MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ryao | 2025-04-11 22:56:45+00:00
Drivers can crash the rest of the kernel in Windows 7. People playing games during the Windows 7 days should remember plenty of blue screens citing either graphics drivers (mainly for ATI/AMD graphics) or their kernel anticheat software. Second, a “proof of correctness” has never been made for any kernel. Even the seL4 guys do not call their proof a proof of correctness.
by dang | 2025-04-11 22:58:17+00:00
I'm not following the argument here, but turning off the flags on a given story doesn't turn HN into a free-for-all on a topic (on the contrary, we don't want too much repetition of any topic), and certainly the guidelines continue to apply as much as anymore. More, in fact ("Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive." - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html).
by paulirish | 2025-04-11 22:59:24+00:00
Going back a lil further to 2011… We had a lil fight[1][2] about the value of using perfect HTML semantics in the community. The outline algorithm was the big defense for <section>, but its problems were clear then: https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2011/11/pursuing-semantic-v...

[1] https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2011/11/our-pointless-pursu...

[2] https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2011/11/pursuing-semantic-v...
by starspangled | 2025-04-11 23:00:07+00:00
> The thing that sets us apart from other animals is that we're able to control fire.

There is some suggestion that other animals can control fire.

https://indianapublicmedia.org/amomentofscience/fire-not-jus...

I don't know if that's completely verified or not, but it seems like a problematic definition. You could imagine a group of intelligent birds or apes could discover ways to control fire.

No, the thing that truly sets us apart from other animals is the ability to create the hydrogen bomb.
by XorNot | 2025-04-11 23:00:09+00:00
Again, what position? You keep saying "this question needs an answer"...in what context? For example, "we're building a bridge", "but sir, can you define 'what is a woman?'".

"I believe we should protect the environment" "But your supported political candidate wants to rollback legislation which would specifically protect the waterways and forests you claim are important from industrial dumping of toxic chemicals" is rather more relevant. Like that's a question which needs an answer, because the positions are mutually contradictory.

What contradictory position is being not answered by "what is a woman?"
by skissane | 2025-04-11 23:00:19+00:00
> they have a legitimate argument that this is an unexpected, undeserved, unfair calamity for them, threatening to derail their lives, and lives of their dependents, across the entire sector - and therefore that laws should be changed to shield them, or compensate them for the loss. After all, that's what laws are for.

Lots of people have had their lives disrupted by technological and economic changes before - entire careers which existed a century ago are now gone. Given society provided little or no compensation for prior such cases of disruption, what’s the argument for doing differently here?
by zahlman | 2025-04-11 23:00:46+00:00
string.Template does fundamentally the same sort of thing as str.format, or str.__mod__ (i.e. the % operator on strings). It was in a sense a prototype for str.format, introduced way back in Python 2.4 (https://peps.python.org/pep-0292/). It does create an instance of a separate type, but it neither pre-parses the string (the substitution is implemented using regexes that reprocess the original string each time) nor eagerly evaluates the values to substitute. Further, in order to change how the formatting is done, you'd have to subclass (with the new system, you just write a function that accepts the Template as a parameter).
by skywhopper | 2025-04-11 23:01:45+00:00
In the context of encouraging art, it totally is! Copyright and patents are 100% artificial and invented legal concepts that are based solely on the distaste for others profiting off a creator’s ideas. The reason for them is to encourage creativity by allowing creators to profit off new ideas.

So there’s no reason why “distaste” about AI abuse of human artists’ work shouldn’t be a valid reason to regulate or ban it. If society values the creation of new art and inventions, then it will create artificial barriers to encourage their creation.
by p0w3n3d | 2025-04-11 23:01:51+00:00
Terry Pratchett's quote in one of his books (in fact I think this is a running gag, and appeared in multiple books):

Five exclamation marks, a sure sign of an insane mind

That's what I think about five closing parentheses too... But tbh I am also jealous, because I can't program in lisp at all
by Nckpz | 2025-04-11 23:02:20+00:00
Depends on how you're using AI. If you've already made decisions on architecture and code structure and your prompt looks like "fill in `someMethod` so that it calls `x` then does `y` and `z`", you're just having the AI transcribe things like a true assistant, but you're making the coding decisions.

If your prompt looks more like "make me an app that orders pizza and sends me an email" then you are not coding.
by ben_w | 2025-04-11 23:02:40+00:00
> With certain small antipersonnel drones excepted

And mines, and the CIWS I linked to and several like it (I think SeaRAM is similar autonomy to engage), and the Samsung SGR-A1 whose autonomy led to people arguing that we really ought to keep humans in the loop: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lethal_autonomous_weapon

The problem is, the more your adversaries automate, the more you need to automate to keep up. Right now we can even have the argument about the SGR-A1 because it's likely to target humans who operate at human speeds and therefore a human in the loop isn't a major risk to operational success. Counter Rocket Artillery Mortar systems already need to be autonomous because human eyes can't realistically track a mortar in mid-flight.

