MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ladylady | 2025-04-14 21:42:23+00:00
I graduated from Mit Sloan with an MBA degree more than 10 years ago. Like you I was it sounds like a first generation college student. MIT Sloan was absolutely a nightmare when it came to helping me and other students find jobs. It sounds like the broader school is an equal disaster. I know from working with people at Sloan on a continued basis that the school (ie the MIT Sloan CDO or career development office) continues to be atrocious and perhaps the rest of MIT is the same. I can help you by giving you some feedback on your resume and a chat if you want. Derus @ alum.mit.edu
by williamdclt | 2025-04-14 21:42:52+00:00
Let’s put your uncertainty to rest: at the extreme, any function execution spends both time and energy, both of which are observable side-effects.

So yes, you’re right that there no such thing as an absolutely pure function. “Pure” always assumes that all dependencies are pure themselves. Where it’s a reasonable assumption and whether it’s still useful or not depends on your program: assuming an API call to be pure is certainly not reasonable for many use cases, but it is reasonable enough to be useful for others.
by jredwards | 2025-04-14 21:42:53+00:00
I've been kicking around idea for a similar open source project, with the caveats that:

1. I'd like the backend to be configured for any LLM the user might happen to have access to (be that the API for a paid service or something locally hosted on-prem).

2. I'm also wondering how feasible it is to hook it up to a touchscreen running on some hopped-up raspberry pi platform so that it can be interacted with like an Alexa device or any of the similar offerings from other companies. Ideally, that means voice controls as well, which are potentially another technical problem (OpenAI's API will accept an audio file, but for most other services you'd have to do voice to text before sending the prompt off to the API).

3. I'd like to make the integrations extensible. Calendar, weather, but maybe also homebridge, spotify, etc. I'm wondering if MCP servers are the right avenue for that.

I don't have the bandwidth to commit a lot of time to a project like this right now, but if anyone else is charting in this direction I'd love to participate.
by mmoskal | 2025-04-14 21:43:01+00:00
The way I understand it: if the instruction are at the top, the KV entries computed for "content" can be influenced by the instructions - the model can "focus" on what you're asking it to do and perform some computation, while it's "reading" the content. Otherwise, you're completely relaying on attention to find the information in the content, leaving it much less token space to "think".
by justAnotherHero | 2025-04-14 21:43:52+00:00
We have been using Meilisearch with firebase for years and it has always worked great. I just wish they would update the extension on the firebase extensions hub[1] because the current version available uses node 14 which is not supported by cloud functions on GCP so the extension is not usable at all. What's weird is that the latest version available on their repo has upgraded the node version but they are not offering it in the extensions hub.

[1]: https://extensions.dev/extensions/meilisearch/firestore-meil...
by henryfjordan | 2025-04-14 21:44:01+00:00
here's a Techcrunch article from the time: https://techcrunch.com/2012/04/09/facebook-to-acquire-instag...

> Last year, documents for a standalone Facebook mobile photo sharing app were attained by TechCrunch. Now it seems Facebook would rather buy Instagram which comes with a built-in community of photographers and photo lovers, while simultaneously squashing a threat to its dominance in photo sharing.
by nodja | 2025-04-14 21:44:05+00:00
My understanding is that frontier researchers will work for companies that will let them publish papers and discuss them with their peers.

When you're an engineer at the tier of these AI researchers, winning an extra 100k/year on top of you current 500k (numbers out of my ass) is not worth it vs getting name recognition. Being known as one of the authors that made the transformer for example will enable you work with other bright minded individuals and create even better things.

So essentially these commercial companies have "we'll let you publish papers when you work for us" as a perk.
by tauoverpi | 2025-04-14 21:44:09+00:00
You don't need everything to be generic to have safety as the API provided by the object using the linked list can maintain safety by making it difficult to do the wrong thing and being correct by construction. Of course that doesn't stop a user of a library ignoring the safe way to handle types which use intrusive linked list nodes but that same user is likely going to shoot themselves in the foot regardless even when given a "safer" interface.

