MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by gradschool | 2025-04-14 18:05:52+00:00
I supervised a few students doing senior research projects back when I used to be a faculty member. I think a senior project is a different situation than a master's or Ph.D. thesis because it's more about demonstrating your employability than making original contributions to knowledge, and your time is very limited. To that end, it's important that you finish up with something to show for yourself. Unless you plan to go into academia, working code counts for more with employers than a research paper in itself. A null result even when properly investigated and analyzed is less impressive than a success, so a good way to hedge your bets is to find two or three competing technologies addressing the same need, implement a small similar project using each of them, and compare their relative strengths and weaknesses. That way you improve your chances of a successful outcome even if not all of them work out, while also demonstrating a broader variety of skills to potential employers than you would if you focused on just one thing. Read enough of the literature to avoid embarrassing yourself but not to become a world class expert because the latter would waste your whole year. Be careful of faculty members drawing you down a rabbit hole. They like thinking about cutting edge research problems, some of which might be of industrial interest, but even so, no company is going to put somebody fresh out of school in charge of that regardless of how smart that person seems to be.
by sgc | 2025-04-14 18:06:05+00:00
I have a couple companies that force me to send them data via email. They have an email template that you have to conform to, and they can parse it. Mainly just very rudimentary line breaks and 'LineItem: content' format. But json in the body should be fine as well. Given the way email programs strip or modify html at times, I would be leery of xml.
by grayhatter | 2025-04-14 18:06:07+00:00
Speed isn't the only performance metric that matters. I probably should have said explicitly that I'm referring to uses where it makes sense to use a linked list. But unfortunately I didn't specify because that wasn't the point I really wanted to make.

There's a lot of things to learn that appear to to not makes sense... until suddenly they do.

> There are valid uses of linked lists, that's why they exist, but most people don't have those use cases.

Isn't that pretty much what I said?

I'm pretty sure we agree that they're useful, but their usefulness isn't as universal nor as common as the pattern is.
by OneDeuxTriSeiGo | 2025-04-14 18:06:37+00:00
Just because the program exists doesn't mean native americans are getting good access to healthcare.

Likewise you'd expect that native americans would have access to drinking water given that the government provides some amount of guarantees for that as well but substantial portions of the reservations in the southwest have been systematically denied water rights and as such have limited access to drinking water.
by dimal | 2025-04-14 18:06:39+00:00
I agree with the 100% rule. The problem with Typescript is how many teams allow “any”. They’ll say, “We’re using TypeScript! The autocomplete is great!” And on the surface, it feels safe. You get some compiler errors when you make a breaking change. But the any’s run through the codebase like holes in Swiss cheese, and you never know when you’ll hit one, until you’ve caused a bug in production. And then they try to deal with it by writing more tests. Having 100% type coverage is far more important.
by cafard | 2025-04-14 18:06:49+00:00
One Friday at a non-tech job there were no paychecks at lunchtime. They did come through later in the day, but needless to say this was not a confidence-builder.

A friend got stiffed at a tech job, a government contractor, I think. I'm not sure whether it was for a month, or for a bit more. Fortunately for him, his expenses were low and his partner was working.
by hackingonempty | 2025-04-14 18:07:16+00:00
If you haven't, check out Mat Ryder's videos on YouTube. He's newly retired guy in decent shape from jogging who buys a bike and does the GDMBR while making a bunch of videos. He shows everything and at the end talks about how much he spent and how much less he could have spent if he tried harder to be frugal. You can see how an average guy without any bikepacking experience do it. You can do it too!

