MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by thinkingemote | 2025-04-05 16:06:02+00:00
#39 skull (dev/null) or daemon

To me it looks like monkey face or like a cats face, a lynx? There is a tap / spigot above but I don't think tap wasn't much of a unix thing back then?

edits:

https://github.com/drio/unixmagic/issues/13

> the top of head has an old time faucet handle and this might be referencing IO redirection (streams) as well as the stream of molten lava/magic brew.
by hinkley | 2025-04-05 16:06:42+00:00
People act like I have two heads when I start drilling down on the expected read vs write rate on the application. Because when there are orders of magnitude difference between the two it shifts when you make expensive calculations. Either on the infrequent write or lazily on the infrequent read.

And if I’m honest I kind of wish I had two heads in this situation so I could bite them all. Fucking amateur hour.
by glenstein | 2025-04-05 16:06:45+00:00
>Suggesting that something is unreliable is not the same as saying that it is consistently fabricated.

I generally understand that to be true, but that was not the upshot of the point being made by the other commenter. Their extrapolation was a much more along the lines of treating it like an open question whether the other stories were fabricated at a level of elevated suspicion that calls for spot checking.

All the other stories were vulnerable to being upended just like this one and seem to have withstood the test of time. I also think that despite this particular story falling apart, TAL has a track record of credibility and vetting that is more legitimate than is being implied by casting doubt over the history of theirs, and I did contrast it to the case of Stephen Glass, which model conditions where that degree of skepticism is more appropriately warranted.
by jaredklewis | 2025-04-05 16:06:57+00:00
> What does it say about the tech industry that so many orgs continued to use a system that was known to be broken for so long?

Well, broken in what sense? In the sense that HN complains about it? Then it says nothing at all because that is not a signal of anything. HN reliably complains about ALL interview methods including coding challenges, chats about experience, take home exams, paid day-of-work, and so on.

If it is "broken" in another sense, we would have to quantify that and compare it to some alternative. I'm not aware of any good quantitative data on this sort of thing and I can imagine that the challenges to meaningfully measuring this are considerable. A qualitative survey of the tech industry is likely to surface opinions as wide ranging as HN complaints.

Basically you start with the conclusion that what we have is extremely sub optimal, but that's not clear to me. I think it is uncontroversial to assert that coding challenges are not an amazing predictor of job performance and lead to lots of false positives and negatives. Easy to find lots of agreement there. What is unclear is that there are other methods that are better at predicting job performance.

It may just be that predicting job performance is extremely difficult and that even a relatively good method for doing so is not very good.
by poincaredisk | 2025-04-05 16:07:15+00:00
DeepMind was EU based, for example, before Google bought them. When I worked three, they were still London based (and in EU). Are they American now? American capital controls most of the AI, but that doesn't mean Europeans are incapable of AI research.

Also I think the push for AI alignment is American. At least three AI alignment people somehow always think that forcing I to adopt American values of the only correct and moral thing to do. Isn't that similar?
by turnsout | 2025-04-05 16:07:37+00:00
As an early adopter of SwiftUI, this hasn't been my experience—but I understand that a lot of people struggle with it. I think it's pretty opinionated, and if you stick to the "preferred" way of doing things, life is easier.

The biggest (and known) issue with SwiftUI is the complex error messages you get, and the fact that the type checker will give up and ask you to break up your view into "distinct sub-expressions." Really the issue is almost never the complexity of a view, but some simple syntax error (passing the wrong type to a function, etc).
by david38 | 2025-04-05 16:08:29+00:00
It is 100% irrelevant that a doctor “experience” a disease. They should have training / exposure to it though.

I constantly hear non-medical people talk about how “only female doctors understand because they’re women”. What crap.

The very same people when facing cancer magically don’t require a doctor who has had cancer. Suddenly they just want the most qualified.

