MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by throwawayObvs27 | 2025-05-30 17:55:41+00:00
I think lots of people would support a world in which it was illegal for Huntington's carriers to reproduce (or two people with recessive Huntington's alleles, whichever). That rule would stop an unimaginable amount of human suffering. But unfortunately that highly acceptable idea (I think) sits within a wider category that is extremely controversial, unpopular and dangerous.

People cannot be trusted to just outlaw Huntington's on its own, because the next politician will take power and outlaw some ethnic group they hate, arguing that there is precedence. Which is really annoying.
by marvinborner | 2025-05-30 17:55:44+00:00
Also, once you get used to it, it makes writing large lambda terms faster, easier and more intuitive. The terms all just kind of magically interconnect in your mind after a while. At least that has been my experience after writing a lot of code in pure de Bruijn-indexed lambda calculus using bruijn [1]. Otherwise, thinking a few reduction steps ahead in complex terms requires alpha conversion, which often ends in confusion.

Similarly, it seems like languages with de Bruijn indices are immune to LLMs, since they require an internal stack/graph of sorts and don't reduce only on a textual basis.

[1]: https://bruijn.marvinborner.de/
by dzaima | 2025-05-30 17:55:49+00:00
While there is no direct access to flags in standard C, you can nevertheless on gcc and clang compile with -ftrapv and get your signed integer arithmetic be overflow-checked. Or you can use __builtin_add_overflow & co and get access to the overflow flags that way. Rust debug builds trap on signed and unsigned integer overflow, and you can make release builds do so too.

While it'd be nice to have a formal proof that every single `a+b`, `a-b`, `a*b` in every codebase doesn't overflow, I'm sure you understand that that is rather impractical. (and really, it'd be nice! I've thought about having some compile-time-bounded-size integers where each addition increases the size, but multiplication is much less suitable for that, and it also means you can't have a loop adding to an accumulator. It's a rather non-trivial problem really - you might think that it'd be fine to have a loop over a list of objects and sum their sizes, but that can relatively easily overflow if the list references the same massive object many times, so can't even really abstract that)
by zozbot234 | 2025-05-30 17:55:49+00:00
With RCU the "we don't need this Goat" occurs as soon as the last readers are done with the earlier version of Goat, modulo a limited grace period in some RCU implementations. New readers always get the latest version, so there is no risk of waiting for an "unspecified" or "arbitrary" amount of time.

Hazard pointers are a bit fiddlier AIUI, since the reclamation step must be triggered explicitly and verify that no hazard pointers exist to the object being reclaimed, so it is quite possible that you won't promptly reclaim the object.
by sinisterMage | 2025-05-30 17:56:07+00:00
You're totally right to catch that — I’ll update it for clarity!

The idea was: W++ aims for a syntax that feels lightweight like Python (minimal boilerplate, indentation structure), but it also borrows C-style flow and expression flexibility. So technically it’s a bit of a hybrid:

Block structure + minimalism = inspired by Python

let, const, switch, and lambdas = more JS/C-style

I’ll clean up SYNTAX.md and the description to better reflect that. Appreciate you pointing it out!
by mst | 2025-05-30 17:56:39+00:00
8 days late but for posterity:

So far I've only ever been using a private symbol that only exists within the codebase in question (and is then exported to other parts of said codebase as required).

If I ever decide to generalise the approach a bit, I'll hopefully remember to do precisely what you describe.

Possibly with the addition of providing an "I am overriding this deliberately" flag that blows up if it doesn't already have said symbol.

But for the moment, the maximally dumbass approach in my original post is DTRT for me so far.
by neophyto | 2025-05-30 17:56:49+00:00
Travelbuddy helps you collect and organize links for flights, hotels, and activities by destination — all in one place. Add as many locations as you like, view your saved trips beautifully with images, and export or share your plans via email or text.

