MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by sefrost | 2025-05-12 19:36:59+00:00
My work Mac regularly pops up an alert box claiming that Slack is “trying to install a new helper tool”. I have no idea why or what it means. I asked IT how I could verify it was legit and they didn’t know.

I often wonder if this could also be exploited because it asks for a password and it keeps popping back up every time I click cancel.
by boznz | 2025-05-12 19:37:24+00:00
The main issue is they often try to write code using dated/unsupported packages, but simply asking them not to use any out of date components or units will give you a baseline to do most things or from first principles.

Gemini 2.5 was the last one I used for generating an interface to a really old OLE based SCADA system, the base code it generated required almost no re-work to read and write the interface.
by ndriscoll | 2025-05-12 19:37:49+00:00
The only reason people buy those books is that they're required for problem sets (sometimes needing a single-use key for online homework that comes with the book and costs as much as the book to buy standalone). Universities drive this racket. It's not like we need 15 editions of a book (e.g. University Physics with Modern Physics) to keep up with the fast-moving fields of freshman physics and calculus.

When I was in school, people passed around a CD that had all of the books for our major on it. These days there's libgen. There are also plenty of free, legal, high quality sources of material for learning. But you can't really get out of the $100 license to do your homework.
by AStonesThrow | 2025-05-12 19:38:30+00:00
Interesting that you should mention the Old Testament. 2025 is a year of Ordinary Jubilee. I'd invite you to research what a Jubilee Year meant to the Jews, and what it currently means to Christians. Because Jubilee Years have never been abolished.

Hint: there's parts about freeing slaves, about repatriating foreigners, and about fallow fields. It's really sort of awe-inspiring how our secular government is implementing Jubilee by fiat.
by thezoq2 | 2025-05-12 19:38:45+00:00
Spade author here! The biggest difference is that BlueSpec uses a different abstraction than standard "RTL". That has significant advantages of course, but also means some overhead and a shift in mental model.

With Spade my goal is to build new abstractions on top of RTL. That should allow you to operate at a higher abstraction level with minimal overhead most of the time, and dive down to regular RTL when necessary
by TeMPOraL | 2025-05-12 19:38:51+00:00
In some sense, they did. The world may not be full of human-like robots autonomously roaming the wastelands^Wurban landscape - but it's chock-full of actuators, sensors and batteries. There are sensors and actuators in your coffee maker. There are plenty of them in your car too, whether they control the wheels, or the angle of the mirrors, or the height of the windows, or the state of your door knob. Etc. And all of those robotic parts were mostly made by... larger robots in factories.
by s1artibartfast | 2025-05-12 19:39:44+00:00
Both can lead to those bad outcomes. Many crises have been centered around assets that have some sort productive or utilitarian use.

Housing bubbles obviously come to mind, where there is obvious income and utility potential. Bubbles are about the balance of these return factors with pricing, not a result of their entire absence.

Either way, there is a fundamental question about whose moral authority it is too allow or not allow certain behaviors of others, and what that threshold is.

If I want to buy a smart TV, flashy car, or a case of beer on credit because I value pleasure today over cost tomorrow, who are you to tell me it is illegal?
by yamazakiwi | 2025-05-12 19:39:52+00:00
The problem isn't that anyone has access to programming, it's that corporate incentives prioritize profit over quality, security, and ethics.

And sure, if your follow-up is "that won’t change," I get it, but that doesn’t mean the open nature of programming is the problem.

>At the end of the day the masses will finally get tired of the fuckery of programmers doing whatever they want and start putting laws in place, and the laws will be passed by the stupidest people among us.

I agree laws will pass eventually but it won't start from the people. They rarely even think or hear about software security as something other than an amorphous boogie man, and there are no repercussions so any voices are easily forgotten. Eventually, it will be some big tech corp executive or politician moving into government convincing them to create a security auditing authority to extract money from these companies and/or shut them down.

I'm sure we can find some holier than thou types to fill chairs with security auditors for the new "SSC" once it's greenlit.
by libraryofbabel | 2025-05-12 19:41:33+00:00
The concert hall and theater is indeed the main reason most people who aren’t residents end up in the Barbican. When I lived in London it was almost a classical music rite of passage to get completely lost on the wrong concrete overhead walkway while rushing to get to an LSO concert there.

