MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by MoonGhost | 2025-04-07 08:39:10+00:00
I was working some time ago on image processing model using GAN architecture. One model produces output and tries to fool the second. Both are trained together. Simple, but requires a lot extra efforts to make it work. Unstable and falls apart (blows up to unrecoverable state). I found some ways to make it work by adding new loss functions, changing params, changing models' architectures and sizes. Adjusting some coefficients through the training to gradually rebalance loss functions' influence.

The same may work with you problem. If it's unstable try introduce extra 'brakes' which theoretically are not required. May be even incorrect. Whatever it is in your domain. Another thing to check is optimizer, try several. Check default parameters. I've heard Adams defaults lead to instability later in training.

PS: it would be heaven if models could work at human expert level. Not sure why some really expect this. We are just at the beginning.

PPS: the fact that they can do known tasks with minor variations is already a huge time saver.
by wongarsu | 2025-04-07 08:39:29+00:00
Most hardware companies are just terrible at software in general. Camera makers are pretty average in that regard.

Usability of the camera hardware and software ecosystem is another matter. I think the common wisdom is that most paying users don't want beginner-friendly, they want powerful and familiar. So everything emulates the paradigms of what came before. DSLRs try to provide an interface that would be familiar to someone used to a 50 year old SLR camera, and Lightroom tries to emulate a physical darkroom. Being somewhat hostile to the uninitiated might even be seen as a feature.
by esperent | 2025-04-07 08:39:39+00:00
> The only real limitation is coming from you.

Personally, my real life is a continuous sequence of being confronted by my limitations and learning to overcome them or live with them. I enjoy that for the most part, I choose a life that challenges me. But sometimes I get tired and choose to do something that relaxes me and doesn't remind me of my limitations, like play a game, or go for a walk. I suspect this is the case for a lot of people.

At an earlier time in my life, when my days were much less challenging, I did play games to challenge myself. If Elden Ring had come put 20 years earlier I would have loved it, and perhaps I would have appreciated this timer as well. But in the current era of my life, not so much.
by piterrro | 2025-04-07 08:39:50+00:00
The optimizations listed in the article are common fallbacks of all serverless databases. Unless you are super diligent with writing queries to your database, it's going to be costly. The only real application I found so far are small projects where less than 5 tables are needed and no JOINs are required. That means projects like: page visitor counts, mailing lists, website pageview tracking are a perfect fit for serverless databases.

I used Mongo serverless few years ago when it was first released, I didn't know how the pricing works so I wasn't aware how much these full table scans will cost me even on a small collection with 100k records...

For example in logdy.dev[1] I'm using D1 to collect all of the things listed above and it works like a charm with Cloudflare Workers. Just last week I published a post on how to export D1 and analyze it with Meatabase[2], for the next post I think I'm going to describe the whole stack.

[1]https://logdy.dev/ [2]https://logdy.dev/blog/post/how-to-connect-cloudflare-d1-sql...
by yyy3ww2 | 2025-04-07 08:40:09+00:00
> When told, "only room for one person OR one animal"

In common terms suppose I say: there is only room for one person or one animal in my car to go home, one can suppose that it is referring to additional room besides that occupied by the driver. There is a problem when we try to use LLM trained in common use of language to solve puzzle in formal logic or math. I think the current LLMs are not able to have a specialized context to become a logical reasoning agent, but perhaps such thing could be possible if the evaluation function of the LLM was designed to give high credit to changing context with a phrase or token.
by ricardobeat | 2025-04-07 08:40:23+00:00
What countries were applying “asymmetric tariffs” to the US before?

I think you misunderstood the message you’re trying to stand behind: when they talk about reciprocity they mean trade deficits (as if that made sense), not import tariffs. The majority of the world had very low import taxes on US products before this happened, and now they are only going up.
by palata | 2025-04-07 08:40:26+00:00
I understand the complaint about entitled users: because it is open source does not mean that there is a community, support, reviews or anything. Open source just says something about the kind of licence and that's it.

This said, the author doesn't seem to have a good understanding of the definition of "open source" in the context of software. It is about the licence, not about the fact that one can read the source. It's a common mistake, but it's a mistake nonetheless.

To people who would say "well, if I want to understand "open source" as "source that is open", sure: you could also consider that a "hot dog" is a kind of dog. But don't be surprised when people tell you that they eat dogs ;-).
by amai | 2025-04-07 08:42:26+00:00
"because the White House had authorized the use of Signal, largely because there is no alternative platform to text in real time across different agencies, two people familiar with the matter said.

Previous administrations, including the Biden White House, did not develop an alternative platform to Signal, one of the people said."

Is that true? There is no alternative platform to text in real time across different agencies? And nobody had a problem with that?
by dcminter | 2025-04-07 08:42:31+00:00
Many years later one of my Dad's customers paid me and my college housemates £10 to take away a Wang MVP system with four chonky terminals from their London offices.

