MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by beeforpork | 2025-04-16 19:05:08+00:00
No.

Why is it so important to you that sex/gender is binary? Maybe try to relax and be a little less judgemental. It really does not matter for you what other people's sex is.

Intuitively, for normal people on the street, and arguably for politicians trying to define that sex is binary, how you would read a person is their sex. So that is, I would say, the historic traditional way of determining sex: by look and intuition (called common sense, usually). That's also how sex is determined at birth. (Note that in some cases, nurses need help with that, because it's not intuitively clear...)

Because this intuitional method does not work well, other ways have been tried to find something more objective than having a quick look. We found the sex chromosomes. But they are not binary either, as mentioned above. Now, one way of making chromosomes forcibly binary is to take the check for a Y cromosome, as you say. But that's just one arbitrary simplification. It is not an universally agreed criterion, because it does not always match with other criteria, particularly looks/intuition nor hormones.

And even intuitively, I argue, you should know that sex is non-binary. There are people where you cannot easily read the sex. You have an immediate intuition most of the time, sure, but not always. And then, as mentioned, your intuition may contradict chromosomes and/or hormone level categorisation of that person.

Another example: typically, an XY chromosome person with female external genitals is most probably read as clearly female. But by chromosome judgement, as you suggest, they would be clearly XY male. And at birth, they are most probably be classified as female. But they do have testicals and high testosterone levels, which again is totally in line with the male chromosomes.

Sex is not binary. Really. The world is not that simple. I'd argue that instead of trying to force sex to be binary, we should just try to not care so much about sex and gender. Because why?
by tocs3 | 2025-04-16 19:05:40+00:00
The title does not (to me) seem to be advertising something to go out and buy. I do not imagine that the video will reveal something shocking. it does not look especially clickbaity. It looks sort of nerdy.

So, I am not to worried about marketing. Also, how is something antique better than something more modern that does not have much room for improvement. How have things changed over time. Titles are short so I do not expect to much detail.
by tenga | 2025-04-16 19:05:49+00:00
I like this!

https://rwsdk.com/personal-software

"We believe software can be personal again. Not just technically, but philosophically. Owned. Forkable. Shareable. Local. Beautiful. Built for use, not for scale. Built with love, not venture funding. Built for yourself - and maybe a few others. If this resonates with you, come join us. We're not just building a framework. We're building a future where software is yours again."
by erikw | 2025-04-16 19:06:15+00:00
Interesting... I asked o3 for help writing a flake so I could install the latest Webstorm on NixOS (since the one in the package repo is several months old), and it looks like it actually spun up a NixOS VM, downloaded the Webstorm package, wrote the Flake, calculated the SHA hash that NixOS needs, and wrote a test suite. The test suite indicates that it even did GUI testing- not sure whether that is a hallucination or not though. Nevertheless, it one-shotted the installation instructions for me, and I don't see how it could have calculated the package hash without downloading, so I think this indicates some very interesting new capabilities. Highly impressive.
by breppp | 2025-04-16 19:06:21+00:00
I don't need to deny a genocide that isn't happening. Even according to Hamas skewed death statistics most dead in Gaza are military aged males and in higher proportions than their share in the population

If you go over pictures of jews from the holocaust it is very obvious they were starved and there is no shortage of such pictures because it was so widespread. The holocaust or other incidents of starvation such as the siege of leningrad, the great famine or the holodomor have documented incidents of cannibalism and other manifestations of extreme hunger

I saw a video of a demonstration against Hamas from today, there were at least 300 people and these are the people that are less fed because they aren't Hamas, and there is no case of malnourishment I saw. This was the same across everything I saw this week and in general from the war. I believe the ICC will have real issues establishing starvation.
by wrs | 2025-04-16 19:06:24+00:00
AFAIK it’s still an open question whether there is any copyright in model weights, for various reasons including the lack of human authorship. Which would mean that if you didn’t separately and explicitly agree to the license by clicking through something, there is no basis for the “by using this model” agreement.

