MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by awongh | 2025-05-16 22:44:07+00:00
For Moody's or any other agency, do they have any real insight on credit worthiness?

I would have just assumed that if you're another big financial institution you're doing your own research.

Is it that orgs below a certain size need these people to help tell them what's going on?

I would have also assumed anyone who holds an important amount of US treasuries does their own research and doesn't need to listen to any of these agencies?

What actual value do they provide? (esp. in light of the housing crisis proving they weren't providing any value at all?)
by jstummbillig | 2025-05-16 22:44:09+00:00
Maybe you are not that great at using the most current LLMs or you don't want to be? I find that increasingly to be the most likely answer, whenever somebody makes sweeping claims about the impotence of LLMs.

I get more use out of them every single day and certainly with every model release (mostly for generating absolutely not trivial code) and it's not subtle.
by quadragenarian | 2025-05-16 22:44:45+00:00
Not to be overly pedantic but there are more than 3. It's just 3 that are commonly used in asset management (S&P, Moody's, Fitch). Others include Morningstar DBRS (Dominion Bond Rating Services - rates primary Canadian debt issuers). Kroll is another one (used to be Duff & Phelps).
Yeast-Based LLM Research
by daly | 2025-05-16 22:45:42+00:00
I've spent a lot of time on self-modifying, self-learning systems. I even have a design based on genetically modified yeast. The trick is a cross between yeast and the Conway Game of Life game. It turns out that it is possible to build a computer on a game-of-life platform https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kk2MH9O4pXY&ab_channel=AlanZucconi

Yeast can be modified to follow the live/die rules that make up the game-of-life. CRISPR-CAS9 technology along with carefully designed "genetic switch" technology makes it possible to embed these rules in DNA. https://www.amazon.com/Genetic-Switch-Third-Lambda-Revisited/dp/0879697164

The trick is to combine genetically modified yeast in an initial condition following the game-of-life computer layout. The difficult part isn't the computation but the care and feeding of the yeast, still unsolved so far. It turns out that clumps of yeast will specialize so they provide nutrients to the clump. That implies a more massive clump with internal compute capability.

However, clumping yeast that self-structures as a deep learning network is another possible path to intelligent yeast. The question before the court is how to do back propagation of results so one can apply reinforcement learning to the clump. If yeast can self-structure and learn they can propagate without external help.

As for the training / backprop question my current thinking is to find a way to "impress" an existing LLM set of weights on a yeast-based deep learning network. Each yeast-node gets a weight from an existing published set. Thus the yeast-beast is now equivalent to the electronic version in knowledge.

Still LOTS of engineering / biology / genetics to ponder but so far it seems the problems are hard but solvable.
by zahlman | 2025-05-16 22:46:25+00:00
>Im worried about stuff written 15 years ago

Please don't - it isn't relevant.

15 years ago, new Python code was still dominantly for 2.x. Even code written back then with an eye towards 3.x compatibility (or, more realistically, lazily run through `2to3` or `six`) will have quite little chance of running acceptably on 3.14 regardless. There have been considerable removals from the standard library, `async` is no longer a valid identifier name (you laugh, but that broke Tensorflow once). The attitude taken towards """strings""" in a lot of 2.x code results in constructs that can be automatically made into valid syntax that appears to preserve the original intent, but which are not at all automatically fixed.

Also, the modern expectation is of a lock-step release cadence. CPython only supports up to the last 5 versions, released annually; and whenever anyone publishes a new version of a package, generally they'll see no point in supporting unsupported Python versions. Nor is anyone who released a package in the 3.8 era going to patch it if it breaks in 3.14 - because support for 3.14 was never advertised anyway. In fact, in most cases, support for 3.9 wasn't originally advertised, and you can't update the metadata for an existing package upload (you have to make a new one, even if it's just a "post-release") even if you test it and it does work.

