skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
When my company was still working closely with CN factories a few years ago (before the bans / clients no longer wanting to work with companies working with china etc), the CEO's of the factories we worked with all were electronic engineers at that company or another before; they all could jump in, debug schematics, sold and write firmware themselves. And they did. These were places with massive campuses with towering buildings with robots and a few (relative to the massive space) employees doing maintenance etc + prototyping.
I'm genuinely worried that within 5 years AI will completely replace me as a software developer. For perspective ChatGPT is 3 years old, and it went from spewing non-working code blurbs to scaffolding a whole project in one try.

It's also better at soft skills, communication, understanding requirements and humans, and so on. I don't really see what will be left for white-collar workers once intelligence is completely automated. I think blue-collar jobs are safe for the most part, which is unprecedented in history.
You are saying you think his playbook at Doge is "This is fine".
America adheres to the FAFO principle; fuck around and find out.

Things tend to get demonstrably worse before it gets better. SIGH
Everyone knows 'goto' is bad, so a language like this needs 'comefrom'
nothing wrong with it. I wasn't evangelizing, just noting that at least some developers also want dual-pane markdown editing.
> Look at how decimated the opposition in Turkiye and Hungary became due to this kind of oratory flourish.

Or was it the Fascism itself that decimated the opposition?

If your closing argument is "Don't anger the oligarchs or else we'll end up in Fascism" then maybe you need to reassess where we are along this process.
I'm sure China and India will like GDPR if they can use paper money to purchase industrial products and natural resources from the EU and North America
Reddit is a platform that is openly and intentionally opening itself up to astroturfing. https://thefederalist.com/2024/10/29/busted-the-inside-story...

Matter of fact the owners of the platform take part in astroturfing as a part of day to day business — see the moderation takeover.
Show HN: Swatch Switch – A minimal color conversion tool for design and dev
A lightweight web tool that instantly converts between HEX and RGB color formats while providing real-time color previews. Built with JavaScript. Features include:

- Live color preview as you type
- One-click format switching
- Mobile-friendly interface
- <1KB gzipped

Source: https://github.com/abishekvenkat/swatch-switch
The hot people are now in charge, just like everywhere else.
Show HN: A lightweight LLM proxy to get structured results from most LLMs
Hey HN!

After struggling with complex prompt engineering and unreliable parsing, we built L1M, a simple API that lets you extract structured data from unstructured text and images.

curl -X POST https://api.l1m.io/structured \
-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
-H "X-Provider-Url: demo" \
-H "X-Provider-Key: demo" \
-H "X-Provider-Model: demo" \
-d '{
"input": "A particularly severe crisis in 1907 led Congress to enact the Federal Reserve Act in 1913",
"schema": {
"type": "object",
"properties": {
"items": {
"type": "array",
"items": {
"type": "object",
"properties": {
"name": { "type": "string" },
"price": { "type": "number" }
}
}
}
}
}
}'

This is actually a component we unbundled from our larger because we think it's useful on its own.

It's fully open source (MIT license) and you can:

- Use with text or images
- Bring your own model (OpenAI, Anthropic, or any compatible API)
- Run locally with Ollama for privacy
- Cache responses with customizable TTL

The code is at https://github.com/inferablehq/l1m with SDKs for Node.js, Python, and Go.

Would love to hear if this solves a pain point for you!
> So they will blame immigrants and "bloated inefficient governments" for the problem. And will push anti-immigration and "personal liberty" and "more free markets" as the solution.

This trope is getting tiring to be honest. There are very clear issues with immigration in many countries. The issue is that for the last 20 years when these issues where brought up, the main parties just dismissed them and ostracized anyone who dare bring up the subject.

This failure to address the problem is what is fueling the rise of the far right everywhere except in 1 country, Denmark. Why? Because they actually decided to listen to their constituents and do something about it. Is it perfect no? But if you look at the result of their action, the far right in Denmark is comparatively low compared to many other European countries.