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL3-zVwEVdJ-UbC1DT4tSG...
by mindslight | 2025-04-14 18:07:24+00:00
Your whole argument rests on excluding the middle, which could have been tepid support instead of appearing on stage to throw Nazi salutes, giving out money to voters signing fake Orwellian pledges about "supporting" the Constitution, and threatening to primary non-maggot congressional candidates. You've essentially set up a Roko's Basilisk, based around one small hateful man rather than superintelligence.
Ask HN: Slopsquat CVE?
by ChuckMcM | 2025-04-14 18:07:45+00:00
This came up on conversation over the weekend and I thought I would reach out here and on social media. There is a theoretical way to weaponize slopsquatting, which is to create many (number to be determined) repositories on Github that use a loadable package that promises one thing but has a back door in it to enable an adversary to take control. By filling a pipeline of repositories, giving them "popularity" with a spambot army, one could "inject" into the CoPilot model that the package with the back door was a valid solution to some common coding "want." If the compromised package "worked" to the extent that it did what it said it does until someone asks it to do something different, it could conceivably migrate into non adversary controlled repositories and from there into the greater network.

So crazy talk or CVE? Hard to tell the difference these days.
by spankalee | 2025-04-14 18:08:13+00:00
This would be even nicer if TypeScript added type inference for tagged template literals, like in this issue [1]. Then you could write:

const schema = proto` syntax = "proto3"; message Person { ... } `; type Person = typeof schema['Person'];

And you could get built-in schema validation with a sophisticated enough type definition for `proto`, nice syntax highlighting in many tools with a nested grammar.

We would love to see this feature in TypeScript to be able to have type-safe template in lit-html without an external tool.

The issue hasn't seen much activity lately, but it would be good to highlight this library as another use case.

[1]: https://github.com/microsoft/TypeScript/issues/33304
by elmerfud | 2025-04-14 18:08:22+00:00
People have tried to build BitTorrent clients to do this. As far as I know they never took off. The primary problem is you oftentimes don't get people who want to share back or who have firewalls or other connections that don't allow them to share back. So you end up with a few people who end up seeding everything out. The second problem is in order to watch a streaming protocol things need to arrive in order. It is totally possible to do with BitTorrent and request the blocks in the order that you want but you may not always be able to get them in the order you want.

In general people aren't tolerant of lag and spinning circles and other such things when they're trying to watch streaming content. If you're fine with just watching it a little bit later might as well queue it up and left the whole thing down load so it's ready when you're ready.
by bayarearefugee | 2025-04-14 18:08:42+00:00
> What is the support for the idea that AI is a winner takes all market?

A lot of people seem to have the idea (or at least SELL the idea, I'm not sure if they actually believe it) that this all leads to superhuman intelligence AGI and whoever hits that first is the "winner takes all" winner.

But yeah firstly as someone who uses LLMs often I don't believe there is reason to think that LLMs lead to AGI (and I think people selling the idea that this is a foregone outcome are hucksters).

And secondly, even if I ended up being wrong about that, there's no indication that any of the known groups working on LLMs is very far ahead of anyone else on LLM technology so even if you believed that LLMs are going to lead to AGI I don't see why that wouldn't just mean that like 3-5 super human intelligences were created around the same time which is still not a winner takes all situation unless those AIs go full Skynet and only one ends up standing at the end. (This last part is a joke, hopefully).
by HaZeust | 2025-04-14 18:09:19+00:00
I want to explain something here that is of utmost importance to these developments.

To be a citizen, you have 8th amendment protections against "cruel and unusual" punishment. As it is, it can be fiercely debated for involuntary servitude in foreign nations as "unusual" as it is, but prisons like the El Salvador one are innately cruel and unusual, watch any media or even El Salvador's brags about its techniques and methodologies last year.

To be sent there - or to any other country to do a bid - is to be subjected to cruel and unusual punishment, to be subjected to such as an American citizen is unconstitutional.

We, as citizens, really need to take a step back and decide if we're going to do something about this tyranny - and if we'll truly be our brother's keepers. If a post-Heller America in 2008 couldn't even agree on trusting the government to fairly regulate a constitutional right like guns, why trust them to define “heinous” or “violent” and not yank your 8th Amendment protections, as well? Once they can call you an “exception,” they can ship you off anywhere, even to some third-world prison, and say “tough luck.” That’s the same overreach we’re supposed to be wary of in the first place.
by jsnell | 2025-04-14 18:09:37+00:00
https://aider.chat/docs/leaderboards/ shows 73% rather than 69% for Gemini 2.5 Pro?

