MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by throwanem | 2025-04-05 20:23:40+00:00
"I would like to share a prepared statement across database client sessions" is nearly the exact use case for a view, or some other possibly partially materialized decomposition. You are of course still going to use prepared statements in your clients to avoid naïve SQL injection, but that's always going to be true; by the time the engine has parsed a query sufficiently to validate it can be safely executed with given parameters, it has effectively been "prepared," so you're not actually getting a meaningful perf benefit there. Where you do see that benefit is, as almost always, in query complexity: if your statements cost so much to prepare and your sessions are so unreliable that this becomes a genuine problem, optimizing query preparation is very much the wrong place to start solving.

If you find yourself so frequently hitting socket timeouts attempting to execute database queries that you need to modify your ORM to work around this problem automatically, your problems likewise almost certainly begin at the schema layer. I'm not going to blame an ORM maintainer for having to deal with that concern in a way that avoids irritating library consumers, and I suppose I can see where it does no good arguing that one's own clients (said consumers) are using the database wrong in order to need such functionality.

I'd have thought to see perf considered to some extent beyond blaming the engine, but I suppose there is a kind of honesty in simply omitting any discussion of causes for these apparently so common "network errors," in cases where they are so common and thus must be so transparently retried that the entire existence of this behavior could be totally overlooked by the application developer nominally responsible for the database interaction.

(I'm curious why a library maintainer needs to assert responsibility over session variables at all times, but I suppose it makes sense from a perspective that one's users are not especially trustworthy, as I suppose most ORM maintainers and especially ActiveRecord's must conclude. I guess it's fair to say that connections needing to manipulate the session that granularly should exist outside the ORM entirely, but then we're back to the whole tiresome architectural question that's vexed the field for now nearly two decades since Neward's "Vietnam" paper: https://web.archive.org/web/20060703024451/http://blogs.tedn....)
by mncharity | 2025-04-05 20:23:46+00:00
And as a github search[1], I recall it turning up fun work[2] amidst clutter.

Hmm, I wonder if an LLM could sift a "Essentials of Compilation" search[3] for interesting repos?

[1] https://github.com/search?q=Ghuloum&type=repositories https://github.com/search?q=incremental%20approach%20to%20co... [2] just some old bookmarks: https://github.com/namin/inc https://github.com/iambrj/imin https://github.com/jaseemabid/inc [3] https://github.com/search?q=Essentials%20of%20Compilation&ty...
by aaomidi | 2025-04-05 20:25:02+00:00
> when I suggest we self-host something instead of forking over millions to AWS, it’s an instant no.

This is something that bothers me a lot, and I've given up. It's to a point where we're paying thousands of dollars sometimes a year for 200 lines of code.

It also kinda makes it harder to sometimes just practice engineering skills.

For example, I wrote a just in time access request solution at work. However, okta also has one of these. Funny thing is, the one I wrote is a proof of concept - so it's a little rough around the edges but nothing spectacularly wrong.

I then used the okta solution for this and my god, what an absolute mess of software they have.

1. They don't have the ability to have the requester specify a duration of access they want. It all has to be hardcoded.

2. Imagine you request access to group A for 3 hours. 2.5 hours later, you're thinking "Hmm, I think I'm going to need more access. So you make another access request for 3 hours. After half an hour that first access expires, and just removes your access. Even if you still have 2.5 hours left from your second access.

3. Without even trying, I got the backend for setting up the access requests into an inconsistent state. Okta's UI is insisting I can't delete a group because it's used by an access request form. However, when I was making that access request form the save button partially failed, so now there's this dangling foreign key somewhere in their database. Inconsistencies like that in software that's supposed to be the source of truth of access is just absolutely unacceptable.

4. Okta "removes" access by removing you from the group that you had requested. However, if there's any issues with Okta's provisioning code, from Okta's perspective you don't have access but the third party service might still think you do. They don't _remove_ the access from the third party first before removing it from their own source of truth.

What's depressing is that in my proof of concept, before even trying Okta's product I thought about and planned around all of these problems.

