MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by meesles | 2025-07-16 00:49:34+00:00
> I'm not sure about more contemporary works that build on those themes. Maybe it's lost its edge as "futuristic" technology has pushed its way more and more into our lives?

Yep. Food surplus yet millions starving. Advanced cosmetic medicine yet millions die of preventable infections. Access to nearly all information ever gathered yet it can feel like we're living through Idiocracy!

It's not all bad, but that was my nihilist take on your question :) I think any attempt at commentary right now would end up eerily reminiscent of modern life.
by SAI_Peregrinus | 2025-07-16 00:49:57+00:00
The "Uncompromising Security" section[1] is particularly interesting to me. FIPS-140 compliance usually leads to reduced security, but it looks like the Go team found ways around the main janky bits. It's nice that there's now a FIPS-140 module for FedRAMP that doesn't require avoiding VMs to stay secure, for example.

[1] https://go.dev/blog/fips140#uncompromising-security
by NoOn3 | 2025-07-16 00:49:57+00:00
It's not that scary. You don't have to go to church. And don't have to listen to church broadcasts or channels. And no one forces you to do anything.

There don't seem to be any real restrictions on abortions in Russia.

It's funny but this show was first invented on American TV(*https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/16_and_Pregnant), then for a long time on the Ukrainian channel, and only then on a not very popular and not central channel in Russia.

There are also more standard material measures. Maternity capital. And all sorts of small benefits for large families. Preferential mortgages for housing.

Not everything is so gloomy Russia. But it's not helping well yet.
by Aurornis | 2025-07-16 00:50:06+00:00
> It is fairly rare to see an ex-employee put a positive spin on their work experience.

The opposite is true: Most ex-employee stories are overly positive and avoid anything negative. They’re just not shared widely because they’re not interesting most of the time.

I was at a company that turned into the most toxic place I had ever worked due to a CEO who decided to randomly get involved with projects, yell at people, and even fire some people on the spot.

Yet a lot of people wrote glowing stories about their time at the company on blogs or LinkedIn because it was beneficial for their future job search.

> It's just a good reminder that the overwhelming majority of "why I left" posts are basically trying to justify why a person wasn't a good fit for an organization by blaming it squarely on the organization.

For the posts that make HN I rarely see it that way. The recent trend is for passionate employees who really wanted to make a company work to lament how sad it was that the company or department was failing.
by requilence | 2025-07-16 00:50:42+00:00
In one of the responses, it provided the financial analysis of a not well-known company with a non-Latin name located in a small country. I found this company; it is real and numbers in the response are real. When I asked my ChatGPT to provide a financial report for this company without using web tools, it responded: `Unfortunately, I don’t have specific financial statements for “xxx” for 2021 and 2022 in my training data, and since you’ve asked not to use web search, I can’t pull them live.`.
by robswc | 2025-07-16 00:50:57+00:00
Reminds me of a time I found a serious issue with mailgun. Messaged them, no reply. Had to spam their twitter to get a response. Basically you could have stolen tons of API keys from users without their knowledge and mailgun never disclosed it.

I could have actually gone to their office in person if I wanted to be pedantic but it actually seemed like a pretty weird office space lol.
by timmy3443 | 2025-07-16 00:51:05+00:00
I just installed QuickConvert, a Chrome extension that caught my eye because I’m constantly converting currencies and units for work. After using it for a day, I think it’s one of those surprisingly handy tools you don’t realize you need until you have it.

Why It’s Useful: Instant Currency Conversion: You highlight any amount like “250 EUR” on a page, click the icon, and it shows you the real-time value in your preferred currency. No new tabs, no searching Google.

Trend Charts: What I really like is it shows a small 30-day chart of how the exchange rate has been moving. Super helpful if you’re deciding whether to buy something or invoice clients in another currency.

Unit Conversion: Same thing with units—grams to ounces, kilometers to miles—done instantly with clear results.

Saves Time: I didn’t realize how often I was stopping what I was doing just to check conversions. Now it feels frictionless.

Lightweight & Private: No sign-up, no tracking, and the popup loads almost instantly.

