MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by robinhoodexe | 2025-04-20 16:33:49+00:00
We use this for internal base images at $DAYJOB in order to get SIGTERM properly passed in Kubernetes, mostly a problem with Python, R and Elixir. Works wonders with only a default ENTRYPOINT in the base image, so it’s completely “hidden” from the developers (most of them don’t care, and rightly so).
by alephnerd | 2025-04-20 16:34:13+00:00
> It’s immediately abandoned the moment those folks are in Washington, because as much as Miller wants to deal with Modi, Loomer doesn’t and he needs her for natsec and the border

Pretty much. But I'd still disagree that this kind of lobbying doesn't have value. The UK (Vance), Israel (Kushner but now Trump Jr), and KSA have been working on building similar informal networks with the Trump admin. They can't predict everything but they can at least start understand the inner workings of the admin somewhat.

Ironically, this is similar to how China scholars and India scholars would try to approach power dynamics in both countries as well.

Clearly a severe degradation of our administrative capacity though - there's a reason diplomacy was increasingly formalized after the Gulf of Tonkin incident

> They’re against imports, period

Yep! I meant decoupling.
by quesomaster9000 | 2025-04-20 16:35:18+00:00
And even with the constant `b=BLAKE("ECCFrog512CK2 forever")` there is an open question, while not as problematic as it is with the NIST & SEC curves, it's covered in "How to manipulate curve standards: a white paper for the black hat"[1]

I'm surprised they didn't include the constant in the paper and at least a short justification for this approach, despite stating "This ensures reproducibility and verifiable integrity" in section 3.2, whereas several other curves take the approach of 'smallest valid value that meets all constraints'.

Really they should answer the question of "Why can't `b` be zero... or 1" if they're going for efficiency, given they're already using GLV endomorphisms.

Likewise with the generator, I see no code or mention in the paper about how they selected it.

[1]: https://eprint.iacr.org/2014/571.pdf
by avar | 2025-04-20 16:35:37+00:00
As an American, I feel I'd prefer this system.

You'd like to live in Alaska and vote for say a Democrat, only to have some Democratic representative from say Florida be the one "you voted in" to the House of Representatives?

A representative with absolutely zero self-interest in representing you, as it's highly unlikely you'll be able to "vote for" them the next time around? Your representation being an odd mathematical quirk?

Because that's essentially what the Icelandic system is like. The US has the same lopsided population-to-representative ratio to some degree [1].

[...]and please correct me if I am wrong)

No, it has nothing to do with turnout in Iceland.

You can think of it as an odd way to enact something like the US Senate without a bicameral legislature.

1. https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2018/05/31/u-s-popul...
by Mountain_Skies | 2025-04-20 16:36:01+00:00
Hot Coco had an article about hooking it up to the TRS-80 Color Computer.

https://colorcomputerarchive.com/repo/Documents/Magazines/Ho...

>By moving the joystick (a mechanical linkage), you select one of a series of rotating cams that connect a gear to the power shaft. This is probably the worst design possible for modification to electronic control.

At the time I was disappointed that it didn't use (non-existing) motors already in the Armatron but looking back at it with an understanding of the mechanical design, it's easy to see why they went with that decision. The only other choice would have been to connect to the joysticks themselves. The added motors probably improved the operation quite a bit.
by __MatrixMan__ | 2025-04-20 16:36:38+00:00
As for how to get rid of a piece of content... I think that one's a lost cause. If the goal is to prevent things that make content unavailable (e.g. AI scrapers) then you end up with a design that prevents things that makes content unavailable (e.g. legitimate deletions). The whole point is that you're not the only one participating in propagating the content, and that comes with trade-offs.

But as for updating, you just format your URLs like so: {my-public-key}/foo/bar

And then you alter the protocol so that the {my-public-key} part resolves to the merkle-root of whatever you most recently published. So people who are interested in your latest content end up with a whole new set of hashes whenever you make an update. In this way, it's not 100% immutable, but the mutable payload stays small (it's just a bunch of hashes) and since it can be verified (presumably there's a signature somewhere) it can be gossiped around and remain available even if your device is not.

