MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by wahern | 2025-06-20 12:24:08+00:00
It's a matter of praxis. Targeting portable constructs is (IMO) a useful methodology for achieving the abstract goal. It doesn't have to be strict, but it provides a quantifiable, objective metric (i.e. amount of non-portable constructs employed) to help achieve an otherwise subjective goal.

Otherwise you face an ocean of choices that can be overwhelming, especially if you're not very experienced in the problem space. It's like the common refrain with C++: most developers settle on a subset of C++ to minimize code complexity; but which subset? (They can vary widely, across projects and time.) In the case of Make, you can just pick the POSIX and/or de facto portable subset as your target, avoiding alot of choice paralysis/anxiety (though you still face it when deciding when to break out of that box to leverage GNU extensions).
by littlecorner | 2025-06-20 12:24:17+00:00
While there's some things that's can be done in the political and legislation spheres, there's a lot more need for just basic human relationships. Talking to those people and making friendships with those who different than you, and might be a little scary or uncomfortable. I suspect a lot of out social and political problems could be solved were we to get off of these shiny screens and spend time being in our bodies, building relationships with real people who don't fit all of our lofty ideals
by darkerside | 2025-06-20 12:24:24+00:00
Putting in a plug for a great book called Another Bullshit Night in Suck City. https://www.amazon.com/Another-Bullshit-Night-Suck-City/dp/0...

This is the book that humanized homelessness for me. I better understand how it can happen to just about anyone, the vicious cycles involved, and how it affects observers on a deep level.

For the record, I found the article pretty annoying as well. Overwrought and vague. The best satire is (was?) subtle and yet incisive. This feels like a verbal pep rally. But maybe tastes are changing.
by adelineJoOs | 2025-06-20 12:25:35+00:00
tbh, that seems pretty close to what I would call snapshot testing already. What people usually do with it is using it for more broadly compared to API testing (for example, I currently use it to test snapshots of a TUI application I am developing) - i.e. you can use it whenever your test is of the form "I have something that I can print in some way and that should look the same until I explicitely want it to look differently in the future". There are a bit more bells and wizzles - For example, it is nice that one does not have to write the initial snapshots oneself. You write the test, execute, it creates the resulting file, then you review and commit that - handy little workflow!
by echelon_musk | 2025-06-20 12:27:58+00:00
If my memory serves me:

Amber trichomes indicate the THC degrading into CBN.

If you harvest when the trichomes are milky or clear but not amber you'll have higher THC vs CBN.

But this earlier harvest comes at the expense of yield as you sacrifice time that would be spent with the buds increasing in size as they become ever more sexually frustrated.

Black market cannabis tends to optimise for this.
by bayindirh | 2025-06-20 12:29:59+00:00
I’ll kindly disagree on wasting junior developer time. Any person who’s using tools professionally should read (or at least skim) the manual of the said tool. Especially, if it’s something foundational to their all workflow.

They are junior because they are inexperienced, but being junior is the best place to make mistakes and learn good habits.

If somebody asks what is the most important thing I have learnt over the years, I’d say “read the manual and the logs”.
by manyaoman | 2025-06-20 12:30:22+00:00
I didn't get the impression that he's against text per se, just that LLMs should use a format that's most concise for humans in the given scenario. Example from the video: showing the (textual) diff between old and new versions of text/code, rather than just the new version. Or converting a text-only restaurant menu to photos+text.
by nravic | 2025-06-20 12:30:26+00:00
This is super interesting! We do something similar I think by taking a checkpoint after model initialization. I'm curious what you think about our approach, here's some benchmarks: https://docs.cedana.ai/articles/performance-of-cedanas-gpu-i...

We do some on-the-fly optimizations as well (like compiling into CUDA graphs or fusing together calls) which ends up resulting (for some inference engines) faster token throughput too.
by ulf-77723 | 2025-06-20 12:30:45+00:00
Insects and Microorganisms are indeed wanted from my perspective - I grow in living soil and cherish any form of live. There are studies about certain fungi in the soil which lead to peach aroma and flowery terpenes. This plant is plenty of tastes: gasy and fruity, herbful. When you get a Banana Punch it feels like a fruit ensemble and the sweetest fruits just like grapes do need terroir
by throwaway313313 | 2025-06-20 12:30:47+00:00
RPKI plus ASPA does solve the hijack problem by securing both the origin of a prefix and the AS path of a route.

