MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ezekg | 2025-05-12 16:11:35+00:00
> Right now, if you're working on a gem, you have to think really hard how to name it so its top-level classes an modules don't conflict with any other modules and classes found in the Ruby ecosystem.

Follow gem naming conventions and this is a non-issue -- both FooBar::Record and BazQux::Record can coexist for foo_bar and baz_qux gems, respectively. If a gem is defining other top-level constants outside of their gem module, then that's considered against convention, i.e. bad practice, and the language should not be modified to allow such a thing.

I'd like to hear of a real use case for namespaces that existing conventions don't already solve.
by kridsdale1 | 2025-05-12 16:11:35+00:00
I loathe ads as a consumer. But I can’t agree they’re parasitic. If I put myself in the shoes of a small business selling something I created, a well targeted IG ad can keep me alive where I’d have no chance against a company that can make (traditionally) a TV, Print, or billboard ad.

I do support the notion that tech monopolies have killed a lot of the software industry dynamism by subsidizing anti competitive products. Like Android being free where Windows Mobile needed to make revenue from OEMs.
by petercooper | 2025-05-12 16:12:23+00:00
It's one of my favorite places to spend time when in London. It's comfortable, clean, quiet, aesthetically striking, easy to loaf around at, and there's high brow art in numerous forms to enjoy – it's kinda like BBC Radio 3 if it were a neighborhood. It's also five minutes from the Elizabeth Line and the parking is good which is unusual for the City. It's strikingly non-commercial - there are no chains or even convenience stores there, though there is a fantastic music shop. It's one of those rare places you can feel more intelligent and cultured by merely being there.

I'd love to retire there when the kids are gone, although there are a lot of oddities about Barbican living to contend with that are probably more fun to read about than deal with for real.
by klabb3 | 2025-05-12 16:12:30+00:00
Yes and for those cases it’s kind of already solved decently like with htmx or just plain old forms and post requests. I think those old ways are underrated.

But, for a chat app it isn’t gonna cut it. Or a collaborative app, where changes need to be pushed to the client. Or maps, or similar. Or anything which needs offline working. (I’m working on a desktop app where majority of state is owned by and lives on the client.)

TLDR I agree for passive web pages but the web is often more than that, many times for good reason.
by palmotea | 2025-05-12 16:12:37+00:00
>>> Despite that, Humans can read a book, get inspiration, and write a new book and not be litigated against.

>> The fatal flaw in your reasoning: machines aren't humans. You can't reason that a machine has rights from the fact a human has them. Otherwise it's murder to recycle a car.

> We are talking about the rights of the humans training the models and the humans using the models to create new things.

Then that's even easier, because that prevents appeals to things humans do, like learning, from muddying the waters.

If "training the models" entails loading up copyrighted works into your system (e.g. encoded them during training), you've just copied them into a retrieval system and violated copyright based on established precedent. And people have prompted verbatim copyrighted text out of well-known LLMs, which makes it even clearer.

And then to defend LLM training you're left with BS akin to claiming an ASCII encoded copy of a book not a copyright violation, because the book is paper and ASCII is numbers.
by lossolo | 2025-05-12 16:12:41+00:00
> despite their success in their businesses

It's interesting how often business success gets mistaken for general wisdom or street smarts. Just because someone built a profitable company doesn’t mean they’re immune to being naive or that their success wasn’t largely due to timing or luck. It’s a different skill set entirely to spot scams, especially the ones that are dressed up in just enough buzzwords to sound legit. Some people are great at one thing but totally blind in other areas of life.
by duped | 2025-05-12 16:12:50+00:00
> The stack is clean. The interfaces are better. But the expectations are still stuck in 2012.

The interfaces are absolutely not better, they're a bunch of ~~undocumented~~ C preprocessor macros that hide a pit of complexity and indirection. Pulse is mature enough that you can figure out how to interface with it, pipewire has a handful of examples and some reference documentation that doesn't make sense if you don't already know what you're looking for. Good luck if those examples don't fit nicely into your existing applications' architectures.

