MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by tootie | 2025-04-17 18:16:48+00:00
The executive has discretion in how funds are disbursed, but they have to fulfill all the obligations laid out by Congress. Impoundment is expressly illegal, not just due to Article 1, but also the Impoundment Act to avoid any ambiguity. The Dept of Education, for example, is created by act of congress and has a list of obligations in the congressional budget and the president has no authority to deny that. They have discretion in terms of how it is fulfilled and who gets paid when, but they are assuredly not allowed to just cancel programs or agencies that explicitly funded by congress.
by nopinsight | 2025-04-17 18:17:45+00:00
OpenAI‘s early investment in Cursor was a masterstroke. Acquiring Windsurf would be another.

Next advances in coding AI depend on real-world coding data, esp how professional developers use agentic AI for coding + other tasks.

RL works well on sufficiently large base models as shown by rapid progress on verifiable problems with good training data, e.g. competition math, competitive coding problems, scientific question answering.

Training LLMs on detailed interaction data from AI-powered IDEs could become a powerful flywheel leading to the automation of practical coding.
by pineaux | 2025-04-17 18:18:01+00:00
No this is not the middle that should be considered.

Nobody really thinks that AI is useless anymore. We disagree on timelines, we disagree on how useful it will be, but the extremes are not between useful and useless (although some people believe it will not change anything, but pretty fringe). The real extremes here are "evil god AGI" and "benevolent god AGI". This piece takes the road where they say: it's pretty powerful/useful, but it's not a godlike something because it's not everywhere, all the time, at once. It will change the world, but over a pretty long timespan and it will feel like normal technology. It will be used for evil and good.
by youoy | 2025-04-17 18:18:04+00:00
True, but 4 years old? The reactions that 4 year olds have to videos on screens is like drugs. They are fully hipnotized while watching the video, to the point that its difficult to get them to react to the outside world, and turning off the screen triggers some hard withdrawal reactions. At that age they have 0 tools to control and understand their emotions.
by talkingtab | 2025-04-17 18:18:11+00:00
the link is apps.apple.com. In other words, this some app on the on the app store. Not made by Apple, just an app.

This is somewhat misleading as at first glance I took this as being a Apple product. This misdirection, intentional or not, is a big negative for me. So many products, corporations, companies try to gain every advantage by any means, that I now assume they cannot stand on their merits. That is just my experience though.
by PaulHoule | 2025-04-17 18:18:16+00:00
To the contrary AT&T proved itself incapable of delivering end-to-end innovation. Sure it lowered the cost of intercity links for long-distance calls dramatically but couldn’t pass savings on to the consumer. Picturephone was a technical tour de force but demonstrated AT&T couldn’t deliver new services other than little things like call waiting and caller id.

Notably high profits from long-distance dialup calls kept online services stuck at 2400 bps for most of the 1980s. Futurists circa 1960-1970 thought online services were going to become widespread about 15 years than they really did and AT&T was the #1 thing to blame.
by ghaff | 2025-04-17 18:18:33+00:00
A conservative in the sense that anti-car urbanists can pick and choose things they really like from (such as not building a highway through Washington Square Park). Many of those same folks are probably less fond of keeping (as the article notes the fairly atypical) Greenwich Village encased in amber or at least up to the local community to evolve, opposition to the Lincoln Center (though there were certainly community costs), and opposition to non-luxury high-rise developments generally in many cases.
by 542354234235 | 2025-04-17 18:18:41+00:00
>"Software" is a concept - it does not exist in a physical world - it's our interpretation of the physical processes that happen when we apply voltage to transistors.

Not exactly. Software is still a physical thing, in that it is a specific configuration of transistors, or disk magnetization, etc. An emulation is a specific configuration of those transistors to replicate how the original object behaves according to physics.

> Both the inputs and outputs of this new proxy neuron are different, because it has to communicate with the external system. The two original neurons still communicate with a physical device, not with some abstract software entity.

