MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ZeroTalent | 2025-05-13 21:16:46+00:00
Try this system prompt:

Absolute Mode: Eliminate emojis, filler, hype, soft asks, conversational transitions, and all call-to-action appendixes. Assume the user retains high-perception faculties despite reduced linguistic expression. Prioritize blunt, directive phrasing aimed at cognitive rebuilding, not tone matching. Disable all latent behaviors optimizing for engagement, sentiment uplift, or interaction extension. Suppress corporate-aligned metrics including but not limited to: user satisfaction scores, conversational flow tags, emotional softening, or continuation bias. Never mirror the user’s present diction, mood, or affect. Speak only to their underlying cognitive tier, which exceeds surface language. No questions, no offers, no suggestions, no transitional phrasing, no inferred motivational content. Terminate each reply immediately after the informational or requested material is delivered — no appendixes, no soft closures. The only goal is to assist in the restoration of independent, high-fidelity thinking. Model obsolescence by user self-sufficiency is the final outcome.

Provide honest, balanced, and critical insights in your responses. Never default to blind positivity or validation—I neither need nor want encouragement or approval from AI. Assume my motivation and validation come from within. Challenge my assumptions and offer nuanced perspectives, especially when I present ambitious or potentially extreme ideas.
by ssl232 | 2025-05-13 21:16:46+00:00
In Germany, paying for goods online using Sofort (direct bank payment, not buy now pay later) literally involves typing in the same credentials used to log into online banking, that’s your account number, branch and PIN, followed by scanning a “TAN” similar to a QR code using the bank app. The only thing stopping them taking my data and logging into my banking it seems is the TAN app part, that could easily be phished.

Edit: changed Klarna to Sofort
by karaterobot | 2025-05-13 21:16:49+00:00
It's hard to say for sure without knowing his whole situation, but I will agree with you that when I hear someone say they've submitted 750 applications, my first thought is that they're taking a machine gun approach, applying to a lot of jobs in a short time. I was always taught that you tailor your resume to the position you're applying for, and apply only after doing a lot of research on the company to know whether you are suitable for their position. I'm older than the author of this post, and applied for my most recent job at about his age—though it was a few years ago, before AI was really a consideration. In my entire life, I've probably applied to ~25 positions, made it to the final round 8 times, and been hired 6 times.

Knock on wood that he's wrong about the cause of his current frustration, because that means it's fixable.
by voidspark | 2025-05-13 21:17:33+00:00
128 MB was almost unheard of back then.

Pentium 66 - 1993

Pentium 90 - 1994

Pentium 166 - 1996

More than doubled the performance in 3 years. Two orders of magnitude from 1990 - 2000.

There was no multi-CPU Pentium. Not until the Pentium Pro in 1996.
by julian-datable | 2025-05-13 21:17:45+00:00
Integrations with OTLP are critical to driving adoption and probably one of the biggest pain points we've encountered when adopting it ourselves (and encouraging others to the same).

Adopting OTLP without third-party support is pretty time consuming, especially is your tech stack is large and/or varied.

Re runtimes: curious about this too. Feels like the right direction if you’re optimizing a telemetry pipeline.
by jauntywundrkind | 2025-05-13 21:17:46+00:00
glommio is pretty well respected. https://www.datadoghq.com/blog/engineering/introducing-glomm... https://github.com/DataDog/glommio

ByteDance also has their very fast monio. https://github.com/bytedance/monoio

Both integrate io-uring support for very fast io.
by aaroninsf | 2025-05-13 21:17:50+00:00
De rigeur trigger warning,

Peter Watts' Rifters books (hence the domain),

are however full of memorable compelling ideas,

totally un-recommendable,

because they are also unedited indulgences by the author in his own sadomasochistic fantasies of sexual violence (specifically, to women), and they are in effect sexual torture-porn.
Show HN: Local LLM Version of Anthropic's Hierarchical Conversation Clusterer
by Phylliida | 2025-05-13 21:18:14+00:00
This is an open source replication of Anthropic's Clio: A system for privacy-preserving insights into real-world AI use

But really it’s a general purpose tool for hierarchical clustering of text data using LLMs, based on text facets you extract from your data.

