MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by sitkack | 2025-05-08 20:13:34+00:00
https://archive.is/psChH

> In his sharpest rebuke of the world’s richest man, a distinction he once held, Bill Gates accused Elon Musk at least twice in the past week of “killing” children in the world’s poorest countries by cutting foreign aid under the Trump administration.

> Mr. Gates, the billionaire Microsoft co-founder and philanthropist, assailed Mr. Musk for the actions he has taken as the head of President Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency during interviews with The New York Times Magazine and The Financial Times.
by lolinder | 2025-05-08 20:13:35+00:00
This. This is what I'm talking about. If you can't see it, nothing I will say can change it, but suffice it to say that I'm more convinced than ever that SO is culturally very sick.

I'll just refer back to the key relevant part of my initial post:

> A small core of contributors to a community resource invariably seems to develop a sense of "us against the world"—the thin blue line of police lore isn't an isolated thing, it's what happens when people view themselves as lone defenders of something they care about. And just like with police, that can result in a toxic culture that begins to actively degrade the plebian outgroup that they started out serving.
by GuB-42 | 2025-05-08 20:13:41+00:00
There is still an advantage to using Qt over dozens of libraries that offer the same functionality.

Qt is backed by a single company, so all you have to watch out for is that company. Also, Qt is generally high quality, I have worked with it, read the source code, etc... and I generally liked what I saw. So I can reasonably assume that quality is consistent overall. When you have many libraries from many independent developers, it doesn't work. The JSON parser may be good, but it doesn't tell me anything about the library that deal with internationalization for instance, and if I wanted to keep track of everything, that's several time the work compared to a single vendor.

I agree that Qt is bloated though, but multiplatform UI frameworks are hard to keep light. There is a lot going on in a desktop UIs that people only notice when it isn't there. I tend to treat them like I treat the standard libraries, the OS, and for web apps, the browser. Big components, but you reasonably can't do without.
by karencarits | 2025-05-08 20:13:44+00:00
I think it's also important to recognize that while the Catholic church has values and principles they adhere to and are unlikely to change because they are so deeply founded in tradition and scripture - for example, that marriage (as in the sacrament) is between a man and a woman - the "men of the cloth" are expected to take care of their ministry as caring and loving sheperds. But that process is often based on personal and individual relationships and they will not reach headlines in the media.
by balfirevic | 2025-05-08 20:13:54+00:00
> I'd say that if I invite friends to do "anything", it is because I am prepared to feed them if needed

Agreed! Though I think ordering is also perfectly fine, as are the other options you mentioned.

But what prompted me to respond in the first place was:

> but here in France if you invite some friends over, you are expected to cook. The only time its okay to order food its when people came for something else in the first place (moving, doing some handywork...)

Which is just silly.
by CamperBob2 | 2025-05-08 20:14:17+00:00
Indistinguishable from an attack. I've said that all along.

The actions of the Trump administration -- and of those who voted for him -- are indistinguishable from a deliberate enemy attack. We're living in the world of the classic Pogo cartoon: we have met the enemy, and he is literally us.

No outside forces were needed this time around. No Dust Bowls, no Chicxulub meteors, no phantom Communist menaces, no Pearl Harbors, no 9/11s. Just Fox News, pretty much.
by mystified5016 | 2025-05-08 20:14:20+00:00
Yup, that's what all my tattoos are. They're markers of things I've done, experiences had, and mistakes made.

If when I get older and those memories mean less to me, the tattoos will become markers of who I was and what was once important to me. I could see myself getting some of them removed, but I don't think it's likely.

Because of the way my brain is, it's difficult for me to stay attached to the past. Having permanent marks on my body makes the past unforgettable, inescapable. I like to think it's made an improvement on the person I've become, but of course it's impossible to know.
by vsgherzi | 2025-05-08 20:14:34+00:00
It feels a bit like throwing the baby out with the bathwater to completely swap languages. I was hoping rust could be a more general language for me.... I know they're not interested but I wonder if the foundation would ever entertain an opt in more expansive std library?

