MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by threeseed | 2025-05-15 23:49:59+00:00
> Confidential computing has been around a while, and we still don’t see widespread adoption of it, largely because of the difficulty

This is not the reason at all. Complexity and difficult are inherent to large companies.

It's because it is a very low priority in an environment where for example there are tens of thousands of libraries in use, dozens of which will be in Production with active CVEs. And there are many examples of similar security and risk management issues that companies have to deal with.

Worrying about the integrity of the hardware or not trusting my cloud provider who has all my data in their S3 buckets anyway (which is encrypted using their keys) is not high on my list of concerns. And if it were I would be simply running on-premise anyway.
by cadamsdotcom | 2025-05-15 23:50:10+00:00
What a blast from the past! Stoked it’s still under development!

Had a look for the etymology of “Krell” - in the readme it mentions “GKrellM - keeping an eye on your computer’s Id”.

Seems to be a reference to this 1956 movie, Forbidden Planet / Monsters from the Id: http://guidetomonsters.com/html/50s/Id%20Monster.html

Can I get a fact check?
by const_cast | 2025-05-15 23:50:18+00:00
> Sure but that's not a subsidy being borne by tax payers

When the cost is being borne by every single tax payer, then it's functionally equivalent.

Cars are easily one of the most subsidies goods in America. It's absolutely absurd how many trillions of dollars we dump into making automobiles work, even if they make no sense.
by zahlman | 2025-05-15 23:51:18+00:00
> ChatGPT never says your question is unclear or off topic.

Yes, because ChatGPT doesn't care about publishing your question and its answer with the explicit intent of enabling other people to find it later with a search engine. It has no mandate to organize content or care about the quality of its content. It has no reason to care about the topic. Other people will not read your prompt (which doesn't even need to be trying to ask a question at all), so there's no reason to care about whether other people can understand the question - let alone figure out whether it's something they also want to ask.

> I remember one suggestion from the company that users could reopen a closed question at least once (which is a great thing to try!) and mods downvoted that to hell so they chickened out.

Questions can be reopened, and this has always been the case. What is not allowed is for the OP to reopen a question unilaterally, because that defeats the entire purpose of question closure. The entire point is that when you come to Stack Overflow, you aren't the one who gets to decide what the standards for questions are, or judge whether your question meets those standards. Because if you were, the standards would effectively not exist.

The people you think of as "mods" are overwhelmingly not.

> I say that as someone with 100k reputation.

I have found that reputation scores say very little about whether one understands the purpose of the site or how it's designed to work. Famously, a user with over a million reputation once went on a spree of violations (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/430072) of the best-publicized site policy ever to appear on the meta site (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/421831/). Many users with 100k+ reputation and/or a 10+ year history have likely never looked at the meta site. (See https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/427224 for someone who first posted on meta after 14 years.)
by elmerfud | 2025-05-15 23:51:54+00:00
I read the first part complaining of an unfair ban, but she admitted to creating a fake account to report another. How is the ban unfair? A permanent ban might be extreme but past behavior is the best predictor of future behavior.

They were clearly violating the terms of service They were clearly doing something unethical by creating a fake account and did it intentionally, but they had justified it in their mind with the idea that "the ends justify the means".

I'm not saying that a permanent ban is fair but this type of zealotry in believing that you are allowed to do something wrong because someone else is doing something wrong It's not justification for their behavior. It is not a defense or legitimate grounds to appeal the ban either.
by waynecochran | 2025-05-15 23:52:54+00:00
This idea that everything must be initialized (i.e. no undefined or non-deterministic behavior) should never be forced upon a language like C++ which rightly assumes the programmer should have the final say. I don't want training wheels put on C++ -- I want C++ do exactly and only what the programmer specifies and no more. If the programmer wants to have uninitialized memory -- that is her business.
by toomuchtodo | 2025-05-15 23:52:57+00:00
Bills:

SB 2278 - https://www.ilga.gov/legislation/billstatus.asp?DocNum=2278&...

