MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by sorcerer-mar | 2025-05-19 23:20:56+00:00
The guideline to stop screening at 70 has nothing to do with financial cost. It’s that detecting it at that point is useless because you’ll generally be dead of other causes by the time it catches you.

Compounding the issue, the rate of false positives rises as you get older which then 1) freaks people out and 2) encourages them to get more invasive tests done which are themselves increasingly hazardous (and less valuable) with each passing day.

There are a lot of good reasons not to speculate about others' health decisions on the Internet, and avoiding a spotlight on your own basic ignorance is one of 'em!
by mmooss | 2025-05-19 23:22:17+00:00
The evidence is well-documented and overwhelming, as are the witnesses to it, news stories, etc.. Are you saying it's all false?

Maybe you didn't know what you were seeing? People don't often openly say, 'I'm not hiring them because they are black'. They don't necessarily think it; they think, 'I'm not as comfortable with this person' and 'I don't know how they'll fit into our team', without even realizing why.

DEI trains people to be aware of those feeling and thoughts and double-check them. Most people don't want to make decisions in that way and appreciate the training.
by rmah | 2025-05-19 23:22:33+00:00
We (humans) have not only survived but thrived. 200,000 annual deaths is just 7% of the 3mil that die each year. More (as a percentage) probably died from access to the best health care 100 or 200 years ago. The fall in birth rates is, IMO, a good thing as the alternative, overpopulation seems like a far scarier specter to me. And to bring it back to AI's, an AI "with a pathological drive to maximize an arbitrary metric" is a hypothetical without any basis in reality. While fictional literature -- where I assume you got that concept -- is great for inspiration, it rarely has any predictive power. One probably shouldn't look to it as a guideline.
by bongodongobob | 2025-05-19 23:23:33+00:00
Doesn't mean that the infra is still ancient. What I see a lot is tech debt from migrations. Lots of times both the old and new systems have to work together for a period of time, so you leave certain legacy protocols and flags in place for the transition period and then the new system is never fully "updated" to the new standards. Pre win2k AD, file path lengths, encryption protocols, etc etc. Sure, the new system is "up to date" but the old compatibility settings remain.
by al_borland | 2025-05-19 23:23:44+00:00
I built a suggestion box for a team at work like this. It was pretty basic. The page had no login, and no tracking of any kind. The DB only had an index, the date, and the suggestion. The source was available to everyone who would use it, and if they wanted I would have shown them the DB. These people also had root access to the server it ran on, so if they were really paranoid they could clear any system logs. The site was also heavily used for the day to day work, so the noise from everyone on the page would obscure any ability to tie a single IP to a time stamp without a lot of effort and a large chance for error.

Over the course of 4 years I think it was only used 3 times. Most people assumed it was some kind of trap. It wasn’t, I genuinely wanted honest feedback, and thought some people were too shy to speak up in a group setting, so wanted to give options.
by ryandrake | 2025-05-19 23:23:45+00:00
My one "boomer" take: Something I wish the younger generation would learn is that it's useful to be able to separate a work from its author. Some of my favorite films were produced by Harvey Weinstein. They're still my favorite films. The fact that a slimeball was a force behind making them doesn't detract from their content. I like Robert Heinlein sci-fi, even though, judged by today's moral yardstick, some of his views were... questionable. I still like Harry Potter even though J. K. Rowling went totally bananas. Troubled and/or terrible people can make great art and music, and it's OK to like the art and question the artist.
by Mofpofjis | 2025-05-19 23:23:46+00:00
The complaints about ISO Prolog, and about ISO standards generally not being available publicly / at no cost, resonate a lot with me. If you compare eg. the POSIX and the ISO C development workflows, and their respective end results, there's a world of difference.

"ISO" (International Standards Organization), where you have "national member bodies", should absolutely be a thing of the past for programming languages (or for anything related to computing). My country's national body's own homepage has a huge tirade, aiming to "dispel myths", such as the "myth" that "standards should be available free of charge". Meanwhile, lots of std orgs have published computing standards with various degrees of openness already.

