MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by growse | 2025-05-31 08:24:56+00:00
> It seems disingenuous to suggest that the open sourcing was in bad faith given it happened years and paradigms apart from the closed sourcing, even though I don't agree with the decision either.

The problem here is that their actions are indistinguishable from an entity that is acting in bad faith. "Get loads of free labour, then claim ownership of it and try to monetize" is a business strategy.
by jillesvangurp | 2025-05-31 08:25:33+00:00
You are saying that like it is a bad thing. As far as I'm concerned, Valkey is a very healthy open source project with a wide range of companies and people contributing code to it and sponsoring development. None of these companies wield exclusive control over the project. And we all benefit from their work. And if I want, I can take their work and create a commercial product and try to sell it or make money of it. What's not to like there?

I don't get the anti-capitalist stance here. If you want to contribute to redis, Redis Inc. will require you to sign a contributor license agreement: https://github.com/redis/redis/blob/unstable/CONTRIBUTING.md

They'll be happy to take your work but the right to exploit it commercially is exclusive to them. That agreement (should you choose to sign it) gives them the right to take your contributions and re-license them under a proprietary license, or any license of their choosing. There's also no commitment that the code base will stay AGPL. That agreement gives them the right to do whatever. Agreements like that are very common with AGPL because it doesn't make much commercial sense to use that license without one.

> Put in anti-hyperscaler clauses into your licenses to preserve your ability to make money and be sustainable.

.. and permanently alienate the rest of the open source community from providing contributions to your project. That raises the question why you are open sourcing at all? Why would you cripple a community like that? Permissive licenses are successful because, well, they are permissive. It's why there are a lot of decades old OSS projects where the original developers and companies have long moved on, or in some cases, passed away. It doesn't matter. Because they have diverse communities that survive such things.
by eddythompson80 | 2025-05-31 08:25:45+00:00
> Zero LLM evaluation, observability, or tooling companies in the Series-A data.

This makes sense. The entire engineering/tooling field is so gonna change. Picking a winner makes isn't really possible. Most people are just starting to solve real problems with it and starting to build patterns that are not complete nonesense. But it will still change a lot

> “AI for X” verticals are surprisingly narrow.

I think that makes sense too. Those were a significant part of the initial hype. A lot of people promising that they'll take a "generic" LLM (which you all have seen how already smart that is) but now train it specifically on parenting, or trivia, or your emails, or your help center. It's a service type that will continue to exist. Perhaps it needs to tailor to a specific enterprise scenarios to gain traction as a startup. Though the need for these companies to manage the privacy concerns of the customers with their ability to inspect and look at the data and clean it might not be fully solved yet.

> Reducto - Reducto is an AI-driven API that specializes in converting unstructured documents like PDFs and images into structured data.

This is an example of the type of companies where "extracting LLM relevant context from X" and are relevant for any company doing the "AI for X" schtick or enterprise doing AI development on their own. This company is specifically about PDF and images, but we probably gonna see others that are for videos, archives, isos, msoffice docs, and even the ultimate holy grail of "universal binary => very rich structured data" API.

> Developer Tools & Infrastructure

The picks in this category are the most perplexing to me.
by mikhailfranco | 2025-05-31 08:27:42+00:00
Support for the Palestinian cause is to be expected in an Arab country.

But perhaps the reported strength of feeling is correlated with the history of the PLO, who moved there after being expelled from Lebanon by the Israeli invasion in 1982. Israel then attacked the new PLO HQ in Tunisia in 1985.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palestine_Liberation_Organizat...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Wooden_Leg

Correlation might mean causation in a couple of directions. Did the PLO move to Tunis because Tunisians already supported them sympathetically, or do they now support the Palestinian cause more strongly because they provided refuge and were attacked by Israel? Probably both.
by bjackman | 2025-05-31 08:28:34+00:00
> container runtime that uses virtualization to protect the host

True, by "container" I really meant "shared-kernel container".

