MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by busyant | 2025-04-13 00:08:36+00:00
> Wouldn’t it make more sense for each co-equal branch to have some degree of executive autonomy? For example, marshals that report only to the judicial branch or Congress.

Your suggestion sounds good at-a-glance. But I always worry that these types of ideas have down-sides that might not be immediately obvious. I have no idea what the down-sides might be for your particular suggestion, but it seems that all systems are corruptible if people try hard enough.

I'm not trying to dismiss your suggestion--only saying that a lot of times, it's difficult to see the imperfections.

I also think it's absurd that so many people treat the framers of the Constitution as deities. They were flawed people like the rest of us--and the Constitution is not a perfect document. If it were a perfect document, we would not be in the current situation, where the Executive branch is thumbing its nose as the Judicial branch.
by rssoconnor | 2025-04-13 00:09:19+00:00
Dave Cunningham created jsonnet from some conversations I had with him about how Nix's lazy language allows one to make recursive references between parts of one's configuration in a declarative way. No need to order the evaluation beforehand.

Dave also designed a way of doing "object oriented" programming in Nix which eventually turned into what is now known as overlays.

P.S. I'm pretty sure jsonnet is Turing complete. Once you get any level of programming, it's very hard not to be Turing complete.
by razille | 2025-04-13 00:09:45+00:00
This is exploitative.

The part that Cofertility keeps quiet about is that egg freezing doesn't work very well. If the intention is to have children later in life, the success rate goes down significantly as you age. The best approach with fewest complications is to have children earlier. Medical technology involving freezing eggs does not change this biological reality, so women are quite likely putting their bodies through a lot for nothing if they choose to do this.

For egg harvesting, this sort of company will want to extract dozens of eggs. Harvesting too few will be unlikely to result in the end product of a baby, so the idea is to put women's bodies through even more intrusive procedures to make the business profitable.

Cofertility is not even offering to pay money for this. Their deal is to scoop out as many eggs as they feasibly can, put half of them on ice for a baby that most probably won't be viable, all while they sell the eggs to those who have the money.

Even if women who do this decide later to use their frozen eggs, they'll have to pay for all the IVF procedures and so on. Cofertility are only agreeing to store them in the freezer.

If you change your mind, Cofertility will not return or destroy these eggs. Or if they do, it will involve having to pay them thousands of dollars. Also they'll only agree to freeze them for ten years, so it's not even a long lasting arrangement.

Those eggs are worth $10,000s, maybe even $100,000s if you consider the eugenics angle. Which is way more than just ten years of egg freezing payments at around $500 a year. And there are very real health and medical risks to the egg extraction procedure.

The fertility industry is incredibly predatory and this is yet another example of this.
by zzo38computer | 2025-04-13 00:10:21+00:00
I don't really like either format (I am not sure which is worse; both have significant problems). YAML has some problems (such as Norway problem and many other problems with the syntax), and JSON has different problems; and some problems are shared between both of them. Unicode is one problem that both of them have. Numbers are a problem in some implementations of JSON but it is not required. (Many other formats have some of these problems too, such as using Unicode, and using floating numbers and not integers, etc.)

I think DER is better (for structured data), although it is a binary format, but it is in canonical form. I made up the TER format which is a text format which you can compile to DER, and some additional types which can be used (such as a key/value list type). While Unicode is supported, there are other (sometimes better) character sets which you can also use.

(However, not all configuration files need structured data, and sometimes programs are also useful to include, and these and other considerations are also relevant for other formats, so not everything should use the same file formats anyways.)
by mistrial9 | 2025-04-13 00:10:56+00:00
There was a guy who was hired to pull all the data and setup from the hands of a University of Oregon grant administrator who would not give anyone access to the database system. The grant program was more than $150k per year? more? they had no more then eight students working at any given month, often half that, so four students and the admin for example. The students were paid about $10/hour IIR for up to 30 hours a month? So back of the envelope is that the labor costs were at most $4k per month, but the grant paid more than $10k per month. This went on for years and the sponsoring agency, a County government in California, was having trouble stopping the whole thing.
by Philpax | 2025-04-13 00:11:11+00:00
> First of all, the goal is that a website operator would be able to control the use of information they disseminate to the general public via their website, such that it won't be used specifically for AI training.

