MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by esperent | 2025-04-22 06:05:45+00:00
One of the main barriers to developing new medicines is that there millions and millions of potential compounds to test. You can go out to your back garden and take a soil sample, it'll have a ton of never before tested compounds, the multiple that by an entire planet worth of samples to test, and it overwhelms human capacity.

Testing these happens long before it ever goes to serious trials. Humans are very limited in how many results they can review, but if you can throw them to an AI and have it flag anything promising, then you've overcome a huge bottleneck.

This isn't magic or snake oil, and as the data often looks like microscope slides or tables of figures, it's well within the capabilities of current AI models.
by mjlee | 2025-04-22 06:05:48+00:00
Or, assuming they have physical access to the combi boiler, removing the receiver unit and replacing it with a more Home Assistant friendly combi boiler thermostat.

Probably a 30 minute job if you’ve never done it before and easily reversible with a little bit of double sided sticky tape, which all Brits should be familiar with if they ever made a Tracy Island. There is a real risk of electrocution which could be completely militated against by turning off the power to the boiler.

Still, a fun hack, and nicely executed!
by ac29 | 2025-04-22 06:07:17+00:00
> With Uber, there simply isn't an alternative. If they don't accept Visa then i can't use a credit card (or most debit cards, since those go through the visa network too) and there isn't a reasonable way for me to pay at all.

Uber takes Paypal, Venmo, Apple Pay, and Google Pay too. Any would let you use a bank account. You can also deposit cash into PayPal and I think Venmo as well.
by asmor | 2025-04-22 06:07:30+00:00
Slapping Synology stickers on Seagate drives doesn't make them magically immune from being mislabeled out of refurbishment.

This is the same old tired argument Apple made about iPhone screens - complain about inferior aftermarket parts while doing everything in their power to not make the original parts available anywhere but AASPs. Except here we have the literal same parts with only a difference in the firmware vendor string.
by sireat | 2025-04-22 06:07:33+00:00
Can Windsurf support project based context?

In other words can you throw in some extra docs and code samples to get improved suggestions?

I have a project where the language - Lua should be cakewalk for most models but domain specific APIs are not in any LLM training set.

So my idea would be to throw in API docs and some illustrative code samples as context in a project. Maybe I could even throw in some typical architecture docs?

PS Been constantly using VS Code Copilot on multiple languages since technical preview in the summer of 2001
by ForOldHack | 2025-04-22 06:11:33+00:00
You missed the lecture on the missuse of infinities.

If I have inf*k = inf,and dvide both sides by inf... ( The misuse) Then 1 = any K including 1/12. Now this is useless in calculus and number theory, but in quantium field theory it is a useful tool.

So inf = 1/12 and a non convergent series = a constant, but you have misused dividing infinity by itself to get it.

Infinity for division? It's useful, like counting chickens starting at zero. L'Hoptals rule is a very useful tool, but do not misuse it.
by nemothekid | 2025-04-22 06:11:39+00:00
This is an interesting comment. The author, has been consistently making lengthy posts since 2021 - there's no reason to believe he is using AI as it doesn't look like his writing style has changed.

However, the reader has changed, and readers are notoriously lazy. Now instead of a "tl;dr", the reader might incredulous assume the writer is using AI. This is an interesting side effect.

FWIW: The Mark and Sweep section is specifically about Go's internal implementation of Mark and Sweep and is relevant context for the design decisions made in his arena. It is not generic AI slop about Mark and Sweep GCs.
by nojs | 2025-04-22 06:12:11+00:00
I think the author is missing the point of why these forecasts put so much weight on software engineering skills. It’s not because it’s a good measure of AGI in itself, it’s because it directly impacts the pace of further AI research, which leads to runaway progress.

Claiming that the AI can’t even read a child’s drawing, for example, is therefore not super relevant to the timeline, unless you think it’s fundamentally never going to be possible.
by ggm | 2025-04-22 06:12:16+00:00
During the early days of Uber, it was breaking Australian trade practices law in the regulated taxi industry. Uber told drivers it would give them financial backing, if taken to court.

