MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by xg15 | 2025-04-11 00:09:22+00:00
> [During Covid] In a moment when screens kept us connected, protected and employed, the reductiveness of dystopian science fiction felt silly. Biotechnology like GMOs and mRNA offered existential hope, rather than risk.

He can thank Elon & the Tech Lords for bringing the public perception of tech right back into dystopian nightmare territory.

But even apart from that, this seems like an extremely selective recollection of the Covid era. Yes, technology was a livesaver during that time, and we all were using it in frequency and to a degree like never before. (And indeed even that time brought lasting new "skills" which offer genuine new possibilities, like the new casualness and ubiquity of online meetings)

But I also remember that tech didn't actually feel very empowering during, on the contrary: Suddenly being online changed from something fun and interesting to mandatory: You had to be online, even for the things you'd much rather do offline. What been an extension of possibilities before now became a constraint. This definitely made it feel much more dystopian than before.

> We must move away from binary tales of catastrophe, not towards naive utopianism that ignores problems and risks that comes with change, but hopeful solutionism that reminds us we can solve and mitigate them [...]

I think this misunderstands the reasons why people are wary of new technology and instead pulls up the old "Luddite" strawman (which was itself a misrepresentation).

Of course we could introduce new tech carefully and with a strong emphasis of identifying and mitigating the risks. The problem is that we won't do that, because the incentives point into the opposite direction. Companies don't want to fall behind, so they move fast and break things instead of being careful. The general population then finds themselves as guinea pigs in barely tested new technology with little power to actually influence the course this technology takes. This causes a feeling of helplessness and resentment.
by mandevil | 2025-04-11 00:09:50+00:00
I feel like a big problem in the modern world is the small scale of our dreams. Dreams drive us, they change the world. In 1865, French author Jules Verne decided to write a book to inspire people to dream big, impossible dreams. He decided to write a novel proving that humans could do anything- by describing how, if enough people worked together, they could journey all the way to the moon. This became one of the first hit books in a new genre, science fiction. Sure, plenty of people had written about travelling to the moon before- e.g. the Roman poet Lucian wrote of being sucked up into a giant waterspout and deposited on the moon- but Verne was the first to write at a level of detail that made is seem realistic, something that humans could do- e.g. he spends several pages discussing- with math- how, if you are in America and want to go into space, the coast of Florida is the right spot (he picked a spot two hundred km from Cape Canaveral). These stories are important. The fathers of rocketry in at least two different countries (Konstantin Tsiolkovsky of Russia and Hermann Oberth of Germany) were inspired by Verne (Goddard of the US was more inspired by H.G. Wells than Verne). They independently realized that you couldn't build a cannon (like Verne depicted) that could let humans survive and get to the moon, so they went into rocketry. Verne and H.G. Wells told stories that were the first step to changing the world.

And modern science fiction seems stuck in a dystopian rut. Most of the good sci-fi (and I enjoy things like the Murderbot Diaries) are largely dystopic. Hell, Star Trek- long the most utopian of sci-fi- is doing movies about Section 31 and whole seasons about android slave uprisings. No one is inspired to build a better future by "Don't create the Torment Nexus", they just get inspired to build the Torment Nexus.

Basically, we are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be, as Kurt Vonnegut wrote.

Thank you for reading my TED talk.
by dataviz1000 | 2025-04-11 00:10:06+00:00
"The Jungle" by Upton Sinclair published in 1906 described an extremely pessimistic vision of the exploitation of the American factory worker. The descriptions of the meat packing industry in the book led to passing of the Meat Inspection Act. Sinclair was frustrated that most people were more concerned about eating bovine tuberculosis infected beef than the exploitation of people, but, nonetheless, it was pessimistic novel which lead to positive action.
by jart | 2025-04-11 00:11:19+00:00
Here's the pending GCC 15 release notes: https://gcc.gnu.org/gcc-15/changes.html (since the link in the article points to GCC 14)

- I'd love to see godbolt examples of the sort of optimizations [[unsequenced]] and [[reproducible]] can do.

