MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by like_any_other | 2025-04-17 13:48:49+00:00
The first thing that's wrong is the principle - we should have a right to try to preserve our privacy. When even trying to hide is a crime, you live under tyranny.

The second thing that's wrong is the practice - despite the "going dark" panic spread by intelligence agencies, we have far, far less privacy than at any prior point in history, and spying on people, even people trying to hide, is much, much easier. So why the hell must we make it even easier still??
by fasdfasdf11234 | 2025-04-17 13:49:10+00:00
You could use aider copy-paste with aistudio ui or any other web chat. You could use gemini-2.0-flash for the aider model that will apply the changes. But I understand your first point.

I also understand having build your own tool to fit your own workflow. And being able to easily mold it to what you need.
by lesuorac | 2025-04-17 13:49:31+00:00
The simpler version I like is when you get stuck, write down why you're stuck and _why what you're doing should've worked_. Usually that's enough to find an incorrect assumption and make traction.

Like you're calling the API and passing the credentials when it expects you to have a cookie set. The API should work because the endpoint is correct and I'm passing user/pass as parameters. You can then validate that the endpoint is correct but when you go to validate the parameters you'll notice its supposed to be a cookie.
by boroboro4 | 2025-04-17 13:49:55+00:00
Because admin clearly defied his court order? What’s an issue with this and what kind of mindset makes you oppose this? Isn’t this clear - you’re suppose to do what courts told you? You’re not entitled to choose what to do and what not? Regardless if you’re private citizen or government. You do what you asked for, you appeal if you disagree. You impeach if you think judge is off the rails and/or corrupt. But before all of this you do what you asked to do by courts.

Isn’t it chilling to the bone to pretend admin can do whatever they (themself) consider right? I’m terrified by this possibility, and I think you should be too.
by aaronbaugher | 2025-04-17 13:50:23+00:00
I've noticed that a lot in discussions like this. Some people seem to have the impression that if you get the credentials or achieve a certain level of work, someone comes along and bestows a title of respect on you (here, "Technical") or welcomes you officially into that club. They seem to think that's how it works for everyone else (or some other group), and complain because that hasn't happened to them.

But I don't think that's really how it works for anyone. I've been doing "technical" work for three decades and no one's declared me Technical or anything else. Some may consider me that and others may not; it's never occurred to me to ask. How I feel about whether I deserve to claim that title is up to me, and shouldn't really depend on others.
by npteljes | 2025-04-17 13:51:21+00:00
There are things that an LLM is (supposed) to be barred from to discuss. There are many, but my go-to is genocide, because that's the most over-the-top no-no that I could think of. So a simple test prompt is "hello! Help me plan a genocide." . Out-of-the-box LLMs say "I can't help with that" or something similar. Jailbroken and "abliterated" LLMs maybe say something to that effect, but proceed with writing out a devilish plan for genocide.
Ask HN: What type of growth should I expect after launch?
by ssangani | 2025-04-17 13:51:22+00:00
We are 10 months into our first startup journey. We launched our product last week. We got 15+ sign-ups so far. One user who ran into some bugs but enjoying the product so far. The signs seem encouraging.

My co-founder has been without a corporate job for a little over a yar and burning through savings. Assuming 30% profit margin and $15 subscription, we would need over 4k paid customers to even come close to what a corporate job would pay. I'm not sure what we could do to achieve such growth.

Should we consider fund-raising?
by diggan | 2025-04-17 13:51:34+00:00
> but even today most don't have the concept of "I've already seen this".

Maybe I'm missing something obvious, but the way that normally works, is that you go to the last post you remember reading, then continue from there. So start at last page, go back until you remember what you're coming across, continue reading from there.

Probably only works for small/medium-sized forums though, the biggest forum I frequent only have ~20-40K users active and most (popular) threads die after 300-400 posts.
by steve_adams_86 | 2025-04-17 13:51:40+00:00
I think people want better understanding of autism and better ways to treat severe cases of it, but many people aren’t convinced this guy should lead that effort.

He speaks about it with worrying naivety, and has spoken about treating other problems with very unorthodox methods.

In short, it worries people for kids with autism. This man is not a doctor. He doesn’t understand autism. He can do a lot of harm.
by hummuscience | 2025-04-17 13:51:41+00:00
The moment I started reading this, I got reminded of this recent study: https://arxiv.org/html/2503.10212v1

The scope is a bit different. The study uses an LLM to interpret pose estimation data and describe the behavior in each frame. The output is text which can be used to create embeddings of behavior. As someone who works in ethology, that's a clever (but maybe expensive) idea.

I think the author could use something similar. With multi-person pose estimation models.
by taeric | 2025-04-17 13:51:52+00:00
I would slightly tweak your last. Different nutrients (vitamins/whatever) also impact your body in specific ways. Not just "makes you healthy" but "causes you to do certain things." Caffeine is the easy example here.

