MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by gnabgib | 2025-06-02 00:29:23+00:00
Although not from Cell, this seems largely related to: Wuhan lab samples hold no close relatives to virus behind Covid (44 points, 2024, 77 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42351422

Cell paper, shame they didn't link: [The recency and geographical origins of the bat viruses ancestral to SARS-CoV and SARS-CoV-2](https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(25)00353-8)
by layer8 | 2025-06-02 00:30:05+00:00
> Is anyone whose decision on this matters motivated by "the best interests of humanity"?

The article doesn't claim that they are — but maybe that they should be.

And it doesn't look to me like AI will solve economic insecurity, declining national prestige, or governmental ideology.

> But the US profiting from AI sounds pretty good.

It's an open question who exactly in the US will profit.
by apothegm | 2025-06-02 00:30:45+00:00
Ah, getting AI to do that part of the work… hasn’t worked for me. The only thing that it’s been helpful for in that regard is as a rubber duck, which isn’t much. But honestly, the built-in refactoring tools in an IDE are more consistent.

How’s your test coverage? Good E2E tests that treat the codebase like a black box will help a lot, however you approach the actual refactoring. That might conceivably also be something the AI could help you with.
by fallingknife | 2025-06-02 00:31:12+00:00
Only a small minority of farm workers owned the farms they worked on even back before tractors. And the tractors didn't do much to help most of those owners either. Industrial farm equipment increased the area a single farmer can work so far beyond what he could before that it made no sense for owners of the time to each have their own equipment and most sold their land and consolidated the industry into much larger farms. Farm employment went from 90% of all workers before the industrial revolution down to a bit over 1% today in the US.

And maybe it happens to software engineers next. So what? The economy looks completely different today than it did 50 years ago, which was completely different than 50 years before that, and that shouldn't stop just because some people feel childishly entitled to do the same work for their whole lives even it if it is obsolete. I'll just change careers like I have done twice before. There's a massive shortage of electrical/plumbing/hvac contractors. There's a massive shortage of nurses / doctors that will only get worse as the population gets older. Not as cushy as my mid six figure tech job, but I have no god given right to that. And there's plenty more opportunity beyond that for anyone willing to take it, so if any other engineers want to cry about it, their tears will be wasted on me.
by DamnInteresting | 2025-06-02 00:31:15+00:00
I unapologetically love PHP + jQuery, even for new projects in 2025. The technologies are solid, and they didn't stop working just because they are no longer trendy. Is vanilla Javascript "better" than jQuery? Sure, in some ways. But for those of us steeped in jQuery, it's so much quicker to whip up an MVP. If the ~90k of bandwidth becomes an issue, I can always retroactively swap jQuery for vanilla.
by at0mic22 | 2025-06-02 00:32:36+00:00
Very much depends on the purpose, supersonic aircrafts coming from 60s are a great way to demonstrate power over a long distance along with aircraft sea carriers

But they are vulnerable both in the air and on the ground. Recent Iran attacks over Israel and everyday Russian attacks show that shakhed flying vespa-drones can overload any air defense and deliver ammo for real cheap
by MilnerRoute | 2025-06-02 00:33:38+00:00
Kelsey Hightower says this about Nix early in the interview. "I was like, 'Where were you two decades ago when I was at that fork in the road?' Maybe we would've went in a different way..."

https://thenewstack.io/kelsey-hightower-on-nix-vs-docker-is-...
Ask HN: Best GTM strategies to engage indie hackers as early users?
by maxime_wellapp | 2025-06-02 00:35:38+00:00
Hey HN,

I’m Maxime — a product builder and former Head of Product at Qonto (think Brex for Europe, ~$6B). I recently started building something new called [Well](https://wellapp.ai/), where we deploy autonomous agents (via remote browsers or Chrome extensions) to collect supplier invoices on behalf of founders. The idea is to save them time and mental load from chasing finance ops manually.

As we’re shaping the product, I’m thinking hard about *go-to-market (GTM) for indie hackers* — a group I deeply respect and believe could be our early champions. They move fast, give real feedback, and are opinionated in all the right ways.

