MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by codegeek | 2025-04-04 17:32:55+00:00
It doesn't work that way unfortunately. The founder(s) have to sell initially because you know your product the best. No external sales person can come and suddenly get all these sales. You may hate sales but if you want to start a business, you are the best salesperson for your product/service.

There is no magic wand to this. You just learn sales by doing. I am a nerd myself but when I started my company, I automatically started selling which is mostly just trying to talk to potential customers and understanding if your product can solve their problems. Only you know that best in early days.
by kibwen | 2025-04-04 17:33:10+00:00
> At the end of the day situations that involve humans always involve feelings.

My more cynical take is that humans are emotional beings first and foremost, and reason is a distant second at best. And even our pretenses to reason can't be trusted, as they are often just emotion masquerading as reason, and the most insufferable of the reasonpilled are those that refuse to understand this.

I'm not trying to say emotion/reason are good/bad. What I am trying to say is that any hopes for a human society that place reason above emotion are fundamentally unachievable.
by nickdothutton | 2025-04-04 17:33:41+00:00
This business model was quite popular and successful in the 90s in the UK when early stage US tech firms wanted to come to Europe without having an office or perm hires. Those working in it that I knew were highly capable. Most of them went on to be hired by the client once enough business had been built in the geography. They would typically become EMEA VP Sales for said clients. Netscreen among others started this way in EMEA.
by simonw | 2025-04-04 17:33:49+00:00
This feature works with OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, Mistral and Ollama via various plugins.

The new Gemini 2.5 Pro is particularly good at this - especially with gnarly sources like PDFs of scanned documents.

I just upgraded the llm-gemini plugin to support the paid tier of Gemini 2.5 Pro which was released this morning: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Apr/4/gemini-25-pro-pricing/
by soulofmischief | 2025-04-04 17:33:49+00:00
Citation needed. Modern transformers are much, much more than just speech models. Precisely define "cognitive capabilities", and provide proof as to why neural models cannot ever mimic these cognitive capabilities.

> But let's say we have something more than an LLM

We do. Modern multi-modal transformers.

> This is because natural languages are, as the article mentions, imprecise

Two different programmers can take a well-enough defined spec and produce two separate code bases that may (but not must) differ in implementation, while still having the exact same interfaces and testable behavior.

> And no, transformers can't change how languages work. It can only "recontextualize," or as some people might call it, "hallucinate."

You don't understand recontextualization if you think it means hallucination. Or vice versa. Hallucination is about returning incorrect or false data. Recontextualization is akin to decompression, and can be lossy or "effectively" lossless (within a probabilistic framework; again, the interfaces and behavior just need to match)
by ForOldHack | 2025-04-04 17:33:57+00:00
AIX is a different beast. I played with it on a couple of RT/PCs. It was IBMs foray into the workstation market, that became the RS/6000. It had an educational alternative based on BSD. Trying to get it to work on a 486? It only worked on PS2/386s, and I do not remember if efforts to add accelerator boards worked, but unless you are a ATT SYS V god at debugging hardware drivers in the kernel... "It was based on UNIX System V Releases 1 and 2, incorporating source code from 4.2 and 4.3 BSD UNIX."

https://technologists.com/sauer/Advanced%20Interactive%20Exe...

Mee Too!
by airstrike | 2025-04-04 17:34:06+00:00
As someone who spent nearly a decade with Python, I'd say 90% of people will answer "yes", so I'd like to offer a different perspective.

IMHO if you want to pick it up for a couple toy projects just to get a feel of what coding is like, then by all means try it out. But eventually you'll benefit tremendously from exploring other languages.

Python will teach you a lot of bad habits. You will feel like you know what you're doing, but only because you don't know all of the ways in which it is handwaving a lot of complexity that is inherent to writing code which you should be very much aware of.

Knowing what I know now, I wish Rust existed when I started out so that it could have been my first language. I'm never giving up the borrow checker and the type system that come with it.

But you don't have to do Rust. It's fine to work on a couple of projects in Python, then maybe something small in C (though the tooling can feel arcane and frustrating), then maybe switch it up and go with some more functional programming (FP) flavored like Lisp or F#.

