MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by pxc | 2025-04-10 02:23:32+00:00
You may not use Nix, but some pretty cool Nix tools use your work. :)

Just today I was working on some integrations with a runtime dependency resolver for shell programs that uses OSH for parsing on the job. We use Nix to manage our development environments, and we use it to make some small wrappers and tools written in Bash into something portable and reproducible that we can include in development environments that run both on Linux and macOS.

Historically we've just included them inline in our Nix files, but thanks to resholve, we're switching to a nicer system so that they live in separate files that are more pleasant to edit. The "source code" of the scripts lives in the repo as normal bash scripts, but when they get built into the development environment, all command invocations get automatically replaced with hard-coded references to the paths of the relevant executables in the Nix store, the shebang gets pinned to a specific bash version in the same way, and they also get run through ShellCheck. Now we have not only a really nice and quick way to define portable wrappers in our Nix code, but a sane way to manage longer scripts without any portability issues.

So thanks for your cool shell and associated tools and libs!

> Or maybe it's just a harder problem

Fwiw, I think this is true.

> Some people do not like git, but I get the feeling that most people just use it, and get on with their day.

I think one of the other devs on my team probably feels this way. He thinks it's conceptually cool but is somewhat horrified by the complexity and UI. He makes simple uses of it in ways that have precedent on our team, but never really dives in.

> Why the difference with Nix?

Nix didn't have a celebrity author to spur adoption early on, in some ways it can be slow, and I think maybe it isn't as much better than entrenched alternative stacks than Git was as opposed to SVN. The pain of SVN was very acute for the average developer. I'm not sure that any of the pains of dependency hell, stateful configuration management, distribution of portable executables, etc., are quite as acute for the average operator or developer as that. People who feel Nix makes their professional lives easier tend to have come to it after their career has inflicted more specialized pain upon them.

Using Git also doesn't generally (ever?) involve writing code in a Turing-complete language, but to make the best use of Nix, you do have to do that. The paradigm of that language is not very mainstream, either, and although it's generally suited to its domain imo, it certainly has some warts.
by sidewndr46 | 2025-04-10 02:24:06+00:00
Quite a long time ago I worked on a system using Cassandra for storing some data. The system used about 100 gigabytes for data storage of Cassandra on all of the nodes in the cluster. At some point we needed to upgrade from version 2 to 3. I decided to take a backup using the included tooling of Cassandra. After taking a snapshot and compressing it, the size was 14 megabytes. I'm still in awe that this system existed.
by recursivecaveat | 2025-04-10 02:24:25+00:00
He owns like $100 billion in bitcoin, so I think unmasking him as either someone who just has chosen not to use that money yet, or someone who died with the keys likely lost would presumably have a big price shock. Once he is identified, he and everyone connected to him becomes a massive target for organized crime and such, that many coins ending up in the hands of North Korea or something would probably significantly damage bitcoin's future; I imagine the feds would do whatever they could to ensure that can't be turned into spendable money.
by sixpackpg | 2025-04-10 02:24:31+00:00
There's some sad irony to that, making homework easier for future generations but those generations being worse off as a result on average. The lack of AI assistance was a forcing function to greater depth.

Outliers will still work hard and become even more valuable, AI won't affect them negatively. I feel non outliers will be affected negatively on average in ability to learn/think.

With no confirming data, I feel those who got that fancy education would do so in any other institution. Just those fancy institutions draw in and filter for intelligent types, not teach them to be intelligent as it's practically a pre-requisite.
by forgetfreeman | 2025-04-10 02:25:11+00:00
The deficit should count, but since Federal taxes haven't been increased to service it it doesn't, so there is that. Likewise, CA and WA are what they are, but I think it's a bit of a stretch to suggest they're so central to the US economy that their local tax structure is driving tracked changes to household income and savings, real wages, inflation, etc. metrics on a national level. Additionally relatively recent changes in these states do nothing to explain flat wages and the declining middle class over the last 50 years.

"So the mountains of new regulations have no effect?"

