MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mrguyorama | 2025-04-24 17:23:36+00:00
>If you determine a Tesla is the best car to fit your needs, there are far better ways to influence Elon's actions than depriving yourself of the best car for you.

As if "having the best car for you" is some sort of moral imperative or necessity, as if buying a less luxury vehicle is some sort of unthinkable option.

>You could write your Senator / Congressperson to support laws that would curtail Elon's actions.

Ah yes, tell the government that supports elon and that elon is part of to simply not do those things. Surely that is a workable option right now!
by chrisco23 | 2025-04-24 17:23:51+00:00
I'm trying to get this to work with ollama. I'm on Arch Linux, fish shell, new to ollama, and only very rarely used pipx. I get:

raise ValueError("OPENAI_BASE_URL and OPENAI_API_KEY must be set. Try running `zev --setup`.") ValueError: OPENAI_BASE_URL and OPENAI_API_KEY must be set. Try running `zev --setup`

even when I run (for example) set -x ZEV_USE_OLLAMA 1; zev 'show all files and all permissions'
by Hansenq | 2025-04-24 17:24:25+00:00
I'm surprised most commenters haven't mentioned that the presence of Tiktok as the biggest reason why Facebook was pushed into this direction.

Ben Thompson of Stratechery did a great deep dive into Facebook's Three Eras here (https://stratechery.com/2025/meta-v-ftc-the-three-facebook-e...). Essentially, Meta could afford to prioritize positive well-being when it had a monopoly on social media, but as soon as Tiktok came onto the scene and Meta started bleeding users to it, they had to respond. Now, everyone (Instagram, Youtube Shorts, Twitter, LinkedIn) is copying the model of vertical auto-scrolling short-form videos, because it's a battle for attention.

What _was_ Facebook supposed to do when it saw all of its users leave Instagram/Facebook for Tiktok? Not do anything? Though it's terrible that everything is now a short form addicting video platform, I understand the logic behind why the company did what they did (and why everyone is building this). People say they want real connection, but really, they just want to be entertained.
by scarecrowbob | 2025-04-24 17:24:27+00:00
For context, the US has been renditioning folks for my entire life, and likely since the idea of national identity made it a category of treating humans.

If you believe the various books on them (which I am not wholly sure I do but I don't find it unlikely) the CIA has always had sites to where it would pick up foreign nationals and move them, and then torture them or do literally whatever.

That's largely what Guantanamo serves as, if I understand correctly.

Historically (once again, if I understand correctly) that usually this was done for "national security" reasons, which I find to be not much of an excuse for destroying people via extra judicial means.

Now the executive is claiming that deporting folks is an issue of that same national security.

Additionally, they are claiming larger powers to do that kind of thing. And it certainly seems that they would like to do it for masses of people, out loud and in public, and ultimately to folks who have been stripped of citizenship in the same way that they have stripped legitimate green card and visa holders of their legitimate right to be in the country.

To answer your question "Or to put it in simpler english can you imprison someone for life by proxy by deporting them":

yes they have always done that (regardless of the legality of that action) and yes it is becoming a more overt attempt to terrify those of us who dissent or who aren't able to conform to their political ideology.
by hamilton | 2025-04-24 17:24:35+00:00
Obviously one advantage of SQL is everyone knows it. But conceptually, I agree. I think [1]Malloy is also doing some really fantastic work in this area.

This is one of the reasons I'm excited about DuckDB's upcoming [2]PEG parser. If they can pull it off, we could have alternative dialects that run on DuckDB.

[1] https://www.malloydata.dev/ [2] https://duckdb.org/2024/11/22/runtime-extensible-parsers.htm...
by frabonacci | 2025-04-24 17:24:45+00:00
Thank you! If you're looking for a Docker alternative to something like e2b, we're planning to ship a containerized version of c/ua that also handles VNC and model hosting. Right now we're using the Lume CLI (https://github.com/trycua/cua/tree/main/libs/lume) with an API server on the host as a lightweight alternative, but the Docker setup will make it easier to self-host and extend. Would love to hear what kind of workloads or use cases you had in mind!
by sepositus | 2025-04-24 17:25:26+00:00
> Too distracted by social media and our phones perhaps?

