MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by krackers | 2025-05-25 01:02:57+00:00
I think this finally answers a question I've had since I started learning programming. All my life I've been told "you can't convert a shared library to a static library". When you try to probe for more details, all you get is some mumbling about how a shared library is already prelinked for mapping into memory so the relocation table is lost. When you press further about the precise information loss that prevents you from reconstructing it, you get the equivalent of "you just can't ok!".

That was never satisfying to me because recompilation (decompiling to source code or IR that can be recompiled for another platform) is an academic field of study [1], so the problem of converting a shared library to a static one should be easier. After all, you have all the assembly and symbol information right there, it seemed like all you needed to do was massage it the right way.

[1] https://rev.ng/
by roenxi | 2025-05-25 01:03:59+00:00
Has anyone done the legwork to demonstrate the degree? The linked article is lists around 6 conferences. Which is not a huge number, in the grand scheme of things, given how anti-Trump the US academy seems to be. More than 5, less than 10 and I assume conferences move around fairly regularly.

It is annoyingly typical that they managed to interview a "historian who studies international conferences" yet fail to contextualise how large 6 conferences is in the scheme of things. Thanks to the Magic of the Internet [0] I can see that hundreds of thousands of conferences have taken place since their first appearance in the late eighteenth century which isn't that informative (averages to >333/year over 3 centuries I suppose).

[0] https://www.bbk.ac.uk/our-staff/profile/8008585/jessica-rein... & https://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/id/eprint/52195/1/BJH2300063_R.pdf
by -__---____-ZXyw | 2025-05-25 01:04:18+00:00
It is not "an agent" in the sense you are implying here, it does not will, want, plan, none of those words apply meaningfully. It doesn't reason, or think, either.

I'll be excited if that changes, but there is absolutely no sign of it changing. I mean, explicitly, the possibility of thinking machines is where it was before this whole thing started - maybe slightly higher, but moreso because a lot of money is being pumped into research.

LLMs might still replace some software workers, or lead to some reorganising of tech roles, but for a whole host of reasons, none of which are related to machine sentience.

As one example - software quality matters less and less the as users get locked in. If some juniors get replaced by LLMs and code quality plummets causing major headaches and higher workloads for senior devs, as long as sales don't dip, managers will be skipping around happily.
by testing22321 | 2025-05-25 01:05:12+00:00
You pretty much listed all the things that “simple life” people in the Yukon and Alaska get up to in their spare time - which is ample.

My first time up there I met a lady in her 40s who had just worked 12 weeks at a mining camp. She was bummed because that was the most she’d ever worked in her life. Had 10 acres, three kids, monster log home. Great life.
by BlueTemplar | 2025-05-25 01:05:54+00:00
> the great GameSpy shutdown, in which mountains of games lost online connectivity

No, they didn't. They 'just' lost a form of (semi-automatic) matchmaking : these server lists.

"LAN mode" is a related misnomer : a better term is the also used "Direct IP connect". Even after GameSpy shut down, you can still play these games online through this "LAN mode". You 'just' need to do the matchmaking yourself. The likes of Hamachi and GameRanger 'just' make the connecting and matchmaking easier.

It's particularly sad to see this mode (which is required internally anyway !) getting removed from games using "we added Steam MP" as an excuse. (Like for Dawn of War 1.) What if Steam and non-Steam players want to play together ? More importantly, what happens once the Steam MP servers are inevitably shut down ? Now you will be able to talk about "lost online connectivity" !
by dclowd9901 | 2025-05-25 01:05:57+00:00
> It usually comes from a good place, but is typically given by two groups of people:

> those who tried to invent a wheel themselves and know how hard it is

> those who never tried to invent a wheel and blindly follow the advice

There's a third, and I think more common group: folks who know all that's involved with reinventing the wheel, and how to do it, and know the juice of doing it isn't worth the squeeze, and there's no value in doing it yourself, educational or otherwise.
by NAHWheatCracker | 2025-05-25 01:06:40+00:00
Having an editor isn't wrong, but it's an luxury for something as small as a Hacker News comment or an email.

