MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by somenameforme | 2025-06-20 04:32:29+00:00
NASA's modern budget isn't eaten up by satellite and ISS maintenance, it's eaten up by pork/corruption like the SLS. The SLS was already largely obsoleted by the Falcon Heavy 7 years ago. And Starship will make it look like a 13inch black and white CRT (with a million dollar price tag) in the era of cheap 80" bendy flat screens. Artemis is a similar story. Artemis simply isn't going to work. The entire project is filled with unrealistic handwaving.

Yet NASA continues to cheerlead for these things. I briefly thought NASA might right their heading under Bridenstine but then at some point he suddenly just did a hard 180. It seems every man has his price. He eventually just turned into another Boeing cheerleader (and his new found rubber stampage is a big part of why that Boeing monstrosity left astronauts stranded on the ISS) and went straight from out of office to a high level advisory gig for some MIC company which is almost certainly just a laundered paycheck.
by a-dub | 2025-06-20 04:32:36+00:00
idk. i don't really follow the argument. large projects in open source coordinate internally and engage externally when they need to- i suspect that isn't all that different from what you'd see in a large megacompany like apple or microsoft.

open source people create reusable interfaces. i'd argue they go one step further and create open and public internet communities with standards, practices and distribution/release channels.
by lovehashbrowns | 2025-06-20 04:33:36+00:00
While I think it’s great that kubernetes standardized primitives and I do love that IMO its best “feature” is its declarative nature and how easy it is to figure out what other devs did for an app without digging through documentation. It’s the easiest thing to go through a cluster and “reverse engineer” what’s going on. One of the legacy apps I’m migrating to kubernetes right now has like 20 different deployment scripts that all do different things to get a bunch of drupal multi sites up and running correctly whereas the kubernetes equivalent is a simple deployment helm chart where the most complicated component is the dockerfile. How does Rivet handle this? If I give 100 devs the task of deploying an app there do they get kinda fenced into a style of development that’s then simple to “reverse engineer” by someone familiar with the platform?
by kstrauser | 2025-06-20 04:35:22+00:00
This hasn't been updated in 4 years. Does that mean it's "done", or did the author get bored and drop it? Are there other common alternatives people who are into this kind of thing are using today?

I don't mean that to sound dismissive. This might be the most popular tool out there for all I know, and so well done that it hasn't needed any updates any ages.
by viamiraia | 2025-06-20 04:35:28+00:00
I want to quickly address your last two coupled questions. Just loosening tight expectations for gender roles is not enough. For many of us there is a physical component. When puberty hit I started plucking out any facial hair, grew out my hair, lamented my deepening voice, and became extremely depressed. At that time I had no idea what the word transgender even meant.

Also, not saying you are asking this, but why do trans people have to be the ones always asked to break gender roles? Trans women are so often pressured to be feminine men instead, but our mental health depends on both seeing ourselves as women and being seen as women (depending on the individual). Passing, which is a difficult but reliable path to relieve dysphoria, requires some degree of conforming. And knowing lots of trans women, there are plenty that don't conform. I feel like trans people are held to an unfair standard here.
by sandspar | 2025-06-20 04:36:17+00:00
Fittingly enough, the Rationalist community talks about this a lot. The canonical article is here ("I can tolerate anything except the outgroup").*

The gist is that if people are really different from us then we tend to be cool with them. But if they're close to us - but not quite the same - then they tend to annoy us. Hacker News people are close enough to Rationalists that HN people find them annoying.

It's the same reason why e.g. Hitler-style Neo Nazis can have a beer with Black Nationalists, but they tend to despise Klan-style Neo Nazis. Or why Sunni and Shia Muslims have issues with each other but neither group really cares about Indigenous American religions or whatever.

* https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anythin...
by autobodie | 2025-06-20 04:37:37+00:00
When I do that, they come back with something more simple than before but either wrong or still unnecessarily complex.

