MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by cvz | 2025-04-24 06:14:08+00:00
Yes, you are morally responsible for your own actions. But those actions don't happen in a vacuum. They happen in a world that you are able to observe and make predictions about, however imperfect those predictions are. If you don't know that you're enabling the shooter, sure. But if you do know and do it anyway, you are responsible for knowingly enabling the shooter.

This doesn't mean that the shooter doesn't have his own agency and his own responsibility for his actions. It just means that his responsibility for his actions doesn't diminish your responsibility for yours, even if your actions involve him.

It seems to be a common idea that we can just overlook the abuses committed by the other people we deal with, as things "I'm not responsible for", regardless of our actual ability to do something about them. I have no special insight, but I think it's a common idea because it lets us feel better about ourselves while we do nothing. But "feeling good about oneself" isn't a solid way to build or evaluate a moral framework.
by nine_k | 2025-04-24 06:15:50+00:00
No, not a ceiling, but rather less baroque terms of use / price structure, I'd say. It's like licensing software per CPU core, and / or with a separate license with separate conditions for every of the two dozen components of software. These have been ridiculed because people who end up working with that get bothered and want to vent. Should not be a moral crusade though; a crusade to "liberate" someone else's property, as opposed to creating and maintaining something free, has a different name.
by edanm | 2025-04-24 06:18:44+00:00
> Perhaps the only reason Cursor is so good is because editing code is so similar to the basic function of an LLM without anything wrapped around it.

I think this is an illusion. Firstly, code generation is a big field - it includes code completion, generating entire functions, and even agenting coding and the newer vibe-coding tools which are mixes of all of these. Which of these is "the natural way LLMs work"?

Secondly, a ton of work goes into making LLMs good for programming. Lots of RLHF on it, lots of work on extracting code structure / RAG on codebases, many tools.

So, I think there are a few reasons that LLMs seem to work better on code:

1. A lot for work on it has been done, for many reasons, mostly monetary potential and that the people who build these systems are programmers.

2. We here tend to have a lot more familiarity with these tools (and this goes to your request above which I'll get to).

3. There are indeed many ways in which LLMs are a good fit for programming. This is a valid point, though I think it's dwarfed by the above.

Having said all that, to your request, I think there are a few products and/or areas that we can point to that are transformative:

1. Deep Research. I don't use it a lot personally (yet) - I have far more familiarity with the software tools, because I'm also a software developer. But I've heard from many people now that these are exceptional. And they are not just "thing wrappers on chat", IMO.

2. Anything to do with image/video creation and editing. It's arguable how much these count as part of the LLM revolution - the models that do these are often similar-ish in nature but geared towards images/videos. Still, the interaction with them often goes through natural language, so I definitely think these count. These are a huge category all on their own.

3. Again, not sure if these "count" in your estimate, but AlphaFold is, as I understand it, quite revolutionary. I don't know much about the model or the biology, so I'm trusting others that it's actually interesting. It is some of the same underlying architecture that makes up LLMs so I do think it counts, but again, maybe you want to only look at language-generating things specifically.
by the_hoffa | 2025-04-24 06:20:10+00:00
Ok, but can your tacos run DOOM??

I kid I kid ;) That's a commendable effort and nice job! Question though: was it an effort to make TacOS using DOOM as a "standard" or was it an effort to make an OS dedicated to running DOOM run from scratch?

And I don't ask from any place but actual curiosity. I made an absolute bare-bones-cant-do-anything-but-boot type OS way back "in the day" (like almost 30 years ago, ack!!!) just for my own education/fun, but the idea of having a dedicated OS that can basically only run DOOM, yet be ported to anything would just make the "can it run DOOM" meme so much more ironic and fun!

Nice stuff! Keep it up!!
by quietbritishjim | 2025-04-24 06:21:59+00:00
I hadn't heard the term library operating system before, but what is described at that link is nothing like your project.