HB 1263 - https://www.ilga.gov/legislation/BillStatus.asp?DocNum=1263&...

Related:

https://activetrans.org/blog/we-need-fewer-over-sized-inters...

https://chi.streetsblog.org/2023/03/08/heres-an-update-on-se...
by scubadude | 2025-05-15 23:53:50+00:00
I have some minimally popular answers on SO and for years my "points" graph has notched its way upwards. It flatlined at the start of 2024 as people moved to AI.

The best thing about SO is seeing the competing solutions, the discussions, meaning with some discernment you can find that peer-reviewed high quality code snippet. Why would people prefer whatever the AI spits out?

Fortunately I see a few blips on SO so hopefully people are coming back now that the shine has worn off AI.

What is the value of SO to the world economy? Billions. Like the internet archive, it should be some sort of government funded (UN?) library
by rat87 | 2025-05-15 23:54:53+00:00
Median home prices have risen. Home prices have gotten out of control due to limits on supply that's one of the main factors of inflation. Cars today are very different then cars back then and come with more features. The dollar is what we use for currency and the measurement of inflation is well defined (even if there can be good faith argument of which inflation works better especially when comparing long term) meanwhile gold is just shiny rocks
by jchoksi | 2025-05-15 23:54:56+00:00
The original author of gkrellm, Bill Wilson, also made PiKrellCam. <https://billw2.github.io/pikrellcam/pikrellcam.html>

Which was/is the best Raspberry Pi Audio/Video Recording, OSD Motion Detect Program. It was made to run perfectly on a RPI Zero with its limited CPU and memory.

I was very sad to learn that Bill passed away in Oct 2021. <https://github.com/billw2/pikrellcam/issues/78#issuecomment-...>

I'm glad gkrellm got a new maintainer and continues to exist.
by BSTRhino | 2025-05-15 23:55:14+00:00
Unfortunately, this is not compatible with the rollback netcode model. However, all the world state is stored in WASM linear memory and so it is not the most straightforward to decode.

The rollback netcode model is necessary to make the multiplayer invisible to the developer. The other client-server/state-synchronization approach which is used in other multiplayer games, while great in many ways, requires you to assign authorities to every entity and to send a remote procedure call when attempting to affect entities you do not control. Rollback netcode was the only way for me to achieve the primary mission.

I may look into supporting the client-server/state-synchronization multiplayer model in the future though, which would enable "need to know" style revelations. Given we already have a deterministic programming language it is not at all infeasible as a future project.

From my experience running a multiplayer game, I only had 1 in every 50000 players attempt to perform some kind of hack and it was faster and more reliable for me to shadow IP ban the players. That feature is built into Easel. There is also a replays system built-in which makes it easy for people to submit evidence of people hacking. This is the current pragmatic solution that I suggest.
by const_cast | 2025-05-15 23:55:41+00:00
> You're likely right, but I suspect only because of social stigma and classism.

No, our cities are extraordinarily poorly designed.

They're built in such a way that the only way to get around in a cost-effective and time-effective way is by taking a private vehicle.

Here in Dallas, TX, we have the DART and it's pretty expansive. But the city is huge and sprawling - Dallas is still basically a suburb pretending to be a city. A typical 20 minute drive is going to be an hour on the DART. There just isn't enough density to make train and bus stops make sense in almost all US cities.
by shadowdev1 | 2025-05-15 23:56:37+00:00
Heh, low comments on C++ posts now. A sign of the times. My two cents anyway.

I've been using C++ for a decade. Of all the warts, they all pale in comparison to the default initialization behavior. After seeing thousands of bugs, the worst have essentially been caused by cascading surprises from initialization UB from newbies. The easiest, simplest fix is simply to default initialize with a value. That's what everyone expects anyway. Use Python mentality here. Make UB initialization an EXPLICIT choice with a keyword. If you want garbage in your variable and you think that's okay for a tiny performance improvement, then you should have to say it with a keyword. Don't just leave it up to some tiny invisible visual detail no one looks at when they skim code (the missing parens). It really is that easy for the language designers. When thinking about backward compatibility... keep in mind that the old code was arguably already broken. There's not a good reason to keep letting it compile. Add a flag for --unsafe-initialization-i-cause-trouble if you really want to keep it.

