MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by bigyabai | 2025-06-14 17:37:28+00:00
Debugging in Rust is a cakewalk compared to vanilla Javascript. Maybe it's the quality of code, maybe it's the linter, maybe it's the type annotation; but errors tend to be much more clear in my experience. Rust errors are almost always semantic - JS errors could be your runtime, your interpreter, your code, your logic or even the specification of the language.

I've seen a couple pleasant JS libraries in my day, and hundreds of absolutely horrifying packages, many of which are proprietary "internal use only" that will thankfully never see the light of day. I could see how JS work would tax you mentally, especially if your superiors refuse to switch to TS.
by 0cf8612b2e1e | 2025-06-14 17:37:51+00:00
This was a meticulously planned operation and took several months of preparation. Sources say that the engineers chose to fly in the data on hard drives, because it would take a lot of time to transfer the data online without attracting attention. They then divvied up the hard drives between four passengers to avoid raising alarm bells with Malaysian customs and immigration officers.

Months? I must be missing some complexity because suitcases of hard drives does not seem like it required any clandestine operations. Would have been logistically more annoying, but possibly less suspicious to mail the drives piecemeal to different addresses.
by crabl | 2025-06-14 17:37:52+00:00
Sole prop registrations (for individuals/non-corporations) are not _too_ onerous anymore and generally have a faster time to approval, provided you submit the right docs. Totally agree it's a money grab though. Twilio et al. have so much power to keep bad actors at bay but keep pushing responsibility to the consumers of their API. I feel like setting up push notifications is easier though, which is saying something.
by sundarurfriend | 2025-06-14 17:38:25+00:00
Scrolling with the mouse on the image (no Ctrl or anything, just scroll) zooms into the section of the image you're on, for anyone else trying "Open image in new tab" or other ways to zoom in.

I'm a big GeoGuessr fan, and had heard of TimeGuessr occasionally in those circles. I'd assumed it would be mostly pictures from the USA and so wasn't massively interested, and from trying it out now, I wasn't too far off: most of the images were from the US and Western Europe, and every single picture so far has been from a rich country. There are obvious reasons for that, and it's not a bad thing in some absolute terms, but it makes it kinda boring for me - the big appeal of GeoGuessr for me is that you routinely get dropped off in a country that you don't often think of, and momentarily get to see and imagine life through their eyes.

Maybe over time, TimeGuessr will also accumulate images from more varied places - or maybe one of the alternatives mentioned in this thread (whentaken and whichyr) already do better in that regard?
by talkingtab | 2025-06-14 17:39:27+00:00
Interesting thoughts. Thanks. As for your statement: "That the outputs of LLMs are frequently useful is the surprising thing that is worth investigating". In my view the hallucinations are just as interesting.

Certainly in human society the "hallucinations" are revealing. In my extremely unpopular opinion much of the political discussion in the US is hallucinatory. I am one of those people the New York Time called a "double hater" because I found neither of presidential candidate even remotely acceptable.

So perhaps if we understood LLM hallucinations we could then understand our own? Not saying I'm right, but not saying I'm wrong either. And in the case that we are suffering a mass hallucination, can we detect it and correct it?
by bertails | 2025-06-14 17:39:28+00:00
Great question. It really depends on the projection. For example, the projections to GraphQL and Java are mostly limited to what can be expressed there. But the projection to SHACL has access to all of SPARQL Constraints, which is what's used for the bootstrapping knowledge graph. We are looking into being able to do more runtime validation for data in the warehouse.
by caprunner | 2025-06-14 17:40:16+00:00
Every time I went out to raise, I felt like I was always on the edge of getting scammed by all these financial terms. I wish I could just see the actual numbers, but conveniently none of the prospective VCs would send me that.

Bought cap table management software, only for them to tell me 10 shares out of 100 = 10% ownership. What a joke. Cost me thousands, plus they wanted to charge me more if I add more shares into the mix. Its literally not that complicated.

On the side I'm getting rid of this nightmare by just making a sandbox that covers everything. Run wild and model whatever the hell you want without getting charged fees from every angle.

