MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by meroes | 2025-05-20 16:58:23+00:00
Look at this recent “data incident”

https://oag.ca.gov/system/files/Partnership%20HealthPlan%20o...

“Based on the investigation into this incident, it was determined that the information involved may include your name, Social Security number, date of birth, Driver’s License number (if provided), Tribal ID number (if provided), medical record number, treatment, diagnosis, prescription and other medical information, health insurance information, member portal username and password, email address, and address.”

It’s not about innocence or guilt. If you leak so much information these people will have to monitor every single account, credit card, etc for life, on top of all their personal sensitive info being leaked and possibly accessed by unscrupulous employers. The damage is incredible. It’s not about innocence. It’s about responsibility.
by nomel | 2025-05-20 16:58:24+00:00
I think it would be more unusual, and concerning, if an intelligent individual didn't attempt to apply their expertise for a head-canon of something unknown.

Coming up with an idea for how something works, by applying your expertise, is the fundamental foundation of intelligence, learning, and was behind every single advancement of human understanding.

People thinking is always a good thing. Thinking about the unknown is better. Thinking with others is best, and sharing those thoughts isn't somehow bad, even if they're not complete.
Conductor MCP Server is now public
by AWOrpington | 2025-05-20 16:58:38+00:00
Open Source Conductor: https://github.com/conductor-oss/conductor

Enterprise Orkes Conductor: https://orkes.io

And finally, the MCP Server, which is compatible with both open source Conductor and Orkes Enterprise Conductor: https://github.com/conductor-oss/conductor-mcp

If you aren't familiar with Workflow Orchestration, there's an article here: https://www.ibm.com/think/topics/workflow-orchestration

In brief (and in my own words), workflow orchestration separates the state from the code so they can be managed independently.

Here's a blurb I grabbed about Conductor:

"Conductor is an open-source, Apache 2.0 licensed workflow orchestration framework. You can use Conductor to easily build highly reliable distributed applications using the language of your choice.

Conductor removes the complexities of maintaining and propagating the state of the execution while increasing the robustness of the application by natively supporting retries and error handling scenarios. That way you can focus on coding the business logic of your application instead of the complexities of building the distributed ecosystem."
by baobun | 2025-05-20 16:58:46+00:00
> The French supplier of the devices – a company called Oportik – has been stopped from trading and three staff members arrested. It is believed to have sold about 5,000 of the phones

> While they are themselves perfectly legal in France, it is a crime to supply a prisoner with a phone.

Is the allegation that the three staff knowingly supplied to prisoners or what's the story with those arrests?
by ghssds | 2025-05-20 16:58:58+00:00
>Most users are happy to just go to ChatGPT and talk to whatever’s available. Why is that?

I can talk to ChatGPT without authentication. The obligation to create a username/password is a step so high no current chatbot can overcome. And even if it's so good I would be willing to authenticate, how would I know? For me to know, they ask a username/password I'm unwilling to provide without knowing.
by stephenr | 2025-05-20 17:00:30+00:00
> Are people not finding these tools useful, even with the significant investment and hype in the space?

How exactly would someone find hype useful?

Hell, even the investment part is questionable in an industry that's known for "fake it till you make it" and "thanks for the journey" messages when it's inevitably bought by someone else and changes dramatically or is shut down.
by csomar | 2025-05-20 17:00:55+00:00
Capital investment are potential future negative outflows. They do not replace exports (goods and services). That is unless these investments are a scam (ahem), investors are probably expecting a yield in the future and to retrieve their investment. Movement of capital will be good if it was balanced, but it is not: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_international_investment_p...

The US runs a NIIP of negative $27 Trillion. This is a consequence of the trade deficit as the deficit is being financed mainly with this money.
by robertlagrant | 2025-05-20 17:01:27+00:00
"the need to advocate for yourself" isn't the only thing you said. I was referring to "the first line of offense for the health management companies whose whole function is to deny healthcare" doesn't apply everywhere. I also don't think it particularly applies in the US, although I'm happy to see evidence of that.

