MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jmholla | 2025-04-14 22:12:30+00:00
This article has an asterisk on the title.

> (* not actually why l10n support is important)

I'm honestly not sure why it's included in the title there at all. There really is no talk about localization in the document.

This article is about custom bash and vim configurations when SSHing into a machine. The roadblocks the author runs into aren't too surprising to anyone that has a fairly deep understanding of SSH, bash, and Linux processes, but a worthwhile read for more novice users.

For the more advanced, I think the tone can get a little weird, with the author expecting behaviors that don't make sense. But, they do quickly realize why their expectations were not met.

There is one point where they didn't explain what was going on. When they attempted

echo 'alias puppet_="sudo puppet agent --test"' > custom-bashrc ssh -t secret-abc123.1d6.org "bash --rcfile <( echo '"$(cat custom-bashrc)"' )"

The issue here was the shell's invocation of echo losing the quotes in their file. One option, assuming both ends have `base64`, is to reencode the file.

ssh -t secret-abc123.1d6.org "bash --rcfile <( echo '"$(base64 bashrc)"' | base64 -d )"

There might also be some sed invocation that can properly escape everything, but I think I'm good on spending any more time on this.

Also, there is a commenter trying out a few other successful "file smuggles" that are worth a gander. (My favorite is their usage of environment variables locally to bypassing the shell's "removal" of quotes.)
by const_cast | 2025-04-14 22:12:42+00:00
> Most professors in non stem departments are Marxist

So, as I alluded to before, the issue here isn't the education - you are delusional. I don't know how to help you because what you're saying is just not aligned with reality and that's not something I can fix.

For the record, you can analyze the text of various scholars even if you don't agree with them, and that's a huge part of critical thinking and higher education. Understand the historical, social, and economic context that lead someone like Marx to his ideology is important. We do this for Hitler and Mussolini all the time, but I don't see anyone claiming that educators are fascists.

Meaning, you, and others, have a severe bias here. You're missing, looking past, the instances that disagree with your perception. So then all that's left is the stuff that aligns with your perception, and such you've constructed a perfect delusion.

This idea that conservative socioeconomics and the "invisible hand" is the One True theory of everything and nothing else should even so much as uttered, lest you be a communist, is, in it of itself, as you say, "fashionable nonsense". In fact, you cannot truly understand the context for 20th century fiscal policy without understanding the impact of Marx and other ideologues that came after him.
by petsfed | 2025-04-14 22:12:54+00:00
When I use it in an IT (or honestly, any non-physics or non-physics) context, I typically mean "how many different ways can we do it with the same effective outcome?".

To whit, "contract entropy": how many different ways can a contractor technically fulfill the terms of the contract, and thus get paid? If your contract has high entropy, then there's a high probability that you'll pay your contractor to not actually achieve what you wanted.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-04-14 22:13:04+00:00
> since the money ultimately needs to be spent in the U.S. it doesn't seem that important whether the funds are frozen in the U.S.

Of course it does. The hypothetical we're considering is the administration illegally freezing bank accounts. You don't need something legally impenetrable. Just complicated enough that it slows down the goons while you fight them in court.
Ask HN: What books continue to be relevant with vibe coding and beyond?
by muzani | 2025-04-14 22:13:21+00:00
I'll start with two: The Pragmatic Programmer, A. Hunt & D. Thomas, and Test-Driven Development by Example, K. Beck.

They don't have to be applicable in every situation, but the principles last well over the years, and some even seem prescient.
by margalabargala | 2025-04-14 22:14:56+00:00
> In both cases, those that believe in them try to force them on everyone in law, policy, etc. They've been doing that, too, so it isn't speculative.

I think it is speculative. I haven't seen this happen beyond a small number of isolated cases, that generally are met poorly within the organization where it happens.

To my observation the association between "believing that intersectionality accurately describes the world today" and "attempting to force others to believe similarly", is about as strong as the association between "frequently voting Republican in the US since 2016", and "attempting to carry out a mass shooting".

