MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mrtksn | 2025-05-08 15:12:49+00:00
It seems like he intends to give away the same way he did until now.

How is this a good idea considering that a political instability can wipe out all that effort?

Here's an idea: Give away your wealth to run unprofitable but essential "machines" like social media and news organizations to stop the vicious circle the humanity plunged in. Do it just like Musk but hand it to an independent organization that does't push for an agenda or profits.

Russians for example, pay social media personalities to push their talking points or even better they pay people who push talking points that are beneficial to them without directly agreeing on the transaction. Hijack the method, pay influencers you believe are beneficial for your causes and ideals.

It may look like just another billionaire trying to influence politics but you can make it into transparent institution. You can award prizes(monetary and honorary) like Nobel did.

Wouldn't be great if Twitter was run buy a transparent institution that releases logs, stats and full source code and doesn't need to do sketchy shit? Sure it would be imperfect but it can be beneficial, like Wikipedia for example.

Make social media into an impartial infrastructure with decades of runway and let people build the specialized things around it.
by bluGill | 2025-05-08 15:12:55+00:00
7 minutes max is good. Anything longer than that is bad, though you can accept up to every 30 minutes, anything more than that is unacceptable. I used to ride a every 30 minute bus, and I always started checking where the bus was (as opposed to the schedule/time!) long before I wanted to leave. A couple times I made a mistake and arrived at the stop just after the bus left, and was then in for an unacceptably long wait for the next bus.

Mid day you need better service than rush hour. People going to work generally have a schedule and they have input into it - they can plan their day around when the bus goes. People doing errands in the mid day do not know when they will be done, if there happens to be a line when you go to the checkout you miss your bus. When you are at work you have more control over when you leave and so will always make your bus.

When people see your bus system as a way to get to work and a car is for everything else you can do worse service than when you want people to get rid of the car.
by PaulHoule | 2025-05-08 15:13:17+00:00
Somehow I never found the StackOverflow game to be worth playing.

In retrospect it is a case study of a particular enshittification scenario: "benign neglect" Back when they published a data dump I had a project on my speculative list to clean up their database, take only the best answers, etc. For python, the numerous Python 2 examples

print "something"

would get rewritten to Python 3

print("something")

basically do the maintenance work they weren't doing. Personally I find their idea of what is a valid question to ask offensive. If you're coding in Java or Javascript for example, the question of "Guava vs. Spring" or "Vue vs. React" are probably more consequential decisions for your app as opposed to anything else but questions like that are forbidden.
by wincy | 2025-05-08 15:14:36+00:00
Huh? You must not hang around middle America, out here people act like Bill Gates wants to vaccinate all of Africa in order to sterilize them and also put microchips in your brain. I guarantee if I asked five random people on the street in Kansas about what they think of Bill Gates, half of them would say “oh right he’s like doing bad stuff with the Illuminati?” or something similar.
by hedora | 2025-05-08 15:14:52+00:00
You don't need to be in the country legally to get a California driver's license.

https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/driver-licenses-identification...

Similarly, there are mechanisms that allow victims of crimes to seek help from the police without fear of deportation.

Makes sense to me. I'm much more worried about road safety and crime than people coming to the US then paying payroll and sales taxes, but not being able to claim federal benefits.
by sjsdaiuasgdia | 2025-05-08 15:15:09+00:00
I toured Alcatraz in...2019 I think? I'm far from an expert in construction, but the buildings do not look to be in great shape. I don't think there's really a path to re-using the structures in any meaningful way, it would be bulldozing those and building an entirely new prison on the same island.

We could build a prison on land and dig a moat around it for less.
by ttfkam | 2025-05-08 15:15:50+00:00
It's also highly dependent upon the team's skill and diligence. You can easily ignore errors and skip error handling in Go with predictably hilarious results.

In Rust, you can't just skip error handling. You have to proactively do something generally unwise (and highly visible!) like call .unwrap() or you have to actually handle the error condition.

