MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by thdhhghgbhy | 2025-07-28 05:59:25+00:00
The new online safety rules are already being used to shut down government criticism. How it works is their new elite protection squad, if someone is deigned an influential critic of government policy, trawls through your social media posts until they find something against the laws. A lot of government critique is coming from the working class here now, who have virtually no political representation in the UK. As you can imagine, some of these social media posters don't mince their words, and end up getting caught out and arrested.
by motorest | 2025-07-28 06:01:12+00:00
> Thought experiment: as you write code, an LLM generates tests for it & the IDE runs those tests as you type, showing which ones are passing & failing, updating in real time. Imagine 10-100 tests that take <1ms to run, being rerun with every keystroke, and the result being shown in a non-intrusive way.

I think this is a bad approach. Tests enforce invariants, and they are exactly the type of code we don't want LLMs to touch willy-nilly.

You want your tests to only change if you explicitly want them to, and even then only the tests should change.

Once you adopt that constraint, you'll quickly realize ever single detail of your thought experiment is already a mundane workflow in any developer's day-to-day activities.

Consider the fact that watch mode is a staple of any JavaScript testing framework, and those even found their way into .NET a couple of years ago.

So, your thought experiment is something professional software developers have been doing for what? A decade now?
by weinzierl | 2025-07-28 06:01:23+00:00
I think "hard surface modeling" is a keyword you might want to look up. Also look into traditional CAD and "parametric design". All of these have considerable overlap and are focussed on mostly "boxy shapes" with some "free form surfaces" added.

On the other end of the spectrum you have "sculping" for organic shapes and you might want dig into the community around ZBrush, if you want to fill the gap from "start with a cube" to real sculpting.

More niche, but where I feel home, is the model with coordinates and text input approach. I don't know if it has a real name, but here istwhere is pops up and where I worked with it:

- In original AutoCAD (think 90s) a lot of the heavy lifting was done on an integrated command line hacking in many coordinates

- POVRay (and its predecessors and relatives) has a really nice DSL to do CSG with algebraic hypersurfaces. Sounds way more scary than it is. Mark Shuttleworth used it on his space trip to make a render for example.

- Professionally I worked for a couple of years with a tool called FEMAP. I used a lot of coordinate entry and formulas to define stuff and FEMAP is well suited for that.

- Finally OpenSCAD for a contemporary example of the approach.
by jeroenhd | 2025-07-28 06:01:40+00:00
By design, this app isn't mandatory. There should be an alternative way to do age verification. If you can't access a service because you can't run the app, the service fucked up.

Furthermore, there's nothing stopping the governments implementing these standards from permitting GrapheneOS' signature. It's one of the ROMs that actually has a reliable signature so unlike random images from XDA there's a case for it to be permitted. Google's integrity check isn't just a binary check, it's a combination of a hash and a pre-defined list of suggested acceptable hashes.
by gizmo686 | 2025-07-28 06:01:43+00:00
Some vaguely related research: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.aaw2594

If you compare different languages, the speed people tend to speak (measured in syllables per second) varies significantly. However, the number of possible syllables also varies significantly. Once you account for that, the speed of speaking in terms of information is fairly consistent across languages.

I'm not aware of any specific research directly on point to what the author of the posted blog describes. But his hypothesis that having a consistent speaker reduces the cognitive overhead of decoding seems to be part of the story.

However, we would expect a similar effect in people who read, as the writing is also highly standardized. However, I've generally seen silent reading speads for English estimated at around 250. Getting up to 800 WPM puts you well within the realm of speed reading territory.

The relatively high structure of code and rote emails probably helps too.
by djtango | 2025-07-28 06:01:51+00:00
It's unpopular to voice anti-science sounding sentiments about medicine but it's worth noting that there is often a disconnect between known and practiced medicine.

Optimal outcomes at the aggregate don't always translate to optimal outcomes for the individual.

This can mean that strategies like effective triage and prioritization lets people fall through the cracks of conventional medical treatment. This is especially true for both public healthcare and separately chronic issues which are often too hard to treat vs acute medicine.

