MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by sorcerer-mar | 2025-05-20 14:29:22+00:00
There's more manufacturing than there ever has been in the United States.

It doesn't make low value-added goods like TVs, it doesn't employ a lot of people, and it's not growing as fast as other sectors, but we still manufacture more than ever before.

The “crumbling” sensation is because fewer people are employed by it and more people are employed (and earning more) in other sectors.
by alexey-salmin | 2025-05-20 14:29:29+00:00
The rail gauge doesn't really matter but personally I wish Europe adopted the Russian loading gauge with 3.750m wide cars opposed to 3.080m wide. It makes a big difference on the comfort of sleeping carriages, you also have +2 seats on 2nd/3rd class sitting carriages and +1 seat on the 1st class.

That's of course completely impossible but one can dream.
by rcarmo | 2025-05-20 14:29:37+00:00
Yeah, I limit context by regularly trimming the TODOs. I like having 5-6 in one file because it sometimes informs the LLM as to how to complete the first in a way that makes sense for the follow-ups.

READMEs per module also help, but it really depends a lot on the model. Gemini will happily traipse all over your codebase at random, gpt-4.1 will do inline imports inside functions because it seems to lack any sort of situational awareness, Claude so far gets things mostly right.
by Lerc | 2025-05-20 14:31:27+00:00
>it’s mostly about the paid-for services Deno Inc offers.

In a way I think that's a good thing. Their plan for making money is to provide those services. That goal is enhanced by Deno being healthy. I would be more concerned if Deno was the product they were wanting to sell.

As long as Deno itself is FOSS, then I think I'm ok with it.
by Cthulhu_ | 2025-05-20 14:32:12+00:00
> why didn't it do so in 1945 when it was there for the taking

They tried, but weren't able to defeat them completely; a deal / armistice was made in the end.

> Finland lost 12% of its land area, 20% of its industrial capacity, its second largest city, Vyborg, and the ice-free port of Liinakhamari

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finland#World_War_II
by djoldman | 2025-05-20 14:32:20+00:00
> If a member of your family turned into a radicalized neo-nazi not talking about it is like abandonding them, just like it would be if they got a clinical depression.

I think it would be hard to find an adult with clinical depression who would choose to have clinical depression if it was a choice.

Believing that socio-political and economic theories like neo-nazism are superior is an opinion. It's hard to find folks without opinions.

* If someone is talking neo-nazism all the time and that's not interesting to you, then don't talk to them about it.

* If anyone is breaking the law to support some political cause... stay away.

What matters is what people do.

It seems people are looking constantly for reasons to dislike others. Looking for common ground may be a better way to connect.
by xeonmc | 2025-05-20 14:33:08+00:00
> (mmap's created could only be as large as the file's current size as in Windows, while Linux/BSD semantics allows for a mmap larger than the file that's usable without constant remapping as the file grows).

I thought you could do it using ntdll functions, no?

https://www.jeremyong.com/winapi/io/2024/11/03/windows-memor...
Ask HN: Can sharded contexts scale up to long-context with global composition?
by deazy | 2025-05-20 14:33:29+00:00
I was exploring this conceptual architecture for neural networks (transformers/attention) based long-context models, its conceptual but grounded in sound existing research and architecture implementations on specialized hardware like gpu's and tpu's.

Can a we scale up independent shards of (mini) contexts, i.e Sub-global attention blocks or "sub-context experts" that can operate somewhat independently with global composition into a larger global attention as a paradigm for handling extremely long contexts. Context shared, distributed and sharded across chips, that can act as Independent shards of (mini) Contexts.

This could possibly (speculating here) make attention based context sub-quadratic. Its possible (again speculating here) google might have used something like this for having such long context windows.