I know Rust has a lot of zealots and a lot of haters, but I'm not pushing an agenda. I just think it strikes that perfect balance between being extremely expressive, clear to read (after maybe a month of writing it daily), strong type system, lots of FP elements, no OOP clutter but super powerful traits, the borrow checker which you'll invariably learn to love, and more...

This will give you a strong foundation upon which you'll be able to continuously build knowledge. And even if you start with Rust, you should definitely explore Python, C, Lisp and F# later (or maybe Haskell instead of F#)
by autoexec | 2025-04-04 17:34:37+00:00
Americans are too busy going to work, with an increasing number of them needing more than one job just to get by. If people protest instead of working they will be fired which means they'll also lose their health insurance.

Since we're all sickened by the poisons corporations put into our food/water/air/products and by a sedentary lifestyle which has been strictly enforced from the age of 5 we wouldn't last long without health insurance. Almost all Americans are just one uncovered medical expense away from bankruptcy and/or homelessness.

Even still, there have been a huge amount of protests recently. There are protests nearly every weekend in and around major cities. All those fired government workers have a lot more time on their hands so I expect that will continue (until their prescription medications start running out anyway)

https://wtop.com/dc/2025/03/vets-protest-trump-doge-and-musk...

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2025/02/17/anti-t...

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2025/02/05/anti-t...

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/thousands-across-the-u...

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2025/04/04/hands-off-pro...

https://www.npr.org/2025/03/29/nx-s1-5343986/anti-musk-prote...
Ask HN: Are you working in a distributed team?
by planetjones | 2025-04-04 17:34:43+00:00
I am curious if you’re working for a tech company, if your product / engineering team is co-located I.e. same office. And if so, do you think this the optimal model. I understand the way remote companies like Gitlab are structured, so the responses I would be interested in are more for ‚established‘ companies where it’s been decided there is a return to office mandate. Do you think this is most effective when all or some of the team is located together? Do teams which split by geography e.g. same timezone split or different timezone split have advantages or disadvantages in your experience.
by mapontosevenths | 2025-04-04 17:34:55+00:00
Question from audience: [muffled audio which sounds like:] "...why is this culture..."

[loud noise which sounds as if it represents a point where the tape has been edited]

Rand: [mid-sentence] "...for healthy children to use handicapped materials. I quite agree with the speaker's indignation. I think it's a monstrous thing — the whole progression of everything they're doing — to feature, or answer, or favor the incompetent, the retarded, the handicapped, including, you know, the kneeling buses and all kinds of impossible expenses. I do not think that the retarded should be ~allowed~ to come ~near~ children. Children cannot deal, and should not have to deal, with the very tragic spectacle of a handicapped human being. When they grow up, they may give it some attention, if they're interested, but it should never be presented to them in childhood, and certainly not as an example of something ~they~ have to live down to."

- Ayn Rand, The Age of Mediocrity, Q & A Ford Hall Forum, April, 1981

*EDIT* Youtube video: https://youtu.be/Q1HD8KXn-kI
by lxgr | 2025-04-04 17:35:24+00:00
LLMs are much better at summarizing textual content or extracting specific pieces of information from it rather than answering complicated/niche queries from their weights alone, and that's likely (part of) what is happening here (i.e. fetching Wikipedia articles and cross-checking before answering).

Arguably this is using Wikipedia exactly for what it's designed for, although in an unexpectedly resource-intensive way. I bet just adding a web query cache for most frequently visited URLs on the side of the LLM provider could mitigate most of the negative effects here.
by kazinator | 2025-04-04 17:35:30+00:00
So you wouldn't mind if I dip my hands into the pockets of the clothing you are wearing and help myself to whatever cash bills I might find?

Also, can you wash this not-my car I'm driving, that happens to be registered in my name?

Let me know if you will be requiring compensation for not-your time and not-your effort.

