MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by tuyiown | 2025-05-08 20:46:00+00:00
(not an unix sysadmin, just guessing what happened from my shaky knowledge)

cron jobs reports activity by email to the user (UID) they are running, historically UNIX boxes have the ability to handle mail locally (people would leave messages to each other by connecting to the same server via terminal), so that the root cron activity would land into the root (/root) account mbox file.

When email got interconnected more across servers, generally the service that would dispatch mail to the users account on their home folder on the server started to be able to forward to to others servers, if a domain name was provided. Add to it the ability to fallback to a _default_ domain name for sending email into the organization, and voilà, the root email account for the default domain name receives the entirety of the cron jobs running under root of all the servers running with the default configuration and domain fallback.
by carefulfungi | 2025-05-08 20:46:00+00:00
I suppose like so many historical discussions, it depends on where you draw the starting line. Personally, I find understanding the colonization of the Americas and the emergence of the United States more effectively as a continuum that includes the Spanish, who were the dominate initial "new world" colonial power for a couple hundred years. Not to mention, who actually funded Columbus ;-). I understand this isn't the popular or common place to draw the starting line when reading US history, though. (And maybe not even a good way - just a way that I find personally more interesting.)
by antonvs | 2025-05-08 20:46:03+00:00
I’m guessing you’re thinking of a certain kind of application (web apps perhaps?), where a monolith can make sense. But that’s but the only kind of application.

We have dozens of service components that are all largely independent of each other - combining them together would be purely a packaging decision, and wouldn’t really simplify much. In some cases, it wouldn’t make sense or even be possible at all.

An example is our execution agent, which executes customer workflows - that’s completely independent both conceptually and from a security perspective. Each agent instance executes a single flow at a time, for resource consumption and security reasons, which entails an ecosystem of services to manage that - messaging, data ingestion at scale (100K flows per day, multi-petabyte “hot” datastore for active data), orchestration, and other supporting services such as data access and network routing.

All of our teams support multiple services, and many of them qualify as microservices.
by michaelsbradley | 2025-05-08 20:46:21+00:00
Rev. P. Robert Francis PREVOST, O.S.A. (now Pope Leo XIV), Address to the Synod of Bishops, 2012

https://www.vatican.va/news_services/press/sinodo/documents/...

At least in the contemporary western world, if not throughout the entire world, the human imagination concerning both religious faith and ethics is largely shaped by mass media, especially by television and cinema. Western mass media is extraordinarily effective in fostering within the general public enormous sympathy for beliefs and practices that are at odds with the Gospel. However, overt opposition to Christianity by mass media is only part of the problem. The sympathy for anti-Christian lifestyle choices that mass media fosters is so brilliantly and artfully engrained in the viewing public, that when people hear the Christian message it often inevitably seems ideological and emotionally cruel by contrast to the ostensible humaneness of the anti-Christian perspective. If the “New Evangelization” is going to counter these mass media-produced distortions of religious and ethical reality successfully, pastors, preachers, teachers and catechists are going to have to become far more informed about the challenge of evangelizing in a world dominated by mass media. The Fathers of the Church, including Saint Augustine, can provide eminent guidance for the Church in this aspect of the New Evangelization, precisely because they were masters of the art of rhetoric. Their evangelizing was successful in great part because they understood the foundations of social communication appropriate to the world in which they lived. In order to combat successfully the dominance of the mass media over popular religious and moral imaginations, it is not sufficient for the Church to own its own television media or to sponsor religious films. The proper mission of the Church is to introduce people to the nature of mystery as an antidote to spectacle. Religious life also plays an important role in evangelization, pointing others to this mystery, through living faithfully the evangelical counsels.
by frollogaston | 2025-05-08 20:46:28+00:00
I'm fine with the contempt approach. New business priority comes in, and the software can't support it because of tech debt, so someone fixes it.

