MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by HappMacDonald | 2025-05-20 12:30:59+00:00
I'm not sure what you mean by "deterministic". You can set the sampling temperature to zero (greedy sampling), or alternately use an ultra simple seeded PRNG to break up the ties in anything other than greedy sampling.

LLM inference outputs a list of probabilities for next token to select on each round. A majority of the time (especially when following semantic boilerplate like quoting an idiom or obeying a punctuation rule) one token is rated 10x or more likely than every other token combined, making that the obvious natural pick.

But every now and then the LLM will rate 2 or more tokens as close to equally valid options (such as asking it to "tell a story" and it gets to the hero's name.. who really cares which name is chosen? The important part is sticking to whatever you select!)

So for basically the same reason as D&D, the algorithm designers added a dice roll as tie-breaker stage to just pick one of the equally valid options in a manner every stakeholder can agree is fair and get on with life.

Since that's literally the only part of the algorithm where any randomness occurs aside from "unpredictable user at keyboard", and it can be easily altered to remove every trace of unpredictability (at the cost of only user-perceived stuffiness and lack of creativity.. and increased likelihood of falling into repetition loops when one chooses greedy sampling in particular to bypass it) I am at a loss why you would describe LLMs as "not deterministic".
by FpUser | 2025-05-20 12:31:17+00:00
>"...than pursuing a single thing..."

Where did I say about single thing: "...weapons and other more effective preventive measures..."

Looking from the other angle - should Russia attack it'll trigger article 5. Russia can not win conventional war with NATO. It is just laughable. They're not that suicidal. And if they are it'll escalate to nuclear and then the railroad will be your last worry.
by geoctl | 2025-05-20 12:31:20+00:00
Thank you. Actually one of the very hardest things for me working on Octelium is basically how to describe it concisely and clearly and I still can't say that I have an answer, that's why I prefer to describe it as a "unified secure/zero trust access" platform. It's a ZTNA platform but not in the typical sense, it's also a remote-access VPN but actually works via identity-aware proxies to control access at L-7 instead of at L-3 like in VPNs. It's BeyondCorp but actually supports client-less access for both humans via their browsers and SSO but it also supports client-less access for workloads via OAuth2 client credential flows and standard bearer authentication which makes it relevant for any workload written in any language to access all your HTTP-based Services via a single bearer access token without being aware of the Cluster's existence at all. And it's also a deployment platform that enables you to deploy and scale any containerized application, HTTP-based or not, and instantly provide secure client-based/client-less access to it via your policies or even completely expose it to anonymous access like it's a hosting platform if you wish.
by brookst | 2025-05-20 12:31:42+00:00
LLMs can absolutely score things. They are bad at counting letters and words because the way tokenization works; “blue” will not necessarily be represented by the same tokens each time.

But that is a totally different problem from “rate how red each of these fruits are on a scale of 1 (not red) to 5 (very red): tangerine, lemon, raspberry, lime”.

LLMs get used to score LLM responses for evals at scales and it works great. Each individual answer is fallible (like humans), but aggregate scores track desired outcomes.

It’s a mistake to get hung up on the meta issue if counting tokens rather than the semantic layer. Might as well ask a human what percent of your test sentence is mainly over 700hz, and then declare humans can’t hear language.
by hyperpape | 2025-05-20 12:32:52+00:00
> Does anyone know of a server-side typescript scripting engine that is not trying to be backwards compatible with node?

I'm sure you can find other projects that are going to fail, but why do you want to?

Node has lots of problems (I am basing this statement on the fact that it's a major tech project). None of them are sufficient to prevent it from being extremely widely used.

To fix those problems in a product that will be used, it is not sufficient to provide something sort of like Node but without those problems. You either have to:

1. Provide a tool that requires a major migration, but has some incredible upside. This can attract greenfield projects, and sometimes edge out the existing tool.

2. Provide a tool with minimal migration cost, and without the same problems. Maybe this tool can replace the existing one. Ideally there will be other carrots (performance, reliability, ease of use). Such a tool can get people to migrate if there are enough carrots, and the migration cost is low enough.

Deno was a classic example of messing this up. It's not #1 or #2, it has the worst of both worlds. The upside was that it did things "the right way", and the downside was that you couldn't run most code that worked on Node. This is the kind of approach that only attracts zealots and hobbyists.
by pydry | 2025-05-20 12:33:43+00:00
I was talking about the US as a reserve currency. That's what is driving the deficit and how the US has been exchanging bits on a screen for free stuff for the last ~50 years or so.

It would collapse in value overnight if there were a run on the dollar (treasury holdings were sold off). Then hyperinflation would set in and import dependence would become existential.
by LoganDark | 2025-05-20 12:33:50+00:00
I haven't seen any true competition with TypeScript, at least for me. Go is unsound (Go slices...), Python is too high-level (even with mypyc), Rust is too low-level (in comparison to TS), and so on. It's not just "a language with types".

