MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by treetalker | 2025-04-30 22:03:09+00:00
Surprisingly true-to-life situations:

> Aline, a young art student, is sketching in the Jardin du Luxembourg in Paris. An older gentleman, Monsieur Dubois, a retired professor of literature, notices her work and strikes up a conversation.

>> Pardon, Mademoiselle, mais vous avez un coup de crayon absolument magnifique. Vous êtes étudiante aux Beaux-Arts, peut-être?

Older literature professor hits on young female art student — very French! ;-)
by Ygg2 | 2025-04-30 22:03:10+00:00
> Also, there’s a huge difference between beginners not understanding 0-based indexing and experienced C++ engineers describing the challenges understanding Rust’s unique features

Keep in mind I wasn't new to programming at that point. I was programming in C64 basic for 3 years and Pascal for 3 as well. For hobby of course, and not fully.

Zero indexes aren't simple, they are intertwined everywhere but they are easy - as in familiar.

What experienced C++ devs in Rust are not much different than experienced Pascal devs in C. Lost. And having to rethread semi-familiar grounds.

---

And I described you my own. I don't fight the borrow checker. I just intuitively know how it works and what to avoid.

If you think just subtracting one or adding one is enough, there should be an easy enough way to test if it is. In Veritasium video they mention that having glasses that turn your vision upside down will cause confusion at first, but you will get used to them quickly.

What you could do is take a language that has arbitrary starting index value and set it to something weird. Like 42 or -5. Then rewrite your programs. See how many off by 41 errors you make. Then once you no longer make mistakes with it. Go back to 0 indexes.
by Tallain | 2025-04-30 22:03:40+00:00
That also sounds super fun. I love it when things get hyper-specific like that. If you ever need a beta reader, let me know.

I use a mix of things. For a long time I used vim with some plugins to emulate iA Writer, along with vimwiki for general notes. Now I use Obsidian for notes (general stuff like character bios, tags, ways to track relationships, worldbuilding stuff).

I use iA Writer for a quick outline and first draft because it's simple and distraction-free, and I like its focus mode. Again this can be done with vim, I can send you my .vimrc if you're curious. I just wanted to support the company.

Once the first draft is done, I spin up Scrivener. I put in the notes from the outline into the corkboard view, then paste the draft. I read through it front to back and take notes, usually in iA where the outline was. Then I create a new version of each doc, one by one, and do line edits or rewrites where I see fit. Sometimes I rewrite something wholesale, or split it into multiple scenes, or delete completely.

Scrivener is very handy for this type of work, especially with the corkboard view, which lets you slide things around and see a story from a higher level than headlines or chapter / scene titles would.

I know Scrivener has a focus mode, but I use iA specifically to remove distractions. If I have Scrivener open, I'm tempted to fiddle with things in its UI, or try to take that high-level view too early. iA is for drafting because drafting is supposed to be a single-minded enterprise. There's no room for second thoughts and any loss of momentum kills a story for me.
by dimal | 2025-04-30 22:04:57+00:00
> Shareholders are not the all and everything of a company.

I agree with you. But what you or I think doesn't matter.

> This is how the whole system is supposed to work.

My point is that our current form of capitalism is designed to work this way, but there's no requirement that capitalism must work this way. This is just the toxic form of market economy that we ended up with.
by JohnFen | 2025-04-30 22:05:02+00:00
I think it will make us dumber.

The reason that I think this is because it seems that all of the thinking-enhancement tech we've developed through history seems to have had that effect. They may be amplifiers society-wide (although I think that's a debatable assertion), but it's a different story individually.

> knowledge/productivity boost

That might be true, but knowledge and productivity are different things than intelligence.
by tuatoru | 2025-04-30 22:05:17+00:00
The cost of Ph. D.s to operate the fusion reactor, vs the cost of associate degrees to operate a fission reactor. Also, the short life and disposable nature of the fusion reactor vessel - most proposals deal with neutrons by ablating lithium from the inside wall of the reactor vessel. And disposal costs, much more radioactive material to be disposed of than with fission, and it can't be reprocessed into fuel either. Also, the ancillary equipment needed for startup, and for operation, is much more expensive.

