MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by 0xbadcafebee | 2025-05-16 14:37:47+00:00
> The value that the user typed in a field before hitting submit is also a "state"

I'm sorry but that's not what these terms mean. Stateful vs stateless has to do with a state machine holding a state across interactions. In order to be stateful it has to remember what the state was after it takes action. The fact that a text box can temporarily hold some text in it doesn't make it stateful. You would have to submit the form, the page would have to completely reload, and the browser would have to keep the text in the box. That would be a stateful form field. So the browser isn't doing anything stateful. As HTTP is a stateless protocol, the browser is also (traditionally) stateless. This changed with the introduction of JavaScript, and to a certain extent with HTTP caching conventions, and cookies.

From the article:

Using REST we can model this as a path, say /api/foo, that supports GET and POST methods to fetch or replace the text by a given value[..]. A React component that allows users to edit this piece of text will probably display a text input element, GET the initial value when the component is created and POST a new value when the text input loses focus. We show an error message with a retry button if a request failed, and we display a spinner while requests are in-flight. Given that we just want to enable the user to edit one string in the database, there’s quite a lot of boilerplate here. Ideally, we’d just need to specify how to display the user interface and where to find the string in the database, but here we have to also deal with sending state back and forth, showing errors and displaying a spinner.

He's describing two different state machines, and a network protocol to transmit data between, in order to synchronize an equivalent state. This isn't transferring state, they are two independent systems. The frontend code has a state and the backend code has a state, both of which may be different at any given time.

If they were both the same system then they'd have one state machine with distributed operation. This is technically possible now that there's a stateful TCP connection over HTTP (WebSockets) and cookies to retain the state. But in practice the backend applications function without the frontend, while the frontend doesn't function without the backend, so this is less of a distributed system and more of a traditional client-server model with independent client and server applications.
by YeGoblynQueenne | 2025-05-16 14:39:22+00:00
>> Here’s the meat of The Mind in the Wheel: the mind is made out of units called control systems.

I see someone re-invented Rodney Brooks' Subsumption Architecture [1].

It's a good idea but it doesn't work. Enfin, it works, but up to a certain point, which is how well robotics work today. Yes roombas and industrial robots. No robot maids/butlers and no level-5 self-driving cars. Sure doesn't work as a model of a human mind. I don't think Brooks even had the temerity to suggest it should tbh.

More importantly this just goes to show what happens when psychologists and AI scientists stop talking to each other, the former because they're lost up their own bums [2] and the latter because they've switched focus to creating the next automated shaker of the magick money tree.

What happens is that the ... well, wheel, keeps getting reinvented, over and over again, and nobody is really trying to make, you know, a vehicle. With wheels. That do something else than just sit there being wheel-y.

_________________

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subsumption_architecture

[2] I just mean the reproducibility crisis.
by JKCalhoun | 2025-05-16 14:40:25+00:00
Does Ollama support the "user context" that higher level LLMs like ChatGPT have?

I'm not clear what they are called (or how implemented) — but perhaps 1) the initial prompt/context (that, for example, Grok has got in trouble with recently) and 2) the kind of saved context that allows ChatGPT to know things about your prompt-history so it can better answer future queries.

(My use of ollama has been pretty bare-bones and I have not seen anything covering these higher level features in -help.)
by fuzzfactor | 2025-05-16 14:41:06+00:00
This is "analogous" to soldering different components into an analog audio circuit in ways intended to strategically modify the signal.

And then listening to it afterward to see if you like the sound better or not.

The cross-platform challenge is like developing the ability to utilize any audio components from any supplier, whatever is available. Lots actually not even intended for audio signals.

I guess you would call that Analog Signal Processing ;)
Ask HN: Did news.Y Combinator.com start blocking VPNs more aggressively?
by the-anarchist | 2025-05-16 14:41:12+00:00
For the past few days, I've consistently encountered a blank page with a "Sorry" message when accessing Hacker News through most exit nodes of my (reputable) VPN provider.

