MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by bruce511 | 2025-05-12 19:01:38+00:00
When it's VCs investing private money, on a high risk, high return (to private individuals) that's celebrated. The recipients (aka founders) will mostly lose that "grant" money, and end up with nothing to show for it. Of course the winners produce massive economic gains to the general public.

Alas when the govt follows the exact same model, taking high risk, high reward bets, then it's seen as "wasteful spending". Despite the staggering value of the wins, it becomes better to "spend nothing" than waste a penny on research that goes nowhere.

The levels of cognitive dissonance, not to mention hypocrisy, are truly incredible.

And the charge is being lead by someone who literally made his wealth from this model.
by soumendrak | 2025-05-12 19:01:40+00:00
Are you blindly running expensive LLM evaluations on EVERY response your AI generates?

This widespread practice is costing companies thousands while delivering questionable value.

Here's why your LLM evaluation strategy might be broken:

1. Generic evals are practically USELESS • Hallucination and toxicity scores mean nothing without context • Your use case is unique - generic metrics rarely capture what matters

2. More evaluation ≠ better results • Evaluating entire conversations drastically reduces judge accuracy • Specific, targeted inputs yield more reliable scores

3. Your judges need guidance too • Binary outputs with justification > arbitrary 1-5 scales • Few-shot examples from YOUR domain are critical

4. The reliability problem is real • Position bias: favors responses based on presentation order • Verbosity bias: longer responses get better scores regardless of quality • Self-enhancement bias: models favor their own outputs

Smart evaluation strategies that won't break the bank:

• Sample strategically instead of evaluating everything • Combine automated evals with periodic human validation • Provide context-specific examples to your judge • Always request justification, not just scores

Remember: The best benchmark isn't some generic leaderboard - it's how well the model performs in YOUR specific application.
by thebaxiq | 2025-05-12 19:02:56+00:00
If you’re launching a U.S. business as a non-resident or helping founders navigate the basics, you’ve likely come across these acronyms. But what exactly is an EIN? How does it differ from an ITIN? Why do you need one, and what might surprise you about their uses? Here’s a developer-focused breakdown:

EIN (Employer Identification Number): Used by businesses for tax filings, hiring, and opening accounts. You get it from the IRS, and it’s tied to your company—think of it as your business’s Social Security Number. ITIN (Individual Taxpayer Identification Number): For individuals who aren’t eligible for a Social Security Number but need to pay U.S. taxes. This isn’t for business entities, but for people (often founders or foreign investors) who must interact with the IRS. Key differences, unexpected edge cases, and practical advice for remote founders wanting to do things "by the book"—happy to answer questions in the thread.
by somat | 2025-05-12 19:03:26+00:00
Yes, the tricycle. Masterfully combining the exposed position of a bicycle with the space requirements of a car.

They really don't make sense in motorcycles, A large part of the point of a motorcycle is that you are willing to give up a lot of comfort and safety in exchange for having a very small nimble personal transport. Nothing wrong with this tradeoff, but why would want a vehicle that takes up the same amount of space as a car that gives you the safety and comfort value of a motorcycle?
by gwern | 2025-05-12 19:03:33+00:00
Note that he did not use the expression you are criticizing him for misusing.

The rule is the rule, and exceptions are the exception. Exceptions do not make the rule, by definition, so if your only defense of Brutalism is to say 'look at this one exception out of the tens of thousands that got built, which doesn't suck!', then you have conceded the point about Brutalism sucking.
by notahacker | 2025-05-12 19:03:43+00:00
Which in a way actually does align with the OP's view on why it never became known as a dangerous sketchy place.

Much more thought gone into the aesthetics of the Barbican than the Heygate Estate though, which is why the Heygate Estate was the one that ended up as every film scout's first choice of "scary, deprived place" even though it reportedly actually wasn't bad by the standards of south London postwar estates. And that's before taking into account the Barbican's arts facilities and all the money spent maintaining its communcal areas
by zackmorris | 2025-05-12 19:04:13+00:00
Came here to say the same thing.

