MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by dang | 2025-05-25 18:29:09+00:00
Please don't cross into name-calling or personal attack, regardless of how wrong someone else is or you feel they are.

If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it. We've had to ask you this more than once before and your account has unfortunately been continuing to break the rules pretty badly.
by hamburglar | 2025-05-25 18:29:52+00:00
I once spent a little time writing code to find the longest possible boggle word and found there were a few candidates. Interesting things I noted that weren’t entirely obvious: the longest word is actually 17 characters, not 16, because of the “Qu” side, and there are actually lots of words that are impossible, because for example there is only one J and only one B and they are on the same die.

I don’t remember all the longest words but sesquicentennials was one of them.
by bzmrgonz | 2025-05-25 18:30:20+00:00
What's stopping us from implementing holo style 3d displays like in the movies? Star-Trek etc. Are we not there yet?? alternatively, what about VR? we could virtually project the traffic controllers out into space like silver-surfer or ironman right(pov of course)? I'm not an expert, but it seems we need a better UX/UI right?
by nickpsecurity | 2025-05-25 18:31:05+00:00
You're leaving off both the "limited liability" and "it's a person with legal rights" parts of a corporation.

If it's a person, then they might have to go after the corporation. Alternatively, each corporate crime might be a conspiracy charge.

With limited liability, it's unclear how much one can discourage the bad behavior if there's distance between the owners and the punishment.

I oppose both of these concept by default for criminal behavior. Power and accountability should always go hand in hand. Only people should be people, too.
by skydhash | 2025-05-25 18:32:07+00:00
A quick example can be found with date. You can store it in ISO 8601 string and often it makes more sense as this is a shared spec between systems. But when it comes to actually display it, there's a lot of additional concerns that creep in such as localization and timezones. Then you need to have a data structure that split the components, and some components may be used as keys or parameters for some logic that outputs the final representation, also as a string.

So both the storage and presentation layer are strings, but they differs. So to reconcile both, you need an intermediate layer, which will contains structures that are the domain models, and logic that manipulate them. To jump from one layer to another you map the data, in this example, string to structs then to string.

With MVC and CRUD apps, the layers often have similar models (or the same, especially with dynamic languages) so you don't bother with mapping. But when the use cases becomes more complex, they alter the domain layer and the models within. So then you need to add mapping code. Your storage layers may have many tables (if using sql), but then it's a single struct at the domain layer, which then becomes many models at the presentation layer with duplicate information.

NOTE

That's why a lot of people don't like most ORM libraries. They're great when the models are similar, but when they start to diverge, you always need to resort to raw SQL query, then it becomes a pain to refactor. The good ORM libraries relies on metaprogramming, then they're just weird SQL.
by Aurornis | 2025-05-25 18:32:27+00:00
I’m all for imposing fines and restrictions in proportion to damage done. Officers of the company should be held legally liable for their roles in decision making.

However, I’m also amazed when these discussions generate calls for “corporate death penalty” powers being handed to the government and/or used for various transgressions. This entire discussion section is occurring under and article about the current administration abusing government powers for their own gain. How can people be so quick to call for even more levers for corrupt governments to use? “Nice company you got there. Would be a shame if it got the death penalty. On an unrelated note, my campaign fund could use another $100 million if you know anyone…”

Let’s leave the punishments as proportional to the damage/crime.
by saltcured | 2025-05-25 18:32:46+00:00
This takes me waaaaaaaay back to when I did my first bit of practical low-level programming. I wrote a little C program that translated PNM bitmaps into the wire format for my dusty 24-pin Epson dot matrix printer. I don't remember the details, but I used it with some plugin system involving Ghostview to print postscript documents from my first Linux system in the early 90s.
by alephnerd | 2025-05-25 18:32:47+00:00
> but it seems we need a better UX/UI right?

Wrong.

It's the fact that the FAA has $5.2B in outstanding repairs but only $1.7B allocated for repair.

