MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by surgical_fire | 2025-05-16 21:09:20+00:00
> The endgame is to develop social structures where non-whites, and especially black people, have moral superiority while whites have moral culpability.

What can possibly go wrong when a portion of the population feels segregated?

I wonder if it will make them adopt a victimization stance and band together around those that promise to end it.

Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.
by armchairhacker | 2025-05-16 21:10:06+00:00
I feel similar, except not because of AI but the internet. Almost all my knowledge and opinions have already been explained by other people who put in more effort than I could. Anything I'd create, art or computation, high-quality similar things already exist. Even this comment echoes similar writing.

Almost. Similar. I still make things because sometimes what I find online (and what I can generate from AI) isn't "good enough" and I think I can do better. Even when there's something similar that I can reuse, I still make things to develop my skills for further occasions when there isn't.

For example, somebody always needs a slightly different JavaScript front-end or CRM, even though there must be hundreds (thousands? tens-of-thousands?) by now. There are many programming languages, UI libraries, operating systems, etc. and some have no real advantages, but many do and consequently have a small but dedicated user group. As a PhD student, I learn a lot about my field only to make a small contribution*, but chains of small contributions lead to breakthroughs.

The outlook on creative works is even more optimistic, because there will probably never be enough due to desensitization. People watch new movies and listen to new songs not because they're better but because they're different. AI is especially bad at creative writing and artwork, probably because it fundamentally generates "average"; when AI art is good, it's because the human author gave it a creative prompt, and when AI art is really good, it's because the human author manually edited it post-generation. (I also suspect that when AI gets creative, people will become even more creative to compensate, like how I suspect today we have more movies that defy tropes and more video games with unique mechanics; but there's probably a limit, because something can only be so creative before it's random and/or uninteresting.)

Maybe one day AI can automate production-quality software development, PhD-level research, and human-level creativity. But IME today's (at least publicly-facing) models really lack these abilities. I don't worry about when AI is powerful enough to produce high-quality outputs (without specific high-quality prompts), because assuming it doesn't lead to an apocalypse or dystopia, I believe the advantages are so great, the loss of human uniqueness won't matter anymore.

* Described in https://matt.might.net/articles/phd-school-in-pictures/
by kjreact | 2025-05-16 21:10:48+00:00
Because everyone who likes how Apple has made it easy for users to manage their subscriptions and enjoy the overall user friendliness of their products we are thus cultists who just blindly do as we’re told. Maybe some people don’t agree with your views; that doesn’t make them cult followers for having a different opinion.

Edit: fuck I just got trolled. According to jillyboel profile we are all just fascists. And dang is preventing him from spamming his trolls on HN.
by fzwang | 2025-05-16 21:13:07+00:00
I'm not a lawyer but have talked to a few founders who faced similar situations, ie. employee breaks the law or there's a substantial breach of ethics.

1) Document your case and speak to your lawyer. Pray they didn't do anything that would affect your customers/clients that could cause legal issues for you. I assume you're reviewing all their communications.

2) In most cases for early-stage companies, it's probably not worth it financially to pursue the case. It'll end up eating a lot of time, energy, and money that could've gone elsewhere. In the very least, documenting your case and throwing out some low-cost tactics could be useful for defensive purposes.

3) The priority at this point, I assume, is to re-establish your sales op. I would reach out to your professional networks and let them know not to work with this individual. Recruit your investors' networks as well, if any. The goal is to find good ways to protect yourself and your friends/partners.

4) Use the crisis to rally the team! You've been debuffed all this time! Turn this into a gift.

5) This sort of stuff happens all the time in one form or another. And it'll happen again. Anecdotally, I've found that it's happening more now with remote work where it's just harder to vet people. And if you're working cross-cultures, it can be even more difficult. Don't beat yourself up too much and learn from it.

Good luck!
by jcadam | 2025-05-16 21:13:25+00:00
Been coding on the JVM for a good chunk of my career. Though the last several years has been in languages other than Java - Scala, Clojure (my personal favorite), and Kotlin.

