MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mootothemax | 2025-05-02 04:16:09+00:00
I’d love to hear your thoughts on BERTs - I’ve dabbled a fair bit, fairly amateurishly, and have been astonished by their performance.

I’ve also found them surprisingly difficult and non-intuitive to train, eg deliberately including bad data and potentially a few false positives has resulted in notable success rate improvements.

Do you consider BERTs to be the upper end of traditional - or, dunno, transformer architecture in general to be a duff? Am sure you have fascinating insight on this!
Looking for builders who quit healthcare because of its misaligned incentives
by clement1107 | 2025-05-02 04:18:32+00:00
I've met a lot of young ex-founders who wanted to create positive change in healthcare, but were burnt out by healthcare's convoluted incentive systems. I think if we can band together enough young people fired up about realigning healthcare to, once again, serve the patient we can actually build something cool
by AStonesThrow | 2025-05-02 04:18:45+00:00
Awhile ago, I learned that Jericho was an ancient center for moon worship. That their main deity there was identified strongly with the Moon itself, and that Joshua's battles had been to defeat the heresiarchs of their time, the worshippers of the Moon, who refused to acknowledge Yahweh as he truly was.

Working a bit backwards from this, and indeed back from the Space Race championed by JFK and others, I decided that perhaps, just perhaps, one way of interpreting the Jericho battles and the Hebrew victory was that Joshua conquered the Moon itself. That he literally led an army bearing the Ark of the Covenant into Outer Space, and demolished the Moon and came back with all the spoils of war. [Now this handily explains why the Moon was so barren already!]

I found other cues too, such as "Gilgal" referring to the rolling of circumcision stones (but could it also mean "orbit"...) and perhaps there are multiple pericopes in our Old Testament that can be interpreted as conquering Outer Space itself... wandering in the wilderness 40 years before attaining Heaven, anyone?

It is all quite crazy but I feel like it handily explains the fervor and excitement that accompanied our push to land on the Moon itself. That Christians saw the USA as a modern-day Joshua who would actually make the trip and claim the Moon for ourselves. If you go over the details of the Jericho battles you will see that they are intricately planned, engineered, and executed. They were the pinnacle of liturgy at the time and could never have been realized without divine assistance and solid human leadership. And likewise were our Moon journeys of the Space Race.

Now today we may have another issue, as Joshua also took on "Ai" itself...
by modeless | 2025-05-02 04:19:27+00:00
> Even if session cookies are stolen, they cannot be used from another device.

This seems false? Given the description in the article, the short lived cookie could be used from another device during its lifetime. Having this short lived cookie and having the browser proactively refresh it seems like a bad design to me. The proof of possession should be a handshake at the start of each connection. With HTTP3 you shouldn't need a lot of connections.
by mgraczyk | 2025-05-02 04:19:31+00:00
It currently costs around $2200 to run Gemini flash lite on all of Wikipedia English. It would probably cost around 10x that much to run sentiment analysis on every Yelp review ever posted. It's true that LLMs still cost a lot for some use cases, but for essentially any business case it's not worth using traditional NLP any more
by ytpete | 2025-05-02 04:20:28+00:00
During the "Safari is the new IE" era though, Apple had created all sorts of proprietary extensions to make websites more mobile-friendly... a whole slew of nonstandard `-webkit-*` prefixed CSS properties and DOM events.

I can't say for sure whether pressure from Google got all that stuff migrated into real web standards faster or not, but it sure felt at the time like it was having that effect.
by Alupis | 2025-05-02 04:21:48+00:00
You're a bit late to the party. Its been normalized for almost as long as distros have existed.

No, you don't just randomly have a different package installed one day, at least on major distros. The next distro release will include the new package. If for any reason you care, you can always go install the other one you want instead as well, it just won't be part of the default package repos.

Generally, the replacement packages are 1:1 with the one they are replacing, and/or compatibility shims are included during the install. Its seamless. Also, generally the package manager does tell you what it's installing.

The major Linux distros are very careful about this stuff. The two largest have huge enterprise user bases, and it's never been a problem.

