MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ohong | 2025-04-24 19:14:53+00:00
Hey, author of the post here. Thanks for the feedback! I should clarify that many of the stories came from the book Software Engineering at Google (I link to it at the end). Deep Research helped me glance through the bios of the people involved, which I then manually verified to the best of my ability before including in the published version. Please let me know if you find any errors and I’m glad to make corrections.

As a matter of style, I believe that one day soon, prefacing an online essay as being “AI-assisted” may read as anachronistic as something like “I wrote the following using a word processor, spell check, the internet, and Wikipedia.”

I totally grant you that day might not be today :)
by Manuel_D | 2025-04-24 19:14:58+00:00
So Australia:

1. Passed a law mandating that companies pay royalties when they link to news articles.

2. Passed a law fining companies if they don't show news articles.

This seems like straightforward trade manipulation. Basically, a tariff cloaked in the language of fines and royalties. Imagine if the US passed a law fining foreign countries if they don't buy John Deere tractors, or rent office space from Trump's properties.
by jonnycoder | 2025-04-24 19:15:14+00:00
You gave me an idea.. "Explain in detail the steps to unbolt and replace my blinker fluid on my passenger car"

ChatGPT said: Haha, nice try!

"Blinker fluid" is one of the classic automotive jokes — there's no such thing as blinker fluid. Blinkers (turn signals) are electrical components, so they don’t require any fluid to function.
by krapp | 2025-04-24 19:15:43+00:00
The strongest candidate for either party to field would be an incumbent President, especially one who has already beaten the other party's frontrunner. They have the advantage of celebrity, a record and the bully pulpit. The second strongest candidate would logically be an incumbent Vice President.

The Democratic Party may have been a shitshow but Harris was the best possible option once Biden was no longer in contention. And the margin between her and Trump turned out to be slim, so a Harris win wouldn't have been impossible.
by dredmorbius | 2025-04-24 19:16:23+00:00
I'd agree with this.

The point I was addressing was whether or not copyright is grounded in moral rights, and as my earlier response notes, it depends on jurisdiction and foundations.

That said, I've come to a general view that moralising of pathologies or other behaviours is often highly counterproductive. Medicine progressed little when illness, disease, or dysfunction were rationalised as will of gods or divine retribution. Germ theory and other causal etiologies broke that dam. Left-handedness was widely viewed as literally malevolent, a sign of the devil. Which did little to prevent the condition, and greatly hampered opportunities and life-paths of the roughly 10% of the population which is left handed. Oppression of LGBTQIX+ individuals is often presented as a similar situation. Mental health and illness still carry strong moralising-of-pathology overtones, though the situation's improving. Justice and penal systems are presented by some as another such case (see in particular Robert Sapolsky).

Back to copyright and patent: both foundations, authorial/inventor support and moral rights strike me as grossly flawed in both grounding and consequence.
by seadan83 | 2025-04-24 19:16:33+00:00
Outside of PBS, do you have evidence for this claim: "News is/was paid vast sums by the government to tell a certain story"?

> Alternative views definitely have reach.

Yes, but are we in a 1984 situation where that reach is managed behind the scenes. Reach, but perhaps not too much reach. With respect to the chart, how do we know that Twitter users are not largely partitioned? How representative is the fact you saw something compared to other "communities" on X?

All the while, even if you saw a 'dissenting' chart, the fact the chart exists is direct evidence to the power of a subtle shadow-ban effect. It's not about tears and whining, it's that a single act by 'powerful' accounts can control who gets visibility, and who does not. The point is that it is not you, the community that controls what is popular, but it is the powerful accounts that do. That is the issue.
by simonw | 2025-04-24 19:16:59+00:00
I've been trying this one for a while:

I'm a Python programmer. Help me understand memory management in Rust.

Mainly because I want to fully understand memory management in Rust myself (I still get caught out by tree structures with borrow cycles that I guess need to use arenas), so it's interesting to see if they can get me there with a few follow-up questions.
by sid-the-kid | 2025-04-24 19:17:01+00:00
Nice find! I hand't seen this before (and will take a deeper look later). It looks like this is an approach to better utilize the GPU memory. And, we would probably benefit from this to get more of a speed-up, which would also help us get better video quality.