> In theory you could shove the container runtime into something like k8s

Yeah this is actually supported by k8s.

Whether that means it's actually reasonable to run completely untrusted workloads on your own cluster is another question. But it definitely seems like a really good defense-in-depth feature.
by fhd2 | 2025-05-31 08:28:36+00:00
Yup. To counter my own points a bit:

I could also argue that the word "design" has a connotation strictly opposing emergent behaviour like evolution, as in the intelligent design "theory". So not the best word to use perhaps.

And in your example, just because we made a system that exhibits emergent behaviour to some degree, we can't assume it can "design" intelligence the way evolution did, on a much, much shorter timeline, no less.
by simianwords | 2025-05-31 08:29:27+00:00
There’s a specific reason why google doesnt promote a Docusign like product even when they have superior technical abilities.

It probably comes down to the fact that code is not that crucial but all the other non technical aspects like distribution, supplier relations and marketing that makes a product.

Maybe LLM wrappers turn out to be that way. The model may not matter but the distribution and customer relation etc would matter more.
by anthk | 2025-05-31 08:29:53+00:00
You can be pro-Palestine and hate both Hamas' terrorism and butchery actions from the IDF. And, yes, dear Israel citizens, I am pretty aware of what the Palestinian leaders did in Nazi Germany...

But that's like hating Spaniards because of Isabella and Fernando or the Francoist regime siding up with Hitler... (and even under that regime some Spaniards helped Jews to be safe against the Nazi crimes).
by roenxi | 2025-05-31 08:30:49+00:00
Which part of that is the tricky part? Spraying down a facility sounds straightforward. Killing bacteria in food products isn't particularly novel either; there are a lot of abattoirs around the world.

We're talking about farmers here. Having to do something a couple of times a day is not going to intimidate them. In an extreme case they'd hire someone and promote them to chief sprayer. These aren't challenges of the magnitude needed to get natural monopolies to form - they're standard style challenges for running a business in an industrial sector. Challenges that farm owners are quite acutely aware of.

If there are monopolies in the US chicken supply chain it is probably just everyday regulatory capture.
by eddythompson80 | 2025-05-31 08:31:14+00:00
They do exist, but not in the simplistic "AI but for X" you described. The article even explicitly says there were zero of those companies in that round.

You can see "AI startups" examples there, A company that manages your business outbound communication with lots of AI features. AI powered code generation for business operations, Accounting services with lots of AI features, business finance software with lots of AI features
by seanhunter | 2025-05-31 08:31:23+00:00
I consulted a radiologist more than 5 years after Hinton said that it was completely obvious that radiologists would be replaced by AI in 5 years. I strongly suspect they were not an AI.

Why do I think this?

1) They smelled slightly funny. 2) They got the diagnosis wrong.

OK maybe #2 is a red herring. But I stand by the other reason.
by gambiting | 2025-05-31 08:32:37+00:00
I'm a member of a few car groups on Facebook and the misinformation coming from Google is infuriating, because people treat it as gospel and then you have to explain to them that the AI slop they were shown as the top result in Google is not - in fact - correct.

As a simple example - someone googled "how to reset sensus system in Volvo xc60" and Google told them to hold the button under the infotainment screen for 20 seconds and they came to the group confused why it doesn't work. And it doesn't work because that's not the way to do it, but Google told them so, so of course it must be true.
by tmtvl | 2025-05-31 08:32:48+00:00
I learnt touch typing with KDE's Ktouch (a touch typing tutor program), which has auto-generated courses for various layouts but also has a manually laid-out course for Dvorak. It really made me appreciate how well Dvorak works for learning TT, because when a Qwerty course has me just typing out sdfjkl nonsensical gibberish, the Dvorak course had me typing silly but memorable stuff like 'none hunt out the one ton nun'. And yeah, just having actual words to type from lesson 2 on really made me feel a sense of progression which gave me the motivation to power on through it even when I started running into the limits of my dexterity.

Now that I can touch type, though, I'm actually kinda interested in stenography. I wonder whether that can be as much of a force multiplier as touch typing.

