MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by SomaticPirate | 2025-05-13 01:53:00+00:00
Everyone in startups should be a fan of this. More competition in government space is a net benefit for everyone.

Its quite funny to see the comments complaining about "lowering the bar" when FedRAMP compliance is essentially a compliance regime that is so convoluted that most startups wouldn't be able to afford the entry barrier.

Now, there is a chance that a smaller vendor could feasibility compete with a massive consultancy like Accenture since the artificial barriers have been decreased.

FedRAMP compliance are also required for SaaS vendors. Datadog is famous for having it (and it took them awhile)
by calmbonsai | 2025-05-13 01:53:42+00:00
I disagree with its use personally. There are many, many people whose BMI is in the 'Level 1 obese' category, but they're carrying around extra muscle not fat. Muscle is anywhere from 12-18% denser than fat. Also, DEXA scans are incredibly cheap (~$50) these days.

I do agree with your general statement about its use.

There's no reason NOT to use it, generally, just recognize that it has severe limitations when applied to the individual. Notably, effects of training and exercise on health using BMI as any sort of baseline or incremental figure of merit.
by roughly | 2025-05-13 01:54:01+00:00
I mean, I think it’s a distinction without a difference, is the problem - yes, the biosphere exchanges material with the rest of the ball of mud, but that, for all intents and purposes, is a closed system, and so things like its ability to draw down carbon, or dilute pollutants, or break down plastics, are constrained beyond where we apparently thought they were. Per the notion of landfill mining, that also puts constraints on how effective we can be there - how much energy we can commit to that, what level of wastage or side effects we can accept. We’ve had a philosophy that all problems will be solved in the future by technological developments, but our timelines don’t seem to be lining up right now.
by hoseyor | 2025-05-13 01:55:45+00:00
I wish I could vote more for this.

You forgot that it costs at min $1M to get certified up to several dozen millions once everything is said and done; and that does not guarantee any government contracts or agency purchases. You have to basically be a big player that can put up the money and because by any number of the various methods of corruption, you already know that you will have government contracts waiting for you on the far side.
by _heimdall | 2025-05-13 01:57:40+00:00
How do you propose we supplant all of our current energy use with green energy? What are the sources that work at scale, how do we store energy at scale assuming the green sources aren't 24/7 reliable, and how do we scale said systems without a net impact on the environment?

Our current use of electricity per capita, at least in the west, is ridiculously unsustainable if we aren't willing to keep abusing fossil fuels as an efficient store and source of energy.

I'm a for reducing our impact, but we have to stop kidding ourselves with the pipe dream that we just need the right source of energy to be able to grow our energy use per capita indefinitely.
by Quenby | 2025-05-13 01:58:21+00:00
I walked away from this with a feeling I can't quite put into words. I'm not a doctor, and I don’t really understand medical AI, but a friend of mine who is a doctor has been relying more and more on ChatGPT lately—to look up guidelines, organize his thoughts. He says it’s not that it knows more than he does, but that it’s fast, clear, and saves him time. That got me thinking. I used to assume AI in healthcare was about replacing people. Now, it feels more like an extension. Like doctors are getting an extra pair of hands—or a second consultation room that's always online. Maybe that’s what progress looks like: human judgment is still there, but increasingly shaped by structured input. I don’t know if that’s good or bad. It just feels complicated.
by dalance | 2025-05-13 01:59:53+00:00
As the author of Veryl and an ASIC frontend engineer, I aim to enable smooth transitions from existing SystemVerilog projects, making it immediately applicable to ASIC projects. (In fact, it’s already being applied to an ASIC currently under design.) I see languages like Spade and SUS as HDLs for a slightly more future-oriented.
by smattiso | 2025-05-13 02:00:06+00:00
This is a great idea. I have a question:

Typically speaking an LLM is the code driving the control flow and the MCP servers are kind of dumb API endpoints (find_flights, search_hotels, etc) say for a travel MCP.

With your product, how is the LLM made aware of the underlying data store in a more useful way than “func search(query)”?