It's time for the leaders of many countries to stop pretending that problems don
't exist and acknowledged that the way the immigration issue was handled for the last 20 years is an utter abject failure.
the .Net environment strongly depends on the runtime-ability of all .Net Languages - its feel like AOT (ahead-of-time/finaly compiled) but its not, so Rust woulnd fit good
Here's an interesting thought experiment. Take any definition of consciousness or intelligence that is not based on biological components. For example "reacts to stimuli, exhibits anger". You can apply that definition to other entities like the United States. Does the United States react to stimuli (i.e. invasion) and exhibit anger? Yes (e.g. Pearl Harbor). Therefore the United States is conscious?

If a person argues that an LLM is conscious or intelligent based on how it responds, is the United States conscious or intelligent?
Great job, that's looking very nice and polished already! Are you also planning to introduce a SaaS version of it?
James Flint – a sino-pioneer ahead of his time
"Upon initial review of the U.S. and U.K. bilateral CLOUD Act Agreement, the United Kingdom may not issue demands for data of U.S. citizens, nationals, or lawful permanent residents ("U.S. persons"),..."

OK, I can see that, though even then I could imagine this sometimes being the case.

"...nor is it authorized to demand the data of persons located inside the United States."

Really, even if in the case of individual UK citizens, under all circumstances ?
Free and open source, simple, database design editor, modeler, and SQL generator
Gene Hackman has died
We use Tidb at work at scale. Great product! Was looking at the source today to understand an error code.
Your 'Founding Fathers' only lived a few hundred years ago, not thousands of years ago, and were elites in one of the richest societies in the world at the time. I wouldn't use the bible as evidence; from what I heard they also talk about people living hundreds of years in that book, don't they?

I agree that most of medicine itself hasn't necessarily made much of a dent in average adult life expectancy at, say, age 30.

In any case, feel free to ignore that part of my comment. And concentrate on the part about the number of children.

Or you can replace the now missing part with: how much should you spend on clothing? Should you spend the same in inflation adjusted terms as your ancestors? Or should you spend the same in terms of proportion of overall income (or time, in case of home production)?
And I assume houses in these places aren't exactly holding up well as investments?

EDIT: Oh, I think you were talking about deprecation? Even in the downtrodden areas, land values going down isn't technically deprecation. It's just like a bar of gold sitting in your garage: its market price might fluctuate, but that has nothing to do with deprecation.
good thing you can still download and run them!
Whenever I see a quaternion post, I wonder why the rotors aren't the default[1].

They are mathematically equivalent, easier to explain, can generalize to higher dimensions, and aren't mocked in the Alice in the Wonderland[2] (famous tea part scene).

[1]https://archive.is/20240820193111/ (mirror of https://marctenbosch.com/quaternions/ )

[2]https://gaupdate.wordpress.com/2011/07/26/quaternions-part-o...
> Americans liked to laugh at Europe's data regulations

They aren't laughing.

On the contrary, the surveillance capitalists (many of which frequent this site) are vocal because they are spreading FUD. After all, sensible data protection laws affect their business models.
But it is debunked: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42986476
Well yeah, but most companies still have a much higher headcount than before the pandemic so those initials layoffs from 2 years ago haven't cut through all the bloat.
My neighbour made a point of telling me he bought his before when I said "good morning". Now he has a cheeky bumper sticker stating it a bit more clearly.
Already having them in place without moving would be the main benefit
it does help having video of virtuous people vandalizing your car to show the police
How many is many? Are we talking 1% of all cars on the road? 0.1%?
> not everything that is Turing complete can run DOOM

Beware with such blanket statements, you might inspire someone to do 18-hour days for a year to prove you wrong.
The national debt ($36.22 T) is the total amount of outstanding borrowing by the U.S. Federal Government accumulated over the nation’s history.

