MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by blahaj | 2025-05-09 01:28:10+00:00
> Service robots depicted in the study were the same except for the use of gray or pink colors to portray male or female genders, respectively. After receiving a menu recommendation, participants then rated the robot’s persuasiveness.

So they found out that different colors have an effect on how persuasive people perceive robots to be? And then they just claim that this is due to genders they associate to the colors? Their metric of a self reported sense of power also seems dubious to me.

This looks like junk science to me.
by lucyjojo | 2025-05-09 01:29:20+00:00
gentle reminder that the majority of developers do not live in the united states.

median salary for a japanese dev is ~$60k. same range for europe (swiss at ~100k, italy at ~30k for the extremes). then you go down.

Russia ~$37,000 Brazil ~$31,500 Nigeria ~$6,000 Morocco ~$11,800 Indonesia ~$13,500 and india ~$30k usd

(asked chatgpt for these numbers down there, JP and EU numbers are mostly correct though as I have first hand experience).
by hajile | 2025-05-09 01:30:49+00:00
That article is pure sophistry. No actual reasoning why. Just the assertion that "we don't think it makes sense, so it doesn't matter". That's not how holy books are supposed to work. If they really are inspired by God, who are they to disagree?

"You can't find any reliable scholar" is an appeal to authority fallacy. EVERYONE regardless of Christian denomination agrees that the text says what it says very clearly (can you point to even one controversy about 1 Tim 3:1-7 ?). The idea that they reject what the book clearly states while also claiming the book to be divinely inspired is extreme cognitive dissonance.

If you are a Christian, prove your position from the Bible alone. In this case, that clearly isn't possible. You should look at what other claims from many churches (including the Catholic Church) that also aren't supported by the Bible without resorting to sophistries while obviously ignoring the parts that are inconvenient to your position.
Show HN: Boost Reader – An online reader I built to stop context switching
by beaniez | 2025-05-09 01:31:05+00:00
Hi guys,

I built Boost Reader, which is an online reader with LLM integration. Think of it like Cursor/Windsurf but for reading. Right now, it only supports PDF.

The main features it supports are:

Highlight any text to ask the LLM a question. Summarize the current page. Screenshot a portion of the page and ask the LLM a question about it. The reason I built this is pretty personal: when I read anything technical or in some unfamiliar domain (books, papers, reports), I find myself spending lots of time either googling or GPT-ing concepts or context I don't understand. All that copy and pasting back and forth during reading is such an interrupting experience, it finally started to annoy me enough to attempt to fix it. I just wanted things to happen in one place.

This is mostly a hobby project, but I genuinely think this could be a tremendous help for anyone who experiences the same pain I was. So, I wanted to throw it out here to see if this could be useful to others. It's mostly a personal tool for me right now. But if people like this, I can then perhaps turn this into a larger-scoped project with cooler features.

Link is boost-reader.vercel.app

What do you think? If this something you'd use?
by harimau777 | 2025-05-09 01:31:12+00:00
The elephant in the room is the AIDs crisis. They already had a chance to demonstrate that they were capable of disagreeing with homosexuality but still treating people with live. Instead they left them to die.

What we have now is just saying "we super duper pinky promise that we've learned our lesson and won't do the exact same thing next time even though we totally are with MAGA."
by Retric | 2025-05-09 01:31:22+00:00
Venice is an interesting example because most of the population moved off the island for obvious logistical issues. However, tourists love interesting places so the islands have not been fully abandoned. What’s telling is it’s not the kind of model that really scale as the more common it gets the less interesting it becomes.

Chicago is a more scalable model, as both raising the city and moving existing housing worked quite well. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raising_of_Chicago
by thaumasiotes | 2025-05-09 01:31:54+00:00
When NCC Group fired me, they characterized the payment for a nondisparagement agreement as "severance", and didn't offer anything else.†

So now I'm free to tell people that they fired me with zero days' notice and zero severance. That's just the way they roll.

I find it funny that their nondisparagement policy specifically causes disparagement that otherwise couldn't have occurred.

