MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Springtime | 2025-05-02 20:52:44+00:00
Reading between the lines I think a key part of what makes chatbots attractive, re lack of judgment, is they're like talking to a new stranger every session.

In both IRL and online discussions sometimes a stranger is the perfect person to talk to about certain things as they have no history with you. In ideal conditions for this they have no greater context about who you are and what you've done which is a very freeing thing (can also be taken advantage of in bad faith).

Online and now LLMs add an extra freeing element, assuming anonymity: they have no prejudices about your appearance/age/abilities either.

Sometimes it's hard to talk about certain things when one feels that judgment is likely from another party. In that sense chatbots are being used as perfect strangers.
by maj0rhn | 2025-05-02 20:53:07+00:00
We had an Altair at home, that my father assembled from a kit. That version did not have a serial port. It had only the switches on the front panel. I did succeed in inputting some programs and in having them run. But of course it was appallingly limited.

The serial port was its own separate board. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RaYTd3dbXeM

There were two very clever I/O ideas that emerged for the Altair: (1) A radio on top of the housing would pick up a signal, allowing audio output! (2) A cassette tape recorder could be used as an external storage device, though I forget how it interfaced... the serial board, I think.
by amiga386 | 2025-05-02 20:53:13+00:00
> How would it directly replace your key with its value?

In the same way that if you wrote this C code:

const int x[] = {20, 100, 42}; int addten(int idx) { return x[idx] + 10; }

the C compiler would "just know" that anywhere you wrote x[2], it could substitute 42. Because you signalled with the "const" that these values will never change. It could even replace addten(2) with 52 and not even make the call to addten(), or do the addition.

The same goes for Java's value-based classes: https://docs.oracle.com/en/java/javase/17/docs/api/java.base...

But it's a bit more magical than C, because _some_ code runs, to initialise the value, and then once it's initialised, there can be further rounds of code compilation or optimisation, where the JVM can take advantage of knowing these objects are plain values and can participate in things like constant-folding, constant propagation, dead-code elimination, and so on. And with @Stable it knows it that if a function has been called once and didn't return zero, it can memoise it.

> What if there are bucket collisions? Do immutable maps expand until there aren't any? Moreover, what if there are hash key collisions?

I don't know the details, but you can't have an immutable map until it's constructed, and if there are problems with the keys or values, it can refuse to construct one by throwing a runtime exception instead.

Immutable maps make a lot of promises -- https://docs.oracle.com/en/java/javase/17/docs/api/java.base... -- but for the most part they're normal HashMaps that are just making semantic promises. They make enough semantic promises internally to the JVM that it can constant fold them, e.g. with x = Map.of(1, "hello", 2, "world") the JVM knows enough to replace x.get(1) with "hello" and x.get(2) with "world" without needing to invoke _any_ of the map internals more than once.

What wasn't working until now was strings as keys, because the JVM didn't see the String.hash field as stable. Now it does, and it can constant fold _all_ the steps, meaning you can also have y = Map.of("hello", 1, "world", 2) and the JVM can replace y.get("hello") with 1
by diggan | 2025-05-02 20:53:40+00:00
Seems Blast uses browser-use (https://github.com/browser-use/browser-use) which seems to be some client specifically for AIs to connect to/run browser runtimes.

Unfortunately, it seems like browser-use tries to hide that it's controlled by an AI, and uses a typical browser user-agent: https://github.com/browser-use/browser-use/blob/d8c4d03d9ea9...

I'm guessing because of the amount of flags, you could probably come up with a unique fingerprint for browser-use, based on available features, screen/canvas size and so on, that could be reused for blocking everyone using Blast/browser-use.

If calebhwin wanted to make Blast easier to identify, they could set a custom user-agent for browser-use that makes it clear it's Blast doing the browsing for the user.
by mjr00 | 2025-05-02 20:54:19+00:00
Artists playing live is the end result though. If anything, the fact that people go to see Katy Perry in concert and not Max Martin, or how Tiesto is still a massive festival draw despite everyone knowing he's used ghost producers for 2 decades, are great examples of how little people care about the process of music being made versus the end result.

