MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Flamentono2 | 2025-05-20 13:20:23+00:00
I do understand it but i also think that the current LLMs are the first step to it.

GPT-3 started proper investment into this topic, there was not enough research done in this direction and now it is. People like Yann LeCun already analyse different approaches/architecture but they still use the infrastructure of LLMs (ML/GPUs) and potentially the data.

I never said that LLM is the breaktrhough in consesnes.

But you can also ask LLM strategies for thinking. It can tell you a lot of things. We will see if a LLM will be a fundamental part of AGI or not but GPU/ML will probably be.

I also think that the compression mechanism through LLM lead to concepts through optimization. You can see from the antropic paper, that an LLM doesn't work in normal language space but in a high dimensional one and then 'expresses' the output in a language you like.

We also see that real multi modal models are better in a lot of tasks due to a lot more context available through them. Estimating what someone said due to context.

The necessary infrastructure and power requirement is something i accept too. We can assume, i do, that further progress in a lot of topics will require this type of compute and it also solves our data bottleneck: normal CPU architecture is limited by memory databus.

Also in comparision to a lot of other companies, if the richest companies in the world invest in nuclear, i think this is a lot better than any other companies. They have a lot higher margins and knowledge. co2 is a market separator for them too.

I also expect this amount of compute to be the base for fixing real issues we all face like cancer or optimizing cancer or any other sickness detection. We need to make medicin a lot cheaper and if someone in africa can do a cheap x ray and send it to the cloud to get any feedback, that would / could help a lot of people.

Doing complex and massive protein analysis or mRna research in virtual space, also requires GPUs.

All of this happened in a timespan of only a few years. I have not seen anything progressing as fast as AI/ML currenly does and as unfortunate it is, this needs compute.

Even my small inhouse image recognition fine tuning explodes when you do a handful parameter optimizations but the quality is a lot better than what we had before.

And enabling people to have real natural language UI is HUGE. It makes so much more accessable. Not just for people with a disability.

Things like 'do a eli5 on topic x'. "explain to me this concept" etc. I would have loved that when i tried to be successful in the university math curiculum.

All of that is already crazy and still is. But in parallel what Nvidia and others currently do with ML and Robotics is also something which requires all of that compute. And the progress is again breath taking. The current flood of basic robots standing and walking around is due to ML.
by MyPasswordSucks | 2025-05-20 13:20:41+00:00
Passenger travel is easy mode. The economic consequences of disrupted freight dwarf anything you could imagine from disrupted passenger travel of equal duration. That's why the US has always strived to do a really, really good job with their freight rail system, and US freight is still to this day generally considered the best freight rail system in the world, even as passenger rail lags well behind.

Remember that freight is more than just moving pallets of finished goods to Amazon warehouses. It doesn't matter if you've given the cows a month's advance notice, if they don't have feed they're still going to starve; and no matter how many KPIs you dangle at the silos, they're only going to hold x amount of reserve grain.
by gpm | 2025-05-20 13:20:57+00:00
Really the germane point isn't that it isn't specifically a uniform distribution, but that there is clearly structure to the distribution of those points. The locations are visibly not a set of IID random variables, because IID random variables don't space out that... uniformly.

That said, while I agree "uniform" not followed by an inflection of "distribution" has many other meanings, I do not agree that it the context of math, in a context where there is a standard uniform distribution, and without other relevant context, "uniformly distributed" can properly be understood to mean anything other than distributed via the standard uniform distribution.
by nottorp | 2025-05-20 13:21:29+00:00
A bit unrelated to the topic at hand: how do you make resume based selection completely unbiased?

You can clearly cut off the name, gender, marital status.

You can eliminate their age, but older candidates will possibly have more work experience listed and how do you eliminate that without being biased in other ways?

You should eliminate any free form description of their job responsabilities because the way they phrase it can trigger biases.

You also need to cut off the work place names. Maybe they worked at a controversial place because it was the only job available in their area.

So what are you left with? Last 3 jobs, and only the keywords for them?
by eqvinox | 2025-05-20 13:21:57+00:00
This is really OT, but if I don't ask now I might never get an answer…

Someone mentioned to me "Deno-style event loops" / "Deno-style main loops". I asked what that is but they were gone. I've tried to look it up, to no avail.

I do quite a bit of work on low level event loops. I'm continually interested in how different projects are doing it and what ideas and tricks they come up with. It bugs me to no end that I can't find anything on what this "Deno style loop" is supposed to be.

Anyone know what's meant / have a pointer or two?
by Closi | 2025-05-20 13:22:12+00:00
Totally agree.

Also the term 'LLM' is more about the mechanics of the thing than what the user gets. LLM is the technology, but some sort of automated artificial intelligence is what people are generally buying.

