MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by kev009 | 2025-04-26 05:48:28+00:00
It seems like the parent was trying to paint a situation of you being a bottleneck to success. It seems a bit Schrödinger's BFDL though.. is Linus a bottleneck to the most used server operating system? Did Guido hold back Python? The existence of the GDC and LDC compilers torpedoes toolchain concerns.. I'd be more worried about Java or Golang suffering from some eventual corporate buffoonery.

To the parent's point of startups, betting the farm on something like a particular language out of some sense of superiority might mean you are not focusing on the right problems. But if the founders happen to know a less widely used tool it doesn't seem inappropriate either. The type of employee that can drive a startup or a big tech project forward is not going to be thwarted by a language, and they might find something new to learn fun.
by dimgl | 2025-04-26 05:49:59+00:00
> And Dlang was, by far, the worst experience out of the lot. Firstly is the lack of adequate, comprehensive, and centralised tooling. I almost gave up when dmd could not even compile a freshly init'd project.

Yep this also happened to me when I tried D. I love the idea of the language and the syntax is great, but I really don't want to fight my tools when I'm working on a project.
by ricksunny | 2025-04-26 05:51:37+00:00
The very namesake building I’ll keep sensitized to the STS Bonvillian name, I was unfamiliar prior, thank you.

That’s great to hear you sometimes give talks to course 3 students, as maybe some of them will go on to study lattices like: https://www.sf-uap.com/materials-science , for which study under what governance structure we may not know.

All the best.
by owenversteeg | 2025-04-26 05:52:22+00:00
I love "In textbooks, astonishing facts were presented without astonishment."

I think that is precisely what made my biology classes so good; the astonishment. Properly blowing students' minds week after week is a real skill. People are capable of incredible things, the motivation is the hard part. Each "wow" is a great motivator for you to learn more.
by timewizard | 2025-04-26 05:53:15+00:00
> No citizen is required to make themselves known to their state government either.

The hospital is required to create a birth certificate for you. I knew a guy growing up who was born to extremely off the grid people and it was a constant problem for him until he decided to just get himself the birth certificate and all other paperwork to avoid the obvious problems with trying to live that way and participate in our society.

Most importantly, if you plan to vote, you're going to have to "make yourself known" and actually prove you have the right. We're creating a class that otherwise doesn't exist and to the extent they do they accept the limitations that come with it.

> at least until the the census rolls around

The federal census? And while living under sanctuary status you think they're going to participate?

> cities are better off abstaining from questions of immigration status entirely.

So services that are reserved for immigrants? How do we means test those? Isn't the act of applying for an AB60 license declaring your immigration status implicitly? I get that some people may not want cities to do this but I have trouble with the extent of this logic.

> [0]: which there wasn't

There absolutely was. It's called a section 287(g) delegation. Los Angeles ended this in 2015.

https://abc7.com/la-county-board-of-supervisors-los-angeles-...
by lazide | 2025-04-26 05:53:45+00:00
One thing I ran across when trying to figure this out previously - while some firmware is undoubtably dumb, a decent amount of it was that it was doing a lot more than typical PC firmware.

For instance, the slow RAM check POST I was experiencing is because it was also doing a quick single pass memory test. Consumer firmware goes ‘meh, whatever’.

Disk spin up, it was also staging out the disk power ups so that it didn’t kill the PSU - not a concern if you have 3-4 drives. But definitely a concern if you have 20.

Also, the raid controller was running basic SMART tests and the like. Which consumer stuff typically doesn’t.

Now how much any of this is worthwhile depends on the use case of course. ‘Farm of cheap PCs’ type cloud hosting environments, most these types of conditions get handled by software, and it doesn’t matter much if any single box is half broken.

If you have one big box serving a bunch of key infra, and reboot it periodically as part of ‘scheduled maintenance’ (aka old school on prem), then it does.
by TheDong | 2025-04-26 05:54:06+00:00
Okay, I'll look at the "coreruleset" which you say is good.

