MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by doctorpangloss | 2025-06-18 17:12:22+00:00
okay well, there are a few things that are known to be true: (1) clip's tokenizer in diffusers, the reference source in BFL's repo, and in openai's repo, is buggy (2) many clip prompts are observed to have a low impact in the flux dev and schnell models. it is very likely to be true that (1) the tokenizer in the BFL reference source and openai's repo does not match the tokenizer used in training openai's clip or the text conditioning for any of the flux checkpoints (2) the guidance and timestep distillation play a role in weakening the role of clip (3) it is practical to fine tune clip on more image-caption pairs. if you care about fine tuning, the tokenization bugs matter. everything else is hard to prove.
by OkayPhysicist | 2025-06-18 17:13:12+00:00
The best paying jobs are ones that look inapproachable and are inapproachable. (even if that's for two entirely different reasons). Most people look at surgeons, for example, and go "I could never do that", and their jobs are, in fact, difficult and require lots of training, and the combination of those two factors primes people to be willing to give them a bunch of money. Jobs that look hard but are (compared to appearances) easy also tend to pay pretty well.

But jobs that look easy or approachable are in a much tighter spot. Regardless of how difficult they actually are, people are far less willing to give them large amounts of money. Pretty much all the more artistic jobs fall into this camp. Just because any idiot can open up Photoshop and start scribbling, it doesn't follow that competent graphic design is easy.

Right now, software development is incidentally in the "looks hard is hard" category, because the reason it "looks hard" is entirely divorced from the reason it is hard. Most of the non-tech population is under the obviously (to us) incorrect impression that the hard part of programming is understanding code. We know that that's silly, and that any competent programmer can pick up a new programming language in a trivial amount of time, but you still see lots of job postings looking for "Java Developers" or "Python Developers" as opposed to actual domain specific stuff because non-technical folk look at a thing they know is complicated (software development) see the first thing that they don't understand (source code) and assume that all the complexity in the space is tied up in that one thing. This is the same instinct that drives people to buy visual programming systems and argue that jargon needs to be stripped out of research papers.

The shift over to plain-language prompt engineering won't solve the underlying difficulty of software development (requirement discovery, abstract problem solving), but it does pose the threat of making it look easy. Which will make people less prone to giving us massive stacks of money to write the magic runes that make the golems obey their commands.
by dang | 2025-06-18 17:13:16+00:00
Sorry! You are right.

It's all too easy to fall into, and we do it too. In such cases it's good when people point it out, and I'm happy to take my own medicine.

The fix is to be more mindful of how easily this happens and edit one's comments to err on the side of unsnark. That's what I will do. If you're willing to do that as well, then HN will be better off in both cases.

(I do think it's great that you're in medical school and willing to share some of what you know on HN, but I shouldn't have singled out the "very aware" bit - that was me being passive-aggressive.)
by lcnPylGDnU4H9OF | 2025-06-18 17:14:22+00:00
That kinda just means that tax evasion is still not totally precise but I still think it's closer to the mark than money laundering. They can both be either illegal or legal in similar ways and, indeed, the same otherwise-legal actions can be seen as either or both in different contexts. It's just a matter of semantics whether one's (seemingly legal) actions are better labeled as one or the other, and the tax evasion seems to more sense in this context.

Money laundering refers to making "dirty" money (profits from criminal activity) "clean" by introducing it into the general financial system in a way that doesn't easily trace it back to the crime. The way Breaking Bad used the car wash business to launder the drug money is a good example: the car wash business model doesn't have easy means of verifying the volume of legitimate transactions (e.g. inventory) so the owner can just arbitrarily perform fraudulent transactions with the dirty money. I presume it's far more complex when actual banks are involved but it's the same basic concept of making dirty money appear legitimate through some transaction.