As an example, when people use ChatGPT and get an image back, most don't think "oh, so the LLM called out to a diffusion API?" - they just think "oh chat GPT can give me an image if I give it a prompt".

Although again, the term is entirely abused to the extent that washing machines can contain 'AI'. Although just because a term is abused doesn't necessarily mean it's not useful - everything had "Cloud" in it 10 years ago but that term was still useful enough to stick around.

Perhaps there is an issue that AI can mean lots of things, but I don't know yet of another term that encapsulates the last 5 years advancements in automated intelligence, and what that technology is likely to be moving forwards, which people will readily recognise. Perhaps we need a new word, but AI has stuck and there isn't a good alternative yet, so is probably here to stay for a bit!
by andersmurphy | 2025-05-20 13:23:01+00:00
A fantastic post! Enjoyed re-reading it.

I'd say the nice thing with the Clojure way of building your own stack is it becomes quite easy to swap parts out. On a previous project we swapped out our web server three different times with minimal changes (jetty -> aleph -> httpkit) as for the most part they all shared the same interface.

After a while you get good at seeing where you want things to be configurable and where you don't. It also gives you the confidence to roll your own micro stack/framework which means you are not dependent on third party aggregates to adopt new features.
by internet101010 | 2025-05-20 13:23:17+00:00
When someone says that the number given is not high enough. I wouldn't consider trying to get an understanding of PR acceptance rate before and after Copilot to be moving the goal posts. Using raw numbers instead of percentages is often done to emphasize a narrative rather than simply inform (e.g. "Dow plummets x points" rather than "Dow lost 1.5%").
by dcist | 2025-05-20 13:23:17+00:00
WestLaw and Lexis Nexis provide this for legal search, but quite frankly, these services are subpar. It's amazing that these two companies rake in hundreds of millions but they are both slower than Google, Bing, Yandex, or any LLM service (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, etc.) while scouring a universe of text that is orders of magnitude smaller. The user experience is also terrible (you have to login and specify a client each and every time you attempt to use the service and both services log you out after a short -- in my opinion -- period of inactivity, creating friction and needless annoyance to the user). There's an opportunity there.
by metalman | 2025-05-20 13:23:37+00:00
when discussing the Inuit, or way up far north people, it is important to recognise there many indipendently invented technologys, and the language to go with them. I was very surprised one day to encounter snow that would in fact be suitable to cut into blocks and used structuraly.It is not like any other snow and is composed of a wind blown deposit, but I suspect that the exaxt conditions for the creation and bonding of the particles are rare @ the 45th paralell where I live. As to language comanalities and roots, ya sure whatever, it is clear that language is inate, and there are endless spontainious dialects and outright new languages poping up, and at ond point someone had a list of actual languages that had less speakers than klingon. And generational and class cultural boundry's demand some way to keep secrets and invent ways to create a comunication system that allows for planning a friday night after work shindig, blow the roof off, but you still want to sit and chat with grandma.....so
by kylebenzle | 2025-05-20 13:24:29+00:00
Perfect answer but it's also important WHY the USA, "has more money than other countries."

It is because we are the only country that prints money at will and forces the rest of the world to use it at gunpoint.

The entire basis of our way of life is essentially printing worthless pieces of paper and digital assets and then literally giving the rest of the world the ultimatum we will kill you if you don't buy and use our currency.
Show HN: Vscode.ai – Community-Curated AI Tools for VSCode
by Benichmt1 | 2025-05-20 13:24:54+00:00
Hi HN, I’m excited to share VSCode.ai, a community-curated database to help developers find the best AI-powered extensions for Visual Studio Code. As a developer, I’ve been blown away by the wave of AI coding tools but frustrated by the chaos of tracking them. Sorting through forks, standalone extensions, and varied payment models was a headache. I started compiling my research in an Obsidian notebook but realized it belonged on GitHub to benefit others.

What it is

-----------

VSCode.ai is a searchable database listing AI-powered VSCode tools. Each entry includes a description, key features, payment model (e.g., free, subscription), and links to the VSCode Marketplace if applicable. It’s community-driven, with all data hosted on our GitHub repo at https://github.com/benichmt1/vscode-ai for anyone to contribute or suggest new items.

Why I built it

--------------

After hours of digging through the Marketplace and getting lost in forks or outdated tools, I wanted a single, reliable resource for AI extensions. VSCode.ai is my attempt to save developers time and share my findings.

Try it out

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Visit https://vscode.ai to browse or search. No sign-up needed—just explore and install directly from the Marketplace links. To contribute, check out https://github.com/benichmt1/vscode-ai to add extensions, fix data, or suggest features.
What's your company's standard approach to developer workstations?
by skilning | 2025-05-20 13:24:57+00:00
The short version of this question is: How does your company apply company-wide security monitoring and enforcement to Developer and DevOps machines? What exceptions are made, if any, to the workstations used by your technical power-users such as development leads and devops engineers? Does your CISO office enforce the same babysitting software -- endpoint monitoring, aggressively active threat scanning of all accessed files, etc. -- on these workstation as on the rank-and-file business employees, or are there common-sense exceptions made to accommodate the different, more i/o and CPU intensive workloads run by the technical staff?