The "kernel" referred to at that link is a full actual kernel, with networking, proceed scheduling, device drivers and hardware access, etc. It means the full implementation of those features. The reason it can be linked into the application's process as a library is because it's taking about a situation where there's only a single application running on the whole machine (presumably a virtual machine). The kernel and application then run together in a single memory space, with the kernel code (maybe the whole thing?) running in kernel mode.

You have implemented the user mode API that makes system calls to the (Windows) kernel. That is not a kernel in any sense. It is confusing and wrong to call it a kernel.
by gnabgib | 2025-04-24 06:22:15+00:00
Related

Pricing software adds billions to rental costs, White House says (69 points, 4 months ago, 66 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42465610

DOJ sues realpage for algorithmic pricing scheme that harms renters (795 points, 8 months ago, 632 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41330007
by casey2 | 2025-04-24 06:22:31+00:00
Articles like these always lack perspective despite desperately trying to seem woke. These "awful people" are the people that stepped up in the system and were forced to make the hard decisions. You can either be the guy paying strike breakers to kill your striking workers or the guy whose business failed. Do you really think you are any less awful for deciding to minimize your participation?

Who am I kidding, progressive economic theory hasn't progressed passed "lets kill everyone who is better off than me"
by sandspar | 2025-04-24 06:23:06+00:00
I use AI chatbots for 2+ hours a day but the Garmin thing was too much for me. The day they released their AI Garmin+ subscription, I took off my Forerunner and put it in a drawer. The whole point of Garmin is that it feels emotionally clean to use. Garmin adding a scammy subscription makes the ecosystem feel icky, and I'm not going to wear a piece of clothing that makes me feel icky. I don't think I'll buy a Garmin watch again.

(Since taking off the watch, I miss some of the data but my overall health and sleep haven't changed.)
by dahart | 2025-04-24 06:24:47+00:00
> Camera pixels represent area, but pixels coming out of a 3D game engine usually represent a point sample

Having worked on both game engines and CG films, I think that’s misleading. Point sample is kind of an overloaded term in practice, but I still don’t think your statement is accurate. Many games, especially modern games are modeling pixels with area; explicitly integrating over regions for both visibility and shading calculations. In fact I would say games are generally treating pixels as squares not point samples. That’s what DirectX and Vulkan and OpenGL do. That’s what people typically do with ray tracing APIs in games as well. Even a point sample can still have an associated area, and games always display pixels that have area. The fact that you can’t display a point sample without using area should be reason enough to avoid describing pixels that way.
by quietbritishjim | 2025-04-24 06:25:53+00:00
User mode Linux does actually run something like a real kernel in user space. OP is just providing a POSIX API with no kernel implementation whatsoever. It just forwards those calls to the Window's API. The library OS concept linked to above is different again – that is an actual kernel running in kernel mode but as part of a unikernel (kernel code and application code linked together into a single process).

Still pretty cool but overshadowed by the claim that they've written a whole kernel.
by UnmappedStack | 2025-04-24 06:25:53+00:00
Well, it can do a little more than run Doom, that's just the latest milestone as to what was ported last. It wasn't a huge effort, maybe took a week or so to get Doom itself running including adding libc requirements for Doom, but what came before that was a fair bit more groundwork. I used DoomGeneric, which is basically a fork of Doom which is made to be very portable. I hope I answered your question, I might have misunderstood.
by fxtentacle | 2025-04-24 06:26:04+00:00
Wow, this entire thing reads like a huge "stay away" sign to me.

The call to action at the end is: "Try out Text-to-CAD in our Modeling App" But that's like the last thing I want to do. Even when I'm working with very experienced professionals, it's really hard to tell them what exactly I want to see changed in their 3D CAD design. That's why they usually export lots of 2D drawings and then I will use a pencil to draw on top of it and then they will manually update the 3D shape to match my drawn request. The improvement that I would like to see in affordable CAD software is that they make it easier to generate section views and ideally the software would be able to back-propagate changes from 2D into the 3D shape. Maybe one day that will be possible with multimodal AI models, but even then the true improvement is going to be in the methods that the AI model uses internally to update the data. But trying to use text? That's like bringing a knife to a gunfight. It's obviously the wrong modality for humans to reason about shapes.