This isn't the goal; the goal is to punish/demotivate poorly-behaved scrapers that hammer servers instead of moderating their scraping behaviour. At least a few of the organisations deploying Anubis are fine with having their data scraped and being made part of an AI model.

They just don't like having their server being flooded with non-organic requests because the people making the scrapers have enough resources that they don't have to care that they're externalising the costs of their malfeasance on the rest of the internet.
by ganoushoreilly | 2025-04-13 00:11:46+00:00
I was hoping to see this too. I regularly travel with my vision pro and it has been fantastic. It's definitely bulky though. I also tend to carry a couple laptops for work and recently switch my windows laptop to a GPD pocket. While I like it (using right now), the keyboard has many nuances you have to adjust to. Both of those options end up with me bringing a small keyboard and mouse.

I own a previous gen Xreal set and it just wasn't there for me resolution wise. I may have to try this newer gen and see.
by eschaton | 2025-04-13 00:12:11+00:00
Yeah, Amiga 1000 only had a bootstrap ROM, which is what led to having a Kickstart ROM with part of the OS in it—same with the original Atari 260ST/520ST. Apple’s Lisa also had only a bootstrap ROM, which is why it originally had two Twiggy drives and everyone got a hard disk.

Macintosh made the decision to put the OS in ROM to save disk space and make a single-floppy 128KB RAM system livable, but that only lasted a few months since the OS needed fixes and issuing new ROMs is expensive. Nonetheless Amiga and Atari ST did the same thing, and kept pursuing it far beyond when it was a reasonable trade-off just like Apple—who only went back to a bootstrap ROM with the “New World” systems in the very late 1990s.
by light_triad | 2025-04-13 00:12:56+00:00
AI is changing fast! And to be fair to the model companies, they have been releasing products of (mostly) increasing quality.

It really depends what your use case is. Over the range of all possible use cases this has been the narrative.

I tried Google's model for coding but it kept giving me wrong code. Currently Claude for coding and ChatGPT for more general questions is working for me. The more exotic your use case, the more hit or miss it's going to be.
by raggi | 2025-04-13 00:14:28+00:00
It's amusing that Xe managed to turn what was historically mostly a joke/shitpost into an actually useful product. They did always say timing was everything.

I am kind of surprised how many sites seem to want/need this. I get the slow git pages problem for some of the git servers that are super deep, lack caches, serve off slow disks, etc.

Unesco surprised me some, the sub-site in question is pretty big, it has thousands of documents of content, but the content is static - this should be trivial to serve, so what's going on? Well it looks like it's a poorly deployed Wordpress on top of Apache, with no caching enabled, no content compression, no HTTP 2/3. It would likely be fairly easy to get this serving super cheap on a very small machine, but of course doing so requires some expertise, and expertise still isn't cheap.

Sure you could ask an LLM, but they still aren't good at helping when you have no clue what to ask - if you don't even really know the site is slower than it should be, why would you even ask? You'd just hear about things getting crushed and reach for the furry defender.
by theamk | 2025-04-13 00:15:41+00:00
Offices don't only spend money "to be able to function" - there are all sort of expenses which are entirely optional. Workers' morale, manager's morale, "prestige", etc.. Have you ever heard about management ordering pizza for workers when something goes well? Do you know how much this costs? It's $50 in pizza + 10 people x 1 hour = $2500 in wages, for total $2550 for that pizza party. A totally optional spend, which is not required for offices to be able to function. And yet it happens all the time in many many offices. And don't get me started on cost of all-hands meetings.

