MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by DemocracyFTW2 | 2025-07-06 03:12:43+00:00
Maybe not the right time to remind us how truly great those singular men are who rule our lives the Norse gods of yore. The author frankly sounds like he's pounding water with a sledgehammer when he's pointing out that—after all, just to drive this home!—Gates is "also a giant when it comes to giving away wealth".—https://archive.ph/6qCDJ
by dontTREATonme | 2025-07-06 03:13:02+00:00
I like docker because it makes it super easy to try out apps that I don’t necessarily know that I want and I can just delete it.

I’m also confused about the claim that there is no config file… everyone I know uses docker compose, that’s really the only right way to use docker, using a single docker command is for testing or something, if you’re actually using the app long term, use docker compose. Also most apps I use do have a specific place you can set for configuration in the docker compose file.
by gruez | 2025-07-06 03:15:34+00:00
There must be something funky with your setup. I just tested using the exact version of 7-zip and latest version of VLC in a fresh windows VM, and it doesn't have you issue you described. I can even see the file lying around in %TEMP%\7z[random characters], and they aren't deleted until I close the 7-zip window.
by tombert | 2025-07-06 03:17:47+00:00
I remember in 2017, I was trying to benchmark some highly concurrent code in F# using the async monad.

I was using timers, and I was getting insanely different times for the same code, going anywhere from 0ms to 20ms without any obvious changes to the environment or anything.

I was banging my head against it for hours, until I realized that async code is weird. Async code isn’t directly “run”, it’s “scheduled” and the calling thread can yield until we get the result. By trying to do microbenchmarks, I wasn’t really testing “my code”, I was testing the .NET scheduler.

It was my first glimpse into seeing why benchmarking is deceptively hard. I think about it all the time whenever I have to write performance tests.
by Davidzheng | 2025-07-06 03:19:11+00:00
no the AI doesn't actually need to interact with world economy it just needs to be capable of self-substence by providing energy and material usage. But when AI takes off completely it can vertically integrate with the supply of energy and material.

wealth is not a thing in itself, it's a representation of value and purchasing power. It will create its own economy when it is able to mine material and automate energy generation.
by dinkumthinkum | 2025-07-06 03:20:12+00:00
The human brain is an existence proof? I think that phrase doesn’t mean what you think it means. I don’t think dualist or non-dualist means what you think it means either. When people are talking about AGI, they are clearly talking about something the human research community is actually working towards. Therefore, they are talking about computing equivalent to a Turing machine and using using hardware architecture very similar to what has been currently conceived and developed. Do you have any evidence that the human brains works in such a way? Do you really think that you think and solve problems in that way? Consider simple physics. How much energy is needed and heat produced to train and run these models to solve simple problems. How much of the same is needed and produced when you would solve a sheet of calculus problems, solve a riddle, or write a non-trivial program? Couldn’t you realistically do those things with minimal food and water for a week, if needed? Does it actually seem like the human brain is really at all like these things and is not fundamentally different? I think this is even more naive than if you had proposed “Life exists in the universe, so of course we can create it in a lab by mixing a few solutions.” I think the latter is far likelier and conceivable and even that is still quite an open question.
by weinzierl | 2025-07-06 03:23:03+00:00
I get why you would hide interface elements to use the screen real estate for something else.

I have no idea why some interfaces hide elements hide and leave the space they'd taken up unused.

IntelliJ does this, for example, with the icons above the project tree. There is this little target disc that moves the selection in the project tree to the file currently open in the active editor tab. You have to know the secret spot on the screen where it is hidden and if you move your mouse pointer to the void there, it magically appears.

Why? What is the rationale behind going out of your way to implement something like this?
by 6510 | 2025-07-06 03:23:03+00:00
In the 90's I had this vision that the menu and the scrollbar should be physically separated from the screen.