Trying to write a safer version of the above without losing the performance / advantages takes you into the realm of ATS2 https://www.cs.bu.edu/~hwxi/atslangweb/ which quickly becomes more difficult to work with than practical (and no, rust can't solve this with it's implementation of resource types as far as I'm aware).

So yes, doing the above makes sense when the problem demands it as allocating memory you don't need when there's a clear way to represent a graph without it just wastes cycles on memory management you didn't even need to do.
by mrguyorama | 2025-04-14 21:44:19+00:00
Without proper anti-trust and monopoly enforcement, no, small businesses cannot compete with megacorps who have giant war chests to fund the literal destruction of whatever niche you call your market.

Megacorps are destructive to market forces in general.

Small businesses died because we fed all the IGAs to Walmart, through Reagan's absolutely braindead "what if we just don't prevent monopolies?" policy.

It turns out, destroying the economy of local communities so that Walmart shareholders can be even wealthier while average Americans only get a few cents cheaper on some products.... at least until the monopoly has consolidated control and can just keep raising prices for the rest of history while selectively dropping prices anywhere someone tries to compete only serves the goddamned shareholders, not Americans.

Most rural places had small grocers. Now people who live in those places have to drive an hour to Walmart, and the local economy no longer has anyone working at the local grocer. The building that used to house the local grocer now has a fourth generation of whatever sketch dollar store company bought it this year, which employs exactly one human being from the local community, and the products are terribly priced, meaning not only did we lose the money staying local with whatever kind of more expensive IGA we replaced, we didn't even get better prices for it!

Monopolies are a huge percentage of the problem. America's rural communities are dying partially because all the local businesses have been replaced by national behemoths so literally every single day to day purchase you make ships more money out of the local economy. Nobody can have a job in a rural community because every dollar that finds its way to that community gets shipped out to Walmart HQ instead of flowing around and paying tradespeople and buying local products and services.
by kuhewa | 2025-04-14 21:44:53+00:00
You don't tend to hear about it and not that there isn't still progress to be made, but there has been tonnes of progress on fisheries interactions with protected bycatch species. For ex the infamous dolphin problem in the eastern tropical Pacific purse seine tuna fishery is down 99.8% from its peak to the point populations are recovering, despite the fishery intentionally setting on dolphin schools to catch > 150,000 t of yellowfin tuna per year.

Pelagic gillnets are probably the gear that still have the most issues with dolphin bycatch, and acoustic pingers that play a loud ultrasonic tone when they detect an echolocation click are already used to reduce interactions in some fisheries.
by bananalychee | 2025-04-14 21:45:36+00:00
Both standardized tests and IQ highly correlate with success in higher education and career over a lifetime. Harvard's performance and reputation have tanked as a result of its anti-meritocratic policies, and the market is indeed responding, slowly but surely. You are making things up and conjuring nonsensical hypotheticals to deny the evidence that's right in front of our eyes.
by const_cast | 2025-04-14 21:45:45+00:00
> You want to argue that Joe Biden didn't weaponize every branch of the bureaucracy against Republicans?

He didn't. I don't know why you guys think he did. A lot of those agencies, like the Justice Department, act independently.

It's not like any Republicans were jailed. This is starting to seem less like a legitimate take, and more like a strange fetish for persecution.

For the record, if people like President Trump want to no longer be under the eye of Justice, they should stop doing illegal things. It seems every other American citizen has figured that out. It is shameful our own president has not.
by pydry | 2025-04-14 21:46:27+00:00
quadlets == systemd which requires root to run. this is NOT the same thing as "systemd cant run non root containers". OBVIOUSLY it can, just as docker can run non root containers.

