MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by godelski | 2025-05-22 00:32:50+00:00
> The way to make Linux takeover is get kids using it

Agree!

> Windows could play games easily when Linux could not even use a USB mouse

I don't think I've ever had a USB mouse (or wireless mouse or keyboard) issue in the last 15 years.

Games? I'll give you that. But honestly, Steam has really made that almost a non-issue. Good guy steam! (their work has affected more than SteamOS)

> Replace all the desktop legacy with some blank canvas and local models

This seems like the opposite of what you initially argued.

Models as in... LLMs or ML models? This seems like a great way to break things. I'd really encourage you to get these things to try to do what you're saying they should do.

> Apple Silicon is

Where are you going with this?

> Show that potential with local models on Linux and it’s over.

I'm an ML researcher... these models are generally made and deployed on linux systems. Explicitly because they work better there and is easier to deal with.

> In an interview with IGN during Covid lockdown

Serious question: you okay? Did a LLM contribute to your comment? Did a LLM make the whole comment? GPT, can you describe to me Act 4 Scene 5 from Henry V but as told by a Pirate from the deep south? (American south)
by johndoe0815 | 2025-05-22 00:33:03+00:00
If you are concerned about spyware, don't think about buying an x86-based machine that uses Intel ME (management engine) technology – so, any system produced in the last ~15 years:

https://www.zdnet.com/article/minix-intels-hidden-in-chip-op...

If you are interested in open hardware and software, you might want to check out the ARM-based MNT Reform laptops:

https://mntre.com
by encom | 2025-05-22 00:33:07+00:00
Been using Linux for ages, but only for a few years on my home desktop, because Steam is now that good, and gaming is a major part of that computers duties.

HOWEVER - I've yet to find a good email client. Kmail is good, but uses Akonadi with is a disaster, and literally doesn't work. I have to restart it multiple times a day, because it silently stops working. I have found bug reports about this issue going back years which are either ignored or marked fixed, which it clearly isn't.

Don't say Thunderbird.
by squigz | 2025-05-22 00:33:18+00:00
> I'm right there with you, but I know a lot of people who very much do want to know how many of their friends "like" their selfies and other posts, and how that compares to how many "likes" their friends are getting. I think they're more common on social media than we are.

Just to be clear about something though: this sort of person existed long before social media, would still exist without social media, and will continue to exist long after the current evolutions of social media
by MyPasswordSucks | 2025-05-22 00:33:19+00:00
> Earth is a moon of Sol, is it not?

No. The sun is a star, so it doesn't get to have moons. It has planets. If Jupiter started generating heat from nuclear fusion reactions, we'd call Io a planet right before we boiled to death, and with our dying breath we'd add "and also, it's no longer a moon".

Putting a leash on a cat doesn't make it a dog, and both of those creatures have four legs even if you call the tails of each a leg. A planet revolves around a star, a moon revolves around a planet (revolving around a star). There's further elements which make Ceres and Ed White's lost glove not a planet or a moon, respectively, but planets and moons are distinct and non-overlapping categories.
Show HN: I built Vercel for your VPS, saving you money
by ben_hrris | 2025-05-22 00:33:24+00:00
Vercel taught us to pay them a premium, worry about affording any more traffic, and thanking them for the privilege.

I built PulseUp so we can move away from server-less. You can deploy any full stack application and database in minutes, directly to your VPS, and sleep well.
by naikrovek | 2025-05-22 00:35:12+00:00
What’s a moon that orbits a moon? Doesn’t that make the orbited moon a planet? Pluto has moons. But it’s not a planet? ???

If a super massive planet and two stars orbit each other in the center of a star system, all the planets that orbit those stars are moons then technically, right?

This is all super fuzzy and completely arbitrary. These concepts are constructs. Humans could make them better. Instead, everyone decided to make it all worse.
by godelski | 2025-05-22 00:37:25+00:00
I agree. I think the problem is it is easier to see the distance we still need to go than the distance we've already covered. It is good to reflect and look back, seeing how far we've come. It's the best thing to motivate continued efforts forward.