Go still relies on goodwill and a good night's sleep. The Rust compiler will guard against laziness and sleep deprivation, because ultimately programming languages are about people, not the computers.
by giovapanasiti | 2025-05-08 15:16:03+00:00
The fastest Bootstrap 5 WordPress starter theme. Experience the power of SASS merged with the WordPress Customizer.

Picostrap 5 leverages the flexibility of Bootstrap 5 (currently v5.3+) and integrates it deeply with the WordPress Customizer. Customize Bootstrap's look and feel directly from your WordPress backend, and Picostrap will recompile the necessary CSS on the fly using a built-in SASS compiler that runs right in your browser.
by fwip | 2025-05-08 15:16:19+00:00
As somebody who took daily bus trips for nearly a decade of my life, I would definitely prefer the meager shade from these to the bare bus stops they were replacing. Standing in the sun for even fifteen minutes waiting for a bus can be miserable.

I'm not sure what your point about "gender wars" is. Is this pole too effeminate for a man to be shaded by?
Ask HN: What are your thoughts on Cluely – The hidden AI overlay tool?
by artur_makly | 2025-05-08 15:16:50+00:00
Just found out about them here: https://archive.ph/DzOE6 I know lots of SDRs will be using this.. but for interviews?? what's the point if you dont know your shit..it will come up one way or another.

Founder interview here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FAPrWsBgFc8

https://techcrunch.com/2025/04/29/startups-launch-products-to-catch-people-using-ai-cheating-app-cluely/

a response by another Ai startup: https://tldv.io/blog/cluely-review/
by nandomrumber | 2025-05-08 15:16:57+00:00
You’re skeptical of nuclear, a proven technology with excellent safety record, the only power generation that has a completely closed fuel life cycle, and believe in a technology we don’t have.

If we (the West) had built out nuclear to satisfy our electricity needs, implementing new nuclear power tech as it improved, we could have electricity subscriptions like we have mobile / home internet planes.

You’d just pay for amps, say 50 amp, 150 amp, 300 amp, all you can consume.

But instead we have expensive electricity (at least here in Australia), where your mind is constantly loaded wit being aware of your energy consumption.
by jmull | 2025-05-08 15:17:03+00:00
So... what even is the purpose of computer language abstractions?

To provide building blocks useful for the construction of programs.

There's a number of properties that are good for such building blocks... composability, flexibility, simplicity, comprehensibility, etc.

Naturally, these properties can conflict, so the goal would be to provide a minimal set of interoperable building blocks providing good coverage of the desirable properties, to allow the developer can choose the appropriate one for a give circumstance and to change when needed. E.g., they could choose to use a simple but less flexible block in one situation, or a more complicated or less performant block in another.

IMO, inheritance is a decent building block -- simple and easy to understand, though with somewhat limited applicability.

We can imagine improvements (particularly to implementation) but I think it got a bad rep mostly due to people not understanding its uses and limitations.

...I've got to say, though, if you aren't figuring out how to use the simple and easy tools, you're really not going to do better with more complicated and capable tools. People hate to admit it, but the best of us are still highly confused monkeys haphazardly banging away at keyboards, barely able to hold a few concepts in our heads at one time. Simple is good for us.
by ViewTrick1002 | 2025-05-08 15:17:19+00:00
This seems to be revisionist history trying to position nuclear power as some underdog?!?!?

We threw absolutely massive handouts at the nuclear industry 20 years ago.

Only look to Vogtle, Virgin C. Summer, Olkiluoto 3, Flamanville 3 and all other projects. Moorside, Oldbury, Wylfa and countless in the US.

Had new built nuclear power delivered on budget and on time nuclear power would definitely have been part of the solution.

Instead Vogtle provides electricity costing 19 cents/kWh. Virgil C. Summer is a $10B hole in the ground and Flamanville 3, which is not finished yet, is 7x over budget and 13 years late on a 5 year construction schedule.

