MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by iandanforth | 2025-05-12 09:24:17+00:00
This paper is concerning. While divorced from the standard ML literature there is a lot of work on biologically plausible spiking, timing dependant artificial neutral networks. The nomenclature here doesn't seem to acknowledge that body of work. Instead it appears as a step toward that bulk of research coming from the ML/LLM field without a clear appreciation of the ground well traveled there.*

In addition some of the terminology is likely to cause confusion. By calling a synaptic integration step "thinking" the authors are going to confuse a lot of people. Instead of the process of forming an idea, evaluating that idea, potentially modifying it and repeating (what a layman would call thinking) they are trying to ascribe "thinking" to single unit processes! That's a pretty radical departure from both ML and ANN literature. Pattern recognition/signal discrimination is well known at the level of synaptic integration and firing, but "thinking?" No, that wording is not helpful.

*I have not reviewed all the citations and am reacting to the plain language of the text as someone familiar with both lines of research.
by Hilift | 2025-05-12 09:24:34+00:00
> Universities are left to defend The Promise of American Higher Education alone.

"Only the federal government can provide the funding needed".?

NSF fields 40,000 proposals per year, 110 per day.

The US is unlike other countries. By design, each state has their own capabilities, and owns everything except that which is specifically provided to the federal government. The combined capabilities of California and Massachusetts equal the remainder of the country. There's nothing to prevent any state from funding the universities in their states.

Was it more convenient before? Sure, but there is now an inflection point where more than 50% of the country "don't like you and wish you weren't here". You don't have to get beat up at the bus stop if you walk or take an uber.

This is hardly unique to research or higher education. All 50 states have negligently constructed budgets to rely on copius federal funding for health care (Medicaid) and education. That makes it easy for a petulant politician to kick sand in your face and "disrupt" that.
by pjmlp | 2025-05-12 09:25:10+00:00
I assume it will follow gjc footsteps if no one steps up for maintenance.

GCC has a high bar for having frontends added into the standar distribution, and if there isn't a viable reason why they should be kept around, they get eventually removed.

What kept gcj around for so many years, after being almost left for dead, was that it was the only frontend project that had unit tests for specific compilation scenarios.

Eventually someone took the effort to migrate those tests, and remove gcj.
by Sinosteelpipe | 2025-05-12 09:26:38+00:00
The two sides agreed to jointly take the following measures: The US side promised to cancel a total of 91% of tariffs on Chinese goods imposed by Executive Order No. 14259 dated April 8, 2025, and Executive Order No. 14266 dated April 9, 2025, and modify the 34% "reciprocal tariffs" on Chinese goods imposed by Executive Order No. 14257 dated April 2, 2025. Among them, the imposition of 24% of the tariffs will be suspended for 90 days, and the remaining 10% of the tariffs will be retained. Correspondingly, the Chinese side will cancel a total of 91% of counter - tariffs on US goods; regarding the 34% counter - tariffs in response to the US "reciprocal tariffs", the imposition of 24% of the tariffs will be suspended for 90 days accordingly, and the remaining 10% of the tariffs will be retained. The Chinese side will also suspend or cancel relevant non - tariff counter - measures against the US accordingly.
by mihaaly | 2025-05-12 09:26:56+00:00
Statistics work on generic population but mush away a lot.

People are careless and inattentive beast of animals in our modern societies. Things are done for them, expected this way, they do not need to pay attention that much, which has lot of merits and advantages for the advancement of humanity. Dumb solutions doing as told and need to be handled expertly can be dangerous for modern people. Developing automation right (emphasis is here, big emphasis!!) is very necessary.

But unfinished and sloppy developers are killing careful people. Not show in the statistics, saving more bad drivers than killing good ones overridden by shit software cars.

Need to do it right with no collateral casualties.