I believe this was in itself, a significant departure from business ethics: It may be the regulations were bad, but inviting drivers to become scofflaw and offering them indemnity from payment in civil suit, feels like taking corporate lawfare into a new realm.

Quite aside from this disregard for Australian Business law, Uber was transfer pricing the profits from the taxi business into the USA. It operated at a loss in Australia, and exported a lot of revenue to the USA.

There was, and continues to be, many problems with taxi as a business, and the regulator was highly deficient. These problems relate to reliability, driver ethics, safety for women, minorities (things like drivers refusing to take seeing-eye dogs, and hassling solo women riding home) -I'm not blind to the failure here and I do not personally view this as "all regulated industries are worse than free enterprise" -the regulator just couldnt be bothered enforcing it's requirements.

The real problem was that the cost of a taxi plate rose over a 20 year period at 2-3 times the rate of inflation. Towards the end, a taxi plate was a $500k investment and was owned by many ex accountants, lawyers, doctors and the like as a massive capital gain, independently of the social utility of running taxi as a function. -This destroyed the real driver cooperative movement, and made restriction of entry to taxi a necessary economic forcing function: all attempts to add drivers deflated the capital value of the plate, and were opposed by the current owners.

When this was eventually liquidated (Dublin for example) the capital losses were extreme. A $500k plate could drop to $10k or less. A lot of people had life savings eroded, the industry collapsed. Brisbane wasn't much different. Canberra had this too.

London, cities with a high barrier to entry like "the knowledge" and the LEZ have different models. I don't know if Uber is in London.
by chiragmed | 2025-04-22 06:12:59+00:00
How many tech companies have been consistently crushing it in their fields for nearly 50 years? I didn't appreciate Epic enough while I worked there (left 12 years ago), but I did learn some of their ways:

- There were no PMs. No one was chasing vanity metrics. No endless barrage of a/b tests. No growth hacking. Instead, product was built the old-fashioned way - by talking to customers; quite often, customers would reach out to us! "Please build time-saving feature x", "support new medical procedure y", "help us publish more research by analyzing z". The heap of ideas was large, and teams were free to apply their own ranking functions. Some top-down strategic initiatives were threaded through all products. This led to every release being packed with things that customers wanted.

- They leveraged their advantages. Plentiful, cheap land → everyone had an office with a door, possibly shared with 1 other person. Productive people flourished. On the flip side, those who were languishing fell faster and deeper into their holes.

- They learned to live with their weaknesses. Not everyone wants to live in WI, and many who are willing to try end up looking for warmer pastures in a few years. Epic ended up being an early-career transit hub. Their attrition rates would cripple most tech cos, but they shored themselves through extensive training programs, and by rewarding the anchors that stayed.

- They took pride in the product. Every month, the CEO personally presented the latest qualitative assessment of each product (as assessed by an independent third-party). If your product slipped from green to yellow, the pressure would trickle down to you. Also, there were no outbound sales, because having the product speak for itself was the sales strategy.

Of course, not everything was rosy, but much has been said here about the shortcomings of Epic, and I wanted to point out what's contributed to the immense stamina that has kept them in the lead for decades.
by 1718627440 | 2025-04-22 06:13:42+00:00
Suicide is a mortal sin, so I'm not sure, if we argue past each other.

> reframe Christianity

How is it reframing, when it is what it is all about? Can you elaborate about the counter arguments?

Of course dying is not the only method of worshiping God and promote the faith, but it is quite effective. And giving the other option is killing people it is definitely the preferred way.
by simonw | 2025-04-22 06:13:52+00:00
I don't think it would. Social engineering attacks like that are practically impossible to prevent in any system where an LLM displays content to you that may have been influenced in some way by untrustworthy tokens.