Unrelated, but recently the complex has been appearing in the general consciousness again as the excellent Apple TV series/spy novels Slow Horses (about a bunch of outcast MI5 agents) is set near there.
by stunningllama | 2025-05-12 19:42:07+00:00
I recreated Veritasium's setup in my simulator and measured the current through the load resistor, the results of which are here: https://imgur.com/a/sxVihf0

The gap between the wires is about 1 micrometer, so light should take about 3 fs to propagate through. The simulation output approximately matches this prediction, and over the first few tens of femtoseconds the current increases, with a jump at around 70 fs due to the reflected wave. All of this is pretty much in line with the results of Veritasium's experiment.

Thanks for bringing it up. I might include this as another example in my sim.
Show HN: A Human-Centered Protocol for Containment-Aware AI Design
by architect137 | 2025-05-12 19:42:49+00:00
I’ve written a small protocol for engineers and researchers working on advanced AI systems LLMs, agents, simulators, where alignment can’t be assumed.

It’s called the "AI Human Protection Protocol". It’s not a manifesto or policy paper. It’s a design-layer spec focused on recursive coherence, boundary maintenance, and preserving human agency as systems scale.

I've done some evaluation against common symbolic failure patterns, including recursive collapse scenarios like Roko’s Basilisk, Surveillance Capitalism, Technocracy, Synthetic Gods, Simulated Suffering (Hellbox), 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Matrix... all the classics.

It’s meant as a practical foundation for containment-aware system design, simple enough to implement, general enough to extend.

If you’re working in the space and want to help pressure-test or improve it, I’d appreciate feedback. Especially from folks who’ve thought deeply about recursion, autonomy, or edge-case behaviour in aligned systems.

Protocol: https://github.com/fieldarchitect137/AI-Human-Protection-Pro...

Core breach pattern reference: https://github.com/fieldarchitect137/AI-Human-Protection-Pro...
by skeeter2020 | 2025-05-12 19:43:23+00:00
feels like these types of human-powered cargo vehicles work better when they're pushing the load vs towing a trailer, either the 2 wheeler cargo that's got the payload way out front, or the reverse trikes. The closest I've tried to this type of geo is a regular bike towing a 2-wheeled trailer, and that has both logistic & performance issues. This setup has you really tall/forward, and the trailer interfering with the pedaling & leg movement.
by gweinberg | 2025-05-12 19:44:24+00:00
I don't understand why some people consider the concept of many dimensions to be so mysterious. It's numbers specifying something like degrees of freedom. If I wanted to specify the position of my body sitting at my desk, I might say use two angles to specify the what is happening at each joint, and so would probably need a couple hundred to fully specify my position. A human being probably could not look at the numbers and see "he's sitting at a desk", but I don't see the conceptual difficulty".
by winwang | 2025-05-12 19:45:04+00:00
Yep, CPU has to transfer data because no RDMA setup on GCP lol. But that's like 16-32 GB/s of transfer per GPU (assuming T4/L4 nodes), which is much more than network bandwidth. And we're not even network bound, even if there's no warm data (i.e. for our ETL workloads). However, there is some stuff kept on GPU during actual execution for each Spark task even if they aren't running on the GPU at the moment, which makes handling memory and partition sizes... "fun", haha.
by haiku2077 | 2025-05-12 19:45:55+00:00
Sure, but how are you going to find customers? Within weeks of beginning carpentry you can make useful products that people will pay for. Even using less than $100 of hand tools (A saw, a chisel, and sanding + polishing can make useful and beautiful kitchen tools.) How long to go from beginner programmer to break-even revenue? Maybe if you're really smart and hit it big, at least six months. For most people closer to 2-6 years.
by palmotea | 2025-05-12 19:48:00+00:00
> That's the thing though: intuitively, they do - training the model != generating from the model, and it's the output of a generation that violates copyright (and the user-supplied prompt is a crucial ingredient in getting the potentially copyrighted material to appear). And legally, that's AFAIK still an open question.