† They also gave me an explicit reassurance that I shouldn't worry about my health benefits, because those would remain good until the end of the month. I didn't find this particularly reassuring, since it was Halloween.
by litbear2022 | 2025-05-09 01:32:36+00:00
After the shameful defeat of the Indian Air Force, new propaganda has arrived as expected.

Love from J-10CE :)

> A high-ranking French intelligence official told CNN today that one Rafale fighter jet operated by the Indian Air Force was downed by Pakistan, in what would mark the first time that one of the sophisticated French-made warplanes has been lost in combat.[1]

[1] https://www.cnn.com/world/live-news/india-pakistan-attack-ka...
by renewiltord | 2025-05-09 01:32:59+00:00
We have NEPA now to protect the environment and historic protections. e.g. https://apnews.com/article/us-army-ukraine-russia-ammunition...

> The obstacles the U.S. faces in ramping up production can be seen at the Scranton plant.

> The factory — built for the Delaware, Lackawanna and Western Railroad just after 1900, when the city was a rising coal and railroad powerhouse — has produced large-caliber ammunition for the military going back to the Korean War.

> But the buildings are on the National Historic Registry of Historic Places, limiting how the Army can alter the structures.
by pixl97 | 2025-05-09 01:33:02+00:00
doesn't by itself tell you that they are working in remotely the same way or capable of the same sorts of things.

I believe any intelligence that reaches 'human level' should be capable of nearly the same things with tool use, the fact it accomplishes the goal in a different way doesn't matter because the systems behavior is generalized. Hence the term (artificial) general intelligence. Two different general intelligences built on different architectures should be able to converge on similar solutions (for example solutions based on lowest energy states) because they are operating in the same physical realm.

An AGI and an HGI should be able to have convergent solutions for fast air travel, ornithopters, and drones.
by andrewmunsell | 2025-05-09 01:34:04+00:00
The reason I have never bothered with Claude Code (or even other agentic tools), is that I still code mostly by hand.

When I am using LLMs, I know exactly what the code should be and just am using it as a way to produce it faster (my Cursor rules are extremely extensive and focused on my personal architecture and code style, and I share them across all my personal projects), rather than producing a whole feature. When I try and use just the agent in Cursor, it always needs significant modifications and reorganization to meet my standards, even with the extensive rules I have set up.

Cursor appeals to me because those QOL features don't take away the actual code writing part, but instead augment it and get rid of some of the tedium.
by srvmshr | 2025-05-09 01:34:21+00:00
Not the OP but in a similar boat. Curious to understand how do you make sure that Claude code cli tool does not break existing code functionality?

My hesitation to adopt stems from the events where Claude.ai WebUI ignorantly breaks the code, but since I can visibly verify it - I iterate it until it seems reasonable syntactically & logically, and then paste it back.

With the autonomous changing of the code lines, I'm slightly nervous it would/could break too many parts concurrently -- hence my hesitation to use it. Any best practices would be insightful
by KennyBlanken | 2025-05-09 01:35:58+00:00
"Gee, sorry my ancestors stole that thing from that house a hundred plus years ago. Too bad there's a jerk living in the house right at this moment, that's why it hasn't been returned yet."

It's a little strange to have so little morals you accept a stolen gift from conquerors and don't make the slightest effort to return it over a considerable period of time, even after doing such a thing becomes the accepted moral thing to do...and then suddenly develop a conscience and set of morals so particular that "who is running the country" means you can't return it.

It's almost like it's a very thin excuse and not a legitimate reason.

It doesn't belong to France, and it's not France's place to decide that they don't like the particular guy running things at that moment and thus refuse to return it.

Really, Europe just has a massive problem refusing to acknowledge any of the brutally oppressive colonialism it was responsible for across centuries...
Ask HN: Privacy concerns when using AI assistants for coding?
by Kholin | 2025-05-09 01:36:13+00:00
I've recently seen some teams claim to use third-party AI assistants like Claude or ChatGPT for coding. Don't they consider it a problem to feed their proprietary commercial code into the services of these third-party companies?