Paul having an editor isn't a luxury. His essays are edited because it's important for his business. He can easily justify a paying someone.

More to the point, we're contrasting Paul's essays to people who don't have the luxury. Paul's essays could be seen as less genuine, even if they seem wiser.
What if you could pay to own the top spot on a social platform?
by brock_frisbie | 2025-05-25 01:07:24+00:00
I built this after seeing a post about an app called OneDollarChat and wondering: instead of paying for individual messages, what if you could own the entire conversation?

The concept is simple: there's one "top post" that anyone can claim by paying more than the current owner. The first post each day is free, but then to replace the current post a user must outbid it. When someone outbids you, your post gets replaced. Everything resets periodically each 24 hours.

I kept adding features as I went:

What if I add replies?

What if the replies cost a fraction of the post they're replying to (wondering if I could actually pay reply money to a post creator - this is really interesting to me)?

Temporary ownership (posts expire)

Payment processing through Stripe

Attempted to implement HTTP 402 (Payment Required) but hit some walls. I'd really like to get this working because I think the microtransactions, particularly for replies, would be awesome to experiment with.

Technical details:

Built with Next.js and Supabase for auth/database Real-time updates when posts change hands Had to think through edge cases like simultaneous payments Stripe integration was trickier than expected for variable pricing

The experiment: I'm curious whether people will actually pay for temporary digital "ownership" of a shared space. Maybe it's the novelty, maybe it's spite against the current post, maybe it's just the desire to be heard. Not sure yet.

Questions for HN:

Has anyone tried similar micropayment social experiments?

Thoughts on HTTP 402 implementation, particularly on Next.js? (I couldn't get it working cleanly)

Is there something fundamentally broken about monetizing attention this way?

Link: toppost.io

This is definitely an experiment that could fail spectacularly, but I learned a lot building it and I'm curious what happens when real users try to use it.
by braaaahp | 2025-05-25 01:08:07+00:00
Won’t be attending local conferences anymore.

My colleagues outside the US say that a big part of why they are bailing on the US is the public response.

They see France protest over their own internal retirement politics. They don’t see the US public protest over global destabilization through our politics.

It isn’t just Trump. The American people are completely failing to read the room.

So I am done supporting my fellow Americans as much as possible too. Enjoy your conference randos, but fuck me food and shelter and healthcare seem a bit more essential.
by exiguus | 2025-05-25 01:08:11+00:00
The British Post Office scandal involved the wrongful prosecution of over 900 subpostmasters between 1999 and 2015 due to faulty Horizon accounting software developed by Fujitsu. The software reported financial shortfalls, leading to convictions for theft and fraud. Despite known bugs, the Post Office denied issues, causing severe personal and financial hardships.

Investigations revealed Horizon's defects, leading to a £58 million settlement in 2019 and the overturning of many convictions. By 2024, over 100 convictions were quashed, with compensation costs exceeding £1 billion. The scandal highlighted governance issues and the Post Office's role as a private prosecutor.

The Horizon system, despite updates, remains controversial. The Post Office plans to replace it with a new cloud-based system, acknowledging significant flaws in the software that affected financial records.
by ajross | 2025-05-25 01:08:42+00:00
How many examples do you need? Mahmoud Khalil remains jailed in perpetuity without charge. In any reasonable world that should be enough. We can keep going.

(Just to head this off: I know you're going to say he's a criminal. That's how the scam works. But if the government could show he's a criminal they'd charge him with a crime. They don't want to, they just want to jail him, LITERALLY because they don't like what he was saying.)
by duped | 2025-05-25 01:11:39+00:00
In every movie except the first one (where society was starting to collapse, it hadn't fallen yet) the question of "where's the gas" is a major plot device

I'm not going to sit here and argue Beyond Thunderdome is high art or anything, but kind of the whole point of the Mad Max films is not just to comment on resource scarcity and control but to make them the call to action for everything in the story. You're asking "who's making all the gas" because that's exactly what George Miller wants you to be thinking about.
by bcoates | 2025-05-25 01:14:01+00:00
I think the underlying problem is that lots of orgs have siloed out security stuff into its own workflow and its own class of bugs.

