MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by tech_ken | 2025-04-16 21:18:39+00:00
> For what it’s worth, could possibly have an intermediate Python model that...materializes the results to a table

I think this is kind of the answer I was looking for, and in other systems I've actually manually implemented things like this with a "temp materialize" operator that's enabled by a "debug_run=True" flag. With the NB thing basically I'm trying to "step inside" the data pipeline, like how an IDE debugger might run a script line by line until an error hits and then drops you into a REPL located 'within' the code state. In the notebook I'll typically try to replicate (as close as possible) the state of the data inside some intermediate step, and will then manually mutate the pipeline between the original and branch versions to determine how the pipeline changes relate to the data changes. I think the dream for me would be to having something that can say "the delta on line N is responsible for X% of the variance in the output", although I recognize that's probably not a well defined calculation in many cases. But either way at a high level my goal is to understand why my data changes, so I can be confident that those changes are legit and not an artifact of some error in the pipeline.

Asserting that a set of expectations is met at multiple pipeline stages also gets pretty close, although I do think it's not entirely the same. Seems loosely analogous to the difference between unit and integration/E2E tests. Obviously I'm not going to land something with failing unit tests, but even if tests are passing the delta may include more subtle (logical) changes which violate the assumptions of my users or integrated systems (ex. that their understanding the business logic is aligned with what was implemented in the pipeline).
by Hackbraten | 2025-04-16 21:18:54+00:00
> Even compared to just a few years back, people seem more often to struggle to carry a thought, and resort much more quickly to emotional belligerence.

We're living in extremely uncertain times, with multiple global crises taking place at the same time, each of which could develop into a turning point for humankind.

At the same time, predatory algorithms do whatever it takes to make people addicted to media, while mental health care remains inaccessible for many.

I feel like throwing a tantrum almost every single day.
by WarOnPrivacy | 2025-04-16 21:19:07+00:00
Until 2021, I lived in a semi-rural area that was saturated with homeless. Camps are miles in all directions and they are a constant presence.

My ex transitioned into that community (increasing mi issues). Safe to say I had lots and lots of interaction with our unhoused neighbors.

For all that, we housed folks weren't unsafe. More to the point, we didn't feel unsafe - because that's how folks feel in the absence of an angst-creating drumbeat.
Show HN: Beta for Doltgres, the Postgres Version of Dolt
by zachmu | 2025-04-16 21:19:17+00:00
You asked for it, we built it: the world's first version-controlled SQL database, Dolt, now has a Postgres-compatible version, Doltgres. We announced the limited alpha here on Hacker News 18 months ago, and today we're excited to announce the Beta release.

Doltgres is free and open source, and you can download it from our GitHub repository here:

https://github.com/dolthub/doltgresql/

More details on the Beta release in our announcement blog post:

https://www.dolthub.com/blog/2025-04-16-doltgres-goes-beta/

If you've been waiting for the Postgres version of Dolt, wait no more. Please give it a try by importing your Postgres database using pg_dump and psql, then playing around with the version control features. Let us know via GitHub issues if you encounter any problems.

This release represents 18 months of engineering and innovation. We're excited to hear what you think.
by gnabgib | 2025-04-16 21:19:42+00:00
Discussion (in past thread) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43704827

Related CVE program faces swift end after DHS fails to renew contract (1857 points, 19 hours ago, 1069 points) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43700607

Related CVE Foundation Launched to Secure the Future of the CVE Program (215 points, 9 hours ago, 45 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43704430
by mewse-hn | 2025-04-16 21:19:50+00:00
A lot of posts here saying this is irrelevant or whatever - unix was mostly developed out in the open and got into all sorts of trouble when big companies started cracking down on copyright ownership. This blog post isn't entreating you to necessarily behave differently w/r/t your Llama usage, just to be aware the license is restrictive, doesn't really line up with Meta calling it "open source", and eventually this could create consequences down the road. The post doesn't even mention it but there are safer models to use right now (deepseek) that have permissive licensing.
by Nick-W | 2025-04-16 21:20:10+00:00
No - and this is our argument when applying for funds, I can deliver 2.5gbps (symmetric speeds) to someone for < $1.5k up to 15km away, and I have a roadmap to eventually hit 10gbps and beyond. Unfortunately we're not "fiber" though, so our projects are automatically deprioritized, even if we're like 5% of the cost.
by DrBazza | 2025-04-16 21:20:18+00:00
Zoning is a US thing. The article refers to the UK housing problem and we don't really have that problem, but I suppose that might fix the US market.