Set Theory is the classical foundation of SQL:

https://www.sqlshack.com/mathematics-sql-server-fast-introdu...

It's analogous to how functional programming expressed through languages like lisp is the classical foundation of spreadsheets.

I believe that skipping first principles (sort of like premature optimization) is the root of all evil. Some other examples:

- If TCP had been a layer above UDP instead of its own protocol beside it, we would have had real peer to peer networking this whole time instead of needing WebRTC.

- If we had a common serial communication standard analogous to TCP for sockets, then we wouldn't need different serial ports like USB, Thunderbolt and HDMI.

- If we hid the web browser's progress bar and used server-side rendering with forms, we could implement the rich interfaces of single-page applications with vastly reduced complexity by keeping the state, logic and validation in one place with no perceptible change for the average user.

- If there was a common scripting language bundled into all operating systems, then we could publish native apps as scripts with substantially less code and not have to choose between web and mobile for example.

- If we had highly multicore CPUs with hundreds or thousands of cores, then multiprocessing, 3D graphics and AI frameworks could be written as libraries running on them instead of requiring separate GPUs.

And it's not just tech. The automative industry lacks standard chassis types and even OEM parts. We can't buy Stirling engines or Tesla turbines off the shelf. CIGS solar panels, E-ink displays, standardized removable batteries, thermal printers for ordinary paper, heck even "close enough" contact lenses, where are these products?

We make a lot of excuses for why the economy is bad, but just look at how much time and effort we waste by having to use cookie cutter solutions instead of having access to the underlying parts and resources we need. I don't think that everyone is suddenly becoming neurodivergent from vaccines or some other scapegoat, I think it's just become so obvious that the whole world is broken and rigged to work us all to the grave to make some guy rich that it's giving all of us ADHD symptoms from having to cope with it.
Show HN: Lumoar – Free SOC 2 tool for SaaS startups
by asdxrfx | 2025-05-12 19:05:03+00:00
We built Lumoar to help small SaaS teams get SOC 2-ready without paying thousands for Big 4 consultants or dealing with bloated compliance platforms.

As a startup ourselves, we faced the usual issues: long security questionnaires, confusing audit requirements, and expensive tools that felt overkill.

Lumoar is a simpler alternative: - Generate compliant SOC 2 policies automatically - Track your controls and progress in a clean dashboard - Upload evidence and get plain-language recommendations - Designed for engineers and founders, not compliance pros

It's free to start — you can generate policies and explore the dashboard without a sales call or demo.

Would love to hear what blockers you’ve faced with SOC 2 and what other frameworks you’re thinking about (e.g., ISO 27001, GDPR). All feedback is welcome.
by simianwords | 2025-05-12 19:05:19+00:00
yes that's what i meant thanks for clarifying. the grepping part is definitely done at least in spirit where the COT includes quotes. if i were searching for top 10 cars that are manufactured in South America for example, the COT might show:

"Brazil" car manufacture

This forces Brazil to be included in the keywords, at least that's how google (used to?) works.
by kazinator | 2025-05-12 19:05:39+00:00
Speaking of which, I more accurately should have stated that even people from a higher earning working class are not going to sue. Suing requires not only a commitment of cash, but time. People who work don't have the time; especially if they have children. It's a gamble; what if you lose?

Litigation is mainly a form of sport available to and enjoyed by the rich. And I mean serious litigation like taking on some corporation with deep pockets; not pick-on-someone-your-own-size litigation as in neighbor cut down a tree which fell onto your toolshed.
by rad_gruchalski | 2025-05-12 19:05:43+00:00
> You're just full of confidence. Pray tell where it comes from. What makes you believe this is true?

I trust in people who look for this stuff as a daily job, or because „they’re here to get you”. Because you know a sim card in the open is really easy to verify. And there are thousands of them driving around but also easily approachable sitting targets in every possible setting.

But you double down. I find this discussion pointless.

> How many accidents resulted in fatalities because 911 couldn't find the victim?