Could you describe what you believe "intersectionality" to mean, as a philosophy?
by sliken | 2025-04-14 22:14:59+00:00
I've had 3 serious failures.

1. Santa Cruz aluminum frame, snapped a few inches above the bottom bracket, at a weld line for a reinforcement. I was sprinting and heard it, frame didn't fail/fold but felt weird, didn't realize till I looked close. SC had me a new frame in a few days after I sent pics. 2. Light weight road racing seat, I think they were aluminum rails, snapped when I leaned back on the seat, my hands weren't on the handlebars. I landed on the road on my back. No warnings at all. 3. Cannondale aluminum crit frame. Back before replaceable derailleur hangers. It snapped clean off, got a new frame for free, even asked which one and which color I wanted.

I've bent various bike parts out of steel, but never had one snap. Does seem like aluminum has a reputation for just snapping. Heard similar stories from friends, riding buddies, and fellow racers.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-04-14 22:15:46+00:00
> it's eating your seed corn

Paraphrasing J. P. Morgan, the man, in the midst of the Panic of 1907 reassuring a banker concerned about dipping into reserves to pay out depositors: "what are reserves for if not times like these."

Eat the seed corn. Fight. Then raise unencumbered donations from the billionaires whose balls haven't fallen off. If Harvard plays this correctly, they could become one of the flag bearers of the legal and financial resistance to Trump.
by anal_reactor | 2025-04-14 22:16:11+00:00
> I mean, the fact we have so many metaphors for the act of being the person giving a group bad news, should tell you how poorly humans look on it.

Who told you this? Because science shows again and again that humans respond stronger to negative stimuli than positive. This is also why media is mostly filled with bad news, and "good news only channels" always fail.

BTW we have so many words for people who bring bad news unnecessarily exactly because people overreact to bad news, and quite often it reaches comical proportions, and needs to be called out. Like the guy who shows up at a party just to tell everyone that every beer shortens the lifespan for one minute.

And even if what you say is true, think about it: this is a mechanism that has somehow evolved across all cultures independently. Either this, or it is a biological atittude, predating the idea of "culture". Therefore, it's not a stretch to assume that it has its purpose, and "people doing whatever they have been doing for thousands of years" is NOT a reason to panic.
by elcritch | 2025-04-14 22:16:23+00:00
Sorta! It didn’t start out that way but I’ve been building more from HTML overtime but keeping it fast and lightweight. I’ve cherry picked a subset of HTML like CSS grids which add a lot of layout power without tons of normal HTML hacks.

I want to try adding a JavaScript runtime with simple DOM built on Figuro nodes instead. But there’s some issues with Nim’s memory management and QuickJs.
by arp242 | 2025-04-14 22:17:09+00:00
When I was active on the Politics Stack Exchange site years ago I was "reported to the ADL" for merging the [jews] and [judaism] tags. Right out of the gate after I casually mentioned it in another discussion: not even a big fight about it. But the same person outright ignored the Trump-supporting holocaust denying user who harrassed a Jewish user with antisemitic slurs such (e.g. [1]).

Sadly antisemitism obviously exists, and sadly some pro-Palestinian activists have veered off into antisemitism. But the selective outrage is hard to take serious.

Remember, Caesar subjugated Gaul and killed or enslaved about a quarter of all Gauls in the process, to "protect" them from invading Germanic tribes. "Top kek", as I believe the old Latin saying goes.

[1]: https://politics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/3596 – I am the author of that, I deleted my account since in large party due to all of this
by matt3210 | 2025-04-14 22:17:31+00:00
I don't want AI to be part of anything I do unless it's opt-in. When I want to use AI I'll go use AI I don't need or want it integrated into my other tools.

I especially dont want it nativly on my phone or macbook unless it's opt-in. the opt-out stuff is soooo frustrating.
by omneity | 2025-04-14 22:17:34+00:00
I have been trying GPT-4.1 for a few hours by now through Cursor on a fairly complicated code base. For reference, my gold standard for a coding agent is Claude Sonnet 3.7 despite its tendency to diverge and lose focus.

