MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by harlysparks | 2025-05-04 15:32:02+00:00
Perhaps you need to first define "innovation" and maybe also rationalize why that view of innovation is the end-all of determining CEO performance. Otherwise you're begging the question here.

Google's stock performance, revenue growth, and political influence in Washington under his leadership has grown substantially. I don't disagree that there are even better CEO's out there, but as an investor, the framing of your question is way off. Given the financial performance, why would you want to replace him?
by harlysparks | 2025-05-04 15:33:30+00:00
They are getting slapped with anti-trust right now because they gave $10M to Kamala Harris and only $1M to Trump.

That's it.

Also, the AI race is a red queen race. There is no line on the sand that says "you are the ultimate winner", that's not how time works. And given that the vast majority of the internet is on AWS, NOT GCP, and that Gemini isn't even the most popular LLM among AI developers, I'm not sure you can even say that Google is the leader at this exact point in time.
Ask HN: Do you struggle managing and writing test cases before you ship?
by sneha_tamal | 2025-05-04 15:33:45+00:00
Hi HN,

I’m working on SprintZen, an AI-native test case manager that helps you write, organize, and sync tests right alongside your code. It can:

- Auto-generate sensible test cases - Sync with tools like Jira, Linear, and Monday (or just your local files) - Report bugs back into your workflow automatically

Before building anything else, I’d love to hear from solo devs and early founders:

1. How do you handle writing and updating test cases today? 2. Do you ever feel like you’re shipping without enough test coverage? 3. Would an AI assistant for test management fill a real gap for you?

If this resonates, I’m happy to share a free early-access invite. Thanks!
by codeguro | 2025-05-04 15:35:04+00:00
> AGPL isn't LGPL, it infects anything that uses it over a network.

Stop lying. This is FUD. It must be disregarded with extreme prejudice. The AGPL must remain free, and anyone interacting with it over the network must receive the opportunity to obtain the original or modified versions of the AGPL'd software and that's it. Nobody said anything about opening up the entire network stack. That is SSPL territory.
by em-bee | 2025-05-04 15:35:19+00:00
it's still under development, but it most certainly isn't dead. it's stable in that development is not disruptive. i use it as a daily driver.

you are right about lack of support for job control, it's annoying. but my understanding is that the problem seems to be a difficulty in implementing job control with go. when people say nobody needs parallel tasks that doesn't make sense because you can run jobs in the background. you just have to do it explicitly before starting, and you can't switch back and forth. yes, that's a problem, and for me it is one of the most annoying missing features. but it comes up seldom enough that it doesn't disrupt daily use for me. which is to show that the things i need for daily use are all there.
by lightedman | 2025-05-04 15:35:32+00:00
"My complaint is that it is not clear why you think what you describe is a problem."

Well, while you read, do the math in your head and think about what OP was trying to say. The point - latency is a cold and often uncalculated bitch that will screw with reliability and integrity of the system - got across to me quite easily. I was already on that page by the 4th sentence.
by Rochus | 2025-05-04 15:35:33+00:00
The music market is likely goint to converge to the following two extreme segments: A) audiences who are mostly interested in idols and lifestyles, where music is merely a means to an end, and B) audiences which are mostly interested in the music itself (either as main act or in the background). For the A) audience, music is actually secondary and more of a supporting function. For the B) audience, the musicians or composers are secondary (i.e. mostly relevant as a source reference for getting more music). Since serivces like Suno have reached an excellent quality level for most genres, it opens rationalization potential for both groups of audiences. The production companies who focus on the A) audience can massively reduce their production costs (i.e. instead of a "ghost composer" and behind-the-scenes musicians they just use generated music); the only obstacle for them to overcome are today's copyright laws which don't protect computer generated music (which I personally still prefer to state-imposed monopolies enabled by patent or copyright law). The audience B) instead has access to an inexhaustible supply of new music that interests them, without having to wait for new releases.