It seems to be that if you could expose some precomputed API structure into the MCP for a given data store then the LLM could reason more effectively about the data rather than throwing search queries into the void and hoping for the best?
by nmgycombinator | 2025-05-13 02:00:20+00:00
An important correction, so hopefully this bubbles to the top (this will be appearing on the post as well):

A previous version of this article mentioned below that this CVE was patched in macOS Sequoia 15.5 et al., but I was a bit mistaken in that. Despite being released today as well, it appears that macOS Ventura 13.7.6 and macOS Sonoma 14.7.6 are not patched against this vulnerability.

I wrote that sentence assuming that Apple would have included a patch in all of the releases. It was only later, when I checked the security release notes, that I saw I was not credited under the other two releases. I reached out to Apple to clarify if these releases were patched. As of writing, I have not heard back.

I chose to do my own testing and spun up a virtual machine. After some difficulties I got it updated to macOS Sonoma 14.7.6 and was able to compile and run my proof of concept. It still worked. I would assume the same is true for macOS Ventura 13.7.6. I'm not sure why Apple didn't include the patch in these two releases.

I will update the post when I have more information and/or context.
by add-sub-mul-div | 2025-05-13 02:00:31+00:00
He is unusual in that he's boosted by decades of pop culture fame. Other MAGA candidates haven't been able to recreate the same level of success. You're right that there's a lot of stupidity that won't magically go away when he does, but the environment for an adult (of either party) to win won't be so hard.
by toomim | 2025-05-13 02:00:52+00:00
Well, you can see by examining the actual list of grants they've defunded from the NSF:

https://airtable.com/appGKlSVeXniQZkFC/shrFxbl1YTqb3AyOO?jnt...

Take a look. They're almost all political DEI things. That's not science.

This administration is bringing the focus back to science.
by johnnyanmac | 2025-05-13 02:00:53+00:00
> Copyright infringement is not stealing

If we can agree that taking away of your time is theft (wage theft, to be precise), we as those who rely on intellect in our careers should be able to agree that the taking of our ideas is also theft.

>moved to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, where he argued that the goods he was distributing were not "stolen, converted or taken by fraud", according to the language of 18 U.S.C. 2314 - the interstate transportation statute under which he was convicted. The court disagreed, affirming the original decision and upholding the conviction. Dowling then took the case to the Supreme Court, which sided with his argument and reversed the convictions.

This just tells me that the definition is highly contentious. Having the supreme court reverse a federal ruling already shows misalignment.
by bigfatkitten | 2025-05-13 02:01:33+00:00
In my view, no.

The key thing it gives you is the ability to define policies about who can talk to what, irrespective of where the endpoints actually are, while also cryptographically protecting your traffic.

On the other hand, if you never ever use anything but HTTPS, then you probably don’t need it and you could do away with it today.
by SR2Z | 2025-05-13 02:02:14+00:00
Where do you get the idea that peasants owned their land?

One of the defining traits of medieval Europe was that peasants were forced into serfdom and were granted the privilege to work the land.

More primitive societies banned usury because the concept of interest was seen as unfair. This held them back from investing or speculating on the future and kept them very poor.
by zelphirkalt | 2025-05-13 02:02:27+00:00
Is it really stacking ones reputation? Think about it: If everyone is doing it all the time, an overlooked something is quickly dismissed as a mistake that is bound to happen sooner or later. Person X is reviewing so much code and does such a great job usually, but now they overlooked that one thing. And they even admitted their mistake. Surely they are not bad.

I think it would quickly fade out. What are we going to do, if even some organization for professional code reviews signs off the code but after 5y in the business they make 1 mistake? Are we no longer going to trust them from that day on?

I think besides signing code, there need to be multiple pairs of eyeballs looking at it independently. And even then nothing is really safe. People get lazy all the time. Someone else surely has already properly reviewed this code. Let's just sign it and move on! Management is breathing down our necks and we gotta hit those KPI improvements ... besides, I gotta pick up the kids a bit earlier today ...

