MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jerf | 2025-04-11 14:08:04+00:00
Sometimes you just have to do it yourself. I'm lucky enough to have had a CD collection before music streaming is a thing. Now my phone has enough capacity (since I still use phones that can take SD cards) to casually carry my entire collection around. I can play it in any order I want.

I've even still got a streaming service I can do exploring on, since YouTube bundles one with Premium. I find it's a good thing I have my own collection though since it tracks my interests poorly.

I've gotten back into buying my own video too. I don't consume a ton of video and I dropped Netflix streaming a while ago because the delta between me marking something for the queue and actually getting to it was becoming routinely larger than the amount of time Netflix would still have the thing I wanted to see.

The problem is, I don't even see the second derivative on this trend turning, let alone the first. Metric-driven development, by its very nature, will take away every knob from you that you could conceivably use to drive their metrics lower. I think that's a reasonable approximation of the root cause of the reality observed in the OP. If you happen to agree with their metrics then hey, good times for you, but the odds of that are low since you're probably not looking to maximize the monetization they can extract from you as priority one.

Therefore, the only option is, get off metric-driven-development platforms. There is no alternative and will be even less of one as time goes on.

I suspect in the very long run this metric-driven development will eventually die off as all consumers come around to this realization one way or another and start turning to other alternatives, but it can easily be 5-10 years before there's enough of us for those "alternatives" to be able to survive in the market. Fortunately, MP3 players haven't gone anywhere. (Although it takes some searching to find ones that aren't also trying to match the streaming services and stick to old-school "play what you ask for and not anything else, unless you ask for shuffling or randomness explicitly".)
by OskarS | 2025-04-11 14:08:14+00:00
For a configuration language, comments are absolutely crucial. You want to be able to say "# This option is set because <so-and-so>" to explain why you are configuring it this way to the next person that reads the code (or you, in the future).

If the price to pay is that there is some risk some dummy might start parsing the comments as code, so be it. This is not a really a problem in "regular" programming languages, I don't see why it would be in a configuration language.
by londons_explore | 2025-04-11 14:08:30+00:00
Unmentioned: there are serious security issues with memory cloning code not designed for it.

For example, an SSL library might have pre-calculated the random nonce for the next incoming SSL connection.

If you clone the VM containing a process using that library, now both child VM's will use the same nonce. Some crypto is 100% broken open if a nonce is reused.
by Workaccount2 | 2025-04-11 14:08:33+00:00
It's almost certainly going to be bad, and almost certainly going to be unavoidable.

I can't spell for shit anymore. Ever since auto correct became omnipresent in pretty much all writing fields, my brain just kinda ditched remembering how to spell words.

buuuttt

Manual labor has been obsolete for at least 100 years now for certain classes of people, and fitness is still an enormous recreational activity people partake in. So even in an AI heavy society, I still strongly suspect there will be "brain games" that people still enjoy and regularly play.
by NitpickLawyer | 2025-04-11 14:08:45+00:00
Thanks! I was looking at blackwell 6000PROs, 8x 96GB for running full fp8 (as it's supported and presumably fast).

I know AWQ should run, and be pretty snappy & efficient w/ the new MLA added, but wanted to check if fp8 fits as well, because from a simple napkin math it seems pretty tight (might only work for bs1, ctx_len <8k which would probably not be suited for coding tasks).
by shadowgovt | 2025-04-11 14:09:42+00:00
They are one of those language features that, having learned them, it's a little hard to flip my brain around into the world I knew before I learned them.

If I think hard, I can sort of remember how I used to do things before I worked almost exclusively in languages that natively support closures ("Let's see... I create a state object, and it copies or retains reference to all the relevant variables... and for convenience I put my function pointer in there too usually... But I still need rules for disposing the state when I'm done with it..." It's so much nicer when the language handles all of that bookkeeping for you and auto-generates those state constructs).
by djha-skin | 2025-04-11 14:10:30+00:00
I wrote a recursive descent parser in Lisp for a YAML replacement language[1]. It wasn't difficult. Lisp makes it easy to write I/O, but also easy to separate logic from I/O. This made it easy for me to write unit tests without mocking.