Doge is doing what every other administration in history has failed to do.
> Huh? I don't necessarily care about an exact "base45", I care about QR code alphanumeric

> I suspect your referring specifically to RFC base45

> For more detail of my work, my BASE45 predates the RFC by 2 years in 2019

The RFC was linked in the comment I originally replied to. The same comment where you saw the term "base45", because I didn't repeat it in my original reply.

> The way we calculate this, for example, 2025/2048, we've termed "bit space efficiency". I'm not sure how commonly adopted this term is used in the rest of the industry.

It's not a good metric when the size can vary.

3/4 uses 75% of the bit space, and 512/1024 uses 50% of the bit space. But if you give 20 bits to each, the first method can encode 59049 combinations and the second method can encode 262144 combinations.

> which is somewhat absurd considering that the bit is the quantum of information, again as shown by Shannon. There is no such thing as a partial bit that can be communicated, since information is fundamental to communication, so the fractional representation we've found to be more informative and easier to work with.

You can use any base and the math is roughly the same.

Distinguishing between two symbols is just the minimum. You can't transmit .3 bits but you can easily transmit 2.3 bits. If your receiver can distinguish between 5 symbols at full speed then 2.3 bits at a time is the most natural communication method.

> There are other considerations, like padding and escaping, that makes exact calculation more difficult than it's worth. I just needed to "most of the time" calculation and that's where I stopped.

Yeah, that's fine. They're both efficient. My deciding factor is not the tiny difference in efficiency, it's the ill-behaved symbols in alphanumeric.
This is bonkers, utter insanity. Read defensively (which is the only safe way to read legal text), this renders Firefox unsuitable for any sensitive communication: prima facie, accepting this means I violate FERPA when I talk to my students via email through Firefox. Most likely health professionals would violate HIPAA by using Firefox in a similar manner. Furthermore, this has to violate at least the spirit of GDPR in the EU where I am located.

What is this absolute clusterfuck? No, I do not consent to any of that. Which, if any, update, informed me of this change in policy? And how on earth do my data, and which data, pass through Mozilla's servers?
Demand isn’t the same thing as request. As long as the US is willing to rubber stamp most requests it’s not nearly as limiting in practice as it might seem in theory.
> Most of the online bookstore pages have this mess so I wouldn't blame the tool for what seems like an upstream data quality issue.

I think that's an uncharitable read of the GP's comment. I read it as curiosity about how the upstream data issues present in the tool, which also interests the part of my brain that likes to solve minor mysteries.
No. Some languages use . for thousand (or even hundred) separators.
I read the Fil-C overview, and I was confused by one thing: how does Fil-C handle integer-to-pointer conversions? Rust has the new strict provenance API that is somewhat explicitly designed to avoid a need to materialize a pointer capability from just an integer, but C and C++ have no such thing. So if the code does:

int deref(uintptr_t p)
{
return *(int*)p;
}

Does this fail unconditionally? Or is there some trick by which it can succeed if p is valid? And, if the latter is the case, then how is memory safety preserved?

edit: I found zptrtable and this construct:

https://github.com/pizlonator/pizlonated-quickjs/commit/258a...

The latter seems to indicate that:

(int*)((uintptr_t)p + 1)

is at least a semi-reliable way to increment p by one. I guess this is a decent way to look like C and to keep a widely-used pattern functional. Rust’s with_addr seems like a more explicit and less magical way to accomplish the same thing. If Fil-C really takes off, would you want to add something like with_addr? Is allowing the pair of conversions on the same line of code something that can be fully specified and can be guaranteed to compile correctly such that it never accidentally produces a pointer with no capability?
Very much so.

Dot is often used as thousands separator too.

I remember the first time I saw 10,000 as a price and thought: 10 bucks? So cheap. But also: who needs 3 decimal points for a price?

Looks like its more or less 50% of the world [0].

