MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by wormius | 2025-05-08 21:54:44+00:00
Haha i had a 486/dx2-66 laptop and my first try using linux was in 1997 with Debian Bo, IIRC. Downloading over 28.8 modem (maybe it was 56k at that point?) took a LOOOOOONG time, and then trying to get XFree86 to work was no luck with that chipset, even thought it was an IBM computer. It didn't help that the only source of info was the computer itself so getting online in text mode with a usenet client to ask questions and then try to reboot and fail and getting back online etc.

It's amazing how far we've come with video drivers.

sound drivers on the other hand.
by andrewpareles | 2025-05-08 21:56:04+00:00
Yep, Void is a VSCode fork, but we're definitely not wed to VSCode! Building our own IDE/browser-port is not out of the picture. We'll have to see where the next iteration of tool-use agents takes us, but we strongly feel writing typescript/rust/react is not the endgame when describing algorithms to a computer, and a text-based editor might not be ideal in 10 years, or even 2.
by kevin_thibedeau | 2025-05-08 21:56:05+00:00
There's a great interview of Allen Baum, high school friend of Wozniak and peripherally involved in the early years of Apple (he pilfered the HP stock room to supply Woz with parts for the Apple 1 & 2 prototypes). He was a roommate with Jobs for one summer and, notably, doesn't say anything bad about him over the course of the three hour interview.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wN02z1KbFmY
by jaberjaber23 | 2025-05-08 21:56:27+00:00
hey:D

i built a tool that lets any dev write and optimize cuda code without knowing gpu stuff. just tell it what you want, it generates the kernel, runs it, and shows you bottlenecks. no setup, no cuda experience needed.

we launched 3 days ago and hit #1 developer tool on product hunt. you can get started for free here: https://rightnowai.co

would love your feedback if you try it out.
by woodruffw | 2025-05-08 21:56:45+00:00
FWIW: Self-hosted runners are non-trivial to secure[1]; the defaults GitHub gives you are not necessarily secure ones, particularly if your self-hosted runner executes workflows from public repositories.

(Self-hosted runners are great for many other reasons, not least of which is that they're a lot cheaper. But I've seen a lot of people confuse GitHub Actions' latent security issues with something that self-hosted runners can fix, which is not per se the case.)

[1]: https://docs.github.com/en/actions/security-for-github-actio...
by greenavocado | 2025-05-08 21:57:01+00:00
The amount of radioactive scrap produced by hypothetical decommissioned radioactive fusion containment vessels is laughably trivial compared to fission waste streams. Even accounting for the most pessimistic irradiation models of first-wall materials, the total radioactive burden remains orders of magnitude below legacy technologies. The half-lives of such activated components like predominantly steel alloys and ceramic composites trend dramatically shorter than actinide-laden spent fuel, with activity levels plummeting to background within mere decades rather than geological timescales. This makes waste management a single-generation engineering challenge rather than a multi-millennial obligation
by michelpp | 2025-05-08 21:57:17+00:00
While this is a good approach to implements state machines, the transition function is hardwired to one transition graph. Another approach is to generalize the state and transition graph into a table, and group those transitions by a machine id, as shown here:

https://github.com/michelp/pgfsm

Now many machines (sub-graphs of state transitions) can be defined in general, and the transition checking function checks the validity of the next state based on the table, instead of static rules in a function.
by arghandugh | 2025-05-08 21:57:22+00:00
Hey, there it is! Lots of radioactive waste being generated on a continuous business but maybe baby with dreams and creams we can decommission it with robots and recycle it all. Meanwhile a reactor is offline for refurbishment for days, weeks, months, blowing a hole in the economics of it all.

Unironically: you’re the first person I’ve come across to openly acknowledge this issue. Thank you.
by jamweba | 2025-05-08 21:57:58+00:00
Sorry, didn't see your reply earlier. Let me address each of your points. First, your question about shifting work to a universal validator. The point isn't to create one monolithic parser for all formats — it's to enforce a structural validation layer before any decoder is allowed to operate. Think: byte-level box/frame/atom parsing for formats like MP4, MOV, PNG — where the container format is well-defined and modular. The validator isn’t decoding media; it’s checking that structure matches declared length/type bounds, box trees are sane, and forbidden segments aren’t present. This can be OS-level, just like Apple’s existing xprotect and AMFI — but for structured media, not binaries.

