MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by neom | 2025-05-27 23:00:39+00:00
The missing part is... those are Valentino's, those are not "Tennis shoes". Now, why did someone throw out those Valentino's? Because nobody who goes to college and wears Valentino would wear those Valentino's, those particular Valentino's pictured, to someone who likes Valentino: are garbage. To your second point, why not give them to someone with less? I would suspect that a young person who is attending Duke University, one of the most exclusive universities in the world, wearing Valentino, a luxury brand that even people who love luxury brands laugh at, gives oh about...mmm.. zero shits for someone who has less than them. Third, you referenced a society that has a sense of egalitarianism, I'd hazard: that society is far removed from the above realities.
by corey_moncure | 2025-05-27 23:01:59+00:00
This is a tall tale told by one of his sons to pump up the mystique (=> market value) of the unpublished work at the time of his father's death. Common sense and technical analysis tell a different story.

By all means,there's no way anyone, even the great Master himself, could have undertaken a project of 14 fugues with various subjects, with the final one (14, not 15) being a quadruple fugue that combines four of them together, without being certain of what the subjects were and that ultimately they could indeed be combined.

Bach scholars have analyzed the paper and the device used to draw staff lines to show that a completed version likely existed, now lost.
by 90s_dev | 2025-05-27 23:02:07+00:00
Don't compare your life to others. Their measure of success is not absolute. You have to have a dream and follow it. But you can't dream while you're chasing the dreams others have for themselves or for you. Think for example of Jesus who at 30 was unmarried, childless, and left his career in carpentry to become homeless and help the poor and sick, yet he was so influential in history that we count our years from when he was born. Francis of Assisi did the same thing about 800 years ago, living with lepers and rebuilding a broken down church nearly by himself, and to this day even atheists have statues of him in their gardens. I'm not saying you should be like these people and follow their path, only pointing out that their path looked nothing like the stereotypical path people expect of you, yet they were far happier and more fulfilled than anyone you've ever met, not to mention their positive influence and legacies far outreach anything anyone you've ever met will ever achieve.
by KoolKat23 | 2025-05-27 23:02:27+00:00
Agreed, I can see fundamental flaws to many experienced peoples logic and knowledge, their suggestions often are missing key fundamentals. Often their ideas still work but they're either reinventing the wheel or overlooking something. Many things to them are relative, whereas it should be absolute (benefitting from past human learnings).

I mean it's on full display with social media, people these days are willing to chime in on things they have no understanding of and come to the wrong conclusions.
by AStonesThrow | 2025-05-27 23:02:54+00:00
True indeed, true indeed.

Cisco offers some simulator tooling. It basically virtualizes a lot of networking devices and allows you to play LEGO/SimCity with them: Cisco Packet Tracer

https://www.netacad.com/learning-collections/cisco-packet-tr...

Now, we built toy networks from scratch while I was working toward my certification. Surely larger-scale simulation files could be loaded into Packet Tracer. And perhaps, vendors have simulators on a larger scale than the free downloads?

https://developer.cisco.com/modeling-labs/

When I worked at a regional ISP, my supervisor was the BGP wizard. He referred to exterior routing as "a black art". Even more, the telcos were deploying their own technologies like Frame Relay and SMDS, which are Layer 1/Layer 2 protocols beyond the standard "point-to-point" leased lines.

We once experienced a fiber cut on our T-3 backbone (construction workers didn't dial 811). So my supervisor arranged the BGP routes to send everything over a 56k line, IIRC. He gloated about it. The packet loss rate was absurd, but our customers had connectivity!
by simonw | 2025-05-27 23:03:33+00:00
I get the impression that the key to getting great performance out of tool calls is having a really detailed system prompt, with a bunch of examples.

Anthropic's system prompt just for their "web_search" tool is over 6,000 tokens long! https://simonwillison.net/2025/May/25/claude-4-system-prompt...
by nyrikki | 2025-05-27 23:04:30+00:00
Note the 'hypothetical profit' part , I know of several groups looking for opportunities to skim off LLM traders, leveraging its limited sensitivity, expressiveness, and the loss of tail data.