Making systemd a necessary dependency to run > 1 container kinda negates many of the the nice advantages that podman has of not requiring root.

podman compose doesnt require root and would serve as a substitute but it's a very neglected piece of software.
by resters | 2025-04-14 21:46:37+00:00
I use them as follows:

o1-pro: anything important involving accuracy or reasoning. Does the best at accomplishing things correctly in one go even with lots of context.

deepseek R1: anything where I want high quality non-academic prose or poetry. Hands down the best model for these. Also very solid for fast and interesting analytical takes. I love bouncing ideas around with R1 and Grok-3 bc of their fast responses and reasoning. I think R1 is the most creative yet also the best at mimicking prose styles and tone. I've speculated that Grok-3 is R1 with mods and think it's reasonably likely.

4o: image generation, occasionally something else but never for code or analysis. Can't wait till it can generate accurate technical diagrams from text.

o3-mini-high and grok-3: code or analysis that I don't want to wait for o1-pro to complete.

claude 3.7: occasionally for code if the other models are making lots of errors. Sometimes models will anchor to outdated information in spite of being informed of newer information.

gemini models: occasionally I test to see if they are competitive, so far not really, though I sense they are good at certain things. Excited to try 2.5 Deep Research more, as it seems promising.

Perplexity: discontinued subscription once the search functionality in other models improved.

I'm really looking forward to o3-pro. Let's hope it's available soon as there are some things I'm working on that are on hold waiting for it.
by palmotea | 2025-04-14 21:46:59+00:00
I don't think Trump University was ever indented to be a real university. Wasn't it basically the Trump-branded version of those late night infomercials promising to teach you how to get rich in real estate? You know, the ones where ultimately they basically just sell you a bunch of tapes for $5000?

If you're looking for an actual conservative university, a better example would be a place like Liberty University. I think the problem is starting an institution is hard, it'll only really hit its stride like 100 years after being founded, and it's hard to keep an ideological project on track for such a long period of time.
by ViktorRay | 2025-04-14 21:47:28+00:00
It’s not just a sample of one. You are forgetting about the Marshall Plan. About West and East Germany. About when the Berlin Wall came down.

There’s no reason South Vietnam couldn’t have become like South Korea or Taiwan one day. We are all human beings and deep down aren’t we all alike and want the same things?

https://youtu.be/5F_aHt34a-g
by Spooky23 | 2025-04-14 21:48:00+00:00
It’s really all about the protocol. AI tends to spot things that doctors don’t, and vice versa. Dermatology is also an area being pillaged by private equity and access is poor for many people.

I lost my wife to melanoma. She noticed a lesion within days of it appearing, and a doctor saw it within 48 hours and felt it was benign. My wife didn’t accept it and had a plastic surgeon remove it and biopsy, then had a margin removed by surgical oncologist, the standard of care at the time. It came back as a brain tumor 4 years later and she was gone in 6 months, even with the incredible advancements today.

So I’d hold the position strongly that anything that improves overall detection rates and access to care is incredibly important and will save lives. Weeks matter with melanoma. Today with immunotherapy Molly would be fine. But if she hadn’t advocated and gotten the original thing removed, it would have cost her 4 important years.
by mleonhard | 2025-04-14 21:48:09+00:00
Related paper on the immune system triggering anxiety: "Stress-Induced Metabolic Disorder in Peripheral CD4+ T Cells Leads to Anxiety-like Behavior" https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cell.2019.10.001

Related: "N-acetylcysteine as a new prominent approach for treating psychiatric disorders" https://doi.org/10.1111/bph.15456 section "2.3 Regulation of inflammatory mediators".

N-acetylcysteine (NAC) is considered safe and is sold as a diet supplement in USA and many other countries. If you suffer from anxious feelings, 1200mg/day NAC may reduce them a lot.
by lxgr | 2025-04-14 21:48:20+00:00
Yes, there definitely is linear programming over the Internet, both free and paid.