Also, when I was writing a frontend and backend both in TS, I could literally share the exact same type definitions between them. Then I could use a compiler plugin (`typescript-is`) to validate on the server that payloads match the appropriate type. It was amazing and worked quite well, and I can't really see that being nearly as easy and seamless with anything else.
by codingbot3000 | 2025-05-20 12:35:03+00:00
Good point about the flammability, wasn't aware of that.

The safety mechanisms are part of why nuclear is so ridiculously expensive. I think every major power needs nuclear infrastructure for their nuclear weapons, but I don't think it is economically viable anymore as a power source, whatever the propaganda says. Maybe for the US, China, and Russia who have enough empty wastelands to dump the nuclear waste at low cost. Finland and Sweden their granite. Everyone else has to do sth. expensive.
by jgalt212 | 2025-05-20 12:35:08+00:00
The other joke package is-even has 179K weekly downloads. Is an LLM making up these numbers as well, or is this the Dead Internet at work? And if it's the Dead Internet, has the Dead Internet ever heard of caching? Maybe the Dead Internet gets a kickback from S3 egress fees.

https://www.npmjs.com/package/is-even
Ask HN: There is a HR vicious cycle in the current market?
by major505 | 2025-05-20 12:35:08+00:00
Time for some controversial question:

Yesterday I was reflecting on my current job search, and been founding out that scoring interviews became increasing difficult in the last couple of years.

Specially the ammount of not responses or ghosting I been hearing from employers.

At the same time I been seeing a lot of posts from managers and CEOs complaining that its been difficulting hiring and filling positions at their companies.

So I was thinking what was my biggest obstacles and changes I observed: IA tools became avaliable in the last years and widelly used in most HRs departments. So I acceded a payed service called Kick Resume, and found out my resume scored very low when an AI reviewed it. Maybe one of the walls I been hitting is the increase widespread of such tools in HR departments, and imagine how many good engineers and developers are having the same trouble.

At the same time, every company seens to think they are google, and when you pass the AI analitics phase, they want to schedulle 4, 5 interviews with you for the hiring process.

And when you are without a job, and needing money, you don't have this luxury, so you just greabb the first offer that comes to you, even if is not the best or most suitable for your skill set.

In response to this difficult to hire, many CEOs are investing in more HR professionals for recruiting purpose. So, honest question: are HR creating more difficult than helping by feeding this system?
by darkwater | 2025-05-20 12:35:52+00:00
I was going to reply that current MATE is more "modern" that late Gnome 2 compared to "Trinity vs KDE3", but then I went to compare screenshots and I wasn't right. But in both cases I'm amused that people can get so attached to a UI paradigm that they rather fork it and spend time and effort keeping it alive. It doesn't really click with me, but I admire the effort.
by shaftoe | 2025-05-20 12:36:47+00:00
(US centric assumption)

It might be easier to change today than it was in 1886. Back then, trains were really the only means of travel between cities. Today, there are less passenger trains than back then, though more freight (even with trucks and planes). But freight diversions/delays could be scheduled well in advance and have alternative means. Not to mention, since then we've developed variable gauge train tech. A subset of trains could run during the cutover.

It's likely more costly today, but less disruptive.
by incomingpain | 2025-05-20 12:36:58+00:00
I think the parents of today were told to go heavily into tuition debt, that they cant bankrupt, for a degree in whatever that only has a 36.6%(2019 bachelors degrees in canada) who actually use the degree. In addition, employment rate of graduates is well below the unemployment rate.

Parents are pretty bad at giving career advice.

What do you even say? Labour might be replaced by robots soon.

AI replacing writers and artists?
by hunglee2 | 2025-05-20 12:37:53+00:00
Using a national currency as the de facto global reserve guarantees a trade deficit for that country.

No one else can manufacture USD's, so other countries have to acquire them by shaping their economies to supply goods and services demanded by the US. They can then use these earned dollars to transact with other countries, as the US itself insists they do.

For the US, this is a simple trade off - gain massive political influence (and market intelligence - all USD transactions go through US institutions regardless of where those transacting partners are located), at the expense of hollowing out domestic industry and running a deficit in physical goods traded.

The solution is a non-national global reserve, calculated on a basket of national currencies. This was Keynes argument at Bretton Woods, but the US would not have it then, and does not want it now.
by mapt | 2025-05-20 12:38:21+00:00
I can intuit that you hated me the moment you saw me at the interview. Because I've observed how hatred works, and I have a decent Theory of Mind model of the human condition.