C++, I still love you. We're still friends.
by zahlman | 2025-05-15 23:57:02+00:00
I used it once purely because I figured out that "turn a sequence of per-tile bitmap data into tiles, then produce the image corresponding to those tiles in order" is equivalent to swapping the two inner dimensions of a four-dimensional array. (And, therefore, so is the opposite operation.) The task was extremely non-performance-critical.

Of course I wasn't happy about bringing in a massive dependency just to simplify a few lines of code. Hopefully one day I'll have a slimmer alternative, perhaps one that isn't particularly concerned with optimization.
by voidspark | 2025-05-15 23:58:11+00:00
The default chat interface is the wrong tool for the job.

The LLM needs context.

https://github.com/marv1nnnnn/llm-min.txt

The LLM is a problem solver but not a repository of documentation. Neural networks are not designed for that. They model at a conceptual level. It still needs to look up specific API documentation like human developers.

You could use o3 and ask it to search the web for documentation and read that first, but it's not efficient. The professional LLM coding assistant tools manage the context properly.
by heavyset_go | 2025-05-15 23:58:12+00:00
> Is this true? I anal but I have a publicly available GitHub repo which shall go unnamed where most of the heavy lifting is by Claude and Gemini. If I can't copyright this code, does that mean I can't license it under AGPL? If someone copied some code from my repo, does that somehow now taint their code as well?

No one knows, it's untested in court.

As far as I understand, you can own and license the code you modify or create yourself, but if someone decides to copy and paste code they can prove came from an LLM that they found in your project, you don't have much of a standing to enforce your license on them.
by duskwuff | 2025-05-15 23:59:05+00:00
Calling libraries "malicious" and "malware" simply because they interact with web service APIs in an unauthorized way, or because they could potentially be used for nefarious purposes, is a pretty serious overstatement.

Would I use these libraries in an application I was writing? Probably not. But I don't see any evidence of malice here, like exfiltrating the usernames/passwords to a third party or executing code from an unexpected source. At best, these libraries are potentially unwanted, not malicious.
by const_cast | 2025-05-15 23:59:48+00:00
Attempting to vaguely level the playing field is not "anti-car". Nobody in the US is "anti-car".

The reality is that we have conceded such an absurd amount of money, space, safety, noise, you name it, to automobiles that even if we reeled that back 90% we'd still be squarely in the "pro-car" space.

On one side, you have one concession that we spend trillions of dollars subsidizing and spend the majority of all space in our country getting to work. And then, on top of that, it's the primary cause of death for multiple demographics. And we still subsidize it.

On the other side, you have something we don't put any money into.
by Voklen | 2025-05-15 23:59:52+00:00
At St Andrews University we have the concept of an “Academic hour” where every class and lecture begins at 5 past and ends at 5 to the hour. So your 10:00-11:00 lecture is actually 10:05-10:55. I believe this is mainly to give people time to get between their classes across town and to standardise how much time one has to set up between lectures.
by drob518 | 2025-05-16 00:00:28+00:00
Yep. It’s all frothy hype. It’s all crashing down at some point. The billion dollar valuations. Nvidia’s revenue. All of it. That’s not to say that it’s worthless, but everyone is throwing money around like the dot-com days and LLMs (thus far) are not nearly as transformative as the Internet. I’m even hearing that phrase investors use when it’s about to pop: “this time it’s different.”
by techpineapple | 2025-05-16 00:01:33+00:00
In general, debanking for political/moral/ethical views seems like a messy situation, but I guess I wonder with crypto currency firms in particular. Not to get all philosophical, but what is banking? I could imagine some practical considerations of interfacing with some types of big financial institutions, and certainly no one should be forced to lend to high risk folks (though it should be based on an objective metric).

