MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ecb_penguin | 2025-05-28 15:11:52+00:00
> It seems like you have equated "excel" with "must thrive under pressure"

Thriving and excelling are not that far apart :).

Thrive: grow or develop well Excel: be exceptionally good at or proficient in an activity

> It is not the single most important skill

Nobody said it was!

> everyone must be filtered on

It's a data point. Exam scores don't matter when you apply for a job, or do anything else in life.
by palmotea | 2025-05-28 15:12:22+00:00
> Unfortunately it’s becoming more obvious that “short-term” is all we really have in this world. There is no long term.

That's definitely not true. It sounds like a rationalization for the existing bad and unwise behavior.

> So why plan for long term? Life is a series of short-term wins until you finally die.

So, dump the untreated toxic waste into the river, then?

> Same with companies. Things change so fast now that you could be crushing it one year and going out of business the next. It’s not like old days where you could setup a blacksmithing shop and have business for generations.

Maybe if you're in some startup, but that's not the usual case.

> Results now are way better than results later.

So be "very proud [for taking] home a salary for about two hours of work per day following up with contractors, then heading to the gym and making social plans."?
by mrweasel | 2025-05-28 15:12:26+00:00
> If the user doesn't have pixi or micromamba installed, Wetlands will download and set it up automatically.

Please don't. Never have a tool that automatically reaches out onto the internet to get a binary and then run it. Just let the user know that they need to install either pixi or micromamba. It's inherently unsafe and you don't know what will be put into those binaries in the future.

Maybe it's because I don't have a use case for this, but I don't really get what this is for. It's interesting, but I'm not really sure where I'd use it.
by PeterStuer | 2025-05-28 15:12:27+00:00
Remember, there was no Internet, so all info you got was by word of mouth from fellow enthusiasts, or from a few magazines, which were only to be found in a special newspaper shop in a nearby major city to which you made a pilgrimage by train every month.

The 'hobby' computers were no to be found in any 'regular' shop, but sold in what would now probably be called 'pop-ups' run by an enthusiast from his front room.

There was no software to be found, so you programmed everything yourself not for utility but simply for the joy of programming.

There were no standard architectures in the space, not even in terms of display or input. You had things like the Newton with a single line led display, the ZX81 with a membrame 'keyboard' or the Vic-20 with real video out (mostly PAL for europe).

You'ld travel with a little kaggle of friends to a regional 'hobby computer expo', which meant the region's pop-up store owners each had one or two computers set up on a table in some school's gym, and stare in awe at the 'advanced graphics' of the precursor of the BBC Micro that could display the (static) television test card in 8 bit.
by lapcat | 2025-05-28 15:12:34+00:00
> So why is it a surprise that, when employees are not supposed to take work personally, they stop taking work personally?

I'm a bit puzzled about how this reply is supposed to relate to or add to my comment. For example, I already said, "The question is, in the face of such job insecurity, why should employees care are their jobs? Their employers clearly don't care about them."

What I don't see in the reply is any kind of contextual or critical analysis. You speak as if this is simply an immutable law of nature rather than a product of our contemporary economy. "You're not supposed to take work personally." Where do you think this "principle" comes from? I agree that a lot of people say it, and indeed that it's a rational reaction to the economic circumstances. But must it be this way, and why? And if so, what do you expect to be the outcome, aside from animus and anomie? Is it a good way for us to live together, forever?
by IanCal | 2025-05-28 15:12:44+00:00
So, I'll start by saying I love that you have made a thing and shipped. That's great, and the following is intended to be helpful.

I read this and understand what it is. I then went to the site and it says bathroom privacy, tells me it's version two etc.

What on earth is it! Your very first thing you show me as a new person is to tell me it's got better sound than the unknown previous item. Upgraded sound is a feature that is relevant to

1. The 250 people that bought the first one that didn't like the sound

2. Anyone who would have bought the first one, but didn't because of the sound.

Nobody else.

