here, so wanted to share it here and see if anyone finds it helpful. Would love any feedback or ideas. Thanks, and hope it helps someone out!
by eikenberry | 2025-04-07 21:10:23+00:00
No, but ignoring their disabilities and saying to just learn to do better is not good enough. It is no different from telling a deaf person to learn to hear with their other sense, it doesn't make sense as their disability is what prevents it. People do need to be able to interact with other people, it just doesn't work like it does with non-neurodivergent people. It takes an effort on both sides. Quit putting it all on the person who cannot do what you want. That is the bigotry.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-04-07 21:10:33+00:00
> might want to look up the definition of sacrifice if you think it's synonymous with self-indulgent. It's literally the opposite.

It's orthogonal to self indulgence; what defines that is the effect. And it's inherently subjective. I'd argue most religious animal sacrifices are self indulgent. Obviously, the believers think otherwise. (Nobody asks the animal.)

In this case, they absolutely made a sacrifice. But the main effect is the fact that they sacrificed something. The sacrifice didn't actually do anything. Contrast that with e.g. putting yourself at risk to save somebody. That is more than performative.
by Anon1096 | 2025-04-07 21:10:54+00:00
You have chosen a very very poor example in calling out Meta Ads. I can assure you that the entire org has a massive magnifying glass over it with insane amounts of data analysis, every % change in revenue is absolutely attributable to exactly what group brought it about whether it be DC hardware, ML teams, or backend infra. It is the lifeblood of Meta with many billions flowing through it of course it isn't just being cowboy'd with random changes that have undefined impact on yoy revenue.
by johnnyanmac | 2025-04-07 21:11:14+00:00
Thars like saying "the reason the best employees are good is that they are paid the most money". You're putting the cart ahead of the horse here.

They are dedicated partially because they can spend their time focused on doing their job and not grinding leet code looking for the next pay bump in 2 years. Those pay scales are very strict in government, and very predictable.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-04-07 21:11:18+00:00
> Support for Palestinians has increased steadily since Israel started it's latest genocide

I never argued otherwise. I'm saying look at the polling immediately after the protests.

Media reporting of atrocities drives down favourability for Israel. Media reporting of the protests drives down favourability for Palestine. It's why, despite favourability for Israel monotonically declining since 2023, its net favourability vis-a-vis Palestine blipped up in '24.