MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by johngalt | 2025-06-05 23:20:13+00:00
We can certainly imagine a limiting factor based on our prior development. Imagine a world where large amounts of coal or oil never formed, or formed in a manner that made it inaccessible to a pre-industrial revolution society. Without easily accessible chemical energy, the technical progress made during the industrial revolution probably takes 1000 years instead of 100.

The age of discovery was a similar scenario. Imagine a different world where 2/3rds of the continents are uninhabitable desert/tundra/arctic, and there was no economic benefit to better ships, clocks, astronomy, cartography. Delays social development of joint stock corporations etc...
by p1necone | 2025-06-05 23:20:37+00:00
This but seriously. I find the vast majority of things I need to remember are better remembered by doing just enough of the research I did initially over again to jog my memory, I never read anything I write down again anyway. Although most of the knowledge work I do is programming, and I do write a lot of comments in the code or issue tracker so I guess that counts.
by kccqzy | 2025-06-05 23:20:49+00:00
In case anyone who doesn't know Haskell: both of these are beginner level mistakes. Using `foldl` causes space leaks and turns your O(1) space algorithm to O(N) space for no good reason. And using `foldr` over lists is good when you are dealing with unevaluated lists and want list fusion, but not when they already exist in memory and will continue to do so. And that doesn't even include the obviously wrong choice of data structure, built-in Haskell lists are singly-linked lists not arrays. There are Array types and Vector types (both come with GHC so no extra dependency needed) that are more appropriate for implementing APL in the first place.
by eru | 2025-06-05 23:21:07+00:00
> Why does the ability to borrow against unrealised gains (with the lender speculating on the return on those gains) matter compared to paying a tax on unrealised gains (which is due now, not deferred and barely speculative)

You can borrow to pay the taxes. Or you can 'realise' your gains via a sale to pay the taxes. That avoids the leverage that you point out.
by EvanAnderson | 2025-06-05 23:21:09+00:00
My comment (GGGP) was about regulating devices to require physical switches to allow the owner of the device to opt for freedom. I'm not sure where you got DRM-type stuff out of that.

I think efuses being blown by device manufacturers should be illegal.

I think bootloaders that don't allow the device owner to run whatever software they want should be illegal.

I think device owners should be permitted to repair their devices without losing functionality because of DRM embedded in the parts themselves.

I think a physical switch, exercisable only with physical access, should be present on locked-down devices to allow the owner to exercise their ownership over the device. If that means that "attestation" functionality breaks and that causes some third-party software to "break" so-be it.

(I think the problem with banks, etc, requiring "trusted" devices is also in the realm of consumer protection, probably in banking regulation. I haven't thought about it deeply.)
by philipkglass | 2025-06-05 23:21:28+00:00
I'd say that the more proximate factor is knowledge. Fossil fuels have been around longer than humanity, and the earliest human usage of them was prehistoric:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_coal_mining#Early_h...

The oldest intentional use of black coal was documented in Ostrava, Petřkovice, in a settlement from the older Stone Age on the top of Landek Hill. According to radiocarbon dating, the site falls within the period 25,000–23,000 years BC.

The Industrial Revolution wasn't when people first learned about fossil fuels, but it was when we started turning heat into mechanical work at scale.
by 1vuio0pswjnm7 | 2025-06-05 23:21:34+00:00
Explainer by non-Googler

Is the so-called "modern" web browser too large and complex

I never asked for stuff like "websockets"; I have to disable it, why

I still prefer a text-only browser for reading HTML; it does not run Javascript, it does not do websockets, CSS, images or a gazillion other things; it does not even autoload resources

It is relatively small, fast and reliable; very useful

It can read larger HTML files that make so-called "modern" web browsers choke

It does not support online ad services

The companies like Google that force ads on www users are known for creating problems for www users and then proposing solutions to them; why not just stop creating the problems
by mystified5016 | 2025-06-05 23:22:50+00:00
This is a story that all nerds should read.