If you have (next to your monitor on the left side) a narrow physical display with menu entries in it. You get 4 things for "free", the user will expect there to be menu entries, the developer will understand the expectations to have menu entries, there is limited room to go nuts with the layout or shape of the menu and last but most funny, you won't feel part of the screen has been taken away from you.

The physical scrollbar should be a transparent tube with a ball (or ideally a bubble) floating in it.

Usage could be moving the pointer out of the screen. The scrollbar led goes on and you can hold the button to move the page. When using the menu the pointer [also] vanishes and the menu entry at that height is highlighted. (much better usability) Moving the mouse up or down highlights the above or below entries, if there are a lot of entries it may also scroll. It may be a touch screen but the most usuable would be a vertical row of 5 extra wide (3 fingers) keyboard buttons on the left with the top 4 corresponding to the 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th menu entry and the 5th one for page down. (scrolling down 4 entries) Ideally these get some kind of texturing so that one can feel which button one is touching.

This way knowledge in the world can smoothly migrate to knowledge in the head until eventually you can smash out combinations of M keys in fractions of a second without looking at the screen or the keyboard. The menu displayed is always in focus, you don't have to examine the view port to use it. Having a row of horizontal F keys is a design fiasco. Instinctively bashing the full row of those might come natural after learning to type, then learning to type numbers, then symbols and only if you frequently use applications that have useful F key functionality. I only really know F5 and F11 but I cant smash them blindly as I pretty much never use them. I just tried F1 in firefox and no help documentation showed up... I think that was what it was suppose to do? Not even sure anymore.

Having the antenna menu (file, edit, etc) at the top of the viewport is also ugly. For example, smashing the second then the top M key could easily become second nature. CTRL+Z is fine of course but it aint knowledge in the world. Does anyone actually use ALT+E+U for undo? Try it on the CTRL+F input area. It's just funny. Type something in the address bar then compare ALT+E+U with using the Edit menu.

A separate display would take many of these "design" privileges away from the clowns.

(note: I think it is ALT+E+U as the Dutch layout is forced on me by windos. Edit is called Bewerken and the shortcut is ALT+W!?! ALT+E does nothing.)
Where are those that would defend us?
by drwong | 2025-07-06 03:23:24+00:00
Years ago people would stand up for what was right and good and defend it.

Today, I don’t see any of those people on the news. Where are they? Are they so afraid of the world as it stands currently to do anything, or are they biding their time, and, if so, why?

We’re ready for someone to help us.
by GianFabien | 2025-07-06 03:24:34+00:00
AI is a new addition to the technological toolkit used to solve problems.

B2B sales has always been the problem solving business. Define the problem, demonstrate how your solution makes more money or saves money. Price your solution at some viable fraction of the value you deliver.

So AI is part of your magic sauce. It might make some solutions feasible that require that capability.

Another suggestion: pick up the phone and talk to your prospects. eMails get lost in the volumes being received. The spam filters might be rejecting everything that has AI/ML/LLM etc in it.
by chamomeal | 2025-07-06 03:25:00+00:00
This is such a good intro to clojurescript in general. I’ve dabbled in clojure for a few months, and CLJS seems really cool but also really confusing to get into. It’s got a whole ecosystem to itself.

Now I’m SUPER excited to try cljs!! It’s crazy how modern it is despite being kinda old in webdev terms
by ryao | 2025-07-06 03:26:38+00:00
If you use secure string functions, you can generally avoid buffer overflows in C. The problem is that not everyone does. That said, exploiting buffer overflows in programs whose source code and binaries are not public is very difficult. It likely can be done, but most people would likely go after easier targets. If you deploy AddressSanitizer in production, you can get the program to terminate whenever a buffer overflows occurs, at the expense of additional overhead when there is no buffer overflow.

Memory leaks are considered a feature in short lived programs, since not freeing memory in favor of relying on the kernel to free it at program exit lets them run faster.
by analog31 | 2025-07-06 03:26:57+00:00
Just a minor quibble. Terminal based UI's weren't completely memorized. Many of us had a reference card taped to the wall, or a list of commonly used commands. It was an acceptable way to extend the limited information density of the 80x25 text display, and a really good manual was as discoverable as a GUI.

