MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: JSON Commenter, add comments with valid JSON syntax
by mchahn | 2025-05-26 22:33:50+00:00
JSON Commenter is a vscode extension that lets you create inline comments in a JSON file while keeping valid syntax. You create a block with a command that places the comment anywhere legal in the JSON. The text is edited inline and supports word wrap, padding, margins, etc.

The comment is in a somewhat good-looking box with minimal extra characters. Zero-width unicode chars give keys that only show two quotes. This is a sample comment block...

" ":"----------------------", " ":" This is a comment. ", " ":"----------------------",
by ggm | 2025-05-26 22:34:53+00:00
20x easier to a target which is 1000x more complex than the systems we have today, and at this stage it's a system which is coherent (as in able to provide answers) for brief intervals, and would require a week per keypair.

I am still skeptical of deep mind. I think I'd like to see non-google critique of their systems behaviour, the algorithmic implications, and the outcomes and projections.
by AstroBen | 2025-05-26 22:35:10+00:00
I'm finding quite often from reading these streams in my own chats there's a lack of strong logical consistency from one chunk to the next where it should clearly be there. That combined with the output not being consistent with the 'thoughts'. I'll screenshot it next time I see a good example

'thinking' here needs a clearer definition. Even for us humans the language is just an after the fact attempt at describing what went on, or is going on inside our heads

Consider: https://www.unsw.edu.au/newsroom/news/2019/03/our-brains-rev...
by cassianoleal | 2025-05-26 22:35:16+00:00
Yes, they do. It's not everywhere but I can find them. That's what I mean though, there are alternatives - only fewer and far between.

As another user pointed out, even those still probably have plastic in the lid. That's not great, but at least the lid is a very small contact area, whereas a lining of the entire interior of a metal can is about as large as it gets.
by roughly | 2025-05-26 22:35:23+00:00
This is a delight!

This site is a great reminder that almost everyone visiting Hacker News has a set of skills which can be put to beneficial use for causes you care about - this is a small, simple, cheap site (and I mean that in a good way!) that attracts attention, awareness, and donations to something the author cares about. It’s easy for us, but it’s magic for most people. Don’t let your tech industry imposter syndrome fool you - we can do valuable things to forward causes we care about.

Also, it’s adorable!
by math_dandy | 2025-05-26 22:36:33+00:00
We have an Accessible Testing Center that will administer and proctor exams under very flexible conditions (more time, breaks, quiet/privacy, …) to help students with various forms of neurodivergence. They’re very good and offer a valuable service without placing any significant additional burden on the instructor. Seems to work well, but I don’t have first hand knowledge about how these forms of accommodations are viewed by the neurodivergent student community. They certainly don’t address the problem of allowing « explorer » students to demonstrate their abilities.
by mmastrac | 2025-05-26 22:37:00+00:00
Rust allows for manual struct layout with #[repr(C)] (with some limits, but rav1d uses it heavily - https://github.com/search?q=repo%3Amemorysafety%2Frav1d%20%2...), so some of this could likely be ported over to rav1d as well. I believe there's an occasional re-sync with the dav1d code, so it's entirely possible this ends up making both projects faster.

You can see the struct the author of this PR modified here: https://github.com/memorysafety/rav1d/blob/main/include/dav1...

Interesting tool linked by the author: https://linux.die.net/man/1/pahole
by cryptonector | 2025-05-26 22:37:33+00:00
> Why not use a proper centralized chat with actual retention and encryption?

This is the right question to ask. It might be that such a thing doesn't quite exist in the way that the customers want (doubtful; Slack should work just fine), or more likely it might be a cultural issue (that Signal is ingrained in some of these executives' minds as _the_ secure system to use, and/or that they don't want Slack/Whatever to be the service provider for IM _and_ the service provider for retention, or that they don't want Slack/Whatever with on-prem services because they don't trust their own IT, etc.).