I think this is a significant contributing factor. It's becoming increasingly difficult to have any semblance of a meaningful conversation with those around me. I don't really know how to describe it other than an apparent "dumbing down" of the average person. I despise elitists, and I hate to even act in a way that might come off as elitist, but I simply have no other explanation for what I am seeing. People just want to talk about the latest trend on TikTok and have no interest in applying anything close to intellectual thought to what's happening around them.
by fidotron | 2025-04-24 17:25:33+00:00
I didn't think Huawei had released a certified Android device in many years now, as I don't believe Google would be allowed to act as a supplier to them even if they wanted to.

Back around the Nexus 6P they probably got an exception as Google tried to promote more competition for what was rapidly turning into a Samsungopoly. Samsung later themselves negotiated a position where they could make other changes in ways Google didn't approve of, and that was by leveraging the threat of going all-in on Tizen.
by apercu | 2025-04-24 17:25:33+00:00
A (plant) nursery, a library, elections are all stuff that I've considered.

Thanks for reinforcing the library thing (I live in a somewhat rural area so maybe different issues there).

I've also thought about machine operating in landscaping (I know how to run a tractor and a skid steer so I think I would pick up an excavator pretty quickly) but I worry they won't want a part-timer.
by LegionMammal978 | 2025-04-24 17:25:57+00:00
> Another interesting alternative is SIMT. Instead of having a handful of special-case instructions combined with heavyweight software-switched threads, we could have had every instruction SIMDified. It requires structuring programs differently, but getting max performance out of current CPUs already requires SIMD + multicore + predictable branching, so we're doing it anyway, just in a roundabout way.

Is that not where we're already going with the GPGPU trend? The big catch with GPU programming is that many useful routines are irreducibly very branchy (or at least, to an extent that removing branches slows them down unacceptably), and every divergent branch throws out a huge chunk of the GPU's performance. So you retain a traditional CPU to run all your branchy code, but you run into memory-bandwidth woes between the CPU and GPU.

It's generally the exception instead of the rule when you have a big block of data elements upfront that can all be handled uniformly with no branching. These usually have to do with graphics, physical simulation, etc., which is why the SIMT model was popularized by GPUs.
by ndiddy | 2025-04-24 17:26:09+00:00
Again I see no purpose in doing things this way besides trying to minimize the amount of people who look at your GPL code for some reason. Isn't it more annoying for the company to make someone in customer support read paper letters, burn the GPL package onto a CD-R, and mail it than it is to simply host the GPL package for each product on a support site or Github or something and include a link in the product documentation?
by singingboyo | 2025-04-24 17:26:26+00:00
Physical thank you cards are pretty dead. I don't even keep track of mailing addresses for a number of my friends (and a couple siblings, come to think of it) - how would I send them a physical card?

Even older relatives - we sent a physical gift a bit ago, but the response/thanks was by text. It just doesn't make sense to send a letter, have it take a week, never know whether it got lost, etc.
by simonw | 2025-04-24 17:26:34+00:00
Hard disagree.

I've been an engineering manager and it's a lot easier to make useful decisions that your team find credible if you can keep your toes in the water just a little bit.

My golden rule is to stay out of the critical path of shipping a user-facing feature: if a product misses a deadline because the engineering manager slipped on their coding commitments, that's bad.

The trick is to use your minimal coding time for things that are outside of that critical path: internal tools, prototypes, helping review code to get people unstuck, that kind of thing.
by mrandish | 2025-04-24 17:26:59+00:00
I recently learned that the IBM Z series mainframes are generally compatible with software written for the legendary IBM 360 launched in 1964. While I'm sure there are caveats, maintaining any backward compatibility with a platform from over 60 years ago is impressive.

