MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by brabel | 2025-06-08 17:29:43+00:00
> Like, actors can trivially deadlock/livelock,

Oh my ... you never seen a proper Actor language, have you?

Have a look at Erlang and Pony, for starters. It will open your mind.

This in particular is great: https://www.ponylang.io/discover/what-makes-pony-different/#...

> Pony doesn’t have locks nor atomic operations or anything like that. Instead, the type system ensures at compile time that your concurrent program can never have data races. So you can write highly concurrent code and never get it wrong.

This is what I am talking about.

> You make it sound like there is some modern development superseding what java has, but that's absolutely not the case.

Both Actor-model languages and Rust (through a surprisingly different path: tracking aliases and lifetimes) do something that's impossible in Java (and most languages): prevent data races due to improper locking (as mentioned above, if your language even has locks and it doesn't make them safe like Rust does, you know you're going to have a really hard time. actor-languages just eliminate locks, and "manual concurrency", completely). Other kinds of races are still possible, but preventing data races go a very, very long way to making concurrency safe and easy.
by josephcsible | 2025-06-08 17:30:03+00:00
> You can change the system defaults on sane OS.

You can, but most people won't.

> Thats like saying every application should come up with its own bespoke encryption framework because the OS doesn’t utilize full disk encryption by default. The solution is not to implement encryption in all your programs, the solution is to configure full disk encryption in the OS.

Should password managers just store all of your passwords in cleartext instead of encrypting them, since you should be using FDE?
by agshinrajabov | 2025-06-08 17:30:22+00:00
EmotionSense Pro is a Chrome extension that adds real-time emotion analysis to Google Meet. It reads facial microexpressions and voice tone without sending any data to external servers.

Built for UX researchers, recruiters, and remote teams, it helps detect confusion, engagement, and emotional shifts—so you can make better, faster decisions based on what people feel, not just what they say.
by rezmason | 2025-06-08 17:31:00+00:00
You're right. Flash and its legacy would have been better if it had built in "Edit Source".

The earliest Flash projects were these artful assemblages of scripts dangling from nested timelines, like an Alexander Calder mobile. They were at times labyrinthine, like they are in many similar tools, but there were ways to mitigate that. Later on, AS3 code was sometimes written like Java, because we wanted to be taken seriously.

Many Flash community members wanted to share their source, wanted a space where interested people could make changes. We did the best we could, uploading FLA files and zipped project directories. None of it turned out to be especially resilient.

It's one of the things I admire about Scratch. If you want, you can peek inside, and it's all there, for you to learn from and build off of, with virtually no arbitrary barriers in place.
by not_your_vase | 2025-06-08 17:32:07+00:00
I tried to set up a self hosted mail server just a few months ago, but I stumbled over 1 minor thing.

I have a residential connection of course. Thought contractually I have a dynamic IP, in practice it hasn't changed ever since I have been with them (which is now 7 or so years). I can host my own website from my home without a problem. Also, all the necessary ports are unblocked. So that's great.

I started to follow some tutorials, and it was working fine, I could send emails to certain places. But not everywhere. Most notably not to gmail. And that's when I started to learn about DMARC and other email security thingies. I started to set them up, and one of them required me to set up RDNS records.

When I contacted my ISP about that, the customer service folks had no idea what I was talking about. After a few rounds of back and forth, I gave up. (3 years ago I really thought that AI would solve such customer support issues by now. I was wrong.)

And I don't really know what else... I guess I would use some smtp relay services, though I haven't found one yet that would sell only smtp relay, without some other hosting bundle.
by Retric | 2025-06-08 17:32:47+00:00
As an objective criteria what percentage include peddles and a chain connecting one of the wheels? I quickly found a dozen and stopped counting. Now do the same for those LLM images and it’s clear humans win.

> ""Average human" is a much lower bar than most people want to believe

I have some basis for comparison. I’ve seen 6 years olds draw better bikes than those LLM’s.

Look through that list again the worst example does even have wheels, multiple of them have wheels without being connected to anything.