Predictive AI is problematic no matter what tool you use. Great at demoware that doesn't deliver.

I am sure there are use cases, but it would be augmentation, not a reliable approach by itself.
by simonw | 2025-05-27 23:05:03+00:00
> This greatly opens up the risk of footguns.

Yeah, it really does.

There are so many ways things can go wrong once you start plugging tools into an LLM, especially if those tool calls are authenticated and can take actions on your behalf.

The MCP world is speed-running this right now, see the GitHub MCP story from yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44097390

I stuck a big warning in the documentation and I've been careful not to release any initial tool plugins that can cause any damage - hence my QuickJS sandbox one and SQLite plugin being read-only - but it's a dangerous space to be exploring.

(Super fun and fascinating though.)
by tuatoru | 2025-05-27 23:05:52+00:00
As a schizoid[1] I'm only capable of one deep relationship.

I believe there is an epidemic of SPD among men, because they have been emotionally neglected since babyhood. Infant daycare is a primary contributor. People without SPD mostly cannot understand the lived experience of such men, and deny it.

1. No, not schizophrenic or schizotypal or schizoaffective. Not crazy at all, quite the contrary. Read: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schizoid_personality_disorder
by erikerikson | 2025-05-27 23:07:01+00:00
It seems you were correct that I was confused. This comment didn't help me discover that but this[0] one in combination with rereading did.

In that context, you're right that I was more confused than now but I disagree that the client-server requirements for confidentiality and authenticity are the same.

In the case of webhooks the sender does not want to include breach of the receiver in their threat model. The consequences of and ability to detect malicious API calls to service are different than those of malicious calls claiming to be from a service. A shared secret removes the potential for detection from the service while asynchronous key signing does not.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44108512
by akoboldfrying | 2025-05-27 23:07:01+00:00
"Fruit flies like a banana" is arguably the quintessential example of ambiguity in English grammar. It shows that the grammatical structure of a sentence (which words are nouns, which are verbs, etc.) cannot be reliably recovered even if we know the meaning and possible grammatical categories of every word.

Both ways to parse it are grammatically sound:

(Fruit) (flies) (like a banana)

(Fruit flies) (like) (a banana)

To decide which meaning was likely intended, the listener needs to make a value judgement about the speaker, based on detailed knowledge of the everyday world.
by simonw | 2025-05-27 23:07:51+00:00
Because I only showed it the CSS! It doesn't even get the HTML, it's guessed all of that exclusively from what's in the (uncommented) CSS code.

Though it's worth noting that CSS Minecraft was first released three years ago, so there's a chance it has hints about it in the training data already. This is not a meticulous experiment.

(I've had a search around though and the most detailed explanation I could find of how that code works is the one I posted on my blog yesterday - my hunch is that it figured it out from the code alone.)
by staticshock | 2025-05-27 23:08:56+00:00
As a rule of thumb, when the pause between two adjacent sentences implied by the period seems a bit too halting, try a semicolon.

I find it easier to think about the utility of semicolons from the perspective of individual sentences to be combined. And therefore, if a properly used semicolon were to be replaced with a period, the two resulting sentences should still make sense in isolation, they'd just feel ever so slightly too far apart.

"Semicolons bring the drama. That's why I love them." Does it work? Yes. Is there a clear through-line from one sentence to the next? Yes. Does the pause between the sentences feel a bit too abrupt, though? Maybe!

("Establish clear through-line" can be another nice reason to combine sentences with a semicolon.)
by mattmanser | 2025-05-27 23:09:18+00:00
Where are these millions, and where is their output? You're in an echo chamber mate, there aren't millions of people using AI to do significant amounts of work.

Indie hackers just did an article on 4 vibe coded Startups and they all seem like a joke.

And they could only find 4!

I didn't look at them all, but the flight sim is spectacularly bad, the revenue numbers obviously unsustainable and it looks like something moderately motivated school children might have made for a school project in a week.
by duxup | 2025-05-27 23:11:38+00:00
It happens to food too. The "traditional" foods are never from just one place and it's always evolving and somewhere along the way someone adds their local cultural twist to something from the outside and it's suddenly so much better.

