MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ben_w | 2025-04-20 07:16:58+00:00
> I am unaware of any significant efforts to reclaim and promote the word in question. It is anachronistic and inextricably connected to 20th century transphobia and violence against trans women in particular

It's the primary term I grew up with in the UK specifically about what is also called cross-dressing.

It's also used by one of my favourite comedians, Suzy Eddie Izzard, as self-description ("executive transvestite") before she identified as transgender: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dress_to_Kill_(Eddie_Izzard)

> Re: your second point, a closer reading of the comments will show that this thread is discussing "women."

1) Quite a lot of transphobes focus entirely on women, thus ignoring how their own rules end up forcing trans men to end up in women's-only spaces.

2) I am informed that many trans women have implants before hormones. In fact, one woman I know openly discussed face surgery as part of her transition.

Also: cis women have breast surgery. I'm told most often as a reduction. Facebook, in its complete uselessness, has advertised the surgery to me along with dick pills.
by IshKebab | 2025-04-20 07:16:59+00:00
Yeah I've used FORTRAN to C transpilers before too and they worked fine. There were some downsides though like it has to add and subtract 1 everywhere to deal with FORTRAN's 1-based indexing.

In theory AI could do a more idiomatic translation, but I think I would still prefer the janky but correct translation over the looks nice but probably subtly buggy AI one.
by trog | 2025-04-20 07:17:51+00:00
All true but tell the average programmer that you think their industry should be regulated and they should potentially be held liable for their code.

This is not a popular opinion on software development circles - unless you're already in one of those regulated fields, like where a software engineer (a literal accredited engineer) is required.

But it's been an increasingly common talking point from a lot of experts. Bruce Schneier writes about it a lot - he convinced me long ago that our industry is pretty pathetic when it comes to holding corporations liable for massive security failures, for example.
by lukan | 2025-04-20 07:18:01+00:00
Oh, I am obviously a racist, by glorifying indigineous teaching methods.

But otherwise can you show, where this is documented? The natives tribes where I have some knowledge, don't force their kids to learn in the sense that is talked about here. No need to - the whole culture is about becoming a good hunter (for male individuals). So indeed lots of peer pressure, but no individual forcing.
by Validark | 2025-04-20 07:19:46+00:00
I'm specifically referring to:

> There are- things like flat or hollow earth, antivax and HIV deniers, homeopaths etc. Proponents of all of the above are looking for a grand unifying cosmology. Dark matter and dark energy are confusing and unknown, so people want to just simplify them away.

I think that's pretty uncalled for. To me, positing and exploring alternative views of the universe is a noble and interesting goal, even if the currently accepted answers don't get overturned. The generated ideas might still have other value. Maybe there is a piece of it that's salvageable and can be integrated with other concepts. Or it can inspire future ideas. I think it's pretty uncalled for to lump them in with "flat or hollow earth, antivax and HIV deniers, homeopaths". Do MOND and MOG people make conspiracy YouTube videos about how governments of the world just want you to believe in dark matter and energy to shutter your mind from realizing the truth of their theories? Are they telling people to stop taking chemotherapy and be healed through faith alone instead? Perhaps I'm simply unaware of some nasty behavior, but if not it's pretty rude to lump them in with those other groups.

From my perspective they're engaging in a theoretical pursuit and you're just taking a dump on them.

> If the MOND people and the MOG people keep getting things wrong, they're still free to persevere just as we're free to ignore them.

Are you ignoring them? There are a lot of things I don't pay attention to, MOND/MOG included, but I also don't feel the need to demonize them for getting out of bed in the morning and trying out a new idea. Couldn't you just say, "Interesting concept. I doubt it works out for cosmic background radiation, but would make for a cool Star Trek episode". Or just say nothing?

Why do you have to accuse them of being small-minded, simplistic thinkers who are really just motivated by being too dumb to understand the current meta and not unlike harmful idiots that earnestly believe space is just government propaganda and viruses aren't real?

> people are entitled to

> they're still free to persevere just as we're free to ignore them.

I don't think we were talking about what people should be penalized for by the government, in which case rights and freedoms are primary considerations. We're talking about what things people can do to deserve to be considered unreasonable and be ridiculed, looked down upon, and likely considered harmful to society. I don't think MOND/MOG people qualify.
by foundart | 2025-04-20 07:19:52+00:00
It makes me wonder: Would an airline that drastically simplified its fares be more likely to appear in flight search results?

Simplifying the fares would make it less computationally expensive and, in theory, could take fewer steps to answer a flight planning query.