Having started in 8-bit microcomputers and progressing to various desktop platforms and servers, mainframes were esoteric hulking beasts that were fascinating but remained mysterious to me. In recent years I've started expanding my appreciation of classic mainframes and minis through reading blogs and retro history. This IEEE retrospective on the creation of the IBM 360 was eye-opening. https://spectrum.ieee.org/building-the-system360-mainframe-n...

Having read pretty deeply on the evolution of early computers from the ENIAC era through Whirlwind, CDC, early Cray and DEC, I was familiar with the broad strokes but I never fully appreciated how much the IBM 360 was a major step change in both software and hardware architecture. It's also a dramatic story because it's rare for a decades-old company as successful and massive as IBM to take such a huge "bet the company" risk. The sheer size and breadth of the 360 effort as well as its long-term success profoundly impacted the future of computing. It's interesting seeing how architectural concepts from the 360 (as well as DEC's popular PDP-8, 10 and 11) went on to influence the design of early CPUs and microcomputers. The engineers and hobbyists creating early micros had learned computers in the late 60s and early 70s mostly on the 360s and PDPs which were ubiquitous in universities.
by caseyy | 2025-04-24 17:27:05+00:00
> Yeah, just like a turd is a piece of gourmet food if there is no other good food around.

I didn't mean it's on a continuum, as you assumed. Apologies for phrasing it unclearly. I meant that the weights are public. They are open; there is no debate to be had about it. Generally and broadly, that is already considered open-source.

And we all understand what "open-source" means in the context of Llama - it doesn't mean one of the idealized notions of open source, it means open weights.
by int_19h | 2025-04-24 17:27:27+00:00
This difference is because smaller organizations are less of an entity in their own right, and more of an actual group of people doing things together (even if legally the company might still be a separate entity).

As organizations grow, they become more than a mere sum of its parts. It seems to be an emergent phenomenon driven by complexity - as humans interact, this very interaction creates something resembling an entity in its own right past a certain scale, with its own agenda (distinct from individual agendas of its constituent humans) and drive for self-preservation as a whole - the egregore that you mentioned. My pet theory is that this starts to happen when you scale beyond the Dunbar number, but the effect is only obvious at scales where most members of the organization are faceless strangers to each other.

Either way, this emergent entity is decidedly amoral.
by oytis | 2025-04-24 17:27:40+00:00
At least in a liberal society humans matter. Their opinions, judgements, tastes matter. Why should "opinion" (which is not even a real opinion) of a machine matter?

Not to say that we validate whether to trust an opinion of a human expert by them being able to deliver measurably correct judgements, the same thing LLM seem to be not good at.
by Tijdreiziger | 2025-04-24 17:28:04+00:00
Not sure if this works in other countries, but here in the Netherlands, homeless folks can get a postal address at municipal offices. People who move can set up (albeit paid) mail forwarding for up to a year.

Other than that, there’s good old ‘poste restante’, in which you can supposedly address mail to any post office and they’ll hold it for the recipient (even internationally), although I’ve never tried this.

(I appreciate that not everyone may actually know about these options, though.)
by gwern | 2025-04-24 17:28:20+00:00
> How many examples does OpenAI train on now that are just variants of counting the Rs in strawberry?

Well, that's easy: zero.

Because even a single training example would 'solved' it by memorizing the simple easy answer within weeks of 'strawberry' first going viral , which was like a year and a half ago at this point - and dozens of minor and major model upgrades since. And yet, the strawberry example kept working for most (all?) of that time.

So you can tell that if anything, OA probably put in extra work to filter all those variants out of the training data...
by tialaramex | 2025-04-24 17:28:27+00:00
If you buy beer "loose" like at a bar it has to be sold in pints. Most people will have seen a "half" and anybody who likes stronger beers or goes to festivals where you taste different ones will know a "third" of a pint is also a legal amount of beer to sell. You would not want to try out a few different 8% stouts if they were sold only in whole pints, unless they're going to make it a multi-day event and provide somewhere for you to sleep it off.

Milk is also allowed to be sold in pints, traditionally glass bottle re-usable milk bottles were one pint.

