MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by correa_brian | 2025-05-28 17:55:41+00:00
I did some prototyping with SQLite + VSS extension to handle embeddings and wasn't getting the same results as using the Redis search modules. My preference would be to run something that doesn't require a separate for the DB, but it still needs some tuning. Redis gets the job done but there are likely simpler solutions that could give us comparable performance that we'll discover.
by vitorsr | 2025-05-28 17:55:46+00:00
> you can configure it to automatically archive every page you visit

What?? I am a heavy user of the Internet Archive services, not just the Wayback Machine, including official and "unofficial" clients and endpoints, and I had absolutely no idea the extension could do this.

To bulk archive I would manually do it via the web interface or batch automate it. The limitations of manually doing it one by one are obvious, and the limitations of doing it in batches requires, well, keeping batches (lists).
by bell-cot | 2025-05-28 17:57:24+00:00
> People with WS, often dubbed the 'opposite of autism', have an innate desire to hug and befriend total strangers. They are extremely affectionate, empathetic, talkative and gregarious.

> Few people with WS live independently as adults, and many suffer from severe anxiety. There are also health problems that accompany the condition, such as cardiovascular disease, developmental delays, and learning disabilities. Many people with WS have a lower IQ than the average, for example.

Sounds like yet another trait which would be advantageous in a well-functioning tribal village - performing drudge work, lifting the group's mood, and minimizing conflict. But is a major handicap in the modern (mega-scale, low-trust) world.
by gilbetron | 2025-05-28 17:57:26+00:00
I appreciate the words, and it maybe a symptom of being in my 50s, but kind of my entire point is that I do have experience with multiple decades of change, and this one feels really different. When cellphones and smartphones and tablets and laptops and LCDs and SSDs and console after console and new graphics cards came out previously, it was really fun. Now, it isn't, and hasn't for quite a few years. Maybe the pandemic broke things!

Also, we can do some great things, but there are a lot of things that aren't great. Health care has some profound improvements, but day to day medical care is worse than 10 years ago. There isn't much of a change in the physical world either. Uber was great for a while, now it is just ok. But otherwise flying is generally worse (although the free movies are a nice change), and traveling in general.
by castillar76 | 2025-05-28 17:58:10+00:00
I'm aware this is old-man-shakes-fist-at-cloud territory, but I don't want an AI-based AI browser with AI integration to AI the AI in all the AIs. I want a freaking browser. If I want to leverage AI features, I'll use a site for them. I don't want to chat with my browser — I want to tell it what site to open and it opens that site. I don't understand the use case for AI in the browser itself at all, and I'm really frustrated to lose a useful tool to another finance-bro-driven relentless drive to AI all the things with AI.
by mrweasel | 2025-05-28 17:58:54+00:00
> Just be mindful and prepared

Absolutely, but that's true for pretty much all the package managers, for all languages. They all break at some point.

One thing I would note is: Don't install your dependencies with apt in a development environment, you need to have a clean environment to avoid dragging unneeded dependencies into your production environments. That does mean that you need to find the exact version of your dependency in Debian, but it's a good exercise and ensures that you're mindful of your dependencies.

Be mindful, be prepared is good advise, in all aspects of life really.
by very-old-sw | 2025-05-28 17:59:10+00:00
Software engineers have known for decades that the choice of implementation language is one of the smaller costs in a large project. Also, I personally never use a language that is less than 20 years old. Life cycle costs:

post-release fixes: 50%.

pre-release testing and debugging: 25%.

requirements, design, implementation, etc: 25%
by devnullbrain | 2025-05-28 17:59:41+00:00
>despite Google solemnly promising that “all existing links will continue to redirect to the intended destination,” it went read-only a few years back, and now they’re finally sunsetting it in August 2025

It's become so trite to mention that I'm rolling my eyes at myself just for bringing it up again but... come on! How bad can it be before Google do something about the reputation this behaviour has created?

Was Stadia not an expensive enough failure?
by rvz | 2025-05-28 17:59:56+00:00
> It's very similar to crypto in that people pumping it up for financial gain or because they enjoy being part of the current hype are overconfident in how much of an impact it's going to have. Unlike crypto my workplace is very into it for our domain, so it's something we have to deal with.