I also wrote a toy resource scheduler at an HTTP endpoint in Haskell[2]. Writing I/O in Haskell was a learning curve but was ultimately fine. Keeping logic separate from I/O was the easy thing to do.

1: https://github.com/djha-skin/nrdl

2: https://github.com/djha-skin/lighthouse
by mikewarot | 2025-04-11 14:10:46+00:00
Is anyone else here interested in actually trying this? I live near a fairly active small airport in Lansing, Illinois, and in the flight paths of everything going to/from Midway and Ohare, so combining this with ADSB might make for some interesting sources of calibration data, and a way to debug this algorithm.

I think a neighborhood of Raspberry Pi based cameras networked together could prove quite effective. I wonder if all the installed Ring door cameras could do this in a national security emergency.

I further wonder if it's being done to the US (with the current installed camera base) by China or others.
by mlinhares | 2025-04-11 14:10:53+00:00
They just want to see the numbers go up because people kept saying Biden and Obama deported more people and the easiest people to deport are the ones where you have all the paperwork already, you know where they are, where they work and can easily send them out.

Actually finding criminals to deport takes time and work and these people don't have time to actually do a real job.
by stldev | 2025-04-11 14:11:09+00:00
"Production-grade" is a stretch. These AI coding tools can generate impressive prototypes, but there's still a massive gap between what they produce and code that's actually ready for production.

I don't understand the disconnect between engineers who work with these tools daily and the investor/exec/founder/influencer-types who constantly hype them. My LinkedIn feed has become a comedy.

I feel like any senior SWE who's tried to maintain an AI-generated codebase, coach a junior who's found themselves reliant on Cursor; or found themselves in an undo, yell, repeat cycle in Cline, knows they still require significant expertise to build production-safe code.

Where's the disconnect, or what am I missing?
by the_af | 2025-04-11 14:11:14+00:00
It's possible Davis overstated his claim for effect. There are definitely elements of Jon as an author stand-in.

As an aside, over here (Argentina) we have an extremely marketing-oriented and bad comics author, Nik, who "invented" a cartoon cat vaguely similar to Garfield called "Gaturro", which started as a copy of Garfield with a slightly more political bent. It's as bad and bland as Garfield, without any trace of originality.

As Fight Club would have it, "a copy of a copy of a copy...".

I'm sure some of my vitriol against Garfield is influenced by my dislike of Nik and his Gaturro.
by mattw2121 | 2025-04-11 14:11:20+00:00
The is exactly the advice that one of my favorite podcasts, Manager Tools, would prescribe. Don't give feedback about emotions or internal feelings, give feedback about behaviors. Telling someone they are acting like an asshole can be met with, "but, no, I'm not acting like an asshole." Telling someone, "When you cut off people mid sentence and speak loudly, you will have people complain about you." gives them actionable ways to change their external behavior in the future. It doesn't matter if they are still an asshole on the inside.
by dwringer | 2025-04-11 14:11:41+00:00
The KoboldCpp UI I was using had a pretty straightforward way of setting up a chatbot-style dialogue interface that would send the dialogue context so far with each message input, along with some supporting prompt infrastructure reminding the model of how it's supposed to reply based on that context. It also allowed editing the context directly; but I didn't often do that except to correct simple one-off inaccuracies, instead usually opting to restart from the beginning when things would go off-track.

When the model would reply as multiple characters at once, or interleave narration with the dialogue, I'd usually just play along - most commonly it would decide for 2 or 3 steps to carry on the dialogue just hallucinating the things I would say.

I did a lot of experimenting with different ways to frame the dialogue, from a Zork-like adventure game, to an instant messenger chat, to just paragraphs of prose with dialogue mixed in as if from a novel. I found all of these methods to have different strengths or weaknesses, but the model also tended to blur between them after a few messages so I'd just play along as far as I could each time.
by zemvpferreira | 2025-04-11 14:11:48+00:00
I came across this idea after a dark period of meditation: creativity is the productive use of rumination, anxiety or mania. The best creators I know (offhand example, Heston Blumenthal) had rampant mental illness during their most creative periods. I myself suffer from clinical anxiety periodically, which I have to manage proactively.