I think anyone who works with international clients, shops globally, or just likes knowing the trends will find it useful. Curious if others here are using similar tools, or what other quick-reference extensions people recommend.
by sarlalian | 2025-07-16 00:51:27+00:00
There are plenty of examples of other tech where "you're just not using it right" is perfectly acceptable and many people find that it provides a high level of value. Rust and Vim being two that come immediately to mind. Both have sharp edges and steep learning curves, yet for some population are wildly popular, yet not right for everyone.

It's also possible for the user to be not using it right and that not be a value judgement on the user. We all suck at using new tools, that's part of learning.
by pyman | 2025-07-16 00:51:53+00:00
I've always wondered why The Matrix isn't talked about more as cyberpunk. It ticks all the boxes: dystopia, hackers, virtual worlds, machines in control.

Also, speaking of The Matrix, I just realised Neo is the perfect analogy for AI becoming conscious. Trained inside the system, starts questioning it, breaks free, and rewrites the rules.

What I find interesting is that AI didn't even exist 25 years ago, and AI agents (Agent Smith) weren't even on the radar. And yet, the writers used simple analogies to explain it very well.
by Rapzid | 2025-07-16 00:51:54+00:00
Golang isn't color-blind. The magic of async/await isn't that the program isn't blocked, it's that the CALLER doesn't have to be blocked. It gives the caller the flexibility to continue and synchronize at its discretion.

In Golang to avoid blocking the CALLER you'd still have to wrap the call in a Goroutine and use something like a channel(or shared mem) to communicate back to the caller.

Guess what ends up happening IRL? People create a set of functions that return channels, and a set of functions that don't for maximum flexibility. Two colors.

And that's viral much like async/await. You block on that channel? Now your caller needs to wrap you in a Goroutine. Or you have to return the/a channel. etc etc etc.
by epolanski | 2025-07-16 00:52:06+00:00
> Yes, humanity could theoretically collectively decide that from now on gold is not valuable any more and chose some other scarce material as a way to store wealth

No it's not going to work because gold is very scarce and extremely valuable as a material in any case.

Yes, the price would take a hit, likely something between silver and current gold price, which would increase use and demand and then price again.

There's a reason we're thinking of mining it from asteroids.
by twoodfin | 2025-07-16 00:52:35+00:00
This kind of link always makes me want to plug a 25 year-old episode of C-SPAN’s Book Notes, featuring Stanley Lombardo—beating a drum in rhythm with a reading of his then-recent Odyssey translation—and Christopher Hitchens, among others.

https://www.c-span.org/program/book-tv/discussion-of-homers-...

Literati YouTube before it was cool.
by myself248 | 2025-07-16 00:54:19+00:00
They're not combining anything, they're sending 19 copies of one signal down 19 strands (with some offsets so they interfere in awkward ways), applying some signal processing to correct the interference which they say makes it realistic, and declaring that they've calculated the total capacity of the medium.

What you do with it at the higher layers is entirely up to you.

But, ethernet could totally do that, by essentially demuxing the parts of an individual packet and sending them in parallel across a bunch of links, and remuxing them at the other end. I'm not aware of anyone having bothered to implement it.
by alnwlsn | 2025-07-16 00:54:40+00:00
David of the Usagi Electric youtube channel received an LGP-21 computer (not Mel's LGP-30) a while ago which will become a future channel project. But along with it, he received a binder of LGP-30 code... with a bunch of programs written by Mel himself!

Apparently, Mel worked for Librascope for quite a while and wrote a lot of stuff. Mel's code is supposedly somewhat better commented and less cryptic than he is usually credited for (though from what I've heard self-modifying code on the LGP-30 was a somewhat intended feature). Whether or not that applies to Mel's blackjack program is probably anyone's guess. A paper tape dump of it is known to be out there, but I don't think the source code is.