It's still copyright infringement if I download a pirated movie and never watch it (writing the bytes to the disk == "training" the disk's "model", reading the bytes back == "generating" from the disk's "model").

> That's 100% true. I know that, I'm not denying that. But in this particular case, I find my own views align with their case.

IMHO, unless you're massively wealthy and/or running a bigcorp, people like you benefit a lot more from copyright than are harmed by it. In a world without copyright protection, some bigcorp will be able to use its size to extract the value from the works that are out there (i.e. Amazon and Netflix will stop paying royalties instantly, but they'll still have customers because they have the scale to distribute). Copyright just means the little guy who's actually creating has some claim to get some of the value directed back to them.

> and any individual work that went into training data contributes approximately zero to it.

Then cut all those works out of the training set. I don't think it's an excuse that the infringement has to happen on a massive scale to be of value to the generative AI company.
by jmyeet | 2025-05-12 19:49:08+00:00
This is a meaningless argument people trot out all the time for things they just don't understand. Sometimes it applies but often it doesn't.

For example, people will dismiss arguments saying FTL is likely impossible because people once said that about going to the Moon. To be fair, there was some logic to the anti-Moon argument based on physics. The big change came with multi-stage rockets that solved the weight and thrust problems. And even then it's close [1].

There are good, physical reasons why FTL is highly likely impossible. You know, based on phnysics.

Likewise, the challenges to commercial fusion are also based on physics. Fusion reactions produce neutrons. Neutrons can't be magnetically contained. Neutrons destroy the container and, more importantly, lose energy from the system.

But saying "people once said the Earth was flat" or "people once said we couldn't get to the Moon" and so on are just meaningless platitudes. [1]: https://www.realclearscience.com/blog/2017/07/06/if_earth_wa...
by yencabulator | 2025-05-12 19:50:22+00:00
I don't think the Rust ecosystem has that at this time. They're annotating the vulnerabilities with affected functions, but as far as I know nobody's written the static analysis side of it.

https://github.com/rustsec/rustsec/issues/21

Python and JS might be so dynamic that such static analysis just isn't as useful.
by pmarreck | 2025-05-12 19:50:38+00:00
Honest question- Would a full IPv6 implementation across the board, hurt Tailscale's M.O. and bottom line, assuming all routing worked properly (a big assumption, to be sure)?

You can probably guess the next question, if the answer to that one is anything like a "yes"

That said, my experiences with Tailscale have been nothing but positive and I appreciate the work they're doing to simplify Internet connectivity between endpoints inside different LANs and WANs
by flyingcircus3 | 2025-05-12 19:51:02+00:00
https://www.washingtonpost.com/video/politics/trump-if-supre...

It's not related to copyright. It is an example of your hypothetical standard required to attribute something to Trump. My point is that even when he is on camera saying something, that does not prevent the post facto rationalizations. Even if he was on tape firing this person, people would rationalize this away too.
by sokoloff | 2025-05-12 19:51:11+00:00
Having rigorous enforcement of minimum radius in curves*, preserving more available cornering/braking traction and wide lanes, providing for better sightlines ahead (for faster traffic) and behind (for slower traffic contemplating pulling out to pass even slower traffic).

* - I did an internship for Mercedes in the early 90s and we had testing access to a section of ex-A8 near Stuttgart that was retired because it didn't meet the modern autobahn requirements and so had been replaced with a re-routed A8. To my American college-student mind that seemed incredibly wasteful, but it sure was convenient for our testing. I can't find it now on Google maps, but it's been 30 years so may have been demolished by now.

Edit: There's a hiking area called "Alte A8" which is probably it/related: https://maps.app.goo.gl/1SyBPKNie1x13AYy8
by throwaway150 | 2025-05-12 19:51:35+00:00
Yep, and it's not just Clojure. This will end up flagging projects across all non-mainstream ecosystems. Whether it's Vim plugins, niche command-line tools, academic research code, or hobbyist libraries for things like game development or creative coding, they'll likely get flagged simply because they're often maintained by individual developers. These devs build the projects, iterate quickly in the early stages, and eventually reach a point where the code is stable and no longer needs frequent updates.