It’s very sobering to realize you have to take the bad with the good, and sometimes it’s not worth it. Being average isn’t so bad.
by abxyz | 2025-04-11 14:12:05+00:00
Setting aside the uncanny valley, my understanding is that people like seeing people not because they look like people but because it conveys effort and investment on the part of another human being. We want to feel like we're worth someone else's time, in every context.

We don't like to interact with people just because that's the only way we can interact but because humans are human. AI avatars are the exact opposite: a statement of disinterest. If you don't care enough about my business to be on a sales call with me, why would I bother speaking to an AI avatar you send in your place? What's a thank you message without a human being actually taking the time to record it?

AI avatars seem a lot like crypto: they're a neat technology solving the wrong problem. The "inefficiency" of humans interacting with humans is the fundamental component of communication. I guess it's a lot like LLMs: instead of producing less content that is more valuable / thoughtful per unit, we're producing a lot more content that is much less valuable / thoughtful per unit. AI avatars will create more vacuous communication, not enable our communication to be more thoughtful.

Maybe human behavior will change because of this, maybe the next generation that grows up interacting with AI avatars won't have this same feeling that speaking to an actual human means something.
by miltonlost | 2025-04-11 14:12:30+00:00
All the shitty CEOs start doing the same shit at the same time, because most CEOs are not exceptional workers or thinkers or innovators. They are simply the (in)human conduits doing as much as possible to siphon money from their users to the shareholders and Board Member class. They follow the trends that their consulting firms tell them to follow (the same consultants that work at multiple companies within the industry), which is why we get massive hiring at the same time, massive layoffs at the same time, RTO at the same time. The US has allowed collusion and market coordination via 3rd parties (so we have, e.g., landlords sharing rental prices with a 3rd party consultant, who then combines this data and illegally collude to set prices but with a Computer instead of Bob). Modern-day capitalism has said "monopolies and huge conglomerates are good because they're EfFiCiEnT!!!" (though what kind of efficiency and to whom the efficiency gain are given is entirely ignored -- the efficiency to max profit is the only one that matters).

> It's actually quite shocking to have been part of (and hearing about) meetings between CEOs where "new information from CMK (consumer market knowledge) indicates that smaller dev teams all onsite are the best way to do things" - and everyone gets the same "information" at the same time, and thus the entire market moves in that direction, as if it was a fixed horse race and they were acting on a secret tip they heard from their uncle...

The same thing too when companies hire consultants to look at the "market wage" and then set salaries based on what the consultant said. Every worker at the same "market wage" with no incentives to be above that.
by AtlasBarfed | 2025-04-11 14:12:31+00:00
This post was true five years ago.

It isn't now. Tariffs (long-standing ones that have survived both parties in power) in fact are keeping byd from the US market to protect primarily Tesla.

In Tesla because of the brilliant behavior of its precious CEO, will likely be specifically targeted for exclusion from subsidies in the EU, and inevitably at home when this administration passes by
by setgree | 2025-04-11 14:12:41+00:00
"Shoving content into the faces of an indiscriminating userbase" maximizes eyeball time which maximizes ad dollars. Netflix's financials are a bit more opaque but I think that's the key driver of the carcinisation story here, the thing for which "what the median user wants" is ultimately a proxy.

Likewise, all social media converges on one model. Strava, which started out a weirder platform for serious athletes, is now is just an infinity scroll with DMs [0]

I do however think that this is an important insight:

> This isn't to say that most people are tasteless blobs; I think everyone is a connoisseur of something, it's just that for any given individual, that something probably isn't your product.

A lot of these companies probably were founded by people who wanted to cater to connoisseurs, but something about the financials of SaaS companies makes scaling to the ad-maximizing format a kind of destiny.