---

Anyway rant over, but at least in hiring I am very adamant about the candidate knowing how to get a basic website up and running and understanding NAT/Port Forwarding/HTTP(S) Proxies. Why? Well, when our customers run into issues with our software our engineers need to have the fundamentals to help troubleshoot.
by immibis | 2025-04-05 20:25:39+00:00
Is that such a bad thing? Are they really providing that much value?

The remaining YouTube channels would be concentrated around the ones that are of higher quality, rather than easy slop produced to push ads. Nobody would try to clone someone else's channel for money. They would only be produced by people who were passionate about that topic. There would be fewer channels by passionate people, but the percentage would be much higher, so it's not necessarily a worse situation overall.

TV has always cost money - you pay for satellite or cable, and the free-to-air programming available to you is overtly subsidized by your government - they shouldn't need to double-dip by showing ads.

We used to pay for newspaper subscriptions too. A lot of newspapers are trying to go back to that, but it's a market for lemons. Maybe if advertising was banned, we'd each subscribe to one or two online newspapers and discover which ones are decent and which ones are crap. Remember, it's harder to make someone who was paying $0.00 pay $0.01, than to make someone who was paying $10 pay $20. Would the market be more efficient at price discovery if there was no $0.00 at all?
by yojo | 2025-04-05 20:25:41+00:00
In comedy, they call this “punching down” vs “punching up.”

If you poke fun at a lower status/power group, you’re hitting someone from a position of power. It’s more akin to bullying, and feels “meaner”, for lack of a better word.

Ripping on the hegemony is different. They should be able to take it, and can certainly fight back.

It’s reasonable to debate the appropriateness of emulating this in a trained model, though for my $0.02, picking on the little guy is a dick move, whether you’re a human or an LLM.
by mindcrime | 2025-04-05 20:25:59+00:00
Meh. This scenario does not seem broadly representative of the US to me. I mean, I don't live anywhere exceptional and near me alone there are Food Lion, Harris Teeter, Wegmans, Trader Joes, Aldi, and Whole Foods stores in addition to the grocery sections at Walmart and Target. And if one drives a little further, there are Publix, H-Mart, and several smaller local outfits - Compare, Li Ming's Global Mart, etc.

And just Food Lion alone has probably half a dozen to a dozen different salt varieties on the spice aisle.

I'm sure there are places in the US where choice is more limited, but that's the thing about a country of the size of the United States... you can find all kind of scenarios in different regions.
by Winblows11 | 2025-04-05 20:26:02+00:00
Quoting: https://www.politico.eu/article/gold-germany-conservatives-s...

> Already in 2012, Wanderwitz had unsuccessfully requested to inspect the gold holdings as part of an effort to pressure the bank to either take a more active role as a custodian, or to repatriate it to Germany.

Well that is worrying, what was he unsuccessful?

Surely that is going to be big world drama if it turns out Germany's gold is missing in New York?

> Today, over half of the Bundesbank’s reserves are stored on its premises in Frankfurt. Outside the U.S., the remaining 13 percent is held at the Bank of England.

I see Germany not asking for gold in London to be returned, I guess because required for trade in currency?
by eliasreyes10 | 2025-04-05 20:26:09+00:00
I built Plateful for a few personal reasons:

Me and my wife had a recurring problem, we would set a budget for our groceries (we shop every two weeks) but we kept overspending. This would happen because we planned our own meals but followed the same budget without any coordination.

When I was meal planning my meals, I was jumping from different stores looking for the best macros and prices. I had a notepad and was writing it all down that way. I decided to try and make an app for it to make our lives easier.

The cycle was annoying - going over budget pretty much everytime.

Plateful solves these problems with:

Real-time shared grocery lists so both partners instantly see updates, even while one is at the store

Collaborative meal planning with a calendar view showing what meals are planned for the week

Store price comparison across major chains like Walmart, Target, Aldi, and more

Budget tracking that lets you set limits and see exactly where you stand

Barcode scanning to quickly add items you're running low on

Nutrition tracking for those watching macros or calories

For us, the greatest help was being able to add ingredients/items from the stores we shop at into the same grocery list. The prices are added to the shared grocery list with the macros (if available).

