MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by MiddleEndian | 2025-04-15 23:23:47+00:00
I don't use VSCode (or Cursor in this case (which I do think was malicious in the way it blindly hallucinated a policy for a paying customer)); I use vim or notepad++ depending on my mood.

I just don't have a problem with people "violating" Terms of Service or End User License Agreements and am not really convinced there's a legal argument there either.
by gamblor956 | 2025-04-15 23:24:03+00:00
"Code as law" was attempted as a defense in another token-related "hacking" case.

It didn't work there, and it won't work here either.

If you end up using the legal system to remediate undesired transactions, what's the point of cryptocurrencies in the first place?

That is a philosophical argument completely unrelated to whether or not something is illegal. Cryptocurrencies aren't a replacement for the law, nor do they stand outside of it.
by callc | 2025-04-15 23:24:07+00:00
I’m pretty much in the same boat as you, but here’s one place that LLMs helped me:

In python I was scanning 1000’s of files each for thousands of keywords. A naive implementation took around 10 seconds, obviously the largest share of execution time after running instrumentation. A quick ChatGPT led me to Aho-Corasick and String searching algorithms, which I had never used before. Plug in a library and bam, 30x speed up for that part of the code.

I could have asked my knowledgeable friends and coworkers, but not at 11PM on a Saturday.

I could have searched the web and probably found it out.

But the LLM basically auto completed the web, which I appreciate.
by StanislavPetrov | 2025-04-15 23:24:31+00:00
Card counting is still possible (albeit a bit harder) in the present day - the mathematics are the same. Most casinos use more decks and don't deal as deeply into the shoe, but it is still entirely possible to gain a statistical edge over the house, which is why casinos will still ban you from playing blackjack if you are playing with an advantage(counting, varying your best sizes greatly based on the count, sitting out and watching until the deck gets deeper, ect). They will never ban you from games like Roulette, where you there truly is no way to gain an advantage over the house regardless of what strategy you use.
by consumer451 | 2025-04-15 23:24:47+00:00
My most controversial take, even though it is 100% true:

The entire planet is minority "white." I put that in scare quotes because even as the lightest skinned person in the land, I know that "white" is a made up in/out group term. As a Slav, I was not "white" according to US immigration law as recently as the 1950s. There is technically no such thing as being white, there is only passing for white. The definition of white entirety depends on the day, and who you ask. Slavs, Irish, Italians, Greeks, were not "white" until very recently. It's a silly word that really means nothing.

If one wants to slow down "white" people becoming the minority more and more due to their economic advancement, clearly the solution is carpet bombing poor countries with e-readers preloaded with Wikipedia. That is the only moral way to even things out!
by dang | 2025-04-15 23:24:51+00:00
Related. Others?

An Introduction to Modern CMake - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39784784 - March 2024 (28 comments)

An Introduction to Modern CMake - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22577889 - March 2020 (41 comments)

An Introduction to Modern CMake - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17897685 - Sept 2018 (122 comments)
by dimal | 2025-04-15 23:25:40+00:00
I used to be like that and I’ve completely flip flopped. I decided that people really need to know the problems they cause, and needless animations are absolutely rampant.

I was watching a conference talk yesterday on SVG, and the speaker had an endlessly repeating dumb meme gif on their slide. I couldn’t focus on what they’re saying at all. So, I’m excluded from the information they’re sharing. Fuck that. This is a very experienced web developer who probably cares enough to make things accessible, but they don’t realize the harm they’re doing. So, at least on places like HN, I’m going to be vocal.
by patagurbon | 2025-04-15 23:26:11+00:00
The US is not really in trouble because of maintaining global hegemony. It’s in trouble because of repeated tax cuts by Republicans that are too popular for Democrats to fully unravel, and deficit spending largely caused or enacted by Republican administrations. Maintaining global hegemony really isn’t that costly to the US as a percent of GDP. It’s foolishness like the Middle East wars that are costly.
by roenxi | 2025-04-15 23:26:13+00:00
> Markets don’t account for externalities

But on net the externalities are just as likely to be doing more good than bad. I've yet to see anyone in the public debate tallying up the positive externalities of markets. "They have externalities!" is likely to be an argument in favour of free markets, without the positive externalities a free market generates we would be poorer and more uncomfortable - it doesn't take much looking to find a whole raft of spinoffs where free market activity generates positive externalities.

