MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by strcat | 2025-06-07 14:18:31+00:00
Our web installer is more safer and easier to use than Google's web installer which doesn't include important checks or information. Making a fancy wizard interface instead of having it as buttons integrated into a page is more aesthetically pleasing, but doesn't make it easier. The reason we include a bunch of information is to provide all the necessary information to work around every common issue people run into instead of them needing help.

If the web install guide only had to cover installing from macOS, ChromeOS and Android, it would be significantly simpler. Most of the complexity in the install guide is to work around issues with desktop Linux distributions.
by lisper | 2025-06-07 14:18:33+00:00
I have a patent on a faster-than-light communications system:

https://patents.google.com/patent/US7126691B2/en

Obviously it doesn't actually work. I submitted the application as an experiment to see how hard it would be to sneak this past the patent office. The answer turns out to be: not hard at all. In fact, there's pretty much an algorithm for it:

1. Write up a half-assed patent application.

2. Submit it and wait for it to be rejected (which it almost certainly will be).

3. Read the rejection notice and tweak the application to address every individual point that was made.

4. Go to step 2. Repeat until the patent office capitulates and issues your patent.

In my experience (my name is on six patents) has never been necessary to do more than one iteration.

The reason this works is that the patent office is required by law to give specific reasons for rejecting a patent application. They are not allowed to simply say, "This is obviously stupid." If they see that you are going to persist, it's a lot easier for them to just give you the damn patent (it's no skin off their nose) than to keep doing your homework for you.

With AI, following this procedure becomes borderline trivial. In fact, I'm a little surprised that the patent office isn't being overwhelmed by AI-generated patent applications. (Or maybe they are and it just hasn't made it into my news feed.)
by bgwalter | 2025-06-07 14:19:26+00:00
Calling someone a "disagreeable asshole" just for saying that something is a dumb question is a bit strong. So he went out for challenging management on an internal document and he was 100% correct according to that tweet.

Seems to me that the actual assholes are still employed in that company. Perhaps he was just hired to fix the mess. Once the job was done, he was no longer needed.
by MontyCarloHall | 2025-06-07 14:19:47+00:00
The sentiment of the title is reflected in this comment [0] from a few hours ago:

We use so much AI in production every day but nobody notices because as soon as a technology becomes useful, we stop calling it AI. Then it’s suddenly “just face recognition” or “just product recommendations” or “just [plane] autopilot” or “just adaptive cruise control” etc

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44207603
by pfdietz | 2025-06-07 14:20:07+00:00
There's a related technology that creates downdrafts by cooling air. In a region with warm air near cold water (like, say, Los Angeles, with cold ocean water), injection of the water at the top of a large tower can cool the air, causing it to descend.

This was proposed to be used, again in Los Angeles, as a way to not only generate power (via turbines at the bottom of large hyperboloidal towers) but also clean pollutants from the air. I don't think it ever went anywhere (probably too expensive) but it would work at least in principle.
by lylejantzi3rd | 2025-06-07 14:20:12+00:00
I'm surprised nobody's talking about the hireability of FE vs BE engineers. The specialist vs generalist debate has been raging on for multiple decades now and the general conclusion is that only early stage startups hire generalists. Everybody else wants a specialist.

I'll go one farther: nobody hires senior FE engineers.

FE is perceived as having a lower skill ceiling than BE[0]. I rarely see an FE position (or a "senior" FE position) require more than 3 years of experience. And can you blame them when FE technologies churn so much faster than BE ones? It's still fairly common to have a decade old Java backend running against an equally old postgresql database. Who still runs jquery (other than levelsio)?

[0]: I do not agree with this, but it's a common perception.
by carefulfungi | 2025-06-07 14:20:24+00:00
For most projects (that don't comprehensively review their entire dependency graph's codebases), whether you started with foobar-1.0.1 or foobar-1.0.2 is just a coincidence of timing. They downloaded whatever the current version was when first needing foobar. Selecting 1.0.1 with little review but then declaring that all upgrades deserve deep review is a contradiction. I think it is this contradiction that leads people to auto-update dependencies.

