MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jsnell | 2025-06-19 16:24:16+00:00
I mean, I've mostly been trying to establish what the specific alleged behavior even is and what the factual basis is for the allegation.

I certainly can't agree with the maximalist interpretation of what you're ascribing to me. There's all kinds of things that are lawful and within the licensing terms but that would still be unacceptable.

But I do not think that mere use of open source software is abuse of the maintainer, even if the use is for profit. Nor is security research or reporting bugs. (But inversely the maintainer has no obligation to those users, no obligation to fix or acknowledge the bugs. The new security disclaimer seems like a great way to change the userbase without having to change the license.)
by necrodome | 2025-06-19 16:24:23+00:00
Thanks for the benefit of the doubt. I typed that in a hurry, and it didn’t come out the way I intended.

We had the idea that there’s a class of apps [1] that could really benefit from our tooling - mainly Fireproof, our local-first database, along with embedded LLM calling and image generation support. The app itself is open source, and the hosted version is free.

Initially, there was no login or signup - you could just generate an app right away. We knew that came with risks, but we wanted to explore what a truly frictionless experience could look like. Unfortunately, it didn’t take long for our LLM keys to start getting scraped, so the next best step was to implement rate limiting in the hosted version.

[1] https://tools.simonwillison.net/
by lukeschlather | 2025-06-19 16:24:56+00:00
Yeah, $100M is the estimate I have seen. Which actually makes their current track record seem very sustainable compared to SLS which has spent on the order of $4B per launch. This is the first unequivocal failure this year. Aspects of the previous flight failed but proving the booster can be reused was a significant milestone. And they can afford a dozen more of these launches while still being significantly cheaper than SLS.
by marginalia_nu | 2025-06-19 16:25:24+00:00
They're likely only serving previously accessible domains already in their index as wayback machine links, which is neat, but doesn't really solve the problem of indexing the wayback machine in a broader sense.

Would be a very nice feature to have indeed, though the data is a bit too inaccessible to index as far as I can tell (even though I've not given it any serious effort, so maybe it is?)
by tudorizer | 2025-06-19 16:25:37+00:00
Working code or not is irelevant. Heck, even human-in-loop (Tony-in-the-Iron-Man) is not actively the point. If we're going into "it's all about" territory then it's all about:

- training data - approximation of the desired outcome

Neither support a good direction for the complexity of some of the system around us, most of which require dedicated language. Imagine doing calculus or quantum physics in English. Novels of words would barely suffice.

So a context window as big as the training data itself?

What if the training data is faulty?

I'm confident you understand that working code or not doesn't matter in this analogy. Neither does LLMs reaching out for the right tool.

LLMs has its merits. Replacing concrete systems that require a formal language and grammar is not.

`1 + 1 = 2` because that's how maths works, not because of deja vú.
by mkleczek | 2025-06-19 16:26:01+00:00
This is why I call all this AI stuff BS.

Using a formal language is a feature, not a bug. It is a cornerstone of all human engineering and scientific activity and is the _reason_ why these disciplines are successful.

What you are describing (ie. ditching formal and using natural language) is moving humanity back towards magical thinking, shamanism and witchcraft.
by polishdude20 | 2025-06-19 16:26:14+00:00
Yeah at what point do we look back at this type of tech and say "the researchers surely knew this was going to be used in a bad way" and then blame them for it?

Like, I get it. The argument that "maybe the tech will be used for good" is an easy one to make. But given how tech is being used more and more for bad these days, surely it's harder to make that moral argument to justify this continued research?

Just because you can come up with one or two good reasons for the tech to exist, doesn't mean you get to ignore the overwhelming amount of reasons it shouldn't.
by scoodah | 2025-06-19 16:26:26+00:00
If I were buying a non Mac laptop today it’d likely be a Framework. Their laptops don’t feel as premium, imo, but the fact you can repair nearly every single thing on the laptop yourself makes up for a lot of it. I don’t think they’re very directly comparable to a MacBook, they’re two products with fairly different ideologies behind them. Other than that I’ve been largely unimpressed by non-Apple laptop offerings.
by zellyn | 2025-06-19 16:26:28+00:00
"Gentle introduction" is a pretty typical phrase, meaning more or less that the acceleration curve of learning is a gentle slope. That one doesn't irk me.

