MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jerf | 2025-05-13 18:32:33+00:00
Mnesia is not a database by any modern definition of the term and it should generally be avoided. It is at least 4 if not 5 orders of magnitude away from "being able to run Twitch". That is, yes, I'm serious, if you tried to run a Twitch clone "but 10,000x smaller" I would still expect Mnesia to completely fall over.
by alganet | 2025-05-13 18:33:03+00:00
I am currently leveraging scammers, doxxers and all sorts of scumbags to do that for me, for free. Better than AI.

I advised them to avoid it because it would be shameful for them to be used like a marionettes, but I guess if they stopped it would be even more shameful. There's something about their pride of being covert that makes it easy to use for this.

Sometimes it stores stuff that I don't care about, but that's fine.

I also do handwritten notes sometimes.
by JohnMakin | 2025-05-13 18:34:11+00:00
I’m not trying to be unsympathetic in this comment so please do not read it that way, and I’m aware having spent most of my career in cloud infrastructure that I am usually in high demand regardless of market forces - but this just does not make sense to me. If I ever got to the point where i was even in high dozens of applications without any hits, I’d take a serious look at my approach. Trying the same thing hundreds of times without any movement feels insane to me. I believe accounts like this, because why make it up? as other commenters have noted there may be other factors at play.

I just wholly disagree with the conclusion that this is a common situation brought by AI. AI coding simply isnt there to start replacing people with 20 years of experience unless your experience is obsolete or irrelevant in today’s market.

I’m about 10 years into my career and I constantly have to learn new technology to stay relevant. I’d be really curious what this person has spent the majority of their career working on, because something tells me it’d provide insight to whatever is going on here.

again not trying to be dismissive, but even with my fairly unimpressive resume I can get at least 1st round calls fairly easily, and my colleagues that write actual software all report similar. companies definitely are being more picky, but if your issue is that you’re not even being contacted, I’d seriously question your approach. They kind of get at the problem a little by stating they “wont use a ton of AI buzzwords.” Like, ok? But you can also be smart about knowing how these screeners work and play the game a little. Or you can do doordash. personally I’d prefer the former to the latter.

Also find it odd that 20 years of experience hasnt led to a bunch of connections that would assist in a job search - my meager network has been where I’ve found most of my work so far.
by ninetyninenine | 2025-05-13 18:35:04+00:00
Of course parrots can output knowledge that doesn’t exist. Stochastic parrot is a different term.

> "knowledge that doesn't exist".

I said that term. So there’s no official definition but you already know that.

Basically it’s clear among everyone academics included that LLMs can rudimentarily do what humans do. That means composing knowledge and working things out to form new knowledge that doesn’t exist.
by d4rksystem | 2025-05-13 18:36:09+00:00
Looking to build a malware analysis lab from the ground up? Or maybe your current setup could use some defenses against malware that may be detecting your lab/sandbox environment?

I’m sharing a full chapter from my book Evasive Malware (published by No Starch Press) that covers exactly that. It will teach you step-by-step how to create and harden your lab against evasive threats. Enjoy, and let me know if you have feedback! :)
by uecker | 2025-05-13 18:36:36+00:00
Can you point me to a qsort that does call malloc? This is news to me as the API is designed to not require this. There is no standard way to overwrite malloc/free (which would be a limitation when using other libraries that do not make the allocator configurable), but it is often supported (e.g. malloc_hook in GNU libc) or can be done using the linker.
by lcnPylGDnU4H9OF | 2025-05-13 18:37:15+00:00
> Do you really think having 50 completely different regulatory regimes is somehow better?

Yes, that is a less bad problem than a law that bans any enforcement of such regulations. 50 different sets of regulation just means that companies will change policy to adhere to the most strict of them (presumably California's) and be done with it.
by FredPret | 2025-05-13 18:37:29+00:00
After that, play Civ 1 and follow the chariot swarm strategy. I forget the exact strategy, but it's something like this:

- build your cities only two squares apart

- research only until you can build chariots, then set Science to 0%. (This takes all the fun out of the game for me, but winning on Deity mode is nice too)

- alternate between building colonists and chariots only. I think you build barracks as well

- build cities until you have a dense network of ~50 closely packed cities, each very small. Then churn out chariots.

- swarm everyone else with chariots ASAP. Hope that every enemy is reachable through dry land, or you're cooked.

You can beat the game with the max number of computer players on the highest difficulty this way... if your chariot swarm doesn't cause a buffer overflow.
by ninetyninenine | 2025-05-13 18:37:53+00:00
The usefulness of an LLM is similar to the usefulness of a baby, but higher.

The term stochastic parrot has nothing to do with usefulness and everything to do with the existential meaning of whether this ai is repeating what it is taught or creatively forming new knowledge from logic and composition from previous knowledge.