Of course you probably don’t have enough money to get a ruling on this question, just wanted to point out that (afaik) it is up for debate. Maybe you should just avoid clicking on license agreement buttons, if you can.
by mrguyorama | 2025-04-16 19:06:30+00:00
I think people VASTLY overestimate the amount of graft in military procurement.

Lockheed only has a $100b market cap. Raytheon has $200b. General Dynamics $74b

The reality is that US defense spending pays American designers and American laborers high prices for their American effort. We pay basically the same prices for ammo and supplies and services as other countries.

When we pay $13 billion for an aircraft carrier, that's just what it costs to build a gigantic boat with nuclear reactors. The French paid $4 billion for their aircraft carrier, and a $12 billion Gerald R. Ford class is over twice as large as the Charles de Gaulle (40k tons vs 100k tons), and much much much more advanced.

Americans love to misunderstand the cost of military things. They will scream about the F35's $1.5 trillion "price tag", ignoring that the estimate is for 50 years of operations and maintenance as well as initial purchase. Actual purchase price is about $90 million a plane, which is reasonable. Which makes sense, since being not stupidly overpriced was a key point of the program. The operational cost is about $40k a flight hour, which is roughly the same as the F-14, another high tech superplane program.
by mbessey | 2025-04-16 19:06:51+00:00
Surely some of it is just nostalgia for a "simpler" time, but I think there is a legitimate reason to preserve and celebrate these older systems, too.

It's essentially impossible for a single person to build something as complex as a modern PC "from scratch", or indeed to build an operating system that compares to Windows, Linux, or MacOS.

These old microcomputer systems are simple enough for one person or a small team to understand and build, and they are/were capable of doing "useful work", too, and not so overly-abstracted like some "teaching systems" are.

I think that for me, part of the point of digging into something like the p-System is to show some of the brilliant (and stupid) ideas that went into building something as ambitious as a "universal operating system" in the mid-1970s.
by saltybytes | 2025-04-16 19:07:51+00:00
Was laid off more than 2 years ago.

For me it was not the process (the company I worked for announced their plans early) of being let go - it is the current job market that keeps me from sleeping at night: every day I get rejection emails, every day I'm told I'm not good enough or that other 220 candidates applied for the position. I feel obsolete, depressed. All I want is to find a job where I can be helpful, have a purpose and focus on my work goals.

If you have any work please reach out to me on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/christianskala/
by sillywalk | 2025-04-16 19:08:18+00:00
In a similar vein, the game Another World[0] had a VM, and the IBM System/38 (aka AS/400 aka iSeries aka System i(5) aka i)[1][2] had/has a Technology Independent Machine Interface that acts as an abstract machine that sits underneath most of the Operating System.

[0] https://fabiensanglard.net/anotherWorld_code_review/index.ph...

[1] https://treasures.scss.tcd.ie/hardware/TCD-SCSS-T.20121208.0...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_i
by Jtsummers | 2025-04-16 19:08:32+00:00
We're averaging 80 cases a week over the last 8 weeks nationally now (and that's the official count, not all cases are counted so this is low but maybe not by a huge amount). If you look at the numbers from prior years this century with a large number of cases there's a clear rise, peak, and decline in cases as an outbreak happens somewhere (like NY a few years ago), it's detected, and it's responded to (various means, promoting isolation, vaccination, etc.). This year we're cutting funding for vaccination right when we need to be increasing access to vaccines.

https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/68/wr/mm6840e2.htm - 2019 as an example.

It was only at or around the peak of the 2019 outbreak that we saw weekly numbers comparable to this year. In fact, only 4 weeks from that year were at or over 80 cases. This year we have five weeks over 80 cases, two over 70, and one just shy of 70 (68). Last week had a reported 21 cases but that'll be revised upward this Friday (with unconfirmed cases getting added in to the confirmed count and some that were reported too late to be in last week's count).

