MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by WarOnPrivacy | 2025-04-19 19:41:55+00:00
Wired [detailed] an effort at DOGE to fold[the SSA] database into the DHS [database] Specifically, mass amounts of personal data harvested from the IRS, SSA voting records in Pennsylvania and Florida were recently uploaded into servers at the US Customs (USCIS) [within DHS], which processes immigration cases. [Rep] Connolly cited testimony from SSA whistleblowers who witnessed DOGE engineers accessing the agency’s IT system with “backpacks full of laptops, each with access to different agency systems”, with the aim of combining them into one database. Connolly warned that not only would such a database pose a threat to government cybersecurity which siloes its information across several agencies to prevent cyberattacks from accessing all info at once it was also very likely violating several privacy laws.
by westurner | 2025-04-19 19:42:45+00:00
NP; improving QA feedback loops with IDE support is probably as useful as test coverage and test result metrics

/? vscode distributed tracing: https://www.google.com/search?q=vscode+distributed+tracing :

- jaegertracing/jaeger-vscode: https://github.com/jaegertracing/jaeger-vscode

/? line-based display of distributed tracing information in vs code: https://www.google.com/search?q=line-based%20display%20of%20... :

- sprkl personal observability platform: https://github.com/sprkl-dev/use-sprkl

Theoretically it should be possible to correlate deployed code changes with the logs and traces preceding 500 errors; and then recreate the failure condition given a sufficient clone of production (in CI) to isolate and verify the fix before deploying new code.

Practically then, each PR generates logs, traces, and metrics when tested in a test deployment and then in production. FWIU that's the "personal" part of sprkl.
by nathan_compton | 2025-04-19 19:43:02+00:00
I think this is a somewhat wrong framing, and its also shitty to blame libraries for this shift. Tech companies, for the most part, are responsible for the destruction of attention spans, if that has really happened. And I'd be happy to bet that by whatever criteria you choose to select there are more great books written per year now than in 1240 or whatever time you think they only wrote great shit. Its just that now there is much more to wade through and the media environment is totally different.

At any rate, I just think that its a very strange thing to do to use "old" as a substitute for "good." There are tons of old books that are moronic and if the population of the world back then had been the same as now there would be tons more.
by bambax | 2025-04-19 19:43:10+00:00
I can't edit the above comment, but there's obviously an error in the math! ;-) Doesn't change the point I was trying to make, but putting this here for the record.

33.3 million input tokens / 7 tokens per loc = 4.8 million locs

3.6 million output tokens / 7 tokens per loc = 515k locs
by dventimi | 2025-04-19 19:43:27+00:00
"It's really disheartening to see you make these theories into an "us vs them" ego contest."

"I think your attitude is a perfect example of why science is said to advance one funeral at a time"

Hey now, don't you think that's a little uncalled-for? It's difficult to determine the attitude of a stranger over the internet via text.

"just because they got it wrong in the past doesn't mean they can never get it right, and it doesn't mean there's a 100% certainty that you got it right."

Nobody said either of these things, but people are entitled to extend to or withhold trust from purported experts based on the successful or not-so-successful application of their claimed expertise. If the MOND people and the MOG people keep getting things wrong, they're still free to persevere just as we're free to ignore them.
by ck2 | 2025-04-19 19:43:40+00:00
"15 years" seems like an oddly specific number?

https://m.xkcd.com/678/

But invention of gravity-wave detectors (laser interferometers) have been the most exciting thing and can't wait for them to build the space version, so maybe go for it?

Won't be funded in US this decade though, they are even cancelling space-telescopes ready to launch, sigh
by motorest | 2025-04-19 19:43:52+00:00
> Here's a challenge, to help appreciate the nature of these: try to find an error in the diagrams.

The point of diagrams is to communicate concepts and ideas. They are a design tool, not a design goal. They are used to help reason about your design. One of the most basic uses is to step through each of your requirements and verify if the design meets each and every single one of them.

> For example, large amounts of work that have to be redone, or a project abandoned (...)