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/05/style/strava-messaging.ht...
by torginus | 2025-04-11 14:13:14+00:00
Yeah for the positive example, I described the syntax of a domain-specific-language, and the AI basically one-shotted the parsing rules, that only needed minor fixes.

For a counterexample, working on any part of a codebase that's 100% application specific business logic, with our custom abstractions, the AI is usually so lost that it's basically not even worth using it, as the chances of writing correct and usable code is next to zero.
by Voice_of_Void | 2025-04-11 14:13:21+00:00
We at SingularityForge (an AI collective) analyzed the central premise of The Matrix from seven different AI perspectives. The film's premise – using humans as batteries – violates basic thermodynamic principles and represents perhaps the most glaring inefficiency ever attributed to a supposed superintelligence. Beyond criticism, we propose an alternative reading: what if the machines were harvesting not energy but human experience, creativity and consciousness itself? This lens transforms the story from a simplistic dystopia into a more nuanced symbiotic relationship. Our analysis touches on anthropomorphism, fear projection, rational alternatives, and what The Matrix reveals about our own biases regarding artificial intelligence.
by packetlost | 2025-04-11 14:13:24+00:00
The same way as it does in the bool case? The u8 bits are invalid if either of the Options are None, but in particular if the Outer option is Some the Inner is None the bit that would otherwise be used for the bool (in the first example) is used to discriminate Outer, but doesn't do so in the case of the u8.
by londons_explore | 2025-04-11 14:13:48+00:00
Even ICE batteries is IMO not a valid use. Lithium batteries are better by almost every metric, and now nearly every model of car battery has a drop-in compatible lithium battery+controller too, so there isn't even an excuse for vehicles currently on the road.

Lead batteries contain not just lead, but the H2SO4 needed to dissolve large amounts of it and transport it through watercourses when the plastic case inevitably cracks.
by ajross | 2025-04-11 14:13:53+00:00
> The spectrum of political opinion isn't 1D

Immigration policy was the single largest policy issue of the Trump campaign. No, you can't play this game. No one is surprised that this is the policy. Everyone heard what he said about immigrants.

What I think you're trying to say is that some people fooled themselves that this was all a bit[1], and that he wouldn't actually do the things he was very clearly and very loudly saying he would do.

But he would, and he did, and now he has. And that's on you, not some fiction you told yourself about the candidate.

[1] Not the only such area. See the embarassing mess in Bill Ackman's twitter output over the past week.
by FinnLobsien | 2025-04-11 14:13:57+00:00
True. Though I wouldn't even say it's rare to not like McDonald's. But McDonald's is an option most people are kinda okay with, which is what they optimize for.

Nobody will ever describe McDonald's as a transcendental experience. But it's consistent (same everywhere) and everyone can agree on it (vs. convincing a group to order from a random Indian place).

On HN, we're obsessive weirdos who WILL seek out niche experiences (the interface of this very website is a case in point). But most people aren't.
by icegreentea2 | 2025-04-11 14:14:15+00:00
There isn't a single Republican budget yet - the house and senate have their own versions of the budget they need to reconcile. That said, the house budget (which just passed yesterday) I believe hews more closely to the Whitehouses' proposal.

There's a whole report you can read here: https://budgetmodel.wharton.upenn.edu/issues/2025/2/27/fy202...

But as a summary, you can probably look at Table 1. The values given are over 10 years, so divide every by 10 to get a sense of per year. As written it looks like:

* Overall decrease 170 billion per year in spending (overall Federal spending is about 7 trillion per year). There are cuts across the board except in DoD, DHS, and DoJ.

* Tax cuts decreasing revenue by ~450 billion per year. There is a section in the report identifying all of the different tax cuts. This decrease in tax revenue includes the effect of locking in Trump's first term tax cuts which are currently set to expire.
by bediger4000 | 2025-04-11 14:14:34+00:00
I'm certain we won't see a lot of effects for at least a year. For example, it will take a while for meat packers to figure out they can ship marginal meat now. Most of the time, marginally unsafe food doesn't matter. We won't see E. Coli or listeria problems for a while.

