MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by losvedir | 2025-05-23 18:29:13+00:00
> Continuous training is the key ingredient. Humans can use existing knowledge and apply it to new scenarios, and so can most AI. But AI cannot permanently remember the result of its actions in the real world, and so its body of knowledge cannot expand.

I think it depends on how you look at it. I don't want to torture the analogy too much, but I see the pre-training (getting model weights out of an enormous corpus of text) as more akin to the billions of years of evolution that led to the modern human brain. The brain still has a lot to learn once you're born, but it already also has lots of structures (e.g. to handle visual input, language, etc) and built-in knowledge (instincts). And you can't change that over the course of your life.

I wouldn't be surprised if we ended up in a "pre-train / RAG / context window" architecture of AI, analogously to "evolution / long term memory / short term memory" in humans.
by turtleyacht | 2025-05-23 18:29:20+00:00
Thank-you. If art is communication and self-expression to be consumed by others, that may be all the motivation needed. Despite the disincentives, even.

> new data

We'll likely keep seeing it, up until the inflection point between "machines are for people" and "people are for machines." Along a spectrum, the latter being complete cybernetic mechanization of a life.
by BoorishBears | 2025-05-23 18:29:46+00:00
Which is strictly worse than just giving the LLM access to the source of truth for the database.

You're adding a round trip to the database and the LLM and inserting a tool call in the conversation before it even starts generating any code.

And the reference Postgres MCP implementation doesn't include Postgres types or materialized views, and is one of the most widely used packages: Zed.dev's MCP server for example, is seemingly just a port of it and has the same problem.
by focusedone | 2025-05-23 18:30:16+00:00
This impacted my family directly. A family member has a severe sesame allergy. Honestly we weren't aware people could be allergic to sesame before we found ourselves in the hospital after a severe reaction.

Shortly after the hospital incident and after much time spent scrutinizing every ingredient label the law changed. We were excited about this at first. It became much easier to identify things we couldn't have in the house.

The unfortunate side effects of the law were most visible in the bread aisle, where nearly every item now contains sesame. This included all of the store brands and most of the brand-name products. Initially, we were limited to only one brand of bread (shout out to Kings Hawaiian). We also found a few artisan / local boutique options we could trust, but that's a pretty expensive way to make a PB&J.

Our situation has improved a bit. Recently a second, slightly less expensive, name brand sandwich bread went sesame-free. We're still stuck with oddly expensive artisanal hotdog buns. Why are the fancy ones all top cut instead of side cut? It's just weird that way.

Anyway, I expect that eventually more brands will go sesame-free as recipes change and factories go through whatever update process where it makes sense to separate allergens.

We're still happy about the regulation change and how easy it is now to identify dangerous items. Seeing global brands add sesame to a product to avoid whatever cost necessary to change their process was...not endearing. Hopefully their share price went up a few cents I guess.
by porridgeraisin | 2025-05-23 18:31:42+00:00
> system call, the context switches

No, there is no separate kernel "executing". When you do a syscall, your thread becomes kernel mode and it executes the function behind the syscall, then when it's done, your thread reverts to user mode.

A context switch is when one thread is being swapped out for another. Now the syscall could internally spawn a thread and context switch to that, but I'm not sure if this happens in read() or any syscall for that matter.
by jabl | 2025-05-23 18:32:54+00:00
The kilogram is no longer defined by a physical artifact, fwiw.

Anyway, the point is the inconsistency in the system due to the kilogram being the base unit. So derived units are defined in terms of kilogram rather than gram. Say, the unit of force, Newton (N), is defined as kgm/s^2 and not gm/s^2). Or pressure, Pascal (Pa) which is N/m^2 which inherits N being defined in terms of the kilogram). And so on. Anyway, an annoying inconsistency maybe but doesn't really affect usage of the system once you get used to it.
by sgarland | 2025-05-23 18:33:51+00:00
> For clones you dont pay for the extra storage for the new database, only the delta if you add new data...

Considering how much they’re charging you just to query storage, that’s still a net negative. If anything, you’re going to pay MORE since you’re probably querying more.

