MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by varunnrao | 2025-04-30 18:00:38+00:00
I think what ultimately led to Sun's downfall is a combination of what ESR [1] and joelonsoftware [2] have previously covered.

1. Sun didn't become the defacto desktop platform because they lost out to WinNT. So they lost out on the consumer market. 2. Custom server hardware and software makers like Sun and Silicon Graphics were the fashion till Google and later on Facebook came around and built their own data centers with consumer hardware and specialized software to overcome the inherent unreliability of that hardware. And anyway ever since web-based software became a thing your device is practically a console a la Chromebooks. So they lost the server market.

The only option left was to serve the high end HPC market like labs or even banks but that didn't make business sense since that's increasingly niche because those customers would eventually also want the effects of commoditization.

[1] - http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=6279 [2] - https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/08/30/platforms/
by wood_spirit | 2025-04-30 18:00:38+00:00
Globalisation is about comparative advantage.

Some of America’s comparative advantages that we see a lot of on HN has been designing chips, online services and financial services etc. Also the defence industrial complex. There are probably more.

In general todays Americans don’t want to work in factories any more, and factory owners don’t want workers these days either: they want robots. Witness all Musk has said about workers being temporary while he gets robots at Tesla since the start etc.
by no_wizard | 2025-04-30 18:00:48+00:00
Trade wars are class wars. This is big business pushing back on labor gains made from the last few years. They can't let labor keep any power or gains because it means we might ask for more instead of continuing to defer to corporate power and the ultra rich.

I expect a wave of bad economic news, followed by a wave of consolidation, all the while prices rising, and toward the end of all this, the tariffs will be fully removed, but the prices will not meaningfully (if at all) come down, and the consolidation will have only further entrenched power at the top
by icoder | 2025-04-30 18:00:58+00:00
Yeah building something like this is not a weekend project, getting enough traction for it to make sense is another orders of magnitude beyond that.

I like the idea of one's trust to leverage that of those around them. This may make it more feasible to ask some 'effort' for the trust gain (as a means to discourage duplicate 'personas' for a single human), as that can ripple outward.
by matwood | 2025-04-30 18:00:59+00:00
The US has enjoyed amazing prosperity, but it was squandered by allowing the majority to only go to the 1% instead of spreading it around through programs like universal healthcare and free education. Thinking that workers would still be working if it just wasn't for globalization is completely ignoring automation. Add in that very few people want to do work that is long and dangerous, and it made sense to send it elsewhere and move up the value chain.
by jbm | 2025-04-30 18:01:07+00:00
You must not use it that much.

Features that worked in mIRC in the 1990s are broken, like sending messages. Right this second if I click to reply to someone's message, I can't add a message in Japanese unless I copy-paste it in. This happens every few months. I can't tag people who have non-English names reliably.

It crashes my browser. There are weird security settings, and when you have multiple environments, it is completely unusable without having multiple browsers. Sometimes you can't log in without clearing your cache completely.

It is sheerly anti-organic, adding features no one wants.

I'm literally taking time out of my vacation to complain about it, fml.
by burningChrome | 2025-04-30 18:01:16+00:00
A Mind at Play: How Claude Shannon Invented the Information Age

In this elegantly written, exhaustively researched biography, Jimmy Soni and Rob Goodman reveal Claude Shannon’s full story for the first time. It’s the story of a small-town Michigan boy whose career stretched from the era of room-sized computers powered by gears and string to the age of Apple. It’s the story of the origins of our digital world in the tunnels of MIT and the “idea factory” of Bell Labs, in the “scientists’ war” with Nazi Germany, and in the work of Shannon’s collaborators and rivals, thinkers like Alan Turing, John von Neumann, Vannevar Bush, and Norbert Wiener.