Lmk if there's anything else annoying like this you guys want solved, I'm basically doing everything out of pocket and eating the cost bc why not.

shouldn't be that hard just to see the results of the actual documents you're signing.
by throwawaymaths | 2025-06-14 17:40:38+00:00
sunk cost, stockholm syndrome, refusal to change mental models, "it is hard to get a man to understand something when their salary depends on it not being true"

amyloid experiments, especially biophysics experiments, are really fucking hard and really fucking expensive. like, months of hundred hour weeks hard. then it usually fails. so when you burn years of this cycle to find a consistent result (artefact or not), its crazy hard to let go of it.

if you want a very rare example of someone who did the right thing:

https://scholar.google.com/citations?view_op=view_citation&h...

45 citations in 10 years. how many amyloid researchers do you think are aware of this problem with plasticware being published. and probably most "know" it from lived experience, but they say "fuck it, i need to finish my phd/postdoc" and just scramble to push out any result, plastics being problematic be damned.

the only thing that could remotely stop the nonsense from continuing is if the NIH had the balls to take this result and issue guidance to halt all amyloid research that doesnt take plastic use into account. but 1) the program managers are not smart enough to do something like that and 2) such a deep challenge to the research agenda would shake the system way too much from the top AND the bottom. just easier to continue being a bureaucrat with a nice salary and a very "mid" approach to science.
by treetalker | 2025-06-14 17:40:54+00:00
I don't mind that my comment above got downvoted right after I posted it.

Just came back to point out that, after noting the sheriff's insane comments, we've now had what appears to be a targeted political assassination of Democrat legislators in Minnesota.

True, it's not Florida, but the extreme right-wing views behind the threats of violence of LEOs (of all people) and the actual violence of the assassin are the same.
by dbg31415 | 2025-06-14 17:42:24+00:00
I really can’t stand these augmented-voice videos. I get that they’re meant to sound polished or stylized, but to me it just comes off as creepy and distracting. Whatever processing or autotune effect they’re using strips the humanity out of the voice and gives it this artificial vibe — like a personified LinkedIn post. What could be an interesting technical walkthrough ends up feeling more like a spammy marketing pitch than a real person sharing insights.

Maybe there’s an audience for that kind of aesthetic — especially among people who grew up immersed in highly produced digital media — but I’d much rather hear someone’s actual voice, imperfections and all. That rawness is what makes content engaging and authentic. When everything is filtered and synthetic, it’s hard to connect with the speaker or take the message seriously. (Maybe that’s why Apple has had to change spokes models every two minutes since Jobs.)

Honestly, I wish people would stop overproducing everything. I wouldn’t be surprised if this guy was using a green screen too — for no good reason! It just adds to the weird, artificial feeling.
by btilly | 2025-06-14 17:42:51+00:00
The Heisenberg uncertainty principle says that basic physical quantities do not have unique values. They have ranges of values. And therefore it is not always possible to compare two physical properties. For example you can't always compare two particles to discover which is farther away from you.

Various proposals exist in which the fundamental physical structure of space form a kind of "quantum foam". And so, somewhere near the Planck length, it doesn't even make sense to talk about distance.
by Xss3 | 2025-06-14 17:42:57+00:00
Yes it is possible.

Unfortunately it isn't practical.

Too much energy lost, and the loss rate per meter increases per meter too. It just gets worse and worse.

I think microwave transmission is the most practical means we have, and even then it's still crazy inefficient, saying you could get 10kw out for 100kw in, over a 1km distance, would be a very generous interpretation of US navy tests.
by bluGill | 2025-06-14 17:43:15+00:00
not my experience - I switched a year ago and have yet to notice anything not working. X backers rant about things all the time but realistically for most wayland just works. the example - xkill - is something that should be killed on X since it is a big security issue. there are also a number of cases where X does not work and cannot because of design issuses, but I have never encountered them either.

which is to say try it for yourself - odds it works and you won't have to worry.
by jbotz | 2025-06-14 17:43:25+00:00
The key to your difficulty is "my brain doesn't talk to me"... the solution is to realize that there is no "me" that's separate from your brain for it to talk to. You are the sum of the processes occurring in your brain and when it simulates others inside your mind, that's nothing but narrative. A simulation is a narrative. You may not perceive this narrative as sequence of words, a monologue, but it certainly is the result of different parts of your brain communicating with each other, passing information back and forth to model a plausible sequence of events.

