MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by snapplebobapple | 2025-05-30 14:42:04+00:00
Corporate lawyers would argue this is already happening and they are partially correct its a really tough problem because there are valid points on both sides. Take a simple product. Say all the design and development work happens globally to create IP that is the how of the product. Production and integration into a product happens in southeast asia. Sales happen globally but lets look at a sale in Germany. If you sell it for Y , you manufacture it for X and you have a large sunk cost for the IP you need to recover C, your profit is Y-X - C/units sold. Units sold is unknown until you finish selling the product potentially years later. It's not at all cut and dry which part should get allocated what profit. What Germany is doing with this tax is arbitrarily pushing more of the profit to the end sale, where potentially none of the work to make the product and very minimal to none of the design work may have been done, which isn't necessarily right/fair/justified.
by linsomniac | 2025-05-30 14:42:53+00:00
thanks.dev seems to me like it's making SOME headway into paying open source developers. At least, I've fallen into a couple hundred bucks of unexpected payments there for open source contributions.

Also, github sponsors seems to work some as well. I enabled it last year and I've had a few gracious souls throw up to $50 at a time into my tip jar, though I've sent out way more than has come in (but that's ok).

I sure wish I could get my company to start contributing some significant funds though. We get a huge benefit from open source, but never seem to have the money to spend towards it.
by rhdunn | 2025-05-30 14:43:08+00:00
The number of quantized bits is a trade off between size and quality. Ideally you should be aiming for a 6-bit or 5-bit model. I've seen some models be unstable at 4-bit (where they will either repeat words or start generating random words).

Anything below 4-bits is usually not worth it unless you want to experiment with running a 70B+ model -- though I don't have any experience of doing that, so I don't know how well the increased parameter size balances the quantization.

See https://github.com/ggml-org/llama.cpp/pull/1684 and https://gist.github.com/Artefact2/b5f810600771265fc1e3944228... for comparisons between quantization levels.
by jerpint | 2025-05-30 14:43:26+00:00
I have a feeling LLMs could probably self improve up to a point with current capacity, then hit some kind of wall where current research is also bottle necked. I don’t think they can yet self improve exponentially without human intuition yet , and the results of this paper seem to support this conclusion as well.

Just like an LLM can vibe code a great toy app, I don’t think an LLM can come to close to producing and maintaining production ready code anytime soon. I think the same is true for iterating on thinking machines
by onlyrealcuzzo | 2025-05-30 14:43:44+00:00
> If no one has a job, who’s going to buy your stuff?

All the people employed by the government and blue collar workers? All the entrepreneurs, gig workers, black market workers, etc?

It's easy to imagine a world in which there are way less white collar workers and everything else is pretty much the same.

It's also easy to imagine a world in which you sell less stuff but your margins increase, and overall you're better off, even if everybody else has less widgets.

It's also easy to imagine a world in which you're able to cut more workers than everyone else, and on aggregate, barely anyone is impacted, but your margins go up.

There's tons of other scenarios, including the most cited one - that technology thus far has always led to more jobs, not less.

They're probably believing any combination of these concepts.

It's not guaranteed that if there's 5% less white-collar workers per year for a few decades that we're all going to starve to death.

In the future, if trends continue, there's going to be way less workers - since there's going to be a huge portion of the population that's old and retired.

You can lose x% of the work force every year and keep unemployment stable...

A large portion of the population wants a lot more people to be able to not work and get entitlements...

It's pretty easy to see how a lot of people can think this could lead to something good, even if you think all those things are bad.

Two people can see the same painting in a museum, one finds it beautiful, and the other finds it completely uninteresting.

