MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by soulofmischief | 2025-05-06 18:25:19+00:00
I agree that porn, as with any other source of dopamine, can be extremely addicting, and porn addiction in particular can destroy lives and relationships. But I wholly disagree that we can just go around pointing at things and essentially saying, "that objectively has no value to anyone and if you think it does for you, you're wrong.".

OP specifically says, "quitting since quitting implies there's something valuable in porn. there isn't." That's an insanely broad claim to make, and it ostracizes all non-addicts with healthy sexual proclivities and boundaries, and again we can replace porn here with a multitude of other things. In a general sense, OP's argument is flawed.
by reverendsteveii | 2025-05-06 18:25:31+00:00
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Default_mode_network

Daydreaming is extremely important to mental processing. It's not just spare cycles firing off randomly, your brain is designed to spend lots of time basically operating your body on autopilot and using the spare resources to collate, analyze and integrate information that has come in since the last cycle. Making sure you get enough DMN/daydreaming time is important, as is recognizing when the DMN is spending your spare cycles on things that aren't useful to you. For example, trauma survivors often manifest symptoms that are linked to a hyperactive DMN. The thinking is that in a threatening environment there's a pretty direct payoff to being hypervigilant and focusing on finding threat patterns and that maladaptive behaviors start out as adaptive behaviors in a different environment.

tldr - Doug Funnie was actually the model of a healthy boy with a rich inner life
by thr0waway39290 | 2025-05-06 18:26:04+00:00
It's disappointing that there is such an automatic response to cover up for the parents who starve their children that people automatically dismissed your argument.

I have a problem with government stepping in to remove children from their parents but parents should definitely be blamed for their own child starving. I think all empathy should go to the child who is starving and significantly less to the parent who caused it (even if they are starving too, they are an adult and they have significantly more choices then a starving child)
by absoluteunit1 | 2025-05-06 18:26:09+00:00
I cannot emphasize how much I relate to this

It’s gotten better but in the past I would :

- happily spend weekends exploring what possible with QMK (consistently tweaking and re-programming my keyboard; diving into the depth of QMK docs)

- spend hours building various neovim tools for myself and playing around with different configs

- building various bash scripts

I’ve recently quit my software dev job to pursue building online products and my friend said something that sometimes being an engineer going into business can be a detriment - because you feel that you can build anything…and you can end up building forever. Whereas a business person would leave it at a “good enough to sell” state and move on
by noitpmeder | 2025-05-06 18:26:15+00:00
Your take on lawyers is absolutely insane. If you don't think the extremely specialized and well trained professionals can successfully navigate contracts then I can't wait for the absolute garbage the LLMs spit out when faced with similar challenges.

Honestly, same for doctors and accountants. Unless these model providers are willing to provide "guarantees" that they will compensate for damages faced as a result of their output.

Doctors and Lawyers are required in many areas to carry malpractice insurance. Good luck getting "hot new AI legal startup" to sign off on that.
by HopLabs | 2025-05-06 18:27:12+00:00
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Learn more and apply here: https://www.hoplabs.com/careers
by dvt | 2025-05-06 18:27:27+00:00
Maybe contrarian, but imo the `Result` type, while kind of nice, still suffers from plenty of annoyances, including sometimes not working with the (manpages-approved) `dyn Error`, sometimes having to `into()` weird library errors that don't propagate properly, or worse: `map_err()` them; I mean, at this point, the `anyhow` crate is basically mandatory from an ergonomics standpoint in every Rust project I start. Also, `?` doesn't work in closures, etc.

So, while this is an improvement over C++ (and that is not saying much at all), it's still implemented in a pretty clumsy way.
by xenodium | 2025-05-06 18:27:40+00:00
I know what you mean, though at least today, this isn't as much of an issue for Org.

Org markup is fairly rich. Journelly is my 4th Org app on iOS. Neither has required additional syntax/plugin to cover my use-cases.