Go's is very nice however if I remember they ran into an issue with crypto that was hard to fix due to it being so bundled to the std library.
by int_19h | 2025-05-08 20:14:39+00:00
I understand that there may be other requirements that dictate the design. It's just that the specific one that you gave originally - that of displaying the values - strikes me as something that shouldn't be difficult even when you have units reflected statically in the type system.

> At the point where you convert to unitless you lose all the benefit of strong types.

Right, but if you do that right before it actually gets displayed, then it shouldn't be a problem since all actual computations have been performed already? I mean, you also need to convert numbers to text to render them, so all the same arguments apply.

So e.g. in the "ideal" desktop app using MVVM, that would happen on the boundary between the model and the view-model.

> One part of that trade off that you are adding the ability to convert to unitless and thus making it easy to use unitless where you shouldn't.

But any typed unit-of-measure system inherently has such an ability if it tracks units properly for arithmetic operations - you just divide by 1 of the same unit to get a unitless value. E.g. in F#:

let v = 10<m/s> // in m/s let n = v / 1<m/s> // unitless
by tart-lemonade | 2025-05-08 20:15:58+00:00
Indeed, and he's from Dolton (a southern suburb) and lived in Hyde Park (south side of Chicago) for awhile. (Not that it's uncommon for south siders to favor the Cubs, but it certainly is amusing.)

https://blockclubchicago.org/2025/05/08/pope-leo-xiv-is-a-cu...

https://abc7chicago.com/post/2025-is-new-pope-cardinal-rober...
by mixmastamyk | 2025-05-08 20:16:06+00:00
Worked at an aerospace concern in the early 90s… for the first year or so there was no firewall. Yes, my Mac and PC directly on the internet with routable addresses.

I soon set up a website and webcam as they were shipped. CU-See-Me blew my mind. At some point I stood up a Quake server and invited friends to play. ;-)
by Beijinger | 2025-05-08 20:16:09+00:00
Not all of his wealth is so clean as it looks.

The competition against Linux was often nasty. Governments often got a bad deal. Think Munich and Linux.

And I still remember ugly stories about licensing of windows and Africa. This was not necessary Billy who did it, but he profited from the corruption.

Admire Linus. Admire Richard Stallmann. Don't admire Bill.
by godelski | 2025-05-08 20:16:52+00:00
I wouldn't call that political, though the politics sure can cause it.

Measurements are never perfect and we need to stress this a lot. A measurement is meaningless without good interpretation. People want to ignore the latter and often politics is the means of resolution. But what matters more? Who sounds right or who is right. It's usually easy to identify experts because they can't ignore nuance. But they're long winded, boring, and present more complicated solutions. That's misinterpreted as dismissal (and sometimes they are too quick to dismiss).

It's always about alignment. The whole tech debt thing is alignment. A big issue is many of our big companies have sacrificed future earnings but short term ones. These are good decisions if you only care about shareholders and if by shareholders you mean short term investors who have no interest in the long term stability of the organization. But if you want a company to last and you want long term profits to be high then these usually aren't the best decisions. The bigger question is why everyone has become so myopic. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43873275
by arp242 | 2025-05-08 20:16:55+00:00
Jesus travelled around the land healing the sick and helping the poor. He didn't travel around the land with a sign saying "God hates fags".

There are just a few (oblique) mentions of homosexuality in the New Testament. It clearly wasn't a main concern. Pope Francis' interpretation always seemed completely consistent with scripture. It's the extremely heavy emphasis on homosexuality that's inconsistent with it.

Also: being gay and gay acts are two different things. Catholic priests are not supposed to engage in any sexual acts, so in that sense, it doesn't really matter if a priest is gay.
by gjm11 | 2025-05-08 20:17:04+00:00
That's a confusing paragraph.

> The addition of the white smoke to announce the election of a new pope is more recent, however. Baumgartner traces it to 1914 [...]

but also

> In ancient times, the method to give the smoke these colors was to burn the ballots used in the voting with a bit of wet straw [...]

In ... the ancient times of 1914? Something's wrong here.

