MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by avogt27 | 2025-04-28 15:02:39+00:00
I think my problem is that this is maybe the most minimal and mundane use of AlphaFold, but it is treated like one of the main points of the paper. The small molecules they tested were already known to inhibit this enzyme, the structural modeling done based on AlphaFold is a minute part of the story compared to the dozens of incredibly difficult experiments they did - it almost seems the sort of thing one of the reviewers suggested during the initial submission and was added after the first round of edits.

I can't tell you how many times I've sat through talks where someone (usually ill-equipped to really engage with the research) suggests that the speaker tries AlphaFold for this or that without a clear understanding of what sort of biological insight they're expecting. It's also a joke at this point how often grad students plug their protein into AlphaFold and spend several minutes giving a half-baked analysis of the result. There are absolutely places where structure prediction is revolutionizing things including drug discovery, but can we acknowledge the hype when we see it?

I'm very sorry for your loss, my aunt is also declining due to this disease. I think statistically everyone either goes through it or becomes a caretaker if they live long enough.
by timgreen | 2025-04-28 15:02:57+00:00
A few things:

- Snapshot (https://apps.shopify.com/snapshot): AI generated product photos for Shopify. Previously used Flux and Stable Diffusion but always had quality problems. Was very tricky ensuring text remained the same and the product fit into the generated background. Just integrated the new OpenAI image generation model and results are much better however their masking feature doesn't work properly so need to wait for them to fix that before I can offer the same feature of keeping text/fine details the same

- Lurk (https://apps.shopify.com/lurk): New one I just launched - allows Shopify merchants to track the prices of competitors and adjust their own in response with dynamic pricing rules. It's cool because you just have to paste a URL and it uses AI to figure out the price. Again, there's a surprising amount of things you need to figure out to make this work reliably at scale (e.g. popups, ambiguous HTML, location-based pricing, etc.)

- Origin UTM Tracking (https://apps.shopify.com/origin-utm-tracking): Simple UTM analytics for Shopify stores. Acquired this last year and its being growing nicely.
by Bender | 2025-04-28 15:03:37+00:00
If HN was self-hostable software like Lemmy, would you host an instance?

Do you mean an instance that is tied to and moderated by HN but distributed to handle a bigger load, or a completely stand alone website where I must moderate it?

If distributed I might consider it. If it's just my site probably not. If it's my site I would have to pick topics that are not covered by HN and most of the interest here I have seen that is off topic is politics. That would mean I have to set up a site that can take a serious paddlin' which I have done and it's a lot of work. I'm lazy(er) these days.
by abra0 | 2025-04-28 15:03:46+00:00
Tbh it still puzzles me why gameplay degradation specifically was chosen as a way to try to discourage piracy. I imagine many more people hit the degradations, thought the game was just buggy and abandoned it, compared to people who were motivated by bad gameplay to give the developers money.

The mindfuck angle is pretty effective though. This article wouldn't have been written otherwise.
by g2963 | 2025-04-28 15:03:49+00:00
a hypothetical portable layer exists, but it starts diverging once deployed, because of cleanups, refactoring, or implementation specific hacks.

LOOP is a great example, because all loop is just MIT LOOP version 829, originally cleaned up by burke. but nobody can resist deploying their personal architectural touch, so while the basic framework of loop remains identical across impelementations, there's superficial refactoring done by pretty much everyone. if you take SBCL and franz lisp as state of the art in free software and commercial respectivaly, they have equally solid improvements on original loop, that actually produce incompatible behavior in underspecified corners of spec. respective developer communities are very defensive about their incompatible behavior being the correct behavior of course. beach's SICL from sibling comment is the xkcd joke about standards "20 standards? we need a new standard the unifies them all! -- now we have 21 standards"

LOOP in this case is a very simple example, but for example CLOS was originally implemented on top of PCL, Portable CommonLoops, an interlisp system, that was massaged into being compliant CLOS over years. for example sbcl uses a ship of theseus PCL, but franz lisp did from scratch rewrite. the hypothetical portability of that layer is significantly trickier than LOOP since clos is is deeply tied to the type system, and the boundary between some hypothetical base system common lisp and its clos layer becomes complicated during system bootstrapping. but that's not all! of course clos has to be deeply tied to the compiler, the type system, all kinds of things, to provide optimizations. discovering the appropriate slicing boundary is difficult to say the least.
by xandrius | 2025-04-28 15:04:02+00:00
I'd definitely support this (even help). My non-related wish for my future kids would be to have some modern version of the BASIC games you would have to type in manually.