"Gentle study" is a bit unusual.

"Gentle ping" or "Gentle nudge", and especially "Gentle reminder", are starting to get a bit more annoying, but I think the intention there is try to convey the opposite of being demanding, but over a textual medium. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
by ben_w | 2025-06-19 16:27:01+00:00
I've said as much in other threads. Given mediocre sales and the high existing competition for the futuristic vision for their unreleased future products, I think the correct price for TSLA is USD 10-20/share, and no that's not missing a digit.

For Mars… well, I like the idea of settling other worlds and expanding and yada yada yada, but Musk has repeatedly demonstrated he's not got the personality to actually do that right and not lock people out of the base for disagreeing with him. Plus, if you Muntz* a life support system or a food supply or the walls on a Mars base, everyone can die before replacements arrive.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muntzing
by namanjain01 | 2025-06-19 16:27:22+00:00
I am one of the authors of the Syzygy work! Thank you for writing this, it was a great read! Especially since we attempted this last year when considerably weaker models (o1-preview) were available, it is great to see how far we have come.

A significant portion of our research focuses on utilizing testing in conjunction with LLMs. Beyond translation, we are also exploring code optimization, which aligns with the "precise" specification as part of the GSO project - https://gso-bench.github.io/.
by diggan | 2025-06-19 16:27:38+00:00
> coding is no longer the problem.

"Coding" - The art of literally using your fingers to type weird characters into a computer, was never a problem developers had.

The problem has always been understanding and communication, and neither of those have been solved at this moment. If anything, they have gotten even more important, as usually humans can infer things or pick up stuff by experience, but LLMs cannot, and you have to be very precise and exact about what you're telling them.

And so the problem remains the same. "How do I communicate what I want to this person, while keeping the context as small as possible as to not overflow, yet extensive enough to cover everything?" except you're sending it to endpoint A instead of endpoint B.
by goku12 | 2025-06-19 16:27:56+00:00
> The structural design also probably defines the maximum acceptable size of defects. ... what size of defect could we see, and be confident a defect smaller than this size won't grow sufficiently during operation

Very much so! I have seen hardware being accepted and rejected on the basis of those limits. There were also cases where medium sized defects were reworked and rectified after careful assessments and reviews.

> With this being metal, small defects tend to grow over time- called metal fatigue

The tank and feedline welds don't cycle too often. But that also makes it very critical in reusable rockets. It may fly fine ten times and then show up unexpectedly.

> I don't know how "close to the edge" the design is

That's the fun part! As you suspect, they have ridiculously low structural margins in order to optimize for mass. What it means is that many physical phenomena that you don't usually worry too much about (when margins are splendid), suddenly turn into critical issues. Then you're off to doing doing materials research and other scientific studies, instead of doing just design and engineering (rocket engineering suddenly becomes rocket science. literally!). I've seen cases where the engineers were forced to study the algorithms used by finite element analysis software used for structural simulations. It can get that 'close to the edge'!
by xnorswap | 2025-06-19 16:28:26+00:00
> This idea [buying all combinations] struck Nettles as immensely unfair.

I don't understand why it's seen as unfair, seems like fair game to me?

Edit: Reading further on, it seems this story is more about a person unhealthily obsessed by the Texas lottery than the lottery itself:

> In 2014, Nettles told the Texas Tribune that she was spending fourteen to sixteen hours a day keeping tabs on the lottery.
by lisper | 2025-06-19 16:28:46+00:00
> Safety isn’t the presence of safe constructs, but the absence of unsafe ones.