Yes ASPA is new. Reference implementations in open source routing daemons and RPKI tools are being developed and rolled out. If you want to be a pioneer you can run a bird routing daemon and secure the routes with ASPA. Only experimenters have created ASPA records at this point, however once upon a time we were in the same position with RPKI.
by mr_mitm | 2025-06-20 12:31:30+00:00
Expansion happens only in the Lemaitre-Friedmann-Robertson-Walker walker metric, which is a solution to the Einstein equations in a homogeneous universe. That's a fine approximation to our universe at the largest scales, but not on the scale of a solar system. Spacetime locally around the earth looks much more like a Schwarzschild solution. So we're not experiencing expansion.

If you are asking hypothetically, if a human body were floating in the intergalactic medium, then yes, the accepted answer you quoted would apply.
by harimau777 | 2025-06-20 12:33:21+00:00
Most of the people someone interacts with are not someone they already have a close relationship with. E.g. if I move to a new city, the clubs that I need to interact with to establish a social life are probably using big tech. If I need to buy or sell a couch, the people that I need to interact with are probably on FB Marketplace.

Certainly there are things that people can do to be less reliant on big tech. However, being a part of society still requires a lot of reliance on big tech.
by ethbr1 | 2025-06-20 12:35:48+00:00
> Kubernetes is awesome in the following scenario: [...]

Ironically, that looks a lot like when k8s is managed by a dedicated infra team / cloud provider.

Whereas in most smaller shops that erroneously used k8s, management fell back on the same dev team also trying to ship a product.

Which I guess is reasonable: if you have a powerful enough generic container orchestration system, it's going to have enough configuration complexity to need specialists.

(Hence why the first wave of not-k8s were simplified k8s-on-rails, for common use cases)
by lapcat | 2025-06-20 12:35:48+00:00
> Just remember that the invisible people vote

Some do, but 36% of the eligible population did not vote in 2024. I don't think there's any evidence that "invisible" workers disproportionately vote.

I think the article makes a very questionable—and unnecessary—connection to electoral politics: "A sense of feeling invisible clearly animates working-class rage in many countries, and may have powered Donald Trump to victory in the US presidential election last fall." Note the weasel words "may have", as well as the vague, unsupported "clearly animates" claim, which I would dispute. Although Trump did try to appeal to the working class in several ways, I don't recall him ever discussing the issue of depersonalization, the subject of the article. What do immigration and tariffs, for example, have to do with depersonalization?
by svnt | 2025-06-20 12:36:36+00:00
Reasoning is one information-processing process, performed by humans, with bounds on what it can accomplish. It works in a limited context and is inherently incomplete and imperfect. Other non-logical processes, emergent processes, parallel processes such as evolution, process information in ways reasoning cannot. It perhaps should not be surprising that we may have internal systems of understanding that follow these principles, instead of only those of logic or reasoning.

Reasoning from first principles cannot span very far in reality, as for starters the complexity of the argument quickly overwhelms our capacity for it. Its numerous other limits have been well-documented.

Logicomix, Gödel Escher Bach are some common entry points.
by kkoncevicius | 2025-06-20 12:36:42+00:00
I think there is a general over-emphasis on DNA. There is no process in nature that builds a cell out of DNA. Instead DNA is just part of the cell and the cell can slice-and-dice its own DNA however it wants. Neutrophils even throw their DNA outside of the cell in order to build traps for bacteria.

https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/getting-over-the...
by Apreche | 2025-06-20 12:37:01+00:00
I’ve been thinking lately about one impact of technology that may have been overlooked.

Nowadays if someone has a free moment, they have their phone to occupy their mind. I lived in a time before phones. What did we used to do with free moments? Sometimes we had reading material available. Sometimes we would day dream. Sometimes we would just think and introspect about ourselves. Sometimes we would carefully observe the world around us looking for anything interesting.

