MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by CelestialMystic | 2025-05-16 09:18:14+00:00
There are transactions happening all the time in regular cash for weapons, drugs etc. Large banks have been found to be knowingly processing funds from terrorists, drugs dealers and have got fines. If you anti-war, you would also include the wars that are financed partly by the ability to print money.

These transactions while not the majority of transactions I would wager is far larger in terms of dollar value that the whole crypto ecosystem.

The reality is that criminals will find loop holes in a system and they will exploit it if it is worth exploiting. Many of the checks done in banks now impede transactions. I was buying a car (private seller) and I couldn't transfer the cash without going through a fraud check, even though I had signed the transaction with a card reader in the app. It turned a 30 minutes of test driving the vehicle and checking docs into 3 hours of wrangling on the phone. BTW I am not the only person having these problems with banks in the UK.

As for what crime we are referring to as well in this scenario needs clarifying as well. I suspect that most of crypto transactions are through darknet drug markets. These markets reduce the risk of violence to basically zero when purchasing drugs. While I am not one of these people that is pro-legalising all drugs, the reality is that people are going to buying them.
by int_19h | 2025-05-16 09:18:35+00:00
Python 3.11.12 (main, Apr 8 2025, 14:15:29) [Clang 16.0.0 (clang-1600.0.26.6)] on darwin Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information. >>> "1" + 2 Traceback (most recent call last): File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module> TypeError: can only concatenate str (not "int") to str
by sph | 2025-05-16 09:18:56+00:00
I have built a production Javascript library with decent amounts of users that incorporates the following hack to deal with float error (avert your eyes if you're sensitive):

// 1.2 - 1.0 === 0.19999999999999996 // fixFloatError(1.2 - 1.0) === 0.2 var fixFloatError = function (n) { return parseFloat(n.toPrecision(12)); };

It felt correct at the time, but after reading the article, I cringe at how fundamentally broken it is. I got away with it because the library is used to convert betting odds, which are mostly small floating point numbers, so the error is often < 10^-12.
by minetest2048 | 2025-05-16 09:19:50+00:00
Breakthrough Starshot StarChip (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakthrough_Starshot#StarChip) is the closest thing:

> StarChip is the name used by Breakthrough Initiatives for a very small, centimeter-sized, gram-scale, interstellar spacecraft envisioned for the Breakthrough Starshot program,[1][36] a proposed mission to propel a fleet of a thousand StarChips on a journey to Alpha Centauri, the nearest star system, about 4.37 light-years from Earth
by Karrot_Kream | 2025-05-16 09:20:17+00:00
> Eh. That's not as good as being skilled enough to know exactly what you want and have the tools to make that happen.

I mean, do you know that? A tool that offers this audible fluent experience needs to exist before you can make that assessment right? Or are vibes alone a strong enough way to make this judgement? (There's also some strong "Less space than a Nomad. Lame" energy in this post lol.)

Moreover why can't you just have both? When I fire up Lightroom, sure I have easy mode sliders to affect "warmth" but then I have detailed panels that let me control the hue and saturation of midtones. And if those panels aren't enough I can fire up Photoshop and edit to my heart's content.

Nothing is stopping you from taking your mouse in hand at any point and saying "let me do it" and pausing the LLM to let you handle the hard bits. The same way programmers rely on compliers to generate most machine or VM code and only write machine code when the compiler isn't doing what the programmer wants.

So again, why not?
by bugarela | 2025-05-16 09:20:53+00:00
It is in deed tricky, but we tried. We fully kept the semantics of TLA+, so the same mental model people still need to learn (at least a little), but a syntax that is much more familiar to engineers/programmers.

This is Quint [1], a different syntax for TLA+ with some extra tooling (type checker, CLI, evaluator, REPL, VSCode extension, testing framework, etc) which can be transpiled to TLA+ (which is a very direct translation, as the semantics is the same [2]) and therefore make use of the TLA+ tools as well (mainly the model checkers).

I think this is far from the same level of "unreadableness" than TLA+, and it makes formal methods much more approachable. It would be great if you could take a look and tell me whether you agree.

