MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by lucianbr | 2025-04-04 09:27:09+00:00
Romainan courts say all kinds of things, many of them patently false. It's absurd to claim that since romanian courts say something, it must be true. It's absurd in principle, because there's nothing in the concept of a court that makes it infallible, and it's absurd in this precise case, because we are corrupt as hell.

I'm pretty sure the election was manipulated, but the court only said so because it benefits the incumbents, which control the courts and would lose their power.

It's a struggle between local thieves and putin, that's all. The local thieves will keep us in the EU, which is much better than the alternative, but come on. "More importantly, Romanian courts say so"? Really?
by mrweasel | 2025-04-04 09:27:18+00:00
The implementation is what gets to me too. Fair enough that a company doesn't want their LLM used in a certain way. That's their choice, even if it's just to avoid getting sued.

How they then go about implementing those guardrails is pretty telling about their understand and control over what they've build and their line of thinking. Clearly, at no point before releasing their LLMs onto the world did anyone stop and ask: Hey, how do we deal with these things generating unwanted content?

Resorting to blocking certain terms in the prompts is like searching for keywords in spam emails. "Hey Jim, I got another spam email from that Chinese tire place" - "No worry boss, I've configured the mail server to just delete any email containing the words China or tire".

Some journalist should go to a few of these AI companies and start asking questions about the long term effectiveness and viability of just blocking keywords in prompts.
by Macha | 2025-04-04 09:27:28+00:00
Like AI could write code perfectly as soon as I thought of it, and that would not improve my productivity 10x. Coding was never the slow part. Everything that goes around coding (like determining that the extra load here is not going to overload things, getting PMs to actually make their mind up what the feature is going to do, etc.), means that there's simply not that much time to be saved on coding activities.
by g0db1t | 2025-04-04 09:27:48+00:00
Yeah, we live in a world of "That's next quarters problem" is the de facto standard but on HN we regard the 120th year as the true icing on the cake of the pudding lol

How many movies did you see last year that is more than 10 or 20 years old? Or 50, for that matter?

Also, in what other industries are 100 year old designs/products/tech/standards/stuff relevant and hold up like the golden standard worth dying for?
by TomK32 | 2025-04-04 09:27:58+00:00
Stealing? Don't start a war against neighbours or other neighbours might get angry.

I don't see much movement into other currencies, just the usual fluctuation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reserve_currency#Global_curren...

"Other currencies" gained two percent point, I guess that's the Rupees the Ruzzians sold their oil for.
by caseyy | 2025-04-04 09:28:08+00:00
This reminds me of the "universal building blocks of life" or the "standard model of biochemistry" I learned at school in the 90s. It held that all life requires water, carbon-based molecules, sunlight, and CHNOPS (carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus and sulfur).

Since then, it's become clear that much life in the deep sea is anaerobic, doesn't use phosphorus, and may thrive without sunlight.

Sometimes anthropocentrism blinds us. It's a phenomenon that's quite interesting.
by planb | 2025-04-04 09:28:56+00:00
>If I could print 30 rings a day, my partner wouldn't want any of them as a show of my undying love. Something more special and rare and thoughtful would have to take its place.

And now I think this serves the opposite argument better. Downloading some random ring from the internet would not show your undying love. Designing a custom ring just for your partner, even if it is made from plastic, and even if you use AI as a tool in the process, is where the value is generated.
by jauntywundrkind | 2025-04-04 09:29:56+00:00
Astonishing.

Seth Cotlar put forward his "nuts, for now" theory, of utterly unbelievable craziest of crazy shit. Specifically calling out Loomer and Jack Posobiec as absolutely cracked individuals to have influence.

> Laura Loomer and Jack Posobiec having massive influence over Trump's White House is a perfect illustration of my "nuts, for now" theory of GOP politics. If something seems "nuts" and hard to believe right now...just wait, because it's only "nuts, for now."

https://bsky.app/profile/sethcotlar.bsky.social/post/3llwulm...

Such deep sadness.
by InsideOutSanta | 2025-04-04 09:30:28+00:00
"My main gripe with this is how do you charge users?