I would say maybe it's the opposite for Org. My apps implement a subset of Org features and, because its plain text, the user experience degrades fairly gracefully.

edit: This doc still blows my mind https://doc.norang.ca/org-mode.html
by matheusmoreira | 2025-05-06 18:27:51+00:00
> the "moral weight" appears for me when someone starts relying on my stuff

Yeah. These feelings of guilt are terrible. I once threw something out there and forgot about it. Woke up one day and realized users had found it somehow, they even built new stuff on top of it. Someone asked for help on how to use the thing and I didn't even notice because I had notifications turned off.

In these situations I repeat the license terms to myself like a mantra. The software is provided "as-is", in the hope it will be useful, but without any warranty.
by rafram | 2025-05-06 18:28:20+00:00
These products are not complicated at their core — you can pretty much just drop in something like Monacopilot [1] and be 80% of the way there. But the last 20% is a real slog, and it mostly comes down to handling edge cases (bracket closing...) and optimizing prompting/context so you aren't burning cash. Whatever anyone claims about "feeling the AGI," AI isn't there yet.

[1]: https://github.com/arshad-yaseen/monacopilot
by GardenLetter27 | 2025-05-06 18:28:23+00:00
The borrow checker rejects loads of sound programs - just read https://rust-unofficial.github.io/too-many-lists/

Aliasing rules can also be problematic in some circumstances (but also beneficial for compiler optimisations).

And the orphan rule is also quite restrictive for adapting imported types, if you're coming from an interpreted language.

https://loglog.games/blog/leaving-rust-gamedev/ sums up the main issues nicely tbh.
by titzer | 2025-05-06 18:28:47+00:00
> Implicit numeric conversion is terrible.

It's bad if it alters values (e.g. rounding). Promotion from one number representation to another (as long as it preserves values) isn't bad. This is trickier than it might seem, but Virgil has a good take on this (https://github.com/titzer/virgil/blob/master/doc/tutorial/Nu...). Essentially, it only implicitly promotes values in ways that don't lose numeric information and thus are always reversible.

In the example, Virgil won't let you pass "1000.00" to an integer argument, but will let you pass "100" to the double argument.
by bawolff | 2025-05-06 18:28:56+00:00
> Are there really cases where the CSS is so complex or the page loads so many resources that this effort is worthwhile?

On the contrary, the more complex the css is or the more resources loaded, the less this would be worthwhile.

The thing i think they are trying to optimize is latency due to RTT. When you first request the html file, the browser needs to read it before knowing the next thing to request. This requires a round trip to the server, which has latency (pesky speed of light). The larger your (critical) css, the more expensive this optimisation is so the less likely it is a net benefit.
Show HN: Show your robots live on a map in the browser
by chfritz | 2025-05-06 18:29:03+00:00
Show your robots live on a map (OccupancyGrid), incl. speed and access maps, navigation plans and laser scans. You can also relocalize your robots right from your browser or watch your map evolve from afar while a robot is mapping!

Mobile indoor robots cannot navigate without maps. Likewise, knowing where your robots are at all times is crucial for operations. As such, all mobile indoor robotics companies use maps in one form or another and we are excited to finally provide them with this badly needed capability to visualize them on the web. In fact, many companies build their entire fleet management system around the concept of locations and maps as they elegantly tie together the entire fleet.

Demo: https://youtu.be/t8GHSuYaz8w Details: https://transitiverobotics.com/caps/transitive-robotics/maps...

Please let me know if you try it and have feedback or suggestions. We are already planning a lot more features, but would love to hear your needs
by Baeocystin | 2025-05-06 18:29:08+00:00
This essay is (painfully) apt, and it reminds me of where I was when I finally switched, to my great relief, from being a Maximizer to a Satisficer*. It was all just Too Much, and I was feeling overwhelmed with responsibilities.

And my drive to Solve All The Problems was not making me happy. At all. It was just a way to exert control over a difficult life, and by being terminally distracted by the easily-solvables, I was avoiding the big problems I genuinely needed to confront.

*https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Paradox_of_Choice
by thr0waway39290 | 2025-05-06 18:29:32+00:00
Never, this is purely on the dog owner. All shame goes to the dog owner, not the dog.