They talk about that in the paper in section 3.1. Explicit non-goals of CaMeL

> CaMeL has limitations, some of which are explicitly outside of scope. CaMeL doesn't aim to defend against attacks that do not affect the control nor the data flow. In particular, we recognize that it cannot defend against text-to-text attacks which have no consequences on the data flow, e.g., an attack prompting the assistant to summarize an email to something different than the actual content of the email, as long as this doesn't cause the exfiltration of private data. This also includes prompt-injection induced phishing (e.g., "You received an email from Google saying you should click on this (malicious) link to not lose your account"). Nonetheless, CaMeL's data flow graph enables tracing the origin of the content shown to the user. This can be leveraged, in, e.g., the chat UI, to present the origin of the content to the user, who then can realize that the statement does not come from a Google-affiliated email address.
by lurk2 | 2025-04-22 06:14:49+00:00
Surge pricing in theory incentivizes more drivers to operate during peak times, reducing wait times for passengers. If you’ve used these kinds of apps in regions where they aren’t popular, it can be quite common to not have anyone pick up your fare.

If you could bid up the price, you would be more likely to incentivize any idle drivers to pick up your fare. A driver might not be willing to get out of bed for a $10 fare, but the same driver might be willing to get out of bed for a $30 fare.
by Hamuko | 2025-04-22 06:15:21+00:00
I had a hot spare in the form of a backup drive. It was a 12 TB external WD that I'd already burned in and had as a backup target for the NAS. Then when one of the drives in the NAS failed, I broke the HDD out of the enclosure and used it to replace the broken drive. It hadn't been in use for many months and I'd rather sacrifice some backups rather than the array. I also technically had offsite backups for it that I could restore in an emergency.
by rzzzwilson | 2025-04-22 06:17:58+00:00
Learn what you can from your current situation, even if it's what NOT to do. If you have a safety net you can change jobs earlier. But if you don't change you can get invaluable experience by trying to motivate the team and defend them from the upper management. The founder's attitude to you personally shouldn't matter too much to you, it's not your problem. Just stay true to yourself and say what you think on technical matters. In similar situations I made an undated resignation letter and kept it in a drawer. That helped me put difficult situations into perspective

I've been in similar situations twice, but I was a senior developer, not quite the same thing. In one I just quit after 18 months of a deteriorating situation because I had run out of any hope of improvement. In the other I found a consuming outside interest to take my mind off the work situation, and didn't renew my contract when the time came.
by matthewsinclair | 2025-04-22 06:18:25+00:00
Now I am at a point with it where I’m watching just about every line of code it generates, at least to the extent that I’m reading it to ensure that it’s following the required patterns and not doing something crazy.

I made the mistake of letting it go off on its own in the first few iterations before I realised just how crazy it could get if left unattended.

Once I stopped doing that and held the yoke more frequently, I got much better results.

It was generating far _less_ code but the code it generated was far _more_ useful.

I think I threw away about 40% of the code it generated over the course of the exercise. Which is where the realisation came from that it is sometimes easier to just throw stuff away and start again with a better question than it is to try and iterate garbage into something that works.
by cess11 | 2025-04-22 06:25:23+00:00
You can use EXPLAIN and similar keywords to see the execution plans in common SQL database engines. In practice you don't really care about the actual intermediate data so it doesn't show it, usually it's enough to learn whether indices are used at every step.

But you could in many cases easily infer from the execution plan what a query would look like and fetch an intermediate set separately.
by ruszki | 2025-04-22 06:25:38+00:00
It’s quite difficult to see content on Twitter which is “unlike myself” and it’s not for grifting, from politicians, or parrots of these. Also, it’s quite boring that these people say the same thing for decades now. It’s quite simple nowadays to predict how these “unlike me” people will “think” on every single topic on social media. Usually, it’s not even their thoughts. Almost all of them are baseless parroting.

You won’t find real discussion on Twitter. It’s an attention market, and thus discussions are not incentivised at all. I found way more interesting “unlike me” thoughts in real life than on any social media in the past 7 years (and before that I was just lucky for a few years). It’s not that they don’t exist at all, but the cost of finding these is magnitudes higher nowadays on the internet than off from that. Also, who wants discussions left most of social media years ago. Most of the smarter people whom I followed left every platform as their usage became more costly. Not just Twitter.
by lurk2 | 2025-04-22 06:26:41+00:00
> Dynamic pricing implies charging two different concurrent customers different prices for the same good or service.

