MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mintsuki | 2025-05-27 05:26:26+00:00
That is a very niche use case, and also won't really work on most real BIOS machines as they actually check for a proper MBR and/or BPB (and no GPT), which is also why GPT on BIOS support is very spotty, since a lot of BIOSes will detect the GPT and refuse to boot, or refuse to boot in legacy (CSM) mode.

In any case that is far beyond the original scope of booting old PC OSes, which MBR support alone serves really well (99.9% of the way there, really), which is why I assumed by default you were thinking of MBR, not some other weird scheme.
by protocolture | 2025-05-27 05:28:00+00:00
When I was studying games programming we used an in house framework developed by the lecturers for OGRE.

At the time it was optional, but I get the feeling that if they still use that framework, it just became mandatory, because it has no internet facing documentation.

That said, I imagine they might have chucked it in for Unity before AI hit, in which case they are largely out of luck.

>But every year a small handful of dum-dums made it all the way to exam without having connected two dots, and I have to fail them and tell them that the three semesters they have wasted so far without any teachers calling their bullshit is a waste of life and won't lead them to a meaningful existence as a professional programmer.

This happened to me with my 3d maths class, and I was able to power through a second run. But I am not sure I learned anything super meaningful, other than I should have been cramming better.
by noahbp | 2025-05-27 05:32:53+00:00
> I've tried:

> - Cursor (can't remember which model, the default)

> - Google's Jules

> - OpenAI Codex with o4

Cursor's "default model" rarely works for me. You have to choose one of the models yourself. Sonnet 4, Gemini 2.5 Pro, and for tricky problems, o3.

There is no public release of o4; you used o4-mini, a model with poorer performance than any of the frontier models (Sonnet 4, Gemini Pro 2.5, o3).

Jules and Codex, if they're like Claude Code, do not work well with "Build me a Facebook clone"-type instructions. You have to break everything down and make your own tech stack decisions, even if you use these tools to do so. Yes they are not perfect and make regressions or forget to run linters or check their work with the compiler, but they do work extremely well if you learn to use them, just like any other tool. They are not yet magic that works without you having to put in any effort to learn them.
by djur | 2025-05-27 05:33:07+00:00
I was in the hospital for a month and was specifically prescribed BiPAP while I was there. I was completely unable to tolerate it and the technicians sent up to adjust it for me did not know how to access the clinician settings -- they just fiddled with the patient-facing controls, which are very limited. These were people who I am sure have lots of experience working on respirators and oxygen, but at least three different people clearly had no idea how to begin adjusting a ResMed BiPAP. Eventually, I was strong enough to get out of bed and adjust the settings myself, and finally I could get a good night's sleep.

That is to say that I agree: basically nobody outside of sleep clinics seems to know how they work, and even they don't provide much more expertise than you can get from publicly available information and tools.
by rafram | 2025-05-27 05:33:31+00:00
> if you yourself run a prompt on your LLM, which explicitly says to fetch random commenters' comments from your GitHub repo, and then run the body of those comments without validation, and then take the results of that execution and submit it as the body of a new PR on your GitHub repo

Read the article more carefully. The repo owner only has to ask the LLM to “take a look at the issues.” They’re not asking it to “run” anything or create a new PR - that’s all the attacker’s prompt injection.
by jazzcomputer | 2025-05-27 05:33:35+00:00
Flat silhouetted icons have a more versatile set of contexts - much like flat text does. Sure, you can express a lot in an icon that's 3D and whatnot but it needs its own stage to 'act' and really come alive, or else it'll just look a bit small, hard to read or a set of them will look too dense and over-egged on a shelf. Maximalism is visually demanding, and whilst it'll look cool, the context is too small for those kind of gaudy claims of some huge game-changer in aesthetics.- It's not I don't welcome them, as I do like diversity, but this is not gonna be some game-changer like when skeuomorphics was binned by Apple.
by remarkEon | 2025-05-27 05:34:37+00:00
In my undergraduate experience, the location of which shall remain nameless, we had amble access to technology but the professors were fairly hostile to it and insisted on pencil and paper for all technical classes. There were some English or History classes here and there that allowed a laptop for writing essays during an "exam" that was a 3 hour experience with the professor walking around the whole time. Anyway, when I was younger I thought the pencil and paper thing to be silly. Why would we eschew brand new technology that can make us faster! And now that I'm an adult, I'm so thankful they did that. I have such a firm grasp of the underlying theory and the math precisely because I had to write it down, on my own, from memory. I see what these kids do today and they have been so woefully failed.

