MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by rustcleaner | 2025-06-03 17:58:47+00:00
>I think the real issue with GUIs: You have technical people building something (mostly) for non-technical people.

As a disgruntled power user, I think we have more of the exact opposite problem: the 'common denominator' users are driving interfare development toward oversimplicity. We have good software which continually undergoes translation into the GUI-equivalent of New-Speak. No please, I beg of you: don't spuritually reduce your program to some singular green [GO!] button! KDE 3.5 > 4+, GNOME 2 > 3+. Mozilla with a long habit of option removal (rivaled by GNOME project). If today's interface designers were in control 60 years ago, we would never have the Unix paradigm (it would be "too complicated" lol).

There should be a bit of elitism in this. Some things are hard to do, not all software should turn all hard things into 'easy', 'simplified', singular [GO!] buttons.
by kbolino | 2025-06-03 17:59:13+00:00
It's an interesting idea. Right now, you can do something like this:

res := someFunc() // func() any switch v := res.(type) { case error: // handle error case T: // handle result default: panic("unexpected type!") }

Then, presumably, a T|error sum type would be a specialization of the any type that would allow you to safely eliminate the default arm of the switch statement (or so I would like to think -- but the zero value issue rears its ugly head here too). Personally, I'd also like to see a refinement of type switches, to allow different variable names for each arm, resulting in something like the following hypothetical syntax:

switch someFunc().(type) { case err := error: // handle error case res := T: // handle result }

However, there's no real syntactic benefit for error handling to be found here. I like it (I want discriminated unions too), but it's really tangential to the problem. I'd honestly prefer it more for other purposes than errors.
by starlust2 | 2025-06-03 17:59:32+00:00
A big challenge is that programmers all have unique ever changing personal style and vision that they've never had to communicate before. As well they generally "bikeshed" and add undefined unrequested requirements, because you know someday we might need to support 10000x more users than we have. This is all well and good when the programmer implements something themselves but falls apart when it must be communicated to an LLM. Most projects/systems/orgs don't have the necessary level of detail in their documentation, documentation is fragmented across git/jira/confluence/etc/etc/etc., and it's a hodge podge of technologies without a semblance of consistency.

I think we'll find that over the next few years the first really big win will be AI tearing down the mountain of tech & documentation debt. Bringing efficiency to corporate knowledge is likely a key element to AI working within them.
by ben_w | 2025-06-03 17:59:35+00:00
Unless they arrest Farage ;P

More seriously, don't trust that Farage wants free speech, he's opposed to the Human Rights Act: https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/nigel-farage-human-righ...

Also more seriously, the actual old blasphemy laws (which the article isn't really talking about despite acknowledging their existence) were already de-facto dead before being officially repealed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blasphemy_law_in_the_United_Ki...

Now, should burning a book be a crime? I say no, as long as it's your own book and not part of another crime like "arson" — a "public order offence" is a crime, though one I don't grok because I don't work in law: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Order_Act_1986
by simonw | 2025-06-03 18:00:12+00:00
I think it's pretty counter-productive to default to not trusting anyone under any circumstances.

Having a "disclosures" page on a personal website is a pretty strong quality signal for me - it's inspired me to set a task to add my own.

As with all of these things, the trick is to establish credibility over time. I've been following Geoff for a few years. Given his previous work I think he has integrity and I'm ready to believe his disclosures page.
by jmyeet | 2025-06-03 18:00:21+00:00
Like I said in an earlier comment, there are things about the Texas property tax system I like. But we can't really compare Texas housing to the Bay Area. Texas is flat with low-value land in all directions. The Bay Area is incredibly space-constrained in an earthquake zone.

I'm not defending the largely single-family home zoning of SF here. I'm simply saying that any affordability you get in Austin (which itself isn't really that affordable) is mostly by spreading in all directions, something simply not possible in SF.

If regulation was the core problem, wouldn't Houston [1] defy housing price trends having no zoning regulation? It does not (eg Austin [2]).

> It's the left-wing parties and politicians that stand against supply-side policies informed by this reality.

