MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by iloveburritos89 | 2025-04-27 19:29:31+00:00
Found this in MIT’s basement archives after Ron Rivest told me he’d helped write it but no digital copy existed.

The 1983 committee was reacting to federal pressure on university cryptography. It warned that “trying to firewall cryptography … will shrink the talent pool and slow U.S. progress” (p 2) and predicted a labor crunch if non-citizens were barred from cutting-edge VLSI work.

Swap “cryptology & VLSI” for “LLM weights & 3 nm” and it reads like 2025 BIS testimony. Do today’s export-control proposals on AI and chips risk the same backfire? Curious to hear from anyone involved in CHIPS-Act workforce planning.
by treetalker | 2025-04-27 19:30:08+00:00
As I understood, the service currently creates a PDF file in which each PDF page is standard US letter size and automatically generates flash cards 6-up for the user to cut up after printing.

What I had in mind was to generate the same flash cards 1-up on index-card-sized PDF pages. Then the user can print onto blank index cards and avoid the cutting.

I hope that answers your question!
by PaulRobinson | 2025-04-27 19:31:37+00:00
Marx actually had stuff to say here.

He expected the end state of capitalism to be business owners just constantly fighting the markets to stay still. On the one hand, they'd be constantly trying to figure out how to make sure they were paying bottom prices for goods and services on which they relied, and on the other they'd constantly be fighting to try and sell in a saturated market. Eventually, collapse would ensue.

This was one of the foundations for his thinking.

He couldn't have predicted information technology, or ad tech, but the premise seems to hold up.

Of course, where he ended up was workers owning the means of production and every business basically being a "lifestyle business", with no need - or ability - to scale. This, as you know, became corrupted into government ownership, central planning of the economy, and all the other nightmares of a non-free market.

The ideal state - and I think this is where Marx would have wanted it - is that you might not have had a gazillion milk brands all screaming for attention (and the consumer ultimately paying for that, as it being priced into the amount they pay), but there being a free market of worked-owned businesses.
by roxolotl | 2025-04-27 19:31:49+00:00
Very long article which largely amounts to the “prevalence of left-handedness chart”[0]. If you don’t believe that, or you’d like to understand how that phenomenon works it’s a great read.

[0]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/09/22/the-s...
by rsynnott | 2025-04-27 19:32:08+00:00
> Can't they come up with a more coherent argument like it put paid encyclopedias out of business so the donations it gets for running ads should be taxed like a business.

... Hold on, are you saying that charities shouldn't be allowed to do things that businesses do? Close the food banks, to protect the poor innocent supermarkets! Ban the FSF and OSI, for competing with Microsoft!

I mean, really, what.
by techjamie | 2025-04-27 19:33:05+00:00
> but I can't fathom why Facebook would want to be in the porn bot business

Given the blatant infestation of user AI slop, and their blatant unwillingness to do anything about ads that are blatant scams; I think the lows Meta are willing to sink to for engagement/money are pretty rock bottom.

They don't really seem to care about how nice(or not) Facebook itself is to use as long as they keep eyeballs scrolling on it.
by andrewflnr | 2025-04-27 19:33:46+00:00
They planned all kinds of crazy things in the cold war. Most of them have been phased out, except for attacking military installations which I count as a strategic usage. (And per the surrounding discussion, very much a live possibility, so it doesn't count as evidence of abandoning tech due to the inherent horror. I got distracted but my main point is, these things stay in the toolbox or not entirely on pragmatic grounds.)
by ay | 2025-04-27 19:34:23+00:00
Ah. Apparently I didn’t use that crate, so happily missed that footgun, thanks for the info! That is an unfortunate case.

Though I suspect it’s fair to say the entire settlement is built of glass houses here :-)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43798312

I suppose if one wants absolutely no surprises, they will need to lock the entire toolchain as well, regardless of the language…
by trod1234 | 2025-04-27 19:34:42+00:00
> I want us to plan, strategize, review, and set AI tools to auto. While they work, we're free to be human - thinking, creating, living. Agree, disagree?

It cannot be called assumption, when it comes directly from the horses mouth.

Plan and Do. You implicitly assume that you will survive the environment you intend to create, at its most basic.

Its not a big assumption to assume you are a rational and good person that intends to create an environment capable of raising and allowing children to survive, we wouldn't be having this discussion if I didn't make that assumption.

A big assumption would be your insane and delusional, but I didn't say that, did I? I wouldn't bother saying a thing if that were the case.

I pointed out the problems, and the important parts that should naturally occur with thought and a good education.

Minds much greater than yours (and mine) have attempted to tackle the underlying problems going all the way back to the turn of the last century (1900s). None of these have been solved, and the only thing learned has largely been that they likely can't be solved given the mathematical property of chaos. Mises wrote extensively on these subjects in the 30s.