And sometimes we would attempt to socialize with whatever person happened to be nearby, even a complete stranger.

I don’t have any evidence or studies or anything. But I am beginning to wonder if there is a hidden consequence not from people are doing with the technology, but from what people are no longer doing because they are looking at their phone instead.
by talkingtab | 2025-06-20 12:37:04+00:00
An accurate diagnosis of a problem is crucial. The problem addressed here is real. The diagnosis is wrong. Big Tech enables the problem and certainly is associated with it. Societies rely on "messaging" to adapt. When messaging is broken, so is the society. The messaging in our social societies is now driven by targeted "advertising". Or more accurately propaganda: "communication that is primarily used to influence or persuade".

And certainly the big tech (here's looking at you Google and FaceBook et al) business model is propaganda. As is the business model of the Washington Post (here's looking at you Jeff Bezos) and the New York Times.

If the messaging in a society is used to persuade rather than listen things break. A simplistic model of is social insects. If ants can't leave a pheromone trail, or if some ants lead misleading trails, the colony will die. It will not be able to adapt.

Breaking up big tech is appealing, but it does not change the fact that we now "live" in the internet and that the current internet is a gigantic propaganda machine.
by Ar-Curunir | 2025-06-20 12:38:00+00:00
There is little ideological overlap between rationalists and Rust folks (and thank god for that). IME unlike the rationalists, Rust has actually done something useful for the world, and HN’s opinion of Rust and its community has drastically improved over the last decade.

The rationalists have not had any such clearly positive effects, and rather their adherents (Thiel, Vance, etc) have had severely deleterious effects on society.

There is no comparison between the two communities.
by ordu | 2025-06-20 12:38:35+00:00
You'll get mental issues if you sleep under a bridge for a while. You see, homelessness is a very low-status existence. Hormone levels mirror it and make your mind to be low-status. It changes your behavior in perceptible ways. Like a position of leadership changes a personality of people by adjusting their hormone levels, so a position of low-status omega do.

It doesn't mean that it is impossible to fight it and to stop being homeless, but the longer you are homeless, the closer you to a mind state where you don't feel that you have any human rights, including the right to exist. So it becomes harder with time passed. And if you were not a kind of a person that had spent years meditating and had reached enlightenment, resolving all of small psychological issues that everyone have, then your smallest psychological issues will become big and you will have mental issues.

Of course, there are still a lot of people who manage to fight homelessness despite of odds, and there are a lot of people who had become homelessness because of their mental issues, but at the same time there are a lot of homeless people who have mental issues because they became homeless at some point and didn't manage to get their place in the first year or so.
by skywhopper | 2025-06-20 12:38:51+00:00
Many of the people involved in the history of Linux (and most software) are jerks, but when people dig up a “this jerk blocked X for 25 years” story, we aren’t seeing the 100s of other (mostly bad) ideas that same jerk also blocked that would have changed things in other ways (possibly for the worse).

My point being, not that the person isn’t a jerk or that the decision wasn’t wrong, but that one error by one jerk doesn’t tell us much.
by lifestyleguru | 2025-06-20 12:38:54+00:00
It's universal problem everywhere where you pay with dollars and euros. The jobs are not where the housing is. Where the jobs exist the housing immediately becomes a turbo investment vehicle. Where there are no jobs the housing is not particularly cheap either. The solution usually is to inherit a real estate or two in desirable location. So we continue ignoring it or everyone are like "I have mine, fuck you"?
by MarkusWandel | 2025-06-20 12:39:53+00:00
Once upon a time - an era that was already ending when I was young - there were also a lot of service workers. The mailman, the milkman, the ice man, the coal delivery man (not being sexist here, these were the terms then in use), the newspaper boy, it goes on and on. Were they treated any differently by their customers?