Looks like they also added the cost of the benchmark run to the leaderboard, which is quite cool. Cost per output token is no longer representative of the actual cost when the number of tokens can vary by an order of magnitude for the same problem just based on how many thinking tokens the model is told to use.
by Hizonner | 2025-04-14 18:09:50+00:00
The intent of the whole underlying system is that the intent of all the parties be described by code of the smart contracts. Which are intended to be composable, intended to be used in unanticipated ways, and intended to operate independent of any human oversight. The system is also intended to avoid all ambiguity by enforcing the contracts exactly as described by the code... and to provide certainty of transactions and prevent them from being undone after the fact.

Everybody involved knows all of that, and claims it as a positive feature of the system. At least until they find out that it's actually hard to write bug-free code.

There may indeed not be a legal "meeting of minds" (although there very well also may)... but from an ethical point of view, everybody involved knowingly signed up for exactly that kind of risk. And honestly it would be good public policy if the law held them to it. Otherwise you get people trying to opt out of the regular legal system up until it's inconvenient.

There'd be more of a case if he'd exploited the underlying EVM implementation. But he didn't. He just relied on the "letter" of a contract, in an environment that everybody had sought out because of unambiguous to-the-letter enforcement.
by srean | 2025-04-14 18:10:33+00:00
I elaborated here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43684124

> Even with emotions different languages independently came up with words for them and we can still translate between those languages.

Of course. That's a no-brainer that different human languages have come up with names for experiences they share.

The hard part is learning the correspondence between say two nouns in different languages that mean the same thing.

Its perfectly possible for an unsupervised ML to use the French word 'rouge' in a French sentence but the notion that 'rouge' corresponds to 'red' in English has to come from some shared grounded experience/emotion.

The French word x word relationship graph has to get connected to the English word x word relationship graph.

BTW for people born deaf and blind it's an enormous challenge just to get to the point where the person understand that things have names. For example for Hellen Keller, it was a very non-trivial event when it finally clicked that the wet sensation she was feeling had a correspondence with what her teacher was writing on her arm. They were lucky that wet was an experience that was common between her and her teacher, lucky that Hellen Keller could experience wetness. Someone or something has to play the same role for dolphins and us. Just a corpus will not suffice.
by Imnimo | 2025-04-14 18:11:09+00:00
This sounds very cool at a conceptual level, but the article left me in the dark about what they're actually doing with DolphinGemma. The closest to an answer is:

>By identifying recurring sound patterns, clusters and reliable sequences, the model can help researchers uncover hidden structures and potential meanings within the dolphins' natural communication — a task previously requiring immense human effort.

But this doesn't really tell me anything. What does it mean to "help researchers uncover" this stuff? What is the model actually doing?
by lukaslalinsky | 2025-04-14 18:11:36+00:00
I completely agree, but I still question the purpose of FP languages. Writing the S3 upload code is quite hard, if you really want to handle all possible error scenarios. Even if you use whatever library for that, you still need to know about which errors can it trigger and which need to be handle, and how to handle them. The mental work can be equal to the core function for generating the file. In any language, I'd separate these two pieces of code, but I'm not sure if I'd want to handle S3 upload logic with all the error handling in a FP language. That said, I've not used Clojure yet and that seems like a very pragmatic language, which might be actually usable even for these parts of the code.
by stego-tech | 2025-04-14 18:11:49+00:00
Because - speaking from a lot of experience, both personally and professionally - human beings hate bad news. They reject the wet blankets, the naysayers, the doomers, the party poopers...you get the idea. I mean, the fact we have so many metaphors for the act of being the person giving a group bad news, should tell you how poorly humans look on it. Humans want to believe the sun will rise tomorrow, the birds will sing, the lines will go up, and everything will be fine (or better) than it was yesterday.

