MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jerf | 2025-04-23 13:07:39+00:00
I haven't tried shopping with ChatGPT. Is there any good reason to believe we aren't there already? It's not like they're going to program the chatbot to spew out all the money it has gotten for ads, and the recent paper demonstrating how the reasoning the LLM claimed for how it did math bore no resemblance whatsoever to how it actually did the math means it'll be plenty easy for it to give you endless ramblings about how it is just picking the best product when in fact it's just following its RHLF-trained paid brand preferences.

Besides, even the mighty power of LLMs and RHLF and all our AI tech probably can't overcome the fact that the input data is already so massaged that even if you did set out to create a hypothetical LLM chatbot that was 100% on the side of the user, and not the person actually running it, you would probably not be able to succeed.
by KineticLensman | 2025-04-23 13:07:48+00:00
There was no need to run a scorched-earth policy to prevent the Nimrod project from being revived. The plane that caught fire, killing 14 people, in mid air was a flying deathtrap. It had leaky internal fuel pipes that ran past a different (extremely hot) pipe that allowed exhausts from one engine to be used in restarting the other engine after an intentional in-flight shutdown (they used to shut down one engine to loiter more fuel efficiently when they reached their mission's surveillance area). The leaky fuel pipes were the aftermath IIRC of an air-to-air refuelling system that was retrofitted to allow long range flights down to the Falklands islands. The devastating official post-crash report (the Haddon-Cave review) is at [0]. It was one of the classic 'normal accidents' situations - they got away with multiple routine internal fuel leaks up until the day when they didn't.

Separately, the planes were all very old, and had been constructed over several years so were all slightly different. Projects that tried to do fleet upgrades usually went massively over-budget because each airframe had to be treated as a special case, even for things that you would expect to be standardised like the basic fuselage and wing dimensions.

[Edit] The Haddon-Cave review was exceptional in that it actually named and shamed those in the MOD and industry who helped develop the bodged safety case. People in the MOD and industry lost their jobs after the crash.

[0] https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...
by zeptonaut22 | 2025-04-23 13:08:11+00:00
I wanted to share this post with any other engineers that have struggled with the transition from "building what you're told" as a junior engineer to "figuring out what to build" as a senior engineer.

This post talks about a super pragmatic roadmap I came across from an experienced indie game dev dealing with exactly this problem: how do you balance between "building" and "figuring out what to build"?
by GuB-42 | 2025-04-23 13:08:36+00:00
Quite effective at destroying anything good left of Google I would say.

Google has a bunch of nice things (search, gmail, maps, ...) that cost money, and an advertising business that makes money, the former helping the latter. Split the two and the nice stuff will be without funding and die out, and only the "evil" part will survive. Or so I think. Splitting out Chrome will not change the face of the world, but Firefox has shown that an (somewhat) independent browser can work.
by PaulKeeble | 2025-04-23 13:08:56+00:00
There is a different value to the person if your rabbit hole is filled with learning and information that informs rather than being just a mechanism to try and sell people something they don't want. Its not really in wikipedia's direct interest for people to just scroll around, it costs them bandwidth, but its also part of the point of wikipedia and every page read is directly towards their mission.
by preommr | 2025-04-23 13:10:22+00:00
> And the vibe of the whole thing is very topical, of course, with the US basically demanding we spend more money subsidizing their defense industry by buying their overpriced armaments from them while at the same time key people in the administration openly musing about the elimination of our sovereignty.

Surprised this doesn't get mentioned more.

If Canada wanted to, we could easily scale military spending by investing it in homegrown projects instead of spending it at the altar of the mililtary industrial complex.

It's easy for America to complain about other countries not spending as much when it's the one that owns the market we all shop at.
by iambateman | 2025-04-23 13:10:25+00:00
This is the problem with breaking Chrome out of Google. It’s not just OpenAI, but the constellation of potential buyers is short and problematic.

Is Apple a good buyer? Oracle? OpenAI? NVIDIA? The Saudis? (I think I’m kidding about that?)

