MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by aaron695 | 2025-04-28 05:20:04+00:00
It's been around since 2012 and the best Wikipedia has - "explored using these boxes in the Dominican Republic for three months." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet-in-a-Box

Where is a follow up study 3 years later? Are there any follow up studies [1]?

(I have said in past comments the medical version might work, it failed in the Dominican Republic [1])

One follow up study - [1] https://www.sipa.columbia.edu/sites/default/files/2023-01/In... which is not real positive.

Why does it not work? An idea to think about, physical encyclopedias and university textbooks have been around forever and accessible.

I've worked in schools with 1000's on one ADSL trying to use proxies to cache. I've volunteered for a few years in country on mobile apps for use in very low PPI villages without internet. I'm not coming at this with zero experience.

It's impossible to discuss these things on HN, there is neither the technical or process knowledge here, I could be totally wrong but I have looked hard to disprove myself.

The solution I propose Starlink -> box with billing / access control + terabytes of offline vids/books + fun online games, that an idiot with determination can manage and make a profit or run free and works well in a country where the MPAA doesn't exist.
by throw54644532 | 2025-04-28 05:20:06+00:00
This is becoming even more of a consensus now as in it feels like the tech is somewhat already there, or just about to come out.

As a software professional what makes it more interesting is that the "trick" (reasoning RL in models) that unlocked disruption of the software industry isn't really translating to other knowledge work professions. The disruption of AI is uneven. I'm not seeing in my circles other engineers (e.g. EE's, Construction/Civil, etc), lawyers, finance professionals, anything else get disrupted as significantly as software development.

The respect of the profession has significantly gone down as well. From "wow you do that! that's pretty cool..." to "even my X standard job has a future; what are you planning to do instead?" within a 3 year period. I'm not even in SV, NY or any major tech hubs.
by bigbadfeline | 2025-04-28 05:21:34+00:00
There are a whole lot of propaganda-spreading non-profits with agendas which contribute much less to the public interest compared to Wikipedia. This should be the starting point of this discussion because it's apparent that in this case, the "right" propaganda isn't called out as propaganda.

Wikipedia could be a lot better but it could be a lot worse too - the current pressure tactic can only make matters worse. The key point here is that if Wikipedia cannot be tax free, nobody should be, just remove that as a legal possibility because it can be used to suppress some views and promote others simply by arbitrary definitions of "propaganda".
by reincoder | 2025-04-28 05:21:38+00:00
I appreciate you enjoying the game! I work for IPinfo but initially made it as a sort of meme for our users.

I'm generating random IP addresses on the frontend, then making an call to our free API to validate the "realness" of the IP addresses — mainly to remove bogon IP addresses, non-routable IPs, and IPs from large ASNs (national ISPs, the DoD, car companies, etc.).

Our free API supports 1,000 requests per day from unique IP addresses, so there shouldn't be any issues for low usage. However, if we get more power users who enjoy the game, I’ll switch to our Lite API service (which is also free, https://ipinfo.io/lite) to validate IP addresses, as it supports unlimited requests.

Let me know if you have any feedback for me :) I made it mostly by "vibe coding", I will write a post about the whole process of it.
by dvdhs | 2025-04-28 05:21:52+00:00
Maybe not so much in a perfect world, but in reality it is often the case that some kind of filtering is needed. I work at a place that's fairly competitive to get into -- some positions get upwards of 20-30K applications for one position. Most of the engineering team spends enough time interviewing as is, so often it is, unfortunately, the case that stuff like your degree and what school you went to does materially (negatively) impact your chances. At some point, one must find a way to cut down these numbers. Cannot speak for the average case, though.
by Scrounger | 2025-04-28 05:22:36+00:00
This is a dope idea, nice job!

I would love to see some UI/UX improvements like split view where the map is on the left and the news reading/scrolling happens on the right reading pane instead of on the bottom while horizontally scrolling.

You could even use AI/LLM's to summarize the most important news from each country etc.
by neilwilson | 2025-04-28 05:22:37+00:00
Trust and Verify.

The world has been full of snake oil salesmen since the dawn of time, all with a highly persuasive sob-stories.

