MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by amos-burton | 2025-05-05 10:28:09+00:00
> I’d like you to keep in mind that we can train ourselves to feel more compassion rather than more empathic distress.

having compassion in a world that lacks functioning sensory machinery to realize the pain it creates to achieve its goal is like deliberately giving yourself to the mongols during their invasion. It is not that they did not care, they simply had no conscious. Having compassion for someone about to kill you, it s accepting we never had a choice, you pardon, not because you don't fear to feel the pain, but because you internalized that it required you to feel the pain, as a protagonist, as a prosthesis, for it to also feel the emotion through the other protagonist, it evaluates the result, for the result to happen, we are assigned roles.

it all looks very religious, though, it is not, you must never let you go to some fantasy, just accept that contradictions have a purpose.
by sensanaty | 2025-05-05 10:28:33+00:00
> 3. Will it have historical significance in 10 years time?

I mean, almost by definition there's basically no way of knowing this right?

A picture of a mountainside with nothing interesting going on other than nature might not be significant in 10 years, or maybe the entire landscape has transformed into something completely different.

I grew up in Bali, Indonesia. In the 90s, where I lived was nothing but lush jungle and beaches, with a few very small houses here and there dotting things. By the 2000s we had actual asphalt roads, and by the 2010s we had a full on highway on the south of the island. The stretch of land where I grew up is quite literally incomparable to what it looked like before despite my house not changing much, and it took roughly 10 years to reach that state. I would've loved if I had a camera back then to record the changes as they were happening, because you'd be amazed how quickly things become significant in some way, not to mention any potential memories of a place you think of fondly!
by lupusreal | 2025-05-05 10:28:34+00:00
> If planets are required to clear their orbits, what was Jupiter called while the solar system was forming?

Hell, what's it called now? Jupiter's orbit is shared with millions of Trojans. Many of them are more than a hundred kilometers in diameter; for reference, Deimos, one of Mars' moons, has a mean radius of about 6 km.
by mike_hearn | 2025-05-05 10:29:57+00:00
Look at my other comment for one simple example from a few days ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43881222

But as you just discovered, there are endless examples.

Dismissing criticism of BBC bias as "right wing people calling it far left for not agreeing with them enough" is almost tautological: yes, that's what bias looks like, the people it's biased against will disagree with them a lot. Not because they're just wrong and the BBC is just right, but because the BBC fires right wing journalists and hires/promotes left wing journalists who then tell themselves that left wing beliefs are True and right wing beliefs are False and thus the news should automatically be left wing. It has been like this for years.

A few more simple examples of institutionalized bias:

1. During Brexit Nick Robinson wrote an article saying the Today programme no longer has any obligation to balance its coverage of Remain vs Leave; i.e. stating in public writing that the BBC is biased.

2. Many on the right don't believe climatology is scientific or accurate, but the BBC has a written policy of refusing to interview or platform such views. They just systematically forbid it and have done for decades. They only report the left's view that there is a crisis. That's political bias.

3. The BBC broadcast a documentary about Palestine in which the child narrator turned out to be the son of a Hamas official.

4. BBC on the US election: "On the campaign trail, Donald Trump drove his message of fear all the way to the White House but it was based on a misconception. Rather than an invasion, America has long been dependent on the work of these migrants in agriculture and manufacturing, making them both essential and dispensable…For his opponents these feel like dizzying and dark times."

Of course if they discover they have a journalist who criticizes the left they fire him immediately citing neutrality (see Chris Middleton).

All this makes a mockery of the concept of public service broadcasting. The BBC is gonna die, it's inevitable, and when it does, it will be because its staff relentlessly abused the public for decades by exploiting the tax based nature of its service.
by tarantababu | 2025-05-05 10:31:23+00:00
I'm excited to share lwlnow, a web app built to help language learners improve their listening, vocabulary, and writing skills through dictation-based practice — a method that's simple, immersive, and surprisingly powerful.

Why we built it Most language apps focus on passive learning or gamified memorization. But real fluency comes from training your brain to understand native speech and respond with precision.