Let's see what's blocked:

"Division by zero" anywhere in the response body since that's a php error. Good luck talking about math ([0] and [1])

Common substrings in webshells, all matched as strings in response bodies, rather than parsing HTML, so whatever, don't comment about webshells either [2]

Unless the body is compressed, in which case don't apply the above. Security [3].

Also, read this regex and tell me you understand what it's doing. Tell me the author of it understands what it matches: https://github.com/coreruleset/coreruleset/blob/943a6216edea...

What the coreruleset is doing here is trying to parse HTML, SQL, HTTP, and various other languages with Regular Expressions. This doesn't work. This will never give you a right result.

It's trying to keep up to date with the string representation of java and php errors, without even knowing the version of Java the server is running, and without the Java maintainers, who constantly add new errors, having any say.

The only reasons attackers aren't evading the webshell rules here trivially is because so few people use these rules in practice that they're not even worth defeating (and it is quite easy to have your php webshell generate unique html each load, which cannot be matched by a regular expression short of /.*/; html is not a regular grammar).

I was ready to see something that made WAFs feel like they did _anything_ based on your comment, but all I see is a pile of crap that I would not want anywhere near my site.

Filtering java error strings and php error strings out of my rust app's responses using regexes to parse html is just such a clown-world idea of security. Blocking the loading of web-shells until the attacker changes a single character in the 'title' block of the output html seems so dumb when my real problem is that someone could write an arbitrary executable to my server.

Every WAF ruleset I've read so far has made me sure it's a huge pile of snake-oil, and this one is no different.

[0]: https://github.com/coreruleset/coreruleset/blob/943a6216edea...

[1]: https://github.com/coreruleset/coreruleset/blob/943a6216edea...

[2]: https://github.com/coreruleset/coreruleset/blob/943a6216edea...

[3]: https://github.com/coreruleset/coreruleset/blob/943a6216edea...
by GuestFAUniverse | 2025-04-26 05:54:34+00:00
Speak after me: Despotism.

despotism /dĕs′pə-tĭz″əm/ noun

Rule by or as if by a despot; absolute power or authority. The actions of a despot; tyranny. A government or political system in which the ruler exercises absolute power. A state so ruled. The power, spirit, or principles of a despot; absolute control over others; tyrannical sway; tyranny. Similar: tyranny A government which is directed by a despot; a despotic monarchy; absolutism; autocracy. Similar: absolutism autocracy Government by a singular authority, either a single person or tight-knit group, which rules with absolute power. Dominance through threat of punishment and violence.

The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition
by vbezhenar | 2025-04-26 05:55:21+00:00
When I'm using Fusion 360, I can't stop thinking that this whole experience would be much better with code. It has awesome underlying engine, but GUI UX is just terrible. I'd prefer to describe objects in code, observing code output in real-time on adjacent panel, using proper text editor to apply changes.

I've used OpenSCAD, it's not the thing I want, it doesn't have constraint solving, the key is using constraint solving with feedback to highlight warnings, etc.

Now maybe I'm not talking about complete replacement of GUI with code, but rather an alternative view, where you can either use GUI to model objects, or switch to code where everything is synchronized.
by darajava | 2025-04-26 05:55:28+00:00
Canny filter: https://i.imgur.com/Ju7Ggac.png

Sora: https://clevercoloringbook.com/samples/3_cartoon.png

I've had this idea years ago and searched extensively for a way to turn images into nice line art, but it turns out there needs to be a good bit of creativity (AI) to do so. Old school computer science techniques don't cut it.
by giancarlostoro | 2025-04-26 05:55:41+00:00
One area where Go, C# and Rust beat D is packages in a few different ways.

For C# Microsoft eventually embraced NuGet their package manager, and used it to put core packages that don't need to be fully available OOTB but can then benefit from frequent updates on a per project basis as opposed to updating the entire language runtime.

For Go it was the out of the box packages, like if I want to make a website, I can pull in net/http and their templating packages that come out of the box with Go, maybe a reasonably simple core maintainer package or packages that go into Dub would be a strong selling point. Right now Vibe.d is the only option for web dev, but there's no reason a much simpler web server couldn't exist.

For Rust, I just really love Cargo, I think its one of the nicest package managers I've ever used.

