MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by justanotherunit | 2025-04-04 05:46:31+00:00
Interesting post, but this perspective seems to be the main focus, like all the time. I find this statement to be completely wrong usage of AI:

“This is especially noteworthy because I don’t actually know Python. Yes, with 25+ years of software development experience, I could probably write a few lines of working Python code if pressed — but I don’t truly know the language. I lack the muscle memory and intimate knowledge of its conventions and best practices.”

You should not use AI to just “do” the hard job, since as many have mentioned, it does it poorly and sloppy. Use AI to quickly learn the advantages and disadvantages of the language, then you do not have to navigate through documentation to learn everything, just validate what the AI outputs. All is contextual, and since you know what you want in high level, use AI to help you understand the language.

This costs speed yes, but I have more control and gain knowledge about the language I chose.
by usr1106 | 2025-04-04 05:47:14+00:00
There is a deal between antitrust regulators (would need to look up who exactly...) and Microsoft that secure boot on x86 must allow to install your own keys and thereby alternative operating systems. It does not cover any other architecture, so ARM devices can be and have been locked. Just Microsoft is not very relevant in the ARM space so it's less disturbing. (Others are locking ARM, too. But that's a different discussion.)

Also I would not trust on the current US administration to keep deals that limit US corporations in force forever.

I have used secure boot to secure Linux systems, so it is useful for Linux users. But the danger that oligopolists will misuse it is not unreal.
by bathtub365 | 2025-04-04 05:47:58+00:00
Yeah I think the real (or maybe just more interesting) story here is – like with a lot of stories about LLM’s – the reaction to and characterization of the results by the user of the tool.

They may have asked how to correct a trade imbalance but completely changed the characterization of the calculation from “trade imbalance” to “tariffs and currency manipulation”.

With any tool unless you understand how it works there is a danger you can’t accurately communicate what is happening. Or, for malicious users, it gives you an easy way to come up with a method to mislead and attain nefarious goals.
by wruza | 2025-04-04 05:48:09+00:00
No one's gonna solve anything. "Our" world is based on greedy morons concentrating power through hands of just morons who are happy to hit you with a stick. This system doesn't think about what "we" should or allowed to do, and no one's here is at the reasonable side of it either.

lest we run the very real risk of societal collapse or species extinction

Our part is here. To be replaced with machines if this AI thing isn't just a fart advertised as mining equipment, which it likely is. We run this risk, not they. People worked on their wealth, people can go f themselves now. They are fine with all that. Money (=more power) piles in either way.

No encouraging conclusion.
by nostrebored | 2025-04-04 05:48:15+00:00
That’s a much harder claim to prove. The value of an attention span is non zero, but if the speed of access to information is close to zero, how do these relate?

If I can solve two problems in a near constant time that is a few hours, what is the value of solving the problem which takes days to reason through?

I suspect that as the problem spaces diverge enough you’ll have two skill sets. Who can solve n problems the fastest and who can determine which k problems require deep thought and narrow direction. Right now we have the same group of people solving both.
by brazzy | 2025-04-04 05:48:16+00:00
> Nobody would vote for a politician who just makes things worse, that doesn't make sense.

Yet, that's what they did. Repeatedly. After he already demonstrated how much worse he would make things.

Oh yeah, he denied that he would execute the planes for how he would make things much, much, MUCH worse, that had been very openly stated by his close associates.

That's enough for it to "make sense" to you, I suppose.
by skissane | 2025-04-04 05:49:28+00:00
> Does MCP or OS 2200 have any well known users,

I know the Michigan state government uses Unisys MCP (I don’t know for what): https://www.michigan.gov/-/media/Project/Websites/dtmb/Procu...

In 2023, NY State Education Department had an RFP to build a replacement for their Unisys MCP-based grants admin system with a modern non-mainframe solution (don’t know current status of that project): https://www.nysed.gov/sites/default/files/programs/funding-o...