Dictation is one of the most underrated yet effective ways to build these skills:

You listen to a native sentence You type exactly what you hear You get instant feedback on spelling, grammar, and word recognition

It’s like shadowing, but active — and it works incredibly well for learners at every level.

Who is it for?

Learners who want to internalize grammar naturally People struggling with listening comprehension Students who want daily active practice

Feedback welcome! We’re in early development and improving fast. I'd love your feedback:

What do you like?

What would you add/change? Which languages should we support next? Thanks for checking it out — and good luck with your language journey!

— Yigit
by bgwalter | 2025-05-05 10:31:25+00:00
The fact that Bitcoin itself has never been banned strongly suggests that it was government approved from the beginning or even developed at the NSA.

The tracking is a feature, and many governments want a CBDC.

What does the CIA think? The CIA thinks Bitcoin is great:

https://cointelegraph.com/magazine/bitcoin-price-million-cia...
by InkCanon | 2025-05-05 10:31:43+00:00
It's a common idea, all the way back to Hoare logic. There was a time when people believed in the future, people would write specifications instead of code.

The problem with it takes several times more effort to verify code than to write it. This makes intuitive sense if you consider that the search space for the properties of code is much larger than the code for space. Rice theorem's states that all non trivial semantic properties of a program are undeniable.
by Quinzel | 2025-05-05 10:31:47+00:00
I know nothing about programming and have been using AI to build a prototype, a MVP, based on some hand drawn wireframes for a business idea I have been thinking about since 2022, where I suddenly thought up my “solution”.

It’s been an interesting experience because I’ve tried to learn coding before got bored way more quickly. This time, the AI suggested I use Swift. I genuinely didn’t know if that was a good or bad suggestion so I went with it.

And it’s taking me AGES is not an efficient way to develop anything! Not even a prototype, but at this stage I don’t have the money to pay anyone to do it for me, so I’ll persevere because I actually genuinely believe in my idea, but I actually am finding it fun and rewarding. Every time I run my code and find it works I get a buzz out of that. And every time AI generates something shit that doesn’t work, I’m forced to actually look at the code and figure out what the problem is, and how to fix it.

Slowly but surely, it’s like… even though I’m doing something in a language I don’t understand, I’m starting to learn what bits of it mean because they either lead to an outcome, or they recur in a similar pattern that my brain goes “oh ok, that’s what that bit of code does”.

It’s probably a terrible way to learn, but I’m still learning. I’m still building an MVP. Even if the whole business idea is a massive failure, I’ve learned a little bit about Swift, I’ve also learned the value of human programmers and I can tell you one thing - if my business is a success and I can get it off the ground, I’ll be investing big time in human programmers and I won’t mind at all if they use AI to assist them if it makes them more efficient on whatever.

I don’t really care if it’s vibe-coding, or AI assisted programming, it’s another way of acquiring a skill, and as far as I can tell, at a minimum it lowers the barrier to entry to coding in an unconventional way.
by slics | 2025-05-05 10:31:53+00:00
You forgot one big reward with your approach. You are not 200k in debt which will take that kid with diploma to get that piece of paper. You are debt free.

I am not arguing on the merit of having a diploma is a bad thing - the colleges these days have turned their backs on the people as well.

Average $100k to get a piece of paper (LLMs are not the issue here the useless degrees that the colleges offer). Invest that $100k at an average 15% return - it becomes a lot of money 25 years from now.

Or get a piece of paper (if your major is useless) and pay the banks 100k + interest.
by bilekas | 2025-05-05 10:32:23+00:00
> And therefore the EU government had something to “go after” them for.

The EU doesn't have a government in the sense you're talking to, it has regulatory bodies and a council, the individual countries make up the enactment of their laws and regulations in the EU, there is Interpol and Europol but these work usually in conjunction with a countries governments on large scale/impact crimes where cross border jurisdiction is required.
by perlgeek | 2025-05-05 10:33:05+00:00
I wonder what the impact will be on ransomware attacks.

