MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by wys2wyg | 2025-05-20 23:52:56+00:00
Verizon made an update to its privacy policies. Account holders’ email addresses are no more private. Also, the option opt out keeps reverting back to “allow”. Their policy now startes: “We may disclose, or allow certain third-party advertising and analytics companies to collect personal information such as your email address, information about your purchase of products and services from us, and information about your activity on our sites and in our apps. These companies may use your email address, or other information they collect to create one or more identifiers associated with you, your household or your device(s) both on and off our sites and in our apps.”
by pxc | 2025-05-20 23:57:09+00:00
I built something like this out using an old version of Dagger and found it enormously complicated, and the they rewrote everything and abandoned the version of Dagger I used.

When I they did, I said "fuck it" and just started distributing a Nix flake with wrappers for all the tools I want to run in CI so that at least that part gets handled safely and is easy to run locally.

The worst and most annoying stuff to test is the CI platforms' accursed little pseudo-YAML DSLs. I still would like that piece.

devenv.sh tasks might be a good basis for building on it. I think maybe bob.build also wants to be like this
by al_borland | 2025-05-20 23:57:14+00:00
> if you work on a company mac and don't have install privileges.

I’ve found installing apps to ~/Applications to be a way around this. It doesn’t require the admin rights that installing to /Applications does.

The app is only installed for the user, instead of all users, but that’s not an issue for a single user system. I haven’t run into any issues so far.

Even for app I can install to /Applications at work (via self service from IT), I opt to install many of them to ~/Applications anyway, as it allows the auto-updater to run without having to jump through hoops.

Your mileage may vary, if your company know about this and takes extra steps to lock things down beyond restricting admin rights.
by maxdamantus | 2025-05-20 23:57:19+00:00
Article title:

> Linguists Find Proof of Sweeping Language Pattern Once Deemed a ‘Hoax’

Abstract from the cited paper [0]:

> our work suggests that large-scale computational approaches to the topic can produce non-obvious and well-grounded insights about language and culture.

I think I'll continue to be sceptical of the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis.

[0] https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/qmgn8_v2
by QuadmasterXLII | 2025-05-20 23:57:43+00:00
sufficient: if entity A can build B who solves task C, then A can solve C by building B

necessary: if superintelligences are much smarter than humans and humans can build superintelligences, then superintelligences can build superintelligences

If humans categorically can’t build superintelligences, then its not that consequential for our definition of superintelligence to be wrong
by Tadpole9181 | 2025-05-20 23:57:51+00:00
I am not surprised by this reply, but at least I have clarified your lack of good faith to other viewers.

Elon clearly and assuredly did a Nazi salute. A man who has promoted Nazi rhetoric and who had his AI push Holocaust denial this week, whose time in government has been haphazardly destroying careers, dismantling oversight bodies, and having the president advertise his products.

The stills you provide clearly did not. And are people who have spent their lives fighting for civil rights, universal healthcare, and police reform.
by npalli | 2025-05-20 23:58:03+00:00
My reading was 640MiB was seen as some extraordinary upper bound that was unlikely to be breached in 1995 leaving lot of bits of the address bus for NV1 for quite some time. The 640 KiB seems definitely not a limit as even IBM PC/AT released in 1984! had an upper limit of 16MiB. So, as NV1's designer you could not assume 640KiB was some sort of upper bound on PC's of 1995 when designing the scheme. As to why 640MiB and not something else, I believe Windows 95 could address 2GB in theory but would start becoming unstable around 512MiB so maybe he chose 640MiB.

The whole thing a bit ironic since Bill Gates took great pains to say he never said 640KiB is all you need (or something like that). Given my example of the IBM PC/AT it definitely was not common understanding of upper limits in 1995 apocryphal or not.
by bionhoward | 2025-05-20 23:58:11+00:00
I think this could be worth it if:

we could have our chat histories with Gemini apps activity turned off (decouple the training from the storage) — including no googler eyeballs on our work chats (call this “confidential mode”)

Jules had a confidential mode for these folks (no googler eyeballs on our work code tasks)

Deep research connected to GitHub and was also confidential (don’t train on the codebase, don’t look at the codebase)

The other stuff (videos etc) are obviously valuable but not a big draw for me personally right now…

The biggest draw for me is trusting I can work on private code projects without compromise of security
by DiabloD3 | 2025-05-20 23:58:24+00:00
They need to reverse course on this immediately, along with removing all the other LLM-based technologies. No mentions of "AI" should appear anywhere in the OS.