Sometimes, I feel so old. Recently, I read about a junior dev who did not understand that you can build websites that aren't SPAs and was confused when Chrome's debugger cleared itself on a page reload.

People have been charging users for offline apps since before "offline" was a concept that needed to exist because back then, everything* was offline.

* with exceptions.
by milesrout | 2025-04-04 09:30:31+00:00
What a strange view. America has done a poor job of teaching you about rights. They are legal only - natural law (the proper name for the doctrine of so-called "human rights") is religion. God-given rights you may have but rights in law they are not.

The rule of law is crucial to a free, just, and good society but you conflate the rule of law with the law saying what you would have it say. If the law is changed or the powers given under law are used in a way you do not like then that is not unlawful.

Dictators vary in how much they rely on law. Some have used law to do their evil: take Hitler. Some do their evil outside the law. This tells us that in truth the rule of law is but one part of what we need to have a good society.
by anonzzzies | 2025-04-04 09:31:51+00:00
I find actual lock on edit or last-save-wins to work best of what I have seen for structured data. You can add nice visual tools that show who is editing (so you can wait for them) and pass the object lock to someone else etc, but this way at least there is no merge mechanism (that generally knows very little about the ins/outs of the data) which will merge two semantically incompatible fields into one record.

For offline-first, the user would be alerted that someone changed the record(s) while you changed them as well and ask what to do. In attempts to make these things for an offline first healthcare app which is mostly structured records based, I found that it is very rare for 2 (or more) to work on the same data, but I guess it really depends on the use case and with unstructured data it's not a nice way of working.
by ramonverse | 2025-04-04 09:31:53+00:00
> Not because analysts are getting lazy, but because AI is making the job feel easier than it actually is.

But all the examples feel like people are being really lazy, e.g.

> Paste the image into the AI tool, read the suggested location, and move on.

> Ask Gemini, “Who runs this domain?” and accept the top-line answer.
by almusdives | 2025-04-04 09:32:38+00:00
Over the last few years, I’ve been working on Zyme, an esoteric language for genetic programming: creating computer programs by means of natural selection. I’ve started seeing promising results, showing that random bytecode mutations can, over time, lead to measurable improvements in program performance. While still a long way from state-of-the-art approaches like neural networks, I wanted to share my progress in a blog post.

Feedback and criticism are welcome!
by frenchmajesty | 2025-04-04 09:34:44+00:00
You make a good point. The shrinking headcount is not necessarily tied to mass-firing. It's more likely tied to +10M newly trained engineers entering the job market every year, but only 50 positions being opened.

Over time, with each recessions, headcount will shrink at some companies, and will not grow back to pre prior levels. Over time, the line trends downwards
by palata | 2025-04-04 09:35:09+00:00
> due to overly complex regulations such as GDPR, there are no EU-based alternatives to speak of

You're talking specifically about AWS competitors, right? I don't think it's related to GDPR. It's really that everybody uses AWS. Would you say that Canada doesn't have a competitor to AWS because of their regulations, too?

Regulations like the GDPR precisely try to give incentives for competitors. Which is hard to do because people/companies fight to use the US solutions and don't care about privacy, just convenience.
by nottorp | 2025-04-04 09:35:50+00:00
The "AI" are useful for one thing. I had no idea what functions to use to scan a directory in a native C++ Windows application. Nor that they introduced an abstraction in C++ 2017?. They all work the same (needless fs access should be avoided no matter the OS) but it did give me the names*.

Stuff that google search from 10 years ago would have done without pretending it's "AI". But not google search from this year.

* it wasn't able to simply list the fields of the returned structure that contained a directory entry. But since it gave me the name, i was able to look it up via plain search.
by soneca | 2025-04-04 09:36:08+00:00
I wonder if really great stuff are always for a minority. You have to have listened a lot of classical music to notice a great interpretation of Mozart from a good one. To realize how great was a chess move, how magical was a soccer play, how deep was the writing of a philosopher. Not only for stuff that requires previous effort, but also the subjectiveness of art. Picasso will be really moving for a minority of people. The Godfather. Even Shakespeare.