Practically speaking, pure-Python packages usually do work in the next version, and in the next several versions, perhaps beyond the support window. But you can really never predict what's going to break. You can only offer a new version when you find out that it's going to break - and a lot of developers are going to just roll that fix into the feature development they were doing anyway, because life's too short to backport everything for everyone. (If there's no longer active development and only maintenance, well, good luck to everyone involved.)

If 5 years isn't long enough for your purposes, practically speaking you need to maintain an environment with an outdated interpreter, and find a third party (RedHat seems to be a popular choice here) to maintain it.
by marginalia_nu | 2025-05-16 22:47:09+00:00
> what legacy code?

The Java API has its fair deal of baggage due to its extreme backward compatibility. Boolean.getBoolean[1] is one of the more accessible examples of a bad API that exists only because of legacy reasons, but there quite a number of them.

[1] https://docs.oracle.com/javase/8/docs/api/java/lang/Boolean....
by amluto | 2025-05-16 22:47:30+00:00
I think you’re measuring the wrong thing. Most email apps (and I sure hope the app in question is in this category) make the from, to, and subject lines part of the scrollable content region. In the example in question, I doubt they removed it — they scrolled it off the screen.

Amusingly, whoever made the blog post or perhaps the slide with the “4x faster” star seems to have doubled down on not caring about space allocated to content - the “4x faster” star also obscures the content!
by burnt-resistor | 2025-05-16 22:48:45+00:00
I prefer people with a sense of humor and joie de vivre over people who treat others like objects, crush your hand with a handshake as a "joke", or walk out of the room mid-conversation. I think it's a mistake to seek cofounders to work with or founders to invest in only for the utilitarian advantage of a current project because there's nothing much holding them together otherwise, and that leads to venture fragility from the outset.
by tacker2000 | 2025-05-16 22:49:05+00:00
Material design v1 is the reason we have extremely low information density and extreme whitespace everywhere.

Just compare the original Gmail UI to the one Google has now. Or original Adwords admin page to the one they launched 2-3 years ago. Its a regression in every possible way.

And apple is also not far behind in enshittyfying their UIs in order to merge the Desktop and the Smartphone paradigms into one.

This is the worst phase in UX/UI history we have ever witnessed.
by Aloisius | 2025-05-16 22:49:29+00:00
> How does Coinbase protect data in transit and data at rest?

> Coinbase employs a range of technical and organizational measures to defeat eﬀorts to intercept, surveil, or otherwise access without authorization data in transit. For instance, Coinbase encrypts all confidential data transfers to prevent interception or tampering of that data by unauthorized third parties.

Coinbase does business in the EU and thus, already has to comply with the GDPR. Moreover, the US also requires safeguards for sensitive customer information by financial services companies.
by bsaul | 2025-05-16 22:50:04+00:00
I am keeping up, but honestly i feel like rust dev is a bit like a trap : people like us love challenges and solving technical problems. So whenever we "triumph" over a rust tricky compilation issue, we feel intense gratification in solving it.

However, at some point you have to ask yourself why you're accepting to face all those challenges. Is it worth it ? When was the last time i faced a race condition when developping a backend ?

The reason i started with rust was for a very specific need on building a cross-platform library (including wasm), and that was a good justification, and i'm happy that i did. However now that i'm using it for the server as well and face the same kind of challenges, i seriously question whether this is a wise choice.
by pandaman | 2025-05-16 22:50:37+00:00
Visa and status are different things and exist simultaneously. A visa is used to cross the border, a status is what enables one to be in the country. Many people on H1B don't have a physical H1B visa either as they have "adjusted status" from some other status to H1B without leaving the country and hence cannot possibly have a visa, which can only be issued in a US consulate, which don't exist in the US per se.

Colloquially people refer to a status granted through a particular visa category as "visa" e.g. "I am studying on F-1 visa", "H-1B visa employees" etc.
by bigfatkitten | 2025-05-16 22:50:43+00:00
> In the "before times" limitations were either a fact of the hardware (i.e. you only have so much RAM, storage, CPU cycles, etc) or of your own ability (you don't know how to crack the protection, defeat the anti-debug tricks, etc).