Difficult to say until there's a few specific examples to examine. I've just spent the last half hour digging around for evidence that suggests there's been a spike in enforcement actions by the government at any point in the last three presidential terms and I'm not coming up with anything so until some evidence surfaces I'm going with probably not.

As for local goings on in LA and Seattle, neither are "the market". This isn't the first time I've been exposed to the apparent self-absorption of West Coast politics but I gotta tell you, y'all aren't the singularity around which the US economy or global markets pivots around. That'd be the oil and gas industry.
by defrost | 2025-04-10 02:26:48+00:00
Elsewhere in the press:

The Register: Trump kills clearances for infosec's SentinelOne, ex-CISA boss Chris Krebs https://www.theregister.com/2025/04/10/trump_cisa_investigat...

CyberScoop: Trump signs order stripping Chris Krebs of security clearance https://cyberscoop.com/trump-chris-krebs-executive-order-202...

NB- not the same as Brian Krebs of KrebsOnSecurity.com.
by delta_p_delta_x | 2025-04-10 02:27:15+00:00
This is genuinely the best plug ever and no one can convince me otherwise.

I've toured continental Europe (France, Austria, Switzerland, Germany, Italy), the US, India, and ANZ, and all of their plugs are downgrades in comparison to the icon of engineering that is Type G/BS1363. The former somehow all tend to end up with loose contact, wiggling and sparking, degraded power/current, or a cable that sticks out perpendicular to the wall, or some other annoyance. People argue for the Schuko but it is as large as, if not larger than BS1363 plugs. The earthing setup is odd.

The BS1363 is so massive that it shrugs off power loads of multiple kilowatts—British kettles and toaster ovens run at up to 3 kW or more. One could possibly even charge their EV with BS1363 without needing any automotive cable standard[1].

The BS1363 has a satisfying 'thonk' that no other plug has. It feels like you're powering up some futuristic space craft, not your vacuum cleaner.

[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/ElectricVehiclesUK/comments/1gta12f...
by tedsanders | 2025-04-10 02:27:26+00:00
The false statement is “OpenAI got caught [gaming FrontierMath] a while back.”

From a primary source:

"OpenAI did not use FrontierMath data to guide the development of o1 or o3, at all.... we only downloaded FrontierMath for our evals long after the training data was frozen, and only looked at o3 FrontierMath results after the final announcement checkpoint was already picked."

https://x.com/__nmca__/status/1882563755806281986
by alganet | 2025-04-10 02:27:30+00:00
People wanting magic to be real is the hook.

My guess is that the whole thing is made to work on a single word, either to promote it, hide it or change its meaning over time.

It has autonomous defenses (the creator(s) could claim it as a joke or misunderstanding), it has propagating parallell beliefs (the "typing" tulpa as an analog for muscular memory), etc. You acted to defend it using one of its autonomous mechanisms, unwillingly perhaps (it preys on the inability of some to perceive its parts as distinct pieces, you only saw the new age stuff outside).

It seems highly engineered, but not sophisticated enough to be completely invisible.
by Johanx64 | 2025-04-10 02:28:15+00:00
As per modus operandi of the midwit, you didn't demonstrate anything. You just disagreed.

I implore you to bring evidence where demonstrated competency of John Carmack or Michael Abrash is called into question. Demostrate how that is a phenomenon or a trend. And if you can't, I rest my case.

It is obvious to any reasonable person that in the statement "nobody" doesn't literally mean not a single entity within 8 billion population of the planet.
by tombert | 2025-04-10 02:29:08+00:00
I run NixOS on every computer I'm allowed to install it and I really don't think it's hard to use, just different. Adapting to a new workflow is hard, but I don't know that NixOS is intrinsically more difficult than any other Linux.

I wouldn't want a docker container as my main environment, but I do like having NixOS managing my main environment for a few reasons.

First, the declarative nature of everything makes it clear and easy to know what is actually installed on my computer. I can simply look at my configuration file and see if a program is installed, and if it's not. If I want to uninstall something, I delete the program from the configuration.nix and rebuild. This might not seem insignificant, but to me it's game changing. How many times have you uninstalled things in Ubuntu or something and had a ton of lingering transitive dependencies? How many times have you been trying to debug a problem, end up installing a million things, and then painstakingly having to track down every unnecessary dependency and transitive dependency that you ended up installing, only to miss something for months? Maybe most people here are better at this than I am, but these things happened to me all the time.