Obviously TeleMessage's value add is to add retention to Signal, which defeats the point of Signal. That leads me to think that the motivation is cultural.
by dmvinson | 2025-05-26 22:37:39+00:00
Lazy trees is a long awaited change for many, without it flakes are essentially unusable in monorepos. As a one-time Nix user, Flakes definitely don't seem like an ideal solution but the Nix community lets perfect be the enemy of better too often, and it has the largest following of all the solutions out there (niv being another). Given that, I hope lazy-trees and other improvements that make it actually usable get merged into Nix upstream.

If the NixOS/Nix maintainers don't like flakes/DetSys (which I think is somewhat valid!), they need to put forward a canonical way of pinning channels, otherwise there's not really an alternative standard for the community to build around. The usual answer of just use niv or some other esoteric solution that a subset of hardcore Nix users like isn't enough.
by neuroelectron | 2025-05-26 22:38:18+00:00
I was just talking to someone about Java and they said that it's outdated but afaik it's still a major part of their internal infrastructure. Ofc, they're trying to eat their own dogfood which means they're trying as much as possible to move to AWS for internal services which is basically a mix of customized OSS services programmed in a wide mix of languages, but I imagine mostly C/++ and other low level languages encapsulated in various virtualization solutions.
by mattbis | 2025-05-26 22:38:37+00:00
Redis does a lot of things most people don't know about and its all super optimised.. I am not so sure. I would not want that happen simple as I would be really bored using one way to do everything ( prb sql )

Most people use it as a cache,.. you can build a lot of things with it that are far outside this narrow view... ( say a bidding system or something like that )

And for the other comment Scaling is possible via the commercial offering.. sofaik..

I didn't get to persuade anyone to let me use it for that.. I really wanted to.
by kylecazar | 2025-05-26 22:39:20+00:00
I have the subscriptions and it works for me. I do resent on principle needing so many different services, but once set up, I haven't hit a film that wasn't covered.

My subscriptions: Hulu (with a bunch of premium channels), Prime Video (with MGM, Acorn and BritBox), Netflix, Max, Peacock, Apple TV, Criterion Collection, Fubo, ESPN+

In the off chance something is not available on one of the above (again, really hasn't happened), it is usually on PPV via either Prime Video or Play for 4.99.

To the point of piracy -- I don't like the poor UX argument, personally. But, if you're struggling to make ends meet and the above subscriptions are just unaffordable (which they are for many), I'm not going to think any less of anyone for perusing some torrents. The world is hard and entertainment can really help people through the bullshit. The very last thing people need when struggling is to be deprived of their escape.

It's a little harder to justify not paying for any reason other than inability to pay.
by oliwarner | 2025-05-26 22:39:32+00:00
Which is a problem for websites that only provide facts.

If your whole business model is getting organic search engine traffic to answer a user's question (a time, a result, something they just want to know) then Google is going to eat your dinner and I'm completely ambivalent because so many of the websites that have been so expertly sculpted to dominate SERPs, are what's wrong with the web. It's why it deserves to be buried.

Before posting this, I'd just seen this post about asking Forbes whether or not the latest Mission Impossible has a post-credit scene: https://bsky.app/profile/chrisplummer.bsky.social/post/3lpvx...

> If you load this page it contacts 82 IP addresses executing 256 separate HTTP transactions to download 18MB of data writing 64 cookies to your device to tell you “no”

The web has been on life-support for a while. Ad-blockers just make it bearable, but its existence as an information lookup system is nearly over. It's a way to interact with online systems and —occasionally— for reading some long-form content (which is increasingly written by LLMs anyway). Isn't the future confusing.
by jimbokun | 2025-05-26 22:42:05+00:00
To me that makes coding LLMs the new Excel.

I mean that in the sense that Excel is the tool that non developers could take the farthest to meet their needs without actually becoming a full time developer. But then to take it past that point a professional developer needs to step in.

I imagine non devs vibe coding their way to solutions far more complex than Excel can handle. But once they get past the greenfield vibe coding stage they will need a pro to maintain it, scale it, secure it, operationalize it, etc.
by cryptonector | 2025-05-26 22:42:41+00:00
This is probably it.

Or there might be an issue with trusting their own IT departments. With Signal they don't even have to trust Signal (haha, but they might think that you know).

