MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by tromp | 2025-04-05 17:06:26+00:00
Last year I ported Loader's construction to Haskell [2] in order to better understand it, and managed to shrink the code down to under 232 bytes [1]. That work was also featured in a video that youtuber CodeParade made about the Quest To Find The Largest Number and its followup [3].

[1] https://github.com/tromp/AIT/blob/master/fast_growing_and_co...

[2] https://codegolf.stackexchange.com/questions/176966/golf-a-n...

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kQLcoSuMKHg&t=10s
by verteu | 2025-04-05 17:06:51+00:00
You are correct -- the (bid,ask) price can change with no trades taking place.

GP is hinting at a common fallacy -- I call it the "strong hands fallacy." It's common in crypto: "Every time the price of $fartcoin goes down, it's moving from weak hands to strong hands. Price drops are just more reason to be bullish!"
by tmoertel | 2025-04-05 17:06:56+00:00
I made no extrapolation. I said that we haven't measured the reliability of the earlier stories. Instead of having a reliable measurement, we're going with our much-less-reliable assumptions (prior beliefs).

The interesting thing, I think, is those prior beliefs. Your prior beliefs, it would seem, include the belief TAL's stories are generally reliable. You believe it strongly enough that you write that doubting the reliability of earlier TAL stories is an "over correction in the wrong direction."

I don't think it's an overcorrection. When we find evidence of one fabrication from a trusted source, that source ought to lose trust. If we want to know how much trust it should lose, we have to measure. When we don't measure, when we don't take seriously the responsibility to ground our beliefs, that's how we end up with things like the replication crisis in psychology.
by theamk | 2025-04-05 17:07:30+00:00
I am sure that some people would still want to live on the surface of that beautiful, untouched planet. And I am sure this could be arranged, for the right price of course. And as the extra bonus, all those rich surface-dwellers would not need to see the common folks and other riff-raff, who would be be living under the ground. Hey, even under ground could use the same system: top levels for more well-off folks, and lower levels for poorer folks.

I think I've read a book about this. Or ten.
Solo founder developing a social platform for action-oriented collaboration
by shannontkwong | 2025-04-05 17:07:34+00:00
Hey everyone! I am a 19 y/o founder taking a gap year to build Airdel - a social media platform startup that transforms how people accomplish meaningful goals together.

I've noticed many of today's social media platforms aren't action-oriented nor optimized for real-time collaboration. This gap affects people across numerous scenarios:

- Emergency responders coordinating resources during California wildfires - Healthcare teams arranging critical medical deliveries - Adventure seekers finding partners and sponsors for climbing Everest - Scientists collaborating on research across institutional boundaries - Filmmakers assembling crews and equipment for independent productions - Engineers seeking specialized expertise for challenging technical projects

That's why I'm building a social media platform that connects your needs with people who can help — whether it's industry stakeholders, professionals, or individuals with a common solution to your problem. How Airdel Works:

- Mission Feed: Post updates, progress, and achievements related to your goals - Resource Directory: Search for specific needs or browse available resources/expertise - Collaboration Workspace: Purpose-built tools to coordinate from planning to completion - Profile System: Your completed missions build a portfolio of verified achievements - Trust Network: Collaborators can be anonymously reviewed, allowing others to judge trustworthiness

What makes Airdel different is that resource matching is built directly into conversation flows. When someone needs specialized equipment, expertise, or support, our system identifies who can help and facilitates the connection - turning communication into coordinated action. We've seen an 87% completion rate for missions on the platform vs. 34% with traditional methods. Early adopters span humanitarian organizations, healthcare providers, adventure groups, creative professionals, and tech startups.

I'd love feedback from the HN community - what features would make this most valuable for your personal or professional missions? Landing page: www.getairdel.com

Interested in helping out? Contact me shannon@getairdel.com

Best, Shannon
by rvz | 2025-04-05 17:07:35+00:00
"Coding" != Software Engineering

Also:

> Around 2012 or 2013, my former employer went on a hiring spree for software developers. The criteria to qualify for a role were owning a computer and convincingly stating you wanted to learn programming. The bar was low. We had the budget and patience to train people in basic front-end coding, and we needed warm bodies, so we hired everyone, some unqualified.

