MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by setr | 2025-05-15 15:35:49+00:00
Candide and White Noise I accidentally read prior to the class, not knowing they were curriculum books. Both I found absolutely hilarious.

Both failed to elicit even a minor chuckle once it entered the classroom. Not from the students, not the teacher, and somehow not even myself.

I don’t know what how classrooms are so categorically destructive to the book they purport to teach
by diggan | 2025-05-15 15:36:03+00:00
> AI bots can't solve proof-of-work challenges because browsers they use for scraping don't support features needed to solve them. This is highlighted by existence of other proof-of-work solutions designed to specifically filter out AI bots, like go-away[1] or Anubis[2].

Huh, they definitely can?

go-away and Anubis reduces the load on your servers as bot operators cannot just scrape N pages per second without any drawbacks. Instead it gets really expensive to make 1000s of requests, as they're all really slow.

But for a user who uses their own AI agent, that browses the web, things like anubis and go-away aren't meant to (nor does it) stop them from accessing the websites at all, it'll just be a tiny bit slower.

Those tools are meant to stop site-wide scraping, not individual automatic user-agents.
by BobaFloutist | 2025-05-15 15:36:42+00:00
Also eliminating non-compliant data might actually just not work, since the one thing everyone knows about AIs is that they'll happily invent anything plausible sounding.

So, for example, if a model was trained with no references to the Tiananmen Square massacre, I could see it just synthesizing commonalities between other massacres and inventing a new, worse Tiananmen Square Massacre. "That's not a thing that ever happened" isn't something most AIs are particularly good at saying.
by stanley0306 | 2025-05-15 15:37:19+00:00
I recently completed a RISC-V CPU with a 5-stage pipeline (IF, ID, EX, MEM, WB) using Verilog. It supports arithmetic (add, sub, mul), branching, memory access, and can execute C code compiled with GCC. GitHub repo: https://github.com/SHAOWEICHEN000/RISCV_CPU

I’d love feedback or suggestions for optimization / synthesis. Please click in and give me some advice
by fivestones | 2025-05-15 15:37:19+00:00
I don’t think the person needs to be bilingual. They could just speak English, and start with whatever English attempt at translation had already been made, then take a look at an LLM translation, and then create the final copy based on all of that. They don’t need to speak Mandarin.

I always thought there might be a market for this kind of service. Maybe it would be hard to build trust though. If they don’t trust your language and copy creating abilities, no one will pay for your English skills. And how are they supposed to assess your abilities when the problem they are facing is that they don’t have good command of English in the first place?
by ohr | 2025-05-15 15:37:28+00:00
> don't you have to get your version's struct data member type correct

No, since Serde will happyly fill a `u64` field with any other `u{8,16,32}` value, and even with signed types (as long as the actual value is non-negative) - this is sort of what happens when you deserialize a JSON `[1, 2, 3]` into `[u64]`.
by emptybits | 2025-05-15 15:37:33+00:00
Another fact you may find interesting because it's unique, I think, for a North American city of its size: Vancouver has no freeways.

Within city limits, there are no roads with speed limits over 50 km/h (30 mi/h), lots of traffic lights, lots of bus/bike lanes, and lots of congestion. The Trans Canada highway skirts along the side of the city but does not enter it. Things get slow, very quickly.

There are complex historic reasons behind this. Politics, activism, lack of federal funding, etc.

This is a decent article:

https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2016/may/09/story-cities-...
Show HN: I built HN Buddy to stop compulsive HN checking
by gaborme | 2025-05-15 15:38:02+00:00
I found myself compulsively checking Hacker News and wanted a calmer way to keep up – just one daily email. So, I built HN Buddy. It's an open-source project you can self-host.

The core idea is: 1) Fetch yesterday's top HN posts. 2) Summarize the previous day's top posts and comments, like I'd tell a friend. 3) Send it as a daily email digest to my inbox. I chose Listmonk for this because it handles subscriber lists, archives the digests (acting as a simple DB), manages unsubscribes, and lets me easily switch SMTP providers.

Emailed myself for over 10 days now and helped me cut down on direct HN visits.

It's been a learning project, so the code and AI summaries are always evolving.

If you want to see the last digests: https://hn-buddy.com

The code: https://github.com/herget/hn-buddy
by hmdai | 2025-05-15 15:38:17+00:00
Since the introduction of Model Context Protocol, I've been wondering why this protocol is so complicated to work with and after many wasted hours and a few MCP spec updates, I've decided to write down what I think MCP should have been and I call it Naive Context Protocol ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.

