MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Gazwad | 2025-04-23 20:03:14+00:00
I was just about to replace my 2 Drobo units with 2 of 4 bay Synology, my very early Synology single drive NAS is still working so thought I'd go for familiarity.

Read about this BS and thought it's bound to end with Synology branded drives costing much more than other brands as people won't have the choice. QNAP took my order instead.
by mullingitover | 2025-04-23 20:03:48+00:00
Title 18 of the United States Code, Section 202(a). As a Special Government Employee he's not allowed to work more than 180 days out of 365 (and this

> they should in theory be able to delegate to an arbitrary contractor

Nothing stopping them, as long as they're able to follow 41 U.S. Code § 2303 regarding conflicts of interest.

I know it's controversial right now, but I'm going to come out and say it: corruption is bad. We shouldn't be allowing companies to run amok and capture their regulators. That's putting unelected corporations in power over the people, which will not end well.
by earthnail | 2025-04-23 20:03:54+00:00
I have the same experience. It‘s basically a better StackOverflow, but just like with SO you have to be very careful about the replies, and also just like SO its utility diminishes as you get more proficient.

As an example, just today I was trying to debug some weird WebSocket behaviour. None of the AI tools could help, not Cursor, not plain old ChatGPT with lots of prompting and careful phrasing of the problem. In fact every LLM I tried (Claude 3.7, GPT o4-mini-high, GPT 4.5) introduced errors into my debugging code.

I’m not saying it will stay this way, just that it’s been my experience.

I still love these tools though. It’s just that I really don’t trust the output, but as inspiration they are phenomenal. Most of the time I just use vanilla ChatGPT though; never had that much luck with Cursor.
by izacus | 2025-04-23 20:04:01+00:00
Respecting the users does not have value FOR THEM. That's how the job works - they're measured on how much people they trick into falling into their feature so they can put together a slide deck with nice DAU numbers.

Same for engineers - user respect doesn't have value for them either, you'll get the laziest, easiest implementation of a given ticket. Or the most complex and one if they're up for promotion or want to learn a new tech.

Afterwards, both groups will happily run towards greener pastures by the time any of this "respect value" materializes.
by alexose | 2025-04-23 20:04:13+00:00
As a huge OpenSCAD fan and everyday Cursor user, it seems obvious to me that there's a huge opportunity _if_ we can improve the baseline OpenSCAD code quality.

If the model could plan ahead well, set up good functions, pull from standard libraries, etc., it would be instantly better than most humans.

If it had a sense of real-world applications, physics, etc., well, it would be superhuman.

Is anyone working on this right now? If so I'd love to contribute.
by mrguyorama | 2025-04-23 20:04:32+00:00
The R7 ICBM was operationally deployed to northern Russia on February 9th, 1959. The Arrow was canceled on February 20th, 1959.

The Arrow was pointless before it finished development. Canada correctly figured out that further investment into dedicated super-interceptors was a bad choice. They DID buy US interceptors to replace their old ones because 1) You usually hedge your bets when you can in defense spending and 2) Governments were not excited to say "We stopped building these planes because we literally cannot protect you from nuclear weapons now"

The US spent decades continuing down interceptor development and saw exactly zero payoff for it. We retired the Delta Dart in 1986 after never using the garbage machine, which likely wouldn't even have been good at it's job. Consider that the primary armament of the interceptor Canada bought to replace the Arrow was a fucking unguided nuclear rocket. Because that was literally the only interception weapon that provided even a snowballs chance in hell of being effective.

The Detla Dart was built to sit in a shed in the plains of Canada, waiting for a truly terrible day. When SAGE radars saw the wave of bombers, an alarm would sound and the pilot would jump in the plane and turn it on. The plane, automated entirely by SAGE, would rocket up to intercept altitude and be guided to the intercept. Closing rates were in excess of Mach 4. You only had a single pass at the target and if you didn't get them, you would not be able to catch up and eliminate the threat. Missing meant nukes dropping on US cities. Because of this terrible engagement profile, the entire weapons system was automated. You had a screen between your lap that you interacted with like a Vectrex video game to line up with a circle. The actual weapon firing was automated because that's how tight the tolerances were. Early models even had stupid dumbfire WW2 style rockets. One of the first times this interception process and fire control was tested, they blew up the plane towing the target drone. That's just how poor ground based interception was. We are talking like 50% interception rates on a good day.

