MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by kryptiskt | 2025-06-17 23:31:47+00:00
Japan holds the record for the smallest rocket to reach orbit with the SS-520, which put a cubesat into orbit in 2018.

Its dimensions according to Wikipedia:

Height – 31 feet (9.54 meters)

Weight – 2.9 tons (2.6 metric tons)

Diameter – 20 inches (52 centimeters)

Payload to Low-Earth Orbit – ~9 lbs (4 kg)
by acdha | 2025-06-17 23:33:04+00:00
Consider the degree to which we’ve already seen vigilantes attempting what they term immigration enforcement, targeted assassination of political enemies, a president pardoning those who commit violence on behalf of his causes, and federal law enforcement repurposed to harass opponents or hustle inconvenient arrestees out of the country where they can be held incommunicado. It seems pretty reasonable to me to that many people without a huge degree of privilege would want to avoid the risk of drawing fire like that.
by flyinghamster | 2025-06-17 23:33:06+00:00
All of the purple lights I've seen have been of the same design, and they seem to be in towns that are (at least to some degree) cash-strapped. The manufacturer better be replacing these under warranty.

There aren't any of them in my town, though I've seen one LED streetlight so far that went out. The main streets have lights with a slight yellow tint, and the side streets are neutral white, which I find much more pleasing than the purplish mercury arcs they replaced.
by timr | 2025-06-17 23:33:13+00:00
> Poltical stories that show "evidence of some interesting new phenomenon" are not against the guidelines.

Call me evil and obtuse, but this is neither interesting, nor new. The only thing new here is that (it seems) a huge swath of people are learning how the law works for the first time.

Brad Lander had nothing to do with the situation. He's a politician, and he was there "observing". It's the equivalent if I walked down to the Manhattan courthouse, ran up to the first defendant in shackles I saw in the hallway, and started interfering with their movement. I'd be arrested.

The fact that you, as a random bystander, aren't shown ID and briefed on the situation isn't relevant. If you aren't involved, you aren't involved.
by DavidPiper | 2025-06-17 23:33:14+00:00
Thank you for describing this so eloquently.

Meaning no disrespect to photographers, I'm starting to think that a probable outcome of all the AI investment is a sharp uptick in shovelware.

If we can get AIs to build "pretty good" things - or even just "pretty average" things - cheaply, then our app stores, news feeds, ad feeds, company directives, etc, will be continuously swamped with it.
by ngruhn | 2025-06-17 23:34:00+00:00
I bet. The middle east is more complicated than quantum mechanics. There are like gazillions of factions, local and foreign. You would think you can roughly group them into Israel+US, Russia, Shia, Sunni. They surely all hate each other. But there are still constantly shifting alliances. At some point Iran (Shia?) was funding ISIS (Sunni?) only to later team up with the US and Israel to fight them. Sometimes all these islamist groups have a dude who looks like the leader but it's actually the guy two levels down who is the real puppet master. And everybody is known under at least three different names all of which are Al-something. I tried to read a book on this but you become this manic investigation board meme guy.
by bitwize | 2025-06-17 23:35:14+00:00
Nintendo has ABSOLUTELY competed on graphics. The NES, SNES, N64, and Gamecube were graphical powerhouses upon release, at or near the top of their generations in graphical performance. It was only with the Wii, when they chose to iterate on the Gamecube design rather than pair a powerful multicore processor with a powerful shader-capable CPU like the PS3 and Xbox 360 did, that Nintendo started going all "but muh lateral thinking with withered technology" and claimed they never intended to compete in that space.
by tptacek | 2025-06-17 23:35:43+00:00
The reasonable concern people have about AI eliminating coder jobs is that they will make existing coders drastically more productive. "Productivity" is literally defined as the number X of people required to do Y amount of stuff.

I'm not sure how seriously people take the threat of non-coding vibe-coders. Maybe they should! The most important and popular programming environment in the world is the spreadsheet. Before spreadsheets, everything that is today a spreadsheet was a program some programmer had to write.
by AlotOfReading | 2025-06-17 23:36:31+00:00
Knowing just what's going on in the existing text isn't the whole problem in navigating a DSL. You have to be able to predict new things based on the patterns in existing text.

