MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by theletterf | 2025-05-11 12:50:36+00:00
This is a nice analysis of Rust documentation, but I find the continued emphasis on content types disappointing. I think docs should shift from what to write to what are the needs of users of the docs are. Then you can think of content types. If you don't, you just end up checking boxed just cause.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42645075
Ask HN: Examples of continuous work agent templates
by viraptor | 2025-05-11 12:50:45+00:00
I'm after examples / papers on prompts and workflows that work well with continuous behaviour. So far there's lots of "build a plan and finish this task" style agents. I'm after some examples of "look at your existing state and knowledge, look at new events, the last action took Xmin and updated Y, figure out next steps and update the state".

The naive version of that seems to work ok, but I'm sure someone experimented with the state representation and dealing with multiple event streams more than I have.
by spwa4 | 2025-05-11 12:50:45+00:00
Why should it be unique among proteins? Bags of water and proteins famously behave in extremely statistically predictable ways on a cellular level ... and are conscious. Animals and humans are nothing but a lot of those bags. Ok ... a very large number. I also have a Msc in statitstics, which tells me a combination of a large number of statistically predictable variables is itself a statistically predictable variable.

So why couldn't a large collection of statistical variables be conscious? Mathematically, it's the same thing.
by ninetyninenine | 2025-05-11 12:51:22+00:00
If ai handles all the technical skills what’s left?

Like you made a claim here with no logical reasoning as to why.

My reasoning is simple if AI handles all technical skills then no technical skills are required for the job anymore. Where’s your reasoning?

In addition to this “unqualified hand waving”. Look at your own baseless statement. At least I qualified my statement with “it’s possible”.

If LLMs solve the hallucination issue then it’s stuff like this that will sit at the top of the hierarchy. People who make grand claims with confidence and play politics to get to the top. You say my statement is handwavy but really that’s another way of saying “I don’t need to prove you wrong I’m just going to make a baseless claim about how your statement is utter crap but do it in a way as to subvert HN politeness rules, i can say it in a way that doesn’t raise any eyebrows and people who already agree with me will automatically take my side even though I didn’t present any additional new reasoning here”.

This is what I’m talking about. It’s people who are good at strategies like this who will occupy the top spots in the future should LLMs continue to improve. Case in point. If karma was voting for the next person in a leadership position you would win.
by trealira | 2025-05-11 12:51:36+00:00
The message I got upon connecting to this site:

> Website Access Prohibited

> Malware Website Warning

> The website you are trying to access is known to host malware and poses a security risk to your computer and network. Please contact your IT help desk to review if you are impacted. If you think you are receiving this message in error, please contact your IT help desk.

I guess you should know your website is seen as a malware vector.
by neilv | 2025-05-11 12:51:42+00:00
It doesn't have to be love.

If it's for a good cause, the person would like to donate, and can afford some amount, then there's a role for cooperation in facilitating that.

As a facilitator, you can look at it like: here's a person who wants to donate, I approve of that, and I can help with that.

If you like the person for wanting to do that, and that comes across, and that helps them get past their aversion to sales in general, all the better.

Where it can go wrong is if you play manipulation games on them and/or yourself.

(Telemarketing modality of phoning and disturbing is a different problem, though. That's a reason not to do it at all, at least not that way. But manipulation can be averted.)
by awei | 2025-05-11 12:52:15+00:00
Right, a pure functional program can be composed of many things, so it can be complex even without side effects. Only a program with side effects is necessarily complex, as it includes at least two components if not more. Another interesting thought is that you can always encapsulate a purely functional program in a black box with an input and an output. Doing so with a program with side effects that themselves might be programs with side effects and their own interface is probably much more difficult.
by cartoffal | 2025-05-11 12:52:33+00:00
> I don’t know why the network would be any way special.

The network isn't special. This applies locally too. But the article we are commenting on (at least, _I_ was commenting on) is about the network, and it uses the phrase "type safety over the network" in particular.

> You parse/validate unstructured binary blobs into structured data, and what’s left _is type safety_.