No, this is not the diagram's fault. That's a problem caused by poor or even inexistent design. You only need to redo a project if you fail to meet critical requirements and you can't figure out a way to make them work with what you have. The diagrams only convey the output of your design process, and if it is faulty then it's not the diagram's fault.
Show HN: EyesOff – Alerts you when someone peeps at your screen
by Two_hands | 2025-04-19 19:44:05+00:00
Hey HN, this is Yusuf.

I've built a privacy focused macOS app which makes use of a locally running neural network (YuNet), to notify you if other people are looking at your screen. YuNet runs fully on-device with no data leaving your computer.

The app utilises a 230kb facial detection model, which takes images from your webcam and checks for any faces entering the viewing field of your webcam. If the number of faces exceeds the threshold an alert will be shown.

Built with Python + PyQt, the YuNet code comes from OpenCV. Currently it's a macOS app only, however I will be widening access to windows devices soon.

Link + Source code: https://www.eyesoff.app

I'd love your feedback on the app, I look forward to reading your comments on thoughts and future directions you'd like to see!
by TomMasz | 2025-04-19 19:44:05+00:00
I never imagined a day when faculty would be given instructions on how to handle ICE demands, but here we are. The activity so far has only been visas being revoked, but this is just beginning. Enrollment for Fall semester is way down, though some of that is due to uncertainty in FAFSA. All in all, it's a bad time for US universities.
by lupusreal | 2025-04-19 19:45:20+00:00
Modern concrete could last as long ad Roman concrete, if not for the fact that we use rebar which inevitability corrodes and is the limiting factor in how long those structures can last. But that same rebar allows us to create structures that the Romans never could have. Concrete structures with huge spans and thin walls.

It's not that we don't know how to build things which last long. Rather, we choose not to because building that way has tradeoffs we usually don't want to make. This is also the reason we make things out of concrete and rarely out of meticulously stacked rocks.
by zahlman | 2025-04-19 19:46:28+00:00
> I am now of the opinion that every form of web-scraping should be considered abusive behaviour and web servers should block all of them. If you think your web-scraping is acceptable behaviour, you can thank these shady companies and the “AI” hype for moving you to the bad corner.

I imagine that e.g. Youtube would be happy to agree with this. Not that it would turn them against AI generally.
by 1oooqooq | 2025-04-19 19:47:10+00:00
prop65 have the same level of coordinated opposition and information corruption as the food pyramid or cigarettes damage had for most of the time.

industry coluded to make it seems useless and industry spoon fed you the narrative you repeated. the list is very informative and meant to force the "invisible hand of the market" (its a pun, relax) to pay for better studies if they truly believe it is not harmful but studies are inconclusive. industry just decided to band and spend on making the signs useless.
by Terr_ | 2025-04-19 19:48:40+00:00
Even If we set aside the rampant illegality threading through this initiative, it also feels like a bad pattern you can find in the private sector:

1. Customer reports problem that cannot be validated and probably doesn't exist.

2. Management insists a solution be created.

3. Solution doesn't actually find the problems the customer was reporting.

4. Management, to save face, retroactively changes what the system was supposed to be used for.

In this case, the system will fail to find millions of people committing very serious crimes and then somehow getting away with it for no reason... But to justify its existence, it will instead be used for crap like canceling visas over parking tickets and deporting otherwise-saintly residents.

... Or worse, attacking anybody who says something mean about the government.
by kazinator | 2025-04-19 19:49:19+00:00
Give has an irregular past tense though. I think if the past tense were gived, probably the past participle would be the same.

Same with: write, wrote, written; smite, smote, smitten; bit, bit, bitten; hide, hid, hidden; ride, ride, ridden; drive, drove, driven.

There's a pattern that the verbs with the en participles do not have ed regular past tenses. They have ove, ote, ode, it, id past tenses.

There are exceptions though like swell, swelled, swollen. It's fuzzy enough that any -en past participle will sound fine if you just get used to hearing it.
by jasonjmcghee | 2025-04-19 19:49:29+00:00
If you do it a bit, it just becomes habit / no extra time or cognitive load.