The problem lies much more in over-specialization, rapid patient turn-around, patient demand that treatments be easy, pills, and yes, training in how patients (fe|male) communicate and feel pain, illness, etc
by jbverschoor | 2025-04-05 16:08:55+00:00
Either as shebang/interpreted script, or just compile to a binary for great startup speed. I actually only recently found out you could use swift for scripting. Turns out, you can also access all the other Apple APIs :-)

#!/usr/bin/env swift

I made this small "shebang thing runner script" that either runs your script interpreted, or compiles and executes it. Depending on if you're on a TTY or not. I'm also changing it to simply check for the number of executions since last modified, and then compile. In some cases the extra time is well appreciated. You still get the convenience of interpreting, but also the performance of native.

It's basically a drop-in replacement:

#/path/to/autocompile_or_interpret_swift

Very noticeable difference.

real 0m0.212s user 0m0.159s sys 0m0.045s vs real 0m0.014s user 0m0.004s sys 0m0.008s
by hatefulmoron | 2025-04-05 16:09:20+00:00
Maybe someone can explain it to me, but isn't that slide sort of just describing what makes solving problems hard in general? That there are many more decisions which put you on an inevitable path of failure?

"Probability e that any produced [choice] takes us outside the set of correct answers .. probability that answer of length n is correct: P(correct) = (1-e)^{n}"
by lunarlull | 2025-04-05 16:10:29+00:00
It was the US benefiting from its position on the world stage as to why that was possible. The US was never and is not going to retain it's position on the world stage, and indeed under Trump it is radically declining.

The US is going to normalize with other western nations as we enter a multi-polar world.

The problem is Republicans don't accept that and think they can return to the 1950s.
by giantg2 | 2025-04-05 16:11:40+00:00
I remember being a kid and we had a small jumping spider living in our car for about a week. It would actually jump onto our hands and let us look at it. Then we'd move our hand to another part of the car in the direction it was moving and it would jump onto whatever was close there.

Now I find very large mostly black jumping spiders under my beehive top lid. No doubt they are well fed on some of the bees (I've seen one eating/drinking one).
by turnsout | 2025-04-05 16:11:50+00:00
I think you hit the nail on the head. By extending Go to many platforms, it doesn't feel like you're using a corporate-sponsored language (though you are). The Swift team is aware that they need to help the language thrive in other contexts, which is why they're working on projects like Embedded Swift [0]. I hope they fully embrace wasm as well!

[0]: https://www.swift.org/getting-started/embedded-swift/
by DVRC | 2025-04-05 16:12:09+00:00
> Does it build today In this form it won't, since that is missing the Sun PixRect library. And you also need the "operators.h" file (which is in another directory...) and the "acceptconnect" function.

On comp.windows.news Usenet group and on the NeWS book is reported that a portable codebase (called REF) exists, and Sun ported it on Ultrix (on thr VAXstation) and System V. I read it included a version of PixRect called "Generic PixRect", which should be more portable.

BitSavers put on the net a tape dump of X/NeWS 2.0, and there are some differences: a different graphics library called SHAPES replacing CScript (and it needs the Ace preprocessor to build the device dependent portion of the library), a different memory allocator, support for X11 protocol, support for Folio F3 fonts, and other things.

Fortunately I found a copy of PixRect in the leaked sources of SunOS 4.1.4 , but it's not enough, since that device dependent routines must be rewritten.

I'm slowly porting NeWS 1.1 to NetBSD (since that wscons is easier to work with) as a proof of concept. I managed to execute code and grt my screen turn blue, but the current obstacle is decoding binary fonts: the OG routines fail completely on 64 bit machines, since that the original format assumes 32 bit machine words and big endian order. More work will be needed.
by fsckboy | 2025-04-05 16:12:26+00:00
>When you give money to a bank, the bank owes you money. You are a creditor and you technically own debt (which may or may not give interests). This debt is money.

the bank does not owe you the money you put in, they owe you the interest payments.

look up "valuing a perpetuity", study the equations, that's how it works. If somebody owed you the interest payments and the money, your net worth (in regard to this money) would double. They only owe you the original money if you give back your rights to the interest payments.