That is in fact exactly what I said. The point is that at some point you started with unstructured binary blobs. As soon as data leaves the application, it is no longer "safe", and it is unsafe until it is ingested and (re)validated. So my point can be freely generalised to "type safety beyond the application boundary is a fiction". And the application boundary will always exist, whether you are working with a strongly or weakly, statically or dynamically typed language.
by StefanBatory | 2025-05-11 12:52:41+00:00
But there's no living if you can't find work :P

It'd suck a bit should you be automated out of the thing you've spend a few years studying if you're a fresh grad, not to speak of anyone with more experience. While I guess one shouldn't be complaining, no work bring shame, going back to cashier, or warehouse worked would be a bit of a letdown.
by mpweiher | 2025-05-11 12:52:45+00:00
Yeah, it's not a war crime.

Israel is not required to supply its enemy.

If the enemy takes control of humanitarian aid shipments, which Hamas has done consistently from the start, the requirement to supply aid no longer applies.

So Israel has been over-fulfilling its requirements. And when it stops over-fulfilling people start accusing it of war crimes.

You know what's a war crime?

- Using your own civilian population as human shields

- Commandeering humanitarian aid

- Unprovoked attacks targeting civilians

- Using hospitals and schools to launch attacks (including rocket attacks)

Nothing about war is "OK", and neither is your attempt at framing. War is horrible.

Pro-Tip: don't start wars.

Free bonus pro-tip: don't start wars and then cry victim when you start losing.

However, neither Dresden nor the nuclear attacks were "genocide". Look it up.

And last I checked, the consensus is that they were not war crimes, although a vocal minority claims otherwise.
by bcraven | 2025-05-11 12:53:06+00:00
There's some interesting results here[0] but from what I can make out the trees don't necessarily die and take the liana(s) with them. They may continue to stand (dead) or may simply be hugely starved of light.

[0]https://besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.13...
by rainsford | 2025-05-11 12:53:29+00:00
> This study investigates a class of special integers that the factors differ by only two bits, and the difference is present only at the two bits with weights of 2 and 4.

So as far as I can tell from some quick skimming, the paper's title is entirely clickbait. Regardless of the size of the numbers involved, this is not really "RSA-2048" because no one would construct an actual RSA-2048 key this way. And if they did, I think it would be susceptible to classical attacks like Fermat factorization, no "quantum computer" needed.

To be fair, the paper does eventually admit this has no real impact on actual RSA-2048, but it does still try to characterize this as some sort of looming threat.
by mbil | 2025-05-11 12:54:00+00:00
I think we’ll see a lot more software. Lots of non tech people will increasingly have the ability to create custom software tools and prototypes. They’ll share and remix these. Some of them will be fully productized, at which point professional software engineers will be called in to help untangle the LLM spaghetti and create proper applications. So I think there will be more software work in consultancy.

I think we’ll see advancements in robotics and more hires there.

And I think there will be more jobs around the LLM ecosystem — progress on foundational models, inference optimizations, on prem migrations, networks of agents, AI more deeply integrated with existing sw.

Overall I think there will be more jobs in observability, security, and infrastructure.

I agree there will be fewer junior positions. I’ve written about some of these ideas before including a deskilling for new practitioners https://matthewbilyeu.com/blog/2025-03-08/ai
by os2warpman | 2025-05-11 12:54:09+00:00
ChatGPT is incapable of thought and can only mash together strings of text and output grammatically correct-ish sentences that meet an arbitrary criteria for "sameness" to what it has fed on.

Like with all things that are complicated and have nuance, it is incapable of giving an answer that is useful.

Fuel expenses over the life of an aircraft are tricky because the life of an aircraft is defined by its number of cycles (take offs and landings) independent of the number of miles flown.

For short/medium haul aircraft like the A320neo, 48,000 cycles at 1,220km/cycle with 2.79kg of fuel used per km of flight, at $0.80 per kg for fuel means that the total spent on fuel during the life of the aircraft is just below the list price of the aircraft but slightly above what airlines actually pay for an A320neo.