It's basically Conway's law applied to the security/feature development split.

So even if they have a build/release procedure with a mature regression test suite it probably wouldn't have "security" issues like this in it just as a matter of internal organization
by onecommentman | 2025-05-25 01:18:09+00:00
In a greenhouse operation with high-valued crops. Automated control technologies in those applications have been around for decades, and AI is competing with today’s sophisticated control technology designed, operated and continually improved by agriculturists with detailed site-specific knowledge of water (quality, availability, etc.), cultivars, markets, disease pressures, etc.. The marginal improvements AI can make in a process of poor data quality and availability, an existing, finely tuned, functioning control system, and facing the vagaries of managing dynamic living systems are…tiny.

The solution for water-constrained operations in the Americas is move to a location with more water, not AI.

For field crops…in the Americas, land and water is too cheap and crop prices are too low to be optimized with AI at the present era. The Americas (10% of world pop) could meet 70% of world food demand if pressed with today’s technologies…40% without breaking a sweat. The Americas are blessed.

Talk to the Saudis, Israel, etc. but, even there, you will lose more production by interfering in the motivations, engagement levels and cultures of working farmers than can be gained by optimizing by any complex opaque technological scheme, AI or no. New cultivars, new chemicals, new machinery even…few problems (but see India for counter examples). Changing millennia of farming practice with expensive, not-locally-maintainable, opaque technology…just no. Great truth learned over the last 70 years of development.
by basket_horse | 2025-05-25 01:18:31+00:00
> It's hard to be right without sounding right.

This doesn't seem true in the age of LLMs, which are notorious for being confidently incorrect.

In fact, this whole article seems out of touch with the realities of where AI is going. In my opinion, good writing is dead. Or rather, good writing is commoditized. Good ideas are still very much alive, but if you have an idea and bad prose, iterating with an LLM will have a better end state than rereading your paragraph 50 times.

That said, if you're only writing to internalize your own ideas (journaling) then this makes more sense.
by libraryatnight | 2025-05-25 01:19:30+00:00
Americans are doing stuff. I call my reps and their vms are full. I go to their offices and there are lots of other people there. There's been protests at state capitals, Bernie & AOC have been giving speeches and zoom meetings about organizing and canvasing. Lawyers are suing and judges are trying to use the system despite the supreme court gone mad. It's tough to get a big group photo, but people are doing stuff. I'm as angry and jaded as anybody, but I dislike this defeated "nobody is doing enough so fuck it" thing I keep seeing. It's laying the groundwork a self fulfilling prophecy.
by zzo38computer | 2025-05-25 01:20:08+00:00
> But for complicated solutions where open source alternatives already exist, its a hard argument to spend your time reinventing it unless just for learning purposes.

Even if the open source alternatives already exist, does not necessarily mean that they do what you want them to do. In some cases they can be fixed to do what you need (since it is open source, that is an advantage), but sometimes it cannot really be done without rewriting it and making a new one.
by charcircuit | 2025-05-25 01:20:34+00:00
>Most organizers, including for-profit organizations, do not want to choose this option due to ethical concerns or concerns about community building.

The alternative is selling the tickets to scalpers which doesn't seem ethically better or better at community building as compared to directly selling it to fans.

Even if you assign tickets to IDs scalpers will sell access to bots instead to capture the delta between market price and the price the ticket is being sold for.
by sotix | 2025-05-25 01:21:25+00:00
Do you mind clarifying your point? Are you implying excel didn’t replace accountants? As a CPA and software engineer I can tell you that I left the accounting industry because accountants had been replaced. Wages are abysmally low for a field that required a graduate degree to sit for the CPA exam, and the industry has been in a crisis mode with a shortage of entrants.