And that's why most offices won't think twice about buying that $500 box. A random manager, or even a senior programmer wants it? Sure, get it, no need to even get any approval since it is under $1000. There are exceptions, but that's the thought in many US-based software organizations.

From individual perspective, you are right it makes no sense. If this was my house, I'd do it all myself. But this is not marketed to individuals, it is marketed to people working in companies.
by londons_explore | 2025-04-13 00:15:48+00:00
Royal mail really seems to be lacking in the innovation department - this is the first innovation I've seen for years.

Ideas for other improvements to their service:

* Ability for the recipient of a parcel to pay to expedite things. Ie. "Pay £10/month, and all parcels sent to your address will be delivered in 24h, even if the sender only paid for slow shipping".

* Auto convert all incoming letters to emails. Should save them delivery costs, especially when the sender uses the reverse service.

* A premium 'I need it now' service where you pay say £200 and an Uber driver is dispatched on a motorbike direct from the parcels current location to you.

* 'Choose address later' service for sender's. I package up an item and send it to royal mail, and later can tell royal mail where to deliver it. Would be very handy for online shops. Royal mail then becomes an Amazon logistics competitor.

* Packaging service. Frequently I have an item I want to send, ie. A laptop, but no packaging materials. When I request a collection, I should be able to request they bring packaging materials too and pack it for me (for a fee obviously).
by iDon | 2025-04-13 00:17:09+00:00
For decades people have been dreaming of higher-level languages, where a user can simply specify what they want and not how to do it (the name of the programming language Forth derives from '4th Generation Language', reflecting this idea).

Here we are - we've arrived at the next level.

The emphasis in my prompts is specification : clear and concise, defining terms as they are introduced, and I've had good results with that. I expect that we'll see specification/prompt languages evolve, in the same way that MCP has become a defacto standard API for connecting LLMs to other applications and servers. We could use a lot of the ideas from existing specification languages, and there has been a lot of work done on this over 40+ years, but my impression is they are largely fairly strict, because their motivation was provably-correct code. The ideas can be used in a more relaxed way, because prompting fits well with rapid application development (RAD) and prototyping - I think there is a sweet spot of high productivity in a kind of REPL (read/evaluate/print loop) with symbolic references and structure embedded in free-form text.

Other comments have mentioned the importance of specification and requirements analysis, and dahlfox menions being able to patch new elements into the structure in subsequent prompts (via BASIC line number insertion).
by AnyTimeTraveler | 2025-04-13 00:18:22+00:00
My common sense tells me: "If you aren't paying for the product, you are the product." Am I the only one who finds it a bit weird, that they are hosting a the video conversion part of server with graphics cards etc. for free? I see no way to support that long term, unless they are doing something more than the data gathering with Plausible that they have on their page.

Anything I missed, that explains this?
by abetusk | 2025-04-13 00:18:37+00:00
Time delay, as you proposed, is easily defeated by concurrent connections. In some sense, you're sacrificing latency without sacrificing throughput.

A bot network can make many connections at once, waiting until the timeout to get the entirety of their (multiple) request(s). Every serial delay you put in is a minor inconvenience to a bot network, since they're automated anyway, but a degrading experience for good faith use.

Time delay solutions get worse for services like posting, account creation, etc. as they're sidestepped by concurrent connections that can wait out the delay to then flood the server.

Requiring proof-of-work costs the agent something in terms of resources. The proof-of-work certificate allows for easy verification (in terms of compute resources) relative to the amount of work to find the certificate in the first place.

A small resource tax on agents has minimal effect on everyday use but has compounding effect for bots, as any bot crawl now needs resources that scale linearly with the number of pages that it requests. Without proof-of-work, the limiting resource for bots is network bandwidth, as processing page data is effectively free relative to bandwidth costs. By requiring work/energy expenditure to requests, bots now have a compute as a bottleneck.