Things like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol's_cost_disease where through no action of their own actors and musicians get a lot more money than in medieval times purely to represent the alternatives the market offers them.
by vunderba | 2025-04-15 23:26:22+00:00
I must be misreading this. Are you saying the following is/should be okay/ethically okay/perfectly legal:

Author A spends a year writing a fiction book. They are not well known in the industry. They publish the book, it sells very few copies (perhaps none at all).

Person B (a well known Instagram influencer with tens of thousands of followers) downloads a copy of your book. Replaces your name with their name as the author, and promotes it as a book they've finished writing. Goes on to sell at a very profitable rate.

If your answer is NO this should be illegal, what about if Person B searches/replaces all definite articles with indefinite articles, or changes all the proper nouns to begin with "schmla"? Where do we draw the line?

If your answer is YES, then my gut instinct tells me you are neither a writer, composer, or creator in any meaningful sense of the word.
by rhines | 2025-04-15 23:26:51+00:00
I have changed my mind on things in online discussions. Usually in the form of them saying something I disagree with, me trying to articulate why they're wrong or searching for evidence that they're wrong, and then coming up short or finding information I wasn't previously aware of. I find this is more likely to happen online than IRL since you don't really interrupt IRL conversations to go spend 3 hours looking for sources, though I do also get what you mean about a lot of online comments being so blatantly hostile that you just don't engage.
by UtopiaPunk | 2025-04-15 23:28:20+00:00
Yeah, exactly. When someone like Bernie Sanders talks about the economy and big corporations today, they sound a lot like Teddy Roosevelt. Teddy Roosevelt was a full-on capitalist and proud of it, and definitely would not have been understood as a "leftist" at the time. He believed the USA government's job was to act as a strong, firm check against the worst tendencies of capitalism (like monopolization), but only so that capitalism could function at its best. There were many at the time who did not believe capitalism was really the way to go, though! Just look at organizations like the IWW, and the various worldviews that were sympathetic to the rise of the USSR just a few years later. Hell, one of the people who ran against Teddy Roosevelt was Eugene Debs, a socialist who got more than an insignificant number of votes.

But 100+ years later, a Teddy Roosevelt-esque understanding of government and capitalism is the furthest left USA politics can imagine.
by bigiain | 2025-04-15 23:29:18+00:00
Nah, my point was that people who ignored the incumbent "wisdom" in the late 90's, actually took over the web.

As much as some "technical" people deride PHP and the sort of self taught developers that were using it back then, WordPress pretty much is "the web" if you exclude Facebook and other global scale centralised web platforms, and the bits of the non FAANG et al owned web that aren't WordPress are very likely to be PHP too. Hell, even Facebook might still count as a PHP site.

In 30 years time, it won't be the most elegant or pure language or framework choices that dominate, it'll be the language/frameworks that people who don't care about elegance or purity end up using to get their idea onto the internet. If I had to guess, it'll likely be LLM written Python - deeply influenced and full of idioms from publicly available 2018-2024 era open source Python code that the AI grifters hoovered up and trained their initial models on.
by rfw300 | 2025-04-15 23:29:23+00:00
The amount of blatant pandering OpenAI is doing to California politicians should make everyone suspicious. They are structuring this nonprofit transition as a bribe to the California politician-nonprofit complex in exchange for a much more valuable regulatory approval. Their announcement from a few days ago:

> built by the leading AI company, put in the hands of nonprofits throughout California, across America and beyond… This commission will also incorporate feedback from leaders and communities in health, science, education, and public services—particularly within OpenAI’s home state of California.

These advisors have no connection to AI whatsoever—what they have in common is deep political connections in the state of California. Dolores Huerta is a remarkable woman, but she is a 95 year-old union organizer. The rest of the list is similar.

