MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by junon | 2025-04-29 12:39:38+00:00
ReDos often get 7 or above since they can be "network accessible" (anything can be). CVSS is broken.

And yes, people who get scared file reports asking us to fix it, oftentimes we can't (because it's not a real vuln), and 99% of the time they're not even remotely affected. The requests are generally not very nice, either.

Most of the time, the request to fix a CVE is the first we've ever heard of it being filed. "Security research agencies" oftentimes have their own databases, and rarely do these "researchers" follow any amount of responsible disclosure, let alone even telling us about their findings or that they've filed. Many of them don't even cite a reporter, email, or any such contact information.

Especially when the CVE is nonsense, improperly scored, etc. there is almost no way to get it taken down or to reduce its severity. Apparently in the eyes of these agencies the people writing the code cannot adequately gauge the severity of vulnerabilities. It's nearing levels of almost zero collaboration with maintainers before things are filed.

I can't remember the last time I even had the opportunity to release a proper fix before a CVE went out. I can count on one hand the number of times I was asked before a CVE was filed. I don't think a single CVE of any code I maintain has had a score that properly reflected the severity of the actual vulnerability (assuming there even was one).

Remember, most of us do this in free time, for free. So all of the extra bureaucracy and synthesized urgency can be extremely detrimental.
by terinjokes | 2025-04-29 12:39:49+00:00
Hey, I'm KG8ORS. It's been aong time since I've sent a QSL card (and I've never received one), but it's where I first heard about IRCs.

I agree that UPU members are required to accept them. PostNL closed all of their post offices a few years ago in favor of contracting out to businesses, who may not be familiar with them.

It looks like Omniva (aka/fka Eesti Post) also ships worldwide and charges in Euro.
by godzillabrennus | 2025-04-29 12:39:58+00:00
November 30th, 2022 is when ChatGPT burst into the world stage and upended what people thought AI was capable of doing. It’s been less than three years since then. The technology is still imperfect but improving at an exponential rate.

I know it’s replaced marketing content writers in startups. I know it has augmented development in startups and reduced hiring needs.

The effects as it gains capability will be mass unemployment.
by anthk | 2025-04-29 12:40:03+00:00
Lots of HN users in Spain have transversal knowledge of tons of terms. Bear mind Spain it's highly social and engineers (proper ones, with a Bachelor's at least) often share trivia back and forth from their respective areas. Is was not weird seeing for people ask Biologysts when the pandemics and viceversa on cyberattacks.

By just politely asking you can hit tons of different terms in a day.
by TuringNYC | 2025-04-29 12:40:21+00:00
> Well if nobody hires junior devs, how do you make more senior devs?

This is an excellent question for society to answer, and hopefully for policy-makers to think about. A challenge with capitalism as I see it practices -- is that most for-profit orgs think quarter to quarter about earnings, costs, etc. They are not focused on second order issues arising 5-10yrs later.

We've all seen this play out in our own lives -- with the gutting of American manufacturing...and the resulting discord a generation later.
by Tsarp | 2025-04-29 12:40:40+00:00
1. Brain dump

- Voice based note taking tool that does transcription locally

- Markdown files to any folder(s) you setup.

- Help with ideation, rumination, todolists

- Alternative to when writing is too high friction

- https://voicebraindump.com

2. VoiceType

- wisprflow, superwhisper alternative

- runs locally so no subscription

- dictation tool, best for when using cursor, windsurf, chatgpt or talking to an LLM

- https://carelesswhisper.app
by Cthulhu_ | 2025-04-29 12:41:03+00:00
It's nice to think about what is involved in a "black start", but as people working with power grids are engineers too and these scenarios are things they will often consider and train for, it wasn't that big a deal.

I suspect it's a bit of insecurity; what would you do if your application's landscape suddenly went offline? In theory it's all infrastructure-as-code and pressing 'start' will boot everything up, pull up the last backups, etc... but when's the last time you tested that? When's the last time you did a training?

