MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mouse_ | 2025-05-14 19:52:32+00:00
> that doesn't mean you're going to get it.

Totally wrong; as a computer user, I can very confidently say that computer users are going to get what they want. They may get what they want by switching to amateur, insecure software forks, such as Hyprland, or by switching to software that allows them to use their computer as they please, such as Microsoft Windows.

I'm so sick of this modern "We know best how you should use your computer" tag. Does absolutely nobody any good. The only reasonable computer security policy is "assume breach".
by hbartab | 2025-05-14 19:52:36+00:00
> We believe that higher levels of greenness can reduce violence through four major mechanisms: reduced crime, improved short-term and long-term mental health, sending a signal that a place is well-cared for and increasing the use of outdoor spaces by nearby neighbors.

While I did not read the paywalled paper, it seems like a latent variable might also explain it: affluence and greenery might be positively correlated and police are less trigger-happy in rich neighbourhoods.
Show HN: Landing pages where you control the code
by sanswork | 2025-05-14 19:52:48+00:00
I somewhat regularly need to create landing pages or homepages and the typical flow for me is find a really great looking template, set of components or design somewhere that I want to use, then spend a bunch of time trying to figure out how to convert it into a CMS theme, give up on the design and sign up to a landing page platform to save time but not get the design I want, or code a small application using whatever my current web framework of choice is that just shows the pages and handles forms.

I've done the last one a bunch of times so when I needed to do it again I decided to generalise it out into an actual application. STL supports the standard landing page stuff, form submits, integrations, etc but it's a BYO design so if you like going the template route or you have design skills you'll get a better result.

This website is built in it so you can see an example of its output.
by tpoacher | 2025-05-14 19:52:59+00:00
Things I don't want to (try and) remember? Forward to a telegram group I own, aptly called "my nerd drawer". I have friends on that group too, so they get to see the nerdy stuff I 'save'.

Things I do want to remember? I make notes on anki. Note not all of this is for the memorization function intended by anki. Some of it is just (linked) references. So in some way, I've become very adept in using anki in the same way others use obsidian, for instance, and have come to prefer it. Most of it is indeed things I want to keep relatively fresh and do spaced repetition on though. Every single time I didn't invest the time to convert something I wanted to remember into an anki note I've come to regret it.
by PaulHoule | 2025-05-14 19:53:18+00:00
That kind of company is always laying off 3% of the workforce.

I decided that I never wanted to work at Intel in the early 00's when it became clear that they had a periodic ritual of laying off 10% of their engineers. I left academica because I didn't think I was good at musical chairs and no way would I want to work somewhere where I might get laid off just because they want to lay off 10% of the workers.
by woodruffw | 2025-05-14 19:53:20+00:00
Hizzoner aside, I don’t think NYC’s government is markedly more crooked than any other American municipality.

(NYC news is often national news, so there’s a double effect: transparency is a deterrent, and transparency makes the city look uniquely corrupt. If, say, Dallas had the same kind of persistent national coverage as NYC does, I’d expect to see roughly the same stuff.)
Show HN: Atlas: Independent Evals and Benchmarking for Generative AI Models
by Arch223 | 2025-05-14 19:53:51+00:00
We are LayerLens, a project focused on building better resources for independent, transparent evals for frontier AI models. Atlas is a community resource intended to provide insights about the performance of the top foundational models through independent evals on benchmarks such as MATH, HumanEval, and MMLU. LayerLens is a team of engineers and data scientists who have been constantly frustrated by the lack of independent verification for LLM performance. Most benchmarks come from the model creators themselves, and for developers, building an independent evaluation pipeline is often more trouble than it is worth. Open-source leaderboards, while admirable, often do not provide enough transparency, and are often too scientific for the average user. While evals have historically been a tool to measure the proverbial progress toward AGI, they have become increasingly relevant for validating LLM performance. Large enterprise teams and independent hackers alike use evals as a way to select the right model for a particular use-case, all while depending on singular “accuracy” metrics. Atlas is an LLM analytics leaderboard that is both simple and highly detailed. You can view the top models, sorted by region, vendor type, or a particular use-case, via evaluation spaces. You can use the battleground to compare two models on an individual benchmark, getting prompt by prompt comparisons for each entry. For any individual evaluation run, you can get a clean summary of model performance on individual subsets. And finally, each model page has its own dedicated analytics and information section. This is only our first iteration of the product. We eventually want to release the same suite for custom models, agents, evals and more. We will be around to answer any questions on our product!
by bilbo0s | 2025-05-14 19:53:52+00:00
Sigh.

