MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by uecker | 2025-05-13 18:11:03+00:00
Use of libraries via FFI also has a cost in terms of ergonomics. But then, what do you give up: For C, many tools exist that support C from very basic stuff such as syntax highlighting to formal verification etc. There are plenty of C programmers, C tutorials, C books etc. There is an industry supporting tooling with many different implementations even for obscure platforms. There is an ISO standard and processes for certification. It is also basically guaranteed that C exists and will be supported in the next 50 years no matter what. Once you start using a niche language you lose a lot of this.

(But I think Odin is great!)
by jkingsman | 2025-05-13 18:11:37+00:00
Yes, there were definitely parts where I felt maybe I was picking up on a vibe or a hint, and later realized that was now a structural part of the story without which I would be quite lost.

I found this INCREDIBLY FULL OF SPOILERS explanation of fundamental plot points to be helpful in confirming or summarizing some things I missed[0].

[0]: —-EXTREME SPOILER WARNING-- https://old.reddit.com/r/printSF/comments/4p6zqj/understandi...
by dghlsakjg | 2025-05-13 18:12:29+00:00
The Air Canada case is interesting since it predates LLMs. If you read the details it was basically the chatbot had been programmed to respond to point at a policy that for some reason differed from what Air Canada claimed was its actual policy. Nothing was made up, Air Canada simply had two contradictory policies based on where you were on the site.

A customer trusted the policy that the chatbot provided to make a decision, and the tribunal said that it was reasonable for the customer to make a decision based on that policy, and that the airline had to honor that policy.
by wang_li | 2025-05-13 18:12:30+00:00
> but only if they know the software is higher quality.

I assume all software is shit in some fashion because every single software license includes a clause that has "no fitness for any particular purpose" clause. Meaning, if your word processor doesn't process words, you can't sue them.

When we get consumer protection laws that require that software does what is says on the tin quality will start mattering.
by somnium_sn | 2025-05-13 18:12:56+00:00
I have followed Makepad since Raph Levien pointed me towards it, while developing Xi. I am so stoked about this. What they have achieved in terms of UI framework is so unique in the rust ecosystem, particularly with the Shader abstractions. I am so eager to build with this. I know there are plenty of shortcomings when you are building your own UI framework without native components, but for creative applications, DAWs, Synths, 2D UI for games, even text editors, I think it will be so cool.
by xg15 | 2025-05-13 18:12:56+00:00
The API seems to have some peculiar restrictions, specifically that you cannot share the Downloads folder and no entire SD cards (only subfolders on the card). Maybe Nextcloud offered this functionality before and so couldn't restore it with the new API?

Also, unsurprisingly, data/ and obb/ are also forbidden, so the API is unusable for a backup tool.
by AceJohnny2 | 2025-05-13 18:12:57+00:00
when I was a kid, I was frustrated by the difficult choices of colony placement: "here, I get ore, but one tile over there's bonus food!" and wished I could create a "perfect" map.

This was possible in the Civ IV: Colonization version! However, it appears that the more productive you are, the bigger the Royal army is. I wish I understood the precise mechanism of that.
by 9283409232 | 2025-05-13 18:13:12+00:00
That's not possible. The Republican propaganda machine is very effective and there are many supporters who will vote with the GOP because "states' rights" but will simultaneously vote for all these policies. I don't think the fiercely logical part of HN understands politics and thinks you can just out debate someone into changing their mind but if it was that simple, the GOP would've died out decades ago.
by blizdiddy | 2025-05-13 18:13:13+00:00
Paying over $1000 for an rk3588 that lasts 4 hours, with glitchy wifi, bluetooth, and charging?! $500 for the SoC module alone, despite the fact that Chinese companies can put that same chip in a $200 handheld.

It’s a shame that China is so singularly capable at making things
by vel0city | 2025-05-13 18:13:37+00:00
I am using New Outlook.

I don't doubt it's happening to you, but I've never experienced it. And I'm not exactly using bleeding edge hardware here. A several year old i5 and a Ryzen 3 3200U (a cheap 2019 processor in a cheap Walmart laptop).

