MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by catlikesshrimp | 2025-05-12 08:30:49+00:00
>"This contrasts with peasants who had permanent land rights and owned everything they produced, and did not have a fixed rent"

There are places where they didn't own anything. Decades ago I read that at some point each feudal lord coined his own currency for his peasants. If a peasant escaped, he wouldn't have means to take anything with him.

Same in Russia. A couple centuries ago, serfs came with the land. They could be liberated if the owner decided it. However, being a free man is quite difficult without a job.
by kqr | 2025-05-12 08:30:56+00:00
That sounds plausible, but is not how it is told in The Idea Factory, where the authors explain that both AT&T (running the phone system) and Western Electric (manufacturing equipment for the phone system) had separate research divisions even before this. They then discovered that they were duplicating a lot of research, so they set up one entity to perform research for both the harder and the softer sides of the communication system.
by reynaldi | 2025-05-12 08:32:27+00:00
VS Code with GitHub Copilot works great, though they are usually a little late to add features compared to Cursor or Windsurf. I use the 'Edit' feature the most.

Windsurf I think has more features, but I find it slower compared to others.

Cursor is pretty fast, and I like how it automatically suggests completion even when moving my cursor to a line of code. (Unlike others where you need to 'trigger' it by typing a text first)

Honorable mention: Supermaven. It was the first and fastest AI autocomplete I used. But it's no longer updated since they were acquired by Cursor.
by mike_hearn | 2025-05-12 08:33:56+00:00
The right place to start is definitely a deep study of the Java SecurityManager because it came the closest to what seems to be needed here, and yet failed. One reason it was hard to use is that many permissions transitively implied others without that being obvious. For example, you said you want an annotation that lets you drop filesystem access or sockets. But that's not enough, is it?

- Loading native code = granting all permissions

- Access to the unsafe package = granting all permissions

- Many syscalls that write data to user buffers = granting all permissions

- Being able to run a sub-process = granting all permissions

So you need at minimum to exclude all of those too. But then you also have:

- Tampering with global state of any kind e.g. the default HTTP server can be mutated by anything in Go (I think?). If you can modify the logging system to write to a new location you might be able to use that to escape the sandbox.

- Deserialization of objects can be a sandbox escape.

And then what about the threat model? If you can cause every process including your library to segfault simultaneously, then that's a DoS attack on a company that can be profitably used for extortion. Are DoS-driven extortions in-scope or out? This is why System.exit is a permission in the SecurityManager.

And so on. The large number of ways you can accidentally configure an exploitable set of permissions is huge, and because nobody seems to care much, there was no tooling to help avoid such misconfigurations.
by roenxi | 2025-05-12 08:34:06+00:00
I have absolutely no idea, but it is in interesting question and until someone more cluey can chime in a quick search suggests:

- Florida is using photogypsum - https://www.ijpr.org/npr-news/2023-06-30/florida-moves-forwa...

- Photogypsum in the US is banned if it radiates at >0.4 Bq/g of 226 Ra. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phosphogypsum

- Granite radiates at maybe 450 Bq/kg -> 0.45 Bq/g of 226 Ra. https://www.nature.com/articles/jes200944

So it looks like we're dealing with pretty standard rock. If this stuff was going to be banned without special permitting it is probably a little more risky than a granite kitchen-top counter if someone goes and sits on the road all day. Although this all raises the question of whether granite should be legal as a building material given that people get twitchy about this stuff - I doubt anyone can prove that granite is safe in this context.
by npodbielski | 2025-05-12 08:34:38+00:00
It is a bit silly, but I think it is silly in a different way than you do. For me it is silly in a way that some American discovered that real world do not exists just to keep Americans happy and content, but it requires real, continuous hard work of million of people to keep infrastructure running.

About Chinese people in China: they are working very very hard. My wife family in New Zealand have a new neighbors from China and they are saying that they escaped from China to lead normal life in NZ, instead of working all the time.

You example of Cat feeder: yes seems nice but only because you were able to get it from China or Indonesia or other country like that for 50$ dollars probably. To actually make it and deliver it to you most probably few thousands of people had to do their job, including mining for resources, transportation, design, software, microprocessors etc. just to save you few minutes every day. Exactly what author of this article is talking about. If this would be done in UK, by people that live there you probably would have to pay 5000$ dollars and it would brake every month. At some point you would most probably came to conclusion that feeding your cat by yourself would be much easier.

I am sorry, I am not trying to be personal here, but seems like you are the target of this article, make people understand that our civilization is taken for granted by people glued to their phones for entertainment.
by rustcleaner | 2025-05-12 08:34:53+00:00
That's it, it's time to start a FOSS car project which is operated by poor lawsuit-proof individuals, because we will need to "steal" existing ECU firmware and incorporate it illegally into this FOSS car project. The idea here is to component-wise replace all the major computers on a bunch of well known car makes and models, creating a standardized car model (software platform), so we can kill trackers, black box recorders, take back control over power and efficiency from the ecofascists, etc.