[1]: https://quint-lang.org/ [2]: https://quint-lang.org/docs/lang
by gpderetta | 2025-05-16 09:21:21+00:00
> Want to make a copy of something? Who is responsible for calling constructor/destructor.

What do you mean? The compiler will do it for you.

> This should be the exception - rather than the default way to think about structs.

the way that RAII in C++ recursively construct and destroys arbitrary object graphs is extremely powerful. It is something that very few other languages have (Rust, any other?). It should definitely be the default.

> I think we should separate resource allocation from use. Allocators are the things that care about cleanup, move, etc.

I'm not sure what you mean by use. If you mean we should separate allocation from construction, I agree! But then so does C++. They are tied by default, but it is easy to separate them if you need it.
by robertlagrant | 2025-05-16 09:21:30+00:00
> If you don't grow by 15% in a year you are a failed company

This just isn't true. Giant numbers of small companies out there doing just fine.

It's only if you need investment that it's hard, because the government sets a floor on what you should expect on a return with the bond market. So a business taking money has to promise a return greater than what the government will just give you.
by johannes1234321 | 2025-05-16 09:21:46+00:00
Well, the last big German spelling reform in 1996 also had been quite a culture war, where big newspapers resisted for a while, rejecting "Delfin" over "Delphin" or reducing usage of "ß" and using more "ss" depending on the previous vowel etc.

But over time most of the change have proven to be successful ...

And yes, the French "est" will remain for the time being, but for me as a student of French there would have been a lot of low hanging fruit.

But today the interesting thing to me is how modern communication changes this. Text messaging leads to a massive increase in "dialect writing" while at the same time auto correction (and more recently AI) counters that. Back in the days™ writing was mostly done by the elites (authors, news papers, authorities) and the private letter was well thought. But test messaging, online forums, ... lead to more text being generated by "average" public, which over time certainly impacts "professional" writing.
by mike_hearn | 2025-05-16 09:21:53+00:00
You remember correctly. Moderna had a lot of problems with their drug trials due to the lipid nanoparticles they were using to transport mRNA. They were toxic to the liver upon repeat dosings. Unfortunately, it appears they never found a fix for the problem. Instead they gave up and found a "business solution" by pivoting from drugs to the (at the time) less profitable vaccines, on the grounds that vaccines are something you only need to take once so the toxicity issue could be dodged. Doh. That was in 2017.

https://www.statnews.com/2017/01/10/moderna-trouble-mrna/

By the time COVID vaccines came around a few years later there was no evidence they had fixed the problems with lipid nanoparticle delivery. I looked for such evidence extensively at the time, for example, announcements by Moderna of breakthroughs or trials of new drugs. Today the situation seems not much different. Note that Moderna's wikipedia article has a section on "rare disease therapeutics" but it's literally empty:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moderna#Rare_disease_therapeut...

Because of their failure to progress beyond COVID vaccines Moderna's share price got slaughtered, falling from a peak of ~$450 to ~$25 today.

I don't know if other companies were able to find breakthroughs here, after COVID I stopped following the topic. Unfortunately, although mRNA tech has great potential, when normal safety standards were reimposed it appears that Moderna went back to being unable to make anything safe enough to launch.
by vanderZwan | 2025-05-16 09:23:12+00:00
I was going to say the same thing: medicine does this all the time. The crucial thing to keep in mind though is that it usually has a decent awareness of the difference between when it has a decent working model of underlying causes, or if it is currently stuck at a "least-terrible reverse-engineered behavioral rule of thumb" stage of understanding. The latter can still often be better than doing nothing, and what kind of doctor would choose to not help their patient just because they don't understand why the cure works most of the time?

> Anecdote but: you absolutely feel good. At least, I did.

I don't know you but glad you're still with us, first of all. Anyway, I think the author was trying to say that the feeling of relief doesn't typically make one seek out the experience of drowning again. Although benign masochism exists of course (which is the technical term for the way people can learn to enjoy negative emotions and experiences). Which probably would be an interesting thing to explore using this cybernetics approach.
by radiator | 2025-05-16 09:25:08+00:00
in a German newspaper they put their verb away over on the next page; and I have heard that sometimes after stringing along the exciting preliminaries and parentheses for a column or two, they get in a hurry and have to go to press without getting to the verb at all. Of course, then, the reader is left in a very exhausted and ignorant state.
by dgimla20 | 2025-05-16 09:25:12+00:00
Material Design v1 cracked it. It was simple to implement, simple to understand and simple to use. Minimal overheads with a clear content-first approach.