Whether people will still learn an instrument or become musicians is a question that is difficult to answer today. The decline of this profession actually began with the invention of recording technology and has steadily increased since then. It is now almost impossible to make a living from it, and that was already the case before Suno and co. Services such as Spotify have taken anonymization and commodification to the extreme. Nevertheless, people still learn instruments and make music. It may well be that the creative possibilities offered by services such as Suno will even inspire people to make more music again.
by fifticon | 2025-05-04 15:35:39+00:00
as I understand it, populism is when you exploit 'popular' causes to get a mass backing to bring yourself into, and to stay in, power. It is opportunistic, 'goal justifies means' philosophy.

So, you don't really have orinciples or a cause, apart from 'I should be in charge'. It also means voters, if they are capable of judging that, cant really trust you, because you will switch causes whenever it suits you.

In my own country, I could name politicians who always carried the same color as the reigning political movement, and who would switch when the winds change, because their real principle was 'be on the winning side'.
by Eextra953 | 2025-05-04 15:35:54+00:00
I think random selection would be really cool. Imagine if some fraction of our representatives were chosen at random. Not enough to be the majority, maybe something like 1/3, but enough to have a real effect.

The more I think about it, the more I like it. This would allow a sampling of all groups in a country to have access to power and decision making without the need to be exceptional in some way. It would also remove the self-selection bias of all elected officials.
by throwanem | 2025-05-04 15:36:04+00:00
Oh, that's an excellent point, especially since this is a perfect case for workers more broadly. I've had a bit of an app dev interregnum these last or postpandemic years; if service worker support has advanced that broadly, then that's wonderful news! Not especially surprising news, I suspect, but wonderful. Last I afforded close attention, the state of play for service workers in iOS Safari particularly was "don't bother."

Since I like an iPhone - or have thought at least they're least worst for 13 years and counting - you can probably imagine how this would have depressed my interest: Even though irrelevant here in that touchscreen PDF editing is an extremely hard problem and none I'd expect a solo dev to address, just knowing nothing I built with a worker I would myself be able to use, has made me not want to sink good time and effort into the topic at all. Best case that's all just wasted; worst case, it creates a dilemma I might not escape without a new regret.
by ncr100 | 2025-05-04 15:36:21+00:00
On "reduced linguistic precision":

Another example (this is a hard one imo) "discrimination". It is used in the US in an important legal document, a part of a powerful legal social right.

It's both the NEGATIVE and unjust social process of dividing minorities, often segregating them away from the resource-plenty enjoyed by majorities -- basic 'good favor', low prices, neighborhoods with food oases.

And it's also the POSITIVE or NEUTRAL term of "making a fine distinction and discerning". Such as, "The experienced journalist listened intently to the politician's statement, applying a keen sense of intellectual discrimination. She was able to quickly discern the subtle ways in which key facts were being selectively highlighted and crucial context was being omitted, allowing her to call out the misrepresentation rather than accepting the narrative at face value." (gen'd by ai <3)

It was once an efficient term for identifying careful critical thinking. I speculate we do less of this as we have fewer words to do this with, nowadays.

I suppose "bigot" and "bigotry" ought to have been used by the US when it made its civil rights advancements.
by flanbiscuit | 2025-05-04 15:37:11+00:00
I agree. It was my favorite. Used to do it a lot in my 20s. I'm in my late 40s now. Haven't done it in years but I would love to do it once a year and just dance my ass off at an event or festival.

I personally don't like weed. I am not a fan of smoking/vaping anything (the act of smoking itself) and I've tried edibles/gummies of varying mg and types and just never found a high I enjoyed on it.

I enjoyed LSD when I was young but would probably find it too much now. Mushrooms are great though, but also haven't done that in years. Would also do that once or twice a year.
by perrygeo | 2025-05-04 15:38:54+00:00
Why? The article is light on details. Yes, having spatial analysis combined with SQL is awesome and very natural. There's nothing special about 2D geometries that makes them significantly different from floats and strings in an RDBMS perspective - geometry is just another column type, albeit with some special operators and indexes. We've been doing it with PostGIS, Spatialite, etc for two decades at this point.

