MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by matheusmoreira | 2025-05-11 16:05:56+00:00
Actually having hardware lying around to reverse engineer is the limiting factor for me. I suppose I could give it a shot if people who own the devices sent me the required data. I'd need their help with testing.

USB stuff was really nice to work with. Wireshark made it really easy to intercept the control commands. For example, to configure my keyboard's RGB LEDs I need to send 0xCC01llrrggbb7f over the USB control channel; the ll identifies the LED and rrggbb sets the color. Given this sort of data it's a simple matter to make a program to send it.

Reverse engineering ACPI stuff seems to be more involved. I wasn't able to intercept communications on the Windows side. On Linux I managed to dump DSDT tables and decompile WMI methods but that just gave me stub code. If there's anything in there it must be somehow hidden. I'm hoping someone more experienced will provide some pointers in this thread.
by holowoodman | 2025-05-11 16:06:32+00:00
That is useless, because of the tons of sleazy CVE-collectors. They will always announce the next heartbleed, details soon. When the details are out, total nothingburger, useless mitigation recommendations, incomplete report, misreported scope, different attack vectors, I've seen everything. It only feeds the CVE hype cycle to no use of the customers, victims and public.
by CrulesAll | 2025-05-11 16:06:41+00:00
No one was allowed mock Stalin, comrade. In socialist society, you will be told what you mean. The USSR won WW2 with no air force. I can't recall the USSR's long range bombing of Tokyo nor Berlin which is odd because that would kind of be essential to such an argument. Destroying the industrial heartland seems kind of important, comrade. Nor do I recall the great victories at sea? Stalin had no aircraft carriers. Again quite strange. They won WW2 without a de facto air force or Navy. They also seemed to limp into Berlin with horse and carts. Which again is odd because you said they were victorious. It's even odder when Patton said he could be in Moscow within a week. Probably capitalist lies, comrade, and not real socialism.
by mdaniel | 2025-05-11 16:06:46+00:00
To the novice reader in golang, it was an unexpected "wait, where did these symbols come from?" because I wasn't used to being able to look after the function signature for variable names, and that's doubly true for symbol names that didn't come from caller data

I'm sure this solved some Google-y problem but for my tastes it is just needlessly confusing since I have never met a programmer who needed help creating local variables and that's got to be infinitely true now that AI gonna take all our jobs

> Isn't it basically equivalent to an anonymous tuple which is automatically deconstructed on assignment?

Your comment brought up an interesting point: a certain audience may also think those names appear in the caller's scope because they're part of the function's published signature but are an implementation detail

func Doit() (result int, err error) { return 123, nil } func main() { // a, b := Doit() // fmt.Printf("In reality %d %+v\n", a, b) Doit() fmt.Printf("Uh-huh %d %+v\n", result, err) } ./fred.go:13:32: undefined: result ./fred.go:13:40: undefined: err

I also just realized they're one of the places where golang doesn't emit a compile error for unused variables (as in the example above). Now I extra hate it

func Doit() (result int, err error) { result = 123 return 456, nil }
by bolognafairy | 2025-05-11 16:07:11+00:00
Thank you Hacker News commenter for lecturing someone on Human Resources policy. The ultimate scope creep from someone explaining why this feature might have an iota of value. The SECOND a tool that you use add a feature that you want because “um, we don’t think that your business should work like that, actually”, there’d be an angry rant on the front page of this very site.
by pphysch | 2025-05-11 16:07:12+00:00
> My theory is that its not meant to set direction, or describe a vision, or even goals – rather it converges towards something intended to impress and socially posture against other managers.

Yes, it's self-preservation behavior. It's a strong indicator that the manager knows they are in a position that provides little to no value, so they need to aggressively preserve it.

Why does a single, non-technical middle manager need authority over multiple PL development teams? It makes no sense. The bare minimum of that position must be to connect technical expertise of the ICs to strategic vision of the C-suite. That is a full-time job, and if it's not being done, there needs to be accountability.
by WillAdams | 2025-05-11 16:07:21+00:00
That's pretty much it in a nutshell --- I've always described the "Maker Movement" as "Geeks who missed shop class".