It is also usual (but not legal) to sell a pint or a half of various soft drinks, in theory you should be sold these in some other way, I always say "large" or "small" but in practice ordinary people say "pint" and after all the staff will probably more or less fill a pint glass so, whatever.

Spirits (e.g. gin) are measured in either 25ml or 35ml shots. An establishment can choose either, post which one they picked and use that consistently. Why two seemingly unrelated sizes? Well, historically there were two different non-metric sizes permitted in law, and when the government legislated to make these SI units there were lobbyists demanding they allow this to continue despite the opportunity to rationalize.

As in the US, containers you purchase in a store are labelled, but here the labels must prominently show SI volume units and EU-style value metrics are required on shelf markings, so e.g. 10p per 100ml of Coke is a good price, maybe the Pepsi is on a deal for 9.5p per 100ml, the store's terrible own brand is 5p per 100ml. This EU strategy prevents people screwing with sizes to make you think you're getting a better deal, that cheaper bottle may look like a good idea but hey, it's 18p per 100ml, ah, it's slimmer in the middle which makes it actually much smaller than it looks.
by asdff | 2025-04-24 17:28:40+00:00
The issue with programming is that it isn't like music or really any other skill where you get feedback right away and operate in a well understood environment. And a lot of patterns are not well designed as they are often based on what a single developer things the behavior ought to be instead of something more deterministic like the laws of physics that influence the cord patterns we use in music.

Nope, your code might look excellent. Why the hell isn't it running though? Three hours later you find you added a b when you closed your editor somewhere in the code in a way your linter didn't pick up and the traceback isn't clear about, maybe you broke some all important regex, it doesn't matter. One second, it's fixed, and you just want to throw the laptop out the window and never work on this project again. So god damned stupid.

And other things are frusterating too. Open a space deliminated python file, god forbid you add a tab without thinking. And what is crazy about that is if the linter is smart enough to say "hey you put a tab here instead of spaces for indent" then why does it even throw the error and not just accept both spaces and tabs? Just another frustration.

Really I would love to just go at it, write code, type, fly, be in the flow state, like one does building something with the hands or making music or doing anything in the physical world. But no. Constant whack a mole. Constantly hitting the brakes. Constant blockers. How long will this take to implement? I have no fucking idea man, could be 5 seconds or 5 weeks and you don't often know until you spend the 5 seconds and see that didn't do it yet.
by eth0up | 2025-04-24 17:28:44+00:00
Fascinating. I intend to do some research on this, but if you're aware of any methods or protocols to retrain the system for increased motility in absence of fiber, drop a link. I'm pretty sure that an abrupt change would not work well for one adapted to fiber and observe such every time the situation arises. Probiotics and physical activity don't affect this for me.

Edit: I see that the report did pretty much exactly what I say doesn't work. This is confusing when considered through my own experience. Definitely interesting though.
by int_19h | 2025-04-24 17:29:05+00:00
The difference is that in a small company, it's the owner who is abusing you (or not). It's all down to the qualities of the person itself.

In a large company, it happens regardless of the qualities of the people involve, because it's baked into the processes. Good-natured people can mitigate it to some extent, but they cannot prevent it.
by ang_cire | 2025-04-24 17:29:08+00:00
I love this detailed discussion of how people are actually using LLMs for coding, and I think this rarely happens in professional spaces currently.

I do see more people who seem to be using it to replace coding skill rather than augment it, and I do worry about management's ability to differentiate between those versus just reverting to LoC. And whether it will become a demand for more code, for the same pay.
by conartist6 | 2025-04-24 17:29:45+00:00
I don't know what industry your company is in, but godspeed to your CEO on tanking your company with AI bullshit so that this stupid f**ing bubble pops and everyone can go back to thinking carefully using their brain instead of working on better serving Roko's Basilisk.

