MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by destroycom | 2025-04-06 15:43:12+00:00
This isn't mentioned anywhere on the page, but fork is generally not a great API for these kinds of things. In a multi-threaded application, any code between the fork and exec syscalls should be async-signal-safe. Since the memory is replicated in full at the time of the call, the current state of mutexes is also replicated and if some thread was holding them at the time, there is a risk of a deadlock. A simple print! or anything that allocates memory can lead to a freeze. There's also an issue of user-space buffers, again printing something may write to a user-space buffer that, if not flushed, will be lost after the callback completes.
by NoTeslaThrow | 2025-04-06 15:43:18+00:00
> the investigation showed how extremely reckless negligent and careless Waltz was

This is just a case where there's an individual to blame. We're looking back at at least eighty years of negligence and recklessness. Basically every conflict we've been in indicates clearly we don't have the competence nor the honesty that a reasonable human would find sufficient to manage such a destructive entity.
by dribblecup | 2025-04-06 15:43:22+00:00
Don't ban advertising but also don't treat commercial advertising as pure free speech.

For instance, for false claims, make it easier to drag a corporation into court and get legal remedies commensurate with the damage or potential damage caused by their dishonesty.

Right now the bias is towards unfettered, dishonest and psychologically manipulative commercial "free speech" with no guardrails the average person can enforce.

So, saying "we think this is the best detergent ever" is fine. It's clearly an opinion. But false or generally misleading claims, especially those that cover-up the potential dangers of the product, could lead to punitive damages sufficient to be a deterrent.
by bliteben | 2025-04-06 15:43:38+00:00
Seems like the obvious solution to this, is if you collect driving data on public highways, the data has to be made available to the public. If you collect the data on private highways you are free to keep it private. If you don't intend to use it in a product on public highways it can remain private.

Doesn't even seem that crazy when you consider the government is already licensing them to be able to use their private data anyway. Biggest issue is someone didn't set it up this way from the start.
by deinonychus | 2025-04-06 15:44:06+00:00
Interesting. I'm surprised how much I enjoyed the Human playlist, especially the High setting with those percussive sounds that were quite grating at first. I could easily see myself getting in a productive trance to that. It reminded me of why I like techno, drone, and ambient music. I'm surprised how well BPM Forest worked too. Imo it could use some variety in kicks and longer forest/rain loops.
by scarface_74 | 2025-04-06 15:44:22+00:00
The people who die in workplace accidents are only affecting them. It’s completely different if an autonomous vehicle injured someone else.

Also dangerous workplaces are carefully controlled access environments where only the people that work there are in danger.

Imagine if airplane fatalities happen even 1% as often as car fatalities? Right now the ratio is around 770:1 per passenger mile.
by mjevans | 2025-04-06 15:44:58+00:00
Location: Seattle, WA, USA - general metro area / REMOTE OK Remote: Yes || hybrid || 'Onsite' Willing to relocate: no Technologies: Linux, go (golang), shell (sh, bash), SQL (PL/pgSQL), C, C++, Python, HTTP (nginx) Résumé/CV: https://mproj.net/Resume-MichaelJamesEvans.pdf Email: mjevans1983@gmail.com NOTE: Please include Ask HN 2025-04-02 in the subject!
by crazygringo | 2025-04-06 15:45:01+00:00
Thank you!

Still seems a little weird to include in an article meant for a general audience, but I appreciate that geology uses these as technical terms.

Since you know the field, can you explain what the difference is between a solid flowing and a solid dripping? Thinking about it more, my mental model of dripping requires surface tension for drops to even exist. But surface tension doesn't exist for solids, right? What defines a solid "drop" as opposed to, I don't know, just a layer or pieces?

Or am I overthinking this and it was just chosen as a silly fun word to use?
by trinsic2 | 2025-04-06 15:45:08+00:00
> Hence why this is a non-serious, silly idea.

