MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by FirmwareBurner | 2025-05-30 13:39:44+00:00
No other engineering discipline has such a low barrier to entry where everyone can self tech themselves at home almost everything people that go through the higher education pipeline can, and then extra on top due to how fast the industry evolves, where even having a degree might not make you qualified for a job today. In no other engineering discipline is all the tooling FOSS.

So the PRO is that anyone can become a SW engineer, but the CON is that when anyone can become a SW engineer you're competing with soo many people on an even playing field that weeding out the wheat from the chaff is tricky and no company had the perfect solution because it doesn't exist.

What other engineering profession things change so fast that tools from ~20 years ago (C, PHP, Perl, etc) are not useful on the job market anymore? What other engineering profession gets hundreds/thousands of applicants per open position? What other engineering profession has such a lack of standardization that every company works completely different, with different tools and different processes to ultimately do the same thing?

In most other traditional engineering disciplines it's not just the university degree or credential that matters to getting in, but a lot of critical knowledge can only be gained from mentoring and learning at the job from graybeards of the industry, knowledge you'll never get if you try to teach yourself, even if technically all the relevant courses and information is freely available online. Not to mention that in a lot of engineering professions the tooling is specialized, non-FOSS and very $$$, so your only chance of touching it is at university or a company who will pay you to get certified in that tooling.
by jaggs | 2025-05-30 13:40:33+00:00
hf.co/bartowski/deepseek-ai_DeepSeek-R1-0528-Qwen3-8B-GGUF:Q6_K is a decent performing model, if you're not looking for blinding speed. It definitely ticks all the boxes in terms of model quality. Try a smaller quant if you need more speed.
by sebstefan | 2025-05-30 13:40:37+00:00
>Deterministic simulation. Another lightweight method widely used at AWS is deterministic simulation testing, in which a distributed system is executed on a single-threaded simulator with control over all sources of randomness, such as thread scheduling, timing, and message delivery order. Tests are then written for particular failure or success scenarios, such as the failure of a participant at a particular stage in a distributed protocol. The nondeterminism in the system is controlled by the test framework, allowing developers to specify orderings they believe are interesting (such as ones that have caused bugs in the past). The scheduler in the testing framework can also be extended for fuzzing of orderings or exploring all possible orderings to be tested.

This is fucking amazing
by fragmede | 2025-05-30 13:40:58+00:00
because that's a lazy dismissive take on LLM usage. If you drive someone to airport, do you just say your cat have them a ride and say you had no part in it? Or do you just say you gave them a ride because of the time and effort it still took you, even though you didn't pick them up and throw them over your shoulder? Would you ride a self-driving Waymo car to the airport?

The problem with LLM generated writing is that, apart from a couple of tells, which high school and college students have figured out how to ask ChatGPT to use diction that befitting a highschool student, to avoid tells like "delve", that you can't reliably detect when something is basically entirely LLM generated vs half human and half LLM generated, vs entirely LLM generated. And if you can't actually tell that it's been generated, that you're instead trying to look for tells that it comes from an LLM instead of the content or the message itself, then whybare you even reading it?

If instead of setting it up to run entirely on its own, as this post did, you give it a scenario, writing a fiction book with ChatGPT is a fun way to spend a bit of time that's (imo) better than doom scrolling for the same amount of time. Give it a scenario and some theme and tell it you want to write a book about it, and have it ask you questions on where the book should go and then make a book that goes how you want. Want a utopian pollyanna view of the future? what a nitty gritty future that makes skynet look like paradise? Want aliens to visit? Want ChatGPT to give you an act three surprise that isn't a trope you expected? Whatever you want, it's just fun to play with (unless you just hate LLMs and can't have fun).

The question is, what do you do with this book that's now been written. If you had fun by yourself and don't share with anybody, was fun still had? If you only share the book with your LLM adopting book writing club, and you all take turns doing analysis of each others books, knowing they were helped by an LLM, does it still "count"? And what if you submit it, or not, to a publisher who accepts it, you get it posted to Kindle Unlimited, and you get a lot of readers? What then?

The very nature of entertainment is changing, from mass media, to personal media. Culture was already fragmenting, AI will only serve to divide us further apart from one another. Between AI for writing and images, as well as video, along with AI like suno for music, the only challenge we need face is the problem of connecting with other people when there's no shared cultural references.

If you and I have both read an loved a book/enjoyed a song/joined a movie/tv show's fandom, there's a basis for continued conversation. But other than adversity like addiction or a trip into the desert/mountain/Serengeti, soon we'll have even less to connect with our fellow humans over.

(and yes, I know there are a lot words here. I wrote this all by hand and didn't have time to shorten it)
by ecb_penguin | 2025-05-30 13:41:20+00:00
> There's a big difference between private citizens saying things and the federal government punishing speech

Nobody said there wasn't a difference. Why do you keep making arguments that nobody is saying??

