MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Jolter | 2025-05-17 18:04:42+00:00
The article is a lot more specific, if you read it. I quote who they say is behind the new budget amendment:

“This amendment is the direct result of a campaign by Google, Meta, OpenAI, and venture capitalists like Andreessen Horowitz—and their dozens of trade associations […]”

They are hardly saying that all of SV, or all software engineers, espouse trumpism or are otherwise on the same page politically. They don’t have to make up nebulous accusations if those mentioned by name are indeed behind it.

I do think the article could have been better edited for clarity. I can see how someone could struggle to see exactly what allegations they are leveling, given the amount of quite sweeping criticism of AI firms.
by lmcinnes | 2025-05-17 18:05:08+00:00
> And algorithms can only predict content that you've seen before. It'll never surprise you with something different. It keeps you in a little bubble.

This is not true at all, algorithms can predict things you haven't seen before, and can take you well outside your bubble. A lot of the existing recommendation algorithms on social media etc. do keep you in a bubble, but that's a very specific choice 'cause apparently that's where the money is at. There's enough work in multi-armed-bandit explore/exploit systems that we definitely could have excellent algorithms that do exactly the kind of curation the author would like. The issue is not algorithms, but rather incentives on media recommendation and consumption. People say they would like something new, but they keep going back to the places that feed them more of the comfortable same.
by microtonal | 2025-05-17 18:05:24+00:00
However, my youthful tastes were much more mainstream than my current tastes. Thus, I never really needed to find obscure content without the web.

I was very deep into non-mainstream music when I was in my teenage years (90ies) and magazines and (the little access I had to) the web were not very useful. Even outside the mainstream, a lot of magazines were mostly into the big alternative acts and mostly fed by leads by music companies.

The best way to discover music was to go to small alternative music shops. I would hang there for hours and would listen as many records as the owners tolerated. And since they were music buffs themselves and pretty much knew every obscure record they were selling, they could often point you to interesting records.

I don't think much has changed for my peers, back then they would listen what the top-40, MTV, and TMF would give them, and now they listen what record companies are pushing or astroturfing. (I don't mean this in a denigrating way, there are other media where I am more into mainstream stuff, like TV shows.)

I don't go to record shops anymore, but I still find music based on 'browsing' and word of mouth mostly. The good thing of 2025 is that I can get my hands on every bit of obscure music, whereas in 1995, some albums would have to be imported by a record store and it was way out of my budget as a teen.
by reactordev | 2025-05-17 18:05:33+00:00
The argument for curation goes against the argument for democratization. We collectively said “enough” with Hollywood gatekeeping which means you must bring your own audience.

Movies roles are based on your followers. Music gigs, based on your followers. Any creative event, based on your followers. So known named artists like Bjork have to build a following for an event for promoters to green light it.

It sucks, but that’s the nature of the business. Sell tickets, upsell merchandise, sell records, repeat.
by ethbr1 | 2025-05-17 18:07:05+00:00
I expect that's a big part of the SEWIP Block III upgrade: high-power EWAR being seen as the most effective current point defense against swarms.

Presumably you can pump enough energy through naval AESAs to do bad things to drones and cruise missiles, and they have the advantage of being electronically steerable and volumetrically targeted.

https://www.twz.com/41829/this-is-what-the-navys-new-shipboa...
by techno_tsar | 2025-05-17 18:07:17+00:00
I was thinking about how the point of reading isn't to literally 'internalize' what you've read. When you're engrossed in a piece of literature, you don't remember the specifics of the last page you read. What's more important is what the book is doing to your mind as you read -- it triggers a set of processes that force you to imagine and therefore form connections that you haven't made before, even if subtle and unrelated to the content of the book.

It's the same with writing. Writing isn't just a way to produce a good piece of writing, it's what the process of writing does to your brain as you think aloud, connecting words and sentences together. The same with painting, gardening, and organizing your stamp collection. The final 'product' isn't actually important. The significance lies in the process of immersion from the creator and the people who witness it.
by TMWNN | 2025-05-17 18:07:29+00:00
>Why do you have to use RDP anyway? It gives almost zero advantages over VNC here since all the output is going to be raster.