ISO is a relic when it comes to computing. (So are other standards bodies that choose to remain proprietary; like those behind PCI, SCSI, ... Computing is ubiquitous and these bodies should be forced open by law, for the public interest.)
by i_am_jl | 2025-05-19 23:24:15+00:00
>you couldn't figure out that something trying to install to your terminal is probably malware because the guy sounded polite

Politeness is a part of the approach, but it's not the whole game. The author wanted to be interviewed. It's flattering! Journalists asking you about things you've done because they think your work is interesting feels good.

He wanted it enough that it blinded him to every (blatant and obvious) sign that this was a scam.
by bradcray | 2025-05-19 23:24:34+00:00
@yubblegum: I'm unfairly biased towards Chapel (positively), so won't try to characterize HN's opinion on it. But I did want to note that while Chapel's original and main reason for being is HPC, now that everyone lives in a parallel-computing world, users also benefits from using Chapel in desktop environments where they want to do multicore and/or GPU programming. One such example is covered in this interview with an atmospheric science researcher for whom it has replaced Python as his go-to desktop language: https://chapel-lang.org/blog/posts/7qs-dias/
by hoseyor | 2025-05-19 23:25:35+00:00
For all the talk of AI Slop, I don’t hear much about the fact that we have been suffering from Outsourced Slop for decades now. I suspect that is how this kind of thing also fail at LinkedIn. I say that based on my experience dealing with outsourcing companies and the product they produce through outsourced programmers.

It’s really just been a similar problem as with AI code, that without strong and competent management that can set intelligent expectations and requirements and test for them, you will surely get what appears to all the business and leadership types like an equivalent product, without any sense that it’s slop underneath the surface.
by ggm | 2025-05-19 23:26:13+00:00
Dangerous to claim rain forecasts approach perfection. It may be statistically true, but it's highly politicised in Australia, it has strong ties to forward financial outcome in the farm sector which is primed to be suspicious of government and see the BoM as "the enemy" for a clutch of bizarre conspiracy theory reasons.

If you make this claim, be prepared for the hate storm when it gets it wrong for some marginalised community.

Also, the lack of warning processes in flood contexts means the BoM can claim it gets the rain forecast right, but the downstream flood alerts which lie in the hands of 3 tiers of government still break down. Who gets the blame? EVERYONE including the BoM.

I love the BoM. But, I worry about them too. They could be defunded for political gain.

Also: their app is crap and for bizarre reasons they still offer their weather radar in the best, most simplest, 1990s internet form over http:// urls because of the overhang of farm equipment which can't handle TLS https: connections. There is a good https: service but they modernised the UX. I would prefer the 1990s style, but delivered over secure transport. (browsers now routinely preference https: urls so you wind up with an interstitial delay. minor nit only)

If you use windy, or willyweather, it's federating BoM data with other sources.
by arghwhat | 2025-05-19 23:27:15+00:00
That just feels like scope creep. Notepad would also be neat with some better keybinding support, plugins, lsp, ... - but then it wouldn't be notepad, and theres countless not notepads out there.

Tools like nano (well, pico) exist to provide a reliable and always available minimum feature set. If you expand it, then you end up with something that is neither the minimum nor capable enough to sensibly compete with fully fledged alternatives.
Show HN: try-module.cloud – Preview and share NPM Packages from any PR
by TorstenDittmann | 2025-05-19 23:27:19+00:00
I built try-module.cloud because at work we maintain several npm packages, and collaborating across multiple teams and features is a pain. We often need to test changes from PR's or feature branches before merging, but didn’t want to publish temporary versions to the public npm registry all the time - as we have done before (probably every dev here has public package full of garbage versions because of this).

I was heavily inspired by pkg.pr.new (awesome product), but found it was missing some features we needed, most important was private packages.

