MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by derefr | 2025-04-18 18:13:45+00:00
> AI is therefore designed to convince you it's right, which is a different optimization than actually being right.

I get the impression, when talking to conversational AIs, that they're more tuned to convince you that you're right — sycophantry likely minimizes how often people press the RLHF thumbs-down button, and thereby appears more-often-than-warranted in the RLHF fine-tune dataset.
by dismalaf | 2025-04-18 18:14:08+00:00
In many languages "Easter" is a variation of Passover. "Pâques" in French for example, Pascha in Greek and Russian, Pascua in most Latin languages. In others (aome Slavic languages) it's a variation of "Great Day" ("Velikonoce" in Czech for example). " And so on. English and German are the only languages I know with a weird word for Easter.

Edit - also Passover is Pesach in Hebrew. So Pesach -> Pascha in Greek, then onwards to other languages. Or just "Great Day" (which finishes off Great and Holy week which is what the week leading up to Easter is in most languages).
by dkarl | 2025-04-18 18:14:21+00:00
Policy is decided by people. "Car-centric culture" is just a description of the material status quo, much of which was built by people who are dead, who have changed their minds about cars, or who see different conditions in their city and now want a different approach.

An orientation towards adopting new ways of living when the old ones become impractical or harmful can be just as part of a person's "culture" as a piece of technology.
by alt227 | 2025-04-18 18:15:00+00:00
> The man proposing the sentence is Meletus

Yes, this is what I originally stated, that it is his prosecuters arguing for death.

You seem to be ignoring the passages where he explicitly suggests a fine as the sentence, however you may also argue that he does this in jest/sarcasm.

Yes he argues against exile etc, but in no way does he ever suggest death is a prefered option in my opinion.
by efitz | 2025-04-18 18:15:19+00:00
Exactly right. I’ve known from when I started sailing 35 years ago that I was a racer.

Sailboat racing is amazing; it’s this incredibly complex exercise involving physical boat handling skills, teamwork, leadership, communication (in a jargon that itself takes a year to internalize), as well as physics, geometry, meteorology, and minute observation of effects (that dark patch on the water or the flutter of a telltale). All of this feeds into strategic decisions on where to position your boat and tactical decisions of how to do so.

It looks crazy boring from the outside but if you get into it, it’s an activity that is intensely mental as well as physical and requires a very broad set of skills.
by steveklabnik | 2025-04-18 18:15:21+00:00
Sure, but you write games in it in Lua. That Love2d is implemented in C++ (GitHub says like 80% C++ and 10% C) doesn't mean that you're writing the game in it. In my understanding, Love2d uses reference counting (which is still GC) for its own stuff, and integrates those into Lua's tracing GC.
by gregw2 | 2025-04-18 18:16:01+00:00
AWS should provide features where you are prompted to set a hard budget limit when you first signup and services fail once that's exceeded, so you don't get surprised, but they don't. That should be opt-out.

(recent thread on this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42133700 )

AWS does provide free trial accounts with $25 credits in some of their training environments/partners so there already are /some/ ways to do this.

(AWS does provide a opt-in budgeting feature which can alert you if budgets are exceeded. Not the same!)

While on the subject, AWS should provide an account-level setting/feature such that if there are multiple people/users/IAM logging into a single account, there is a flag so that any resources invoked in the console by a user get auto-tagged with that user's ID/IAM-identity/etc. In a small business with technical users, this would be quite helpful.

I went to give my 10 year old access to my old AWS account to play around and figured I should add some billing guardrails and was saddened to find I could anymore setup Cloudwatch/Budget billing alert guardrails to SMS my phone without paying $X a month for the SMS setup. Email is supported so I suppose I shouldn't complain and I hate SMS spammers so I get it but still another scenario of an unfriendly experience.

-- Someone using AWS the last 11 years, responsible for millions of dollars in enterprise spend on it, and sad to see their customer-centric attitude only goes so deep. I feel it getting weaker over time but there have always been limits to it.
by pc86 | 2025-04-18 18:16:09+00:00
It sounds perfect which is part of it, but if you've ever looked at the Pro tabs, especially the vocal transcriptions, the fretboard positions are all over the place, seem to be wrong about half the time, and in the worst cases I've seen nearly physically impossible to play.

