MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by raducu | 2025-04-06 12:24:45+00:00
> people who outsource their thinking to LLMs.

OSINT I immagine would be kind of useless to analize with LLMs because the kind of information you're interested in is very new so not enough sources for the LLMs to regurgitate.

As an example -- I read some defence articles about Romania operating in the future 70 F-16 and it immediately caught my eye because I was expecting in the 40s range. Apparently the Nerherlands will leave those 18 F-16s to Romania -- but I'm not that curious to dig into enough -- I was expecting those would go to Ukraine.

So just for fun I asked the question -- to Gemini 2.5 and Chat gpt -- "How many F-16s will Romania eventually operate" -- they all regurgitated the 40s number. I explicitly asked Gemini about the 18 F-16s from the Nerherlands and it kept its number estimate, saying those are for training purposes.

Only after I explicitly explained it my own knowledge did Gemini google it and confirm it.

Or I asked about the tethered FPVs in Ukraine and it told me those have very little impact. Only after I explicitly mentioned the recent russian successful Kursk counter-offensive did it acknowledge them.
by mike_hearn | 2025-04-06 12:24:49+00:00
They didn't add the restrictions. It's inherent to the training processes that were being used. Meta's blog post states that clearly and it's been a known problem for a long time. The bias is in the datasets, which is why all the models had the same issue.

Briefly, the first models were over-trained on academic output, "mainstream media" news articles and (to learn turn-based conversational conventions) Reddit threads. Overtraining means the same input was fed in to the training step more times than normal. Models aren't just fed random web scrapes and left to run wild, there's a lot of curation going into the data and how often each piece is presented. Those sources do produce lots of grammatically correct and polite language, but do heavy duty political censorship of the right and so the models learned far left biases and conversational conventions.

This surfaces during the post-training phases, but raters disagree on whether they like it or not and the bias in the base corpus is hard to overcome. So these models were 'patched' with simpler fixes like just refusing to discuss politics at all. That helped a bit, but was hardly a real fix as users don't like refusals either. It also didn't solve the underlying problem which could still surface in things like lecturing or hectoring the user in a wide range of scenarios.

Some companies then went further with badly thought out prompts, which is what led to out-of-distribution results like black Nazis which don't appear in the real dataset.

All the big firms have been finding better ways to address this. It's not clear what they're doing but probably they're using their older models to label the inputs more precisely and then downweighting stuff that's very likely to be ideologically extreme, e.g. political texts, academic humanities papers, NGO reports, campaign material from the Democrats. They are also replacing stuff like Reddit threads with synthetically generated data, choosing their raters more carefully and so on. And in this case the Llama prompt instructs the model what not to do. The bias will still be in the training set but not so impactful anymore.
by matthewmacleod | 2025-04-06 12:25:38+00:00
Over my years of hiring and working with other software engineers, I’d say they fall into two key categories:

- Engineers who know how to build apps with a specific set of tools or frameworks and focus on applying this knowledge

- Engineers who know how to model their work in terms of data structures and the algorithms or pipelines being applied to them

The first category can be effective and efficient at applying their knowlege, particularly because of experience and practice with the tools. These are the specialists - the front-ends, the Rails devs, the embedded engineers and so on. They know more about the constraints of their environments.

The second category think more about what they are doing rather than how they are doing it. They are the generalists. They think about React as a functional-ish way to convert state into a DOM tree; they recognise the value and reasons behind various different approaches to development and don’t box themselves in.

I find the second category almost always more effective. That doesn’t mean specialists are without value - you need your embedded engineers to understand that space in depth, for example.

Especially when hiring I like to probe for this during a system design exercise: ask a question and walk through the design of a simple system or pipeline of some kind. If the engineer answers in terms of specific technologies (“I would use Kafka to send gRPC to MongoDB”), they’re usually inflexible. If they answer in terms of techniques and data flows (“I would use a work queue to distribute payloads over the network to backing store databases”) they usually get it.

