MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by squirrel55583 | 2025-06-04 00:54:29+00:00
>Before, you had the map. So you were aware that Fitzroy was to the west of Collingwood and both were south of Clifton Hill and so on. I had dozens of these suburbs roughly mapped out in my mind.

>Driving down an unfamiliar road, one could use signs to these suburbs as a guide. I might not know exactly where I was, but I had enough of an idea to point me in the right direction.

Reading those sentences feels like I am dreaming. The exploration... The possibilities... Serendipitously finding you way through and getting temporarily lost at night in a big friendly suburban area with trees and in summer...
by const_cast | 2025-06-04 00:55:38+00:00
Usually it's a bit more complicated than that, and a reason why it's a big problem in the US is we don't have good ways to reliably gauge identity. SSNs got pushed onto everything because it's actually the only thing everyone has. Everything else is fragmented and optional. DL? State-to-state, fragmented, optional. Passports? Very optional, and expensive. Phone numbers? Much more universal, but the telephony system is not secure by any means. Usernames? Passwords? Well, we all know those aren't perfect security measures.
by teeray | 2025-06-04 00:56:52+00:00
> _When done well._ Every time I write an `if err != nil {}` block, I need to decide whether to return the error as is (`return err`) or decorate it with further context (`return fmt.Errorf("stuff broke: %w", err)`)

Easy. Always wrap. Wrap with what you were doing when the error occurred.

> I'm pretty sure logback's complexity is anathema to Go. But my goodness, it had some nice features... And then you just throw the stack trace in IntelliJ's "analyze stacktrace" box and you get clickable links to each line in every relevant file... I can dream.

Yeah, despite the proliferation of IDEs for Go in recent years, Go has traditionally been pretty anti- big-iron IDE.
by thomastjeffery | 2025-06-04 00:57:24+00:00
The presidential election is not directly gerrymandered. It's also not the president who chooses where ballot locations are, who gets registered and how, or who gets sent a mail in ballot. The more local the politician, the more power they have over the voting system that is used for all elections.

Gerrymandering is not just used on its own. The legislators that use their authority to disenfranchise voters use gerrymandering to dodge accountability. When Republican state legislators, congressmen, and senators do this, they do it to disenfranchise the same voters that would vote for a non-Republican president.

So yes, it's technically indirect, but gerrymandering obviously affects presidential elections. It couldn't not.
by ChuckMcM | 2025-06-04 00:58:39+00:00
I get that people don't like the braces in TeX but ... :-)

I'm only half sarcastic here, I don't like them either. I have recently been using pandoc[1] to do the things they are talking about, I had added some stuff in perl using the Template Toolkit[2] to make HTML pages. My issue is that I have very different fugue states for writing vs. coding. Switching states breaks my flow so I've been trying to make the two modes as orthogonal as possible.

I'm curious if anyone has used something like this to go straight to PNG. My use case is that I have a surplus epaper display that can display pngs it fetches from the network and I've been forwarding it my todo list. Have been doing this with a LuaTeX flow but would like something a bit more seamless.

[1] Pandoc -- https://pandoc.org/

[2] Template Toolkit -- https://template-toolkit.org/
by perching_aix | 2025-06-04 01:00:26+00:00
Care to expand beyond the snark?

The way I understand that paragraph is that "aesthetic information" is the aesthetics involved themselves, and I think it's more than agreeable that art at minimum concerns itself a great deal with aesthetics (things looking pretty, organized, orderly disorganized, etc.) - some might even argue it's all aesthetics, or that aesthetics are inalienable or foundational to it. I'd personally argue there's no art without aesthetics.
by 0xab | 2025-06-04 01:00:28+00:00
> When VLMs make errors, they don't make random mistakes. Instead, 75.70% of all errors are "bias-aligned" - meaning they give the expected answer based on prior knowledge rather than what they actually see in the image.

Yeah, that's exactly what our paper said 5 years ago!