Maybe your IT team has something scanning every email on open. I don't know what to tell you, but it's not the experience out of the box on any machine I've used.
by alabastervlog | 2025-05-13 18:13:41+00:00
> Generative AI is a novelty that makes us crazy productive at certain tasks. But it doesn't yet seem to fundamentally change what we build or why. We just do it faster and sloppier with AI. It's a tactical tool to help you win, whereas interest rates define the rules of the game.

We're building some stuff that actively uses it—not (just) using it to write code, but integrating it into business processes.

This is both:

1) A far, far more valuable use of it than as a replacement for e.g. macros in your editor, assuming it worked as one might hope it would.

2) In practice so incredibly brittle, tightly-coupled, expensive, and slow to develop (not to mention some of the most boring work I've ever done in my 25 year career) relative to other options that the business could have embraced at any time in the last 15 years (but didn't because it took the hype of "AI" to gain activation energy for the project) all with no evident path toward any of that meaningfully improving, that I'm looking for an exit to another project that's ideally non-AI-related for when this one turns into a nightmare before eventually imploding and staining everyone involved's reputation, if not getting them fired. I reckon the nightmare phase is about six months out, for this one, and the implosion 12-18 out.

I expect similar stories are playing out all over the place.
by kaycebasques | 2025-05-13 18:14:43+00:00
(Tangential) On a recent roadtrip up to Portland from SF I stopped in a small historic mining town near Shasta called Dunsmuir. They had a Little Free Library so of course I had to check out what was in it. I was delighted to find an old book on Forth from the 80s, called Starting Forth. Inside of the book there were some business cards for FIG: Silicon Valley Forth Interest Group.
by magicalist | 2025-05-13 18:15:00+00:00
> Queue the usual remarks about "automated decision systems": is the PID controller in an espresso machine an automated decision system, is a pacemaker, Cochlear implant, fuzzy logic controller in a rice cooker, etc.

Almost certainly yes. The provision defines it as

> The term "automated decision system" means any computational process derived from machine learning, statistical modeling, data analytics, or artificial intelligence that issues a simplified output, including a score, classification, or recommendation, to materially influence or replace human decision making.

https://d1dth6e84htgma.cloudfront.net/Subtitle_C_Communicati...
by mrandish | 2025-05-13 18:15:59+00:00
> Good concluding paragraph. Very polite. Probably not quite fitting the usual online conversation format. You're supposed to call me Hitler or something.

Sorry to disappoint you! :-) As I indicated in my concluding paragraph, we're not going to change each other's viewpoint, so I'm going to choose not to address your points one by one, and just say some are based on either incorrect or incomplete assumptions and others aren't persuasive from my perspective.

I will add a historical point of fact to clarify one thing. The American civil war and the American civil rights protests are two different events a hundred years apart. The first was in the 1860s and the second in (roughly) the 1960s. The civil war settled the matter of slavery being legal (although there were other issues as well). Unfortunately, losing the civil war didn't change racial prejudice in the Southern states. Blacks there were no longer slaves but they were treated as second-class citizens and subject to grossly unjust non-protection under the law. This injustice persisted because Southern state governors, city mayors and police chiefs colluded to maintain the pretense of enforcing the laws equally while tacitly permitting gross discrimination and mob violence by racist whites against blacks. The civil rights protestors of the 1960s changed this when Martin Luther King adopted the peaceful protest strategies Gandhi used in India against British colonial rule. The violent police over-response against peaceful protestors exercising constitutionally protected free speech was obviously illegal. That undeniable evidence of Southern police and local governments behaving criminally against the constitution, not only as an aberration but systemically, forced both Southerners and the rest of the country to accept this ugly reality existed and make a choice how to deal with it. The horrific photos and films of illegal police violence against peaceful protestors changed public awareness and sentiment nationwide, providing the political support the President needed to send federal troops to Southern states to force desegregation. This was the civil rights protestor's plan, to use their protected speech rights to force the local governments to expose themselves publicly as tyrants. In conjunction with the media using their free speech rights to distribute the photographic evidence, the plan worked (the recent emergence of national live television broadcasts was also a key enabler). These ugly events led to some of our most important laws and legal precedents around free speech and elevated first amendment rights to a place of nearly sacred reverence among U.S. citizens. It's a dramatic historical episode well worth studying to understand American's intense support of free speech rights and deep distrust of government power. I offer this final historical note only as clarification of what happened and when re: "civil war" vs "civil rights protests" (which I think is uncontroversial). It's not intended to counter anything you wrote or to be argumentation.