The worst part is that many people (investors) who are actively pushing such a narrative (crypto, AI, etc) not only most have an undisclosed position, but in private they are doing / saying the exact opposite.

That is the reason why you see them publicly screaming such nonsensical predictions and you then get companies like builder.ai collapsing. (You won't see any investor in builder.ai proudly announcing this news in their portfolio).

This won't be the last of frauds in AI.
by asadotzler | 2025-05-28 18:00:22+00:00
You apparently never learned about the 1939 New York World's Fair's "The World of Tomorrow" expo. That didn't wait for the century half way point. How about the 1900 Paris Expo and the 1933 Chicago World's Fair, which both also featured predictions and prototypes of future technologies that got everyone from workers to sci-fi writers focused on flying cars and moving sidewalks.

Hardly anyone on this site has any sense of history and people just make shit up about the past. How sad to see a once intellectual forum turn into another Reddit or Twitter.
by theideaofcoffee | 2025-05-28 18:00:26+00:00
I think it’s probably as simple as some old fool on Sand Hill Rd got suckered into writing a check for this nonsense with promises of world domination by AI’s promised infinite profit with minimal cost. And to keep the whole charade going, everyone has to pretend that this will eventually see some returns otherwise the whole farcical system will come crashing down. We can only hope that happens and some correction rears its head.

The end result being all of us suffers in some way for the greed of a handful.
by Aunche | 2025-05-28 18:00:47+00:00
> "well, it lasted this long and the organizational rot only killed a few hundred people"

It should be clear that is not what I meant. This reinforces my view that popular criticism towards Boeing is unhelpful and ironically is relevant to the posted essay. People care more about gotchas more than deep discussion.

If the 737 Max incidents were due to negligence on Boeing's part, the many of the incidents in the 70s were also due to negligence. You can't have it both ways.
by andrewaylett | 2025-05-28 18:00:51+00:00
Ah, I'd misunderstood how much the git binary was used for. I think I might go with could be a porcelain, if you don't mind? It's far too late for me to edit my comment now.

I'm a smidge late to the "early adopters" party, but I've been using Jujitsu intensively for a couple of weeks now and do not intend to stop :).
by yojo | 2025-05-28 18:01:07+00:00
It's not a new or scary thing, but it's way more expensive (in time or money) than relying on "it looks good on my machine, so it looks good everywhere."

I've worked on large consumer-facing web-apps where we had a dedicated QA team (and/or contracting firm) that runs visual regression testing on multiple platforms and browser versions. As a solo developer, I have no interest in being that team for my hobby project. So the tradeoff with Tauri for me was "accept that I will ship obvious UI bugs" vs "accept that I will ship a bloated binary."

Reading anecdata on forums, it seems like the only people who get up in arms over an extra 200MB are HN readers, and my app isn't really targeted at them.
by asadotzler | 2025-05-28 18:01:22+00:00
Google pays Mozilla a fraction of the money Goggle makes from ad clicks driven by Firefox, a revenue sharing agreement. Where's xAI's 80:20 split here? Where's the default AI interface in Telegram that users would fill with some other AI service if Telegram wasn't getting paid for the distribution? Where's the user expectation of AI in the product in the first place.

This is nothing like the Google Mozilla (or Googlge Apple or Google whoever) deal.
by enricozb | 2025-05-28 18:01:34+00:00
Differentiable Logic Gate Networks [0] are super interesting. However, I still don't like that the wiring is fixed initially rather than learned.

I did some extremely rough research into doing learnable wirings [1], but couldn't get past even learning ~4-bit addition.

[0]: https://arxiv.org/abs/2210.08277

[1]: https://ezb.io/thoughts/program_synthesis/boolean_circuits/2...
by 90s_dev | 2025-05-28 18:02:12+00:00
There's strong precedence for associating file extensions with content types. And it allows static files to map 1:1 to URLs.

I agree though that I was too harsh, I didn't realize it was written in 1998 when HTML was still new. I probably first read it around 2010.

