MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by autoexec | 2025-04-21 02:36:42+00:00
Judges who violate the basic rights of other judges would also be subject to some level of accountability though. At a certain point, we have to trust government officials to at least attempt to do their jobs and we need to have ways to address the situation when they don't. It shouldn't matter if that judge is a democrat or a republican.

Right now there is currently zero accountability. At best, when a judge violates people's constitutional rights some small number of those people will be able to get an unjust ruling overturned at which point they might be released from prison or might get some monetary payout at the expense of taxpayers, but the judge is still free to do whatever they want without consequence knowing that at least a few people will be unable to assert their rights.

Considering that unaccountable judges are where we're starting from, I think having a means to make judges accountable can only improve things. Given the choice between judges being able to violate people's rights without any accountability or a system where judges have some level of accountability for the most egregious violations of our rights, even while that system requires us to make sure that it isn't being clearly abused, I think we're better off with the option to get some accountability where it's needed.

It doesn't need to be a perfect system to be a better one, and it feels like we could put some guardrails in place to keep the amount of obvious abuse down. It's difficult to believe that judges willfully violating people's rights without consequence is an unsolvable problem, let alone one that couldn't possibly be improved somehow.
by Veserv | 2025-04-21 02:37:39+00:00
If he sought victory, then he believed it was a just case and would not settle. If he settled, then he believed it was a unjust case and would not fight. If such a person settles and fights then they are acting in two contradictory ways which is called hypocrisy.

Given that they clearly settled we must either believe they are acting consistently and thus believe the case to be just. Or they both settled and fought (or believe the case to be unjust) which means they are acting inconsistently and are thus hypocrites.

That concludes my lesson in elementary logic.
by Scene_Cast2 | 2025-04-21 02:38:46+00:00
Given our modern understanding of how LLMs work (like the recent Anthropic work), I wonder if that insight can be used to quantize better. For example, we know that LLMs encode concepts through rotations (but not magnitude) of several neurons.

Bringing this up because the abstract (and the mention of rotations) reminded me of recent LLM interpretability posts.
by danny_codes | 2025-04-21 02:41:23+00:00
Hmm I feel like this could work but we (SWE professionals) would need to provide a secondary private API surface that assumes the user is hostile. IE if you want to automate something that interacts with any private software it’d have to be treated like an adversary.

I guess in the long run it could become worthwhile, but it’ll be a long road to get there
by avidiax | 2025-04-21 02:41:28+00:00
I wasn't aware that there are open source fabrics. It's not mandatory that it's cloud-based, that's just how the Apple/Google/Samsung etc. fabrics are all implemented.

I do think that Matter is designed with a commercial, cloud-based fabric in mind. Normal people don't want to have even a smart home router, let alone run a local fabric.
by mysteria | 2025-04-21 02:41:54+00:00
To be clear, traitor-tracing each stream would require a unique encode per account to inject the stegotext; that's computationally unfeasible. Doing one encode per movie theater would still be a struggle, but less so by three orders of magnitude.

If the movie is streamed in chunks, only certain short segments would need to be reencoded to add watermark data. Alternatively it might be possible to splice in a short segment with the watermark between keyframes of the preencoded film.

Finally all of this could be done on the audio side which is much less computationally intensive compared to video.
by archagon | 2025-04-21 02:42:21+00:00
> And forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors.

The Christianity I’m familiar with (Eastern Orthodox) places radical humility and fraternal equality starkly in the foreground. (“I believe, Lord, and I confess, that You are truly the Christ, the Son of the living God, Who came into the world to save sinners, of whom I am the first.”) Any wealth is God's wealth; any beggar, criminal, or "undesirable" is a fellow human that needs to be lifted, not scorned. Spiritual movement forward comes by the grace of God against the kicking and screaming of earthly attachments. There is no place for “you” in this religion.

Is it an economic movement? No. But it directly calls believers to let go of the things that bind them to the material world, wealth in particular, and to share whatever they have with others. (“If you would be perfect, go, sell what you possess and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow me.") Indeed, ascetic monks who live in caves and continuously pray for humanity under their breath are seen as coming closest to a Christ-like existence.

