MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by AnonC | 2025-05-12 11:44:06+00:00
I’m not an expert on this, but I read this by Lawrence M Krauss (theoretical physicist and cosmologist):

“In 5 billion years, the expansion of the universe will have progressed to the point where all other galaxies will have receded beyond detection. Indeed, they will be receding faster than the speed of light, so detection will be impossible. Future civilizations will discover science and all its laws, and never know about other galaxies or the cosmic background radiation. They will inevitably come to the wrong conclusion about the universe......We live in a special time, the only time, where we can observationally verify that we live in a special time.”

A billion is just 10 to the power of nine, and that number of years in time is itself a long, long time that’s difficult to imagine. Looking at 10 to the power of 78 is…it wouldn’t matter much for us if it were to the power of 60 either. (I think!) I seriously doubt humans (as we know of now) can meaningfully affect the expansion or decay of the universe.
by delichon | 2025-05-12 11:44:11+00:00
> So carpentry, plumbing, electrician, mechanic, basically anything you can do that does not require the permission of an employer, just you and the person that needs the job done, and results in the satisfaction of some basic human need.

I've hired all of these trades for my basic needs and I've never seen their licenses. They don't need no stinking license to get lots of residential work around here, just word of mouth that they are competent.
by conartist6 | 2025-05-12 11:45:24+00:00
Any thoughts on the aspect of tool like this being, gosh, I don't know else to say it except evil?

To some extent, you've sanitized the business of ruining people's lives. This is the meat grinder. YOU as its creator don't fear it because it's your pet basilisk.

But make no mistake, your pet is a killer monster the only real purpose of which is to but a rubber stamp on every kind of bias while removing accountability for doing violence to real people's lives. If you get rich with this, at least now you can't say nobody told you where the money was coming from.

Think about it. What would you say if it made a mistake and ruined your life? "We're sorry, the AI says you're not allowed to have credit anymore." "We're sorry, you met the criteria to be targeted for extermination by a drone." "We're sorry, the AI scored you 8/10 on the deport-with-no-due-process chart, so off to no-rights terrorist prison."

You'd care if it was you, but the fact is that you won't have any way of knowing when your client uses your product to ruin or even end a life. A counter won't tick up by one. You'll just be there thinking "another happy customer." Now that's vom-inducing.
Ask HN: Do you think language development will be frozen in time?
by parpfish | 2025-05-12 11:45:52+00:00
I was just thinking about how new languages slowly build adoption and had the thought that LLM based coding may have basically frozen things in time so new languages (or language features) won’t be adopted.

Without a large training corpus, agents/autocomplete assistants will struggle knowing what to do (or will just confidently do the wrong thing), so people will hesitate to adopt a new language even if it has great features.

Or maybe we’re going to see an explosion of new languages for every project because it’s one way to stay ahead of the machines and make sure that humans are writing your code?
by kimos | 2025-05-12 11:46:08+00:00
I think about this every time my car is slow to wake or doesn’t wake when in a spot with poor signal, it’s SMS fuckery.

Regardless of all their problems now, decisions like this that made Tesla successful. Need a low power always on way to send the car a signal to wake from a mobile device? Don’t invent and build some complicated hardware and protocol, just use SMS and a small cell phone board.
by sebstefan | 2025-05-12 11:46:34+00:00
>DriverHub only responded to requests with the origin header set to “driverhub.asus.com”. So at least this software wasn’t completely busted and evil hackers can’t just send requests to DriverHub willy-nilly.

>When I switched the origin to driverhub.asus.com.mrbruh.com, it allowed my request.

One more CVE to developers validating URLs in some silly way

Your language comes with a URL parser. Use it! You can't handle all the edge cases of the URL format by yourself.

if ((new URL("https://user:password@driverhub.asus.com/whatever?q=whatever#whatever")).hostname === "driverhub.asus.com") { ... }
by askonomm | 2025-05-12 11:47:43+00:00
Clojure is very fragile though. Most Clojure companies are driven by vc funding and so whenever there's even a slight economic downturn, the few jobs that there are all disappear, sometimes mid-interview process, I've found out the hard way. But if you have tons of savings to justify a potentially half-year-or-more job search then no, not dying. But I wouldn't exactly say alive either, and the job market also hasn't grown in any noticeable way in the last half a decade.
by speak_plainly | 2025-05-12 11:48:24+00:00
Given our limited success in understanding the communication of non-human species (despite sharing evolutionary ancestry) our chances of meaningfully communicating with an alien species are likely near zero, unless they take the lead in bridging the gap.