As an analogy, consider if sending an email would cost $0.01. For most people, the number of emails sent over the course of a year could easily cost them less than $20.00, but for spam bots that send email blasts of up to 10k recipients, this now would cost them $100.00 per shot. The tax on individual users is minimal but is significant enough so that mass spam efforts are strained.

It doesn't prevent spam, or bots, entirely, but the point is to provide some friction that's relatively transparent to end users while mitigating abusive use.
by averageRoyalty | 2025-04-13 00:18:54+00:00
Others have some great suggestions here, but my advice is - don't.

I don't mean this negatively, but your focus seems to be wanting to share cool shit you've done. a successful business sells a solution to a problem, and sometimes to solve the problem you actually sacrifice the cool shit ans just build boring code you've built 100 times before.

If you're super keen, pick a problen to solve and build a conpany. Open source all the above code on github and use it as a funnel with links back to your new company site. Then you can share the cool shit, no matter subgenre it is.
by arunabha | 2025-04-13 00:19:32+00:00
I was following HN guidelines and trying to come up with the most charitable interpretation. However, try a I might, I can't come up with anything better than 'sheer incompetence'

Tariffs can work, but they need to be paired with sound industrial policy and careful, strategic implementation. At the best of times, it takes a decade plus for the results to start showing.

Instead of that, so far we have seen

* Tariffs imposed as executive orders under a dubious exercise of the National Emergencies Act. This alone pretty much guarantees that they will be rolled back by the next president

* Zero participation from Congress and not even a pretense of attempting to build a bipartisan consensus

* Haphazard implementation with rates and countries affected whiplashing wildly from day to day

* Immediate capitulation at the first sign of trouble.

At this point we have shown the world that

* There is no real plan and probably never was a plan

* Trump has no actual stomach for a fight. Big economies like China can just wait for Trump to fold completely

* No one should be rushing to invest in the US given the shaky legal and political foundations of the tariffs

We brought our economy to the brink of a financial crisis, alienated all of our long standing allies, destroyed confidence in the US Dollar and economy, eased off tariffs on China while China has done no such thing and our exports to them are still tariffed at over 100%.

All of this for no real policy gains. It would be laughable if the consequences to us and future generations weren't so dire.
by azemetre | 2025-04-13 00:20:25+00:00
This is a trillion dollar corporation.

Would Google seriously have trouble raising the funds to build a chip fab? This seems like something they could do if they actually want to but I’d guess that would take actual leadership when they appear to have none.

Especially in today’s political climate, building this in a purple state would ensure longevity too. The Trump admin would probably let them break ground immediately if they had the plans and I doubt democratic leadership would disagree either.

So what gives?
by Saline9515 | 2025-04-13 00:21:11+00:00
The problem is that most cyclists in my city have no idea about the basic of safety and how to evaluate risk. Most of them ride with headsets on, often noise-cancelling, no helmets and no reflectors. So I'm a bit dubious about the excuse "they are so scared". And even then, they can still walk instead of endangering pedestrians.

As for your last paragraph, this is false; walking on the sidewalk is and should be safe: adding cyclists there makes it unsafe, irrelevant of the car's behavior. Typical predatory thinking of a toxic cyclist.
by alganet | 2025-04-13 00:22:48+00:00
Ask llama to recommend you a pair of sunglasses, then look to see if the top recommendation by the LLM matches a brand that has advertisement association with the creator of llama.

Soon we will start seeing chatbots preferring some brands and products over others, without them telling that they were fine tuned or training biased for that.

Unless brand placement is forbidden by purging it from training data, we'll never know if it is introduced bias or coincidence. You will be introduced to ads without even noticing they are there.
by rchaud | 2025-04-13 00:22:50+00:00
"For some reason", really?

The US reconstructed Europe after WW2 using its own funds mostly and has subsidized its defense spending for the past 80 years and counting.