The true underdog from that time, renewables (and storage) deliver energy cheaper than even fossil fuels.
by emmanueloga_ | 2025-05-08 15:17:33+00:00
Chrome debugger tools? htop? visidata [1]? Clicker games are interesting in that they start bare and end up filling the screen with controls. Rerun visualizations come to mind too [2].

--

1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N1CBDTgGtOU

2: https://rerun.io/viewer
by lapcat | 2025-05-08 15:18:03+00:00
That's because the ultra-wealthy control the elections via unlimited campaign contributions, "independent" group spending, lobbying, providing lucrative jobs to ex-politicians, or even running for office themselves. Both of the major political parties are corrupted by money, just in different ways, different funding sources. The news media has also been centralized, monopolized, and increasingly, owned directly by billionaires.

The public sector doesn't work because it's been sabotaged by the private sector.
by TheOtherHobbes | 2025-05-08 15:18:37+00:00
I'm honestly baffled by the persistent irrationality of nuclear supporters.

This is a solved problem. The investment required to build grid storage for renewables, the TCO, the scalability, the capacity, and the build time, are all objectively better than nuclear.

So what's the real story? What is this obsession with an outdated last-century technology really about?
by bluGill | 2025-05-08 15:18:41+00:00
You need roads anyway! Most of the businesses need to get trucks in to deliver the things they need. Thus you can reuse those roads for buses for places that are less busy and this is cheaper than a train. The real trick is how to get private one passenger automobiles off the roads.

In very dense areas you should have both roads and trains. However only the most dense cities in the world can support that, and then only in their most dense which is often small. For everyone else buses save money over trains.
by quietbritishjim | 2025-05-08 15:18:49+00:00
> The bottom line is, no one ever really used inheritance that much anyway (other than smart people trying to outsmart themselves).

Inheritance is most definitely used in many popular C++ libraries, e.g., protobuf::Message [1] (which is base class to all user message classes and also has its own base class of MessageLite) or QWidget [2] (which sits in a large class hierarchy) or tinyxml2::XMLNode (base class to other node types). These are honestly the first three libraries that I thought of that have a non-trivial collection of classes in them. They're all stateful base classes by the way, not pure interfaces. And remember, I'm not trying to justify whether these are good or bad designs, just the make the observation that inheritance certainly is well used in practice.

(The fourth library I thought of with a reasonably complex collection of classes is Boost ASIO [4] which actually doesn't use inheritance. Instead it uses common interfaces to allow some compile-time polymorphism. Ironically, this is the only library in the list that I've been so unsatisfied with that I've written my own wrapper more than once for a little part of it: allowing auto-(re)connecting outbound and accepting incoming connections with the same interface. Guess what: I used inheritance!)

[1] https://protobuf.dev/reference/cpp/api-docs/google.protobuf....

[2] https://doc.qt.io/qt-6/qwidget.html

[3] https://leethomason.github.io/tinyxml2/classtinyxml2_1_1_x_m...

[4] https://www.boost.org/doc/libs/1_88_0/doc/html/boost_asio/re...
by Bender | 2025-05-08 15:19:00+00:00
Seems like they support more than 3DES. It might be interesting if they shared stats on how many legit MTA's are using old ciphers. Should exclude bots, scanners, etc... There are of course other mitigating factors such as PGP encrypting emails, accepting that some information is still disclosed. That can be further mitigated by using gmail to only perform the initial communication then go out of band for anything sensitive.

SSLv2 not offered (OK) SSLv3 not offered (OK) TLS 1 offered (deprecated) TLS 1.1 offered (deprecated) TLS 1.2 offered (OK) TLS 1.3 offered (OK): final Testing cipher categories NULL ciphers (no encryption) not offered (OK) Anonymous NULL Ciphers (no authentication) not offered (OK) Export ciphers (w/o ADH+NULL) not offered (OK) LOW: 64 Bit + DES, RC[2,4], MD5 (w/o export) not offered (OK) Triple DES Ciphers / IDEA offered Obsoleted CBC ciphers (AES, ARIA etc.) offered Strong encryption (AEAD ciphers) with no FS offered (OK) Forward Secrecy strong encryption (AEAD ciphers) offered (OK)

Tested with testssl.sh [1]

[1] - https://github.com/testssl/testssl.sh
by ViewTrick1002 | 2025-05-08 15:19:34+00:00
You do know that nuclear power has experienced negative learning by doing throughout its entire life?