The other thing that would really help D is if something significant is built around D, whether it be a framework (like what Rails did for Ruby) or some major application that needs D to function at its core and is used by many, this could be a groundbreaking modern IDE, or anything really, a database that uses the best bits and pieces of D to scale, or even a really rich cross-platform GUI stack (my kingdom for std.gui to be a thing in D, and reasonably exhaustive).

I wish I had unlimited time and money, I would invest it in D. Alas, I'm not a language maintainer, just a guy who loves really good tools.
by Aloisius | 2025-04-26 05:56:39+00:00
Sure, but classic folktales weren't intended for children. They were stories largely for adults.

Indeed, the Grimm brothers did not intend their books for children initially. They were supposed to be scholarly works, but no one seems to have told the people buying the books who thought they were tales for children and complained that the books weren't suitable enough for children.

Eventually they caved to pressure and made major revisions in later editions, dropping unsuitable stories, adding new stories and eventually illustrations specifically to appeal to children.
by musicale | 2025-04-26 05:57:41+00:00
> They're like writing cursive: we learned them, so we think naturally everybody must and lament how much it sucks that kids these days do not

Writing cursive may not be the most useful skill (though cursive italic is easy to learn and fast to write), but there's nothing quite like being able to read an important historical document (like the US Constitution) in its original form.
by frizlab | 2025-04-26 05:58:08+00:00
> the swift wasm project still uses a forked compiler IIRC…

No <https://forums.swift.org/t/stdlib-and-runtime-tests-for-wasm...>.

Like I told you, I cross compile to all of the targets directly on my Mac (except windows that I do technically on my Mac, but on a VM). I could use Linux all the same.

Swift now has the concept of Swift SDK (`swift sdk install …`) and it is possible to target whatever (that has an SDK) easily. Yes, they took their sweet time, but it now works properly.
by PaulRobinson | 2025-04-26 05:58:52+00:00
It's not about identity politics. It's not about self-deprecation. It's not even about if the material is particularly funny or not.

It's whether you're punching up or punching down.

If the purpose of Crap Towns is to punch up, speak to power, to point out the failures of Thatcherism, decreased social mobility through a perptuation of failing center-right politics thanks to an overly-powerful media and political class that is divorced from reality, the absurd dominance of PPE graduates within policy making, and on, and on, on... well, it's great satire.

If it's just to point at working class people and go "haha, their streets are dirty and they eat bad food", well... you're punching down, and it's rare that can work as comedy. It's just mean bullying.

So yes, you can write Crap Towns today, but it lands better if you draw the line from Thatcher through Major, Blair, Brown, Cameron, May, Johnson, Truss, Sunak and Starmer, and their acolytes - the PPE mafia on both sides of the House, and point out how their crappy politics has caused all this, not their victims.
by ForOldHack | 2025-04-26 06:01:16+00:00
Apparently,many people are. I once was in an interview with an aquired company. ( We were aquired... I thanked the founders and only said a few words about the opportunity we had... )

Months later, I was taking to one of he founders, and he said that someone on the board of directors was sitting behind me. He said "keep THAT guy. He has more enthusiasm than the entire rest of your company."

Thanks Richard K and Jim V.
by r0b05 | 2025-04-26 06:02:03+00:00
MSFT want to build their own Cursor aka Copilot Agent.

They can build a better product with their resources effectively extinguishing Cursor, who will then need to find a way to differentiate.

If Cursor was smart, they would have decoupled from the beginning as they had first mover advantage. They will now have to adapt while fending off competition from MSFT and the other players.

MSFT meanwhile, have discovered that this market is too profitable to be left untouched. They have probably been building their agent for a while and have now decided to launch while simultaneously blocking direct competition. They already have an ecosystem with users who have switching inertia. It's a brilliant yet ruthless move.
Show HN: Templon – A strict, modern template string engine for JavaScript/TS
by amirfarzamnia | 2025-04-26 06:02:09+00:00
Hi HN,

I built [Templon](https://github.com/amirfarzamnia/templon), a lightweight template string engine for JavaScript and TypeScript.