Now if you’re arguing the average human is worse than the average 6 year old I’m going to disagree here.

> Given mandatory art lessons in school are longer than 10 months, and yet those bike examples exist, I have no reason to believe this.

Art lessons don’t cumulatively spend 10 months teaching people how to draw a bike. I don’t think I cumulatively spent 6 months drawing anything. Painting, collage, sculpture, coloring, etc art covers a lot and wasn’t an every day or even every year thing. My mandatory collage class was art history, we didn’t create any art.

You may have spent more time in class studying drawing, but that’s not some universal average.

> If you automate it in literally the manner in this write-up (pairwise comparison via API calls to another model to get ELO ratings), ten thousand images is like $60-$90, which is on the low end for a human commission.

Not every one of those images had a price tag but one was 88 cents, * 10,000 = 8,800$ just to make the image for a test even at 4c/image your looking at 400$. Cheaper models existed but fairly consistently had worse performance.
by pas | 2025-06-08 17:33:00+00:00
Global settings are easy to check and verify and modern frameworks handle it for you, because there's all these knobs. (I agree it's waaay too many, but that's because there's a runtime and on top of that there's a process manager, and on top of that there's nginx/apache or other reverse proxy.)

Sure, someone can write a Go library to wrap every low-level function to make sure there's some error handling, maybe with closures and generics it would be quite okay.

In Go if you don't see the error handled you know it's not handled anywhere else. Great? Well, sure .. um, maybe? After all if you want to handle it you need to add error handling there. Consequently your code now is 3x as many lines and ~66% of it is returning errors upward. It's the new Assembly.

(I don't think try-catch is good, I think that PHP's error handling is better despite try-catch.)

Porting to Go (for reliability or otherwise), why? There are other languages out there! Especially if you spent the last decade learning about compile-time checks.

I know that k8s (and tons of now-critical software) is written in Go, and it's not a pretty sight -- and instead of having better abstractions there's NASA-cargo-culting[0]. Linux is written in C. It does not make C a great choice for many reasons. (Go is definitely a better choice than C when it comes to memory safety for example, but I prefer Scala or Rust.)

Facebook added their own typing to PHP (and tellingly called it Hack, of course).

[0] https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/blob/ec2e767e593953...
by jandrewrogers | 2025-06-08 17:33:21+00:00
I think most takes on this are overly reductive. The whole situation is sad really.

The root cause, to the extent that one exists, is that no one is accountable for successful execution in a very literal and systemic way. Some parts of the government I've worked in are worse than others, but it is endemic. This leads to a textbook case of Pournelle's Iron Law. There are no negative consequences for a handful of people aggressively maximizing their personal benefit and acquisition of power as their primary objective. This is how you get the fiefdom-building, feather-bedding, and the usual revolving-door corruption that these programs are notorious for.

Most people involved in these programs aren't like that but enough people are that it is impossible for people trying to do their jobs competently to get anything done. The people that defect are the people that end up controlling the programs because that is how the incentives work.

Inefficiency and corruption are a symptom, not the disease. The incentives virtually guarantee that these programs become playgrounds for sociopaths. Average workers on these programs are put in the demoralizing position of either having their good effort constantly undermined by leaders that don't care about the mission and are openly making decisions for personal benefit or to defect to the side of the sociopaths so they at least get some personal benefit out of it. Most of the best and most competent people I know eventually leave Federal service entirely.

A second-order consequence of this is that over time, no one competent wants to work on the programs that are run this way. Through churn these programs slowly fill up with mostly useless seat warmers who don't mind a job where no one expects productive outcomes. It is a kind of stealth UBI for government employees. Some people request assignment to these programs.

You never hear about the programs where the leadership is actually competent and cares about the objective because these actually function pretty well. But the incentives are such that this is the exception rather than the rule.