For long haul aircraft like a 787-10 with the GEnx engines, 44,000 cycles at 10,240km/cycle with 6.12kg of fuel used per km of flight at $0.80 per kg for fuel means that the total spent of fuel during the life of the aircraft is over $2.26 billion, or roughly 8x the list price of the aircraft.

Neither 0.8x-1.25x nor 8x are "2-3x". Looking at financial reports, for no US airline does it even average out to 2-3x.

But those were fuel prices 3 years ago, today they're half that.

Tomorrow they might be double.

All of this ignores the fact that "the planes themselves are..." doesn't limit the dollar amount to the initial purchase cost.

It also ignores the fact that some aircraft are leased, and others are major capital expenditures so the total costs for the same aircraft at the same company can vary greatly. Airlines typically report the "cost" of their aircraft as CASM-ex, or cost per available seat mile excluding fuel so the "price" of an airplane over its lifetime is CASM-ex + fuel and fuel is currently around 25% of the CASM-ex of the three largest US airlines.

Every single aircraft type has different costs that can vary widely.

A useful non-bullshit response from an A"I" would start with "For what kind of aircraft?"
by Zak | 2025-05-11 12:55:19+00:00
It's my understanding that availability of alternatives is a major factor in determining whether a company has market power. Someone looking for interactive entertainment has a multitude of options beyond gaming consoles, so the manufacturer using technical means to extract a payment from anyone selling games is less likely to be considered anticompetitive. Furthermore, people with gaming consoles often have more than one brand, PC games, and games on mobile devices.

There is no viable alternative to an Android or iOS powered smartphone for most people, and even switching between the two is enough of a challenge that few people do it once they've picked one. That gives their respective vendors substantially more power to fix prices and exclude competitors.
by masswerk | 2025-05-11 12:55:35+00:00
Maybe interesting in this context: the CRT font renderers for the DEC PDP-1 (notably one of the first commercial machines for which a CRT was available) also rendered at 5 × 7 dots. (As bit patterns for 35 dots fit perfectly into two 18-bit words, with just one bit going unused.)

The first one, there's preserved source code, I would know of, was by Ben Gurley (the designer of the PDP-1) and Weldon Clark, April 10, 1961. [0] This one featured just upper-case letters, figures and the very minimum of special characters. Notably, the input devices used featured provisions for upper and lower case, hinting at the programmers wanting something workable done quickly. Moreover, the character set may not have defined fully, yet, since (reportedly) Ed Fredkin, then at BBN (and mostly responsible for BBN acquiring the first production prototype), was involved in the final definition.

Later, the same year, we also see a fully developed font renderer [1], which uses the spare bit in the glyph definition to indicate a drop of the entire font matrix, which enables drawing lower case characters with descenders. (This convention was also used by the later hardware symbol generator Type 33.) With this, all characters can be displayed with perfect readability (with possible compromises only involving lower-case "f".) At the same time, we also see support for the full character set, including representations of non-printable characters for editing.

[0] https://masswerk.at/spacewar/chargen/pdp1-bbn37-crt.html

[1] https://masswerk.at/spacewar/chargen/pdp1-1961-codeword-crt....

[2] Overview with links to related glyph dumps: https://masswerk.at/spacewar/chargen/
by fragmede | 2025-05-11 12:55:45+00:00
I wanted to lampshade the caps part, but more explicitly, the QR code's Instagram link to my profile has igsh=xxxxxxxxxxxxx%3D%3D&utm_source=qr appened to it, where the X's are some tracking id. that tracking id that instafram app forces on people makes the qr code much more complicated (= smaller dots on a bigger qr code) which scans just fine on a iPhone 16 that instagram devs use, but that an 8 year old $50 Android phone isn't going to like as much.
by matheusmoreira | 2025-05-11 12:55:52+00:00
Just a few days ago people were talking about this on the kicad discord. A chinese team made an open hardware x86_64 motherboard and published it not too long ago. Then they were essentially wiped off the face of the planet.