It’s designed to solve a simple but surprisingly messy problem: safely replacing placeholders in a string, with features you usually have to hack together yourself.

Templon supports: - Deep variable access (`{{user.name}}`) - Custom delimiters - Escape characters for literal brackets - Strict mode (error if missing keys) - Circular reference protection - Full TypeScript types

It’s useful when you want more than `string.replace`, but don’t need a full EJS/Handlebars engine.

I was frustrated by older libraries like `string-template` not supporting nested objects or strict validation, and wanted something modern, strict, and flexible.

Repo: https://github.com/amirfarzamnia/templon

Would love feedback — good, bad, brutal. Thanks!
by roenxi | 2025-04-26 06:02:12+00:00
Ex-CIA head Brennan famously remarked in an MSNBC interview [0] that when he says something is a Russian information operation that includes dumping accurate information.

So really it isn't enough to identify something as Russian propaganda - it is necessary to analyse whether it is propaganda of the accurate and informative variety, or the inaccurate variety.

Propaganda really just means someone is arguing a viewpoint. The BBC is classic propaganda, but nonetheless a pretty reliable source of information and a lot of the views are very agreeable.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L8Shx2AR_E4
by theptip | 2025-04-26 06:04:23+00:00
I really struggle to grok this perspective.

The semantics of whether it’s the LLM or the human setting up the system that “take an action” are irrelevant.

It’s perfectly clear to anyone that cares to look that we are in the process of constructing these systems. The safety of these systems will depend a lot on the configuration of the black box labeled “LLM”.

If people were in the process of wiring up CD trays to guns on every street corner you’d I hope be interested in CDGun safety and the algorithms being used.

“Don’t build it if it’s unsafe” is also obviously not viable, the theoretical economic value of agentic AI is so big that everyone is chasing it. (Again, it’s irrelevant whether you think they are wrong; they are doing it, and so AI safety, steerability, hackability, corrigibility, etc are very important.)
by riehwvfbk | 2025-04-26 06:05:39+00:00
But not all science is actually producing anything of value. Most universities aren't Harvard. A lot of labs do very obvious, very incremental work. They jump on the bandwagon du jour for grant writing and figure out a way to get the most papers/citation per grad student. Grad students themselves are mostly immigrants, and they are mostly there not for the love of science but because it's a good way to eventually get US work authorization.
by Spivak | 2025-04-26 06:05:43+00:00
And this back-and-forth here is why the folks at the BLS have a hard job. Both options— a car in 1990 is a car in 2025 and real value/utility is unchanged and price should be compared 1-1 ignores that cars are actually better now. But at the same time you literally can't buy a new car at 1990's quality so the additional value/utility might not actually be wanted by some and so this in effect makes real price go up.
by rhubarbtree | 2025-04-26 06:06:39+00:00
You’re looking at the wrong numbers. Wealth, not income. Wealth inequality is through the roof. Poverty is through the roof. More people using food banks than ever. More people on zero hours and low paid contracts.

If you think the problem with the UK is that rich people are leaving, then you have no idea about the reality of living in the UK. Visiting some of the towns in this book would be a starting point.
by darajava | 2025-04-26 06:07:24+00:00
Thanks! I priced it as low as I could given the costs of printing the book, Sora's API costs, and the human effort that goes into it (there are some creative choices to be made too!). The 100 page books you see on Amazon aren't personalized and probably not the best quality. I'm also hoping a completed page from one of these books will be a nice keepsake for the parents as well as being more of an incentive for a child to exercise some creativity.
by PaulRobinson | 2025-04-26 06:07:39+00:00
Go get an airbnb in a poor suburb for a few weeks and live there, talk to people, and ask them if they think they're more or less equal with other Britons in the last 15 years. Show them your Gini coefficient and see what they think of it. Ask them if they feel the income distribution has been flattened in a way that favours them.

The rich people living here for the last 40 years all leaving does not bother most people. In fact, it's cause for celebration. They're leeches who don't pay tax on their piles of cash held in off-shore accounts - they just drive up the price of everything, particularly property. Meanwhile there are plenty of people trying to get here from the US to replace them who understand the purpose of capital is to put it to work and create jobs, not stare at it on a screen.