Exactly. Here is a data point: https://spinroot.com/spin/Doc/rax.pdf

Tl;DR: This was software that ran on a spacecraft. Specifically designed to be safe, formally analyzed, and tested out the wazoo, but nonetheless failed in flight because someone did an end-run around the safe constructs to get something to work, which ended up producing a race condition.
by mystified5016 | 2025-06-19 16:28:51+00:00
All browsers I've used (chromium and Firefox based) store your profile in AppData. This directory can be dropped into a linux install at the appropriate location and you get all your history, plugins, cookies transferred. Completely seamless if you're willing to go through some simple steps.

Then again plenty of modern browsers have some type of profile syncing built in, which does all this for you.

> email inboxes

Please don't use POP3. Your inbox should live on a remote server and simply follow your account. Storing your inbox exclusively on your PC will make you very sad some day.
Show HN: WhatsDate – Meet new people in WhatsApp
by MasihMinawal | 2025-06-19 16:28:54+00:00
Hi HN,

I've developed a service that connects people and runs on the WhatsApp Business API.

Start chatting and set up your profile using AI.

Once you've set up your profile, you'll be connected to others.

If you like it, please let me know.

If you don't, just text "STOP" and the service will stop sending you messages.

Thanks,

Masih Minawal
by bsenftner | 2025-06-19 16:29:15+00:00
Consider that these AIs are trained on human communications, they mirror that communication. They are literally damaged document repair models, they use what they are given to generate a response - statistically. The fact that a question generates text that appears like an answer is an exploited coincidence.

It's a perspective shift few seem to have considered: if one wants an expert software developer from their AI, they need to create an expert software developer's context by using expert developer terminology that is present in the training data.

One can take this to an extreme, and it works: read the source code of an open source project and get and idea of both the developer and their coding style. Write prompts that mimic both the developer and their project, and you'll find that the AI's context now can discuss that project with surprising detail. This is because that project is in the training data, the project is also popular, meaning it has additional sites of tutorials and people discussing use of that project, so a foundational model ends up knowing quite a bit, if one knows how to construct the context with that information.

This is, of course, tricky with hallucination, but that can be minimized. Which is also why we will all become aware of AI context management if we continue writing software that incorporates AIs. I expect context management is what was meant by prompt engineering. Communicating within engineering disciplines has always been difficult.
by lurk2 | 2025-06-19 16:29:47+00:00
Minecraft might qualify per this definition but that really comes down to whether you’re considering the game as a form of “content.” (e.g. FPS games would typically not qualify because they aren’t primarily intended to be a medium of expression even though most of them include a chat option).

> The key factor is that a third party has an algorithm that decides what you gets on your feed, based on the content.

You are describing Hacker News.
by pentagrama | 2025-06-19 16:29:53+00:00
This is great, but one UX issue I’ve always seen when trying to get regular Windows users to switch to Linux is the whole USB flash drive process and needing external tools like Rufus.

Take Ubuntu, for example. It’s one of the most popular and recommended distros for non-techy users, but just look at the install process: https://ubuntu.com/tutorials/install-ubuntu-desktop#1-overvi...

Let’s be honest, I don’t think most people would actually go through with that.

One idea to fix this and get more people to switch would be for Ubuntu to offer a Windows app that handles everything. It could download the ISO in the background, format the flash drive, install Ubuntu in dual boot with Windows by default, and clearly explain each step so users know how to start using Ubuntu or go back to Windows.
by lukeschlather | 2025-06-19 16:30:38+00:00
They are failing more but they are also succeeding more and the successes aren't recognized as successes. The previous Starship blew up but the Booster successfully launched and landed two flights in a row, and that was in the same two flights both of which were viewed as failures because the Starship blew up.

Even if Starship turns out to be a dumb idea the super heavy booster already seems like it might outperform SLS as a reusable heavy-lift stage.
by treyd | 2025-06-19 16:30:45+00:00
It's not an issue of getting the act together on "security". Fairly consistently Linux desktop OSes have a better security story than Windows desktops due to better software supply chain integrity.

The issue is that Windows is designed to be able to protect the will of proprietary software publishers against the will of users that want to assert control over the software running on their computer. It's very similar to the story with DRM.