Has there been a recent change in how HN handles VPN traffic, or have I simply been fortunate until now to not encounter this issue?
by PaulRobinson | 2025-05-16 14:41:24+00:00
I do not believe that people are more productive after about 4-5 hours a day of work.

The fact that the productivity metric used here is emails sent kind of proves my point: I send emails when I'm worn out with real work.

I've seen real teams cut hours and get more productive, so if the workday is extending that should be a red flag to employers: productivity is going down, and they need to push back on it.

If somebody runs a team or an org here and wants to A/B test it, I'd love to see the results. My anecdata is historical and not properly tested.
by rayiner | 2025-05-16 14:42:22+00:00
Some of them do. But their premise is that there’s a large, unmet demand for dense, walkable neighborhoods in which to raise families. But there are tons of dense, walkable neighborhoods all over the country where prices and demand are quite low. Why the focus on more building and upzoning when you could buy existing stock?

There’s a big urbanist movement in the DC area, but it’s focused on trying to upzone Northern VA and Montgomery County, MD. Meanwhile, most of the Maryland side of the Metro network is underutilized. Urbanists would rather pay triple to try and turn Tysons Corner, VA into an urban area.
by jFriedensreich | 2025-05-16 14:42:27+00:00
I was working on exactly this in gpt 3 days and still believe ad hoc generation of super specifc and contextual relevant UIs will solve a lot of problems and friction that purely textual or speech based conversational interfaces pose especially if the UI elements like sliders provide some form of live feedback of their effect and are possible to scroll back to or pin and make changes anytime.
by beeflet | 2025-05-16 14:42:30+00:00
This is gonna be a disaster. They would have been better off using an existing cryptocurrency instead of rolling their own. The problem with these "meme tokens" is that they are typically designed with terrible tokenomics that benefit the creator. And even worse, this has no anonymity, so the users are gonna get busted for using it.

> The only downside is that obtaining Sci-Hub tokens on the Solana network can be a non-trivial puzzle for a user who are new to crypto. But that only makes the process more interesting.

"Interesting"

https://c.tenor.com/K_aiz0CjfNgAAAAd/dr-evil.gif
by modeless | 2025-05-16 14:42:44+00:00
Yeah I've had great success sharing numpy arrays this way. Explicit sharing is not a huge burden, especially when compared with the difficulty of debugging problems that occur when you accidentally share things between threads. People vastly overstate the benefit of threads over multiprocessing and I don't look forward to all the random segfaults I'm going to have to debug after people start routinely disabling the GIL in a library ecosystem that isn't ready.

I wonder why people never complained so much about JavaScript not having shared-everything threading. Maybe because JavaScript is so much faster that you don't have to reach for it as much. I wish more effort was put into baseline performance for Python.
by ljf | 2025-05-16 14:42:55+00:00
I can't remember where I was reading someone the other day remarking how since they had stopped working extra hours, they had suddenly been promoted, after years of trying.

They now stuck to their hours, got used to saying no, but worked hard while they were 'at work'. Part of the thinking was this moved them out of the group who were always staying on to finish something off, which can make you look ill-prepared or behind - despite the fact that you only there are you are taking on additional work.
Ask HN: Why is there no good travel organizing app?
by danielpetrica | 2025-05-16 14:42:56+00:00
Has anyone else struggled to find a great app for trip planning? It seems like a common pain point:

- Search/discover activities/attractions in advance. - Build a flexible itinerary (not rigid time slots). - Share the final plan or reviews post-trip.

Plenty of apps do pieces of this, but why is there no seamless, user-friendly solution combining all three? Is it a technical challenge (e.g., dynamic routing/data aggregation), a market gap, or just undervalued by builders? Curious for takes from travel-tech folks or frustrated travelers alike.
by tsumnia | 2025-05-16 14:43:07+00:00
> When you're done with work, shut down your laptop and walk away.

