MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by hoseyor | 2025-05-31 10:46:17+00:00
Not only that, but the whole system was such that the very type and nature of the support led to ever more dependency and creation of yet more need that the system could then further argue needed more support, i.e., a self-licking ice cream cone.

Worse yet, at the cost and expense of people who are damaged by being forced to support this system against their will.

I propose that everyone that supports things like USAID be able to willingly and freely sign up to have their taxes increased by whatever proportional amount is necessary to fund it every year. We need to move to a voluntarist system for anything but the tightest core functions of government.

It is a win-win, USAID continues and people get to feel good about themselves, while others are not damaged by being forced to support it against their will.
Ask HN: Slop Recruiting Emails from Meta?
by roxolotl | 2025-05-31 10:46:40+00:00
Has anyone else gotten AI slop recruiting emails from Meta? I received what’s clearly an unproofed email from a prompt like “Compare joining Meta to joining the Rebel Alliance.” Feels fake because it’s so bad but the email and author seem to checkout, though they could be faked of course. Here’s the first half:

I hope you're ready to embark on a journey that's out of this world! As a skilled product professional, you have the power to join the Rebel Alliance and help us bring balance to the Force.

The Mission:

Meta's products, such as Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, are like the Millennium Falcon - they're fast, agile, and always on the move. And just like Han Solo, they're primarily used by people around the globe, navigating through the galaxy of users and bringing people together.

But we need your help to take our mission to the next level. As a product professional at Meta, you'll have the opportunity to work on projects that have a global reach, just like the Rebel Alliance's quest to defeat the Empire. With your expertise, you'll be able to tap into a vast network of users across the galaxy, creating experiences that are as seamless as a lightsaber duel.
by miki123211 | 2025-05-31 10:46:42+00:00
I think how the authors of this post think about "AI agents" is really interesting.

Most people think of agents like they think of human employees. They set up a limited number of agents to run in parallel (often just one), with each agent running in a loop and doing one task at a time. They're still in a world where you have a fixed (on the timescale of hours or days) number of employees, each employee can only do one thing at a time, and transferring tasks between employees is slow and costly.

LLMs don't really work like that. You effectively have an infinite number of agents that you can conjure out of thin air at any time. There's no cost advantage to performing LLM requests in series rather than in parallel.

If you realize this, the pattern of each agent fanning out and forking itself into as many sub-agents as are needed to fulfill the task becomes obvious. This is exactly what the authors have done.

I think a better way to think of agents is as "tasks" or "jobs", like those you might find in Celery or sidekik, and apply the learnings from those.
by motorest | 2025-05-31 10:47:24+00:00
> This study brings to light a hidden problem of countries and individuals dependent on foreign aid. There should’ve been plans in place to reduce foreign aid dependency over time.

This would be a reasonable topic to discuss, if only these cuts to USAID didn't resulted in supplies decaying in warehouses. This means no cost was cut and no expense was averted: just waste. Those desperately depending on these supplies to survive simply didn't.

https://www.reuters.com/world/us-aid-cuts-leave-food-million...

It's like preaching people in food lines about the need to pull themselves by the bootstraps, and depriving from their next meal.
by theandrewbailey | 2025-05-31 10:48:07+00:00
It's not about length of support (I generally upgrade from LTS to LTS versions of software), it's about not wanting to be advertised to. (I had been using Ubuntu on my server for over a decade, and was always irritated about those MOTDs, even though I knew how to delete them.) I also moved away from Ubuntu for other reasons, like them pushing snap packages for browsers (and probably others I was unaware of).
by komali2 | 2025-05-31 10:49:01+00:00
That a capitalist society might achieve a 15 hour workweek if it maintained a "non debauched culture" and "culture homogeneity" is an extraordinary claim I've never seen a scrap of evidence for. Can you support this extraordinary claim?

That there's any cultural "degenerative debauchery" is an extraordinary claim. Can you back up this claim with evidence?