On top of that, the GS pay scale penalizes federal employees in high CoL areas.

Both are very difficult problems to solve, as the former means dramatically increasing the FAA's budget (which is tiny for the scope of responsibility it has across North America), and the latter means completely reforming the General Schedule.

On top of that, Congress constantly meddles with the FAA and DoT in general because it's the easiest way to get some quick wins for constituents.

The FAA has been working on modernizing air traffic control, but that project won't be completed til 2030 at the earliest.

Furthermore, the Northeast is a uniquely congested airspace with the massive number of airports and passengers.
by fzwang | 2025-05-25 18:33:02+00:00
I run a comp sci education program to help students self direct their education[1]. We sometimes reference the OSSU curriculum.

Althought there are lots of benefits to the self-taught route, there are some caveats which students should be aware of. You will have to work harder on the "signaling" and networking. There are definitely social benefits in being associated with a university. And a lack of degree will mean you're "marked"[2], which you'll have to overcome. A setback or mistake will be attributed to your lack of degree, whether justified or not. And some hiring managers can't take the political risk of hiring a non-degreed candidate. Not insurmountable, but this means we work on it from day one. If you do decide to self-direct your education, the benefits are that you learn faster and don't waste time spining the hamster wheel, so to speak, to grind out courses. Everything you learn is in context and relevant. If you realize you miss some fundamentals, you'll just go back and learn those concepts/topics. It's a different way of learning, which imo, is inevitable for technical professions. But it's not for everyone, and some students just vibe with it more.

What's sad is that many students are sort of forced into the self-taught route, because they don't have the financial resources to go to college/university. And if they're not aware of the trade-offs, they could really struggle.

[1] https://www.divepod.to [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Markedness
by arp242 | 2025-05-25 18:33:04+00:00
> Top posting did not win anything. Lazyness did.

In addition to what the sibling comment already points out, most people don't even know what "top posting" or "bottom posting" is because they just do what the email client does by default (which in Outlook's case: strongly favours top posting).

The only "lazy" thing here is this kind of smug judgemental attitude instead of looking for the actual reasons.
by dasil003 | 2025-05-25 18:33:07+00:00
I don't disagree that top posting is often the result of laziness, but I think the logical thread of the articles starts to break down at this point:

> But when the thread is long, and when your reply is to a point deeper inside, suddenly the receiver has to do a lot of work. You, the sender, have saved yourself time, but the receiver has to do more work than you have saved. Potentially a lot more work.

The problem is that readers are also lazy, and increasingly people don't have time to follow long threads at all. With inline responses, it's far too easy for threads to branch off in a million directions. Once that happens you'll often lose the forest for the trees. It's reasonable for usenet-style internet discussions where participation is voluntary and asynchronous by definition, but in work collaboration it's a strong anti-pattern. In a situation where there is a goal and desired outcome, top-posting is a reasonable way to keep a thread linear and outcome-focused. It can still break down for complex or controversial issues, but in that case email is the wrong medium, instead jump on a call or write a proposal.
by colingauvin | 2025-05-25 18:33:54+00:00
I'm a structural biologist working for a small biotech. Very interested in alternatives to PyMOL and ChimeraX. Took it for a small spin, right away I'm unable to move with the mouse using the free cam. Also was unable to open a .pdb file that I had locally (fetching from RCSB worked though). Really cool work thus far though.

what type of docking are you planning to support? Autodock? Or something from scratch?
by Adrig | 2025-05-25 18:33:57+00:00
Two instances of crypto kidnapping happened recently in France just a few weeks apart. The first was the father of a crypto milionnaire who was rescued after a few days, missing a finger. The second is the daughter of a crypto CEO who fended off a kidnapping in broad daylight in the center of Paris, while she was with her husband and baby. Insane stuff.

This will only go worse and harder to protect from. Most of the instances I heard about were carried by "amateurs", which makes all this quite unpredictable.
by Aurornis | 2025-05-25 18:34:33+00:00
That would destroy most of the value of the company.