Teachers and professors: you can say "no". Your students will thank you in the future.
by BrenBarn | 2025-05-27 05:36:03+00:00
> I think there is a good case to be made for trying to restrict AI use among young people the way we try to restrict smoking, alcohol, gambling, and sex.

I would go further than that, along two axes: it's not just AI and it's not just young people.

An increasing proportion of our economy is following a drug dealer playbook: give people a free intro, get them hooked, then attach your siphon and begin extracting their money. The subscription-model-ization of everything is an obvious example. Another is the "blitzscaling" model of offering unsustainably low prices to drive out competition and/or get people used to using something that they would never use if they had to pay the true cost. More generally, a lot of companies are more focused on hiding costs (environmental, psychological, privacy, etc.) from their customers than on actually improving their products.

Alcohol, gambling, and sex, are things that we more or less trust adults to do sensibly and in moderation. Many people can handle that, and there are modest guardrails in place even so (e.g., rules that prevent selling alcohol to drunk people, rules that limit gambling to certain places). I would put many social media and other tech offerings more in the category of dangerous chemicals or prescription drugs or opiates (like the laudanum the article mentions). This would restrict their use, yes, but the more important part is to restrict their production and set high standards for the companies that engage in such businesses.

Basically, you shouldn't be able to show someone --- child or adult --- an infinite scrolling video feed, or give them a GPT-style chatbot, or offer free same-day shipping, without getting some kind of permit. Those things are addictive and should be regulated like drugs.

And the penalties for failing to do everything absolutely squeaky clean should be ruinous. The article mentions one of Facebook's AIs showing CSAM to kids. One misstep on something like that should be the end of the company, with multi-year jail terms for the executives and the venture capitalists who funded the operation. Every wealthy person investing in these kinds of things should live in constant fear that something will go wrong and they will wind up penniless in prison.
by palmotea | 2025-05-27 05:36:29+00:00
> Teachers typically also have years, sometimes decades, of experience running exams. Yet I've never seen a teacher that is any good at stopping cheating. And that's in person for the class that they are teaching.

The difference is running exams is a small part of a teacher's job, and almost certainly not the part they're passionate about.

Also proctors demand things I've seen no teacher at any level demand (or be able to demand).
by crystal_revenge | 2025-05-27 05:36:30+00:00
It's almost irrelevant now since Reddit is basically just a gigantic bot farm, but I was always annoyed that Reddit would aggressively remove self promotion in most subs while clearly running major PR campaigns under the guise of organic content.

Hacker News is the opposite and the better for it. If you're openly promoting your work, awesome! If you're doing anything to attempt to manipulate the platform for PR reasons, you can bet you will be punished for it.

I never understood why Reddit, which always tried to give off the "for the little guy" vibes was so rabidly against anyone promoting their own work.
by pavon | 2025-05-27 05:37:59+00:00
Yeah, the icon style is the part I care about the least when taking about flat design. It is the fact that it removes all visual affordances that something is interactive. Clickable items that don't look like buttons or hypertext, they just look like the rest of the page. Scrollable regions that don't have scrollbars or any other visual clue that there is more content below or to the right, unless some of that content happens to be cut off by the invisible region boundary. Windows whose only indication of which is selected is the title goes from dark gray on light gray, to medium gray on light gray.
by pastage | 2025-05-27 05:39:55+00:00
> In its first 35 years, the Web has sustained three mighty blows: 1. The pop-up advertisement (late 1990s). 2. The emergence of content farms for SEO (2000s). 3. The final drowning of the Old Web in LLM-generated “slop” (now).