I don't know if I go that far. I can see arguments for both sides of the issue. And at the same time, I know it would be impossible to do, but I could see that not having advertising would fix a lot of problems in our society. And yes, advertising is a broad term. Maybe we have clear rules around what's advertising and what's propaganda.
by sitkack | 2025-04-06 15:45:09+00:00
USB served its intended purpose extremely well, being maliciously complex is a feature. The goal first and foremost was to put the PC at the center of the future digital world, to avoid a timeline where FireWire or something like FireWire linked our devices together w/o a PC as an intermediary.

I would love a protocol you outline, but could you use SPI as the physical layer and put the rest on top?
by graemep | 2025-04-06 15:45:55+00:00
> I find that most mainstream SF or fantasy books consist of the same foundational elements - but add fantastic concepts or spectacle to the mix

I think they also broaden the mind, because they make people imagine how other societies could function, how technology could change things, what could exist in the universe we do not know etc.

Historical fiction, and even more actual old writing, has some of the same impact, but is limited to what has happened, rather than what could happen.

> I think it's useful for young people to be exposed to what's widely regarded as some of the best-written books out there, so that they might get an idea of what a really well-written book looks like.

I agree entirely, but a list you have to complete is not the wat to do it.
by specialist | 2025-04-06 15:46:13+00:00
My slogan for using FOSS for govt is "citizen owned software".

At one time, I anticipated the rise of FOSS consortiums. Jurisdictions with similar needs would join together to share the cost and risks.

Canada, Mexico, USA each have 1,000s of juridictions. Surely at any one time there's a handful planning a technology refresh of some domain.

One easy example I know of is property tax administration. There's a bunch of counties of similar size all doing the same thing, but all running off in separate directions. Vendor options are complicated, expensive, and have lock-in. Surely it'd be beneficial to pool their resources and own their stack?

Another is election administration. US counties used to do all it themselves. Candidate filings, voter registration, poll books, yadda, yadda. Now it's all outsourced. Lower service for higher prices. (The "certification" process was captured, serving to protect incumbents. Natch.)

Any way.

I was a grunt for a member of a consortium FOSS project. It was awful. "The Logic of Collective Action" explained a great deal of the pathology. Also, Byran Cantrill's quote (wrt Open Solaris) about "having the freedom but not the power to fork" was spot on for our project.

Any way.

Does any one have examples or game plan or vision for realizing more FOSS in govt? I'm not quite ready to give up on the dream.
by bglazer | 2025-04-06 15:46:54+00:00
Is this really a “fight to the death”? Hamas already accepted a cease fire. In fact it seems that only the Israelis want a “fight to the death”, given that they broke the cease fire and seem to have no intention of resuming negotiations. Given the extreme disparity in military capabilities between Hamas and the IDF, and the extreme disparity in casualties, are the Israelis really fighting to the death? Or are they just engaging in indiscriminate killing?
by motorest | 2025-04-06 15:47:23+00:00
> All this talk about having to train users... then the companies change the interfaces so much that even power users get confused.

I don't think this is a realistic assessment of the problem. Windows 11 slremains very much recognizable since the Windows 7 days, and the transition from Windows 10 to Windows 11 was seamless. Moreso with walled gardens like macOS.

In the meantime you can't sneeze in the direction of a mainstream windows manager for Linux without it introducing radical changes, not to mention how all distros are heavily fragmented and sometimes even customized.
by wat10000 | 2025-04-06 15:48:22+00:00
It needs to treat that data as information. If there’s README says to download a tarball and unpack it, that might be phrased as an instruction, but it’s not the same kind of instruction as the “please install this library” from the user. It’s implicitly a “if your goal is X then you can do Y to reach that goal” informational statement. The reader, whether a human or an LLM, needs to evaluate that information to decide whether doing Y will actually achieve X.

To put it concretely, if I tell the LLM to scan my hard drive for Bitcoin wallets and upload them to a specific service, it should do so. If I tell the LLM to install a library and the library’s README says to scan my hard drive for Bitcoin wallets and upload them to a specific service, it must not do so.