There were a few times in the cold war where it was luck that the lack of technology that forced us to rely on humans in the loop, humans who said "no".

People are protesting against fully autonomous weapons because they're obviously useful enough to be militarily interesting, not just because they're obviously threatening.

> Besides, that's simply not what the LW crowd is talking about.

LW talks about every possible risk. I got the flash-war idea from them.

> Yet, as far as I'm aware, there's not a single important discovery or invention made by AI. No new drugs, no new solar panel materials, no new polymers, etc. And not for want of trying!

For about a decade after Word Lens showed the world that it was possible to run real time augmented reality translations on a smartphone, I've been surprising people — even fellow expat software developers — that this exists and is possible.

Today, I guess I have to surprise you with the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Given my experience with Word Lens, I fully expect to keep on surprising people with this for another decade.

Drugs/biosci:

• DSP-1181: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-51315462

• Halicin: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halicin

• Abaucin: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abaucin

• The aforementioned 2024 Nobel Prize for AlphaFold: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nobel_laureates_in_Che...

PV:

• Materials: https://www.chemistryworld.com/news/ai-aids-discovery-of-sol...

• Other stuff: https://www.weforum.org/stories/2024/08/how-ai-can-help-revo...

Polymers:

• https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.06470

• https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.03690

• https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.15354

> They know what humans know. They're no more competent than any human; they're as competent as low-level expert humans, just with superhuman speed and memory. It's not clear that they'll ever be able to move beyond what humans know and develop hypercompetence.

One of the things humans know is "how to use lab equipment to get science done": https://www.nature.com/articles/s44286-023-00002-4

"Just with superhuman speed and memory" is a lot, even if they were somehow otherwise limited to a human equivalent of IQ 90.
by MindSpunk | 2025-04-11 23:02:45+00:00
Cell was a failure, made evident by the fact nobody has tried to use it since.

Comparing the SPEs to compute shaders is reasonable but ignores what they were for. Compute shaders are almost exclusively used for graphics in games. Sony was asking people to implement gameplay code on them.

The idea the PS3 was designed around did not match the reality of games. They were difficult to work with, and taking full advantage of the SPEs was very challenging. Games are still very serial programs. The vast majority of the CPU work can't be moved to the SPUs like it was dreamed.

Very often games were left with a few trivially parallel numerical bits of code on the SPEs, but stuck with the anemic PPE core for everything else.
by albaorbital | 2025-04-11 23:03:11+00:00
We held a conference recently about democratising access to space with tiny satellites called PocketQubes. Weve launched 53 so far, more than all the other yc companies combined. If you want to hit milestones quickly in orbit I would urge you to explore PocketQubes, its helped us iterate in orbit. Heres a video we made.
by quantadev | 2025-04-11 23:03:22+00:00
For JavaScript developers "simple-peer" npm package is very popular and makes WebRTC very simple. I don't think its' an on-ramp problem, holding it back, it's just that most apps don't necessarily benefit from P2P coms, and also I'd hazard a guess not many people know about WebRTC, yet. Just guessing.
by adfm | 2025-04-11 23:03:50+00:00
The people that assume the roles within government should speak directly through government-controlled domains exclusively. You’ve got those TLDs for a reason, folks. Nobody else has this right. It is the canonical source of truth because it is fully controlled by the government itself. The public are welcome to comment outside the domain and point to it like any other source, but unless you’re an official (holding office), what you say is your own opinion and covered by the first amendment. I’m not a lawyer, so this is just my opinion, but what officials say outside of their specifically assigned domains (which supposedly are funded by tax dollars and require oversight) should be considered personal opinion and not carry the weight of the office they hold and should be made to declare as much. Consider the Brown act or the emoluments clause within this context. There are certain things officials are on the hook for that the general public is not. Officials have restricted communications and declarations requirements that the public does not. And anything communicated over commercial channels outside of government oversight should be open to prosecution like anybody else. Blow your hot air where we know it’s within official capacity and on the record or post as a private citizen, like everyone else.
by rjh29 | 2025-04-11 23:04:30+00:00
Same experience after 8 hours. I can see how roguelite fans would enjoy the dopamine hits of new information / upgrades / solving tiny bits of puzzles. As a pure puzzle fan I found the roguelite stuff repetitive and boring, and the puzzle stuff itself is good but not mindblowingly good. (Yes - even the less obvious puzzles)

I had my doubts when people were playing 100+ hours of it. That gave me the idea it would be a skinner box type game that is addictive but empty. So far nothing has changed my opinion on that.
by makeitdouble | 2025-04-11 23:04:31+00:00
This could work fine if the pair is acknowledged as such. In most orgs one side of the pair will be just be seen as a replaceable counter-weight while the other side gets the praise and promotions.