Your kind of thinking is not unusual within centre right politics, but it's also why nationalist populism is a credible threat. Farage is currently favourite with most bookmakers to be next PM because of the kind of defence of Tory policy you're making. Please think on that.
by YZF | 2025-04-26 06:09:16+00:00
This feels like a decent list. I'm not an American but some of these processes seem to be happening in other places.

1. Is all of us, on the "right" or the "left". Let's not do this.

2. Here you could say maybe the government is doing a little. But I would still say most of the lies and conspiracies that are reverberating in our society are not originating from there. This is like 95% on all of us (or social media). 5% you can maybe blame Trump.

3. I don't really see this happening yet.

4. I would say the "left" has been demonizing the right very effectively. But sure, goes both ways. This just seems to be standard for political debate today (it's the end of the world if those guys get power). I think it's mostly up to us to push back against this. So if you're a democrat push back against casting Trump as a dictator (I don't think he is) and if you're a republican push back against all this "stop the steal" and "lock her up" whatever nonsense.

5. Not happening IMO.

6. I guess Trump is blaming illegal immigrants for the rise in crime. I don't think is is a perfect match to the intention here. America is so multi-cultural/diverse anyways so this tactic doesn't really work.

7. Trump sort of does this but not really to the extent that I think the author of the list meant. So far it seems there's no fear from voicing dissent. Musk went ballistic on Navarro calling him a moron and is critical of Trumps tariffs. Many other republicans are critical. This is more of a kindergarden than authoritarianism.

8. Not happening. Would be very worrying if we get there.

9. Not happening. We had large rallies before the election but you don't see the sort of things you might see in Iran or Turkey. Again this would be a worrying sign if we get here.

10. Also not happening. You see universities fighting back against Trump. you see courts. you see states. you see people. If anything it seems people feel like they have a lot of power.
by snackbroken | 2025-04-26 06:09:40+00:00
Bend[1] and Vine[1] are two experimental programming languages that take similar approaches to automatically parallelizing programs; interaction nets[3]. IIUC, they basically turn the whole program into one big dependency graph, then the runtime figures out what can run in parallel and distributes the work to however many threads you can throw at it. It's also my understanding that they are currently both quite slow, which makes sense as the focus has been on making `write embarrassingly parallelizable program -> get highly parallelized execution` work at all until recently. Time will tell if they can manage enough optimizations that the approach enables you to get reasonably performing parallel functional programs 'for free'.

[1] https://github.com/HigherOrderCO/Bend [2] https://github.com/VineLang/vine [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interaction_nets
by tzs | 2025-04-26 06:10:50+00:00
Personally I feel like cars with headlights in the daytime on days with good visibility can be too noticeable. I find myself giving them too much attention because they stand out more in my visual field.

When the oncoming cars do not have headlights on I find it easier to give them just enough attention to see that they are behaving normally leaving more attention to devote to things other than oncoming cars.
by darajava | 2025-04-26 06:13:25+00:00
Thanks! I've added a section at the bottom of the site showing some real photos of an actual coloring book I got in the mail. There are thumbnails of all photos uploaded on the back.

$24 + postage is the lowest I could reasonably charge for this. Printing costs are a bit more than half of that, OpenAI charge a surprising amount for image generation, but there is also a good amount of human effort (and creative choices) in generating the book. It's not a fully automated process and I hope that's evident from the quality of the end product.
by karlgkk | 2025-04-26 06:15:04+00:00
Often when someone, especially a comedian, complains about “political correctness”, what they actually mean is: nobody is laughing at the same joke I told 20 years ago

Sensibilities change. The sense of what is and isn’t punching down changes. Even the appetite for punching down changes.

People who whine about “PC” always pretend like it’s the death of comedy or speech or whatever, and yet… there are younger people building great careers!

And yes, there is a real worrying erosion of free speech - but 98% these people could keep saying exactly what they’ve been saying - they’re just not getting the laughs they think they’re entitled to.