According to the article, Microsoft will be able to read all of your prompts. For many Enterprise situations, having remote "AIs" having access to internal data is a security and data access violation and could lead to a mandatory disclosure (ie, HIPAA, GLBA, etc), and must install Windows with a group policy to hard disable the Copilot service from even existing, and now Microsoft wants to also require you to issue mandatory disclosures for non-remote "AIs" just because they slipped something new in quietly and, whoops, now it exfiltrated data to a remote server?

What the flying fuck, Microsoft? Your biggest customers are Enterprises! Stop attacking your customers!
by ori_b | 2025-05-20 23:58:52+00:00
> On-site, users type or dictate short notes (e.g. “rebar exposed east end of slab”), and the tool turns them into full sentences, paragraphs, tables, or photo captions in a report template that matches the firm’s format. You can work offline, and it syncs automatically when back online.

Why isn't the short note good enough? What value is the LLM contributing? Is it all stylistic filler?
by cco | 2025-05-20 23:59:14+00:00
Today Google launched a model, Gemma 3n, that performs about as good as SOTA models from 1-2 years ago that runs locally on a cell phone.

Training SOTA models will, like steel mills or other large industrial projects, require a lot of environmental footprint to produce. But my prediction is that over time the vast majority of use cases in the hands of users will be essentially run on device and be basically zero impact, both in monetary cost and environment.
by bawana | 2025-05-20 23:59:14+00:00
Here is a python script that plots on the Z axis - each number through an entire Collatz cycle until the result of 1, on the X axis - the number of cycles needed to get to 1, on the Y axis - add 1 for odd numbers, subtract 1 for even numbers. https://gist.github.com/bwanaaa/4c77b33311916b230c8b1891bab4...

You can open it in colab to visualize it. You can change the range of integers by modifying line 33 in the function def generate_all_sequences():

Interestingly, it seems there are more odd numbers than even ones in a collatz sequence as all graphs tend to the positive Y axis. All numbers tend to generate 3x as many odd results as even and they all seem to do this at this same rate.

In the first 750 integers, the number 703 reaches as high a collatz result as 250504.
by aspenmayer | 2025-05-21 00:00:10+00:00
Five years. That’s how long it took to resolve this, and Apple still has some appeals left. I hope Apple will open up the US App Store a bit more to be comparable with the EU App Store, but I’m not sure if they would ever do so willingly.

Previously, related:

Apple just kicked Fortnite off the App Store - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24146987 - August 2020 (1454 comments)
by asimops | 2025-05-21 00:02:39+00:00
Do they have to be journalists to look into something that is affecting the trust of their viewers?

Just like Gamers Nexus explained in their video, you can not trust the coverage of whatever Nvidia is pushing this way. You furthermore can not know what they might be pushing elsewhere, so you have to mistrust all Nvidia coverage.

IMHO that sucks and if Gamers Nexus wants to investigate, why shouldn't they?
by Liftyee | 2025-05-21 00:03:30+00:00
From my little experience I find this article's point to be true. I've been in a few organisations where the flow of people (students) is constant, so experience constantly leaves and mistakes get repeated (we haven't figured out a proper knowledge base). All one can do is try their best to transfer the experience before graduating, but taught lessons don't stick as deeply as firsthand learnings (with the associated toil...)
by rasz | 2025-05-21 00:04:51+00:00
Commodore wanted $1000 for a 1985 computer combined with single speed CDROM barely able to play 160×100@12Hz CDXL video and called it multimedia! It cost less to just buy external SCSI CDROM and SCSI controller + A500.

