MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by scubadude | 2025-05-12 01:09:34+00:00
My (government-funded) primary school got a room full of these, plus a couple of disk drives, printers and whatever networking joined them together. It must have cost a fortune. Of the handful of students I have since run into, 2 worked in IT for universities and one in defence. Plus whatever digital literacy was instilled in the people who went into areas outside IT. Pretty smart investment in building a future workforce.
by titanomachy | 2025-05-12 01:10:48+00:00
I don’t totally disagree, but it’s a little different because continuous access to food is necessary in more so than any other good. If you obscure the fact that someone can’t actually afford to eat hand-delivered burritos for every meal, they may do so to their detriment. Easy access to credit obscures the unaffordability of luxury goods, especially for those with low financial literacy. If I _can_ press the burrito button any time I want, it’s tempting to do it every time instead of eating cheap buttered noodles. If I get an error saying “you have no money left”, I will make the damn noodles.
by ToucanLoucan | 2025-05-12 01:11:04+00:00
I mean the hole in the wall burger joint near me that I love openly charges 3% more when you pay with a credit card for the exact reason of not wanting to give away 3% of their sales figure to a credit card processor, since said credit card processor didn't cook the burger. And you can feel how you feel about that, I personally appreciate the transparency and make it a point to bring my debit card.

I don't know if they're engaged in tax fraud though. Not really my department.

I believe in business done for mutual gain, that's how I do mine, and I make it a point to find as many like-minded people to do business with because they're just easier to deal with. I don't feel the need to get second quotes on car repairs because I've gone to the same shop my dad went to. I know the guy, I handle his IT needs. He isn't out to get me for every dime he can, and I'm not out for every dime either: we go to each other when we have problems, and we solve those problems for one another with some on the top to take home.

I'm sure neither of us will be billionaires but I can also sleep at night which is nice.
by stevage | 2025-05-12 01:12:03+00:00
The bit about writing an essay in 2 hours really hit me. I remember being a student and each essay being an enormous amount of time. There were digital catalogues, but they weren't great, and there were no digital resources like journals. Spent a lot of time just wandering along the relevant sections of library bookshelves looking for books that might be relevant and skimming my way through them.

It feels to me like it was a pretty valuable way to spend time. I got a much bigger sense of the discipline I was studying, of this collective intellectual culture I was just on the outer fringes of.

I wonder how much ChatGPT-boosted students really end up knowing at the end of their degree.
by thrance | 2025-05-12 01:14:01+00:00
It's becoming increasingly difficult to understand what you're even arguing about. My original comment was:

> Which is why there should be no patents in healthcare. Most research is already publicly-funded, production and distribution should be too. We could drown in cheap medicine, instead we artificially increase the prices by 5000% to fatten the pockets of already super-wealthy parasites.

If a company sells a pill for $100 that cost them $2 to manufacture, that's a 5000% markup. Indeed, they would need to recoup R&D expenditures, but I am arguing for a system where we don't need to, because R&D is paid for by the state, and we don't need to turn a profit once the product has been developed. Where's the logic flaw?
by gus_massa | 2025-05-12 01:14:18+00:00
At least here in Argentina, after 6+2 weeks the mother gets an echography and may know if the baby is a boy or a girl. Another afer 10+2 weeks, where it's more clear. So I expect that the prediction is checked most of the times instantly.

Also, if they go to Mali again in a few years, if they by chance meet again in the airport, if it's a prediction I expect the parents to say hello and show the little boy. But in the other case I expect the parents to avoid embarrassing her with the anecdote of he failure.
by muzani | 2025-05-12 01:14:54+00:00
People love to talk about themselves and what they're doing. I don't think there's any barrier; if you know the right way to approach these conversations, they'll dump ideas on you.

I believe it might be selection bias. Founders who are building things are not joining networking events. I tend to avoid co-working spaces too ever since I realized it's full of the people I block on Facebook.