Evidence points to this: Google's pioneering MoE research (Shazeer, GShard, Switch), advanced TPUs (v4/v5p/Ironwood) with massive HBM & high-bandwidth 3D Torus/OCS Inter-Chip Interconnect (ICI) enabling essential distribution (MoE experts, sequence parallelism like Ring Attention), and TPU pod VRAM capacities aligning with 10M token context needs. Google's Pathways & system optimizations further support possibility of such a distributed, concurrent model.

Share your thoughts on this if its possible, feasible or why it might not work.
by ComplexSystems | 2025-05-20 14:34:40+00:00
I really liked this article, though I don't know why the author is calling the idea of finding a separating surface between two classes of points "topology." For instance, they write

"If you are trying to learn a translation task — say, English to Spanish, or Images to Text — your model will learn a topology where bread is close to pan, or where that picture of a cat is close to the word cat."

This is everything that topology is not about: a notion of points being "close" or "far." If we have some topological space in which two points are "close," we can stretch the space so as to get the same topological space, but with the two points now "far". That's the whole point of the joke that the coffee cup and the donut are the same thing.

Instead, the entire thing seems to be a real-world application of something like algebraic geometry. We want to look for something like an algebraic variety the points are near. It's all about geometry and all about metrics between points. That's what it seems like to me, anyway.
by linsomniac | 2025-05-20 14:35:03+00:00
>It's still a miserable experience to maintain it...

How so? I've been maintaining an instance for a decade, and it really doesn't seem that bad. Updating plugins we do about monthly, it's largely clicking a couple buttons in the UI. Updating Jenkins itself is an apt update. Groovy takes a bit to grok, sure, LLMs help a lot here. The UX isn't that bad, IMHO, but I can see why some would say that. We've switched over almost entirely to using a couple runners, docker, and Jenkinsfiles, which works great. We do still run deploys directly on the Jenkins box, largely because we need to run them single-threaded so they don't step on each-other with load balancer rotations.
by fwn | 2025-05-20 14:35:36+00:00
This seems like a tangent. The article isn’t about whether the ICC’s jurisdiction is valid—it's about how dependent international institutions (or anyone, really) are on US-based tech providers, and how that exposes them to US executive power, like sanctions or account blocks.

I’m not convinced that “digital sovereignty” is the right framing for this problem. What I think is more important here - and probably more interesting to HN - is the fragility introduced by technological monocultures and lack of service portability. Open protocols, interoperability, and reducing concentration risk matter more than trying to build a digitally fenced-off Europe.
by Reason077 | 2025-05-20 14:35:50+00:00
> "For routes where this happened I don't see why we couldn't upgrade the stations to a bigger loading guage and have double decker trains."

The costs would be high and the benefits negligible. Where more capacity is required, it's typically easier to lengthen existing trains, or run more trains, than to go adapting stations and building new unique double-decker trains that are only going to be compatible with a specific line.

And, as mentioned elsewhere, double-deckers have a big disadvantage in lengthening dwell times (due to less doors per passenger), which could result in slower services.
by vrighter | 2025-05-20 14:36:05+00:00
If there is a single objective right answer, the model should output a probability of 1 for it, and 0 for everything else. Ex. If I ask "Is a sphere a curved object?" The one and only answer is "100% yes" not "I am 99% sure it is" (and once in a while actually say it isn't)

This is pretty much impossible to achieve with current architectures (which aren't all that different to those of old, just bigger). If they did, then they'd be woefully overfitted. They can't be made reliable. Anyone who understands the tech does know this.
by kibwen | 2025-05-20 14:37:26+00:00
If correctness is a secondary consideration, then you'll be happy to learn that LLMs will let you code in plain English, so there's no need to bother with using a programming language at all. The LLM will happily fill in all the holes it encounters, more eagerly than any compiler would ever dream of.

But for people who prioritize precision and correctness, that's what programming languages were invented for.
by obblekk | 2025-05-20 14:37:54+00:00
This is incredibly well written.

The oil example is very compelling for import substitution. And the covid example is interesting in showing the savings rate only went up as an offset of gov spending.