EDIT: shout out to typelit as well, I discovered it here on HN (<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34193504>) and it's awesome.
by SebastianKra | 2025-05-31 08:33:15+00:00
Okay I see where you're coming from.

> if that change also didn't enforce that way of thinking

My gut says that your mental model would lead to overall more spaghetti than the current one.

I also think that remounting all the DOM nodes is the correct default, since it clears any uncontrolled input and open popovers. Any shared settings between routes/forms etc. are custom behavior for user-convenience and should require additional code.

> needs to be applied by the consumer of the component, not the component itself

Depends on how you look at it. In my mental model, the client is actually requesting multiple form components, each with a different default value. Like 50 list cells where only one is visible. It's not a coincidence that lists and state-resets are implemented with the same api. But if you want to colocate this behavior, there's still the option to build a small wrapper:

function FormWrapper({ item }) {

return <FormInner key={item.id} … /> }
by bjt12345 | 2025-05-31 08:33:24+00:00
By SAAS I assume you mean public LLMs, the problem is the hand-wringing occurring over intellectual property leaking from the company. Companies are actually writing policies banning their use.

In regards to Private LLMs, the situation has become disappointing in the 6 months.

I can only think of Mistral as being a genuine vendor.

But given the limitations in context window size, fine tuning is still necessary, and even that requires capex that I rarely see.

But my comment comes from the fact that I heard from several sources, smart people say "we tried language models at work and it failed".

However in my discussion with them, they have no concept of the size of the datacentres used by the webscalers.
by Cyphase | 2025-05-31 08:33:35+00:00
I was recently introduced to this at PyCon US. A group of us played it for a good chunk of an evening and had a blast. The vocabulary quickly became an inside joke. I've played it a bit since I got back from the conference to great effect.

They've launched pre-orders for a physical set, but you don't need that in any way to play.

Or in other words..

Person and many other person do thing in place before, like thing big big. Many good-feel. Person want do again many many, and want other many person do same.

Before, person-do-thing in think-place, no in real-place, but person-do-thing make-person want make real and hard thing. Person want have real thing before many other person?
by Nursie | 2025-05-31 08:34:03+00:00
Yep, I was looking up a hint for the Blue Prince game the other day for the (spoiler alert?) casino room.

Google’s AI results proceeded to tell me all about the games available at the Blue Prince Casino down the road from here, where I know for a fact there’s only a prison, a Costco, a few rural properties and a whole lot of fuck-all.

It’s amazing to watch it fill in absolute false, fabricated tripe at the top of their search page. It also frequently returns bad information on subjects like employment law and whatever else I look up.

It would be hilarious if people weren’t actually relying on it.
by DaSHacka | 2025-05-31 08:35:25+00:00
> I'd expect that each spam recipient is given a unique BTC address, so that they can be identified for further "blackmail"[0] should they actually comply.

They typically aren't, actually. Most of the time when you enter the wallet address into Blockchair or another BTC transaction monitoring service you'll see tons of payments for the demanded amount having been sent to that sole wallet.

Even thinking of it logistically, its a whole lot easier for a scammer to just send literally the same email to every victim, wait some months, then withdraw the funds from one BTC wallet.

It's such a simple scam, anyone who can make a BTC wallet and send emails could pull it off.
by masklinn | 2025-05-31 08:37:21+00:00
Not only that, but now that Go has iterators if you need this in several locations the logic of the original can easily be encapsulated in an iterator with a few relevant tunable knobs, and then you just write something like:

for range ExponentialBackoff(ctx) { err := request(ctx) if err == nil { return nil } }

and if one of the callsites needs to configure the backoff then you've got something like:

for range ExponentialBackoff(ctx, MaxAttempts(20), BaseDelay(5)) { err := request(ctx) if err == nil { return nil } }
by WJW | 2025-05-31 08:41:11+00:00
TBH I think 99% of users don't care who owns the project as long as they get their free KV store to stick data into.