Failing to think rationally based in external measure and failing to have a plan that is tempered by reality is a choice towards destruction/annihilation, once all indirection and contradictions have been resolved.
by alexop | 2025-04-27 19:35:47+00:00
Yes, I agree. Like I said, in the end it did what a human would do: google for the answer. Still, it was interesting to see how the reasoning unfolded. Normally, humans train on these kinds of puzzles until they become pure pattern recognition. That's why you can't become a grandmaster if you only start learning chess as an adult — you need to be a kid and see thousands of these problems early on, until recognizing them becomes second nature. It's something humans are naturally very good at.
by ikiris | 2025-04-27 19:36:14+00:00
I don't understand these arguments at all. Do you currently not do code reviews at all, and just commit everything directly to repo? do your coworkers?

If this is the case, I can't take your company at all seriously. And if it isn't, then why is reviewing the output of LLM somehow more burdensome than having to write things yourself?
by anatoly | 2025-04-27 19:37:37+00:00
There's lots of true things in that post, and it's undeniable that there's been huge broadening of criteria and it's responsible for a lot of the growth in stats. The question is, is it responsible for all of it? To understand that we have to hold severity constant and compare across time.

A recent study tries to define "profound autism" as "nonverbal, minimally verbal, or IQ<50". They found a significant increase in US children aged 8 from 2000-2016 with profound autism. Non-profound autism increased much more, which makes sense given the broadening of criteria. The study is https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10576490/

Anecdotally, any speech therapist with a long career will likely remark on a local increase of severe autism cases over the last 20-30 yrs. It's not as "skyrocketing" as ASD stats, but prevalence has likely increased substantially.
by zoechi | 2025-04-27 19:38:08+00:00
The first thing the compiler tells after using dyn is, that the value is not object safe. Then you just got yourself another problem ;) With a lot of experience it becomes more obvious from the start what approach can work out, but with little knowledge, the compiler only sends you in circles and the great error messages tell you what you need to change to make the code compile, but usually pushes you in the direction you tried to avoid. I'm reasonably productive now, but it was bloody hard time to get there.

I never worked with low level languages except some university lession, but I think I have good general understanding how a CPU and memory works (just for some context)
by _bin_ | 2025-04-27 19:38:10+00:00
I have less of an issue installing these in the vehicles of repeat offenders but much of the conversation here has been around more general installation or mandating of governors.

I doubt that existing areas are going to see that happen. Plus, I'd rather live in a totally car-dependent area because 1. it makes it harder for people I don't want to live near to move in. Lower crime, fewer cars on blocks in front yards, etc. and 2. I like having lots of space. I like having room for a shop/lab combo. I like having space for a full-size piano. I am not willing to surrender all that for the sake of "walkability". Also 3. it's 105F in the summer here. Honestly, I'm not much interested in walkable cities in this part of the country.
by p0w3n3d | 2025-04-27 19:38:27+00:00
Bare metal printf is usually faster but (surprise surprise) platform dependent.

I remember I was trying to program Atari 8-bit using C compiler, and writing directly characters to Antic memory range WITH charcode translation was 100x faster than using printf.

However I'm not sharing this code because it won't work on UART... laughs nervously
by lordnacho | 2025-04-27 19:38:29+00:00
Makes a lot of sense from my amateur perspective. It takes a bit of time to charge a car, and you might as well use it to buy your groceries. Plus I'm sure WM can get a sensible bulk discount on electricity.

Add to that, you can make people use your app and show them targeted adverts. You can get them to buy any bulk goods for pickup when they are charging the car.
by jchw | 2025-04-27 19:39:00+00:00
> I'm finding it hard to determine that actual harm has occurred here. [...]. But neither fail0verflow nor RTEMS seem to care about any of this.

? There isn't really any evidence that the original RTEMS developers are aware of this situation.

> You don't need permission to use open source code..

"Open source" on its own is just industry jargon. When you use open source code, you are copying it in accordance with an open source copyright license. The copyright license contains certain stipulations around how it is allowed to be used. For example, BSD licenses require that the copyright notice is included when using the code. IANAL but my understanding is if you omit this information even though your work is a derivative work of the original you're in violation of the copyright license.

> So there appears to be two double standards occurring at once.

You should really elaborate who is being held to what standards because I can't make sense of this.
by thatcat | 2025-04-27 19:39:05+00:00
The force is proportional to speed, you can countersteer a bicycle just the same as a motorcycle. There are 2 separate steering techniques, one for high speed (countersteering) and one for low speed (steering) on motorcycles and bicycles - that results from gyroscopic wheel force. The geometry doesn't change, only thing that changes as speed increases on the bike is the gyro force.
by calf | 2025-04-27 19:39:40+00:00
If I were to fathom a guess it would be (the argument that) that LLMs have been a science experiment upon humanity, that many of us haven't consented to.

