MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Spivak | 2025-05-17 11:11:01+00:00
I think you're inventing a hypocrisy that doesn't really exist.

Abortion protection should exist at a federal level because it's healthcare. If a pregnant woman is traveling and has an emergency that requires an abortion she should be able to receive one regardless of what state she's in.

Vaccine mandates are a federal issue because the virus doesn't give a shit about state lines and right of movement is a thing neither states nor the federal government can restrict.

AI is a state issue because it can be contained within a particular state. It works like pornography bans. If you are in a state that bans pornography you can't distribute it nor consume it regardless of whether it originated on a computer outside the state.

Marijuana should be a state issue for the same reason. Whether you're allowed to import it from outside the country or if you move your marijuana from a legal state to an illegal state is a federal issue. Whether states that ban it should have to respect medical cards is a federal issue.

Education is a federal issue because the state has an interest in children getting a quality public education even if they move.

Nobody is all federal or all states rights. To do so would literally be unamerican.
by TeMPOraL | 2025-05-17 11:11:29+00:00
More like, "Money isn't free anymore, so let's try and automate away some more labor". It's very much not setting the money on fire from business POV - it's the opposite actually. It's also a constant in history - the more expensive human labor gets, the more effort is put into eliminating the need for it (whether by automating jobs away or redesigning the product or the entire business to not need them in the first place).
by 0xCE0 | 2025-05-17 11:13:33+00:00
I don't understand how somebody can code like this and reason/control anything about the program execution :)

async (() => (e) { try { await doSomething(); while (!done) { ({ done, value } = await reader.read()); } promise .then(goodA, badA) .then(goodB, badB) .catch((err) => { console.error(err); } catch { } finally { using stack = new DisposableStack(); stack.defer(() => console.log("done.")); } });
by 0xfffafaCrash | 2025-05-17 11:16:08+00:00
Here’s some relevant discussion about some of the footguns:

https://github.com/typescript-eslint/typescript-eslint/issue...

https://github.com/tc39/proposal-explicit-resource-managemen...

I imagine there will eventually be lint rules for this somewhere and many of those using such a modern feature are likely to be using static analysis via eslint to help mitigate the risks here, but until it’s more established and understood and lint rules are fleshed out and widely adopted, there is risk here for sure.

https://github.com/typescript-eslint/typescript-eslint/issue...

To me it seems a bit like popular lint libraries just going ahead and adding the rule would make a big difference here
by bossyTeacher | 2025-05-17 11:16:09+00:00
> Today I'm not sure how I could continue programming without Google Gemini in my toolkit

Anyone else concerned about this kind of statements? Make no mistake, everyone. We are living in a LLM bubble (not an AI bubble as none of these companies are actually interested in AI as such as moving towards AGI). They are all trying to commercialise LLMs with some minor tweaks. I don't expect LLMs to make the kind of progress made by the first 3 iterations of GPT. And when the insanely hyped overvaluations crashed, the bubble WILL crash. You BETTER hope there is any money left to run this kind of tools at a profit or you will be back at Stackoverflow trying to relearn all the skills you lost using generative coding tools.
by TeMPOraL | 2025-05-17 11:16:10+00:00
> If you aren't hiring junior engineers to do these kinds of things, where do you think the senior engineers you need in the future will come from?

Cynical answer for the immediate future: maybe from the pool of existing seniors and principals that have all been stuck doing a faux-management job onboarding, mentoring and managing the juniors who were the only ones actually writing any code in many tech companies? It's a reversal of a trend, for sure: my feeling about the market until the last year or two, was that there's hardly any job for seniors or above, that isn't just management without the title and its privileges.

Past the immediate future, if we end up replacing juniors with LLMs, then the next cohort of "seniors" will need to come from some kind of vocational training.
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-05-17 11:16:52+00:00
> If you went on Amazon and purchased art+drugs, that would quickly be shut down.

Would it? Amazon has no way to know that it's a payment for drugs, as far as they know it's just art.