That was the day I learned you literally cannot develop a computer motherboard without Intel's permission. Turns out Intel is no different than the likes of Nintendo.
by jonplackett | 2025-05-11 12:55:59+00:00
Maybe companies will just want someone to hold to account.

Did you see the recent case of the airline’s customer service LLM that promised someone a refund due to a relative dying? And the courts forced the airline to honour it despite it not being accurate (turns out LLMs have more humanity than a corporation).

Putting your company in the hands of an LLM workforce could save a few dollars, but it can cost a lot too.
Show HN: Vector Charts – Add Nautical Charts to Your Web App
by chrisdalke | 2025-05-11 12:56:53+00:00
(TLDR: I made a new API to render maritime maps. If you just want to scroll around for fun, check out https://app.vectorcharts.com/, a free nautical chart viewer. And if you're interested in using nautical charts in your app, just sign up or reach out at https://vectorcharts.com/contact-us/ - I'd love to help you!)

Hi HN! I'm making Vector Charts, an API product which allows nautical charts to easily be added to web apps. Vector Charts provides a Vector Tile API that you can use to embed nautical charts into any web-based map. We're putting a lot of work into styling and modernizing the map experience so anyone building maritime-related web apps can use charts.

"Nautical Charts" are maritime-specific maps that show the structure of the ocean environment, above and below water. Among other info, they show bathymetry contours, which help avoid boats running aground. They're relied on by both professional and recreational mariners to navigate safely and are a mature technology that's been around for many years.

I've been working in the marine software space for years, and adding nautical charts to web applications is a frequent requirement. But there are a few problems with existing SDKs: First, they're generally too expensive for small web apps, due to the fact that they're designed for safety-critical user interfaces used for navigation on commercial vessels. Second, existing options generally render as raster images, which leads to a blurry or pixelated and cluttered view when used inside a web-based map.

Vector Charts focuses on non-safety-critical web experiences that might benefit from nautical charts, which is a growing segment of the market. We want to be the "Mapbox for Nautical Charts" - The easiest & highest quality option to add nautical charts to a map.

A few examples of where this is useful: A live tracking map for a sailboat race, a watersports logging app, or an unmanned surface vessel C2 software. Anywhere that you're building a web app for a marine setting, nautical charts are likely a better background layer than satellite.

Right now I'm in testing this with customers, improving styling & data quality - So there might be data inconsistencies or missing layers. But the API is live and you can play with it now using the example app!
by jaybrendansmith | 2025-05-11 12:57:28+00:00
why are we assuming this is just stupid trade policy? Why are we not understanding that this policy mirrors moves by historical leaders who used economic disruption and nationalism to justify consolidation of power? It follows a pattern: Create crisis > identify scapegoats > offer strongman solutions > dismantle democratic norms. Imposing drastic tariffs that severely harm the economy could create widespread instability (job losses, inflation, business closures.) He would then exploit this chaos to justify emergency powers or override normal constitutional constraints. Read your history.
by EdwardDiego | 2025-05-11 12:58:49+00:00
> Which is why he has undeniably succeeded in doing incredibly hard things, things that many (most) said were well nigh impossible.

> Built an EV car company, operating at scale

He bought into a pre-existing company.

> Produced batteries for those cars at scale

How is the 4680 going? And is BYD eating its lunch yet? Last I looked they losing court cases over a particular dry cathode patent.

And well, BYD's new fast charging tech is far more performant than Tesla superchargers, multiple car makers (including Tesla!) are using their batteries not the 4680, so...

> Launched brand new self-made rockets to space, at scale, including catching them on a ship when they fell back from the sky!

That is indeed pretty cool, but did Elon actually do that? Also, how's Starship looking? Can it take more payload to orbit than a Falcon Heavy yet? Is it exploding less often?

> Bored tunnels cheaply

[citations really needed] If they can do this, the Boring Company isn't capitalising on it, I see a lot of cancelled projects, and only one where the public actually uses it (in Las Vegas).