Also, as a more general comment, I am not sure that it is possible to introduce a new CAD tool with only subscription pricing. Typically, an enclosure design will go through multiple variations over multiple production runs in multiple years. That means it's obvious to everyone that you need your CAD software to continue working for years into the future. For a behemoth like Autodesk, that is believable. For a startup with a six month burn rate, it's not. That's why people treat startups with subscription pricing like vaporware.
by polycaster | 2025-04-24 06:26:56+00:00
> The replacement will affect more than a hundred utilities that are part of Coreutils

…

> Last week, the issue of the package uutils coreutils 0.0.30 successfully passed 507 tests (in the last issue of 506, in a year old – 476) from the standard GNU Coreutils test set.

If I’m reading this right then there are on average only one to five tests per utility (like cat, dd, …) which is a shockingly low number. Particularly when you consider how many options a single command alone might accept. And of course, this alone would not even remotely cover a critical part of all the circumstances that might vary.
by BrenBarn | 2025-04-24 06:26:59+00:00
Following due process is part of enforcement, and yeah, it needs to be done in accordance with law. But we've had problems with due process for a long time. One example is that our court system is not remotely adequate to handle the load it actually needs to handle. The result is long delays in justice (which usually benefit those with enough resources to wait it out), as well as a heavy reliance on plea bargains (which can act as an end-run around due process by applying pressure on vulnerable accused people to essentially waive their due process rights).

I don't disagree that there are huge problems with how enforcement is currently happening. My point is that we've had those problems for a long time and the current situation is just pushing things to the breaking point along the same axis.
by namaria | 2025-04-24 06:28:26+00:00
Thank you for the reply.

> What limits computers fundamentally is energy. There is simply a minimum amount of energy required to flip a bit.

I'm talking about things that lie beyond computation in the absolute. It doesn't matter how much energy is available to perform it.

> Not a computation breakthrough.

Again I think you misunderstand my point. What lies beyond computation is impossible on a level that lies beyond it in an absolute sense. It is not a matter of engineering, innovation, scale. Doesn't matter how much energy is funneled through computers or any 'breakthrough'. It simply cannot be done.

So I think we disagree on this point. I think intelligence is a feature of life, which is a feature of this Universe, and is beyond computers because computers are a very narrowly define formal system. You think computers might become intelligent given enough energy and time. But the limits of formal systems and computers as defined by Gödel and Turing in my view put an absolute wall around it that make it impossible for computers to be intelligent even if given infinite time and infinitely large energy gradient to flow through them.
by larsga | 2025-04-24 06:29:08+00:00
> Just like now, you boil water if you are aware of risk.

People didn't do that, though. As far as I can tell, water-drinking was not particularly common. People went to surprising lengths to produce other forms of drinks, all of them fermented in some way.

> All of your uncertainty applies just as much to today as it did in the past.

What on earth do you mean by that? Today you have clean water from taps all over your house. In the old days, clean water was rare, and you had to carry it home. If you were lucky you could use a wagon, but it was still hard work.

I mean, yes, of course there was risk then and risk now, but the risk was orders of magnitude higher in the past.

> Btw, you casually ACCEPTED that people drank beer instead of water when we know this is false.

You have absolutely no idea what you are talking about. I've worked on this for a decade, collecting archive accounts from around Europe. I can quote you pages and pages and pages and pages of people writing about how they used to drink beer against thirst every day. Read [my book](https://www.brewerspublications.com/products/historical-brew...) for more.

> Even on ships (as you would know if you clicked through the askhistorians link under the top of the thread) ships did carry (a lot of!) water

Buy a subscription to Craft Beer & Brewing and read my article on [skibsøl](https://beerandbrewing.com/skibsol-smoky-ale-of-the-seas/) the Danish style of beer created expressly for the purpose of being drunk by sailors. It starts with the story of the gov't commission created to investigate improving the sailors' beer after the Battle of Køge Bay.