Tax evasion is just not paying taxes. Whether or not someone avoids paying taxes through loopholes is only really a legal technicality that I don't think most people care about when discussing this topic. Corporations avoid paying the tax they should and that can be reasonably described as tax evasion even if it's not strictly illegal tax evasion.
by steve_adams_86 | 2025-06-18 17:15:01+00:00
This is usually enough for me, too. Use tracing, figure out where things fell apart in the traces, isolate those service(s), and debug from there. It's definitely more work. When we start new projects, I encourage people not to use services until proven necessary because this added layer of friction is a real drag. For a lot of us that isn't a choice, though.
by numpad0 | 2025-06-18 17:15:15+00:00
Maybe we should stop using advanced and somewhat hand-wavy vocabulary like "context" for that. The thing is that the prompt has to be long enough.

The word "potatoes" in context of a specific 500-page book has little ambiguity. Same word but extracted out of the same book and fed to a translator(human or machine) in isolation would be much more ambiguous. You probably don't need the whole book, but the solution space do reduce as you give translators more out of the content or how it's used in the original as well as in other parts of translations.

It's similar to how GPS works. With one satellite, your location is precise as "on Earth, I guess". It gets more precise as you add more satellites that further and further reduce margins of errors.
by woooooo | 2025-06-18 17:15:43+00:00
Iran has behaved pretty rationally IMO.

We killed one of their top generals, unprovoked, 5 years ago. Israel bombed their embassy in Syria a year ago. Both times, they sent telegraphed, calibrated missile barrages that let them deescalate situations they didn't create.

Now we're in a third instance of them being attacked. Who's the irrational party?

(Edit: and in Iraq, we invaded their neighbor while loudly saying "youre next", their actions in Iraq were also rational and calibrated given that context. Bog us down there, deniably, smart move.)
by Wowfunhappy | 2025-06-18 17:15:52+00:00
> I don’t think I’ve encountered a case where I’ve just let the LLM churn for more than a few minutes and gotten a good result.

I absolutely have, for what it's worth. Particularly when the LLM has some sort of test to validate against, such as a test suite or simply fixing compilation errors until a project builds successfully. It will just keep chugging away until it gets it, often with good overall results in the end.

I'll add that until the AI succeeds, its errors can be excessively dumb, to the point where it can be frustrating to watch.
by aprilthird2021 | 2025-06-18 17:16:16+00:00
I'm not really sure what you are insinuating? You think Meta leaked LAMA so they could claim, legally that they are in the clear for copyright violation? Sorry, I just don't really get what you want me to opine about.

If that is what you are asking, I don't think that's what happened. It's far more likely that it was just leaked or grabbed by a hacker
by brudgers | 2025-06-18 17:17:09+00:00
I would put it in a mattress. Because

We must do something This is something Therefore we must do it

Is poor decision making, preservation is a very good way to handle wealth, and I don’t have a good idea.

Sure, I have lots of dubious ideas…$35k will buy a nice synthesizer, but wealth is not needing to grow your money and being wealthy is the ability to wait for appropriate investments.
by Tadpole9181 | 2025-06-18 17:17:33+00:00
Protests mostly make people feel good, but rarely invoke change. MLK did not accomplish his goals through life, it was the violence that followed that precipitated actual change. Did RvW protests stop the SC? Did Palestine protests stop our involvement with Israel? Did Occupy Wall Street work? Did the LEO system get reformed after the massive Floyd protests? No. Not a single one of those protests with tens of millions of total participants worked.

France didn't preserve their retirement age by walking around with signs. They had to get disobedient. Break shit, stop collecting trash or running services.

Shockingly, people who are going to fuck you for power or money could care less if you're upset about being fucked. And now that the majority of media in America is controlled by 7 billionaires and they've spent 30 years justifying shooting or run over protestors, they're calling the bluff and betting Americans will roll over and take it.

And they're probably right.
by username223 | 2025-06-18 17:18:03+00:00
I wish them the best, but if they can't compete with a MacBook Air on price despite Apple's huge profit margins, then maybe it's just not meant to be. People used to talk about paying the "Apple tax," but how many people are willing to pay the "Linux tax?" Mac OS is a similar Unix with the usual tools, and you can rent a VPS if you need Linux on an x86 sometimes. An MBA with an M4 will last 5+ years with a battery swap, and still probably perform better than whatever Framework releases in 2030.

