MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by devmor | 2025-04-09 14:08:53+00:00
I have repeatedly tried to use LLMs as search engines, both general (like ChatGPT) or more focused on specific domains.

I have not been impressed by the results. In my experience, LLMs used this way generally output confident-sounding information but have one of two problems the majority of the time:

- The information is blatantly wrong, from a source that doesn't exist.

- The information is subtly wrong, and generated a predictive chain that doesn't exist from part of a source.

I have found them about on-par with the reliability of a straightforward Google search with no constraints, but that is more of a condemnation of how poor Google's modern performance as a search engine is, than an accolade for using LLMs for search.
by iNic | 2025-04-09 14:08:55+00:00
People who want play tetris _fast_ (on places like jstrs) will prefer the "real" rotation to the "NES" rotation, because it allows you to place pieces with fewer button presses.

To explain why check out this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_QBs703nOnk&t=502s
by yamrzou | 2025-04-09 14:08:57+00:00
I recommend this one for Android: https://github.com/markusfisch/ScreenTime

It doesn't limit apps, it just displays your screen time in a permanent notification and allows you to view and export past statistics.

I've found that to be very effective. From a systems perspective, it amounts to adding a new feedback loop, similar to this leverage point described by Donella Meadows[1]:

There was this subdivision of identical houses, the story goes, except that for some reason the electric meter in some of the houses was installed in the basement and in others it was installed in the front hall, where the residents could see it constantly, going round faster or slower as they used more or less electricity. With no other change, with identical prices, electricity consumption was 30 percent lower in the houses where the meter was in the front hall.

We systems-heads love that story because it’s an example of a high leverage point in the information structure of the system. It’s not a parameter adjustment, not a strengthening or weakening of an existing loop. It’s a NEW LOOP, delivering feedback to a place where it wasn’t going before.

[1] Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System - https://donellameadows.org/archives/leverage-points-places-t...
by Gasp0de | 2025-04-09 14:08:59+00:00
You can have up to 2000W panels with an inverter up to 800W. Note that the 800W is what you're allowed to produce, not feed in, but it can still be beneficial to overprovision panels because with 800W of panels you won't produce 800W of power in mornings, evenings and winter. Panels are also cheap af in Germany currently, about 60€ for a 440w panel.
by throwanem | 2025-04-09 14:09:05+00:00
There are seventeen names so far of people who died because it was more important to NASA management to get things done on time than to get things done right.

How many more names do we need to add to that list, before the psychotic mania for paperclips-uber-alles efficiency has been satisfied? And for that matter, I'm sure somewhere there's a headstone carved "Robert Strange McNamara," but have we checked what's in the casket under it? Or that there's a casket there at all? Did anyone see a body?
by jchw | 2025-04-09 14:09:41+00:00
I doubt this is going to be a popular opinion, but I honestly think Tetris 1v1 just isn't that interesting of a game. The interaction between players is pretty damn boring. In guideline 1v1 a lot of very high level games are decided by garbage RNG which I think is even less interesting than determining who is 0.1pps faster. I don't think either ruleset is particularly better for either players or people watching. Don't get me wrong, there's definitely a lot of tension in high level game play and so it's not completely boring, but to me it starts to get old once you realize what's happening, and I haven't really watched any high level Tetris stuff in a long time. I have a lot more fun watching Classic Tetris World Championship, because as janky as NES Tetris is, it's fun to watch people absolutely decimate it.

Now if you want a good multiplayer puzzle game with super rich interactions, I think you just simply need a different game entirely, because there's no obvious way to weave some sort of responsive strategy into a Tetris game. Therefore, my pick for the ideal competitive falling blocks puzzle game is Puyo Puyo Tsu.
by theandrewbailey | 2025-04-09 14:09:43+00:00
It's called Content Security Policy, not Content Performance Policy. My thoughts:

1. Inlining everything burns bandwidth, even if it's 100KB each. (I hope your cloud hosting bills are small.) External resources can be cached across multiple pageloads.

