MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by stereolambda | 2025-05-16 11:13:32+00:00
Honestly to me inequality has been always the main reasonable angle of attacking gene editing. But if vaccines are an analogy, many countries were eventually able to mass vaccinate for dangerous diseases. So this could be only the question of cost, after some period of only elite availability.

There's no inherent metaphysical worth in being on any particular level of strength, height etc., so we can spread whatever is the most convenient. I think arguments against (that I see being made) ultimately devolve into some magical thinking and a priori thing bad. (I am glad to be shown otherwise.) In fact we are already messing with human fertility in possibly unsustainable ways, so maybe more tools are needed as a part of the way out.

Of course there is political execution, corruption etc., but I don't see it any different from other technological challenges that civilization has dealt with. I.e. we need better politics but the tech is not at fault. Gene editing is isolated interventions, so it's in that detail more manageable than for example mass surveillance which is hidden and continuous.

One more esoteric argument is that we cannot socially agree on what traits are desirable. The ‘The Twenty-first Voyage of Ijon Tichy’ scenario. So opposite to "monoculture" in a way. But I don't see people expanding on that.
by squigz | 2025-05-16 11:14:41+00:00
> Another Note: Also, ironically WHO's article I've linked is lamenting that Sub-saharan Africa only had 5% cesarean due to less availability of the procedure. It is their perspective that the increase in percentages is a good thing and indicates progress, instead of being concerning. And, they find Sub-saharan Africa's low numbers concerning, instead.

Pretty sure their perspective is that "saving the lives of mothers and babies" indicates progress.

> While a caesarean section can be an essential and lifesaving surgery, it can put women and babies at unnecessary risk of short- and long-term health problems if performed when there is not medical need.

> Rather than recommending specific target rates, WHO underscores the importance of focusing on each woman’s unique needs in pregnancy and childbirth.

> WHO recommends some non-clinical actions that can reduce medically unnecessary use of caesarean sections, within the overall context of high quality and respectful care:
by smeej | 2025-05-16 11:14:46+00:00
In the vast majority of cases, it's actually extremely easy. It took less than an afternoon for me to learn how to trace 90%+ of transactions on either BTC or any of the networks built on Ethereum or an Ethereum-like protocol. There are large companies that specialize in exactly this, which make tools that allow government agents who have no particular crypto expertise to trace the majority of transactions.

It is possible to make your transactions extremely difficult to trace, but you really, really, REALLY have to know what you're doing.

Law enforcement loves that people think it's easy and cheap to launder money with crypto, though. It's made it vastly easier for them to catch those people!
by redandblack | 2025-05-16 11:15:23+00:00
stupid question as I have not tpuched C++ since the 90s - can the IDEs not do this with all these now almost universal linters and AI assists. Maybe something that prompts before a commit and autoprompts before/after fixes to only the inititaization. Maybe simple as a choice in the refactoring menu? Rust - where are you for proposing this fix to C++ or, is it javascript?
by ahoog42 | 2025-05-16 11:15:44+00:00
If you want to be alerted to new/updated SEC cybersecurity filings, you can subscribe to my free alerts [1] or see the full index of cybersecurity incidents [2] on my tracker (I check SEC EDGAR every 5 mins).

[1] https://www.board-cybersecurity.com/alerts/

[2] https://www.board-cybersecurity.com/incidents/tracker/
by PurpleRamen | 2025-05-16 11:15:51+00:00
IIRC AwesomeWM has the option to define the area of the screen used for tiling. It's called workarea[0] I think. So in theory you should be able to just make the screen a bit smaller and free some screen estate for other things.

[0] https://awesomewm.org/doc/api/classes/screen.html#screen.wor...
by dmazin | 2025-05-16 11:15:53+00:00
This rings true to me.

I still use LLMs heavily. However, I now follow two rules:

* Do not delegate any deep thought to them. For example, when thinking through a difficult design problem, I do it myself.

* Deeply review and modify any code they generate. I go through it line-by-line and edit it thoroughly. I have to do this because I find that much of what they generate is verbose, overly defensive, etc. I don't care if you can fix this through prompting; I take ownership over future maintainability.

"Vibe coding" (not caring about the generated code) gives me a bad feeling. The above approach leaves me with a good feeling. And, to repeat, I am still using them a lot and coding a lot faster because of it.
by bayindirh | 2025-05-16 11:16:33+00:00
More realistically, as it happened in ML/AI scene, the knowledgeable people will write the complex libraries and will hand these down to scientists and other less experienced, or risk-averse developers (which is not a bad thing).

With the critical mass Python acquired over the years, GIL becomes a very sore bottleneck in some cases. This is why I decided to learn Go, for example. Properly threaded (and green threaded) programming language which is higher level than C/C++, but lower than Python which allows me to do things which I can't do with Python. Compilation is another reason, but it was secondary with respect to threading.
by inglor_cz | 2025-05-16 11:17:11+00:00
I think that taxpayers should be advised that science is not a straightforward process like building a house from blueprints, and that a lot of important discoveries happen serendipitously.