Let's say you want to generate differently sized text here. An LLM will have ingested lots of text talking about clothing size and tailwind text sizes vaguely follow that pattern. Maybe it generates text-medium as a guess instead of the irregular text-base, or extends the numeric pattern down into text-2xs.
by PaulDavisThe1st | 2025-06-17 23:37:34+00:00
This "let them do it, and try to rectify wrongs later" model is why we end up with innocent gay hairdressers in CECOT.

There are clearly established procedures for US law enforcement (which includes ICE). If they are not following those procedures, then any citizen has the right to raise this as an issue, politician or not. They don't get to just haul people away because you have no "official capacity".

Do you have a legal right to see the documents that MUST be presented to the person they are seeking to detain? Probably not. Do you have a moral duty to insist the US law enforcement HAS that document before leaving the situation? Many people would say yes.

The 2nd amendment crowd are strong on the idea of guns as a means of resisting tyranny. Other people feel similarly about standing up to law enforcement being done illegally.
by acdha | 2025-06-17 23:40:09+00:00
I’ve checked in on Reason from time to time and it’s scary. They’ll have an article accurately recognizing the threat and incompatibility with even remotely libertarian principles, and the comments are like “this boot tastes great!” or “not a problem as long as it happens to brown people”.

Their top immigration story right now is a great example: https://reason.com/2025/06/12/california-immigration-raids-a...
by alephnerd | 2025-06-17 23:40:37+00:00
I tend to disagree. Iran was already on the verge of a succession crisis, as Khamenei only rose to power by viciously putting down Khomeini's allies after his passing, and the inter-service rivalry between the Army (leaning towards reformers like Khomeini's grandson), IRGC (autonomous), and the Basij (lead by Khamenei's son). This is the forcing function.

Iran had a very violent succession crisis in the late 80s-early 90s, but the titans of the revolution and rallying behind the flag due to the Iran-Iraq war helped ensure some base amount of unity.

There is a vacuum in Iran's elite, as most of the upper and mid-level echelons are those who solidified their fiefdoms in the 1990s.
by EstanislaoStan | 2025-06-17 23:40:47+00:00
"...even as he fell, Leyster realized that he was still carrying the shovel. In his confusion, he’d forgotten to drop the thing. So, desperately, he swung it around with all his strength at the juvenile’s legs.

Tyrannosaurs were built for speed. Their leg bones were hollow, like a bird’s. If he could break a femur …

The shovel connected, but not solidly. It hit without breaking anything. But, still, it got tangled up in those powerful legs. With enormous force, it was wrenched out of his hands. Leyster was sent tumbling on the ground.

Somebody was screaming. Dazed, Leyster raised himself up on his arms to see Patrick, hysterically slamming the juvenile, over and over, with the butt of the shotgun. He didn’t seem to be having much effect. Scarface was clumsily trying to struggle to its feet. It seemed not so much angry as bewildered by what was happening to it.

Then, out of nowhere, Tamara was standing in front of the monster. She looked like a warrior goddess, all rage and purpose. Her spear was raised up high above Scarface, gripped tightly in both hands. Her knuckles were white.

With all her strength, she drove the spear down through the center of the tyrannosaur’s face. It spasmed, and died. Suddenly everything was very still."
by timr | 2025-06-17 23:41:18+00:00
> Do you have a legal right to see the documents that MUST be presented to the person they are seeking to detain? Probably not. Do you have a moral duty to insist the US law enforcement HAS that document before leaving the situation? Many people would say yes.

Well, you can theorize a "moral duty" to do whatever you want, but that won't stop you from getting actually arrested, under real laws. But you do you.

The thing about being a martyr for your beliefs is that it comes with a downside. This article is trying to stir up controversy that someone doing something illegal (i.e. obstruction) was arrested for a valid reason.
by selcuka | 2025-06-17 23:41:30+00:00
Also take the "can't see your messages" statement with a grain of salt. Like the famous Lotus Notes backdoor [1] they might have given the government an easy(ier) way to decrypt those messages.

The backdoor in Lotus Notes (differential cryptography) wasn't a secret. It was public information. Ray Ozzie used it as a way to circumvent US encryption export laws. Today companies have to be more discrete.

