MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by k310 | 2025-05-10 04:39:32+00:00
Outlier here. I'm retired and I have zero need for AI or even Siri in my more than full life full of the usual chores (way more in fhe foothills than in the suburbs I inhabited "forever") and hobbies, chief of which are piano and photography. I could let AI play music all day, but I wouldn't be engaging with the music. I could let AI create an infinite gallery of pictures, but I wouldn't be running outside in a sun shower to catch a fabulous double rainbow, fully engaged with nature (and needing only minor touch up to make the image match my feelings.)

I experience. I have agency. I co-create. I feel what a composer felt through my hands and ears. Absolutely nobody knew about the sun shower, but I felt it.

The proof that AI has already ruined life is that I sent that rainbow photo to a friend of some 40 years with lens data and it had full EXIF info attached, less location, which can be seen from only one place on earth. He asked me if it was real.

My philosophy is not that we seek meaning in life, but that we live to create meaning, as we write stories with our lives, and exerience the stories of others, stories that touch our knowledge (filtered, not a giant bag of dissociated bytes) and life experience, and as we process them with our minds and emotions.

To destroy meaning is to destroy life. Might as well be "living" in The Matrix. Someone else's idea of life.

Virtual steak.
by breppp | 2025-05-10 04:40:05+00:00
> Skips the part that Peter Thiel was already in the top 1% of the population—Stanford-educated, ex-Credit Suisse, and founder of a small capital firm—before PayPal. He wasn’t a struggling outsider with nothing to lose. His advice is filtered through a lens of early privilege and structural advantage.

> The book wraps fatalism in edgy language and markets it as practical wisdom

First the author embraces fatalism, then criticizes fatalism. I guess only one kind is fashionable
by zahlman | 2025-05-10 04:41:03+00:00
> The standard library also has inconsistencies in calling conventions and naming conventions and it has to support those *FOREVER*.

Not to mention abysmal designs inspired by cargo-cult "OOP" Java frameworks from the 90s and 00s. (Come on, folks. Object-oriented programming is supposed to be about objects, not about classes. If it were about classes, it would be called class-oriented programming.)
by absolutelastone | 2025-05-10 04:41:25+00:00
So your argument is that nothing is communism? The fact that it's a single large organization allocating resources is rather key to the whole point. That the same organizational structure doing it is interesting to me anyway. I suspected this line of thinking is too triggering for some people though.

A corporation is not an economic system, just a tiny participant of one. And I'd rather describe their decision making as hierarchical yes, but by middle managers implementing the agendas of higher ups, not necessarily by committees. When they operate by committee they tend to be at their worst...
by recursive | 2025-05-10 04:42:49+00:00
I definitely saw the button, and clicked on it many times. And vigorously, but nothing ever happened. I tried this in Firefox and Chrome on two different machines.

Then I used some debugging skills, and found that there were a pair of zero-opacity <iframe>s blocking my clicks on the button, which is why nothing happened. After detaching them from the document, the shape button started doing stuff. I suspect these mystery iframes explain most of my difficulty in using it.
by Avi-D-coder | 2025-05-10 04:42:51+00:00
The solution is strong compile time and runtime guarantees about code behavior.

The author is right there's no way an individual can audit all that code. Currently all that code can run arbitrary build code at compile time on the devs machine, it can also run arbitrary unsafe code at runtime, make system calls, etc..

Software is not getting simpler, the abundance of high quality libraries is great for Rust, but there are bound to be supply chain attacks.

AI and cooperative auditing can help, but ultimately the compiler must provide more guarantees. A future addition of Rust should come with an inescapable effect system. Work on effects in Rust has already started, I am not sure if security is a goal, but it needs to be.
by smitty1e | 2025-05-10 04:43:02+00:00
> sweet careers are made of this, so who am I to disagree? Compile the world; Java Python C. Everybody’s looking for some bug. Some of them want to maintain you. Some of them want to be maintained.

For those missing the reference:

https://youtu.be/qeMFqkcPYcg?si=at-YtggekbPdv7sN
by mindslight | 2025-05-10 04:44:13+00:00
For outages like this, you can't really beat the effectiveness of a gas generator.

