MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by masfoobar | 2025-04-09 11:14:15+00:00
> All innovation begins as closed source

I think you need to check your history. In the early days, before closed/proprietary software, source code was often shared between programmers.

Lets look at text editors. They did not begin "closed source" - but companies have a team of people to help SELL their products, even if they are inferior to whats already out there.

Baically, once computers matured was an opportunity to make a buck. Companies started selling their products for a fee. I would not be surprised if the source code was included before someone realised people can just pay for the executable. More money can be made by excluding the source code so new updates can also be for a fee.

(Lets not talk about "End user Licence Agreements" in this post, OK)

The "dominance" of closed source is really about companies with money controlling the status quo, with lawyers and sales teams knowing how to push it in favour.

Companies like Micro$oft today have soo much money they dictate the direction our computers systems are going. They push it in a direction that favours them. They have a hand controlling the flow, like other big companies having a hand trying to change to stream for their intent and purposes.

This is why -- whether you love him or hate him, I have much respects for people like Richard Stallman or others like Linus Torvalds.. to name a few!

You want to talk about "innovation" ?? What do you think these "Closed source innovations" are build with? Software is created using a Programming language such as Python, C++, C, Javascript, etc... the VAST MAJORITY being free to use, under some sort of Open Source community!

Lets also look at large companies in general.. many of which are not innovating... they are just purchasing smaller companies that are trying to do new things... closed source software or not.

Lastly, lets also be honest that innovation is not created out of thin air -- everything is inspired by something previously.. whether a failed experiment or something already successful. New ideas come about with more failures.. but comes further ideas until, eventually, we have something successful!

Linux may be inspired by other Operating Systems, and those were inspired by other things, etc. Innovation is progressive. Point I am making, if any company found ANY opportunity to build a closed-source version to shut down a popular Open Source equiverlant... THEY WOULD DO IT!
by bobdvb | 2025-04-09 11:14:27+00:00
A lot of the time the company cannot make it remote global because of tax and regulatory compliance. I work for a multinational company who has employees in at least a dozen countries, but we can't employ anyone who isn't in a country we don't have a registered company entity.

Add to that the number of people we've had apply for jobs using AI and then turn out to have zero knowledge of what we've hired them for when they turn up.
by Al-Khwarizmi | 2025-04-09 11:14:36+00:00
If the result you want is in the first few search hits, it's always better. Your query is shorter so there is less typing, the search engine is always faster, the results are far better because you side step the LLM hallucinating as it regurgitates the results it remembers on the page your would have read if you searched

Most often not true in the kind of searches I do. Say, I search for how to do something in the Linux terminal (not just the command, but the specific options to achieve a certain thing). Google will often take me to pages that do have the answer, but are full of ads and fluff, and I have to browse through several options until I find the ones I want. ChatGPT just gives me the answer.

And with any halfway decent model, hallucination only seems to be a problem in difficult or very specialized questions. Which I agree shouldn't be asked to LLMs (or not without verifying sources, at least). But over 90% of what I search aren't difficult or specialized questions, they're just things I have forgotten, or things that are easy but I don't know just because they're not in my area of expertise. For example as a learner of Chinese, I often ask it to explain sentences to me (translate the sentence, the individual words, and explain what a given word is doing in the sentence) and for that kind of thing it's basically flawless, there's no reason why it would hallucinate as such questions are trivial for a model having tons of Chinese text in its training set.
by rbergmair | 2025-04-09 11:14:52+00:00
Location: Germany

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: No

Languages: English, German

Technologies: Python, Natural Language Processing, Search Engines, Machine Learning, Finance, Perl, Lua, Java, Linux, Golang, Haxe, scientific Py (numpy, scipy, pandas, matplotlib, scikit-learn), QGIS & geographical Py, nltk, word2vec, vector search, llms, elasticsearch, apache solr, lucene, quickwit, tantivy, PostgreSQL, clickhouse, mongodb, redshift, AWS, Azure, docker, git

Résumé/CV: https://richard.bergmair.eu/en/projects/resume.pdf

Portfolio: https://richard.bergmair.eu/en/projects/projects.pdf

Web: https://richard.bergmair.eu/

Email: richard.bergmair funny-at-shape urefpa25.onmicrosoft.com

Hours: CET (European), US East, Indian

Data Scientist, Data Engineer, Search Engineer, Backend Developer

Ph.D. in Natural Language Processing from the University of Cambridge

13 years of freelancing

~ 10 years of that was heavy on Data Science & Machine Learning (Goldman Sachs, Telefónica Germany, Flowminder Foundation, ...)