I'm not saying you need to use generative tools, but if it helps you make music you should do it. Ultimately what you're sharing with the world is your taste, not your technical abilities. To slightly expand on a famous quote in the music world -

> I thought using AI was cheating, so I used loops. I then thought using loops was cheating, so I programmed my own using samples. I then thought using samples was cheating, so I recorded real drums. I then thought that programming it was cheating, so I learned to play drums for real. I then thought using bought drums was cheating, so I learned to make my own. I then thought using premade skins was cheating, so I killed a goat and skinned it. I then thought that that was cheating too, so I grew my own goat from a baby goat. I also think that is cheating, but I’m not sure where to go from here. I haven’t made any music lately, what with the goat farming and all.
by lilyball | 2025-05-02 20:54:59+00:00
Speaking as a trans therian, being a therian is kind of like being trans, except there's no cross-species HRT, and even fewer people will be willing to respect your identity.

It is really hard to actually describe what this means, though. What's the actual distinction between "they so strongly identify with the animal" and "they are the animal, trapped in a human body"? Is it just the desire to tell us "ok but you know you really are human, right?" I know my body is a human body, I know my DNA is human DNA, but that doesn't say anything about the mind inside this body, the concept of self. What I experience can best be described by a thought experiment: imagine that, through some magic spell, an animal was put into the body of a human and had to learn how to fit in to human society. What would that animal be feeling after all that? Probably the same way I feel.

Ultimately though, it doesn't really matter how one tries to describe this. None of the descriptions will be sufficiently accurate. But what matters is that treating me as the animal whose identity I claim makes me happy, and it doesn't harm anyone.
by mrtksn | 2025-05-02 20:55:35+00:00
In my experience, in soviet engineering they don't augment stuff unless absolutely necessary. As a result, stuff tend to work as long as the physics work. It results in relatively crude but simple and reliable machines. The elegance comes from simplicity, in western tech the elegance comes from being well thought and designed for specific use cases. I.e. a Lada will be uncomfortable, loud, uneconomical car but at the same time it will withstand abuse and be easy to repair enough to get it going.

Thinking about the elevator in our commie block, it would have given a heart attack to a western European. Instead of having double doors to keep us safe from the moving wall, it had pads on the bottom and top edge so if your hand or leg is stuck, the pad will be pushed and the elevator will stop immediately. Also there was a tiny cabinet door on the right side so you can access the mechanism to force open the door or force move/halt the elevator. As kids, we would be experimenting with those mechanisms. They worked every single time, no legs or arms were lost.
by ben_w | 2025-05-02 20:56:12+00:00
A few things:

1. UK houses are not usually custom builds with specs determined by first owner, they're usually "firm builds a street or ten, sells to whoever they can"; the builders have little incentive to care about what's cost-effective.

IIRC, custom-builds are only about 10% of UK market.

2. Houses don't behave quite the same way as other assets.

People have a certain approximately fixed amount of money available to spend on a house, and basically all of that money will be taken by the sale.

When the physical cost of building the house is forces to go up, the value of the land is forced to go down.

3. PV itself is now absurdly cheap, the primary cost is getting it installed. If this is done at construction time, this is cheaper than if it is done later.
by divan | 2025-05-02 20:56:50+00:00
Never cared about scoring in Beat Saber. To me the game stood out for two reasons:

1) multisensory experience - when you chop the block it's a music+visual+kinestetic experience (beat/flash/haptic). That alone was wildly satisfying and worth playing game for 2h hours.

2) simplicity of rules

The first thing later was replicated in may apps/games (one I enjoyed a lot is FitXR). But Beat Saber nailed it so good and early, that it's still unbeatable :)
by jimbokun | 2025-05-02 20:57:04+00:00
> Of course the reality is just that the US has become the axis of evil, and perhaps always was, it just had the best PR.

Sigh.

Yes, the Soviet Union really was the worker's paradise with free, prosperous, happy people!