(For what it's worth, the Wikipedia article about this says that before 1914 black smoke meant "we held a ballot but it didn't successfully choose a new pope" and no smoke meant something other than that, though it's not clear there what the "we got one" signal was. The Wikipedia article, unlike the Catholic News Agency one, cites some references, but I haven't checked them.)
by nobody9999 | 2025-05-08 20:17:23+00:00
>Fingerprints are collected only from criminals or people who visit US. Why did Europeans agree to being treated like criminals or tourists I don't understand.

Only if you assume that anyone who works for a SEC regulated company[0], applies for a California driver's license[1], current and former US Military personnel[2] healthcare workers, teachers, real estate agents, child care providers and others[3] are either "criminals" or "tourists."

If so, into which bucket would you place CA driver's license applicants? Criminals? How about US Military personnel? Tourists?

Please do elucidate.

[0] https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/17/240.17f-2

[1] https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/vehicle-industry-services/occu...

[2] https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/8/1440f

[3] https://blog.certifixlivescan.com/state-by-state-guide-to-fi...
by mandevil | 2025-05-08 20:17:27+00:00
Both military and civil GPS signals are L-band. Any jamming that runs across the L-band will hit both of them. And since the frequencies are publicly available (and it is possible to confirm that they are correct with your own detecting equipment) it is not any harder to jam the purely military frequency versus the civil and military frequency. The only thing is having more frequencies to jam should mean less power on any given frequency for a given amount of power, especially since you would probably want to jam BeiDou and Galileo signals as well (all also on the L-band). I mean, since Ukraine and Russia can buy things on the open market, they could buy BeiDou receivers just like GPS, so I would expect them to target all of those frequencies.

Block III GPS satellites added a new feature, designed to help the military signals defeat jamming. They added a "spot beam" - a high gain directional antenna capable of covering an area about 200km wide with 20db extra power, to try and burn through jamming. This spot beam is only used for military signals, and it requires extra processing on the receiver to use (since the satellite still has the earth-wide antenna broadcasting the military signals, a military receiver inside the spot-beam area would see two different signals from the same satellite, absent jamming).

During the Biden administration, at least, USAF ISR assets spent a lot of time running race-tracks just at the edge of Ukrainian airspace, monitoring events in the country, and I would expect that would be something that would be a good use case for the spot beams, though I don't know about Ukraine ever getting any of those receivers, and I would not expect coordination with the USSF on pointing the high gain antenna to support UAF operations even under Biden, but all of that is my speculation, I haven't seen anything on where these high gains are pointing.
by jbellis | 2025-05-08 20:17:44+00:00
(creator here)

idk, everyone else seems to want to take the 40 year old IDE paradigm we're all used to (really! that's how old Turbo Pascal 3 is!) and graft AI onto it. I think we need a fundamentally different design to truly take advantage of the change from "I'm mostly reading and writing code at human speeds" to "I'm mostly supervising the AI which is better at generating syntax than I am."

of course the downside to going against the crowd is that the crowd is usually right, we'll see how it goes!
by wizzwizz4 | 2025-05-08 20:18:23+00:00
It's not possible to write (usefully novel) proofs with an LLM, but we have other algorithms that can do that. Perhaps a reinforcement learning component could improve upon the search strategy in some way, but there's no compelling reason to use a predictive text model. (There's not even good reason to believe that naïve reinforcement learning would improve the mathematical ability of a system: RL says "that was good: do more of that", and mathematics is about discovery: thinking thoughts that nobody has ever thought before.)
by AleksMisztal | 2025-05-08 20:18:39+00:00
Hey HN! I'm Aleks Misztal, one of the cofounders behind tracelight.

We’ve built an AI that understands spreadsheet financial models and it's available directly in Excel. You can chat with your whole spreadsheet and get natural language descriptions of the precedents in every formula.

Behind the scenes, it's like a coding agent - it combines reasoning models with tools such as semantic search, formula evaluation, and precedent tracing. It's already pretty good (took a lot of iteration on prompts and tool input and output schemas) and will get much better over the coming weeks.