It is categorically unequivocal that LLMs do not just parrot previous knowledge stochastically. They form new ideas from scratch.
by ceejayoz | 2025-05-13 18:38:55+00:00
> This is the same state that banned plastic bags to "save the environment" - did they mandate paper bags then? Renewable, compostable, organic paper? No!

https://skeptoid.com/episodes/4460

"When the UK Environment Agency did a life cycle assessment of supermarket carrier bags (PDF) they found that non-woven polypropylene bags needed to be re-used at least 11 times to have lower global warming potential than single-use HDPE, or High-Density Poly-Ethylene, bags. Cotton shopping bags need to be used at least 131 times. Paper bags were the big losers. They aren't likely to survive the 4 uses needed to reach the same global warming potential, but are much more toxic to produce than plastic."

11 uses out of a reusable bag is not a tough threshold to hit. I've got one I know is from 2018 in daily use still and has crossed the Pacific several times.
by jbm | 2025-05-13 18:38:59+00:00
I like the walled garden but its a bit of an exaggeration to say they are doing a good job.

Just last week, while looking for a password app, they had a "validator" app with in-app purchases using the old google authenticator logo in the #1 position. Worse it was an ad; someone saw all of that, both as an ad and as an app, and let it go.
by sharken | 2025-05-13 18:39:01+00:00
They do - a range of 800 km is possible with CATL latest battery. And about 100 km of range can be added per minute, so it's now very close to adding range as fast as petrol cars.

To me that is the turning point and not using lithium is an added bonus.

Source https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20250421-china-s-catl-...
by jdiff | 2025-05-13 18:39:09+00:00
None of that gives me any useful spatial sense of where. "Payment terminal." Okay. Where is it? Left? Left where? How much left? How far?

The only truly useful bits I see in your stream of text is, again, "Cream of Mushroom" vs "Cream of Chicken." I am actively holding something, so I know where it is, but need to differentiate it from printed detail.
by mike_hearn | 2025-05-13 18:39:28+00:00
There are research papers that examine this question of whether runtime optimizing data structures is a win, and it's mostly not outside of some special cases like strings. Most collections are quite small. Really big collections tend to be either caches (which are often specialized anyway), or inside databases where you do have more flexibility.

A language fully integrated with the relational model exists, that's PL/SQL and it's got features like classes and packages along with 'natural' SQL integration. You can do all the things you ask for: specify what operations on a collection need to be efficient (indexes), whether they're durable (temporary tables), atomically updatable (LOCK TABLE IN EXCLUSIVE MODE) and so on. It even has a visual GUI builder (APEX). And people do build whole apps in it.

Obviously, this approach is not universal. There are downsides. One can imagine a next-gen attempt at such a language that combined the strengths of something like Java/.NET with the strengths of PL/SQL.
by Tijdreiziger | 2025-05-13 18:40:10+00:00
> I think we've seen this before. Back before phones were "smart" there was one (Nokia, maybe?) that you could put on a little dock into which you could plug a keyboard and monitor.

There have been multiple attempts at this over the years.

https://liliputing.com/5-laptop-docks-that-let-you-use-a-sma...
by culebron21 | 2025-05-13 18:40:44+00:00
It's not 80% pilot error, but poor training, signature of many Russian airlines. In fact, all 3 accidents last 6 years (this one, 2020 Ural Airlines field crash landing near Moscow, 2023 field landing near Novosibirsk) were due to pilot inadequate training, leading to inadequate behavior (ZIA case) or overreacting to issues (the diversion to OVB).

If you watch some traffic landing videos, Russian planes sometimes land on the front wheels, exactly because of overspeed. The belief that you need to land slightly faster than the speed in the manual, is very frequent. Some companies did change this recently, though.

And the plane in the OP was switched to "direct control mode". The default mode is like Airbus fly-by-wire where the yoke sets vertical speed. The direct control mode is like Boeing's. The pilots were not prepared for this kind of change.
by varunneal | 2025-05-13 18:40:54+00:00
I've been hacking away at trying to process PDFs into Markdown, having encountered similar obstacles to OP regarding header detection (and many other issues). OCR is fantastic these days but maintaining a global structure to the document is much trickier. Consistent HTML seems still out of reach for large documents. I'm having half-decent results with Markdown using multiple passes of an LLM to extract document structure and feeding it in contextually for page-by-pass extraction.
by GeorgeCurtis | 2025-05-13 18:41:02+00:00
Interesting, we've had a few people ask about this. So essentially you'd call the server to retrieve the HNSW and then store it in the browser and use WASM to query it?