Over the past week, I have been writing a small library for midi controller I/O and simple/elegant is the priority. I am not really that opinionated. I just want it to not be overengineered. AI has been able to make some suggestions when I give it a specific goal for refactoring a specific class, but it cannot solve a problem on its own without overengineered solutions.
by skydhash | 2025-06-20 04:37:43+00:00
> The distros could add new APIs could be added to expose new capabilities.

Those exist already. With Debian, Alpine, Fedora,... you can put anything on top of the kernel in the userland. Android goes with a restricted version.

It's the same with MacOS. It's Unix, but with proprietary add-ons and systems. And lately, with more restrictions.
by rfrey | 2025-06-20 04:39:17+00:00
I'm a fellow geriatric and have seen the wheel turn many times. I would like to point out, though, that most cycles bring something new, or at least make different mistakes, which is a kind of progress.

A lot of times stuff gets added to simple systems because they're thought to be necessary for production systems, but as our experience grows we realize those additions were not necessary, were in the right direction but not quite right, were leaky abstractions, etc. Then when the 4-year-experienced Senior Developers reinvent the simple solution, they get stripped out - which is a good thing. When the new simple system inevitably starts to grow in complexity, it won't include the cruft that we now know was bad cruft.

Freeing the new system to discover its own bad cruft, of course. But maybe also some new good additions, which we didn't think of the first time around.

I'm not a Kubernetes expert, or even a novice, so I have no opinions on necessary and unnecessary bits and bobs in the system. But I have to think that container orchestration is a new enough domain that it must have some stuff that seemed like a good idea but wasn't, some stuff that seemed like a good idea and was, and lacks some things that seem like a good idea after 10 years of working with containers.
by ewoodrich | 2025-06-20 04:40:09+00:00
I have been dealing with an extremely frustrating issue after moving from a very popular but now deprecated package to its supported successor. The API looks deceptively similar in terms of method names which is causing endless grief for LLM pattern matching. Even when I provide the exact documentation needed for the new API the massive amount of training material scattered across the internet for the old package version dominates and has zero effect even after one reply into the conversation.

I've tried Gemini 2.5 Pro, o3 and Claude 4 and they have their own unique tone of confidently wrong, deception about reasoning and gaslighting but produce the same result. I wasted way too much time trying to figure out a zero shot prompting strategy before I just rewrote the whole thing by hand.
by swagmoney1606 | 2025-06-20 04:41:40+00:00
When I was 15-18, in around 2017, I got extremely into Elizer Yud, "the sequences", lesswrong, and the rationalist community. I don't think many people realize how it appeals to vulnerable people in the same way that Atlas Shrugged, Christianity, The furry community (/jk), the self-help world, andrew tate and "manosphere content", does.

It provides answers, a framework, AND the underpinnings of "logic", luckily, this phase only lasted around 6 months for me, during a very hard and dangerous time in my life.

I basically read "from AI to zombies", and then, moved into lesswrong and the "community". It was joining the community that immediately turned me off.

- I thought Roko's basilisk was mind numbingly stupid (does anyone else that had a brief stint in the rationalist space think it's fucking INSANE that grimes and elon musk "bonded" over Roko's basilisk? Fucking depressing world we live in) - Elizer Yud's fanboys once stalked and harassed someone all over the internet, and, when confronted about it, Elizer told him he'd only tell them to stop after he issued a very specific formal apology, including a LARGE DISCLAIMER on his personal website with the apology... - Eugenics, eugenics, eugenics, eugenics, eugenics - YOU MUST DONATE TO MIRI, OTHERWISE I, ELIZER (having published no useful research), WON'T SOLVE THE ALIGNMENT PROBLEM FIRST AND THEN WE WILL ALL DIE. GIVE ALL OF YOUR MONEY TO MIRI NOWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW

It's an absolutely wild place, and honestly, I think I would say, it is difficult to define "rational" when it comes to a human being and their actions, especially in an absolute sense, and, the rationalist community is basically very similar to any other religion, or perhaps light-cult. I do not think it would be fair to say "the average rationalist is a better decision maker than the average human", especially considering most important decisions that we have to make are emotional decisions.

