MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by TZubiri | 2025-06-07 07:07:49+00:00
Yesterday on an article on some Package URL proposal and I wrote a comment about these super deep supply chains based on free volunteer work, and how it's becoming even more work to just keep a handle on them. But hn didn't allow me to post it.

When you need to add dependencies that manage packages to avoid version conflicts, when you need to add dependencies that check for vulnerabilities in your dependencies, that's when you know you are in too deep.

And it's not like these things are necessary, for the big majority of systems that have less than 100k users, you can just build systems that run for less than 200$ per month. I've started working with an empty requirements.txt and empty package.json, everything is fine.

Before you call me a dinosaur and claim that I might as well be writing assembly, first, I do depend on an Operating System and a Programming Language, and maybe a database if I need the convenience, there's such a thing as nuance. And second, I'm using cutting edge tech, these things (Linux, python, mysql) have existed for less than 50 years! They are in their infancy!

But man, I'm really banking on the ethos of building on top of the shoulders of "giants" falls soon. I hate to be on the side of hackers, but it's inevitable that something bad will happen if you keep on doing shit like this.

It's like having a friend or group of people that constantly have orgies with random people and they develop a huge culture around using different types of condoms and profilactics of some kind or other, and giving tips on what works and what doesn't and switching strategies when one of their friends gets an STD but still not quite ever abandoning the idea of having massive orgies.

All of the while the cost of developing software is dropping to 0, almost no one uses GPL, and surprise surprise, companies build proprietary systems on top of 95% software of the commons. It sucks to compete with companies and programmers that just npm install 1000 things, not sure what I'm banking on, maybe a slew of lawsuits that increase the liabilities of writing bad software that incentivizes actually understanding the shit that we build?

Gnight HN.
by kiitos | 2025-06-07 07:08:16+00:00
PAR isn't any kind of panacea or golden rule for nodes in a distributed system, it describes properties of nodes that meet very narrowly-defined requirements, which are in no way universal, and which are in no way requirements for those nodes to participate in the distributed system.

More broadly, there's no concept of "crash recovery" at the system level, which has any meaningful utility. Nodes are either there or they're not there, exactly how they crash or recover from their crashes are irrelevant to the overall distributed system, insofar as if a crashed-and-recovered node comes back online, it's gonna need to re-sync with its peers before it can talk to anyone else, and that's not anything to do with "crash recovery" related to local disk or anything like that (which is all implementation details of the node itself) -- it's just normal node synchronization, orthogonal to any state storage stuff of the node.

PAR is something that your system can maybe implement, it's not any kind of rule or definition or requirement that all systems of some classification must satisfy..!
by _ink_ | 2025-06-07 07:10:54+00:00
> What we need to develop is something that doesn't degrade at all under most human living conditions, but does degrade rapidly if we expose it to some sort of not-common trigger, whether that is another chemical or temperature or pressure or whatever.

That requires that people care enough to collect that material in order to have it transported to the facility that can degrade it. The amount of plastic in the environment indicates that this is clearly not the case.
by fch42 | 2025-06-07 07:11:19+00:00
It won't make it impossible for junior engineers to learn.

It will simply reduce the amount of opportunities to learn (and not just for juniors), by virtue of companies' beancounters concluding "two for one" (several juniors) doesn't return the same as "buy one get one free" (existing staff + AI license).

I dread the day we all "learn from AI". The social interaction part of learning is just as important as the content of it, really, especially when you're young; none of that comes across yet in the pure "1:1 interaction" with AI.
by tome | 2025-06-07 07:11:38+00:00
Yes, absolutely, I would say for almost every programmer, certainly for me. "Scrap your iteration combinators" goes into more detail. foldl' is a bit too simple to replace with for_, but for almost every other use case, yes, I do use for_. In fact, I find it remarkably liberating compared to the "iteration combinator" conventional wisdom that has been passed down from Haskeller to Haskeller over the years.

I don't feel that monads are particularly complicated. I have several non-Haskellers programming in Haskell at work, using monads. They just think they're writing a sequence of statements. I feel that mixing monads is complicated, which is why I recommend an IO-wrapper effect system (Bluefin or effectful), so that you don't need to mix.

https://h2.jaguarpaw.co.uk/posts/scrap-your-iteration-combin...
by regularfry | 2025-06-07 07:12:07+00:00
Same question got asked of Bob Bussard when he visited Google to talk about his whiffle-ball design. It's not that we lack models, it's that they're effectively incomputable at the scale we'd need them to be.