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03014...

You don’t get ”free electricity” with absolutely massive handouts to the nuclear industry.

Instead renewables and storage are delivering on the ”too cheap to meter” promise.
by mlyle | 2025-05-08 15:19:58+00:00
> I am within mine to remind everyone to please help your friend, your neighbor, your town, state, and country before you look further afield.

Nah. We have memberships in families, neighborhoods, friend groups, local areas, cultural groups, nations, and the whole world. And problems at any of these levels can grow to the point where they affect us, too. And places where the needs are most acute and broad stand the greatest chances of developing to not be as acute of problems anymore and indeed to offer value to the overall world community through trade.

Indeed, the extreme version of what you're saying is why so many only give to their church communities which are insular and isolated. Or to just retain everything.

70% of my giving is domestic, but I think it's nuts to ignore the rest of the world. Yes, things improved in distant lands maybe are harder for me to see and have less of a direct impact on those around me; so discount their benefit some, but that marginal benefit is so much larger...
by pphysch | 2025-05-08 15:20:14+00:00
Anyone with a truly global perspective will notice multiple elephant-sizes omissions from Gates' statement. The premise that deep, systemic societal issues can be addressed directly while stepping on egg-shells around political topics is laughable. In 2025, you cannot separate starving kids and poverty alleviation from global politics and the world order.

His #1 goal listed is almost offensive when you consider what is happening right now in May 2025 -- an utterly preventable scenario that he can't even mention lest it get "too political" and tar his image.

In other words, it's perfectly valid to be skeptical of his motives, which seem primarily to be around elevating his personal brand and legacy.
by Y_Y | 2025-05-08 15:20:16+00:00
Since you asked, my objection is both aesthetic and semantic, though I was really referring to the semantic part above.

I think you've hit the nail on the head with this visual vs. verbal distinction.

I can add a few clarifying details. I don't use IDEs as much as basic text editors maybe with highlighting, and I try not to rely on any fancy features. It does worry me that the allcaps use you describe is (afaik) not known to the editor or interpreter, so if you make a mistake or the symbol gets out of sync with its meaning (re: pattern variables) you may have a false signal. Finally I'll say that in the end I can't suggest a good way to treat these special variables, and so maybe I don't get it, or tastes like mine would be better served by a different formalism for macros.
by mock-possum | 2025-05-08 15:21:26+00:00
Yeah I’m puzzled by this too - I suppose it helped that I wasn’t living in school housing, I was living at home for most of college, so my only college expenses were tuition, transportation, and supplies, all of which could be paid directly by my loan issuers but - yeah, I never saw a cent of cash, either through student loans or financial aid, it all just went directly to my school.
by kayodelycaon | 2025-05-08 15:21:44+00:00
> Stating this implies that minimizing risks and maximizing benefit is not a need of most customers?

I believe this should have meaning. It would mean risk mitigation is a primary objective of the company. And not every company decides to consider risk mitigation as a primary objective.

The problem is that risk mitigation is a long term objective. Who has time for that?
by sfilmeyer | 2025-05-08 15:21:50+00:00
>On the other hand, even 0.01% is not acceptable when the system is responsible for human lives.

I've got bad news for you about a whole lot of medical tests and interventions if 0.01% is unacceptable for you. I get your point that the stakes might be higher with medical technology than in some other fields, but you're still setting the bar too high.

The first pathogen I saw mentioned by name while skimming through the linked article was H. Pylori, where the false-positive and false-negative rates for various currently used tests are several dozen times worse than that at about 0.30-0.90% [0]. Even just being hospitalized in and of itself has failure rates. Just eyeballing some of the numbers at [1] and elsewhere, I suspect that at least 0.01% of hospitalizations result in a death attributable to a hospital acquired infection.

