skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The first point to understand is that a knowledge of Concurrent Programming (in all its guises) is mandatory for all programmers today.

The second point to note is that when people like Rich Hickey or John Ousterhout talk about multi-threaded programming being "hard" they are talking about a level of depth far beyond what a "normal" application programmer will encounter in his/her entire career. These guys span everything from Apps/OS/Compilers/Language/Hardware and hence by necessity know the full gamut of complexity involved in concurrency. Trying to understand concurrency across all the above abstraction layers is very difficult and that is what they mean when they say it is "hard".

But for most application programmers the above is simply not relevant and they can comfortably stay at higher-level abstractions given by their language/library and ignore lower-level details unless and until forced by other needs like performance etc. One can do a lot with this knowledge alone and indeed that is what most of us do.

So instead of making wild statements like "random crashes and segfaults" and "too hard to program" learn to use heuristics/commonsense to simplify the code structure eg. a) copy code patterns given by reputed authors so one does not make unnecessary errors b) Keep the number of locks to a minimum by using a few "global locks" rather than a lot of "granular locks" c) Learn to use Thread Local Storage d) Acquire locks/resources in the same order to avoid deadlocks etc etc.
I Built an AI That Picks Gifts Better Than I Do
Hi HN!

Gift-giving is hard, so I built Giftron.app to help. It’s an AI-powered gift finder that personalizes recommendations based on recipient, age, interests, and the occasion.

Under the hood, it uses GPT to generate gift ideas then search for products. Right now, it’s integrated with Amazon, but I’m exploring adding more platforms and refining the personalization to assist better.

I started this as a fun side project after struggling to find thoughtful gifts myself. It’s helped my friends to get perfect ideas, but I’d love feedback from the HN community:

Does it solve a problem you care about?
Any ideas for features or improvements?

Thanks
As mentioned by another comment, this is a big reason that Vladimir Voevodsky started his Homotopy Type Theory and Univalent Foundations program. He had see first hand a field collapse by a mistake in “first lemma on the first page” of a foundational paper. Arguably, he initial work on UniMath and the special year at IAS ending up in the HoTT book, pushed the whole formalization of mathematics topic forward to where it is today.
Why not just do a search and get an answer in five seconds?
Sometime around 1990 is when I got my first computer, and it was one of those. Came with the wonderfully audible cassette recorder, boxy 5-1/4" disk drive, pair of joysticks and a couple cartridges. My parents bought it secondhand off someone. You never know, maybe your machine went to some kid, sparked a passion they turned into a career, and is still in some closet cherished to this day.
>This is one of those rare cases in modern history where there is a clear right vs. wrong.

There is no right or wrong in politics.
> We like to think that we are individuals, but we are much more alike that we wish to admit.

There is something missing here.

If you have to poll people and slavishly follow large aggregated preferences in order to show commonality, that really doesn’t prove much commonality. Because you basically asked “what is common?”.

Averages are low frequency, low information pass filters. By design.

If you ask for averages, don’t be surprised to get little variation.

They are not measures of differences in preferences which would show up as variance. High frequency, high density information.

Low pass: Everybody likes cats.

High pass:

[Disclaimer, advance apology, don’t hate me: generated list. I was genuinely interested in what I would get by asking for distinctive culturally specific cat archetypes/icons.)

1. Hello Kitty (Japan, kawaii culture).

2. Maneki-neko (Japan, ceramic beckoning cat).

3. Egyptian Bastet statues (Ancient Egypt, feline goddess).

4. Cheshire Cat (UK, literary folklore from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland).

5. Maru the cat (Japan, YouTube sensation, internet meme culture).

6. Lucky Cat figurines (China, feng shui prosperity symbols).

7. Cat-shaped alfeñique candies (Mexico, Day of the Dead crafts).

8. Schrödinger’s cat (Austria, quantum thought experiment symbol).

9. Le Chat Noir posters (France, 19th-century cabaret art).

10. Pusheen the Cat (global, digital sticker and merchandise phenomenon).

I could happily spend many an hour going down the rabbit hole for any of these.

So much of art and anything aesthetic is culturally distinctive. For instance, Hindu art from India vs. Christian art from Europe, each are highly prevalent phenomenon, and surely demonstrate culturally contrasting artistic preferences.
A high-velocity style of software development
Sequence to sequence learning with neural networks: what a decade
I had once a collegue at work who said, "I pity you that you need to drink expensive coffee, I can't taste the difference" My taste tops out at $600 grinders.
Of course there is, at 1:30, the lady even says it.
Interesting you say that about HN, because reading this (and other) threads I have the opposite view: HN is devolving into Reddit-like nonsense.
Apple Intelligence Accessing My Photo Library Without Consent?
I recently tried out the Apple Intelligence AI image generator app (Image Playground), and to my surprise, it presented me with a list of people from my photo library to create new images based on them. The issue is: I never gave explicit consent for the app to access my photo library.

