MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by isr | 2025-05-16 02:55:10+00:00
FYI, for those who may not be aware, moonscript is the "coffeescript" for lua. It has been in production use for quite a while (the author of moonscript also created itch.io, using ... moonscript).

yuescript, from the dora-ssr game engine dev, is essentially moonscript-2.0

And of course, if you want to treat lua as the scheme-like it really is (deep down), then ... fennel.

Lots of choices. They all compile to straightforward lua, are very easy to incorporate (you can even compile at runtime, if you wish), and all employ full lua semantics, meaning zero runtime overhead

EDIT: and the curse of not reading fully ahead strikes again (doh!). Someone else has made the same points below ...
by Joel_Mckay | 2025-05-16 02:55:51+00:00
Fertility care often already included testing for common genetic disorders, and parents with a history of severe disease would often make the hard choice to try again. Due to recent Theocratic political shifts, it means more families will face the worst possible life for their children.

Gattaca was a film years ahead of its time, and raises the question of what happens when people try to "fix" human beings beyond disease prevention. A subtle, but important ethical difference. =3
by wffurr | 2025-05-16 02:56:31+00:00
>> They are not used because somehow all countries pretty much agreed they’re way TOO effective and horrific

That’s the story but it doesn’t hold up. Chemical weapons were used as recently as the Syrian civil war. I also think if they were really effective in modern warfare, Russia would have long ago deployed them in Ukraine.

More here: https://acoup.blog/2020/03/20/collections-why-dont-we-use-ch...
by rob74 | 2025-05-16 03:01:17+00:00
That's all very cool, but there are also articles like this one: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/feb/20/trump-nih-cu... - I'm not able to read the Times article because it's paywalled, but as other commenters have mentioned, this research was funded by the NIH, which the Trump administration is currently in the process of defunding. So, if further progress along this road will be made, it'll probably be much slower and less likely to be in the US.
by cyberax | 2025-05-16 03:02:20+00:00
This can really take off once self-driving matures. The _main_ problem with freight train is not their speed or the rail track throughput, but the time it takes to sort the train cars ("dwell time"). It's so bad, that the average car "speed" can be around 10 km/h. Or even slower.

And the railroads do not particularly care about optimizing their network, they are content to milk the bulk hauls for as much profit as they can. My friend worked at a startup that tried to pitch fully automated couplers to rail companies. They didn't care, even though it could have cut the dwell time significantly.

But if the improvements can be made on the _cargo_ side, then it's a different story.
by refulgentis | 2025-05-16 03:03:23+00:00
Well, I wouldn't put it that way as long as we're correcting the record. It was always the boring moving dirt company, never pivoted, but it grew a cancer that became Too Big To Fail because it was more profitable than moving dirt.

- it did boring non-tech big industry stuff

- it was good at this

- it started an in-house hedging department (normal)

- they were good at their jobs and accidentally created a massive speculative trading business that fell apart
by pansa2 | 2025-05-16 03:03:47+00:00
Am I right in thinking that Python's type annotation syntax originally came from Mypy though?

IIRC Mypy started off as a type annotation syntax and corresponding type checker for Python. Mypy's type annotations were adopted by Python itself (in version 3.5 - PEP 484), which reduced Mypy's role to be just a type checker.

Since then, type annotations have indeed become a core part of Python - not only are they used in frameworks and libraries, but are also required to use language features like @dataclass.
by burnt-resistor | 2025-05-16 03:04:06+00:00
Correct. The problem is arrogance doesn't guarantee results either but it sure seems to over-promise to the point of fraud more often than not. Perhaps the Ivy business schools should make an effort to mint MBAs who have real world experience rather churn out Dunning-Kruger effect specimens who believe they have a special monopoly on "the answer".
by Yiling-J | 2025-05-16 03:04:44+00:00
Seems like there are more and more fake stars on GitHub these days. For example, this one: https://github.com/Hammerock?tab=stars, this https://github.com/MacKeepUS?tab=stars and this https://github.com/Hirakok?tab=stars. These people seem to be engineers from tech giants, but they all starred risesoft-y9/Digital-Infrastructure, WuKongOpenSource and Heygem, which seems weird. I think there's a 90% chance these are fake stars from bots.
by acheron9383 | 2025-05-16 03:06:23+00:00
I mean the EEs / MEs can certainly turn out a board and housing in under 6 months, certainly on a yearly cycle. Though for the current automakers, they don't have a team for this so it would take them probably 3 iterations to get good enough to actually scale it to a mass market car, and that is if their team has good talent and strong leadership.
by CobrastanJorji | 2025-05-16 03:08:18+00:00
It's frankly bonkers how many insane success-at-long-odds stories NASA has and how few "we made a stupid mistake and everything exploded" stories NASA has.

