MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by InsideOutSanta | 2025-04-16 07:55:30+00:00
>It takes strong and complex social glue to create a place where millions can safely follow their own self-interest.

This exactly. All of these people who profess to believe in objectivism could easily move to a failed state and do anything they want to with zero government intervention. But they don't do that. They want all of the benefits of a working government with none of the things required to actually create a working government.
by FirmwareBurner | 2025-04-16 07:55:57+00:00
>They've been aware of the risk of relying on the US for software security for years, but AFAIK there have been no efforts to do anything about it.

Indeed. Just as Germany knew their economy is vulnerable to Russian gas and did nothing about it, even after the 2014 invasion of Crimea. Just as the west knew moving their entire manufacturing sector to one country would make them vulnerable, but choose to ignore it because it was too profitable.

I never EVER saw politicians act proactively for the good of the nation or the people, all they do is act reactively after the shit hits the fan to control public opinion and blame someone else to make sure they get re-elected, that's it.

Once you realize our rulers aren't competent at their jobs or acting in the peoples' best interest, it all makes sense. They're in it for the grift and to enrich their monopolistic friends in the private sector, to make sure line goes up in the next quarter, that's it.

Yes, I know there are good politicians out there who care and fight for their local communities, but they never make it to rule at national or international stage and actually change the rotten system because the status quo doesn't allow that.
by qingcharles | 2025-04-16 07:56:16+00:00
It's expensive. Really expensive. I remember a major bank calling me and my buddy's 2-man consultancy team and telling me they had spent a small fortune on whatever the top-level access to MS developers is, to get some outdated MS COM component to interface with .NET, and MS had failed.

(We charged ~$20K and estimated two weeks. We had it working in two hours.)
by sagolikasoppor | 2025-04-16 07:56:23+00:00
I have had a lot of stomach issues, I have done 3 CT scans during my life and I am not even 40 years old. I worry already about the dosage I have gotten.

Though when I asked they said it was like a long flight trip to aroynd the globe. While I don't believe that, I do believe that they are much more effective than they were 10+ years ago. Also I wouldn't have got my stomach surgery without my first one.
by try_the_bass | 2025-04-16 07:57:29+00:00
> Wealth inequality can rise without regulatory capture. Government is not the source of all evil. Smaller govenrment would just lead to further concentration of wealth and power within the private sector. We need a balanced system, not blind devotion.

But there's the problem: The person you're replying to clearly thinks there's too much government. You seem to think there's not enough.

If I had to pick a side of this to bet on, I would bet on it being "too much" rather than "too little" at this point, simply because in the trend has been for the US government to get larger over time, not smaller. The bigger it gets, the less likely it is that it's "not big enough". I understand that the responsibilities we've delegated to the government continue to increase in complexity, but complexity drives exponential growth, which I would also weigh against the "there's not enough government" argument.

Also I'm really not convinced by the argument that "smaller government would just lead to further concentration of wealth and power". I think we agree that wealth is becoming increasingly more concentrated--but so too is the size of the government. There's simply more direct evidence that wealth concentration grows as government complexity grows, at least in the US, because that's literally what appears to be happening!

I would wager that if I look into relative size of a country's government and its concentration on wealth, I'd find that they're not terribly correlated; or if they are, that the data indicates that increasingly government complexity drives increasingly wealth concentration. But I don't have a lot of confidence in that wager! But I also certainly don't buy the naive "markets fix everything" argument, either. People love to game markets, and if they're not controlled in some fashion, fraud tends to win out every time. Just look at crypto!
by int_19h | 2025-04-16 07:58:21+00:00
Trump didn't always have this kind of power; he acquired it. Why do you think it's impossible for another person - especially one that is effectively "officially anointed" as successor by Trump himself - to step into his shoes?

Right now this is impossible because Trump sucks all the air out of the room. But with him gone, I don't see any reason why all those people who voted for him will suddenly not vote for the closest similar candidate, and that voting block is really where his power comes from.