You can soft-delete something just by updating whatever pointed to it to not point to it anymore. Eventually most nodes will forget it. But you can't really prevent a node from hanging on to an old copy if they want to. But then again, could you ever do that? Deleting something on on the web has always been a bit of a fiction.
by bobmcnamara | 2025-04-20 16:37:39+00:00
> By requiring candidates for the general election to first pass through a gauntlet composed of the most die-hard voters from one part of the political spectrum, you frequently end up with candidates who are way more extreme than the electorate in general.

It's not always that they're more extreme, it's largely the people who have the extra time to go to additional elections or caucusing. Ex: retirees. And this is affected each party differently.
by tyre | 2025-04-20 16:38:16+00:00
Great question. It depends on why you want to kill it.

Sometimes it’s because there are regular bugs and on-call becomes a drag on velocity.

Sometimes making code changes is difficult and there’s only one person who knows what going on, so you either have a bus factor risk or it limits flexibility on assigning projects / code review.

Sometimes the system’s performance is, or will be in the short–medium term, going to start causing incidents.

Sometimes incident recovery takes a long time. We had a pipeline that would take six–ten hours to run and couldn’t be restarted midway if it failed. Recovering from downtime was crazy!

Sometimes there’s a host of features whose development timelines would be sped up by more than it would take to burn down the tech debt to unlock them.

Sometimes a refactor would improve system performance enough to meaningfully affect the customer or reduce infra costs.

And then…

Sometimes you have career-driven managers and engineers who don’t want to or can’t make difficult long-term trade-offs, which is sometimes the way it is and you should consider switching teams or companies.

So I guess my question to you is: why should you burn this down?
by necovek | 2025-04-20 16:38:33+00:00
Seemed simple to me: one of the first results for "Mein Kampf full text" gave me https://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks02/0200601h.html

But yeah, I don't want to be expressly forbidding disagreeable content to my kids, I want them to learn to choose content that is worthwhile themselves.
by mrcwinn | 2025-04-20 16:38:35+00:00
This is poor analysis. It claims OpenAI is spending “3 of its 40” billion in raised capital on Windsurf. Who said this was an all cash deal?

And so if you’re purchasing with equity in whole or in part, the critical question is, do you believe this product could be worth more than $3b in the future? That’s not at all a stretch.

Cursor is awfully cozy with Anthropic, as well, and so if I’m OpenAI, I don’t mind having a competitive product inserted into this space. This space, by the way, that is at the forefront of demonstrating real value creation atop your platform.
by wavemode | 2025-04-20 16:38:44+00:00
> in practice it isn't because there are very few language that do not see software design as being hierarchical

It has been possible since the days of C (via forward declarations / header files) for two compilation units to call functionality in each other circularly. Java and many other languages have followed suit. I don't buy the argument that it is some sort of new or esoteric thing for a compiler to allow this.
by fforflo | 2025-04-20 16:39:37+00:00
With $GEMINI_MODE=gemini-2.0-flash I also got some decent results for libraries like simonw/llm and pgcli.

You can tell that because simonw writes quite heavily-documented code an the logic is pretty straightforward, it helps the model a lot!

https://github.com/Florents-Tselai/Tutorial-Codebase-Knowled...

https://github.com/Florents-Tselai/Tutorial-Codebase-Knowled...
by Ozzie_osman | 2025-04-20 16:41:18+00:00
> Search enginers offer a good choice between Exploration (crawl through the list and pages of results) and Exploitation (click on the top result). LLMs, however, do not give this choice.

I've actually found that LLMs are great at exploration for me. I'd argue, even better than exploitation. I've solved many a complex problem by using an LLM as a thought partner. I've refined many ideas by getting the LLM to brainstorm with me. There's this awesome feedback loop you can create with the LLM when you're in exploration mode that is impossible to replicate on your own, and still somewhat difficult even with a human thought partner.
by kjellsbells | 2025-04-20 16:41:21+00:00
I dont think the transformative zeal that powerful people experience is new. The assumption that expertise in one domain, coupled with money/power and vision must equate to positive results in another.