The problem isn't the auto-merging 1.0.2 - it's the lack of attestation in the PR that appears to be code from the foobar authors who were trusted in version 1.0.1.
by clbrmbr | 2025-06-07 14:20:30+00:00
Fascinating reading the section about why the 1980s AI industry stumbled. The Moore’s law reasoning is that the early AI machines used custom processors which were commoditized. This time around we really are using general purpose compute though. Maybe there’s an analogy to open weight models but it’s a stretch.

Also the section on hype is informative, but I really see (ofc writing this from peak hype) a difference this time around. I fund $1000 in Claude Code Opus 4 for my top developers over the course of this month, and I really do expect to get >$1000 worth of more work output. Probably scales to $1000/dev before we hit diminishing returns.

Would be fun to write a 2029 version of this, with the assumption that we see a similar crash as happened in ~87 but in ~27. What would some possible stumbling reasons be this time around?
by antisol | 2025-06-07 14:21:18+00:00
> Though signs point to this person not being a good mainainer

I don't know about that. If you read through the whole issue which was linked, you'll see the guy was quite responsive, fixed the issue very quickly, and gave a reasonable explanation as to the cause of the issue.

> Maybe this is needed to get into a long term better place though.

Yeah, agreed.

I think a separate repo/branch seems like a good place for him to do his work, so he doesn't have to mess with the core repo and has no chance of breaking anything.

I do sympathise with the X maintainers - 1500 commits is a lot to try to keep up with, particularly if you're not very interested in maintaining the thing. I feel like doing the stuff he's doing as a ton of PRs might be a mistake - a separate branch and a couple of huge PRs might have been a better approach.

Maybe he'll be able to make some progress and improvements. That would be cool.

I guess we'll see.
by e3bc54b2 | 2025-06-07 14:21:36+00:00
Nix cache (cache.nixos.org) does in fact maintain older versions[0]. In fact, they maintain so much older stuff (binaries and associated source), that they are used in both research[1][2] and are having issues with gigantic cache size[3][4].

And yes, their reasoning implies NIH and just unfamiliarity combined with unwillingness to really understand Nix.

[0]: https://discourse.nixos.org/t/how-long-is-binary-cache-kept-...

[1]: https://hal.science/hal-04913007

[2]: https://luj.fr/blog/is-nixos-truly-reproducible.html

[3]: https://discourse.nixos.org/t/nixos-foundations-financial-su...

[4]: https://discourse.nixos.org/t/the-nixos-foundations-call-to-...
by akoboldfrying | 2025-06-07 14:22:05+00:00
> pop culture conceptions of the Turing test are usually much weaker than what the paper actually proposes

I've just read the 1950 paper "Computing Machinery and Intelligence" [1], in which Turing proposes his "Imitation Game" (what's now known as a "Turing Test"), and I think your claim is very misleading.

The "Imitation Game" proposed in the paper is a test that involves one human examiner and two examinees, one being a human and the other a computer, both of which are trying to persuade the examiner that they are the real human; the examiner is charged with deciding which is which. The popular understanding of "Turing Test" involves a human examiner and just one examinee, which is either a human or a computer, and the test is to see whether the examiner can tell.

These are not identical tests -- but if both the real human examinee and the human examiner in Turing's original test are rational (trying to maximise their success rate), and each have the same expectations for how real humans behave, then the examiner would give the same answer for both forms of the test.

Aside: The bulk of this 28-page paper anticipates possible objections to his "Imitation Game" as a worthwhile alternative to the original question "Can machines think?", including a theological argument and an argument based on the existence of extra-sensory perception (ESP), which he takes seriously as it was apparently strongly supported by experimental data at that time. It also cites Helen Keller as an example of how learning can be achieved through any mechanism that permits bidirectional communication between teacher and student, and on p. 457 anticipates reinforcement learning:

> We normally associate punishments and rewards with the teaching process. Some simple child-machines can be constructed or programmed on this sort of principle. The machine has to be so constructed that events which shortly preceded the occurrence of a punishment-signal are unlikely to be repeated, whereas a reward-signal increased the probability of repetition of the events which led up to it.

