MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by somenameforme | 2025-05-06 05:23:44+00:00
There are obviously some extremely high profile incidents of journalists being forced to promote an ostensibly partisan view in recent times, but that's generally only when the ownership flip flops on their views. And the reason for this is quite insidious. Knowing somebody's partisanship, biases, and other interests in pretty easy in modern times for people who like to be visible which is, more or less by definition, always true for journalists. So if you want bias [x] or partisanship [y], you simply only hire people of such partisanship or bias. So there's only a problem when you change your mind about the 'right' biases.

And I don't think there's any legacy media outlet that's really independent now a days. They've all gone hardcore partisan one way or the other, and all frame things in strong accordance with US geopolitical policy. For instance imagine how absurdly different the coverage would look if what was happening between Israel and Gaza was instead, otherwise identically, happening between China and Xinjiang (Uyghurs).
by TFYS | 2025-05-06 05:24:21+00:00
Everyone "agrees" to it because there's no other choice, it's the system we have. Everyone agrees to it the same way people in communist countries agree to do what the state tells them to do. Most people have to agree, or the whole system will collapse.

Even if you could say that people truly choose to give a piece of their paycheck to someone simply for being named the owner, it's not a reason not to consider limiting that right to choose. We limit many things that we consider harmful. This system is producing ever increasing inequality of wealth and power. There are now people so wealthy that they're able to break democracies. This will only get worse and worse.
by rogermavis | 2025-05-06 05:24:24+00:00
To ensure I'm not speaking incorrectly (as I was going from memory), I grep'ed my several years' of databricks notes. Oh boy.. the memories came flooding back!

We had 8 data engineers onboarding the org to databricks, it was only after 2 solid years before they got to working on serverless (it was because users complained of user unfriendliness of 'nodes', and managers of cost). But then, there were problems. A common pattern through my grep of slack convos is "I'm having this esoteric error where X doesn't work on serverless databricks, can you help".. a bunch of back and forth (sometimes over days) and screenshots followed by "oh, unfortunately, serverless doesn't support X".

Another interesting note is someone compared serverless databricks to bigquery, and bigquery was 3x faster without the databricks-specific cruft (all bigquery needs is an authenticated user and a sql query).

Databricks isn't useless. It's just a swiss army knife that doesn't do anything well, except sales, and may improve the workflows for the least advanced data analysts/scientists at the expense of everyone else.
by wqtz | 2025-05-06 05:25:37+00:00
Databricks acquired bit.io and subsequently shut it down quite fast. Afaik bit.io had a very small team and the founder was a serial entrepreneur who is not going to stick around and he did not. I am not sure who from bit.io is still around at databricks.

If I am guessing right, Motherduck will likely be acquired by GCP because most of the founding team was ex-BQ. Snowflake purchased Modin and polars is still quite immature to be acquisition ready. So, what does this leave us with. There is also EDB who is competing in enterprise Postgres space.

Folks I know in the industry are not very happy with databricks. Databricks themselves was hinting people that that they would be potentially acquired by Azure as Azure tries to compete in the data warehouse space. But everyone become an AI company which left Databricks in an awkward space. Their bdev team is not bestest from my limited interactions with them (lots of starbucks drinkers and let me get back to you after a 3 month PTO), so they do not know who or how to lead them to an AI pivot. With cash to burn from overinvestment and the snowflake/databricks conf coming up fast they needed a big announcement and this is that big announcement.

Should have sobered up before writing this though. But who cares.
by nemanja_codes | 2025-05-06 05:26:23+00:00
Location: Serbia, GMT +2 Remote: Yes Willing to relocate: Yes Technologies: React, Next.js, JavaScript/TypeScript, Node.js, Astro, TailwindCSS, Jest, Cypress, Prisma, PostrgreSQL, MongoDB, Docker, C#/.NET Resume/CV: Available on request GitHub: https://github.com/nemanjam Website: https://nemanjamitic.com LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nemanja-mitic Email: nemanja.mitic.elfak [at] hotmail.com

I am a full stack developer with a Master's degree in Computer Science and 4.5 years of professional experience with JavaScript. My top skills are React/Next.js and I am also good with Node.js backends. I have decent experience with C# and .NET but currently it is not my main focus. I have a decent understanding of DevOps technologies (Linux, containers, IaC, automation) for a developer. I also have an interest in Python and FastAPI.