Finally managed to get a job offer (after being unemployed for a bit) doing Python. It's starting to look like demand for JVM experience is beginning to wane. Might be time to move on anyway :shrug:

I'm old... as long as there's a steady paycheck involved, I'll code in whatever language you say.

Though, currently working on a little personal project in Scala. :)
by montebicyclelo | 2025-05-16 21:13:31+00:00
> LLMs can't think. They are generating tokens one at a time

Huh? They are generating tokens one at a time - sure that's true. But who's shown that predicting tokens one at a time precludes thinking?

It's been shown that the models plan ahead, i.e. think more than just one token forward. [1]

How do you explain the world models that have been detected in LLMs? E.g. OthelloGPT [2] is just given sequences of games to train on, but it has been shown that the model learns to have an internal representation of the game. Same with ChessGPT [3].

For tasks like this, (and with words), real thought is required to predict the next token well; e.g. if you don't understand chess to the level of Magnus Carlsen, how are you going to predict Magnus Carlsen's next move...

...You wouldn't be able to, even just from looking at his previous games; you'd have to actually understand chess, and think about what would be a good move, (and in his style).

[1] https://www.anthropic.com/research/tracing-thoughts-language...

[2] https://www.neelnanda.io/mechanistic-interpretability/othell...

[3] https://adamkarvonen.github.io/machine_learning/2024/01/03/c...
by geekraver | 2025-05-16 21:14:06+00:00
Same, mine is about to graduate with a CS masters from a great school. Couldn't get any internships, and is now incredibly negative about ever being able to find work, which doesn't help. We're pretty much looking at minimum wage jobs doing tech support for NGOs at this point (and the current wave of funding cuts from Federal government for those kind of orgs is certainly not going to help with that).
by Keyframe | 2025-05-16 21:14:06+00:00
As is customary, I read only what you quoted before the article.

The way I understood it is that main incentive was to capture ships, that's on top of the pay; So, like a bonus structure in modern day and age. If you weren't assigned to a ship, you'd still get paid but half of what you'd get on a ship. Since there were eventually more officers than ships, this created a pool of officers eager for assignments and thus "if you won't, there's someone that will" management style.

Now, a bit more complicated what Allen argued about, also from what I understood, is if captains were on fixed wage they'd turn down assignments (which they could since they weren't permanently employed) since reward isn't following the risk and you'd probably get only the worst or desperate captains to accept the job instead of competent which have all the reasons to refuse.

I don't know, maybe I read it wrong, but it makes sense like that at least.
by rdtsc | 2025-05-16 21:14:08+00:00
> Lots of little share nothing process are great conceptually but that does create significant overhead.

It doesn't, really? I have clusters running 1M+ Erlang processes comfortably per node.

> you typically don't need large amount of threads

Exactly, that's why Erlang only spawns just the right amount of threads. One scheduler thread per CPU, then a bunch of long running CPU task threads (same number as CPUs as well), plus some to do IO (10-20) and that's it.
by SigmundA | 2025-05-16 21:14:28+00:00
CancellationTokens can be passed in synchronous functions just fine, I have done cancellable sync apis before cancellation tokens existed usually its a .Cancel() on the thing doing the work just like Command.Cancel() in the Sql client or Connection.Cancel() in a network client. I agree CancellationTokens are better and always use them now and thats not the problem with async.

The problem is the need to color functions with async and if you have existing client code that call existing synchronous methods it not easy to move their internal implementations to async form so that you can remain backward compatible without copy/pasting the same layers of code with different function coloring to async.
by duskwuff | 2025-05-16 21:15:36+00:00
> It sounds like "we don't like it and won't tell you why, we're hiding behind MIT policy and vague notions of privacy".

FERPA is federal law. It is quite likely that MIT is legally bound to not release some pieces of evidence which are crucial in this case (hypothetically, for example: that the student's educational record is inconsistent with claims made in the paper).
by simonw | 2025-05-16 21:16:43+00:00
> Let's look at the data: 72% of enterprises are now fine-tuning models rather than just using RAG (22%) or building custom models from scratch (6%). This isn't a trend, it's because fine-tuning works when other approaches fail.

Where did that data come from? My mental model is still that most companies find fine-tuning an LLM isn't worth the effort compared to promoting with better chosen examples or setting up effective RAG. Am I out of date?

