MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by tonymet | 2025-04-26 03:23:48+00:00
I tried volunteering and contributed a few thousand edits, and ended up brigaded into hours of silly reviews by sock puppets and their crony admins. The bureaucracy is nuttier than a Monty python sketch. Endless futile debates on talk pages.

It’s not supposed to have many rules (according to the Jimbo gospel), but admins apply policy pages as law , and given how many inane and convoluted policies there are, you can be censured for practically anything with the right quote. You can see these sockpuppet brigades watching and pouncing on the edit history of any semi controversial page.

It’s a pathetic monoculture that lacks any self awareness or sense of introspection. Critical discussions are quickly shut down and the authors are put into a penalty box.

Leadership needs to address the power dynamics, and come up with a better self regulating structure. Editors need to identify themselves and their agenda. Networks & brigades need to be monitored and shutdown using activity tracking.

Wikipedia’s social network is operating with 1990s era protocols but their influence via syndication on every common news surface means they are way too influential. Google, Alexa, LLMs and mainstream media all syndicate Wikipedia content as gospel. But the content is completely unregulated.

And don’t get me started on Wikimedia Foundation.
by zippyman55 | 2025-04-26 03:23:58+00:00
My observation at my employment was the separation w the IT people and the scientists. Also grouped apart from IT was the procurement, operations, etc. But the key observation I had was for social functions, such as a hike at the ocean, a BBQ, riding bikes at lunch, etc, the attendance ratios always demonstrated a very low turnout of IT people but high attendance from the others. The IT people always had too much work to do, too many deadlines, and broken things to address. The scientists and others could flex a lot more and it was much harder to pin them down to the potential improvements not made due to not aggressively working their issues.
by ninetyninenine | 2025-04-26 03:24:23+00:00
We're a small company. Definitely significantly less then 10k concurrent connections. I would say like 100 concurrent connections at most, 20 concurrent connections on average. Even at 10k concurrent connections you don't have to spin up a lambda. There is almost no case where you do unless you are using that lambda CPU to do blocking computations.

If your server is your typical crud server that hits a database, your database will be overwhelmed before your server gets hit to the point where it can't even wait.

It's not about respect, I don't mind the disrespect. It's more about how they're wrong and they don't realize it and this over engineering is pervasive in the industry.

I don't think you understanding how cheap it is on the CPU for a server to wait for an external IO call.
by gorgoiler | 2025-04-26 03:26:22+00:00
On the topic* of having 24 cores and wanting to put them to work: when I were a lad the promise was that pure functional programming would trivially allow for parallel execution of functions. Has this future ever materialized in a modern language / runtime?

x = 2 + 2 y = 2 * 2 z = f(x, y) print(z)

…where x and y evaluate in parallel without me having to do anything. Clojure, perhaps?

*And superficially off the topic of this thread, but possibly not.
by grishka | 2025-04-26 03:26:38+00:00
There is a permission to record the screen. It requires user consent and there's an icon in the status bar while it's being used. It's impossible to use this covertly.

What I believe the article is speaking about, is an app taking screenshots of its own windows. This is obviously possible and obviously requires no permissions whatsoever. Just make a screen-sized bitmap and do

getWindow().getDecorView().draw(new Canvas(bitmap));

It does sound believable that third-party advertising/marketing/tracking SDKs, which many apps are chock full of, could be doing this.
by maximinus_thrax | 2025-04-26 03:27:33+00:00
I'm fairly certain that a sitting judge who's a former president of the bar association knows the law better than you or me or Crack Patel and is more aware of the legal ramifications than random armchair lawyers.

From my personal armchair, this will go nowhere, the accusation has no basis. Something similar happened before and the charges were dropped. This was just an attempt to intimidate the judiciary. I hope the SCOTUS is happy with the monster they created.
by alganet | 2025-04-26 03:27:50+00:00
I also tend to be very skeptical towards popular sayings. Sometimes, they fail.

