MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by rawgabbit | 2025-07-06 05:08:07+00:00
I have been following this story. It is tragic with many dead and missing. The worst hit is a summer camp for girls called Camp Mystic in Hunt TX.

This is Texas Hill Country with limestone hills & cliffs and chalky clay soil and the Guadaloupe River cuts through it. It had been undergoing severe drought and the land was baked hard like in an oven. That is it couldn’t absorb the rainwater and flooding quickly developed. The news reported the first flood watch was issued around 1:30 in the afternoon but the “considerable” tag that triggers cell phone alerts was not issued until around 1:00 in the morning. The river crested around 4:00 in the morning. It was reported the river rose 20 feet and dragged houses, cars, and people with it.
by simonw | 2025-07-06 05:08:21+00:00
Here's the justification for removing cgi - https://peps.python.org/pep-0594/#cgi

Amusingly that links to https://peps.python.org/pep-0206/ from 14th July 2000 (25 years ago!) which, even back then, described the cgi package as "designed poorly and are now near-impossible to fix".

Looks like the https://github.com/jackrosenthal/legacy-cgi package provides a drop-in replacement for the standard library module.
by LoganDark | 2025-07-06 05:08:54+00:00
> no one else seems to have any issues with most of this stuff

In my experience, 9 times out of 10 what this actually means is that they just don't know it's an issue! The type of person who would be confused by, say, the iOS control center, is not necessarily the type of person who would easily identify and raise the issue of it being difficult to do something on their device. They would just be mildly annoyed that they can't figure it out, or that the device "can't do it", and move on to find some other way. You may not realize it if you don't interact with those types of people but they fundamentally do not think like you or I do and what may be an obvious problem-solving process to you (e.g. identify a problem, figure out what tools are at your disposal and whether each could be helpful, check for functionality that could do what you are wanting, ask for help from others if you can't figure it out on your own, etc.) may actually not always be so obvious.

That's why the main way I find out people don't know how to do something is from them seeing me do it with my device and going "what!! I didn't know it could do that!!"
by aim4min | 2025-07-06 05:10:00+00:00
This sounds great, but I would like them to see them fix bugs first, like this 6yr old one, with over 160 comments: https://github.com/openzfs/zfs/issues/9130 Every new feature, esp a complex one like this, creates a potentially huge amount of new bugs. Love ZFS, but would never run it without backups. Haven’t had data lose, but needed to restore from backups to get around constant panics.
by K0balt | 2025-07-06 05:10:15+00:00
Make no mistake, we spent the USSR to death. We made our military advances so expensive to stay at parity with that it simply overwhelmed their economic production capacity as a nation.

Sure, they did it to themselves, but we made the situation lose/lose by exploiting our position as an economic powerhouse.

With the very sad state of US manufacturing, where just trying to buy US made bolts and nuts can be impossible, it is entirely possible that China could use the same play against us.

We don’t have the critical skilled manpower to recover overnight, it’s at least a 5-8 decade process just to get enough qualified die makers to build the tools we need to build the tools and products we want. Die making is a skill that takes decades to master, and a master can only teach so many apprentices in a lifetime.

This leaves us in a very vulnerable position. We need to buy the tools from China at scale in order to build the tools that we need to rebuild our capabilities. We cannot build them ourselves at scale. If we had a BRICS embargo against selling certain tools to the USA, like we used to have with China before Reagan, we would be well and truly up a creek without the proverbial paddle.

Right now it’s almost impossible to manufacture in the USA at any significant scale, and cheap and easy to do in China. We can assemble, but manufacturing not so much.

The people with the skills needed to rebuild this capacity now number in the low thousands or even high hundreds , and the average age of those that are left in the field is 64. Deregulation and outsourcing, kicked off in earnest during the Reagan years, cut us off at the knees.

Pointing out that China is much better positioned than we are to lead the world in economic and industrial production isn’t unpatriotic. The first step to a solution is to recognise the problem.