Correlation or causation aside, the same people I see complain about cost, complain about quality.

It might indicate more tightly controlled sessions may also produce better results.

Or maybe it's just people that tend to complain about one thing, complain about another.
by pipodeclown | 2025-04-19 19:49:47+00:00
Sure but you should be comparing the goal end state, a world in which out energy consumption and generation is green, that's the whole point of our move to bev's and hydrogen. So you should be comparing energy generation by green means to power a BEV or using green energy to produce hydrogen to power a hydrogen car. In that world the whole energy production and consumption chain is about 3x as efficient for BEV, which in my mind means there is no way hydrogen is going to be competitive and we shouldn't waste valuable resources on persuing it.
by westurner | 2025-04-19 19:50:03+00:00
Same. Thanks; TIL about HbbTV: Hybrid Broadcast Broadband TV: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hybrid_Broadcast_Broadband_TV

Had been wondering how to add a game clock below the TV that syncs acceptably; a third screen: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30890265
by hkpack | 2025-04-19 19:50:38+00:00
> but it's not even true to say that Ukrainian government represents the people anymore, which is why they refuse to hold elections.

As Ukrainian I strongly disagree. Ukrainian government do plan to have elections as soon as any ceasefire is negotiated. Also the idea to even talk about election is _very_ unpopular, to the point of any politician who tries to start political discussions is being ostracised heavily by people of all political spectrum. It is understood that any disagreement (and elections is based on discussing all the disagreements), will weaken the army, so you cannot have that during the war.

And we do have this discussion very often, since as soon as US make another promise to stop the war in the next 24 hour (as it did in November, December, January, etc...), some politicians decide that it is finally a time to start off their election campaign and get hated on by really everyone immediately.

I didn't vote for Zelensky and will not vote in the future, but he is indeed _VERY_ popular. The whole discussion about how he is a dictator and afraid of the election really pisses people off.
by AStonesThrow | 2025-04-19 19:52:52+00:00
Okay this is a fake headline designed to clickbait you into reading the entire article, which I did, and comes with a Big Letdown Punchline at the end, that it is not actually a "coffin" at all.

But if you enjoy family-drama, crazy-kids, harried-young-mom type stuff, why not read about it from the child's witty perspective? https://hyperboleandahalf.blogspot.com/
by thisislife2 | 2025-04-19 19:53:36+00:00
True. An indian muslim friend of mine is doing his Masters + Doctorate in Israel. His fiancée also got into the same program. Two-three years back, he was quite excited to go and study there and went full of optimism and hope to Israel. Last year, he came down for a week to get married. But he was so anxious about going back to Israel because of the open visreal hatred that some Israelis now have of Palestinians, and his own anguish and anger of the brutality of the genocide in Gaza. He felt frustrated that he was not doing anything about it. We commiserated with each other on how powerless such things can make us feel. And while I am politically active about it in my own country (anti-war protests), my advise to him was not to do anything about it, or to say anything about it while he was in Israel. To follow the golden rule of not discussing religion or politics with anyone, or even post anything about it on social media. To not even talk about it on phone when he spoke with any of us. And to just focus on his program, his newly married life, and if possible to get out of Israel as soon as he can. And that's what he has decided to do - focus on spirituality than politics, while he and his wife also explore options to transfer somewhere to Europe and continue their education.

See, "free speech", right to protest, and all the other rights that democracy entails is all fine and dandy - until you are a foreigner in another country. For all purposes, a foreigner is often a second-class citizen with fewer rights. And no country (democracy or otherwise) I know of tolerates any sort of political activity by foreigners. Indeed, many countries explicitly state so when issuing a visa that any kind of political activity can result in your immediate deportation.

