MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by woodruffw | 2025-04-12 17:16:53+00:00
> This specific line in Tier 2 would send most project managers running for the hills "Tier 2 target-specific code is not closely scrutinized by Rust team(s) when modifications are made. Bugs are possible in all code, but the level of quality control for these targets is likely to be lower"

Are you operating under the assumption that the largely implicit support tiers in other compilers are better? In other words: do you think GCC’s m68k backend (to pick an arbitrary one) has been as battle-tested as their AArch64 one?

(I think the comment about evangelists is a red herring here: what Rust does is offer precison in what it guarantees, while C as an ecosystem has historically been permissive of mystery meat compilers. This IMO doesn’t scale well in a world where project maintainers are trivially accessible, since they have to now field bug reports on platforms they can’t reproduce for and never intended to support to begin with.)
by pxc | 2025-04-12 17:16:57+00:00
When builds are reproducible, one thing a distro can do is have multiple build farms with completely different operators, so there's no shared access and no shared secrets. Then the results of builds of each package on each farm can be compared, and if they differ, you can suspect tampering.

So it could help you detect tampering earlier, and maybe even prevent it from propagating depending on what else is done.
by gs17 | 2025-04-12 17:17:38+00:00
> but to me it seemed that Bluesky was generally better about staying “on track” when it comes to showing relevant things, once trained. Xitter really, really likes to veer off course and so much as stopping scrolling for a second while an undesired post is on screen is enough for it to start showing more of the same type.

What is your "track"? Bluesky seemed to be behaving exactly like you described Twitter, and the only explanation I could come up with was that the process of clicking on a post to block/mute the account (which is what I was told to do to curate my feed) was considered enough engagement that my feed should be more and more of what I don't want any of.
by __turbobrew__ | 2025-04-12 17:17:56+00:00
You cannot estimate the risk of taking internet LSD, that is the problem.

There is also a history of cutting drugs with other substances to give them a unique effect which brings back return customers (i.e. cutting heroin with fentanyl).

And then there is the possibility that whoever produced the LSD screwed up and/or the end product is not pure.
by Tijdreiziger | 2025-04-12 17:18:03+00:00
The actual impact is that your private medical data is in the hands of thieves, which most people don’t want.

It’s similar to how most people are distressed after a break-in, because they considered their home to be a private space, even though the lock manufacturer never claimed 100% security (or the thieves simply bypassed the locks by smashing a window).

Agreements and laws don’t solve that problem, because thieves already aren’t stopped by those.
by eyelidlessness | 2025-04-12 17:18:09+00:00
SVG complexity is a good counterpoint to “why this instead of SVG”. But I don’t think we need to even address the claim that most tools for SVG generation use JS, if the concern is JS on the client.

Realistically, on a scale beyond very few graphs, it’s pretty likely some sort of software is going to be used to process data into markup. At which point, if the desired result is static markup, it doesn’t really matter (to the end user) whether that software is written in JS or some other language. That’s a toolchain concern. It probably doesn’t matter much if at all (to the end user) whether the resulting markup is HTML or SVG. There may be some imperceptible performance difference, or slightly different accessibility requirements. But neither requires users to run JS.

If I were evaluating this choice, it would almost certainly come down to what’s most familiar, or what most readily integrates with other parts of the project’s stack and/or data sources. And I could easily imagine even that evaluation being a wash.
by 10-1-100 | 2025-04-12 17:18:33+00:00
Also worth noting that with modern emissions standards (and transition to EVs), over 50% of handful particulates come from tires, brakes, road surface wear, and resuspended dust:

https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/non-exhaust-particulate...

I don't think there's any healthy level of private cars coexisting with humans in a city, without even considering the more immediate harms from crashes, etc.
by 317070 | 2025-04-12 17:18:37+00:00
Way back when, most of a GPU was for graphics. Google decided to design a completely new chip, which focused on the operations for neural networks (mainly vectorized matmul). This is the TPU.