So far, here’s what I’m exploring to attract and engage them:

- Posting on *Hacker News* (like this!) - Answering relevant threads on *Reddit* - Launching on *Product Hunt* - Running a limited-time offer via *AppSumo*

I’d love to hear from this community:

- What GTM tactics worked best for you when targeting indie hackers? - What other overlooked channels, communities, or tactics would you recommend? - How do you balance “launching” vs. just showing up consistently?

Any insight — even contrarian ones — would mean a lot. Thanks!
by tuyguntn | 2025-06-02 00:38:06+00:00
> Here's a suggestion: show me a demo!

Yes, yes and yes again!

Also, please don't use GIFs in your demos! It's freaking me out, because the speed of your GIF playback doesn't match my information absorption speed and I can't pause, look closely, go back, I just need to wait the second loop of your GIF
by spankibalt | 2025-06-02 00:38:11+00:00
Thank you; interesting machines. A modern, compact industrial-grade metal keyboard case PC with an external PSU, and some quality of life goodies, built around a Pentium MMX or Pentium II CPU, is really something I would fork over money for. Essentially something along the lines of C64EVOs planned MODLR case. [1]

> But still I couldn't help but think: "wow, you had that in 1989?". There was no comparison with the PCs of its time.

This speaks more of local market realities, e. g. "demo software" on hardware in an actual computer shop or, as in your example, at a friend's home, especially in the form of 2D arcade action games, then at its peak of popularity on 8- and 16-bit home computers... and yet to shine on PCs (and as opposed to glossies and the like, where the first 486 machines stepped onto the stage turn of the year 89/90).

But at that time I wasn't thinking about computers that much, still digesting the beginning of the end of the GDR.

1. [https://xcancel.com/C64EVO/status/1893158033917669785]
by dieortin | 2025-06-02 00:39:40+00:00
They didn’t drop any ammo, the drones themselves exploded on top of the wings, making the plane catch fire. So if there were tires (I didn’t see any) they didn’t do much to protect the planes.

Also, I don’t know why you would consider the reports in russian media. There’s more than 4 planes being destroyed on video.
by Joker_vD | 2025-06-02 00:39:47+00:00
> or pay less for the same set of features.

Or pay the same, and the employers/shareholders pocket the difference?

> That's the entire justification of the free market -- corporations benefit by benefiting consumers with better products via competition.

That doesn't mean the prices would drop; if every corporation employs the same technology, and they were roughly at the same level of efficiency, they will stay relatively the same, so the relative costs won't change, and neither will the actual prices. The level of the profit margins will just go up in the industry as the whole, which has precedents in the history.

Just postulating that the consumer surplus simply has to stay with the consumers doesn't translate to it actually staying with the consumers; companies have researched lots of ways to capture it over the last couple hundred years.
by Aurornis | 2025-06-02 00:39:49+00:00
> The farmer owns the farm

I grew up in a family with a lot of farmers and I can tell you this is not universally true.

It’s very common for farmers to have leased their farmland or fields.

I can also say we are all very much better off with farming automated on a large scale. Farming jobs were brutally difficult in the past
by OutOfHere | 2025-06-02 00:39:59+00:00
A good dating app optimized for relationships would disallow a user from having more than five matches at a time, and it would delist the user from search and further matching while they have five matches. Moreover, if the user is non-responsive to solicitations, if only to reject them, the user would again get delisted until their queue had no more than five pending solicitations. Being inactive on the app for seven days, as defined by taking no action in the app, also leads to a delisting.

Secondly, money would be charged per message, perhaps 50 cents per received and sent message, so a dollar in total, instead of a subscription fee. This prevents wasteful messages and wasteful matches too. A user can at a time send only one message to another user until a reply is received. The cost is meant to force them off of the app rather soon.

Thirdly, humans would at repeated intervals have to prove that they're human by uploading a video of them performing a particular blinking or bodily action, also their ID photo, about the same as was done by login.gov for user registration. Elite users would also be required to share annual STI panel test results, with their matches getting restricted to anything that both test positive for, and in exchange their limits will be increased from five to seven.