~ 7 years of that was heavy on Search Engines & Natural Language Processing (DuckDuckGo, JUJU a.k.a. job-search-engine.com, ...)

some special interests: privacy & data protection (TÜV-certified), law & compliance, finance, bookkeeping
by Vox_Leone | 2025-04-09 11:16:27+00:00
Your arguments are pretty lame. Pix was indeed launched in the Bolsonaro administration, but it is incidental. You are flailing around the bulk of my argument, which is about the source code openness, without actually attacking it.

It might as well be illegal today.

Art. 16 da Lei nº 14.063, de 23/09/2021: estabelece que os sistemas de informação e de comunicação desenvolvidos exclusivamente pela administração pública são regidos por licença de código aberto, permitida a sua utilização, cópia, alteração e distribuição sem restrições por todos os órgãos e entidades públicos.[0]

Art. 16 of Law No. 14,063, of 09/23/2021: establishes that information and communication systems developed exclusively by the public administration are governed by an open source license, allowing their use, copying, alteration and distribution without restrictions by all public bodies and entities.[0]

[0]https://www.gov.br/governodigital/pt-br/plataformas-e-servic...

So, lets open up its code!
by hitekker | 2025-04-09 11:16:38+00:00
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43413702 is one example.

A Rustacean implied Go was not memory safe and that Microsoft couldn't understand the power of Rust. Steve Klabnik & others told them off. But other Rustaceans, like Patrick Walton, argued that Go has memory safety issues in theory.
by namaria | 2025-04-09 11:16:48+00:00
I thought the value proposition of using LLMs to code is the lesser cognitive load of just describing what you want in natural language. But if it turns out writing the prompt is so involved, you end up trading snippets on forums and you often run into undefined behavior (the thing you described turned out to be ambiguous to the LLM and it gave you something you did not expect at all)...

I have to wonder, wouldn't just writing the code be more productive in the end?
by tjader | 2025-04-09 11:16:57+00:00
It needs to rerender everything whenever you change any setting that affects typesetting. This used to be quite annoying when trying out fonts or find the best value for some setting, but recently they implemented a better way so that it first renders the current fragment (usually a chapter), releases the UI so that you can read, and renders the rest in the background. Page counts and some other stuff are broken in this meantime.
by fennecfoxy | 2025-04-09 11:17:02+00:00
I notice you didn't include them making cards for gay individuals in their community in your argument. As a gay man I definitely and most certainly feel offended, like being told I don't exist because your argument focussed only on women being represented.

Do you see what I mean? I 100% agree that both men and women, gay, straight and every other group all need to be properly represented in society where it matters. But battles should be picked & chosen.
by Zr01 | 2025-04-09 11:17:16+00:00
I'm more interested in the technical details than the publicity. Pretty much anyone these days can learn what a diffusion model is, how they're implemented, what the control flow is. What about this new multimodal LLM? They have no problems with text, they generate images using tokens, but how exactly? There's no open-source implementations that I know of, and I'm struggling to find details.
by dielll | 2025-04-09 11:18:12+00:00
guess your website got Hacker news Hug of death. Getting the error below:

Please check back later Error 1027 This website has been temporarily rate limited

You cannot access this site because the owner has reached their plan limits. Check back later once traffic has gone down.