There's people who bounce ideas, and then there's some form of idea tire kicking. They talk about how vibe code is the future and going to change how we live and work, but they have never downloaded an AI IDE. These people are there to kick ideas around all day and they'll pay for a co-working space so they can kick their ideas at strangers and ignore all feedback. It's exhausting and it's possible that you might be viewed as one of those people.
by linsomniac | 2025-05-12 01:14:56+00:00
>they offered only one medication

I've had a few doctors offer me alternatives and talk through the options, which I'll agree is rare. It sure has been nice when it happened. One time I did push back on one of the doctor's recommendations: I was with my mom and the doctor said he was going to prescribe some medication. I said "I presume you're already aware of this but she's been on that before and reacted poorly to it and we took her off it because of that. The doctor was NOT aware of that and prescribed something else. I sure was glad to be there and be able to catch that.
by jiggawatts | 2025-05-12 01:15:12+00:00
> I'm not aware of any accessible hardware that goes beyond a small to, maybe at a stretch, moderate scale. As a small OpenSource project, we have to rely on the community to do this.

That's especially absurd considering that it's possible to rent a VM in the public cloud with hundreds of CPU cores for the price of a cup of coffee per hour!

I've seen several projects where their learned helpless transforms over years into an obstinate point of pride.

For example, refusing to provide Windows builds in an era of free build pipelines in GitHub, virtual machines, cross-platform build tools, etc...

"We don't do that here!" -- says person who could trivially do that.
by Karrot_Kream | 2025-05-12 01:15:31+00:00
I'm not sure what the rest of the US market is like, but the Bay Area has a huge shortage of tradespeople because of the 2008 housing crash and very high cost of living pricing folks out. I knew of this but became much more acutely aware when I started doing transit advocacy. Getting folks to build/maintain HVAC systems, weld, drive buses, etc is getting increasingly difficult.

If your son can avoid having to buy into the Bay Area housing market (by living on property you own/pay for), he can make good money and probably will have little trouble finding work for years to come.
by zdragnar | 2025-05-12 01:16:02+00:00
No, this proves my point. Back in my days of backend programming, Varnish was the "magic" that made servers (especially CMSs) feel fast. Memcached is another common go-to cache.

Browser caching isn't a replacement as the first request for every endpoint is still going to be slow.

Yet somehow, APIs aren't treated with the same requirements for performance as web pages.
by garyfirestorm | 2025-05-12 01:16:59+00:00
I work in one of the big three - the culture here is more waterfall and less agile. They decided at some point ‘we don’t need to be experts in building systems, we should only be good at spec’cing them and putting them together’ This leads to a mindset of relying on suppliers for changing even one line of code and at their mercy. Talent leaves because they didn’t get to do any of the fun stuff. And you’re left with bunch of MBAs trying to wing it in what is available which is - no talent, bunch of admineers, and a long list of supplier bills. They go for cheapest component they can spec for a given feature cutting 4MB memory will save 5 cents per car, we sell half a million cars, that’s big savings! I can go on and on about this, but one of us even tried to be Tesla trying to build our own zonal architecture - and are currently struggling due to costs, tarrifs and turnover. Also you can’t overnight change this mindset - building vs assembling. But there has to be some way and I’m too about to walk out the door due to ~10yrs of frustrations.
by kevmo314 | 2025-05-12 01:17:46+00:00
From what I can tell, this approach appears to combine "make a plan" style prompting with reinforcement learning?

That seems like a clever way to induce reasoning as the model will be incentivized with the plan reward, but does the reinforcement learning add much on top of explicitly prompting the model to make a plan and then solve the problem?

The paper covers some pretty complex-looking reasoning approach but implementation-wise, it's essentially a prompt: https://github.com/LeapLabTHU/Absolute-Zero-Reasoner/blob/ma...
by seanmcdirmid | 2025-05-12 01:18:31+00:00
Welder employment market is very boom bust (people crowd it when work is well paid because welders are rare, and they leave it when work is not well paid because welders are plentiful), it could go either way in 5 years (programming is the same, but we haven’t had a bust since 2008, and then there was the 80s which was brutal for SWEs).
by Clubber | 2025-05-12 01:19:09+00:00
>That makes intuitive sense, but quickly falls apart when you do any rigorous analysis. Buying a house might cover your shelter needs, but you still need to eat, and you can't eat bricks.