Don't let perfect be the enemy of good. There is surely some benefit, but one can probably never be 100% sure, unless one goes into mathematical proofs and understands them oneself.
by Yiling-J | 2025-05-13 02:03:14+00:00
It would be interesting if there were an AI tool to analyze the growth pattern of an OSS project. The tool should work based on star info from the GitHub API and perform some web searches based on that info.

For example: the project gets 1,000 stars on 2024-07-23 because it was posted on Hacker News and received 100 comments (<link>). Below is the static info of stargazers during this period: ...
by ETH_start | 2025-05-13 02:03:47+00:00
You're right, but it is actually not the general class 2 that electrocardiographs are under, it's Class II (performance standards).

And yes, the FDA will require pre-market clinical data. The FDA required a clinical study for the Apple Watch ECG:

https://www.accessdata.fda.gov/cdrh_docs/reviews/DEN180044.p...

Apple also ran the Apple Heart Study which had 419,000 subjects to validate the algorithm:

https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa1901183

Median cost for a U.S. pivotal cardiovascular‑device trial: ≈ $19 million:

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle...

You're right that a company like Apple could afford it. However, the type of small company or small group that would form the base of a hacker culture cannot afford these kinds of clinical studies just for an experimental product. We need more experimental products being used in the market to get a faster rate of innovation.

"NOTE that they allow many products to register as investigative!"

Receiving the Investigational Device Exemption does NOT allow the device to be commercially sold or mass-distributed to the general public. The IDE just lets the device be used in human clinical trials. That's it.
by password4321 | 2025-05-13 02:05:41+00:00
Docker networking defaults have been tightened up but per https://github.com/moby/moby/issues/22054#issuecomment-28714...:

the default binding address is still 0.0.0.0.

There are now rules in raw-PREROUTING to drop packets sent from outside the host to container addresses, and to ports mapped to the loopback address. Rules in the filter-FORWARD chain no longer depend on its default policy.
Side project site and Adsense = coffee money only. What am I doing wrong?
by nmfccodes | 2025-05-13 02:06:10+00:00
Hey HN!

So, I'm a college student (meaning permanently broke by default), and recently, I've put all my hopes and dreams (ahem, well...a weekend of coding and loads of coffee anyway) into a little niche website:

https://nmfclist.com

I admit, my ultimate goal was simple: I thought Adsense would rescue me from ramen noodle dinners. Sadly, the earnings barely cover my morning caffeine addiction.

Could you savvy folks please have a quick look and tell me where I'm going wrong? (Any honest feedback would be greatly appreciated—and let's face it, might even save my sanity and health by upgrading me to slightly more nutritious food.)

Thanks in advance! P.S: Feel free to roast it, my stomach already does daily!
by muzani | 2025-05-13 02:07:11+00:00
Claude 3.7 is a little overeager. It'll solve problems you don't tell it to solve. Like I give it a screenshot of an app and ask it to do a button; it'll do the status bar as well. It's somewhat like a jerk genie and I feel like I'm writing a contract rather than working with an assistant. Claude 3.5 doesn't have this problem.

Gemini 2.5 Pro will one shot complex instructions and even read between the lines. The drawback is that it can often overthink as well. One example was I want to deselect a dropdown if I recreate it (e.g. select state when changing countries). The ideal solution is to just check this on the view layer. Gemini 2.5 pro is terrible at this - it'll go down into lower layers and overengineer, when the solution should just to set as null if the new dropdown doesn't contain the same text.

GPT 4.1 has been quite good lately, but it's not quite as agentic and it will ask you a lot of questions and request confirmation to begin. It is perfect for workflows where you aren't certain yourself.

GPT is also smartest from the visual angle, able to read color variations well and designs them well. Claude is the worst visually.
by hayst4ck | 2025-05-13 02:10:58+00:00
I dislike that quote. It's not knowing where to make the mark. It's that there's no one else who knows where to make the mark charging less that $9,999. Knowing where to make the mark implies that payment is proportional to ability/productivity, but it is proportional chiefly to relative positions of power. Learning where to make the mark won't earn you $9,999, it will instead put you in competition with the other $9,999 markers in a downward race to the "true value" of those marks.