And looking at history, cults of personality often survive replacement of the figure around which they are built - examples are numerous in various dictatorships, just look at North Korea for one that is still ongoing.
by mike_hearn | 2025-04-16 07:58:32+00:00
Why isn't it a good justification?

I think the question everyone in this thread should ask is: why is it the government's job to do this, especially given the prior widespread view that they're doing a bad job? Is the software industry so immiserated by poverty that it cannot organize its own distribution of security bulletins? Clearly not: GitHub already runs its own vuln tracking scheme that's better integrated with the tooling we use for open source software. The industry routinely sets up collaborations like standards bodies, information sharing groups and more. And there is as whole ecosystem of security companies to help you understand vulns in your stack.

So there seems nothing specific to CVEs that requires government involvement, but the existence of the tax funded scheme does discourage the creation of competitors that might function better.

But, to CVE or not to CVE ... that is not the question. US deficit spending is out of control. This sort of thing had to happen some day. It's what Europeans in the 2010s called "austerity" and it always makes some people scream but this graph:

https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/natio...

... is not sustainable. Up to 1984 overall US debt was stable. Since then its growth rate became dangerous. Debt/GDP ratio is now worse than just after WW2. The federal government is currently spending more on interest than on defense or Medicare:

https://www.crfb.org/blogs/interest-costs-have-nearly-triple...

The US is currently getting its first taste of what parts of Europe started going through in 2008, and unfortunately there's bad news: the cuts you're seeing now are mostly cosmetic. They're what can be done within the current framework of laws, sort of, with lots of bending of the rules and creative interpretations of them and maybe some oversteps. But it's just the start of what's needed. Large scale reform of the laws themselves will be required regardless of whoever wins the next elections.
by Vinnl | 2025-04-16 07:58:34+00:00
There are a couple of "red flag" quips that if I hear them coming out of my mouth (or feel the urge to do so), I have to do a quick double take and reconsider my stance. "Everything old is new again" is one of them — usually, that means I'm missing some of the progress that has happened in the meantime.
by Xelynega | 2025-04-16 07:58:45+00:00
Yes, as it would be a public good to everyone to be able to know where the potholes(that aren't profitable to fix for these private companies apparently) are so they can avoid them.

They might take a step back and realize that it would be more cost-effective to just own the roads, in which case your thought experiment ends where we are, because where we are was a place reasoned to(to an extent).
by raxxorraxor | 2025-04-16 07:58:49+00:00
> Then some morons connected them to the internet for no good reasons.

Bad engineering at this point. To be fair, we could have had good car OS, good smartphone OS. But we didn't because everyone wanted to have their own pie castle.

Imagine a smartphone that was actually useful. Or a car OS that supports you with repairs. Possible, but not wanted by manufacturers.
by jmaker | 2025-04-16 08:00:09+00:00
A Markov chain is commonly understood to be a time-discrete Markov process. Intuitively, it’s a “chain” because you can “single out” its states in time rather than intervals. That’s also Markov’s original definition. Instead of Wassermann one can look up the notion in Wikipedia. A path is a notion relevant to the state space of a process - it’s a realization of states at every single point in time for the time span of interest.
by mitthrowaway2 | 2025-04-16 08:01:14+00:00
Wait, what happened to "it's just learning hands have five fingers"? A few comments ago you seemed to be saying that copying one artist's style on purpose might be bad, but that with billions of training images, no one source will be recognizeable in the output, and under that condition the impact to the artist is minimal. (and yet...[1]). Now you're taking the position that even using their work without permission to train AI for the purpose of directly and unmistakably replicating that artist's signature style is OK? Which is it?

And are you not fearful of a world in which nobody ever develops a new Ghibli-tier art style, because they'd starve in the process while competing against low-cost AI interpolations of prior art and AI companies make a fortune selling their efforts?

I'm fearful of a world in which anyone can print "Huggies" on counterfeit diapers and pass them off on Amazon as the real deal, so I hope you at least have room in your philosophy for trademarks, if not trademark art styles.