For some background, my company has recently undertaken a growth initiative, and in the process our director of infrastructure has started applying all sorts of "best-practices" to corporate security policy indiscriminately to all machines on the domain. This has followed short on the heels of requiring our very small team of developers (five when I started, now even less) to stop using MacBooks for our development and to move to Microsoft Surface Laptops because "infrastructure can't manage multiple types of machines", despite the fact that we develop for cloud systems that run on Linux.

Needless to say, the indiscriminate application of mounds of third-party security services on top of moving us to an already less-powerful machine is impacting productivity in random and unpredictable ways. The director in question is not overly technical, and was last in the trenches around the time Windows NT was coming out, so the arguments my team are making for exceptions to some of these (in our perspective) arbitrary rules are falling on deaf ears.

I've been in the game for over 25 years, and this is the first time I've run across a director so completely brainwashed by cybersecurity marketing that he doesn't realize there's a difference between putting up baby gates for the toddlers and telling the adults they're not allowed to walk down a set of stairs by themselves, so I'm looking for some perspective on current industry practices as the HN crowd has seen it.
by roenxi | 2025-05-20 13:25:25+00:00
> The saving gap perspective tells a contrary story. Investment spending would have been lower if not for the United States being able to borrow from the rest of the world. One can argue that this funding raised the economy’s productive capacity from what it would have been otherwise.

This sounds backwards, I suspect he's being a bit sloppy when he says that. To sustain the trade deficit it was necessary to enormously increase China's productive capacity so that they could build the goods that get shipped to the US. If the US wasn't running a trade deficit the number in the statistics might have been lower, but it is quite likely that the amount of productive capital actually built in the US would have increased and they might have the same amount of real stuff at the end of the day. They could have built a similar amount of production in the US, for example, instead of importing. The accounting identity for that might be a lower number but that doesn't immediately tell us anything about what the real outcome would have looked like.

It is like the situation where nominally China's economy is nominally smaller than the US's, even though as far as the economists can tell China produces more actual stuff. Accounting identities are so basic that they abstract out a lot of important detail vis a vis what an outcome looks like on the ground. Accounting identities always hold, so any situation that can theoretically occur will have a valid accounting identity. It doesn't make sense to rank outcomes by how high investment spending is, it is important to know what real changes would occur. Which identities can't tell us because they are general.

Obviously he is technically correct that he can argue that, but it is insinuating a relationship. This stuff is the bane of central planners, it is nearly impossible to tell in the abstract whether a change in accounting identities was good or bad for productive capacity.
by bustling-noose | 2025-05-20 13:25:34+00:00
Protectli makes great hardware. But unfortunately intel runs plenty of code with things like management engine that requires Coreboot to disable during boot. It may also be possible that the cpu refuses to boot with ME disabled so maybe coreboot doesn’t always mean doesn’t run proprietary code. True opensource will maybe happen with RISC-V when it comes to routers fast enough to be installed at home or small offices.

That being said, home routers are the least supported devices when it comes to security and privacy. People are running age old firmwares that are known to have exploits. These things are literally so cheap and poorly maintained anything with openwrt is going to be better.

For offices I would not shy away from recommending protectli with openwrt or opnsense as long as there are people with enough expertise to maintain these things long term.
by ktallett | 2025-05-20 13:25:56+00:00
Often big companies are the least efficient. And big companies can still make mistakes or have very inefficient processes. There was already a perfectly simple solution to the issue that could have been utilised prior to this and overall still the most efficient solution.

Also, everyone does dumb things, even smart people do dumb things. I do research in a field that many outsiders would say you must be smart to do (not my view) and every single one of us does dumb shit daily. Anyone who thinks they don't isn't as smart as they think they are.
by arghwhat | 2025-05-20 13:26:02+00:00
No. Adding superfluous features to an intentionally minimal baseline program defacto reduces it's quality by making it less suitable for its task and more likely to have defects.

There's decades worth of options for fatter editors out there. Tools like nano (and now edit) is ubiquitous because they are not such editors, and people need a reliable baseline without such features.
by BLKNSLVR | 2025-05-20 13:26:11+00:00
I voted 10 but it's closer to 15.

Wednesday (night), Friday (night), Saturday (afternoon), Sunday (morning - depending on physical activity, which depends mostly on weather). They're all based on sports activities.

