MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by 827a | 2025-05-28 14:52:11+00:00
This is the entirely predictable and avoidable impact of hyperscale bureaucracy. Its not because people aren't paid enough (though, most aren't). Its because people in these systems aren't given enough agency. Humans crave authority, agency, and creativity.

Here's something I implore tech business leaders to think about: If you believe AI to be the world-changing technology you say it will be: It follows that you must believe that intelligence will become commoditized. What is going to differentiate your business from every other business as thought workflows become a commodity? I'm not sure I know the answer, but while most business leaders seem to believe the answer to live in "how much AI can we shove down our employees and customers throats", I suspect the real answer is the opposite. If AI is an omnipresent, powerful substrate of business delivery, like computers are today, available in-kind to every business, what will differentiate your business is how you handle the gaps between what AI is capable of. What is your human element? Are the humans just glue between AI agents or are they actually a differentiating factor?

All this is why I tend to believe AI is going to mean slow but complete death for hyperscale companies, and there's nothing they can do about it. The only survivors will be the ones providing AI services, and they'll be the next generation's IBM. The winners are going to be small companies, teams of ten that can now operate like a team of a hundred. These small teams will have access to the exact same thought workflow automations that the hyperscalers have access to, but they also have something that the hyperscalers don't: human agency and agility.
by RankingMember | 2025-05-28 14:52:20+00:00
I don't want to put quite that fine a point on it, but generally I agree. I think people see that wages have been stagnant for a long time and spending power has gone down. Working harder gives them marginal, if any, life improvement. I'm reminded of the Lithuanian immigrant character Jurgis Rudkus from Upton Sinclair's "The Jungle", whose response to continual setbacks was "I will work harder", only to ultimately be ground down and devoured by a job and life circumstances that could never be sated no matter how hard he worked.
by simonw | 2025-05-28 14:52:21+00:00
OK this looks like a very promising start!

You're using function-based tools at the moment, hence why you have to register each one individually.

The alternative to doing that is to use what I call a "toolbox", described here: https://llm.datasette.io/en/stable/python-api.html#python-ap...

Those get you two things you need:

1. A single class can have multiple tool methods in it, you just have to specify it once 2. Toolboxes can take configuration

With a Toolbox, your plugin could work like this:

llm -T 'MCP("path/to/mcp.json")' ...

You might even be able to design it such that you don't need a mcp.json at all, and everything gets passed to that constructor.

There's one catch: currently you would have to dynamically create the class with methods for each tool, which is possible in Python but a bit messy. I have an open issue to make that better here: https://github.com/simonw/llm/issues/1111
by CGMthrowaway | 2025-05-28 14:52:44+00:00
All of these chairs are upholstered. I've found it interesting that chairs were exclusively hard-surfaced for nearly all of human history, even among royalty who could afford a cushion. Hard chairs were seen as promoting discipline and moral uprightness while comfortable seating would have signalled weakness, decadence (in the archaic sense) or laziness.

Chairs themselves were a status symbol. Commoners would use stools or benches.
by mystified5016 | 2025-05-28 14:53:12+00:00
Yup, at work I have a few projects split across several repos in like four languages. A completely new feature implemented across the whole stack involves PRs in up to 8 different repos. Potentially more.

To be totally honest, yes this is an unbelievable pain in the ass, but I much prefer the strict isolation. Having worked with (much, much) smaller monorepos, I find the temptation to put code anywhere it fits too much, and things quickly get sloppy. With isolated repos, my brain much more clearly understands the boundaries and separation of concerns.

Then again, this results in a lot of code duplication that is not trivial to resolve. Submodules help to a degree, but when the codebase is this diverse, you're gonna have to copy some code somewhere.

I view it sort of like the split between inheritance and composition. You can either inherit code from the entire monorepo, or build projects from component submodules plugged together. I much prefer the latter solution, but clearly the former works for some people.
by carlosjobim | 2025-05-28 14:53:47+00:00
And what's your problem, exactly? You want to buy tickets to give away before you've decided who to give them to? Sorry, you can't do that. There are other people who also want the tickets and know who they are inviting. You have to wait until you've decided who to invite and you can't "scalp" those tickets, because you are not worth more than any other paying customer.