And yet, more integrated into society weren't they. Rich or poor, you had your social clubs, your church scene, your neighbourhood contacts. You had to, since you didn't have TV or internet.
by circadian | 2025-06-20 12:40:32+00:00
Very glad to see a tutorial like this. Make is something I've used relentlessly because it just works, but I know I'm missing out a lot more that it can help with because of my feeling that the docs are inaccessible. Knowing that this is here waiting for the day when a project calls for something just a little more means I won't bloat out my development workflow. Something a little more friendly than the make docs themselves lowers the barrier for me, nice one! :)
by nxobject | 2025-06-20 12:40:36+00:00
Perfect - it works! Yes, I’m glad for all the time you’ve spent on this project: one of my ulterior goals is to make technical documentation for old systems and their programming environments accessible to LLMs, so that programming in retro computing can benefit from the advances in productivity that modern languages have. I’m sure you’ll find plenty of other user stories like that :)
by loudmax | 2025-06-20 12:40:59+00:00
Programmers aren't deterministic either. If I ask ten programmers to come up with a solution to the same problem, I'm not likely to get ten identical copies. Different programmers, even competent experienced programmers, might have different priorities that aren't in the requirements. For example, trading off program maintainability or portability over performance.

The same could apply to LLMs, or even different runs from the same LLMs.
by TeMPOraL | 2025-06-20 12:40:59+00:00
Yes, but making it more nuanced still doesn't change the point.

Singularity obviously never happened before, and if anyone bothered to read up on what they're talking about, they'd realize that no one is trying to predict what happens then, because the singularity is defined as the time when changes accelerate to such a degree that we have no baseline to make any predictions whatsoever.

So when people speculate on when that is, they're trying to forecast the point forecasting breaks; they do it by extrapolating from known examples and trends, to which we do have baselines.

Or, in short: we know how it is to ride an exponent, we just never rode one long enough to fall off of it; predicting singularity is predicting when the exponent gets steep enough we can't follow, which is not unlike predicting any other trend people do. Same methods and caveats apply.
by karlperera | 2025-06-20 12:41:17+00:00
The technology itself is absolutely incredible. The potential for people who have lost the ability to speak, for instance those with locked-in syndrome, is a monumental leap forward and a huge humanitarian win.

But on the other hand, this feels like we're crossing a major ethical boundary into "pre-crime" or thought-policing territory. We've always taken for granted that our thoughts are the one truly private place. If a non-invasive scanner can pull the "gist" of your thoughts, even if it's imperfect now, what does this look like in 10 years?

What kind of legal or societal safeguards are even possible to prevent the misuse of this? This seems like a technology where we need to have the ethical conversation before it's perfected, not after.
by lightedman | 2025-06-20 12:41:20+00:00
"How can you possibly guarantee output using purely voltage control of an LED?"

They don't tend to emit much heat when underdriven using voltage control because they can't pass high amounts of current at low voltage. Run an LED from 2.4-2.7V in discrete hundredths of a volt steps. You can get almost nothing to getting close to drawing 50mA doing discrete steps like this. This is how we also characterize and bin LEDs. As long as the LED is on a thermal mass, it isn't going anywhere near thermal runaway.

I've done this for almost 2 decades, now.
by ty6853 | 2025-06-20 12:41:43+00:00
That works as long as they don't strip out all the copper wiring, appliances, doors, windows, and anything else of value either because of drugs or some other unmet real need or other issues that come up when inevitably they can't be monitored 24/7. Which probably will only happen sometimes, but it only takes a few to destroy the whole program due to the sky high cost of construction in the US.

You probably need some buy in, like have the homeless people go into a wood with an axe and build their own cabin. Then it's all their own labor if they lose it.
by stego-tech | 2025-06-20 12:42:47+00:00
This is something I absolutely loathe about modern technology and its uses. We have grand power and potential to solve so many societal ills, and yet our grandest achievements are repeatedly used not to better humanity, but to enrich a monied minority that views humans as disposably inconvenient, human interaction a luxury to be savored rather than a baseline expectation.

We replaced branch offices with call centers, then outsourced them to people we will never see and cannot relate to in a foreign land. Then we replaced them with chatbots and TTS, anything to reduce support times and save more money for those at the top.