But now that we have hindsight, I think it's safe to say .html files will continue to be supported for the next 50 years.
by WorldMaker | 2025-05-28 18:03:06+00:00
It's a post facto index. It lags disaster by a few days and is far more interesting as a recovery statistic than a forecast. That's why it was important to certain types of FEMA operations, going in days or weeks later and trying to assess the hardest hit areas and triage them into a priority list. If Waffle House is serving a limited breakfast menu 24-hours a day in a neighborhood you can focus on sending the Red Cross-sponsored food tents to a different neighborhood.

Waffle House has been trying to distance themselves from it as a "Disaster Index" ever since the FEMA Director admitted to using it as an unofficial index. It's part of why FEMA increasingly refers to it as "unofficial" and has started to distance itself from discussions about it, too. I agree with the OP that part of it is definitely Waffle House wants to distance themselves from being "the brand of disasters". When it has been talked about as a "Recovery Index" (and without mentioning FEMA, because FEMA is the "brand of disasters") and the light has been shined to focus on why they've been among the fastest businesses in the country to recover from the worst problems, they've been happy to discuss and market that. It really is cool to see their flowcharts and checklists and graded levels of menus designed for all the scenarios they thought to design disaster recovery for (does the building have electric? does it have gas? when was the last supply truck in? when is the next supply truck expected? what are the road conditions?; it truly is fascinating).
by ericdiao | 2025-05-28 18:03:44+00:00
The ZIP code system in the US CAN somewhat work the same way.

The usual 5 digit ZIP code routes to your Post Office. The longer ZIP+4 code routes more detailed locations: a city block, an apartment building. The even longer ZIP+6 code goes to something called delivery point, which to my understanding is basically a single mailbox. The ZIP+6 code is in fact embedded in the bar code sprayed onto the mail piece.
by spwa4 | 2025-05-28 18:03:47+00:00
Reference to:

* https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ceqjq11202ro (xAI bought Twitter)

* https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/aug/01/elon-musk... (Tesla bought solarcity)

Effectively, of course, Twitter and Solarcity went bankrupt. That's what really happened.

I hope the CxO's at companies realize this, and so realize that Musk's big plan for Twitter ("just fire everyone, keep collecting the income") had a slightly different outcome when put into practice: fire everyone, rehire half, get publicly shamed by important people refusing to go back, bankruptcy in 2 years, 5 months. In other words, since 2022 Musk lost 5 million per day, on average, for 2.5 years.

Let that sink in!
by 0_____0 | 2025-05-28 18:04:09+00:00
In the private sector, the burden of a shirking employee is borne by owners, investors, shareholders. In the public sector, the weight is borne by our collective dollars, and shirking represents money that could have gone into a playground, better wayfinding infra, curb cuts... We necessarily have a stake in what our governments do, therefore the expectations of the public are different vs. the private sector.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-05-28 18:04:15+00:00
The entire “equity” movement strikes me as cover for bullshit through neologism.

What the kid getting F’s needs are some combination of subsidised meals, 1:1 tutoring, a psychiatric consult and a chance to do over the grade. (Basically what rich, caring parents do when their kids fall behind.) Instead we get this papering-over of public schools’ failures in the name of social justice.
by JKCalhoun | 2025-05-28 18:04:18+00:00
> the age of tech we are living in now is not the one any of us thought we were working to create

"No one would have designed it this way," is the refrain that comes to my mind so often. Raising kids and realizing the amount of "institutional knowledge" you need just to have a bank account (for example) underscores this thought (and refrain) frequently.
by hadlock | 2025-05-28 18:04:19+00:00
Another way to look at this is, "millenials have kids/lives now and don't have the bandwidth to be rage-baited near-constantly" and also "Gen Z grew up in the rage baiting era, they're immune by default". There's no policy outcome for this particular piece of rage bait so very few people are going to suit up and white knight about supplemental ai slop. If it were a fake front page news article people might care more. Getting mad about people not getting mad is also very low tier rage-bait.
by oooyay | 2025-05-28 18:05:08+00:00
I agree with you to some degree. When I got to the bottom of the article I read this:

> Be yourself.