Currently the road block for that is the LMDB storage engine. We have on our own storage engine on our roadmap, which we want to include WASM support with. If you wanna talk about it reach out to my twitter: https://x.com/georgecurtiss
by Ar-Curunir | 2025-05-13 18:41:24+00:00
Really useful article to learn about idiomatic Rust :)

In general I think there is a lack of intermediate Rust material that teaches you common design patterns, idiomatic Rust, and so on.

Even I (someone who's written hundreds of thousands of fairly complex Rust code) learnt about the let-else style solution from this article =).
by franktankbank | 2025-05-13 18:41:34+00:00
Also of note UNH stock is down about 50% over the last month or 6 months depending on how you want to look at it. It went down quite some amount but recovered to close to highs only to fall quite steeply again. What the hell is going on? Is there something brewing? I've read all the other explanations but don't really buy it.
by schultzer | 2025-05-13 18:42:17+00:00
mnesia is great, and you can get very far before you would make the jump to anything else. And it can be way faster then any other database. For obvious reasons.

Although it would be great if it spoke SQL, maybe one day it will: https://github.com/elixir-dbvisor/sql since we can already pass it and get the AST.
by bilbo0s | 2025-05-13 18:42:36+00:00
Problem is, in the EU, the secure sources of income are not becoming more shaky looking. At the same time though, in the EU, the risky stuff is becoming a bit less risky looking. The EU is clearly energized to decouple itself from US tech, defense, etc etc. It's probably a good time to look into those kinds of enterprises if you're in the EU.

In the US it's different. The secure sources are actually looking more secure. At the extreme you have just parking gargantuan amounts of money in TIPS right? I mean interest rates have gone up to even better compensate that kind of risk free behavior. Meanwhile the risky stuff in the US is a bit more risky due to the uncertainty.

Hopefully, Trump's people will convince him of the folly of the approach he's taking currently. If not, yeah, not sure? Uncharted waters really. I don't think anyone really knows what will happen.
by kome | 2025-05-13 18:43:22+00:00
I’m against smartphones. Sure, they’re a technological marvel, but they’re also incredibly dumb in practice. They’re built mainly for consumption, not creation. They feel like walled gardens that limit freedom and stifle creativity. The hardware might be amazing, but the software is awful. In the end, they mostly just make our kids dumber.

What I’d really like is a personal computer I can plug into a screen to work, then carry with me when I’m done. That would be a real step forward in personal computing. It would make laptops unnecessary.
by alexchantavy | 2025-05-13 18:43:24+00:00
PyPI is such an important service and as a Python user it's easy to take for granted that it just works. I recently had to make a config update from my project's GitHub repo to PyPI and lost the password and had to do account recovery, and then suddenly realized "wow, they take care of a lot of other orgs", and "wow, this is a TON of ops work" -- see the issues _just_ on account recovery: https://github.com/pypi/support/issues.
by utkarshkhokhar | 2025-05-13 18:44:17+00:00
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by czhu12 | 2025-05-13 18:44:29+00:00
Really great! A major downside of moving from SPA's back to vanilla JS is how much you lose in terms of UI components.

I've normally done DaisyUI + Tailwind + Rails but it never feels quite right. Basecoat is a really nice step forward.

I have to imagine the author is planning to charge for a premium package at some point, but given that a huge % of development is spent on UI design, I'd be more than happy to pay for a year of updates.
by Tuna-Fish | 2025-05-13 18:44:33+00:00
Sure, and I'm not against belt-and-suspenders here.

It's just that "all values are defined to be zero-initialized, and you can use them as such" is a horrible decision. It means that you cannot even get best effort warnings for lack of initialization, because as far as the compiler knows you might have meant to use the zero value.
by unmute-sh | 2025-05-13 18:45:12+00:00
Thanks! There is a model that turns the voice into an embedding that is used to determine the voice. Unlike the STT and TTS, we won't be releasing the weights of this voice cloning model, but we will provide it over an API so that we can do verification and prevent abuse.

edit: Ah yes, and we do not store the voice sample on our server. The voice embedding is cached for 24 hours.
by JohnFen | 2025-05-13 18:45:32+00:00
The president is elected to enact the will of congress and to represent the US internationally. He is not elected to be the people's representative in government. That's what congress is for, and that's one of the reasons why the executive is not supposed to have the ability to impose taxes.

What Trump is doing is unambiguously taxation without representation, as he is not the representative of the citizenry. For one, no single person can be the "representative of the citizenry".

Or, to put it another way, "representation" means that the people have a say in what's happening. With the executive branch, that's not the case. The mechanism for that is Congress.
by captainclam | 2025-05-13 18:45:36+00:00
To be clear, I'm pretty sure the half-trillion figure is the projected combined investment between SoftBank, OpenAI, Oracle, and MGX. Not public, US tax-payer dollars.

