MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ykonstant | 2025-04-28 08:20:32+00:00
The power of a legal obligation like the GPL lies in its ability to bind equally people you like and people you don't; and in contrast to popular belief, social attitudes (like yours) do influence the courtrooms' disposition towards such laws—they certainly influence the lawmakers passing amendments and clarifications.

If we, the relevant community, do not think much of GPL violations when they hurt people we dislike, the social foundation that gives power to the law goes away.
by klibertp | 2025-04-28 08:21:04+00:00
> If I recall correctly, there are macros to control the level of code optimization?

Yup, you can either `(proclaim (optimize (debug 3) (speed 1)))` somewhere, which will take effect globally, or you can `(declare (optimize ...))` inside a particular function. It sounds great in theory - and it is great, in some respects - but this granularity makes it harder to ensure all interesting code is steppable when you need it.
by Rastonbury | 2025-04-28 08:21:46+00:00
When we hire MBAs it means nothing except a minimum standard of work ethic and communication skills and usually (but not always) ability to grasp and breakdown problems. What they usually lack is expertise/applicable experience, we know this when we hire them, but any non-MBA candidate with relevant experience is preferred to an MBA. Like I said we don't expect fresh MBAs to know deeply about software but you do get pompous types who don't have the humility to realise they are out of their depth
by Beretta_Vexee | 2025-04-28 08:22:04+00:00
For a bicycle frame, we want an alloy that is relatively light and easy to weld. At no point is weldability considered, and it is not impossible that this alloy welds very poorly (losing its properties in the area thermally affected by welding, requires a very narrow energy range to weld properly).

The advantages of this alloy do not make it a better choice than special steels or titanium alloys when it comes to metallic materials.

There are few cyclists on Venus.
by winwang | 2025-04-28 08:22:08+00:00
I'm working on GPU-accelerated SQL+Spark in a zero-hassle package: https://paraquery.com

Been prod for a few months, recently ripping through 900TB with ~5x efficiency (customer was on BigQuery).

If anyone has any data/infra challenges, or just wanna talk about this kind of tech, lemme know :D
by einr | 2025-04-28 08:22:15+00:00
True! And if so, that license has clearly been broken many times by everyone selling 386BSD, NetBSD and Linux <0.12 on CD-ROMs etc ;)

Then again -- and IANAL -- the license is worded so vaguely that I doubt any of it is enforcible. "You may not distibute this for a fee" -- what is "this"? Is it the entire kernel or does it apply to small excerpts of it? Because apparently "small partial excerpts may be copied without bothering with copyrights". But do you mean copyright attribution or are you rescinding your copyright entirely if I only copy "small partial excerpts"? But what is a small partial excerpt? And so on and so forth...
by mtlmtlmtlmtl | 2025-04-28 08:22:32+00:00
IANAB, but from what I do understand. It depends what you mean by different genes. Information wise, DNA is a string of base 4 digits(nucleotides) in groups of 3 digits, these groups are called codons. Each codon corresponds to a specific amino acid*. A protein is made up of a bunch of different amino acids chained together. The gene determines which amino acids are chained together and in what order. This long chain of amino acids tends to fold up into a complex 3 dimensional structure, and this 3 dimensional structure determines the protein's function.

Now, there are a couple ways a gene could be different without altering the protein's function. It turns out multiple codons can code for the same amino acid. So if you switch out one codon for another which codes for the same amino acid, obviously you get a chemically identical sequence and therefore the exact same protein. The other way is you switch an amino acid, but this doesn't meaningfully affect the folded 3D structure of the finished protein, at least not in a way that alters its function. Both these types of mutations are quite common; because they don't affect function, they're not "weeded out" by evolution and tend to accumulate over evolutionary time.