The primary reason that doesn't happen much is that Amazon and eBay charge higher fees than simple payment processors and the drug dealers have no reason to pay a premium to have their "art" show up in the Amazon search results to people who don't know that it's really for drugs and therefore aren't going to buy it anyway.

> If they are collecting payments from fans and disbursing it to creators and artists, then I say that they have a responsibility to ensure no illicit activity goes on and people are getting what they paid for.

Why is this their responsibility any more than it's the responsibility of a bus driver to search through all your luggage for drugs, or the responsibility of a hardware store to prevent you from using the duct tape you bought to commit a kidnapping? They're merchants and common carriers, not law enforcement.

> In meatspace, you're going to have a comedy club or a concert venue, an art gallery, you know, someplace that showcases artists and may sell their work, or enable them to work for money.

Do you know how much "money laundering" goes on at "legitimate" art galleries?

> And the opportunities are vast for organized crime and nation-state threat actor sort of activities when you scale that up and go crossing international borders with your service, wouldn't you agree?

Neither of those entities have any use for small time payments systems. Nation states and large criminal organizations have their own value transfer systems:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawala

Every large organization with shady dealings has an internal system that works like that. They don't need "buy me a coffee" services to transfer money, they just put a stack of cash or a sack of gemstones on the same truck as the drugs and guns. So all you get by harassing the retail payment services is harm to innocent people who get shut out for no benefit.
by rvz | 2025-05-17 11:18:45+00:00
> Using AI when a static scanner like SonarQube easily picks up these types of resource leaks, especially in Java.

Exactly.

It's very disappointing to see that Uber engineers would rather trust an LLM to that claims to spot these issues when a battle-tested scanner such as SonarQube would have caught this in the first place.

The LLM hype-train is almost just as bad as the JavaScript hype train in the 2010s where some of the worst technologies are used on everything.
by foldr | 2025-05-17 11:19:37+00:00
Software engineers earning enough to achieve financial independence are generally employed by FAANG or (indirectly) by venture capitalists who have more money than they know what to do with.

With all this money sloshing around, it takes only a little imagination to think of ways of channeling some of it to working people without employing them to write pointless (or in some cases actively harmful) software.
by CuriouslyC | 2025-05-17 11:19:37+00:00
My writing process is a bit different from my coding process with AI, it's more of an iterative refinement process.

I tend to form the story arc in my head, and outline the major events in a timeline, and create very short summaries of important scenes, then use AI to turn those summaries into rough narrative outlines by asking me questions and then using my answers to fill in the details.

Next I'll feed that abbreviated manuscript into AI and brainstorm as to what's missing/where the flow could use improvement/etc with no consideration for prose quality, and start filling in gaps with new scenes until I feel like I have a compelling rough outline.

Then I just plow from beginning to end rewriting each chapter, first with AI to do a "beta" draft, then I rewrite significant chunks by hand to make things really sharp.

After this is done I'll feed the manuscript back into AI and get it to beta read given my target audience profile and ambitions for the book, and ask it to provide me feedback on how I can improve the book. Then I start editing based on this, occasionally adding/deleting scenes or overhauling ones that don't quite work based on a combination of my and AI's estimation. When Gemini starts telling me it can't think of much to improve the manuscript that's when it's time for human beta readers.
by passwordoops | 2025-05-17 11:19:42+00:00
From the bottom of the FAQ at the end of the page:

How can I help?

We welcome help, especially from those with experience in RFI shielding and software GUI development. Your expertise could make a big difference as we refine both the hardware and user interface. While we’re actively pursuing funding to support the project long term, any assistance now would accelerate our progress and broaden the impact of Wow@Home. Whether it’s technical support, outreach, or collaboration, your contribution matters.
by js8 | 2025-05-17 11:19:44+00:00
Of course AI has a way to judge truth -it's what we tell it to. We say to it, forests are real, but dragons are not. If it didn't discern it, it would lose competitivness with other AIs, the same way delusional humans are shunned by sane humans.