"Decimated," "muddled," and "polluted" imply you have an objective analysis framework for culture. Typically people who study culture avoid moralizing like this because one very quickly ends up looking very foolish. What do you know that the anthropologists and sociologists don't, to where you use these terms so freely?

If I seem aggressive, it's because I'm quite tired of vague handwaving around "degeneracy" and identity politics. Too often these conversations are completely presumptive.
by hnlmorg | 2025-05-31 10:49:15+00:00
> Otherwise a sudden halt of aid can lead to, well, exactly this.

A sudden halt in funding for any project, domestic or otherwise, is catastrophic to that project.

While I don’t disagree with your point, it’s also not really the crux of the problem.

Also it’s a lot easier said than done asking recipients of aid to become self sufficient. In a lot of cases the problems are either poverty, which means aid would still be needed to fund any “self sufficient” services, or that the foreign governments really are more corrupt than Trump. The end result often means people flee from their country and then Trump supporters start moaning about immigration. Ultimately you have to pay the price either way.

My personal opinion is that we should be paying too. In many cases you can trace these issues back to exploitation lead by the 1st world. So you could reasonably argue that we owe them this aid. But even if you don’t want to do it for reasons of morality, supporting developing countries still helps with the immigration “problem” in the long run.
by palmfacehn | 2025-05-31 10:49:36+00:00
This topic is going to be too divisive for a productive discussion. The framing is also troublesome. In a more reasonable world, I might expect abortion opponents to be included by the author in those who should oppose mass surveillance.

>Lawmakers who support reproductive rights must recognize that abortion access and mass surveillance are incompatible.

Putting aside the issue of abortion, it should be plain to see how mass surveillance is incompatible with basic civil liberties. Instead the inflammatory issue is used as a wedge.

It is disappointing to see activists playing narrowly, rather than speaking to the broader underlying principles.
by baq | 2025-05-31 10:50:12+00:00
It is if you want good results. I’ve been giving Gemini pro prompts for 200+ seconds multiple times per day this week and for such tasks I really like to make it double/triple check and sometimes give the results to Claude for review, too (and vice versa).

Ideally I can just run the prompt 100x and have it pick the best solution later. That’s prohibitively expensive and a waste of time today.
by jobigoud | 2025-05-31 10:51:16+00:00
It's very easy though, Right click > Block element > Create. Overlays show which blocks you are removing. Sliders can be used to increase/refine.

How can we make it even easier and visual? Customizing pages by removing elements should be part of the default browser experience to be honest. Like in the initial web where you would tweak the color of links, visited links, etc.
by jhanschoo | 2025-05-31 10:52:47+00:00
Hot take: Some valid rules are just brute-force search in an altered state space.

For example, a valid "advanced" rule is this: consider a line, then consider all permutations of ways to complete it given the current state of the line. If a square is filled in/crossed out in all these permutations, then it you may fill it in/cross it out.

This is an O(n!) algorithm! In practice you only have <5 permutations.
by pron | 2025-05-31 10:55:00+00:00
What you usually want to limit isn't the number of threads but the number of threads doing a particular operation, such as accessing some service, so it's more flexible (and efficient) to just guard that particular operation with a semaphore.

The only place where you may want to limit the number of threads is at the entry to the system, but since the semaphore is the construct for limiting the number of anything, you might as well just use that there, too. For example, if the number of requests currently being processed is too high (above the semaphore's number of leases), you don't accept new connections.
by diggan | 2025-05-31 10:56:08+00:00
> That’s prohibitively expensive

Assuming you experience is working within enterprise, you're then saying that cost is the biggest bottleneck currently?

Also surprising to me that enterprises would use out-of-the-box models like that, I was expecting at least fine-tuned models be used most of the time, for very specific tasks/contexts, but maybe that's way optimistic.
by richliss | 2025-05-31 10:56:57+00:00
With AI and robotics killing off huge amounts of entry level jobs in the next 5 years, the number of young men who are angry is going to absolutely explode.