It's not a GPU, as there is no graphics hardware there anymore. Just memory and very efficient cores, capable of doing massively parallel matmuls on the memory. The instruction set is tiny, basically only capable of doing transformer operations fast.

Today, I'm not sure how much graphics an A100 GPU still can do. But I guess the answer is "too much"?
by danielbln | 2025-04-12 17:18:41+00:00
I can have cline control and terminal command, it's by no means limited to editing code. On the flip side, if you do edit codey it can lean in the LSP and various other IDE diagnostics to produce better code more efficiently.

Claude Code is pretty great, but I find Cline better (plus I can use Gemini 2.5 with it and am not limited to Anthropic only).
by quantadev | 2025-04-12 17:19:00+00:00
I was a C++ dev all thru the 1990s, but moved to Java, JS, Python. There's really no good argument for using C++ nowadays in 99.999% of apps. Unless you're doing something VERY special like realtime stuff, or something where each action of the CPU needs to be controlled directly, you just don't need it. I'm sure you know that, tho. Not preaching at you. I learned Python as recently as 2023, just so I could get deep into the AI landscape and access all those libraries/tools.
by Igrom | 2025-04-12 17:20:27+00:00
>You only look at the surface China is subsidizing everything but at the same time forcing the companies to share the wealth created with all of its populace not just the company and company share holders.

Do you have in mind any examples that make your case the strongest? In particular, examples caused by subsidy to the company, and not to the population[1].

[1] like this one: https://www.gov.cn/zhengce/202501/content_6997459.htm
by 10-1-100 | 2025-04-12 17:20:37+00:00
With modern emissions standards, more than 50% of the harmful pollution comes from tires/brakes/road surface wear/resuspended dust:

https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/non-exhaust-particulate...

Moving away from privately owned cars entirely seems to be the only way to eliminate the health impact of cars on people in a city.
by mdp2021 | 2025-04-12 17:20:40+00:00
All of that is very interesting. Side note: don't you agree that "answering about documentation with 100% reliability" would be a more than desirable further feature? (Think of those options in the shell commands which can be so confusing they made it to xkcd material.) But that would mean achieving production-level RAG; and that in turn would be a revolution in LLMs, which would revise your list above...
by the_snooze | 2025-04-12 17:21:16+00:00
The Democrats have repeatedly shown they are feckless, ineffective, and beholden to special interests. In California where they are a supermajority, they can't make any progress on the much-touted high speed rail system because everyone wants their piece of the pie. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/09/us/california-high-speed-...

>“SNCF was very angry. They told the state they were leaving for North Africa, which was less politically dysfunctional."

No surprise that enough people would say "we gotta do something else."
by mk_stjames | 2025-04-12 17:21:38+00:00
I have a very long and maybe ill-formed in-person rant about medical costs in the USA and the cost of higher education in the last 30 years and how these issues are are n-sides of the same n-sided coin but it takes about 8 beers to get through and isn't something I ever have the nerve to put down in an HN comment.
by nayuki | 2025-04-12 17:22:00+00:00
> mechanical watches are among the very finest fossils of the pre-digital age

Clocks have discrete ticks. They are digital devices. Even a base-60 second hand is digital because the number of states is finite.

Mechanical and digital are not mutually exclusive concepts. For example, "The analytical engine was a proposed digital mechanical general-purpose computer designed by English mathematician and computer pioneer Charles Babbage." -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analytical_engine

Going further, I could argue that the digital age is very old. Humans who wrote numbers for accounting purposes were engaging in a digital activity; only the numbers matter, not the medium they were written on or the exact handwriting style of the scribe who wrote those numbers. DNA is a form of digital data conveyed through a sequence of 4 possible symbols, and DNA predates humans by billions of years.

The pedantic phrase substitution for "pre-digital age" would be something like "age before widespread digital electronic computers on solid-state microchips" (thus differentiating from analog electronic computers and vacuum tubes).
by spacemadness | 2025-04-12 17:22:12+00:00
I’m completely over the tech industry falling over itself to bootlick and apologize away everything we’ve seen play out recently. The Cloudflare CEO, Matthew Prince, recently posted on X trying to explain the strategy and likely calm investors fears: https://x.com/eastdakota/status/1909822463707652192

“They’re not stupid. I know enough of the players involved to know they’re not idiots.”