So yes, you're conscious. So is my dog, but my dog can't post his thoughts about this on Hacker news, so you are more conscious than my dog.
by thaumasiotes | 2025-06-14 17:43:31+00:00
> Even ignoring that, a set containing n elements is different from a set containing n sets of one element each.

Different in what way? A set containing n sets of one element each is a set containing n elements.

In ZF, everything that's an element of a set is itself a set, so unless what's bothering you is the idea that "a set containing n elements" might contain the empty set, or a set with two elements, I'm not seeing it.

> you’d need some model of index, for one. And I’m not sure how you’d construct that with uncountably many elements

Why would the number of elements matter? Set elements aren't indexed. What are you using your model of index for?

I really feel I should repeat the question I asked you to begin with: You say you need to convert a Cartesian product into a set containing "its elements". In your mind, what is a Cartesian product, before that conversion takes place?
by zippyman55 | 2025-06-14 17:44:31+00:00
I understand the cliquey comment! Usually there are several clubs in the area and you have to find one that resonated with you. And I always had trouble with the few that wanted to devote their lives to toastmasters. But if you find the right club and spend a year, you can get rewarded. And if you try to become a club level position, you do develop those soft skills needed to deal w difficult and crazy people, just like work. I think developing ones soft and executive skills is a long process and many things need to be tried.

One other item: track down an executive level negotiation course. Our local library had one, it was excellent. A lot of soft skill development is figuring out what potholes in the road you are driving on need to be filled.
by dcminter | 2025-06-14 17:44:35+00:00
I vaguely recall building a resource allocation tool using IBM's "ILOG" mixed integer linear programming library and we realised that if we'd built the tool about 20 years earlier it would have still been running for the same problems we were now solving within 5 minutes.

As I recall it the raw computer power had increased by a factor of around a thousand and the algorithms had improved by about the same, giving us a factor of a million improvement.

Worth pondering when trying to predict the future!

The "resources" in question were diamonds by the way...
by wk_end | 2025-06-14 17:45:35+00:00
I dunno. Jane Street started using OCaml back in 2002. Consider the world of programming languages back then: no Rust, of course...but, like Java wouldn't even have generics for another two years! At the time - and for a long time after - OCaml's offering of power/performance was pretty unbeatable. It arguably still is, but I think there's at least an argument these days. I'm not sure exactly when that argument became viable, but it would've been long-after Jane Street had already built up a pretty huge codebase and a pretty crack team of OCaml engineers.
by dehrmann | 2025-06-14 17:46:04+00:00
I recently started as a GCP SRE. I don't have insider knowledge about this, and my views on it are my own.

The most important thing to look at is how much had to go wrong for this to surface. It had to be a bug without test coverage that wasn't covered by staged rollouts or guarded by a feature flag. That essentially means a config-in-db change. Detection was fast, but rolling out the fix was slow out of fear of making things worse.

The NPE aspect is less interesting. It could have been any number of similar "this can't happen" errors. It could have been mutually exclusive fields are present in a JSON object, and the handling logic does funny things. Validation during mutation makes sense, but the rollout strategy is more important since it can catch and mitigate things you haven't thought of.
by joshmarinacci | 2025-06-14 17:46:06+00:00
Former Palm employee here. I was a developer advocate working directly with app devs from a couple of months before Palm was acquired until after the shutdown.

