MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by maaaaattttt | 2025-06-04 08:40:34+00:00
Apologies for opening a tangeant on a tangeant, but am I the only one who thinks there are 2 levels of playing master mind (and therefore wordle)? Easy level, you let the player know exactly which spots are correctly placed and which ones are there but incorrectly placed. Hard level, you let the player know only that some are correctly placed and some are there but incorrectly placed without identifiying which ones. I personnaly don't enjoy the easy level when playing mastermind, but I do enjoy the hard version which is much more investigative and in my opinion triggers the same brain process as when I'm debugging code.
by rwmj | 2025-06-04 08:40:45+00:00
Guitar definitely. An acoustic guitar is ideal since you just pick it up and start playing any time (even plugging something in can be a barrier sometimes). My rule is I always play for 10 minutes minimum every day, even when I'm not feeling it.

The great thing about guitars is that you can buy really well made ones, brand new, for only $100-300. That and a $10 tuner and watching free online tutorials is all you need.
by chipx86 | 2025-06-04 08:42:19+00:00
I'm really glad it was useful for you and your teams! :) Hearing that kind of thing always brightens my day. I've felt very lucky getting to work on this as my job all these years.

It'd have been amazing having something like DiffX when we started building some of these SCM integrations too. It's really saved us a lot of trouble with some of the recent ones we've built (PlasticSCM / Unity Version Control, Keysight SOS, and ClearCase), which didn't have a format to work with and needed a lot of extra metadata for lookups and some other stuff.
by FirmwareBurner | 2025-06-04 08:42:22+00:00
>Also, I think a CT for head injury is fairly standard practice. I think they do that in Europe.

Chiming in here from a rich EU country. CT for head bumps at the ER is not standard unless the doctor deems it absolutely necessary in grave injuries since the public system is already clogged up. Only X-ray on the spot is standard.

When I had my bicycle accident they did no CT scan, only head Xray. They said they'll do a head CT only if concussion symptoms don't go away or worsen after a few days.

In poor EU countries, you don't even get an Xray if your skull isn't cracked wide open because there's already 100 people in the ER waiting with even bigger issues than you. My dad slipped and fell on a concrete floor and the ER sent him home after looking at him for 3 seconds telling him "it looks fine". If he went to a private hospital he'd get all the imaging he wants since he'd be paying out of pocket and they'll never say NO to money.

I feel like Americans live in a parallel universe where healthcare has infinite money so they throw expensive checks procedures at the wall since insurance pays anyway, but that's not the case in public systems where money is tight than the government demands frugality from hospitals and doctors.
by pyman | 2025-06-04 08:42:36+00:00
The short answer is no, their website doesn't claim that development is done using AI.

My gut feeling is that a lot of people, including developers, are posting hate messages and spreading fake news because of their fear of AI, which they see as a threat to their jobs.

If you look at their website, builder.ai, they tell customers that their virtual assistant, "Natasha", assigns a developer (I assume from India):

> Natasha recommends the best suited developer for your app project, who then customises your code on our virtual desktop. We also use facial recognition to check that the developer working on your code is the same one Natasha picked.

Source: https://www.builder.ai/how-it-works

They also have another page explaining how they use deep learning and transformers for speech-to-text processing. They list a bunch of libraries like MetaPath2Vec, Node2Vec, GraphSage, and Flair:

Source: https://www.builder.ai/under-the-hood

It sounds impressive, but listing libraries doesn't prove they built an actual LLM.

So, the questions that remain unanswered are:

1. Did Craig Saunders, the Head of AI at Builder.ai (and ex-Director of AI at Amazon), ever show investors or clients a working demo of Natasha, or a product roadmap? How do we know Natasha was actually an LLM and not just someone sitting in a call centre in India?