> No observable Aurora downtime taken in over 5 months of experimentation

I manage somewhere north of 500 Aurora instances spread across dozens of clusters. We have one drop out at least weekly, if not more often.

> Over 46 billion transaction records indexed and available, compared to less than one billion stored in the former online Redis system

This isn’t unique to Aurora.

> 4.8 TB of data across all tables

Neither is this; also, it’s honestly not that big.

I doubt we’re going to convince each other of anything here.
by bluefirebrand | 2025-05-23 18:34:02+00:00
> There is something to be said for ensuring your kids go to the best schools possible. Those early networks are pivotal in forming an above average life.

I think this might be more of an American thing tbh. Having early networks can help grease the wheels for an above average life maybe but it's not so straightforward.

Personally, I went to an average public high school, I went to a small university (~9k students), and I'm now one of the top 3% of earners in my country just shy of a decade after graduating

I didn't wind up keeping in touch with anyone I went to any of my schooling with, honestly. I had to move away from my hometown to find opportunities so those bonds faded

It hasn't been easy for sure, it would definitely help to have that embedded network from childhood, but I don't think that is a requirement

Being competent and working hard can get you a long way
by seanhunter | 2025-05-23 18:34:12+00:00
This is a really terrible way to learn sightreading.

I got to music college without really being able to read at all and turned it into a real strength to the extent that by my final year I was by far the best sight reader in the college on my instrument (I was a bass player so it's a relatively low bar, but I was even a good reader compared to many folks on other instruments). How I learned (and what I would recommend) is get yourself a truly massive pile of music for your instrument and get a metronome or drum machine app on your preferred device.

Then, every day (will take a few months to get good) pick a piece up from the pile, allow yourself a few seconds to check out the key and time signature, check for repeats etc so you know the basic structure and look for anything funky (odd bars, key changes etc). Set the metronome a little below the indicated tempo on the music (you can work up to sightreading fully up to speed), then start the metronome and immediately play it through without stopping as though you were doing a performance. Then put the music on the done pile, pick up the next piece and go back to the start.

So: Use real music. Play each piece once as though it was a performance. With a metronome/drum machine to keep you honest tempo-wise. In a few months you will get good at sightreading.

Once you're good start doing transcriptions of things you like. Doesn't need to be your instrument. Obviously this helps your ear but I found it also helped my sightreading. But it's not really worth doing until your basic sightreading chops are solid.
by dcdevito | 2025-05-23 18:34:39+00:00
A few issues I see with these (and all smart glasses): it cannot replace a phone, battery life will be terrible the first few years and it really doesn't solve the attention problem smartphones cause. I'd rather have an audio only device.

I only use my Apple Watch Ultra and one AirPods in for a better (albeit not perfect) solution to limiting screen time. I feel smart glasses exacerbates the problem. At least with a smart watch it can already make calls and send messages.
by wkat4242 | 2025-05-23 18:34:56+00:00
> I'm not sure if planes' computers already (continuously) provide this to pilots: "here are the top 5 landing spots in this and that contingency"

No they don't. For airliners it doesn't really matter. The only place they can set down safely is an airport. Which are already listed in their systems and flight plan (alternates)

For the smaller stuff it depends on the pilot, a common electronic flight system like the Garmin G1000 doesn't have sensors to actually make that determination.
by ip26 | 2025-05-23 18:35:12+00:00
As categorical guidance, that seems like a problematic thing to teach. First, parents don’t know everything, but they know their kids and have witnessed their journey, so they have a unique perspective to offer. Second, parents will begin to (justifiably!!) grow suspicious of your institution and develop resentment, which is a serious structural problem.

Hopefully what you mean is something like you teach them to think critically about their parents advice as one input among many, understanding where the advice comes from and its inherent strengths and flaws.
by Toritori12 | 2025-05-23 18:36:22+00:00
I wont likely find the video but I remember watching the PM for both VSCode and VS (at the time was the same one, not sure now) recommending people to move to Visual Studio "eventually". I clearly remember it because it didn't make any sense, even if the names were similar there were/are nothing alike UI-wise and supported-language-wise. I said few years ago but it was prob around 8 years ago, vsc was still pretty young.
by tass | 2025-05-23 18:37:09+00:00
Maybe, but this has a few advantages.

