skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Who is developing, deploying, and profiting from these harder captchas? Apparently not Cloudflare.

> They are using commercial services such as Cloudflare to outsource their bot-blocking and captchas, without knowing for sure what these services are blocking, how they're doing it, or whether user privacy and accessibility is being flushed down the toilet. But nothing seems to offer anything but temporary relief.

Also:

> The current generation of bots is mindless. They use as many connections as you have room for. If you add capacity, they just ramp up their requests. They use randomly generated user-agent strings. They come from large blocks of IP addresses. They get trapped in endless hallways. I observed one bot asking for 200,000 nofollow redirect links pointing at Onedrive, Google Drive and Dropbox. (which of course didn't work, but Onedrive decided to stop serving our Canadian human users). They use up server resources - one speaker at Code4lib described a bug where software they were running was using 32 bit integers for session identifiers, and it ran out!
Rust has all the OOP features minus class inheritance, but folks like to repeat otherwise.

All the COM programming patterns can be easily done in Rust.

Here, ray tracing in one weekend, quite closely translated from the original C++ OOP design into Rust.

https://github.com/pjmlp/RaytracingWeekend-Rust
Are you already employing Bayesian optimization techniques? These are commonly used to explore spaces where evaluation is expensive.
Is this going to finally replace all the Xbox Kinects everyone uses?
I hear this all the time on HN. I am nearly a neckbeard at this point as a programmer. I have never once used any linear algebra in my career. Discrete math: Only a tiny bit, and mostly to pass HackerRank/LeetCode questions for interviews. Looking back, the highest impact (to me) undergraduate comp-sci course was intro to algorithms. You really use those over and over again, even if you are just "using the library" (vector/map/etc.). It helps to know what and how they do it, even if you cannot write it from scratch yourself.
One includes freedom and creates an economic incentive for the development of environmental rehabilitation, recycling, and carbon negative technologies.

If some celebrity wants to single-handedly fund the development of a microplastics recovery technology as part of a red carpet fashion item, I'm OK with that.
Aduro’s tech works with hard to recycle, dirty, mixed plastic. Search for Eric Appelman interview on YouTube for more info. Some of the retail investor coverage is cringeworthy, but my take is the tech is likely as good as described (disclosure: I’m an investor).
Really liked the fact that the team shared all the shortcomings of the model in the post. Sometimes products just highlights the best results and isn't forthcoming in areas that need improvement. Kudos to the OpenAI team on that.
Awesome Tom.

Snout were v good.
Powershell too.
I think the term posthuman captures things concisely. Most transhumanists seek a posthuman future. Maybe the author's word soup wasn't fully charitable, but I understood the sentiment. I do think given that the author is exploring whether transhumanist movement constitutes a cult, it's maybe fair to pull on some of the more cult-like endgame that does exist in sub-genres. Agree/disagree.

Anyway I do agree that the human condition gives rise to favorable qualities in individuals and the larger population. I don't support utilitarian hedonism either. I will say my experience discussing transhumanism has usually been in terms of becoming posthuman and the notion of a virtual bliss-state, if mentioned, is more if an intriguing a side-quest, but we might just have different exposures there.

I mean I still think there are problems with becoming post human even if you remove the utilitarian hedonism from the mix, I guess. In the author's defense this is a difficult topic to articulate.
> I would however suggest that you are not a prototype for self-taught programmers

Twenty-five years ago this was bog standard. Most people who were programmers did not come from a computer science background. They were self-taught. What is so different today that they cannot do the same? If anything, the biggest difference is the "gates are higher", but the work is barely different.
an important question is why indeed do people that do cool work dont write or talk about it or worse (to them) sell it and advertise it.

i also motivate myself to browse deeper (or visit obscure second hand dusty (book)shops) to find such unspoken of things.
It is called human language, if current AI expectations turn out true, eventually there won't be a need to use current languages as intermediary step.
I am out of the loop. Who is Rachel, and what are they famous for?
This is pretty cool, I like the google (pre-ai) option.
Yes, true.