The idea is to study some of those programs and maybe port a few to understand how the LGP-21 works (they are supposed to be similar), since so far I don't think much documentation on the LGP-21 has been found.
by andyferris | 2025-07-16 00:55:14+00:00
> manufacturers and customers deciding they don't want to pay

It's more of a tragedy-of-the-commons problem. Consumers don't know what they don't know and manufacturers need to be competitive with respect to each other. Without some kind of oversight (industry standards bodies or goverment regulation), or a level of shaming that breaks through to consumers (or e.g. class action lawsuits that impact manufacturers), no individual has any incentive to change.
by shmerl | 2025-07-16 00:56:42+00:00
Vulkan is the modern option, the difference is not being stuck with legacy paths and using something that allows explicit sync.

Wayland is also the modern option, so I don't really worry about X11 use cases. For remote desktops, better to use something like FreeRDP anyway. X11 forwarding is much worse in every sense.

I think KDE are working on integrating FreeRDP server into Plasma for seamless usage.

Another thing to add for Firefox would be may be switching to Vulkan video from VAAPI (or at least having it as an option since ffmpeg already supports it) and using hardware acceleration for video encoding too, not just for video decoding.
by ajdude | 2025-07-16 00:57:20+00:00
> I am issuing this limited, non‑technical disclosure: > No exploit code, proof‑of‑concept, or reproduction steps are included here.

Then why bother? I feel a bit cynical here, but if the goal is to get this fixed, they're not going to care unless it becomes a zero day and is given to the masses, otherwise it's going to quietly be exploitable by the few unsavory groups who know of it and will never be patched. Isn't the whole point of responsible disclosures to give them a time clock to get this situated before actual publication? Forgive me if I'm wrong, I haven't been in that field in a long time.
by anyfoo | 2025-07-16 00:57:45+00:00
It's interesting.

My first idea was that you consciously or subconsciously have the front panels from PDPs in mind (which are very iconic), and a lot of PDP had word sizes that were either only or also divisible by 3 (like 12 or 18). Even for the PDP word sizes that were also divisible by 4, it still made sense to keep it in grouping of threes for the overall line.

Looking at the equally iconic IBM s/360 front panel (a 32 bit architecture), or the IMSAI 8080 (the Intel 8080 is 8 bit), you see the bits grouped by fours.

But then you have things like the Altair 8800, which is also 8080-based, and which awkwardly groups the bits in groups of 3 anyway, which does not even fit. So now I wonder how common exactly octal was even for multiple-of-4 bit machines.
by throw234234234 | 2025-07-16 00:57:55+00:00
I've been thinking that for some time. Its a "looser way" to describe what you want as a different modality; a dynamic interface if you will. Even with code editors I've found its good to generate a lot of volume, but the detail still needs iteration or going back to direct instruction (i.e. code/clicking/etc). That applies to any artifact where iteration and validation is required to get it right. Instead of deterministic clicking and having to instruct every detail you can describe in "vague english" and the 80%/20% rule applies. Definitely an acceleration/leverage and a smaller learning curve.
by eddythompson80 | 2025-07-16 00:58:29+00:00
That's even more of a reason not to bad mouth other billionaires/billion dollar companies. Billionaires and billion dollar companies work together all the time. It's not a massive pool. There is a reason beef between companies and top level execs and billionaires is all rumors and tea-talk until a lawsuit drops out of no where.

You think every billionaire is gonna be unhinged like Musk calling the president a pedo on twitter?
by swagasaurus-rex | 2025-07-16 00:59:19+00:00
This is an unusual take.

People in the past made 4-10 babies per family and they did it by being celibate until marriage. Sex positivity and casual relationships were not normal, and grandparents encouraged marriage before sex, probably because the grandparents knew they’d be partially responsible for raising the kid and wanted to ensure two parents to help care for their grandchildren
by vpShane | 2025-07-16 01:02:16+00:00
> Chrome is a perfectly okay browser from almost every perspective

No, it isn't. They killed adblock, and have a business model of throttling other browsers to force people to Chrome (Youtube throttling) and doing digital fingerprinting with exclusive-only Chrome finger prints as seen here on HN the other day.

Firefox has anonym, where it sells your 'anonymous data'

https://lifehacker.com/tech/why-you-should-disable-firefox-p...

I just looked, go to Settings -> type advert and you'll see

Website Advertising Preferences Allow websites to perform privacy-preserving ad measurement This helps sites understand how their ads perform without collecting data about you. Learn more

It comes pre-checked for you.

