MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by bengarney | 2025-04-06 00:40:52+00:00
As someone on the hiring side, I strongly agree with GP.

I can think of a specific example where someone with experience and strong qualifications pushed for a higher salary - which I agreed to - then struggled with the role and ended up not sticking around. In another instance, someone had lower qualifications and experience, but also negotiated hardest out of their hiring cohort - same outcome, plus they weren't a great fit personality wise.

Meanwhile, I can think of several other people who cross-trained from their initial non-technical careers at the local community college, came in with low experience, didn't negotiate aggressively (although did stand up for themselves)... They've done great work (and grown substantially and been good to work with) over the long term, and seem to enjoy working for me enough that a few who left for other jobs were interested in being hired again later on.

Negotiating employment terms is the first task you complete at a new job. It is a good predictor. If it leaves a bad taste in the mouth for either side, it's not a good sign of things to come...
by t-writescode | 2025-04-06 00:41:04+00:00
You can test:

* the tools that operate the model. * to make sure the fitness function calculates fitness correctly, * simulation runs right. * the storing and recovering of the model operate correctly - that is, data is saved and then recovered correctly and consistently. * that the engine that runs the training operates correctly * that shutdown and startup work * the a crash can be recovered from usefully

And I’m sure more
by simonw | 2025-04-06 00:41:39+00:00
This is why I'm not at all a fan of pure test-driven development where you try to write the tests before the implementation. I think that's often a big time sink and can put people off writing tests entirely.

Instead, I like tests-in-the-same-commit development. I write the implementation, tweak it until it works, then add a test that proves it does what it's supposed to before I commit the code. I wrote about that here: https://simonwillison.net/2022/Oct/29/the-perfect-commit/

I often use snapshot testing for this, which is very fast to implement. I have a short note about one way to do that here: https://til.simonwillison.net/pytest/syrupy - and a longer piece here: https://simonwillison.net/2020/Feb/11/cheating-at-unit-tests...
by RadioactiveMan | 2025-04-06 00:42:07+00:00
I really value tests on projects I work on alone because the work is usually intermittent. I don't have the time or energy to deal with regressions, and I may not remember everything about the system by the next time I work on it.

I also find manually testing to be tedious, so I'd rather spend that time writing code that does it for me.
by mparkms | 2025-04-06 00:44:55+00:00
This is pretty similar to the Japanese "flick" keyboard that's fairly commonly used on smartphones. Instead of 3 possible directions per button there's 5 (up, left, right, down, and neutral): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z5UEsHEZWII

It's pretty intuitive because Japanese kana is a syllabary that's organized by their starting consonant and one of five possible vowels in the Gojuon system: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goj%C5%ABon

I never got used to it but people who use it swear by it. Google even made a mechanical version for an April Fools a few years back: https://youtu.be/5LI1PysAlkU
by jltsiren | 2025-04-06 00:45:48+00:00
Europe is too decentralized. Each country has its own languages, cultures, laws, and politics. If you leave things to the market, the chances are you get a large number of regional solutions tailored to the local conditions. None of which is clearly superior to the others, and all of which are too small to benefit from economies of scale.

And then bigger companies from countries with larger domestic markets come and buy the most successful ones.
by EasyMark | 2025-04-06 00:46:26+00:00
But if you don't incorporate some moral guidelines, I think if an AI is left to strictly decide what is best to happen to humans it will logically conclude that there needs to be a lot less of us or none of us left, without some bias tossed in there for humanistic concerns. The universe doesn't "care" if humans exist or not, but our impact on the planet is a huge negative if one creature's existence is as important as any other's
by simonw | 2025-04-06 00:49:13+00:00
I'm hoping that Llama 4 goes the same way as Llama 3.

The first Llama 3 models released were 8B and 70B in April 2024.

Llama 3.1 came later in July at 8B, 70B, and 405B.

Llama 3.2 in September got really interesting: 1B, 3B, 11B and 90B.

Then Llama 3.3 in December was 70B but claimed performance similar to the earlier Llama 3.1 405B!