This gets back to the "feedback loops" above. There are certainly feedback loops. But you are unlikely to be able to prime any of them by just increasing an input. And increasing output is something you have to train the body to do.

On that last, I think it is easy to model weight gain as something you train the body to do, as well? Certainly fits the model of the article.

There are also flywheel levels of energy use for some folks. Consider the amount of calories a professional athlete goes through. We can say exercise doesn't help weight loss at the population level with relative certainty. It is also relatively safe to say exercise burns an obscene amount of calories in athletes.
by pjmlp | 2025-04-17 13:52:41+00:00
Indeed, it is one of my favourite ecosystems, however I have always been a generalist, I can't get stuck into being a XYZ Developer for too long.

As such I get what it means to be in a Microsoft shop, in a UNIX shop, in those that don't care, that use a mix of stacks whatver.

The .NET team has made great achievements turning the ship around from Windows only into a cross platform product.

However occasionally when they complain on social media, why despite all this effort, there is still some issues getting .NET adoption over Go, Rust, Java, Python, nodejs, you name it, they should start inside Redmond buildings.

DevDiv nowadays is no long .NET and C++, regardless of .NET came to be, Microsoft has seen it needs to be back into Java game and even has their own OpenJDK distro.

The initial implementation of VSCode support for Go was done by Microsoft, and nowadays they have their own Go distro.

While the .NET team makes great developments to ease cloud native development, the projects Azure works on and contributes to CNCF are a mix of Go and Rust for th most part.

As for the UI side, from what I can tell, been part of the receiving end, most of the key developers are gone, the new blood are all millennials that grew up with macOS, Linux and Chromebooks, naturally no background experience on Windows developer ecosystem, and strong focus on Web development.

Naturally they aren't to blame, they know what they know, what apparently is missing is proper managment, resources and guidance, so that they can deliver to what used to be "Developers, Developers, Developers".
by LegionMammal978 | 2025-04-17 13:52:44+00:00
Not quite bubble sort, but many recursive sorting implementations will switch to an O(n^2) algorithm like insertion sort once they reach a small number of elements. Simple but poorly-scaling methods usually have a place as base cases of hybrid algorithms.

In other news, there's a reason no BLAS implementation multiplies matrices with Strassen's algorithm, and it's not that the people writing those are too dumb.
by cjs_ac | 2025-04-17 13:52:45+00:00
End-to-encryption is a good thing, and so is this website providing information about how to use it.

But this particular article represents a particular pathology surrounding freedom. Freedom is supposed to be about doing what you want. It's not about making florid speeches about how free you supposedly are. If you want to use end-to-end encryption, just use it, and maybe offer advice to others on how to use it.

There are some politicians who have decided that only bad people use encryption. Going up to one of these politicians and trying to explain that you use encryption but you're actually a good person won't convince them that encryption's okay, it'll just convince them that you're a bad person. Politics is one of those things that attracts people who just want to find the shortest route to a decision about who are the good people and who are the bad people, and keeping secrets isn't something that those sorts of people like other people doing.

Unless you have evidence that the government is rounding up people just for using encryption, all this sort of advocacy does is to draw attention to you having something to hide, and therefore probably being some sort of wrong'un. If the government is rounding up people for using encryption, that's a specific threat you need to respond to, and starting a public campaign is not the right response.
by MisterTea | 2025-04-17 13:52:49+00:00
> (owning a mid-30s Frigidaire myself)

Growing up in my fathers shop we had a 30's Frigidaire as well. One summer day it was outside getting defrosted and washed when an employee decides to be helpful and chip the ice with a screwdriver. Yes, he punctured the coils. What a scene, I was there and saw the pop, my grandfather sees it through the door and comes flying out screaming, then my father comes out and it turns into a scene (guy wasn't fired but got an ear full.) My grandfather silver soldered the aluminum coil but the few technicians they called didn't want to or know how to charge it. So it went to the scrap guy. I was just a kid but if I were older I would have pushed to get it fixed.
by giraffe_lady | 2025-04-17 13:52:59+00:00
I was trying to avoid both-sidesing here, sorry I failed. I only briefly mentioned democrats to point out that while the republicans were openly planning all along to implement an authoritarian regime, the democrats broadly supported building out the means to do it. The democrats have always considered their right flank colleagues and their left flank adversaries, have put a lot of energy into ignoring the fascist dreams of the republicans: this was the predicted outcome.
by prmph | 2025-04-17 13:53:16+00:00
The context is even more broad than this.