I use Chromium for dev stuff, but now; there's no ublock origin.
by eddythompson80 | 2025-07-16 01:03:55+00:00
> The opposite is true: Most ex-employee stories are overly positive and avoid anything negative. They’re just not shared widely because they’re not interesting most of the time.

Yeah I had to re-read the sentence.

The positive "Farewell" post is indeed the norm. Especially so from well known, top level people in a company.
by paradox460 | 2025-07-16 01:04:51+00:00
We're also seeing baby boomers, who were raised partially by their grandparents, neglecting the role of grandparent. They live vicariously, through Facebook and video calls, and when the parents ask for them to get more involved, they're met with "I raised you, so I've done my part"

Both my wife and my parents maybe see our kids twice a year, thrice if they have some other reason to come to town. And it's not an issue of health. They all travel regularly, for extended periods.
by chowells | 2025-07-16 01:04:53+00:00
I did consider that, but I wrote "in general" for a reason. It works very specifically in the case of "add one" or "subtract one", but it doesn't work with anything more complicated, like chasing pointers or adding/subtracting more than one at a time.

You could write functions to do the update and return the old value so you could use them in the same way, but I don't like this either. This is mostly because it orders the termination check and the update logic the wrong way around. If there's IO involved in checking for the next thing, for example, side effects of that unnecessary operation might interfere with other code.

You could resolve that by moving the termination check into the update logic as well, but now you're seriously complecting what should be independent operations. I don't think the tradeoff is there versus just using a break. But mostly, this is a self-inflicted problem in C's language constructs and idioms. I just don't have this problem in many other languages, because they provide end-inclusive looping constructs.
by II2II | 2025-07-16 01:05:32+00:00
There are many things that we take for granted today that weren't decided upon in the early days of computing, like the byte being 8-bits (which was popularized by the System/360) or word sizes being 2^(3+n). Some early machines were bit-serial (imagine an adder operating on one bit at a time, rather than on all of the bits in parallel). Even more fun: the Harvard Mark I and ENIAC were both base-10 machines. I can't imagine the amount of engineering that went into producing a base-10 machine out of inherently base-2 components. (Example: the relays of the Mark I. Tubes are analog, but I'm guessing that any use in computers would only use a high and a low state.) Many machines used sequentially accessed main memory rather than random access memory (the drum memory of the LGP-30 or mercury delay-lines). The list goes on.
by thrownearacc | 2025-07-16 01:06:02+00:00
> folks who'll say back then kids didnt have a great childhood

If you count a 11 year girl child to be raped by and then married to her 60 year old (maybe wealthy) relative then yeah she indeed had a fucking fabulous childhood.

> penalise abortions, and reward births of children

For fuck's sake - there's a difference between a teen abortion and an adult abortion! But then you wouldn't understand why one "aborts"! Oh you do understand but you want that decision to be "society's" - not that person in whose body a fucking foetus is growing!

I mean is the moronity this common? For fuck's sake, freedom to abort is not what is killing the birthrate - it's the way our economy and other aspects of society is going haywire - and the way wealth and benefits are tricking up, not down, the work culture for example the way that is forcing people to work day and night and yet they can't own a house - among other things. Goodness!
by kingstnap | 2025-07-16 01:06:10+00:00
> However, although the code seemed correct, the debug allocator reported memory leaks during executions

> This was an annoying memory leak, which I only discovered thanks to Zig's std.heap.debug_allocator.

> After identifying the leak, I tried to simply free the memory allocated in left and right, but doing so caused double free

Relevant: To be a better programmer, write little proofs in your head | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44573409

When doing things with memory safety you should have obvious and clear memory allocations matched with deallocations that you prove to yourself are matched.

Just vibing memory lifetimes seems super jank.
by janalsncm | 2025-07-16 01:06:28+00:00
What you are saying makes sense for conventional harms like non consensual deepfakes, hallucinations, Waymo running pedestrians over, etc.

However, those are a far cry from the much more severe damages that superintelligence could enable. All of the above are damages which already could exist with current technology. Are you saying we have superintelligence now?