But I guess, they called out cash businesses, is there a risk to the bank, or I guess worried about doing business with drug dealers? I guess cryptocurrency falls into this category, where maybe the bank has to deal with potentially large sums of money it can't trace the origins of?
by kragen | 2025-05-16 00:01:53+00:00
There are, even with optimizations on. You could have checked: https://godbolt.org/#g:!((g:!((g:!((h:codeEditor,i:(filename...

I didn't find any way to get a compiler to generate a branchless version. I tried clang and GCC, both for amd64, with -O0, -O5, -Os, and for clang, -Oz.
by mtklein | 2025-05-16 00:03:00+00:00
My preferred way to compare floats as being interchangeably equivalent in unit tests is

bool equiv(float x, float y) { return (x <= y && y <= x) || (x != x && y != y); }

This handles things like ±0 and NaNs (while NaNs can't be IEEE-754-equal per se, they're almost always interchangeable), and convinces -Wfloat-equal you kinda know what you're doing. Also everything visually lines up real neat and tidy, which I find makes it easy to remember.

Outside unit tests... I haven't really encountered many places where float equality is actually what I want to test. It's usually some < or <= condition instead.
by isaacremuant | 2025-05-16 00:03:15+00:00
> think you have a distorted sense of what fairness is. Charging the same price to the rich that you charge to the poor for the same service is fair. Charging different prices would be unfair.

Nice strawman. No. Charging for something that changes behavior in the poor but not in the rich because it's an exclusinary device is definitely not fair. I also didn't suggest different prices but simply not doing exclusion via money or taxation, which doesn't affect the rich.

> Charity/philanthropy is a good thing, because human life is inherently valuable, but it's not a matter of fairness. People don't have an inherent right to benefit from the labor or ingenuity of others.

What are you on about? I'm sorry to tell you but the likes of corporate magnates and rich politicians don't create more value just bend the rules to stay on top. It's easy to throw money at things to create more money when you have it. When you can put your capital in a tax haven and the rubble pays it in full.

Next time you come with inspired strawmen takes, prep a bit.
by const_cast | 2025-05-16 00:03:17+00:00
Uber achieved their success by cheating - they went billions of dollars deeper into debt each year to subsidize your rides, because their business model doesn't work. On top of this, they operating by exploiting gig workers who, sometimes, earn effective negative wages.

Make no mistake - Uber did not pioneer anything. They merely developed new wages to exploit you, the business model of Venture Capital, and their workers.
by roughly | 2025-05-16 00:04:02+00:00
> There are plenty of commercial pirates, and those commercial uses were grouped in with noncommercial sharing

I don't think many people were particularly sympathetic to people making money off piracy - by and large, people were upset because people committing piracy for personal use were getting hit with the kinds of fines and legal charges usually reserved for, well, people who make money off piracy.

> Am I wrong in assuming most of this scraping comes from people utilizing AI agents for things like AI-assisted coding?

Yes. The huge increases in traffic aren't from, say, Claude going and querying Github when you ask it to, it's from the scraping to drive the initial training process. Claude and the others know the first thing about code because Github and StackOverflow were part of their training corpus, because the companies which made them scraped the whole damn site and used it as part of their training data for making a ~competing product. That's what Github's reacting to, that's what Reddit reacted to, that's what everyone's been reacting to - it's the scraping of the data for training that's leading to these reactions.

To be clear, because I think this is maybe a core of our disagreement: The problem that's leading to this isn't LLM agents acting on behalf of a user - it's not that Cursor googled python code for you - it's that the various companies training the models are aggressively scraping everything they can get their hands on. It's not one request for one repo on behalf of one user, it's the wholesale scraping of everything on the site by a rival company to make a rival product, most likely in violation of terms of service and certainly in violation of anything that anyone could reasonably assume another corporate entity would stand for. Github's not mad at you, they're mad at OpenAI.

> There is tons of software on Github written by users who wish for their work to remain open access. Is that the class of software and people you believe should be shuffled around into smaller and smaller services that haven't yet abandoned the commitments that allowed them to become popular?