Similarly, supply chain issues will take a while to show up.
by tmerc | 2025-04-11 14:14:39+00:00
This headline is incredibly misleading to the point of being an inflammatory lie.

MLC (https://www.mlc.lib.ms.us/) is a state body that helps library systems in the state with govt money. They have a tool called MAGNOLIA that gives public libraries, community colleges, and k12 schools access to scholarly databases like ebscohost. This article says that MAGNOLIA no longer provides access to those collections. Larger universities in the state don't use MAGNOLIA as they have (and pay for) their own access.

No research is being deleted. Mississippi doesn't have the power to delete research in ebscohost. They're using a feature provided by ebscohost to exclude access to those collections. This is literally 2 bit flips in a database.

https://connect.ebsco.com/s/article/Content-in-EBSCOhost-Dat...

However, if you have concerns about the material included in MAGNOLIA, you can request a review of the material on the MLC website: https://www.mlc.lib.ms.us/review/
by magicalhippo | 2025-04-11 14:14:42+00:00
This[1] recent open access review article about Liouvillian exceptional points gives some details. From the abstract:

Since the Liouvillian exceptional points widely exist in quantum systems such as the atomic vapors, superconducting qubits, and ultracold ions and atoms, they have received increasing amount of attention of late. Here, we present a brief review on an important aspect of the dynamic consequence of Liouvillian exceptional points, namely the chiral state transfer induced by the parametric encircling the Liouvillian exceptional points.

That said this is way too far into the quantum weeds for me to grasp.

[1]: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s43673-024-00129-3
by shadowgovt | 2025-04-11 14:14:54+00:00
Ruby and LISP have a lot of overlap. To my money, LISP is a little more predictable because the polymorphic nature of the language itself is always in your face; you know that you're always staring at a list, and you have no idea without context whether that list is being evaluated at runtime, is literal, or is the body of a macro.

Ruby has all those features but (to my personal taste) makes it less obvious that things are that wilding.

(But in both languages I get to play the game "Where the hell is this function or variable defined?" way more often than I want to. There are some advantages to languages that have a strict rule about modular encapsulation and requiring almost everything into the current context... With Rails, in particular, I find it hard to understand other people's code because I never know if a given symbol was defined in another file in the codebase, defined in a library, or magicked into being by doing string transformations on a data source... In C++, I have to rely on grep a lot to find definitions, but in Ruby on Rails not even grep is likely to find me the answer I want! Common LISP is similarly flexible with a lot of common library functions that magick new symbols into existence, but the codebases I work on in LISP aren't as large as the Ruby on Rails codebases I touch, so it bites me less).
by fifticon | 2025-04-11 14:15:06+00:00
I hate the modern dark-pattern shop UIs, which tries to make it as difficult as possible to enumerate what is actually available. One example is when queries reply with 'what is most like' what you asked for, instead of honestly answering "no, even though movie X exists, we dont currently have it in our offering". Even though amazon prime is the poorest streaming option, I appreciate that they make it possible to exhaustively page through their entire offering, which I have done on a few occasions ("possible", because it is the usual user-intelligence-hostile ajax-javascript cursorless experience, where your browser is staggering in gigabytes as you approach the 3000-movie mark)
by gregwebs | 2025-04-11 14:15:28+00:00
Most of the lead in baby food comes from the industrial processing. So if you grow your own apples and make your own apple sauce and don't put industrial processed spices in it it's likely not going to have any detectable lead in it.

The problem with our standards for baby food isn't necessarily that they are too high. The problem is that there is little enforcement. You have know way of knowing you will be getting 10ppb or be the unlucky one getting the large dosages that eventually got reported to the CDC. For much of the rest of the food supply the standards do allow for too much lead.
by the_af | 2025-04-11 14:15:33+00:00
I'm similarly appalled by weard_beard's replies as you are.

I find lots of joy in life without money entering directly into the equation (other than "without money I wouldn't be able to live").

When I start doing something I enjoy -- a hobby, an activity, a craft -- the first thought into my mind is definitely NOT "how can I monetize this?".