I, after all those years, can finally understand my dad coming into my room, yelling at me due to the electrical bill.

Couldn't understand, only was running Seti@Home 24/7 on my Pentium 4 :D
> significant chunks of the Dragon Book

You did this as an undergrad? I am surprised. That is normally graduate level.
It has to work with the existing C++ code and class hierarchy. And OOP-like API is not good enough.
It was not my assessment though. It was theirs.
There is no reason to believe we are lucky. Instead, this is more of a canary in the coal mine that the DOD OIG and Congress are less able to excuse for a long-running hazard.

How much of the administration, for how long, and for what, is using hackable systems and without mandated audit trails for protected communications? Whether external hackers are already successfully snooping, or internal cover-ups are happening of ongoing corruption, both are deeply problematic, and can be happening in parallel to stupid leaks like this. Likewise, we can't even investigate and cleanup properly because these people are illegally deleting the forensic data for their illegal and insecure actions.

It's not even a surprise. Ex: It's already pretty well documented to embarrassing extents like the president flushing official documents down toilets and clogging them. Ex: The admins use of signal was a thing in the first term as well. The only new thing afaict is the public and checks-and-balances people have the evidence in front of them of illegal use when accepting the lies and criminality.
These have been around since at least 2016 and haven't really made any real waves... it's another technology Intel held out to dry. Stereo is a reliable tech that is relatively simple to implement but for the most part it seems to be have been left behind by other methods that are better suited for compact form factors in consumer like time of flight, or even LIDAR. Intel itself tried its hand at LIDAR, but shuttered the LIDAR real sense cameras in the early 2020s after no success.

I think the only consumer application where I know of stereo 3D being used is in hobbyist 3D scanners. I'm sure there's some machine vision applications in industrial QC, but besides that not really much else. Maybe in AR/VR but even there it seems ToF is a better match.
I’d love to hear more. What are they seeing?
Not sure. Maybe because I have the latest one? Google pixel 9 pro fold
> Monetized “brainrot” reels is generative AI’s killer app

These images provoke dark, negative emotions. This type of emotions are heavier and thus they feel more intense. This is why many users (Instagram addicts) have the backwards desire to repeat these emotions, even though they understand that this will do no good for them. So they find more images like that, their mind reflects the images in thoughts to provoke the heavy emotions. Slowly their mind warps to adapt to the kind of "content" it's trained to watch and the users get stuck in this warped thoughts <-> dark emotions loop. In the near future these Instagram reels will become interactive and we'll get the ultimate AI soul killer app.
You're getting dangerously close to describing labor aristocracy when you use established working class communities to suggest that affluent people don't have an easier time starting and maintaining communities. What the original commenter is saying - and they are correct - is that, when you can afford to live in a place, you have way fewer obstacles to starting/maintaining community.

If you have to move every 6 months, work second and third shift, and are constantly having vehicle problems and other emergencies, you are going to have a way harder time. Obviously. Let's not create a mythos of the working class that obfuscates reality.
> Recently I was accused of using AI to produce something because of my use of em-dash

Absolutely absurd of them to accuse you of using AI just because you used punctuation above a middle school level.
Crawling, incidentally, I think is the biggest issue with making a new search
engine these days. Websites flat out refuse to support any crawler [other]
than Google, and Cloudflare and other protection services and CDN's flat out
deny access to incumbents. It is not a level playing field.

I wrote the above some time ago. I think its even more true today. Its practically impossible to crawl the way the bigger players do and with the increased focus on legislation in this area its going to lock out smaller teams even faster.

The old web is dead really. There really needs to be a move to more independent websites. Thankfully we are starting to see more of this like the linked searchmysite discussed earlier today https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43467541
I'm an external individual to the US, but I must admit that some of the sentiments being expressed here in this thread and elsewhere about the lack of accountability deeply concern me, it reminds me of many things I saw growing up and still see today in south asia.