Imagine if OpenAI instead crawled the Earth for shedded human hair and skin cell samples, did advanced genetic engineering and started growing GMO humans and put them in society "for free", would there be an equivalent outrage? I honestly don't know.
by AshamedCaptain | 2025-04-27 19:39:47+00:00
> Note that e.g. copyright does not apply to decompiled source code

Where does this non-sense come from exactly? Are you claiming the decompiled source code is not a derivative work? It is almost a text-book definition of one (in much the same way the executable is...).

There are some situations (and this depends on your legislation) in which _violating_ copyright is lawful (e.g. in the EU, if it is _strictly necessary_ to do so for interoperability reasons -- think cryptography for network equipment; a decade ago I used to work on this!). But blanket distribution of decompiled proprietary (or GPL'd!) binaries _is_ a copyright violation (literally textbook, as "decompilation" is quite an example of an automated translation). And frankly, I have no idea what kind of confusion of ideas makes these people believe it is OK to distribute game code publicly. Or why it would be OK for code but not for assets. (And it has nothing to do with patents).
by adelineJoOs | 2025-04-27 19:39:59+00:00
Slightly adjacent, I like these two blog articles that show ways to think about non-linear dialogues:

https://philipphagenlocher.de/post/video-game-dialogues-and-...

(introduces an interesting and useful way to think about dialogues, in my opinion)

https://philipphagenlocher.de/post/data-aware-dialogues-for-...

(further expands on the ideas of the first blog post, automatically ensuring that some properties that might be desirable)
by jjav | 2025-04-27 19:40:44+00:00
> Nobody races steeet legal cars.

Most people don't but that's an overly broad generalization.

I raced Spec Miata in its early days (2000-2010) and it was possible (and I did) to keep a moderately competitive Spec Miata still street legal. I didn't have space for a trailer so had to drive it to the track.
by WarOnPrivacy | 2025-04-27 19:40:47+00:00
A mistaken command— /bin/rm -r -f * inputted by one of the animators on the root folder and the movie started deleting Galyn Susman ... was working from home she had a full backup¹ on her home computer Galyn’s home computer ... in 1998 ... stored the data for the feature film ... [it] required 8 people ... to help carry her computer from her Volvo in the parking lot, to Pixar's studio ¹[her computer contained] the character database, the foundational code and models for the characters... They still had to manually review and restore over 100,000 files
by netsharc | 2025-04-27 19:40:50+00:00
In the ancient times there was an ISP selling Internet access where the catch is, you dial up via their program, and this program would have an always-on-top window showing ads...

Then again, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube started "You pay for it with your attention (and your data)" and only later have they implemented payment for being ad-free, although with Zuck's properties, the EU forced it.
by kaoD | 2025-04-27 19:41:03+00:00
You can embed HTML in an SVG via foreignObject. Seems like that's exactly what the library is doing[0].

Whether that's faster or more reliable, I don't know. Seems likely to render different depending on where you view the SVG (especially out of browsers).

[0]: https://github.com/search?q=repo%3Azumerlab%2Fsnapdom%20fore...
by JorgeGT | 2025-04-27 19:41:23+00:00
Lenovo has been doing this in Spain for quite a bit, and you can even buy them without any preinstalled OS at all for a lower price still. But at least here the option is typically available for ThinkPads rather than for more cheap consumer lines. Same with Acer. Dell offers Linux options but no "empty" option afaik.
by 999900000999 | 2025-04-27 19:41:34+00:00
Chaotic good, I could imagine Walmart deciding to sell a miniature EV for around $12,000.

Imagine something like a two-seater City car, while I'm dreaming I imagine this type of vehicle completely taking over for most City commuting. Since these would be smaller and slower than normal cars, they would be phenomenally safer.
by whartung | 2025-04-27 19:41:35+00:00
At what point does a CL implementation need to be before it can start hoovering up the available library code from other implementations (license permitting).

How many LOOP macros does the community need, particularly when bootstrapping an implementation, as an example.

Similarly with, arguably 70-80% of the runtime. The CL spec is dominated by the large library which, ideally, should be mostly portable CL, at least I would think.
by Bender | 2025-04-27 19:41:54+00:00
Adding to this the GSM A3/A8 algo were broken shortly after they arrived in the US. The only mitigating control was my boss in a wireless provider and the FBI meeting up with someone that was going to demo breaking it. They were advised what prison they would be relocating to and the demo was called off. Rinse and repeat. This was before the internet was popular or even widely used. The word eventually got out.
by toast0 | 2025-04-27 19:42:04+00:00
ZFS on FreeBSD is quite nice. System tools like freebsd-update integrate well. UFS continues to work as well, and may be more appropriate for some use cases where ZFS isn't a good fit, copy on write is sometimes very expensive.

