MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by dr_kretyn | 2025-05-27 21:48:58+00:00
Maybe a small plug of own similar library: terminal-agent (https://github.com/laszukdawid/terminal-agent) which also supports tools and even MCP. There's a limited agentic capability but needs some polishing. Only once I made some progress on own app I learned about this `llm` CLI. Though that one more won't harm.
by Uehreka | 2025-05-27 21:49:07+00:00
That’s what his llm CLI is? I’ve been waiting for this release so I can take my existing notes on best practices coding with LLMs (which I’ve been doing for both work projects and side projects) and try some experiments with rolling a coding agent myself instead of using Claude Code or VS Code’s Agent mode. If it works well then other folks on my team might switch to it too.

I don’t get where you get the idea that people aren’t actually using this stuff and being productive.
by belorn | 2025-05-27 21:49:14+00:00
Could it be time for the US to look towards European declaration of human rights and define political views, or any world views for that matter, to be equally worth defining as a protected class as for people who visit a holy place regularly. None should be looking at people's social media for undesirable political views, no more than they should dig into peoples life to determine if they are a devout something.
by SR2Z | 2025-05-27 21:49:43+00:00
> Do they have any other actual purpose?

Some people believe that offices should be pleasant places to work. It's not a grand conspiracy.

> The lockdowns incidentally showed that not _every_ single job needs to be held in the office by rote.

Sure, but if we're being really honest then we have to accept that junior folks actually DO benefit a lot from having experienced people around and easily accessible. You CAN make up for it by scheduling a lot of 1:1 meetings, but in my experience people just don't do that and instead stay blocked.

Companies need good junior engineers, which means that more senior people also have to be in the office.

> I think satisfaction from working in an office is directly related to the pay given to those coming into the office.

I think that what you're saying here is really "how much you like going into the office depends on how much you like your job." Being paid well is just one of many components of this. Liking your coworkers/manager is probably even more important.

I think that working remote is great, but it takes a very decisive company culture and motivated employees to make it work for the business. Not every company has that and frankly I don't think that every company COULD have that.
by alephnerd | 2025-05-27 21:50:23+00:00
Cholo culture is not a mainstream culture in Vietnam though, and is very overstated in the article - it's more counterculture and a mix of Cali Kieu who "returned" to Vietnam or people who are cult fans of content like the Fast and Furious franchise ("familia")

Hallyu is the primary mainstream culture having impact in Vietnam. Can't walk a meter without bumping into something Korean.

> particularly among older generations of Vietnamese, who are inclined to associate tattoos with gangs and violence

Younger generations too excluding the Thao Dien or the D3 type. You see plenty of heavily tattooed lecherous older Japanese men in D1, and everyone knows the implications of that.
by davely | 2025-05-27 21:50:23+00:00
I work for a tech company you’ve definitely heard of.

I use the “llm” tool every single day. You may not know it, and that’s okay, but Simon’s tools are an immense help to tons of developers using LLMs.

I know it’s fun and trendy to hate on LLMs, but if you’re not productive with them at this point, you’re either:

1. Working on a novel problem or in some obscure language, or

2. Have a skill issue related to how to utilize LLMs.
by nemomarx | 2025-05-27 21:50:54+00:00
Starbucks is a lot easier to swing by then trying to get boxes to haul things away. Also in my experience the dorms don't let you bring by rented trucks or vehicles in the loading zone unless it's your assigned move out time slot, so you can't really do that mid semester. you could carry things by hand slowly somewhere, but it's going to be much more cumbersome.
Ask HN: Decided I no longer want to be a SWE – what next?
by leeroihe | 2025-05-27 21:51:11+00:00
I recently spent the past six months working on a startup. We had a fair bit of momentum coming out of a well known accelerator and an idea with traction, but unfortunately the money just didn't quite show up for the seed. At 30, doing this without pay (and expenses covered) seemed like an ok idea, at least for a few months. But at this point I'm kind of done.

Co-founder didn't understand why I wasn't interested working without salary anymore... there were other signs the relationship had broken down etc. Planning on letting him know I'm out near the end of this week.