If you rely on shortcuts, like anecdotes or 'credentialism' for those who profess to be experts, then you will get rolled over regularly. That's the cost of using shortcuts.

That information may be fraudulent and put forward by this season's Dr Andrew Wakefield has to be factored into any plan for using external sources.
by platevoltage | 2025-04-28 05:23:04+00:00
I feel like I should clarify. I am currently working part time on a contract basis for 3 different companies. I'm also running a small SaaS.

I'm at the point where if there is a tool or technology I need to learn to solve a specific problem, I can do that in a reasonable time amount of time.

My post was to see if getting a degree is worth it in an age where they are becoming more important to get past the recruiter than they were 5+ years ago.
by pacmansyyu | 2025-04-28 05:23:09+00:00
I'm working on Damon[1], a Nomad Events stream operator that automates cluster operations and eliminates repetitive DevOps tasks. It's a lightweight Go binary that monitors the Nomad events stream and triggers actions based on configurable providers.

A few examples of what it can currently do:

- Automated data backup: Listens for Nomad job events and spawns auxiliary jobs to back up data from services like PostgreSQL or Redis to your storage backend based on job meta tags. The provider for this is not limited to backups, as it allows users to define their custom job and ACL templates, and expected tags. So it can potentially run anything based on the job registration and de-registration events.

- Cross-namespace service discovery: Provides a lightweight DNS server that acts as a single source of truth for services across all namespaces, solving Nomad's limitation of namespace-bound services. Works as a drop-in resolver for HAProxy, Nginx, etc.

- Event-driven task execution: Allows defining custom actions triggered by specific Nomad events; perfect for file transfers, notifications, or kicking off dependent processes without manual intervention. This provider takes in a user-defined shell script and executes it as a nomad job based on any nomad event trigger the user defines in the configuration.

Damon uses a provider-based architecture, making it extensible for different use cases. You can define your own providers with custom tags, job templates, and event triggers. There's also go-plugin support (though not recommended for production) for runtime extension.

I built this to eliminate the mundane operational tasks our team kept putting off. It's already saving us significant time and reducing gruntwork in our clusters.

Check out the repository[1] if you're interested in automating your Nomad operations. I'd love to hear your thoughts or answer any questions about implementation or potential use cases!

[1]: https://github.com/Thunderbottom/damon
by toomuchtodo | 2025-04-28 05:23:31+00:00
We already require breathalyzer interlocks be installed for habitual DUI drivers in a majority of states. This is an extension of that same legal principle. Road access is a privilege (as evidenced by the requirement to have a driver’s license and vehicle tags).

https://www.ncsl.org/transportation/state-ignition-interlock...
by ganterich | 2025-04-28 05:23:40+00:00
I aggree with your point and the first comment about seatbelts, thanks for that perspective. The reason I personally still see an issue is that personification of AI is an actual issue, while personification of seatbelts and spears is not. This lands on the frontpage of hackernews, and people don't read every article on the frontpage, but they read the headlines, and the headlines carry latent messages that get interpreted. And with the huge hype around LLMs, AI for most people means LLMs. So most people will read this headline and not the article and subconsciously concluce that researchers used LLMs to solve Alzheimers, further strengthening their religious belief LLMs were mystical oracles of truth, potentially able to solve widespread deadly diseases, while not realizing that the researchers might have used highly specialized machine learning or what not instead of text completion algorithms.
by evmar | 2025-04-28 05:23:53+00:00
I noticed math_emulate.c comes from Linux (it even has a " * (C) 1991 Linus Torvalds" bit on it). I was wondering what the license on that code is. It looks like Linux adopted GPL in 1992 so maybe this copy predates that, but it was under some other non-BSD license before that.
by abhisek | 2025-04-28 05:24:48+00:00
IMHO there is neither baseline nor “enough” when it comes to learning any programming language for any reasonably complex domain.

As you already know, C/C++ helps with low level software layers that interface with or manage hardware resources. In my experience, Go and Rust are also pretty much used as systems programming languages. For example, I use Go and EBPF to instrument systems calls on Linux kernel.

