MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by SketchySeaBeast | 2025-05-13 18:56:45+00:00
"Stochastic Parrot" implies that the thing producing the noise doesn't understand it. I'm not sure how that's currently disproven. Even acting as an agent, it is my understanding that it's just acting on it's own messages in the exact same way it'd act on one of ours.

> That means composing knowledge and working things out to form new knowledge that doesn’t exist.

That's not a terribly useful criteria, though. A Markov chain can produce novel sentences, hell a bingo machine can if you write words on the balls. "Knowledge" is kind of meaningless but also seemingly profound.
by smodo | 2025-05-13 18:57:05+00:00
Gaaf. I’ve written a piece of software using egui and while it let me iterate fast it has its limitations. There’s also gpui but that’s very Mac centric for now… I’ll give this a go in the near future. I’m a little curious about the DSL though. What is the advantage of a/this DSL over the builder pattern used by gpui? Does the fact that you can insert new code during runtime mean that there is in fact an interpreter between my code and the ui? How do you manage performance/efficiency in that case?
by thesuitonym | 2025-05-13 18:57:19+00:00
> Honestly, it could’ve been any event. Just show up, be sincere

This is true in just about any facet of your life. We've all heard the phrase "right place at the right time" but I don't think a lot of folks take the next step to realize you have to get out there to be in that right place. Dating, friendships, business, nothing beats being in the same place as someone else.
by vel0city | 2025-05-13 18:57:32+00:00
As someone who routinely hops between WiFi networks, I've never seen a wrong value here.

And OK, we'll draw a tile with all the buttons with greyed out status for that half second and then refresh to show the real status. Did that really make things better, or did it make it worse?

And if we bothered keeping all that in memory, and kept using the CPU cycles to make sure it was actually accurate and up to date on the click six hours later, wouldn't people then complain about how obviously bloated it was? How is this not a constant battle of being unable to appease any critics until we're back at the Win 3.1 state of things with no Bluetooth devices, no WiFi networks, no dynamic changing or audio devices, etc?

And remember, we're comparing this to just rendering a volume slider which still took a similar or worse amount of time and offered far less features.
by salmincp16 | 2025-05-13 18:57:54+00:00
Location: Alaska, US

Remote: Yes (all US time zones)

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: Ruby on Rails, TypeScript, Python, R, React, PostgreSQL, Stripe, Synctera, Plaid, Twilio

Résumé/CV: https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/lkrqjctqhs4qnvcoctv6w/ChuckSa...

Email: chuck[dot]salminen[at]gmail[dot]com

--

Hi, I'm Chuck. I have 9+ years of professional software development experience with a specialization in banking and payments applications. I can work across the entire stack but my strongest skills lie in data model design and implementation. I'm open to full-time, part-time, or contract work. Please reach out to me at the email listed above if you'd like to chat!
by antognini | 2025-05-13 18:57:59+00:00
Oh for sure there is a ton that is going on behind the scenes when you substitute `np` --> `jnp`. But as someone who worked on gravitational dynamics a decade ago, it's really incredible that so much work has been done to make running numerical calculations on a GPU so straightforward for the programmer.

Obviously if you want maximum performance you'll probably still have to roll up your sleeves and write CUDA yourself, but there are a lot of situations where you can still get most of the benefit of using a GPU and never have to worry yourself over how to write CUDA.
by johnea | 2025-05-13 18:58:12+00:00
Your mileage may vary.

I know a number of very experienced engineers that went through hundreds of application over more than a year before finally finding employment.

Often there would be several rounds of interviews, sometimes 6!, with several leading to c-suite interviewers saying "you'll be receiving an offer", and then nothing. Ghosted.

These are people with decades of experience, big corps, successful startups, extensive contact networks.

The DOGE breed of 20 something darlings are in for a rude awakening down the road.

I'm very very glad I'm at the tail end of my 40 year career. If I were looking at university enrollment in the present, I don't think I'd choose engineering. The tech industry is just not the employment growth opportunity that it was.