I started interviewing when these feelings started to get to me and... the VC from the accelerator ratted to my co-founder that they'd "heard from recruiters". This was effectively the most unprofessional breach of privacy I've ever experienced and as a result I think I'm done working in software (don't even ask me my opinion of SF).

I've been doing this six years, clearly I'm not good enough (tech screens these days are ridiculous) and even as a founder of multiple previous companies (with one exit) and lots of SWE experience I'm no longer attractive for roles that pay well. I've come to realize I don't really even enjoy programming or prepping for interviews - it all feels grating and makes me feel like an idiot.

That said, I have no idea what to do next and feel inexplicably lost. My age doesn't help this, but I'm fully drawing a blank. I don't really have money to go to grad school and it appears that dev roles are just getting more competitive. Maybe I was an ok engineer for a while, but I just feel lost and scared.

At 30 I don't care about clout anymore, most of my friends make way more money than me or have families. Being an adult here seems like acknowledging doing startups is maybe the dumbest thing I could've done with my life.

This probably sounds like a lot, but it's the first time I've run up against this many things going wrong in my life at once. Anyone else pivot away from tech and still make half-decent income?
by xtiansimon | 2025-05-27 21:52:09+00:00
That shocked me when I moved to Nassau County, NY--that home owners did not have that protection. Nassau County is allegedly one of the most expensive tax counties in the country. There is definitely a retirement migration of blue collar residents who can't afford the property tax increases on their home when they retire. And in this perverse housing market, what was even 350k 10 years ago is 750k now (I know because I was looking). Forget what retirement age homeowners paid 30+ years ago.
Show HN: Blogs.hn – Tiny Blog Directory
by surprisetalk | 2025-05-27 21:52:15+00:00
It's been a while since I shared my blog directory...

In proper HN fashion, the site is open-source and requires no JS!

There's instructions on how to add/edit a blog on the Github README.

[0] https://github.com/surprisetalk/blogs.hn

Note that your blog might appear in blogs.json, but not on the site! Right now I'm using the following code to filter out blogs. Your blog might appear if you add more metadata:

if ( 3 > 0 + !!blog.title + (blog.desc.length > 40) + !!blog.about + !!blog.now + !!blog.feed + 3 * (blog.hn.length > 1) ) continue;

As I mention on the /about page, if you don't already have a blog, I recently made a minimal static site generator! It's easier than ever to begin your writing journey :)

[1] https://github.com/surprisetalk/worstpress
by bluGill | 2025-05-27 21:52:45+00:00
If your lighting and display have flicker at mathematical ratio you will notice unless the frequency is extremely high. 1:1 is most likely because it is easy to sync lights and the CRT to the AC line frequency which is 60Hz in the US (50Hz in Europe). 1:2 (used to be somewhat common) or 4:5 ratios would also cause issues.

Though now that I think of it, the CRT should be syncing with the signal and there is no reason that sync needs to be related to the AC line, but it does anyway (all the computers I know of generate their own sync from a crystal, I have no idea where TV stations get their sync but I doubt AC line frequency).
by mc32 | 2025-05-27 21:53:07+00:00
I think that’s overstating it. There are pockets in the largest cities, but that’s about it. Very few Latin Americans would be like, hey let’s go get some Chinese food, outside of the largest cities. It’s not like Canada or the US where even in towns in the middle of nowhere you can find a Chinese joint.

Now, some do call nannies “Chinese”, so presumably, many decades ago, some very poor Chinese took a voyage across the sea to poor countries because China was even more desperately poor. Also some Chinese as well as Philippine folks were brought over to Mexico as slaves and they were all labeled ‘Chinese’ kind of like how chino fabric originated in the Philippines but is called ‘chinos.’
by m463 | 2025-05-27 21:53:29+00:00
I think craigslist is pretty close. That said it takes time and effort, and a little bit of opening up to the general public.

I remember doing a garage sale before moving years ago. We sold some stuff, but in reality nobody wants to give you anything for your stuff. I still remember a guy who came, pushing his way over asking brusquely, "Do you have any jewelry, watches, iphones or ipads?". When I said no, he left just as abruptly as he came.