Llama 4 is 109B and 400B, both of which were trained with the help of the 2T(?) "Behemoth".

I'm hoping we'll see further releases in the Llama 4 series that are smaller. I'm particularly excited to see if they produce a ~24B model, since that appears to be the sweet spot for running models on my 64GB laptop while still being able to have other applications running at the same time. Mistral Small 3.1 is a 24B model and is absolutely superb.

(Fleshed this comment out a bit on my blog: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Apr/5/llama-4-notes/#my-hopes...)
Show HN: Reactive Proxy State – Vue-style reactivity without Vue
by Yiin | 2025-04-06 00:50:44+00:00
I really like how Vue 3 handles reactive state. It's simple and works well.

But it's tied to the frontend, so I wrote something similar that works in plain JavaScript, without Vue or any UI layer.

I called it Reactive Proxy State ...because it is. It uses proxies and tracks deep changes. Works with arrays, Maps, Sets, Dates. Emits changes so state can be rebuilt.

Might be useful if you want reactive state outside of the frontend.

GitHub: https://github.com/Yiin/reactive-proxy-state
by shanemhansen | 2025-04-06 00:50:52+00:00
For me personally tests have a positive ROI within hours.

Even if I was doing a one day hackathon I'd probably have some sort of test feedback loop.

I've dealt with P1 bugs that cost the company 100k/minute and still took the time to write a test for the fix because you really don't have time to get the fix wrong and not find out until it is deployed.
by grishka | 2025-04-06 00:51:36+00:00
I honestly never understood why on earth QWERTY became the standard for touchscreen text input. It's a good keyboard layout but only when the keys are physical and large enough that you can type with two hands without looking at the thing. But it's absolutely godawful when you have to use it with one finger or two thumbs and no feel. All those dictionary-based crutches that were piled on top of it over time don't help, they only exacerbate the problem, especially considering how laughably poorly they work with languages whose grammar is more complex than English. I've been using touchscreen phones since 2011 yet I somehow still make typos all the time. This suggests that the problem isn't me.

An ideal touchscreen text input method should embrace the strengths of the medium. Touchscreens allow swipes and gestures, so use that to your advantage! Like in the OP, yes. I myself experimented with a similar concept, except it was a 3x4 grid of square buttons that each can input one of 5 characters, one for tap and the other four for each of the directions, inspired by Japanese keyboards. I tried to use it for a day, it worked, but it felt somewhat unnatural. Maybe I haven't given myself enough time to get used to it, or maybe it was a terrible idea to begin with, or maybe the character layout wasn't optimal (I arranged them alphabetically).

Another idea I have is to take the 8pen[1] concept but add more lines, make it 6 or 8, so it's practical for Russian which has 33 letters. Haven't tested this one yet.

I feel like touchscreen text input is a very under-researched area for a world where nearly everyone owns a smartphone.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q3OuCR0EpGo
by soulofmischief | 2025-04-06 00:51:39+00:00
I have been careful to use language like "theoretically" throughout my posts, and to focus on leaving doors open until we know for sure they are closed. You are claiming they're already closed, without evidence. This is a big difference in how we are engaging with this subject. I'm sure we would find we agree on a number of things but I don't think we're going to move the needle on this discussion much more. I'm fine with just amicably ending it here if you'd like.
by mattl | 2025-04-06 00:53:00+00:00
You can see here what I'm talking about:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Co-op_Food

Different groups of co-operatives sharing "The Co-Op" brand with different but similar branding.

Co-op Food in Devon vs other parts of the UK will be run by a different group.

I went down a Wikipedia hole on this the other day.
by Ray20 | 2025-04-06 00:53:23+00:00
>banning advertising creates a situation where incumbents (known names) have a significant advantage over new entrants to a market.

The article almost explicitly states that this is precisely the goal. We all understand who those populists in 2016 are, who "bypass traditional media gatekeepers and deliver tailored messages to susceptible audiences".