I'd choose being an electrician before being an electrical engineer in the current conditions...
by jeroenhd | 2025-05-13 18:58:37+00:00
Android has supported basic peripherals and screen mirroring for a decade at least, and several vendors have tried to bring plug-in phones to the market as desktop alternatives. The fact people still find out about this feature today shows how badly the feature was marketed. Samsung Dex is good enough for 90% of office work these days, if not more. For a short time you could even run fully-fledged Ubuntu through DeX, which would've made the phone a full desktop replacement.

I wish there was a phone-laptop-dock solution that wasn't as expensive as an equivalent Chromebook. My phone is more than powerful enough to act as a travel laptop, yet its potential is constrained by a small touch screen..
by hickoryhashrate | 2025-05-13 18:59:51+00:00
Absolutely, no energy background required.

We’re looking for builders who can think critically about how AI agents might be used to improve compute efficiency. That could mean smarter scheduling, load balancing, power-aware inference, or even model-level optimizations. If you’re strong in AI, that’s already a great foundation.

The challenge prompt will be revealed on the day of the hackathon, but it’s designed to be approachable from multiple angles..., systems, infra, or model design.

Happy to chat more if helpful.
by rdtsc | 2025-05-13 18:59:57+00:00
> According to a footnote in the MAK report, at the time of the accident the flight crew operations manual (FCOM, a Sukhoi product) contained descriptions of Airbus controls laws instead of SSJ control laws. The reasons for this darkly hilarious mix-up are not elucidated in the report.

That is shocking, but not that shocking if you're familiar with how things are done in those parts.

So SSJ doesn't implement Alternate Law (mode) only Direct Law, but Sukhoi inserted Alternate Law descriptions from Airbus into the manual anyway. Just yolo copy-paste basically.

> UAC calculated that the probability of a Direct Mode reversion should be approximately 1 per 1.64 million flight hours [...] In 2015 alone, there were three such events, even though the entire SSJ fleet had accumulated just 81,000 flying hours

Heh "Our SLA is still in play, we just extended the time we'll average it by to 100 years"
by riedel | 2025-05-13 19:00:10+00:00
This is not really a contradiction, IMHO. I published about systems 15 yrs ago and experienced the crisis in systems research. My personal take is, that the academic community failed to set new standards and research methods for computing system. (Maybe they cannot even exist in our short lived publish or perish world) I still review for conferences that still have systems (like ieee percom), but it is really difficult to reach consensus on system papers in comparison to AI or HCI stuff, that is also published.
by lcnPylGDnU4H9OF | 2025-05-13 19:00:39+00:00
> The point of calling someone a lunatic is to undermine their opinion.

I don't see that as the point. I think they were just opining. There doesn't seem to be an argument they are making or refuting so this cannot, by definition, be an "argument ad hominem" (argument to the person).

The parent comment to yours nails it with the given examples. The first is the conclusion to arguments -- which they did not expound on -- "this opinion is lunacy"; and the second is specific argument that "you are a lunatic" and conclusion that therefore "your opinion is lunacy". That is an argument to the person.

(Not to speak to the quality of OP's comment for this message board. A comment explaining why they think it's crazy would be preferred.)
by f30e3dfed1c9 | 2025-05-13 19:01:44+00:00
Agreed, and I've been using macs since 1985. Tried an iPhone once, didn't like it, went back to using android phones. Never had an iPad, did have an android tablet for a while but not currently. Turns out I just don't have much use for tablets. Absolutely no interest in an Apple watch or whatever they call their virtual reality thing.

I just like using macs, that's all. Do not have an emotional attachment to the company and fwiw, do not recommend forming emotional attachments to companies, either.
by trenchgun | 2025-05-13 19:02:55+00:00
Yep.

Some context from the blog post: > I turned to service apps this winter: doordash, instacart, uber eats. Their signup systems were incompatible with my full, legal, one-letter last name, and it took about 50 hours on the phone with doordash support in Malaysia and the background check provider in India to eventually get cleared to drive them. I was not able to get through on the other apps.

For sure the impact is not just limited to service apps.
by Meleagris | 2025-05-13 19:03:00+00:00
This past weekend I was struggling to teach my 97-year old neighbor how to login to his RBC Bank account. It was an 11 step process!!! The state of technology in the Canadian banking system is abysmal.