Rads can see a person's race. We look at them.

That's the reason rads never train to determine race from a chest x-ray.

BTW, models don't need to train that either. Because if it's important, it's recorded, along with a picture, in the guy's medical record.

I'd just like to gently suggest that determining someone's race from an X-Ray instead of, say, their photograph, is maybe not how we should be burning training cycles if we want to push medical imaging forward. Human radiologists had that figured out ages ago.
Show HN: Semantic Calculator (king-man+woman=?)
by nxa | 2025-05-14 19:54:31+00:00
I've been playing with embeddings and wanted to try out what results the embedding layer will produce based on just word-by-word input and addition / subtraction, beyond what many videos / papers mention (like the obvious king-man+woman=queen). So I built something that doesn't just give the first answer, but ranks the matches based on distance / cosine symmetry. I polished it a bit so that others can try it out, too.

For now, I only have nouns (and some proper nouns) in the dataset, and pick the most common interpretation among the homographs. Also, it's case sensitive.
by comex | 2025-05-14 19:54:40+00:00
> There was no standardization of parts in the probe. Two widgets intended to do almost the same job could be subtly different or wildly different. Braces and mountings seemed hand carved. The probe was as much a sculpture as a machine.

> Blaine read that, shook his head, and called Sally. Presently she joined him in his cabin.

> “Yes, I wrote that," she said. "It seems to be true. Every nut and bolt in that probe was designed separately. It's less surprising if you think of the probe as having a religious purpose. But that's not all. You know how redundancy works?"

> “In machines? Two gilkickies to do one job. In case one fails."

> “Well, it seems that the Moties work it both ways."

> “Moties?"

> She shrugged. "We had to call them something. The Mote engineers made two widgets do one job, all right, but the second widget does two other jobs, and some of the supports are also bimetallic thermostats and thermoelectric generators all in one. Rod, I barely understand the words. Modules: human engineers work in modules, don't they?"

> “For a complicated job, of course they do."

> “The Moties don't. It's all one piece, everything working on everything else. Rod, there's a fair chance the Moties are brighter than we are."

- The Mote in God's Eye, Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle (1974)

[…too bad that today's LLMs are not brighter than we are, at least when it comes to writing correct code…]
by foobazgt | 2025-05-14 19:54:41+00:00
There's clearly a cost-benefit tradeoff on the spectrum of static typing. We aren't all using Coq. OTOH, the burden of "basic" static typing is very low at this point given the successes we've seen with type inference. [0]

It seems like all of the dynamically typed programming languages are pursuing (optional/gradual) static typing systems, and we've mostly moved on past "pure" dynamically typed PLs at this point. It's more about how-much and what-kind of static typing. And perhaps this depends upon your domain (e.g. Rust and its focus on memory safety while eschewing GC, which necessitates lifetime annotations).

0) I don't think type inference is a panacea. For example, it's not super helpful when you have a complex type system inferring crazy types for you, and you're stuck debugging them when the inferrer has failed.
by hibbitybibbity | 2025-05-14 19:55:18+00:00
Not really because Phoenix handles the web layer while Ash handles the domain/application layer. In other words Phoenix provides one interface, of potentially many, through which users could access an application built in Ash.

Which is all to say if there's been something I couldn't figure out in Ash I've tended to put it into a regular Elixir module rather than anything Phoenix-specific.

The only exception I can think of is that AshAuthentication doesn't provide support for API keys out of the box, so I have ended up writing my own little plugs for that.