The cilantro taste stuff does not sound absurd to me at all. In biology, there is no hard wall between banal stuff and critical stuff; they interact and fundamentally operate in the same environment under the same genetic and epigenetic rules. Sure, the research necessary for correcting cilantro-as-soap may be marginal, but there is a chance of discovering something significant along the way.

We should be more careful and also honest when communicating about science to taxpayers.
by bhouston | 2025-05-16 11:17:35+00:00
I also tried to go as hard as I could with agents and I ran into a ton of problems. The core issue I found is that inferring "intent" from existing code is hard and it makes errors that accumulate and build up. This ends up wrecking the software project by adding tons of complexity and duplicate ways of doing things and changing assumptions depending on which part of the code base you are in.

I think that the solution is to somehow move towards an "intent" layer that sits above the code.

I still use Cursor, but I use AI judiciously so that I don't wreck the project and it is only acts as an aid.
by motorest | 2025-05-16 11:17:45+00:00
> Overcommit is an optimization where virtual memory that is allocated but unused is not mapped to physical memory.

Either you're replying without bothering to read the messages you're replying to, or you're failing to understand what is being written.

> If you want to avoid this (for some reason), choosing not to initialize early is not going to have the intended effect.

Read PP's comment.
by tuna-piano | 2025-05-16 11:17:46+00:00
Thanks for the healthy skepticism.

I still think there's a lot to learn from those articles for most folks uninvolved in this area, even if some of their immediate optimism has additional complications.

I think what I mostly took away is a combination of technologies is likely to dramatically change how we have babies in the future.

1. We'll make sperm/egg from skin cells. This has already been done in mice[1], so it is not science fiction to do it in people.

2. When we're able to do this inexpensively, we could create virtually unlimited embryos. We can then select the embryos that have the most optimal traits. Initially, this may be simple things like not choosing embryos with certain genes that give higher risk of certain diseases.

This may involve selecting traits like intelligence and height (there are already companies that offer this embryo selection capability [2]).

3. Instead of creating a lot of embryos and selecting the best ones, we could instead create just one embryo and edit the DNA of that embryo, which has already been done in humans [3]. Alternatively, we could edit the DNA of the sperm/egg prior to creating the embryo.

The fact that none of this is science fiction is just wild. All of these steps have already been done in animals or people. Buckle up, the future is going to be wild.

[1] https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2023/05/27/1177191...

[2] https://www.theguardian.com/science/2024/oct/18/us-startup-c...

[3] https://www.science.org/content/article/chinese-scientist-wh...
by bluGill | 2025-05-16 11:17:54+00:00
That one in once in several hundred years. they were mostly interested in visiting 5 planets though not getting out. There may be other orbits that allow for more speed but skip something - I'm not an orbital engineer so I don't know how to calculate that.

there is a lot more to learn about planets than what is outside the solar system so there is much point in a dedicated misson out. We still won't reach any other star for thousands of years, and have no power supply that will last that long. (there are things to learn out side our solar system, but most of it we can learn with a telescope from earth)
by nottorp | 2025-05-16 11:17:57+00:00
> on what a complete mess of a protocol and implementation it [still] is

Banks are banks :)

> so it's down to the merchant

... or down to the implementation team that may not even have mentioned it to the merchant if said merchant is in an area used to insecure credit card payments ...

Opting out is still customer hostile if you ask me.
by jansan | 2025-05-16 11:19:22+00:00
Biggest change seems to be that everything is round and purple now. It looks more playful and less professional.

Edit: I dislike their recent color picks. First that teal in Google Maps, now the purple. Why? Are they trying to copy the color paltette of the first Mecedes A-Class (aka "Listerine" colors [1][2])?

[1] https://prestigeandperformancecar.com/wp-content/uploads/A97...

[2] https://image.stern.de/31749130/t/Ag/v2/w1440/r0/-/01--artik...
by LeratoAustini | 2025-05-16 11:19:53+00:00
"how much time does it take on first use to spot a button"

We need to help first time users work out how to use our software, but I don't follow the logic on why we should prioritise around this. I get that we can lose users early on if they are confused by our apps, but that's not the full picture.

For a regular-use app (such as email in the example), what % of a user's time is spent as a new user, vs time spent as a no-longer-new user? Obviously over the lifetime of an app the amount of time spent as a new user is far less than that spent as a non-new user. After a few uses I know where the button is. But the design compromises (eg less space in the UI for content due to the oversize button) persist.

At some point the training wheels on the bike stop helping and start hindering.