Then in private medicine it can be a bit of a crapshoot of practitioners who are incentivised to upsell or recommend preferred treatments.

I think this has soured people's opinions of conventional medicine.

My own personal anecdote to offer on the subject is a friend who suffered from severe eczema and over their life and was just put on progressively higher doses of steroids until that stopped working. The last advice from the doctor was "we give up - our next recommendation is chemotherapy to shock your body. Maybe you would like to consider alternative medicine first"

They went to try traditional Chinese medicine and for the first time in their life got control of their eczema.

Given alternative medicine is a dirty word here what I'd say is missing these days is the family doctor who has excellent holistic patient history and is willing to provide a mixture of therapy and lifestyle guidance eg exercise or nutrition intervention.

Some people might claim a GP should do this but the reality is that GPs often aren't allowed to provide this kind of care due to capacity constraints or top down strategic planning.

Ironically you see the gap being bridged from the other direction with therapists increasing their scope - eg someone close to me went to an osteopath for neck issues to get diagnosed (correctly!) that the root cause was sleep apnoea
by lazide | 2025-07-28 06:02:41+00:00
Forests are not long term carbon sinks. They flatline rather quickly.

This is obvious to anyone who has spent much time in a forest, because if this wasn’t the case, forests would be sitting on thousands of feet of sequestered carbon. Instead of a few feet (typically) of non-mineral soil.

Forests also (typically) go through cycles of burning.

The highest rate of carbon sequestration is when a forest is in the 3-25 year old range, because that is when the bulk of the actual growth is occurring.

Renewable doesn’t mean ‘indefinite carbon sink’. Renewable means ‘renews’.

This entire discussion is incredibly ridiculous.
by burnt-resistor | 2025-07-28 06:02:43+00:00
Corn and most ag subsidies are using taxpayer money for corporate welfare for mostly mega farming consortia with a smattering of medium and smaller farmers, who also can't exist in the rigged market without welfare. 5% of all US land, not just arable land, ALL land is used for mostly cow corn. It's absolute insanity.

And then there's the federal US sugar cartel keeping prices artificially (no pun intended) high.
by ajb | 2025-07-28 06:02:51+00:00
Makes sense.

In my ex-employers case, the sale was what's called a "pre-pack" sale. That means the sale was advertised and proposed before the administrator were appointed and the administration was noticed. So you would not have found out in time from the filings, only from ip-bid.com. I don't know if Australian law allows pre-packs.
by thomasmg | 2025-07-28 06:03:28+00:00
I'm working on a new memory-safe systems programming language that is supposted to be (almost) as fast as C, Rust etc, but as simple and concise as Python: https://github.com/thomasmueller/bau-lang

There is a playground which is using a C compiler and WASM, and so is quite fast, while running fully in the browser. Theres also a (online) conversion tool to convert and compare source code. There are some benchmarks as well.

Writing my own (concise, simple) programming language was a dream for me since I'm 20 or so. Feedback would be great!
by yurimo | 2025-07-28 06:04:25+00:00
I might be wrong but isn't the HUD the author suggesting for coding is basically AREPL? For debugging I can see it work, but chatbox and inline q&a I feel has awider application.

On a wider note, I buy the argument for alternative interfaces other than chat, but chat permeates our lives every day, smartphone is full of chat interfaces. HUD might be good for AR glasses though, literal HUD.
by JeremyMorgan | 2025-07-28 06:04:39+00:00
This is exactly it. I'm also a volunteer for a small town, in a department that is decently funded. We have had the same two engines since 2009. We just (within the last month) received a new engine. It became extremely difficult to provide the level of service the community expects, and come up with money for a new engine. It's a major struggle.

Also something most folks don't know: about 70% of the firefighters in the US are volunteers. If you're in a big city you'll have 4 paid folks on an engine (maybe 3 and 1 intern) but as soon as you venture out of the city you'll see more engines 100% staffed by volunteers. And if you don't know the difference that's a good thing!