Imagine a flight search planner that, say, fanned out N airline-specific workers when handling a planning query and then displayed to the user whatever results it got back within some time limit. If FooAir had simple fares, the FooAir searcher would likely run faster than searchers for other airlines. Thus it would be more likely to return results for more queries, assuming the deadline is fairly tight because of usability metrics. (People don't tend to stick around waiting for slow results.)
by kubb | 2025-04-20 07:21:55+00:00
Wowzers, it’s happening imminently. Great to know that we can expect agents that learn from experience very very soon!

When they’re here I’ll make an upvote farming bot that learns from experience how not to get caught and unleash it on HM.

After that I’ll make an agent that runs a SaaS company that learns from experience how to make money and I’ll finally be able to chill out and play video games.

That last thing I’ll actually do myself, I won’t use an agent, although the experience revolution stared with games. Ironic!

But I’ll make an agent that learns from experience what kind of games I like and how to make them. This way I’ll have an endless supply.
by perilunar | 2025-04-20 07:22:04+00:00
> The purple colour we see is formed from a mixture of red and blue, whether it's something in nature, screen displaying or printing.

Well if it’s on an RGB screen, or printed with CMYK inks then it’s not ‘real’ violet, but there must be plenty of natural and artificial pigments that are actually reflecting violet light and not blue + red light. I imagine any pure compound would be doing this. E.g cobalt phosphate (aka cobalt violet).

You could tell by illuminating a sample with different light sources. See metameric failure:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metamerism_(color)#Metameric_f...
by bravetraveler | 2025-04-20 07:22:23+00:00
You can monkey with the Python primitives, containerize the runtime env, or probably something more involved

Would suggest the middle option: https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/latest/getting_started_ee/i...

One can use the primitives, but eventually you'll find conflict or drift. Config management becomes something else. Not worth the hassle considering inconsistent usage/placement of the 'become' keyword, the '-b' argument, and such.

EEs slot perfectly into AWX/AAP, the next logical step once you've grown tired of using the Ansible CLI.
by trcf21 | 2025-04-20 07:24:38+00:00
From flow.py

Ensure the tone is welcoming and easy for a newcomer to understand{tone_note}.

- Output only the Markdown content for this chapter.

Now, directly provide a super beginner-friendly Markdown output (DON'T need ```markdown``` tags)

So just a change here might do the trick if you’re interested.

But I wonder how Gemini would manage different levels. From my take (mostly edtech and not in English) it’s really hard to tone the answer properly and not just have a black and white (5 year old vs expert talk) answer. Anyone has advice on that?
by Keccak | 2025-04-20 07:24:43+00:00
Hi HN! I recently built ChessApp, a web application for over-the-board (OTB) chess players, but it’s also useful for anyone in the chess community.

Main features:

Player Search: Find any FIDE-registered player (1.5M+), or users from Chess.com and Lichess.

Repertoire Viewer: Enter a username and a color to view their opening repertoire.

Chess Map: Discover places to play chess worldwide (DM me to suggest a new location).

Game Review: In development — will offer post-game analysis features.

I'm actively working on new features (like an Elo calculator, searching people by email, dark theme, etc.), and I'd love to hear your thoughts on the UI/UX, ideas for improvement, or general feedback!
by remarkEon | 2025-04-20 07:24:47+00:00
Sure, but Mal and Zeit intentionally elicit different contextual meanings. The literal word is the same in English but it's quite obvious that the context is different, and in German the context calls for a different word. English, while being within the Germanic language family, isn't as particular in many ways as German can be or is. If you can speak multiple languages surely you understand what I am getting at. Vegetarian "hamburgers" is a poor example because, well, the point of calling something a "vegetarian hamburger" is that it resembles a _real_ hamburger, which would contain meat. Thus, you now understand my point about changing language in this regard.
by 3abiton | 2025-04-20 07:27:15+00:00
I know this topics comes up ever so often here, but this is really amazing demo. A reminder that on Android you can use tools like XPL-EX (previously XprivacyLua) to heavily block such calls and libraries, or something simpler even like something like [App Manager](https://muntashirakon.github.io/AppManager/).
by neom | 2025-04-20 07:27:38+00:00
I think this isn't quite the same thing, never the less: I have dyscalculia on extreme mode (/dyslexia/autism), and I was forced to do math in the 90s in the UK, rote style. I don't know if they didn't know about dyscalculia, didn't care, or whatever, but holy hell I wish I'd never been forced to do that, it's still today a fairly painful memory and I'm in my 40s now. If you're gonna force kids into math, at least make sure they're not unable to process it correctly.
by atoav | 2025-04-20 07:29:25+00:00
I can easily imagine a myriad of situations where vandalizing a car is ethically the right choice, e.g. if it is made by someone who is the sieg-heiling number one supporter of an president struggling to overthrow democracy.

And I studied ethics. Meanwhile you have supporters of Trump vandalizing the capital because they couldn't accept the result of a democratic election with the goal to force their minority opinion onto the majority.