I'm not even sure how you would fix it, I suspect it is politically impossible. When companies become overtly like this they tend to slowly self-immolate into irrelevancy. Governments lack these negative feedback loops in any meaningful sense.
by pbronez | 2025-06-08 17:33:45+00:00
There are a lot of structural details that people tend to gloss over. This was illustrated by an Italian art project:

https://www.gianlucagimini.it/portfolio-item/velocipedia/

> back in 2009 I began pestering friends and random strangers. I would walk up to them with a pen and a sheet of paper asking that they immediately draw me a men’s bicycle, by heart. Soon I found out that when confronted with this odd request most people have a very hard time remembering exactly how a bike is made.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-06-08 17:33:58+00:00
> It's pretty clear that the laws are full of "extraordinary" powers for use in "extraordinary" situations

When people talk about Congress ceding its power to the executive, this is what they're describing. It's a modern phenomenon, a product of lazy legislating.

We need a generation of lawmakers to rewrite decades of statute to be clear about what the federal government has the power to do, and then have the discipline to end it there. No extraordinary powers. The Constitution already extraordinarily empowers the President in military emergencies. Other emergencies can be dealt by an emergency session of the Congress. (There is no reason the President should have emergency tariff powers, for instance.)
Ask HN: Looking for an open source AI chat agent with a local task panel?
by simonhuang1234 | 2025-06-08 17:34:32+00:00
I’m looking for an AI chatbot agent that feels like a normal AI chat until it decides to do something on the web.

Wanted workflow

Typical Chat with agentic capability to start – I type prompts and get answers in a tidy messenger-style window, able to use tools like ChatGPT

Browsing Agentic moment – If the model needs to use a browser (“file this form,” “collect data from my dashboard,” “send that email”), it flips a switch.

Task panel appears – A separate, slide-in pane shows exactly what the agent is doing in my current browsing session—mouse moves, clicks, keystrokes, status messages.

User's Context – Because the actions run inside my logged-in tabs, the agent already has the cookies, 2FA, saved passwords, etc.

User's Control - chatbot will ask for permission for next critical step, or ask user to take over some steps (input password, captcha). I can pause, step in, or abort at any time.

Wrap-up – When the task finishes, the panel disappears and the chat continues with a concise summary.

Why I care

Privacy – Chrome browser manage my credentials as usual; AI can only see what are appeared on the side panel browser.

Transparency – I can watching every step live

Simultaneous – Chat and watch AI do things.

Correct me if I am wrong - I don't see anything working this way. Browser-Use seems to just open a separate window and perform tasks until completed.

Any suggestion? Many thanks in advance.
by zahlman | 2025-06-08 17:34:43+00:00
> back in 2009 I began pestering friends and random strangers. I would walk up to them with a pen and a sheet of paper asking that they immediately draw me a men’s bicycle, by heart.

Someone commissioned to draw a bicycle on Fiverr would not have to rely on memory of what it should look like. It would take barely any time to just look up a reference.
by to11mtm | 2025-06-08 17:34:55+00:00
I'm fairly certain that Ford has gotten to the point where, at least in the US they aren't losing money on their 'smaller' vehicles.

Certainly not making as much as they can make on an F150, (I think the estimate on a Maverick is somewhere around 500-600 a car to ford).

As far as overall 'demand', there is a bit of market distortion (depending on how you look at it) as far as dealers frequently trying to push people into bigger vehicles because they are inherently more expensive and they get more commission and profit too. [0]

[0] - I've had this happen more than once, even when I knew what car I wanted to buy.
by ang_cire | 2025-06-08 17:35:04+00:00
A pro baseball player can tell if someone is throwing a baseball well by watching them do it. Baseball training camps like pitching workshops often bring in pro players to coach new players on technical points of pitching.

If those pro players go 10 years without ever pitching a ball, they'll still know all the rote technical details on an academic/ theoretical level, but their actual pitching ability will have diminished, because skills are perishable. Coding is a skill.

