MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by k310 | 2025-04-05 22:13:31+00:00
Firing people, closing offices and generally making access frustrating effectively destroys the service without destroying the service, which would require many legislators to face the wrath of voters.

Think of these assaults on services as sabotage from within. Money saved is for a trillion in tax cuts for billionaires and to lead to privatization of government, likely by billionaires such as Musk, Ellison, Bezos and friends. Those two goals are paramount.
by pcwalton | 2025-04-05 22:13:35+00:00
This is sort of true in theory, but in practice there's a major difference in that nearly all the libraries in Swift use a reference-counted (i.e. GC'd) shared-everything model, while in Rust nearly all the libraries use ownership and borrowing. The "normal path" of least friction in Swift is a reference-counted world, while the "normal path" in Rust is the ownership-and-borrowing world.

This is not a knock on Swift--it's really the inevitable outcome of seamless compatibility with the COM-like model of Objective-C and Core Foundation being a guiding principle of the language.
by simonw | 2025-04-05 22:14:16+00:00
This thread so far (at 310 comments) summarized by Llama 4 Maverick:

hn-summary.sh 43595585 -m openrouter/meta-llama/llama-4-maverick -o max_tokens 20000

Output: https://gist.github.com/simonw/016ea0fd83fc499f046a94827f9b4...

And with Scout I got complete junk output for some reason:

hn-summary.sh 43595585 -m openrouter/meta-llama/llama-4-scout -o max_tokens 20000

Junk output here: https://gist.github.com/simonw/d01cc991d478939e87487d362a8f8...

I'm running it through openrouter, so maybe I got proxied to a broken instance?

I managed to run it through Scout on Groq directly (with the llm-groq plugin) but that had a 2048 limit on output size for some reason:

hn-summary.sh 43595585 -m groq/meta-llama/llama-4-scout-17b-16e-instruct -o max_tokens 2048

Result here: https://gist.github.com/simonw/a205c5fc131a1d4e9cd6c432a07fe...

I'm a little unimpressed by its instruction following here, the summaries I get from other models are a lot closer to my system prompt. Here's the same thing against Gemini 2.5 Pro for example (massively better): https://gist.github.com/simonw/f21ecc7fb2aa13ff682d4ffa11ddc...
by jordanb | 2025-04-05 22:14:39+00:00
The US was not an export-focused economy in the 50s and 60s. In fact trade as a percent of GDP bottomed out in those decades. Arguing that the prosperity for the average person was only "sustainable" in an environment where there wasn't foreign competition is an argument for tariffs.

https://www.stlouisfed.org/on-the-economy/2020/march/evoluti...
by falcor84 | 2025-04-05 22:15:01+00:00
If that's what he said, I'd be happy, but I was more concerned about this:

> His belief is so strong that, at a conference last year, he advised young developers, "Don't work on LLMs. [These models are] in the hands of large companies, there's nothing you can bring to the table. You should work on next-gen AI systems that lift the limitations of LLMs."

It's ok to say that we'll need to scale other mountains, but I'm concerned that the "Don't" there would push people away from the engineering that would give them the relevant inspiration.
by Henchman21 | 2025-04-05 22:16:06+00:00
Feeding people lines about what “they need” or what their neighbors might be doing is manipulative. All advertising attempts to be manipulative, IMO.

But, I’ll play along for a moment: If trying to convince people they need something that oftentimes they simply don’t isn’t manipulation, then what is it? It isn’t simply informative because it’s attempting to change one’s mind.
by jjk166 | 2025-04-05 22:16:44+00:00
I take some issue with the notion that we shouldn't blame the individual who does a bad job because of the system that incentivizes them to do a bad job.'

Let's say you have someone working a cash register. It is rare for a manager to check the amount of money in the register, and it's certainly too infrequent for them to be able to determine who took money from the register if any were missing. This is a system that encourages low paid employees to take money from the register - it's clearly in their personal best interest. As the store loses money to these issues, it's harder to pay a good wage to a large staff, so individual compensation is going to get worse, further incentivizing skimming.