Couldn't be more excited for this kind of short-sighted, AI-instead-of-people thinking to become shameful. How many people need to aim the gun at their foot and pull the trigger before they're not bragging as they do it?
by Twirrim | 2025-04-24 17:30:04+00:00
Likewise, Facebook has become spectacularly useless for me. I've missed important moments in friend's lives for several days because Facebook has decided that shoving random fan pages and adverts are what I actually want to see.

A friend's dad died and I didn't know for 5 days. He was busy dealing with everything that comes with such a major life event, posted it to facebook assuming that would be an effective way to communicate it.
by qntmfred | 2025-04-24 17:30:19+00:00
relatedly - what are y'all using to manage your personal collection of prompts?

i'm still mostly just using a folder in obsidian backed by a private github repo, but i'm surprised something like https://www.prompthub.us/ hasn't taken off yet.

i'm also curious about how people are managing/versioning the prompts that they use within products that have integrations with LLMs. it's essentially product configuration metadata so I suppose you could just dump it in a plaintext/markdown file within the codebase, or put it in a database if you need to be able to tweak prompts without having to do a deployment or do things like A/B testing or customer segmentation
by timewizard | 2025-04-24 17:30:24+00:00
It depends on how full those drawers are. $250k to $1m would be the typical price range.

It's easier and harder at the same time to buy older hardware. That's half the challenge though because the software is strictly licensed and you pay per MIPS.

Here's a kid who bought a mainframe and then brought it up:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=45X4VP8CGtk
by IsraCV | 2025-04-24 17:30:31+00:00
In 2020, I lost my company.

In 2024, I realized the problem we had struggled with for almost 10 years… was still there.

That’s why we’re building Neuraan.

This is a story about costly mistakes, hard-earned lessons, and why the real challenge of AI isn’t the technology—it’s integrating it with the real world.
by scarecrowbob | 2025-04-24 17:30:39+00:00
Eh, I see this claim that he's smart and or competent.

I think he just doesn't care for norms which gives him a much easier time in operating the mechanisms of power. That doesn't make him smart or skilled. Previous folks did it with a great deal more skill, leaving far fewer impressions that they were criminals. Half the country seems to have forgotten how easily they supported the illegal invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan- that was skill and smarts to make folks believe those were okay actions. As much as I hate him, Papa Bush would have used the CIA to murder this fool and everyone would have cheered.

Any idiot can extract gallstones if they don't care about killing the patient.
by bsnnkv | 2025-04-24 17:30:56+00:00
Switch flip after I was unceremoniously laid off from a Series C (now D) company (along with 25% of my fellow comrade workers) that I went many extra miles, many times, to stop from going under between Seed - Series C.

I'm still what people refer to as a "10xer" (though I don't like this term) when it comes to my own projects[1], but at this point if an employer wants this kind of quality from me, they'd need to x10 whatever initial salary offer they present me with.

Besides my own software projects, I now put the extra brain power into music, dance, videography, editing etc., and life is good.

[1]: https://github.com/LGUG2Z/komorebi
by MomsAVoxell | 2025-04-24 17:32:25+00:00
I still have my nanowire, received directly from Grace herself during one of her last lectures I attended in the 80’s.

Of course, it’s in among about a thousand other wires and cables and nonsense.

One of these days I should sort it out and try to identify it by length.

She had a very firm handshake, and a very definite glint in her eye as she handed those out to her star struck fans ..
by josh2600 | 2025-04-24 17:32:27+00:00
I came here to write this exact response.

Folks work in mission driven organizations. In organizations that are optimizing for dollars you see quality fall by the wayside.

Mission driven organizations that understand the levers of capital are the most enjoyable workplaces of my career.

You want a CEO who is customer obsessed, not a CEO who is maximizing for dollars in the bank at all costs.

It has to be mission first for a startup to be great, really for any critical endeavor.
by rootnod3 | 2025-04-24 17:33:23+00:00
Among the plethora of strong suits that Common Lisp brings along, the live coding is hands down the best part of it. There is just no better way to experience programming than that.

Sure, the condition system is awesome, CLOS is next to nothing, but the live coding just wins al the way. All the other aspects are just icing on the cake for me.