On reading further: it looks like this series of posts is specifically about building voice assistants that run on a mobile phone, which need TINY models. From what I understand getting tiny models to perform interesting custom tasks is a challenge that fine-tuning is well suited for.
by wahern | 2025-05-16 21:18:29+00:00
> It's weird that there's such a good museum so far from everything, including from the most-traveled highway through-routes for the state.

It was built near the most-traveled highway through-route in Kansas, considering it was originally established in 1962.

It's only a couple of miles from US-50. Much of US-50 aligns with the first transcontinental highway, the Lincoln Highway; and for much of the 20th century US-50 was one of the primary east-west highways. It looks like it currently skirts around Hutchinson, but I'd bet 50 years ago it passed directly through the middle of town, very close if not adjacent to the Cosmosphere.[1]

The construction of I-70 in Kansas started in the mid 1950s, but didn't completely cross Kansas until 1970. And it would have taken decades for development patterns to shift from the US-50 corridor to the I-70 corridor.

[1] At least as of 1939 it appears to pass directly through the downtown: https://www.davidrumsey.com/luna/servlet/detail/RUMSEY~8~1~2... (EDIT: 1962 map shows the same: https://www.ksdot.gov/home/showpublisheddocument/4727/638724...)
by vram22 | 2025-05-16 21:18:31+00:00
Interesting about that long list of languages.

There's also Groovy.

I wonder what other languages run on the JVM. What about Perl, Icon, SNOBOL, Prolog, Forth, Rexx, Nim, MUMPS, Haskell, OCaml, Ada, Rust, BASIC, Rebol, Haxe, Red, etc.?

Partly facetious question, because I think there are some limitations in some cases that prevent it (not sure, but a language being too closely tied to Unix or hardware could be why), but also serious. Since the JVM platform has all that power and performance, some of these languages could benefit from that, I'm guessing.

#lazyweb
by rhines | 2025-05-16 21:19:33+00:00
When I looked at working in America several years ago, many people I spoke to and people commenting about it on Reddit/HN/Blind emphasized that it's TN status, not TN visa. They even suggested that calling it a visa when trying to enter the US could get your application rejected. I'm not sure if things have changed since then but if so there's probably lots of people who heard that same advice in the past and haven't learned the updated info.
Show HN: Solidis – Tiny TS Redis client, no deps, for serverless
by jayl-e-e | 2025-05-16 21:20:15+00:00
Hey everyone!

Over the past two years I threw myself back into full-time engineering with a simple goal: write code that gives back to the community. After a lot of late-night FOMO (“AI will do it all for us, right?”) and some painful production incidents, I finally turned my weekend project into an open-source library.

[ What is Solidis? ]

- Super-light (< 30 KB) RESP2/RESP3 client with zero runtime deps and first-class ESM/CJS support.

- Fully tree-shakable – import only the commands you need.

- Written with SOLID principles & full TypeScript typings for every command.

- Designed for cold-start sensitive serverless platforms (small bundle + tiny memory footprint).

[ Why I built it ]

1. node-redis & ioredis pain

- ESM is still an after-thought.

- Hidden deadlocks on RST, vague error surfaces.

- Everything gets bundled, even commands you’ll never call.

2. I refuse to add a dependency I don’t fully understand – I literally read candidates 10× before `npm i`.

3. Serverless bills love to remind me that every KB and millisecond matters.

[ Key features ]

- Protocols: RESP2 and RESP3 (auto-negotiation)

- Bundle size: `<30 KB` (core) / `<105 KB` (full)

- Dependencies: 0

- Extensibility: Drop-in command plugins, custom transactions

- Reliability: Auto-reconnect, per-command timeouts, type-checked replies

[ Roadmap / Help wanted ]

- Benchmarks against `node-redis` & `ioredis` (PRs welcome!)

- More first-class Valkey love

- Fuzz-testing the parser

- Docs site – the README came first; I’d love help polishing full docs

This might be my last big OSS push for a while, so stars, issues, and PRs mean the world.

If Solidis saves you some cold-start time or just scratches a TypeScript itch, let me know!