"true" in the sense you used here. Have you thought about what it means in that context?

We live in an age full of fear of missing out baits and reversed versions of such. There is no sense of "oh, this is good for me" that can be relied upon (implied in the original comment, you are going to find it), although there are sayings.
by gsf_emergency | 2025-04-26 03:30:01+00:00
And China's authoritarian governance would be mostly by trial ? :)

Snark aside, I am trying to engage in good faith to your comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43794764

Credible reports on the ground say that patent litigation in China (at least in some core cities) are now more efficient than in California.

So far, it's not so easy to see if China has indeed been successfully apeing California, just like Mr. Thiel hoped.
by acdha | 2025-04-26 03:30:28+00:00
You’re not arguing in good faith if you’re not recognizing that the “pandemic authoritarianism” started under Trump, or asserting that the lab leak theory was ever suppressed (it was continuously discussed throughout - just check the comments here for the last 5 years!) or that the most criticized theories making wild claims about bioweapons or gain of function research are now widely accepted. Many assessments have included the possibility of a lab leak of a natural specimen from the beginning, but in the absence of evidence nobody credible is saying more than, say, the CIA’s “low confidence” back in January.
by johnnyjeans | 2025-04-26 03:33:23+00:00
a prolog wizard crossing the path is an exceedingly rare and brilliant event, im compelled to make a wish upon this shooting star :3

> I remember a guy telling me the simplest exercise in some or other of the classic functional programming books is implementing Prolog in (some kind of) Lisp and it's so simple!

it's really easy to underestimate just how well engineered prolog's grammar is, because it's so deceptively simple. the only way you're getting simpler is like, assembly. and it's a turing equivalent kind of machine, but because if you squint your eyes you can delude yourself into thinking it kind of looks procedural, people can fool themselves into satisfaction that they "get" it, without actually getting it.

but the moment NAF and resolution as a concept clicks, it's like you brushed up against the third rail of the universe. it's insane to me we let these paradigms rot in the stuffy archives of history. the results this language pulls with natural language processing should raise any sensible person's alarm bells to maximum volume: something is Very Different here. if lisp comes from another planet, prolog came from an alternate dimension. technological zenith will be reached when we push a prolog machine into an open time-like curve and make our first hypercomputation.
by acdha | 2025-04-26 03:38:06+00:00
More accurately, they rejected the wave of people who tried to add that single word to characterize of his entire career but were not otherwise contributing anything to the article. There’s a good discussion here highlighting how they were looking for substantial improvements by people who were actually familiar with his work, not just trying to affix a label to someone they were otherwise unfamiliar with.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Rhododendrites#Don...
by Tycho | 2025-04-26 03:39:49+00:00
I recall right-leaning social media sites like Gab, Parler, r/TheDonald, Infowars being taken offline.

I can’t read the WP article because it’s paywalled, however I have been suspicious of Wikimedia for a long time. I used to donate to them thinking I was helping to keep the severs running, then being alarmed to find the money was going on all sorts of nonsense. The former CEO (Maher) was blatantly a political/intelligence operator. Fits the pattern of the establishment/powers-that-be abusing the NGO/non-profit sector to illicitly further their aims, so I’m not surprised the new DoJ are looking into them.
by old-gregg | 2025-04-26 03:39:52+00:00
Languages do not matter as much as you think. Ecosystems are everything. Twice in my life I started companies (the first one took all my life savings) and in both cases the right call was what you called an "inferior language".

I actually liked D very much, and WB had been a personal hero of mine when I was in college. But I am not betting my career on an ecosystem built around by a single brilliant guy. For high-stakes projects, a wise decision is building on a platform with several deep-pocketed backers.

And for toy/personal projects... do you even need a language anymore? Just ask your favorite LLM to generate you an executable which does what you want (partially joking here).
by stingraycharles | 2025-04-26 03:40:36+00:00
You are absolutely correct, which is why we switched auditors. We use a third party to verify compliance of all our cloud resources (SecureFrame), and one of their checks is that specific AWS WAF rulesets are enabled on e.g. CloudFront endpoints. These are managed rulesets by AWS.