Can’t decoders already do this themselves? Theoretically yes — but in practice, media decoders are huge, legacy-tangled, performance-optimized, and frequently cross-platform. Asking each one to reliably gate input based on structural sanity is like asking libc to do bounds-checking. Sandboxes help, but they’re coarse — we’re talking about a clean, minimal contract: don’t decode unless the container structure is provably valid. It’s the same logic behind memory-safe preprocessing layers.

What about subtle decoder bugs in seemingly valid media? True — this doesn’t solve all decoder vulnerabilities. But it dramatically cuts risk by stripping malformed, truncated, recursive, or structurally deviant files before they reach the decoder logic. You can’t prevent every logic bug in a decoder, but you can gate execution to files that pass structural integrity — just like we gate executable code through signing and entitlement checks.

Thanks for the thoughtful reply!

Jamweba
by RandomWorker | 2025-05-08 21:58:07+00:00
That might be true but at the level of understanding that the Greeks had of things - making fire does give you a lot. Flint, dry grass, fuel source wet versus dry wood, wind and soil conditions- how to deal with them, once you have a fire how do you control, manipulate it, and keep it going. All those things are learned through making fire. Then you can also piece together which fuels work best, that leads to more understanding and experimentation followed by more learning. I think it’s what I take away from this article. I think those ancient people know more and understood more about keeping a fire going through the night than i ever will.

When you use an LLM and don’t have any understanding what you asking about it presents a huge problem. I see more and more people just using what it provides. And then when asked about it they can’t defend it because the didn’t read it or even tried to understand it. This is in proposals and business cases worth multiple millions.
by rossant | 2025-05-08 21:58:27+00:00
I'm still having a hard time with coding agents. They are useful but also somehow immature hence dangerous. The other day I asked copilot with GPT4o to add docstrings to my functions in a long Python file. It did a good job on the first half. But when I looked carefully, I realized the second half of my file was gone. Just like that. Half of my file had been silently deleted, replaced by a single terrifying comment along the lines of "continue similarly with the rest of the file". I use Git of course so I could recover my deleted code. But I feel I still can't fully trust an AI assistant that will silently delete hundreds of lines of my codebase just because it is too lazy or something.
by pfannkuchen | 2025-05-08 21:58:58+00:00
What do you mean claim? Like, that is an extremely unpopular, borderline heretical opinion already in the west. If what he actually meant was “empathy in general is bad and you should be self centered” or whatever, then laundering it to “excessive empathy for foreigners is bad” is not the spot you’d want to launder it to, if it were indeed laundering and not what he actually meant.
by weird_trousers | 2025-05-08 21:59:06+00:00
You're definitely not alone. This situation is not new, and it isn't acceptable either.

The concept of `features` when using a crate is kinda cool as "you only download / compile what you use" *but* most of the crates are very badly designed, and also developers do not tend to reinvent a very tiny wheel when they can, but heavily depend of possibly dangerous crates to just serialize or deserialize a very simple data structure...

It's very annoying, as this increases the compilation time and introduces possible unsafe behavior in larger crates.
by shagie | 2025-05-08 21:59:12+00:00
Hypothetically, if that was the case it doesn't cover the closing of questions that are not duplicates.

I would contend that the "close as something that you have an answer on" is less driven by "I want more votes on the answer" but rather "I know where to find this answer."

Alternatively, if the person didn't close it as an answer you would instead have the person copying and pasting the same answer into the new question - which would accomplish the same thing (more votes for your answers) and further fragment the "one place to look" ideal.

From the perspective of the site and curation of information, a given answer should appear in one and only one question. Closing a question as a duplicate serves to further that goal. Copying and pasting answers ( https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/320351/how-to-handl... ) to questions that would be duplicates is frowned upon. Diamond mods get such behavior raised to them as a system flag ( https://meta.stackoverflow.com/a/317988/ ) - "Duplicate answers (auto) - raised on each duplicate answer"
by FeteCommuniste | 2025-05-08 21:59:29+00:00
They try so hard these days to put a "loving" spin on things but it's always the same when you get down to it.