Typical companies operate with some debt load (financing, etc). That would have to be paid off with the proceeds of selling off their pieces.

So in practice, even selling it off would produce zero or negative monetary return once debts were settled. You’d also be obliterating tens or hundreds of thousands of jobs overnight.
by lloeki | 2025-05-25 18:34:59+00:00
Larousse dictionary disagrees:

https://www.larousse.fr/dictionnaires/francais/informatique/...

This cites the same person (Philippe Dreyfus) but with "automatic":

https://www.caminteresse.fr/societe/quelle-est-lorigine-du-m...

> Il faut attendre 1962 pour réentendre parler d’informatique dans les médias. « Informatique » est en effet le terme utilisé pour la première fois par un scientifique français pour désigner le traitement automatique des données. Il s’agit de Philippe Dreyfus, fondateur de la société SIA, acronyme pour « Société d’Informatique Appliquée ».

And then enters the dictionary in 1966.

In 1957 in Germany, Karl Steinbuch describes Informatik as Automatische Informationsverarbeitung.
by specialist | 2025-05-25 18:35:08+00:00
Mugging, larceny, robbery, assault & battery, a stick-up.

Kids these days.... Always inventing new words for old ideas, amirite?

More seriously: I'm still a little unclear how stealing crypto is feasible. There's a ledger, right? Tumblers are really that effective at hiding the chain of custody?

At some point(s) the cyberspace "durable digital asset" (h/t a15z) has to emerge in meatspace, right? Even if it pops up in Russia, NK, or Golden Triangle, there's always some heads to bash, fingers to break. Right?
by kweingar | 2025-05-25 18:35:09+00:00
I can't think of many engineering disciplines that do things this way. "This seems to work, I don't know how or why it works, I don't even know if it's possible to know how or why it works, but I will just apply this moving forward, crossing my fingers that in future situations it will work by analogy."

If the act of discovery and iterative refinement makes prompting an engineering discipline, then is raising a baby also an engineering discipline?
by cronelius | 2025-05-25 18:35:25+00:00
HN is not a feed of pharmaceutical ads. HN is a place where industry experts in many industries exchange projects and news in _their_ language. HN is going to be a difficult place to live if you are unwilling to google or chatgpt for things you don't understand. Most of us are here explicitly to discover things we've never seen before – there are other places on the web to have everything spelled out
by bluefirebrand | 2025-05-25 18:35:30+00:00
I think what OP is saying is that the corporate veil should not exist at all

Executives should be held accountable for making decisions or approving company direction that break laws

I know there's a lot of complexity here with how businesses operate

But it is really messed up that individuals can enrich themselves an incredible amount by directing companies to break laws, and often suffer zero consequences for that because the corporate veil is such a strong mechanism
by jampekka | 2025-05-25 18:35:40+00:00
It's not necessarily about the standard of living, but about production going into the zero or negative sum status consumption. Or as Keynes puts it:

> Now it is true that the needs of human beings may seem to be insatiable. But they fall into two classes -- those needs which are absolute in the sense that we feel them whatever the situation of our fellow human beings may be, and those which are relative in the sense that we feel them only if their satisfaction lifts us above, makes us feel superior to, our fellows. Needs of the second class, those which satisfy the desire for superiority, may indeed be insatiable; for the higher the general level, the higher still are they. But this is not so true of the absolute needs -- a point may soon be reached, much sooner perhaps than we are all of us aware of, when these needs are satisfied in the sense that we prefer to devote our further energies to non-economic purposes.
by gruez | 2025-05-25 18:35:46+00:00
>When we receive the death penalty, the state doesn't just physically seize our bodies. We die. We have neither assets nor any benefit of life. It can also have highly negative effects of others since it's a sudden, catastrophic loss.