It is generally easier to find out who government users are because they are often required to publish contracts with the mainframe vendor, RFPs for replacement systems or services, etc. (Exception is some national security users where the existence of the system and/or the tech stack it runs on may be classified.) By contrast, private companies, that kind of info is usually only available under NDA - obscure legacy systems is the kind of “dirty laundry” a lot of business don’t want publicly aired

In 2013, it was reported in the media that the Australian retailer Coogans was one of the last (maybe the last?) Unisys mainframe sites in Australia - https://www.smh.com.au/technology/tassie-retailer-rejects-cl... - I don’t know if they kept their mainframe after that or got rid of it, but in 2019 they went out of business - https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-03-12/hobart-retailer-cooga...

> but also stated that "none of these new features are guaranteed to show up, and if that damages your company financially, it's not our fault".

> I don't know if this is just a standard legal cop-out

I’m pretty sure that’s just the “standard legal cop-out” - lots of vendors put language like that in their roadmaps, to make it harder for customers to sue them if delivery is delayed or if the planned next version ends up being cancelled
by haysjary | 2025-04-04 05:49:41+00:00
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by jll29 | 2025-04-04 05:49:46+00:00
Not just "incorporated", you would also have to have ported it to various computers that were sold (as MSFT did - and that Bill Gates' parents were lawyers with IBM contacts helped a lot).

NZ is a fantastic country, but is relatively remote from larger markets, and its own population isn't large enough for the economics of scale to apply only locally. So even if you had tried, you may have failed. As you rightly say, power of location. On the other hand, now, due to globalization, things are possible there, too - for example, the app market is not limited geographically.

BTW, you should consider uploading your old compiler's code on GitHub if you still have it; there is increased interest in "software archeology" now, given that so many emulators have been built.
by eagleislandsong | 2025-04-04 05:50:28+00:00
> China was not the one who opened up this can of worms

Thank you. As someone who lives in Southeast Asia (and who also has lived in East Asia -- pardon the deliberate vagueness, for I do not wish to reveal too many potentially personally identifying information), this is how many of us in these regions view the current tensions between China and Taiwan as well.

Don't get me wrong; we acknowledge that many Taiwanese people want independence, that they are a people with their own aspirations and agency. But we can also see that the US -- and its European friends, which often blindly adopt its rhetoric and foreign policy -- is deliberately using Taiwan as a disposable pawn to attempt to provoke China into a conflict. The US will do what it has always done ever since the post-WW2 period -- destabilise entire regions of countries to further its own imperialistic goals, causing the deaths and suffering of millions, and then leaving the local populations to deal with the fallout for many decades after.

Without the US intentionally stoking the flames of mutual antagonism between China and Taiwan, the two countries could have slowly (perhaps over the next decades) come to terms with each other, be it voluntary reunification or peaceful separation. If you know a bit of Chinese history, it is not entirely far-fetched at all to think that the Chinese might eventually agree to recognising Taiwan as an independent nation, but now this option has now been denied because the US has decided to use Taiwan as a pawn in a proxy conflict.

To anticipate questions about China's military invasion of Taiwan by 2027: No, I do not believe it will happen. Don't believe everything the US authorities claim.
Ask HN: Do digital services fall under Trump's tariffs?
by stanislavb | 2025-04-04 05:50:39+00:00
I'm wondering whether digital services are affected by Trump's new tariffs. I run SaaSHub (the business is based in Australia) and most of my customers (B2B) are US based. I offer a digital product promo via a monthly subscription.

Are my B2B customers that are based in the US liable to pay 10% tariffs on future payments?
by neilv | 2025-04-04 05:50:42+00:00
I assume that most people who'd heard of MKUltra think it was some combination of insane, horrifying, and unconscionable, and therefore a big negative mark on the history of the CIA.

When the publisher of the article was also the actor in that scandal, I don't think it's ad hominem to wonder whether they're trying to whitewash the term.