I did study finance in grad school, I'm not making this up. I am using simplified language to stay focused on the simplicity of what is happening.
by eesmith | 2025-04-05 16:13:28+00:00
From this article:

> Conservationists often claim that the reason to save charismatic species is that they are necessary for the sound functioning of the ecosystems that support humankind. Perhaps the most well-known of these stories is about the ecological changes wolves drove when they were reintroduced to Yellowstone National Park. Through some 25 peer-reviewed papers, two ecologists claimed to demonstrate that the reappearance of wolves in Yellowstone changed the behavior of elk, causing them to spend less time browsing the saplings of trees near rivers. This led to a chain of cause and effect (a trophic cascade) that affected beavers, birds, and even the flow of the river. A YouTube video on the phenomenon called “How Wolves Change Rivers” has been viewed more than 45 million times.

> But other scientists were unable to replicate these findings—they discovered that the original statistics were flawed, and that human hunters likely contributed to elk population declines in Yellowstone.Ultimately, a 2019 review of the evidence by a team of researchers concluded that “the most robust science suggests trophic cascades are not evident in Yellowstone.”
by david38 | 2025-04-05 16:13:37+00:00
I disagree. I despise pampering in a country where everyone makes a pittance and slaving over some rich American is a more lucrative career than most others. I come from such a country.

It’s possible to have fun very easily, even a very relaxing vacation and not have most of the money siphoned away by some corporation like a giant resort company that plays fast and loose with local resources because the government is desperate for employment
by onetimeusename | 2025-04-05 16:14:16+00:00
For the record I am not really defending Israel. I think they routinely violate conventions and illegally expand their territory. They also mistreat non-Jewish people. So it is reasonable to protest against Israel.

I am more interested in knowing how someone decides what is moral and immoral, i.e. which causes they choose to support. I have my theories. I have very mixed feelings towards the pro-Palestine protestors on campuses stemming from the tactics used, how they directed protests at universities themselves and not Israel, and the subtle implications that universities were "Zionist" for vague reasons. I guess that by extension most Americans are Zionist also?? I am not sure if that's fair and then obviously there's an element of conspiracy theory that is also kind of nasty.

I note you mentioned abolition, colonialism, and genocide so I think it's not a stretch to say you decide based on anti-Fascism which I'll leave open to definition.
by turnsout | 2025-04-05 16:14:29+00:00
Ha, nice! I've used the Swift shebang before, but honestly once you have something that works as a "script," it's so easy to convert it to a real command line utility via Swift Argument Parser [0] that I usually spend the 5 minutes to wrap it up.

[0]: https://github.com/apple/swift-argument-parser
by Jtsummers | 2025-04-05 16:14:56+00:00
Learning a new programming language isn't that hard of a task, every decent programmer will learn a dozen or maybe even dozens over their career.

Also, neither OCaml nor SML are hard to learn. Haskell is more challenging, but that's because it's become, in a sense, multiple languages. The core of Haskell is no harder than OCaml or SML to learn, except for reasoning about lazy evaluation and some of its consequences. All the things people use on top of Haskell, though, does make it more to learn but what you'd need to reach equivalent utility as SML or OCaml for a compilers course is not that hard to learn.
by LinuxBender | 2025-04-05 16:15:11+00:00
I have an old Linux PC and monitor dedicated to HN. I use uBlock to filter out boring topics that I am disinterested in and I consume all the rest all day and part of the night for the single purpose of waiting for a message from a long lost contact. I reply to many threads so they may recognize my stylometry or they could just stop by but I do not have wine.
by kjkjadksj | 2025-04-05 16:15:14+00:00
Because they aren’t building a cheap old bridge animals will probably learn to use. They are effectively regrading the mountainside and landscaping over this bridge to try and blend it in with the landscape. Imo its a waste of money. Crabs learn to use the dead simple ugly bridges. Crabs. A coyote or a mountain lion or deer (what you’d see using this thing in CA) all already use human style bridges to cross highways.
by mindslight | 2025-04-05 16:15:16+00:00
This feels like a typical political comment (or youtube ad) but applied to electronics. Calling the common model false, writing it off as "weird", and then making up a new model with a hint of truth but still less explanatory power than the original one. Like, just don't.