What DuckDB brings to the table is cloud-native formats. This is standard geospatial functionality attached to an object store instead of a disk. As such, it doesn't require running a database process - data is always "at rest" and available over HTTP. I'm not downplaying the accomplishment, it's really convenient. But know that this is a repackaging of existing tech to work efficiently within a cloud IO environment. If anything, the major innovation of DuckDB is in data management not geospatial per se.
by PaulDavisThe1st | 2025-05-04 15:40:03+00:00
> The only way to ensure the existence of truth is [...]

there is no way to ensure the existence of a thing until there is first some consensus on how the thing is defined.

with the conservative right adopting and extending foucault-era post-modern epistemology ("alternative facts", "that's just, like, your opinion"), it isn't even possible to discuss what "the truth" is, because the agreement on what how we would arrive at an answer is has been undermined (intentionally so, IMO).

for some period of time, much of the west's population bought into the idea that truth was arrived at using some variety of evidence collection, falsification, logic, experimentation and debate. this consensus has been undermined to the point where questions like "do vaccines cause autism" can be asked without any willingness to engage with the historical definition of how a true answer would be arrived at.
by Skunkleton | 2025-05-04 15:40:16+00:00
We are carbon neutral against the earth as a whole. The problem is that sequestered carbon is now in the atmosphere. It doesn't matter how many people are breathing out carbon. It matters where that carbon came from, and where it ends up. Of course we now have so many humans that the majority of them are dependent on fossil fuels to survive, and as others have pointed out, not just for energy.
by chunkmonke99 | 2025-05-04 15:40:17+00:00
Yes I know of this "study" AFAIK it has not been subjected to peer-review and uses a lot of suggestive language. Other studies have shown that these things use large bags of heuristics which isn't surprising given that are trained on unimaginably large amounts of tokens.

I am not an expert ... but to me anything that is associated with these companies is marketing. I understand that makes me a "stick in the mud" but it's not a crime to be skeptical! THAT SHOULD BE THE DEFAULT ... we used to believe in gods, demons, and monsters. Given that Anthropic is very very closely related to EA and Longtermism and given that this is the "slickest" paper I have ever read ...

If I had the mental capacity to have read a good amount of the internet and millions of pirated books ... I wouldn't be confused by perturbations in questions I have already previously seen.

I am sure there are lots of cogent rebuttals to what I am saying and hey maybe I'm just a sack of meat that is miffed about being replaced by a "superior intelligence" that is "more evolved". But that isn't how evolution works either and it's troubling to see that sentiment becoming to prevalent.
by inejge | 2025-05-04 15:40:19+00:00
I'm sure you can look up the dictionary definition like everyone else, and it won't mention anything similar to "democracy", but if you want one from a random internet person: it's pandering to discontent and fear of some portion of the populace. The populist implies that he or she represents the interests of that populace and has solutions to their problems.

Of course it is never that easy.
by alain94040 | 2025-05-04 15:40:34+00:00
Remember those startup pivots we used to make fun of on HN? When a pivot happens, it often means the initial idea ran its course, the startup is about to shut down because it's running out of money. However, the team seems to work reasonably well together, at least they get along and seem to have a decent balance of engineers and business people. A new idea comes along, some investors could be interested. But the condition for the investment is to reset the cap table and wipe out the previous investors. From the new investor's point of view, it makes sense: for all practical purposes, this is a brand new startup. From the founders' point of view, they don't really have a choice.
by holowoodman | 2025-05-04 15:41:52+00:00
"Kids don't need anesthetics. If they are young enough, they won't remember the pain, so you can just operate without anesthetics. They are also easier to restrain than adults."

This was state of the art in medicine for quite some time. I fear the general trend of "medication bad" will get us back to those dark times.