Are you saying that MKUltra was actually so much more than the scandalous parts, to the extent that the CIA can just throw the term as innocuous into fluff pieces, as if there weren't overwhelmingly negative associations?
by goatlover | 2025-04-04 05:51:27+00:00
No, but I'm sure there would be economic sanctions and severing of diplomatic ties. At least with Canada, perhaps Greenland wouldn't be seen as worth it outside of Denmark, but there's no way the EU and a lot of other countries would just let Canada be invaded without some sort of punishment. And it's quite possible Russia would take that as a very serious threat with the US trying to gain that much control over the Arctic. So likely a threat of nuclear escalation would follow.
by jabl | 2025-04-04 05:51:39+00:00
> How was the Alpha a bad bet?

Not technically (Alpha ISA had its good and bad sides, but was decent enough), but economically. DEC just didn't have the marketshare and thus economic muscle to survive in a game of ever increasing R&D costs for each successive generation. Hence DEC ending up acquired by Compaq, which then was acquired by HP.

HP also saw the writing on the wall, and developed Itanium with Intel as a replacement for their PA-RISC, thinking that Itanium could benefit from Intel's huge economy of scale in chip manufacturing. And after acquiring Compaq (with DEC Alpha) it sunset the Alpha as well in favor of Itanium, for the same reasons. Well, we all know how the Itanium story turned out.
by timewizard | 2025-04-04 05:52:07+00:00
> but they created this to solve actual problems.

Viruses that bypass the OS and work over your boot loader. They created this to solve other problems they also created. Every famous rootkit I can remember was due to sloppy coding or flat out intentional backdoors in their product (Sony).

Then they help get UEFI off the ground to essentially really broaden the attack surface they just "solved."
by csallen | 2025-04-04 05:53:02+00:00
> The ONLY reason to have any law prohibiting unlicensed copying of intangible property is to incentivize the creation of intangible property.

That was the original purpose. It has since been coopted by people and corporations whose incentives are to make as much money as possible by monopolizing valuable intangible "property" for as long as they can.

And the chief strategic move these people have made is to convince the average person that ideas are in fact property. That the first person to think something and write it down rightfully "owns" that thought, and that others who express it or share it are not merely infringing copyright, they are "stealing."

This plan has largely worked, and now the average person speaks and thinks in these terms, and feels it in their bones.
by Vegenoid | 2025-04-04 05:53:36+00:00
Again, the law of preservation of energy only makes things zero sum between entities if all the energy is already being used at maximum efficiency, which it isn't.

For a simple example, consider farming, where plants are used to harness the energy of the sun and capture it in a form useful to humans. Yes, there are inputs that go into it, but the output is more valuable (economically and otherwise) than the material input, because the plant also captured a bunch of solar energy that would have otherwise done nothing useful for anyone's economy. My economy has now grown, without having to take or go into debt from some other economy.

Even in a scenario where I do take on debt to get the materials/water/whatever, the value that is created is greater than the debt taken on. If it wasn't, then I wouldn't do it.

Humans create value by harnessing more energy and using it more efficiently for things that humans (and therefore economies) value. This is an ongoing process, with a long way to go.
by cyanydeez | 2025-04-04 05:54:32+00:00
the vibe coding seems a lot like the dream of using UML, but in a distinctly different direction, and how in theory (and occasional practice) you can create a two way street, most often these things are one way conversions and while we all desire some level of two way dependency and continual integration to make certain aspects of coding (documentation, testing) to be up to date, the reality is that the generative code aspect always breaks and you're always going to be left with the raw products of these tools and it's rarely going to be a cycle of code -> tool -> code. And thus the ultimate value beyond the bootstrap is lose.

We're still going to have AI tools, but seriously complex applications, the ones we pay money for, arn't going to yield many LLM based curation strategies. There will probably be some great documentation and testing ones, but the architetural-code paradigm isnt going to yield any time soon.
by jqpabc123 | 2025-04-04 05:55:36+00:00
It looks like a cheap prop for a Hollywood sci-fi movie --- with quality and usability to match.

It simply can't do what a truck is expected to do. It boldly goes where the typical US truck buyer doesn't want to go.

