MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by diggan | 2025-05-30 15:32:01+00:00
> If you want to run LLMs locally then the localllama community is your friend: https://old.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/

For folks new to reddit, it's worth noting that LocalLlama, just like the rest of the internet but especially reddit, is filled with misinformed people spreading incorrect "facts" as truth, and you really can't use the upvote/downvote count as an indicator of quality or how truthful something is there.

Something that is more accurate but put in a boring way will often be downvoted, while straight up incorrect but funny/emotional/"fitting the group think" comments usually get upvoted.

For us who've spent a lot of time on the web, this sort of bullshit detector is basically built-in at this point, but if you're new to places where the group think is so heavy as on reddit, it's worth being careful taking anything at face value.
by cwsx | 2025-05-30 15:32:30+00:00
> One coulld hire a software developer to write such a program. But, in general, software developers can be untrustworthy and prone to stealing ideas for their own selfish purposes.

Ehhhh? Yes there are examples of that, as there are for any arbitrary group of humans you could select, but [anecdotally] I've noticed the opposite... it's not uncommon to find a passionate developer that's only interested in the challenge/problem solving aspect - it's a lot less common for say.. real estate agents.

I don't really get the point you're making beyond "people be greedy sometimes" (which I do agree with, don't get me wrong).
by actuallyalys | 2025-05-30 15:32:46+00:00
I’m a little confused; it “looks like Python” but basically every snippet has elements that don’t look like Python. Ignoring the semicolons, which you do call out as a difference, I see let for introducing variables, new for creating objects, and a completely different lambda syntax.

Maybe the “looks like Python” means it uses significant whitespace? In that case I think the README should have an example demonstrating that.

To be clear, you can diverge from Python syntax all you want. I think you just need to be clearer about what you mean by “looks like Python,” maybe by providing an example that highlights the features that particularly resemble Python.
by anonymoushn | 2025-05-30 15:32:53+00:00
You can use modded-nanogpt for testing this sort of change. If you don't want to do anything really weird, you can just train whatever tokenizer you like on the training set, then retokenize the input, then run the existing training code. One person did this earlier this year using a Tokenmonster vocab and got better downstream performance in less train time.
by bee_rider | 2025-05-30 15:33:20+00:00
I’m curious (as someone who knows nothing about this stuff!)—the context window is basically a record of the conversation so far and other info that isn’t part of the model, right?

I’m a bit surprised that 8GB is useful as a context window if that is the case—it just seems like you could fit a ton of research papers, emails, and textbooks in 2GB, for example.

But, I’m commenting from a place of ignorance and curiosity. Do models blow up the info in the context window, maybe do some processing to pre-digest it?
by LargeWu | 2025-05-30 15:33:45+00:00
Have you ever seen teenage boys? A lot of them are basically quasi-feral owing to the newly elevated levels of testosterone unleashed on their brains which are still a long way from being fully baked.

I don't know that "girls" remains the gold standard so much as girls are more able to conform to broader behavioral expectations. This is not to say teenage girls are immune from hormonal-driven behavior issues, but it manifests in different ways. I have a 13-yo daughter and let me tell you it's no walk in the park. But it's absolutely not a surprise to me that boys account for the majority of problematic behavior.
by jrowley | 2025-05-30 15:34:00+00:00
Namecheap CEO denies they are responsible, offering $50k to anyone who can prove they are behind it:

> This is false, we do not monitor customer searches nor do we register domains that have been searched on our site. I've said this before and I'll say it again here, if anyone cares to prove that this actually exists and someone within our company is registering searched domain names I will give them a 50k reward on the spot.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35344122#:~:text=Namech...
by sinisterMage | 2025-05-30 15:34:36+00:00
You're totally right to ask — W++ borrows Python’s general feel (like significant indentation and dynamic typing), but its core is rooted in a C-style heritage due to the .NET foundation. So while let and semicolons aren’t Pythonic, the language avoids boilerplate, supports clean control flow, and aims for the readability people love about Python.