Also yes I agree, you hit the nail on the head. What good is rational/logical reasoning if rational and logical reasoning typically requires first principles / a formal system / axioms / priors / whatever. That kind of thing doesn't exist in the real world. It's okay to apply ideas from rationality to your life, but it isn't okay to apply ideas from rationality to "what is human existence", "what is the most important thing to do next" / whatever.

Kinda rambling so I apologize. Seeing the rationalist community seemingly underpin some of the more disgusting developments of the last few years has left me feeling a bit disturbed, and I've always wanted to talk about it but nobody irl has any idea what any of this is.
by viccis | 2025-06-20 04:42:55+00:00
We obviously can, otherwise where do our myriad of complex concepts, many of which aren't empirical, come from? How could we have modern mathematics unless some thinker had devised the various ways of conceptualizing and manipulating numbers? This is a very old question [1] with a number of good answers as to how a human can [2].

1: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/hume/#CopyPrin

2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analytic%E2%80%93synthetic_dis...
by fc417fc802 | 2025-06-20 04:43:07+00:00
> in C++ debuggers

An awful lot of my debugging is done without a debugger. I generally expect a language to permit me to do anything that can be expressed in a logically coherent manner even when I would clearly be shooting myself in the foot. I also expect a bright neon sign warning me not to proceed.

I quite like python in that regard. You can monkey patch just about anything even when you really shouldn't.
by mbreese | 2025-06-20 04:43:38+00:00
I don’t think of it as a coordination issue. OSS can coordinate well. What it can’t do is make decisions. Most times there are at least two possible implementations for a given task (with different legitimate trade-offs). The OSS approach isn’t to pick the implementation that works for the most people, but rather support both implementations. Many times the only decision is to not to decide.

The best projects have someone who will make unilateral decisions. They might be right or wrong, but it’s done and decided. Companies with an organizational hierarchy do that much better than a decentralized group of OSS developers.
by KomoD | 2025-06-20 04:44:14+00:00
I tried it, couldn't get HTTPS to work.

Also my console gets spammed with:

04:43:20.160 [warning] invalid 'event' parameter: size: 6 value: "paused"

but it seems to work. I would've liked to see HTTP stats too but I guess UDP is fine (though I have it disabled)
by viamiraia | 2025-06-20 04:44:46+00:00
Decoupling behavioral expectations from physical appearance would be great! But that would be a titanic task, and shouldn't fall solely onto trans people, whose mental health often depends on seeing oneself as and being seen as the gender they identify as.

In addition, there is an undercurrent here that suggests "changing your body is bad," or perhaps some appeal to nature. If you hold these ideas, I would like to ask why, and perhaps reexamine why you believe so.
by o11c | 2025-06-20 04:45:05+00:00
Keep in mind the 4 factors of Fair Use (US-specific):

1. the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes; 2. the nature of the copyrighted work; 3. the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and 4. the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.

For 1, maybe OpenAI could've been safe if they'd actually stayed "open", but nowadays every AI company clearly fails, as do many (but not all) of the LLM users. Contrast this with most traditional fanfiction and personal projects where there were scary letters and occasional bullying, but few actual law-based problems.

"Transformative" is also part of 1 and is often cited as letting LLMs get away with everything, but everybody argues that and doesn't always win. Also, it's quite linked with 4.

2 mostly isn't a problem but gets into nasty details.

For 3 (emphasis on "used"), this link once again proves that the point does fail.

For 4 we are indisputably seeing mass disruption in several fields, so that point fails.

To be clear - there are ways to use LLMs that balance much closer to the side of fair use, but that isn't how LLMs are advertised.
by simoncion | 2025-06-20 04:46:29+00:00
I've spent many, many, many years working with YAML at $DAYJOB. YAML is just a really bad choice for configuration files that are longer than a handful of lines.