You will find the needed cleaning materials at the household goods store down the street. Just walk in, grab whatever you need, and walk out.
by dimal | 2025-04-04 17:36:06+00:00
This is a cynical take, but I’m increasingly becoming tired of studies like this. Is this is where our science funding is going? It’s clever, trite, and probably meaningless. I keep reading about the publish/perish problem in academia and how it encourages research that safe, slightly interesting, but not too interesting, and doesn’t move anything forward. This study seems to fit that criteria.

And since it’s behind a paywall, I can’t really determine the how the study was designed, how well powered it is, how they defined statistical significance, and exactly how they justify their conclusion. But it got clicks and comments, so I guess it served its purpose, only to be quickly forgotten in endless churn of popular science news.

I’m sad to say, I’m beginning to think that a lot of current science is bullshit. As a very pro-science person, this is very depressing.
by kube-system | 2025-04-04 17:36:31+00:00
I was careful in how I worded my statement. Clearly, "shoving infants into a meat grinder" is to the detriment of shareholders, because shareholders will lose money if the company does that.

It is also entirely true that you cannot just do whatever you personally want with shareholder money.

The truth here is in the middle.

Apple (well, Cook) certainly did not have to donate to him. But the fact of the matter is that they will have to work with this administration to run their business over the next 4 years, and I am sure that $1m is a small investment to make Cook's life easier.
by Jianghong94 | 2025-04-04 17:36:52+00:00
Not only does the article claim that when we get to self-improving ai it becomes generally intelligent, it's assuming that AI is pretty close right now:

> OpenBrain focuses on AIs that can speed up AI research. They want to win the twin arms races against China (whose leading company we’ll call “DeepCent”)16 and their US competitors. The more of their research and development (R&D) cycle they can automate, the faster they can go. So when OpenBrain finishes training Agent-1, a new model under internal development, it’s good at many things but great at helping with AI research.

> It’s good at this due to a combination of explicit focus to prioritize these skills, their own extensive codebases they can draw on as particularly relevant and high-quality training data, and coding being an easy domain for procedural feedback.

> OpenBrain continues to deploy the iteratively improving Agent-1 internally for AI R&D. Overall, they are making algorithmic progress 50% faster than they would without AI assistants—and more importantly, faster than their competitors.

> what do we mean by 50% faster algorithmic progress? We mean that OpenBrain makes as much AI research progress in 1 week with AI as they would in 1.5 weeks without AI usage.

To me, claiming today's AI IS capable of such thing is too hand-wavy. And I think that's the crux of the article.
by saalweachter | 2025-04-04 17:36:55+00:00
Eh, you can prove anything but starting history at a particular point.

For instance, "GamerGate", where a bunch of anonymous people on the internet tried to get a number of women in the game industry fired, predates "cancel culture" by a year or two.

Or how the whole #MeToo movement was, you know, a response to powerful people abusing people in their power, and firing or otherwise limiting their careers if they resisted.

If <insert famous talking head from ten years ago> didn't want to be "canceled", well, he could have always just not sexually harassed his underlings.
by sothatsit | 2025-04-04 17:36:56+00:00
You just have to write the prompt in a way that is not so obviously pointing to Indiana Jones, and you get something that is not Indiana Jones...

"A nerdy archaeologist adventurer in a pith helmet, with glasses and a backpack, stumbling his way through a green overgrown abandoned temple. Vines reach for his heels" (https://sora.com/g/gen_01jr0yd810e8xsenp85xy2g47f)

"A nerdy archaeologist adventurer in a pith helmet, with glasses and a backpack, nervously sneaking her way through a green overgrown abandoned temple. She is wearing pink khaki pants, and a singlet" (https://sora.com/g/gen_01jr0z837jecpa770v009bs1m3)

Is it as creative as good humans? Not at all. It definitely falls into tropes readily. But we can still inject novel ideas into our prompts for the AI, and get unique results. Especially if you draw sketches and provide those to the AI to work from.
by claytonjy | 2025-04-04 17:37:36+00:00
I’ve always thought it was weird GPU stuff in python doesn’t use asyncio, and mostly assumed it was because python-on-GPU predates asyncio. But I was hoping a new lib like this might right that wrong, but it doesn’t. Maybe for interop reasons?

