MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by wredcoll | 2025-04-07 20:02:12+00:00
> This is a horrible authoritarian justification. People shouldn't be made to starve so they can appreciate the gruel they are given versus having nothing. We should have a functional, efficient, and pleasant government that isn't adversarial to the general population.

We absolutely should. Do you think elon musk is on his way to accomplishing that? I sure don't.

Like, yes, there are things and situations that absolutely suck dealing with the government. They also suck dealing with corporations and neighbors and anything else involving humans.

The answer is to fix the problems.

Filing taxes is an easy and obvious pain point. It's annoying and tedious and wastes a ton of money that could be automated away by a more efficient and pleasant government.

Here's the actual history of how that's gone:

Democrats: the IRS has started to create electronic versions of the forms people can use to file their taxes without involving a tax prepaper.

Republicans: “We don’t want the tax system to be simple. We want it to be hard so that people realize how much they’re paying.”

> In December 2024, Representative Adrian Smith (R-NE), along with 27 House Republicans, urged President-elect Donald Trump to terminate the IRS's free tax filing service, known as Direct File, on his first day in office. They expressed concerns that the program could lead to government overreach into tax preparation services

> In June 2024, House Republicans introduced a policy rider in the Financial Services and General Government Appropriations Bill aiming to eliminate funding for the IRS's Direct File program. This move was part of a broader effort to prevent the IRS from developing its own tax preparation software, reflecting concerns about government competition with private tax preparation companies.

Are the democrats amazing angels who will solve everything if given power? Obviously not. Are they at least making some small amounts of progress? YES. The republicans are out here actively trying to go BACKWARDS.

Again, and I cannot stress this enough, the answer to problems with government is to fix them. It's possible that the fix in some situations is for the agency/rule/etc to stop existing, but that decision should probably be made by someone with at least an average level IQ and possibly empathy.
by m463 | 2025-04-07 20:02:48+00:00
basically. A heavy duty strip with an AC power plug, many spaced-out full-power USB ports for charging stuff. Same form factor as an AC power strip, with feet or even those cutouts on the back for attaching to screws on wall or desk.

I have so many devices now that take USB for power. Camera battery chargers. Flashlights. power banks. plenty more I can't think of.
by VohuMana | 2025-04-07 20:02:52+00:00
As someone who has conducted interviews with candidates almost certainly using AI in both the phone screen and coding portion. The biggest giveaway is the inability to explain the why of things. Even some of the simple things like "why did you initialize that class member in this method rather than in the constructor?"

I think at this point we are in a world where the cat is out of the bag and it's not are you or are you not using AI but how are you using it. I personally don't care if a candidate wants to use AI but be up front about it and make sure you still understand what it is doing. If you can't explain what the code it generated is doing an why then you won't be able to catch the mistakes it will eventually make.
by renerick | 2025-04-07 20:03:00+00:00
It's really not that long. Once you figure out that

1. jj operates on revisions. Changes to revisions are tracked automatically whenever you run jj CLI

2. revisions are mutable and created before starting working on a change (unlike immutable commits, created after you are done)

3. you are not working on a "working directory" that has to be "commited", you are just editing the latest revision

everything just clicks and feels very natural and gets out of the way. Want to create a new revision, whether it's merge, a new branch, or even insert a revision between some other revisions? That's jj new. Want to move/reorder revisions? That's jj rebase. Want to squash or split revisions? That's jj squash and jj split respectively. A much more user-friendly conflict resolution workflow is a really nice bonus (although, given that jj does rebasing automatically, it's more of a requirement)

One notably different workflow difference, is absence of branches in the git sense and getting used to mainly referring individual revisions, but after understanding things above, such workflow makes perfect sense.
by hn_throwaway_99 | 2025-04-07 20:03:07+00:00
I realize I may not be the average consumer, but I love Impossible Burgers. I generally try to limit my intake of mammalian meat for animal welfare reasons, but I've found no other alternative satiates that "red meat craving" like an Impossible burger can for me.