> You'd really have to find evidence that people explicitly avoided water to make such a claim.

I don't claim that people explicitly avoided water, because the evidence is thin and ambiguous. (Seriously, read the comment you replied to!) What I do claim is that people did drink lots of beer for thirst in various contexts (listing exactly which would make this too long). Exactly why they did is not clear, but we do know people thought beer was healthy. Probably they thought it was healthy because it has lots of calories. (This was a time when getting enough to eat was a challenge for large parts of the population.)

> being unable to boil it.

Again, people didn't do that. You don't need to go back very far in time before people didn't have easy access to metal containers to boil in. Long story, [this chapter explains](https://press.nordicopenaccess.no/cdf/catalog/view/238/1292/...).
by brunkerhart | 2025-04-24 06:29:10+00:00
Have the author did the reality check exercise? What might seem as awful conditions by some westerner, might be great given other options. Once I read a post about working at Foxconn - assembly line for majority of hardware manufacturers. You might remember people were dropping off the roof because of hard working conditions. Yet they have a line of candidates. Because the other option is working at the same intensity but at no conditioned and barely ventilated clothing shop.
by somenameforme | 2025-04-24 06:30:09+00:00
It has excellent presentation, excess verbosity, and is wholly nonsensical. Read the code. It uses excessive whitespace doing things like function calls/declarations with one parameter per line, and so it's probably like 100 lines "real" code of mostly tight functions -- the presentation/objections make no sense whatsoever.

I was able to generate extremely comparable output from ChatGPT by telling it to create a hyper-negative review, engage in endless hyperbole, and focus on danger, threats, and the obvious inexperience of the person who wrote it. Such is the nature of LLMs it'd happily produce the similar sort of nonsense for even the cleanest and tightest code ever written. I'll just quote its conclusion because LLM verbosity is... verbose.

---

Conclusion This code is a ticking time bomb of security vulnerabilities, AWS billing horrors, concurrency demons, and maintenance black holes. It would fail any professional code review:

Security: Fails OWASP Top 10, opens SSRF, IP spoofing, credential leakage

Reliability: Race conditions, silent failures, unbounded threading

Maintainability: Spaghetti architecture, no documentation, magic literals

Recommendation: Reject outright. Demolish and rewrite from scratch with proper layering, input validation, secure defaults, IAM roles, structured logging, and robust error handling.

---

Oooo sick burn. /eyeroll
Show HN: OutreachGuy – AI Twitter Automation with Realistic Personas
by yoanndefay | 2025-04-24 06:30:19+00:00
Hi HN,

I'm the founder of several projects, and like many entrepreneurs, I know how important it is to have a consistent presence on Twitter—both to build an audience and to get leads. But when you’re bootstrapping, you rarely have time to post daily or join relevant conversations.

That’s why I built OutreachGuy. The idea was simple: set it up once, and forget about it. OutreachGuy runs in the background, automatically posting and replying every hour with human-like, persona-driven accounts tailored to your target audience. This way, my brand stays visible and engaged on Twitter, while I focus on actually building the product and running the business.

What’s different:

- Runs continuously and posts/replies using AI-generated, context-aware personas (style, tone, and interests can be customized).

- Designed to engage in real conversations, not just broadcast or spam.

- Each tweet or reply is written to look like a real person responding to the actual thread context.

No need for daily manual content planning or constant attention.

# How it works:

1) Monitors relevant hashtags and threads.

2) For each opportunity, generates a tweet or reply based on your selected persona.

3) Keeps a steady but non-intrusive posting rate (about 1 per hour per account).

