MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by dm03514 | 2025-05-27 17:38:29+00:00
Looked forward to move out day at state university in early 2000s. The university would rent dumpsters and place in the common outdoor areas. The dumpsters had the end door that would open so it was easy to walk inside of them without climbing.

I’d Spend all morning in the dumpster with some friends. Name brand clothes were good finds, also pretty much all the textbooks carried a trade in value. Lots of sealed food snacks as well.

I don’t know if the kids that threw them away were lazy or they just didn’t know about buy back, but the books easily brought me $100 for a couple hours of morning dumpster diving.
by 542354234235 | 2025-05-27 17:38:36+00:00
Tests are just a proxy for understanding and/or application of a concept. Being good at the proxy doesn’t necessarily mean you understand the concept, just like not being good at the proxy doesn’t mean you don’t. Finding other proxies we can use allows for decoupling knowledge from a specific proxy metric.

If I was evaluating the health of various companies, I wouldn’t use one metric for all of them, as company health is kind of an abstract concept and any specific metric would not give me a very good overall picture and there are multiple ways for a company to be healthy/successful. Same with people.

There are lots of different ways to utilize knowledge in real world scenarios, so someone could be bad at testing and bad at some types of related jobs but good at other types of related jobs. So unless “test taking” as a skill is what is being evaluated, it isn’t necessary to be the primary evaluation tool.
by gilbetron | 2025-05-27 17:38:40+00:00
> All of the best professors I had either did not grade homework or weighted it very small and often on a did-you-do-it-at-all basis and did not grade attendance at all. They provided lectures and assignments as a means to learn the material and then graded you based on your performance in proctored exams taken either in class or at the university testing center.

I have the opposite experience - the best professors focused on homework and projects and exams were minimal to non-existent. People learn different ways, though, so you might function better having the threat/challenge of an exam, whereas I hated having to put everything together for an hour of stress and anxiety. Exams are artificial and unlike the real world - the point is to solve problems, not to solve problems in weirdly constrained situations.
by suzzer99 | 2025-05-27 17:38:44+00:00
We merged with a group from Israel and I had to explain to them that our engineers had given them the "Hollywood no" on something they'd asked for. Basically "Yes, that sounds like a great idea" which actually means "Hell no" unless it's immediately followed up with an actionable path forward. The Israeli engineers found this very amusing and started asking if it was really a Hollywood no anytime they'd get a yes answer on something.
by bawolff | 2025-05-27 17:39:39+00:00
> For HN, replace M$ with Musk and you'll still see parallels. Although to be fair HN is much more even-keeled than most commenting systems, like Ars and Electrek.

I don't really see it. /. had this basically every single thread and the criticism was very not substantive. Musk is unpopular here, but the criticism at least has a bit more meat to it and is not on every single post.
by Shorel | 2025-05-27 17:39:51+00:00
This is related to Kerckhoffs principle:

"The design of a system should not require secrecy, and compromise of the system should not inconvenience the correspondents"

This means that all of the security must reside on the key and little or nothing in the method, as methods can be discovered and rendered ineffective if that's not the case. Keep in mind that this is for communication systems where it is certain that the messages will be intercepted by an hostile agent, and we want to prevent this agent to read the messages.

When implementing modern cryptographic systems, it is very easy to misuse the libraries, or to try to reimplement cryptographic ideas without a deep understanding of the implications, and this leads to systems that are more vulnerable than intended.

Security by obscurity is the practice of some developers to reinvent cryptography by applying their cleverness to new, unknown cryptosystems. However, to do this correctly, it requires deep mathematical knowledge about finite fields, probability, linguistics, and so on. Most people have not spent the required decades learning this. The end result is that those "clever" systems with novel algorithms are much less secure than the tried and true cryptosystems like AES and SSL. That's why we say security by obscurity is bad.

Now, going back to the main topic: Hacker News is not a cryptographic system where codified messages are going to be intercepted by an hostile actor. Therefore Kerckhoffs principle doesn't apply. There's not a secret key that can be changed in a way the system will recover its functionality if the secret key is discovered.

There is a series of measures that have worked in the past, and are still working today despite a huge population of active spamming and disrupting agents, and they should be kept secret as long as they keep working.
by saulrh | 2025-05-27 17:40:09+00:00
Works even if you're not in a college town. I once pulled a $4000 set of speakers out of my building's trash room - Boston Dynamics floor speakers, Polk Audio subwoofer - and I was just in a random apartment building in the bay area. Turned out the tweeter on one of the speakers needed replacing but that was like a $40 part on eBay and ten minutes of work with a screwdriver, didn't even need a soldering iron. You can get some crazy stuff if you're in the right building. Really sucks seeing it go to waste when it isn't something you can take, I always have to fight myself to leave some things behind.
by BardiaPezeshki | 2025-05-27 17:40:16+00:00
In datacenters people use optics for longer distances (10m to 2km). Within a rack it is almost always copper. The reason is that for short distances lasers are too expensive, unreliable, and consume too much power. We think microLED based links might replace copper at short distances (sub 10m). MicroLEDs into relatively thick fiber cores (50um) are much easier to package than standard single mode laser based optics.

on the distance - exactly right. The real bottleneck now in AI clusters is the interconnect within a rack or sub 10m. So that is the market we are addressing.