For every Climate Orbiter "we made an oopsie converting metric to imperial" story, there are three "we figured out how to get the crew of Apollo 13 to fit a square peg into a round hole and they can breath now" miracles.

I mean, sure, there's Apollo 1's "we put people and a bunch of wires in a pressurized can of pure oxygen", but there's also the Perseverance Rover's "we made a crane that holds itself aloft with rockets and lowers a one ton rover gently to the ground on a tether."
by perihelions | 2025-05-16 03:09:32+00:00
"The backup roll thrusters in use are now at risk due to residue buildup in their fuel lines, which could cause failure as early as this fall."

If anyone was curious where residue comes from in hypergolic fuel systems, the answer is it's SiO2 (silica) from decaying rubber components,

"After 47 years, a fuel tube inside the thrusters has become clogged with silicon dioxide, a byproduct that appears with age from a rubber diaphragm in the spacecraft’s fuel tank".

┕ https://science.nasa.gov/missions/voyager-program/voyager-1/...

An HN commenter tracked down relevant documentation on NTRS,

"They expel the Hydrazine(N2H4) fuel out of a spherical Ti tank by inflating a rubber balloon that involve Teflon inside the tank using helium supply. I guess N2H4 was potent enough to degrade even those space age materials."

https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/19810001583/downloads/19...

┕ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41525267
by matheusmoreira | 2025-05-16 03:10:17+00:00
They just think you have lots of dead code because of silly undefined behavior nonsense.

char *allocate_a_string_please(int n) { if (n + 1 < n) return 0; // overflow return malloc(n + 1); // space for the NUL }

This code seems okay at first glance, it's a simple integer overflow check that makes sense to anyone who reads it. The addition will overflow when n equals INT_MAX, it's going to wrap around and the function will return NULL. Reasonable.

Unfortunately, we cannot have nice things because of optimizing compilers and the holy C standard.

The compiler "knows" that signed integer overflow is undefined. In practice, it just assumes that integer overflow cannot ever happen and uses this "fact" to "optimize" this program. Since signed integers "cannot" overflow, it "proves" that the condition always evaluates to false. This leads it to conclude that both the condition and the consequent are dead code.

Then it just deletes the safety check and introduces potential security vulnerabilities into the software.

They had to add literal compiler builtins to let people detect overflow conditions and make the compiler actually generate the code they want it to generate.

Fighting the compiler's assumptions and axioms gets annoying at some point and people eventually discover the mercy of compiler flags such as -fwrapv and -fno-strict-aliasing. Anyone doing systems programming with strict aliasing enabled is probably doing it wrong. Can't even cast pointers without the compiler screwing things up.
by bigyabai | 2025-05-16 03:11:02+00:00
But that's already been principally undermined by PRISM compliance, NSO Group and Tim Cook's hunky-dory relations with Donald Trump.

Users don't actually care about security. They don't even know what it looks like, or how to assess it. They do care about the Jungian shadow of security, vulnerability, which is what Apple's marketing instills in them as a customer: https://youtu.be/0HjDpPnxcP0

So, it's not existential at all. Apple could announce tomorrow that the CIA has unfettered access to all iCloud data, and Apple's customers wouldn't perceive any real alternative. Not because there aren't secure alterantives - but because they were taught that Apple knows best, and without them they're powerless to choose for themselves. This is the critical danger of becoming reliant on a commercialized "protection" service, both online and in real life.
by pton_xd | 2025-05-16 03:11:37+00:00
Nice! There's a few techniques that I remember when doing something similar. Subgoal graphs [0], using precalculated landmarks in the heuristic [1], and theta* [2] may be worth looking into. A bunch of other variations and techniques are on the Red Blob Games site [3]. Also the priority queue implementation you use can really impact performance if it's not done well.