Many of the Linux distros are extremely opinionated on what goes into their default package repositories - it's a major reason why you choose certain distros. You are delegating all of this concern about packages, compatibility, bug/security fixes, and licenses and whatever to the maintainers of the distro. They are very careful not to break existing systems, and aren't going to surprise you one day with a major disruptive change. For them to replace Redis, for instance, with Valkey, it's going to be on the next major os release, it'll be a drop in replacement (all Redis commands continue to work, etc), and you'll have an opportunity to see this change while installing packages. This isn't "shoot from the hip" npm style stuff...
by jhatemyjob | 2025-05-02 04:22:00+00:00
Thank you and immibis for bringing this issue up. Always thought this was fishy. I don't fully understand this yet and will need to do more research. I bet these comments are unpopular because SSPL hurts GCP/AWS, which hurts YC.

Not saying the mods of HN are conspiring to bury these comments. But the fish rots from the head in upvote-ordered comment trees
by thayne | 2025-05-02 04:23:34+00:00
The cookie jar isn't the only place the cookie could be leaked from. For example, it could be leaked from:

* Someone inspecting the page with developer tools

* Logs that accidentally (or intentionally) contain the cookie

* A corporate (or government) firewall that intercepts plaintext traffic

* Someone with temporary physical access to the machine that can use the TPM or secure enclave to decrypt the cookie jar.

* A mistake in the cookie configuration and/or DNS leads to the cookie getting sent to the wrong server.

This would protect against those scenarios.
by throwaway314155 | 2025-05-02 04:24:37+00:00
> And are you really trying to present that you have practical experience building comparable tools to an LLM prior to the Transformer paper being written?

I believe (could be wrong) they were talking about their prior GOFAI/NLP experience when referencing scaling systems.

In any case, is it really necessary to be so harsh about over-confidence and then go on to predict the future of solving hallucinations with your formal verification ideas?

Talk is cheap. Show me the code.
by ocdtrekkie | 2025-05-02 04:25:44+00:00
I have had my disagreements with dang over the years, but to be clear: I think the HN mods do incredible work. I disagree with some of their choices, but I don't think they moderate with an eye on YC's bottom line.

The OSI and the FSF are still extremely popular organizations despite their very big issues, I fully expect to upset some people when I bring this up. ;)
by stahtops | 2025-05-02 04:27:10+00:00
Our priorities just aren't aligned, I am not being measurably hurt by any of the AppStore rules cyberax laid out.

I don't want to be forced or even prompted to fill out my personal information on every apps website. To me that sounds like an increased burden of my time, and it puts my personal information at higher risk to be gathered and sold or leaked. I prefer the transaction to happen within the app on iOS conforming to the UI/UX standards that Apple has established.

I know exactly what happens when we just let the free market "manage" anything. Utter chaos. We get an internet that is completely and utterly infected with ads, spam, and scams.

No thanks.
by TZubiri | 2025-05-02 04:28:10+00:00
Oh I didn't notice I was talking to a primary source.

Below I have tried to make clear what the original statement was (root comment), the implicit presumption in it that I adressed (that flat salaries make a company more co-op) instead of addressing the actual now invalidated question (why not 'make it this other thing), why I think it's wrong and what I think is the case (the opposite).

None of this is necessarily worthy of such deep elucidation, mind you, but I quite enjoy the nerdy depth-first nitpickiness that only internet threads can afford. So here goes nothing:

The root comment asks "why not make it an employee owned co-op at this point." implying that Oxide's salary policy difference, (diff between the Oxide fork and the SF Startup base) brings it too close to employee-owned status.

What I say is, au contraire mon amie, the delta that Oxide's bylaws/RFP apply on top of the base Corp Structure refer to the fixed compensation, where equity/ownership remains largely unchanged (unchanged from the base, not inexistent or unchanged compared to the base of the base, the commodity non-sf Corp.). So to the extent that it is employee-owned, it is a property of the immediate base and not of the fork.