"It's time to move beyond “clean” and “boring” designs to create interfaces that connect with people on an emotional level."

I don't want websites and apps to connect with me on an emotional level. I want to turn my phone/computer on, use the app/program to achieve what I'm trying to do, and turn it off again, so I can get back to the real world.
by gregoriol | 2025-05-16 09:25:25+00:00
Eurotunnel's system is very nice, but only works for a short journey: they don't provide space on those trains for passengers to relax, you stay in or near your car. This is perfect for 30 minutes, also makes faster loading/unloading, but can't work for longer journeys. Also because of this "stay near your car" thing, their trains are wider than usual trains in Europe, which makes it impossible for them to go anywhere except on that dedicated tunnel.

I'd love to see a solution that actually works almost like them but for longer trips: there is zero fun driving 1000km by the road when you need to go somewhere. It could be fun if you have time, but otherwise it's boring and tiring, would much prefer driving at the destination than on the journey.
by throwaway2037 | 2025-05-16 09:27:08+00:00
What's wrong with a US bank sending money to Ukraine? Sure, they might ask for an explanation, but I doubt they will reject. Example: You need to send money to a family member (immediate or extended), or want to donate directly to the national treasury (yes, you can do this), or another war-related non-profit. These are all legit. There is probably more risk in money transfers to Bulgaria or Romania, due to online scammers. Belarus is a wholly different matter. They are one step away from Russia-level sanctions, due to aiding Russia during the invasion of Ukraine.
by jiehong | 2025-05-16 09:28:42+00:00
Instead of struggling to find them another aquarium/jail, perhaps those 12 dolphins and 2 orcas deserve freedom in the vast oceans of the planet, even if they may someday meet fishing boats.

Shouldn’t they get the right to try living free, instead of in a very small but kinda comfy jail? [0]

[0]: dolphins can swim for like 50/100 km per day and orcas for 400 km per day.
by stringsandchars | 2025-05-16 09:29:35+00:00
This may seem callous, but isn't a large point of crypto that you are 'free' from the shackles imposed by the State?

And I guess that includes protection from criminals by the oppressive forces of the State (aka the police). In which case being kidnapped and having your fingers sent to your family is an integral part of your 'freedom'.
by mcny | 2025-05-16 09:30:03+00:00
> container trains are [...] fast

I never imagined for a second that these things were going slow for our benefit (maybe safety, noise etc). I just had in my mind that they were simply incapable (technical reasons such as track or economic reasons like fuel efficiency) of going any faster.

So they could be speeding through the rail crossing instead of crawling at what feels like five miles an hour?
by void-pointer | 2025-05-16 09:30:19+00:00
Can we please go back to making usable prototypes and testing those for usability, instead of just throwing something together in Figma, showing test subjects a static image and asking them to find the send button, then asking how cool it looks?

Software designers left to their own devices always end up turning up the “wow” and “cool” factor, because that’s the only thing they can do.

I know the “design is how it works” line is tired at this point, but come on folks, this blobby colourful interface looks like a Fischer-Price toy.
by larodi | 2025-05-16 09:31:33+00:00
That's not precisely true. Let me illustrate:

A client we did marketing for produces gaming rigs - the metal frames. He's putting it together in the USA, and is super proud of his product (simfab.com) and the way wires come together, the whole modular design. But he struggles with massive Chinese competition ripping his designs off, and also people not understanding which part of the product is his own, and which are the third parties.

So he has the wires in SolidWorks, and everything, but when he needs to showcase the product in 3D he lacks the meshes of all his partner products. And nobody ever's gonna give these out as it is industrial design intellectual property.

It is super apparent that at some point he starts doing lidar point-clouds and having these third-parties scanned (first), and eventually modeled in 3D again by some mesh artist.

