MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by archagon | 2025-05-07 19:47:48+00:00
> One participant in the groups described them as a “Republic of Letters,” a reference to the long-distance intellectual correspondence of the 17th century. Others often invoked European salon culture.

It genuinely baffles and disturbs me that these corpos seem to think of themselves as the intellectual elite. History will remember them as little more than greedy idiots falling over each other to manifest a new age of violent and repressive authoritarianism.
by FireBeyond | 2025-05-07 19:48:43+00:00
This might have been the case back in the day - in the 90s, young me would get a kick out of seeing just how many SMTP servers my email passed through. But now, email communication is "essentially" point-to-point, and relays in use are configured/whitelisted.

My SMTP server will pull up your MX and talk directly to it. It might be your Exchange server, a Google server, or a third-party scanner that then sends on to your "real" MX.

But gone are the days of "Hey, I only know a few places to send this message, so I'll send to one of them and they'll forward it". Nor can you do anything akin to route poisoning or other things to try to insert yourself into the message flow.
by ebiester | 2025-05-07 19:49:02+00:00
How much of your active attention is tracking on your hunger signals.

If I can't focus on my current task because I'm too hungry, that's food noise. If I can't get to sleep and am tossing and turning because I am too hungry, that's food noise. If all I can think about is a doughnut, or even if I'm chomping on raw broccoli and hating myself because it's just making me hungrier, that's food noise.
by zanie | 2025-05-07 19:49:24+00:00
As in, how are we parsing the Python code into an AST?

CPython uses a generated parser. The grammar is defined in https://github.com/python/cpython/blob/main/Grammar/python.g... which is used to generate the specification at https://docs.python.org/3/reference/grammar.html#full-gramma...

We use a hand-written parser, in Rust, based on the specification. We've written that previously at https://astral.sh/blog/ruff-v0.4.0#a-hand-written-parser
by lelanthran | 2025-05-07 19:49:52+00:00
> No I don't, which exploit are you talking about?

Log4j

> The most expensive exploit I can think of was caused by heartbleed which was in a memory unsafe language.

Heartbleed was nowhere near as costly as Log4j. Last I checked, there was two orders of magnitude difference between the cost of fixing Log4j (which still isn't completely fixed for a few systems) than Heartbleed (which is completely fixed).
by blueelephanttea | 2025-05-07 19:50:58+00:00
> Anyone know if it's still a drop in replacement for Elasticsearch?

As you point out it was forked a number of years ago so it started from the same place (7.10). Elasticsearch is now on 9.0+ and has 27,000 more commits than OpenSearch. So I doubt it is a drop-in replacement anymore.

I have no idea how many of those 27K commits are key features, but it is clear divergence.
by dtkav | 2025-05-07 19:51:08+00:00
Yes! Editing the whole buffer is a major feature because the more you keep around failed attempts and trash the dumber the model gets (and more expensive).

If you're working on stuff like marketing websites that are well represented in the model dataset then things will just fly, but if you're building something that is more niche it can be super important to tune the context -- in some cases this is the differentiating feature between being able to use AI assistance at all (otherwise the failure rate just goes to 100%).
by gunalx | 2025-05-07 19:51:11+00:00
Like iy way more than the old one. (really didnt like how i couldnt just copy code blocks in one click) The new one seems interresting but useless without the agentic toolcalling, witch seems to be unsupported by most (even tool capable models like o4-mini or gemini2.5-pro. I would like to be able to supply debug info like before, as well as importing regular text threads into the context.
by ArthurStacks | 2025-05-07 19:51:59+00:00
> My problem is that directives such as "software developers need to use tool x" is an _input_ with, at best, a questionable causal relationship to outcome y.

Total drivel. It is beyond question that the use of the tools increases the capabilities and output of every single developer in the company in whatever task they are working on, once they understand how to use them. That is why there is the directive.
by rdtsc | 2025-05-07 19:53:00+00:00
That's a good summary, thanks! It covers Pell Grants well.