Link: https://outreachguy.ai

Would love any feedback—especially on persona realism, edge cases, or ways it could better avoid coming across as automated. Happy to answer any technical or implementation questions!
by BrenBarn | 2025-04-24 06:31:26+00:00
In a sense, yes. I lean more and more toward the idea that we're not going to get out of this mess without "hitting rock bottom", so to speak. That means we have to somehow confront people with the reality of the laws we actually have, not the imaginary ones we've convinced ourselves we have. If we had those kinds of criminal prosecutions we might get riots in the streets and revolutions that would result in changes to the laws. Moreover, if we had had those kinds of criminal prosecutions in the past (e.g., George Wallace), we might have been able to fix things with less pain than will be required now.
by unnah | 2025-04-24 06:33:15+00:00
You could still save the branch-and-bound tree, the LP problems solved at the tree nodes, the derivations of the LP cutting planes, and the LP solutions that together constitute the proof. Then you could in principle create an independent verifier for the branch-and-bound tree and cutting plane derivations, which could potentially be much more straightforward and simple code than the entire Concorde TSP solver, and wouldn't have so high performance requirements.
by hulitu | 2025-04-24 06:33:49+00:00
> Would be nice to plug the phone in and unless I say otherwise it does a nice slow charge even if the cable and charger is capable of more. But if I press a button on the front after I plug it in then I can select fast and it goes as quickly as the combination allows

This is Windows 95 style UI. We don't do that anymore. We are "smart" now. With blockchain security. And you can choose any colour you like, as long as it is a shade of grey. /s
by dns_snek | 2025-04-24 06:34:58+00:00
> But someone has to pay for the costs of developing the SDKs and the platform.

Like their customers who happily pay a premium of $hundreds on every device sold? Talking about a free-rider "problem" in connection with literally the richest corporation in the world is diabolical. They develop the SDKs and the platform because that's the foundation of their business, nobody would buy an iPhone that doesn't have any 3rd party apps.

What's the cost of developing the SDK and the platform amortized over the number of devices that Apple sells? Is it $0.50, $5, $50, or $500?

> oh poor multi-billion dollar Apple can’t get paid

Apple is 1000x richer than that, they're a multi-trillion dollar company.
by Animats | 2025-04-24 06:35:11+00:00
If you just use the simple-minded Bell Labs probabilistic algorithm, how much worse is that result?

The classic TSP approach is:

1. Hook up all the nodes in some arbitrary path.

2. Cut the path in two places to create three pieces.

3. Rearrange those three pieces in the six possible ways and keep the shortest.

4. Iterate steps 2-3 until no improvement has been observed for a while.

This is not guaranteed to be optimal, but for most real-world problems either finds the optimal result or is very close.
by pavlov | 2025-04-24 06:37:09+00:00
Server programming in AppleSoft BASIC, as shown in the manual screenshot from the article:

10 &WAIT 20 &HOME:&PRINT"HELLO" 30 FOR I = 1 TO 2000:NEXT 40 &PRINT"BYE" 50 &END

Counting to 2000 must have taken a few seconds in BASIC on the Apple II.
by carlmr | 2025-04-24 06:38:00+00:00
I wouldn't say many, but not none: https://app.opencve.io/cve/?vendor=gnu&product=coreutils

The question is rather how many are logic bugs and how many are memory safety bugs, Rust excludes the latter quite well, which according to the MS and Google Studies makes up about 70% of programming mistakes in their C++ codebases. However rewriting carries the risk of introducing new logic bugs. So There's a tradeoff here.

I am a big believer in Rust, I basically only use rg instead of grep and fd instead of find and never looked back, but they are slightly different in behavior, so not a drop-in replacement. I'm not sure if porting coreutils will be so useful in the end, since if you do all the workarounds for the rust version to behave like the C version, maybe you won't have the performance benefits or the clean codebase that you set out for in the end. I like the rg and fd approach much better. It's an almost drop-in with huge performance benefits.

But let's see if they succeed.
by arduanika | 2025-04-24 06:38:20+00:00
I think you might have taken this snippet from Cory Doctorow's review, not the NYT article here?

https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/22/vinges-bastards/#cyberpun...

The NYT article does not mention the dreaded T word, and is not clear to me whether this notional acronym plays any large role in Becker's book.