MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by rozab | 2025-04-16 23:49:40+00:00
I've looked into the state of research on font legibility many times over the years, and this time I came across this thorough thesis from one Dr Liz Broadbent[0] (who sadly passed away recently).

It includes a great rundown of all the studies that have been done regarding font legibility and dyslexia. I remain completely unconvinced that any of these fonts offer a measurable improvement in readability over, say, Arial.

A big problem I see again and again is that the sizes compared are not fair - the author notes that spacing likely has a large effect on results and that different studies have tried to account for this in different ways. In her own study the author compares 16pt Arial with 15pt OpenDyslexic in an attempt to match the x-height. But in terms of how much space on a page a given text takes up, 15pt OpenDyslexic is actually equivalent to 25pt Arial! On page 154, a study participant even points out that it's clearer to read because it's bigger.

But overall I'm just glad funding is being directed to serious research on this topic.

[0] https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10173561/2/L.Broadbent...
by s1artibartfast | 2025-04-16 23:49:47+00:00
Tax exemption has nothing to do with the amount of resources. It is based on what those resources are used for.

I also think there should be absolutely no expectation that Harvard educates or people. If you are worried about allowing enabling enough people to get an education, allow more schools to open. I don't see why it's the duty of any one pre-existing institution to pick up that slack, especially a private one.

If Harvard wanted to have 10 students, that's its prerogative and right
by compumike | 2025-04-16 23:49:54+00:00
(Shameless self-promotion) We set up our https://heiioncall.com/ monitoring to give our on-call rotation a non-critical “it can wait until Monday” alert when there are 14 days or less left on our SSL certificates, and a critical alert “do-not-disturb be damned” when 48 hours left until expiry. Because cert-manager got into some weird state once a few years ago, and I’d rather find out well in advance next time.

Edit: it’s configured under Trigger -> Outbound Probe -> “SSL Certificate Minimum Expiration Duration”
by riyanapatel | 2025-04-16 23:51:17+00:00
The truth is, while you had past jobs you hated or regretted it, you got something out of it. You learned to deal with difficult people, you learned to manage hard situations, you navigated through tumultuous times, you learned a ton about growing, and you found out what you were capable of even in the darkest times. If anything, this can be super positive. You can also just say your past roles "were a good start to your career but didn't fit my future goals as much as this role does" and then jump in to what you want to do in your future and how this role fits.
by michaelt | 2025-04-16 23:51:20+00:00
If you get the Llama weights from Meta directly, you need to make an account [1] and hand over your "full legal name, date of birth, and full organization name" (and presumably click 'agree' on a click-through agreement) before they'll let you download them.

You can sidestep this by just downloading someone else's quantisation / fine tune.

[1] https://huggingface.co/meta-llama/Llama-4-Scout-17B-16E-Inst...
by lolinder | 2025-04-16 23:52:25+00:00
I agree that both matter, but one is more important than the other.

If they released the binary as "Open Source" but had a long list of things I wasn't allowed to do with it, the fact that they didn't release the source code would be of secondary concern to the fact that they're calling it "Open" while it actually has a trail of legal landmines waiting to bite anyone who tries to use it as free software.

And that's with a clear cut case like a binary-only release. With an LLM there's a lot of room for debate about what counts as the preferred form for making modifications to the work (or heck, what even counts as the work). That question is wide open for debate, and it's not worth having that debate when there's a far more egregious problem with their usage.
by glacier5674 | 2025-04-16 23:52:37+00:00
I'm guessing it's passages like this one regarding transitional forms:

Why then is not every geological formation and every stratum full of such intermediate links? Geology assuredly does not reveal any such finely graduated organic chain; and this, perhaps, is the most obvious and gravest objection which can be urged against my theory. The explanation lies, as I believe, in the extreme imperfection of the geological record.
by eirikbakke | 2025-04-16 23:53:17+00:00
The learning materials are all online, but realistically, very few students are going to work full-time 9 months per year for 4 years doing assignments by themselves, without weekly deadlines and friends to cheer them on. If you're going to put in all that time, you might as well get the degree.

