MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by hungmung | 2025-05-27 00:32:28+00:00
I've had to do this several times, it's really the best way to handle birds and bats that get into your home -- just toss the towel on top of it and pick it up. Another trick if a bird flies into your window and stuns itself, you can pick it up with a towel and place it in a (closed) cardboard box outside in the shade so they can recover without a ton of sensory input/stressors, you just have to make sure predators don't get into it.

(If you ever have to relocate a bat, don't just leave them on the ground, they can't take off from there and will almost certainly die. Put them in a tree or somewhere higher up)
by djoldman | 2025-05-27 00:34:10+00:00
Basically it comes to this: a sufficiently large proportion of a student's grade must come from work impossible to generate with AI, e.g. in-person testing.

Unfortunately, 18-year-olds generally can't be trusted to go a whole semester without succumbing to the siren call of easy GenAI A's. So even if you tell them that the final will be in-person, some significant chunk of them will still ChatGPT their way through and bomb the final.

Therefore, professors will probably have to have more frequent in-person tests so that students get immediate feedback that they're gonna fail if they don't actually learn it.
by 0xbadcafebee | 2025-05-27 00:35:17+00:00
The ideal solution for health checks is to set both a maximum timeout duration, and a maximum number of retries. Typically you would want to fail after X retries first, and up to Y time (to account for network weirdness). But you definitely want to fail earlier, and not just wait for a long-ass time to pass before you finally fail.

That's for a standard service health check anyway. That service and health check shouldn't be started until the container it depends on has started and is healthy. In Kubernetes that's an Init Container in a Pod, in AWS ECS that's a dependsOn stanza in your Task Container Definition, and for Docker Compose it's the depends_on stanza in a Services entry.

set -eu nowtime="$(date +%s)" maxwait=300 maxloop=5 c=0 while [ $c -lt $maxloop ] ; do if timeout "$maxwait" curl --silent --fail-with-body 10.0.0.1:8080/health ; then exit 0 else sleep 1 fi if [ "$(date +%s)" -gt "$((nowtime+maxwait))" ] ; then echo "$0: Error: max wait time $maxwait exceeded" exit 1 fi c=$((c+1)) done

However, Curl already supports this natively so there's no need to write a script.

curl --silent --fail-with-body --connect-timeout 5 --retry-all-errors --retry-delay 1 --retry-max-time 300 --retry 300 10.0.0.1:8080/health
by duxup | 2025-05-27 00:36:49+00:00
>parents warned

It's not really the point of the article (some of these folks in the story are adults) but I was thinking about this.

I always wonder about these warnings to parents, if they have any use.

Are any parents who would hear / listen to such a warning have kids at who are seriously at risk?

As a parent I hear other parents talk about various risks, and I always think "Uh ... yeah your kid is the last kid I think would do that." and so on. The parents who are less present / have other challenges / aren't connected with their kids, they aren't bringing these things up.
by AStonesThrow | 2025-05-27 00:37:09+00:00
Did someone say "religious"?

https://computer.rip/2020-06-14-manifest-telephone.html

I said that religion does not thrive under capitalism, and of course this was the fate met by the Bell system. The breakup of the Bell system in 1982 occurred primarily in response to their very high rates, which were (accurately) seen as symptomatic of the monopoly they enjoyed.

CNBC Reporting Live from Jack Welch's funeral, March 5, 2020: https://youtu.be/6opKFgvRzjE?si=ynbAEYEZBCzfuTqE

Nobody is wearing masks, but there is a lot of name-dropping by the field reporter, Robert Frank, and a full obituary in the dooblydoo; don't miss them
by theptip | 2025-05-27 00:37:09+00:00
I wonder if we need some new affordances to help with these sorts of issue. While folks want a single uber-agent, can we make things better with partitioned sub-agents? Eg "hire" a DevRel agent to handle all your public facing interactions on public repos. But don’t give them any private access. Your internal SWE agents then can get firewalled from much of the untrusted input on the public web.