I think this became the driving force of "always at work". When you sit at home all day, you're online. And the inevitable "let me just check..." habit I know I formed starts to occur. At some point its 6 or 7pm as you're playing catch up on work and since its still "early" its fine to respond to that small email or Slack message. Next thing you know its 11 or 12 at night and you're still sitting on the computer browsing or working or doing something in between. The 24/7 chatroom is always open and there's always someone willing to socialize.
by noodletheworld | 2025-05-16 14:43:36+00:00
I'm responding to this assertion:

> Ollama is written in golang so of course they can not meaningfully contribute that back to llama.cpp.

llama.cpp consumes GGML.

ollama consumes GGML.

If they contribute upstream changes, they are contributing to llama.cpp.

The assertions that they:

a) only write golang

b) cannot upstream changes

Are both, categorically, false.

You can argue what 'meaningfully' means if you like. You can also believe whatever you like.

However, both (a) and (b), are false. It is not a matter of dispute.

> Whatever gotcha you think there is, exists only in your head.

There is no 'gotcha'. You're projecting. My only point is that any claim that they are somehow not able to contribute upstream changes only indicates a lack of desire or competence, not a lack of the technical capacity to do so.
by WorldPeas | 2025-05-16 14:43:53+00:00
The problem is there is so little optimistic futurist media, the number of optimistic movies I've seen about the future I can count on my left hand. I can't square the blame entirely on Hollywood, but it's a shame there is so little discussed about the American state-of-the-art, something I believe China does better is center technological development in discourse, I see very little talk of the modern miracles we've witnessed outside of HN
by mjl- | 2025-05-16 14:44:12+00:00
Most SMTP traffic is encrypted nowadays, at least "opportunistically", without verification.

Only with MTA-STS enabled for the server will an SMTP client (that's delivering to an SMTP server) verify the TLS certificate against PKI (with DANE, it's verified against "self-signed" or CA certs in DNS). (I'm the developer of a mail server that sets up TLS for SMTP with MTA-STS and DANE using Let's Encrypt certificates by default).

I have never heard of any SMTP server doing TLS client certificate authentication. I'm pretty sure there's no standard for that, so it can't be a requirement for all incoming email. It could be a requirement between parties that have made agreements about that explicitly. And theoretically, some mail servers could use it as a signal of authenticity of the sender. But email has other, standardized mechanisms for that. And I suspect you might see delivery failures if you start requesting TLS client cert authentication from all SMTP clients.
by BobaFloutist | 2025-05-16 14:44:31+00:00
It could also be a sign of appropriate medication. What if depression is actually just that naturally prevalent, and anti-depressants, despite the tradeoffs, are actually worth it?

I understand the instinct to be concerned about prescribing indefinite, powerful, psychoactive substances to teenagers, but just because it's understandable doesn't mean it's necessarily correct.
by hengheng | 2025-05-16 14:44:52+00:00
Orwell said it better than I could, naturally. My point isn't that the professions can be traced back to origins in other languages. Nor do I mind a lingua franca for a scientific discipline. My gripe is that jargon, colloquial use and even common parlance haven't evolved away from it.

There could have been a movement away from old inherited terms. But there wasn't. And I have no better idea as to why than classism.

(German has a word for that! Jägerlatein, "hunter's latin", as a term for blowing up terminology to keep away the working population and restrict the game to the upper classes that are better educated, and frankly have a lot of time for that BS.)
by superblas | 2025-05-16 14:44:53+00:00
Because this follows what the Associated Press style guide suggests and it’s either in enough of the training data to be followed, or, OpenAI purposefully made it follow a style guide that happened to contain this rule after the fact when generating responses? https://apnews.com/article/archive-race-and-ethnicity-910566...

Why do _you_ think this is the case?
by jjice | 2025-05-16 14:45:15+00:00
> The accountants I have had here have been completely unable to read basic investment account data. They have fabricated numbers out of thin air, repeatedly made the same mistakes over and over.

Were these independent accountants and not something like an HR Block? If so, I guess I'd look for recommendations and calling them ahead of time to see if they have experience with UK x US taxes. Unfortunate if that's been the case you've seen.