[0] https://www.gameaipro.com/GameAIPro2/GameAIPro2_Chapter15_Su...

[1] https://www.redblobgames.com/pathfinding/heuristics/differen...

[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20190717211246/http://aigamedev....

[3] https://theory.stanford.edu/~amitp/GameProgramming/
by nullc | 2025-05-16 03:13:16+00:00
From accounts it seems likely that they completely squandered that opportunity covering up for the exaggerations and fraud.

If at the start there had been, at least internally, an honest view of: We have no idea how to do this, existing technology won't do this, we must make a breakthrough-- and then spent 15 years grinding on that then there might be a chance.

But even then it would just be a chance. It might well be the case that what they were promising is only possible through molecular nanotechnology or some other kind of breakthrough that was entirely outside the domain of their research and which has still not yet been accomplished.

Even the new company's pitch supports that: They credit AI as an integral part of their supposed solution. Was Theranos spending those 15 years working on anything we'd call AI today? probably not.
by invalidname | 2025-05-16 03:16:06+00:00
The problem is bad articles like this are in effect making things far worse for the Palestinians by pushing Israel to the right. Here's the flip side: https://www.msn.com/en-ca/news/world/icc-decided-to-charge-n...

Corrupt people like Khan inadvertently give Netanyahu legitimacy and hurt the voices within Israel that are trying to stop him. Biased reporting like the BBC is responsible is a huge part of the problem.
by theendisney | 2025-05-16 03:16:14+00:00
I once ran into a website about some french industrialist who made a hundred drawings of roads and rail mixed with vehicles that looked like they belonged in some epic cartoon. Im sure his version would be a very long passenger or cargo train (probably both) with the roof exactly the height of the road. Trucks would drive onto the roof and park all the way to the front. Then the train would dive deep into the grounds because gravity is free.
by skissane | 2025-05-16 03:16:15+00:00
> The is no year 0, it goes 1 BC, 1 AD. So testing whether 0 is a leap year is moot.

Not true if you use astronomical year numbering: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astronomical_year_numbering

Which is arguably the right thing to do outside of specific domains (such as history) in which BCE is entrenched

If your software really has to display years in BCE, I think the cleanest way is store it as astronomical year numbering internally, then convert to CE/BCE on output
Ask HN: Do startup founders/teams care about health during stressful times?
by Bkimmy16 | 2025-05-16 03:16:32+00:00
I created a way for myself to send me a quick telegram message daily for tracking things that I value as healthy (did i take morning vitamins, did I run, did I go to the gym) because i want to stay healthy and look good even through tough times. Then it stores these forums i quickly answer each day in an excel sheet then at the end of the week i use ai to analyze my health goals and then my input from my daily forums to track how well I'm taking care of myself and the ai gives me strategies on how to enhance or what I'm lacking on. Im curious though if other founders and teams care enough about these health aspects in stressful times like in launch and how they take care of themselves.
by hbbio | 2025-05-16 03:17:19+00:00
That's why in practice you need more than this simple loop!

Pretty much WIP, but I am experimenting with simple sequence-based workflows that are designed to frequently reset the conversation [2]

This goes well with Microsoft paper "LLMs Get Lost In Multi-Turn Conversation " that was published Friday [1].

- [1]: https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.06120

- [2]: https://github.com/hbbio/nanoagent/blob/main/src/workflow.ts
by 90s_dev | 2025-05-16 03:18:11+00:00
> Douglass used a keyboard similar to that of a typewriter to select the corresponding style, gender and age of the laugh as well as a pedal to time the length of the reaction. Inside the machine was a wide array of recorded chuckles, yocks and belly laughs: 320 laughs on 32 tape loops, ten to a loop. Each loop contained up to ten individual audience laughs spliced end-to-end, whirling around simultaneously waiting to be cued up.