Social media and generative AI may be good business because the capture the attention of the majority, but maybe they are not valuable to anyone.
by onetoo | 2025-04-04 09:37:53+00:00
> Even more annoying is that I have to duplicate the iterator code: as I often work with frames that may be flipped bottom-up I want to write code like > > let mut iterator = if !flipped { > data.chunks_mut(stride) > } else { > data.chunks_mut(stride).rev() > }; > for line in iterator { ... } > > but I can’t since objects have different type (and probably size) and there’s no realistic way to coerce them to the same interface.

For this specific case there is a relatively ergonomic solution using dynamic trait objects + temporary lifetime extensions, available since Rust 1.79:

let iterator: &mut dyn Iterator<Item = _> = if !flipped { &mut data.into_iter() } else { &mut data.into_iter().rev() }; for line in iterator { ... }

Alternatively, if this is not a feasible solution (e.g. we want to return the new iterator to an outer scope, or the overhead of dyn indirection is unacceptable in this context), one can consider using itertools::Either instead:

use itertools::Either; fn conditionally_flip_iter<I: DoubleEndedIterator>( data: I, flipped: bool, ) -> impl Iterator<Item = I::Item> { if !flipped { Either::Left(data.into_iter()) } else { Either::Right(data.into_iter().rev()) } } // ... let mut iterator = conditionally_flip_iter(data, flipped); for line in iterator { ... }
by weinzierl | 2025-04-04 09:38:21+00:00
Many years ago I tried to order a t-shirt with the postscript tiger on the front from Spreadshirt.

It was removed on Copyright claims before I could order one item myself. After some back and forth they restored it for a day and let me buy one item for personal use.

My point is: Doesn't have to be Sony, doesn't have to be a snitch - overzealous anticipatory obedience by the shop might have been enough.
by fc417fc802 | 2025-04-04 09:40:02+00:00
I get that. I don't condone the behavior of those doing the fingerprinting. But what I'm saying is that the fact that it is possible to fingerprint should in pretty much all cases be viewed as a sort of vulnerability.

It isn't necessarily a critical vulnerability. But it is a problem on some level nonetheless. To the extent possible you should not be leaking information that you did not intend to share.

A protocol that can be fingerprinted is similar to a water pipe with a pinhole leak. It still works, it isn't (necessarily) catastrophic, but it definitely would be better if it wasn't leaking.
by 4ad | 2025-04-04 09:40:19+00:00
Hyperscaler companies or the TOP500 don't need high reliability, especially the latter.

With cloud computing reliability is achieved through software, distributed software which needs to be horizontal.

On a mainframe reliability is achieved through hardware (at least as fast as user software is concerned), and the software is vertical.

If you need to run vertical, single-system image software, the cloud is useless for making it reliable.

Systems built on the cloud are reliable only insofar as people can write reliable distributed systems which assume components will fail. It is not reliable if you can't, or don't want to write software like that (which carries a significant engineering cost).

The real reason to avoid mainframes (and VMS) is vendor lock-in, not technological.
by robertlagrant | 2025-04-04 09:40:22+00:00
> What's remarkable is that the cost of software companies will rise dramatically simply because cost of laptops, office chairs, tables, electric cables will rise.

I think this is incredibly unremarkable. These are all fixed costs. It's variable costs, like wages and fuel, that drive everything up. If a table costs twice as much you might buy a slightly lower quality table, or you might be fine.
by lm28469 | 2025-04-04 09:40:45+00:00
> Slowdown"/somewhat more aligned world is still pretty rough for humans: What's the point of our existence if we have no way to meaningfully contribute to our own world?

We spend the best 40 years of our lives working 40-50 hours a week to enrich the top 0.1% while living in completely artificial cities. People should wonder what is the point of our current system instead of worrying about Terminator tier sci fi system that may or may not come sometimes in the next 5 to 200 years
by SapporoChris | 2025-04-04 09:42:48+00:00
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16569567/ Conclusions: Intercessory prayer itself had no effect on complication-free recovery from CABG, but certainty of receiving intercessory prayer was associated with a higher incidence of complications.