But either way, the good news is that you yourself can put in the work to hand-paint 100,000 frames of imitation Ghibli-style artwork and then train an AI on your portfolio and give it to whoever you want, or even master a style of your own; the bad news is that this will take sixty years of your life and career, during which time you'll have to feed yourself and your staff, and when you're done you might not feel so generous about giving it away for other people to use to sell greeting cards on Etsy.

But there's more good news, which is that Miyazaki is at least generous enough to allow at least one other studio to use his art style with his blessing, as long as the result lives up to the following standard: "every film you make, you’ll have to realize that has to be a film that is worthy to show to children".[2]

And personally, I do think he's earned the right to ask that much.

[1] https://theaiunderwriter.substack.com/p/an-image-of-an-arche...

[2] https://www.themarysue.com/studio-ponoc-interview/
by lynguist | 2025-04-16 08:01:30+00:00
https://www.anthropic.com/research/tracing-thoughts-language...

The section about hallucinations is deeply relevant.

Namely, Claude sometimes provides a plausible but incorrect chain-of-thought reasoning when its “true” computational path isn’t available. The model genuinely believes it’s giving a correct reasoning chain, but the interpretability microscope reveals it is constructing symbolic arguments backward from a conclusion.

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

This empirically confirms the “theory of bullshit” as a category distinct from lying. It suggests that “truth” emerges secondarily to symbolic coherence and plausibility.

This means knowledge itself is fundamentally symbolic-social, not merely correspondence to external fact.

Knowledge emerges from symbolic coherence, linguistic agreement, and social plausibility rather than purely from logical coherence or factual correctness.
by silves89 | 2025-04-16 08:02:24+00:00
Can I read a physical book when I'm running? Can I read a physical book when I'm doing house work? Or throwing pots in my studio? Or knitting? Or cooking? Or driving?

Can I stay focused if I'm just sitting and listening instead of reading? Absolutely not.

There's no 'vs' here. They occupy different spaces. All hail text, whatever form it takes.
by bjackman | 2025-04-16 08:02:42+00:00
At first I thought it was useless: "but each ISA will still end up having different effective syntax because the underlying macro systems will not be designed the same".

But then I reread it and realised I was not paying attention to the usecase. It's about making it easy to write assemblers. So this isn't for your Arms and RISC-Vs it's for your random niche microcontrollers where the vendor-provided toolchain kinda sucks.

Seems cool!

I've experienced a couple of under-documented assemblers in my time. In neither case did this turn out to be that much of a problem in practice, but I guess I just don't write that much assembly.
by bjornsing | 2025-04-16 08:03:25+00:00
Sure. As I see MCMC it’s basically a mathematical trick that lets you sample from probability distributions even if you only know the relative probability of different samples. It’s based on the observation that some Markov processes have a stationary distribution that is identical to a distribution you may want to sample from. But you need to carefully construct the Markov process for that observation to hold, and the properties you need to ensure are most easily understood as properties of a random walk graph. So the interesting subset of Markov processes are most easily understood as such random walks on a graph.
by SideburnsOfDoom | 2025-04-16 08:04:18+00:00
3. Understanding, Independence and control. The desire to continue to have a working computer in future, and to have own control over that by knowing what went wrong, how to avoid it happening again and what to do after. "There I fixed it." does not help with this. It is low information and high dependence.

Some would draw the conclusion that the person doing this is deliberately maintaining high dependence. That may be paranoid (The tech person may just be overworked and find social explanations harder than fixing computers) but some do draw that conclusion.
by concats | 2025-04-16 08:04:41+00:00
A lot of people seem to argue that the original intent was for disputes to be handled by the courts. That is, governed by laws outside of the crypto's smart contract implementation. And thus the company is right to seek judicial help and label this act as theft. Alright, sure, on its surface that doesn't seem like an unreasonable position. After all, we all trust the courts right?

But, if this really was agreed upon by most of the parties involved, shouldn't the smart contract have include giving the courts a master-key that allows them to override the blockchain when necessary? Undoing fraudulent transactions and such. Can we really argue that everyone expected disputes to be handled by the courts if this wasn't implemented?