If you are just getting started I'd strongly recommend working through tutorials and/or the Ash book (it's in beta but pretty solid) rather than just diving into a project. It's a lot when you're first wrapping your head around it.
by ryao | 2025-05-14 19:55:34+00:00
They are negotiable in Rust too. Just use the unsafe keyword everywhere. If you want to use a language where they are non-negotiable, use JavaScript.

Secure string functions are built into C these days. The older error prone ones are as well. You can ban the older functions from code bases, but it is hard to justify outright bans for all of them. If you audit string function usage in a non-trivial codebase, you likely will find instances where the old, error prone, string functions are used in safe ways and leaving them alone makes sense. This is particularly the case when constant length strings are used with constant length buffers. Here is an example where the old string functions are just as safe as the secure string functions:

https://github.com/openzfs/zfs/blob/master/etc/systemd/syste...

I found it when I audited the string function usage in OpenZFS with the goal of removing all uses of the older string functions. While I replaced every instance old string function where the secure string functions mitigated even the slightest risk, I could not bring myself to remove these, since there was nothing wrong with them. After my patches, a few string functions were then banned from the codebase with a build system hack put in place to break the build process if someone tried to reintroduce the banned functions.
by alfor | 2025-05-14 19:55:35+00:00
What I find tiring is propaganda and "the message" (if you watch the critical drinker) The structure of the myth is not a problem if you respect the personages playing it. I just watched Firefly, a sci-fi serie done on a small budget decades ago, it's so much better than the slop we have these days with 100X the budget.

Why? Because the personages are different (really diverse) pursue their own goals and try to do good (mostly) in their own weird and incompatible ways.

To see that and enjoy it realy show what we lost recently, we are demoralized by our own culture.
by moonikakiss | 2025-05-14 19:56:12+00:00
With the push towards open table formats (Iceberg) from both Snowflake and Databricks, it's even harder to get your Postgres OLTP tables ready for OLAP.

The problem isn't in the CDC / replication tools in the market.

The problem is that columnar stores (especially Iceberg) are not designed for the write /upserts patterns of OLTP systems.

They just can't keep up...

This is a big problem we're hoping to solve at Mooncake [0]. Turn Iceberg into an operational columnstore. So that it can be keep up (<s freshness) with your Postgres.

https://www.mooncake.dev/
by jabzd | 2025-05-14 19:57:39+00:00
We actually had it that way on accident in a few of our applications - we had a `#isTextable(e164)` function that would do a carrier lookup and voip carriers sometimes returned as landlines or as arbitrary values that didn't mean mobile. We eventually did some work to refine that function to be smarter and actually better represent if the number was textable. At least for us, it wasn't a conscious decision, it was a gate being aggressive in our SMS pipeline.
by mdeeks | 2025-05-14 19:57:44+00:00
It's not about PR budget or whatever. It's about the fact that they have an incredibly easy to use app, with millions of people actively using it, and a ton of software engineers who are really great at logistics problems like this.

Our transit authority hasn't managed to spring this up for us and I'm not confident they have the capability.

FWIW I'm not "younger people". I'm just someone who's been using mass transit to commute for the past 15 years and desperately wants something better. I don't care if it is an original idea. I just want it to exist.
by empath75 | 2025-05-14 19:57:51+00:00
This is exactly why I think the concerns about AI taking people's jobs are overblown. There is not a limited amount of knowledge work to do or things that can be invented or discovered. There's just work that isn't worth the effort, time or money to do right now, it doesn't mean it's not valuable, it's just not cost effective. If you reduce effort, time and money, then suddenly you can do it.

Like even just for programming. I just had an AI instrument my app for tracing, something I wanted to do for a while, but I didn't know how to do and didn't feel like figuring out how to do it. That's not work we were likely to hire someone to do or that would ever get done if the AI wasn't there. It's a small thing, but small things add up.
Show HN: OpenCode – TUI based coding agent
by thdxr | 2025-05-14 19:57:58+00:00
Hey HN - we've built an open source terminal based coding agent

You might be familiar with Claude Code but OpenCode runs a full TUI rather than the typical scrolling CLI output.