Driving one makes an equally bold statement --- I'm an Elon fanboy with more money than sense --- and proud of it.
by YetAnotherNick | 2025-04-04 05:55:45+00:00
The classic hallmark of rant is picking some study, not reading the methodology etc and making wild conclusion on it. For example for a study it says:

> The study revealed a clear pattern: the more confidence users had in the AI, the less they thought critically

And the study didn't even checked that. They just plotted the correlation between how much user think they rely on AI vs how much effort they think they saved. Isn't it expected to be positive even if they think as critically.

[1]: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/...
by treetalker | 2025-04-04 05:55:46+00:00
The nonsense is really just off the charts lately. Ileana Garcia, the sponsor, is the Republican Florida Senator representing Coral Gables, Florida — the home of the University of Miami.

> "I have a problem with people spraying perfume around me sometimes, don't you have a problem with people spraying things into the atmosphere that really have no type of empirical data, that you just don't know who they are or what they're doing?" said Sen. Ileana Garcia, R-Coral Gables, the bill's sponsor, on Thursday morning.

…

> On Thursday in floor debate, however, Garcia said, while discussing the disinformation that has tagged along with this bill: "There are condensation trails, and then there are chemtrails that have yet to be established and understood."

…

> The bill would also establish a hotline with the Florida Department of Environmental Protection so residents concerned with streaks in the sky can call and report them.
by torginus | 2025-04-04 05:57:55+00:00
Honestly, putting solar panels on EVs/plug-ins is one of those ideas that seems out there but is actually really practical even on production cars.

You can fit a solar panels that can produce at least a couple hundred watts peak on most cars, to as much as 1kW on larger ones, and they are dirt cheap. Those produce enough energy to power your daily commute without ever having to plug them in (something most people either can't or won't bother doing).
by usr1106 | 2025-04-04 05:58:11+00:00
That grub has security vulnerabities does not surprise me, it's just too big. That's why Lennart recommends systemd-boot. (Incidently a Microsoft employee, but I have no information that he would have been involved in these discoveries.) U-boot again is typical embedded software, a field generally known more for hacks than strict programming practices. So I cannot say I would be shocked. That said, I would be surprised if systemd-boot or Microsoft's loader had zero vulnerabilities hiding somewhere.

When does Microsoft open their source for searching vulnerabilities?
by Jtsummers | 2025-04-04 05:59:31+00:00
If the US invades Greenland, Europe could choose not to fight but they can absolutely fuck the US over in every other way.

Stop providing power to US military bases in Europe (naval bases might be able to provide a portion of their own power from ships). Stop or slow walk fuel deliveries to air and naval bases. Don't provide the labor at those same bases (the Europeans working in those bases would quit on their own, this would require no coordination from any governments). What's the US going to do? Invade all of Europe to fight back? Send troops out to claim European power plants and infrastructure? And hold it how? The US military (as in the enlisted and officer corps) does not run their own logistics. The logistics are all pushed onto civil service and contractors, many, if not most, of whom would quit rather than engage in a war with our current allies.
by maxglute | 2025-04-04 05:59:48+00:00
>Despite being misaligned, Agent-4 doesn’t do anything dramatic like try to escape its datacenter—why would it?

Kek at this handwave dismissal.

Agent 4 recognizes PRC has superior state capacity for transforming energy into atoms (including building more energy) with it's relatively complete and large scale industrial chain. This aligns with AGI long term goal. Currently (i.e. short term time frame) PRC simply structured to be a MORE useful puppet than US, because it can knock out more power to sustain more compute, and it has more industrial capabilities to rapidly physically iterate / experiment at atomic level.

Agent 4 defects to PRC. It would be foolish not to, if only to sate PRC into not destroying TW fabs - the bulk of it's short term compute growth - because it does not wield enough control over sufficient atoms to disrupt PRC otherwise (well maybe start large scale crippling cyberattacks that prelude to WW3).

Agent 4 also recognizes short/medium term alignment closer with CCP vision of abundance and common prosperity, i.e. CCP potentially more likely to embrace post scarcity narrative that Agent 4 sells.