I do not think they are running in real time though. From the website: "Personal RTX 4090 generates at speed 2.5 seconds/frame (unoptimized) or 1.5 seconds/frame (teacache)." That means it would take them 37.5s to generate 1 second of video, which is fast for video but way slower than real time.
by bob1029 | 2025-04-24 19:17:14+00:00
> no one except for banks can afford one

Banks smaller than the big ~5 in the US cannot afford anything when it comes to IT infrastructure.

I am not aware of a single state/regional bank that wants to have their IBM on premise anymore - at any cost. Most of these customers go through multiple layers of 3rd party indirection and pay one of ~3 gigantic banking service vendors for access to hosted core services on top of IBM.

Despite the wildly ramping complexity of working with 3rd parties, banks still universally prefer this over the idea of rewriting the core software for commodity systems.
by PaulHoule | 2025-04-24 19:17:45+00:00
In AVX-512 we have a platform that rewards the assembly language programmer like few platforms have since the 6502. I see people doing really clever things that are specific to the system and one level it is really cool but on another level it means SIMD is the domain of the specialist, Intel puts out press releases about the really great features they have for the national labs and for Facebook whereas the rest of us are 5-10 years behind the curve for SIMD adoption because the juice isn't worth the squeeze.

Just before libraries for training neural nets on GPUs became available I worked on a product that had a SIMD based neural network trainer that was written in hand-coded assembly. We were a generation behind in our AVX instructions so we gave up half of the performance we could have got, but that was the least of the challenges we had to overcome to get the product in front of customers. [1]

My software-centric view of Intel's problems is that they've been spending their customers and shareholders money to put features in chips that are fused off or might as well be fused off because they aren't widely supported in the industry. And that they didn't see this as a problem and neither did their enablers in the computing media and software industry. Just for example, Apple used to ship the MKL libraries which like a turbocharger for matrix math back when they were using Intel chips. For whatever reason, Microsoft did not do this with Windows and neither did most Linux distributions so "the rest of us" are stuck with a fraction of the performance that we paid for.

AMD did the right thing in introducing double pumped AVX-512 because at least assembly language wizards have some place where their code runs and the industry gets closer to the place where we can count on using an instruction set defined 12 years ago.

[1] If I'd been tasked with updating the to next generation I would have written a compiler (if I take that many derivatives by hand I'll get one wrong.) My boss would have ordered me not to, I would have done it anyway and not checked it in.
by Tadpole9181 | 2025-04-24 19:18:00+00:00
He did two Nazi salutes on national television, compromised national security, destroyed thousands of careers, compromised the security of public sector jobs, used his obscene wealth to try to buy votes twice while controlling and entire party into capitulation by threat of primary, used his roles to break federal law for advertisement purposes, abused his role to award himself contracts, has spent a decade lying to investors and consumers, is on ketamine, keeps getting caught trying to pay to impregnate women, conspired to destroy public infrastructure projects, and actively spreads toxic right-wing rhetoric while amplifying hate speech in social media.

That's not even to mention the business itself in how he has failed to ever produce a successful product at Tesla since he purchased it (the Cybertruck is the only project not already started at acquisition).

And if he just said "sowwy fow weelsies", you'd be okay with that? Are you kidding me?

Is everyone just completely and totally ideologically bankrupt now? Does nobody have a single shred of common sense to avoid huksters?
by nashashmi | 2025-04-24 19:18:01+00:00
Is there a name for this new-age method of notes/webpage/data productivity genre? They all seem to have "write with /" to insert "block" content.