It seems like you're stuck focusing on where the energy comes from, hence wanting to talk about the "powerful DC signal" (eg power supply). But the concept of amplification says nothing about where the energy comes from - it's merely talking about the magnitude of a signal being increased. You can also say "an audio amplifier requires a power supply". Multiple concepts apply to the same situation! This is true everywhere in life, but it's easier to ignore for software and impossible to ignore for electronic design.
by csdvrx | 2025-04-05 16:15:53+00:00
Intransitive preferences is well known to experimental economists, but a hard pill to swallow for many, as it destroys a lot of algorithms (which depends on that) and require more robust tools like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paraconsistent_logic

> just one of the many tools of reason.

Read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preference_(economics)#Transit... then read https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7058914/ and you will see there's a lot of data suggesting that indeed, it's just one of the many tools!

I think it's similar to how many dislike the non-deterministic output of LLM: when you use statistical tools, a non-deterministic output is a VERY nice feature to explore conceptual spaces with abductive reasoning: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abductive_reasoning

It's a tool I was using at a previous company, mixing LLMs, statistics and formal tools. I'm surprised there aren't more startups mixing LLM with z3 or even just prolog.
by every | 2025-04-05 16:16:17+00:00
My introduction to jumping spiders was as a child on a long, boring drive in the back seat of a Buick. One emerged from somewhere down in the door and crawled onto the glass. When I moved closer it would back away. When I moved back it would follow me. When I tilted my head to get a better look it tilted in response. We kept this nonsense up for the rest of the trip...
by rsynnott | 2025-04-05 16:16:20+00:00
> Nor can we afford their protective tariffs against our goods.

Virtually none of the US’s major trading partners have high tariffs. Per the World Bank:

- EU: 1.39% total effective tariffs.

- China: 2.3%

- Canada: 2.35%

- Mexico: 1.21%

- Japan: 1.84%

US (prior to Trump II): 1.47%

US (next week): Estimated at over 20%.
by mdaniel | 2025-04-05 16:16:50+00:00
I had a distaste for Nomad before the rug pull[1], but hopefully no serious person would voluntarily choose Nomad after that stunt. Doubly so that going with the Nomad ecosystem mandates self-hosting as one cannot $(aws elastic-nomad create-cluster). I was similarly surprised that HashiCorp didn't even offer "you pay for compute but we will administer your control plane" since both the "community" and the "enterprise" links from the front page both say "self-managed"

I will be super curious to see if IBM Cloud actually does ship $(ibm-cloud-cli create-nomad)

1: I also didn't realize they rug pulled Consul, too; that's just cruel https://github.com/hashicorp/consul/blob/v1.20.5/LICENSE
by kadushka | 2025-04-05 16:16:54+00:00
There are LLMs which do not generate one token at a time: https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.09992

They do not reason significantly better than autoregressive LLMs. Which makes me question “one token at a time” as the bottleneck.

Also, Lecun has been pushing his JEPA idea for years now - with not much to show for it. With his resources one could hope we would see the benefits of that over the current state of the art models.
Show HN: Weekend Project-Floral Booth-Custom SVG Floral Pattern Generator
by momoiamcgi | 2025-04-05 16:17:31+00:00
Hi HN,

FloralBooth is a browser-based tool that lets users generate and customize floral SVG patterns. This started as an experiment within my ongoing generative design project, reusing the same key visual language and core code base. Along the way, it naturally evolved into a tool (lol) You can:

Adjust count, size, position, color, and stroke of each element

Instantly generate real-time SVG code

Download as SVG or PNG

Even use your custom floral composition as a live photo filter (camera mode)

It’s fully client-side, install-free, and mobile-friendly.

I'm working on a broader system that can convert image into reusable, code-based assets, aiming to help both designers and developers build generative tools like this more easily.

I’d love feedback on what directions might be most useful next?
by cosmic_cheese | 2025-04-05 16:17:51+00:00
This is more or less how I feel too. Writing Swift feels good, and once you make a habit of avoiding code smells that trip up SourceKit, syntax coloration and all that works well enough too. SwiftUI on the other hand gets to be a mess for anything larger than small components and collection view cells.

And so I write pure code UIKit most of the time. It’s not trendy but it’s very effective.
by paulryanrogers | 2025-04-05 16:18:10+00:00
The left is loud about the hypocrisy and faults of its own. Whether that's drone striking US citizens, trading on insider info, or taking literal bribes. The left has prosecuted its own far more often than the right.

