MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by x0x0 | 2025-05-30 16:29:51+00:00
we've been trying "dear user: caveat emptor, every email you get has eg a 0.01% chance of being a security hole" for 30+ years and it's resulted in comprehensive failure.

See also the campaign to make users competent sysadmins of their own devices.

Hell, I almost got got because the morons running our cell networks let anyone text and claim they're fedex. No reason to authenticate a thing like that. I was waiting for a delayed / lost package so it wasn't crazy that fedex would be texting me. If they'd used a better link forwarder domain I probably would have clicked.
by ToValueFunfetti | 2025-05-30 16:30:14+00:00
I think this comes down to whether the chemistry is providing some kind of deep value or is just being used by evolution to produce a version of generic stochastic behavior that could be trivially reproduced on silicon. My intuition is the latter- it would be a surprising coincidence if some complicated electro-chemical reaction behavior provided an essential building block for human intelligence that would otherwise be impossible.

But, from a best-of-all-possible-worlds perspective, surprising coincidences that are necessary to observe coincidences and label them as surprising aren't crazy. At least not more crazy than the fact that slightly adjusted physical constants would prevent the universe from existing.
by LarsDu88 | 2025-05-30 16:30:45+00:00
I live in Silicon Valley, and one thing I noticed while house hunting is that the entire Google Campus, including the entire early campus sits atop a superfund site due to groundwater contamination from solvent tank leaks from early chip manufacturing sites.

There were even reports from the early 2000s of workers getting nauseous within the offices, and the former YouTube CEO passed away recently prematurely from lung cancer (not saying that's related, but if we're looking at correlational studies...)
by SamInTheShell | 2025-05-30 16:31:15+00:00
Kubernetes just kinda won the container orchestration war against swarm, nomad, and mesos. It is quite an improvement over working with those orchestrators.

My strategy involves building stateless apps with distributed services that have good support in Kubernetes like Yugabyte and Minio.

What I do is host the thing on a cheap cloud server until it grows enough to need HA or scaling. At that point I move my workloads into a cluster.

I already have everything patterned out though so, I’m living in some sunk costs if anything newer or truly better comes along.
by vouaobrasil | 2025-05-30 16:31:39+00:00
> The stuff that gets under my skin I'm rejected for jobs where I'm reasonably confident that I am one of the more qualified applicants that they've gotten for that position. At that point, it's hard to not start feeling a little bad about myself.

Gotta keep in mind though that job seekers aren't looking necessarily for the most qualified people. Sometimes they also look for people they think they'll get along with more, which could just be because the other guy put he likes rock climbing in his interests. Totally random. Or because they're trying to fill a quota, etc. Just say ** them in your mind and go onto the next.
by SOLAR_FIELDS | 2025-05-30 16:32:16+00:00
Various stories from people who have been on the other side of this tend to concur. I unfortunately cannot find the story, but a Pakistani call center scam artist who was hired by one of these crime syndicates went on record recently talking about the experience (I think it was in a podcast) and he said that he was recruited into a well paid, well organized machine and the workers themselves were treated well. He painted a picture of a hyper-competitive Glengarry Glen Ross-esque environment with leaderboards and the like, where people fought over and protected their "leads" (marks). The only struggle for him was not the working conditions, but rather with the moral aspects when he realized what he was doing.

Usually, as you would expect, the employees don't really realize until after they are recruited in what they are doing, and oftentimes the money and job is cushy enough they are willing to set aside their morals to do it.
by skydhash | 2025-05-30 16:32:18+00:00
I'm not an expert but my current understanding is that code execution is always a state transition to the next state. So what you do is fully specify each state and the relation between them. How the transition actually happens is your code and it's not that important. What's important is that the relations does not conflict to each other. It's a supercharged type system.

> Also how is TLA+ spec determined from the code?

You start from the initial state, which is always known (or is fixed). Then you model the invariants for each lines.

> Won’t it implicitly model incorrect bugs as correct behaviour since it’s an existing state in the system

Invariants will conflicts with each other in this case.