- GCC has always been in my experience smart enough to know how to optimize normal C code into ROL and ROR instructions. I've never had any issues with it. So what's the point of __builtin_stdc_rotate_left()? Why create a builtin when it is not needed? What I wish GCC and Clang would do instead, is formally document the magic ANSI C89 incantations that trigger the optimization, e.g. `#define ROL(x, n) (((x) << (n)) | ((x) >> (64 - (n))))`. That way we can have clean portable code with less #ifdef hell along with assurances it'll go fast when -O is passed.

- What is "Abs Without Undefined Behavior (addition of builtins for use in future C library <stdlib.h> headers)."?

- What is "Allow zero length operations on null pointers"?

- Re: "Introduce complex literals." How about some __int128 literals?

- "The "redzone" clobber is now allowed in inline assembler statements" wooo I've wanted something like this for a while.

Great work from the greatest compiler team!
by mortar | 2025-04-11 00:11:46+00:00
> the template string expression itself (resulting in a Template object) will take a long while to evaluate

Are you saying that calling:

template = t”{fib_slow()}”

Will immediately run the function, as opposed to when the __str__ is called (or is it because of __repr__?) - Apparent I might just have to sit down with the code and grok it that way, but thanks for helping me understand!
by dexwiz | 2025-04-11 00:13:21+00:00
I dunno about you, but I don't care about a computer program that believes it's me living on after I die. You can wrap it with all the feel good trappings you want, that set of bits is not you. If anything, living a life in a way that you put off doing the fun things until the after life, spiritual or digital, sounds awful.
by perrygeo | 2025-04-11 00:14:08+00:00
Read it earlier this year and I agree. Also, he's all over various podcasts and youtube channels if you'd rather watch.

What I got out of the book was two things:

* Mitochondria are freaking cool.

* The DSM is bollocks and metabolic dysfunction explains all mental illness.

Despite how radical the above sounds, the evidence for it is overwhelming. The book is largely an accessible tour of the evidence. It's well cited without being too academic.

And while Dr. Palmer is a prominent spokesperson for this movement, there are hundreds of other neurologists, psychiatrists and doctors on the same line.
by mtlynch | 2025-04-11 00:14:54+00:00
For a docs site with no special requirements, I'd be surprised if Hugo or another SSG can't do what they need out of the box. So, it's the cost of implementing your own SSG vs. the cost of figuring out how to use an existing one.

Also, just as a datapoint, I've been using Hugo on multiple sites for about five years, and I don't recall ever having to drop into Go to fix an issue. Hugo might be unique in this regard, as it ships as a single-file binary. You have to learn Go templates, but you don't have to learn anything about Go the language or standard library.

Before Go, I used Jekyll, and I don't recall ever having to learn Ruby, but I did have to work within the Ruby ecosystem because Jekyll required a Ruby environment.

Incidentally, TigerBeetle seems to have rolled their own rudimentary templating language, too.[0] I think that has potential to either limit the functionality they need or cause a lot of bugs.

[0] https://github.com/tigerbeetle/tigerbeetle/blob/0.16.29/src/...
by themanmaran | 2025-04-11 00:16:04+00:00
I'm curious when it crossed the line into "fraud" here. Since almost every "AI" application has tons of human fallback. Waymo has human drivers that can teleoperate the vehicle when it gets stuck. The Amazon Go stores were really powered by teams in India [0]. And companies have been pitching "powered by AI" for a decade.

Perhaps this came up because investors finally got a peak at margins and saw there was a giant off shore line item. Otherwise it seems like an "automation rate" is a really ambiguous number for investors to track.

> This type of deception not only victimizes innocent investors

Also this was a funny line

[0] https://www.businessinsider.com/amazons-just-walk-out-actual...
by Avicebron | 2025-04-11 00:17:05+00:00
I clearly don't follow so bear with me,

> A consent decree is an agreement or settlement that resolves a dispute between two parties without admission of guilt (in a criminal case) or liability (in a civil case).

