MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jmye | 2025-04-07 12:28:03+00:00
It’s clear you don’t understand anything about the conflict or what might happen if the US withdrew support for Israel. What’s weird is refusing to bother learning, and instead plugging your ears so you can smarmily opine about being “pro killing children”.

Again, this is social media political thinking. No nuance or even a vague hand wave at intellectual honesty.
by fawnwind | 2025-04-07 12:28:30+00:00
Hard for me to tell if I'm in the minority or part of some silent majority, but I don't see much toxic or political content on either site, mostly just art and content related to hobbies I have. I only look at my following feeds, and it's pretty easy to mute a few problem words or phrases. I figure if you spend a lot of time on social media, it's worth it to put in the work to tailor the content you see to your tastes.
by tybit | 2025-04-07 12:29:16+00:00
> At successful tech companies, engineering work is valued in proportion to how much money it makes the company

If you look at what it actually takes to get promoted at most tech companies I’d say this isn’t generally true at many big tech companies.

Being on a very lucrative part of the product may not get you as much “impact” on your promotion packet as if you are working on a platform/infra touching the whole org. Even if that platform isn’t generating the company much money even indirectly.
by kllrnohj | 2025-04-07 12:29:29+00:00
In C++ you can also make the FD-equivalent of std::unique_ptr, like Android does with unique_fd: https://cs.android.com/android/platform/superproject/main/+/...

It doesn't guarantee the issue never happens, like Rust would, but it does make it dramatically less likely to occur.

Also I think in general people vastly under-appreciate how severe an issue EBADF actually is. Outside of extremely specific, single-thread-only scenarios, that error is essentially the kernel telling you that heap corruption occurred, but almost nobody treats it with that level of severity
by mrighele | 2025-04-07 12:29:40+00:00
I think it is the opposite. When you are in your echo chamber you don't realize that your view is toxic because what you get is positive feedback and think that it is in fact "normal".

Bluesky has plenty of toxic communities (e.g. the trans one), but hey are on the "good side" of the political spectrum so they get a pass.
by throwawaymaths | 2025-04-07 12:30:05+00:00
> That happens much less than you'd think though

Hard disagree. My dad worked for the federal government and he was railroaded for pointing out where money just disappeared down some corners. In his case it was untracked doctor reimbursements.

This happens everywhere in government because the taxpayer just doesn't care and spending money itself is largely considered to be the metric of effectiveness -- goodhart's law. The public generally thinks that if we allocate funding to X or Y bleeding heart cause it's magically done and we don't have to think about it anymore; conversely if we delete funds nominally allocated to X or Y it means we don't care about X or Y. By the year 2025 the system of consuming funds without voter accountability has optimized itself to do as little as possible with as high a price as possible, as evidenced by 45 billion dollars for broadband.
by outime | 2025-04-07 12:30:42+00:00
I used to think like that, but now I believe the vast majority of those discussions are inherently toxic, so I just don’t bring them up anymore in almost any context, whether it's work, friends, family, or social networks (if I still used them, that is). It just brings so much unhappiness, and there's nothing to "gain", especially nowadays when you're constantly bombarded by social media, the media, or whatever else is pushing you in whatever direction is convenient at the time.

Let’s be honest, most political posts here get flagged and disappear almost immediately, especially if they lean a certain way. I’m not specifying which direction I think they lean because people will interpret it differently, and it would be pointless. It's yet another example of why, in most cases, it’s toxic.
by jmye | 2025-04-07 12:30:58+00:00
> I don't know of anyone who has had a positive experience using the American for-profit, multi-payer healthcare system

You’re aware, of course, that it isn’t a binary choice, right? That Medicare for All isn’t the sole and only other possibility, or that thinking it’s an idiotic idea does not, in fact, suggest that one thinks the status quo is perfect?

What, specifically, do you know about healthcare, Medicare reimbursements, or how doctors work in this country? What, specifically, do you know about how the current system functions? I’m curious what apparently extensive knowledge underpins these really strongly held opinions.

