MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by piva00 | 2025-05-30 14:01:25+00:00
Do you think this infrastructure just sits there, being used all the time, without requiring constant replacement/maintenance?

All the roads everywhere are only possible when maintained, you are in Germany so you are very familiar with Autobahn closures for it. The same is needed for all power lines, water lines, sewage, internet infrastructure, cellphone infrastructure, etc. they are constantly being repaired, expanded, and replaced by better technology.

All of that is only possible through economies of scale, you simply cannot have all the necessary infrastructure expected from a contemporary life style in good functioning state without a large cohort of people sharing the financial burden to maintain it, the less dense it is the more expensive it is to maintain each metre of power lines, sewage, water, roads, etc. per capita.

I do not understand what you aren't understanding.

> it's just the basic infrastructure like 5G and fiber internet that drives people away from the rural areas, caused by politicians thinking "we don't need 5G on every cow pasture" (yes, literally, that was an actual quote).

Because to do that it needs to be subsidised by someone else, the 10 people in a town without 5G coverage are not enough to support the installation, and upkeep of multiple towers to service them, 5G has quite shorter range compared to 4G/3G. Fibre needs to be rolled out, trenches dug, switching infrastructure somewhere not too far away to maintain a good SNR.

The basic infrastructure can only exist if there are enough people to pay for it, if it's already difficult to subsidise this use even with the dense population centres paying for it, how exactly do you see it being paid by in your fantasy?
by uecker | 2025-05-30 14:02:04+00:00
I think this is asking the wrong question. In many case it would be smarter to implement these algorithms using high-level abstractions and then let the optimizer specialize it again. This works very well also in C:https://godbolt.org/z/bohvffd7r I use it a lot, but I am not aware about a public project similar to Eigen. I definitely convinced this could be done and would be very nice. One downside is that one might want to have more precise control. But even then there are solutions which IMHO are better than template metaprogramming.
by bediger4000 | 2025-05-30 14:02:36+00:00
> resembling a fascist salute.

Seems like a fairly damning article, particularly for those whom "drugs" are a giant societal problem. At least Mr Musk isn't using Fentanyl, the Devil's Sweat.

The reporters did mention that Mr Musk had sired 14 publicly known children, and indeed, they mentioned 14. But they also mentioned a rumored child with a Japanese Pop Star. This seems damning for the "family values" crowd.
by meheleventyone | 2025-05-30 14:03:21+00:00
As a man I don't recognize that game playing as something all women do. It's just not something I've experienced in my relationships platonic or otherwise with women. Maybe it's a Europe vs. America thing (edit: from your other comments, you seem to be in Europe so not that) or something personal to you and your experience but it sounds very 'incel-adjacent'.
by crossroadsguy | 2025-05-30 14:03:32+00:00
That would be worse than nukes. We already see what UN and UNSC has become. Even hearing the “one world” government gave strong star wars vibes even though I didn’t need to go that far.

We are designed (or destined, if you want to say so) to be fucked and fuck up everything on this earth faster than we thought maybe even just 20-30 years ago.
by gavinray | 2025-05-30 14:03:57+00:00
I take 20,000iu of Vitamin D a day (10,000iu morning/night).

You can take quite an amount of Vitamin D safely, an example: "Results of daily oral dosing with up to 60,000iu of vitamin D3 for 2 to 6 years in 3 adult males"

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28012936/
by getToTheChopin | 2025-05-30 14:04:45+00:00
3D model control (move, rotate, scale, animate) using hand gestures and voice commands, running in real-time in the browser

Created with threejs, mediapipe computer vision, and web speech API

3D model from Quaternius

Here's the live demo if you want to try: https://rosebud.ai/p/93986db5-4d99-437f-9e8b-c8d742e131da

Any feedback would be appreciated!
by Windchaser | 2025-05-30 14:05:06+00:00
Awww, I don't know that that's true. If by "greed" you mean "it'd be nice to not have to clip coupons before doing my grocery shopping", sure, there are a lot of old people who would like things to be less tight.

