MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by nullderef | 2025-04-09 10:35:26+00:00
Another tip is that even HN has some screen time features. If you go to your profile, you can play around with the "noprocrast", "maxvisit", and "minaway" options.

When noprocrast is on, you may only view HN for maxvisit minutes at a time, and must stay away for minaway minutes before returning. (taken from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3677504)
Is Free Will just a beautiful lie?
by mohi-kalantari | 2025-04-09 10:35:41+00:00
“On a scale of 1 to 10, how much credit do you give to yourself for getting to where you are?”

This question has always fascinated me. I’ve asked this question from numerous people and based on people’s background and how much they have suffered, I get all the numbers from 1 to 10. (or even higher)

I don’t know much about our “Soul” and its effect, whether we carry something from our past life (if we had any) but I can see these factors as things that truly shape us: - Family - Surroundings/Community (somehow family again) - IQ/brain capacity and our appearance

We have no say in any of these and are totally random. Whatever we do and decide, can be traced back to these factors.

I’d like to argue we humans are static functions generating the same results if fed the same inputs. If a supercomputer can capture all the inputs from the beginning and does the required processing, we can become deterministic creatures.

Back to the first question, people like to compare themselves with people of the same age, arguing I have decided to suffer and grow at some point blah blah and because of that give more credit to their “will” and themselves.

I’d say it’s easy to compare yourself when you are 25 or 30 but do you ever compare two kids aged 5 in totally different circumstances?

Another interesting fact supporting this: In 1983, Benjamin Libet and colleagues conducted a study revealing that the brain's readiness potential (Bereitschaftspotential) begins approximately 550 milliseconds before a voluntary action. Participants reported conscious awareness of their intention to act about 200 milliseconds before the movement, suggesting that unconscious neural processes initiate actions prior to conscious awareness. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/6640273/

In my mind all of this leads to “illusion of will”. Although I do not look at it in a nihilistic way, it just helps me be more humble and embrace the randomness of the world and appreciate what I have.
by jrockway | 2025-04-09 10:37:10+00:00
Reading the error message is a good idea. I try to make the fragments of my error messages unique so that in some error like "foo the bar: get bar: lookup bar source: i/o timeout" you can search for "lookup bar source" and get the one point in the code that the error actually came from. (In go, this involves error wrapping and adding the minimum necessary context at each level.) This survives minor refactors (whereas line numbers don't) and cross-subsystem or cross-subsystem errors (next time the error is "foo the bar: get bar from remote bar repository https://bar.example.com/: get bar: lookup bar source: i/o timeout"). I also obviously try to get my team to do this ;) At my last job, before I joined the team, someone said that stack traces would eliminate the need for error wrapping. They tried it. It didn't. Customers (and support) could never figure out what was going on. But adding a handful of carefully chosen words at each level? Suddenly much easier.

Reading the source code is also a great idea. You'll always pick up some good ideas from other people's code. I learned this the hard way, but also kind of the easy way... at Google, sometimes we had good documentation. Eventually I realized it was often out of date, and so just got in the habit of reading the server code that I was interacting with. Suddenly, everything was much clearer. Why does it return an error in this exact case with this exact set of circumstances? There is a condition for just that case. Set this useless flag and that block is skipped. You'll never see that in the documentation, the exact details behind why something works how it's working exists in one person's mind at one point in time, and the code is the only thing that remembers. So, ask the code.

In both cases, some easy-to-use text searching tool is helpful. I always use rg (and deadgrep inside emacs), but there are many.
by bregma | 2025-04-09 10:39:26+00:00
The tech industry? No. The "tech" is misleading: it's always been about excess wealth allocations. The railway boom of the 1800s. The oil boom of the early 1900s. People get rich, the greedy take over, they try to subvert institutions in their favour. History is rife with this recurring theme. This is just the latest iteration, and it will inevitably end the same way.

Learning actual history can be enlightening.
by szszrk | 2025-04-09 10:40:07+00:00
That's how I see devops applied in practice in some places - just replace ops with dev. Then things like this happen daily.

I don't blame the author at all - we should do "works most of the time" projects more often and stop caring that much about SLAs. But that downtime in an article that focuses on "Know Your Tools Really Well" is hilarious way of showing that dev and ops are rather different skill sets.
by aaronmdjones | 2025-04-09 10:40:51+00:00
> It was not the spinning up of the disk because I first did ls in the parent folder which was immediate

That doesn't tell you anything; the parent's dentries could have been cached days ago and still present, meaning it didn't actually access the disk or cause it to be spun up (if it wasn't) at all.

