MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by gnabgib | 2025-04-07 02:41:57+00:00
@CodeCrusader perhaps you can spend a bit more time participating in the community (participating in other stories, submitting things that interest you, rather than just things to promote you) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43605551

> Please don't use HN primarily for promotion. It's ok to post your own stuff part of the time, but the primary use of the site should be for curiosity.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
by transitorykris | 2025-04-07 02:42:00+00:00
I worked with a boutique management consulting company part time during college in 98/99. Notes and Domino came packaged with a few IBM servers they bought. I was tasked with setting it up for email. It was fun exploring the system, absolutely not knowing what I was doing. I ended up having a similar experience of building out an app in realtime to help one of the consultants manually compiling a large amount of data for a customer. Extremely rewarding. But, it was also a painful lesson in NoSQL (before we even had that word...)
by pornel | 2025-04-07 02:42:31+00:00
I don't think it's a common concern in Rust. It used to be a problem in Internet Explorer. It's a footgun in Swift, but Rust's exclusive ownership and immutability make cycles very difficult to create by accident.

If you wrap a Future in Arc, you won't be able to use it. Polling requires exclusive access, which Arc disables. Most combinators and spawn() require exclusive ownership of the bare Future type. This is verified at compile time.

Making a cycle with `Arc` is impossible unless two other criteria are met:

1. You have to have a recursive type. `Arc<Data>` can't be recursive unless `Data` already contains `Arc<Data>` inside it, or some abstract type that could contain `Arc<Data>` in it. Rust doesn't use dynamic types by default, and most data types can be easily shown to never allow such cycle.

It's difficult to make a cycle with a closure too, because you need to have an instance of the closure before you can create an Arc, but your closure can't capture the Arc before it's created. It's a catch-22 that needs extra tricks to work around, which is not something that you can just do by accident.

2. Even if a type can be recursive, it's still not enough, because the default immutability of Arc allows only trees. To make a cycle you need the recursive part of the type to also be in a wrapper type allowing interior mutability, so you can modify it later to form a cycle (or use `Arc::new_cycle` helper, which is an obvious red flag, but you still need to upgrade the reference to a strong one after construction).

It's common to have Arc-wrapped Mutex. It's possible to have recursive types, but having both together at the same time are less common, and then still you need to make a cycle yourself, and dodge all the ownership and borrow checking issues required to poll a future in such type.
by saintfire | 2025-04-07 02:43:52+00:00
Ads are often involuntarily consumed. Even the most vigilant and self-aware person will fall prey to a multitude of advertising gimmicks.

Marketing is basically just manipulating deep-rooted psychological factors. Marketers would even tell you as much, I'm sure.

Choosing to eat potato chips and being bombarded by ads aren't anywhere near in the same ballpark.
by levocardia | 2025-04-07 02:44:58+00:00
They retrained their model less than a week before its release, just to juice one particular nonstandard eval? Seems implausible. Models get 5x better at things all the time. Challenges like the Winograd schema have gone from impossible to laughably easy practically overnight. Ditto for "Rs in strawberry," ferrying animals across a river, overflowing wine glass, ...
by AndrewKemendo | 2025-04-07 02:46:33+00:00
This kind of horrifying behavior - like most things people are pointing out happening now - isn’t new

A 2011 study indicated at least 1% of deportations were consistently US citizens with no rectifications or resolution

Page 629 from this study:

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1931703

I’m glad people starting to pay attention to this kind of stuff
by TheDong | 2025-04-07 02:46:35+00:00
In the old days, if I wanted someone to remove a tree stump in my yard, I would ask my neighbor who had a stump removed who did it for them, or open the yellow pages.

In the modern age, I would open google maps (where companies can, for free, volunteer to be listed), or google.com and search.

The yellow pages are ads, and in a sense a company having a webpage which is indexed by google is advertising, but advertising in an index of services is wildly different from paying an influencer on tiktok to do a dance video that just happens to have a tree stump being removed in the background, as if by accident, with the company name visible.