* except for a few that are known as start and stop codons. They delineate the start and end of a gene.
by nonrandomstring | 2025-04-28 08:23:27+00:00
> Philosopher kings != democratic representants. Professional politicans in the most basic sense know their craft and their field of expertise well

Indeed. What we see though is a decline in the quality of representatives who are forced to skew toward immodest grandiosity and media theatrics instead of statecraft. They forced into a race to the bottom to present a veneer of "expertise" in everything, and pontificate confidently.

> Our societal complexity is a result of our cultural evolution and not caused by political failure.

I'll hold my position here; Culture and politics are not separate. If politics is the project to attain a "good life" (Aristotle), then managing complexity is part of that. There is no "perfect" society that is such a burden on its people it's unfit to live in (Tocqueville).

> Corruption, etc. is not a contradictor of professionalism.

Your pragmatic slant maybe, but it is not a definition of public office I recognise or respect. Integrity and professionalism are bedfellows in my take.

> That said, why should randomly selected people be better and not get corrupted or misinformed?

This is a very good question. The question, indeed.

I don't think I've even thought about it, but simply started from the clear perspective (one that I've arrived at reluctantly through observing the world) that a random person could do no worse than those who seek power today.

Maybe that's what the "anti-elite" populists wanted to achieve - a devaluation of politics itself. Ready to offer up their "technical solutions".

> civic duty and democratic literacy falls on all of us, and right now,

How do you think real professionals and experts, who are being excluded from the decision making arena, can be effective in exile?

Working with these guys [0] recently I see the emerging idea of a functional government in exile ready to "restore from backups" after DOGE crash the system.

[0] https://www.wethebuilders.org/
by Yizahi | 2025-04-28 08:23:35+00:00
I just want to note that asking people with severe autistic symptoms may be as pointless as asking a person with alzheimer. They have no frame of reference in that particular moment. But that is only my hypothesis, so I may be wrong. But for example I have an ADHD for decades and I'm sick and tired of this quite obviously illness and disability. I would immediately pay if there was a one time cure for it, no debate even for a second.
by Arisaka1 | 2025-04-28 08:24:25+00:00
I will preface this by saying that, I decided to stop pursuing a job as a software developer because my 2 years of work experience mean nothing in the job market.

Now that I ended up finding a job as a waiter (of all things) I finally enjoy learning new things again. Before, I would get chronically stressed researching the job market, gathering keywords from job openings, consuming Udemy courses at 2x speed, using AI to plan the project and scaffold it. I was writing projects to save my life, because my finances are just that bad.

Surrendering and giving up the pursuit of work made all this mental load go away, and ironically made me progress in a personal skill level faster than anything else. I can now learn deeply. I can tinker with code to my heart's content. I can see all the warnings. I can research why this and that happen, without feeling like I have to "sigma grindset" every second.

Perhaps when the storm is gone with the whole "AI is gonna take our jobs" and the market demanding every keyword match, and I feel more confident in myself I'll try to get professional again. Or not. All I know is that I love programming.
by anon_e-moose | 2025-04-28 08:24:32+00:00
> the skill that actually matters is reaction time to sudden unexpected hazards (and consequent need for stopping distance)

More important than that is actually learning to predict hazards. Over years of experience, what was unexpected becomes hedging risks. Tight corners in residential areas, parked cars blocking visibility, managing distance not just from the car in front of you but behind you. That obviously requires slowing down in those sections.

One of the few places unrestricted speed makes sense, is a fully enclosed highway with very little traffic and enough lanes, during the daytime.
by milesrout | 2025-04-28 08:24:34+00:00
I'm not sure that is actually true about tailors. My understanding is that most clothing was homemade. I assume people didnt generally make their own shoes but they made their own textiles and basic garments and most people didnt have many garments.

Maybe there is a specific time period you are referring to where this was common but as I understand it, pre-industrially there were very few artisans selling products for money. Clothes were made largely by women and girls for their families.
by Agentlien | 2025-04-28 08:24:57+00:00
Absolutely. But the kind of portfolio and experience that allows you to jump the queue is really hard to attain without first having been hired. So a degree really helps landing a good first job and getting that experience.