Can we get away from the sophomoric idea the USA was ALWAYS the ONLY source of badness in the world, just because right now it's the most powerful nation in the world and also a complete mess?
by MaxBarraclough | 2025-05-02 20:57:06+00:00
> You cannot possibly write or deliver spaghetti, working or otherwise, if you're not capable of remembering what you wrote three minutes ago.

Forth programmers make a similar point. Forth is stack based; you typically use stack operations rather than local variables. This is ok when your 'words' (analogous to functions/procedures) have short and simple definitions, but code can quickly become unreadable if they don't. In this way, the language strongly nudges the programmer toward developing composable words with simple definitions.

(Of course, Forth sees little use today, and it hasn't won over the masses with its approach, but the broader point stands.)
by alabastervlog | 2025-05-02 20:57:36+00:00
The time before antibiotics and vaccines is alien to modern people. Basically everyone suffered trauma we'd call fairly extreme, these days.

The world also tended to be far more violent in the past than it is now.

The TV show Dickinson has fun with this, juxtaposing its modern-sounding and often flippant dialog with things like whole families you knew dying of disease being a pretty common piece of news to receive.
by 8fingerlouie | 2025-05-02 20:58:15+00:00
I'm willing to bet that if you start a career in COBOL programming today, you will live a long and happy life as a COBOL programmer until your retirement age, earning more than your peers who chose NodeJS, Go, Rust, Kotlin, or whatever is modern today or tomorrow.

The only language that comes even remotely close is Java, in terms of job guarantee.

I doubt it's more stressful. Debuggers absolutely do exist, as do modern desktop editors with step by step debugging, but you will have to learn at least a little bit about memory management, SQL, and other "nasty relics".

It appears to be a part of the skillset that is no longer taught. I've worked in the embedded industry for a decade, and we usually had little more than trace lines over a serial cable to debug our code, and yet we somehow made it work.

I've long since realized that being a skilled programmer has very little to do with what language(s) you code in, and more about your understanding of the problem space. Yes, you can be a star in Advent of Code if you know every nook and cranny of your chosen (esoteric) programming language, but often people that understands the business side of things will fare much better.

And yes, I've also been young once, and I've programmed in just about every programming language that has been "modern" or "old" in the past 30-40 years (I've even written software in APL), and I've been good at it. I also absolutely despised the thought of programming in COBOL, but in the end, programming is about telling the computer what to do, and the what is the important part, not the how.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-05-02 20:58:15+00:00
Yup. I'd hazard an analogy to the idea that one can strategically bomb a population into submission via morale collapse [1]. Not only does it not work, in WWII "being bombed hardened civilian will to resist." (Also in Vietnam.)

Speaking more concretely: Canadians are willing to suffer more pain today (vis-à-vis America) than before because of the trade war.

[1] https://acoup.blog/2022/10/21/collections-strategic-airpower...
by crazygringo | 2025-05-02 20:58:15+00:00
Are you sure you don't rely on any third-party libraries that have been updated for security reasons? Are you sure there's no Android API being deprecated that you're still using?

I sympathize with the general idea that software that hasn't been updated in a long time is more likely to contain bugs and incompatibilities with newest OS versions. Whenever I've opened ancient apps on my iPhone or my Mac, they generally break either partially or entirely.

In your case I understand it might genuinely not need updates. But across the Play store as a whole, it seems like a largely beneficial policy. If there really aren't any dependencies that can/should be updated, surely you can make a tiny change to a text string somewhere, and get the added benefit of making sure your whole build chain still works? I get that it's annoying, but it really is valuable to weed out the truly unmaintained apps.
by theamk | 2025-05-02 20:58:25+00:00
Who exactly is suffering in this case?

The original company went under, they no longer exist, so they obviously don't care.

The software user does not care either. OK, someone made a proprietary fork, and that "someone" is a hyperscaler... so what? The last released version is still out there and still can be used-as is / maintained by you / maintained by other 3rd party.

The new maintainers / fork authors should not care too. They base off the last released version, and their fork is not affected in any shape by what some hyperscalers do.