Also for unknown reasons (licensing?) it's impossible to have the vocal track play when you're using a backing track.
by clort | 2025-04-18 18:16:09+00:00
If you want to learn how to sail and actually how to sail as the person in charge, you need to be in a dinghy. Its small enough that every thing you do will affect the course and speed, you can feel every little difference and nobody else will confuse the issue by moving or changing anything without you noticing. Sure, having instructors around giving you tips is necessary but you are doing it and the feedback is immediate.
Ask HN: Thinking to add in open-source lib a support of any model and MCP
by kateyan | 2025-04-18 18:16:27+00:00
Hey,

I have a platform to test and improve prompts, with observability. It has its own SDK.

I'm thinking to add in the context of the model rules, like:

You have next skills:

``` - web_call({'query': '...query'})

- make_plan({"step1": {"expected_results": "", actions: "", "where_we_are": }})

- update_plan("step_name": {"expected_results": "", actions: "", "where_we_are": })

If you wish to make a call you need to make a call:

<tool_call>

{

"tool_name": "",

"parameters": { // parameters of the tool },

}

</tool_call> ```

----

It's a prompting technique which i use for models like deepseek. But, I wonder if ppl here are interested to have a python lib which will support MCP in the same similar way with all other models, not just Claude, and it will help to choose easily which model performs best for your task. w/o marriage to Claude models.
by patagonia | 2025-04-18 18:17:50+00:00
I learned to race first and am now learning to cruise. And I’m glad I learned in that order. Cruising has a very specific set of skills that you’ll never learn racing. That stuff will be obvious and if you want to cruise, you’ll learn those skills.

But what is not obvious to cruisers is that racing teaches you how to handle your boat in many different and difficult conditions, with confidence. When you race you have to go from a specific place to another specific place and you don’t get to pick the weather. You’re often pushing your boat and are in high stress situations.

Often, cruisers will go out, when it’s nice, and turn on the motor when they can’t make their boat go the way they want it to go.

So, what happens when you’re out sailing and an unexpected storm rolls in? Because if you sail enough, especially offshore, it 100% without a doubt will happen. I’d honestly be pretty comfortable handling the boat through all but the worst weather, boat breaking weather. And even that, I would be confident in my safety gear and ability to contact support for a rescue. Because all of that is drilled into you as a seasoned racer. And I’ve been through some bad weather on the race course. I’ve had to make my boat go upwind in horrible sea state for hours on end while my crew is throwing up from sea sickness.

There are multiple occasions on which I’ve turned down sailing with cruisers because I just don’t trust that they have the skills or equipment to keep me safe should things go sideways.
by jfengel | 2025-04-18 18:18:23+00:00
What kind of retaliation is she afraid of? Personal, or against her state?

Who's "all"? Just you and the Democrats? Surely it can't be all of the other 50+ Republicans, some of whom seem to support the President's program in detail. So is it a few, or most, or nearly all?

I tried and failed to find a full transcript of her speech. I'd be interested in knowing the context. Was it prepared remarks, or an answer to a question?
Show HN: Teskooano – Multi-camera 3D N-Body Simulator
by tanepiper | 2025-04-18 18:18:26+00:00
I've been working on this 3D N-Body simulator, quite by accident.

I started working focused more on a game - but ended up creating quite UI for a multi-camera view of the simulator.

It's still "early release" - but overall it's quite stable now. I've added docs and there is a tour of the functionality when you first load the app.

Fully open source on GitHub - https://github.com/tanepiper/teskooano
by rayiner | 2025-04-18 18:18:35+00:00
Because I view DEI and ethnic identity as a personal threat to my mixed kids. Followed closely by the fact that i’m from a third world country, and I know that promoting ethnic identity invariably corrodes and destroys a society. It wrecks every facet of society and governance. Every issue becomes overtaken by ethnic scorekeeping and jockeying. Democracy itself disappears, replaced with ethnic machine politics.
by steveklabnik | 2025-04-18 18:18:46+00:00
The main issue with using arenas in Rust right now is that the standard library collections use the still-unstable allocator API, so you cannot use those with them. However, this is a systems language, so you can use whatever you want for your own data structures.

> reading wavemode comment above