No, they don't. I'm sorry but you are uninformed here. You are either confusing liberal policies with leftist policies or simply haven't seen a leftist policy or you're confusing opposition to deregulation as being a NIMBY and not understanding why.

[1]: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/ATNHPIUS26420Q

[2]: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/ATNHPIUS12420Q
by ummonk | 2025-06-03 18:00:25+00:00
I'd happily come up with criticisms of any specific proposal and bikeshed it, but any one of these proposals would be preferable to the status quo.

I'd understand if they decided they needed more time to continue iterating on and analyzing proposals to find the right solution, but simply declaring that they'll just suspend the whole effort because they can't come to a consensus is rather infuriating.
by arccy | 2025-06-03 18:01:25+00:00
considering the recent post [1] on system correctness in amazon quoting "In 2014, Yuan et al. found that 92% of catastrophic failures in tested distributed systems were triggered by incorrect handling of nonfatal errors."

perhaps it's a good thing that error handling is so explicit, and treated as a regular code path.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44135638
by bbrubaker | 2025-06-03 18:01:49+00:00
Thanks for the kind words! I do get lots of gratifying positive feedback as well. I don't make a habit of arguing with strangers online, but I felt obliged to correct the record here for anyone who might encounter this later and come away thinking "wow, I can't believe Quanta got it completely backward."

Here on HN people often complain about the level of detail, which is fair! I think they are often falling prey to a common fallacy about conditional probabilities. P("X reads Quanta"|"X has some technical background (college STEM major or more)") is likely larger than it is for most popular science magazine. But P("Y has some technical background"|"Y reads Quanta") is much lower than many people realize. There is a limit on how much technical stuff I can put in an article and still have it be accessible to many of our readers, and I care a lot about making things accessible.
by vedantnair | 2025-06-03 18:02:06+00:00
Managing configs is a pesky infrastructure problem that slows down scaling robotics fleets.

A single robot can have thousands of configuration parameters, many of which are custom, based on factors such as the customer site, hardware version, etc. This makes it difficult to manage which configs belong on which robot, version them globally (while maintaining sanity for local edits), and deploy them to your device.

In this blog, I wrote about the challenges teams have faced with config management and how we’ve designed Miru to solve them.
by UncleOxidant | 2025-06-03 18:02:09+00:00
> or costly (jammers,

Are jammers really that costly?

Also spoofers that could take over a drone - not sure how much encryption is used in most of these off-the-shelf drones, but it would seem like it wouldn't be too difficult to create a Flipper Zero-type device that could spoof the codes used between controller and drone.
by us-merul | 2025-06-03 18:02:11+00:00
Thanks for your response. Getting feedback like "hot or cold" in the algorithm's mind is exactly what I'm thinking of. It's a tricky issue and reminds me a lot of this: https://www.datcreativity.com/

I had tried hard to pick a set of fairly simple words, thinking I had an intricately unique association in my head, only to find out that the reported connections were nothing more than average. My partner obviously landed in an extremely high percentile by instantly picking the first words that came to her without much thought.
by dabockster | 2025-06-03 18:02:11+00:00
Hahaha I wrote that literally 1/2 a decade ago now! I was referring to stuff like Dribbble, Deviantart, and others before they required account signups everywhere.

Devs aren’t usually the best UX people and end up making great code but with menus and radio buttons everywhere, and UX people aren’t necessarily devs. And, at the time, I noticed there was a disconnect. So I figured I’d encourage people more to meet in the middle.

But, again, that was only a few months before the Covid lockdowns. I think the advice still rings true, but with all the tech layoffs happening I think our field is becoming really lost overall lately. We seem to have based way too much of our self identities on our day jobs, and obviously lost those identities when people got laid off or fired.

(And I should really update that bio for 2025 now that I’m back more regularly.)
by bko | 2025-06-03 18:02:17+00:00
I don't know if thousands are being arrested, but I know that I can't rely on what's being reported out there.

A little while ago I was curious if people were actually being arrested for posting mean tweets in the UK so I looked for a fact check (top google result for "fact check arrest mean tweets UK"), and sure enough I was told that an 11 year old was NOT arrested for mean tweets.