Combine that with our cell providers, and it's a real problem. There's some cell providers like Public Mobile where you can't even opt into roaming. So SMS 2FA is never an option. [1]

[1] https://productioncommunity.publicmobile.ca/t5/Get-Support/T...
by GabrielTFS | 2025-05-13 19:03:08+00:00
That's the generic implementation - it's not used on most popular architectures (I think the most popular architecture it's used on would be RISC-V or MIPS) because they all have architecture-specific implementations. The implementation running on the average (x86) computer is likely to be https://sourceware.org/git/?p=glibc.git;a=blob;f=sysdeps/x86... (if you have AVX512), https://sourceware.org/git/?p=glibc.git;a=blob;f=sysdeps/x86... (if you have AVX2 and not AVX512) or https://sourceware.org/git/?p=glibc.git;a=blob;f=sysdeps/x86... (if you have neither AVX2 nor AVX512 - rather rare these days)
by tjader | 2025-05-13 19:04:10+00:00
> And OK, we'll draw a tile with all the buttons with greyed out status for that half second and then refresh to show the real status. Did that really make things better, or did it make it worse?

Clearly better. Most of the buttons should also work instantly, most of the information should also be available instantly. The button layout is rendered instantly, so I can already figure out where I want to click without having to wait one second even if the button is not enabled yet, and by the time my mouse reaches it it will probably be enabled.

> And remember, we're comparing this to just rendering a volume slider which still took a similar or worse amount of time and offered far less features.

I've never seen the volume slider in Windows 98 take one second to render. Not even the start menu, which is much more complex, and which in Windows 11 often takes a second, and search results also show up after a random amount of time and shuffle the results around a few times, leading to many misclicks.
by kerkeslager | 2025-05-13 19:04:13+00:00
If it quacks like a duck, flies like a duck, swims like a duck, and fishes like a duck, it probably is a duck.

If you spout all the verbatim opinions of a neoconservative, you're probably a neoconservative. I don't care if you identify as a libertarian or an attack helicopter. You're in this thread opposing the only proposed solution to feeding children, so it's pretty clear what you are.
by sophacles | 2025-05-13 19:04:26+00:00
> My main gripe with this error message is that it doesn’t explain why the ? operator doesn’t work with Option in that case… just that it doesn’t.

The error in question:

> the `?` operator can only be used on `Result`s, not `Option`s, in a function that returns `Result`

It literally tells you why it doesn't work, wtf do you want?
by progbits | 2025-05-13 19:05:24+00:00
> I believe there’s a clippy lint for this, although I could be mixing it up with the lint for Option::expect (which iirc tells you to do unwrap_or_else in some cases)

It's one lint rule which covers bunch of these _or_else functions: https://rust-lang.github.io/rust-clippy/master/#or_fun_call
by Eduard | 2025-05-13 19:05:35+00:00
- horrible usability

- can only participate in conversations via e-mails

- unclear how to participate in / reply to an older thread that wasn't delivered to your mailbox

- NOT accessible, especially in the disabilities sense

- doesn't have a search feature; depends on external search engines to crawl the mailing list for discoverability

- no responsive design, tiny text and horizontal scrolling on mobile phone screens

- sends you your password in cleartext via e-mail

- actually complicated to unsubscribe from a list / manage your membership
by AlphaWeaver | 2025-05-13 19:06:04+00:00
I looked at using this for a client project a few months ago. We use Erlang and Elixir at work, and it's my go-to for anything serious.

Be aware that parts of their stack use a custom license for some components... but a large portion of it is OSS Apache 2.0, which is nice if you can stick to those parts!
by abetusk | 2025-05-13 19:06:04+00:00
This is a really succinct analysis, thanks.

I'm thinking out loud but it seems like there's some other factors at play. There's a lower threshold of quality that needs to happen (the thing needs to work) so there's at least two big factors, functionality and cost. In the extreme, all other things being equal, if two products were presented at the exact same cost but one was of superior quality, the expectation is that the better quality item would win.

