MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by lolinder | 2025-05-31 00:18:21+00:00
> Since you're on HN, I'd recommend skipping Ollama and LMStudio.

I disagree. With Ollama I can set up my desktop as an LLM server, interact with it over WiFi from any other device, and let Ollama switch seamlessly between models as I want to swap. Unless something has changed recently, with llama.cpp's CLI you still have to shut it down and restart it with a different command line flag in order to switch models even when run in server mode.

That kind of overhead gets in the way of experimentation and can also limit applications: there are some little apps I've built that rely on being able to quickly swap between a 1B and an 8B or 30B model by just changing the model parameter in the web request.
by smcin | 2025-05-31 00:19:15+00:00
Right. The unwritten story of the last three decades is the Mexican people in general have lost out on the huge generational opportunity they theoretically should have from being a (comparatively) low-wage manufacturing and R&D option on the US's doorstep ("friendshoring").

On paper Mexico reaped enormous gains from NAFTA(/MCA) but those went to a small slice of the population, and people on fixed incomes/not in manufacturing/services objectively got worse due to inflation and rising cost-of-living, property prices. The share of GDP effectively lost due to corruption is also an issue.
by mcbuckeye | 2025-05-31 00:21:49+00:00
I got my first computer, an Apple ][+, at the original Micro Center store in Upper Arlington (Columbus), Ohio.

The store was tiny and then grew over time to be huge. I live in NJ now and they have a store about 40 minutes away from me. I'm surprised they are still around given e-commerce and all the other stores that have collapsed. Happy they are--it's always fun to walk through the store like in the good old days and see what you can find.
by neilv | 2025-05-31 00:22:27+00:00
I agree that interns are pretty much over in tech. Except maybe for an established company do do as a semester/summer trial/goodwill period, for students near graduation. You usually won't get work output worth the mentoring cost, but you might identify a great potential hire, and be on their shortlist.

Startups are less enlightened than that about "interns".

Literally today, in a startup job posting, to a top CS department, they're looking for "interns" to bring (not learn) hot experience developing AI agents, to this startup, for... $20/hour, and get called an intern.

It's also normal for these startup job posts to be looking for experienced professional-grade skills in things like React, Python, PG, Redis, etc., and still calling the person an intern, with a locally unlivable part-time wage.

Those startups should stop pretending they're teaching "interns" valuable job skills, admit that they desperately need cheap labor for their "ideas person" startup leadership, to do things they can't do, and cut the "intern" in as a founding engineer with meaningful equity. Or, if you can't afford to pay a livable and plausibly competitive startup wage, maybe they're technical cofounders.
by fn-mote | 2025-05-31 00:23:09+00:00
Possibly also because they don’t observe added value of the additional schooling.

Also because US salaries are sky high compared to their European counterparts, so I could understand if the extra salary wasn’t worth the risk that they might not have that much extra productivity.

I’ve certainly worked with advanced degree people who didn’t seem to be very far along on the productivity curve, but I assume it’s like that for everything everywhere.
by al_borland | 2025-05-31 00:23:18+00:00
Unload timing on the washer/dryer matters.

Leave things wet in the washer too long and they smell like mold and you have to run it again. Leave them in the dryer too long and they are all wrinkled, and you have to run it again (at least for a little while).

I grew up watching everyone in my family do this, sometimes multiple times for the same load. That’s why I set timers and remove stuff promptly.

The dishwasher I agree, and it’s usually best to leave them in there at least for a little while once it’s done. However, not unloading it means dirty dishes start to stack up on the counter or in the sink, so it still creates a problem.

As far as “load, start, unload” goes. We covered unload, but load is also an issue where some people do have issues. They load the dishwasher wrong and things don’t get clear, or they start it wrong and are left with spots all over everything. Washing machines can be overloaded, or unbalanced. Washing machines and dryers can also be started wrong, the settings need to match the garments being washed. Some clothes are forgiving, others are not. There is still human error in the mix.
by quantadev | 2025-05-31 00:24:09+00:00
It was when I started using Github Copilot in "Agent Mode" that my LLM productivity gains went from like 5x to 30x. People who are just using a chatbot get like 5x gains. People who use "Agent Mode" to write up a description of a new feature that would take several days by a human, but get it done in one click by an Agent, are getting 30x or more.