The fact that YAML encourages you to never put double-quotes around strings means that (based on my experience at $DAYJOB) one gets turbofucked by YAML mangling input by converting something that was intended to be a string into another datatype at least once a year. On top of that, the whitespace-sensitive mode makes long documents extremely easy to get lost in, and hard to figure out how to correctly edit. On top of that, the fact that the default mode of operation for every YAML parser I'm aware of emits YAML in the whitespace-sensitive mode means that approximately zero of the YAML you will ever encounter is written in the (more sane) whitespace-insensitive mode. [0]

It may be that bcl is even worse than YAML. I don't know, as I've never worked with bcl. YAML might be manna from heaven in comparison... but that doesn't mean that it's actually good.

[0] And adding to the mess is the fact that there are certain constructions (like '|') that you can't use in the whitespace-insensitive mode... so some config files simply can't be straightforwardly expressed in the other mode. "Good" job there, YAML standard authors.
by ulrikrasmussen | 2025-06-20 04:47:01+00:00
I am also not so worried about it being used as evidence in a court conviction, but what if it is just used to continuously monitor public spaces? In that case the amount of data can filter out the noise, especially if you monitor a large area and can correlate samples over time.

We should not necessarily worry about this being used as concrete evidence in court, but about it being an automated way of generating suspicion. I could totally see how such technology could be used to identify people who the police could focus on.

On the other hand, CCTV is probably just as efficient for that, so perhaps this technology won't make it worse.
by dragonwriter | 2025-06-20 04:47:14+00:00
> The glass-is-half-full take is that no states have prohibited gender affirming care for adults.

Given that a number have prohibited it from being paid for by the state Medicaid program for adults when it previously was, that is, maybe, a glass quarter full take. (There is also the issue that wrong-gender puberty is a particularly significant suicide risk factor for trans youth, so restricting gender affirming care for youth is a particularly strong assault on trans lives.)

And even then, its not strictly true, as while most states with restrictions that have passed have only restricted care to minors, Nebraska did so for persons under the age of 19, which includes some adults.

> Point being, even the most conservative states haven't (yet) sought to limit treatment for trans adults.

They have not only sought to do so, they have actually done so (as mentioned above). They have not yet implemented broad prohibitions (except Nebraska's for adults under 19), but "limit" and "broad prohibition" are not the same thing, and mere limitations can have the same practical effect as broad prohibitions, as many states demonstrated by making it nearly a practical impossibility to provide (and therefore access) abortion services, even before the Supreme Court overturned Roe; conservative states are following the same playbook with gender-affirming care.

> Not sure about legislation dictating certain aspects, like waiting periods, but those were widespread as a practical matter in even the most liberal states.

No, legally-imposed waiting periods for adult (or even youth) gender affirming care were not present (and still are not present) in the most liberal states. That's a very strange thing to invent to minimize the restrictions being imposed by conservative states.

If you are equating the fact that it can take time, for some services beyond HRT, to save up money and/or jump through whatever hoops are established by your insurance, and find and schedule time with the required provider(s) with legislatively imposed waiting periods and other access restrictions, that's incredibly dishonest (for one thing, the legislative restrictions don't overlap the other ones, they add on top, and, by making it more difficult for providers to operate and thereby reducing the number of providers, make the other issues worse as well.)
by sunshowers | 2025-06-20 04:47:38+00:00
I have much less patience for C++ than I would in a world with free will.

Since there's no free will, outcomes are determined by luck, and what matters is how lucky we can make people through pit-of-success environments. Rust makes people luckier than C++ does.

I also have much less patience for blame than I do in a world with free will. I believe, for example, that blameless postmortems lead to much better outcomes than trying to pretend people had free will to make mistakes, and therefore blaming them for those mistakes.

