MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by busethai | 2025-05-15 22:18:23+00:00
Hello everyone! I just launched my study companion, MindLift! I’m a second-year computer science student based in Switzerland.

Every semester, my friends and I have to absorb an enormous amount of knowledge and concepts to pass our final exams. That’s when I started thinking about creating a platform that brings together all the essential tools to study more effectively and retain information more efficiently.

The goal of this project is to enhance the learning experience with interactive quizzes, comprehensive summaries, and a personal AI assistant that knows everything about your study materials. The project is currently in beta, and I believe we have the potential to build something impactful that helps everyone learn more effectively and absorb knowledge faster.

MindLift aims to develop tools that are genuinely useful for students and anyone who wants to learn more efficiently.
by PinkSheep | 2025-05-15 22:18:24+00:00
> every problem that society already tackled with in the past

More KYC creates more problems while solving some others. Why didn't the same society despite KYC/AML tackle the problem pointed at in a previous comment? "Florida teens kidnap Las Vegas man, drive him to Arizona desert, steal $4M in cryptocurrency"[1] Why is there this crime?

Without mandatory KYC laws, this particular attack would be near pointless. No name tied to account, bookkeeping doesn't archive wire transaction details for the past 10 years.

Let businesses easily accept cryptocurrency (like... regular cash?), without a blade to their throat held by the government, and the need for such centralization points will greatly diminish. People get in trouble by p2p-exchanging money with unknown peers; in some instances this "trouble" has the unit of "years".

It's in nobodies' interest to protect cryptocurrency payments as the alternative, other than the activists, and the big groups jumping in on it for the speculation purposes - something they had refined decades ago. There's CBDC is on the horizon.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43999011
by cgio | 2025-05-15 22:18:28+00:00
REST as the author finds out is not for state synchronisation. CRDTs are also not about state synchronisation, only so in an eventual sense, so similar to REST, you can make it work, but you are twisting the approach with assumptions and sticky tape. State synchronisation is a “solved” problem, in the form of distributed data stores, or in some more relaxed sense, database replication, CDC etc. Not an expert, so this is just an opinion even if it sounds assertive.
by gnabgib | 2025-05-15 22:18:30+00:00
Small discussion at the time (42 points, 6 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14532478

Related: Initialization in C++ is Seriously Bonkers (166 points, 2019, 126 points) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18832311
by kjellsbells | 2025-05-15 22:18:57+00:00
It also helps to have read books published in other eras: in the Borgesian case, material written from about 1850 to 1920. It has a certain literary style that Borges riffs on extensively and is reflected here.

Even text books of the era had this style, but perhaps less so than in the humanities, where there is and was a lot of discussion in books about other books.
by oliwarner | 2025-05-15 22:18:58+00:00
Woof. Looking at a single metric and extrapolating "LLMs killed the radio star"

Stack Exchange sites are designed to nuke duplicates, help people before they post a new question. It seems a natural conclusion that the number of original questions decreases over time.

I won't pretend that some people live their lives inside and LLM but many of us still use search engines and SO.
by maccard | 2025-05-15 22:19:11+00:00
The same can be asked about any number of things - why would someone ever not free their memory, use a dynamic allocation, not use a lock, use an orm, not use an orm.

> I just can’t understand the thought process that led to that.

Bluntly, it’s not understanding the tools and fundamentals. Your original reply assumed that it would use all cores, for example. To me that’s obviously not true but I’m sure there’s 10 things you could list off that are obvious to you but I’d get wrong -
by palata | 2025-05-15 22:19:25+00:00
> Overwhelmingly, the people you're talking about are not moderators.

I was actually thinking about you. You keep saying everything is great. My observation is that I used to be on SO every day, and I completely stopped contributing even though I would have plenty of stuff to add (more than ever, actually).

> Why should a reduction in incoming questions mean that it's "dying"?

There is "a reduction", and there is "being back to the amount of questions SO had in 2009 when it launched".
by vasusen | 2025-05-15 22:20:09+00:00
I built the admin panel used by internal employees and contractors at a major fintech payments processor (PCI Level 1). We had to add multiple levels of safety once we decided to hire a team outside of our US office including logging, monitoring and also rate-limiting (ask for manager to approve if more than 5 full details requests, etc.) I think these requirements are much stringent due to PCI-DSS standards for credit card processors. I wonder if a lack of such standards in crypto makes the companies holding customer funds more lax.
by sfink | 2025-05-15 22:20:34+00:00
If you can affect germline cells, then I don't see how it's not a slippery slope. (I'm not arguing against doing it, just that it is a slope and the slope is slippery.) No designer babies necessary.