This is the original sin.
by hintymad | 2025-04-05 17:07:37+00:00
A naive question: why is global warming bad for the earth, especially for the environmentalists? I mean I get it that it will be bad for human, but the biosphere thrived in much warmer pre-historical ages, right? Or rain forests still have the highest biodiversity nowadays, right? For people who hate human activities to preserve a thriving earth, wouldn't they welcome global warming?
by mock-possum | 2025-04-05 17:07:48+00:00
> Now—the snare. This one was tough. I spent a long time trying to recreate it, convinced it was a processed acoustic snare layered with something synthetic. After too many failed attempts, I caved and sampled the original. Yes, the snare is the only part I couldn’t fully replicate.

which seems so weird to me, because when you listen to the isolated sample, it sounds like a fairly standard Lindrum fare, a snare hit plus some kind of other perc sample, maybe a wood block or one of those 'congo' bell samples or something.
by gopher_space | 2025-04-05 17:08:10+00:00
The whole "bright guy writes like he's an idiot" schtick attracted an element that wasn't going to parse sarcasm. Seanbaby's entire oeuvre assumes you went to high school with a bunch of racist assholes and hated them. It was safe for him to do that at the time because the internet was still mostly cool people.
by rayiner | 2025-04-05 17:08:20+00:00
If you have a trade defect with everyone, like the US does, you have a current accounts deficit: https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/010715/what-differe.... It means you’re perpetually borrowing to finance consumption.

That’s why the Madagascar example misses the point. There’s a handful of large trading partners that account for our overall trade deficit. Everyone else is just being swept in.
by BobaFloutist | 2025-04-05 17:08:59+00:00
I think the argument is that even very disordered and disregulated consumption of porn doesn't resemble what we typically define to be an "addiction". There's a meaningful difference of degree and of kind between a bad habit that's difficult to shake, even a deeply entrenched one, and medical/psychological addiction, and researchers have repeatedly concluded that porn consumption never reaches the standard of the second.
by siliconc0w | 2025-04-05 17:09:29+00:00
Of the ones I've heard about - those were already underway pre-trump (e.g, Apple, Stargate), and they're inflated headline numbers. What is less illusionary are the immediate pain that will be inflicted by suddenly increasing the price of inputs. Small businesses can't sustain that. Consumers can't sustain that. Multinationals can maybe fly to mar-a-largo to try and get a carve out if they can drum up an announcement but they are quietly cutting spending and laying off workers. Even if it made sense to build these inputs in the US, it takes half a decade to build this kind of infrastructure - there is no explanation for how we get from X to Y or even what Y looks like. That is why it is (IMO) an unconvincing argument.
by necovek | 2025-04-05 17:10:21+00:00
There is a log message that won't be output in that case: whether getting a full, "native" FileNotFound exception is better is beside the point, since the goal of the code was obviously to print a custom error message.

And it's trivial to achieve the desired effect sanely:

try: with open(...) ... except FileNotFound: logger.error(...) raise

It'd even be fewer lines of code.
by rvnx | 2025-04-05 17:10:36+00:00
In that thread, I see for example, another challenge linked on that page:

> Write the shortest possible program (length measured in bytes) satisfying the following requirements:

> infinite memory and runtime

> no input

> output is to stdout

> execution eventually terminates

> total number of output bytes exceeds Graham's number

This sounds like a loop and that's it ?

I'm struggling to see the challenge or discovery there ?
by ein0p | 2025-04-05 17:11:44+00:00
That's the trouble with "barrier" tariffs and weighted tariff calculations. E.g. a lot of US agricultural products are subject to up to 50% tariff in the EU, so the US is simply unable to sell them there in significant quantity. What do you get as a result of a weighted tariff calculation? That's right, you get "low tariff". Japan is also interesting. It imposes insane tariffs (several hundred percent) on some US agricultural goods, but 0% on US cars. Why 0% on cars? Because they are able to basically disallow import of US cars through regulation.