Western countries are going to reap what they are sowing.

Feel free to copy and paste this question into your LLM of choice:

"What has happened throughout history to countries with lots of young men who don't have work or money?"
by CyberRymden | 2025-05-31 10:58:00+00:00
I think it absolutely makes sense. ChatGPT's strength is how generalised it is as a tool, but openAI will never able to adapt the platform to every single use case. You can absolutely use it to learn a language for instance, but a great AI language learning platform needs a better tailored UI, it needs all kinds of non-AI functionality around it like idk a spaced repetition system, it might need to integrate into other platforms, and good prompting to be effective. AI isn't the product itself, but a component to try to solve a problem. And honestly I wish more startups focused less on simply "AI" and more on the problems it should solve.

If for nothing else openAI won't be able to market itself for every single use case, and so long as people aren't using chatGPT for some use case (even if it could perform the task) there's still an opening.
by dustingetz | 2025-05-31 10:58:23+00:00
i would add that the reason no product manager wants to pay for #3 is because historical attempts to do so have overwhelmingly resulted in cost/schedule overruns; did-not-finish outcomes are common. Let he who believes otherwise demonstrate so with his own money, this is called a startup and note that virtually all startups fail i.e. run out of some critical resource without finishing! So what is a wisened product manager to do? No easy answers here - simply look to the industry to see what the average outcome is. And it is not for lack of trying. in my opinion software delivery is not a solved problem. but it is really hard to make money as a software delivery expert by going around and saying that you don’t know how to deliver software.
by mikelevins | 2025-05-31 10:58:33+00:00
At some moments there has to be a singular decision taken, such as which of two possible options to take. In such a moment some particular consciousness makes the decision, if it’s a decision made by a consciousness (though consciousness takes credit for more decisions than it actually makes, I think).

But granting that point does not grant that there is a single consciousness that is always (or ever) in charge, and it does not grant that any specific consciousness is associated with any specific singular narrative.

We know, scientifically speaking, some things that call the idea of a single consciousness with a single narrative into question. We know, for example from psychology of testimony that the same person’s memory of the same events differs at different times, and that the act of remembering rewrites memories. We have reason to suspect that the brain attributes to conscious choice decisions that are made too quickly for sensory data to reach the brain (and which may therefore be made elsewhere in the nervous system, even though the brain claims to have made the choice after the fact).

And I know from personal experience that some phenomena that normally appear to be singular conscious experiences can devolve into something else under some circumstances. For example, I have experienced blindsight, in which I cannot see something but can nevertheless collect accurate information from it by pointing my eyes at it. I have also experienced being asleep and awake at the same time.

Experiences like these are hard to account for if I assume that my consciousness is singular and continuous and in charge, but not so hard to account for if I assume that it’s a useful illusion cobbled together by a network of cooperating processes that usually (but not always) work well together. For example, many people might claim that it’s nonsense to say that a person can be asleep and awake at the same time, but it’s nonsense only if asleep and awake are mutually exclusive states of a singular consciousness. If, on the other hand, they are two neurological processes that are normally coordinated so that they don’t occur at the same time (because it’s less than useful for them to do so), then it’s not nonsense to observe that under unusual circumstances that coordination might be disrupted. Similarly, if seeing something is one process and consciously experiencing seeing it is a different process—normally, but not necessarily coordinated—then blindsight is not so hard to account for.

Not to mention that it’s trivially easy to find examples of consciousness not being in charge of our behavior, although it likes to think that it is.

I suggest that the supposed singular consciousness, supposedly in charge, may be an illusion constructed by a system of mostly, but not perfectly, coordinated cooperating processes.
by marvinblum | 2025-05-31 10:58:37+00:00
Yup, I've been running Altcha on pirsch.io for a while now, and it was super easy to set up, is free, and open-source.