If you feed the most critical parts of your project to an AI, wouldn't that introduce security vulnerabilities? The AI would then have an in-depth understanding of your project's core architecture. Consequently, couldn't other AI users potentially gain easy access to these underlying details and breach your security defenses?

Furthermore, couldn't other users then easily copy your code without any attribution, making it seem no different from open-source software?
by lotharcable | 2025-05-09 01:36:18+00:00
Yes. The NIF is a weapons research lab, not a power research lab.

The purpose of it is to show that the USA is still capable of producing advanced hydrogen bombs. More advanced then anybody else.

The '2.05 megajoules' is only a estimation of the laser energy actually used to trigger the reaction. It ignores how much power it took to actually run the lasers or reactor. Even if they update the lasers with modern ones there is zero chance of it ever actually breaking even. It is a technological dead end as far as power generation goes.

The point of the 'breakthrough' is really more about ensuring continued Congressional approval for funding then anything else. They are being paid to impress and certainly they succeeded in that.

However I suspect this is true of almost all 'fusion breakthroughs'. They publish updates to ensure continued funding from their respective governments.

People will argue that this is a good thing since it helps ensure that scientists continue to be employed and publishing research papers. That sentiment is likely true in that it does help keep people employed, but if your goal is to have a working and economically viable fusion power plant within your lifetime it isn't a good way to go about things.

If the governments actually cared about CO2 and man-made global warming they would be investing in fusion technology and helping to develop ways to recycle nuclear waste usefully. Got to walk before you can run.
by stonelazy | 2025-05-09 01:37:08+00:00
> I don't believe that phonemes are real

I used to think the same until I came across the VQ-VAE paper [1], where the goal was to let the model learn the smallest units of speech without any supervision. Interestingly, the model ended up learning units that closely aligned with the phonemes we recognize today.

[1] - https://arxiv.org/pdf/1711.00937
by zelphirkalt | 2025-05-09 01:38:35+00:00
My optimism for the US is quite limited, because they have kinda knowingly dismantled their own democracy, and are in the process of dismantling it even more, while the president tries as hard as possible to become a Putin-like dictator, and important decisions are made by tech giant owning oligarchs. A while longer and the US might enter a civil war or will simply lose all good will it had directed towards it in the world and will then stand alone, while other countries enable the US' competitors. If Americans do not change something about their trajectory soon, it will not end well for them, and probably not end well for many other countries either.
by raspasov | 2025-05-09 01:38:45+00:00
Sorry to hear that.

Is it fair to assume that every individual library/API can somewhat easily create a brand-new-world with every release (because it won't compile until the types are "re-aligned") yet they don't bother to check if the new release works with any other library/API?

I think the problem is partially cultural with a specific ecosystem but also fundamental. It takes a lot of type craft, care and creativity to design future-proof function/method signatures that are "open" to extension without breakage.
by munificent | 2025-05-09 01:38:51+00:00
It's true that if you always add new functions to your library instead of changing existing ones then users can upgrade without breaking. There is real value in that.

But woe unto the user who first starts using your library after a decade of that "evolution" and they are faced with a dozen functions that all have similar but increasingly long names and do very similar things with subtle but likely important differences. (I guess a culture of "the longest function name is probably the newest and the one you want" will emerge eventually.)

Personally, I like when a library's API represents the best way the author knows to tackle a given problem today without also containing an accumulated pile of how they thought the problem should have been tackled years ago before they knew better.

If I want the old solutions, that's what versioning is for. I'll use the old version.
by ants_everywhere | 2025-05-09 01:39:01+00:00
> “This provides a new perspective on how Phoenician culture spread—not through large-scale mass migration, but through a dynamic process of cultural transmission and assimilation.”

> “At each site, people were highly variable in their ancestry, with the largest genetic source being people similar to contemporary people of Sicily and the Aegean, and many people with significant North African associated ancestry as well.”

They say "cultural exchange" but is this a euphemism that includes things like warfare and slavery? Like the way Alexander the Great spread Greek culture?