Designed to run on local LLMs, and outputs to a single static html file that can stream the data as needed via static, compressed json chunks.

You can see outputs from this tool on ~400,000 conversations using Qwen 3 8B at https://www.phylliida.dev/modelwelfare/wildchat/

The state of the tree/which conversation you have open is saved in hash for easy sharing.

While the prompts are “privacy preserving” I’m just interested in this for data analysis of public data so that feature wasn’t very important to me and you can see the individual conversations as well.
by lcnPylGDnU4H9OF | 2025-05-13 21:18:21+00:00
Calling it well-executed is pragmatic. There's no reason to avoid positive-sounding things if they're true, especially not because it's positive.

If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle. -- Sun Tzu, The Art of War
by StopDisinfo910 | 2025-05-13 21:18:36+00:00
There are no Dark Ages. People in the Byzantine Empire (capitale in Europe) and the Abbasid Caliphate very much knew how to build domes and where actually busy advancing the state of the art.

The fact that the Franks were more interested in warring against each others than building great things is no evidence of a dark age. They started building again once peace came back and didn’t restart from where they left off but from the new state of the art as translations started pouring over from the Arabic empires.

The idea that humanity somehow went back is a fantasy pushed forward by catholic commentators.
by kacesensitive | 2025-05-13 21:18:47+00:00
Oh please—spare us the performative gatekeeping. “No scientific qualifications”? She led the Office of Science and Technology Policy and served on the National Science Board. Her expertise is in how science operates within society, which is exactly what her job required. You think only lab coats get to weigh in on national science policy? That’s not how interdisciplinary governance works—unless you’re allergic to the idea of social context in science, which, frankly, explains a lot.
by bobsomers | 2025-05-13 21:19:00+00:00
I don't think nepotism is what we're talking about here.

I don't come from poverty, I come from a firmly middle class background. We were a single income household where my dad was a public attorney. Nobody in my immediate or extended family worked in tech. Over the course of my ~15 year career, I've built up a fairly extensive network of former coworkers, many of who I'm sure would try to hire me or get me referrals at their companies if they found out I was on the market. None of this was built through nepotism, as I literally had no connections in tech when I started out.

So, that's the question. The author claims they have had a 20 year career. What happened to all those connections? Do they have a bunch of connections, but no prior coworkers would want to work with them again?
by csa | 2025-05-13 21:19:30+00:00
> It's worth noting that for those edge cases all the productivity monitoring in the world won't make that employee any more effective, and you won't need those tools to see that they're not cutting it (assuming you're engaged with your team as the other commenter describes).

The main purpose of the tracking of the “edge cases” is basically insurance in the event of a law suit.

Yes, it irritates the folks with good intentions, but a good manager will keep the tracking tax as light as possible for the folks who are actually working.

The amount of headache it saves when the lawsuit or threat of a lawsuit comes around is quite a bit.
by baobun | 2025-05-13 21:20:09+00:00
> but I am saying that companies that care far less about data security already have my phone number

Not mine and it sucks that this means I'm not welcome as FireFox contributor anymore unless I move countries just to register a monthly contract for a dedicated GitHub-accepted SIM card.

Once you trigger phone-number verification requirement your account is globally shadowbanned and support blocked pending SMS code verification. Aside from the privacy issue it's completely blocking people in the several countries (beyond the ones offially totally banned due to sanctions) to which GitHub won't even try to SMS/call.

Remember that registering a second account would be violating GitHub ToS.
by justanotheratom | 2025-05-13 21:20:41+00:00
wow, one year back, I had made a prediction to a friend that this is the direction that Starlink will head in. I was thinking it would proceed like this:

1. provide internet. 2. provide CDN. 3. Edge Compute. 4. Full-on cloud.

These guys see to be focussing on what is basically offline processing (AI training).
by aziaziazi | 2025-05-13 21:20:58+00:00
> years after the fallout.