Guy was clearly an inventor at heart.
by const_cast | 2025-05-16 03:19:15+00:00
> I haven't found anything, except that all vegan organizations recommend supplementing vegan diets with industrially synthesized B-12.

For those of us who are particularly frightened by fallacies of nature, have no fear: we already do this with a ton of nutrients and have for a long time. Iodine being the most obvious example. But almost every piece of food you can buy is going to be enriched in some way, even things like soda!
by kunzhi | 2025-05-16 03:19:46+00:00
Of course Holmes will have a second act. Just look at Adam Neumann. Goof up, wait it out bit, come back.

To me it seems very obvious that Holmes is slowly but surely building her charm offensive. Nice articles in the New York Times showing her with her husband.

Theranos defrauding people is just an unfortunate footnote in her career.

I would not be surprised if within the next few years we see Holmes in a government position.
by ajjenkins | 2025-05-16 03:21:12+00:00
I’m not an expert in physics, but this seems like a misguided critique to me. My understanding is that physicists aren’t looking for “new” physics because they’re trying to upend established physics, but because they’re trying to reconcile “inconsistencies” in the standard model. Like reconciling quantum physics with general relativity. We need new physics because we know there are gaps in our current understanding of the universe. I haven’t heard about many attempts to disprove established physics. Theoretical physicists aren’t looking just trying to fill the gaps in the model.
by zahlman | 2025-05-16 03:21:41+00:00
Where do people on HN meet these devs who are willing to do this sort of thing, and get anxious about being 3 months behind the latest and greatest?

In my world, they were given 9 years to switch to Python 3 even if you write off 3.0 and 3.1 as premature, and they still missed by years, and loudly complained afterwards.

And they still can't be bothered to learn what a `pyproject.toml` is, let alone actually use it for its intended purpose. One of the most popular third-party Python libraries (Requests), which is under stewardship by the PSF, which uses only Python code, had its "build" (no compilation - purely a matter of writing metadata, shuffling some files around and zipping it up) broken by the removal of years-old functionality in Setuptools that they weren't even actually remotely reliant upon. Twice, in the last year.
by -__---____-ZXyw | 2025-05-16 03:22:03+00:00
a. Primogenitor is a nice word!

b. Wigner's original essay is a serious piece, and quite beautiful in its arguments. I had been under the impression that the phrasing had been used a few times since, but typically by other serious people who were aware of the lineage of that lovely essay. With this 6-paragraph vibey-blog-post, it truly has become a meme. So it goes, I suppose.
by const_cast | 2025-05-16 03:22:19+00:00
> you get cancer from everything you touch these days, what you eat is no issue

Nonsense, processed red meats are the same group of carcinogen as Tobacco and Alcohol. That is to say, the most carcinogenic substances we know of.

> less heart disease - you drink carrot shakes while you exercise vs you eat steaks while you sit behind table...

I have no idea what this means, but it's just plainly true that diets high in saturated fats are going to contribute more to obesity, heart disease, liver disease, metabolic syndrome, and some others.
by Sharlin | 2025-05-16 03:22:23+00:00
Cool! (Just to be clear, I meant the common, or Eurasian, teal whose iridescent green head markings the color’s apparently named after. The NA teals are closely related, although it seems they were assigned to their own genus in 2009 as it was discovered that the then-Anas was not monophyletic.)

Generally colors are named after things in nature and not the other way around, given that the latter would’be had names for a long time, and most color names are comparatively recent inventions, driven by modern dyes and pigments and status, fashion, etc concerns. A West European peasant in the 11th century would’ve known the bird well, possibly trapped them for food, but would’ve had very little need for a separate word for ”blue-green”.

The history of color words is quite interesting. There’s a specific progression that almost all languages have gone through. It’s fairly well known that many East Asian languages don’t have separate names for ”blue” and ”green” at all (except as modern loans). Accordingly, they don’t usually make the distinction mentally, one could think that they simply consider them hues of ”cyan”.
by MichaelRo | 2025-05-16 03:22:38+00:00
>> Of all the warts, they all pale in comparison to the default initialization behavior.