This allows for better UX and can be used with any LLM. We're also working on support for using multiple LLMs together.

It has built in support for LSP servers so it can pick up errors from your codebase. We've found this greatly reduces the bad errors.

Some other features - Session Management: Save and manage multiple conversation sessions - Tool Integration: AI can execute commands, search files, and modify code - Persistent Storage: SQLite database for storing conversations and sessions - LSP Integration: Language Server Protocol support for code intelligence - File Change Tracking: Track and visualize file changes during sessions - External Editor Support: Open your preferred editor for composing messages
by Airyisland | 2025-05-14 19:58:00+00:00
Tired of the complexity of existing note-taking apps? MemoCat is built from scratch with AI assistance, offering a simple and intuitive experience. It loads local files and syncs notes to your disk in real-time. Open-source at https://github.com/airyland/memocat. Though it’s reinventing the wheel, it’s a joyful creation. Hope you love it!
by criddell | 2025-05-14 19:58:06+00:00
It's not that the characters were unlikable. Unlikable characters can be great.

My hate for Gatsby was more about the paper thin plot, the shallow characters, and the purple prose. Why should I spend any time thinking about what these characters do or say when, as far as I can tell, they basically have no internal life. They are simple, one dimensional beings who just do things with about as much spirit as a typical video game NPC.

Most of the books I was assigned in high school I actually enjoyed or at least didn't hate.
by linguae | 2025-05-14 19:58:51+00:00
You might be interested in this paper: "Unix, Plan 9 and the Lurking Smalltalk" (https://www.humprog.org/~stephen/research/papers/kell19unix-...)

Cuis Smalltalk and related implementations are rather self-contained systems to the point they seemed walled off from the rest of the system, making it difficult to develop Smalltalk programs using external tools.

However, there's something compelling about the idea of a Smalltalk (or Lisp) OS running on bare hardware, where everything runs in a single address space. I've been thinking about this for a few years, but I haven't had time to pursue these ideas. Some ideas from the 1994 paper "Sharing and Protection in a Single-Address-Space Operating System" (https://homes.cs.washington.edu/~levy/opal.pdf) could be applicable to add some security to a Smalltalk OS.
by _DeadFred_ | 2025-05-14 19:59:54+00:00
You're missing the constraints: what kinds of stories actually work for humans and can be told clearly, with mass appeal, in a 90-120 minute audio/visual format.

We already have spaces for broader or more experimental narratives, they're called novels. Music videos gave us popularized short form experimentation for a while. TV series give us longer form audio/visual storytelling. But there's a hard limit to how much complexity or diversity you can pack into a 90-120 minute block while still keeping it cohesive and broadly engaging. TV gets away with slower pacing and more meandering structures because viewers can dip in and out. People like/recommend a series even if one episode didn't keep their interest. If 30 minutes of a movie don't keep someone's interest they aren't going to recommend it, it sucks to spend 30 minutes in a theater detached from what you are watching. Movies have to convince audiences to stay locked in for the entire runtime, which naturally narrows the kind of stories that can work.

And part of the problem now is that movies were once novel. They evolved from stagey, non-gritty recorded plays basically to gritty, photorealistic stories. That leap kept things feeling fresh for a long time. But now that the tech curve has plateaued, now that dark/gritty has run it's course, it's like people want movies to somehow figure out how to be... not movies.

Punk was new/novel fresh. Then what was new/novel/fresh was identified and expanded upon. Then it become not new/novel/fresh. Other music genres were kept fresh by technical limitations slowly being removed by new tech/monetary limits limited who could do what/knowledge gatekeeping. Now that every tool is available to every person along with deeper knowledge of music theory, which theoretically should make it more interesting, music has gotten more boring. Because we don't want good. We want novel new experiences.
by perihelions | 2025-05-14 20:01:12+00:00
If this was 1930, then this was spoken three years before Hilbert watched Nazis destroy his department at Göttingen. This reads differently viewed in that light.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Göttingen#%22Gre...

