MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by zzo38computer | 2025-05-31 21:13:21+00:00
> under what circumstances might it be valid to dial 911 to ask for the time?

Maybe, if all of your clocks don't work and you went to somewhere else and their clock isn't working either, and it is raining and you cannot use a sundial, and you tried to call everyone else already and they also cannot give you the time for whatever reason, then you might try to call 911 and ask them, because you tried everything else and it didn't work. (I once heard a (fictional) story where this happened. This is an unlikely scenario, but some of the things mentioned here (and other things) might happen, e.g. bad weather so you cannot go out, the television and computers are not working (and maybe the power is out but the telephone uses a separate power), and there are some problems with the telephone too (I have had problems before where some telephone numbers worked and some didn't), etc.)
by AngryData | 2025-05-31 21:14:31+00:00
Like what? Farm another product that has the similar problems? Row crop farm where generating a 2% return on investment over a decade span is considered a success? The response has been farmers dropping out of the business entirely, which ends up with some few people doubling down into larger operations, which only makes the problem worse as it is harder to pivot and makes processing and distribution even harder to divert away from the big controlling players.
by timewizard | 2025-05-31 21:14:56+00:00
NASA did take a 25% budget cut. Through a combination of OMB and NASA decisions this led to a 50% cut in the entire sciences budget which went from $7.3b to $3.9b; however, the line item budgets for both Webb and Hubble are not touched and both are expected to operate at full planned capacity.

The rest of the cuts are around propulsion systems and mars science missions. The administration and some parts of NASA see the commercial segment becoming more developed and more capable and are hoping they will be able to fill the gap. This also accelerates the plan to retire the ISS and move to commercial orbital platforms.

Interestingly this budget does allocate $646 million more to exploration in 2025 than it did in 2024. Showing a shift in priorities from Earth based science missions to full manned missions returning to the Moon and eventually to Mars.
by johnea | 2025-05-31 21:15:41+00:00
All I can say is: It's about time.

I'm amazed there aren't more of these stores nationwide.

I live in San Diego, and (luckily) the closest one is an hour drive away in Tustin.

California, 1/8 of the US population, and the world's 4th largest economy, has "after years of waiting" 2 stores 8-/

I can only reminisce about the olden days when there were dozens of "bin stores", with electronic components, test equipment, new and used gear of every variety, and staff that knew about the stock.

Apparently, modern electronic developers feel that ordering from Alibaba is some kind of viable substitute 8-/

This whole disappearance, coupled with the disappearance of the many many small local electronics development firms, is a clear sign of the demise of the American republic.

The elimination of small independent tech companies, and the supply chain that went with them, from our communities and our economy has been a disaster for the american people, and quite frankly, I couldn't care less how many vulture capital fanbois disagree with me...
by exiguus | 2025-05-31 21:17:04+00:00
In my professional role, I primarily work with Next.js, React, Vue, Golang, Rust, and various AWS technologies. These tools help address common software engineering challenges such as scalability, maintainability, and compatibility. Consequently, I prefer to adhere to native standards in my personal and side projects.

For web components, I utilize Lit for its syntactic sugar and because I appreciate the decorator approach. Since browser compatibility is typically not an issue in these projects, I leverage native CSS 3 features and avoid using SCSS as a polyfill for nesting, variables, and maintaining DRY principles.

I haven't heard of Mithril before. Thanks for sharing!
Ask HN: What is best practice for passing in public keys to API?
by jaidenlee | 2025-05-31 21:17:09+00:00
I'm working on an API that lets users pass in a public key (sort of like how Supabase has an anon key), but I'm not sure the best way to go about passing it into the API?

My 3 main thoughts were: pass in to request body, pass in Authorization header (like a secret key), or pass in a custom header (like x-public-key).

I wanted to get some thoughts here, since I'm fairly new to this
by lifthrasiir | 2025-05-31 21:18:00+00:00
Timing is all about periodicity; if something beeps every second, you can measure intervals between two beeps but have no other information. It's often the case that timing is also synchronized to, say, second boundaries too, and most time sources would do this. Time would then be giving some indices to those beeps; the time source would beep and say that it was the N-th beep so that you can work the actual time out from N.
by dragonwriter | 2025-05-31 21:18:55+00:00
> We're getting so much more productivity out of IC engineers that I would expect to see layoffs

More software engineer productivity may mean fewer jobs at a firm with a fixed niche, but it means more applications where software engineering time can be productively deployed and greater number of software engineering jobs in aggregate.

General economic downturn kills jobs that are about immediate returns and higher interest rates make it less attractive to burn software engineering hours on long-payoff efforts.