2. Best practice is to load CSS files as early as possible in the header, and load (and defer) all scripts at the end of the page. The browser can request the CSS before it finishes loading the page. If you're inlining scripts, you can't defer them.

3. If you're using HTTP/2+ (it's 2025, why aren't you?[0]), the connection stays open long enough for the browser to parse the DOM to request external resources, cutting down on RTT. If you have only one script and CSS, and they're both loaded from the same server as the HTML, the hit is small.

4. As allan_s mentioned, you can use nonce values, but those feel like a workaround to me, and the values should change on each page load.

> Local caches can be bafflingly slow, and letting the browser just execute it all in one go without even needing to look for a file has huge benefits.

Source? I'd really like to know how and when slow caches can happen, and possibly how to prevent them.

[0] Use something like nginx, HAProxy, or Cloudflare in front of your server if needed.
by candiddevmike | 2025-04-09 14:09:44+00:00
As I understand it, it enables SaaS for Agents, along with the associated consumption and billing. All of those partners are going to have some kind of agent subscription for you to plug into your enterprise LLM of choice.

I see this as Slack bots 2.0. Maybe this will create real revenue opportunities where the original chatops didn't.
by dleeftink | 2025-04-09 14:09:44+00:00
One thing I would really like to see explored more is the 'double blind' assistant, where neither I nor the assistant is in the loop on who wrote what (I am talking in the context of very long documents that you may have written years ago), and then collaboratively improve. I can half-bakedly do this now by blocking out half my writing, and letting the token predictor do its thing.

If the generated portion overlaps with the blocked out part I've written, I know I'm heading in the right-ish direction. If not, back to the drawing board.

There is also the opposite excercise, where you finish a passage generated by the model and see whether what you've written falls along similar lines the model would have suggested.

In both cases, I rarely use the suggestions ad verbatim, but sharpen my writing based on the discrepancies in the predicted and blocked passages.
by tmottabr | 2025-04-09 14:09:45+00:00
because the people above are just for the interview.. And they are shared across multiple jobs, so it is not just 1 position..

They apply to multiple jobs at multiple companies..

One team handle interview process to make sure they get the job, once they get the job another set of people handle the actual work.. And then the interview team also handle any instance the person need to be seen or talked to..

Each job pay a few of those guys and the company keep the rest.. If they land enough jobs they can easily pay for all that..
by huijzer | 2025-04-09 14:10:00+00:00
> The US isn't serious about it,

More than 40% of Texas's energy was carbon free already in 2022 [1], and they are still installing solar. Not on public lands, but most solar wasn't installed on public lands anyway.

Having said that, in the big picture the US is far behind China indeed regarding solar renewable installations. Compared to the EU, California is far behind and Texas is a bit behind. Germany for example sits at around 50% renewable [2].

[1]: https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/blue-states-dont-build-red-sta...

[2]: https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/germany-sets-new-re...
by taeric | 2025-04-09 14:10:28+00:00
I'd hazard most of that 30s+ build time is not in the line wrapping algorithm. Most slow documents are either very heavy in math typesetting, or loaded with many cross references needing multiple passes through TeX to reconcile.

To be clear, just because I would hazard that, does not mean I'm right. Would love to see some benchmarks.
by yieldcrv | 2025-04-09 14:10:59+00:00
> and took it super well

I just close that company’s laptop and never think about them again.

There is no linkedin to update, no resume to update, no desperate dash or networking for another role.

Although there is less sympathy for being sacked for performance issues when thats the reason, the realities in my overemployment journey have been companies running out of runway for reasons not solvable by engineering direction, furloughs, government contracts where the top performers only lasted 5 more weeks longer than I did after being promised that the project was a 5 year contract, whole org adjustments, “we are going in a different direction” and more. Tech is not a stable sector. This is a far superior position to be in.

I’ve met expectations and gotten raises from simultaneous full time roles as well.
by mcphage | 2025-04-09 14:11:09+00:00
> Remember the original 'unreasonable effectiveness of data'?