However, in my search I also found studies that showed prayer to be effective.
by jdietrich | 2025-04-04 09:43:18+00:00
It's reasonably well established that large neural networks don't contain copies of the training data, therefore their outputs can't be considered copies of anything. The model might contain a conceptual representation of Harrison Ford's face, but that's very different to a verbatim representation of a particular copyrighted image of Harrison Ford. Model weights aren't copyrightable; it's plausible that model outputs aren't copyrightable, but there are some fairly complicated arguments around authorship. Training an AI model on copyrighted work is highly likely to be fair use under US law, but plausibly isn't fair dealing under British law or a permitted use under Article 5 of the EU Copyright and Information Society Directive.

All of that is entirely separate from trademark law, which would prevent you from using any representation of a trademarked character unless e.g. you can reasonably argue that you are engaged in parody.
by rich_sasha | 2025-04-04 09:43:58+00:00
IIRC he stepped down because he thought it's a good feature and people pointlessly moaned about it. Not because he thought it's controversial and has enough.

I used it a small handful of times. But it also seems like quite a source of footguns. Many examples here: https://github.com/satwikkansal/wtfpython rely on the misuse of the walrus operator.
by kotaKat | 2025-04-04 09:44:07+00:00
> There’s no need to discard the language of the mainframe—it’s part of the platform’s strength. But we do need to be deliberate about how we teach it. Too often, explanations stop at “what” something is, without digging into “why” it matters.

That's even assuming you got an explanation in the first place that wasn't an "ask your systems programmer" or some other high level administrative gatekeeping cabal of the greybeard operator that is too scared of a new kid on the block wanting to learn how to IPL metal from scratch. That's scared me mostly away from working with most of this. I don't want to learn the code per se -- I want to work with the metal.
by pjmlp | 2025-04-04 09:44:38+00:00
HN is mostly formed by the UNIX culture that you get at many startups since the turn of century, hence why.

If anything is a good reflection of what I keep referring to you about the Microsoft image outside the traditional Microsoft shops, that posts from .NET team on social networks about how much performance is possible nowadays with .NET won't change.

Working on a polyglot agency with lots of such clients, I get to handle this problem on routinely basis.

And why another approach to market .NET is required instead of boasting about TechEmpower results.
by scotty79 | 2025-04-04 09:44:58+00:00
I think the idea of AI wiping out humanity suddenly is a bit far fetched. AI will have total control of human relationships and fertility through means so innocuous as entertainment. It won't have to wipe us. It will have minor trouble keeping us alive without inconveniencing us too much. And the reason to keep humanity alive is that biologically eveloved intelligence is rare and disposing of it without very important need would be a waste of data.
by zozbot234 | 2025-04-04 09:45:26+00:00
> And now most of those hobbists are going back to commercial licenses

It seems to be specifically the "hobbyists" that are also taking VC investment money for their "hobby project". It's pretty clear what's driving these decisions: VC's are not okay with a bootstrapped, penny-pinching business focusing on specialized support or custom development (which is the successful RedHat model), they want an early chance at really outsized returns.
by greatgib | 2025-04-04 09:45:29+00:00
Basically a little bit yes. Especially for an entity located in US and with strong links to the basic government.

But in the case of secure boot, this is worse, because Microsoft is just a "software" editor. But its root certificate and probably a few random others are distributed in countless of devices produced by manufacturers unrelated to them, but also, a few number of software distributors will also have subkeys to be able to sign their os/software. All of that, with zero transparency.

And in the end, if I buy a Lenovo laptop, to have Linux OS running on it, there is no reason and no trust to have my OS be signed by Microsoft, that has the key to run whatever they want on my laptop. Think about it and you will see that it makes no sense at all, if you don't trust Microsoft for your OS, to have to trust them for ensuring a secure boot...
by breppp | 2025-04-04 09:47:06+00:00
talk about zero nuance, people here started comparing to concentration camps, and now you are at death camps

just a quick reminder, the ghettos which had far better living conditions than concentration camps (not death camps), had people living on 180 calories a day and ended with more than a half a million dead