There’s an interesting video that is on this tangent:

https://youtu.be/3ZTGwcHQfLY?si=D3ngTOl7xvxN340q

I believe he has made some headway since this video, but the trials involved in manufacturing in the USA even at a very modest scale are salient.
by leakycap | 2025-07-06 05:10:26+00:00
> This is in no way true and is quite an absurd claim.

You provided no evidence to back up this very strong statement; should we just take your word for it?

> especially in areas such as 1% lows, stuttering etc.

Oh, if you're willing to spend $1k to improve your 1% lows, I guess your argument makes sense.
by edg5000 | 2025-07-06 05:12:17+00:00
If I may speculate the opposite: With cost-effective energy and a plateau in AI development, the per-unit cost of an hour of AI compute will be very low, however, the moat remains massive. So a very large amount of people will only be able to function (work) with an AI subscription, concentrating power to those who own AI infra. It will be hard for anybody to break that moat.
by _kidlike | 2025-07-06 05:12:55+00:00
I had similar discussions with my father who started his career in the 80s as an engineer, and has been a CEO for the last ~15 years. The discussion was a bit broader, about engineering and quality/usability in everything.

His perspective was that companies were "run" by engineers first, then a few decades later by managers, and then by marketing.

Who knows what's next, maybe nothing (as in all decisions are accidentally made by AI because everyone at all levels just asks AI). Could be better than our current marketing-driven universe.
by dima55 | 2025-07-06 05:13:50+00:00
Because there are different use cases. About 100% of the people I talk to that use docker, are using it to make a separate set of dependencies available in a possibly-different distribution. For THOSE people, the ephemeral, stateless nature of docker is a huge detriment in usability, and a chroot would be far more appropriate. I see docker users waste countless hours working around its statelessness. All the time. YMMV
by PoshBreeze | 2025-07-06 05:13:56+00:00
I don't believe what you are describing is necessary. I am pretty sure you could have a module where the switches are wired normally into something and that communicates with the main bus. I am pretty sure this is how a lot of cars already work from watching people work on more modern vehicles.

In any event. I've never heard a good explanation of why I need all of this to turn the lights on or off in a car, when much simpler systems worked perfectly fine.
by AngryData | 2025-07-06 05:14:10+00:00
Are we suppose to bury our heads in the sand and deny the reality right in front of us because it is inconvenient? Maybe if people faced reality we wouldn't have sold off so many western assets and industries in the first place and put us in a bad position compared to them. It wasn't their job to stop us from being stupid and gutting our own industries in favor of their exports and giving them everything they needed to quickly industrialize and modernize.
by agnishom | 2025-07-06 05:14:58+00:00
I understand where you are coming from, but in a large number of cases this advice does not really make sense.

Sure, a Haskell programmer does write toList when relevant. The lens library also has operators named each or over or _Left.

But let's say I write <$> and you tell me to use fmap. Is that any better? Not particularly. If you didn't know what Functor is, you wouldn't automatically be able to infer it by reading the name `fmap`.

A large number of Haskell concepts simply have no analogue in everyday English.
by edg5000 | 2025-07-06 05:15:28+00:00
I've spent many year moving away from relying on third parties and got my own servers, do everything locally and with almost no binary blobs. It has been fun, saved me money and created a more powerful and pleasant IT environment.

However, I recently got a 100 EUR/m LLM subscription. That is the most I've spend on IT excluding a CAD software license. So've made a huge 180 and now am firmly back on the lap of US companies. I must say I've enjoyed my autonomy while it lasted.

One day AI will be democratized/cheap allowing people to self host what are now leading edge models, but it will take a while.
by leakycap | 2025-07-06 05:16:01+00:00
Thanks for sharing some of the process, especially with screenshots!

> This is 2,000 lines of Python code that, even if I had written it manually, I would've never bothered to automate more than the most critical steps, and certainly would not have put the effort into making the output look this nice.

Did you have concerns about the software doing things you didn't intend within its 2,000 lines of code - either due to bugs or you as the human not reading or understanding some parts of the code (or just not bothering to)?