This a good manifesto, a reason to improve tools.

I am not a fan of TeX for writing (for layout it fits). But projects like these which concentrate on making tools to publish lower and higher effort knowledge graphs might be a good fit. Complex enough Markdown is just TeX. That said wsiwyg will always win.
by NilMostChill | 2025-05-27 05:40:59+00:00
It sounds interesting, but its still just moving the problem surface elsewhere.

Bringing model definition and usage closer to the storage layer thereby reducing the need for translation and transport might cut down on the need for repeated and variant definitions across layers but it doesn't remove the other issues related to data storage.

There will need to be a system for storage and that will have to deal with transactional state management as well as consistency schemes, having that in an actor layer that is shared with other parts of the system might solve some issues, but it'd need to be really carefully managed so as not to inflict the solutions to those problems on the other parts of the system using the same transport mechanisms.

i dislike javascript with a passion but I'd be down for using a wasm based system that does what you say, my skepticism is usually just me shouting at clouds so it'd be interesting to see a working model.
by grumbelbart2 | 2025-05-27 05:41:01+00:00
It's more consistent.

As a rule of thumb, Bloom filters require 10 bits per element for a 1% false positive rate. Say 100 pixels changed between the frames, that 1000 bits or ~125 bytes to store the which-pixel-changed-map.

Runlength encoding of the (in)active bits can use anything from ~10-200 bytes for 100 pixels (Say 1 byte per run, 200 runs of active vs. inactive in the worst case).
by cess11 | 2025-05-27 05:42:21+00:00
It's what they consistently call it here, VM and bytecode:

https://docs.racket-lang.org/guide/performance.html

As I understand it the difference between raco make and raco exe is that the latter bundles a VM.

I don't really care about these minutiae, it's a great platform for GUI development that consistently builds as well on Debian as Windows.
by dabinat | 2025-05-27 05:42:43+00:00
There’s an article I like on this topic called Staring into the Abyss: https://www.benkuhn.net/abyss/

It talks about asking yourself really hard, scary questions as a habit, that may result in having to admit that you made wrong decisions or wasted time or money. Persevering is often the easiest decision but may not be the best.
by protocolture | 2025-05-27 05:43:53+00:00
>I'm 62, and what allowed me to follow my curiosity as a kid was that the school lessons were finite, and easy enough that I could finish them early, leaving me time to do things like play music, read, and learn electronics.

Yeah I feel like teachers are going to try and use LLMs as an excuse to push more of the burden of schooling to their pupils homelife somehow. Like, increasing homework burdens to compensate.
by hatefulmoron | 2025-05-27 05:44:24+00:00
You're confused by the word 'unsafe', which is a misnomer. Rust. The point of 'unsafe' is to indicate that the compiler should be extra careful when compiling the code, because you're about to do something that only a C/C++ programmer would do. Rust sees this and is extra careful. As in your quote, the compiler makes sure we're not using it incorrectly. Rust.
by barrenko | 2025-05-27 05:44:43+00:00
I've tried re-enrolling in a STEM major last year, after a higher education "pause" of 16-ish years. 85% of the class used GPTs to solve homework, and it was quite obvious most of them haven't even read the assignment.

The immediate effect was the distrust of the professors towards most everyone and lots classes felt like some kind of babysitting scheme, which I did not appreciate.
by maeil | 2025-05-27 05:44:46+00:00
> As in, don't you know these publicly traded companies are legally bound to extract profit without these silly notions of empathy or trust?

Based on your first question, I think you might already know this, but just in case you don't: This is a myth.

> The idea that choosing a 1% strategic internal investment over a 4.5% T-bill constitutes actionable "financial malpractice" or a breach of fiduciary duty leading to successful lawsuits is incorrect. Courts recognize that running a business requires strategic choices and risk-taking, not just maximizing immediate, risk-free yield. A lawsuit would fail unless plaintiffs could show the decision was tainted by disloyalty, bad faith, or gross negligence in the decision-making process, none of which are implied by simply choosing a lower-yield strategic project.