Europe also has enormous amounts of resource wealth expropriated from its many colonies around the world, plus significant ownership stakes in resource supply chains in those countries that persists to this day. Every single Russian oligarch, plus dictators in Asia and Africa have stashed their wealth in European banks.
by bee_rider | 2025-04-13 00:23:11+00:00
For some reason (not sure why, maybe it was the discussion of portability and this fun NVIDIA not-quite-assembly language), this made me wonder: has anybody gotten really good at writing LLVM IIR? It seems fairly low level, and but also quite portable. And… I don’t know, I’m talking about a topic I don’t know much about, so I’m happy to be corrected here, but as a static-single-assignment language maybe it is… even more machine sympathetic than assembly? (I’m under the impression that writing really high performance assembly is really quite difficult, you have to keep a ton of instructions in flight at once, right?)
by Braxton1980 | 2025-04-13 00:23:59+00:00
>Also the US is hardly unique in deporting extremists:

How is this argument over right or wrong? The US has a unique system of rights and the first modern Democracy.

>They're American citizens and our problem to handle and tolerate?

Why can't it be our problem to tolerate and handle green card holders, students with Visas, etc
by timschmidt | 2025-04-13 00:25:15+00:00
> What in the history of the US makes you believe it will be done sustainably?

Unions, labor law, the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flint_sit-down_strike in which the national guard and police used automatic weapons against striking workers, the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italian_Hall_disaster immortalized in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oz7oguguIZE the winning of the work week, overtime pay, healthcare of any kind, holidays, payment in legal tender, existence of the country in the first place... so much more. I won't sugar coat it, no human endeavor is ever perfect, but I find the attitude that we can't do it, or we don't want to do it here as backwards and regressive. Worthy of rebuke. If our society depends on something, we should have no shame in doing it here. And if we can't figure out how to do it here safely, then we definitely shouldn't be doing it elsewhere.
by pclmulqdq | 2025-04-13 00:26:27+00:00
Electrons and positrons have been smashed together before. It has been done at CERN before, too. The premise of this experiment is to do it at higher energy than has been done before.

The scientific goals of that experiment are somewhat more unclear, though. The LHC had a landmark scientific purpose, finding the last particle in the standard model. There is, as far as I can tell, no specific experiment that can be the headline for this new machine because the LHC pretty much did its job (modulo some error) and string theory et al need higher energy. There are a bunch of guesses about the higgs field and about dark matter that failed to materialize at the LHC, so now we want moar energy to see if that fixes our problems.

As to the theory they will be proving, maybe there are a few minor ones about the higgs field, but that's pretty much it at this point.
by henryway | 2025-04-13 00:26:28+00:00
I cannot tell either. It seems to be a potentially well-intended remark about correcting an inaccurate historical analogy to the current U.S. national leadership. It may be important to remark upon potentially inaccurate information, even if in the comments section of an Internet forum, because otherwise more people will have a wrong impression of the French Revolution and the role of guillotines. When they go to watch Les Miserables they will also be surprised. This last remark was unimportant and for that, I deeply apologize.
by _heimdall | 2025-04-13 00:26:45+00:00
I've created some crazy types with zod since v3 released, these look like really interesting changes for v4.

I've been bit by performance issues, and even a few issues where I just couldn't infer types, with some of the more complex schemas I tried to define, especially with multiple .extend() and .omit() calls.

The zod-mini library looks particularly interesting. I don't mind the more functional approach with nested functions rather than chaining. Reminds me of ramda, that library is pretty massive but still easy to tree shake since everything is functional.
by miningape | 2025-04-13 00:26:48+00:00
> I built a few small functions in different languages (Python, Go, Rust) that do neat things — data cleanup, API scraping, PDF generation — but none of them are “products” by themselves.

Publish PIP packages, rust crates, and go gophers (?). You can call them `splime-utils` or something and it'll always be available.

Pro tip: cover it with a few unit tests, and every time you get a bug report add to your series of tests.