MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by theahura | 2025-04-29 06:25:24+00:00
From the order:

> Sec. 4. Using National Security Assets for Law and Order. (a) Within 90 days of the date of this order, the Attorney General and the Secretary of Defense, in consultation with the Secretary of Homeland Security and the heads of agencies as appropriate, shall increase the provision of excess military and national security assets in local jurisdictions to assist State and local law enforcement. (b) Within 90 days of the date of this order, the Secretary of Defense, in coordination with the Attorney General, shall determine how military and national security assets, training, non-lethal capabilities, and personnel can most effectively be utilized to prevent crime.

> Sec. 5. Holding State and Local Officials Accountable. The Attorney General shall pursue all necessary legal remedies and enforcement measures to enforce the rights of Americans impacted by crime and shall prioritize prosecution of any applicable violations of Federal criminal law with respect to State and local jurisdictions whose officials: (a) willfully and unlawfully direct the obstruction of criminal law, including by directly and unlawfully prohibiting law enforcement officers from carrying out duties necessary for public safety and law enforcement; or (b) unlawfully engage in discrimination or civil-rights violations under the guise of “diversity, equity, and inclusion” initiatives that restrict law enforcement activity or endanger citizens.

> Sec. 6. Use of Homeland Security Task Forces. The Attorney General and the Secretary of Homeland Security shall utilize the Homeland Security Task Forces (HSTFs) formed in accordance with Executive Order 14159 of January 20, 2025 (Protecting the American People Against Invasion) to coordinate and advance the objectives of this order.

A plain reading states that Trump intends to use federal forces to arrest state and local officials and to enforce laws in non-federal-land.
by somenameforme | 2025-04-29 06:26:34+00:00
> "I really like Rust as a replacement for C++, especially given that C++ seems to become crazier every year."

I don't understand this argument, which I've also seen it used against C#, quite frequently. When a language offers new features, you're not forced to use them. You generally don't even need to learn them if you don't want. I do think some restrictions in languages can be highly beneficial, like strong typing, but the difference is that in a weakly typed language that 'feature' is forced upon you, whereas random new feature in C++ or C# is near to always backwards compatible and opt-in only.

For instance, to take a dated example - consider move semantics in C++. If you never used it anywhere at all, you'd have 0 problems. But once you do, you get lots of neat things for free. And for these sort of features, I see no reason to ever oppose their endless introduction unless such starts to imperil the integrity/performance of the compiler, but that clearly is not happening.
by palmotea | 2025-04-29 06:26:44+00:00
> Number of people I know that used Duolingo successfully to be fluent in a new language: 0

But they say they're "the world's best way to learn a language," right there on their homepage: https://www.duolingo.com.

So either no one has ever successfully become fluent in a foreign language (because not even the best tool can be used to successfully accomplish the task), or the tech industry is full of liars and its claims cannot be trusted.
by WalterBright | 2025-04-29 06:27:00+00:00
> What is your basis for this claim?

Great question! Here's one answer:

Having written a great deal of C code, I made a discovery about it. The first algorithm and data structure selected for a C program, stayed there. It survives all the optimizations, refactorings and improvements. But everyone knows that finding a better algorithm and data structure is where the big wins are.

Why doesn't that happen with C code?

C code is not plastic. It is brittle. It does not bend, it breaks.

This is because C is a low level language that lacks higher level constructs and metaprogramming. (Yes, you can metaprogram with the C preprocessor, a technique right out of hell.) The implementation details of the algorithm and data structure are distributed throughout the code, and restructuring that is just too hard. So it doesn't happen.

A simple example:

Change a value to a pointer to a value. Now you have to go through your entire program changing dots to arrows, and sprinkle stars everywhere. Ick.

Or let's change a linked list to an array. Aarrgghh again.