Cut my teeth on texts such as:

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7326227-steel-square

and have bought (and given away) more copies of:

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/30685840-practical-shop-...

and

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/54328381-construction-ge...

than I'd care to count.

Current project has me working through: the _Make: Geometry/Trigonometry/Calculus_ books (and looking for a good book on conic sections which has optimized formulae to speed up/simplify what are currently a series of chained trigonometric functions...).
by brundolf | 2025-05-11 16:07:58+00:00
Agreed. It's become a pretty useful tool for individual people to use for individual tasks. But to hyper-scale to a point where it justifies crazy valuations - even short of super-intelligence - it has to scale beyond users. It has to no longer require human oversight from one step to the next.

I think that's the key threshold all these companies have been running up against, and crossing it would be the paradigm shift we keep hearing about. But they've been trying for years, and haven't done it yet, and seem to be plateauing

And then in OpenAI's case specifically- this tech has become commoditized really quickly. They have several direct competitors, including a few that are open, and their only real moat is their brand and Sam's fundraising ability. Their UX is one of the best right now, but that isn't really a moat
by buyucu | 2025-05-11 16:07:59+00:00
stupid security theater liket his makes everything less secure.

people who used to take screenshots will now resort to taking screen pictures with their phones. this means microsoft teams is incentivizing everyone to 'leak' content outside of corporate networks.

creating a unworkable 'secure' system causes ordinary people to to go around the security to get their job done. which makes everything less secure in the end.
by lynx97 | 2025-05-11 16:08:16+00:00
I have a similar feeling. While LLMs have given me a new way to do search/questions, it is the byproducts that feel like the actual game changers. For me, it is vision models and pretty impressive STT and TTS. I am blind, so I have my own reasons why Vision and Speech have so many real world applications for me. Sure, LLMs are still the backbone of the applications emerging, but the real progress in terms of use cases is in the fringes.

Heck, I wrote myself my own personal radio moderator in a few hundred lines of shell, later rewritten in Python. As a simple MPD client. Watch out for a queued track which has albumart, and pass the track metadata + picture to the LLM. Send the result through a pretty natural sounding TTS, and queue the resulting sound file before the next track. Suddenly, I had a radio moderator that would narrate album art for me. It gave me a glimpse into a world that wouldn't have been possible before. And while the LLM is basically writing the script, the real magic comes from multimodal and great sounding TTS.

Much potential for really cool looking/sounding PoCs. However, what makes me worry is that there is not much progress on (to me) obvious shortcomings. For instance, OpenAI TTS really can't speak any numbers correctly. Digits maybe, but once you hand it something like "2025" the chance is high it will have pronounciation problems. In the first months, this felt like bad but temporarily acceptable. A year later, it feels like hilariously sad that nothing has been done to address such a simple yet important issue. You know that something bad is going on when you start to consider expanding numbers to written-out form before passing the message to the TTS. My girlfriend keeps joking that since LLMs, we now have computers that totally can not compute correctly. And she has a point. Sure, hand the LLM a tool to do calculations, and the situation improves somewhat. But it seems to be underlying, as shown by the problems of TTS.

Vision models have so many applications for me... However, some of them turn out to be actually unusable in practice. That becomes clear when you use a vision model to read the values off a blood pressure sensor. Take three photos, and you get three slightly different values. Not obviously made up stuff, but numbers that could be. 145/90, 147/93, 142/97. Well, the range might be clear, but actually, you can never be sure. Great for scene and art descriptions, since hallucinations almost fall through the cracks. But I would never use it to read any kind of data, neither OCR'd text nor, gasp, numbers! You can never know if you have been lied to. But still, some of the byproducts of LLMs feel like a real revolution. The moment you realize why whisper is named like that. When you test it on your laptop, and realize that it just transcribed the YouTube video you were rather silently running in the background. Some of this stuff feels like a big jump.
by Eridrus | 2025-05-11 16:08:26+00:00
I feel like there's some conceptual drift going on in Kagi's blog post wrt their proposed remedy.