On your second point - exactly! Normally people think LEDs are slow and suck. That is the real innovation. At Avicena, we've figured out how to make LEDs blink on and off at 10Gb/s. This is really surprising and amazing! So with simple on-off modulation, there is no DSP or excess energy use. The article says TSMC is developing arrays of detectors, based on their camera process, that also receive signals at 10Gb/s. Turns out this is pretty easy for a camera with a small number of pixels (~1000). We use blue light, which is easily absorbed in silicon. BTW, feel free to reach out to Avicena, and happy to answer questions.
by lacker | 2025-05-27 17:40:31+00:00
The problem with the pyrefly behavior is that if you have a large codebase that isn't using any sort of Python typechecking, you can't just adopt this tool incrementally. You have to go fix up all of these issues. So you need to get widespread support for this migration.

For an internal tool at Meta, this is fine. Just make all your engineers adopt the style guide.

For introducing a tool gradually at an organization where this sort of change isn't one of the top priorities of engineering leadership, being more accepting is great. So I prefer the way ty does this, even though in my own personal code I would like my tool to warn me if I mix types like this.
Ask HN: Would you use an OSS dating app giving 2 swipes per decent GH commit?
by kuberwastaken | 2025-05-27 17:40:42+00:00
There are no decent Open Source dating apps (that I know of)

Could add a lot of quirky and fun features, this being one of them

Current dating apps... suck to say the least and are very paywalled for everything, in this version you "earn" your swipes

maybe better chances with a greener contribution graphs or pull requests, more developer/ nerd friendly?
by adanto6840 | 2025-05-27 17:41:21+00:00
I've done a lot of work on realtime obstacle avoidance that scales well (targeting ~60-100k agents) -- steering behaviors, flow fields, RVO2/ORCA, and lots more -- for agent-based "old school" tycoon-style simulation games. :)

I'm super intrigued by what you've created, especially to hear about running it in a compute shader! I'd love to talk with you more about it, if you're open to it? I briefly looked for a way to get in touch directly but didn't see any contact info -- my email is in my profile, I'd love to connect! :)
by alnwlsn | 2025-05-27 17:41:29+00:00
Those 2000s VCR's made near the end were pretty crappy though. We used VHS well beyond when everyone else threw theirs out - it was a cheap way to record TV. We would find one, it would last 8-10 months, and then break. I must have taken apart dozens of them, it was a fun thing to do as a kid.

Meanwhile, my dad's VHS machine from the 80's works to this day, plus there is a service manual for it.
Show HN: Built a No-code platform to build and deploy MCP Servers
by dheerajmp | 2025-05-27 17:41:53+00:00
Most of the LLMs behave like crap when vibecoding for MCPs. Either the libraries used are totally outdated or confuses MCP with "Microsoft Certified Professional".

I built this during the MCP hackathon by YC. And got some good traction during the hackathon itself (100+ users tried, 27 of them 1+ hours).

I have a separate deployment platform at leanmcp.com to deploy these MCPs.

And a testing platform to test the MCPs out. Would love to get some feedback from you guys.

I kind of see mostly developers using it. I am in a bit of crossroads. Should I just focus on hard-core cracked developers? Or may be focus on vibe coders as well.

Any feedback is appreciated.
by secondbrain_io | 2025-05-27 17:41:54+00:00
Looking awesome! If it's not a secret, what's the reason for going with 1-time payment, besides subscriptions?

Maybe it would also be cool to allow 1-time download (many times, people just need to animate 1 SVG, but they don't wanna pay for full software). So let's say $10 for 1 SVG would be a great deal
by bitmasher9 | 2025-05-27 17:42:00+00:00
How much goes on FB Marketplace depends on how economical the student is. Most students will only consider this for their biggest ticket items.

Students are dealing with graduation, job placement, saying goodbye to friends, welcoming family coming in for graduation, etc. Honestly most people have better uses of their time then making a few hundred dollars on the second hand market, especially for the students most well off.
by toomuchtodo | 2025-05-27 17:42:00+00:00
It looks like unionizing and organizing when you can, and civil complaints against your employer when you can (constructive dismissal by changing work arrangement unilaterally). Also, to your point, looking for another remote job when you've exhausted your options (always be passively searching for your next role, always keep your professional network hot, etc).