And as the article points out, the time itself is what dominates the total cost--not tuition.
by kelipso | 2025-04-16 23:54:35+00:00
I would argue MAGA is somewhat revolutionary from the neoliberal globalist two party consensus in the last 30-40 years. Coastal liberal culture and its components might see itself as revolutionary, woke and so on, but I see it as just a continuation of liberal culture. After all, wokism, or whatever the term is, very comfortably fits in elite coastal liberal culture and that culture has been dominant for decades.
by andai | 2025-04-16 23:55:34+00:00
The most striking difference to me is that o3 and o4 know when the web search tool is unavailable, and will tell you they can't answer a question that requires it. While 4o and (sadly) 4.1 will just make up a bunch of nonsense.

I'm simultaneously impressed that they can do that, and also wondering why the heck that's so impressive (isn't "is this tool in this list?" something GPT-3 was able to handle?) and why 4.1 still fails at it too—especially considering it's hyped as the agentic coder model!

That's pretty damning for the general intelligence aspect of it, that they apparently had to special-case something so trivial... and I say that as someone who's really optimistic about this stuff!

That being said, the new "enhanced" web search seems great so far, and means I can finally delete another stupid 10 line Python script from 2023 that I shouldn't have needed in the first place ;)

(...Now if they'd just put 4.1 in the Chat... why the hell do I need to use a 3rd party UI for their best model!)
by ebfe1 | 2025-04-16 23:56:06+00:00
100% this... the authn/authz should be gated at the server that store sensitive data... whatever token/user that MCP uses must have its access scope down to what needed. I guess the biggest issue right now is many of these APIs have no granular access control and is open to abuse :(

With that said, some vulnerabilities like command injections or argument injection, the responsibility is on MCP developer to make sure they follow best practices and not let user take control of these commands when "shelling out".
by Nick-W | 2025-04-16 23:56:13+00:00
We'll probably do a "hard-launch" soon where we'll do a bit of advertising and open up installs within the city, instead of just serving homes up in the mountains. Good news is we don't need contracts, we have exactly 0 turnover and no real competition, it's not hard to beat Starlink and everyone universally hates CenturyLink/Comcast here.
by mystraline | 2025-04-16 23:56:30+00:00
That is true, especily after https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Griggs_v._Duke_Power_Co. That forbid IQ testing in the workplace.

The next best, and completely legal requirement was a 'college degree'. What college? We don't care. What degree? Again, we dont care.

Its a bar that less black people pass than white people. So completely legal discrimination, but on its face is completely equal.
by danans | 2025-04-16 23:56:31+00:00
> > Our poorest states have higher GDPs per capita than many "rich" western EU countries.

Not the OP, but poor as used here seems to refer to average quality of life , quality of infrastructure, etc.

> Is the result of that a higher median income, or is it a reflection of a higher wealth inequality?

Higher wealth inequality leading to stretched public services and infrastructure, which lead to lower quality of life , despite higher nominal GDP per capita.

You are probably much better off being a poor person in Spain (33k GDP/capita) vs Mississippi (40k GDP per capita), because at least you don't need to worry about the cost of healthcare.

You're more likely (but still very unlikely) to get extremely rich in the US though, although probably not in Mississippi.
by saadatq | 2025-04-16 23:58:55+00:00
This is so good…

“… you can find frameworks not just in software, but also in ordinary life. If you buy package holidays, you're buying a framework - they transport you to some place, put you in a hotel, feed you and your activities have to fit into the shape provided by the framework (say, go into the pool and swim there). If you travel independently, you are composing libraries. You have to book your flights, find your accommodation and arrange your program (all using different libraries). It is more work, but you are in control - and you can arrange things exactly the way you need.”
by lo_zamoyski | 2025-04-16 23:59:05+00:00
> If you can afford college, it is absolutely worth it to go to college. For a variety of reasons, ROI not top of the list.