We drove it all the way to Wales and had it in our shared student house for the rest of that year. Fun times.

New that system would have been something like £40,000 in late 70s/early 80s money so that was a stark introduction to asset depreciation for us!

We did have fun with it, but sadly we left it for our landlord to deal with at the end of the year. Kind of a dick move in retrospect.

I think all of us had our own PCs that were individually more powerful than that system.
by hnbad | 2025-04-07 08:43:10+00:00
"The greatest trick the devil ever played on mankind is to believe you can be free from ideology." Alternatively: "If you don't have an ideology, you just end up creating your own inconsistent ad hoc ideology from scratch."

I'm not sure who first started promoting the lie of being "free from ideology" or ideology being bad, although I could imagine it being tied directly to the rise of Third Way politics (e.g. New Labour in the UK) - which, ironically, very much is a political ideology (although one so incoherented and conflicted it has fallen victim to right-wing populism throughout the West). Actually the Democratic Party's politics (think Obama and Biden, not AOC and Sanders) generally closely align with Third Way politics.

I can understand opposition to ideologues as the term is usually applied when talking about people who only talk about their ideology rather than applying their ideology directly (e.g. I could at lengths explain the ideas behind Democratic Confederalism or Anarchism but that would do nothing to help with concrete policy decisions in the present system or day-to-day problems in real life). After all, when people say e.g. "Trump says it like it is" they don't mean he speaks the truth but that he talks about problems people perceive as directly affecting them and then talks about things he wants to do about them (whether or not they're helpful for addressing those problems is beside the point) - the distinction is that he offers a concrete solution at all rather than waffling on about the spirit of the light of the hope of the nation at the dawn of the greatness etc etc. Ironically this waffling is actually compensating for a lack of an explicit ideology but it is indeed quite off-putting.
by amarcheschi | 2025-04-07 08:43:26+00:00
“he uses it for negotiating”

My second piece of evidence to suggest the current chaos is temporary is that before being part of the administration, Miran said that the Dollar policies that he proposed would likely be.

“Miran: pursued later in an Administration after tariffs had produced the sufficient negotiating leverage”

So both Miran and Bessent are essentially telling us that the current Tariff chaos is just about creating leverage that can be used when implementing the rest of the plan.

Ok, just a few minutes ago trump said: Trump: "I spoke to a lot of leaders -- European, Asian, from all over the world. They are dying to make a deal, but I said 'we're not gonna have deficits with your country' ... to me a deficit is a loss. We're gonna have surpluses or at worst we're gonna be breaking even."

I don't see any way he wants to actually use the leverage he "created"

Yesterday peter navarro also said, i'm copying a tweet: Peter Navarro responds to Vietnam’s offer to remove all tariffs: “This is not a negotiation. This is a national emergency based on a trade deficit that’s gotten out of control because of cheating,” Trump’s trade adviser says on Fox News. “Don’t say you want to lower the tariffs and be done with it. It’s the non-tariff cheating. Stop manipulating your currencies. Stop dumping stuff in.” [1]

[1] https://x.com/LucasFoxNews/status/1908900999449763931
by MrMcCall | 2025-04-07 08:43:31+00:00
The reality is that we spend FAR more time reading code than writing it. That is why readability is far more important than clever, line saving constructs.

The key to further minimizing the mental load of reacquainting yourself with older existing code is to decide on a set of code patterns and then be fastidious in using them.

And then, if you want to want to be able to easily write a parser for your own code (without every detail in the spec), it's even more important.

And now that I have read TFA, I see he wrote:

> We have tooling that verify basic code style compliance.

His experience and dilligence has led him to the mountaintop, that being we must make ourselves mere cogs in a larger machine, self-limiting ourselves for the greater good of our future workload and production quality.
by ajuc | 2025-04-07 08:44:45+00:00
I worked at a company that makes machines reading books/press/whatever to people with impaired vision (or altogether blind).

It wasn't the best paid job, but the satisfaction when you can talk with someone who uses your product daily for obvious life improvement beats any cozy bank job.

This is a huge underdeveloped market BTW, and as the populations worldwide age it's only going to be more and more important.
by hnlmorg | 2025-04-07 08:44:46+00:00
You’re not missing anything. A lot of the problem is due to clunky generators.

But then those clunky generators do solve different problems too. Though I’m not going to debate that topic here right now, besides saying no solution is perfect and thus choose a tech stack is always a question of choosing which tradeoffs you want to make.