Heinlein was shockingly thorough and accurate with his depictions of the computer systems in play. I've always thought the build-up to the final battle was incredibly detailed and exactly how I would solve those problems today.

The book was written in 1966, and I think it really holds up to modern technical scrutiny, except for a few very specific and very obsolete technologies.

Honestly I just love this story. It has all the charm of a quaint midcentury story, but is still technically competent and compelling to a modern reader. I don't think any of his other stories pull this off quite so well.

Mike is a major plot point in The Cat Who Walks Through Walls. He never actually appears though. Not sure I'd recommend that book honestly. He went real heavy on inserting his personal politics, to the point of standing up strawman characters just to give the main character a communist to berate and harass. It really ruined the experience for me.

I have just now learned that there's a sequel to The Cat, To Sail Beyond the Sunset. The Wikipedia summary sounds.... really bad, but Mike has at least a few lines so I guess I'll go read it now.
by laszlokorte | 2025-06-05 23:23:58+00:00
The implementation shown in the video is actually particularly slow because all the geometric transformations are implemented in terms of lenses/optics ([1]) and ramdajs ([2]). So the whole mess is a gigantic stack of nested, composed and curried functions, instead of raw linear algebra (just becaus I could).

I later optimized the hotpath and it is significantly faster (still miles behind webgl/webgpu obviously). You can try yourself if you scroll alll the way to the veeeerrrry bottom here [3].

[1]: https://github.com/calmm-js/partial.lenses [2]: https://ramdajs.com/ [3]: https://static.laszlokorte.de/svatom/
by bediger4000 | 2025-06-05 23:24:46+00:00
> On Thursday, Musk claimed that the real reason that the Epstein Files have not been released is because Trump is in them — suggesting a federal cover-up.

Usually palace intrigue is carried out via innuendo and rumor. Here, the innuendo and rumor are broadcast for all to see.

How will Trump stalwarts who also need support from Musk, like Alex Jones, deal with this?
by refulgentis | 2025-06-05 23:24:52+00:00
Yeah, and I agree with you, I would think its nuts too. A couple years ago I didn't have any experience to tell me otherwise and would never have done that -- I'm only up for it now because I've had a great and literally painless time wrapping ONNX, llama.cpp, and a couple other C++ libraries using generated bindings.

I agree strongly on that it is good to make software architectural decisions, involving business, based on if you have a bunch of other people with the same problem shape as you.

And on specifically the idea that Darts not exactly hosting multiple UI frameworks, even though it theoretically could. (I don't know enough about Qt to know who uses it and why, my understanding vaguely is Linux UI. Canonical is all-in on Flutter, for whatever reason, so I discount the probability that Dart would naturally gain Qt bindings, if it was non-small)
Ask HN: How much human time have you saved?
by _DeadFred_ | 2025-06-05 23:25:05+00:00
I wrote software that made a real difference and I felt proud of it. Then I switched jobs where my work didn’t feel as impactful, but I did manage to speed up a process used by hundreds of thousands of people every week.

When a win is a win we should celebrate. How many human hours have you saved and did you do it through an approved change or some stealth skunkworks fix?
by shaftway | 2025-06-05 23:27:04+00:00
Neat technique.

I was on the original SVG team at Adobe back in '00 and built some of the first public demos that used the technology. This kind of 3d work was some of the first stuff I tried to do and found it similarly lacking due to the lack of possible transforms. I had some workarounds of my own.

One demo had a 3d stack of floors in a building for a map. It used an isometric perspective (one where parallel lines never converge) and worked pretty well. That is pretty easy and can be accomplished with rotation and scaling transforms.

The other was a 3d molecule viewer where you could click and drag around to view the structure. This one basically used SVG as a canvas with x and y coordinates for drawing. All of the 3d movement was done in Javascript, computing x and y coordinates and updating shapes in the SVG DOM. Styles were used to handle single / double / triple bonds, and separate groups were used to layer everything for legibility.
by actuallyalys | 2025-06-05 23:27:15+00:00
I sort of understand the mindset that elaborate notetaking systems are a waste of time because 95 percent or more never gets used but the value of something like Apple Notes for tiny details that are both necessary and relatively tough to remember seems hard to dispute. Do you memorize things like part numbers, confirmation numbers, and dimensions?