2. Was there a technical team behind Saunders capable of building such a model?

3. Was the goal really to build a domain-specific foundation model, or was that just a narrative to attract investment?

Having said that, the company went into insolvency because the CEO and CFO were misleading investors by significantly inflating sales figures through questionable financial practices. According to the Financial Times, BuilderAI reportedly engaged in "round-tripping" with VerSe Innovation. This raised red flags for investors, regulators and prosecutors, and led to bankruptcy proceedings
by mjg59 | 2025-06-04 08:42:50+00:00
The implementation seems to be libsodium sealed boxes, with the key material sequestered using the juicebox.xyz protocol. In itself this seems broadly fine, with the significant proviso as mentioned in https://help.x.com/en/using-x/encrypted-direct-messages that identity is not verified at present, and as a result it's trivially MITMable.

But there's something more subtle here. Juicebox means that your key material is remotely stored in encrypted form. In an ideal setup, it's split between multiple different realms operated by different people, and the key material is stored in HSMs. There's a complicated dance where you prove knowledge of the PIN without actually revealing the PIN, and then the remote realms hand over the key material and you reassemble it into your key by decrypting it with a key also derived from your PIN.

If Twitter is running their own Juicebox realms then you're having to trust them. Even if the realms are implemented as HSMs, they're in a position to see the encrypted key material as it exits the HSM. And if they're not in HSMs, then the encrypted key material is just sitting there where they can see it. This doesn't intrinsically give them the key, since it still needs the PIN to decrypt it - but the key derivation function from the PIN is just 32 rounds of argon2id with 16MB of memory use, and given the PIN is limited to 4 digits, that's going to take about a second of GPU aided brute forcing to drop out the actual key.

As noted in the help doc, this isn't forward secure, so the moment they have the key they can decrypt everything. This is so far from being a meaningful e2ee platform it's ridiculous.
by zevon | 2025-06-04 08:43:30+00:00
Health concerns are important - which is why the PP knowledgebase and PP workshops include quite a few infos about the safety aspects of different plastics and how to work with them.

The laser cutter is not necessarily a good comparison for safety considerations. By definition, a laser cutter burns the materials it cuts. With equipment that melts plastic - like injection molding machines or FDM 3D printers - burning the material just means that you did it wrong, your temperature was too high - and you will not get a useful product.

What people do on their own is another matter - but hey, that's apparently just human (see all the chainsaw heroes in safety flip flops, the people running SLA printers in their dorm room, all the soldering that goes on without a fan/filtration, ...)
by Yizahi | 2025-06-04 08:44:13+00:00
Robots today can't "leverage profanity". Robots today can generate words either excluding profanity via some pre-made dictionary or not excluding them. Since both results are simply rehash of the human created data, of course it is possible to program robots to copy profanity too.

It really says nothing about the robot, because it is a robot; but a characteristic of a human who programmed it.
by Klwy | 2025-06-04 08:45:37+00:00
Hi everyone! I’m conducting a research survey for my university project and was gonna compete in an innovation competition, and I’d love to hear your thoughts and experiences about tech toys, robots, gaming devices, and decorative collectibles to make it a success. Link: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdBy93NHhtW_X2vuSTs... Your responses are completely anonymous and will only be used for academic and competition purposes. Thank you so much for helping out!
by fsloth | 2025-06-04 08:46:28+00:00
”not great, somebody else used my program and they got root on my server...”

In general security sensitive software is the worst place possible to use LLM:s based on public case studies and anecdata exactly for this reason.

”Do it the hard way”

Yes that’s generally the way I do it as well when I need to reliably understand something but it takes hours.

The cadence with LLM driven experiments is usually under an hour. That’s the biggest boom for me - I get a new tool and can focus on the actual work I’m delivering, with some step now taking slightly less time.

For example I’m happy using vim without ever having read the code or debugged it, much less having observed it’s callgraph. I’m similarly content in using LLM generated utilities without much oversight. I would never push code like that to production of course.
by teekert | 2025-06-04 08:46:54+00:00
You're fully right of course. I used plastic materials to make rapid prototypes for lab-on-a-chip purposes. We laser-burned channels in PMMA and laminated it to foils. PMMA behaves very poorly with any solvent, so we started exploring other polymers, and then you run into this issue... I remember PP (poly-propylene) being a very good, inert, non-problematic polymer btw.
by krisoft | 2025-06-04 08:47:44+00:00
This is the first time I’m hearing about “Precious Plastic”, so my comment is entirely based on this one article.