This is true for `&mut T` but that isn't directly related to arenas. Furthermore, you can have multiple mutable aliased references, but you need to not use `&mut T` while doing so: you can take advantage of some form of internal mutability and use `&T`, for example. What is needed depends on the circumstances.
by bilbo0s | 2025-04-18 18:18:59+00:00
That's not how things should work.

Apple should not be the arbiter of whether a business model you want to engage in is legal or not. That's what courts of law are for. I would strongly oppose Apple unilaterally deciding which apps can-, and which cannot-, use the geofencing feature.

Go to the government, and have the government compel Apple to restrict certain apps if that is your desire, but for them to do that on their own is completely out of line.
by ThrowawayR2 | 2025-04-18 18:19:06+00:00
He's not that far off the mark unfortunately. From a detailed post-election analysis by David Shor posted on HN a few weeks ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43400172): "... Fundamentally, 40 percent of the country identifies as conservative. Roughly 40 percent is moderate, 20 percent is liberal, though it depends exactly how you ask it. Sometimes it’s 25 percent liberal. ..."
by reissbaker | 2025-04-18 18:19:47+00:00
The Dung Gatherer's Decree is mentioned on Wikipedia and the citation points to here: https://search.worldcat.org/title/995805601

That is not a "fictional work."

And the UPenn article was literally written by a professor of Arabic studies!

And the quote about the piles of corpses I gave you was referencing the fall of Constantinople, when it was sacked by the Ottomans; I even gave you the Wikipedia link where you could find it. It in fact happened under Islamic rule and there is plenty of primary evidence of it.

And there is plenty of evidence of atrocities carried out by Muslims against Jews, e.g. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1834_looting_of_Safed

Or the Mawza Exile under Imam al-Mahdi Ahmad: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mawza_Exile

Or the Allahdad: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allahdad

Not to mention mass killing and forced conversion of Christians under the Ottomans:

For strategic reasons, the Ottomans forcibly converted Christians living in the frontier regions of Macedonia and northern Bulgaria, particularly in the 16th and 17th centuries. Those who refused were either executed or burned alive. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christianity_in_the_Ottoman_...

Your repeated assertions that none of this happened are simply ahistorical.
by hodgesrm | 2025-04-18 18:19:48+00:00
> As a junior, I often wonder how many deals are signed in exclusive country clubs, on golf courses, and at the dining table with endlessly flowing Maotai.

Virtually none in our business. (Databases.) What does get deals is listening carefully to what customers actually want and putting together offerings that get it to them at a reasonable price. Incidentally, good sales people are vastly better at this than devs. There are a number of skills that go into it but being a good listener is the most important.
by rsynnott | 2025-04-18 18:19:53+00:00
The other issue, AIUI, is that it is not entirely to what extent chlorine washing and other external treatments actually reduce bacterial contamination, vs merely _messing with tests for_ bacterial contamination (eg https://journals.asm.org/doi/pdf/10.1128/mbio.00540-18 )

Arguably the US industry is suffering from Goodhart’s Law; if rather than taking a rules-based approach to production you focus on a post-production metric, you may not get quite what you were expecting.
by hyperbrainer | 2025-04-18 18:20:23+00:00
Tcl is another language used in the domain; it is rarely used outside of some sectors, but lots of interfaces for embedded systems are written in Tcl, especially in the Electical/Computer/Electronics Engineering sector.

IMO, the implementation of event handling is easy and simple, while being incredibly powerful. It may not fill the same niche as C does, but as a glue/scripting language, it's really good. Furthermore, the Tk library allows easy development of GUIs without much hassle.

Outside of embedded, you can also find it used for automation and testing -- SQLite famously has many millions lines of Tcl code for testing. [0]

[0] https://sqlite.org/testing.html
by dayvigo | 2025-04-18 18:20:39+00:00
> The hardware I have sitting on my desk is vastly more powerful that what I was rocking 10-20 years ago, but the user experience seems about the same.

Not even.

It used to be that when you clicked a button, things happened immediately, instead of a few seconds later as everything freezes up. Text could be entered into fields without inputs getting dropped or playing catch-up. A mysterious unkillable service wouldn't randomly decide to peg your core several times a day. This was all the case even as late as Windows 7.