This analysis relies on someone to have a mortgage that takes 100% of their salary every month. The general rule was don't buy a house over 3x your annual pre-tax salary. I think it's moved up past that in most places though. Either way, don't buy so much house you can't afford food. I would think that goes without saying.

>Moreover if the fear is your portfolio losing value, buying a house doesn't really mitigate that. Sure, you might still have a house at the end of the day, but that's cold comfort if you paid $2M for a bay area house that subsequently saw its value tank (eg. something like Detroit).

This analysis is an edge case and in no way represents the norm. I'm not sure of any area that has gone from Bay Area prices to Detroit prices in a single lifetime.

>Even in some sort of apocalypse scenario a house isn't obviously better than stocks, because the whole concept of owning a house relies on some sort of functioning legal system.

Another crazy edge case. It's saying don't buy a house because an asteroid might hit. I'm pretty sure that newly non-functioning legal system wouldn't protect your stock portfolio either. If it comes to that, best to invest in bullets and whiskey.

>On the other hand there are very real problems with investing in "bricks / house". It has historical under-performed stocks.

Include paying rent in your analysis comparing it with stocks, particularly after you pay it off. You're sinking $X into a rental property with zero return and zero equity gained. I don't have to pay $2000 to the mortgage ever again and I have an asset that has more than doubled in 20 years, and a place to live that is essentially rent/mortgage free for life. That's a lot of dividends comparatively. Also, rents go up, mortgage payments typically don't, so factor inflation in your rent analysis.

>Moreover a single house provides poor diversification compared to a basket of stocks and its performance is tied to the economic health of your local area.

You shouldn't ever put all your money in stocks. Putting money in real estate, bonds, CDs, cash, etc. is the definition of diversification.

>If you lose your job, there's a good chance that your house won't fetch a high price.

Housing prices are unrelated to an individual losing their job. If you lose your job and haven't saved up enough runway, you could default on your mortgage. You could also not pay your rent. You get kicked out either way, but the bank should cut you a check for the equity you have remaining, minus whatever fees they conjure up.

>All of this makes for a poor risk adjusted return, and it's unclear how "has value to you" counters this.

All of your points were based on invalid assumptions, edge cases, or are irrelevant when compared to paying rent. Buying a house is a long game.
by jwr | 2025-05-12 01:20:41+00:00
> customers simply don't believe good interfaces are worth the money

I guess I'm in the minority, then, but as a data point: I own a VW ID.4 and I'd pay significantly more to get software that isn't such a burning dumpster tire fire.

And no, the excuses provided in this thread don't cut it.

To be clear: it doesn't even annoy me anymore that the infotainment is slow and crappy, I've gotten used to it and I just never use it. But I when I want to close both windows and I press two buttons simultaneously, I would like both windows to go up, not one up and one down, as it sometimes happens.

The crappiness of the software in this car is mind-boggling and it cannot be excused: most of it is incompetent and sloppy programming.

I would pay more for a car where the software department is somewhat competent and knows what they're doing.
by usefulcat | 2025-05-12 01:21:05+00:00
It sounds like a big part of the target market for this is people who are living paycheck to paycheck, but those are exactly the people who should not use it.

The less disposable income you have, the more careful you need to be about not exceeding it, because if you do it can be very difficult (not merely inconvenient) to dig yourself out of that hole.
by gopiandcode | 2025-05-12 01:22:41+00:00
Oh, really? I'm curious what exactly you mean by limitless metaprogramming. I've really been drawn into Lean specifically because of how easy to extend and malleable the language itself is, so if Agda is even more so then I'd be really eager to try that out.

e.g.:

- embedding a prolog/asp DSL: https://github.com/kiranandcode/cleango

- embedding a tex/latex DSL: https://github.com/kiranandcode/LeanTeX
by FredPret | 2025-05-12 01:24:52+00:00
Wow, I’m convinced!