Pretty sure his situation is super common. So this GOOG thing is huge for himself and others, who don't even have the lidar option.
by vanderZwan | 2025-05-16 09:31:45+00:00
I would be surprised if viruses using U instead of T didn't already exist. After all, don't all viruses work by doing gene editing in vivo, except just localized to one cell?

EDIT: well, I suppose the question is whether cells of living beings could produce the U required for the viruses. But if not, then a wild virus using U instead of T to bypass our immunity also would not be a threat for that very reason.
by throwaway2037 | 2025-05-16 09:32:59+00:00
What percent of Bitcoin transactions are money laundering or other crime related? It must be astonishing.

FT Alphaville has a good article about it: "How much does cryptocrime pay?": https://www.ft.com/content/f40b7ac7-bb50-4712-aa7f-5219c2b18... (free sign-up)

To quote:

2025 Chainalysis Crypto Crime Report ... The authors have so far tracked over $40bn of crypto transfers to illicit addresses made in 2024, though they reckon the final total will be north of $51bn.

Ouch.
by umanwizard | 2025-05-16 09:33:47+00:00
I suspect that French people aren’t really thinking about this when they speak, just like in English we aren’t usually consciously aware that “ninety” is derived from “nine”. It’s obvious when you stop to think about it, but for the most part “ninety” is just its own separate token in our mind, and so is “quatre-vingt-dix” to the French.
by dwattttt | 2025-05-16 09:35:24+00:00
> If you expect anyone to adopt your new standard revision, the very least you need to do is ensure their code won't break just by flipping s flag.

Why would you expect that a new revision can't cause existing code to compile? It means that "new" revisions can't fix old problems, and one thing you always get more of over time is perspective.

If you don't want your code "broken", don't migrate to a new standard. That's the point of supporting old standards. Don't hobble new standards because you both want new things, but don't want old things to change.
by larodi | 2025-05-16 09:35:38+00:00
Precisely my thought - try learning French. At some point we've been asking our teacher "but, why would they start writing so many chars (unreadable) and so many different endings". and our guess is there must've been a financial reason to do so - more chars, more money when copying manuscripts, and less chance for the common people to ever have this level of writing skills, which takes years to master.
by dgimla20 | 2025-05-16 09:35:53+00:00
I must be going through some mental changes nowadays. I just want my computers and software to get their job done and go back to the real world as soon as possible. I feel sad about all the time I lost staring at screens growing up. I wonder if this will be widespread opinion someday.

The quicker the phone is back in the pocket, or the computer is turned off again after using it for something (that it does better than I can) the better.
by jiehong | 2025-05-16 09:36:09+00:00
> Is this even real? I doubt EU would deliberately allow this. What happened to the park? What was the reasoning for abandoning them there? Surely someone there had some small iota of concern for the welfare of the animals.

The EU has its issues, and so has this park.

Environment / animal welfare groups are why we have such news.

The park itself had big issues a few years ago, because of massive muddy floods due to heavy rains in the region.
by xlii | 2025-05-16 09:36:49+00:00
I really want to like Lua but I just can’t. Tried Lua/Fennel/even Teal but I just can’t.

I can’t tell what it is exactly. Maybe those weird global rules? Maybe inspection of objects and metatables? Maybe the weird mix of verbose and not verbose (e.g. getting output of a process requiring popen and manual handling but then function can take more arguments than declared and whateva) or exotic control flow and structures (metatable, global env).

It’s interesting language, but I just grit my teeth every time I’m interacting with it.
by orwin | 2025-05-16 09:38:44+00:00
I'm sorry but why? War crimes are war crimes. Raping prisoners is raping prisoners, being right or left has nothing to do with it.

ICC investigation are needed to see if there is any substance to the allegations, whoever the prosecution is, and why would be left-leaning or right-leaning influence it?

If state/billionaire propaganda use it as propaganda props, that's not the props fault, and they would use other perceived slights instead.
by Aardwolf | 2025-05-16 09:38:48+00:00
> It was sad to turn my back to, but it got me a 5x salary bump.

It feels like there's missing a step here, how did we get from leetcode to 5x salary bump?

