MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mdnahas | 2025-04-05 23:27:19+00:00
Economist here. My biggest issue is with the “news” industry.

Companies provide what the customer wants. And, as the adage goes, if you’re not paying, you’re not the customer, you’re the product. Advertisement-funded “news” isn’t meant to enrich the reader/viewer — it is meant to attract the reader/viewer.

I think that perverted incentive has always existed with it, but the internet ad technology has really killed the information content. And now we’re have society-scale problems with misinformed citizens.

I don’t think industry will solve the problem. If a company allowed users to opt out and pay, their richest customers would do that and those were the ones most valuable to advertise to. So, offering an opt-out probably loses them money (and increases costs).

I think the news industry should be advertising free. I’d have to think on if it should also have govt funding, but that often gets co-opted.
by gerdesj | 2025-04-05 23:27:34+00:00
"I turned off Dark Reader and uBlock"

When you get older, not only do parts of your body head south and start to refuse to co-operate with the rest of you, your eyesight goes badly off track. Its all a bit disconcerting.

I have never been a fan of "dark mode", even when the www didn't exist. Sometimes magazines would go weird and print an article in reverse - white on black. Dramatic effect or some such bollocks. When the fount (a specific instantiation of a typeface) was small enough and the print blead too badly in the specific copy you are reading it became very tricky to read.

Nowadays we have pixels small enough to be much better than ye olde skoole CRT scan lines and a LED screen has a refresh rate that, even in my florescent tube lit lair (not really), is rock solid.

I can read the site but it is not as easy as possible for me and let's face it: a book with a well chosen typeface and fount is a fair standard of readability and legibility. Why not replicate that in a web page?

Why on earth is the text occupying only 1/3 of my screen widthways? When have you seen a book or mag with 1/3 margins?

The fount is a sans job but it is small and white on black which is hard for me. At least it is very thin so that the glare from the white text doesn't go too fuzzy.

Have a look at Wikipedia. There's a good reason for their design choices - they have to worry about everyone and not just their mates.
by eddythompson80 | 2025-04-05 23:28:01+00:00
That makes even less sense than I thought. So things that "are not made out of matter" can be advertised. Like I can advertise YouTube, AWS, Netflix, pretty much 99% of online services, movies, a doctor practice as long as I just do diagnostics, landscaping as long as I just cut and clean. I just can't advertise anything where I'd hand you something "made out of matter". What kind of sense does that make?
by ivanmontillam | 2025-04-05 23:28:02+00:00
One of the sentences at the very start caught my eye:

> I thought to myself: why is there so little actionable advice out there about negotiation?

There's a wealth of actionable negotiation advice if you know where to look, like Harvard Business Review and Harvard Law, First Round Review, among others.

One of the big pieces on negotiation I got from Harvard[0], from their Program on Negotiation. I did not attend Harvard, but reading two or three of their articles a week goes a long way.

--

[0]: https://www.pon.harvard.edu/uncategorized/what-is-anchoring-...
by zeristor | 2025-04-05 23:28:20+00:00
So is the issue that the uk National Grid hasn’t really had software updated to make the most of grid battery storage.

I follow the grid several times a day, and whilst I can clearly see the power drain and support for pumped hydro; there’s no equivalent for grid battery storage.

How long before all the grid battery storage that has been built is actually being used?

Or is it being used in a different manner.
by kragen | 2025-04-05 23:28:27+00:00
I wasn't saying we shouldn't have such laws. I was saying that we should consider the possible enactment of such laws in the light of the knowledge that people will try to circumvent them and will sometimes succeed, rather than assuming that, if advertising is prohibited, there will be no advertising. You seem to agree with this, which means you disagree with the original article, which does make that assumption.