I think anti-advertising people are largely fine with a yellow-pages-like list of companies, with a search engine that indexes company websites, with word-of-mouth questions and reports about what services exist out there.

Will it be harder for a new company that spends $10 on a purse made in vietnam and $20MM on advertising to convince consumers it's a necessary fashion item worth $20k to take off? Yes, absolutely. Will it be harder for a plumber in my area to get business? Honestly, probably about the same, people who need a plumber will usually look at the list of businesses offering the service in their area, and a new plumber can easily get added to google maps and slap together a site.
by AStonesThrow | 2025-04-07 02:47:55+00:00
I've been flying Southwest exclusively for about 25 years, save for one international expedition. Their cheeky attitude and the good-natured humor of the flight crew has always pleased me, because flying is so serious and stressful for many of us, that a light-hearted safety briefing really brightens our day and unclenches our butt-cheeks. And they have never forced me to endure a video (unlike churches around here!)

Art was imitating life when SNL dropped this extremely over-the-top parody of a live-action safety briefing, showcasing talents of Luke Null and the seasoned veteran Will Ferrell: https://youtu.be/Ji0TgBy085U?si=3ZHQk9p6wWZB4Oja
by Balgair | 2025-04-07 02:48:05+00:00
Ratna's math, in the second tweet, is high on the savings by 10x.

> If rolled into 10-yr bonds, every 1 basis point drop in rates saves approx $1B/year; so a 0.5% drop would save $500B over a decade.

It would be $50B on this math. Also, and I am an econ idiot here, how does the $9.2T refinancing work? Who is the US negotiating with to do this, itself?

> Lower yields free up fiscal room—without them, core spending gets crowded out.

What does this sentence mean? Fiscal room relative to what, to do what?

> But cheap refinancing isn’t enough on its own. Even at lower rates, the debt remains enormous.

Especially when Congress is about to vote on a bill to explode the debt again. Like, refinancing at $50B/year for savings isn't going to mean a thing compared to extending the tax cuts.

> Don’t forget: tariffs also bring in revenue. Estimates suggest they could raise over $700 million within the first year. That’s not a game-changer on its own, but it gives the Treasury a bit more room to maneuver—especially if paired with deficit cuts.

Again, that's 1.4% of the $50B. Literally a rounding error. No room is given to do anything. Also, what is a deficit cut, do you mean spending cuts (genuine question)? The only real spending cuts we can do to anything are, what, ~1/6th of the budget?

> Still, this approach isn’t without risks. If domestic supply chains can’t catch up, or if global retaliation kicks in, inflation could rise again. And if that happens, the Fed may be forced to raise rates—which would blow a hole in the low-yield plan. That’s the tightrope.

This was written on Apr 3. So, it seems that the tightrope that Ratna talks about has failed, the plan is over.

Look, the thread was an attempt at sanewashing the policy, it lasted about a day. Obviously, there is no plan.
by anonzzzies | 2025-04-07 02:48:12+00:00
Yep, exactly. I do that over far less. And otherwise, f off. People are way too nice to people screwing you over. Unlike we often see here, there are really good business owners who would (and do) sell all they have to keep all the staff through rough times. But those usually are (all I guess?) small businesses; I have the good fortune to contract (yes they even bend over backwards, both unconnected company owners, to keep their contractors) with 2 of them. And they pay well above market in the EU; American wages while they are from the EU. Most others will try to screw you and they call it 'it is not personal, it's just business'; while that's true, it rings hollow when you just did your stinking best. We are led to believe (mostly because of US tech in my case), that you need to work yourself to death while accepting everyone will throw you in a meat grinder whenever they wake up on the wrong side. Musk as poster child of this. But you make money! Sure, so especially for those, and especially in a pickle, our hourlies are bizarrely high and they still come back.
by asdf6969 | 2025-04-07 02:49:31+00:00
The companies exist to serve me and not the other way around. Companies don't have any inherent right to exist. If they can't make money off of me they're probably not doing anything that matters.