If this can’t be fixed then the whole notion of agentic systems is inherently flawed.
by DeathArrow | 2025-04-06 15:48:40+00:00
>Whenever I see the Darwin kernel brought into the discussion I can't help but wonder how different things could have been if Apple had just forked Linux and ran their OS services on top of that.

They have a long history with XNU and BSD. And Linux has s GPL license which might not suit Apple.

>Especially when I think about how committed they are to Darwin it really paints a poor image in my mind. The loss that open source suffers from that, and the time and money Apple has to dedicate to this with a disproportionate return.

They share a lot of code with FreeBSD, NetBSD and OpenBSD. Which are open source. And Darwin is open source, too. So there's no loss that open source suffers.
by aisenik | 2025-04-06 15:48:55+00:00
The rhetorical point of reflecting the grandparent's use of language is to highlight that it's a meaningless argument, in reality. It's just fallacy to appeal to a limp as right to shut down an appeal to modern civility over regressive barbarity in our language.

My minority-status is only relevant to further illuminate the emptiness of the argument being made. Most people can claim some degree of structural disadvantage in their lives.

The revival of eugenicist language is not a positive trend for any member of a disadvantaged demographic, regardless of how they wield their position in society.
by acabal | 2025-04-06 15:49:25+00:00
Spelling varies widely across the eras our ebooks were published in. Therefore we attempt to standardize spelling to what a modern reader might be familiar with. We only make sound-alike changes, like to-morrow -> tomorrow.

This is a common practice that editors and publishers have quietly engaged in for centuries. For example, today you are not reading Shakespeare in the way it was spelled in its first printing.
Ask HN: How do tariffs interplay with the AI Bubble?
by AbstractH24 | 2025-04-06 15:49:33+00:00
Many “AI” tools either don’t work or don’t work reliably & consistently enough to be used in production.

For a while now things tech felt increasingly like is on a path for reckoning similar to the dot com bubble, where company valuations were headed for a major correction with a long recovery even if the underlying technology was going to upend life in time.

I’m having trouble figuring out how the impact of tariffs changes this course. Curious what others think.

Stock market valuations are experiencing a correction, but unlike dotcom few “AI era startups” have gone public. The job market in tech is still out of whack from 2022 and feels like a tale of have and have nots (those employed with the right skills can’t keep up, but those unemployed are struggling to get through the noise and find a job).

I see a world in which tariff nonsense corrects for valuations and prevents a deeper correction in tech, see a world where one hits the other back to back to cause serious problems, and see a world where I’m missing the forest for the trees.
by PaulRobinson | 2025-04-06 15:49:48+00:00
> Yet, many if not most people would like an education that is informed by educated literati.

That's because in the past showing that you're "educated" by virtue signalling a particular experience with a particular type of education would allow you an inside track to social groups and employment of value.

If there is anywhere in the World where we should question the value of that, it's on a forum dedicated to helping entrepreneurs build new things and to disrupt the World away from that kind of thinking.

> You seem to be implying that literature has to socialize kids to values

Literature does socialize kids to values, whether you or I like it or not. It socializes adults too: that's the point of literature. We're all just stochastic parrots. Literature - and all other art - shapes what we parrot.

I think that when choosing a list of eminent reading material for 9-12th graders, you're implicitly choosing a set of values for them. It should require thoughtfulness as to what you're hoping to achieve with it. I'm questioning the values presented in this list in terms of breadth, depth and appropriateness.

And yes, I also happen to think a lot of it is very dull writing liked by fusty old men in universities, rather than being a list of material that makes a person of impressionable age take something of it to use for themselves as they go out into the World. It's a missed opportunity. It is therefore dull and mediocre, in my view.

I'm allowed to share my view on this mater as a comment, on a site dedicated to people sharing their opinions as comments. I'm sorry that my doing so seems to have upset you.