This raises major privacy concerns. How did the app gain access to all my images and identify people in them without my explicit permission? While Apple has always marketed its products with a focus on privacy, this incident makes me question how much control users really have over their personal data.

Key concerns:

1. Access without consent: I never allowed this app to access my photos, yet it clearly analyzed and indexed faces from my library.

2. Face recognition and storage: Is this facial data stored locally, or is it being sent to Apple’s servers for processing?

3. Transparency: Apple should provide clearer guidelines and disclosures for such features.

Are we unknowingly giving these apps more access than we realize?

I’m considering filing a privacy complaint, but before I do, I wanted to gather the community’s thoughts. What are your experiences in Apple Intelligence?

The evidence: https://imgur.com/a/OuGyslH
That actually is really cool. That implies a certain degree of isolation for A very long time. Do genetics in that area have any interesting patterns?
So very many nightmares from that as a child.

Who thought that was a good idea for kids? I mean, it was an awesome show, but still.
This is bad. - Just recently I broke my system badly. So I decided to erase my system and re-setup from time machine. After several unsuccessful attemts I realized that my Time Machine backup (1.45 tb) exceeded my ssd capacity (1 tb). I did research, and learned not to prune my Time Machine backups. As that may corrupt it. So after several days and failed attempts to restore from time machine and after some research and finding out that indeed it was still possible to boot from external ssd, I decided to buy a 2 TB ssd, restore to that ssd, boot from it, clean up excessive data, and migrate from that ssd to my Macbook. It took me three days to solve it. As each failed attempt and investigation took hours to complete.

In the meantime I called Apple support to get help. I said right away that I am an IT professional who worked as sys admin in the past and that I would like to talk to experts. And they forwarded me to „experts“. The first said: „Forget about full restore, won’t work. Create a fresh install and manually (!) copy individual files from time machine to your mac.“ Second person told me to buy a new Mac with 2 tb ssd and restore to that. I asked her if it was possible to restore to an external ssd via Carbon Copy Cloner? As I did in the past half a dozen times. She told me she definitely does not recommend that path as she cannot recommend third party apps (?!?).

I did not try that option immediately as I heared a few years ago that latest MacOSes do not support booting from external ssds. And so I didn’t think of this option. But some research and I found out that indeed it is still possible, but you have to go some extra steps.

So if this wouldn’t have been possible I would have had spent two weeks to restore my machine. Or bought another machine with 2 tb just to restore from backup.

PS: I spent almost 5k Euros for this maxed MacBook Pro with 64 gb. Plus Apple Care. I didn’t want to buy another Mac just to restore from backups.

PPS: All of this was shortly before a very important presentation. So I was stuck with my work laptop (windows machine), and I am 90% less productive with it as it lacks my tools. Yeah, shouldn’t have screwed my main machine just before a super important milestone. Lessons learned.
How is Python a disaster?
> lot of ppl on the left mad at billionaires too

Seems the left were always in favor of Luigi. I'm more surprised by the right in the US. The days just after the shooting, they were all in favor too, but after their media pundits took an opposing stance, they joined the bandwagon and are now ranting about "muh poor CEO".

Bunch of sheep I suppose.
For those who will not visit the website:

https://web.archive.org/web/20241211184437/https://suchir.ne...

tl;dr he concludes ChatGPT-4 was not fair use of the copyrighted materials he gathered while working for OpenAI

For those who cannot read x.com:

https://nitter.poast.org/suchirbalaji/status/184919257575813...
MBB alum here--

Here's the thing: these firms are set up as partnerships meaning each of the partners (but really the senior partners) has their own little world enabled by their equity and voting power. They each have their own spin on the "values," risk tolerance, communication style, "followers," etc.

Trying to paint the entire firm with the same brush is naive. Like anything else, there are good and there are bad

Plenty of good smart people at each of these firms just trying to do good work and "make it." Then you have the sociopaths willing to trade lives for their own gain who have the benefit of hiding behind brand equity and human shields (aka the other partners)
Exactly. There's plenty of return on investment. Knowledge workers around the world are paying nice subscription fees for access to the best models just to do their work. There are hundreds of millions of daily active users already. And those are just the early adopters. Lots of people are still in denial about that they need this to do their work very soon. Countless software companies pay for API access to these models as well. As they add capabilities, the market only becomes larger.

OpenAI is one of a handful of companies that is raking in lots of cash here. And they've barely scratched the surface. It's only a few years ago that Chat GPT was first released. OpenAI is well funded, has lots of revenue, and lots of technology coming up that looks like it's going to increase demand for their services.