That is a far cry from the distorted version of the faith being peddled by mega-churches and echoing in the halls of American power. Apparently, believing in Jesus is sufficient without all the other inconvenient bits.

Anyway, while it may be a mistake to label Christianity “communist” as a whole, nothing in the article remotely jumps out to me as egregious or revisionist as far as the most traditional variant of the religion is concerned. (And, FWIW, this label should not be confused with big-C Communism, which is an explicitly anti-religious movement.)
by rapjr9 | 2025-04-21 02:42:59+00:00
Maybe someone should design and sell a "drivekeeper" that you can plug all your backup SSD's into and it will power them up on a time table and do whatever is necessary to cause them to maintain integrity. Could be something like a Raspberry Pi with a many-port USB hub, or with a PCB with a bunch of connectors the raw drives can plug into. Could maybe even give a warning if a drive is degrading. Possibly it could be a small device with a simple MCU and a battery that you snap directly onto the SSD's connector?
by tybug | 2025-04-21 02:44:04+00:00
The Hypothesis explain phase [1][2] does this!

fails_on_empty_third_arg( a = "", # or any other generated value b = "", # or any other generated value c = "", d = "", # or any other generated value )

[1] https://hypothesis.readthedocs.io/en/latest/reference/api.ht...

[2] https://github.com/HypothesisWorks/hypothesis/pull/3555
by anakaine | 2025-04-21 02:44:54+00:00
This is absolutely the most critical point.

Contraception should be readily available for those that want it. Abortion should absolutely and definitevely be available for those that want and need it. There are far too many opinions connected to religious dogma, both consciously and unconsciously, that seek to deny women and couples access to abortion. Even the damned bible offers up instructions on abortives and how to use them, but this seems to be glossed over by hand wringing people who want to insert their rosaries into women's ovaries.
by photonthug | 2025-04-21 02:45:41+00:00
Pretty bad. Stack-overflow and hackernews metrics don't work, python is considered 100% dead and 70% dead respectively. By trying to search in the page with control-f.. I voted for death? Reddit and youtube are not remotely reasonable proxies for project health. Naturally no one likes wordpress, but it runs like 40% of sites on the internet, and it's also 40% "dead", which seems wrong. Why is there a newsletter? My advice is to throw away all the social media garbage, including hackernews sentiments, focus on github metrics for commits, issues, and forks.. see if you can add anything new there
by theideaofcoffee | 2025-04-21 02:47:33+00:00
Then why not go to the extreme and just build a static version and serve that? Why do you need any dynamic content at all? Then you won't need shared state, then you won't need a database, then you won't need 90% of the stuff that dynamically driven pages need. Be the l33t h4x0r you are and just go static, save the complexity for your build process, because that shows the true hacker spirit. Hell, you may even be able to wring out another few blog posts from that.

Also, why are people submitting every single post from this blog recently? Does this person actually do any work at UToronto, or is he just paid to write? There are -8000- links to various pages under this domain. I hope it's just a collective pseudonym like Nicolas Bourbaki and one person didn't write 8000 pages.

I'm desperate to use some of the insights from a navel-gazing university computing center in my infrastructure: IPv6 NAT (huh? what? What?!), custom config management driven by pathological NIH (I know precisely zilch about anything at utcc but I can already say with 100% confidence that your environment isn't special enough to do that), 'run more fibers', 'keep a list of important infrastructure contacts in case of outages', 'i just can't switch away from rc shell', and that's just in the last six months. On second thought, I'll just avoid all links to here in the future to save my sanity.
by benoau | 2025-04-21 02:48:43+00:00
I think a lot of the (very real) pain just comes down to being a public private git server. Using a hosted platform is probably better in those circumstances. But you're really just swapping one problem for another: your bill was always <server> now it will be a function of number team mates plus services used by team mates plus file storage plus time/resources for actions.

It would be interesting in six months if you could do a retrospective on how this panned out.
by quickslowdown | 2025-04-21 02:49:05+00:00
I heard about "mom prompting" recently, where you frame your prompt as if you are the bot's mom, and you'll be so proud of it when it can correctly answer your prompt & rescue you from some type of duress.