[1]: https://archive.org/details/MIND--COMPUTING-MACHINERY-AND-IN...
by z3ugma | 2025-06-07 14:22:31+00:00
"Dear Nest Learning Thermostat owner,

We want to make you aware of some upcoming changes that will impact our earliest generation thermostats, including those at Your House. Starting October 25, 2025, Google will no longer provide support for the Nest Learning Thermostat (1st gen) launched in 2011 and Nest Learning Thermostat (2nd gen) launched in 2012.

You will still be able to access temperature, mode, schedules, and settings directly on the thermostat – and existing schedules should continue to work uninterrupted. However, these thermostats will no longer receive software or security updates, will not have any Nest app or Home app controls, and will end support for other connected features like Home/Away Assist. See more details at our support website."
by sschueller | 2025-06-07 14:22:45+00:00
I don't understand this. It's a Boeing. If the president wants this specific interior and size of a plane he could just purchase one directly from Boeing and retrofit it saving the whole "search for bugs" part.

Of course the largest issue is that you can't just retrofit a new Boeing with all the crap that is in the current air force one. All the radar stuff and missile defense isn't something a regular Boeing is designed for and that is also why the new AF1 that is in the works takes so long.

My prediction is that this plane will sit for 4 years and then go to trump but not without wasting millions in planning how to retrofit the plane.

IMO the president should have a 40 container he can put in what he wants and then be transported in that in either a C-17 or a C-5...
by goodthink | 2025-06-07 14:23:06+00:00
If you ask me, React and Typescript is responsible for the enshittification of web development (as well as the plethora of other kludges upon kludges of bundlers and compilers). And since you can't get jobs using them anymore maybe its time to look at something actually - modern? https://newspeaklanguage.org is sublime. Give it a try. Enjoy web dev again. (0n the other hand, i feel completely alienated by using it since no else does :)
by avhz | 2025-06-07 14:23:28+00:00
I scratched together a new package called RS for R (via Rust) that provides a relatively simple OOP implementation, and it is currently the fastest R classes option available (that I am aware of).

If you're interested in Rust and/or R programming I'd love to hear your thoughts/criticisms/suggestions, and issues/PRs are definitely welcome. It's still very early stages with things I need to add and iron out.
by millzlane | 2025-06-07 14:23:53+00:00
It's not my <insert company name>. Has been my mantra lately. If I mention that a quarterly update cycle for mission critical software is too long in the context of security and the desktop enginners don't agree...I just repeat my mantra. I did recently develop a fix to a stupid bug a company said was working as expected. So I don't always stick to the mantra. But I'll disagree once. But then I commit to whatever management wants no matter how boneheaded. They're smart enough to see their dumb idea failed without me rubbing their noses in it.
by dekkers | 2025-06-07 14:23:56+00:00
Yes, they release particles in your body and this seem to cause issues for at least some people. But if there is a long time span between getting the implant and chronic health issues appearing I don't think people will be able to pinpoint that titanium implants might be the cause.

There are limited publications about the possible effect of titanium implants, for example https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30174768/
by Zambyte | 2025-06-07 14:25:25+00:00
FWIW Zig has error handling that is nearly semantically identical to Go (errors as return values, the big semantic difference being tagged unions instead of multiple return values for errors), but wraps the `if err != nil { return err}` pattern in a single `try` keyword. That's the verbosity that I see people usually complaining about in Go, and Zig addresses it.
by hedora | 2025-06-07 14:25:50+00:00
California also has easily solvable housing, education, transportation and mental health crises that are entirely driven by mismanagement by the state government. They haven’t done anything meaningful to address these issues in 25-40 years depending on the issue.

Heck, they ignored the water crisis for twenty years, and what they’re doing now for aquifer replenishment is still less than what makes sense.

I say they are easily addressed because simply reverting to California’s policies from ~ 1975 would greatly improve the current situation.
by pombreda | 2025-06-07 14:28:04+00:00
You wrote:

> It's just a single line of text might not be enough to encode build configurations.

that's the tough part, and IMHO outside of PURL? ... Note that for C/C++ code ... @alcroito mentions cps in the same comment page at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44196246 ... and a quick glance is that this attempts to capture these details may be?