In worst case, you've bought tickets and the person you invited can't come: You sell the ticket back to the venue for a refund.

This attitude reminds me of what happens al the time at hotel front desk: They're fully booked for a certain date and some people call and e-mail, asking the hotel to cancel other guests reservations to give them a room. Sorry, not going to happen. First come, first served.

And as I said in another comment, artists and venues can price and release their tickets in such a way that people who are willing to pay much more can get some last-minute tickets.
How would you design a human internet protocol?
by yehudalouis | 2025-05-28 14:53:57+00:00
A good friend and I have been discussing the growing feeling that we're ready to "leave" the Internet as we know it. The AI slop on the websites we used to find the most utility in is getting unbearable. While I know that there are still high-quality websites hidden in the corners of the Internet untouched by AI (or relatively so), the fatigue we feel is certainly real.

It got us thinking -- if someone were to design a new Web, a new protocol that requires verification that a human is accessing it and only a human is submitting content/interacting/reading, what would the verification process look like?

Parameters for design: - Only humans can access - Only humans can interact (all CRUD must be done by a human) - Anonymity is the default -- if you wish to identify yourself, feel free - Must be able to use existing technology (a web browser)

What would the initial and ongoing realtime verification look like? How would you design it?
Show HN: Wetlands – a lightweight Python library for managing Conda environments
by arthursw | 2025-05-28 14:54:04+00:00
When building a plugin system for an application, avoiding dependency conflicts is critical. To address this, I created Wetlands – a lightweight Conda environment manager.

Wetlands not only simplifies the creation of isolated Conda environments with specific dependencies, but also allows you to run arbitrary Python code within those environments and retrieve the results. It uses the multiprocessing.connection and pickle modules for inter-process communication. Additionally, one can easily use shared memory between the environments, making data exchange more efficient.

Docs: https://arthursw.github.io/wetlands/latest/ Source: https://github.com/arthursw/wetlands/

I’d really appreciate any feedback. Thanks!
by palmotea | 2025-05-28 14:54:11+00:00
> That article comes at the same time I am blocked by PayPal's stupid captcha because I don't have a "web GPU" (whatever that shit is) in my browsers (even on Chromium) despite having 2FA enabled.

That's fun. I have a coworker who had to disable that on his laptop, because ads were crashing his machine.

Yeah, it's a hardware problem and he should get a new one, but that's a lot of trouble (and may not be feasible for someone who bought their own machine).
by simonw | 2025-05-28 14:54:44+00:00
Here's one: https://github.com/icarito/gtk-llm-chat

I've been meaning to put together a web UI for ages, I think that's the next big project now that tools is out.

It's not using LLM, but right now one of the best UI options out there is https://openwebui.com/ - it works really well with Ollama (and any other OpenAI-compatible endpoint).
by JulianGough123 | 2025-05-28 14:54:47+00:00
I’m slightly startled to see my Blowtorch Theory post at number one here. (A friend sent me a screenshot, so I came over to check if he was joking.)

I’m happy to answer questions, though I will be dealing with a five-year-old and eating dinner at the same time, which may lead to delayed responses.
by metalman | 2025-05-28 14:54:53+00:00
all they did was move the resonance problem with there fuel lines somewhere else.......and it should be noted that there top shelf guy who was doing resonance mitigating design and engineering, left the company last year, quietly, all smiles and handshakes. resonance is test bench defying, in that real world issues only show up when there is no dampening effects from iether bieng bolted to a test stand or even just sitting on the ground under the influence of gravity, so figuring it out on the ground requires, math, mojo, and experience.Lots of counterintuive gotcha's as well.
by amluto | 2025-05-28 14:54:55+00:00
Segmenting data is exactly what writing it into non-overlapping Parquet files is. My point is that many tools can read a bucket full of these segments, and most of them can handle a scheme where each file corresponds to a single value of a column, but none of them can agree on how to efficiently segment the data where each segment contains a range, unless a new column is invented for the purpose and all queries add complexity to map onto this type of segmentation.