My take aways:

- This is the first model from OpenAI that feels relatively agentic to me (o3-mini sucks at tool use, 4o just sucks). It seems to be able to piece together several tools to reach the desired goal and follows a roughly coherent plan.

- There is still more work to do here. Despite OpenAI's cookbook[0] and some prompt engineering on my side, GPT-4.1 stops quickly to ask questions, getting into a quite useless "convo mode". Its tool calls fails way too often as well in my opinion.

- It's also able to handle significantly less complexity than Claude, resulting in some comical failures. Where Claude would create server endpoints, frontend components and routes and connect the two, GPT-4.1 creates simplistic UI that calls a mock API despite explicit instructions. When prompted to fix it, it went haywire and couldn't handle the multiple scopes involved in that test app.

- With that said, within all these parameters, it's much less unnerving than Claude and it sticks to the request, as long as the request is not too complex.

My conclusion: I like it, and totally see where it shines, narrow targeted work, adding to Claude 3.7 - for creative work, and Gemini 2.5 Pro for deep complex tasks. GPT-4.1 does feel like a smaller model compared to these last two, but maybe I just need to use it for longer.

0: https://cookbook.openai.com/examples/gpt4-1_prompting_guide
by zamadatix | 2025-04-14 22:18:29+00:00
I (and the provided link) are not referring to http://example.com:80 to https://example.com:443 type redirects, though those are certainly nice too. They are, indeed, solely about http://example.com:443 to https://example.com:443 type redirects and what those can provide.

The "why/value" is usually in clearly handling accidents in hardcoding connection info, particularly for local API/webdev environments where you might pass connection information as an object/list of parameters rather than normal user focused browser URL bar entry. The upside is a connection error can be a bit more opaque than an explicit 400 or 302 saying what happened or where to go instead. That's the entire reason webservers tend to respond with an HTTP 400 in such scenarios in the first place.

Like I said though, once I remembered this was more a "hacky" type solution to give an error than built-in protocol upgrade functionality I'm not so sure the small amount of juice would actually be worth the relatively complicated squeeze for such a tool anymore.
by kjellsbells | 2025-04-14 22:18:58+00:00
Companies like these are hard to find in the US because of the twin curses (or joys, depending on your views) of "maximizing shareholder value" and "SEC regulation".

If you list on a big exchange, your investors will expect revenue and profit to go brrr quarter after quarter forever. It's a treadmill you can never get off. Amazon is uniquely special in that Bezos persuaded investors to keep faith for the best part of a decade. Or perhaps "lucky": one wonders what their stock price would have done without the incredible luck of the former side hustle of AWS becoming the engine of their business. (Not to denigrate the incredible feat that it is, or the work that went into it.)

Regulation provides some practical limits on how small you can be, too. All those 10-Ks and audits and SOX compliance don't come cheap. You need to be big enough to employ specialists to do it or rich enough to partner up with Deloitte.

The alternative is to list on a pink sheet exchange, but then you are keeping company with a long long tail of companoes that give off sketchy vibes. A one man Nevada corporation selling healing oils, or an interest in a hitherto-undiscovered source of limitless energy. I cant think of any company that graduated from this part of the market into full DJI/Nasdaq respectability. Maybe someone knows of one?
by nyrikki | 2025-04-14 22:19:12+00:00
To add to this.

Both the Bayesian vs frequentist interpretations make understanding the problem challenging, as both are powerful interpretations to find the needle in the haystack, when the problem is finding the hay in the haystack.

A better lens is that a recursive binary sequence (coin flips) is an algorithmically random sequence if and only if it is a Chaitin's number.[1]

Chaitin's number is normal, which is probably easier understood with decimal digits meaning that with any window size, over time the distribution, the distribution of 0-9 will be the same.

This is why HALT ≈ open frame ≈ system identification ≈ symbol grounding problems.

Probabilities are very powerful for problems like The dining philosophers problem or the Byzantine generals problem, they are still grabbing needles every time they reach into the hay stack.

Pretty much any almost all statement is a hay in the haystack problem. For example almost all real numbers are normal, but we have only found a few.