Fire departments run on budgets that would also shock you (how low they are).
by nine_k | 2025-07-28 06:05:52+00:00
A decimal digit encodes approximately 3.3 bits. The current Unix timestamp (barely) fits into 32 bits, so it should take approximately 10 decimal digits to represent. The number of seconds since the beginning 0 CE fits into 36 bits, so requires 12 decimal digits at least. The ISO timestamp (YYYY-mm-dd HH:MM:SS) requires 4 + 4 + 6 = 14 decimal digits.

If we wanted to compress the representation while remaining within ASCII and allowing for textual sorting and easy glancing, our best bet is something like base64: Latin upper case + lower case + digits give us 66 characters, a soupçon more than 6 bits per character. We'd need only 6 characters to represent a 36-bit timestamp with 1 second precision, and just 5, for a minute precision. Yay!

Better yet, since timekeeping is base 60 since Sumerian times, we could directly represent minutes and seconds with one digit each, using base60 (with a room to spare for the leap second). Relinquishing 1.5 more bits, we could use only 24 distinct values for hours, allowing for a clear separation of "date" and "time"; time would take 3 characters, like D7a.

If we agree to spend 2 characters (12 bit) for month + day, then the month and the day directly map to one character each. Now allocate 2 characters for the year, and we're set until year 4095, when we could reconsider.

So, we have a timestamp of 2 + 2 + 3 = 7 characters, only one longer than the theoretical minimum, and with quite a room to spare. The result directly maps to the traditional calendar dates, with year, month, day, hour, minute, second being separate digits, and which is readable, sortable, pronounceable, and trimmable. (Now we only need to write it in cuneiform again.)
by M4v3R | 2025-07-28 06:05:58+00:00
> environmental impact of a single average prompt (generating 400 tokens' worth of text, or about a page's worth) was relatively minimal: just 1.14 grams of CO2 emitted and 45 milliliters of water consumed

While it’s non-zero, it doesn’t strike me to be “hurting the planet” as some people would want me to believe I’m doing when I decide to use LLMs.

Yes, the training has a much bigger impact but the benefits of training are shared will all users and it’s a one-time cost per model.

I did the math and if I’m right the environmental footprint of a single LLM training, emitting 13,600 metric tons of CO2 and consuming 187,333 cubic meters of water annually, represents 0.000026% of global greenhouse gas emissions and 0.0000047% of freshwater use.
by jeroenhd | 2025-07-28 06:08:16+00:00
The law designed this as a privacy-friendly and convenient alternative to traditional identity verification, and stipulates usage should be optional.

Without the wallet, you'll be forced to jump through the same hoops as you're doing right now. Depending on what EU country you live in, that can be anything between "no real difference" to "making an appointment to exchange stamps on documents".
by TFYS | 2025-07-28 06:10:43+00:00
Maybe, but it's not possible to critically evaluate everything you see and read. For sure most people don't, and probably no one does all the time. So if before 10% of information was lies and manipulation, most of the information was still good, or at least something that a real person thought was good. Now, or soon, anything you read or watch has a 99% chance of being generated by someone who wants to manipulate you, because those who want to manipulate have something to gain from it, and are willing to spend more money to do it than those who want to share the truth.
by CRConrad | 2025-07-28 06:11:01+00:00
> Give me a brutalist UI that isn’t embarrassed to show itself. Gimme things that both explain and enable the app’s features. By all means make them shiny and lickable

[...or not, according to user preference. -- my addition /CRC]

In other words, give me Windows 7. Where I could select everything from the "Classic" (Win 95/NT4/2000) via the XP to the Vista UI "themes" (and then modify to my exact preference from there).

With apps from ~the XP era, when their UIs too were still useful.
by nextaccountic | 2025-07-28 06:11:38+00:00
Even if something is surprising just because it's a novel algorithm, it warrants better documentation - but commenting the code explaining how it works will make the code itself less surprising!