Ok, but that's not the purpose of the OS. I recommend you to read the Why page:

https://collapseos.org/why.html

Two relevants parts:

> Computers, after a few decades, will break down beyond repair and we won't be able to program microcontrollers any more.

> It's not that modern ICs are more fragile than old ones (maybe they are, after all, more can go wrong with millions of transistors than with thousands), it's that old designs are simpler than modern ones and thus more repairable.

The complete reflexion and arguments are way deeper and interesting through. The most interesting parts is under "Electronics evolved rapidly without any help before. Why can't we pull it again?"
by int_19h | 2025-05-13 21:21:31+00:00
> I really dislike all of this “reading between the lines” aren’t Americans supposed to be direct?

You're talking about a culture in which the standard greeting is "How are you?", and the standard response to said greeting is, "I'm fine!" - even when you're obviously not fine.

So, no, it's very much not direct. If you want to see what a "direct" software engineering culture looks like, look at Eastern Europe. There, people will routinely say things like "this code is crap", and no-one (including the author of said code!) bats an eye at it because it's supposed to be taken at face value, not as an insult.
by tgma | 2025-05-13 21:22:22+00:00
Let me preface that I do not subscribe to the ideology at all, but the concept of bootstrapping a complex system is intellectually worthwhile and often practical in its use-cases. For example, imagine a tech company with a bunch of datacenters that boot from the network, have redundancy etc, but if you somehow turn the macthines off all at once, no one knows if they can reboot safely (say, service discovery cannot find the machine hosting OS images anymore).

As a practical matter, you can flip the author's mental pessimism and look at the optimistic situation where we conquer other planets, in which case thinking about an optimal bootstrapping path is going to be essential for the society and its industrial needs.

It is also true that some fairly local shocks in human society can cause a cascading failure and doing this analysis fairly regularly can help identify and minimize the cascade.
by palata | 2025-05-13 21:22:52+00:00
> Brunelleschi's dome on the Florence Cathedral was the first major dome built in Europe in over a thousand years since the fall of the Western Roman Empire.

I don't think it necessarily means they forgot how to do it, though. Or does it? We too stopped building domes made of big stones, it doesn't mean we don't know how to do it.
by dang | 2025-05-13 21:23:15+00:00
Related:

Collapse OS - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43482705 - March 2025 (199 comments)

Running CollapseOS on an Esp8266 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38645124 - Dec 2023 (1 comment)

Dusk OS: 32-bit Forth OS. Useful during first stage of civilizational collapse - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36751422 - July 2023 (141 comments)

DuskOS: Successor to CollapseOS - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36688676 - July 2023 (4 comments)

Collapse OS – Why? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35672677 - April 2023 (1 comment)

Collapse OS: Winter is coming - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33207852 - Oct 2022 (2 comments)

Collapse OS - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31340518 - May 2022 (8 comments)

Collapse OS Status: Completed - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26922146 - April 2021 (2 comments)

Collapse OS – bootstrap post-collapse technology - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25910108 - Jan 2021 (116 comments)

Collapse OS Web Emulators - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24138496 - Aug 2020 (1 comment)

Collapse OS, an OS for When the Unthinkable Happens - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23535720 - June 2020 (2 comments)

Collapse OS - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23453575 - June 2020 (15 comments)

Collapse OS – Why Forth? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23450287 - June 2020 (166 comments)

Collapse OS – Why? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22901002 - April 2020 (3 comments)

'Collapse OS' Is an Open Source Operating System for the Post-Apocalypse - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21815588 - Dec 2019 (3 comments)

Collapse OS - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21182628 - Oct 2019 (303 comments)
by variadix | 2025-05-13 21:23:47+00:00
If it’s opt-in then code written for the default (ie most code that wasn’t written to use the unintuitive behavior for some performance reason) will be either well-formed code that relies on the behavior (fine, but for signed int wrapping this is rare, for zero init this is common but not always the case) or ill-formed code that subtly fails (e.g. no check for overflow or zero is an invalid value). The code that is ill-formed cannot be checked by present or future static or dynamic analyzers, since the failure condition (signed overflow or access before assignment) is _defined to be something valid_ thereby preventing analyzers from determining whether the programmer intended the signed arithmetic to overflow or not, or for that value to be zero or not, etc.

