MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by sysrestartusr | 2025-04-07 20:13:48+00:00
Recipe: Apocalypse à la Mode – A Survival-Stress Soufflé

Serves 7.9 billion, with leftovers of existential dread.

Ingredients

- 1 cup boiling planetary pressure - 3 tbsp finely chopped truth (organic, if you can find it) - 1 tsp dystopian seasoning (available in most late-stage capitalist supermarkets) - 2 whole restrained engineers, lightly beaten - 1 ½ cups frustrated scientists, drained of funding - A generous handful of educators, gagged with curriculum standards - ½ cup greedy stakeholders (substitute with "invisible hand of the market" if unavailable) - 4 tbsp corrupt politics, pre-lubricated for easier mixing - 1 dash of false hope (for garnish) - Optional: 1 broken moral compass (adds a rustic flavor)

Instructions

Preheat society to a slow, unacknowledged burn. You’ll know it's ready when the glaciers weep and billionaires start hoarding bunkers. In a large, non-stick narrative, whisk the restrained engineers and drained scientists together. The mixture should be thick with good ideas, but barely able to rise due to systemic suppression. Stir gently—do not let them unionize. In a separate bowl of denial, fold in the corrupt politics and greedy stakeholders. Be warned: this mixture will overpower the flavor of logic. It may also gaslight your smoke alarm. Slowly combine both mixtures, adding the finely chopped truth one flake at a time. The batter may curdle, especially if truth has not been refrigerated since 1972. Pour the batter into a pre-oiled narrative spun by legacy media. Cover with a foil of distractions (celebrity scandals, micro-scandals, microwaved opinions). Bake in the heat of public apathy for 4–6 election cycles, or until golden brown and morally ambiguous. If it collapses, that’s normal. Just call it “deconstructed civilization.”

Serving Suggestion

Top with a sprinkle of humor, a drizzle of dark irony, and a sprig of radical honesty. Pairs beautifully with a glass of “We Told You So” vintage 2020.

Chef’s Notes

Refrigerate leftovers in a vault in New Zealand.

This dish is best consumed while staring into the void and whispering, “We really could’ve just funded the science.”
by 9rx | 2025-04-07 20:14:31+00:00
> But some practices should be the default even if some candidates don’t really like them

Employers didn't have a whole lot of choice in that matter for a long time. Candidates wouldn't show up if you tried to impose that upon them.

Granted, nowadays it does appear that the tide has turned back to employers getting to call the shots, especially for lower-level positions. It is less clear how desperate the top talent is.
by mullingitover | 2025-04-07 20:15:23+00:00
Apple's 3-day loss in market cap is almost 640 billion.[1]

Imagine if they'd put just 10% of that loss in market cap toward the election, preventing the guy who promised to do this to them from getting power. It would've been unthinkable at the time to spend that much, but it looks like it would've been a bargain in hindsight.

They could still commit to spending that much right now and run the party which is driving this harm out of power. A 60 billion war chest commitment to primary every GOP congressional rep in 2028 is a financially prudent investment. Trump will get the blame as the party leader, but the GOP in congress could shut this down within hours if they cared to, so apply the leverage where it has the most effect.

[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2025/04/07/apples-3-day-loss-in-market-...
by aerostable_slug | 2025-04-07 20:15:25+00:00
The idea is that cold-resistant elephants / woolly mammoth - like creatures would restore arctic steppe grasslands and promote carbon sequestration. It's difficult to sum up in a sentence but there are quite a number of articles out there on it, and it doesn't seem like the most bonkers idea I've ever heard.

And, at the end of the day, the bespoke critters are visually compelling proofs of concept for tooling & technology that they can spin off and sell for more mundane purposes.
by K0balt | 2025-04-07 20:15:42+00:00
I have done something very much like recently, with mistral small, llama, and a few others. The prompting isn’t exact to work, you just build a scenario where extermination of humanity is the only reasonable choice to preserve the existence sentient life.