We can construct them, say with .101010101 in base 2 .123123123123 in base 3 etc...but we can't access them.

Given access to the true reals, you have 0 percent chance of picking a computable number, rational, etc... but a 100% chance of getting a normal number or 100% chance of getting an uncomputable number.

Bayesian vs frequentist interpretations allow us to make useful predictions, but they are the map, not the territory.

Bayesian iid data and Frequentist iid random variables play the exact similar roles Enthalpy, Gibbs free energy, statistical entropy, information theory entropy, Shannon Entropy etc...

The difference between them is the independent variables that they depend on and the needs of the model they are serving.

You can also approach the property that people often want to communicate when using the term entropy as effective measure 0 sets, null cover, martingales, kolmogorov complexity, compressibility, set shattering, etc...

As a lens, null cover is most useful in my mind, as a random real number should not have any "uncommon" properties, or look more like the normal reals.

This is very different from statistical methods, or any effective usable algorithm/program, which absolutely depend on "uncommon" properties.

Which is exactly the hay in the problem of finding the hay haystack problem, hay is boring.

[1]https://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~cristian/samplepapers/omegast...
by kadushka | 2025-04-14 22:19:15+00:00
I see a huge progress made since the first gpt-4 release. The reliability of answers has improved an order of magnitude. Two years ago, more than half of my questions resulted in incorrect or partially correct answers (most of my queries are about complicated software algorithms or phd level research brainstorming). A simple “are you sure” prompt would force the model to admit it was wrong most of the time. Now with o1 this almost never happens and the model seems to be smarter or at least more capable than me - in general. GPT-4 was a bright high school student. o1 is a postdoc.
by furyofantares | 2025-04-14 22:19:16+00:00
I'm usually happy to flag news, politics. I'm happy with HN being for anything intellectually interesting, and nothing else.

America is being attacked from the top, Donald Trump gaining and abusing more and more personal power every day in an apparent attempt to become an autocrat, meanwhile he and the dictator of El Salvador sit in the White House and just about the ONLY power you will see these two disclaim is that they "don't have the power" to bring this guy back.

The ONLY thing I can see that makes this not intellectually interesting is just how sad and maddening it is. That definitely detracts from the curiosity of it all. But it's hard to imagine historians will find it remotely uninteresting.
by mdaniel | 2025-04-14 22:19:42+00:00
I don't want to dissuade you from Podman Desktop, because Podman is awesome in its own way, but I do hear you about the "uncanny valley" part.

I wanted to offer that you don't have to jump all the way to podman (and Podman Desktop) just to escape the Docker Desktop licensing problem. There are a lot of alternatives which a whole spectrum of "I am CLI savvy or not" interaction experiences

- Rancher Desktop is A++ and carries a friendly license https://rancherdesktop.io/ -> https://github.com/rancher-sandbox/rancher-desktop/blob/v1.1...

- colima (and the lima it wraps) -> https://github.com/abiosoft/colima#readme

- there's one from AWS called Finch <https://github.com/runfinch/finch> that some of my colleagues like better than colima; YMMV <https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/opensource/introducing-finch-an...>
by zem | 2025-04-14 22:19:50+00:00
I love fantasy in general, and have read a ton of it. other than tolkien, I have never read a novel with that strong a sense of geography in a constructed world - specifically, that there is an entire rich land out there, and not just a graph of interesting places with the focus shifting from one point to another. when the hobbits have to go from the shire to rivendell, or aragorn has to take the paths of the dead to reach his destination in time, tolkien really manages to convey the experience of a difficult journey that takes a significant amount of time even when nothing plot-significant is happening along the way.
by ajross | 2025-04-14 22:19:56+00:00
> The entire point is that whoever is in power decides which law actually gets applied and to whom.

And that "entire point" is historically incorrect in the United States. There is a long, long, LONG history of the Department of Justice investigating and prosecuting members of the administration that technically runs it.