This is the same gripe I have with the argument for UI animations "informing the user about what's happening". macOS (which stands out due to its refusal to just add a preference to fully disable animations) has educated me on the concept that an app minimises 'into the dock where it lives' many thousands of times now. I get it, honestly.

Maybe the solution is to have the UI grow in complexity as the user becomes more familiar? After the enlarged 'send' button has been clicked 5 times, reduce its size... maybe even do this gradually, a couple of pixels per click until it reaches 'expert size'. Or have an internal list of user actions and once a few of them have been completed offer to put the UI into intermediate mode?
by incomingpain | 2025-05-16 11:20:09+00:00
Trump pushed the F47? France/Germany's 6th gen is probably better.

But I wonder. The future is obviously pilotless fighter drones. Without the need to have any pilot focused things, you dramatically reduce cost, weight, range and stealth/size of the fighter jet.

The actual pilot gets to be in a cozy room operating it with a vr headset via starlink.
by lm28469 | 2025-05-16 11:21:16+00:00
Since a few years I can't tell if these things are satirical or serious, a lot of people working for FAANG are completely delirious and barely connected to the reality of 99.999% of the population.

> M3 Expressive designs were rated higher across desirability attributes, including “modernity,” “subculture,” and “rebelliousness.”

What does it even mean ?
by mdp2021 | 2025-05-16 11:21:28+00:00
> What is your solution

As always, education.

> If you're just gonna interject

You are made to note that discussing whether "X is harmful" is a wrong target, and requested to sharpen the focus. Everything can be harmful - water can be harmful. Teaching people how to drink is closest to the proper point. Should resources be available? Yes. Should they be used responsibly? Also yes. Whose burden is it? Societies'.

Good common sense is as always the criteria drawer. One cannot be responsible for leaving a screwdriver around because there are fools around who use them to stab.
by komali2 | 2025-05-16 11:21:39+00:00
> When it was time to start coding, I asked Claude to give me a big and complicated markdown file outlining my existing infrastructure, my desired new infrastructure, what I’m trying to achieve, why I'm doing it, etc.

Yes, imo, too many people believe current LLMs are capable of doing this well, They aren't. Perhaps soon! But not today, so you shouldn't try to use LLMs to do this for serious projects. Writing that MDN file sounds like a wonderful way to get your own head around the infrastructure and chat with other devs / mentors about it though, that's a great exercise, I'm going to steal it.

Anyway, LLMs are, as we all know, really good text predictors. Asking a text predictor to predict too much will be stretching the predictions too thin: give it one file, one function, and very specific instructions, and an LLM is a great way to increase your productivity and reducing mental overload on menial tasks (e.g., swap out all uses of "Button" in @ExperimentModal.tsx with @components/CustomButton.tsx). I think LLM usage in this sense is basically necessary to stay competitively productive unless you're already a super-genius in which case you probably don't read HN comments anyway so who cares. For the rest of us mortals, I argue that getting good at using LLM co-pilots is as important as learning the key bindings in your IDE and OS of choice. Peel away another layer of mental friction between you and accomplishing your tasks!
by cameronh90 | 2025-05-16 11:23:06+00:00
Sure, but again those concepts typically will still have an equivalent way to express them in English. For example, Kindergarten is nursery in en-GB. I'm not entirely sure what the others actually mean, but Bildungsroman is probably "coming-of-age novel" which is a common literary genre.

The biggest challenge I've had when writing multilingual user interfaces aren't lacking a way to translate, but just practical issues like dynamic string construction or where the structure of the UI somehow doesn't work in another language, or when a given string is used in multiple parts of the app in the English version, but the non-English versions need different strings in different places[0], or just where an English single word translates into a whole sentence (or vice versa).

[0] For example some languages don't have a commonly used word that means "limb" - i.e. arm _or_ leg. A bit niche, but if you're doing something medical-related it can cause issues.
by Gareth321 | 2025-05-16 11:23:12+00:00
Apple is just being petty now. They're legally allowed to keep Epic out, but why? As a message to others who might wish to legally contest Apple's monopolistic (or at least duopolistic) practises? You lost, Apple. Be a gracious loser. This action is only going to foment even more animosity from developers, gamers, customers, judges, and importantly, legislators. This absolutely will be used as a datapoint for future rulings, and cases are ongoing or being filed all over the world now.
by divan | 2025-05-16 11:23:12+00:00
I'm glad Flutter is not changing design to support this M3Expressive [1] right off the bat. One of the biggest problems with Flutter for me is just a lack of alternative design systems (compared with web frameworks) or the ability to easily spin off your own design system. And it's ok to use default Flutter's design system (which is Material Design), but the need to conform to whatever the Google design team comes up with in the next update wasn't great.