I remember Phil and rather liked him. Everything he states in the article is correct as far as I remember it. Yes we were being slammed by the iPad, but we were far and away the #2 tablet that summer. Android tablets really sucked then, and despite Google's push there were more tablet native apps in the TouchPad app store than Android's. In hindsight it should have been cheaper and faster. And it would have been by Christmas (the TouchPad mini was just weeks away from shipping). Given more time and funding it would have been a contender (maybe not "winning" but still having a good run).

I suspect Palm was doomed the moment Apotheker took over. He wanted to turn HP into IBM. HP's plans to use WebOS everywhere (I was able to see prototypes of fascinating future products that I still want today) were well thought out, but didn't fit his vision. If you want to blame someone, blame the board for hiring him.

Ultimately WebOS's destruction was great for the rest of the ecosystem. Some really talented people went to Apple and Google, improving their interfaces at the expense of losing a 3rd way. I still wish I'd kept at Pre3. Modern iPhones and Android devices may be more powerful, but they don't have that elegant simplicity I miss from WebOS.

[Some notes](https://joshondesign.com/2012/06/06/webos-on-the-verge) I wrote shortly after the shutdown.

PS: I wish I'd see this post yesterday and could have responded earlier. I'm happy to answer any questions. email me josh at josh dot earth.
by wafflemaker | 2025-06-14 17:46:37+00:00
That's a 'kunst' of UI (a gem?). One look and you instantly know the orientation of your craft.

As an amateur astro-pilot (1000h in KSP and 200+ in Flight of Nova, both flight simulators with realistic orbital mechanics) I'd like to say that in modern cockpit of the fusion propelled ships in FoA, the one thing I'm missing from Apollo-style flight instruments of KSP is the Nav-Ball.

The jet-fighter-like "ladder" style attitude meter can't be read with just one look. You need to focus to see the numbers next to the ladder steps. And then another look at the compass for a full reading. 3s of focus (away from controlling the ship) vs. 0.5 (that your subconscious has most likely already interialized).

To put that 3s into perspective, according to ship readings, Apollo 11 had <20s fuel left when it touched down on the moon.
by Kranar | 2025-06-14 17:46:55+00:00
Sure, if you make a bunch of assumptions and manually implement how you think a regex will compile your code, allowing the optimizer to take your compile time implementation and make a finely tuned algorithm specifically for one use case, you can make something that outperforms what is kind of a dumb algorithm.

But if you use an actual regex the way people actually use them, using either the one provided by their standard library or one that is readily available then regex is pretty slow. Certainly, in principle a regex is neither fast or slow, it's a declarative description of a set of strings. Any claim about its performance rests on particular implementations.

For example you wrote out a benchmark that presumably is a lot faster than a naive search... but notice you didn't use the standard library <regex>, instead you manually implemented an algorithm to perform a search and then just decided that this is what a regex implementation would have done anyways (ignoring that by implementing it directly in source code, the optimizer can then fine tune it).

So now... there is a 10% chance that you genuinely didn't know that C++ has a <regex> library that you could have used, or you did in fact know that C++ has such a library and you chose not to you use it because... you also know it's very slow.

I did the benchmark myself using the standard library regex, boost regex, and PCRE2 regex, and all of them are about 5-15x slower than the simple loop:

https://gist.github.com/kranar/a3187cba00d57ba630b74b84f09b4...
by btilly | 2025-06-14 17:47:17+00:00
Are they?

The idea that uncountable means more comes from a bad metaphor. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44271589 for my explanation of that.

Accepting that uncountable means more forces us to debatable notions of existence. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44270383 for a debate over it.

But, finally, there is this. Every chain of reasoning that we can ever come up with, can be represented on a computer. So even if you wish to believe in some extension of ZFC with extremely large sets, PA is capable of proving every possible conclusion from your chosen set of axioms. So yes, PA is enough.