Pipewire is very impressive as an achievement, but the work needs to be put in to make it mature enough as a software project (meaning: documentation and well typed interfaces) before existing software can work with it.

The architecture may well be better equipped to provide stable and elegant interfaces to complex media routing problems in application software. But I couldn't tell you if that's true or not, because it's sparsely documented. An undiscoverable API is a nonexistent one.

edit: I wrote this ignorantly before looking back at the pipewire docs. They've improved since I last looked, but I still find the docs lacking (comparable to Apple's docs, which is not a compliment) and the overall interface design of Pipewire a massive challenge to grasp. It might be better, but I don't know. The last time I tried to implement direct support for pipewire in a Linux app I gave up because of its design and lack of useful documentation.
by CalRobert | 2025-05-12 16:13:17+00:00
I was so excited to try a cargo bike I made sure to rent a Cristiana bike on a holiday to Copenhagen with my pregnant wife. Then I crashed while turning with her as a passenger. She was displeased.

We now ride a two wheeled urban arrow. Three wheelers seem incredibly unstable except perhaps for ones with independently pivoting wheels like the babboe carve
by danielbln | 2025-05-12 16:14:08+00:00
As far as I understand it, both involve translating between IPv6 and IPv4, but NAT64 is a broad standard for general IPv6-to-IPv4 internet access, whereas Tailscale's 4via6 is more specific feature to solve a niche problem of overlapping private IP ranges within a Tailscale VPN environment using some proprietary addressing scheme. But it's been a while since I was deep in network land.
by bilbo0s | 2025-05-12 16:14:18+00:00
That's a trick question.

I mean, name 2 things anyone owns that aren't dumpster fires?

Long time ago industrial engineers used to say, "Even Toyota has recalls."

Something being a dumpster fire is so common nowadays that you really need a better reason to argue in support of a given entity's ownership. (Or even non-ownership for that matter.)
by lotsofpulp | 2025-05-12 16:14:32+00:00
I did not intend to imply write average personal home is placed in a trust.

>It’s why you see even average personal homes placed in trusts.

This statement meant to convey that people with average levels of wealth, such that tax liability is low enough such that tax avoidance is not necessary, can also benefit from spending a couple thousand dollars with an estate lawyer.

Technically, their heirs benefit because they don’t need to deal with probate court.
by hwillis | 2025-05-12 16:14:49+00:00
> A great early use case for fusion will directly use the heat for these industrial processes.

There is no chance that early fusion plants will be small enough to justify building them in the same building as a factory. They will start large.

> For example, aluminum requires ~14-17MWh to produce 1 ton

The Hall–Héroult process runs at 950 C, just below the melting point of copper. It is close to twice the temperature of steam entering the turbines. It is not something that can be piped around casually- as a gas it will always be at very high pressure because lowering the pressure cools it down. Molten salt or similar is required to transport that much heat as a liquid. Every pipe glows orange. Any industrial process will effectively be a part of the power plant because of how difficult it is to transport that heat away.

Also NB that the Hall–Héroult process is for creating aluminum from ore, and recycling aluminum is the primary way we make aluminum.
by PaulHoule | 2025-05-12 16:15:19+00:00
Note you don't see arXiv papers where somebody feeds in 1000 male gendered words into a word embedding and gets 950 correct female gendered words. Statistically it does better than chance, but word embeddings don't do very well.

In

https://nlp.stanford.edu/projects/glove/

there are a number of graphs where they have about N=20 points that seem to fall in "the right place" but there are a lot of dimensions involved and with 50 dimensions to play with you can always find a projection that makes the 20 points fall exactly where you want them fall. If you try experiments with N>100 words you go endlessly in circles and produce the kind of inconclusively negative results that people don't publish.

The BERT-like and other transformer embeddings far outperform word vectors because they can take into account the context of the word. For instance you can't really build a "part of speech" classifier that can tell you "red" is an adjective because it is also a noun, but give it the context and you can.