[1] http://www.cypherspace.org/adam/hacks/lotus-nsa-key.html
by generalizations | 2025-06-17 23:42:43+00:00
Short answer: you still need a complex vehicle to finish the orbit insertion after getting thrown, and now you have the added complexity of designing your (smaller) rocket to a) survive a massive g-force while being thrown and b) fit into the catapult sling. So far the tradeoffs haven't been worth it.

Basically the only things we know of that can survive our spin launch systems is stuff like 'very crushable food supplies' or 'a giant lump of steel'.
by aaronvg | 2025-06-17 23:44:53+00:00
We're making a prompting DSL (BAML https://github.com/BoundaryML/baml) and what we've found is that all the syntax rules can easily be encoded into a Cursor Rules file, which we find LLMs can follow nicely. DSLs are simple by nature so there's not too many rules to define.

Here's the cursor rules file we give folks: gist.github.com/aaronvg/b4f590f59b13dcfd79721239128ec208
by throw0101c | 2025-06-17 23:45:48+00:00
I can intuitively understand the math behind RSA and DH (though EC is a bit hand-wavey with the "dot" operation [1]). But I have yet to grasp latticed-based stuff [2] or 'learning with errors' [3] yet.

[1] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/10/a-rel...

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QDdOoYdb748

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K026C5YaB3A
by titanomachy | 2025-06-17 23:45:58+00:00
“Good debugger worth weight in shiny rocks, in fact also more”

I’ve spent time at small startups and on “elite” big tech teams, and I’m usually the only one on my team using a debugger. Almost everyone in the real world (at least in web tech) seems to do print statement debugging. I have tried and failed to get others interested in using my workflow.

I generally agree that it’s the best way to start understanding a system. Breaking on an interesting line of code during a test run and studying the call stack that got me there is infinitely easier than trying to run the code forwards in my head.

Young grugs: learning this skill is a minor superpower. Take the time to get it working on your codebase, if you can.
by neilv | 2025-06-17 23:46:15+00:00
Some additional things that translators do (which I recall from a professional translator friend, put in my own words):

* Idioms (The article mentions in passing that this isn't so much a difficulty in Norwegian->English, but of course idioms usually don't translate as sentences)

* Cultural references (From arts, history, cuisine, etc. You don't necessarily substitute, but you might have to hint if it has relevant connotations that would be missed.)

* Cultural values (What does "freedom" mean to this one nation, or "passion" to this other, or "resilience" to another, and does that influence translation)

* Matching actor in dubbing (Sometimes the translation you'd use for a line of a dialogue in a book doesn't fit the duration and speaking movements of an actor in a movie, so the translator changes the language to fit better.)

* Artful prose. (AFAICT, LLMs really can't touch this, unless they're directly plagiarizing the right artful bit)
by miki123211 | 2025-06-17 23:48:10+00:00
Considering how popular WhatsApp is, it's very hard to believe that there are no security researchers reverse-engineering its crypto code.

Because WhatsApp uses end-to-end encryption, any backdoor must necessarily be on the client side, and all client-side code can ultimately be reverse-engineered. This makes such backdoors very tricky to implement.

With that said, while I think a "general backdoor" (one that weakens the crypto algorithms so much that all messages can ultimately be read by Meta) is super unlikely, a "vulnerability" in some image parsing library, designed and implemented by the NSA, and only used on the most interesting targets... now that's a different story.
by fzeroracer | 2025-06-17 23:48:54+00:00
The speed with which other Americans went from 'we need guns to protect ourselves from the feds trampling over our rights' to 'federal agents bagging someone with zero identification or justification is OK actually' really does go to show how much of that was bluster. It's obvious to me that if federal agents weren't concerned with backlash for obviously illegal actions they would properly present themselves.
by alephnerd | 2025-06-17 23:49:01+00:00
At this moment no. Most administrative and strategy positions for Intel and Foreign Service seats have remained unconfirmed. Maybe the head of the CIA - John Ratcliffe, an avowed Iran+China Hawk - but this administration is hard to read given how disjointed and domestic-driven decisionmaking is.