Btw, those dark times ended only as recently as 1987! https://www.newsweek.com/when-doctors-start-using-anesthesia...
by sfink | 2025-05-04 15:42:09+00:00
I was Basic (on C64) -> assembly -> Pascal -> C, more or less. 0-based indexing wasn't too bad for me, except when it came to for loops.

for (i=0; i<length; i++)

I eventually just memorized that pattern, but stumbled every time any part of it changed. I had to rethink the whole logic every time to figure out < vs <= and length vs length-1, and usually ended up getting an answer that was both confident and wrong.

The borrow checks feels similar but different. It feels like it has more "levels" to it. Initially, it came naturally to me and I wondered what all the fuss was about. I was fighting iterators and into, not the borrow checker. I just had to mentally keep track of what owned my data and it all felt pretty obvious.

Then I started working on things that didn't fit into my naive mental model, and it became a constant fight.

So overall, a similar experience to 0-based indexing, yes. (Except I still don't "just know" the trickier bits of the borrow checker yet, so I don't know what comes next.)
by notahacker | 2025-05-04 15:42:50+00:00
> This has predictable downsides, but ensures fair representation and prevents the existence of a political class.

This depends one whether you consider the existence of a political class to be purely negative.

Seems like random selection of candidates who have no influence over what happens after their term selects for all the negative aspects of a political class (ability to enrich themselves and their friends at others expense, tendency to be ignorant of and ambivalent about issues that don't really affect them) and against the [at least arguably] positive aspects (institutional knowledge of how things operate, some sort of political philosophy which has some public support, some level of skill and drive to get things done, and the motivation to try to keep the public happy enough to reelect them or their compatriots)
by snkzxbs | 2025-05-04 15:43:49+00:00
They are both correct.

Primary care physicians do not spend more than two minutes diagnosing you in my experience. The diagnosis is always shallow and sometimes wrong because of how rushed the process is.

You pay a third of your salary in taxes, then you pay VAT on everything you buy plus many more taxes for other things such as your property. It amounts to more than half the money you earn.
by kengoa | 2025-05-04 15:44:09+00:00
Great project! I'm also maintaining a fully in-browser data visualisation/analytics tool [1] and I often found it hard to convince people that their data isn't sent anywhere. It's funny I also say the exact same thing that they can inspect the Network tab. As a potential alternative to open-sourcing the codebase, maybe a desktop version of the same tool (i.e. an Electron app) could help address the privacy concerns if it explicitly states that it won't make network calls, although it's a perception problem rather than a technical one.

[1]: https://docs.visprex.com/
by throwanem | 2025-05-04 15:44:42+00:00
This research is aimed precisely at making it safe enough to administer general anesthesia in these populations for that to become standard of care.

Let me preempt one possible line here: I do not love the circumstances under which I would have been circumcised as a neonate in Mississippi in the very early 1980s, and I do not resent the result. Living that far tied up in the past is for men who can't figure out how to do anything else. I am not one of those and despite an essential sympathy with the theoretical basis of their position that no putative benefit remotely justifies the the risk of the intervention, I have a short way with "intactivists."

But if it had been possible safely to administer more than EMLA (perhaps!) for pain relief, not even in that place and time would anyone be so barbaric as to refuse it. Of course. And that, making possible that precise measure of mercy in the case where the intervention is not merely cosmetic, is exactly that at which this research is directed. So, to anyone looking to make a cause of the ghosts of a billion foreskins or whatever, I would say please do not attempt even by implication to recruit my argument in support of your position.
by leereeves | 2025-05-04 15:45:18+00:00
Populism refers to any movement that claims to represent the interests of the common people against the elite. It might be left, right, democratic, or authoritarian. It might really serve the people or just use anti-establishment sentiment for its own benefit.

It's not necessarily a bad thing but it's almost always reported negatively because the media is owned by the elite. Even elites who claim to care about the people don't want to be cast as the villain or lose power themselves.

Ironically, a successful populist movement becomes the new elite and creates an opportunity for other people to be populists.
Ask HN: Best email solution for personal domain
by lemonlime227 | 2025-05-04 15:45:48+00:00
I've had a personal domain for a couple of years now and I'd like to start using it for email. I've had iCloud+ so I linked it up to that, but I don't really use it that much. The #1 feature I use is the "catch-all" email address: any email sent to whatever@my.domain (replace "whatever" with any text) is routed into my inbox. This has the nice intention of easily creating filter rules based on what email I used for a website.