There's always the "good, fast, cheap" triangle but with Moore's law (or Wright's law), cheap things get cheaper, things iterate faster and good things get better. Maybe there's an argument that when something provides an order of magnitude quality difference at nominal price difference, that's when disruption happens?

So, if the environment remains stable, then mediocrity wins as the price of superior quality can't justify the added expense. If the environment is growing (exponentially) then, at any given snapshot, mediocrity might win but will eventually be usurped by quality when the price to produce it drops below a critical threshold.
by microtonal | 2025-05-13 19:06:04+00:00
This would be close to it. Google added a Linux VM to Android 15 QPR2. You can already try it on Pixel devices by enabling it through the developer options:

https://www.androidpolice.com/android-15-linux-terminal-app/

As linked somewhere else in the thread, Google wants to extend it to run (non-Android) Linux desktop apps besides Android apps. So once this is refined, plugging in an Android phone will give you a general-purpose desktop.

Exciting times!
by jbverschoor | 2025-05-13 19:06:06+00:00
Yep. I totally feel you. And then you see people just fill in 8hrs every day for the same stuff.

They don’t care about reality. They care about accountability. As long as the numbers are right, everybody’s happy. And if you’re out of budget. Hooray, one difficult meeting and everybody, the consulting agency, the champion inside, a few manager, get a nice increase in their budget and team size.

Unfortunately it’s not about the product, impact, quality, etc.. it’s just a game, and everybody’s just taking from the corporation/their customers (ultimately consumers).
by wizzwizz4 | 2025-05-13 19:06:10+00:00
That one's from asterCrash (via Tumblr). Canonical URL: https://astercrash.tumblr.com/post/157419046864/did-anyone-n.... Full text below.

---

Did anyone notice how quickly the internet turned into a Lovecraftian horror scenario?

Like we’ve got this dimension right next to ours, that extends across the entire planet, and it is just brimming with nightmares. We have spambots, viruses, ransomware, this endless legion of malevolent entities that are blindly probing us for weaknesses, seeking only to corrupt, to thieve, to destroy.

Add onto that the corrupted ones themselves, humans who’ve abandoned morality and given up faces to hunt other people, jeering them, lashing out, seeing how easy it is to kill something you can’t touch or see or smell. They’ll corrupt anything they think could be a vessel for their message and they’ll jabber madly at any who question them. Their chittering haunts every corner of the internet. They are not unlike the spambots in some ways.

Add on top of that the arcane magisters, who are forever working at the cracks between our world and the world we made. Some of them do it for fun, some of them do it for wealth, others do it for the power of nations unwise enough to trust them. There are mages who work to defend against this particular evil, but they are mad prophets, and their advice is almost never heeded, even by those who keep them as protection.

All people know several spells to use the internet. Facebook asks you for the magic words to log in, so does your email, so does your twitter and on and on. The spells are words or a gesture with the hand, some use the colour of your eyes, or the shape of your finger. Our chief of security joked about requiring users to give a drop of blood before they could log in. Many do not understand the humour of mages.

The cracks between the two are breaking. IP cameras filled our world with eyes and the magisters learned how to open almost all of them. We all carry magic slabs of glass that if you hold it up to your ear can sing to you with a loved one’s voice, but if you look at it with your eyes, can show you a corrupted human with bleeding orange skin scream the profane with a thousand voices. The other day I saw someone hack a moving vehicle. At one point they made it stop. At another they made it so it couldn’t stop. Some of our best and brightest are going to create an army of four winged bats hovering throughout every city and we are going to connect them directly to the dimension where the nightmares live.

I’m not saying it’s all bad, but I am saying Cthulhu lies deathless dreaming in this web we built him and he is waking up.
Show HN: OCR Workbench: AI OCR for hard documents
by viking2917 | 2025-05-13 19:06:11+00:00
OCR on old documents is hard. OCR Workbench uses AI for OCR and provides an editing environment to clean things up, as is inevitably required.

Inspired by this Hacker News post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43048698

Backstory: I was having trouble producing transcriptions of Colonial American documents, which have their own unique challenges for OCR, and things like Tesseract fail miserably. So I built something. Uses Gemini and seems to work pretty well (disclaimer: you need your own API key). I didn't build Claude but I expect it works similarly well.