It'll probably make it harder for people who aren't in "bullet-proof" countries (i.e. without good cooperation with to receive ransom payment, which sounds like a good thing. It could also cause some decidedly negative effects during the transition, when companies that really want to pay a ransom (because they cannot recover otherwise) are unable to.
by smallnix | 2025-05-05 10:33:27+00:00
> If he's acting under NK command, this wouldn't be insulting, it's just doing a hacker's work.

I understand where you are coming from, I wanted to express my idea that their person cult shaped culture might be so alien to us, that what seems obvious to us, might be a non-option to them. At least at the level where I imagine such operators.

> you cannot have it both ways: either North Korean hackers are a "50ct army" or they are a credible threat

I assume the people performing the en-masse long term infiltration are not the same with technical skills who the execute technical attacks.
by JoshTriplett | 2025-05-05 10:34:05+00:00
It's a component of pervasive surveillance.

But, as one of many examples, consider the many stories of someone going around with a larger than commonly carried amount of cash, such as the deposits of a business that accepts cash or the savings of someone who is underbanked, and is presumed to be up to something and that pretense is used to seize the cash with no recourse or reasonable legal proceeding or likely hope of timely recovery.
by throw0101b | 2025-05-05 10:34:15+00:00
> Pictures are one way, there are other ways too like writing a journal.

Finding a shoebox full of photos is a lot easier to go through and reading through a journal / diary. One can quickly reminisce with the photos, but it would take a while to read through various written entries.

Photos can also capture spontaneous instants of time, whereas recollecting and writing down something involved taking up the entire context of an event and then 'interpreting' it so you can write it down.

Further, not all of one's internal state can even perhaps be put into words to be written down. A photo may help you recall feelings that you find difficult to put into words.
by bilekas | 2025-05-05 10:35:17+00:00
> Under the new Anti-Money Laundering Regulation (AMLR), credit institutions, financial institutions and crypto asset service providers (CASPs) will be prohibited from maintaining anonymous accounts or handling privacy-preserving cryptocurrencies, such as Monero

This isn't really an issue, AML exists for a reason, having had experience in countries where corruption was extremely bad, AML combined with solid privacy obligations of data from the exchanger is a net positive thing.

People can complain about "I want fully private transactions" - Okay then use cash.

Otherwise force your exchange provider to keep your data secure.
by neiman | 2025-05-05 10:35:25+00:00
I'm a foreigner living in the EU for many years, here's my 2 cents.

For over a year, I was locked out of financial services due to my inability to pass KYC. The reason was that I had already left one country, but was still in the process of getting a residency visa in another. During the process, I'm allowed to live in this country, but I have no ability to prove it to any financial institutions.

So, no wonder I'm bitter about KYC and AML.

Regarding privacy, I appreciate the EU's effort, but I also feel they focus too much on the legal side and not enough on the implementation side of it.

My ID was photocopied at almost every accommodation I visited in the last decade. I have no way to make private digital payments, and even offline cash is not being promoted.

At least once, my private financial record was accessed by a 3rd party that used it against me. But I'm not the kind of person who would go into a legal battle. I'm the kind of person who uses technology to protect his privacy. And the EU, with decisions like this, makes it very difficult for me.

I doubt banning Monero or Zcash would prevent criminals from tax evasion. They'll find other ways. So, as often happens, "Locks keep honest people honest".
by formerly_proven | 2025-05-05 10:35:58+00:00
Axis-angle also doesn't have gimbal lock - the main advantage of quaternions is that actually performing rotations with them only involves addition and multiplication, no trigonometry at all. The same is true for using proper rotation matrices, but those use a lot more memory. Plus, you can actually lerp between quaternions (more generally - they compose). That doesn't work with matrices (I think)
by godelski | 2025-05-05 10:36:17+00:00
> That's why I find it baffling how so many blogging & documentation tools lock you in to using

I feel this about so many things and it boggles my mind why people often choose to do things the hardest way possible.

Honestly, I think a good portion of it of the unwillingness to toss something aside and write something new. If it's just a hack on a hack on a hack on a hack then no wonder it's shit. It's funny that often it's quicker to rewrite than force your way through.