Essentially back to the networking concepts of firewalls and security perimeters; until we have the tech needed to harden each agent properly.
by rbanffy | 2025-05-27 00:38:23+00:00
> People seem to complain about headaches trying to get it to work over samba with linux servers

A long time ago, when I had a bunch of 68k Macs, I had an AppleShare server running Debian. I even served MP3 files to iTunes using a DAAP service. At some point I set up a Time Machine system for the newer machines - the trick was to broadcast a specific machine type so that the Macs would recognise it.
by wyldfire | 2025-05-27 00:38:24+00:00
> I don’t agree with the guy on most things, but I really think many people mischaracterize him pretty severely.

I'm not so sure you're right about that. He's dishonest, corrupt, and vain. So a lot of the disgust that is directed his way seems well-deserved.

I would believe it if you told me that if he somehow proposed a policy that was for the genuine benefit of all of his constituents that some would knee-jerk oppose it. But -- due to his vanity and corruption - we'll never see that come to pass.
by AfterHIA | 2025-05-27 00:38:29+00:00
Just a little bit of encouragement: this is a really, really nice site that reminds me of growing up on the 1990's internet. You can tell you, "actually give a shit" about what you're sharing and that alone I think gives it credence and relevance. Don't let a silly thing like economics keep you from this worthwhile human achievement pal.
by squigz | 2025-05-27 00:39:01+00:00
> Perhaps we should reconsider the purpose of teaching. If one does not want to learn, why are we teaching them?

Certainly there's something to be said for reconsidering much of the purpose (and mechanisms) of post-secondary education, but we often 'force' children and young adults to do things they don't want to do for their own good. I think it's better we teach our children the importance of learning - the lack of which is what results in, as another commenter puts it, students viewing homework as "something they have to overcome"
by digi59404 | 2025-05-27 00:40:04+00:00
Self hosted GitLab with a self-hosted LLM Provider connected to GitLab powering GitLab Duo. This should ensure that the data never gets outside your network, is never used in training data, and still allows you/staff to utilize LLMs. If you don’t want to self host an LLM, you could use something like Amazon Q, but then you’re trusting Amazon to do right by you.

https://docs.gitlab.com/administration/gitlab_duo_self_hoste...
by folkrav | 2025-05-27 00:40:35+00:00
Canada is unusual in many ways, I’d say hehe. We never separated from the British like the colonies did, so the languages (quebecois French, too!) have kept a lot of British influences. About 2/3 of its relatively small population of 41 million lives in the first 100km north of the US border - an individual in British-Columbia is 8000km+ and 5-6 time zones away from someone in the Atlantic provinces. We’re similar to the US in how different every province can be from one another, I think.
by codethief | 2025-05-27 00:40:40+00:00
Just NixOS. When building the VM / live CD I copy my dotfiles into the Nix store and then during first boot-up I copy them into my home dir and set up symlinks.

The main reason I decided against home-manager was that it makes my simple symlink setup (~/.foo -> ~/.dotfiles/foo) virtually impossible: Symlinks will always point to the read-only Nix store in one way or another. See https://github.com/nix-community/home-manager/issues/3514 or one of the countless other tickets on the topic. Through this episode I also learned that home-manager isn't exactly well-documented, either, and also quite opinionated. (Which, to be fair, is not a bad thing – if it works for you, it probably works great.)

Finally, not using home-manager was also a risk management decision in that it's probably best to not go all-in on Nix, NixOS, home-manager etc. all at once. Start with the simplest possible config that gets you running, then iterate.
by duxup | 2025-05-27 00:42:47+00:00
>amid concerns America’s investment industry is caving in to pressure from the Trump administration to abandon basic principles of stewardship

I can't read the whole thing but I also don't know what that means.

He notes that they're not calling out the president, as far as I know people who work in the investment industry, it isn't part of their job to make public statements about POTUS, even if I'd like it if they would. It doesn't make them more or less responsible to do so or not.
by codethief | 2025-05-27 00:43:52+00:00
> unless the language has a very solid 'effect polymorphism' story.

That seems to be the premise, yeah. (See also the comment by the Ante author on polymorphism somewhere here in the thread.)

> The problem is, if you're using them for capabilities, it wouldn't just be an 'Await' effect: it would be an 'AwaitDatabase' effect and an 'AwaitFilesystem' effect and an 'AwaitNetwork' effect and an 'AwaitSubprocess' effect and....

I have to admit I will have to think about this a bit. It's already late over here and my brain is no longer working. :)
by djoldman | 2025-05-27 00:47:28+00:00
> If we are in the business of teaching, as in making people learn, exams are a pretty blunt and ineffective instrument.