I never did that but it sounds a really fun to get into technology and programming. The difference is that I'd use different languages and maybe also allow them to draw images (with paint) and such. Everything offline and simple.
by runarberg | 2025-04-28 15:04:41+00:00
It won’t matter what I do personally if the company can just hire new engineers (or even outsource the work[1]). Let me repeat what I said above:

> however that won’t stop the company from hiring new engineers who value their salary more than their ethical behavior—or have different ethical standards.

Just because the state of consumer protection is abysmal in our current state of capitalism, that doesn’t mean it has to stay that way, and just because the regulators are unwilling to enforce the few remaining consumer protection laws it doesn’t mean they will never. Before Reagan consumer protection laws were passed all the time, and they used to be enforced, they can so again.

1: https://restofworld.org/2025/big-tech-ai-labor-supply-chain-...
by dkarl | 2025-04-28 15:04:56+00:00
The article is about what LLMs can do, and I read it as what they can do in theory, as they're developed further. It's an argument based on principle, not on their current limitations.

You can read it as a claim about what LLMs can do now, but that wouldn't be very interesting, because it's obvious that no current LLM can replace a human programmer.

I think the author contradicts themselves. They argue that LLMs cannot build theories because they fundamentally do not work like humans do, and they conclude that LLMs can't replace human programmers because human programmers need to build theories. But if LLMs fundamentally do not work like humans, how do we know that they need to build theories the same way that humans do?
by bigstrat2003 | 2025-04-28 15:05:07+00:00
Yeah, I definitely agree with you. Any time you see someone saying how hard it is to write code as a job, you can tell they've never had a "real" job. I grew up working on a farm every day - I would take programming every day of the week. Even on the days when I'm frustrated or dealing with difficult people, it's better than hard physical labor which wears down your body, is fairly gross (lots of poop!), and doesn't even pay 1/2 of what programming does.
by noosphr | 2025-04-28 15:05:14+00:00
They were a tar pit in the 1980s and 1990s when Moores law meant a 16x increase in processor speed every 6 years.

Right now the only reason why we don't have new generations of these eating the lunch of general purpose CPUs is that you'd need to organize a few billion transistors into something useful. That's something a bit beyond what just about everyone (including Intel now apparently) can manage.
by jandrewrogers | 2025-04-28 15:05:19+00:00
Fixed points actually move relative to each other. This is measurable even locally if you are doing high-precision localization e.g. with LIDAR. The geometry of relationships between objects is in constant motion but below the threshold of what a human can sense. There are many identifiable causes of this motion that vary with locality (tidal, thermal, hydrodynamic, tectonic, geophysical, et al). Additionally, there are local time dilation effects, both static and transient, that influence measurement but aren’t actually motion.

This comes up concretely when doing long-baseline interferometry. Lasers are used to precisely measure the distance between receivers in adjacent structures for use in time-of-flight calculations. Over the course of a day, the distance between those structures as measured may vary by multiple centimeters, which is why they measure it.
by proc0 | 2025-04-28 15:05:19+00:00
Right, but the industry wants bad programmers who are good managers and business thinkers. Unfortunately it's hard to draw a straight line from formal methods to profit. So it's hard to convince people to fund a solution that requires highly specialized knowledge and cannot be easily scaled by adding more people.