If you are owner of this website, prevent this from happening again by upgrading your plan on the Cloudflare Workers dashboard.
by defrost | 2025-04-09 11:18:20+00:00
What to know about CECOT, El Salvador's mega-prison for [alleged] gang members

CECOT prisoners do not receive visits and are never allowed outdoors. The prison does not offer workshops or educational programs to prepare them to return to society after their sentences. The prison's dining halls, break rooms, gym and board games are for guards. [ the human rights organization ] Cristosal reported last year that at least 261 people had died in El Salvador's prisons during the gang crackdown. The group and others have cited cases of abuse, torture and lack of medical attention. .. the government has shown CECOT prisoners in boxer shorts marching into common areas and made to sit nearly atop each other. Cells lack enough bunks for everyone.

~ https://www.npr.org/2025/03/17/g-s1-54206/el-salvador-mega-p...
by ffsm8 | 2025-04-09 11:19:29+00:00
Depends on the implementation. E.g. Javas HashSets include has the same performance profile as a Map lookup. Its still not particularly performant with large datasets, but significantly less abysmal then a regular JS .includes().

I just didn't want to explore the example to such a depth, as it felt irrelevant to me at the time of writing.
by nobleach | 2025-04-09 11:19:54+00:00
I think it speaks to an incredibly pragmatic viewpoint though. When you take a look at your flagship language/ecosystem and you say, "hey, this is great for building entire systems for doctor/patient data... or perhaps even banking software"... but recognize that "it's probably not the best thing for building a compiler/tooling". Google themselves show the same pragmatism when NOT using Go for Android. They prefer Kotlin these days.
by rbergmair | 2025-04-09 11:21:30+00:00
SEEKING WORK | Remote | Data Scientist, Data Engineer, Search Engineer, Backend Developer

Location: Germany

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: No

Languages: English, German

Technologies: Python, Natural Language Processing, Search Engines, Machine Learning, Finance, Perl, Lua, Java, Linux, Golang, Haxe, scientific Py (numpy, scipy, pandas, matplotlib, scikit-learn), QGIS & geographical Py, nltk, word2vec, vector search, llms, elasticsearch, apache solr, lucene, quickwit, tantivy, PostgreSQL, clickhouse, mongodb, redshift, AWS, Azure, docker, git

Résumé/CV: https://richard.bergmair.eu/en/projects/resume.pdf

Portfolio: https://richard.bergmair.eu/en/projects/projects.pdf

Web: https://richard.bergmair.eu/

Email: richard.bergmair funny-at-shape urefpa25.onmicrosoft.com

Hours: CET (European), US East, Indian

Ph.D. in Natural Language Processing from the University of Cambridge

13 years of freelancing

~ 10 years of that was heavy on Data Science & Machine Learning (Goldman Sachs, Telefónica Germany, Flowminder Foundation, ...)

~ 7 years of that was heavy on Search Engines & Natural Language Processing (DuckDuckGo, JUJU a.k.a. job-search-engine.com, ...)

some special interests: privacy & data protection (TÜV-certified), law & compliance, finance, bookkeeping
by pocketarc | 2025-04-09 11:21:40+00:00
> should be frowned upon as hard as table-based layouts

I absolutely agree with you. I've been very very keen on CSP for a long time, it feels SO good to know that that vector for exploiting vulnerabilities is plugged.

One thing that's very noticeable: It seems to block/break -a lot- of web extensions. Basically every error I see in Sentry is of the form of "X.js blocked" or "random script eval blocked", stuff that's all extension-related.
by ben_w | 2025-04-09 11:21:41+00:00
Between better insulation[0], and north-south grid connections[1], I'm not sure this is a huge issue.

Yes, there are going to be places like Nuorgam in Finland where a population of 200 may turn out to be non-economical to put on the same suitably upgraded HVDC grid as everyone else, but they're also not getting e.g. a dedicated nuclear reactor any time soon.

Yes, that does still leave oil and gas in such places. Or would, if the oil and gas remained economical to supply internationally when the majority of users worldwide stop using it. Biofuels (e.g. wood in a fireplace) is still a thing, even if not fantastic for either health or environment. I have no idea if we're going to see other long-term chemistry-based solutions, people keep talking about ammonia but it's too far out of my knowledge to argue for or against.

[0] I'm 52° north and for the last 6 months was wearing T-shirts indoors for an average of 17 kWh per day (for everything: heating, hot water, appliances, tech) even though there were a few times I accidentally left a huge window open for hours. It's very well insulated and has a heat pump.