I'm curious: what is fulfilling in your job as a math teacher? When students learn? When they're assigned grades that accurately reflect their performance? When they learn something with minimal as opposed to significant effort? Some combination?

I always thought teacher motivations were interesting. I'm sure there are fantastic professors who couldn't care less as to what grades they gave out at the end.
by pfdietz | 2025-05-27 00:47:40+00:00
I went to a presentation on the reintroduction of the bald eagle to New York state. When handling young eagles, the presenter (then much younger) found the best way to immobilize them was stuff them into the leg of her pants (not when she was wearing the pants, mind you.)

She had to constantly do this as they fledged, since they couldn't get back up to the platform where the nest was. In the wild, the parents would continue to feed the young after they left the nest but before they could fly, but that wasn't practical for her to do.

The process of raising raptors from eggs is called "hacking", so it's entirely appropriate for this site. Normally done on hawks, this project showed it would work with eagles too.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/hack#dictionary-e...
by nicbou | 2025-05-27 00:48:21+00:00
Someone needs to experience the real world and translate it into LLM training data.

ChatGPT can’t know if the cafe around the corner has banana bread, or how it feels to lose a friend to cancer. It can’t tell you anything unless a human being has experienced it and written it down.

It reminds me of that scene from Good Will Hunting: https://www.imdb.com/de/title/tt0119217/quotes/?item=qt04081...
by programjames | 2025-05-27 00:48:27+00:00
There is, and people have trained purely optical neural networks:

https://arxiv.org/abs/2208.01623

The real issue is trying to backpropagate those nonlinear optics. You need a second nonlinear optical component that matches the derivative of the first nonlinear optical component. In the paper above, they approximate the derivative by slightly changing the parameters, but that means the training time scales linearly with the number of parameters in each layer.

Note: the authors claim it takes O(sqrt N) time, but they're forgetting that the learning rate mu = o(1/sqrt N) if you want to converge to a minimum:

Loss(theta + dtheta) = Loss(theta) + dtheta * dLoss(theta) + O(dtheta^2) = Loss(theta) + mu * sqrtN * C (assuming Lipschitz continuous) ==> min(Loss) = mu * sqrtN * C/2
by rbanffy | 2025-05-27 00:50:34+00:00
> I know what you are saying. macOS is UNIX. macOS is a desktop OS

Apple is the only (significant) hardware company making only Unix desktops. Neither Dell nor Lenovo have more than a couple specific offerings.

> The same market forces have led to the creation of the Windows Subsystem for Linux.

WSL is a way for Microsoft to prevent migration to Linux by providing a Linux environment on Windows. It makes Windows bearable to a Unix user, the same way Cygwin does (although Cygwin is a more elegant approach).

> Apple realized the NeXT vision

Modern Apple IS NeXT. MacOS is a direct descendant of OPENSTEP. Apple may have paid money for NeXT, but it’s more like NeXT acquired Apple - everyone at the top of NeXT landed top positions at Apple.
by pentagrama | 2025-05-27 00:50:45+00:00
A good strategy can involve betting on alternative distribution channels beyond search engines. Here are some ideas:

- Newsletters. You own your audience and your list is portable and interoperable.

- PWAs with push notifications. Be careful not to overwhelm users with too many messages. Make opt-out options easy to find.

- Door flyers with QR codes. A return to the basics that can still be effective.

- Social media. Still useful, but its reach and engagement seem to be declining.
by sn9 | 2025-05-27 00:51:14+00:00
It's unambiguously true that some amount of math beyond high school like that studied in Discrete Mathematics is essential for computer science.

That's not the same thing as being essential for programming.

That being said, studying more CS will only open more doors for you, giving you the tools to solve ever more complex problems, or the ability to recognize when something is effectively impossible.

It's not gatekeeping to point out that a field of knowledge will help you access other fields of knowledge. It's an invitation.
by fy20 | 2025-05-27 00:51:42+00:00
I'd say the main reason is that Europe has been doing it longer and they don't outsource.

In Europe the biggest suppliers of public transportation vehicles and equipment are Siemens (Germany), Alstom (France), Solaris (Poland), Hitachi Rail and Iveco (Italy), CAF (Spain). Each of these companies export products worldwide, and they have mature supply chains with the majority of parts sourced from Europe.