That came out in 2009, correct? I wonder how much was spent on LLMs up to that point.

> In contrast, Yuxi goes through the handful of described Cyc use-cases from their entire history, and it's not impressive.

They're also not humble. Maintain a semantic database of terrorist cells? Create a tutoring AI? These seem closer to the things that LLMs are currently being used for, with middling success, after vastly more money has been pumped into the field.

Whereas most of the uses you describe for early LLMs are far more humble (spelling error detection & correction, text compressors), and also a lot more successful.

Which makes me think that CYC went first for the big targets, and fell on its face, rather than spending a few decades building up more modest accomplishments. In hindsight that would have obviously been a much better strategy, but honestly—it feels like that would have been an obviously better strategy in non-hindsight as well. I don't know why CYC went that way.
by thmsths | 2025-04-09 14:11:15+00:00
Perhaps companies should go back to promoting their job openings at in person events? I remember a couple years ago when I went to a job faire, it was typical for recruiters to politely refuse your printed resume and instead suggest you apply through their online portal. Now that bots/AI have made applying trivial and resulted in a deluge of applications they can't seem to properly filter, I think it's time to try a different approach.
by metadata | 2025-04-09 14:11:35+00:00
Just for the context, I've been making (and selling) database (migration/translation) tools for 20-ish years.

What you have built can definitely become a product supporting you with a very nice income. Free version can stay free but you can sell solo licenses and team licenses as subscriptions. Paid license users will also have your support - and that matters to companies.

As others have said, commercial features can be built on top of the OSS product, like Electron desktop client, support for more databases, for views/procedures etc.

There is no downside to trying to commercialize this. Whoever wants to use what you have built so far can continue and I guarantee that many companies would be happy to give you $50/month for a more advanced version with support.

(edit for typo)
by crowcroft | 2025-04-09 14:11:36+00:00
Yea 'needle in a haystack' style search is something that LLM based search is simply not as good at.

The reason Google is still seeing growth (in revenue etc.) is that for a lot 'commercial' search still ends with this kind of action.

Take purchasing a power drill for example, you might use an LLM for some research on what drills are best, but when you're actually looking to purchase you probably just want to find the product on Home Depot/Lowe's etc.
by trevorwhealy | 2025-04-09 14:11:52+00:00
Hey there. I wrote this data-viz site over the holidays to learn Rust. I'm a Web developer by trade, so it was nice to try my hand at something a little different.

I think the app is a fun way to interact with TV show review data. Mostly I use this to know if the show I'm going to start is worth the trouble.

It's also fun to see if you agree with the general consensus. Finally got the time (and importantly courage) to share it online. Let me know what you think!
by tenwz1 | 2025-04-09 14:12:07+00:00
In fact, there are many college students and employees in China who use VPN to view foreign networks, just like what I am doing now. I can tell you responsibly that we understand the government's suppression of dissent, although many of us are dissatisfied with this, but there is a consensus that we need a harmonious, stable and positive society. Chinese people are not fools, we will also complain to the government, we have many channels, and in fact we have seen that the government is changing. In recent years, the efficiency of the province where I live has been very high, and we are quite satisfied. Many times foreigners will misunderstand the Chinese government as a high-pressure dictatorship, but if you really live in China, you will find that things are not like that.
Show HN: Python at the Speed of Rust
by olokobayusuf | 2025-04-09 14:12:09+00:00
I’m sure many of you are familiar, but there’s a treacherous gap between finding (or building) a model that works in PyTorch, and getting that deployed into your application, especially in consumer-facing applications.

I’ve been very interested in solving this problem with a great developer experience. Over time, I gradually realized that the highest-impact thing to have was a way to go from existing Python code to a self-contained native binary—in other words, a Python compiler.

I was already pretty familiar with a successful attempt: when Apple introduced armv8 on the iPhone 5s, they quickly mandated 64-bit support for all apps. Unity—where I had been programming since I was 11—kinda got f*cked because they used Mono to run developers’ C# code, and Mono didn’t support 64-bit ARM. Unity ended up building IL2CPP, which transpiles the C# intermediate language into C++, then cross-compiles it. Till date, this is perhaps the most amazing technical feat Unity has achieved imo.