In the context of full text search, bringing in synonyms is a mixed bag because a word might have 2 or 3 meanings and the the irrelevant synonyms are... irrelevant and will bring in irrelevant documents. Modern embeddings that recognize context not only bring in synonyms but the will suppress usages of the word with different meanings, something the IR community has tried to figure out for about 50 years.
by IncreasePosts | 2025-05-12 16:15:23+00:00
Naples is the first place I got honked at for not cutting the person off. I was at a stop sign, making a left turn onto a main road that had a steady stream of traffic. Apparently, I was supposed to wait a few seconds and then just creep out, cutting cars off on the way, which is what I believe the driver on the main road meant when he beeped at me and gesticulated wildly while I was sitting still at the stop sign.
by sansseriff | 2025-05-12 16:15:44+00:00
It would be great to semantically search through literature with embeddings. At least one person I know if is trying to generate a vector database of all arxiv papers.

The big problem I see is attribution and citations. An embedding is just a vector. It doesn't contain any citation back to the source material or modification date or certificate of authenticity. So when using embeddings in RAG, they only serve to link back to a particular page of source material.

Using embeddings as links doesn't dramatically change the way citation and attribution are handled in technical writing. You still end up citing a whole paper or a page of a paper.

I think GraphRAG [1] is a more useful thing to build on for technical literature. There's ways to use graphs to cite a particular concept of a particular page of an academic paper. And for the 'citations' to act as bidirectional links between new and old scientific discourse. But I digress

[1] https://microsoft.github.io/graphrag/
by lupusreal | 2025-05-12 16:15:47+00:00
Nuclear waste isn't an engineering problem at all, it's a social problem. Objectively, dropping it all into a deep ocean crevice is utterly safe and effective but you'll never get the ignorant public who go off feelings to buy into it.

Fusion is only better insofar as the public don't yet understand how radioactive the reactor will become, but counting on that ignorance is a bad long term strategy.
by Joker_vD | 2025-05-12 16:16:04+00:00
As someone who can't stand Ruby, I am personally against this feature. I'd rather have my Ruby experience universally miserable, with no deception, instead of having, say, half of the language decent and sane, and another half, well, be traditional Ruby.

Edit: apparently, people who do love Ruby are also against this feature, for roughly the same reasons. Kinda funny, but entirely reasonable in hindsight.
by smusamashah | 2025-05-12 16:16:05+00:00
I made this userscript[1] that solves the 3rd point of "Missed listings". When you visit HN, new stories show up with a green "(NEW)", you will also see change in rank. Its done using localstorage.

If you missed a few days, just keep doom scrolling to next pages and checkout only the NEW stories.

You can set a var to only show the new stories or stories with many new comments. The filter logic can use some work but it works just fine.

[1]: https://gist.github.com/SMUsamaShah/e7c9ed3936ba69e522f8cb38...
by coldpie | 2025-05-12 16:16:17+00:00
It's a pretty common reaction :)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43964238

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43964122

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43964428

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43963196
by johnnyjeans | 2025-05-12 16:17:58+00:00
You correctly intuit that I am young, but I do have a lot of experience with that era of games. They could be reliably played on any shitbox I could commandeer in high school (early 2010s.)

Thus I've cut through a laundry list of silver and golden age cRPGs (and other genres, of course) with cute copy protection and complex manuals. Often times the relevant information was included as a text file (maybe not in the same format it came in), sometimes the copy protection was patched right out of the game (the Scene in the 20th century was just that crazy.) I never particularly cared. I was there for the game, not the auxiliary accoutrements. To some degree I understand the sentimentality and attachment if you grew up with the tactile materials accompanying the game. That being said, I don't feel like my experience of Ultima 3 was lessened because I lacked the cloth map any more than I feel like my experience of Wasteland was ruined because I could ctrl+f the copy protection challenges.
by OJFord | 2025-05-12 16:18:06+00:00
I would think of it as the whole embedding concept again on a finer grained scale: you wouldn't say the model 'has a dimension of whether the input is king', instead the embedding expresses the idea of 'king' with fewer dimensions than would be needed to cover all ideas/words/tokens like that.

