MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by runako | 2025-04-16 18:37:16+00:00
> But did we run that experiment while foreign alternatives were nearly or equally expensive?

Tariffs will have to go a lot higher than 145% for this to be a relevant question. US labor (and now due to tariffs, raw materials) costs are so much higher that frequently even doubling the import price would not make US cost-competitive.

> Are you suggesting former factory workers all became scientists and engineers?

No, I am suggesting that those people currently work in jobs that support higher productivity of the overall labor force, and that higher productivity creates the conditions necessary for increased prosperity for Americans.

Let's take QA for example as something that is often thought of as lower-skilled (but which is not) job that a hypothetical former factory worker could retrain to do. A person could QA a T-shirt or QA the Netflix app. The Netflix QA impacts more flow of money than a T-shirt QA, and so supports higher income for everyone working at Netflix than those working in a T-shirt factory. It is not possible for a person to manually QA enough shirts to have a similar economic impact as QAing the Netflix app.

Or compare the typical factory worker to a profession that is often denigrated in the US: retail. A factory worker making cutlery or light bulbs will generate less money for the economy than the average Costco employee[1].

Or look at a company that moves these goods around, like UPS. $360k revenue per employee @ 21% gross margin.

> Is the result of that a higher median income, or is it a reflection of a higher wealth inequality?

This is the continued choice of the US polity to not use our wealth to improve our common good. We instead choose to allocate it in ways that are markedly different from other rich and developing nations. So a high-productivity state with a higher GDP per capita than the UK is "poor" because our chosen combination of labor laws, tax laws, etc. are designed to produce that outcome. There used to be robust debate about the best way to make our economy less anxiety-inducing for individuals, but that discourse ended and everybody pretty much accepts that this is how it has to be. Nonetheless, we are allowed to choose differently.

1 - Costco produces close to $100k of gross profit per employee. This is multiples of the prevailing wage even in rich countries in Western Europe, much less countries like China.
by senderista | 2025-04-16 18:37:27+00:00
IME PBT is complementary to assertions: PBT probes the space of inputs and your assertions find inputs that make your code violate invariants.

When I was writing a nontrivial data structure library I was amazed (and humbled) by how many bugs were caught by PBT (again, combined with copious assertions) but not by my unit tests (which tried to cover all the "obvious" edge cases).
by pphysch | 2025-04-16 18:38:09+00:00
I'm not talking about Red vs. Blue. US national policy doesn't actually swing that much when Red switches to Blue and so on. Yes, Trump abandoned this or that agreement, but Biden generally didn't reverse.

I believe Lee Kuan Yew said "In China, you can't change the government but you can change the policy. In America you can change the government but you can't change the policy", referring to the postwar neoliberal / Deng era.
by Lammy | 2025-04-16 18:38:11+00:00
lol at recommending Cloudflare and Microsoft (Github) in response to a comment decrying spyware

Every single thing you mentioned is plugged in to the tier-1 surveillance brokers. I am talking plain files on single server shoved in a closet, or cheap VPS. I don't often say this but I really don't think you “get” it.
by mattmanser | 2025-04-16 18:38:14+00:00
Nottingham city, the pure "legal" definition, is actually quite small and not what most people think of when you say "Nottingham".

For example, it doesn't include Beeston, West Bridgford, Stapleford, Clifton, Ilkeston, Arnold, Long Eaton, Hucknall and more.

Even though no outsider could draw a line where Nottingham city stops and most of them start.
by ceejayoz | 2025-04-16 18:38:15+00:00
> But it seems there are major flaws that even Darwin knew about.

Sure. He recognized the importance of inheritance, but didn't know the mechanism. We've learned a lot since Darwin's days about how it all works - genetics, in particular - but the basic concept has held up just fine.

We can even demonstrate it in lab conditions: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._coli_long-term_evolution_ex...
by sbpayne | 2025-04-16 18:39:19+00:00
As new model releases support longer and longer context windows, there is a lot of discussion around whether RAG is still relevant.