In a fluid, effects are local: a particle can only directly effect what it is in direct contact with.

In a plasma, every particle interacts with every other. One definition of a plasma is that the motion is dominated by electromagnetic effects rather than thermodynamic: by definition, if you have a plasma, the range of interactions isn't bounded by proximity.

This doesn't apply quite so much to (e.g.) laser ignition plasmas, partly because they're comparatively tiny, and partly because the timescales you're interested in are very short. So they do get simulated.

But bulk simulations the size of a practical reactor are simply impractical.
by starship731 | 2025-06-07 07:12:17+00:00
What utter and complete rubbish. Deepseek is available on all the major LLM API hosts, from TogetherAI, to Replicate, to Fireworks, to OpenRouter, to NVIDIA NIM, to Groq, to Hugging Face, to GitHub, to Cloudflare Workers AI. Hell, even Scaleway, a FRENCH provider, offers it.

Pls do a bit of investigation before posting nonsense. Low information commenters like you detract from the conversation.
by timewizard | 2025-06-07 07:12:27+00:00
> Worry about cell towers, not cell phones.

The grounding is usually required to meet a standard and is tested during the towers installation. There are also coaxial surge arrestors and isolators that get used along the span.

Some of the site to site communications equipment has no ground component other than a PoE switch. The ethernet interface, radio, and antenna are all in a single packaged unit installed at height on the tower.
by anal_reactor | 2025-06-07 07:12:54+00:00
The older I get, the more I realize there's no point. I'll never be rich. I'll never have a family. I'll never go to space. I'll never take part in Olympics. Best I can do is beating a video game on medium. So I try to focus on that, instead of spending 80% of my life trying to make myself 20% more productive.
by notorandit | 2025-06-07 07:13:06+00:00
VPN customers should think twice before subscribing that kind of services.

VPN providers are bound to their homeland laws and can be ordered at anytime by law enforcement agencies or by judge rulings to provide whatever is needed, eavesdropping included.

Abroad VPN providers can be blocked with the same means.

So, unless you need VPN for lawful activities, you are just trying to fool around the law.
by simoncion | 2025-06-07 07:15:46+00:00
> ...most of the value is vested in the person that wrote the code, not the code itself.

You must have misphrased what you intended to say. If what you wrote was true, a software company's most valuable asset would be the specific programmers in its employ. If true, average tenure of a programmer would be way longer than 1.5->2 years as companies worked really, really hard to keep their most valuable assets from walking out the door into the doors of another company just to get reasonable pay increases.

Perhaps your opinion is influenced by doing post-collapse-sales of a whole bunch of software houses that built just plain bad software? I can't see why else you'd be selling "software IP" independently of the rest of the business.

Anyway. Given that information, how should you have phrased what you wanted to say?
by SkiFire13 | 2025-06-07 07:17:28+00:00
> Ultimately, we traced the issue to a 15-year-old Git function with O(N²) complexity and fixed it with an algorithmic change, reducing backup times exponentially.

I have yet to finish the article, but this means they improved the complexity to something like O(logN), right? I hate when people confuse quadratic improvement for exponential ones.
by pjmlp | 2025-06-07 07:18:58+00:00
People keep mistaking languages with implementations.

OCaml and Haskell don't suffer from similar pain points, because interpreters, and JIT like tooling is also available.

One can happily develop with one toolchain, and press the red button for an optimised compiled build, when it actually matters.

Also both Swift and Rust have made the mistake to make used of the compiler backend that everyone avoids when they care about build performance, LLVM.
by thaumasiotes | 2025-06-07 07:19:21+00:00
> but lasting a thousand years isn't necessary for those properties

Yes, it is. Lasting for thousands of years is the same thing as (1) impermeability to microbes (mold / insects / etc...) plus (2) failure to react with local chemicals. Those two things are the things we want, and if you have them both, you last for thousands of years, because there's nothing to stop you from doing that.
by distances | 2025-06-07 07:20:47+00:00
These look very nice, but are not pixel art in the sense I understand it. The pixel matrix is not consistent. They look pixelated, but if you zoom in, you'll notice that the block size varies quite a bit within one image and between images. There are also artifacts, pretty clear for example in the jumping deer's antlers.