I'm worried that with LLMs and vibe coding on the rise we're just going to get more. Because people will be asking "how do I make X do Y" when in reality you shouldn't ever make X do Y, you need to find a different tool.
by metalman | 2025-05-05 10:36:31+00:00
hey now!

there is a wall, on one side is everything that has been done.....and can be learned/replicated. If someone is compeled to see the other side the best way through, ha!, is with very little baggage/knowledge or theory

some few talk about the experience of crossing that divide, but in no way are they responsible for anyone else considering there museing, instructional

if you want a gentler discorse on the process, then there is no one better than keef, and his various atempts to explain why 5 strings are all he can handle, does alright with them as well
by TeMPOraL | 2025-05-05 10:36:41+00:00
I don't know what the point of Babbage's statement was; it makes little sense other than a quip, or - as 'immibis suggests upthread[0] - a case of Babbage not realizing he's being tested by someone worried he's a fraud.

I do usually know what the point of any comment quoting that Babbage's statement is, and in such cases, including this one, I almost always find it wanting.

--

[0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43893270
by mandmandam | 2025-05-05 10:37:55+00:00
> I see little hope for the future.

Try reading some Sarah Kendzior [0] if you want to lose whatever shreds you had left (or if you'd like to base any droplets of hope on a more accurate world-view).

Wynn-Williams, and the author of this post, both severely underestimate how dark the tech-bros vision for the future actually is and how far along they are. Envision Snow Crash, but without the humor.

0 - https://sarahkendzior.substack.com/p/ten-articles-explaining...
by codetrotter | 2025-05-05 10:38:13+00:00
They are asking for a physical device with a memory card, that you attach to your computer and it appears as a printer to the computer and when you print to it, the device instead creates a PDF on its memory card. I think.

I also first started typing a comment about “PDF printer” software that I used to use on Windows XP back in the day before most programs and before Windows had a native export to PDF via print dialog. (These days I run macOS. So not sure if current Windows has export to PDF at system level when you print from any program. I know Office has built in export to PDF, and I think back in the day Office did not have that.)
by tpmoney | 2025-05-05 10:38:22+00:00
> We were talking about writing, not about vibe coding. We don't use calculators for writing. We don't use API requests for writing (except when we make an LLM write for us).

We do however use them to summarize and transform data all the time. Consider the ever present spreadsheet. Huge amounts of data are thrown into spreadsheets and formulas are applied to that data to present us with graphs and statistics. You could do all of that by hand, and you'd probably have a much better "internalization" about what the data is. But most of the time, hand crafting graphs from raw data and internalizing it isn't useful or necessary to accomplish what you actually want to accomplish with the data.
by amarcheschi | 2025-05-05 10:38:33+00:00
As of now paying for a ransomware in btc is still quite hard, at least in europe.

A person i know works in an art/craft company - so not tech - and the boss faced a hard time to pay 40k€ in btc for a ransomware a few months ago, since many of the transfers were blocked and had to pass through a middle man. the backup they had was last done months earlier, i don't know if its their fault or their security company's fault but i guess in the future they'll gladly pay more for working backups
by oneeyedpigeon | 2025-05-05 10:39:55+00:00
The most useful Shortcut I've written on macOS is a simple 'toggle dark mode'. It's very simple and works as a good 'first task' if you've never used the app before. I wrote up the process here: https://medium.com/@bobbyjack/how-to-toggle-macos-dark-mode-...

Overall, Shortcuts feels like a nice polished app, but it's definitely severely lacking compared to Automator.
by josephg | 2025-05-05 10:40:32+00:00
> I'm worried that with LLMs and vibe coding on the rise we're just going to get more.

I'm hoping the opposite, at least eventually. I think before long it'll be easy to get chatgpt to build your own version of whatever you want, from scratch.

Eg, "Hey, I want something kinda like markdown but with these other features. Write me the spec. Implement a renderer for documents in Go - and write a vs code extension + language server for it."

