MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by energy123 | 2025-05-20 12:03:51+00:00
Question then is whether to fine tune an autoregressive LLM or use embeddings and attach a linear head to predict the outcome. Probably the latter.

You could also create viable labels without real life hires. Have a panel of 3 expert judges and give them a pile of 300 CVs and there's your training data. The model is then answering the easier question "would a human have chosen to pursue an interview given this information?" which more closely maps to what you're trying to have the model do anyways.

Then action the model so it only acts as a low confidence first pass filter, removing the bottom 40% of CVs instead of the more impossible task of trying to have it accurately give you the top 10%.

But this is more work than writing a 200 word system prompt and appending the resume and asking ChatGPT, and nobody in HR will be able to notice the difference.
by sam345 | 2025-05-20 12:03:52+00:00
Ok. One can certainly ignore reality but it won't help employment or put food on the table. Have you ever actually read a regulation and then tried to comply your business with it? Protection from competition will cause Europe to wither further on the vine. It's not protectionism that's needed. It's freedom to innovate without hiring teams of lawyers and consultants before you hire your first programmer.

From the article (and this is just for IT): "European businesses spend 40% of their IT budgets on complying with regulations, according to a recent survey by Amazon. Two-thirds of European businesses don’t understand their obligations under the EU’s AI Act, which came into force last summer, the survey found."
by afavour | 2025-05-20 12:05:27+00:00
I’m sure a bunch of the criticism of Deno is exaggerated. But there’s something fundamental holding me back from investing my time in Deno, or Bun for that matter: they’re both VC funded.

The post is a good illustration of why that matters. Very little of it is about Deno itself, instead it’s mostly about the paid-for services Deno Inc offers. They have to prioritise and chase that because their investors want to see financial growth.

It’s the same reason they abandoned the idea of Deno being a fresh start in the JS ecosystem (an idea I loved) and instead started patching in Node compatibility layers. They had to reduce friction, not add to it. But for me that compromised the reason for using it in the first place.

Node has many flaws. And it’s boring. But its existence doesn’t depend upon the whims of random investors who might decide to pull the plug at any moment. So I’m just going to stick with it.
by sybercecurity | 2025-05-20 12:05:36+00:00
Wow - looks impressive. Like the direction it's going. Doing things where access policies can be set as code is the way to go IMHO.

One issue I've heard from ZTA early adopters is the lack of interoperability between the various ZTNA solutions. Not a big problem unless you have two organizations that have different solutions that now have to work together (merger, partnership, etc.). Ironically, I have overheard people complain enough that they would pay for a FOSS solution...
by bArray | 2025-05-20 12:05:46+00:00
> I completely understand the concerns about AI potentially replacing human thinking, but what if we look at this from a different perspective? Maybe AI isn’t here to replace us, but to push humanity beyond its own limits.

"Tool AI", yes, at least in theory. You always have to question what we lose, or want to lose. Wolves being domesticated likely meant they lost skills as dogs, one of them being math [1]. Do we want to lose our ability to understand math, or reason about complex tasks?

I think we are already losing the ability to "be bored". Sir Isaac Newton got so bored after retreating to the countryside during the great plague, that he invented optics, calculus, motion and gravity. Most modern people would just watch cat videos. I wonder what else technology has robbed us of.

> If we look at the history of human progress, the emergence of tools has always made life more convenient, but it also brought new challenges. The printing press, the steam engine, and electricity have all greatly transformed society, but we adapted and thrived. Why can't AI be the same?

As long as we are talking about "tool AI", then with the above caveats, maybe. But a more general AI (i.e. AGI) would be unlike anything else we have ever seen. Horses got replaced by cars because cars were better at being horses. What if a few AI generations away we have something better than a human at all tasks?

There was a common trope for a while that if AI took our jobs, we would all kick back and do art. It turns out that the likes of Stable Diffusion are good at that too. The tasks where humans succeed are rapidly diminishing.

