MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by delfinom | 2025-05-17 14:22:11+00:00
Yea but the Japanese IC card system has complete interop between all transit systems run by completely different private companies. So you can hop on a train from one city to another and then hop on a bus in that new city on the other side of the country all using the same card.

And a good chunk of vending machines in Japan accept the IC card. Sometimes even food shops a step above vending machines.
by lmeyerov | 2025-05-17 14:22:30+00:00
I can bring data here:

We recently did the first speed run where Louie.ai beat teams of professional cybersecurity analysts in an open competition, Splunk's annual Boss of the SOC. Think writing queries, wrangling Python, and scanning through 100+ log sources to answer frustratingly sloppy database questions:

- We get 100% correct for basic stuff in the first half that takes most people 5-15 minutes per question, and 50% correct in the second half that most people take 15-45+ minute per question, and most teams time out in that second half.

- ... Louie does a median 2-3min per question irrespective of the expected difficulty, so about 10X faster than a team of 5 (wall clock), and 30X less work (person hours). Louie isn't burnt out at the end ;-)

- This doesn't happen out-of-the-box with frontier models, including fancy reasoning ones. Likewise, letting the typical tool here burn tokens until it finds an answer would cost more than a new hire, which is why we measure as a speedrun vs deceptively uncapped auto-solve count.

- The frontier models DO have good intuition , understand many errors, and for popular languages, DO generate good text2query. We are generally happy with OpenAI for example, so it's more on how Louie and the operator uses it.

- We found we had to add in key context and strategies. You see a bit in Claude Code and Cursor, except those are quite generic, so would have failed as well. Intuitively in coding, you want to use types/lint/tests, and same but diff issues if you do database stuff. But there is a lot more, by domain, in my experience, and expecting tools to just work is unlikely, so having domain relevant patterns baked in and that you can extend is key, and so is learning loops.

A bit more on louie's speed run here: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/leo-meyerovich-09649219_genai...

This is our first attempt at the speed run. I expect Louie to improve: my answers represent the current floor, not the ceiling of where things are (dizzyingly) going. Happy to answer any other q's where data might help!
by jack_h | 2025-05-17 14:22:39+00:00
The Social Security surplus is used to fund general government operations and the Social Security Administration gets an IOU (Treasury security) in return. So it's still money the government didn't have before that it uses to fund its operations that it borrowed from a different self-funded program that had an excess, and it still needs to pay it back with interest. Usually the Treasury doesn't have enough tax dollars to pay it back, so they auction more bonds to the public and it gets added to the public debt at that point. However, if effective tax rates go up or spending is cut elsewhere then it can pay it back without adding to publicly held debt.

So you're right that it's not the same as publicly held debt. Rather intragovernmental debt is deferring the decision of how to pay for some governmental services to a later time, although usually it becomes publicly held debt. One way or another, the tax payer is on the hook for this spending which is part of the gross national debt, just like they're on the hook for publicly held debt.
by diggan | 2025-05-17 14:23:19+00:00
Highly dependent on your local bubble, obviously.

According to the latest Stack Overflow Developer Survey (https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2024/technology#most-popular..., which also is biased admittedly), it seems like for professional use, ~48% use Windows, ~32% macOS and 28% Ubuntu. ~17% also use WSL, which is basically Linux in Windows, so I guess you could say ~45% wants to (or at least, does) use Linux for work.

Seems not so clear cut as you seem to think it is.
by lxgr | 2025-05-17 14:23:43+00:00
Apple Pay uses hardware secure elements, so the same limitations largely apply.

Google Pay emulates the card on the application processor, so theoretically it could be faster, but I wouldn't be surprised if anything won in terms of more performant RSA cryptography is lost to higher command processing latency between the NFC interface and application processor.

It would be interesting for somebody to do a latency comparison between Apple Pay, Google Pay, and a physical card!
by jmull | 2025-05-17 14:24:04+00:00
Only when you have an object that implements [Symbol.dispose]. If you don't, then you need to create one (like the wrapper in the example from the article) or bang out some boilerplate to explicitly make and use a DisposableStack().