Here are some of my projects:

1. Comprehensive project: full stack Next.js, Prisma, unit, integration, e2e tests, CI/CD.

https://github.com/nemanjam/nextjs-prisma-boilerplate

2. Latest project: HN job ads aggregator, Next.js, SQLite (GitHub and demo links are in the first post).

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42373936

I have experience working remotely for startups within globally distributed multicultural teams.

I am looking for a full-time remote position. If we work well and stable I can relocate. I have detailed resume available upon request. You can check out my other projects at https://github.com/nemanjam . You can tell me about your company and project via email: nemanja.mitic.elfak [at] hotmail.com or connect with me on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nemanja-mitic .
by Quizzical4230 | 2025-05-06 05:27:47+00:00
I recently got to know about this[^1] paper that differentiates between 'uh' and 'um'.

> The proposal examined here is that speakers use uh and um to announce that they are initiating what they expect to be a minor (uh), or major (um), delay in speaking. Speakers can use these announcements in turn to implicate, for example, that they are searching for a word, are deciding what to say next, want to keep the floor, or want to cede the floor. Evidence for the proposal comes from several large corpora of spontaneous speech. The evidence shows that speakers monitor their speech plans for upcoming delays worthy of comment. When they discover such a delay, they formulate where and how to suspend speaking, which item to produce (uh or um), whether to attach it as a clitic onto the previous word (as in “and-uh”), and whether to prolong it. The argument is that uh and um are conventional English words, and speakers plan for, formulate, and produce them just as they would any word.

[1]: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00100...
by seanhunter | 2025-05-06 05:28:03+00:00
There is a real connection insofar as the internal space of an LLM is a vector space so things which hold for vector spaces hold for the internal space of an LLM. This is the power of abstract algebra. When an algebraic structure can be identified you all of a sudden know a ton of things about it because mathematicians have been working to understand those structures for a while.

The internal space of an LLM would also have things in common with how, say currents flow in a body of water because that too is a vector space. When you study this stuff you get this sort of zen sense of everything getting connected to everything else. Eg in one of my textbooks you look at how pollution spreads through the great lakes and then literally the next example looks at how drugs are absorbed into the bloodstream through the stomach and it’s exactly the same dynamic matrix and set of differential equations. Your stomach works the same as the great lakes on a really fundamental level.

The spaces being described here are a little more general than vector spaces, so some of things which are true about vector spaces wouldn’t necessarily work the same way here.
by tverbeure | 2025-05-06 05:28:18+00:00
I've added an additional section about the noise issue after doing some additional measurements: https://tomverbeure.github.io/2025/05/04/TDS684B-CCD-Memory.....

It's a repeating pattern of ~195 samples so it's easy to figure out this pattern during calibration and subtract it from the values measured by the ADC.

In addition to that, there is also some interleaving going on.
by dizhn | 2025-05-06 05:29:38+00:00
A credit card is required for sign up but it won't be set up as a billing card until you add it. One curious thing they do is though, the free trial is the only entry way to create a new cloud account. You can't become a nonfree customer from the get go. This is weird because their free trial signup is horrible. The free trial is in very high demand so understandably they refuse a lot of accounts which they would probably like as nonfree customers.
by brewdad | 2025-05-06 05:30:48+00:00
Right, but I want to validate my identity for cases where it is important to me. I also want to prevent others from assuming my identity in cases where it doesn't really matter (until it does). My identity here is not the same identity use on Reddit. At the same time being erroneously linked to someone else's posts on Reddit because they use this username could be a real problem. At he same time, I don't necessarily want my posts here to be linked to posts at Reddit or X or wherever. Rinse and repeat across thousands of web sites.