I've been working at an energy company for a few years now; while we have an office fire drill a few times a year, there is never an IT outage training. At best a load test late at night. And they paid the price a few years ago; due to the energy crisis, people checked their energy contracts and prices more often, causing 2-5x more load than normal. And the IT hadn't been updated, even though they were warned for a decade that their IT had bottlenecks (single database etc) and they would run into issues sometime.
by colinmorelli | 2025-04-29 12:41:16+00:00
FYI: The actual study may not quite say what this article is suggesting. Unless I'm missing something, the study seems to focus on employee use of chat-based assistants, not on company-wide use of AI workflow solutions. The answers come from interviewing the employees themselves. There is an analysis of impacts on the labor market, but that is likely flawed if the companies are segmented based on employee use of chat assistants versus company-wide deployment of AI technology.

In other words, this more likely answers the question "If customer support agents all use ChatGPT or some in-house equivalent, does the company need fewer customer support agents?" than it answers the question "If we deploy an AI agent for customers to interact with, can it reduce the volume of inquiries that make it to our customer service team and, thus, require fewer agents?"
Ask HN: What are your favourite daily puzzle games?
by cookie_monsta | 2025-04-29 12:41:21+00:00
I got hooked on daily puzzle games like a lot of people, with Wordle and since then have been collecting them here and there. Most of my faves have been posted here by creators or fans, others I don't remember how I found them. Anyway, it's been a while since we've had a dedicated thread for people to share their favourites, but there are new ones coming out all the time, so I'm curious to know if there are any good ones I'm missing out on. I guess my only real criteria are that they are browser-based, mobile friendly, free to play and somewhat original. Below are the ones I regularly play:

From the NYT: Wordle, connections and the mini

https://wordchase.semantle.com guess the word guided by AI hints

https://travle.earth/ get from one country to another by passing through bordering countries

https://wafflegame.net/ drag and drop letters to make a "waffle" of words

https://imsqueezy.com/ insert letters to make other words, to form 3 words connected by a theme

https://truncate.town/ kind of an adversarial scrabble, PvP or against the computer

https://ziggurwords.com/ unscramble letters to find increasingly longer words

https://crosswordle.com/ a crossword/wordle hybrid

https://www.threemagicwords.app/ more word unscrambling

https://www.theatlantic.com/games/bracket-city/ hard to explain - uncover a famous event in history by unwrapping nested clues?

https://www.omiword.com/ drag tiles within sectors to spell 4 common words

Am I missing any good ones?
by pbohun | 2025-04-29 12:41:22+00:00
I think this kind of control mechanism is not a great idea and could lead to easy bugs.

I think it's a better idea to write a function that applies a function to the elements of a tree. Ideally you'd make a function for each traversal order. This makes it obvious what is happening.

map_tree_pre(my_tree, my_func);

map_tree_in(my_tree, my_func);

map_tree_post(my_tree, my_func);

map_tree_bfs(my_tree, my_func);
by busfahrer | 2025-04-29 12:41:36+00:00
> That is, any sufficiently mature indie game project will end up implementing an informally specified, ad hoc, bug-ridden implementation of Unity (... or just use the informally specified, ad hoc and bug-ridden game engine called "Unity")

For the 4 people on HN not aware of it, this is a riff on Greenspun's tenth rule:

> Any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of Common Lisp.
by byoung2 | 2025-04-29 12:41:48+00:00
I am a tech lead and while I don't use AI at my company (Disney) for writing code, since I have a team of contractors at my disposal, in my spare time I am working on a side project where ChatGPT is writing all of the code. It is an experiment mainly to see if it can be done. I am getting better at writing prompts to get better results, but I don't think we are at the point where a nontechnical project manager could get good results. I feel like a lead or senior can use AI to replace interns and juniors, but more likely it is currently being used to make them more productive rather than replace people. It will be interesting to see the next few years, when it will be possible for one lead or senior to do the work of entire teams.
by sephalon | 2025-04-29 12:41:48+00:00
Yes, noise is a problem, which unfortunately makes the lamp quite unpopular with my girlfriend ;-) Some is indeed coming from the folding mechanism itself, but the majority of noise is actually caused by the stepper motor, despite limiting the current to the necessary minimum. One could try to switch to a more advanced (i.e. silent) stepper motor driver than the A4988 (I mainly picked that one because ESPHome already has a driver for it), or use a servo motor instead.
by canucker2016 | 2025-04-29 12:42:30+00:00
from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_Canadian_federal_election