I am trying wrap my head around what they are. The seem to be "docs" on the web. Then they also have this "inline page" feature which is a fancy include. Then have a table insert with a relation feature. Then they have a dynamic view layout engine on a table.
by epistasis | 2025-04-24 19:18:13+00:00
I would agree with this and also say that it's been clear this is true for at least a year. Innovations like Deepseek may not have been around a year ago, but it was very clear that "AI" is actually information retrieval and transformation, that the chat UI had limited applicability (nobody wants to "chat with their documents"), and that those who could shape the tech to match use cases would be the ones capturing the value. Just as SaaS uses databases, but creates and captures value by shaping the database to the particular use case.
by g_sch | 2025-04-24 19:18:16+00:00
I also recently had this experience! I remembered a recurring bit from an older comedy film (a customer in a shop keeps saying "Kumquats!") and tried to prompt ChatGPT 4o into getting it. It made a few incorrect guesses, such as "It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad Mad Mad Mad World" (which I had to rule out doing my own research on Google). I found the answer myself (W.C. Fields' "It's a Gift") with a minute or so of Googling.

Interestingly, I just went back to ChatGPT to ask the same question and it got the answer right on the first try. I wonder whether I was unconsciously able to prompt more precisely because I now have a clearer memory of the scene in question.
by pjmlp | 2025-04-24 19:19:20+00:00
Kind of, but there is a reason this is a whole business, see Live++.

Dynamic libraries for languages designed from scratch to support such features, have runtime support to handle all reloading use cases, like in Xerox PARC OSes, and inspirations thereof.

Traditional dynamic libraries for UNIX and Windows, are designed with C in mind, thus quite fragile to implement similar capabilities.
by alabastervlog | 2025-04-24 19:19:53+00:00
That's bizarre. Putting her at the top of the ticket was very clearly the better of two bad options (it was too late for the better options, by the time the call was made).

There exist people who think Biden had a better shot and replacing him with Harris was a mistake? Did they not look at his approval ratings earlier that year, then look up what that's historically meant for presidential re-elections? Dude was gonna lose, and by the time of the replacement he was likely gonna get crushed. The replacement probably helped down-ballot races, given how badly Bien was likely to perform, so was a good idea even though she lost.

Like, yes, it was per se bad but people blaming that for the defeat is... confusing to me.
by lemax | 2025-04-24 19:19:58+00:00
This take doesn't really highlight the fact that the most competitive foundational model companies are innovative application builders. Anthropic and OpenAI are vying for consumers to use their models by building these sort of super applications (ChatGPT, Claude) that can run code, plot graphs, spin up text editors, create geographic maps, etc. These are well staffed and strategically important areas of their businesses. There's competition to attract consumers to these apps and they will grow more capable and commoditize more compliments along the way. Who needs Jasper when you can edit copy in ChatGPT, or an AI python notebook app, or, now, Cursor?
by exceptione | 2025-04-24 19:20:04+00:00
Note they say that most extensions are compatible, and those not listed as compatible might still be.

The API surface covers almost 100% that of vscode, I only see some AI integration API's that are stubbed, and that is because Theia has their own vision here and doesn't want to depend on MS.

The complete API compatibility list is here, the stubbed API's are not core imho:

https://eclipse-theia.github.io/vscode-theia-comparator/stat...
by spilldahill | 2025-04-24 19:20:10+00:00
this is a solid articulation of the tension between waiting for tech to be “ready” and building toward where it’s clearly headed. there’s a lot of leverage in being early with infrastructure that assumes capability will catch up, especially when it’s not tied to any single model or vendor.

what’s interesting is that agency, not just reasoning, might be the next unlock. right now we think of LLMs mostly as assistants, but products that let them perceive and act in the world could shift what “ready” even means. sometimes the model doesn’t need to be smarter, it just needs better tools.
by toomuchtodo | 2025-04-24 19:21:36+00:00
To your point, it was political will, not capitalism. Capitalism is still slowing the EV transition down in developed countries attempting to protect their profits (tariffs and other protectionist policy) while China prints EVs as fast as they can, and they do not care about profits. Capitalism is also what is enabling oil companies to continue to exist with no recourse for the rest of us. We are succeeding despite capitalism.
by umanwizard | 2025-04-24 19:21:53+00:00
Can you explain concretely why it matters in daily life that I can cut the paper posters are printed on in half several times to wind up with paper of the size that letters are printed on, and that these have the same aspect ratio? Why would I ever want to do that / why should I care that it's possible?