“They’re not just in it for themselves. I get that this has become non-conventional wisdom, but I am going to assume for this that the goal isn’t merely grift.”

TLDR: don’t worry, it’s 5D chess. Keep on bootlicking your way to success while your stock gets trashed by these policies and we double down on anti-science rhetoric which will hasten our decline. I guess most of these leaders will have cashed out before it all implodes.
by FractalFir | 2025-04-12 17:23:10+00:00
The linked article was mostly meant for people already lossely familiar with the project, but it seems it escaped its intended audience.

I do have a whole bunch of articles about the project on my website, going trough the entire journey of the project, from its start as a Rust to .NET compiler, to the current state.

https://fractalfir.github.io/generated_html/home.html

I should have probably linked the previous articles in this one - I'll add that to my website. I'll also look into adding some more context to the articles next time.

Thanks for the feedback :)
by bawana | 2025-04-12 17:23:51+00:00
Inflation continues. Salary bumps reward the bureaucracy. Meanwhile i get paid less every year - even medicare is going to cut me 2% next year. I guess doctors will suffer the same fate as teachers. I discourage every young person i see from going into medicine. Unless they want to live like a missionary- exposed to disease every day, under equipped to help the sick, and become targets of political forces beyond their control.
by conception | 2025-04-12 17:24:25+00:00
For me, as a non-introvert, I had to come to the realization that most people just won’t reciprocate at a level I want. That you just have to make the stuff happen that you want to happen. So, you really can’t wait for people to reach out to you. If you want to spend time with someone or if you want to have a group outing you just have to be the one to do it. It’s kinda like any club Ive been a part in. There’s usually a few people that drive things, organize, etc and most freeload off that. Your friendships will be like that too. You might find another driver and that’s great! But it won’t be the case most of the time. And it won’t be because people don’t want to do things, it’s just how people are. I wouldn’t take offense. Just think they aren’t gonna be the vice president of your friend club and they’ll just be a member and that’s okay too. Y’all still have a good time.
by immibis | 2025-04-12 17:24:34+00:00
It sounds like you have to find a design that meets your performance target and usage patterns - just like anything else. It also sounds like Google's CFS is a grass is greener situation - you heard Google had something that solved the problem you have, so you want it. But the reason it sounds good, compared to the other designs, is that you haven't had to actually use it and run into its quirks yet.
by nramanand | 2025-04-12 17:24:37+00:00
I guess because the article is talking about insider trading through the use of options and your point on Taleb is how he traded options like any option trader would.

I should be clear that what you seem to think ties these together, i.e:

> given the volatility, at least one would be a hit in this month.

I don't actually believe to be true. It's not like these options aren't being priced somewhat accurately. There could be insanely high volatility and all that needs to happen is for the price to go up instead of down for none of your options to "hit."
by ModernMech | 2025-04-12 17:25:02+00:00
It's not the furthest thing from the American economy as it stands today, but the inevitable conclusion of the "free-market" capitalism we've been practicing over the past number of decades.

Donald Trump is the poster child of American capitalism gone right, he's an aspiration for wealthy capitalists across the nation. Generally people have felt that if only we could get an American businessman like Trump in charge of the country, running things the way a true capitalist would (as opposed to how those dirty awful communists/socialists tend to run things), then the country would start going right for a change.

Well now we have that, and in short order the country has Russian-style crony capitalism from the top. This would not happen in a country that actually cares about free markets. But we don't. Everything we consume is owned by like 10 companies. If you want to get a start in the market you have to get access to capital they control, or meet regulations they set, because they've captured the government regulators through bribes.