> But what about my skillset? Despite significantly regressing

How can skillset regress 5 years after university? It's not like you forget coding skills, or the old projects disappear (even if stale) during that time
by Tainnor | 2025-05-16 09:39:01+00:00
Weltschmerz and Bildungsroman relate very closely to their compositional meaning. Sure, they have become slightly more specialised (a novel about a teacher wouldn't be a "Bildungsroman", I guess), but it's not like you can't make an educated guess.

Also, the fact that collocations can acquire more specialised meanings than just the sum of their parts is hardly unique to German (in English, the "theory of relativity" means something very specific and isn't used, e.g., for moral or epistemic relativism).
by dwattttt | 2025-05-16 09:41:47+00:00
> You're arguing about static code analysis being able to identify uninitialized var reads.

(Safe) Rust does guarantee to identify uninitialised variable reads, but I believe the point is that you can get the optimisation of not forcing early initialisation in Rust, you just have to be explicit that that's what you want (you use the MaybeUninit type); you're forced to be clear that that's what you meant, not just by forgetting parens.
by hoseyor | 2025-05-16 09:42:00+00:00
Rather odd hatred of German considering that English is in effect a regression of German (yes, I know, that simplifies it, but it’s true), i.e., a simplification.

It’s a typical kind of lashing out by hubristic people who reject complexity they cannot master with vigorous anger; kind of like how a child may call math stupid out of frustration. It’s probably a symptom of the jingoistic era, especially in trust-fund-baby-country called America.
by Cymatickot | 2025-05-16 09:42:21+00:00
To Ai paraphrase Obi-Wan: I felt a great disturbance in the Force — as if millions of developer voices from the future cried out in confusion and despair, and were suddenly silenced. I fear something terrible has happened to the future of our craft.

In short before we Ctrl+Copy our way to StackOverflow or Forums or IRC and we got collection of responses between good and ugly. But made us think and read or talk to others.

Now we Ctrl+Copy into LLM into a room of hell.

If LLM function is useful but don't get addicted to like honey.
by bob1029 | 2025-05-16 09:43:13+00:00
> One wrong turn, and in the rabbit hole they go never to recover.

I think this is probably at the heart of the best argument against these things as viable tools.

Once you have sufficiently described the problem such that the LLM won't go the wrong way, you've likely already solved most of it yourself.

Tool use with error feedback sounds autonomous but you'll quickly find that the error handling layer is a thin proxy for the human operator's intentions.
by DrScientist | 2025-05-16 09:45:01+00:00
Bear in mind that they intentionally choose something that was soluble - ie the easiest thing possible. So it's doesn't mean everything is now solvable.

For example it's no coincidence this is a liver disease as basically almost everything you inject in the bloodstream ends up concentrating in the liver by default - if you needed to target another organ with your LNP it would be much harder. Most of the time people are trying to stop stuff accumulating in the liver!

The liver has other special properties that are helpful as well.

Having said all that - it is still a massive achievement.

> That is one of the most incredible things I have ever read.

Biology is incredible - and you can do incredible things if you leverage it.
by mytailorisrich | 2025-05-16 09:45:18+00:00
The thing is that reforms are not needed. Usually they are pushed under the argument of "simplification" by people who have arguably too much tome onbtheir hands but why is it needed and how far should you go?

It is not just spelling. There are periodic calls to simplify grammar for no other reason than apparently people get dumber and dumber over time and can't learn the language anymore so it should be simplified.

One example in France is reform to reduce the use of the subjunctive tense. For example, now when I read the news I see horrible stuff like "Après qu'ils ont" (instead of "Après qu'ils aient" [and btw "est" and "aient" are pronounced the same ;)]), which would have sent my primary school teacher into a rage. Why do that? Cynically just because the members of the Académie Française need to find something to do...
by arp242 | 2025-05-16 09:46:40+00:00
Lotus 1-2-3 famously considers 1900 a leap year (carried over in Excel for compatibility), presumably because it just does the "(y & 3) != 0" check (arguably a reasonable optimisation given the hardware of the time).

I'd be surprised if someone found this solution before, as it seems both relatively difficult to find and a small optimisation.