UK houses are a good investment, in fact the best investment for £500k, and also their price is additionally inflated by 'cheap money' and dual incomes.

Can't quite afford that house that's current 'under offer' at £500k? You might be able to find a bank that will lend you just that little bit more. 5.5x your salary? No problem. Congratulations, the bank has just helped push house prices that little bit higher. In the UK in the 1970s the single income 3x mortgage multiplier was on its last legs. Now it's 4+ times your joint salary. Madness.
by mtmail | 2025-04-16 21:20:33+00:00
I had to guess who "most famous podcaster is" and check was DMT means.

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/thats-crazy-man-have-you-ever... "[Joe] Rogan reacts to a variety of unrelated statements by saying "That's crazy. Have you ever tried DMT?", referring to dimethyltryptamine, a chemical consumed as a psychedelic drug."
by TheOtherHobbes | 2025-04-16 21:20:59+00:00
Computers are more like an assembly of subsystems than a single thing, and you can just about get away with agnostic byte code as long as you ignore most of the subsystems.

So cross-platform byte code is sort of viable on mid-80s text terminal systems with limited memory and addressing. But as soon as you start adding graphics cards, video acceleration, sound, and AI accelerators, you need to add abstraction layers which will be limited and inefficient and limited compared to the hardware.

And if the hardware isn't available you can either say 'This won't run at all' or emulate it in software, which will be even slower.
by ogurechny | 2025-04-16 21:21:14+00:00
I guess I should set the reference point.

I remember the time when normal internet users who visited imageboards simply couldn't figure out what was happening, and went back to normal sites (sometimes in disgust). There were no tourist guides written by journalists for the general public. Big forums had informational topics teaching users who “internet trolls” are (starting a short period when any argument which someone didn't understand, or pretended to, was automatically called “trolling”). Someone who used imageboard slang on a regular site was seen as an underage idiot (and certainly looked like one to outsiders), and could find that his accounts with “original” passwords no longer belonged to him (because internet was serious business). Oh, and if someone wrote a post praising some politician, no one needed an explanation that it was a satire that made fun of people believing in “supporting our candidate”.

Compared to that, and after 15+ years, 4chan public is pretty normal, even if it is not exactly the same as on some other site.
by pdfernhout | 2025-04-16 21:21:34+00:00
Related: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_credit "Douglas disagreed with classical economists who recognised only three factors of production: land, labour and capital. While Douglas did not deny the role of these factors in production, he considered the "cultural inheritance of society" as the primary factor. He defined cultural inheritance as the knowledge, techniques and processes that have accrued to us incrementally from the origins of civilization (i.e. progress). Consequently, mankind does not have to keep "reinventing the wheel". "We are merely the administrators of that cultural inheritance, and to that extent the cultural inheritance is the property of all of us, without exception." ... Douglas believed that it was the third policy alternative [the object of the industrial system is merely to provide goods and services] upon which an economic system should be based, but confusion of thought has allowed the industrial system to be governed by the first two objectives [to impose upon the world a system of thought and action and to create employment]. If the purpose of our economic system is to deliver the maximum amount of goods and services with the least amount of effort, then the ability to deliver goods and services with the least amount of employment is actually desirable. Douglas proposed that unemployment is a logical consequence of machines replacing labour in the productive process, and any attempt to reverse this process through policies designed to attain full employment directly sabotages our cultural inheritance. Douglas also believed that the people displaced from the industrial system through the process of mechanization should still have the ability to consume the fruits of the system, because he suggested that we are all inheritors of the cultural inheritance, and his proposal for a national dividend is directly related to this belief."
by ikurei | 2025-04-16 21:21:52+00:00
I use this setting often, together with Increase Contrast, through the Accessibility Shortcuts menu. For whatever reason, my computer feels more peaceful and calm with those on, even if it's worse and uglier too.