We built out infrastructure that met our needs and revolutionized how we worked. We did this on-site, with glorious rooms of consoles and equipment that, while fragile, were also impressive to behold. Then leadership got on a treadmill of “also needs”, bolting on new kit of questionable value, outsourcing expensive jobs abroad or to contracting firms. As internal knowledge dried up, it became easier to embrace the perpetual bullshit machine demanding you adopt ERP as a medium-sized business, demanding you hoard data, demanding you surrender sovereignty to “the cloud”, to embrace per-second billing over amortization schedules. Fewer humans in the loop, knowing the business, understanding its needs. Just some guy at the top slapping their name over a Gartner or Big Three report before sending it to the board.

And now in this “age of AI”, the attack continues at record pace. Gone are the people who know and understand your code, replaced by chatbots who can only predict what they’ve already seen. Gone are the developers, the engineers, the architects, replaced with armies of temps and contractors who aren’t allowed to engage with the workers or incentivized to solve a problem, but merely meet arbitrary KPIs decided by algorithms they had no say over.

Robots are meting out punishments to gig workers, our devices spy on us to send data to companies hostile to our existence as consumers, with products designed to break but never be repaired, sold by stores online with no human interaction for questions or to identify flaws.

We have allowed a system to be built that does nothing to improve the daily lives of the average human anymore. These “innovations” do not drive meaningful growth in a majority of businesses. New technologies are little more than checkboxes to be met rather than profound improvements in processes or automation to enable leisure.

We let this happen. We can also choose - at any time we want - to stop.
Show HN: Cartesian vs. Sparse Merkle Trees – faster treap-based design in Go
by rafaelescrich | 2025-06-20 12:42:57+00:00
I built a treap-style "Cartesian Merkle Tree" (CMT) in Go and benchmarked it against a classic Sparse Merkle Tree (SMT). Key results: * SHA-256: CMT ~40 % faster gets, ~30 % faster removes * SHA3-256: CMT ~67 % faster gets, ~47 % faster removes * Thread-safe, SHA-256/SHA3-256, full tests & bench suite Source + benches: https://github.com/rafaelescrich/cartesian-sparse-merkle-tre... Feedback welcome!
by leeter | 2025-06-20 12:43:18+00:00
> but practically useable operating systems in the traditional sense of abstracting away real hardware can still be counted on one hand.

I think this is telling. There are plenty of 'standards' for interfaces in the hardware world. Some (mostly USB) are even 'followed', but the realities of hardware are that it never behaves nominally. So without someone willing to spend the time writing code to handle the quirks that can't be patched out and the errata it's very hard to run on physical hardware with any performance or support.
by randomcarbloke | 2025-06-20 12:43:56+00:00
If you spend your own money sure why not, I couldn't agree more, but it's the taxpayer's.

This very same individual was until recently trying to highlight frivolous government spending, surprisingly coming up short, obviously it'd be very cynical of me to suggest even a hint of hypocrisy let alone a conflict of interest so I'll leave it.
by skywhopper | 2025-06-20 12:43:58+00:00
It’s not at all. As a counter-example, in the 00s, open source rapidly coalesced to using git, which has been so incredibly successful that it has now been adopted for many private corporate proprietary software repositories as well.

I don’t think you can take a general lesson from any particular example here. Coordination of complex systems among thousands of competing and cooperative components is very hard and unpredictable, and why things happen depends on random events and personalities in ways that are not generalizable.
Show HN: Byethrow – Tree-shakable, function-based Result type for TypeScript
by karibash | 2025-06-20 12:44:07+00:00
I built byethrow to offer a lightweight, function-based alternative to neverthrow for handling errors in TypeScript using a Result<T, E> pattern.

While I appreciated neverthrow's explicit error handling model, I ran into a few issues:

- It's not actively maintained (many PRs left open)

- It requires different APIs for sync and async results

- It's class-based, making results harder to serialize

byethrow takes a different approach:

- Plain-object based (no classes)

- Unified API for both sync and async values

- Tree-shakable and minimal

- No third-party dependencies

I'd love feedback—especially from other TS developers who've used neverthrow, fp-ts, or similar libraries!