Despite all that, as you say, you won't be sued for saying that stuff.
by munificent | 2025-05-20 17:01:32+00:00
> But, we didn't have the budget for an editor. Instead we set up the asset pipeline to hot-reload everything. Meshes, scenes, materials and animations from Maya.

I was the tools lead for "Superman Returns: The Videogame" (the PS2/X630 Superman game, no the N64 one). We did the same thing. All of Metropolis was essentially "modeled" in Maya with plug-ins handling importing and exporting between that and the in-game format.

It was an open world streaming game and it would have killed an artist's machine to try to load the entire city into Maya, so the plug-in would let an artist pick which chunks of the city to load, load them in, let them make changes, and save the results back out.

It worked out fairly well.
by lelandfe | 2025-05-20 17:02:02+00:00
There is no robust accessibility linter tool (axe covers only a portion) and you don't want to add ARIA attributes to all HTML markup. Both "accessible" and "responsive" are ultimately subjective, and all code gen tools I've used are more than happy to introduce startling a11y regressions.

It'll probably get there eventually, but today these are not things solvable with context.
by inglor_cz | 2025-05-20 17:02:08+00:00
The Helsinki-Tallinn tunnel would be expensive, but in the current climate of hostilities with Russia, the EU could support it just to make a point.

It would also enable high-speed services from Finland to Central Europe - Rail Baltica to Tallinn is currently being built, so Helsinki-Warsaw could be a plausible connection, doable in less than 8 hours. (More than ideal, but trains that run for 8 hours from one end of their journey to another are commonplace in Central Europe.)
by srean | 2025-05-20 17:03:37+00:00
Yes indeed, thanks for pointing this out. There are strong relationships between max-ent and Bayesian formulations.

For example one can use a non-uniform prior over the micro-states. If that prior happens to be in the Darmois-Koopman family that implicitly means that there are some non explicitly stated constraints that bind the micro-state statistics.
by michaelt | 2025-05-20 17:05:10+00:00
Imagine you ran a spy agency and you were infiltrating signal, Facebook, Google, aws, cloudflare, and so on.

Would you have them make a secure back door that could only be intentionally designed, and potentially traced back to you?

Or would you just have them be incompetent in plausible, deniable ways?

Nobody’s getting shot for espionage because they chose log4j and it had the shell shock bug.
by alephnerd | 2025-05-20 17:05:31+00:00
Because your point is that the wage gap between the US and Chinese household would close significantly - yet it does not.

Even with those multipliers, the wage gap between your median Thai and Malaysian household and your median Chinese household is significant, let alone with an American household.

The wage gap cannot be solved until there is a serious expansion in China's social safety net if China wishes to continue to use a production driven growth model.

This is what Japan, Germany, the US before Reagan, South Korea, and much of Eastern Europe did when they reached similar developmental precipices to China today.

China can see a significant jump in living standards similar to that which Poland saw over the past 15-20 years if the social safety net is expanded.
by jacob019 | 2025-05-20 17:06:15+00:00
Generally, I keep the context. If I'm one shotting then I invoke a new agent. All calls and responses append to the agent's chat history. Agent's are relatively short lived, so the context length isn't typically an issue. With the pricing agent the initial data has been longer than the context window sometimes, but that just means it needs more preprocessing. Now if there is a real reason that I would want to manage it more actively, I can reach out to the agent internals. I have a tool call emulation layer, because some models have poor native tool support, and in those cases it's sometimes necessary to retry calls if the response fails validation. In those cases, I will only keep the last successful try in the conversation history.

There is one special case where I manage it more actively. I wrote an REPL process analyst, to help build the pricing agent and refine the policy document. In that case I would have long threads with an artifact attachment. So I added a facility to redact old versions of the artifact replacing them with [attachment: filename] and just keep the last one. It works better that way because multiple versions in the same conversation history confuse the model, and I don't like to burn tokens.