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal_separator#Conventions_...
Tariffs are paid by the people buying and selling, to the state imposing the tariff.
In many regards USA has more regulations than the Scandinavian countries do, so isn't really a freer market. So that difference isn't about number of regulations but just taxation rates.
No, what I mean is: they could've had persistent storage on device, and have it hoover up enough data, and learn user preferences over time - it's fine to do it locally, as long as it doesn't leave the device. But, when you also do extensive telemetry, it becomes very hard to ensure none of that sensitive data gets leaked directly or indirectly through logs and diagnostic events. The two easy choices are to pick one or the other - UX or extensive telemetry. They chose the latter.
The insightful mathematical part of exponential progress is that this is a mathematical law without memory.

In concrete terms, that means that blue-collar workers are protected for exponentially less time than you expect because at this rate of progress the limits of robotics automation are getting piled through

So to answer your question I do think that AI will create greater and greater pressure for many jobs starting from bad software engineers and gradually but quickly eating up through every part of society.

I will be a psychiatrist in a few years and know that there are ways to practice psychiatry that really only rely on easy soft skills and applying pharmacological heuristics and guidelines. Of course, all of this can be very well accomplished by not so frontier models in not so long from now.

But for every given job though, there are ways to practice them that are completely irreplaceable. The software engineer that invents Linux. The psychiatrist that does miracles with mostly his voice. The mechanic who has invaluable insights. And golden fingers. and then of course it is extremely hard to get at this level of mastery if you have never been able to practice as a beginner this job because AI took the place of junior level work.

So yeah I am sometimes scared that AI will completely replace huge swaths of society but then that seems so extreme and yet so believable the only thing I can think of is that prediction markets are maybe among the most important technology right now to figure out our best moves at both individual and societal levels.
Remember when all we worried about was when government was tracking/spying on you? With illegal phone wiretaps and hidden microphones. Good times...

Now we have to worry about the government AND the big tech companies AND their crazy CEOs as the lines get blurred between the three.
i don't read it that way. i take it more they're saying the problem is broader than just tesla.
Joplin worked great when I spent 8h+ daily on my laptop (computer with big screen and physical keyboard).

During my long sabbatical, I wanted to take notes on my phone, a LOT. Joplin sucks at that, clumsy, non-user friendly android client.

Tried obsidian (first on mobile) and it is superb. I had to install a couple extensons (S3 sync, "Ink" for drawing with a pen), and it just works. It's so good, I sometimes even edit tables on my phone. With Joplin, note taking on my phone was just dumping thoughts in random formats to it and later fixing it on my desktop.

Like Joplin, Obsidian also has a Firefox extension to capture a web page I to markdown.

So after a couple days of trial, I realized that all the features Joplin has, obsidian has it too, with a much better (and snappier) UX on both my Linux desktop and Android. The only thing I wish for of it was Open Source. But oh well, I'm not dogmatic about that anymore
Meta Apologizes for Error That Flooded Instagram with Violent Content
As it usually goes. See also Wigner's classic essay "The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unreasonable_Effectiveness...
Don't understand how that could have somehow been vetted by a YC committee. I mean I'm all in for fusion power, but so far it remains in the state of utterly edge-case research project into which governments all over the world have been pouring insane amounts of money in the hope for the holly grail of energy. And you are spawning a private company that is discussing the nitty-gritty details of applying that non-existent technology to a niche market?
I mean would people invest into a startup applying quantum computing to wearable devices? And that latter idea is actually way more down to earth.
ATM by Synaptic – Create, share and discover agent tools on ATM
Ask HN: How do you validate hosting providers for PCI-DSS 4.0 compliance?
With PCI-DSS 4.0's increasing focus on third-party service provider management, I'm curious how companies are handling validation of their hosting providers.
Do you actually enforce Attestations of Compliance (AOCs) from your hosting providers? How do you handle situations where providers claim compliance but can't provide complete documentation? What additional evidence do you request beyond the AOC?
I'm particularly interested in hearing from people working in the payment industry. My payment provider doesn't request any compliance evidence from me and shifts all responsibility to my side.
Our organization is currently updating our compliance processes for version 4.0, and I'd appreciate hearing about practical approaches other companies are taking, especially regarding shared responsibility matrices and ongoing monitoring of hosting provider compliance.
Sure, but it has the same energy as saying it's worth having a camera in your living room recording 24/7(to the cloud) because any potential recording of burglars entering your house is worth having.
These are not fully autonomous systems and we live in a very litigious society.