But it's not greed in the sense of Ebenezer Scrooge or finance bros. All it takes is some pie-in-the-sky naivete and trusting the wrong person.
by 542354234235 | 2025-05-30 14:05:32+00:00
To add, in walkable communities you are much more likely to be a “regular” at more places, since you are walking to the places nearby, and to share multiple regular places with other people. Walking 15 minutes to 30 minutes still keep you in about a 1-2 mile radius, which is pretty small and has a lot of overlap with other people walking. So you are likely to see the same people at the bar as at the gym or the coffee shop.

If you are driving 15 minutes to 30 minutes, especially if you get on a highway for any amount of time, you could be anywhere in a 15+ mile radius. Your grocery store and your preferred bar could be 20 miles away from each other, so not likely you will run into Jim from the bar in the cereal aisle.
by bko | 2025-05-30 14:05:43+00:00
Thank you for this. Some people are critical of coding tests but I do this there is a point: namely to weed out people who can't code.

Am I the only one that interviewed people with lengthy resumes full of programming experience and when I asked them to do a simple programming exercise they fell flat on their face? I've seen experience in C, gave them take home two hour exam and they couldn't even get anything to compile. What he meant was he took a class a few years back.

You see it in other domains with extensive Excel experience and the guy gets hired and never heard of a vlookup.

I think some of the stuff is overkill but you need to select for people that know how to program.

I for one am glad they exist because I don't have a CS degree but learned on my own. I lucked into this profession through an online leetcode style screener and your book helped me immensely,so thank you
Ask HN: Lisp eval vs. Lisp macros. Are they the same underlying concept?
by behnamoh | 2025-05-30 14:05:50+00:00
Is my understanding correct that Lisp's powerful macro system stems from the ability to write the eval function in Lisp itself? From what I gather, Lisp starts with a small set of primitives and special forms—seven in the original Lisp, including lambda. I recall Paul Graham demonstrating in one of his essays that you can build an eval function using just these primitives. Those primitives are typically implemented in a host language like C, but once you have an eval function in Lisp, you can extend it with new rules. The underlying C interpreter only sees the primitives, but as a programmer, you can introduce new syntax rules via eval. This seems like a way to understand macros, where you effectively add new language rules. I know Lisp macros are typically defined using specific keywords like defmacro, but is the core idea similar—extending the language by building on the eval function with new rules?
Show HN: Open-source LLM-powered test automation library for mobile and web
by p0deje | 2025-05-30 14:06:44+00:00
Hey HN!

I'm Alex, a tech lead of the Selenium project and a QA engineer. For the last 10 months, I've been working on Alumnium - a test automation library that should make my life easier and let me write less code when automating the tests. The goal is to use LLM for _automating_ so I could focus more on _testing_.

Unlike other similar projects, Alumnium can be used in existing tests without changes to test runners, reporting tools, or any other test infrastructure. This allows me to gradually migrate my test suites (mostly Selenium) and revert whenever something goes wrong (this happens a lot, to be honest).

Other major differences:

- cheap (works on low-tier models like gpt-4o-mini, costs $20 per month for 1k+ tests)

- not an AI agent (dumb enough to fail the test rather than working around to make it pass)

- fast thanks to a built-in caching

- supports both mobile (Appium) and web (Playwright, Selenium)

- supports completely local execution (Ollama)

The project is still in a very much experimental phase, but I'd be happy to get any feedback.
by throwawaymaths | 2025-05-30 14:06:57+00:00
I honestly still don't know what `with` does in python. Without looking it up: Since I don't use python all that often, my best guess is that it calls some magic dunder function? I get that "primitives" like +, - aren't actually and ALSO call dunders, but there's a bit of "ssh don't tell me that and let me pretend" in the python ethos, and writing your own dunder function for anything that isn't number-ish is probably a huge code smell, and probably a potential footgun even if it is numberish. which is why `with` always felt weird to me.
by smeej | 2025-05-30 14:07:11+00:00
This was mostly true of v.1 cryptocurrencies, but it's not like it's inherent to the system. It's just as easy to design cryptocurrencies where there are control mechanisms, governed however you'd like them to be. USDC, for example, can be frozen in any wallet at any time, and has still become hugely popular.

IF reversibility is a desired feature of digital currencies, the market will bear that out. People can and will choose those currencies.