They didn't even cite us :(

"Measuring Social Biases in Grounded Vision and Language Embeddings" https://arxiv.org/pdf/2002.08911
by toomuchtodo | 2025-06-04 01:00:30+00:00
All of this plastic should be shoveled into a plasma gasifier. This performance art is just a grift. Recycling it results in suboptimal downstream products, landfilling it allows for future mismanagement (methane emissions, groundwater contamination). Gasification is cleaner than incineration, and you can burn the syn gas produced to recover some energy for cogeneration. Resulting slag produced is inert and can be safely landfilled.
by thayne | 2025-06-04 01:01:24+00:00
Something like:

x := FallibleFunction() ? err -> return fmt.Errorf("something happened %v", err)

Doesn't really change that, but significantly reduces the amount of noise from error handling boilerplate. And (most importantly to me) reduces the amount of vertical space taken up by error handling code, which makes it easier to follow the happy flow.
by const_cast | 2025-06-04 01:01:38+00:00
> There's no reason to expect it to be cheaper.

There is IMO, because we don't factor the cost of disposal and it's management into just about any product. Except maybe nuclear reactors.

The reason plastic is so cheap is that you're free to make it and let it go where ever the fuck it does. The taypayer pays for cleanup in the long run, not you. You're externalizing a lot of costs.
by jdlshore | 2025-06-04 01:01:46+00:00
Quality is more important than quantity in engineering, so a mediocre hire can be a net negative. In so many ways:

- consuming time and attention from people who help them

- time spend checking and fixing their work

- additional maintenance costs from poorly thought out solutions

- time spent reproducing and fixing bugs

- lowering morale of better engineers

- creating whatever the opposite of “a culture of excellence” is

- consuming management time in performance management

- inability to interview or saying “yes” to even worse hires
by mvdtnz | 2025-06-04 01:03:29+00:00
It's not the outright debt it's the acceleration in spending. It was completely unsustainable. We are borrowing in order to fund our day to day activities, which is definitionally precarious.

According to your posting history you don't even live in New Zealand. I doubt you have the first clue what is going on here.

https://newsroom.co.nz/2025/05/08/willis-caught-between-the-...
by gus_massa | 2025-06-04 01:03:32+00:00
I remember a few pages that sed some stupid captcha like "please write the word orange" or "please calculate 204+109". It was a static value, so it was trivial to program. For not very popular blogs, it was good enough (a long time ago).

Also, other blog has a hidden field, that should be empty, but bots like filling all fields.

I'd try those stupid tricks, and if they fail I'd try to put Spambayes as a filter. It was nice because it has good/bad/unusual, and you may like to take a look at unusual stuff to detect false positives. (I'm not sure if there is a better alternative to Spambayes. I used it like 20 years ago.)
by II2II | 2025-06-04 01:03:48+00:00
The point is that it wasn't a universally understood icon at the time. It was culturally, not even linguistically, dependent. The footnote even suggests that it was a relatively new symbol in computer interfaces, having been introduced some 8 months earlier in NextSTEP. Adding to the difficulty: some people couldn't identify the simplistic icon as a magnifying glass.

English compression was not an issue here. The buttons would have been translated.

Anyways, it was an interesting read for me. It took me several years to figure out why the icon disappeared after I upgraded from a 386 to a 486. (Clearly an OS upgrade was involved.) Now I know why Microsoft made that change.
by femto | 2025-06-04 01:04:00+00:00
The article says:

"The first 115 units will begin shipping this summer at $35,000 each"

From Cortical's home page [1]:

"We're a revolutionary biotech firm based in Melbourne, Australia."

Melbourne is the capital city of the Australian state of Victoria.

Part VIII, Section 38, paragraph (1) of the Victorian "Human Tissue Act 1982" says:

"Subject to this section, a person shall not sell, or agree to sell, tissue (including his own tissue) or the right to take tissue from his body."

Maybe you buy the device and they throw the brain cells in for free?