I set out to build something similar, but this time starting from Python. It’s a pretty difficult problem, given the dynamic nature of the language. The key unlock was the PyTorch 2.0 release, where they pioneered the use of symbolic tracing to power `torch.compile`. In a nutshell, they register a callback with the Python interpreter (using CPython’s frame evaluation API), run a function with fake inputs, and record an IR graph of everything that happened in the function.

Once you have an IR graph, you can lower it to C++/Rust code, operation-by-operation, by propagating type information throughout the program (see the blog post for an example). And now is the perfect time to have this infrastructure, because LLMs can do all the hard work of writing and validating the required operations in native code.

Anyway, I wanted to share the proof-of-concept and gather feedback. Using Function is pretty simple, just decorate a module-level function with `@compile` then use the CLI to compile it: `fxn compile module.py` .

TL;DR: Get Rust performance without having to learn Rust ;)
by notTooFarGone | 2025-04-09 14:12:15+00:00
You act like you should be able to 3D print a car and be allowed to drive it. Let's talk about seatbelts - is this another of those damn regulations????! How about airplane security? I should be allowed to build a helicopter and fly to new york! God damn gubbernment.

On the day any of that is allowed I built my hut and leave society for good.
by lossolo | 2025-04-09 14:12:20+00:00
He said he wants the EU to pay €350 billion a year and to "pay for the past"—and I assume he'll feel emboldened to make even more demands and weaken the EU economy further. And all of that for "security" that's now pivoting to Asia? That sounds like a terrible deal for the EU.

The EU spent €326 billion on its military in 2024. Add €350 billion to that, and you're looking at real-value spending higher than the U.S. military budget. On top of that, if that money is spent within the EU, you get economic growth plus full independence from the U.S.

Trump is overplaying his hand with both the EU and China—especially with China, where some minerals essential to modern manufacturing are mined and processed almost entirely there (90%+ in some cases). You can't do cost-effective manufacturing in many industries without China—at least not for many years to come.
by AStonesThrow | 2025-04-09 14:12:36+00:00
Look, why should it be the individual consumer or their parents who regulate screen time when it’s not our fault?

Computers have become an unprecedented scourge and curse to our attention, our moods and our very souls, but radio, telephone, and TV led up to this.

It is time that the architects of consumer communications technology took responsibility for the utter grind and drain they’re causing us in every waking hour--literally--because these days, my smartphone knows exactly when I begin to stir in the morning and dumps a fresh deluge of pings before I can make it to the bathroom...
by no_wizard | 2025-04-09 14:12:52+00:00
I am of the same opinion. Employers get to jerk employees around. Look at union busting, look at how they fight tooth and nail against any pro labor regulation. Arguably unjustified mass layoffs. The tech salary suppression case and there are so many other examples that simply aren't jumping to my head right now.

But god forbid the laborers do anything that takes advantage of a situation to better their lot in life.

For the record, I ain't one of those folks either. I'm not looking to hold more than one job at a time, and I suspect the actual majority of workers are like this too, so even if the argument held water for someone, 400K people is less than 0.1% of the workforce. That is hardly worth worrying about beyond simple precautions if it something you think is an issue
by matthewdgreen | 2025-04-09 14:13:08+00:00
Generators are garbage, including the standby ones. Maintenance issues are a real problem over the years due to moving parts. Installation also costs a fortune for the standby generators, due to the need for plumbing and electrical going indoors and out —- even though the actual products are cheaper. Battery backup products are just hugely cheaper to install, but the prices need to come down by about 50%. It’s obvious this will happen, because if you look at pricing on battery components and inverters vs. the cost of the “all in one products” it’s obvious there are huge costs and margins in the fancy assembled products that will go away as global manufacturing ramps up (tariffs excepted.)
by jon-wood | 2025-04-09 14:13:14+00:00
This is very contextual. If I'm building a web application for an early stage startup which is basically a bunch of pretty CRUD views I'm absolutely using a framework for it, there's no point in hand rolling everything when the problem being solved is exactly what a framework is designed to do. If it's something safety critical, or where getting software updates out to it is going to be a problem, I'm probably going to end up hand rolling a lot more and depending on frameworks less, because I need to understand what the failure modes are and how it's going to deal with them.
by NoMoreNicksLeft | 2025-04-09 14:13:15+00:00
Neither of these would be illuminating. Switzerland's like the size of Rhode Island. And the United States prior to 1980 had much the same rail as today... not much was added at any point in the latter half of the 20th century.