As with any "feature," there are tradeoffs, and it might well be that people en masse decide they would rather everyone control their own money than have central powers supervising, just as it might well be that people opt back into a system very much like the one that exists today, but with new efficiencies.

Adding programmability to money in the digital age was necessary. I don't know why anybody is surprised it hasn't reached some sort of final, settled state this early in the digital age. It basically only came into practical existence after the launch of smartphones and ubiquitous internet access. Give it a minute.
by arp242 | 2025-05-30 14:08:04+00:00
It's really hard to do that from three weeks of travel.

I like Matt's posts, but I always take them with a grain of salt. To really get an in-depth viewpoint you need to live somewhere for a year at least, and probably speak at least some of the local language. I've lived in a few countries over the years, and it's just such a different experience from just travelling for a few weeks.
by unethical_ban | 2025-05-30 14:08:39+00:00
Phi-4 is scared to talk about anything controversial, as if they're being watched.

I asked it a question about militias. It thought for a few pages about the answer and whether to tell me, then came back with "I cannot comply".

Nidum is the name of uncensored Gemma, it does a good job most of the time.
by jerf | 2025-05-30 14:09:09+00:00
Many of them are infinite, so you'd have to provide them as functions rather than files. There's obvious ones like plain text, but some less obvious ones, like, PNGs are defined as a series of chunks, but there's no chunk count in the header, so you can keep appending chunks forever: https://www.libpng.org/pub/png/spec/1.2/PNG-Structure.html

This sort of thing is not just a funny question, it's something you think about when you're writing scanners. For instance, another "biggest possible file" is the zip file that decompresses to itself[1], which is in some sense also an infinite file. Many a scanner has been written that will fill the disk then crash if presented with that file, which is actually more pathological behavior than would be experienced if the scanner isn't there.

[1]: https://research.swtch.com/zip
by whywhywhywhy | 2025-05-30 14:09:42+00:00
Model Collapse doesn't seem to be real and from recent models it seems synthetic data seems to actually work no?

Author is overlooking a major thing, if the code works the person paying for the code doesn't really care where it came from.

Author works on "a platform that helps companies do collaborative coding interviews AND avoid LLM cheating", thing is we're getting a growing sentiment of CEOs who WANT you using LLMs. I've seen them get visibly frustrated that some of the dev team were not using them or not using the latest approach. Lots more talk of results focused hiring rather than could they write this without an LLM hiring.
by sgt101 | 2025-05-30 14:09:51+00:00
Ummm I don't remember that - can you give some more details?

I do remember them running articles like "what should NATO do if Russia invades". Which isn't a dismissal.

Of course, it would have been a really bad thing to dismiss & deride a Russian invasion that took Kiev in 4 days and ended with the partition and neutering of Ukraine with less than 1000 Russian dead. But I don't live in that reality, I live in the reality in which the Russians managed to pull of an even bigger foreign policy mistake than Iraq 2003. It's not got to the all time high of June 1941, but it's getting closer with every week that goes by.
by scotty79 | 2025-05-30 14:09:52+00:00
The point of event horizon is that everything at it expeiriences infinite gravitational time dilation in relation to everything even barely outside it.

So talking about things inside event horizon is about as physical as talking about things traveling at superluminal speeds. You can consider such object, it just takes more than infinite acceleration time to get there.

I don't really understand why people think they can get rid of the discontinuity at event horizon by changing coordinate system. It's as if we were considering function 1/x in new coordinate system xi where xi is defined as 1/x and suddenly we have a nice continuus function without anything special happening around 0. It's a mathematical sleigh of hand.

Sure, from the point of view of infalling matter nothing special happens at event horizon but why would we, outside people, should care about this perspective since the universe will evaporate before this infalling matter crosses event horizon?

So when black hole becomes made of mostly photons, they are all still outside of the event horizon, because infinite time has not yet passed outside.
by sahilagarwal | 2025-05-30 14:10:05+00:00
I try not to think about it, but HZD (game) had the most believable take on the future.

AI war machines apocalypse - War machines that consume earth's sources to build drones and other war machines. There are autonomous supply chain of these to the war front, all managed by the AI.