So the distinction between a direction and a dimension expressing 'gender' is that maybe gender isn't 'important' (or I guess high-information-density) enough to be an entire dimension, but rather is expressed by a linear combination of two (or more) yet more abstract dimensions.
by chris37879 | 2025-05-12 16:18:06+00:00
I just stumbled across armbian recently and I must say I really like it.

I wanted to use UEFI, but my orangepi cm5 modules don't seem to have the SPI chip needed to store the UEFI there, so I'd have to load it on a partition and lose out on some features like persisting variables across boot.

The arm ecosystem really needs to settle on some sort of universal boot loader / firmware layer and stop just hacking up the linux kernel and not contributing back to it.
by kingbob000 | 2025-05-12 16:18:24+00:00
As I work on personal projects I often have this internal battle: "Do I really need to use react for this small project? Doesn't this make it more bloated than it needs to be?" ...and then I create a vite react app and get up and running quickly while I still have the inspiration for the idea. There's something to be said for having an opinionated framework that just removes a large amount of extraneous decisions that can slow progress. I want a lightweight page but that is secondary to just wanting the thing I'm trying to make.
by 93po | 2025-05-12 16:18:25+00:00
Disney has a copyright over Moana. I would argue Moana is an idea in the sense that most people think of as ideas. Moana isn't tangle, it's not a physical good. It's not a plate on my table. It only exists in our heads. If I made a Moana comic book, with an entirely original storyline and original art and it was all drawn in my own style and not using 3D assets similar to their movies, that is violating copyright. Moana is an idea and there are a million ways to express the established character Moana, and Moana itself is an idea built on a million things that Disney doesn't have any rights to - history, culture, tropes, etc.

I understand what you're saying but the way you're framing it isn't what I really have a problem with. I still don't agree with the idea that I can't make my own physical copies of Harry Potters books, identical word for word. I think people can choose to buy the physical books from the original publisher because they want to support them or like the idea that it's the "true" physical copy. And I'm going to push back on that a million times less than the concept of things like Moana comic books. But still, it's infringing copyright for me to make Moana comic books in my own home, in private, and never showing them to anyone. And that's ridiculous.
by adwn | 2025-05-12 16:18:35+00:00
> I would argue that the prevalence of HDLs proves that DSLs are a good design for problem domains that scale in complexity.

The major HDLs (i.e., Verilog/SystemVerilog and VHDL) are not DSLs in any meaningful sense of the word. There exist HDLs which actually are DSLs, but they're mostly used by hobbyist and aren't gaining any significant traction in the industry.
by iambateman | 2025-05-12 16:18:51+00:00
Please excuse my hacker-newsyness…

This idea is absurdly underbaked…other commenters mentioned that it’s going to flip, and it is. Not to mention that no bike shop in the world will know how to work on these things.

There’s lots of reasons that this design died in the 1930’s after a short run.

But…so you know I’m a reasonable guy despite my blithering criticism…I love weird alternative vehicles and I hope that version two of this is a massive success because this world needs more tiny vehicles and fewer 8’ tall Ford F-150’s.

Best of luck!
by DrScientist | 2025-05-12 16:19:02+00:00
> The whole financial world would be better written using blockchain/smart contracts, same goes for voting/governance, etc.

Eh? I thought blockchain didn't scale? As far as I can see blockchain swaps trust in banking institutions ( not to simply make up numbers in their banking systems ) - to trust in a majority based voting system where you don't know the people involved and you just hope the bad guys don't have a majority.

And the computational cost of running the distributed voting system - is many of orders magnitude higher than the computational costs of transactions in the we-trust-the-bank-model.

As for smart contracts - a quick google suggests that the cost of deploying a smart contract on Ethereum is 500 dollars - that's quite an overhead for the vast majority of financial transactions.
by moomin | 2025-05-12 16:19:03+00:00
Always great to see more people who love the Barbican as much as I do. A gloriously inventive space that feels like it comes from an alternate timeline. There’s also an integrated complex including a theatre housing the RSC, a concert hall that hosts the LSO, a library and I think a cinema.