How did you assign it to a hotkey? I'm sure there's at least a dozen ways to do it, but I couldn't find a simple one without installing additional software.
by Nick-W | 2025-04-16 21:22:02+00:00
I self-funded. It was about $500k and years of time to get things really going, but we have a dream greenfield deployment with a full-mesh network, our own ASNs & IP resources (couple of /21s & IPv6), and some super high-end network edges that support full multipathing with tons of redundancy throughout the network. It was a labor of love, I'm unpaid, and I'll never see that 500k back, but that's ok. I now have 8 employees and we're growing, fast.
by jonahx | 2025-04-16 21:22:50+00:00
It can't solve this puzzle: https://i.imgur.com/AJqbqHJ.png

Thought for 3m 51s Short answer → you can’t.

The breathtaking thing is not the model itself, but that someone as smart as Cowen (and he's not the only one) is uttering "AGI" in the same sentence as any of these models. Now, I'm not a hater, and for many tasks they are amazing, but they are, as of now, not even close to AGI, by any reasonable definition.
by bsder | 2025-04-16 21:23:03+00:00
> They didn't do this because they're incompetent but because they think it'll improve security.

No, they did it because it reduces their legal exposure. Nothing more, nothing less.

The goal is to reduce the rotation time low enough that the certificates will rotate before legal procedures to stop them from rotating them can kick in.

This does very little to improve security.
by BriggyDwiggs42 | 2025-04-16 21:23:03+00:00
Bringing back factory jobs isn’t bringing back the American dream. It’s just replacing the shitty gig work you have to do to barely get by with a shitty factory job that you have to do to barely get by. If they pay well, it’ll drive up the cost of goods a ton and still be unhelpful for people.
by daxfohl | 2025-04-16 21:23:19+00:00
Additionally in terms of career development, you're going to be a lot better off learning the low level LLM interfaces rather than being dependent on a framework (or their even more evil cousin, platforms). Once you learn those, jumping to a platform is usually trivial, whereas the reverse can be more challenging. Junior devs often think that the more frameworks they have on their resume the better, but it often pigeonholes you more than it helps.

And I don't mean to imply that frameworks are always bad. Things like security best practices out of the box can be worth it. But especially in AI right now, nobody knows what those best practices are going to be. So it's best to spend this time learning how to do things at a low level rather than attaching to some framework that may be obsolete in a year.
by da_chicken | 2025-04-16 21:23:27+00:00
It's a decision by Certificate Authorities, the ones that sell TLS certificate services, and web browser vendors. One benefits from increased demand on their product, while the other benefits by increasing the overhead on the management of their software, which increases the minimum threshold to be competitive.

There are security benefits, yes. But as someone that works in infrastructure management, including on 25 or 30 year old systems in some cases, it's very difficult to not find this frustrating. I need tools I will have in 10 years to still be able to manage systems that were implemented 15 years ago. That's reality.

Doubtless people here have connected to their router's web interface using the gateway IP address and been annoyed that the web browser complains so much about either insecure HTTP or an unverified TLS certificate. The Internet is an important part of computer security, but it's not the only part of computer security.

I wish technical groups would invest some time in real solutions for long-term, limited access systems which operate for decades at a time without 24/7 access to the Internet. Part of the reason infrastructure feels like running Java v1.3 on Windows 98 is because it's so widely ignored.
by wizzwizz4 | 2025-04-16 21:23:33+00:00
PhasmaFelis and mikeash have all matches mutual for the top 20, 30, 50 and 100. Are there other users like this? If so, how many? What's the significance of this, in terms of the shape of the graph?

tablespoon is close, but has a missing top 50 mutual (mikeash). In some ways, this is an artefact of the "20, 30, 50, 100" scale. Is there a way to describe the degree to which a user has this "I'm a relatively closer neighbour to them than they are to me" property? Can we make the metric space smaller (e.g. reduce the number of Euclidean dimensions) while preserving this property for the points that have it?
by ivewonyoung | 2025-04-16 21:25:24+00:00
I'll give you one example that I saw just now of someone else's comment that was downvoted.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43710265

It happens all the time.