I also loved this one:

Exploding the Phone: The Untold Story of the Teenagers and Outlaws who Hacked Ma Bell

Exploding the Phone tells this story in full for the first time. It traces the birth of long-distance communication and the telephone, the rise of AT&T’s monopoly, the creation of the sophisticated machines that made it all work, and the discovery of Ma Bell’s Achilles’ heel. Phil Lapsley expertly weaves together the clandestine underground of “phone phreaks” who turned the network into their electronic playground, the mobsters who exploited its flaws to avoid the feds, the explosion of telephone hacking in the counterculture, and the war between the phreaks, the phone company, and the FBI.
by srveale | 2025-04-30 18:01:22+00:00
You may underestimate how many people do not need to be convinced. Again, I'll refrain from making a value judgment, but the hard numbers show that LLMs have been one of the most quickly adopted technologies in the history of mankind, including the time before anyone was forced to use them.

Not sure if these are the best stats to illustrate the point, but ChatGPT was released November 2022, 2.5 years ago, and they currently claim ~1 billion users [1]

By comparison, iPhone sales were something like 30 million over the same time period, June 2007 through 2009. [2]

In other words, what took ChatGPT several months took smartphones several years.

Of course there are problems with the comparison (iPhones are expensive, but many people bought each version of the iPhone making the raw user count go down, Sam Altman is exaggerating, people use LLMs other than ChatGPT, blah blah blah), so maybe let's not concentrate on this particular analogy. The point is: even a very skeptical view of how many people use LLMs day-to-day has to acknowledge they are relatively popular, for better or worse.

I think we're better served trying to keep the cat from scratching us rather than trying to put it back in the bag. Ham-fisted megalomaniac CEOs forcing a dangerous technology on workers before we all understand the danger is a big problem, that's for sure. To the original point, "AI-first is the new RTO", there's definitely some juice there, but it's not because the general public is anti-AI.

[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/martineparis/2025/04/12/chatgpt...

[2] https://www.globaldata.com/data-insights/technology--media-a...
by GuB-42 | 2025-04-30 18:03:21+00:00
I have been told so often about how the Mercator projection misrepresents the size of countries that seeing it like this is underwhelming to me.

It turns out that even when put in the middle of Africa, Russia is still massive. And even without the projection, Greenland is not small either, which, in a sense, makes Denmark the largest European country by far.
by lowercased | 2025-04-30 18:03:22+00:00
It's that last step - 5 - which I think is a missing piece of the discussion. A lot of private company pharma and medical research is often doing the 'last mile' work that started in university research programs. Stuff that looks promising is picked up and commercialized, but there's usually significant work the research people have done before big commercial players take it to market. They're not doing all their research from scratch - they're taking the best bits funded by our government research programs and bringing them to market. Cutting university research will damage the private sector pretty quickly.
by geodel | 2025-04-30 18:03:34+00:00
As usual I think it is combination of skill, luck and hard work. There are people who do enormous hard work but just do not have skill to create impact. And there are many highly skilled people but not motivated enough or likely they just not in right place at right time to create consequential things.

> I fear the current state of our industry eliminated the possibility for not-great, not-skilled juniors to embark in these journeys

It is just that industry would be 100 or 1000 times larger than it was in 70s or 80s. Now not-great not-skilled people can get IT jobs in Accentures/IBMs of today which pays well enough for mediocre computer skills. When thousands of new PhDs in Computer science, electronics and semiconductors etc are available every year it is infeasible that mediocre folks can land in hardcore engineering roles.
by rahimnathwani | 2025-04-30 18:03:41+00:00
Most of the parameters you would include in ollama's ModelFile are things you would pass to llama.cpp using command line flags:

https://github.com/ggml-org/llama.cpp/blob/master/examples/m...

If you only ever have one set of configuration parameters per model (same temp, top_p, system prompt...), then I guess you can put them in a gguf file (as the format is extensible).

But what if you want two different sets? You still need to keep them somewhere. That could be a shell script for llama.cpp, or a ModelFile for ollama.

(Assuming you don't want to create a new (massive) gguf file for each permutation of parameters.)
by Terr_ | 2025-04-30 18:04:17+00:00
Yeah, I think there's plenty of evidence to contradicts the theory that Trump is somehow "now or never" decisive.

For example, his habit of promising all sorts of things in "two weeks" and then doing nothing. [0] Neither "now", nor "never", but always "soon".