I’ll make the README clearer with a side-by-side W++ vs Python snippet to highlight the similarities better. Thanks a lot for pointing it out!
by sorenjan | 2025-05-30 15:34:41+00:00
No, an image is a well ordered grid of pixels. The 3D variant would be voxels, and Nvidia recently released a project to do scene reconstruction with sparse voxels [0].

If you take these triangles, make them share vertices, and order them in a certain way, you have a mesh. You can then combine some of them into larger flat surfaces when that makes sense, draw thousands of them in one draw call, calculate intersections, volumes, physics, LODs, use textures with image compression instead of millions of colored objects, etc with them. Splatting is one way of answering the question "how do we reproduce these images in a way that lets us generate novel views of the same scene", not "what is the best representation of this 3D scene".

The aim is to find the light field that describes the scene, and if you have solid objects that function can be described on the surface of those objects. Seems like a much more elegant end result than a cloud of separate objects, no matter what shape they have, since that's much closer to how reality works. Obviously we need to handle volumetrics and translucency as well, but if we model the real surfaces as virtual surfaces I think things like reflections and shadow removal will be easier. At least gaussian splats have a hard time with reflections, they look good from some viewing angles, but the reflections are often handled as geometry [1].

I'm not arguing that it doesn't look good or that it doesn't serve a purpose, sometimes a photorealistic novel view of a real scene is all you want. But I still don't think it's the best representation of scenes.

[0] https://svraster.github.io/

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yq6gtdpLUCo
by avinassh | 2025-05-30 15:34:42+00:00
I would like to give a try, but I am getting this for India:

My name is Aline, and I'm the founder of interviewing.io. Thanks so much for your interest. It looks like you’re not in a country where we’re open for business yet, so we can’t create your account, but we’ll add you to our waitlist.
by andrei_says_ | 2025-05-30 15:35:52+00:00
My experience is similar to yours. LLMs are helpful but the code that I write directly, from my own thinking, fits better and feels more satisfying.

Craftsmanship brings joy different from the one of productivity.

Not sure if because age, or because I use Ruby, a beautiful, terse language, but I like the process.

Often I close Cursor and fire up SublimeText for a simpler, quieter process.
by sinisterMage | 2025-05-30 15:35:58+00:00
Thanks! That means a lot

W++ doesn’t have full-blown data flow analysis (yet!) — the current interpreter walks the AST in a fairly straightforward way, and the JIT just compiles expression trees without SSA or optimization passes. But your idea of analyzing LLM-generated scripts is super interesting. I'd love to explore basic flow inference or a visualizer in the future.

Feel free to open an issue or discussion if you’re curious — would be awesome to collaborate!
by the_af | 2025-05-30 15:36:20+00:00
In some contexts I got ChatGPT to answer "I don't know" when I crafted a very specific prompt about not knowing being and acceptable and preferable answer to bullshitting. But it's hit and miss, and doesn't always work; it seems LLMs simply aren't trained to model admittance of ignorance, they almost always want to give a positive and confident answer.
by jandrewrogers | 2025-05-30 15:36:27+00:00
That drone is not hardened against modern EW and countermeasures at all. The fiber optic link only solves the problem of not having military-grade RF networking tech for denied environments, which wouldn’t even be an issue for a modern military. It doesn’t protect the drone itself.

Wire-guided systems are ancient military tech. There are good reasons they were phased out decades ago.
by ryandrake | 2025-05-30 15:36:38+00:00
> I struggle to imagine it replacing a plumber who comes to your house and fixes your pipes, or a waiter serving food at a restaurant, or someone who restocks shelves at grocery stores, that kind of thing.

These are three totally different jobs requiring different kinds of skills, but they will all be replaced with automation.

1. Plumber is a skilled trade, but the "skilled" parts will eventually be replaced with 'smart' tools. You'll still need to hire a minimum wage person to actually go into each unique home and find the plumbing, but the tools will do all the work and will not require an expensive tradesman's skills to work.