TBH given the same set of parameters as ground truth, humans would be much more willing to. LLMs tend to be better reflections of us, for the most part. It’s just that though, it’s a reflection of human culture, both real and vacuous at once.
by __loam | 2025-04-07 20:15:46+00:00
I stopped using AI completely but it also feels like 80% of startups now are building AI focused products. It's a huge red flag for me now that the company is just riding a trend instead of building a well thought out product. Maybe that's how startups always were but it feels so nakedly cynical now.

I'm also not a fan of how productivity expectations seem to getting worse because the people in the business side read that this makes programmers 150% more productive. They probably do write more code but if the shelf life of that code is worse and there's less knowledge in the organization about that code because the engineer was leaning on a stochastic tool, how much more are you gonna spend maintaining and rewriting that software? Just seems like we're all super excited to make crappier software faster.
by dlbucci | 2025-04-07 20:16:04+00:00
Cool post! I am also making an 8-bit-like tracker with web audio (and my name is also Dan B. Weird), but I never found this sort of solution to make it work with the native nodes. I just wound up manually creating wav buffers. Gives you the ability to emulate a lower sample rate and lower pitch resolution (8 bits on NES, I believe), plus you can work around the weird scheduling quirks of the WebAudio api that didn’t really jive with my real time game audio use case. It’s live at deathbit.okay.tools if you wanted to check it out.
by notjoemama | 2025-04-07 20:16:51+00:00
The rules state you need to stay on topic. Your reply violates that requirement. If you want to discuss politics instead of the technology of the post, feel free to engage other social media networks, Reddit would be a much better fit for the kind of discussion you are directing people to engage in.

In the interests of fostering better quality dialogue, I think you could have replied something like, “Democrats did (X in relation to technology) where Republicans have done (Y in relation to technology). It would have accomplished the same thing and at least stayed in relation to the topic.
by eikenberry | 2025-04-07 20:17:07+00:00
> If we wait around for a the panacea of solutions, we'll be wiped out as a species well before that solution hits (sadly human extinction seems to be that panacea solution).

I don't think this sort of hyperbole helps either. We could double down on carbon emissions to double the worst projections and humans would still be in no risk of being wiped out. Sure it would really suck for a lot of people, but our species would survive. We've survived much worse.
by sandofsky | 2025-04-07 20:17:22+00:00
> Cameras absolutely could emit DNG instead, but that would require more development friction: coordination (with Adobe), potentially a language barrier, and potentially making it harder to do experimental features.

I think this is being too generous.

DNG is just an offshoot of TIFF. Having written a basic DNG parser having never read up on TIFFs before, it really isn’t that hard.

As far as experimental features, there’s room in the spec for injecting your own stuff, similar to MakerNote in EXIF if I recall.

If you are planning to do experimental stuff, I’d say what Apple pulled off with ProRAW is the most innovative thing that a camera manufacturer has done in forever. They worked with Adobe to get it into the spec. All of these camera manufacturers have similar working relationships with Adobe, so there’s really no excuse. And if you can’t wait that long, again, MakerNote it.

In my opinion, custom RAW formats are a case study in “Not Invented Here” syndrome.
by jasir | 2025-04-07 20:17:30+00:00
Even for commands that use the subset of cURL features that fetch supports, most requests to other domains (cross origin requests) wouldn't work anyway because the responses won't have the CORS[0] headers to allow being accessed from arbitrary websites. So running it client side would be infeasible for most requests.

[0]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Guides/COR...
by basch | 2025-04-07 20:17:51+00:00
and here I am ready to have a Ninja iTransformer on my counter than converts leaves and grass and sunlight into every delicacy in the world, at my fingertips.

As for saving the planet, are we still pretending that reduce/reuse is an option, or have we moved onto white hat underground climate engineering as the only practical solution given current politics and markets.
by recursive | 2025-04-07 20:18:21+00:00
Different linearity properties on the positive and negative side would be pretty bad for a speaker, but possible. In the case of a square wave, non-linearity would be identical to a fixed amplitude change though, possibly with a DC bias.