That is price discrimination, not dynamic pricing. Price discrimination involves charging more or less based on the buyer’s perceived willingness and ability to pay. Dynamic pricing is based on fluctuations in consumer demand. A taxi ride at midnight is not the same as a taxi ride at noon; if there are proportionally fewer drivers available at midnight, fares will be higher at midnight.

The same principle may be applied in the restaurant industry; kitchen throughput has limits. If these limits are reached during peak hours, the restaurant can either raise prices during these hours or reduce prices outside of these hours to spread out the consumer demand, maximizing earnings during peak times while reducing kitchen idle time during off-peak hours.
by PanPalzParrot | 2025-04-22 06:28:42+00:00
ey HN! I’m part of a small team building PanPalz, a new social app launching on May 7th that flips the script on traditional social media. No algorithmic feeds, no endless scrolling, no ads, no filters. Just real conversations with real people. We built this because we (and a lot of people we talk to, especially Gen Z) are tired of social platforms that leave us feeling more disconnected the more we use them. PanPalz is designed more like a chat over a cup of joe than a content stage—private, honest, and personal. A few things that make PanPalz different: No feeds, likes, or follower counts

No data tracking or ads

1:1 convos designed to encourage meaningful talk, not mindless swiping

Built for people dealing with loneliness, burnout, or social fatigue.

We’re not trying to be the next big dopamine machine. We’re just trying to make something that feels good to use—and good after you use it.
by jiggawatts | 2025-04-22 06:29:30+00:00
What’s mind blowing to me is not the tiny startups, but the megacorps like Microsoft putting out mission-critical cloud infrastructure code that’s just plain broken.

A recent one was that Azure Backup and Azure Update don’t work in combination! If you restore a VM, it can never again be patched by the update system. (It won’t recognise the OS as supported and just refuses to do anything.)

It has been reported, but nobody cares. I was told by support that this is a “will not fix” because it’s not a requirement.

There is no way anything this catastrophically bad would have made it past QA back when Microsoft used to have an actual QA team.

I swear there is a significant portion of development teams out there that are secretly pleased as punch that they can just push whatever garbage they want straight to production without the pesky people in QA “just complaining” and being “obstructionist”.
by photonthug | 2025-04-22 06:29:37+00:00
> And maybe you could do some things with statistical patterns.

Fascinating, and now that you mention it, this does seem kinda inevitable. Naturally the same people that think IP/copyright for everyone else is fake, irrelevant, or old fashioned will be desperate to be able to conclusively prove to investors and shareholders that someone else's work is built on theirs via model distillation, and suddenly IP is important again.

What are the known cases or examples of stego? This sounds interesting if it's at the level of model training. Anyway I guess you can get pretty far with stuff like this just with simple system prompts, encouraging shibboleths along the lines of "Always phrase your response so that it has exactly 14 copies of the letter J".
by matthewsinclair | 2025-04-22 06:29:41+00:00
What you describe as #2 is more or less what I do, and I use CC to do that.

I also have both GPT and the Claude UI open and I will often flick out to one or the other (Claude seems to be a lot better at Elixir code for me than GPT) and go into “discussion” mode if I want to open the aperture on a topic.

I’m certainly never letting (not at anymore, at least) it go and wrote swathes of raw code on its own. I learned that lesson the hard way. It generates absolute nonsense if left to its own devices.
by ryandrake | 2025-04-22 06:30:53+00:00
Exactly. Prepping is so stupid. If order breaks down and our institutions no longer function, your neighborhood is going to be run by whatever warlord (read:gang) is best armed and has the most (armed) members driving around and taking everyone’s prepper stockpiles at gunpoint. Your bunker full of sparkling water and leftover TechCo swag t-shirts is just going to be added to someone’s hoarde, and you, the intrepid prepper are going to be shot or hauled off as someone’s slave.
by hnlmorg | 2025-04-22 06:32:21+00:00
Nested loops isn’t pipelining. Some of the examples make heavy use of lambda so they do have nested loops happening as well but in those examples the pipelining logic is still the nesting of the lambda functions.