Is there anyone in America who believes OpenAI is making this transition to better achieve its nonprofit’s mission? I would like to meet them.
by GabrielHawk | 2025-04-15 23:29:33+00:00
> Cursor is trapped in a cat and mouse game against "hacks" where users create new accounts and get unlimited use

Actually, you don't even have to make a new account. You can delete your account and make it again reusing the same email.

I did this on accident once because I left the service and decided to come back, and was surprised to get a free tier again. I sent them an email letting them know that was a bug, but they never responded.

I paid for a month of access just to be cautious, even though I wasn't using it much. I don't understand why they don't fix this.
by amy214 | 2025-04-15 23:29:45+00:00
It's funny you were thinking that, because I was thinking, "how would you teach a japanese man english?." The obvious answer is to jerk him off and give him high doses of LSD first. I immediately came to the same conclusion with this AI-dolphin stuff. Have they tried jerking off the dolphin and giving it LSD first? Apparently - yes.
by generativenoise | 2025-04-15 23:30:04+00:00
It is insane that people think we need a growing population to make this perfect population pyramid, to make things work easily in monetary terms with taxes. It really does ignore so many of the other forces as you mention.

The picture looks radically different if you focus on real resources and allocation. In fact a growing population could make things very economically tenuous in real terms, depending on how a few key environmental factors play out over the coming centuries.
by NunoSempere | 2025-04-15 23:30:09+00:00
I have written similar tools

- for command line, fermi: https://git.nunosempere.com/NunoSempere/fermi

- for android, a distribution calculator: https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.nunosempere.distribution...

People might also be interested in https://www.squiggle-language.com/, which is a more complex version (or possibly <https://git.nunosempere.com/personal/squiggle.c>, which is a faster but much more verbose version in C)
by didgetmaster | 2025-04-15 23:30:26+00:00
And yet that morbidly obese guy probably got that way by a thousand unhealthy snacks between meals. While just a few extra calories generally doesn't do much; a steady stream of them over time can do the trick.

As DOGE is finding, that $36 trillion of government debt didn't come in one blow. When every agency has a bunch of bloated programs; it really adds up.
by lupusreal | 2025-04-15 23:30:51+00:00
You're clearly confused. This conversation is about 4chan jannies, not reddit moderators. They don't ban you for posting racial slurs or fascist rhetoric, or any other traditionally offensive material.

Make a thread about Chinese naval buildup or related strategic developments in the Pacific on /k/; banned for "off topic". Get into an argument with a user who turns out to be a janny; banned for "trolling". Respond to a funny /tv/ thread memeing on some TV show, banned for "responding to off topic threads". Post a dozen pictures of rockets in the spaceflight general being raided by some /pol/tard who thinks space is fake, get banned for "spamming".

The jannies are arbitrary and capricious. Three day bans can't be appealed so they hand them out like candy.
by Retric | 2025-04-15 23:32:13+00:00
That overstates the difference as mergers hardly destroy the old companies in their entirety.

Instead it’s the same kind of shakeups you regularly see in government agencies. Picking one small example, HERSA is a merger of the Health Services Administration (1973–1982) and Health Resources Administration (1973–1982). However currently one of its major functions is managing the Ryan White HIV/AIDS Program that showed up in 1990.
by NunoSempere | 2025-04-15 23:32:20+00:00
Fermi in particular has the following syntax

```

5M 12M # number of people living in Chicago

beta 1 200 # fraction of people that have a piano

30 180 # minutes it takes to tune a piano, including travel time

/ 48 52 # weeks a year that piano tuners work for

/ 5 6 # days a week in which piano tuners work

/ 6 8 # hours a day in which piano tuners work

/ 60 # minutes to an hour

```

multiplication is implied as the default operation, fits are lognormal.
by wegfawefgawefg | 2025-04-15 23:32:42+00:00
Do you remember when people thought first person shooters made people into murderers because the colombine guy played doom a lot and made a custom wad to simulate the attack?

If a murderer eats omelettes every day we should ban eggs. Eggs turn people into murderers.

Reminder some kids died jumping off buildings with umbrellas after Marry Poppins. Ban movies.
by cs702 | 2025-04-15 23:32:49+00:00
Yup, hallucinations are still a big problem for LLMs.

