MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by fragmede | 2025-05-12 15:51:41+00:00
Given that the driving characteristics of most of the cars on the road don't match a BMW, what're the real "real important car things"? The revealed preference seems to be that the things you listed aren't actually that important. Long term cost is. Maintenance cost is. Not having to bring your car to the dealership for service is. Having the car have a long lifetime is. Handling well is nice; sporty drivetrain is nice; but that sort of stuff is clearly just a luxury, and the bottom dropped out of the luxury market recently (see: LVMH restructuring). If you're going to buy a sporty luxury car, why not get a Porsche or something with more cachet? Obviously there are reasons, but BMW's in an awkward position.
by ralferoo | 2025-05-12 15:52:18+00:00
Back in the mid 80s, I'd killed several joysticks playing Daley Thompson's Decathlon on my Amstrad CPC (which was more-or-less a standard Atari pinout apart from 2 select lines and 2 fire buttons). By chance, my parents had a push-button phone that was being scrapped because it wasn't very good for some reason that I've forgotten. I reverse-engineered the PCB and figured out that 2,4,6,8 and # would all be individually detectable if I cut a couple of traces on the PCB and I soldered and old joystick cable to the where the original edge connector on the keypad board used to be. That was aged around 10. I suspect I still have it somewhere, nearly 40 years later, as I was still using it with my Amiga when I packed that away when I went to university.
by tensor | 2025-05-12 15:52:21+00:00
If I write a math book, and you read it, then tell someone about the math within it. You are not violating copyright. In fact, you could write your OWN math book, or history book, or whatever, and as long as you're not copying my actual text, you are not violating copyright.

However, when an LLM does the same, people now what it to be illegal. It seems pretty straightforward to apply existing copyright law to LLMs in the same way we apply them to humans. If the actual text they generate is substantially similar to a source material that it would constitute a copyright violation if a human were to have done it, then it should be illegal. Otherwise it should not.

edit: and in fact it's not even whether an LLM reproduces text, it's wether someone subsequently publishes that text. The person publishing that text should be the one taking on the legal hit.
by jmyeet | 2025-05-12 15:53:06+00:00
There are a couple of factors in play with any research, including fusion. If there's money to be had for funding then somebody will research it.

But another more nefarious factor is the nexus of fusion energy research and nuclear weapons research [1]. To build and maintain a stockpile of nuclear weapons (specificially thermonuclear weapons) you need appropriate trained nuclear energy physicists.

[1]: https://thebulletin.org/premium/2024-11/the-entanglement-of-...
Ask HN: How are you managing connections/authZ for Cursor/Windsurf?
by manibaur | 2025-05-12 15:53:13+00:00
I'm exploring hooking up various internal tools/datastores (think Postgres, the on-call tool etc.) to Cursor via MCPs.

One recurring problem I'm facing is managing and enforcing employee-level ACLs to these tools via Cursor the same way they are managed/enforced outside.

Say an employee has limited read access to a table in Postgres containing support tickets, I want them to have the same level of access when accessing that table via Cursor.

Seems like running company-wide instances of remote MCP servers is a start. Is anyone solving the user management and permissions problem for the AI-powered IDE space?
by ihatehn | 2025-05-12 15:53:48+00:00
The good news is that the fork team is a majority of the top contributors outside of the owners, and the owners have been burnt out and embroiled in conflict for months, so I expect the experience to be roughly the same or better going forward. Drawing users is a gradual process no matter what, but isn't really the #1 metric of a FOSS project... active contribution by diverse contributors is, next to usability and popularity.
by graypegg | 2025-05-12 15:53:53+00:00
I really like Ruby, I do sort of wish it could focus on it's own identity a bit.

Some new features feel almost prescribed from other languages? Like, RBS and Namespaces specifically... they don't really fit the model of Ruby exactly, but they need to be there so Ruby can be presented as "having" type-safety and a-solution-for-monkey-patching. I'm all for taking inspiration from other places, but Ruby wasn't quite built around the same axioms that other programming languages started from.
Show HN: Artifacthub MCP Server
by surrTurr | 2025-05-12 15:53:55+00:00
Hi HN!

I built this small MCP server to stop my AI agents from making up non-existent Helm values.

This MCP server allows your copilot to:

1. retrieve general information about helm charts on artifacthub 2. retrieve the values.yaml from helm charts on artifacthub

If you need more tools, feel free to open a PR with the tool you want to see :)

Link: https://github.com/AlexW00/artifacthub-mcp
by chgs | 2025-05-12 15:53:58+00:00
Part time I went to Paris I had a 30 minute wait for a taxi at Gare du Nord.

However last time I was as Dulles I wanted straight into a taxi, having been burnt the previous time when I ordered uber while going through customs and had to wait for ages.

At Singapore Changi taxi queues can take ages, or no time at all.