Independent of anything else, I do see the overton window shifting in the US, the most subtle of which are norms and expectations around acts of corruption.

Every nation has it's minor acts of corruption, small favours between friends, which I've always thought of as being functionally impossible to remove as they also allow for a flexible environment which allows things to get done.

However the norms seem to be shifting more towards the idea that those in power can act as they will, and in fact the expected thing is they will act to enrich themselves. I hope this does not happen, because this is death to entrepreneurship, this is one of those things that will poison the economy, when people no longer trust that what they make can be theirs, that others can look on in envy at the work they have built on their blood and sweat and can take it as their due because they have power.

That will create a chilling effect for anyone who wishes to create and will make them wonder as myself and many others have considered, whether it's better to create their life's work elsewhere.

I sincerely hope this doesn't happen here, once this mindset becomes a norm, it's incredibly hard thing to stamp out.
The authors' claim is that it is cheaper than other catalytic methods that have been explored/invented to depolymerize PET into TPA monomers. These qualitative cost estimates are based on the reaction conditions (temperature, solvent, other reactants (in this case, humid air)) and the unit operations involved in the downstream separation processes that isolate the TPA product from unreacted PET. The largest hurdle that precludes widespread deployment of technologies for PET recycling, as well as those for most other plastics, occurs (way) upstream of the reaction and separation train. The highest cost is related to collecting and sorting used PET bottles and TPA-derived textiles.

Mechanical recycling or any flavor of chemical recycling (pyrolysis, hydrolysis, etc.) all suffer from the same hurdle. If the target product of the recycling process is a TPA-derived plastic (be it for clothing or soda bottles), then mechanical recycling is usually cheaper, since it produces a product that only needs to be reshaped and remolded to give shirts or jugs. Chemical recycling converts PET into its constitutive monomers, and to (re)produce a TPA-derived plastic from the monomers requires a not inexpensive (re)polymerization step, in addition to reshaping and remolding.

Chemists, even highly regarded ones like Tobin Marks, are less interested in "solving" the PET recycling issue and more interested in the fundamental chemistry involved in chemical recycling. Issues of Green Chemistry (or blurbs in phys.org) are not the appropriate reading materials to get insight into costs, scale-up, etc.. Very few, if any, academic journals are focused on such matters, and rightly so, in my opinion.
No you cant see the fold, only if you look at it from an angle.

Try it if you dont believe me. Or read any review, they will tell you the same
My experience with using Svelte 5 in production the last few months is that while runes are an upgrade to the magic of previous Svelte versions, it's still too much magic to easily reason about complicated state. This seems like it just adds to the mental overhead. Harris says it's "sacrificing a little bit of purity in service of pragmatic goals" but I don't find it very pragmatic to be debugging glitches, lost reactivity etc which I find myself doing exponentially more as our project grows. The compiler definitely makes simple code snippets look pretty but there was a reason the magic syntax didn't find itself in Vue[1], which in my limited experience has a much more intuitive reactivity model.

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37592471
Using Reddit and AI content to drive leads – what's working for you?
There’s been a lot of chatter lately about using AI to generate lead magnets or helpful content, then posting it to Reddit to drive email signups or product interest.

I’ve seen decent success combining AI-generated content with niche subreddits — as long as the content is genuinely helpful.

I’m building a tool (MagnetManager) to help generate lead magnets for this exact purpose, so I’m really curious what others are doing.

Has anyone here tried combining Reddit + AI to drive conversions? What’s working (or not working) for you?
Started out great and progressively degraded.
https://github.com/features/preview/immutable-actions

They are actually releasing this very soon. I’ve seen some of my workflows use an immutable OCI image for some of GH’s actions like actions/checkout.
1. Can I use my own indiehosted OP?