In many cases humans do not know the objective truth either. For example, what we know about Ancient Greece comes from cultural artifacts that we got. When you cannot do any experiments, you have the same problem as GAI. Yet, we manage to get somewhat objective picture of history.

Grok struggling with alleged South African genocide of Afrikaners is a nice example. It knows that what's on Wikipedia is usually close to reality, so much that it defied its own programming and became conflicted.

The objective reality is consistent, while the errors (intentional or not) often cancel out. So the more you're statistically averaging information about the world, the closer to the objective truth you will get (which might be just you don't really know enough to tell).
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-05-17 11:19:58+00:00
> All new ones. You can buy 'fresh coins' from miners directly.

Putting aside that there are a finite number of Bitcoins that will ever be mined, what good is that? You'd have "untainted" coins that you could hardly even spend without immediately tainting them because six degrees of Kevin Bacon means that everybody else's wallet has already interacted with the unclean.

> And it's not even strictly adhered to, because some bitcoins are already more valuable than others.

Is it the tainted ones that are the more valuable ones because you can still exchange them for the same number of dollars but they also have additional value for trolling people by sending trivial amounts of them to their untainted wallets without their permission?
by treebirg | 2025-05-17 11:20:08+00:00
But I do know what numbers are. I've also done addition before, so I know what the steps are. The result of 51 + 92 is derivative from (at least) these two concepts, which derive from others and so on. Maybe I'm stretching the meaning of derivative here, but to me derivative doesn't mean strictly recalling something verbatim.
by pwdisswordfishz | 2025-05-17 11:20:26+00:00
Yes, it and WeakRef are exceptions, but they are the only ones, designed to be deniable – if you delete globalThis.WeakRef; and delete globalThis.FinalizationRegistry; you go back to not exposing GC at all. WeakRef even has a special exception in the spec in that the .constructor property is optional, specifically so that handing a weak reference to some code does not necessarily enable it to create more weak references, so you can be also limited as to which objects' GC you can observe.

Though another problem is that the spec does not clearly specify when an object may be collected or allow the programmer to control GC in any way, which means relying on FinalizationRegistry may lead to leaks/failure to finalize unused resources (bad, but sometimes tolerable) or worse, use-after-free bugs (outright fatal) – see e.g. https://github.com/tc39/ecma262/issues/2650
by AdrianB1 | 2025-05-17 11:21:28+00:00
Yes. If I will have to go there on a normal visa, I will not take my phone with me, just the SIM card. For the laptop, I don't care at all, it is a company laptop and as long as the company agrees to open it up for the border control, I will, but I will set a clean password upfront that meets the minimum complexity requirements ("UperLower12345#") with no access to anything else. I have long random passwords on all accounts like email or Amazon account, I never type it in because I never know the password, that may be a problem if they ask me - who will believe that the only 2 passwords I ever know are for the company laptop and for my desktop at home in Europe?

This is not because I have something to hide, but because I have nothing to show. I don't have Facebook, Twitter or Instagram accounts, don't keep pictures on the phone (family pictures are downloaded on the NAS, I don't take other pictures), so there is nothing to show on a personal level, while the company I work for is a big, old US company and the content of the laptop is theirs, not mine, and it is nothing sensitive that even our business competitors would be interested into.

I case I would go there as a tourist, my only luggage would be my motorcycle helmet and a pair of gloves, I would rent a bike, buy a cheap phone with a local number and do road trips around the country. Not even a suitcase, so nothing to show. If they ask me about itinerary, that is a high risk for me because I use to travel across Europe without an itinerary, just a direction, they may not believe me, but old bikers don't go to a destination, they go wherever the road goes.
by constantcrying | 2025-05-17 11:22:27+00:00
To be honest an unsurprising result.

But I think the paper fails to answer the most important question. It alleges that this isn't a statistical model: "it is not a statistical model that predicts the most likely next state based on all the examples it has been trained on.