It seems like the main hypothesis they're ruling out is migration.
by CGamesPlay | 2025-05-09 01:39:53+00:00
The project being discussed in this post is https://codeberg.org/valpackett/podfox#podfox

You can actually use Traefik to do something similar using its Docker service discovery. Instead of being a SOCKS proxy, Traefik is a reverse proxy, and you can combine with `lvh.me` which resolves all subdomains to localhost. I don't use this technique any more, but a functional example command can be seen here: https://github.com/CGamesPlay/dotfiles/blob/c49e2b4ddd0fe591...
by api | 2025-05-09 01:40:37+00:00
I read it and… I don’t get it. There isn’t much of a real argument.

Like in the famous “gentle introduction” he spends like 10000 words to convince you that… maybe Samuel Adams was an asshole? Okay, fine. Therefore the American revolution was a fraud, because… some Tory wrote a witty book mocking its leaders? Wow, so you are saying that a major revolution was not absolutely black and white and that maybe some of the folks on “our” side were dicks? What a revelation. Meanwhile there’s little engagement with the actual ideas, which are the important and lasting part.

That’s just one example. I have no interest in spending days deconstructing those walls of text. Let’s just say they did not change my mind on anything.

I have this theory that much of Yarvin’s underlying motive is a sublimated rage out about the idiocy and hypocrisy of San Francisco politics. He lived there at the time. But he couldn’t just say damn these SF latte sipping rich lefty people are hypocritical assholes. If you don’t like a place then for fuck’s sake just move.

A big irony is that SF is not a well functioning democracy. It’s a one party state controlled by boomer NIMBY property owners with a gigantic divide between rich and poor. It’s a f’ing feudal city state run by landlords, and he thinks the whole world should be like that?

I happen to dislike a lot of things about how SF is run and some things about its zeitgeist which is why I don’t live there.
by typewithrhythm | 2025-05-09 01:41:27+00:00
I'm guessing it's at least partially too high risk from a students perspective.

Much of the point of an established university is credentials, a new one cannot give the same recognition.

This means that to attract new students, and build a reputation, you have to have some other draw; either some world renowned experts, or cheap (even free or scholarships) tuition. Probably both.

And if you want your graduates to be outstanding, then you need to offer the best incoming candidates a reason to choose your school, because the truth is the school has less impact than the individual.
by klank | 2025-05-09 01:42:10+00:00
Unless you're deep in a conversation with a graphics nerd, when "the framebuffer" is referenced, what the person normally means is some area of memory, accessible programmatically, that directly represents the pixels displayed on the screen. No fancy windows, vectors, coordinates, just raw memory and values that are the literal values the screen is showing.

In practice, it's not literally that, but in practice, it acts/works like that.
by jonstewart | 2025-05-09 01:43:45+00:00
When I first read, years ago, about how many aircraft carriers the US Navy had during WW2, I was gobsmacked. But then I read how most of them were escort carriers, slow converted merchant ships with just a few planes. The US military currently has a lot of exquisite platforms; what it [mostly] lacks today is mass from cheaper systems.

It’d be good if we built more submarines, faster…
by impish9208 | 2025-05-09 01:44:04+00:00
His Excellency, President for Life, Field Marshal Al Hadji Doctor Idi Amin Dada, VC, DSO, MC, CBE, Lord of All the Beasts of the Earth and Fishes of the Seas and Conqueror of the British Empire in Africa in General and Uganda in Particular.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idi_Amin
by tmoertel | 2025-05-09 01:44:13+00:00
Two notes on the weighted version. First, the straightforward implementation of selecting the top N when ranked by POW(RANDOM(), 1.0 / weight) has stability problems when the weights are very large or very small. Second, the resulting sample does not have the same distribution in expectation as the population from which it was drawn. This is especially so when the overall weight is concentrated in a small number of population elements. But such samples are workable approximations in many cases.

I discuss these issues more here: https://blog.moertel.com/posts/2024-08-23-sampling-with-sql....
by bcrosby95 | 2025-05-09 01:47:10+00:00
Diagrams are great at providing a simplified view of things but they suck ass when it comes to providing details.