My gripe with using iCloud for my email is that I just am not a fan of the mail client. Because of this, I've been very reluctant to send emails with it and prefer using my personal Outlook.

I use my personal email with the Outlook client, but I link this to a Google account mostly for convenience. I feel like switching entirely over to Google Workspace would be nice, but (1): Lock in (2): I don't think Workspace supports the catch-all/many email addresses for 1 user (3): I don't like Gmail's client. Switching over to Microsoft 365 has problems 1 and 2, just not 3.

What is the best solution for running email, preferably FOSS?
by Glyptodon | 2025-05-04 15:45:51+00:00
I think a Stickley dining set or side hutch is probably ~$12k not on sale, and a sofa could probably go anywhere from $6k to $20k, but YMMV. (I don't personally own anything like that.)

But even brands like Herman Miller or Ekornes can really add up. (And I don't think of them as being the highest-end of things. Even hiring a quality woodworker to make something for you can end up similarly priced depending on detailing, finish, wood species, etc.)
by jpalawaga | 2025-05-04 15:46:29+00:00
Molly addiction risk: low. Once your brains serotonin is depleted, the drug stops working, and the hangover isn’t really something to be avoided.

Cocaine addiction risk: moderate. Similar to alcohol. Most people won’t end up otherwise a bonafide addiction but some will. Its use is inherently addictive, most people do not have just “one” bump and then go home.

Molly therapeutic use: still under research, but extremely promising in helping to resolve ptsd and other similar issues. Potentially other uses, too.

Cocaine: used as an anesthetic. It can also be used to reverse the effects of some other drugs in emergency situations (I.e. canceling out a downer, or other situations where you need a burst of energy)
by sometimes_all | 2025-05-04 15:46:31+00:00
Hi Henri, the game was a lot of fun! There were multiple surprises for me along the way, definitely gave me enough to think about.

A couple minor nits (after playing on mobile):

1. After hitting 40 correct answers, the right/wrong emojis weren't showing up next to the options after selecting one of them as they used to from Q1 to Q40. The only way for me to find out whether I was correct was to see whether the right answer count went up or not.

2. Apologies I don't have an example, but for a couple of questions, it felt that both options described a successful startup; while the startup listed in the explanation might have failed, there was at least one other startup with the same/similar description which had succeeded. Might want to look a bit more into that.

Otherwise good game and great book recommendations!
by kmeisthax | 2025-05-04 15:47:59+00:00
> Mruczek says he's worried that the handling of the Wiebe rec-ord has set a dangerous precedent that could set back the community to the '80s, when people would claim records that were impossible to achieve.

I'm not sure if this quote has aged like wine or milk. Possibly both.

For context, we now know the Billy Mitchell score at issue was almost certainly made on an inaccurate version of MAME. It has emulation artifacts, and no sound, which MAME couldn't emulate well back then. Twin Galaxies does accept emulation scores, but they have to be verified in a different way, and they go on a different leaderboard. The way Billy recorded it without the additional emulator verification would have made it trivially easy to play an input file and claim a just-slightly-higher score for pure ego reasons.

For legal reasons, I'm not saying Billy Mitchell actually did this, but I am saying he sued Twin Galaxies when they removed the score at issue.

There's a few other particularly suspect high scores that were purged from Twin Galaxies; notably Todd Rodgers' literally impossible time on 2600 Dragster. That score and Todd's explanation for it is now a speedrunning in-joke.
by PaulHoule | 2025-05-04 15:48:13+00:00
They must be turning infrared intensity at various frequencies to (r,g,b) in a way that longer wavelengths contribute to the r channel and shorter wavelengths to the b channel because they say "more distant galaxies" look redder. See

https://ned.ipac.caltech.edu/level5/March02/Sarazin/frames.h...

for some explanation of how the gas gets so hot