Someone is going to buy this for $100B and find a way to make a (big) profit off of it. I’m not sure the new landlord is going to be less rapacious than the last one was.
by madamelic | 2025-04-23 13:10:29+00:00
That is the root of the problem with these batteries-included frameworks: lock-in.

Once you encounter a problem they either don't want to solve or haven't solved, your only choices are either:

- start layering on hacks (in which case you quickly get into case where no one and nothing else could help you)

- decide not to do that-thing

- do a rebuild to get rid of the batteries-included.

Personally I think something Supabase is great for toy projects that have a defined scope & no future or a very early startup that has the intention to rebuild entirely. Just my opinion though, maybe others feel more comfortable with that level of lock-in.

Even something like Heroku is miles better because they keep everything separated where your auth, database, & infrastructure aren't tightly coupled with a library.
by BrandoElFollito | 2025-04-23 13:10:33+00:00
Volleyball is also one of the sports most difficult to watch on tv (and to style extend, also live).

I play amateur volley so I know what to expect but still miss the action most of the time because the ball moves too fast.

This is why I prefer by far to watch women's volleyball: since it's slower, they rely more on technical accuracy and you can follow what's going on. The play is also more interesting because it is not a constant bam! supersonic serve, followed by bam! supersonic spike, done.
by StopDisinfo910 | 2025-04-23 13:11:04+00:00
> It's a big controversy in CS education, isn't it?

Is it?

I think most people who have heard of the topic are familiar with the Church-Turing thesis and know that both definitions of effective calculability are equivalent.

My preference is mostly a matter of taste I think. I admire how little there is to the lambda calculus definition and how computability somehow emerges through construction and definition (which admittedly are not simple). It nicely shows that you need very little "machinery" to get a powerful computational system.

Turing machines by comparaison seem somewhat contrieved with their infinite tape, head and register even if I realise that in a lot of way they are closer to an actual computer.
by lcnPylGDnU4H9OF | 2025-04-23 13:11:36+00:00
> Why should your distaste for a platform preclude them from having platform support that would benefit the things they want to build?

They answered this in their initial comment:

> If you officially support visionOS, it now requires all product and engineering innovation to take it into account, slowing down velocity for very little gain, if any.
by criddell | 2025-04-23 13:12:01+00:00
And the article really isn't about the man or his achievements. The term is named after Gruen, but I don't think he had all that much to do with it or wanted to be associated with it.

I probably would have linked the first use of "Gruen" to his wikipedia page, but I understand why the author didn't. If you really care you can find it yourself and keeping the post focused is a good thing.
by ryao | 2025-04-23 13:13:09+00:00
I doubt that, since telemetry slows things down and it has been found that software runs faster under WSL than native Windows. A quick search found this, which shows a substantial performance difference for the same thing between native Windows and WSL:

https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/vtc0fy/wsl2_faster_th...

There have been others who observed the same in the past (and with WSL1), although I do not have a list. I recall reading libc telemetry hooks on Windows that are absent as being claimed to be the cause, but I cannot find the page where I read that. The Reddit post has the alternative suggestion that process creation speed is the cause.
by omnimus | 2025-04-23 13:13:31+00:00
This doesn’t seem right. What is Microsoft supplying? Windows which is used almost exclusively to access some web service CRUD form. All of these services are made by third party vendors. Any number of OSes could do that from linux based or ChromeOS or MacOS… probably even iOS. There are some legacy win desktop apps that are slowly getting replaced or they are run in VMs.

The Microsoft servers are most likely azure running linux. Thats quite possible to replace by any number of vendors.

The main MOAT microsoft has are the contacts and the lobby. There always is some politician around fighting for Microsoft because they like Outlook more than Thunderbird.

It’s also reason why i think they will keep their dominant position. Even though the idea they provide something rare is increasingly more untrue.
by retskrad | 2025-04-23 13:13:37+00:00
Interesting piece from Ben Thomson regarding Apple’s troubles in AI. He says this of Vision Pro:

https://stratechery.com/2025/apple-and-the-ghosts-of-compani...