Maybe this approach is in fact naive (please tell why!), the "spec" is very minimal at this point (I will expand based on feedback here) and it probably ignores some use-case (some of them on purpose), but I would like to hear:

1. What everyone here thinks the MCP/NCP should've been/should be?

2. What use-cases would you like a context protocol to support?
by dgb23 | 2025-05-15 15:38:25+00:00
Neat article!

This will depend on the type of game or application, but one thing I've been doing is to do the more rigorous pathfinding when the environment (collision map) changes in order to generate a sort of precomputed pathfinding map (grid, or graph). When I search a path, or route for an entity, then it's on that pathfinding map.

Again, it depends on how that simulation fundamentally works. Some have natural POIs, crossroads and corners that one can work with. Others might need some heuristics to determine those or merge together paths. It might also be worth trying to use a very coarse logic for gross movement but adjust the actual path moment to moment, but that's just an idea that I never tried.

The approach in the article is of course very dynamic, which has the advantage of being excellent at trying stuff out and visualizing it.

I personally never tried out the space partitioning mentioned in the article and don't understand it fully. But there might be strong similarities to what I described above.
by theamk | 2025-05-15 15:38:29+00:00
no, the company did not say that his solution was correct, that's just what the author thought.

The company said that _the parts he wrote in the doc_ would not negatively affect his scoring. But his doc did not contain many parts that the company cared about - read it yourself, and try to answer the questions like: Will there be a per-email indicator? Is there a "sent mail" folder? How will user be notified of incoming email?

More on this here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43996105
by insane_dreamer | 2025-05-15 15:39:20+00:00
Too many points than I have time to reply to, despite being an interesting convo to have, so just real quick:

- yes, particularly under Trump the rule of law is being eroded; no question there. And there is systemic bias in the system here (i.e, driving while black, etc.) But it's not comparable with how the "rule of law" (which really should be called "rule by law") works in China. I know, I lived it for a number of years, owned a business there, was deeply immersed in the goings on, and many frank discussions with our circle of well educated Chinese (many of whom were emigrating or at least getting their kids out of the country).

> most Chinese (greatly influenced by the perceptions of those I interact with) believe that there was a successful crackdown on rampant corruption coinciding with a cross society economic uplifting.

Maybe the thinking has changed since I was there (left in 2017) but I can tell you without a doubt that the well educated class was not fooled by Xi's crackdown (which started a couple of years after he came into power). There's corruption everywhere--who got cracked down on (who certainly were corrupt) depended entirely on whose side they were own (much like Trump today). At the lower level, who gets the ax depends on the relationships they have with higher ups. Yes, in the US this happens to, but it's not at all the same level (until Trump--which is what's frightening about Trump).

Yes, the cross-society economic lift was real and greatly to China's credit. But that was not a result of some crackdown on corruption but rather a liberalization of the economy under Deng and continued by others especially Hu Jintao. I was there when Xi came into power and we all thought he was going to continue that, and instead after a couple of years it become clear he was going the opposite direction. That's when those who had the money and ability to leave started doing so, or putting together plan B's.

There is a faustian bargain whereby the middle class will support the government so long as there is economic growth (which is why the illusion of economic growth must be maintained). This is couple with extreme information controls and immediate crackdowns on any dissent, so that there is no opportunity to mount any resistance, and therefore "mei banfa", as the Chinese would say.
by Sammi | 2025-05-15 15:39:20+00:00
> If user data in models is valuable corporations will move to legal regimes where it is allowed.

So lets take a concrete example. Let's imagine Facebook moves out of the EU in order to skirt EU law. How do they now operate in the EU? How do they make any money from the EU users?

If the EU has neighbors who have nukes, then that is a threat to the EU, and the EU needs their own nukes for deterrence. This far I follow. If the EU has neighbors who have lax data privacy laws, then that is their problem - it's not a problem in the EU because they can be barred from running businesses in the EU. Can they store the data from EU users who visit their online services? Sure. But they will have to offer free services to entice EU users to visit, because they can be blocked from running business in the EU. I don't see the business model for keeping this up.
by ohr | 2025-05-15 15:40:00+00:00
In WMI, the fields are lazy loaded when you do a `*` query, but the real crate [does use the same Serde reflection tricks](https://github.com/ohadravid/wmi-rs/blob/main/src/query.rs#L...) to create the correct field list when you query a struct which improves perf a lot!
by marv1nnnnn | 2025-05-15 15:40:26+00:00
Oof, you nailed it. Thanks for the sharp eyes on llm_min_guideline.md. That's a clear sign of me pushing this out too quickly to get feedback on the core concept, and I didn't give the supporting docs the attention they deserve. My bad. Cleaning that up, and generally adding more polish, is a top priority. Really appreciate you taking the time to look deeper and for the encouragement to keep going. It's very helpful!
by jayd16 | 2025-05-15 15:40:40+00:00
Splatting is about building a scene that supports synthetic view angles.