> It mostly seems to be “anti-cheat” measures that are statistically indistinguishable from malware that still cause trouble.

This seems to be a big hitch. But we also know that studios will drop these methods (hopefully in favor of ones that actually work without being incredibly invasive) if the userbase pushes back. They can only make these moves because people don't care. Or they care only as far as their mouth, but not to their wallet. Certainly there is addiction here, and that should be accounted for, but it does still warrant push. That's only sufficient as an explanation, rather than an excuse.
by Spooky23 | 2025-05-22 00:37:36+00:00
He transformed the MacBook Pro into its pure essence, the ultimate form, meant to be used on a slab of polished granite in a HEPA filtered room, with only a precisely aligned array of dongles to offset the clean vision.

The fact the you took your laptop out in the field or to a couch in some barn like a filthy animal, corrupting perfection with dust and grease, rendering the keyboard useless is on you. It is a reflection of your own animal nature.
by tbihl | 2025-05-22 00:37:46+00:00
Growing up in the 90s and 2000s, my mom trained by brothers and me to forcefully demand to call her if we thought 911 had been called so she could race down to intercept and send them packing, lest we get a crazy ambulance ride bill. The calls ranged from total non-issues to things that in no way required ambulance transport, though a hospital visit be necessary.
by cpeterso | 2025-05-22 00:38:15+00:00
Some biting critiques from Edsger Dijkstra:

Red: “the proposal is both advanced and backward in such an incongruous manner that I am baffled”

Green: “technical incompetence, probably enhanced by dishonesty”

Blue: “the blue language is unacceptably complex” … “these documents are an inextricable mixture of technical documentation and salestalk”

Yellow: “an unsalvageable mess”

https://craftofcoding.wordpress.com/2014/04/16/dijkstra-on-a...
by mncharity | 2025-05-22 00:39:36+00:00
> if we were centrally storing all of the operations

Community-scale caching? That's basically what pre-compiled software distributions are. And one idea for addressing the programming language design balk "that would be a nice feature, but it's not known how to compile it efficiently, so you can't have it", is highly-parallel cloud compilation, paired with a community-scale compiler cache. You might not mind if something takes say a day to resolve, if the community only needs it run once per release.
by rabbitofdeath | 2025-05-22 00:40:21+00:00
thankfully its pingable ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

$ ping shouldiblockicmp.com PING shouldiblockicmp.com (52.92.225.139) 56(84) bytes of data.

64 bytes from s3-website-us-west-2.amazonaws.com (52.92.225.139): icmp_seq=1 ttl=241 time=75.3 ms
by vrv | 2025-05-22 00:40:37+00:00
If the output schema specifies an id field, the LLM can write a code snippet that references it based on the context of the subsequent request, but the LLM doesn't need to observe the underlying value unless necessary. E.g., it can pass the 'id' opaquely to another call that receives the "id" as an input. If the user specifically wants to see the "id", the code orchestration approach can have the LLM just print the content.
by Waterluvian | 2025-05-22 00:41:22+00:00
This gave me an idea: a Slack AI that will give me an analogy to support my point, whatever it may be.

“Hey Analogai, help me out here.”

“Ah I see what Chip Frumpkins, Director of Looking Relevant is saying. It’s basically that we need to throw a lot of paint at the wall to see what sticks. And if we fail, at least we’ve got a Jackson Pollock.”
by mindslight | 2025-05-22 00:42:42+00:00
Does anyone else have the sickening feeling that their actual plan is to straight up destroy USD, with the looters fleeing to hard assets and foreign/crypto currency, and the plebs' currency crisis then serving as the justification for naked fascism red in tooth and claw? With the narrative then shifting to the usual "Democrats did this! And we tried to stop it but we were too late!" nonsense, backed up by an army of "AI" spambots.