The Arrow would have been similarly worthless. The only thing these programs succeeded at was stressing out pilots.
by SkyBelow | 2025-04-23 20:05:52+00:00
So if I'm understanding this, there are two central arguments being made here.

1. AI Coding leads to a lack of flow.

2. A lack of flow leads to a lack of joy.

Personally, I can't find myself agreeing with the first argument. Flow happens for me when I use AI. It wouldn't surprise me if this differed developer to developer. Or maybe it is the size of requests I'm making, as mine tend to be on the smaller size where I already have an idea of what I want to write but think the AI can spit it out faster. I also don't really view myself as prompt engineering; instead it feels more like a natural back and forth with the AI to refine the output I'm looking for. There are times it gets stubborn and resistant to change but that is generally a sign that I might want to reconsider using AI for that particular task.
by Hasu | 2025-04-23 20:06:26+00:00
> For you (and me), switching browsers is annoying but doable. There was a time when I used Firefox, and then a time when I used Chrome, and someday I'll use something else. But for the vast majority of the world, the idea of switching browsers feels like a big challenge.

Given this paragraph suggests you haven't changed browsers in over 15 years, you should probably give it a try sometime and see if what you think is true still is true.

(If you don't want to do your homework, it is not true. A not-very-technical person could change browsers three times between now and dinner and have no issues)
by kazinator | 2025-04-23 20:06:50+00:00
Using vanilla MinGW would be masochistic, given that you can install the Cygwin environment in which the MinGW toolchain is available as a package!!!

Under Cygwin, you can compile programs in the MinGW way, but you can also use any build-time tool that will compile on Cygwin.

Getting a build-time tool for MinGW means porting it to MSYS; have fun!
by GuB-42 | 2025-04-23 20:07:45+00:00
It think the point of the article is that you don't say "5 pixels wide x 4 pixels tall" but just "5 pixels x 4 pixels", though I would say that "5x4 pixels" is the most common and most correct terminology.

And the article concludes with : "But it does highlight that the common terminology is imperfect and breaks the regularity that scientists come to expect when working with physical units in calculations". Which matches your conclusion.
by Magma7404 | 2025-04-23 20:07:57+00:00
> Media has always been a core part of Reddit’s user experience and infrastructure

We know that reddit was a forum whose main purpose was to be an alternative to digg, there is no need to rewrite history. They could be honest and say that they want more money instead. Anyway, redditors won't leave as we've seen in the past which means that they have guaranteed eyeballs.

I wish good luck to their comment-editing CEO and their future slop machine. It will be a funny thing to watch on such a large scale.
by wgpatrick | 2025-04-23 20:08:14+00:00
I definitely agree with your point about the long prompts.

The long prompts are primarily an artifact of trying to make an eval where there is a "correct" STL.

I think your broader point, text input is bad for CAD, is also correct. Some combo of voice/text input + using a cursor to click on geometry makes sense. For example, clicking on the surface in question and then asking for "m6 threaded holes at the corners". I think a drawing input also make sense as its quite quick to do.
by simonw | 2025-04-23 20:08:16+00:00
This has become especially true for me in the past four months. The new long context reasoning models are shockingly good at digging through larger volumes of gnarly code. o3, o4-mini and Claude 3.7 Sonnet "thinking" all have 200,000 token context limits, and Gemini 2.5 Pro and Flash can do 1,000,000. As "reasoning" models they are much better suited to following the chain of a program to figure out the source of an obscure bug.

Makes me wonder how many of the people who continue to argue that LLMs can't help with large existing codebases are missing that you need to selectively copy the right chunks of that code into the model to get good results.
by kr99x | 2025-04-23 20:08:29+00:00
In my phrasing, 128k + 7 -> 81k + 5 for all positive integers k.