Save links by category Add descriptive tags to links Auto-display trip images Share or download trip plans Toggle edit mode to manage trips
by johnb231 | 2025-05-30 17:56:55+00:00
Correct and it wasn’t fixed with more parameters. Reasoning models question their own output, and all of the current models can verify their sources online before replying. They are not perfect, but they are much better than they used to be, and it is practically not an issue most of the time. I have seen the reasoning models correct their own output while it is being generated. Gemini 2.5 Pro, GPT-o3, Grok 3.
by matty22 | 2025-05-30 17:57:01+00:00
I would argue that the fatal flaw of this idea is that it is an online app. If this was solvable with technology, Meetup.com has a 15 year head start on you and they didn't solve it.

I think technology is antithetical to the goal you are working toward. Instead, start a local group and have a "all cellphones go here" basket when members enter so that when they are there, they are fully engaged and not doom scrolling the entire time.
by ty6853 | 2025-05-30 17:57:19+00:00
Banking reversibility is also kicking the can to a trusted third party.

Several years ago my credit card was stolen. I contacted my bank, who then accused my wife of cheating on me in another state (I know this didn't happen because there is no way she left 1000 miles away for several days multiple times between me seeing her, unless she has a hidden personal jet). By 'lying' about it being a fraudster instead of my wife who 'had cheated on me' the bank then accused me of bank fraud.

The bank then obtained fraudulent invoices, which were used to 'prove' I owed the money. They just buried me in false paperwork to the point I could never win. When the bank was done with all that, they closed my regular checking account too, because they had now flagged me as a criminal.

I will take anyday, an 'irreversible' crypto account over a banking system where they just close my other accounts because they think one was fraudulent because I was defrauded.
by imaginationra | 2025-05-30 17:57:36+00:00
Yes I do think we should be compensated for it, and we are- when we talk of compensation that usually refers to money- I'm referring to other forms of compensation-

I feel compensated on a spiritual level for my work- I do other things for money and my art can stay "pure" in a sense-

It's said that if you "sell your soul" you are unable to ever "buy it back"- so why sell it in the first place? Just so you can try to get "rich" and attempt to buy it back later because you are soulless and miserable? Doesn't make sense to me.

Maybe art is something higher? A higher cause? I was really inspired by the Rudolf Steiner book "The arts and their mission" early in my career- worth looking into if you are in the arts.
by mjb | 2025-05-30 17:57:44+00:00
Hey Will. I'm a huge fan of the work you all are doing, and of FoundationDB, but I don't believe it's accurate that DST was invented at FoundationDB (or, maybe it was, but was also used in other places around the same time or before).

For example, the first implementations of AWS's internal lock service (Alf) used DST as a key part of the testing strategy, sometime around 2009. Al Vermeulen was influential in introducing it at AWS, and I believe it built on some things he'd worked on before.

Still, Anithesis is super cool, and I really admire how you all are changing the conversation around systems correctness. So this is a minor point.
by constantcrying | 2025-05-30 17:58:42+00:00
This of course is about Covid, but the rise of LLMs is another point where students are supposed to become less private, opening up their devices to monitoring software.

I think that there is exactly one correct direction to take here, which is that direct human interaction is the most valuable thing, both in learning and in keeping students mentally and physically healthy. Every single surrogate for that inevitably will make all of these aspects worse.
by bell-cot | 2025-05-30 17:58:43+00:00
The article's last photo is from the Tesla's front camera, a fraction of a second before FSD suddenly swerved off the 2-lane asphalt road.

Nothing in that photo hints at "why?". (I have no computer vision experience.) The article speculates about shadows on the road...maybe those suddenly appeared (sun came from behind a cloud), and the FSD image analyzer freaked out?
by pacerier | 2025-05-30 17:59:23+00:00
Indeed, the Americans have a very weird ruler for respect, which measures solely by power and sex (anything else beyond this two you have to wax wordy essays to convince of its value and still have dubious success) due to its original sin, crossing oceans and expanding westwards for its own sake, fueled by raw sex and power, be it brutes, scientists, farmers, mormons, evangelicals, and missionaries, then they teach their children the same, who teach their children the same.

Orphans and imports don't escape. Even those that are not born here (eg Musk), are eventually taught by society to do the same.