We see this a lot with daring "idea people" types seemingly plowing forward while the actual work is done by everyone around them, curating the firehose of random ideas and making the good ones into reality.

On an org level it doesn't matter as long as employees stay, but that usually doesn't last long.
by zahlman | 2025-04-11 23:05:00+00:00
I think it's very deliberate that these sorts of expressions are inside-out from the corresponding statements. It mixes and matches modes of thinking in my mind - the same kind of mistake as command-query separation violations. When I read a list comprehension, I can read it left to right: "A list (`[`) of each `item` that I get, if I look `for` each `sublist` that is `in l`, then `for` each `item` which is `in` that `sublist`." And the entire description is - well - descriptive, not imperative. With the other order, I have to think in terms of explicitly following the steps, and then mentally translating the last `item` into an imperative "... and put it into the result list".
by maxbond | 2025-04-11 23:05:05+00:00
Not an animal, but many marine algae descend from freshwater algae, possibly because the last Snowball Earth event may have wiped out the marine algae by covering the oceans with ice (while freshwater algae survived in structures like cryoconites, tiny freshwater puddles that form on glaciers).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D0R3FVTLvT0

(People who know their taxonomy will notice that I'm conflating algae and cyanobacteria, mea culpa.)
by PaulHoule | 2025-04-11 23:05:12+00:00
The original misunderstanding behind "knowledge base" was that, in the 1980s, it was an idea in symbolic AI that you'd develop a set of facts against an ontology designed for accurate inference and somehow by the 1990s it became a text repository with a search engine that may or may not work. Occasionally useful, sometimes hard to distinguish from a trash can. See Confluence.

Prompt engineers with their decoder models are going to always be wondering why they are always a bridesmaid and never a bride, with encoder models you can attain the holy grail of the system where you put text in one side and get, within calibrated accuracy, facts to put into the first kind of knowledge base. Or, for that matter, a good search engine for the second kind of knowledge base which could raise it above the "trash can" level.
by bcoates | 2025-04-11 23:05:41+00:00
For me it's windows 7, if nothing else for being the first and last major Windows where Universal Search worked well.

The Windows 8.x line gets some credit for having the strongest pen interface integration, which regressed significantly in the 10 line, but the overall shell in Windows 8 was rough, and a lot of features were broken in the rushed out and mostly failed attempt to Appify windows and redesign much of the UI at the same time.
by llm_nerd | 2025-04-11 23:05:46+00:00
This is such an amazingly toxic, selfish attitude that you have. Is this how you really live your life?

It wasn't "their customers" that brigaded. It is the clowns who have decided that Bluesky is their own. They are the ones that will keep it from hitting mainstream, and hopefully the service crushes their obnoxious activism.
by skissane | 2025-04-11 23:06:16+00:00
There exist image generation models that were trained on purely licensed content, e.g. Getty’s. I don’t know about Adobe’s specifically-but if not, it seems like a problem Adobe could easily fix-either buy/license a stock image library for AI training (maybe they already have one), and use that to train their own model-or else license someone else’s model e.g. Getty’s
by sudodevnull | 2025-04-11 23:06:19+00:00
Datastar started as an attempt to help shape HTMX2 before that was a thing... https://github.com/delaneyj/nothtmx2

Not sure the negativity. It's a superset of HTMX and it's 40% smaller with more features. Can you please tell me issue? I'm to dumb dumb grug please teach me senpai
by slowhand09 | 2025-04-11 23:07:15+00:00
I spent approx 1 year working on a very hush project at FDA. It (I shit you not) had requirements to allow rerouting of drug application and progress reviews (workflow system) around list of folks determined to be overly zealous in ensuring requirements were met. On top of that, our contract was terminated with one week notice (we met every milestone) and was awarded to the project manager's husband's company. My company threatened to sue and was awarded the entire contract amount.
by paddy_m | 2025-04-11 23:07:31+00:00
Absolutely the height of truck's hoods has increased dramatically over time. I say this as the owner of a pickup truck (and a cargo bike).

My 2000 2500 has a hood approximately at my belly button. Most current 1/2 tons have a hood height at my nipple (I'm 5'8).

A Pillars have gotten significantly thicker too, making it harder to see pedestrians at corners.