The real problem here is that they are lacking a clear and well articulated roadmap.

If we give them money, what will they use it for? Will they make new opensource tool designs which has bigger capacity? Easier to maintain? Or smaller and easier to manufacture? Or safer by design? Or lower energy? Or easier to transport? Will they use it to develop forum and wiki software? Will they throw all the donations into a litigation pit? Will they use it to microfund workshops all over the world? Are they planning to do more outreach? If so where and how?

I’m not looking for a detailed step by step project plan. But something directional would be great. What will “version 5” give to the world compared to “version 4”?

If they can’t answer that then Precious Plastic is indeed in trouble. But the trouble is not from any of those mentioned stresses, but from a lack of vision and direction.
by cookiengineer | 2025-06-04 08:47:59+00:00
Containers allow separation of access rights, because you don't have to pwn only one program/service that is running on the host system to get physical access to it.

Containers have essentially 3 advantages:

- Restart the containers after they got pwned, takes less than a second to get your business up and running again.

- Separation of concerns: database, reverse proxy, and web service run in separate containers to spread the risk, meaning that an attacker now has to successfully exploit X of the containers to have the same kind of capabilities.

- Updates in containers are much easier to deploy than on host systems (or VPSes).
by jqpabc123 | 2025-06-04 08:48:49+00:00
I'm interested in what happens in 9 months when support ends for "Plucky Puffin".

Is there a clear and simple upgrade or do you get to repeat/redo a lot of the setup and installation you've just done?

Compatibility and continuity over the long term hasn't exactly been a strong selling point for Linux in the past.
by maccard | 2025-06-04 08:49:38+00:00
> It’s a fine balance. > People don’t like it when you sugarcoat or otherwise patronize them.

Agreed. One of the earliest things you have to learn as a manager is that people also don't ask for what they want, they ask for what they think they want.

I had a direct report who said they wanted to know what was going on, so I told them regularly about the ups and downs. At the end of the year I got the feedback that I was providing unclear direction and being inconsistent - my direction was always the same, but it was obvious that even though they said they understood that I was telling them to stick to the roadmap we planned and checked in on, they were internalizing the week on week things we talked about.

I've since learned the difference of how much to share, and how to effectively say "I know that team X are talking about changing the Foo to Bar, but we're going to keep working with Foo for now". If I've done my job as a lead, the direct acknowledgement of the uncertainty and an instruction to stay the course should be the communication the team needs, and from a technical perspective hopefully our earlier choices will make it less hassle for us to switch from Foo to Bar if/when that decision actually happens.
by palata | 2025-06-04 08:50:42+00:00
> Managing is a hard job, which is why so many managers are bad

Many jobs are hard, and I don't think it is a rule that most workers in hard jobs are bad.

My take is multifold:

- Managing takes experience. In the software industry, the evolution has been such that there aren't enough experienced people to fill all the manager positions.

- Startups usually don't hire experience managers because they are deemed too expensive. They end up with inexperienced managers. If it's your first job, you never had a manager yourself, and you're suddenly managing a team, how can you be good?

- It is hard to evaluate the competences of a manager. As an engineer, you can talk with another engineer and get a sense of how good/experienced they are: just ask them to talk about technology. As a manager, it seems harder to evaluate. It's easy to manage a team in a highly functional environment, so you can't say for sure that the manager is good. It's hard to manage a team in a highly disfunctional environment, so you can't say for sure that the manager is bad.

- Managers are promoted from above. It's difficult to judge a manager without considering how their subordinates think about them. I have seen too many people climb the management ladder even though all of their subordinates absolutely hated them.
by dgb23 | 2025-06-04 08:50:45+00:00
Test first programming has its use and can be quite peoductive.