Second, the declarative nature of NixOS makes snapshotting trivial. Again, this is game-changing for me, and it makes fixing stuff on my computer more fun and less scary. If I break something, all I have to do is reboot and choose the last generation, then fix it.

This might not seem like a big deal, and again maybe for people smarter than me it's not, but for me it completely changed the way I deal with computers. When I first started using Ubuntu, when I would do something like break the video driver or the WiFi driver, I would end up having to nuke the system and start again, because I would get into a state where I didn't know how to fix it. I probably could fix these things now, I've been doing this stuff for awhile, but even still, it's nice to be able to not ever have to worry about getting into a state like that.
Show HN: An immersive, social reading app for book nerds
by ishanr | 2025-04-10 02:29:12+00:00
This is a first draft of an app that I am working on that is the "anti blinkist (the book summarization app)".

I call it Augre (aug-ur - short for augmented reader) and the whole idea is that I want to immerse more, not less in a book.

I want to dive deeper into the text, chat with others who are reading the book and get into delicious discussions.

It's still early but here are a couple of features:

1. A really solid cross platform epub reader

2. Left sidebar which augments the reading experience with tables, images, maps (and other artifacts coming soon)

3. Book chat where you can chat with the book and ask questions such as how to apply lessons to real life.

4. Chat with other readers, aka, a virtual book club which you automatically join if you have a book (also doesn't have to be an exact match. philoshopher's stone + sorcerer's stone for example would join the same club.

5. Background music that understands what you are reading and adapts accordingly (still clunky - I will do another pass soon).

I have been working on this for about a month now (started 3 months back but working on it only on weekends). It is a Tauri app so the sizes are really small (4MB). InstantDB is doing a lot of the syncing, auth, chat, stuff. (You don't need to login but it is recommended to get all the social features).

The goal is to have a place to publish books as well as read them as fewer people are reading and fewer new authors are getting published and to build a community of readers and authors and have a bunch of other interesting things which will make reading more fun and reward those activities.

Oh also there is an auto audiobook functionality coming soon and an iPad app coming soon where you can read some of the book, continue listening to the book in your car and then continue reading on the computer etc. I plan to replace the AI stuff with local models as soon as it is feasible.

Please let me know what other features would you want.

Here are the mac, linux, windows builds: https://getaugre.com
by tedsanders | 2025-04-10 02:29:32+00:00
The incorrect part is “OpenAI got caught [gaming FrontierMath] a while back.”

From a primary source:

"OpenAI did not use FrontierMath data to guide the development of o1 or o3, at all.... we only downloaded FrontierMath for our evals long after the training data was frozen, and only looked at o3 FrontierMath results after the final announcement checkpoint was already picked."

https://x.com/__nmca__/status/1882563755806281986
Show HN: New Android App alerts you to scams and suspicious links
by arjun_protego | 2025-04-10 02:29:34+00:00
Hello everyone,

I’ve developed an Android app designed to help keep you safe from online scams. Here’s what it currently does:

1. Detects scams in messages from unknown numbers in SMS and WhatsApp and alerts you immediately.

2. Scans links shared in conversations and warns you if they are suspicious. If they’re safe, you’ll be notified too—so you can click with confidence.

3. Verifies Instagram ads and flags any that seem suspicious or potentially fraudulent.

Privacy first: Your conversations stay entirely on your device. Only links are analyzed externally by trusted servers, and they’re neither stored nor linked to your identity.

The app is currently in testing mode, with support for SMS and WhatsApp. I am actively working on expanding to other apps like Instagram messaging, Signal, Discord, Telegram etc.

Try it out: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.scamdetect...

Learn more and share feedback: https://goprotego.ai/

Thanks for checking it out—and stay safe online!
by marcusverus | 2025-04-10 02:29:50+00:00
> Holding mass gatherings under such conditions is utterly irresponsible

Yet they don't ban vital gatherings, like concerts[0]. They only ban elections, for which large gatherings are hardly necessary.