Do you mean real progress like washing machines and more efficient solar panels or fake progress like another beverage company to replace the ones that are already there? Real progress will spread by word of mouth. It will be much slower, but I'll accept that to never see an ad for another McDonalds new burger of the month.

Also, search engines are the perfect solution for discoverability here. I don't care if lawn care ads pop up if I search "lawn care service" but I don't want to have this thrown at me when I watch a YouTube video about Napoleon
by dragonwriter | 2025-04-07 02:51:33+00:00
> Locally running, like, llama.cpp? Or Python?

I’d guess it supports a small set of popular HTTP APIs (particularly, its very common for self-hosting LLM toolkits—not the per-model reference implementations or low-level console frontends—to present an OpenAI compatible API), so you could support a very wide range of local models, through a variety of toolkits, just by supporting the OpenAI API with configurable endpoint addresses.
by wruza | 2025-04-07 02:52:24+00:00
I don't disagree with the idea, but this:

Effective prompt engineering requires understanding transformer architectures, attention mechanisms, and how these models actually process sequences—much like how deep software engineering requires understanding processors, memory hierarchies, and operating systems

That's not true. You don't understand "transformer architectures" etc (let's be honest, barely anyone of us does) and you don't expect your system/chat prompts to work with different models in the same architecture, or in different contexts of the same model. Prompt engineering gets a side eye simply because it's an ad-hoc iterative process of adjusting a prompt after a series of non-rigorous testing in a limited set of success and failure modes until it's just good enough.

In other words, without trying to sound smart, you make it work in a few minutes and hope that this will kinda work for every dialog. Which it doesn't do later, but now you're too lazy to create debug environments with similar contexts, so you blindly throw few more capsbold statements into the card.

Anyone who prompts a lot knows that there's almost nothing you can generalize around, except for specific prompt template syntaxes. And the knowledge how it works and practice tells you exactly that. You're navigating the space, elements of which and their combinations randomly overweight each other depending on incomprehensible factors. And creating a one-size-fits-all prompt is impossible and impractical in such conditions.

All that said, it's still non-trivial and can be a job title.
by AStonesThrow | 2025-04-07 02:52:31+00:00
An obscure, youthful film director known as John Waters filmed a notorious "No Smoking" PSA to be shown in theaters. And show it they did, before Rocky Horror, and before his film festivals, thereby eliciting gales of laughter from the LGBTs, club kids, goths, and straights alike.

https://youtu.be/-VzSiilYSKs?si=dC_e9NTeiCFz74eN

In the mid-90s, I attended a live lecture by John Waters at a San Diego university campus, and smoke he did, in a non-smoking building on a tobacco-restricted campus, and he took approximately 2 drags while the thing turned into a long cylinder of ash.

It's been really difficult, and somewhat undesirable, for airlines and other places to eliminate smoking. Especially when there's literally nowhere to take refuge whilst in the air on a long flight.

I've also been incarcerated in mental hospitals where smoking was practically encouraged/required. We would all go "take a break" in an enclosed courtyard, and if you didn't smoke, you definitely got it second-hand, up close and personal.

Although nicotine is generally a stimulant, it's also a laxative and people who can't smoke become extremely anxious and agitated. I suspect that commercial flights today have escalating discipline problems with passengers who become extremely unruly just from hunger or jonesing for nicotine. Flight crews should dole out complimentary transdermals.

So it is generally considered best for psychiatry to allow smokers to smoke, keeping the peace wherever possible. Although the last place in 2023 insisted on providing specially-formulated "House Cigarettes", so psychiatry may also have taken control of cigarette manufacturing to some degree.
by TheDong | 2025-04-07 02:53:00+00:00
Do you have strong examples of this?

Like, the SlapChop is a good counter example I think. The commercial demos the item, makes it looks useful, uses hot sales tactics, a bunch of people think "it's just 20 bucks, and chopping stuff sucks", buy one, and now we've got a bunch of SlapChops in the landfill because in practice they're finicky and more annoying to use than just a knife.