"Sorry, gay people, your desires for sexual intimacy are actually just temptation from Satan / the corrupt nature you inherited from Adam and Eve. Now be celibate your whole life because you were born broken."

They don't say the last bit in so many words, of course.
by pclmulqdq | 2025-05-08 21:59:53+00:00
"Episkopos" literally translates to "overseer" ("epi" = "on/over"; "skopo" = "watch/behold/contemplate"). "Guardian" is also in LSJ, as is the translation you give of "bishop." It's likely this is the unambiguous word for "bishop" in this text, which is pretty funny.
by ndileas | 2025-05-08 22:00:00+00:00
I feel strongly that we should save every human life it's possible to save during disasters. Fema is pretty great at that.

However, that doesn't neccesarily imply that there should be flows of money available to rebuild in vulnerable locations. Insurance becoming unavailable or unaffordable is probably the best signal available that someplace is a bad place to live. If you can't afford the price or the risk ... There are lots of other places in the world.
by GuB-42 | 2025-05-08 22:00:23+00:00
For the insulin thing, maybe you are thinking of Martin Shkreli. What he did got him in prison more than he got him rich.

For the pollution thing, the truth is that many of those who got rich polluting the rivers and such actually produced lots of innovation. Plastics fit your description, and I think few things have been more of a paradigm shift than plastics.

I get you with the ads business, but Google made a revolutionary search engine, Amazon disrupted e-commerce. I have a hard time defending Facebook/Meta but they have their fair share of innovation.

Almost all "very good businessman who made a lot of money" actually made great things, that's how you make a lot of money doing business. Though usually, there is a dark side, and Steve Jobs is no exception. You can also make a lot of money just being an asshole, think crime lords, or Martin Shkreli, but it often doesn't end well.
by CuriouslyC | 2025-05-08 22:00:45+00:00
Aider is quite configurable, you need to look at the leaderboard and copy one of the high performing model/config setups. Additionally, you need to autoload files such as the readme and coding guidelines for your project.

Aider's killer features are integration of automated lint/typecheck/test and fix loops with git checkpointing. If you're not setting up these features you aren't getting the full value proposition from it.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-05-08 22:01:03+00:00
> since these guys are just doing war crime after war crime, it's a good thing if it leaks

Irrelevant. One, we’re no longer in an era of international rules-based order. All the great powers agree on this.

Two, the definition of war crimes has expanded so broadly as to include any collateral damage. This overinclusiveness has rendered the term meaningless, with everyone calling everything they don’t like a war crime.

There will be consequences for this administration. But not because they bombed a terrorist commander.
by SirensOfTitan | 2025-05-08 22:01:29+00:00
Anyone who sees Trump as either an aberration or a savior is deeply deluded on the state of America.

In my opinion, the US world order’s decay was unmasked in 2008, and it has been accelerating since. The two economic realities between the poor rural America and the rich coastal cities (and even within them there is so much clear wealth disparity) have only gotten worse, and the political and bureaucratic system isn’t really capable of skillfully dealing with it.

Trump actually speaks to the realities that few politicians will (Bernie Sanders did too in 2016, hence his appeal), though his prescribed solutions are likely just accelerating the country’s demise.
by BrandoElFollito | 2025-05-08 22:01:51+00:00
I opened my SO account 15 years ago and I was liking the dynamics very much.

Now at 200k+ rep I cannot stand it anymore. Whenever I ask a question that does not make me bow backwards or discuss how my Python code looks in assembly it gets downvoted almost immediately. Go and Typescript are tags that being frustration.

Now compare this with many other Stack Exchange sites.

A question about cooking or LaTeX gets nice, coloriant answers, even when they are basic.