I love chocolate, and while I'm skeptical this will taste like my favorite dark chocolate, I'm open-minded that it could be a viable substitute on some occasions.
by jesuslop | 2025-04-07 20:03:15+00:00
Leibniz wrote "I have often said: 'Aurum latere in stercore illo scholastico barbarico'; {there is gold hidden in all that barbaric scholastic crap} and I wish that some skillful man could be found, versed in this Irish and Spanish philosophy, who would have the inclination and ability to extract what is good from it. I am sure his work would be rewarded with many beautiful and important truths".

I'm not pasting the walltext full quote, but there's also in it mention of Perennis quaedam philosophia. The first one? Don't have the book in digital, for the full quote in Spanish, Google sent me here: http://dx.doi.org/10.12795/Vico.2020.i34.03.

[1] New Essays on Human Understanding, 1704
by otherayden | 2025-04-07 20:03:26+00:00
Such a rich UI like google sheets seems like a bad use case for such a general "browser automation" MCP server. Would be cool to see an MCP server like this, but with specific tools that let the LLM read and write to google sheets cells. I'm sure it would knock these tasks out of the park if it had a more specific abstraction instead of generally interacting with a webpage
by TheAmazingRace | 2025-04-07 20:03:58+00:00
This is quite a neat story. Thanks for sharing!

I also heard that Bobby Kotick of Activision infamy was planning to buy Commodore back in the early 90s, only to be rebuffed by Irving and Co.

Although I'm not a personal fan of Bobby, I'm sure his leadership would have been a sorry sight better than the dumpster fire at Commodore back then.
by fmstephe | 2025-04-07 20:05:06+00:00
Location: New Zealand, Manawatu Remote: Yes Willing to relocate: No Technologies: Go, Java, Git, Erlang, Postgres, Linux Resume: https://www.linkedin.com/in/francis-stephens/ Email: francisstephens@gmail.com

I work primarily on backend systems, with a strong focus on performance and system stability/resilience. I worked as a performance engineer at the mobile add-attribution company Adjust.

Some interesting open-source projects include

https://github.com/fmstephe/memorymanager An exploratory manual memory allocator for building large in-memory data structures with near zero GC cost.

https://github.com/fmstephe/matching_engine A financial trading matching engine with a somewhat novel red+black tree implementation.

https://github.com/fmstephe/flib A set of packages primarily in support of a lock-free single-producer single-consumer queue.

My ideal position would be working on backend systems primarily in Go.
by tverbeure | 2025-04-07 20:05:07+00:00
I’m all for speed bumps but I could imagine issues with an Amazon speed jump being out of spec/poorly made resulting is durability issues that make the plastic break and create shards, being too slippery causing issues when bicycles ride over it. Stuff like that.

And litigious people are almost certainly more imaginative about these things than you and me.
by dllu | 2025-04-07 20:05:22+00:00
Anecdotally, using Darktable, I could never get as good of a demosaicing result as using the straight-out-of-camera JPEGs from my Fujifilm GFX 100S. In challenging scenarios such as fine diagonal lines, Darktable's algorithms such as LMMSE would add a lot of false colour to the image.

However, modern deep learning-based joint demosaicing and denoising algorithms handily outperform Darktable's classical algorithms.
by notpushkin | 2025-04-07 20:05:37+00:00
Yeah, you’re technically right (the best kind of right!) — on both counts.

However, if I understand everything correctly (IANAL), personal liability is basically the same. If you go for 2500 € capital and your company becomes undercapitalized, you’ll still be personally liable for any claims against your company, no?

(But personally, I just like how this opens opportunities even for people for whom 2500 € is a serious amount of money. Granted, you probably shouldn’t open up a company in this kind of situation, but at least you can!)
by dfabulich | 2025-04-07 20:05:58+00:00
Luxurious margins make it possible to promote a luxury story. Think like Häagen-Dazs.

> "Häagen-Dazs" is an invented pseudo-Scandinavian phrase coined by the American Reuben Mattus, in a quest for a brand name that he claimed was Danish-sounding.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H%C3%A4agen-Dazs
by sysrestartusr | 2025-04-07 20:06:04+00:00
> shady practices that really scared me away and assume I'm not a rare case either.