These things do not exist in a vacuum. The federal response is to limit federal funds. Not receiving billions in taxpayer money is not a punishment when you fail to uphold the basic principles for which that money was awarded.

> as a transphobic dogwhistle (or whichever bigoted opinion you're upset about having consequences for),

There it is! Took you two comments. Thought terminating cliches are exactly why Harvard needs to lose these funds.

It's wild how easy it is for you to absolutely lose your mind. This lack of maturity has no place in education or tech.
by jchw | 2025-05-30 13:41:28+00:00
Not to distract from this but if you're primarily using Firefox I really like Container Tabs for this. With the Multi-Account Container Tabs extension, you can set a SOCKS proxy per container, then set certain origins to always open in a given container. You can even use it with Wireproxy to give tabs an individual Wireguard VPN as an exit route, though Firefox can't authenticate a SOCKS proxy so a secure setup may be challenging.

Sidenote: the Firefox VPN integration is lame. For some reason it's only possible to change the destination per container, but seemingly you can't set some containers to be on VPN and some off. I figured the value-add for Firefox VPN (e.g. over just using Mullvad) would literally be deep integration but sadly it's not very impressive. You can do better with Wireproxy.
by lupusreal | 2025-05-30 13:41:37+00:00
Whether a boyscout group sits around and does lame crafts or goes into the woods to start fires and hit each other with sticks is entirely down to the leadership (boys and adults) in that troop. So to is it with girlscouts. There is nothing intrinsic about boyscouts that makes it more exciting, except that it was lead by guys.
by jebarker | 2025-05-30 13:42:30+00:00
Yep, this is one issue. There are lots of limitations to what you can compile in this way though and your python code rapidly resembles a lower level language and not just scripting. There are also overheads associated with handling distributed collectives from python, multiprocessing for data loader workers in python and also baked in assumptions in the lower level libraries that introduce overhead if you can't go in and fix them yourself (in which case you could be coding in C++ anyway)
by debesyla | 2025-05-30 13:43:02+00:00
I, personally, like mistakes in writing (as with in painting or singing) - I feel that it gives the art an additional depth, context, detail and comparison with author earlier/later works, other authors.

I believe that art function is to communicate - we create art, type letters, paint graffiti, verbal-vomit in online game PvP match to make a connection with other people.

So the mistakes are only adding to the art: "cooking this is difficult, and everyone do mistakes, but it's made with love and intuition, not blind recipe". Well, I can continue with examples of kissing but I guess I am repeating myself, haha.

I believe that being perfect is not human, and life doesn't have to be perfect. Getting better is great! But so is making mistakes.

(Or, dunno, maybe I have more to learn and I will some day think in a different way.)
by Peroni | 2025-05-30 13:43:06+00:00
Aline is a bit of a Hacker News legend. She's been active here for longer than most people have been working and when you see how she's built her product, it's plainly obvious that she legitimately understands and sides with the HN community.

I bet the genuine answer to your question is that she knows it's a resource that could help tons of people (at a time when tons of people need that help) and paywalling it means that it won't serve that same purpose.
by pc86 | 2025-05-30 13:43:11+00:00
Because other engineering disciplines don't have joke applicants, because other engineering disciplines have governing bodies distributing credentials. If you're a PE, everybody knows you have a base level of competency in your field. Yeah you might not be a great engineer but you're not going to be the Civil Engineering equivalent of somebody typing questions into ChatGPT and pretending to not understand you when you ask why they're reading a script back to you.

I'm not necessarily arguing that software engineering should have some gatekeeping organization that you need to prove yourself to, but you take the good with the bad. In other engineering disciplines, a third party organization takes the responsibility of filtering out the unqualified people. In software, the hiring companies have to do it, so you end up with the first interview (at least) being spent just proving you're not lying about every single thing on your resume.
by dosnem | 2025-05-30 13:43:33+00:00
I’ve always envisioned tla and other formal methods as specific to distributed systems and never needed to understand it. How is it used for a snake game? Also how is the TLA+ spec determined from the code? Won’t it implicitly model incorrect bugs as correct behaviour since it’s an existing state in the system? Also when using TLA from the start, can it be applied to implementations? Or is it only for catching bugs during design? Therefore I’m assuming implementations still need to match the design exactly or else you would still get subtle bugs? Sorry for all the questions I’ve never actually learned formal methods but have always been interested.
by carlosjobim | 2025-05-30 13:45:06+00:00
Depends on region. In many places a hotel room for two guests has two beds that are either separate or together. So make sure you book a king size bed, and also buy one of those fake moustache-and-glasses for your wife so nobody suspects anything at breakfast. Or she can wait in the room and you'll sneak some scrambled eggs and bacon from the buffet in your coat pockets for her.
by arbll | 2025-05-30 13:45:15+00:00
IMO "easy/medium" coding questions have their place. I run quite a lot of interviews and I have many many "seniors" from known techn companies that can't do exercises that are glorified reverse for loops.