Otherwise, even if people tackle the tech debt in good faith, they spend endless time polishing things that don't really matter. Something big like a database or API is deeply flawed, and they focus on improving the unit tests, which further entrenches the broken stuff because any replacement now has to meet the same standards.
by fishtoaster | 2025-05-08 20:47:11+00:00
Honestly, it's been pretty great at my tiny startup. The designer has a list of tweaks he wants that I could do pretty quickly... once I'm done with my current thing in a day or two. Or he can just throw claude at it. We've got CI, we've got visual diff testing, and I'll review his simple `margin-left: 12px;`->`margin-left: 16px;`.

But we're unlocking:

A) more dev capacity by having non-devs do simple tasks

B) a much tighter feedback loop between "designer wants a thing" and "thing exists in product"

C) more time for devs like me to focus on deeper, more involved work
by swyx | 2025-05-08 20:47:29+00:00
> You can see this in practice when you use Claude Code, which is pay-per-token. Our heaviest users are using $50/month of tokens. That’s a lot of tokens. I asked our CFO and he said he’d be happy to spend $100/dev/month on agents. To get 20% more productive that’s a bargain.

fwiw we interviewd the Claude Code team (https://www.latent.space/p/claude-code) and they said that even within Anthropic (where Claude is free, we got into this a bit), the usage is $6/day so about $200/month. not bad! especially because it goes down when you under-use.
by AlexandrB | 2025-05-08 20:47:44+00:00
This is such a whitewash of Microsoft's history. There's a reason Microsoft is a convicted monopolist - they used brutally unfair tactics to push out competitors, including open source ones. Have we all forgotten the IE winter when browser innovation stopped for almost a decade thanks to Microsoft killing Netscape in the crib?

Microsoft is not an ethical company - a pattern that has continued today with their user-hostile decisions.
by jll29 | 2025-05-08 20:48:21+00:00
It is an interesting game-theoretic question how to spend money x (say, hundreds of billions) to maximize good.

- Should you first educate anyone who cannot read or write?

- Should you first feed anyone hungry/thirsty?

- Should you first provide shelter for all without homes?

- Should you first make peace for all without safety?

(all the way down the Maslow pyramid of needs)

How would the philanthropic billaires united ensure peace, if he had even more money? (Should one "buy" a military force that is mightier than any country's, to send out the message that every nation that started an armed conflict would regret it? Not sure if that could suppress war, but perhaps one would not feel inclined to call that "peace"...)

If I had the financial means, by gut instinct I would start out with the most vulnerable, those that can least help themselves, e.g. orphaned small children, the handicapped, the unborn.

However, in a geopolitically unstable world one could then argue it is a "waste" of resources to help people by first feeding them when they get invaded and killed by their neighboring country soon after. But creating world peace has historically not been something that a single person - billionair or otherwise - has been able to solve.
Ask HN: Help us validate our idea of an administrative app for small businesses
by Kuyawa | 2025-05-08 20:49:03+00:00
We’re developing an administrative app designed to simplify tasks like invoicing, purchases, inventory, and expense tracking for small businesses. Our goal is to save time and reduce stress for busy entrepreneurs while providing a very affordable subscription model. We know it's boring and not AI related but somebody has to do it and that's us, think of it as a QuickBooks or FreshBooks competitor in a very tough market.

We’d love your input to ensure the app meets real needs, if you can spare 2 minutes to answer 3 quick questions

1. What’s your biggest pain point when managing administrative tasks (e.g., invoicing, inventory, finances, paperwork)?

2. What tools do you currently use, and what do you wish they did better?

3. Would a streamlined, all-in-one app for these tasks be valuable to you? Why or why not?

We’d really appreciate your honest thoughts as a small business owner or possible investor

Thank you for helping us build something truly useful

Adminix Team

---

As a thank-you, respondents get early access to the app, just select the free plan and register with your email
by ralphc | 2025-05-08 20:50:18+00:00
Erlang figured this out so much you've described the BEAM. You can have hundreds of thousands of small "processes" communicating through BEAM mailboxes on a modern machine. Elixir has protocols and macros, improvements on Erlang, and if you really require lisp there is LFE, Lisp Flavored Erlang, that has true lisp homoiconicity.
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-05-08 20:50:24+00:00
No, Trump will answer questions and do media interviews, and the specific way in which he lies about things is consistent and predictable. Most of what he's doing are the things he said he was going to do. The problem is he said he was going to do a lot of asinine stuff, like promote coal. Which is bad because it's a bad policy, not because you had no idea he intended to do it.