They argue that the search index is an essential facility, and per their link "The essential facilities doctrine attacks a form of exclusionary conduct by which an undertaking controls the conditions of access to an asset forming a ‘bottleneck’ for rivals to compete".

But unlike physical locations where bridges/ports can be built, the ability to crawl the internet is not excludable by Google.

They do argue that the web is not friendly to new crawlers, but what Kagi wants is not just the raw index itself, but also all the serving/ranking built on top of it so that they do not have to re-engineer it themselves.

It's also worth noting that Bing exists, and presumably has it's own index of the web and no evidence has been presented that the raw index content itself is the reason that Bing is not competitive.
by dvfjsdhgfv | 2025-05-11 16:08:51+00:00
I've worked on such projects, too. They were carefully selected to have minimum impact when the models are wrong.

In some of these cases, as you say, the KPI was higher, e.g. in classification tasks (where previously a clerk was supposed to label some cases). An LLM produced decent results most of the time - and didn't get tired. But when I looked deeper, it turned out the folks who decided to use LLMs could have used classical ML learning methods as well with similar efficiency.

I believe we arrived to the point where people just got lazy and just use LLM for anything.
by jnwatson | 2025-05-11 16:10:09+00:00
I think there's a simpler answer. Google has drastically slowed hiring. Less hiring means fewer natural opportunities for growth.

I joined in 2021. I feel like I caught the tail end of old Google. Any decent idea was greenlit.

Now, it is a lot harder to find resources to do things. (This is of course relative. It is still far easier than any other place I've worked at).

The company has transitioned into something a little more traditional.
by 90s_dev | 2025-05-11 16:10:24+00:00
Maybe this is true for non-Catholic theology. But Catholic theology has no inherent need for metaphysics.

As St. John Henry Newman put it: "Christianity is eminently an objective religion. For the most part it tells us of persons and facts in simple words"

Metaphysics are not a required aspect of Catholic theology, because Catholic theology is neither systematic nor a philosophy, but just a set of objective, historical claims. They might have implications, but even those are unclear.

For example, with the story of the multiplying of the fish and the loaves, there is no definitive answer as to how this occurred. Only that over five thousand people were there, they had this many loaves, everyone ate their fill, and afterwards they had more loaves left over.

Metaphysics might be helpful in guessing how this happened, but it's neither required nor infallible when explaining it.
by ryandrake | 2025-05-11 16:10:49+00:00
There are plenty of situations where the meaning of something depends entirely on what is in the mind of the recipient. If I approach someone in a bar and say "Hi, that outfit looks very nice on you!" If the recipient is into me, then I'm flirting. If the recipient is not into me, then I'm being creepy. One needs awareness of how likely it is for their words to be interpreted one way or the other, and act accordingly.
by alwa | 2025-05-11 16:11:15+00:00
I remember being amused to learn that psychology folks call a real smile a “Duchenne” smile, and that the tell, to them, is that a Duchenne smile forms creases around the corners of the eyes.

To hear Ekman, father of the Facial Action Coding System, tell it:

https://www.paulekman.com/blog/fake-smile-or-genuine-smile/
by pelagicAustral | 2025-05-11 16:11:59+00:00
Talk about turning your luck around...

Somehow not mentioned in the Wiki page, but Guerrero actually means Warrior in Spanish. So I get the last name comes from him (?), unverifiable of course.

EDIT: Several people pointed out that the surname “Guerrero” has existed in Spain long before the 1500s, so my guess about it originating with Gonzalo Guerrero was off. Thanks for the corrections—leaving the rest of my comment for context.
by viccis | 2025-05-11 16:12:45+00:00
Yeah my first reaction when I see an interesting new game on Steam or elsewhere is to search r/games (NOT r/gaming lol) for the game's name and look around at what people have to say about it. They're often very detailed and honest.