The amount of pushback I got on this thread tells me most devs simply haven't started using actual Agents yet.
by fitzn | 2025-05-31 00:24:13+00:00
They won in 3.6 secs, but second place took 3.73 (or 3.74 if being consistent with the winning time). So, did second place also optimize the PoW or were they presumably on an FPGA as well?

The previous submission the author describes as being some expensive FPGA one was 4+ seconds. You'd think he'd mention something about how second place on his week was potentially the second fastest submission of all time, no?
by alvah | 2025-05-31 00:24:42+00:00
Exactly. For as long as I can remember, in any organisation of any reasonable size I have worked in, you could get rid of the ~50% of the headcount who aren't doing anything productive without any noticeable adverse effects (on the business at least, obviously the effects on the individuals would be somewhat adverse). This being the case, there are obviously many other factors other than pure efficiency keeping people employed, so why would an AI revolution on it's own create some kind of massive Schumpeterian shockwave?
by martin-t | 2025-05-31 00:24:43+00:00
Almost 15 years in and I feel like I am still just scratching the surface.

But most of the lessons learned during that time go towards quality, not quantity or speed. The current trend with LLMs (and eventually maybe AI) seems to be doing what humans can do worse but significantly faster and cheaper. Unfortunately, not everyone needs or cares about safety, security or correctness.

I am afraid software will mirror the evolution of physical products from the industrial revolution to present day. It feels like the quality of consumer grade products is constantly decreasing.
by jiggawatts | 2025-05-31 00:25:03+00:00
SRE / DevOps / coding mostly in the Azure and .NET ecosystems.

The problems I have to solve tend to be the horrible ones that nobody has answers to, anywhere on the Internet, so unsurprisingly the AIs aren't good at it either.

The trick has been to use the AIs for what they are good that, which used to be "nothing" for me at least, but now I can use them productively for certain "spot" tasks.

Random examples:

- Cross-language and cross-platform benchmarking of a bunch of different database clients to see how they stack up. I gave the AI a working example in one language and got it to whip up a series of equivalents with other DB drivers and languages. Sure, it's trivial, but it's way faster than doing it myself!

- Crash dump analysis using WinDbg. I read somwhere that "vibe debugging" of kernel dumps totally works, so when I had an actual crash I gave it a go for laughs. With AI help I managed to extract the name of the specific file that had NTFS corruption and was crashing the server. Deleted the file, restored it from backups, and the server was good to go again!

- If you ever watch the top mechanical engineers on YouTube, they all make their own tools instead of just buying them. Jigs, extenders, unusual sizes, etc... IT work is the same. As a recent example, I got Gemini to make me a code-AST rewriter for a specific issue I wanted to clean up in bulk across a huge code base. Using the Roslyn compiler SDK is a bit fiddly, but it spat out a working tool for me in under an hour. (This is not something you can solve with a script full of regex, it needed a proper parser to handle commented-out blocks and the like.)
by philipkglass | 2025-05-31 00:25:25+00:00
This is GPU terminology:

https://cvw.cac.cornell.edu/gpu-architecture/gpu-characteris...

A function that is meant to be executed in parallel on an attached GPU is called a kernel. In CUDA, a kernel is usually identified by the presence of the __global__ specifier in front of an otherwise normal-looking C++ function declaration.
by bitpush | 2025-05-31 00:25:55+00:00
I'm not saying I like all of this, or I dont worry about the future. But then again, WHO AM I to think that others are gonna "make things worse" or "not be given this power".

Democratizing tools, knowledge, access has always been messy. Think of the days when books were restricted to only elites. Explosion of ideas happened once it was opened up, but it was also messy.