Zuckerberg and friends don't just want to chill on the beach: They want to 0wn it. A common property, then redefine it as "obviously not common", at the expense of others, so that no one else can chill on the beach, unless you provide compensation, for obviously infringing upon their rightful rights duh.
by weinzierl | 2025-05-30 17:59:52+00:00
What is a good alternative? What I am looking for is a drop-in replacement for real AWS S3 for customers that can't or don't want to use it. Should have all the major features of AWS S3 (similar to MinIO) but nothing else. I am not interested in a huge storage solution that is hard to set up and maintain and also does S3 somehow, partially.
by pittma | 2025-05-30 18:01:08+00:00
Cool stuff! This method is very similar to how AVX-512-optimized RSA implementations work too, as they also have to do Very Large Exponentiations. This paper[1] covers how RSA does its windowing, which includes the formula showing how the window size can be arbitrary. One additional thing AVX-512 RSA implementations do, though, is store the results of the multiplications for the range [0..2^{window-size}) in a table; then, for each window, that result is retrieved from the table[2] and only the shifting/repositioning has to be done.

1. https://dpitt.me/files/sime.pdf (hosted on my domain because it's pulled from a journal)

2. https://github.com/aws/aws-lc/blob/9c8bd6d7b8adccdd8af4242e0...
by floundy | 2025-05-30 18:02:26+00:00
Good. Why should MRNA get 10% of their market cap in free government research handouts when there's other pharmaceutical companies that have been far more successful at making vaccines. MRNA literally has two products.

This is a dying one trick pony, the ultimate COVID meme stock, that has lost 95% of its peak market capitalization. One of the top 15 or so pharma companies will probably buy them out when the market cap gets to $3-5B.
Show HN: Fontofweb – Discover Fonts Used on a Website or Websites Using Font(s)
by sim04ful | 2025-05-30 18:02:42+00:00
Hey HN,

I've been working on fontofweb.com on and off for the past 4 years, and I'm keen to share it with you. It lets you type in the URL of any website and see exactly how the fonts are used: all the weights, line heights, and sizes.

A big plus is that it doesn't require a Chrome extension, unlike a lot of other tools in this space.

You can also search for a specific font and find websites using it. For example, check out sites using Inter: https://fontofweb.com/w/inter. This reverse font search even supports looking for multiple fonts at once, like here’s an example with Inter and Space Mono: https://fontofweb.com/w/inter/space-mono.

My goal with Font of Web is to build up a comprehensive database of font usage across the web. By collecting and analyzing this data, I believe we can uncover some valuable trends, such as:

* Common font pairings * Popular heading fonts over time * Market share of commercial fonts * Top font foundries based on actual usage

I originally built a version of this four years ago and was surprised by how much organic interest it received.

I’ve now rebuilt the tool from scratch, moving away from browserless.io — which was quite expensive — to an invisible iframe approach with a proxied URL to handle CORS (it’s a straightforward solution, and I’m rather surprised it isn’t discussed more often). This change has completely eliminated all costs related to web scraping.

Here's the Tech Stack:

* Remix + HeroUI + Tailwind * Rust Backend in Axum * Authentication with OTP email and Google social auth (via openidconnect) * Sqlite running on the same VPS as the API service * $5/mo VPS * Cloudflare CDN * Cloudflare R2 for storage * Zeptomail for emails (very cheap and reliable, highly recommend!) * Simple Analytics: https://dashboard.simpleanalytics.com/fontofweb.com * Logging: Journalctl :)

There are currently 275 websites in the database, and I'm working on increasing this. Stats are available at: https://api.fontofweb.com/stats.

While the main site doesn't need an extension, for more robust searching and to help with Cloudflare-protected sites, there’s a chrome extension available.

There's also a public API for domains that have already been checked. For instance: https://api.fontofweb.com/report?domain=apple.com&path=/.

There's also RSS feed I’ve got no idea why you would need this directly, but I'm using it because Pinterest allows you to automatically populate boards with an RSS. https://api.fontofweb.com/rss

There’s a premium subscription available as well, for some extra perks like previewing fonts and downloading them.