It's probably a good thing that reddit seems to have been too incompetent to enshittify their site completely yet. There's lots of it that has been, but there's still plenty of very good discussion there if you know where to look.
by thethethethe | 2025-05-11 16:13:12+00:00
Not a huge fan of calling random things you don't like fascist but op has a point here

> The things you've listed might be bad, but they're neither dictatorial nor fascist.

Uhh I'm pretty sure that CEOs/executives act very similar to dictators. Large companies certainly don't act like democracies. Companies often employ many forms of totalitarian control used by fascist dictatorships. There's often mass surveillance (mouse trackers, email auditing, etc), suppression of speech, suppression of opposition, fear of termination, cult of personality.

The tax stuff is irrelevant imo though
by SoraNoTenshi | 2025-05-11 16:13:24+00:00
I think that'd require a different Datatype than a Raw pointer. Allocating heap memory is a side-effect that's not really predictable, if you take all the factors into account. However i can see a world where this may be possible because of virtual memory, but i don't know how.

Dependent Types could help, although i am unsure if it helps with raw pointers.
by benzible | 2025-05-11 16:13:43+00:00
One person's dystopia is another's Christian nationalist authoritarian paradise. Vought / Project 2025 have been quite explicit in their goals. They believe that they're at war with secular institutions and what they call the "administrative state" - any government function that operates independently of direct political control by the executive branch. That is an explicit goal of doing away with the US Constitutional system. Vought has justified this through conspiratorial nonsense, claiming that the "deep state" has already brought about a "post-Constitutional" order via bureaucratic overreach.

Their plan will mean impoverishment of most of the population, as well as removal of a substantial part of the population through deportation but they're not particularly concerned with that. In their eschatology, non-believers (which includes not just atheists but Catholics, Jews, Muslims, and even other Protestant denominations they deem insufficiently pure) are literally destined for eternal torture in hell. Some of the more extreme elements actively look forward to this as divine justice. Their apocalyptic worldview frames everyone outside their narrow in-group as either potential converts or enemies destined for damnation. Why worry about climate change, democratic institutions, or social welfare when the faithful will be raptured away while the unrighteous suffer? This theological framework makes it remarkably easy to dismiss the suffering of others as either deserved or irrelevant in cosmic terms.

Musk has a different set of motivations. Some of it is just straightforward corruption - killing off agencies and firing specific individuals who have pushed investigations of his various enterprises, as well as awarding contracts to himself (e.g. the FAA Starlink contract, which is genuinely terrifying).

But as far as his motivations to decimate government more generally, I think it's a combination of things. He seems to genuinely believe that dismantling government oversight will unshackle great men such as himself to bring about some techno-libertarian utopia. But I think a lot of it is that his brain has just been pickled by right-wing social media and he's a bit of a useful idiot. The fact that this aligns with Christian nationalist goals is just a convenient overlap.

Then there's the Stephen Miller wing, who are primarily motivated by racism (of course, all of these factions are extremeley racist).

It's all quite grim.
by mdaniel | 2025-05-11 16:14:18+00:00
> Look how many friends they have on FB.

I can't tell if you mean it literally, or you're adopting the FB nomenclature, but in my mind that FB edge is just labeled friend, and is not the relationshipStatus between the nodes

I have a to of "connections" on LinkedIn, too, but I can assure you I am not "connected" to hardly any of them
by _mlbt | 2025-05-11 16:15:02+00:00
I think unfortunately what holds Lazarus back is the Pascal programming language. Although it is a very capable language that can hold its own against other languages, it suffers from a reputation of being obsolete.

It’s a pity that the C family of languages won out over Wirth’s languages. Pascal’s superior string handling alone would have saved us from countless security flaws.
by selfhoster | 2025-05-11 16:15:38+00:00
Agreed, between Google, Microsoft and Apple, Apple is the worst in not contributing jack back to the world. I can't stand how Microsoft was able to get to their status using evil means but at least the Microsoft of today does give back open and free (at least in beer) products. Google is the best of the three in this regard. Come to think of it, not sure where I'd place Amazon on that scale.
by p_ing | 2025-05-11 16:16:03+00:00
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vibe_coding

Does what you do fit the Definition outlined there? Or do you come up with some actual code on your own (things that maybe aren't boilerplate) and ask ChatGPT to rewrite/enhance/verify correctness?