I believe the tone of the conversations are into this direction anyway: please, pretty please, do it right! Not the current sloppy way! This is a dangerous game not mobile messaging platform, needs different mindsets than average software development approaches.
by Kaibeezy | 2025-05-12 09:27:28+00:00
One of my favorite cafes has simple signage with an explanation, plus an owner/manager with the interest and confidence to enforce it. He’s really just replacing the empathy, self-awareness and social awareness that’s fading generally. It’s his prerogative: the scrambled eggs, toast and coffee are basically perfect; that’s where he puts his effort and what makes money; he’s tending his shop with care and dedication.

Corporate cafes are flaccid and indifferent. A pay toilet that hands out free coffee. Who even cares what a customer is up to?
by n4r9 | 2025-05-12 09:27:32+00:00
> why MBAs appeared in the first place, why they were a preferable alternative to other types of large scale management

This is a whole topic of its own, intertwining with the rise of neoliberalism and short-termist managerial capitalism. I don't think we have to get into that every single time we point out a case where short-termist managerialism fails.
by elAhmo | 2025-05-12 09:28:17+00:00
Cursor/Windsurf and similar IDEs and plugins are more than autocomplete on steroids.

Sure, you might not like it and think you as a human should write all code, but frequent experience in the industry in the past months is that productivity in the teams using tools like this has greatly increased.

It is not unreasonable to think that someone deciding not to use tools like this will not be competitive in the market in the near future.
by chii | 2025-05-12 09:28:33+00:00
That's interesting! So i assume that this macro allows code to get registered to be run after the 'current' scope exits.

But from my understanding (or lack thereof), the `auto _defer_instance_1234 =` is never referenced post construction. Why doesn't the compiler immediately detect that this object is unused and thus optimize away the object as soon as possible? Is it always guaranteed that the destructor gets called only after the current scope exits?
by aspenmayer | 2025-05-12 09:29:05+00:00
That's great. I'm happy for you, really. I want that experience for everyone, but you still have to go to work tomorrow.

That's the sense in which I mean it doesn't matter. The certainty of labor under a system of control operated for profit is another sort of pseudo-democratic state we find ourselves in, and I hope I'm not too old to see the day that the last person works the last shift of wage labor, as that will be another sort of cause for celebration.
by Loic | 2025-05-12 09:29:43+00:00
Not necessarily, I have a website with 95% (maybe even more) of the traffic generated by crawlers. If some of them are behaving badly, it is fair to exclude them with my robots.txt.

But of course, the ones behaving badly tend to not respect the robots.txt, so you end up banning the IP or IP block.

And here, I am a nice guy, the crawler must really be a piece of crap for me to start to block.
by Grimblewald | 2025-05-12 09:30:45+00:00
you're selling the 16 year old angle on HN, where 20 years old and younger represents about 2% of the demographic. You're getting an unusually high level of negative responses in comments as well, so I am curious, did you buy 'upvotes' for your post to boost it? I can't imagine such a disconnect between upvotes and comments arising from controversy, since the project isn't controversial, just unremarkable and somewhat amateur.

---

To answer your question: Personally? I don't think so. When I was 16 I was aware of how little I knew, and knew that by virtue of units life lived vs units experience possible to have gained, there was likely little to nothing I knew sufficiently enough about to be relied on over most adults, with the exception of, at the time, tech. Then, this was only true given how niche it was, so niche most folks did not yet even have a computer or even internet access. If it was common place for folks to access, even that would not have been true. So for that reason, I saw no reason, it shouldn't also be true for my peers. For that reason I would give low weighting to whatever peers offered. For example, that one friend who claimed to have all the answers when it came to girls/women, why would you treat them as anything other than full of shit? Or that friend who might claim to know more on a topic than our teacher. While plausible in some domains, it is extremely unlikely in general like the know-it-all would have claimed and required a higher burden of proof than they could provide. That being said, this humility came from having constant reinforcement that my assumptions were overly simplistic, or outright wrong. This reinforcement tempered an otherwise self-indulgent world view and sense of self. I have to wonder how things like sycophantic AI influence this aspect of natural human development. Terrible ideas reinforced as world changing and awesome, ideas lacking in depth or nuance left not only unchallenged but outright reinforced and celebrated.

