MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by CamperBob2 | 2025-05-26 21:30:49+00:00
The details are irrelevant, because - I stress again - Searle's Chinese Room is not cognitively limited, by definition.

So said Searle. But without specifying what he meant, it was a circular statement at best. Punting to "it passes a Turing Test" just turns it into a different debate about a different flawed test.

The operator has no idea what he's doing. He doesn't know Chinese. He has a Borges-scale library of Chinese books and a symbol-to-symbol translation guide. He can do nothing but manipulate symbols he doesn't understand. How anyone can pass a well-administered Turing test without state retention and context-based reflection, I don't know, but we've already put more thought into this than Searle did.
Show HN: Discover and bookmark songs, books, movies, and food by mood
by manogas | 2025-05-26 21:32:10+00:00
I wanted to go through every stage of launching a product, so I built a simple site that lets you discover and bookmark songs, books, movies, and food based on your mood.

It has no fancy AI features, it's more like a lightweight, mood based Pinterest.

I’m a developer and I built the whole thing using Cursor using an imperative approach instead of vibe coding declaratively. So even though the product itself is pretty minimal, the backend is well structured and it should give me the ability to implement future pivots fairly easily.

It was mainly a learning exercise but I'd love to hear suggestions for directions to explore from here to make it actually valuable
by amterp | 2025-05-26 21:33:15+00:00
I'm working on a programming language aiming to replace Bash. It specifically targets CLI scripts where Python or Rust are overkill, but it contains a bunch of constructs that make it particularly well suited for CLI scripts, including arg parsing, table formatting, HTTP querying, Bash command invocation, etc.

Keen to hear people's thoughts and feedback! GitHub here: https://github.com/amterp/rad

The docs site also contains a guide for getting started, including some of the unique features: https://amterp.github.io/rad/guide/getting-started/
by trod1234 | 2025-05-26 21:34:03+00:00
There are a lot of people that believe most of us will die within the next 10 years, and a rational discussion of these subjects is largely based in the fact that for the last three generations, we have faced numerous existential threats that instead of solving them, have instead all had the can kicked down the road.

Eventually what inevitably happens is you get convergence in time where you simply do not have the resources, and with the risk factors today, that convergence my cause societal failure.

Super Intelligent AI alone, yeah that probably is not a threat because its so highly (astronomically) unlikely, but socio-economic collapse to starvation; now that's a very real possibility when you create something that destroys the ability for an individual to form capital, or breaks other underlying aspects which underpin all of societal organization going back hundreds of years.

Now these things won't happen overnight, but that's not the danger either. The danger is the hysteresis, or in other words by the time you find out and can objectively show its happening to react, its impossible to change the outcome. Your goose is just cooked as a species, and the cycle of doom just circles until no ones left.

Few realize that food today is wholly dependent on Haber-Bosch chemistry. You get 4x less yield without it, and following Catton in a post-extraction phase sustainable population numbers may be fractional compared to last century (when the population was 4bn). People break quite easily under certain circumstances and so any leaders following MAD doctrine will likely actually use it when they realize everything is failing and what's ahead.

These are just things that naturally happen when the mechanics of things that are long forgotten which underpin the way things work fail to ruin. The loss of objective reality is a warning sign of such things on the horizon.
by stackskipton | 2025-05-26 21:34:03+00:00
On top of not having source concerns, licensing makes sharding less useful. MSSQL on Linux exists but it comes with a bunch of caveats so most people will stick with Windows. Therefore, each instance of the server will MIGHT be Windows License (depending on various factors) + SQL Server licensing and that licensing is not cheap, therefore, with MSSQL, if at all possible, scaling up and not horizontally is generally preferred. You do have Availability groups if Write Primary + Read Only Secondaries work for you.

Also, MSSQL is clearly on maintenance mode. Microsoft continues to support it and sale it because $$$$ but it's not a focus.
by codedokode | 2025-05-26 21:34:22+00:00
SVG has some serious flaws. How do you preserve fonts when saving an SVG image, and still keep the text editable? Currently as I understand the only way to display text is to convert the text to Bezier path.