[1] https://corticallabs.com/company.html

[2] https://content.legislation.vic.gov.au/sites/default/files/2...
by jitl | 2025-06-04 01:04:17+00:00
Moving every success value to the heap seems like a big loss to me but I don't see an alternative. I think going the interface route also ends up wrapping everything in an even fatter pointer. But at least I get to think "ah maybe this isn't going to get boxed and it will be free".

interface Result[T] { IsOk(): bool IsErr(): bool Unwrap(): T UnwrapError(): error } // Ok is a Result that represents a successful operation. struct Ok[T] { Value: T } func Ok[T](value T) Result[T] { return Ok[T]{Value: value} } func (s Ok[T]) IsOk() bool { return true } func (s Ok[T]) IsErr() bool { return false } func (s Ok[T]) Unwrap() T { return s.Value } func (s Ok[T]) UnwrapError() error { panic("UnwrapError called on Ok") } // Err is a Result that represents a failed operation. struct Err[T] { Reason: error } func Err[T](reason error) Result[T] { return Err[T]{Reason: reason} } func (e Err[T]) Error() string { return e.Reason.Error() } func (e Err[T]) IsOk() bool { return false } func (e Err[T]) IsErr() bool { return true } func (e Err[T]) Unwrap() T { panic(fmt.Errorf("Unwrap called on Err: %w", e.Reason)) } func (e Err[T]) UnwrapError() error { return e.Reason }
by rustcleaner | 2025-06-04 01:06:12+00:00
Popper's definition of Science™ is an algorithm for establishing and testing truth-statements against reality. An educated man would still be susceptible to the weakness you describe, but his education ideally has informed and practiced him in the weaknesses and folley of unchecked emotionalism. Man is emotionally driven, but we can hope for a rationally and logically informed drive-gating system.
by robingchan | 2025-06-04 01:06:35+00:00
I hate to say it but i sort of agree.

I’ve also followed PP from the initial grant in Paris but a lot of these problems seem to be self-inflicted. Ones that most stood out were having no insurance, unrealistic open source expectations and giving $100k away rather than furthering the cause.

I’m sure theres minutiae and context i’m missing but that post doesn’t scream competence.

I’m worried any donation would be fluttered away.

The line about being at peace with the project dying seems bizarre. Perhaps time for a little organisational shakeup
by dottjt | 2025-06-04 01:06:39+00:00
As someone who has been weight lifting for the past few years and previously was really into keto diets, one thing I've realised is that carbs are simply necessary in order to have the energy to push very heavy weights. Fat just doesn't give you the required energy to do so.

With that said, if you're only pushing moderately heavy weights or if you're a beginner and you're starting out with low weights, then it usually can be done.

Though the compromise is usually to eat high carb/low fat on workout days, and low carb/high fat on rest days. Fasting as well helps a ton.
by MyPasswordSucks | 2025-06-04 01:06:46+00:00
Because it's a lengthy stream of barely-parsable copy-paste diarrhea when a simple "Dasher might be a great option! I don't have time to summarize why I think it would be great, but here are some links to previous HN threads where it's been discussed <link> <link> <link>, and it comes recommended by <Firstname McLastname>, a <JobTitle> at <Company> - here's a couple 45-minute Youtubes to not-watch <link> <link>" would do much better.
by Daub | 2025-06-04 01:07:12+00:00
I am an artist who works with both digital and traditional media. When household computers were just making an appearance I remember talking with a family friend on the subject of art. They asked my if I had considered trying out this new technology, saying with stars in her eyes that ‘it can draw lines to a degree of accuracy of thousands of an inch’. I was at the time rightfully unconvinced.

This anecdote demonstrates how completely misunderstood new technologies can be. Such accuracy is completely irrelevant to an artist.

In the end the thing that ‘converted’ me was getting my hands on a copy of Photoshop. I was then, and remain, unimpressed by its painting tools. However, I was blown away by its ability to penetrate the surface of a photo - to change the facts of that photo. Effectively, this solved a creative problem I did not even know I had.

I honestly believe that tools are invented before tool users.
by gnabgib | 2025-06-04 01:07:16+00:00
Related:

The CL1: the first code deployable biological computer (54 points, 28 days ago, 24 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43909418

Melbourne startup launches 'biological computer' made of human brain cells (54 points, 3 months ago, 37 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43261218

Cortical Labs: "Human neural networks raised in a simulation" (89 points, 2 years ago, 126 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37982175
by const_cast | 2025-06-04 01:07:39+00:00
Right-wing party platforms aren't a conspiracy theory, it's literally their platform.

"Starve the beast" isn't something the left made up to point and laugh at the right, it's just what the right does because they legitimately believe it works. And, in very rare cases, it does. But usually, privatizing just makes costs explode and inefficiency go through the roof as systems become horribly fragmented and opaque.
by selcuka | 2025-06-04 01:10:48+00:00
Nothing at IBM is ever straightforward.