Corporations aren't people though. For one, corporations are just groups of people, so it's hard to claim that it's irredeemable and must suffer the death penalty. If you take a corporation, replace its board, executives, and employees, is it even the same corporation?

>operations totally ceasing, all employees are fired, [...] and individual assets sold off (like a will).

What purpose does this serve?

>That "shares going to zero" part would be important for accountability.

That happens regardless of the "death penalty" though. The government dispossessing all shareholders has the same effect.
by api | 2025-05-25 18:35:49+00:00
Most truly original art and literature doesn’t sell well, or if it does it’s a slow burn where sales very gradually creep up. Often popularity is achieved after the artist’s death.

The way to make money is to find a schtick that works and repeat and market it.

There’s a funny Behind the Bastards podcast episode on Kinkade, who apparently was kind of an asshole IRL.
by brookst | 2025-05-25 18:36:22+00:00
You’re saying that he was holding Iraq together in a bad way, which is true.

But he was holding it together. There might be a case for removing him, but note that nobody ever made that case without resting it on total fabrications. Because, while he was “bad” in a moral sense, there was no case for the war that could be made using the actual truth.
by ogogmad | 2025-05-25 18:37:37+00:00
> Running tens of thousands of chips crunching a bajillion numbers a second sounds fun, but that's not automatically "engineering".

Not if some properties are unexpectedly emergent. Then it is science. For instance, why should a generic statistical model be able to learn how to fill in blanks in text using a finite number of samples? And why should a generic blank-filler be able to produce a coherent chat bot that can even help you write code?

Some have even claimed that statistical modelling shouldn't able to produce coherent speech, because it would need impossible amounts of data, or the optimisation problem might be too hard, or because of Goedel's incompleteness theorem somehow implying that human-level intelligence is uncomputable, etc. The fact that we have a talking robot means that those people were wrong. That should count as a scientific breakthrough.
by lancekey | 2025-05-25 18:38:23+00:00
So since 1950, lifespan has gone up ~14 years in UK.

Retirement age has not gone up since it was created in 1940s. Not crazy to raise it a little.

Quickly looking at Denmark articles, it seems they’re raising the age to adjust to life expectancy increases as well.

I don’t see this a sign of the system failing.
by mihaaly | 2025-05-25 18:38:39+00:00
Of course it failed when it was created in completely different circumstances.

Or some may say it got outdated.

It was started at times when the life expentancy was low. And it was given at age above the life expentancy. And in the beginning not to everyone. The retirement age got lower and given to broader set of population gradually. These moves made governments popular, so it was no brainer to introduce, on the expense of future generations.

Birth rates that can maintain the economics of relatively low retirement age could not be sustained without destroying the planet. Actually has to be reversed still as it went too far already and deteriorating as we speak, especialy with the ongoing large increase in the overall life quality - causing decreasing birth rate alone - and healt. The system was destined to fail. But how to take away rights? It is much harder than giving, especiallly when the adverse effects are for current voters, not future generations?

So the necessary steps are postponed, postponed, postponed yet again, for many decades, taking about necessity in many forms, meanwhile filling bigger and bigger holes in the budgets, through borrowing, making the problem worse, again for future generations. Very few countries do tiny adjustments, and even those are met with huge protests mostly.

I wonder what the future holds. Painful adjustments or more painful collapse later in some form.
by acdha | 2025-05-25 18:38:49+00:00
It seems like quite a stretch to think the public feels significantly greater affinity to wealthy people who hold stocks, real-estate, and other traditional assets compared to cryptocurrency speculators. It seems like a much more parsimonious explanation that the attacks are more prevalent in the less secure medium since attackers are more likely to succeed.

“Be your own bank” makes a cool bumper sticker but it’s like saying “be your own pilot” or “do your own surgery” in terms of complexity and risk. There’s a reason why these things traditionally involve teams of people with various safety precautions baked in to make attacks riskier.
by foobarqux | 2025-05-25 18:38:52+00:00
"Tom Jones" isn't a strawman, Chomsky is addressing an actual argument in a published paper from Steven Piantadosi. He's using a pseudonym to be polite and not call him out by name.