Now goodwill is our preferred way. We found it is hard to get any sort of tax credit to work, so we don't even bother with receipts anymore.
by stego-tech | 2025-05-27 21:53:50+00:00
> Second, why not just put on the street so that other people can come and collect items?

Boston does this! The locals refer to it as “Allston Christmas”, it takes place every September 1st, and it’s a great time to scavenge furniture and appliances, even computers and electronics.

My big concern remains bedbugs, personally. As a renter myself, I don’t have the facilities to disinfect and kill off any pests that might’ve hopped on between the old apartment and the curb, which narrows my selection considerably. Still, lots of students and locals partake in the yearly turnover tradition and walk away with new room furniture sets!
by ge96 | 2025-05-27 21:53:57+00:00
Yeah by LLM (and I didn't specify above) I meant if you had a generic summary command/parsing images or OCR... it's probably not possible to extract code, maybe you can with words embedded in an image that is a sentence eg. "run this script"

edit: generic command as in "what does this image show" and the underlying mechanism is vulnerable to reading hidden data
by gnabgib | 2025-05-27 21:53:57+00:00
Discussion on your 2023 post (225 points, 57 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36613727

Related:

Show HN: Hacker News user blogroll (937 points, 2023, 187 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36605493

Show HN: OPML list of Hacker News Users Personal Blogs (281 points, 2023, 101 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36627112
by layman51 | 2025-05-27 21:53:59+00:00
A text search for “cholo” yields no results. I found that kind of surprising. That is the type of aesthetic that seems to have spread the most but I would hope that all these people learn beyond more than gang-life stories. I’m thinking the stories of Rudolfo Anaya, “Corky” Gonzales, Sandra Cisneros, etc.
by leeroihe | 2025-05-27 21:54:02+00:00
If you ignore data regarding H1B, OPT and O1 your analysis is meaningless. I support immigrants coming to this country to work, my girlfriend is one of them! But what has happened to tech in terms of Americans being displaced is candidly astounding.

As a black man, I honestly think more of the apparent "discrimination" against American minorities is a direct result of offshoring and h1b.
by twixfel | 2025-05-27 21:54:35+00:00
No, not at all. I meant to say Europe. The attack on Ukraine is an attack on Europe. I meant exactly what I said.

> Additionally, there are historical reasons for what is going on between Russia and Ukraine

And there are historical reasons why Europe cares about what is going on between Russia and Ukraine.

Sorry but not only Russia gets to have "historical reasons" and "interests". We all do. Europe does too. Sorry if that upsets you and think Russia is the main character.

And sadly Russia's attacks on Europe are not limited to Ukraine. For example they have been doing chemical attacks in the UK before the full scale invasion of Ukraine.

> It is not like Russia is going to attempt to conquer Europe, is it?

It doesn't have to in order to be a threat to Europe. That's the thing about power.

> We might though

Who's "we"?

What's sad is how cucked the Hungarians are. Is there a more tragic country? Backed the wrong horse 1914-18, then again 39-45, then again in the cold war, and now again during the Russian invasion of Ukraine. What a tragic place. Literally always on the wrong side of history. I guess if there was ever any doubt that the Russian invasion of Ukraine is wrong, it's that Hungary supports said invasion. Hey, but it also means it will fail, because everything Hungary seems to touch turns to shit :)
by jldugger | 2025-05-27 21:54:39+00:00
> when selling, if for instance I sell something for $50 but put in an hour or two of my time, I'm still in the hole.

I used to sell via gameflip and glyde, and that was pretty efficient; five minutes cataloging and listing the game and five minutes putting it in an envelope before my daily mail run. But these companies keep tripping over payment processing -- gameflip lost paypal, probably due to an infestation of scammers in the digital goods market?

So now I just post for sale ads on an internal company forum. But every time I come to the same conclusion. Having to personally deliver these flips the script. I seriously wonder if donating to a public library has a better ROI. They get a loanable asset, and I get a tax writeoff? But there seems to be many variables on how the writeoff is valued.

edit: or I need to set up coordination destination. Like "pickup at board game night only."
by amluto | 2025-05-27 21:55:11+00:00
Because the footer metadata is in the Parquet file, which is already far too late to give an efficient query.