Here's an example of my comment on the same topic.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43256114

The tone policing one has to do has to be done only by one side, the other "side" can write very low quality comments with personal attacks and not get downvoted or flagged as frequently. It's same on Reddit too. Absolute misinformation and FUD gets voted up if they favor the prevalent side and countering comments are downvoted creating a chilling effect to reduce visibility and discourage participation of folks that don't agree 100% with the political narrative.

That is exactly how Reddit became more and more extreme leading to popular subs becoming full of death threats at one point. And HN is on it's way there.
by ryandv | 2025-04-16 21:25:35+00:00
But this is already basically how Let's Encrypt challenges certificate applicants over ACME DNS01 [0].

I would be more concerned about the number of certificates that would need to be issued and maintained over their lifecycle - which now scales with the number of unique clients challenging your server (or maybe I misunderstand, and maybe there aren't even certificates any more in this scheme).

Not to mention the difficulties of assuring reasonable DNS response times and fresh, up-to-date results when querying a global eventually consistent database with multiple levels of caching...

[0] https://letsencrypt.org/docs/challenge-types/#dns-01-challen...
by minimaxir | 2025-04-16 21:26:28+00:00
A few misc notes:

1. The better way to get all Hacker News data instead of blasting the API is to download the data from the official BigQuery dataset, which can do the task in a single query: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40644563

2. For labeling the posts, instead of label-then-explanation, it may be better to do explanation-then-label to give the model a chance to reason though the edge cases.

3. Following up from #2, for prompt engineering the system prompt, it would likely be better to give a list of multiple valid examples and invalid examples (as noted after the fact) to guide reasoning.

4. Since the target label is a binary objective, it may be more practical/faster/cheaper to create a normal logistic regression model (e.g. tf-idf/BoW) from a large representative sample, then use that to predict the rest of the labels.

The more advanced way to do #4 would be to encode the posts as text embeddings first then use them as the input for a small MLP model...which I may or may not have a project in the pipeline based around that approach.
by sneak | 2025-04-16 21:27:08+00:00
My home in Las Vegas is 2000Mbps down and 100Mbps up, and it's $200/month. $50/month of that is an add-on for "unlimited" usage, but Cox still writes me letters and threatens to cancel my service if I upload more than 2-3TB in a calendar month, despite having paid well over $3000 in "unlimited" add-on upcharges.

Internet pricing is a scam in the USA.
by RajT88 | 2025-04-16 21:28:38+00:00
My first job out of college was at a fixed wireless ISP which was started by a guy with a story just like the OP.

This was 20 years ago now, but the service was very reliable using Motorola radios. Relatively low bandwidth (4-6mbps, not bad for the day) but you could on a good day do that at a few miles out.
by Nick-W | 2025-04-16 21:29:02+00:00
802.11ad/ay on unlicensed 60ghz, our most economical option is to deploy Ubiquiti Wave Pros. We see real-world 2gbps+ speeds at 15km distances. We have Wave Pro, XG, and XR radios all throughout the network for multigig links, and 95% of our non-business installs are Wave LRs and Nanos. We can do up to 33gbps symmetric on 70ghz licensed bands on a single radio, and I have a number of 10gbps radios, but they're not cheap.
by pancsta | 2025-04-16 21:29:05+00:00
Thanks, terminal UI is an important design choice - it's fast, cheap, and runs everywhere (like the web via wasm / ssh, or on iphones with touch). The LLM layer is still fresh, and I personally use it for web scraping, but the underlying workflow engine is quite mature and ubiquitous - it was used for sync engines, UIs, daemons, network services. It shines when faces complexity, nondeterminism, and retry logic - the more chaotic the flow is, the bigger the gains.

The approach is to shape behavior from chaos by exclusion, instead of defining all possible transitions. With LLMs, this process could be automated and effectively an agent would be dynamically creating itself using a DSL (state schema and predefined states). The great thing about LLMs is being charged by tokens instead of a number of requests. We can just interrogate them about every detail separately and build a flow graph with transparent (and debuggable) reasoning. I also have API sketches for proactive scenarios (originally made for an ML prototype) [0].