We often assume that language, a distinctly human trait, is a prerequisite for intelligence or success, but it may be unique to us. Even on our own planet, no other species demonstrates the capacity for language.
by netbioserror | 2025-05-12 11:48:27+00:00
KDL seems like such a fantastic format. It's well-defined, and a parser can easily be built from the spec. It's explicitly and exclusively textual. It's an excellent rethink of node-based syntax and works fantastically for XML and HTML. Staggeringly, in my own testing, it can represent JSON maps and lists, as well as tabular formats, and even mix them, while still being slim, clear, unambiguously parsable, and human-readable. It's like a best of all worlds for a textual format. As with any node-based format, a parser hook to convert to and from pre-built types is probably necessary in most scenarios, but that's a small price to pay.

It really needs some strong word-of-mouth.

For anyone curious, you can represent tabular data using sentinel - child nodes for rows:

WeatherTable City Temperature Conditions { - Chicago 14 blizzard - "New York" 33 rain - Miami 68 sunny - "Los Angeles" 55 sunny }
by sublimefire | 2025-05-12 11:48:46+00:00
I was shopping for a new car and could not fathom why would you buy one that is heavy on electronics and especially software. Software does not age well unless it is designed in a controlled environment like aviation, which is not what happens with car systems. Besides the risks of being locked out of bugfixes in the future the software features are marginal to the overall experience and utility of the car. I would argue that cars made today are hardly any better than the ones made a decade ago. The problem is that making similar cars is not that profitable unless you spice it up and sell that feature for a premiuim.
by TeMPOraL | 2025-05-12 11:49:28+00:00
That's a long-winded way of spelling out a a Dog in the Manger approach to society, coupled with huge entitlement issues:

There is something valuable to others, that I neither built nor designed, but because I might have touched it once and left a paw print, I feel hurt no one wants to pay me rent for the valuable thing, and because of that, I want to destroy it so no one can have it.

Point 2) operates on a spectrum, there's plenty of cases where human work has no agency or free will behind it - in fact, it's very common in industrialized societies.

RE 3), "engineers" and "operators" are distinct; "engineers" make money because they provide something of immense value - something that exists only because of collective result of 1), but any individual contribution to it is of no importance. The value comes from the amount and diversity and how it all is processed. "Operators" usually pay "engineers" for access, and then they may or may not use it to provide some value to others, or themselves.

In the most basic case, "engineers" are OpenAI, and "operators" are everyone using ChatGPT app (both free and paid tiers).

RE 4) That's the sense of entitlement right there. Motivations from point 1. have already been satisfied; the value delivered by GenAI is a new thing, a form of reprocessing to access a new kind of value that was not possible to extract before, and that is not accessible to any individual creator, because (again) it comes from sheer bulk and diversity of works, not from any individual one.

IMO, individual creators have a point about AI competing with them for their jobs. But that's an argument against deployment and about what the "operators" do with it; it's not an argument against training.
by jcranmer | 2025-05-12 11:49:43+00:00
The fraud in Theranos for which Holmes et al were ultimately convicted was running regular blood tests (i.e., those any certified lab would run) on samples which were too small so that the blood tests gave essentially random data. Yes, they made much more outlandish claims about what they could eventually do (and at times veered into making those claims about what they could do at the present), but the actual fraud was that they couldn't even do what they were certified to do.
by lan321 | 2025-05-12 11:50:35+00:00
Grass is always greener and all that, but at least in high tax Europe and in poorer countries trades can be very well paid.

A whole lot of money can be earned under the table and it lets you work everywhere and under diverse conditions. Lots of people do short term work for a couple months, than vacation at home for a couple months, etc.. This is much more difficult to do in IT.

On my last flight back home I was talking to a guy doing roofing for some data centers in the Netherlands working for some dude from Sri Lanka. We calculated his theoretical salary and he could be making 80k+ euros cash a year assuming he worked normal yearly hours. He was working for a month or two, then chilling for 2-3 months, rinse and repeat. Sure, he's breaking his body, sure his retirement will be nonexistent since he's not paying taxes but he's literally on vacation more than half of the time and has been earning money since he became an adult without the broke student step.

I also have very close relatives with construction businesses and they're dying for skilled workers. It's very well paid if "you're not in construction because you can't do anything else" and they'd hire you for any period of time. Once approved you essentially call your boss the day before you want to work and he tells you where to go and what to do. You can work 7 days a week, you can work every second Saturday to get some movement in...
by throw0101d | 2025-05-12 11:50:43+00:00
See perhaps "Trump Fires U.S. Copyright Chief Days After Landmark AI Report"

* https://www.thedailybeast.com/trump-fires-us-copyright-chief...

And "Copyright and Artificial Intelligence Part 3: Generative AI Training" (PDF):

* https://www.copyright.gov/ai/Copyright-and-Artificial-Intell...
by dingaling | 2025-05-12 11:50:57+00:00
> though they probably got the iPod HD exclusivity very cheap and weren't so big then.