Separately, I was saying that we can't usefully debate the pros and cons of such a vague proposal. You can postulate that some sort of vaguely defined prohibition would have no drawbacks, but any concrete policy proposal will in fact have drawbacks, and in some cases those will outweigh their advantages.
by vladms | 2025-04-05 23:28:38+00:00
From a forum with technical people (that build stuff) I would have hoped to see more ideas that would propose replacing advertising with something better (sorry, if I missed any replies, but did not see that).

Advertising can be useful (to find out about stuff) but very disingenuous (because people can lie). What I would very much like is to be able to assess the trustworthiness and similarity of people advertising me stuff. If someone likes same things as me and I never find him to "lie" (whatever my personal interpretation of that is) I should give him more trust. If someone picks things that I am not interested in and I think he favors stuff (because he is paid, for example) I should give him less trust. Then when I look for a product/video/restaurant I should see things recommended by people I trust more.

I know this kind of happens with "stars", "vloggers" and so on but lacking a system where you track it, means that it is easier to get complex to separate who is just "fun" and you watch but you know he lies and who is also "trustworthy" and you know you can also take his recommendations into account.

But that's just one idea, maybe there are others out there...
by toomuchtodo | 2025-04-05 23:28:38+00:00
> The letter, signed by the CEOs of Zenobe, Eel Power, Field Energy and Harmony Energy, stated: “Our own data – verified by the ESO – shows that batteries are being skipped over 90% of the time during constraint periods for some sites … The cost of these constraints to consumers could exceed £2 billion a year by 2030.

If it is a software issue making the grid operator unable to effectively signal for battery storage, perhaps this refactor and enhancement should be prioritized considering the cost involved?

More info at https://www.current-news.co.uk/battery-storage-developers-sa...

> Notably, the letter focuses on the potential for private investment that government legislation could open up. Zenobē founder James Basden said: “Solving this issue does not require major new investment or infrastructure. With more transparency and engagement with industry, we can fix this quickly. The Government has an opportunity to cut bills and emissions by ensuring that grid-scale batteries are being properly utilised and that the market is fit for purpose.

Hard to project scope without any info, but I’d be optimistic based on what I’ve read so far. Extend logic to tell grid batteries to charge when grid criteria is met vs telling wind turbines to curtail immediately.
by luqtas | 2025-04-05 23:29:02+00:00
> I am convinced that outlawing advertising is the best thing we can do for our world now. More than gun control. More than tackling climate change.

i would rather live in a world of public transportation, with less children and vegan oriented (climate change == enviroment) without people with guns and only at the hands of an effective police; 100x times than an ad. free world...

wrote this at my Android without a single ad. notification, via Firefox along ublock. been a while i watch an ad.
by stared | 2025-04-05 23:30:06+00:00
I have been recommending this post over and over - in a blog post from 2016 on going from academia to data science (https://p.migdal.pl/blog/2016/03/data-science-intro-for-math...), via email, in person.

It helped quite a lot of people - especially women, who had a mindset that they should accept they should accept the offer. A thought that one can (and should) negotiate was a game-changer. Sometimes they were shocked that an ask for 25% more was accepted with no questions.
by andrewstuart | 2025-04-05 23:30:48+00:00
I've negotiated hundreds of salaries for developers and tech people.

The key to negotiating is to get to a deal that both parties feel happy with - if you “win” a negotiation through power then you will likely find later you lost when you get paid back for winning through strength.

Here is what I know about negotiating:

1: know in advance the salary that you want

2: aim for a salary that is not at the high end, not at the low end

3: your target salary should be one that you will feel satisfied with if you get the job - you do not want to get the job and then be unhappy and feeling like you undersold yourself an looking over your shoulder for the next job.

4: it is a good idea to ask for a salary range - typically $5K to $10K. you can say "I'm looking for $150K to $160K but it depends on what the role is" - this gives you some room to negotiate and helps avoid overpricing yourself.

5: if you feel that your salary target is fair, then stick to that - when the time comes that they ask you how much you want - state what you want and explain why you think it is fair.