Fun fact: a good chunk of the video to “As It Was” was shot there.
by artski | 2025-05-12 16:19:11+00:00
Fair take—it's definitely context-dependent. In some cases, solo-maintainer projects can be great, especially if they’re stable or purpose-built. But from a trust and maintenance standpoint, it’s worth flagging as a signal: if 90% of commits are from one person who’s now inactive, it could mean slow responses to bugs or no updates for security issues. Doesn’t mean the project is bad—just something to consider alongside other factors.

Heuristics are never perfect and it's all iterative but it's all about understanding the underlying assumptions and taking the knowledge you get out of it with your own context. Probably could enhance it slightly by a run through an LLM with a prompt but I prefer to keep things purely statistical for now.
by Vanclief | 2025-05-12 16:19:17+00:00
Stars are just a signal. When I am looking at multiple libraries that do the same, I am going to trust more a repo with 200 starts that one with 0. Its not perfect, but I don't have the time to go through the entire codebase and try it out. If the repo works for me I will star it to contribute to the signal.
by sklargh | 2025-05-12 16:19:22+00:00
Hi. Assuming the US here. Depends on scope of analysis and dumpster fire definition.

1. The National Weather Service. Crown jewel and very effective at predicting the weather and forecasting life threatening events.

2. IRS, generally very good at collecting revenue. 3. National Interagency Fire Service / US Forest service tactical fire suppression

4. NTSB/US Chemicals Safety Board - Both highly regarded.

5. Medicare - Basically clung to with talons by seniors, revealed preference is that they love it.

6. DOE National Labs

7. NIH (spicy pick)

8. Highway System

There are valid critiques of all of these but I don’t think any of them could be universally categorized as a complete dumpster fire.
by lern_too_spel | 2025-05-12 16:19:29+00:00
You can sell ownership across the world instantly, and you can use a centralized authority for authenticity and grading. Done. All for less cost than crypto and without enabling DPRK to steal your card with no recourse.

This is exactly what happened with gold, and then people realized that basing money on gold was stupid, so now we have the system we have today. Cryptofools are two financial revolutions behind modernity.
by btbuildem | 2025-05-12 16:21:09+00:00
Tricycles are inherently unstable in turns, especially when not loaded down, because they cannot lean. And when carrying a load, the same rules of physics apply, resulting in a lot of torsional forces on the frame. There's a reason we see so few of those on the roads, amidst an explosion of various human-powered modes of transport.

Here's the original: http://youtube.com/watch?v=RuPwRQOUhl4

Here's the reimagined modern version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kA7qGYNFuY0

In both cases, the rider effectively sits atop of where the handlebars would be on a traditional trike. You can see in the first video the lads have a hard time keeping all wheels on the ground.

One notable difference between the new model and the old is that they seem to have changed the geometry of the frame so that the driver doesn't lean into the turn (the turning wheel stays upright). They don't demonstrate it in motion very well, but that kind of turn action will tend to throw the rider "out" of the turn, making the trike fall over opposite of the direction of the turn. The old version tends to fall "into" the turn.

I can't think of many advantages to this design, other than the driving unit and cargo are modular. Even then, the rider would not be able to travel without the cargo portion.

Trikes are tricky, they don't go very fast, they don't turn well, and they're wider than most other pedal-powered vehicles, making them hard to use on existing cycle infrastructure.
by eli_gottlieb | 2025-05-12 16:21:30+00:00
IMHO the problem is that "oversupply" is either a normative statement - it's a surplus relative to some idea of what it should be - or a nearly trivial statement - it's a surplus relative to demand and many scientists are thus underemployed. I agree with the latter as a matter of fact, but it is a trivial claim because financial demand (eg: funding and positions, under whatever structure, industrial or academic) is downstream of normative decisions like the former interpretation, rather than exogenous.