A friend many years ago worked for a company doing data processing. It took about a week to learn the tasks, and they soon realised that the entire process could be automated entirely in Excel, taking a week-long task down to a few minutes of number crunching. Worse still, they realised they could automate the entire department out of existence.

> The real question isn’t whether AI will replace us, but whether we are ready to use it to do things we couldn’t do or even imagined. Imagine if we didn’t see AI as something that replaces us, but as a tool that allows us to focus on doing what truly matters, leaving the mundane tasks to machines. Isn’t that the ultimate form of progress?

It could be that AI ends up doing the cool things and we end up doing the mundane tasks. For example, Stable Diffusion could imagine a Vincent van Gogh version of the Mona Lisa quickly, but folding laundry to dry, dusting, etc, remain mundane tasks we humans still do.

Something else to consider is the power imbalance that will be caused. Already to even run these new LLMs you need a decently powered GPU, and nothing short of a super computer and hundreds of thousands of dollars to train. What if future AI remains permanently out of reach of all except those with millions of dollars to spend on compute? You could imagine a future where a majority under class remain forever unable to compete. It could lead to the largest wealth transfer ever seen.

[1] https://www.discovermagazine.com/planet-earth/dogs-not-great...
by matsemann | 2025-05-20 12:05:52+00:00
Just curious, is there a hidden bias in just having two candidates to select from, one male and one female? As in, the application pool for (for instance) a tech job is not 50/50, so if the final decision comes down to two candidates, that's some signal about the qualifications of the female candidate?

> How Candidate Order in Prompt Affects LLMs Hiring Decisions

Brb, changing my name to Aaron Aandersen.
by code_aetheris | 2025-05-20 12:05:56+00:00
Yeah this is frustrating... seen stuff like this a few times. Honestly, some of these platforms don’t act unless there’s volume or press involved. what sometimes works is tagging them on X with a screenshot. Also try emailing their security@ or abuse@ directly if the form gets ignored.

Not saying it’ll fix it instantly, but might speed things up a bit. sucks that users have to chase this though.
by jari_mustonen | 2025-05-20 12:06:41+00:00
The gender bias is not primarily about LLMs but rather a reflection of the training material, which mirrors our culture. This is evident as the bias remains fairly consistent across different models.

The bias toward the first presented candidate is interesting. The effect size for this bias is larger, and while it is generally consistent across models, there is an exception: Gemini 2.0.

If things in the beginning of the prompt are considered "better", does this affect chat like interface where LLM would "weight" first messages to be more important? For example, I have some experience with Aider, where LLM seems to prefer the first version of a file that it has seen.
by corimaith | 2025-05-20 12:06:47+00:00
We don't really know why the US savings rate is low, but we do know more explicitly why the savings rates of those "shops", aka surplus countries is abnormally high, with weak social spending, financial repression, currency manipulation etc. Their manufacturing capacities exceed their domestic consumption to absorb, that is to say, they need export markets to stave off unemployment.

Is there not an argument that by the virtue of free capital controls and stronger commitments to free trade, the US is taking the inverse of the exportation of domestic imbalances created by these surplus countries?
by EdgeCaseExist | 2025-05-20 12:06:53+00:00
That's kind of an engine though ? An engine is just a bunch of low level types, DS, algos that go onto build mid level abstractions that go onto form systems. In this case you can argue the game itself (aka the runtime) is the game engine?

As others say, getting data (Assets) in/out of the engine is the hard part. Especially as they are the real contribution to the shipped game been so large (unless smart compression, delivery optimisation is used, sadly not common).
by rickdeckard | 2025-05-20 12:08:01+00:00
It's not even that certain sub-industries prefer "AI", it's the umbrella term a company can use in Marketing for virtually any automated process that provides a seemingly subjective result.

Case in point:

For a decade the implementation of cameras went through development, testing and tuning of Auto Exposure, Auto Focus and Auto White-Balance ("AAA") engines as well as image post-processing.

These engines ran on a Image Signal Processor (ISP) or sometimes on the Camera sensor itself, extensive work was done by Engineering Teams on building these models in order to optimize them to run on low-latency on an ISP.