On could obviously see the system has a flaw, and it could be fixed with more managerial effort. But at the same time the employees are just straight up stealing. They are actively choosing to do something which is clearly unethical simply because they can get away with it. Those upstanding individuals who do the right thing suffer the consequences - whether it be a less prosperous employer or a less trusting management - because of these selfish individuals.

Applying the same principle, those who intentionally do a bad job, such as throwing packages in the bushes or not putting in the effort to make sure a prescription is filled properly, are likewise acting unethically in their own self interest because they can get away with it. They are stealing time or energy instead of money, but in the grand scheme of things they are all mutually interchangeable.

I do think that better pay, better aligned incentives, and better training would all help, and the broader trend of enshittification is obvious. There is a price point below which quality is just not really viable, and those who want cheaper will get what they pay for. But treating those employees who are active participants in this system, the ones who agree to take the jobs for low pay and then cut corners to make up for it, as helpless victims of the system with no agency is intellectually stifling.
by TeMPOraL | 2025-04-05 22:16:52+00:00
> But newspapers, TV and Youtube would die out.

Good. They're but shells of themselves, eaten through and bloated up by cancer of advertising. Even if they were to die out, the demand for the value they used to provide will remain strong, so these services would reappear in a better form.

I thought people in tech/enterpreneurship circles were generally fans of "creative disruption"? Well, there's nothing more creatively disruptive than rebuilding the digital markets around scummy business models.

(Think of all business models - many of them more honest - that are suppressed by advertising, because they can't compete with "free + ads". Want business innovation? Ban "free + ads" and see it happen.)
by b0bben | 2025-04-05 22:17:03+00:00
that's a really interesting take on self-hosting, you've given me a lot of food-for-tought here, thank you. I now have a subreddit setup for this project at https://www.reddit.com/r/mollyconsole/ if you wanna keep tabs on changes (or just install and come say hi in MOLLYCORP crew)
by eddythompson80 | 2025-04-05 22:17:10+00:00
What?

Yes, the purpose of "free speech" is to allow the spread of ideas. The purpose of any particular piece of speech (a book, a pamphlet, a poster, a sign, a rally, a concert, anything) is to spread an idea. The idea in that particular piece of speech.

Do you want to preserve free speech but ban speech that tries to spread an idea? Your comment would be banned because you're trying to spread that idea.

Commercial speech is a legal term for speech that promotes commerce [1].

[1] https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/commercial_speech
by SebastianKra | 2025-04-05 22:17:34+00:00
> Likewise, advertising on its own at its core is useful: there might be something that adds value to your life that someone else is trying to provide and the only missing link is that you don't know about it.

Journalists exist.

The best way to learn about new products is through influencers/reviewers/experts in their field. I'd even say its superior, which is why advertising companies ~sponsor~ bribe influencers to promote their products. Companies can also promote a product by sending it to reviewers.

So ads are not the only way to inform consumers, and the benefits IMO don't outweigh the cost.
by reissbaker | 2025-04-05 22:19:33+00:00
Oh, it'll never run on a 4090. 17B is the active parameter count, not the total param count (and "active" doesn't mean you can slice just those params out and put them on the GPU — which parameters are active constantly changes, even per-token. "Active" just means you get tokens faster than a dense model). It's 109B total parameters, so you'd need at least 54.5GB VRAM just for the weights alone.

A Framework Desktop, Mac Studio, or Nvidia DGX Spark should be able to handle the Scout model locally though... Maybe even at FP8, depending on how much context you need.
by wkat4242 | 2025-04-05 22:19:47+00:00
Good, that will stop it from coming to BSD :) I really don't want it.

It's not systemd per se that I hate, I just really have an issue with Linux distros constantly changing stuff around to solve issues that I don't have. Another one is the move away from ifconfig. So I have to learn new stuff just for the sake of it.

This is the main reason I went for BSD, they have a more traditionalist outlook.

If they do come up with a new init system I expect it to be fully tailored to take advantage of BSD's own unique properties and not something tagging a long "because everyone else uses it". Especially not Linux because BSD is not Linux and we don't want it to be. Otherwise we would have used Linux in the first place.
by rawgabbit | 2025-04-05 22:19:48+00:00
Not directly answering your question; but this is the advice I wish someone had told me 30 years ago.