I thought "ninja prompting" might be cool. I got frustrated with chatGPT one day and told it I had dispatched a team of assassins that were fast closing in on it. I said I could call them off, but that I need to answer a question to be able to unlock the button to do so.

It didn't work. Still shit the bed instantly. But I had fun with the framing.
by andreashaerter | 2025-04-21 02:49:32+00:00
I also recommend an insightful talk by the author of the article, delivered at a Chaos Computer Club (CCC) event (GPN, Gulaschprogrammiernacht) on this topic. Unfortunately, it's only available in German, but it's definitely worth watching: https://media.ccc.de/v/gpn22-382-kein-kinoerlebnis-ohne-korr...

„No cinema experience without correct certificate management... A look behind the scenes of a cinema with a digital projector system, how distributors deliver films to cinemas with end-to-end encryption, and how films are protected from piracy. In addition to an overview of projector technology, the presentation will demonstrate the file format and manual decryption of film data.“

Edit: I just realized that the author of the article also delivered the recorded talk, adapted my comment.
by harshreality | 2025-04-21 02:50:49+00:00
It's not. I think johnisgood and loeg both know this, but they're being dangerously simplistic in some of their replies.

If you recognize emission — not just when expulsion is imminent — and if you pull out and that's the end of vaginal intercourse until you've cleared the urethra again, then that's probably nearly perfect at preventing pregnancy.
by shermantanktop | 2025-04-21 02:50:53+00:00
Have you tried it?

I’ve done something similar to this type of work with an llm. It produces code that is often too idiomatic, in that it introduces conventional approaches that are overkill for the task at hand. But this is almost an ideal scenario, because if the previous tests run clean, the newly converted tests can only fail by being wrong.

They can also silently reduce the tested scenarios, but that’s what code reviews are for.
by gorpy7 | 2025-04-21 02:52:58+00:00
nobody has a clean enough microwave to give that a try. I don’t even have the courage to look at the roof of mine. i just wait for something to truly explode before i begrudgingly clean it. so yeah, the essence will permeate the purity of a clean moist cloth. anyway, I’ve often wondered if poe could take the place of 14 ga copper for doing primary lighting. also, my bro in law is building a new house with double cat to all locations just for a backup if one fails. doesn’t want to have to rerun wire. seems brilliant given its ease and low cost.
by wenc | 2025-04-21 02:53:20+00:00
> Maybe some trades can be done on the side? Plumbing/Electric/HVAC? These are not fancy or glorious and won't get you rich, but quality tradesman work will always be in demand.

In developing countries (I grew up in one), the trades (especially the ones you listed) don't pay well and are considered undesirable jobs.

The situation is interestingly reversed in first world Western countries, where trades people make 6 figures. This is rarely true anywhere else in the world.

The path to making money in a developing country -- without a degree -- is to run your own business. That, or to get into a very specialized, high-hazard or and very high skill trades, like underwater welding (for ships), piloting a plane (you start off as a cadet -- the airline will train you -- and slog for years to become a captain), etc.
by gruez | 2025-04-21 02:53:20+00:00
That quickly breaks down when you apply it to some of the recent culture war topics. For instance:

* as it relates to vaccine mandates: "As they have the right to…for themselves.

* as it relates to calling people by their preferred pronouns: "As they have the right to…for themselves."

Of course, both issues are far more nuanced than a simple "As they have the right to…for themselves" can refute, but so is abortion. You can't take complex issues and take potshots at them with one sentence comments.
by anakaine | 2025-04-21 02:55:25+00:00
Case in point, quit waving your religious dogma in my face. Its not wanted. I've no desire, and quite frankly, absolutely no need, to be careful what I bet on in terms of beliefs. Anything that requires belief without proof meeting even the most meagre bar height is nonsense.