The tariff tantrum, destroying US soft power institutions with DOGE, alienating all of our allies with petty feuds, the constant framing of the United States' enviable global positions as bad things. None of these things make any sense if you actually want the United States to succeed.
by arn3n | 2025-05-22 00:44:20+00:00
I really wish stories like this traveled farther. As the world fraud economies have grown, most people have remained mostly uninformed about how fraudsters and Ponzi schemes operate -- how they sound, what their founders act like, and how they can go on for far longer and trap far smarter people than you'd expect. With the constant weakening of serious consumer protections (at least in America), sharing these cautionary tales is more important than ever.

On a tangent, I wonder how much of "Uncut Gems" was inspired by this story.
by AStonesThrow | 2025-05-22 00:45:42+00:00
Oh, indeed. It is ridiculous to rely on ambulances just to get to the hospital. In so many situations.

What happens out on the streets here is that someone has an oopsie, maybe they go unresponsive, or have massive pains or something, and some well-meaning dope contacts 9-1-1.

Then the EMTs show up and the circus begins, and inevitably the ambulance transports the patient and gets them to the E.R., post-haste dispatch.

When I broke my leg while roller skating, I was firmly expecting an ambulance ride. Thankfully I was in a large group of very sane and pragmatic individuals who said "just call a taxi!" It's not like I would die of a broken leg if the taxi took an extra 30 minutes! [Unfortunately, taxis do not like bodily fluids that soil their interiors.]

I once dipped into the hot tub where I live. Due to the pandemic, all our pool furniture had been disappeared, and so when I exited the hot tub, I just lay on the ground to bliss out and enjoy the relaxation. A neighbor immediately began shouting at me and brandished her phone to call 9-1-1. I told her to please cease and desist. Well-meaning citizens have a hair trigger on emergency services and it's exceedingly unnecessary. But your insurance doesn't need to pre-auth an EMT/ED circus.

Conversely, I had an urgent visit with my PCP once, and feebly attempted to describe symptoms. He shrugged. No testing, no diagnosis, no speculation. I can't do nothin' for ya, man. Two days later I was ambulanced to the E.R. with a kidney stone. And yet, no hospital was necessary. Nothing my PCP could've done for a kidney stone. 6 hours, let it pass. It was painful but it passed. All that medical care? Unnecessary. PCP? No reason to sue -- he did nothing wrong. He could've referred me to a CT scan -- for what reason? Let it pass. No lawsuits.

Karen Ann Quinlan's case had a poignancy that touched my heart. I had heard of Terri Schiavo, but Karen Q was before my time. Karen's parents weren't malicious -- they didn't want her to die -- they simply wanted to take away her pain. Physicians insisted that "pulling the plug" would be tantamount to murder! Her parents fought the state and the medical establishment, and ultimately, won for her nine years of life and peace.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karen_Ann_Quinlan
by gnabgib | 2025-05-22 00:46:14+00:00
This was very much spelled out in the first article by Micah (15 days ago) - if you read through.

Despite their misleading marketing, TeleMessage, the company that makes a modified version of Signal used by senior Trump officials, can access plaintext chat logs from its customers.

(..)

However, once they're at an endpoint, they are in plaintext (if they weren't, you wouldn't be able to read your texts).

(..)

At this point, a lot of people might have access to the chat logs.

(..)

This server was open to the public – anyone in the world could send HTTP requests to it to try to get chat logs back in a response. On Saturday, one of those people did.

The result of the action of that person who did, who talked to Micah and 404media several weeks ago, is the DDosSecrets dump.
by chneu | 2025-05-22 00:47:12+00:00
I would go one step further and say people are not uninformed, they're primed to fall for it.

We live in a world where a person can believe whatever they want and find sources to back it up. With the lack of critical thinking in a large amount of the public, people willfully fall for scams because the scammers say whatever people want to hear and that messages goes out to millions of people thanks to social media.

The current conditions are perfect for scammers. Look at the US President
by PaulDavisThe1st | 2025-05-22 00:47:49+00:00
From the man page on my system:

> Use of the numeric conversion specifiers produces Undefined Behavior for invalid input. See C11 7.21.6.2/10 ⟨https://port70.net/%7Ensz/c/c11/n1570.html#7.21.6.2p10⟩. This is a bug in the ISO C standard, and not an inherent design issue with the API. However, current implementations are not safe from that bug, so it is not recommended to use them. Instead, programs should use functions such as strtol(3) to parse numeric input. This manual page deprecates use of the numeric conversion specifiers until they are fixed by ISO C.
by gsf_emergency | 2025-05-22 00:48:15+00:00
>because Cannon is a goddess of compassion a lot like Mary.