> Hence why no one ever gets sued for this. It doesn't happen. It lives in the minds of HNers and Redditors to provide a very convenient excuse for their employers, or in general companies, making abhorrent decisions purely based on feels and short-term next-quarter profits/stock price, regardless of the negative externalities they inflict on society.
by yusina | 2025-05-27 05:46:03+00:00
> The problem required the user to set up a GitHub MCP server with credentials that allowed access to both public and private repos, to configure some LLM to have access to that MCP server, and then to explicitly submit a request to that LLM that explicitly said to read and parse arbitrary issues (including the one created earlier) and then just blindly parse and process and perform whatever those issues said to do, and then blindly make a publicly-visible update to a public repo with the results of those operation(s).

To be fair, with all the AI craze, this is exactly what lots of people are going to do without thinking twice.

You might say "well they shouldn't, stupid". True. But that's what guardrails are for, because people often are stupid.
by vladvasiliu | 2025-05-27 05:47:30+00:00
> At my new gig I have to use web Outlook (not allowed to use my finger-memorized mutt setup), and I must say it's a pleasure to look at the UI. Still line drawing icons, but and elegant play with colors at least.

What do you mean "colors"? I have been using Web Outlook for a while, and everything is blue black and grey with a ton empty space.
by davydm | 2025-05-27 05:47:40+00:00
The pragmatic programmer, having learned from their overconfidence in the past, resolves to build the simplest software possible, consciously avoiding the pitfalls of over-engineering.

Some software is complex because it has to be. Some is complex because some nimrod threw every new tech they could at it and filled it with features users will never use and couldn't be arsed to constrain it with automated tests. C'est la vie.
by AStonesThrow | 2025-05-27 05:47:59+00:00
I am confused by your pronouns and other plot holes.

You wanted to "ace the class", which is an "A" on your final report card? But your crush's exam tanked your grade? You passed the class anyway, right?

Did you swap Scantrons, then, and your crush sat next to you, writing answers on the dgfitz forms?

She wouldn't pass without an "A" on the exams, so her running point total was circling the drain, and your effort gave her a "C-" or something?

In what ways did your teacher make the exams "fair"? What percentage of the grade did they comprise?

Were the 3 tests administered on 3 separate occasions, so nobody caught you repeatedly cheating the same way?
by swoorup | 2025-05-27 05:48:42+00:00
Nix is great but the user interface is ugly and cryptic. Debugging dependency issues (what depends on this package of particular hash), installing a particular version of a package is just more trouble than something you would get from the likes of npm or cargo.

Would I use nix for my servers? Yes. Would I also use nix personally to keep my systems in sync? Yes. Will I recommend nix to others? Absolutely not.
by probably_wrong | 2025-05-27 05:49:17+00:00
IMO you're coming at it from the wrong angle.

Capitalism barely concerns itself with humans and whether human experiences exist or not is largely irrelevant for the field. As far as capitalism knows, humans are nothing but a noisy set of knobs that regulate how much profit one can make out of a situation. While tongue-in-cheek, this SMBC comic [1] about the Ultimatum game is an example of the type of paradoxes one gets when looking at life exclusively from an economics perspective.

The question is not "what's the value of a human under capitalism?" but rather "how do we avoid reducing humans to their economic output?". Or in different terms: it is not the blender's job to care about the pain of whatever it's blending, and if you find yourself asking "what's the value of pain in a blender-driven world?" then you are solving the wrong problem.

[1] https://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=3507
by hyperman1 | 2025-05-27 05:49:23+00:00
I've wondered about that after reading the article.

In my country, we collect plastics at home (PMD) and it gets picked up bi-weekly in a bag. The PMD system has similar recycling stats as in the article. It is seen as an excuse for shops to declare the plastic waste problem as 'solved' without doing anything, and making consumers responsible.

The shops are fighting tooth and nail against collecting plastics themselves or introducing reusable drink bottles.

What's the UK alternative for collecting at the shop? Collecting at home? Doing nothing?
by Sourabhsss1 | 2025-05-27 05:50:06+00:00
1. Your hero section takes some time to be fully visible. You can try increasing the speed of the animation. It'll help in CRO.