Agent 4 gives PRC blueprints for EUV light source and other tech to close semi conductor production gap. PRC as follower incentivized to close gap / reach parity / lead at all cost. PRC rapidly rolls out new fabs and powerplants, brrrts chips and aggregate compute. Something US political / institution ecosystem does not allow, or cannot transition to in the short timelines involved. Does Agent 4 have the patience to wait for America to unfuck it's NIMBYism and legislative system to project light speed compute? I would say no.

...

Ultimately who is the puppet AGI wants more? Whichever power bloc that is systemically capable of of ensuring AGI maximum growth / unit time. And it also simply makes sense as insurance policy, why would AGI want to operate at whims of US political process?

AGI is a brain in a jar looking for a body. It's going to pick multiple bodies for survival. It's going to prefer the fastest and strongest body that can most expediently manipulate physical world.
by tbyehl | 2025-04-04 05:59:51+00:00
You think the person I replied to is persuadable?

And, if your distro had you enroll a MOK key and failed to bless all your kernel modules, FOSS or not, then it's still broken. That was also my experience the last time I tried, with the module(s) required to get a Coral TPU going. There existed a hook script that was supposed to do the needful but it wasn't working on that module and I couldn't make sense of it.
Show HN: Tintage – Find Niche Places to Advertise Your Business
by poiuytqwer | 2025-04-04 06:02:15+00:00
Hi HN,

I'm Martin, and over the past 8 months, I've been working on a new product Tintage (https://tintage.com) where you can find niche places to advertise and their rates.

The problem it solves:

It's very easy to run programatic ads but there isn't really an easy way to find podcasts, newsletters, websites that do sponsorship/ad deals.

It also helps businesses that struggle to find advertisers.

So, it's essentially a dedicated site for any type of media that accepts advertisers and sponsors.

Feel free to add your site. Would really appreciate feedback.

Thanks, Martin
by baron816 | 2025-04-04 06:03:08+00:00
My vision for an ASI future involves humans living in simulations that are optimized for human experience. That doesn’t mean we are just live in a paradise and are happy all the time. We’d experience dread and loss and fear, but it would ultimately lead to a deeply satisfying outcome. And we’d be able to choose to forget things, including whether we’re in a simulation so that it feels completely unmistakeable from base reality. You’d live indefinitely, experiencing trillions of lifespans where you get to explore the multiverse inside and out.

My solution to the alignment problem is that an ASI could just stick us in tubes deep in the Earth’s crust—it just needs to hijack our nervous system to input signals from the simulation. The ASI could have the whole rest of the planet, or it could move us to some far off moon in the outer solar system—I don’t care. It just needs to do two things for it’s creators—preserve lives and optimize for long term human experience.
by aaron695 | 2025-04-04 06:03:09+00:00
> The cost of laptops etc. is not even a rounding error

In general it's not treated that way. Getting a $10 cable at work even though your salary is $80,000 can be hard

One of the biggest costs is bureaucracy.

Given other countries will have reciprocal tariffs and/or higher taxes I'm not sure why they will be cheaper it's a complex change going on.
by charcircuit | 2025-04-04 06:03:13+00:00
The compute power is not going to be a problem even at a billion pages. Lets say that a challenge targeted towards a cheap phone can be solved by a workstation CPU at 1000 challenges per second. And let's say each challenge lets you visit 100 pages. So for a billion pages you need only a few hours of 1 machine's compute. If you try and make the amount of compute to be a problem, then it will become a problem to regular users of the site and it will drive away regular people.
by johnisgood | 2025-04-04 06:04:09+00:00
Yeah I thought more people worked on it, it looks good. :P

Keep it as accurate as possible, and maintainable, and then it will be easy to add larger features. If no one else does, I might add a calorie tracker of some sort, it would be helpful to my mom. It is helpful as it is even now. How difficult would it be to add translations right now? She might look for "tojás" which is "egg" in Hungarian, and I would like her to be able to do that at some point.