by ashvardanian | 2025-04-18 18:21:32+00:00
I agree that it may not be the most readable format. So far, the best-structured piece on similar topics I’ve seen is Algorithmica: <https://en.algorithmica.org/hpc>.

I am sure it overlaps in terms of topics, maybe even some examples, but the homepage suggests that the book is about 500 pages long. I generally don’t have a time budget to read that much, and in most cases, I want to play with the code more than read the text, especially when some new IO_uring feature, a metaprogramming tool, or an Assembly instruction comes out.

Another observation is that people don’t like to read into 5000-word essays on each topic. At best, those become training materials for the next LLMs and will affect future code only indirectly…

I’m all ears for alternative formats if you have recommendations, as I generally reimplement such projects every couple of years ;)
by Timon3 | 2025-04-18 18:21:47+00:00
> This is presented as an argument against objective metrics

No, it's not. It's presented as an argument that measuring objective metrics doesn't mean you're measuring merit.

> If you're poor but determined, you can't afford a high cost test prep course, but you can go to the library.

The library most likely doesn't have the same specialized learning materials that rich kids can afford, so this doesn't mean the poor kid has equal opportunity.

> The rich kid has their private tutor come to their house and then saves time that allowed them to be chauffeured to tennis lessons. The poor kid has to take the bus to the library and spend twice as long with the study books and then doesn't get any tennis lessons, but it's possible for someone to do that if they actually care about it.

You're presenting this like it's purely an issue of free time, which is obviously not the case. The poor kid possibly can't reach the library without their guardian, who may or may not have time to drive them there. The poor kid possibly doesn't have anyone to teach them using the learning material there, while the rich kid likely has either their guardians or even specialized tutors for this purpose.

Your comment is a wonderful example of how people arguing for meritocracy can ignore reality - the bare minimum is supposed to be enough for the disadvantaged, even though there's a massive difference in effectiveness.
by ajross | 2025-04-18 18:22:58+00:00
That explains jealousy, not "suffering" as the upthread commenter put it. No, this is 100% irrational.

I mean, think about it: there have always been phenomenally wealthy people. If every billionaire in the US had their net worth cut by 50%, instantly, that would fix the "Gini index" you think we should be looking at.

But would their lifestyles change? Would anyone but the billionaires even notice? If you stop a person on the street and ask "Is it fair that Bill Gates is worth $50B dollars?", they're going to say "no", right? That's way too much money. Except, of course, that Gates is worth twice that and the number is something that you argue should be "fair".

No, it's not numbers. It's irrational delusion fed by fear and anger and click-chasing from everywhere across the media landscape. But. It's. Wrong. And someone needs to start telling people that.

Because at this point our shared delusion is causing a trade war that is going to make all of us (literally, all of humanity) poorer.
by tstrimple | 2025-04-18 18:23:10+00:00
Why do you speak so confidently around something you clearly know nothing about?

https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/12/21/how-russian-money-helpe...

> But Trump eventually made a comeback, and according to several sources with knowledge of Trump’s business, foreign money played a large role in reviving his fortunes, in particular investment by wealthy people from Russia and the former Soviet republics. This conclusion is buttressed by a growing body of evidence amassed by news organizations, as well as what is reportedly being investigated by Special Counsel Robert Mueller and the Southern District of New York. It is a conclusion that even Trump’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., has appeared to confirm, saying in 2008—after the Trump Organization was prospering again—that “Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets.”

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/aoc-is-multi-millionaire/

> According to the most recent disclosure from 2023, Ocasio-Cortez had documented that she had no more than between $1,001 and $15,000 in each of three different bank accounts. The total for these three accounts would land somewhere between $3,003 and $45,000. She also recorded in the disclosure having between $1,001 and $15,000 in additional funds in a fourth account for a 401k plan. Further, she noted in the disclosure that she was still paying off student loans, with an "amount of liability" landing somewhere between $15,001 and $50,000. In other words, Ocasio-Cortez was at least $940,000 short of being a millionaire, with the maximum possible amount of the four accounts totaling $60,000, and that's before even factoring in her student loan debt.