But as I read further I was less convinced. An 11 year old boy was arrested for "suspicion of violent disorder" although the fact check didn't elaborate what that was. Then it went on a non-sequester about a different 11 year old boys arrested for arson. Finally it got around to admitting sending grossly offensive, obscene, indecent, or menacing messages on public electronic communication networks is a criminal offence.

Never mind the tweet from West Midlands police bragging about arresting a 12 year old boy. Pretty wild you get this as the top result when you search "fact check arrest mean tweets UK".

https://mleverything.substack.com/p/anatomy-of-a-fact-check

https://x.com/WMPolice/status/1282627004018364416
Show HN: I made a scripting language run in the browser with no HTML
by sinisterMage | 2025-06-03 18:02:22+00:00
Hey HN,

A while back I posted about W++ (a Python-style scripting language that runs on .NET). I couldn’t resist pushing it further, so now… here’s OOPSIEWASM: A (very experimental) way to run W++ in the browser via WebAssembly—with a live playground, real canvas drawing, and (maybe, one day) the dream of replacing HTML.

What’s working:

Write W++ code in your browser and run it instantly (no C#, no JavaScript, no HTML needed)

Call browser canvas APIs from W++ (via externcall)

All running in Blazor WebAssembly

Playground UI is just the start—my final boss goal: “web apps with zero HTML in dev tools”

How hacky is it?

Extremely.

But it’s real, and you can try it!

All code is MIT-licensed and on GitHub.

Link for the showcase video https://github.com/sinisterMage/WPlusPlusPlayground/blob/mai...

Repo: https://github.com/sinisterMage/WPlusPlusPlayground (look for OOPSIEWASM)

Try it out, read the code, ask me anything (including how much C# black magic was needed). I’d love your feedback, ideas, and even wild critiques.
by esafak | 2025-06-03 18:02:41+00:00
This happens because images are the only signal VLMs have, whereas humans distinguish between eyesight and synthetic images. We are not surprised when we see three-legged chicken in a research data set; our priors are weaker for images. If you "saw" one in real life, you'd probably rub your eyes and discount it too.

Try the same experiment on a robot.
by simonw | 2025-06-03 18:02:50+00:00
Their client application (written in Go) is open source: https://github.com/superfly/flyctl

They have a few other notable open source components, I think these two are particularly interesting:

- https://github.com/superfly/corrosion

- https://github.com/superfly/litefs

(Disclosure: they sponsor some of my work.)
by skydhash | 2025-06-03 18:03:13+00:00
You actually don't. In mistakes #52 "Handling an error twice" from the book "100 Go Mistakes and How to Avoid Them" by Teiva Harsanyi, the recommendation is to either return an error to the caller or handle the situation (and maybe logging it). Sometimes you wnat some extra information as to why it's an error, so you wrap it.

Go forces you to be explicit about error handling. Java syntax is not that much better. JavaScript, Kotlin, Swift,... is more about avoiding null pointer exception than proper error handling.
by jes5199 | 2025-06-03 18:03:35+00:00
there's a myth I know where the true Forth enthusiasts end up making their programs so pure that they start needing their own special hardware (in one version, I heard that machine words were all 13 bits), their own networking stack, their own communication apps. Until eventually they transcend into a second internet, populated only by forth hackers, where everything is optimally elegant.

and that's why we don't hear from them anymore
by tuckerman | 2025-06-03 18:03:41+00:00
If you shake things up so much that users who previous dismissed your language are interested, you might also be making a big enough change that your current users look around as well. The pool of prospective new language users is always large but they won’t join a language that is dying because it churned all its existing users and package maintainers.