In short, it's probably possible (and it's maybe a good engineering practice) to structure the source such as no specific part is really surprising

It reminds me how LLMs finally made people to care about having good documentation - if not for other people, for the AIs to read and understand the system
by smiletondi | 2025-07-28 06:11:50+00:00
We are building a social network that makes it simple for people all over Africa (Niger) to find, organize, and share events, such as underground music performances, street festivals, local markets, and cultural gatherings. We are creating something that is accessible to all, supports grassroots communities, and honors local culture.

This platform is entirely self-funded and was created with passion, hard work, and faith in our goal. However, at this point, even modest assistance, such as paying for our internet, can have a significant impact on future advancement.

Find me on LinkedIn if this speaks to you or if you would like to work with me, grow together, or just have a conversation. Connecting would be wonderful.

One community at a time, we can work together to illuminate Africa's events landscape.

Some links :

https://www.linkedin.com/in/smiletondi/ https://kuukoo.com/
by jeroenhd | 2025-07-28 06:11:51+00:00
iOS also be supported and will use Apple's remote attestation capabilities. But, as there are no real alternative ROMs for iOS devices, only Android users are really affected by this.

From a legal point of view, the app should be a reliable convenience feature and not replace traditional (physical) identity verification. How much your dad will be affected will depend on how shitty and lazy the services he uses are. If he doesn't use a phone or a computer, he probably won't notice the difference.
by aspenmayer | 2025-07-28 06:11:53+00:00
Probably some modern interpretation of noblesse oblige. If a rising tide lifts all ships, great and small, then Buffett is the rain man. He’s probably the closest anyone came to making trickle down economics more than just a theory as an individual in business. He made a lot of folks very wealthy simply by making investing boring and easy through his focus on value investing.

I don’t know much about him, but I know Berkshire Hathaway. He didn’t even found it; he took it over by monetary force. He knew who worked their ass off and who just talked shit. He came across someone who wronged him in a business deal at Berkshire Hathaway before he ran it, and he literally drove the prior owners out of their own company over it. He says it was the biggest mistake he made, which leads me to believe he is generally a serious person, but he’s also principled. He’s a case study on overcoming yourself in order to make better decisions.

His business sense may not be as learnable, but I have tried to apply his lessons to my own life, and I didn’t have to pay anything for that.
by motorest | 2025-07-28 06:13:03+00:00
> That would be interesting. Of course, gherkin tends to just be transpiled into generated code that is customized for the particular test, so I'm not sure how AI can really abstract it away too much.

I don't think that's how gherkin is used. Take for example Cucumber. Cucumber only uses it's feature files to specify which steps a test should execute, whereas steps are pretty vanilla JavaScript code.

In theory, nowadays all you need is a skeleton of your test project, including feature files specifying the scenarios you want to run, and prompt LLMs to fill in the steps required by your test scenarios.

You can also use a LLM to generate feature files, but if the goal is to specify requirements and have a test suite enforce them, implicitly the scenarios are the starting point.
by oakwhiz | 2025-07-28 06:14:42+00:00
I've got an LVM setup where the EFI boot stuff is triple RAID1 and the OS is on LVM with RAID5, but all other LVM volumes for data are selectively RAID0 or RAID5. It was not a fun experience to set up and it seems like certain actions could break it. But as long as it's respected it keeps going really well.
by burnt-resistor | 2025-07-28 06:15:32+00:00
$24 billion in American taxpayer money went to Israel in 2024, or about $65M/day. That's 32 equivalent of those. Each and every day. And this is what enables burying/killing a wide ranging, unknowable number (60k-200k?) of humans, half of whom were children, by systematic aerial bombardment using 2000 lbs. unguided Mk. 84's into urban areas and terrestrial structural demolitions, forced concentration/ethnic cleansing, and engineered famine by siege. Not all Israelis and Americans are okay with this, but protesting so far hasn't made much difference.
by mrtksn | 2025-07-28 06:16:33+00:00
Because countries don’t want to give away more sovereignty?