Furthermore, the DNI is at the lowest rung of the intel hierarchy on the Hill, as it is a post-9/11 invention, and faces inter-service competition from the CIA, FBI, and NSA.
by gorpy7 | 2025-06-17 23:49:16+00:00
I used to try it for a few drives after each release then revert to driving myself. with the newest version i let it drive a lot- and i’m on the older hardware. Everyone likes to bemoan the lying but every corp lies, at least with Tesla you get to point the finger instead of yell at a faceless mass. and if it’s 15 years of lying and a well known political target, then at some point it’s not lying- it’s a feature. people need to take some personal responsibility. also, of course, every day that goes by without a fatality is another day that all the naysayers should capitulate- but we won’t hear it. time and pressure will solve fsd sooner than later, i doubt there is a soul in here that doubts it, so there is also /that/ clock that is ticking.

Cars, one of life’s current greatest killers. by accidents and by pollution-hmmm, let’s run down that evil dude!

edited: made on writing mistakes
by alganet | 2025-06-17 23:49:19+00:00
Good, but not exactly what I expected for "easily fixed".

It includes a lot of steps and constant human evaluation between them, which implies that decisions about tone are ultimately made by whoever is prompting the LLM, not the LLMs themselves.

> "If they are generally in the style I want..."

> "choosing the sentences and paragraphs I like most from each..."

> "I also make my own adjustments to the translation as I see fit..."

> "I don’t adopt most of the LLM’s suggestions..."

> "I check it paragraph by paragraph..."

It seems like a great workflow to speed up the work of an already experienced translator, but far from being usable by a layman due to the several steps requiring specialized human supervision.

Consider the scenario presented by the blog post regarding bluntness/politeness and cultural sensitivities. Would anyone be able to use this workflow without knowing that beforehand? If you think about it, it could make the tone even worse.
by nvch | 2025-06-17 23:49:35+00:00
RAW? Storage is becoming cheeper, why discard the originals?

When looking for a format to display HQ photos on my website I settled with a combination of AVIF + JPG. Most photos are AVIF, but if AVIF is too magical comparatively to JPG (like 3x-10x smaller) I use a larger JPG instead. "Magic" means that fine details are discarded.

WebP discards gradients (like sunset, night sky or water) even at the highest quality, so I consider it useless for photography.
by morkalork | 2025-06-17 23:50:03+00:00
Huh, yeah the article just kind of... ends. Strange. The fiasco has a wiki article so make of that what you will:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third-pound_burger

>This misunderstanding stemmed from consumers focusing on the numbers "3" and "4," leading them to conclude that one-third (1/3) was smaller than one-fourth (1/4), even though the opposite is true

I wonder if there's a correlation between those consumers and Trump voters?
by binarysneaker | 2025-06-17 23:50:30+00:00
Great post, thank you. You articulated my feeling with ChatGPT models, and one of the reasons I prefer Claude to ChatGPT. I find Claude tries to please less. Anyway, I turned your blog post in a Cursor rule, and told ChatGPT to follow it too, and so far the output is much improved IMO. If you want to try it, the rule is here: https://github.com/davenicoll/cursor-rules/blob/main/.cursor...
by rossdavidh | 2025-06-17 23:50:42+00:00
All of this is good reason that orgs _shouldn't_ be laying off developers, but none of it is a reason that they won't/aren't. In any case, I see more "if they're remote why can't they be on the low-wage side of the planet" at the moment, than I do "use AI instead of a developer", although they are no doubt related.

The more awkward truth is that most of what developers have been paid to do in the 21st century was, from the larger perspective, wasted. We mostly spent a lot of developer time in harvesting attention, not in actually making anything truly useful.
by theandrewbailey | 2025-06-17 23:50:53+00:00
> JPEG-XL seemed like the next logical step until Google took their toys and killed it despite already having the support in Chrome, which pretty much makes it dead in the water (don't you just love monopolies making decisions for you?)

I've done several tests where I lowered the quality settings (and thus, the resulting file size) of JPEG-XL and AVIF encoders over a variety of images. In almost every image, JPEG-XL subjective quality fell faster than AVIF, which seemed mostly OK for web use at similar file sizes. Due to that last fact, I concede that Chrome's choice to drop JPEG-XL support is correct. If things change (JPEG-XL becomes more efficient at low file sizes, gains Chrome support), I have lossless PNG originals to re-encode from.
by NoMoreNicksLeft | 2025-06-17 23:51:58+00:00
>private trackers and warez groups are the plentiful (

Sure. It combines all the fun of pledge week with a fraternity with the wrong-headed attitudes that became part of the culture when ftp servers were the height of technology. And you just have to schedule an interview and learn the secret knock/handshake. Don't ever invite anyone, because if they're the wrong type, you get banned for their behavior too.

