MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by MisterTea | 2025-04-11 11:07:02+00:00
Radiation shielding. There's a lot of it in industry involving electron beam processing which produces x-rays. From printing machines using EB set ink, welding, melting, cross-linking, etc. A lot of those machines are lead shielded. Even at particle accelerator labs I've walked past stacks of lead bricks around beam lines (esp around the injector)

Sucks that there's so much use for something so dangerous. Amazing the perils we have both dug up and invented in the pursuit of progress which is ultimately just making money.
by terminalbraid | 2025-04-11 11:07:11+00:00
> Other general purpose languages are more popular and ultimately can do everything that Lisp can (if Church and Turing are correct).

I find these types of comments extremely odd and I very much support lisp and lisp-likes (I'm a particular fan of clojure). I can only see adding the parenthetical qualifier as a strange bias of throwing some kind of doubt into other languages which is unwarranted considering lisp at its base is usually implemented in those "other general purpose languages".

If you can implement lisp in a particular language then that particular language can de facto do (at least!) everything lisp can do.
by A_D_E_P_T | 2025-04-11 11:07:59+00:00
That's not "AI risk" because they're still tools that lack independent volition. Somebody's building them and setting them loose. They're not building themselves and setting themselves loose, and it's far from clear how to get there from here.

Dumb bombs kill people just as easily. One 80-year old nuke is, at least potentially, more effective than the entirety of the world's drones.
by rcxdude | 2025-04-11 11:08:19+00:00
The legal standard will be related. Absent a written deal, the court would look at what the customer would have or should have reasonably expected, based on typical rates for such work, the value and cost of doing the work, etc. It can get quite messy and usually it's not worthwhile litigating such a thing.

(heck, even with a written deal, the fine print often matters less that people might think in court, though a badly written contract will sure draw out much more protracted arguments about such details)
by FirmwareBurner | 2025-04-11 11:08:32+00:00
>what is suitable for publication in the public sphere

That's why the persons, intent and context makes all the difference between something being funny and something being ofensive. And you could tell that statement wasn't in bad faith or meant to be derogatory.

>If you had a job interview for a senior position at Microsoft and your interviewer was Satya Nadella, would you make this joke?

Please don't move the goalposts to bad faith arguments, The casualness of the HN comment sections very different than the context of a job interview, hence my comment above on context mattering. Do you talk to your friends the way you talk to HR at work?

And yes, I'm sure graybeard Microsoft employees who worked with Nadella for a long time also make such jokes and banter with him behind closed doors and they all laugh, people are still people and don't maintain their work persona 24/7 or they'd go crazy.
by moefh | 2025-04-11 11:10:11+00:00
I have no idea, and I'd have to know more context before thinking my opinion matters. For example, just off the top of my head: (1) What are the fines for comparable things in other countries (in an out of Europe)? (2) "Bendels has no criminal record" -- does that mean he was never convicted of defamation, or is that a red herring because defamation a civil (not criminal) matter?

I can't help to notice how with just a little bit of context we've come from reacting to "A journalist in Germany was just sentenced to seven months for posting a meme" to deciding if a fine was disproportionate.

With all that, the only sensible answer I can give is that I don't know. It's useless to be outraged by something that might be a non-story.
by diggan | 2025-04-11 11:11:21+00:00
> "Standing out" has been by far the biggest factor in web design ever since there was a web,

I don't think that's true or at least as strongly as you suggest. When Bootstrap first came along, all websites that used it clearly looked the same, with minor differences. We see the same today but instead of Bootstrap, people use Tailwind or other libraries/frameworks but the effect is the same, most landing pages look the same, even if the images have different colors.

Most websites today look like each other one way or another, as they're all mostly using the same libraries and frameworks that kind of pushes people into specific approaches. Very different from the web in the 90s/early 00s, where every website worked and looked very different from each other.
by ColinWright | 2025-04-11 11:11:42+00:00
This is not the title of the page, I know, but it accurately reflects the content. I've selected this title specifically so as not to be misleading as to that content.