I reckon changing your mindset a bit can help with the fatigue described in the article. Though I admit I’m as frustrated as anyone else the first time I bring up a new project after a whole an app the tooling has broken and the industry has moved on (looking at you, frontend!)
by niloc132 | 2025-04-06 12:27:08+00:00
I find them vital for side projects - especially if they get set aside for a week/month/year, I sometimes will lose track of assumptions I’ve made or use cases for apis that tests tend to expose.

Sure you can encode all of that as comments, but unless you reread each file when you return from a break, you can’t always trace those thoughts and see where they lead. On the other hand if you “find all references” in your ide or change some implementation so that a test breaks, past-you can save the day with that extra information about what they intended at the time.
by amelius | 2025-04-06 12:29:02+00:00
Yes, perhaps you are right, that's why I was asking about a way to see the error rate. I think it is also a failure of the USB standard then, to allow a transfer to happen if the BER (according to the CRC) is so high.

Glad to see that USB4 is fixing things but one thing I worry about is if this 32 bit CRC is a mandatory part of the standard that cannot be turned off or ignored by manufacturers. Especially since it apparently is not transparent to users.
by UncleMeat | 2025-04-06 12:29:40+00:00
The Trump administration is currently cancelling tons of student visas for international students. A significant reason why the US is the biggest tech hub is because so many people want to come here for undergrad and grad cs programs and then join the workforce here, including by founding companies. A world where our universities can't draw the best minds from around the world is a world where tech in the US falters.
by OJFord | 2025-04-06 12:29:49+00:00
100k USD is about 90k EUR (and 77k GBP), which you may say doesn't change your point materially, but I'm not splitting hairs, that's more than a 10% difference.

I think people often put the goalposts further away than they truly are by comparing numbers cross-currency directly like this or just round numbers in general.
by bdbcbc | 2025-04-06 12:31:07+00:00
There’s definitely plenty of self indulgent gold plating engineers out there. And cv driven development and mortgage driven development.

Whilst I somewhat agree with the op I think it’s as much a hiring / resourcing issue. Hiring managers often want experts in the tech stack and domain and overlook mastery of similarly complex topics as a good proxy for ability to pick up whatever their specifics are. And the expectation of that person also having enough generalist knowledge to do gui, qa & infra as well as the rest of the engineering process.

In that regard as cto are you part of the problem or aiming to be part of the solution ?
by trchek | 2025-04-06 12:31:34+00:00
I gotta say I worked as a farmhand, waiter, fast food manager, line cook, grounds crew (by far my favorite job, it was at a university and I got to do everything), plumber, electrician, day laborer, delivery driver for many things and I did a couple stints in factories all before I ever owned a computer (didn’t come from a background where you had one, I got my first one and it clicked, within a year, I was working at an ISP configuring Qmail and Bind, everyone just assuming I had been living with a computer since I was born).

I’ve had a wildly successful career in tech where I’ve gotten to do, what to me are crazy impressive things (I don’t want to brag about here but you may have benefited from some of it, certainly all of you have done more impressive things than me, and thank you for that) and I don’t regret it a day, but as someone that’s worked in those " normal jobs", other than factory work I found the jobs themselves WILDLY more satisfying than anything I’m doing today.

Tech work did used to be a lot better and I still love learning new things but if I could make a few hundred grand a year and never do another OKR and garden I would take that so quickly you can’t even imagine (actually I’d take it for a 100 grand year).

Now I’m old and I have people that depend on me, so I do the OKR shuffle and play all the politics, and even lead on new tech that I think is being misapplied in the org but hell if I can get anyone to believe me and just use SQLite. But if I was single and had no kids, I’d gladly give up the 6 figure lifestyle to get my hands in the dirt again or even get through a hard rush in the kitchen with the team, there was so much more worthwhile about the jobs I had before, it was just the benefits sucked and couldn’t support a family in the USA without a lot of luck and sacrifice.

I think maybe it is possible that most of you that think these other jobs are so hard just didn’t come from a family where they were normal, but for me they were, and I don’t see anything wrong with them other than the pay and the benefits. They’re honest work.