If there were some reusable item (whatever that may be) it would need to be stored somewhere accessible to the construction crews, would eventually need to be repaired or replaced, and depending on how it's made may need to be customized per installation.

Hay and rope are readily available and (depending on the rope) biodegrade so could fall into the river with pretty minimal pollution. I imagine back in the day they were both just borrowed from a local farm or stable.
by Zirias | 2025-05-23 18:37:29+00:00
TBH, I've shown this before, but a LOT has changed since then, most notably:

* Performance improvements by adding support for epoll() (with singalfd and timerfd), kqueue() and solaris event ports, and also by fixing a few design issues

* Server side sessions are gone, instead signed Json Web Tokens are implemented -> saves lots of RAM

Among other things, swad can do what Anubis can do, that's why it's in the title. It's much smaller though, and proof-of-work-crypto-challenge-to-defeat-bots is just ONE module, the other modules offering more regular means of authentication: by calling some external tool, by checking a bcrypt hash from a file, or by asking PAM.

Contrary to Anubis, it's NOT a reverse proxy but designed to work with nginx' auth_request facility instead, might also work with other reverse proxies if they offer something similar. Swad is written in C, compiles to a 200-300kiB (depending on compiler and platform) binary, needs only zlib, OpenSSL (LibreSSL) and optionally libpam. Doing some stress testing with 1000 distinct simulated clients, I managed to bump up the resident set on my FreeBSD machine to 100MiB, but no more. Without heavy load, it typically stays at much less.

The general architecture of swad is a reactor with attached thread pool. A HTTP request is parsed (to headers and body) in the main thread, then a thread job is created to run the handler pipeline (including response compression, cookie management, form and query string parsing, etc) that's expected to add a HTTP response to some context object, once that's finished, the main thread takes over again sending that out to the client.

During my stress test mentioned above, I was kind of surprised to see the main (reactor) thread almost maxing out one core, while the pool threads (running request pipelines) didn't have too much to do. Well, serving a small login form and processing login requests indeed isn't THAT much work. Maybe it might make sense to have more than one "reactor thread"? Could this work, e.g. by just listening on the same socket from multiple threads?
by jll29 | 2025-05-23 18:38:27+00:00
The talk is suitable for the target audience, the young undecided.

For the rest of us, especially here at HN, it would have been interesting to learn a bit more about how she got to that Fidelity job first and how she then "drifted" towards "her people", namely the startup people, and then the book and Y Combinator in specific. Some Y combinator early anecdotes would have been great, too.
by wrs | 2025-05-23 18:39:00+00:00
The most obvious general case (to me) is reading an uninitialized local variable in a loop. If uninitialized has to be the same value every time, you’d have to allocate a register or stack space to ensure the value was the same on every iteration. Instead, you’d don’t have to allocate anything, just use whatever value is in any register that’s handy. (By this logic you can also start pruning code, by picking the “most optimal” value for the uninitialized variable.)
by fidotron | 2025-05-23 18:39:10+00:00
I would agree with that if there were no distinction between clients and servers. i.e. agents and LLMs are resources that should be discovered and exploited in the same exact way as anything else, and switchable in the same ways.

The whole thing reminds me of stuff like Alan Kay's legendary OOPSLA talk in 1997 ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oKg1hTOQXoY ) "Every object should have an IP" (Also "Arrogance in computer science is measured in nano Dijkstras").
by vel0city | 2025-05-23 18:40:17+00:00
> the only way you cannot talk with "it" is through Teams

This is definitely a feature for Teams for all platforms I have Teams installed on.

On the Android app, there's a Copilot icon at the top right next to the search button. Pressing that takes me to a prompt to talk to Copilot.

On the Windows app, there's an icon in the left nav bar.