> A former college president and financial aid director in Atlanta used the names of former students and individuals who never attended the college to fraudulently obtain $5 million in grants.10 ... In another case, two former financial aid advisers and a tax preparation business operator in Chicago were charged with filing fake tax returns to obtain nearly $1.5 million in financial aid for 75 students over a 2-year period.

That's interesting. Maybe it's worth taking a closer look at the college administration? They have both the access, the knowledge, the opportunity and even the official motive - to bolster admission numbers.
by ethbr1 | 2025-05-07 19:53:04+00:00
As the wikipedia page points out, this assumes a highly price elastic good.

Household energy use is not such a good, because most uses have fixed utility.

Very few people are going to cool their house down to 10C because the price of cooling to 15C decreased.

Nor is their overall energy use budget-capped. (Outside of low income AC and/or heating use cases)
by betterThanTexas | 2025-05-07 19:53:43+00:00
> under ideal conditions.

I interpreted the claim as being under non-ideal conditions (which is fair, frankly—it's well-known that the visual and sound quality is better at the beginning of a run than at the end, and film quality doesn't matter if your local theater doesn't ensure it's preserved as best it can be).

Plus, I saw a film viewing of Sinners this past weekend (quite a fun movie, highly recommend it) and some visual artifacts were very noticeable—it was regular enough I figured there was a slice of the film roll that got damaged somehow.
by cestith | 2025-05-07 19:53:54+00:00
It helps to know that the swirly equations on the screen were meant to be the director’s interpretation of the characters’ internal mental model of what they were seeing and not some magical UI trick on the computers of the time. The wall-attached phones near the end didn’t suddenly become spinning glass phonebooths either, but you’ll seldom hear the movie bashed for the lack of realism there.
by lelanthran | 2025-05-07 19:54:11+00:00
> The practice of writing code has clearly shown that early returns lead to better structured code.

While I share that opinion, I recognise that it is, in fact, an opinion.

> It's not even disputable anymore.

For it to not even be disputable anymore you need a mountain of overwhelming evidence in the form of peer-reviewed double-blind studies. IIRC, there's maybe 2 papers that have very weak and never-reproduced evidence for early returns leading to better code in terms of cyclometric comlexity (not even "better structured", which is pretty subjective).
by lblume | 2025-05-07 19:54:12+00:00
> Secondly, why does this generate a uniform random number?

Each interval of equal size occurs with equal likelihood at each step.

Consider that you want to generate a random number between 0 and 1024 (excl.). The midpoint would be 512, thus you choose randomly whether the lower interval [0, 512) or the higher interval [512,1024) is selected. In each step, the range size is independent of the concrete numbers, i.e. for it is exactly 2^(-step_size) * (high - low), and in each step each range has equal probability. Thus if the algorithm terminates, the selected number was in fact uniformly sampled.

I would also presume it must terminate. Assume that the two endpoints are one ulp apart. The midpoint is thus either of the two, there is no randomness involved (barring FPU flags but they don't count). In the next step, the algorithm either terminates or sets the endpoints equal, which also fixes the midpoint. Thus the procedure always returns the desired result.
by reverendsteveii | 2025-05-07 19:54:51+00:00
When I was 8, in the first grade, I hummed in class. I read comic books, I napped, I generally fucked about, around, and several other prepositions. I did this to such an extent that the teacher wanted to shunt me into the shame places you want to shunt these kids into. Fortunately my mother caught wind of this and, knowing what level my intellect was at when it was allowed a little freedom and presented with a challenge, raised actual holy hell at that little Catholic school outside Pittsburgh. Thank God she did, because I ended up being tested and started along the gifted track. My brother in law, otoh, is just as smart as me and just as defiantly internal as me. He didn't have an advocate. For him, school was 12 years of no resources, no opportunities, no goals, and memorizing a copy of The Lion King on VHS. Now I make a tidy living as a software engineer and I'm pretty decent at it. He lives at home with his mom because he never graduated high school, so he stays in all day and hand-hacks NES roms literally bit by bit. He's a shitload better than me at a very valuable thing and no one can take advantage of that, not him, not some employer, not society in general, because he was disposed of by a school system that wanted to get him out of the way of all the future contributors.