Trump is just taking this whole system of favoritism we've been living under and making it official. I for one am for it because honestly people pretending there is no corruption is worse than the corruption at this point.
by michaelsshaw | 2025-04-12 17:26:44+00:00
>BTW the five acts are: killing — typically systematic, targeting civilians rather than militants; bodily/mental harm (e.g widespread slavery, systematic rape); deliberately inflicting conditions meant to destroy the group (e.g. mass starvation);

Check, check and check. And Zionism has always been seeking to expel Palestinians, despite your dubious claims to the contrary. Success is not a requisite as written in the genocide convention. Your population stats are irrelevant.

Try this: go on Israeli politicians twitters. Read the Hebrew language ones and translate them to English. Report back.
by rini17 | 2025-04-12 17:27:14+00:00
So you refuse to learn from the history, because that's basically the UNIX model. That you string together simple text processing programs and any misbehaving program gets sigsegv without endangering anything, you don't have to worry. But it transpired that:

1. splitting functionality in such way is not always possible or effective/performant, not to mention operators in practice tend to find fine grained access control super annoying

2. and more importantly, even if the architecture is working, hostile garbage in your pipeline WILL cause problems with the rest of your app.
by austin-cheney | 2025-04-12 17:28:02+00:00
There is no reason to avoid WebSockets. This is a conclusion people come to because they are familiar with HTTP round trips and cannot imagine anything different.

There are no nuances to understand. It’s as simple as fire and forget.

The only downside to WebSockets is that they are session oriented. Conversely, compared to WebSockets the only upside to HTTP is that its sessionless.
by matthewdgreen | 2025-04-12 17:28:18+00:00
Weekly active users is a pretty strange metric. Essential tools and even social networking apps report DAUs, and they do that because essential things get used daily. How many times did you use Google in the past day? How many times did you visit (insert some social media site you prefer) in the last day? If you’re only using something once per week, it probably isn’t that important to you.
by mystraline | 2025-04-12 17:28:46+00:00
It reminds me of Cory docotorow's comment of something like 'there are 5 social media sites and everything is just copied from one another'

HN isn't immune either, given that karma provides 'rights to punish views and accounts' (downvoting). And it makes a great strategy to make a whole lot of socks with 520 karma, and selectively kill comments and stories you don't want.
by pstuart | 2025-04-12 17:29:05+00:00
> Donald Trump is the poster child of American capitalism gone right

This is the same guy who went bankrupt 3 times, including a casino?

The same guy who'd be as rich as he is today if he had invested the funds bequeathed by his father?

The one who had a TV show based on him that was incredibly manipulated to make him appear richer and wiser than he really is?
by Whoppertime | 2025-04-12 17:30:03+00:00
https://www.emarketer.com/content/pharma-companies-increase-... https://www.fiercepharma.com/marketing/pharma-passes-tech-cl... Newsrooms, online or otherwise get a lot of money from Big Pharma Pharma has overtaken tech to become the second-largest industry for ad spending in 2023.
by awongh | 2025-04-12 17:30:16+00:00
To put on my techno-optimist hat, some specific searches I make already thinking please, please sell me something and google's results are horribly corrupted by SEO.

If an LLM could help solve this problem it would be great.

I think you could make a reasonable technical argument for this- an LLM has more contextual understanding of your high-intent question. Serve me some ads that are more relevant than the current ads based on this deeper understanding.
by deng | 2025-04-12 17:30:35+00:00
> I don’t agree with Trump’s policies generally nor am I American, but this is a good short term strategy.

This strategy has failed spectacularly, as bond yields are still up and treasuries are sold like crazy. US treasuries are no longer seen as safe havens. People rather invest in gold or treasuries from other countries which are not led by a corrupt government. Buying US treasuries is now seen as "lending Trump money", and since Trump runs the US economy exactly like he ran his companies, where IIRC he defaulted on debt at least six times, US treasuries are now a rather risky investment.
Poaching
by anonyporiian | 2025-04-12 17:30:54+00:00
I run a small 5 person company. We’re finally getting traction and suddenly 2 of our employees are getting poached by a nearby giant pharmaceutical.