Why would this be in any way relevant to what I think is happening at Columbia from approximately ~20 min/week of random news snippets
by alabastervlog | 2025-04-11 00:17:36+00:00
The end shows us the entirety of anything real happening: it’s a modern day pharaoh’s tomb. Nothing’s alive, just pantomiming at life. Hieroglyphs and organs in jars, but even less human.

What you see is the only real thing. Caretaker machines swapping hard drives or whatever it is they were doing (it’s been a while since I watched it)

That’s why it shows us that, when it does.
by stavros | 2025-04-11 00:18:50+00:00
Yeah, I generally like most of the stuff that goes into Python, but I have to admit I can't really see the usefulness in this (or, at least, enough usefulness to warrant making it standard).

One of the PEP's developers, Lysandros, presented this in our local meetup, so I am passingly familiar with it, but still, I might be missing something.

I guess the crux of it is that I don't understand why it's `t"some string"` instead of `Template("some string")`. What do we gain by the shorthand?
by CobaltFire | 2025-04-11 00:20:06+00:00
We have our daughter a cellular connected Apple Watch in sixth grade because she wanted to walk home from school alone (it was about two blocks). She’s getting ready to enter high school and just told us she doesn’t see the point in getting a phone; her watch is fine.

We also don’t do social media as a family (HN being my one exception) so she is growing up without exposure to that.
by wwweston | 2025-04-11 00:20:19+00:00
what’s the story integrating R code into larger software systems (say, a saas product)?

I’m sure part of Python’s success is sheer mindshare momentum from being a common computing denominator, but I’d guess the integration story is part of the margins. Your back end may well already be in python or have interop, reducing stack investment and systems tax.
by int_19h | 2025-04-11 00:21:41+00:00
It decided that deportations can continue, removing the temporary restraining order. And the administration claims that they are irreversible because those people are no longer in US custody. Such wonderful due process we have...

Then when you look at how SCOTUS justified it, they basically claim that the petition is invalid if it's not filed where the detainees are currently held. So how is it supposed to work if the feds just keep shuttling them around?
by cmiller1 | 2025-04-11 00:21:56+00:00
> - ScummVM, maybe modern games could run under a G4 with Altivec

Having done some testing for the PPC version of ScummVM on 10.4 I can say that it won't run many of the more modern games because none of those machines supported shaders on the GPU, which many of the more modern ScummVM supported games like Thimbleweed Park depend on. A software shader implementation could be added in theory if someone had the gumption to build it but it would most likely be unusably slow on those older machines.
by streptomycin | 2025-04-11 00:23:45+00:00
The small % you get on each purchase is crumbs, but the cookie is the big sign up bonus you can get. For the past several years I've been making about $2k/year from that, which is so much more than the % bonus that I don't know why anyone would care about getting 3% back rather than 2%. Like if you are that worried about your money, take the free $2k first.
Show HN: Stickrz – An AI powered sticker creation marketplace
by bgzingler | 2025-04-11 00:24:14+00:00
Hey!

I made Stickrz to make custom sticker creation fast, easy and fun.

You just type what you want, and our AI turns it into a custom sticker you can actually order. Most AI sticker sites stop at image generation, but I wanted to go further.

I run the site, handle the code, and fulfill every order by hand with my dad. We’ve got a full printing setup, so every sticker is high quality, weatherproof, and made to last.

Would love your feedback - and if you try it, I’d love to see what you make!
by _jayhack_ | 2025-04-11 00:26:18+00:00
Related article from mid-pandemic: https://www.theinformation.com/articles/shaky-tech-and-cash-...

A friend asked me to do diligence on this company circa 2021 given my personal background in ML. The founder was adamant they had a "100% checkout success rate" based on AI, which was clearly false. He also had 2 other startups he was running concurrently (?)

Live and learn!
by AdieuToLogic | 2025-04-11 00:26:34+00:00
> The shebang seems underbaked to me. There is no way to reference a user's home directory AFIK. I came across this annoyance when trying to make my python virtual environment portable.

You can use env[0] to invoke a command based on `$PATH` if desired:

The env utility uses the PATH environment variable to locate the requested utility if the name contains no `/' characters, unless the -P option has been specified.