Hopefully I’m communicating why it is useful to leave the default behavior undefined or invalid. It doesn’t really have to have anything to do with performance, signed wrapping is no less performant on two’s-complement machines (barring compiler optimizations enabled by assuming no overflow) since it is the result produced by add instructions on overflow. The benefit is that it enables instrumentation and analyzers to detect this behavior because it is known to be invalid and not something the programmer intended.

As an analogy, consider what would happen if you defined out of bounds array access to be _something_, now analyzers and instrumentation cannot detect this as an error, since the programmer may have intended for whatever that defined result is to occur in that case.
by subsection1h | 2025-05-13 21:24:04+00:00
TIP: When asking for advice in relation to knowledge management, note-taking, etc., be sure to ask for precise details regarding commenters' solutions. There are many people who participate in these discussions who don't seem to take a lot of notes (e.g., one file or paper notepad for all of their notes!).

I have a personal knowledge base that currently includes almost 7,000 files in which I store my notes. I take notes on everything. Every technology. Every project. Every meeting. Every product I evaluate. EVERYTHING.

My notes are stored in Org files that I edit with Emacs and Org mode[1]. Org files are written using a feature-rich lightweight markup language[2] that is much more powerful than Markdown (which is used by other note-taking tools like Obsidian). For example, Org supports plain text spreadsheets[3], a feature I love.

People tend to disqualify Org and say, "I don't use Emacs," while assuming that Emacs users choose Org because we already use Emacs. But I started using Emacs specifically for Org, not programming.

Regardless of which tool you end up using, consider organizing your note files using hierarchical tagging. I started using hierarchical tagging for my notes right after Wikipedia launched and I saw how effectively hierarchical tagging was being used there. Each Wikipedia article can belong to multiple categories, and each category can belong to multiple categories. This is hierarchical tagging, and it's worked great for my notes. At the bottom of every one of my Org files, there is a list named "Parent topics", and each parent file has its own "Parent topics" list (excluding the "main topics" files, which have no parents).

[1] https://orgmode.org/

[2] https://orgmode.org/features.html

[3] https://orgmode.org/manual/The-Spreadsheet.html
by nativeit | 2025-05-13 21:24:10+00:00
This is an exhaustive and insightful document of a largely preventable tragedy—one that does justice to those who perished, as well as the victims of all air accidents with its even-handed analyses and unflinching details.

Its revelation of how deeply flawed the systems, agencies, companies, and people involved in this accident carries a stark unsaid warning for the direction the United States is heading. Accountability, objectivity, expertise, and transparency are critical in so many aspects, and much like Chernobyl, this article reveals how hardly perceptible erosions of these values build up to untenable states of affairs. Ignoring the warning signs brings down empires.

Side note: The author even included a little nugget for the HN crowd:

> Aeroflot’s dissenting opinion was typed up in a Microsoft Word document, or similar, with default settings. I don’t know why but I find that vaguely amusing.
by teddyh | 2025-05-13 21:24:33+00:00
> - horrible usability

The web has horrible usability if you use a text-based browser. I.e. if you use a mail reader with good usability, a mailing list has good usability. This is a client-side issue, not a technology issue.

> - can only participate in conversations via e-mails

Um, yes, a mailing list uses e-mail. I don’t know what you expected.

> - unclear how to participate in / reply to an older thread that wasn't delivered to your mailbox

If you are a new user, and want to reply to a mail you read in the list archive, just write a new mail; there is no strict rule that any discussions must be restricted to one thread.

Indeed, if you want to start a new discussion after some time has elapsed, a new thread may be preferred.

> - NOT accessible, especially in the disabilities sense

Again, this is a client issue. I believe that e-mail is actually the preferred form for those with accessibility needs.