This idea that school is a place where kids compete with one another, the weak are weeded out and the strong are rewarded with additional resources is a disgusting perversion of an institution we used to recognize as providing a baseline for everyone. And it simply doesn't work.
by TZubiri | 2025-05-07 19:55:09+00:00
This is the inescepable tradeoff. You either have a system for investigating abuse (and in this case it's tech abuse, there's also physical crime), or you have a system that protects the privacy of everyone.

I sleep like a baby knowing a state can submit subpoenas for my information. And I wouldn't sleep like a baby using a system that not only irreversibly encrypts contents, but neuters the admin capabilities such that it's not even possible to know the headers of messages sent, like telegram or protonmail, knowing that I would give plausible deniability by pooling with cyber and non cybercriminals.
by enugu | 2025-05-07 19:55:11+00:00
Cutting off water supply is clearly the bigger threat. However, it involves a longer time frame - building infrastructure which one expects not to use in a normal situation.

Importantly, even once built, it selects the wrong targets, not terrorists or military bases - but regular people who will be faced with scarcity of water and food, as the crops use Indus water. This would be something highly unethical, and also not something sustainable - once visuals of hunger start reaching screens across the world, the force to restart the supply would be strong.
by azemetre | 2025-05-07 19:55:13+00:00
The entire purpose of DOGE is to attack the government while forcing them to use private services.

Don’t believe their lies because they’re just that lies.

Nothing they are doing is efficient because they don’t care. They just want to attack the government.

—-

For something HN relevant please look back at all the stupid comments Musk made after he was forced to acquire Twitter. Comments like there being hundreds of “ghost employees” or wanting devs to print their code changes.
by mmooss | 2025-05-07 19:55:54+00:00
> Prince could have done the same, but AFAICT he never did. Wonder why?

He might not have had the same rights to the music, publishing, etc. that Swift has. Also, his music relied quite a bit on production (not an insult; it's just the way he made music); maybe he felt he couldn't reproduce the originals or didn't want versions other than the ones he believed in.
by alabastervlog | 2025-05-07 19:55:56+00:00
This perception is an effect of what gets promoted, which is mostly hot garbage.

I watch a lot of movies and can't keep up with the likely-to-be-good ones every year.

There are north of 500 US & Canadian films released per year. Add in foreign (edit: I mean, even more foreign than Canada) cinema, and it's solidly in the four figures. How many movies were you aware of last year? Ten? A couple dozen? Maybe as many as fifty? Drop in the bucket, regardless.

I'm sure there hasn't been a year in the 2000s in which there weren't at least 20 movies released that were worth your time (for those with all but the stingiest and harshest take on "worth my time", and probably also coupled with narrow taste to get the list down under 20).

And I write this as the person who has been perceived as disliking modern movies, from my post a couple steps up this thread! (I don't dislike modern movies! They're just almost-all, for reasons of technology-related changes in production processes, missing certain qualities that I appreciated a bunch in film-era movies)
by dowager_dan99 | 2025-05-07 19:55:58+00:00
active male who's now 51; I disagree a bit about it "sneaking up" - at least for me. I noticed a massive decline in just a year or two, where I started commenting "I feel old" a lot more.

The delta isn't so different, but there are lots of things where I feel an inflection from "improving" to "flat or declining" and that is extremely noticeable. To me that's what aging is, and it happens FAST.
by talldatethrow | 2025-05-07 19:56:10+00:00
It doesn't matter what percentile in the US it is, when a 2 bedroom apartment is $3k+ and the average small house is $6k to rent.

Also. If you haven't been to a public school in California recently you really don't know what has changed. I went to public school all my life and then ended up in Berkeley. I'm 40. It was borderline negligent for my parents to send me there in my opinion as a kid knowing what I know now. But we were pretty hard up for money.

But if you told me, should someone lease two luxury cars or send their kid to private school.... You'd have to be nuts to think you'd gain more from the cars than the school.
by int_19h | 2025-05-07 19:56:15+00:00
They are well aware of it, which is why there's a distinction between "system" and "user" messages, for example.