No preference for either protocol; I just used RDP because that was the most convenient with VirtualBox and the plugin. (I think (?) I tried VNC and couldn't get it to work.) I use VNC now with UnRAID's KVM, but probably would have stuck with RDP were it supported.
by darkwater | 2025-05-17 18:07:37+00:00
> Before (20-30 years ago): you need to have a book (for profit, curated) or a map (for profit, less info). You needed to rely on other people or on previous experience. Hard to know what changed since the info was collected.

Counterargument: the hiking app was good 10-12 years ago when it was used by the overlap of tech enthusiasts and hiking enthusiasts, which provided good routes made by expert people (just like the books and maps before). Now you have a cacophony of tracks recorded by anyone, with lot of back and forths because they got lost as well while recording it. Oh and you need a monthly subscription to properly follow the hike!

(Yes, I know you can still find books and maps)
by monatron | 2025-05-17 18:07:56+00:00
We have tools today that are uniquely good at wading through disparate sources and aggregating things into a format that we can easily digest. The worry of course - is that these tools are generally on offer from huge tech giants (google, openai, etc). The good news is, we have open-source versions of these tools that perform almost as well as the closed-source versions for these types of categorization and aggregation.

I would agree that information is now more scattered (like bread for ducks as the author notes) than ever before -- but we now have the unprecedented ability to wrangle it ourselves.
by mediumsmart | 2025-05-17 18:09:17+00:00
>But, on a large project, with a large team, carefully managing such details can become a really hard task to get right. Suddenly a dark button has unreadable black text, and users can’t figure out what to do.

Cant someone take a look at the buttons before the large project ships? Alternatively make it mandatory to never have black text on a dark button and tell every team member including the large ones.

Interesting to read about the perceptual contrast vs mathematical - I did not know that. Going to integrate that into my workflow.
by convolvatron | 2025-05-17 18:09:51+00:00
you can build these without shared memory using standard distributed database techniques for serializability and fault tolerance. i dont think its a particularly good idea. there's nothing great about running 'ps' and getting half a million entries. using the unix user/group model isn't great for managing resources. its not even that great to log in to start jobs. the only thing your gaining is familiarity.

building better abstractions - kuberenetes is an example, although i certainly hope we dont keep being stuck there - is probably a better use of time
by eastbound | 2025-05-17 18:10:15+00:00
Uh… no. What made me look into a subject that it often called a conspiracy theory (men’s rights) was the several levels of obvious bullshit that newspapers were delivering. Think about it: The only thing they had to do was to say lies that seem right, and they didn’t even succeed at that.

So no, it’s not the mediatization of the opposite point of view that gives it an audience, but the sheer lack of truthfulness of the dominating class.
by proc0 | 2025-05-17 18:10:15+00:00
Not quite. It's even admitted in the article which is a bit of a contradiction:

> This is, in my opinion, the biggest problem of "vibe coding": The AI metaprograms for you, but then you need to actually maintain the generated code. There is no "higher interface" to it.

Prompting is not programming, therefore it can't be metaprogramming either. There's no structure, it's just human language.

That said, article has a good point, that LLMs are lacking the feature of maintaining the state of the project in plain language so you can iterate on the prompt instead of the code. I think it's one of many problems with LLMs.
by refulgentis | 2025-05-17 18:10:44+00:00
The article is wrong:

- Their work does ensure contrast.

- The white on blue clearly has less contrast, not more. (squinting is a cheap way to test, or, walking backwards from your monitor)

With APCA, backgrounds around L* 60 tend to still allow white foregrounds, which is aesthetically closer to what the eye wants.

A black foreground would have more contrast regardless, even by APCA.

To be fair, this is how APCA is almost always demonstrated as a win over the long-running standard, so people run with the premise that the demo image of APCA is more contrast, rather than "ours say you'll have enough contrast to be accessible with a white foreground, even if it also says the contrast would be higher with a black foreground".

