MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by tecleandor | 2025-05-24 20:00:41+00:00
Yep. Regular apartment or business buildings are teared down and rebuilt regularly, every 25 or 30 years, for compliance with new earthquake regulations. [0] Also, the 80's economic bubble long term effects are still showing: a lot was built with low quality materials, land lots were super expensive and there was less money for high quality building...

Also, land and building ownership is separated on Japan, so depending on how you got your home, you could own an apartment or single family home, but still be paying rental for the land that it uses.[1]

Edit: Also, from the West we aren't familiar with how often do they rebuild stuff like, for example, the temples. We arrive to a, let's say, 300 years old temple, and we're imagining it being 300 years old. Of course, being mostly wood, they're like huge Theseus temples that, during the years, they're fixed and repaired and pieces substituted and probably right now the oldest wood piece is 'only' a 150 years old. Others were burnt down due to accidents or war. And not only that, some others are regularly rebuilt as a tradition or ceremony. Like the one in Ise (Mie) that has been rebuilt every 20 years since the 690 [2]

0: https://www.archdaily.com/980830/built-to-not-last-the-japanese-trend-of-replacing-homes-every-30-years 1: https://www.rethinktokyo.com/2018/07/11/freehold-vs-leasehold-land-ownership-available-foreign-residents-japan 2: https://www.archdaily.com/1002972/the-eternal-ephemeral-architecture-of-shikinen-sengu-the-japanese-temple-rebuilt-every-20-years
by RajT88 | 2025-05-24 20:00:49+00:00
I am reminded of a strange issue I had with a DV Cam which I took on a "tiger cruise". The TC is where you visit your family aboard an aircraft carrier on the way back from a tour - in our case we rode the boat from Honolulu to San Diego.

When on deck, the video would get scrambled every 3 seconds. It was a weird issue! I soon figured out it lined up with the sweep of the radar array - makes sense.

Knowing I was dealing with radiation of some sort, I reasoned if I kept my phone angled so the battery (filled with heavy metals) between the radar array and magnetic heads, the video would no longer stutter every 3 seconds. Worked like a charm.
by vlovich123 | 2025-05-24 20:01:08+00:00
Maybe but even if that's the case, you've now got just plain and colored vs before you'd have plain, color A, color B, color C if you go beyond just async as the only other color (e.g. whether you're accepting something by reference or value, whether it's a mutable reference, whether or not the function is compile-time, etc etc etc).

Still seems better to me if you collapse colors >= 1 into a single language system.
by pllbnk | 2025-05-24 20:01:48+00:00
When initial Sora demos came out well over a year ago they looked impressive at first but still in the uncanny valley territory (current paid Sora offering is nowhere near those demos). Veo doesn't seem to be any better, it just has more features - sound and video.

I agree with your point though. To me it looks uncanny but if somebody was insisting that some generated video was real, I might not have counter-arguments to prove otherwise.
by hamburglar | 2025-05-24 20:02:29+00:00
Eh, I think that’s what it meant for a while. I’ve now interacted with enough systems that have rigor about representing things as resources that have GET urls and doing writes with POST etc that I don’t think it’s always the ad hoc RPC fest it once was. It may be rare to see according-to-hoyle HATEOAS but REST is definitely no longer in the “nobody actually does this” category.
by EasyMark | 2025-05-24 20:03:00+00:00
A lot of people don't want to hear it but Trump isn't really a part of the Washington elite and is bringing in his own circle of people from his first pass at being President. Along the way he has picked up various sycophants and of course likes to hob knob with other billionaires. That is the clique you are dealing with, not the traditional washington crowd from Ivy Leagues. Harvard has a history of standing up to Trrump and he doesn't like that and is a very veangeful person, whether he was in the wrong or not. Unless you bend the knee (he can be very "forgiving" then if it benefits him or his ego) you are going to be a target. Mix that with his sociopathy and zero concern over rule of law and it doesn't look good for Harvard or Columbia for the next few years, unless courts move quickly
by 0cf8612b2e1e | 2025-05-24 20:04:52+00:00
The SQL Server driver for Django. Originally maintained by someone from Nebraska, Microsoft then took ownership of the project (now lives under the Microsoft GH organization). The last commit was 11 months ago. Has not supported a current release of Django for over a year now. There are almost certainly security implications for sticking on the now deprecated Django 5.0. The issues are begging for anyone at Microsoft to do something. Several pull requests sitting there with the ostensibly required updates to make it compatible with the latest Django LTS.