> Noam Chomsky

Who may have done a brilliant job of discussing Israeli political thought, and whose writing might’ve led you to understand what would happen if the US withdrew support and Israel was pushed into an existential conflict. Let someone know when you get to that part.
by zipy124 | 2025-04-07 12:31:08+00:00
For smaller amounts of monies such as £250k or £1mm, it is much easier to get funding, since a decent amount of countries offer tax relief to the investors for example in the UK through EIS, SEIS, or even VCT. These offer advantages to angels over the VC's.

In addition the whole point of this piece is that you are generally looking to grow slower, thus having smaller capital requirements and burn rate.
by loudmax | 2025-04-07 12:31:16+00:00
It's pretty clear now that a suggestion algorithm that prioritizes engagement at all costs has toxic side effects. This does not prove that all promotion algorithms, much less all social media, is inherently toxic.

Mastodon is a social media platform that's not built on a content promotion algorithm. Mastodon has a lot of group think, and you can absolutely build yourself an echo chamber full of political virtue signalling if that's what you're into. But I wouldn't characterize this as "toxic," it just reflects what you put into it. There's no algorithm to pump it into your face if you don't want it.

I'd love to see a version of Mastodon, or some social media platform, that manages to promote sensible discussion algorithmically. I don't know how this would work, but I wouldn't go so far as to say that this proves that it's impossible.
by nottorp | 2025-04-07 12:32:48+00:00
> Second, the money is not gone. It is right there in the company's account. You use it to pay company bills.

That's fine if you start a restaurant or small workshop and need money for salaries, materials etc, of course.

It's a barrier to entry when you can start something digital only with just a person or three putting in sweat equity and zero to very little actual cash.
by aleph_minus_one | 2025-04-07 12:32:50+00:00
While I completely agree with many of the points that you made, I disagree with some:

> Bureaucracy is crazy in Germany. Forget about doing anything online, paper and in person only.

The latter point has nothing to do with bureaucracy.

> Germany is also one of the least friendly countries for expats. And I say that as a native Germain. Officials will refuse to speak English to you. Yes, refuse.

For example in the USA, they will refuse to speak German with you. So what?

In my opinion there actually exist good reasons for this:

1. A lot of legal, bureaucratic German terms have no direct analogue in English (and their word forming sometimes depends on subtle grammatical features of the German leanguage).

2. For official purposes, it does not suffice if the clerk can somewhat speak English; he/she rather has to be fluent in a way that is "negotiation-safe" ("verhandlungssicher"; I know that this German term is usually translated with "confident in business discussions", "business fluent", "language proficient", but all of these translations don't catch the subtlety of the German term).

> people [are] not open to making new friends.

The German word "Freund" (commonly translated with "friend") has a different meaning than the English "friend" - the relationship goes much deeper. I don't think that Germans are not open to making new "Freunde", but if you want to have shallow, superficial relationships, Germany is not the ideal country. Vice versa, if you want to have deep relationships, you will likely be annoyed by the USA.
by throwawaymaths | 2025-04-07 12:33:07+00:00
My point is if you don't think the ship was already sinking you are hopelessly naive. Consider the possibility that scientific funding is net social negative (scary, I know, but possible, if the only people in the system are fraudsters at the top and good scientists forced to chase after or try to replicate or refute fraudulent results for careerist reasons). Then cutting all funds would be socially good.
by mexicocitinluez | 2025-04-07 12:33:38+00:00
Man, the amount of people who will carry water for this admin astonishes me.

You couldn't even be bothered to read the sources you're quoting.

> That doesn't sound "extremely reckless negligent and careless". It sounds like he misclicked one time on an unexpected popup.

hwut? We're not talking about accidently texting your ex-girlfriend though I know people like you need to rely on false equivocations to sanewash the garbage.
by yahoozoo | 2025-04-07 12:33:40+00:00
LLMs are “next token” predictors. Yes, I realize that there’s a bit more to it and it’s not always just the “next” token, but at a very high level that’s what they are. So why are we so surprised when it turns out they can’t actually “do” math? Clearly the high benchmark scores are a result of the training sets being polluted with the answers.
by dspillett | 2025-04-07 12:33:41+00:00
As the article states:

> The question could possibly be exactly where to draw the limit, and that’s a debate for every project to have.