Decades ago, I was working with three IBM employees on a client project. During a discussion about a backup solution, one of them suggested that we migrate all customer data into DB2 on a daily basis and then back up the DB2 database.

I asked why we couldn't just back up the client's existing database directly, skipping the migration step. The response? "Because we commercially want to sell DB2."
by yubblegum | 2025-06-04 01:11:13+00:00
> gaming the evaluation

Co-evolution is the answer here. The evaluator itself must be evolving.

Co-evolving Parasites Improve Simulated Evolution as an Optimization Procedure Danny Hillis, 1991

https://csmgeo.csm.jmu.edu/geollab/complexevolutionarysystem...
by 3dsnano | 2025-06-04 01:13:21+00:00
their work to date seems like 100K well spent on trying something very few other people would even attempt, no less take it as far as they did.

i'm not sure if people here comprehend how much work it is to do and sustain something like this for almost a decade. a lot of the work is niche community-building, it's a hard slog fought one workshop at a time. its like herding idealistic cats, not easy. i will always appreciate those who hold the line and choose to die on weird hills like this.

while i commend them on their work to date, it's clear that this is a hard problem to solve within our current socio-economic environment. after all, plastic is around us, within us, and inevitably part of us now. as humans we need to stop burying it and confront what we are doing.
by fasthands9 | 2025-06-04 01:14:37+00:00
The thing is I imagine the LLM would be able to write a code that counted the lines and outputted what is on line 27. It seems inevitable (in a way that scares me) that a good model in the near future would know enough to write that file and execute on its own.

My understanding is early LLMs were bad at math (for similar reasons) but then got better once the model was hooked up to a calculator behind the scenes.
by 9rx | 2025-06-04 01:15:06+00:00
> So there's obviously no such thing as "just an error" from that alone

The point is that all values are potentially errors. An age value, for example, can be an error if your business case requires restricting access to someone under the age of 18. There is nothing special about a certain value just because it has a type named "error", though.

Let's face it: At the root of this discussion is the simple fact that "if" statements are just not very good. They're not good for handling errors, but they're also not good for handling anything else either. It is just more obvious in the case of what we call errors because of frequency.

Something better is sorely lacking, but seeking better only for types named "error" misses the forest for the trees.
by alisonatwork | 2025-06-04 01:15:20+00:00
I work professionally in Python these days, but I've just spent a bit of time digging into the contemporary situation because the JVM environment is much more interesting to me, and found this spec: https://build-server-protocol.github.io

Seems the Scala guys have doubled down on the "compiler as a service" approach, presumably because their compile time story continues to be painful. But also looks like the same solution is used for the VS Code Java/Gradle integration, so seems like this might be the more conventional way to go for traditional JVM projects.

For processes where the JIT takes a while to kick in, but also you don't want to waste memory keeping JVMs alive while not doing anything (and compilation could be a good example of that), I wondered if there was a way to snapshot and restore the JVM state and turns out some people are experimenting with that too: https://openjdk.org/projects/crac/

It's all neat stuff!
by autoexec | 2025-06-04 01:16:15+00:00
I agree, that was the best way to use 7. I moved to 7 from Win2k pro and there were changes I liked and changes I didn't, but it was still a solid OS.

I'm glad that gaming on linux is improving all the time. At this point I'm almost able to move away from windows entirely. There are plenty of games that will be fine on linux/consoles/steamdeck. I'll probably always keep a couple windows systems around running 7 or XP (entirely offline) for older games, but I'll never buy a system with windows 10 or 11 on it and I don't see MS ever abandoning their ways and respecting the users of their software at some point in the future. I expect they'll just keep accelerating as they nosedive.
by JadeNB | 2025-06-04 01:16:38+00:00
> "We are in discussions with Google to address a potential miscommunication regarding the application of their policies," a Meta spokesperson told The Register. "Upon becoming aware of the concerns, we decided to pause the feature while we work with Google to resolve the issue."

Ah, good, so it was all an innocent miscommunication, certainly not Meta hoovering up whatever they thought they could get away with.
by CharlesW | 2025-06-04 01:16:39+00:00
As someone who hasn't used Java professionally, this was helpful informed skepticism. Thanks!