Definitely not the only one, which is ground for discourse, and a source for content, money, critical thinking, improvement and cognitive and linguistic mechanics that help others find their POV ...

... it's not just what it is, it's mostly what it is not and if you can put it in words and or find creators with guts, turn it into a sweeper ...
by TuringTest | 2025-04-07 20:06:08+00:00
The article is deliberately ignoring the history of software, which in the 90's gave a very clear definition of "open source" by the OSI as a synonym of "free software", which also historically means the four freedoms defined by Richard Stallman.

You may want to ignore what words have come to mean and try to derive a literal meaning from their constituent words, but then you need to fight established common use.
by JeremyNT | 2025-04-07 20:06:19+00:00
Say what you will about Clinton, but slashing the military budget is what made the math actually work, and lead to a budget surplus. The austerity and efficiency stuff was peanuts in comparison.

Clinton's cuts were ultimately only temporary, since the military-industrial complex got fat again in the post 9/11 gold rush. A correction is long overdue.

That this isn't really even considered is pretty telling about the real motivations of the current regime.
by dovin | 2025-04-07 20:06:36+00:00
Location: Portland, OR

Remote: yes

Willing to relocate: yes, to SF, NYC, Berlin, London, and possibly other EU cities

Technologies and tools: Python, TypeScript, AWS (+ a few certs), React, llama.cpp / local LLMs, Ansible, HIPAA certified, experience with HL7 and EMR/EHR, competent in a wetlab

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1T_t6Gkib3DCQ1oryyH0oc11XifM...

Email: see resume

Hey there! I'm Rowan. I have ~8 years experience in life sciences startups and research: I built and led the software team at molecular diagnostics lab, built an award-winning synthetic bio video game, and have worked with startups and major research groups like at Stanford Health. Recent work of mine: published a survey of semantic search engines for science and soon to launch a climate data research & analysis agent.
by tudorgirba | 2025-04-07 20:07:30+00:00
In Glamorous Toolkit we have extensive infrastructure to interoperate with Rust. In fact, the main app is a Rust app that relies on several other Rust plugins. The Pharo Virtual Machine is used as a library :).

I enjoy your comparison with Docker. Indeed, the comparison to what you know is inevitable and it works quite well for incremental news. It works less well for new. But it's still on us, the authors, to try to find ways to communicate differently to appeal to a larger audience especially as our goal is to educate. I am also of the opinion that the most interesting path is to get someone to create outsized value that cannot be ignored. Our current focus is to find those initial someones :).
by lurking_swe | 2025-04-07 20:07:40+00:00
it’s only effective because disney has high paying customers and disney wants to please them. i have no idea why you think that would generalize to the general public.

why would a private company, put in charge by the government, not do the bare minimum to maintain their contract, and pocket the rest as profit? Disney isn’t maintaining their potholes out of the goodness of their hearts.
by otherayden | 2025-04-07 20:08:06+00:00
I literally started working on the same exact idea last night haha. Great work OP. I'm curious, how are you feeding the web data to the LLM? Are you just passing the entire page contents to it and then having it interact with the page based on CSS selectors/xpath? Also, what are your thoughts on letting it do its own scripting to automate certain tasks?
by DeborahEmeni_ | 2025-04-07 20:08:21+00:00
The “holding a button” thing actually resonated. It feels like the real work here is engineering the reward structure to make exploration even remotely viable. Dreamer’s world model might be cool, but most of the heavy lifting still seems to come from how forgiving the Minecraft environment is for training.

I do wonder though: if you swapped Minecraft for a cloud-based synthetic world with similar physics but messier signals, like object permanence or social reasoning, would Dreamer still hold up? Or is it just really good at the kind of clean reward hierarchies that games offer?
by foobahify | 2025-04-07 20:08:49+00:00
Same in 2001. Took 8 months to get my first job. I started the hunt after graduation to avoid job interviews interfering with study (an 1 hr interview would be a 1 day affair with commuting).

Had I got a job before I graduated that company may well have gone bust or laid people off anyway.