RAG is here to stay for a while:

(1) Enterprises have much more data than reasonably will fit in a context window any time soon (2) Even if you can technically put 1M tokens in, that does not mean the model can effectively use it all (3) Longer input = higher latency and cost for inference

Would love any other thoughts on the topic!
by lucb1e | 2025-04-16 18:39:22+00:00
> it's a few commands to generate a CA

My dad still calls my terminals a "DOS window" and doesn't understand why I don't use GUIs like a normal person. He has his own business. He absolutely cannot just roll out a CA for secure comms with his local printer or whatever. He literally calls me to help with buying a PDF reader

Myself, I'm employed at a small business and we're all as tech savvy as it gets. It took me several days to set it up on secure hardware (smartcard, figuring out compatibility and broken documentation), making sure I understand what all the options do and that it's secure for years to come and whatnot, working out what the procedure for issuing should be, etc. Eventually got it done, handed it over to the higher-up who gets to issue certs, distribute the CA cert to everyone... it's never used. We have a wiki page with TLS and SSH fingerprints
by nailer | 2025-04-16 18:39:51+00:00
You can with extensions.

> you don’t make an argument.

I have made an argument, here's a fourth reminder. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43690612 You haven't responded once.

I could knock anything from Ray from Austin Community College out of the park. His video on the creation of Israel is full of falsehoods that are easily proven wrong, that's where I recognised him from. If he's an historian, I am too.

Which reminds me I need to click the block button.
by recursivedoubts | 2025-04-16 18:39:58+00:00
Aaaayyyy yooo, i wrote this a long time ago, but I think it holds up!

TLDR: there is a trade off in how much expressive power you can surface to front-end developers when their logic is written in-browser because anything you give to them, you give to anyone who can open up a console. That makes things a lot more dangerous and is in contrast w/ the back end, where you can give developers access to a full SQL implementation.
by sarahk44 | 2025-04-16 18:40:15+00:00
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by const_cast | 2025-04-16 18:40:43+00:00
Yes, and we need a lot more death in the tech company space. The problem is we have a lot of companies that are just bad, stupid ideas that are allowed to survive because they're on life support. We just dump hundreds of millions in marketings to cover up the shit product. And then we purposefully operate at a loss to flood the market, aka defrauding consumers, to cover up the shit product.

And then, like 12 years later, after our anti-competitive practices have paid off and we have 90% market share, we jump our prices 200% and drop our quality as we enter our robber baron business strategy.

All of this, because the shit company didn't die when it's time came. Instead, like a zombie, it now feeds on the brains of consumers that have no where else to turn.
Trying out a custom new tab solution I made–keen to hear your feedback
by kowskiio | 2025-04-16 18:41:00+00:00
Hey HN,

I recently built a small project called NitroTab, a custom new tab page designed to streamline your browsing experience. The idea is simple: type where you want to go, and NitroTab takes you there immediately. For example: • Typing “YouTube MrBeast” opens his channel directly. • Typing “Amazon men’s socks” skips a search engine detour and takes you straight to socks on Amazon.

You can even toggle to a traditional Google search when needed. I built this tool to solve the everyday friction of clicking through search results when you already know your destination. I use it daily—for checking email, bank accounts, and more. There’s a Windows app available, and I’m awaiting Google approval for the Chrome extension.

The project is free, and I’m really interested in hearing about: • What you’re building right now • Your thoughts on simplifying navigation • Ways to improve NitroTab or similar tools

Looking forward to your feedback and any discussions around similar projects or ideas!