> Also when using TLA from the start, can it be applied to implementations?

Yes, by fully following the specs and handling possible incorrect states that may happens in practice. If your initial state in the TLA+ specs says that it only includes natural numbers between 1 and 5, you add assertions in your implementation (or throw exceptions) that check that as the Int type in many type systems is not a full guarantee for that constraint. Even more work when using a dynamic language.
by password4321 | 2025-05-30 16:32:42+00:00
Ah well pardon my ignorance then, thanks for filling me in -- I was afraid of something like that.

Shrek is long forgotten for me though I remember the web-based soundtrack player worked for quite a while longer than I expected after the movie website lost any real purpose. Many times it seemed scenes were written to tie in the popular music of the day, or maybe they just had a big licensing budget.
by 0cf8612b2e1e | 2025-05-30 16:32:44+00:00
Eh, I think that is just the result of more attention/funding. Plenty of scientists have wacky ideas (very much encouraged!) that do not pan out upon further investigation. If you are a no name lab that tries a novel idea that fails, nobody knows or cares. “Celebrity” scientist with a failed idea and now you are off the deep end.
by AuryGlenz | 2025-05-30 16:33:08+00:00
Nah, that’s fine. So is Windows for most tools.

The main thing is having 1. Good images with adequate captions and 2. Knowing what settings to use.

Number 2 is much harder because there’s a lot of bad information out there and the people who train a ton of Loras aren’t usually keen to share. Still, the various programs usually have some defaults that should be acceptable.
by sowbug | 2025-05-30 16:33:09+00:00
The size and cost are easily solvable. Load the software and hardware into a space probe, along with enough solar panels to power it. Include some magnets, copper, and sand for future manufacturing needs, as well as a couple electric motors and cameras so it can bootstrap itself.

In a couple thousand years it'll return to Earth and either destroy us or solve all humanity's problems (maybe both).
by hnthrow90348765 | 2025-05-30 16:33:29+00:00
The problem is leetcode interviews for CRUD jobs, and there is no accountability to really stop that.

This is in part due to job titles being meaningless. Senior Software Engineer has a very large dynamic range of technical ability needed when looking industry-wide. For example, if "Developer" was the non-leetcode title, and "Engineer" was the leetcode title (with harder interviews and higher pay), it'd make things a lot more understandable for everyone.
by cvoss | 2025-05-30 16:33:33+00:00
What happens in the evaluator when you have

(\ a . a a) (\ x . \ y . x y)

Variables are uniquely named at parse time, but after one beta step, you have two distinct instances each of x and y, albeit in different scopes, and after a second beta step, you have two distinct variables named y in the same scope.
by marcellus23 | 2025-05-30 16:34:22+00:00
Disclaimer that I'm not an astronomer and might be totally wrong, but from some quick searching, it seems like the article is conflating Hubble's discovery and Riess's. Hubble's law can be true even if the expansion of the universe is slowing down, not speeding up: a galaxy twice as far away as another can be receding at twice the speed, even if that speed is decreasing over time. But it seems like Riess's discovery is that the speed is actually increasing over time. It's related to Hubble's law but not the same thing.

Frankly, the fact that I could find that out with 2 minutes of reading Wikipedia reflects pretty poorly on the author.
by jerf | 2025-05-30 16:36:04+00:00
"Am I correct in thinking that this would require a fork of the main Go implementation, in order to make a deterministic (and controllable) goroutine scheduler and network stack?"

Yes, because the Go runtime actually explicitly and deliberately leans in the opposite direction. Additional non-determinism is deliberately added to the system, most notably that a "select" call with multiple valid channels will be psuedorandomly chosen, and iteration on a map is somewhat scrambled on each iteration. It's not entirely random and as such not suitable for pretty much any randomness requirement you may have, but enough to generally prevent accidental dependencies on deterministic iteration.