I cooked a recipe recently that was based on a dish that was made for American GI's in Japan after WWII ended. Okinawan Taco Rice

Now that's the only way I want to eat taco meat ....
by hn_acker | 2025-05-27 23:11:49+00:00
For the title I abbreviated the text of the first post:

> 1/ Earlier this month, the Head of the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) for Papua New Guinea threatened DDoSecrets with legal action - "including cooperation with INTERPOL" - if we don't censor the Mineral Resources Authority data.

> We refuse to comply. www.documentcloud.org/documents/25947694-ddosecrets-reply-to-png-mra/
by phil21 | 2025-05-27 23:12:14+00:00
I wish this existed in the US. I have plenty of somewhat esoteric stuff that a generalized post to FMB or CL may take weeks or months to even give away to someone who knows what it is/has a use for it. And the cost of shipping + eBay marketplace fees make it just totally not worth the hassle for the wider market.

Right now I have an antique deli slicer with a brand new blade that needs a little TLC but should operate at least another 100 years once fixed up a bit. A dental clinic autoclave I just don't have room for, a bunch of old IBM model M keyboards, and a slew of various mid-range electronic items that still have plenty of use in them but not a lot of monetary value. I'd give them all away to a decent home - but I don't really have the time to spend on packaging them up and/or the items are too bulky to consider shipping. This is just a few things that have been sitting around my house collecting dust for at least a year.

Pawn shops here are pretty useless and Goodwill/SA are simply not interested in the vast majority of the items I have to get rid of. I'd love to de-clutter, but can't really bring myself to toss perfectly good stuff so it's down to pestering every guest I have over to take things if they have a use.

I can set it out for trash collection in the alley here and 9 times out of 10 someone will take it if it's a mainstream and obviously decent item. That or has value as scrap metal. But for the weirder stuff it's not a great method to ensure it won't just be scrapped and/or trashed as soon as a scrapper decides it's not worth their trouble.
by xg15 | 2025-05-27 23:18:27+00:00
I read somewhere that migrating birds often use human infrastructure - roads, railways, power lines, etc - as landmarks or even "route markers" for their migrations.

A bit of a shower thought, but I think you can probably generalize that idea: Most birds spend a significant part of their life in the air, looking down onto human-designed landscapes. The aerial view of our cities is probably as familiar to them as our neighborhood streets are to us.

But unlike Google Maps, they see the city moving - all the cars, pedestrians, trams, railways, etc. It seems likely to me that if this is what you see day-in, day-out, because it is literally the space you are living in, you will pick up some general patterns in what you see and might even start to experiment how those patterns can be exploited.
by jonstewart | 2025-05-27 23:19:23+00:00
Ah, drat. I have an application that uses DuckDB to output parquet files. That application is by necessity disconnected from any sense of a data lake. But, I would love to have a good way of then pushing them up to S3 and integrating into a data lake. I’ve been looking into Iceberg and I’ve had the thought, “this is great but I hate the idea of what all these little metadata files will do to latency.”
by gizmo686 | 2025-05-27 23:19:33+00:00
It probably depends on location, but around here, giving stuff away is easy. There are several for profit thrift stores in the area, some of which will let you just drop stuff off for them. There are also several non-profits that will accept donations and write you a receipt you can use for tax purposes. I've also seen collection receptacles in various parking lots (as well as the county dump).

I've been able to get the local branch of Habitat for Humanity to come to me with a truck to pick up some old furniture free of charge. The only downside was that they are not allowed to come into houses, so I was responsible for moving the furniture to the yard.