Not if you’re a mainframe customer. Capacity based licensing has been a standard practice in the mainframe world for around 50 years.
by charleshn | 2025-05-16 22:51:06+00:00
> Fork on Linux should use copy-on-write vmpages now, so if you fork inside python it should be cheap.

No, that's exactly the point I'm making, copying PTEs is not cheap on a large address space, woth many VMAs.

You can run a simple python script allocating a large list and see how it affects fork time.
by BobaFloutist | 2025-05-16 22:51:47+00:00
>the way German-speaking people think about their grammar is often different from how foreigners think about the German grammar. The rules end up with the same result, but the angle can often be different.

That's true for most languages, native speakers are almost universally terrible at explaining rules because they just intrinsically know them and never have to name or even think of the rule. To the extent that native speakers are formally taught grammar, it's usually edge cases, formal registers, and more sophisticated tools, none of which are the primary concern of language learners.
by icedchai | 2025-05-16 22:51:49+00:00
Entity Beans were terrible, representing the height of JEE over complexity. I remember editing at least 3 classes, a couple interfaces, and some horrific XML deployment descriptors to represent an "entity." A lot of the tooling was proprietary to the specific app server. On top of that, it was slow.

In the early 2000's, I used to work on JEE stuff for my day job, then go home and build PHP-based web apps. PHP was at least 10x more productive.
by carstenhag | 2025-05-16 22:54:44+00:00
In some way yes, but not really. Had a colleague working on a project for Deutsche Bahn (state owned train operator), he was developing an app and the domain knowledge was full of long German words, no one outside this bubble ever uses: Bremshundertstel, Bremszettel, Mindestbremshundertstel, Notbremsüberbrückung... In a way it's better to have a super long name for this, so there are no 2-3 ways to describe the same thing.
by lcsiterrate | 2025-05-16 22:55:56+00:00
I wonder if there is any like the cs50.ai for other fields, which acts as a guide by not instantly giving any answer. The one I experiment to have like this experience is by using custom instructions (most of LLMs have this in the settings) wherein I set it to Socratic mode so the LLM will spit out questions to stir ideas in my head.
by mullingitover | 2025-05-16 22:57:13+00:00
The US can issue currency to cover debt obligations. There should never be a situation where debts wouldn't be paid, the problem can just be printed away. The idea that the people who can print more money and pay the interest just wouldn't do it, out of what, spite? Incompetence? Seems pretty bad.

The fact that one party is always behind this financial profligacy, and the US keeps putting it in charge, probably means that the US' debt rating is still much too high.
by gregw2 | 2025-05-16 22:58:48+00:00
There is a very simple but often missed pair of solutions to this REST+sync-state problem.

1) When fetching data from the source (to appear on your web form that someone will edit), ensure that you always also fetch a "version number" (or version number dictionary for multi-tables) attached with the source data (a la MVCC). (This does imply you control the backend database and can have a version# field in each table or your CRDT event table.)

Only apply updates/deletes on your backend when the version number still matches, otherwise return an error saying the state has changed, refresh the UI and have the user retry their data entry.

OR

2) When sending information back to the server in your REST PUT, include both old+new values. On the backend, only perform the UPDATE or DELETE operations if/WHERE the old values are still present (preferrably wrapped within a transaction). Otherwise return an error saying the underlying data has changed and refresh the UI and have the user retry their data entry.
by fspeech | 2025-05-16 22:59:04+00:00
If you are referring to Apple's sending engineers to work out problems and enforce standards you should know that this is not unique to Apple. Huawei does the same with its own suppliers. In my opinion it has much more to do with the fact that Apple and Huawei can afford to pay their engineers much better and hire people with good problem solving skills. It is not that they have some secret sauce and have to teach the factories how to make things. That would be a strange interpretation.
by bsaul | 2025-05-16 22:59:16+00:00
oh, believe me, cloning and Arc-ing is something i realized very early that i was going to use. But that's the point: you still end up with things like : Arc<tokio::RwLock<dyn MyTrait>> for every single dependency.