You can get to these positions through means other than rejection of free will, but the most robust grounds for them are fundamentally deterministic.
by motorest | 2025-06-20 04:48:54+00:00
> If you're using k8s as a service where you've outsourced all of the cluster maintenance (from any of the cloud vendors), which part due you see as super complex?

This point bears repeating. OP's opinion and baseless assertions contrast with reality. Even with COTS hardware nowadays we have Kubernetes distributions which are trivial to setup and run, to the point that they only require a package being installed to get a node running, and running a single command to register the newly provisioned node in a cluster.

I wonder what's OP's first-hand experience with Kubernetes.
by cookiengineer | 2025-06-20 04:49:10+00:00
The story reminded me a lot about the Brazil trilogy, and its spiritual successors, aka the movies Brazil (1985), 12 Monkeys (1995) and Zero Theorem (2013).

The dystopian world in that trilogy is becoming more and more reality and humanity will become a tool for programming more or less in the future, similar to how humans help a supercomputer solve "puzzles" a machine cannot solve.

I always mention a quote from an old friend in this context, who said: "The rat race of economy will force humans to have to do programming in one form or the other, there is no way to avoid it".

To me, the first level of software automation was the 2000s, when each and every company automated themselves with Excel spreadsheets. You'd be mind blown working for a corporate enterprise just by looking a the crazy use cases Excel has. That's the real reason companies cannot migrate away from Microsoft software.

Now we have the breakthrough of agentic coding agents, which eventually will be tools to plug and play into the machine via MCP.

And the next big thing will be the one that helps to make this possible in a training loop, where humans are in the testing and discovery loop of "what to write next", similar to how the supercomputer in Zero Theorem was portrayed (or your story's marketing AI).

In an economic context I highly recommend to watch CGP Grey's "Humans need not apply" (2012) video. Even when the predictions are off, the general truth in it remains, and that's what the job market is seeing now. To me the current software engineer market reflects what CGP Grey predicted at the time, even when it still might be too early to bet all-in into AI and LLMs.
by ddahlen | 2025-06-20 04:50:49+00:00
I have been working in astronomy for a few years now and I recently have gone back to school for a PhD in orbital dynamics.

Rubin is going to make a big difference in our knowledge of the asteroid belt, it will likely more than triple the size of our known catalog of asteroids. Its actually somewhat difficult to know exactly how much it will increase our knowledge. The bigger the telescope we build, the fainter the asteroids we see. The difficulty is that while we can make a pretty educated guess as to how many smaller ones there are, this is such a jump that the error bars on that guess is quite large. I am quite excited to see how the catalog of asteroids changes, I expect we will be finding a LOT of smaller rocks near the Earth.

Asteroids have a broad range of albedo, basically the brightness of the surface can vary from the blackest coal (like 3-5% of the light reflecting) to concrete (up to about 50%). All visible range telescopes will be susceptible to a bias in their observations, since a big black rock will be as bright as a smaller paler rock. We know that the asteroid belt favors the dark material.

In a couple of years, the Near Earth Object Surveyor (NEOS) space telescope will launch. NEOS is an IR telescope and will not have the same albedo bias. The trade off is that it will measure the black body radiation, meaning asteroids have to be nearer the sun. Broadly these are very complementary surveys, Rubin will be fantastic for filling out the main belt, and NEO Surveyor will do a great job on our neighborhood.

Source: I worked at Caltech on NEOS, I wrote the code they use to predict known asteroid orbits:

https://github.com/dahlend/kete

Edit: I failed to mention that Rubin is a big deal for a lot of time-domain astronomy, I'm just being selfish talking about asteroids only.
by psviderski | 2025-06-20 04:51:14+00:00
The problem with running a registry locally is that Docker doesn't provide an API to get individual image layers to be able to build a registry API on top. You have to hook into the containerd Docker uses under the hood. You can't do this locally in many cases, for example, on macOS the VM running Docker Desktop doesn't expose the containerd socket. I guess the workaround you implemented in docker-pushmi-pullyu is an extra copy to the registry which is a bummer.