Accounting has probably been hit significantly harder by offshoring than by tools like excel, but the market for it is not what I would consider healthy. Excel making it easier for offshore talent is also a possibility. Further, the industry has been decimated due to a lack of union / organization. The AICPA allowing people in India and the Philippines to become CPAs has been devastating to US CPA wages.

Accordingly I find your original comparison of software engineering to accounting a bit concerning!
by priorityfill | 2025-05-25 01:22:18+00:00
I agree. The key term is "don't necessarily force it on others" but it doesn't mean there aren't instances where it was the right thing to do. It's all about finding the right balance. A good rule of thumb could be to seek simple solutions and minimize accidental complexity (those crappy libraries you pointed out are exactly that). My broader point is that in order to assess whether your wheel is worth it, you have to be curious and learn about what other wheels are available, and how they work. If you just reinvent on your own, chances are you will have overlooked important factors that others have already considered. When people don't, the situation oscillate between two extremes.
by wlesieutre | 2025-05-25 01:25:39+00:00
I'm not following what the "sticker collection" occupying the prime page real estate at top left is supposed to be. They have names like watercolor, realistic, cartoon, pixel art, neon, and graffiti, but all of them just look like photos. When I click on them there are two buttons with download/upload icons, but neither one is doing anything when I click it.

The "Featured Pet Transformations" below that are good illustrations of the concept, except the "Happy Shiba" example starts from a not-shiba (long floppy ears) and through the magic of GPT-Image-1 becomes an entirely different dog (pointy triangular ears). That makes it look more like an image generator than a restyling of your actual pet.

I wonder if there's anything you can do with the image transformation to make it keep distinctive features of the source material? "Tuxedo Cat" for another example, it makes up a different white and black cat from the one that was provided. The white patch in the original goes up around one eye while the sticker has a pointy triangle up the middle, and its legs were both white but in the sticker they're black with white paws.

EDIT - giving it another look, the "Banana Buddy" example for Cute Style is also turning a bulldog into a terrier
by machinelearning | 2025-05-25 01:25:42+00:00
> “So here we have the most exciting kind of idea: one that seems both preposterous and true.”

Am I missing something or is the “seems true” part taking too many liberties here?

If anything, as described in the previous few sentences, the premise seems false, not true.

Kind of ironic since the line sounds right but isn’t rigorously right, so it undercuts the main argument.
by jsnell | 2025-05-25 01:26:58+00:00
This seems pretty well covered by the post?

Doing any kind of access pattern analysis leaves you with the problem of handling false positives, and your proposal doesn't help with the accessibility problems.

IP addresses aren't a panacea here -- this is a high margin business where the attackers can switch to high cost / high quality proxies.

> unless they are specifically targeting that site

In this case the attackers would very specifically be targeting specific sites (ones selling tickets to events with more demand than supply).
by swatson741 | 2025-05-25 01:27:09+00:00
Maybe I'm not understanding the insight here, but it sort of seams like having confluence defeats the purpose of logical semantics.

My specific concern is that by having logical semantics in a language you can represent non-deterministic ambiguous computations, but for this you need divergent paths which, if I understand correctly, the authors have removed from their language. So what's the point of doing this?
by recursivegirth | 2025-05-25 01:29:30+00:00
Understanding this isn't necessarily my audience, I am not a startup, instead a freelance consultant. I could call it a startup, but that would be stretch, and I am not interested in VC funding.

If you don't value your developers perspective in the sales cycle, you are fundamentally doing something wrong. Developer's don't necessarily hold more product knowledge than anyone else, but they sure as shit can tell you how your company can make an extra 100k on a sale by just adding 10 more lines of code.

Sales are incentivized to sell, developers are incentivized to provide impact. Include them.
by jltsiren | 2025-05-25 01:30:34+00:00
It's far too early to say. You can't move a conference to a different country on a short notice. You can only hold it with whatever audience you can get, postpone it, or cancel it. For larger events, it's already too late to move events scheduled for 2026, and possibly even for 2027. Maybe there will be some data in a couple of years, but until then, anecdotes and informed guesses are the best you can have.
by ChrisMarshallNY | 2025-05-25 01:32:49+00:00
That's the main reason that I tend to "Reinvent the wheel."