Do you get your information from anywhere other than random twitter posts?
by _bin_ | 2025-04-18 18:23:21+00:00
I have to disagree on this. I was not an "easy child", and there were periods where both my parents worked, but they never budged and pacified me. I never had a videogame system and didn't have a cell phone until I got a job and earned the money. TV was almost never permitted; generally when someone was sick or family movie night a few times per year. If they had conceded when my siblings and I were young, if they had established they were weak and could effectively be bullied into giving us our way, that really would have been poor parenting. It's how one winds up with spoiled brats. And I remember vividly during the various tantrums of various children, my mother in particular would tell us, "I refuse to raise a brat."

I know I probably sound incredibly boomer rn, but I see the effects of this in my generation (zoomers) and much, much more sharply with kids. I can't say it's "easier", but from my limited experience handling kids, it's trading a short-term hassle for huge long-term benefit.
by flyingcircus3 | 2025-04-18 18:23:28+00:00
The remote programming seems like a novelty aimed at hobbyists. If I have a deployment of remote devices, large or small, iterating on code on a device in the field is a recipe for disaster. How will you track the different versions of code on the various devices you have changed individually? If you need to directly change the code on a field device, doesn't that imply that you are unsure that the changes will work?

If the code needs to change, that is much safer to do in a controlled, low risk, nonproduction environment, where you will very likely have development hardware that has been optimized for ease of development/debugging. Once changes are tested and otherwise validated, an over the air update process would be used to send that new firmware image to the device. This way, your devices all can be on a single version of the firmware, meaning you can scale the deployment of that update to 10, then 100, then 1000 devices, etc.
by ra0x3 | 2025-04-18 18:23:41+00:00
> but I feel less emotionally invested in the craft of coding.

I don't think caring about the craft of coding and using AI tools are mutually exclusive options. I think you can totally do both! In a way, some of these tools actually allow you more space and time to "care about the craft" because they can take care of all of the mundane boilerplate for you.

A man once said "Bad programmers worry about the code. Good programmers worry about data structures and their relationships."[1]. Well IMO these tools allow programmers the time/space to care about data structures and their relationships -vs syntax and such.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25501427
by calepayson | 2025-04-18 18:24:00+00:00
It's the tension between the plush job and the desire to do good.

No one wants to be evil but losing a job is hard. Most people will try to push back against something that seems wrong and, when faced with the choice of being Morally Right or Financially Secure, are going to chose the path that keeps food on the table and ensures their kids can keep going to the same school.
by dhash | 2025-04-18 18:24:02+00:00
One of the cited references is Guillermo Webster — and while the article lists uncmin as the desired artifact, the project that uncmin was developed for takes the concept beyond layout to back solving for desired program outputs.

Carbide [0] is the project that encapsulated some of this in a workable demo. It’s really cool!

[0] https://alpha.trycarbide.com/
by huydotnet | 2025-04-18 18:25:12+00:00
I gave it this picture https://i.imgur.com/HyfVxiD.jpeg

At first, it's unsure, but also mention that there are a lot of riverside cafes in Southeast Asia that have this view. Then I said it was in Vietnam, and it was immediately concluded that this was taken at the Han River in Da Nang city, which was correct.

I can see that there is some actual analysis skill here. I'm not 100% convinced, but I'm still impressed.
by nrds | 2025-04-18 18:25:25+00:00
Until recently I believed that too. However, I came across some discussion which made me realize I was mixing up the sequence. The transmission interruption, which can be clearly heard, didn't happen at that point in the quote; it happened a moment later, after the word "man". The critical part of the quote seems to come through clear. It's more of a linguistic question about how "for a" and "for" may sound almost indistinguishable in Armstrong's accent.