> Be imperfect.

> Be human.

> Care.

It sounds like a simple message but the 2010's were rife with "care about everything" and "inaction is action" type slogans. Should someone at that paper or the products being represented care? Yes, because it's their job. To blame the reader or anyone beyond that point I think is very 2010's era that yielded some portion of this societal apathy and burnout.

What we need is the people who have a duty to care to care. In reality there are very few people who are on paper duty bound to care. The people that are duty bound are rarely held accountable when they don't. It's a sort of cyclical problem.
by proxynoproxy | 2025-05-28 18:05:51+00:00
Source: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=195.msg1611#msg1611

It’s not an apples to apples comparison — I was there in 2013 with the 0.4/0.5 bdb issue happened, it was a split (not downtime), and the community went with 0.4 until 0.5 was patched. The community was much smaller. There was no downtime. There could have been loses on the centralized exchange side for the few hours of ambiguity. maybe there was 1 public report of loss at the time. This is the lesson that ETH people were not around for. More moving parts; more failure cases. More client, more moving parts.
by jandrewrogers | 2025-05-28 18:05:57+00:00
I use engineering paper and a mechanical pencil extensively for software development work, a habit I picked up in my chemical engineering days.

None of it is saved. I use it to extend my working memory for complex design problems, and for this purpose I find it very effective. The advantage of paper and pencil is that it is naturally and efficiently amenable to non-linear and somewhat arbitrary patterns of access and representation.

Software really struggles at this because computer UIs force everything into coarse linear workflows no matter the presentation, which makes navigating and rewiring a large number of orthogonal dimensions awkward and inefficient on the best days.
by minimaxir | 2025-05-28 18:06:02+00:00
ChatGPT.com (and other LLM UIs such as Perplexity) now use a Tool that searches the web if it detects that it is necessary to solve the user's question, and then uses the output of that search query to answer the user's question. This allows it to surface responses that are out of its training data cutoff date, and cite specific data sources.
by 90s_dev | 2025-05-28 18:06:39+00:00
It's always bothered me in a small way that github doesn't honor this:

https://github.com/sdegutis/bubbles

https://github.com/sdegutis/bubbles/

No redirect, just two renders!

It bothers me first because it's semantically different.

Second and more importnatly, because it's always such a pain to configure that redirect in nginx or whatever. I eventually figure it out each time, after many hours wasted looking it up all over again and trial/error.
by alpha_squared | 2025-05-28 18:06:53+00:00
I think the intent, as stated, appears to match what you're saying. It's hard to ignore that there doesn't appear to be any display of critical thinking involved, though.

He wants recognition for quickly building simple tools (e.g. visual org chart) without the responsibility of what the tool was used for: to fire half a million people. Where are the efficiency gains in this? It's very telling that the interview that he got fired for included his praise that the government was actually more efficient than he expected.

Given all that, I can't take the writing as being all that sincere.
by jancsika | 2025-05-28 18:07:22+00:00
There's too much money at stake to be able to have sensible discussion about it online.

We saw the same thing with blockchain. IIRC, someone on the Cryptography list replied to the whitepaper with the critique that the energy use wouldn't be worth the measly number of transactions processed. If it were Bells Labs, that observation would have been followed up with two or three prototypes for fundamentally different decentralized payment designs by now.

Instead, it's over a decade later and all we have is a literal strategic reserve of hot air.

So I'd give it some time, Steve. :)
by jnsie | 2025-05-28 18:07:34+00:00
> I´d say those who feel the need for a device like this are guilty by association of farting and burping even louder than average, why otherwise get something to mask their clearly obnoxious and dare I say noxious emanations in the privy?

This seems like a jump. Social etiquette is important. A desire for visitors (or others) not to be subjected to the various sounds emanating from the bathroom is a form of politeness, not cover-up of something more sinister.
by tomxor | 2025-05-28 18:07:40+00:00
Yes, it only works better because the obscurity to IP ratio is good. It could easily be as bad as mullvad if they became more popular. But as I understand it the really popular VPNs address this with huge pools of servers and IP cycling?