Also what I hate about SVG is that it requires a whole browser to display because it can contain CSS and JS.

Both these facts hint that it was designed only for embedding into websites, and is not ready for standalone use. Maybe we need a new format for vector graphics that doesn't require a browser.
by math_dandy | 2025-05-26 21:34:49+00:00
I teach math at a large university (30,000 students) and have also gone “back to the earth”, to pen-and-paper, proctored and exams.

Students don’t seem to mind this reversion. The administration, however, doesn’t like this trend. They want all evaluation to be remote-friendly, so that the same course with the same evaluations can be given to students learning in person or enrolled online. Online enrollment is a huge cash cow, and fattening it up is a very high priority. In-person, pen-and-paper assessment threatens their revenue growth model. Anyways, if we have seven sections of Calculus I, and one of these sections is offered online/remote, then none of the seven are allowed any in person assessment. For “fairness”. Seriously.
by pcrh | 2025-05-26 21:35:04+00:00
No system is perfect or never in need of reform, including the UK civil service.

However, recent attacks on the civil service from the political right are almost always a consequence of reality colliding with politics, i.e. the civil service pointing out that ministerial decisions may be unlawful, etc. There are legions of examples of this conflict arising under the previous Tory government.

As such, it is indeed within the power of parliament to change the law so that their political objectives may be met. It is not up to the civil service to break the law when that is convenient to ministers.
by mxfh | 2025-05-26 21:36:08+00:00
That's exactly what im talking about.

Re-Containerizing MPEG-TS as-is to something like mkv, vs. Transcoding is exactly what I'm talking about here.

There are currently not any meaningful ways known to me, to even make MPEG2 files significantly smaller in way more modern and advanced codecs without loosing perceived quality even at the same bitrate.

Not even talking about interlacing issues here.

So for anything MPEG2 and newer lossless reencoding seems quite a futile excersise to me from my personal experience.

If there is a promising way I'm all here for it, but this sadly doesnt look like it.
by nchmy | 2025-05-26 21:36:22+00:00
I'm at a fairly high level in learning spanish, which mostly came from actually speaking the language and just studying the dictionary etc... Duolingo was absolutely useless - and that was 6 years ago. I can only imagine how terrible it is nowadays.

Anyway, Im responding to you because i find ChatGPT to be a FANTASTIC tutor. Like I was absolutely blown away. It can do all the translation stuff, but also answer questions about different verb tenses, conjugations, syntax etc... I'm sure that an extremely good spanish teacher would be better, but I think ChatGPT is probably better than most. And it is free.
by lolinder | 2025-05-26 21:36:29+00:00
All of the best professors I had either did not grade homework or weighted it very small and often on a did-you-do-it-at-all basis and did not grade attendance at all. They provided lectures and assignments as a means to learn the material and then graded you based on your performance in proctored exams taken either in class or at the university testing center.

For most subjects at the university level graded homework (and graded attendance) has always struck me as somewhat condescending and coddling. Either it serves to pad out grades for students who aren't truly learning the material or it serves to force adult students to follow specific learning strategies that the professor thinks are best rather than giving them the flexibility they deserve as grown adults.

Give students the flexibility to learn however they think is best and then find ways to measure what they've actually learned in environments where cheating is impossible. Cracking down on cheating at homework assignments is just patching over a teaching strategy that has outgrown its usefulness.
by echelon | 2025-05-26 21:36:32+00:00
> I’m just grateful my college degree has the year 2011 on it, for what it’s worth.

College students still cram and purge. Nobody forced to sit through OChem remembers their Diels-Alder reaction except the organic chemists.

College degrees probably don't have as much value as we've historically ascribed to them. There's a lot of nostalgia and tradition pent up in them.

The students who do the best typically fill their schedule with extra-curricular projects and learning that isn't dictated by professors and grading curves.
by pessimizer | 2025-05-26 21:37:49+00:00
> woefully old fashioned and at worst completely broken

This is the part that I'm shocked people don't notice. A young high school teacher who keeps up with the literature is going to be miles ahead of Duolingo pedagogically. One of the reasons I'm bullish on AI in language learning is that you could do fully-reactive, individualized TPRS* with AI. You could even simulate other students.