For me, most of my learning came from solving problems and building for specific use-cases. I think getting into builder mode and creating some cool will definitely accelerate your learning.
by avogt27 | 2025-04-28 05:25:40+00:00
It's really a bummer to see this marketed as 'AI Discovers Something New'. The authors in the actual paper carried out an enormous amount of work, the vast majority of which is relatively standard biochemistry and cell biology - nothing to do with computational techniques. The AlphaFold3 analysis (the AI contribution) literally accounts for a few panels in a supplementary figure - it didn't even help guide their choice of small molecule inhibitors since those were already known. AlphaFold (among other related tools) is absolutely a game changer in structural biology and biophysics, but this is a pretty severe case of AI hype overshadowing the real value of the work.
by MisterBastahrd | 2025-04-28 05:25:42+00:00
Never going to happen. We don't have the technology, we're not going to get the technology, and nobody benefits by having wealthy people around forever. Your body parts will eventually wear out regardless of what you try to do to mitigate the situation, and everybody will get terminal cancer sooner or later regardless of anything else. And even if THAT doesn't get you, an accident eventually will. Doesn't matter if it's a car wreck, a plane crash, someone coughing on you at the wrong moment, or you sneezing and bursting a blood vessel in your head.
by delusional | 2025-04-28 05:26:02+00:00
I understand your point, and I don't disagree with it as a matter of utility. It just doesn't capture all of what code is.

I find computer systems beautiful. A system of parts interacting in a complex dance to process data. Each part effortlessly modifyable and reusable, executable by the generic machine people already own.

I love the puzzle of putting data together, of shaping it in main memory, and the joy of finding that previous shaping makes the current problem easier. The joy of finding a hidden algebra or transitivity.

All of these things go beyond the "tool" view of software and touches the "art" view. A painter doesn't find the painting useful, they find it beautiful.

I would be writing software, even if I want paid. I would however be working on vastly different software, and I think that's the OP's point.
by notorandit | 2025-04-28 05:26:16+00:00
Exactly. All countries are equal, but there are countries that are more equal than others.

USA used to have quite some business on the Russian soil. Sacrificing them for the sake of politics was considered needed and doable.

One thing is antisemitism and anticommunism. One thing is being against Putin and Netanyahu, for example. Putin is not communism, Netanyahu is not Israel.
by snihalani | 2025-04-28 05:26:17+00:00
I think getting a degree ensures your answers are similar to what your interviewer is trained on. Being untraditional in your education means you have to figure out how to package and sell your ideas. Getting a degree ensures its harder to reject you. Instead of finding an offer after 500 interviews, now you may have to do 400. For me, getting a master's degree was more useful than getting a bachelor's.

since you are in bay area, I can grab coffee if that'd be useful for you.

Is contributing to open source an option for you instead?
by IvanK_net | 2025-04-28 05:26:48+00:00
I have no idea why they mention coding. It is the same in any kind of job. You can bake cakes for fun, make music for fun, write poems, novels, play chess for fun, practice sports, grow potatos ...

At a certain stage, you realize that in order to be able to do only that job, you must make someone pay you for it. You must do it in a way (or in a volume) which makes others happy. The fact that it makes you happy is not enough anymore.

I don't think there is an angel and a devil. It is still the same thing. If you like the result of your work, there is a high chance that others will like it. You don't need to change what you do by a 100%. Changing it by 5% - 10% is often enough.
by jasonkester | 2025-04-28 05:27:03+00:00
I notice that I have a form of Gell-Mann amnesia for this sort of thing. Do we need a new term, or does that cover it?

Because I find myself nodding along with optimism, having two grandfathers that died from this disease. It’d be great if something could sift through all the data and come up with a novel solution.

Then I remember that this is the same technology that eagerly tries to autocomplete every other line of my code to include two nonexistent variables and a nonexistent function.

I hope this field has some good people to sanity check this stuff.
by 20after4 | 2025-04-28 05:27:43+00:00
You can't keep a constant eye on both the road and the speedometer. Further, you might have missed the last speed limit change or remember it incorrectly. It's also possible for the speed sensor in your car to be faulty or out of calibration. This happens if you change the size of your wheels/tires significantly without reprogramming the ECU - and that setting isn't made available to the owner of the vehicle, at least not in most cars I'm aware of¹.