It is subjective, and does not live in a vacuum because along with purely subjective preference regarding it on its own, it affects, and is affected by, other choices like naming and indentation conventions.

They like 80 in their project. Feel free to choose something else for your project.
by pjmlp | 2025-04-07 12:34:05+00:00
It would help if since lint was created in 1979, the large majority of C developers actually used the right tools and strategies.

In practice only when forced down MISRA like processes people seem to care, versus how relevant secure programming is seen in other programming language communities since 1960's.

Secure programming was part of Burroughs and Multics design, so why is the answer from a systems language community designed a decade later, and after 40+ years since the Morris worm, "we don't use right tools and strategies over here"?
by marcinzm | 2025-04-07 12:34:08+00:00
That's another reason I find the re-naming of small business to startup so silly. Putting a billion dollar company and a family small business on the same label is silly just because were started recently. Some startups are worth billions the second they are created. Personally I think startups generally stop being called startups when they get old enough or go public. Then they get other labels such as a private company or a public company.

The point of labels is to quickly give a lot of relevant information about some entity. This helps customers, investors, clients, future employees and so on understand the entity quickly.
by imgabe | 2025-04-07 12:34:43+00:00
The richest companies do the most business. If you have a billion transactions a year and 0.1% of the time something goes wrong and a customer is pissed off, that's a million pissed off people writing angry reviews online. That makes it seem like they are "universally hated", but you don't hear anything from the 99.9% of people who had perfectly fine, unremarkable experiences.

In my lifetime I've gone from paying a few cents to dollars per minute for phone calls (on the high end for international calls), to being able to have a video call with anyone, anywhere in the world for essentially free.

TVs have gotten bigger, lighter, and cheaper. Cars are more powerful, have better gas mileage, and are much safer. Air travel quality has declined, but so have prices. New video games have consistently been around $50-$60 since the 1980s. If they kept pace with inflation, they should cost $140 to $150 now. The phone in my pocket is about 1000x more powerful than the top of the line desktop I couldn't afford in the 90s and even before inflation it's about 1/3 the price.

Food has more variety and is cheaper. Craft beer was not a thing 30 years ago. Coffee was Maxwell House freeze dried garbage from a can, not fresh roasted beans.

I'm sure there's more. The government is responsible for basically none of that.
by kllrnohj | 2025-04-07 12:35:26+00:00
> The success of C's ability to let programmers create layers of abstractions is why C is the foundational language of the OS I'm using, as well as the browser I'm typing this message in.

What browser are you using that has any appreciable amount of C in it? They all went C++ ages ago because it has much better abstraction and organization capabilities.
by zellyn | 2025-04-07 12:35:38+00:00
Andrej Karpathy goes into quite some depth about how tokenization works here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zduSFxRajkE

tl;dr many of the LLMs use byte-pair encoding to create tokens. You take a set of documents, and then form tokens by repeatedly merging the most common pair of tokens. The initial set of tokens is 256 raw bytes. And the text is typically represented in utf-8.

I expect that although the LLMs can understand arbitrarily but cleanly offset unicode code points by (eventually) noticing the final byte of each sequence, they would do markedly worse on actually processing and completing on them, because they will not have been reduced to the normal set of tokens. However, if the text is actually output cleanly converted, either in internal thinking tokens or in the beginning of the response, they should do fine.

Understanding tokenization is surprisingly useful, even if that video seems awfully long to devote to such a tedious subject. Even Karpathy doesn't like it!
by jamesrcole | 2025-04-07 12:35:41+00:00
Some feedback on the webpage.

"The goal? To make the inside of systems explainable.

[image]

caption: "The need for moldability is pervasive. The treemap shows the classes of Glamorous Toolkit organized in packages. Blue denotes classes that contain at least one contextual view; green shows those that have an example."