Nope, there's no reliable solution for them, as of yet.

There's hope that hallucinations will be solved by someone, somehow, soon... but hope is not a strategy.

There's also hype about non-stop progress in AI. Hype is more a strategy... but it can only work for so long.

If no solution materializes soon, many early-adopter LLM projects/trials will be cancelled. Sigh.
by TacticalCoder | 2025-04-15 23:32:53+00:00
https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdny/pr/former-security-enginee...

From that link:

"U.S. Attorney Damian Williams said: “Today, Shakeeb Ahmed was sentenced to prison in the first ever conviction for the hack of a smart contract and ordered to forfeit all of the stolen crypto. No matter how novel or sophisticated the hack, this Office and our law enforcement partners are committed to following the money and bringing hackers to justice. And as today’s sentence shows, time in prison — and forfeiture of all the stolen crypto — is the inevitable consequence of such destructive hacks.”

The undisputable matter of fact is this: there have already been several cases of people who thought they could invoke the "(smart contract) code is law" argument to outsmart judges and the legal system.

But that's fantasy. In practice these people, when caught, go to prison.

> Indexed Finance is an unlicensed investment firm. The promoters knew the risk ( decentralized finance) and now they want to blame someone who outsmarted them at their own game.

And DeFi exchanges are "unlicensed brokers". And yet I posted a case where the hacker who "outsmarted" them is now in prison: how smart one has to be to end up in prison right?

Post me a case where an "unlicensed investement firm" sued a thief who "outsmarted them" and where the judge decided to let the thief walk free.

For I posted a case from justice.gov to prove my point.
by pessimizer | 2025-04-15 23:33:59+00:00
> Is it so fundamental a shift that nothing can be done? I'm not convinced.

A fundamental shift in our complete trust of technology is good. It encourages ignorance and obedience, and alienates people from each other.

And the fact that AI can be used to fake pictures of your neighbors having sex is nothing but good. No one will be able to say whether any picture is real, so the public won't be able to destroy another young girl's life over it. I also think that arguing about the distribution of pretend movies of your neighbors having sex will have to lead to clear legislation regarding the distribution and sale of personal data.
by ortusdux | 2025-04-15 23:34:01+00:00
IIRC, the original conceit of the Matrix was that the computers were using the humans brains as computers. That is why they are fed and kept in a dream state - so the remaining 95% of their brain power is free to be used. This also explains how Neo can gain superpowers by unlocking his full potential.

The studio reportedly forced the change to 'humans as batteries', which in my opinion is much worse (why not cows?). I have zero proof, but I think they were concerned about overlap with a famous series of sifi novels that I won't spoil by naming, but that is currently being produced by Bradley Cooper at Warner Brothers.
by arrosenberg | 2025-04-15 23:34:02+00:00
> How do we know whether they lie without a solid definition of net worth?

They get to tell us what they are worth. Generally speaking, if you want to lie about your net worth you are choosing between tax fraud and insurance fraud. There are some areas that are tricky, like pre-market startups, but we have things like 409A valuations that help with that. Penalties should have no statute of limitations - if you lie about it, you get to look over your shoulder forever. It's not perfect, but as you have clearly recognized, there is no perfect system that allows for a reasonable degree of freedom.

> Can we tax him based on his Tesla shares? What happens if Tesla stock goes down by 99% next year?

Not really tricky! He gets taxed on the value of his shares in year 1 and he gets taxed on the value of the shares in year 2. If the value goes down 99%, you pay way less tax (or none if he's no longer wealthy enough to qualify). He can sell his shares to pay it, and I honestly do not care if he is not liquid enough to do that - that's a situation he put himself into. No he doesn't get a tax break on the loss - the rich have a sense of entitlement that their wealth belongs to them free of charge, and I think they should have to pay maintenance. Without public utilities (roads, electricity, air and sea traffic control, etc) and social stability, most of these billionaires would lose their wealth to warlords very quickly.
by BizarroLand | 2025-04-15 23:34:09+00:00
Ok, but can you find one that also has homeassistant integration?