The biggest concern I see repeated over and over when it comes to apps coded by machines is that the user & creator don't know what the app does.
by kragen | 2025-07-06 05:16:42+00:00
That fails pretty hard at providing a rationale. Basically it says that CGI is an inefficient interface because it involves creating a new process! Even if that were true, "You shouldn't want to do such an inefficient thing" is very, very rarely a reasonable answer to a technical question like "How do I write a CGI script in Python?" or "How do I parse a CSV file in Python?"

There are certainly some suboptimal design choices in the cgi module's calling interface, things you did a much better job of in Django, but what made them "near-impossible to fix" was that at the time everyone reading and writing PEPs considered backwards compatibility to be not a bad thing, or even a mildly good thing, but an essential thing that was worth putting up with pain for. Fixing a badly designed interface is easy if you know what it should look like and aren't constrained by backwards compatibility.
by mootoday | 2025-07-06 05:19:08+00:00
Wasm Components, deployed on wasmCloud.

IMHO, that's the way to go. Instead of hundreds of megabytes or even gigabytes, we're talking kilobytes, sometimes megabytes for each unit of compute.

Actually sandboxed environments per component.

Add/remove permissions of who can execute what at runtime.

But then again, I'm biased towards modern tech and while it often turns out I was right on the money, it's not always the case.

Do your own research and such, but FYI about wasmCloud.
by rkagerer | 2025-07-06 05:21:30+00:00
Did it for decades before Docker was a thing. Even for projects with lots of complex dependencies, some tied into the OS. Basically you just need a well documented, thorough and up to date set of steps for setting up the environment.

This is something you should still have even if using Docker.

I don't knock Docker for making that easy and "tied up with a bow and ribbon" for its users (that's great!), but do agree there are times when you really don't need the extra abstraction layer.
by weatherlite | 2025-07-06 05:22:12+00:00
Well yeah , being high status does not always mean you actually contribute a lot of value to society. And being medium status does not mean your value is mediocre - take a nurse or a kindergarten teacher - their value is substantial but the status they get is mediocre at best. So if you get a feeling the "game" is somewhat rigged and twisted, perhaps the feeling is correct...
by colechristensen | 2025-07-06 05:22:48+00:00
It's really good in the way that the best cheeseburger in town is really good. There are snobbish reasons to dislike it, but it is very good at being what it is. It's a superhero story but instead of magical powers and bad guys, it's a nerd being somewhat implausibly good at solving problems in a sci-fi context.
by unmole | 2025-07-06 05:23:42+00:00
> "India makes people loan 20% of their foreign remittances to the government interest-free" would be more accurate.

It wouldn't. The TCS can be offset against other tax liabilities. The government pays out 6% interest on excess tax payments. For reference, 364 day T-bills are currently yielding ~5.5%.

The idea is to force reporting and add friction. Not raise revenue.
by aniforprez | 2025-07-06 05:23:49+00:00
For your complaints about the taskbar, yes I too find it incredibly annoying that they compress all the application windows into a tiny thumbnail but there is a setting to expand thumbnails to include titles and separate them if there are multiple windows which is what I use. I don't currently have access to my windows machine or I'd help you out with the exact setting but it's there somewhere in the "taskbar settings"
by palmfacehn | 2025-07-06 05:24:08+00:00
Your first premise has issues:

>In such a future, people will have minimal income (possibly some UBI) and therefore there will be few who can afford the products and services generated by AI

Productivity increases make products cheaper. To the extent that your hypothetical AI manufacturer can produce widgets with less human labor, it only makes sense to do so where it would reduce overall costs. By reducing cost, the manufacturer can provide more value at a lower cost to the consumer.

Increased productivity means greater leisure time. Alternatively, that time can be applied to solving new problems and producing novel products. New opportunities are unlocked by the availability of labor, which allows for greater specialization, which in-turn unlocks greater productivity and the flywheel of human ingenuity continues to accelerate.

The item of UBI is another thorny issue. This may inflate the overall supply of currency and distribute it via political means. If the inflation of the money supply outpaces the productivity gains, then prices will not fall.