If it was something like a chain service, I've heard nothing but awful things about how they're essentially a keyboard proxy for entering your taxes into software without any understanding.
by AIPedant | 2025-05-16 14:45:49+00:00
This seems like a misreading of the comment. The models and knowledge of arrays, classes, etc, are known with "arbitrarily high" certainty because they were designed by humans, using native instruction sets which were also designed by humans. Even if this knowledge is specialized, it is readily available. OTOH nobody has a clue how neurons actually work, nobody has a working model of the simplest animal brains, and any supposed model of the human mind is at best unfalsifiable. There's a categorical epistemic difference.
by lxgr | 2025-05-16 14:45:57+00:00
My understanding is that ollama is more of an "LLM backend", i.e. it provides a server process on your machine that answers requests relatively statelessly.

I believe it keeps the model loaded across sessions, and possibly keeps the KV cache warm for ongoing sessions (but I doubt it, based on the API shape; I don't see a "session" parameter), but that's about it. Nothing seems to be written to disk.

Features like ChatGPT's "memories" or cross-chat context require a persistence layer that's probably best suited for a "frontend". Ollama's API does support passing in requests with history, for example: https://github.com/ollama/ollama/blob/main/docs/api.md#chat-...
by Delk | 2025-05-16 14:46:00+00:00
Generally, a single-slot class was 45 minutes. So a slot at "10 AM" would have started at 10:15 AM and ended at 11:00 AM.

Most lectures were allocated double slots, though, for example from 10 to 12. In that case the actual official lecture time would have been either 10:15 to 11:00, followed by a quarter hour break, and another 45 minutes from 11:15 to 12:00. Alternatively -- and probably more commonly -- there was no break, and the lecture was 1.5 hours from 10:15 to 11:45.
by chubot | 2025-05-16 14:46:06+00:00
Spawning processes generally takes much less than 1 ms on Unix

Spawning a PYTHON interpreter process might take 30 ms to 300 ms before you get to main(), depending on the number of imports

It's 1 to 2 orders of magnitude difference, so it's worth being precise

This is a fallacy with say CGI. A CGI in C, Rust, or Go works perfectly well.

e.g. sqlite.org runs with a process PER REQUEST - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3036124
by SoftTalker | 2025-05-16 14:46:48+00:00
> If you take a railroad worker from the 1980-s, they would be able to work, with only minor training.

The same could be said about computer programmers.

Trains and trucks serve two different markets. Trains are better for long hauls of bulk goods or containerized cargo where you have a lot of stuff all going from one place (e.g. a port) to another (inland distribution hub).

Trucks are good for "last-mile" local delivery or small loads/single containers going from one place to another.
by hello_computer | 2025-05-16 14:47:26+00:00
Opting to enable low-level parallelism for user code in an imperative, dynamically typed scripting language seems like regression. It’s less bad for LISP because of the pure-functional nature. It’s less bad for BEAM languages & Clojure due to immutability. It is less bad for C/C++/Rust because you have a stronger type system—allowing for deeper static analysis. For Python, this is “high priests of a low cult” shitting things up for corporate agendas and/or street cred.
by kbolino | 2025-05-16 14:47:38+00:00
Given that this is just due to a Chrome Root Store policy, it seems like a possible solution is to maintain two PKI root stores, one for browsers and one for servers. The server one can be a superset of the browser one, adding CAs that allow client auth. This way, you could request a client certificate from Let's Encrypt that works everywhere except a browser.
by sjsdaiuasgdia | 2025-05-16 14:47:47+00:00
I recall using the Windows version of WordPerfect 6. The performance was awful versus Word on the same hardware.

It was also very unstable. I remember going to a friend's house to use his better computer and WordPerfect 6 to dress up a paper for school. It took hours longer than it should have due to the constant crashes. It was a very solid lesson in "save often" for teenage me.

I adored WordPerfect under DOS. The experience of WP6 for Windows was so bad that I switched to Word and never tried any future WP versions. Maybe they made it better in 7, but the damage was done.
by aleph_minus_one | 2025-05-16 14:48:27+00:00
> Now, instead of having to deal with all those requests, Sci-hub can point users to this market to get the paper instead of eating up its limited personal resources.

The problem is not the limited resources of sci-hub, but that sci-hub actively decided to stop updating its database:

> https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/205911/why-did-...