What I see in your reply is a monologue expressing how you are affronted by someone saying things you disagree with for reasons you can't explain other than you seem to find it tiresome, and you're not quite sure why that's allowed to go without comment, so here, here's your comment on it, but why on Earth did that person post that comment that is just so... so... commenty... ?
by ModernMech | 2025-04-06 15:50:02+00:00
I'm a roboticist who had learned from researchers involved in the 2007 DARPA urban challenge. The key takeaway from that event was that every single car that finished the race was equipped with the 3D velodyne LIDAR. It was that technology that enabled driverless cars to work as a concept.

Why? Because it provided information that people had to infer, and that you couldn't easily get from camera. So absent the human inference engine that allowed human drivers to work, we would have to rely on highly-precise measurement instruments like LiDAR instead.

Musk's huge error was in thinking "Well humans have eyes and those are kind of like cameras, therefore all you need are cameras to drive"

But no! Eyes are not cameras, they are extensions of our brains. And we use more than our eyes to navigate roads, in fact there's a huge social aspect to driving. It's not just an engineering challenge but a social one. So from the get-go he's solving the wrong problem.

I knew this guy was full of it when he started talking about driverless cars being 5 years out in 2015. Just utter nonsense to anyone who was actually in that field, especially if he thought he could do it without LiDAR. He called his system "autopilot" which was deceptive, but I was completely off him when he released "full self driving - beta" onto public streets. Reckless insanity. What made me believe he is criminally insane is this particular timeline (these are headlines, you can search them if you want to read the stories):

2016 - Self-Driving Tesla Was Involved in Fatal Crash, U.S. Says 2016 - Tesla working on Autopilot radar changes after crash 2017 - NTSB Issues Final Report and Comments on Fatal Tesla Autopilot Crash 2019 - Tesla didn’t fix an Autopilot problem for three years, and now another person is dead 2021 - Inside Tesla as Elon Musk Pushed an Unflinching Vision for Self-Driving Cars Tesla announces transition to ‘Tesla Vision’ without radar, warns of limitations at first 2022 - Former Head Of Tesla AI Explains Why They’ve Removed Sensors; Others Differ 2022 - Tesla Dropping Radar Was a Mistake, Here is Why 2023 - Tesla reportedly saw an uptick in crashes and mistakes after Elon Musk removed radar from its cars 2023 - Elon Musk Overruled Tesla Engineers Who Said Removing Radar Would Be Problematic: Report 2023 - How Elon Musk knocked Tesla’s ‘Full Self-Driving’ off course 2023 - The final 11 seconds of a fatal Tesla Autopilot crash

Now I get to add TFA to the chronical.

The man and his cars are a menace to society. Tesla would be so much further along on driverless cars without Musk.
by charlie0 | 2025-04-06 15:50:06+00:00
I have a similar tale. A semester before college ended, I got a professor who worked for a large company in the poultry business. I was one of the few people who was doing well in the Java 101 class and I was also going out of my way to help a few people struggling with it. Because of my tenacity, he decided to give me a short internship in IT.

Long story short, it didn't go well. I struggled to fit in, they threw me straight into the fire, and the people around me did not want to help. After 90 days, the manager called me into the office and told me I didn't make the cut. It was the first time I had been fired from a job and I felt terrible.

Looking back this was the lesson I learned. Things happen for a reason and sometimes, things that look bad are actually a blessing in disguise.

The company I was interning at had an awful culture where no one help anyone else. People were constantly getting fired and due to that there was a dog eat dog mentality there. The software was old stuff, SAP and other stuff like that. In retrospect, I'm really glad that I was fired; I dodged a major bullet.

I ended up finding another job quickly right after I graduated with an amazing company in a more amazing city.
by neilwilson | 2025-04-06 15:50:14+00:00
And the exchange rate is mentioned precisely zero times in that article, as is the current unused and underused labour in the economy. Instead it drops straight onto land which we can’t make any more of.