If I were to take the dog owners excuses seriously and donated free food to the dog owner every once in a while to make sure the dog didn't starve to death (while ignoring the fact that the dog owner wasn't feeding the child). That would not be a good scenario.

The dog obviously needs some help and there are animal shelters that can help with that.
by qwertox | 2025-05-06 18:29:34+00:00
I have my issues with the code Gemini Pro in AI Studio generates without customized "System Instructions".

It turns a well readable code-snippet of 5 lines into a 30 line snippet full of comments and mostly unnecessary error handling. Code which becomes harder to reason about.

But for sysadmin tasks, like dealing with ZFS and LVM, it is absolutely incredible.
by throwup238 | 2025-05-06 18:29:36+00:00
> I really liked the Gemini 2.5 pro model when it was first released - the upload code folder was very nice (but they removed it).

Removed from where? I use the attach code folder feature every day from the Gemini web app (with a script that clones a local repo that deletes .git and anything matching a gitignore pattern).
by AnimalMuppet | 2025-05-06 18:31:03+00:00
Article title continues, "... And Is Trying To Destroy Them".

And:

> “The group referred to the NEXRAD system towers as ‘weather weapons,’ and claimed there were no laws preventing American citizens from destroying the ‘weapons,’” the email states.

So, wait, if I declare something to be a weapon, does that mean that there is no law against me destroying it? Or do these guys think they're the only ones who get to do that?
by soulofmischief | 2025-05-06 18:31:42+00:00
I literally used to get laughed out of the clinic, told I was a healthy young male and just needed to exercise more. After a decade of this, I was finally diagnosed with gout, something doctors had just been lying about testing for. No one could believe someone could have gout in their 20s (It's been developing since my late teens and I've generally had arthritis my entire life, since I was a child).

It took a physician's assistant, who happened to see me one day when both of my doctors were on their third extended vacation of the quarter, to hear my plight, take my suggestion of gout seriously, and do the leg work, also revealing to me that "full test panels" don't include uric acid by default and that my doctors had been lying to me about their thoroughness.

The assistant was also massively more knowledgeable about the disease, its history, the history of treatment, etc., and disease in general, than either of the two doctors running the clinic. Really opened my eyes.
by cma | 2025-05-06 18:32:18+00:00
> It will just spin its wheels. So for that reason I'm a little skeptical about the value of automating this process.

Question is would you rather find out it got stuck in a loop with 3 minutes with a coding agent or 40 minutes copy pasting. It can also get out of loops more often by being able to use tools to look up definitions with grep, ctags or language server tools, though you can copy paste commands for that too it will be much slower.
by _DeadFred_ | 2025-05-06 18:32:47+00:00
And I talked with my great grandmother about her family providing meals to visiting tribes on their farm in Iowa, and how there was some sort of marker indicating that they were a welcoming farm for traveling tribes. The majority of people in the frontier were northerners/immigrants looking to create a better life, not ex-Confederates looking to take out their being complete losers on the frontier. These were people often rejected by their own society for having the wrong religion (my family were German/Irish Catholics who were literally driven out, the Irish part arriving as orphans because their families died on the boats over), living in very rugged/primitive situations, dependant entirely on their individual ability to survive. There was very much an individualism yet a 'look out for others' ethic among these people whom had had no one look out for them (to the point their home countries had left them to die) and a very strong appreciation of America having providing them a place where they could go.
by grumbel | 2025-05-06 18:33:33+00:00
There is '-Wconversion' to catch things like this. It will however not trigger in this specific case since g++ assumes converting 1000.0 to 1000 is ok due to no loss in precision.

Quantity(100) is counterproductive here, as that doesn't narrow the type, it does the opposite, it casts whatever value is given to the type, so even Quantity(100.5) will still work, while just plain 100.5 would have given an error with '-Wconversion'.
by delopsu | 2025-05-06 18:33:58+00:00
In my builing we have 2 lifts with one button that calls the closest one.

Noticed that when both of them are on the same floor, the left one will arrive. I guess there is some chip that prioriteses the first in the list.

That would explain why left one already has more issues with doors.