I guess I'm not the target customer for this. I can see myself tinkering with a desktop, but I'd rather just have a laptop that runs fast and long enough, and stands up to abuse for 3-5 years.
by tripped6789 | 2025-06-18 17:18:09+00:00
Experiencing ego death is a mystical experience. Perhaps it is the mystical experience.

You describe it in terms that make sense to your culture. Perhaps the term mystic has been contaminated for you by all the nonsense and bullshit.

The experience is very difficult to communicate, generally relying heavily on metaphor. Those who are uninitiated often wildly misunderstand. We see this in other areas of life too, cargo culting for example, but the deep and very personal nature of the mystical experience pretty much ensures confusion.

A perpetual motion crackpot probably describes themselves as a "physicist", but that's nonsense and bullshit too.

You are a mystic in the real sense, having an esoteric experience and then integrating it into your worldview.

Psychedelic drugs are just one way of doing this, but one of the more accessible.

I think your attitude is completely appropriate, by the way.
by EGreg | 2025-06-18 17:18:39+00:00
Interesting, you say Facebook didn’t listen to anyone’s audio, yet they themselves admit their contractors routinely did: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/aug/13/facebook-...

They even paid them to do transcribe chats: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-08-13/facebook-...

And this is just the publicly known stuff. So perhaps you weren’t privy to everything?

So Facebook (not Meta at the time) just “forgot” to turn off the camera after they were done with it? Sounds reasonable… except wait, they were actively re-activating it while you were scrolling, and until iOS 14 users were none-the-wiser. If it was an honest mistake, do you think FB testers would have not caught it during the MONTHS between iOS 14 developer preview and release? And yet, for this one I do think it was probably a bug about when to activate the camera.

https://medium.com/macoclock/apples-ios-14-catches-facebook-...
by queenkjuul | 2025-06-18 17:18:40+00:00
Agreed. Wayland has things to offer me, just like pipewire; then I actually use it, and find things i rely on don't work properly.

Why in bloody hell is it so hard to persist routing across reboots with pipewire? Why is Wayland turning 17 without a serious replacement for SSH forwarding?

Not that Pulse was ever excellent on that particular point, but it mostly worked without resorting to third party apps or hand writing scripts.
by nilirl | 2025-06-18 17:19:10+00:00
This felt forced.

If you read through the whole thing, they don't manage to build an AI Agent, they make LLM API calls using Flink's SQL.

They admit making it agentic, with choice over tool selection and with agent-like memory, requires workarounds.

Annoying workarounds, imo.

The post mentions work is in progress to build agents that use Flink without using Flink SQL.

Thereby invalidating it's own title.
by norir | 2025-06-18 17:19:35+00:00
Here is my circular argument against debuggers: if I learn to use a debugger, I will spend much, possibly most, of my time debugging. I'd rather learn how to write useful programs that don't have bugs. Most people believe this is impossible.

The trouble of course is that there is always money to be made debugging. There is almost no incentive in industry to truly eliminate bugs and, indeed, I would argue that the incentives in the industry actively encourage bugs because they lead to lucrative support contracts and large dev teams that spend half their time chasing down bugs in a never-ending cycle. If a company actually shipped perfect software, how could they keep extracting more money from their customer?
by Terr_ | 2025-06-18 17:20:07+00:00
I distrust that rationale, because even if generation>=verification, it depends on the error-rate and impact. Wiring up a condemned building with demolition charges might take longer than a casual independent review...

Truly perfect code verification can easily cost more than writing it, especially when it's not just the new lines themselves, but the change's effect on a big existing system.
by 1-more | 2025-06-18 17:20:19+00:00
I'm just talking null-less FP languages such as Haskell and Elm, not a full proof system such Lean and Agda or a formal specification language such as TLA+.