Jamie Dimon is almost 70, he will be gone eventually ("Progress occurs one funeral at a time" -- Max Planck). Workers today are able to grind forever against old management who keeps aging out in a structural demographic macro where there are less workers in the working age population every year. 2M people 55+ age out every year in the US, ~5k per day. 4M Boomers retire every year, ~11k per day. These people and ideas will leave the labor force eventually, either through retirement or death.

Why do we collectively care what old CEOs think (average age of US CEO is 58)? "Because I say so?" Nah. So long, thanks for the suboptimal mental model because their work is their identity and status, and they strongly believe in command and control without concern over the wellbeing of their workers. We can do better.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/bryanrobinson/2022/05/05/remote...

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35379616/

https://www.epi.org/blog/americans-favor-labor-unions-over-b...

https://news.gallup.com/poll/12751/labor-unions.aspx

https://www.employmentlawwatch.com/2024/10/articles/employme...

https://www.mckinsey.com/mgi/our-research/dependency-and-dep...

https://www.cato.org/cato-journal/spring/summer-2018/demogra...

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
by Rochus | 2025-05-27 17:42:07+00:00
I used the site as intented. I was referring to the discussions which happened under the question independetly of answers (and which usually were not the intended outcome). Most of my questions resulted only in such "discussions" and usually there was no answer or just one which recommended to not ask the question. I neither care much whether the people who blocked my questions are called admins or moderators or whatever, the outcome is the same.
by helge9210 | 2025-05-27 17:42:29+00:00
> biggest control-freaks

"control-freak" not necessary. For any known sequence/set of feature requirements it is possible to choose an optimal abstraction.

It's also possible to order the requirements in such a way, that introduction of next requirement will entirely invalidate an abstraction, chosen for the previously introduced requirements.

Most of the humans have trouble recovering from such a case. Those who do succeed are called senior software engineers.
by codeforafrica | 2025-05-27 17:43:09+00:00
I don't donate money to projects, instead give my time where I can. I am hiring junior developers when I can afford it, mentor students to work on FOSS projects and contribute to the FOSS community in various ways. I am also supporting a few children so they can go to school. Effectively, I am targeting the long game, raising the next generation of FOSS contributors. So far this is all funded by myself. If you would like to contribute, please contact me. http://codingforafrica.at/
by consumer451 | 2025-05-27 17:43:37+00:00
As the context grows, all LLMs appear to turn into idiots, even just at 32k!

> We evaluate 12 popular LLMs that claim to support contexts of at least 128K tokens. While they perform well in short contexts (<1K), performance degrades significantly as context length increases. At 32K, for instance, 10 models drop below 50% of their strong short-length baselines. Even GPT-4o, one of the top-performing exceptions, experiences a reduction from an almost-perfect baseline of 99.3% to 69.7%.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44107536
by modeless | 2025-05-27 17:43:44+00:00
As they're described here, Pyrefly's design choices make more sense to me. I like the way Typescript does type inference and it seems like Pyrefly is closer to that. Module-level incrementalism also seems like a good tradeoff. Fine-grained incrementalism on a function level seems like overkill. Performance should be good enough that it's not required.
by seanmcdirmid | 2025-05-27 17:43:57+00:00
Most designers don't do that, and are plenty overworked in most organizations that they don't have time to gratuitously fiddle with new UI trends anyways. In fact, these kind of things usually come from non-designer VPs or SVPs who are trying to "spice" up the product much to the chagrin of designers on staff (I'm married to a UXD and this comes up often).
by brettkromkamp | 2025-05-27 17:44:12+00:00
What AI is going after, that is, the size of the pie, is the $50 trillion per year portion of global GDP that makes up wages. Putting aside the risks (which are enormous) when you see it that way you begin to understand OpenAI's valuation late last year, and that that's just the tip of the iceberg of what's coming.

The risk of disrupting a sizable chunk of the world's wages is fuel for a separate post and conversation. IMHO it's the real risk of AI, and the Skynet scenario around ASI/AGI that has been popularized is a distraction.

There is no end goal. It's just a bunch of independent actors who are all trying to get ahead of their competitors a step at a time. Two steps if they're lucky. The collective system steers into whichever direction was determined by the previous set of steps, with very little potential for any individual actor to turn it around.
by tgv | 2025-05-27 17:44:37+00:00
You can enjoy them either way: you can try to follow the individual voices, or listen to the overall texture, and you can switch too. It's all about enjoying the music as deeply as you can. Listen to it again, listen to other performances or re-arrangements, and see what you like best. There are people who don't like the organ, but many have been transcribed. Some organ pieces work even better on piano than organ.

But it's not for everyone. I had a colleague who called the violin double concerto tedious and long-winding, whereas I think of it as a fantastic piece which by itself is enough to put Bach in the top tier.
by jrochkind1 | 2025-05-27 17:44:59+00:00
There are more rich people in the US than when some of us middle-aged people were younger, the distribution of wealth has gotten much more uneven, while the numbers of rich have gotten larger.