“We already established above that the next paradigm is wearables. Wearables today, however, are very much in the pre-iPhone era. On one hand you have standalone platforms like Oculus, with its own operating system, app store, etc.; the best analogy is a video game console, which is technically a computer, but is not commonly thought of as such given its singular purpose. On the other hand, you have devices like smart watches, AirPods, and smart glasses, which are extensions of the phone; the analogy here is the iPod, which provided great functionality but was not a general computing device.

Now Apple might dispute this characterization in terms of the Vision Pro specifically, which not only has a PC-class M2 chip, along with its own visionOS operating system and apps, but can also run iPad apps. In truth, though, this makes the Vision Pro akin to Microsoft Mobile: yes, it is a capable device, but it is stuck in the wrong paradigm, i.e. the previous one that Apple dominated. Or, to put it another way, I don’t view “apps” as the bridge between mobile and wearables; apps are just the way we access the Internet on mobile, and the Internet was the old bridge, not the new one.”
by mst | 2025-04-23 13:13:49+00:00
OpenAI stuff in general seems (to me, at least) to be overly positive and confident in terms of how it replies.

While I make no foolish claims that it's perfect, I've found Claude feels much less arrogant, and was genuinely appreciative when one of its replies started with an (accurate, of course I checked primary sources to verify that) analysis of the first half of my question, and then for the more obscure second half said "I'm not sure if I can answer that without hallucinating, but here's some stuff you could try researching."

Certainly Claude's tone and "attitude" (FSVO) works much better for me than any other LLM I've tried, though mileage will, of course, vary.

(I have zero connection to the company and am still on a free account, I'm just quietly impressed relative to the competition)
by matthewowen | 2025-04-23 13:14:30+00:00
Do people in Spanish cities with strong grids (eg Barcelona) not also use the local language equivalent of "blocks" as a term? I would be surprised if not. It's a fundamentally convenient term in any area that has a repeated grid.

The fact that some cities don't have repeated grids and hence don't use the term is not really a valuable corrective to the post you are replying to.
by alias_neo | 2025-04-23 13:14:57+00:00
Isn't that essentially just any existing systems integrator? There's plenty of those that are non-American.

That aside, governments have the resources to do this themselves, that's how they currently do so. Extending those services to local organisations would be a step in the right direction.

The thing about services and tooling is that for many orgs, there's not a whole lot you need, and once you're at a scale where you need tooling to manage that scale, you presumably have the resources for an operations team to deal with that, and can outsource the bits you can't do.

The org I work for outsources our public-facing website work to a web-design co, because that's their speciality, and not ours.

All of that is to say; I agree with you, but I think they already exist in the form of SIs.
by pavel_lishin | 2025-04-23 13:15:22+00:00
> It is abuse to rope people into an impossible activity. It would be crazymaking to me, if my church or our volunteer leadership, would force me into a virtual singing activity.

Then I suppose it's a good thing that nobody forced these people into it.

> They will not understand the technological limitations, and they will not understand that no matter what they do, they will not succeed in synchronizing their voices or instruments.

And yet, from the article:

> “We found virtual group singing could provide emotional, cognitive and social support through accessible, engaging music programs for diverse aging populations.”
by NikkiA | 2025-04-23 13:15:24+00:00
ETH is a lot more than something a simple battery could provide. 1 ETH 'unit' is 5kW of power at 750-1000V AC. A train will usually require much more than 1 unit.

HEP cars (aka 'generator cars') are a solution, but the UK never really had them, we had converted diesels called 'Ethels', which are functionally identical to the current practice of tagging a diesel locomotive at idle on the tail of the train, but all of those were scrapped.

* Ethel => https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Rail_Class_25#Train_He...
by karmakaze | 2025-04-23 13:15:26+00:00
The interesting thing here is that Apple finally learned that games matter. Of course they go about it in the same "we're never wrong" attitude by never admitting it, like how their mice don't have two physical buttons to stay true to "a mouse should have one button" from the original Mac. They're learning though, it was voluntary unlike USB-C on their phones/tablets.
by StopDisinfo910 | 2025-04-23 13:16:07+00:00
> The EU would have a lot more sympathy for this if there were any non trivial digital markets that originated in the EU

Why should that be a prerequisite?