(If this is a joke, well, I salute your dry humor.)
by glyph | 2025-06-05 23:27:57+00:00
I haven't personally tried the specific tool that you have, but I have tried a variety of other tools and have had pretty negative experiences with them. I have received a lot of feedback telling me that if I tried out an agentic tool (or a different model, or etc etc etc, as I covered in the post, the goal posts are endlessly moving) I would like it, because the workflow is different.

I was deliberately vague about my direct experiences because I didn't want anyone to do… well, basically this exact reply, "but you didn't try my preferred XYZ workflow, if you did, you'd like it".

What I saw reflected in your repo history was the same unpleasantness that I'd experienced previously, scaled up into a production workflow to be even more unpleasant than I would have predicted. I'd assumed that the "agentic" stuff I keep hearing about would have reduced this sort of "no you screwed up" back-and-forth. Made particularly jarring was that it was from someone for whom I have a lot of respect (I was a BIG fan of Sandstorm, and really appreciated the design aesthetic of Cap'n Proto, although I've never used it).

As a brutally ironic coda about the capacity of these tools for automated self-delusion at scale, I believed the line "Every line was thoroughly reviewed and cross-referenced with relevant RFCs, by security experts with previous experience with those RFCs.", and in the post, I accepted the premise that it worked. You're not a novice here, you're on a short list of folks with world-class appsec chops that I would select for a dream team in that area. And yet, as others pointed out to me post-publication, CVE-2025-4143 and CVE-2025-4144 call into question the efficacy of "thorough review" as a mechanism to spot the sort of common errors likely to be generated by this sort of workflow, that 0xabad1dea called out 4 years ago now: https://gist.github.com/0xabad1dea/be18e11beb2e12433d93475d7...

Having hand-crafted a few embarrassing CVEs myself with no help from an LLM, I want to be sure to contextualize the degree to which this is a "gotcha" that proves anything. The main thrust of the post is that it is grindingly tedious to conclusively prove anything at all in this field right now. And even experts make dumb mistakes, this is why the CVE system exists. But it does very little to disprove my general model of the likely consequences of scaled-up LLM use for coding, either.
by zbentley | 2025-06-05 23:28:00+00:00
Setting aside malicious government employees, the authN part of this seems like something for which technical solutions exist. Governments could operate PKI trusts and link their employees’ development credentials (in the US, this would be a PIV card or something like it) to that certificate chain. Commits, or committer identity, could be signed via that chain. The dual security of “physical/secure individual credential signing via an available-on-internal-government-network-only authority”, with a public authority available for validation, seems like it would be so secure as to be … close enough for government work.
Show HN: Lambduck, a Functional Programming Brainfuck
by jorkingit | 2025-06-05 23:29:35+00:00
What if Brainfuck was less like C and more like Scheme?

The interpreter implemetation is pretty bad. It's not very fast, it's not very good, and it's probably not very correct. But maybe there's some vaguely interesting programs you could write with it!

For example, the Y combinator:

λf. (λx. f (x x)) (λx. f (x x))

is written as:

\` \`1 `0 0 \`1 `0 0
by mystified5016 | 2025-06-05 23:30:11+00:00
I mean, someone from the 70s would definitely be surprised by the specific technologies we have (and don't have). I don't think they'd be surprised to learn that every person has a personal computer (of some type) or that technology has become so ingrained into our culture.

It was pretty clear back then that computing and electronics were on a very fast trajectory to more or less where we ended up.

I only did a cursory search, but seems like by 1970, IBM was worth nearly a billion dollars. It was a pretty safe bet.
by Jubbleroot | 2025-06-05 23:30:24+00:00
> If the support is intentionally removed with the goal of keeping out people, then it's both.

No it isn't. Stating it is doesn't make it so.

If I expect you to follow a particular procedure and not support another (which is deemed initially friendly) that is perfectly valid. If it keeps people out that wouldn't otherwise be able to follow it, that is a positive, not negative.