> Why you think an AI could do better than a human at that is beyond me.

You strike me as someone who thinks like me before I started using LLMs. Now when I read things like this rather than thinking in terms of black and white like I might have before, I instead think about percent likelihoods, and once you let in the grey it's no longer a matter of can/cannot but how many resources will be invested into making it so.

I think you hold doctors in pretty high esteem and I'm not sure how many other people hold doctors in as high esteem as you do. I've certainly ended up worse for having visited one. How seriously do you think most doctors take continuing education, particularly if they are overworked? An AI can consume the latest research/guidelines/text books immediately. Doctors can often act on 20 year old medical dogma. AI can get immediate social media feedback weighted in a way professionals deem appropriate.

I think diagnostic work is one of the things most likely to be taken over by AI. Even when asking specific technical questions in my own field, AI is capable of hitting some key points, and with extra prodding even getting to some very very specific niche points without too much coddling.
by Ar-Curunir | 2025-05-13 02:11:17+00:00
https://github.com/emeryberger/csconferences indicates that ATC acceptance rate has averaged 20% in the last five years, so better than ~13%, but not by too much.

However, at least speaking as an academic, I wouldn't say that ~20% acceptance rate is necessarily indicative of a shortage of good venues. There is plenty of not-so-good research that is submitted to top places that has no hope of getting in. (My experience is from computer security research, where the acceptance rate of security conferences has gone down, but the fraction of good papers has also actually gone down, so the fraction of good papers getting in has roughly stayed the same.)

That being said, ATC seems to indeed have been a high-prestige conference back in the day, and hence indeed competitive. My experience is from recent years, where it was viewed as a good-but-not-tier-1 conference in systems research.
by burnt-resistor | 2025-05-13 02:11:20+00:00
Probably not. Devices would run out within a generation.

It ain't ever going to happen because people can write these things called books. And computer organization and architecture books already exist and there are many 10k's copies of them. What should be captured in modern computer organization books is applied science aspects of the history until now and the tricks that made Apple's ARM series so excellent. The other thing is TSMC needs to document fab process engineering. Without the capture of niche, essential knowledge they become strategic single points of failure. Leadership and logic dictate not allowing this kind of vulnerability to fester too deeply or too long.
by rconti | 2025-05-13 02:11:27+00:00
> I just want to outline my overarching concern off the bat with similar sentiments I see expressed exactly in this vein by people: there's a very strong potential for serious cognitive biases, and, frankly, simple flawed logic, to be operant in the statement, "I do not need emergency assistance because I am skilled driver".

Sure; and I'm sure you likewise recognize that there's a difference between "This could never help me", "I don't need this", and "I don't want this". People don't live their lives by making game theory optimal choices at every turn. There's also a difference between a safety regime offered as a cost-extra feature on a car, a regulatory requirement on a car, and a regulatory requirement on an airliner.
by manwe150 | 2025-05-13 02:12:11+00:00
That’s fine, but also just means the “real” installer just runs on first launch instead in those cases, whether that is to ask for permissions or setup launch scripts or copy files to more places

But just think about how much fun phone apps could have been if you first installed an installer and than than that downloaded an app to install the side components before launching a configuration program for installing that specific software suite
by somenameforme | 2025-05-13 02:12:26+00:00
$70k isn't a median income, it's much more than it. Which is to say it's much more than 50% of full+ time American workers, with years of experience on average, earn. And overtime is typically time and a half. So somebody earning $50k and working 60 hour weeks would be earning $87,500 which would put them in the top quarter of all earners in the US [1], straight out of high school, and with 0 debt.

You are right that doing this in the Bay Area would be unusual due to an unreasonable cost of living, but it's possible he's still living with his parents. If not, the great thing about the trade is that they're in high demand everywhere - including offshore where the pay skyrockets, especially for a welder who can get underwater work. Those gigs enable one to comfortably retire, if they want, a multi millionaire well before 40.