Yes, it is slightly editorialised, but I feel that t is justified in this case. The post is unlikely to last long regardless, but it seems worthwhile making the link available to the HN community.
by diggan | 2025-04-11 11:13:54+00:00
> If I want to render text using Comic Sans by default, that shouldn't "break" anything

Not sure how we could expect users to switch between whatever font they want, and things not breaking.

Different fonts both appear and have different sizes, so what might look perfect with one font (a button where the text is aligned in the center vertically/horizontally), can look massively different with another (say the font's characters are wider, so now the text either overflows or breaks into two parts, making the button "broken").
by billconan | 2025-04-11 11:13:56+00:00
While I like Tauri being light weight, its rust backend and support for mobile, I'm considering moving to electron now.

The webviews on different platforms are very fragmented. they support different feature sets and have different bugs. For example, on mac, I have seen svg and pdf rendering bugs I don't know when they will be fixed. I can't predict their behaviors on platforms I have no access to.

Tauri is also too young, I have seen its new window system crashes on users' machines. And as for the sidecar/external binary feature, Tauri doesn't fix the rpath when packaging, you will have to solve it using manual solutions.

I love rust, but many solutions are only available in c++. rust bindings are usually maintained by hobbyists and rarely updated. I have no energy to fix the binding issues.

I'm now going back to electron, so my frontend can use webgpu. As for the backend, I'm planning to write nodejs addons in c++ and rust.
by burhanrashid52 | 2025-04-11 11:14:30+00:00
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My name is Burhanuddin Rashid, and I am a software engineer with 8+ years of experience in developing mobile applications. I am an open-source enthusiast and a Google Developer Expert in Dart and Flutter.

I owe most of my career to the open-source community. I got exposed to this when I open-sourced my first Android PhotoEditor library, which reached around 3.8K stars and is still active. This led me to an opportunity to speak at Droidcon Berlin 2021, sharing my open-source learnings.

My biggest contribution so far in the product was to improve code and app quality by introducing testing to the team. Before that, I was the Android tech lead to build an offline-first app to manage package delivery with real-time location tracking, collaborating with a remote team. Apart from this, I've also worked on web and backend technologies like React and Spring Boot, which gives me additional knowledge of how the system works end-to-end.

Also, in my free time, I learn and share my knowledge by writing blogs, newsletters, Youtube videos, or speaking at conferences.
by kebman | 2025-04-11 11:14:40+00:00
Yes, in the US associations are granted certain legal rights, including the right to political expression and collective action. That's a matter of legal precedent.

But law doesn't define philosophy — philosophy defines law. And from a philosophical standpoint, freedom is a property of individuals, not collectives. Only individuals possess consciousness, agency, and moral responsibility. Associations, corporations, and groups are abstractions — tools created by individuals, composed of individuals, and led by individuals. They cannot make free choices; they can only be directed.

Freedom of association means individuals are free to join or leave groups as they see fit. But the moment something is mandated, such as being forced to participate in a fluoridated water system, or coerced into accepting the political will of a corporate “person,” the individual's freedom is compromised in favor of an artificial entity.

Philosophically speaking, rights flow from individuals to associations, not the other way around. The association has no legitimacy that exceeds or contradicts the will of its participants, especially when it undermines individual liberty.

So yes, associations may have freedoms under law, but only because individuals granted them those freedoms. The moment those freedoms infringe on individual rights, they lose their moral legitimacy, regardless of legal precedent.
by InsideOutSanta | 2025-04-11 11:14:50+00:00
>The problem is that merely insulting someone can be a crime at all

I disagree that this is a problem per se. Pretty much all jurisdictions across the world have laws like that. It really depends on how exactly the law is implemented.

In fact, American libel and defamation laws are, in some ways, more problematic than many European ones simply because of how the legal system works. If you are sued in a place with no SLAPP laws, the mere lawsuit can be so expensive that it can have a chilling effect on free speech, even if the defendant ultimately wins the case.