It's a shame that this tool penalizes such projects, which I think are vital to a healthy open source ecosystem.

It's a nice project otherwise. But flagging stable projects from solo developers really sticks out like a sore thumb. :(
by hamilyon2 | 2025-05-12 19:52:00+00:00
Genuine question. Why country with so much freedoms tolerates this particular injustice so much.

Freedom to pay is very fundamental for free speech, I think courts and legislatures made this very very clear multiple times.

There are whole countries where you don't need Apple as intermediary to cancel any subscription without notice. In these countries it is up to companies to sue you if they think you are in wrong, and "they made it hard to cancel subscription" is basically all defence consumer ever needs.

So they never win.

So they never sue.
by PaulDavisThe1st | 2025-05-12 19:52:29+00:00
There is a Smile of Love And there is a Smile of Deceit And there is a Smile of Smiles In which these two Smiles meet And there is a Frown of Hate And there is a Frown of disdain And there is a Frown of Frowns Which you strive to forget in vain -- William Blake, The Smile of Smiles

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47468/the-smile
by nkrisc | 2025-05-12 19:52:40+00:00
And yet in some cases there are clear societal benefits that outweigh any hindrances on personal freedom, such as seat belts in vehicles. In any society, individuals must make personal sacrifices in order to be part of that society and to receive the benefits of society as a whole.

It's not that "the government" knows better than you how you should live your life, but it sets the ground rules that we all must adhere to in order to participate in society.

And for better or worse, because our society dictates that we won't simply leave crash victims who weren't wearing a seat belt to die in the median of the highway (whether they want to be left or not) we mandate that everyone wears a seat belt.
by rdtsc | 2025-05-12 19:53:10+00:00
I recently rewatched https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grizzly_Man. It's a Werner Herzog film about Timothy Treadwell's story. It's a classic story of "well, his heart was definitely in the right place" kind of a situation.

Charlie Russell, a Canadian naturalist who worked with Treadwell offered a different perspective on it http://cloudline.org/treadwell.html. He is a bit critical of how Herzog presented Treadwell and the bears in the documentary.
by danans | 2025-05-12 19:53:12+00:00
> Ultimately, InventWood is planning to use wood chips to create structural beams of any dimension that won’t need finishing. “Imagine your I-beams look like this,” Lau said, holding up a sample of Superwood.

I have several exposed PSL beams and posts in my house that cross spans that are too long (~20 ft carrying an upper floor) for dimensional lumber. Because they are stained, most people who are not in construction think it's some kind of exotic hardwood due to the complex patterns made by the wood strands, and don't believe when I tell them it's just woodchips glued and compressed.
by thezoq2 | 2025-05-12 19:53:55+00:00
Thanks for the kind words!

> The challenge of a HDL over a regular sequential programming (software) language is that a software language is programmed in time, whereas a HDL is programmed in both space and time. As one HDL theory expert once told me "Too many high level HDLs try to abstract out time, when what they really need to do is expose time."

That's an excellent quote, I might steal it :D In general, I think good abstractions are the ones that make important details explicit rather than ones that hide "uninteresting" details.
by ryao | 2025-05-12 19:54:05+00:00
Nuclear fusion as an energy source has major unsolved problems. Off the top of my head:

* The super conducting metals required for confinement randomly stop superconducting. * The fuels produce absurd amounts of radiation and the Helium-3 solution for that might as well be fairy dust, since even if we convert the energy global economy to helium-3 production, we will not have enough by orders of magnitude to power hypothetical fusion reactors that would handle our needs. Strip mining the moon for it is supposedly a way to get it, but defacing the surface of the moon for minuscule amounts of Helium-3 per acre is unlikely to ever be profitable. * The amount of radioactive materials produced from the experiments are many times those produced in fission reactors.

This is just off the top of my head. Until recently, I would have included the inability to produce more energy than we put into it on this list, but LLNL’s breakthrough a few years ago seems to have solved that. I suspect that someone with time to look into the practical issues involved in building a fusion reactor would find other issues (such as the design not being practical to use in a production power plant and thus further research being needed to make one that is).