However on the topic of monolithic config files vs config directories, the latter does provide more options for how to manage your config. So even if you have a perfect system for yourself which lends itself better for monolithic files, that doesn’t mean that config directories don’t make life a lot easier for a considerable number of other systems configurations.
by mrb | 2025-04-07 08:45:15+00:00
Some fun math: according to some estimates there is 175 zettabytes of data worldwide. Assuming 20-terabyte harddrives, this could be stored on 8.8 billion drives. Assuming 10 drives per rack unit, 42 RU per rack cabinet, 16 square feet per cabinet (including aisle space), that means you need about 330 million square feet of data center space to host this data. If it was hosted in a single square data center, it would be 3.5 miles long and wide. (I always like to picture the physical space something would occupy.) And energy wise, assuming 5 watts per drive, it would consume 44 gigawatt, so it could be powered by about two large hydro dams similar to the Three Gorges Dam (22 gigawatts capacity). I am assuming a PUE close to 1.0 for simplicity. Of course one would not be able to spin up all these drives at once, since a drive spinning up consumes about three times more power (15 watts). So you would definitely staggered spin up when booting the servers :-)

If 90% of this data is "crap" and could be cut down, it would still be just a drop in the bucket compared to worldwide energy use.
by senko | 2025-04-07 08:45:53+00:00
My problem with LangChain (aside from dubious API choices, some a legacy of when it first started) is that now it's a marketing tool for LangGraph Platform and LangSmith.

Their docs (incl. getting started tutorials) are content marketing for the platform services, needlessly pushing new users into more complex and possibly unnecessary direction in the name of user acquisition.

(I have the same beef with NextJs/Vercel and MongoDB).

Some time ago I built a rather thin wrapper for LLMs (multi provider incl local, templates, tools, rag, etc...) for myself. Sensible API, small so it's easy to maintain, and as a bonus, no platform marketing shoved in my face.

I keep an eye on what the LangChain ecosystem's doing, and so far the benefits ain't really there (for me, YMMV).
by 6510 | 2025-04-07 08:46:07+00:00
I only do small solo projects but the value from maintainable code depends on how often it needs to be updated.

If management comes with new [crazy] ideas and/or feature [cruft] every other week it should be easy to prefer a warehouse with ready to use components over a scrap yard. If you need a set of usable tires a few times per year the scrap yard will provide. If you need a set of tires 20 times per day you want at least 200 sets of each kind stored in a convenient place. You probably live some place in between.

edit: Also, timing is everything. Write down everything you want, add the pony. Wait for the right moment when their head is not raging with 50 deadlines.

Most important imho is to not want anything but explain what options they have. If they want faster results they might be able to get them by attacking the technical debt.
by cuu508 | 2025-04-07 08:47:24+00:00
> Things that have a small solar panel, a battery, and no grid connection could benefit from this.

As a side topic, what are the currently available options for this?

I've heard about sodium ion (safer but still not sub-zero charging friendly, also no easily available solar charging controller boards), lithium titanate (same), and plain old deep-cycle lead acid.

For small solar-powered projects, it would be nice if there was a power bank on market which supported solar charging, and could either be safely charged in freezing temperatures, or had built-in temperature sensor and reject charging when it's too cold.
by ladyanita22 | 2025-04-07 08:47:35+00:00
Low-level code is being written in Rust. Of course userspace doesn't require low-level languages (and I don't quite get why C and C++ are exposed to the userspace and Rust is not).

Swift is not a replacemente for C and C++, but rather for Objective-C.

Do you have any sources for those claims?
by goku12 | 2025-04-07 08:47:40+00:00
I just read a story about a young Trump voter who died a gruesome death because she wasn't allowed to have her foetus aborted/evacuated after it died naturally inside her and started rotting. She was waiting eagerly for her baby and had even named her. So much for 'pro-life'!

Meanwhile, the private companies are so incentivized to protect their workers' health that even employed people are dying of diabetes because they still can't afford insulin - something unthinkable in other countries! Insulin injections are so old and cheap to manufacter at this point. Did you forgot to mention that the employees must also be rich? And what about jobless or homeless people?

Meanwhile, about 68K people die annually of preventable diseases because their insurance claims on essential treatment get turned down by insurance companies against their doctors' determination. And that isn't charity money - it's what they paid the premiums for. How many of those thousands will be saved if you cut STD treatments, contraceptives and abortions nationwide?

There are less developed and more conservative countries in the world who know better. I don't understand how such obviously dangerous decisions can be spun as benefits for the masses!
by 0xbadcafebee | 2025-04-07 08:49:38+00:00
Oh, right. Ukraine is still at war. We don't hear about it on the news over here in the civilized democratized developed modern advanced West anymore, so I just figured it was over. But turns out it's still going on, since 11 years, 1 month, 1 week, and 5 days. The actual invasion of Ukraine has been ongoing for 3 years, 1 month and 2 weeks.