In all seriousness: why do you insist on an intellectual totem pole with art being more “hoity toity” as you say, and more worthy? And if so, why is engineering below painting?

In mathematics and some hard sciences, and in absolutely elementary aspects of other fields like programming, things can be proven to be right or wrong. In every other endeavour, we need to repeatedly apply fuzzy judgements.

Some do this poorly, some do it well.

Just in case you actually are interested in nuance, here’s some more on the topic:

https://www.paulgraham.com/hp.html

https://nealstephenson.substack.com/p/idea-having-is-not-art
by strogonoff | 2025-05-12 01:27:27+00:00
Monitoring and metric collection makes a lot of sense when you run a production system, or a personal but critical system.

Promoting a telemetry solution when it comes to a hobby server, which you host for yourself and which can’t bankrupt you by running up a massive AWS bill, doesn’t seem to make much sense when simply bottling it up in Docker and being able to restart or recreate at will is enough (mount volumes for logs and persistent data, back it up, and you’re good).

With games like Minecraft in particular there’s value in being able to have multiple servers with different worlds, perhaps different mods, etc. If you decide not to have more servers because they are snowflakes you do not have time to set up monitoring for then you rob yourself and your players of the opportunity to have more fun.

Furthermore, containerizing it allows you to upgrade as new game versions come out quickly by simply spinning up a new container with your preexisting world as a test, and you get you basic system resource usage monitoring built-in.

What I think could be a more interesting exercise is a dashboard for friends or family that allows to manage the lifetime and configuration of their respective containers.
by explodes | 2025-05-12 01:27:59+00:00
The internet has been changing societal structure for a while. The world is still learning to operate with it, and will likely be continuously adjusting for quite some time.

Over the course of time, we will "lose" things and we will "gain" things. Society will approach equilibrium over time. Even when sectors of the digital world are considered hostile, there are plenty of ways for society as a whole to handle it. Societal equilibrium will never look like our ideals.
by kcplate | 2025-05-12 01:29:19+00:00
Do you agree that it could be possible to find someone who could prove whether a name was left off a list without resorting to breaking the law to do it?

Do you agree that a reporter could write a story about a deportee’s name being left off a deportation list and the subsequent government admission that the person was in fact deported without ignoring or perhaps burying the fact that the deported was legally deported after a judge ordered them deported?

Do you agree that a government or government official could provide accurate information the first time when questioned about someone who was detained and deported?

Those are the types of people that I would consider trustworthy. None of that happened here which fans the flames of my skepticism.
by seanmcdirmid | 2025-05-12 01:30:10+00:00
20 years ago each city/province was basically its own closed market. So if you were driving a car in CQ, it was probably bought and even made in CQ. They simply required that the horns be disabled.

China internally is much more of a free market now, so I’m not sure how they could just disable horns anymore, although you still can’t get away with driving an outside register vehicle inside a city for very long without getting a crackdown by the police (meaning, they can enforce inspection requirements fairly easily).

I’m not sure if it was really Chongqing or some other obscure city like Dalian, I’m going by hearsay 20+ years ago. More recently, Shanghai banned honking in most circumstances in 2007 (inside its outer ring), but it’s enforced with just fines.
by saboot | 2025-05-12 01:31:11+00:00
ctrl+f "national lab" = 0 results

Hello? We have 17(!) federally funded national labs, full of scientists doing the work this article waxes nostalgic about. Through the Laboratory Directed Research and Development (LDRD) program they afford employee scientists the ability to pursue breakthrough research. However, they are facing major reductions in funding now due to the recent CR and the upcoming congressional budget!
by fennecbutt | 2025-05-12 01:31:16+00:00
You're right, and anybody that tries to convince us otherwise is the enemy, or a friend of the enemy.

Now our world is all about maximum profit extraction. Interest.

How about no more public education, you get a loan for it. What, that's what your taxes pay for? Well, it's not enough, too bad. The masters say that you can't possibly pay enough tax to give your child an education. But they'll give you a loan for it, with interest.