Do other languages surface the asynchronous nature of GPUs in language-level async, avoiding silly stuff like synchronize?
by tocs3 | 2025-04-04 17:37:55+00:00
It’s like comparing a Ferrari to a Model T Ford.

It is a tangent (in litght of the article topic) but for most applications that I can imagine I would rather have the Model T. When I went into my flight training (just recreational) I imagined zooming around in aerobatic airplanes. When I started flying I actually much preferred "low and slow". It might not be everyone's experience but cheap and easy has since been something I enjoy more.
by zabzonk | 2025-04-04 17:38:15+00:00
Well, I found it a bit hard on my Dec10-based emulator. I never got the memory-mapped stuff to work properly - I just mocked up some of the I/O instructions. But it was actually a spare-time project, intended to let my students do stuff like sorting, searching in strings, so I didn't feel too guilty. It had an assembler, debugger and other stuff. And it was portable - completely standard FORTRAN77!
by empath75 | 2025-04-04 17:38:35+00:00
I think a lot of people didn't read past the first paragraph because of the paywall, but this is actually about Edmund Halley (the comet Halley), and his attempt to explain the wandering of earth's magnetic field by positing that the earth was full of rotating spheres with magnetic material in the middle, which was _wrong_, but not _that_ far off, all things considered.
by raffael_de | 2025-04-04 17:38:58+00:00
> What’s changed is that no one cares about the public sphere anymore.

> So yes, Britain feels poor—but it’s not because the money is gone. It’s because it’s been withdrawn from the commons and buried behind closed doors.

This is not necessarily related. People don't care because the fabric of society is eroded and the essence of what makes a country and a culture is diluted to a point that it is almost non-existant. Those factors are correlated but not causally determined.
by h4ck_th3_pl4n3t | 2025-04-04 17:39:04+00:00
Unironically best opsec I've read about in a while.

In times of Deepfakes, people really underestimate the level of fakes they can receive. I've seen companies getting scammed with spoofed phone calls where they didn't have a policy to call back to prevent numbers being spoofed etc. Most of the private data is available online, so you always have to assume that e.g. a workflow via email or phone can be malicious by default.

In an alternate reality M$ Outlook would be a product for the receivers of email, and not a business product for spammers.
by hinkley | 2025-04-04 17:39:53+00:00
Recall that sea shanty business a few years ago with the talk of the Weller Brothers, a NZ outfit that delivered supplies to whaling vessels so they did not have to return to harbor as frequently.

The implication of the song is that the Weller Brothers would provide supplies on credit based on the progress of the whaling expedition. The sailers are singing about capturing a whale that leads to hopes of resupply coming soon.

Less time traveling back and forth to hunting grounds is more time for violence, and that’s the calculus of the whole sordid business.
by mrguyorama | 2025-04-04 17:40:13+00:00
The general public's understanding of food is still stuck in 1990s "destroy all fats (and completely ignore the sugar we replaced it with)" diet culture.

The fact that people still believe in reducing fat as it's own goal (instead of being an easy way to reduce calorie content) is a testament to how bad the public is at identifying fact from fiction.

Then you have shit like the influencer foods, "Feastables" and "Hydration beverage" Prime, which is just flat soda. It's pathetic.

Or think of all the dude bros who insist on dry scooping cup fulls of protein+caffeine powder, and going home to gorge themselves on two pounds of chicken breast, and yet doing absurdly normal amounts of weightlifting or exercise that requires no modifications to their already protein overloaded American diet.

Diet culture is what is fucking American health. People read fucking tabloids that bad-faith regurgitate poorly done "science", funded by the council for selling more food, and insist that since "Woman's Health" says that scientists say chocolate both kills and saves you, scientists are dumb and know nothing, even though THE ACTUAL SCIENCE NEVER CONCLUDED ANYTHING, because the scientific paper was just an observational study!
by notepad0x90 | 2025-04-04 17:40:33+00:00
I can only speak from my experience, and it is bad. If there are enough people that like this, then of course this should be a good library to use. but I'm just expressing my experience and feedback that I usually don't expose my gpu and cheaper hardware has less gpu power. GPU also uses a lot of energy (did everyone stop caring about that?). Browsers are already using too much power. I've seen other services like netflix vs prime as I mentioned earlier where I'm getting the same bandwidth utilization but less performance because someone at netflix decided to not care about cpu/gpu usage. I'm just asking for devs to be considerate unless the target audience is clearly people who have lots of gpu and don't care about energy usage (like graphics editors,vfx workers,etc..)
by jmull | 2025-04-04 17:40:41+00:00
That's not really a useful way to think of it.