> Did they JUST update to java 11?

As an LTS release with "extended" support until 2032, that certainly seems possible.

Another near-certain factor in this decision was that Apple has an extreme, trauma-born abhorrence of critical external dependencies. With "premier" support for 11 LTS having ended last fall, it makes me wonder if a primary lever for this choice was the question of whether it was better to (1) spend time evaluating whether one of Oracle's subsequent Java LTS releases would solve their performance issues, or instead (2) use that time to dogfood server-side Swift (a homegrown, "more open" language that they understand better than anyone in the world) by applying it to a real-world problem at Apple scale, with the goal of eventually replacing all of their Java-based back-ends.
by Riskofrain | 2025-06-04 01:18:33+00:00
What you're doing is rasterizing an SVG at runtime — basically turning it into a PNG, and when there's a scale change you're rasterizing the SVG again at a new resolution.This is useful for displaying statics svgs and things like interfaces.But when we think about actually using animated vector art, characters, objects, this becomes largely useless. since it would require multiple frames and a huge spritesheet would need to be rasterized for that — increasing memory usage and causing many other issues.

I would like a way to truly draw the vectors and actually use real SVGs — especially via Thor/Lottie.
by ednite | 2025-06-04 01:18:38+00:00
Not sure about digital tools, but I’ve leaned more into analog methods, specifically the Pomodoro technique.

I started with short intervals and gradually built up to 90-minute and sometimes longer focus sessions (which I wouldn’t recommend for everyone). For most people, 20 minutes of focused work followed by a 5-minute break is a great entry point. It’s simple, low-tech, and surprisingly effective at training your brain to lock in.
by miffy900 | 2025-06-04 01:19:50+00:00
I'm going to call it now: Swift on the backend is pointless for everyone but Apple, and trying to make it takeoff as a backend service language is as pointless as porting Xcode cross platform and trying to lure non-Apple devs into using it over say VSCode, any JetBrains IDE or Visual Studio.

The choices that already serve the market are just too numerous and the existing tooling is already far greater in features, functionality and capability than anything that Apple can provide. What's funny is that they actually have the money to dedicate resources to this space to compete with C#, Java, go or Rust, but they're not going to because it's just too far afield of their core business. Any backend service written in Swift is not going to be running on a Mac in the cloud, and probably won't be serving just iPhone/iPad clients exclusively, so why bother when we know Apple leadership will treat it as an afterthought.

If it does takeoff, I'm betting it will be because the open source community provides a solution, not Apple and even then it will be in a tiny niche. Indeed, this entire project is enabled by Vapor, an open source Swift project that I'm guessing the team only chose because Vapor as a project finally reached the requisite level of maturity for what they wanted. It's not like Apple went out on their own and built their own web framework in Swift, like Microsoft does with C# and ASP.NET. All of this makes me feel even more skeptical about Swift on the backend. Apple won't do anything specifically to give Swift a legup in the backend space, beyond the basics, like porting Swift to linux, but will avail themselves of open source stuff that other people built.
by scarface_74 | 2025-06-04 01:23:19+00:00
ChatGPT o4-mini got it right

https://chatgpt.com/share/683f9f73-42d8-8010-9cbc-27ad396a55...

ChatGPT 4o (the product not the LLM) got it right with a little additional prompting

https://chatgpt.com/share/683f9fd4-e61c-8010-99be-81d25264ba...
by rayiner | 2025-06-04 01:25:12+00:00
As far as I can tell, we pay more for healthcare for the same reason we pay more for schools and more for subways. We’re a low competence, low trust society, and have to compensate for it by making everything subject to litigation to the point where the country is effectively run by lawyers.

My six year old boy ran into a table and got a black eye. Took him to the doctor (because my wife made me), who physically examined him and saw he was fine. But ordered a CT scan anyway (which we got the same morning because this is America). No sane healthcare system would order a CT scan for this! But in our litigation-driven system, the doctor has to do it, because in the extremely unlikely situation that there was an undetected internal bleed, he’d get sued. And some expert would get on the stand and say the standard of care is to order a CT scan every time a six year old boy does a six year old boy thing.