We disabled this check, auditor swerved out of his lane, I spent more several hours explaining things he didn’t understand, and things resolved after our CEO had a call with him (you can imagine how the discussion went).

All in all, if the auditor would have been more reasonable it wouldn’t have been an issue, but I’ve always been wary of managed firewall rulesets because of this reason.
by rmason | 2025-04-26 03:40:54+00:00
Actually I meant it in a good way. To my knowledge there has never been a car company anywhere that was started by a female team.

Just checked with ChatGPT and it confirmed while there have been women involved with EV and battery startups there hasn't ever been an all female founder led car company. Now that Mary Barra became the CEO of GM it was wildly heralded that there was no longer a glass ceiling in the auto world. But I'd posit actually starting a company, raising money from investors like Jeff Bezos is taking it to another level.

The good news is that I don't think its the last new car company that will get started. I personally know of a guy in Ohio who wants to manufacture a car he built using a diesel engine that gets over 100 mpg and can beat both a Dodge Viper and a Tesla Model 3 to 60 mph.
by patch_collector | 2025-04-26 03:41:39+00:00
I tried to do exactly that once. I was offering between $20-$40 per image to make a few coloring pages as a mother's day gift for my wife. Not complex images either -- just basic coloring pages from photos of my wife and child, without backgrounds, for my kids to color in.

I reached out to multiple artists, and got one image back (from a good friend). I gave up on commissioning actual artists, and traced the images myself on a tablet. I imagine someone with the right knowledge of where to find artists and the willingness to wait on their schedule could have done it faster, but I'd have used this service if it had been around.
by ks2048 | 2025-04-26 03:42:14+00:00
Point taken, but I think my comment is a reflection of the problems with the modern use of "left" and "right".

Yes, of course NPR is more on the side of democrats than republicans.

But, it is very much pro-business, and often pro-war status quo ("right"). And, as I mentioned ("identity politics"), also very much pro-diversity in race/gender/etc. ("left").

So, IMHO, very much "centrist", not "left" (except on race/sex/gender).
by bruce511 | 2025-04-26 03:45:21+00:00
Your qualifying statement is found some heavy lifting.

First 'tech company' is a very narrow band. There are lots of companies that were founded to leverage technology, but which do not consider themselves 'tech' companies. We're, for example a services business, the service we provide happens to use tech we developed.

Second "of note" is very subjective. Do you mean billions of users? Global brand name? Thousands of workers? Because those are very high capital outcomes achieved either via long time (IBM?) or massive capital injection (which leads to very financial motivations.)

Of course there are zillions of my smaller 'less notable' businesses that exist all around you and me. You've never heard of the company I work for, but we're well known in our domain in our market. We've never taken outside investment, and we're free to make a lot of 'discretionary spending' that often serves a purpose other than increasing dividends.

For example we pay low-end workers (non techies) substantially more than market rate (aka minimum wage) because we belive in 'living wage' principles. That directly reduces profits, which we can do because the owners care about many things, and money is just one of them.

Of course the business has to be a business. Of course it has to make money. But money is like blood. You need it to live, but you don't live to make blood.
by nonethewiser | 2025-04-26 03:45:52+00:00
That is key indeed. But I'm not sure if it's key for the reason you believe. Its not a big deal that they didnt have a search warrant - they stayed in public areas. But it helps prove the intent of the judge to aid the escape of Ruiz.

The judge specifically clarified the type of warrant with the agents when she learned they were there. Then she escorted Ruiz out a path that she knew they could not legally be in.
by codingdave | 2025-04-26 03:46:51+00:00
> It's not about respect, I don't mind the disrespect.

But do they mind? Because so far you are saying anyone who doesn't agree with you doesn't understand. Sounds like while you might not mind being disrespected, you fail to realize that other people do mind.