>public trackers and torrent sites are also just 90% malware and RATs.

It's an mkv file. Don't double click exes.
by Aloisius | 2025-06-17 23:53:00+00:00
He already had immense power prior to the coup. At best, his autocratic power was strengthened. Calling him installed by the US is a misrepresentation.

Iran was not a British-style constitutional monarchy. The Shah was not a ceremonial position. His father ruled with even more power than he did. He was just an absentee ruler for the first part of his rule until someone tried to assassinate him.

Never mind that Prime Minister Mosaddegh had dissolved parliament and had been ruling by decree for a year also acted as an autocrat. Even his own party turned against him for abuse of power.

At best, one could argue the British installed the Shah. They are, after all, the people who made him Shah in the first place.
by zem | 2025-06-17 23:53:03+00:00
even when you have tagged unions, visitors are a useful way to abstract a heterogenous tree traversal from code that processes specific nodes in the tree. e.g. if you have an ast with an `if` node and subnodes `condition`, `if_body`, and `else_body` you could either have the `if node == "if" then call f(subnode) for subnode in [node.condition, node.if_body, node.else_body]` and repeat that for every function `f` that walks the tree, or define a visitor that takes `f` as an argument and keep the knowledge of which subnodes every node has in a single place.
Show HN: Sysmodeler.ai cuts safety-critical modeling from weeks → minutes (Beta)
by mtbwaez | 2025-06-17 23:54:15+00:00
Hi HN,

I’m Tawhid. I spent ~14 years at Ford & GM building safety-critical systems and dreading the part where we had to draw SysML diagrams for audits. Even good teams lose weeks clicking around Cameo or Rhapsody before real design starts.

Since July 2024 I’ve been bootstrapping SysModeler with a small team (14 people, mostly engineers/interns I trained). Goal: make a browser tool that gets you a correct first draft in minutes, then stays out of your way so you can edit by hand.

What it does Accepts plain English or code snippets → generates all nine SysML diagram types (block defs, activity, sequence, …).

Runs in the browser; nothing to install, works on Linux/Win/Mac.

Manual drag-and-drop still works; you can ask the helper to clean up or refactor but it never overwrites without confirmation.

(Upcoming) Early checks for consistency and traceability; spits out a PDF package for audits.

Why bother Compliance isn’t optional in automotive / aerospace, but the modelling step is still a time sink. Most engineers use today’s tools only because the spec says they must—so they rush, and quality suffers. I’d rather shorten the grind and let teams iterate earlier.

Stack (nutshell) React + React-Flow editor, Python/FastAPI backend, LLM calls (OpenAI / Gemini) behind an API, deployed on Azure AKS. No user data is reused for training.

Free beta No credit card.

Looking for feedback Anything confusing in the editor?

Performance pain on large models?

Must-have integrations we’re missing (Git, req-tools, etc.)?

Odd SysML edge cases we should support?

Demo: https://youtu.be/zAdmf5Muq-0

Happy to answer questions or open the hood on any part of the stack. Thanks for taking a look.
by dragonwriter | 2025-06-17 23:55:55+00:00
> Furthermore, the DNI is at the lowest rung of the intel hierarchy on the Hill, as it is a post-9/11 invention, and faces inter-service competition from the CIA, FBI, and NSA.

The DNI is by law [0] the head of the intelligence community; the role was created to separate that function from the CIA Director (formerly, "Director of Central Intelligence"), who previously was the head of the intelligence community as well as the head of one of the major constituent agencies within that community. The CIA, FBI, and NSA or components of the intelligence community, not "competitors" with the DNI.

(And all of those are executive branch positions, so not in any hierarchy "on the Hill", which is a metonym for the Legislative branch because of the location of the Capitol complex on Capitol hill.)

[0] 50 U.S. Code § 3023(b)(1) Subject to the authority, direction, and control of the President, the Director of National Intelligence shall— (1) serve as head of the intelligence community; (2) act as the principal adviser to the President, to the National Security Council, and the Homeland Security Council for intelligence matters related to the national security; and (3) consistent with section 1018 of the National Security Intelligence Reform Act of 2004, oversee and direct the implementation of the National Intelligence Program. https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/50/3023