Assume I've not given up by now, but customers are very quick to leave with even just minor delays. I see a little radio like thing in a CGI setup. (note for later, you do have actual pictures and they don't look the same, so I don't know what I will get and that dramatically lowers my trust)

Is it a privacy device? It's for relaxing? I have to charge it every week?

I genuinely have no idea at this point what problem it is solving.

I have to go down further to figure that out.

Here's the question I have as a potential customer.

Why is my phone not enough? Or a radio? The first I already own, and plays any music I want and has speakers and absolutely has the time and the latter is incredibly cheap.
by klabb3 | 2025-05-28 15:13:19+00:00
I know it’s technically reproducible under the right conditions, and sure it might help in some cases. But it matters little in practice – the issue is that it’s unstable relative to unrelated parameters you often have good reason to change, often uninitentionally. For instance, you can and will get vastly different output based on usual non-semantic variations in language. I’m not a logician, but this is probably even a necessity given the ginormous output space LLMs operate on.

My point is that it’s not a tool, because good tools reliably work the same way. If, for instance, a gun clicks when it’s supposed to fire, we would say that it malfunctioned. Or it fires when the safety is on. We can define what should happen, and if something else happens, there is a fault.
by no_wizard | 2025-05-28 15:13:20+00:00
Here’s the nugget that goes along way to explaining it, IMO

> Ever since the federal education policy known as No Child Left Behind went into effect in 2002 and tied students’ test performance to rewards and sanctions for schools, achievement testing has been a primary driver of public education in the United States

Intentionally or not, the No Child Left Behind Act has created (accelerated?) the practice of not only teaching to the test it has also encouraged the practice of schools being held to the outcomes of the standard tests for funding (failing schools can lose funding sources from federal grants and programs for example) therefore teacher livelihoods are at stake.

Now it’s a situation where there is this thing, that if you don’t do well as a school (or schools district) you lose a big chunk of funding and may also make you ineligible for certain grants and other programs as well, but the state controls the means of which the standards are graded and reported, there are nothing but incentives through the entire system for this to be happening.

Since federal funding and grants make up a healthy portion of a good many state education budgets, it’s no shock that gaming compliance is something that happens, and I imagine this goes beyond Texas
by drob518 | 2025-05-28 15:13:30+00:00
Forths created for constrained environments will sometimes use this sort of dictionary header structure, but it’s not just 3 characters. It also typically includes a length of the whole thing. So, TYPE would be TYP/4 (inventing a notation there) versus TYPOGRAPHY as TYP/10. While you can still get clashes, you’d be surprised how much better it does than a straight prefix.

EDIT: Sorry, I realize I didn't explain that very well. A Forth system has a "dictionary" that stored the names of words (think procedures or functions) as well as their code. The dictionary is compressed like this (e.g., TYP/4 or TYP/10). When you're writing code, you write TYPE or TYPOGRAPHY in the code and the compiler searches the dictionary for either TYP/4 or TYP/10 depending on what you typed, ignoring the other one. Most of the time this works. If you have a bunch of words that are the same length with different suffixes, they will clash (e.g., AVGX and AVGY both reduce to AVG/4).
by saltwatercowboy | 2025-05-28 15:14:39+00:00
Well that's the word, isn't it: 'typically'. That hasn't happened. The activities that make life worthwhile have largely been priced out for the average person. I think that we can tarry about historical causes (and accomplish nothing, creating an ever-worsening feedback loop) or identify where changes could be made to incentivize productivity beyond what amounts to macroeconomic punishment.

As for the garbage man... can you blame him? What reason does he have to maintain the appearance of vigilance? Their routes are long, getting longer with cuts, they're largely understaffed, and they deal with both the contempt of the public and their refuse.

Conditions are actively getting worse for some; the UK's second largest city has proposed cutting wages by up to £8,000 p/a due to a bureaucratic nightmare of their own making [1].

It is a thankless job with no opportunity for progression which most people would rather put out of mind completely. Frankly, they deserve better.

[1] BBC: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c98gv5dpr7lo
by rasengan | 2025-05-28 15:14:51+00:00
This isn't really privacy or security focused unless 'trust' is a component of security architecture.