I'll steelman "fixing defects" by sticking to serious hereditary diseases (and yes, only those that correspond to one or a few known genes). As more and more conditions become treatable, the population with access to resources will have lower healthcare costs by being less susceptible to problems. (Which is a good thing, note!) Insurance companies will have more and more proxies for differentiating that don't involve direct genetic information. Societally, "those people" [the poor and therefore untreated] cost more to support medically and are an increasing burden on the system. Eugenics gains a scientific basis. Do you want your daughter marrying someone genetically substandard, if you don't have the resources to correct any issues that might show up? Probably not, you're more likely to want to build a wall between you and them. Then throw over anyone who falls behind the bleeding edge of corrections.

It'll be the latest form of redlining, but this time "red" refers literally to blood.
by gopalv | 2025-05-15 22:21:52+00:00
> recognise the shape of a scored note, minim, crotchet, quaver on a 5 x 9 dot grid

Reading music off a lined page sounds like a fun project, particularly to do it from scratch like 3Blue1Brown's number NN example[1].

Mix with something like Chuck[2] and you can write a completely clientside application with today's tech.

[1] - https://www.3blue1brown.com/lessons/neural-networks

[2] - https://chuck.stanford.edu/
by kderbe | 2025-05-15 22:22:08+00:00
Idle power almost always goes up with higher resolutions and refresh rates [1], and AMD cards typically raise their idle clockspeeds more drastically than Nvidia cards [2] when resolution or refresh rate increases. The OP uses an 8K 60Hz screen so 45W seems reasonable.

[1] TechPowerUp and ComputerBase have the most thorough collections of power consumption measurements, but compare them to each other and you'll see how much it depends on the test setup.

[2] Nvidia's latest 5000 series cards buck this trend. The 9070 XT's direct competitor, the 5070 Ti, has especially high idle consumption for no clear reason.
by palata | 2025-05-15 22:22:20+00:00
> So yes, we absolutely do need to "alienate most", because "most" are there for a reason that has absolutely nothing to do with getting the best content.

How many of the "desirable" contributors did you alienate in the process?

I may be naive, but when people say "I have been using SO for 10 years but it has become toxic so I left", it doesn't sound like new accounts asking for their homeworks.
by jqpabc123 | 2025-05-15 22:22:24+00:00
I have trouble getting my head around what the exact impact of tariffs are

Here is how it works:

1) When WalMart imports goods from a foreign country, they receive a bill from Homeland Security listing the tariff amount due on the shipment. If WalMart don't pay, their next shipment gets impounded by customs until the outstanding bill is paid.

2) When WalMart pays extra, they raise prices so you pay extra.

3) The US government has more money. You have less money (due to price inflation). Yaaay taxes!!!

NOTE: Contrary to some repeated claims (aka lies), tariff bills are never sent to any foreign country. Because the US government has no means of forcing them to pay.
by kcplate | 2025-05-15 22:22:29+00:00
A while back (22+ years) I worked with a vendor on a very specialized amazing image processing workflow product. I noticed at the time that all of his devs were these older guys from former Soviet nations. I figured it was a cost thing but over beers he told me that even though they were cheaper than US devs…they were significantly better devs because they were used to squeezing every drop of computing resources to the max because they had too back in the old days. The hardware they worked on back in the day was already “obsolete” in the west but they needed to maximize it.

They were just used to writing super fast high efficiency code. They worked small and that product screamed in comparison to other vendors out there.

To a degree I think we have gotten soft and complacent…relying on shit libraries with great hardware to make up for it.
by PinkSheep | 2025-05-15 22:22:34+00:00
> store just a checkbox that the person showed their ID and it was valid.

Doesn't work at scale. You get bribes, rogue employees, socially engineered employees. In the US, look up the articles about phone/SIM unlocks and SIM card copies. Russia has a problem with e-signatures, that most people have no idea about. It's possible to sell somebody's real estate with one of these. Loans granted just based on passport data. Neither politics nor media highlight these issues. Overall in this case your suggestion tries to handle the symptoms of the KYC requirement.

Here's a more extreme treatment: let people change their full legal name at will. Gender's already kinda possible.
by Buttons840 | 2025-05-15 22:22:47+00:00
StackOverflow should have focused on linking duplicates rather than forbidding duplicates.

No Boilerplate recently said "writing is thinking"[0], and suggested links are the ultimate knowledge graph organizational tool--not tags, not folders--links[1].