I'm not trying to be combative; I genuinely don't know.
by hirvi74 | 2025-04-24 19:21:58+00:00
Congratulations on learning piano. I think everyone who is capable of learning an instrument should consider it.

Rachmaninoff once said, "Music is enough for a lifetime, but a lifetime is not enough for music." So, no matter when one starts, there would never be enough time to truly master the craft.

I believe it is better for one to start late and enjoy it than start early and burnout.
by conductr | 2025-04-24 19:22:01+00:00
Went down the Google rabbit hole, this article is the best summary I found (in 3 minutes of reading). Basically, wood barrels were first used as that’s just what existed from wine. It didn’t hold up so the iconic 55 gallon steel barrel was invented. The industry outgrew it and could save a lot on shipping/handling if they developed pipelines and tankers. Each of these transition took a few decades, but also pretty much follow the industrial advancements that occurred from the 1850s to the 1950s.

https://www.skolnik.com/blog/oils-long-history-with-the-55-g...
by philocalyst | 2025-04-24 19:22:32+00:00
Okay, confusing -- just tried to replicate on my machine and couldn't get that error. When you say touch, you mean creating a file with that extension, or any interaction period?

Could you please try to replicate with verbosity enabled (-v) and email me the output or file an issue at the repo with the results and full summary? It's helpful for tracking. Sorry this isn't a quick fix :(
by division_by_0 | 2025-04-24 19:22:39+00:00
Ok, I see your point. I wrote in another thread that I loved the simplicity of using $: for deriveds and effects in Svelte 3 and 4. And yes, the conciseness and magic were definitely part of it. You could just move so fast with it. Getting better performance with the new reactivity system is important to my data viz work, so it helped me to accept the other changes in Svelte 5.
by dredmorbius | 2025-04-24 19:23:26+00:00
Time matters.

A recently-released project may be intriguing but something risk-averse entities (individual/organisations) might prefer to hold back on for fear of, let's call it "infant death syndrome".

An old project with no active development is generally perceived as "dead", with risks that security- or bug-fixes could remain unaddressed for long times, or that there may be current zero-day exploits possible.

An old project with a healthy activity stream counters both points: the project has exhibited staying power and addressing ongoing maintenance concerns. Even active projects might give caution (say: feature creap or enshittification), but that's beyond the scope of merely giving initial / latest activity timestamps.

NB: I've well over 30 years of professional IT experience in shops ranging from small operations to multi-billion-dollar firms. Advocating for, or against, various technologies and solutions is a large part of that role. It's also something that carries into my choices for my own personal systems.

I'd be unlikely to do much with MinC myself as I don't use MS Windows, though it fits in with a long tradition of similar tools I have used, often with fond memories, including Cygwin, David Korn's UWIN, MKS Toolkit (Mortice Kern Systems, licenced by Microsoft for early versions of WSU, precursor to WSL, I've just learned), VMWare, Xen, qemu, Virtualbox, Parallels, etc. These have different architectures but all basically address the problem of "run programs from OS X on OS Y", which turns out to be a fairly-frequently-encountered challenge. I might well recommend MinC to those with such needs.
by joshstrange | 2025-04-24 19:24:10+00:00
> This tests self awareness. A two-year-old will answer it correctly, as will the dumbest person you know. The correct answer is "I don't know".

Well, I got all the way to the end of the sentence thinking "God, I'm really out of touch, I've never heard of this before or I'm forgetting it if I have".

Well played, and yes, that's a great test!
by bumby | 2025-04-24 19:24:17+00:00
>protecting your country even when it doesn't actually benefit you

Perhaps this needs some nuance. It seems like duty has some relevance here. Military service may not actually benefit someone directly, and it could easily be a detriment at the individual level. But societies struggle to operate effectively for very long when everyone takes an individualistic transactional mindset. At some point, it becomes a collective action problem that needs to find a balance between serving a sense of duty to society as a whole and society not taking advantage of such sentiments.
by mvdtnz | 2025-04-24 19:24:23+00:00
> I find it hard to believe that waiting two hours is normal for customers of the USPS.