The EU is sovereign. They are free to do whatever they want with their law. Let's not forget we are talking about the second consumer market in the world. There will be a lot more space for homegrown solutions or companies ready to comply if the foreign companies currently profiting decide to leave.
by flakiness | 2025-04-23 13:17:00+00:00
Two of top Chrome co-founders, beng and darin, who are also Firefox alumni, are now working at OAI. It's rather surprising if they do not build a web browser. These are browser people.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/bengoodger/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/darin-fisher-7059ab/

I honestly wonder whether they even have to buy Chrome. They can just fork it. This feels more like trolling to me tbh.
by simpaticoder | 2025-04-23 13:17:06+00:00
I almost edited my comment to anticipate this comment. It is not large compared to the budget. Nothing is. It's large in absolute terms. $50M is a lot of spend compared to most businesses with a similar scope. The product is a database of information other people report, naively it seems like a lot. It doesn't have any of the complexity of most businesses. This is not to minimize the work of fixing messy input, reproducing and properly cataloging vulnerabilities, etc. That budget is ~250 workers (assuming $100k/year with 100% overhead), ignoring infra. More than anything I'm curious how the money is being spent because without knowing that it's impossible to judge whether it's bloated or not.
by mcphage | 2025-04-23 13:17:14+00:00
There's also another numeral system called "Bijective Numeration" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bijective_numeration) which does is a bijection between numeral sequences and numbers (hence the name). It's pretty neat... it doesn't have a 0, so you can't get an infinite string of trailing 0s.
by skybrian | 2025-04-23 13:17:30+00:00
What you said here is helpful.

Maybe start with an explanation of what it does without referring to Cygwin? That would be for people unfamiliar with Cygwin. Edit: actually you already did that, but starting off with “not Cygwin” is confusing.

You could also explain how your approach differs from Cygwin, for people who do know it.
by BrandoElFollito | 2025-04-23 13:17:37+00:00
A woman who is pregnant is tagged by society with "mother". The man who leaves is not. Legally yes, but socially not.

The mixer who abandoned her child is "a mother who abandoned her child". The father is not even in the picture.

I would live to live in a world where the rational words cubby, but culture, history, religion is still very strong.

And I live in France, love of the most free countries in the world in this regard.
Show HN: Advanced-Alchemy – A framework agnostic library for SQLAlchemy
by Kumzy | 2025-04-23 13:17:48+00:00
Hello HN!

Advanced Alchemy is an optimized companion library for SQLAlchemy, designed to supercharge your database models with powerful tooling for migrations, asynchronous support, lifecycle hook and more.

You can find the repository and documentation here:

- GitHub Repository: https://github.com/litestar-org/advanced-alchemy - Official Documentation : https://docs.advanced-alchemy.litestar.dev/latest/

Advanced-Alchemy extends SQLAlchemy with productivity-enhancing features, while keeping full compatibility with the ecosystem you already know.

At its core, Advanced-Alchemy offers:

- Sync and async repositories, featuring common CRUD and highly optimized bulk operations

- Integration with major web frameworks including Litestar, Starlette, FastAPI, Sanic

- Custom-built alembic configuration and CLI with optional framework integration

- Utility base classes with audit columns, primary keys and utility functions

- Built in File Object data type for storing objects:

- Unified interface for various storage backends fsspec and obstore - Optional lifecycle event hooks integrated with SQLAlchemy's event system to automatically save and delete files as records are inserted, updated, or deleted.

- Optimized JSON types including a custom JSON type for Oracle

- Integrated support for UUID6 and UUID7 using uuid-utils

- Integrated support for Nano ID using fastnanoid

- Pre-configured base classes with audit columns UUID or Big Integer primary keys and a sentinel column.