Keep in mind that in Sweden an education is not a financial burden. All universities are free and you get a state scholarship (plus very reasonable student loans if you wish).
by Cthulhu_ | 2025-04-28 08:25:20+00:00
> would my neighbors understand it?

I think this identifies a real problem in western society; there's a crisis situation of sorts, but instead of people talking to each other, this comment worries about whether people can figure it out on their own.

I believe that if there were to be a crisis situation like that, long-term power outage or whatever, people would find each other again instead of the individualism we have right now.
by phplovesong | 2025-04-28 08:26:37+00:00
Haxe is still alive!

The devs are working on 5.0 as we speak!

Its really calming that Haxe is not moving as fast as the JS/TS ecosystem. You upgrade once every 3-4 years. Everything just usually "works"

We use Haxe for PHP and its really a secret hidden superpower, im amazed people dont know about / use.

Its mostly marketing, i guess. But i wish more devs tried it as an alternative to PHP or TypeScript, as the language is WAY better in almost every way.
by dsign | 2025-04-28 08:26:45+00:00
This piece of the puzzle, and its finding, if confirmed, is very neat. But I think we are barking at the wrong tree, because senescence is inherently chaotic. Sometimes we identify a disease with a set of common symptoms because there are many alternative causes that lead to those very symptoms. It's like "convergent symptoms", so to speak.

If I had any funding to work freely in these subjects, I would instead focus on the more fundamental questions of computationally mapping and reversing cellular senescence, starting with something tiny and trivial (but perhaps not tiny nor trivial enough) like a rotifer. My focus wouldn't be the biologists' "we want to understand this rotifer", "or we want to understand senescence", but more "can we create an exact computational framework to map senescence, a framework which can be extended and applied to other organisms"?

Sadly, funding for science is a lost cause, because even where/when it is available, it comes with all sort of political and ideological chains.
by vv_ | 2025-04-28 08:28:02+00:00
> This is one of the reasons I'm hoping for the open source phone community to succeed. So far, the modem stack is usually proprietary (with hardware kill switches in the most paranoid phones) [...]

This is very unlikely to happen, primarily because certifying these modems is extremely expensive. I doubt any commercial vendor (e.g., a phone manufacturer) would commit the necessary resources to support them. Modern modems are also highly complex; they not only support various radio technologies but also incorporate numerous offloading mechanisms and a range of proprietary communication methods with telecom operators (e.g., VoLTE). Furthermore, the firmware must be carefully optimized for the hardware, so unless you have access to the complete package, this will likely remain confined to amateur circles.

> I honestly wouldn't be surprised if the standard was written to make this kind of surveillance possible and that any modem refusing to cooperate would be spec incompliant. You can read most of the 3GPP spec for free on sites like https://portal.3gpp.org/ but I don't have the time or interest to dig through the unreadable stream of abbreviations and industry terms to find out.

The standard is written to accommodate the most prevalent use cases. Given the ongoing efforts to improve security and address known vulnerabilities, I highly doubt it was written with bad intentions. However, that does not mean they will catch everything, nor does it guarantee that they will always prioritize stronger security over better usability - whether for network operators or end users.
by xico | 2025-04-28 08:29:01+00:00
This case sounds crazy, I cannot even imagine loosing a child and how anybody could expect someone to keep sane in those conditions.

Beyond this, there is a very clear difference between inciting hatred towards a group of people based on race, religion, nationality, origin, etc, and towards a single individual without those aggravations. The law is quite clear about this distinction in various countries (Public Order Act in the UK for instance), and the penalties are rightfully much stronger when one would try to instil hatred towards a racial (or other) group.
by sublimefire | 2025-04-28 08:29:36+00:00
Yes I do agree that much of the work was done using conventional methods and quite little was done with AI. AI model did do the folding though which was IMO critical to understand the structure and see the secondary substructure.