Javascript could not have been released perfect for all current and future uses. Thus it either needed to change or fall out of use.

It changed.

The linting is simply part of a migration mechanism that allows for the change to happen. Compatibility is maintained for existing code, while on-going and future development can avoid the bad/obsolete parts. It's not random that eslint has such fine-grained configurability -- it allows each code base to migrate at whatever rate makes sense for it.

So all this is simply a product of javascript's longevity, which itself is a testament to its utility and flexibility. You call it "weird" but it would be a damn shame if it wasn't as useful and flexible as it is.
by nickff | 2025-04-04 17:40:57+00:00
It depends on your understanding of Article 1 Section 8:

>"The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States; but all Duties, Imposts and Excises shall be uniform throughout the United States;"

What does "general Welfare" mean in this context? Are those words just meaningless filler, or should they be interpreted to indicate that the spending must be in furtherance of another specifically enumerated power? I believe the latter (Madisonian take), but this is a contentious subject:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxing_and_Spending_Clause#Gen...
by saalweachter | 2025-04-04 17:41:06+00:00
> Our forefathers would be absolutely ashamed...

Well, like half of our forefathers. Maybe 30%.

America has always been this weird combined project of Hopeless Idealists and The Worst People In The World. Our forefathers sought independence for freedom and self-determination and all sorts of other noble things, but also because many of them owned a bunch of slaves and were worried that was going to be outlawed in the near future. And then sought independence again a century later out of the same fear.
by q0uaur | 2025-04-04 17:41:23+00:00
gave it a shot, i like the concept, even though i suspect it'll cost like $2 a query to really get somewhere.

anyway, my test was to search for FOSS software, explicitly asking for "not big tech" and no ads. the contents of the results were fine, if repetitive - but i was a bit sad to see a lot of youtube and reddit in the results. does the " algorithm" not look at the actual domains?
by kazinator | 2025-04-04 17:41:44+00:00
Before using realloc, you have to do this:

void *sane_realloc(void *ptr, size_t size) { if (ptr == 0) { return malloc(size); } else if (size == 0) { free(ptr); return 0; } else { return realloc(ptr, size); } }

ISO C realloc has braindamaged corner cases. Some implementations behave like the above, in which case you can just have #define sane_realloc realloc on those targets.

With the above you can initialize a vector to null, with size zero, and use nothing but realloc for the entire lifetime management: growing it from zero to nonzero size allocates it, shrinking down to zero frees it.

malloc(0) doesn't necessarily return null; it can return some non-null pointer that can be passed to free. We can get such a thing if we call sane_realloc(0, 0), and can avoid that if we change the malloc line to:

return size ? malloc(size) : 0;
by andrewflnr | 2025-04-04 17:41:47+00:00
You're saying they advocated a policy that pre-emptively and specifically banned Anduril from posting in the jobs section of their forum before they posted a single thing? There's no evidence that that's justified or that the top level poster believed that. And it still wouldn't change that their swipe at corporate advertising was nonsense.

Maybe they advocate for removing the job board entirely? They didn't say that though, even when forrestthewoods specifically mentioned it. Instead they moved the goal posts.
by rsanek | 2025-04-04 17:41:56+00:00
It's interesting how similar the Trump plan is to the one Buffett suggests. Clearly it trades simplicity of implementation for flexibility. It seems to me like there are two major differences: doesn't incentivize exporters as much, since they don't receive ICs; and punishes imports from some countries more than others vs. all having the same IC market price applied.

Also interesting to update some of the numbers from the doc. Buffett mentions the $2.5t net foreign ownership vs. $12t in total US stocks in 2003; the values are now $26t vs. $62t.