Check it out here: https://nitrotab.tech
by akudha | 2025-04-16 18:41:39+00:00
Not disagreeing with you, but there are 8 billion people (at least) on this planet, we all need something to do, no? There is probably only a fraction of work that is actually meaningful (growing food, healing others...) and a big chunk is probably junk work or mostly junk ("social media manager" - how many of these do we need and do we need 40 hours a week for this?) but these jobs also keep people employed, so maybe in that sense, they are meaningful?
by goku12 | 2025-04-16 18:41:53+00:00
Hyperbole according to whom? Clearly, this forum full of tech professionals seem to disagree with you. And I listed those arguments to show how hollow your own argumentation is - not to draw a parallel. But even with that straw-man, how did you decide that such a database has no serious utility to the governments and private institutions worldwide? And what's even worse is how some people belittle others' work without getting even the basic facts right. You neglected the fact that they were underfunded to begin with. So perhaps what's needed to improve their quality is to increase their funding, not cut it further. That's a trick used by some sleazy politicians to justify de-funding and privatizing useful endeavors like these. I find such excuses to be quite dishonest to begin with.
by jsheard | 2025-04-16 18:41:57+00:00
The bots which query in response to user prompts aren't really the issue. The really obnoxious ones just crawl the entire web aimlessly looking for training data, and wikis or git repos with huge edit histories and on-demand generated diffs are a worst case scenario for that because even if a crawler only visits each page once, there's a near-infinite number of "unique" pages to visit.
by rsanheim | 2025-04-16 18:42:05+00:00
`ETOOMANYMODELS`

Is there a reputable, non-blogspam site that offers a 'cheat sheet' of sorts for what models to use, in particular for development? Not just openAI, but across the main cloud offerings and feasible local models?

I know there are the benchmarks, and directories like huggingface, and you can get a 'feel' for things by scanning threads here or other forums.

I'm thinking more of something that provides use-case tailored "top 3" choices by collecting and summarizing different data points. For example:

* agent & tool based dev (cloud) - [top 3 models] * agent & tool based dev (local) - m1, m2, m,3 * code review / high level analysis - ... * general tech questions - ... * technical writing (ADRs, needs assessments, etc) - ...

Part of the problem is how quickly the landscape changes everyday, and also just relying on benchmarks isn't enough: it ignores cost, and more importantly ignores actual user experience (which I realize is incredibly hard to aggregate & quantify).
by exabrial | 2025-04-16 18:42:12+00:00
So sad. They had a huge chance to be the center of the "maker world", but instead they had some terrible leadership that was trying to make the small chains compete with Best Buy.

If the chain simply focused on it's hobbyist roots, got into 3d printing, and tried to be a physical store for something like Adafruit, partnered with like Mark Rober or something, maybe pick up some other esoteric hobbies, they'd be thriving.
by minimaxir | 2025-04-16 18:42:17+00:00
The parent company Codeium last raised a Series C of $150M at a valuation of $1.25B: https://techcrunch.com/2024/08/29/github-copilot-competitor-...

That was in August 2024, before the vibe-coding meme hype, so $3B makes sense.
by dylan604 | 2025-04-16 18:42:17+00:00
there's a difference between rendering unto Caesar what is Caesar's vs owing a bank for a mortgage, owing a utility company for power/water, paying for 100% of your food.

sure, there's no getting around taxes, but today, there's no getting around having some sort of service provider. you can't DIY your way into a fibre network and/or cell service. at least not legitimately.
by tedsanders | 2025-04-16 18:42:25+00:00
(I work at OpenAI.)

In ChatGPT, o4-mini is replacing o3-mini. It's a straight 1-to-1 upgrade.

In the API, o4-mini is a new model option. We continue to support o3-mini so that anyone who built a product atop o3-mini can continue to get stable behavior. By offering both, developers can test both and switch when they like. The alternative would be to risk breaking production apps whenever we launch a new model and shut off developers without warning.

I don't think it's too different from what other companies do. Like, consider Apple. They support dozens of iPhone models with their software updates and developer docs. And if you're an app developer, you probably want to be aware of all those models and docs as you develop your app (not an exact analogy). But if you're a regular person and you go into an Apple store, you only see a few options, which you can personalize to what you want.

If you have concrete suggestions on how we can improve our naming or our product offering, happy to consider them. Genuinely trying to do the best we can, and we'll clean some things up later this year.