You’re missing the point of the eCall system. Think out of the box. What if there is no witness? What if everyone in the car cannot get help

Everyone who could reach out for help, received it. Can you tell the same about those who weren’t able to contact first responders in time? Maybe they’re still missing! It’s called survivorship bias.

Sounds like you are trying hard to be obnoxious.
by slipnslider | 2025-05-12 19:05:50+00:00
>price control strategy to pit these suppliers against each other to lower costs

Apparently that rabbit hole goes super deep in which the large auto manufacturers in the US throw their weight around and force suppliers into selling parts at cost or with razor thin profit margins. And on top of that, they force the suppliers to eat the loss when it comes to cyclical business demand (e.g. storage costs for over-producing during low demand and increased labor costs during times to under producing from high demand)
Show HN: Creating 3D shapes with hand gestures (open source demo / code)
by getToTheChopin | 2025-05-12 19:07:00+00:00
Sharing a demo for creating / controlling 3D shapes with hand gestures.

Video demo: https://x.com/measure_plan/status/1921962955878400210

Runs in real-time on the web. Built with threejs and MediaPipe computer vision.

Github repo: https://github.com/collidingScopes/shape-creator-tutorial
by mattmaroon | 2025-05-12 19:07:31+00:00
No matter how well you plan to deport 1 million illegal immigrants you will get some of them wrong. Being deliberate does not mean being inerrant. Much of what they are doing now Miller has been talking about for many years.

It’s always a mistake to assume that people are stupid or incompetent just because you don’t believe in what they are doing. It looks reckless to you because that’s what most of the media in the country tells you, if you had a different Information diet, it would not. That’s why I intentionally read sources slanted in the other direction.

Epistemology has never been harder than it is right now
by thedanbob | 2025-05-12 19:07:54+00:00
A few years ago I was helping run sound at a conference which involved recording and rebroadcasting multiple audio streams simultaneously. The provided equipment included a Linux computer running a real-time kernel and routing was handled by JACK.

It was a disaster. If the USB audio interface ever disconnected, JACK crashed and wiped my routing configuration. After the first day I ditched the Linux computer and ran the whole setup through my MBA, using Reaper for both recording and routing.
by os2warpman | 2025-05-12 19:08:16+00:00
>However, we also need to improve the driving skills of the young and elderly.

In the US, at least, an 80-year-old driver is safer than a 21-year-old.

Additionally, the least safe group of female drivers, females aged 15-20, is only marginally more likely to be operating a motor vehicle that causes a fatal crash (25.5 per 100k licensed drivers for teenaged girls) than the safest male cohort (23.8 for males aged 65-74).

The gender gap is not even close. Males aged 15-20 are 60.3, my cohort is in the mid-30s, and retiree males are in the mid-20s.

Female retirees are 7.5, geriatrics 10.1. All other age groups are in the mid-teens.

It doesn't matter how you massage the data.

Driving for work vs. not, crashes per hours driven, crashes per number of licensed drivers by gender, crashes per 100 million miles driven, highway vs. surface street, at all times in every instance women cause fewer single vehicle, multi-vehicle, pedestrian-involved, injurious, and fatal, crashes.

Crashes involving a female driver are also less likely to have passenger fatalities, due to the greater likelihood that all passengers will be wearing their seatbelts. Females are less likely (by a LOT) to drive intoxicated, less likely to drive distracted, and are less likely to speed.

Actuaries working for insurance firms and rental car bean counters have known this irrefutable and unquestionable truth for at least 30 years.

Whenever I suggest that males receive additional training and oversight until their crash rates fall to those of the typical 16-year-old girl, people get irate.

edit: I can't find the numbers but it is fact that CDLs (commercial driver's licenses) both lower and level the statistics so training and oversight is almost certainly the answer.
by billyp-rva | 2025-05-12 19:09:07+00:00
> You’d think that, by 2025, technology would have solved the problem of things getting to people. I think it’s the opposite. Social media is optimized to keep people engaged and does not want people leaving the walled garden. Openly prohibiting links would cause a revolt, so instead they go as close as people will tolerate. Which, it turns out, is pretty close.