This is complicated by the fact that the mission of the university and of education in general has become muddled. There is also an intellectual crisis that plagues academe (like the silos separating the liberal arts and the sciences). The two intertwined and at times competing missions are that of educating the person and that of career preparation. Arguably, the latter is where the bulk of energy is going; I don't know where you can locate the former, in general.

So, in that light, you have to ask: are universities the best option for everyone...

a) from the perspective of job training?

b) from the perspective of education?

Not everyone is called to go to university.
by kace91 | 2025-04-16 23:59:24+00:00
The included descriptions of the battle’s aftermath are haunting.

As much as movies and documentaries usually reflect the horrors of combat itself, they rarely deal with the aftermath - not lights out in an adrenaline fueled moment, but lying for hours in a random patch of land no longer having a mouth, trying to cry for help knowing that no one will come until dying from exposure and maggots.

This was the reality for millions of young people; still is. Let’s hope we never see it firsthand.
by roenxi | 2025-04-16 23:59:31+00:00
> Maybe, but 0% interest should have make it easy to invest in capital intensive endeavors that would have turned into great protective moats when the interest rates inevitably bumped up.

It doesn't - if you look at the situation in real terms, the amount of resources available to invest is about the same (probably shrinking because some are diverted to people who aren't creditworthy and consume them). So the major effect of artificially low interest rates is to add a whole heap of artificially supported highly wasteful companies to the mix.

All that changes is the market started rewarding people with access to credit instead of people who were responsible and effective. The credit people aren't particularly capable and it'd be better if they had been forced out.
by detaro | 2025-04-17 00:00:12+00:00
sure!

News report: https://www.heise.de/en/news/DigiCert-Customer-seeks-to-exch...

nitty-gritty bugzilla: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1910322#c8

some follow-on drama: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43167087
by jltsiren | 2025-04-17 00:00:30+00:00
They charge us so much, because they are selling something, and the barrier of entry to the industry is high. Prices are naturally set to the level people can afford to pay, rather than being based on how much it costs to provide the service efficiently.

Some of the main benefits of institutionalized education are social. It's more acceptable to go to a college instead of spending a few years self-studying. And if you are not exceptionally motivated, the institutional pressure probably makes you study more than you would do on your own.

And some fields are easier to study on your own than others. One common pitfall of studying on your own is that you may learn the content without understanding it in the right context. Each field has its own ways of thinking, its own implicit assumptions, its own approaches to things, and so on. Theoretical frameworks, if you like big pretentious words. Those things are difficult to learn without people who are already familiar with the field. Software engineering is probably one of the easiest fields for self-study, as a lot of activity happens in public in open source projects. Computer science is already much harder.
by api | 2025-04-17 00:00:50+00:00
Infinite expansionism is just one of a whole tower of assumptions that underlie the Fermi paradox. It’s a good thought experiment and does rule out certain scenarios with ET life but beyond that it’s a speculation.

The main scenario it rules out is one where intelligent ET life is common and we are late to the party. I feel like both those things can’t be true or we would see evidence.

I do find it fun to think about because it unfolds under scrutiny into such a vast tree of possibilities. But that same huge tree of possibilities makes it hard to say much.

One of my favorite wild speculations is that there is somewhere more interesting to go than space, and more accessible, and eventually whatever that is gets found before starships get built. What could that be? A traversable multiverse maybe?

That belongs to a subset of scenarios I call “positive great filters.” That’s where the great filter is a big success that renders space flight unimportant or uninteresting but does not result in extinction.

What about hyper-miniaturization. Maybe you can have something the size and scope of a galactic civilization without leaving home by folding your minds and everything else up into quantum states or hidden extra dimensions. Think a civilization of “sophons” (three body problem reference) with trillions upon trillions of minds occupying a few square meters of space and consuming a few hundred watts.

Yet another is some kind of remote sensing that lets you explore without physically moving, like a real equivalent to remote viewing. There’s a sci-fi novel called Blind Lake about this. Combine with miniaturized super efficient information processing and you could have superintelligences that explore everywhere and learn everything without going anywhere.