So I think we are not talking about authoritarianism here, but full-fledged totalitarianism. Such a policy is a powerful lever of control, allowing government to obtain even more levers. And in the end people still vote "wrongly" (spoiler: they are voting "wrongly" not because of some Russian advertisement on facebook), but the government at that point will not care anymore how people vote because that will not affect anything.
by Joshringuk | 2025-04-06 00:56:20+00:00
Yes the temp allocator will remove things at the end of it's scope. It makes it very clear when memory will be affected and gives predictable code execution.

There are other contexts for managing mutex locks so they auto close and you could dream up one for database connections and transactions too.

The nice things about a context is you can always see it's there, destructors by design are a bit hidden which can make code harder to reason about.
by Fire-Dragon-DoL | 2025-04-06 00:56:23+00:00
We have been using humans for automations for a long time, factories have been a thing for quite a while now.

They have an intersection, the fact is that you might need only the benefits in the intersection, not all the benefits. Given that, it could make sense.

I have way more fun writing tests, but automating certain things have a steep maintenence cost, a checklist for humans is a better idea in that case
by cratermoon | 2025-04-06 00:57:09+00:00
He's another one, you might call it the Music of Theseus.

A band records and releases a song on its first album. Several years or decades later, after numerous personnel changes, none of the musicians that were in the band at the time the song was released are still with the group. The band plays the song in concert. Is that original or a cover?
by ryandrake | 2025-04-06 00:57:43+00:00
I've had a company actually halt the recruiting process because I wouldn't share my current salary. They asked (as they all do), and I did a standard polite "I'd rather not share my current compensation, please make an offer you feel is a good starting point." They then said, well we'd rather not make an offer without knowing this baseline. And that was that. Sure, I guess I could have just made up a fake (high) number, but I wasn't too thrilled about what I saw about the company during the interviews, so it didn't bother me at all. If a company is being shitty during the interview process, they're probably going to be shitty to work for.
by lightedman | 2025-04-06 00:58:45+00:00
Too many things will prevent Windows from going to sleep in a proper manner. Update available? It won't sleep half the time until you restart the system to allow the update to install. OBS's virtual camera being active? No sleep.

I had kept thinking my cat had gotten onto my desk and stepped on the keyboard or moved the mouse around - security camera showed that to not be the case.
by Acrobatic_Road | 2025-04-06 00:58:48+00:00
Where do we draw the line at what counts as an advertisement? I just bought a cassette tape that I learned about from a Facebook post. What do we call that post if not an advertisement? And if that was illegal, how exactly would I have found out the tape? Word of mouth? I don't think there is anyone in a 100 mile radius who listens to the same kind of music as me.
by precommunicator | 2025-04-06 00:58:53+00:00
I guess learning about every single law in every single situation would be this one thing that's "sure they're not easy and they take time" but:

Quoting from the swedish driver education book[1].

> It is not desirable to have 100% adherence to the rules. According to the criteria for a category B licence, you must display “good judgement when interacting with other road users”. A reasonable interpretation of this statement is that you may depart from the rules in some cases.

I feel the same can be said about many other situations.

- [1] https://korkortonline.se/en/theory/learning-maturity/
by soulofmischief | 2025-04-06 00:59:47+00:00
I apologize for assuming!

I do believe it's clear that if you support the American-Israeli war machine, you support colonialism and Zionism intrinsically. So I don't know if most Americans are Zionist or not, but I do personally know a frightening amount of Zionists.

A confused bunch, as I am originally from the Deep South and most of these Zionists I speak of were shitting on Jews and making light of the Holocaust just a few years ago. It seems paradoxical until you realize the common thread is the support of fascism.

> I note you mentioned abolition, colonialism, and genocide so I think it's not a stretch to say you decide based on anti-Fascism which I'll leave open to definition.

Absolutely. Specifically, I start from the Golden Rule, or a modified version of it, I also back the spirit of the Constitution, which in my mind should have always extended to protect not just white, land-owning Americans, but the entire world, rich and poor, given that the rights it recognizes are considered inalienable for all humans.