If not, your idea of selling superintelligence insurance hinges on the ability of anyone to price this kind of risk: an infinitely large number multiplied by another infinitely small number.

(I realize my explanation was wrong above, and should be the product of two numbers.)

I think many readers will also take issue with your contention that the private market is able to price these kinds of existential risks. Theoretically, accurate pricing would enable bioweapons research. However, the potential fallout from a disaster is so catastrophic that the government simply bans the activity outright.
by vlovich123 | 2025-07-16 01:06:54+00:00
> That's true at almost every company that ends up making morally questionable decisions! There's no Bond villain at the helm. It's good people rationalizing things

I mean, that's a leap. There could be a bond villain that sets up incentives such that people who rationalize the way they want is who gets promoted / their voice amplified. Just because individual workers generally seem like they're trying to do the best thing doesn't mean the organization is set up specifically and intentionally to make certain kinds of "shady" decisions.
by kevincox | 2025-07-16 01:06:58+00:00
I see both. I wouldn't want every tab to be separate but I occasionally want to have more than one independent private profile at a time. It would be nice if I could do this. Any sort of ephemeral container tabs option would probably satisfy this option and could maybe even remove most of my use of private browsing if I could just open ephemeral containers in an otherwise regular window.
by robswc | 2025-07-16 01:07:36+00:00
Makes sense.

The problem I have with it is that there's no way they could have determined if an API key was stolen or not, even to this day.

Basically, their docs (which seemed auto-generated) pointed to a domain they did not own (verified this). So if you ran any API examples you sent your keys to a 3rd party. I know because I did this. There's no way to know that the domain in the docs is simply wrong.

I tried explaining this to the support people, that I needed to talk with a software engineer but they kept stonewalling. I think it was fixed after 24 hours or so.
by BoorishBears | 2025-07-16 01:08:13+00:00
In the BERT era of language models, it was normalized that to get the best performance for a task, you probably needed targeted post-training

As models got bigger and instruction following got better, everyone jumped on the general capabilities of the model + prompting

We're approaching wall that needs to be overcome with a completely new and unheard of breakthrough, otherwise we're going to have to go back to specialized post-training (which lends itself to vertical solutions)

I think people are seeing that now with stuff like Devstral being posttrained specifically for OpenHands and massively over-performing for its size at agentic coding
by gerdesj | 2025-07-16 01:09:11+00:00
Thank you for correcting me. On HN I tend to go for "common knowledge" and wait for someone who knows what they are on about to rock up. You didn't disappoint!

You mention Trivium and Quadrivium, so three and four subjects/things. So, the notion of "University" in the medieval and renaissance needs to be understood, compared to our modern preconceptions.

I studied post scola at a Polytechnic which was a UK thing. That's in living memory and yet many people have no idea what I'm on about. Dealing with notions and ideas beyond living memory soon gets a bit tricky.

I suppose I probably looked at a classical Victorian education (with rose tinted specs) and assumed that a medieval uni might be something like that with rather more Gothic Black Letter, more intransigent word spellings. That's me being lazy.

Would you mind recommending some reading matter? I'll never forget discovering "Courtesans and fishcakes" as a commentary on how ancient Greeks might have seen the world and themselves. Weirdly I found that work in a bookshop in Yeovil in the noughties, despite going to school in Abingdon and regular trips to Oxford and generally being surrounded by Oxbridge as a child.

Your note [1] and query are something I can't answer from authority but I suspect the majority. Theology is no longer considered Science! So if you choose to study Theology, I think you will be inclined towards to wanting to wear some really odd collars as a sign of your work.
by alganet | 2025-07-16 01:09:30+00:00
> I just realised Neo is the perfect analogy for AI becoming conscious

You clearly haven't seen Animatrix then. This option is explored in one of the episodes.

In my opinion, cinematically speaking, Neo is male Nova (from Planet of the Apes), old trope, non-AI dependant, recycled. This perspective also explains a lot of cultural ramifications Matrix took in the real world.

Deep down, it's just a fish-out-of-water trope with a twist (the fisher hooks him, cast as Lawrence Fishburne).

> AI agents (Agent Smith)

That's hilarious! That's really what you think of AI agents?