Before Election:

Liberal: 152 Conservative: 120 Bloc Quebecois: 33 NDP: 24 Green: 2

Election Results:

Liberal: 155 (+13 leading) == 168 Conservative: 133 (+11 leading) == 144 Bloc Quebecois: 21 (+2 leading) == 23 NDP: 5 (+2 leading) == 7 Green: 1
by bluGill | 2025-04-29 12:45:20+00:00
I'll answer the opposite question: the worst way to learn a language is to spend all you effort learning all the different ways to learn trying to find what is best.

unfortunately the above is not a joke. It is what many people are really doing. The question itself is fine but don't let it consume you. Or if it does at least do as I do: confine your research to the language you are trying to learn.
by westcoast49 | 2025-04-29 12:45:46+00:00
It seems to have merit as a subdivision scheme.

The shapes look a bit wonky when projected onto a map, though, and it may not be as intuitive to reason about as the hexagons that would (mostly) result from subdividing an icosahedron. With a subdivided icosahedron you end up with a regular lattice of shapes that is easier to reason about. I think an icosahedron might be a better fit for an indexing scheme for that reason, despite it's higher mathematical error in approximating the sphere at a given resolution.

I explored a similar idea four or five years ago, without being aware of H3. My goal was to find a compact multi-resolution geospatial height map format. My idea was closer to H3 than to yours, it seems.
by colinmorelli | 2025-04-29 12:45:54+00:00
This is the real value of AI that, I think, we're just starting to get into. It's less about automating workflows that are inherently unstructured (I think that we're likely to continue wanting humans for this for some time).

It's more about automating workflows that are already procedural and/or protocolized, but where information gathering is messy and unstructured (I.e. some facets of law, health, finance, etc).

Using your dietician example: we often know quite well what types of foods to eat or avoid based on your nutritional needs, your medical history, your preferences, etc. But gathering all of that information requires a mix of collecting medical records, talking to the patient, etc. Once that information is available, we can execute a fairly procedural plan to put together a diet that will likely work for you.

These are cases that I believe LLMs are actually very well suited, if the solution can be designed in such a way as to limit hallucinations.
by pjmlp | 2025-04-29 12:46:26+00:00
Many people dream to make it as indie, most don't even achieve that.

No it isn't, there are now two versions of Minecraft, the classical one, and Minecraft Bedrock, that is the one written in C++.

Minecraft Bedrock doesn't have half of the community that Minecraft classical enjoys, hence why Microsoft is trying to use JavaScript based extensions to bring the mod community into Minecraft Bedrock.

Finally without Minecraft classical market success, there wouldn't exist Minecraft Bedrock at all, so Java did serve well enough to Notch's fortunes.
by InsideOutSanta | 2025-04-29 12:47:03+00:00
I can only tell you what worked for me: it's input. Read. Start using any brute-force method to learn the basics, like the 100 most common words. Then start reading stories aimed at toddlers (or especially written for language learners, there are apps), and keep going to more complex input as you progress.

Do not worry about grammar; you will learn it intuitively as you move from simple sentences to more complex blocks of text. Do not worry about learning word lists after you have the basics; learn words in the context of the text you're reading.

(I have no qualifications besides being a self-taught English and Chinese speaker, so take my input for what it's worth.)
by DontchaKnowit | 2025-04-29 12:47:14+00:00
Used to work on CHS systems for Cerner. If I am not mistaken they were a "communityworks" client, which meant their databases were shared with a number of other clients - a "multitenent" envirnment, we called it. Completely bumblefucked design. Not surprised somthing like this happened.