I get it that they are one or two orders of magnitude less crowded but this may mean that SO passed its scale limit and is done.
by lvass | 2025-05-08 22:02:07+00:00
>His foundation really does seem to do a good job with 'effective altruism'

Can you provide some sources for this? I'm by no means an expert in this area, but my city happened to receive some of his modified A. Aegypti since 2017 and it didn't make the people here happy, at all. Though I don't even think there's a comprehensive study on how much good or harm came from it.
by DennisP | 2025-05-08 22:02:13+00:00
A lot of people think so, but the US government openly spends way more money on nuclear weapons than on fusion research. We'll spend almost a trillion dollars on nuclear weapons over the next decade.[1] The government's fusion funding was only $1.4 billion for 2023.[2]

So it seems more likely to me that some physicists figured out how to get their fusion power research funded under the guise of weapons research, since that's where the money is. NIF's original intent was mostly weapons research but it's turned out to be really useful for both, and these days, various companies are attempting to commercialize the technology for power plants.[3]

[1] https://theaviationist.com/2025/04/26/us-nuclear-weapons-wil...

[2] https://www.fusionindustryassociation.org/congress-provides-...

[3] NYTimes: https://archive.is/BCsf5
by pwg | 2025-05-08 22:02:40+00:00
> Can we just agree this is terrible UI

It is, but they had some "checklist" that included "block paste" for reasons unknown, and so they blocked pasting.

In firefox, if you change the about:config setting "dom.event.clipboardevents.enabled" to false you'll be able to paste no matter whether the website operator has "block paste" on their braindead checklist or not.
by umanwizard | 2025-05-08 22:03:40+00:00
Really? Do people call the city just "México", by itself, not "Ciudad de México" or similar?

There is a similar situation in Quebec (the province and its capital city are both just called "Québec" in French, whereas in English we use Quebec/Quebec City). However, there is usually no ambiguity because French grammar requires the definite article for (masculine) names of large territories like countries and provinces, but not for cities. E.g. "Je vais au Québec"[1] = I'm going to Quebec (the province) vs. "Je vais à Québec" = I'm going to Quebec City.

I'm not sure if there is any similar grammatical distinction in Spanish.

1: au is a mandatory contraction for à + le
by eru | 2025-05-08 22:03:49+00:00
Very nice post!

Another interesting direction you can take reservoir sampling is instead of drawing a random number for each item (to see whether it replaces an existing item and which one), you generate a number from a geometric distribution telling you how many items you can safely skip before the next replacement.

That's especially interesting, if you can skip many items cheaply. Eg because you can fast forward on your tape drive (but you don't know up front how long your tape is), or because you send almost your whole system to sleep during skips.

For n items to sample from, this system does about O(k * log (n/k)) samples and skips.

Conceptually, I prefer the version of reservoir sampling that has you generate a fixed random 'priority' for each card as it arrives, and then you keep the top k items by priority around. That brings me to another related interesting algorithmic problem: selecting the top k items out of a stream of elements of unknown length in O(n) time and O(k) space. Naive approaches to reaching O(k) space will give you O(n log k) time, eg if you keep a min heap around.

What you can do instead is keep an unordered buffer of capacity up to 2k. As each item arrives, you add it to the buffer. When your buffer is full, you prune it to the top k element in O(k) with eg randomised quickselect or via median-of-medians. You do that O(2k) work every k elements for n elements total, given you the required O(n) = O(n * 2*k / k) runtime.

Another related topic is rendezvous hashing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rendezvous_hashing

Tangentially related: https://www.keithschwarz.com/darts-dice-coins/ is a great write-up on the alias method for sampling from a discrete random distribution.
by usecodenaija | 2025-05-08 22:03:50+00:00
While Firefox's tab groups are a great addition, it's intriguing to consider whether relying on traditional tab groups is keeping us from embracing more innovative solutions like BrowserGPT by CivAI.

BrowserGPT not only manages tasks but does so with voice commands, offering a forward-thinking approach to browsing automation. Are we holding onto old habits at the expense of exploring groundbreaking technology?
by quesera | 2025-05-08 22:03:58+00:00
It strikes me as fairly irrelevant what Catholics call ex-Catholics.

I don't think you can (edit: reasonably) call yourself a Catholic if you do not adhere to certain tenets of the Catholic Church.