Or look at the stream of inconsistency from the White House about quantum-mechanical tariffs, as they endlessly mutated between: On, off, on but only when being observed, paused, never paused that was fake news, on but a different set of tariffs, off because a fabulous deal was made but don't ask about the details because you wouldn't know that country anyway, etc.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ZLmhF7TgzY
by lordfrito | 2025-04-30 18:04:18+00:00
Biden's multiple student loan forgivness attempts come to mind? He might have been handing out money, as opposed to taking it away like Trump. But the underlying issues are the same: he did it unilaterally using executive order, and the courts had to get involved because there were concerns about constitutionality.

If the executive branch has the authority to determine where money is spent, then it seems obvious to me that it also has the authority to determine where it isn't spent. If you think of the president as an executive "CEO", then the current CEO can change the decisions of the previous CEO... This is in fact what we're voting for in the presidential election -- "how" to run the daily business of country. New CEO, new goals, new policies, etc.
by xp84 | 2025-04-30 18:04:47+00:00
The word "want" is the key there -- they have zero interest in what you 'want' to watch, they have every interest in what will compel you to watch for the longest time! Maybe a certain person wants to watch a few 2-minute cute cat videos, and subscribe to those exclusively. But research showed Google that those people's watch minutes per day can be tripled if you fill their homepage with "Trump did WHAT?" videos (or whatever effectively baits their rage, makes them more afraid, or stokes some addiction or anxiety).
by chneu | 2025-04-30 18:04:47+00:00
As an American who did vote, please stop acting like "herp derp half the country didn't vote for him because they didn't vote" is some gotcha that proves Americans aren't idiots.

Not voting was a vote for trump. Low turnout benefits trump. Americans had the choice between trump and a black woman, Americans chose trump.

Americans are so stupid and refuse to look at ourselves in a fair light. It's so dumb and the rest of the world is laughing at us.

"You can always count on Americans to do the right thing, after they've tried everything else." What this quote means is that Americans falsely believe we're exceptional and different when in reality we aren't, but we'll waste a ton of time/resources before we admit it.
by cmrx64 | 2025-04-30 18:04:57+00:00
It’s incredibly annoying that it will probably be cheaper/easier to get the “real deal” than these analogs for some time. I could buy some LSD or ibogaine right now, who knows how long before I get to eat some TBG. The party scene isn’t going to want it. edit: it is possible to get easily, just expensive. I guess I’ll report back :)

I have also had good experience with sleep-shrooming, I agree it seems to minimize the sedating aftereffects. Also probably helps avoid any wildcard ontological shock.
by linsomniac | 2025-04-30 18:05:43+00:00
What do you mean by "anti-capitalists"?

Because today's climate in the US seems, even related to the tariffs, to be heavily weighted towards making those with deep pockets even deeper. The confusion in the markets, for example, have been a perfect opportunity for those properly placed to rake in a ton of money. Ditto with DOGE ending spending on a lot of projects, moving it commercial providers.
by cadamsdotcom | 2025-04-30 18:06:05+00:00
Sovereignty needs to be viewed as a full stack pursuit, where at each point in the supply chain - from cobalt in the ground to email with document attached - a question must be posed whether the EU is at correct degree of ability to operate without each current trading partner. That includes considerations of stockpiling, relationship stability & adversity, shipping lanes, and many other things. The complexity isn’t noticed because for 99.9% of things we’ve settled into comfy patterns.

Slicing at the cloud (Azure) without considering “above” or “below” isn’t detailed enough. There are technologies and supply chains EU has neglected that need to be restarted. The industrial policy needed to do this will stimulate amazing innovations Europe can one day be proud of.

But man is it hard to add an eclipsed capability to an advanced economy. It’ll be in the difficulty ballpark of bringing high speed rail to the US.
by ljoshua | 2025-04-30 18:06:23+00:00
NotebookLM audio overviews/podcasts have been an absolute boon for my homeschooled kids. They devour audiobooks and podcasts, and they love learning by listening to these first. Then when we come together for class, we discuss what was covered, and can spend time diving into specifics or doing activities based on the content. It’s super nice to have another option for a learning medium here.