Plus Europe just has a lot more demand, meaning more experience in how to do it right. In the US there are maybe 25 cities with trams or light rail, in Europe there are over 300.
by kbolino | 2025-05-27 00:51:57+00:00
I think that physical media is already known as the weakest link in the chain today and is thus being phased out. While the studios were reticent to adopt streaming initially, I think they've realized it is actually easier to secure, and to keep secure over time.

I don't know if there are exploits against GPUs like those against SGX. It's much easier to update GPU firmware than BIOS/UEFI.
by ajross | 2025-05-27 00:52:14+00:00
> That's only your perception of groupthink. You read those threats looking for anti-Google bias, and you find it, because of course.

Or... maybe it's only your perception. You're engaged in groupthink and read headlines looking for Google crimes[1], and you find them, because of course. I mean, I'm the one citing evidence (literally the headline we're discussing). Your theory that we're actually seeing a general change in attitudes toward AI in the HN commenter community seems interesting! But... unsupported.

Occam says you're just engaged in apologia for the echo chamber, sorry.

[1] I mean, come on. "Burying the web alive" really seems like reasoned discourse to you? A real rationalist would enter this discussion with a prior that the ridiculous hyperbole is probably wrong, not "let's find ways to make the ridiculous hyperbole more reasonable".
by fenomas | 2025-05-27 00:52:17+00:00
Only guessing, but I have a theory that Mojang considered that circa 2017 :D

In 2019 they released a web version of minecraft classic, as a quirky marketing thing for the game's anniversary. But what they released turned out to be built on my open-source voxel engine, and when I dug around their code I realized they'd yoinked my engine a solid two years earlier.

And the demo they released was probably not two year's of work, so my theory is that somebody at Mojang investigated the idea of minecraft-but-JS, and made a demo but then decided not to pursue it, and then later on it got recycled for the marketing demo. (which, annoyingly for me, they pretended was an old alpha build of Minecraft instead of a new thing built on open source.)

The demo is still live, though the multiplayer stopped working the same day it launched:

https://classic.minecraft.net/
by AfterHIA | 2025-05-27 00:52:26+00:00
What exactly do you mean, "analogous to our own" and, "in a deep way" without making an appeal to magic or non-yet discovered fields of science? I understand what you're saying but when you scrutinize these things you end up in a place that's less scientific than one might think. That kind of seems to be one of Chomsky's salient points; we really, really need to get a handle on when we're doing science in the contemporary Kuhnian sense and philosophy.

The AI works on English, C++, Smalltalk, Klingon, nonsense, and gibberish. Like Turing's paper this illustrates the difference between, "machines being able to think" and, "machines being able to demonstrate some well understood mathematical process like pattern matching."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computing_Machinery_and_Intell...
by dgfitz | 2025-05-27 00:53:38+00:00
Way back like 25 years ago in what we call high school in the US, my statistics teacher tried her damndest to make final exams fair. I said next to someone I had a huge crush on, and offered to take their exam for them. I needed a ‘c’ to ace the class, and she needed an ‘a’ to pass. 3 different tests and sets of questions/scantrons. I got her the grade she needed, she did not get me the grade I needed.

So to your point, it’s easy to cheat even if the proctor tries to prevent it.
by turtletontine | 2025-05-27 00:54:43+00:00
I’m similarly worried about businesses all making “rational” decisions to replace their employees with “AI”, wherever they think they can get away with it. (Note that’s not the same thing as wherever “AI” can do the job well!)

But I think one place where this hits a wall is liability and accountability. Lots of low stakes things will be enshittified by “AI” replacements for actual human work. But for things like airline pilots, cancer diagnoses, heart surgery - the cost of mistakes is so large, that humans in the loop are absolutely necessary. If nothing else, at least as an accountability shield. A company that makes a tumor-detector black box wants to be an assistive tool to improve doctor’s “efficiency”, not the actual front line medical care. If the tool makes a mistake, they want no liability. They want all the blame on the doctor for trusting their tool and not double checking its opinion. I hear that’s why a lot of “AI” tools in medicine are actually reducing productivity: double checking an “AI’s” opinion is more work than just thinking and evaluating with your own brain.
by mdaniel | 2025-05-27 00:55:34+00:00
The cited claim about python mangling dunders is 100% not my experience

> If a class member starts with two leading underscores, then it really is private. The language will name mangle it to make it inaccessible.