I have no idea what that caption, nor the image, means, nor what it has to do with making the inside of systems explainable.
by tlogan | 2025-04-07 12:36:06+00:00
I think the post is off.

How exactly is a VC—or any investor, really—supposed to make money from a startup that’s aiming for a “middle of the road” outcome? That just doesn’t add up. In that case, wouldn’t it make more sense to invest in something safer or more traditional?

From what I understand, the very definition of a startup is tied to ambition. Founders need to be aiming for the moon—or at least something close to it. If you’re not taking big risks with the potential for big rewards, can you even call it a startup?
by dimitri-vs | 2025-04-07 12:37:27+00:00
This is exactly my sentiment. Sonnet-3.5-latest was the perfect code companion: wrote just the right amount of okay quality code but its strength was it really tried to adhere to your instructions. sonnet-3.7 was the exact opposite, wrote waaay too much code and overengineered things like crazy while having very poor instruction adherence. Gemini 2.5 Pro is basically what I hoped sonnet-3.7 would be: follows instructions well but still softly opinionated, massive (usable) context window, fast response, more biased towards latest best practices and a up to date knowledge cutoff.

I'm wondering how much gemini 2.5 being "amazing" comes from sonnet-3.7 being such a disappointment.
by kpcyrd | 2025-04-07 12:37:41+00:00
> It is not the only tool

The burden of proof is on you. I asked which tool specifically would have detected CVE-2025-0665 and I don't mean to be mean, but your reply is essentially a very confident "I don't know but I'm sure somebody could build one", while also handwaving the security benefits of programming in Rust.

When building a http client library, unsafe Rust and C FFI are not really a problem I'm having.
by bayindirh | 2025-04-07 12:38:04+00:00
> That is not what most file copying tools do by default.

Yes, and that's OK.

> When foo copy a file from user bar, and put it on his homedir, the last thing h want is for it to be owned by the foo user.

It depends.

> Your expectations are irrealistics (sic).

No, rsync can do this (try -avSHAX) and tar does this by default, and we're talking about rsync here.
by LoganDark | 2025-04-07 12:38:20+00:00
> Even then, it still assumes that users understand that it is a problem in the first place and that they are willing to take steps to solve it.

No it doesn't. All it assumes is that some users may want to take steps to solve it and that those users deserve the option. Literally nothing needs to happen to the existing behavior, the automatic preconditioning can still stay.
by willvarfar | 2025-04-07 12:39:45+00:00
> And I rolled it over 30 days to be able to show any recent changes while not getting lost in the noise of daily change.

small thing, but learned at work that often there's a weekly pattern (and I'd bet there is for airplane travel) so you ought use a rolling 7 day average instead of 30 because there are different numbers of weekends in each day's 30 day number.

This is why there's a slight zigzag in the line charts in the article.
by esafak | 2025-04-07 12:39:51+00:00
Russ (VC): Why would you go after revenue?

Richard (CEO): Because... to make money?

Russ: No. If you show revenue, people will ask how much, and it will never be enough. The company that was the hundred x-er, the thousand x-er, becomes the two x dog. But if you have no revenue, you can say you're pre-revenue... you're a potential pure play. It's not about how much you earn, it's about what you're worth, and who's worth the most? Companies that lose money. Pinterest, SnapChat, no revenue. Amazon has lost money every fucking quarter for the last twenty fucking years and that Bezos motherfucker is the king. There's no revenue. No one wants to see revenue. Go!

Richard: Oh, um, I just thought that mainly the goal of companies is to make money.

Russ: Yeah, no no no, that's not how it works. I don't want to make a little bit of money every day, I want to make a fuckton of money all at once. ROI. ROI!

— Silicon Valley, "Bad Money" (2015). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BzAdXyPYKQo
by bayindirh | 2025-04-07 12:39:59+00:00
What if the tool accessing the file is malicious, and can copy the file, but can't change the context of the said file? SELinux shall be strict on its behavior even if it's a detriment to user convenience.