So it could be a happy combo?
by snapplebobapple | 2025-06-07 14:28:22+00:00
This might get turned on its head in a couple years. Some new research just came out on combining incretin based therapies (ie semaglutide) with myostatin blockers (in this case trevogrumab and garetosmab) and the monkey lost a crap load of fat while also putting on muscle mass. It's a hell of a time to be a monkey, hopefully it translates into a hell of a time to be a human in a few years. Also, I would like some samples of whatever substance the guys naming these drugs are consuming. Whatever it is, they are wasting it on naming drugs when they should be using it to write science fiction.
by runningmike | 2025-06-07 14:28:35+00:00
“ a federated and independent repository of trusted plugins and themes for web hosts, commercial plugin and tool developers in the WordPress ecosystem and end users.” The goal of this project is blurred. They want to move away from WP and allow commercial plug-ins. Both are very hard to accomplish. Forking WP and build a community was more transparant and easier to do. Since WP is gpl , there has for a long time been too many violations by commercial plugin sellers. You can sell your plug-in, but you must apply with the gpl terms. So release all the code. Too many plugins are malware, since code is loaded by an api call. No trust, no security and no privacy.
by hulitu | 2025-06-07 14:28:35+00:00
> office worker that want get the job done

Then why the fsck gets in my way ? Why 1px borders when i have to resize windows ? Why no place on the titlebar when one can click and drag on second monitor ? Why the stupid taskbar where some windows are hidden and others not. Why the stupid alt-tab where it rearanges the window stack ? Why ?
by vrm | 2025-06-07 14:29:20+00:00
I definitely see different prompts based on what I'm doing in the app. As we mentioned there are different prompts for if you're asking questions, doing Cmd-K edits, working in the shell, etc. I'd also imagine that they customize the prompt by model (unobserved here, but we can also customize per-model using TensorZero and A/B test).
by setheron | 2025-06-07 14:30:56+00:00
Nix gives you a commit guarantee rather than arbitrary versions. You're going to put yourself in a bad time when you have edge cases: glibc changes or conflicting shared libraries.

It sounds like it's a little bit too late, but I'm happy to provide some consulting on how you can get it to work idiomatically with Nix.

Product looks cool!
by _xerces_ | 2025-06-07 14:31:58+00:00
I was taking taurine 1000 mg per day but stopped when I heard a plausible link to colon cancer. Having a strong family history, it wasn't worth the risk.

Eagerly awaiting the results of this trial: https://ascopubs.org/doi/10.1200/JCO.2024.42.16_suppl.TPS363...

Uncertain though how they will separate the effects of the taurine from all the other stuff including sugar that is contained in energy drinks.

I think this is a hard theory to pin down as it might depend on how much taurine producing bacteria an individual has in their gut B. wadsworthia, so two people could have very different outcomes while taking the same amount of taurine.
by extraduder_ire | 2025-06-07 14:32:26+00:00
Above ground level, and above sea level are two easily confusable ways of reporting altitude. Reporting a value above sea level on ADSB so that it doesn't change is probably the right thing to do, especially since airfields report their local pressure and have their elevation recorded.

Expecting every runway to be above sea level is another falsehood. AMS has runways 3 meters below sea level, and I'm sure there's even lower ones on the east side of Africa.
by rmccue | 2025-06-07 14:32:38+00:00
The contributors who worked on this project (including myself - I'm one of the TSC co-chairs) are very familiar with the internals of WordPress - we were the ones who wrote them :)

Blocking the way that FAIR works would break the way that premium plugins work, which would break a huge amount of the ecosystem, so we think it's unlikely - WordPress core would need to be patched.
by lapcat | 2025-06-07 14:33:11+00:00
> Elon saying it can only gain him favor with liberals.