Higher level features, like what C++ and D have, make this sort of thing vastly simpler. (D does it better than C++, as a dot serves both value and pointer uses.) And so algorithms and data structures can be quickly modified and tried out, resulting in faster code. A traversal of an array can be changed to a traversal of a linked list, a hash table, a binary tree, all without changing the traversal code at all.
by barrell | 2025-04-29 06:27:14+00:00
I would have to know more about your circumstances before I could make genuine recommendations. But as an autodidactal programmer, I can serve as somewhat of an authority on this manner ;) The value I get out of the platform is:

1. I can study all my languages on the same platform. For my, having studied 30+ languages (note: not claiming to speak them), I just want to “do my languages”. I can study dialectal Arabic, minority languages, archaic languages, and the major languages, all in a nice consistent and (if I can say so myself) beautiful UI.

2. Everything is heavily annotated with all the information you could ever need. This means that I add flashcards, and when I’m learning them, I have the gender, cases, tenses, agglutination, phonetics, translations, audio, conjugation/declention tables, character breakdowns, mutations, idioms, multilword expressions, roots, etymology, etc etc (the list really does go on) at my fingertips. This means I just go through my flashcards, and when I have a question, I get an answer. If I have more questions, I have a context aware chat integrated. For me, this is the autodidactal dream come true.

3. Personally, I really love SRS. I also really hate SRS. If I have to study the words “dog”, “walk”, & “morning” - and I have a sentence “I walk my dog in the morning”, I just want to study that one one sentence and be done with it. Also, I really want to just be able to play audio sentences and listen to them while cooking/cleaning/walking my dog. Or do a free recall sessions, write down everything I remember from yesterday, and skip those reviews today (it’s more effective than SRS anyways).

Lastly, WRT to creating your own flashcards: You can still create flashcards manually on Phrasing - I agree the act of creating flashcards is beneficial, I’m not trying to take that away from anyone - but I’m not sure I buy it’s the highest leverage way for one to spend their time. At least for me, it definitely is not. I would rather skip that (admittedly beneficial) step, and move onto the next step. YMMV

It’s really hard to narrow the list down to three, I have a hundred things I want to say, but I’ll leave it here. Due to popular demand, I recorded a few live demos today so you can see it in action:

https://x.com/barrelltech/status/1917093849219895715?s=61

Higher quality demos will come in time!

Let me know your thoughts, I’m happy to dive deeper into any of this (I mean I could talk about Phrasing for literally days on end)

EIDT: s/extinct/archaic
by jshaivitz | 2025-04-29 06:30:46+00:00
Happy to post the full text of my goodbye post, but yes, it was brief, cordial, and not at all accusatory or anything like that. Sadly, this story gets much weirder as the Reddit Admins themselves got involved and behaved in a way I would characterize as unbecoming of a publicly traded $20B tech giant. I have documentation of everything that occured. For me, this all began because I was treated in a way inconsistent with their stated policies, and my reputation/name was being attacked, publicly, on Reddit by a moderator. I just wanted to defend my good name, which I’ve spent my whole life building. They made it personal, and into a much broader issue of platform management, which I felt compelled to address. Thank you for your reply.
by anal_reactor | 2025-04-29 06:31:01+00:00
It's the same as Tinder. The business isn't about getting you dates, the business is selling you the fantasy of getting a date. Those two things are different, but for a new user, difficult to distinguish. Duolingo offers you the fantasy of speaking a new language.

Of course it is possible to learn a language using Duolingo, just like it is possible to get dates on Tinder, but it's just not a good method. If you're new to learning foreign languages, you'd be better off signing up for a course (but that costs time and money), and if this is your n-th foreign language, then you'd rather get a book and some boring flashcard app.
by Maro | 2025-04-29 06:31:11+00:00
Full text from the tweet:

I'm going to call it right now. A lot of stuff is going to break on this mission.

By design.

As part of the plan.

Don't get upset. I'm not saying SpaceX plans to fail. I'm pointing out that SpaceX has taken an ultraimportant principle from software engineering, and realized it applies to all engineering.

Feedback beats planning.

And that, you see, is why SpaceX doesn't do things the NASA way. The NASA way was to gold-plate everything, plan and test and plan and test, and generate mountains of paper detailing every contingency, with every scenario prepared for.

SpaceX just shrugs, says "it's unmanned", and sends it.