Instead of having the gains of productivity allocated by the market to consumers, those with political connections will be first to benefit as per Cantilion effects. Under the worst case scenario this might include distribution of UBI via social credit scores or other dystopian ratings. However, even under what advocates might call the ideal scenario, capital flows would still be dictated by large government sector or public private partnership projects. We see this today with central bank flows directly influencing Wall St. valuations.
by Animats | 2025-07-06 05:25:08+00:00
Corners and edges are rarely used that way. They should be. See "Fitts Law".[1]

My metaverse client normally presents a clean 3D view of the world. If you bring the cursor to the top or bottom of the screen, the menu bar and controls appear. They stay visible as long as the cursor is over some control, then, after a few seconds, they disappear.

This seems to be natural to users. I deliberately don't explain it, but everybody finds the controls, because they'll move the mouse and hit an edge.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitts%27s_law
by famouswaffles | 2025-07-06 05:25:34+00:00
>We're not philosophizing here, we're talking about practical results and clearly, in the current context, it does not deliver in that area.

Except it clearly does, in a lot of areas. You can't take a 'practical results trump all' stance and come out of it saying LLMs understand nothing. They understand a lot of things just fine.
by potamic | 2025-07-06 05:25:53+00:00
A better analogy might be something like medicine. There are many drugs prescribed that are known to help with certain conditions, but their mechanism of action is not known. While there may be research trying to uncover those mechanisms, that doesn't stop or slow down rolling out of the medicine for use. Research goes at its own pace, and very often cannot be sped up by throwing money at it, while the market dictates adoption. I see the same with LLMs. I'm sure this has attracted the attention of more researchers than anything else in this field, but I would expect any progress to be relatively slow.
by Supermancho | 2025-07-06 05:25:59+00:00
> Very few people were using Unix instead of DOS (or Mac OS or Windows or whatever) for their home PCs; it only got popular and people learned how to use it and later Linux because of its use in business

I would say this part is correct.

Your first statement is incorrect, as phrased, but I understand what you meant. Granted, you would have to wipe out all cloud providers using flavors of unix, most phones and macs to reduce the footprint. That being said, it's unpopular as a desktop OS. Phones and Macs hide it so well that most people are unaware of the underlying OS.

My first Linux machine was on my work desk in 1998, while we were running racks of UltraSPARCs in production.

I use docker extensively for local development in all my projects at home and at work. This guy is wrong about multiple things, eg "Well, if you’re expecting Docker to have a file-system easily accessible, you’re wrong"

I can access my docker OS from: docker exec -it containername bash (allowing that it has bash).

If the container OS has autocomplete and other GNU tools and features, you can get all the functionality. If you want to build that image or even upgrade the image you have (most containers have access to package management), you have a new image you can use the way you like...which might include running more than one service on the same container. Just like using a script on another unix machine, except without having to set up the physical networking or paying a host.

It's very UNIX-y to provide single entry points to services and run them in relative isolation (changes to one container do not affect the others) by default.
by routelastresort | 2025-07-06 05:26:10+00:00
Containerization is so widespread... from almost every single programming book and beginner class to the foundation for most of the Internet running today. As a technology, it's very easy to teach. I suggest keeping an open mind with relevant and ubiquitous technology and at least coming up with a compelling alternative for any of the use wildly popular use cases that have made it commodity tech at this point.

Lack of real moderation and reddit tier opinions like this are why I no longer visit this site on a daily or even regular basis.
by weatherlite | 2025-07-06 05:26:42+00:00
I agree but I think many of us are paralyzed even in the face of tiny risks or even imaginary ones. I have an idea for a 20 hour solo software project and besides the usual resistance of sitting there and getting it done, one of the barriers is the thought "what if people don't use it much" or what if "my wife doesn't get what I did it" and stuff like that. These are quite paralyzing feelings that are not really rational, I stand to gain more than I stand to lose by doing this project, and yet my mind has settled on the risk being about as high as the reward. You could say this is just me but I think many many people are like that.
by musicale | 2025-07-06 05:28:26+00:00
> I have always found this quote annoying

"Mission accomplished." -(fake) E.W. Dikjstra

My strong impression/suspicion is that Dijkstra had a great sense of humor and also enjoyed irritating people; it's puzzling when people take things like his comments on programming languages as serious rather than tongue-in-cheek, but I suspect he would have been amused.