I believe the issue with „TDD“ is the notion that it should drive design and more importantly that it‘s always applied. I disagree with both if those.

Given a problem where test first makes sense, I prefer roughly this procedure:

1. Figure out assumptions and guarantees.

2. Design an interface

3. Produce some input and output data (coupled)

4. Write a test that uses the above

5. Implement the interface/function

The order of 4 and 5 aren‘t all that important actually.

My experience is that an AI is pretty good at 3, at least once you defined one example, it will just produce a ton of data for you that is in large parts useful and correct.

Step 4 is very easy and short. Again, AI will just do it.

Step 5 is a wash. If it doesn‘t get it in a few tries, I turn it off and implement myself. Sometimes it gets it but produces low quality code, then I often turn it off as well.

Step 1-2 are the parts that I want to do myself, because they are the significant pieces of my mental model of a program.

I believe this is also how evolutionary/genetic programs usually work if you squint. They operate under a set of constraints that are designed by a human (researcher).
by preisschild | 2025-06-04 08:51:07+00:00
> Have they figured out how to store the waste yet?

Not the power plants problem, as per law the government is responsible for it and the utilities have to pay them. The govt is in breach of this by not opening Yucca Mountain.

For contrast, in Finland the utilies are responsible for their waste and they have Onkalo

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repo...

> How to insure the power plant

Thats what insurance pools like the "American Nuclear Insurers" are for

> How to make a dime of nuclear power without relying on massive public subsidies?

German commercial nuclear power plants for example never received ANY subsidies and they still made a lot of money.
by urschrei | 2025-06-04 08:54:06+00:00
> A side effect of the geometry simplication is that there are some very small gaps between states. Based on your use case, you'll need to handle the case of the point not being within any state borders. In these rare cases, you could fall back to a different method, such as distance checking centroid points, adding an episilon to all state borders, or simply asking the user. (The user may also be in another country or in the ocean...)

If your pre-simplification input geometries form a coverage[0], you can use e.g. ST_CoverageSimplify[1] or coverage.simplify[2] to simplify them without introducing gaps.

[0] http://lin-ear-th-inking.blogspot.com/2022/07/polygonal-cove... [1] https://postgis.net/docs/ST_CoverageSimplify.html [2] https://shapely.readthedocs.io/en/2.1.0/reference/shapely.co...
by lionkor | 2025-06-04 08:54:40+00:00
It seems to me like this is what happens when you do impulsive, hype-driven development. I assume a junior walked into Elon's office, and pitched it with the words "Bitcoin style encryption, as a chat platform--Written in Rust, almost entirely developed my Grok3", and he was sold.

I'm not being cynical or funny, I legitimately think, after having worked with some hype-driven leadership people, that this is quite common and results in a lot of flawed slop products, which are hyped up by leaders who don't know what they're talking about.

Admitting that this sort of product doesn't do what they think it does would mean admitting that they are wholly incompetent and got tricked by the hype; and that's not acceptable. So it get sunk-cost-fallacied into being a real product even more.
by ZeroGravitas | 2025-06-04 08:54:52+00:00
Historically burning trash has been a net win because food scraps decompose to methane if landfilled and if used to generate electricity and/or local heat networks the trash displaced fossil fuels from the grid.

If your nation is diverting enough organic waste from household waste, and has enough low carbon generation in the grid mix then the calculus changes and you can start worrying about the fossil plastic in the mix, but the biggest impact there is to intercept the plastic early and recycle it.
by ethagknight | 2025-06-04 08:55:01+00:00
Well no not at all, the loans already exist, and I guess you assume write offs are a given, so rip the bandaid off? Why not work to avoid?

Loans are tied to a term, borrowers can resolve their own liquidity issues, so it’s not crazy to give underwater loans time and breathing room in rate to work out without forcing a collapse. Simply broaden underwriting requirements for new loans.