Toshiba were struggling to find a market for the 1.8" disk they'd invented. It was mentioned in passing after a routine meeting with Apple engineers and, to the latters' credit, they immediately saw the potential and called Steve Jobs to get the cash to sign an exclusivity deal. It cost them $10 million, absolute peanuts.

The Creative Nomad had a vast capacity but used standard 2.5" disks to minimise costs, making it bulky. If Creative had had the opportunity and foresight to grab the 1.8" supply chain, history might have been very different. If...
by formerly_proven | 2025-05-12 11:51:54+00:00
The magic numbers (hashes and UUIDs) sort of make sense because there's a slightly adversarial interaction between developers and Microsoft. If you just had a compatibleWindowsMin and compatibleWindowsMax field with version numbers, people would just go ahead and put "9999" in the max field, and then OS upgrades break applications again. By using UUIDs instead, an application developer can't intentionally or unintentionally declare compatibility with unreleased Windows versions.
by _heimdall | 2025-05-12 11:52:22+00:00
Reactivity features are helpful, but in my opinion they're only helpful in a problem that largely shouldn't exist.

For a vast majority of websites out there state largely lives on the server. Reactivity is only helpful when the state reacted to is client side, and for that most sites that's only going to happen when we decide to keep a duplicate copy of state in the client rather than rendering on the back end where the state lives.

I get the desire for smooth transitions, optimistic rendering, etc. Those goals lead to endless complexity and bugs when the actual source of truth lives elsewhere.

How a site is build becomes way more simple when we stick to keeping HTML rendering where the state lives even if that means making UX tradeoffs.
by tough | 2025-05-12 11:52:32+00:00
yea... I guess is too niche, I guess scratch your own itch + foss it so the low hundreds of us can have fun or smt

I was exploring using andyk/ht discussed on hn a few months back, to sit as a proxy my llm can call at the same time i control via xtermjs, but i need to figure out how to train the llm to output keybindings/special keys etc, but promising start nonetheless, i can indeed parse a lot of extra info than just a command, just imagine if AI could use all of the shell auto-complete features but feed into it..

maybe i should revisit/cleanup that repo and make it public. It feels like with just some data training on special key bindings etc an llm should be able to type, even if -char by char- at a faster speed than a human, to control TUI's
by awongh | 2025-05-12 11:52:43+00:00
For american cars at least, I read that one of the reasons this process exists is because car companies want to work around union rules for manufacturing by outsourcing components of the cars to subcontractors that they can make deals with.

Ultimately it's a price control strategy to pit these suppliers against each other to lower costs. But it means that designing these electronic sub-systems isn't just a question of the design itself, but also of managing all of these supplier relationships as well, they all have different contracts, you would have to coordinate all of them at once to make sure things are interoperable, etc.
by delichon | 2025-05-12 11:53:01+00:00
That's city talk. In this rural area we hire whoever has the know how and feel lucky to get them. I know for a fact that the current mechanic I use (the best I've ever had) is a farmer trying to make ends meet with no formal training. My electrician had a license as a lineman once but is now just supplementing his pension, unlicensed. Etc., etc.

The guy who came out to install a generator is licensed, and he needed one for the inspection, but that's an exception not the rule. The claim was that all you need is the skill to make a living, and around here that's demonstrated daily. Sometimes they don't even have the tools and use mine. Frequently they require cash, and that's standard procedure here.
by ano-ther | 2025-05-12 11:53:02+00:00
What’s the backstory?

> There was no real progress in negotiations with Organic Maps shareholders.

> It appears that Viktor is only open to a guarantee not to sell the project, however besides that he wants to retain full control of Organic Maps.

> And Organic Maps future is uncertain still, as the disagreement between shareholders (Viktor and Roman) has not been resolved.
by Bostonian | 2025-05-12 11:53:37+00:00
I program in Python, Fortran, and R. LLMs may be better at Python than Fortran since there is more training data for the former, but they are still pretty good at Fortran. LLMs make it easier to use less popular languages and much easier to use the more popular ones. An advantage of using LLMs for a compiled language like Fortran is that you can iterate with compiler messages until the code compiles. A Python script to do this is at https://github.com/Beliavsky/Groq-Fortran-agent. I assume Cursor and Windsurf do this too.
by mykowebhn | 2025-05-12 11:54:29+00:00
Agreed. It is so highly unlikely that the probability is effectively zero.

Let's give everyone the benefit of the doubt and assume that humanity can exist a thousand times longer than your estimate, say 3x10^9 years. That's about as long as we think life has existed on earth, which is a VERY LONG TIME. That said, it's still 1 x 10^-69 of that time period. I think you can see where we're going with this.
by int_19h | 2025-05-12 11:54:37+00:00
Does your "nice reactive table with search" retain its current state (including scrolling!) if I click on a link that opens another page, and then back out?