[0] https://github.com/pancsta/secai/blob/474433796c5ffbc7ec5744...
by Abhimanyu21 | 2025-04-16 21:29:07+00:00
I trade pretty actively, and one pain point kept coming up: I’d have TradingView open with a bunch of charts, Twitter on the side for news, and other tabs for on-chain data or sentiment indicators. I knew exactly what I wanted to see — but no platform let me build it without writing code or hacking things together.

So I teamed up with a few friends and built Dynamic Dashboard — a tool where you can just type a prompt like:

“Show me BTC chart + tweets from whale accounts”

“Add ETH chart + fear & greed index”

“Include Coinglass Open Interest data”

…and it builds the dashboard for you. Instantly.

Prompt-based Fully customizable trading components No code required Built for speed + clarity

It’s still early and we’re letting users in via a waitlist — if this sounds useful, sign up for early access.

Would love to hear thoughts, feedback, or what components you’d want it to support.
by wduquette | 2025-04-16 21:29:36+00:00
My bad; I missed the Turbo Pascal reference.

I first heard of Turbo Pascal in a magazine called Profiles, published by Kaypro for owners of their computers; I'd recently gotten a Kaypro 4, which ran CP/M-80, my first computer of my very own, and I was pining for Apple Pascal/UCSD Pascal. I read the ad (and maybe a review?); it was $49.95, and I ordered it immediately. Nor was I disappointed.
by bubblyworld | 2025-04-16 21:30:04+00:00
Right, I agree with you in general but in this particular case it seems fine to me. OP refers to the first two paragraphs of the introdution, so the authors clearly aren't hiding anything. It's a very far cry from an actual crank paper like the sort you see on vixra. But yeah, this stuff is subjective, I probably just have a higher tolerance for fluff.
by filoleg | 2025-04-16 21:30:44+00:00
> You say this like the rationalist community and 4chan edgelords aren't two circles with an incredible amount of overlap.

They are not.

Rationalists are the crowd that would attract typical Bay Area tech yuppies. Which is something that 4chan seems to despise with passion and makes merciless fun on.

Just go on /g/ (the technology board) and see any mentions of bay area, rationalists, or tech companies/startups. If you believe there is a significant overlap, then they surely are hiding it really well there by mercilessly mocking everything related to any of those topics.
by rglover | 2025-04-16 21:30:48+00:00
Is it? This is the crux of the problem with a lot of institutions. There's little to no professional accountability for bad moves anymore. It used to be that doing a good job and taking pride in one's work was all you needed to do to keep your job.

Now? It's a spaghetti of politics and emotional warfare. Grown adults who can't handle being told that they might not be up to the task and it's time to part ways. If that's the honest truth, it's not "mean," just not what that person would like to hear.
by Nick-W | 2025-04-16 21:31:44+00:00
Yeah, it also feels great - we know everyone now, we provide free service to all of our local fire departments and organizations like the Rocky Mountain Rescue Group, and people rave about us all over social media. I have hundreds of install requests though and only 8 part-time guys though, so it's tough to keep up with the demand and I feel terrible that it sometimes takes us absolutely forever to get someone connected up.
by bri3d | 2025-04-16 21:32:07+00:00
Starlink is definitely cannibalizing the boutique WISP market, which for the most part probably deserved to be cannibalized, although it's sad for cool grassroots efforts like the parallel thread about Ayva. Many WISPs make a lot of their money on enterprise service, for example, construction trailers, rather than residential service. This type of service is being absolutely destroyed by Starlink, which while expensive, is much easier to install and maintain than WISP solutions, and tends to be much more reliable.

In the case of the linked article project, however, I suspect there's limited impact from Starlink. The linked article was a subsidy project. The subsidy is to provide fiber in places that don't have landline Internet options, so it's still eligible in spite of Starlink. With subsidies, Starlink isn't hard to compete with due to its price (customers would be rather irrational not to switch to a $55/mo service that was comparable to their $80-$120/mo Starlink).