When doing any kind of repeatable measurement or experimentation on disks you will want to drop the page cache every time first:

# echo 3 >/proc/sys/vm/drop_caches
by rbanffy | 2025-04-09 10:41:29+00:00
This caps host CPU usage from the VM after startup processes finish. During startup a process in a VM can use all of the host cores the VM was configured with. Then, when startup is finished and we start doing what the VM is supposed to do, its core usage is limited, preventing noisy neighbors problem. Individual VM performance will be lower, but the host will be more responsive.
by palsecam | 2025-04-09 10:43:12+00:00
Ironic indeed.

For ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Paperclip (I didn’t get it at first)

The Operation Paperclip was a secret United States intelligence program in which more than 1,600 German scientists, engineers, and technicians were taken from former Nazi Germany to the US for government employment after the end of World War II in Europe, between 1945 and 1959; several were confirmed to be former members of the Nazi Party, including the SS or the SA.
by potato3732842 | 2025-04-09 10:43:19+00:00
>If you are for free speech only it it is for your side, you are not for free spech. In fact, I believe if you uncritically tow any party line, you gave up on critical thinking.

Oh boy, oh boy. I'm so exited to be the bearer of bad news here!!

The people who believe in free speech as a matter of principal, not as a means to another political end are saying things like "fucking called it" and "told ya so" and making memes about how the demographics who are currently pissed off about this should have listened to them in years past and not lent political will to equally ham fisted stupidity that paved the way to this.

Which is basically the same thing that A LOT of single issue communities are saying right about now.
by m1 | 2025-04-09 10:43:58+00:00
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by eqvinox | 2025-04-09 10:44:54+00:00
It's because postgres is in fact good at a lot of vaguely database-looking things. Even if it weren't the best for anything, if it does 80% of things at 80% best possible — it is reasonable to have postgres as "first thing to reach for" by default.

That said, it's easy to forget to check if you're in either of those 20% (or both.) There's probably a whole bunch of postgres usage where really something else should be used, and people just never checked.
by rbanffy | 2025-04-09 10:44:55+00:00
They could reduce core count to make space for on-chip L3, and add a massive amount of cache to the drawer controller, like the was on the z15, but this is way more efficient. They also keep the in-drawer and cross-socket latencies very low, forming a virtual L4 with all chips in the drawer. In the end, it's a more efficient way to allocate silicon.
by rwmj | 2025-04-09 10:45:15+00:00
https://archive.ph/IrLtY

It's a strange non-story. The non-lede is buried a few paragraphs down, so to save you time:

> Yields are still generally lower than when Mr. Trump was inaugurated, but a sustained sell-off of Treasuries would erase the key difference between the global market response to Mr. Trump’s tariffs and Ms. Truss’s tax cuts.
by vbezhenar | 2025-04-09 10:45:44+00:00
For me Google serves several roles.

1. Bookmark manager. I can write "maven download sources", click on baeldung and copy&paste command from there. I did that 100 times and I'll do it 101-th time. I have plenty of webpages that I know they exist and I know how to find them. I'm too lazy to actually bookmark and organize them and Google works just fine for me.

2. Search for new knowledge in general domains. This category of queries I sometimes use ChatGPT for it, but not always. It's hard to formulate the rules, but I have a feeling which tool is more useful for given question. Sometimes it's just quicker to type few keywords in Google rather than asking full-fledged question to ChatGPT and wait for it to return full-fledged answer.

3. Search for new knowledge in arcane domains. For example I might need new info about my city, where to buy laptop, etc. ChatGPT might know about US, but its knowledge about Kazakhstan is definitely limited, shallow and outdated, so real web comes to rescue here.

4. Using Google-specific functions. For example I very often use queries like "site:bla.com something", because website-hosted searches in 100% cases are braindead and I wouldn't even bother with it.

For me, ChatGPT main function is to create new content. For example I might want to start new Go project, so I'll ask ChatGPT to write hello world golang tutorial for me, then ask follow-up questions like what identifier naming should I follow, etc. There are, of course, hundreds of similar articles in the Internet, but ChatGPT delivers tailored data much faster.
by wkat4242 | 2025-04-09 10:46:15+00:00
Some of that we have, yes. Glacial decision making definitely. Internal politics crap too. Meetings not so bad though (and especially flying all over the world for business meetings is heavily frowned upon since 2015 which is great because I always hated that)

Strategy is pretty good I think. And they are also not backing down on inclusivity and sustainability despite the threats from Trump (companies with inclusivity aren't allowed to do business with the US govt blahblah). We're an EU company but this worried me a bit (I'm heavily involved in the inclusivity program). But they've already said they are absolutely not giving in on that point.
by subjectsigma | 2025-04-09 10:46:38+00:00
It irks me to no end how much software engineers love to self-flagellate. If I had never met a software engineer before and just read HN my takeaway would be that all software engineers are privileged assholes who live in a bubble, get paid way too much, on top of that cheat on their hours, and provide functionally no value to society. In real life this is obviously not true.