There’s nothing conceptually or algorithmically difficult about what I want to do. All that’s needed is to encode a range of times into the path of a segment. But Hive didn’t do this, and everyone implemented Hive’s naming scheme, and that’s the status quo now.
by cmovq | 2025-05-28 14:55:11+00:00
Yeah it’s nice even just to avoid having to set up a vertex buffer:

ivec2 vert = ivec2(gl_VertexID & 1, gl_VertexID >> 1); out_uv = 2.0 * vec2(vert); gl_Position = vec4(out_uv * 2.0 - 1.0, 0.0, 1.0);
by toomuchtodo | 2025-05-28 14:55:18+00:00
Acting their wage is reasonable. Can't ask for a smile and pride in work from those forced to participate in the torment nexus. 60 percent of Americans can't afford to meet their basic needs, for example.

If we want better outcomes, employers must provide the necessary comp, benefits, and work life balance to arrive at those outcomes. Otherwise, we get slop because that's what is paid for.
by jnsie | 2025-05-28 14:55:31+00:00
Living in a tiny urban apartment, this is a problem I am interested in a solution for. However, I always read that such solutions might block the noise for the toilet-user, but not for those outside of the toilet. I'm curious as to the efficacy of a white noise machine versus this device and, specifically, if either is really effective. It's an interesting solution, OP, an I commend you for your efforts - but I fear $150 is going to be a difficult sell.
by bredren | 2025-05-28 14:55:47+00:00
I think the tenacity to deliver a product is great and hope that you get good feedback here. Congratulations on shipping a second version.

I had thought that noise machines were primarily for people who would be listening. For example, therapists put white noise machines in the waiting area, not where the session is occuring.

So, this sound provides the sense of privacy but would be better set up outside the bathroom to those who might hear, uh, human sounds inside.
by justin66 | 2025-05-28 14:55:53+00:00
> The buildings around me that take the better part of a decade to build (really? A parking garage takes six years?)

I occasionally point out to my neighbors that a new seven-story apartment building down the street took as long to build as the Empire State Building. Denial and/or a lack of understanding that this might represent a problem are common.

(if you don't adjust for inflation it cost about the same in USD to build, but that's a separate topic)
by JoshTriplett | 2025-05-28 14:55:59+00:00
To clarify something: I feel the same way about excessive amounts of parking. Taxis are much better on that front, and provide point-to-point transportation. I would love to see a fleet of electric taxis forming part of the public transportation strategy. (In an ideal future world, I'd love to see self-driving electric taxis.)

And I absolutely think that paths for walkers and paths for cars should not intersect; either cars should be underground or walking paths should be raised (which, if built densely enough, is roughly equivalent).
by sponaugle | 2025-05-28 14:56:28+00:00
Eliezer (the author of this piece, in 2023) is best described as a 'technical blowhard'. He very much likes to pontificate about things that are so unrealistic that they sound like a great fiction novel. His career has moved into the stage where he tells people the great work they are doing is going destroy the world while sitting comfortable in an arm chair. He loves talking about an industry that he isn't actually in.
by ge96 | 2025-05-28 14:56:39+00:00
Most jobs I've had I use a macbook and I take daily notes in the Apple Notes app

Ex:

W22 D111 Wed May 28, 2025 (7)

The (7) means hours since I'm a contractor and I do walks/subtracts time that I fill in with PTO

I will probably get a remarkable 2 again at some point, it seems redundant if you have a tablet like device (I have a Surface Book 3) but that is rarely used funny. I used to use an RM2 a lot but had to sell it when I needed cash. It's cool that it's programmable.
by nosianu | 2025-05-28 14:56:54+00:00
> Classic example is gov't work - taxpayers pay money, and has no say.

I would claim this is not a good example at all.

A lot of the specific requirements of public jobs, all the documentation and endless rules, comes from the public reacting very negatively to any reports of waste, perceived misspending., etc. So now everybody is covering their asses by being overly bureaucratic, doing exactly what's written, following the many many rules to the letter. Just like many especially lower-level jobs in large corporations, you just follow the book and please don't show any initiative.