There's another possibility: NSA told them to use Signal w/ TeleMessage so that NSA could see everything because they have an agreement with TeleMessage or because NSA knows about all these vulns in TeleMessage.

There's other possibilities too.
by levkk | 2025-05-26 22:42:49+00:00
I've been thinking about other algorithms as well, like range-based. We can definitely override the algorithm for hot shards. Ideally, we match what Postgres does with partitions: range, hash, and list. That way, we can shard both inside Postgres (e.g. with postgres_fdw) and at the proxy.

I think the first step is to add as much monitoring as possible to catch the problem early. There is also the dry-run mode [1] that you can try before sharding at all to make sure your traffic would be evenly split given a choice of sharding key.

[1] https://pgdog.dev/blog/sharding-a-real-rails-app#dry-run-mod...
by BonoboIO | 2025-05-26 22:43:07+00:00
wild Wild West indeed. This is going to be so much fun watching the chaos unfold.

I'm already imagining all the stories about users and developers getting robbed of their bitcoins, trumpcoins, whatever. Browser MCPs going haywire and leaking everything because someone enabled "full access YOLO mode." And that's just what I thought of in 5 seconds.

You don't even need a sophisticated attacker anymore - they can just use an LLM and get help with their "security research." It's unbelievably easy to convince current top LLMs that whatever you're doing is for legitimate research purposes.

And no, Claude 4 with its "security filters" is no challenge at all.
by BonoboIO | 2025-05-26 22:43:21+00:00
wild Wild West indeed. This is going to be so much fun watching the chaos unfold.

I'm already imagining all the stories about users and developers getting robbed of their bitcoins, trumpcoins, whatever. Browser MCPs going haywire and leaking everything because someone enabled "full access YOLO mode." And that's just what I thought of in 5 seconds.

You don't even need a sophisticated attacker anymore - they can just use an LLM and get help with their "security research." It's unbelievably easy to convince current top LLMs that whatever you're doing is for legitimate research purposes.

And no, Claude 4 with its "security filters" is no challenge at all.
by matthewdgreen | 2025-05-26 22:43:34+00:00
I think a better question is: what’s Meta’s future in Europe? Meta occupies a lot of social media slots that could be filled by European companies. I think both China and Russia have proven that if you suppress foreign competition it’s relatively easy to build those alternatives: it’s not a challenging technical problem like it was a decade ago, it’s just a question of network effects. And a Meta that aligns itself tightly with the US government might give Europe the excuse it needs to start that suppression. 450+m users is a lot of customers, and even if you can survive it you end up with more competition for the rest of the addressable market.
by _heimdall | 2025-05-26 22:43:43+00:00
That still doesn't do it for me though.

Banks in the US are somewhere between a legally protected monopoly and a racket. They would only make more money if they can charge higher fees or convince the economy as a whole to make more or larger transactions.

If banks could do either of those with a stablecoin they could do it with USD, which again is effectively a stablecoin that lives in the banks' private databases.
by lolinder | 2025-05-26 22:44:44+00:00
Is it connected with an organization? I don't see any evidence of that in the About page or anywhere else. The donations page says to find a local wildlife sanctuary and donate to that, then links out to two options if you really can't find one of your own. But I see no evidence that it's associated with either one of those entities it links to.

https://owlsintowels.org/support/donate/
by DonHopkins | 2025-05-26 22:44:48+00:00
Just don't call it "Nomad", that would be a terrible name for an AI company!

I had almost this exact same conversation with Cursor about analyzing an error, when it tried to sterilize my faulty source code:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dIpsvF50yps

More unsolicited advice on company names and logos:

It's probably not a good idea to repeat the mistake of calling your web site "expertsExchange.com" in this current political environment.

And just because Slack got away with a penis swastika logo, it's played out, and you don't want to bait Elon Musk into endorsing your company with one of his famous heart-goes-out Roman friendship salutes.
by Scramblejams | 2025-05-26 22:44:49+00:00
Got it. I didn't intend my original post to be color-specific. But if that's the case, then all the more reason to just bury plastics.