You can find workarounds, but it is an awful situation. Now the community is probably going to have to re-fork the library back to the public for maintenance.

I am clearly not a bean counter, but if Microsoft wants its database to win against the free options, they could do their best to ensure popular libraries can seamlessly connect.

https://github.com/microsoft/mssql-django/issues/418#issueco...
by KennyBlanken | 2025-05-24 20:05:32+00:00
> I know there’s something about the Raspberry Pi that makes armchair quarterbacks want to find ways to call their engineers “hacks” and “NOOBS”

Because they are hacks and noobs? Who puts a WLCSP part on a board which is more commonly zip-tied to a piece of wood than it is placed into a case, and is more likely to be driving some wild contraption shooting RF and UV and god knows what else everywhere, than it is sitting inside some nice little commercial device like an office labelmaker?

Their hardware is almost always immediately superceded by cheaper, faster, better boards because they're not trying to give Qualcomm blowjobs clearing out shitty SoCs nobody wanted to buy because they were buggy, underperformant, overpriced, or all three...and they don't have the market advantage of everyone buying whatever garbage they spit out. Other companies have to start on the back of their heels so their products can't suck.

Their hardware designers are inept with every generation of every product they've made having issues and/or promised features not making it into production.

Their QA is non-existent despite seeding test boards widely where either they're not catching problems before doing into production or they're intentionally not fixing stuff because it would increase their costs and they know people will just snap up whatever garbage the Pi Foundation ships. The problems are so bad that you have to ask how they even got past internal testing and validation.

Seriously: if a bunch of college EE students worked for a semester they could probably build a better product.

Each generation of the Raspberry Pi has had basic hardware design flaws showing that their hardware engineering was not up to the task of producing the dominant hobbyist (and increasingly commercial/industrial, somewhat frighteningly) SBC.

Then they fucked up the RP2040, a wildly simpler product. When when they released a revised version that fixed the ADC issue, they fucked up GPIO. How do you fuck up GPIO and not notice?

I don't know who the Raspberry Pi foundation employes as hardware enginers but whoever their head of engineering is should have been fired a long, long time ago.
by dwaltrip | 2025-05-24 20:06:40+00:00
Does this person make your life better in anyway? Why do you put energy into the relationship?

Sounds like they kinda suck.

Edit: I saw your other comment, I'm sorry to hear that you are doing through such a hard time. I'm coming out of a multi-year one myself, wiser and stronger than I was before. Rooting for you! :)
by theptip | 2025-05-24 20:06:59+00:00
It’s a good point. For epistemic hygiene I think it’s critical to actually have models of the growth rate and what is implied. Eg we are seeing exponential growth on many capability metrics (some with doubling-times of 7 months), but haven’t joined this up to economic growth numbers. In models where the growth continues you could imagine stuff getting crazy quickly, eg one year AI contributes 0.5% GDP only measurable in retrospect, next year 2%, year after 8%.

Personally I don’t think politicians are capable of adapting fast enough to this extreme scenario. So they need to start thinking about it (and building and debating legislation) long before it’s truly needed.

Of course if it turns out that we are living in one of the possible worlds where true economically meaningful capabilities are growing more slowly, or bottlenecks just happen to appear at this critical phase in the growth curve, then this line of preparation isn’t needed, but I’m more concerned about downside tail risk than the real but bounded costs of delaying progress by a couple years. (Though of course, we must ensure we don’t do to AI what we did to nuclear).