And it's prophetic, when he speaks (in translation)

>"The achievements of industry, for example, would never have seen the light of day had the practical-minded existed alone and had not these advances been pursued by disinterested fools".

Because who was it Nazis purged from Hilbert's Göttingen? Szilárd; Einstein; Teller—the future of industry, born of abstract theories and of sciences pursued for their own sake.
by bobajeff | 2025-05-14 20:02:15+00:00
Microsoft has been abusing their monopoly for a lot longer than Google. I wish they would put that target on their back. There are so many remedies I can think up straight away.

Force them to sell off Windows. Force them to not have special pricing for specific OEMs under any special agreements or terms. Force them to unbundle Edge from windows. Force them to continually support and fully implement competing standards into their products. Edit: Force them to sell off Visual Studio, Direct X and .Net
by krapp | 2025-05-14 20:02:19+00:00
One of the more common criticisms I've read about AI - and tend to I agree with it - is that it automates away all the things people enjoy and none of the things people want automated.

That's why I don't want to touch it. I enjoy the creative process. I don't want it reduced to the most efficient means of putting a MVP to market with as little effort as possible, generated as the average of other people's work. It makes sense in terms of maximizing value for an employer and shareholders but Christ is it dismal. Why even bother at that point?
by viridian | 2025-05-14 20:02:21+00:00
Moana might actually be a better example than Mulan or Frozen, because there's not even any inner turmoil outside of the very beginning.

Moana herself is just about the only person who doesn't have a character arc, she just gets better at doing the things she was already set on doing. Both Maui and the entire village of Motunui including her family need to learn that Moana is actually right about everything.

She's effectively an avatar of the ocean's will, and the more she leans into it, the better it goes for her.
by jerf | 2025-05-14 20:02:24+00:00
Passwords are "something you know". TOTP is "something you know". It wanted to be "something you have", but it's not. Proof: I can put TOTP tokens into my password manager now. Anything that can go into my password manager is proved to be "something I know" by the fact I can put it into my password manager.

Incidentally, passkeys go into my password manager too. You can probably work the math from there.

(I'm heterodox on this matter, though. I don't believe in the existence of "things you are" and "things you have". I think it's all ultimately just "things you know" and it's all better analyzed in terms of the cost of knowing and proving knowledge, and that the 3-factor framework for authentication is wrong.)
by theamk | 2025-05-14 20:02:45+00:00
I don't see much disagreement in the comments here? However there seems to be some people who only read the blogpost and did not actually follow the link to the original assignment [0].. you can tell their response by the lack of mention of "terminal inspired" features. Sadly this happens during discussions sometimes, especially when original author did not mention all the relevant facts in the post.

anyway, the exchange went like this:

Kagi: "please build terminal-inspired email client, you can choose which email flows you'd like to implement."

Applicant: I am going to spend a week building it, using golang, AWS, TMPL etc... I am also going to fit it onto 2 html pages.

Kagi: Sounds great!

Applicant: After a week, I have built something using golang, AWS, TMPL etc.. It has nothing to do with terminal, and does implement any of the email flows completely.

Kagi: Not at all what we are looking for. Rejected.

I don't see any way to blame Kagi for that exchange. Who would have thought the candidate decided to ignore half of the requirements?

[0] https://archive.md/A95Ju#selection-549.5-549.63
by cyberax | 2025-05-14 20:04:11+00:00
> Passkeys support an attestation anti-feature, enshrined in the spec. This feature can be abused (and will be IMO, why put it in the spec otherwise?) to limit which providers can access a service.

The problem is that Passkeys really conflate two separate feature sets:

1. Synchronized password replacements. They _have_ to be represented as accessible clear-text to be synced between devices, at least during transit. So they can be stolen, for example, by malware that scans RAM for keys.

2. Keys that never leave a hardened hardware devices. Since they never leave the device, they can't be synced. But they're completely secure.