This is absurd. Musk has already completely burned his bridges with Democrats. There's no going back. Making some petty insult against Trump, reminiscent of the "pedo guy" comment, isn't going to magically switch people from protesting and actually defacing Teslas to buying them.
by crazydoggers | 2025-06-07 14:33:48+00:00
If I were on the board / an investor of the company, I’d let the managers go and hire back that engineer.

The goal of a company is to serve its customers and make a profit, not stroke managements egos.

And it sounds more like this guy pointed out what was wrong and maybe embarrassed people, but that doesn’t make him an asshole. It’s one thing to be mean or call people names, that’s an asshole. But this guy was an “asshole” because he was right and it embarrassed people? I’ve seen the type of management that is so insecure they can’t be pointed out what they are doing wrong, sounds more like what happened here.

A good company has management that has a thick skin and acknowledges its missteps and raises up talent. If you can’t admit an employee “lower” than you can point out your flaws and give you criticism, then you’re the problem.
by more_corn | 2025-06-07 14:33:49+00:00
Telling the interviewer that his first question is stupid is a sign of a disagreeable asshole. Now granted, you can push back about questions irrelevant to the job but asking candidate for a data engineering role a MySQL question is fair game. And even if it were irrelevant you’d want to frame it better. I’ve pushed back twice. Once the interviewer apologized (you’re right that’s not really relevant to the role) the other time the interviewer was playing tech bingo and we simultaneously invalidated each other.
by Ray20 | 2025-06-07 14:34:50+00:00
The problem with plastic is not that nothing can be done with it after disposal, the problem with plastic is that it harms the environment during use.

There is no problem with the fact that a plastic bag does not deteriorate for thousands of years after use: you just throw it in the trash, and it lies in a pile of garbage for thousands of years, absolutely harmless and with a near-zero impact on the environment (because the areas of garbage dumps are tiny both relative to the environment and relative to other human impacts on the environment)

Propaganda about the harm of plastic bags is designed for complete idiots, whose idiocy borders on a clinical diagnosis.

The real problem is with other products of plastic, which break down while in use, polluting the water and air with microparticles.

Car tires, synthetic fabrics, paints and paint coatings and various exterior finishes, sidings and so on. All of this, even with the slightest wear, whether from mechanics or ultraviolet radiation, pollutes the environment throughout the entire use.

Against this problem, plastic bags are completely harmless even if we start using them ten times more and throwing them away ten times more often. And this problem cannot be solved by changing the method of disposal or recycling. Only by stopping the use.

The fight against plastic bags and all this stuff about recycling plastic is literally a joke how drunk man searching for something under the streetlight that he lost somewhere else in the park. Only he searches for it at someone else's expense, actively spending the allocated funds on alcohol and large-scale media projects on the need and importance of the search under the streetlight
by solardev | 2025-06-07 14:34:52+00:00
Lol, I guess this is what happens when two assholes surround themselves with sycophantic yes-men for far too long.

Nobody taught them how to play nice. I've met eight year olds with more civility and maturity than those two...

Oh well. Reminds me of that Alien vs Predator movie: Whoever wins, we lose.
by archerx | 2025-06-07 14:35:05+00:00
There is so much code on github and all the other repos that it can compare with the amount of art that is out there. Also all of your Javascript code is public once your site is published.

There is nothing stopping artists from using A.I. to improve their work. The sketch to image work flows are great, the variation work flows can save from the tedium and inpainting can help fix and improve images.

Text to image is lazy and is the cause of most of the slop but no one is saying artist should replace their Wacom tablets with text prompts. I feel like there is a lot of hurt egos going on. I remember back in the day on CGtalk, there was so much elitism and in hindsight it probably held a lot of people back, myself included.
by epistasis | 2025-06-07 14:35:08+00:00
When described from 10,000 feet, I could almost believe this. If Musk were smart he might be doing something like this on the route to rehabilitating his image with customers.

But the particulars on the ground show that Musk is not smart, just vindictive, power-hungry, petulant, and childish. He literally posted that he would decommission Dragon because of Trump's threat, which was stupid in intent and stupid in potential negotiating effect on Trump (Trump does not know what Dragon is and does not care):

https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2025/06/05/musk-trump-spacex-dragon...