If I have an S3 bucket containing five years worth of Parquet files, each covering a few days worth of rows, and I tell my favorite query tool (DuckDB, etc) about that bucket, then the tool will need to do a partial read (which is multiple operations, I think, since it will need to find the footer and then read the footer) of ~500 files just to find out which ones contain the data of interest. A good query plan would be to do a single list operation on the bucket to find the file names and then to read the file or files needed to answer my query.

Iceberg and Delta Lake (I think -- I haven't actually tried it) can do this, but plain Parquet plus Hive partitioning can't, and I'm not aware of any other lightweight scheme that is well supported that can do it. My personal little query tool (which predates Parquet) can do it just fine by the simple expedient of reading directory names.
by bsder | 2025-05-27 21:55:38+00:00
> Aren't the ads already injected and the real trick will be getting the advertisers to foot more of the bill?

No, the ads aren't specifically injected. Yet.

When you start finding LLMs that call all sodas "Pepsi", you will know the ads have arrived.

(Side note: I avoided using "Coke" because there are already certain sections of the US where all sodas are referred to as "Coke".)
by akoboldfrying | 2025-05-27 21:55:54+00:00
In compression, "efficiency" usually means "compression level".

If by "efficiency" you mean "speed", then yes, I think OP's approach can be much, much faster than usual video compression approaches -- but this is true of all compression algorithms that don't compress very well. The fastest such algorithm -- leaving the input unchanged -- is infinitely fast, but achieves no compression at all.
by sigmoid10 | 2025-05-27 21:57:07+00:00
Since shaders were designed for, well, shading, this early experiment was more of an academic playground exercise than useful research. But AlexNet still wasn't the first deep neural network trained using CUDA. It had already been done three years earlier: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1553374.1553486

The ImageNet competition had also been around since 2010. So the ingredients were actually all there before.
by ChuckMcM | 2025-05-27 21:57:35+00:00
Awesome, that is very helpful.

> Then the _material_ is a store of energy. Once it's exhausted, the condensation will stop.

The paper points out that the sample was surface that maintains a particular temperature (20 degrees C in this case). The water condenses, the material heats up, the thing its sitting on removes that excess heat to maintain the temperature. No violation of CoE or TD.

Without that temperature controller, the material would presumably continue to store the heat, which would make it hotter than the ambient temperature. By how much is, as you point out, something to be characterized.

Thermodynamics says that the heat will equalize, so that excess heat will conduct to the air around it (it's not in a vacuum so it doesn't have to radiate it). That will lower the temperature of the material which will then condense more water and heat up again. My original thought was you could enhance that conduction by putting a heatsink on one side of the material.

The paper states that inside the pores they have managed to create a space that changes the parameters around the vapor carrying capacity of the air which results in the water condensing even though it would not have condensed outside those pores. Then they go on to describe how the effects of hydrophillic and hydrophobic materials, used in conjunction, create spaces near the molecular limit of water molecules and how the forces acting on that water might result in it condensing. When the vapor does condense, the heat goes somewhere, and they assume its going into the material (reasonable assumption in my opinion) and that their temperature controlled platform is then removing it. I found the description of how that water expresses to the surface a bit more "hand wavy" but that they observed liquid water on the surface, and that it is somehow coming from the material they created, seems reasonably well supported.

I think for the purposes of this discussion we're done. I really do appreciate that you are skeptical and feel that some of the more well tested laws of physics are being violated :-). Since we can only go on what they wrote up, I did make the presumption that they too know the laws of physics and have a good faith belief that they are not being violated either. It is one of the things I look for in papers that talk about things like this. Also the journal where they published their paper, Science Advances, is a refereed journal so I would presume that the reviewers were also satisfied they weren't violating any well known laws of physics. Doesn't mean that you should believe what they say, just that it's not obviously wrong.
by perching_aix | 2025-05-27 21:58:04+00:00
I don't remember frankly. For what it's worth, TV sets would always be 50 Hz here (PAL) (unless they did some tomfoolery I'm not aware of and ran at 100 Hz "in secret" or something) and evidently I could watch those on end without too many holdups for years and years, so clearly it wasn't a dealbreaker. But on monitors, yeah, I just wouldn't tolerate it, whereas 85 Hz felt perfect (no discernible flicker for me that I'd recall).
by nssnsjsjsjs | 2025-05-27 21:58:26+00:00
Do you mean the person at the tracks taking odds or a business doing online bookmaking.