There's also another aspect, beyond tariffs. In a very real sense, we're paying for the security of EU, Japan, and Canada. Why aren't they buying more of our goods or energy? How long can we foot the bill of over 2/3rds of NATO defense spending, _and_ run $900B+ trade deficits? To what end are we funding the security of developed countries, most of which are half across the world, who could fund it on their own? Why are they _still_ buying Russian oil and gas while we do all that? The whole situation is idiotic.

Trump basically has two levers when it comes to trade deficits: boost exports, and reduce imports. Of these he only directly controls the latter, but he's trying to pull both. And crash the treasury yields at the same time.
by somenameforme | 2025-04-05 17:11:48+00:00
I think he's focusing on the distinction between facts and output for humans and drawing a parallel to LLMs.

If I ask you something that you know the answer to, the words you use and that fact iself are distinct entities. You're just giving me a presentation layer for fact #74719.

But LLMs lack any comparable pool to draw from, and so their words and their answer are essentially the same thing.
by gnabgib | 2025-04-05 17:12:19+00:00
Related:

The Leader of the LeetCode Rebellion: An Interview with Roy Lee (70 points, 9 days ago, 44 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43497848

I got kicked out of Columbia for taking a stand against LeetCode interviews (20 points, 9 days ago, 18 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43497652
by necovek | 2025-04-05 17:12:37+00:00
If you check elsewhere in this thread, the author decided on Python to test out AI capabilities — they could have built it quickly in a language of their choice. I am sure I could have built it quickly in Python to a higher standard of quality.

Perhaps they wouldn't have built it because they did not set the time aside for it, like they did for this experiment (+ the blog post).
by yencabulator | 2025-04-05 17:13:05+00:00
Sure, readability is a quality of a font, and older fonts can be worse at it. But it's hard to use just readability to justify yet another designer pushing yet another font as a "A versatile, modern, humanist sans-serif with a neutral aesthetic, designed for legibility in both digital and print applications" by just that.

If it were a non-fashion criteria, surely we'd be hitting a local maximum on readability.

I don't need or want my everyday use font to "affect" me, or to "make impact" -- that's the branding world, again, and not aligned with readability.
by 0xCE0 | 2025-04-05 17:13:06+00:00
Many Freedesktop-projects have very beautiful/elegant/professional/clear C code, e.g.: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa/-/blob/main/src/amd...

Also Blender, Chrome, FFmpeg, LLVM are examples for large and long scale projects codebases, that are almost like old vs. new brain, meaning there are old low-level codelines and on top of those cumulates all kinds of abstractions.

Geohot's tinygrad is great example of booting up codebase from scratch: set conscious goal for small max lines of code (e.g. 1k), then code the next state of working implementation, then clean and refactor it to cut the fat off. It feels that code wants to shape to specific form and size depending on goal.
by Turboblack | 2025-04-05 17:13:26+00:00
as an example

https://elpis.ws

now to the point, what is needed:

1. respect the reader, write interestingly.

2. write as you think is necessary, do not bend to fashion

3. no advertising! no social components

4. only RSS subscription no other methods

5. reading should be like in old magazines, so that the reader really gets the impression that he is reading old magazines, and not an advertising catalog

thats it :=)
by jvanderbot | 2025-04-05 17:14:10+00:00
Or, the propensity to discount ingenuity and capability and to inflate the usefulness of doom based messaging, never really changes and I now find it ineffective and unmotivating.

And I will tell my kids (and you) that it's better to believe you can make positive changes than to try to bring about negative emotions in people all the time.

Don't tell me what to feel, show me what to do.
by klipt | 2025-04-05 17:14:55+00:00
> LLMs learn from examples where the logits are not probabilities, but how a given sentence continues (only one token is set to 1).

But enough data implies probabilities. Consider 2 sentences:

"For breakfast I had oats"

"For breakfast I had eggs"

Training on this data, how do you complete "For breakfast I had..."?