Playstation was a $350/$299 toy with a computing power delivering 3D experience only available in top end Arcades a year prior (Namco System 22). 60fps 3D gaming plus 320x240@30Hz ~MJPEG video playback. You couldnt buy anything with similar 3d power for a couple of years, closest would be $3000 top of the line 1997 PC (P200, dx5/glide).
by jcranmer | 2025-05-21 00:06:19+00:00
Given the ample reporting of Russian speakers in places like Odesa switching to speaking in Ukrainian as a result of the 2022 invasion to distance themselves from Russia, or the difficulty the Russian occupiers of Ukraine has had in finding people willing to work for them, or the fact that the current president of Ukraine is himself a Russian-speaking Ukrainian, or the fact that in the 1991 referendum, a majority of people in every Ukrainian oblast (including Crimea!) supported being a part of Ukraine rather than Russia, I don't think it's that hard to say what the general appetite of Russian-speaking Ukrainians becoming part of Russia is.

Or, to use an analogy with a different language, Putin's argument is akin to saying that a majority of Irishman want to be a part of England, because they speak English.

Don't confuse language for cultural identity.

(And, FWIW, I have fallen for this propaganda in the past; I've just been successfully educated since then as to why the simplistic linguistic map is fundamentally the wrong way to look at the conflict.)
by tuveson | 2025-05-21 00:06:28+00:00
There are plenty of places where it makes more sense to use DSLs (or where they’re flat-out required). SQL and regex both spring to mind. Pretty much any HTML templating language is simpler to use than concatenation a bunch of strings together. JSX is usually easier read than directly calling React functions directly. A line of a shell script can be much nicer (and more portable) than 20 lines of a more general purpose language.

Those are things that spring to mind that I think are unequivocally DSLs, but if you’re willing to consider markup languages as DSLs, the list could get a lot longer.
by danenania | 2025-05-21 00:07:18+00:00
It might not be as many API calls as you think. Taking OpenAI as an example, if you're using the most expensive models like o3, gpt-4.5, o1-pro, etc. heavily for coding in large codebases with lots of context, you can easily spend hundreds per month, or even thousands.

So for now, the pro plans are a good deal if you're using one provider heavily, in that you can theoretically get like a 90% discount on inference if you use it enough. They are essentially offering an uncapped amount of inference.

That said, these companies have every incentive to gradually reduce the relative value offered by these plans over time to make them profitable, and they have many levers they can use to accomplish that. So in the long run, API costs and 'pro plan' costs will likely start to converge.
by cj | 2025-05-21 00:09:00+00:00
If what you're saying is true, why are we hearing about AI companies wanting to build nuclear power plants to power new data centers they think they need to build?

Are you saying all of that new capacity is needed to power non-LLM stuff like classifiers, adtech, etc? That seems unlikely.

Had you said that inference costs are tiny compared to the upfront cost of training the base model, I might have believed it. But even that isn't accurate -- there's a big upfront energy cost to train a model, but once it becomes popular like GPT-4, the inference energy cost over time is dramatically higher than the upfront training cost.

You mentioned batch computing as well, but how does that fit into the picture? I don't see how batching would reduce energy use. Does "doing lots of work at once" somehow reduce the total work / total energy expended?
by jeffbee | 2025-05-21 00:09:32+00:00
This series of articles is driving me insane. The authors or editors are using inappropriate units to shock readers: billions of gallons, millions of square feet. But they are not putting the figures into context that the reader can directly comprehend. Because if they said the Nevada data centers would use 2% as much water as the hay/alfalfa industry in Nevada then the entire article loses its shock value.
by PlunderBunny | 2025-05-21 00:10:43+00:00
The software development company that I worked at for 20 years, made a specialised practice management system that was (at the time) years ahead of the competition - a real Windows experience with a real database, where the competition was all DOS based or using Access. At one point, they sold the rights to develop their software in a particular country to another company (they had no plans to enter that market, and were a bit strapped for cash at the time). So the other company got the source code, and - in the spirit of the time - insisted it was printed out on paper too! The other company never managed to do anything with it in the end - having the source code for the entire product was not enough!
by Tor3 | 2025-05-21 00:10:56+00:00
Boas claimed in 1884 that the Inuit language on Baffin Island had four words for snow. The "100" was inflated through re-telling. And that number has been thoroughly refuted. Of course. Inuit languages don't have 100 different roots for snow. As for "four".. well, English has several too (snow, sleet, slush, firn..), and most other languages from regions where snow exists have a number of such words. Nothing new there.
by jwmcq | 2025-05-21 00:11:31+00:00
If we're still calling Guile a Scheme (I'm out of the loop) then I don't know, it gets really bloody close. Not so much in image-based development (that I've usually found less good than a decent packaging system because the contents of my files on disk is usually more tractable than the contents of my image), but its object system and error handling are definitely up there close to CL.