If the public had nothing to say, you really think the bureaucracy would have developed with all those restrictions and checks and counter-checks and rules? I don't think so. That has to come from pressure from somewhere, and when you follow news, every time there is a news report about something going wrong in government, politicians do get pressure.

All the rules don't make the problem go away of course, but everybody in the chain can point to the rules and say "I followed them to the letter!" and be fine.

Example, rules like the ones in the EU that even local projects have to be announced in the whole of the EU and accept bids from everywhere, combined with lots of documentation rules and rules for selecting the winning bids.

Sure, there's more or less subtle ways around those rules (just like in large corporations), but the point is that they exist.

I would claim a lot of the idiosyncrasies of government bureaucracy exists exactly because of the public.
by close04 | 2025-05-28 14:57:11+00:00
> Not only is working too much bad, but competence and intelligence itself is bad.

That could be also because of the employer's rising expectations. The baseline expectation goes up as soon as one person overdelivers. The "making us look bad" doesn't mean you underdeliver, just that it's all of a sudden proven that all of you could do more.

When another employer offers higher salary you might also go to your current job suddenly pissed at your employer or boss. Not because your current salary is low but because it could be higher.
by JulianGough123 | 2025-05-28 14:57:14+00:00
If it will help, you can check out the predictions this approach was able to make before the James Web space telescope sent back any data.

https://theeggandtherock.substack.com/p/predictions-what-the...

And how they were validated later by the James Webb.

https://theeggandtherock.com/p/killer-new-evidence-that-supe...
by kixiQu | 2025-05-28 14:57:18+00:00
Some people think I'm effective at work because I have a deep understanding of the system my team owns. There are projects we take on and decisions we make that do depend on that understanding. However, what's far more important 80% of the time are the wide-ranging shallow understandings I have of other systems that we interact with (sometimes directly, sometimes highly indirectly). I can't imagine being able to be successful in my role without both, but I see folks overindexing on the former pretty frequently.
by simonw | 2025-05-28 14:57:43+00:00
That credentials trick is possible right now using LLM's tool support. You'd have to write a pretty elaborate tool setup which exposes the "ask for more credentials" tool and then prompts the user when that's called. The tool should keep the credentials and never pass the actual tokens back to the LLM, but it can pass e.g. a symbol "creds1" and tell the LLM to request to make calls with "creds1" in future requests.
by Loughla | 2025-05-28 14:57:51+00:00
You're not supposed to take work personally. That is a lesson that I've been taught many, many, many times over the years. I've been told that within the last 24 hours.

So why is it a surprise that, when employees are not supposed to take work personally, they stop taking work personally?

I do not understand anyone's confusion about this. We are a resource to be used in companies now; replaced, shunted, and changed as they see fit. We are not an asset. Why would I give a flying fuck about my employer, other than the baseline expectation of what I was hired for?

This "Who Cares Era" sort of nonsense just absolutely reeks of the pearl clutching that occurred with "Quiet Quitting" (otherwise known as doing the expectations of your own job and no more).
by doctor_lollipop | 2025-05-28 14:58:11+00:00
This, very much.

My employer has no bonus system whatsoever for regular employees so even if I did put in extra effort and the company made more profits, all of that would go into management's pockets.

And as you said, even if I miraculously made 20% more, I still wouldn't be able to afford a house.

So why bother? Of all the things I can do with my energy, making management richer is very much not a priority.
by fennecfoxy | 2025-05-28 14:58:12+00:00
Doesn't bitcoin then completely fall over when the block reward is 0? What incentive do former miners have to process transactions?

I've seen discussion that as the block reward falls, transaction fees will go up but this doesn't seem like enough. Hash rate will fall and people will sell up and get out of it. If the hash rate falls enough doesn't that open the network up to fraudulent transactions if a big player (in terms of hash rate) decides to go rogue? The whole 51% takeover thing. Seems like the entire market cap of bitcoin will pop at some point in the future.
by kiselitza | 2025-05-28 14:58:41+00:00
Well, it's a standalone, non-hosted, offline application.