This has the effect of "spreading out" concurrency issues and hopefully reducing the sort of issues you get when you only discover a major issue when something else in the environment changes three years later. It's a nice default but nothing like a proof, of course.

You can also go the "predictable OS" route, since the entire Go runtime sits on top of it. Nothing can non-deterministically run on top of a fully deterministic OS image. But a fully deterministic OS would probably want some integration with the Go runtime to be able to more deeply control it through mechanisms other than varying inputs to the random function, which is a very indirect way to go down a code path.
by thanhnguyen2187 | 2025-05-30 16:36:28+00:00
There are some comparisons at their repository

> Dioxus vs Leptos

> Leptos is a library for building fullstack web-apps, similar to SolidJS and SolidStart. The two libraries share similar goals on the web, but have several key differences:

> Reactivity model: Leptos uses signals to drive both reactivity and rendering, while Dioxus uses signals just for reactivity. For managing re-renders, Dioxus uses a highly optimized VirtualDOM to support desktop and mobile architectures. Both Dioxus and Leptos are extremely fast.

> Different scopes: Dioxus provides renderers for web, desktop, mobile, LiveView, and more. We also maintain community libraries and a cross-platform SDK. Leptos has a tighter focus on the fullstack web with features that Dioxus doesn't have like islands, <Form /> components, and other web-specific utilities.

> Different DSLs: Dioxus uses its own custom Rust-like DSL for building UIs while Leptos uses an HTML-like syntax. We chose this to retain compatibility with IDE features like code-folding and syntax highlighting. Generally, Dioxus leans into more "magic" with its DSL including automatic formatting of strings and hot-reloading of simple Rust expressions.

For Go, sadly I don't know any framework in the scope of Rust land's Dioxus/Leptos. You continue to have two choices:

- Either to go down the SSR route (and add HTMX for a more SPA-like experience, and use Templ for HTML templating)

- Or to use Go in the backend and something else for the frontend (NextJS or SvelteKit or React Router, you name it; I went with SvelteKit as it fits my needs well, and seems to be "the most popular niche" frontend framework)

Hope it helps
by DougBTX | 2025-05-30 16:38:01+00:00
Model weights are code, for a dive into that see [0]. That shows how to encode Boolean logic using NAND gates in an MLP.

The expressivity is there, the only question is how to encode useful functions into those weights, especially when we don’t know how to write those functions by hand.

[0] http://neuralnetworksanddeeplearning.com/chap1.html
by charcircuit | 2025-05-30 16:38:37+00:00
I don't see how it would kill web freedom. If anything the reduction of duplicate work means that the web can evolve faster to better compete against its competitors to stay relevant and attractive for developers to target and support.

>The Linux kernel is an implementation detail on Android

The kernel is such an important part of an operating system, you can't really ignore it as a developer even if technically it may be an implementation detail.

>Any use of Linuxisms on Android apps is done at user's own peril and possible kick out of PlayStore.

Sure, but Linux's ABI is stable and even in a world where things are moved to Zircom starnix was made to support that same ABI.
by ivape | 2025-05-30 16:38:38+00:00
Well the unfortunate truth is HN has been behind the curve on local llm discussions so localllama has been the only one picking up the slack. There are just waaaaaaaay to many “ai is just hype” people here and the grassroots hardware/localllm discussions have been quite scant.

Like, we’re fucking two years in and only now do we have a thread about something like this? The whole crowd here needs to speed up to catch up.
by _DeadFred_ | 2025-05-30 16:38:45+00:00
My son was the gentlest soul. He did city year to help inner city youth with their schooling. He has a very liberal sexuality. He loves and accepts everyone.

He has gone over to the dark side and I am heartbroken. The final straw was he built up a business from scratch, with the laid out plan that if he got it running and was successful he would run it. Once it was all successfully running the promise was broken and he was passed up because he was a white male (this was explicitly the reason. The business was in a high minority area and they felt it would look bad having a non-local white man running things as the product's identity was in part it's location). He dedicated years of his life sacrificing building a career somewhere else getting this off the ground and an explicit promise that was broken purely because of his skin color/gender once his usefulness/startup level effort and dedication had made the business successful enough that they could replace him.