We are only as sovereign as we are willing to fight, and if voting worked do you think they'd let you? lol
by Cthulhu_ | 2025-05-12 08:35:10+00:00
> You can simply not pay if you choose not to.

It's only a matter of time before this seller falls victim to a scammer - once they're found. I used to work for a book publisher who started doing their own e-commerce, and at the time one of the payment methods was a "pay later" one that predated the internet ("acceptgiro"). It only took a few months (if that) after the first sites went live that someone placed an order for a few hundred euros worth of books and had it delivered at a storage unit address. We scrapped the pay later payment option for orders over a certain amount then, and I'm sure later on the pay later option was removed entirely in favor of pay in advance methods.

There's newer pay later schemes now (Klarna IIRC) but the risk and debt collection falls to this payment provider. Of course, they got in legal trouble recently because they're a loan / credit company but didn't present the user with the right legalese for that.
by dlahoda | 2025-05-12 08:35:11+00:00
esdb is within ms/dotnet ecosystem.

why not kusto?

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/kusto/query/project-operat...

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/kusto/query/aggregation-fu...

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/kusto/api/connection-strin...

https://github.com/microsoft/Kusto-Query-Language/blob/maste...

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/fabric/real-time-intellige...

esdb cannot compete with high scale things like nats(which caters non ms crowd), so using lang from ms is fine.
by chmod775 | 2025-05-12 08:35:21+00:00
The problem is not remote work, the problem is social fabric breaking down, causing people to take without giving in return. In the case of Starbucks, an anonymous corporation, little reciprocity is expected in the first place, but mom&pop coffee shops getting loads of freeloaders and squatters is an indicator of a larger problem in an area. Do these guys order one coffee in the morning and at lunch eat sandwiches they brought from home?

Also I wouldn't dare to take up space in a shop that's already short on space, nor would that be a particularly nice environment to work in.

I've got a local mom&pop coffee shop that I love, staff included, and obviously don't want to be a net negative to the place. Something would have to be seriously wrong with me if that ever changed and I'd hope someone would take corrective action by giving me a piece of their mind.
by Washuu | 2025-05-12 08:35:39+00:00
It needs to be closer to where the acronym is first introduced. The definition, on my screen, is below the fold so it can not be seen in context of where the acronym is first introduced. If it was defined below the title, I would understand.

* https://apastyle.apa.org/style-grammar-guidelines/abbreviati...

* https://www.stylemanual.gov.au/grammar-punctuation-and-conve...

* https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/style-guide/acronyms

I do a lot of copy editing for clarity and non-native speakers so I have keep these things in mind. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
by p_v_doom | 2025-05-12 08:36:00+00:00
> If you just look at the success stories, you could say that today's VC model works great too

Well, thing is actually it is kind of horrible. You are basically handing the choice of what to develop where - something that is actually kind of important to society in general in the hands of unelected rich farts that look into making more money. Doesn't help when many of those farts have specific views and projects of society in the future as a technofascist hellscape.

And you could argue the vast majority of what the VC model has given us is scam and services that are very ethically dubious, surveil everyone everywhere, try to squeeze as much money/value out of people, without actually solving many real problems. There is also the thing that the very model is antitethical to solving problems - solving problems costs money, and doesnt bring anything back. Its inherently unprofitable, so any solution is doomed to become more and more enshitified.
by imiric | 2025-05-12 08:36:00+00:00
This is the way.

All this IDE churn makes me glad to have settled on Emacs a decade ago. I have adopted LLMs into my workflow via the excellent gptel, which stays out of my way but is there when I need it. I couldn't imagine switching to another editor because of some fancy LLM integration I have no control over. I have tried Cursor and VS Codium with extensions, and wasn't impressed. I'd rather use an "inferior" editor that's going to continue to work exactly how I want 50 years from now.

Emacs and Vim are editors for a lifetime. Very few software projects have that longevity and reliability. If a tool is instrumental to the work that you do, those features should be your highest priority. Not whether it works well with the latest tech trends.
by npodbielski | 2025-05-12 08:38:12+00:00
> We're going frictionless digital because it's the easiest way for our benefactors to take your money, and we're going crumbling infrastructure because it's the easiest way for our benefactors to save money.

Exactly what I understood. Also if people in country forget that infrastructure need uptake to keep it running this crumbles and to get it running you need to spend 10x times more money to get it up again.

If at all.
by Juliate | 2025-05-12 08:39:02+00:00
That still does raise the question whether he (alone, without actual experts on the fields) would have started any of the initiatives (and engineering teams) he... bought.