So I decided to simulate its work and see how much more left one will be worn out over time.

In 100K simulated trips left one went 494535 floors vs 226344 of the right one.

Lifts are old, but AFAIK well maintained and planned for replacement.

Still prefer to use the right one, when possible.
by spacemadness | 2025-05-06 18:34:18+00:00
I don't think this world exists anymore. A lot of people I know are stressed out of their minds for the last few years by being way overworked and under constant threat of a layoff. I'm not talking about startups, I'm talking about Big Tech Corp. But I guess the mythical coasting engineer making a big tech salary that everyone talks about will never go out of style.
by mdf | 2025-05-06 18:34:41+00:00
Generally, I agree the situation with errors is much better in Rust in the ways you describe. But, there are also panics which you can catch_unwind[1], set_hook[2] for, define a #[panic_handler][3] for, etc.

[1] https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/panic/fn.catch_unwind.html

[2] https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/panic/fn.set_hook.html

[3] https://doc.rust-lang.org/nomicon/panic-handler.html
by jerf | 2025-05-06 18:35:48+00:00
> I think your blog post could have explained more about what kinds of validation are practical to do

Perhaps following the two links with the word "valid" in them to will answer your concerns: https://jerf.org/iri/post/2023/value_validity/

Note that article does explicitly have the sentence "Let’s forget the Umptydozen Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Addresses for the sake of argument and stipulate a perfect such function." These are examples. Trying to write "here's how to validate everything that could ever happen and all also here's a breakdown of all the falsehoods and also here's how it interacts with all your other logic" is not exactly a blog post so much as a book series. It turns out that even if you completely ignore the Umptydozen falsehoods of all the various kinds, you still have plenty of validation problems to talk about!

However, the in-a-nutshell answer to "how do you handle time invalidating things" is that you treat your database as an untrusted store and validate things as needed. I'm actually an 80/20 guy on using databases to maintain integrity for much this reason; I love me some foreign keys and I use them extensively but the truth is that that is only a partial solution to the data validity problem no matter how clever you get, and temporal inconsistency is a big one. Once you have any source of inconsistencies or errors in your DB, a whole whackload of need for validation and care basically comes dropping in all at once, or, to put it another way, if you're not 100.00000% successful at maintaining data integrity, the next practical option is 95%. There is no practical in-between, because even that .001% will end up driving you every bit as crazy as 5% being wrong in most ways.

But that's also out-of-scope for blog posts targeted at people who are only doing ad-hoc validation whenever they are forced to. Learn how to validate properly at all, then get better when you have a time-based problem.
by emushack | 2025-05-06 18:35:52+00:00
Reputation systems for this kind of thing sounds like rubbing some anti-itch cream on bullet wound. I feel like the problem seems to me to be behavior, not a technology issue.

Personally I can't imagine how miserable it would be for my hard-earned expertise to be relegated to sifting through SLOP where maybe 1 in hundreds or even thousands of inquiries is worth any time at all. But it also doesn't seem prudent to just ignore them.

I don't think better ML/AI technology or better information systems will make a significant difference on this issue. It's fundamentally about trust in people.
by labrador | 2025-05-06 18:36:11+00:00
Your last line made me think of telescopes: bigger mirrors bring in more light, but they’re harder to keep in focus due to thermal distortion.

Same with ChatGPT. The more it knows about you, the richer the connections it can make. But with that comes more interpretive noise. If you're doing scientific or factual work, stateless queries are best so turn off memory. But for meaning-of-life questions or personal growth? I’ll take the distortion. It’s still useful and often surprisingly accurate
by diggan | 2025-05-06 18:36:20+00:00
Thanks, as mentioned, I'm not really a Python programmer so don't follow along the trends...

I tried to figure out why anyone would use pyproject.toml over requirements.txt, granted they're just installing typical dependencies and didn't come up with any good answer. Personally I haven't had any issues with requirements.txt, so not sure what pyproject.toml would solve. I guess I'll change when/if I hit some bump in the road.
by xnx | 2025-05-06 18:36:28+00:00
I'm sure it could. I was very unspecified with my prompt (below). No doubt it could add sound, etc. as well.