6: if you get negotiated down, explain again that you think your target number is fair and explain why. explain that given that the number is a fair market rate then you're not moving down.

7: be willing to accept that you do not get the job as an outcome of asking for a fair salary - at that point shrug and move on.

8: if you are the start of your career then money should not matter at all - find a job that will allow you to hone your craft and learn key skills - this is the attitude you should have for your first five years. After that, you will be able to negotiate on the strength of your skills and experience.

Remember negotiation of salary should not be about a win/lose attitude - if either party feels that someone won and someone lost, then that will be a bad start to the relationship. Negotiating salary is about finding a salary that both employer and employee feel happy at.

If you are an employer, remember that every dollar you pay ABOVE the requested salary buys you good will and enthusiasm. Every dollar you offer BELOW the requested salary does the inverse. Also avoid the "If you do well we will pay you more in 3 months" - just pay straight up front that amount.
by spmurrayzzz | 2025-04-05 23:30:52+00:00
The source file I linked in my initial comment is honestly the most succinct way to understand how this works, but the TL;DR is that there is a NoPE layer interval parameter passed to the transformer block implementation. That defines how frequent a "no positional encoding" layer is used. The NoPE layers use the global attention mask, which is a traditional application of attention (attends to all tokens in the context window). The other layers use RoPE (rotary positional encodings) and a chunked local attention mask, which only attends to a fixed set of tokens in each chunk.

There is a wealth of literature to catch up on to understand the performance motivations behind those choices, but you can think of it as essentially a balancing act. They want to extend the context length, which is limited by conventional attention compute scaling. RoPE on the other hand is a trick that helps you to scale attention to longer context, but at the cost of poor retrieval across the entire context window. This approach is a hybrid of those two things. The recent Cohere models employ a similar methodology.
by wavemode | 2025-04-05 23:31:47+00:00
No, I don't think there is any exception. If you intend to maintain a piece of software for any length of time (i.e. it's not just a throwaway demo), you should write tests for it.

Over time you realize that testing truly does not slow down development as much as many people think it does. Maybe devs who just aren't used to testing find it difficult, but after a while it becomes second nature.

The best thing an early startup CTO can do is enforce testing across the board, so people don't just test when they feel like it.
by JustExAWS | 2025-04-05 23:32:03+00:00
So you put American companies at a disadvantage and that means companies could just advertise on foreign websites. Are you going to block those websites? Again we see it happening today, the American porn websites are losing money to foreign websites owned by MindGeek.

Why wouldn’t the same happen to more mainstream sites.

Do we also ban Netflix and other streaming services from having an ad tier? Do we make all search engines and other content providers for pay?

How do broadcast companies make money without advertising? Do we want the government funding and controlling content?
by rlpb | 2025-04-05 23:32:36+00:00
> How big is N today? The simplest assumption is that it is infinity. Any build timestamp embedded into binary packages will change on every iteration. This will cause the process to never terminate. Fixing embedded timestamps is something that the Reproduce.Debian.Net effort will also run into, and will have to resolve.

This was addressed by the Debian reproducible build project years ago. We’re down to 2.2% of packages that are not reproducible. Even if this uses a different definition, it certainly means that the majority of packages do not have a build timestamp problem.

I’m struggling to make sense of this article and I’m a Debian Developer. I think part of the problem might be that the author isn’t aware of the huge progress Debian has already made in this area over many years.
by orwin | 2025-04-05 23:32:45+00:00
Interestingly, American express hired my uncle to help them integrate smart chips into credit card in the late 90s. He took the Concord twice a month on a Paris-NY. It was hell, a lot of different banks and a love of magnetic stripe despite the fraud being easier with those prevented any mass adoption. I think that while he was successful technologically (American express credit card had a chip i think? But honestly i'm not sure, don't take my word for it _at all_), but politically it was a sysiphian effort and they scraped the project. For him the reason was that the cost of fraud was lower than in France, and also pushed into users, and unless you made bank liable (i think that's the word) in case of fraud, so a more secure method of payment wasn't interesting for the banks (in that case why american express?).