If you simply say "create me a DNS server in C", sure that's vibe coding. If you provide it code to correct some issue you can't figure out, that's using AI to your advantage.
by SoraNoTenshi | 2025-05-11 16:16:11+00:00
I mean reading through the article it was only considering author's present perception which is a bit too naïve in my opinion.

Out of my head, the benefits of having a `build.zig` that you learn right from the get go is, that you kind of have to dig a bit into the eco-system a bit. Also how the buildsystem works, etc. which then in return makes it muuuuch easier later on if you have a bigger project, to properly utilize the power of the buildsystem.

I can also only consider my perspective here, but I've done quite a bit of Rust now (and work with it for over a year now, full time as well), and i can tell you as much: I would be thrown into icy waters if i need to do anything with a build.rs.
by AStonesThrow | 2025-05-11 16:16:30+00:00
As I was briefly a beneficiary of SNAP EBT ("Food Stamps") I was subjected to the process of managing that debit card. When checking out, for example from Walmart.com, a popup would appear so that the user can input his PIN.

The popup was served by the SNAP EBT provider, and it would randomize the PIN number pad. So indeed, you couldn't rely on muscle memory to input your PIN because the number pad changed every time input was requested. It seemed that the mouse was also required for this input, rather than the keyboard.
by mjevans | 2025-05-11 16:16:42+00:00
Those reference cards are very helpful. In college the embedded PC boards (generic) x86 and (I forget if it was a 68 or 65 series CPU) each included a CPU manual and quick assembly reference card. Seeing instructions grouped by how the decoder wanted them, it was much easier to see where a given entry would have 3 or 4 bits utilized to decode a sub function among a general class of instructions.

Sadly I couldn't find a good link to a quick reference card, but there are some copies of the CPU manual on https://archive.org/search?query=6809 . A Wikipedia site is nowhere near as good as a properly typeset and slightly grouped to convey clarity card, but it's still useful https://github.com/Ta0uf19/Motorola-6809-Cheatsheet
by malux85 | 2025-05-11 16:17:12+00:00
Thank you!

Originally, before I knew which plants I would use, I was going to use ML models to measure the surface area of the plants, and in earlier versions (before the camera) I had rotating, high polygon 3D models.

So I threw a bit more hardware at it than it needed because I didn’t want to have my future ideas limited by hardware
by pjmlp | 2025-05-11 16:17:27+00:00
100% great advice, but really better go with Avalonia, Uno, WPF, Windows Forms, WinUI 3.0 only if one is a Microsoft employee.

https://github.com/microsoft/microsoft-ui-xaml/issues

https://github.com/microsoft/WindowsAppSDK/issues

https://github.com/microsoft/CsWinRT/issues

https://github.com/microsoft/cppwinrt/commits/master/
by jsnell | 2025-05-11 16:18:16+00:00
> The interesting thing, to me, is how speculative OpenAI's bet is.

It doesn't really matter how speculative the AGI bet is, their consumer AI business by itself is basically guaranteed to drown them in money. The only reason they're making losses at the moment is because they're choosing not to monetize their free tier users with ads, presumably since they don't need to make a profit and can prioritize growth.

But the moment they flip the advertising switch, their traffic will be both highly monetizable and ludicrously high margin.
by overu589 | 2025-05-11 16:18:33+00:00
I’m suggesting single minded lascivious persons seclude in dark crevices, and the throngs of tens of thousands who are fed and provoked my them (each their own tens of thousands) loot everything dear in this world.

There is a mob culture of the thought controlled and there are the “game masters” who have been indoctrinated into an inner workings of a machinework which underlies and overrides all modernity.

Anything about the voices in our heads being actual disembodied others, who screw all and provoke mass delusion (with very real yet impossible to document consequences.)

The conspiracy behind all conspiracies, the exogenous of thought control.

https://pastebin.com/3cPXbjhA