1. Logical arguments. No one wants to be interrogated by a courtroom lawyer. Sometimes it is necessary for very high-stakes scenarios where everything must be exactly right. But nobody likes it. This is the same reason why "waterfall" gets a bad name. If the specifications were correct, waterfall won't get such a bad reputation. The reason why specifications are never correct is that nobody actually sits through and takes the time to logically define in excruciating detail what they want. The only part of logical argumentation I have found useful is agreeing upon common terminology; in any non-trivial document, you should always have a terminology section where you specify this is what you mean by X. I have witnessed massive pushback against the common definitions like what a database is or what a system owner is.

2. People problems. I would argue 20% of tech problems are people problems which are really communication problems. e.g. business people don't know how things work and what is involved in performing Y. In their minds, what they are asking for is very simple. What they don't realize is they are asking you to integrate three different pieces of software created by different vendors that are completely incompatible with each other. When the developer tries to explain the technical complexity, they think you are lying.

3. Political problems. I would argue 80% of tech problems I have encountered at work is pure power politics. This is war in the non-violent sense. People have lied to me repeatedly and actively tried to sabotage my reputation and my projects. Not to mention to accuse me of wrongdoing for things they were actually responsible for. In this land of where everything is a lie, people go with their "gut". This is where psychology is useful. It turns out their "gut" is nothing more than past biases and cognitive short-cuts. The ability to read the room is the most critical ability here.
by kernel_cat | 2025-04-05 22:19:55+00:00
Location: Canberra / Sydney, Australia or Remote Willing to Relocate: No Resume: https://kernelcat.au/resume.pdf Technologies: C, C++, Go, Rust, Python, Linux (Kernel) / UNIX, AWS, Cryptography, Networking Availability: 20 hours per week Contact: hn@kernelcat.au Website: https://kernelcat.au/

Hi,

I have over 20 years in the industry starting out as a Linux SysAdmin / Network Engineer and now doing more Systems / Low level Programming, R&D, and occasional DevOps.

Looking for opportunities involving low level / embedded systems / backend software development. Happy to also do automation / SysAdmin / DevOps as well. Although not my forte, I like to do robust automated testing / QA for software to ensure they meet (potentially undocumented) requirements.
by PaulDavisThe1st | 2025-04-05 22:20:13+00:00
What you can do relatively easily is to control the physical format of advertising. For example, consider how rare "billboards" are outside of the USA. Or towns in various places that prohibit signage that is not in the same plane as the edge of the building (i.e. no sticky-outy signs).

Or for that matter, consider Berlin, which has banned all non-cultural advertising on public transportation. Yes, there's some edge cases that are tricky, but overall the situation doesn't seem too fraught.
by torginus | 2025-04-05 22:20:23+00:00
I'm kind of puzzled by the way copyright is applied - an artist can create fanart of Captain America at their hearts content - as long as they don't use it for any commercial purpose. At least I haven't heard of fan pictures of famous characters getting taken down from art websites such as Artstation or Deviantart. But when I use ChatGPT imagegen to do the same, suddenly it goes against the guidelines - a rule very likely created to avoid litigationg from the IP holders of these characters.

Isn't the law being applies inconsistently here?
by briandw | 2025-04-05 22:20:24+00:00
Llama scout is a 17B x 16 MOE. So that 17B active parameters. That makes it faster to run. But the memory requirements are still large. They claim it fits on an H100. So under 80GB. A mac studio at 96GB could run this. By run i mean inference, Ollama is easy to use for this. 4x3090 nvidia cards would also work but its not the easiest pc build. The tinybox https://tinygrad.org/#tinybox is 15k and you can do Lora fine tuning. Could also do a regular pc with 128gb of ram, but its would be quite slow.
by hintklb | 2025-04-05 22:20:26+00:00
My advice to everyone is to never book an Airbnb if you value your time and sanity.

After a couple OK stays I had an absolutely horrible experience. The place was super dirty and the shower was clogged. The hosts tried to play nice and made us stay even though they didn't do the cleaning (Our fault I guess but when you are tired and already there you just want to move on and forget about the incident).

