MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by godelski | 2025-06-04 07:28:31+00:00
> Almost nobody is "anti-science".

Last I checked:

- 15% of Americans don't believe in Climate Change[0] - 37% believe God created man in our current form within the last ~10k years (i.e. don't believe in evolution)[1]

I don't think these are just rounding errors.

They're large enough numbers that you should know multiple people who hold these beliefs unless you're in a strong bubble.

I'm obviously with you in news and pop-sci being terrible. I hate IFuckingLoveScience. They're actually just IFuckingLoveClickbait. My point was literally about this bullshit.

90% of the time it is news and pop-sci miscommunicating papers. Where they clearly didn't bother to talk to authors and likely didn't even read the paper. "Scientists say <something scientists didn't actually say>". You see this from eating chocolate, drinking a glass of red wine, to eating red meat or processed meat. There are nuggets of truth in those things but they're about just as accurate as the grandma that sued McDonalds over coffee that was too hot. You sure bet this stuff creates distrust in science

[0] https://record.umich.edu/articles/nearly-15-of-americans-den...

[1] https://news.gallup.com/poll/647594/majority-credits-god-hum...
by bob1029 | 2025-06-04 07:28:40+00:00
There is a presence that you get with some of these engines.

Go try a V8 with a proper supercharger on it. I bet at least 1 EV genius would convert after the first ride. Nothing compares. The EV is faster, but it will never feel that fast.

For me, it's about being in control of a complex thermodynamic engine. When you add an additional element that the brain can use as feedback (the whine of the blower) it makes the experience much more engaging.
by chipx86 | 2025-06-04 07:29:19+00:00
Yeah the nomenclature sucks.

When talking about the file, the two terms are often used interchangeably (and are usually a .diff or a .patch extension).

For fun, the GNU Patch manpage says:

"NAME: patch - apply a diff file to an original"

followed by:

"patch takes a patch file patchfile containing ..."

"patch tries to skip any leading garbage, apply the diff, and then ..."
by dragonwriter | 2025-06-04 07:29:24+00:00
> There hasn't been much coverage because it's not as sexy as drones but the degree to which AA tech that was formerly the domain of well funded armies has proliferated down the economic spectrum in recent years is really hard to overstate.

A lot of the key AA tech that has suddenly become important in the era of drone swarms began proliferating to mid-tier forces around the 1980s (or earlier), and was retired by well-funded armies between then and the 2000s, because compared to SAM systems, it was suitable only for lower, slower, less capable targets.

Turns out, suddenly large numbers of lower, slower, less capable targets are being fielded, and its really expensive to take them on with SAM systems optimized for dealing with modern manned aircraft, cruise missiles, and/or ballistic missiles.
by polotics | 2025-06-04 07:30:08+00:00
Sorry I had forgotten who it was. Now time to name and shame: the culprit calls itself https://brightdata.com/ Also LG relying on the developer's own disclosure for what they call "Data Sefety" is really poor: "There is no relevant information provided by the developer" is all the app reports in the LG app store... Also no way to rate or report the app, I only found a mention that I shouldreport this to lgappsreport@lge.com
by maeil | 2025-06-04 07:30:09+00:00
> I think incompetence comes when personal loyalty to Trump is the most important requirement.

It is the only requirement. Loyalty to the party and not a hint of anything suggesting shared views with any of its opponents.

The "defense of the West" narrative has become entirely laughable. The only places left to defend are parts of Europe, Taiwan and Japan, and maybe Korea at a stretch. And those now need to defend against the US, which has become a bigger threat than Russia.
by Zanfa | 2025-06-04 07:30:12+00:00
I think Ukraine is already using mothership & hunter drones to target slow-flying drones (Shaheds and similar).