In Kenya I waited for an uber for 40 minutes to have it cancelled by the driver as I saw him get close to the airport, with a message saying he had “been arrested”.

I don’t bother with uber in the U.K. any more - very rarely works. Used to be nice and reliable in cities It was in, about 10 years ago.

You can’t draw a conclusion based on personal annecdotes.
by uberman | 2025-05-12 15:54:21+00:00
I feel terrible for this guy, but he really has stacked the deck against himself by moving to a rural area and refusing (or being unable) to work "on-site". He is up against every new grad and every laid off FAANG programmer clinging to the notion that they should be able to work remotely. To be clear, I'm a huge proponent of remote work but I recognize that many power dynamics have shifted in the last few years.

I could offer a number of critiques about things but instead, I'll encourage him to go back and un-delete his AI vlog content as even if he feels the ground has moved, I would likely find his interest in this topic as a positive thing. I would also recommend he move his tech vlogs to someplace where the topic was the focus rather than blending it into other important parts of his life.
by RetroTechie | 2025-05-12 15:55:42+00:00
Each HDL has its own strengths, weaknesses, tool support & application areas. So each has its place as long as -for specific designs/projects- it's better than alternative HDLs. Users can define "better" for themselves.

Not to mention: existing designs already done in Verilog, VHDL or whatever. Converting such a design from one HDL to another may no be easy.

So as always: use the best tool for the job.
Show HN: AI Cold Outreach Tool
by ignalex | 2025-05-12 15:55:46+00:00
Hi everyone. Over the weekend, I built a tool for finding contacts using AI. Here's the backstory. My partner and I are working on an agrotech startup – we’re building telematics for agricultural machinery. Most of our sales come through cold outreach: you search for contacts, message them, call, make deals and so on

We also do indiehacking, because agrotech is slow and a sometimes boring. At some point, we got tired of manually collecting contacts from the internet, so we built a AI tool for that. It turned out to be super helpful, and we decided to share it with the world.

If anyone here uses tools like this, we’d love to get your feedback - how does it work for you? If you're interested, I can throw in some free credits in exchange for feedback.
by datavirtue | 2025-05-12 15:55:50+00:00
"If it breaks and starts spitting out other peoples work verbatim (or nearly verbatim) there is a problem."

Why is that? Seems all logic gets thrown out the window when invoking AI around here. References are given. If the user publishes the output without attribution, NOW you have a problem. People are being so rabid and unreasonable here. Totally bat shit.
by layer8 | 2025-05-12 15:56:06+00:00
The study used 7-day rotating meals, so one would expect some consistency on average in a weekly rhythm, but it also only covered 14 days, so only two data points per meal and participant, if I read this correctly. In that case, I’m not surprised either that there is a lot of variation, also considering that this is a new meal regimen for the participants.
by Stephen304 | 2025-05-12 15:56:13+00:00
> If it’s the former, a vacation seems like a totally legitimate use

Imo hiding that the funds were used even in a legitimate case makes it improper. If it was intended to be paid as a salary then they should have disclosed that $x were paid out as a salary. As I understand it, the only reason we know that the funds left the project was because one of the founders revealed the use of funds by the other founders, not through a planned, transparent, or regular process. In other words, the revelation that funds were being used seemed to be an anomaly as opposed to a regular practice.

The original open letter states essentially as much: "It's fine for developers to be reimbursed for their hard work, but it should be done in a fair, transparent and accountable way."
by SilasX | 2025-05-12 15:56:20+00:00
>My opinion: I think using copyrighted data to train models for sure seems classically illegal. Despite that, Humans can read a book, get inspiration, and write a new book and not be litigated against. When I look at the litany of derivative fantasy novels, it's obvious they're not all fully independent works.

Huh? If you agree that "learning from copyrighted works to make new ones" has traditionally not been considered infringement, then can you elaborate on why you think it fundamentally changes when you do it with bots? That would, if anything, seem to be a reversal of classic copyright jurisprudence. Up until 2022, pretty much everyone agreed that "learning from copyrighted works to make new ones" is exactly how it's supposed to work, and would be horrified at the idea of having to separately license that.

Sure, some fundamental dynamic might change when you do it with bots, but you need to make that case in an enforceable, operationalized way.
by staticman2 | 2025-05-12 15:56:22+00:00
> these comparisons of llms with human artists copying are just ridiculous.

I've come to think of this as the "Performatively failing to recognize the difference between an organism and a machine" rhetorical device that people employ here and elsewhere.

The person making the argument is capable of distinguishing the two things, they just performatively choose not to do so.
by coldpie | 2025-05-12 15:56:42+00:00
> Odd, I would have expected this to be somewhat the case?

