MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by DoingIsLearning | 2025-06-03 11:54:59+00:00
Is there any precedent in prior government bodies or other countries where you have a number of attempts or a moratory period to propose embodiments of the same law?

As in if you propose a law in a general area and gets shot down you cannot simply rewrite it slightly and once again pitch through attrition.

Something like 4 strikes and you can never bring it back to vote or for every proposal you lose a vote you cannot repackage the same core for the next 10 years.
by yorick | 2025-06-03 11:55:31+00:00
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by GenshoTikamura | 2025-06-03 11:56:13+00:00
> I get up in the morning to make things, not to watch others make things.

If you ever followed down the rabbit hole of children content on YouTube, the one that infants and toddlers end up after an hour of autoplay with some innocent cartoon at the beginning, you'd find among the piles of morbid psychotic trash a variety of videos of children watching someone else playing some games, a whole class of videos in itself.

I can't explain this with anything else but a coordinated effort to flash the norm of watching someone/something doing something as opposed to being engaged in immediate action yourself into the firmware of future people. This lines up with many other current trends pretty well. Talk about incrementing Baudrillard's level of simulation a notch up.
by 59nadir | 2025-06-03 11:56:24+00:00
Honestly, the one through line that I've seen with regards to the success of AI in programming is that it'll work very well for trivial, mass-produced bullshit and anyone who was already doing that for work will feel like it can do their job (and it probably can) almost entirely.

I don't really doubt that AI can put together your Nth Rails backend that does nothing of note pretty solidly, but I know it can't even write a basic, functioning tokenizer + parser in a very simple, imperative language (Odin) for a Clojure-like language. It couldn't even (when given the source for a tokenizer) write the parser that uses the tokenizer either.

These are very basic things that I would expect juniors with some basic guidance to accomplish, but even when using Cursor + Claude Sonnet 3.5 (this was 2-3 months ago, I had seen recommendations about exactly the combinations of tools I was attempting to use, so I don't really buy the argument that somehow it was the choice of tools that was wrong) it fell apart and even started adding functions it already added before. At some point I seeded it with properly written parser functions to give it examples of what it needs to accomplish, but it kept basically failing completely when having access to literally all the code it needed.

I can't even imagine how badly it'd fail to handle the actual complicated parts of my work where you have to think across 3 different context boundaries (simulation -> platform/graphics API -> shader) in order to do things.
by bananapub | 2025-06-03 11:56:38+00:00
this seems like a true but pointless observation? if you're producing security-sensitive code then experts need to be involved, whether that's me unwisely getting a junior to do something, or receiving a PR from my cat, or using an LLM.

removing expert humans from the loop is the deeply stupid thing the Tech Elite Who Want To Crush Their Own Workforces / former-NFT fanboys keep pushing, just letting an LLM generate code for a human to review then send out for more review is really pretty boring and already very effective for simple to medium-hard things.
by barrkel | 2025-06-03 11:57:49+00:00
When PG started out talking about three reasons you might not know something, I paused and thought what they might be aside from unimportance, to see how at lined up.

I came up with difficulty, opportunity and motivation.

If an idea is difficult or non-obvious, if it requires insight or following the steps of a particular argument, many people of any age may remain ignorant of it. You could kind of force this into the obtuse bucket, but in my experience people are less obtuse, than slow. Obtuse, as a label, is mostly a way of lazily flipping the bozo bit and cutting your losses.

And if you don't encounter an idea or concept or piece of knowledge, you won't know it. If it's useful, you may just have accepted a worldview without that use. This kind of ignorance isn't just inexperience. It can be learned helplessness too.

Motivation is an axis that isn't fully orthogonal to the others. Motivation can overcome difficulty, and encourage searching and testing behavior which gets you to opportunity.

I'm not sure, having read the essay, that PG's perspective is more correct. I think obtuseness is too reductive, and inexperience strikes me as more plausible as a reason an essay might be impactful, optimizing for one reason for ignorance, than a reason for not knowing the topic of any given essay if it's not general common sense.

On impact: I think something is likely to be more impactful the more ignorant you are about the topic were beforehand (the distance between what you knew before and after reading), multiplied by how motivated you are (which is related but distinct from importance: you can be motivated by stamp collecting or trainspotting). Your motivation is generally split among competing motivations the older you get; you can't afford focused monomania like a teenager.

A big dose of information isn't likely to shift your momentum (getting close to physical impact) when it's just a glancing blow, rather than hitting it head on.