Also - cerner software in general allowed hospitals to freely completely fuck up their own architecture. Sometimes ireperably.

If anyone has details about how this happened Id love to hear.
by ozgrakkurt | 2025-04-29 12:47:32+00:00
It can’t replace a human for support, it is not even close to replacing a junior developer. It can’t replace any advice job because it lies instead of erroring.

As an example if you want diet advice, it can lie to you very convincingly so there is no point in getting advice from it.

Main value you get from a programmer is they understand what they are doing and they can take the responsibility of what they are developing. Very junior developers are hired mostly as an investment so they become productive and stay with the company. AI might help with some of this but doesn’t really replace anyone in the process.

For support, there is massive value in talking to another human and having them trying to solve your issue. LLMs don’t feel much better than the hardcoded menu style auto support there already is.

I find it useful for some coding tasks but think LLMs were overestimated and it will blow up like NFTs
by narrator | 2025-04-29 12:47:40+00:00
In San Francisco they did a 1 mile extension of the subway and it cost 1 billion dollars. That's 10x what it would cost in any other major city anywhere in the world, but a whole bunch of middle management surplus elites found a way to get at all the tech company tax revenue, so the tunnel served it's purpose and nobody is upset.

The high speed rail project is serving a similar redistributive purpose to act as middle class welfare for people who work from home, go to zoom meetings and produce and review reports. Living in California is already as good as it gets, nothing needs to improve, but it sure is expensive so the governments job is to take tech money and dig and fill up holes in the ground and use homeless crackheads who randomly attack people and are never put in prison to terrorize the normies into continuing to pay for it all. If any of these projects got finished or there was a reasonable resolution to the homeless issue, all those middle class liberal arts degree meeting attenders would be out of a job and couldn't afford to live here.
by Ekaros | 2025-04-29 12:48:06+00:00
I think that drivers are probably pretty late in cycle. Many environments they operate in are somewhat complicated. Even if you do a lot to make automation possible. Say with garbage move to containers that can simply be lifted either by crane or forks. Still places were those containers are might need lot of individual training to navigate to.

Similar thing goes to delivery. Moving single pallet to store or replacing carpets or whatever. Lot of complexity if you do not offload it to receiver.

More regular the environment is easier it is to automate. A shelving in store in my mind might be simpler than all environments where vehicles need to operate in.

And I think we know first to go. Average or below average "creative" professionals. Copywriter, artists and so on.
by lnenad | 2025-04-29 12:49:20+00:00
> Japan unveils world’s first solar super-panel: More powerful than 20 nuclear reactors

> Under its revised energy plan, the Ministry of Industry now prioritizes PSCs on Section 0 of its plan wherein Japan aims to develop PSC sections generating 20 gigawatts of electricity equivalent to 20 nuclear reactors by fiscal 2040.

Wtf is this headline. Why are journalists doing this shit.
by scarface_74 | 2025-04-29 12:49:23+00:00
My anecdote is that I am in cloud consulting specializing in app dev. 90%+ of my projects are greenfield development.

Before LLMs got good enough, there were projects I would scope with the expectation of having one junior consultant do the coding grunt work - simple Lambdas, Python utility scripts, bash scripts, infrastructure as code, translating some preexisting code to the target language of the customer.

This is the perfect use case for ChatGPT. It’s simple well contained work that can fit in its context window, the AWS SDKs in various languages are well documented, there is plenty of sample code, and it’s easy enough to test.

I can tell it to “verify all AWS SDK functions on the web” or give it the links to newer SDK functionality.

I don’t really ever need a junior developer for anything. If I have to be explicit about the requirements anyway, I can use an LLM.

And before the the gate keeping starts, I’ve been coding as a hobby in 1986 and started coding in assembly language then and have been coding professionally since 1996.
by tlxio | 2025-04-29 12:49:54+00:00
Would you happen to have (sample) or open-source Rust code out there demonstrating this approach? I'm very curious to learn more.