Pick a power of 3 n to be the coefficient for k on the right/reduced side, and then the left side will have at least one valid reducing form with coefficient power of 2 f(n) = ⌊n·log2(3)⌋+1. If there is more than one, they will have different constants. Each multiplication immediately has a division (you already got this part), and there must be a final division which is not immediately preceded by a multiplication because (3x + 1)/2 > x for all positive integers (that is, if you multiply once and then divide once, you will always be larger than just before those two things, so an "extra" division is needed to reduce). This means that there must always be at least one less multiplication than division, so the initial condition is one division and zero multiplications - the even case with n = 0. Then for n = 1 you need 2 divisions, which works because 2^2 > 3^1. Then for n = 2 you need 4 divisions, because 2^3 < 3^2 so 3 divisions is not enough. This is where f(n) comes in, to give you the next power of 2 to use/division count for a given n. When you do skip a power of 2, where f(n) jumps, you get an "extra" division, so at 16k + 3 -> 9k + 2 you are no longer "locked in" to only the one form, because there is now an "extra" division which could occur at any point in the sequence...

Except it can't, because you can't begin a reducing sequence with the complete form of a prior reducing sequence, or else it would "already reduce" before you finish operating on it, and it so happens that there's only one non-repeating option at n=2.

At n = 0, you just get D (division). At n = 1, you have an unsplittable M (multiply) D pair MD and an extra D. The extra D has to go at the end, so your only option is MDD. At n = 2, you appear to have three options for arranging your MD MD D and D: DMDMDD, MDDMDD, and MDMDDD. But DMDMDD starts with D so isn't valid, and MDDMDD starts with MDD so also isn't valid, leaving just MDMDDD.

At n = 3 there are finally 2 valid forms, 32k + 11 -> 27k + 10 and 32k + 23 -> 27k + 20, and you can trace the MD patterns yourself if you like by following from the k = 0 case.

The constants don't even actually matter to the approach. If there are enough 2^x k - > 3^y k forms when n goes off to infinity, which it sure looks like there are though I never proved my infinite sum converged, you have density 1 (which isn't enough to prove all numbers reduce) and this angle can't do any better.
by sureglymop | 2025-04-23 20:08:34+00:00
Very interesting! A while ago I worked on a toy project that would allow for realtime collaboration for obsidian vaults located on a nextcloud instance.

Basically, I saw that nextcloud built their own realtime text editor based on TipTap so I created an obsidian extension to connect to it.

Unfortunately work and uni got in the way but it was a very interesting idea/learning experience.
by concerndc1tizen | 2025-04-23 20:08:40+00:00
It's important to remember that the communist states were in a cold war with the US, and were being sabotaged from within, so they had to aggressively monitor for internal threats.

We don't know what the world would look like if the US hadn't destroyed communism, and hadn't actively supported tyrannical leaders.

But in an ironic twist, the US will now be destroyed by the same dark forces they created.
by perryflynn | 2025-04-23 20:08:57+00:00
Well, the DCI system relies on trusted (TPM-ish) hardware. One server vendor has used insecure certificates. So if a AES key for a movie is encrypted / shipped for such insecure certificate the AES key for the movie can be decrypted outside of the actual projector hardware.

This is one reason why they use Device lists, if such a issue becomes public, they will just block this specific projector or the whole product line for future movie releases and the leak is contained.

Also only movies which got assigned to that projection system are affected. So the damage is low/medium.
Show HN: A place for asynchronous book clubs
by xonev | 2025-04-23 20:09:29+00:00
Hi there,

I really enjoy reading and discussing books with other people. But sometimes it's hard to get together more than a couple of people to actually read and finish a book and contribute to meaningful discussion.

I set up https://www.kookbooknook.com/ in an effort to solve that. It's a discourse forum that I'm building into a community for running async book clubs. To start, I'm running a book club on the book Release It! by Michael Nygard.