We progress when everybody is empowered, and I see AI giving super powers to all of them. Will it be messy? 100% but we'll come out it better than what we have today.
by cebert | 2025-05-31 00:26:03+00:00
AI discussions in the tech industry are puzzling to me. When I interact with people at work or with tech enthusiasts, it appears that the majority of individuals are either strongly pro-AI or believe it’s useless, with a relatively small number in the middle.

AI still has much room to improve, but it can be useful even today. Claude Code keeps improving and has helped me improve my productivity by performing maintenance tasks or creating PRs for simple defects. At the same time, peers working on the same code base as me state they find AI useless or always wrong.

I am not sure where I fall on the AI mass job replacement hype. It’s hard for me to determine if this is FUD from investors or actual something that will happen in the near future.
by alwa | 2025-05-31 00:26:34+00:00
> Other films that have not yet screened because of filmmaker stipulations include 100 Years starring John Malkovich. The short film is from 2015 but has been placed in time-locked safes that won’t open until 2115, 100 years after the film was made.

I wonder how one goes about engineering a "time-locked safe" such that it opens, reliably, only after 100 years...
by nyrikki | 2025-05-31 00:26:38+00:00
While VMs do have an attack surface, it is vastly different than containers, which as you pointed out are not really a security system, but simply namespaces.

Seacomp, capabilities, selinux, apparmor, etc.. can help harden containers, but most of the popular containers don't even drop root for services, and I was one of the people who tried to even get Docker/Moby etc.. to let you disable the privileged flag...which they refused to do.

While some CRIs make this easier, any agent that can spin up a container should be considered a super user.

With the docker --privlaged flag I could read the hosts root volume or even install efi bios files just using mknod etc, walking /sys to find the major/minor numbers.

Namespaces are useful in a comprehensive security plan, but as you mentioned, they are not jails.

It is true that both VMs and containers have attack surfaces, but the size of the attack surface on containers is much larger.
by chatmasta | 2025-05-31 00:27:25+00:00
But there are millions of part-owners. Every “member” of co-op (i.e. a customer in the same membership program that just lost all their data to this hack) is an owner of it. Maybe the employees get more “shares” but it’s not at all significant.

And at the executive governance level, there are a few dozen directors.

There is a CEO who makes £750k a year, so it has elements of traditional governance. I’m not saying the structure is entirely to blame for the slow reaction to the hack, or that there is zero accountability, but it’s certainly interesting to see the lack of urgency to restore business continuity.

My family used to own a local market, and as my dad said when I told him this story, “my father would have been on the farm killing the chickens himself if that’s what he had to do to ensure he had inventory to sell his customers.”

You simply won’t get that level of accountability in an organization with thousands of stakeholders. And a traditional for-profit corporation will have the same problems, but it will also have a stock price that starts tanking after half a quarter of empty shelves. The co-op is missing that sort of accountability mechanism.
by LorenPechtel | 2025-05-31 00:28:11+00:00
Disagree. You're assuming nothing upsets the balance. I'm thinking of the Hammer's Slammers books. For those who haven't read them: a reasonable extrapolation of future tech with one big change: Cartridge-based energy guns. They are lightspeed weapons, no leading your target or the like. Center it in the optics and you'll hit it. The skies are nobody's friend, no aircraft, ballistic weapons are generally not of much use. The only combat rockets are ultra high acceleration short range stuff that's based on getting through before it can be tracked and engaged by the defense mounts. While nukes exist they don't get used because they're just going to be picked off. Against missiles you can make your warheads salvage fuse (messes up the tracking against the next missile), but you can't detect a lightspeed weapon until it hits.
by gerdesj | 2025-05-31 00:30:26+00:00
I'm quite handy at what I do. You will not replace me with AI.

Today I set up a remote network with a couple of switches, a router and the rest. From the outside. The customer had already got the router to the internet (good skills) and a LAN. I had a router (pfSense) with six 2.5 GB connections.

I turned it into a 10 VLAN effort with access and trunks and so on, ports at layer 2, without disconnecting myself.

It's quite hard visualising a network, with VLANS and even harder working out how to pivot from the current setup to another. Anyone who has had to change the default VLAN across a site knows what I'm on about.