Just beware of the "dual fuel" lure of thinking you only need propane. In the winter, the self-evaporation rate of a 20lb propane tank isn't nearly enough to even power my little 2500 watt inverter generator.

Solar panels and batteries are for if you're preparing for a really long outage when gasoline might not be available.
by slt2021 | 2025-05-10 04:44:14+00:00
Its not only the idea, but the history, and analysis of the author.

Reading a book is not just “downloading a knowledge into your brain”.

Reading is more like executing a program and seeing dofferent result in dofferent people. People will reflect in a different way and come out with different takes, emphasize points, lessons, and takeaways
by cmrdporcupine | 2025-05-10 04:45:54+00:00
It absolutely is so, or was for the 10 years I was there. I worked on Google3 (in Ads, on Google WiFi, on Fiber, and other stuff), in Chromium/Chromecast, Fiber, and on Stadia, and every single one of those repos -- all different repositories -- used vendored deps.
by GianFabien | 2025-05-10 04:46:41+00:00
I stumbled across Zig by a reference to it as part of the Bun (JS engine) documentation.

I didn't find the Zig language benefits sufficiently compelling to learn yet another opinionated language.

Since much of my work is with embedded and bespoke systems, I did find the Zig cc front-end to LLVM convenient. Maybe it's because I haven't sufficiently mastered Clang for cross-compilation.
Show HN: NR34P3R – Fast Open Port Scanner with Short Service Descriptions
by m-o-z-z-i-x | 2025-05-10 04:48:07+00:00
After a recent penetration test, when I had to manually Google the purpose of the detected ports, I realized that I needed a tool that would not only show open ports, but also instantly determine which service was running on each of them.

Key Features: Up to 100 streams for ultra-fast scanning, Database of more than 3,000 services – right in the terminal, Support for individual ports, custom ranges and full scan (1-65535), Beautiful output using advanced tables, Progress bar and real-time progress tracking

Would love your feedback!
by gxvxc | 2025-05-10 04:48:19+00:00
Have you tried looking at web apps? My experience as a software engineer working mostly on web uis has been with (s)css modules and only recently with css-in-js. When working on large, complex projects we’ve always steered away from atomic css solutions like tailwind with the long lists of class names being difficult to maintain, awkward syntax, and subpar theming being the main reasons for it. Personally I go for pandacss which imo strikes a nice balance between atomic styles, type safety, and ergonomics. Still stirs away from web standards though
by voxl | 2025-05-10 04:48:24+00:00
The desire of the HN community to pull a random person's uninformed opinion about a topic that they, justifiably, wrote for their own interests and amusement and then pontificate about how either stupid or amazing it is will never ceise to confuse me.

Effects on their own are a very active area of research and I would laugh behind a PL researchers back if they claimed it was a solved issue. Between Monads, call-by-push-value, and algebraic effects there is really no clear "how do people actually use this" answer.

But that's not the job of a PL researcher anyway, or a random software engineer for that matter. Sorry to say, the software engineer knows next to nothing about "the right way" to design language features that people want to use or enjoy using. If anything this should be an HCI person with a penchant for PL or vice versa.
by kijin | 2025-05-10 04:49:59+00:00
Gravity is boring, at least in Newtonian physics. It involves a whole bunch of calculation but not much to experiment with IRL.

Alchemy on the other hand was the perfect hobby for any medieval or early modern nerd. Alchemists were basically trying to hack chemistry together. There was a promise of gold, sprinkled with an air of mystery, with lots of booms and bangs along the way. It must have felt like Dungeons and Dragons.
by alephnerd | 2025-05-10 04:50:20+00:00
Kinda. In these kinds of roles, you're basically making executive decisions every couple hours. You don't have much time to think deeply when you need to execute asap, so you take what info you have and make a call.

It's a skill that helped me in Eng, Product, and VC roles, but it gets stressful very quick.
by int_19h | 2025-05-10 04:50:57+00:00
When this kind of thing happens - and it absolutely does - it's never put in writing. The company training is always going to say what the law requires it to say.