Key features:

+ Build and share installable npm packages directly from any branch or pull request

+ Get a unique install URL for each commit, branch and pr

+ Keep previews private and manage access with organizations and API keys

+ Built-in support for including GitHub Actions
by andyferris | 2025-05-19 23:27:19+00:00
Software and cloud services have entered the infrastructure stage.

I don't think it matters who writes the software. Governments should mandate the infrastructure be hosted and operated locally by people accountable to the host nation (the operators would pay for the software, perhaps a subsiduary or whatever). It should require a Netherlands court to deprive an institute located in the Hague of its infrastructure.

This means bringing "big regulation" like we have for the electrical network (and the physical internet!) to the cloud. It would be tricky to draft since we'd still want to support the millions of small providers who, unlike Microsoft, you wouldn't describe as infrastructure.
by Chris2048 | 2025-05-19 23:27:36+00:00
But that "standard explanation" is a process, not a definition. Riemann sums can't be used with all integrals.

In any case, if we stick with Riemann sums, there should be a strong relationship to Generating Functions (which there is).

> Generating functions in code are basically a rote repetition of the mathematical definitions

GFs with a mathematical basis may have, for example, set-theoretic definitions that are not similar to, say, Turing machines. Any non-constructivist math is automatically not like code.
by reitzensteinm | 2025-05-19 23:27:41+00:00
Do you have a source for "The grid fees solar owners pay account for that"?

If you look into e.g. PG&E's financials, their expenses are dominated by operation and maintenance of the grid, not what they pay for electricity.

You appear to be claiming that the grid fees cover this cost entirely, but they're not high, e.g. $15/mo on some plans.

You're obviously very knowledgeable about the space, but I suspect you may be talking your book a bit here.
by KetoManx64 | 2025-05-19 23:28:35+00:00
- Advanced URI: create advanced URI's to run actions like create new note, open daily note, or run Obsidian commands. I then add system wide hotkeys to activate these URI's to quickly either open a new note or create a new note.

- Excalidraw. Create drawings and link/insert notes within your drawings without ever leaving the application.

- omnisearch. Run circles around the native Obsidian search and also has an API that you can interact with through your terminal if you want to add scripts to quickly search your notes for specific things.

- Confluence Integration: My company uses Confluence behind a VPN, so I write all my notes in the very snappy Obsidian interface and then sync them up to Confluence when I'm done.

- Style Settings + Minimal Theme Settings: gives you a GUI to edit all the settings and colors of your theme without having to learn about CSS or parse CSS files.

- Edit History: I sync a subsection of my personal notes with my work computer using Syncthing and setting up ignored folders. This gives me a edit history of my notes that I imagine is similar to what Obsidian's official sync gives you.

- Dataview: still learning this, but let's you treat your Vault as a database and write queries to pull in information from other notes. I use it mostly for scraping my entire Vault for unchecked todo items (Grouped by their parent note name) and showing them in 1 place.

Hope these are helpful :)
by adastra22 | 2025-05-19 23:29:20+00:00
A lot of these things can be made to work. That isn't being contested. But if you take a random piece of code of the internet from 20 years ago, it very likely won't compile out of the box on a modern system.

For example, I just took the oldest version of openssl I could find with a quick search (2015, so only 10 years old), and it fails to compile on my Mac. It detects macOS/darwin, and then proceeds to compile for 32-bit Intel, which obviously doesn't work. OpenSSL has fallbacks for straight C implementation to support platforms that haven't been customized, but their build scripts assume that macOS = Intel.

Ok sure, changing the whole freaking CPU architecture will bork a build script. So to prove a point I just downloaded v2.6.11 of the Linux kernel (released in 2005), unpacked (this time on Ubuntu 24.04 on real Intel), and did a `make menuconfig && make`. Of course I don't expect a 20 year old kernel to run on modern hardware, but could I compile it? No, I could not: modern GCC forces PIC by default, which parts of the Linux kernel do not support. I was able to fix that by editing the makefile to pass `-fno-pic` in CFLAGS. Then I get hit with another error due to "multiple definitions" of functions that are declared slightly differently. Turns out old GCC didn't warn about this, but modern GCC handles these declarations differently. This is after pages upon pages of warnings, btw, with only a few source files compiled so far.