[1] Longer days closer to the equator. North tip of Lapland has 52 days without sunrise in winter[2], but it's just a question of "how much money and what's the cheaper alternative" for a grid connection that ultimately ends up in the Sahara where the winter solstice day length is 10 hours[3].

[2] https://www.finavia.fi/en/newsroom/2023/what-polar-night-exp...

[3] https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=Tataouine+sunrise+21+De...
by im3w1l | 2025-04-09 11:23:45+00:00
I haven't made up my thinking about this yet. I think first there is the principal question. Is a library deleting content always a violation of free speech? And I think the answer to that question is no. A library comes with an expectation of quality, so they must do do content curation, keeping quality content in and low-quality content out. Those who are not judged to meet the bar are not silenced, they have other options for getting their opinions and material out.

But the harder question is whether this particular material was unfairly singled out or not. If the library is unfairly suppressing quality research then that would be a bad thing. I think what would help me understand the situation in that respect is if someone posted examples of high quality research that was deleted but arguably shouldn't have been.
by xmcqdpt2 | 2025-04-09 11:23:55+00:00
Where I work did an inventory a few years back of their systems and found that we had about the same number of databases (not tables!) as employed engineers, counting all deployed (QA and prod) instances.

The team on that inventory project obviously created a new database to put their data in, plus QA and test replicas. They (probably) have since moved to another DB system but left the old ones running for legacy applications!
by FinnLobsien | 2025-04-09 11:24:13+00:00
A few things:

0. Everyone feels like an imposter, especially in the beginning. I'm sure when you were an intern/junior, you felt like an imposter and got over it by continuing to do the thing.

1. Unless your company culture is toxic, I'd also tell your manager that this is your first managing role and you'd love their advice and ask them to fill in your knowledge gaps.

Being vulnerable like that at work might not feel great, but it's way better than needing to remedy something you messed up because you put on a facade that you know everything.

3. It's totally fine to ask your team about things you don't understand. "How did you do this when Ben was the manager? What worked about it? What didn't?"

4. One of the biggest changes from IC to manager is that it's a lot more difficult to fix things with more effort.

Say you're worried about delivering something late. As an engineer, you can work a late night or two and deliver on time. As a manager, it's much harder to fix issues by deploying more of your own time to them.

This is effectively leverage: Things can go very well without much of your input. But when things are going badly, you also can't fix it with just your own time.

Think about it like you used to be rowing a boat and now you're captaining a small crew sailing vessel: There's a crew that can go further, faster, but it requires working well together.
by verzali | 2025-04-09 11:25:13+00:00
It's never that simple, especially when it comes to human spaceflight and NASA procedures. Switching out the thrusters will mean months of safety reviews, tests, updated procedures and flight rules, and endless other paperwork to make sure neither the crew nor the space station are put in any risk.

Not that all that necessarily works - Starliner had already been through all that and the really wild stuff to me is how much NASA was willing to waive their rules about safety around the ISS in order to let Starliner dock.
by figmert | 2025-04-09 11:26:04+00:00
To be clear, the difference is something along this line:

$ bash -ec 'echo hello && ls -la /tmp/ | grep systemd && false && echo testing' hello drwx------. 3 root root 60 Mar 29 18:33 systemd-private-bluetooth.service-yuSMVM drwx------. 3 root root 60 Mar 29 18:33 systemd-private-upower.service-YhHHP2

versus

$ bash -euxc 'echo hello; ls -la /tmp/ | grep systemd; false; echo testing' + echo hello hello + ls -la /tmp/ + grep systemd drwx------. 3 root root 60 Mar 29 18:33 systemd-private-bluetooth.service-yuSMVM drwx------. 3 root root 60 Mar 29 18:33 systemd-private-upower.service-YhHHP2 + false

Docker also supports the `SHELL` syntax now, which is even better, because you can set it once at the top of the Dockerfile without having to do the whole `set -eux` on every line.
by gruez | 2025-04-09 11:26:07+00:00
"Locking down" is almost always a bad approach when it comes to border crossings. You have very little rights at the border, so keeping your phone locked and refusing to divulge the 20 characters password isn't really an option. Even without the threat of detaining you, they can refuse entry (if you're not a citizen/permanent resident), or seize your $1000 phone/laptop. Far better to wipe your phone and restore from backup after you've crossed the border. The article does make a good point that you should seed your wiped phone with signs of activity so it doesn't look freshly wiped.
by debarshri | 2025-04-09 11:26:32+00:00
It is commendable that TS has created a market in an already crowded marketplace of VPN tools. They're competing with Palo Alto, Netskope, Check Point, and Cisco, to name a few.