The depth is helpful to properly handle the parallaxing of the scene as the view angle changes. The system should then ideally "in-paint" the areas that are occluded from the input.

You can either guess the input depth from matching multiple RGB inputs or just use depth inputs along with RGB inputs if you have them. It's not fundamental to the process of building the splats either way.
by UncleMeat | 2025-05-15 15:40:42+00:00
Yep. It is remarkably clear that AI chatbots take the existing open web, hide it behind a wall owned by a single institution, and provides the largest ever capacity for controlling public opinion in history. The fact that we are trending towards replacing the search experience (which does have plenty of its own problems, but not nearly as many) with this is going to concentrate such an enormous amount of power behind whoever wins this that we should be very concerned.
by jedbrooke | 2025-05-15 15:41:09+00:00
this thread is helping me understand why I always thought 3D movies looked _less_ 3D than 2D movies.

That and after seeing Avatar 1 in 3D, then seeing Avatar 2 in 3D over 10 years later and not really noticing any improvement in the 3D made me declare 3D movies officially dead (though I haven’t done side by side comparisons)
by 3vidence | 2025-05-15 15:41:10+00:00
I still haven't gotten into rust yet, mostly due to time and demand, but, I have been doing a lot of C++ in the past few years.

Coming from that background these rules sound fantastic, theres been a lot of work put into c++ the past few years to try and make these things easier to enforce but it's still difficult to do right even with smart pointers.
by oaeirjtlj | 2025-05-15 15:41:28+00:00
And now that chatgpt has a "memory" and can access previous conversations, it might be poisoned permanently. It gets one really bad idea, and forever after it insists on dumping that bad idea into every subsequent response ever after you repeatedly tell it "THAT'S A SHIT IDEA DON'T EVER MENTION THAT AGAIN". Sometimes it'll accidentally include some of its internal prompting, "user is very unhappy, make sure to not include xyz", and then it'll give you a response that is entirely focused around xyz.
by manuel_psquared | 2025-05-15 15:41:57+00:00
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by benoau | 2025-05-15 15:41:59+00:00
I think fundamentally the problem is how many languages and developer-niceties are LLMs going to need? Over the last two decades there's been an absolute explosion in tooling to make development better but an LLM is just as happy to vomit out Perl or PHP. Once the code generation tools reach a good-enough state who's even going to check how the sausage was made.
by cometapi | 2025-05-15 15:42:04+00:00
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Cline is an open‑source, AI‑driven coding assistant designed to streamline development workflows by interpreting natural language prompts and executing code changes directly in your editor or terminal. Since its initial release, Cline has become a favorite among developers for tasks ranging from simple refactoring to complex feature generation. Its plugin‑based architecture allows it to support multiple model providers—such as OpenAI, Anthropic, and custom endpoints—making it highly flexible for different project needs.
by evanelias | 2025-05-15 15:42:39+00:00
> Till about yesterday, MySQL was little more than a CSV file on wheels

That's utter nonsense. What are you even referring to here?

InnoDB is a rock-solid OLTP storage engine, and it's been MySQL's default since 2010. A very large percentage of the global economy relies on InnoDB, and has for quite some time.
by bee_rider | 2025-05-15 15:42:47+00:00
Although, FAANG is kind of an old acronym. Those companies (other than maybe Apple because they’ve always been weird) are more like Microsoft was, when the phrase was coined. In the sense that they are matured companies that aren’t striking out and building new things in new markets.

It wouldn’t surprise me if they’ve lost the “look at interesting portfolios” muscle and gained the “look at metrics” one.

Most people didn’t work at FAANG back then, right? You worked at FAANG because you were better than people who took the conventional approach, and the really competent growing companies could figure that out.

Not sure who the up-and-comers are now, though.
by SparkyMcUnicorn | 2025-05-15 15:43:18+00:00
It's also missing the documentation part. Without additional context, method/type definitions with a short description will only go so far.

Cherry picking a tiny example, this wouldn't capture the fact that cloudflare durable objects can only have one alarm at a time and each set overwrites the old one. The model will happily architect something with a single object, expecting to be able to set a bunch of alarms on it. Maybe I'm wrong and this tool would document it correctly into a description. But this is just a small example.

For much of a framework or library, maybe this works. But I feel like (in order for this to be most effective) the proposed spec possibly needs an update to include little more context.

I hope this matures and works well. And there's nothing stopping me from filling in gaps with additional docs, so I'll be giving it a shot.
by wanderingbort | 2025-05-15 15:43:21+00:00
I think this is the part of the article that lands poorly with me. It lacks perspective. Why couldn't the people who evaluated those skills, demonstrated through those projects, pay the author? There are a myriad of possible reasons but some of them are in the category of "the result has marginal value".