One other issue I had with Mullvad that put the nail in the coffin for me was randomly laggy DNS resolvers, they would get fixed just by the time I start investigating it, but it kept happening... I say this as a mostly happy user for probably 7 years, but then found myself having to turn it off more than on to be able to access most sites.
by Capricorn2481 | 2025-05-28 18:07:41+00:00
> Reading anecdata on forums, it seems like the only people who get up in arms over an extra 200MB are HN readers, and my app isn't really targeted at them

I think it's good to be wary of overly sensitive advice that regular users don't care about. But would a regular user realize they have 10 electron apps running and their ram is maxed out all the time?

The argument against Electron isn't just a single bloated binary, but everyone shipping an app that uses way more RAM than necessary.
by nneonneo | 2025-05-28 18:07:45+00:00
It’s useful for simple breakpoint automation and conditional breakpoints, as well as basically adding virtual print statements to programs (the printf command in GDB is very powerful). I also used it to find a complex bug that someone posted here on HN once: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22031581

Also, GDB supports Python scripting too, which is really good since you can use the full power of Python with a decent debugger API; many of the plugins I use frequently (e.g. GEF - https://github.com/hugsy/gef) are written using the Python GDB API.
by correa_brian | 2025-05-28 18:08:00+00:00
The move from Electron helped us remove "native libraries" in Node. Previously we were using Xenova transformers to instantiate the models. This forced us to use multiple package.jsons and added a lot of cognitive overhead to our development.

The move to rust freed us up to focus more on feature development than configs and setup. It was surprising because I thought learning rust would set us back much longer, but the trade-off was worth it.
by bsoles | 2025-05-28 18:08:32+00:00
> I've seen across my work experience in different domains; teams defaulting to ML when fundamental engineering would work better.

In my current field (predictive maintenance), there are (in)famous examples and papers using multi-layer deep networks for solving anomaly detection problems, where a "single" line of basic Matlab code (standard deviations, etc.) performs better than the proposed AI solution. Publish or perish, I guess...
by antisthenes | 2025-05-28 18:09:03+00:00
Frankly, the younger I was the longer my prospective time horizon was.

E.g. in 2000 I might have cared about what's going to happen in 2100.

Now, in 2025, as I got older, my time horizon has shrunk down to maybe 10 years at most, but typically ~3 years, as my life experience has taught me that life is often unpredictable, sometimes too short, and age has that ability to temper our expectations through health issues and other things.

I also don't have the executive function anymore to think about long-term abstract things, since it is primarily occupied with my shorter-term responsibilities.

So yeah, I really don't give a shit what 2125 will look like. I don't have the arrogance in me to even make an educated guess, because 99.9% chance it will look different than what I imagine.
by mk_stjames | 2025-05-28 18:09:13+00:00
I'm surprised at some of the comments here that don't see Waffle House's side of this.

You're a company, and some third party makes a website that very much looks like it could be official, using your name and logo in part, and this website is purporting to know the open/close status of your stores. Literally an indicator if people should bother going out to spend money at your business or not. An actual signal to economic performance of your entire corperation.

Now, this person is using your own data from your own websites to update this map. But, you do not control that person. They are not an employee. What if their scraping scheme breaks? What if their implementation has some bug and shows stores closed that are not closed. What if they get pissy and decide to just randomly start showing locations as closed just to F with you.

If the site got very popular and you had no control over it, you could could be losing customers and have no way to fix it.

It's a seriously irresponsible move to allow people this kind of leeway with your brand and trademarks. Even if it seems they mean well at first.
by drweevil | 2025-05-28 18:09:50+00:00
Sometimes someone can be right for mostly wrong reasons. (Most of us will be familiar with the ideas of RFK jr.) Nonetheless, I do like the idea of federally funded journals. After all, the results being published are paid for by taxpayers, and it is unseemly to be placing them behind an expensive Elsevier paywall, so that they profit from publicly-funded science. And there certainly are arguments to be made that the private journals are corrupt, as a visit to retractionwatch.com will show.