Observing someone else code is not practice for coding yourself, and will not maintain (nevermind improve on) your coding skills.
by seanmcdirmid | 2025-06-08 17:35:48+00:00
Wiki says it was more because of the private right away used, not necessarily its steepness:

> While many streetcar lines were converted to bus lines after World War II, the J Church avoided this due to the private right-of-way it uses to climb the steepest grades on Church Street, between 18th Street and 22nd Street.[9]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J_Church
by alexandretrotel | 2025-06-08 17:35:52+00:00
Vercel is developing adapters to make deployment more flexible and less tied to their platform. On top of that, the developer experience is so smooth that it aligns perfectly with my goal of rapidly prototyping MVPs. I chose the framework primarily for the experience it offers—not for Vercel itself—because I believe that for Next.js to succeed long term, it needs to break free from its dependency on Vercel.
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-06-08 17:36:29+00:00
> This goes the other way too. Normal people don't know about DNS at all, and without DoH, are leaking all of their DNS queries to their ISP without knowing.

But is this actually any better than leaking them to Cloudflare? There is at least the possibility that the ISP isn't logging them and that they only run a DNS server because their customers expect one.

It's hard to imagine any reason for Cloudflare to do it other than because they want to analyze DNS traffic, and then it's in a much more centralized location than to be distributed across every network and ISP.

> DoT uses port 853, which can just be blocked wholesale. It's not feasible to do the same for DoH since it uses port 443.

So run DoT over port 443. The benefit of DoT is removing the implementation complexity of a pointless HTTP stack.

> Normal people won't change defaults, and they deserve privacy too.

So change the system defaults to use DoT. That might even get you port 853 open, because breaking the defaults in popular devices would get the network admins off their butts to notice that a new protocol exists.
by sarchertech | 2025-06-08 17:36:35+00:00
And the AI is trained to write plausible output and pass test cases.

Have you ever tried to generate test cases that were immune to a malicious actor trying to pass your test cases? For example if you are trying to automate homework grading?

The AI writing tests needs to understand the likely problem well enough to know to write a test case for it, but there are an infinite amount of subtle bugs for an AI writing code to choose from.
by bediger4000 | 2025-06-08 17:36:47+00:00
> base pay averages between $80,000 and $90,000 a year

"Average" is a number, a single number. Either the article is being deceptive by writing a range, or we're not talking "average". Innumeracy - no wonder they can't find skilled workers.

More seriously, Boeing's 787 production problems are an example. Boeing moved production from unionized Washington state to non-unionized South Carolina. Problems ensued. I'm not saying that unions don't have problems, or that they'd solve everything, but if you de-prioritize your labor force, I'm not sure why you'd expect to attract skilled labor.
by constantcrying | 2025-06-08 17:37:51+00:00
I think you are very confused. My post is about approximation. Obviously other areas use other polynomials or the same polynomials for other reasons.

In this case it is about the principle of approximation by orthogonal projection, which is quite common in different fields of mathematics. Here you create an approximation of a target by projecting it onto an orthogonal subspace. This is what the Fourier series is about, an orthogonal projection. Choosing e.g. the Chebychev Polynomials instead of the complex exponential gives you an Approximation onto the orthogonal space of e.g. Chebychev polynomials.

The same principle applies e.g. when you are computing an SVD for a low rank approximation. That is another case of orthogonal projection.

>Instead, you would normally use Chebyshev interpolation

What you do not understand is that this is the same thing. The distinction you describe does not exist, these are the same things, just different perspectives. That they are the same easily follows from the uniqueness of polynomials, which are fully determined by their interpolation points. These aren't distinct ideas, there is a greater principle behind them and that you are using some other algorithm to compute the Approximation does not matter at all.

>I am also not totally sure what polynomial chaos has to do with any of this.