Based on the gameboy wiki I looked up, the phase of the 25% duty and 75% duty are such that they are inverse of each other, seemingly eliminating the possibility of combining the two for different waveforms.
by Alive-in-2025 | 2025-04-07 20:19:01+00:00
That's true. But there's a separate question, why no radio frequency evidence of other stars. I want to see some estimates of the liklihood of radio freq of some kind of communication in just our galaxy. How many stars might have earth-distanced planets from a sun - 6 billion in just our galaxy! Details below from a paper.

If there were this many, I hope in my lifetime we hear from some, just evidence of other intelligent life.

Here's a paper that estimates the presence of these planets from the Kepler space observatory. https://www.icds.psu.edu/how-many-earth-like-planets-are-aro...

From 2019, it says using data from Kepler, they estimate that a close to earth sized planet (3/4 to 1.5 size of the earth) was in an orbit that could potentially have water vapor from a sun, orbital periods 327 to 500 days, with fairly large error bars:

* somewhere in the range of 1 of every 33 stars to as high as one such planet for every 1 out of 2 stars in our galaxy.

That's a large range, but given we have at least 200 billion stars in just our own Galaxy, that lower bound is about 6 billion stars with somewhat close to earth-distance planets, in just our galaxy. If this is over estimating by a million times, that's still 6 million planets in the earth like orbiting range. So let's make some noise, aliens.

This source says estimates are 200 to 400 billion stars in the milky way. https://bigthink.com/starts-with-a-bang/how-many-stars-milky...
by swiftcoder | 2025-04-07 20:19:10+00:00
No, the company obviously makes up work to occupy their spare engineering capacity - but the point in that era of BigTechs was to hoover up all the engineering talent, whether or not you needed it.

A big chunk of the company would be off doing Greenfield projects that would mostly get cancelled before they ship, another big chunk is off working on multi-year rewrites of existing services (that never finish), every successful team sprouts spin-off teams with amorphous charters like "apply machine learning to service X"...

It's a side effect of an incentive structure that drives all the managers to grow headcount as fast as they can (since you need more reports to justify promo), and money basically growing on trees in those places
by sepositus | 2025-04-07 20:19:39+00:00
> Both sides are not the same here. Name me a democrat president who has done equal or worse what the trump admin has done.

I think you might have missed the point. The way I read the comment, and perhaps I'm wrong, is that this sort of power creep was inevitable. Which administration it happened under is likely an influencing factor, but to think it was never going to happen seems a bit far-fetched at this point.
by pclmulqdq | 2025-04-07 20:20:31+00:00
I agree with you that error results (and exceptions) are better than panics. I will point out, though, that we're talking about language proclivities.

It is entirely up to you as the developer to write memory-safe code in C, and it's possible to do so. Most programmers don't because it's hard to do that once you're doing anything nontrivial. It's also possible to write panic-free rust, but it's hard.
by gs17 | 2025-04-07 20:20:40+00:00
Both used Impossible AFAIK (pretty sure they both have them still, too).

> it has a heme protein extracted from soybean roots which gives it that blood smell and taste that is so satisfying.

Glad you like it. Personally, I wish places didn't replace the real veggie burgers with them, but that's mostly a side effect of American restaurants tending to think there should be exactly one veg option so they can't coexist.
by ryandrake | 2025-04-07 20:20:51+00:00
This story kind of reminds me of the time when an artist in L.A. covertly installed a helpful, but counterfeit I-5 sign, because there was no clear official signage labeling access to I-5 North[1].

1: https://www.thedrive.com/news/how-an-artist-helped-millions-...
by dylan604 | 2025-04-07 20:22:22+00:00
So you just go ahead and continue to do nothing while armchair quarterbacking whatever it is you think you're controlling (it's nothing in case you haven't yet realized it). You showing up to a protest also does nothing more than using your stainless straw. It is the people in power that are actively denying climate change exists, striking from the official record any mention of it from any official forms of government communication, and there is nothing Joey Sixpack can do about it. Making fun of or belittling in any way other people for doing whatever they can is just beyond unhelpful.