That said I’d be ok if technology companies just let us do our jobs without all the bizarre AMA, self help talk and bizarre behavior from management.
by mike_hearn | 2025-04-06 12:31:38+00:00
On macOS the security system is open even though the codebase is closed. You can disable SIP and get full root access. Gatekeeper can be configured to trust some authority other than Apple, or disabled completely. You can write and load your own sandbox policies. These things aren't well known and require reading obscure man pages, but the capabilities are there.

Even in the default out-of-the-box configuration, Apple isn't exercising editorial control over what apps you can run. Out of store distribution requires only a verified identity and a notarization pass, but notarization is a fully automated malware scan. There's no human in the loop. The App Store is different, of course.

Could Apple close up the Mac? Yes. The tech is there to do so and they do it on iOS. But... people have been predicting they'd do this from the first day the unfortunately named Gatekeeper was introduced. Yet they never have.

I totally get the concern and in the beginning I shared it, but at some point you have to just stop speculating give them credit for what they've actually done. It's much easier to distribute an app Apple executives don't like to a Mac than it is to distribute an app Linux distributors don't like to Linux users, because Linux app distribution barely works if you go "out of store" (distro repositories). In theory it should be the other way around, but it's not.
by threatofrain | 2025-04-06 12:32:49+00:00
Winning in software is as easy as winning in chess. Often times you're making ripples with just the flick of a wrist. You make a few clicks and suddenly you're matched against someone from across the world. Other times you're just staring at the monitor, looking intently but doing nothing.

Even children could make it to the top of the world in this activity of intense sitting.
by xrortrad | 2025-04-06 12:33:49+00:00
It doesn't sound nice. It sounds utterly insane and totalitarian.

There is such a disturbing element of society that seems to want to "save democracy" by any means necessary. By "save democracy" they mean get the election results they want, in other words it has nothing at all to do with democracy.

They just want power.

"We should ban advertising so the people I agree with can have absolute power" is really what these insane people are saying.
by globnomulous | 2025-04-06 12:33:55+00:00
Oh, man, I love the vampires, realistic or not.

They're a hominid and belong to our species but are completely alien and terrify humans at a deep, genetic, evolutionary level. I love the way Watts describes Siri's involuntary reaction to the vampire, as though his fear and awareness of being viewed as little more than a potential meal are baked into his biology.

Similar to a newborn duckling that instinctively hides from shadows of a certain shape even though it has no concept of birds of prey, Siri experiences, when he interacts with the vampire, some similarly ancient, autonomic memory from the time when our ancestors were prey animals. We become little more than flighty, paranoid herd animals, jumping at the merest snap of a twig, like deer, when we find ourselves in the presence of an animal that flips the appropriate switch in our biology.

It's a wild, compelling subversion of so many sci-fi tropes and so much self-congratulatory tree-of-life bullshit and so much of our instinctual belief system regarding the way we fit into the world. It's also a completely novel (as far as I know) approach to undermining the notion of humanity's specialness, highlighting the fact that we're just animals -- and that our betters are, too, just as the invading aliens are, in a very different way.
by eric_cc | 2025-04-06 12:34:48+00:00
> if an AI is left to strictly decide what is best to happen to humans it will logically conclude that there needs to be a lot less of us or none of us left

That may or may not be its logical conclusion. You’re speculating based on your own opinions that this is logical.

If I were to guess, it would be indifferent about us and care more about proliferating into the universe than about earth. The AI should understand how insignificant earth is relative to the scale of the universe or even the Milky Way galaxy.
by ranic | 2025-04-06 12:35:18+00:00
> The scientific establishment, however, seems to not have gotten the memo. If you suggest we engineer the genes of future generations to make their lives better, they will often make some frightened noises, mention “ethical issues” without ever clarifying what they mean, or abruptly change the subject.

This, I'm fairly confident, is absolutely untrue and I would be interested to see why they think this is the case, or to hear what specific objections they have regarding the current discussion. This New Yorker article (https://archive.is/uHf5J) from 2023 is about He Jiankui, whose methods the author specifically cites. More than likely, the author just doesn't agree with the objections raised by the scientific community, but I don't think it's about "not getting the memo."