It's almost like asking - how can someone want the Red team to win when I want the Blue team to win?
by idkwhattocallme | 2025-05-30 14:43:55+00:00
I worked at two different $10B+ market cap companies during ZIRP. I recall in most meetings over half of the knowledge workers attending were superfluous. I mean, we hired someone on my team to attend cross functional meetings because our calendars were literally too full to attend. Why could we do that? Because the company was growing and hiring someone to attend meetings wasn't going to hurt the skyrocketing stock. Plus hiring someone gave my VP more headcount and therefore more clout. The market only valued company growth, not efficiency. But the market always capitulates to value (over time). When that happens all those overlay hires will get axed. Both companies have since laid off 10K+. AI was the scapegoat. But really, a lot of the knowledge worker jobs it "replaces" weren't providing real value anyway.
by Jotalea | 2025-05-30 14:44:16+00:00
I started reading when I was 2, and writing at 4. And in elementary school I was the one that read the fastest. As of 2021 (12 years old) I had read books ranging from 50 to 600 pages; approximately 270 books. Nowadays, I just read reddit stories, programming documentation, blogs, forums and chats; and to be honest, I lost track of how much I have read.
by ben_w | 2025-05-30 14:44:25+00:00
Game theory/Nash equilibrium/Prisoner's Dilemma, and the turkey's perspective in the problem of induction.

So far, for any given automation, each actor gets to cut their own costs to their benefit — and if they do this smarter than anyone else, they win the market for a bit.

Every day the turkey lives, they get a bit more evidence the farmer is an endless source of free food that only wants the best for them.

It's easy to fool oneself that the economics are eternal with reference to e.g. Jevons paradox.
by aspenmayer | 2025-05-30 14:44:40+00:00
I liken the concept of tankie to that of jumping the shark by Fonzie on Happy Days. I wonder if there's some kind of portmanteau going on there in the etmology? Maybe a (now-discontinued SAT test style) analogy will help show how I think this might have occurred, or a least provide a potentially helpful backronymic mnemonic device? I think I have made my relations clear conceptually, and I think the analogy works and the wordplay seems like it could be intentional, but I can't say what was going through the mind of whoever first used the word tankie to refer to socialists who essentially backslide into fascism after some kind of failed revolution, if I understand the proper usage as understood by modern leftists correctly.

Tankie (authoritarianism with little red flags (after precipitating incident)) is to Tank Man (precipitating incident) in relation to China (socialist status quo (before precipitating incident)), is as Fonzie is to jumping the shark in relation to Happy Days.
by UncleMeat | 2025-05-30 14:44:45+00:00
...because we now are happy that gay people can leave the closet and overcome the threats that would keep them there, straight men can't share emotions?

There are gay women. Why are friendships between women not a threat to the "no homo" need?

There is evidence that the intimacy (especially physical intimacy) of male friendships declined starting in the 90s as more gay people left the closet and slowly worked towards social acceptance. But the "no homo, bro" reaction is entirely self inflicted and has absolutely nothing to do with a sexualized society. I'd actually wager that the straight men who spend the most time around out gay men are the least likely to feel the need to resist male intimacy out of a fear of a threat to their sexuality.
by TechDebtDevin | 2025-05-30 14:45:11+00:00
This is really awesome, I do this myself with https://github.com/go-rod/rod

I have hacky cli tools I've built with it that manage lots of different browser profiles for scrapers. I need some sort of API though so I'm not sure Donut will do it for me, however, I may find some use for it.
by PaulHoule | 2025-05-30 14:45:27+00:00
Seems like it could be a good application of semantic search.

Years ago, before BERT and all that, I worked on a search engine for patents where you could give it a paragraph describing an invention and it would use a combination of document embeddings and probability-based full text search to find matching patent and non-patent literature.

Today's embeddings (see SBERT) are much better than what we had back then and I bet if you had a database of company descriptions, maybe articles about them, you could write a paragraph about your business and find competitors.
by maxwellg | 2025-05-30 14:45:35+00:00
Ha! I love this. There's nothing like a proper Bash script to make me realize how terribly gross all of mine are.

The drum I'm currently beating is that local MCP is a ton of fun for techies like us - if you're on this website you can `npx ...` or install whatever you want with a modicum of common sense - but local MCP is going to be a dead end for mass adoption. If we want to build MCP servers that get used by everyday people (or on mobile or other locked down ecosystems) then remote MCP + OAuth is the only realistic way forward. I can't get my dad to open up a terminal window - anything over stdio or touching environment variables and API keys is a nonstarter.
by energy123 | 2025-05-30 14:45:52+00:00
> Let's have a planet with 100,000 sovereign governments.