After having to move cross country back home to restart his life purely because he was a white male (and in spite of him having been successful at building the business) he very much sees the world as white males versus the left that hates/betrays him. Remember this kid gave up a year to do city year to help raise disadvantaged minority youth up (and did many, many other things before deciding things were rigged against him).

He is not scapegoating anyone, and that you judge someone's view of the world being a character flaw on their part instantly instead of trying to have any empathy, is fucking gross to be honest. Do you think people with your opinion are being intentionally obtuse out of some sort of racism on their part (they feel uncomfortable with empathy for white males), or because they just lack empathy? My last statement is as valid as your sentence above and as helpful/insightful are yours (which is zero).
by w0mbat | 2025-05-30 16:39:04+00:00
It's not a static situation. The questions have changed, to the point where solving them in interview conditions is a separate skill. When I interviewed people at Google, I asked interesting but quite simple questions and they gave me all the information I needed. As a candidate doing interviews elsewhere I have often been asked questions that are way too complicated to actually solve in the time.

How we got to this point : as average candidates train more in interview-coding, the interviewers pick harder and harder questions. It's got to the point where the only way to reliably pass is to have pre-canned memorized solutions to hundreds of existing questions. It's an arms race divorced from the reality of the job, which is done with real world tasks, privacy, little time pressure, and access to reference materials.
by api | 2025-05-30 16:40:14+00:00
The blaming of cliques of scientists for rejecting alternate ideas was cliche and kind of a red flag.

That does happen, of course. Science is conservative because if we have a theory that is a good fit to the data it should take a lot of evidence to unseat that theory and the new one must also fit all the data the old one did. (Unless some data was wrong, but that also takes evidence.)

But this is also something every crank says, and loudly. The more obsessed and loud someone is with a conspiracy against them the more they sound like a crank.

Was Einstein or quantum theory instantly rejected and held down forever by a conspiracy? Not really. There were skeptics but I seem to recall these ideas taking hold pretty fast because they fit a lot of anomalous data very well.
by jmehman | 2025-05-30 16:40:37+00:00
I've been looking for something I could host for this kind of thing - for LLM agents. Ended up on https://www.daytona.io/ as I couldn't find anything suitable to self host and realised it was a complex thing to manage. It seems Daytona is open source, including the server platform, but there is no documentation for the server element. Azure also seem to offer a service for this, it's a space that is growing rapidly.
by alpaca128 | 2025-05-30 16:40:39+00:00
One can be largely satisfied with their situation but still be lonely or just not particularly happy & fulfilled. Higher satisfaction with one's income can mean more loneliness because of work hours etc.

The number of births per woman has been declining for decades worldwide, in cases like South Korea it's collapsing massively. That has many reasons, but it's obviously linked to loneliness and relationships.

> This is a manufactured crisis like seed oils, or ADHD and autism diagnoses

More ADHD and autism diagnoses aren't a crisis, they're an improvement in detection and diagnosis and overall life quality of the affected people.
by leeny | 2025-05-30 16:40:42+00:00
You can try to short-circuit the AI Interviewer by just entering your solution into the IDE. OR you can ask to end the interview, and then you'll get a link to the solution.

We built it this way on purpose, though... the intent is to mimic an interview and gently force you to talk through your thought process, not to have yet another LeetCode clone.
by kjkjadksj | 2025-05-30 16:40:53+00:00
I feel like that would lead to burnout of the staff working at that pace for a career.

What would be interesting if we could be empowered to go back to that say 19th century idea of the reasearcher. You know, someone with all their wants and needs seemingly acceptably met, tinkering on some obsession they have in their workshop/lab on their own property or out collecting data around the world. Only with modern technology and ideas of course.
by georgemcbay | 2025-05-30 16:41:44+00:00
I worked for a company called Chumby ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chumby ) a few years before that and our device was Flash focused. It was basically an "Internet Alarm Clock" that could run Flash apps. Having a dedicated "Internet Alarm Clock" made sense back then though after the iPhone caught on it became a pretty hard sell to have a dedicated device for this purpose.