StackOverflow tried to prevent all duplicate questions. This was stifling and reduced writing, reduced thought, and most importantly, reduced user engagement.

The people who wanted to write their problems and ask their questions stopped going to StackOverflow. The people who wanted to write and give answers stopped going to StackOverflow.

Look at Discord or IRC and you'll see that people have their own questions to ask, and the people who answer such questions enjoy answering the same questions over and over. Let the people write their questions, and write their answers and give advice. Instead of preventing duplicates, link duplicate questions together.

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sqm4-B07LsE [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B0yAy2j-9V0
by Nevermark | 2025-05-15 22:23:13+00:00
My understanding, which is far from certain, is that problems like this (try a large combination of solutions, cooperate between superpositions to identify the best, then set up the quantum outputs so when they are classically sampled, the best answer is the most likely sample obtained) are solved in four stages:

1. N^2 potential solutions encoded in superposition across N qubuts.

2. Each superposition goes through the quantum version of a normal inference pass, using each superpositions weights to iteratively process all the classical data, then calculates performance. (This is all done without any classical sampling.)

3. Cross-superposition communication that results in agreement on the desired version. This is the weakest part of my knowledge. I know that is an operation type that exists, but I don't know how circuits implement it. But the number of bits being operated on is small, just a performance measure. (This is also done without any classical sampling.)

4. Then the output is sampled to get classical values. This requires N * log2(N) circuit complexity, where N is the number of bits defining the chosen solution, i.e. parameters and architectural settings. This can be a lot of hardware, obviously, perhaps more than the rest of the hardware, given N will be very large.

Don't take anything I say here for granted. I have designed parts of such a circuit, using ideal quantum gates in theory, but not all of it. I am not an expert, but I believe that every step here is well understood by others.

The downside relative to other approaches: It does a complete search of the entire solutions space directly, so the result comes from reducing N^2 superpositions across N qubits, where for interesting models the N can be very large (billions of parameters x parameter bit width), to get N qubits. No efficiencies are obtained from gradient information or any other heuristic. This is the brute force method. So an upper bound of hardware requirements.

Another disadvantage, is since the solution was not obtained by following a gradient, the best solution might not be robust. Meaning, it might be a kind of vertex between robust solutions that manages to do best on the designed data, but small changes of input samples from the design data might not generalize well. This is less likely to be a problem if smoothing/regularization information is taken into account account for determining each superpositions performance.
by Loughla | 2025-05-15 22:24:18+00:00
I was accused of not having enough to do by a boss. He was habitually late to everything. I am at every meeting 3 to 5 minutes early, because I leave every meeting at the :20 or :50 depending. Then I have 5 minutes to pee or whatever before going to the next one.

Either way, he saw me get to meetings a few minutes early and legitimately accused me of not having enough to do.

That was one of two jobs that I've ever walked out of.
by panarky | 2025-05-15 22:25:44+00:00
The US Government didn't provide high-volume, bulk access to this extremely sensitive information to contractors in foreign countries with no controls over their ability to mass-exfiltrate the data.

Coinbase is the entity that set up this dangerous system.

Coinbase did it because it was cheap for them, not because they were being trustworthy custodians of information that put their customers at risk.

Sure, yes, obviously every company's employees and contractors are vulnerable to bribes and blackmail. That's why a trustworthy, competent custodian would establish systems and controls to prevent bribed and blackmailed insiders from mass-exfiltrating information that could get their customers killed.

The fact that other companies manage to be trustworthy, competent custodians while Coinbase doesn't is not the fault of KYC.
by NegativeLatency | 2025-05-15 22:26:02+00:00
json isn't necessarily columnar, but it is a natrual fit for stuff that is columnar that's otherwise harder to model in a traditional relational db

here's my usecase:

- we have a bunch of attributes (all different names by customer, and many different values for each record that a customer stores)

- it's a fairly natural fit for a json value with only one level of key: value mapping

- we use mysql on GCP (no columnar plugins, too hard to switch to postgres)

Someone could go back in time and correctly model it as columns and not json but that ship has sorta sailed. While it's not impossible to change, it would be pretty hard, time will tell if that ends up happening.

I would love to be able to tell mysql "put this column in a collumnar engine and use that when I query on it" (AlloyDB is this for postgres on GCP)
by Loughla | 2025-05-15 22:26:14+00:00
My experience is that when you have habitually late people will enter a meeting after you start, their first question is, "what did I miss?"

So then you waste even more time when someone recaps for them.

It's almost like people need to think about their day when they're scheduling things instead of just accepting every single meeting.