To me, it seems like by volume commercials mostly fall into trying to convince you you want/need something that's ultimately not that useful vs inform, and the vast majority of actual useful things I've found via actively searching, or via word-of-mouth / seeing it at a friend's house.
by eadmund | 2025-04-07 02:54:09+00:00
For what it’s worth, that’s also exactly how I read your response, which was (to repeat) ‘That's fine! Our editions didn't erase any of the other editions you can find online and in print. You're more than welcome to select any edition that fits your reading preferences.’

I think that Standard Ebooks is a great-sounding project, but I honestly found your response not just flippant, but passive-aggressively rude to the original poster.

But — full disclosure — I also think that it would be a good idea to preserve the spellings found in the original editions you are digitising. So perhaps I inclined to feel the bite of your response more than someone who just doesn’t care.
by maronato | 2025-04-07 02:54:23+00:00
We don’t have to do it all at once. Focus on what ad platforms like Google’s offers. Ad banners, ads on videos, etc.

Start by banning target advertisements - now ad platforms can’t use information about the user to decide which ad to show.

Next, ban forced advertisement - people cannot be forced to watch 10 seconds of an ad, or to have the ad be persistent on a page. All ads can be easily dismissed.

Then, force ad platforms to respect a user setting that says they don’t want to see ads. Just a new browser standard that communicates the user preference, or a toggle that can be changed in apps.

That alone should get rid of most problematic ads, but we’d still have sponsors and affiliate links. For those, we can start by increasing the requirements for disclaimers or identification. e.g. sponsored content has to be strictly separated from non-sponsored content. Get rid of “segways” and affiliate links close to the actual content.

If advertisers find loopholes or ways around these measures, we just close the holes with new regulation.
by stevage | 2025-04-07 02:54:32+00:00
There is a billboard near me that is advertising a billboard advertising company. They use the slogan "Unmissable. Unblockable. Un[something]able."

It makes me irrationally angry. They're rubbing the viewer's face in the fact that they can't avoid looking at the sign.

Really gives one a strong urge to deface it.
by duskwuff | 2025-04-07 02:54:42+00:00
I'd advise looking at the actual language of the GPL, not the FSF's (non-binding) statements about what they intended it to mean. The relevant text is at the end of section 6 of https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.txt - search for the words "Installation Information". I am not a lawyer, but my reading of the text suggests that:

1) The so-called anti-Tivoization clauses are scoped to "consumer products". Don't ask me why, but the language is very deliberately constructed to limit these terms to products "which are normally used for personal, family, or household purposes" - if you're building hardware for commercial or industrial use, none of this applies.

2) These clauses are also scoped to object code which is conveyed "as part of a transaction" in which the user purchases or rents a consumer product which the code is intended for use with. The intent was to limit this to software which was incorporated in the device; however, it accidentally ends up applying to any consumer transaction where the user purchases (e.g.) both a computer and a piece of software which includes GPLv3 code - regardless of who's selling them. So, in practice, this actually applies to any GPLv3 software, regardless of whether it's part of a device's firmware or not.

3) The end result of these clauses is to require that any software distributed under these conditions (which is to say, any GPLv3 software) be distributed with "Installation Information". It's somewhat ambiguous what precisely this encompasses, but it's quite possible that, if Apple distributed GPLv3 software, some of their internal software signing keys and/or build processes would be considered part of that Installation Information.
by relaxing | 2025-04-07 02:55:09+00:00
My Domino war story isn’t as interesting as some of these, but:

At a company I worked for, an intern mangled a bit of lotusscript into an unintentional virus that forwarded the entire contents of his inbox to every email address in the company, causing a reply storm that took a week to recover from.