My whole point is both sides deserve the rebutes and criticism they have earned, and at this moment one side is objectively far, far worse. Which doesn't excuse faults on the left. But it certainly is not the left who has embraced facism and kleptocracy, nor has anyone except the Republican party and their voters caused this.

> There are a lot of people on the "right" who are horrified about how Trump is doing anything

Citation needed
by zozbot234 | 2025-04-05 16:18:39+00:00
> Compare : Apple M4 perf vs $your_favourite_rv_”fast”_core perf per MHz

We might get a meaningful comparison like that if Qualcomm starts making RISC-V based SoC's as a hedge against ARM. Or if Tenstorrent comes up with a M4-like CPU design. I think the jury is very much still out as to whether the rather limited variable-sized insns (2 or 4 bytes) of RISC-V + the compressed insn extension is a genuine concern. It's certainly nothing like the chaos you see with x86-64 (which seems to be a real bottleneck for very wide decode), and a lot closer to something like the old ARM32+Thumb2.
by onetimeusename | 2025-04-05 16:19:08+00:00
Ya I just have a suspicion that for some industries maybe easily done but for others, four years isn't long enough to embed yourself in an economy to the point where you have political support. It's not a bad idea to onshore some manufacturing. Like targeting the semiconductor and medicine industries should be a higher priority than autos I think. But what could happen is the companies put on a show of onshoring but nothing is really done because they know four years isn't long enough. For those two industries I suspect it's not.
by poincaredisk | 2025-04-05 16:19:24+00:00
What's impossible about that? If he said average, you're right. But back when I lived alone and worked remotely I barely talked in real life, except when hanging out with friends (when it was probably 10k+ words in an evening). I think I honestly only said "hello", "thank you", "by card" etc, when doing errands, and that's all. It's not as ascetic as you think, I type a lot daily, to the point that when talking irl with someone I often say "like you wrote" instead of "like you said". I have a wife now, so that completely changed for me, but I absolutely believe in the 50 word median.
by secabeen | 2025-04-05 16:20:06+00:00
> Why would I stay in a dirty Airbnb?

Because of what I described above! In summary:

* Desire to have an experience and living environment I can't get at home.

* Desire to have living space beyond 2 beds and a bathroom crammed into the smallest available space.

* Indifference to dirt or wear and tear.

Thankfully, no one is saying that AirBNB should replace name brand hotels, in the same way that no one thinks that every hotel should be a Motel 6. AirBNB/VRBO is just another segment of the industry, and those people who want to stay in an AirBNB can, just as people who want a Hilton can without affecting those people who want to stay in the Ritz-Carlton. This is the beauty of the market!
by kjkjadksj | 2025-04-05 16:20:22+00:00
Any type works. This one is stupid elaborate. Animals are smart. They don’t need a graded landscape to learn crossings. See what they use for crab migrations. Looks nothing like what is native in a crab environment and yet this is fine for the simple crab. Meanwhile coyote already is used to walking on our sidewalks in california.
by mdaniel | 2025-04-05 16:20:54+00:00
> Also, helm gave me a loathing for yaml I never knew I had in me

If it's the whitespace that jams you up, I wanted to point out that since YAML is a superset of JSON, there's nothing stopping you from using text/template to cook JSON manifests. There is, of course, a toJson function available in helm <https://helm.sh/docs/chart_template_guide/function_list/#typ...>

But I'm conceptually with you that the jokers who decided to use a text templating language for a structured output were gravely misguided and now we all suffer
by ethbr1 | 2025-04-05 16:21:02+00:00
If you're curious about who the author is, you can find his White House bio here, under staff: https://www.whitehouse.gov/cea/information-resources/

>> The Honorable Stephen Miran is Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers in President Donald Trump’s second Administration. On December 22, 2024, President Trump announced his intention to nominate Miran to be the 32nd CEA Chair, and he was confirmed by the Senate on March 12th, 2025.

Figured it was an interesting look into what the administration is trying to strategically do with the world economy, whether you agree or disagree with the goals and/or effectiveness.