You store your money in a bank. The bank gets robbed repeatedly by an organized group of serial bank robbers, and increases security at the branch. You move your money to another bank, because the increased security annoys you. You understand the problem here may repeat itself elsewhere as well, right?
by palata | 2025-05-16 00:05:26+00:00
> The people who have been around for 10 years or so who disagree with the basics of question closing policy [...] Because they flood the site with inherently low-quality answers to low-quality questions

I see that you just don't hear the complaints.

I don't hear people who have been around for 10 years or so complaining because they can't answer to low-quality questions.
by jchw | 2025-05-16 00:05:43+00:00
I believe something similar is going on internally in Windows with event queues. It coalesces and prioritizes input events when multiple of them pile up before you're able to pop new events off of the queue. (For some events, e.g. pointer events, you can even go and query frames that were coalesced during input handling.) On the application/API end, it just looks like a "scalar select" loop, but actually it is doing batching behavior for input events!

(On the flip side, if you have a Wayland client that falls behind on processing its event queue, it can crash. On the whole this isn't really that bad but if you have something sending a shit load of events it can cause very bad behavior. This has made me wonder if it's possible, with UNIX domain sockets, to implement some kind of event coalescing on the server-side, to avoid flooding the client with high-precision pointer movement events while it's falling behind. Maybe start coalescing when FIONREAD gets to some high watermark? No idea...)
by bnolsen | 2025-05-16 00:05:45+00:00
We can always dream about the unicorn language. In my opinion zig is the closest I've seen. Simple and orthogonal yet brilliantly extensible with its comptime. But it's not without its warts. And it doesn't annoy me like Rust seems to. (long time c++ programmer here who is weary of the ever growing complexities).
by refulgentis | 2025-05-16 00:07:40+00:00
I think if I coloured it as [gov't] deputizing [companies], and prioritized financial banks not knowing their customers, in case they decide they get hacked, I could sort of get excited about blaming regulation.

At the end of the day it'd be hard for me to continue holding that because, on the balance, we expect companies to keep data private and to not enable illegal activity, not gov't to avoid asking companies to do things, lest they screw up.
by Buttons840 | 2025-05-16 00:08:14+00:00
Maybe "answered by duplicate" would have been a more friendly way to say it--but I hear you, yeah, the closed questions were linked, which is what I was asking for. Whatever the case, a lot of people decided to never use the site because their questions were closed.

> People who want to give the same easy answers over and over to the same easy questions, so as to get imaginary internet points that move them up a leaderboard, should not feel welcome on Stack Overflow.

I think it's worth asking, why do people give answers on the internet at all? Maybe it's because of internet points, but more often people just like interacting with other humans and teaching.

In the beginning, StackOverflow was a place for people who wanted to interact with other humans, and also a place for people who wanted to build the ultimate knowledge base--for a time their incentives were aligned.

But then over time the space for interacting with other humans got smaller and smaller, and now StackOverflow is almost entirely about maintaining the knowledge base that has been built.

And yeah, like you say, it's okay if StackOverflow isn't the place for human interaction. StackOverflow has built its knowledge base, and some still maintain it, and the long term success of that knowledge base is becoming ever more apparent--which is to say, not very successful--the day may soon come that StackOverflow isn't even hosted anymore.

(Also, I want to ward off the claims that this is because of AI. StackOverflow was in steady decline long before AI was competent at answering questions; even in 2025 the competence of AI is still in question: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44000118)
by protocolture | 2025-05-16 00:08:34+00:00
>Is this true?

Depends. Probably not.

Code produced solely by AI with no inputs or modification is not copyrightable.

But theres an amount of human labor and direction you can mix in to pass that hurdle.

Likely:

1. If you never tell anyone its AI created it doesnt matter 2. Someone will test this in court one day and we will discover where the line is actually drawn

Until then you should follow the Terms and Conditions of the tool you use, it probably assigns you all applicable rights to the generated code.

Not a lawyer etc.