Thanks for the interesting discussion. Per my prior conclusion, I'll be moving on now...
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-05-13 18:16:16+00:00
> the majority of voters are not well represented

The majority are well represented. They’re just idiots. This isn’t a criticism of Americans; it’s why direct democracy fails in a predictable, partisan way in any society. (If you really think about it, you’re probably something of an idiot a good amount of the time. And you, like me, probably hold stupid views with low conviction because it was never worth it to do the research.)
by ahmeneeroe-v2 | 2025-05-13 18:16:20+00:00
The Clinton Foundation somehow wasn't open bribery? That was the most powerful political family in America for a generation. You think people paid him&her for speeches because they're talented orators?

Pelosi insider trading is a minor transgression? She was the most powerful congressman for years. You think she didn't do anything to earn those stock tips?
by Sean-Der | 2025-05-13 18:16:30+00:00
Fantastic project, and the team behind it is really good! The developers I have worked with are passionate about building things the right way (not just making it work/adding kludge).

I felt like I was seeing the future when I saw the visualization/rendering of PeerConnection stats on the server side. The video compositor is really neat also how they have it working with live modifications.

I wish I had more time/a chance to use it on a project myself.
Ash HN: Is Privacy Dead to the Consumer?
by labadal | 2025-05-13 18:16:44+00:00
I've noticed that any time I'm buying software for my company I see, in detail, the subprocessors used, data collected and why. As a regular old consumer though, I get next to nothing when I sign up to a service.

Why do you think that is? Is privacy not that important to you? Do you feel obligated to give it up to get what you need?
by DrillShopper | 2025-05-13 18:17:29+00:00
I usually avoid meta-commentary like this, but this comment has been re-iterated 500,000 times on this site any time this topic comes up. The reason I'm replying is that it's become offensive at this point the idea that anyone needs to wear a cup while playing baseball to (sometimes) avoid being barraged by baseballs and people kicking me in the dick.
by kevinsync | 2025-05-13 18:17:51+00:00
Really depends on where you're located and what kind of cheap we're talking about. For instance, I buy the overwhelming majority of my equipment used or refurb -- anywhere from Amazon (warehouse deals) to Microcenter / Newegg (open box) to Ebay to sites like PC Server and Parts [0]. I also frequent thrift stores (got a perfectly good Epson Workforce 1100 for $9, just needed ink and a little love).

I will say that for some of it, stuff in the "really-cheap-in-comparison-to-MSRP, but still money" category, buying from a vendor that specializes in refurb/off-lease is a safer bet than a mishmash of Ebay parts just in the event that a given component is bad or unreliable. For instance, I recently put together a dual-Xeon box and the riser board was damaged in some way I couldn't repair; PCSP sent me a new one, problem solved. Would've been fairly costly had that been an Ebay buy (especially from a Chinese vendor, the shipping now! my god). All-in, I ended up with case, power supply, riser board, 2x E5-2667v4 CPUs, 256gb ram, GTX 1080ti for like $490. After using some other recycled parts and then selling some old stuff on Ebay, I ended up with a new computer for like 350 bucks... and for being essentially 10 year old equipment, it's shockingly performant.

You just never know what you'll find!

It takes time to research and decide what you actually want, then locate it at a good price, so you better be in love with the hunt hahaha.