That's the real value add with all of the work done. You could also purchase a 1 buck usb-c lithium charging IC chip and wire the outs in place of the broken "usb-c" port and have the original working the way it was "supposed" to.
by wenzhang | 2025-04-15 23:34:20+00:00
Introducing BitcaskDB - A fast, lightweight and fixed capacity key/value storage engine based on the Bitcask model!

Features: • Append-only • Namespace • Fine-grained compaction • Fixed memory & disk usage • LRU-like eviction policy • Fast recovery with WAL hints • Soft deletion • And much more…

Why BitcaskDB? • Predictable performance • Single-seek retrieval • Fast disk space reclamation • Customizable compaction policies & filters

Check it out and contribute:

https://github.com/wenzhang-dev/bitcaskDB

Feel free to star the repo and submit PRs!

#Go #Database #StorageEngine #BitcaskDB #OpenSource
by asveikau | 2025-04-15 23:34:28+00:00
JD Vance is a poster boy for Y Combinator adjacent fascists. Marc Andreessen, when he is not cheering on opiate overdoses in his hometown and praising the British Raj, loves what's going on. We need to accept that Silicon Valley has major culpability here. After all, how much do you see on HN that you should ignore the law because it's better to ask forgiveness than permission?
by xmgad | 2025-04-15 23:34:59+00:00
Sucks how things are rough out there right now. You strike me as someone with a lot of heart, and I really hope something good comes your way soon. I’m working on a startup at UC Berkeley with my co-founder, we’re bootstrapping at the moment, but we’ve got a lot lined up.

Would love to connect if you’re open to chatting. No pressure at all — just figured I’d reach out. Feel free to shoot me an email (info’s in my bio).
by Aurornis | 2025-04-15 23:35:00+00:00
> The subsequent message about Russian activity could be a coincidence–Internet background noise

These weren't random login attempts. It says the Russian login attempts had the correct login credentials of newly created accounts.

If the article is correct, the accounts were created and then shortly afterward the correct credentials were used to attempt a login from a Russian source.

That's a huge issue if true. Could be that someone's laptop is compromised.
by hedora | 2025-04-15 23:35:02+00:00
When you say identity, you mean “the identity of someone that convinced a certificate authority that they controlled walmart.com’s dns record at some point in the last 47 days, or used some sort of out of band authentication mechanism”.

You don’t mean “Walmart”, but 99% of the population thinks you do.

Is it OK to trust this for anything important? Probably not. Is OK to type your credit card number in? Sure. You have fraud protection.
by FiniteField | 2025-04-15 23:35:07+00:00
>Note, some of these are associated with the far right.

I think that should be trivially obvious based on the discussion at hand. What is interesting, though, is how so many of these terms came into public use as well-known, generic terms, despite the far right being poison to any normal person's reputation. Even many of the ones containing obviously offensive components have made it into wider use in some clipped form. Eg:

- based

- goyslop -> slop

- normalfag -> normie
by api | 2025-04-15 23:35:57+00:00
The edgelord thing goes back way further than 4chan and Something Awful. I remember plenty of racist fascist rapist satanic misanthropist kitten smasher edgelords from the BBS days. It was not serious, though sometimes it was I hate my dad and I just got the new NiN album serious.

At some point something did change though. It was around the same time as Gamergate and it’s been written about extensively. I’ve been into edgy hacker adjacent culture since like 1992 and when the “actual not ironic” stuff landed it was immediately recognizable as something unfamiliar and different. I’m still not sure how many people got “pilled” versus how much of it was some kind of weird collision with normie spaces where people didn’t get the culture.

There was a generational shift in there too. OG hacker culture was GenX and older millennials, the people who grew up with the net pre enshittification. The /pol stuff and GG seems like younger millennials and GenZ.

I am not pretending to have a clue and I don’t think anyone truly does. It’s all a very complex soup of memes and people and influences.
by potato3732842 | 2025-04-15 23:36:41+00:00
Sounds like they just couldn't put their money where their mouths were and wanted daddy gov to manage the bears and couldn't agree on how. If the neighborhood has bears just store your stuff better and you won't have to shoot them causing problems with the neighbors. Easier than bickering and cheaper than paying for government to do it.

Edit: I guess this works of thieves too.