I'm not sure I agree with your prior that "your tests are also going to 'deal with "what if this input is null?" everywhere' cases and whatnot." Invalid input is at the very edge of the program where it goes through a parser. If I parse a string value into a type with no room for null, that eliminates a whole class of errors throughout the program. I do need to test that my parser does what I assume it will, sure. But once I have a type that cannot represent illegal data, I can focus my testing away from playing defense on every function.
by rodespm | 2025-06-18 17:20:36+00:00
At the very least, the new [extension stores](https://chromewebstore.google.com/category/extensions). I think the point here is that Agents could redefine how we interact with the internet, even if they don't change the internet itself.

ChatGPT has their [GPTs](https://chatgpt.com/gpts) marketplace, which could be considered an app store, but I'm not sure if it'll take off quite like Google Play or Apple's App Store.
by basisword | 2025-06-18 17:21:48+00:00
I wish companies would invest more in docs. It's too hard to keep the quality high if it's just another thing for engineers to do. I've seen too many cases where a small group invests lots of time and effort bringing the docs up to standard and then another person or group comes along and starts dragging down the quality because they can't be bothered taking to time to see how and where their information fits and ensuring the formatting and styles are maintained.

Eventually the quality drops to such a level that some poor bastard spends their time bringing it all back up to standard - and the cycle repeats.
by atum47 | 2025-06-18 17:21:59+00:00
mine was a php mysql backend with a js spa running on the browser. back then I got a cheap server to host everything, but once the app (pwa) was installed there were only a handfull of requests per user.

my idea was to actually have a centralized backend and distribute the app. I need to take a look at the source code for that project...
by perching_aix | 2025-06-18 17:22:30+00:00
I can definitely appreciate that. I just think it's important that people argue the right thing. It provides insight to the variables and mechanisms at play, and avoids people falsely giving rhetorical checkmates to each other, like I kind of did to you.

The brief version is that if someone has a screen real estate concern, they need to look for the PPI, but if they have a visual quality concern, they need to look for the PPD.

Maybe it will be elucidating if I describe a scenario where you will have low PPI but high PPD at the same time.

Consider a 48" 4K TV (where 4K is really just UHD, so 3840x2160). Such a display will have 91.79 PPI of pixel density, which is below even standard PPI (that being 96 PPI, as mentioned).

Despite this, the visual quality will be generally excellent: at the fairly typical and widely recommended 40° degree horizontal field of view, you're looking at 3840 / 40 = 96 PPD, well in excess of the original Retina standard (60 PPD), which is really just the 20/20 visual acuity measure. Hope this is insightful.
by fragmede | 2025-06-18 17:22:37+00:00
Those who write code do care about the code though, if only because it makes their job harder when the code is complete shit. It might be like welding, where only another welder can appreciate a good weld, and spot oxidization and shitty welds and judge the welds as being good/bad. If there's some janky software that desperately wants to be refactored/rewritten, then (LLM written or not) fellow programmers should rightly judge the code as being crap and choose to stay away from it or refactor it into being better. It might be, as pointed out, functional code, and the end user might not notice (or they might; shitty code is brittle and prone to having bugs), but all else being equal, if there are two products and one has shitty code and one is beautifully architected, I know which one I'd rather use, assuming the state of the code is known.
by steve_adams_86 | 2025-06-18 17:22:42+00:00
For JavaScript, you're actually able to debug fairly easily by default by adding a `debugger()` call in your code. Browsers will stop at that call, and start the debugger.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Refe...

Another way (and probably a better idea) is creating a launch definition for VS Code in launch.json which attaches the IDE's debugger to Chrome. Here is an article describing how that works: https://profy.dev/article/debug-react-vscode

Breakpoints are nice because they can't accidentally get shipped to production like debugger calls can.

For Python I essentially do the same thing, minus involving Chrome. I run the entry point to my application from launch.json, and breakpoints in the IDE 'just work'. From there, you can experiment with how the debugger tools work, observe how state change as the application runs, etc.