(This is where I was going with the calls-themselves-Christian-but-aintnosuchthing comment, but it's less clear on re-read...)
by gond | 2025-05-08 22:04:05+00:00
Ah. Not semantics, that is cybernetics and systems theory.

As in your example: If a bunch of x in a jar leads to the jar tipping over, it is not emergent. That’s just cause and effect. Problem to start with is that the jar containing x is not even a system in the first place, emergence as a concept is not applicable here.

There may be a misunderstanding on your side of the term emergence. Emergence does not equal non-understanding or some spooky-hooky force coming from the unknown. We understand the functions of the elements of a car quite well. The emergent behaviour of a car was intentionally brought about by massive engineering.

Reductionism does not lead to an explaining-away of emergence.
by Al-Khwarizmi | 2025-05-08 22:04:19+00:00
The continuous metrics the paper uses are largely irrelevant in practice, though. The sudden changes appear when you use metrics people actually care about.

To me the paper is overhyped. Knowing how neural networks work, it's clear that there are going to be underlying properties that vary smoothly. This doesn't preclude the existence of emergent abilities.
by AlotOfReading | 2025-05-08 22:04:49+00:00
The vallecitos reactor site is still there to look for anyone in the bay area, at least for the next few years. It's along the 680 corridor just south of Pleasanton and it's been quietly producing medical isotopes since the 70s. They shut down the power factors after they discovered that the entire Pleasanton valley is a gigantic active fault zone called the calaveras fault, and the site itself is in a rift from from another, smaller fault called the positas fault.

Probably not the greatest placement in hindsight.
by asdf6969 | 2025-05-08 22:05:34+00:00
> In a 2012 address

Almost every American public figure was anti-LGBT in 2012. The majority of the Democratic Party including the Obama, Clinton, and Biden families were against it. It sounds ridiculous now but Donald Trump was the most LGBT friendly president in history at the time of his first inauguration.

Wait to see what he does now or find a more recent position.
by steveklabnik | 2025-05-08 22:06:06+00:00
It’s pretty simple: you choose the dependencies you want to have. Don’t like having a ton of them? Either choose carefully (which you should already be doing), or write it yourself.

Most people prefer to build off of the work of others, rather than reinvent the world for every project. That trade off is a trade off though, and nothing prevents you from taking the other side of it.
by codinhood | 2025-05-08 22:06:49+00:00
> This distinction is important. Sometimes, creating a separate service is the scrappy thing to do, sometimes creating a monolith is. Sometimes not creating anything is the way to go.

I think this hits the nail on the head. People are trying to find the "one true way" for microservices vs monoliths. But it doesn't exist. It's context dependent.

It's like the DRY vs code duplication conversation. Trying to dictate that you will never duplicate code is a fool's errand, in the same way that duplicating code whenever something is slightly different is foolish.

Context is everything
by asadm | 2025-05-08 22:06:51+00:00
these models have hard time modifying LARGE files and then returning them back to you. That's inefficient too.

What you want is to ask for list of changes and then apply them. That's what aider, codex, etc. all do.

I made a tool to apply human-readable changes back to files, which you might find useful: https://github.com/asadm/vibemode

aider has this feature too.
by dragonwriter | 2025-05-08 22:07:14+00:00
> It strikes me as fairly irrelevant what Catholics call ex-Catholics.

> I don't think you can call yourself a Catholic if you do not adhere to certain tenets of the Catholic Church.

If John calls himself a Catholic, and the Catholic Church up to the Pope calls him a Catholic, you are pretty silly saying he is not a Catholic because he doesn't agree with the heirarchy on things on your personal priority list for what makes someone a Catholic.
by kcplate | 2025-05-08 22:07:31+00:00
Sure it’s a shit job, but let’s face it…AI and automation wouldn’t be able to replace it…probably ever. I don’t see too many people talking about “vibe plumbing”. We will never reach a point in society where people will not pay handsomely to remove backed up shit from their homes and have clean water piped in.

And frankly, I know a few plumbers—most of the ones my age are already semi retired, play golf daily, just work when they want to, and all have a shitton more money than I do.