(I guess you can make an argument that proprietary fork might pull users/resources from the open-source one... but I don't think it's a big issue. If the users chose open-source version to begin with, why would they switch to proprietary fork?)
by makeitdouble | 2025-05-02 20:59:08+00:00
Reading from the comments here I was expecting at lot more meat about the case, but it's just a report on anonymous reports and what the husband allegedly told to the press ?

Otherwise, does a divorce really need anything more than one party willing to get out of the relationship ?

Even assuming anyone is calling it quits on frivolous grounds, it also means that's how much emotional investment there was left in the first place and they were due for a break any day really.
by bongodongobob | 2025-05-02 20:59:47+00:00
Any musician will tell you most music isn't original. You just don't have the ear for it. You telling me Green Day's songs are all unique and original? Even jazz uses 6-2-5-1's over and over. Unless you only listen to avante garde prog rock or something, all of music is derivative. And that's ok. Every song being a unique snowflake isn't important. If you like it or it makes you feel something, that's all that matters.
OneText (YC W23) Is Hiring a DevOps/DBA Lead Engineer
by bluepnume | 2025-05-02 21:00:14+00:00
We're OneText, a YC backed (Winter '23) startup in the Bay Area, and we're looking for a Devops/DBA Engineer

Please apply here: https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/one-text/b95952a2-9bc2-4c3a-9da1-3d...

Or email engjobs@onetext.com if you have any questions!
by MetallicDragon | 2025-05-02 21:00:28+00:00
I don't think we have any active craft capable of recovering it. The space shuttle probably could have done it, but with a cost of about $1.5b per launch, there is no way that would be worth it.

SpaceX's Dragon 2 easily has enough cargo capacity to bring it down (~3 tons vs 0.5 ton), but there's still the question of intercepting, capturing, and securing it in Dragon's cargo bay. That would still cost something north of $100m to recover the lander.
by blacklion | 2025-05-02 21:00:37+00:00
Records can be changed via reflection and thus doesn't participate in constant-folding in JIT phases, as this could break, for example, some serialization libraries and other nasty and dirty code. It will work in interpreter mode and eventually has heisenbugs after JIT. Not good.

`@Stable` annotation (only internal for now) and `StableValue<>` (for user code in future) says JIT that programmer guarantee (swear by his life!) that no dirty tricks are played with these values in whole codebase and JIT can constant-fold these values as soon as they are initialized.
by namaria | 2025-05-02 21:01:01+00:00
You assume a lot about me.

But you're right. The NLP interface is cool. It's kinda like VR. It would be awesome if it worked the way we dream it could.

Maybe that's why we keep getting hung up on implementations that make it seem like they got it figured out. Even when they clearly haven't, we still avert our eyes from the fraying edges and make believe.

Maybe that's why both fields are giant money pits.
by kmoser | 2025-05-02 21:01:02+00:00
There's a saying: "Don't post anything online you wouldn't want grandma to see." The developer equivalent is "Don't use test data you wouldn't want the client [or boss] to see." This also applies to variable names, function names, and comments in code.

For a project that involved creating fake companies and user records, I purposely choose to use characters from Star Trek, Star Wars, and the Simpsons for each of the different companies. They're whimsical, non-offensive, and as an added bonus, if I see Homer Simpson listed alongside James T. Kirk, I instantly know there's a data integrity problem.
by JohnFen | 2025-05-02 21:01:42+00:00
> Firefox’s underlying Gecko browser engine is “the only browser engine that is held not by Big Tech but by a nonprofit,”