> instead of even attempting to summarize the arguments for his position..

He makes a very clear, simple argument, accessible to any layperson who can read. If you are studying insects what you are interested in is how insects do it not what other mechanisms you can come up with to "beat" insects. This isn't complicated.
by cj | 2025-05-25 18:38:57+00:00
> I fail to see why anyone would want this to be the future of code.

IME there's an inverse relationship between how excited the person is about AI coding and their seniority as an engineer.

Juniors (and non-coders) love it because now they can suddenly do things they didn't know how to do before.

Seniors don't love it because it gets in their way, causes coworkers to put up low-quality AI-generated code for peer review, and struggles with any level of complexity or nuance.

My fear is that AI code assistants will inadvertently stop people from progressing from Junior --> Senior since it's easier to put out work without really understanding what you're doing. Although I guess I could have said the same thing about Stack Overflow 10 years ago.
by MegaDeKay | 2025-05-25 18:40:31+00:00
Here's another example [0]: "Hacker Conference HOPE Says U.S. Immigration Crackdown Caused Massive Crash in Ticket Sales". A quote: "“We are roughly 50 percent behind last year’s sales, based on being 3 months away from the event,” Greg Newby, one of HOPE’s organizers, told 404 Media in an email." No reason to think this conference is especially different from others like it.

[0] https://www.404media.co/hacker-conference-hope-says-fewer-pe... OR https://archive.is/QWmxO
by A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 | 2025-05-25 18:40:56+00:00
It is unfortunate opinion, because I personally hold Chomsky in fairly high regard and give most of his thoughts I am familiar with a reasonable amount of consideration if only because he could, I suppose in the olden days now, articulate his points well and make you question your own thought process. This no longer seems to be the case though as I found the linked article somewhat difficult to follow. I suppose age can get to anyone.

Not that I am an LLM zealot. Frankly, some of the clear trajectory it puts humans on makes me question our futures in this timeline. But even if I am not a zealot, but merely an amused, but bored middle class rube, the serious issues with it ( privacy, detailed personal profiling that surpasses existing systems, energy use, and actual power of those who wield it ), I can see it being implemented everywhere with a mix of glee and annoyance.

I know for a fact it will break things and break things hard and it will be people, who know how things actually work that will need to fix those.

I will be very honest though. I think Chomsky is stuck in his internal model of the world and unable to shake it off. Even his arguments fall flat, because they don't fit the domain well. It seems like they should given that he practically made his name on syntax theory ( which suggests his thoughts should translate well into it ) and yet.. they don't.

I have a minor pet theory on this, but I am still working on putting it into some coherent words.
by guywithahat | 2025-05-25 18:41:34+00:00
Well he doesn't have a right to free speech, he's not American. Technically France does afford their citizens the right to free speech either, so he's SOL on every front.

My understanding is the refused entry is effectively the punishment. You wouldn't try him here, generally they try to have foreign nationals charged with the US crime in their home country, and it probably wasn't likely to happen.

Lastly a friend of mine in college was arrested by the FBI for a joke on social media during the Biden admin. They arguably take online behavior more seriously than in person
by James_K | 2025-05-25 18:41:47+00:00
I've been doing a similar thing for a while now, but I have a 36-key board. I take a slightly different approach to the one in this article, namely I just have the space key on the left thumb cluster to raise to a layer with the numbers on the home-row keys, and then I have the Shift+Number combinations that you would have on a normal keyboard. I mainly do this so that I'm not completely at sea when typing on a regular board, though one of the great advantages of a 36-keyer (and mine uses low profile laptop switches) is that you can just put it in your pocket and take it around with you. You can cover all of the standard typing symbols in just two layers which are nicely similar to that of a regular keyboard (and if you use Vim keys, that's all you need).