Anyway, all that to say that from what i've heard from him, AmEx, Visa and masterCard had to be from the US because the banking sector was so fragmented, in so many ways (different actors, different regulations, different fraud tolerance), it was sorely needed.
by YZF | 2025-04-05 23:33:12+00:00
You can have 100% fact based propaganda by cherry picking. This is not dissimilar to coming with a theory just based on your selected subset of preferred observations. This is the fuel of conspiracy theories.

I completely agree with you. Necessary but insufficient. One needs to approach your view of reality like the scientific process, looking to disprove your theories, not looking for facts that reinforce them.
by mplanchard | 2025-04-05 23:35:18+00:00
Tried to look at one of my open source repos and kept getting the error “Failed to process codebase. Please try again later or try adding your own Gemini API key.”

Edit: fwiw I am an “engineering leader,” and I do think it would be nice to have a model that could answer questions about our codebase at work, but we’d need some guarantees that the data would not be used for training, stored inappropriately, etc.
by ivanmontillam | 2025-04-05 23:35:41+00:00
One of the greatest gems I got from a blog post once posted back in HN (I can't find it anymore, unfortunately) was about a guy getting a job at Google (or ex-Googler), and he dropped the following (I'm paraphrasing, of course):

> Treat yourself as a business and every job offer as a business deal. Every job offer is a deal, a business deal that must remain carefully balanced win-win. If you let it slip, by getting too much work and not the required promotion or salary bump, it will become a win-lose deal (you on the losing end).

It was a short post, but that piece of advice has been with me for more than 10 years now.
by edoceo | 2025-04-05 23:35:54+00:00
No excuses. I've done this like 12 times as startup CTO.

The habit is important. If you don't start, after three pivots you'll have a huge mountain of tests for a system nobody understands. Plus all the wasted time manually "testing".

Tests are so critical for the success of the business. It's fiscally irresponsible to skip.
by kragen | 2025-04-05 23:37:13+00:00
There has probably never been a human society in history or prehistory without bribery, and no possible set of bribery laws could conceivably create one. This is a property of human nature, not the current set of laws in one country.

I think the same is probably almost true of advertising, though maybe societies without money such as Tawantinsuyu are an exception. But I don't think you can have merchants without advertising, because, like fraud, advertising is so profitable for merchants that they will do some of it despite whatever laws you have.
by markus_zhang | 2025-04-05 23:37:14+00:00
I purchased the book a year ago but never had the pleasure to examine it closely.

I feel RE (or binary analysis as we are discussing) is a fascinating topic but it demands a lot of focus and an uncertainty amount of time to reach a milestone. It gives me the feel, that it is not something that I can comfortably study for a couple of hours every night for a few days, pause, and then pick it up again in a week or so. It requires a dedicated amount of time pretty much every day.

I wonder what is your experience?
by taylodl | 2025-04-05 23:37:17+00:00
A Blue Wave in 2026 won't undo the damage done. The world no longer trusts America, and it's going to be a minimum of decades, if not centuries, for that trust to be restored. That trust permitted America a lot of power and now that is gone.

https://www.thebulwark.com/p/the-american-age-is-over
Show HN: Professional Profile Page
by saranshsharma | 2025-04-05 23:38:05+00:00
Folks who care about 1. Owning their professional data 2. Algorithms that decide our interactions from the applications 3. Don’t want to get stuck in infinite scroll mode 4. Deeply care about sharing with people you know

I have developed a simple professional profile page which stores your followers and can public ally recommend your profile.

I don’t like LinkedIn it’s a great thing but they sell your data and use heavy attention based advertising it’s becoming a place for marketing company .