So, some specific jobs at specific firms may be lost to AI, but aggregate job losses are more likely to be a result of economic and financial market conditions.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-05-31 21:19:03+00:00
> NASA inefficiency is driven from the top down, by terrible goals and perverse incentives

To the extent there is documented inefficiency at NASA, it's in the way it manages its contractors for manned exploration. Its science budget is a paragon of institutional efficiency.

> It's not bottom up waste and fraud

Read the GAO report [1]. (Ctrl + F Bechtel.)

But for sake of argument, let's assume this is true. How does cutting the science budget while preserving SLS make sense?

[1] https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-24-106256
by olivercameron | 2025-05-31 21:19:47+00:00
All of this is really great work, and I'm excited to see great labs pushing this research forward.

From our perspective, what separates our work is two things:

1. Our model is able to be experienced by anyone today, and in real-time at 30 FPS.

2. Our data domain is real-world, meaning learning life-like pixels and actions. This is, from our perspective, more complex than learning from a video game.
by nextos | 2025-05-31 21:20:38+00:00
My school solved this quite well, I think. Homework wasn't graded. You were supposed to build a project or a series of projects. There was a practical exam at the end of the term where you were asked to make one big change to your homework project, and you were given 3 or 4 hours to do it in the computer room. It was really tough, and impossible to pass if you had not implemented everything yourself and knew things inside out.
by CountGeek | 2025-05-31 21:21:52+00:00
I have tried Kagi for a month and it has been good. Clean results and on point for my basic searches compared to Google. Though not much different than when using my selfhosted searxng...

I am now trying to decide if I want it for the standard AI models or if I can continue scraping by the available free (restricted) offerings from various providers. There is a difference in the quality of responses between Chatgpt and when using Kagi. I guess that's what you get when using an agent...
by somat | 2025-05-31 21:22:57+00:00
Oh man massive nostalgia hit.

When I was younger I was trying to learn the traditional unix tools, so I sat down with a copy of openbsd and made a wiki using only what was found in the base system, and perl was cheating. The templating engine was m4, web server in shell, page history in rcs, a really neat back reference system in awk(when you square linked to another page, it would put a link back in the backreference section of that other page, inspired by everything2) ...

Now I am trying to see if I have any of the code saved... It was probably one huge pile of injection vectors... but they were my injection vectors.

Hah, found it, Apologies for inflicting it on everyone, But I was having too much fun trying to figure out what past me was on.

https://nl1.outband.net/fossil/gami/dir?ci=tip&type=tree
by kiitos | 2025-05-31 21:25:27+00:00
Java defines what is or isn't a "data race" in one way, as part of its spec. C++ defines that same term "data race" in another way, as part of its spec. Your linked papers use a definition of "data race" which they define themselves based on a claimed 'standard definition' which is different than both the Java and C++ definitions of the same term. The point here is that the definition of "data race" is not universal or objective. When you want to evaluate whether or not some bit of code exhibits a "data race" then without qualifying what you mean when you say "data race" that property is gonna be evaluated in the context of the language, not some higher-level abstract assumption. You can talk about whatever set of common properties of a "data race" that are invariant to language or whatever and that you want to talk about, that's fine, but you need to make that expectation explicit if you want to have a productive conversation with anyone else, because "data race" by itself is context-dependent.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-05-31 21:26:11+00:00
> Spare a thought and a word for the NIH, the Fish and Wildlife Service, and the Social Security administrators

Not sure framing this in terms of sympathy for jobless bureaucrats is as effective as considering the impact on babies who will die of diseases in cancelled pipelines, ecosystems and fisheries that will collapse due to negligence or proud grandmas who will go hungry because SSA fucked up their cheques.
by perrygeo | 2025-05-31 21:26:54+00:00
HTML and Javascript (the vanilla kind, written right into <script> tags like a caveman) is still one of best ways to experiment with UIs. It's not sustainable or maintainable but why do you need those qualities in demo software? I still maintain that a competent developer should be able to bang out an HTML/JS demo faster than they can draw the same complex flow in Figma.
by AnimalMuppet | 2025-05-31 21:27:01+00:00
At the risk of coming across as a smart aleck, 40 years of experience building software.

What experienced software engineers have is a sense of taste - this looks like good code and/or design, that doesn't. But they don't have data; they have, at best, a couple of anecdotes. It's more a sense of "that was harder to work with than it should have been; that approach seems to have drawbacks". But you only get a few examples of that in a career.

And there are very few outfits compiling usable data that could shape the approaches that software engineers use.

So I don't think how humans got there was primarily data.
by lolinder | 2025-05-31 21:28:04+00:00
This is similar to the Minecraft version of this from a few months back [0], but it does seem to have a better time keeping a memory of what you've already seen, at least for a bit. Spinning in circles doesn't lose your position quite as easily, but I did find that exiting a room and then turning back around and re-entering leaves you with a totally different room than you exited.