Since we started using it, we have been able to stick to our budget and macros much easier!

I build this hoping it will help couples, families, and roommates who want to collab when it comes to meal planning/grocery list planning.

It can still be used for individual users who want to make it easier to budget and meal plan on their own.

And yes there is a dark mode!

Check it out here (Pre-order): https://apps.apple.com/us/app/plateful-meal-plan-budget/id67...
by glacier5674 | 2025-04-05 20:26:11+00:00
What's the threshold they have to meet to ban? Half of them, give or take, will probably not be able to recognize the lie, and a sizeable portion of them would likely not be convinced in deliberation. It's also subject to nullification, e.g. "I know it's a lie, but it 'owns' the people I don't like"
by gwd | 2025-04-05 20:26:23+00:00
> E. LLMs only do multi-paragraph autocomplete; they are and always will be incapable of actual thinking.

FWIW, this guy thinks E is true, and that he has a better direction to head in:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ETZfkkv6V7Y

HN discussion about a related article I didn't read:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43562768
by vessenes | 2025-04-05 20:26:54+00:00
@mods this title is the title of the page. However, it is an extremely misleading title for the content, which describes the math of searching for a RIPEMD160 collision, and in no way announces the successful finding of such a collision — an event that would be a major market mover in crypto.

I suggest maybe adding “: calculating the odds of success” or something.
by LeafItAlone | 2025-04-05 20:28:07+00:00
>To models from GPT-3 on you get highly “liberal” per Pew’s designations.

“highly ‘liberal’” is not one of the results there. So can you can a source of your claims so we can see where it really falls?

Also, it gave me “Ambivalent Right”. Which, if you told describe me aa that anyone who knows me well that label. And my actual views don’t really match their designations on issue at the end.

Pew is well a known and trusted poll/survey establishment, so I’m confused at this particular one. Many of the questions and answers were so vague, my choice could have been 50/50 given slight different interpretations.
by cf100clunk | 2025-04-05 20:28:36+00:00
I like the compactness, and since it seems to be North American gear I'm wondering if additional gear like an HD Radio (IBOC) modulator-injector such as a Nautel HD MultiCast+ could be part of the chain? I wish there was progress on an open source IBOC exporter but it doesn't seem to be a thing and its waaay outside of my capabilities.
by subsection1h | 2025-04-05 20:28:38+00:00
> At the thought of leftists in power, I think open data day at the IRS is really not bad.

LOL. You're not even an American. He's a tip: U.S. states with the highest GDP per capita are mostly run by Democrats[1] (who, by the way, aren't leftists).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territ...
by saagarjha | 2025-04-05 20:30:03+00:00
That’s…not how war crimes work. If you conduct an attack that indiscriminately kills civilians, or torture prisoners of war, or deploy chemical weapons, those are all war crimes even if you say you’ll stop the moment you win. By your definition nothing would ever be a war crime because when one side unconditionally surrenders the war is over. Doing these things outside of an active conflict is state-sponsored terrorism or genocide instead.
by DiegoGA | 2025-04-05 20:31:00+00:00
Location: Puebla, Mexico

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: No yet

Technologies: Back-end: SQL, Java, php, laravel

Front-end: JavaScript,TypeScript HTML/CSS, TailWind, React, playwright

Other: GitHub, Unreal Engine, Object-oriented programming, Databases

Portfolio: https://diegosup.github.io/CV/

Résumé/CV: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1cugLtSrpRTVeTD47Mu32AyizijO...