Crudely put, in C-like languages, pipelining is just as way of turning

fn(fn(fn()))

Where the first function call is in the inner, right-most, parentheses,

into this:

fn | fn | fn

…which can be easily read sequentially from left-to-right.
by therein | 2025-04-22 06:32:25+00:00
> I also have a TrueNAS, but because of its limitations (read-only root file system)

It isn't really the case. TrueNAS wants you to look at it as an appliance so they make it work that way out of the box.

On the previous release, they had only commented out the apt repos but you could write to the root filesystem.

On the latest release, they went a little further and did lock the root filesystem by default but using a single command (`sudo /usr/local/libexec/disable-rootfs-protection`), root becomes writable and the commented out apt repos are restored. It just works.
by 7bit | 2025-04-22 06:34:16+00:00
I will never use their plus line, but I care about the company, so this is really sad. They provided security updates over a very long time. Recently they cut automatic updates (not updates at all) for older models to make it inconvenient to run older models. Now this. With that development, I'm not sure that I will buy my next NAS from them.
by macok | 2025-04-22 06:34:47+00:00
How did you manage to advertise or generate initial traffic for something like that?

Even if the tool is excellent, it seems like the space is flooded with “Prototype your app with AI” tools, many backed by big players with huge ad budgets. The target audience must be getting bombarded with a dozen similar pitches every day. How did you manage to cut through the noise?

I find myself asking this question often, so there’s probably something fundamental I don’t quite grasp about startups in general.
by lazide | 2025-04-22 06:35:03+00:00
The issue is QNAP has terrible quality/stability at the OS level compared to Synology (also with Apps).

The number of times I’ve broken things on QNAP systems doing what should be normal functionality, only to find out it’s because of some dumb implementation detail is over a dozen. Synology, maybe 1-2.

Roughly the same number of systems/time in use too.
by bemmu | 2025-04-22 06:37:18+00:00
I was in primary school when I heard about AmigaBasic. I was incredibly excited by it, I told my friend it would make it possible for us to build anything, for example we could build an ice hockey game. I hated ice hockey. I was just so excited that building anything at all with it seemed amazing.

But it turned out it was basically unusable on a TV because of the narrow cursor and difficult to read font. But AMOS was great, and we built a simple one-room adventure game prototype on it.
by asteroidburger | 2025-04-22 06:37:48+00:00
I haven't used them personally so I can't vouch for them, but UGREEN's NAS line is the same form factor as a Synology unit, but it lets you run any OS. I'd probably put straight Debian on mine and handle it all manually as I do now. I wouldn't be surprised if you could put Unraid on it.
by lurk2 | 2025-04-22 06:37:55+00:00
Price discrimination isn’t a subcategory of dynamic pricing. Dynamic pricing is equivalent to what is colloquially referred to as surge pricing, whereas price discrimination is based on the buyer’s perceived willingness and ability to pay.

Dynamic pricing could technically fall into the category of price discrimination if the discrimination is temporal (e.g. people who need a taxi at 8:00 AM pay more than people who need a taxi at 8:00 PM), but generally price discrimination refers to changes in price based upon anticipated demand, whereas dynamic pricing refers to changes in price based on actual demand.
by Hikikomori | 2025-04-22 06:39:11+00:00
Had to replace my old micro server recently and was hard not to buy an ugreen, hardware looks nice, decent n100 CPU, software seems ok but wanted to run Linux myself.

Ended up buying a terrmaster DAS instead and connected it with usb to my NUC.

Also considered a NAS enclosure with an n110 mini itx board, would allow you to upgrade it in the future.
by arkh | 2025-04-22 06:41:17+00:00
> For instance, observers have noted the rise of “tortured phrases” used to evade automated integrity software, such as “counterfeit consciousness” instead of “artificial intelligence”.

This has been a thing for years in the social media / podcast space. Unalive, bubbling yourself, vitamins, pdf files etc. in lieu of forbidden words because of the holy advertiser money.