I don't think anybody was expecting to be surprised by this study. In practice, most science is pretty boring and rarely breaks expectations. But being unsurprising does not mean it's not worth doing. A lot of studies are simply validating expected outcomes and providing foundational data points for future studies to refer back to. For example, a future study might use this study to justify funding ("as shown in Study 2025.abcd, glucose is highly variable... we propose to further study this by controlling for ... which will help us understand the influence of ..." etc etc).
by tinco | 2025-05-12 15:57:17+00:00
I can rest your mind, I've being coding Ruby for 17 years now, and I've never seen two gems or even files define the same global constant in a way that wasn't intentional. It's fair to say it's not at all pervasive.

That said, I do think there's use to this. First of all it would allow fancy platforms like RoR to make more effective use of namespaces. Right now you always need to specify the fully qualified name of a constant whenever you're defining it, which is just not aesthetically pleasing.

Another potentially useful place for this is in migrations. If you could just move the old implementation of a thing into a subdirectory and then load it into a namespace you make references to it a lot more explicit, and you give the replacement architecture full freedom within its root namespace.

Just to say, it's not only bad behavior that would be enabled by this feature. I definitely agree that having gems not sticking to their own modules would be a very bad thing indeed.
by lenerdenator | 2025-05-12 15:57:51+00:00
"Planning" and "research" are two very, very different things.

I can "plan" to sell off the majority of my company's holdings and give all of the proceeds to shareholders over the next few years. I'd be considered a genius and have a business school somewhere named after me.

Coming up with a hypothesis, testing it, and creating a product/service based off of it with no guarantee of even a penny of monetary return is far riskier, and that's what "research" is.
by et-al | 2025-05-12 15:58:17+00:00
> For what it's worth: I like Organic Maps for being more lightweight, quicker rendering & simpler configuration than OSMand. But it (still? haven't used in a while) does lack some useful features like points of interest (supermarkets, gas stations & such).

Am I misinterpreting something? This is because of the underlying OSM data. So one should add these places to OSM so downstream apps will show the places you want, right?
by sorcerer-mar | 2025-05-12 15:58:21+00:00
> It's absurd if you believe the point of government is to be by, for, and of the people. > If you see government as a way to enhance the ability of the owner class to enrich themselves, it makes perfect sense.

No I actually think it's important for people to square views like "government is a way to enrich the owner class" with actual reality, such as the fact that the government when administered by a different party did the exact opposite.
by kmarc | 2025-05-12 15:58:42+00:00
Thanks for the input.

I happened to work for a car navigation software development company 15+y ago. Cool stuff, Windows CE / PDAs as devices, android and ios nowhere. These were totally offline devices (map updates through usb / sdcard).

Even then, this offline navigation was super fast, across countries. Today I managed to wait a whole minute for a 5km bike navigation in OsmAnd. Then I uninstalled (after years of hoping for improvement. Yes, I was regularly donating money.)
by WilliamCranna | 2025-05-12 15:58:48+00:00
This is the best comment here! I made this app not with making money in mind, but knowing I want an obtainable skill that I can leverage with applying to schools/jobs. I’m not here to make money quick, I want to build something with meaning, and I don’t think that’s possible with someone’s first app. This is the first step in learning to reach my meaningful idea.
by ProllyInfamous | 2025-05-12 15:59:05+00:00
IANAL (also, not from Colorado; never used a rideshare); it seems that this would provide benefit to both drivers and riders.

My nephew used to commute to work via rideshare, and would usually work outside deals with regular drivers. Knowing how much each person in the rideshare might save would definitely incentivize out-of-network rides.
by Hilift | 2025-05-12 15:59:20+00:00
> When the Model 3 first came out, it took far too long to stop in Consumer Reports testing, thanks to bad anti-lock braking system (ABS) calibration. Tesla was able to fix this with a software update over the air, something no one else could do for a braking system. That was impressive, but the example presented a worrying question: Did engineers not do stopping-distance testing before they shipped the car to customers?

Narrator: No, they really did not.
by incomingpain | 2025-05-12 15:59:28+00:00
>there’s been basically no progress in my life time — or really ever — on addressing the underlying political dispute over Kashmir

Who are "we" to dictate the situation between india or pakistan? I am neither.

Late 2019, India took control and are still in control. You might not like the results or situation but that's progress and change. If you don't like it, go protest against India.
by surgical_fire | 2025-05-12 15:59:34+00:00
> I trust free speech over any system that relies on a sanctioned arbiter of truth. And I think that protection of people from bad ideas often backfires (see European history and the Catholic Church, McCarthyism, Nazi propaganda, Soviet censorship, etc.)

I choose to believe that a democratically elected government with proper functioning institutions can regulate speech properly instead.

Absolute freedom is not possible nor desirable to live in a society. And cultural problems should be addressed with regulations. If it was cultural norm to engage in revenge killings, I would very much expect government to step in and stop that, not to take a wishy-washy stance "eh, it is a cultural problem" and handwave it away.