SELinux contexts shall be sticky, and needs to be manually (re)set after copying.

This is the default behavior, BTW. SELinux contexts are not (re)set during copy operations in most cases, from my experience. You need to change/fix the context manually.
Show HN: EduVibz – Turning School Curricula into Music (Beta)
by JasonViviers | 2025-04-07 12:40:25+00:00
Hi HN!

After a year of building solo—balancing late nights, a demanding day job, family commitments, and countless cups of coffee - I’m excited (and relieved!) to announce the beta launch of EduVibz.

EduVibz transforms traditional curriculum topics into catchy, educational songs to help students learn more easily and effectively. I've started lean by covering three subjects from the South African CAPS Grade 12 curriculum, with additional Grade 12 and Grade 8 subjects already created and soon to be uploaded. The intention behind this initial release is to gather user feedback to refine both the music and the content, ensuring it’s genuinely impactful before expanding to more grades and other curricula.

Part of the reason it took this long was securing a provisional patent, given that (to my knowledge) this is the first platform of its kind to attempt delivering curriculum-aligned educational songs at scale, while keeping content accurate, relevant, and continually updated.

I’ve learned a lot building this so far, made my fair share of mistakes, and recognize that I probably could’ve launched leaner. But I'm committed to improving and learning as I go.

You can check it out at www.eduvibz.com. Please note: a quick, free signup (just name, email, and password) is required to access the music library due to our streaming setup.

I'd greatly appreciate any feedback on the concept, the songs, the UX/UI, or anything else you feel could help EduVibz become better and more impactful. If you're passionate about EdTech or have experience scaling early-stage educational products, your insights would be particularly invaluable.

Thanks so much for taking a look. I’m looking forward to hearing your thoughts!
by pmags | 2025-04-07 12:41:25+00:00
Here's the key text from Kennedy's post on X:

"I also visited with these two extraordinary healers, Dr. Richard Bartlett and Dr. Ben Edwards who have treated and healed some 300 measles-stricken Mennonite children using aerosolized budesonide and clarithromycin."

Antibiotics and steroid drugs DO NOT heal measles.
by pseudalopex | 2025-04-07 12:41:32+00:00
Many Americans thought their institutions protected the status quo pretty well.

In Australia the Liberal Party in changed the rules to require a 2/3 majority to remove a PM. In America blocking Trump's tariffs or removing him would require less than 1/3 of his party to vote with the opposition. They fear voters would punish them. How many Australian politicians voted for these party room coups knowing it would end their political careers?
by ljdtt | 2025-04-07 12:41:43+00:00
Slightly off-topic from the article itself, but… does anyone else feel like Nature’s cookie banner just never goes away? I have vivid memories of trying to reject cookies multiple times, eventually giving up and accepting them just to get to the article only for the banner to show up again the next time I visit. I swear it’s giving me déjà vu every single visit.. Am I the only one experiencing this, or is this just how their site works?
by namdnay | 2025-04-07 12:41:59+00:00
why would this be the higher level story? The US government doesn't build guns either, but they're capable of buying the appropriate one from the market.

There are more than enough enterprise chats out there with security levels ranging from "good enough if you trust a major US corp" (Teams DoD) to "complete paranoia" (finance communication apps with on-premise encryption/decryption modules plugged into your HSM)
by vitus | 2025-04-07 12:42:05+00:00
> We've had several SecDefs, all dramatically more competent than Hegseth, who did not have any military experience.

Who do you have in mind? Carter, Cohen, and Cheney were the only confirmed secretaries from the past 40 years who fit "no military experience".

There are a handful of recent secretaries with < 5 years of military experience who did not even reach the rank of Captain (e.g. Rumsfeld, Robert Gates, Panetta, Perry).

To be clear: I agree with you that military experience is not really a qualification for the job, unless the individual has achieved high enough rank (i.e. General) to be involved in strategic planning. And certainly most secretaries of defense don't have that (Austin and Mattis are quite rare on that front, doubly so because they needed congressional waivers to serve in the position while still being active-duty military).