For longer lived state, I give the agent memory tools. For example the pricing agent's initial state includes the most recent decision batch and reasoning notes, and the agent can request older copies. The agent also keeps a notebook which they are required to update, allowing agents to develop long running strategies and experiments. And they use it to do just that. Honestly the whole system works much better than I anticipated. The latest crop of models are awesome, especially Gemini 2.5 flash.
by harrall | 2025-05-20 17:06:42+00:00
Most of the the heap dump will be filled with stuff like java.util.String!blahjava.util.ArrayList!

Though the heap dump would have messages in flight at the time. It's obviously not as useful if you are just trying to grab messages for a specific person.

Frankly the most useful part might be any in-memory secret keys, which could be useful for breaking deeper into the system.
by psunavy03 | 2025-05-20 17:07:26+00:00
Why is this even a question? I run one hell of a personal trade deficit with Costco and Safeway, because they have groceries and supplies I need to buy, and I have money to give them. Countries are no different.

The whole point of free trade is a win-win game. Someone has stuff/services you need, and you're willing to pay for them. In the end, everyone is happier than before.
by avital | 2025-05-20 17:07:27+00:00
I work at OpenAI (not on Codex) and have used it successfully for multiple projects so far. Here's my flow:

- Always run more than one rollout of the same prompt -- they will turn out different

- Look through the parallel implementations, see which is best (even if it's not good enough), then figure out what changes to your prompt would have helped nudge towards the better solution.

- In addition, add new modifications to the prompt to resolve the parts that the model didn't do correctly.

- Repeat loop until the code is good enough.

If you do this and also split your work into smaller parallelizable chunks, you can find yourself spending a few hours only looping between prompt tuning and code review with massive projects implemented in a short period of time.

I've used this for "API munging" but also pretty deep Triton kernel code and it's been massive.
by Suppafly | 2025-05-20 17:07:48+00:00
>A claim that I find similarly frustrating is that English only has one word for love, whereas there are several other (often ancient) languages that have scores of words for love.

A lot of that is because we use multi-word phrases instead of single words to express a lot of ideas too. Greek might use philia where we'd just say 'brotherly love', it doesn't make our language less for not having a single word for the concept. Every time I've heard someone say "you can't express x in English", I've been able to express it in 1-4 words. Often we have a word but the other person just isn't familiar with it and assumes it doesn't exist, or assumes it's not known because it was borrowed into English.
by sailingparrot | 2025-05-20 17:08:50+00:00
> Anyone who understands the tech does know this

Yes, and this is does not mean the technology can never be useful.

I work everyday with that have false beliefs about a tech, I have a friend that until recently thought there were rivers on the moon, and some believe climate change is a hoax, I often forget things people told me and they have to tell me again.

Are humans not useful at anything ?
by overfeed | 2025-05-20 17:08:51+00:00
> but indebtedness and the future having to pay up for the spending of the past

The debt is denominated USD, the US mint could hypothetically print a trillion dollar note and settle the debts. Doing so would wreck trust in the existing system - so it's not just about the debt, but people tend to gloss over how much control the US has over the debt, so the indebtedness (in USD) is a relatively small factor overall.
by cchianel | 2025-05-20 17:09:09+00:00
N-Queens can be solved (find a single valid solution) in polynomial time [1]. That being said, Local Search is a powerful technique that can solve a lot of problems such as employee scheduling, vehicle routing, or maintenance scheduling. You might want to take a look at Timefold [2], which is a local search solver that can be configured to use simulated annealing, tabu search, late acceptance and other local search algorithms. Note: I work for Timefold.

[1] https://stackoverflow.com/a/13109557

[2] https://solver.timefold.ai/
by troupo | 2025-05-20 17:09:14+00:00
Every advanced feature of MS Office is used by a different 5% of users. https://web.archive.org/web/20080316101025/http://blogs.msdn... (The whole series is worth reading: https://web.archive.org/web/20080316101025/http://blogs.msdn...)