I'm Steve. I'm a software engineer. I like books. Come read with me: https://www.kookbooknook.com/t/new-book-club-release-it-by-m....
by sanderjd | 2025-04-23 20:09:33+00:00
Except past attempts didn't have the ability to pass on to modern foundation models.

Look, I dunno if this idea makes sense, it's why I posed it as a question rather than a conviction. But I broadly have a sense that when a new technology hits, people are like "let's use it for everything!", and then as it matures, people find more success in interesting it with current approaches, or even trying older ideas but within the context of the new technology.

And it just strikes me that this "routing to tools" thing looks a lot like the part of expert systems that did work pretty well. But now we have the capability to make those tools themselves significantly smarter.
by 1vuio0pswjnm7 | 2025-04-23 20:09:45+00:00
In 2013, IDC estimated 40% of software authors were "hobbyist programmers" not "developers".

https://www.computerworld.com/article/1513176/the-rise-of-ho...

https://www.pcworld.com/article/443076/idc-hobbyist-programm...

Fast forward 10 years. Stack Overflow conducted a survey and only 5.56% of respondents said they programmed as "hobby" and were not employed as "developers". But 70.4% said they were employed as "developers" but also programmed outside of work as a "hobby".

https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2023/

Perhaps there could be some ambiguity in the term "hobbyist" as applied to computer programming.
by danielbln | 2025-04-23 20:09:51+00:00
I agree, and I think it's a continuum. I can say "make me an Instagram clone" and then come back after 100 agent loops and no looking at the code. Or I can outline the architecture, the components, service layer, data structures etc in a back and forth with the LLM and then have it do the minutia implementation.

You still get code hell after a while unless you review the code and refactor where needed, but I can absolutely imagine a future where the code is just a compile target for the architecture and design I specify. A little bit like a compiler spitting out assembly (caveats apply, LLMs being non-deterministic etc etc and at current state probably not reliable enough for full unsupervised coding)
by grandempire | 2025-04-23 20:10:27+00:00
> Cameras don't take point samples. That's an approximation

They use a physical process to attempt to determine light at a single point. That’s their model they try to approximate.

> And for pixel art, the intent is usually far from points on a smooth color territory.

And notice that to display pixel art you need to tell it to interpret the image data differently.

Also it has a vastly different appearance on a CRT where it was designed which is less like a rectangle.
by kazinator | 2025-04-23 20:10:39+00:00
A bathroom tile is also a unit of length and area. A wall can be so many tiles high by so many wide, and its area the product, also measured in tiles.

It is just word semantics revolving around a synecdoche.

When we say that an image is 1920 pixels wide, the precise meaning is that it is 1920 times the width of a pixel. Similarly 1024 pixels high means 1024 times the height of a pixel. The pixel is not a unit of length; its height or width are (and they are different when the aspect ratio is not 1:1!)

A syntax-abbreviating semantic device in human language where part of something refers to the whole or vice versa is called a synecdoche. Under synecdoche, "pixel" (the whole) can refer to "pixel width" (part or property of the whole).

Just like the synecdoche "New York beats Chicago 4:2" refer to basketball teams in its proper context, not literally the cities.
by jchw | 2025-04-23 20:10:42+00:00
I don't know if this actually counts as copyright infringement, since typeface shapes are not eligible for copyright in the U.S. (disclaimer: IANAL) so depending on how it was cloned, it might be legal.

The more amusing detail, to me, is whether or not XBAND Rough is related to the XBAND peripheral for video game consoles in the 90s. (Fascinating story, it was an add-on that enabled multiplayer over a phoneline on the SEGA Genesis/MegaDrive and Super Nintendo/Super Famicom.) Seems silly, however there is at least one source that seems to corroborate this idea, crediting the font to Catapult Entertainment, the company behind the XBAND:

https://fontz.ch/browse/designer/catapultentertainmen

Of course, this could've just been someone else guessing; I can't really find any solid sources for the origin of this font.
by shadowgovt | 2025-04-23 20:11:06+00:00
PDF is a famously (and hilariously) wild document format because it satisfied the need of being able to recreate a work piece faithfully using thousands of kinds of outputs, some of which didn't even exist when the document was created, to ideally arbitrary pixel resolution (see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qbCniw-BcW0 for a delightful and informative talk including this topic).