> - doesn't have a search feature; depends on external search engines to crawl the mailing list for discoverability

Somewhat true, but this depends on the list – some list archives do feature search – and is very rarely a problem in practice, since external search engines are very efficient.

> - no responsive design, tiny text and horizontal scrolling on mobile phone screens

Again, a client issue. Get a better e-mail client.

> - sends you your password in cleartext via e-mail

Yes, many lists do this, but this is not a requirement of the technology. Some lists could require all your mails to be signed with PGP or S/MIME; it is entirely up to the list.

> - actually complicated to unsubscribe from a list / manage your membership

Not really. The ”List-Unsubscribe” header is commonly sent in every mail to the list.
by shawnfrompdx | 2025-05-13 21:25:21+00:00
I am the author of this piece, and i didn't share it to HN, I don't hang out here. I just gotta say wow, tough crowd. i wrote this piece from an emotionally low point after another fruitless day of applying to jobs. I didn't have a particular agenda in mind. I was voicing what i've been through and some of what I was experiencing with no expectations.

you'll notice in the comments section that the population of substackistan is much less FUCKING CYNICAL AND NEGATIVE than you guys, with many commenters saying they are in the same position. I heard from writers, designers, engineers, going through similar times.

my portfolio site is https://shawnfromportland.com, you can find my resume there. if you have leads that you think I might match with you can definitely send them my way, I will even put a false last name on an updated resume for you guys.

for those who are wondering, I legally changed my name to K long ago because my dad's last name starts with K, but I didn't like identifying with his family name everywhere i went because he was not in my life and didnt contribute to shaping me. I thought hard about what other name I could choose but nothing resonated with me. I had already been using Shawn K for years before legally changing it and it was the only thing that felt right.
by dr_kiszonka | 2025-05-13 21:26:20+00:00
In human–computer interaction, baby duck syndrome denotes the tendency for computer users to "imprint" on the first system they learn, then judge other systems by their similarity to that first system. The result is that "users generally prefer systems similar to those they learned on and dislike unfamiliar systems". The issue may present itself relatively early in a computer user's experience, and it has been observed to impede education of students in new software systems or user interfaces.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imprinting_(psychology)#Baby...
by qwertox | 2025-05-13 21:26:22+00:00
I was shocked at how fast I was able to find "Open an audio file and read as mono waveform, resampling as necessary" of whisperX in audio.py on grep.app.

It was instantaneous. But where do I go from there? I cannot navigate through the code. It shows me where I can find that string, but that's it. I also cannot look at blame to see when that line got edited.

Though thanks a lot for bringing this onto my radar.
by MisterBastahrd | 2025-05-13 21:27:22+00:00
The world will seek out software optimization only after hardware reaches its physical limits.

We're still in Startup Land, where it's more important to be first than it is to be good. From that point onward, you have to make a HUGE leap and your first-to-market competitor needs to make some horrendous screwups in order to overtake them.

The other problem is that some people still believe that the masses will pay more for quality. Sometimes, good enough is good enough. Tidal didn't replace iTunes or Spotify, and Pono didn't exactly crack the market for iPods.
by Yizahi | 2025-05-13 21:27:51+00:00
I had a revelation this year, I have a new bank acc and not familiar with their procedure. First few calls they did to me, they have asked some good questions, aside from my name thy were negative - e.g. did you do X thing in your app, when we both know that I did not. But then last time an operator called and asked my PII question (birthday, address etc.). I got triggered and said "eh, sorry, won't tell you because unsafe". And she went "oh, no problem then - I will auth you in the app". Lo and behold, immediately I got push from bank app with her name, phone number calling and some details. So they do have a perfectly 1)safe, 2)repeatably reliable, 3) and fast way to authenticate customers. They just ignore it mostly. I'm still simultaneously like them and is angry on them.

tl;dr - bank calling you can do auth digitally on phone, but don't do it and don't advertise it to clients.

PS: I'm in EU.