But hey, Elon's definitely a doer, just you know, sometimes he's doing things that are very bad for the companies involved.

If he could stop trying to micromanage his companies, and just trust the very very very smart people who work there, and maybe I dunno, turn back time and not get radicalised on the Internet because his child transitioned, and avoid getting involved in politics in the absolute worst way possible, he'd accomplish so much more.

Someone once told me that Tesla and SpaceX largely succeeded in spite of Elon, and it rings true.

But I feel mean-spirited commenting this on a 3 year old post, that feels like an eternity ago in the Muskverse.
by chrisdalke | 2025-05-11 12:59:09+00:00
On a technical level, this is a perfect use-case for PostGIS, which I'm a huge fan of.

Charts are hand-authored by government hydrography offices and encoded into a format called "S-57". These files contain spatial data for a small area, and different charts cover different zoom levels. This presents a few problems for web apps: Charts of different intended zoom levels cover other data, the full chart dataset is too large to stream, and charts aren't divided into xyz tiles cleanly.

To solve this, I run a bespoke pipeline which processes all nautical chart data into an internal format using PostGIS. From there, I merge all chart data together, overlaying higher accuracy charts over the lower accuracy charts. The pipeline performs a lot of data validation & reconciliation to remove bad data, then simplifies & renders to vector tiles.

PostGIS is critical to this - I started by using a bunch of python geometry manipulation libraries, and slowly shifted more and more of the processing into SQL queries as I realized how fast and intuitive it is.
by LadyCailin | 2025-05-11 12:59:37+00:00
I wonder how worried they would get if more people actually started selling exploits on the black market, instead of reporting and not getting a bug bounty. If you don’t offer a bug bounty program in the first place, my gut feeling is that they probably wouldn’t care in that case either. Either way, this is a super good reason to not do business with such a company.
by formerly_proven | 2025-05-11 12:59:52+00:00
This is ridiculous clickbait even for quantum computing standards. It might actually cross the threshold of being flag-worthy…

> When factoring this class of integers, their special properties will make the exponential-level solution space search problem in the factorization simplify to a constant-level solution space search problem, which greatly saves computational resources.

„We elected to solve a O(1) subset instead of the actual problem“
by ModernMech | 2025-05-11 13:00:24+00:00
> “It's gonna be nice if we can finally get American companies to actually support America and pay citizens what they're worth.”

Posters are skeptical because prices will raise across the board for these good. You ask:

> “what if they are largely automated”

If that’s the case, and they work where they work now as you say, then Americans will just get poorer as things become more expensive due to tariffs. The factory owner is keeps all the protectionist profits. Maybe some of that goes back into the tax base but we know these types are good at paying 0% taxes.

The rich get richer, the poor get poorer. That’s why socialism is relevant, because that’s the system under which this idea at a national scale actually helps workers, whereas this idea under capitalism helps mainly capitalists. Which is why I’m so confused because you keep talking about workers in your post, but that’s not who this is for.
by agolsme | 2025-05-11 13:01:20+00:00
if you think a bit harder, you shouldn't be. the data on you isn't just used to manipulate your choices on the market, it also ends up being used to manipulate your choices as a citizen -- politically, socially. You might think you're above such psychological tactics (and perhaps you are, but many many people are not, and whether you believe the democrats accusations of electoral fraud in 2016 or the many accusations on both sides since, there is absolutely no doubt that the corporatization of the internet has played a giant part in the most repugnant aspects of american and world politics since 2016)
by throwawaymaths | 2025-05-11 13:02:00+00:00
save your energy for the truly heinous things that trump is going to do (starting with the abrego garcia case, and worse).

then, when you have the time, go read article I section 8 and ask yourself how much stuff that isn't in there congress just decided to start authorizing we do. do that before trotting out constitutionalism arguments -- and then search the constitution for where it says the supreme court should be doing judicial review (I'm not saying it's a bad idea). the constitution is basically meaningless in this country and has been from since the beginning.