We've finally come full circle: Linear broadcast TV -> TiVo (finally, no more missed episodes!) -> VOD, i.e. Netflix, Max, Hulu etc. (why linear broadcast everything to everyone if we can just OTT stream everything individually?) -> FAST, i.e. Pluto TV etc.
by jitl | 2025-04-14 21:48:29+00:00
It’s pretty rad how flexible template literal types are, but I can’t imagine wanting this kind of shenanigans hanging out in a production app slowing down compile times. I prefer to define types in TypeScript and generate proto from that, since the TypeScript type system is so much more powerful than the Protobuf system. Types are much more composable in TS.
by nelblu | 2025-04-14 21:48:33+00:00
Every time I read a chapter from LOTR and then hike with my dog, I imagine myself being Frodo and my dog being Samwise, and I find myself talking to the dog, sometimes yelling at him - hey don't go there, there might be Orcs there or maybe Dark Riders were here etc. Of course my dog doesn't care, but I love this silly monologue with him.

Just ordered this book and can't wait to start reading LOTR again!
by henryfjordan | 2025-04-14 21:48:45+00:00
Yes, every horizontal acquisition is anti-competitive.

Antitrust violations are a higher bar, you must improperly flex your dominant market position to violate the law. For that the government would have to show that FB offered an unreasonable price that nobody sane would match or that they threatened to cut off Insta links from FB if they didn't sell, something like that.
by solardev | 2025-04-14 21:48:49+00:00
To some degree, yes, and I'd hope that other skilled professionals would take a similar approach.

Like if I wanted to add EV charging to my home, I'd hope the electrician would take the time to explain the different levels of charging, the breaker and wire upgrades needled, etc., find a suitable installation site around the house, etc., not just start hooking things up willy-nilly. Or that a HVAC person might talk about the pros and cons of heat pumps, or a doctor might discuss different treatment options, etc.

It's different from, say, being a line worker in a factory assembling the same part 10000x a day, or a fast food worker.

Sure, at some level we're all just "solving problems", but I'm arguing that a good dev thinks about the problem and possible solutions as a whole, and utilizes that agency to make the final output better, instead of just coding Jira tickets to spec and never saying a peep.

But that's my own bias as a predominantly frontend person working for small or medium sized companies where specialization isn't as extreme. Maybe at bigger companies and teams they already have many layers of UX/UI/design/management and don't need (or want or appreciate) a dev speaking up about any of those things. In my experience it's never that black-and-white and a lot of tickets and designs are ambiguous and require both professional judgment and some empathy to implement well.

Maybe that's why I prefer the generalities and of the frontend vs, say, hyper-optimizing a very specific database call.
by thayne | 2025-04-14 21:49:20+00:00
> In non-web contexts untrusted input is not interpolated into the executable streams so you don't worry about special characters

I don't know what you mean by `executable` streams, but besides databases as I've already mentioned, a common thing that shows up in non-web applications is invoking a shell command that includes a user-supplied file name as part of it. Currently doing so safely means you need to call `shlex.quote` or similar on the filename, but with t-strings you could have something like: `shell(t"some-command {filename} 2> somefile | other-command")`.

And that is just one specific example. There are other cases it might be useful as well, like say generating an XML configuration file from a template that includes user-supplied input.

> No, you can't do that... Every function evaluation creates a new Template object, it does not reuse a precompiled one.

The code that generates that Template object is pre-compiled though.

If you define a function like:

def my_template(a, b,c): return t"a={a} b={b} c={c}"

When python parses that, it will generate bytecode equivalent to:

def my_template(a, b,c): return Template("a=", Interpolation(a, ...), " b=", Interpolation(b, ...), " c=", Interpolation(c,...))

yes, it does create a new `Template` object every time `my_template` is called, but it doesn't have to re-parse the template string each time, which is an improvement over existing APIs that do re-parse a template string every time it is used.
by pmags | 2025-04-14 21:49:32+00:00
If, like me, you were curious about the qualifications and background of the author of the linked article, here is some context from Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Kory:

* During his testimony before the US senate in 202, Kory erroneously claimed that the antiparasitic medication ivermectin was a "wonder drug" with "miraculous effectiveness" against COVID-19.