Components' renaming (RaisedButton -> ElevatedButton, wtf - was it really worth millions of person-hours of renaming in hundreds of thousands of Flutter codebases?), apps suddenly becoming pinkish, until developers frantically updated code setting `useMaterial3: false` just to stop apps being suddenly ugly, etc. I.e., it's fine for the design system to change and evolve, but with Flutter, all control over the app's look is virtually taken away from developers who use default material widgets. You just update the Flutter version and pray that your app didn't change in a way that was never expected.

It would be good to have Material 3 Expressive as a separate design system, for sure.

[1] https://github.com/flutter/flutter/issues/168813
by jclardy | 2025-05-16 11:23:27+00:00
I don't get the whole "all-in" mentality around LLMs. I'm an iOS dev by trade, I continue to do that as I always have. The difference now is I'll use an LLM to quickly generate a one-off view based on a design. This isn't a core view of an app, the core functionality, or really anything of importance. It's a view that promotes a new feature, or how to install widgets, or random things. This would normally take me 30-60 min to implement depending on complexity, now it takes 5.

I also use it for building things like app landing pages. I hate web development, and LLMs are pretty good at it because I'd guess that is 90% of their training data related to software development. For that I make larger changes, review them manually, and commit them to git, like any other project. It's crazy to me that people will just go completely off the rails for multiple hours and run into a major issue, then just start over when instead you can use a measured approach and always continue forward momentum.
by OJFord | 2025-05-16 11:23:57+00:00
> A CEO force-merging a change to production would indeed be an "unauthorized action circumventing established processes" by exact words.

Of course it would, but I wouldn't expect this post to follow it, especially at a Musk company, was my point.

But anyway, I'm just further speculating that other speculation seems unlikely to me, heh.
by jonasdoesthings | 2025-05-16 11:24:17+00:00
I would have liked a short explanation on what makes the new M3 Expressive really different from Material You?!

They are re-using the exact same words [1] ("expressiveness", "personal style") from You. Did they just add more spacing and change the default-color?

[1]: https://m3.material.io/blog/announcing-material-you
by nerdsniper | 2025-05-16 11:24:22+00:00
Indeed. However, it might make sense to change the definition of "realized". For example, if you use invested capital as collateral for a loan, we could require that it be valued at its basis cost. If you want to use the current market value of the stocks for loan collateral, then the IRS could recognize that the loan institution "realizes" that the stocks have appreciated in value and that the holder of the stocks agrees on the valuation. Multiple parties realized that the stock has a higher value today than its basis cost and expect it to presumably hold at least roughly that value for the duration of the loan.

Using the market value as collateral is in fact one way of realizing the gains: the investor is using the loan to convert their gains on invested capital into something usable. The capital gains tax would only be triggered when the investor utilizes a price other than their basis cost for their financial instruments.

This would probably not affect very many people: 99% of people don't use their retirement stocks as collateral on loans. It would fix the "Jeff Bezos et al. never pay taxes because they just keep getting bigger and bigger loans to pay off their loans" nonsense.

I don't think anyone in D.C. is currently proposing this, but I think it's a nifty idea. Even if the tax revenue generated is modest, it would boost the average citizens confidence that the system is working and not rigged/broken. And that is probably something worth pursuing these days given how dissatisfied voters have been for the past 9 years or so.
by bluGill | 2025-05-16 11:24:34+00:00
Dictatorships (which is what communism always amounts to in the real world) are always good at big visible projects. they fail because things not on the dictators 'radar' don't get anyones attention as there is no reward for small projects that keep the world running until the dictator notices the lack. If the dictator doesn't notice the lack you have to be really good at marketing yourself if you do them otherwise you will be 'purged' for wasted effort when you do them.
by mjlawson | 2025-05-16 11:25:01+00:00
My rule with Cursor is that unless I know exactly what I want it to do, I have it stay out of my way. If I have a general idea, I may turn on auto-complete. I reserve the agent for things like tests, UX, and rote programming that saves me time.

When I do use the agent, I inspect its output ruthlessly. The idea that pages of code can be written before being inspected is horrifying to me.
by nicodjimenez | 2025-05-16 11:25:56+00:00
I tend to agree with this. These days I usually use LLMs to learn about something new or to help me generate client code for common APIs (especially boto3 these days). I tried Windsurf to help me make basic changes to my docker compose files, but when it couldn't even do that correctly, I lost a little enthusiasm. I'm sure it can build a working prototype of a small web app but that's not enough for me.

For me LLMs are a game changer for devops (API knowledge is way less important now that it's even been) but I'm still doing copy pasting from ChatGPT, however primitive it may seem.

Fundamentally I don't think it's a good idea to outsource your thinking to a bot unless it's truly better than you at long term decision making. If you're still the decision maker, then you probably want to make the final call as to what the interfaces should look like. I've definitely had good experiences carefully defining object oriented interfaces (eg for interfacing with AWS) and having LLMs fill in the implementation details but I'm not sure that's "vibe coding" per se.