EDIT: Looking at thinking about it though, it would be nice to be able to say add copilot to a group chat and be able to @copilot or whatever within the room, have it respond, and have its response be shared with everyone like any other chat participant.
by ketzo | 2025-05-23 18:40:40+00:00
The longer I work in engineering the fewer windows I want open on my screen

If this is “PGAdmin, but 50% worse, but it just lives as another tab in your editor instead of another application” that is genuinely a huge win for me

Probably that’s because my day-to-day isn’t actually database administration, it’s application development where I need to be able to work with a database from time to time — so the preservation of context, however marginal, is really nice.
by theGeatZhopa | 2025-05-23 18:40:44+00:00
next time you can head to \Windows\System32\Tasks\Microsoft\Windows\UpdateOrchestrator and rename all the files* containing reboot in their name, or, move them to a backup folder and then create two new folders with exact the same name as the files and set their properties to read-only, so windows can't recreate the original files. And you're done. No more reboots except you want to. My actual uptime: 52:16:07:09 (d:h:m:s) -> Thank me later ;)

*(as I remember there are two files, Reboot_AC and Reboot_Battery)
by db48x | 2025-05-23 18:40:49+00:00
Yea, loneliness is not something you should rely on work to solve. It’s something people should just solve for themselves by simply going out and meeting people. It’s a bit cliche, but you know those people at the park who play chess at lunch time? What do people think _they_ are there for? Go out for a walk, or a meal, and meet your neighbors.
by foobiekr | 2025-05-23 18:41:03+00:00
However their actual actions resemble companies who know AGI isn’t even on the horizon and moreso they are acting as exactly as if they believe the AI hype bubble is coming to an end and they need to dump the stuff into the public markets asap.

There really isn’t any other way to interpret OpenAI’s actions for the last few months.

Sure it could all be a feint to hide their amazing progress. Or it could be what it looks like.

Given the hype cycles of the last 20 years, I’m going with the second.
by _DeadFred_ | 2025-05-23 18:41:45+00:00
I remember when you claimed the APA didn't apply to this. At least now you don't bother to defend based on legality and are cool with forcing your 'totally not corrupt' single totalitarian viewpoint on the country in order to counter... corrupt totalitarianism.

Get rid of Harvard and the person you mentioned would just... go somewhere else. You aren't actually advocated FOR anything, just saying 'there are bad people in the world'. Um, ok, yeah, we know that. That's why we disagree with you empowering those we see as bad people but that you defend illegally empowering/illegal behavior of because you happen to agree with them.
by Taikonerd | 2025-05-23 18:42:07+00:00
> any American could live an earlier iteration of the American Dream — and could be living so cheaply, they’ve got their expatriate buddies down in Mexico beat.

Their expatriate buddies down in Mexico probably aren't shivering through an upstate New York winter with nothing but a wood-burning stove for warmth, the way this guy proposes.
by SketchySeaBeast | 2025-05-23 18:42:28+00:00
As an Albertan I really have to wonder who is behind this PR push. Immediately after the election there were people coming to my door, asking about my attitude towards separatism. There's been flyers and news articles, and now there's an article in the NY Times? Considering the relative unpopularity of the movement, whoever is bankrolling this has a big reach and deep pockets.
by keiferski | 2025-05-23 18:42:31+00:00
I agree with you for the most part, and think a lot of people think they need to live in NYC/LA/London/etc. because of unstated social pressure, not because they actually utilize all of the megacity’s amenities.

However – I do think there is a sweet spot. If you can get a remote job that pays decently well and doesn’t require an excessive amount of time – and live in one of these cities – you can actually manage to see and do everything.

For example - I lived in New York for a while doing exactly this. I worked remotely and so could avoid rush hours on the subway, at restaurants, etc. and I had enough time and pocket money to explore the city.
by lesuorac | 2025-05-23 18:42:36+00:00
> or some other pre-shared information between server and client [the worst of protocols - custom bullshit])

Why is this worse than JSON?