Not too convenient to carry along with a pocket computer, though.
by jhanschoo | 2025-07-06 03:27:06+00:00
A caveat that practice itself without reflection or deliberation does not necessarily lead to better outcomes. The author gives the example of poker, but a frequent poker player without knowledge of theory and without sufficient skepticism of optimality can easily learn suboptimal strategy.

Similarly, learning a sport (which must be done by practice and alongside conditioning towards the sport) without a good coach is risky with respect to safety and with respect to failing to learn the right thing.
by VikRubenfeld | 2025-07-06 03:27:14+00:00
Let's say AI gets so good that it is better than people at most jobs. How can that economy work? If people aren't working, they aren't making money. If they don't have money, they can't pay for the goods and services produced by AI workers. So then there's no need for AI workers.

UBI can't fix it because a) it won't be enough to drive our whole economy, and b) it amounts to businesses paying customers to buy their products, which makes no sense.
by 0xfaded | 2025-07-06 03:27:56+00:00
It seems, though I have no way of knowing, that these clips were conceived by a human and realized using AI tools.

How would you feel if these were presented amongst a sea of other clips that were prompted by "create a short video that captures the attention of a 25-30yo male", presumably in the hope of syphoning a few cents from Instagram?

I recently bought a book to read on a flight, and it was the first time it occured to me there was no way to verify the thing was written by a human other than to check that it was published before ~2023. Part of what I, at least, feel when reading a book is a connection to another human and our shared experience that lead them to tell their story. For me this experience is steeply cheapened by the thought that that connection might not be with a human.

I feel similarly about the Ghibli style transfer craze. AI generated images may be "cool", but you no longer know if you're connecting to an artist. At least in the case of Ghibli, their work is well known so it's possible to tell. Where's the room for human creatives to create new original art styles? The rightful default assumption is that anything post 2023 came out of a model as some mash-up of inputs stolen from anonymous no-names.

FWIW, this is coming from a non-creative atheist who has long belived humans are nothing more than probabilistic biological machines.
by sbeli | 2025-07-06 03:28:01+00:00
I built a food delivery price optimization platform that algorithmically stacks discounts across multiple layers (store promos, credit card rewards, gift cards, etc).

Initially, I found a lot of discounts were hiding behind the massive marketing budgets of delivery corporations. I originally architected cross-platform price comparison, but delivery platforms' terms of service explicitly prohibit displaying "priced items from multiple retailers on the same screen." This forced a complete pivot from comparison to single-platform optimization. Basically they don't want me comparing their prices and promos to competitors. Makes sense.

So my adapted approach is: Instead of price comparison, the system takes your list/search terms and builds optimized platform-specific carts.

- Real-time promotion discovery - Credit card reward optimization - Smart cart building so it can qualify for all discounts - Uses ML to suggest product swaps that maintain savings while improving nutritional value - Predictive rebate matching based on shopping patterns

In early testing I'm seeing around 35% higher cart values on average. So I really think the idea has legs and I don't want to give up, but navigating these partnership dynamics as a solo founder is proving to be challenging.

Has anyone else had to completely restructure their product architecture due to partnership requirements? How do you balance technical capabilities with business partnership limitations?
by kulahan | 2025-07-06 03:28:39+00:00
I assumed most of the actual genetic variation comes in during times of plenty, when you can have lots of offspring without worrying about them being perfectly tuned for their environment. Then a shock comes along, straining the population in some way, and whoever happens to have the right genes simply survives. The "millions of years" thing is probably for becoming a whole separate species, no? Like our ancestors turning into homo sapiens.