So, do I think kids would trust another kid to develop a worthwhile tool? Not in my generation, but perhaps kids in your cohort have a different attitude. They are inheriting a world on the brink of collapse due to mismanagement and are largely guided by sycophantic AI, and I have no illusion that this would breed a level of resentment and disregard for what older generations have to say / offer. You'd know better what kids your age would like and how they'd respond than I do by virtue of lived experience and my lack of insight on that demographic's wants/needs/perception of things, but if what was true for my cohort is true for yours, it would not help you sell your product.
by fowl2 | 2025-05-12 09:31:50+00:00
Suprised no one has mentioned RFC 8914 Extended DNS Errors, specifically section 4.17[1]:

> 4.17. Extended DNS Error Code 16 - Censored

> The server is unable to respond to the request because the domain is on a blocklist due to an external requirement imposed by an entity other than the operator of the server resolving or forwarding the query. Note that how the imposed policy is applied is irrelevant (in-band DNS filtering, court order, etc.).

Which would be relevant for Google DNS's "Query refused" at least. Although I guess it's possible maybe they do support it but Windows/Chromium don't...

[1] https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc8914.html#section-4.17
by Aicy | 2025-05-12 09:31:55+00:00
My partner has lived in China for 2 years, and I can assure you many people who live in China are also buying automatic cat feeders and in fact the domestic market is their primary one.

The cat feeder is I understand a feels like a good point as it feels rather trivial, but for the most part technology helps everyone to be more efficient. Even with the cat feeder its not just a few minutes - it means I can stay out later from work, or go on trips for several days without having to worry, or pay someone to come as a cat sitter. Its cost of $50 pays for itself in just one 7 day trip of not paying for a cat sitter, which usually would be some low paid immigrant from East Asia. Efficiency gains all around.
by Joker_vD | 2025-05-12 09:32:49+00:00
What is "injector"? Is this the Service Locator anti-pattern?

The application's entry point takes the God Object of capabilities, slices it accordingly to what it thinks its submodules should be able to access, and then initializes the submodules with the capabilities it has decided upon. Obviously, if some submodules declare that they need access to everything plus a kitchen sink, the choice is either a) give up and give them access to everything; b) look for a replacement that requires less capabilities.
by Tainnor | 2025-05-12 09:33:29+00:00
I have a pet (undergraduate complex analysis) formalisation project in Lean, purely for didactic and recreational purposes. I find it rewarding in the same way others may find it rewarding to train for a triathlon - it's often extremely grueling work and it can take forever to make even modest progress. When I actually do get to a "big" result such as defining pi (from scratch) or Cauchy's integral theorem it feels rewarding, but there's a ton of torn out hairs along the way, when linarith is stupider than it should be, I need to spend forever to prove very obvious things, I can't find the tactic I need in mathlib or I realise there's barely anything about triangles in there. For somebody like me without a PhD it also doesn't help that mathlib almost always goes for full generality which makes it hard to use it effectively (although I do understand the reason for it).

I think this is all very exciting but I also think ergonomics will probably need to improve quite a bit before Lean will become mainstream in mathematics.
by BrandiATMuhkuh | 2025-05-12 09:34:08+00:00
This is some cools work.

Not sure if it fits but I still have ~20k currated step by step solution for mathematics (pedagogical math) "lying" around from my previous startup. They are all hand currated. And could even be used for fine tuning or so.

Here are some details: The dataset has 20.600 Abstract Exercises which turn into 1.193.958 Concrete Exercises.