As a result, in one of the modes of PDF you can save the entire font file for every font used by the PDF into the PDF itself, just in case it's not present on the recipient's machine. Costly? Sure! But what else are you going to do if your document uses a super-special font for displaying mathematical symbols or sanskrit or the glyphs of a language understood by fifty people on the planet and Unicode isn't widely adopted yet, having been invented just two years before PDF?

So in this case, the author grabbed a copy of a PDF version of the ad (because those ads are still available online), cracked open the document itself, and found the glyphs for the letters are sourced from a version of the font that was intentionally created to steal someone else's font work because the whole font file is in the document.
by phony-account | 2025-04-23 20:11:49+00:00
Is this the wrong time to rant about font licensing though? I’ve always bought and paid for fonts, but as I’ve gradually transitioned to mobile app development, I one day realized that all the fonts I bought for print are now worthless to me.

These crazy outdated licenses that let you print as many magazines or books you want forever, for a one-time price. But if your hobby is making apps, then suddenly the same font will cost you 50 times more - for a single year.

I guess these font sellers imagine there’s still some app boom - a Klondike rush with developers bathing in dollars. Maybe if their licenses were more realistic, piracy would be less of a problem.
by crazygringo | 2025-04-23 20:11:52+00:00
There's no evidence XBAND Rough was extracted from a digital source bit-for-bit, unless someone can point to any?

It seems like it was just a hobbyist project to recreate the look of the font from the anti-piracy ads? Which is 100% legal.

Edit: OK, so the original font appears to be "FF Confidential"? Why didn't the post even mention that? So maybe it is a digital clone, which would be illegal. But then strange that there aren't any DMCA takedowns of it on major font sites?
by mullingitover | 2025-04-23 20:12:00+00:00
> they still have the best EVs on the market with the best EV supercharging network on the market

This is a very "Blackberry still has the best smartphone on the market" in 2008 take.

Anyone who's seen the Chinese EVs released in the past year can see that they're building iPhones, Tesla is still building Blackberries, and the only thing keeping Tesla as a going concern in 2026 will be iron-fisted protectionism.
by HeyLaughingBoy | 2025-04-23 20:12:23+00:00
You're downvoted, but it's a good question. When I was in nautical school, we were learning the concept of propeller slip: you can estimate distance travelled by the number of propeller revolutions, since the ship moves a fixed distance for each revolution at a particular speed. This is affected somewhat by wind, current and propeller inefficiency (slip).

Anyway, Chief Engineer of a ship had noticed that slip increased slightly but couldn't account for it. It was a tiny amount, so not worth investigating.

Then the ship comes into port and after taking on a harbor pilot, the pilot asks "do you guys know there's a whale caught on your bow?" The ship was riding fairly high and a whale, now long dead, had been stuck crosswise in the curve just above the ship's bulbous bow: (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulbous_bow)

So, if it has a negligible impact on performance, ship owner is unlikely to care enough to spend money on it.
by mvieira38 | 2025-04-23 20:12:39+00:00
It's what we want, though, isn't it? AI should make our lives easier, and it's much easier (and more productive) to review work already done than to do it yourself. Now, if that is a good development morally/spiritually for the future of mankind is another question... Some would argue industrialization was bad in that respect and I'm not even sure I fully disagree
by phkahler | 2025-04-23 20:13:04+00:00
>> What saddens me is that a lot of people are so ignorant that they don't even realize a font is something that takes creativity, tradecraft and a lot of work/time/effort to design.

I get that an average computer user who just views content might not. But as soon as you start creating stuff and even searching for and downloading a font you like I'd think some kind of mental bell would ring like "oh, these are a thing. Like some type of commodity."