[0] https://www.aafp.org/pubs/afp/issues/2019/0701/p16.html [1] https://www.cdc.gov/healthcare-associated-infections/php/dat...
by bunderbunder | 2025-05-08 15:22:23+00:00
I'd go a step further and say that duck typing is more than just structural typing's dynamic counterpart. Because, again, that's confounding two different axes. Dynamic vs static describes when type checking happens and whether types are associated with names or with values. But it doesn't necessarily describe the definition of "type".

The real difference between structural typing and duck typing is that structural typing requires all of a type's declared members to be present for an object to be considered compatible. Duck typing only requires the members that are actually being accessed to be present.

This is definitely more common in dynamic languages, but I'm not aware of any particular reason why that kind of checking couldn't also be done statically.
by somenameforme | 2025-05-08 15:22:59+00:00
There are pretty much 0 people who think healthcare insurance providers should be intentionally engaging in delay, deny, defend as a means of maximizing profit. Passing a law against stands essentially 0 chance of happening. If it was passed, it would intentionally have loopholes aplenty buried in a hundred page document that essentially 0 people, including those who wrote it, could understand.

Modern democracy mostly just doesn't seem to work how it ought.
by throw10920 | 2025-05-08 15:22:59+00:00
When I say "it doesn't work" I mean that it doesn't allow you to write good code, not "doesn't work" as in the sense that people don't like it. That latter one doesn't make any sense, as languages like PHP "work" for many tens (hundreds?) of thousands of people.

I'm well aware of the tendency of Rust programmers to write bad code, constrained by the language, and then be deluded into thinking that that's good code.
by ViewTrick1002 | 2025-05-08 15:23:10+00:00
People think it is cool. Spicy rocks make heat.

Which was followed by climate change denying conservatives who found their position untenable embracing nuclear power being able to create a culture war issue in debates about climate change.

All in the name of preventing the disruption of their fossil assets by stymying renewables.

Peter Dutton in Australia which now lost is the perfect example of this with his ”coal to nuclear” plan leading to massively increased emissions for decades to come.
by zahlman | 2025-05-08 15:23:12+00:00
Snark like this is neither productive nor accurate.

Regarding the now flagged and killed response:

> Link to a duplicate that isn't actually a duplicate, yet you will still get your question closed as a duplicate with a link to the "dupe" you linked and directly stated as not actually a duplicate.

Unfortunately, it would be both too time consuming and too traumatic to share with you the years of experience I have on the meta site of people protesting that their very obvious duplicates were not duplicates because of trivial and irrelevant details, not to mention the people resisting the idea of duplicate closure on principle. But as I've said in other comments already: if you think something isn't a duplicate, you're welcome to take the case to the meta site.
by matthewdgreen | 2025-05-08 15:23:18+00:00
A more serious political observation is that this administration operates on the theory that possession is 9/10ths of the law. If they control a pot of funding that you need to maintain normal business operations, they’ll block its payment until you’re out of business. What are the courts going to do about it? The law is not something they respect.

The flip side is that in other areas their powers are much more limited. Revoke Harvard’s tax exempt status? That’ll filter through the courts and years from now Harvard might actually have to make a tax payment (I expect they won’t.)

From a societal perspective, however, we’re in deep shit. There’s an excellent chance that you or a loved one will die from a potentially curable disease (cancer, dementia) because the research and clinical trials that should be bringing us those drugs are all being murdered. We should be reacting to this the same way we respond when someone shoots up a school or hospital. A friend who is a breast cancer survivor just had her trial moved from NIH funding to industry funding, but she is one of the lucky ones.
by ttfkam | 2025-05-08 15:23:26+00:00
I liked checked exceptions. I just think they were overused. Had a CS prof that summed up the optimal case like this:

Programmer's fault: runtime exception

Not programmer's fault: checked exception

Reading from a file but the disk fails? Not programmer's fault. IOException (checked). Missed a null somewhere? Programmer's fault. NullPointerException (unchecked).