For buying stuff, the local thrift stores are good, and offer very low prices on everything. The only downside is you actually need to show up, and are limited to the items they have, so it is not an option if you have a specific thing in mind.
by kristopolous | 2025-05-27 23:19:42+00:00
It's worth noting the streaming markdown renderer I wrote just for this tool: https://github.com/day50-dev/Streamdown

More background: https://github.com/simonw/llm/issues/12

(Also check out https://github.com/day50-dev/llmehelp which features a tmux tool I built on top of Simon's llm. I use it every day. Really. It's become indispensable)
by pembrook | 2025-05-27 23:20:08+00:00
But it’s a “solution” to a nonexistent problem. The vast majority of stuff people own sits unused for decades but gets moved around to whatever home you’re living in out of irrational loss aversion.

This is human, and fine. But I’m 100% certain this author is grossly overestimating the value of the junk they believe they are “saving” and how much of it they will actually use. This is the rationalizing of a budding hoarder.

The time pressure does these kids a huge service by forcing them to clear out stuff that doesn’t actually matter so they don’t feel the need to buy a 4,000 sq ft McMansion to store their college bean bag chair and every other piece of junk they’ve ever owned.

Ultimately, the authors children will run across these “salvaged goods” in a decades-untouched pile in her basement upon her death in about 66 years.
by ElijahLynn | 2025-05-27 23:20:08+00:00
SatGus launch party (great watch) https://space.crunchlabs.com/livestream https://www.youtube.com/live/6Zqe3SJVjUM?si=CB7_3YCQTx6GqZ1x (direct)

*SatGus is named after Phat Gus from Mark Robert's squirrel obstacle course.
by simonw | 2025-05-27 23:20:15+00:00
No. If I was they'd probably be a bit angry about how much time I spend writing about their competitors:

https://simonwillison.net/tags/anthropic/

https://simonwillison.net/tags/gemini/

https://simonwillison.net/tags/mistral/

https://simonwillison.net/tags/qwen/
by snuxoll | 2025-05-27 23:20:21+00:00
Really depends on the company and interviewer. I can't teach problem solving and critical thinking skills, but those are what I focus on during interviews and why I toss 98% of the applications that make it to my manager and myself after an interview. Given I am a hybrid SRE/SWE my role and team is a bit weird, but I can give somebody extra time on tasks while they're learning new tools or responsibilities, what I can't do is have somebody tell me "I don't know how to do that" and require I sit with them and walk them through the entire thing or create a detailed step-by-step design document that takes longer than doing the work itself. Being able to do the research, think about the problem, and design a solution is what separates the warm bodies that contracting firms provide from actual engineers - and I don't just need warm bodies.

Hell, if I had an open req right now I'd ask for your CV, because I think you're probably being a bit too hard on yourself and overthinking things. There's plenty of chill places who just need somebody to keep those couple critical pieces of software that are 15 years old running, and there's nothing wrong with work just being a means to an end.

EDIT: Actually, send it to me anyway. If nothing else I can at least give you some more specific advice or a mock interview and see if there's anyone in my network that you'd fit with. Email's in my profile.
by AStonesThrow | 2025-05-27 23:21:10+00:00
Want to know something crazy? In Greek, the question mark looks like a semicolon

; ;

Of course, all punctuation is an invention of comparatively modern typography.

In the Greek New Testament, many sentences and paragraphs begin with "Kai" which means "And". In English, discouraged just as much as "But".

I tend to type breathlessly, as if speaking; I've done a lot of time in chat rooms. These days, when I'm composing a message, I'll rewind to proofread it, insert commas and semicolons, and break up sentences and paragraphs.

I believe what really drove home the importance of punctuation was singing from sheet music and watching the director. Now there's a job where timing is everything, and it was eventually revealed that a comma (or semicolon) in the lyric text implied a pause in the sung phrase as well. You could take a breath at a comma. In fact, there's a sheet music breath mark that's like a comma above the staff line.