The title is clickbaity, it would be useful to stress that AI solves a very specific problem here that is extremely hard to do otherwise. It is like a lego piece.
by jasimvk | 2025-04-28 08:29:46+00:00
After struggling with bloated, ad-filled debugging tools, I decided to build MyDebugTools—an open-source, clean, and ad-free debugging tool. It’s designed to simplify the debugging process and help developers stay focused. No ads, no distractions—just efficient debugging. You can check it out at mydebugtools.com, and I’d really appreciate your feedback or suggestions!

https://www.mydebugtools.com/
by thingfish | 2025-04-28 08:30:19+00:00
Thanks for taking the time to read the source code and commenting on it. And you're right. My kernel is implemented in userspace, so I should use the term "kernel emulation". But I did find it fascinating to find out some of the reasons why a kernel is needed in the first place.

For starters, I needed to put the code of my kernel emulation (libposix-6.1.0.dll) at a specific memory address in order to get that snappy feeling when you start an OpenBSD program. Normally, 32bit DLLs in Windows are loaded at 0x10000000 (called the "ImageBase"). This causes the Windows kernel reposition the DLL because in most cases, other DLLs are already loaded there. In my case these are netapi32.dll, ws2_32.dll, iphlpapi.dll and shell32.dll among others. Making my DLLs load at an address just below the 0x10000000 boundary makes MinC programs load faster, in effect creating a space for my kernel, e.g. "kernel space".

Secondly, I needed some mechanism to reset the contents of the CPU's registers after calling into the various Windows DLLs which are not part of the Windows NT kernel. For instance, the WriteFile() function changes the %edx register, which is used by the GCC compiler to contain the high part of 64bit variables. Turns out I needed what is called a "context switch", saving the contents of all registers onto the stack, calling my kernel emulation and then restoring the registers from the stack. In Linux, this mechanism is triggered by a special interrupt (int 0x80). I decided to name the function that does this in my kernel emulation "__kernel", so in assembly I can write "call ___kernel" [0].

There is more, but I won't go into that right now. I plan to do a write-up on the topic. By the way, Microsoft also has a user space implementation of their kernel, called kernel32.dll, implementing Win32 APIs in user space.

[0] https://github.com/dboland/minc/blob/master/libposix/arch/x8...
by soco | 2025-04-28 08:30:22+00:00
Nevertheless, words (let's not call them labels, maybe terms) are what allows us to communicate ideas. While yes communicating about real things is the real deal, having a common understanding of words, language and concepts, is what allows everybody to have discussions. Labels are just shortcuts which may or may not be understood the same way by the participants, so such clarifications are always necessary at the beginning.
by vianarafael | 2025-04-28 08:30:48+00:00
Last year, I repurposed an old laptop into a simple home server.

Linux skills? Just the basics: cd, ls, mkdir, touch. Nothing too fancy.

As things got more complex, I found myself constantly copy-pasting terminal commands from ChatGPT without really understanding them.

So I built a tiny, offline Linux tutor:

- Runs locally with Phi-2 (2.7B model, textbook training) - Uses MiniLM embeddings to vectorize Linux textbooks and TLDR examples - Stores everything in a local ChromaDB vector store - When I run a command, it fetches relevant knowledge and feeds it into Phi-2 for a clear explanation.

No internet. No API fees. No cloud. Just a decade-old ThinkPad and some lightweight models.

Full build story + repo here: https://www.rafaelviana.io/posts/linux-tutor
by vv_ | 2025-04-28 08:31:50+00:00
> And same here – I've read a few of the 3GPP specs, but they make legalese sound like plain English, and of course never tell the full story including actual manufacturer decisions.

They are technical standards designed to ensure interoperability (though not always successfully — cough VoLTE cough) rather than exhaustive guides on how to implement features. They have been developed over a long period of time and have become quite complicated to read, especially if you are not familiar with the specific nomenclature. However, with enough time and willpower you can make sense of them quite quickly.