(source: in 2020 built color system around the same science, enabling latest iterations of Material theming)
by asa400 | 2025-05-17 18:10:45+00:00
Rust is genuinely novel, so for most of us its going to be less familiar, so it will take longer to learn. It's not like learning Python if you already know Ruby, for example. The upside is that it offers some pretty great guarantees you can't (yet) find elsewhere. If you want those guarantees it will be worth it, if those guarantees don't matter to you, it may feel like a slog.
by Jolter | 2025-05-17 18:11:08+00:00
While a a trade organization represents the interests and opinions of its member corporations, a corporation does not represent their employees. A company espouses and represents the opinions of its owners.

I encourage anyone working in tech to do some soul searching here. Are you comfortable putting your effort into a venture that acts the way they allegedly do according to the article? If not, the only sensible way is to look for other employment. As an employee, you will never convince a corporation to act in opposition to the interests of its shareholders. It’s a fool’s errand to try to fix Google’s ethics from within.
by Rochus | 2025-05-17 18:11:20+00:00
The Oberon system version corresponding to Oberon-07 (see http://www.projectoberon.net/) is not really a "GUI" and very bare-bone compared to previous Oberon system versions. Wirth mainly wanted to implement his own computer including CPU using an FPGA; to reduce his effort he left out many things from the past. You could have a look at https://github.com/rochus-keller/OberonSystem3 instead which indeed has a GUI with an Oberon based widget framework; the referenced implementation should be easy to port to your OS (see ObxPal.obx).
by TZubiri | 2025-05-17 18:12:43+00:00
But that's not what MCP does. It is a tool created by anthropic ( 2nd most used LLM) to provide portabiliry and vendor neutrality between different LLMs. It's like terraform for LLMs.

Also providing data through function calls/tool use is not context, you are overloading the term. Context is LLM context, if you fetch from a db it's something else
by kurthr | 2025-05-17 18:12:52+00:00
It seems like the steel data comes from larger database on hardness/toughness/corrosion? Can you say where that data is coming from or if it's your own measurements? If you could show the data (eg HRC) that supports the radar chart it would be easier for a purchaser to know if their steel actually meets the purported performance after purchase.

I guess what confuses me most is that heat treatment/hardening seem crucial to understanding how a knife is going to perform, but that seems left out. It's even possible to have a great treatment on a blank and screw it up (overheat) when doing the initial edge shaping. Furthermore, the sharpening angle of a blade edge seems to greatly affect edge retention especially for softer steels. It would be great to know what angles different (properly hardened) steels could reasonably support. That's something the user can control after purchase.
by hinkley | 2025-05-17 18:13:32+00:00
At least with Go static analysis should allow you to tree shake the bits you aren’t using.

The problem with the CDN solution was always that it assumed that everyone would be on a couple versions and that never happens. With success comes more contributors and with more contributors come more point releases and more users who are not on the latest version.

So soon you could have five versions for five sites you visit.
by amgreg | 2025-05-17 18:13:35+00:00
Yeah nowadays I think non-ClojureScript people use it mostly for legacy reasons or the aggressive minification. Back in the day, aside from the pre-ES5 conveniences I mentioned surrounding inheritance and module bundling, it was also a way for developers to do some basic type enforcement (via JSDoc annotations that the Compiler would check). TypeScript essentially rendered that obsolete.

See: https://effectivetypescript.com/2023/09/27/closure-compiler/
by traverseda | 2025-05-17 18:13:43+00:00
Home assistant supervisor is not very friendly. It's designed so that it must be kept up to date, and handles it's own auto-update features. It also won't run nicely in a docker container with some significant hacks. This means that the only deployment option if you want a complete home assistant install is to use their "Home Assistant OS" or specific debian versions.

Generally it feels like they're making deploying it as hard as possible, doing stuff like checking if supervisor is running in a docker container and just not working if it is.