Appreciate your thoughts and feedback.
by riku_iki | 2025-05-30 18:03:10+00:00
> The company and product doesn't matter and they'll happily burn it to the ground if that makes more money.

they do not burn it to the ground, community has open source high quality product for absolutely free developed on investors money. Anyone can fork it, and do whatever he wants. I imagine if product is very good, and parent corp will decide to close sources, there could be some smaller business/consultancy supporting OSS version of this, or even MS/Google take over it as it happened many times e.g. ElasticSearch vs OpenSearch.
by qingcharles | 2025-05-30 18:03:55+00:00
When I first saw gpt-image-1 I was equally scared that OpenAI had used its resources to push so far ahead that more open models would be left completely in the dust for the significant future.

Glad to see this release. It also puts more pressure onto OpenAI to make their model less lobotomized and to increase its output quality. This is good for everyone.
by A3mercury | 2025-05-30 18:04:35+00:00
It's difficult to enter an established space, especially with products like a major social network because it's become a daily part of people's lives. It puts it on the user to actively work to use a new platform when the old one is still there and more active. It's hard not to have FOMO when you're not on the larger one.

Plus.. leaving due to hate only motivates for so long.
by timschmidt | 2025-05-30 18:04:36+00:00
> it’s not that dangerous today.

It's not the sort of place you want to spend any appreciable time at. Plenty of documented death and mutation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_exclusion_zone#Radio...

> what little Pu-239 is there isn’t that spicy compared to many places people live without significant worry about the natural radiation dose.

Walking around most of the 30km exclusion zone 100,000 years from now will be comparable to walking around a granite quary in terms of gamma dose. Which is still elevated compared to most of the planet, but usually not a worry. However, granite does an excellent job of sequestering the radioactive elements whereas I explicitly called out disturbing the earth as a risk due to inhalation and the compounded effect of internalized isotopes which is much greater at the Chernobyl site than elsewhere. Hence the need for a $2.1 Billion confinement structure which is only designed to last 100 years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_New_Safe_Confinement

No amount of inhaled Pu-239 is going to be fun for anyone.
by smeeger | 2025-05-30 18:04:45+00:00
if you look at monotheism it usually draws from the same constellation of things. fasting is encouraged. humility. and some concept of intrinsic sinfulness which is actually a very deep insight into the nature of organisms that prioritize their own wellbeing over everything else. ie all organisms. monotheism springs up in response to the cynical nature of human society. but more broadly to protect us from all the cynical and unnatural consequences of human society, not just selfishness. monotheism is how human beings reconcile with the terrible products of their own society. and therefore it tends to be similar everywhere. but only in places where the population reached a tipping point and broadly adopted a moral crusade against those things.
by ToValueFunfetti | 2025-05-30 18:04:54+00:00
>I think you're kind of losing track of what this thread was originally about.

Maybe I am! Somebody posed a theory about how self-improvement will work and concluded that it would lead to self-awareness. Somebody else replied that they were on board until the self-awareness part because they considered it supernatural. I said I don't think self-awareness is supernatural, and you clarified that it might be the undefined process of becoming self-aware that is being called supernatural. And then I objected that undefined processes leading to predictable outcomes is commonplace, so that usage of supernatural doesn't stand up as an argument.

Now you're saying it is the rest of the original, the hive-mindy bits, that are at issue. I agree with that entirely, and I wouldn't bet on that method of self-improvement at 10% odds. My impression was that that was all conceded right out of the gate. Have I lost the plot somewhere?
by badc0ffee | 2025-05-30 18:05:43+00:00
I had the opposite reaction - it's like a breath of fresh air compared to a lot of contemporary travel writing. It's honest.

Sometimes you're not visiting a place to engage deeply with humans, but to take in the natural landscape and the historic sites, or simply to exist for a short time somewhere that's not like home. Sometimes while travelling (especially while travelling!) you have limited time and need to have a quick bite and keep moving, because long meals and deep conversations are not your priority.