point being: I imagine it's sorta the opposite - evolution happens when things are stable, but the species is only shaped towards it during hard times

edit: This is reflected in the mammalian explosion - while dinosaurs ruled the earth, things were stable. asteroid comes, hard times arrive, mammals suddenly explode because they were most-ready to take over new environments thanks to their already-developed genes. Millions of years of honing all that led to H. Sapiens, the hot new species
Gmail Error Message
by katcrab | 2025-07-06 03:29:15+00:00
Hi,

I pay for google workspace and I have lost access to my gmail account. I always get the error: "We are sorry, but you do not have access to Gmail. Please log in to your Admin Console to enable it." I have checked to make sure gmail is enabled for all, it is. I don't know what to do and I really need access to that account. I have searched everywhere and can't get answers. Any help is appreciated!

Thank you
by tomhow | 2025-07-06 03:29:24+00:00
> "I can make millions out of selling stolen code if I don't get caught"

This is the opposite of what happens and YC drums this into founders from the start; at least they did in my day, because pg's main startup (Viaweb) was nearly brought undone by an IP dispute, and it scarred him deeply.

What YC tells you is that the more successful you are, the more likely it is that you'll be caught if you mis-use IP, and auditing this is one of the biggest parts of the due diligence that investors, acquirers and commercial partners will undertake.

In fact, pg explicitly addresses this very thing in his 2005 essay How To Start a Startup [1], which was the original inspiration for YC:

One of the worst things that can happen to a startup is to run into intellectual property problems. We did, and it came closer to killing us than any competitor ever did.

As we were in the middle of getting bought, we discovered that one of our people had, early on, been bound by an agreement that said all his ideas belonged to the giant company that was paying for him to go to grad school. In theory, that could have meant someone else owned big chunks of our software. So the acquisition came to a screeching halt while we tried to sort this out. The problem was, since we'd been about to be acquired, we'd allowed ourselves to run low on cash. Now we needed to raise more to keep going. But it's hard to raise money with an IP cloud over your head, because investors can't judge how serious it is.

[1] https://paulgraham.com/start.html
by delifue | 2025-07-06 03:29:32+00:00
This is a common example of not fixing from root cause and try to fix from "outside valiation" that has bad side effects.

The correct way of fixing SQL injection is to use prepared statement and parameters.

Other examples: Windows allows software to do bad things, having no proper permission control (to maintain compatibility). Antimalwares scan applications by matching patterns of virus code, but has many false positives and false negatives. This causes many troubles (kill innocent software, scanning cost performance, etc.) because it does not fix from root case (proper permission management).
by ekianjo | 2025-07-06 03:30:49+00:00
> but in a way where the cure is significantly worse than the disease.

Since the US has by far the sickest human population on Earth (it's not even debatable), I guess the current system has been a spectacular failure. I don't think that RFK is the right answer either, but "continuing on the same path as before" is a bad idea just as well.

> independent expertise to reduce regulatory capture

What is independent expertise exactly? Where do you find virgin experts completely devoid of external influence? I have yet to meet any expert who has never had grants or speaker engagements.
by chrismorgan | 2025-07-06 03:31:16+00:00
I started out with gVim with menu and toolbars. I quickly removed toolbars and after a while longer menus, as I didn't need them any more, they had taught me—though I seem to recall temporarily setting guioptions+=m from time to time for a while longer, when I couldn’t remember a thing. I think I had also added some custom menu items.

Being a modal editor probably makes removing all persistent chrome more feasible.
by lieks | 2025-07-06 03:31:17+00:00
I've been trying to solve that for a few years now. The closest existing thing I could find in my research was acme from Plan 9, which actually does a pretty good job. The trick it uses is to have you click on a typed command instead of "sending" it, and it stays on your screen after it runs. So you can save several commands in a file, and that's a menu. Or clear the current document and print out several commands from a script, and that's a dynamic menu.

I highly recommend reading the paper[a] and trying it out. It's really interesting, and pretty easy to program.