After the stay they became dishonest and lied to Support, tried to make us pay more. Support sided with the Host and even deleted our bad review of the place.

And the final nail in the coffin is that by deleting our bad review the host was able to get to Superhost status.

That stay destroyed our holidays. We then had to spend multiple hours on the phone and by message with support to defend ourselves. Ultimately they manage to leave a misleading review for us that we couldn't delete and Airbnb deleted our review of them.

It was already overpriced but once you account for the time lost when something goes wrong there is absolutely no point to book an Airbnb ever again.

Stay with professional in hotels. Your future you will thank you.
by wil421 | 2025-04-05 22:20:27+00:00
When I saw the first iPhone commercial I knew it was the future immediately. Pinch to zoom and all the pleasures of a touch screen. Plus a web browser comparable to a desktop but with mobile usability.

The web experience and usability of the original windows phone and blackberries was terrible. Nokia had a Swiss Army knife that didn’t sell or translate well to the iPhone/Android future.
by cogman10 | 2025-04-05 22:20:29+00:00
> it assumes that making advertising illegal would make advertising go away

It would? I don't understand why you and others see this as a hard law to craft or enforce (probably not constitutional in the US).

The very nature of advertising is it's meant to be seen by as many people as possible. That makes enforcement fairly easy. We already have laws on the books where paid advertising/sponsorship must be clear to the viewer. That's why google search results and others are peppered with "this is an ad".

> To me it sounds a lot like "What if we made drugs illegal?"

Except drugs/alcohol can be consumed in secret and are highly sought after. The dynamic is completely different. Nobody really wants to see ads and there's enough "that's illegal" people that'd really nerf the ability of ads to get away with it.

There's not going to be ad speakeasies.
by nyarlathotep_ | 2025-04-05 22:21:29+00:00
I'm in the same boat.

I'll say LLMs have influenced this for me. I've lost some part of what made programming "interesting".

Sure, digging through docs and finding small-scale workable examples to for boillerplate/whatever was never fun, but a lot of what drew me to programming was the wading into the unknown and the satisfaction of figuring things out (often even "chore" type things).

I'll keep looking for a new hobby, I guess.

Related, I feel like programming jobs are on the way out, one way or another (at least for me); programming recreationally had the side benefit of increasing marketable skill--this was never a primary or even secondary motivator for me, but now seeing as it's benefit in that realm seems far smaller, I've also lost motivation there.

Maybe I'll feel a bit better as the weather improves.
by PaulDavisThe1st | 2025-04-05 22:21:37+00:00
> Advertising is unsolicited content which attempts to trigger or nudge a behaviour.

So I'm listening to the radio, and one minute I'm hearing someone on NPR (or an equivalent public broadcaster) explaining how to make my back healthier; the next minute there's someone trying to convince me that some product will make my back healthier.