There is no technical reason why it couldn't have been done, as far as I can tell. It would not be great for PR perhaps, since it sort of goes against what a lot of the original crypto enthusiasts believed in: decentralization and protection from future hypothetical tyrannical governments. But at least it wouldn't be half as hypocritical as what we have today.

Of course, if you designed your crypto like this, with a court controlled backdoor, you'd unfortunately have to stop calling the whole thing decentralized. But if that's the intent, and everyone agrees to it, what's the issue?

I'm trying not to pass any value judgement on the "Canadian math prodigy" in this scenario, on the whole I don't care much about the isolated incident, but rather on whoever wrote the smart contract trying to both have their cake and eat it too.

I find crypto really fascinating from a technical and philosophical standpoint, but I'm not too fond of how it's been adapted by society as mostly a sort of get-rich-quick scheme.
by nickf | 2025-04-16 08:04:44+00:00
Certificate pinning to public roots or CAs is bad. Do not do it. You have no control over the CA or roots, and in many cases neither does the CA - they may have to change based on what trust-store operators say. Pinning to public CAs or roots or leaf certs, pseudo-pinning (not pinning to a key or cert specifically, but expecting some part of a certificate DN or extension to remain constant), and trust-store limiting are all bad, terrible, no-good practices that cause havoc whenever they are implemented.
by therein | 2025-04-16 08:05:43+00:00
It comes across borderline comical when a man gets asked for his sources while he is clearly stating his formed opinion based on his impressions.

It is hard to think of an example without sounding like I am exaggerating. Imagine if you shared on a thread that Rust has a great ecosystem but it is a little bit too overhyped and someone so cleverly asked for you to cite sources.

Do you really rely on academic studies to form any impression of anything? Is your chain of thought full of citations?

I have this screw I want to undo but Schonenberg et. al. has demonstrated that a Philips screw should be used for this situation. Unable to find any citations on the feasibility of a blunt knife in this situation. Further research needed.
by svara | 2025-04-16 08:05:49+00:00
> Is it so simple? The highest marginal tax rate in the US is 50.3% (37% federal + 13.3% state in California). The highest marginal tax rate in Norway is 47.4%.

Marginal income tax rate. People's aggregate incomes are a drop in the bucket compared to the amount of wealth in the world.

I'm mostly a fan of free markets, but the way we've set up the game around the Western world, we're moving back towards a sort of feudal system made up of an asset owning upper class and then everyone else who needs to work to survive.

I think what we need is a 100% marginal estate tax. Maybe something along the lines of 1M$ tax free per child and spouse.

Everyone should have the right to vast financial success through free enterprise, but no one should be able to build multi generational dynasties, since it destroys the fabric of democracy over time.
by noelwelsh | 2025-04-16 08:06:00+00:00
Two things:

"Party politics" is ill-defined, and so a "no politics" rule becomes an arbitrary hammer that bosses can use to smash employees. If I say "I'm going to get a COVID vaccine this afternoon" is that discussing party politics? In the UK, where I live, the vaccine was provided by the government, so I'm implicitly discussing the actions of the government. That is under any reasonable definition a discussion of politics.

"everyday party politics are spilling out and overwhelming a project's or industry's individual, internal politics" is how "no politics" rules are usually justified, but this was not what happened in the poster child cases of implementing "no politics" rules (37signals, Coinbase). 37signals in particular tried to spin it this way, but it was the actions of a group within the company approved by the founders that caused the problem. (Coinbase was just completely incoherent from the start. Their mission is something like "End economic inequality" which a reasonable person could take to mean anarchist or communist discussion is on topic.)
by nickf | 2025-04-16 08:06:10+00:00
I've said it up-thread, but never ever never never pin to anything public. Don't do it. It's bad. You, and even the CA have no control over the certificates and cannot rely on them remaining in any way constant. Don't do it. If you must pin, pin to private CAs you control. Otherwise, don't do it. Seriously. Don't.
by benterix | 2025-04-16 08:06:12+00:00
They do have an enormous amount of control over them, but the bigger issue is that standards are not that relevant given that all developers will test their stuff on Chrome and basically it (slower Firefox on Google sheets? Pause when opening YT documents? Who cares!).