Fun fact: before GPT-4, we had a unified naming scheme for models that went {modality}-{size}-{version}, which resulted in names like text-davinci-002. We considered launching GPT-4 as something like text-earhart-001, but since everyone was calling it GPT-4 anyway, we abandoned that system to use the name GPT-4 that everyone had already latched onto. Kind of funny how our unified naming scheme originally made room for 999 versions, but we didn't make it past 3.
by phtrivier | 2025-04-16 18:42:42+00:00
I missed the North Carolina part. Do you think the judges will play ball here too ?

If you can't vote your representative out of office, then, well, yeah, you're not really in a democracy anymore.

I guess you can always incorporate and sell bitcoins - then, you have a chance to buy your élections.

Or, admit that you now leave in a dictatorship, and thank your maga neighbors for that.

At some point, both Presidents Musk and Trump die of old age, and a window of opportunity for change opens.
by matheusmoreira | 2025-04-16 18:42:57+00:00
The problem is people delete glibc and are surprised when glibc features are missing.

The only point I'm making is: Linux does not require glibc.

Users and their programs usually do require glibc but that's their choice. It's not mandated. People could theoretically rewrite the entire Linux user space in pure freestanding Rust if they wanted to.

Name Service Switch is just a solution to a problem. There's no law that says Linux systems must have that system. Programs that depend on it will break if it's not there but that's not the fault of Linux.
by ogurechny | 2025-04-16 18:43:35+00:00
Well, but who shoots that bullet? It doesn't appear out of thin air. We shouldn't consider that it all happened “by itself”, it has formed quite recently, and the memory is fresh. In addition to that, we can see that quite specific topics attract attention of that internet cop, and he's pretty ignorant about the rest. It seems that the choice is somehow guided by the spectacle presented to public inside the US, and changes with political fashions.
by outer_web | 2025-04-16 18:43:35+00:00
Should be interesting to see the DOJ's response. Considering the wagons have been circled since day one, we may see an independent prosecutor execute this referral. If so, discovery might have some fun details about the early days of the deportation campaign.

The administration has been flaunting the fact that judges can't easily police their bad faith actions ("oops, too late", "ms13 is an invading military"). Here Boasberg has found a low threshold for holding the administration accountable.
by siminm | 2025-04-16 18:43:53+00:00
1) It sounds like you have a decent amount of negativity built up from your previous role, and you haven't quite vented it all out. Get it out of your system -- talk to a friend that gets how annoying that was and vent until you're tired of talking about it. Get heard and you'll feel like the negativity is finally behind you.

2) Think about the opportunities that your previous job gave you. Specifically opportunities. Every time a negative thought comes up, ask "What was my opportunity at that moment?" and write down your answer. Opportunity to disagree and commit? Great. Opportunity to solidify your understanding of your own values? Great! Opportunity to challenge yourself and work on something outside of your comfort zone? etc. Write those down and brag about them to your next amazing job!
by fancyfredbot | 2025-04-16 18:44:05+00:00
Yes it's behind everything a derivatives quant would do. But I think quite a long way behind. Closed form analytic solutions using calculus only exist for relatively simple models and products. Most of the time you use it to calibrate and discretise a model and afterwards it's all Monte Carlo. What's more you can often just look that part up as models are increasingly commoditised rather than secret sauce.
by 9rx | 2025-04-16 18:44:12+00:00
> paying for 100% of your food.

Aren't you going to pay for food no matter what? You can pay for it indirectly by trading your time with someone else who has put in time to produce it (the way most people pay for food), or you can put your time directly into the food (how self-sufficiency would pay for it), but either way the time will be spent. There is, quite literally in this case, no free lunch.

> you can't DIY your way into a fibre network and/or cell service.