I don't know what would be a practical way to do it, but I imagine some postprocessing step where a consistent matrix is enforced.
by starship731 | 2025-06-07 07:21:09+00:00
Deepseek R1, the Reasoning Model, never had a 'moment' when it was released.

It was DeepSeek, the Mobile App that consumers (including stock traders, analysts, & investors who don't follow the day-to-day developments within the LLM field) could download from App Stores that had the 'moment'.

And it was the AI chat app that led the professional talking heads to learn about the Language Model (DeepSeek R1) powering the Chat App, the Scientific Paper explaining the techniques used to build the core model (Deepseek V3), and the said paper's claims of the model being developed at a far cheaper amount than comparable Western models.
by remarkEon | 2025-06-07 07:21:49+00:00
I'm not stating an opinion though. Only in the ivy towers of exceedingly diverse tech companies could one make the argument that there's some innocuous and reassuring meaning of that word that doesn't imply what it does, in fact, imply in any Western country. Everywhere else a Jihad is, ya know, a Jihad. I also never pretended to speak for everyone in the islamic world, which you are attempting to use as a cudgel here, as in I'm somehow "speaking for the Muslim world" by pointing out that normal people in America know what that word means.
by unkulunkulu | 2025-06-07 07:24:38+00:00
++ for the “lowest bar” and constantly negotiate with oneself on if every line is still valuable and brings profit and not despair.

Like “brush teeth”, “do nothing at all for half an hour after work” “remove trash photos for the day in the phone”, “finish working” (here I have a detailed sublist ending with “close computer lid”) “move todos I did not have time for today to tomorrow”

another cool habit is “I did list”: add items that you did that were not planned, because we sometimes forget why we did not do something “planned”, because we actually did something else important that we are just blind to when “planning”. for example, “meal”, “took some rest that I actually need”, “took out trash”, “told someone irritating to fuck off” etc etc
by jl6 | 2025-06-07 07:24:40+00:00
Mansa Musa’s headline story is that his spending caused inflation in Egypt. I understand that estimate of Augustus Caesar’s wealth is based in part on him considering Egypt, in its entirety, to be his personal possession. It feels like “owning the whole country” should probably outrank “causing inflation in that country”, it’s probably meaningless to try to compare across such vast gulfs of time and place.
by jen729w | 2025-06-07 07:24:52+00:00
> “I work on these tax write-offs and still hadn’t heard about this,” a chief operating officer at a private-equity-backed tech company told Quartz. “It’s just been so weirdly silent.”

Hasn't Ben Thompson of Stratechery spoken about this a number of times? I'm aware of this 'feature' and I'm not even in the USA, let alone a COO at a private-equity-backed yada yada.
by rgavuliak | 2025-06-07 07:27:21+00:00
Maybe it's the fact that we've seen VCs and a16 specifically push for highly overhyped things that didn't really come true like WeWork, Crypto?

If we go beyond a16, the last decade has shown us VCs pushing for insane valuations for companies that went under after hiring sprees. We've seen Mark Zuckerberg sing similar odes to Metaverse.

At some point you stop believing the next big thing from a certain crowd.

This doesn't mean I am not exploring how to use AI and even have something I am working on in terms of an idea, it's just that caution is advised.
by bunnie | 2025-06-07 07:27:22+00:00
It's pretty bad.

It had a huge impact on my personally, I'm a small R&D shop and basically I have had to end all risky long-term research projects.

In addition to the research costs, I'd also have to pay taxes on the research costs mostly up-front. Significantly, if the project doesn't work out, I'm still out of pocket for the tax money. It's a penalty for taking a risk, and it kneecaps American innovators in a globally competitive technology race.

The rules are even worse than the article notes because it double-dings open source developers. See Section 6.4 of https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-drop/n-23-63.pdf. The relevant bit is here:

> "However, even if the research provider does not bear financial risk under the terms of the contract with the research recipient, if the research provider has a right to use any resulting SRE product ... costs paid or incurred by the research provider that are incident to the SRE activities performed by the research provider under the contract are SRE expenditures of the research provider for which no deduction is allowed ..."