I also find solidarity within some of the views of most of our founding fathers, especially regarding basic things such as taxation without representation, even if I don't agree with their views on slavery or certain economic positions.
by cassianoleal | 2025-04-06 01:02:04+00:00
> Going further: do you want a US internet, a French internet, Japanese internet, etc?

The Internet was conceived as a network of independent nodes, all interconnected. What I said looks a lot more like what the Internet was intended to be than YouTube does.

> I would prefer to avoid fragmentation of the ecosystem, since it complicates discovery of content, reduces potential reach, limits cross-pollination of ideas, etc.

Aggregators, RSS feeds or similar, word of mouth, all those things help with relevant discovery. The YouTube recommendations algorithm seems to do less so.

> Suppose that I really want to consume content from certain UK creators, but the UK YouTube-equivalent is region-locked, as much of BBC is today. That's a net loss compared to the status quo.

Perhaps. You might also ask yourself why they are region-locked. I believe it will come down to advertisement, at least to a non-negligible amount.

In any case, I'm not saying multi-language or multi-country websites and services would be prohibited from existing, only that the likes of YouTube would probably not be as profitable and may cease to exist.

> And there are plenty of people who speak languages other than their native one. English literacy / fluency is a de facto standard in tech, whether we like it or not.

It is. And within a certain circle it's less of a problem, though sometimes it can also become one.

> It's not a matter of suppressing other cultures, but rather providing a common language for discourse.

I assume you're a native English speaker, most likely from the USA. What you call "a common language for discourse" is unfortunately exactly the suppression of other cultures. There's no way to have that common language without the language, the ideas and the very ways of thinking approaching more the one of the language that's becoming common.

The very premise of TFA shows that. Propaganda and advertisement are one and the same in some languages. And that has profound implications in how the speakers of those languages interpret the world in what pertains to these concepts. By "providing a common language" where there is an intrinsic difference between the words, that world view, the very premises of those other cultures are changed and moulded to be more similar to those of the dominant language.

The very existence of said common language makes the world less interesting, it slowly erases and erodes individualities of cultures and ultimately we as a species are poorer for it.
by GuB-42 | 2025-04-06 01:02:47+00:00
> Voyagers will keep flying across Milky Way, maybe they will last longer the the Earth itself

Will they? Good thing I am tired and going to sleep right now, you almost nerd-sniped me. What will happen on the scale of millions to billions of years? Will it collide with something? Will it be slowly eroded by particles? Will it lose material by outgasing?
by EasyMark | 2025-04-06 01:02:53+00:00
This regime is one Man, tRump, who surrounded himself by yes men. He doesn't have any sort of negative feedback cycle now to keep a cap on how much damage he can do to the economy. Either they owe him something, they are part of the MAGA cult, or they stand to make money by bending the knee (like Bezos and Zuck and Husk).
by unhingedcrouton | 2025-04-06 01:04:40+00:00
Hell yes. Advertising is legitimate interest but it has become completely degenerate with social networks and the attention economy.

It is the root cause of many modern issues and _something_ definitely needs to be done about it. It even erodes capitalism itself by making consumers the product, which has been known for a while but the generalization seems non-obvious - that this happens every time when to the producer-consumer relationship is introduced a third party that changes the financials incentives of producers.

I probably wouldn't go as far as making advertising completely illegal but I'd like to see it regulated and probably limited to spaces specifically made to be "advertising hubs" both online and in the physical world.
by dangus | 2025-04-06 01:05:58+00:00
I'm all for resources for people looking for alternatives, but I think there are some flaws with the way this is presented.

The whole first section is a bunch of scary stuff that in the end is not really a great way to select products, at least in my personal opinion. If you are worried about nation-state spying you aren't going to use any cloud services, and you shouldn't take a company's location as any sort of reasonable way to protect yourself if you are truly on that level of tin foil hat.

> If the company has servers, offices, or employees in the US, it can be legally forced to hand over your data to the US government.

Yeah, including many of the alternatives that are on this list.*

I also think a lot of the alternatives have their own flaws.