And we're still in a high travel time of year, with Easter weekend coming up and the last spring breaks still happening.
by nonameiguess | 2025-04-16 19:09:28+00:00
I think people miss the point of Wikipedia.

I don't know what they're expecting others to use this data for, but if it's the same old same old LLM training data scraping, then you've got a perfectly good repository of syntactically correct, semantically coherent strings of characters and words in whatever languages Wikipedia supports. That is entirely reliable data. Whether or not it's also factually accurate doesn't matter. Language modeling doesn't require factual accuracy. That comes from some later training step if you care about that.

If you're trying to use it as a repository not of language examples but of facts, then recognize the limitations. Wikipedia itself performs no verification, no fact checking, and by design does not assure you that its content is factually accurate. Instead, it assures you that all claims of fact come along with citations of sources that meet some extremely lightweight definition of authority. Thus statements of the form "A claims X" should be viewed as statements that Wikipedia is saying are true. However, statements simply of the form "X" found on Wikipedia are not statements that Wikipedia is claiming are true.

It's up to the consumer of Wikipedia data to recognize this and do what they can with it.
by NoMoreNicksLeft | 2025-04-16 19:09:50+00:00
Rwanda wasn't well-known for its expansive internet forums. The genocide in Rwanda stemmed from whispers and hushed conversations in rooms with closed doors. That no one could easily monitor. If you succeed in censoring the likes of 4chan, then you can look forward to those whispers here in places where they'd find no agreeable ears.

There is a natural human inclination to want to listen to and read the words that you're not allowed to listen to and read. If you want to lend credence to genocidal ambitions, ban and censor them.
by yjftsjthsd-h | 2025-04-16 19:10:42+00:00
> Surely you must understand that "security" and "giving users a say in how their phone works" are diametrically opposed?

Absolutely not.

> A phone can't be secure if its sandbox can be bypassed in one tap by the user. You might have a lot of say in how your linux system works, but don't kid yourself into thinking it's secure. It's only one `bash -c "$(curl -fsSL http://...` from getting pwned.

In both cases, yes, a user may choose to bypass a security measure. In most threat models, that's fine. If malware needs me to give it permission to compromise the system, I consider that a secure system.
by kazinator | 2025-04-16 19:10:48+00:00
The problem is that multi-byte data like UTF-8, stored in char strings, produces negative values. The can't just throw those away.

The usual workaround for the nasty <ctype.h> functions is to cast the char value to unsigned char.

if (isalnum((unsigned char) str[i])) ..

type of thing. The <ctype.h> functions also have locale-specific behavior. What is an alphabetic character depends on locale. For instance various ISO Latin characters may be alphabetic. Unfortunately, those characters are also in the range of UTF-8 continuation bytes (128-255). If you blindly apply <ctype.h> on UTF-8 data in a program that has called setlocale() to establish some locale, you can get weird results.

If you intend to test for the ASCII alphabetic characters, and nothing else, no matter what the locale is set to, then your best bet is (ch >= 'a' && ch <= 'z') || (ch >= 'A' && ch <= 'Z').
by Spooky23 | 2025-04-16 19:10:52+00:00
Desired by who?

There’s nothing stopping Apple and Google from issuing themselves certificates every 10 minutes. I get no value for doing this. Building out or expanding my own PKI for my company or setting up the infrastructure to integrate with Digicert or whomever gets me zero security and business value, just cost and toil.

Revocation is most often an issue when CAs fuck up. So now we collectively need to pay to cover their rears.
by pizzathyme | 2025-04-16 19:10:52+00:00
The image generation improvement with o4-mini is incredible. Testing it out today, this is a step change in editing specificity even from the ChatGPT 4o LLM image integration just a few weeks ago (which was already a step change). I'm able to ask for surgical edits, and they are done correctly.