It is the exact same thing. Projection onto an orthogonal subspace of polynomials. Just that you choose the polynomials with regard to a random variable. So you get an approximation with good statistical properties.
by brabel | 2025-06-08 17:37:54+00:00
Given your example, I am convinced you've never written any Rust. Of course it does stop you doing shit like that. But in this example, even Java does it properly, since the constructor runs to completion before any Object is accessible to any Thread, not just the one creating it. You need to validate the state of the object in the constructor to prevent that, but TBH why are we talking about this, it's almost completely unrelated to concurrency models.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-06-08 17:38:05+00:00
> plans for the robo-taxi release this month is about 5.5 years behind Waymo (or 6.5 years if they use safety drivers, even remote ones)

Clocking how far behind Tesla is remains tricky given the massive amounts of telemetry they collect from their legacy fleet. (As well as their seated production base.) We can only conclude, from their lack of a product, that they're probably no more than half a decade behind Waymo.
by briian | 2025-06-08 17:38:20+00:00
The funny thing about vibe coding is that God tier vibe coders think they're in DGAF mode. But people who are actually in DGAF mode and just say "Make instagram for me" think they're in god tier.

But agreed, there needs to be a better way for these agents to figure out what context to select. It doesn't seem like this will be too much of a large issue to solve though?
by jauntywundrkind | 2025-06-08 17:38:55+00:00
This represents a huge advance. In functional useful societies, they will be able to develop adequate power infrastructure.

The article also mentions that the charger has its own battery reserves, which it can fill in between fill-ips, and then use to help provide those high peaks. Load averaging.

Then there's your list of gotchas. Oh will it work in the cold? Will it work in heat? Ok yeah maybe that will diminish charge rate maybe. But this habit of looking for problems, looking for reasons to discredit and ignore is a horrible perspective, risks ignoring so much possibility because of such a negative minded orientation.

5 minutes is more than good, imo. At. If you think about the steps before and after filling up, there's a couple minutes of pulling off the road, turning off the car, getting out, walking around, setting up payment, opening the fill up, selecting fuel grade, inserting the filler. You can absolutely speed race this down to 2-3 minutes, but but usually a gas station stop is 5-10 minutes of lost time for most people today. It feels like 5 minutes of waiting is really not a big deal. Is it slower? Yes. But is it significantly slower? Not really, not usually.

It's just so sad having such energy poured into negative mental energy, into convincing people against doing better things. The world deserves better than to be beholden to pestilences of the mind.
by zahlman | 2025-06-08 17:39:11+00:00
> And honestly, even with LLM assistance getting Image Magick to output a 1200x600 image with two SVGs next to each other that are correctly resized to fill their half of the image sounds pretty tricky.

FWIW, the next project I want to look at after my current two, is a command-line tool to make this sort of thing easier. Likely featuring some sort of Lisp-like DSL to describe what to do with the input images.
by josephcsible | 2025-06-08 17:40:04+00:00
> But is this actually any better than leaking them to Cloudflare? There is at least the possibility that the ISP isn't logging them and that they only run a DNS server because their customers expect one.

> It's hard to imagine any reason for Cloudflare to do it other than because they want to analyze DNS traffic, and then it's in a much more centralized location than to be distributed across every network and ISP.

Your ISP knows your real-world identity, whereas Cloudflare just knows your IP address. And I trust most ISPs, e.g., Comcast, less than I trust Cloudflare.

> So run DoT over port 443. The benefit of DoT is removing the implementation complexity of a pointless HTTP stack.

That would be perfectly fine and address all of these problems, but it isn't how things work today, and unless/until it does happen, I think DoH is way, way better than DoT over port 853.

> So change the system defaults to use DoT. That might even get you port 853 open, because breaking the defaults in popular devices would get the network admins off their butts to notice that a new protocol exists.

That'd only be true if the system defaults prevented fallback to insecure DNS, and so far, the few systems that support any form of secure DNS all will automatically do insecure fallback.
by BugsJustFindMe | 2025-06-08 17:40:18+00:00
Are you unfamiliar with the many world-changing technologies and inventions that have come about because of the needs and drivers of the human space program? On what basis do you form the belief that we would not continue to develop and benefit from new world-changing innovations despite all historical evidence that says otherwise?

A huge amount of scientific invention is made incidentally to another goal. It's intensely myopic to disregard that.