Make no mistake, Mullvad Leta knows what you searched for and who you are.

/Theater/ has no place in privacy.

The right way to do it, short of FHE, is to encrypt the query client side, pass this to the proxy which does not pass the source IP, which passes this to the search engine for decryption. Search results are encrypted and pass thru in the reverse:

Client (encrypts) -> Proxy (passes thru no IP) -> Search engine (receives, decrypts, performs, and encrypts results) -> Proxy passes encrypted blob of results back to user -> Client privately reviews private search results.

Edit: private.sh tried this in the past but unfortunately was shuttered with the end of gigablast.
by leeroihe | 2025-05-28 15:15:01+00:00
It's hard to explain how diametrically different the playing field is now. In most cases it's not "AI" it's just systemic replacement of Americans because they're "too expensive". Which basically just means more yacht money for executives at the altar of infinite GDP growth.

Both sides are complicit as well. It's not just the left but in current times even more so the right. The right won't shut up about deporting "illegals" but has created even more opportunities for H1B's to flood in and no disincentive for corporates to outsource. Canada already has laws that act as "tariffs" for offshoring labor - we desperately need awareness first and unified action.

What is happening now to knowledge work in the U.S. is what happened to factory jobs in the 90s.
by oleganza | 2025-05-28 15:15:13+00:00
Sorry for lack of clarity, but i was saying “Keccak” and not “sha3” for that specific reason: it’s a permutation building block suitable for a whole range of constructions - cshake, kangaroo etc. sha3 specifically is an overkill and unnecessary imho.

CShake128 is much better replacement for hmac and sha512 in (zk)proofs, while Kangaroo for things like FDE and massive volumes of data.
by dahart | 2025-05-28 15:15:16+00:00
Naw, the “it” in the 2nd clause is referring to the first clause, and they are directly related. They are not independent unrelated clauses, and that’s the criteria for a comma splice. Your assertion that a colon should be used contradicts the idea that using a comma would make it a comma splice error.

In this case, this sentence’s meaning and point would get across unambiguously no matter what punctuation is used between comma, period, colon or semicolon. What else matters?
by kokanee | 2025-05-28 15:15:26+00:00
Attestation is a compelling technical idea, but a terrible economic idea. It essentially creates an Internet that is only viewable via Google and Apple consumer products. Scamming and scraping would become more expensive, but wouldn't stop.

It pains me to say this, but I think that differentiating humans from bots on the web is a lost cause. Proof of work is just another way to burn more coal on every web request, and the LLM oligarchs will happily burn more coal if it reduces competition from upstart LLMs.

Sam Altman's goal is to turn the Internet into an unmitigated LLM training network, and to get humans to stop using traditional browsing altogether, interacting solely via the LLM device Jony Ive is making for him.

Based on the current trajectory, I think he might get his way, if only because the web is so enshittified that we eventually won't have another way to reach mainstream media other than via LLMs.
by atoav | 2025-05-28 15:15:28+00:00
The answer is that no age related verification-problem in real world is so sensitive that a day plus or minus would make any difference. So they skip the entire clusterfuck of a problem of timezones by just ignoring them.

I grew up in a country where you could legally buy beer with 16 and and hard alcohol with 18. So if the answer to "when should someone be allowed to choose to drink alcohol" has a variance of multiple years between countries who cares about a day or two.
by PaulHoule | 2025-05-28 15:15:30+00:00
In my town they seem to have spent a decade building "luxury housing for seniors" in a project that seemed about as bungled as a building a nuclear reactor. They blame the pandemic but the project stretched on for years before the pandemic.

Of course they find out when it is ready to rent that there is no market for "luxury housing for seniors" because seniors who have money either split for Florida or go to Kendal [1], and the remainder are on a fixed income and looking for "affordable housing".