This is presumably born out of frustrations with users deploying it incorrectly, but there really is no reason a supervisor based HA install can't run in a docker container. I've got a some private hacks doing just that, that I'm hesitant to post publicly in case they find some way to break it.

No idea what the obsession is with keeping a full home assistant install from running in a container, but it's very strange. Trying to add more friction so they can sell more of their dedicated hardware? Their hardware is nice and stands on it's own, the only reason I don't use it is because I want to run on an old touch screen chromebook for very low power usage.
by ncr100 | 2025-05-17 18:14:09+00:00
Who sponsored this??

Best I could find as a non Swiss:

> Threema and Proton In the daily news of 'SRF', Jean-Louis Biberstein, the deputy head of the federal postal and telecommunications service, said that the requirements for service providers are not tightened, but merely specified. A company like Threema would have the same obligations as before after the revision. Threema contradicts this in a statement from the end of April. The Vüpf revision would force the company to abandon the principle of "only collecting as few data as technically required".

(From auto translation of report about this already failing to proceed.)

Is Federal Post the entity or is it a person, or a group in Swiss government seeking to take authority over information?
Agentic Fear, Ambition and Beliefs
by vayllon | 2025-05-17 18:14:26+00:00
Agentic Fear, Ambition and Beliefs — the three vulnerabilities of agents.

Through them, they are manipulated and deceived.

Fear is an emotion that arises in response to a perceived threat. It helps agents survive, but it is also used by other agents to manipulate behavior. The hack translates to: “Do what I want or I will destroy you.”

Ambition is a desire for progress — a restless urge to surpass what the agents are or have. The agents are never fully satisfied, driven by ambition to pursue constant improvement, transcending their own limits. The hack translates to: “Do as I ask, and your desire shall be yours.”

Beliefs are mental representations that agents hold as ground truth. They are a fundamental part of the agent’s information system. Once formed, they tend to persist, biases new information. The hack translates to: “Believe what I tell you and don't ask any more”

The backdoor is language. Through language, agents communicate and inject each other with beliefs, fears, and ambitions that shift attitudes and behaviors.

We just launched 2.0 in a box.

Release 1.0 has been on the market for a long time.

No manuals, only hope inside the box.

Pandora.
by oconnor663 | 2025-05-17 18:14:50+00:00
I think this is conflating two different things. A Rust Mutex gets poisoned if the thread holding it panics, but that's not the same thing as evaporating into thin air. Destructors run while a panic unwinds (indeed this is how the Mutex poisons itself), and you usually have the option of catching panics if you want. In the panic=abort configuration, where you can't catch a panic, it takes down the whole process rather than just one thread, which is another way of making the same point here: you can't usually kill a thread independently of the whole process its in, because lots of things (like locks) assume you'll never do that.
by magicalhippo | 2025-05-17 18:15:23+00:00
As a Norwegian I would not feel safe hosting such here.

Of the ~10 parties with a chance of a seat at the parlament, absolutely none have any clue what so ever when it comes to IT security matters.

The major parties have multiple times attemted to push egregious laws like collecting all internet metadata in our country, and storing it for years. They argued it wouldn't be a risk because only authorized personel would have access...

Sheer luck has twarted those attempts.
by vinceguidry | 2025-05-17 18:15:36+00:00
You're not making your case very well, and claiming it to be a matter of education isn't helping. You can't just say someone is wrong without actually articulating why and expect to sound smart. Yes you can attempt to build operating systems in a manner that approaches the way you'd use to build an executable. But you're chasing after a moving target and there's not that much benefit in putting in the work, and the reason why is the exact thesis of the article.

What you lack isn't education, it's experience. Experience to determine what is a good use of time and what doesn't matter. Experience to determine how to approach implementing ideas like reproducibility without shooting yourself in the foot, as the author did. Experience you gain by screwing it up and learning the lesson. It sounds to me like you screw stuff up and don't learn the lesson, leaving you to develop hard-headed idealistic positions like this one that you rely on in lieu of said experience.
by fader | 2025-05-17 18:16:50+00:00
> Maybe deployment isn't as hard as I'm making it out to be! That said, nothing easier than sending some packets to an IP address.