It's a problem with no easy solutions. In part, because no two users want exactly the same solution.
by Animats | 2025-05-06 05:31:01+00:00
This is pretty good.

A useful way to think about this:

- All data in Rust has exactly one owner.

- If you need some kind of multiple ownership, you have to make the owner be a reference-counted cell, such as Rc or Arc.

- All data can be accessed by one reader/writer, or N readers, but not both at the same time.

- There is both compile time and run time machinery to strictly enforce this.

Once you get that, you can see what the borrow checker is trying to do for you.
by astrange | 2025-05-06 05:34:43+00:00
> Recently I've been doing a lot of reading and thinking around developing mechanisms to help with all this, and I stumbled on another term that may be familiar to those familiar with ADHD, too: Rejection Sensitivity Dysphoria (or RSD)

It should be noted that this is just a term one guy made up, and isn't medically accepted as an ADHD symptom.

Of course it is a legitimate thing that happens to people.
by setopt | 2025-05-06 05:34:44+00:00
Scientific journals do edit the TeX file. Both to update the visual style (e.g. enabling commercial fonts that they use for print but are not allowed to distribute with the template), and to update the content itself (to revise the grammatical style to fit the style guide followed by that journal, to update scientific references to have clickable links, etc.). Usually, at the end of all these edits, the journal sends a PDF “proof” back to the authors to verify that the final version is OK, or ask for corrections if they broke something (which they often do).
by tverbeure | 2025-05-06 05:35:27+00:00
In practice, you can get very far with high speed interfaces while never using a high-speed scope. I've spent years professionally doing HDMI, DisplayPort and LVDS interfaces with FPGAs and never had the need for scope shots. (Admittedly, a colleague did use it, but that was always for certification related measurements which is a non-issue for hobbyists.)

Part of the reason is that the specifications for these fast interfaces are created for robustness. They can sustain a lot of PCB design abuse and still work fine in practice even when out of spec.
by xarope | 2025-05-06 05:35:38+00:00
A friend who's a pre-school teacher has this excellent t-shirt (I LMAO the first time I saw it):

let's eat, kids.

let's eat kids.

punctuation saves lives.

https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/B1pppR4gVKL._CLa%7C2140%...
by goku12 | 2025-05-06 05:36:37+00:00
> For users who don't pay for their personal email, email is nothing but a marketing channel and a very inefficient one at that.

I have a paid personal email plan on my own domain name. (Mostly to get aliases and plus addresses). It is setup very well and filters spam very efficiently, compared to some 'corporate-standard' filters on other services. But I still have to use my gmail address because most individual contacts wouldn't see my mails otherwise since they are on gmail, hotmail, etc. And for many official websites, my email addresses are 'not valid email addresses'. Granted that my TLD .space isn't an official sounding one, but it's used by exactly two types of users - people who use it as their space, and people/organizations working on space tech. So I pay, but I'm still forced to watch them spam. Honestly, I believe that email is now a captured monopoly (cartelopoly?).

> I would love to see a more secure protocol to replace it, where the recipient always has full control over all the messages that he can ever receive.

I wholeheartedly agree. Email is an awesome idea. But its age is starting to show. We need something with security and encryption built-in, much fewer moving parts (Can we integrate MTA, MDA, WebUI, spam filters, DKIM, etc into just one?), option to opt out of rich formatting (the HTML and AMP junk), dynamic updates, etc and proper spam filtering, etc. We should also have a way to disincentivize or punish big players from rejecting valid emails. Perhaps it can use HTTPS to overcome those pesky corporate reverse proxies and firewalls. But the idea of having a domain name as a namespace for users is still precious.
by baq | 2025-05-06 05:36:56+00:00
Everything other than 80 and 443 is blocked by default, anything-over-https is just a matter of time. With a properly configured TLS MITM proxy only certificate pinning will prevent snooping, but it’ll also prevent connectivity, so you might call it a win for security/privacy, or a loss for the open internet if it’s you who needs to VPN to a safe network from within such an environment…
by bluefirebrand | 2025-05-06 05:37:51+00:00
> For AI training, a central argument is that training is transformative