The tradeoff is that in the long run codebases accumulate a lot more complexity and become brittle, hard to maintain, and a pain to work with. Companies don't value this long term thinking though, and instead want to see a direct line to profit with every ticket and change to the codebase (which of course isn't really conducive to a well engineered codebase).
by brulard | 2025-04-28 15:05:49+00:00
I'm there with you. So many times I have heard this, what a great opportunity for me: build another guys (I have met 5 minutes ago) idea. It's simple, just a clone of (youtube|twitter|foursquare|...) with a little twist. It will certainly make me rich, because I can have a small fraction share of the project. Salary? No, that's for losers. We are going to make it big.
by iamthepieman | 2025-04-28 15:05:51+00:00
Thank you for the enthusiasm!

It was not intentional but my post really does read like a little story vignette that ends with a gut punch.

Not looking for sympathy so much as fellow appreciators of irony and schadenfreude but here's another kicker.

I pitched this idea to my previous company and was told there was no appetite for it. Just saw on my old company's blog that they released a "digital transformation in a box" program for mid-market clients in this space which is 90% of what I pitched to them. Bad and hilarious timing all around.
by pbmonster | 2025-04-28 15:05:53+00:00
> The substations or feeders that are tripped off are not currently determined by real-time metering - instead they are pre-allocated based on their typical demand. This means that the system operator does not really know how much demand will be disconnected at any given time.

This is wild. From a amateur technical perspective, it would only take a cheap hall sensor inside the transformer to have a pretty good guess of how much current has been flowing to the load.

Hell, put the hall sensor onto a board with a micro controller and a LORA transmitter and stick it to the outside of the feed line. Seems like an incredibly cheap upgrade to get real-time load data from every substation.
by rashkov | 2025-04-28 15:05:59+00:00
Seems like this should have been obvious to someone on the iOS team, no?

Like, "hey we need a way to trigger springboard UI events.." "ok let's just use this unauthenticated bus and have springboard subscribe to it"

Something like that? Only thing I can think of is that this line of code was written so long ago and it's way at the bottom of the abstraction stack, so no one had a look
by Amezarak | 2025-04-28 15:06:07+00:00
Most of the dozens of towns in the scandals have the same perpetrators. It is a qualitatively different issue: we’re talking about organized gangs of foreign-origin perpetrators raping thousands of girls in each of these towns.

This is clearly not the same sort of thing as the “usual” case of individuals abusing their power and trust over children in their care.

It takes very little work to find more and more examples. Why are you pretending they don’t exist?

For example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxford_sex_gang https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bristol_child_sex_abuse_ring https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derby_child_sex_abuse_ring https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aylesbury_child_sex_abuse_ring

The list goes on and on and reading through the cases, most of the convictions/arrests got only the tip of the iceberg, as they themselves say.

Edit: I just looked up this Glasgow case and it’s not even close to the same scale, Rotherham was literally three orders of magnitude worse in terms of victims. Of course a criminal ring that victimizes 1000x the number of children will get more attention.

Edit2: of course, you can google almost any UK city and find a grooming gang story - here’s one where asylum seekers ran a massive grooming gang in Glasgow, much bigger than the case you mentioned: https://www.thescottishsun.co.uk/news/5215881/police-scotlan...

> those cases dont make the Daily Mirror and Sun front page somehow. Most of the perpetrators of CSA are white men

I’m not sure why you mention this given you immediately dismiss it. The per capita rate is not even comparable. To take Rotherham, Wikipedia reports it’s only 5% Pakistani and the population is about 100k. And the “conservative estimate” is that the gang there abused more than a thousand girls. Of course taken over the whole country we would expect the main perpetrators of any general crime category to be the native people - but that’s an absolutely bonkers per capita discrepancy and for some reason people are afraid to point out there’s an obvious cultural problem relating to one specific group of people. Instead you just want to say “well English people do it too” (almost never in these organized gangs vs single abusers) and “well if the cops were better” instead of “our policies introducing these people here in combination with our attitudes about policing and race caused this.”