[0] https://pcserverandparts.com
by mike_hearn | 2025-05-13 18:18:08+00:00
Some of this is due to the adoption of React. GUI optimization techniques that used to be common are hard to pull off in the React paradigm. For instance, pre-rendering parts of the UI that are invisible doesn't mesh well with the React model in which the UI tree is actually being built or destroyed in response to user interactions and in which data gets loaded in response to that, etc. The "everything is functional" paradigm is popular for various legitimate reasons, although React isn't really functional. But what people often forget is that functional languages have a reputation for being slow...
by 90s_dev | 2025-05-13 18:18:39+00:00
Have any of you ever thought to yourself, this is new and interesting, and then vaguely remembered that you spent months or years becoming an expert at it earlier in life but entirely forgot it? And in fact large chunks of the very interesting things you've done just completely flew out of your mind long ago, to the point where you feel absolutely new at life, like you've accomplished relatively nothing, until something like this jars you out of that forgetfulness?

I definitely vaguely remember doing some incredibly cool things with PDFs and OCR about 6 or 7 years ago. Some project comes to mind... google tells me it was "tesseract" and that sounds familiar.
by teknominds | 2025-05-13 18:18:49+00:00
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Gen OS is a seed-funded team (~$5m) building LittleBird, a digital twin that understands you: what you care about, what you want to accomplish, the people in your life, your near and long term goals, for Mac + Android. The team is remote-first, with teammates in the Bay Area, NYC, Europe & India.

HIRING: Senior Backend Engineer:

- Requires strong experience w/ Python

- Passion for solving problems in the areas of scalability, ML infra, system performance, hybrid search, data pipelines, vector Dbs, or related.

- Bonus points for experience or interest in Swift, Rust, OS concurrency

More details + apply here: https://scarlet-magician-747.notion.site/Senior-Backend-Engi...
by zahlman | 2025-05-13 18:19:04+00:00
How long did your computer take to start up, from power off (and no hibernation, although that presumably wasn't a thing yet), the first time you got to use a computer?

How long did it take the last time you had to use an HDD rather than SSD for your primary drive?

How long did it take the first time you got to use an SSD?

How long does it take today?

Did literally anything other than the drive technology ever make a significant difference in that, in the last 40 years?

> Almost everything loads instantly on my 2021 MacBook

Instantly? Your applications don't have splash screens? I think you've probably just gotten used to however long it does take.

> 5 year old mobile CPUs load modern SPA web apps with no problems.

"An iPhone 11, which has 4GB of RAM (32x what the first-gen model had), can run the operating system and display a current-day webpage that does a few useful things with JavaScript".

This should sound like clearing a very low bar, but it doesn't seem to.
by keybored | 2025-05-13 18:20:13+00:00
For people who want people to read their documents[1] they should have their PDF point to a more digital-friendly format, an alt document.

Looks like you’ve found my PDF. You might want this version instead:

PDFs are often subpar. Just see the first example: standard Latex serif section title. I mean, PDFs often aren’t even well-typeset for what they are (dead-tree simulations).

[1] No sarcasm or truism. Some may just want to submit a paper to whatever publisher and go through their whole laundry list of what a paper ought to be. Wide dissemanation is not the point.
by asabla | 2025-05-13 18:20:31+00:00
I remember when they presented the S10, with the initial implementation of Dex.

It felt so close already back then, sluggish, but still usable. But that initial implementation was running some in-house version of Ubuntu with a custom kernel (if I remembered it correctly).

I just wish this becomes a reality much sooner then later. Especially if I can have my dev environment on some remote VPS with either tunneling, github code spaces or Azure DevBox
by matja | 2025-05-13 18:20:42+00:00
For reads across different VMs on the same CPU, theoretically TME-MK could mitigate the usefulness of the memory reads by having each VM access memory using a different memory encryption key, but I don't know of any hypervisors that implement this.