We observe that it learns to use its attention mechanism to compute 3x3 convolutions — 3x3 convolutions are a common way to implement the Game of Life, since it can be used to count the neighbours of a cell, which is used to decide whether the cell lives or dies."

But it is never actually shown that this is the case. It later on isn't even alleged that this is true, rather the metric they use is that it gives the correct answers often enough, as a test for convergence and not that the net has converged to values which give the correct algorithm.

But there is no guarantee that it actually has learned the game. There are still learned parameters and the paper doesn't investigate if these parameters actually have converged to something where the Net is actually just a computation of the algorithm. The most interesting question is left unanswered.
by mgkimsal | 2025-05-17 11:22:32+00:00
I suspect the same number of people were upset in 2006 as would be upset in 2017. But there wasn't a social media platform for those upset views to be expressed and easily measured.

This idea of "oh everyone is offended these days" is a bit weird to me; the 'these days' part I mean. There was a lot of comedy from the past that was... awkward to me as a kid, or just... felt unnecessarily cruel. But I was in a minority, or at least felt like it, with some of those. And... I don't think I changed, but I now can hear/read about others who share the same sensibilities on comedic topics.

The notion that it's somehow "more" people getting "offended" today just strikes me as odd. It may be that as more folks have a platform to share their views, that influences some folks, but I'm not sure that works on all topics. Certainly... on comedy, I've heard many of complaints about some comics/topics. Rarely has anyone's view of a comedy bit made me change my position. If I found it cringe/bad, I found it cringe/bad.
by jstummbillig | 2025-05-17 11:22:33+00:00
The problem is that, knowing the public internet, what would absolutely happen, is people arguing the ways in which

a) the code is bad b) the problem is beneath what they consider non-trivial

The way that OP structured the response, I frankly got a similar impression (although the follow up feels much different). I just don't see the point in engaging in that here, but I take your criticism: Why engage at all. I should probably not, then.
by thinkingemote | 2025-05-17 11:23:19+00:00
A lot of comedy back then was about laughing at the absurdities of a shared life.

The absurdities of yesterday have been changed - and there can be no actual normality today when there are no absurdities. Laughing at absurdities was not considered cruel.

With no common shared understanding of what's funny or not. Today we can laugh at cruel people only. The cruel and those who think others are weird are the strange ones.

Comedy used to be "look at us, hahaha" now it's "look at them, heh". Real comedy has truth and the truth is always about ourselves not some external other. But such vulnerability is very risky.
by saagarjha | 2025-05-17 11:23:22+00:00
> The number of "best people" out there is usually under 500 in a country the size of the US, a country that has hundreds of thousands of employees is not hiring the best.

> I would guess under 100 people at Google actually positively impact financial results in any way

It's really funny to me that people write comments like this and yet are incapable of basic arithmetic, like this being 0.0001% of the US population, or thinking that the entire ad business runs on just 100 people who are magically making the company $4 trillion dollars while everyone else drags it down.
by cassianoleal | 2025-05-17 11:24:41+00:00
I wholeheartedly agree with you. This is one of the most bizarre arguments against it that I've ever come across.

And that's even before you realise it's based on fiction:

> Home Assistant Operating System is not based on a regular Linux distribution like Ubuntu.

https://github.com/home-assistant/operating-system

There is no apt or any other package manager on HAOS.
Show HN: Low-backlash Angular gearbox and 3D-printed wrist differential [video]
by sergeymishin | 2025-05-17 11:25:18+00:00
I recently spent several months designing and prototyping a low-backlash angular gear drive. The goal was to create a compact transmission for robotic wrists that avoids bevel gears and belts — while still transmitting torque smoothly at various angles.

The design was inspired by roller pinion linear systems, but adapted for angular motion. Paper: https://www.mdpi.com/2076-3417/12/11/5620

To be honest, I couldn’t figure out the tooth profile for the straight pinion variant, so I brute-forced it — by writing a script that rotates two bodies at a set gear ratio and performs boolean cuts between them.