But it still seems like people should be able to agree that being forced to choose between two bad candidates is a problem worth solving.
by svieira | 2025-05-08 20:50:26+00:00
> If they then proceed to ostracise that person, that’s crossing into hate and pridefulness.

Agreed

> or refuse to recognise their relations, that’s crossing into hate and pridefulness.

There I think we need a finer view. "Mx. Other" is important to you? Yes, absolutely, they should recognize that. What you do with "Mx. Other" is good? Absolutely not, it's harming both you and "Mx. Other" who you clearly love.

See https://boldlybeloved.com/ for a beautiful example of how to do accompanying _right_ (in my opinion).
by Ey7NFZ3P0nzAe | 2025-05-08 20:50:28+00:00
Pretty usual stuff I'd say. And I'm willing to bet that the 2nd sets of antibiotic had a lower spectrum of action than the 1sr because we had some guess about the initial strain.

Also because you're still with us so it probably worked.

In any case I'm glad you're better and sorry you had to go through this.
by msephton | 2025-05-08 20:50:54+00:00
This is an astonishing conversion, even in this obviously heavily edited form. The topic is ever present: at exactly the same time in 1983 artists/illustrators like Barbara Nessim https://blog.gingerbeardman.com/2023/11/09/early-computer-ar... were facing backlash and resistance for their use of computers as a new tool to do their work, an opinion which lasted for a decade until the early-mid 1990s. And here we are in the 2020s having the same discussion about machine learning/LLMs or "A.I." If you want to call it that. It's the relentless march of progress and people's resistance to change. Progress always seems to win.
by Aloisius | 2025-05-08 20:51:29+00:00
Do Argentinians regularly refer to themselves as Americans?

I can't think of the last time I needed to describe myself as being from the continent, but if you really want to call yourselves Americans, I say go for it. People can call themselves whatever they like.

Still, I can't help but notice Argentinean newspapers using americano to refer to refer to things from the US.
by skydhash | 2025-05-08 20:51:33+00:00
Yep! Most tools are there to handle the painful aspects of your tasks. It's not like you are consciously thinking about them, but just the fact on doing them without the tool will get a groan out of you.

A lot of current AI tools are toys. Fun to play around, but as soon as you have some real world tasks, you just do it your usual way that get the job done.
by chatmasta | 2025-05-08 20:51:59+00:00
I imagine one challenge you’ll face is how to keep it configurable and flexible prior to any data leaving the system. For example, you’d like to default to “intercept everything,” but also allow the user to define rulesets for which packets to ignore or include. That would be a nicer UX with an application-level tool, but at that point you’ve already exfiltrated the data they want to filter. So you’ll need a rules engine that can execute locally in the eBPF program, but now that program is becoming much more complicated.

Also worth noting this is very similar to the code path that got Crowdstrike in trouble when they crashed every device on the internet because of a bug in the parser of their rules engine.
by antonvs | 2025-05-08 20:52:08+00:00
You’re suffering from a misunderstanding there. Functional programming is all about encapsulation, starting at the individual function boundary (closures can encapsulate state) and then at every layer above that.

Functional languages have some of the most rigorous module systems available. In fact Java adopted such a system recently, showing the weaknesses in its previous support for encapsulation via classes and packages.
by EA-3167 | 2025-05-08 20:52:40+00:00
When they made the first move a month or so ago I promptly bailed and now I buy Kobo. I have ZERO interest in digital products I can't archive, it's my bottom line, especially with books that I don't want to have to deal with Amazon's Kindle app to manage.

I've purchased hundreds of Kindle volumes over the years, and never will again; I really doubt that I'm alone in that.
by sepositus | 2025-05-08 20:52:53+00:00
> It would be hard to argue that the bible actively promotes same-sex marriage, but I think you could reasonably argue that it says nothing on the subject and so leaves it for the church/community to decide.