You also clearly have an over-sized server if you think 10K concurrent connections can be covered on it. If that is true, you could save a heap of money by downgrading that server and going to lambdas. The more you defend your position, the less tenable it becomes.
by bb88 | 2025-04-26 03:46:55+00:00
> I don't see circuit-as-code taking off with humans anytime soon

I don't agree with this. Circuits aren't really anything more complex than anything else humanity has had to figure out. Most knowledge in this area seems solvable.

Maxwell's equations have been known for a century.

For whatever reason, Software Engineering and Hardware Engineering even though they rely upon the same fundamental physics, are so very different? And apparently can't be reconciled? No. I don't believe it.
by chubot | 2025-04-26 03:48:10+00:00
That looks more like a SIMD problem than a multi-core problem

You want bigger units of work for multiple cores, otherwise the coordination overhead will outweigh the work the application is doing

I think the Erlang runtime is probably the best use of functional programming and multiple cores. Since Erlang processes are shared nothing, I think they will scale to 64 or 128 cores just fine

Whereas the GC will be a bottleneck in most languages with shared memory ... you will stop scaling before using all your cores

But I don't think Erlang is as fine-grained as your example ...

Some related threads:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40130079

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31176264

AFAIU Erlang is not that fast an interpreter; I thought the Pony Language was doing something similar (shared nothing?) with compiled code, but I haven't heard about it in awhile
by ninetyninenine | 2025-04-26 03:48:52+00:00
No I seriously did not mean that. Basically global birth rates are declining. You can offset this decline in local microcosms via immigration but if global birth rates are declining inevitably the external sources will dry up. Lots of immigrants from say China coming to the US right? This props the US population up, but logically speaking Chinese birth rates are declining... So that means immigration won't last.

In fact, when immigration begins drying up, the US will become much much more open to it.
by acdha | 2025-04-26 03:48:54+00:00
Those sites weren’t taken offline by Democratic officials, they had to find new hosting after breaking the contracts they entered into with private companies. They were still free to move elsewhere, as they did, whereas in this case Wikipedia is being threatened with penalties for remaining in the country.

I would also note that the last straw for companies like Parler was involvement in a violent attempt to overthrow the government whereas in this case the objection appears to be constitutionally-protected speech. Again, those are nowhere near comparable situations. Where is something like, say, going after a right-wing non-profit because they published content which criticized Biden?
by kristopolous | 2025-04-26 03:50:22+00:00
It's pretty constant on hn. People paint everything from country X, holistically, with some broad and blunt moral brush.

It reads like a cartoon. Everything from China is loaded with secret spyware snooping on you for countless unspecified evils - everything out of Russia by anyone is part of some secret global propaganda network.

I point it out as absurd and reductive whenever I see it and people dogpile on me like I desecrated a sacred cow.

The world is incredibly complex and a simple label doesn't cut it. Wernher von Braun was a Nazi but that doesn't mean his work on rocketry was fictional lies.

You need to assess things based on the merits of the thing, not on any narratives of attributive associations you're choosing to assign.
by jdietrich | 2025-04-26 03:50:23+00:00
Twenty years ago, I think there was still a sense that we were collectively laughing with each other about the dullness of small towns. We all had the same shops - Woolworths, Dixons, Our Price, BHS. We all had a leisure centre that looked like everyone else's leisure centre. Some towns were better off than others, some towns had parts that you were better off avoiding after dark, but the majority of towns belonged to the same broad spectrum of bland mediocrity.

Today, I think it's clear who would be being laughed at by whom. The fates of places have so radically diverged that we no longer have a sense of collective identity. All of the places listed in Crap Towns are now unrecognisable, for better or worse. Those familiar shops are now gone; in some places they have been replaced by artisan bakeries and pop-up boutiques, while in others they have been replaced by charity shops or nothing at all. Half the leisure centres have shut and we all know which half.