- Synchronous and asynchronous repositories featuring:

- Common CRUD operations for SQLAlchemy models - Bulk inserts, updates, upserts, and deletes with dialect-specific enhancements - Integrated counts, pagination, sorting, filtering with LIKE, IN, and dates before and/or after.

- Tested support for multiple database backends including:

- SQLite via aiosqlite or sqlite - Postgres via asyncpg or psycopg3 (async or sync) - MySQL via asyncmy - Oracle via oracledb (async or sync) (tested on 18c and 23c) - Google Spanner via spanner-sqlalchemy - DuckDB via duckdb_engine - Microsoft SQL Server via pyodbc or aioodbc - CockroachDB via sqlalchemy-cockroachdb (async or sync)

The framework is designed to be lightweight yet powerful, with a clean API that makes it easy to integrate into existing projects.

You can find a full example using FastAPI there: https://docs.advanced-alchemy.litestar.dev/latest/usage/fram...

There are custom datatypes, a service and repository (including optimized bulk operations), and native integration with Flask, FastAPI, Starlette, Litestar and Sanic.

Feedback and enhancements are always welcomed! We have an active discord community, so if you don't get a response on an issue or would like to chat directly with the dev team, please reach out.

The library: https://github.com/litestar-org/advanced-alchemy
by MyPasswordSucks | 2025-04-23 13:19:46+00:00
First and foremost, you have to understand why people use Amazon. Amazon has a good chance of having whatever it is I'm looking for, the price is generally about the same as I'd expect to pay elsewhere, and the shipping (with Prime, in the US, can't speak for UK/EU/RoW) absolutely can't be beat. People don't generally feel like messing around on three or four different websites to find the item, add it to their cart, and start the checkout process to determine how long the shipping will take and how much it'll cost, so the mental heuristic of "Amazon shipping is always free and if it's the sort of thing I'd find at Walgreens it'll usually be same-day/next-day" is incredibly valuable for Amazon.

So, with that in mind: The margins for most of the products people buy on Amazon these days are miniscule, so you really need to be able to sell at scale right out the gate, and it's a gargantuan investment to be able to do that. Shipping costs have also shot through the roof. I can't really speak for the U.K. or EU, but in the continental US, free shipping is a money-loser if you're shipping items heavier than 1 pound and not making a $20 average profit per order. Amazon can do it because they have their own shipping network, so if you want parity there, it's a gargantuan^2 investment.

Amazon didn't become "Amazon" overnight. They started by just selling books (which, in the US, can be shipped at much cheaper rates than the size/weight would otherwise cost, because the USPS subsidizes media mail), pivoted into CDs and DVDs just in time for the tail end of the CD money-printing heyday and the middle of the Reign of DVD, and slowly incrementalized into offering drugstore / grocery / big-box-store items and faster and faster free shipping. A competitor won't be able to copy that strategy. I think the most likely path in 2025 would be a company that started with a focus on just one geographic region (a state or three in the US, a single country in Europe) and was able to slowly expand as cashflow allowed.

So the short answer is "nobody has the money". The longer answer is "nobody has the money, and also the time and patience".
by troupo | 2025-04-23 13:20:11+00:00
> But removing Chrome from Google makes zero sense and won't stop it from being a monopoly. The monopoly part comes from buying DoubleClick

Not only. Google controls a lot of user attention. See how many services they link together to serve you ads .... erm .... recommendations to make browsing better or something: https://x.com/dmitriid/status/1908951546869498085 And one of those services is Chrome
by mst | 2025-04-23 13:20:14+00:00
I feel like it would be creepy if the kid was using it without anybody ever checking up on it ... but I think all of my friends with kids would say that the answer to that is "parenting."

I mean, giving a kid an unlocked iPad and not bothering to do basic supervision can also have really creepy results, so I'm unconvinced that something like your work actually makes anything worse in the negligent parenting situation, and seems like it could be a lot of fun in the competent parenting one.

If you haven't already done this, I'd note that I can think of a number of parents who would probably rather enjoy a version of story mode that let them collaborate with their child and your code to put together a bedtime story before they turn it off for the night and tuck the kid into bed.