Very soon the most challenging part of anti-drone defence is going to be detection since fiber-guided drones can already fly tens of kilometers at low altitudes where they’ll be virtually undetectable with radar. You can literally fly them just above ground if necessary.
by Simorgh | 2025-06-04 07:31:33+00:00
Thanks! I use Athens as a personal voice-memo copilot. It’s much harder to use it for sharing ideas with others; e.g. for presentation…

It’s voice-first so you have to express what you’re trying to communicate solely via speech to text. I think that’s part of the challenge. ‘Thinking in voice’, for presenting ideas is quite hard for me.
by allenleee | 2025-06-04 07:31:51+00:00
Has anyone explored a different angle — like mapping out the 1,000 most frequently mentioned or cited books (across HN, Substack, Twitter, etc.), then turning their raw content into clean, structured data optimized for LLMs? Imagine curating these into thematic shelves — say, “Bill Gates’ Bookshelf” or “HN Canon” — and building an indie portal where anyone can semantically search across these high-signal texts. Kind of like an AI-searchable personal library of the internet’s favorite books.
by masfoobar | 2025-06-04 07:31:58+00:00
> I am always curious how different C programs decide how to manage memory.

At a basic level, you can create memory on the stack or on the heap. Obviously I will focus on the heap as that is dynamically allocating memory of a certain size.

The C programming language does not force you how to handle memory. You are pretty much on your own. For some C programmers (and likely more inexperienced ones) they will malloc individual variables like they are creating a 'new' instance in a typical OOP language like Java. This can be a telltale sign of a programmer working with C that comes from an OOP background. As they learn and improve on their C skills they realise they should create a chunk of memory of a certain type, but could still be malloc(ing) and free(ing) all over the code, making it difficult to understand what is being used and where -- especially if you are looking at code you did not write.

You can also have programs that do not bother free(ing) memory. For example, a simple shell program that just does simple input->process->output and terminates. For these types of programs, just let the OS deal with freeing the memory.

Good C code (in my opinion) uses malloc and free in only a handful of functions. There are higher level functions for proper Allocators. One example is an Arena Allocator. Then if you want a function which may require dynamic memory, you can tell it which allocator to use. It gives you control, generally speaking. You can create a simple string library or builder with an allocator.

Of course an Allocator does not have to use memory on the heap. It can still use on the stack as well.

There are various other patterns to use in the world of memory, especially in C.
by sergioisidoro | 2025-06-04 07:32:24+00:00
The thing knitting taught me is that you can have something beautiful and useful even tho literally every part of the piece is a single point of failure.

No redundancy, no backstop. If any of the stitches gets cut, the entire piece can unravel completely.

We're so used to redundancy, but sometimes you just need to get things done, and it's ok if it's all a deck of cards.
by ben_w | 2025-06-04 07:32:34+00:00
> Therefore practical vehicles (Prius, Rav4 Hybrid) sell well while cars that might evoke excitement in good times but are poor investments (anything Stellantis makes) are just sitting on dealership lots

Stellantis? Surprised they have a bad reputation on cost (or, conversely, a reputation for evoking excitement), but I guess export market is different from domestic. Isn't Dacia part of that group? Seeing a lot with that badge here in Germany these days (even in Brandenburg, which is former DDR and therefore low GDP/capita).
by bananamerica | 2025-06-04 07:32:36+00:00
I know this is a website for programmers and I am not one. I like LLMs for quick answers and simple tasks like proofreading (just to fix errors, not to add or change anything) and simple text formating. I absolutely hate for everything else. I am a writer and LLMs prose may be correct and sometimes whimsical but it has soulless quality to it that makes me forget about what I just read after five seconds. My friends use Meta AI on our chat groups on WhatsAppp and I hate it so much, I delete every single AI message as soon as I see it.
by wltr | 2025-06-04 07:34:08+00:00
I rather meant real weirdos, mostly YouTube experts et al. But well, if the official had it said …

However, there’s this one weirdo who held official position (if I’m not mistaken) yet he was spilling similar nonsense for … well, he may still do that, I’m not aware. He’s this infamous Mr Arestovych, all I’m aware is him pushing Russian narratives these days and not holding any official position these days. I’ve heard him being even sanctioned for treason-like something, but I’m really not following him much to tell more.