This doesn't actually matter though does it? They still had access to a copy of the data in the first place to train the AI on

Since they likely did not pay a license to have access to the books they trained the AI on, then they violated copyright

The same way it would be violating copyright for a university student to pirate a textbook and learn from it
by brewdad | 2025-05-06 05:38:02+00:00
OTP verification can largely be worked around because so many sites still use SMS codes which a dumb phone can handle. Similarly, 2FA codes can be handled on a PC without requiring a smart phone. It adds hurdles but can be done.

Where it becomes challenging is situations where smart phones truly are required. When I attended college football games last fall, all tickets were e-tickets. You were required to present a QR code on your device or your ticket stored in Apple Wallet or Google Wallet. I ran into the same situation with my local theater's ticketing. You haven't lived until you've witnessed an audience with an average age of 70 try to figure out their tickets on their smartphones when they've never used them for that before nor had any notion that was even POSSIBLE.
by somenameforme | 2025-05-06 05:39:29+00:00
Differentiating between AGI and non-AGI, if we ever get remotely close, would be challenging, but for now it's trivial. The defining feature of AGI is recursive self improvement across any field. Without self improvement, you're just regurgitating. Humanity started with no advanced knowledge or even a language. In what should practically be a heartbeat at the speed of distributed computing with perfect memory and computation power, we were landing a man on the Moon.

So one fundamental difference is that AGI would not need some absurdly massive data dump to become intelligent. In fact you would prefer to feed it as minimal a series of the most primitive first principles as possible because it's certain that much of what we think is true is going to end up being not quite so -- the same as for humanity at any other given moment in time.

We could derive more basic principles, but this one is fundamental and already completely incompatible with our current direction. Right now we're trying to essentially train on the entire corpus of human writing. That is a defacto acknowledgement that the absolute endgame for current tech is simple mimicry, mistakes and all. It'd create a facsimile of impressive intelligence because no human would have a remotely comparable knowledge base, but it'd basically just be a glorified natural language search engine - frozen in time.
by 0xDEAFBEAD | 2025-05-06 05:39:35+00:00
Thanks for the reply!

Technically, I would say that you should just write a test for the error path.

I also tend to think that finding bugs at compile time is not actually that much better than finding them at runtime. If you have good monitoring (which you should have), and a customer triggers the bug at runtime, you can fix the bug then. A customer triggering a rare bug once isn't the end of the world.

My sense is that people are very keen to find bugs at compile time rather than run time, but I haven't been generally able to figure out why this matters, unless you're working on some sort of real-time embedded system. What matters to me is the probability of spotting the bug, not when it is spotted.

I suppose perhaps data corruption could be a concern with runtime errors? I would argue you should work to be robust against that anyways, by using atomic transactions as necessary.

I'm most interested in subtler bugs which don't trigger exceptions at runtime. Those are the sort of bugs which will get executed over and over in production if they aren't prevented. It seems to me that static analysis doesn't do much to prevent these bugs, but tests can be really helpful.

I will grant that implicit type conversions can lead to subtle runtime bugs. I see that as a separate issue however. I've worked most with Python, which doesn't do static analysis, but also enforces types at runtime. That seems fairly ideal to me.

Interested to hear your perspective!
by captn3m0 | 2025-05-06 05:40:07+00:00
Not really. Colleges in Chennai have been in the news several times over the years for these prison-like behaviour. https://www.hindustantimes.com/education/jail-on-campus-chen... https://www.reddit.com/r/india/comments/3lrnqt/i_did_my_engi...

Even the Zoho CEO (who is from the region) wrote about the phenomenon in 2008[0].