Repo: https://github.com/vcms-io/solidis

License: MIT

Thanks for reading, and happy hacking!

(Feel free to AMA in the comments – I’m around.)
by jchw | 2025-05-16 21:20:58+00:00
I know you aren't supposed to comment on it, but man, you just never know what will set people off on this site, and god knows they won't tell you. Are people bothered that I chimed in to say "works for me" or that I insinuated Fennec F-Droid is usually less smooth than the Webkit-based mobile browsers? I'll never know for sure. Sometimes with Hacker News, whether a comment is actually well-received feels like a dice roll.
by fredoralive | 2025-05-16 21:21:15+00:00
IIRC later revisions of the 486SX have a unique mask set without the FPU, presumably the higher chips per wafer made up for the extra tooling costs.

Also, as a note, unlike modern chips where they fuse off broken cores and sell them as lower specs[1] as part of the binning process, with the early 486SX the FPU was disabled before any testing / binning, so they weren’t selling broken DX dice as SXs.

[1] Or in some cases, fusing if working silicon if the supply / demand curve works that way, see the infamous 3 core AMD Phenom.
by grumpymuppet | 2025-05-16 21:21:30+00:00
I wish cache analysis was exposed more broadly everywhere. Everyone I deal with seems to understand and know how to think about it, but best practices seem to be wrapped up in a lot of heuristics.

I am aware of being able use hardware counters for profiling systems, but the more fine-grained exposure of what's happening at a lower level seems to be just hidden... Or I haven't found the right reference resource yet.
by pyreko | 2025-05-16 21:21:43+00:00
Obviously anecdotal but I've had zero issues with preclearance at Pearson as a TN holder, both crossing and when applying for TN. They usually just ask me some combination of where I work for, what I do, and if I know when my TN expires, and that's it. My experience applying there has also been incredibly uneventful. I guess engineering is a bit easier to do though, especially if you have a strong application that's been done by lawyers.

I've been given hell by immigration about my TN when flying directly into US airports though.
by TheNewsIsHere | 2025-05-16 21:22:17+00:00
And some of them don’t suck and are quite well run, it’s worth noting.

Personally I think the postal service housing critical services is an elegant solution. It needn’t be the only option, but postal services by their nature have offices throughout their respective lands, and that can make sometimes-high-touch functions easier to facilitate. You already have the brick and mortar space, public servants who have presumably passed some measure of vetting, and infrastructure, all right there.
Show HN: Lailaims – Talk to multiple LLMs at once
by youz | 2025-05-16 21:23:45+00:00
Introducing Lailaims: An open source client-side web app that lets you test multiple LLM providers (GPT-4, Claude, Gemini, Mistral, DeepSeek) side-by-side in one interface.

Your data stays private - everything runs locally in your browser!

Video example: https://vimeo.com/1084976999/8687b63f85
by rollinDyno | 2025-05-16 21:23:58+00:00
I recently finished my PhD studies in social sciences. Even though it did not lead me to career improvements as I initially expected, I am happy I had the opportunity to undertake an academic endeavor before LLMs became cheap and ubiquitous.

I bring up my studies because what the author is talking about strikes me as not having been ambitious enough in his thinking. If you prompt current LLMs with your idea and find the generated arguments and reasoning satisfactory, then you aren't really being rigorous or you're not having big enough ideas.

I say this confidently because my studies showed me not only the methods in finding and contrasting evidence around any given issue, but also how much more there is to learn about the universe. So, if you're being rigorous enough to look at implications of your theories, finding datapoints that speak to your conclusions and find that your question has been answered, then your idea is too small for what the state of knowledge is in 2025.
by henjodottech | 2025-05-16 21:24:25+00:00
Cool idea. I think LLMs aren’t built for intentional error. They’re wired to optimize meaning—next tokens chosen from attention scores, beam search. You can’t just flip logic and get creativity. You either get coherence or gibberish. If you want poetic mistakes, train on surreal input—but I wouldn’t expect avant-garde results.
by ahelwer | 2025-05-16 21:24:32+00:00
There is a strong Jevons Paradox effect at play here though, people generally have a set amount of wall-clock time (1 minute, 10 minutes, etc.) they budget to check their model and then find the largest model that fits within that wall-clock time. So really this just increases the size of the state space people will explore, which might be the difference between checking, say, 3 vs. 5 nodes in a distributed system.
by brudgers | 2025-05-16 21:25:01+00:00
An O(n) startup grows

If it grows at O(n) it is not a startup in the way "startup" is used in Silicon Valley. It is just an ordinary new business.