Sorry to nitpick, but it's Canon, exactly like the printer company (as well as what Taoism has in addition to a ton of uh auxiliary tracts on divination). Judging by the thousand arms*, the compassion part must have been evolved too haha. Canon used to be a masculine "demigod" of the folk religion in India**

https://global.canon/en/corporate/logo/#:~:text=The%20logo%2...

*E.g. Shiva

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avalokite%C5%9Bvara

>Some have suggested that Avalokiteśvara, along with many other supernatural beings in Buddhism, was a borrowing or absorption by Mahayana Buddhism of one or more deities from Hinduism, in particular Shiva or Vishnu.

**I find it highly likely that scripture was "Budsplaining" an extant superstition
by FireBeyond | 2025-05-22 00:48:45+00:00
It gets worse, and on both sides of the coin.

I was a paramedic (and before, an EMT) who has responded literally thousands of times to SNFs (skilled nursing facilities).

Dozens, if not hundreds of these calls were for the most trivial of concerns. A nurse told us at one facility that their policy was "anything larger than a bandaid, call 911", so we'd do "first aid" while two nurses stood by and watched us. I'm sure they (the facility) had motivations on liability, etc., but nonetheless, it was utterly galling that you'd leave such a facility and see big proud billboards or ads offering "24/7 nursing care!" - and knowing that they were certainly charging the patient or their family for a rate commensurate with that, potentially five digits a month, while offloading all their work to 911 and relying on skeleton crews of an LPN per floor supervising way too many CNAs.

They'd also routinely "forget" to fill out paperwork on ambulance necessity (Medicare, and many insurers, have paperwork to justify why the patient was not suitable for private vehicle or wheelchair van transport and instead needed a "fully equipped BLS/ALS ambulance"). It wasn't onerous, a single pager with a bunch of checkboxes, "Does the patient pose a fall risk?" "Need for oxygen?" "Unable to support themselves in a sitting position", etc. But we'd have to fight tooth and nail to get anything more than "patient name, DOB, and an illegible provider signature". Insurance would routinely reject payment, etc.

UHG involved in more of these shenanigans? Not surprised. They were slapped several years ago for denying HEMS (Heli EMS, aka "Life Flight") from severe MVA / trauma scenes due to lack of pre-authorization... ("This is John, I'm a paramedic working on one of your patients who was hit by a truck. We would like to fly him to the hospital due to his extensive multisystem trauma but we need your authorization. His name? Hang on, let me find his wallet. No, that's Smythe, S-M-Y-T-H-E, sorry, I know, it's a bit loud with the jaws of life in the background... Uhh, sure, I guess I can hold for a nurse consultation...")
by CSMastermind | 2025-05-22 00:48:48+00:00
It's in the official OpenAI prompting guidelines: https://cookbook.openai.com/examples/gpt4-1_prompting_guide#...

But it's also evident for anyone who has used these models. It's also not unique to OpenAI, this bias is prevalent in every model I've ever tested from GPT 3 to the latest offerings from every single frontier model provider.

As to why I would guess it's because XML bakes semantic meaning into the tags it uses so it's easier for the model to understand the structure of the data. <employee>...</employee> is a lot easier to understand than { "employee": { ... }}.

I would guess that the models are largely ignoring the angular brackets and just focusing on the words which have unique tokens and thus are easier to pair up than the curly braces that are the same throughout JSON. Just speculation on my part though.

And this only applies to the input. Earlier models struggled to reliably output JSON so they've been both fine-tuned and wrapped in specific formatters that reliably force clean JSON outputs.
by austinpilot | 2025-05-22 00:49:32+00:00
The problem solved in this paper is strictly harder than alignment. Alignment works with multiple, unmatched representations of the same inputs (e.g, different embeddings of the same words). The goal is to match them up.