Time, value, and risk, right?
by magic_hamster | 2025-06-04 08:55:08+00:00
Sony learned their lesson from what happened with the PS1, where commercial emulators like Bleem became available during the product's lifetime. It was probably not a huge deal in terms of lost sales, but Sony really didn't like this, as evident by their lawsuit (which also failed).

The PS2 with its Emotion engine was a huge leap which was pretty hard to emulate for a while. And the PS3 was even harder. Yes the developers hated the Cell architecture, but overall, Sony managed to create a pretty good system which spawned incredible games, while also being so hard to emulate that it took over a decade to reach a point where it's done properly, and almost 20 years to reach a point where it's considered really fast.

Compare this to the Switch, which was being emulated pretty well from the get go. This allowed some people to just make do with an emulator instead of buying the console (and the games). Actually this goes for pretty much all Nintendo devices.
by lm28469 | 2025-06-04 08:57:27+00:00
Losing weight is only a bonus for me, you could lose weight by following a diet that exclusively consists of eating a cube of sugar every XX minutes if you wanted to. Where fasting shines is that it helps control hunger and energy levels. A normal person in the west is basically always in a fed state (bf, lunch, snack, dinner) to the point it's hard for most people to differentiate thirst from hunger from boredom.
by rollcat | 2025-06-04 08:59:23+00:00
Just to give everyone some perspective, my guesstimated peak power usage of common household appliances: an electric stove - 5kW; a fridge - 500W; washing machine - 500W; 55" TV - 120W; a laptop - 65W; gaming PC - 600W. If you'd run all of these simultaneously, that'd be around 7kW.

So, in the most unrealistic scenario, a 1GW power plant could power 140.000 households. The grid may have to handle those kinds of peaks by using other sources of energy, but let's assume all we have is this one power plant.

Let's pretend we don't need to handle peaks. Assuming average yearly power usage of 10kWh, average power draw could be around 1.15kW. In that scenario, a 1GW plant could power 870.000 houses.
by teruakohatu | 2025-06-04 09:00:00+00:00
> This is just PR and carbon greenwashing.

> All current power plants are completely unsuitable as single power source for a data center

I don’t think this is a fair assessment.

For example, there is a data center being built in New Zealand that will be grid connected but the power will be supplied from a huge hydro dam that has to have generators shutdown if the load is not great enough. Its primarily purpose is to power an aluminium smelter and there is not enough transmission capacity to transfer all the electricity elsewhere.

Another counter example is home solar. If a house is grid connected it’s still producing green energy even if it still sips gas generation at night.
by cogman10 | 2025-06-04 09:00:32+00:00
> Yes, there are endless stories companies spending enormous resources to optimize Java stack

And not what I'm advocating for. Sometimes rewrites are necessary.

What I'm advocating is exercising a few well documented and fairly well known jvm flags that aren't particularly fiddly.

The jvm does have endless knobs, most of which you shouldn't touch and instead should let the heuristics do their work. These flags I'm mentioning are not that.

Swapping g1gc for zgc, for example, would have resolved one of their major complaints about GC impact under load. If the live set isn't near the max heap size then pause times are sub millisecond.

> This seems like constant refrain that Apple or anyone choosing their own tech over someone else's owe absolute fair shot to stuff they didn't choose. This is simply not the way world works.

The reason for this refrain is because Java is a very well known tech, easy to hire for (which Amazon that you cite heavily uses). And Apple had already adopted Java and wrote a product with it (I suspect they have several).

I would not be saying any of this if the article was a generic benchmark and comparison of Java with swift. I would not fault Apple for saying "we are rewriting in swift to minimize the number of languages used internally and improve the swift ecosystem".

I'm taking umbridge to them trying to sell this as an absolute necessity because of performance constraints while making questionable statements on the cause.

And, heck, the need to tweak some flags would be a valid thing to call out in the article "we got the performance we wanted with the default compiler options of Swift. To achieve the same thing with Java requires multiple changes from the default settings". I personally don't find it compelling, but it's honest and would sway someone that wants something that "just works" without fiddling.