Linux desktop OSes will never put in place the measures to make a Vanguard-like system work, because it's just unethical for a bunch of reasons, the most basic of which being that it's a violation of freedoms 0 and 1.
by lillecarl | 2025-06-19 16:30:59+00:00
Internally a lot of modules cast dictionaries to lists of the same length because the keys of the dict might not be known at plan time or something. The "Terraform AWS VPC module does this internally for many things.

I couldn't tell you exactly, but modules always end up either not exposing enough or exposing too much. If I were to write my module with Terranix I can easily replace any value in any resource from the module I'm importing using "resource.type.name.parameter = lib.mkForce "overridenValue";" without having to expose that parameter in the module "API".

The nice thing is that it generates "Terraform"(config.tf.json) so the supremely awesome state engine and all API domain knowledge bound in providers work just the same and I don't have to reach for something as involved as Pulumi.

You can even mix Terranix with normal HCL since config.tf.json is valid in the same project as HCL. A great way to get started is to generate your provider config and other things where you'd reach to Terragrunt/friends. Then you can start making options that makes resources at your own pace.

The terraform LSP sadly doesn't read config.tf.json yet so you'll get warnings regarding undeclared locals and such but for me it's worth it, I generally write tf/tfnix with the provider docs open and the language (Nix and HCL) are easy enough to write without full LSP.

https://terranix.org/ says it better than me, but by doing it with Nix you get programatical access to the biggest package library in the world to use at your discretion (Build scripts to fetch values from weird places, run impure scripts with null_resource or it's replacements) and an expressive functional programming language where you can do recursion and stuff, you can use derivations to run any language to transform strings with ANY tool.

It's like Terraform "unleashed" :) Forget "dynamic" blocks, bad module APIs and hacks (While still being able to use existing modules too if you feel the urge).
by jdsleppy | 2025-06-19 16:31:03+00:00
No, in my example the docker-compose.yml would exist alongside your application's source code and you can use the `build` directive https://docs.docker.com/reference/compose-file/services/#bui... to instruct the remote host (Hetzner VPS, or whatever else) to build the image. That image does not go to an external registry, but is used internal to that remote host.

For 3rd party images like `postgres`, etc., then yes it will pull those from DockerHub or the registry you configure.

But in this method you push the source code, not a finished docker image, to the server.
by Ccecil | 2025-06-19 16:31:11+00:00
I live in Coeur d'alene, ID...which sits in the Purcell trench. The floods started just north of here at Clark Fork, ID. There is massive evidence of them everywhere you look.

One spot, Chilco mountain, if you look towards the trench it is all flat and if you look the other way it is all mountain/river valleys. This wall separated the floods from the non flooded area. Lots of exposed rimrock here too. Also the reason we have such a good aquifer here (Rathdrum aquifer) which supplys Spokane/Coeur d'alene.

edit: https://iafi.org/ice-age-floods-videos/
by mananaysiempre | 2025-06-19 16:31:34+00:00
That book, IMO, reads very much like a smear attempt, and not one done with a good understanding of the target.

The premise, with an attempt to tie capital-R Rationalists to the neoreactionaries though a sort of guilt by association, is frankly weird: Scott Alexander is well-known among the former to be essentially the only prominent figure that takes the latter seriously—seriously enough, that is, to write a large as-well-stated-as-possible survey[1] followed by a humongous point-by-point refutation[2,3]; whereas the “cult leader” of the rationalists, Yudkowsky, is on the record as despising neoreactionaries to the point of refusing to discuss their views. (As far as recent events, Alexander wrote a scathing review of Yarvin’s involvement in Trumpist politics[4] whose main thrust is that Yarvin has betrayed basically everything he advocated for.)