But if that happens, we'll get way more fragmentation of the computing ecosystem. Maybe to the point that you really need the memory of a LLM to even know what's out there - let alone understand how to glue everything together.
by theandrewbailey | 2025-05-05 10:40:43+00:00
I've loved XFCE for over 15 years. When I started experimenting with tablets recently, I started with and stopped at KDE, because GNOME sucks. GNOME's UI and UX is a mess, because everything old is thrown out even if it works. It's like they're actively trying to sabotage themselves at every possible turn.
by alainshema | 2025-05-05 10:40:44+00:00
Pavefi.com | Data Scientist | Remote (US) | Full-time

I’m the Director of Data Science at Pavefi.com, a rapidly growing startup revolutionizing financial access for 100M+ underserved consumers and small businesses through AI-powered Cashflow Analytics and Scores.

We’re hiring a Data Scientist to ship models that will redefine the US credit system, making it fair and inclusive. Pavefi.com is backed by Better Tomorrow, Bessemer, 8VC, and other top funds and angels from Coinbase, Chime, SoFi, CashApp, and Plaid.

If you’re passionate about cutting-edge credit risk modeling and want to join a high-growth startup, apply here: https://wellfound.com/l/2AqFf9
by vintagedave | 2025-05-05 10:42:06+00:00
Clickbait headline, and it's reporting something from Business Insider (itself IMO a terrible website these days), but:

> the results were dismal. The best-performing model was Anthropic's Claude 3.5 Sonnet, which struggled to finish just 24 percent of the jobs assigned to it. The study's authors note that even this meager performance is prohibitively expensive, averaging nearly 30 steps and a cost of over $6 per task.

and other AIs were worse.
by lordofgibbons | 2025-05-05 10:42:09+00:00
These are the real Cypherpunk coins. Specially Monero. The premise behind Cryptocurrencies, (before crypto-bros joined), were all about distributed control, privacy, and censorship avoidance.

If there's a single company or "foundation" that is in charge of development decisions, then it's not a distributed currency. That's no different from Paypal.

If a random country (that you don't even live in) can block your wallet-address/transactions then what you have is not a cryptocurrency worthy of its name (they can force miners and exchanges to not accept any funds that can easily be traced to your wallet address). Just use Venmo or Paypal at that point they have lower fees and faster transactions.
by _djo_ | 2025-05-05 10:42:22+00:00
My statements were complete. You were not completing them, but trying to spin them in a way that implies wrongdoing when no evidence exists of it. I can only presume you're doing so for partisan reasons, to try to defend the actions of the current administration.

Whatever the reason, I have made my case. Feel free to make yours with a similar level of evidence.
by pjc50 | 2025-05-05 10:42:47+00:00
The swinging bladed tool people might use for gardening is a machete, which (absurdly) is banned under separate legislation along with "zombie knives", whatever the hell that is (some sort of serration?)

You have to understand that as a headline factory. The Offensive Weapons Act already prohibits carrying anything with the intent of using it as a weapon. Police routinely confiscate kitchen knives from the pockets of young men in stop-and-search. The specific bans on specific weapons are part of a stupid media cycle where a crime is carried out using a fancy weapon so the government legislates against that specific weapon. It's like trying to outlaw cryptocurrencies by banning them by name one at a time. It's incredibly stupid but a tradition of UK politics because it's easier than trying to untangle the actual problems of knife crime.

It's also a UK thing, not an EU thing. There isn't an EU level knife directive, rules vary; Czechia and Finland seem to be loosest from some brief googling.
by killerstorm | 2025-05-05 10:43:38+00:00
That's actually not true. Cobain used a rather "weird" technique where he would "accidentally" hit 4th in addition to 5th. That actually has characteristic Nirvana sound and is sometimes called "Cobain chords". Assuming Cobain doesn't hit any other strings these are sus4 chords.

Here's a video with some analysis of "Smells like teen spirit": https://youtu.be/Xambk1JkWrE?si=aV-kCj1JsbMdM_AV&t=137

I find it really weird that people claim these are power chord even though they sound really different. In my view they are important to the vibe of "Smells like teens spirit" as they bring some dreamy characteristic as they make it a lot brighter compared to what it would be if it was played with only two lowest notes.