Suddenly AI came along and all of these features became "AI features". One company started with "AI assisted Camera" to promote the process everyone was doing all-along. So all had to introduce AI, without any disruptive change in the process.
by kevincox | 2025-05-20 12:08:45+00:00
I don't think it is. I can archive my own messages and E2E security on the messaging layer means I don't have to trust the operator of the messaging service to not read my messages because they can't. The choice of how I archive the messages is completely orthogonal to the choice of messaging platform security. I could choose to use an E2EE approach if I want but in that case it probably wasn't even desired as the point was to have these be archived for audit purposes. (Of course they are more secure options such as archiving to an audit key, but this is still orthogonal to the concern of the messaging protocol)
by dbushell | 2025-05-20 12:09:46+00:00
Doesn't inspire confidence.

I guess we’ll see soon enough what Deploy will become since that's "imminent".

KV is dead if they've no desire to develop it out of beta and are working on something new. No reason to ever use it for a new project now.

Fresh is being refactored with an alpha in "late Q3 2025 (likely September)". It was a fairly basic framework to being with. The no compilation/build step was the only interesting idea and that's going away.

The runtime is actively developed but I find this statement amusing:

> We’re not chasing feature parity with other runtimes.

The release notes on Node/NPM compatibility would suggest otherwise.
by bencyoung | 2025-05-20 12:10:20+00:00
Thanks! Hmm, I think we're talking about slightly different things but it's been too long since I studied it to put it in the right words :)

I completely agree that spacetime can be "flatish" for a large block hole, but the event horizon does still represent a boundary right?

Consider the edge case of crossing the event horizon itself at some speed <<c (because you've got magic thrusters fighting the pull). At some point your feet will be through the event horizon and your head won't be. Do you agree that at that point you won't be able to see your feet?

I agree that your head will pass through the future light cone of your feet, and so could do somethign to affect your head (by emitting something falling slower than your head), but I'm not sure any light rays could follow that path.
by diggan | 2025-05-20 12:11:00+00:00
> There’s been some criticism lately about Deno - about Deploy, KV, Fresh, and our momentum in general.

It seems like they never replied to the criticism against their momentum (something I haven't seen myself, what would the argument even be), was that intentional or just missed?

> Some of that criticism is valid.

Would have been great to also outline what criticism is/was valid, and how they're aiming to solve those things. Sure, maybe a bit "shoot yourself in the foot" but personally I really prefer companies that are upfront about the drawbacks, and makes it more likely I'll chose them. Migadu is a great example of this, where they have a pro/con page where they are upfront about the drawbacks of using Migadu (https://migadu.com/procon/). Just the existence of that page is probably ~20% of why I chose Migadu in the first place.
by OisinMoran | 2025-05-20 12:11:27+00:00
I love this genre! I've started calling it “Dantzig Sniping” and here’s my own one: https://x.com/TheOisinMoran/status/1298305686082744320

Some more context and related ones here: https://x.com/TheOisinMoran/status/1299124512240398336
by Maken | 2025-05-20 12:12:01+00:00
But the trains in Cuba used standard gauge. And the early trains in the north of Spain used (and still use) a narrow-gauge. It was when the central government decided to build a nation-wide network that the Iberian-gauge was chosen, making it incompatible with both the pre-existing Spanish railways and other continental European railways, in the infamous "Informe Subercase" [1]. It is the perfect example of design-by-committee, in which no technical reasons are given other than there are wider and narrower gauges, so they choose an arbitrary middle ground.

bast copy of the Subercase report I could find: [1] https://www.agrupament.cat/documents/Informe%20Subercase.pdf
Ask HN: The worst CEO alive needs help with fixing Accounting and Tax
by stevejoos | 2025-05-20 12:12:03+00:00
Dear All!

I am terrible at being CEO — the worst you have seen –, thus I neglected submitting our tax filing for calendar 2024.

Who should we turn to for fixing our late filing and setting up our Stripe for accounting and tax?

Stripe lists: Pilot, Fondo, Puzzle, QickBooks, Xero.