That’s who came to my head first, as he’s quite infamous for this ‘Russia will fall within 2…3 weeks.’
by oblio | 2025-06-04 07:34:38+00:00
We basically need to increase the cost of plastic to account for all externalities.

It's a super material, it needs to cost as much as competing natural materials: nylon - silk, whatever plastic bottles are made of - glass/aluminum, whatever packaging is made of - paper/textiles, whatever containers are made of - wood/steel/aluminum/etc. Similar story for paints.

Basically, excises, but for plastic instead of just alcohol and tobacco.

We do this, plastic starts being used just where it really makes sense.
by mike_hearn | 2025-06-04 07:35:13+00:00
Sometimes papers do. Like everything with academia, there's no consistency and it varies mostly by field. It's especially common in CS and less common in other fields.

The main reason people don't do it is because incentives are everything, and university/government management set bad incentives. The article points this out too. They judge academics entirely by some function of paper citations, so academics are incentivized to do the least possible work to maximize that metric. There's no positive incentive to publish more than necessary, and doing so can be risky because people might find flaws in your work by checking it. So a lot of researchers hide their raw data or code for as long as possible. They know this is wrong and will typically claim they'll publish it but there's a lot of foot dragging, and whatever gets released might not be what they used to make the paper.

In the commercial world the incentives are obviously different, but the outcomes are the same. Sometimes companies want the ideas to be used as they compliment the core business, other times the ideas need to be protected to be turned into a core business. People like to think academics and industrial research are very different but everyone is optimizing for some metric, whether they like it or not.
by fake-name | 2025-06-04 07:35:17+00:00
> It's trivial to normalise the various formats,

Ha. Ha. ha ha ha.

As someone who as pretty broadly tried to normalize a pile of books and documents I have legitimate access to, no it is not.

You can get good results 80% of the time, usable but messy results 18% of the time, and complete garbage the remaining 2%. More effort seems to only result in marginal improvements.
by mdp2021 | 2025-06-04 07:35:49+00:00
> not really a good source for scientific information

Probably so, but - while remaining of course based on academical articles - the perspective was that of a therapist - spendable information, not full caution. As said, it seemed to be the only work for the general public at the time.

> a scientific sounding explanation before they’ll make any diet or lifestyle changes

In a good basic commonsensical framework it's different: from e.g. "it seems that exercise also promotes some regeneration in the nervous system" follows "we have hints to value exercise even more". We most frequently work on hints, as that's what we most often only have.

I need to match this with e.g. some recent HN submission about the toxicity of some vitamines in the B group, making the abuse of supplement quite dangerous. Similarly, a prominent actress once declared her stroke an effect of extreme fitness regimes. So, you know, good commonsense... An extremist mentality applied to lifestyle (e.g. "Only/never eat butter, articles suggest") makes of science another miracles shop.
by pjmlp | 2025-06-04 07:36:11+00:00
I don't buy the reasoning.

First of all, it is a missed opportunity for Microsoft to have another vector for people to learn C#.

Secondly at BUILD session, Anders ended up explaning that they needed to rewrite the AST data structures anyway, given that Go type system is much inferior to Typescript.

And Go's story on WebAssembly is quite poor, when compared with Blazor toolchain, they are hopping Google will make the necessary improvements, required for the TypeScript playground and when running VSCode on the browser.

Finally, some of the key develpers involved on this effort have been layed off during the latest round.
by dragonwriter | 2025-06-04 07:37:58+00:00
> A "Fiduciary responsibility to shareholders" means exactly what I said: "legally bound to extract profit without these silly notions of empathy or trust".

You can define the term that way, but then it doesn't apply to anything that actually exists. Firms do have enforceable legal obligations to their shareholders, but that isn't one of them.