But let's say that the top management in your org have made a public commitment to "increase representation of underrepresented groups". The managers in that org are then required, by company policy, to have their own goals be "aligned" with it, so they write something similar. What do you think then happens when it comes to interviews and hiring decisions?
by chrismorgan | 2025-05-10 04:51:55+00:00
Hmm. Last time I could reproduce it consistently; since then, I’ve upgraded my build of Firefox Nightly; today, I think I reproduced it the first time, but then opened the dev tools and haven’t managed to reproduce it since, even in new tabs or a fresh browser profile with only video autoplay blocked, so probably I misremembered, and maybe you fixed something?

I do have video autoplay turned off completely, but it looks like you’re at least partly handling .play() throwing an exception (and I can’t reproduce it any more anyway).

I baulk at blocking displaying the website on loading a couple of megabytes of ornaments. Even apart from the unnecessary delay, it’s just fragile. External resources are way less reliable than most people think, though first-party are by far the most reliable.

I also note how the loader doesn’t get out of the way as soon as it can, but first switches to 100%, wasting another half a second or something. (Starts at 7%, waits a couple of seconds, transitions to 100%, transitions to real content.)

Another tip, on your cursor circle thing: https://www.joshwcomeau.com/css/backdrop-filter/#the-issue-2
by reillyse | 2025-05-10 04:53:45+00:00
I really wonder if there is something else at play here. None of this is normal behavior and it's very strange for it to be normalized.

Day 4 no more deliveries but we still have takeout! For real, you can still order food from your local restaurants and you are in a panic about things. Instead of spending $4,500 on a generator you'll never use again maybe just pack the kids in a car an go to the beach for the weekend. Seriously.

When I was a kid I enjoyed the days we lost power. Grab a candle and have a laugh in the dark. It was fun.

That said, I don't want to be mean. I do think there is a generalized anxiety that is very much enabled on the internet. Like this kind of behavior - basically prepping - is encouraged.

I read analysis that suggested that prepping behavior is a way of coping with feelings of inadequacy by imagining a future world where all the person's capabilities will be fully appreciated. "All my guns and dried rice and my underground bunker will make me the most relevant person in the future". Most prepper's visions of the future are unique to them and focus on their skills. E.g. one of us tech types might think we could create a connected network and support wifi for a region and be a source of knowledge or something. Obviously if something did happen all of this would go to shit in seconds but that isn't the point..

Maybe it's all just a fantasy of feeling relevant.
by 0_____0 | 2025-05-10 04:56:48+00:00
It was a Scaled Composites project (or at least a lot of Scaled people were working on it! I used to work with an ex-SC guy, they had some nifty codename for it), with Paul Allen bankrolling it. They built and started testing, then Paul died and they shuttered. The project was bought by a private equity firm, and now they're back doing this.
by wtallis | 2025-05-10 04:57:34+00:00
The legal risks were at most the last straw. If Optane had a promising future, Intel could have made the investments necessary to make the legal issues go away. If Optane had a promising future, Micron would have helped Intel secure that future. The long-term value of a persistent memory technology capable of taking a big chunk out of both the DRAM and NAND flash markets is huge.

Optane did not have a promising future. The $/GB gap between 3D XPoint memory and 3D NAND flash memory was only going to keep growing. Optane was doomed to only be appealing to the niche of workloads where flash memory is too slow and DRAM is too expensive. But even DRAM was increasing in density faster than 3D XPoint, and flash (especially the latency-optimized variants that are still cheaper than 3D XPoint) is fast enough for a lot of workloads. Optane needed a breakthrough improvement to secure a permanent place in the memory hierarchy, and Intel couldn't come up with one.
by int_19h | 2025-05-10 04:59:42+00:00
Your argument boils down to "no true Scotsman".

I have personally heard managers discussing the candidates' backgrounds in the context where it was clear that some were preferred over others, because their managers wanted to see them "demonstrate some commitment". Now what? Are you going to tell me that I misheard, or that my experience is somehow invalid?

This administration is a cesspit of vile fascist scum, and that's a mild way to put it. But one of the major reasons why they were able to ride the resentment wave into power is because of people like you blatantly denying that water is wet.
by gg2222 | 2025-05-10 04:59:45+00:00
Hello, congrats on the release of your framework! I myself also wrote a reactive library for my own projects long ago when jquery was still widely used.