--- start quote ---

The percentage difference in usage between the #100 command ("Accept Change") and the #400 command ("Reset Picture") is about the same in difference between #1 and #11 ("Change Font Size")

--- end quote ---
by dughnut | 2025-05-20 17:09:23+00:00
I am an engineer at an AEC firm you would probably recognize. I think there are a few competing products in this space. Owners don’t care how you do CEI or have their own absurd rituals pioneered in the 60s or 80s. DOTs are the worst offenders and their project delivery practices are largely 80+ years old.

My unsolicited advice is I would expect Owner-side administrators (IT people) to direct sales decisions, and they don’t care about users or working products. I have only ever met one CTO in the AEC space who even considered end user benefit. Unfortunately, this means your product quality and utility is not actually important as evidenced by the whole Bentley product line, but integration with existing products is. Nobody seems to make big money in tech for white-collar AEC unless Bentley or Autodesk buy your IP. Then they will crudely bolt it onto their garbage software and their missionaries embedded in large companies disguised as technologists and CAD managers will sell it.

My opinion is con-tech is totally broken for very complicated reasons with the private market (commercial architecture) being the only small voice of sanity since they compete on price sometimes.
by RyanOD | 2025-05-20 17:09:51+00:00
As a "for fun" side project, I've started building clones of retro classics in Pygame as a way to help beginners gain knowledge of procedural game dev fundamentals.

Python seems like a nice entry point and Pygame works well for the 2D classics like Frogger or Defender or Dig Dug or whatever. It's a lot of fun, but, woah! It's a lot more work than I was expecting.
by chessgecko | 2025-05-20 17:11:04+00:00
Actually since the qe to fix 2008 foreign investors/governments cut down on bond buying. Treasury has foreign bond holdings up about 2T since 2014 and current account deficits sum to around 7T.

Nowadays we're mostly selling companies and real estate. (though there was a nice jump in bond buying a few years when rates went up)
by inglor_cz | 2025-05-20 17:11:04+00:00
This is a lot easier to do with wooden sleepers than with concrete ones. You can drive new nails into wooden sleepers almost at will, so you can keep the sleepers in place and "just" move one rail to a different position. Concrete sleepers have pre-fabricated holes for the indicated gauge, which means replacing them.

German soldiers re-gauged Soviet railways on a very short notice too when Barbarossa started.
by okost1 | 2025-05-20 17:11:15+00:00
Hi. I appreciate your feedback. Basically, juvio stores all of the project requirements (versions of the packages and of the python interpreter) directly within the notebook itself using the PEP 723 spec. Then, when you open the notebook, a new ephemeral environment is created on the fly with all of the required dependencies. Therefore, you don't have to maintain a separate e.g. requirements.txt/conda.yaml/uv.lock file.
by 90s_dev | 2025-05-20 17:12:42+00:00
Working on paint app[1] now:

- [x] Add canvas with semi-transparent background

- [x] Make canvas resizable by dragging corner (min 1x1)

- [x] Show grid on canvas if grid button is checked

- [x] Make zoom adjustable by clicking and dragging zoom number up/down

- [x] Show selected color as square over canvas during mouse move

- [x] Allow click/drag to change square colors

- [x] Right-click/drag to erase squares

- [x] Support loading/saving bitmap

Hopefully I can finish it while this comment is editable! :D

As features are added, you will see them in the source code. Either:

1. Click the top-left button and click View Source

2. Download helloworld.zip from Downoad SDK and view /fs/sys/apps/paint.app.js

3. Open https://90s.dev/os/fs/sys/apps/paint.app.js in an incognito window

These all show the same live copy of the source for the paint app. The reason for the incognito window is because the service worker compiles TSX to JS at runtime.

[1] https://90s.dev/os/#sys/apps/paint.app.js

[edit] Ha, I did it! I got all the features working before the edit button went away! But it was about 2 hours, not 1. As a bonus I'll try to work on undo/redo.
by rolph | 2025-05-20 17:13:18+00:00
an example image depicts a phone about same size as a cigarette lighter, smooth n rouned all over. i have suspicions where these are hidden.

https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/800/cpsprodpb/7d41/live/82aafd...