From then on we called it Locust — a plague.
by harshreality | 2025-04-07 02:58:50+00:00
They can still promote their products, by sending them to social media reviewers no-strings-attached, or by posting through non-commercial channels. For instance, corporate representatives can promote their company's offerings on their own accounts on twitter or reddit.

What they should not be able to do is pay people, who have a media or influencer "brand", to say things about a product or service. Or pay media for a time slot during which a corporate agent spouts propaganda about the company's product or service. Or send a product to a reviewer as part of a contract for a review, even if it's supposedly a "fair and honest" review.
by hintymad | 2025-04-07 02:59:13+00:00
Wouldn't the labor cost be amortized over millions and millions of units of production? Yeah, I'd be happy if the cost comes from labor. I worry instead that that cost comes from the fact that we can't mass produce any more and we don't have robust supply chains, especially in the light industry. China's strategy is much more clever than that of the Soviet Unions because China has built a massive light industry, which produces all kinds of components for the heavy industry if needed. And the booming light industry also becomes the source of innovations.
by mmphosis | 2025-04-07 02:59:29+00:00
Casually maybe once a day. No tabs. Two or three separate windows: one for the lists of 30 items — no scrolling, one for the comments on the item, and maybe one to open the article depending on the comments or if the title sparks my interest. I up vote good comments and good articles that I read in full and post an article if someone hasn't already. I've started using HN Angolia more often.

Consumption in moderation.

I am in the world only for the purpose of composing. — Franz Schubert
by perdomon | 2025-04-07 02:59:48+00:00
Why do you think airlines spend so much money on these safety videos when they're almost exclusively shown to people who are already customers of the airline? The 2m YouTube example you gave is great, but 1. that's probably an exception to most safety videos and 2. the vast majority of safety video views are probably uninterested folks in cramped seats with earphones in. Do you think that's the best use of marketing dollars? What about making the actual product (flight experience) better?
by xyst | 2025-04-07 03:00:14+00:00
It’s wild how America is just complacent with the destruction of the federal government.

We see all of these red flags across the agencies yet there’s minimal uproar.

I have seen a few protests (50501, recently) but nothing that stops this wanton destruction.

- $6.6T sell off in market due to Orange administration trade war in just _2 days_

- USAID decimated

- US trade partners lost

- Federal agency head count losses across critical departments such as the DOJ

- Weaponized incompetence at the DoD under the Hegseth “leadership” with Signalgate being the latest blunder

- An unelected, billionaire Musk, with his supposed limited “special government employee” access and DOGE have been cutting public programs left and right. Public programs meant to be our safety nets

- Department of Education being undermined by putting incompetent leadership at the top position (a _professional wrestling promoter_) and cutting funding to critical programs for public schools. This is also purportedly to be “abolished”

- Then we have a non-medical professional, and health misinformation promoter at the head of HHS. The awful leadership during the measles outbreaks explains itself…

Wonder if this is what it was like in the months preceding the _2008 subprime mortage crisis_

Definitely not excited for this recession induced by absolute stupidity.

[1] https://www.wsj.com/finance/stocks/u-s-stock-futures-fall-fu...
by gnabgib | 2025-04-07 03:00:15+00:00
> Please don't do things to make titles stand out, like using uppercase or exclamation points, or saying how great an article is. It's implicit in submitting something that you think it's important.

The current H1 is: AI Agents for modern work. Smarter. Faster. Better.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
by rcxdude | 2025-04-07 03:00:44+00:00
Yeah, anything can (and should) be marked unsafe if it could lead to memory safety problems. And so if it potentially breaks an invariant which is relied on for memory safety, it should be marked unsafe (conversely, code should not rely on an unchecked, safe condition for memory safety). That's basically how it works, Rust has the concept of unsafe functions so that libraries can communicate to users about what can and can't be relied on to keep memory safety without manual checking. This requires a common definition of 'safe', but it then means there isn't any argument about where the bug is: if the invariant isn't enforced by the compiler in safe code, then other code should not rely on it. If it is, then the bug is in the unsafe code that broke the invariant.