(OTOH, for a widely-held publicly-traded firm, the set of incentives facing management will encourage much the same behvior that that mythical obligation would require, but the mechanism is entirely different.)
by imiric | 2025-06-04 07:38:15+00:00
It's interesting to see this article in juxtaposition to the one shared recently[1], where AI skeptics were labeled as "nuts", and hallucinations were "(more or less) a solved problem".

This seems to be exactly the kind of results we would expect from a system that hallucinates, has no semantic understanding of the content, and is little more than a probabilistic text generator. This doesn't mean that it can't be useful when placed in the right hands, but it's also unsurprising that human non-experts would use it to cut corners in search of money, power, and glory, or worse—actively delude, scam, and harm others. Considering that the latter group is much larger, it's concerning how little thought and resources are put into implementing _actual_ safety measures, and not just ones that look good in PR statements.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44163063
by pjmlp | 2025-06-04 07:38:35+00:00
Native AOT is quite good enough nowadays, I think there were other politics at play.

Azure team has no issues using AI to convert from C++ to Rust, see RustNation UK 2025 talks.

Also they mention the reason being a port not a rewrite, yet they had anyway to rewrite the whole AST datastructures due to the weaker typesystem in Go.

Finally, the WebAssembly tooling to support Blazor is much more mature than what Go has.
by justforfunhere | 2025-06-04 07:38:39+00:00
>> the sun will enter the final phase of its life. Its core of hydrogen fusion will expand and, in doing so, inflate the outer atmosphere of the star into gross proportions. It will swell and become a red giant star that will engulf Mercury and Venus and incinerate Earth.

Does anybody know what is the timescale we are talking about here? From start of inflation of Sun's outer atmosphere to engulfing of earth?
by GolfPopper | 2025-06-04 07:38:49+00:00
>And has written a lot about how corporations are in fact evil AI running on the operating system of the government.

I would say his view of them is more Lovecraftian than "evil", but here's the speech (as a blog entry): https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2018/01/dude-yo...
by aprilthird2021 | 2025-06-04 07:38:50+00:00
"Your data is secure" is known to never be 100%. But what assessments and technology they say they use for security needs to be followed. And if it's found out that those are lies, then it's fraud.

Kind of like how these guys lied about the volume of sales they had. Textbook fraud. They aren't in trouble for saying "AI is going to be great"
by hulitu | 2025-06-04 07:38:55+00:00
> The point is that it wasn't a universally understood icon at the time

Just like the hamburger, or the 3 dots menu, or whatever a program manager thinks it shall be the symbol for a menu.

The point is: everything is learned (see discussions about intuitive interfaces in alt.sysadmin.recovery 20 years ago). If you change every couple of months the meaning of a symbol, nobody will know what that symbol means anymore.
by bilekas | 2025-06-04 07:40:40+00:00
I'm still not sure the question makes much sense, if it's a general: "I want to support the project and so I want to seed a large chunk" Okay, I guess it's your due diligence to check, but there is a reporting feature built in, if something is found, report it.

Aside from that, if you're searching for specific content, the question is moot I guess.

I guess my confusion is what distinguishes this apart from any other torrent ? That is, if the submitted content is submitted at all.
by neilsharma | 2025-06-04 07:41:16+00:00
The Sound ID is amazing. Been using it for a few years now. I usually just keep it on while I'm hiking and it identifies over a dozen birds in 20-30min, nearly all of which I've eventually verified are in the area.

The photo ID feature is okay, but I assume that's because the photos I take on my phone of far away birds is too pixelated.

I actually want a similar ID feature frog species; i hear a lot of croaking
by dineshgowda24 | 2025-06-04 07:41:30+00:00
Thanks for the feedback.

Actually, for AWS[0], it's already there. Being a prior user of it, that's where I got the idea to build for GCP after shifting to GCP.

You may want to consider adding new features to it or exploring the option of building for Azure. I'm pretty sure it's not currently available for Azure.