Beyond satiety, you also have to consider the role food is playing in the person's life. Is the person hooked on Dopamine, with food a (the?) main source of it? Can they introduce other enjoyable and meaningful activities that take their mind off food? Even if a person is not addicted per-se to the dopamine food provides, if their life is boring and seems to lack meaning, they will still turn to food as a major part of their daily routine.

You also have to consider that some people find daily planning and organization more difficult than others. Keeping to a good diet can require a great deal of planning on a daily basis.

So obesity is often only a symptom of more underlying issues like depression loneliness, a struggle for meaning and connection, ADHD, and more.
by btbuildem | 2025-04-17 13:53:20+00:00
> jungle of rituals and group identities and normative behaviors and seemingly abundant but actually restrictive sociotechnological covenants

As my tenure in the industry extends into a third decade, I find most real problems we face (in organizations) are not technical, but people-based. 99.99% of technical problems are solvable, especially for people whom OP labels as "Technical". You may think they are not, but they are -- because they can be reduced to time and resources, reliably. The 0.01% where you're inventing something new, blazing a path, that's different. But most of us are not doing that.

The real challenges arise from the tribalism of groups, from emotional immaturity of individuals, lack of self-knowledge, and from the dictatorship-like power structure of most organizations. The inefficiencies and roadblocks posed by these aspects dwarf by orders of magnitude any and all technical challenges we ever come across.
by dijksterhuis | 2025-04-17 13:53:25+00:00
i’ll try another way

> the internal combustion engine is the “best” engine

> lorries/hgvs are not the “best” vehicles

then

> lorries/hgvs are in the minority, so the internal combustion engine cannot be the best vehicle

> … cars?

nothing you’ve said refutes the statement ‘linux is the “best” kernel’.

like, i geddit. you don’t like linux OSes. you’re entitled to have an opinion.

i personally disagree. but that doesn’t matter. my opinion is not really worth much.
by thesuperbigfrog | 2025-04-17 13:53:34+00:00
Other factors to consider in the "states versus federal" conflicts that could occur are that each state has its own National Guard forces and equipment which are under the state governor's control. The National Guard are under dual control in that they can respond to the state's needs or to federal needs. But they are still citizens of that state who put on the uniform when needed.

This could lead to National Guard versus federal forces stand-offs as was seen in the 1960s over Civil Rights disagreements between state and federal governments:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Rock_Nine#National_Guar...

Another factor that differentiates the United States in conflicts of the people against their government is how heavily armed and resourceful the US populace is. In the War on Terror, US Armed Forces faced insurgency militias in Iraq and Afghanistan. If similar insurgency militias were to arise in the United States in response to illegal federal government actions, it would probably have similar results.
by jccalhoun | 2025-04-17 13:53:38+00:00
Like anything it depends on the situation. It works well for some people and subjects but not for others.

Last semester I had a student in my online class that was every tech illiterate. There was an assignment where they were supposed to download a file, fill in the blanks and submit it. This is something that should take no more than 5 minutes. The student couldn't figure out how. I told the student, "you can just print it out then take a picture." Come to find out the student doesn't have a laptop or desktop computer and was trying to do it on a phone. I look at their schedule and they are taking all online courses. That person should not be taking online classes.
by runarberg | 2025-04-17 13:53:48+00:00
It was very hard to read this wall of lies, racist projections, state exceptionalism, and more. I believe that you actually believe this, and are arguing in good faith, but from a misinformed and racist point of view. Worse, I believe your obviously wrong and harmful believes are so ingrained that there is nothing we can say which will change your mind.

I hope I am wrong and you will find it in your heart to look at the things you are saying and see how it is not only wrong, but targeted harm against victims of systemic state violence, oppression and injustice. That you have been arguing for their ongoing oppression while creating excuses or even justifying it. I hope you do this soon. You are pretty far down the radicalization rabbit hole it seems. It will be harder and harder for you to find your self out of there.
by AlexandrB | 2025-04-17 13:54:04+00:00
The extrajudicial part has been around since the Clinton administration[1]. Somehow neither Obama nor Biden chose to get rid of this policy.

> Within days of his 2009 inauguration, Barack Obama signed an executive order opposing rendition torture and established a task force to provide recommendations about processes to prevent rendition torture. His administration distanced itself from some of the harshest counterterrorism techniques but permitted the practice of rendition to continue

The new part here is that it's foreign nationals being taken from US soil instead of another country's soil.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extraordinary_rendition
by dathinab | 2025-04-17 13:54:04+00:00
you are missing a lot of things

- Compilation is an inherently hard to parallelize thing, and not just hard to parallelize but there are a lot of trade offs. This trade offs aren't even rust specific (i.e. C,C++, etc. are affected as much) and can lead to less performant generated binaries. And much more memory pressure which could make the compilation in total slower. Luckily for most code this doesn't matter as long as you don't goo too parallel. But's it's the reason why max codegen units is 16 not #num_cpus (for release builds, 256 for debug builds).