From a business perspective Redis falls into this really awkward niche where its does like 50 different things but most people only use 5% of that and have no desire to use the fancy stuff like Sentinel and Streams. What's worse: when any software tool wants to start charging money for their product, the options for users are not just "stop using Redis" or "start paying". There are also the options "switch to a competitor", "rewrite it yourself with just the functionality you need" and (for OSS projects) "fork the last open source version then maintain it yourself so you don't have to pay the overhead of the OSS company". It seems to me Redis sits in a super awkward spot where forking or rolling your own is preferable to many business users. Much more so than (say) postgres, because the cheap-and-dirty version of redis is "just" a hashmap with a network interface.
by antirez | 2025-05-31 08:41:31+00:00
I'm happy ValKey did great work in the area of I/O threading, and we started to incorporate the most interesting changes recently: a big thank you to all the ValKey contributors that did great work.

However, this article is a bit misleading:

>Antirez’s emphasis on a shared nothing architecture has been foundational for Redis. Nevertheless, as early as 2020, Redis added support for I/O threads. Unfortunately, they did not offer drastic improvement until recently. If you have previously tried and discarded I/O threads, it is time to evaluate again!

Please note that is that same Antirez that implemented I/O threading in 2020, exactly because it does not violate the same reasons why I believe in shared nothing.

<technical background>

What I/O threading does, is, when we return from the event loop, to recognized that write(2) / read(2) syscalls are very slow, and in that moment we have zero contention, so what about parallelizing in N threads just that I/O, and returning single threaded immediately after? So I implemented this system, and the ValKey folks did the awesome job of making it better (thanks again).

</technical background>

But it is not true that the system didn't work back then, even if now it was improved, as you can see from the graph in the article itself... I wonder if those posts are payed by somebody or what. There are similar non-sensical posts in the Redis side as well, and they suck likewise, blabling about random things. WTF... What a disservice is this kind of journalism.

Anyway, one reason why these stuff are interesting mostly for Redis the company itself, Amazon, Google, and only marginally for normal Redis users, that is in turn the reason why the feature is not so used, is that if you don't have many users in the same machine or you don't see extremely high loads in specific circumstances, you usually don't need to enable it. Many users of Redis, even big users (I remember the numbers of a few very popular social networks) have their Redis CPU usages low enough to don't bother.

Btw about threads, there are times when they simply fit. If you see my latest work at Redis, the new vector set data type, well, queries are threaded by default, and you can even use VADD (so writing to a vector set) in a threaded way. Why I changed my mind? Because HNSWs are the first data structures with huge constant times, Redis never had something like that, and this changed the design space that was worth considering. So in 2020 I was already positive about threads, in the past I already had implemented the threaded support for moduels operation, and now vector sets are threaded. It is not about being pro or against, it depends.
by rleigh | 2025-05-31 08:41:55+00:00
The main source of complexity isn't the .deb format, but the tooling and infrastructure around the format. It's mired in overcomplexity, and it's very much still in a '90s mindset of building locally with multiple layers of Perl-based tools. If it was rethought to be git-native using docker images or equivalent then it could be of equivalent simplicity to other contemporary systems. When I look at what you can do with the FreeBSD ports and Poudriere or with Homebrew and other systems, I see how much of the complexity has been added incidentally and incrementally, with good intentions, but a radical rethink of the basic workflows are necessary to consolidate and simplify them.