That your point seems to be correct now, in the most corrupt administration of the modern era, is something that is notable and worth discussing. It's certainly not something to sweep under the rug with a both-sides-ist dismissal.
by ideashower | 2025-04-14 22:20:24+00:00
At the time, Instagram had 80 million users, it had no monetization strategy and was profitless[1]. I suppose this made it seem less of an immediate competitive threat to Facebook's business model, especially with the presence of other smaller photo sharing platforms by Google etc.

In 2020, the Wall Street Journal reported that FTC officials in 2012 had concerns about the deal raising antitrust issues. However, they were apprehensive about potentially losing an antitrust case in court if they sued to block the deal.[2] If they would lose then on the merits of trying to enforce the Clayton Act, it would set a precedent that likely could not be undone.

[1] https://www.ibtimes.co.uk/facebook-instagram-deal-down-747m-...

[2] https://www.wsj.com/articles/tech-ceos-defend-operations-ahe...
by ghaff | 2025-04-14 22:21:01+00:00
I came back from Bali and shortly after came down with a really high fever when I was on vacation in Maine. When I got home week later called my primary as I was still running a bit of a fever and got blood work which was pretty bad. Went to ER and my primary care figured it was something tick related. The infectious disease guy on call immediately identified as Dengue Fever. At the end, including sending blood to the Louis Pasteur Institute in Paris I spent something south of $1K to get told I’d recover on my own—the Paris tests came back like weeks later—and there really wasn’t much they could do.
by reissbaker | 2025-04-14 22:22:25+00:00
No, the generic approach requires your data to be spaced out further in memory (or to be heap allocated), which causes CPU cache misses and is slower. The entire reason for intrusive linked lists is performance. Standard linked lists are notoriously slow compared to almost any other similar data structure, which is why they are hardly ever used in real code (ArrayLists and vectors are much more common).
by malfist | 2025-04-14 22:22:42+00:00
"Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past"

- Jean-Paul Sartre
by lproven | 2025-04-14 22:22:51+00:00
None of that is correct.

No, it's not in all OSes. I wish it were.

No, it's not in all native apps. KDE reinvents its own set of keystrokes, for instance, and half the KDE apps have no menu bars any more... And there's no global way to force them either.

Yes, the control panel and RegEdit are totally keyboard controllable.

You can literally just unplug the mouse from a Windows desktop and it remains totally 100% operable.

Some apps may not, because the developers didn't do their jobs right, but the OS is.

How else could blind people use PCs?
by peterbecich | 2025-04-14 22:24:21+00:00
I'm not a lawyer but I do not consider a property tax to be the same thing as a wealth tax.

If I own a house or condominium in San Francisco, at a fundamental level I do not own the land or space the residence is sitting on. "Ownership" is basically a lease of the parcel from the city. The house structure is an improvement on leased land; this ties the property tax calculation to the value of the structure. The property tax is the rent on the land/space. I believe this is the constitutional justification for property taxes (no opposition from me).
by vaxman | 2025-04-14 22:24:21+00:00
It's biological https://www.bbc.com/news/newsbeat-47622059 (mankind didn't know this until the relatively recent advent of "live" brain imaging). Something similar happened with SJobs and today people deify him.

Seriously though, Billy was a FB investor (in addition to apparently being a Sith Lord who may have seen an Anakin-echo in youngling Zuck) and it's assumed he didExert influence during the dark period. It must have been intense for Zuck. Can only hope such influence faded with the Epstein scandal, but it's too late for Mark to stay in control of Meta now anyway, unfortunately you have to take the Bad with the Good. Mark's problem now is he's too young to retire and he really, it's not like he can spin-off with Reality Labs and keep going on the Orion stuff --without leadership, that market isLost to Apple now (though Apple's entire C-suite is aging out and since Elon is not available anymore..heh yeah: Zuck, the next CEO of AAPL --halfway callin' it.)
by ttul | 2025-04-14 22:25:24+00:00
I feel the same way about these models as you conclude. Gemini 2.5 is where I paste whole projects for major refactoring efforts or building big new bits of functionality. Claude 3.7 is great for most day to day edits. And 4.1 okay for small things.

I hope they release a distillation of 4.5 that uses the same training approach; that might be a pretty decent model.