I'd love to see a follow up on (a) is it important for the US to increase domestic savings and (b) what are the best policies to do so, and why are they the best?

I imagine blanket tariffs might actually increase the savings rate because they increase the cost of importing all goods when the domestic alternatives are either inferior or more expensive. But I'm curious if they are the best way to achieve the savings goal.
by ale42 | 2025-05-20 14:38:02+00:00
I'm not sure where is the security issue here. As already noted, one can just put several --proxy-header arguments, so the functionality is equivalent.

The only way this would do something unexpected (and not necessarily dangerous besides breaking the service) would be if the curl command would be used in a scenario like: (1) curl is used by some script to access some API or other URL, (2) a user can configure the script to give a specific value to an header, let's say an authentication token or similar, but the user can't directly alter the curl command (e.g. because they can only change URL and TOKEN with a web interface). Here the user would be able to add an header IF the script is not properly sanitizing the input (so the supposed security issue IMHO would be in the script), but if adding an additional header breaks security, the underlying system has a problem too...

In a very far-stretched scenario, one can possibly add two CRLFs and have the rest of the header (if any) considered by the server as data. IF the request is a POST/PUT/... request, and IF the server returns (or allows later access to) the data, and IF the attacker manipulating the supposedly-restricted single-header can see the output of the call (or retrieve the saved data), then we'd have an information disclosure issue. Would it disclose anything sensitive? Not sure, unless there's an auth token or something AFTER the header. And again, I'd rather incriminate the curl caller for not sanitizing the input if this happens.
by raincole | 2025-05-20 14:38:19+00:00
> Engines are the easy part.

> The real meat & potatoes is all the tooling and content and asset pipelines around the engine.

When people talk about engines they often include the asset pipelines and editors by default. Engines today are not just a main loop + 3D API calls. Very few devs will say we're going to use Unity but only for its rendering code.

(Of course I'm not implying as long as you use Unity/Unreal you'll never need to write your own asset tools.)
by elzbardico | 2025-05-20 14:39:08+00:00
Yes. Too much of a good thing, or a good thing at the wrong place or instant of time, ends up not being a good thing.

I would recommend against having sex in a subway station at rush hour, or drinking French Cognac during a job interview, although both are good things.

We can and should discuss how much trade deficit, and the nature of it, but in essence, it is still a good thing if you don't owe to other countries money in a currency you don't control to have this deficit.
by o_m | 2025-05-20 14:39:17+00:00
Most people and even most companies don't need horizontal scaling. Hardware has been much faster and cheaper since Heroku's heyday. Scaling vertically with 80+ cores on a single CPU and 256gb+ of ram only costs a few hundred dollars a month these days. With caching on a server like that, it can handle a million requests a second, or tens of thousands a second for dynamic data from the database on the same server.
by iggldiggl | 2025-05-20 14:39:32+00:00
While narrower gauges are somewhat more favourable to tighter curve radii, ultimately the difference is negligible enough that it can be ignored. At the extreme end of the range, curve radii for standard gauge trams can go down into the 10 – 15 m range just the same as metre gauge networks, and for mainline railways curve radii instead are usually limited by vehicle geometry and mostly line speeds (centrifugal forces), which (especially the latter) aren't related to the track gauge.

You're right about switches though – if you keep the rest of the switch geometry (angle, radius) the same (and to some extent you have to if you want to keep existing speeds across switches), the large track gauge alone will make the switch somewhat longer, which at least in complex stations with huge clusters of switches (like e.g. https://www.google.com/maps/@50.1039604,8.6563677,197m/data=...) could potentially cause some headaches.
by vel0city | 2025-05-20 14:39:52+00:00
If I'm buying 3 sandwiches a week most weeks of the year (or similar eating out) that's like 150 meals a year. Adding an extra $10 to that is $1,500.