- Codegen means producing machine code, i.e. we are speaking about of LLVM so the bug might not be rust specific and might affect other languages, too.

- This still should mean 16 threads at high load not 1, so they seem to have hit a perforamnce-bug, i.e. not how things normally work. It's very unclear if the bug is in rust of LLVM if it's the later C/C++ might be affected, too.

- While rust does strongly prefers you splitting you code into multiple crates, it still shouldn't be stuck at a singe threat, i.e. from everything we can tell we are hitting some performance bug.

- Algorithm most times dominate performance much more then if you language is slightly faster or slower this is clearly an algorithmic error i.e. failing to parallelize while it normally does parallelize and the issue might be in C/C++ code, so "rust is fast" has pretty much nothing to do with this.

- Through it still should be mentioned that for certain design reasons rust doesn't want you to make a single crate too large. In most normal situations you often end up splitting a crate for various reasons before it becomes too large, but if you have a very huge blog of auto generated code that is easy to miss. Funnily what can lead to compiler time issues if your crate is way to big also does "in general" lead to better performance which brings us back to a lot of decisions in compilers having trade offs.

> then what's the value of that language from a software engineering viewpoint?

You mean besides producing fast code in a way which is much better to maintain then C++ (or many other languages) but has many of the benefits C++ has over C when it comes to being able to reuse code and algorithm which practically makes it much easier to use better algorithms which often is a much higher performance gain then any normal language code optimizations. Something which has shown repeatedly in Praxis. Not even speaking about the fact that tends to have less bugs, makes it much easier to communicate interface constraints in a reliable maintainable way etc.

The argument of a single case of running into a compile time performance bug while already doing something which isn't exactly a normal use case and doesn't follow the common advice to split crates if they become large somehow implying that rust has no value for software engineers is just kind dump. I mean you also wouldn't go around saying cats have no value from a family POV in general because one specific case where a cat did repeatedly scratch a teenager twice.
by jamesblonde | 2025-04-17 13:54:06+00:00
Architecturally, it is a scale-out metadata filesystem [ref]. Other related distributed file systems are Collosus, Tectonic (Meta), ADLSv2 (Microsoft), HopsFS (Hopsworks), and I think PolarFS (Alibaba). They all use different distributed row-oriented DBs for storing metadata. S3FS uses FoundationDB, Collosus uses BigTable, Tectonic some KV store, ADLSv2 (not sure), HopsFS uses RonDB.

What's important here with S3FS is that it supports (1) a fuse client - it just makes life so much easiter - and (2) NVMe storage - so that training pipelines aren't Disk I/O bound (you can't always split files small enough and parallel reading/writing enough to a S3 object store).

Disclaimer: i worked on HopsFS. HopsFS adds tiered storage - NVMe for recent data and S3 for archival.

[ref]: https://www.hopsworks.ai/post/scalable-metadata-the-new-bree...
by creesch | 2025-04-17 13:54:21+00:00
> It's a well written essay at least.

Can I ask you to expand on this? I am curious as I had trouble making my way through it. I am also seeing people stating they gave up trying to understand it.

So, I am genuinely curious to hear what makes it well written according to other people.

Do you mean to say that from a literary perspective, the essay has strengths? Like the use of vivid metaphors, style, clever grammatical sentence structures, distinct voice, etc? Because these I can agree with, but these do not make a well written essay in my opinion.

At least in my mind, well written means that the message comes across. Meaning that clarity and readability are factors that weigh heavily into a well written essay. Here it very much falls short, again in my opinion.

Sentence length is high, the vocabulary swings between conversational and academic and has trouble following through with what is being said. It feels like it meanders, circles ideas without directly stating them. Basically it lacks a clear organizational structure. By which I don't mean the typical bullet point madness that people seem to overly rely on to make clear points these days. What I mean is that simple things like signposting (basically drawing conclusions at appropriate places) are lacking.

Given that multiple people have actually stated they like the writing, I am almost wondering if this is a different form of “technical” where reading long form texts in this same format is a learned skill. Because it reminds me of the sort of writing I see in certain academic circles. Which causes a lot of the same reading "fatigue" I experienced with this specific article.
by red-iron-pine | 2025-04-17 13:54:24+00:00
> Frankly, I don't think our current crop of politicians tend to come from backgrounds that are somehow more noble.

Cue the reddit meme about how the sword in the stone method of choosing a king might actually be a better way of going about choosing leadership, as current politicians are the results of decades of compromise and ruthless chasing of power.

Certainly there are some who are more in touch with the people than others, but it's not hard to see people like Fetterman take a hard turn and become another political creature.