Those who don't equate the two simply realized that context matters in ethics. Example: Stealing is wrong. Not stealing when a child is starving and no one can help is more wrong. However stealing from someone whose child is starving is more wrong than stealing from a faceless multinational corporation that exploits millions. This is btw. something you can also observe in real life ethical decisions. That doesn't mean the excuse people find for themselves is always factually correct, but in US politics one side sees actively making shit up as a strength now, so that should tell us something about how much care is given for reality.

You likely tricked yourself into equating the two (vandalizing a symbol of a unelected fascist billionair VS a mob trying to force the senate to ignore the will of millions) by drawing a mental bubble around the word "vandalized" and assuming two acts are the same because their description may contain the same word. This is quite frankly an astonishingly simplistic stance to take. Words are things used to describe reality, yes, but reducing real acts down to one word, removing all the context and then equating words is not how ethics work.

Maybe you remember the trolly problem craze from a while ago. The original trolly problem premise is that murder is wrong and you have a lever where you can save 5 lives by switching the lever to a track with only one person stuck. The variations on the trolly problem are essentially a mental experiment to explore the ethical context of a decision. Our ethics prof e.g. liked to propose a variation where you have to push one person off a bridge in order to stop the trolly, suddenly everybody would deem it wrong. Turns out whether it is a lever or you have to touch a person makes a huge difference in how close to murder it feels.
by jpc0 | 2025-04-20 07:30:28+00:00
I'm not sure if it would be easier to explain a map / filter to a first year student vs implementing the patten manually using a for loop and if statement...

Seems like a pretty easy example to make practically, for map have a collection of things, say balls or black. Pick up each one and do a thing to them, paint them blue for example.

For filter do the same except have two different colour balls, if they are yellow they get thrown away, of they are blue they get put in a bucket.

A for loop doing exactly the same you would need to explain the topic at hand, as well as explain iterating an index etc...
by croes | 2025-04-20 07:32:51+00:00
> The problem is that most people misunderstand what AI is good at. They talk about it "taking over" writing, planning, and problem-solving—as if these were simple, mechanical tasks that could be fully automated without any loss in quality.

Because that’s the claim of all the AI companies. Right next to the claim that AGI is in reach.

The question is if all use AI will all text become too similar.
by redbell | 2025-04-20 07:34:07+00:00
That was fun and definitely a bit challenging to figure out—I scored 3677, landing in the top 46%, with an average of 9.2 years.

As for some (hopefully constructive) feedback: I think the year selection slider could benefit from a few adjustments. If an image is from the distant past—say, pre-1950s—it might make more sense to use decade-based precision rather than individual years. For example, a black-and-white photo had me way off that caused me to lose 20 years of my life :). It would be helpful if such images were categorized more broadly, something like “191x”.

For mid-century images (roughly 1960–1990), a 5-year interval could strike a better balance. I came across one from that era and was six years off. And for more recent images, say post-2010, a one-year precision feels reasonable.

Of course, this suggestion mainly applies if we're deducing the year based on visual cues like clothing, hairstyles, and the environment. If the game is intended more as a quiz based on the text descriptions under the images, then it shifts more into trivia territory—and that’s a different type of challenge altogether.
by aorth | 2025-04-20 07:34:24+00:00
In the last week I've had to deal with two large-scale influxes of traffic on one particular web server in our organization.

The first involved requests from 300,000 unique IPs in a span of a few hours. I analyzed them and found that ~250,000 were from Brazil. I'm used to using ASNs to block network ranges sending this kind of traffic, but in this case they were spread thinly over 6,000+ ASNs! I ended up blocking all of Brazil (sorry).

A few days later this same web server was on fire again. I performed the same analysis on IPs and found a similar number of unique addresses, but spread across Turkey, Russia, Argentina, Algeria and many more countries. What is going on?! Eventually I think I found a pattern to identify the requests, in that they were using ancient Chrome user agents. Chrome 40, 50, 60 and up to 90, all released 5 to 15 years ago. Then, just before I could implement a block based on these user agents, the traffic stopped.

In both cases the traffic from datacenter networks was limited because I already rate limit a few dozen of the larger ones.

Sysadmin life...
by 0manrho | 2025-04-20 07:38:12+00:00
A 1st party ad is still an ad, though in isolation I do I agree that it's quite mild all considered. With context however (this being Microsoft's doing, and all the AI/Adware/telemetry/darkpatterns they're cramming into everything), I share OP's derision for this development in a tool that has become a centerpiece for many developers workflows, dev environments, and ancillary (plugins) ecosystems.

Thankfully, for now at least, VSCode is MIT Licensed [0], source available [1], and if built from source it does not include CoPilot, Telemetry or MS' other crapware or branding. You can do this yourself, or, there's VS Codium [2] that compiles this source for you without the cruft and makes those binaries/installers available [3] if like.