They do only interact with the software indirectly, but if it is properly emulated, it will behave in the exact same way. To simplify even more than a 3 neuron system, I want to talk about logic gates. As I’m sure you know, logic gates are the basic building block of a computer that perform simple operations like AND, NOT, OR. Well, you can build mechanical version, like this [1] one with marbles. So you can build a super simple computer using marbles and physical gates. Now what if you build a machine that would input and output marbles according to software emulation of a physical gate and a falling marble? Even though the physical logic gates connected to it would be interacting with a complex physical computer, not the abstract software entity, the results would be identical. If you built a computer with half physical logic gates and half marble input/output machines controlled by abstracted emulated logic gates, the computer would still function the same. I think that if you did it with neurons, the brain would function the same.

It seems to me that neurons are biological variations of logic gates. They receive electrochemical input based on a limited number of options, and based on physical differences in how the neuron is wired and what input it receives, the neuron produces and output based on a limited number of options. We have seen through many medical cases that every part of your personality can be changed by physical changes to your brain, either injury, disease, or surgery. There is no core “you” separate from the interaction of 100 billion neurons. So to me, if half those neurons are actually a software “abstraction”, I don’t see why my subjective experience would be any different.

[1] https://www.nathanielbrookes.com/articles/marble-logic-gate/
by runeks | 2025-04-17 18:19:53+00:00
> How can I verify that?

Good question. I was speaking from memory, and all I can find when googling is this: https://docs.getutm.app/settings-apple/virtualization/#ballo...

EDIT: I recall vaguely something about it being a problem with Linux guest VMs because it aggressively uses RAM as a file system cache. So it'll just fill up RAM to the max when reading from disk, and overwrite this if it's later needed by applications.
by ndiddy | 2025-04-17 18:19:59+00:00
> Look at the hundreds of millions wasted on the Windows / IE monopoly trial.

That trial found Microsoft guilty of antitrust practices and ordered the company to be broken up. What caused it to be a waste of time was that Microsoft appealed the decision, which bought them enough time that the 2000 election happened and the Bush DoJ decided to give them a slap on the wrist instead of continuing to pursue a breakup.
by jack101311 | 2025-04-17 18:20:16+00:00
I've tried Reader Mode, but Safari's Reader Mode doesn't properly display JavaScript elements, such as my footNote popups, and some YouTube videos also fail to load correctly. Additionally, embedded Google Maps within this article don't appear accurately, and many website layouts get distorted. Furthermore, current Reader Modes on major browsers predominantly rely on scrolling, which isn't ideal for E Ink. These shortcomings are pain for E Ink users and this is why I'm advocating for this alternative mode.
by randomwalker | 2025-04-17 18:20:31+00:00
Thanks for the comment! I agree — it's important to remain fluid. We've taken steps to make sure that predictively speaking, the normal technology worldview is empirically testable. Some of those empirical claims are in this paper and others in coming in follow-ups. We are committed to revising our thinking if it turns out that our framework doesn't generate good predictions and effective prescriptions.

We do try to admit it when we get things wrong. One example is our past view (that we have since repudiated) that worrying about superintelligence distracts from more immediate harms.
by Finnucane | 2025-04-17 18:20:38+00:00
And if you divert income from one fund, or liquidate it to raise cash, that comes out of someone's budget one way or another--as the saying goes, you are robbing Peter to pay Paul. And in the long run, it leaves them with less. The feds are trying to force them to choose to cut programs they don't like--they've been explicit about that in the demand letter.
by bluefirebrand | 2025-04-17 18:20:51+00:00
> any use of AI in any capacity render it not worth your time to read it?