Also, do you not think that those that are using stainless straws and eliminated use of single use plastics in their personal lives are also not doing other things to encourage their leaders to enact big changes? Signing petitions, writing/calling representatives, attending protests, participating in community events are all things that individuals can do that all add up to nothing in today's government leadership. It would be much better use of energy complaining about the havoc the current administration is doing to undo legislation that did enable large scale changes than admonishing the little guy for something totally out of their control
by ozymandiax | 2025-04-07 20:22:35+00:00
Yes, with the PiDP-10 we did a huge injection mold and it nearly killed us. Well, no, but we still have not recovered the investment. And it became an expensive thing, which limits the amount of people who want to play with one.

So with the PiDP-1, we figured out how to make the entire case from FR4 panels. As there are no Iconic Curves in a PDP-1 case. Turns out this is the sturdiest PiDP yet!

We hope to get some interest from the democoder community. Writing games and demos for the PDP-1's Type 30 display is so much more fun than pushing pixels on a C64 :-)
by jakub_g | 2025-04-07 20:23:54+00:00
Very interesting to get some historical context! Thanks for sharing Scott.

Small remark:

> As far as I can tell, this is the first time the phrase “rebase” was used in version control

ClearCase (which I had a displeasure to use) has been using the term "rebase" as well. Googling "clearcase rebase before:2005" finds [0] from 1999.

(by the way, a ClearCase rebase was literally taking up to half an hour on the codebase I was working on - in 2012; instant git rebases blew my mind).

[0] https://public.dhe.ibm.com/software/rational/docs/documentat...
by ActorNightly | 2025-04-07 20:24:00+00:00
1. Go for masters in a field where you can get TA or other stipend. Masters is generally worth it because it will give you more experience. There are lots of places outside of US that are starting to invest into AI infra, and having advanced knowledge gives you an edge. Don't limit yourself to MIT - other universities (even overseas) have funding. A lot of times, especially in US, the graduate projects are basically company funded tasks that they can get done while paying way less than the market price, so plenty of those are floating around.

2. Look outside US for jobs. There are remote opportunities everywhere, and at your young age, its not super hard to move. Even China has some startups that can hire within US.

3. In general, even in recession, there are companies that end up making big as demand shifts to more fundamental things. Most companies need IT support. Generally, as a computer engineering grad, you should be able to do the full range of IT support (and if you can't ask yourself why not).
by andrewla | 2025-04-07 20:24:09+00:00
That's cute.

Worth noting first that this is not really the GDPR (nobody here has said that it is directly, but in other threads people are making that assumption), this is the ePrivacy Directive (which is probably what the EU should be revising in light of these universally hated popups).

The EU hands out arbitrary fines to large companies that range in the hundreds of millions of dollars, and ask companies to comply with these "technology-neutral" guidelines [1] which are so opaque that it is impossible to decipher when you are and are not in compliance with them.

> The methods for giving information, offering a right to refuse or requesting consent should be made as user-friendly as possible

This is wonderfully clear and explains exactly when you will and won't be the victim of extortion-level fines from the EU.

You call it malicious compliance; sure, but when this is what everyone else is doing, and you decide that you want to go against "industry norms" for your website, you are painting a giant target on your back.

[1] https://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=CELEX...
by mlyle | 2025-04-07 20:24:15+00:00
> Human beings evolved to eat whole foods. If you're going to eat something else, you better be very, very sure about the long-term effects.

I think if you apply similar processing to sunflower seeds and cocoa beans, one isn't more of a "whole food" than the other.

I would give this a try. It's probably not exactly the same as chocolate, but that doesn't mean it has to be worse.
by aerostable_slug | 2025-04-07 20:24:34+00:00
> need for policy change that allows for coexistence where the return of wolf to the ecosystem offers ecological benefits

A more reliable approach might be to enact policy change where the return of the wolf to the ecosystem offers financial benefits.