An Abstract Exercise looks like this: a + b = c A Concrete Exercise looks like this: 2 + 3 = 5 Tital compiled file size (JSONL): 11.6GB

And here is an explorer to see some of the data https://curriculum.amy.app/ToM
by pjc50 | 2025-05-12 09:34:23+00:00
Well, yes. The legacy car companies are ossified. They want to keep churning out minute variations on the same cars, and regard software as a thin layer for the entertainment system. They don't want to adapt to EVs, which force a redesign of the car as a whole. They're going to get run over by Chinese companies unless they can beg for tariffs to prop up their un-innovation.
by JKCalhoun | 2025-05-12 09:34:35+00:00
Telling everyone to "just learn to code" is worse I think. Especially since I'm not reading about well off white collar workers telling kids to skip school and go into the trades. (Except maybe on HN?)

I realized a long time ago that there are a lot of people that absolutely will not function if they cannot do a job with their hands where they can feel like they did something at the end of each day. (In fact I might almost be one of those people.) Keeping some manufacturing as well as good (union?) trade jobs is a smart move for a country/society.
by LeonM | 2025-05-12 09:35:41+00:00
For those unaware: the Volkswagen Up! is a small, low-budget car produced by VW group, it's also sold as the Škoda Citigo and Seat Mii. AFAIK it was only sold in Europe and Latin-America.

A family member had a early-gen Up!, and the OEM display (build by Navigon) that sat on top of the dashboard was removable, but used a proprietary connection, not USB. I believe it snapped on with magnets, which I remember thinking was quite nice.

The detachability was mostly for anti-theft reasons I presume, but quite quickly an aftermarket started to form to replace the OEM screen with other options, including phone mounts. I don't think VW envisioned that, but I thought that a detachable mount for aftermarket satnav, phone mounts or other accessories was quite smart.

I did wonder why they didn't just make it a phone mount as standard so you can basically BYOD, which could lower the price of the car further and probably be a better experience anyway.

> Volkswagen Up!: infotainment is just a USB port and a phone clamp.

Thanks to your comment I looked into it again, and I'm pleasantly surprised to see the newer generation Up! actually does have a OEM phone mount now, how cool! From what I just read it uses an app to integrate with some of the car's features.

More car manufacturers should do this for their budget cars. Have a few physical buttons for controlling built-in functions (namely HVAC), and let the user's phone provide the entertainment, navigation and other driving aids. Maybe even ditch the radio interface, and just have an amplifier and speakers build in.

It's a shame that phone OSes are moving away from on-device 'driving mode' in favor of Android Auto and Apple Carplay. I get it though, larger screen makes for easier controls and thus safer to interact with while driving, but still...
by n_ary | 2025-05-12 09:36:12+00:00
I agree with /u/welder. Preferably neither. Both of these are custom and runs the risk of being acquired and enshittified in future.

If you are using VScode, get familiar with cline. Aider is also excellent if you don’t want to modify your IDE.

Additionally, Jetbrains IDEs now also have built-in local LLMs and their auto-complete is actually fast and decent. They also have added a new chat sidepanel in recent update.

The goal is NOT to change your workflow or dev env, but to integrate these tools into your existing flow, despite what the narrative says.
by ArtTimeInvestor | 2025-05-12 09:36:19+00:00
But you can read the books right in the library and learn from them.

And you can later tell other humans about what you have learned. Like "Amazing, in a right-angled triangle, the square of the longest side is equal to the sum of the squares of the other two sides".

As AI agents become more and more human-like, they do not need to have "copied books". They just need to learn once. And they can learn from many sources, including from other AI agents.

That's why I say it is inevitable that all human knowledge will end up in the "heads" of AI agents.

And soon they will create their own knowledge via thinking and experimentation. Knowledge that so far exceeds human knowledge that it will seem funny that we once had a fight over that tiny little bit of knowledge that humans created.
by KronisLV | 2025-05-12 09:36:55+00:00
> it's still a far cry from your ~200 Mb Electron hello world.