So, yeah, a lot more just really rich students than there used to be, rich enough to think nothing of throwing out luxury goods, finding it more convenient than doing something else with them.

Then the increase of wealthy international students on top of that -- also richer than most students 20 years ago, and add on even less convenient to try to move anything back home or do anything else with it.
by mettamage | 2025-05-27 17:45:08+00:00
Getting any programming job. I was too stuck on working for FAANG and that made me apply for 1.5 years. Getting a job and just doing something meant I slowly got experience. The pay was shit, the experience was okay. But then after 6 months when I applied again, I was seen as someone "with experience" (in 2018). I felt it was really unfair/crazy because I wasn't that much better.

To this day the toughest things I've done technically are at uni (Rowhammer via JS, hacking binaries, creating computer graphic engines from scratch, etc.).

There were some things in industry that were tougher. Mostly: navigating millions of lines of code, at one company.
by BardiaPezeshki | 2025-05-27 17:45:40+00:00
The fiber cables we use are basically 2D arrays of 50um thick fibers that match the LED and detector arrays. We've made connectors and demonstrated very low crosstalk between the fibers. Advantage over VCSELs is much lower power consumption overall, much lower cost (LEDs are dirt cheap and extremely high yield), because we are blue light, the detector arrays are much easier and can be modified camera technology, and most importantly, much better reliability. VCSELs are notorious for bad rel.
by tshaddox | 2025-05-27 17:45:45+00:00
> an LLM has access to attacker-controlled data, sensitive information, and a data exfiltration capability

> THe "cardinal rule of agent design" should be that an LLM can have access to at most two of these during one session

I still don't really get it. Surely the older, simpler, and better cardinal rule is that you just don't expose any service to the Internet that you have given access to your private data, unless you directly control that service and have a very good understanding of its behavior.
by Shorel | 2025-05-27 17:46:05+00:00
You can only say that if you have no idea about cryptography. It is definitely true in the real world, but it needs the right context to be relevant.

It is related to Kerckhoffs principle: "The design of a system should not require secrecy, and compromise of the system should not inconvenience the correspondents"

This means that all of the security must reside on the key and little or nothing in the method, as methods can be discovered and rendered ineffective if that's not the case. Keep in mind that this is for communication systems where it is certain that the messages will be intercepted by an hostile agent, and we want to prevent this agent to read the messages.

When implementing modern cryptographic systems, it is very easy to misuse the libraries, or to try to reimplement cryptographic ideas without a deep understanding of the implications, and this leads to systems that are more vulnerable than intended.

Security by obscurity is the practice of some developers to reinvent cryptography by applying their cleverness to new, unknown cryptosystems. However, to do this correctly, it requires deep mathematical knowledge about finite fields, probability, linguistics, and so on. Most people have not spent the required decades learning this. The end result is that those "clever" systems with novel algorithms are much less secure than the tried and true cryptosystems like AES and SSL. That's why we say "security by obscurity" is bad.

Now, going back to the main topic: Hacker News is not a cryptographic system where codified messages are going to be intercepted by an hostile actor. Therefore Kerckhoffs principle doesn't apply.
by zahlman | 2025-05-27 17:46:12+00:00
The point of an LLM is that it can take your problem as input, along with answers to previously asked questions (perhaps implicit) in its training data, and attempt to synthesize a solution to a problem as output. Here, a "question" is something that can be found with a search engine - something that directly presents the/a crux of an issue, which is identified after a debugging session (for a problem in existing code; for projects still in the design phase, a how-to question emerges after coming up with user stories and breaking tasks down into their logical steps). The point is that the question can be relevant to many different people who have written different code which encounters different problems - all caused fundamentally by the same conceptual misunderstanding (or non-understanding).

Stack Overflow is explicitly not designed or intended to solve problems or do the decomposition of the problem for you, nor the synthesis of answers. Because the result would never be useful to anyone else. The entire point is to have something searchable, and to allow answer-writers to keep their explanations DRY.

This has spectacularly failed, because no matter how frustrated people get with traditional discussion forums (https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/979:_Wisdom_of_th... among many other typical complaints), they apparently are much more suited to human nature.

Heaven knows how Wikipedia managed to avoid devolving into "Quora but even worse because you can scribble over someone else's post".
by tdeck | 2025-05-27 17:46:42+00:00
> Everybody talks about evironmentalism execept they don't actually practice it.

I think this is just a lack of planning and options for many students. Think about it - it's the end of the year, you've got a pile of exams to study for, and then a week or two later you've got to be out of the dorms. Many students don't have a car to haul things to Goodwill or sell them further afield, and nobody on campus wants to buy their stuff because everyone else is moving out at the same time. If they look into shipping the stuff, they find it's prohibitively expensive. So the only option available in the time they have is to trash it.