2. Waiter serving food, already being replaced with kiosks, and quite a bit of the "back of the house" cooking areas are already automated. It will only take a slow cultural shift towards ordering food through technology-at-the-table, and robots wheeling your food out to you. We've already accepted kiosks in fast food and self-checkout in grocery stores. Waiters are going bye-bye.

3. Shelf restocking, very easy to imagine automating this with robotics. Picking a product and packing it into a destination will be solved very soon, and there are probably hundreds of companies working on the problem.
by gibspaulding | 2025-05-30 15:36:49+00:00
Not op, but I can jump in with a couple of my own thoughts:

- Knitting is very technical. Similar to programming, you have a relatively small set of tools (stitches) that you can combine into virtually anything.

- It has a fairly satisfying learning curve. Continually challenging, but with achievable next steps.

- It’s an excellent way to keep busy without totally disengaging during slower paced social events. In other words it keeps me from constantly checking my phone while hanging out at my in-laws during holidays.
by BLKNSLVR | 2025-05-30 15:36:57+00:00
I kind of wonder why ISPs haven't already started offering value-add security services that have various levels of filtering to provide a cleaner-feed internet experience.

From my limited research there seem to be a surprisingly large number of bad actors that own moderate swathes of ip address ranges and even Autonomous Systems (AS) that are known and can therefore be blocked.

I use OPNSense, which seems to allow AS blocking in the firewall rules, and also have some automated blocking based on external malicious IP address lists. My not very well maintained project can be found here: https://github.com/UninvitedActivity/UninvitedActivity

I have no idea if these sites would have been blocked by my setup.

Another concept I like but haven't put the research time into is blocking recently registered domains (RRDs). It would appear to be the case that RRDs probably aren't crucial to the average persons daily browsing experience, so blocking them for a certain period of time shouldn't cause too much hassle. There are some services that list them - problem is that there can be tens of thousands per day, which can be difficult to manage into lists compatible with various blocking softwares ( I haven't found how to automate it for pihole yet - but I haven't tried very hard either).
by mock-possum | 2025-05-30 15:37:14+00:00
You’re missing that you’re probably not the kind of person who has the problem being outlined in the comment you’re replying to.

For what it’s worth, I remember being a closeted teenager, I remember feeling like I “couldn’t” be real - but that feeling was wrong. I just hadn’t figured that out yet at the time. It seemed too scary, too risky to be real. That’s probably one of the only pieces of advice I would have given my younger self if I could go back in time - come out sooner, come out before you’re ready, come out as bi before you know you’re gay, come out as curious/questioning before that even.

Force other people to deal with you as you are, instead of constantly working to make yourself into something that you think will be more acceptable to them. Take the risk of being real.
by dcminter | 2025-05-30 15:37:50+00:00
In the past I've occasionally had PDF docs printed at copy shops (spiral bound usually) - but that can work out surprisingly expensive.

You should try out a Remarkable and see if that works for you (it didn't for me but it was close). They don't have a lot of distractions and they're pretty good at displaying PDFs.

Currently I buy books and put up with them being a little behind the bleeding edge. Good ones are hard to find though.
by NitpickLawyer | 2025-05-30 15:37:58+00:00
> This demonstrates a technique whereby a smaller/older/cheaper model has been used to improve the output of a larger model. This is backwards (as far as I understand). The current SOTA technique typically sees enormous/expensive models training smaller cheaper models.

There are two separate aspects here. In this paper they improve the software around the model, not the model itself. What they're saying is that the software improvements carried over to other models, so it wasn't just optimising around model-specific quirks.

What you're describing with training large LLMs first is usually called "distillation" and it works on training the smaller LLM to match the entire distribution of tokens at once (hence it's faster in practice).
by neutronicus | 2025-05-30 15:37:59+00:00
There are also blue- and pink-collar industries that we all tacitly agree are crazy understaffed right now because of brutal work conditions and low pay (health care, child care, K-12, elder care), with low quality-of-service a concern across the board, and with many job functions that seem very difficult to replace with AI (assuming liability for preventing children and elderly adults from physically injuring themselves and others).