So with using there's a little collection of language features to learn and use, and (probably more importantly), either app devs and library devs have to get on the same page with this at the same time, or app devs have to add a handful of boilerplate at each call site for wrappers or DisposableStacks.
by CraigJPerry | 2025-05-17 14:24:24+00:00
> Prefers the former after a substitution...

That's not quite right, it's a substitution AND ablation of 2 functions and an enum from the code base.

There's quite a reduction in complexity he's advocating for.

Further, the enum and the additional boilerplate is not adding type safety in this example. Presumably the parameters to foo and bar are enforced in all cases so the only difference between the two examples is the additional boilerplate of a 2-armed enum.

I strongly suspect in this case (but i haven't godbolted it to be sure) that both examples compile to the same machine code. If my hunch is correct, then the remaining question is, does introduction of double-entry book keeping on the if condition add safety for future changes?

Maybe. But at what cost? This is one of those scenarios where you bank the easy win of reduced complexity.
by AndrewKemendo | 2025-05-17 14:24:38+00:00
For what it’s worth, Program Offices and contracting officers are not including this (or any limitations on autonomous control) as a blanket or even specific requirement to be in compliance for any contract awards, so it’s largely irrelevant.

There’s also no independent V&V team that will actually verify these kinds of things the way they say they will.

DoD used to be ahead in AI now it’s decades behind
by Swizec | 2025-05-17 14:24:55+00:00
How is it irrelevant? Kids will always cheat their way through classes they feel are a distraction. Even the super smart Type A kids.

Hell, all humans do that. You use every resource available to get out of dealing with things that are not your priority. This means you will never be good at those things and that’s fine. You can’t be good at everything.
by spacedcowboy | 2025-05-17 14:25:11+00:00
Oh $deity yes, I was rapidly disabused of the notion, given I was living in San Jose or Cupertino, or Mountain View, … or anywhere in reasonable traveling time to the Apple campus, really.

Going to buy a place by the beach in the UK, with a little (half acre or so) land, and plenty of space (for Space :) now that I’m retiring. I have an interest in optical astrophotography too, so as low a Bortle sky as I can finagle given the other constraints (school proximity, wife’s opinion, …)
by amannm | 2025-05-17 14:26:05+00:00
It's a half-baked, rushed out, speculative attempt to capture developer mindshare and establish an ecosystem/moat early in a (perceived) market. It's a desperate "standard" muscled in by Amazon/Claude, similar to their overwrought "Smithy" IDL that basically nobody outside the Amazon SDK team chooses to use for API/Schema management. It will end up in that same niche in the long term, most likely... AWS/Amazon/Claude specific app integrations, buried underneath some other 3rd party framework that abstracts it away and makes the "spec" irrelevant.
by wrsh07 | 2025-05-17 14:26:16+00:00
Does anyone know if this is still up-to-date?

All three authors are large contributors to the field (the book _discrete and computational geometry_ by O'Rourke & Devadoss is excellent), Demaine has some origami in the collection at MoMA NYC^, Mitchell found a ptas for euclidian tsp (Google it - the paper is readable and there is another good write up of his vs Arora's)

^ https://erikdemaine.org/curved/MoMA/
by lcnPylGDnU4H9OF | 2025-05-17 14:26:30+00:00
> Not the tech company executives making billions, with a b.

To be fair, they did include this group. I’m also not sure the number-goes-up investors are “the” problem (perhaps “a” problem) or if they’re just acting rationally in an inflationary economy, which does seem to be a problem with far-reaching consequences.

But I agree that the problem is pretty far removed from the workers working for a paycheck, regardless of what they do; someone is paying them to do it, maybe criticize that first.
by delfinom | 2025-05-17 14:26:54+00:00
AFAI, many Android phones have Osaifu-Kaitai support outside of the US just sitting there. I think if there is a key generation fee, it's at setup time of a wallet and not just physical phone's existence.