Finally I’ll note in agreement with your point, that there are a whole class of solutions that are mostly incomprehensible or inconceivable to most people at this time (ie currently fully outside the Overton Window). Eg radical abundance -> UBI might just solve the potential inequities of the tech, and therefore make premature job protection legislation vastly harmful on net. I mostly say “just full send it” when it comes to these mundane harms, it’s the existential ones (including non-death “loss of control” scenarios) that I feel warrant some careful thought. For that reason while I see where you are coming from, I somewhat disagree on your conclusion; I think we can meaningfully start acting on this as a society now.
by SoftTalker | 2025-05-24 20:07:13+00:00
Though I haven't tried it, I would probably enjoy peer programming with an LLM more than I do with a real person (which I have tried and hated).

I could assign the LLM the simple drudgery that I don't really want to do, such as writing tests, without feeling bad about it.

I could tell the LLM "that's the stupidest fucking thing I've ever seen" whereas I would not say that to a real person.
by K0balt | 2025-05-24 20:07:23+00:00
You’re welcome! I was pleasantly surprised to have had that roll off of my keyboard as well. It is something difficult to elucidate but somehow perfectly encapsulated in “pedantic cadence”.

Also, Pedantic Cadence (r), the acerbically sarcastic EDA software where AI critiques all of your design decisions for the best possible engineering result! Only an extra $199 a month!
by antithesizer | 2025-05-24 20:08:25+00:00
Marx wrote the following about Proudhon:

>M. Proudhon has the misfortune of being peculiarly misunderstood in Europe. In France, he has the right to be a bad economist, because he is reputed to be a good German philosopher. In Germany, he has the right to be a bad philosopher, because he is reputed to be one of the ablest French economists. Being both German and economist at the same time, we desire to protest against this double error.

I don't know if Paul has much of a reputation as a technologist among tech lay people, but this quote reminds me of Paul's fame as a thinker among tech people.
by eszed | 2025-05-24 20:08:32+00:00
My company is medium size, at least within our industry, and I actively look for little companies. Every complex platform has bugs and un-considered edge-cases and poorly thought out engineering choices. Large companies don't fix them; small companies do. (That's overstated, obviously, but not wildly so.)

I'm the sort of client that wants to help you improve your product, and can - if you'll let me. When I'm allowed to talk directly to engineers (possible at small companies, vanishingly rare at large ones), we both end up better off.

I've seen the whole cycle, though, and it gets frustrating. Small and ambitious company works closely with me to build something really great; raises money / goes public / gets acquired; early employees cash out (good for them!) or get outsourced (disastrous choice); development stalls and features break. Now I'm back looking for a new small company to work with again. It's dispiriting, and so, so wasteful.
by jbellis | 2025-05-24 20:09:02+00:00
I would have said that Harper Reed's workflow (brainstorm spec, then co-plan a plan, then execute using LLM codegen) is basically best practice today and I'm surprised that the author adds that "I’ve not been successful using this technique to build a complete feature or prototype."

Here's an example of using this pattern with Brokk to solve a real world bug: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t_7MqowT638
by p_ing | 2025-05-24 20:09:22+00:00
Requiring elevation wasn't uncommon for games or most applications back then. Installing to local app data is somewhat new, though platforms like Steam smartly modified the NTFS permissions in their own app dir to prevent elevation specifically for binary deployment; other components like C runtime, etc. during game install would require elevation.

Office is a poor example of 'what to do'. The title bar is a hack. It only supports ~214 character path length even though Win32 API has been lifted to 32k, etc.
by timewizard | 2025-05-24 20:09:46+00:00
> Traditionally, workers learn their craft by shadowing one master with knowledge passed down through generations.

I love it when white collar people try to have perspectives on blue collar life.

> But Ms Pak learned any way she could, working with different bosses to broaden her skills and techniques, and overcoming taunts about her ability as a novice and her 5-foot-1 stature.

That's literally every construction job anywhere ever.

> “It would be a shame if the tradition dies in our hands,” she said.

There's no reason the tradition has to die. You just can't legitimately use it anymore for complex and large scale building projects. Profits are not more important than lives.