Do you need these anyway? They are arguably necessary services for participating in a modern society, but if you are self-sufficient that implies a disconnect from society.
by idiotsecant | 2025-04-16 18:44:16+00:00
Yes, full agree. I also think there is a future in personal memetic firewalls that will filter ideas before they hit our wetware and filter our tics and habits that uniquely identify us on the way out. Such a firewall would need to be much smarter than we are, but not necessarily as smart as the smartest ai trying to 'attack'. It would have perfect knowledge of its user, and as such possess information assymetry.
by mystified5016 | 2025-04-16 18:44:21+00:00
Intelligence vs education. On average, most humans have about the same baseline intelligence. Obviously some have more and some have less, but that's an inherent quality of our species, and the baseline is really only moved by evolution.

It can be hard to square the fact that intelligence and education are totally unrelated to each other. Ancient humans certainly knew less than we do now, but they were more or less just as intelligent as modern humans.

We can see from archaeology that ancient humans had language, sophisticated religions, and complex and vast societies. That's not something you can really accomplish with a significantly different baseline intelligence.

We know a lot more now and have a much more complicated global society, but mainly because we have machines to do a lot of the thinking and management for us. We're still just as intelligent as we always were, we just have tools to multiply our efforts now.
by bityard | 2025-04-16 18:44:26+00:00
Okay, so I started reading this and got excited to see what this was all about. I've been wanting a web browser that can turn the "regular web" (as much as possible) into something more like an e-book that happens to have hyperlinks.

Essentially, imagine Reader Mode, but all the time.

But this is... something else? I tried scrolling to the bottom and as soon as I click on the scroll bar, I get a pop-up showing a bunch of gestures and can no longer scroll. Pressing the back button does nothing. Closing the tab asks me if I want to discard my unsaved changes?!

So I'm guessing this is some CSS/JS to make a regular site _behave_ something like an e-reader? Which may be fine as far as it goes, I just don't think it's a good idea to hijack the scroll
by poincaredisk | 2025-04-16 18:44:44+00:00
Yes, 4chan and similar subcultures use "fren" as a funny way to say "friend" or "bro".

But I think you're committing a logical fallacy here. There's nothing wrong with the word "fren". It doesn't matter that some questionable people use it. For example, nazis liked beer most likely. It doesn't mean that liking beer makes you a nazi.
by osigurdson | 2025-04-16 18:44:52+00:00
As I mentioned, this is not a scientific test but rather just something that I have tried from time to time and has always (shockingly in my opinion) failed but today worked. It takes a minute of two of prompting, is boring to verify and I don't remember exactly which models I have used. It is purely a personal anecdote, nothing more.

However, looking at the code that Gemini wrote in the link, it does the same thing that other LLMs often do, which is to assume that we are encoding individual long values. I assume there must be a github repo or stackoverflow question in the weights somewhere that is pushing it in this direction but it is a little odd. Naturally, this isn't the kind encoder that someone would normally want. Typically it should encode a byte array and return a string (or maybe encode / decode UTF8 strings directly). Having the interface use a long is very weird and not very useful.

In any case, I suspect with a bit more prompting you might be able to get gemini to do the right thing.
by warpspin | 2025-04-16 18:44:52+00:00
Vertical layout is awesome for 8 bitters. We tended to use it a lot on the C-64, too.

The c64 had a very awkward native memory layout for bitmaps (8 bytes vertical corresponding to a 8x8 or 4x8 pixel block, then jumps back up, next 8 bytes again vertical but to the right of the first 8x8 pixel block!). Super annoying and the worst of all worlds for coordinate to memory address calculations.

So for demo effects we often used a purely vertical layout by abusing customizable character sets, which are allowed to have 256 fully custom 8x8 pixel characters: arranging the characters in, for example, an 16x16 character grid = a 128 x 128 pixel grid, such that the memory for the character set will effectively result in a vertically oriented mini bitmap.

This also has nice advantages for example for fast pixel filling: if you unrolled an EOR $address; STA $address; EOR $address+1, STA $address+1, etc. etc. loop, you had a pretty fast, almost constant time filler for a bitmap where you only painted top and bottom lines of the area you wanted to have filled - one line to switch on filling, bottom line to switch off again.