Being a bookie would be fun if you like maths, are street smart, somewhat not highly ethical but you are disciplined and can control your emotions. Similar to poker I guess. And are knowledgeable about the sport with respect to odds not trivia.

I doubt a typical gambler would enjoy it. Does a "foodie" love working in a lab testing flour samples?
by chneu | 2025-05-27 21:58:32+00:00
I lived near Oregon State for years after I went there. Every year end we would go to all the dorms with our trucks and tell folks to toss their shit in our truck instead of the dumpsters.

We got tons of high end, brand new electronics. Laptops, desktops, audio equipment, etc. Whatever we didn't keep we would sell.

Kids don't give a shit. Their parents bought all of their stuff and it's just too annoying to deal with moving it. If it won't fit in their car/luggage they won't take it. It's too much effort for them to sell it.
by IshKebab | 2025-05-27 21:59:13+00:00
That's not why low-code or WYSIWYG failed. I mean arguably they didn't fail - Squarespace and Notion seem to be doing fine. But the reason they didn't fully replace most developers is that people generally want to do things that are outside the capabilities of the platforms. They aren't generic enough for every use case.

AI is fundamentally different in that regard.

There should be a name for this fallacy - the previous attempts failed therefore all attempts will fail.
by SketchySeaBeast | 2025-05-27 22:01:05+00:00
Sure, same with the "This time is fundamentally different" fallacy. See my previous comment about apocalyptic cults.

Important to note I'm not saying there is no technology ever that won't fill that gap, GenAI probably would, but I'm not at all convinced that LLMs are the right tech to do everything that needs to be done to replace devs.
by simonw | 2025-05-27 22:01:43+00:00
I really need to put together a better tutorial - there's a TON of documentation but it's scattered across a bunch of different places:

- The official docs: https://llm.datasette.io/

- The workshop I gave at PyCon a few weeks ago: https://building-with-llms-pycon-2025.readthedocs.io/

- The "New releases of LLM" series on my blog: https://simonwillison.net/series/llm-releases/

- My "llm" tag, which has 195 posts now! https://simonwillison.net/tags/llm/
by bsder | 2025-05-27 22:01:59+00:00
At this point, the biggest problem simply seems to be that the size of "Python Core" has outstripped the number of maintainers.

I helped shepherd a bug fix into Python that was less than a dozen lines, dead simple, completely obvious, sorely needed and still took 3 years and a summoning of Guido, himself, to get it shoved through. Because there was no designated maintainer for that section of code, people were absolutely terrified of touching the code even though it was completely obvious that the fix was backwards compatible. It finally hit the latest Python and a bunch of other projects immediately removed their workarounds for the bug.

If it was that difficult to get a super small, super obvious bugfix through, trying to get a "frozendict" into the language is going to be a Sisyphean task.
by bluGill | 2025-05-27 22:02:21+00:00
> Undergraduate tuition at Duke starts at $65,000 USD/year.

Does it? I don't know anything about Duke, but a lot of colleges I know of tell your tuition is around that price. However dig deeper and you discover it is almost impossible to not get scholarships thus making the real price cheaper. I know of one school near me that automatically gives everyone a 40% scholarship, then they look at your background to figure out if you qualify for anything more.
by sherdil2022 | 2025-05-27 22:02:27+00:00
All I can say is you are not alone. When I read this, almost all you say resonates with me - and there is no privacy, especially in startups. I learnt it the hard way too.

Please don't think you are not good enough. The interviewing process is just ridiculous and illogical (for an industry that deals with logic all the time!).

I don't have any answers - since I am also in the current state. And I also found out that no one has any answers - everyone is probably lost in some way or another.

Take some time off if you can. And if you have the luxury, don't think about anything else for a while.