Didn't understand why that whole part about Elon was in the essay, though (except revealing a bizarre fascination for the guy, as he's far from the single typical example of his kind in history). It does not bring any value or demonstration to the main points that are in the two final parts.
by rustcleaner | 2025-05-12 08:39:26+00:00
I think making manufacturers pay you back the whole car in a recall, or half the car and you keep it, for this kind of crappy design, would be a good thing (especially since I am sure the firmware is code signed lolol). Oh no more Matsuda or GM because they went bankrupt from fines and restitution? Cry me a river, sucks to suck cutting corners lol.
by InsideOutSanta | 2025-05-12 08:39:51+00:00
Yeah, I use IntelliJ with the chat sidebar. I don't use autocomplete, except in trivial cases where I need to write boilerplate code. Other than that, when I need help, I ask the LLM and then write the code based on its response.

I'm sure it's initially slower than vibe-coding the whole thing, but at least I end up with a maintainable code base, and I know how it works and how to extend it in the future.
by pjc50 | 2025-05-12 08:39:58+00:00
> mainstream media does not fact checking themselves.

Mainstream media will print a press release for you if you send it to them. It is very important to understand how limited the fact checking really is. If a mainstream paper prints a statement of the form "X said Y", you can be sure that:

- they are pretty good at checking that person X did actually say Y

- they make no effort whatsoever to fact check the underlying statement Y.

There isn't really the money or interest in actually investigating the claims of every little press release.

> really wants to be seen as an "AI-first tech company" when it goes public, and not a "buy now pay later loan company" because AI companies have higher valuations even with the same revenue

Yes. This is because multibillion dollar investments are made by people who are easily distracted by the jangling keys of AI.
by benterix | 2025-05-12 08:40:01+00:00
For daily work - neither. They basically promote the style of work where you end up with mediocre code that you don't fully understand, and with time the situation gets worse.

I get much better result by asking specific question to a model that has huge context (Gemini) and analyzing the generated code carefully. That's the opposite of the style of work you get with Cursor or Windsurf.

Is it less efficient? If you are paid by LoCs, sure. But for me the quality and long-term maintainability are far more important. And especially the Tab autocomplete feature was driving me nuts, being wrong roughly half of the time and basically just interrupting my flow.
by globular-toast | 2025-05-12 08:40:29+00:00
I spend all my time in Emacs so I implemented a similar thing there. Been using it for, hmm.. a decade now?

Org-mode includes clock in/out features and can display this in either the modeline or frame title (or both). I did the frame title because it's basically unused space otherwise.

I used to use this in conjunction with the Pomodoro method. I don't need to use that these days, though.

I can easily add a task to any project, or the currently active one, without breaking my flow at any time. I recently added an "immediate" task that will instantly clock me in for those things that randomly come up during the day.

The nice thing is I get a complete breakdown of how all my time was spent during the week. I need to report on this for current job so it's a win/win.

This is also a good example of why I use Emacs. I hacked this together in a few minutes and been using and building on it for years.
by ben_w | 2025-05-12 08:41:00+00:00
The grants were cancelled on the basis of keywords that Trump objects to.

The previous administration wanted many of the same keywords, resulting in projects getting stuffed with them — I saw the same myself 20 years ago, where scientists working with satellite observations of ocean chlorophyll needed to justify their work with e.g. "this will help protect us from terrorists trying to cause an algal bloom".

If the latter is propaganda, the former is censorship.

And what you're using as an example is, essentially, "Huh, this group is acting different. Why?"

--

Meta:

2.8 million USD is, what, one small startup for a year or two? It's one of those things that sounds like a lot to a single person, but really isn't.

Also: Do American really say "whopping"? I thought that was a UK tabloid thing.
by pseudony | 2025-05-12 08:42:12+00:00
Right, and popularity is the ultimate determinant of value.

Maybe you are simply ignorant of how many systems might actually run a lisp or similar "irrelevant" programming language in the systems you interact with. From airline reservation systems to banking and high-frequency trading.

JavaScript is not, in fact, eating the world, and nor will Python, Rust or whatever else.
by cess11 | 2025-05-12 08:42:36+00:00
That's just business, you need to price in disturbances like an important customer going bankrupt or switching suppliers or some customers refusing to pay for other reasons, and do a risk assessment before supplying on large orders.

It's one of the earliest lessons you'll learn from starting a company. Another close one is to not waste time on failed sales and annoying customers, replacing them with new customers is usually more profitable and enjoyable.
by blitzar | 2025-05-12 08:43:08+00:00
Bottom right says "cursor tab" you can manually manipulate it there (and snooze for X minutes - interesting feature). For binding shortcuts - Command/Ctrl + Shift + P, then look for "Enable|Disable|Whatever Cursor Tab" and set shortcuts there.