If you, a CEO, eliminate a bunch of white-collar workers, presumably you drive your former employees into all these jobs they weren't willing to do before, and hey, you make more profits, your kids and aging parents are better-taken-care-of.

Seems like winning in the fundamental game of society - maneuvering everyone else into being your domestic servants.
by michaeldoron | 2025-05-30 15:39:06+00:00
The growth of home ownership was an indicator of real estate investment, not of real world capabilities - once the value of real estate dropped and the bubble burst, those investments were worth less than before, causing the crisis. In contrast, the growth in this scenario is the capabilities of foundation models (and to a lesser extent, the technologies that stem out of these capabilities). This is not a promise or an investment, it's not an indication of speculative trust in this technology, it is a non-decreasing function indicating a real increase in performance.
Ask HN: Can we use tools in batch prediction with GenAI SDK?
by roughrider67 | 2025-05-30 15:39:14+00:00
I'm exploring the use of Google's Generative AI SDK (genai) and wondering about its compatibility with the tools parameter when running batch predictions.

So far, I can use tools (like Google Search) in single prompt calls, but when running batch prediction, I’m not sure where and how the tools config should be passed.

I couldn’t find clear documentation for this. Has anyone been able to successfully use tools with batch prediction jobs via the GenAI SDK?

Any references, example payloads, or code snippets would be appreciated!
by cjs_ac | 2025-05-30 15:39:31+00:00
There's a connection to the return to office mandates here: the managers who don't see how anyone can work at home are the ones who've never done anything but yap in the office for a living, so they don't understand how sitting somewhere quiet and just thinking counts as work or delivers value for the company. It's a critical failure to appreciate that different people do different things for the business.
by lars_francke | 2025-05-30 15:39:34+00:00
Which alternatives are there though? Honest question.

- Ceph

- SeaweedFS

- Garage

- CubeFS

- Apache Ozone

Do any of them fill the niche that MinIO sits in? (Relatively easy to set up and operate and with all the typical enterprise bells & whistles)

Ozone/Ceph -> Way more complicated
by rhdunn | 2025-05-30 15:39:46+00:00
It is feasible to run 7B, 8B models with q6_0 in 8GB VRAM, or q5_k_m/q4_k_m if you have to or want to free up some VRAM for other things. With q4_k_m you can run 10B and even 12B models.
by nosianu | 2025-05-30 15:39:57+00:00
A significant thing to keep in mind for non-extinction doomerism is that individual experiences vary greatly. There may be a significant number of people or groups that really do experience what was predicted.

Similar to how the experiences of average rise in temperature (I would prefer if they had used the term "energy") differ greatly dependent on the region.

Also similar to "the country is doing well, look at the stick market and the GDP".

I think everybody who wants to have an actually serious discussion needs to invest a lot more effort to get tall those annoying "details", and be more specific.

That said, I think that "AI 2027" link looks like it's a movie script and not a prediction, so I'm not sure criticizing it as if it was something serious even makes sense - even if the authors should mean what they write at the start and themselves actually take it seriously.
by fennecfoxy | 2025-05-30 15:40:03+00:00
As a millennial, probably the exact same stuff. I see my friends, especially the genz ones, addicted to cracktok. And ofc cracktok advertises endless cheap crap for them to buy, by dropshippers with huge margins, or Chinese sellers who have realised why bother with a Western middleman when you can up your factory price to dropship retail & make the most money.

Plus with advancements in AI, people are gonna have to finally get pretty good at seeing anything and thinking "I don't know if this is real, I should fact check it" but I personally think that'll never happen, people will continue to go on believing whatever they see as evidenced by YT/TT comments that I've seen on obviously fake or scripted videos.
by bachmeier | 2025-05-30 15:40:05+00:00
> That I think is the point of the original comment: AI is getting better, not worse.