- Alternatives that are listed with "Strong privacy laws, GDPR applies." Well, the GDPR applies to any user in the EU using a product made by a US-based tech company. So choosing a company solely for GDPR coverage isn't really a particularly good reason to choose it.

- Alternatives like Opera and Deepseek have offices in China which for many people concerned about state surveillance isn't exactly an upgrade.

- Some alternatives on the list have US servers and US ownership, like Tidal (owned by Block (Square), a US company).
by globnomulous | 2025-04-06 01:08:21+00:00
This is an excellent recommendation! I read Blindsight earlier this year. Easily one of my favorite sci-fi novels. It and Canticle for Leibowitz are in a class by themselves when it comes to sci-fi that deals with "philosophical" issues.

I'll check out The Freeze-Frame sequence next, thanks! First I just need to finish Consider Phlebas, which I'm finding pretty weak.

Transference is also on the to-do list. Watts says it is almost diametrically the opposite, intellectually, of Blindsight, but he also praises it.
by highfrequency | 2025-04-06 01:08:27+00:00
Crazy that there are now five and a half companies that all have roughly state of the art LLMs.

> We developed a new training technique which we refer to as MetaP that allows us to reliably set critical model hyper-parameters such as per-layer learning rates and initialization scales. We found that chosen hyper-parameters transfer well across different values of batch size, model width, depth, and training tokens.

This sounds interesting. Anyone have a link to the paper or other documentation on MetaP?
by shalmanese | 2025-04-06 01:08:58+00:00
A priori, this is a very strange assertion.

Assume that X% of companies are interested in you and you pursue Y leads to result in X% * Y offers. A large number of people will receive 0 offers and they'll be long term on the job market until they make a change to either X (job hunting strategy) or Y (pool of roles considered).

A large number of people will receive >1 offers because they're competitive in the marketplace. Only some tiny number of people will receive exactly one offer unless Y is very small.

That many people only receive one offer is more of a sign that they're not strategic in their job hunting approach (which is upstream of them not being strategic in their negotiations) and this is a fixable problem.
by spoonfeeder006 | 2025-04-06 01:08:58+00:00
Well, arguably so do LLMs. You put in the same input prompt, out comes the same code. But yeah, it is kinda different, but I'm just saying that as LLMs become better at understanding how to solve sub-problems, they may become reliable enough that coding via LLMs becomes the new norm, and learning how to effectively prompt will become a new skill for coders
by phire | 2025-04-06 01:09:20+00:00
It's not even per token. The routing happens once per layer, with the same token bouncing between layers.

It's more of a performance optimization than anything else, improving memory liquidity. Except it's not an optimization for running the model locally (where you only run a single query at a time, and it would be nice to keep the weights on the disk until they are relevant).

It's a performance optimization for large deployments with thousands of GPUs answering tens of thousands of queries per second. They put thousands of queries into a single batch and run them in parallel. After each layer, the queries are re-routed to the GPU holding the correct subset of weights. Individual queries will bounce across dozens of GPUs per token, distributing load.

Even though the name "expert" implies they should experts in a given topic, it's really not true. During training, they optimize for making the load distribute evenly, nothing else.
by roenxi | 2025-04-06 01:09:23+00:00
That seems rather focused on one policy that was big in the 50s. The Marshal Plan was great but that isn't something the modern US seems to be capable of - since around Vietnam I think was the change. It has been a good 50 years where the US just breaks stuff and leaves it broken.

Modern prosperity is caused by modern policy. I've seen some reasonable theorising that income basically comes from how easy it is to do business (thinking especially of https://www.grumpy-economist.com/p/the-cost-of-regulation). Which is linked in no small way to the cultural factors chgs pointed out - the most vibrant and high income industry in the world is also the one that sees laws impeding them as a problem that can be overcome.

The attitude of doing things that create wealthy even if NIMBYs object is an attitude that leads to wealth creation. Strange but true. Not the only factor, the political strength of the opposition matters a lot too.