To generate them, we’ve scanned the physical book pages, and then with a simple Python script fed the images into GCP’s Document AI to extract the text en-masse, and concatenated the results together into a text-only version of the chapter. Give that text to NotebookLM and run with it.
by senko | 2025-04-30 18:06:49+00:00
He can be right 100% of the time, this is no way to run a company.

You hire passionate people who pour their soul and overtime into a thing then you parachute in, override half their decisions, micromanage other half, then leave leaving them to live with the mess.

After a few of these stunts, you end up with disillusioned, cynical, burnt out people who just don't care any more, and either quiet quit or leave for greener pastures, or the kind of folks who crack the game and fail upwards while caring nothing about the company and the products.

And as soon as the word spreads out that this is your modus operandi, smart folks who have neen around the block a few times will avoid you like the plague.

It can work if you're willing to churn people (khm Elon), for some definition of "work".
by alphabetting | 2025-04-30 18:06:49+00:00
I found this prompt online and tweaking it for audio overviews works extremely well for me.

https://open.substack.com/pub/lawsen/p/notebooklm-podcasts-b...

Generate a deep technical briefing, not a light podcast overview. Focus on technical accuracy, comprehensive analysis, and extended duration, tailored for an expert listener. The listener has a technical background comparable to a research scientist on an AGI safety team at a leading AI lab. Use precise terminology found in the source materials. Aim for significant length and depth. Aspire to the comprehensiveness and duration of podcasts like 80,000 Hours, running for 2 hours or more.
by kjs3 | 2025-04-30 18:07:04+00:00
That's a little unfair. StrongARM did well in the WinCE market (which I assume you are referring to as 'consumer junk') and did very well in the embedded market especially as Xscale over several generations (PXA, IOP, etc). As an embedded chip with a relatively short lifespan that's reasonably impressive.

However, the idea that somehow it (or any of it's contemporary ARM kin) could somehow 'replace SPARC and save Sun Microsystems'...well, that's just laugh out loud silly.
by matwood | 2025-04-30 18:07:23+00:00
I hope this is parody. The average life expectancy was 35-40. The average person was working 12 hours/day with much of it being heavy labor. No one was going to the pub or having a good meal, they were just trying to survive. I don't understand this romanticization of the past. Does everyone just assume they would be the king? Even then, they would still be worse off than nearly everyone in a modern economy today.
by epistasis | 2025-04-30 18:07:25+00:00
If a presidential candidate promises to break the law in his campaign, that does not give him the authority to break the law. We are a constitutional republic and the constitution must be followed.

It's quite clear that the current President does not give a damn about the constitution, know anything about it, or have any compunction about blatant violation of the constitution.

> Otherwise, all authority in the executive branch effectively belongs to the president and random midlevel bureaucrats can only exercise it on his behalf.

This is factually wrong.
by axelr340 | 2025-04-30 18:07:53+00:00
We are also building a tool to understand codebases. Our tool shows the features implemented in a codebase visually, along with their hierarchy, and with traceability to associated code.

Here is an example feature map for the Spot robot SDK from Boston Dynamics with 100k lines of code: https://product-map.ai/app/public?url=https://github.com/bos...
by swatcoder | 2025-04-30 18:07:57+00:00
> I am genuinely baffled as to how I could potentially escape this…

> My only exit is over employment or launching some successful business.

This reads like you've already reached the peak of your career at 28. Do you really feel that way?

That seems pretty unusual for a skilled worker, like you'd seem to be if you're able to bank 12k in savings per year already, and as most commenters on HN are.

More usually, you'd expect to be earning much more in 10 years than you do today and perhaps even a fair amount more 10 yeads later depending on what you're capabilities and opportunities turn out to be.

Do you not feel like that's in the cards for you? Why?
by marcosdumay | 2025-04-30 18:08:03+00:00
> Didn't basically everything go up but wages?

That's how inflation works.