In fact, most cars lie to you about the speed - reporting a speed slightly faster than reality. It's a cover-your-ass measure for the car manufacturers because it's illegal to sell a car (in the US, at least) where the speedometer is inaccurate in the other direction, that is, reading slower than actual speed.

1. Some older vehicles, including pre-1996 GM trucks (and probably others from the same era) had the speedometer calibration controlled by a resistor array on a circuit board under the dash, those can be changed with a lot of effort and a soldering iron, or by swapping out the whole circuit board with a different one that matches your tire size + rear end gear ratio.
by edg5000 | 2025-04-28 05:28:02+00:00
Well said. If the company is built around a certain specialism, the specialist will want to spend most of your time there, because that is where most value is created per hour. But many of the other things are critical, but happen to be very time-consuming. Such as traveling around. So in some teams you end up having one person do this specialist work while the other can focus on the more time-consuming things. I think you worded it much more elegantly, I'm just repeating what you said.
by xvector | 2025-04-28 05:28:50+00:00
The big assumption in this counterargument is that we stay biological forever. I see biological "immortality" (anti-aging) as a temporary stopgap while we develop gradual replacement and migrate to a synthetic/digital consciousness, hosted on nodes distributed throughout Earth orbit or beyond for fault tolerance and availability.

I'd be shocked if this didn't happen in the next thousand years.

Needing air/water everywhere we go is incredibly limiting as well.
by tsimionescu | 2025-04-28 05:28:51+00:00
I don't understand this scenario, how long is the piece of track that you had to clear? Does the road not simply cross over the track? Even at 10km/h, you'd clear the <2m of track in 0.72 seconds, barely enough time to notice the train was coming and start accelerating. Is this instead a situation where you were nearing the track with too much speed to stop before reaching it, so you had to accelerate instead to clear it?
by bcantrill | 2025-04-28 05:29:27+00:00
No, the ZFS team did not "literally reference NetApp and WAFL" in their presentations and no, Sun did not "start it" -- NetApp initiated the litigation (though Sun absolutely countersued), and NetApp were well on their way to losing not only their case but also their WAFL patents when Oracle acquired Sun. Despite having inherited a winning case, Oracle chose to allow the suit to be dismissed[0]; terms of the settlement were undisclosed.

[0] https://www.theregister.com/2010/09/09/oracle_netapp_zfs_dis...
by fuzzfactor | 2025-04-28 05:29:37+00:00
The problem also is Windows has gotten worse, regardless of Copilot :\

There's got to be millions more people as you go along who can no longer fathom adopting any more Microsoft products whatsoever until after they fix Windows.

Especially the mission-critical things for business and everyday activities.

They were supposed to have all the time in the world since Windows 10 was going to be the final true version.

What are they doing working on anything else? Totally neglecting what people want most. You can't paint a pretty picture here.

And how is Copilot not going to possibly be anything of a surveillance pilot? Windows 11 has gotten way worse about this before Copilot, how much more account tracking & advertising are people supposed to be craving that they are not already getting? Sheesh.
by AStonesThrow | 2025-04-28 05:29:53+00:00
So many Catholics may focus on things like the removal of altar rails, but it would seem that the decay and removal of working pipe organs has been a significantly painful loss for many parishes.

Often these organs were too massive, specialist, and expensive to maintain (or even just to operate them) and that lack often prompted a complete overhaul of a congregation’s repertoire, as guitar-strummers and tambourine-clappers would be called in to fill the gaps.

Even electronic organs could not suffice, as they proved harder to maintain as their unique technologies aged poorly.

Nothing against folk music, but the transition and loss of continuity has really messed with some of us, spiritually.