I mean, Common Lisp is still the gold-standard for me, but reading about Hoot recently really made me want to check Guile out a bit more (CL does not have much in the way of lovely WASM stories right now) and, honestly, I was super impressed. I think if the interactive experience of developing in Hoot in the browser matched the interactive experience of developing in native Guile, I'd be a pretty happy convert.
by stianhoiland | 2025-05-21 00:11:33+00:00
Thanks for undertaking this project, as well as making WT such an awesome app!

I already expressed my appreciation on the repo, but was promptly shushed by your colleague for Incitement Of A Language War, hehe.

I'm impressed by the architecture and implementation choices, especially the gap buffer and cursor movement. It seems we've independently arrived at the same kinds of conclusions on how to min-max a text editor: minimal concepts with maximal functionality.

Others have asked about Zig. I would love to hear more about the work you did in C. Did you start in C? What are some reasons why you didn't continue with C? If you had continued in C, with hindsight, what would have been most annoying? What was clearly better in C? Again, with hindsight, what would have been the best parts of following through with C? I see that you are C-cultured as well (Chris Wellons' blog) and some of the upsides of Zig that you mention I would have guessed you could have elegantly solved in C using Chris' insights. I'm very curious how with such expert advice available you still sought elsewhere and preferred it. Looking forward to hear about the C-side of the story.

Good luck with the project, and see you on the repo :)
by burnt-resistor | 2025-05-21 00:12:09+00:00
Go compiles massive codebases in that time. V can recompile itself probably 2-3x in that time.

I don't take any new language seriously unless it's memory safe, free of UB, able to interoperate with what already exists including optional shared libraries (because static linking the world every time in everything is memory and disk wasteful), and assists formal proofs of correctness. Otherwise, what already exists seems preferable for serious use and hobbies can remain fun distractions.
by gort1 | 2025-05-21 00:12:17+00:00
Just my two cents but I had a persistent issue with this webapp, tried probably 50 diff prompts to fix it across o3, 2.5 Pro, 3.7 to zero avail. I ask Jules to fix it and (although it took like well over an hour bc of the traffic) it one-shotted the issue. Feels like this is the next step in "thinking" with large enough repos. I like it.
by admiralrohan | 2025-05-21 00:13:19+00:00
The product looks polished. I have 3 questions:

1. If I am using Supabase for DB, should I use Supabase auth or use Better auth which would anyways use Supabase DB for saving data.

2. When using Supabase auth, they don't give access to the auth.users table and for saving additional user details like country we need a seprate profiles table. If I use Better-auth what should be the approach for saving additional details?

3. How Better Auth Infrastructure is different than Clerk or Supabase auth?
by amy214 | 2025-05-21 00:13:27+00:00
I'm confused by all this nuance about verb conjugations. The idea is to say "today I lived (but also am not alive anymore)" as I interpret it. Would it not suffice to say something along the lines of "by the end of today, I will have had lived". Of course, I know the response, this would not suffice, some sort of Anthony Bourdain-ish romanticism about a particular language and the romance of complicated French verb conjugations.
by Sebb767 | 2025-05-21 00:13:58+00:00
> And I’d go further than that. I’d suggest that, contrary to what intuition might tell you, refactoring might be better achieved by throwing the code away and starting again.

I don't think this applies in most situations. If you have been part of the original core team and are rewriting the app in the same way, this might be true - basically a lost code situation, like the author was in.