There's a very obvious product market fit.
Like all tools it can be used for good and evil. It could be installed directly in cameras to sign videos. And people with the power to turn it off could make AI fake videos that much more believable.
That doesn't seem like a very divisive statement.
I wish all the smart physicists were working on this instead of string theory.
That's so absurdly far from what Zuck said it's an outright lie.

"Zuckerberg told Rogan: "The background here is that the FBI came to us - some folks on our team - and was like 'hey, just so you know, you should be on high alert. We thought there was a lot of Russian propaganda in the 2016 election, we have it on notice that basically there's about to be some kind of dump that's similar to that'." He said the FBI did not warn Facebook about the Biden story in particular - only that Facebook thought it "fit that pattern".
There is no intrinsic "overall hierarchy" but merely a "a posteriori" appearance of one.
Intel ME Cleaner
For the most valuable applications, sure - but a lot of the biggest historical advances came not from the first application of that new tech, but from that new tech becoming cheap and ubiquitous.

Maybe (cheap) room-temp superconductors won't actually be that interesting (maybe it just increases energy transmission efficiency 5-10%), but perhaps it's availability catalises a whole range of new applications that were never considered before.
This isn't a tautology. Plenty of hardware is in the set of hardware officially supported by manufacturer or oem under Linux or known to be well supported by open source drivers. If offical data is absent unoffocial data is oft readily available.

If nothing would lead a reasonable person to believe it is supported then your default assumption should be that is likely not.

If the functionality that one expects to work works as expected on supported hardware but not on yours then Linux isn't broken your hardware is.

If it doesn't work on previously supported or otherwise well supported hardware its a bug in the software.

It's weird that compatibly is discussed as if for the next 20 years one shall be forced to use a succession of randomly chosen machines and compatibility will ever be a crapshoot.

Often people will initially try Linux on random machines but official Linux machines are out there and those who have decided that Linux meets their needs can easily find well supported hardware.
Claude (LLMs) fails to even identify Indian Languages
Did you intentionally not read the article?

> According to Kavanaugh, former McKinsey senior partner Martin Elling "personally deleted various Purdue related electronic materials from his McKinsey laptop with the intent to obstruct future investigations." DOJ officials said Elling has agreed to plead guilty to a felony count of obstruction of justice for destroying those company records.

You might've been too busy trying to force "inculpating."
Amazing how fast these meta-comments multiply.
It’s documented in their older blog posts, I believe they use the ‘asr’ utility to copy the OS install. The many partitions that make up a macOS install means that cp or rsync isn’t enough. dd would do it, but at great cost in flexibility (can’t back up to a smaller disk, or select files) and speed
They aren’t.

Doctors in Canada went on strike when nationalized healthcare was pursued by the government in the 60’s.

The government broke the strike by importing foreign doctors.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saskatchewan_doctors%27_stri...

In those other countries doctors power was significantly curtailed long long ago.
Show HN: A Svelte-powered tool for creating 4chan-style stories
Lots of people talking, but no one's having a good time. That's a strong sign of a flame war happening.
It looks they used a proprietary format to encode the secret message. Notice all the "f"s in the middle. Message is probably split into 2 parts.
The ironic part is, Elon's own attorney, Alex Spiro, represented $100 million in BHR (China) shares for Hunter Biden. Alex also tried to save Jim Baker's job (FBI official) at Twitter, which is why Alex was removed. Those BHR shares are now controlled by Hunter's Malibu attorney.

Alex's law firm was able to get this story removed in 1-day from The Sun. But it's true, Alex's passport is online due to this deal-

http://archive.today/InaZQ
Deposition != court
It seems like you can, with the usageDirect app.
A side rant with some useful information:

I had a nightmare week with an office Mac Mini, 2018
.
When the employee tried to update to Sequoia, he faced the error-try again conundrum. So logically, I introduced the restore option.

Oh boy, what a shitshow.
So after faced by 8 hours restore process option, I proceeded to USB installation.
Due to T2 restriction, enabling the boot process in restore utility menu is mandatory.

Surprisingly, this cannot be done without working installation and admin user.
So installing the OS which was the default for the computer and booting again was the next step.

Long story short, the Mini stopped working in the middle of the installation.
No chime sound. No light. We decided that it is dead for good.

And then I got mad. Perfectly working computer bricked by slow and buggy restore process.
8 hours? Did Apple have no money to afford more server speed from Akamai? Or deliberately f&cks up the process, users to go and buy the new stuff? HMM.

Solution:

So I proceeded to DFU mode with non-recommended cable USB2 to USB-C (from my Logitech mouse, with data capabilities.) You power up the mini by holding the startup button and push the power cable in. USB-C must be connected to the first thunderbolt port after the HDMI input. Then magically you have a connection in your host mac Finder and proceed to restore the T2 firmware. Install as usual from the USB stick and revive the Mini.

P.S. Found bits and pieces to come up with this solution from hardware repair forums. If you call your Apple "support" you know the procedure. Come to the store and buy more.
This is actually key.