What a bizarre perspective this article puts forward.
by tauoverpi | 2025-05-24 20:10:43+00:00
Well, what would I have to do to please the LLM? Writing code isn't for LLMs to consume but rather to communicate intent for people and for machines to run which provides value for the user at the end of the day. If an LLM fails at being useful within a codebase when it's supposed to be a "works anywhere" tool then the tool is less than useful.

Note that language servers, static analysis tooling, and so on still work without issue.

The cause (which is my assumption) is that there aren't enough good examples in the training set for anything useful to be the most likely continuation thus leading to a suboptimal result given the domain. Thus the tool doesn't work "everywhere" for cases where there's less use of a language or less code in general dealing with a particular problem.
by pseudo0 | 2025-05-24 20:11:42+00:00
I can't find the ScarJo image you are referring to, so it either looks nothing like her, or it got reported and removed. Yes, people use NSFW models to generate NSFW content... What a shocking discovery.

What exactly are you proposing here that CivitAI didn't do already? Yes, people can scrub metadata from images. This is the exact same issue that image hosts have faced for decades - people can upload abusive or illegal images. The solution has been to do automated filtering, and have users report content that slips through. The solution is not to ban Photoshop because some people use it to make fake nudes.
by AstralStorm | 2025-05-24 20:11:42+00:00
You do not control the tool either.

You cannot manually train it for your case.

You cannot tell it to not touch particular parts of your project either. It will stomp over all of the code.

You cannot even easily detect this tool has been used except for typical failures.

The tool may also leak your secrets to some central database. You cannot tell it to not do that.

(If you try either tack of those, it will lie to you that it complied while actually not doing that at all.)

When your networking fails, the tool does not work. It's fragile in all cases.
by fabianlindfors | 2025-05-24 20:11:58+00:00
A table access method can decide itself if it wants to use the PG buffer cache, pgfdb does not so it's irrelevant in that case.

> Also, how do the deployment semantics of FDB affect this. If I remember correctly, you typically run one FDB process per CPU on a machine. How do PG processes map to those

You would run the two separately, so PG processes would run and scale separately from FDB processes. Postgres spawns a new process for each connection so you would not want to map Postgres itself 1:1 with CPUs!
by amzn8727363 | 2025-05-24 20:12:01+00:00
I found a new tool today called ratemycomp.tech that’s been blowing up quietly – over 1,000 tech compensation submissions in the last 12 hours.

It’s like a blend of Levels.fyi and Blind, but simpler and totally anonymous. You input your role, company, and comp, and it benchmarks you against others in your cohort. What’s different is it also provides tailored advice – e.g. how far off you are from market, what you could ask for next cycle, or when it’s time to switch companies.

I tried it with my current offer from a Big Tech company and it gave surprisingly useful insights. Apparently they’re adding templates soon for each major company’s promo/comp systems.

Not affiliated – just thought it was cool to see something that respects user privacy but actually helps you navigate tech comp.
by trane_project | 2025-05-24 20:12:09+00:00
> Nonetheless, Bloom was on to something: Tutoring and mastery learning do have a degree of experimental support, and fortunately it seems that carefully designed software systems can completely replace the instructional side of traditional teaching, achieving better results, on par with one to one tutoring. However, designing them is a hard endeavour, and there is a motivational component of teachers that may not be as easily replicable purely by software.

I've been working on an implementation of mastery learning and other related techniques called Trane (https://github.com/trane-project/trane/) for the past three years or so. Mastery learning is the main one, but it also integrates spaced repetition, interleaving, mixing difficulties, and reward propagation (doing well or bad in an exercise affects how related exercises are scheduled).

I think it works pretty well, but you need to pair it with proper pedagogy of the skill you want to learn and the proper curriculum. The latter is the hardest part, so it's being my main limitation. I've used some external resources to build courses, and they work well, but obviously it would work much better with a full curriculum built from the ground up.

Currently working on Pictures Are For Babies (https://picturesareforbabies.com/), which is meant to do just that for literacy. I am hoping to do a first release soon. As for the motivation angle, the solution in this particular instance is fairly simple. Use the software to enforce scheduling andpedagogy,y and a human tutor to provide emotional and social support. This division allows any literate person to become an effective tutor with a few hours of training.