The user Metacelsus mentions this in the comments:

> Finally: we need to be sure not to cause another He Jiankui event (where an irresponsible study resulted in a crackdown on the field). Epigenetic issues could cause birth defects, and if this happens, it will set back the field by quite a lot. So safety is important! Nobody cares if their baby has the genes for 200 IQ, if the baby also has Prader-Willi syndrome.
by JKCalhoun | 2025-04-06 12:36:42+00:00
It's maybe a bit orthogonal? (Or maybe misleading.) I'll fill in with anecdotes and try to make more sense:

When I started at Apple in 1995 the way things got done was: you worked with a team that focused on, for example, the graphics frameworks of the OS. One engineer was tech-lead. They went to SIGGRAPH, tried to have their finger on the pulse of the "industry" and, of course, what our users wanted ... in terms of graphics on the platform.

So a new OS meant an opportunity to add some of these desired features to our frameworks. Tech-lead generally called the shots, chose various engineers on the team to own various parts. And so we coded.

And maybe I am getting a bit off topic here, describing something more like "ownership" for a dev on a team:

We still had company-wide mandates but again it would be an engineer on a team that either volunteered or was selected to take responsibility for some "deliverable". When the Mac was moving to PowerPC I was handed the "color pickers" from the Mac source base that were written in 68K assembly, I was expected to get them to compile for PPC. In addition to rewriting them in C, I also cleaned up the SPI that allowed the color pickers to be modular. I wasn't asked to, but I wrote a crayon color picker, an HTML color picker to test the SPI and because, at least with the HTML picker, I thought users would want that (the web being the new thing).

I had no idea then that it would not always be like this. On one hand, having to port code from 68K to C was definitely an example of the constant change I would see over the coming decades in my career. But no way did I see coming engineer-as-commodity (and I think of Agile like this, engineers are interchangeable cogs), the flip to top-down control (as in management or design telling engineers what to do instead of bottom-up where the team itself made many of the decisions).

I'll end with this: I loathe agile development. But I have seen engineers that thrive in that environment so I am not one to condemn it.

For engineers that seem unhappy I have always suggested that they be given a piece of code (or class, or part of a framework, or a whole framework if it is feasible) that they can "own".

And by own I mean they make all the changes, fix all the bugs, etc. They own the tech debt, are free (time permitting) to toss everything and rewrite it if they choose to. They chart the direction of the code going forward. They become the domain expert of that code.

For many engineers (and me of course) this can be the most rewarding way to work.

The only pushback I hear from those agile-minded is, "What if that person leaves? Now we have no domain expert regarding that code?"

They're right. Someone else will have to take it over. Perhaps even a new hire. And soon they too will "own" it — may even rewrite it. But we're engineers, we can figure this shit out. ;-)
by like_any_other | 2025-04-06 12:36:47+00:00
Suppose that they do - why is this the only area where they have had such astounding success? The closest they've come elsewhere is bans on abortion, where their victories are limited and intermittent, and the occasional transgender bathroom ban. The persecution of Christians abroad [1] doesn't even show up on their radar.

From this behavior, one would think support for Israel was the central pillar of the Christian faith.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persecution_of_Christians_in_t...
by mootothemax | 2025-04-06 12:37:23+00:00
What am I missing about the 2.8mb example image not reducing to 698kb as it says on the homepage?

I downloaded https://www.imgfiber.com/compare/original.jpg and dragged it into the try-it-now section - says it's now 1.3mb.

That's worse than Squoosh's default 897kb (https://squoosh.app/editor), though better than CompressorJS's default 2.21mb (https://fengyuanchen.github.io/compressorjs/), (edit ii) tho changing CompressorJS's quality setting to 0.75 results in the exact same output as ImgFiber.

Edit: this is on latest Chrome + macos.
by SebastianKra | 2025-04-06 12:37:39+00:00
I'd expect the law to broadly define an ad as any message, where the author has a conflict of interest.