Afaik, the FreeBSD position is both ZFS and UFS are fully supported and neither is secondary to the other; the installer asks what you want from ZFS, UFS, Manual (with a menu based tool), or Shell and you do whatever; in that order, so maybe a slight preferance towards ZFS.
by napsterbr | 2025-04-27 19:43:44+00:00
Coincidentally I'm working on FeebDB[0], which is similar but for Elixir instead. It can be seen as a replacement to Ecto (which won't work well when you have thousands of databases).

Mostly as a fun experiment, but also from the realization that every place I worked at in the past (small/medium-sized B2B startups) would greatly benefit from such architecture.

Yes, there are massive trade-offs to this approach, and the concerns raised in the comment section are valid. This doesn't mean the database-per-tenant is never worth it. There's a sweet spot for it, and if it fits your business/application, I personally would consider it a technical advantage over competitors.

My goal with FeebDB is to eliminate or reduce the common pain points of database-per-tenant, including:

- ensure there is a single writer per database.

- improved connection management across all tenants (e.g. only keep open at most 1000 DB connections, similar to an LRU cache).

- on-demand migration (all shards are migrated on application startup, but if a shard that hasn't migrated yet receives a request, it will first perform the migration and then serve the request),

- on-demand backups and replication (e.g. the library knows which shards were updated in the last X minutes, so it can trigger Litestream or similar on demand).

- support for enumeration of databases (performing map/reduce/filter operations across multiple DBs)

- support for clustered deployment with "pinned" tenants (for now I'm assuming the IOPS of a single beefy server should be enough for all use cases, but once that's no longer sufficient you can have "shards of shards")

[0] - https://github.com/renatomassaro/FeebDB/
by throwaway0123_5 | 2025-04-27 19:45:47+00:00
It doesn't seem like it is intended for a manager to use to get information about their direct reports, but rather org-wide information?

NASA apparently has ~18k employees, it seems like it might be useful to be able to query "Who at NASA has X, Y, Z skills that can help us with this project." Then you can speak to some of those people face-to-face. It won't be perfect but certainly sounds like a useful tool in principle.
by dragonwriter | 2025-04-27 19:47:05+00:00
> Obese parents, both mum and dad, multiply the likelihood of child autism by something like 4x. It could be that the obesity epidemic is the cause of the rising autism rates.

Even assuming the first sentence is correct going from 0% prevalence to 100% prevalence of something with a 4x risk increase would explain only a very small part of the increase in the various proxies by which the prevalence is estimated, whereas (as the article argues) change in diagnostic criteria and reporting practices can easily explain all of it. So, sure, to the extent there is any real increase in prevalence (which is not at all clear), factors like parental obesity, parental age, and other things that have some indication of being either risk factors or proxies for unidentified risk factors may either play a role or be indicative of things that do, but we can be fairly certain what the main driving factor in the numbers is, and it is sufficient to explain the observations, and invoking anything else is a violation of the principal of parsimony.
by napoleoncomplex | 2025-04-27 19:47:05+00:00
"In response, Lord Watts added that young people “are not stupid”, explaining that if they assume they will “earn low incomes and there’s no future”, then youths will likely lower their aspirations as a result."

There's probably a lot more interesting info hiding behind that statement. If housing is massively unaffordable (as it in the UK), social mobility is rather low, why go out there and destroy yourself in low wage jobs?

Not saying there's no spoiled youth waiting for their lottery ticket that will never come, but there's a rational aspect to it as well.
by simultsop | 2025-04-27 19:47:30+00:00
there are underlying differences between C++, Rust, JS. The aim of libraries are re-usability. To call a small library shallow, its your choice. If you want to drag a helpers folder with you anywhere its your choice. JS does not have the fate to have language updates as C, Rust. Code lives in many envoirements and is in many cases polyfilled/transpiled.

You are welcome to shape your point of view in this free world.

Checkout slidevjs, that may also look shallow to you. The eco-system is very open. It will never be as C++ or Rust. I believe everyone is happy where they are.
by detourdog | 2025-04-27 19:47:48+00:00
What we have already lost is the process of reading the newspapers that birthed the obituary.

Newspaper's used to have strong local coverage and a collection of vignettes into the outside world. The way the author uses the obituaries is the way I used to use the newspapers. Getting multiple newspapers (and magazines) from all over the world was a fixture for New York City creative offices pre-internet.