At the time I found ActionScript 3 to be a very good language that one could structure programs in very nicely, but ActionScript 2 was kind of nightmareish and any project in AS2 that had grown to a certain size was bound to be horrendous unless the person creating it was extremely meticulous with how they structured everything.

Chumby devices were stuck on the AVM1 (ActionScript 1 & 2) virtual machine for most of the company's lifespan though we did support AVM2 (AS3) very late in the game when the larger 8" devices were released.

For most of my time there I worked in the Haxe language because it allowed you to have an ActionScript 3 like language that could be compiled down to AVM1 bytecode (among other targets) and it had a pretty amazing compiler macro system that was great for doing all sorts of precompute optimizations which were very useful given how anemic the hardware we were running on was. Its been years since I've used Haxe but it appears to still be a thriving, if somewhat niche, language targeting a lot of different platforms.

We also had access to the underlying Flash Plugin C++ code as part of our deal with Adobe and I worked in that code directly for a while to extend a custom Chumby flash player to support braille devices as output for a joint project accessibility demo we did with NPR. Whatever suspicions people who have worked with the Flash Player as a blackbox might have about it being a horrible ball of spaghetti inside, I can vaguely confirm.
by km144 | 2025-05-30 16:42:07+00:00
Maybe automated testing of all forms will just become much more ubiquitous as a safeguard against the worst of AI hallucinations? I feel that would solve a lot of people's worries about LLMs. I'm imagining a world where a software developer is a person who gathers requirements, writes some tests, asks the AI to modify the codebase, ensures the tests still work, makes sure they are a human who understands the change the AI just made, and continues with the next requirement.
by jasonjmcghee | 2025-05-30 16:42:11+00:00
ECS's main performance benefit comes from reducing cache misses.

Memory that's accessed together is stored together.

So for example, if you're calculating physics in a game, you perform all the needed physics operations on values stored contiguously in memory. Great cache locality means huge reduction in cache misses and performance benefits. If you had millions of entities and are performing each entity's set of operations (rendering, IO, AI, physics, etc) entity by entity, you might be getting a lot of cache misses.

There's an entire talk by Bob Nystrom (of crafting interpreters and game programming patterns) arguing you likely don't need to use ECS unless you have the exact problem of high cache miss rate.
by api | 2025-05-30 16:42:48+00:00
I tried a prototype continuous feedback haptic keyboard once. You could feel the “keys”. Took getting used to but it wasn’t bad. It basically tricks your senses into thinking there is something three dimensional there.

I wonder if power consumption is a problem. That requires constant energy use. There’s also been problems with them emitting a faint sound, since you’re creating vibrations.
by collingreen | 2025-05-30 16:43:00+00:00
I don't agree with almost any of the assertions and implied points here except the very top level one - obviously the code belongs to the company. Everything else seems weird to me - especially the advice to let managers make technical debt decisions and to let anyone refactor the code even if it is bad because then they will understand that (bad!?) code better now.

The steelman feels weak or misguided to me. Many companies (not all!) explicitly want engineers to "own" products and codebase (it's on almost every job description I see or write) and to me that means keeping the deep and detailed knowledge of all the nuances that drive a project. Managers often can't do that and usually don't want to (and it's a waste of their breadth if they have to know that much detail) - thinking abstractly about projects is important for strategy and it's hard to do that while keeping all the weeds in your head.

I agree the project engineers shouldn't (and can't for the other side of the same reasons above) own the company strategy - tech leadership should help set the proverbial dial between speed today and speed long term and product leadership should set the various facets of long term product strategy. Engineering should own the codebase so that it fits into those goals and doing that correctly, planning ahead so you can be robust in the static places and nimble in the dynamic/growth places is exactly what ownership of a codebase entails.