Anyway, it sure is impactful to tell the kids stuff. I think we already knew this though.
by gpderetta | 2025-06-03 11:58:05+00:00
> don’t wake this thread up while the value is still X

That's the wrong way to think about FUTEX_WAIT. What it does is "put this thread to sleep unless the value is not X".

> If you call futex wait and the value is unchanged, the sleeping thread will not wake up!

[I assume this was meant to be FUTEX_WAKE] I can't be bothered to check the kernel source or to test, but I would be surprised if this is true as it might cause missed wakeups in an ABA scenario. Futex_wake must wake up at least one successful futex_wait that happens-before the wake. Futexes are best understood as edge triggered, stateless (outside of the wait list itself) primitives, so the value at the futex location (as opposed to its address) is not really important[1], except as a guard to avoid missed wakeups.

Unfortunately the name itself (Fast Userspace Mutex) is a bit misleading, because a mutex is only one of the many things you can do with a futex. They really are a generalized waiting and signaling primitive.

[1] for plain WAIT and WAKE at least, the bitset operations or the robust futex operations are more complex and attach semantics to the value.
by lausingh | 2025-06-03 11:58:07+00:00
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by asoneth | 2025-06-03 11:58:27+00:00
Well the pricest component is the screen, and that's under patent.

I think rising consumer expectations soak up a lot of that -- you could make the main board and other components a third the price if you're satisfied with mid-2000s specs e.g. 200MB storage, slow page turns, bundled radios, no touchscreen, no PDF support, etc.

At some point the raw materials cost (which generally aren't getting much cheaper) becomes a major factor and that's harder to cut without a new approach.

Eink screen aside, it may be that we're just nearing the limits with current manufacturing approaches and that the next leap requires a wildly different approach.
by cbeach | 2025-06-03 11:59:04+00:00
I tried that with my MEPs on the Copyright Directive. Nearly all of them replied with parrotted talking points from the EU Commission, as opposed to any kind of understanding of the issues I raised.

At the end of the day, EU Parliament representation is dilute and indirect. Unlike the democratic systems of most nations, elected EU parliamentarians cannot originate any new law. Only appointed (unelected) individuals within the EU Commission/Council can do so, behind closed doors if it suits them.

MEPs are on a lucrative gravy train and they generally don't want to rock the boat. If the Commission doesn't get a "yes" from Parliament, it simply makes superficial amendments and retries Parliament until the "yes" is received.

With the Copyright Directive, after a "no" vote in Parliament in 2018, the Commission literally put the same contentious articles (11 and 13) back in again for the second vote - this time under different article numbers (15 and 17), so all the public activism and criticism linked to the original article numbers would be orphaned. MEPs voted "yes" the second time, like the good, obedient MEPs they are.
by impossiblefork | 2025-06-03 11:59:17+00:00
I don't know exactly what you mean, since we have a representative democracy and since the governments enter the treaties and have strong influence over many parliaments it's really is very person focused in the end, even though it really shouldn't be.

A sensible world would have lots of referendums with the general public approving or disapproving of parliamentary decisions, à la Switzerland, but that is not the world we live in.
by 4ad | 2025-06-03 11:59:29+00:00
Dafny is great, and has some advantages compared to its competitors, but unequivocally calling it "the best" is quite bullish. For example, languages using dependent types (F*, ATS, Coq/Adga/Lean) are more expressive. And there are very mature systems using HOL.

Truth is that everything involves a tradeoff, and some systems are better than others at different things. Dafny explores a particular design space. Hoare-style invariants are easier to use than dependent types (as long as your SMT solver is happy, anyway) but F* also has that, except that in F* you can also use dependent types when automatic refinement proofs become inadequate. And F* and ATS can target low-level, more so than Dafny.

Probably I would not use ATS for anything, but between F* and Dafny, there isn't such a clear cut (I'd most likely use F*).

And if I don't need (relatively) low-level, I wouldn't use either.
Show HN: Deep Timeline log-scale world history timeline
by darkstarsys | 2025-06-03 11:59:48+00:00
This app is a weekend project I just built for fun. It's inspired by a log-scale geologic timeline I created with a friend in high school in the 1970s, on an adding-machine tape. We took the logarithms of the dates of all kinds of paleological events, plotted them on the 40' long tape, and hung it up in the classroom. We realized we could fit the Big Bang, dinosaurs, and what we ate for breakfast that day on the same scale! I still have that tape somewhere, and I've been wanting to create an interactive version for many many years.