One key understanding from my brief market experience is that you must build a firewall or router if you really want to own the VPN market. The way the sale is done is that the vendor goes in with the firewall, router, and switch, offering office space connectivity with the infrastructure and various network locations and upselling the VPN. This often accounts for the subpar quality of VPN software. There is a trend called SASE, which includes technologies like TS; people are questioning the enterprise value of SASE. Netskope and Cato Networks are some examples.

I believe that their enterprise journey will be challenging, given the player's extensive experience in upmarket sales. Although TS appears appealing and has potential for improvement, the GTM is entirely unique for enterprise. You need to build reseller network, System integrator partners, high value customizations, etc.

If you decide to embrace the security positioning, you must have a diverse portfolio of products. If you model the org. around Palo Alto et al., you need a huge diversity of products, VPN, hardware, cloud security tools, app security tools, etc., as the ICP (CISO) is trying to optimize their allocated budget. People in enterprise are ok with good enough products as long as they meet compliance standards, fit the budget, and does not disrupt operations.

It could be that they might acquire bunch of companies with this capital.
by liendolucas | 2025-04-09 11:26:36+00:00
I prefer to read source code, articles, watch videos or even join a chat channel to discuss and try things out until they work (or understand why they don't work) than fall and consume trash from HypeAI. Heck even if I don't get a solution I prefer to be stuck thinking with paper and pencil.

The only time I did it try it for the very first time was an evening that I was so bored that decided to compare my 3 line Python snippet (of which one of those was the "def" statement) that generates an alternating pulse clock against the output of an "ai" prompt.

The output code I saw kept me thinking about all those poor souls relying on HypeAI to create anything useful.

Not long ago there was a thread about someone proud of a 35k LoC cooking web app entirely made from a prompt. What it kept ringing from that thread was that the author was proud of the total LoC as maybe thought that the more the better. Who knows?
by angra_mainyu | 2025-04-09 11:27:08+00:00
Zig is fantastic, however there are a few issues (mostly related to its immature/wip status):

- the build system is constantly changing in a breaking way (between releases some of the repos I have on GH no longer build and need their build.zig to be updated).

- the comptime section of the docs needs to be heavily expanded, I'd love to see them take common Go interfaces and redo them in Zig (like io.Writer, io.Reader), breaking down the process step-by-step. It took me a little bit longer than it should've to efficiently use comptime.

- a whole section dedicated to things like using WaitGroup and multithreading, for those coming from langs like Go. Also, higher-level concurrency primitives like channels would be fantastic.

- a better import system for external zig libraries, the zig fetch => .dependency => .root_module.addImport stuff is not as straightforward as it should be although for someone coming from C it definitely does feel like using meson

None of these are critical and again, all signs of Zig's "youth".
by defrost | 2025-04-09 11:27:25+00:00
The greatest conquest during the time of the founder ...

In December 629, after eight years of intermittent fighting with Meccan tribes, Muhammad gathered an army of 10,000 Muslim converts and marched on the city of Mecca. The conquest went largely uncontested, and Muhammad seized the city with minimal casualties.

~ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conquest_of_Mecca

hardly sounds like the work of an "an imperialist death cult"
by lloeki | 2025-04-09 11:27:27+00:00
in TFA, it is explained how Chromium only considers the last four lines and aims to only solve one aspect (lone word) and none of rivers, bag rags, hyphenation, etc...

Comparatively:

> WebKit is not the first browser engine to implement, but we are the first browser to use it to evaluate and adjust the entire paragraph. And we are the first browser to use it to improve rag.