Sometimes it's ok to say "here's my brief impression of this place, and here are its highlights and its faults from my perspective" because at least that's expressing an opinion. I don't need another Instagrammer making the most vague statements about a foreign place, telling me how beautiful/resilient/spirited the people are despite their circumstances, and saying noting more concrete, because anything more specific will be met with offense that the traveller could never possibly understand the context of this people or that country, and is just a spoiled westerner.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-05-30 18:05:43+00:00
> Perhaps that's because all the U.S. airlines have engaged in such a race to the bottom on quality

Nope. The rule is proven by the exception. When carriers and new entrants have tried to disprove it, it’s generally proved true.

> I'd happily pay more for a more pleasant experience, but no one offers it

Between premium seats and private charter it absolutely exists. Most people can’t or won’t pay it, however, because it’s not worth that much to them.
by pkasting | 2025-05-30 18:05:52+00:00
I disagree with both the premise and the conclusion.

As far as I can determine, Musk is the sole founder of only two companies -- SpaceX and The Boring Company. The former is clearly valued at >$1B; the latter is not.

He is also the cofounder, with many other cofounders, of a variety of other companies: Zip2, X.com, OpenAI, Neuralink. OpenAI is clearly valued at >$1B; Musk was one of eleven cofounders. My assumption is that your third company is X.com; Musk was one of four cofounders, and the company then merged with Confinity (also multiple cofounders), then took the name PayPal (which had been a Confinity product). PayPal is clearly worth >$1B today. I would find it misleading to say Musk "founded OpenAI and PayPal" given the above, but up to the reader.

Whether this is "more than luck" -- in particular, whether it's actually due to Musk's good leadership -- is far from proven. OpenAI, for example, had $1B in capital pledged at founding, suggesting it was already valued at over $1B at creation time. And the skill sets required to found a later-successful company versus to lead one are distinct. Musk might well be a great founder but bad leader.

(Of course, the obvious intent of my original post was to be a snarky dig at someone I view to be an atrociously terrible leader whose success has been due to a combination of others succeeding despite his influence and simply going all-in with huge amounts of capital every time. If you're not already inclined to view Musk that way, and you believe he's actually a successful businessman who is brilliant if eccentric, then a joke post on HackerNews won't change your mind.)
by ty6853 | 2025-05-30 18:06:07+00:00
I've intentionally used irreversible crypto payments to a merchant that is an an industry with high chargebacks. It is highly useful in transactions where the merchant is highly trusted but the buyers tend to be weasels. Such merchants tend to charge high premiums for reversible payment methods.

In such cases it is win-win for both the merchant and customer, the customer doesn't have to foot the reversibility overhead and the merchant is able to offer goods at the same profit margins but lower price which should yield more sales.
by skydhash | 2025-05-30 18:06:29+00:00
It's equally easy for both. But people using broswers only do it a few times, while bots need to do it many times. A second for a human every X pages is not much, but it's a death-knell for the general practice of bots (and they can't store the cookies because you can rate-limit them that way).

Imagine scrapping thousands of page, but with a X>1 second wait for each. There wouldn't be a need to use such solution if crawlers were rate-limiting themselves, but they don't.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-05-30 18:06:59+00:00
> it's a big premium. Which I might pay for especially long haul international but I probably won't for a domestic flight

Sure. That’s the point. So the market rewards the carriers who can cut prices lowest.

What I would be curious about here is whether this single/double discrimination extends to Delta’s loyal customers. (My hunch is no.)
by tshaddox | 2025-05-30 18:07:14+00:00
I wouldn't expect a journalist to apply second derivatives, but I would expect them to talk to physicists and accurately report what the physicists say. Of course, I have no real physics or astronomy education beyond high school, but I can recognize a textbook one-line description of Hubble's law and know that something's off when it's being attributed to a guy in 1998.
by wewxjfq | 2025-05-30 18:07:17+00:00
I don't mind captchas to protect forms and such, but given that so many sites want captchas solved for the first GET request, I really wonder how much more CO2 this is going to produce. And when I see "invisible mode", I'd really like to ask the authors if they think their work is a net-positive for the world.