What's more, when a poem or lyrics are presented line-by-line, at the end of a line where there is no punctuation, this does not necessarily mean you can pause or take a breath, because poetry is divided by meter, not by sentence structure. So, when singing with your favorite band, or reciting your favorite poetry slam, try not to insert semicolons where they don't belong!
by ChiefNotAClue | 2025-05-27 23:21:11+00:00
Yeah, no. Most homes are in the range of 1.500.000 to 2.500.000 kroner. There are some homes closer to 1.000.000 kroner that need repairs or remodeling. You are not buying anything livable for 500.000 kroner, sorry. Those days are in the past. And mind you, these numbers are for medium-sized cities. Not any of the desirable cities, like Copenhagen, Odense, or Aarhus.
by TheCondor | 2025-05-27 23:21:30+00:00
Hive supports 2 kinds of partitioning, injected and dynamic. You can totally use a partition key like the hour in UNIX time. It's an integer starting at some epoch and incrementing by 3600.

Now your query engine might require you to specify the partitions or range of partitions you want to query on; you absolutely can use datepartition >=a and datepartition<b in your query. Iceberg seems to fix that and just let you use the timestamp; presumably the metadata is smart enough to exclude the partitions you don't care about.
by bigyabai | 2025-05-27 23:22:47+00:00
Nope, it has everything to do with Israel. This is not a recent phenomenon either.

Obviously, if left-leaning academia was actually impaired by it's tendencies then right-leaning academia would overtake it. Alas, there is not a better-known school in America than Harvard. The auspices of free market competition have not funded the construction of more conservative schools. The liberal academics have American innovation by the balls, and the market is okay with that.

The good news is, that's a very American process. Your school can be dirty, base, vile, poorly-sorted, distasteful and frugal, but completely validated if your results are superior to your peers. Attempting to force any other outcome is a subversion of the market's will, tooled by the instruments of a planned economy.

> particularly since the 1990s

You know, I recall a certain jingoist American conflict before the 1990s where students protested nationwide. It didn't do much, adults also blamed "both sides" for handling it poorly, but it did ultimately prove the students right when America lost the war. Goes to show how quickly things can change, but I'll leave that as food for thought instead of bringing up Saddam's WMDs.
by meatmanek | 2025-05-27 23:23:58+00:00
Wikipedia for NTSC alludes to a couple reasons why you'd want your refresh rate to be based on your power line frequency:

> Matching the field refresh rate to the power source avoided intermodulation (also called beating), which produces rolling bars on the screen. Synchronization of the refresh rate to the power incidentally helped kinescope cameras record early live television broadcasts, as it was very simple to synchronize a film camera to capture one frame of video on each film frame by using the alternating current frequency to set the speed of the synchronous AC motor-drive camera.

(I suspect shows that were pre-recorded and telecined for broadcast would've also been filmed at 30fps using a synchronous AC motor.)

> In early TV systems, a master voltage-controlled oscillator was run at twice the horizontal line frequency, and this frequency was divided down by the number of lines used (in this case 525) to give the field frequency (60 Hz in this case). This frequency was then compared with the 60 Hz power-line frequency and any discrepancy corrected by adjusting the frequency of the master oscillator.

I think later TVs would've just synchronized to the received signal.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NTSC#Resolution_and_refresh_ra...
by jvanderbot | 2025-05-27 23:24:32+00:00
The comments here don't seem to address TFA.

There's a lot to unpack on this subject and tons of anecdata but the article manages to unpack an infinitesimal amount of real data.

The result shown is that the total number of software jobs has increased the last 3 years (of the data), even increasing relative to total USA population.

It shows a 23% increase in employment the last 3 years overall (1.6/1.3 million = 1.23).

Data ends before 2024.

It mentions BLS analysis projects a 17% growth until 2033. (Useful if LLMs are not a paradigm shift, or if BLS took that into account?)

This comment is longer than the article if you remove the preamble discussion of LLMs.
by voilavilla | 2025-05-27 23:24:42+00:00
>> (where everyone cheated anyways)

This is depressing. I'm late GenX, I didn't cheat in college (engineering, RPI), nor did my peers. Of course, there was very little writing of essays so that's probably why, not to mention all of our exams were in person paper-and-pencil (and this was 1986-1990, so no phones). Literally impossible to cheat. We did have study groups where people explained the homework to each other, which I guess could be called "cheating", but since we all shared, we tended to oust anyone who didn't bring anything to the table. Is cheating through college a common millenial / gen z thing?