This attitude is especially prominent in tech. There's a very real desire to immediately replace whatever was old with whatever is new, regardless of utility or viability. We're participants in (or supporters of) a system of startup-expansion-acquisition-repeat that only focuses on building something new that has a perceived valuation, not something that's actually beneficial. There's no attitude to look back or be objective, because tomorrow will just be better anyway. So when your business leaders, capital investors, regulators, engineers, and developers are all "high on their own supply" of new > old and complex > simple, that attitude seeps out into other aspects of society as a whole.

Nobody likes naysayers who are right. It's just our curse, I guess.
by eveningsteps | 2025-04-14 18:12:07+00:00
Surprisingly enough, this partially exposes the link between depression and some of the autoimmunal diseases. One example is how patients with psoriasis have significantly elevated levels of proteins from the IL-17 family (namely, IL-17A, IL-17C, and IL-17F) - up to 4 to 8 times above nominal values.

At the same time, bimekizumab, one of the bleeding-edge psoriasis and psoriatic arthritis treatments, suppresses production of IL-17A and IL-17F (methotrexate does that, too, albeit to a much smaller degree). As a result, people receiving IL-17 suppressors become happier over the course of years, and not only due to months-long remission - I had a chance to see this in one of the experimental treatment programs.
by jchw | 2025-04-14 18:13:25+00:00
This really would've come in handy when I was debugging my own SQLite parser a couple weeks ago.

One thing that initially confused me was how exactly the pages worked w.r.t. the first page on disk... I misunderstood the SQLite documentation in different ways, but it's really rather simple: the very first page is just treated as containing the file header in it, and it pushes down the rest of the data, making the page shorter than the other pages. You can see that illustrated clearly if you click into the first page of a database using this tool: the database header comes first, then the page header.

This tool will undoubtedly come in handy for anyone who has a reason to be dealing with SQLite data structures directly for whatever reason, especially since the SQLite documentation is a bit terse at times.
by memet_rush | 2025-04-14 18:13:46+00:00
what about having something reasonable for lag, like 30-60 seconds would that make a big difference or you think it would just eventually degrade too? Also do you think there's any way you can prioritize seeders in such a protocol? like some kind of algorithm that the more you share the more you're prioritized in getting the most up to date packets.

The main reason I would think it would be useful is 1. since streaming sites seem to lose a lot of money and 2. sports streams are really bad, even paid ones. I have dazn and two other sports streaming services and they still lag and are only 720p
by Nifty3929 | 2025-04-14 18:14:21+00:00
I'm as or more cynical than the next guy - but it seems to me that being able to communicate with animals has high utility for humans. Partly from an emotional or companionship perspective as we've been doing with dogs for a long time, but maybe even on purely utilitarian grounds.

If we want to know something about what's going on in the ocean, or high on a mountain or in the sky or whatever - what if we can just ask some animals about it? What about for things that animals can naturally perceive that humans have trouble with - certain wavelengths of light or magnetic fields for example? How about being able to recruit animals to do specific tasks that they are better suited for? Seems like a win for us, and maybe a win for them as well.

Not sure what else, but history suggests that the more people have been able to communicate with each other, the better the outcomes. I assume this holds true more broadly as well.
by dijksterhuis | 2025-04-14 18:14:32+00:00
for context (because i had no clue what BitChute was)

> BitChute is an alt-tech video hosting service launched by Ray Vahey in January 2017. It describes itself as offering freedom of speech, while the service is known for hosting far-right individuals, conspiracy theorists, and hate speech.

> Hope not Hate also documented videos hosted on BitChute supporting or produced by terrorist groups, including ISIS and the neo-Nazi groups National Action and Atomwaffen Division.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/BitChute
by great_wubwub | 2025-04-14 18:14:36+00:00
IPAM is insane. BYOIP requires IPAM. This makes things even more insane - if you want to manage any BYOIP addresses you need to enable IPAM for all IP addresses (not just BYOIP) in an account.