$ cat > jimbo.py <<PY __to_whom__ = "world" def __hello(): return __to_whom__ PY python3 -c ' import jimbo print(dir(jimbo)) print(jimbo.__to_whom__) ' ['__builtins__', '__cached__', '__doc__', '__file__', '__hello', '__loader__', '__name__', '__package__', '__spec__', '__to_whom__'] world

and, just on the off chance they really meant "class member" I tried that, too

$ cat jimbo.py; python3 -c 'import jimbo print(dir(jimbo.s)) print(jimbo.s.__to_whom__) ' class Sekrit: __to_whom__ = "world" def __hello(self): return self.__to_whom__ s = Sekrit() ['_Sekrit__hello', '__class__', '__delattr__', '__dict__', '__dir__', '__doc__', '__eq__', '__firstlineno__', '__format__', '__ge__', '__getattribute__', '__getstate__', '__gt__', '__hash__', '__init__', '__init_subclass__', '__le__', '__lt__', '__module__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__reduce__', '__reduce_ex__', '__repr__', '__setattr__', '__sizeof__', '__static_attributes__', '__str__', '__subclasshook__', '__to_whom__', '__weakref__'] world
by jxf | 2025-05-27 00:55:39+00:00
This is a beautiful demonstration of how technology can be simple and powerful for amplifying a message at the same time -- no matter the silliness or seriousness of the message. Very "Old Web" vibes.

Anyone who's worked on random enterprise CRUD REST apps earlier in their career (myself included) knows the pain of wishing that you were doing something a little more helpful or positive for humanity.
by majormajor | 2025-05-27 00:56:50+00:00
> What about actual live events? My impression is that Twitch and YouTube livestreaming are using a 10-30 second delay relative to realtime, specifically to allow for significant buffering on the client, and then using reliable TCP faster-than-realtime downloads of the "near future" of the video content. Since these streams are purely unidirectional, users don't have a way to notice that they're not literally live. (I don't understand how this interacts with the typical ability to start watching almost instantly, with no visible buffering delay, though.)

For TV, last I worked on a system like this the clients received data the same way as non-live streams: Http streaming (HLS or Dash), where you fetch playlists and small video files and the player stitches them all together. There's buffering along the pipe, the 30-60s total delay (which you'll notice if you watch sports and chat with someone who has cable and is watching the same thing) is a cumulative thing, so you don't see a 1-min startup delay, you just near-instantly get dropped into something that's already quite a bit behind.

Not sure what Twitch does. The over-the-network video game streaming-console services are obviously completely different from TV land, they couldn't get away with it there; but for TV the expense of better isn't seen worth it.
by alexjplant | 2025-05-27 00:56:50+00:00
> What do you think?

I know that I've had Copilot make up non-existent methods in the AWS Golang v2 SDK. It also routinely fabricates IAM Actions, AWS managed policies, and Terraform attributes for AWS resources. In a similar vein Claude also made up non-existent kwargs for LlamaIndex methods when I was building a toy RAG implementation last weekend. LLMs are force multipliers but still require supervision because they hallucinate; I see no reason why they couldn't be told about new frameworks on the fly and perform similarly "good enough". They clearly aren't perfect at leveraging the knowledge contained in their weights from their training corpus.

I suspect that as LLM coding tools mature it'll get easier to incorporate framework documentation into queries and mitigate these issues. The last time I used Continue earlier this year it let you add React docs to chat queries so I don't think we're far off.
by AfterHIA | 2025-05-27 00:58:25+00:00
I like to think of the painter who's trained in classical design; they spend their time thinking about Baroque diagonals and golden ratios. They have a, "deep knowledge" of how paintings are classically organized. One day they encounter a strange machine that can produce any image they wish-- without considering the economic impact this would have on their craft he is often asked, "isn't this machine a marvel?" His reply is often, "it sheds no light for me on why certain ratios produce beautiful forms, it tells me nothing of the inspired mind of poets, nor of the nature of the Good."

In Plato's Republic Socrates' compares the ability to produce a piece of furniture with the ability to produce the image of a cabient or so-forth with a small compact mirror; what is the difference if a deceivable crowd doesn't know the difference?