Well, in order to meet the standard of the quote "wipe out half of all entry-level office jobs … sometime soon. Maybe in the next couple of years" we need more than just getting better. We need considerably better technology with a better cost structure to wipe out that many jobs. Saying we're starting on that task when the odds are no better than me becoming a billionaire within two years is what we used to call BS.
by Qem | 2025-05-30 15:40:13+00:00
> This combination of events could explain the presence of highly magnetic rocks detected in a region near the south pole, on the moon’s far side. As it happens, one of the largest impact basins — the Imbrium basin — is located in the exact opposite spot on the near side of the moon. The researchers suspect that whatever made that impact likely released the cloud of plasma that kicked off the scenario in their simulations.

I wish it was associated with Tycho, so we could call it Tycho Magnetic Anomaly 1 (TMA-1). But Imbrium Magnetic Anomaly (IMA-1) also sounds fine for me. Or perhaps more precisely Imbrium Magnetic Antipodal Anomaly (IMA2).
by NitpickLawyer | 2025-05-30 15:40:24+00:00
> nothing foundational

I don't think scaling this to also run training runs with the models is something that small labs / phd students can do. They lack the compute for that by orders of magnitude. Trying it with toy models might not work, trying it with reasonably large models is out of their budget. The only ones who can realistically do this are large labs (goog, oai, meta, etc.)
by altruios | 2025-05-30 15:40:41+00:00
Complex learning behavior is far lower than a neuron. Chemical chains inside cells 'learn' according to stimuli. Learning how to replicate systems that have chemistry is going to be hard, we haven't come close to doing so. Even the achievement of recording the neural mappings of a dead rat capture the map, but not the traffic. More likely we'll develop machine-brain interfaces before machine self-awareness/sentience.

But that is just my opinion.
by ryandrake | 2025-05-30 15:40:46+00:00
"Technology increases" have not made my life better than my boomer parents' and they will probably not make the next generation's lives better than ours. Big things like housing costs, education costs, healthcare costs are not being driven down by technology, quite the opposite.

Yes, the lives of "people selling stuff" will likely get better and better in the future, through technology, but the wellbeing of normal people seems to have peaked at around the year 2000 or so.
by SpicyLemonZest | 2025-05-30 15:41:06+00:00
Do you think that it's possible in principle to have a better or worse corporate AI strategy? I do, and because I do, it seems clear that companies paying top dollar are doing so because they expect a better one. There's no reason to pay KPMG's rates if all you need is a fall guy.

Most criticisms I see of management consulting seem to come from the perspective, which I get the sense you subscribe to, that management strategy is broadly fake so there's no underlying thing for the consultants to do better or worse on. I don't think that's right, but I'm never sure how to bridge the gap. It'd be like someone telling me that software architecture is fake and only code is real.
by AndrewStephens | 2025-05-30 15:41:21+00:00
I am the OP. Please understand that I am not against coding problems in interviews. Anyone who has done any interviewing will tell you that a surprising number of supposedly qualified applicants cannot code at all (usually because they have been doing project management for too long.)

And if you have a specific industry need to invert a binary tree or fill 8 containers with 32 differently sized boxes or whatever then go nuts. But I have found working through a 30 minute exercise with the candidate, asking them to explain their thought processes, and listening to what questions they ask is much better than just giving them 30 minutes to bash their head against a problem.

It is more effort for the interviewer though because it cannot be automated. But it does allow you to scale the interview by asking things like "What would it take to make your code thread safe? Imagine 4 threads. Now imagine 1000, what would you change?", etc.
by bespokedevelopr | 2025-05-30 15:41:26+00:00
Welders, millwrights, machinists, carpenters, lots of trades have qualifying interviews. I’ve taken written exams in interviews for machining and welding as well as hands on show me parts.

Not that I agree with absurd interview process of software development but they often see themselves more akin to attorneys than tradesmen. The difference being attorneys have to pass a bar exam and even trades have journeyman cards to provide credibility.

Software development has none of that. Real engineering has PE licenses but how do you achieve that in such a broadly scoped field of software development?

We either play the interview game or find a way around it.