How do you propose these driverless / driver assist systems work?
I think the US is conscious.
Mind emerges from matter? I thought it was the other way around.
What kind of VLMs are being used in OmniAI?

I fine-tuned a Llama 3.2 Vision on a small dataset I created for extracting text without heavy cropping. Results are simply amazing in comparison with OCR-based approaches. It can be tried here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43192417
You say that, but people actually do that.

I, for one, find it weird.
No plans, cloud deployment platforms like Railway can take of it
Wondering why Florence-2 is not on the list of models?
black mirror vibes.
German startup wins accolade for its fusion reactor design
For a proper comparison, you need to pay up the guy paying off the mortgage with someone who eg invests similar amounts in an index fund.

To be even more proper, you'd need to allow the stock market investor to use leverage, just like the guy with the mortgage does.

Or, if you want to avoid the mortgage/leverage complication, we can compare someone buying a house outright with someone investing the same amount in stocks, and uses the returns to pay rent.

> Around here, houses appreciate in value. Quite significantly, actually. A house can gain 100k in value in just a few years.

Total returns on eg the S&P500 over the last few decades have been pretty good, too. And it's a much more diversified and liquid investment than a single house in a single location.

For some people in some places, buying a house might be better than buying stocks, for some others it might be worse. Results also depend on taxes and jurisdiction and personal preferences. But it's not automatic that buying a house is better than renting.
It works quite well especially in .NET 9!

And exporting to WASM works nearly identically to DllExport.

I used that to shift all the heavy lifting to .NET 9 AOT compiled to WASM in a fun little side project I've been working on: https://evo.ryanpeden.com
The bottle caps are a joke, but how can anyone in their right mind be against transparent pricing?

You think it's acceptable that a company say the price is €170+vat and then after the transaction is complete they inform you that the actual price was €206.50?
Japan births fall to lowest in 125 years
Who are your target users? Why not use an embedded db like sqlite and make it truly "single binary"?
Played the demo of this a few months back on our living room tv + controller and my u5 y/o kids were quite taken with it.

Congrats!
Depends what you mean by replace.

I don’t think I will disappear as an interpreter between the machine and the imprecise meatware known as a product owner. Maybe I will need to move in that direction more myself.

Will I write much code by hand? I doubt it. Debug maybe.
It's only worth powering those cameras up when you're going to be out of the house for a long period of time. Power them down on return.
Applying Purity to the Imperative World
Not sure you can blame the US system. What you describe here sounds familiar in the European healthcare system too. To me, it seems that bowel issues are a complicated matter, with high variance in their manifestations. And as long as the symptoms are considered 'mild' (even with a significant decrease in quality of life), specialists don't seem to have an answer, and you'll end up in the 'deal with it' space.
Yes likewise, thank you for sharing!
Interesting. You use Fisher-Yates extensively. How do you feed it ?
I wonder if this is an argument for more public transport.

Electric buses make rides pretty cheap and comfortable. And shifting traffic from personal cars to buses would make mobility much more efficient. Because in a bus, 30 people can cross a crossing so much faster than in a line of 30 individual cars.

Would privacy also be better? Because the government is more trustworthy regarding the collection of movement data than private companies?
It's very similar to the US housing market, which is frozen with the fewest homes exchanging hands in at least 30 years.

Sellers don't want to sell because most of them are sitting on less than 3% mortgage rate. If they sell and buy a new home now, they'll have to pay 7%.

Buyers don't want to buy because of the 7% mortgage rate and the drastically higher housing prices since covid.

I think the job market is very similar to the housing market. People don't want to leave because no one is hiring. New people can't get hired because no one is leaving.