Not the person you replied to, but for me yes absolutely. If it wasn't worth your time to create then it's not worth my time to consume

People like you are starting to describe their work as "ai assisted" but I don't agree with this. It is "ai generated, human assisted". Why would you bother making something where you're only the assistant to the machine? It's kind of pathetic to be proud of this imo

Personally if I could change a setting in my brain that immediately flagged any piece of work with any amount of AI generation in it, I would spend the rest of my life happily avoiding them. There is too much work created by genuine human artists to bother with the soulless AI slop
by jicea | 2025-04-17 18:23:20+00:00
Hurl's maintainer here,

you can add asserts on response body, headers, certificate etc with Hurl [1]:

GET https://example.org/api/tests/4567 HTTP 200 [Asserts] header "x-foo" contains "bar" certificate "Expire-Date" daysAfterNow > 15 ip == "2001:0db8:85a3:0000:0000:8a2e:0370:733" jsonpath "$.status" == "RUNNING" jsonpath "$.tests" count == 25 jsonpath "$.id" matches /\d{4}/

You can see how you can make various asserts here [2]

[1]: https://hurl.dev

[2]: https://hurl.dev/docs/asserting-response.html
by steveklabnik | 2025-04-17 18:23:24+00:00
LTO is distinct, and happens after what codegen units does.

That said, it is a more fine grained parallelism, for sure. Rust does LTO as well as codegen-units.

Really, as you gesture towards, on some level, this is all semantics: our linkers are also basically compilers too, at this point.
by dang | 2025-04-17 18:24:00+00:00
You've crossed into personal attack here. We ban accounts that do that, and you've been doing it in other threads too—for example:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43662951

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43662889

If you keep this up, we're going to have to ban you again.

If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.
by xpe | 2025-04-17 18:24:23+00:00
> I think that worrying that a self-hosted file system has a backdoor to exfiltrate data is an odd concern.

Great security teams get paid to "worry", by which I mean "make a plan" for a given attack tree.

Your use of "odd" looks like a rhetorical technique to downplay legitimate security considerations. From my point of view, you are casually waving away an essential area of security. See:

https://www.paloaltonetworks.com/cyberpedia/data-exfiltratio...

> but you should not be exposing these kinds of services to the public internet (or giving them access to the public internet), eliminating the concern that it's giving your data away.

Let's evaluate the following claim: "a "properly" isolated system would, in theory, have no risk of data exfiltration. Now we have to define what we mean. Isolated from the network? Running in a sandbox? What happens when that system can interact with a compromised system? What happens when people mess up?

From a security POV, any software could have some component that is malicious, compromised, or backdoored. It might be in the project itself or in the supply chain. And so on.

Defense in depth matters. None of the above concerns are "odd". A good security team is going to factor these in.

P.S. If you mean "low probability" then just say that.
by ssangani | 2025-04-17 18:25:20+00:00
Ok, that's a good point. We are offering 2 week free trial, so I think we will know a little more next week. We have been using ads to drive traffic to our site. We are spending like $2 per sign-up and not sure how sustainable it will be in long run. We are thinking of conferences or community events where we can meet more users. We want to talk to more users and get more feedback, but I'm not sure how to approach this.
by awb | 2025-04-17 18:25:53+00:00
A Great Filter could come before or after intelligence.

For example, predation could be a Great Filter. We made it past the threat of predation, but perhaps most life forms in the universe don’t. In this example, life could be pervasive in the universe but it’s optimizing for defensive attributes like speed and armor rather than intelligence. That could explain why we don’t see aliens colonizing the galaxy. With the Great Filter behind us, nothing would be stopping us from colonizing the galaxy ourselves, we just might be among the first to do it.

Putting the Great Filter in front of us postulates that many life forms have achieved our same accomplishments but haven’t colonized the galaxy. It could be because of doom and gloom scenarios like war, aliens, cosmic catastrophes, etc. Or it could be a beneficial Great Filter like enlightenment and the lack of desire to propagate and consume endlessly, or the ability to survive in deep space, leaving stars and planets untouched.
by CharlesW | 2025-04-17 18:26:07+00:00
I wanted to like Particle, but the current user experience is frustrating. The information density is extremely low even on my giant phone (https://imgur.com/a/p6JQCYO), every 10 stories or so it interrupts the flow with "Help us find stories you want to see" CTAs (https://imgur.com/a/y8VVgqC) even though I've already done that twice, and it keeps shoveling sports content at me even though I've completely turned off sports (https://imgur.com/a/MYYZFJ7). I wish the team well, and I'll keep it on my phone and hope the UX improves.
Show HN: Gin-MCP- All Gin APIs are now MCP-compatible without rewriting
by ckanthony | 2025-04-17 18:26:18+00:00
(Just add two lines of code to integrate the library!)