Just in case anyone here is in any doubt, networks are quite tricky. On a par with programming.
by swsieber | 2025-05-31 00:30:26+00:00
Good timing. I was actually reading the official docs the other day on virtual threads, and it has a big section decidicated to rate limiting virtual threads:

"The hardest thing to internalize about virtual threads is that, while they have the same behavior as platform threads they should not represent the same program concept."

...

"Sometimes there is a need to limit the concurrency of a certain operation. For example, some external service may not be able to handle more than ten concurrent requests. Because platform threads are a precious resource that is usually managed in a pool, thread pools have become so ubiquitious that they're used for this purpose of restricting concurrency, "

...

"But restricting concurrency is only a side-effect of thread pools' operation. Pools are designed to share scarce resources, and virtual threads aren’t scarce and therefore should never be pooled!

"When using virtual threads, if you want to limit the concurrency of accessing some service, you should use a construct designed specifically for that purpose: the Semaphore class."

...

"Simply blocking some virtual threads with a semaphore may appear to be substantially different from submitting tasks to a fixed thread pool, but it isn't. Submitting tasks to a thread pool queues them up for later execution, but the semaphore internally (or any other blocking synchronization construct for that matter) creates a queue of threads that are blocked on it that mirrors the queue of tasks waiting for a pooled thread to execute them. Because virtual threads are tasks, the resulting structure is equivalent"

"Even though you can think of a pool of platform threads as workers processing tasks that they pull from a queue and of virtual threads as the tasks themselves, blocked until they may continue, the underlying representation in the computer is virtually identical. _Recognizing the equivalence between queued tasks and blocked threads will help you make the most of virtual threads._" (emphasis mine)

So it was cool seeing him arrive at the same conclusion (or he read the docss). Either way it was a nice timely article.

Link to the docs: https://docs.oracle.com/en/java/javase/21/core/virtual-threa...
by creer | 2025-05-31 00:30:34+00:00
> I want a good image search engine + database.

You would think we'd be there already. But search as a field has died. Hopefully temporarily but pretty dead. This is interesting because good search is supposedly how Google make their profit. And for years now they have obsessed about anything but good search. It's now a given that a google search will give you anything BUT what you want. I know: there are upstarts - are the upstarts that good? For example, is there a great image search upstart?
by latchkey | 2025-05-31 00:31:23+00:00
The comment (and thread) isn't about getting around capital controls, which is why it is so powerful.

The comment argues that for people in stable, wealthy countries, Bitcoin can seem unnecessary or overhyped. But for those living in countries with dysfunctional banking systems, currency controls, or even mild corruption (like Argentina), it solves very real problems.

Traditional financial systems often restrict access to dollars, limit foreign transfers, and are vulnerable to government seizure or devaluation, leaving people with few safe options to save or send money.

Bitcoin offers a practical alternative for remittances, savings, and financial autonomy in places where the local system fails to protect or empower its citizens. While Bitcoin may look inefficient compared to ACH transfers in the U.S., it’s a lifeline elsewhere, and one that could become more relevant globally in times of instability.
by cafard | 2025-05-31 00:31:51+00:00
"The military wanted a new breed of bomber that would be able to travel beyond enemy lines at great distances and drop bombs with precision. It needed to be able to reach altitudes high enough to fly outside of the range of enemy antiaircraft artillery."

The precision was never what it might have been, and there were substantial losses to flak. But it was an impressive machine for its day.
by daxfohl | 2025-05-31 00:32:27+00:00
Agree, but two questions:

First, is AI really a better scapegoat? "Reducing headcount due to end of ZIRP" maybe doesn't sound great, but "replacing employees with AI" sounds a whole lot worse from a PR perspective (to me anyway).

Second, are companies actually using AI as the scapegoat? I haven't followed it too closely, but I could imagine that layoffs don't say anything about AI at all, and it's mostly media and FUD inventing the correlation.
by dennis_jeeves2 | 2025-05-31 00:33:04+00:00
>How many times have you spoken to another man that can't stop trying to one-up you, or cannot be bothered to ask you a single question? That's the majority of my interactions with other men.