That said, I am somewhat surprised that Donald Trump and the Republicans haven't learnt the political lessons on how Biden's unabashed support, and even defence, of the ongoing genocide in Gaza by the Israeli-right lunatics in power cost Biden (Kamala Harris, and the Democrats) the US Presidency ( https://politics.stackexchange.com/q/89703 ). There was deep resentment against Biden / Kamala Harris due to the harsh crackdown on campus protests ( https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/may/01/college-camp... ). And the fact that political tensions on this issue is still simmering means that even a single political mistake by the Trump administration could be the spark that ignites this issue in a manner that even the media wouldn't be able to cover it up under the guise of "anti-semitism" or "support for terrorism" or "foreign incitement".
by chasil | 2025-04-19 19:53:40+00:00
There are at least some cases where fungi can cause illness in otherwise healthy humans.

The one that comes to mind is ergot, by ingestion of a chemical byproduct:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ergot

A number of poisonous substances in mushrooms are reviewed in this wiki:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mushroom_poisoning

I also checked "black mold," but it appears that link is not firmly established:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stachybotrys_chartarum

Fungal pneumonia is well-known, but apparently not prevalent beyond the immunocompromised:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fungal_pneumonia
by mrweasel | 2025-04-19 19:54:23+00:00
You can do it obviously, but others have observed that Reddit posts made to AskReddit, AITH and other similar types of subreddit, by AI bots, will overuse certain terms. "here's the kicker" being one of of those terms.

In this blog post there' also the distinct lack of an actual introduction, the author just assumes that we know what it's is about, as if we're missing the actual introduction, i.e. the prompt.

Also look at some of the other posts on the site. The writing style of the Django article is much different, more human if you ask me. The author also have a tendency to forget to capitalize the first after a period, as seen in multiple other posts, but not in this one.

You're probably correct, that this is a collaboration, by an AI and someone who's insecure in their English. That's a reasonable "excuse" for posting a AI generated piece of writing, but due to the bombardment of AI generated content, this actually becomes something that is judge harder, and less valuable, than someone just writing about an interesting observation in bad English.
by ashvardanian | 2025-04-19 19:54:34+00:00
Great article — and several other high-quality deep dives linked at the end! Here's another one on the H100 that I found particularly useful: <https://cudaforfun.substack.com/p/outperforming-cublas-on-h1...>

I agree with the author that programming GEMM on newer GPUs is a very different experience, though I'm wondering if "newer GPUs are [actually strictly] better"? It seems like there should still be some highly cost-effective use cases for T4 GPUs — aren't there?
by motorest | 2025-04-19 19:55:17+00:00
> UML is beyond useless, almost nobody understands it, almost nobody does it right and almost nobody uses it when they need to (because it makes no sense to them).

I completely disagree. UML is one of the best tools to communicate system designs and behavior in a high-level language that is easy to understand. Like everything in software engineering, you can make things very hard to understand or you can focus on making things easy to understand, and if you do not take the time to familiarize yourself with the basics them everything sounds very complex and useless to you.
by mattmanser | 2025-04-19 19:56:33+00:00
Saying it's a spectrum implies to most people there's some sort of Gaussian distribution and there's not.

There's not like 20% of humans with mammary glands and a scrotum, right? Or 10% with no reproductive organs. Or 15% with both sets.

The obvious flip side of 1 in 1500 is that 1499 out of 1500 are binary.

So there's not really a spectrum as most people would understand that word.
by heresie-dabord | 2025-04-19 19:57:18+00:00
> school where 80% of the students were descendent of North African immigrants, mostly from Algeria.

Ah, the Colonial power structure. A gift that keeps on giving. But tribalism runs deep too.

> in the Bay Area. Nobody cares about my accent here

For the most part in the modern US, money=caste. Tribalism still runs deep (see: US politics) but how people pronounce isn't such a factor as it can be in the EU and in the UK.

As you are probably aware, French in Canada is also a many-caste system.
by ath3nd | 2025-04-19 19:57:57+00:00
> could argue it's not as bad as some flus.

You could argue that, but you'd be dead wrong. Herman Cain kind of wrong.

Yes, you could argue that, if by "some flus" you mean the Spanish Flu of 1918. But if you are not a demagogue and not trying to twist words and try to compare Covid in 2020 to the flu in 2020, you'd be totally and BRUTALLY wrong.