The list goes on. The more you look, the worse it gets.
by nkurz | 2025-04-30 22:05:22+00:00
The numbers you are suggesting do indeed seem reasonable, and if those were the overheads being used, they would probably be justified. But I think current overheads are often much higher. Here for example is a recent article saying that the proposed 15% cap on overhead for NIH grants would be disastrous for universities like Harvard that currently have a 69% negotiated overhead rate: https://deliprao.substack.com/p/understanding-nihs-15-overhe...

To be fair, I'm not sure if that author is using the same definition that you are. In the article, they clarify that a 69% rate means that a $1,000,000 grant has an extra $690,000 paid to Harvard. Still, the idea that the rates should be the same for all institutions and should be closer to the numbers you remember certainly seems worth considering.
by godelski | 2025-04-30 22:06:41+00:00
> Bounded to...a model trained on virtually all publicly available text ever generated by humans

Don't forget there's a lot of non-public data too!

I don't disagree, but my point is that some bound is better than no bound. I think we can certainly agree that there are even better bounds than others. Obviously we won't ever have a full equal comparison, but I think the bounds do allow for some insights to be gained. We just need to be cautious that those insights consider those bounds (I believe we both are cautious about what insights can be gained. If you doubt me, see my other comments. I do push back on OP pretty hard)

> unless they're turning up data from after the model was trained.

Only under the condition that the models perform lossless compression of all data trained on. If the compression is lossy, then search will reduce that loss.
by faefox | 2025-04-30 22:07:28+00:00
Yeah. Trump 1.0 had a lot of the same mindless flailing but I think a lot of folks were prepared to write it off as an aberration. For him to be reelected after everything (and I mean everything) shows the world that, no, it really is true that a considerable segment of the American populace will gleefully burn it all down as long as they can totally own the libs along the way.
Ask HN: How Would You Break into the Market as a New Grad Today?
by broke_engineer | 2025-04-30 22:07:30+00:00
Hi HN,

If there is an answer, I'm sure I'll find it here.

A bit of context: I recently graduated as a Security Engineer. I've done two internships—one focused on pentesting with a team of four, and the other on DevSecOps. I've been searching for a job or internship for the past six months but haven’t landed a single interview yet. During this time, I’ve been working on multiple courses, projects, and reading a few books to sharpen my skills.

My question is: How would YOU do it as a new grad looking to land their first job today?

Any feedback is welcome. Thanks!
by vel0city | 2025-04-30 22:07:37+00:00
Right? Its like a ballpoint pen. A basic commodity. But there's a lot of challenge in manufacturing the tiny balls and the tips to such a high amount of precision to mass produce quality ones cheaply.

Just looking at the diagram of the airbrush, there's a little bit of complexity there in machining all of that good, quickly, and at scale. Lots of little parts to control it which to work well need to have high quality machining.

https://badgerairbrush.com/images/101_Illustration.jpg
Ask HN: How do you escalate a Rippling support case quickly?
by joatmon-snoo | 2025-04-30 22:08:39+00:00
Just got off the phone with my health insurance provider, who told me that Rippling didn't file paperwork on time and that I don't currently have health insurance.

My company's HR has opened a case with them, but I'm not thrilled with how slow Rippling support's turnaround time seems to be.
by phendrenad2 | 2025-04-30 22:09:29+00:00
I miss the freewheeling days of Android apps. You'd find all kinds of apps made by solo devs as a labor of love. Later, Google largely killed those apps by severely downranking them in the play store algorithm, and made searching in the play store "we'll show you what we want to show you, the filters do nothing", but you could still install a secondary app store in CyanogenMod and find those weird and fun apps. Is there any of this left? I've heard that the secondary app stores have fallen into disrepair.
by zaptrem | 2025-04-30 22:09:39+00:00
"New Coke" is one of the most notable failed product launches in the American food and beverage industry, and I feel like some of its core lessons are becoming increasingly relevant to modern AI developers.