PS. The software behind these standards is probably the most complex we have in the world. At least I am not aware of anything else that is as complicated.
by vagabond_work | 2025-04-28 08:32:31+00:00
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by autoexec | 2025-04-28 08:33:15+00:00
> "please send me your web content but only the stuff I like".

That's the deal. Publishing something on the public internet does not entitle anyone to decide if/how I choose to consume that content. There's no reason to complain about people who choose to not download a bunch of ads, or those who replace fonts, or those who use custom CSS or userscripts, or those who use a screen reader, etc. If you publish something to the internet be grateful that anyone consumes any part of it. That's all you'd be due. "expected revenue" is not a right. It's not ripping off companies. It is not a victimless crime, because it isn't a crime at all.

> But people with adblockers? They are ruining it for everyone

Ads are "ruining it for everyone". If ads were all respectful, honest, safe, and non-obtrusive, ad blockers wouldn't have so many fans. The ads shot first. Blaming people now for making ads "worse" has strong "look at what you made me do!" vibes.
by Beretta_Vexee | 2025-04-28 08:33:16+00:00
Pressurised water reactors use Inconel tubes. Inconel 600 alloys are high-chromium nickel alloys for steam exchange tubes that are highly resistant to various forms of corrosion (capable of withstanding to 30 years in water with boric acid and 300°C+).

The design of these alloys and exchangers is extremely complex and benefits from several thousand years of operational experience. This applies to the alloys themselves, their heat treatment, shaping, interaction with other materials, ageing, etc.

It is highly unlikely that these alloys will be abandoned in the next 20-30 years.
by psviderski | 2025-04-28 08:33:45+00:00
Working on Uncloud [1] — open source tool for self-hosting containerised apps across multiple machines. You can combine cloud VMs and on-premises to create hybrid compute environments, e.g. for cost optimisation or data privacy.

While Kubernetes offers power at the cost of complexity, Uncloud focuses on simplicity for common deployment workflows.

Progress from this month:

- Enhanced Docker Compose support: You can now deploy your entire stack from standard Docker Compose files. This includes volumes, environment variables, resource limits, scaling and logging configuration. - Volume management: Create and manage Docker volumes across your cluster with automatic scheduling based on volume location. - Context management: CLI command to quickly switch between multiple clusters, e.g. homelab and production one

I'm particularly excited about the volume management system as it provides the cluster semantics to the good old Docker volumes. It uses a constraint-based scheduler that ensures services sharing volumes are properly co-located.

If you're seeking something between "just Docker" and full Kubernetes for deploying applications on your own infrastructure, I'd love to get your feedback on Uncloud.

[1]: https://github.com/psviderski/uncloud
by anon_e-moose | 2025-04-28 08:34:04+00:00
Considering the whole world, gun utility for the civilian population is clearly much smaller than car utility. You will also find even in US a higher number of individuals that have at least one car VS number of individuals that have at least one gun.

Sure the reverse might be true for a minority, but the majority scenario is out there with plenty of statistical and empirical evidence.

I'm neither pro nor anti-gun, just stating facts.
by shubhamjain | 2025-04-28 08:34:18+00:00
I've been working on https://textquery.app -- query raw data from your desktop.

I love exploring data, but it always felt clunky to juggle multiple tools, write code/commads, just to import and query a dataset. While there are multiple GUI tools for databases, none are focused on raw data.

TextQuery is the tool I built to solve that. You can import CSV, JSON, and XLSX files and start querying them instantly using SQL. Want to create a chart? Just hop over to the Visualize tab.

I'm also rolling out a major update this week — adding tabs, filters, a redesigned UI, and keyboard shortcuts.

Looking ahead, I’m planning to expand support for more formats (like Parquet and ORC) and data sources (like Postgres and BigQuery), so you can import data from anywhere, and query it right from your desktop. Something like a local data warehouse. With Apple Silicon, the capability of a desktop can make it very cost-efficient compared to something like BigQuery, Snowflake, or Athena.

Happy to hear any feedback!