I rooted my US model Pixel 9 Pro on my Japan trip last year to enable it. :D Literally a boolean in a config file.

https://github.com/kormax/osaifu-keitai-google-pixel

(The author's write up has more theories on why Google blocks it on non-Japan SKUs)
by necheffa | 2025-05-17 14:27:16+00:00
> What an average person wants in their desktop is Windows - not Linux and certainly not some obscure independent distro. And this is still not a problem of that distro or Linux.

The average person doesn't even want Windows. They want to click a button and not be bothered with the implementation details.

That is why mobile/tablet is such a popular form of compute these days. People don't even have to learn the basics of interfacing with a file system most of the time. Want to look at pictures you've taken? You can be oblivious to the fact that your camera app puts picture files in a specific directory and embeds a date code in the file name, the photo viewer app takes care of that for you.
by gavinray | 2025-05-17 14:27:26+00:00
In response to the recent Google Cloud post "Getting AI to write good SQL" [0] and some comments I've seen here lately [1], I wanted to share an approach that I've found useful for portable, dialect-agnostic SQL generation.

tl;dr = Use an abstract Query IR/AST as your generation target, rather than embedding dialect-specific syntax rules. Then render the IR to a target dialect programmatically.

Hopefully this is useful for other folks working in the "need to support multiple SQL dialects for my product" space.

- [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44009848

- [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43812675
by neRok | 2025-05-17 14:27:58+00:00
I'm just a hobbyist and have some scriplets I've written to "improve" things on various websites. As part of that I needed an uninstall/undo feature - so with my "bush league" code I would do `window.mything = {something}`, and based upon previous dabblings with the likes of python/c#/go, I presumed I would be able to do `delete window.mything` and it would auto-magically call a function I would have written to do the work. So the new `[Symbol.dispose]()` feature/function would have done what I was looking for - but really, it;s not a big deal, because all that I actually had to do was write an interface spec'ing `{}.remove()` method, and call it where needed.

(This paragraph is getting off topic, but still... ) Below is my exact interface that I have in a .d.ts file. The reason for that file is because I like typed languages (ie TypeScript), but I don't want to install stuff like node-js for such simple things. So I realised vscode can/will check js files as ts on-the-go, so in a few spots (like this) I needed to "type" something - and then I found some posts about svelte source code using js-docs to type their code-base instead of typescript. So that's basically what I've done here...

export global { interface Window { MyThing?: {remove: ()=>any} } }

So chances are that in the places you could use this feature, you've probably already got an "interface" for closing things when done (even if you haven't defined the interface in a type system).
by belter | 2025-05-17 14:28:30+00:00
> Gemini AI Studio is such a giant leap ahead in programming I have to pinch myself when I'm using it

Every time in the last three or four weeks, there is a post here about Gemini, the top comment, or one of the top comments is something along these lines. And every time I spend a few minutes making empirical tests to check if I made a mistake in cancelling my paid Gemini account after giving up on it...

So I just did a couple of tests sending the same prompt on some AWS related questions to Gemini Pro 2.5 (free) and Claude paid, and no, Claude still better.
by daemonologist | 2025-05-17 14:29:13+00:00
See related:

- from David Cummings at JPL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43732632

- from Bruce Waggoner at JPL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42385393

- Ars article from the time of the fix: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40155293

- CNN article from when communication was lost: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38640900
by SOLAR_FIELDS | 2025-05-17 14:29:54+00:00
Less than a week ago I complained about nearly the exact same issue and received the typical “nixy” response “that’s what the cache is for”. Well, that’s excellent news, when the cache actually works as expected. I see this a lot with my flake.nix per repo configurations too. The flake.nix never changes, yet it inexplicably rebuilds packages sometimes
by ZYbCRq22HbJ2y7 | 2025-05-17 14:30:34+00:00
The original article title is less spooky sounding.

"Imaging Ultraweak Photon Emission from Living and Dead Mice and from Plants under Stress"

https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.jpclett.4c03546
by ksec | 2025-05-17 14:31:04+00:00
>I just got back from Japan. I did not notice a difference in performance between tapping with a Blink credit card and tapping with an IC card. I only used the ICOCA card.