[1] https://kai.kendal.org/
by soulofmischief | 2025-05-28 15:15:33+00:00
The fact that most Linux distros don't do this is a huge selling point for me. In the early Linux days, software distribution was a nightmare, but today the average popular distro's package management experience is unparalleled. I much prefer using my terminal to manage packages than some unwieldy GUI, and I don't have to leave my terminal to discover new packages or remove old ones.
by bigyabai | 2025-05-28 15:15:34+00:00
facepalm

In case you've wondered why you're not seeing Logic Pro in any studios lately, here's a breakdown of each feature in this update.

Stem Splitter - Something PC and Mac users have been "sideloading" since 2019. A cute pittance for all the iPad users that can't conveniently load a Python program.

Flashback Capture - A feature present in Bitwig, Ableton, Pro Tools, FL Studio, Cubase, Avid... I mean shit, why did Apple customers have to wait ten years for background MIDI recording?

New Sound Packs - A scam on every storefront that sells them. Next!

Learn MIDI - I don't think I've ever used a DAW that doesn't have MIDI assignment built-in. Good grief...
by doug_durham | 2025-05-28 15:15:34+00:00
I really don't want to have that argument yet again. However I hold an engineering degree and a computer science degree. Software engineering is very much engineering. Engineering is the art of tradeoffs and balance. Using a lighter weight, but more expensive steel in a structure to place less load on the foundation is an example of a tradeoff in Structural engineering.

Once you get beyond the most simple code you are practicing tradeoff and balance. You can use a simple, memory intensive algorithm, but you need to understand if you have the space to use it. You might be able to develop software in 1/2 the time if you take a basic approach, but it won't scale.

I don't know if you develop software or not. Regardless think more deeply about what is involved in engineering.
by mjburgess | 2025-05-28 15:16:16+00:00
LLMs are just a token->token mapping. They can output any set of tokens for any set of input tokens. So there is no output which isn't in the domain or codomain.

The issue is why one (prompt, answer) pair is given. If the answer is given as a "reasoning process" over salient parts of the prompt, that, e.g., involves imagining/simulation as expected, then for {(prompt', answer')} of similar imaginings we will get reliable mappings. If its cheating, then we wont.

We can, I think, say for certain that the system is not engaged in counterfactual reasoning. Eg., we can give a series of prompts (p1, p2, p3...) which require increasing complexity of the imagined scenario, and we do not find O(answering) to follow O(p-complexity-increase). Rather the search strategy is always the same, and we can just get "mildly above linear" (pseudo-)reasoning complexity with chain-of-thought.
by amberjcjj | 2025-05-28 15:16:35+00:00
After personally seeing many researchers in fields like biology, materials science, and chemistry struggle to apply machine learning to their valuable domain datasets to accelerate scientific discovery and gain deeper insights, often due to the lack of specialized ML knowledge needed to select the right algorithms, tune hyperparameters, or interpret model outputs, we knew we had to help.

That's why we're so excited to introduce the new AutoML feature in Curie , our AI research experimentation co-scientist designed to make ML more accessible! Our goal is to empower researchers like them to rapidly test hypotheses and extract deep insights from their data. Curie automates the aforementioned complex ML pipeline – taking the tedious yet critical work.

For example, Curie can generate highly performant models, achieving a 0.99 AUC (top 1% performance) for a melanoma (cancer) detection task. We're passionate about open science and invite you to try Curie and even contribute to making it better for everyone!

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by bmartin13 | 2025-05-28 15:16:38+00:00
It's emblematic of the post-modern mindset. When feelings are the diver for truth then there is no moral compass. This kind of mindset redefines "excellence" as anything that helps you feel "good". Is it any wonder that character traits like diligence and sacrifice are diminishing?

Oh, and I'm sure this comment will get voted down by the masses because it doesn't "feel" good!
by riffraff | 2025-05-28 15:16:58+00:00
> This includes the entirety of online and remote education

I don't get this. Either you do graded home assignments which the person takes without any examiner, which you could always cheat on, or you do live exams and then people can't rely on AI . LLMs make it easier to cheat, but it's not a categorical difference.