Lots of speculations and possibilities if you allow for the fact that we’ve only been doing science seriously for about 150 years and surely do not know everything.
by gruez | 2025-04-17 00:01:43+00:00
Title: "Seth Rogen Speaks Truth to Billionaires, Gets Censored for It "

Actual quote: "And it’s amazing that others [who have been] in this room underwrote electing a man who, in the last week, single-handedly destroyed all of American science. It’s amazing how much good science you can destroy with $320 million and RFK Jr, very fast."

"single-handedly destroyed all of American science" is hyperbolic and hardly "truth". At best it's a subjective statement. I agree that he's directionally correct in the sense that Trump is doing massive harm to American science, but the article is trying to prove too much. Even something restrained like "Trump is doing massive harm to American science" is arguably subjective, because Musk and co would argue they're just defunding useless programs like DEI or whatever.

If you've read this far: no, don't take this as implying I support Trump or his actions.
by xp84 | 2025-04-17 00:03:06+00:00
As someone who now spends my time conducting over a dozen interviews a week for senior software engineers, it absolutely breaks my heart that I can't tell a smart, tech-loving 18-year-old to either learn to code or get a CS degree and go into software.

I don't know which outcome I'd hate more:

• It turns out that AI has hit a ceiling and in 20 years when I retire there will be no one left to do the complex work that senior engineers do today because we shut out a whole generation of engineers, or

• AI continues to advance and no humans are even involved in software in 20 years
by AIPedant | 2025-04-17 00:03:53+00:00
Technically that is the only natural source, it can be made industrially with hydrogen sulfide and methanol, both of which are very abundant in the interstellar medium and on gas giants (Neptune has large clouds of hydrogen sulfide). The reaction is catalyzed by aluminum oxide, which also occurs naturally. On a world with an aluminum-rich crust, I could see dimethyl sulfide being produced in volcanoes. It was striking that this planet had thousands times higher concentration of DMS than Earth; maybe it has vastly more algae, maybe it's purely geological.
by jtagliabuetooso | 2025-04-17 00:04:07+00:00
"In the notebook I'll typically try to replicate (as close as possible) the state of the data inside some intermediate step, and will then manually mutate the pipeline between the original and branch versions to determine how the pipeline changes relate to the data changes."

You can automate many changes / tests by materializing the parent(s) of the target table, and use the SDK to produce variations of a pipeline programmatically. If your pipeline has a free parameter (say top-k=5 for some algos), you could just write a Python for loop, and do something like:

client.create_branch() client.run()

for each variation, materializing k versions at the end that you can inspect (client.query("SELECT MAX ...")

The broader concept is that every operation in the lake is immutably stored with an ID, so every run can be replicated with the exact same data sources and the exact same code (even if not committed to GHub), which also means you can run the same code varying the data source, or run a different code on the same data: all zero-copy, all in production.

As for the semantics of merge and other conflicts, we will be publishing by end of summer some new research: look out for a new blog post and paper if you like this space!
by bigyabai | 2025-04-17 00:04:26+00:00
If Nvidia was at all in a hurry to lock-out third-parties, then I don't think they would support OpenCL and Vulkan compute, or allow customers to write PTX compilers that interface with Nvidia hardware.

In reality, the demand for highly parallelized compute simply blindsided OEMs. AMD, Intel and Apple were all laser-focused on raster efficiency, none of them have a GPU architecture optimized for GPGPU workloads. AMD and Intel don't have competitive fab access and Apple can't sell datacenter hardware to save their life; Nvidia's monopoly on attractive TSMC hardware isn't going anywhere.
Ask HN: Feedback on My UI Design?
by singlepaynews | 2025-04-17 00:06:51+00:00
www.singlepaynews.com; I’m pretty happy with having a SPA up and running, and not sure what to change, but I feel like my UI is very “coder” and I’d like it to be very “journalist”, if that makes sense. What would be your ideal UI for reading text that was written by Walter Cronkite? (God rest his Soul)
by int_19h | 2025-04-17 00:08:20+00:00
The catch is that the benefits of open vs non-open don't translate neatly from software to models. If software is binary-only, is it exceedingly difficult to change it in any kind of substantial way (you can change the machine code directly, of course, but the very nature of the format makes this very limited). OTOH with a large language model with open weights but without open training data - the closest equivalent to open source for software - you can still change its behavior very substantially with finetuning or remixing layers (from different models even!).
by dextercd | 2025-04-17 00:08:45+00:00
CT definitely helps, but not everyone monitors it. This is an area where I still need to improve. But even if you detect a misissued cert, it can not reliably be revoked with OCSP/CRL.