Unless things have changed, the ICOCA uses Felica as well. And old Offline Credit Card transactions used to be 200-300ms. Compared to Felica that is sub 100ms. May be offline transactions for credit card have gotten faster? Or may be not latency sensitive enough to notice the lag.
by OutOfHere | 2025-05-17 14:31:20+00:00
Since you struggle so much with reading, I will read it for you:

> UPE, also known as biophoton emission, is a spontaneous release of extremely low-intensity light that is invisible to the human eye and falls within the spectral range of 200–1,000 nm.

UPE is due to oxidative stress. In contrast, the wavelength of IR is 700 nm to 1 mm. IR is fundamentally different altogether than UPE.
by josephg | 2025-05-17 14:31:32+00:00
> The latter is not only more readable, but it is safer, because a match statement can ensure all possibilities are covered.

Whether or not this matters depends on what, exactly, is in those match arms. Sometimes there's some symmetry to the arms of an if statement. And in that case, being exhaustive is important. But there's plenty of times where I really just have a bit of bookkeeping to do, or an early return or something. And I only want to do it in certain cases. Eg if condition { break; } else { stuff(); }

Also, if-else is exhaustive already. Its still exhaustive even if you add more "else if" clauses, like if {} else if {} else {}.

Match makes sense when the arms of the conditional are more symmetrical. Or when you're dealing with an enum. Or when you want to avoid repeating conditions. (Eg match a.cmp(b) { Greater / Equal / Less } ).

The best way to structure your code in general really comes down to what you're trying to do. Sometimes if statements are cleaner. Sometimes match expressions. It just depends on the situation.
by ndsipa_pomu | 2025-05-17 14:33:09+00:00
The best paid football players aren't easily replaced with cheaper talent though. Top clubs will need to compete against other top clubs, so e.g. a striker with better performance is going to be heavily in demand and can make a lot of difference to the success of the club.

Arguably, news readers aren't critical to the success of the news broadcast (the content probably makes far more difference), though I can see that presenters can make a big difference to the popularity of shows. I've got nothing against Gary Lineker (quite like him, but rarely watch him on telly), but I do object to being "forced" to pay for his excessive salary when they should be helping younger, unknown talent to get exposure etc.
by proberts | 2025-05-17 14:34:53+00:00
There is an argument that it is harder to renew an E-2 visa when there are no employees and limited revenues than to get a new E-2 visa when there are no employees and limited revenues because a new E-2 is forward looking/potential. But I'd have to dig in deeper to the facts to make a firmer assessment. Regarding majority control, that's not correct; it's enough if your ownership is just 50%.
by gruez | 2025-05-17 14:36:35+00:00
>-- a site not being able to tell the location of your dns server, which is true

>-- your dns server not affecting how sites adjudge your location, which is not

Neither of these statements are definitively true/false.

1. Sites can most certainly tell the IP (and thus the location) of your DNS server. There are many sites that demonstrate this, just search for "dns leak test". Whether sites actually use this is another question.

2. Sites can serve different IPs (servers) depending on the DNS server, or even the client (through the edns client subnet extension). Some CDNs use this strategy to route requests to the closest server. However, this fact is a red herring when it comes to assessing whether "just change your dns to a UK server" is a viable strategy for getting bbc iplayer to work, because its geoblock checks based on IP of the http request, not through DNS.

There's also the question of "smart dns proxies"[1], which make it seem like all you're doing is "change your dns server to a UK server", but there's far more that goes under the hood than just changing your DNS server, because it's actually proxying your traffic as well. Changing your dns server to a uk server that isn't a smart dns proxy wouldn't get you pass bbc's geoblocks.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44013929
by ninetyninenine | 2025-05-17 14:37:19+00:00
I want the power of Nixos and not caring. I would like this experience both for the desktop and the server.

I said this one time on hacker news and a nixos fan told me that people like me should basically fuck off from the community because they don’t want people like me.

I used nixos for about a year for work so I definitely see the benefits of this but this ass hole attitude just made me sick of it. Like why can’t I have both? Is it impossible to have both? It may not exist yet but there’s a need here that would benefit everyone if it were filled.