Had some bad interviews including being beaten by a other candidate on a job writing access databases for a 1 person business, and a job where they said they interview girls to see what they look like (not a girl but was disgusted... I carried on the process anyway because need $)
by m463 | 2025-04-07 20:09:19+00:00
That's the kind of nonsense thinking that leads to folks like apple removing critical features that "noone uses".

reminds me of that yogi berra quote "nobody goes there anymore, it's too crowded"

For example, many people don't even understand target disk mode on apple hardware, but it has saved me countless hours over the years and made administering apple systems a breeze. Ask people who've used target display mode if they can imagine going without it.

on another subject - it's worth mentioning that time machine is based on rsync.
by jokellum | 2025-04-07 20:09:21+00:00
I'm sorry, like the other comment said you're still both-sides-ing.

States / cities (democrat or republican) sent riot police, which is something they have always done. How they handled protests is worth criticism e.g. I don't like that they use curfews to suddenly make protesters breaking the law. I don't like the use of tear gas on otherwise peaceful protestors. As a note, these are state / city officials not federal guidance typically.

However,

The current administration, Donald Trump, the president of the united states, and the top most members of his cabinet, as a federal, top-down policy will:

- Automatically identify protesters

- Arrest them for simply saying things the admin doesn't like.

- Bypass due-process.

- Will ship them to a gulag outside of the united states.

- Are on track to be found in contempt of court for refusing to bring back a lawful resident.

Both sides are not the same here. Name me a democrat president who has done equal or worse what the trump admin has done.
by ghaff | 2025-04-07 20:09:34+00:00
And people may lean on their networks more (though they already do).

I do agree that there’s no reason face to face interviews shouldn’t be the norm again after an initial screen.

If some of those things don’t appeal to some candidates? <shrug> I don’t totally mean that. But some practices should be the default even if some candidates don’t really like them (and even if they’re less convenient or more costly for hiring managers.)

Not sure about the suit at a lot of tech companies but dressing neatly and even throwing on a sports jacket probably doesn’t hurt.
by iSnow | 2025-04-07 20:09:44+00:00
Well, even more recent reports from Germany also claim that wolves are damn clever to cope even with e-fences. Unfortunately, the question of wild wolves roaming the country now has become a cultural war issue where you can easily guess the left/right divide.

For our ecosystem, a well-managed wolf population is probably a good thing, but rationality is about to go out the window over here. Of course, wolves do not slaughter herds out of pure fun, but also true is that the can wreak quite a bit of economic damage if they break into a holding pen.
by nyrikki | 2025-04-07 20:09:53+00:00
I have so much fun with my PiDP-11 that this will have to go on the list.

Does anyone know if MIDAS has been recreated for it or not?

A bit of the hint on the PPT reader, which would be awesome, the rp2xxx chips PIO can handle that with ease. As the PDP1 doesn't have take-up it is pretty trivial to make at 'historic' speeds. Obviously punching is much more difficult.

I looked into it for quite a bit, but not having access to tapes, puncher, supplies etc... I gave up on the idea as the PiDP-10 will scratch my personal nostalgia itch a bit more right now.
by neilv | 2025-04-07 20:10:18+00:00
Is that because

* they don't trust their interviewers to be professional and objective, or

* they're trying to have a EEOC CYA paper trail that says they make efforts to be unbiased, or

* DEI motivated (e.g., not everyone has the advantage of good past experience as a starting point for conversations), or

* some other HR theory?
by dfawcus | 2025-04-07 20:10:38+00:00
It is possibly to earn over £100k as a software engineer employee in the UK, however those tend to be very specialised fields. (Not all of them are finance related).

I do recall a software manager (OK apples to oranges) grumbling about 10 years ago about him exceeding that level, and having to play games to avoid being bit by the tax impact which cuts in between £100k and £125k.

That said, I do know engineers who indicate they earn in excess of £100k, and they're not lead nor founder level - just experienced in the appropriate area.
by AstroBen | 2025-04-07 20:11:01+00:00
There are other forces acting on the movie industry. The rise of streaming killing DVD sales, YouTube and tiktok competition for attention etc. lowered their revenue a lot leading to a lot less ability to take risks on new ideas that may or may not sell well

Actually the opposite of what you think might come to happen. If you lower the barrier to entry for creating a movie, we might see a lot more creative ideas coming from people that would never have the chance before
by stevesimmons | 2025-04-07 20:11:01+00:00
I remember it by heart too, from 38 years ago. Plus most of "O Sirmio, gem of islands and peninsulas, every one of which Neptune, in his dual role, supports in the liquid lakes and vast seas...".