The goal here is harder: given an embedding of an unknown text in one space, generate a vector in another space that's close to the embedding of the same text -- but, unlike in the word alignment problem, the texts are not known in advance.

Neither unsupervised transport, nor optimal alignment can solve this problem. Their input sets must be embeddings of the same texts. The input sets here are embeddings of different texts.

FWIW, this is all explained in the paper, including even the abstract. The comparisons with optimal assignment explicitly note that this is an idealized pseudo-baseline, and in reality OA cannot used for embedding translation (as opposed to matching, alignment, correspondence, etc.)
by pessimizer | 2025-05-22 00:50:28+00:00
> The only people I’ve ever known who actually thought Reddit ever really mattered was people in the HN sphere.

They said the same thing about Quora and 3d TV.

That being said, TikTok and Instagram matter. Reddit probably matters more because it's so easy for motivated people and corporations to manipulate discussions on it; it's even weaker than Wikipedia.

50x as many people read Reddit than post on Reddit, and 10x as many people as read Reddit have gotten their opinions indirectly from people passing on stuff they (can't remember that they) saw on Reddit (but think they learned somewhere legitimate.)
by hn_throwaway_99 | 2025-05-22 00:51:16+00:00
I don't think Ron Johnson is really analogous to Ive.

Ron Johnson's job where he had the most success was where he was selling fundamentally desirable and great products. I think you would have to be pretty shitty at retail to not do a good job selling iPods and iPhones. His subsequent 2 endeavors, JC Penney and Enjoy, were complete flops. It turns out selling middle-market goods is just really f'ing hard.

Ive, on the other hand, I think is pretty universally recognized as a design genius who was directly responsible for the designs of some of the most important consumer products of the past few decades. Yes, it does seem like Jobs was a critical editor that tempered the worst of Ive's "form over function" tendencies like the butterfly keyboard and removing magsafe, but I think it's fair to say there wouldn't have been an iPhone as it was originally released without Ive.

I feel like Apple still would have had a pretty similar in-store experience even if someone else besides Johnson originally launched it.
by godelski | 2025-05-22 00:51:21+00:00
Please give Linux a try. Don't let the perception deceive you. Perceptions are slow to change and a lot has changed in that time.

> They want to do enough with their computer to run up against technical obstacles,

They will solve those problems the exact same way they solve them on Windows: Google, StackOverflow, forums, GPTs, or whatever. There's even an advantage in Linux as there's a large number of highly technical users already doing exactly the same thing and will share knowledge.

> use wine to run software they've been using for a decade

Wine for what? Word? I think most people will use the browser.

If you mean games, I think Steam has got most of that covered. Proton hides in the background for most people.

But these users also happily will install engines for game modding and other things. Give what I see these people doing, Wine seems like child's play.

> only to receive a barrage of conceited responses by zealots

I agree! That sucks! I do try to fight this and there has been serious strides in this direction over the last decade. In fact, I'd argue that the suggested distros were part of this response. The attitude you see on EndeavourOS, PopOS, or Ubuntu forums are very different. Hell, even the Arch forums are getting better! Sometimes they provide links to the "dupe". They're almost to the state of StackOverflow! But I mean... let's not expect that to be ever fully resolved. We lost the war for the Noob Guide (I fought for that and was a contributor!), but at least we got Manjaro and Endeavour in return ;)

I really do mean it, things have changed a lot in the last 10 years. I'm sorry for those experiences. I hated them when they happened to me and I step in when I see them happening. It's the only way we can make change. But what you describe does not seem to be the state of things I see today, but it does describe the state of things I saw (and experienced) in the past.
by johnklos | 2025-05-22 00:54:07+00:00
Considering that we've moved from wire wrapping to being able to design and order multi-layer circuit boards, and we've gone from 74 series and basic PALs to CPLDs and FPGAs that regular people can program, I don't think what tinkerers can do will hit any barriers any time soon.

The ability to recreate classic computing is wonderful, both in preservation of history and in making things available to people who hadn't even been born when these machines were new :)