> I don't care if we blame the current economic policy

You mean the previous one until January, that stopped the inflation, or the current one that is making a lot of it for the next months?

> I still would like to know where all that money went.

The money is cycling around people and companies. That's what money almost always do, the US was an exception until recently, but exceptions to that never last.
by bradhilton | 2025-04-30 18:08:49+00:00
Contributor here, we developed the Agent Reinforcement Trainer (ART) library to make it easy to train LLMs for anything.

No callbacks or straitjacket flows. Instead we serve an OpenAI API-compatible endpoint that you can use as a drop-in replacement for any proprietary APIs you may be hitting.

After collecting responses from the inference API, you can tune the model with your own custom rewards and repeat the process as long as you like, until performance converges. We believe this level of flexibility will make it easier for you to train state-of-the-art models for your own use cases, much like Kyle's new email agent[1].

Also happy to answer any questions you have about the framework.

[1] https://openpipe.ai/blog/art-e-mail-agent
by nobody9999 | 2025-04-30 18:08:59+00:00
>I think part of the issue there is there's free movement in America of capital/labor so it's hard to justify investments. Eg. why have the state pay to give each member or your state elite college educations if they are going to move to another state anyway? Your global businesses are going to move as well the second it makes financial sense to?

You misunderstand my point. Which is probably my fault. My apologies. I'll attempt to clarify:

I don't advocate for states to "pay to give each member or your state elite college educations." Rather, I was commenting on the disinvestment[0] in higher education by the states, resulting in poorer educational outcomes as well as fewer educated professionals to serve as innovators, knowledge workers and entrepreneurs in those states.

I'd posit that if many states in the rust belt invested in quality education, rather than forcing big tuition increases/student debt, more folks would stay in those states, with the positive economic benefits across those state economies improving the lots of everyone.

As for "global" businesses, they're mostly an outlier[1], at least in the US with ~15,000,000 businesses with less than 100 employees and ~170,000 businesses with more than 100 employees (of which only 45,000 or so have more than 500 employees).

And why, exactly, do folks leave such places? Why, for the better economics of states that invest in infrastructure and education. Folks wouldn't leave if they could do just as well or better in their hometowns. But (for a whole bunch of reasons, the ones I cite included), those places don't have the same economic opportunity because they don't have the infrastructure or skilled workforce to do so. If they did, companies would flock to those places as the cost of living and cost of doing business are significantly lower.

Why is Silicon Valley a hub for business?[2] Strong educational institutions, good infrastructure and a skilled workforce?

Why are prisons the highlight of six of the seven poorest counties in the US?[3] Poor or no educational institutions and a lack of skilled workers.

I hope I've clarified my point. My apologies for not doing so initially.

[0] https://www.cbpp.org/blog/by-disinvesting-in-higher-educatio...

[1] https://www.naics.com/business-lists/counts-by-company-size/

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_highest-income_countie...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_lowest-income_counties...
by sporkland | 2025-04-30 18:09:17+00:00
> These crates also get "refactored" every few months, with breaking API changes, which breaks the stack for months at a time until everyone gets back in sync.

This was a problem with early versions of Scala as well, exacerbated by the language and core libs shifting all the time. It got so difficult to keep things up to date with all the cross compatibility issues that the services written in it ended up stuck on archaic versions of old libraries. It was a hard lesson in if you're doing a non-hobby project, avoid languages and communities that behave like this until they've finally stabilized.
by Nzen | 2025-04-30 18:09:25+00:00
Alain de Botton also published this in video form, seven years ago [0]. If you want the cliff's notes, his School of Life channel has a shorter version [1].

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-EvvPZFdjyk 22 minutes

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zuKV2DI9-Jg 4 minutess
by manidoraisamy | 2025-04-30 18:10:40+00:00
Exactly! Finetuning needs at least 10 examples to even work. That’s why Promptrepo begins with prompting and schema-based generation when teams have little or no data. As they gather more examples, it gradually shifts to fine-tuning. It’s the classic cold start problem and we’ve simplified it for product teams who want to launch quickly but improve accuracy over time.