One of the main reasons we've switched from hCaptcha is privacy. The server-side stuff can be self-hosted and there is a Golang integration. Really nice.

Here is the link for anyone who would like to take a look: https://altcha.org/
by b112 | 2025-05-31 10:58:53+00:00
For users? Hardly.

If you want stable, you want a non-changing branch with security fixes only. No surprises, no api changes, no config file changes.

And you don't want to be stuck on a non-security fix version. You cannot sit on the same version without tracking security, while you slowly retool and recode for breaking api/behaviour changes.

Debian stable has redis, and others, and will see backported security updates for the life of the support window.

This isn't just about redis. If you're doing this with anything, you must track secuirty updates, must stay up to date, or you are negligent. And tracking changes for infra stuff like redis, and other backend stuff is a waste of resources with typically zero benefit.

I won't touch core daemons like redis, if it isn't distro maintained. I have better things to do. More important things to worry about.
by safety1st | 2025-05-31 10:59:32+00:00
Respectfully, yes there is!

Foreign aid is not a thing governments dole out due to the kindness of their hearts.

More often than not its purpose is to curry military, economic or political favor with the recipient country.

More often than not a lot of it is skimmed off the top once it arrives.

The US loves to buy allies - reciprocity may come in the form of the country in question agreeing to a military base, or a trade deal. It can be as specific as "You will allow these specific US megacorps to do business in your country unhindered." This stuff isn't really secret at all, hang out at AmCham meetings overseas and you will hear all about it.

The folks back home, though, are generally unaware.

I don't support the death of 300k people either (which currently is not a real thing, it is in a model created by an academic). But the American public has every right to form opinions about whether this money is well spent and express them at the ballot box.

As an expat who has seen how a bit of the sausage is made overseas with this money, just shutting down USAID overnight was pretty reckless but I wouldn't be surprised if more than half of it was spent in ways that the average US taxpayer would be enraged by. This is a country with $36T of debt we're talking about, my main concern is I don't think Trump and Musk will go far enough.
by dgfitz | 2025-05-31 11:00:33+00:00
I for see that when people only employ AI for programming, it quickly hits the point where they train on their own (usually wrong) code and it spirals into an implosion.

When kids stop learning to code for real, who writes GCC v38?

This whole LLM is just the next bitcoin/nft. People had a lot of video cards and wanted to find a new use for them. In my small brain it’s so obvious.
by hnlmorg | 2025-05-31 11:00:40+00:00
I’m not arguing that LLMs are not AI. The problem is that “AI” itself is a nonsense term. It’s been around since forever and used to describe a whole plethora of different behaviours.

My point is that to the average user of Gemini or ChatGPT, LLMs are like AGI. Whereas they’re actually more closer to intellisense or text-completions.

And this is where the problem lies. People will read the output of LLMs and think it has read content on the topic (which is correct) and then deduced an answer (which is technically incorrect).

It also doesn’t help that OpenAI keep using terms like “reasoning” which sounds a lot like general intelligence. But it’s actually just a bunch of scales based on words.

AI doesn’t understand any of the core concepts it is reasoning about. So its reasoning is akin to asking a Hollywood script writer to throw a bunch of medical terms together for a new medical drama. Sure the words might be correct on their own, but that doesn’t mean the sentences are correct. And any subject matter expert who watches a drama that features their specialist subject will tell you that there’s more to understanding a subject than simply knowing the words.
by transpute | 2025-05-31 11:00:47+00:00
> Is there any guarantee that this "silicon support" is any safer than the software?

Safety and security claims are only meaningful in the context of threat models. As described in the Xen/uXen/AX video, pKVM and AWS Nitro security talks, one goal is to reduce the size, function and complexity of open-source code running at the highest processor privilege levels [1], minimizing dependency on closed firmware/SMM/TrustZone. Nitro moved some functions (e.g. I/O virtualization) to separate processors, e.g. SmartNIC/DPU. Apple used an Arm T2 secure enclave processor for encryption and some I/O paths, when their main processor was still x86. OCP Caliptra RoT requires OSS firmware signed by both the OEM and hyperscaler customer. It's a never-ending process of reducing attack surface, prioritized by business context.