If you want to help:

- I want to donate to the Ukrainian people in the most effective way but there are so many options. What is needed most and where? [1]

- 5 ways you can support Ukraine — even if your government doesn't want to [2]

- United Help Ukraine [3]

- Ukraine - Fact Sheet: How You Can Help [4] (Yes, even the god damn CIA cough I mean state department wants you to help)

- How You Can Help Ukraine [5]

- How you can help the people of Ukraine [6]

- Support Ukraine [7]

- How can I help Ukraine? [8]

- No child should face the war experience alone [9]

- Nova Ukraine [10]

- One in five children in Ukraine has lost a relative or friend since the escalation of war three years ago [11]

- UKRAINE HUMANITARIAN CRISIS: Help with critical aid — Give now [12]

- International Medical Corps Ukraine [13]

- Chefs for Ukraine [14]

- Doctors without Borders [15]

- International Rescue Committee [16]

- Greater Good Charities [17]

- Catholic Relief Services [18]

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/ukraine/comments/1eqnmbf/i_want_to_... [2] https://kyivindependent.com/5-ways-you-can-support-ukraine-e... [3] https://unitedhelpukraine.org/ [4] https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/News/Intercountry... [5] https://www.huri.harvard.edu/how-you-can-help-ukraine [6] https://www.obama.org/stories/help-ukraine/ [7] https://war.ukraine.ua/support-ukraine/ [8] https://www.rescue.org/article/how-can-i-help-ukraine [9] https://voices.org.ua/en [10] https://novaukraine.org/ [11] https://www.unicef.org.uk/press-releases/one-in-five-childre... [12] https://my.care.org/site/Donation2;jsessionid=00000000.app30... [13] https://internationalmedicalcorps.org.uk/country/ukraine/ [14] https://wck.org/relief/activation-chefs-for-ukraine [15] https://donate.doctorswithoutborders.org/secure/monthly-an?m... [16] https://help.rescue.org/donate/ukraine-acq?ms=gs_ppc_fy25_uk... [17] https://greatergood.org/crisis-in-ukraine-send-aid-now?utm_s... [18] https://support.crs.org/donate/donate-ukraine?ms=agigoo0922u...
by hollerith | 2025-04-07 08:51:14+00:00
>If you don't have an ideology, you just end up creating your own inconsistent ad hoc ideology from scratch.

I'm not sure that is accurate (when applied to individuals). If we define an ideology as a way of assigning moral value to things that is comprehensive enough so that almost any decision can be viewed through "the ideological lens", then some people are many orders of magnitude less influenced by ideologies than other people are.

What is futile is to ignore or prevent the effects of ideologies on a society or a large organization because people who share an ideology cooperate much more effectively than people who do not, and this has powerful effects on politics and the management of organizations.
by mytailorisrich | 2025-04-07 08:51:34+00:00
Pascal Lammy (former WTO head and former EU commissioner) described Trump bluntly but perhaps not far from the truth in response to the new tariffs:

"“I think Mr Trump learned to do business in the New York mafia-influenced real estate market and that his tactics are based on extortion – you hit and keep hitting for as long as you do not get a good price for stopping."
by rollcat | 2025-04-07 08:52:23+00:00
Try working as a manager.

Software development is just one piece of the bigger picture that your manager is concerned with, same way as adding features is just one among your many responsibilities.

Managers understand risk. Communicate the risk of disregarding bugfixes, documentation, technical debt, even if it takes a lot of handholding. Expect no less from your manger: if they can communicate client expectations, budget constraints, and most importantly: long-term strategy, together you may be able to devise a better plan to address your own concerns.

In other words, empathy can go both ways.

And yeah, there are bad managers, just like there are bad coders. Sometimes it's an interpersonal problem. It's called life.
by dguest | 2025-04-07 08:52:38+00:00
Everything I see is moving to Discourse [1] now.

The experiment SW is a lot like the buildings and labs in every physics department I've been to: everyone is on a separate 3-5 year grant cycle and as such is contractually obliged not to push for newer infrastructure. People stick to the same software/lab until it is discontinued/condemned.

[1]: https://www.discourse.org/
by HenryBemis | 2025-04-07 08:52:41+00:00
Because now _this_ party is in power and controls the systems and information, but in 4/8/12 years _that_ party will be in power and a good-willing-mistake-making-bureaucrat may leak these 'by accident/mistake/etc' if they are properly recorded on a gov-controlled system.

But the auto-delete-after-1-week messages from Signal would never be recovered (unless someone is logging all that data and in the future will be able to crack it).
by ecralx | 2025-04-07 08:54:22+00:00
Started using Coolify (self hosted) for ~6months now and I love it ! Works great with most of the stuff I deploy (react SPAs, python/fastapi stuff, hugo). Sure, I can do my proper setup, but tbh I just want to go fast sometimes and Coolify is great for that. For DBs and cache, didn't test it though, but willing to next time I have a personal project !

Great stuff, thanks for your efforts and keep up the good work !