* In August 2023, the American Board of Internal Medicine informed Kory his certifications were to be revoked for spreading medical misinformation. As of August 2024, Kory's three certifications are listed as "not certified, revoked" on ABIM's website.
by iLemming | 2025-04-14 21:49:34+00:00
> what's the best way to learn it?

What's the best way to learn programming in general? For me, is to try to build something. Find a problem, pick a Lisp, start building.

Just make sure to have two things: structural editing and the REPL. Without these two, Lisp may feel awkward. But when you have the ability to quickly move any expression around, transpose them, etc., - writing programs becomes like composing haikus or something. You basically will be moving some "lego-pieces" around. With the connected REPL, you will be able to eval any expression in-place, from where you're writing your code.

I started without these and indeed, that was challenging. Having to balance the parentheses by hand, counting them, omg, I was so obtuse, but I'm glad I didn't give up. You don't have to go too crazy - in the beginning, something that automatically balances out the parens, or highlights them when they are not, and lets you grab an expression and paste it somewhere else would be good enough.

And the REPL. Shit, I didn't know any better, I thought I was suppose to be copypasting or typing things into it. That is not the way! Find a way to eval expressions in-place. Some editors even show you the result of the computations right where the cursor is.

I have done years of programming prior to discovering Lisp, and I don't really understand how I was okay without it. I wish someone has insisted to try it out. Today I don't even understand how can anyone identify as a programmer and "hate" Lisp, just because they have stared at some obscure Lisp code for like two minutes at some point.
by bsder | 2025-04-14 21:49:44+00:00
Linked lists get a bad reputation because they wound up being a default data structure--and that's almost always a mistake on modern computers.

Back in days of yore, small memory and CPU meant that linked lists and arrays were really the only effective data structures. Allocating and computation were super expensive, so following a link or having an index is really the only thing that works.

On today's computers, CPU is so much faster than memory that it is almost always better to recompute a value than try to look it up. Locality is so important that linear actions trump asymptotic complexity until you get quite a lot more elements than you might expect. Memory is so cheap that it is worth exponentially overallocating in order to amortize complexity. etc.

At the end of the day with modern programming, you should almost always be reaching for something simpler than a linked list (array/vector) or you should be reaching for an abstraction that is more complex than a linked list (hash/dict, queue/deque, etc.).

With modern CPUs, if you are using a linked list for anything other than building a more complex data structure, you're probably making an incorrect choice on almost all fronts.
by bogwog | 2025-04-14 21:49:54+00:00
How does the compare to Microprofile?

https://github.com/jonasmr/microprofile

Btw, I recently worked with a library that had their own profiler which generated a Chrome trace file, so you could load it up in the Chrome dev tools to explore the call graph and timings in a fancy UI.

It seems like such a good idea and I wish more profiling frameworks tried to do that instead of building their own UI.
by bangaladore | 2025-04-14 21:51:16+00:00
Excuse my lack of knowledge here.

To what extent is 65% impressive? Naively, I imagine someone very familiar with teams and players could probably achieve similar results. I say this because I assume its obvious that Team A is better than Team B to some extent. Team A might still lose to Team B for whatever reason, but that's why its only 65%. And Team C vs Team D might be a tossup.
by williamdclt | 2025-04-14 21:52:07+00:00
I have to say I don’t understand your point! The parents comment is both clear and a reasonable, common approach of programming

> Can the objects a function creates be mutated by functions they call?

No

> can functions modify their input parameters?

No

> If a function returns one of their input parameters (modified or not), does that mean the calling function can no longer mutate it?

No. Because the called function isn’t allowed to mutate its inputs, there’s no problem for the caller to mutate it. It’s irrelevant whether the input was also an output of the called function as it cannot mutate it anyway.

I suppose you can get into race conditions between caller and callee if your language provides asynchronicity and no further immutability guarantees. Still, you eliminated a whole lot of potential bugs