We've also trained a specialised model for semantic understanding of spreadsheets. It's able to assign meaning to each cell in the sheet based on the labels, layout, formulas, styles, etc. We use it to power semantic search and to give feedback to the agent when it uses other tools.

You can download it for free on the Excel add-in store. Let us know what you think!
by yencabulator | 2025-05-08 20:19:00+00:00
There's been attempts to standardize a way for a HTTPS server to say "Yes, this response really did come from me", but nothing has been really adopted.

https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc9421.html

https://httpsig.org/

Without the server participating, best you can do is a LetsEncrypt-style "we made this request from many places and got the same response" statement by a trusted party.

Inspiration: roughtime can be used to piggyback a "proof of known hash at time" mechanism, without blockchain waste. That lets you say "I've had this file since this time".

https://www.imperialviolet.org/2016/09/19/roughtime.html

https://int08h.com/post/to-catch-a-lying-timeserver/

https://blog.cloudflare.com/roughtime/

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12599705
by cj | 2025-05-08 20:19:29+00:00
Quick googling on honorary knighthood:

> [Honorary knighthoods] are a way for the UK to recognize the achievements of individuals who are not UK citizens. They are awarded on the advice of the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office, and are conferred by the Crown.

> In the US, accepting a title of nobility from a foreign state is prohibited without the consent of Congress. However, this prohibition is different from accepting an honorary knighthood, which is more of a recognition or award rather than a title of nobility.
by jmward01 | 2025-05-08 20:19:34+00:00
If you like 'em get one. If you don't like it later, remove it. Sounds good to me. I always take ideas to the extreme to see if they still make sense. It seems like over time tattoos are becoming less permanent and it isn't inconceivable that they could become exceptionally transient meaning add/remove at will (or even become 'live' interactive displays). Does that change their meaning or value? Some people wear a belt buckle or jewelry for decades because of sentimental value even though they can easily change things. I suspect in a future where this is easy/normal we will see even more variety, expression and meaning.
by compiler-guy | 2025-05-08 20:19:46+00:00
All of those things are real problems with Google, and its decisions, but they don't seem to be signs of technical debt. I suppose they _could_ be, but they could all have plenty of other causes, many of which seem more plausible to me.

1. Decreasing quality of search and poor SEO technique responses may be caused by technical debt, but they also might be the results of strategic product decisions to make more money. That isn't technical debt, that's enshittification for money.

2. Similarly. If Google chooses to do worse spam filtering in order to get more advertising in front of its customers (for example), that's a bad product decision, not technical debt.

3. Constant drops on projects are simply resource allocation decisions, unless of course, they are dropped because they are too expensive to maintain. But there are a myriad of other reasons a product might be dropped.

4. A million more things.

There are numerous valid reasons to dislike Google these days (and I say that as an employee!), but tracing them all back to technical debt is finding the wrong reason for real problems. Similarly with worse spam filtering.
by danjl | 2025-05-08 20:20:27+00:00
I am a huge supporter of completely re-working the IDE UI as well. I'm not arguing for keeping the existing IDE interfaces. I like that folks are experimenting with entirely new interfaces. In fact, I'd go further and suggest that all of the overly complex interfaces used on any sort of content-creation app, like Unity, Unreal, Photoshop, as well as code IDEs, will eventually be completely refactored to remove all the old complexity in favor of either chat-based or other AI-driven interfaces. My point is simply that there are too many new AI-driven IDEs for folks to try out, even the developers of those IDEs. Many of the features in Brokk that were seemingly described in the Brokk 101 blog video as "differentiators" are existing Copilot features. Has the author ever used Copilot? Or just Cursor? Or another AI variant?
by weird_trousers | 2025-05-08 20:20:29+00:00
That's the main criticism my colleagues have about Rust: a lot of unmaintained crates, and most of the time a lot of dependencies for... (almost) nothing.

It seems most of Rust developers adopt the pov of web front-end developers since a few years: depend on a lot of libraries for small things, never update your project to 1.0, and abandon "quickly" to build something new... and redo it again.

I really hope that alternatives like Zig or Jai will not let the community do like what they did with Rust.
by derriz | 2025-05-08 20:20:35+00:00
I wouldn't call it "a lot" when you put it into perspective.