I am hoping that the average student can complete the whole curriculum in five years. That would mean that (assuming they start at between 4 and 5 years old), the average student would have college-level reading and writing skills by the time they are nine or ten.

Most complete explanation so far is in the pedagogy page: https://picturesareforbabies.com/home/pedagogy/
by b112 | 2025-05-24 20:12:10+00:00
A lot of burned coal, is what.

The "don't blame the victim" trope is valid in many contexts. This one application might be "hackers are attacking vital infrastructure, so we need to fund vulnerabilities first". And hackers use AI now, likely hacked into and for free, to discover vulnerabilities. So we must use AI!

Therefore, the hackers are contributing to global warming. We, dear reader, are innocent.
by ChuckMcM | 2025-05-24 20:12:43+00:00
This is some great research, the paper is here: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-025-59675-5.pdf and there are two things that stand out in it, the first is that they used a "commercial graphene transistor" and the second is that their apparatus didn't need to be super-cooled or under tens of atmospheres of pressure or in vacuum etc. For me, that means that the risks of bringing this into an actual thing are much less than they have been for other technologies (like Josephson-Junctions).

It's also kind of funny that you could mine the shit out of Bitcoin with something like this, which would either pay for itself or crash Bitcoin, hard to predict.
by w10-1 | 2025-05-24 20:12:43+00:00
Many thanks for the openness that offers some insight into success, and the kindness that can see and unlock the potential in (underperforming) people.

"Find your people" is presented as finding those who can unlock you, show new worlds and opportunities. It can sound like the wonderful promise of networking bringing you opportunities (like a land of milk and honey).

But at the same time, you're told you must tolerate rejection and disbelief.

So perhaps the key is first to find something you believe in enough to stake a claim to it. Then some people will reject you (and leave), but you'll find others who buy in. Then you'll have the terrifying responsibility of making it true, for yourself and for them, and your (mutual) commitment becomes, well, serious.

Are they "your" people? Are you leading them, or following what you've targeted? When you need to pivot, are they following you, or are you all following the moving target?

It's complicated, but there's a phase/governance shift from interaction to trusting and being trusted that makes the entire dance possible.

It's your reliability in your commitment that leads them to trust your vision and direction, and willingly fill your many gaps and blind spots.

So I wouldn't mis-read "find your people" as "suck up to those handing out opportunities you want". It's not just getting off the tracks, but setting your own direction - reliably - that might secure other's trust.
by kccqzy | 2025-05-24 20:13:45+00:00
Frequentism methods are strictly less general. For example Laplace used probability theory to estimate the mass of Saturn. But with a frequentist interpretation we have to imagine a large number of parallel universes where everything remains the same except for the mass of Saturn. That's overly prescriptive of what probability means. Whereas in Bayesian statistics what probability means is strictly more general. You can manipulate probabilities even without fully defining them (maximum entropy) subject to intuitive rules (sum rule, product rule, Bayes' theorem), and the results of such manipulation are still correct and useful.
by nickpsecurity | 2025-05-24 20:13:56+00:00
Most have been trained on illegally-distributed, copyrighted works. They might output them, too. People might want untainted models. Additionally, some have weaknesses due to tokenizers, pre-training data, or moral alignment (political bias).

For those reasons, users might want to train a new model from scratch.

Researchers of training methods have a different problem. They need to see whether a new technique, like an optimization algorithm, gets better results. They try them more quickly with less money if they have small, training runs representative of what larger models do. If BabyLM-10M was representative, they could test each technique at the FLOPS/$ of a 10M model instead of a 1B model.

So, both researchers and users might want new models trained from scratch. The cheaper to train, the better.
by moron4hire | 2025-05-24 20:14:06+00:00
I've long said, I hate when people say, "don't reinvent the wheel." Even for the literal wheel, I know of at least 3 times it was usefully reinvented in just the last 20 years.

People who say "don't reinvent the wheel" should come up with something new to say.

But they can't, because they hate innovation so much.