Come on. That's nothing compared to the horrors that lay in manual memory management. Like I've never worked with a C++ based application that doesn't have crashes lurking all around, so bad that even a core dump leaves you clueless as to what's happening. Couple OOP involving hundreds of classes and 50 levels deep calls with 100s of threads and you're hating your life when trying to find the cause for yet another crash.
by winddude | 2025-05-16 03:23:00+00:00
I'm being pydantic, "So unlike the thermostat in your house, which doesn’t have to contend with any other control systems, all of the governors of the mind have to fight with each other constantly.", but what about automated blinds, self tinting windows, automatic skylights, humidistats, and humans open and closing windows.

It's also important to note that other control systems in the body that affect control systems in the mind, eg. endocrine.
by pclmulqdq | 2025-05-16 03:23:10+00:00
Theranos was a bit too early to its idea, and while they were flailing around trying to get customers with the Edison, microfluidic testing became a reality. It was done by the "old" medical device companies that Theranos was supposed to disrupt. It turned out they were the competent ones.

It is entirely possible to spend 15 years doing absolutely nothing of value.
by acheron9383 | 2025-05-16 03:23:27+00:00
When you design electronics you have to produce millions of, it takes a couple of dev 'spins' and usually a couple of prod 'spins' to get to the mass market board. Usually the PMs, EEs, MEs and SWEs get together and spec out a schematic, then the EEs will create the first draft of the board. There is usually extra connectors and test points on this board to ease testing and development. Once they verify it powers on, I as an embedded software engineer, start producing the software to get it running, or 'brought up'. While that is happening EE testing is going on for all sorts of things like EMI, power, communication speeds, etc. Besides the software I actually write, the chipset vendor's drivers need to be added and tested as well, there are always little things that take longer than they should. I've lost a lot of schedule to very subtle issues with chips. As we progress along, the schematic or layout gets updated and new versions are produced. Maybe the traces need to change to reduce EMI, maybe a chipset isn't workign well or we find a cheaper equivalent and swap it out. Then once everything looks good we move to a production version, all the test points are removed, and we start putting in orders for the parts we need in volume. If you want a million of something you usually have to order in advance. Then you start bringing the factory online, helping with factory test software...and well the point is the cycle time for all this is like 6 months for a tight ship. More like a year if the kind of thing your making is novel to the team since you need a longer dev time.
by Sophira | 2025-05-16 03:24:33+00:00
There's another problem here that I haven't seen anyone talking about, and that's the futility of trying to distinguish between "good bots" and "bad bots".

The idea of Anubis is to stop bots that are meant to gather data for AI purposes. But you know who has a really big AI right now? Google. And you know who are the people who have the most bots indexing the web for their search engine? Yup, Google.

All these discussions have been assuming that Googlebot is a "good bot", but what exactly is stopping Google from using the data from Googlebot to feed Gemini? After all, nobody's going to block Googlebot, for obvious reasons.

At most, surely the only thing that blocking AI bots will do is stop locally-running bots, or stop OpenAI (because they don't have any other legitimate reason to be running bots over the web).
by aussieguy1234 | 2025-05-16 03:25:23+00:00
Given how little customer support agents in cheaper countries are paid, i'm surprised this type of serious attack has not happened sooner.

Corruption in these countries is extremely common. We're used to having a government that actually works in western countries. In these cheaper countries, bribes are routine and almost unavoidable.

Given the culture of corruption and how little the support agents are paid, it was only a matter of time before some bad actor tried to bribe them. Medical bills are expensive and need to be paid, making the agents highly vulnerable to this type of attack.

For many, the choice would be to accept the bribe, or let their sick child suffer from a treatable condition.

Now that a high profile attack has happened, expect copycat attacks from other bad actors.
by jjk166 | 2025-05-16 03:25:46+00:00
How much does a swarm of extremely long range jet ski robots with hardened military electronics and large explosives packages cost?

Getting enough of anything that can do serious damage to a ship to overwhelm the defenses is going to be an expensive undertaking. Maybe if some idiot sails a $10 billion aircraft carrier close to shore such a mass attack is justified, but it is simply not at all evident that "some success engaging Russian surface warships" equates to posing a serious threat to modern navies.