Old fashioned variable name / function name auto complete is not affected.

I considered a small macropad to enable / disable with a status light - but honestly don't do enough work to justify avoiding work by finding / building / configuring / rebuilding such a solution. If the future is this sort of extreme autocomplete in everything I do on a computer, I would probably go to the effort.
by tsimionescu | 2025-05-12 08:44:06+00:00
I don't know for sure, but I'd bet egg cookers aren't a useful tool for anyone, compared to the alternatives (boiling the egg without taking up extra room in your kitchen).

But even if you're right about this being useful to some people, advertising is not the right tool for discovering this: advertising will always exaggerate any positive of something and downplay any negative. The goal of advertising, and the incentive, is not to neutrally inform people about products they might use. It's to convince people to buy this product by any means necessary. If it weren't explicitly outlawed, advertisers would probably add "enlarges your penis and cures cancer" to every single product ad.
by quietbritishjim | 2025-05-12 08:45:45+00:00
We're starting with this code:

defer->void { CoUninitialize(); };

Using the macros in the second linked file, this expands to:

auto _defer_instance_1234 = Defer{} % [&]()->void { CoUninitialize(); };

* The 1234 is whatever the line number is, which makes the variable name unique.

* auto means infer the type of this local variable from the expression after the =.

* Defer{} means default construct a Defer instance. Defer is an empty type, but it allows the % following it to call a specific function because...

* Defer has an overloaded operator%. It's a template function, which takes a callable object (type is the template parameter Callable) and returns a DeferHolder<Callable> instance.

* [&]()->void { /*code here*/ }; is C++ syntax for a lambda function that captures any variables it uses by address (that's the [&] bit), takes no parameters (that's the () bit) and returns nothing (that's the ->void bit). The code goes in braces.

* DeferHolder calls the function it holds when it is destroyed.

It's subjective but some (including me!) would say it's cursed because it's using a macro to make something that almost looks like C++ syntax but isn't quite. I'm pretty confident with C++ but I had no idea what was going on at first (except, "surely this is using macros somehow ... right?"). [Edit: After some thought, I think the most confusing aspect is that defer->void looks like a method call through an object pointer rather than a trailing return type.]

I'd say it would be better to just be honest about its macroness, and also just do the extra typing of the [&] each time so the syntax of the lambda is all together. (You could then also simplify the implementation.) You end up with something like this:

DEFER([&]()->void { CoUninitialize(); });

Or if you go all in with no args lambda, you could shorten it to:

DEFER({ CoUninitialize(); });
Ask HN: Help with doing statistics over machine code
by phafu | 2025-05-12 08:45:47+00:00
I'd like to do some statistics over the machine code gcc generates, such as a histogram of used instructions, average volatile/preserved registers usage of functions etc. For now just x86_64 SysV-ABI would be enough.

However I'm not aware of any pre-existing tool that lets me easily do this. The options I currently see are either make gcc output assembly and write a parser for the GNU Assembler format (possibly by reusing the asm-parser of the compiler-explorer project), or write a tool that reads (disassembles) object files directly using elfutils.

Any hints, prior work, further ideas, links to useful resources, or any other kind of help would be much appreciated.
by imtringued | 2025-05-12 08:45:56+00:00
It's never going to be AGI, because we're still stuck in the static weights era.

Just because it is theoretically possible to scale your way through sheer brute force alone using a trillion times the compute doesn't mean that you can't come up with a better compute scaling architecture that uses less energy.

It's the same as having a turing machine with one tape vs multiple tapes. In theory it changes nothing, in practice having even the simplest algorithms be quadratic is a huge drag.

The problem with previous AI approaches is that humans wanted to make use of their domain expertise and ended up anthropomorphizing the ML models, which resulted in them being overtaken by people who invested little in domain expertise and more into compute scaling. The quintessential bitter lesson. With the advent of the bitter lesson, people who don't understand anything at all except the concept "bigger is better" arrived, and they think that they can wring out blood from a stone. The problem they run into is that they are trying to get something out of compute scaling that you can't get out of compute scaling.

What they want to do is satisfy a problem definition using an architecture that is designed to solve a completely different problem definition. The AGI compute scaling crowd wants something that is capable of responding and learning through experience, out of something that is inherently designed and punished to not learn through experience. The key aspect "continual learning" does not rely on domain knowledge. It is a compute scaling paradigm, but it's not the same compute scaling paradigm that static weights represent. You can't bet on donkeys in a horse race and expect to win, but since everyone is bringing donkeys to the race it sure looks like you can.

My personal bet is that we will use self referential matrices and other meta learning strategies. The days of hand tuning learning rates to produce pre-baked weights should be over by the end of the decade.