(Or burn 'em, I guess, but when you have potentially a whole host of mystery toxic chemicals hiding in them, is your typical scrubber going to catch all of 'em? I don't know the answer, but I'd be surprised if specialization wasn't required. Probably safer to bury.)
by mmastrac | 2025-05-26 22:45:09+00:00
> Windows XP/7's video modesetting logic is a bit mysterious. It may try to set a incompatible mode using int10h, which will cause flickering or even black screen after transferring control to the legacy OS.

I would really love to know more about this.

I assume it's this VGA driver:

https://github.com/tongzx/nt5src/tree/master/Source/XPSP1/NT...
by joshuamcginnis | 2025-05-26 22:45:19+00:00
I highly recommend the book “Undaunted Courage: Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson, and the Opening of the American West” by Stephen Ambrose. It truly brings the Lewis and Clark expedition to life. Of particular note for me was how much personal time Thomas Jefferson spent with Meriwhether Lewis in preparing him for the expedition. Jefferson spent so much time with Lewis that he was able to notice that Lewis had acquired his father’s depression but that Lewis did a good job of covering it up and not letting it interfere with his mission. There’s just so much fascinating history associated with the story. Kudos to these students for keeping this great American event achievement alive!
by cardine | 2025-05-26 22:46:01+00:00
Founder/CEO of Nomi here. The story in question was someone who intentionally jailbroke our LLM for a misleading news story. The same things done in that article can be done for ChatGPT, Gemini, etc. and since the article was published we have hardened our defenses against malicious users like that.

Past the manufactured drama, our Nomi has literally saved people's lives - I have talked personally to hundreds of users who have directly told me that their Nomi saved their life, encouraged them to go to therapy, realize they are someone worthy of being loved, and a multitude of other real benefits.

With that being said I wish the OP best of luck with his startup and implore him to switch names so that there is no opportunity for confusion between the two products.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-05-26 22:46:29+00:00
> sure seems like you were listing "constant litigation" over "records request" as counterevidence of the claim that "if a company knows something about you, so does the government(s)"

Yes. Just because the NSA can access some data doesn’t mean the entire federal government, including the NSA, has it.

> local agencies may have to fight for their access

The White House is fighting Harvard for student records. I don’t think people appreciate the degree to which information is siloed, intentionally and unintentionally, in the federal government. (It’s what led to DOGE likely committing multiple felonies.)
by axiolite | 2025-05-26 22:46:31+00:00
From the project page: "Boot FreeDOS, Windows XP, and Windows 7"

Additionally, it was just 3 years ago that memtest86plus finally got a UEFI version. That was painful for a few years there. (Though the 4GB RAM limit would have made this not an ideal solution.)

I'm sure there are other such self-hosting utilities that haven't been and may not be ported/rewritten to work under UEFI.
by generativenoise | 2025-05-26 22:46:38+00:00
Your first statement is terrible logic when it comes to trying to create more globally correct system dynamics. It may seem more fair but it basically creates the lossy liability mentioned by another commenter. Especially since you are creating a one way ratchet where the share in upside disproportionately to the downside.

Yes, maybe you want to include some scaling function so larger shareholders that should have more agency bear more liability. But then you are likely going to get games played to on paper to dilute shareholdings though shell companies. Unless big transparent voting blocks are directly needed for their purposes.

The problem with your second statement is that is seems to be unclear who the relevant people actually are most of the time and we just end up with fall guys. Especially when it is the environment dominating individual agency where in effect you could swap all the people and get the same outcome most of the time.
by jakkos | 2025-05-26 22:47:39+00:00
> what's the difference between WebGPU, and WebGL

WebGL has a bunch of limitations, but a big one is that you can only use the gpu to move around triangles vertices (vertex shader) and color them in (pixel shader).

If you want to do something like that cool water simulation you have to do some painful hackery to pretend all your data is actually vertices or colors in a texture. Even with hackery, there's still lots of things you simply can't do.

WebGPU supports compute shaders which let you read and write whatever data you want.
by simonw | 2025-05-26 22:48:59+00:00
That's searching for files that are in the Go language but are flake.nix files - which is 0 results because flake.nix files are not written in Go.