Anyways, these days I moved from React to Solid.js so I know a bit how Solid works.

1. Solid.js also has "stores" and "createMutable" which allow deep tracking of objects and are also built on Proxy objects. Signals are great for single values, but Solid stores and createMutable are for more complex data.

2. Solid.js doesn't redraw entire components. (It's not like React.) It is fine grained and only updates the minimal exact DOM nodes required. This is why it is so fast and topped benchmarks when it first came out. https://dev.to/ryansolid/introducing-the-solidjs-ui-library-...

I found https://blog.theodo.com/2023/07/solidjs-beginner-virtual-dom... which might be a good intro explanation to it.

> Yeah, until you want to add some loops and conditionals in there. That's what regular programming languages are really good at. But it's a trade-off for sure.

Solid's <For> and <Show when={}> and <Switch> tags are actually quite nice and very easy to parse visually.

Regarding the "gaslighting" comments, I kind of feel the same way as the grandparent. No offense meant and I support everyone coding new open source frameworks, but it does kind of feel like that.

I suggest doing a deep dive into Solid and even checking Ryan's blog https://dev.to/ryansolid or YouTube channel. There are a ton of concepts and good ideas to learn. He and tanstack are like at the forefront of web dev today.
by ijustlovemath | 2025-05-10 04:59:47+00:00
AI is fundamentally learning the entire conditional probability distribution of our collective knowledge; but sampling it over and over is not going to fundamentally enhance it, except to, perhaps, reinforce a mean, or surface places we have insufficiently sampled. For me, even the deep research agents aren't the best when it comes to surfacing truth, because the nuance of that is lost on the distribution.

I think that if we're realistic with ourselves, AI will become exponentially more expensive to train, but without additional high quality data (not you, synthetic data), we're back to 1980s era AI (expert systems), just with enhanced fossil fuel usage to keep up with the TPUs. What's old is new again, I suppose!

I sincerely hope to be proven wrong, of course, but I think recent AI innovation has stagnated in terms of new things it can do. It's a great tool, when you use it to leverage that distribution (eg, semantic search), but it might not fundamentally be the approach to AGI (unless your goal is to replicate what we can, but less spikey)
by tgma | 2025-05-10 05:00:47+00:00
Yea, the problem I am pointing to is not the security side, but backup resilience aspect; in any of those scenarios (device passcode^ as you suggest for Android, or account password by default for Chrome, or a separate encryption password for Chrome), if you lose your client device and you forget the password, there is no way to get back the data, by design. I have personally encountered anecdotal situations where this happened to family and they would hate to lose their photo library, so it is not that unlikely. Me personally would opt for losing it--that almost certainly won't be the trade-off an average Apple customer wants to make. They likely expect from Apple to be able to give them their data back if their device is stolen and they have forgotten everything and go to Apple Store and present an ID.

^: I concede that this might be an acceptable thing to assume they won't get to forget. At the same time, I don't think this is a worthwhile encryption given the average 4-6 digit passcode length because you do not have the ability to mix in on-device keys (otherwise backups can't restore in other devices without another key).
by kijin | 2025-05-10 05:02:53+00:00
There is no scarcity of diamonds for industrial use, only for ornamental use -- and both are equally "real".

An ounce of gold is an ounce of gold. Apart from the cost of turning it into a desired shape, gold is entirely fungible. Not so with diamonds, because you can't forge a single 10 ct crystal out of one hundred .1 ct crystals.

So it would seem that lab-grown gold has a better chance of disrupting the market than lab-grown diamonds ever will. Unlike with diamonds, nobody will be able to tell where that gold came from!
by int_19h | 2025-05-10 05:03:22+00:00
You have just described what most people would consider unfair racial discrimination, since it involves picking one of the two equally qualified candidates based solely on their race. You also did that in language that is both mocking and dismissive ("lily white").

And then you wonder why it was so easy for conservatives to rile up the MAGA mob against the intellectuals and radicalize them into full-fledged fascism.
by agentultra | 2025-05-10 05:04:38+00:00
There’s a certain amount of hubris to say, “I don’t know anything about this and you’re making a mistake.” It’s off putting and kills the whole rant.