This is an impossible scenario because there is no authority that can enforce this. We had what you wanted in our tribal past, but it was not competitive. Nation states naturally emerged as the technology that allowed nation states (printing press, railroads, etc) emerged. You can't reverse this just by wishing it to be so. A one world government is at least a feasible possible future instead of an impossible one.
by tanchaowen84 | 2025-05-30 14:46:01+00:00
cool! Even though it’s getting easier to use AI to generate commands these days—I often ask AI to help me write commands myself—I still think it’s important to understand and systematically learn the command line. I’ll definitely recommend this book to my friends. One suggestion: maybe you could include some practical examples from real work scenarios in the book to make it even more approachable and engaging.
by roenxi | 2025-05-30 14:46:28+00:00
You're being confused by the numbers. We aren't trying to maximise consumer spending, the point is to maximise living standards. If the market equilibrium price of all goods was $0 consumer spending would be $0 and living standards would be off the charts. It'd be a great outcome.

It just happens that up to this point there have been things that couldn't be done by capital. Now we're entering a world where there isn't such a thing and it is unclear what that implies for the job market. But people not having jobs is hardly a bad thing as long as it isn't forced by stupid policy, ideally nobody has to work.
by tacon | 2025-05-30 14:46:31+00:00
> The best way I could try to reel him in was to simply suggest that if it were so easy, everyone would be doing it.

Alas, most good entrepreneurial activities violate the efficient market hypothesis. Ditto for many investments. Some people are more alert to opportunities, have better deal flow, etc.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28029044
by furkansahin | 2025-05-30 14:46:53+00:00
Amazing article! Using state machines is a must if you are building infrastructure control-planes. Was P a must, though? I am not sure. We have been building infrastructure control-planes for over 13 years now and every iteration we have built with Ruby. It worked wonders for us https://www.ubicloud.com/blog/building-infrastructure-contro...
by paganel | 2025-05-30 14:47:25+00:00
> Their impact is probably way outsized.

This is pretty dismissive in my book, as in not acknowledging that for the last 6 to 12 months (at least) most of the casualties in Eastern Ukraine have been caused by cheap drones. The same cheap drones that have also been a game-changer when it comes to using armoured vehicles, as they're not being used all that much anymore because they're death-traps, the two armies have switched to using cheap motorbikes (the Russians) and ATVs (the Ukrainians).
by tonyedgecombe | 2025-05-30 14:47:25+00:00
>It would've honestly taken me a few hours to get it right as it's been a while I coded that kind of thing. I was able to generate the solution with o3 in around 10 minutes, with some back and forth.

>which I honestly hadn't programmed myself before.

How can you be sure it is correct if you haven't mastered the data structure yourself?
by zhengyi13 | 2025-05-30 14:48:01+00:00
The way I read your question, anything that will display a waterfall is what you want; you'll see crystal clear that there are signals wherever they might be, and you can just click/tune over to that frequency. You typically can zoom in or out on that waterfall to cover broader or narrower ranges.

You can get this with either full on (expensive!) radios, or with a cheap RTLSDR dongle paired w/ appropriate software on your computer. And to what you said about cheap SDRs... 24 to 1766 MHz isn't a particularly narrow range from my point of view, but if you're willing to spend some more money, the HackRF One will cover 1MHz (160m band) all the way on up to 6GHz (wifi). Going lower or higher than that probably needs more specialized stuff.

(And of course, appropriately tuned antennae hooked to the radios/dongles)
by dimgl | 2025-05-30 14:48:30+00:00
I used to agree with the anti-Leetcode sentiment like the OP, but changed my tune fairly quickly once I started doing actual production-grade software engineering that goes beyond just simple CRUD and realized the things that Leetcode tests are applicable everywhere. It just kinda clicked one day for me and I started passing Leetcode assessments.