If that's not what you meant my apologies. Reason I'm quick to point this out is I think some of the writing/headlines around are suggestive of this misconception.
by rahimnathwani | 2025-05-13 18:45:38+00:00
AI coding simply isnt there to start replacing people with 20 years of experience unless your experience is obsolete or irrelevant in today’s market.

Perhaps in years 3-20 they relied solely on skills and knowledge they acquired in years 1 and 2. So even if the work still needs to be done, it can be done at 10x productivity using AI, requiring fewer people.
by pfdietz | 2025-05-13 18:45:59+00:00
The flow of tritium through a DT reactor is five orders of magnitude higher than tritium production in a fission reactor of the same thermal output. To put a number on it: the tritium produced and consumed in one year by a 1 GW(e) DT power plant would, if released as tritium oxide, contaminate two months of the average flow of the Mississippi River above the legal limit for drinking water.
by Suppafly | 2025-05-13 18:46:00+00:00
My issue is that your rhetoric of "performatively conflating an organism and a machine" doesn't address the core issue of "humans can learn from art why can't machines". You're essentially saying that you don't like the question so you're refusing to answer it. There is nothing inherently wrong with training machines on existing data, if you want us to believe there is, you need to have some argument about what that would be the case.

Is your argument simply about your interpretation of copyright law and your mentality being that laws are good and breaking them is bad? Because that doesn't seem to be a very informed position to take.
by drewbug | 2025-05-13 18:46:27+00:00
Very interesting, but are you sure about that example?

Const. of C.S.A. art. I, § 9, ¶ 4 restricted their federal legislature's power:

> No bill of attainder, ex post facto law, or law denying or impairing the right of property in negro slaves shall be passed.

The next section similarly restricted the states' power to "pass any bill of attainder, or ex post facto law" but did not reference slavery.
by throw310822 | 2025-05-13 18:46:36+00:00
> it is very plausible that had Russia not meddled in the election, the outcome would've been different

Frankly, the US elections system at this point is often equivalent to the flip of a coin. I think there were multiple elections that were won/ lost for a few thousand votes over 100/150 million voters. So everything is "very plausible" in this situation.

> literally hundreds of pages of evidence of the Trump administration itself conspiring to seize power

So which high-level co-conspirators are serving life in prison?
by Zambyte | 2025-05-13 18:46:40+00:00
I have been using Zig a lot lately, and I just want to share the equivalent of the let-else solution in Zig:

const user = getUser() orelse return error.NoUser;

If you only need user for a narrow scope like you would get from match, you can also use if to unwrap the optional.

if (getUser()) |user| { // use user } else { return error.NoUser; }
by munificent | 2025-05-13 18:47:13+00:00
It has to because the analysis to detect that fields are initialized in the constructor body is unsound. Since you have access to `this` inside the constructor, you can call other instance methods which may access fields before they have been initialized.

Java has the same problem.

(Dart, which I work on, does not. In Dart, you really truly can't observe an instance field before it has been initialized.)
by 1vuio0pswjnm7 | 2025-05-13 18:47:35+00:00
"PDF" is an acronym for for "Portable Document Format"

"2.3.2 Portability

A PDF file is a 7-bit ASCII file, which means PDF files use only the printable subset of the ASCII character set to describe documents even those with images and special characters. As a result, PDF files are extremely portable across diverse hardware and operating system environments."

https://opensource.adobe.com/dc-acrobat-sdk-docs/pdfstandard...
by CGMthrowaway | 2025-05-13 18:47:37+00:00
Aeroflot 1492 was an emergency landing (due to earlier lightning strike that scrambled electronics) during which the plane bounced off the runway, rupturing fuel tanks and causing a fire. Of the 78 people onboard, 41 died.

Hard landing by pilot error/poor training is probably the biggest factor. But "people retrieving their luggage" points to inadequate crew training and emergency response more than anything. I don't believe it's fair to principally blame the pax (over the crew) for the disaster. Perhaps in conjunction with the crew, who ought to undergo scrutiny first.

Wrt the pax taking luggage, fta "one of the flight attendants attempted to make a public address system announcement, “Seat belts off, leave everything, get out!” But she forgot to press the PA button and this command was broadcast to the cockpit via the interphone instead. Only a few passengers at the front heard the command to “leave everything.”"
by karl_zylinski | 2025-05-13 18:47:38+00:00
I (the author of the article) also made a kooky game called CAT & ONION: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2781210/CAT__ONION/

It's a short game made in Odin, but I spent a lot of effort in polishing it so that it would be a pleasant little strange experience.

It was the first commercial game made in Odin.

Some games made by other people:

Solar Storm (turn-based artillery game): https://store.steampowered.com/app/2754920/Solar_Storm/

2deez (fighting game, not yet released): https://store.steampowered.com/app/3583000/2Deez/