The idea all tech companies require you to know niche data structures is kind of a meme honestly. I'm sure some do but not the ones I've interviewed at at least.
by constantcrying | 2025-05-30 13:45:44+00:00
How many 100% self taught, no prior experience people are applying to these positions and are accepted for interviews? Obviously that number is extremely low especially given the last couple of years.

Having a process which only exist for the 1% of least likely candidates is absurd. Even if you wanted to give these people w chance, obviously you don't need to subject the 99% of people to the same process. What is the point of asking a CS graduate with 5 years industry experience some brain teaser questions? There is literally no point, it tells you exactly zero about the candidate.

Also, you can self teach everything in most engineering disciplines. What part of Electrical engineering or mechanical engineering requires a substantial financial investment or has things you could only learn in a university?
by phkahler | 2025-05-30 13:45:55+00:00
>> because the software workaround for detecting integer overflow, which is mandatory for any program that claims to be written in a safe way, lowers the attainable performance much more than the workarounds for not having carry

That's absurd. A better way is to ensure that your algorithms don't overflow. Detecting an overflow just means your code has to STOP which is usually not safe. It'd be insane to have conditionally executed code trying to figure out how to handle an overflow anywhere in code. Another problem is that flags are not even accessible from any language higher level then ASM. From a C perspective there are no flags.
by JimDabell | 2025-05-30 13:45:55+00:00
From a Reddit discussion about the same article:

> I spoke with some men at the Man Shed in Edinburgh at Christmas and they mentioned that in the cases they had heard about where women had been let in the number of male members dropped.

— https://www.reddit.com/r/unitedkingdom/comments/1k6w3pr/we_p...

Aside from that, just take a look at what happened. When women joined, the men responded by finding a men-only room to “escape” to. It’s hardly a great leap to think that some of those men will escape someplace else instead.
by bradlys | 2025-05-30 13:46:16+00:00
I agree but I’d say dating app mentality has infiltrated all aspects of dating life. So many women I know have complained about apps and not wanting to use them but then they only end up meeting their serious long term partners through them. The women I run into today are extremely specific about what they will find attractive.

End of the day, women do want to be physically attracted to their partner and that’s what the apps offer immediately. It’s just something I’m going to be unable to provide and the type of woman who doesn’t emphasize appearance is hyper-rare and in extreme demand.
by layer8 | 2025-05-30 13:46:30+00:00
Today's theories are constrained by so much observational data that an idea sounding "solid" or plausible at first glance just isn't enough. There are many plausible ideas that have been and are being tried all the time. The proof is in the pudding, however, which is the math. You have to show that the physical model actually predicts what we observe in quantitative terms, and is in better accordance with the observational data than the existing established theories. If you can do that, great. Otherwise, mere ideas don't yet amount to much.
by ativzzz | 2025-05-30 13:46:44+00:00
I think that the future of local LLMs is delegation. You give it a prompt and it very quickly identifies what should be used to solve the prompt.

Can it be solved locally with locally running MCPs? Or maybe it's a system API - like reading your calendar or checking your email. Otherwise it identifies the best cloud model and sends the prompt there.

Basically Siri if it was good
by diggan | 2025-05-30 13:46:55+00:00
I think your recommendation falls within

> all of them will have some strengths and weaknesses

Sometimes a higher parameter model with less quantization and low context will be the best, sometimes lower parameter model with some quantization and huge context will be the best, sometimes high parameter count + lots of quantization + medium context will be the best.

It's really hard to say one model is better than another in a general way, since it depends on so many things like your use case, the prompts, the settings, quantization, quantization method and so on.

If you're building/trying to build stuff depending on LLMs in any capacity, the first step is coming up with your own custom benchmark/evaluation that you can run with your specific use cases being put under test. Don't share this publicly (so it doesn't end up in the training data) and run it in order to figure out what model is best for that specific problem.
by ecocentrik | 2025-05-30 13:47:13+00:00
It's not just communism that celebrates the heroism of work. Providing for your family is viewed as a heroic act across civilizations. People speak of the sacrifices they make for their families. For most children, parents are their first superheroes and some of that is the safety and security they provide through their income, their sense of professional pride and success and participation in communities.

We can build a bleak dystopian AI driven future where we all work in service to the machines or we can build one that pays dividends by continuing to give humans an inflated sense of their potential. The later is preferable.
by frwickst | 2025-05-30 13:47:53+00:00
Hi! Creator of the pyhuum library and the Huum integration here. If you need someone else to double-check anything, please let me know. I would be more than happy to help out here, as the current API approach is not ideal.