If Firefox is doomed without Google money, then isn't it effectively held by Google? At arm's length, sure, but as Mozilla is currently demonstrating, Google could demand pretty much anything they want regarding Firefox and there's nothing Mozilla could do about it.
Show HN: Kinematic Hand Skeleton Optimization in Jax
by pablovelagomez | 2025-05-02 21:03:52+00:00
I've been trying to wrap my head around fwd/bwd kinematics for imitation learning, so I built a fully‑differentiable kinematic hand skeleton in JAX and visualized it with reruns new callback system in a Jupyter Notebook. This shows each joint angle and how it impacts the kinematic skeleton.
by andrepd | 2025-05-02 21:04:15+00:00
That's a dreadful list in my opinion. Absurdly Anglocentric (esp. Americo-centric). I'm not saying they're bad books but a really far cry from "among the best humanity has produced". Not a single south-american novel? Not a single romance language book as a matter of fact? I highly recommend you diversify your reading choices.
by zvitiate | 2025-05-02 21:04:25+00:00
Yup. My favorite genre by FAR is baroque. High quality recordings are not as wide as you’d expect, and no one’s really pumping out new baroque. V4.5 is noticeably better, even if the model shows the real “plagiaristic” aspect.

Still, I’m excited about the product. The composer could probably use some chain of thought if it doesn’t already, and plan larger sequences and how they relate to each other. Suno is also probably the most ripe for a functional neurosymbolic model. CPE wrote an algorithm on counterpoint hundreds of years ago!

https://www.reddit.com/r/classicalmusic/comments/4qul1b/crea... (Note the original site has been taken over, but you can access the original via way back. Unfortunately I couldn’t find a save where the generation demo works…but I swear it did! I used it at the time!)
by rbanffy | 2025-05-02 21:05:16+00:00
There are some color convergence glitches happening. The 320 was monochrome (and a well preserved one has a very steady, non-glitchy, image). If you want to have color convergence issues, you might want to rename it to a 240 or 340 (which had color screens and could have convergence problems is mistreated enough).
by crazygringo | 2025-05-02 21:05:35+00:00
Nothing of what you're saying makes any sense.

> Income is the only reliable thing you can tax.

Then why does every country on earth tax corporate profit, not income?

> Why an Earth should governments employ entire teams to second guess internal bookkeeping?

Because that's how you make sure companies pay their taxes? Because it's a net gain to employ those teams because they find much more tax cheating than it costs to employ them?

> If a company is taking £billion out of a nation's spending power

Companies don't. They take cash and in return provide services that are even more valuable. The entire idea of free trade is that it's positive-sum for all.
by edanm | 2025-05-02 21:05:47+00:00
I said "pretty much". The homelessness crisis in, say, the US, affects a relatively small portion of the population; from quick looking up figures, it's less than 1% of the population.

I'm no expert on any of this, but as far as I understand it, homelessness is usually 1. transitory, and 2. usually tied to other serious issues like mental health issues, drug abuse etc. It's usually not a "lack of resources".
by primitivesuave | 2025-05-02 21:06:20+00:00
Based on your interest in Tacitus and Thucydides, I might recommend the The Histories of Polybius. [1] It is absolutely mind-blowing to me that he actually witnessed the events he writes about, and how analogous it is to modern-day geopolitics.

By the way, thank you for providing your list of books - I picked up a few future reads from it.

1. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/44125/44125-h/44125-h.htm
by zerr | 2025-05-02 21:06:28+00:00
Thanks for the clarification. I mean, besides employment there is also contracting which I think is a prevalent form of relationship when it comes to rem0te work. I find it odd that "(US, Canada) rem0te" or "US-only rem0te" is so common at US shops, while for instance European companies that hire rem0tely usually consider worldwide contractors.
by const_cast | 2025-05-02 21:08:00+00:00
Giving an interview isn't "lending credit" to. By that logic, the best media would be one that repeatedly tries to hide the truth, because showing the truth must be giving credence to it. This is a kind of doublespeak - freedom is censorship.

Part of whole, unbiased programming is giving interviews to people on the edges, to extremists. If you don't do that, you're intentionally augmenting the story. People do this with the right all the time. They'll purposefully ignore the extremists, which in turn creates an image that such groups are completely rational. For example, news did this constantly with covid denialists like Qanon. They seem just like skeptics of the government... when you ignore the jewish space lasers and 5G covid vaccine. And then that backfired when Qanon attempted a coup. Um, oops!