(I do agree that laws singling out politicians are stupid.)
by lukaslalinsky | 2025-04-11 11:14:57+00:00
Whenever I hear someone talking about purely functional programming, no side effects, I wonder what kind of programs they are writing. Pretty much anything I've written over the last 30 years, the main purpose was to do I/O, it doesn't matter whether it's disk, network, or display. And that's where the most complications come from, these devices you are communicating with have quirks that need you need to deal with. Purely functional programming is very nice in theory, but how far can you actually get away with it?
by tempfile | 2025-04-11 11:15:18+00:00
Some of these criticisms I can understand and agree with. Direct messaging is broken and should be fixed rather than removed (since you need to share credentials in order to use a third party messaging app).

When you say "Account migration does not work" I am forced to ask "compared to what"? There are literally no alternatives. If you have a twitter account with 20k tweets, and you want to leave twitter, "GFY". Ditto if you get banned. A public, instance-independent list of banned and redirected accounts (which survives the death of an instance) could perhaps be a really useful service.

Culturally, mastodon people do seem opposed to bots. There are a lot of people who are hostile to indexing, and hostile to really any automated interactions at all. This causes a huge controversy every few months, when someone tries to build search and gets run out of the community for using a crawler to do it. It is worth mentioning that fedi socials have a pretty high concentration of trans and other marginalised users, who are burned by targeted harassment on other parts of the internet. I think the resistance to bots is part of this.
by hacb | 2025-04-11 11:16:07+00:00
> The calculator did not erase math wizards

The major difference is that in order to use a calculator, you need to know and understand the math you're doing. It's a tool you can work with. I always had a calculator for my math exams and I always had bad grades :)

You don't have to know how to program to ask ChatGPT to build yet another app for you. It's a substitute for your brain. My university students have good grades on their do-at-home exams, but can't spot a off-by-one error on a 3 lines Golang for loop during an in-person exam.
by disgruntledphd2 | 2025-04-11 11:16:18+00:00
> Correct but ChatControl now has a majority among EU Commissioners. The fact that something like this is even proposed in the "free" land and the people responsible not laughed out of the room is sickening.

I agree that this is terrible, but based on prior ECJ rulings, this will almost certainly be struck down if it's ever passed.
by bitethecutebait | 2025-04-11 11:16:38+00:00
> those are already superhuman intelligence(s)

... only because "unsafe" and "leaky" are a Ponzi's best-and-loves-to-be-roofied-and-abused friend ... you see, intelligence is only good when it doesn't irreversibly break everything to the point where most of the variety of the physical structure that evolved it and maintains it is lost.

you could argue, of course, and this is an abbreviated version, that a new physical structure then evolves a new intelligence that is adapted (emerged from and adjusts to) to the challenges of the new environment but that's not the point of already capable self-healing systems;

except if the destructive part of the superhuman intelligence is more successful with it's methods of sabotage and disruption of

(a) 'truthy' information flow and

b) individual and collective super-rational agency -- for the good of as many systems-internal entities as possible, as a precaution due to always living in uncertainty and being surrounded by an endless amount of variables currently tagged "noise"

-- than it's counterpart is in enabling and propagating a) and b) ...

in simpler words, if the red team FUBARS the blue team or vice versa, the superhuman intelligence can be assumed to have cancer or that at least some vital part of the force is corrupted otherwise.
by CoolCold | 2025-04-11 11:16:51+00:00
Nowadays I almost have zero intersection with Varnish - my own impression it was much more popular like 10 years ago or even more.

I know couple of frameworks/systems support it, especially in php world.

Looks like that it's lost in layers - dev guys don't care much, sysadmins are sort of extincted, noone to bother to add Varnish into request processing queue. Needless to say, people ok HN even complain on Nginx configs,while for base caching it's much simpler, from my perspective.
by lproven | 2025-04-11 11:17:03+00:00
I don't think you are remembering correctly.

> It came a few years to early. I remember my shock when I get [1] my OS/2 copy and it was on 10 (yes, ten!) 3.5 inch Floppy Disk

Not so bad, really.