Then you want to declare an async function that takes an async closure over that dependency. And you end up with a total garbage of a method signature.

As for async, the ecosystem for server-side is totally filled with async everywhere now. I don't think it's realistic to hope escaping those issues anyway in any real-world project. i thought i might as well learn to get comfortable with async.
by deepsun | 2025-05-16 23:00:10+00:00
Interesting. I'm not a .Net programmer, but I always thought .Net takes winning approach from Java ecosystem and adopts it. Java approaches/frameworks are kinda pioneering and competing, while .Net follows and grabs the best. So instead of competing approaches/frameworks (like ORMs for example) .Net has only one, the best one, well adopted and used by everyone there.

But reading your message it doesn't sound like it.
by A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 | 2025-05-16 23:00:15+00:00
<< Bond vigilantes, who can bring fiscally irresponsible politicians to heel

I don't want to give people ideas, but at the same time this is not exactly new to anyone following that set of news. During last EU fiscal crisis, EU came up with a novel approach to handling bond issues. Haircut[1].

[1]https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S10575...
by ethbr1 | 2025-05-16 23:00:31+00:00
Double layer hulls? Compartmentalization? 1-8" thick steel plate?

When something floats, there are fewer restrictions on weight. CV-66 took a lot of direct explosions before going to the bottom.

The easiest way to think of modern carriers is ships inside ships, such that the entire thing stays buoyant even if most of the outside compartments are compromised.

Navies have been building steel ships for a minute... and are pretty good at it.
by kstrauser | 2025-05-16 23:00:37+00:00
The interpreter itself is pretty quick:

ᐅ time echo "print('hi'); exit()" | python hi ________________________________________________________ Executed in 21.48 millis fish external usr time 16.35 millis 146.00 micros 16.20 millis sys time 4.49 millis 593.00 micros 3.89 millis
by hooloovoo_zoo | 2025-05-16 23:01:13+00:00
Suppose that arXiv withdraws it and says the reason is fraud. What if it turns out to not be fraud? Either way, what if the author sues for libel? Why should arXiv spend resources evaluating papers after they've already been published on the arXiv? It's just inviting all the issues stackoverflow and the youtube copyright strike system have.
by toomuchtodo | 2025-05-16 23:01:44+00:00
Treasuries only receive the favorable yields they do because they were considered the safest asset in the world. Any indicator of potential haircut is going to cause a rapid (further) loss in confidence and a spike in yields, leading to a debt spiral. This is why there was a fear of the implications of DOGE controlling the Treasury payment system (BFS), potentially leading to non payment and default. The capital markets are built on a foundation of trust. If you want continued access to capital (and with debt at ~123% GDP, it should be obvious that the US has no choice but to have continued access to the bond market), you must respect the trust relationship.

https://www.cbpp.org/research/federal-budget/doge-access-to-...
by JackFr | 2025-05-16 23:04:50+00:00
Well I can extract a square root by hand. We all had to learn it and got tested on it.

No one to day learns that anymore. The vast, vast majority have no idea and I don’t think people are dumber because of it.

That is to say, I think it’s not cut-and-dried. I agree you need to learn something, but something’s it’s okay use a tool.
by tango12 | 2025-05-16 23:05:02+00:00
What’s the eventual goal of text to sql?

Is it to build a copilot for a data analyst or to get business insight without going through an analyst?

If it’s the latter - then imho no amount of text to sql sophistication will solve the problem because it’s impossible for a non analyst to understand if the sql is correct or sufficient.

These don’t seem like text2sql problems:

> Why did we hit only 80% of our daily ecommmerce transaction yesterday?

> Why is customer acquisition cost trending up?