[0] Minecraft with object impermanence (229 points, 146 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42762426
by nextos | 2025-05-31 21:28:04+00:00
The requested change was the same for everyone. They would have also run your project through a series of unit tests and would let you fix your code if they had encountered any bugs. Being able to implement the change was a necessary condition to prove you had authored the code and pass but, overall, the project would be graded based on architectural decisions, algorithms and data structures, coding style, etc. I guess this is not done at other schools because it's a hell lot of work for teachers and passing rates are low. It's quite brutal.
by netcraft | 2025-05-31 21:28:36+00:00
I totally agree, hope my comment didnt come off to the contrary. As a layman, I consume most of my information through popsci sources (though I try to go more for the Dr. Beckys than the meatless or sensational stuff), and its generally described as something that we just take for granted - "we just found the oldest galaxy ever observed, only a few hundred million years after the big bang - and its too bright and has way more 'metals' than expected" - but we measured that with redshift, which makes a bunch of assumptions that of course they cant talk about in every video, but we dont talk about anyone questioning them.

I have no doubt that there are great scientist spending their entire careers trying to improve these rulers and measurements, but I also know that there are great scientists spending their entire careers basing everything on the best rulers they have...
by mdhb | 2025-05-31 21:28:37+00:00
It’s primarily the react crowd specifically who have been off doing their own thing for many years at this point and never seem to look outside their ecosystem and are stuck in this bizarre infinite loop of just reinventing the wheel constantly, never really improving anything just chasing one new buzzword after another. It’s really unlike any other dev or engineering ecosystem I’ve ever seen in over 25 years.
by addaon | 2025-05-31 21:29:33+00:00
> The only case I know of the industry combining them onto a single chip would be Texas Instruments’ MSP430 microcontrollers with FeRAM

Every microcontroller with on-chip NVM would count. Down to 45 nm, this is mostly Flash, with the exception of the MSP430's FeRAM. Below that... we have TI pushing Flash, ST pushing PCM, NXP pushing MRAM, and Infineon pushing (TSMC's) RRAM. All on processes in the 22 nm (planar) range, either today or in the near future.

> This is a major disincentive for using it in place of SRAM, which is frequently written.

But isn't parameter memory written once per model update, for silicon used for inferencing on a specific model? Even with daily writes the typical 10k - 1M allowable writes for most of the technologies above would last decades.
by jowday | 2025-05-31 21:29:39+00:00
> Plus, you've got the very large challenge of learning a rich, high-quality 3D representation from a very small pool of 3D data. The volume of 3D data is just so small, compared to the volumes generative models really need to begin to shine.

Isn’t the entire aim of world models (at least, in this particular case) to learn a very high quality 3D representation from 2D video data? My point is if that you manage to train a navigable world model for a particular location, that model has managed to fit a very high quality 3D representation of that location. There’s lots of research dealing with NERFs that demonstrate how you can extract these 3D scenes as meshes once a model has managed to fit it. (NERFs are another great example of learning a high quality 3D representation from sparse 2D data.)

>That said, our belief is that model-imagined experiences are going to become a totally new form of storytelling, and that these experiences might not be free to be as weird and whacky as they could because of heuristics or limitations in existing 3D engines. This is our focus, and why the model is video-in and video-out.

There’s a lot of focus in the material on your site about the models learning physics by training on real world video - wouldn’t that imply that you’re trying to converge on a physically accurate world model? I imagine that would make weirdness and wackiness rather difficult

> To be clear, we don't yet know what shape these new experiences will take. I'm hoping we can avoid an awkward initial phase where these experiences resemble traditional game mechanics too much (although we have much to learn from them), and just fast-forward to enabling totally new experiences that just aren't feasible with existing technologies and budgets. Let's see!

I see! Do you have any ideas about the kinds of experiences that you would want to see or experience personally? For me it’s hard to imagine anything that substantially deviates from navigating and interacting with a 3D engine, especially given it seems like you want your world models to converge to be physically realistic. Maybe you could prompt it to warp to another scene?
by kassner | 2025-05-31 21:29:42+00:00
Personal choices. I want to selfhost all my stuff, and avoid relying on GitHub, and also having some codebases not being used in AI training. I achieve the latter by not having my forge public, so I don’t have much of a dog in this fight.

I could just have a directory in another server, but I like being able to link to a specific file/line/commit, and I prefer viewing the code in the browser in some situations. Forgejo takes the same effort to selfhost as gitweb on my setup, so why not?
by jwilber | 2025-05-31 21:31:42+00:00
This is a brilliant solution for a project-based course. It does take a decent amount of effort to go through each students project and give them an ask that you know isn’t ChatGPT-able.