> hardware would be subject to exactly the same bugs as software would, except it will be hard to update of course

Some "hardware" functions can be updated via microcode, which has been used to mitigate speculative execution vulnerabilities, at the cost of performance.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protection_ring

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transient_execution_CPU_vulner...
by hoseyor | 2025-05-31 11:00:50+00:00
It does not sound conspiratorial at all. I know this to be a fact from first person knowledge and experience that it is exactly what goes on in NGO board rooms. It’s not really all that different than the MIC though.

Abstracting a bit more, it’s also not really any different than aristocratic, monarchical, and even feudal patronage systems where your fortune and standing was directly linked to how close you could get to the monarch/center of power. In fact, I see the west devolving towards such patronage systems as power and wealth keeps concentrating. All across the board you see every more sycophancy as people grovel for benefits.
by antonvs | 2025-05-31 11:01:01+00:00
> "Bullshit jobs" are the rubbish required to keep the paperwork tidy, assessed and filed.

It's also the jobs that involve keeping people happy somehow, which may not be "productive" in the most direct sense.

One class of people that needs to be kept happy are managers. What makes managers happy is not always what is actually most productive. What makes managers happy is their perception of what's most productive, or having their ideas about how to solve some problem addressed.

This does, in fact, result in companies paying people to do nothing useful. People get paid to do things that satisfy a need that managers have perceived.
by versiqcontent | 2025-05-31 11:01:10+00:00
I read this essay today and it struck a chord. It discusses the odd feeling that some memories, preferences, or déjà vu moments don’t seem to fit your actual life, almost as if your identity is a work in progress, with previous “versions” still echoing through.

Curious if anyone here has experienced something similar, or if there’s a psychological or neurological explanation for these half-familiar feelings.
by threeseed | 2025-05-31 11:03:56+00:00
Only an insignificant minority of companies are running their own AI LLM models.

Everyone else is perfectly fine using whatever Azure, GCP etc provide. Enterprise companies don't need to be the fastest or have the best user experience. They need to be secure, trusted and reliable. And you get that by using cloud offerings by default and only going third party when there is a serious need.
by ourmandave | 2025-05-31 11:04:33+00:00
Stated in total $ of %

US 0.22% of GNI = $63.3B Norway 1% of GNI = $5.2B

I not only hate that they cut aid, but that they did it abruptly, like everything else. No fore thought or care of how it will impact anyone or if it's even legal.

Just one giant fuck you after another, all in the name of the isolationist America First.
by hoseyor | 2025-05-31 11:05:52+00:00
Just because things exist does not mean transporting and securely delivering them half way across the planet would be expense free.

But maybe you are right, there should have been a way for people who want to pay for the delivery and security of that aid out of their own pockets. It could have been a voluntary sign up of whatever the cost would have been, added as a proportional tax at the end of the year, anywhere from 1%-100% of net worth.
by exceptione | 2025-05-31 11:07:06+00:00
> but work out what it’ll take for the country to not need it and try to get there..

One moment. You are just asking to increase the program that will take generations, while being dependent on factors you don't influence.

Many African countries are overrun by Russian wagnerites, who protect local war lords and take control of natural resources. Part of the program is to ensure ongoing chaos and prevent local development.

Some other African countries are burried by Chinese debt, their "development" agenda is set by China with focus on extracting natural resources.

So that is why health, democracy, rule of law and state building is not on the agenda. Thus children die.

The USA has/had an organized administration, laws, police, hospitals etc. But if Americans in comfort even then bow their head for a weird mix of criminals and sectarians, what magic agency would you expect from a population living from health crisis to health crisis in extreme poverty?