> while Windows needed two (one for main OS, one for some utilities).

No version of Windows came on 1 floppy.

Windows 1.01 took 4 360k disks -- here's a picture:

https://www.firstversions.com/2015/05/microsoft-windows.html

Windows 2 took 8 360k disks:

https://archive.org/details/microsoft-windows-v2.0

Windows 3 took 8 even on DS DD 720kB disks:

https://archive.org/details/windows_3.00_english_with_ms-dos...

By Windows 95 it was up to 27 high density 1.4MB disks:

https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/uopb1n/t...

10 is not bad at all for a full preemptive multitasking x86-32 OS with a GUI, IMHO.
by FollowingTheDao | 2025-04-11 11:17:28+00:00
"It was only once I got it that I realized I no longer could play the game "make as much money as I can.""

Funny, that is what my father taught me when I was 12 because we had compassion. What is it with glorifying all these logic loving Spock like people? Don't you know Captain Kirk was the real hero of Star Trek? Because he had compassion?

It is no wonder the Zizians were birthed from LW.
by rep_lodsb | 2025-04-11 11:18:01+00:00
The zero-byte program should work on either :)

It's also possible to detect which mode the CPU is in:

bits 16 mov ax,start16 ;may load EAX instead, jmp ax ;skipping this 2-byte instruction bits 32 dec eax ;REX prefix in long mode, mov eax,start32 ;may load RAX, jmp eax ;skipping these 4 bytes nop nop bits 64 jmp start64

You can even be compatible with CP/M-80 by putting this at the start:

add bx,start8 ;8080: ADD C, JMP start8 nop ;immediate may be 16 or 32 bits nop
by throw0101d | 2025-04-11 11:18:39+00:00
> Pretty much anything I've written over the last 30 years, the main purpose was to do I/O, it doesn't matter whether it's disk, network, or display.

Erlang is a strictly (?) a functional language, and the reason why it was invented was to do network-y stuff in the telco space. So I'm not sure why I/O and functional programming would be opposed to each other like you imply.
by echelon | 2025-04-11 11:19:06+00:00
Who are we kidding. With those as our choices, it's no wonder most people just use the face book.

Hyper scale businesses captured most of the internet's value and humans and turned tech into a series of walled gardens for eyeball attention doom scroll maximization. Retweeting the for you page is what some committee of product managers decided was best for us all. Who are we to question the architectures of power?

It almost sounds like a perverse weird utopia to imagine a world where we controlled all of the information flows ourselves. I can't think why we should have all the power.
by ChrisMarshallNY | 2025-04-11 11:19:25+00:00
> As soon as people start trying to use anything, AI or not, to make as much money as possible, we have a problem.

I noticed that, around the turn of the century, when "The Web" was suddenly all about the Benjamins.

It's sort of gone downhill, since.

For myself, I've retired, and putter around in my "software garden." I do make use of AI, to help me solve problems, and generate code starts, but I am into it for personal satisfaction.
by lproven | 2025-04-11 11:19:25+00:00
> Their timing was not right.

I agree.

https://www.theregister.com/2025/01/05/microsoft_os2_flop_fu...

I think OS/2 1.x should have targeted the 386, in the 1980s.

> Also, the RAM requirements made it pretty much impossible for people to recommend to their friends and family.

I bought OS/2 2.0 with my own cash, and ran it on several different 386SX machines in 4MB of RAM. It was usable on that spec.

Any good spec of machine for Windows 3.0 could run OS/2 2.x usefully without being unpleasant.
by vander_elst | 2025-04-11 11:19:52+00:00
Meta question, why does the website try to make it more difficult to open the images in a new tab? usually if I want to do that, I right click and then select "open image in a new tab". Here I had to go through some loops to do it. Additionally, if you just copy the URL you get to a image that's just noise and that seems to be by design. I still can access the original image though and download it from AWS S3 (https://hai-production.s3.amazonaws.com/images/fig_1e.png). So the question, why all the loops, just to scare off non-technical users?
by notaiagent | 2025-04-11 11:20:22+00:00
That’s a fair point — ecosystems naturally evolve with competing frameworks, and sometimes that diversity helps the best ideas emerge. But in those examples (PHP vs. .NET vs. Django, React vs. Angular), we usually see clear differences in philosophy, performance, developer experience, or use case fit.