Coming very soon to a reality near you. And I thought we were done with being peasants.
by kazinator | 2025-05-12 01:31:30+00:00
However, this approach is easily translatable to a language that has decent FFI, and requires nothing else: no resource compiler and linker to make a resource DLL.

Resource files and their binary format are not a good API.

If you have those CreateWindow calls in a decently high level language, you can probably meta-program some resource-like DSL that fits right in the language.
by drivingmenuts | 2025-05-12 01:31:33+00:00
You cannot punish an AI - it has no sense of ethics or morality, nor a conscience. An AI cannot be made to feel shame. You cannot punish an AI for transgressing.

A person can be held responsible, even when it's indirect responsibility, in a way that serves as a warning to others, to avoid certain behaviors.

It just seems wrong to allow machines to make decisions affecting humans, when those machines are incapable of experiencing the the world as a human being does. And yet, people are eager to offload the responsibility onto machines, to escape responsibility themselves.
by winrid | 2025-05-12 01:32:23+00:00
I like to set timers. I use the taskbar timer in xfce to set it to say 30mins, and then I work on getting something done in that time. It works really well. Not sure if this has a common name.

This was really helpful when I redid the FastComments admin area, as that was a big slog of UI work that I quickly got tired of. This was before Claude :)
by zdragnar | 2025-05-12 01:32:56+00:00
There's a few possible reasons this can happen.

First is that the side effect profile of one option is much better known or tolerated, so the doctor will default to it.

Second is that the doctor knows the insurance company / government plan will require attempting to treat a condition with a standard cheaper treatment before they will pay for the newer, more expensive option.

There's always the third case where the doctor is overworked, lazy or prideful and doesn't consider the patient may have some input on which treatment they would like, since they didn't go to medical school and what would they know anyway?
by chis | 2025-05-12 01:33:15+00:00
Only sane comment here lol. I just don't know what the point of reading rants like this is vs going to a primary source like Pitchbook, which will tell you that venture deals are almost as high as the 2021 craziness right now

https://nvca.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/Q1-2025-PitchBoo...

Anyone even close to the space will tell you there are a million tiny AI-adjacent startups getting funded right now. Which if anyone is in one and looking for an early hire engineer please do reach out, I have the background but haven't found anything in my network yet.
LLM Botnet: Are companies using botnets to scrape content?
by flyriver | 2025-05-12 01:34:51+00:00
I have a web site with several million pages of articles, generated by the llama/gpt/and gemini. As you can imagine, there is a lot of scraping happening. Generally speaking, I allow the crawlers that respect robots.txt and identity themselves as bots to go wild. I figure it might get the site more exposure if it is "in" the LLMs. Otherwise, I try to block them.

Over time, especially recently, I have seen thousands of diverse IP addresses scraping the site. They use random/varying user-agents. I originally was blocking Brazil /16s since it appeared that most of the traffic was coming from there, but over the past few weeks the IPs come from everywhere. Each IP makes only a few requests, trying to stay under the radar. Right now, I have set some scripts to block and log the IPs as they come in.

I am blocking between 50 and 100 unique IP addresses per minute, and this is after I already blocked the main Chinese LLM scrapers and several /16s. Few of the IPs belong to obvious providers. Many just seem to be home users. Many are from countries that do not have the money to build LLMs. There are even wireless phone company IPs.

None of the requests are particularly malicious. They are just downloading pages.

Am I missing something? Is there a new botnet scraping the web ? A quick grep through my logs shows I have blocked 15,000 requests in the past 90 minutes, but only 1300 of them are repeats of IPs that have been added to my block list. Yesterday, I blocked 220,000 requests and only 13,000 of them were repeats.
by hodgesrm | 2025-05-12 01:35:00+00:00
RMT does not depending on background merges completing to give correct results as long as you use FINAL to force merge on read. The tradeoff is that performance suffers.

I'm a fan of what you are trying to do but there are some hard tradeoffs in dedup solutions. It would be helpful if your site defined exactly what you mean by deduplication and what tradeoffs you have made to solve it. This includes addressing failures in clustered Kafka / ClickHouse, which is where it becomes very hard to ensure consistency.