This is actually the reason for the huge increase of the number of requests as the article explicitly admits:

> "The number of such requests increased in the past two years, since Sci-Hub database updates were paused."

> https://sci-hub.se/sci-net
by WorldPeas | 2025-05-16 14:48:52+00:00
Not to argue semantics here but eugenics is arround selective breeding, this would allow for the opposite, even more breeding, especially in populations with hereditary ailments that would have refrained from the act in prior years. I do agree however that it is imperative greater common-sense regulations surrounding "aesthetic" or "performance" "modifications" (such callous words for young life) will need to be enacted.
by arccy | 2025-05-16 14:48:54+00:00
For a server auth cert, you validate that the thing you connect to has a cert for the same name.

For a client cert issued by web pki, all you know is that they've somehow obtained a cert for some name, you don't know if it's legit or not, since it doesn't come from connecting to the name. So kind of useless for trust.
by cogman10 | 2025-05-16 14:49:11+00:00
> If you go legal every time someone abuses a free trial you might as well give up free trials.

What silly "all or nothing" thinking.

You don't have to "go legal" on every free trial abuse, just the egregious ones. Here we have a company that's been abusing the free trial for 10 years and 1000s of instances. Vates rightfully can claim millions (~40M to be exact) from this instance. The company, in particular, can't claim they didn't know this wasn't allowed because they automated creating fake email accounts to abuse the situation.

It's particularly more egregious because Vates allows companies to build and maintain the software directly without support for free.
by IAmBroom | 2025-05-16 14:49:15+00:00
Which leads to the theory of why the USS Constitution was so superior to British ships.

The Americans drilled daily with live cannon, while the British drilled less often, and without live fire (presumably to conserve powder and balls).

As an unsurprising result, American crews were more experienced at reloading under the duress of cannonade. The sound on the gun decks was so great it would burst eardrums. The smoke made it too hard to see anything a few feet from the portals.

If you've never been near a gunpowder cannon fire, it's hard to comprehend the surreal rupture of reality it causes in your perception. I was to the side, but in front, of one. My world went black, then lightening values of gray. Sound returned. Then people appeared in the fog, moving with their arms out trying to get away blindly from the threat they perceived (that was already over).

Without proper training, new sailors will stumble badly in their first firefight, and each man on the gundeck is crucial to a team. The officers were outside the deck, so they could receive orders. If you can't load your cannon while blind and deaf, your cannon sits quiet a long time.
by insane_dreamer | 2025-05-16 14:49:16+00:00
> Destroying the opposition isn't obviously bad.

It's bad. It's what turns a democracy into a dictatorship. And it's always for "good reasons" (by labeling the opposition as Nazi's/corrupt/criminals/etc.).

Now China was never a democracy, but the CCP was not monolithic and was somewhat democratic within the party itself -- except that is now gone.
by stringsandchars | 2025-05-16 14:49:35+00:00
My work really flourished during WFH. I was actually headhunted back to a place I'd worked before with the (verbal) promise they were now and always would be 'remote first'. During the last 2 years my productivity has exploded. I get up, make myself a coffee, and start working at 6am. Then after a shower and a walk in the forest, I work a full day of intense and focussed work. I've been happy, fit, fulfilled. I've often visited the office and love the social interaction. I've often worked weekends and evening because it's been fun, and I've felt loyalty to the company. Then 8 weeks ago the CEO suddenly announced RTO.

But this has been such a wake-up call. I stopped doing the extra work, no longer respond to questions that are out-of-hours, and have finally realized that the company really isn't my 'friend' or 'family'. But best of all, when I'm at the office I can just coast and do practically no work whatsoever - and not only does no-one notice, I've even been getting more managerial praise for my performance.

We're living in a mad world.
by skybrian | 2025-05-16 14:49:38+00:00
> When there was a minor conflict on our team, we brought it to him. His response was, “You two should work it out yourselves.” I remember thinking, isn’t that literally your job? You’re not a life coach. You’re a manager. Why are we solving your problems?

Sometimes their job is to help their direct reports take more responsibility, including working things out themselves, where feasible.