I am thankful that around these parts, we’ve had some responsible pastors who not only cared about music, but also found the resources to rehabilitate several churches and get their pipe organs updated for the 21st century, with a firm establishment of music ministers who could carry on that legacy for the foreseeable future.
by tim333 | 2025-04-28 05:30:35+00:00
Check out:

>The Russo-Ukrainian War began in February 2014. Following Ukraine's Revolution of Dignity, Russia occupied and annexed Crimea from Ukraine. It then supported Russian paramilitaries who began a war in the eastern Donbas region... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russo-Ukrainian_War

It not being in US news doesn't mean it didn't happen.
by ToJans | 2025-04-28 05:30:56+00:00
We're currently in a rewrite with the exact stack this starter pack has.

Bun is faster & has better package management, but the build is only suitable for very basic use cases. Once you get into more exotic build scenarios, the lack of plugins for bun gets obvious, so we've switched from a custom bun build script back to vite.

Side note (in true HN tradition):

I'm a bit hesitant to base our front-end on react. It has currently become the de-facto ui solation, which makes me wonder if the new kid on the block (solidjs IMHO) would not be more suitable.

Unfortunately the ecosystem for solidjs isn't at that level where I'm confident enough yet to make the big bet & switch to it in full. Maybe we'll use it in a few side/tool projects, too get a general feel and see how this evolves...
by sargstuff | 2025-04-28 05:31:02+00:00
On software side, building an OS (distribution) from scratch provides a step above bare metal programming[0].

Provides familiarity with different types of things a kernel does via programs/scripts that make use of kernel.

Actually writing binary code for kernel bit can be done under qem[1][2]. aka don't need to buy actual hardware, can use 'software probes' to view what's going on, etc. Don't have to worry about 'crashing'/trashing box running on (just crash the qem software & loosing just what was done in qem session, if didn't save as 'export/save to external location outside of qem session')

"Reading OpenBSD source code daily (blog.tintagel.pl)" from [hn: 3] automated way to review code.

-----

[0] : https://www.linuxfromscratch.org/

[1] : qem for kernel developers - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LyWlpuntdU4

[2] : https://www.collabora.com/news-and-blog/blog/2017/01/16/sett...

[hn:3] : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14521386
by xvector | 2025-04-28 05:31:17+00:00
If you can cure aging, death itself becomes an engineering problem. Curing aging gives you the time you need to figure out gradual replacement, uploading (transfers, not copies), distributing consciousness across multiple fault-tolerant nodes in orbit or beyond, etc.

Then you have cured death for all practical purposes. You will still be vulnerable to certain cosmic catastrophes (which you can plan around) and the heat death itself, but I would still call that "cured."

Edit reply because of HN rate limit: Transfers are possible, copies aren't our only option. Consider replacing one neuron at the time with an uplink to a virtual neuron in the cloud. An implant (at the cellular scale) reflects communication back to your physical neurons - they don't even notice it disappeared.

Wait for your thoughts to normalize, rinse, repeat. This is gradual replacement. You'd do it with more than one neuron (a cluster of neurons) realistically.
by mitthrowaway2 | 2025-04-28 05:31:20+00:00
If you're driving a bleeding family member to the ER, I'm especially concerned about your ability to drive safely and concentrate on the road. You don't want to turn one emergency into two or three, and your main obstacle on the way to the hospital will probably be traffic, not speed limits. High speed collisions are typically fatal and it's not okay to kill yourself or a pedestrian on the way to the hospital.
by sandreas | 2025-04-28 05:31:43+00:00
Thanks, I'm going to read through the link. I also found some python libs, that do this, so since I need to run Whisper on the backend to transfer the speech to text, I think it would be suitable to use python also for tokenization - maybe spaCy (https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/tokenization-using-spacy-libra...).
by reincoder | 2025-04-28 05:32:09+00:00
I work for IPinfo — I described my process of how I made the game in the other comment.

Using a dataset-based implementation would require me to have a backend, which is out of the scope of this project. Right now, I'm generating random IPv4 addresses, but if I were generating random IPv6 addresses, I would have to go the database route. For that, I would use our free IPinfo Lite dataset: https://ipinfo.io/lite

My colleagues actually developed an extremely fast algorithm to select truly random IPv6 IPs from a series of CIDRs, which is what you see reflected in our dataset.

Let me know if you have any feedback or suggestions for me, please.