> Zelenskyy's main political rivals share the broad consensus that elections should be held only after the war.

His actual main rival's party was banned. Now you see the leaders of the remaining parties toeing the line as sign of robust democracy? Is this a joke?

https://concert.ua/en/catalog/all-cities/concerts
by neom | 2025-04-10 02:29:51+00:00
You mean Tamplin didn't ship this?! Srsly tho, I think the idea (or at least was my impression) that it's backed by firebase and firebase has just become ubiquitous for a part of the gcp backend stack? so I thought firebase studio was a way to put a v0 app creator tool on top of firebase? In that context it made sense to me, but maybe I'm misunderstanding.
by AstralStorm | 2025-04-10 02:31:03+00:00
Ultimately you get out of this trap by making work sustainable and trying to level the playing field.

Almost nobody is spending resources in the US. And that's half of the problem. It's spent elsewhere, therefore labor stagnates or falls, only leaving low tier jobs to work. No factories locks out advancement reducing morale and draining the best that could have their kids advance.

In the US, you had skyrocketing prices on basics like healthcare and housing too, way more than elsewhere. UK has a lot of this problem too.

That together ultimately causes a reduction in teaching and educational standard, which further shrinks the high end advantage.

Short version: economy and people hollowed out in the middle is unsustainable.
by TheAceOfHearts | 2025-04-10 02:31:16+00:00
Here's my short review after playing around with Firebase Studio for ~30 minutes. First of all, I had to turn off Firefox Enhanced Tracking Protection because otherwise projects wouldn't load.

I gave it the following initial prompt:

> An app where you input a question, then flip some coins to generate an I Ching prediction, and it generates a prediction / fortune for you. Then this combination of results can be fed to Gemini AI to produce a more detailed prediction text.

It generated something that looked fine. When I input a question and press the button nothing happened. After asking it to fix the problem multiple times and having it fail, I looked at the browser console to figure out the errors it was getting. Then I copied those errors and told it to fix them. After a few iterations, it solved every error and would generate a result. It completely forgot the part where you are supposed to flip coins before getting a hexagram to generate a fortune. After a bit of prompting, I was able to get it to display the hexagram and input question. However, sometimes it becomes confused about which hexagram was generated.

Overall, my impression is that these tools are still in the toy novelty stage rather than something you'd want to use for anything important.

Here is a screenshot of the app output for the question: Will Hacker News like my vibe coded oracle? [0] As you can see, it says that the generated hexagram is 24 or 41, but in the fortune text below it says 11.

[0] https://files.catbox.moe/i8t7rw.png
by arandomusername | 2025-04-10 02:31:35+00:00
Nestle has a profit margin of ~15%.

If they raise prices by 10%, consumers will buy significantly less. There's a sweetspot somewhere for max profit, it's not 10% and probably not 0% either.

Coffee and tea are very cheap when you buy from a retailer and make it yourself, 10% is nothing anyway. Stuff like starbucks have crazy profit margings. Chocolate is a delicacy that shouldn't be consumed in large quantities anyway. That shit should have a 200% tax.
by the_king | 2025-04-10 02:32:40+00:00
Aqua is in another league when it comes to accuracy. I just ran them side by side on a simple q to ChatGPT and here were the results...

Aqua Voice

What is the first recorded eclipse in human history? I'm not asking when the first one occurred, but the first written record we have of an eclipse.

Windows Voice Typing (v11 24H2, Dell XPS 13 9340)

What is the first recorded eclipse in human history i'm not asking 1 like the first occurred but the first ridden record we have of an eclipse

Windows mistakes were:

-"1" should be "when"

-"ridden" should be "written"

-No punctuation
by antasvara | 2025-04-10 02:32:49+00:00
But what if the rate at which things change increases to the point that humans can't adapt in time? This has happened to other animals (coral has existed for millions of years and is now threatened by ocean acidification, any number of native species have been crowded out by the introduction of non-native ones, etc.).