"{'protected': {'protected': { 'protected': 'QABE' }}}" is just as custom as 66537 imo. It's easier to reverse engineer than 66537 but that's not less custom.
by joshstrange | 2025-05-23 18:42:41+00:00
> The first step is to realize that the subway stops here. Up to this point in life, most of you have been rolling on train tracks. Elementary school, middle school, high school, college—it was always clear what the next stop was. In the process you've been trained to believe something that’s not true: that all of life is train tracks. And there are some jobs where you can make it stay like train tracks if you want, but really today is the last stop.

Well put!

This is something _so many_ college kids don't seem to understand. I had many friends who graduated then just stood around looking for where to go next. It hadn't come up in discussions but it became apparent they were surprised by the sudden end to the "tracks" while the students who saw them coming (or were told better/more often) all were befuddled, "How did you not see this coming?", "Did you expect someone to just walk up and offer you a job?", "You have never even interned in your field??".

I don't blame the kids, they don't know any better. They've spent their whole life focusing on the next goal, I talked about this specifically (in blog post) when I dropped out of college to go full-time into my profession. For me, learning "there are no tracks" and more importantly "you don't need to go to the end of the college track before you decide next steps" was freeing and empowering while also being a bit terrifying.
by TheGRS | 2025-05-23 18:42:49+00:00
I read enough to trust that the writer dug very very deep on this. I was thinking early on "oh yea, probably just an error of the script getting to production and then a producer making a call as they switched locations", indeed it was something like that, but the writer here got down to the exact timeline of events, rewrites and script reads involved, etc. Even for someone like myself who is obsessed with BOTH birds and filmmaking, this is getting a little too deep, but I appreciate the effort!
by nullc | 2025-05-23 18:43:04+00:00
In some sense it's more human than a model trained with no RL and which has absolutely no exposure to its own output.

We have our own personal 'culture' too-- it's just less obvious because its tied up with our own hidden state. If you go back and read old essays that you wrote you might notice some of it-- that ideas and feelings (maybe smells?) that are absolutely not explicitly in the text immediately come back to you, stuff that no one or maybe only a spouse or very close friend might think.

I think it may be very hard to explore hidden subtext because the signals may be almost arbitrarily weak and context dependent. The bare model may need only a little nudge to get to the right answer and the you have this big wall of "reasoning" where each token could carry very small amounts of subtext that cumulatively add up to a lot and push things in the right direction.
by mr_mitm | 2025-05-23 18:43:30+00:00
Can you give a less trivial example? How would different wording help with understanding the proof of Greene's theorem, for example? When it comes down to it, it's just complicated stuff.

Maybe seeing strange symbols appears like gatekeeping to you, but surely we agree that there is also a more amicable explanation: symbols are quick to write, which makes it easier to manipulate equations with pen and paper or on a blackboard, and eventually you run out of symbols and have to resort to more exotic ones. Obviously it's up to you which explanation you prefer, but in my view you should have stronger evidence if you imply malicious intent or properties like arrogance.
Show HN: hcker.news – an ergonomic, timeline-based Hacker News front page
by postalcoder | 2025-05-23 18:44:31+00:00
Hi folks,

I've built an alternative Hacker News front page. It is inspired by and meant to be a replacement for hckrnews.com.

I built this because HN is woefully underfeatured, but most sites that try to improve it seem to assume that the visual design is the problem. hcker.news tries to maintain HN's familiarity while adding useful enhancements.

There are three primary views:

- Timeline View: Browse top stories by votes or comments grouped by day, week, or month (e.g., top 20 per day, top 100 per week). - Aggregate View: See top stories by votes or comments over custom time ranges. - Front Page View: The original HN front page, untouched.

Feed Filtering:

- Kagi Small Web: View only stories from websites that are a part of Kagi's Small Web, which is a curated list of non-commercial blogs - Custom Keyword Filters: Include/exclude keywords (e.g., include "Rust," exclude "DOGE") or set a minimum score threshold. - No HN Algorithm: Timeline and Aggregate Views show stories usually downranked by the HN algo (e.g., flagged posts or those with too many comments).

UI:

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