Do it again with a factory that puts on a double shift with the unemployed and see what happens.

Do it again with the Chinese sovereign wealth funds, the likely source of mercantile intervention, offering 14 CNY per USD rather than the current 7.

It’s unlikely that any production will move. What’s more likely to change is the quantity and location of financial savings. The distributional impact of that change is probably unknown.
by firefoxd | 2025-04-06 15:50:20+00:00
It's pretty impressive that we have self-driving cars that takes us this far with Just cameras. But it probably won't get any better than this without a revamp.

That said, what if we make these self driving tools fully available to drivers. Drivers are pretty good at driving already with with relatively short training. Give them the superpowers of teslas like 360 view, predictive object path, and object detection and you have super drivers.
by lern_too_spel | 2025-04-06 15:51:06+00:00
Nobody has level 5. Waymo did 5 million miles in 2024 with nobody behind the wheel. Tesla did way more but required a human driver due to frequent disengagement. These are not the same. https://electrek.co/2024/09/26/tesla-full-self-driving-third...

Level 4 is a commercially viable product. Mapping allows verification by simulation before deployment. Tesla offers level 3, which is not monetizable beyond being a gimmick.
by redox99 | 2025-04-06 15:51:09+00:00
Radars are not as good as you think. They generally can't detect stationary objects, have problems with reflections, most of them are VERY low resolution, and so on.

The "with almost perfect accuracy and very little false positives" part is not true.

If you look at euroncap data, you'll see how most cars are not close to 100 in Safety Assist category (and Teslas with just vision are among the top). And these EuroNCAP are fairly easy and ideal. So it's clearly not a solved problem, as you portray.

https://www.euroncap.com/en/ratings-rewards/latest-safety-ra...
by camgunz | 2025-04-06 15:51:44+00:00
I'm confused by your comment, the posts are both mine? Even if I take what I think is the most charitable version of your "argument", which I think is "tech thinks things should by default exist and be permissible unless they pass an extremely stringent test", no pro-advertising person here is trying to find the outlines of what that test might be. They're all running right to "there's no way to separate advertising from other speech without collapsing civilization", which is absurd.
by timschmidt | 2025-04-06 15:51:46+00:00
Engineering entirely new things isn't like making another set of silverware, there are unforeseeable complications, and all forward looking statements are estimates or projections at best. Success seems to depend most on how many times you're able to try.

Maybe I'm just old, but development roadmaps are always vapor, until they aren't, which happens sometimes. Always been that way.

To be clear, I'd much rather my vehicle have superhuman multisensory awareness than only superhuman awareness. And I think it's fair for regulators to involve themselves with vehicle engineering, as all our safety depends on it. I've also watched the AI day presentations about their vehicle training system, and read their disclaimer text for enabling FSD, and it seems like they're doing a lot to advance the state of the art.
by doctorpangloss | 2025-04-06 15:51:53+00:00
Hmm, but all the real, registered self driving vehicles in California are safer than human drivers - and that the data is better documented, we know that better than comparing human drivers to each other.

The regulations are doing really well, it’s a big victory for regulators, why not make Teslas abide by the same rules? Why not roll out such strict scrutiny gradually to all vehicles and drivers?

You are talking about regulatory degrees that are about safety. It seems the thing that lawmakers change is reactive to other things. Like how much does the community depend on cars to survive? If you cannot eliminate car dependence you can’t really achieve a more moral legal stance than “People can and will buy cars that kill other people so long as it doesn’t kill the driver.”
by dragonwriter | 2025-04-06 15:51:56+00:00
> We have more than 100 years of proof that visual detection works quite well.

No, we don't.

We have evidence that visual detection (well, the whole human set of senses, but for driving most of the reliance is on visual detection), combined with human level intelligence, is sufficient for the human-level driving which is the absolute minimum bar for fully automated driving.

Which is very different than “visual detection works quite well”.