I can't tell if you hate me because I'm Arab, if it's because I'm male, if it's because I cut you off in traffic yesterday, if it's because my mustache reminds you of a sexual assault you suffered last May, if it's because my breath stinks of garlic today, if it's because I'm wearing Crocs, if it's because you didn't like my greeting, if it's because you already decided to hire your friend's nephew and despise the waste of time you have to spend on the interview process, if it's because you had an employee five years ago with my last name and you had a bad experience with them, if it's because I do most of my work in a programming language that you have dogmatic disagreements with, if it's because I got started in a coding bootcamp and you consider those inferior, if one of my references decided to talk shit about me, or if I'm just grossly underqualified based on my resume and you can't believe I had the balls to apply.

Some of those rationales have Strong Legal Implications.

When asked to explain rationales, these LLMs are observed to lie frequently.

The default for machine intelligence is to incorporate all information available and search for correlations that raise the performance against a goal metric, including information that humans are legally forbidden to consider like protected class status. LLM agent models have also been observed to seek out this additional information, use it, and then lie about it (see: EXIF tags).

Another problem is that machine intelligence works best when provided with trillions of similar training inputs with non-noisy goal metrics. Hiring is a very poorly generalizable problem, and the struggles of hiring a shift manager at Taco Bell are just Different from the struggles of hiring a plumber to build an irrigation trunkline or the struggles of hiring a personal assistant to follow you around or the struggles of hiring the VP reporting to the CTO. Before LLMs they were so different as to be laughable; After LLMs they are still different, but the LLM can convincingly lie to you that it has expertise in each one.
by skybrian | 2025-05-20 12:38:38+00:00
Why do you treat adding a feature (npm compatibility) like you’re losing something? You don’t have to use any Node API’s in your app - Deno’s API’s are pretty comprehensive. You can also stick with the libraries available on jsr.io if you’re satisfied with what you can find there.

If you want the developer experience of using something that’s not Node, you can still get it from Deno.

But it turns out that few people care that much about purity, so it’s fortunate that they’re not relying on that.
by harshreality10 | 2025-05-20 12:38:59+00:00
Vedran and I just wrapped up the APIdays NYC conference, where we had the chance to show Treblle 3.0 (released 6 months ago) and talk to developers, engineering leaders, and product teams across companies of all sizes. One common theme kept coming up, whether it was a solo dev or a company with thousands of engineers, everyone is struggling with this: visibility and understanding of their APIs.

While APIs have been the backbone of modern software, and more so in the AI era, where everything is interconnected and automated, the need to understand, secure, and govern your APIs isn’t a nice-to-have. It’s essential. Yet most teams rely on general-purpose observability tools that lack API context, or use testing tools that were never designed for real-time production use. We built Treblle to solve this problem. It gives you real-time understanding of what’s happening across your APIs. Whether it’s one API or hundreds. You get full request/response visibility, security and compliance insights, automatically generated documentation, and a clear picture of how your APIs are being consumed.

All our SDKs for languages+frameworks and API gateway integrations are open source and the setup is quick. You can start getting API intelligence in minutes. And for smaller teams or indie developers, we offer a generous free tier. We’d love to hear your thoughts. How are you solving this today? What’s missing when it comes to truly understanding your APIs?

Harsha, Vedran, and the Treblle team https://treblle.com | https://github.com/treblle
by bradten | 2025-05-20 12:39:35+00:00
Most of us already know the Internet is fragmenting. China has the Great Firewall. Russia’s got sovereign routing. We’ve all seen this play out.

What gets less attention is what that actually means for people who build or defend infrastructure in the West.

This piece frames the Internet not as a global commons, but as a Western frontier — open by design, under-organized by nature, and increasingly under siege by actors who don’t believe in that openness.

It argues that security professionals — especially in the West — aren’t just engineers anymore. They’re geopolitical actors, whether they like it or not.

Curious if others are seeing this shift operationally: changes in threat modeling, public-private coordination, or just more existential fatigue.
by jqpabc123 | 2025-05-20 12:40:12+00:00
Any result produced by current AI is suspect until proven otherwise.

Any result comes at very high relative cost in terms of computing time and energy consumed.

AI is the polar opposite of traditional logic based computing --- instead of highly accurate and reliable facts at low cost, you get unreliable opinions at high cost.

There are valid uses cases for current AI but it is not a universal replacement for logic based programming that we all know and love --- not even close. Suggesting otherwise smacks of snake oil and hype.

Legal liability for AI pronouncements is another on-going concern that remains to be fully addressed in the courts. One example: An AI chatbot accused a pro basketball player of vandalism due to references found of him "throwing bricks" during play.

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4546063
by whynotmaybe | 2025-05-20 12:40:42+00:00
Other POV : one of the side effect of the Ukraine invasion, it's now possible for countries to buy oil in other currencies than USD. (1)

Because of this, USD 's power is fading and its value slowly plummeting.