For shells which have limited shebang functionality[1], specifying the POSIX shell location and then using its builtin `exec` support can suffice.

0 - https://man.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=env&apropos=0&sekt...

1 - http://www.acadix.biz/Unix-guide/HTML/ch02s20.html
by mardifoufs | 2025-04-11 00:27:37+00:00
What's the issue with f-strings? I'm wondering because I thought they basically had no downside versus using the older alternatives. I use them so often that they are very substantive to me. If anything, this is exactly what python should be focusing on, there really isn't a lot more that they can do considering the design, expectations, and usage of python.
by mjevans | 2025-04-11 00:28:42+00:00
Go(lang)'s rejection makes sense.

A format function that arbitrarily executes code from within a format string sounds like a complete nightmare. Log4j as an example.

The rejection's example shows how that arbitrary code within the string could instead be fixed functions outside of a string. Safer, easier for compilers and programmers; unless an 'eval' for strings is what was desired. (Offhand I've only seen eval in /scripted/ languages; go makes binaries.)
by krapp | 2025-04-11 00:28:49+00:00
1) It's a bad idea to discuss this on a forum full of feds and fascist sympathizers. Hacker News isn't neutral ground, it's enemy territory.

2) I think grassroots organizing, protest and activism will be more effective than "technology," but as far as that goes, I think efforts to archive data being removed by the government, keep track of censorship and support independent reporting are crucial to push against propaganda and misinformation. Also tools to increase visibility for the need of mutual aid for oppressed and at-risk groups.
by alganet | 2025-04-11 00:29:26+00:00
Humans need some level of paranoia, mistrust and waryness of new technology in the same way electrical circuits need circuit breakers and ships need life boats.

Pessimism saves lives and resources. It won't lead us to a better future, but it might save what does.

Furthermore, for many of us, we are already in a state of technological mindfuckery beyond Black Mirror levels. Black Mirror sounds like a fairy tale.

We need humans, kind humans that are not fools. That's very hard to make. Without that any future, technological or not, is bleak.
by nix-zarathustra | 2025-04-11 00:29:33+00:00
>he came up with the laws of robotics and then cases on how they don't work. There are a few that I remember, one where a robot was lying because a bug in his brain gave him empathy and he didn't want to hurt humans.

IIRC, none of the robots broke the laws of robotics, rather they ostensibly broke the laws but the robots were later investigated to have been following them because of some quirk.
by jart | 2025-04-11 00:29:49+00:00
GCC is still marginally superior at both code size and performance in my experience.

The main thing I like about clang is it compiles byzantine c++ code much faster.

Some projects like llama.cpp it's like eating nails if you're not using clang.

So with projects like llamafile I usually end up using both compilers.

That's why my cosmocc toolchain comes with -mgcc and -mclang.
by tastyface | 2025-04-11 00:29:58+00:00
"You can't have a world where "America First", "Germany First", "Islam First", "Japan First", "Korea First", "Korea First", "China First", and "India First" all[0] coexist. They're far too egotistical to be satisfied with a tie. Someone has to be second."

Sure you can - see the Axis during WWII. The trick is to gang up on the rest of the world and win, then deal with each other. (Or perhaps jealously guard your respective spheres of influence.)
by Nihilartikel | 2025-04-11 00:30:56+00:00
It's funny. I view it as a common modality of fraud among the 'cufflinked bozo with a sharp haircut' founder crowd. That is, they probably could have actually pulled off their business plan if they had any ability beyond being able to 'talk a big game.'

LLMs are mostly 'there' if one knows how to use them. Maybe they weren't when they started their business, but what kind of leader getting millions in funding doesn't understand the 2nd and 3rd order derivatives of acceleration in their space? Bozos.
by bradleyy | 2025-04-11 00:30:59+00:00
As someone who has helped build one of those cookie banners, I will admit that using cookies to store the state of what you consented to is somewhat ironic, or at least meta.