One could even argue that since total compensation a limited resource, an increase in fixed compensation means a decrease in equity compensation and viceversa (more salary less profits, less salary more profits), therefore the flat salary difference of Oxide pulls them AWAY from employee-ownership (albeit only slightly admittedly), by making fixed compensation a stronger component of compensation than equity, (at least compensation-wise, as there are non comp. properties of ownership)

If I may mathematically summarize in oversimplified 1D political terms. Consider the Political Alignment 'PA' of company structures as reals [-1;+1], where right = (0;1], left = [-1;0) and center = [-ε;+ε]. Then:

PA(Co-op) < PA(SF Corp) < PA(Oxide) < PA(WY/DW Corp)

And not:

PA(Co-op) ≈ PA(Oxide) < PA(SF Corp)

As root comment would suggest.

I guess what I'm saying big picture is that Oxide is a political-center Company and OS. It was born treading the needle between Linux and Oracle, which are already quite centered Orgs/OS when compared to the extremes like GNU and Apple.

Thank you for coming to my TED talk and yes, before someone asks, I have kissed a girl before.
by rohitshenoy | 2025-05-02 04:28:38+00:00
String (https://www.usestring.ai/) | Founding Engineer | ONSITE - NYC, SF | $120k-200k salary + equity

---

We're building the first end to end web scraping platform powered by AI. We help businesses collect web data without the hassle of maintaining code, infra, and anti-bot evasions.

We're a small team of four that recently raised a seed round from leading VCs and angels to keep up with revenue growth. We ship fast and have signed up several enterprise customers including the largest hedge funds in the world in less than a year. This is an opportunity to join at the ground floor of a product that will be used by thousands of enterprises.

I'm Rohit, one of the founders - if interested, apply here (https://string-ai.notion.site) and mention this post.
by munificent | 2025-05-02 04:28:57+00:00
The foundational document of our nation's government literally treats Native Americans as non-people and slaves (who were overwhelmingly of African descent) as 3/5 of a person.

The majority of Black people in the US are literally descended from people who were brought here as slaves. Half of the country was so attached to the idea of being able to own Black people and treat them as property that they started a civil war to hold onto it.

This is the country that was founded on enslaved Black people, created the Trail of Tears, and placed Japanese-Americans in concentration camps.

It shouldn't be very hard to figure out an explanation for why certain races in the US have historically been at a disadvantage.
by huijzer | 2025-05-02 04:29:06+00:00
Please tell that to European governments too. The Netherlands military police was using Whatsapp (e.g., https://www.defensie.nl/actueel/nieuws/2022/06/15/maatregele...). Only Germany has the BwMessenger (Matrix) as far as I know. It makes me wonder what the other militaries are using.
by billjings | 2025-05-02 04:29:10+00:00
Frankly, when you look around and everyone around you is focused first and foremost on getting rich, that's a good indication that the rich veins have already been mined.

Wealth is built on creating something of value. There is gamesmanship played to acquire that value once it is created, but without the thing itself they are all just picking each others' pockets.
by obeavs | 2025-05-02 04:29:18+00:00
Phosphor | NYC | Full Time | Founding Engineer (HCI focus) | $175-225k + Equity

Phosphor enables the development of the built world (e.g. from real estate to energy projects) to be managed agentically by building programming languages and observability primitives (like version control) on top of a hypergraph.

Our primary technical bet is that if you capture annotated "diffs" of user information with the appropriate annotation, you can create path-dependence to train AI models in an AlphaGo like context. By doing so, we achieve agentic experiences for markets that have never even had an opportunity to imagine what life would be like with basic observability.

Our product is similar a combination of Linear and Wolfram, with components and objects that enable advanced financial modeling, legal/regulatory analysis, and geospatial analysis of infrastructure development opportunities.

We're in stealth, but recently venture-backed by one of the best deeptech funds in the market. We're hiring for a few roles at the senior/staff levels: 1. HCI Engineer - You're a prosemirror wizard who probably follows Ink & Switch or the UCSB HCI lab on Twitter; front-end/rich-text/typescript focused; lots of architectural/sync engine work 2. Systems/Compiler Engineer - We design and build dev tools for languages we create that compile into various graph representations. These range from financial modeling calcs (which need to go very fast to support a seamless UX), to computable representations of legal agreements. Extra points if you've worked with hypergraphs. This in Rust but we're exploring a few other languages.