I wonder if the only reason countries fund nuclear fusion research is to keep nuclear scientists from finding employment in the production of nuclear weapons.
by boznz | 2025-05-12 19:54:23+00:00
Click-bait titles like "All the best programmers know this..", "Breakthrough might make fusion a reality.." or any other type of title that does not give a hint of what the actual thing is are immediately discarded by me regardless of the creator. I actually wish there was a way of blocking these but they are usually the first items I see on YouTube or reddit.. sigh!

This title problem is even worse as an author where you get one-chance for people to notice/read your book, but if the blurb or the cover picture is even slightly misleading or sub-par to the readers expectation they are likely to review it poorly and then the algorithm kicks it down the listings. I seriously miscategorised my first book and it did not do it any favors.
by brudgers | 2025-05-12 19:54:45+00:00
A patient future of regular market monitoring accompanied by ready cash is the best preparation for scoring a lucky bargain.

Basically, you can trade time for money.

There is no website for easy arbitrage.

It also helps to be able to service/repair the tech you want...again trading time for money.

Paying market rate is fast and convenient.

Good luck.
by JohnKemeny | 2025-05-12 19:56:10+00:00
You're right that higher dimensions are just more degrees of freedom, and mathematically it's just more numbers. But what's counterintuitive is how geometry behaves differently as dimensions grow. Things like distance, volume, and angles don’t scale the way we expect. For example, in high dimensions, almost all the volume of a sphere concentrates near its surface, and random vectors tend to be nearly orthogonal—something that rarely happens in 2D or 3D.

These effects matter in practice. In high-dimensional spaces like word embeddings, even unrelated points can seem equidistant, making basic tasks like clustering or similarity search much harder. So it's not that higher dimensions are mysterious per se, but that they defy the spatial intuitions we've developed from living in three.
by Aloisius | 2025-05-12 19:56:23+00:00
RAND did a decent review.[1]

They do show supportive evidence of some gun laws having a meaningful effect on violent crime, so I'm not sure what they're referring to. For instance, it appears that child access prevention laws, specifically, are associated with a significant reduction in firearm homicides.[2]

RAND does complain that there is insufficient or limited evidence in a lot of areas though, like effect on mass shootings.

[1] https://www.rand.org/research/gun-policy/key-findings/what-s...

[2] https://www.rand.org/research/gun-policy/analysis/child-acce...
by piecioshka | 2025-05-12 19:57:45+00:00
My new achievement unlocked!

I’m excited to share the first episode of my brand-new YouTube channel focused on SoftwareDevelopment content in English.

Episode 1: "Secret" Git Similarity Index

I dive into how Git detects file changes, even when filenames change — covering heuristics, thresholds, and a few fun gotchas.

I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments!
by gruez | 2025-05-12 19:58:15+00:00
You can make a patched torrent client that never uploads any pieces to peers. It'd definitely be within Meta's capability to do so. The real problem is that unlike typical torrenting lawusits, they weren't caught red-handed in the act, and would therefore be hard to go after them. This might seem unfair, but it's not any different than you openly posting on Reddit that you torrent, but it'd be tough for rights holders to go after you even with such admission.
by twoquestions | 2025-05-12 19:58:22+00:00
POTUS fired two Dem members of the FTC, and the remainder voted to delay enforcement.

Some people like this, where companies get to effectively scam people by deliberately not enforcing rules preventing it. I don't know why people like this. I speculated that it was due to some dumb new bigotry of some sort, as a wild guess as to why people like it when the gov't harms people for no reason.
by thezoq2 | 2025-05-12 19:58:24+00:00
Spade author here!

That's a good reminder that I need to update the example on the website, I must have written that example almost 3 years ago at this point :)

For more up to date motivation, my talk from LatchUp last year is probably the best one I have https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_EdOHbY2dlg&t=277s

> So my fear is that this new hardware description language hasn't been created by a veteran who has many years of experience in using HDLs

That's annoyingly quite close to the truth :D But I think I have enough experience now to not be completely stumbling around in the dark