You certainly don't have to convince me British police are among the worst in the world, it's obvious the British institutions hate lower class British people and there's plenty of videos of police going hard after people for not paying their TV license, criticizing the school board, or livestreaming unapproved opinions while ignoring murders, rapes etc. It certainly isn't just these cases, they apparently also let e.g., the Russian mob murder people, but god forbid you press send on a bad tweet.
by astura | 2025-04-28 15:06:22+00:00
Lol, wow! The article says

>After filtering out invalid VINs, we narrowed the dataset to roughly ~15 million crashes. (We also removed all drug and alcohol related crashes, since it’s unlikely someone committing insurance fraud would be under the influence.)

Which I immediately found extremely implausible. Seems like the author is very much NOT familiar with the type of people who commit insurance fraud.

In the next paragraph the article links to the FBI website on the fraud ring in Connecticut.

https://www.fbi.gov/news/stories/staged-accident-ring

Which says

>After an autumn evening of drinking and using drugs in 2013, a group of friends got into an Audi A6 and drove to the remote Wilderness Road in Norwich, Connecticut. The car slid off the road, hitting a tree.

>Everyone in the car survived, but this seemingly typical crash was no accident.

>Despite their impairment, the driver and passengers had purposely planned the crash to collect the insurance money.

So yeah, don't exclude drug/alcohol related crashes. Also the author should read the first fucking sentence of the stuff they link. It's only six words in!
by Am4TIfIsER0ppos | 2025-04-28 15:07:00+00:00
Unless a comment is negative like "I used ABC and it was shit for the following reasons" I assume it is as fake as a 5-star movie review written by the director. I would definitely prefer to know why I should not use, watch, or play something rather than why I should. But since this is an anonymous post on the internet about ai slop you shouldn't listen to me anyway.
by mindslight | 2025-04-28 15:07:11+00:00
> Online autism conspiracy theory channels turn this into some kind of eugenics purge.

No, people in leadership positions have a duty to lead - justifying themselves and attempting to get buy in from everyone. Especially so on sensitive topics that we're societally squeamish about due to some very real historic horrors.

I know the memetic field is a bit hazy from the sensationalist media pushing divisive whole-cloth nonsense like Joe Biden is going to make you eat bugs etc, but there is a huge difference when that schizophrenia is actively encouraged from the top.

So this idea that we're just supposed to trust the Trump administration, when many of their actions have already been completely unhinged and senseless (eg huge tariff taxes), when Trump's last time at the helm was completely divisive and destructive, and when he's picked the most unhinged type of charlatans for his cabinet this time around? Sorry, trust needs to be earned - especially the amount required for pulling on rightfully sensitive threads - and they're not even doing the basics of attempting to.
by mlsu | 2025-04-28 15:07:22+00:00
Does solar power make this process easier or harder? I know that with thermal plants you have a spinning mass that you have to synchronize, and phase shift is used to assess how hard the plant is working (and whether to trip a disconnect as we see here)

But with solar, how is the synchronization provided? In like a giant buck? Or in software somehow? Does the phase shift matter as much as in the electromechanical systems?

My intuition is that solar would make the grid harder to keep stable (smaller mass spinning in sync) but also may offer more knobs to control things (big DC source that you can toggle on/off instantly.. as long as sun is out). But I don’t actually know.
by hwpythonner | 2025-04-28 15:07:38+00:00
Thanks — and no worries, that’s a great question!

Right now, PyXL runs fully in-order with no speculative execution. This is intentional for a couple of reasons: First, determinism is really important for real-time and embedded systems — avoiding speculative behavior makes timing predictable and eliminates a whole class of side-channel vulnerabilities. Second, PyXL is still at an early stage — the focus right now is on building a clean, efficient architecture that makes sense structurally, without adding complex optimizations like speculation just for the sake of performance.

In the future, if there's a clear real-world need, limited forms of prediction could be considered — but always very carefully to avoid breaking predictability or simplicity.
by phendrenad2 | 2025-04-28 15:07:50+00:00
We really need a new HN. The fact that people will downvote your comment, which is literally 100% correct, simply because they want to believe a falsehood, is pretty sad. This isn't Hacker News, it's Delusion News.