Sure, some interviews are pretty hard and some algorithms/data structures are not as common on the job. But given a complex enough system, you'll run into lots of situations where having this foundation will pay off. I mean, it's just computer science.

That's the thing about software engineering. You can get a lot done without knowing the foundational stuff. But then you're just a blunt instrument. Everything looks like a nail to a hammer.
by paulluuk | 2025-05-30 14:48:36+00:00
Around the time when bitcoin started to get serious public attention, late 2017, I remember feeling super hyped about it and yet everyone told me that money spent on bitcoin was wasted money. I really believed that bitcoin, or at least cryptocurrency as a whole, would fundamentally change how banking and currencies would work. Now, almost 10 years later, I would say that it did not live up to my believe that it would "fundamentally" change currencies and banking. It made some minor changes, sure, but if it weren't for the value of bitcoin, it would still be a nerdy topic about as well known as perlin noise. Although I did make quite a lot of money from it, though I sold out way too soon.

As a research engineer in the field of AI, I am again getting this feeling. People keep doubting that AI will have any kind of impact, and I'm absolutely certain that it will. A few years ago people said "AI art is terrible" and "LLMs are just autocomplete" or the famous "AI is just if-else". By now it should be pretty obvious to everyone in the tech community that AI, and LLMs in particular, are extremely useful and already have a huge impact on tech.

Is it going to fulfill all the promises made by billionaire tech CEOs? No, of course not, at least not on the time scale that they're projecting. But they are incredibly useful tools that can enhance efficiency of almost any job that involves setting behind a computer. Even just something like copilot autocomplete or talking with an LLM about a refactor you're planning, is often incredibly useful. And the amount of "intelligence" that you can get from a model that can actually run on your laptop is also getting much better very quickly.

The way I see it, either the AI hype will end up like cryptocurrency: forever a part of our world, but never quite lived up to it's promises, but I made a lot of money in the meantime. Or the AI hype will live up to it's promises, but likely over a much longer period of time, and we'll have to test whether we can live with that. Personally I'm all for a fully automated luxury communism model for government, but I don't see that happening in the "better dead than red" US. It might become reality in Europe though, who knows.
by slayerjain | 2025-05-30 14:48:58+00:00
similar to the integration testing component in keploy.io, which includes time freezing.

basically certain system clocks are rolled back and incremented in a deterministic manner to emulate real issues recorded from production bugs. Had lot of fun working with building this and the effect of messing with different system clocks by intercepting system calls.

https://keploy.io/docs/keploy-cloud/time-freezing/
by munksbeer | 2025-05-30 14:49:16+00:00
>It's also easy to imagine a world in which you sell less stuff but your margins increase, and overall you're better off, even if everybody else has less widgets.

History seems to show this doesn't happen. The trend is not linear, but the trend is that we live better lives each century than the previous century, as our technology increases.

Maybe it will be different this time though.
by bitbasher | 2025-05-30 14:49:21+00:00
I went to an interview at minio's office back in early 2017 and had the most bizarre interview I have ever had as a software engineer.

I went into the office and met the two founders. Both were nice and welcoming, but it felt like there was absolutely zero process or structure in the company at all. They didn't have a product or vision. It was more or less "we're building cool stuff".

I wasn't asked a single technical or business question. I was asked what I would like to work on and they suggested I come into the office and do some open source work on whatever I want and if I enjoyed it they would hire me.

Not a bad experience, but very bizarre and out of the norm.
by grues-dinner | 2025-05-30 14:50:01+00:00
The whole point of a shared_ptr is that you can't delete it out from under other users. You can do exactly what you suggest with a weak_ptr.

A shared_ptr to an object with a deinit() is rather like a weak_ptr in that someone else can "delete" it, and you should check if it's really there, except it can still have some information about things like deinit failures rather than just telling you that the object is deleted.
by whynotminot | 2025-05-30 14:50:12+00:00
Not really — even if AGI doesn’t work and these models don’t get any better, there’s still enormous value to be mined just from harnessing the existing state of the art.