These days, pictures can be quite fake, so only videos would be accepted, no shorter than 15 seconds in length, and the app will auto-extract pictures from the videos, also matching them to the ID photo and verification video. Any videos older than one year would be deleted.
by mikewarot | 2025-06-02 00:44:37+00:00
Imagine an FPGA big enough to hold the whole model in LUTS (and not RAM) with latches in appropriate places to keep race conditions in check. Even a 100 Mhz clock cycle would beat almost anything else in the world running it. Even if there's 500 stages of pipeline involved, you could still get 200,000 tokens per second for a single stream and have 499 streams ready for other uses.

With an FPGA like that, you could translate all of the matrix multiplies and weights directly into binary logic, optimizing out every multiply or add of a zero bit. This alone could cut the number of gates and computations, and power consumption in half.

Because you wouldn't need to throw data to/from RAM, you'd save a huge percentage of the usual latency and eliminate memory bandwidth issues. The effective equivalent memory bandwidth would likely be measured in exabytes per second.

This is the type of compute load that would perfectly match a bit level systolic array.
by Aurornis | 2025-06-02 00:45:49+00:00
> Perhaps physical inventions have been somewhat exhausted?

I vividly remember hearing this from a group of elderly adults when I was around maybe 8 years old.

I remember being very sad that I missed it: The good times of the economy, the period where all the cool things were invented, the “good times” that were being ruined by all of this new technology that the elderly people thought were against the natural way of how things should be.

And it’s always wild to me that I see the same fallacies repeated on HN, inevitably by people who are also convinced that the good times are about to end and all of this new-fangled technology stuff is evil because they just figured out how the world worked in their middle age years and now it’s all changing in ways they find scary.
by at0mic22 | 2025-06-02 00:46:11+00:00
I would assume this event was a one-time hack, it does not scale. Actually most of the “miracle weapons” from the very beginning of the conflict have faded away.

Bairktars? Gone. Sea drones? Haven't heard of them in a while. What else?

Russians in comparison are great at scaling. Rockets flying daily, vespa-drones - daily, FAB bombs got wings and flying daily. That's the consistency what wins wars, not the greatest talent.
by 6gvONxR4sf7o | 2025-06-02 00:47:18+00:00
Anybody have any experience with this? I just spend a while contorting a custom pytorch model to get it to export to coreml and it was full of this that and the other not being supported, or segfaulting, and all sorts of silly errors. I'd love if someone could say this isn't full of sharp edges too.
by elliotto | 2025-06-02 00:48:43+00:00
This is true under an economic system that appropriately distributes the fruits of economic production to workers; perhaps one that existed in the post-ww2 to neoliberal era. But it is untrue under a rentier / technofeudal / oligarch economy, in which all excess profits are captured by a cabal of the owner class. Which of these states describes the modern economy is a political exercise.
by Aurornis | 2025-06-02 00:48:49+00:00
As someone descended from farmers on both sides (and half of my wife’s family too), I’m always amazed to see people glorifying the history of farming.

Like you said, owning farmland wasn’t as common as everyone assumes. The number of farming analogies where everyone imagines the farmer as operating a lucrative business empire on land they own is a testament to how much people manufacture historical narratives to fit their desired narratives.
by iliti22 | 2025-06-02 00:49:50+00:00
The origin in Yunnan/Laos does not contradict the possibility that samples were transported to and studied in Wuhan.

The five-to-seven-year divergence window would allow ample time for such study to take place in a lab before an accidental release.

The study provides circumstantial evidence against a lab-leak (by highlighting a plausible natural route), but does not provide a direct refutation of lab-related scenarios.

The headline, “Global study debunks ‘lab leak’ theory, finds Covid-19 virus didn’t originate in Wuhan,” is overstated and interpretively biased, for the following reasons:

The term “debunks” implies definitive disproof, which is not supported by the study’s methodological scope.