I think that projects that ship packaged web apps but attempt to use the system native web views where available are really nice, like Wails: https://wails.io/ (so for example, on Windows it would use Webview2, so you don't have to package an entire Chromium install yourself)

Here's a comparison of how the distribution sizes change, Wails in particular also has way faster builds than something like Tauri: https://github.com/Elanis/web-to-desktop-framework-compariso...

That said, I wish we got more native software, or even something like LCL that can target Win32, GTK, Qt or whatever else is available. Sure, writing components that are available on a lot of platforms and work similarly everywhere is a pain for the developers, but I applaud the effort regardless, since the above solutions like Wails don't actually do anything for the memory usage and CPU cycles, whereas native GUI software is better for most apps that don't try to be very interactive.

I could even see myself using Lazarus/Pascal more if it seemed to have a more active ecosystem, right now I couldn't tell you what are the equivalents of something like Spring Boot for webapps, or even consuming Web APIs in client software, handling OAuth2/OIDC/JWT, seems like mORMot 2 would fit the bill the closest?
by anticodon | 2025-05-12 09:36:56+00:00
I profiled a huge legacy tests collection using cProfile, and found lots of low hanging fruits. Like some tests were creating 4000x3000 Pillow image in memory just to test how image saving code works (checkign that filename and extension are correct). And hundreds of tests had created this huge image for every test (in the setUp method) because of unittest reliance on inheritance. Reducing size image to 10x5 made the test suite faster for like 5-7% (it was long time ago, so I don't remember exact statistics).

So, I'd run the tests under cProfile first.
Ask HN: Claude 3.7 Sonnet or Gemini 2.5 Pro?
by apt-apt-apt-apt | 2025-05-12 09:37:53+00:00
Saw the other thread (Cursor vs Windsurf), and what I'm wondering is Claude or Gemini? I have been using Cursor with Gemini 2.5 Pro (exp. 03-25) for TS and I haven't felt the need to switch, nor can I tell any difference between the two.
by 0xEF | 2025-05-12 09:38:13+00:00
If you are interested, you can do both. I work for a company that produces machines that tend to get integrated in automation cells for aerospace/automotive parts manufacturers. As the field technician, it's my job to know how our machines play with everything else in that cell so I can fix issues for our customers when things break (and they will break, eventually, for a wide variety of reasons which creates a weird fragility to the whole automation system, but that's a different post).

This requires that I know what's going on mechanically _and_ at what expected behavior of the embedded systems should be (PLCs, device firmware/software packages, network security, etc).

Like you, I was pushed to go to college after high school, only to find out later that college is an industry, not an institution, so the rhetoric about not being able to get a good job without a degree was really just a sales pitch to get my lower-class parents to take out loans they could not afford so me, a veritable child at the time, could make a major decision that would set the tone for the rest of my life. It's a lot of systemically flawed Capitalistic nonsense.

In my field, we _desperately_ need people who understand (at the very least) basic electronics and mechanics, but also the software side of things. The amount of techs from other companies, companies with a much larger and more public reputation than my employers mind you, that do not seem to have a grasp on the basics is astounding and alarming. But even the competent electromechanical techs are weak on how the software or firmware functions, which is often a big key to the "wtf is wrong" puzzle.

I'm not even a coder/programmer, but I know enough to get by and make effort to learn something about programming embedded systems or software for Controls every day, and while I am still an amateur, my god, it gives me quite the edge over a lot of the other guys.

You don't have to be trapped at a desk. Mechanical aptitude can be developed, but it starts by not being afraid to take the screws out and seeing what you can just figure out. The pride you mention comes from that, but you also touched on something else; tangible results. Believe me, I have respect for devs who can create a piece of software from start to finish, but when I manage to bring a slag-crusted horrifyingly-neglected machine back to live after a catastrophic failure that had Automaker X sweating $10000 bullets, it is a real thrill, one that infuses me with great energy for days, sometimes weeks. That's why your friend likes sharing those stories!