They're unhackable, with the newest encryption that would take years to decrypt. Unfortunately, there is a bug in the production code that causes the AI to start targeting everything. AI starts killing all humans instead of the filters it was given.

How do you defeat an autonomous self-replenishing robot army that consumes the earth for energy and grows in size each day? You can't.
by Workaccount2 | 2025-05-30 14:10:12+00:00
>You'll hear left wing progressive parents in places like NYC tell stories like "my 8 year old boy came home from school crying because his teacher told hime everything bad that has happened in history was because of men" and stupid stuff that's unthinkable if it was reversed.

People are bashing their heads on the wall trying to figure out why young white men are moving towards the right in droves...and the best answer they can come up with is misogyny.
by AndrewStephens | 2025-05-30 14:10:43+00:00
Cracking the Code Interview is a great book and excellent for practice and brushing up. But I have found leet-code questions terrible for actually interviewing candidates. A lot of them boil down to whether the candidate knows the specific trick or can regurgitate the memorized solution.

(Maybe I am just bitter because I have more than once bombed a leet-code interview myself)

I interview a lot of people and my go-to coding question is actually a pretty simple question that might be found in a 2-year coding course. What I am looking for is production ready code, good error handling, tidy design, and understandable code. All things that leet-coding specifically discourages.
by michael_mroczka | 2025-05-30 14:13:11+00:00
Hot take from the author: This is a commonly repeated claim, but it’s probably not accurate.

It’s FAR easier for companies to stick with the interview process they’ve used for decades—just mandate in-person interviews again—than to reinvent the wheel with some new, unproven format. Sure, there’s a growing need to assess more than just DS&A in initial screenings, but let’s be honest: those interviews aren’t going anywhere.

The REAL reason to make these resources free? Because it’s not a competitive advantage to offer problems to practice. There are already tons of free problems online. The real value isn’t in giving people a place to do problems—that already exists. The value is in the book. If you already know enough to do well on problems without the book, then you shouldn't have to pay to practice it.
by bell-cot | 2025-05-30 14:13:45+00:00
Some centuries ago, pirates* were an ongoing major problem for Britain. Eventually, a competent & responsible monarch ascended to the throne - and organized & enlarged the Royal Navy to actually deal with that problem. (Not saying it was consistently well-managed thereafter.)

No, that wasn't cheap. But compared to the losses to piracy, or costs of each merchant arming & manning his ships so heavily that they could (usually) drive off pirates, the taxes to support the RN were pretty clearly the lesser evil.

Unfortunately, I don't see Charles III being competent nor responsible enough to do much anything about this new problem. Not that the monarch has the legal authority, these days.

*This kind of pirate - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piracy#Middle_Ages Not the IP law kind.
by Spivak | 2025-05-30 14:13:59+00:00
I will take the other side of that bet. I've joked for years about aspartame surely going to give me cancer and yet despite the not inconsiderable amount of research into it trying to find a smoking gun the results are at best vaguely suggestive, which is another way of saying there have still yet been no provable connection between aspartame and any heath problem. If you're a Bayesian thinker at this point your priors should be set on the far side of "it's for all practical purposes inert in the body."

But refined sugar, you'll be drowning in real documented health problems.
by sgt101 | 2025-05-30 14:14:23+00:00
I think that they give adversaries another card to play.

Drones mean that you can do a bunch of tasks that previously needed air dominance without that dominance, or even when you are dominated - like the Houthis are showing. With drones you can surveil and strike even while your enemy kills everything that goes 20m above the ground.

If you can contest the air at the same time I would say that their role becomes greater - as the Ukrainians have showed. But drones do make air dominance less decisive, even as it remains very desirable.
by andsoitis | 2025-05-30 14:15:02+00:00
eval and macros both deal with code-as-data (homoiconicity), but they serve very different purposes and work at different times in the program lifecycle:

eval

Runs at runtime.

Takes a data structure (usually a list) and evaluates it as Lisp code.

Example: (eval '(+ 1 2)) ; => 3

Use case: Dynamically construct and run code while the program is running.

Macros

Runs at compile time (or macro-expansion time).

Transform Lisp code before it's evaluated. They return new code (a Lisp form) to be compiled/evaluated later.