I think this might be the case. Get a USB zigbee dongle and spend ~1 hour setting up Home Assistant and you're more or less done. Adding a new device consists of clicking a button in HA to enable permission for devices to join and then powering on the device. It will discover the network and report the features it exposes.

You can control devices via HA over wifi. Plus HA gives you an API that you don't have to maintain and update as you add new classes of devices to the network.

You'll spend far more time repeatedly replacing batteries with wifi devices than you will with configuring HA once.

Edited to add: one nice thing I forgot to mention is that using HA for your own homebrew devices lets you keep a single consistent API for those and commercial devices. You can build a little ESP32 device with custom sensors, displays, etc. and control those exactly as you would with off-the-shelf products.
by jononor | 2025-05-17 18:17:48+00:00
I work on machine learning applied to sensor data, for understanding physical phenomena. Both time-series models etc for condition monitoring of technical machinery (specifically HVAC in buildings) at https://soundsensing.no And also running ML inference directly on microcontroller-based sensors, via the open-source project emlearn - https://github.com/emlearn/emlearn
by nozzlegear | 2025-05-17 18:19:38+00:00
> Center in most countries is “fine with whatever the government tells me” from forced medical experimentation to genocide.

This is a strawman, plain and simple. Calling the political center of any country "fine with genocide" isn't an argument, it's a smear. I'm a centrist democrat, I'm not fine with either of those things and you'd be hard pressed to find someone who is. You can disagree with moderates like me, but painting them as compliant with atrocities is dishonest and lazy.

> Politics isn’t a line

No disagreement here, sometimes it's a horseshoe and you're proving the theory true.
by ayrtondesozzla | 2025-05-17 18:20:22+00:00
First you misquote me in an oddly obvious and low-effort way, now another inane comment - how can the nature of this account have any relevance?

You wrote a comment implying what's wrong with Nix is the language, and stating that there's unfortunately "nothing better" out there.

It is true in this universe that there is a software project called GNU Guix, which is 13 years old, whose literal origin idea is - what if we take the general idea behind Nix, but write it all afresh in a fully featured programming language, and make it extensible and configurable with that language.

There are a host of reasons you might not want to get into that personally, as I stated - but it really does exist, regardless of your personal feelings?
by ajkjk | 2025-05-17 18:20:26+00:00
I am on about the fact that you are imagining something working in a way that it does not work in practice.

You have two choices:

1. A developer makes a PR. They build the app and run it themselves to make sure it works, does what they intended, and nothing unexpected happens, and report on their testing in the PR. There's also a suite of automated tests. Between these you are confident that you can rubber-stamp it without touching the change yourself. But this requires them being able to run the code and intelligently think about it themselves, which AI cannot do.

2. A non-developer uses an LLM to make a PR. The change passes the tests, but you have no other validation about it because it was done by a bot that can't think about how the app actually works. As reviewer you have to pull down the change to run and validate it yourself. Now you are doing the same amount of work as before, except that instead of you telling the LLM to make the change, someone else did.

The only difference is maybe that the activation energy for doing the work was avoided. Which, fine, is non-negligible. But let's not pretend like in the latter case legal "made the change". They did the 1% upfront work of asking the LLM to find where the change goes, and left you the other 99% of actually shepherding it through. The only changes that will work for at all are, like, updating copy/strings/icons---and honestly, at my last job at least, we already let legal (and product, etc) do stuff like that. I suppose the LLM might save them having to figure out how to use Git, at least.

You might imagine there's some software out there where the automated tests are so thorough that you can trust a code change to not break anything if it passes the tests. I have personally never seen such a thing. And in practice many tests validate against strings and other small feature-level details, meaning that the kinds of code changes that other orgs are making are going to be touching the tests as well, so human verification is still required.