My goal is to inspire people to think about how we fit into the bigger "deep time" picture and think about the long term. The idea of a log-scaled timeline is that ancient events are compressed, and recent events take up more space. Each piece of the timeline covers 10x as much time as the piece to its right (like the film "Powers of Ten" but for time). We humans are naturally oriented toward short-term thinking: tomorrow, next week, a human lifetime. This app puts that in context, so you can see how the present smoothly fades into the very deepest past.

You can zoom in on any time period in the history of the universe. Significant events (my subjective judgment) from politics, art, science, and nature fade in as you zoom into them. It also has a "news feed" so new events will populate in on the right edge every now and then. I tried to optimize for desktop, mobile and tablet. Getting the events to flow and display nicely was the biggest challenge.

I used AI to assist, mostly Claude and some gptel. This is the biggest project I've done with an AI "intern." My takeaway is it's helpful until it gets stuck (badly), and then I have to take over and fix things. It can be surprisingly creative as well as doing the grunt work. Source is at https://github.com/garyo/deep-time-timeline.
by Arnt | 2025-06-03 11:59:54+00:00
Germans generally say things like "politcians prefer to spend on building new things, not maintaining" and so on. In my impression, the deeper reason is that the voters' priorities have changed, and the politicians have sensed that and act accordingly.

German voters now aren't really eager to spend much money on things like that Ringbahnbrücke. Some people think that obviously should be put in order, and improved so it'll carry today's heavier cars too, but they're not a majority. Only a third of the households in the state that would pay for that bridge have a car, so for a majority of voters, that's tax money being spent so a minority can drive and not pay.

When the Ringbahnbrücke was built, many voters drove cars or expected to drive in the future and liked the idea of a nice Autobahn. Not any more, things have changed.

Similarly for the schools: I have children (I live in Germany, but am not German) and it seems to me that only a minority of Germans regard money spent on schools as money spent on themselves. There are majorities or near-majorities that regard pensions as money spent on themselves, ditto health care, ditto police, but schools? I don't see that. So politicians campaign on raising pensions and so on, what else could they do if their analysis matches mine.
by seguri | 2025-06-03 12:00:46+00:00
Location: Switzerland

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies:

- Backend: Java, Kotlin, Javascript, Typescript, Python, Spring Boot, Hibernate, Kafka, Postgres, Mongo, Redis, Kubernetes, Docker, AWS, Node.js

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Résumé/CV: on request

Email: hn.9eqrl@simplelogin.com

Summary: Results-driven Senior Backend Engineer with 13 years of experience and a passion for developing robust and scalable software solutions. Proactive and resourceful, combines strong technical expertise with excellent problem-solving and verbal communication skills to drive project success and foster team collaboration. Adept at translating complex technical concepts to non-technical stakeholders and continuously learning new technologies.
by deltaburnt | 2025-06-03 12:01:56+00:00
In my experience, senior engineers without the curiosity to occasionally dig deeper into their frameworks are significantly worse engineers. No framework, library, or language is perfect. A big part of your job is understanding how your code will execute. Sometimes that even requires, at a very high level, imagining how that code will compile down to assembly once you strip away all the abstractions.

Eventually you will get a memory leak even in a GCd language. Eventually there will be some incredibly obscure, unreported bug in a library. Eventually you will find an issue in unmaintained code you depend on. Eventually there will be performance problems caused by too many layers of abstraction.

You either need to know, roughly, how your dependencies work by occasionally digging into their code/reading the documentation. Or you need intuition to know how it probably works, but you usually build that intuition by actually writing/reading code.
Show HN: I made web agents reliable with smaller LLMs via natural language
by giordanol | 2025-06-03 12:03:35+00:00
Hey HN!

I built Notte to see if converting DOM into natural language could improve web agent capabilities and make them work reliably with smaller models.

The result was using deep DOM parsing and a semantic abstraction layer to transform websites into structured, navigable maps described in NL. Instead of feeding raw HTML, there is a perception layer that means LLMs don't just click the DOM elements, but understand the intent behind them.

I benchmarked it against other agent frameworks and was pleasantly surprised - faster task completion and increased reliability (all open source with replayable/reproducible code).

Beyond the core tech, I also built out unified session management, stealth features, credentials vault, CAPTCHA HITL + some more cool features all via a single API. Still working out some edge cases with dynamic content, but it's been solid for most real-world tasks.