There's a reason why fully creating systems from them died 20 years ago - and it wasn't just because the code gen failed. Finding a bug in your spec when its a mess of arrows and connections can be nigh impossible.

Go image search "complex unreal blueprint".
by brendangregg | 2025-05-09 01:47:45+00:00
To everyone building these things: Please add a disclaimer to say something like:

"This is not a vulnerability: eBPF currently requires root access to do this. Also, eBPF makes this easy but does not make it possible, as debuggers, interposers/shims, and other tools can also attach to pre-encryption points, and therefore banning eBPF (as some people want to do after seeing projects like this) would not actually improve security, but it would instead _reduce_ security as it would prevent eBPF-based security solutions from being used."
by vel0city | 2025-05-09 01:48:09+00:00
Sure, but ~$150k isn't exactly FAANG US salaries for an experienced software dev. That's my point. Lots of people forget how much extra many employers pay for a salaried employee on top of just the take home salary. Labor is expensive in the US.

I imagine a lot of people saw $20k/mo and thought the salary clearly had to be $200k+.
by rayiner | 2025-05-09 01:48:17+00:00
> the US was operating internment camps for US citizens of Japanese descent you know

That is non-responsive to the point raised by OP. That had little effect on Americans unless they were the small minority of Japanese. The point OP raised is much more salient. If we end up in another World War, what lessons do you want to have from the past? “Don’t put racial minorities in internment camps” is well and good, but it won’t help you build a giant navy and win a war.

I learned con law from a social studies PhD who had little interest in the constitution, and focused the entire class on this or that minoritized or oppressed group. It’s a terrible way to learn constitutional law—or anything else—because you over-focus on the 20% of the story while missing the big picture about how the country was actually designed to work.
by hajile | 2025-05-09 01:48:46+00:00
You argued that I was mistranslating. I showed that the etymology and transliteration made a mistranslation effectively impossible. You then completely ignore the evidence to make up an assertion about changing semantics with ZERO proof (even though the burden of proof is on you).

The only reason the word bishop exists in English is because we needed a loan word for episkopos. It has served that purpose and in the religious context has had no significant change in semantics.

As to your assertion that bishop and priest are different, you are wrong even from the Catholic framework (and completely wrong from a Protestant framework). Here's a quote from Thomas Aquinas about 1 Tim 3:1

> But since Dionysius declares that there are three orders, namely, bishops who rule, priests who enlighten, and deacons who cleanse, why does the Apostle make no mention of priests?

> The answer is that priests are included under the term, bishop, not as though the two orders are not really distinct, but only nominally. For priest is the same as elder, and bishop the same as overseer. Hence priests and bishops are indiscriminately called both bishops and priests.
by AStonesThrow | 2025-05-09 01:48:55+00:00
What also made the abuse scandal so bad was that it is predominantly a problem of homosexuality. And the Catholic Church has been quite accustomed to ordain gay men to the priesthood and accept them into monasteries. And this is not generally a problem if the men have good self-control and they can uphold their vows.

But if homosexual men begin to dabble in pederasty and begin to abuse their positions of power against vulnerable and defenseless boys, this is a real scandal, and the Church has been quite embarrassed for people to find out just how prevalent homosexuality is among the ranks of clergy and religious. And the general public and the mainstream media know this, and they have leveraged that embarrassment against the Church in order to discredit her.

And the homosexual aspect of all of this tends to get swept under the rug and sort of ignored, because the general public, in a hypocritical sort of way, doesn't really mind if men are having sex with boys, at least they're not supposed to, but the absence of little girls from the records has been difficult to deny.

The Church can try and correct this by denying entry to homosexual men. But then she will have a profound vocations crisis if she is selecting heterosexual men and hanging the gays out to dry with nothing at all to do. More than a vocations crisis, she will be accused of being "unwelcoming" and "unjust" towards gay men entirely. So she is truly upon the horns of a dilemma.