I say this as someone that gets a very bad taste in my mouth when handling errors in go but use it a fair bit nonetheless.
by hollerith | 2025-06-03 18:04:10+00:00
And the Pentagon likes the B-2 so much that they've developed a successor, the B-21:

"By September 2024, three test aircraft were in service: one performing one or two flight tests per week, and the others involved in ground tests."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northrop_Grumman_B-21_Raider#F....
by Lovesong | 2025-06-03 18:04:49+00:00
>your grandparents probably read for entertainment instead of tiktok

I strongly disagree. Reading books as activity, maybe. It depends on the person too. But reading itself? In this time and age, we are constantly reading, either in your phone ( even most tiktok videos these days have subs for everything ), browsing the web is a constant reading activity, work/email/essays/whatsapp/telegram, completely outweights the amount of text we read/write now comparing it with our older generation.
by ryandrake | 2025-06-03 18:04:49+00:00
> What if 10 neighbors collude and start flying drones over my garden and house, only a few meters above ground or my roof

There are more appropriate legal avenues one can use to curtail harassment, besides blasting away with a firearm.

> What if one of their drones crashes without my doing and hurts _me_?

You can step away and avoid it, or swat it away with a baseball bat, and/or if it hits you, you can sue them for property damage and injury. None of these scenarios require you to fire a deadly weapon into the air.

Honestly, this thread is scary--it reads like a bunch of people yearning to shoot their guns at something and trying desperately to find a wild scenario to justify it.
by Trenthug | 2025-06-03 18:04:57+00:00
Thank you for sharing your perspective—it's an intriguing and poetic framework. However, I find that some of the key terms you use, like “potential” and “existential being,” lack concrete, objective, and exhaustive definitions. The basis of your theory rests on concepts that are not clearly or rigorously defined in a way that can be tested or measured, which makes the framework difficult to evaluate scientifically.

Moreover, mainstream research and empirical evidence strongly suggest that consciousness depends fundamentally on stimuli and interactions with the environment—sensory input and feedback seem essential to sustaining conscious experience.

In contrast, the idea that consciousness arises solely from some kind of self-inflection of an undefined potential feels more metaphysical than scientific at this stage. For a theory to gain traction, its core concepts need to be rigorously defined and connected to measurable phenomena.

I appreciate the boldness of your approach, but I remain cautious about embracing it without clearer operational definitions and empirical support.
by lechatonnoir | 2025-06-03 18:05:08+00:00
I would like to understand how you ideally imagine a person solving issues of this type. I'm for understanding things instead of hacking at them in general, and this tendency increases the more central the things to understand are to the things you like to do. However, it's a point of common agreement that just in the domain of computer-related tech, there is far more to learn than a person can possibly know in a lifetime, and so we all have to make choices about which ones we want to dive into.

I do not expect to go through the process I just described for more than a few hours a year, so I don't think the net loss to my time is huge. I think that the most relevant counterfactual scenario is that I don't learn anything about how these things work at all, and I cope with my problem being unfixed. I don't think this is unusual behavior, to the degree that it's I think a common point of humor among Linux users: https://xkcd.com/963/ https://xkcd.com/456/

This is not to mention issues that are structurally similar (in the sense that search is expensive but verification is cheap, and the issue is generally esoteric so there are reduced returns to learning) but don't necessarily have anything to do with the Linux kernel: https://github.com/electron/electron/issues/42611

I wonder if you're arguing against a strawman that thinks that it's not necessary to learn anything about the basic design/concepts of operating systems at all. I think knowledge of it is fractally deep and you could run into esoterica you don't care about at any level, and as others in the thread have noted, at the very least when you are in the weeds with a problem the LLM can often (not always) be better documentation than the documentation. (Also, I actually think that some engineers do on a practical level need to know extremely little about these things and more power to them, the abstraction is working for them.)

Holding what you learn constant, it's nice to have control about in what order things force you to learn them. Yak-shaving is a phenomenon common enough that we have a term for it, and I don't know that it's virtuous to know how to shave a yak in-depth (or to the extent that it is, some days you are just trying to do something else).
by kbolino | 2025-06-03 18:05:26+00:00
I think it's worth noting that, while the general consensus has converged around (T, error) meaning T XOR error, it does not necessarily mean that. There are some places that violate this assumption, like the io.Reader and io.Writer interfaces. Especially io.Reader, where you can have (n>0, io.EOF), which also isn't even a proper error condition! (This isn't a big problem, though, since you rarely need to directly call Read or Write).
by bakkoting | 2025-06-03 18:05:31+00:00
Both Firefox [0] and Chrome [1] are working on successors which rely on permissions prompts instead of preflight requests.