Email: diego.garciaao@udlap.mx
by thfuran | 2025-04-05 20:31:34+00:00
Corporate personhood exists so that you can be hired by a company instead of a specific person in HR or have a cellphone contract with Verizon instead of a particular sales associate and companies can buy real estate and so on without requiring a whole bunch of extra legal work defining all the ways in which corporations are legally treated like natural persons. That necessarily includes giving corporations some of the same rights and duties as natural persons. But I do think that corporations have been given too many rights which have been interpreted too broadly. The notion that a corporation has a constitutional right to spend however much money it wants to influence politics due to free speech is ridiculous.
by mgraczyk | 2025-04-05 20:31:51+00:00
Is there any concrete evidence that anything bad has ever happened as a result of advertising? I don't like rap music, but I think it would obviously stupid of me to claim that it's harmful because I dislike the aesthetics.

What is the steel man for "advertising bad"? Articles like this always take for granted that advertising is harmful, whereas on the contrary I'm starting from a position where advertising is one of the greatest things that has ever happened, enriching us and making our lives far more vibrant and diverse. PS I have never worked on ads and rarely use them for my products, they are just obviously economically beneficial for everyone.
by kevinventullo | 2025-04-05 20:33:02+00:00
There are shades of grey w.r.t. truth, and in many contexts there is a negative correlation between honesty and other factors (e.g. I think of “bluntness” as prioritizing truth over politeness). When I hear or read a sentence beginning with “honestly”, I interpret it to mean the speaker is warning or indicating that they are intentionally opting to be closer to truth at the expense of other factors. Other factors might be contextual appropriateness such as professional decorum, or even the listener’s perception of the speaker’s competence (“Honestly, I don’t know.”)
by marojejian | 2025-04-05 20:33:44+00:00
No paywall: https://archive.is/uUF3V

Sadly this article is a tease. It doesn't have much data or insight. But... the existence of this camp for 30 years is fascinating to me. I would love to hear a longer analysis of what the economics are.

Some of the details are tantalizing, e.g. that personal wealth seminars are still a big business.
by SideQuark | 2025-04-05 20:34:17+00:00
Tariffs don’t increase jobs. Pretty much all Econ lit shows it lowering jobs, the same way it did during Trump I term and same as Smoot Hawley. It also moves manufacturing offshore for the same reasons Harley Davidson moved them to Europe last time - expensive materials here means expensive goods.

Next, since more expensive goods means less sales (see Ford last time), less is sold, so less workers are needed. Last Trump tariffs led to record farmer bankruptcies for a good economy, it led to ~300k manufacturing jobs loss compared to not having the tariffs, and MI had entered a manufacturing recession right before COVID hit.

If tariffs did even a fraction of the good Trump claims, they be used extensively by every country, by every state, by every manufacturer, etc.

Playing in a 21st century economy with long discredited 15th century tools will end as expected.
by johnea | 2025-04-05 20:34:36+00:00
This is especially true, given that advances in battery tech, and fast charging are going to eliminate the need. Recharging as fast a petro fuel filling have already been demo'd.

Of course, here in the US we don't need any of that commonist technology. We're all so great, we're gonna say "Please, Please, don't make me any greater!". Can't wait 8-/

So, qualify what I wrote before with: _in_China_ they'll be able to charge as fast as a refuel.
by ath3nd | 2025-04-05 20:36:19+00:00
> except that I believe both parties “should“ (can) be grateful for each other and in that acknowledge they both need each other.

Hard disagree on both needing each other.

Employers can't exist or build their own riches without workers, while workers have existed for thousands of years, much before employers. If we are considering the relationship in adversarial terms, always remember that workers are the only ones actually producing anything of value.

Without workers, garbage won't be collected, water won't be delivered to households, buildings won't be built, and food won't be grown.

The people pushing the paternalistic narrative telling us that we should be "grateful" for the "opportunity" to merely work for a wage have forgotten the French Revolution, the Bolshevik revolution, and all the strikes and revolutions of workers that have advanced our rights to where we have them today. The 5 day work week and the 9-to-5, child labor protections, and workers' rights were not brought to you by the employers. In fact, employers often actively resisted those, and had to be put in their rightful place by their workers.