The problem is that, at the end of the day, it's still a single NN processing everything. You can train it to make this distinction, but by their very nature the outcome is still probabilistic.

This is similar to how you as a human cannot avoid being influenced (one way or another, however subtly) by any text that you encounter, simply by virtue of having read it.
by reverendsteveii | 2025-05-07 19:56:46+00:00
this, absolutely. when the person you're replying to asked "What's wrong with their being a tiny elite" they seem to be purposely ignoring the fact that what we're measuring is competence in basic skills. A school isn't supposed to take in 100 kids and turn out 99 droupouts and one nuclear physicist. A school is supposed to take in 100 kids and turn out 100 kids who can read, write, do math and understand how their society works well enough to participate in it meaningfully.
by WaltPurvis | 2025-05-07 19:56:50+00:00
Egads. That’s really bad. I’ve had a few boneheaded responses like that, although I don’t recall any as awful as this example. I’m still figuring out when it’s going to be quicker and better to do something myself rather than putting effort into composing a long prompt which the AI may not understand anyway. One thing I’ve learned is there’s no point in arguing with the AI. if it gets something wrong, I will maybe try one time to explain the error and see if it can correct, but if it doesn’t, then any further attempts are just going to lead to a pointless cycle of the AI regurgitating the exact same error, or making it even worse, until I start using abusive language and give up. That said, I have had many successful interactions, where a 2-minute prompt and 3-5 minutes of me reviewing the output nets perfectly serviceable code that would have taken me considerably longer to implement myself, and I’ve found it consistently useful for suggesting approaches and brainstorming solutions.
by throwawaymaths | 2025-05-07 19:57:08+00:00
> An alternative view of it is that the standard library is reaching into the compiler

Well, no not really, because it's a keyword (I don't know enough about rust internals to know if there are special parser rules for `for`)? You could put `for` in the stdlib instead. As rust has macros, you could in principle implement it as a macro.
by fhd2 | 2025-05-07 19:57:47+00:00
Not sure I can agree with the "I'm billing by the hour" part.

I mean sure, but I think of my little agency providing value, for a price. Clients have budgets, they have limited benefits from any software they build, and in order to be competitive against other agencies or their internal teams, overall, I feel we need to provide a good bang for buck.

But since it's not all that much about typing in code, and since even that activity isn't all that sped up by LLMs, not if quality and stability matters, I would still agree that it's completely fine.
by cjbenedikt | 2025-05-07 19:58:12+00:00
Carbon capture on vessels while they sail has been achieved behore by Mitsubishi in 2021. https://www.mhi.com/news/211020.html The challenge is where to store that CO2 while sailing as each ton of fossil fuel burnt creates 3 tons of CO2. The average ocean going vessel burns approx 200 tons of fossil fuel per day = 600 tons of CO2. On a 10 day journey that results in 6000 tons of CO2. That requires a lot of space and additional weight.
by 7thaccount | 2025-05-07 19:58:12+00:00
Valid points. I will say though that this new era of instant gratification: smartphones, streaming services, engaging/addicting video games...etc is leading to large amounts of people choosing to not have kids. Heck, forget the having kids...people aren't even dating at the same levels as historical norms it would seem. Birth rates are below the replacement level in many countries already and that is concerning. Maybe we just drop back to older population levels after a sharp adjustment period.
by AndrewSwift | 2025-05-07 19:58:54+00:00
I wondered once if it would be possible to ride a motorcycle safely if I drove carefully (everyone I know who rides has been in at least one serious accident).

I thought: I could look at the data, but I see so many motorcyclists driving dangerously that the data wouldn't teach me much.

So then I thought: I bet if I look at the accident rate for women riders it would be interesting.

I found that in the UK, male riders have seven times the accident rate of female riders.

So I guess how you ride does make a huge difference.
by benbayard | 2025-05-07 19:59:26+00:00
I took Semaglutide for 6 months. Before Semaglutide I'd want to have a beer just about every day, but I'd only drink a few times a week. Once I started Semaglutide I completely lost the desire to drink alcohol.