[0] https://groups.google.com/a/mozilla.org/g/dev-platform/c/B8o...

[1] https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/g/blink-dev/c/CDy8L...
by jchw | 2025-06-03 18:05:31+00:00
This logic mostly only makes sense if your goal is primarily to grow the audience and widen the appeal, though. I think at this stage in the Go programming language's lifespan, that is no longer the goal. If anything, Go has probably started to saturate its own sweet spot in some ways and a lot of complaints reveal a difference in values more than they do opportunity for improvement.

To me, it makes sense for the Go team to focus on improving Go for the vast majority of its users over the opinions of people who don't like it that much in the first place. There's millions of lines of code written in Go and those are going to have to be maintained for many years. Of utmost priority in my mind is making Go code more correct (i.e. By adding tools that can make code more correct-by-construction or eliminate classes of errors. I didn't say concurrency safety, but... some form of correctness checking for code involving mutexes would be really nice, something like gVisor checklocks but better.)

And on that note, if I could pick something to prioritize to add to Go, it would probably be sum types with pattern matching. I don't think it is extremely likely that we will see those, since it's a massive language change that isn't exactly easy to reconcile with what's already here. (e.g. a `Result` type would naturally emerge from the existence of sum types. Maybe that's an improvement, but boy that is a non-trivial change.)
by runako | 2025-06-03 18:05:53+00:00
FWIW I tried the first couple of examples in ChatGPT 4o and couldn't replicate this.

For example: "The animal in the image is a chicken, and it appears to have four legs. However, chickens normally have only two legs. The presence of four legs suggests that the image may have been digitally altered or artificially generated."

I don't have a good explanation for why I got different results.
by kmeisthax | 2025-06-03 18:06:09+00:00
If there aren't any five-legged dogs in your trainset, it's safer[0] to just remember that all dogs are four-legged than to actually recognize and count legs. After all, you might have a few images of dogs in your trainset that are misleading enough to look five-legged (e.g. because a dog is in front of another dog).

Overrepresentation is a different source of bias. That's what gives you, say, image generators that always draw "golden 1970s sci-fi robot" as C3-PO even when given additional instructions to draw something else.

Both of these problems are manifestations of the difference between training and deployment distributions. Ok, I guess you could say that four-legged dogs are "overrepresented" in the training set, but that's because four-legged dogs are also overrepresented in reality. The deployment distribution doesn't have five-legged dogs in it. What we've done is instead concoct an adversarial distribution to force a train/deploy gap where none would exist.

Releasing the vision encoder won't help because weights are opaque. Stochastic gradient descent does not yield functional internal representations[1]; it fills the bucket of parameters with one distribution and one distribution only. We could tell if, say the vision encoder produces identical embeddings for dogs regardless of leg count, or some other counterfactuals; but not much more than that.

[0] Lower loss and possibly lower L2-norm

[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.11581
by dim13 | 2025-06-03 18:06:24+00:00
Hilarious, how an old joke from 2003 is still relevant today.

Please, please, please don't execute it. It will try to wipe you disk.

cat "test... test... test..." | perl -e '$??s:;s:s;;$?::s;;=]=>%-{<-|}<&|`{;;y; -/:-@[-`{-};`-{/" -;;s;;$_;see'

Origin: https://www.linux.org.ru/forum/development/392747
by empath75 | 2025-06-03 18:06:33+00:00
I think Ukraine could only have gotten away with this in the current situation where the US is detaching itself from supporting them, because if Russia genuinely thought that the US was behind taking out a large percentage of it's strategic nuclear fleet, the consequences of that are nightmarish to think about.

Those airplanes are one of the things that give Russia a second strike capability, and if they lose that capability, then they are going to be on a hair trigger in a nuclear crisis.