This is where I've yet to see convincing evidence. The whole meta-story of the first few chapters of Genesis was about creation. Not just creation of the universe as we know it, but the pro-creation between a man and a woman in the sanctimony of marriage.

Whether you have an overly-religious view of Genesis or not doesn't really change the fact that the original authors were clearly "sanctifying" this act of pro-creation (the "meme" if you want to use Dawkins' terms). Other cultures and tribes obviously had their own ways of sanctifying it, but in a large, almost universal majority of cases, it was always between a man and a woman.

Changing the gender to same-sex more or less destroy's the original intention of the meme. I mean, you can do it, but I don't think you're walking away with the authentic thought that was being communicated by the authors.

I'm purely speaking from an academic sense here (the art of understanding what someone wrote a long time ago). Sure, we can choose to ignore and/or change it because it's "out of date" but that leads back to a point I made elsewhere about how it's not usually within the Catholic tradition to so blatantly alter scripture.
by me3meme | 2025-05-08 20:53:50+00:00
Metaphor: finding a path from a initial point to a destination in a graph. As the number of parameters increases one can expect the LLM to be able to remember how to go from one place to another and in the end it should be able to find a long path. This can be an emergent property since with less parameters the LLM could not be able to find the correct path. Now one has to find what kind of problems this metaphor is a good model of.
Show HN: Translate between dialects and share SQL queries on the browser
by WhyIsItAlwaysHN | 2025-05-08 20:54:13+00:00
Last year, I wanted to learn a bit about how easy it would be to deploy a python app via web assembly to the browser and decided to make a wrapper around the amazing sqlglot by Toby Mao and the rest of the team.

The tool lets you paste in Sql queries and translate them between the available sql dialects in sqlglot. It also gives you parse diagnostics and the ability to easily share queries via storing all the state in the url.

The stack that was used is typescript for the UI and pyodide to integrate with Sqlglot, which does the heavy lifting.

It's more of a toy app but I've found some use out of it, so I'm sharing it in case anyone finds it useful too.

Future plans are to add some statistics on the queries like number of joins, to add the ability to define a schema and also adding support for executing toy queries.
by rhelz | 2025-05-08 20:54:16+00:00
In any case, 6.2 billion bits (interestingly enough, almost exactly as much information which is on an audio CD which you used for your romantic mixtapes) is an upper bound.

This rules out pretty much every nutty theory which evolutionary psychologists propose. Such as we evolved for altruism, we evolved to believe in religion, etc etc. Complete B.S. Exactly how much information would you need to specify a behavior like being predisposed to a belief in religion??? There's less than 80 minutes worth of music's worth of information in our genomes, and most of that is concerned with just keeping us alive.

You are not predisposed to be anything. Go create the kind of person you want to be.
by cyberax | 2025-05-08 20:54:24+00:00
Yes, it's called cVDPV. It's caused by the virus in the live vaccine "unweakening" itself, and it's typically happening in people with weakened immune systems (e.g. from chronic malnutrition). It's not causing unvaccinated people to get infected, per se.

Most cases are mild, and on average there are about 300-400 cases per _year_ for the entire world.

But it's absolutely heinous to accuse Gates of deliberately infecting people with the live virus. The weakened vaccine has been the standard for polio vaccination for the last 80 years. There is simply no alternative for it for places like DRC or Chad. Inactivated vaccines require refrigeration and injections, and this is not feasible.

We're >.< this close to eradicating polio: https://polioeradication.org/wild-poliovirus-count/ - there are only two countries with the wild virus. A little bit more, and we can actually stop vaccinating from polio altogether.
by acdha | 2025-05-08 20:54:27+00:00
This is a good reminder that while some security policies are pointless or ineffectual, many exist for very good reasons. I haven’t worked with this guy so I have no idea how skilled he is but even bona fide experts make mistakes or get targeted by sophisticated adversaries. Layers of defense, monitoring, and especially requiring multiple people to do sensitive things all seem like overhead until you see an attack get past some but not all of your defenses.