Another possibility is for downvotes to be public, and then allow people to "filter out" downvoters who seem politically motivated (a personal list would be fine, I assume it's like 5 people). HN can't really survive in the year 2025 without some radical anti-politics technology.
by raincom | 2025-04-28 15:07:50+00:00
Yes, indeed. They think that every circular argument is vicious. Not at all, there are two kinds of circularity: virtuous circularity; vicious circularity. Bootstrapping falls under the former. Check [1] and [2]

[1] https://www.hipkapi.com/2011/03/10/foundationalism-and-virtu...

[2] Brown, Harold I. “Circular Justifications.” PSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association 1994 (1994): 406–14. http://www.jstor.org/stable/193045.
by okeuro49 | 2025-04-28 15:08:17+00:00
The EDL hasn't been around for years.

The "far right" narrative is to hide state failure.

Even the group "Hope not Hate" (former far-left "Searchlight" publication) admitted the "far right" narrative was a hoax. [1]

[1] https://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/1933625/uk-riots-list-hoax
by baranul | 2025-04-28 15:08:21+00:00
> Most open source projects are people who have dumped their unfinished project online, but it's hard to know whether or not it is finished until you use it, or worse, use it for a long time and find the gaping holes.

Mostly agree, but what should people expect when it's free? Arguably, there should not be any expectation of a "polished" product. If it is good, that's likely from community support, and general need.

> And without being paid, there is the issue that the maintainer doesn't work on the important things, since there is a lack of (price) signal to state what to work on.

After stumbling upon this thread and article, by itself, most might think there is nothing wrong with the statement, and that it makes some notable points. Upon reading up on the history involving other projects, however, it then comes across as bizarre in an hard to explain way.

Be that as it may, do agree that all FOSS projects have the right to receive donations or be financially supported to compensate and thank them for their work. It's up to the public how important they think supporting it is, and that part looks fair.
by pavel_lishin | 2025-04-28 15:08:42+00:00
Maybe, but I'm not sure how you solve a few problems:

1. Allowing multiple identities & pseudonyms - maybe I don't want my identity as @furry_mpreg_artist in one discord to be directly linked to @database_expert on StackOverflow or to @local_bicycle_repairperson on my local facebook group?

2. People obtaining these digital passports, and immediately giving/selling/losing them to some bot who can juggle those bits as easily as a human can.

3. What happens if you lose access to your passport? A toddler spills cranberry juice into your desktop, an adversary hacks your computer, you have a psychotic break and overwrite your hard drive platters with magnets & hammers?
by PaulHoule | 2025-04-28 15:09:51+00:00
RSS readers need algorithic feeds [1] but unfortunately everyone interested in RSS thinks algorithm = bad.

My YOShInOn reader downloads somewhere between 3,000 to 30,000 items in a cycle [2] and chooses 300 top-scoring items out of 20 clusters. When I complete those, it runs another cycle. It has extra screens that show articles that it thinks would get >10 votes or a comment/vote ratio > 0.5 on HN as well as screens to show top-scoring articles from particular sites and feeds (arXiv, lobsters, ...)

Articles in the primary feed are shown to me one at a time, I thumbs up or I thumbs down. The RoC for the classifier is about 0.78, I read TikTok gets 0.84 so I'm pretty happy.

The problems with it: (1) It depends on arangodb for which the license doesn't allow me to commercialize it and I wouldn't feel OK with open sourcing it. Right now I'm writing a python-arango replacement which will get it and my image sorter running on postgres out of a single code base. (2) the batch organization doesn't work well for certain topics like sports where articles have a shelf life.

[1] doesn't have to be "creepy blond girls want to follow you" or all outrage all the time, an algorithmic feed can apply any heuristic that you like.

[2] depending on how fast I am reading, quality gets better when I am reading slow. The system blends in a certain percentage of randomly chosen results to maintain calibration -- I've been thinking about making it run at a target quality level where it blends in more randoms if it thinks it is showing me too many good results.