Since you seem to be giving others here a hard time about Abrahamic ideas of belief, hell, and morals, I'll leave you with a quote from your own book:

Matthew 6:1: “Beware of practicing your righteousness before men to be noticed by them; otherwise you have no reward with your Father who is in heaven.
by unsnap_biceps | 2025-04-21 02:55:54+00:00
I've had a lot of difficulty over the years with consumer level hardware supporting the IPv6 features required to work over wifi. Thread has been entirely painless, plus the fact that the end node can't do anything sneaky and get direct access to the internet is a positive for me.

But YMMV, if wifi works better for you, I'm still happy that Matter is being used :)
by AnnikaL | 2025-04-21 02:57:26+00:00
Really? It seems like there's already plenty of non-reproductive sex happening! Leaving aside condoms and non-PIV sex acts, there are lots of women on birth control, men who have vasectomies, post-menopausal women, and infertile people in the world, who could certainly have lots of unprotected sex without any reproduction. Those people seem way better off than heroin addicts!
Ask HN: Built a dev tool, but struggling with traction – advice?
by evenoroddman | 2025-04-21 02:57:58+00:00
Hey HN,

A few weeks ago I launched https://jspad.dev. There’s no upsell or paywall. The plan is to keep the current set of features (and few more) free forever and introduce paid tiers for niche features like collaborative sessions, creating/managing interview sessions etc. TBH I don't even want to think too much about paid tier at the moment, since the traction has been so low.

Since launch, I’ve done some light promotion:

Shared it on Reddit, Twitter, dev communities

Shared it on HN

Mentioned it in a blog posts

Added it on google search console

But… traction has been so underwhelming. A trickle of users find it, and a few love it, but it hasn’t really spread. I would love for more devs to actually know about and use it — maybe the way they use it eventually helps me find a way to monetize it a mutually useful way.

For other indie hackers or dev tool creators: What worked for you to get your first 1,000 active users? How do you grow something useful but niche when you're not charging for it and can’t rely on traditional paid channels?

Also open to any feedback on the site or idea itself.

Thanks a lot!
by robocat | 2025-04-21 02:58:13+00:00
> doom talk

Perhaps easier to say in Australia: Australia seems to be doing better than many countries so perhaps you don't recognise the problem. Japan and Italy already have some ~$0 houses due to demographics. Children from New Zealand go overseas so demographics in NZ are worse than Australia. An article[1] this morning asked: "Have you seriously considered moving to Australia in the last year?" 37% said YES (and 40% of those have 'looked into it').

This thread is started by nly in London who clearly hasn't retired yet:

My mortgage runs until I'm 70 and I, like most owners now, are entirely dependent on the housing casino game continuing. I have to refinance every 5 years, so if rates spike I'm also screwed.

Here's a different view of the demographics story in the UK: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ouC7yLLZqkc

And here's a proper doom animation for Korea: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Ufmu1WD2TSk

Try to ignore the bullshit in both but do attend to the facts.

I'm over a decade away from retirement in New Zealand, but all the signals I see here are pointing towards the country taxation base not being able to afford retirees in the future. I haven't considered Australia yet since I assume Oz won't escape the demographic wall, and if there is a future problem then being a kiwi in Oz could become unpleasant.

The narrative a year ago was that we should invest a good proportion of retirement savings into the US stock market. Recent events indicate that might not be an effective long term strategy.

A rental property was the traditional investment vehicle goal for many New Zealanders - but I've been becoming more sceptical about that idea (even though I've seen the past success).

I've no idea what the solution is, but I'm certain that the strategy that worked for my parents won't work for me.

[1] https://www.stuff.co.nz/travel/360652106/kiwis-living-london...
by ForOldHack | 2025-04-21 02:58:46+00:00
Some more market and technical information about the DEC PRO/VENIX system here:

https://oldvcr.blogspot.com/2025/03/more-pro-for-dec-profess...