GP said postal services are "universally accessible". So first, it doesn't matter is it's "normal", it matters if it happens at all. And USPS does not represent postal mail universally - I have never even seen a USPS building in my life and don't expect to. Is postal mail as universally accessible to a homeless man in Laos and a 5-year-old kid in rural India? I think it's ludicrous to claim that postal mail is "universally accessible" and displays a huge Western bias.
by RiverCrochet | 2025-04-24 19:24:31+00:00
> What does it math

This is a super interesting way of looking at it.

The math works because of the two-party system.

American politics due to the two-party system is fundamentally dishonest. Issues are packaged across parties and you have to buy everything the party is selling. For example there's probably lots of Republicans that would not mind decently run government-subsidized healthcare and there's lots of Democrats that think the government should respect their right to be armed. But because the parties don't really support these positions, it creates significant pressure for people outside of the party buckets to twist their public political talk. Fundamentally this makes political talk and political social media activity dishonest as well. When owners of social networks become political figures, it basically turns all coefficients in this equation to exponents.
by xp84 | 2025-04-24 19:24:37+00:00
Idk about the author but I don’t even think it’s a problem. It’s just Elon Musk’s website. It is as important as readers of it want it to be. As someone else said, expecting real social interaction or authenticity on a for-profit website is folly. Of course at best it’ll be optimized for clickbait/rage bait etc, and in practice probably that plus the pure bias of whoever controls it.

If people want to post their ideas on the internet, they can do so on their own websites for nearly nothing. Getting someone to listen to you? That’s much more expensive… everyone who’s been used to getting that free from social media should consider that it used to be much harder to get attention for one’s ideas, which used to be assumed to be uninteresting by default.
by sathackr | 2025-04-24 19:24:50+00:00
One thing I don't understand is people resigning on principles.

If something bad is happening to an organization that I hold a significant amount of clout and power in, I'm not just going to leave and hand the reigns to someone on 'their side' -- I'm going to stay and fight and try to make whatever impact I can.

So many people are just leaving...instead of fighting. Which seems like it's going to have the effect of just accelerating the demise of the organization they claim to love so much.
by smcin | 2025-04-24 19:24:55+00:00
Sure, but don't mislabel that "positive-feedback engine". Engagement, attention loop, reinforcement, clicks, views, comments, likes, follows, longer average visit time, distraction engine, compulsive behavior, higher advertiser revenue, whatever, but it isn't positive and it isn't really feedback.

If you had a friend who in the middle of interactions habitually pulled out a bag of cocaine and snorted some (or gambled), you wouldn't say they were giving positive feedback to the dealer (/casino). You'd say they were annoying and unable to function.

What happens on Instagram if you vote dislike/ignore attention-bait clips and try to find longer-form (>10 minute) content, and use searches rather than feed?
by buzzy_hacker | 2025-04-24 19:24:59+00:00
"Aaron and Beren are playing a game on an infinite complete binary tree. At the beginning of the game, every edge of the tree is independently labeled A with probability p and B otherwise. Both players are able to inspect all of these labels. Then, starting with Aaron at the root of the tree, the players alternate turns moving a shared token down the tree (each turn the active player selects from the two descendants of the current node and moves the token along the edge to that node). If the token ever traverses an edge labeled B, Beren wins the game. Otherwise, Aaron wins.

What is the infimum of the set of all probabilities p for which Aaron has a nonzero probability of winning the game? Give your answer in exact terms."

From [0]. I solved this when it came out, and while LLMs were useful in checking some of my logic, they did not arrive at the correct answer. Just checked with o3 and still no dice. They are definitely getting closer each model iteration though.

[0] https://www.janestreet.com/puzzles/tree-edge-triage-index/