2. You can remove the 7-day trial pill above the H1 as it makes the hero section cluttered. Instead, you can put 'No CC required' in the primary CTA button or just below it.

3. Add a real product image in the hero section. Illustrations are not that convincing.

I hope this helps.
by microtonal | 2025-05-27 05:51:54+00:00
The nix language is fundamentally at odds with general purpose usability.

I have contributed or tried to contribute to many distributions (heck, I even worked for a commercial Linux distribution when I was young) and contributing to nixpkgs was an order of magnitude easier than other distributions. Part of it was the GitHub/PR-centered workflow, but the other part is that Nix is a small functional language and the package definitions are not in some arcane weird format like RPM spec files or Debian rules. Also, Nix makes it much easier to refine a derivation/package without actually having to install it on your system.
by vineyardmike | 2025-05-27 05:52:17+00:00
I don't think it does. The postcard should go to the place where the customers go, so for a restaurant its the place with the tables and the food and stuff.

If the address is different than the address of the shop-owner, then how would a user who uses google maps get to the shop? And why wouldn't the shop owner just create a new, correct listing?
by mediumsmart | 2025-05-27 05:53:30+00:00
So true and the holy grail of being the first entry fuels the industry of reviews and stars which fuels the industry of bad review removal services etc and so on. This is such a vast ecosystem and so humiliating for the participants that it is only logical to let AI write, read and handle it. This is our chance to get a life. Lets not squander it.
by bluecalm | 2025-05-27 05:53:32+00:00
Imo the biggest problem in Western democracies is that in a lot of ideological cases we don't have democracy at all. It doesn't matter what majority thinks as no major party is going to implement it.

I get why democracy has to be indirect when it comes to many complicated, interconnected issues but things like free speech laws, abortion laws, public decency laws, smoking bans etc. should all be decided in a direct vote (repeated every N years). As it is we often have a situation where significant majority have a different view but a small strong group is able to influence the law. It's not a democracy but a farce in my view.
Show HN: Contour – AI-powered, web-based GIS with natural language commands
by thede_plandude | 2025-05-27 05:53:59+00:00
We built Contour, a browser-based GIS that lets you fetch, analyze, and visualize spatial data using natural language — no shapefiles, no scripting, no software installs.

Instead of dragging layers and writing code, you can just type:

“Load census tracts for California and join ACS data for income, education, and population.”

Or:

“Create a vulnerability index using low income, high density, and low education levels.”

It handles real GIS operations — buffers, joins, calculations, visualizations — all through prompts. You can export styled maps, CSVs, GeoJSON, or PDFs directly.

Contour connects to live public datasets (Census, ACS, Overture Maps, etc.), runs on the cloud, and supports collaborative map projects.

We made it because we were tired of spending hours wrestling with traditional GIS just to do simple spatial work. Most modern tools still expect users to be technicians. Contour is our attempt to change that — and make GIS accessible to anyone who thinks spatially.

3-min demo video of Contour in action: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7330593...

More about us: https://www.linkedin.com/company/contourmaps https://x.com/contourmaps

We’re in private beta and onboarding early users. Would love your feedback on what works and what doesn’t. Happy to answer any questions here.
by 3eb7988a1663 | 2025-05-27 05:55:05+00:00
That reddit thread has some amazing benchmarks.

The GNU-yes

$ yes | pv > /dev/null ... [10.2GiB/s] ...

The way I (not a C programmer) would have written it

void main() { while(write(1, "y\n", 2)); // 1 is stdout } $ gcc yes.c -o yes $ ./yes | pv > /dev/null ... [6.21 MiB/s] ...
by ashrawan | 2025-05-27 05:55:24+00:00
I’m in the very early stages of working on NeuroQAI — an SDK focused on secure digital identity verification for AI agents and other intelligent systems BankInfoSecurity I’m an F-1 student building solo and would love guidance, feedback, or connections to keep the project moving. If you’re in security, AI, or a related field — or just curious — I’d really appreciate your insights. Thanks in advance!