Half the time it blows up. That's the whole point. They don't actually want it to blow up, of course, but they're anticipating that it might.

That possibility is part of the plan. Because one rocket blowing up, or crashing, in an actual end-to-end test, beats many, many man-years of planning and plotting.

The key realization here is that knowledge only comes from empirical observation. Everything else is just speculative.

The sooner you get into a feedback loop, and the faster you run it, the more iterations you can do in less time. This means, while others are planning and speculating, you actually learn something.

Relevant data is the most precious thing in the universe. And it's worth blowing up any number of rockets to get it.

Because rockets are just stuff. They're just made of stuff. And you can always get more stuff.

You can never get more time.

So expect to see a lot of things go wrong on this, and other SpaceX missions. Anticipate it. Accept it when it happens. Doesn't mean the dream of the stars is dead.

It just means we're doing it cowboy style.

This is a valuable lesson for our own lives. If there's something you want to do, something you want to try, some goal you have, it's easy to dip a toe in the water, test the temperature, and plan. A lot.

Planning makes us feel good if we're afraid. Because it provides us with the illusion of security. Never mind that we don't know which scenarios are actually going to happen, never mind that we're planning for the wrong thing, planning makes us feel safe. And if we're nervous, we can plan forever.

But the difference between the expert and the novice isn't theory or intelligence or plans. It's relevant domain knowledge. Gathered from empirical observation.

So the trick is to get into that feedback loop as soon as possible, and run it as fast as possible. Give yourself the most possible opportunities to learn, per unit time.

We only learn while we are moving.
by benrbray | 2025-04-29 06:31:16+00:00
I'm sorry, but your reply suggests an incredible disdain for both technical expertise and for educators. There is value in depth&breadth of knowledge, and it takes great skill to craft a good curriculum.

From a US perspective, students paying $50,000+ per year in tuition deserve better than an overworked PI who has crammed C++ over the weekend.
by OtherShrezzing | 2025-04-29 06:33:24+00:00
>Has this turned out to be less of an issue for practical applications than was initially expected? Are the models just not censored in the way that we might expect?

I think it's the case that only a handful of very loud commentators were thinking about this problem, and they were given a much broader platform to discuss it than was reasonable. A problem baked into the discussion around AI, safety, censorship, and alignment, is that it's dominated by a fairly small number of close friends who all loudly share the same approximate set of opinions.
by bilekas | 2025-04-29 06:33:44+00:00
> While refactoring it, I forgot to add the code to stop the 5-minute interval after the new version file was available and downloaded.

I’m sorry but it’s exactly cases like these that should be covered by some kind of test, especially When diving into a refactor. Admittedly it’s nice to hear people share their mistakes and horror stories, I would get some stick for this at work.
by cosmicgadget | 2025-04-29 06:34:31+00:00
The dems are a lot of things but they would not have tolerated this. Or really anything dating back to the 'grab em by...' tape.

There won't be justice in the form of prosecuting corruption. There could theoretically be convictions of people who aren't the president but pardons will fix that.

There may be some justice inasmuch as unconstitutional exective orders may be rolled back.
by Tor3 | 2025-04-29 06:35:20+00:00
There wasn't much to read there, but why aspire to be an alternative to Duolingo of all things? Duolingo focuses on learning by translation, basically. It's even in the name: "Duolingo". It's an utterly broken approach to learning languages, except for the very initial phase where you're getting just enough to move on to modern methods (i.e. avoid translation like the plague, to start with). Which is exactly why a comment I read somewhere said "Duolingo is for the perpetual beginner".
by nandomrumber | 2025-04-29 06:36:14+00:00
I recently acquired a ThinkStation P910 dual CPU Xeon E26xx with 64GB RAM and 1080GTX

Quite a capable machine for my uses.

Not supported in Windows 11. Maybe with some additional config? Can’t be bothered with something hat might turn out to be fragile and need more maintenance than I can be bothered with. That’s a young man’s gane.

Ok, I’m about due to give Linux another tickle anyways.

Hmm, which distro… can always give a few a spin.

Keep it simple, Pop!_OS.