For example; if you have a progressbar that needs to be updated continuously, you do what? Upon every `tick` of your Rust engine you send a new struct with `ProgressBar(percentage=x)`? Or do the structs have unique identifiers so that the UI code can just update that one element and its properties instead of re-rendering the entire screen?
by crote | 2025-04-29 12:50:51+00:00
The problem is that it's still steam pushing spinning rust. You can't instantly scale up or down, let alone do so in an organized fashion. If you were happily generating 1000MW out of 1500MW max, there's very little you can do if a power line goes offline and you're suddenly connected to 2000MW of load - or only 250MW. At best it's going to take tens of seconds to adjust, which in practice means you're forced to dump the entire load because in the meantime your output has deviated so much that you're causing serious damage to downstream equipment - or your own. And load shedding isn't really an option because you're now operating as an island, which means you have to instantly figure out how the grid is now connected, what the current supply/demand is, which neighborhoods should be turned off to best match the pre-incident demand, and what the impact on the local grid is - there are way too many variables there to be able to respond in a fraction of a second.

Starting back up from zero is significantly easier, as you are completely isolated and have zero load. You turn the power plant on, and start slowly adding local load to ramp up. Synchronize with neighboring plants where possible to build the grid back up. The only issue is that a power plant needs a significant amount of power to operate, so you need something to provide power before you can generate power. In most cases you can just piggyback off the grid, but in an isolated black start it means you need a beefy local independent generator setup. That costs money and it's rarely needed, so only a few designated black start plants have them, paid for by the grid as a whole.
by taylodl | 2025-04-29 12:50:51+00:00
That's managed. You don't allow everyone to run pell-mell to see what works best. They never come back together and agree on a stack, and even if they did, there's zero will or funding to retrofit the systems onto the agreed-upon stack. Meanwhile, all the political infighting by those advocating for their preferred stack creates a bad work environment and cliques.

Welcome to chaos.
by f1shy | 2025-04-29 12:50:58+00:00
Wait. It was pretty well known how to make compilers for Lisp, and they were not bad. There were some little parts of some lisps (number tower, overflow to bignum, rationals) which was problematic (and still is today, if you do not have custom HW). But those pieces were and are not that important for general purpose. The era of LISP isa was not so long after all.
by ilaksh | 2025-04-29 12:51:28+00:00
I use AI as much as possible for programming, but the specific wording "replacing" is not quite there yet. The confusing thing for people is it probably will be at full replacement level within a couple of years.

The leading edge models surpass humans in some ways, but still make weird oversights routinely. I think the models will continue to get bigger and have more comprehensive world models and the remaining brittleness will go away over the next few years.

We are early on in a process that will go from only a few jobs to almost all (existing) jobs very quickly as the models and tools continue to rapidly improve.
by colinmorelli | 2025-04-29 12:52:06+00:00
As for correctness, they mentioned the LLM citing links that the person can verify. So there is some protection at that level.

But, also, the threshold of things we manage ourselves versus when we look to others is constantly moving as technology advances and things change. We're always making risk tradeoff decisions measuring the probability we get sued or some harm comes to us versus trusting that we can handle some tasks ourselves. For example, most people do not have attorneys review their lease agreements or job offers, unless they have a specific circumstance that warrants they do so.

The line will move, as technology gives people the tools to become better at handling the more mundane things themselves.
by bko | 2025-04-29 12:52:10+00:00
US perspective.

This is a surprising win for an incumbent party. Whenever I look at basic life issues in Canada I'm blown away. Somehow salaries for engineers are about half what they are in the US, but real estate prices are comparable in large cities. And nation wide the national come price is 678k compared to around 420k in US. Who does this work for?

The liberals have moderated a bit. I remember seeing an ad saying that if elected they would remove trade barriers between Canadian provinces, which is pretty crazy that they exist in the first place. Free trade within your borders should be the starting ante for a country

Finally, there was the increase in immigration which no one really seemed to ask for, that they're also pulling back now due to backlash.

Anyway, I don't really see the tide stemming but who knows. I can't remember a time in the US where an incumbent party has won on so many negatives.