How quickly did America turn from a smallholder society into one trumpeting Manifest Destiny? That seems no different from tech bros trumpeting their utopian cities. It's not exclusively an American thing of course, one thinks of the British of 1800 going from regional naval experts to talking about spreading their idea of civilization to the East in utopian terms. "For the benefit of the natives, you see" doesnt sound very different from the Yarvinesque patter.

It's all hubris, of course. The question is how Nemesis arrives, and who she chews up on the way.
by Terretta | 2025-04-20 16:41:27+00:00
Unlikely they think Microsoft or GitHub wants to steal it.

With LLMs, they're thinking of examples that regurgitated proprietary code, and contrary to everyday general observation, valuable proprietary code does exist.

But with GitHub, the thinking is generally the opposite: the worry is that the code is terrible, and seeing it would be like giant blinkenlights* indicating the way in.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blinkenlights
by __MatrixMan__ | 2025-04-20 16:41:48+00:00
But when you do a "git pull" you're not pulling from someplace identified by a hash, but rather a hostname. The learning-about-new-hashes part has to be handled differently.

It's a legit limitation on what content addressing can do, but it's one we can overcome by just not having everything be content addressed. The web we have now is like if you did a `git pull` every time you opened a file.

The web I'm proposing is like how we actually use git--periodically pulling new hashes as a separate action, but spending most of our time browsing content that we already have hashes for.
by otabdeveloper4 | 2025-04-20 16:42:33+00:00
The only actually useful application of LLM's is processing large amounts of data for classification and/or summarizing purposes.

That's not the stuff you want to send to a public API, this is something you want as a 24/7 locally running batch job.

("AI assistant" is an evolutionary dead end, and Star Trek be damned.)
by ToucanLoucan | 2025-04-20 16:42:39+00:00
I'm definitely gonna get hate for saying this but: the rise of coding with LLM assistants is going to worsen an issue our industry is already struggling with: we have tons of developers out there who do not know their fundamentals in programming, who are utterly rudderless without heaps upon heaps of framework code doing lots of work for them, who are now being further enabled by machines that write even that code for them with some tweaking afterwards.

I have interacted with software developers at conferences who cannot do basic things with computers, like navigate file systems, or make changes to the Windows registry, where to get and how to use environment variables, how to diagnose and fix PC issues... Like in a perfect world your IT department sorts this stuff for you but I struggle to take seriously someone who claims to create software who seemingly lacks basic computer literacy in a number of areas.

And I'm sorry, "it compiles and runs" is the bare fucking minimum for software quality. We have machines these days that would run circles around my first PC in the late 90's, but despite that, everything is slower and runs worse. My desktop messaging apps are each currently sucking up over 600 MB of RAM apiece, which is nearly 3 times what my original PC had total. Everything is some bloated shite that requires internet access now at all times or it utterly crashes and dies, and I'm sorry but I cannot separate in my mind the fact that we have seemingly a large contingent of software developers out there that can't bloody use computers to thank for this. And cheap-ass management, to be clear, but I think these are nested problems.
by arkj | 2025-04-20 16:42:45+00:00
Losing focus as a skill is something I see with every batch of new students. It’s not just LLMs, almost every app and startup is competing for the same limited attention from every user.

What LLMs have done for most of my students is remove all the barriers to an answer they once had to work for. It’s easy to get hooked on fast answers and forget to ask why something works. That said, I think LLMs can support exploration—often beyond what Googling ever did—if we approach them the right way.