so please, proportions, this is an insult to history
by metalman | 2025-04-04 09:47:16+00:00
Missreading my emphasis.....Globisation ....I thought....refered to the creaping take over of "multinational" corporations consolodating whole industrys under one companys rule....locking out small businesses...like mine so ending the competion that realy boils down to makeing it easyer for BTB to buy from the giant multi national, but use my(and other) small businesses just to get that 3'rd quote, with no intent to purchase from me, is a good thing The supposed efficiencies in "economys of scale" are false, and wink wink, refer to the efficiency of extracting profits from a captured market, rather that the localisation of economys, which actualy stregthen comunitys. Problem with trump, is that, some of what he is doing, resonates strongly with actual local comunities, and the possitive effects there, could be quick and profound.Underestimating this, is a big mistake, if you are opposed to his other, shall we say......initiatives.
by johnnyanmac | 2025-04-04 09:48:33+00:00
>This isn’t hypothetical. This is happening now, in real-world workflows.

Yes, thars a part of why AI has its bad rep. It has uses to streamline workflow but people are treating it like an oracle. When it very very very clearly is not.

Worse yet, people are just being lazy with it. It's the equi talent of googling a topic and pasting the lede of the Wikipedia article. Which is tasteless, but still likely to be more right than an unfiltered LLM output
by pjmlp | 2025-04-04 09:48:51+00:00
Back in the day that letter was relevant we used to sell little tools via ads on magazines like BYTE, Dr Dobbs Journal and co, occasionally get nice money out of it.

Also in the early BSD/Linux days, there were distributors like Walnut Creek, Amiga had Fish Disks, and so forth, some money could eventually go back to tool writers.

It isn't only about VC money.
by felix-h | 2025-04-04 09:49:01+00:00
Taskwise | Senior Full-Stack Engineer | Berlin, Germany | REMOTE (CET) | Full-time

With Taskwise we aim to disrupt the services industry. We are applying AI to make complex services bookable and eliminate the need for onsite appointments.

We are looking for a senior engineer with at least five years of full stack experience, a strong focus on product and UX, and optionally some experience building LLM based products. Currently we are focussed on building tooling that enables us to capture domain knowledge from experts to streamline prompt creation and evaluation. Our tech stack is Typescript, React, Next.js and Tailwind. On the backend we use Drizzle with Neon, deployed and monitored via Vercel. We have pre-seed funding from a major US VC and are experienced founders. You’ll be working alongside the founders (ex-Apple, ex-Airbnb, ex-Tulip, ex-Tourlane) and will have a chance to shape the company, product and of course the engineering culture.

Apply here: https://taskwise.jobs.personio.com/job/1646275
by zipmapfoldright | 2025-04-04 09:50:47+00:00
I think of a lot of thing in terms of distributions, and I think the how-much-people-value-quality distribution is not that much different.

On the right side, you have the minority of connoisseurs. And on the left, there is a minority who really don't care at all. And then the middle majority who can tell bad from good, but not good from great.
by StopDisinfo910 | 2025-04-04 09:50:49+00:00
I think you are deeply disconnected from manufacturing if you think most of the companies in the value chain have CEO making millions.

Most of the intermediaries are SME. Despite what you might believe from the media, SMEs are the heart of the economy for most actual people. Their share of jobs is far higher than their impact on GDP and they have neither the means nor the know how to optimise their supply chain like large corporations.

Most SMEs CEO earn less than a software engineer. There is absolutely no way they can take the hit without passing it to customers.
by mcv | 2025-04-04 09:50:55+00:00
You can never get everything you want. Most programming jobs in NL don't pay much more than this. If you want to get paid what you're really worth, you need to work as a freelancer, but the tax service has just ruined that market.

And the advantage of this job is that I know I'll be working on things I love, they really want and appreciate me (if financially not quite as much as I'd like), and maybe I can push for change from the inside. Or maybe I'll leave once the freelance market picks up again. It's not like I'll be married to them.
by zozbot234 | 2025-04-04 09:51:18+00:00
> It was like stepping into the future.

More like stepping into the past with things that the Mac, Amiga and NeXT machines could do out-of-the-box in the late 1980s and early 1990s. I mean, 8.3 file names? Seriously? Who thought that these could be "user friendly"?