“Didn’t originate in Wuhan” refers to a genetic origin, not a place of emergence or initial outbreak, which obviously did occur in Wuhan.
by pfdietz | 2025-06-02 00:50:30+00:00
Unless the burnup is quite high the volume will be larger. I don't think there will not be large fuel rod bundles to handle as units. The carbon binder of the fuel compacts is subject to abrasion and will be contaminated with carbon-14. Worse, it comes along with this moderator, so one has to be concerned with criticality even after the cooled waste has been transferred to dry storage.
by reitzensteinm | 2025-06-02 00:50:39+00:00
I haven't participated in this thread yet, but I would like to drill down on your TSan example. It seems to me that the window of timing for TSan to catch it is _super_ tight, as the overhead of creating a thread is very large relative to the other operations.

For something like TSan, which allows programs to execute normally with additional instrumentation, this timing matters, and so it's not a great example. An equivalent program being simulated in something like Loom would be much more convincing.

I'm a little confused, as you agree with your parent commenter that TSan not raising a flag is not conclusive. But you also appear to be using TSan not flagging the program as some kind of evidence in the same comment.
by viccis | 2025-06-02 00:50:55+00:00
Economics is a pseudo-science typically used to launder political ideology, but this "fallacy" is particularly ill suited to this discussion. Yes, it's true that automation doesn't necessarily cause a net unemployment across the board to go up. But it can still decimate employment in the automated sectors. From that link:

>While many workers fear that automation or artificial intelligence will take their jobs, history has shown that when jobs in some sectors disappear, jobs in new sectors are created. One example is the United States, where a century of increasing productivity and technological improvements changed the percentage of Americans employed in the production of food from 41% of the workforce in 1900 to 2% in 2000.

The problem with AI is that it tends to automate away skilled jobs, ones that sometimes required many years of study and educational debt to get.

So the net result, with respect to software engineering, which was the context of the discussion is here, is not "job creation." The net result is that people (especially the junior ones who just got out of school with a pile of debt) are now forced to compete for jobs they aren't necessary any more qualified for than people without those degrees.

This applies to other things where AI massively reduces the number of people needed. Journalism, art asset creation, etc. These are the kinds of cushy and often fulfilling jobs that are only possible because our grandparents and their parents, and so on, worked backbreaking or mind numbing jobs to build the kind of economy that would support these kind of careers. Thanks AI! My kid might never have to worry about the horrors of creative engineering or artistic careers, freeing up room for the real joy of being a gig economy slave or a factory shift worker!
by gnabgib | 2025-06-02 00:51:17+00:00
Discussion (36 points, 15 hours ago, 9 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44149591

Also: Kernel Mailing List flagging of contributor as potentially malicious (11 points, 1 day ago, 9 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44147317
by gazook89 | 2025-06-02 00:54:19+00:00
Minneapolis/St Paul has at least one tool library (with multiple locations). MN Tool Library. Mentioning it in case someone in this thread is interested and lives nearby. Worth it, especially if you know have projects coming up. Lots of tools, indoor and outdoor, and some space for using the tools at their space , and lots of know-how from the staff/volunteers.

Edit: in the same vein, Minneapolis also has a Toy Library that is pay what you can for annual membership and absolutely stocked with toys for every age, and includes outdoor stuff like trampolines and bikes (small sizes) and board games and such. Very worth it for kids that only maintain interest for 2 hours and helps them learn how to give up a toy before getting a new one (similar to adults learning to return a tool…)
by FireBeyond | 2025-06-02 00:54:51+00:00
> I have recently adopted Nix and NixOS and it's been truly fantastic. It does have a really harsh learning curve though. Big downsides, but for me the upsides are so huge that it's worth it.

It's huge. I tried learning and exploring Nix Darwin. Went through at least half a dozen blog posts with "step by step" instructions. All different. All had some fatal error at some point even on a new install of macOS that was from moderate to impossible to find coherent help on.
by lmm | 2025-06-02 00:56:34+00:00
> Won't the cat and mouse game ultimately tilt to the side of defense?