I am fine hiring a junior developer that just does what is asked of them at a high level of quality. That is the baseline.

By the time you are a senior developer, I expect you to actively push back if you are asked to spend your time wastefully on marginally valuable things. Product managers should be able to explain to a reasonable person why a feature has value. A senior dev should be able to explain to project management why refactoring to reduce tech-debt pays off over time.

Is it possible that looking at the authors open source projects conveys the message:

"I am an exceptional coder with an unfortunate tendency to only consider the complexity of a problem or the elegance of a solution when considering the value of my work."

I hire talent like that... when I have the organizational capacity to see if they grow out of it.
by runjake | 2025-05-15 15:43:27+00:00
This is the correct answer.

And to add to it: macOS (and its derivatives, such as iOS) descends from an operating system called OPENSTEP (formerly NeXTSTEP), which used Display Postscript for on-screen rendering.

Apple later replaced Display PostScript with a more modern reimplementation called Quartz 2D[1], which switched from Postscript to PDF.

Why not PNG? Because PNG is a bitmap format and Quartz 2D is designed to be resolution-independent.

Why not SVG? Probably because Quartz 2D relies heavily on the PDF specification throughout and it would be too much work to reimplement, and for what? PDF is still a common and well-regarded format.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quartz_2D
by probably_wrong | 2025-05-15 15:44:07+00:00
Wasn't that the argument against https, namely, that it was too costly to run [1]? I also run fail2ban [2] in my servers and I rarely even notice it's there.

I'm not saying you should sit down with the iptables manual and start going through the logs, but I can see the idea taking off if all it takes is (say) one apt-get and two config lines.

[1] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1035283/will-it-ever-be-...

[2] https://github.com/fail2ban/fail2ban
by paddy_m | 2025-05-15 15:44:32+00:00
The Interborough Express is one example. Going from southern Brooklyn on the water up to queens. Previous proposals had it also connecting to the Bronx. If you want to be really ambitious, connect Bayridge to Staten Island and continue on with branches to Elizabeth and Bayonne. Up north, it's surprising there isn't rail from the Bronx, through Manhattan, across the GW Bridge to NJ.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interborough_Express
by ChrisMarshallNY | 2025-05-15 15:45:04+00:00
I’ve run side projects for my entire career (over 30 years).

It definitely informed my day jobs, but they never knew (or cared). I did it because I loved doing it. I designed software to help out altruistic organizations, and got some good work done (that no one signing checks ever cared about).

Now, I’m retired, and working on my own stuff. I treat my work as a craft, and really enjoy it.
by krapp | 2025-05-15 15:45:19+00:00
>One thing I've learned since last year; a lot of the tech bros seem to really love fascism.

The current tech-feudalism/AI accelerationist/neo-nazi flavor of American fascism was created by tech bros and nerds who have been deeply influential within the tech community - Curtis Yarvin, Peter Thiel and the like, and this forum is the nexus of it. The anarchist/anti-capitalist/liberationist strain of hacker culture seems all but dead now.
by yndoendo | 2025-05-15 15:45:29+00:00
I was in Kindergarten and watching my fellow classmates get gold star stickers on their work. They were excited when it happened to them. I saw it as being given nothing of real value and person could just go to the store and buy them for $1 or $2.

It is a social engineering technique to exploit more work without increasing wages. Just like "Employee of the Month" or a "Pizza Party."

Company I work for does this with gift cards as rewards. I was reprimanded because I sent an email to HR that this " gift" is as useful as a wet rage in the rain. I don't eat at restaurants that are franchises or have a ticker on Wall Street. Prefer local brick and mortar over Walmart and will never financial support Amazon.

If you want to truly honor my accomplishments, give me a raise or more PTO. Anything else is futile. That gift card to Walmart has 0 value towards a quality purchase like a RADAR or LiDAR development kit to learn more or such.
by jedimastert | 2025-05-15 15:45:30+00:00
> I mean, I’d personally tell them that I wasn’t going to leave the room, but surely it worked a lot?

Maybe it's because I worked in a different office or whatever, but 25 and 50 minute meetings were pretty common and if somebody else scheduled the room it was 100% respected.

It wasn't really considered pedantry or anything, just the basic respect of honoring the commitment of the meeting calendar.
by KronisLV | 2025-05-15 15:45:51+00:00
> There's a part of me that thinks, maybe we'd all be better off if we set the bar for success of a business at "sustains the lives of the people who work there and itself is sustainable."

This would be beautiful in a world where retirement was better and it didn’t feel like inflation or financial crashes are looming around the next corner most of the time.

For many folks, trying to get savings and putting money into investments is less about wanting a lavish lifestyle later and more about just wanting financial security in case something bad happens.