I gave up. This is what is meant by archeology required: for anything nontrivial you often have to build the environment in which the code was originally compiled in order to get it to compile again.
by rainsford | 2025-05-19 23:29:35+00:00
> Your issues with "dirty" energy are entirely separate.

It's not really, that's the entire idea behind economic externalities. Power generation using carbon sources brings with it a cost in the form of pollution and greenhouse gases not directly paid by the customer. That cost is effectively spread out evenly across society, so those who use less carbon intensive energy are more or less subsidizing those who use more. Or to put it another way, if the folks with rooftop solar were instead just using electricity from coal or gas plants like their neighbors, their neighbors would have an increased pollution/global warming cost even if they don't see it in their electric bill.

Of course the math may or may not actually work out since the net metering costs for rooftop solar are based on electricity rates rather than any pollution based externalities. But the idea that it's strictly an economic transfer from people without solar to those with solar doesn't seem entirely accurate. And the economic impacts of "dirty" energy are definitely not a separate issue.
by dr_dshiv | 2025-05-19 23:30:33+00:00
“They've been indoctrinated into thinking that if a business makes money, it must be cheating. The entire continent has Stockholm Syndrome from decades of leftist academics preaching that profit = exploitation, as if every entrepreneur is some 19th-century robber baron twirling a mustache”

So true!! As a university professor, this nails it. It’s sad — Amsterdam, for instance, used to have such a strong culture of business. But that vitality has greatly diminished.
by wesselbindt | 2025-05-19 23:30:35+00:00
But the thing is that there's other ways of dealing with discontent in the working class. Sure, UBI is one of them, but there are less pleasant solutions (just do slavery, or have a well paid class of kapos, or sow internal strife by pushing an "it's the Jews/Muslims/trans folks" narrative with the media that you own), and history shows that the politically dominant class is mighty partial to that kind of solution.

EDIT: Maybe I'm too cynical, but as far as I can see the last time serious improvements to the material conditions of the working class were made was when the soviets were still around, and the threat of a worker's revolution still seemed somewhat realistic. I think the politically dominant class has become quite adept at suppressing that kind of thing, and UBI does not seem to be part of their preferred playbook.
by hoseyor | 2025-05-19 23:31:21+00:00
What is it with people who get all nitpicky about Ryanair charging on a per use basis? Maybe they should have a kind of all inclusive, flat rate, where you pay for food, drink, signed seating, extra luggage, etc. whether you use them or not?

What am I missing? You’re also clearly free to not fly with them. All I hear is bitching.
by theandrewbailey | 2025-05-19 23:31:34+00:00
> Telum II and prior IBM mainframe chips handle server tasks like financial transactions, but curiously seem to prioritize single threaded performance.

IBM was doing SMT (aka Hyperthreading) for decades, long before x86 did. I can't get a number for Telum II, but the original Telum implemented 16-way SMT per core[0], so your 8 core Telum can do 128 threads. I expect similar from Telum II.

[0] https://www.ibm.com/linuxone/telum
by matt_s | 2025-05-19 23:34:25+00:00
There was a time back in the years after dot com era where search servers were sold with the proprietary software loaded for enterprises to use. A google box running on your local network. Now there are advanced things like elastic and other search specific technologies that you can use.

I think LLMs might follow this market pattern where you can buy something to host yourself and then commoditization happens enough where open source solutions will also evolve to have good enough solutions.

An idea for a disrupting company would be to open source their LLM and offer support and feature development to enterprises as the paid offering, kinda like Red Hat or others doing that model. A key difference is running an LLM locally on decent sized compute is fine but it will be costly to scale on your own.
by mmooss | 2025-05-19 23:34:36+00:00
That is the goal of DEI. The problem is, racism is widespread and people are selected based on non-meritorious reasons - in SV, white and East/South Asian men. Look at all those leading SV founders and CEOs - are there any exceptions at all?