> It’s nice for wellbeing to be grateful for everything good that happens

Judging by what happened to the employers and the rich during the workers' revolutions, it's probably a good advice for the wellbeing of the work-givers to start practicing daily gratitude towards their own employees. You see, it's just the workers that find themselves more often in the possession of pitchforks and torches.
by rsynnott | 2025-04-05 20:36:29+00:00
> Many countries have blanket global tariffs to make their own industries more competitive

Which countries are these? In general, if you look at the list of countries with >5% effective tariff rate, it’s all developing world. Vietnam, FWIW, has an effective tariff rate of a little over 1%, in a similar range to the EU and to the US pre-Trump II.

Some countries _do_ have high blanket tariff rates, but you’re generally talking about very poor countries with limited secondary industry; these are, as a general rule, not big exporters to the US. None of the US’s biggest trading partners have high tariffs.
by gamblor956 | 2025-04-05 20:37:03+00:00
Believe it or not, the people that design and build these bridges have a lot more experience than you do. So if they're doing something that doesn't make sense to you, you should ask yourself what you're missing, and not question their basic competence.

The point isn't just to make a bridge, or they would use a simple concrete bridge.

The point is to make a bridge that is preferable to crossing the highway. And to do that they need to landscape it as if it were part of the landscape. That takes more time because the bridge needs to be stronger to handle the weight of the soil and plants, which means the design, permitting, and construction phases are longer.

They're closing the surrounding road for the soil movement part of the project because that part of the project entails risks of landslides, and it's safer to just close the road. However, the road won't be closed the entire time; it will only be closed for a few hours at a time. The months-long period is just the part of the project when the road will be subject to potential closure.
by cf100clunk | 2025-04-05 20:37:06+00:00
The authorities are very picky about the bench-tested qualities of radio and television gear in professional use, and specialization of capabilities across different brands leads to best of breed gear options. It is a very serious business and I have the highest regard for the radio and television engineers who oversee such gear.

For outsiders it is a bit like thinking about how an RPI5 could theoretically run medical gear in an operating theatre or control the just-in-time processes of a major factory, but would regulators and insurance providers go for it? For amateur broadcasting, sure, an RPI can have fun uses like this:

https://github.com/cdzombak/pi-fm-player
by fpgaminer | 2025-04-05 20:37:13+00:00
So, take a raw LLM, right after pretraining. Give it the bare minimum of instruction tuning so it acts like a chatbot. Now, what will its responses skew towards? Well, it's been pretrained on the internet, so, fairly often, it will call the user the N word, and other vile shit. And no, I'm not joking. That's the "natural" state of an LLM pretrained on web scrapes. Which I hope is not surprising to anyone here.

They're also not particular truthful, helpful, etc. So really they need to go through SFT and alignment.

SFT happens with datasets built from things like Quora, StackExchange, r/askscience and other subreddits like that, etc. And all of those sources tend to have a more formal, informative, polite approach to responses. Alignment further pushes the model towards that.

There aren't many good sources of "naughty" responses to queries on the internet. Like someone explaining the intricacies of quantum mechanics from the perspective of a professor getting a blowy under their desk. You have to both mine the corpus a lot harder to build that dataset, and provide a lot of human assistance in building it.

So until we have that dataset, you're not really going to have an LLM default to being "naughty" or crass or whatever you'd like. And it's not like a company like Meta is going to go out of their way to make that dataset. That would be an HR nightmare.
by magicmicah85 | 2025-04-05 20:37:24+00:00
Advertising is not a modern phenomenon, business owners would shout and have town heralds advertise through them. Everyone being literate is a modern thing and people need to learn how to modulate themselves. You don’t have to buy things cause something is on sale. A business owner is absolutely entitled to shout if their underwear is 20% off and you’re entitled to ignore them.
by opello | 2025-04-05 20:37:31+00:00
I think we may have just had different interpretations of "here" in this instance. I took it to mean the article at the link, while you meant the comment that you authored?

I will justify my interpretation because saying "first" primed me to expect a list and the linked comment (and portion quoted) only suggests rewriting, while the article at the link mentions 9 rules to keep in mind during debugging.