Very true. Statistically men don't care about other men, period. Conversely they care about women or their daughters more than their sons. A lot of it is biological - meaning mean are the dispensable gender. The term 'women and children' is not a coincidence.
by lurking_swe | 2025-05-31 00:35:07+00:00
there’s always interesting work out there. It just doesn’t always align with ethical values, good salary, or work life balance. There’s always a trade off.

For example think of space x, Waymo, parts of US national defense, and the sciences (cancer research, climate science - analyzing satellite images, etc). They are doing novel work that’s certainly not boring!

I think you’re probably referring to excitement and cutting edge in consumer products? I agree that has been stale for a while.
by neilv | 2025-05-31 00:35:31+00:00
I don't recall ever asking for a price match at a brick&mortar, even though I'm aware it's available at some stores. I'd guess most people don't.

The store gets some mileage out of being known for price-matching competitors (even online competitors, where that'd be a bit much).

(Well, occasionally I have questioned in-store, when a major chain shows one price on the Web, available at a specific brick&mortar location, but when you get to that location, there's a much higher price on the shelf. Now I tend to order for pickup at those stores, which is more work for them, just to lock in the Web-advertised price, rather than the switcheroo price.)
by dsjoerg | 2025-05-31 00:35:33+00:00
> At worst, they are actively working to make their own job redundant and when they're fired, they will own nothing of what they built. All the money from their work will go to the owners who fired them.

Except that's the case with literally every meaningful information-work job. Your goal is to obsolete yourself. If you do it well then your success becomes your calling card for your next job. Your career is a series of such jobs.
by levocardia | 2025-05-31 00:35:57+00:00
I'm sorry but if an enterprise team can't at least get a stopgap ecommerce site up and running in a week, what are you even doing? Literal amateurs can launch a WooCommerce site from nothing in a weekend; two Stanford grads in YC can do a hundred-fold better than that. Yes, a big site is more complicated, maybe there will be some frazzled manual data entry in Excel sheets while your team gets the "real" site back up, but this is total madness.
by Kirby64 | 2025-05-31 00:35:58+00:00
> Leave things wet in the washer too long and they smell like mold and you have to run it again. Leave them in the dryer too long and they are all wrinkled, and you have to run it again (at least for a little while).

Not a problem for the two-in-one washer/dryers for the mildew issue, and for the wrinkles, most dryers have a cycle to keep running them intermittently after the cycle finishes for hours to mitigate most of the wrinkling issues. You’ve got a much much longer window before wrinkles are an issue with that setup.
by kevinsync | 2025-05-31 00:36:58+00:00
Yup, I go in the Columbus store semi-frequently -- have since the mid-90's. They've kept up with the times so it's a little less "smells like nerd" (which bums me out), but they are very competent, very good on price, and sometimes it's just NICE to zip up 315 to get something instead of hitting Amazon or Ebay.

In comparison, Best Buy is a disaster lol; I hadn't been since Obama was in office, needed to buy a new tv, and it felt more like "electronics" Value City Furniture crossed with TJ Maxx than anything that came before it (Sun TV, Incredible Universe, etc).

At least at Micro Center you can expect a disheveled-yet-tucked-Oxford salesperson to come bother you until you say "I'm good, just put your sticker on the stuff I'm gonna buy" rather than some burned-out retail drone in a blue polo who tries to hard-sell you on a sound bar you didn't ask for!
by EnPissant | 2025-05-31 00:37:39+00:00
NEM 3 makes rooftop solar worse than NEM 2, but it's not common to say it kills it. It's the new flat fees they have been trying to implement that would kill rooftop solar. For example, if 50% of an average bill was a flat fee and then energy was half off, that would kill rooftop solar + batteries on NEM 3.
by chatmasta | 2025-05-31 00:37:50+00:00
Sure, but for every efficiently run company, there’s another with 80% of its engineers working on a “new vision” with zero customers, while the revenue-generating software sits idle or attended by one or two developers…

And maybe this is intentional, rational strategy - why not reinvest profits in R&D? But just because an organization is large does not mean that it’s efficient.