[0]: https://www.zoho.com/blog/general/the-jail-college-phenomeno...
by Surac | 2025-05-06 05:41:15+00:00
I build right now 7 birdhouses. Using Wood and 3D printed PETG. Each house is a different Build. On computer side I implement a CPU in Verilog for a FPGA for fun. For Bussines I build the firmware for a LCD monitor that can display up to 16 video inputs. It can scale, cut, rotate and distort every input and then place them on different layers. The device is used in telemedicine
by gfrison1 | 2025-05-06 05:42:01+00:00
Computer programming is a specialized activity that requires long training and experience to match productivity, precision and integration. It hasn’t been a secret for AI practitioners to ultimately create software tools that can facilitate the role of programmers. The branch of AI dedicated to automatically generate programs from examples or some sort of specification is called program synthesis. In this dissertation, I’ll explore different methods to combine symbolic AI and neural networks (like large language models) for automatically create programs. The posed question is: How AI methods can be integrated for helping to synthesize programs for a wide range of applications?
by BrenBarn | 2025-05-06 05:42:10+00:00
I love that kind of thing too. I lean towards capturing that partly through photos but also through saving occasional pieces of paper or other physical artifacts. Like when I travel, I'll save receipts, restaurant menus, little brochures from museums, etc. At home, although I can't save everything (my apartment is already cluttered enough!), I'll hang onto occasional things like concert programs, election mailers, etc., just because I find they do a pretty good job of encapsulating something about the time they were in. It saddens me in a way that many of those things are being phased in favor of digital alternatives, because the physical objects have a certain intrinsic coherence that files lack.
by steveklabnik | 2025-05-06 05:43:11+00:00
This is a good post! A few comments:

> Function Overloads

Strictly speaking, Rust doesn't support overloaded functions. Function overloading is when you define the same function but with different arguments, and the language selects the correct one based on the argument type. In this case, it's two different implementations of a trait for two different types. That said, it's close enough that this isn't really an issue, more of just a technical note, since this is a series trying to get into details.

> I can't find an explanation in the Rust documentation but I expect the reason is that someone could implement another trait that provides .into_iter() on whatever the x is in for y in x, thus resulting in a compiler error because there would be two candidate implementations.

Yep, I'm not sure that there is an official explanation anywhere else, but this is exactly what I would assume as well. This ensures that the correct implementation is called. This is also one of the reasons why adding a trait implementation isn't considered a breaking change, even if it could create a compiler error, because you can always expand it yourself to explicitly select the correct choice. Of course, these situations are usually treated more carefully then they have to be, because breakage isn't fun, even if it's technically allowed.

> But wait, you say, I'm doing exactly this in the first program, and indeed you are.

It's not the same, as the next paragraphs explain.

> We are able to examine the function and realize it's safe, but because the compiler wants to use local reasoning, it's not able to do so.

This is a super important point!
by lmm | 2025-05-06 05:43:54+00:00
No, our backend serves all the queries that the frontend uses, but (in prod) only the queries that the frontend uses - we compile the queries at build time. When we want to add a new query we figure it out in dev (which allows non-compiled queries, but is not accessible for people outside the company), write it in the frontend, and it will be included in the next build of the backend. This is all pretty basic off the shelf functionality. Maybe spend 5 minutes trying to think about how a system might work instead of assuming everyone else is an idiot.
by Supermancho | 2025-05-06 05:44:28+00:00
My wife was one of these kids. She knew then (and I know now) how and why she tried desperately to get into a state program and away from her drug addict parents. Living in the desert, in a broken trailer, 2 adults and 2 children, only a water tank (reuse that bath water), miles of flat hard (or wet slick) brown dirt in 120 degree heat in every direction. No money, no radio, sometimes TV rabbit ears.

Begging for food from grocery store clerks as her parents bought beer and toilet paper inside, drugs outside. She grew up thinking they were derelict because of the drugs. As they got older and had to quit the drugs or die, she found they were just unfit people.

Lots of people in the world are unfit to care for the children, but the children often persevere and society absorbs the damaged alongside the deaths.

This colors my views of the world, as much as anything I experienced.