Rail at best connects major cities, and a few minor ones. It is largely at capacity for the industries it serves, and moving retail freight to big box stores simply isn't possible. There are no knobs to turn or levers to pull to change that.
by maxglute | 2025-04-09 14:13:44+00:00
Yeah some PRC producers heavily dependant on US is going to get burned. But shave off maximalist 3% and most Chinese will just have to face the bleek reality of... living QoL of summer 2024, which TBH weren't great time for economy due to RE unwinding, but prices were under control and borderline deflationary. Whereas Americans are going to face some of the steepest CoL increases in their lifetimes. E: PRC grew enough and diversified trade enough that even relatively total trade disruption US simply can't fuck PRC hard enough for most people to live worse than they were 5 years ago, vibes will definitely feel bad because... well the world is exploding, but very few in PRC is going to long for lifestyle 20 years ago where per capita income was 1/6th and everything including the air was shitty.
by crossroadsguy | 2025-04-09 14:13:44+00:00
And maybe remove business critical or private data from "well known" online accounts or cloud services well known to US or from US or the one they might force you to give them access to - or the account where it might be trivial for them to show you have an account and then they might demand access. I know the article says they won't ask you for cloud accounts but I mean who the hell knows (esp. in today's USA), they might as well ask you to give access to iCloud Backup/restore because as you said they have close to or exactly zero rights there.
by ElevenLathe | 2025-04-09 14:14:06+00:00
Both things are true, which is actually crazy: the 2024 party tried to outflank Trump on the right by doing bizarre stuff like parading around Liz Cheney and sending Bill Clinton to Dearborn. Now, when they should be formulating a positive view of why people should vote for them, they're trying to figure out why Trump voters are so dumb. They're not a serious political party anymore. The only route I see forward is the long road of organizing normal people in things like labor unions, tenant unions, leftist gun clubs, etc. Most of the infrastructure that the right builds with money can be replicated in 2025 with dedicated volunteers and little actual cash.
by legohead | 2025-04-09 14:14:15+00:00
Mostly GPT, but for World of Warcraft, GPT is absolutely horrible. It's like it has been corrupted by the 20 years of bad/incorrect user data, or maybe just the sheer amount of it in general.

As an example, someone typo'd an abbreviation, so I asked GPT and it gladly made up something for me. So I gave it a random abbreviation, and it did the same (using its knowledge of the game).

Even when I tell it the specific version I'm playing it gets so much wrong it's basically useless. Item stats, where mobs are located, how to do a certain quest - anything. So I'm back to using websites like wowhead and google.
by scarface_74 | 2025-04-09 14:14:50+00:00
Almost none of the types of companies you are referring to use US staff for the grunt work. They may have sales, management and leads in the US. But even the major firms like Deloitte and Accenture use off shore labor for the most part.

You’re not going to want to pay the rates that they will charge for their best of the best hands on developers based in the US and if they did start staffing lots of devs in the US, they wouldn’t be price competitive.

I have worked at AWS Professional Service (full time direct hire) and now work at a third party consulting company as a “staff consultant”. Only a few large and/or well funded companies (and government agencies pre-DOGE) were/are willing to pay the rates that the companies charge to have me on a project.

Even then, they lean on me far more for leadership and strategy than hands on keyboard