You can request different times for things. That's an option.
by lavezzi | 2025-05-15 22:26:19+00:00
> And the reason Coinbase has to keep all that sensitive stuff, much more than what would be required to identify and authenticate you, which you hope will never be stolen, is because of know your customer laws

Real cop out here, be honest. Why should every single agent have access to your identity documentation (which is only required for KYC) in perpetuity?
by MustafaYenler | 2025-05-15 22:26:34+00:00
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by jemmyw | 2025-05-15 22:26:41+00:00
> This makes Ruby threads lightweight (also known as “Green Threads”)

It's a shame they got this wrong and didn't discuss threads much. Ruby threads, since 1.9, are really threads managed by the OS and are not green threads. The parallelism is limited by the goal interpreter lock, but calling out to non Ruby code may be parallel, otherwise all those libraries the author mentions wouldn't bother. That "may" is an annoying point of order though.
by cbrinicombe | 2025-05-15 22:28:04+00:00
Great to hear! Lots more we want to add for sure. One thing that would be nice is a way to directly embed code snippets referenced in my OpenAPI spec into the content of a particular page. I know you have <RequestExample /> and <ResponseExample /> but you have to write the code snippet every time for those (unless you use a custom snippet, but I can see that being cumbersome at scale). Plus these are positioned outside of the main page content. Feels like if I've given mint my openapi spec, with code snippets already in there, then in the same way mint can generate an api playground, surely it could generate code snippets as well. This would be nice as the snippets I have defined in my api spec use our official sdks, so are more relevant than those mint generates itself.
by daveatwork | 2025-05-15 22:28:05+00:00
What of the ADD student who gets distracted when someone comes in late? What should we tell them. "Suck it up"

What of the daycare that's expecting you to show up and pick up your kids on time. Should we tell the workers to wait, because the guy replacing you at work was late. Then of course we tell the cleaners of the daycare to start their shift 30 mins later because they have to wait for the last kid to leave. Oh and the cleaners will have to stay 30 min extra to clean, so now we tell the people relying on them to wait. Or.. Or we tell the cleaners to work a bit harder so they don't take an extra 30 minutes..

So the 30min you're late messes up the day of not just the person expecting you, but all the people expecting them.

How about on principle anticipate that you're going to be late, and make an effort to arrive early. If you know you're late all the time, start giving yourself more time.
by robinsonb5 | 2025-05-15 22:28:30+00:00
I'm actually not wringing my hands over people choosing to use LLMs - I'm wringing my hands over the irresponsibility of the tech world in introducing and making available a technology whose existence will be responsible for a big chunk of the expected doubling of datacentre energy use over the next decade.

But the environmental aspects aren't even my main concern: my main concern is where that energy is coming from - and how the idea of Three Mile Island being restarted solely for Microsoft's benefit marks a huge shift (that no-one seems to have noticed) towards infrastructure that was previously at least nominally for public use being reserved for the use of a private corporation.

I'm also annoyed by the kleptocratic attitude towards training data, but I'll happily accept that reasonable minds may differ on that subject.

So while I don't use LLMs myself for ethical reasons, I don't have a problem with other people choosing to use them.
by lavezzi | 2025-05-15 22:29:06+00:00
> So this is probably why the phishing calls have increased from ~1 per month to ~3 per week.

Yes and their timeline doesn't add up with what they disclosed. If you take the Coinbase narrative, they only believed this was a 'material' issue once contacted by the hackers for a $20m demand, they weren't able to put the pieces together themselves.

The phishing has been elevated for weeks, especially via text message, and their lack of internal controls for access and monitoring are clearly severely lacking.
by shakna | 2025-05-15 22:30:26+00:00
So you're happy to punish 10% of students, for no fault of their own. You'll trade a moment's distraction, for a paid-for day's learning.

That, is a lack of empathy. Especially as for about the last hundred years universities have had a process that allows for the necessary flexibility.

To take this to the extreme... Should we simply fire everyone who is late to work, without reason? If someone else causes a car accident, should we simply revoke the licenses of everyone involved, regardless?
by janalsncm | 2025-05-15 22:30:28+00:00
I would like to be able to turn off implicit broadcasting entirely. It has caused me so many evil bugs (PyTorch, but the same thing applies to Numpy).

Imagine all of the weirdness of js “truthiness” bugs (with silent unexpected behavior) combined with the inherent difficulty of debugging matrix multiplications in 2, 3, or 4 dimensions. I would rather herd goats in a Lumon basement.

Jax can do it but I’m not willing to migrate everything.