I’ve seen moments where students pushed back on a first answer and uncovered deeper insights, but only because they chose to dig. The real danger isn’t the tool, it’s forgetting how to use it thoughtfully.
by LinuxBender | 2025-04-20 16:43:09+00:00
I did something like this ages ago and attracted some hackers that in turn attracted the FBI to my house. I suppose in hind-sight I should have made them sign legal documents and had them notarized but I still would have had to deal with the feds. It didn't end with that. They also pissed off all the locals and the local police offered to drive them far out of the county and just leave them somewhere but I ended up paying to put them up in a hotel and paid to store their stuff in a storage at the advice of my lawyer. I guess all I am suggesting is to be careful.
by lurk2 | 2025-04-20 16:43:22+00:00
All of these books have always been widely accessible in the western world, and I suppose that’s my chief objection; these books have been banned, but they have never been seriously challenged in the west. They are safe to publish and distribute here, which is what makes the whole thing so performative.

I threw out Mein Kampf as the only example I could think of where a book had faced an actual ban; it was illegal to sell in the Netherlands until about ten years ago. But even my regional library carries it. I haven’t been able to find any instances of a book being banned in the USA besides a dozen or so that were banned from being mailed or transported across state lines in accordance with the Comstock Act. I would imagine the list is more extensive than these dozen or so books, and while most were pornographic, a few were culturally notable, such as the Canterbury Tales.

The idea that librarians are leading a resistance movement against the looming threat of Christian ultranationalism is a rhetorical cudgel used to undermine parental rights regarding children’s education. Virtually all of the books that have ostensibly been “banned” in America have been challenged for containing material inappropriate for children. A minority of the materials are objected to on purely religious grounds; that is, the material is not necessarily obscene or inappropriate, but contradicts the religious worldview of the challenging parents. While I personally feel the latter material should be accessible to students, the right to make that determination lies firmly with a student’s parents. There is maybe an argument to be made that the challenges not based on issues of obscenity violate the spirit of freedom of information (since the challenges result in all students losing access to the books, rather than just individual students), but it is hard to make this argument when so much of the “book ban” discussion is centered around works which most people would view as inappropriate for children.

1984 is a good example; while it is a culturally significant work, it contains two or three descriptions of sexual intercourse. The sorts of people who browse a forum like this might find that quaint, but most people do not want their children being exposed to this kind of thing.
by bgnn | 2025-04-20 16:44:40+00:00
I started my gardening adventure with vegetables in pots. It was perfect, plants gave amazing yield, but required too detailed care and attention every day (or sometimes 2-3 times a day in a hot dry summer day). When I have moved to planting in soil I was shocked how worse the plants are doing. Same tomatoes giving 10-15 kg per plant yield in pots were under 3kg in soil. They got more disease issues, more pests (slugs and snails!).

After talking to fellow natural hobby farmers I realized the soil quality was garbage (lack of earth worms and insects), and there were severe drainage and water holding issues: weirdly the soil didn't hold water but it drained way too slow too. So, ehen it rained it was swamped for days but when it got dry none of that water stayed at the top 1 meters of the soil. I'm lucky to find amazing help from local natural farmers, so I got natural green compost (no animal products/byproducts). I have been introduced to no-dig farming too. So first year I started by applying 20cm thick compost on top soil, after putting a layer of old paper boxes against weeds. Then planted my seedlings on these, with worm poop and for some phosphate loving plants bat guano as fertilizers around the plants, topping of with hemp mulch and cacao shell mulch as topping. When this soil has sunken enough, topped off with 2-3 cm compost and mulched again. I have sprinkled insect friendly flowers to attract insects too. This was an amazing succes with not only plants flourishing, fighting diseases much better and resulting in an amazing yield. I didn't need to water as often as before (4x less frequent than before in the soil, 8x less frequent than in the pot). After year 3 I stopped all fertilization and introduced cover crops that could be used as mulch and fertilizer at the same time.

This process though is not linear. I still have plants which are not successful at all. I can grow juicy tasty watermelons in a northern European country but no parsnips or carrots or cauliflowers yet. This is what I love though, I'm interacting with a living microbiome rather than executing lab experiments. Failures are keeping it interesting and improving learning.
by djsavvy | 2025-04-20 16:45:02+00:00
> This idea summarizes why I disagree with those who equate the LLM revolution to the rise of search engines, like Google in the 90s. Search enginers offer a good choice between Exploration (crawl through the list and pages of results) and Exploitation (click on the top result). > LLMs, however, do not give this choice, and tend to encourage immediate exploitation instead. Users may explore if the first solution does not work, but the first choice is always to exploit.