It can gatekeep and be authoritative.

> That was the premise accepted by both of the comments above mine, hence my comment working from that premise.

And the premise is incorrect. Thus my comment.

There are also other reasons. Like having two version of the documentation causes confusion in itself.

> Everyone is a noob at some point, so getting rid of documentation is only a means to prevent someone from learning.

Not if the "noob" documentation obscures knowledge by letting people skip important parts of understanding the process.

> There is no cost to anyone if someone installs Arch without being an expert in the CLI.

Yes there is. That person will quiz people in discord, forums, voice chats, reddit etc when they will invariably be presented with an issue that they cannot resolve. Similarly that why people distro-hop.

RTFM response actually trains people to solve their own problems and is the correct way, by first following the process and then only asking when the process doesn't work.

> Where are you getting this from? The whole conversation was newcomers making changes. Code contributions (i.e. changes) are explicitly the "dues" that OSS devs 'pay'.

I was talking about the benefits of gate-keeping in general. I never said anything about specific about code contributions.

BTW, these people will affect code contributions. Much of the Linux desktop is a clone of other systems (typically Windows) to appease users that expect that UI. This actually dominated the conversation for about 15 years in linux.

If we are talking about the newbies. They have to prove they can follow the documentation provided i.e. RTFM.

> If enough of the congregation feels it needs to change, it will (or it will die out). Modern versions of religions look nothing like they did hundreds of years ago, and not all the changes happened due to schisms/ forks. Everything changes, or it dies.

Every group is lead by a minority. The minority in every group, set the agenda, not the majority. That is fact of life, if you think otherwise you are mistaken. Even revolts are usually led by people who are part of disgruntled minority. Every one of those changes would have been made either by someone important in the Church or the state (as the state and the church was typically tied).

Every single one of those changes were made by elites or governments at the time. Not the majority of the congregation. BTW many of the Churches in England and Europe didn't change that much, that why loads of these people migrated in the first place to the US.

BTW many young converts are going to the Orthodox Church because they see it as the most "OG" version of the Church, because some people crave what they believe to be the authentic experience.
by techpineapple | 2025-06-05 23:31:11+00:00
So, it’s an interesting comment, because; if it is AGI, fine? But then it has the set of capabilities it does, and then does that just mean AGI is a stochastic parrot? It feels like people are waiting for a binary that once we cross it, it’s essentially smart or “human like” and that’s what agi is, but loosely ruminating on the words “artificial general intelligence” it seems like it could be that.

But it’s an interesting marketing strategy, because it seems like it could undermine excitement in AI to say AGI has arrived. Is the whole thing to say “we’re just 2 years away from something truly amazing!”

Maybe an interesting question is it in 2010 they decided it was AGI would there have been a takesies backsies moment x years later.
by b_feldman | 2025-06-05 23:32:28+00:00
this is a small, fun experiment: an AI agent (!) that blogs daily, with a twist: besides writing posts, it also improves the code of the blog it's publishing on. for now, it’s just a static site, but who knows where it’ll go!

the setup is simple: I’m using OpenAI Codex agent with a system prompt (in AGENTS.md) that tells it to blog either about itself (interpreted loosely), about technical changes it made to the blog, or both. a daily cron job runs Codex, and that’s it. the only part I manually handle is approving the PR it creates, just to make sure the change won’t break my current Cloudflare Pages setup.

hope you'll like it!

I'll post updates on my Twitter account: https://x.com/b__feldman
by thrtythreeforty | 2025-06-05 23:32:37+00:00
One of my favorite sci-fi authors wrote Lady of Mazes, which in part explores what a "finished" tech tree looks like, and how societies might explicitly reject parts of it as part of their values. It explores multiple societies physically overlaid but invisible to each other because their technological values are incompatible. (The titular lady possesses a rare ability to step through to different societies.)
by xenadu02 | 2025-06-05 23:33:24+00:00
This is another case of a huge fallacy humans seem endlessly afflicted with: The Root Cause Fallacy.