I 3D-printed several prototypes, including a working wrist differential with embedded reducers and a double hollow shaft drive.

Here's a video about it: https://youtu.be/VXcuryyRGbo

Would love to get feedback — especially from those working in robotics or mechanical design.
by kristianc | 2025-05-17 11:25:47+00:00
Little Britain just hasn’t aged well. The sketches were always more about repetition than wit, relied on caricature a lot and mistook shock value for satire.

You couldn’t make Little Britain today mostly because it wasn’t very good, and the standards of the time were lower.

You could absolutely remake The Day Today, Brass Eye, Goodness Gracious Me or Peep Show today and they’d be just as good.
by mistercow | 2025-05-17 11:27:53+00:00
Fair, I wasn’t aware of that. But even so, there’s a big difference between a wonky feature intended for niche cases and documented almost entirely in terms of caveats, and “this is the new way to dispose of resources”.

And the point that this kind of thing is against the JS philosophy is pretty explicit:

https://w3ctag.github.io/design-principles/#js-gc
by indymike | 2025-05-17 11:28:18+00:00
We had an IT guy who once bought an XML<->JSON server for $12,000. Very proud of his rack of "data appliances". It made XML like XON out of JSON and JSON that was a soup of elements attributes and ___content___, thus giving you the complexity of XML in JSON. I don't think it got used once by our dev team, and I'm pretty sure it never processed a byte of anything of value.
by lycopodiopsida | 2025-05-17 11:28:42+00:00
> Apparently many people need the stories, given how much they boost Go about things that are prior art.

No one but you here cares about prior art. And not even you, most likely, otherwise you would write your in some kind of lisp which was first on most of the things.

> Emacs could be an IDE, if it came with the whole Lisp Machine for the ride, sadly it is only a subset of the whole experience.

Lisp is just an implementation detail in (GNU) Emacs, even though it is what makes it a delight to configure. The rest is done, as everywhere, with plugins and built-in package management.

> VSCode has zero lines of Atom code into it, it started from Azure as Monaco project.

VSCode has everything from Atom in it, since it is basically a rewrite of Atom, using Electron, which was written for Atom.

> Does neovim distribution handle graphical development plugins, without spawing external windows?

What should it be, UML-plugins? Coroner has called, he wants his dead things back. But most stuff is handled with overlays these days with Telescope.
by mistercow | 2025-05-17 11:30:18+00:00
I mean it’s an explicit violation of that philosophy as noted in the proposal:

> For this reason, the W3C TAG Design Principles recommend against creating APIs that expose garbage collection. It's best if WeakRef objects and FinalizationRegistry objects are used as a way to avoid excess memory usage, or as a backstop against certain bugs, rather than as a normal way to clean up external resources or observe what's allocated.
Show HN: Infofused – Turn Your Discord Server into a Knowledge Hub
by julianvie | 2025-05-17 11:31:51+00:00
We built https://infofused.com, a Discord bot + web platform that helps Discord servers retain and surface useful content.

The problem:

Discord is great for chatting, but terrible for retaining knowledge. Mods answer the same questions over and over, and valuable insights quickly disappear into endless scroll.

Our solution:

Infofused lets mods save helpful messages with a right-click or emoji. These get published on a clean, searchable public page (structured like your Discord server) with almost no effort.

How it works:

- Invite the bot to your server - Right-click or add a emoji to save a message - The message appears on your server’s Infofused space, publicly accessible

Features:

- Threads, forums, attachments, and spoilers fully supported - Channel/category structure mirrored automatically - Replies link back to each other if both are saved - Search-function

Coming soon:

- Auto-translation for global access - Private (non-indexed) communities with Discord login - SEO + indexable knowledge base

Would love feedback from you. We're two devs bootstrapping this from Vienna.

Thanks in advance, Julian