The upper middle class might have become more humourless and puritanical, but I think that's a subconscious self-defence mechanism, a manifestation of noblesse oblige without real obligation. The working class are too angry to laugh and certainly aren't willing to be laughed at. We all know that we're teetering on the brink of a populist wave, but no-one in a position of power seems willing or able to do anything about it.
by lolive | 2025-04-26 03:50:24+00:00
There is this discussion going on on Slashdot right now: https://alterslash.org/#article-23675569

about the lack of AppleTV marketing support for one of its shows, called La Maison).

That opens an interesting discussion: the role of their influencers. Their choices can either bless or curse anyone’s work just by manipulating the word of mouth.

[which reminds me of that absolutely brilliant speech by Alan Moore, on « magic » : https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=k1qACd0wHd0]
by Defletter | 2025-04-26 03:50:26+00:00
Really wanted to like Dlang but I just did not have a good time with it.

One of my projects has a really simple server written in nodejs that's basically (in terms of complexity) just an auth'd chatroom, and I wanted to switch it from using raw tcp sockets to websockets. And since the server is so simple, why not refactor it to another language and see if there's no some performance gains from that? I ended up doing something pretty similar to that "Comparing 10 programming languages. I built the same app in all of them." video from Tom Delalande (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-MbTj8DGOP0). I had several working versions of the server in:

- Bun, using Bun APIs (https://bun.sh/docs/api/websockets)

- Dart, using Dart APIs (https://api.dart.dev/stable/latest/dart-io/WebSocket-class.h...)

- Java, using Java-WebSocket (https://github.com/TooTallNate/Java-WebSocket)

- Kotlin, using Ktor (https://start.ktor.io/p/ktor-websockets)

- Rust, using tokio-tungstenite (https://docs.rs/tokio-tungstenite/latest/tokio_tungstenite/i...)

- Zig, using websocket.zig (https://zigistry.dev/packages/karlseguin/websocket.zig/)

- D, using serverino (https://code.dlang.org/packages/serverino)

And Dlang was, by far, the worst experience out of the lot. Firstly is the lack of adequate, comprehensive, and centralised tooling. I almost gave up when dmd could not even compile a freshly init'd project. The impression I got is that you're not really meant to use dmd directly, you're meant to use dub, like how you compile Java projects with Maven/Gradle, not javac. Except that there's also apparently three competing compilers (https://wiki.dlang.org/Compilers)? And good luck remembering the names of the tooling because they're all some random three-letter combination.

Serverino makes heavy use of mixins and attributes (think Java annotations), which is not ideal. But what really killed the deal was (despite using the recommended intellij plugin (https://wiki.dlang.org/IDEs) with the recommended tools installed and setup) not being able to inspect[1] serverino's mixin or its attributes. So I look at serverino's source code, except its source also has mixins... which I can't inspect. I'm not going to use something when I cannot easily ascertain its control flow. And while, yes, I probably should have gone with vibe-d (https://code.dlang.org/packages/vibe-d%3Ahttp) in the first place, mixins and attributes are nonetheless part of the language and the tooling should be able to tell me about them.

- [1] When I say "inspect" I mean requesting the IDE to show me the source/definition so I can see what it is, what it does, and where it's known to be used.
by IggleSniggle | 2025-04-26 03:51:04+00:00
DNS lookups are still frequently in the clear, and even if they're not, that just means you're trusting some DNS-over-HTTPS provider. The incentives are perverse.

And of course whoever you are performing your search with, like, oh, an ad company like Google, Meta, or Facebook? They just might use that search data for something.
by thenberlin | 2025-04-26 03:51:29+00:00
Entirely uncritical state controlled or substantially aligned media masquerading as news is always bad and should be criticized. See also almost anyone called on in White House press briefings these days.

Plus, you are saying it like all propaganda is somehow the same. Rosie the Riveter != "Russia isn't going to do anything...well, it's America's fault...NATO something something...actually, Ukraine basically deserved it."