However, if you are doing so because you lack understanding of the original code or you are switching the stack, you will inevitably find new obstacles and repeat mistakes that were fixed in the original prototype. Also, in a real world situation, you probably also have to handle fun things like data import/migration, upgrading production instances and serving customers (and possibly fixing bugs) while having your rewrite as a side project. I'm not saying that a rewrite is never the answer, but the authors situation was pretty unique.
by const_cast | 2025-05-21 00:14:27+00:00
Patriarchal values can, at face value, seem contradictory but it all checks out.

Part of it is that we naturally have a bias to view men as "doers". We view men as more successful, yes, perhaps smarter. When we think doctor we think man, when we think lawyer we think men. Even in sex, we view men as having the position of "doing", and women of being the subject, and sex being something done to them.

But men are also "doers" of violence, of conflict. Women, conversely, are too passive and weak to be murderers or rapists. In fact, in regards to rape, because we view sex as something done by men to women a lot of people have the bias that women cannot even be rapists.

This is why we simultaneously have these biases where we picture success as related to man, but we sentence men more harshly in criminal justice. It's not because we view men as "good", no, it's because we view them as ambitious. Then we end up with this strange situation where being a woman makes you significantly less likely to be convicted of a crime you committed, and, if you are, you are likely to get significantly less time. Men are perpetrators (active) and women are victims (passive).
by nickvidal | 2025-05-21 00:15:45+00:00
The Open Source Initiative (OSI) is proud to join GitHub and a global community of contributors in honoring the individuals who steward and sustain Open Source projects.

About 50 maintainers came together for Maintainer Month in May to share their stories behind the scenes. These maintainers not only review issues and merge pull requests—they also navigate community dynamics, mentor new contributors, and increasingly adopt security best practices to protect their code and users.

Let's amplify their voices. Together, we can ensure maintainers receive the recognition, support, and resources they need—not only in May, but all year long.
by Andaith | 2025-05-21 00:16:37+00:00
> The new framework will also require vaccine makers to conduct a randomized controlled trial before the agency signs off on a coronavirus shot for healthy people between the ages of 6 months and 64 years. When possible, the agency will “encourage manufacturers” to complete such trials after they get the agency’s approval for a vaccine for high risk groups, a potentially expensive endeavor.

I wonder about this part. Will they have time to do this if they have to release an updated vaccine annually, like the Flu?
by ipaddr | 2025-05-21 00:17:11+00:00
They have a few.

Aput: Snow on the ground. Qana: Falling snow. Piqsirpoq: Drifting snow. Kaniq: Frost. Kanevvluk: Fine snow. Muruaneq: Soft deep snow. Nutaryuk: Fresh snow. Pirta: Blizzard. Qengaruk: Snow bank.
by alickz | 2025-05-21 00:17:32+00:00
>How is the requirement to use a computer and maybe pay a cloud subscription in the long term more accessible than other kinds of art?

Because many other kinds of art require thousands of hours to learn before getting to the level of current AI

The real gate keeper to art isn't the cost of a pencil, it's the opportunity cost of learning how to use it

Some people have creative ideas they cannot realise and tools like AI help them do it. The more people that can realise their creative ideas the better it is for everyone.
by agentkilo | 2025-05-21 00:19:23+00:00
Thanks for posting the link!

It's a quick-and-dirty PoC with lots of caveats and limitations though. E.g. it works only for a single monitor. I don't think we can clip windows to a "view port" on Windows (the OS), so this may never be as nice as PaperWM, Niri etc.
by MrResearcher | 2025-05-21 00:20:12+00:00
There are well-known ways to extract Amazon books as PDFs, iTunes videos as DRM-free video files (with subtitles and audio tracks!), download youtube videos and movies, etc. Plenty of instructions on certain popular web sites that shall not be listed. So, there's an opinion that the audience you're referring to is, in fact, "buying" the books and movies, and not renting them, for as long as you are willing to exercise your technical "prowess".
by const_cast | 2025-05-21 00:20:18+00:00
Yes, but a few problems:

1. Turning them on/off ala bumblebee isn't a solved problem. It's buggy, especially on not-windows. Even on windows, it's going to be buggy especially in regards to sleep.

2. You obviously lose the advantage of a nvidia GPU that way. If you have to always have it off to get decent battery life, which you do, then it's kind of moot. If you turn it on for your 30 minute workload then there goes 70% of your battery.