Email resume/linkedin/twitter to oliver@phosphor.co if you might fit somewhere in here, or if you've taken a credible attempt at building end-user programming tools.
by DaiPlusPlus | 2025-05-02 04:29:24+00:00
> Think of the absurdity of trying to understand the Pi number by looking at its first billion digits and trying to predict the next digit. And think of what it takes to advance from memorizing digits of such numbers and predicting continuation with astrology-style logic to understanding the math behind the digits of Pi.

I'm prepared to believe that a sufficiently advanced LLM around today will have some "neural" representation of a generalization of a Taylor Series, thus allowing it to "natively predict" digits of Pi.
by robert-chandler | 2025-05-02 04:29:47+00:00
Wordware | Engineers | SF On Site | Full-time | AI

Wordware is an IDE for building AI agents using natural language.

It looks and feels like Notion, but lets you design, test, and deploy AI systems in real time - without writing code.

Our mission is to bring structure and joy to human–AI collaboration.

We’re building a generational company that empowers the next billion knowledge workers to create with AI - not by writing code, but by expressing intent.

We’re backed by Spark Capital, Felicis, and Y Combinator ($30M seed round) We work hard, move fast, and don’t take ourselves too seriously. It’s intense, but it’s also fun - at Wordware, you’ll do the best work of your life alongside people you genuinely like.

Hiring for engineering roles @ https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/wordware.ai
by silisili | 2025-05-02 04:30:22+00:00
I'm convinced some are throwing things away.

I have family in the midwest, from a city who made the news because of how backed up its USPS had become. Even intracity mail was taking 3 weeks to get delivered. The postmaster declined to respond.

Magically, a week later, they claimed to be caught up and 'fixed.' I had two family members having sent me something in this time, and neither ever got delivered. I have informed delivery, and neither even showed up at my local PO. It's been over a month. They both resent, and both arrived within a few days.
by soraminazuki | 2025-05-02 04:30:43+00:00
I recently had the pleasure of reviewing AI-generated Ruby code at work. It was so nonsensical and couldn't manage to get basic map and reduce right. I didn't initially know it was AI generated, and I was at a loss of words regarding what I should write as feedback.

Something needs to be done. It should be uncontroversial to require solid understanding of fundamentals from software professionals, yet here we are discrediting knowledge by calling such things "gatekeeping." It's reckless behavior as the industry is hellbent on hoarding as much personal information as it possibly can. Information that any responsible professional should be working to keep secure at the very least.
by trgn | 2025-05-02 04:32:03+00:00
Elastic was in the same bind as every company which writes opensource. There's no way to monetize it when a hyperscaler can sell it at much thinner margins.

Either the product is donated to a foundation, or the parent company dies.

While amazon technically wasn't doing anything "wrong", they're effectively squeezing the oxygen out of the ecosystem.

The parameters of the problem are relatively new. SAAS - which is now the norm for how software should be delivered, and opensource - which is old - just don't mix, the incentive structure is completely misaligned. Companies are prodding to see how to get out of this conundrum. Mongodb set the tone with the SSPL, and other midcap just kind of followed suit, what else was there to do, what other approaches could have been taken? Now, as the fallout starts to become clear, there's just a lot more information now on what works and doesn't, and companies are pivoting.

There's no vibes about it, it's brutal reality out there, big tech is strangling the market, and the small guys are figuring a way out, first trying one way, now another.
by thayne | 2025-05-02 04:33:31+00:00
Right. The idea is that the short lived cookies would have a very short lived expiration, so even if you get access to it, it isn't very useful.

> The proof of possession should happen at the start of each connection. With HTTP3 you shouldn't need a lot of connections.