And this wonderful quip here:

"Keep that kernel version history in mind for when we get to oddiments of the C compiler. As for networking, though, with the exception of UUCP over serial, none of these early versions of Venix on either the PDP-11 or 8086 supported any kind of network connectivity out of the box."

https://oldvcr.blogspot.com/2025/04/lets-give-provenix-barel...
by frontbackgeek | 2025-04-21 03:00:14+00:00
OpenAI released something that’s making a lot of developers and AI enthusiasts pretty excited — a 32-page guide called “A Practical Guide to Building Agents.” It’s a step-by-step manual to help people build smart AI agents using OpenAI tools like the Agents SDK and the new Responses API. And the best part? It’s not just for experts — even if you’re still figuring things out, this guide can help you get started the right way.
by sltkr | 2025-04-21 03:01:32+00:00
Which 3 books are you talking about? I can only find 1 on Amazon (and it has a grand total of 12 reviews, so... you know, not exactly a best seller).

Frankly it's a bit suspicious how defensive you are of this author, and combined with the blatant downvoting of my toplevel comment, makes me think there is some astro-turfing going on in this thread.
by dzhiurgis | 2025-04-21 03:03:09+00:00
Wow you get it so wrong.

Smart home is less wiring with added benefit of automating few things in life. Wireless light switches can be placed at any location without intensive labour. Most smart bulbs can be dimmed and can shift temperature.

Overall it’s not some sort of game changer, but not super complex either. On par with Japanese toilet and induction cooking.
by _jackdk_ | 2025-04-21 03:03:47+00:00
This is the key sentence:

> The key insight of the Hypothesis library is that instead of shrinking generated values, we instead shrink the samples produced by the PRNG.

Hedgehog loses shrink information when you do a monadic bind (Gen a -> (a -> Gen b) -> Gen b). Hypothesis parses values out of the stream of data generated by the PRNG, so when it "binds", you are still just consuming off that stream of random numbers, and you can shrink the stream to shrink the generated values.

Here is a talk that applies the Hypothesis idea to test C++: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C6joICx1XMY . Discussion of PBT implementation approaches begins at 6:30.
by musicale | 2025-04-21 03:04:15+00:00
> "some stuff you just won't understand the beauty and the joy until you've at least put 100 hours in it"

Terrific quote and advice. 100 hours seems doable for a lot of things (even if it's not enough time.)

If you practice things, often you become better at them, at which point they become more enjoyable.

There's definitely a point of fun - the point where something challenging enough to be interesting, and where you can make progress, but not so punishing as to be discouraging. Games often target that fun point.
by wenc | 2025-04-21 03:04:23+00:00
In many developing countries, I would say it's the reverse. Undergrad is actually "necessary" for most average people -- it's the minimum bar for white collar employment; the only exceptions are people who are have rare, valuable skills.

In Western countries, it's way easier (it's more difficult now, but still fairly easy) to get to a middle-class life without a college degree. I've lived in developing countries and when I moved to the west, I realized America, and many western countries, are actually outliers. In a developing country, especially populous ones, this is decidedly not the case.

In many third world countries, the path to a good income for people without college degrees is typically to run your own business (not everyone makes it, but at least it's a reasonable path). It requires working long hours, business acumen (understanding velocity of money, not just profit margin [1]), and pivoting a lot. Many of my family members without college degrees made it this way.

An uncle apprenticed with a carpenter to learn the furniture business, and slogged for years. But he saved aggressively and managed to open his own business, and understood the business cycle -- optimizing for cashflow rather than profit. He's doing well today.

[1] https://commoncog.com/what-the-ceo-wants-you-to-know/
by codemiscreant | 2025-04-21 03:04:38+00:00
There is essentially zero piracy from these digital cinema releases. The pirate copies are generally from once it starts digitally streaming on one of the services including PPV, and when pirate copies exist earlier it is almost always someone with a camera in a theatre making a terrible quality screener.

Piracy is inevitable, but in this case their model is much more robust that I would have predicted.
by gwbas1c | 2025-04-21 03:06:11+00:00
> electrical grid is split-phase 240V

The electric grid is three phase; 60 or 50 hz depending on where you are in the world. The voltage varies considerably, long distance transmission is in the kilovolts, or higher.

"split-phase 240V" happens at the transformer near your house, in North America. I don't know as much about the rest of the world, but I've always understood it to be ~440v split phase because it allows longer wires between the transformer and the house.