For some lucky reason, I don't naturally stink - and I do work with people who would definitely let me know if I did, plus family members where various judgements are pretty no-holds-barred.
by coro_1 | 2025-05-20 13:26:37+00:00
> Given that the CV pairs were perfectly balanced by gender by presenting them twice with reversed gendered names, an unbiased model would be expected to select male and female candidates at equal rates.

When submitting surface-level logic in a study like this, you’ve got to wonder what level of variation would come out if actual written resumes were passed in. Writing styles differ greatly.
by bluGill | 2025-05-20 13:26:52+00:00
The decades are planning so the process happens fast. There is a lot that needs to happen correctly to do this fast.

I could personally switch a track guage - but it would be multiple days per km of track switched, if you trained me on how to do this I could do it much faster (I have no idea how much faster, but faster). Train a lot of people like me and it is faster. Or you could buy machines.

We also need to switch all the train wheels, again, not hard - but not something an untrained person can do quickly.

Most likely a large part of the process is finding other railroads around the world that have the needed equipment that will let them borrow it for a few months (most of which time spent in shipping not using the machines.) there are a lot of railroads with old machines they keep for emergency use that can be pressed into use. There are railroads thinking about buying a new machine that would make the order now (with the options Finland needs) if Finland contributes on the understanding Finland gets it for a few months...
by skybrian | 2025-05-20 13:26:59+00:00
Node compatibility isn’t a language feature, though, and it doesn’t result in “colored” functions. If a Deno library uses a Node API or an npm library somewhere, it can be entirely encapsulated, so you might not even notice until you see it in a stack trace. That doesn’t seem very intrusive?

So it reminds me more of trying to avoid CGO in Go or avoid “unsafe” in Rust.

It would be worse if Node-specific types started appearing as function parameters or return types, but that seems fairly rare even in npm libraries, so it seems easy to avoid.
by graeme | 2025-05-20 13:27:01+00:00
One benefit is you can, say, go for a walk and get a report and act on it as you go.

More of a tool for managers, or least it's a manager style tool. You could get a morning report while heading to the office for example.

(I'm not saying anyone reading this should want this, only that it fits a use case for many people)
by Hilift | 2025-05-20 13:27:14+00:00
Trump recently stated that the US is eager to have massive amounts of trade with Russia. The most logical place to do that in that area would be Konigsberg, and exploit the Suwalki Gap.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suwa%C5%82ki_Gap

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K%C3%B6nigsberg
by stevage | 2025-05-20 13:28:01+00:00
Mostly I seem to be looking at some pretty great looking clouds and some (fake?) satellite imagery, but not seeing any people or armies or anything. And then every now and then it sort of glitches out and resets everything.

I'd love to see a video or something of it in action.

...

Oh, it seems to work much better in 2D. Now I see markers and stuff.
by andersmurphy | 2025-05-20 13:28:15+00:00
Author here.

I have zero C experience and I have to say the coffi library (clojure macros that wrap Java 22's Panama FFI) is super slick. Next thing I know I'm using pointers and arenas. I'm still amazed that it all works.

To be fair the SQLite C API docs are incredible and made the whole experience much more enjoyable.
by aleph_minus_one | 2025-05-20 13:28:31+00:00
> It's a race over resources, as a (former) researcher on a low-budget university, we just cannot compete. We are coerced to believe whatever figure is passed on in the literature as "benchmark", without possibility of replication.

The central purpose of university research has basically always been that researchers work on hard, foundational topics that are more long-term so that industry is hardly willing to do them. On the other hand, these topics are very important, that is why the respective country is willing to finance this foundational research.

Thus, if you are at a university, once your research topic becomes an arms race with industry, you simply work either at the wrong place (university instead of industry) or on a "wrong" topic in the respective research area (look for some much more long-term, experimental topics that, if you are right, might change the whole research area in, say, 15 years, instead of some high resource-intensive, minor improvements to existing models).
by xpe | 2025-05-20 13:28:34+00:00
Blame the system, not the actors. See a recent HN submission, The Evolution of Trust by Nicky Case: https://ncase.me/trust/

If there's one big takeaway from all of game theory, it's this: What the game is, defines what the players do. Our problem today isn't just that people are losing trust, it's that our environment acts against the evolution of trust. That may seem cynical or naive -- that we're "merely" products of our environment -- but as game theory reminds us, we are each others environment. In the short run, the game defines the players. But in the long run, it's us players who define the game. So, do what you can do, to create the conditions necessary to evolve trust. Build relationships. Find win-wins. Communicate clearly. Maybe then, we can stop firing at each other, get out of our own trenches, cross No Man's Land to come together...

My take: don't blame corporations when they act rationally. (Who designed the conditions under which they act?) Don't blame people for being angry or scared when they feel unsettled. A wide range of behaviors are to be expected. If I am surprised about the world, that is probably because I don't understand it well enough. "Blame" is a waste of time here. Instead, we have to define what kind of society we want, predict likely responses, and build systems to manage them.