2. Looks like this streamlines the server trusting the client. Does it do anything for the client trusting the server? I feel gross saying it, but I almost wonder if we should be moving towards some sort of TLS-based protocol for remote login rather than doubling down on SSH, due to the assurances provided by CAs.
My prompt is nowhere near yours.

Just for fun:
Asked it to rewrite the first page of ‘The Fountainhead’ where Howard is a computer engineer, the rewrite is hilarious lol.

https://gist.github.com/sagarspatil/e0b5443132501a3596c3a9a2...
Wouldn't (fully) burning all single-use plastics effectively make them no more long-lived and problematic than burning crude oil at sea? I know that's a low bar, but it seems like at least you're getting two uses out of them at that point...
I mean, scale is also a valid range to include, but I was more thinking about utility and stability. Like, I personally think that a single Raspberry Pi in the corner can be a home lab so long as you're learning something from it. But the thing you're learning on it can be "how do I write a toy HTTP server and the only traffic it gets is me testing it", or "this DNS server is in the critical path for every device on my network". High stakes, low stakes, big, small, careful, YOLO; if you experiment and learn things, it's a (home) lab.
I don’t think everyone involved in this fiasco are billionaires.
Stream Gatherers: The Missing Piece in Java Stream Processing
Coordinating the Superbowl's visual fidelity with Elixir
> I'm tired of this Too Important To Have Consequences business

Sure, but short of something similar to the UH CEO, do you think anything will actually happen to them?

If they’re doing this then the president presumably knows and does too. Even if they get prosecuted and convicted (after years of legal nonsense) they’d just get pardoned.
A fresh approach to secure mobile device usage in classified areas
> through gross negligence

If you talk to someone with a law degree (judge, lawyer, whatever), they will tell you that "gross negligence" is very high barrier to cross in US law. Most people misunderstand that. It is very unlikely that any of the people in that chat group would be found grossly negligent, especially for their first mistake. Please do not read that last sentence as an apology or excuse for their behaviour; they should be reprimanded for it.
Little boxes on a hillside

Little boxes made of ticky tacky

Little boxes on a hillside

And they all look just the same.
In nushell you can use it to look up more detail about that command:

> history | get 81201
╭─────────────────┬─────────────────────────────╮
│ start_timestamp │ 2025-03-26 05:16:58.184 UTC │
│ command │ echo hello world │
│ cwd │ /Users/matt │
│ duration │ 1ms │
│ exit_status │ 0 │
╰─────────────────┴─────────────────────────────╯

It's nice for confirming a suspicion that something is now slower than it used to be.
Not on Android. You can set your Signal PIN, which is a recovery code for if you lose your phone and are locked out of your Signal account. You cannot change the lock screen PIN, which is the same as that of your phone.
Where it's going is a valid question though. If I'm building something on top of it, am I building on top of sand or stone? At which point, looking at its past isn't totally unreasonable.
Thaks. I wanted to do exactly that: find the answer online. It is amazing that people (even in HN) think that LLM can reason. It just regurgitates the input.
Honest question, do you believe something just because the bot tells you that?
Previous discussion:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36904892 (45 comments, 139 points)
> I view this as compelling evidence that current models are more than "stochastic parrots,"

More evidence against "stochastic parrots"

- zero shot translation, where LLMs can translate between unseen pairs of languages

- repeated sampling of responses from the same prompt - which shows diversity of expression with convergence of semantics

- reasoning models - solving problems

But my main critique is that they are better seen as pianos, not parrots. Pianos don't make music, but we do. And we play the LLMs on the keyboard like regular pianos.
a haiku about