If you don't use VS Code, these conventions are similar in other IDEs as well.
by fsloth | 2025-06-18 17:22:54+00:00
Yes.

For example C++ can shoehorn you to a style of programming where 50% of time is spent in allocations and deallocations if your code is otherwise optimal.

The only way to get that back is not to use stl containers in ”typical patterns” but to write your own containers up to a point.

If you didn’t do that, youd see in the profiler that heap operations take 50% of time but there is no obvious hotspot.
by pugworthy | 2025-06-18 17:22:56+00:00
Amusing things to do...

* Type things and listen to the various tones. I'd go for a little app that just let me do this day to day. I'd probably find it annoying pretty quickly but it would be interesting turned down low. * Use your browser's zoom to go way out. It has no problems offering you notes way beyond the ability of you to hear it let alone your computer from playing it.
by surgomat | 2025-06-18 17:23:34+00:00
I love that idea. Yeah i know this app : it is a great example of how simple, adaptive progression can really motivate people (specially beginners).

And yes I'd absolutely be interested in discussing a UI + flow for a self-adjusting progression system like that. Yeah. Let's talk about that, drop me a DM? I can think about some (ugly) alhorithm first
by frollogaston | 2025-06-18 17:24:02+00:00
It's not a realtime system kind of thing where the debugger would change the behavior too much... It's possible with enough engineering work, but nobody has put that work in, in fact they had a debugger for some staging envs that they deleted. Lately they keep adding more red tape making it hard to even run something locally, let alone attach a debugger.

I guess you can attach a debugger for unit tests, but that's not very useful.
by criddell | 2025-06-18 17:24:53+00:00
> I mean which Intel or AMD cpu can be run fanless and perform well?

I don't follow CPU news and have no idea what lake they're at now, but I'd be surprised if Intel and AMD didn't have a chip competitive with an M1 by now.

When I google "fanless amd intel laptop cpu" I find this old thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31142209 which does suggest some fanless machines exist. That's from 3 years ago so surely there are even more options today, no?
by RankingMember | 2025-06-18 17:25:01+00:00
Couldn't agree more about form and keeping it simple. I would note, though, that an app can help with that, e.g. the one I mentioned has videos demonstrating proper form, and what I would do when starting out is video myself from the side and compare. An app will also track progression more easily on something you naturally carry around (your phone), versus needing to remember a notebook.
by cosmic_cheese | 2025-06-18 17:25:41+00:00
Yeah the focus really should be on multipliers. Is it a clean multiple of the typical “normal” DPI resolution for that screen size? You’ve got a great screen. No? It’s a compromise. Simple.

1.5x looks ok mostly (though fractional pixels can cause issues in a few circumstances), but across platforms nothing is handled as well as 2x, 3x, etc is. I have a 1.5x laptop and wish it were either 1x or 2x.
by RadiozRadioz | 2025-06-18 17:26:01+00:00
Dude, you can't have it both ways, pick one. You didn't want load on the DB, so you need to cache things somehow. Dealing with cache invalidation is a natural consequence.

Ok then, keep the DB, provision a distributed array of read replicas, make them use synchronous replication to maintain your atomicity, force them all of them to keep the session table in memory. Now your cache is managed by the DB and meets all your requirements.
by aidenn0 | 2025-06-18 17:26:04+00:00
The same is true of ogg vorbis though[1], and you can have files about 30% smaller (or same size and better quality if you are at 192kbps or lower for your mp3s).

Okay, my SanDisk player (an m300) is only 17 years old; nevertheless it plays Vorbis files just fine.
by femiagbabiaka | 2025-06-18 17:28:36+00:00
There are many different methods through which one can develop against/on Linux. For example, I have a pretty low spec'd Macbook Air and several different test machines at home that I do remote development against. I prefer a low-heat, high battery life, good performing machine like the Air over a power hungry, loud, and constantly overheating workstation. But, those are my preferences -- some people want to have a single interface through which they do all their work, and the most powerful Linux laptop money can buy. If that's the case, Framework is great!