I’ve heard opinions from smart people with lots of experience who say algebraic effects are not worth the squeeze. I’ve also heard some say that we should all be pushing the boundaries: they are the future.

So the matter doesn’t seem to be decided. Now isn’t the time for maxims.
by Animats | 2025-05-10 05:04:59+00:00
This is the new normal in the US. FEMA is being dismantled.[1]

Until a few years ago, being prepared for loss of services for 48 hours was considered sufficient. That's not enough any more, because there will be much less help coming from outside the area.

[1] https://www.cnn.com/2025/03/26/politics/fema-payments-staffi...
by watersb | 2025-05-10 05:06:09+00:00
Your argument is well stated, if I understand it, as the power of free markets to make better choices regarding resource allocation than redistribution by government bureaucracy.

If so, then I can disagree.

However the market behaves in the United States, it has failed us.

Compromise with market forces, in the form of "public-private partnership", has only increased the cost of providing fewer government services.

Market forces won't fix healthcare. Won't invest in early a stage tech development or scientific research that might take decades of investment before becoming amenable to market-driven participation.

Market forces most certainly won't provide adequate care for children or elderly.

Every society requires social investment.

But maybe I don't understand your point. Sorry.
by jansan | 2025-05-10 05:06:27+00:00
Thanks for a ll the great feedback. I will have to write a bunch of issues over the next days and start working on them. Actually, I was hoping for about 5 upvotes and maybe two comments when I posted this on Hackernews, and the feedback is quite overwhelming.

Regarding selection of elements froma group, you can select individual elements with Ctrl + click. The selection process is a bit messy and I need a cleaner concept, but maybe for now this helps.
Show HN: ThatOneTimer, a science backed study timer
by ifthisdontwork | 2025-05-10 05:06:56+00:00
The link: That One Timer

3 crucial point to why this works:

short breaks

random

study 90, rest20

short breaks: There is a mechanism in our brain called neural replay. Which basically states that when we rest, our brain will activate the same neural firing pattern when we study, aka, when we rest, our brain will study things that we just learned. Even for just a few seconds! So inserting these short breaks will not only help us study better, but faster.

random: Why random? This is related to a concept in behavioral psychology: reinforcement. Reinforcement means that through the consequence of a behavior, we increase the chance of acting the behavior again.

For example, daily rewards in games (like Duolingo) does the following:

you log on

you get rewarded for logging on

you are more likely to log on again

There are essenstially 4 types of reinforcement techniques, but the most powerful one is called variable ratio: delivers reinforcement after an unpredictable number of responses, making it highly resistant to extinction—like in gambling. This is where our randomness kicks in, you will get a 10 second break every 3-5min. You know that you will need to study at most 5 minutes to get the break. This is positive reinforcement at its best.

study 90, rest20 : The brain operates in 90-minute productivity cycles (ultradian rhythm). Pushing past that leads to fatigue. After each session, a 20-minute break helps your brain reset. But be careful: don’t break the flow by scrolling TikTok. Instead, meditate, stretch, or listen to chill music to stay in the learning zone.

The app is ad free and I don't track anything!
by Cyphase | 2025-05-10 05:09:11+00:00
I'm a Zulip fan (and poster of this story), so you can take this with a grain of salt if you want.

1. Regarding "minimal costs" of notifications, the project lead said in an HN comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38661960) from when this was announced, "The problem statement is not that we need to fund the costs of delivering push notifications. We need to fund the costs of building Zulip -- the server, apps for every platform, support for a vast range of different self-hosted configurations, etc." That was on the announcement thread on HN, so you can find more from him and other commenters there.

2. They offer free plans (for the app/service itself, and also just notifications if you're self-hosted) for lots of non-commercial organizations (including open source projects and communities). Discounts for larger non-profits and others. The info is prominent on their pricing page: https://zulip.com/plans/

3. There's a discounted plan for just mobile notifications.

Here's their original announcement post, with an update linked to from the top: https://blog.zulip.com/2023/12/15/new-plans-for-self-hosted-...