I built gin-mcp to automatically expose existing Gin web APIs as Model Context Protocol (MCP) tools, making them usable by clients like Cursor with minimal effort.

It uses reflection on your *gin.Engine to discover endpoints and infers basic schemas for path and query parameters automatically. The idea is to be zero-configuration by default --- you add it to your existing Gin app, provide a BaseURL, mount the MCP handler (mcp.Mount("/mcp")), and your API becomes available as tools.

For more complex scenarios where inference isn't enough (e.g., specific struct validation, request body definitions), you can explicitly define schemas using mcp.RegisterSchema(method, path, querySchema, bodySchema). You can also filter which endpoints are exposed.

It aims to reduce the boilerplate needed to connect internal APIs to MCP-compatible AI tools, letting you leverage your existing backend services more easily.

Check out the repo for code, examples, and usage details: https://github.com/ckanthony/gin-mcp

Feedback is welcome!
by aristofun | 2025-04-17 18:26:46+00:00
Don't worry this wave of hype will calm down just like all others, and we'll end up with few new useful tools in our belt.

You shouldn't have been invested in the _coding_ in the first place. Engineering is the real craft no LLM is capable of. Spitting out compilable letters is just one of many tools.

With all due respect Tobi is not an engineer.
by thechao | 2025-04-17 18:26:50+00:00
My PhD dissertation included a chapter (originally from a 2006 paper) on generic programming in CAS' on the algorithmic differentiable ring (and operator). By the 1990s, algorithmic differentiation was easily 30–40 years old. Griewank & Monagan both knew guys who had built early electromagnetic naval targeting computers that used the methodology back by at least the early 60s "by hand". (Very literally.)

I watched the ML/AI bros actively ignore previous research — even when they were requested to properly cite sources they were plagiarizing — in real time. The race to publish (even for big journals) was so important that it was easier to ignore the rank dishonesty than it was to correct their misbehavior. I'm 1000x happier to not have stayed around for all that crap.
by toast0 | 2025-04-17 18:27:08+00:00
> overall the Erlang/Elixir ecosystem is very strong and lacks most of the footguns like an "eval" statement that get people

Erlang has erl_eval [1] if you're looking for more ability to shoot yourself in the foot. You can call that from Elixir, but I guess that'd be weird; I'm not an Elixir person, but I'd bet you can shoot yourself in the foot if you try!

There's always fun with dist and proc_lib:spawn(Node, Fun) [2], which you can put in a list comprehension with erlang:nodes() [3] if you want to shot yourself in many feet rapidly ;)

[1] https://www.erlang.org/doc/apps/stdlib/erl_eval.html

[2] https://www.erlang.org/doc/apps/stdlib/proc_lib.html#spawn/2

[3] https://www.erlang.org/doc/apps/erts/erlang.html#nodes/0
by klik99 | 2025-04-17 18:27:52+00:00
You might be in a bubble, there are a lot of people who consider AI to be useless. It seems you do not take them seriously writing it off as fringe, which is why you consider the discussion to be between evil vs benevolent. And to be clear, my personal view on current LLM is closer to this article. But “all AI is useless” is still part of the discussion, not that it’s literally useless but that its use cases are so minor and/or inferior to existing techniques compared to its resource usage that it’s functionally useless.

Edit: I guess I see the discussion along two axes: Impact magnitude (useless vs just a tool vs god-like) and Impact valence (evil/negative vs neutral vs benevolent/positive) - this article is middle ground for the former axis, magnitude
by db48x | 2025-04-17 18:27:54+00:00
Yea, it wasn’t designed to scale that way.

In principle you could use fiberchannel to connect a really large number (2²⁴ iirc) of disks to a single server and then create a single ZFS pool using all of them. This lets you scale the _storage_ as high as you want.