There is no best deterministic answer. The best answer is a 50/50 probability distribution over "oats" and "eggs"
by sightbroke | 2025-04-05 17:15:04+00:00
Does Russia have a comparably large automotive manufacturing industry & related industry in comparison to the U.S.?

I fail to see how public transit to shopping center in Russia is counter to my point that America likes to consume cars and that better public transit in the U.S. would hurt the selling (i.e consumption) of cars.

Also, again:

> Additionally there is a lack of infrastructure and culture to keep public transit clean.
by Steve44 | 2025-04-05 17:15:23+00:00
I don't have a lot to add other than I'm still using a T61p several times a week. It's got by far the best screen[1] I've ever had on a laptop and the keyboard is also lovely.

It's running Win7 and I only use it for RDP onto work. The battery is screwed, perhaps lasts 10 seconds so just enough to cover quickly moving it.

[1] 1920 x 1200 and very matt. It's just stunningly clear and easy on the eyes with great colour rendition.
by em-bee | 2025-04-05 17:15:43+00:00
i came to the opposite conclusion. people are vastly different. interestingly initially i was only traveling in western countries and i paid attention to the differences between say europeans and americans, western and eastern europeans, etc. there were plenty of differences, but those differences disappeared when i reached asia. i found a culture and attitude that is vastly different from everything western. while one year in new zealand was enough to learn about it. 15 years in china aren't.
by CSMastermind | 2025-04-05 17:16:02+00:00
The exact same as normal.

Even before AI you would have candidates of varying skill level so your coding questions should have always scaled depending on the skill of the candidate.

The purpose is not to check if you've memorized some algorithms - it's to verify that you're capable of mentally constructing the model of a problem in your head, thinking through it in a structured way, etc.

Giving a candidate access to AI doesn't eliminate the need to do that.
by bberenberg | 2025-04-05 17:16:04+00:00
I think it’s pretty good, and it’s good to hear they’re working on better deploys and UX. But the big thing to note is backups. There just isn’t a good way to use this with critical data without bolting on some kind of custom backup solution. I am always terrified the hetzner server with all my random stuff will die before I get around to implementing a solution.
by 5555624 | 2025-04-05 17:16:26+00:00
>The US should have caught this before she came in here but didn't.

How? Unless she said, on her (tourist) visa application or when she actually entered the country, that she wqas going to be working, they wouldn't know.

Years ago, my ex-wife came to he U.S. on a tourist visa specifically to work as an au pair. The agency she worked with and the family she worked for, all told her just to say she was coming here on vacation. No one at (then) INS ever knew. (When we decided to get married, she went home and we went through the seris K visa process.)
by spacephysics | 2025-04-05 17:17:20+00:00
Is there utility for a software engineer to understand ML concepts to a deep degree if they don’t perform research?

Trying to gauge where I should focus learning for my career (which i don’t plan to do research in)

Roughly I see a gap in businesses needing AI/ML implemented, but outside some debugging, would it be worthwhile to develop a model from scratch or would some off the shelf model for use case X, tuned a bit, likely fit most use cases for a standard business?
by ninkendo | 2025-04-05 17:17:40+00:00
Congress is 55-ish% Trump’s party and 45-ish% everyone else. Nobody in the Trump party would ever, ever, ever do something Trump didn’t want. The entire party platform is basically “whatever Trump wants”. Anyone who disagrees was primaried out of existence long ago.

There is no congress any more, not as an independent body. There is Trump, and there is a body of people who will, in the majority, do anything Trump wants them to do, and is not independent in any way.
by SpicyLemonZest | 2025-04-05 17:18:50+00:00
Cancer eradication seems like a clear example of where highly effective pattern matching could be a game changer. That's where cancer research starts: pattern matching to sift through the incredibly large space of potential drugs and find the ones worth starting clinical trials for. If you could get an LLM to pattern-match whether a new compound is likely to work as a BTK inhibitor (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruton%27s_tyrosine_kinase), or screen them for likely side effects before even starting synthesis, that would be a big deal.
by tt002 | 2025-04-05 17:19:12+00:00
Question: https://github.com/modelcontextprotocol/servers/tree/main/sr...