The same was true for food. I thought about food all the time. But once Semaglutide started I just didn't think of food. I had to remember to eat.

Semaglutide in my experience really helps to eliminate addictive behavior in general, I believe. At least oral addictions (I'm not sure if it would help with e.g. gambling addiction).

I never understood why skinny people believed that fat people have no impulse control until I took the medication. Once I had that impulse control it was so much easier to make long-term decisions.
by numpad0 | 2025-05-07 19:59:42+00:00
No, I think you're mistaking the host for the parasite - he's running a software and solutions company, which means, in a reductive sense, he is making money/scamming cash out of customers through means of software. The software is ultimately smoke and mirrors that can be anything so long it justify customer payments. Oh boy those software be additive to the world.

Everything between landing a contract and transferring deliverables, for someone like him, is already questionably related to revenues. There's everything in software engineering to tie developer paychecks to values created, and it's still as reliable as medical advice from LLM at best. Adding LLMs into it probably won't look so risky to him.

> No, there are other values besides maximizing utility.

True, but again, above his paygrade as a player in a free market capitalist economy which is mere part of a modern society, albeit not a tiny part.

----

OT and might be weird to say: I think a lot of businesses would appreciate vibe-coding going forward, relative to a team of competent engineers, solely because LLMs are more consistent(ly bad). Code quality doesn't matter but consistency do; McDonald's basically dominates Hamburger market with the worst burger ever that is also by far the most consistent. Nobody loves it, but it's what sells.
by rexledesma | 2025-05-07 20:00:16+00:00
Very excited to have a new fully featured Python language server working in both vscode and vscode forks (e.g. Windsurf, Cursor).

Pylance is borked on these forked distributions, so having a new solid alternative here that doesn't involve adopting yet another forked Pyright implementation (BasedPyright, Cursor Pyright, Windsurf Pyright, ...) sounds great to me.
by bombcar | 2025-05-07 20:00:28+00:00
I swear there's something genetic about it; I can see the difference between VHS and 4K clearly every time, but I have to remind and point it out to my wife (she couldn't care about the difference between the VHS-quality rip of a movie and the 4K blu-ray).

It has to be absolutely seamless; the received stopped working and the TV was making the noise instead, and it took a month for me to be finally arsed to go fix it.
by tzs | 2025-05-07 20:00:54+00:00
Any article posted here about smart TVs draws a large number of comments about limitations and annoyances of smart TV platforms.

90+% of the things people complain about would no longer be a problem if they got a traditional A/V receiver, plugged all their sources such as streaming boxes and game consoles into the receiver, and just used the smart TV as a monitor (and as a tuner if they watch OTA television).

Until that is no longer the case there will be a role for traditional A/V receivers.
by ai_ass | 2025-05-07 20:01:29+00:00
Store and version your prompts | Share them with colleagues, securely | Enhance them with AI

Instead of sharing your prompts via Google Sheets, Slack, or e-mail... use Promptly. Claude built 70% of it but not all of it. Is it that much better than the alternatives? Probably not... But will you appreciate it when Sheryl in Accounting uses Promptly instead of messaging you again next week? Maybe!
NeuralAgent: AI agent on your computer, not cloud
by riyakhanna1983 | 2025-05-07 20:01:35+00:00
NeuralAgent [1] is an agent that uses your computer, it moves your mouse, types, scrolls, clicks just like a human using a computer would, it can execute a wide variety of tasks including but not limited to writing documents.

1. https://www.getneuralagent.com
by ArthurStacks | 2025-05-07 20:01:50+00:00
> What if I told you that a dev group with a sensibly-limited social-club flavor is where I arguably did my best and also had my happiest memories from?

Maybe you did, and as a developer I am sure it is more fun, easier, and enjoyable to work in those places. That isnt what we offer though. We offer something very simple. The opportunity for a developer to come in, work hard, probably not enjoy themselves, produce what we ask, to the standard we ask, and in return they get paid.