[I used to maintain sbuild and was the author of schroot back in the day]
Show HN: I built a free full-stack prompt engineering tool for every AI dev
by dulra | 2025-05-31 08:42:47+00:00
hi. i'm dulra. i strongly believe in moving humanity forward.

we're at a tipping point: ai-driven applications are generating hundreds of millions of prompts daily, costing organizations millions in token fees and creating governance nightmares.

every wasted word compounds at scale—across chatbots, summarizers, code assistants, and virtual agents—making prompt efficiency not just a nice-to-have, but a strategic imperative.

by treating prompts as first-class assets, we can drive down llms usage costs by up to 60%, eliminate compliance risks, and unlock new multi-model workflows that keep us ahead in a $200B+ ai market.

this is why i'm excited about the prompt efficiency suite- a first-of-its-kind platform that transforms prompt engineering into a strategic, enterprise-grade capability—empowering every team to optimize cost, quality, and compliance at scale.
by mnky9800n | 2025-05-31 08:42:56+00:00
The way you convince scientists to work on something is to convince them they can get grant money to do it. fyi calling scientists Dr. Is weird. I have a PhD but If someone called me Dr. mnky9800n I would tell them to stop. Honorifics don’t respect me they alienate me and I prefer to feel like everyone is colleagues and equals.
by thejohnconway | 2025-05-31 08:42:59+00:00
That always struck me as pretty overblown, given that before map apps, people got lost all the goddam time. It was a rare trip with any complexity that a human map reader wouldn’t make a mistake or two.

LLMs aren’t competing with perfect, they are competing with websites that may or may not be full of errors, or asking someone that may or may not know what they are talking about.
by solumunus | 2025-05-31 08:43:00+00:00
I use LLM’s daily and live them but at the current rate of progress it’s just not really something worth worrying about. Those that are hysterical about AI seem to think LLM’s are getting exponentially better when in fact diminishing returns are hitting hard. Could some new innovation change that? It’s possible but it’s not inevitable or at least not necessarily imminent.
by therealpygon | 2025-05-31 08:43:37+00:00
As best as I have understood, the LLMs output is directly related to the state of the network as a result of the context. Thinking is the way we use intermediate predictions to help steer the network toward a what is expected to be a better result through learned patterns. Reasoning are strategies for shaping that process to produce even more accurate output, generally having a cumulative effect on the accuracy of predictions.
by wiether | 2025-05-31 08:44:06+00:00
I never understood this Twitter thing.

- Everybody in their right mind agreed that, for what they were achieving, Twitter was completely over-staffed. Like most of the big tech co in this period. And like most of those co, they went through a leaning program with mass layoffs.

- If the service is running fine with only 10% of the staff, it doesn't necessarily means that the 90% that got fired were useless. I can get a 6yo to heat their food using a microwave. Does it mean that the kid is a genius, or that the people who made the microwave did it in a way that allows a kid to operate it, even though it's a complex system at its core?

- Comparing Twitter to an international eCom website is disingenuous. If "design Twitter" is a common system design interview question, it's not because the website is popular, it's because the basics are quite simple. Whereas, behind an eCom website, there's dozens of parts going on at any time, with hundreds of interoperability issues. You're not mainly relying on your main DB for your data, most of it is coming from external systems.
by EliRivers | 2025-05-31 08:44:52+00:00
One of the common pitfalls I've seen in my time is someone writing a language they are familiar with in a language that just doesn't fit; trying to apply idioms that flow well with one language to another language where that's just not a good way to achieve the same ends.

An example I've seen a lot is a C thinker writing C++ classes with an init() function; sure, it works, but the C++ way is to do that in constructors. (All those about to start listing exceptions to that C++ idiom, please save it to the end, thanks!) The C thinker is still thinking about objects as "allocate memory, then set values" rather than the C++ way where allocation and initialisation are wrapped together into a single action (from the programmer's point of view).

So what are these pitfalls for a C++ thinker when writing Rust? This "phrasebook" is embracing the idea of taking a C++ way of thinking and applying it to Rust, which I'm sure will be fine for many situations, but what are the C++ phrases that are just the wrong way to do things in Rust?
by TheBicPen | 2025-05-31 08:45:43+00:00
The argument in the post that copyleft licenses are freer seems handwavy at best. In a literal sense, obligations are restrictions on freedom, so yes, copyleft licenses are less free than permissive ones. Whether or not the overall benefits of said obligations outweigh their restrictions on freedom is a question worth discussing, but it's irrelevant to the question of which style of license is freer.