It's worth noting that starting an ordinary new business is hard. Probably as hard as starting a startup for anyone who has not started a new business a few times before. And maybe harder because most new businesses are undercapitalized and therefore likely to suck up personal capital while startups get to use other people's money.
by kurthr | 2025-05-16 21:25:03+00:00
I guess I'm looking for the target of this finding.

This might be interesting for foveated rendering techniques, and certainly it's interesting to know how the eye responds to "real" visual input, but it doesn't seem particularly relevant to standard displays. These images were presented at 1400Hz updates. That's necessary because saccades are 1000deg/sec events over 10s of ms up to >100deg, while the high resolution fovea is only ~1deg wide.

For standard raster scanned displays (CRT, LCD, OLED) upto 240Hz there are other effects such as "tearing", "flicker", and phosphor lag that are much more visible and distracting effects for "rapidly moving" objects. That's even ignoring video compression artifacts.
by neoberg | 2025-05-16 21:26:10+00:00
> The react's algorithm of detecting changes is based on rebuilding a Virtual DOM tree

Not exactly. This is the "mental model" but not how the algorithm works internally. There are a lot of optimizations to do as little work as possible while "appearing" to rerender everything.

This is not to say one is better than the other - each has its own benefits. But that's not a reason to choose Vue over React.
by wormius | 2025-05-16 21:27:36+00:00
From a capitalist perspective all it means is "more money extracted from the same amount of labor".

I agree with you in general regarding personal productivity. However from the capitalist perspective, even if you aren't as "productive" in the later hours, it's still a production cost that they no longer have to hire another person for. Every person hired is not just an "hourly cost" but an extra capital incentive. It's why they love to fire people and make more people take on a heavier load. To us, on the bottom it feels like less productivity (and man do I feel you there!), but to them it's one less cost. And that's what "productivity" is in their eyes. As long as they can extract enough value without having to take on the extra expense, they will call it "productivity increase".

Another interesting book about some of this is a stochastic approach to economics (from a left-wing perspective) - The Laws of Chaos: A Probabilistic Approach to Political Economy: http://symbioid.com/pdf/Politics/laws%20of%20chaos%20probabi...
by bsaul | 2025-05-16 21:29:26+00:00
Funny. I've been trying rust for the past 2 months fulltime, and i'm really wondering how you can call it a "joy to work with" when compared to java, at least for server development.

Rust feels like walking on a minefield, praying to never meet any lifetime problem that's going to ruin your afternoon productivity ( recently lost an afternoon on something that could very well be a known compiler bug, but on a method with such a horrible signature that i never can be sure. in the end i recoded the thing with macros instead).

The feeling of typesafety is satisfying , i agree. But calling the overall experience a "joy" ?
by fredoralive | 2025-05-16 21:29:48+00:00
It’s basically just configuration data for MS-DOS apps running under Windows (or some over MS-DOS multitaskers). Stuff like EMS and XMS memory amounts, various config options etc.

Fun fact: under the hood, PIF files are sent to the same ShellExecute function as EXEs, and if you have an EXE with a PIF extension, it runs the EXE code as normal.

Funnier fact: In Windows 95 and onwards, the UI presents PIFs as a special case of shortcuts, and as with LNK files, Windows always hides (hid?) the extension, even if you have “always show extensions” on. When I get home, I’ll have to check if Windows 11 still has this behaviour…

Edit: Yeah, creating a copy of calc.exe in my ~/Documents folder and renaming it calc.docx.pif does result in a working calculator file that presents gives its name as "calc.docx", albeit with a "shortcut to generic file" icon and a type of "Shortcut to MS-DOS Program" despite the fact that I can't think of any legitimate reason to do anything with a real PIF file on Windows 11 (24H2).