The main problems with it are that it's too text-centered, and the interaction model is kinda weird for modern standards. I feel these are solvable (Plan B's Omero tried, with partial success), but they are hard to do without integrating the UI and the script into a single process, which feels like cheating. But well. If I ever get around to making a prototype, it will be here on Show HN.

[a]: http://doc.cat-v.org/plan_9/4th_edition/papers/acme/
by d--b | 2025-07-06 03:32:47+00:00
It’s a matter of land use and land price.

States / cities need land for agriculture and wilderness. So they created zoning which says what land is for homes and what land is not for homes.

Obviously, they’re not the same price, so people are tempted to buy some farmland and put an RV on it.

But if you buy a land that’s zoned for agriculture and park a huge RV on it that’s basically a house on wheels, well then there is a good chance you’re not going to farm the land, hence mooting the original reason for zoning.

I don’t think it’s unreasonable to qualify RV as permanent dwellings given the amount of Americans who permanently live in one.

Whether states and cities should have control over the land is debatable, sure, but personally I find it makes sense.
by erulabs | 2025-07-06 03:32:49+00:00
There are times you can politicize an issue. A flood that killed a bunch of young kids at a summer camp is not one of them.

Articles like this do more harm than good. Either you already believe climate change is an issue and this changes nothing, or you don’t and this looks like exactly the sort of politicization that a denier supposes the entire global warming issue to be. You gain no allies and you galvanize opponents. I wouldn’t care if it was ineffective but it’s actually destructive.

The article starts by blaming lack of personnel, then goes on to say this community gets warnings day and night and gets alarm fatigue. The real issue is “weather is horribly hard to predict”, but we don’t get to any of this before speculation about blame. Every word drips with desire to blame, and virtually no sorrow at the tragedy is to be found.
by numpad0 | 2025-07-06 03:33:00+00:00
I thought Asian gang-run virtual camgirl sites were virtually extinct... This is undoubtedly targeting likes of Patreon/OnlyFans, and only happening because participants there has working short path feedback loops from output to input. I don't quite see what's wrong about that, but lot of online porn bans seem to focus more on that than contents.
by jerkstate | 2025-07-06 03:33:02+00:00
When running a commercial "hacker space" you have a ton of problems with strangers, it sounds like you're focused on a community hacker space which can be much smaller scale with fewer rando issues. I was on the board of a successful commercial/community hacker space for a while and our problems were not around money (we had a great community of paying members who also volunteered to maintain the space) but more people not using the space in ways that were acceptable to the community (mentally ill members trying to live there, people doing stinky projects, people abusing the tools, major disagreements about how to organize scrap wood, plumb the dust collection, etc). You probably want to avoid this complexity (at least, for now, until you start running into scaling limits) and stick to the "computer club" community.

You will probably want an onboarding process with liability waiver. This is partly materials for parents to help them understand what their kids will be up to at your house. You're going to host other people in your place and there is liability that comes along with that.

You will need to figure out how to keep your computer club from devolving into a lan party (unless that's what you want) and focused on learning opportunities by providing guided learning opportunities. LLMs are really good for helping you develop these activities based on an idea, including digging down into the details. Some things that kids might be into: building adder circuits in Minecraft with redstone (requires a basis in binary math and logic gates, which you can teach on paper and in minecraft). Scratch programs to fulfill certain goals (build a gravity model and get a spaceship to orbit; make a clone of a simple platformer video game they like; etc).

After you have some ideas for projects/classes, you're going to want to write up a schedule so parents can help their kids get there. You should also provide volunteer opportunities so kids (and possibly their parents) can help out - maintain the website, fix the computers, etc. This not only helps lessen your workload, it also gives them a sense of community, that they're not just coming to hang out, they're responsible. Make sure to have community standards around cleaning up after yourself and enforce them.

So, maybe after having a couple of scheduled classes, put out a call for donation of old computer hardware, and maybe have the kids try to assemble some working systems from whatever you get. Good luck!