[0]https://github.com/rkoval/alfred-aws-console-services-workfl...
by mike_hearn | 2025-06-04 07:42:25+00:00
Their assumptions are worse than that. They assume constant global rate of renewable energy production but average global wind speeds aren't constant, they appear to be slowing down. This is called "global stilling". It is often blamed on climate change, which (it is now claimed) both speeds up and slows down the wind simultaneously, although the rapid construction of wind farms and urban buildings might also be related.

https://projects.research-and-innovation.ec.europa.eu/en/hor...
by DocTomoe | 2025-06-04 07:42:34+00:00
I am old enough to remember when similar statements were made about other - now out of favour - energy production methods. NPPs had a "Once in a thousand years" failure rate. Gas was fossil, sure, but the CO2 would be absorbed into the ecosphere (to make plants grow).

In the end, all energy eventually dissipates again. That does not mean that we do not have immediate or near-immediate phenomena to consider (like: global warming).

Let's take solar ... we now have begun to replace agricultural areas with solar farms. For example: How does this affect biodiversity in that area (the things look not green, but gravel under it)? I'm not even saying it is necessarily a bad thing - just a change.

And we should be careful to change running systems, especially considering the stakes. Instead, what I see is proponents of one tech over the other happily shouting down any attempt at critical consideration.
by iLoveOncall | 2025-06-04 07:43:10+00:00
> Also, the dig against "Precious Plastic Camp" as a "hipster commune" is just... I don't even know where to start. From what I could find it's a little thing where kids learn how to recycle plastic, and he makes it sound like they spend their money on some Burning Man, I mean what the hell.

I think the parent refers to Project Kamp, their "sustainable" community in Portugal (they have a YouTube channel), for which "hipster commune" is actually a very kind description.
by svara | 2025-06-04 07:43:12+00:00
I have some visibility into what goes on at different science institutions in the US.

I sense a lot of fear. But the curious thing to see is how people just try to keep calm and carry on as if nothing was happening otherwise, while the government is killing the best parts of American science.

Who would have thought it was that easy to turn the 'land of the free ' around.
by stouset | 2025-06-04 07:44:25+00:00
> Unless documented otherwise, a non-nil error renders all other return values invalid, so there's no real sense of a "bogus value" alongside a non-nil error.

Ah yes the classic golang philosophy of “just avoid bugs by not making mistakes”.

Nothing stops you from literally just forgetting to handle ann error without running a bunch of third party linting tools. If you drop an error on the floor and only assign the return value, go does not care.
by genocidicbunny | 2025-06-04 07:44:34+00:00
They are using it. Review Board is a successful project that's been around for a long time, and it's solving a problem they had. One of the most common workflows with Review Board for source code reviews is to use the RBTools command line tools to post or update reviews. The cli would be the one generating the diff (although it supports uploading diffs that you generate iirc.) I haven't looked into the details, but I assume RBTools can generate DiffX diffs which is probably easier for the backend to process. (E - from what chipx86 has said in some of his posts here, they have been using it for several years now)

I don't really see this as pushing anything, more as documentation of something they did for themselves, but are also willing to provide to anyone else if they want to use it. Same as how the source code for the core Review Board product is available for anyone.

If you're happy with the diff format you're using in your workflow, keep using that. No one's twisting your arm to switch to DiffX.
by saagarjha | 2025-06-04 07:45:18+00:00
Your manager isn't your best friend, but they don't have to be your enemy, either. People like to go "oh managers are faceless executors of company policy" and that is true in certain situations but not all of them. You can still provide value to your reports (and as a report, value to your manager) by explaining your grievances with what's going on. I don't think the article is saying that people should completely shut up, but I actually think the filter doesn't have to be anywhere near where they say it is.

Another team is slow to deliver? It's fine to discuss that. As a manager your job, of course, is to make sure that your report isn't denigrating their coworkers. But it's fairly useful to decide how you want to prioritize your work, or whether you want to depend on that team in the future. Layoffs? There is zero reason to shut up about how dumb your CEO is and how they're doing it for Wall Street. They're coming for you just as they're coming for your reports. Better you talk about it than both people silently bottling up their feelings to please someone way up in their leadership chain.