For those <40: In the 1980s senior executives at Coca Cola had a problem: Pepsi was gaining ground, partly thanks to the "Pepsi Challenge" - blind sip tests where consumers often preferred Pepsi's sweeter taste. Coke R&D developed a new, sweeter formula that also beat both Pepsi and original Coke in these single-sip taste tests involving many thousands of consumers. Based on this data, they launched "New Coke" in 1985.

The result was a legendary disaster. Outrage, protests, hoarding of the original formula. The problem was people didn't just sip Coke; they drank whole cans. They also valued the brand, the history and the familiarity - factors the narrow taste tests completely missed. Within months, "Coca-Cola Classic" was back. New Coke production was quietly scaled back in the early 90s, but stuck around in a few markets until the early 00s.

I think AI practitioners are starting to learn the same lesson. We're tuning our models with RLHF/DPO/other preference methods based on similar one-step blind taste tests. Raters pick the "better" response between two options, often optimizing for immediate helpfulness, agreeableness, or perceived safety in that isolated interaction. I think some of the more extreme recent LLM tuning may also be fueled by taste-test-style benchmarks like LMSYS and the Artificial Analysis image leaderboard.

Examples: ChatGPT's most recent update turned it into an overenthusiastic sycophant. Image models (Apple's Image Playground model is a particularly egregious example you can try right now) are frequently preference tuned until every generation looks like something out of a Pixar movie. Certain music models are incapable of generating music that doesn't sound like a 2020s top-40s song.

In all cases, it might taste/sound/look good once, but ultimately people will get sick of it. I work on generative models and I think (at least for our modality, music) the most enduring enjoyment of using them is the element of surprise and delight, which is increasingly being ruined by preference tuning which collapses the distribution of possible outputs.

Are we optimizing away the very qualities that make these models interesting, creative, and truthful in the long run, just to win the immediate "preference" taste test and rank higher in benchmarks? IMO we're witnessing the New Coke of AI.
by dygd | 2025-04-30 22:10:18+00:00
I didn't know what Augment is, so I checked it out. There's absolute no way I'm going to agree to this [0]:

> When you open a workspace with Augment enabled, your codebase will be automatically uploaded to Augment’s secure cloud.

[0] https://docs.augmentcode.com/jetbrains/setup-augment/workspa...
by silisili | 2025-04-30 22:10:34+00:00
I worked at a company that went through this. Honestly, it changed the entire mood of the company and working there. We went from thousands of messages per day to something like 10 (of those channels I was part of, at least). People just hated it, and only used it if they really, really needed to. No more bouncing of ideas around, no more ribbing, just the desperate 'who do I talk to about accomplishing X, anyone know?'

A business owner might conclude 'ah, less time jawing, more time working', but hardly the case. In fact, I think that was a big factor in what ultimately killed the company off a couple years later - through both people literally quitting over it, and a complete breakdown in communication.
by otterley | 2025-04-30 22:10:52+00:00
It's important to understand the context in which these laws and Constitutional amendments were written. They were designed and enacted after the Civil War (in the case of the Fourteenth Amendment) and the 1960s (Civil Rights Act, once we determined the Fourteenth Amendment was insufficient) to prevent Black people from being discriminated against. At the time, nobody, including the authors, considered these laws to be a shield to protect white and Asian people from discrimination. (At that time, there were hardly any Asians in the US anyway.)

So, from the 1960s until recently, the Court allowed universities to consider race in university admissions because it advanced a public policy that sought to improve the lot of Black people: the more Blacks could enter the ranks of the educated elite, the better off they would be in the long run, both socially and economically.

Over time, though, people whose admissions were rejected started to fight back: they felt that academic merit trumped all other considerations. After all, if they got better grades and aptitude test scores, weren't they more deserving of admission? The fights began, and over time, the Court chipped away at the acceptable use of race in admissions. Finally, in SFAA, the Court did away with them altogether.