Would you advise us to go with one of these, or somebody else?

Thanks very much!!

About: - Humania Inc., Delaware, US - http://humania.io - 2024 gross volume: USD 1.221

Yours, Steve Joos
by diggan | 2025-05-20 12:12:12+00:00
> Does anyone know of a server-side typescript scripting engine that is not trying to be backwards compatible with node?

What's the point? If you're in love with static types, but have to do JavaScript because you're targeting the browser, I kind of understand why'd you go for TypeScript. But if you're on the backend, and don't need anything JS, why limit yourself to TypeScript which is a "Compile-to-JS" language? You control the stack, make another choice.
by _heimdall | 2025-05-20 12:13:05+00:00
That sounds reasonable enough, but the pace or end result is by no means guaranteed.

We have invested plenty of money and time into nuclear fusion with little progress. The list of key acheivments from CERN[1] is also meager in comparison to the investment put in, especially if you consider their ultimate goal to ultimately be towards applying research to more than just theory.

[1] https://home.cern/about/key-achievements
by pjc50 | 2025-05-20 12:13:34+00:00
This is somewhat similar to the language vector embedding, isn't it?

And the article asks the reasonable question "what is the difference between having a single word for a thing versus a commonly understood cluster of words?". It's not a hard boundary.

Every translation loses a little bit of information but potentially brings in different connotations. The things that translators and localizers argue about endlessly: do we look for the words that most closely match the other words, or do we look for feeling and meaning that most closely matches the original intent?
by nchmy | 2025-05-20 12:14:07+00:00
Could it be that they added node compatibility because people wanted node compatibility. If investors pushed for it as well, then they were just being sensible...

I started working with JS/TS just before Deno 2 came out and having, essentially, full node (and TypeScript) compatibility was the primary reason I switched to it. It is all just so simple in comparison to node.

But, I agree about the VC funding - it certainly gives cause for concern about Deno's direction and longevity. But what other option is there, really? Hopefully what was said in this post about reduction of Deno Deploy locations being a function of use rather than economics was true
by anonymars | 2025-05-20 12:14:49+00:00
I think this overstates the challenges, especially given the last 10+ years of despots doing things they shouldn't just be able to do. Waking up one day to find that the US has invaded Canada is now a non-negligible possibility.

I think they are up to the challenge of whipping up some BS casus belli and scaring would-be protesters into submission.
by petesergeant | 2025-05-20 12:14:58+00:00
This methodology is a joke. A key finding they've highlighted is: "One-third of millionaires set [the level of too much money] at $10m". Surely like 85-95% of millionaires have less than $10m, and it's easy to imagine someone with 10x your money having too much money.

Who are their surveyed millionaires? A random 15 people they found from "Brazil, France, Italy, South Africa, the UK, and the USA".

The general idea of a harmful amount of wealth is interesting, this report doesn't feel very serious.
by skydhash | 2025-05-20 12:15:16+00:00
You can represent many things with numbers and build an algorithm that does stuff. ML techniques are formulas where some specifics constants are not known yet, so you go through a training phase to find them.

While combinations of words are infinite, only some makes sense. So there’s a lot of reccurent patterns there. When you take a huge datasets like most of the internet and digital documents. I would be more surprised if the trained model where incapable of producing correct texts as both the it’s overfitted to the grammar and the lexicon. And I believe it’s overfitted to general conversation patterns.
by yahoozoo | 2025-05-20 12:15:24+00:00
I am skeptical whenever I see someone asking a LLM to include some kind of numerical rating or probability in its output. LLMs can’t actually _do_ that, it’s just some random but likely number pulled from its training set.

We all know the “how many Rs in strawberry” but even at the word level, it’s simple to throw them off. I asked ChatGPT the following question:

> How many times does the word “blue” appear in the following sentence: “The sky was blue and my blue was blue.”

And it said 4.
by yubblegum | 2025-05-20 12:15:36+00:00
> The author does not seem to understand that a technology is good or bad, nor in itself, but in how it is used.

The point regarding technology is a given and already understood by any reasonable person. This is not our first encounter with disruptive "technology".