That was thanks to a mid winter Catullus test that got delayed several times due to flu circulating in our year 11 class. By the time everyone was finally back in school, we'd revised it something like 5 times and knew all the set poems off by heart.
by dovin | 2025-04-07 20:11:11+00:00
SEEKING WORK | Portland, Oregon | Remote: yes

Technologies: Python, TypeScript, AWS (+ a few certs), React, Ansible, MCP, HIPAA certified, experience with HL7 and EMR/EHR

Hi, I'm Rowan. Would love to hear from you if you're working on data retrieval for agents. Previously built and led software teams, currently working on composing / semi-autonomous LLMs and climate data knowledge retrieval.

Resume: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1T_t6Gkib3DCQ1oryyH0oc11XifM...
by milesrout | 2025-04-07 20:11:24+00:00
It isn't "your data". Which pages you have viewed on my website is my data. It relates to you but is does not belong to you.

You don't have any privacy right to control data that belongs to other people and happens to relate to you. Privacy is about the state needing a warrant to enter your home and search it or to wiretap you. The idea it has anything to do with information you GIVE to websites by visiting them is a complete delusion.
by IAmBroom | 2025-04-07 20:12:07+00:00
Now you're tilting at imaginary windmills. No one is "telling me what I can and cannot do because you disagree."

I'm simply pointing out it has zero net effect on the problem. It's like trying to stop an island from being flooded by rising sea levels, using a bucket brigade. It's not "better than doing nothing!"; it is doing something that achieves nothing.

Go ahead with your buckets if you want to. Buy them in pretty colors with flowers around the top. Have fun.

But it won't stop the tide.
by sapiogenesis | 2025-04-07 20:13:25+00:00
25% and 75% would sound identical alone, but in a mix there often are interplays where it can create a difference. An easy way to hear it is to run two synced oscillators, say a square and a saw, with sharp attack. The resulting sound should be sufficiently different, one side would dampen the attack compared to the other. Furthermore, I think in hardware synths and those that emulate them changing pulse width can cause the module to implicitly shift the signal up or down to ensure consistent average voltage, further complicating things. I am curious what you mean by compression.
by zenolijo | 2025-04-07 20:13:34+00:00
A lot of things are happening, this company is just doing a little part of it and that's alright.

China have ambitious plans to carbon neutral by 2050 and the US had plans to... ok maybe the US is a bit stuck for the moment but it seems like at least some states seem to care.

What's important is that people show that investing in environmental-friendly companies is worthwhile. Right now that is not usually the case unless there's some kind of state/government incentive. And no, incentives are not bad since the option of polluting also has a cost, the only difference is that the cost of polluting is a long-term loan that it growing and is already hard to pay off.
by aap_ | 2025-04-07 20:13:36+00:00
There are some versions of MIDAS around on bitsavers but I have to admit i haven't really looked into them much yet. Gotta leave something to the community, right? (or so i tell myself...). Another thing is that not all PDP-1s were the same and especially the PDP-1/X at MIT was a super hacked up version. Any code for that will not run my emulation (at least for now).

A real tape reader would be great and is something we are considering for the future, but without a punch it's not very satisfying. There will be a paper tape visualization though (currently writing the code for that).
by eesmith | 2025-04-07 20:13:46+00:00
> Apple iOS led smartphones until Google made Android free and open source, enabling manufacturers and developers worldwide

This is the Android which Google is now developing in private (https://www.androidauthority.com/google-android-development-... ), and which uses specialized security hardware so app developers can override your decision to run the app on a de-Googled Android phone, right?

> Gumroad: An e-commerce platform that allows creators to sell digital and physical products directly to their audience. Now open source!

Ahh, yes, the company whose CEO is DOGE operative at the VA. https://www.wired.com/story/doge-department-of-veterans-affa...

Geopolitical indeed.