FWIW: largely vibe coded, with human review and intervention as required.
by johnmaguire | 2025-05-13 19:06:36+00:00
I suspect that if I took up nicotine patches now, years after quitting nicotine (e-cigs), it would be similarly difficult - but not impossible - to get addicted.

I don't see this as an argument that nicotine is not addictive - just that different routes of administration are more or less addictive, similar to IV vs. oral opiate use.
by eesmith | 2025-05-13 19:07:04+00:00
The future is unevenly distributed.

> Video streaming services

We watched a stream of the 1994 World Cup. There was a machine at MIT which forwarded the incoming video to an X display window

xhost +machine.mit.edu

and we could watch it from several states away. (The internet was so trusting in those days.)

To be sure, it was only a couple of frames per second, but it was video, and an audience collected to watch it.

> EV Cars (that anyone wanted to buy)

People wanted to buy the General Motors EV1 in the 1990s. Quoting Wikipedia, "Despite favorable customer reception, GM believed that electric cars occupied an unprofitable niche of the automobile market. The company ultimately crushed most of the cars, and in 2001 GM terminated the EV1 program, disregarding protests from customers."

I know someone who managed to buy one. It was one of the few which had been sold rather than leased.
by trealira | 2025-05-13 19:07:11+00:00
This is a self-response, but I've thought of a case where it might be fairly difficult for a compiler to prove a variable is always initialized, because of the use of pointers. Take this function to copy a linked list in C:

struct node { struct node *next; int data; }; struct node *copy_list(struct node *list_node) { struct node *new_list, **indirect; indirect = &new_list while (list_node != NULL) { // Pretend malloc can't fail struct node *np = malloc(sizeof(*np)); np->data = list_node->data; *indirect = np; indirect = &np->next; list_node = list_node->next; } *indirect = NULL; return new_list; }

The variable "new_list" is always initialized, no matter what, even though it's never explicitly on the left hand side of an assignment. If the while loop never ran, then indirect is pointing to the address of new_list after the loop, and the "*indirect = NULL;" statement sets it to NULL. If the loop did run, then "new_list" is set to the result of a call to malloc. In all cases, the variable is set.

But it feels like it would be hard for something that isn't a formal proof assistant to prove this. The equivalent Rust code (unidiomatic as it would be to roll your own linked list code) would require you to set "new_list" to be None before the loop starts.
by refulgentis | 2025-05-13 19:07:34+00:00
I worked on Android at Google until 2023 and can 99.999% confirm for you Fuchsia, as the outside understands it is DOA. (i.e. as some sort of next gen OS, and if not that, some kernel that's on track to replace Linux in Android)

Long story short is you can imagine in 2019 there was X amount of engineers, 95% on Android and 5% on what you'd call Fuchsia.

The central argument up top became about why the renegade band that split off from Android/Chrome etc. to do Fuchsia in...early to mid 2010s?...and if it was going to provide a significant step forward. This became framed in terms of "$ of devices shipped", in which case, there was no contest.

Funnily enough this very article is about N dominos down from there (de-investment in Fuchsia, defenestration of head software guy of Android/Chrome/Chrome OS etc., ex. Moto hardware guy is in charge now)

Don't read this comment too closely, I was not in the room. For example, I have absolutely no actual quotes, or relayed quotes, to 100% confirm some set of individuals became focused on # of devices shipped.

Just obsessive enough to track wtf was going on, and on big enough projects, and trustworthy and hard working, and clearly without party or clique, such that I could get good info when asked, as it was clear my only concern was making things that were good and making sure all of Google's products could be part of that story.
by disambiguation | 2025-05-13 19:07:57+00:00
The person I replied to claims their work based social interactions are totally utilitarian and transactional - very Patrick Bateman. Should work be fun? Of course, in fact every part of life should be good and fun for everyone all the time, yes? But realistically, I wouldn't have any fun working with this guy. If other peoples "mediocrity" is spoiling the "fun" for you, then you should consider building your own fun zone - no boring, mediocre people allowed.