There isn't a numerical benchmark for this that people seem to be tracking but this opens up production-ready image use cases. This was worth a new release.
by mmooss | 2025-04-16 19:11:00+00:00
> Currently the "discussion of leverage" you are talking about is out of the hands of the leaders who run these programs.

That's an assertion without any any argument. It means nothing.

> The amount of disrespect you have shown for someone that is just telling you 99% of federal workers have absolutely no leverage says a lot.

What does it say? Why is such a person somehow special?
by Magma7404 | 2025-04-16 19:11:21+00:00
I'm 40 too and used to laugh at all those programmers who were switching to wood working for a living. Now that vibe coding is being advertised all over the place, and will most likely be bought by the CEOs, and the trend of stealing open-source software without attribution while making fun of people who are proud of their knowledge and craft, I'm starting to think that all those future wood workers may not be wrong.

Whatever happens, it will be the end of programming as I know it, but it cannot end well.
by neonsunset | 2025-04-16 19:11:26+00:00
This is a member-only article.

And no, I do not think it does (unless Gleam decides to target .NET or JVM or implements custom memory management and go for LLVM-IR). F# has more efficient concurrency primitives and on raw computing tasks it's going to be faster by an order of magnitude.

F# is a community-driven language with an access to a vast ecosystem of robust and mature libraries too.

Also I agree with a sibling comment - promoting functional programming is not a zero-sum game and you do not need to smear or post FUD about one FP language in order to advance another. We all lose from this.
by skyyler | 2025-04-16 19:11:26+00:00
It existed before widespread association with Apu.

Fren, in a certain context, is a 4channer shibboleth. But you are overstating it a lot here.

If someone joins your community and starts posting green frog comics and calls people fren a lot, there's a good chance they're doing the shibboleth you described. Outside of that context, I don't think it's often a racist term.
by ziddoap | 2025-04-16 19:11:36+00:00
>"So yes, I get it: we shouldn’t trust companies, or even FOSS projects, to self-report.

Unless…what if we made penalties so large for not reporting, and for getting it wrong, that they would fall over themselves to do so?"

We know this doesn't work, and author admits as much.

However, the proposed solution is to add another cert into the mix. But it's not clear how this designation would be applied globally, with agreement across the globe on the requirements, punishments, etc. Not to be rude to the author, but it sort of seems like they forgot that not all software is developed in the US. (Not to mention, I really don't want another cert)
by eakspeasy | 2025-04-16 19:11:51+00:00
I’m no fan of Musk, but this is silly. If I thought Musk was being falsely painted as a Nazi due to a gesture made innocuously, doing it myself so other people could falsely call me a Nazi would hardly convince me that Elon was actually a Nazi.

Like, I know an erudite person (“Bill”) who uses the word “niggard” as defined (miser), without any ill intentions whatsoever. Maybe there are edgelords who intentionally use it because of its similarity to you-know-what, but not this guy. If someone did try to convince me that Bill says it to be an edgelord, and told me to try using it myself and see how people react, I would no doubt get falsely accused of using it in a bad way myself. That wouldn’t convince me that Bill has bad intentions, it would only reaffirm my existing belief that people can misinterpret innocuous things.
by cafard | 2025-04-16 19:12:07+00:00
It should be possible without too much searching to find the Onion headline "Radio Shack CEO Admits He Has No Idea What the Hell His Business Model Is."

Interesting that it should have lasted so long in Maryland, and that the last store should be in Prince Frederick (a town I never heard of). It seems to me that thirty years ago I spent a lot of time at a Wheaton, Maryland, Radio Shack
by aaaja | 2025-04-16 19:12:10+00:00
> exists on a spectrum, rather than being strictly binary

Not really though, at least not for biologists, who have an understanding of sex that encompasses all sexually reproducing species, based on there being two gamete types of different sizes.

This is why it's described as a binary, because of the two distinct types of reproductive cell. By convention the larger type is the female gamete and the smaller type is the male.