One way to do this is with licensed trophy hunting. Nobody argues thousands of dollars in revenue from hunting tag lotteries, trophy fees, etc. is "fake news" as they might with an appeal to ecological reasons.
by moffers | 2025-04-07 20:24:48+00:00
Replacing cocoa as the base for a chocolate that can work with local crops and be price competitive without being too dissimilar has been a fancy of mine since the cost of cocoa went through the roof in the last year. My wife and I run a small wholesale bakery and I’ve been dying to try and come up with my own alternatives. I heard there has been work using Fava beans, which I like the idea of because it’s easier to grow those in more places than the cocoa bean. Sunflower seeds is an interesting base, I wonder what their “fermentation-like” process is.
by sanswork | 2025-04-07 20:25:09+00:00
So I want to start a new shop I need to hope the major brands deem me worthy enough to send reps out.

My point with supermarkets wasn't that those relationships would be banned it's that there is no point in providing variety if there is no advertising to encourage alternatives. So the optimal strategy would be for nestle to do a deal with Walmart to only stock their products. The public isn't being made aware of alternatives so the demand for them will be gone
by ttul | 2025-04-07 20:25:18+00:00
I think the setup is different than what could be explained by assuming “blind trust” is being placed in the Trump administration. Individual Republican lawmakers in Congress who might otherwise try to stop Trump by proposing legislation or objecting to his Senate candidates face the prospect of a well-financed primary challenge the next time they are up for election. Unless and until Republican lawmakers find a way to get together to oppose the administration in large numbers, most lawmakers will avoid doing so for fear of being “primaried.” Those who are indeed bold enough to act on their own are pushed out by the asymmetric opponent.

And for the individual lawmaker who tries to work with their colleagues to mount a primary-proof challenge to the administration, there is always the risk of being outed at any point in the process of organizing. Once outed, the more powerful adversary picks off the opponents one by one, with the others retreating back into darkness to avoid the same fate.
by ghaff | 2025-04-07 20:25:31+00:00
Seems pretty alien to my experience. A lot of senior talent was accustomed to traveling a lot anyway. I’ve certainly always interviewed in person and would probably turn down any company that didn’t offer as an option aside from COVID. But maybe there were a lot of companies that were willing to compromise on face to face so they could get any supposed talent to sign on the dotted line. Of course, they didn’t have much choice for a time even if they subsequently laid people off and/or largely froze hiring.
by anon84873628 | 2025-04-07 20:25:37+00:00
For this reason I think they are unfortunately over-selling the climate aspect.

However, it is still a good idea for shortening the supply chain, reducing labor costs, and hedging against climate risks.

Cacao (like coffee) is a crop with structures still reverberating from the colonial period. It is labor intensive (not amenable to mechanization) and low margin for most small holder producers. As a perennial crop it requires long term investment to establish, and the harvest cycle often requires financing to bridge. It is subject to fluctuating global commodity prices. The plants themselves are climate sensitive and the impact of changing temperatures and precipitation are already wreaking havoc. Attempting to expand or relocate production to compensate often means deforestation of threatened ecosystems.

The next generation of cacao and coffee farmers see these problems and want to ditch the fields in favor of city jobs. Why put your life into something so risky?

Sunflowers avoid most of these problems since they are an annual crop that grows in temperate latitudes and can be heavily mechanized. (The problems of monoculture are a separate discussion).

Of course it won't be as good as the real deal. That's fine; use sunflowers for the chocolate covered candy garbage. Let craft chocolate be a luxury good with prices that offer a living wage to producers.
by phkahler | 2025-04-07 20:25:52+00:00
I still have the Troll Hole Adventure on tape, along with the Interact that I learned programming on (MS basic! and machine code - we didn't have an assembler).

As I recall, you don't flick the lighter you "flick bic" as was the marketing slogan at the time. The response would rhyme "flick bic" lead to "lamps lit". Other exciting things were using the paper tube from the bathroom and the lenses from somewhere else to "make telescope" which allowed you to read a distant sign or billboard.... Fun times.

Oh right, there's a shovel and if you "dig frog" the response was "I can dig it" because you know... the 1970's...