[*] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TPR_Storytelling
by alephnerd | 2025-05-26 21:38:10+00:00
> Online Safety Act was an example, there was a massive media campaign over multiple years. I believe the case that caused it happened nearly ten years ago now, it went quiet for years and then suddenly sparked back up again, parents put out in front of the media...every time.

That's actually a bit of a dumber story than that.

Basically, a well connected and knighted documentary maker (Beeban Kidron) made pornography regulation her sole personal mission after she became a mother.

The UK being a fairly small political playground and her significant network thanks to Miramax made it easy for her to lobby and get private and public support in the UK and California.

Once she was inducted in the House of Lords in 2012, she went gung ho lobbying for it.

> informal. If we are talking about Europe, you see the same thing in Germany (to an extent, in Germany there is a paranoia about political parties, different but historical context).

Yep. A lot of the Cold War era rules and regulations remain in place
by codebje | 2025-05-26 21:38:28+00:00
It’s a confusing (and confused) article. The parts on type systems are expressing IMO a fair observation that dependent types are weird and hard, but without any sense of understanding what they are or what they can do that might justify their cost.

The parts on compile time execution are the better parts of the article, IMO. There’s food for thought here. The author might enjoy reading up on partial evaluation.

Then, fulfilling Greenspun’s 10th, the article reinvents Lisp macros.
by missedthecue | 2025-05-26 21:38:51+00:00
An extremely productive economy with 1/5 the number of consumers (and dropping) will have a cheaper stock index, even with improved productivity. Asset prices over the long-term are driven by cashflows. Hollowing out revenue while improving productivity still results in a lower asset price because your cashflows are smaller.

Productivity gains will also be swimming against the stream because scale advantage will deteriorate in all sectors.
by Aurornis | 2025-05-26 21:39:38+00:00
We had a bug bounty program manager who didn’t screen reports before sending them to each team as urgent tickets.

80% of the tickets were exactly like you said: “If the attacker could get X, then they can also do Y” where “getting X” was often equivalent to getting root on the system. Getting root was left as an exercise to the reader.
by cryptonector | 2025-05-26 21:39:53+00:00
More commentary.

VC is just a calculus, and as such there are no performance concerns. Still, I find it weird that `all` is essentially a collector operation, and that's the only way to "get all the outputs" of an [generator] expression. In jq, because the jq executable itself outputs all the values of the given jq expression [applied to every input to the jq executable, unless -n is given] there is no need to collect all outputs in order to do something with them. What this amounts to is that the jq programmer can trivially implement list fusion, for example, as jq expressions are by default online, and you only lose the online property if you resort to collecting values.

I've not yet looked at the Verse programming language, but I would hope that the language -unlike the calculus- does not force one to give up the online property all the time like VC does.

OTOH, the `one`<->`all` duality is quite elegant -- a tour de force, and a great insight.

This has me wondering how to add unification to jq, or even what a jq calculus might look like.

For example, we can cut the jq language way down, removing even `reduce`, array and object constructor syntax, array and object index syntax, and even `if`, and have just values, expressions, very few built-ins (like `empty/0`, `first/1`, array and object constructor and indexer functions, and maybe a `cond/3`) and application, then we can construct reduction out of recursion, and then the rest of the jq prelude. jq is very close to a calculus as it is.

In particular how to add unification to jq... here's my thoughts:

- add a unification operator, like `?=`, so `lhs ?= rhs | e` would evaluate `e` with all the unified bindings in `lhs` and `rhs` when the equation is true -- the `lhs` and `rhs` would have to be destructuring binders, not regular expressions

- to evaluate the lhs and rhs evaluate all of the rhs for each value produced by the lhs, and then whenever their binders are equal execute the downstream expression `e`

This could be optimized so that as the VM evaluates the rhs it would prune the evaluation as soon as a binding does not match the binding established by the lhs. Right, the evaluation of the rhs can proceed as usual but it wouldn't establish new bindings but, rather, whenever it would have had it been the lhs just check that the binding to be established matches the one currently established, and if not then backtrack immediately.