> Why was the campaign in NYC worse than the same in SF?
by steamrolled | 2025-05-16 23:05:10+00:00
I think the article describes a real problem in that AI discourages thought. So do other things, but what's new about AI is that it removes an incentive to try.

It used to be that if you spent your day doomscrolling instead of writing a blog post, that blog post wouldn't get written and you wouldn't get the riches and fame. But now, you can use AI to write your blog post / email / book. If you don't have an intrinsic motivation to work your brain, it's a lot easier to wing it with AI tools.

At the same time... gosh. I can't help but assume that the author is just depressed and that it has little to do with AI. The post basically says that AI made his life meaningless. But you don't have to use AI tools if they're harming you. And more broadly, life has no meaning beyond what we make of it... unless your life goal is to crank out text faster than an LLM, there's still plenty of stuff to focus on. If you genuinely think you can't possibly write anything new and interesting, then dunno, pick a workshop craft?
by tomhow | 2025-05-16 23:05:11+00:00
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by SoftTalker | 2025-05-16 23:06:06+00:00
Gosling also developed a version of Emacs back in the early 1980s.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gosling_Emacs

"Gosling Emacs was especially noteworthy because of the effective redisplay code, which used a dynamic programming technique to solve the classical string-to-string correction problem. The algorithm was quite sophisticated; that section of the source was headed by a skull-and-crossbones in ASCII art, warning any would-be improver that even if they thought they understood how the display code worked, they probably did not."
by xypage | 2025-05-16 23:06:11+00:00
To be general purpose with a very large package ecosystem so that you can get just about anything started pretty quickly. It is relatively easy to do things that aren't performance critical with python, which is great if you want an MVP to grow off of or if you're messing around with something and want to make a little flask server for it, or maybe run some image recognition, or a little anything. It's really just insanely flexible and puts a lot of the cognitive load in libraries so you can get straight to doing stuff, again, often at the cost of performance.
by bsaul | 2025-05-16 23:06:33+00:00
I hope the same, and TBH it's the only reason i'm keeping up developing that backend in rust. I hope that in the end, it's going to improve my style.

Go felt the same way (but with a much lower order of magnitude) : you feel like bumping into language limitations, but once you learn to do it "simply" in go, your style will have changed into something much more elegant.

As for the bug in question, it has been quite "popular" for about 5 years now, and is actively tracked : https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/issues/110338. Nothing really weird. Just async hitting the limits of the current rust design.
by toss1 | 2025-05-16 23:06:46+00:00
Of course everything can be computed.

I'm talking more of the overhead for every single person who might want to come into the city on a given day — they will need to check and work their schedules around 1) being sure to check the current permitted/denied license plate character pattern and 2) work their schedules around that.

As we've already seen, we already need substantial work-arounds for critical can't move medical appointments. Events can be even worse; working in a business displaying at the biggest trade show for their industry all year, they've got to come in all four days, using their personal cars. Oops, nope, banned two of those days... etc. It is bullshit. Whereas with congestion tolls, it's just a trivial expense part of doing the show. We can think of thousands of such examples where a toll is simply a trivial inconvenience whereas a traffic violation is not. Of course, for each one, we can find a work-around ("just add another layer of indirection...."). And each one of those work-arounds adds to the workload of everyone who might come into the zone.

In contrast, the congestion toll workload is always simple: "Is it worth the extra $X to go in during the busy time, or can I go in a different time?"

And, traffic violations — especially accumulating traffic violations — are a LOT worse for low-income people, as the consequences tend to compound.

You are definitely convincing me even more strongly that congestion tolls are the better idea and lotteries are both far more inconvenient and more unfair.
by betrayawayed555 | 2025-05-16 23:06:54+00:00
Tactically we wonder if leaving them at the competitor at this stage is more useful. Let them work their 'magic' for them full time now.

It's possible the other company was unaware. Though, we wonder how. The company has an active social media presence and our sales person did as well where they indicated they worked for us.

Agree regarding sales + outsourcing.