Does it let me link to page N of results?

As a user, I find that, in practice, it's these kinds of things that frustrate me far more than the lack of instant reactivity, whereas simple form with a submit button and a paginated table below works just fine.
by ysavir | 2025-05-12 11:55:00+00:00
The relevant context is the context in which it existed--that of a Roman library in pre-Christian Rome, making it a Roman library with no context of paganism. If it were a collection specifically of pagan writings assembled and maintained after Rome's widespread conversion to Christianity, then the pagan aspect would be meaningful, as it describes the relevance of that library to the society in which it existed.

To call it a "pagan" library now fails to describe it in the context of what it was at the time as well as what it is today, and instead is needlessly and aimlessly anchoring the perspective to the Christian world. It would be as if I described the library as being a Goy library--sure, I can, and wouldn't be technically wrong, but it's a meaningless distinction, and one that's more concerned about expressing the speaker's context than the subject's context, and the speaker is not relevant.
by resoluteteeth | 2025-05-12 11:55:37+00:00
> Personally, I have directly encountered this shift. I was advised by professors and career advisors against pursuing a Ph.D. because, I was told, I would face disproportionate competition from foreign students, making it an uphill battle. When applying for jobs, I have been explicitly informed that my race and gender alone could be a barrier, not because of my skills or work ethic, but because of the current political and hiring climate.

I think you are lumping together two completely separate things in a way that doesn't make sense: 1) policies to try to encourage hiring of women/minorities and 2) the fact that Americans often don't have what it takes to compete with much stronger foreign grad students (isn't this in fact meritocracy)
by skwee357 | 2025-05-12 11:56:26+00:00
Correct me if I'm wrong, but as an EU registered business, I'm obligated to report all income in my local currency (EUR in my case). This means that if I get paid in non-EUR, I'm obligated to record the transaction as if it was EUR using the official exchange rate on the date of the transaction/invoice.

So, while I do get to keep the non-EUR in a dedicated account, I still record the transaction as if it was in EUR using, say, ECB rate. So it doesn't help with avoiding currency fluctuations (assuming my non-EUR pricing is fixed and not tied to latest exchange rate).

Obligatory: not an accountant; not an accounting advice.
by jameshart | 2025-05-12 11:56:29+00:00
By priority to the right do you mean a French style priorité a droite? Or American style stop sign priorities?

Neither system describes how Indian traffic works, which is much more of an iterated cooperative fluid dynamics simulation, with the main rule being ‘don’t drive into people who are in front of you’.

And they drive on the left, so priority to the right makes no sense.
by LordGrignard | 2025-05-12 11:57:29+00:00
"The terrorists made sure to ask the religion of the Sindoor before symbolically erasing it—because apparently, even brutality comes with selective targeting."

got to correct you here, Sindoor is not a type of person to be asked about its religion lol its an accessory applied by hindu women after marriage symbolizing their marriage itself. The whole sentence is either a very shakespearean play on sindoor in which case, apologies good sir , and in case it isnt, now you know! have a nice day lol
by nottorp | 2025-05-12 11:58:15+00:00
It depends on what you need though, because arm windows has its own rosetta-like translation and does run x86 applications.

I set up a windows arm inside an UTM VM as a test, then installed visual studio (not code!) which is an x86 application and it was pretty much usable.

The codebase i was working on was complaining about missing some OpenGL parts so I stopped and haven't investigated further (I have x86 boxes for working on it). But depending on your requirements the above setup may be just fine(tm).
by K0balt | 2025-05-12 11:59:03+00:00
Yeah, it would be impractical to do them all lol, but you can get set up either by high school graduation or within two years afterward. So you go to college , if desired, at 19 or 20.

As far as the “track” available in high school, I’ve found it trivial to basically ignore it. You can pick and choose, but you may have to demonstrate ability to skip prerequisites, so that means independent study -a critical skill anyway. Also, summer school or community college in the summer can move a student ahead significantly.

Having raised 5 kids under this pattern it hasn’t been problematic or expensive. If the plan is to go to a prestigious university, you will need to do some extra academics or work yourself into a university program to make it obvious that going to a trade school doesn’t define your potential, usually completing a year of community college or participating as a research assistant etc by high school graduation is sufficient.

As far as tools cost, being a mechanic is the pricey one, with basic set of tools around $3000 these days because of the technology component.

But the other trades are not so bad.

If you don’t try to buy all new and vanity brands, you can get set up around $1000. Used tools are generally nearly as good as new ones. If you need advanced tools they are nearly universally available for rent, and often the first time you need to rent a tool, the job you do will pay for you to buy one for next time.

I think most people overvalue the dominant paradigm and pattern copying. It’s fine (even desirable) not to look like the usual applicant as long as your lumps are interesting or signal value to an institution.