Work in progress the code in GitHub at GitHub/cynsar-capital/second-ex
by zeristor | 2025-04-05 23:38:09+00:00
The head of Octopus has said that the UK government is spending £350m a year on support for renewable power when production is too high and they have to be switched off.

I believe the contracts for power supply aren’t so generous, but an essential key thing is to make battery power key to the whole process.

In time with enough battery power I’m guessing carbon free steel generation, and aluminium production might become viable, but there’s a long long way to go before that happens.
by ggm | 2025-04-05 23:38:21+00:00
Steve Kent from BBN told me how they bootstrapped the original trust anchor which signed over the card conpanies PKI using an HSM module. After they initialised the subsidiary CAs they destroyed the private key hardware, and some of them wanted to take bits home to put in lucite as a memento but others were worried it was a skymesh moment and enough information could be gleaned from chip remains they'd reveal the private key.

(The public key proof was all they wanted, no reuse intended of this keypair)
by AngryData | 2025-04-05 23:39:59+00:00
I don't think anyone is against receiving marketing information they request, like a catalog. It is far different than advertising that people are essentially forced to view even if they don't want to see it. You request a catalog, just like you might request to view an online store's website. But advertising you don't request is a completely different ballgame. Imagine if every time you turned on or sat down at your computer it forced an open specific newspaper's site, or reddit, or twitter, and there was no way to stop it from happening. If every time you drove down a specific road all your electronic devices opened up some random website you didn't request or want. That is what people have a problem with.
by Alex-Programs | 2025-04-05 23:40:22+00:00
I used to feel dismayed that I missed that era of the internet and technology (I'm 19). IRC, forums, work-in-progress gifs on personal websites, etc.

I still wish I were there for that, but I'm glad I get to be here for LLMs and the intelligence explosion. I have absolutely no idea what the world will look like in a few years. It certainly isn't the certain high-paying tech job in a largely static world that it looked like a few years ago.

But whatever happens, it's going to be interesting!

I wonder whether I'm spending my time optimally, working on a little SAAS that happens to use LLMs as a downstream commodity, contributing through a niche benchmark.
by breadwinner | 2025-04-05 23:40:30+00:00
> dubious assumption that Trump gives any fucks about the US economy

I do believe that. If the economy crashes he will lose support from his billionaire friends. Also, the economy (along with immigration) was one of the top reasons people voted for him. I do believe he doesn't want to lose popular support. Currently GOP senators won't speak up against him because they know MAGA supporters will turn on them. But if he loses support GOP senators will be emboldened.
by default-kramer | 2025-04-05 23:42:28+00:00
Yeah, automated tests are great when they are good. But when they are bad, they can be worse than no tests at all.

Multiple times in my career I've taken ownership of a codebase written by someone else. Some of the most pleasant ones had very little test coverage, but the code quality was high enough to make the lack of tests not really matter. On the other hand, some code is so bad covering it with tests adds nothing of value; it's just one more thing I have to analyze and decide what to do with.

I agree with most of the author's points in general, but I think that most programmers who are capable of writing good tests are also capable of recognizing situations when it's not worth the trouble.
by Wumpnot | 2025-04-05 23:42:54+00:00
I think all groups engage in in group preference. If you look at businesses run by Indians in the US, they clearly favor hiring Indians, you see the same with other groups. Same with various East Asians, Jewish people etc.

It isn't just the dominate group, it is everyone.

So simplifying, if you have only 2 groups, one being 30% and the other 70% of the population, it would at first appear the 70% group has an advantage for finding jobs, but in reality they do not, as while they are favored at 70% of jobs, they are also competing against an equivalently larger group of people.

Anyway the implementation of racial preferences in college applications, and DEI has led to a system that systematical favors certain groups, and gaslighting that somehow this isn't the case.

I don't support Trump but liberals denying this reality, along with various other incredibly stupid woke positions, has led to the current situation, where we have a complete and utter imbecile running the country, because hey, at least he doesn't deny reality in regards DIE/social issues.