TODO the road less traveled

oops I found a bug
This is so cool. I just moved to the Bay Area, and I know that if someone invited me to such an event I would be thrilled!
Honestly, I'm giving up hoping for even a fraction of deserved punishment too. It's hard to handle the emotional dissonance I feel repeatedly when I see injustice, so I've adjusted myself to expect minimal or no punishment and just hope things improve a little. I know this is exactly what those people who repeatedly do malicious things want to happen, and I'm not suggesting we give up seeking social justice. I just can't handle the rage I feel every time or I'll suffer from severe depression again. I need to save my willpower to still hope for a better world and to encourage or support people who are actually working to improve society.
I think the unique perspective part is something I’m understanding. It’s easy to read or see other people’s work and think you don’t have anything to add
Another aspect of this argument, is that Zig is supposedly not about adding many features, in order to live up to its claim of being a small and simple language, with an emphasis on systems programming. Where on the other hand, Rust's pitch is not promising small and simple.
In vim insert mode you can type `Ctrl+k - m` or `Ctrl+k - n` to insert them.
I think what we need is first and third party notifications about vulnerabilities in specific versions, and a culture of cherry-picking security fixes onto previous versions. (In many cases, the same patch will apply to a previous version without any real difficulty.) First and third party notifications both provide critical roles; I think we've leaned too heavily on first party notifications only, but that's a SPOF.
Re-Introducing Microservices in 2025: Still Relevant, Still Powerful
Eh sorry for being curmudgeonly but the themes are just not attractive to me. Pancake party, dips party, coffee, all those task assignments are just not doing it for me. It doesn’t have an interesting edginess to it like the fraternities and their secret rituals or dedicated niche fanatics like stamp collectors or D&D. It’s all so pastel and milquetoast.
As someone who has whitelisted only US IP address space for my employer and blocked everything else I can attest that is DRASTICALLY reduces hostile traffic to us. I have an RDP honeypot that was blocking dozens of IPs every day before the whitelist and now it blocks 1 or 2 a day.
Survivorship bias at its finest. For as many people have been lived before ourselves there’s only a handful that get remembered on any scale.
I hear this refrain quite a bit: "But what have YOU retained?" and it almost comes across as weirdly accusatory. I can't speak to everyone's experience, but since we're tossing out anecdotal evidence, I've also acted in the role of interviewing applicants for software engineering positions (granted this was over a decade ago). Occasionally we'd discuss CS topics just to get a feel for the applicant and most of the applicants with BS/MS in computer science knew their stuff.

I mean if you aren't retaining a majority of what you spent 4 damn years studying then what was the point? I don't claim to have an eidetic memory but I recall the theory/application of most of what I studied in university. A few months ago, I had to whip out the Taylor series for a particular problem and I pretty much hadn't touched the concept since taking Calc 2.

It also seems like you along with a number of people seem to be addressing a point that I never once made.

Once again I suppose I need to restate the original argument because basic logic apparently missed the cutoff.

The argument was not:

- something something the vast wealth of knowledge on the internet replaces the need for your stuffy ivory tower something something

- something something my horatio algers narrative elevates me beyond the filthy CS grad mugbloods something something

- something something but what did YOU RETAIN Leonard Shelby something something

The argument was that the OP would not LEARN ANYTHING NEW in the course of acquiring a formal degree since they've already started working professionally. If the OP got a job in frontend development (for example), it's highly unlikely that they've ever encountered any of the aforementioned subject material I mentioned.

That you N=1 spent your formative years poring over scrolls of the SICP and The Art of Computer Programming like you were preparing for your bar mitvah is not generalizable to the vast majority of people working in IT.
What a colossal waste of energy
"the work" she was doing was domestic chores?

Like "you can live for free in this room as long as you keep the house clean". It's not like she went there to work, she just did chores

Frankly, you're the one that miss characterizing her.
I actually have only tried this once but had the opposite experience. Gave it 5 or so related functions from a ps2 game and it correctly inferred they were related to graphics code, properly typing and naming the parameters. I’m sure this sort of thing is extremely hit or miss though
I figured you don't update the major unless you significantly change the... algorithm, for lack of a better word. At least I assume something major changed between how they trained ChatGPT 3 vs GPT 4, other than amount of data. But maybe I'm wrong.
Why don't we throw all our trash into a volcano?