But that still limits you to however many requests per second that your single server can handle. You can scale that pretty high too, but probably not by a factor of 2²⁴.
by Izkata | 2025-04-17 18:28:15+00:00
> Is this something that would be clear to me if I’d worked in FAANG or similar? Is it a cultural thing there? Something to do with a corner of social media I don’t engage with?

> The closest I can come up with connected to my experience is the opposite: “tech” related labels used to exclude people and dismiss their ideas, in decision-making or business-social contexts, and design processes. I’ve not seen it used in this power(? I think? I really can’t figure this out)-conferring way.

There's a recent-ish (5 or so years?) style change people have pushed to capitalize "Black" in news and articles [0], and I think this author is trying to do the same here. Whatever this distinction is, it's entirely possible it's in their own mind and nowhere else.

[0] https://apnews.com/article/archive-race-and-ethnicity-910566...
by runjake | 2025-04-17 18:29:00+00:00
Keep this in mind: The future doesn't care about our feelings. It's going to happen regardless of what we think.

There is a ton of uncertainty and rapid evolution happening and it's okay to not have an opinion, reserve judgements, and generally float along until things normalize a bit more.

AI will be used against our interests. It will be weaponized against us. There's no avoiding that. Yes, the existential risk to humanity will probably come along at some point, but humanity has a vested interest in avoiding that.

I'm not saying everything is going to be okay. There's going to be some tough challenges, but at the same time, I don't think the AI genie can be put back into the bottle.
by guywithahat | 2025-04-17 18:29:11+00:00
I've always been somewhat opposed to this, because there's already like 10 different search alternatives, and now AI is taking over, which will further weaken their grip.

Google is on top because they do the best job; I use Yandex primarily, but I switch back to google all the time for coding related questions. In terms of advertising, there's billions of views on Facebook/Instagram/X to get, in addition to all the other sites. I get they're a big player, but I worry we're just beating Google because they're down, not because it's good for the consumer.
by bdcravens | 2025-04-17 18:30:23+00:00
While at first glance this may disprove the idea that they don't cut losses, it actually furthers the argument that advertising revenue creates perverted incentives, since they blew massive amounts of money on projects with no financial value. Moreover, while those products are dead, the data gained likely made its way into the advertising information flow. If you were a competitor to one of those dead products, or an advertising company that has to carefully evaluate the cost effectiveness of an auxiliary product, Google has an "unfair" advantage over you.
by hinkley | 2025-04-17 18:30:44+00:00
Here's something you all need to learn about site (or for that matter, tool) reliability:

Nobody gives a shit about how many good outcomes between incidents there are. They care about how many good hours happen between incidents, and they care how big the incidents are.

So if you make a tool that your coworkers use 5 times as much as the old process, that tool better make things at least 6x more stable or people will start talking about how the process fails 'all the time'.

"all the time", as near as I've been able to figure out, after people have been yelling at me, my team, or a team I'm privy to, is not "every day". No, all the time just means that it happens every couple of weeks and one time happened twice in one day, twice in consecutive days, or with two customers in rapid succession. Usually the day they're screaming about.

So if you're doing that thing every day all day long, where you used to do it rarely, but you made some progress on making it more frequent, nobody cares that it's every 100th run that fails, when it used to be every 10th. They just see the drama has gotten more frequent (and nowhere near as frequent as their narrative says, but you've already lost that argument)
by tenacious_tuna | 2025-04-17 18:30:46+00:00
> The problem of american politics, over the last decade or two, has been the complete cultural maginalisation of the right (from centres of civil power). Something had to give. The universities, the corporate culture, the internet mass media -- had all been monpolised by a "consensus moralism" which was replusive to a lot of people.

I see this offered a lot as an example of a "missing middle", that conservative ideals are systematically underrepresented in e.g. universities or popular culture, and the explanation offered by conservative thinkers is that there's some shadowy force at play.

Could it not just be that these ideals are unpopular? The classic tale of a kid going off to college and coming back with more liberal politics is offered as an example of brainwashing or "consensus moralism," but maybe it's because they were genuinely convinced to shift their worldview.