I might get a new phone every 2-3 years. A $1,000 increase in my phone cost is $333-500/yr on average. And honestly if they jump $1,000 I'll probably try even harder to stretch it out another year or more.

A $10 sandwich going to $20 is probably going to be far more impactful to my budget than a phone going up $1,000 in price.
by socalgal2 | 2025-05-20 14:40:00+00:00
Good or not, many languages choose not to support emoji, even newer ones.

The reasons are complicated but, many people prefer unicode normalization so that different forms of what appear to be the same word are considered the same word. People argue whether or not this is important but it can certainly be argued that it would be frustrating to get an error like

let café = 1; café += 1; // error, unknown identifier 'café'

The error happens in non-normalizing languages because those to idenifiers are not the same unicode.

But, choosing a normalization affects emoji as well. Worse, when new ones are added the normalization rules can change.
by corytheboyd | 2025-05-20 14:40:29+00:00
I’d love to skip to the end of the AI capitalism any% speedrun.

We will emerge from the tunnel, still with LLMs, but they will be tastefully integrated as sub-components of greater systems.

The displaced software engineers will be hired back to do the janitorial work of scrubbing chatbots and all otherwise broken token-streaming text boxes off of the internet. Hopefully they get hired back on full time.

We will know who all the idiots are during that brief period of bag holding where the LinkedIn profiles are still plastered with nonsense like “Senior Principal AI Adopter & Ethics Officer.” It won’t matter, they will still fail up, but it will be funny.
by mpweiher | 2025-05-20 14:40:34+00:00
> what a human on the internet may have said in response

Yes.

Except.

The current societal narrative is still that of discrimination against female candidates, research such as Williams/Ceci[1].

But apparently the actual societal bias, if that is what is reflected by these LLMs, is against male candidates.

So the result is the opposite of what a human on the internet is likely to have said, but it matches how humans in society act.

[1] https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1418878112
by soychai | 2025-05-20 14:41:18+00:00
For too long, enterprise software teams have been sold a false choice: trade autonomy for control, velocity for compliance, innovation for governance. All under the banner of the “platform.”

But here’s the truth: most platforms weren’t built for your world. They were built to lock you in, box you out, and force you to play by someone else’s rules.

At CloudBees, we believe in a different path.
by bryanlarsen | 2025-05-20 14:41:24+00:00
The need for bathing varies greatly depending on whether you use soap or not. It's possible to not stink if you don't use soap, but it requires very frequent bathing. In my experience if I actively sweat for any reason and it's been more than 4 hours since my last soap-less bath, my odor will be offensive to some people. If I can avoid actively sweating, I can get through a work day.
by grues-dinner | 2025-05-20 14:41:43+00:00
Maybe, but you can also get into some very lucrative careers by grinding points, cheating, colluding and generally gaming the system. I know of lots of people who got top-class STEM degrees and yet had barely any actual skills in the subject beyond what they needed to pass exams. They don't give a fuck they didn't really understand thermocouples or river formation or whatever. They answered the formulaic exam questions by rote and checked every marking criteria of the list for their coursework.

If AI makes their kids miscalculate and end up failing in a revamped AI-resistant educational system that actually requires learning to pass, I'll laugh.
by jcranmer | 2025-05-20 14:42:55+00:00
> What you're really saying here, is that Russians are fundamentally different people than you, because they fall for any dumb propaganda, whereas you don't.

No, I don't read that at all. There's plenty of Russian propaganda that Westerners have fallen for hook, line, and sinker, chief among them the idea that all Russian speakers are actually Russian and want to be a part of the Russia.