I’ve been doing this for a while and this is my first experience with this issue. I can’t compete on salary and benefits. My employees haven’t accepted yet. Are there any tactics for this situation? Is this really coming practice?
by Whoppertime | 2025-04-12 17:32:07+00:00
The FBI thought that MLK Jr was a "bad guy". They wiretapped his phones, sent government informants to infiltrate his church meetings, they sent threatening letters to him saying that he should kill himself or tapes would be made public. The FBI leaked damaging or false information to the media about him regularly. The FBI certainly thought he was a bad guy. I don't think the healthcare CEO was under as much legal scrutiny as MLK Jr was
by keldaris | 2025-04-12 17:33:38+00:00
Generally, the reason to bother with this approach is if you have a project that only needs tensor cores in a tiny part of the code and otherwise benefits from the cross platform nature of OpenCL, so you have a mostly shared codebase with a small vendor-specific optimization in a kernel or two. I've been in that situation and do find that approach valuable, but I'll be the first to admit the modern GPGPU landscape is full of unpleasant compromises whichever way you look.
by dtagames | 2025-04-12 17:33:40+00:00
But this article isn't about fake brands or even fake perfumes. It's about legal imitation scents with their own house brand names.

To me, their popularity suggests that buyers want a less expensive product that also smells fancy. With wages and employment what they are, the value proposition has changed.

Disclosure: I bought fancy fragrance when I could afford but I can't at the moment. Can a great Chanel or Guerlain men's fragrance be copied? I'd be willing to try it out.
by LinuxBender | 2025-04-12 17:33:43+00:00
Not a lawyer nor an executive but it's a common practice and also common for companies to file lawsuits for poaching to waste each others time and money. I've had to interview people off-site to avoid such troubles. One viable? tactic is to pay the employees well sometimes called golden hand-cuffs but competing with big pharma may be tough. Pre-IPO shares maybe but in a 5 person company the IPO could be too far out to keep them around. Company perks if you can afford it? Flexible hours, work from remote, good company laptops and so on. It could be worse. Your company could grow, become really successful and that big pharma may just want to take over your company using dirty tactics. Offering your customers the same products at 90% discount just long enough to put you under. Anything else I could suggest would be crossing out of the grey area.
by simonw | 2025-04-12 17:33:57+00:00
I intended those words to imply "being misleading even if they don't know they are being misleading" - I made a better version of that point here: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Mar/11/using-llms-for-code/

> If someone tells you that coding with LLMs is easy they are (probably unintentionally) misleading you. They may well have stumbled on to patterns that work, but those patterns do not come naturally to everyone.
by Amezarak | 2025-04-12 17:34:45+00:00
Sure, but the point is that a wide spectrum of people, particularly on the left, believed so strongly that WTO was such a net negative for the average American they were willing to violently riot over it.

So when we talk about “a useful tool” in the American toolbox, we should keep in mind that tool mostly, or at least has the perception, of benefiting only the rich.
by bawolff | 2025-04-12 17:34:56+00:00
But this is hardly limited to AI.

Copyright is full of grey areas and disagreement over its rules happen all the time. AI is not particularly special in that regard, except perhaps in scale.

Generally the way stuff moves forward is somebody tries something, gets sued and either they win or lose and we move forward from that point.

Ultimately "harm" and "legality" are very different things. Something could be legal and harmful - many things are. In this debate i think different groups are harmed depending on which side that "wins".

If you want to have a nuanced debate, the relavent issue is not if the input works are licensed - they obviously are not, but on the following principles:

- de minimis - is the amount of each individual copyrighted work too small to matter.

- is the AI just extracting "factual" information from the works separate from their presentation. After all each individual work only adjusts the model by a couple bytes. Is it less like copying the work or more like writing a book about the artwork that someone could later use to make a similar work (which would not be copyright infringement if a human did it)

- fair use - complicated, but generally the more "transformative" a work is, the more fair use it would be, and AI is extremely transformative. On the other hand it potentially competes commercially with the original work, which usually means less likely to be fair use (and maybe you could have a mixed outcome here, where the AI generators are fine, but using them to sell competing artwork is not, but other uses are ok).

[Ianal]