--

The maximum cert lifetime will gradually go down. The CA/B forum could adjust the timeline if big challenges are uncovered.

I doubt they expect this to be necessary. I suspect that companies will discover that automation is already possible for their systems and that new solutions will be developed for most remaining gaps, in part because of this announced timeline.

This will save people time in the long run. It is forced upon you, and that's frustrating, but you do have nearly a year before the first change. It's not going down to 47 days in one go.

I'm not saying that no one will renew certificates manually every month. I do think it'll be rare, and even more rare for there to be a technical reason for it.
by jtagliabuetooso | 2025-04-17 00:09:56+00:00
Thanks for your interest! Aside from the demo video in the home page, our quick start takes <3 minutes, which is way less! Just ask for an invite to the free sandbox in our website.

If you love videos and would like to understand the decisions behind it, the GeekNarrator episode is a good start: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8aMm7RHEgIw&t=4812s

For real-world enterprise grade deployment stories, just use our blog or reach out to any of us to learn more (jacopo.tagliabue@bauplanlabs.com).
by smitty1e | 2025-04-17 00:10:31+00:00
> ZFS opts to report the physical block size of the file, which is probably the more useful number for the purposes of things like 'du'. However, it does leave us with no way of finding out the logical block size

If the filesystem is tantamount to a big fat .zip, then perhaps there is a requirement for a manifest of the logical file sizes somewhere.

Somehow I doubt that this problem hasn't already been solved.
by throw0101b | 2025-04-17 00:11:51+00:00
He gave a presentation at NLNOG 2020, "Getting Fiber To My Town":

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ASXJgvy3mEg

* Slides: https://nlnog.net/static/live/nlnog_live_sep_2020_jared.pdf

* 2020: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24424910

* He posted some replies in that discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=jaredmauch

Involves trenchers. Also, at NANOG, "Starting a Telephone Company in 2019, or How I Built Fiber to my Neighbors":

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Twe6uTwOyJo
by kschmelter13 | 2025-04-17 00:12:32+00:00
Over the past few weeks, I couldn’t shake the idea that MCP (Model Context Protocol) servers will play a major role in the future of AI — but today, managing them is fragmented and messy.

I built LinkPoint: a lightweight unified gateway that lets you connect, manage, and permission multiple MCP servers through a single endpoint. It's designed for anyone building AI agents, headless browsers, or personal context systems that need access to multiple contexts at once.

Features:

Deep permissions per server

Real-time context streaming

Unified endpoint for clients like Cursor, agents, etc.

Would love any feedback, questions, or ideas!
by chromanoid | 2025-04-17 00:13:37+00:00
I have to use an internal cert out of my control anyways. For personal projects I switched to web hosters after some bad experience. But I vividly remember setting up my vps as a teen. while I understand the reasoning it's always sad to see those simpler times go away. and sometimes I don't see the reasoning behind and suspect it's because some c-suites don't see big harm, since it ought to make things safer and those people that are left in the dust don't count anyway...
by RetroTechie | 2025-04-17 00:13:48+00:00
> Second, how do you keep them from being emotionally attached to an AI?

You can't. We (including people's kids) will at some point, to some degree, become emotionally attached to an AI.

The thing is to be clear about what that 'friendship' does for you, what you put in & what you get out of it. Be aware of downsides, privacy issues, etc. And then: enjoy.

On the flip side, such bonds are not exclusive with human-human bonding. You can have both. So hug your kids often while they play with their AI-powered toy doggie.