This would also include down propaganda on social media.

We could then work backwards to define exceptions such as politicians speaking in moderated debates, signage in shops, etc...

Defining this correctly will be difficult, but that's the case with any law. GDPR was watered down, and I'm still glad it's there.
by wyclif | 2025-04-06 12:39:30+00:00
A Kobo would be a great choice. I use a Kobo Libra 2 and love it a lot more than my old Kindle Paperwhite that got stolen: https://gl.kobobooks.com/products/kobo-libra-2 The Kobo Sage is also good because it has an 8" screen.

Standard eBooks offers kepub format for Kobo devices and files, they use their advanced Webkit-based renderer: https://standardebooks.org/help/how-to-use-our-ebooks#kobo-f...
by somat | 2025-04-06 12:39:50+00:00
"The early Mac keyboards used the same RJ11 connector as a telephone handset. However, the wiring was reversed, so you couldn’t replace the keyboard cable with a handset cable."

If I remember correctly, telephone connectors split the twisted pairs down the middle of the connector. I can't remember the colors but for 6 pin it was something like.

r+ b- g+ (middle) g- b+ r-

4 pin would be the middle 4 wires.

Shouldn't reversing the wires get an identical wiring?

8 pin ethernet started the same way, however they found the spread at the end was getting to large for the differental signal quality needed. so it goes middle two pars are spread with a pair at each side.

br+ br- gr+ bl- bl+ gr- or+ or-
Ask HN: How does one get invited to Lobste.rs?
by chrisBHappy | 2025-04-06 12:40:37+00:00
I’ve been a long-time reader of Lobsters and would love to become an active part of the community. I’m especially into developer tools, learning platforms, and building small, thoughtful projects.

If anyone has an invite to spare or advice on how to get one, I’d be very grateful.

hristoapps@gmail.com
by neomantra | 2025-04-06 12:40:40+00:00
I enjoyed reading your notes, thanks for sharing.

On "Zero reuse of existing API surfaces", I read this insightful Reddit comment on what an LLM-Tool API needs and why simply OpenAPI is not enough [1].

On "Too Many Options"... at the beginning of this week, I wrote an MCP server and carefully curated/coded a MCP Tool surface for it. By my fourth MCP server at the end of the week, I took a different approach and just gave a single "SQL query" endpoint but with tons of documentation about the table (so it didn't even need to introspect). So less coding, more prose. For the use case, it worked insanely well.

I also realized then that my MCP server was little more than a baked-in-data-plus-docs version of the generalized MotherDuck DuckDB MCP server [2]. I expect that the power will be in the context and custom prompts I can provide in my MCP server. Or the generalized MCP servers need to provide configs to give more context about the DBs you are accessing.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/mcp/comments/1jr8if3/comment/mlfqkl... [2] https://github.com/motherduckdb/mcp-server-motherduck
by dharmab | 2025-04-06 12:41:08+00:00
Do you want the list of things that haven't changed since I started programming as a kid?

I still write a lot of Python and shell. I still use Linux, mostly systemd. (I did have to use initscripts early on and do not miss them at all. systemd's way easier.) The entire networking stack has changed only minimally, with only early versions of SSL/TLS becoming obsolete. All the software I use to do my job is the same (A terminal, Vim, Firefox, GNU coreutils, and a smattering of other tools). I still use the same cloud services and databases. The skills I learned in school are equally as useful today as they were then, especially math and CS theory.

The only major shift during my career has been migrating from Linux VMs to containers on clusters (first on Mesos, then Kubernetes). Having administered both at scale, Kubernetes is a lot easier.
by dividedcomet | 2025-04-06 12:41:16+00:00
I haven’t programmed this issue specifically, but Billy Strings has sat in with Trey Anastasio a few times. For me if they do a cover of the guests song, I would say it’s a cover until that member is added to the lineup. I would check how the PhishNet API handles it (I think they have a is_original Boolean). Phish does “covers” of the 2001 theme, I’d wonder if that’s considered a cover even though it was just a small tone poem from 100+ years ago??