Or these guys pivot and go back to building CRUD apps. They’re either at the front of something revolutionary… or not… and they’ll go back to other lucrative big tech jobs.
by brucehoult | 2025-05-30 14:50:13+00:00
Right.

Even at that time in 2021 I argued that serialising through a carry flag is limiting on wide machines, but there was very little RISC-V hardware available at the time and also GMP was not yet ported to RISC-V.

That has changed a bit now, and almost two months ago I tried the GMP project's own gmpbench on a few RISC-V boards.

I found that when comparing similar µarch at similar clock speed, in dual-issue in-order SiFive's U74 is very comparable to Arm's A53, and in small 3-wide OoO SiFive's P550 is significantly better than Arm's A72.

And that's not even using the kind of technique discussed in this post, but the full multi-instruction carry flag emulation criticised by Granlund.

https://www.reddit.com/r/RISCV/comments/1jsnbdr/gnu_mp_bignu...

It's going to be very interesting when the 8-wide OoO RISC-V cores come out, probably starting with Tenstorrent's Ascalon core which they expect to tape out in Q3 and they have said they want to get into as many hands as possible to accelerate RISC-V development, including in laptops, not only in servers or the like.
Show HN: I made a app after too many "Oh crap, forgot to cancel my subscription"
by next_coder_ | 2025-05-30 14:50:29+00:00
Hey there,

My name is Thomas and I am a solopreneur.

One day I realized I was paying for a lot of services I was no longer using, and I kept receiving those "You've been charged..." notifications.

Sounds familiar?

So I built Ruby, a web application that warns me right before trials are about to end or subscriptions are about to be charged.

I've been using it personally and I've noticed 2 big changes in my spending: -37% reduction in monthly recurring costs -I get to explore a lot more SaaS projects without the fear of forgetting to cancel them

I hope Ruby is as helpful to you as it is for me, and I would appreciate some feedback as this is my first project I've actually launched.

Thank you and keep on building!

Thomas

Link: https://rubyapp.net?ref=hackernews
by NoMoreNicksLeft | 2025-05-30 14:50:33+00:00
>This is an impossible scenario because there is no authority that can enforce this.

No, it's not impossible, it's just not extant. It may be true that there is no path from where we are now to that world, and it is certainly true that if there is a path it's not trivially predictable. But this can be said of the "one world government" thing as well. Knowing that people like myself exist and would sabotage attempts at one world government, how do you propose to make that possible?

>We had what you wanted in our tribal past,

No, we had something even better. We had a zero-world-government. That truly is impossible, at least considering that I'm not a fan of human extinction.
by bgwalter | 2025-05-30 14:51:25+00:00
Using the Upton Sinclair quote in this context is a sign of not understanding the quote. The original quote means that you ignore gross injustices of your employer in order to stay employed.

It was never used in the sense of denigrating potential competitors in order to stay employed.

> People like this have banked their futures on AI not working out.

If "AI" succeeds, which is unlikely, what is your recommendation to journalists? Should they learn how to code? Should they become prostitutes for the 1%?

Perhaps the only option would be to make arrangements with the Mafia like dock workers to protect their jobs. At least it works: Dock workers have self confidence and do not constantly talk about replacing themselves. /s
by paganel | 2025-05-30 14:51:38+00:00
No lol about it, because even the concept of a "sales pitch" in the context of a potential existential war (against China or Russia, or against both at the same time, I'm talking from the US's pov) is kind of a lunacy, so, in that respect, of course that I'm taking the sales pitch-like discourse seriously, because many military procurement decisions are taken based on those sales pitches.
by rhdunn | 2025-05-30 14:51:56+00:00
The 1.58bit quantization is using 3 values -- -1, 0, 1. The bits number comes from log_2(3) = 1.58....

For that level you can pack 4 weights in a byte using 2 bits per byte. However, there is one bit configuration in each that is unused.

More complex packing arrangements are done by grouping weights together (e.g. a group of 3) and assigning a bit configuration to each combination of values into a lookup table. This allows greater compression closer to the 1.68 bits value.