Also, the dependencies often have a lot of extra "baggage," and I may only want a tiny bit of the functionality. Why should I use an 18-wheeler, when all I want to do, is drive to the corner store?

Also, and this is really all on me (it tends to be a bit of a minority stance, but it's mine), I tend to distrust opaque code.

If I do use a dependency, it's usually something that I could write, myself, if I wanted to devote the time, and something that I can audit, before integrating it.

I won't use opaque executables, unless I pay for it. If it's no-money-cost, I expect to be able to see the source.
by 0xbadcafebee | 2025-05-25 01:33:26+00:00
This is wrong in so many different ways it's like an art piece. Every part of it that tries to defend the central thesis is actually disproving it. It's kind of funny actually. Here's a dude that's been writing for 30 years, and not only is his writing bad, his ideas are crap. It has the feel of somebody who's completely convinced of his own ideas, despite the fact that they're based solely on his personal experience.

I have a simple proof that the thesis is wrong. Take a moron, and have him work on a farm for 30 years. Then have him write a book about running a farm. Now, he's going to sound like a moron, and will write very poorly. But most everything he writes will be right. Despite his bad writing, he can still communicate his observations of how and why simple things work. So it's not hard to be right while sounding wrong. You just have to be a moron.
by dghlsakjg | 2025-05-25 01:33:35+00:00
The NYPD have used surveillance footage to go after people at protests before, and even people who proveably were just in the vicinity of a protest, but otherwise not participating. Frequently they issue basically bullshit tickets after the fact, things like blocking the sidewalk or breaking curfew after detaining protesters.

Do you really think there aren’t police forces that will use this in the furtherance of political goals?

https://apnews.com/article/nypd-george-floyd-protests-settle...

https://www.nyclu.org/press-release/face-lawsuit-nypd-ends-r...
by tptacek | 2025-05-25 01:33:55+00:00
I feel like you might know where I'm coming from being confused at people's reaction to this stuff. This is science fiction. I think it's just not sinking in with people. If I could bet on this, I would bet everything I could on "skill with LLMs" being the high order bit of being an effective software developer 5 years from now.
by tbrownaw | 2025-05-25 01:34:06+00:00
> leading to schisms in the communities and competing conferences that would ultimately disagree on fundamental principles in science and policy.

Ignoring the original topic and the rest of the comment, this part sounds like actually a useful thing?

If the different groups don't converge, that suggests that at least one of the consensuses is being driven by something other than verifiable facts (groupthink? conflicts of interest? politics?). Which I'd think is a useful thing to bring to the surface like that.
by nssnsjsjsjs | 2025-05-25 01:34:08+00:00
What about limiting the number of tickets per card?

Or do what airlines do and you need to declare who is using the ticket. Maybe allow exchange for up to 50% of a party.

Then the scalpers can't win but there is still a DOS problem to solve.

Maybe a card auth -> reserve seats -> complete txn flow would help there. The card auth rate limits the amount of unbooked but temporary reserved tickets.
by sorcerer-mar | 2025-05-25 01:35:59+00:00
> A rational person would totally be fine with a non-zero chance of being sent to an El Salvadorean torture camp for the rest of their lives with no due process even when directly ordered by the Supreme Court of the United States... the chance of it happening to you is probably pretty low (though of course we actually don't have a good way to know since people are being whisked away without even chances to contact their lawyers)!

It's crazy how common the meme of "aloofness signals intelligence" has become among the folks at the top of the bell curve.
by tkgally | 2025-05-25 01:36:20+00:00
From the author's note at the end:

"An earlier version of this article was submitted to the U.S. Army War College’s War Room blog back in the fall of 2024.... The piece was accepted and scheduled for publication in February. I found out on February 25, 2025 that USAWC had changed their mind and decided not to publish the piece, after having to pull another previously-published piece 'due to sensitivities' of 'unnamed critics that wield the power'."