Github:https://github.com/nottelabs/notte

Benchmarks:https://github.com/nottelabs/open-operator-evals

Docs:https://docs.notte.cc/side/introduction/what-is-notte

Some questions for the HN community: What's your biggest pain point with current web automation? Is there anything required before you’d try or trust it on certain workflows? Anyone else tried preprocessing web content for LLMs? Curious what approaches have worked for you.

Thanks for checking it out.

— Lucas
by throwaway1004 | 2025-06-03 12:05:02+00:00
True, though there is much emphasis placed on the link between language and thought in the book. As the parent comment suggests, there is a lot of tacit differentiation-without-distinction when it comes to issues of privacy, censorship, and governance.

I guess double-think is nothing more than an extreme form of cognitive dissonance being accepted by the masses, the interesting part is how this achieve in the book. Again, language & propaganda come first, then information control, followed by swift and brutal violence for dissidents.
by stego-tech | 2025-06-03 12:05:12+00:00
> EU commission's retraction can be challenged in the courts if it's not allowed.

Take it from a gay American dinosaur: you cannot trust the courts to do the right thing. The court system of any country is the system of last resort to dealing with issues after they have caused harm or suffering, and by design they’ve been overloaded with grievances to make it harder to stop any institutional harms.

The right time to stop this sort of action is before it becomes law. Ideally, a society should be educated and inoculated against such harmful activity such that the mere mention of an idea of such a plan is enough to ruin one’s career, nevermind letting it make it to an actual proposal or committee.

Stop putting faith in a court system operated by the same entities making the rules. You’re effectively waiting until the last possible moment to stop something after it’s done harm, which is highly irresponsible at the very least and does nothing to prevent harms from happening in the first place.
by jmyeet | 2025-06-03 12:05:44+00:00
I really feel like we'd all be better off if Manufacturing Consent [1] was required reading.

The media is complicit in pushing domestic and foreign policy, is selective in what it covers and how it covers it and intentionally uses very different language to describe the exact same thing (eg [2][3]).

I generally agree that what the DPRK does and what Europe (or the US) does isn't really that different. Dig a little deper and look at the role the West played in creating the DPRK and the intentional starving (ie economic sanctions) we enacted, just like in Iraq, Iran, Syria or Venezuela.

European (and US) history of the last century is the neoliberals siding with fascists to quash anything communist or communist adjacent (eg labor unions). Germany might've lost the war but Nazism won. Whatever you do, don't look too deeply into the background of Adolf Heusinger [4] who was made the Chairman of the NATO Military Committee.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent

[2]: https://x.com/trtworld/status/1785959608168731091?lang=en

[3]: https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/war-gaza-how-media-langua...

[4]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adolf_Heusinger
by ChocolateGod | 2025-06-03 12:06:30+00:00
> The US. The EU is a bureaucratic institution, not a democratic one,

The US has a democratic system where the President is ultimately voted for by an unelected electoral college who can refuse to vote for the candidate their state voted for and has ended up with the candidate with most votes loosing.

Then said president can change the countries top court on obviously political lines and re-interpret existing laws and the constitution.

> At this time there are 0 people worth talking about in the Commission or the council

The European Commission has no need to play popularity contests, it's accountable to the heads of governments, not randoms on social media.
by dmazin | 2025-06-03 12:06:50+00:00
I first read this essay more than a decade ago and it’s still the most influential and inspiring thing I’ve read for computers.

The premise is shockingly simple, and I still apply it: when designing an interface, think about how you’d do it if this was a book, not an interactive interface. That is, take visual design seriously. Only after that add interaction (or maybe don’t).
by modzu | 2025-06-03 12:07:10+00:00
the market will indeed balance this out. remember when a taxi was $20 and an uber $5? now an uber is $25. nobody is going to go back to humans with all their wet meat sack problems, we will get more value for it, but it aint gona stay $5 if those putting up all this capital have anything to do with it. then again, we might get cheap, self hostable local copies (unless theyre made illegal for "safety" or some bullshit)
by sixtyj | 2025-06-03 12:07:27+00:00
Gruber and Schwarz knew that in simplicity is a beauty.

Basic markdown format is good enough.

For specific cases, it depends what is the outcome - html, pdf…

But hell are binary formats that are used for page layout - vendor lock for centuries. Backward compatibility? Forget about it.

From this point of view people should stick to text based formats. Markdown, LaTex, Typst… you name it. Just use it :)