The problem today is the insurers, hospitals and doctors put the patients at the center of the fight.

Insurance denied? You pay patient.

Insurance didn’t pay doctor enough? You pay patient.

Hospital not in network? You pay patient.

I think patients would see it as an improvement if hospital said upfront to go somewhere else as insurance won’t pay. If they knew insurance would pay at the right hospital than it would be better than today’s situation.
Sure, attempting to find one or a handful of bad actors to blame may not yield a sufficient result that could convince the public that justice was served appropriately. Yet, the complexity of how to blame should not absolve the crime.

How should society collectively administer punishment to a large complex network of individuals with varying degrees of power and involvement? Reparations and the Nuremberg Trials / Tokyo Trial come to mind for WWII Axis powers. 500k deaths from opiods (taken from top comment) is comparable to the casualties from WWII, within a soberingly low amount of significant digits. Japan was occupied and could not have a military for some time.

Curious if there are other ideas of how to tackle punishment of businesses (not Luigi'ing it).
Even thoughtful people can be wrong, make mistakes, or have lapses in judgement. Nobody is perfect, we all have flaws.

Edit: Heck, even by definition, "thoughtful" doesn't mean "accurate". You can put a lot of thought and consideration into something and still end up with a different viewpoint than your neighbor. That's okay, that's life.

Edit 2: "Didn't get his way"? He was part of an ongoing trial that hadn't concluded yet, so it hadn't been decided whether or not he "got his way". Setting that very obvious fact aside, we have no idea what he actually wanted or hoped for here, or from in life in general, or why he made this final decision, and to suggest otherwise is about as "thoughtful" as you insinuate he was.
It's less confusing if you understand its name in Farsi, which is Gorgistan. The regional neighbors of it all have unique names for it that don't overlap with the US state.
We don't need to wait around, but people are going to treat you differently if you start casually saying "my friend visited Deutschland on holiday." Even Germans will probably think you're doing some sort of bit.
> and you can even earn pretty good money.

This has not been true in my experience, I can't say I did it on purpose but I'm very thankful my primary profession is as a knowledge worker and I took on a trade as a side-hustle after the fact. A professional carpenter around here makes about $18-25/hr for what is a fairly time and labor intensive job with tight margins since customers are usually really price sensitive.
Alternatively buy laptops that come with Linux or at least are known to be well supported.

Whenever I buy a new piece of hardware of any sort I end up reading lots of spec sheets, reviews, and articles and comparing choices according to a whole range of desirable features. Making Linux support one of them hardly makes it any more complicated.

If nothing else search for product category + Linux then find a list of recommendations and then google choices that look good looking for unbiased critique focusing especially on people claiming systemic flaws in design that effect all units.
GPTBuddy -Chrome extension for navigating inside long conversations with ChatGPT
Apps can stop you from doing it, and many will, then it fails silently. It's also a deprecated feature. When I mean a full backup, I mean a bit for bit identical copy, not what the app developers think you should be able to access.
Tailwind v4 killed the config file
If white collar jobs get automated away to the extent that blue collar jobs were in the industrial revolution, that will be, by definition, a massive upheaval of the economy.
The throwaway diss of Blue Origin was pretty funny.

The biggest miss from Elon seems to be that he overestimated Google's lead. Did Google really drop the ball on staying in 1st place and if so why?
This seems quite unprofessional.
Your rebuttal is corroborating my "lies".
Call me a European communist but if you do your work in 70% of the time you should go for a walk or hang out with your kids. I know some people are built different and have a relationship to wage labor akin to substance abuse but I feel like this, in general, is unhealthy advice. You'll increase your superfluous excess with your family in the periphery.
Prosecutors have to use RICO to charge execs and board members criminally. This is not going to happen, as long as the revolving door (or a sort of collusion between prosecutors and executives) exists.
My favorite book is Herman Hesse's Magister Ludi (the Glass Bead Game), my favorite authors are tied at Mark Twain and Philip K. Dick, and the book that I've read the largest number of times is Clockwork Orange, the UK edition with the added chapter of Alex being a senior politician. I also have an antique copy of Grimm's Fairy Tails that is not the one that got widely published, an earlier version from that 1800's that would be banned today, and that is very interesting, I'd call it psycho-sexual horror. My mother is 88, was a child prodigy, and has quite the antique library. These days I read a lot of memoirs and biographies, not nearly as enjoyable.
Not going to be "the norm" nor will there be an endless stream of vigilantes available to deter this level of sociopathy. Assassinations are obviously not the way we want society to work either, violence to settle grievances etc, no good.

The only way I think we could hope to stem the tide of this level of corruption is through education. I believe it's really in the ruling classes interest to keep as people as dumb as possible though, so I don't think it will happen.

Not sure what else the alternatives could be. Societal collapse?
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