Needless to say that thanks to that person I now really just dislike the nixos community. Rude and no flexibility in changing. Inevitably some guy might respond to this to apologize on behalf of the community and I appreciate that… but at the same time I think most members of the community truly have this attitude of keeping things hard and challenging on nixos and they don’t want things to change at all.

In addition to this.

Everything the guy mentioned that makes nixos hard for desktop can apply to servers as well. It’s not as if everything magically gets better.
by wlindley | 2025-05-17 14:37:47+00:00
My company "Lindley Systems" did all this from 1980 (when I was 14) until the mid 90s, in the Heathkit (later Heath/Zenith) arena. I still have master diskettes and original manuals ready for taking to the Xerox shop, and only a few years ago tossed boxes full of registration cards (with 13 cent stamps on them).

We made the transition from Heathkit HDOS to CP/M and MS-DOS but never shipped a product for MS Windows. We almost had a product ready in 1996 but then MS "upgraded" VB 3 to VB 4 and we started a rewrite, almost completed just in time for the "upgrade" to VB 5 - by which time our market had moved on.

It was a fun time to build custom and specialized hardware and software.
by vunderba | 2025-05-17 14:38:04+00:00
No marketing advice but if you manage to outrank the other dozen similar virtual fashion AI sites on popular search engines - I would try to call out in a comparison table what distinguishes your product from:

Botika

Outfit.fm

AI.Fashion

FASHNAI

Artisse

etc.

Hopefully you surveyed the existing landscape before building your product so that you can carve out an untapped niche. Good luck - seems like a competitive space!
by nopinsight | 2025-05-17 14:38:06+00:00
Au contraire, reasoning LLMs free me from mundane cognitive tasks, e.g. selecting websites to read from among search results, assessing level of evidence in papers before reading them in more detail, routine coding, and many other repetitive tasks. It allows me to spend mental effort on more abstract and strategic thoughts.

We should seize the opportunity to elevate our mental skills to a higher plane, aided by these “cognitive elves”.
by indymike | 2025-05-17 14:39:34+00:00
I’m not sure people care about their OS that much. I’ve watched companies change OSes and not miss a beat, and in many cases getting better:

* less service interruptions by using chromeOS over a cell carriers network instead of a failing internal network

* improved productivity from fewer OS configuration and update problems by switching to Macs

* Lower costs across the board due to better or less expensive hardware with Chrome and Mac

* Higher dev productivity in a small dev shop by requiring devs to use the exact same os they deploy code to (it forced the devs to learn)
by lycopodiopsida | 2025-05-17 14:39:52+00:00
No need to convert me there, I am already in the church.

For programming purposes emacs is not that different from any modern editor - there are some built-in capabilities, the rest you get from ELPA/MELPA/Git. It has no proper plugin arhitecture, which is a gift and a curse at the same time, but mostly works out. Where emacs shines compared to vscode/neovim/etc is that it has a very solid support for prose, org-mode, denote and prots color schemes which are that good. It is why I continue to use it, even though I am not interested in lisp per se these days and could easily replace it for programming with any other advanced editor.
by proberts | 2025-05-17 14:39:53+00:00
I'm sure that there is abuse but from my limited perspective, I see employers using the H-1B program because they can't find qualified U.S. workers or because a foreign national is the best candidate. In essence, your question is whether the H-1B program protects the wages of U.S. workers and my feeling is that in practice, it neither protects nor undermines these wages.
by RetroTechie | 2025-05-17 14:40:43+00:00
Why the "novel" qualifier?

There exist many OSes (and UI designs) based on non-mainstream concepts. Many abandoned, forgotten, @ design time suitable hardware didn't exist, no software to take advantage of it, etc etc.

A 'simple' retry at achieving such alternate vision could be very successful today due to changed environment, audience, or available hardware.
by andyg_blog | 2025-05-17 14:40:46+00:00
A more general rule is to push ifs close to the source of input: https://gieseanw.wordpress.com/2024/06/24/dont-push-ifs-up-p...

It's really about finding the entry points into your program from the outside (including data you fetch from another service), and then massaging in such a way that you make as many guarantees as possible (preferably encoded into your types) by the time it reaches any core logic, especially the resource heavy parts.