For those that like CoPilot, VSCodium even has a guide on how to add it to VSCodium/Source Built VSCode [4]

0: https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/blob/main/LICENSE.txt

1: https://github.com/microsoft/vscode

2: https://vscodium.com/#why

3: https://github.com/VSCodium/vscodium/releases

4: https://github.com/VSCodium/vscodium/discussions/1487
by pjmlp | 2025-04-20 07:39:54+00:00
I got into XEmacs, back in 1995, as there were no UNIX alternatives to the nice Borland IDEs I was used to in PC land.

Have enough muscle memory for several meta commands, and could still write one or two things in ELisp, yet I rather use the "default" IDE and graphical editors than going back to Emacs other than when having to handle a remote session to a Linux machine and the alternative being VI.
by chrisrickard | 2025-04-20 07:40:28+00:00
Userdoc is primarily around building and maintaining software requirements, so we don't do competitor research, or watch market trends etc.

But we can import any info you already have (documents etc), and have an interactive wizard to break it down into features (stories, epics, NFRs, test cases, personas, journeys) then create detailed acceptance criteria for each feature.

We can also take existing source code, and reverse engineer that into detailed documentation.
by jsnell | 2025-04-20 07:40:45+00:00
Of course using AIs is a skill, just like e.g. effectively writing search queries used to be a skill back in the day. When I actually tried getting something done with AI models for the first time, rather than just kicking the tires with the implicit motivation of showing how useless they were, it took way more iterations to get a satisfactory output at the start than a week later.

The kinds of things you'll learn are:

- What's even worth asking for? What categories of requests just won't work, what scope is too large, what kinds of things are going to just be easier to do yourself?

- Just how do you phrase the request, what kind of constraints should you give up front, what kind of things do you need to tell it that should be self-evident but aren't?

- How do you deal with sub-optimal output? Whe do you fix it yourself, when do you get the AI to iterate on it, when do you just throw out the entire sessions and start afresh?

The only way for it to not be a skill would be if how you use an AI either did not matter for the quality output, or if getting better results just a natural talent some people have and some don't. Both of those seem like pretty unrealistic ideas.

I think there's probably a discussion to be had about how deep or transferrable the skill is, but your opening gambit of "it's not a skill, stop trying to make it one" is not a productive starting point for such a discussion.
by satiric | 2025-04-20 07:41:37+00:00
4878, avg 2.4 years off. Way better than I thought I'd do, I think I just got lucky. I agree that it's a lot like chronophoto.app, but that also has freeplay. This has a nicer looking UI but I think a worse feature set. In particular the scroll-to-zoom and freeplay on chronophoto are nice to have.

Edit: I had seen the photo in the subway before, or something very similar. It's an interesting decision to use photos from big events that people might recognize. (Not inherently bad IMO, just not what I would have intuitively chosen)
by WhereIsTheTruth | 2025-04-20 07:43:11+00:00
The issue with people like you is that you have no idea what a pattern is, and you are unaware of Microsoft's past use of such patterns

But I also blame the people who call this "an ad", this is not an ad, this is much worse

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis...
by CaptainFever | 2025-04-20 07:43:22+00:00
My pet peeve is that using the term "AI crawler" for this conflates things unnecessarily. There's some people who are angry at it due to anti-AI bias and not wishing to share information, while there are others who are more concerned about it due to the large amount of bandwidth and server overloading.

Not to mention that it's unknown if these are actually from AI companies, or from people pretending to be AI companies. You can set anything as your user agent.

It's more appropriate to mention the specific issue one haves about the crawlers, like "they request things too quickly" or "they're overloading my server". Then from there, it is easier to come to a solution than just "I hate AI". For example, one would realize that things like Anubis have existed forever, they are just called DDoS protection, specifically those using proof-of-work schemes (e.g. https://github.com/RuiSiang/PoW-Shield).

This also shifts the discussion away from something that adds to the discrimination against scraping in general, and more towards what is actually the issue: overloading servers, or in other words, DDoS.
by vaxman | 2025-04-20 07:43:54+00:00
Ex-DECie (31337) Andreas Spiess demonstrates bridging 36,000km using an ESP32 SoC with (only) 15mW of power. He doesn't mention (the obvious) here, but another way of accomplishing this is to enhance the other side of the link INSTEAD OF the ESP32 side. It is slightly more complex to do that (still 1960s technology), but something that a nation state with its own space fleet (and "weather balloons") would easily be able to accomplish. Seems like the firmware source and the build system capable of producing a bit-perfect mirror of what ships on every version of these devices should be at least escrowed and audited somewhere. Seems like it... ;)