I want to change this to gitmcp.io. I directly modified it to: https://gitmcp.io/modelcontextprotocol/servers/tree/main/src...

But it doesn't work in Cursor. Even if I point to the index.ts file, it still doesn't work. Can anyone tell me how I should write it?
by danielmarkbruce | 2025-04-05 17:19:25+00:00
If you need basically rock solid evidence of X before you stop saying "this thing cannot do X", then you shouldn't be running a forward looking lab. There are only so many directions you can take, only so many resources at your disposal. Your intuition has to be really freakishly good to be running such a lab.

He's done a lot of amazing work, but his stance on LLMs seems continuously off the mark.
by 6stringmerc | 2025-04-05 17:19:33+00:00
Very cool article and a great observation about the “French Touch” as a concept. The explanation is insightful and wonderful. It actually reminded me how much study I’ve done regarding the “Swedish Touch” which is best exemplified by Abba, Max Martin, and Avicii for the sake of discussion.

My one gripe is the caption on his guitar. Almost spit-take level…seeing a Gibson Les Paul Honeyburst described as “humble” is tongue in cheek, but the sign of a person who could use a reality check. I get it’s an attempt at humor, but come on bro, that’s a brag haha.
by jrflowers | 2025-04-05 17:19:54+00:00
I like this reasoning. It is like being sat at the computer in March of 2020 and posting “These predictions of a bad thing happening can not be accurate — I should know, I lived through the 1973 oil crisis” in that “nothing bad ever happens” is more fantastical than saying something bad might happen.

We are quite literally living the aftermath of a Bad Thing that die-hard optimists were factually wrong about at the outset.
by sofixa | 2025-04-05 17:21:55+00:00
Agree to disagree on if a license change (to one that impacts nobody but potential resellers) constitutes a rug pull.

BSL and similar are the second best thing (after open source licenses), and still drastically better than proprietary/closed source. If it allows someone to pay the salaries of the people developing it, I'm fine with that. And not only because my own salary is one of them - I had the same view for MongoDB, Elastic, Sourcegraph, etc. In the era where massive behemoths can just ship your software as a service for free, companies need to protect themselves as much as they can. Do you ever wonder why there are very few profitable open source companies? Most people would know Red Hat and that's it.
by knome | 2025-04-05 17:21:58+00:00
>it is so large that the observable universe is far too small to contain an ordinary digital representation of Graham's number, assuming that each digit occupies one Planck volume, possibly the smallest measurable space. But even the number of digits in this digital representation of Graham's number would itself be a number so large that its digital representation cannot be represented in the observable universe. Nor even can the number of digits of that number—and so forth, for a number of times far exceeding the total number of Planck volumes in the observable universe

How do you write the halt condition for your loop in the minimal number of bytes?
by namaria | 2025-04-05 17:22:04+00:00
> I fully admit that I was looking at Spotify as a user and thus only as a music playing widget

This is the key insight here. Software is not the interface you see. There a whole lot more you don't know about (and probably no one knew before building it), and asking an LLM to find some JS front end patterns that abound in its training data won't come close to giving you.

That is why so many developers are skeptical of the amount of hype around LLMs generating code.
by __hugues | 2025-04-05 17:22:08+00:00
>> There is a path by which these policies can be implemented without material adverse consequences, but it is narrow, and will require currency offset for tariffs and either gradualism or coordination with allies or the Federal Reserve on the dollar. Potential for unwelcome economic and market volatility is substantial, but there are steps the Administration can take to minimize it.

"gradualism", "coordination with allies", are things that this administration is famously good at, so it's probably all going to work out /s
by 6stringmerc | 2025-04-05 17:24:45+00:00
Uh, I’m kind of lost here - in what way is this discussion about music notation? I’m genuine about this because I’m mildly obsessed with the intersection of AI and the arts. Is the discussion how Claude is repurposing one form of language into another use case?

I mean my initial response to the headline was to knee jerk answer “Because it doesn’t understand music because it’s not a human being with emotions” and that actually kind of works if Claude basically is looking at language and using a pipe wrench to hammer nails into wood.