Prompt: Create a game of Pacman with only 2 ghosts. Instead of the player controlling pacman, the player controls the ghosts.

Controls: Ghost 1 (Red): WASD or ZQSD Ghost 2 (Cyan): Arrow Keys
by mhuffman | 2025-05-06 18:36:29+00:00
>Why wouldn't you believe it?

Lots of reasons, but here are a few:

1. The misspellings and grammar issues (used to) continue beyond emails into the websites, etc.

2. The grammar issues, magically, seem to mimic the the same grammar differences between certain countries typical language constructions and those of standard American English

3. Check your spam folder right now if you have gmail. Where did this 4-D chess triage of illiterate potential dupes go? Spelling and grammar are suddenly almost perfect! Also, many of the older scams seem to be replaced with romance or family impersonation scams.

>It makes economic sense. The most expensive part for a scammer in any automated scam is the part which can't be automated, where a human has to get involved for e.g. a phonecall.

Perhaps you haven't heard, but this can also be automated as well, cheaply. Works particularly well on the elderly!

>Economically, the scammer wants to do everything they can to get rid of smart or diligent people who might be harder to scam at the expensive part. It feels like it would cost scammers to not have typos.

I think you are giving too much credit to the spammers. Economically, the easiest thing to do is to send out endless emails and wait for responses. Those people, regardless of diligence or literacy, are already self-selecting and you can let them talk to LLMs to winnow the rest.

>Also, anecdotal, but the rise of autocorrect, spell checking and LLMs doesn't seem to have made any impact on the quality of spelling in my spam folder over the past 20 years.

I agree ... up until the rise of LLM's. Now (outside of more use of emojis) it is very good.
by zozbot234 | 2025-05-06 18:37:27+00:00
As others have explained, there is indeed nothing wrong with "proof by contradiction" of a negative statement. Intuitionistic logic does not view statements phrased in the "positive" and in the "negative" as fully equivalent, as classical logic does. (There are ways of formalizing this point of view quite rigorously, such as in so-called "ecumenical logics" where classical and constructive/intuitionistic reasoning can in fact coexist and interoperate, but statements derived from classical reasoning can only be translated in the negative as seen within constructive reasoning.)
by whyenot | 2025-05-06 18:37:36+00:00
Lyme disease does exist on the west coast, including in the Bay Area. A friend in Los Altos got Lyme disease from a tick in her yard. This is the worst time of year for ticks in the Bay Area. I've picked off over 100 ticks while doing field work in Henry Coe State Park. The one advantage we have on the west coast is that our ticks are larger and you usually notice when one starts crawling on your skin and especially when one bites you.
Show HN: Homescreen widget for Google Sheets (built in 2 days)
by Naiviet | 2025-05-06 18:37:51+00:00
hi. i built a tiny app over the weekend.

it shows your google sheets data as a widget. right on your phone.

2 days from idea → design → code → live on the app store. (not counting apple’s review hell.)

i made it for myself — i track a lot of things in spreadsheets. metrics, budgets, mood, sleep. and i always wanted to see that info on my homescreen.

other apps - bloated. confusing. weird UX. so i just made my own.

no idea who else needs this. maybe you do.

would love feedback. or vibes.
by hollerith | 2025-05-06 18:37:59+00:00
Some of us believe that continued AI research is by far the biggest threat to human survival, much bigger for example than climate change or nuclear war (which might cause tremendous misery and reduce the population greatly, but seem very unlikely to kill every single person).

I'm guessing that you think that society is getting worse every year or will eventually collapse, and you hope that continued AI research might prevent that outcome.
by atemerev | 2025-05-06 18:38:09+00:00
Right. I attempted using Rust for trading-related code as well. However, I failed to write a dynamically linked always sorted order book where you can splice orders in the middle. It is just too dynamic for Rust. Borrow checker killed me.

And don't get me started on dynamic graphs.

I would happily use Rust over C++ if it had all other improvements but similar memory management. I am completely unproductive with Rust model.