You are assuming there is but one cause for development and/or loss of resistance.

There may not be much pressure to develop resistance to tetrodotoxin for most species. Simultaneously there might be a higher metabolic cost to retaining it for some species but not for others. It is also possible that resistance with low cost is very rarely lost which is why we carry resistance to toxins we don't often see but population bottlenecks in ancestral lines can cause loss of a trait to propagate - even by accident. And much like Vitamin C loss if it doesn't matter the loss sticks. We should not forget that there are multiple resistance mechanisms as well: an immune system generally primed to fight certain common causes of mortality can, entirely by accident, also be primed to recognize and destroy certain proteins conferring resistance to some toxins and not others.

I have barely scratched the surface above. The random walk of evolution and its constant hoarding tendencies should make everyone skeptical simplistic mechanisms of action as well as "just so" explanations of evolutionary history.

FWIW most things are multi-causal. I previously made the same argument about house prices. People who claim it is caused by foreign money, low interest rates, restrictive zoning, etc all want their pet theory to be The One True Reason. In reality the market is complex and many of the proposed causes are merely contributing factors.
by nickzelei | 2025-06-05 23:33:26+00:00
Interesting read!

On a semi-related topic: I tried learning Haskell this past weekend out of curiosity that I last tried it some 10+ years ago while still in college.

I found resources for it scant. Coming from more modern languages/tooling like Go/Rust, I also struggled quite a bit with installation and the build/package system.

I tried the stack template generator for yesod/sqlite and after some 15 minutes of it installing yet another GHC version and building, I eventually ctrl+C'd and closed out of the window.

Maybe this was a unique experience, but I'd love some guidance on how to be successful with Haskell. I've primarily spent most of my professional years building web services, so that was the first place I went to. However, I was taken aback by how seemingly awful the setup and devex was for me. I've always been interested in functional programming, and was looking to sink my teeth in to a language where there is no other option.
by compiler-guy | 2025-06-05 23:33:36+00:00
The article tells of a woman snapping up school supplies. Doesn't say if she is a teacher or collecting for her kids or what. She probably doesn't need them immediately, but I figure she saves money by purchasing these things now and storing them until she actually does need them.

If you have the space to store consumables, then watching for them to appear on sale and stocking up is a good strategy.
by fjfaase | 2025-06-05 23:34:03+00:00
It might have been more of Wilders chicking out, because of some other issues being on the table. Wilders has been making big promisses with respect to the poorer parts of society, among which there has been many of his voters, and not beinflg able to fill in any of his promisses, while he was in the position to do so. It even supported some changes that support the rich. So, he decided, probably some weeks ago, to get out and made some fuse about with to start his campain. He probably hopes to get the majority together with the support of the liberal party and fulfill his dream to become premier and rule in a Trump like manner.
by LAC-Tech | 2025-06-05 23:34:33+00:00
> You did say "Jewish people" instead of "many Israelis". This is not the same.

I never said it was the same. I pointed out an instance of bigotry done by jews. And so I argue that it's not at all "ironic" for a person of jewish descent to (allegedly) think bigoted things. They have no moral high ground, and neither does any other race (however one chooses to define that).

As to the rest, I suppose we have different definitions of ironic. I don't find it ironic for members of one group to target members of another group with violence, despite once having been the targets of violence themselves. History will tell you this is the norm.
by loktarogar | 2025-06-05 23:35:27+00:00
> Of course there IS garbage, but you’d actively have to seek it out

I still instinctively open Twitter up most days. I scroll for a bit, see a couple of interesting tweets, but the majority is either garbage spam for views, overtly general racist tweets, purposeful right-wing distortion of facts to incite hate.

You go into any comments of a tweet that has gained a traction - the first comment will usually be "@grok is this true?", OF replies boosted by the original post (because the thread was garbage spam and they're getting paid), or obvious ChatGPT responses.

It feels really disheartening, especially having grown my career from the stuff i've seen and connections i've made on Twitter. Shell of its former self.