As far as "pushing the boundaries" is concerned, actors will generally try to do whatever's in their best interest provided it's not illegal. There's no reward for maintaining a wide margin from legal boundaries when there's competition.
by netsharc | 2025-04-30 22:11:21+00:00
It's a party of spineless hypocrites... given the choice of the embarassment, admitting they were wrong, and coming out somewhat ok vs. the choice of supporting a dictatorship that erodes free and fair elections, my pessimism says most Republicans will vote for the latter. As a bonus, they'll get to have Trump-level immunity. Then it'll be a simple email to the businesspeople of the state asking who wants to be an oligarch, start opening your wallets. And for the weekend fun, line up those girls (and boys!) and get grabbin'!
by Zigurd | 2025-04-30 22:12:04+00:00
To me, it looks as if Toyota is hedging their bets. Toyota has made public statements about their view of autonomous vehicle research. Their publicly stated belief is that active safety is their focus. Things like collision avoidance, and mitigation.

On the other hand, Waymo has been at it for about 15 years. The Toyota people are smart enough to know they can't catch up in full autonomy within the next two or three product generations of vehicles.

For their part, Waymo is looking for more vehicle platforms.
by rahimnathwani | 2025-04-30 22:12:23+00:00
I don't have more time to spend on it today, but will join your discord when I do.

Just documenting what I tried and what happened, in case it's helpful to you:

1. Delete all existing docker containers and volumes.

2. git pull

3. Add this to docker-compose.yml: - OLLAMA_HOST=http://host.docker.internal:11434

4. docker compose up --build

5. Visit localhost:3000/w/

6. Create an account.

7. Enter PIN.

8. Log in.

9. Observe the initial workflow with only the 'Start' block.

10. In the sidebar, click the 'Agent block'.

11. In the newly-created 'Agent' block, choose one of my local (ollama) models.

12. Click 'Run'.

Step 11 works. Step 12 results in a red error message "Workflow execution failed: Invalid block type: undefined {}".
by twothreeone | 2025-04-30 22:12:42+00:00
Relax, that's just words. War starts with weapons. And I would disagree that the US started the trade war. China has been much more aggressive than any other country when it comes to trade policy, certainly more aggressive than the US ever was. Ask literally any company on the planet who wants to do business in China. Or ask the Kenyan's, or Nigerian's about who operates and uses their railways. The only difference is that the Politburo doesn't (openly) discuss its policy. That doesn't mean its actions are hidden, the intention is clear.
by rayiner | 2025-04-30 22:13:11+00:00
> It’s not reasonable to characterize SFFA as a finding of wrongdoing on Harvard’s part

As I understand it, that’s the legal effect of SFFA. SFFA sued Harvard seeking, among other things, a declaratory judgment that Harvard’s admissions policies violate Title VI. The district court ruled, after bench trial, that Harvard didn’t violate Title VI. The Supreme Court didn’t remand for further proceedings, it outright reversed. Meaning that it found that Harvard’s procedures did violate Title VI.

Bad faith or malice aren’t elements of a Title VI violation. And I don’t see any legal reason why an administration couldn’t hold Harvard’s discrimination against students—which happened, even if the Supreme Court changed its mind about whether it was permissible—against Harvard in allocating federal funding.

Moreover, Harvard’s defiant response to SFFA provides a reasonable basis for the administration to believe it has continued to engage in discrimination: https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2023/06/harvard-unite...

Of course, now that Harvard has decided to fight it, the administration will have to prove its belief: https://www.axios.com/2025/04/28/harvard-law-review-trump-ad.... That’s how these enforcement letters always pan out. Many targets fold to avoid litigation. Sometimes, a defendant fights it and the government has to initiate a formal enforcement action.

The DOJ, FDA, FTC, and SEC do stuff like this all the time. These agencies all lean very heavily on the threat of an enforcement action to enforce changes in private behavior without having to actually take entities to court.
by quickthrowman | 2025-04-30 22:13:17+00:00
> So, not inflation adjusted.