Having these consistent definitions is how biologists can discover new sexually reproducing species and understand the specifics, like are individuals hermaphroditic (each individual produces or can produce both female and male gametes) or gonochoric (individuals with distinct and unchanging sexes), and if the latter, which are the females and which are the males.
by jiwidi | 2025-04-16 19:12:13+00:00
Oh missunderstanding here, i meant a great laptop. At the time when i got my mbpro with m1 chip there werent competitors in terms of battery/keyboard/screen and temp/noise.

So i'm looking for a laptop with equal great hardware that i can run linux on. Ofc you can run linux on great hardware, makes it even better!
by 2b3a51 | 2025-04-16 19:12:21+00:00
Initial Teaching Alphabet perhaps? - a bit more radical than what you are describing though.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Initial_Teaching_Alphabet

As the 'pedia page says, the main issue was transfer to mainstream letters. I came through infant school a year or two after this idea was abandoned in the UK. We did have the colour coded reading books mentioned though.
by mrandish | 2025-04-16 19:12:27+00:00
Yes, they're risk adverse but in the last couple of years, Nintendo has also become much more legally expansive than they were. Of course, Nintendo has long been legally aggressive, especially in protecting their trademarks ("Super Mario" et al) but the expansiveness is both new and deeply problematic. It was fine when Nintendo was legally aggressive suing unlicensed Super Mario T-shirt makers but in the past couple of years they're going just as aggressively after retro fan and preservation communities and other non-profit, minor players who they previously mostly ignored.

This change was a conscious decision and makes little sense because these new targets have always tangentially infringed some IP rights but never in ways that had measurable financial impact on Nintendo's current core products. And, arguably, retro preservation and fan communities are net positive for Nintendo's brand. Even notoriously litigious companies like Disney choose to selectively turn a blind eye to cosplayers in Marvel super hero capes. Threatening or suing your hardest core, most loyal brand fans for doing things that didn't make them money or cost you money (at least rounded to the nearest $100) is not only a waste of resources, it's actively bad for your brand.

This has turned me from generally positive toward Nintendo to literally hating the brand. Sure, doing this is technically within their rights but it's just being shitty and there's no compelling reason they had to change from being selectively reasonable to "full-on asshole" toward their fans.
by dang | 2025-04-16 19:12:39+00:00
I hear you! but I would still call it generic in HN's sense of the word (which I admit is a little specialized - is that ironic?). "Generic tangent" means something like swapping out a specific/curious topic (USB-C rules) for a larger/more-general one (rule of law in a specific country). This almost always goes along with increasing indignation levels too.

Interestingly, we had two such hops in this thread—the comment you were replying to had already done a version of the same move, going from a more specific/curious topic (hacking a lamp) to a larger/more-general one (USB-C rules).

I hope it's clear how threads tend to get less interesting as discussion moves in this direction! If there's one point I've been trying to get across for years here, and never quite feeling like it lands, it's that one.

Sometimes I describe these 'hops' as the thread getting pulled by the gravity of larger and larger masses (like topic planets!) and ultimately into the black hole of one of the major flamewars. I'd say "the current general state of rule of law in the US" is either one of these black holes or one hop away from one; a dangerous place to fly.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
by erikw | 2025-04-16 19:12:53+00:00
What language / framework are you using? I ask because in a Node / Typescript / React project I experience the opposite- Claude 3.7 usually solves my query on the first try, and seems to understand the project's context, ie the file structure, packages, coding guidelines, tests, etc, while Gemini 2.5 seems to install packages willy-nilly, duplicate existing tests, create duplicate components, etc.
by lscharen | 2025-04-16 19:13:16+00:00
There are 8 screen hole bytes in the bottom 8 text rows (64 bytes total) and 8 expansions slots, so the screen hole byte at offset "N" was often used to store up to 8 bytes of data[1] (one byte in each of the rows' screen hole area) by the expansion card's firmware in Slot "N". Overwriting those bytes could result in system crashes and hardware hangs.

[1] https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/a/2541/3653