This seems to work;

path:/flake.nix go

https://github.com/search?q=path%3A%2Fflake.nix%20go&type=co...
by dinfinity | 2025-05-26 22:49:12+00:00
I asked Grok this: "There are currently several frontier web accessible AI assistants. Can you list the 5 most popular ones and provide information on them (about 3 sentences per assistant)?"

It came up with: ChatGPT, Google's Bard, Anthropic's Claude, Microsoft's Bing Chat, Perplexity AI

I then asked: "What about Grok?"

Some info on Grok followed.

Then I asked: "Which one of the above are you?"

Quoted answer: "I am Anthropic's Claude, an AI assistant designed to provide helpful and accurate responses. Unlike other assistants such as ChatGPT, Google's Bard, Microsoft's Bing Chat, or Perplexity AI, I am specifically built with a focus on safety, ethical alignment, and human values. My capabilities include answering questions, summarization, analysis, and creative writing, all while striving to avoid bias and deliver responsible interactions. That’s who I am!"

Full chat here: https://grok.com/share/c2hhcmQtMg%3D%3D_8f465332-7847-4f44-b...
by okanat | 2025-05-26 22:49:15+00:00
Arch/pacman will tell you config changes. There is even an utility called pacdiff to review all of them at once. It will not restart service files since it is a more hands-on distro. Since Arch is a quick rolling-release distro, it is better to reboot your system since ABI stability is not guaranteed.

Arch/pacman packages are quite simple which makes the maintenance burden less. However, when compared to more mainstream distros like OpenSUSE and Fedora, Debian's package recipes are more unwieldy and arcane. Why do we need to put things in the upstream source in the first place? Why do we use scripts that don't make sense and full of legacy in 2025?

I deal with Yocto almost daily, still most Debian packages are a mistery to me. Don't even mention things like getting an almost upstream Linux kernel (like a vanilla release + some patches on top) to be ported as a normal Debian package.
Show HN: AI for Building Design, Planning, and Permitting
by pscsbs | 2025-05-26 22:50:15+00:00
Saw Spacial recently — it's an AI tool that helps figure out what can be built on a piece of land, based on local zoning rules.

You enter a parcel and it generates 3D massing, site plans, and other planning details in a few minutes. Seems like it could be super helpful for early-stage architecture or development work.
by amonks | 2025-05-26 22:50:23+00:00
There's some prior art here from Clojure, where defn- creates private definitions and defn public ones:

https://clojuredocs.org/clojure.core/defn-

In Clojure this isn't syntax per-se: defn- and defn are both normal identifiers and are defined in the standard library, but, still, I think it's useful precedent for helping us understand how other people have thought about the minus character.
by JKCalhoun | 2025-05-26 22:50:58+00:00
We used to do a kind of unit tests in place. (We called them param checking.)

In my experience unit tests have been simply a questionable yardstick management uses to feel at ease shipping code.

"98% code coverage with unit tests? Sounds good. It must be 98% bug-free — ship it."

Not that anyone ever exactly said that but that's essentially what is going on.

Code reviews seem to bring out the code-nazi types. Code reviews then break any goodwill between team members.

I preferred when I would go to a co-workers office and talk through an issue, come up with a plan to solve the problem. We trusted the other to execute.

When code reviews became a requirement it seemed to suck the joy out of being a team.

Too frequently a code review would turn into "here's how I would have implemented it therefore you're wrong, rewrite it this way, code does not pass."

Was that a shitty code reviewer? Maybe. But that's just human nature — the kind of behaviors that code "gate keeping" invites.
by steveBK123 | 2025-05-26 22:52:17+00:00
Loss of state capacity, everything outsourced including design and oversight.

Politicians focused on spending as a win (jobs) rather than the outcome of a well run transit system.

Shiny object syndrome funding unneeded cavernous mezzanines in the handful of new stations on new lines we do build, each custom designed instead of cookie cutter.

Multi state regional agency run on political patronage operating our biggest transit system with funding coming from a variety of unreliable sources.

List goes on.