China has about 60GW of nuclear generation capacity - this is after 70 years of building their first nuclear plant. It has about 1600GW of wind and solar after about 10 years.

In 2024, China added 80GW of wind capacity and 277GW of solar. In the first 3 months of 2025 alone, 60GW of new solar capacity and 15GW of new wind capacity were added. In 2024, 4.3GW of nuclear was added.
by tim333 | 2025-05-08 20:20:52+00:00
As someone who was around back then I think the biggest thing that made it easier to achieve financial security was that housing was cheaper for a number of reasons, a big one being the government building a lot of council housing, that you couldn't buy, only rent. Also buy to let wasn't really a big thing due to it being very hard to evict anyone. Not really due to tax.
by mvdtnz | 2025-05-08 20:21:25+00:00
The opposite of "microservices" is not "monoliths". The organisation I work at has something like 250-300+ microservices all in a monolith. This is the best of both worlds for large applications, in my opinion.

(It's no coincidence that this company was largely loaded up with ex-Googlers in the early days).
by bunderbunder | 2025-05-08 20:21:36+00:00
I'd say this is a job for feature flags. That way you always have exactly one live version of the code, but still retain the ability to hide WIP from users until it's ready.

If you're instead doing this with feature branches or something like that, then by definition you don't have CI. You have NI: Never Integration.

Because, to an approximation, there's never any point in time where all of the code you're working on is integrated together so that everyone has a chance to see how what they're doing interacts with what everyone else is doing. And yes, it is possible for a branch to successfully auto-merge and produce something that compiles and passes all automated tests, and still introduce a horrible regression defect because of an unanticipated interaction between two different changes on two different feature branches. I don't see it happen often, but when it does it usually creates such a big production SNAFU that even once every 5 years is still way too often for my taste.
by xienze | 2025-05-08 20:21:54+00:00
> He was all pissed and storming out and said "I bet it was the democrats that make us do that!".

If your story is actually true, that man is somehow oblivious to the fact that Democrats are the ones always bringing up the “it’s so hard to get a driver’s license! And racist to require one for anything!” arguments. I’m not sure how you’ve come to the conclusion that I want to inconvenience people out of spite. I’d like to inconvenience illegal immigrants from getting their education subsidized by citizens. California wants the opposite.
by Capricorn2481 | 2025-05-08 20:22:18+00:00
> the law is better equiped to investigate and unbiased

It's the bias of the Church and the unwillingness to involve the law that people are criticizing.

Also "The law is unbiased" is a new one. They are as unbiased as you and I.

Very disgusting that, to this day, this cover-up is defended.
by delusional | 2025-05-08 20:22:27+00:00
I'm honestly not that interested in constant logging or central collection. I think it's a perfectly useful product, but I find it hard to get buy in for that sort of system in the short term.

Supposedly `kubectl debug` does allow you to set a `sysadmin` profile and grant the debug sidecar `privileged` access. I think that would be a neat low cost way to get value out of your product quickly, right when I have an issue, which would maybe help build some organizational trust and goodwill to make the rest of the stack easier to buy.

It would also solve an issue for me that I would really like solving :P
by nativeit | 2025-05-08 20:22:48+00:00
I stumbled over these incredibly remote islands while surfing Google Earth, and found these stories rather compelling, in the context of how large of an impact humanity has on even the most remote locations on our planet.

Related coverage of the Pitcairn islands (in chronological order, old to new):

- https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2017-05-16/plastic-pollu...

- https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/health/coronavirus/12619239...

- https://news.sky.com/story/royal-navy-finds-uninhabited-hend...

EDIT: Formatting
by toast0 | 2025-05-08 20:22:54+00:00
You can give to state and local governments and get a federal tax deduction [1], per 26 U.S. Code § 170 (c) (1)

> (1) A State, a possession of the United States, or any political subdivision of any of the foregoing, or the United States or the District of Columbia, but only if the contribution or gift is made for exclusively public purposes.

But not if you make a gift to federal agency (unless that's listed somewhere else)

https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/26/170