The story of the book’s conception also severely strains an assumption of good faith[5]: the author, Elizabeth Sandifer, explicitly says it was to a large extent inspired, sourced, and edited by David Gerard, a prominent contributor to RationalWiki and r/SneerClub (the “sneerers” mentioned in TFA) and Wikipedia administrator who after years of edit-warring got topic-banned from editing articles about Scott Alexander (Scott Siskind) for conflict of interest and defamation[6] (including adding links to the book as a source for statements on Wikipedia about links between rationalists and neoreaction). Elizabeth Sandifer herself got banned for doxxing a Wikipedia editor during Gerard's earlier edit war at the time of Manning's gender transition, for which Gerard was also sanctioned[7].

[1] https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/03/03/reactionary-philosophy...

[2] https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/10/20/the-anti-reactionary-f...

[3] https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/10/24/some-preliminary-respo...

[4] https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/moldbug-sold-out

[5] https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/reliable-sources-how-wik...

[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Administrators%27_no...

[7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests...
by tudorizer | 2025-06-19 16:32:01+00:00
> Did you talk with them? Otherwise this is just creating an imaginary argument against some people you just assume they didn't listen.

I have, unfortunately. Start-up founders, managers, investors who taunt the need for engineers because "AI can fix it".

Don't get me wrong, there are plenty of "stochastic parrot" engineers even without AI, but still, not enough to make blanket statements.
Show HN: Simstack, SSH escape room for developers
by sjmog | 2025-06-19 16:33:22+00:00
I built a realistic prod system under heavy pressure where you SSH in and solve real problems. You get your own server (real box) and have to fix various things up under fire.

a friend told me it reminded them of DOOM for SREs, another called it a "flight simulator" because you can do anything (and reboot if you crash). someone else said it was like "an escape room for engineers", in that you have to find your own way around an unfamiliar box and solve puzzles. idk, maybe it's fun. try it!

how it works: you get two Hetzner servers: a traffic generator (real traffic from NYC taxi data highly compressed to 12k rps) firing tons of requests at a user server, which has some (realistically) broken stuff trying to get that data to a chart. your job is to get it working and get the whole system latency down. You can use whatever tools or techniques you like to do so.

so far I've seen people messing around in databases, adding caching, rewriting services in go. There's no one right solution!

why I'm building it: I was a school teacher 15 years ago and have been training developers for the last 10. most dev training (tutorials, toy projects &c) feels nothing like the "real job". I wanted to see if we can make training more realistic, challenging, fun.
by artemonster | 2025-06-19 16:33:30+00:00
Take a look at a default emacs and how long it has been this way and you can quickly generate 200 plausible theories why everything sucks do much around this ecosystem. Tried 5 times going to u ubuntu in last 15 years. Everytime switched back because it sucked. Spending godless amounts of times googling obsucure problems that apprear out of thin air. No thanks. And with wsl2 I never have to look back
by belorn | 2025-06-19 16:33:53+00:00
The only crowd that is consistently in favor of free speech and privacy is the opposition. As soon there is a new crowd in power people change tune and then it is about freedom of speech but not freedom from consequences of speech. Over time people in power may use different criteria when speech should be punished, and by whom, but the differences are only in the fine details. No one in power has ever supported free speech (in modern time) if that free speech may harm their position of power or their voters interests.
by jitl | 2025-06-19 16:34:01+00:00
Idk why we need separate media anyways. Just resize the existing partition and create a new Linux recovery partition in place, reboot from that to install m. Or just run the whole installer in a VM on windows and then reboot to a completely working Linux system.

EDIT: Beyond skill, just getting the external media is a substantial friction. I haven't used a thumb drive besides for Linux install media in 15 years; I'm good at computers but just finding / buying one of those things is its own roadblock.
by _DeadFred_ | 2025-06-19 16:34:10+00:00
China hasn't shown that their railroad buildout will work. My understanding is they currently aren't making enough return to payoff debt, yet alone plan for future maintenance. Historically the command economy type stuff looks great in the early years, it's later on we see if that is reality.

You are comparing USA today to the robber baron phase, whose to say China isn't in the same phase? Lots of money being thrown at new railroads and you have Chinese leaders and best and management leaders chasing that money. When happens when it goes low budget/maintenance mode?