The germinal point is the confluence of behavioral patterns and influences that ultimately determine how technology is used.

OP: >Everybody who uses AI is going to get exponentially stupider, and the stupider they get, the more they’ll need to use AI to be able to do stuff that they were previously able to do with their minds.

This to me is a reasonably probable outcome. It is not the only possible outcome but our record with the internet (the 90s' disruptive technology with its own +/- possibilities) is the cautionary tale. Remember voices that very clearly predicted the surveillance society in the 90s?

[p.s. consider auto-correct for spelling. Would you agree with my impression that the generation that has grown up with this (hardly disruptive) tech no longer can spell words of their own language?]

So, going back to the agreed baseline of 'how we use tools' as the critical matter, it seems (based on historic facts) that we should take 'cassandras' seriously from the very onset of introducing disruptive technology at societal scale and take the necessary steps to insure that the incentive to use a technology in the optimal manner is far greater than its misuse.

What is not helpful (at all) is to revert to the baseline and dismiss timely cautionary concerns.
Show HN: Cyberdesk, API for computer agents to control a desktop (open source)
by sgtwompwomp | 2025-05-20 12:15:38+00:00
Hey HN,

We built Cyberdesk – an open source API for building computer agents that can control a full virtual desktop: click, type, scroll, and more.

If you're working on an agent that needs to operate real apps (desktop apps, web apps in a browser, etc.), this saves you the headache of setting up and scaling VMs. Just call our API to start a desktop and send actions.

Our entire infrastructure, frontend, backend, and SDKs are open source.

GitHub: https://github.com/cyberdesk-hq/cyberdesk

Docs: https://docs.cyberdesk.io

Demo: https://cyberdesk.io

Cyberdesk is ideal if you’re:

- Building screenshot based computer use agents

- Tired of duct-taping Docker, VNC, and cloud infra together

- Curious about computer use

We’re early and would love feedback — whether it's UX/API design, missing features, or performance.

Happy to answer anything. Thanks!
by h2zizzle | 2025-05-20 12:15:41+00:00
IME chats do seem to get "stuck" on elements of the first message sent to it, even if you correct yourself later.

As for gender bias being a reflection of training data, LLMs being likely to reproduce existing biases without being able to go back to a human who made the decision to correct it is a danger that was warned of years ago. Timnit Gebru was right, and now it seems that the increasing use of these systems will mean that the only way to counteract bias will be to measure and correct for disparate impact.
by amoss | 2025-05-20 12:15:53+00:00
At first glance it looks similar to the Monty Hall problem, but it is actually a different problem.

In the Monty Hall problem there is added information in the second round from the informed choice (removing the empty box).

In this problem we don't have the same two-stage process with new information. If the previous process was fair then we know the remaining candidate was better than the eliminated male (and female) candidates. We also know the remaining female candidate was better than the eliminated male (and female) candidates.

So the size of the initial pools does not tell us anything about the relative result of evaluating these two candidates. Most people would choose the candidate from the smaller pool though, using an analogue of the Gambler's Fallacy.
by pydry | 2025-05-20 12:16:34+00:00
It seems great until those imaginary numbers become worthless overnight.

Then you might have a bit of an "oh shit" moment as you realize that the industrial ecosystem required to substitute those imports would take a decade and a half to build even if your money were worth something, which it now isnt.

Lots of countries collapse due to overreliance on foreign imports. Argentina never recovered from its peak in the 1920s - it just kept bouncing from crisis to crisis. This is looking like an increasingly plausible outcome for the US.
by mrweasel | 2025-05-20 12:17:00+00:00
> I’d also be curious why the EU doesn’t consistently run trade deficits.

Some EU countries probably do, but because they are smaller economies it seems less critical. Combining the EU economies can hide a Spanish deficit within the German surplus fairly easily. e.g. the German surplus are 10 times higher than the Spanish deficit (if I recall correctly).

The EU viewed as a whole, I don't know, maybe due to a very diverse economy, lower overall consumption, lower EU salaries?