I'm not at all sure it would cause a revolt. Most people probably wouldn't notice at this point.
by stevenAthompson | 2025-05-12 19:09:12+00:00
> We would do so regardless of your ability to verbalise anything in particular

I don't mean to say that they literally have to speak the words by using their meat to make the air vibrate. Just that, presuming it has some physical means, it be capable (and willing) to express it in some way.

> It's a obcene sort of self-injury to assume that whatever kind of radical behaviourism is necessary to hype the LLM is the right sort.

I appreciate why you might feel that way. However, I feel it's far worse to pretend we have some undetectable magic within us that allows us to perceive the "realness" of others peoples consciousness by other than physical means.

Fundamentally, you seem to be arguing that something with outputs identical to a human is not human (or even human like), and should not be viewed within the same framework. Do you see how dangerous an idea that is? It is only a short hop from "Humans are different than robots, because of subjective magic" to "Humans are different than <insert race you don't like>, because of subjective magic."
by vonnik | 2025-05-12 19:09:38+00:00
Any satellites that carry sensors pointed at the earth are potentially spy satellites, and the commercial sats launched by various companies are regularly used by nation states to gather data. They are inherently dual use.

The kind of satellite referred to hear, SAR, is already aloft. Capella has SAR sats; they were recently acquired. Umbra has SAR. SAR's advantage is that it can read the surface of the earth despite cloud cover, which happens to be common in Ukraine. Its disadvantage is that the data takes a lot of processing to be legible to humans.

Germany is launching these sats in response to the Trump administration's decision to make it hard/expensive for Ukraine to access US commercial satellites' data. Like many such recent decisions, it was later overturned, but by that time, people decided they didn't want to depend on US budgets or technology companies.

https://spacenews.com/u-s-restores-satellite-imagery-support...

So the loss is America's, ultimately.
by _zoltan_ | 2025-05-12 19:09:38+00:00
I was part of the panel discussion at the end of the 2nd day discussing hardware acceleration for query processing. before the panel there were very interesting talks about various approaches on how to get to the end goal, which is to efficiently use hardware (non-x86 CPUs, so mostly either GPUs or FPGAs/custom chips) to speed up queries.
by kaycebasques | 2025-05-12 19:09:39+00:00
> I guess "good" technical writing no longer includes a thesis statement.

Thesis is outlined in the second paragraph:

> What embeddings offer to technical writers is the ability to discover connections between texts at previously impossible scales.

I think it's fair, however, to say that this post is ineffective because it does not provide concrete examples of the thesis in action. My only excuse is that I never intended for this to be a standalone post but life got in the way (in the best possible way!) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43964584

> why would this be useful for technical writing?

You're not going to like this answer, because it's also vague. There are 3 intractable challenges in technical writing. Embeddings can help us make progress on all 3: https://technicalwriting.dev/strategy/challenges.html

See also https://www.tdcommons.org/dpubs_series/8057/
by pants2 | 2025-05-12 19:09:41+00:00
This appears to be a very thoughtful and helpful study. It's also impressive to see the improvement in performance in just the last year of model development - almost double.

I've found o3 & deep research to be very effective in guiding my health plan. One interesting anecdote - I got hit in the chest (right over the heart) quite hard a month or so ago. I prompted o3 with my ensuing symptoms and heart rate / oxygenation data from my Apple watch, and it already knew my health history from previous conversations. It gave very good advice and properly diagnosed me with a costochondral sprain. It gave me a timeline to expect (which ended up being 100% accurate) and treatments / ointments to help.

IMO - it's a good idea to have a detailed prompt ready to go with your health history, height/weight, medications and supplements, etc. if anything's happening to you you've got it handy to give to o3 to help in a diagnosis.
by SketchySeaBeast | 2025-05-12 19:09:47+00:00
The end product being inexpensive is a good thing - it means that the producer can sell it well below the cost it took to produce it, otherwise a novel would cost whatever it takes for Stephen King to live for 3 months.