Racism is not necessarily overt, but you certainly you are well aware that overt racism is widely trendy now, and people engage in it publicly. Look at the well-accepted virulant hatred toward immigrants, often based on transparent stereotypes (i.e., not individual merit at all). Many argue, even on HN, that white/Asian men are inherently superior at math/coding/etc., which is why they dominate SV. Do you think those people hire based on merit?

Racism can be unconscious. In hiring 101, you learn that people instinctively hire people like them. Even beyond that, people hire who they are comfortable with. It's not a secret that humans are uncomfortable with the unfamiliar, and that many white people are particulary uncomfortable around black people. People hire those who they are comfortable with, often without realizing why.

Racism can be systemic. If you grew up in a mostly segregated community, and went to school with those people, who will be in your personal/professional network to hire, or to call up with your investment or business idea, etc.? You didn't choose it; that's the system you grew up in. And unless you consciously change it (for example, via DEI), you will perpetuate it and the next generation will also be segregated.

People often don't intend to be racist; they just don't realize how it comes to pass. Most appreciate training in how to do better (who wouldn't?). Also consider that the small improvements from generation to generation are not nearly fast enough - the minority people of today, right now, deserve fair opportunities. It's absurd to tell them - your grandchildren will have a better chance.
by lhecker | 2025-05-19 23:34:37+00:00
Up until around 2 months ago the project actually built with stable Rust. But as I had to get the project ready for release it became a recurring annoyance to write shims for things I needed (e.g. `maybe_uninit_fill` to conveniently fill the return value of my arena allocator). My breaking point was the aforementioned `LinkedList` API and its lack of cursors in stable Rust. I know it's silly, but this, combined with the time pressure, and combined with the lack of `allocator_api` in stable, just kind of broke me. I deleted all my shims the same day (or sometime around it at least), switched to nightly Rust and called it a day.

It definitely helped me with my development speed, because I had a much larger breadth of APIs available to me all at once. Now that the project is released, I'll probably stay with the nightly version for another few months until after `let_chains` is out in stable, because I genuinely love that quality-of-life feature so much and just don't want to live without it anymore. Afterward, I'll make sure it builds in stable Rust. There's not really any genuine reason it needs nightly, except for... time.

Apropos custom helpers, I think it may be worth optimizing `Vec::splice`. I wrote myself a custom splice function to reduce the binary size: https://github.com/microsoft/edit/blob/e8d40f6e7a95a6e19765f...

The differences can be quite significant: https://godbolt.org/z/GeoEnf5M7
by gruez | 2025-05-19 23:34:48+00:00
>They managed to find the one fucking way to make additional housing make being a new homeowner even more expensive, and I believe it was not by accident.

Who cares about "being a new homeowner" (ie. housing as an investment)? I think the far more important thing to care about is housing as a service, ie. being able to find an affordable place to live. Housing is not a great investment. It lags behind equities, isn't diversified, and is an unproductive asset. As such, I'm not going to care too much that people can't get in on the action.
by jchw | 2025-05-19 23:35:25+00:00
The important bit though is that Docker containers are not VMs or sandboxes, they're "just" a combination of technologies that give you an isolated userland using mostly Linux namespaces. If you're running a Linux host you already have namespaces, so you can just use them directly. Distrobox gives you basically the same sort of experience as WSL2 except it doesn't have any of the weird parts of running a VM because it's not VMs.
by tormeh | 2025-05-19 23:35:31+00:00
> that bootstrap themselves like cars, civilian air planes

A civilian airplane manufacturing business takes decades to get off the ground, and is practically impossible to start without heavy government involvement. Cars are not that far behind. How did you pick these as businesses that "bootstrap themselves"? Bootstrapping requires a non-capital intensive business model. These are the opposite. These are businesses running on decades of momentum and government support.