Another great solution is to give an interview-like oral whiteboard interview for midterms/final. Quite time consuming (you can’t just assign the TA’s a grading prompt) but quite effective.
by 2earth | 2025-05-31 21:31:56+00:00
This blew my mind. I'm a mechanical engineer from Wantage, where this clock was made, (but had no knowledge of it!)

I wrote a blog post reverse engineering (including a detailed CAD model) and discussing a very similar but nearly 200 year older clock at the (relatively nearby?) Salisbury cathedral. It's a good chance to reflect on longevity and design philosophy. Seems relevant to share!

https://2earth.github.io/website/20241003.html
by the_pwner224 | 2025-05-31 21:32:11+00:00
You create hotdog / not-hotdog API. It reads an image and returns hotdog or not-hotdog.

You set API pricing at 1.5 cents per image analysis.

Another company creates an Android hotdog/not-hotdog app. They price it at $5/month. Each app user does an average of 60 food queries per month.

You get 60 API calls = $0.9 revenue. Let's say half of that gets used for compute costs. You're left with $0.45/month profit per user.

The company that made the frontend around your API gets ($5 - 30% app store cut - $0.9 your API cut) = $2.6/month profit per user.
by scotty79 | 2025-05-31 21:32:20+00:00
A lot of hair pulling coming straight from the assumption that CS plagiarism is a problem.

You study to learn. Assignments are to help you learn and evaluate yourself. If you skip them in whatever manner only you suffer. Noone else. When you finish your studies and go to work noone will care about the grade you got, especially if you can't code your way out of a wet paper bag.
by UncleEntity | 2025-05-31 21:32:57+00:00
> A good engineer cares about his craft, not just being maximally efficient.

How about a good engineer who wants to feed their family?

My opinion, and it's just that, is the corporations are betting on the robots advancing fast enough where it won't be an issue there aren't new 'good engineers' to follow the current batch. Probably to their detriment but by the time that happens humans will be tasked to only perform the work the robots simply can't physically do so their agency in the matter will no longer matter, you either install 13.6 screws/min or you are replaced with someone (or something) who can.

Happy days...
by akomtu | 2025-05-31 21:33:21+00:00
If you asked this "AI" to draw a possible continuation of a fictional map, it would draw something very believable and everyone would understand that this map and its continuation is a fiction. No one would try to say that the continuation has a "mistake" in it. "AI" works with text the same way it works with some meaningless ornaments, but we interpret that text to find meaning, and this is why AI is fooling people so much.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-05-31 21:33:26+00:00
> why did we need to see far-away galaxys moving away faster than near galaxies to conclude that the universe was expanding? Wouldn’t just the fact that everything is moving away from us lead to the same conclusion?

Imagine inflating a balloon onto which you've painted dots. All the dots move apart. But the ones furthest apart move apart faster than those close together. This is how you know the dots aren't just moving in their local environment, the entire space is expanding (everywhere).

(If you want a 1D representation, move your fingers apart at a constant rate. Consider how much further apart your pinky and index finger are compared with your middle and ring finger. That wouldn't happen if you just make a Spock hand.)
by exiguus | 2025-05-31 21:34:20+00:00
> It's not hard to shift the state management though, and when I find myself sat with a nice architecture that's formed without a complex frontend system, and with some really simple, uncluttered backend that could probably serve millions of requests a day from a homeserver and internet connection.... it gives me a profound feeling. It's a satisfying and familiar feeling from webdev I enjoyed around 2 decades ago as a teen. It feels like the old way of doing it.

I recall working on systems where the frontend and backend lacked clear separation, such as through an API layer, and there were no defined contracts outlining these boundaries between different teams or disciplines. This often led to significant challenges and disorganization, necessitating numerous compromises, not just in UX and UI.

Such issues typically arise in projects involving many people and disciplines. Fortunately, libraries like React and frameworks like Next.js have significantly reduced this chaos by facilitating the development of a decoupled frontend and backend.

This was 10 or 15 years ago. Now, with a decoupled front-end and middleware/backend, it's much easier to refactor or even replace services and features. Additionally, it's much easier to integrate new teams and technologies.
by ivape | 2025-05-31 21:36:05+00:00
The ship has sailed. If Alice gives me her code, then I’ll just run it through an LLM and ask it to make it look different.

Wait, why don’t I just ask the LLM from the get go?

The ships are all gone from the harbor. Luckily for justice, there won’t be any jobs anyway for those degrees. Something about the universe is just doing quite a rug pull on so many things, fascinating times.
by brudgers | 2025-05-31 21:36:15+00:00
ffmpeg is pretty good for resizing images...and can rasterize vector images.

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/48216871/ffmpeg-support-...

For me, the advantage of ffmpeg is in the future I can just google what I want to do. That is easier than finding a bookmark and even if I find it, it might not exist anymore.