A bit brute force, being O(N^2), but hey, first the jq programmer can arrange things so that the pruning behavior yields better performance than N^2, and second the compiler could learn to reason about the lhs and rhs and come up with better solutions, though at the cost of compile-time (which for an interpreted language is not unimportant).
by nchmy | 2025-05-26 21:40:30+00:00
False.

Could I ask ChatGPT to just "teach me spanish"? Surely not. But if you've got even a slight idea of what to do (learn present tense and vocab, then progressive, future and past, then some conditional, hypothetical etc...), it can be an absolutely incredible tutor.

I started using it when i was already at a pretty high level, but I'm quite certain that it would have been excellent from the very beginning. It translates, gives varied examples, explains syntax, compares verb tenses and conjugation and more.
by Calzifer | 2025-05-26 21:40:45+00:00
A PiTest blog post [1] mentions an interesting article [2] on how mutation testing is (or was) used by Google.

If I remember correctly, instead of overwhelming the developer with the full report, CI only presented a hand full of randomly chosen failed mutation tests. The developer then could decide to ignore the result (mutation testing will usually produce some false positives) or extend the tests to kill the mutation.

I used PiTest recently the first time and found it quite useful. As you said, a pretty awesome idea. But definitely not a tool for people who always strive for 100% test coverage.

[1] https://blog.pitest.org/dont-let-your-code-dry/

[2] https://homes.cs.washington.edu/~rjust/publ/mutation_testing...
by notnullorvoid | 2025-05-26 21:41:42+00:00
I think the answer lies in a network of curated directories, and search within a localised range of the network.

Many people already have a decent list of curated sites in the form of bookmarks, but bookmark software is horribly dated. Even if I limited my search to sites gathered from my own bookmarks, I'd find 95% of everything I'm ever searching for.
by lightedman | 2025-05-26 21:42:31+00:00
I do not, I'm sorry. Basically the bottom is charcoal for a filter, the top is porous carbonate rock to catch moisture from the air, and the large metal tube serves as a way to heat things up and then at night chill down below ambient a bit faster so that water condenses out of the rock and drips through the charcoal and through piping to a water collection system.
by fallinditch | 2025-05-26 21:43:21+00:00
> I want my students to write unassisted because I don’t want to live in a society where people can’t compose a coherent sentence without a bot in the mix.

Kicking against the pricks.

It is understandable that professional educators are struggling with the AI paradigm shift, because it really is disrupting their profession.

But this new reality is also an opportunity to rethink and improve the practice of education.

Take the author comment above: you can't disagree with the sentiment but a more nuanced take is that AI tools can also help people to be better communicators, speakers, writers. (I don't think we've seen the killer apps for this yet but I'm sure we will soon).

If you want students to be good at spelling and grammar then do a quick spelling test at the start of each lesson and practice essay writing during school time with no access to computers. (Also, bring back Dictation?)

Long term: yes I believe we're going to see an effect on people's cognition abilities as AI becomes increasingly integrated into our lives. This is something we as a society should grapple with and develop new enlightened policies and teaching methods.

You can't put the genie back in the bottle, so adapt, use AI tools wisely, think deeply about ways to improve education in this new era.
by danaris | 2025-05-26 21:44:44+00:00
> This is just barking up the wrong tree and it applies to everything that people use.

You're missing the part where it's a single company, not just "the entire anti-DDoS infrastructure", that's being talked about here.

It would be perfectly possible (no idea how practical offhand) to have an entire ecosystem of competing CDNs all doing the same thing that Cloudflare does, rather than just Cloudflare making those decisions all by itself.
by globie | 2025-05-26 21:45:37+00:00
>In the vast majority of cases, the US government at least, has to obtain a warrant to collect data on US citizens, so those two sets are not the same

If only that were true[0][1][2][3].

[0] (2022): https://fedscoop.com/dhs-buying-personal-data-from-govt-cont...