We tried this at a previous job to manage a pair of /24s and it ended up requiring us to manage _hundreds of thousands_ of rfc1918 IP addresses in IPAM, which cost us something like tens of thousands of dollars per month.

For a pair of /24s.
by Capricorn2481 | 2025-04-14 18:14:46+00:00
It's useful alright, but not to us.

I wish people would understand ChatGPT is a toy for consumers, and the real prize of AI is handling the mountains of data tech has been leeching for years.

Sam puts out vague worries of AGI Armageddon so CNBC anchors, who can't even turn their computer on, can argue about that all day because it's juicy. These are the same people that thought the Metaverse was a huge deal, and not just unfinished plans for VR Second Life.

Meanwhile, any company with good AI tech and enough data can classify, minimize, eradicate, and automate as much of our lives as possible. There's going to be no regulation on it, because we have never been about to keep up with text regulation.

And we are told we signed up for it when we were 15, trying to log into an app store on the new device all of our friends had.
by pcwelder | 2025-04-14 18:14:48+00:00
Did some quick tests. I believe its the same model as Quasar. It struggles with agentic loop [1]. You'd have to force it to do tool calls.

Tool use ability feels ability better than gemini-2.5-pro-exp [2] which struggles with JSON schema understanding sometimes.

Llama 4 has suprising agentic capabilities, better than both of them [3] but isn't as intelligent as the others.

[1] https://github.com/rusiaaman/chat.md/blob/main/samples/4.1/t...

[2] https://github.com/rusiaaman/chat.md/blob/main/samples/gemin...

[3] https://github.com/rusiaaman/chat.md/blob/main/samples/llama...
by cmrdporcupine | 2025-04-14 18:15:18+00:00
Yes as a person who had such a retention bonus before (from Google even) to me this seems rather cut and dry. Usually such bonuses are a mix of cash and RSUs, and set over a 3-4 year period. And are often also based on a perception of what the employees existing options were in the startup that they came from.

IMHO they should absolutely be paid out the whole amount of the remaining retention bonus at layoff. On the principle of things alone. Can't speak to the legality of it.
by lukev | 2025-04-14 18:15:19+00:00
Tangential, but this brings up a really interesting question for me.

LLMs are multi-lingual without really trying assuming the languages in question are sufficiently well-represented in their training corpus.

I presume their ability to translate comes from the fact that there are lots of human-translated passages in their corpus; the same work in multiple languages, which lets them figure out the necessary mappings between semantic points (words.)

But I wonder about the translation capability of a model trained on multiple languages but with completely disjoint documents (no documents that were translations of another, no dictionaries, etc).

Could the emerging latent "concept space" of two completely different human languages be similar enough that the model could translate well, even without ever seeing examples of how a multilingual human would do a translation?

I don't have a strong intuition here but it seems plausible. And if so, that's remarkable because that's basically a science-fiction babelfish or universal translator.
by zhivota | 2025-04-14 18:15:19+00:00
This guy is verging on a crank at this point, every article I've read from him is just spewing FUD about OpenAI, and AI in general.

Just click his name at the top of the article and read the titles. With someone like this, even with tons of cited numbers you have to be very, very careful. The conclusions are motivated, and it would take enormous amounts of time to vet what he's saying, because even though the numbers may be correct, it's what he didn't report that may actually matter.
by omoikane | 2025-04-14 18:15:29+00:00
The finances are important but possibly not the first thing on their mind. The first thing on their mind is likely how their entire world has just changed around them, beyond their control.

People who left voluntarily can prepare for the lifestyle change, and maybe they can objectively look at this and say it's not all bad. For people who are laid off, it hits really hard in a gut wrenching way. The sense of despair about everything else comes first, the money part of it might not come until all the severance is exhausted.