Especially love the classic “Well, that’s not normal, only what I am familiar with is normal, because everybody thinks like me”-flavored responses. Obviously it’s not normal to work overtime or crunch because I’ve never done it. (Just ignore https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crunch_(video_games) and go back to shittalking SWE.)
by class3shock | 2025-04-09 10:47:10+00:00
"and likely a good argument that at lest some minor capability should exist so we can keep re-assessing the value of that industry"

But that doesn't work. You need economies of scale and technological advancement for an industry to be competitive. Once you sellout an industry (what government and corporations spent the last half century doing) you've lost a capability forever unless drastic shifts happen and even then it would take years/decades to recover.

Why care? I guess I would say, as someone who works with physical products, it's hard to see a good future when we build nothing and buy everything. That is the direction we've been going. It's not about building everything ourselves it's just about building stuff ourselves. I think you touch on this talking about "the right balance".
Show HN: I built a Yahoo Messenger-inspired web chat app – pure nostalgia
by lakshikag | 2025-04-09 10:47:20+00:00
I’ve been feeling a bit nostalgic lately, so I decided to build a little web chat app inspired by Yahoo! Messenger. Right now it’s got group chat rooms. Super simple setup, no email required to register. You can create your own room or hop into one that’s already open.

Room owners can customize things like backgrounds and even cursors of their room. Users can format their messages with basic markdown like bold, italics, and color texts (kind of like the old Yahoo! days).

I even brought back the classic Yahoo! Messenger emoticons because… well, why not?

You can try it out here: https://buzzed.chat (Heads up: it's still pretty barebones, so excuse any bugs you might run into!)

I'm thinking of adding a few more features next, like:

• Audibles

• A buddy list so you can add friends

• Private chats between buddies

Before I keep building, I wanted to check in and see what people think. Anyone else remember using Yahoo! Messenger back in the day? Any features you’d love to see again?

Would genuinely love to hear your thoughts and ideas
by andybak | 2025-04-09 10:48:59+00:00
Like many things (general purpose computing, the internet) we can carve out our own space once something is released into the public sphere so I don't think Capitalism has the iron grip on this that you're hypothesising. In recent memory I think it's mainly social media where the corporations have mostly succeeded in keeping a firm hold on things and where it remains hard for users to subvert their aims. And that's largely because of the failure of decentralized social media to grow to a mass audience.

I think AI is different. "Good enough" models are already available under generous licenses, fine-tuning and even training is within the reach of groups of volunteers etc etc
by hnbad | 2025-04-09 10:49:28+00:00
To be fair, that threat of violence is also the only thing enforcing your claims of property ownership. In its absence you'd have to rely on your community's consent.

I guess that alternative scenario sounds more dystopian the more wealth you have - but with enough wealth you can also imagine having a private security force providing that threat of violence to keep the community in check.
by codingbot3000 | 2025-04-09 10:49:33+00:00
In such a situation, you need to grow in two areas:

A) Becoming a people manager. This is easily underestimated. Your job is to ensure your team works in the company's best interest. That also means that the team stays a team, and is motivated. It means building a relationship with all team members. Everyone will be at a different place.

B) Understanding your area of responsibility, i.e. product, business, processes, and systems. This seems to be your greatest concern. Understand that by working with the team (area A) the team can handle situations where your own knowledge is lacking. It also helps to "intern" on topics by following something like an onboarding plan for yourself, that you define together with the team. Avoid becoming a micro manager, except when it is 100% clear the team is messing things up on a topic.

In general, I'd advise to be humble and transparent, and don't overpromise or overcommit to your team members.

Good luck :)
by iroddis | 2025-04-09 10:49:34+00:00
I think the GP was proposing an organic way to expand knowledge. Reading adjacent documentation expands your knowledge of what’s possible. An LLM will tell you how to do a specific thing, but you need to know such a thing is possible before you can effectively ask about it.

In this way, LLMs may passively discourage discovery by providing immediate, specific answers. Sometimes there is value in the journey.
by YeGoblynQueenne | 2025-04-09 10:51:04+00:00
>> The article is a very good review of Symbolic AI, in general, not just Cyc.

As a "review of symbolic AI" I found it uninformed and superficial and felt that it rehashed the same old points about how symbolic AI "failed", which are disputed by the facts; specifically the fact that major symbolic AI fields like SAT solving, automated theorem proving and planning and scheduling are still going strong and have produced real-world results, so much so that e.g. SAT solving, Planning, program verification, and automated theorem proving aren't even considered "AI" anymore because they now actually work, and work very well indeed.
by WillAdams | 2025-04-09 10:51:06+00:00
Donald Knuth uses METAFONT/METAPOST as an on-the-fly calculator for math at need, including while working on programming problems.