AMD has had SEV support in QEMU for a long time, which some cloud hosting providers use already, that would mitigate any such issue if it occurred on AMD EPYC processors.
by cultofmetatron | 2025-05-13 18:20:48+00:00
my startup is using elixir in production for the last 5 years. we are a cloud based restaurant POS.

no regrets. the ecosystem has been pretty solid for everything we've wanted to do. Stability/performance has been very good.

also: if you're looking for a high profile startup using elixir, supabase is almost entirely elixir and discord uses it for some critical parts.
Why Isn't There a One-Pager for Every Politician's Performance?
by moeenmiri | 2025-05-13 18:20:49+00:00
Just dumping a thought here — I’d love to see a world where we can objectively evaluate politicians based on their goals, promises, and actions. We’re way past the point of relying on biased news outlets or viral social media clips to form opinions. With today’s tech and LLMs, we should be able to track political figures and hold them accountable.

As someone with a data engineering background, I imagine a simple one-pager dashboard for any politician or political group — showing what topics they focus on and how they’re actually performing. The public deserves that. Right now, most people make emotional decisions based on what they hear in the news or see online. That’s not a healthy trajectory.
by sph | 2025-05-13 18:20:53+00:00
Call it a niche use-case, but every time I had the chance to evaluate Rust, I had to write a function taking a callback, sometimes across to a C library. Every time I have to deal with an Fn/FnOnce/FnMut trait signature, remember if I need to box it with dyn, mayhaps it takes a reference as argument so I also need to deal with lifetimes signatures, then remember the `for<'a>` syntax, then it blows up because I need to add `+ 'static` at the end which still makes no sense to me, then I just rage quit. I am decently handy with (unsafe) Rust, wrote a minimal OS in it, but dealing with function pointers makes me want to carve my eyes out.

C doesn’t even care. You can cast an int to a function pointer if you want.

With Odin it’s taken me like 5 minutes including reading the section of the docs for the first time.
by atotheg | 2025-05-13 18:20:53+00:00
Foray | Lead Software Engineer | Hybrid (Cambridge, MA) | Full Time | $150,000 - $175,000 plus equity | alex@foraybio.com

Mission/Company: We have plants to thank for nearly every aspect of our existence, from the air we breathe to the energy we consume and the food we eat. But today, plant resources, Earth’s life support system, is in need of life support. 40% of plant species are threatened with extinction. We need new ways of collaborating with plants to ensure long-term access to the plant products we need and the ecosystems that provide them. At Foray, we’re building a new operating system for plants. We use the same “hardware," the plant cell, and design ways for these cells to grow in new and productive ways. Spun out of MIT in 2022, Foray combines advanced plant biology with computational tools to reimagine how we propagate, produce, and protect plants. Our biology is already live in the lab. Our software designed to streamline plant growth workflows is entering private beta. We’re looking for a Lead Software Engineer to help bring our software tools to life for a wider group of scientists, growers, and partners.

Role: You’ll be our first dedicated software hire, hands-on from day one. You’ll write code, define architecture, and lay the foundation for a software team that grows with you. You’ll work directly with biologists, engineers, and early users to translate cutting-edge science into usable, scalable tools.

You:

+ 5+ years of experience in a Software Engineering role

+ Strong experience with Python backend development, such as FastAPI and modern Python tooling

+ Expertise in frontend development with React/TypeScript and modern frameworks like Vite

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+ Proven ability to lead technical projects with recent, hands-on software development experience (actively building and shipping features)

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+ Nice-to-have: Practical experience with machine learning, data science, or computational biology; experience with predictive modeling, optimization, or inference is a plus.

+ Must be authorized to work in the United States.

Learn more & apply: https://jobs.polymer.co/foray-bioscience/34839?source=HN

Referrals: We don’t have the capacity to offer financial reward, but can perhaps offer house plant.
by ewoodrich | 2025-05-13 18:21:20+00:00
I use what I call “pseudo DeX” on my Galaxy Tab S8+ constantly. It’s basically the entire DeX laptop like UI without the requirement to use an external monitor (there’s an actual name for it I can’t remember).

It’s what Stage Manager on iPads should have been: a regular, boring laptop mode to make multitasking on a large tablet screen usable without Apple unnecessarily trying to put their own unique spin on it.