I feel like my experience of university (90% of the classes had in-person exams, some had home projects for a portion of the final marks) is fundamentally different from what other people experienced and this is very confusing for me.
by immibis | 2025-05-28 15:17:14+00:00
IP addresses are not anonymous. Have you tried to make your IP address anonymous, e.g., with Tor or one of those NordVPN-like companies? (not picking on Nord, though they deserve to be picked on - they're just the most advertised.)

You'll find CAPTCHAs almost everywhere, outright 403s or dropped connections in a lot of places. Even Google won't serve you sometimes.

The reason you're not seeing that situation right now is that your IP address is identifiable.
by mtlynch | 2025-05-28 15:17:15+00:00
They run Leta on diskless servers, just like the VPN:

>We run the Leta servers on STBooted RAM only servers, the same as our VPN servers. These servers run the latest Ubuntu LTS, with our own stripped down custom Mullvad VPN kernel which we tune in-house to remove anything unnecessary for the running system. > >The cached search results are stored in an in-memory Redis key / value store.

This is surprising given that they try to cache results for 30 days:

>Each search that has not already been cached is saved in RAM for 30 days. The idea is that the more searches performed, the larger and more substantial the cached results become, therefore aiding with privacy.

That's surprising because presumably they lose all results if they have to reboot the server.

With a VPN service, there's not much they have to store past the lifetime of the VPN session, but if they're storing search results for 30 days, I wonder how they deal with this? Maybe best effort is fine because they don't strictly need to cache the results, as it just provides marginal privacy improvements.
by NeeruJaroliya | 2025-05-28 15:17:33+00:00
Pushing browser-based tech to handle native-level video editing is definitely ambitious—but that's what makes it exciting! I'm focusing on keeping the codebase highly modular, enabling compute-heavy tasks like rendering and AI-driven edits to be offloaded to cloud functions. Additionally, I'm working on optimizing the diffing logic between edits to minimize lag and reduce unnecessary component re-renders. Testing for longer videos is on my radar—while 16GB is quite a stretch for browser memory at the moment, I’d love to know if there's a pressing use case behind it. I'm always up for a challenge!
by ecb_penguin | 2025-05-28 15:17:38+00:00
> No, it’s not obvious the DB changes because the team depending on that schema doesn’t necessarily talk to your team much, and you might not even know that team exists.

Literally everything you just said applies to services and API contracts as well. You haven't solved anything.

> the culture of changing an API is much more understood as something that must be communicated and processes are more rehearsed

You're just making this up. There are thousands of incidents every day because someone changed an API without communicating to every stakeholder.

"Services are better than databases because service owners are better at communicating changes than database owners" isn't a very compelling argument.

I'd work to fix the communication problem before I adopted a terrible tech solution.
by squigz | 2025-05-28 15:18:08+00:00
> Unfortunately it’s becoming more obvious that “short-term” is all we really have in this world. There is no long term.

The opposite seems far more obvious to me. Short-term results aren't going to last. Planning for the long-term - whether that's a career, family, or whatever - is critical to a fulfilling and healthy life.

> Results now are way better than results later.

I don't see why you can't have both.
by fatidevrel | 2025-05-28 15:18:11+00:00
This article breaks down how generative AI is being integrated into modern development workflows—from code generation to security testing—and what that means for developer productivity and software quality.

Rather than just focusing on ChatGPT or Copilot, it explores practical use cases like:

- Automating code reviews - AI-assisted vulnerability detection - Prompt engineering tips for DevSecOps - Using LLMs to boost CI/CD pipeline efficiency

Would love to hear what tools or workflows others are using right now with AI in real-world engineering teams.

Full article: https://xygeni.io/blog/generative-ai-for-developers/?utm_sou...
by noosphr | 2025-05-28 15:18:45+00:00
What you're talking about is software machining, not software engineering.

The difference between the blue collar machinist and the white collar engineer is exactly this view of the machines they use.

For an engineer a machine - be in a slide rule, calculator or super computer - is just a tool. You're not doing engineering because you're using the tool. You're doing engineering because you're thinking and the tool helps you think a bit faster.

For a machinist the machine is the job. You can't make widgets if you don't have a machine to make them on. Thinking about widgets is pointless because they don't get made by thinking.