Installed fast, no issues, runs fine, stable. Seems entirely usable.

Customisations? Nah, keep it simple.

I’ll set a black background though.

Nope.
by BrandiATMuhkuh | 2025-04-29 06:36:57+00:00
AI Agents and search for the AEC I industry.

Recently I was fortunate to join a cool startup (as Head of Engineering) that tries to improve the AEC industry by helping them with their paperwork.

So lots of RAG, chat, agents, deep research. It's really interesting but also challenging. The biggest challenges are: large data; different stakeholders/user stories in one org
by paradite | 2025-04-29 06:37:37+00:00
I can't belive Ollama haven't fix the context window limits yet.

I wrote a step-by-step guide on how to setup Ollama with larger context length a while ago: https://prompt.16x.engineer/guide/ollama

TLDR

ollama run deepseek-r1:14b /set parameter num_ctx 8192 /save deepseek-r1:14b-8k ollama serve
by seba_dos1 | 2025-04-29 06:38:06+00:00
Duh. When I used a smartphone almost 20 years ago to hack on its system middleware while riding a tram or write Python scripts to verify my high school math exam answers, it was "screen time" too. It's just as if our devices were tools that could be used in various ways with various consequences. The problem is when we let those with no regard to our best interests form and restrict these tools for their own profit.

There's no Android or iOS on my phone and it works the way I want and need it to, as I'm lucky enough to possess the technical abilities needed to form it myself. Let's make sure that as many people as possible are also empowered to do just that, so they can take care of those less technically inclined as well. This is what "freedom" stands for in "Free Software".
by atoav | 2025-04-29 06:39:32+00:00
OKLCH really shines if you have to interpolate color between two colors (e.g. in space resulting in a gradient or in time as part of an animation) or you just want to change a color without makingnit darker or brighter.

If you interpolate between RGB colors you will get very weird grayish shades inbetween and the new color may be preceptually darker or brighter, which may be a problem (e.g. if it is text on a background). With OKLCH you define one color and as you rotate around the color wheel it stays the same preceptual brightness, which is incredibly cool.

This means before a designer would have to touch 3 values (RGB or HSV) to match the colors preceptually using their eyeballs, now there is only one value and it matched nearly perfectly as it is.
by timewizard | 2025-04-29 06:40:42+00:00
> fits the definitions of an intimate visual depiction,

Hardly seems difficult. I think a lot of services have TOSes which cover this type of content. The text of the bill also plainly defines what is covered.

> are trivial to automate

And removal is trivial to automate. I'm pretty sure providers already have systems which cover this case. Those that don't likely don't allow posting of pornographic material whether it's consensual or not.

> they're not responsible for the consequences of taking something down

So the market for "intimate depictions" got a little harder to participate in. This is a strange hill to fight over.

> It'll inevitably be abused for spurious takedowns

Of pornographic content. The law is pretty well confined to "visual depictions." I can see your argument on it's technical merits I just can't rationalize it into the real world other than for some absurdly narrow cases.
by jongjong | 2025-04-29 06:40:53+00:00
What we have is an ignorance-based society. The more blind-spots you have, the higher you rise.

The higher your rise, the easier it is to maintain your blind-spots because nobody will dare question your worldview. Even those few who do, they're a nobody, so what could they possibly know about anything? Surely, it's only the people on top who have a bird's eye view of the big data, who know what's going on... Everyone else is like an ant following breadcrumbs laid out in front of them. What is there to learn about the real world that you cannot see from above?
by pjmlp | 2025-04-29 06:41:00+00:00
That is why I try to steer away projects whose ultimate goal is to remove people jobs, automatic cash out systems, AI, ecormerce sites for big retail chains that close down their physical shops, ....

Duolingo are not the only ones, I am aware of a project where the whole translation team for internal trainings was replaced by AI automatic translation of training materials.