The point is that the propagandists don't need to base their propaganda on truth. A salient historical example here is actually World War II: the Germans tried to provoke Poland into overreacting and causing a major incident in Danzig to justify their invasion of Poland. The Poles refused to play ball, so when the appointed hour came, the Germans made up some atrocity and used it as the basis of the declaration of war, faking the evidence early in the invasion. Given that Russia has already used a similar pretext regarding Russian speakers in Ukraine, it's not a surprise that the Baltics are nervous about Russia doing the exact some thing with regards to Russian speakers in their territories.
by mindslight | 2025-05-20 14:42:57+00:00
At least for my lifetime, the reactionary hatemongering has always existed on talk radio. It was used by the larger Republican party to get people all riled up against the system, and our society as a whole, but then calm them down enough to get them into the voting booth to vote for the "less bad" status quo Republicans.

I grew up [second hand] listening to a lot of this, and as I came of age I could never understood why there was so much cynical condemnation of the system but yet the cognitive dissonance to keep voting for more of the system. But I guess farming this dissonant frustration was just the whole point. Another way of looking at it is that Trumpism is this populist monster escaping, devouring the Party traditionalists, and leaving Republicans with nothing but Trump.

In some sense I think that is large part of what's fueling the fascist energy is the fact that Trump is not a [traditional] Republican, a conservative, a moral person, a competent businessman, etc. So throwing your support behind him is already buying into a Big Lie where up is down, there are no values or morals, just purely allegiance to what Dear Leader has declared is true. That none of Trump's policy positions make sense is a feature for keeping that support in line - independent thinkers who would point out the contradictions are ostracized and othered. Essentially the worst social dynamics of "woke" most everyone was wary of, but we had/have forgotten how much worse they can be when power is wielded autocratically rather than bureaucratically.
by gwern | 2025-05-20 14:43:36+00:00
OP's workflow might be much more efficient with use of https://github.com/gildas-lormeau/SingleFile/

It can handle most of what they describe for things like private/paywalled pages or media enclosures or completely self-contained archives that live locally or easy to use or editing before saving or ensuring lazy-loaded images are there, you can view it immediately to check for breakage, it automatically works with adblock and NoScript and when you delete stuff in the DOM using the picker so they can clean each page very efficiently (create a bunch of rules in your adblock by picking elements like in ublock, so you never have to do those again, then quickly mouse any remainder), and it stores the final DOM so you can interact with stuff to make sure it is visible or archived.

So what I do ( https://gwern.net/archiving#preemptive-local-archiving ) is I have a script which calls SingleFile-CLI in a headless Chrome browser to automatically archive everything, and then opens up the original URL + snapshot in my normal Firefox, and look at the snapshot then original. If the snapshot looks good, I simply close the 2 tabs after a few seconds and I'm done; if the snapshot looks bad, then I look at the original and make edits: use Ublock Origin to define any necessary rules (assuming the page isn't cleaned up by all the rules I previously defined), make any minor tweaks to the DOM, and then SingleFile-browser-extension it manually.

If you use enough adblock rules, then you get a similar effect to the 'templates' described, since it looks like OP is mostly just trying to remove as much as possible. But since you're archiving the final DOM, you can do anything you like. Something I've done a few times is opening up multiple pages and copy-pasting the key DOM node from each of them into the first one, to create a single consolidated master page, in a way which is a lot easier & more reliable than messing around with the serialized HTML in Emacs.

You can also post-process them. (Because we use these local archives for 'previews' on Gwern.net, and a fully static self-contained HTML page can easily be 100MB+ with all its fonts and images and stuff, we take the SingleFile snapshots and for the large ones, we 'split' them back up, so loading the .html file doesn't necessarily load everything else: https://github.com/gwern/gwern.net/blob/master/build/deconst... And then you can save a lot of space by running standard optimization tools on the split-out files, eg OptiPNG on the revealed PNGs will save gigabytes of space because so many people fail to do the standard image optimizations.)

Compared to "it typically takes me a few minutes to save a page", I handle the majority of pages in a few seconds, and even the nastiest page where I have to delete a lot is usually like a minute. And since I do like 10 URLs a day, this is quite manageable at scale. (I'm up to >15k snapshots, although an unknown fraction are from an initial bulk archiving so may not be of high quality.)