I feel like you're shoving all information under the same label. The most profitable corporations are trading in information that isn't subject to copyright, and it's facts - how you drive, what you eat, where you live. It's newly generated ideas. Maybe it is in how the data is sorted, but they aren't copyrighting that either.

If we're going to overthrow artificial entrenchments of capitalism, I feel like there's better places to start than a lot of copyright. Does it need changes? Absolutely, there's certainly exploitation, but I still don't see "get rid of copyright entirely" as being a good approach. Weirdly, it's one of the places that people are arguing for that. Sometimes the criminal justice system convicts the wrong person, and there should be reform. It's also often criticized as a measure of control for capitalistic oligarchs. Should step one be getting rid of the legal system entirely?
by kmeisthax | 2025-05-12 19:10:32+00:00
Yes, but none of that has anything to do with AI. Or democratization.

The fact that copyright law is easy to violate and hard to enforce doesn't stop Nintendo from burning millions of dollars on legal fees to engage in life-ruining enforcement actions against randos making fangames.

"Democratization" with respect to copyright law would be changing the law to put Mario in the public domain, either by:

- Reducing term lengths to make Mario literally public domain. It's unclear whether or not such an act would survive the Takings Clause of the US Constitution. Perhaps you could get around that by just saying you can't enforce copyrights older than 20 years even though they nominally exist. Which brings us to...

- Adding legal exceptions to copyright to protect fans making fan games. Unlikely, since in the US we have common law, which means our exceptions have to be legislated from the judicial bench, and judges are extremely leery of 'fair use' arguments that basically say 'it is very inconvenient for me to get permission to use the thing'.

- Creating some kind of social copyright system that "just handles" royalty payments. This is probably the most literal interpretation of 'democratize'. I know of few extant systems for this, though - like, technically ASCAP is this, but NOBODY would ever hold up ASCAP as an example of how to do licensing right. Furthermore without legal backing, Nintendo can just hold out and retain traditional "my way or the highway" licensing rights.

- Outright abolishing copyright and telling artists to fend for themselves. This is the kind of solution that would herald either a total system collapse or extreme authoritarianism. It's like the local furniture guy selling sofas at 99% off because the Mafia is liquidating his gambling debts. Sure, I like free shit, but I also know that furniture guy is getting a pair of cement shoes tonight.

None of these are what AI companies talk about. Adding an exception just for AI training isn't democratizing IP, because you can't democratize AI training. AI is hideously memory-hungry and the accelerators you need to make it work are also expensive. I'm not even factoring in the power budget. They want to replace IP with something worse. The world they want is one where there are three to five foundation models, all owned and controlled by huge tech megacorps, and anyone who doesn't agree with them gets cut off.
by winwang | 2025-05-12 19:10:33+00:00
I'm not too familiar with HeavyDB, but here are the main differences:

- We're fully compatible with Spark SQL (and Spark). Meaning little to no migration overhead.

- Our focus is on distributed compute first.

- That means ParaQuery isn't a database, just an MPP engine (for now). Also means no data ingestion/migration needed.
by ElevenLathe | 2025-05-12 19:11:11+00:00
At least in my part of the US (midwest), estate sales are the best place to find old tools. People hold onto them until they die, but then you can buy them! estatesales.net (no affiliation, just a user) lists the vast majority of them, and usually even has pictures of what is for sale that you can scroll through before actually going. I've gotten a lot of insane deals on tools this way -- just recently bought a vintage (good quality, perfect working order) 10inch wood bandsaw for $20!.
by genewitch | 2025-05-12 19:11:21+00:00
I had a feeling some would get hung up on the "passport" thing. The "private" intimate chats were leaked, too. And full name, city, university, phone numbers, sexual preferences, and geolocation. And photographs, obviously. I assume the passport/ID stuff was for "verified accounts", but again, none of that crap should be saved in a database - a boolean default false "VERIFIED" in the user table should suffice.

The disclosure didn't show every API endpoint, just a few dealing with auth and profiles. They also mentioned only a few PII, you can tell because there were multiple screenshots spread throughout the post. I'm harping on passport for the reason you specify, too; but mostly that information shouldn't be stored...