It's not a cliche, it's sad reality. It doesn't have to be thought-terminating, though - some people try to do something about it.
Show HN: VectorDB-CLI – Semantic code search powered by local embedding models
by tradesight | 2025-04-16 08:06:44+00:00
I built a command-line tool that lets you search your codebases semantically rather than just with regex or string matching. It uses vector embeddings to understand the meaning behind your code and queries.

*Features:* - Indexes multiple Git repositories and tracks specific branches - Syntax-aware parsing for 8 languages (Rust, Python, JavaScript, TypeScript, Ruby, Go, YAML, Markdown) - Uses ONNX embedding models running locally (no API dependency) - GPU acceleration support on Linux (CUDA) and Mac (Metal) - Search with natural language queries like "where is the authentication logic?"

I developed this over 2½ weeks with Cursor, which produced about 12,700 lines of Rust code with Claude 3.7 and Gemini 2.5 as my LLMs of choice. Each has different strengths - Gemini is great for quick specific tasks, while Claude excels at detailed implementations requiring attention to detail.

Currently working on adding a gRPC layer to make it more accessible for integration from any language, enabling custom coding agents or other AI tools. It's MIT licensed and freely available as a crate at https://crates.io/crates/vectordb-cli with repository at https://gitlab.com/amulvany/vectordb-cli.

Building this has been quite the learning experience with many mistakes and rollbacks, but it's now becoming genuinely useful for navigating complex codebases.

Would appreciate feedback from the HN community on what capabilities you'd like to see added!
by Spivak | 2025-04-16 08:08:35+00:00
I think the name smart contract is misleading because if you believe that the code is law then there is no actual contract in the smart contract. There is no meeting of the minds, no agreement on what the contract means or what is considered customary. Just a machine floating in the ETHer you can interact with. You owe the machine nothing and it owes you nothing.
by kentich | 2025-04-16 08:08:54+00:00
Hey folks!

Imagine if we had 10-day weeks instead of 7-day weeks. Wouldn't it be great to have a 3-on, 1-off, 4-on, 2-off schedule or a 3-on, 2-off, 2-on, 3-off schedule?

And the calendar would be much simpler. It could have eleven 30-day months and a final twelfth month of 30+ days to include extra days to match the solar year.

I invite you to imagine this together at https://TenDayWeekCalendar.com

I used Bolt.new to vibe-code this web app.

It lets you connect your Google Calendar & Tasks and Microsoft To Do so you can see how your plans fit into 10-day weeks.

And if you are a freelancer or a person who works at any convenient time, then perhaps you will want to live and work by this calendar. ;-)

Have fun!

P.S. Let's ask President Trump to replace the outdated Gregorian calendar with this one. ;-)
by defrost | 2025-04-16 08:09:00+00:00
The article states that data came from Mountain Rescue England and Wales, and was analysed by Ordnance Survey prior to being shared with The Guardian..

* https://www.mountain.rescue.org.uk/

* https://www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/

It implies that addition data came from Scottish Mountain Rescue.

* https://www.scottishmountainrescue.org/
by atmosx | 2025-04-16 08:10:04+00:00
This quote is essentially unworkable. Everything you say, or choose not to say, inevitably advances some political perspective over another.

What we should really aim for is thoughtful, civilized, and maybe even aesthetically pleasing discourse. That’s what educated people strive for.

Trying to “avoid politics” is like collecting seashells while a tsunami is rolling in.
by Philpax | 2025-04-16 08:10:13+00:00
Sure. It's probably not a good thing we have spaces designed to cook the brains of users to the extent that their weakest links are driven to act on their worst impulses and commit ideologically-driven murder, though.

I'm generally on the side of free speech, but having visited /pol/, I can't say it is/was a good place for its inhabitants or society at large.