What I find puzzling in the current wave of AI agent libraries is that many seem to be doing almost exactly the same thing — wrapping LLMs, defining tools, planning steps — just with slightly different APIs or names. It’s hard to see a fundamental divergence in capability or vision, at least so far.

So my question is less about why variety exists — and more about whether this current fragmentation is actually productive, or just noise driven by branding and platform lock-in strategies.

Would love to be wrong here if others are seeing more substantial innovation beneath the surface.
RxInferServer – Remote Bayesian Inference from Python via Julia
by bvdmitri | 2025-04-11 11:20:34+00:00
We’ve just released a Python SDK for RxInferServer, enabling Python developers to perform remote Bayesian inference using models hosted on RxInferServer.

What is RxInfer? https://reactivebayes.github.io/RxInfer.jl/

RxInfer.jl is a Julia package designed for reactive message passing and probabilistic programming. It facilitates real-time Bayesian inference in complex models, supporting both exact and variational inference algorithms.

Key Features: - Remote Model Execution: Call RxInfer models hosted on RxInferServer directly from Python. - OpenAPI Specification: RxInferServer exposes an OpenAPI interface, allowing for seamless integration and client generation. - Julia Interoperability: With minor modifications, RxInferServer can execute arbitrary Julia code, not limited to RxInfer models.

Example Notebook: State-Space Model Example https://lazydynamics.github.io/RxInferClient.py/examples/state-space-model/

Server Documentation https://server.rxinfer.com

Python SDK Repository https://github.com/lazydynamics/RxInferClient.py

We welcome feedback from the developer community, especially those interested in integrating Bayesian inference into Python workflows or exploring cross-language model execution.
by rom16384 | 2025-04-11 11:21:22+00:00
I also find Roo Code chats add way too much stuff. I'd would like something that only includes to the context exactly the files I want, and only calls the model when I want. Using AI Studio with custom system prompt works, but is not as fast, but with Roo / Cline the costs can explode if you are not careful to create new tasks.
by modernerd | 2025-04-11 11:21:28+00:00
Tube Creature is also cool (the source of the tube paths for this map).

Particularly like the "Tube Tongues" metric — the second-most commonly spoken language after English by residents near each tube station, it paints a real picture of a diverse London:

https://misc.oomap.co.uk/tubecreature.com/#/tongues/current/...
by famouswaffles | 2025-04-11 11:21:53+00:00
>No they don't. Computers have a power button. If there was even the slightest indication that you were no longer having the time of your life, you'd press it and find something more enjoyable to do.

This is such a bizarre conversation. Yes, people on the internet sometimes get angry and don't go do something else. It happens.

No one is mistaking humor for anger.
by bravura | 2025-04-11 11:23:15+00:00
Recently, I signed up for two premium cards. The main benefit I wanted: Collision and damage coverage on INTERNATIONAL car rentals.

Honest feedback: I logged into your site and found it useless. I plugged in my two cards. Your site gave me such a cursory and incomplete picture of them, I would never have the information I needed.

p.s. they are literally the credit cards you have on your homepage, so I expected at least these to be complete.
by kebman | 2025-04-11 11:23:53+00:00
It isn't. But as a society, we voted for providing clean, affordable water to everyone was a public good. That's why municipal water exists.

The issue arises when that water is fluoridated against the will of a significant portion of the population. It effectively forces dissenters to either accept it or go through the hassle and expense of sourcing their own water — which defeats the original purpose of providing low-cost, universally accessible water.

Today, the marginal benefits of fluoridation are questionable, especially with fluoride available in toothpaste. So forcing it on everyone, despite objection, becomes harder to justify — and that's why some places have stopped adding it.