Let's look at the numbers and do some rudimentary math:

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1124915/flu-deaths-numbe...

6,300 people died of the flu in the US in 2020-2021

Now, let's visit how many people died of Covid in 2020 in the US.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1382334/number-covid-dea...

380,000 people died of Covid in 2020-2021

Now let's divide 380,000/6,300. We get the number 60. That's 60 times more deaths. One could then argue, but with data, that Covid was actually 60 TIMES worse than the flu in 2020.

Now you might say that 6300 deaths in the US during that time were unusually low for flu and go for the average annual number of flu deaths in the US which is about 25,000. Then we do the math and we divide 380,000/25,000, and we get 15.2. That tells you that in 2020 Covid was "only" 15.2 times worse than the flu. You've heard about the 10x programmer, it's apparently significant enough to mention something is 10x more than something else, so what about 15.2x times?

But yeah, generally you are right, it was not as bad as some flus. It didn't kill as many people as the Spanish Flu epidemic in 1918, which is, I am sure, what many people thought of when their favorite demagogue fed them the narrative that it's "not as bad as the some flus".

> I don't think "covid doesn't exist" was ever a widespread position

Enough right-wingers pushed this BS that there are numerous articles fact-checking their unfounded claims.

https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/08/deep-dive-into-stupi...

https://www.reuters.com/article/world/fact-check-the-virus-t...

Enough right-wing figures also pushed the narrative that the vaccine didn't work (they were up to 17x times wrong, especially in the beginning of the pandemic):

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-to-compare-co...

https://abcnews.go.com/Health/red-blue-america-glaring-divid...

So you could argue a lot of things, but the numbers'd always prove you wrong.
by kopos | 2025-04-19 19:59:26+00:00
We were talking to the reptile caretaker at the Abu Dhabi zoo and we learnt that

- snakes are actually cuties. And more like babies. They do not have strong fight or flight ability like mammals. If they get hurt, they go into a corner and just give up

- they're extremely misunderstood beings. When a snake is hissing, it is because it it actually very very frightened.

- their eye sight is very very bad. They detect mostly by that body heat. And they've a very hard time detecting friends vaa foes. A ball python actually curls into a ball when tensed up. The caretaker had to pet the snake to help it relax.

- most of that snakes are non venomous.
by motorest | 2025-04-19 19:59:59+00:00
> “It doesn’t let me save the fizz I’m creating. How does this handle a case where a fizz doesn’t yet belong to a buzz?”

You are not describing a scenario that involves diagrams of any kind. You are describing a scenario where an analyst missed critical requirements and failed to accommodate them in a design. Blaming UML for a design mishap is like blaming your notepad for you failing to buy some groceries.
by shmoogy | 2025-04-19 20:01:09+00:00
I'm excited for the improvements they've had recently but I have better luck with Cline in regular vs code, as well as cursor.

I've tried Claude code this week and I really didn't like it - Claude did an okay job but was insistent on deleting some shit and hard coding a check instead of an actual conditional. It got the feature done in about $3, but I didn't really like the user experience and it didn't feel any better than using 3.7 in cursor.
by ranger_danger | 2025-04-19 20:02:07+00:00
This sounds like terrible parenting to me.

> can't get off the phone for 1 minute to get your kid off the bus, and the mom is holding heavy groceries the whole time too

> kid not only gets away with saying "I'm going and that's final!" but the mom takes her anyway

> sleepover at a complete stranger's house she's never been to

> "sleepover essentials" of several different dolls and pillows handed to the other parent

> pepper spray? for a child?!

> kid bolts into a house they've never been to

Maybe I'm being too harsh, but I'm a parent and I find every one of these things to be a massive red flag.
by sabellito | 2025-04-19 20:03:47+00:00
Indeed when opening it in a fresh ff profile it loaded just fine.

To redeem myself a bit, spent the last 20 min disabling extensions to find out the culprit, but even with all of them disabled it's still unusable on my default profile. Then spent some time in about:config (and the normal settings like hardware acceleration), but coulnd't find anything obvious.