Even humans have gotten shocks like this. Things like the Black Death created social and economic upheavals that lasted generations.

Now, these are all biological examples. They don't map cleanly to technogical advances, because human brains adapt much faster than immune systems that are constrained by their DNA. But the point is that complex systems can adapt and can seem to handle "anything," up until they can't.

I don't know enough about AI or LLM's to say if we're reaching an inflection point. But most major crises happen when enough people say that something can't happen, and then it happens. I also don't think that discouraging innovation is the solution. But I don't also want to pretend like "humans always adapt" is a rule and not a 300,000 year old blip on the timeline of life's existence.
by autoexec | 2025-04-10 02:32:55+00:00
> This reminds me that we are all losing our unique and diverse cultures and humanity through the incessant drive of globalist world domination to force everyone to do and be the same

We're actually creating new unique and diverse cultures by adopting and remixing parts of the various cultures we encounter. Just looking at photos from other cultures (as you have done today) is a part of that process. This is a good thing. Some of my favorite things are different takes on a thing that came from another culture. Diversity really does make us stronger and it makes our lives richer. While it might be neat to see what results from cultures being totally isolated, I think it'd be much more interesting to see what results from bringing those cultures together.

The truth is that none of those "unique and diverse cultures" you're mourning the loss of came from anything different. Even japan's culture, although it was one of the more isolationist nations, was still massively influenced by other people/places. Technology accelerates the process, but the process itself is unchanged. It made 19th century japan what it was then, just like it made japan what it is now. It's just what humans do and always have done. There's no reason to feel sad about it.
by samarthr1 | 2025-04-10 02:33:44+00:00
Wait, why do you need a shop to cash a cheque? Isnt that one of the last few things you go to a bank for?

Also, how do you cash a cheque without validating signature (from whichever bank)?

Here in India atleast, cheques are cashed only at banks, and often are a/c payee only (no cash disbursed, only account transfer). They get truncated at the bank (basically scanned), and cleared overnight as a part of the CTS (a NPCI product).

However DDs (Demand Drafts) are your equivalent of cashiers cheques, and can be redeemed at par instantly, anywhere (or paid into an account).
by gerdesj | 2025-04-10 02:34:47+00:00
In the UK we use both 240V and 110V (nominal). Our supply is at 240V. Our appliances are pretty safe out of the box - several standards.

We also utilise 110V devices but that requires a step down transformer. I have one. My big hammer drill runs on 110V.

Fire is not caused by electric current. Fire requires a source of ignition and that's not EMF.

More details please.
by pdpi | 2025-04-10 02:34:56+00:00
North/Central America is kind of the outlier running on 100-ish volts. Most of the rest of the world runs on 200-ish[0]. Electricity-related deaths aren't exactly common worldwide. And yes, I can see 100ish causing more fires — given dissipated power scales with current squared, my 2kW tea kettle can't possibly be safe in the US.

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mains_electricity_by_country
by fc417fc802 | 2025-04-10 02:35:03+00:00
Yet strangely a similarly simple explanation is not forthcoming. Curious.

The idea I expressed is also quite straightforward. That the act of copying something around in RAM is a basic component of using a computer to do pretty much anything and thus cannot possibly be a legitimate argument against something in and of itself.

The audience on HN generally leans quite heavily into reasoned debate as opposed to emotionally charged ideological signalling. That is presumably sufficient reason for someone to try to convince me, at least if anyone truly believes that there's a sound argument to be made here.

> This is lazy and obnoxious.

How is a clarification that I'm not blind to the existence of arguments regarding ethical issues lazy? Objecting to a lazy and baseless claim does not obligate me to spend the time to articulate a substantial one on the other party's behalf.

That said, the only ethical arguments that immediately come to mind pertain to collective benefit similar to those made to justify the existence of IP law. I think there's a reasonable case to be made to levy fractional royalties against the paid usage of ML models on the basis that their existence upends the market. It's obviously protectionist in nature but that doesn't inherently invalidate it. IP law itself is justified on the basis that it incentivizes innovation; this isn't much different.