If you're designing your own API, you can do all the specs, docs, and if you get it up and running on localhost, you don't even need internet for testing it.

If you want to run a hosted API endpoint, or push your changes to git ofc you'll need the internet, but not because of the application, rather because you're trying to access something else that is not offline.
by fragmede | 2025-05-28 14:58:49+00:00
You don't? By paying your taxes, some of which goes to the police, you're forcing criminals, with their ill gotten gains into jail. An absurd thing to point out, other than that fact that there are some people who you do want to lose their living. Because those jobs harm you or society. Then we're just left to debate what harms society and what lets everyone in a society thrive.
by JulianGough123 | 2025-05-28 14:58:57+00:00
I understand your critique. But it proposes a sequencing of events which is novel, and testable.

For example, it made these predictions in advance of the James Web’s first data:

https://theeggandtherock.substack.com/p/predictions-what-the...

And these were later validated by the James Webb:

https://theeggandtherock.com/p/killer-new-evidence-that-supe...
by nyarlathotep_ | 2025-05-28 14:59:12+00:00
RE: displays, 4k60

I've done this without a single issue on several iGPU Ryzen CPUs (OTOH, Ryzen 7 5700G, and Ryzen 3 3200G). Neither used a discrete GPU at the time.

Couldn't tell you what Motherboard; I specifically sought after one with 2x HDMI for the Ryzen 7, as I had no intent to use a DGPU for this machine. Plenty of sleep wake issues, but monitors being present/connected has never been an issue with either.
by keyringlight | 2025-05-28 14:59:20+00:00
>(if anyone ever bothers to use it, including Microsoft)

I think this is a large part of the problem, within the range of applications MS offers there's range of ways they get distributed, installed and managed. Will office use it? How about visual studio, teams, various windows components? It'd be more 'sit up and listen' interesting if MS committed to using it themselves, showed it works for a range of use cases and was great at doing it.
by czhu12 | 2025-05-28 14:59:24+00:00
“ Looking back, it feels like a little microcosm of everything right now: Over the course of two months, we went from something smart that would demand a listener's attention in a way that was challenging and new to something that sounded like every other thing: some dude talking to some other dude about apps that some third dude would half-listen-to at 2x speed while texting a fourth dude about plans for later.”

In the Dark was a podcast I came across recently that struck me as being in the former camp. The reporters cared, the organization supported them, and they created content that was gripping and demanded the listener to pay attention.

I’m sure this is the wrong place for a podcast recommendation but I wanted to play my small part in surfacing the work of people who do care
by goku12 | 2025-05-28 14:59:29+00:00
That could very well be the case. I can't be certain. However, it's also a well-known problem in engine design. High flow rate fluid lines like propellant lines are often protected against fluid hammers. That may come in the form of a gas reservoir to absorb the pressure spike (sort of like surge suppression capacitors in electronic circuits) or as a check valve connected to a re-circulation path (like snubber/flyback diodes in electronic circuits).

The reason why I said it sounds counterintuitive is that I suspect that the flame extinction inside the combustion chamber also causes strong mechanical shocks. However, I don't know how that works and I could be mistaken.
by sam-cop-vimes | 2025-05-28 14:59:31+00:00
It comes down to what is "popular" culture.

When I was young, society presented mostly people with intellectual achievements as role models which spurred a generation to strive. Hard work, humility, respect for others were actively inculcated into the growing generation. Children had few external influences other than their immediate circle of family, friends, neighbours and the school community.

Now we have reality TV stars parading their frankenstein bodies and the hype generated by social media as major influences for children growing up today.

Spelling a word correctly is harder than letting our apps auto-correct it for us. Playing a video game takes less physical effort than venturing out to a playground. Heating and eating a ready-meal takes less effort than cooking something.

I read somewhere that every augmentation is also an amputation. Progress in tech means we are constantly lobotomising a majority of the population. We in the tech community are partly responsible for this.

I don't know what the solution is - but I guess what the author suggests is a good start. Start caring.