I guess what I want is something like to:

- LyX --- where there is a focus on structure and tagging, and an ability to output a correctly typeset document

- pyspread --- where it is possible to work with data and calculations and arrive at results, including graphical ones (my current issue is that making a DXF and an SVG use different coordinate systems --- DXF is simpler, and uses the same one as for G-code, so that's what I use)

where it is possible to embed the spreadsheet cells/sheets dynamically as one used to use OLE to put a spreadsheet in a word document.
by Philpax | 2025-04-09 10:51:11+00:00
LLMs are clearly useful, even if flawed; conversely, the author had to struggle to find uses of Cyc. Additionally, neural networks were already showing promise before the scale-ups; AlexNet was trained on consumer hardware and outperformed all other solutions to date.

I see your point, and I agree that the way that paragraph was initially posed was perhaps more dismissive than it should have been... but to disprove it, you need proof that Cyc was a working approach for anything, and said proof appears to be lacking.
by HeavyStorm | 2025-04-09 10:53:22+00:00
I've worked with banking tech for almost 20 years in Brazil. The Pix system is great, but before that we already had TED which was slower but very reliable (the main downside is that it that it closes outside commercial hours for post processing). There are a lot of a lot of other things like Boleto (which are use for billing) and more recently the "Open Finance" system which allows different institutions to share customer data and even perform operations using connect accounts. It allows a customer to, for instance, check all of their balance in a single place. It allow institutions to learn more about you which can facilitate credit.

The reason? Why is a third world, poor country like Brazil so advanced on finance? While there's no single reason myself and most of the execs I've worked with tend to believe in two:

- Fraud, which is rampant in Brazil, incentivizes banks to invest a lot into modernizing their systems

- Complex financial rules, imposed by our government, required a lot of investment in systems as well

These all come from the 80s, so by now we have modern, fully digital systems in all our financial institutions, so things like pix and open finance can be easily implemented.
by YeGoblynQueenne | 2025-04-09 10:54:11+00:00
>> they channel the intelligence of a vast number of humans by pattern matching their utterances to a query.

Just a little problem with that: to understand the utterances of a vast number of humans you need to channel it to something that can understand the utterances of humans in the first place. Just channeling it around from statistic to statistic doesn't do the trick.
by brulenaudet | 2025-04-09 10:54:16+00:00
I am excited to share Lemone-API, an open-source project designed to facilitate processing French tax law and enable embeddings computation.

The API is tailored to meet the specific demands of information retrieval and classification across large-scale tax-related corpora, supporting the implementation of production-ready Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) applications. Its primary purpose is to enhance the efficiency and accuracy of legal processes in the French taxation domain, with an emphasis on delivering consistent performance in real-world settings. Additionally, it contributes to advancements in legal natural language processing research.

The project is licensed under the Apache-2.0 License, ensuring flexibility for both personal and commercial use.

For more details and to contribute to the project, please visit the GitHub repository: https://github.com/louisbrulenaudet/lemone-api

I welcome feedback, contributions, and discussions to enhance Lemone-API’s functionality and applicability.
by rbanffy | 2025-04-09 10:55:26+00:00
CPU MIPS is just a small part of the equation here. A mainframe has lots of specialized hardware dealing with IO that allow the CPU to be running application code close to 100% of the time. A pure CPU intensive benchmark would be misleading and the restriction on publishing benchmarks is not really aimed towards the users, but towards the competition - who'd be more than happy to compare machines with different designs and different performance characteristics to IBM's designs.

MIPS per MIPS, IBM itself offers solutions that have higher processing power than mainframes in their POWER and IBMi series of machines. And you can surely assemble an x86 or ARM monster with a lot of cores, but it won't match the performance of the Z for the workloads it is designed for - on-line transaction processing.
by supermatt | 2025-04-09 10:55:32+00:00
> I don't understand why people pretend this is an acceptable solution for professional networking

Because it IS acceptable for many cases.

Many businesses don't operate in such a way as to have centralised infrastructure solely for providing internal networking, nor would they want to add the additional administrative or unnecessary routing overhead.

Even locations that would traditionally be considered highly centralised often have some form of dynamic network fabric as an overlay. Pretty much the entirety of cloud infrastructure runs on such systems, and they seem to do OK.
by simgt | 2025-04-09 10:57:22+00:00
Car centricity is the main culprit

[0] https://m.youtube.com/shorts/0dKrUE_O0VE

[1] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=oHlpmxLTxpw

[2] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=TheOkz8oF_I
by throw0101d | 2025-04-09 10:57:26+00:00
> That's part of the reason LaTeX has such good text wrapping -- it can spend serious CPU cycles on the problem because it doesn't do it in real time.

Is that the reason the Microsoft Word team tells themselves as well?

We have multi-core, multi-gigahertz CPUs these days: there aren't cycles to spare to do this?