If you're not convinced, I recommend reading https://www.amazon.com/G%C3%B6del-Escher-Bach-Eternal-Golden....
Show HN: AnyCrawl v0.0.1-alpha.5 – custom user-agent and richer scraping API
by ntbperst | 2025-06-14 17:48:26+00:00
## [0.0.1-alpha.5] - 2025-06-14

### Added

- Integrated AWS S3 storage support with new `S3` class and environment variables for seamless file uploads and retrievals. - Introduced `FileController` for serving files from S3 or local storage with robust path validation and error handling. - Added multiple content transformers (Screenshot, `HTMLTransformer`) improving HTML/Markdown extraction and screenshot generation. - Extended scraping capabilities with new options: output `formats`, `timeout`, tag filtering, `wait_for`, retry strategy, viewport configuration, and custom user-agent support. - Added Safe Search parameter to `SearchSchema` for filtered search results. - Refactored engine architecture with a factory pattern and new core modules for configuration validation, data extraction, and job management. - Implemented graceful shutdown handling for the API server and improved logging for uncaught exceptions / unhandled rejections. - Added Jest configuration for API and library packages with ESM support and updated test scripts. - Updated CI workflows to publish Docker images on version tags. - Expanded README with detailed environment variable descriptions and API usage examples.

### Changed

- Refined error handling in `ScrapeController` and `JobManager`; failure responses now include structured error objects and HTTP status codes. - Enhanced `BaseEngine` with explicit HTTP error checks and resilience improvements. - Updated OpenAPI documentation to reflect new scraping parameters and error formats. - Migrated key-value store name to environment configuration for greater flexibility. - Enhanced per-request credit tracking in `ScrapeController` and enhanced logging middleware to include credit usage.

### Fixed

- Improved job failure messages to include detailed error data, ensuring clearer debugging information. - Minor documentation corrections and clarifications.
by bigyabai | 2025-06-14 17:48:33+00:00
"Cripples" might be stressing things a bit hard. Modern near-peer warfare is network-centric - you don't need your radar to be perfect if your AWACs can share a 300km lock over Link 16. Similarly, active radar SEAD is just one option, and passive homing/home-on-jam should also be fine for anti-radiation strikes (though I still wouldn't want to send a Gripen on a Wild Weasel mission). It isn't a Marine or Navy plane, so it really doesn't have to fill the Joint Strike Fighter role in it's entirety.

I'm a huge F-35 fan myself, so I'm pretty hard-pressed to undersell the plane compared to other single-engine fighters. The Gripen isn't equipped to handle contested airspace whatsoever, the F-35 is absolutely king in that department. That said, a Gripen armed with Meteors is a mean payload even compared to an F-15 lugging around AMRAAMs. Unless you have expeditionary/naval operation roles to fill, the Gripen isn't lacking much that a normal customer would want.
by GMoromisato | 2025-06-14 17:49:09+00:00
Lots of interesting questions here.

> I think software is cheap to write but expensive to maintain

OK, but I think you're agreeing with me. Regardless of why it is expensive, it drives companies to bloat their products (to increase their market) and to exploit dark patterns (to increase unit revenue).

If software were very cheap to create and maintain, then it would break that cycle.

> if you don't keep adding features to it and you build on a substrate that's similarly not adding features and putting you on a perpetual treadmill of autoupdates, then software can be much less expensive

In the 90s Microsoft found that people only used 10% of the features of Microsoft Excel. Unfortunately, everyone used a different 10%. At the limit, you would have to create a separate product for each feature permutation to cover the whole market.

And of course, creating and maintaining 10 different products is more expensive than 1 product with all the features.

> I plan to just put small durable things out into the world

This is great! Actions speak louder than words and you'll learn a lot in the process.

> Will LLMs yield custom software that does exactly what you need and stabilizes?

I agree that this is the critical question. No one knows (certainly I don't). But let's say the goal is to create custom software that does exactly what you need. Is there a practical path to that other than via LLMs? I don't think so.

> do you trust the real AIs here, the tech companies selling LLMs to you

I think this is orthogonal to whether the tech works at all. But, in general, yes, I trust most tech companies to provide value greater than the cost of their products. Pretty much by definition, for all the software I pay for, I trust the companies to deliver greater value. When that changes, I stop paying and switch.

And, of course, I support all the usual government regulators and public/private watchdogs to hold corporations accountable.