It's got some really interesting parts though: serving those banners, geolocated (show the right thing for the legal regime you're in) at actual "web scale lol". And while folks hate them, we respect the GPC signal, and then won't show you the banner, just opt you out of everything.
by ksec | 2025-04-11 00:32:41+00:00
>To be honest, the hard part of static site generation is parsing the Markdown, since Markdown is a complex language. Everything around it is simple scripting, which we can easily do ourselves.

I would think 95%+ of the work would be in pandoc if everything was from scratch. And they would have used Zine if it had supported the feature they want.

For larger project, mostly DB selection I completely agree with what you said. But for SSR, especially when there are other similar OSS like Zine available, I think they are fine.

Although I do wish if Zine had all the improvement Tigerbeetle wanted so at least the Zig community could all use one rather than roll their own.
by boznz | 2025-04-11 00:33:56+00:00
The post is supposed to be a bit tongue-in-cheek (and is tagged so), the fact being I am a New Zealand company who does have any known customers or affiliates in the EU but I also have no idea what WordPress or its plugins do in the background if you say enter your email for an RSS or comment feed.

I think lots of non-EU and non-technical bloggers would likely see the email I had (which was just opportunistic marketing spam from a European company and not nefarious) and think they were in breach of something like you say they are probably not.
by PaulHoule | 2025-04-11 00:34:50+00:00
Fits the definition though. I'd note two things:

(1) Lots of accidents and near-misses involving 50-seat planes from Bombardier and Embraer. There's a little told story that if you live in a small town like Ithaca, NY your airport sucks and is going to go out of business because of those little planes. Manufacturers know they suck and quit making them in favor of 70-seat planes that the pilot unions won't let major airlines fly in the US. The 70-seaters would have much better economics and would lower fares and attract more business such that they'd have no problem filling them from small airports.

(2) Lots of incidents are getting in the media post the Reagan collision that you couldn't even dignify with "near miss" such as "pilot forgot his passport and plane had to turn around" (if I was the pilot I would have dissembled... I mean, what are they go doing to do to you, send you back on the next plane?) or "passenger lost her phone and plane had to turn around"
by ryandrake | 2025-04-11 00:35:06+00:00
> To be clear it doesn't have to be happy, it can still be grim and dark, but when every character is a terrible character, it undermines the story

The world is full of terrible people, though. It's a "mirror" on current society, which is probably where they got the name. And by terrible I don't mean "literally Hitler," but the boring terribleness and malaise that so many around us have kind of just slipped into: Selfishness, impoliteness, paranoia, anger, belligerence, spitefulness, indifference to cruelty, unnecessary competitiveness in everything. Just an overall lack of socialization, grace and empathy.

Maybe it's boring to you because the characters' traits can be found all over the place in real life.
Show HN: AgentSDK-Swift – Build AI Agents in Native Swift
by fumitoito | 2025-04-11 00:35:31+00:00
I’ve been working on AgentSDK-Swift, a Swift implementation of OpenAI’s Agents SDK. It lets you build AI agents using native Swift code with tool definitions, real-time streaming, guardrails, and multi-agent handoffs.

The goal is to bring first-class agent development to Apple platforms, especially for native macOS/iOS apps that want to embed LLM-powered workflows without depending on Python bridges or Node wrappers.

Create agents with Swift functions as tools Add input/output guardrails Set up multi-agent handoffs for complex tasks Stream results in real-time

Here’s a simple example:

```swift let agent = Agent<Void>( name: "WeatherAssistant", instructions: "You are a helpful weather assistant." ).addTool(weatherTool)

let result = try await AgentRunner.run( agent: agent, input: "What's the weather like in San Francisco?", context: () ) print(result.finalOutput) ```

It’s still early days (Swift 6 required), but if you’re building LLM-native tools on Apple platforms, I’d love feedback and collaboration.

GitHub: https://github.com/fumito-ito/AgentSDK-Swift
by bradleyy | 2025-04-11 00:36:28+00:00
There are literally thousands. e.g. [1] [2] . Are you remotely serious about "free media"? There is no free media. Never was, not ever.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda_in_the_United_State... [2] https://www.wallis.rochester.edu/assets/pdf/wallisseminarser...