All dollar values on that chart are adjusted for inflation.

> Also doesn't capture the mix of what's being produced, i.e., a shift towards only manufacturing high value items versus being more broadly diversified and manufacturing things along a range of price points.

The chart does not capture the trend you speak of, assuming it exists.

> In other words, a complete hollowing out of our manufacturing base.

That’s not how I would put it, if you want to look at it through that lens, it’s your right.

I would say we manufacture things higher up the value chain and use the dollars we earn from making that stuff to import cheaper foreign commodities instead of manufacturing them here and using dollars to buy American made clothes and shoes and other commodity items at a much higher price than we can buy them from other countries.

We also export services and receive dollars in return, this is much more lucrative that manufacturing imo.
by khedoros1 | 2025-04-30 22:15:53+00:00
Awesome, got it running in Dosbox-x on my Pi4...although I have to figure out how to set up MIDI over UART, using a software synth like Timidity or Fluidsynth.

It's a piece of art, both aesthetically and technologically. Beautiful how it fits together. Getting this kind of behavior out of so little code always amazes me.
by Sammi | 2025-04-30 22:17:03+00:00
Of course it shouldn't be everyone's profession. Most people would and do fail miserably as options traders. A tiny minority though does make consistent long term money as option traders. What this tells us is that the qoute is refuted, because we have a counterfactual. There is indeed some rational system to the market that some people are able to figure out.
by foxglacier | 2025-04-30 22:17:44+00:00
Is that how the law works? Because the Civil Rights Act was written with black people in mind, it only applies to black people even though the wording doesn't specify that? Surely it's quite an obvious omission that they would have written down if that's what they'd wanted. Is it a kind of trick law written to make people think other races are protected but due to how laws are interpreted, it was always known not to apply to them?
by dragonwriter | 2025-04-30 22:17:45+00:00
> You also forget that republicans were radically IN FAVOR of civil rights, but wanted the changes at the state level instead of the federal level.

No, they didn't. The Republicans took up the “States Rights” rallying cry of the old Confederacy only after they became the party of the racists, years after the 1964 Civil Rights Act. From the 1866 Civil Rights Act up through and including the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the Republicans were always more supportive of federal action than the Democrats on the issue. Each of the key votes on the 1964 Act (passage of the original version in the House, cloture on the Senate version, passage of the Senate version, concurrence of the House to the Senate version) passed with 80-82% of Republican votes in the respective chamber and 60-69% of Democratic votes. The attempt to pursue the disaffected Democratic white racists, upset about Johnson support for the bill, is what distinguished the 1964 Act from earlier conflicts over segregation that had split the same faction off the Democratic Party temporarily, but not permanently when they found no other (major party) place to go, and couldn't form their own competitive major party. And that was the second phase of the long 1930s-1990s overlapping realignment.

LBJ wasn't a civil rights “pioneer”. He was just the Democratic President that opened the opportunity for the Republicans to steal the most dedicated racists away from the Democrats as a constituency by not seeing his personal bias as a reason to block equal rights as public policy. And all Republicans had to do to win this prize was give up on the concept of equality, under the same rallying cry pro-slavery forces before the civil war, and anti-civil-rights forces from the day the war ended, had always used.
by analog31 | 2025-04-30 22:18:09+00:00
The Republicans successfully turned economic issues into social ones. Previously, immigrants were stealing our jobs. Now they're stealing our cats.

The three pillars of the Republican party were conservatism, religion, and race. I'm not saying every R is concerned about all 3 of these, but that they couldn't win elections without all 3 of them. Over the past 50 years, traditional conservatism has been hard pressed to explain itself to the working class in light of the rising prosperity of liberal democracies, and has become further detached from reality. People are becoming less religious, and more racially diverse. I think the R's realized that they were running out of runway, and also figured out how to exploit nearly 100% dominance over the "new" media.