"According to Le Monde newspaper, the devices were nicknamed "suppositories" by prison inmates because of their ease of concealment."
by angry_moose | 2025-05-20 17:14:19+00:00
I've been "lucky" enough to get to trial some AI FEM-like structural solvers.

At best, they're sortof ok for linear, small deformation problems. The kind of models where we could get an exact solution in ~5 minutes vs a fairly sloppy solution in ~30 seconds. Start throwing anything non-linear in and they just fall apart.

Maybe enough to do some very high-level concept selection but even that isn't great. I'm reasonably convinced some of them are just "curvature detectors" - make anything straight blue, anything with high curvature red, and interpolate everything else.
by tgma | 2025-05-20 17:15:04+00:00
Two things:

First, that's not the discussion at all. The question is does WSL have valid use cases and benefits over bare metal Linux. The answer is absolutely yes. For whatever reason you have the computer in front of you and you have the choice between the two modalities (many times you don't buy it, employer does, etc.)

Second, if everyone had your attitude, seeing PCs as "Windows computers" and stayed in their lanes in the 90s and 2000s, you would not have the option of three and a half supported "Linux computers" you are alluding to today. Viva hackers who see beyond the label.
by levihanlen | 2025-05-20 17:15:26+00:00
Hi HN, Levi here, author of the linked post.

As a writer and also the developer of an AI writing tool (Varu AI), I was really curious to see how AI would stack up against a novel I'd painstakingly wrote over a year (not published yet). So, I used Varu AI to generate a version of my story in about an hour of active work.

The AI was great in generating plot beats and character interactions, but also had some limitations in areas like worldbuilding and long-form consistency. I've detailed the good and the bad in the post.
by okost1 | 2025-05-20 17:15:29+00:00
Hi. Thanks for bringing this up. To be honest, I have never tried juv, but judging from the readme the ideas of juv and juvio are slightly different. In juvio the ephemeral environment is created on kernel startup. Hence, one can have multiple notebooks within the same jupyterlab session, each with its own venv. This seems to be different with juv, but please correct me if I am wrong.
by like_any_other | 2025-05-20 17:15:50+00:00
The effect is wider and stronger than that: These findings are especially striking given that other research shows it is more difficult for scholars to publish work that reflects conservative interests and perspectives. A 1985 study in the American Psychologist, for example, assessed the outcomes of research proposals submitted to human subject committees. Some of the proposals were aimed at studying job discrimination against racial minorities, women, short people, and those who are obese. Other proposals set out to study "reverse discrimination" against whites. All of the proposals, however, offered identical research designs. The study found that the proposals on reverse discrimination were the hardest to get approved, often because their research designs were scrutinized more thoroughly. In some cases, though, the reviewers raised explicitly political concerns; as one reviewer argued, "The findings could set affirmative action back 20 years if it came out that women were asked to interview more often for managerial positions than men with a stronger vitae." [1,2]

Meaning that, first, such research is less likely to be proposed (human subject committees are drawn from researchers, so they share biases), then it is less likely to be funded, and finally, it receives less attention.

[1] https://nationalaffairs.com/publications/detail/the-disappea...

[2] Human subjects review, personal values, and the regulation of social science research. Ceci, S. J., Peters, D., & Plotkin, J. (1985). Human subjects review, personal values, and the regulation of social science research. American Psychologist, 40(9), 994–1002. https://doi.org/10.1037/0003-066X.40.9.994
by inglor_cz | 2025-05-20 17:16:28+00:00
IIRC Russian army had, prior to the outbreak of the current war, several tens of thousands of soldiers specialized just in emergency railway construction and repairs. IDK how many remain now.

Russians aren't stupid, they know that the enemy will try to destroy the tracks when retreating, so they train to fix/bypass the problems quickly.

That includes some transportable improvised bridges ready for deployment.