That could possibly be workable in some situations, but it would add a lot of complexity to application layer load balancers, or reverse proxies, since they would somehow need to communicate that proof of possession to the backend for every request. And it makes http/3 or http/2 a requirement.
by not_a_bot_4sho | 2025-05-02 04:34:30+00:00
This is a case of media out to get them. The premise is: if you lose your local backup recovery keys, and you lose access to the account you used to login and create your recovery keys, you cannot get a recovery key.

I dare say this is expected behavior. Any mitigation requires a backdoor.

That's not to say MS isn't fucking other shit up though ..
by lytedev | 2025-05-02 04:34:36+00:00
I'm surprised to read this from you, somebody I and many others hold in high regard as accepting and knowledgeable, insulting someone's character because they didn't like some specific aspect of your work or opinions or chose to ignore an ask in this particular use case.

I didn't implement this out of fear or some lack of courage. In fact I had the original avatars up for quite a while. I simply wanted my own logo so visitors wouldn't be potentially confused. It seemed to fit the use case and there was no way to achieve what I wanted without reaching out. I didn't feel comfortable bugging you or anybody on account of my tiny little no-traffic git forge even though, yes, that is what you politely asked for (and did not demand).

I think if you do feel this strongly you might consider changing the software's license or the phrasing of the request in the documentation. Or perhaps making it very clear that no matter how small, you want to be reached out to for the whitelabel version.

I think the success story of Anubis has been awesome to read about and follow and seeing how things unfold further will be fun to watch and possibly even contribute to. I'm personally rooting for you and your project!
by throwaway2037 | 2025-05-02 04:35:07+00:00
I don't want to wade too deeply into the argument is a computer support engineer worth 200K USD per year, but this comment really stands out to me:

> Empower them to figure out and fix the underlying issue thus avoiding the next 1,000 calls

Some of the best software engineers that I have worked with saw every support issue as a chance to fix a bug and/or improve logging/docs. Sometimes they built little tools to do more complex support tasks (update complex config) in moments instead of hours. (Yeah, yeah, I know about this XKCD: https://xkcd.com/1205/)

If I were to guess about Oxide's view of "support engineers": They aren't traditional L1/L2 support. They are essentially software devs who happen to excel at support. As a mentioned earlier, if they respond to a customer call (or email), they might have a quick workaround, then go and fix a bug or update logging/docs.
by jes5199 | 2025-05-02 04:35:17+00:00
the MCP spec as it stands today is pretty half-baked. It’s pretty clear that the first edition was trying to emulate STDIO over HTTP, but that meant holding open a connection indefinitely. The new revision tries to solve this by letting you hold open as many connections as you want! but that makes it vague about message delivery ordering when you have multiple streams open. There even seems to be part of the spec that is logically impossible - people are wrestling with it in the GitHub issues.

which is to say: I’m not sure it actually wins, technically, over the OpenAI/OpenAPI idea from last year, which was at least easy to understand
by cathmere | 2025-05-02 04:35:36+00:00
Cathmere | Fullstack Engineer | Hybrid NYC | Full Time | https://cathmere.com We are a seed-stage startup revolutionizing how capital flows to emerging markets through our innovative fintech platform. We're seeking an exceptional Frontend Engineer to help build our end-to-end solution that connects US investors with high-impact equipment financing opportunities in emerging markets.

Responsibilities

- Own and build our b2b and b2c web apps. - Bring both engineering and product expertise to the team. - Build analytical tools to help businesses securitize their assets. - Create our web-based marketing platform to reach investors in a variety of different markets.

If you’re interested in learning more, email matt@cathmere.com
by riskassessment | 2025-05-02 04:36:37+00:00
The value of good editorial staff may very well be less important in some fields. In the biomedical field subject-matter expertise still matters a lot in terms of discerning good research from seemingly good research. Which also means that prestige journals won't make research any more groundbreaking but if functioning properly should enrich for papers that are less likely to be junk science. I'd also argue that generic journals like Nature and Science are so unfocused that their staff probably provides little to no additional expertise and they rely entirely on peer review. Whereas staff at more specialized journals with lower but still very respectable impact factors are probably doing more informed work to select for quality science.