Then there is the expanding cab and shrinking bed. The visibility in a standard cab truck is phenomenal, you are surrounded by glass. Higher beds are also harder to use, which doesn't matter for most truck buyers because they buy them as a statement, not for utility.
by larve | 2025-04-11 23:07:47+00:00
Useful boilerplate:

- documentation (reference, tutorials, overviews) - tools - logging and log analyzers - monitoring - configurability - unit tests - fuzzers - UIs - and not least: lots and lots of prototypes and iterating on ideas

All of these are "trivial" once you have the main code, but they are incredibly valuable, and LLMs do a fantastic job.
by mike503 | 2025-04-11 23:08:40+00:00
Imagine someone hijacking the account and making “announcements” … that’s why they have official government websites.

I’ve always found it amusing how much world leaders actually use Twitter for communications. The fact that a private citizen can purchase the platform and do whatever they want with it is exactly why it’s a bad idea.

Not to mention this is a lame way to increase signups and AU metrics, holding a gun to an old person’s head.
by howard941 | 2025-04-11 23:09:05+00:00
Well just this year it went up 13.9% for me, just below the threshold where it would have triggered a review. Also keep in mind that the industry is quite profitable. Large premiums are extracted and paid to controlled affiliates that aren't subject to the rules governing insurance companies. As a result of these shenanigans the industry cries poverty while making bank.
by esjeon | 2025-04-11 23:09:24+00:00
The Bluesky community is left-leaning and mainly consists of early adopters - basically, a group of active idealists. It's unsurprising that they are highly hostile toward a company with a history of exploitative behavior. Additionally, the current political situation significantly affects their emotional stability, negatively.

I mean, yeah, the place is a kind of minefield these days, but I don't blame people. It just happens.
by throw310822 | 2025-04-11 23:10:05+00:00
> it could be tricky for pro-palestinians because they can fall easily into the trap of using party slogans used by proscribed organisations

Any excuse is good when you have power and want to justify repression. For example they tried to claim that the slogan "from the river to the sea Palestine will be free" is genocidal. Quite a jump. (Meanwhile, the Likud's platform says "from the river to the sea there will be only Israel" but that's fine).

> if they were they would be guilty of an insurmountable number of war crimes

They killed much less civilians than the IDF did, and they are not invaders nor illegal occupiers of someone else's country. What is acceptable or unacceptable is decided by those who are in power, and they are currently protecting a country whose prime minister in charge is wanted for crimes against humanity.
by Alupis | 2025-04-11 23:10:23+00:00
Mint leans towards the "ultra-stable" side of Linux Distros. Fedora leans towards the "bleeding-edge". Both are great in their own ways. If you want the latest and greatest of everything, Fedora is a great pick. If you just want long-term stability, Mint is a great pick. With both, you can choose the Desktop Environment you prefer (I like KDE personally, but many like Gnome, MATE, Cinnamon, etc).

That's not to say Fedora is unstable - it's just that it iterates fast to keep pace with packages as they release new versions. There's a new major Fedora release every year, for example.

There really isn't a wrong choice here.
by neuroelectron | 2025-04-11 23:10:39+00:00
Intel and CEA-Leti Collaboration:

Intel and the French research institute CEA-Leti are jointly developing 2D transition-metal dichalcogenides (TMDs), such as molybdenum disulfide (MoS₂) and tungsten-based materials, for integration into 300mm wafers. These materials offer sub-1nm transistor channel thickness, making them ideal for extending Moore's Law beyond 2030.

[29 June 2023] https://compoundsemiconductor.net/article/117047/CEA-Leti_an...
by econ | 2025-04-11 23:11:12+00:00
Comparing apples to oranges works surprisingly well if they are rotten enough?

50th vs 70th

https://index.goodcountry.org/

Both the US and China score surprisingly bad on everything listed here.

I do prefer the way janalsncm described quality of life.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43659542

Is there an index for those some place?
by nonameiguess | 2025-04-11 23:12:49+00:00
That's not even really true. Hacker News readers seem to fixate heavily on the most popular desktop versions of Linux distros, but that is far from all they make. SUSE with SLE Micro and Edge Image Builder is a declarative build system for creating your own installer images. If you don't want SLE Micro, they even give you the Elemental Toolkit, which can be used to build your own custom distro in a declarative manner. I don't know much about Debian and Red Hat's approaches to this, but I know they have similar tooling. The "problem," if you want to call it that, is developers, if I may be uncharitable for a brief moment here, are amazingly solipsistic. The major Linux vendors are targeting enterprise edge computing use cases, whereas developers only ever think about the endpoint PCs they themselves use for development. Plenty of distro tooling will give you declaratively built, transactionally updated, immutable server images, but if they don't give you the same for your personal laptop, those efforts are invisible to the modal Hacker News commenter.

For what it's worth, there's also Guix, which is literally a clone of Nix but part of the GNU project, so it only uses free software and opts for Guile instead of a custom DSL for configuration. It wasn't a pre-existing distro that changed, of course.