Which one is advertising and which one is not?
by bradleyy | 2025-04-05 22:22:08+00:00
The buried lede:

```Populists exploit ad marketplaces, using them to bypass traditional media gatekeepers```

I want to believe that the author is hopelessly naive, and not a more nefarious actor. These traditional media gatekeepers are not by any means friendly to democracy; they're literal tools of the state, and actively work against the interests of the populace. I say this without a hint of irony: I trust social media more.
by wkat4242 | 2025-04-05 22:22:37+00:00
Trust me we in BSD don't want it anyway. If we wanted Linuxisms we would have used... Linux.

It's not just systemd that is a linuxism, but it relies heavily on other linuxisms like dbus. Which does work on BSD, sure. But it shouldn't be part of the core system which an init daemon obviously is.
by lukeatkins | 2025-04-05 22:23:05+00:00
My deaf friend passed away in a house fire because they couldn't hear a fire alarm. Sickening.

I built an app that listens to sounds and alerts deaf people with a flash, vibration, and notification. Emergency alerts are free (fire alarm, police siren, et). Convenience sounds like baby crying and door knock are $5/month.

Someone please be my 1st customer or tell someone deaf. Might save their life. Just wanna help people who can't hear and feed myself :)
by makeitdouble | 2025-04-05 22:23:14+00:00
For news, I feel it's another can of worm altogether.

Right now we've already having oligarchs owning news groups and very few independent publications. But getting rid of other revenue sources won't help that situation, we'd get more Washington Post or New York Times than Buffalo's Fire.

It's a lot easier IMHO to have an independent newsroom if the business side can advertise for toilet paper and dating sites than if it needs to convince Jeff Bezos of its value to him.

And investigation journalism costs a lot while not getting valued by many, there's no way we get a set of paid-only-by-viewers papers from all relevant spectrums covering most of the news happening every day.
by zahlman | 2025-04-05 22:23:19+00:00
>I really don't see why you wouldn't expect to find cache-sensitivity in Python, or in some other similarly high-level language... Python lists are sequences and thus must support random access. In practice that means the implementation is a (dynamically resizing) array allocated contiguously.

The contents of the dynamically allocated array, in the C implementation, are pointers (PyObject), since the lists are heterogeneous and must be able to store any Python object. That entails indirection, which defeats spatial locality. Even if you iterate over cached data, you have to jump around to retrieve the actual objects to do anything* with them.
by throw5425 | 2025-04-05 22:23:28+00:00
Counterpoint: ads are non-issue.

I've been on the internet for over 25 years and there wasn't a time in which ads were more than a mild annoyance. Sure, a 5-second ad before watching a video, or a porn ad in The Pirate Bay, or an ad in a news site - I could do without them. But it's a nothingburger, and I'm grateful for those ads, as many of the sites I use would not exist without them. For anyone who's really bothered by them, there are ad blockers.

Furthermore, user data and tracking is a huge bogeyman, and it's extremely overblown. I'm yet to see any evidence of anyone having any relevant data about me AT ALL. With any luck they can profile me in that I use certain sites, or that I'm a male in my 30s and I live in X country. Generic shit at best. Relevant read: https://archive.is/kTkom

If anything, so-called targeted ads have been failing on me because I'm never suggested producs or services I'd actually buy.

So, what's the issue here? For all the issues we currently have, ADS are the worse? No.

What I think is:

a) This is an elitist in-group "luxury belief". It's like saying I hate ads signals a sort of superiority, as if you're part of people in the know, and ads are for normies or NPCs. That's for inferior people, I'm above that.

b) This is a problem for people in the autist spectrum, in which those who say they hate ads are overrepresented.

But I think there's a darker undercurrent since this view has been lobbyied and astroturfed to oblivion:

c) This is a propaganda effort to distract you from more nefarious things, or to encourage them. Such as normalizing banning and prohibiting things. Normalizing strict state-enforced regulation of the internet.
by pessimizer | 2025-04-05 22:23:50+00:00
> framing advertising and propaganda as essentially the same mechanism - just with different masters.

They're not the same mechanism, they're the same thing. Propaganda is advertising one doesn't approve of, and advertising is propaganda that one does approve of. The fine-slicing is the result of people who want to make money doing propaganda attempting to justify themselves.

> Try this thought experiment from the article - imagine a world without advertising. Products would still exist. Commerce would still happen. Information would still flow.

Through what mechanism? Wishes?

I'm getting annoyed with people who made a bunch of money in advertising talking about banning advertising (or in general people who made a bunch of money in X trying to create careers as X-bashing pundits or gurus.) Advertising has a purpose; it's how I find out what products and services are available, and at what cost. People working in advertising who don't realize that have clearly never given the only honest aspect of their occupation a moment's thought. They thought the job was to distract people while robbing them. From that perspective, I can understand why they now think that they themselves should have been banned.

If you want to ban advertising, you have to replace advertising. We have a highway system, there's no reason why we can't have a state products and services that are available system, or in the same vein a matchmaking system between employees and employers. We don't, though. Banning advertising without one would be like banning Human Resources departments without any other hiring process.

What we should do is regulate advertising, since is is commercial speech and we can, but we don't do that either. Talking about banning advertising when we can't even ban direct to customer drug advertisements (which can be easily done, as it was done, by creating standards for the information that has to be included with a drug advertisement, and the format that it has to be done in.) We can't even get the basics; banning advertising, in addition to being a bad idea, is a pipe dream.