Example: (defmacro my-unless (condition body) `(if (not ,condition) ,body))

(my-unless (= 1 2) (print "Not equal")) ; expands to (if (not (= 1 2)) (print ...))

Use case: Extend the language by defining new syntactic constructs. Enables powerful DSLs and optimizations.
by diggan | 2025-05-30 14:15:06+00:00
None of those, if a quick search of "ui/gui/user experience" is of any indication.

Also looking for an alternative to MinIO since I also rely on the GUI for some things. But it feels like these things should probably be separate? Since they all expose a S3 compatible API interface, couldn't we have one GUI that can be used regardless of the backend?
Show HN: Outlier, a new daily word game
by paulvoge | 2025-05-30 14:15:31+00:00
Hello HN,

If you love daily word games like the Crossword, Connections, or Wordle, you might enjoy Outlier.

The game explores relationships between words-- while RED is of course a color, it is also a baseball player in Cincinnati, a Taylor Swift album, and a River on the Texas border (to name a few).

Ex:

Super Mail Slender Aqua Sand Boogey Hail Hit Gentle

While Gentleman, Superman, and Hitman are all real words/concepts, Hailman is not. HAIL is the Outlier. The Outlier then becomes a member of the set for the following.

The next round might then cover Meteoroligical Phenomena, or archaic greetings (Hail Caesar) or words to indicate where someone is from ("she hails from Ohio").

Open to all feedback! Trying to decide if the current time penalty should be increased to encourage more methodical play. I'm also posting daily clues on IG @ outlier.land. Thanks!
by bravetraveler | 2025-05-30 14:15:34+00:00
> At least Mr Musk isn't using Fentanyl, the Devil's Sweat.

Yet. One misstep around "the supply" and, well, anything can happen

edit: I'm endorsing paranoia and test kits, in case it matters. Heh. Easy Palantir. Don't line me up for ~deportation~ exile, too.
by pyrale | 2025-05-30 14:16:19+00:00
No one would have been surprised if the US had increased tariffs on airplanes to cushion Boeing’s failings, understanding that this specific sector may be seen as vital interests. Europe could have replied with tariffs on space launches to avoid reliance on space-x in an equally strategic sector.

On the other hand, blanket tariffs levied on countries rather than specific industries don’t look like they serve a specific industrial policy.
by WillPostForFood | 2025-05-30 14:16:23+00:00
"A high trust society is actually a good trait, not a bad one."

100% agree, and seeing it erode is painful (e.g., toothpaste now locked behind plexiglass).

But to steelman the parents point, while it is be good to be high trust society, that society may be poorly adapted when rapidly integrated into a low trust globalized world.
by EvanAnderson | 2025-05-30 14:16:27+00:00
Thanks for name-dropping FutureSplash. I'd never heard of it, but knowing then name sent me down a mini-rabbit hole:

https://www.webdesignmuseum.org/software/futuresplash-animat...

https://web.archive.org/web/20070509070443/http://www.adobe....
by slackware_linux | 2025-05-30 14:16:54+00:00
Incredible value here, thanks for sharing Aline. The book itself is a wonderful resource, not just for the technical chapters but the rest on resumes and reaching out etc. Even the technical portion provides the framework (boundary thinking, triggers, etc.) which is above and beyond basically any other resource online or in print. The AI interviewer is also super useful and the 'book' section of the site is very well put together. 10/10.
by imaginationra | 2025-05-30 14:17:34+00:00
No I don't see it as theft- in that I choose to not be a part of the formal film industry- I don't "monetize" any of my work- I have nothing that can be stolen but my aesthetics- but aesthetics are dead imo- they no longer have value- as an artist my ideas are what is valuable- and no ML/AI etc can "steal" my ideas as I haven't thought of them yet- my art and ideas are an expression of my soul- no machine will ever have a soul so I'm not threatened one bit my Ai etc
by Peroni | 2025-05-30 14:17:57+00:00
I'm really struggling with Amodei's position because it feels like he (and lots of others) are essentially saying that either AI won't create more job opportunities OR that AI will automatically replace the roles it displaces.

I find both of those positions to be pretty naive which instinctively makes me feel like I'm missing something people way smarter than me (like Amodei) can see but yet never seems to be articulated in these articles.