But the interesting thing about trades is that people end up enjoying them. A friend works the rigs and makes a stupid amount of $$$ thanks to doing 2 on 2 off and spending his offtime in places like Thailand. So he's taking home a healthy 6 figures, gets 50% of the year off, and is having a total cost of living in the low thousands per year. He still has no intention of retiring though, even though he could live off simple interest alone at this point. It ends up being a lifestyle and not just a job.

[1] - https://dqydj.com/income-percentile-calculator/
by johnnyanmac | 2025-05-13 02:13:01+00:00
Scales of effect always come into play when enacting law. If you spend a day digging a whole on the beach, you're probably not going to incur much wrath. If you bring a crane to the beach, you'll be stopped because we know the hole that can be made will disrupt the natural order. A human can do the same thing eventually, but does it so slowly that it's not an issue to enforce 99.9% of the time.
by nighthawk454 | 2025-05-13 02:14:55+00:00
No, mapping to a _fixed length code_, that’s it. Note that the output domain need not be smaller than the input domain either.

If your model takes a sequence of 1 or 10,000 or N tokens and returns a vector of fixed length, say 1500 dimensions, then it is a hash function of sorts.

> A hash function is any function that can be used to map data of arbitrary size to fixed-size values

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hash_function
by muzani | 2025-05-13 02:15:26+00:00
My rule of thumb: If the LLM is more junior than you, then go ahead and let it full autopilot. Check the results like you would check the result from a junior.

If the LLM is more senior than you, learn from it – treat it like a tutor and ask a lot of questions. Things like why we'd use MVP architecture instead of MVC. Ask until you have no dumb questions left. The hardest part of RTFM is often knowing which part of the manual to read and going through the what before the why. Ask the LLM to explain, then verify by searching it yourself.

LLMs will often pull the wrong language if you're not careful. Like contains() may function differently in different languages. This is where it's vital to RTFM.
by pveierland | 2025-05-13 02:16:17+00:00
The entire point of purity within Nix is to have reproducibility by its nature: `In this model a binary component is uniquely defined by the declared inputs used to build the component` (section 1.5). It is not clear to me how this is an entirely different problem than that of reproducible builds. Yes, there are more problems to solve regarding achieving bit-for-bit reproducible builds that Nix does not fully solve alone, but reproducible software builds and deployments clearly are goals of Nix as a technology.
by johnnyanmac | 2025-05-13 02:17:07+00:00
It will when it inevitably hits their wallets. Be it via the public rejection of a lower quality product, or court orders. But both sentiments move slow, so we're in here for a while.

Even with NFTs it still was a full year+ of everyone trying to shill them out before the sentiment turned. Machine learning, meanwhile, is actually useful but is being shoved into every hole.
by benoau | 2025-05-13 02:17:21+00:00
Several things come to my mind:

1) you don't seem to rank at all in Google, so that's one major traffic source gone

2) this is a good search for an LLM to answer which undermines needing to visit your sites at all

3) I bet the companies that regularly need NMFC codes have this information locally

and

4) Firefox SSL error (probably the least important point to make)

> Secure Connection Failed

> An error occurred during a connection to nmfclist.com. The OCSP response does not include a status for the certificate being verified.

> Error code: MOZILLA_PKIX_ERROR_OCSP_RESPONSE_FOR_CERT_MISSING

> The page you are trying to view cannot be shown because the authenticity of the received data could not be verified. Please contact the website owners to inform them of this problem.
by the__alchemist | 2025-05-13 02:17:39+00:00
This is confusing: GPUs seem great for scientific computations. You often want f64 for scientific computation. GPUs aren't good with f64.

I'm trying to evaluate if I can get away with f32 for GPU use for my molecular docking software. Might be OK, but I've hit cases broadly where f64 is fine, but f32 is not.

I suppose this is because the dominant uses games and AI/ML use f32, or for AI even less‽