[1] (2023): https://www.congress.gov/118/meeting/house/116192/documents/...

[2] (2024): https://www.cnn.com/2024/01/26/tech/the-nsa-buys-americans-i...

[3] (2025): https://theintercept.com/2025/05/22/intel-agencies-buying-da...
by Aurornis | 2025-05-26 21:46:38+00:00
Anonymous Internet comment section stories are confused and/or lie a lot, too. I’m not sure why you have so much faith in them.

Also, this conspiracy requires coordination across two separate companies (GitHub for the repos and the LLM providers requesting private repos to integrate into training data). It would involve thousands or tens of thousands of engineers to execute. All of them would have to keep the conspiracy quiet.

It would also permanently taint their frontier models, opening them up to millions of lawsuits (across all GitHub users) and making them untouchable in the future, guaranteeing their demise as soon a single person involved decided to leak the fact that it was happening.

I know some people will never trust any corporation for anything and assume the worst, but this is the type of conspiracy that requires a lot of people from multiple companies to implement and keep quiet. It also has very low payoff for company-destroying levels of risk.

So if you don’t trust any companies (or you make decisions based on vague HN anecdotes claiming conspiracy theories) then I guess the only acceptable provider is to self-host on your own hardware.
by bennydog224 | 2025-05-26 21:46:43+00:00
We’re looking to improve signal and reduce noise for energy traders. Currently, power is a niche market that relies heavily on day-ahead forecasts to set prices for energy contracts. When they’re actually exercised, it can be problematic for the buyer and/or seller if energy demand is significantly lower or higher than anticipated.

We currently are focused on hydroelectric power in the PNW region - converting river flow to tradable metrics.

Check us out -> https://askcrystal.info/dashboard
by jgerrish | 2025-05-26 21:47:14+00:00
Safety deposit box with backup recovery codes.

That puts a lot of burden on users though.

Maybe start a pilot automated service run by Google or Microsoft or whoever where backup codes are securely sent to local credit unions and it's all almost transparent to the user. They just need to either pick up the code at the credit union and put it in their safety deposit box or approve that last step.

I'm not upset at all about banking working with private entities or any of the past with banks. I'm mostly upset because some of these ideas are good, you know? Maybe not this, but some. For a short while longer.
by BeetleB | 2025-05-26 21:48:06+00:00
This is why so far I've used only MCP tools I've written. Too much work to audit 3rd party code - even if it's written by a "trusted" organization.

As an example, when I give the LLM a tool to send email, I've hard coded a specific set of addresses, and I don't let the LLM construct the headers (i.e. it can provide only addresses, subject and body - the tool does the rest).
by kennywinker | 2025-05-26 21:48:16+00:00
“GitHub Copilot for Individual users, however, can opt in and explicitly provide consent for their code to be used as training data. User engagement data is used to improve the performance of the Copilot Service; specifically, it’s used to fine-tune ranking, sort algorithms, and craft prompts.”

- https://github.blog/news-insights/policy-news-and-insights/h...

So it’s a “myth” that github explicitly says is true…
by rawling | 2025-05-26 21:48:18+00:00
> even Quakers

Arrests made _at a Quaker meeting house_, not _of Quakers_ (or at least not for _being_ Quakers).

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cj3x5j6g30ro

> The Metropolitan Police said six people had been arrested on Thursday evening at the Westminster Meeting House on suspicion of conspiracy to cause a public nuisance.

> The force said the arrests had come amid concerns about plans to "shut down" London next month using tactics such as road blocks.

I would imagine your example of "anti-hunting activists" would likely also be people planning to do something to break the law - not purely for online comments.
by crtasm | 2025-05-26 21:49:01+00:00
>she also deleted the post a few minutes after.

This is incorrect.

"At the time she had about 9,000 followers on X. Her message was reposted 940 times and viewed 310,000 times, before she deleted it three and a half hours later. " - https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cp3nn60wyr6o

>you can post and immediately delete, you can post with five followers...they will find it, and will attempt to prosecute

Examples of this happening please?