EU needs to federalize but europeans are still too nationalistic for that to happen. Even Germany is too tiny to matter in the global stage but even small countries with population of a city in America will be like “we are special, we can take on USA and China because of our intrinsic characteristics. Even if we can’t we are definitely better than our neighbors”.
by Faark | 2025-07-28 06:17:11+00:00
The good old "we don't serve gays" argument.

The baker case I think was about the cake, thus having to produce "reprehensible" art. Editorial work (steam selecting what games to promote) is Sth I strongly think is their right to choose. But having a transaction run through your network? That's on the other side of the spectrum, way closer to the "no gay customer" situation. If they'd at least pretend it's because of, idk, higher card fraud rates...
by geocar | 2025-07-28 06:18:45+00:00
> 4May-1May is meaningful to me

Great, but it isn't addition.

> and frankly I do believe that it is meaningful to you.

Well you're wrong.

Consider 1Mar-28Feb: Should this be 1 or 2?

This proves it can't be subtraction (in the arithmetic sense) either.

> You might want to look in a dictionary and see what `subtract` means.

Subtraction is only addition if 4May-1May is equivalent to 4May+-1May which leaves you with an additional problem: What to do about negative plaindates.

> I do not think you have thought about what we are saying at all

I've probably thought about it too much at this point. You don't even know how arithmetic works, so I think if you have anything to say it will be too difficult for me to understand.
by spauldo | 2025-07-28 06:18:48+00:00
CL is like the C++ of the Lisp world. It's standardized, multiparadigm, has a ton of functionality, fast, and built with large codebases in mind. It's also got a lot of cruft and because the standard is old it lacks certain things people expect, like networking and threads. Implementations usually provide these and compatibility libraries do a decent job of smoothing over implementation differences. Choose CL if you have a team, a large project, and you need speed.

Scheme was written for educational purposes. It's very minimal, and implementations aren't very compatible for anything outside the spec and the SRFIs (specs for optional functionality). I'd you choose a major implementation like Guile or Chicken however, there are tons of libraries available and it's very usable for small and medium-sized projects. It isn't known for its speed. Choose Scheme if you think like a computer scientist.

I've never used the others enough to comment, although I did enjoy playing around with Clojure since it's a functional language. I'd do more with it if it wasn't tied to Java and JavaScript. I keep telling myself to learn some Racket, but I never have the time.

Personally, I do most of my Lisp work in elisp, since my regular job isn't Lisp-based but I need to mangle text a lot. elisp is from the same tradition as CL so it's pretty similar.
by adityaathalye | 2025-07-28 06:20:02+00:00
Still plugging away at bitemporal databases. Yesterday, someone shared my blog post about it!

> Poor man's bitemporal data system in SQLite and Clojure (evalapply.org)

> 13 points by PaulHoule 1 day ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44695670
by dragonwriter | 2025-07-28 06:20:42+00:00
> Also, deBeers invented the diamond wedding ring fairly recently.

The DeBeers campaign that boosted the already significant popularity of diamond engagement rings was in 1947. I don't think diamonds or other gemstones on wedding (as opposed to engagement) rings have ever been a major thing (though I'm sure some people do that.)

Tiffany, I think, did a big push a few decades before that did a lot for the popularity of diamond engagement rings among the middle class, and diamond engagement rings had been popular among the upper class since something like the Victorian era.
by motorest | 2025-07-28 06:21:11+00:00
> You need some of way of precisely telling AI what to do.

I think this is the detail you are not getting quite right. The truth of the matter is that you don't need precision to get acceptable results, at least in 100% of the cases. As everything in software engineering, there is indeed "good enough".

Also worth noting, LLMs allow anyone to improve upon "good enough".

> As it turns out if you wish to describe something accurately enough, you have to write mathematical statements, in other words statements that reduce to true/false answers.

Not really. Nothing prevents you to refer to high-level sets of requirements. For example, if you tell a LLM "enforce Google's style guide", you don't have to concern yourself with how many spaces are in a tab. LLMs have been migrating towards instruction files and prompt files for a while, too.