Some things that bother me regarding the current integration are that their API does not return the set value of the sauna unless it is on, nor does it return the target value of the sauna unless it is on. However, they do have this information, as one can circumvent this limitation by turning off the sauna, and then it will return these values. I talked to their CTO about this, and it seems like they don't want to spam the sauna with requests all the time; this is the reason the status endpoint does not return this value. In the end, one can get around this, and now the library spams two requests if the sauna is off: first to check if the sauna is on, and if it is not, then we call the "off" endpoint and get the correct value. This all leads to some unexpected behavior as well, since the status of the sauna does not update fast enough, causing the sauna to turn off after it has been turned on at times. This is not a problem when used exclusively with Home Assistant, as it keeps internal state, but it can be annoying when it is used via the physical controls in combination with HA.

You can find my contact info in the pyhuum package if you want to discuss anything.
by sahilagarwal | 2025-05-30 13:48:34+00:00
This perfectly illustrates why I've always preferred working at startups over major corps including FAANG / MANGA.

There is a top down culture of not embracing mediocrity that genuinely makes me thrive at work. My current company has a good work life balance and if I make a point that some part of the system needs improvement, my voice actually gets heard. Only place I've seen where sprint retros actually made impact. Most of my friends have no work life balance and also don't have a voice when they see half-assed work.

The numbers showcase the effect of this as well. The startup has thrived even when VC's have tightened their purses.
by textlapse | 2025-05-30 13:48:53+00:00
AI/GenAI is unfortunately a loaded word. Does Content-Aware Fill count as "AI"? Does using trained data to fill content count as generative AI?

There is some nuance here that will be filled in by the courts and companies over time - just like other technologies that allowed creative mix-n-match.

I do agree that the current crop of "let's get all your YT videos and all your photographs to train our models and we will pay you peanuts by running ads" is objectively and morally wrong.

However, progress requires aligning the incentives and forcing some legal framework to compensate for training - not outright stop the generative AI train as that's simply not possible in this day and age.
by mgr86 | 2025-05-30 13:49:23+00:00
Interesting project thanks for sharing.

I've casually tried to track down a voice in weather from that time with no luck, but this project scratches the itch somewhat. When I was younger (late 90s-early 00's) I spent a fair amount of my summers fishing with my father and brother on Lake Ontario. We would occasionally turn on the radio and catch a weather report from the coast guard/noaa. There was something about that then out-dated computer generated voice delivering the weather succinctly and to the point.

It was actually a project I used to evaluate coding done by an LLM. It was mediocre and took way too many iterations. But I now have a keyboard shortcut that will fetch KML/XML from noaa, parse out my important details, and read it back to me. The voice isn't quite right. But the morning I spent working on that was a good distraction at the time.
by diggan | 2025-05-30 13:49:36+00:00
I'm currently experimenting with Devstral for my own local coding agent I've slowly built together. It's in many ways nicer than Codex in that 1) full access to my hardware so can start VMs, make network requests and everything else I can do, which Codex cannot and 2) it's way faster both in initial setup, working through things and creating a patch.

Of course, it still isn't at the same level as Codex itself, the model Codex is using is just way better so of course it'll get better results. But Devstral (as I currently use it) is able to make smaller changes and refactors, and I think if I evolve the software a bit more, can start making larger changes too.
by HankStallone | 2025-05-30 13:49:53+00:00
Women do have their own spaces, at least here in the Midwest US. But women tend to think the men are having more fun over in their male-only spaces, so they want into them, and then those spaces become co-ed, and pretty soon the men are looking around for a new male-only space. Not because they don't enjoy spending time with women, but because there's something about a male-only space that lets a man relax and recharge in a different way.

That cycle tends to repeat, and you don't really see it in reverse. Men are mildly curious, at most, about what women do in their own spaces, and generally don't seek to join them. That probably adds to the perception women have that the male-only spaces are more fun.
by headcanon | 2025-05-30 13:50:11+00:00
It includes website references for most of these searches so its easily verifiable.

Here's an example: https://chatgpt.com/share/6839b2a0-d4f4-8000-9224-f406589802...

I was traveling in Tokyo recently and took a picture of a van that was hosting what looked like a political rally in Akihabara with hand painted slogans on the outside. It wrote some python code to analyze the image segment by segment and eventually came up with the translations. Then it was able to find me the website for the political party, which had an entry for the rally that was held that day. I don't speak Japanese so its possible some of the translations were not accurate but it looked like it generally lined up and it ultimately got me what I wanted eventually.

I was there a year ago as well and tried doing similar translations and it had a very hard time with the hand painted kanji. Its really come a long way since then.

I also used it to find some obscure anime events the same day, most of which are only announced in Japanese on obscure websites. Being a non-speaker and not familiar with the websites it would have been a huge pain to google.