Probably not. Most of the history of war is weapons getting stronger and stronger and defence getting harder and harder. E.g. in ancient times a shield or simple palisade could protect you, now even tanks and trenches are not safe. The days of being able to build a wall along a border and hold it against a peer adversary are long gone and not coming back.
by pledess | 2025-06-02 00:56:46+00:00
In my experience, things you can ask include:

What's the history of this first project I've been assigned to?

Who are the most important customers, or types of customers?

What's the risk tolerance (unless you've been told Move Fast Break Things)?

Things you usually can't ask directly, but need to learn quickly:

Is this a meritocracy? If not, what other factors matter?

What types of actions are perceived as throwing a co-worker under the bus?

Is most of my job to figure out what my job is (i.e., exploring how I can contribute most effectively)?
by Joker_vD | 2025-06-02 00:56:49+00:00
Today, a software engineer's time is split between writing code and reviewing code. There is only so much code a software engineer can meaningfully review in a day, without going numb and starting to skip mistakes. Taking away the "writing code" part does not increase the amount of time they can spend on reviewing the code: it's hard-bound by their human nature. So if your software engineers were already operating at the optimal level of writing/reviewing split — then they were limited by their ability to review code, not to write it. So they will stay at this frontier even if you make AI write the code.
by dataflow | 2025-06-02 00:59:22+00:00
Thanks for following along and trying to clarify this, I really appreciate it.

The answer to your questions is that timing is not the issue in my example. You can notice this easily if you strip std::atomic<> from the type. TSAN can and does catch it just fine. The atomicity itself is what tells TSAN to not consider this a data race.

What probably threw you off was that I (sloppily) used "timing" as a way to say "proximity in the history buffer". [1] It's not wall clock time that matters, it's the number of memory accesses that fit in TSAN's history buffer. (This should also explain your confusion w.r.t. "tight" timing.)

Hence, the conclusivity depends entirely on the reason it wasn't flagged. (This is why I explained the failure modes quite precisely in my very first comment: not all of them have randomness involved.) If it wasn't flagged because the history buffer wasn't large enough, then obviously it's not conclusive. But if it wasn't flagged because TSAN noticed it and deliberately exempted it, then obviously it doesn't consider it a data race.

[1] https://github.com/google/sanitizers/wiki/ThreadSanitizerFla...
by JoshPurtell | 2025-06-02 01:03:33+00:00
Open request to skeptics or curious minds - do you have a task that's at least somewhat less difficult for me to set up than swe-bench?

I'd be happy to create you a base agent, and a fine-tuned agent, and OSS the traces for you to look at differently.

And if it's really compelling, visualize them in a hosted frontend :-)
by narratives1 | 2025-06-02 01:04:15+00:00
Yet here I am on the other side surprised to hear you and others saying you’re lathering your poopy butt with your hands in a restaurant bathroom

We all gotta wash our butts, but it just seems more civilized to do it in the shower as you can get everything clean, you didn’t just crap, and you’re not eating with those same hands immediately afterwards.

Toilet paper + wet wipes are 100x more sanitary than what you describe
by hobsonlane | 2025-06-02 01:04:38+00:00
There's a 3rd option. Teach programming like you self-taught leave CS for High School. Just teach a beginner programming language like you would teach a second natural language in a bilingual family. An AI assistant is useless to someone who does not know what "if" does, or order of operations or basic vocabulary, syntax, grammar, and symantics.
by danpalmer | 2025-06-02 01:04:40+00:00
The business model is famously hard. I wonder if you could make a business model out of an explicit matchmaking service, i.e. you pay when you match, not just to exist on the platform, so that the incentives are more closely aligned. Policing it such that you actually get paid, decisions around what constitutes a sufficient relationship to pay, etc, would all be hard.

Similar to real estate in a way (as far as the model goes, nothing else), in that you can have a house on the market for pretty much as long as you like while the agent attempts to find a "match".

Supposedly this sort of thing exits at the very high end of the market, millionaires aren't on Tinder, they're paying large sums of money to be set up on dates by a human who is actually considering the people involved. Making services for the rich more accessible is often a winning business strategy.