One way to limit damages that could come with a weak $ is for the USA to bring back manufacturing capacities. That could be why Biden already put some protectionist measure in place in 2024. (2)

Yes Trump is who he is, but I think the tariffs stuff is part smoke and mirrors to hide that inconvenient truth.

Or as the Super cool ski instructor might say : "If your money is weak and you rely on foreign countries for the majority of your physical stuff, you gonna have a bad time."

(1) https://www.indiatoday.in/business/story/saudi-arabia-ends-8... (2) https://publicseminar.org/2024/09/bidens-green-protectionism...
Ask HN: What do you look for in compliance reporting tools?
by lukejkwarren | 2025-05-20 12:41:08+00:00
I’m building a web security monitoring platform and recently added branded compliance reporting for things like SOC 2 and ISO 27001.

The reports include:

- Your logo/colors or full whitelabel

- Mapped vulnerabilities (OWASP/CWE/WASC)

- Executive summaries for non-technical stakeholders

If you're responsible for security or reporting (internally or for clients), I'd love to know:

- What do you need to see in a compliance report?

- Who are you generating these for — clients, auditors, execs?

- What do you currently use (manual process, automated, third-party tools)?

- What’s still frustrating or slow about your current setup?

Curious how others are approaching this and what you'd actually want to see improved.
by blagie | 2025-05-20 12:42:04+00:00
Drop a Google Streetview in the middle on downtown classical Gothenberg, and try to find a wood construction building. Sweden is about as northern Europe as it gets. Head over to Amsterdam, and it will look pretty similar.

It will be relatively similar to most other major European cities; solid masonry construction has historically been the norm.

You'll find some wooden houses in smaller towns and rural areas, but even there, if you head over to e.g. Poland, most things will be solid masonry. And the wooden construction is mostly relatively new; what you'll rarely find is old wooden construction.
by pjmlp | 2025-05-20 12:42:16+00:00
Indeed, and that is why if I wanted to do university work at home instead of fighting for a place at one DG/UX terminal at the campus, I had to find something else.

I am aware it got much better later on, but given the way it was introduced, the mess with third party integrations, as Microsoft always outsourced the development effort (MKS, Interix,..), it never got people to care about afterwards.

First impressions matter most.
by diggan | 2025-05-20 12:42:34+00:00
What exactly is the problem you're encountering when trying to interact with HTTP APIs? If you really want to use OpenAPI for whatever reason, there are plenty of ways of doing that even in Clojure/Java, so I'm sure it's possible in other languages as well. But it's not like using OpenAPI or GraphQL are the only two options, if you're of that opinion I'm afraid you've drank way too much of the koolaid.
by xnorswap | 2025-05-20 12:43:37+00:00
Well there's C# / .NET, which ticks off all of those boxes, even the functional syntax is well supported since it added pattern matching and people write a lot of fluent functional style anyway with LINQ.

It also interops nicely with F#, so you can write a pure functional library in F# and call it from a C# program in the "functional core, imperative shell" style.

It has an incredibly solid runtime, and a good type system that balances letting you do what you want without being overly fussy.
by diggan | 2025-05-20 12:43:58+00:00
> I could literally share the exact same type definitions between them. Then I could use a compiler plugin (`typescript-is`) to validate on the server that payloads match the appropriate type. It was amazing and worked quite well, and I can't really see that being nearly as easy and seamless with anything else.

But isn't that benefit just because TypeScript does compile to JavaScript and is compatible with JavaScript? Remove that compatibility, and you wouldn't get that benefit anymore, right? And if you still can get that benefit, why wouldn't you be able to get that benefit with other languages too?

It's not like TypeScript gives you some inherit benefit that makes it easier to convert to JavaScript, besides the fact that it's literally a "Compile-to-JS" language.
by codingbot3000 | 2025-05-20 12:44:08+00:00
Adam Smith already pointed out that a trade deficit is not really interesting, so I do not understand the American obsession about it ;)

Also, the often-mentioned US-EU trade deficit is not that big if you count in services. Which I think should be done in the 21st century. Large parts of the US economy are focused on digital high-value services, and they are "exported" worldwide.
by mananaysiempre | 2025-05-20 12:44:50+00:00
> [Covered allied persons] includes Nehterlands, which is a member of NATO.

Because the Netherlands signed the Rome Statute, it does not (italics mine):

> COVERED ALLIED PERSONS—The term ‘covered allied persons’ means military personnel, elected or appointed officials, and other persons employed by or working on behalf of the government of a NATO member country, a major non-NATO ally (including Australia, Egypt, Israel, Japan, Jordan, Argentina, the Republic of Korea, and New Zealand), or Taiwan, for so long as that government is not a party to the International Criminal Court and wishes its officials and other persons working on its behalf to be exempted from the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court.