The endless corners cut by DOGE significantly increase the odds of that happening and we are likely not to know about everything which happens because the administration is going to do damage control and any smart adversary is going to be as quiet as possible. I especially wonder about data leaks where you can’t do anything like rotating keys, and things like personal data might show up on the dark web without enough context to determine where it came from.
by bigbadfeline | 2025-05-08 20:54:47+00:00
> And why do you expect the whole world to agree on a stablecoin-based solution if they can't or don't want to agree on a TARGET-like one?

I didn't read anything about tm-guimaraes "expecting the whole world to agree on a stablecoin-based solution" and you didn't bother to quote him, if he did say it. In fact, multiple stable coins and quick arrangements between individual banks are a big part of the value provided by stable coins.

The point here is that stables do provide a lot of value and convenience for banking, two banks can agree and use a stable in no time at all, they are traded 24x7 on multiple exchanges where every bank has accounts.

I'm not sure what are you trying to argue, the convenience and speed of stables is there for all to see. They have one slight problem, namely they might not be properly regulated and introduce some risks. However, how much can you trust regulations themselves, given that unstable coins, being de facto criminal fraud, are not only legal but perpetrated at the highest level of government.
by tehjoker | 2025-05-08 20:54:48+00:00
Yea, their objective is to optimize labor costs and increase profit margins. It is an objective that is diametrically opposed to our well being in the long run.

Don't confuse a state of affairs where the capitalists are having difficulty replacing us (thus reducing pressure on us) with a general beneficence, their relationship to us is purely transactional and we are disposable. Have solidarity with your class.
by andy99 | 2025-05-08 20:54:52+00:00
I didn't follow entirely on a fast read, but this confused me especially:

The parameter count of an LLM defines a certain bit budget. This bit budget must be spread across many, many tasks

I'm pretty sure that LLMs, like all big neural networks, are massively under-specified, as in there are way more parameters than data to fit (understanding the training data set is bigger than the size of the model, but the point is the same loss can be achieved with many different combinations of parameters).

And I think of this underspecification as the reason neural networks extrapolate cleanly and this generalize.
by trealira | 2025-05-08 20:55:10+00:00
I'm not really a Bitcoin true believer, but it seems like a currency to me. I've had to use it.

There's certain medication that's cheaper for me to buy online from overseas than it is in the US (where I live) even with my insurance. Those from whom I've bought it only accept payment in Bitcoin. I'm going to admit that it seems kind of sketchy, but I'm grateful for the existence of BTC because of it, and I think it really does seem like a good decentralized currency in that situation.

Maybe skeptics would label this money laundering or criminal activity, but I'm using it to buy medication I have a prescription for; if this is illicit, it feels like it shouldn't be.
by lillecarl | 2025-05-08 20:55:19+00:00
The darker the ink the more it hurts, however if you apply the expensive recommended creams beforehand it is very bareable, anyone can endure a 20 minute removal session.

Pretty much if you could do the tattoo you can get it removed, first times hurt a bit but I have vague memories that it hurt like hell when I got it done black-out drunk in Aiya Napa, Cyprus as an 18 year old as well.

If you're thinking about removing a tattoo pain should be really low on your list of considerations, I genuinely mean it (both because sessions are short and it doesn't hurt much)
by strictnein | 2025-05-08 20:55:34+00:00
Sounds like that was incorrect:

https://blockclubchicago.org/2025/05/08/pope-leo-xiv-is-a-cu...

> But later in the day, an ABC7 reporter caught up with one of the pope’s older brothers, John Prevost, and asked him to confirm the report.

> He said it wasn’t true.

> “He’s a Sox fan,” John Prevost told ABC7.
by tunesmith | 2025-05-08 20:55:43+00:00
It just means they haven't modeled the externalities. A plane on the ground isn't emergent. In the air it is, at least until you perfectly model weather, which you can't do, so its behavior is emergent. But I think a plane is also a good comparison because it shows that you can manage it; we don't have to perfectly model weather to still have fairly predictable air travel.