Well said, and an interesting idea, but most of my LLM usage (besides copilot autocomplete) is actually very search-engine-esque. I ask it to explain existing design decisions, or to search for a library that fits my needs, or come up with related queries so I can learn more.

Once I've chosen a library or an approach for the task, I'll have the LLM write out some code. For anything significantly more substantive code than copilot completions, I almost always do some exploring before I exploit.
by zdragnar | 2025-04-20 16:45:05+00:00
I hate doing laundry and cleaning dishes. I still do it, though.

There are things in life that you won't enjoy but you need to do. Learning to do them anyway is in fact a life skill.

I've seen people follow their dreams into careers they chose because they wanted them, despite those careers not being paid well. They're all at least as miserable as the average person, because what they enjoyed is now work, and they don't have money for anything they now enjoy.

"Do whatever makes you happy" is a life plan for the financially independent. Most people simply don't have that luxury.
by reincoder | 2025-04-20 16:45:12+00:00
I work for IPinfo (a commercial service). We offer a residential proxy detection service, but it costs money.

If you are being bombarded by suspicious IP addresses, please consider using our free service and blocking IP addresses by ASN or Country. I think ASN is a common parameter for malicious IP addresses. If you do not have time to explore our services/tools (it is mostly just our CLI: https://github.com/ipinfo/cli), simply paste the IP addresses (or logs) in plain text, send it to me and I will let you know the ASNs and corresponding ranges to block.
by simonw | 2025-04-20 16:45:26+00:00
Seriously? You would rather read all of https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=OJ:... than pipe it into an LLM to answer a few questions about it?

How long would it take you to read that thing? I'm a reasonably fast reader and it would take me hours.

(https://wordcount.com/character-counter estimates 5 hours and 46 minutes)

Are you a dedicated member of the "LLMs have no legitimate uses" camp?

In case it wasn't obvious, my blog post is meant to be equally about the "Meta/open source/EU AI act" thing and the "look at what you can do with these new long context models that were released in the last few weeks" thing.

As so often is the case with my LLM projects this one wasn't a case of choosing between "read the EU AI act or pipe it through an LLM" - it was a choice between "pipe the EU AI act through an LLM or lose interest in this mild spike of curiosity and go and do something else instead."
by dang | 2025-04-20 16:47:00+00:00
If you don't have 'showdead' turned on in your profile, what could be happening is that those articles are so heavily flagged that they're almost all [dead], in which case only users with that setting turned on would see them.

Articles that show [flagged] but are not [dead] have actually been flagged less (relative to upvotes) than articles which get flagkilled, i.e. flagged all the way to the [dead] state, where they cease to be visible to most users.

(Here are a bunch of past explanations about 'showdead' in case anyone wants more: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...)
by lazide | 2025-04-20 16:47:15+00:00
Uh, pretty much every farmer I ever met is going to disagree.

Farming is hard, unpredictable (prone to disasters/famine/plagues), and prone to all sorts of problems with soil, weather, etc.

The reason modern fertilizer and pesticides are used so widely is they make that fundamentally extremely difficult process easier and more predictable.
by iwontberude | 2025-04-20 16:47:19+00:00
> It compiles and runs

…and rapidly becomes deprecated not due to quality but because the requirements for operation or development changed substantially. This second order effects make the “compile and run” focus paradoxically efficient and correct use of resources. Engineers, especially academically experienced ones, prematurely optimize for correctness and arbitrary dimensions of quality because they are disconnected from and motivated by interests orthogonal to their users.
by MortyWaves | 2025-04-20 16:48:12+00:00
That was a great read. This is what I hope to achieve too. I know what you mean about some crops that won’t grow at all, for me, it’s carrots. They are never more than a couple of centimetres long. Deeply frustrating. I’ve tried lots, including making the soil loose, making it compact, adding sand, etc.

Also Aloe Vera, absolutely the most frustrating house plants I’ve ever had.