I learned today that apparently Dijkstra won the Dijkstra prize in 2002. (I'm not sure what the qualifications are, but if I were to choose then it would be awarded to the most brilliant, and irritating, computer scientist who has made a groundbreaking contribution to a particular field.)
by refurb | 2025-07-06 05:28:39+00:00
It's not.

Providing material support is, which is a gray area when it comes to recruitment as recruitment doesn't have to be explicit.

What if I post information that indirectly support terrorist groups such as justifying their actions? What if I post information that supports groups indirectly connected with terrorist groups (say a fund raising arm the US government hasn't listed as a terrorist group)?

None of those things are illegal.

Shouldn't the US government, well any government for that matter, be able to deny such people entry?

As they say "the Constitution isn't a suicide pact". It wasn't intended to be a mechanism by which foreigners can destroy the country itself.
by KittenInABox | 2025-07-06 05:30:42+00:00
If you want interesting worldbuilding concepts of near-future international politics, Ray Nayler is your bet.

If you want "sci-fi your dad would like", Scalzi is your bet.

If you want hilarious, but heartwarming deconstructions of common scifi tropes and protagonists, Martha Wells' Murderbot is your bet.

If you want a comforting read, you'll want Becky Chambers.

If you want a wild romp of science fantasy, you want Tamsyn Muir.

If you want math-as-magic-scifi space opera, you want Yoon Ha Lee.

And of course the most wildass mililitary scifi, Kameron Hurley is the queen.

I have personally been going through and enjoying Alex Gonzalez's "> rekt", which is a novel about chilling brainrot.

So, I should more ask you, what is your definition of "great"?
by reincoder | 2025-07-06 05:31:14+00:00
I made this as meme to guess where a random IP address is geolocated just by looking at the numbers. Then I incorporated ASN and hostname information to introduce a significant winning chance in guessing.

This was coded entirely through ChatGPT/Github Copilot, and the entire functionality is based on the front end.

The selection of IP addresses is randomly generated through a simple function. Valid IP (non-bogon) selection and excluding popular ASNs is done through making an API call to IPinfo Lite. Geolocation information is gathered using the free IPinfo API.

There is a number of things that should improved and PRs are welcome: https://github.com/abdullahdevrel/abdullahdevrel.github.io/t...
by rpcope1 | 2025-07-06 05:31:46+00:00
Among the other wrong/dumb things in the post, equivocating all containers with "Docker" reveals a lot of ignorance. You can have your nice existing stuff, and still use containers (and reap the benefits) if you just use LXC. You get the advantages of not needing to pollute a host with everything (including potentially incompatible dependencies), incorporating cgroups and namespaces and ease of migration (really easy to bring LXC containers to a new host), while not having to buy wholesale into all of the parts of Docker you don't want.

This is (basically) burger king, you can have it your way, you just have to actually learn some new shit once in a while and not just refuse to ever pick up or learn anything new.
by kimixa | 2025-07-06 05:33:35+00:00
Maybe? That's one theory - but what is "spacetime", and what does it mean to "bend", or "fall into" something like that? In many ways we've just given things names as if that suddenly means they're understood.

And even then how can that be measured and proven vs other theories? Is it some other mechanism that simplifies to "close enough" that it measures similarly? We didn't really see the effects of relativity until we got to a sufficient accuracy of measurement, Newtonian mechanics was sufficient to explain things to the accuracy they could reproduce for a very long time.

Einstein couldn't have done anything like what he published if he didn't have evidence from new (at the time) equipment suggesting there was something wrong with the current model. And then testing proposed new models against those same measurements.