I see unshackled free speech as much more dangerous than that of a democracy being overzealous in speech, as the first can absolutely undermine democracy if enough imbeciles decide to believe in.... erm... "challenging" ideas (and I use those quotes very sarcastically).

A proper democracy being overzealous can be fixed by the democratic process.
by jbellis | 2025-05-12 15:59:36+00:00
Great to see embeddings getting some love outside the straight-up-ML space!

I had a non-traditional use case recently, as well. I wanted to debounce the API calls I'm making to gemini flash as the user types his instructions, and I decided to try a very lightweight embeddings model, light enough to run on CPU and way too underpowered to attempt vector search with. It works pretty well! https://brokk.ai/blog/brokk-under-the-hood
by reconnecting | 2025-05-12 16:00:27+00:00
This is a misleading reference to statistics without context. It's not a B2C website, and in fact, most of our audience accesses it from Linux devices rather than mobile Firefox.

Anyway, even if someone does visit using mobile Firefox, it only takes one zoom-in/ zoom-out to adjust. So it's not really a webpage code issue, it's more about how Firefox renders pages on mobile devices.
by PaulHoule | 2025-05-12 16:00:29+00:00
A case related to that is "more like this" which in my mind breaks down into two forks:

(1) Sometimes your query is a short document. Say you wanted to know if there were any patents similar to something you invented. You'd give a professional patent searcher a paragraph or a few paragraphs describing the invention, you can give a "semantic search engine" the paragraph -- I helped build one that did about as well as the professional using embeddings before this was cool.

(2) Even Salton's early works on IR talked about "relevance feedback" where you'd mark some documents in your results as relevant, some as irrelevant. With bag-of-words this doesn't really work well (it can take 1000 samples for a bag-of-words classifier to "wake up") but works much better with embeddings.

The thing is that embeddings are "hunchy" and not really the right data structure to represent things like "people who are between 5 feet and 6 feet tall and have been on more than 1000 airplane flights in their life" (knowledge graph/database sorts of queries) or "the thread that links the work of Derrida and Badiou" (could be spelled out logically in some particular framework but doing that in general seems practically intractable)
by ETH_start | 2025-05-12 16:00:34+00:00
This is for arrhythmia detectors which are under a special class 2 restriction, not under the standard class 2 restrictions. Standard class 2 restrictions are more stringent. Secondly, even with arrhythmia detectors, clinical studies will be needed with any new design.

See the "clinical studies" section here:

https://www.fda.gov/medical-devices/guidance-documents-medic...

"designs dissimilar from designs previously cleared under a 510(k), such as those incorporating significant new features or algorithm techniques new technology, i.e., technology different from that used in legally marketed arrhythmia detectors indications for use dissimilar from arrhythmia detector and alarm devices of arrhythmia detectors of the same type."

And those studies aren’t cheap. A Phase II cardiovascular feasibility trial runs roughly US$7 million. If you go pivotal (Phase III), you’re easily in the $11.5 million–$53 million range. Source: https://www.sofpromed.com/what-is-the-cost-of-a-clinical-tri...

We absolutely cannot create a hacker culture of medical devices with these kinds of costs, and in the long run, not having a hacker culture is going to massively slow innovation, and with it, the opportunity to reduce the cost of healthcare and improve the quality.
by ringeryless | 2025-05-12 16:00:56+00:00
the cause of all this? single client ALSA driver model.

coreaudio doesn't need pulse nor jack nor pipewire to allow a single device to be opened by multiple applications.

ALSA additionally specifies every 2 channels as separate 2channel devices, so your 8 channel audio interface looks like 4.

the confusion is added to by device tree overlays such that you may find your pro audio 8 channel device is always seen as a surround setup, replete wirh highpass filtering on the principle pair of outputs, and you don't know why your poor desktop environments sound device doesn't show this...
by perrygeo | 2025-05-12 16:01:14+00:00
There are three main hurdles here

First, actually getting fusion to positive energy ROI. That's step zero and we're not even close.

Second, scaling the production of fusion in an safe and economical way. Given the utter economic failure of fission nuclear power (there has never been a profitable one), my priors are that the fusion advocates are vastly underestimating, if not willfully ignoring, this part.

Finally, even if we do get to "too cheap to meter" energy, what then? Limitless electricity is not the same thing as limitless stored energy. Only 20% of our energy needs are supplied by electricity. To wit, the crucial industrial processes required to build the nuclear power plant in the first place can only be accomplished with combustible carbon. A power plant cannot generate the energy to build another power plant. Please let that sink in.

We're already seeing countries with photovoltaic and wind hitting $0/kW on sunny windy days - the grid is nearly saturated for daytime load. There isn't enough demand! This makes the economic feasibility of fusion even less attractive. No one is going to make money from it.