Any developer that celebrates AI vibe coding, is going to get some bad vides in the coming years.
by coffeeenjoyer | 2025-04-29 06:42:04+00:00
I assume most of that 2PB network traffic was not egress, right? Otherwise how did it "only" cost you $8k on Google Cloud? Even at a cost of 0.02$ per GB, which is usually a few times lower than the actual prices I could find there, that would still result in an invoice of about $40k...
by jiggawatts | 2025-04-29 06:43:04+00:00
These articles are great, but I have to one-up the blog: I recently helped a small dev team clean up a one-line mistake that cost them $95,000... which they didn't notice for three months.

The relevance is that instead of checking for a change every 5 minutes, the delay wasn't working at all, so the check ran as fast as possible in a tight loop. This was between a server and a blob storage account, so there was no network bottleneck to slow things down either.

It turns out that if you read a few megabytes 1,000 times per second all day, every day, those fractions of a cent per request are going to add up!
by karhuton | 2025-04-29 06:44:05+00:00
To be as user friendly as possible, always ask if user wants automatic background updates or not. If you can’t update without user noticing it, please implement manual updates as two mechanisms:

1) Emergency update for remote exploit fixes only

2) Regular updates

The emergency update can show a popup, but only once. It should explain the security risk. But allow user to decline, as you should never interrupt work in progress. After decline leave an always visible small warning banner in the app until approved.

The regular update should never popup, only show a very mild update reminder that is NOT always visible, instead behind a menu that is frequently used. Do not show notification badges, they frustrate people with inbox type 0 condition.

This is the most user friendly way of suggesting manual updates.

You have to understand, if user has 30 pieces of software, they have to update every day of the month. That is not a good overall user experience.
by jve | 2025-04-29 06:44:05+00:00
> Screen Studio is a screen recorder for macOS. It is desktop app. It means we need some auto-updater to allow users to install the latest app version easily.

No, it doesn't mean that.

Auto updater introduced series of bad outcomes.

- Downloading update without consent, causing traffic for client.

- Not only that, the download keeps repeating itself every 5 minutes? You did at least detect whether user is on metered connection, right... ?

- A bug where update popup interrupts flow

- A popup is a bad thing on itself you do to your users. I think it is OK when closing the app and let the rest be done in background.

- Some people actually pay attention to outgoing connections apps make and even a simple update check every 5 minutes is excessive. Why even do it while app is running? Do on startup and ask on close. Again some complexity: Assume you're not on network, do it in background and don't bother retrying much.

- Additional complexity for app that caused all of the above. And it came with a price tag to developer.

Wouldn't app store be perfect way to handle updates in this case to offload the complexity there?
by Eextra953 | 2025-04-29 06:45:02+00:00
Another lame attempt at subverting the constitution by trying to rule like a king. I hope this order gets challenged and struck down as soon as possible. If the current administration wants lasting change then it should do it the right way, through Congress. He has both houses on his side so why isn't he making things 'great' in a way that's compatible with the constitution?
by timewizard | 2025-04-29 06:45:11+00:00
It applies to a narrow category of providers.

> IN GENERAL.—The term “covered platform” means a website, online service, online application, or mobile application—

> (i) that serves the public; and

> (ii) (I) that primarily provides a forum for user-generated content, including messages, videos, images, games, and audio files; or

> (II) for which it is in the regular course of trade or business of the website, online service, online application, or mobile application to publish, curate, host, or make available content of nonconsensual intimate visual depictions.

If you publish the content on your own website or on certain public websites you don't even have to respond to these requests. You do; however, open yourself to criminal and civil liability for publicly hosting any nonconseual visual images. Your provider is also excluded from service and cannot legally be compelled to participate in their removal.
by cheinic40081 | 2025-04-29 06:46:17+00:00
> After a potential 30 minute commute (even if you live downtown already) and some 2 hours of checking, yes. Only 1.25 hours.

HSR stations are no different.

45-60 minute uber from Berkeley or Cupertino to the SF HSR station? Then another 45-90 minutes on the LA end?

You’d rather just fly SFO (or SJC, OAK) nonstop to Orange County or Ontario or Burbank or Palm Springs or Long Beach or …

Not to mention if you are an experienced flyer, it’s not unreasonable to arrive at the airport curbside 15-30 minutes before your flight boarding door closes and comfortably make the flight. Fuck the lounges.