The rule as written means contractors who write Windows drivers could deduct their expenses (as they would have no residual rights to a closed-source work product), but contractors who write Linux drivers may not (as they would have some rights to open-source Linux drivers).
by antics | 2025-06-07 07:28:12+00:00
I am not sure we are on the same page that the point of my response is that this paper is not enough to prevent exactly the argument you just made.

In any event, if you want to take umbrage with this paper, I think we will need to back up a bit. The authors use a mostly-standardized definition of "reasoning", which is widely-accepted enough to support not just one, but several of their papers, in some of the best CS conferences in the world. I actually think you are right that it is reasonable to question this definition (and some people do), but I think it's going to be really hard for you to start that discussion here without (1) saying what your definition specifically is, and (2) justifying why its better than theirs. Or at the very least, borrowing one from a well-known critique like, e.g., Gebru's, Bender's, etc.
by davydm | 2025-06-07 07:29:42+00:00
Considering the domains this is likely a network test, though it may be reporting the results of the connection to bing.com to cxcs, which apparently collects telemetry.

On one hand, I get it - a lot of us ping google.com to quickly check the network - doesn't mean we're sending spy data to Google. On the other hand, it would be nice if this was more transparent, perhaps asking if it can perform the test.
by teleforce | 2025-06-07 07:30:16+00:00
> We found that LRMs have limitations in exact computation: they fail to use explicit algorithms and reason inconsistently across puzzles.

It seems that AI LLMs/LRMs need helps from their distant cousins namely logic, optimization and constraint programming that can be attributed as intelligent automation or IA [1],[2],[3],[4].

[1] Logic, Optimization, and Constraint Programming: A Fruitful Collaboration - John Hooker - CMU (2023) [video]:

https://www.youtube.com/live/TknN8fCQvRk

[2] "We Really Don't Know How to Compute!" - Gerald Sussman - MIT (2011) [video]:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=HB5TrK7A4pI

[3] Google OR-Tools:

https://developers.google.com/optimization

[4] MiniZinc:

https://www.minizinc.org/
by doix | 2025-06-07 07:31:00+00:00
It really depends. For a "regular" website or blog, I agree. I think people over use complicated web frameworks to just serve what amounts to a mostly static page.

But the approach just doesn't work for things like Slack, Figma, Google docs. When you're trying to create an experience that's somewhat similar to a native application on the web, you need to start worrying about local state.
by unkulunkulu | 2025-06-07 07:32:17+00:00
There is a lot of truth in what you’re saying I believe. At least, in the “cadence of work”. They say in the article about consistent productivity for example. But lets think about consistency and quantitative productivity (ie amount of work per day).

of course we are pressured to be “consistently highly productive”. But is it healthy and sustainable for everyone? Probably not. So I would start with “consistently bare minimum productive” and not demand more from myself. If I demand more, the “procrastination” kicks in, because my body knows that it needs rest and relaxation.

we are not robots: work for us and not we for work.
by apatheticonion | 2025-06-07 07:33:12+00:00
Bundler engineer here. ESM is great when it comes to build-time optimisations. When a bundler runs into CJS code it literally deopts the output to accommodate - so from that side it's amazing.

But also, there's a special place in hell for the people that decided to add default exports, "export * from" and top level await.

Commonjs is also very weird as a "module" instance can be reassigned to a reference of another module

module.exports = require('./foo')

and there's no way to do this in ESM (for good reason, but also no one warned us). In fact major projects like React use CJS exports and the entire project cannot be optimized by bundlers. So, rather than porting to ESM, they created a compiler LOL
by purplesyringa | 2025-06-07 07:38:53+00:00
It's really interesting to see what people focus on when learning new things. Instruction encoding is something I would consider arcane knowledge, except that it isn't really useful; if you need to write an assembler or a disassembler, you can always look it up, but otherwise assembler instructions is basically all you need. Focusing on the nuances of a specific architecture's encoding is like people studying arithmetic instead of algebra and saying they now understand "math"; like, yes, a little, but there's so much you don't even know you don't know.

I'm absolutely not criticizing the author here, machine code can absolutely be beautiful and I love the "it isn't scary" sentiment, it just surprised me how unique the focus is. In fact, I think this is the first time I've ever read a post on "low-level computer stuff isn't that hard" and it was about machine code rather than assembly.

Then again, I can absolutely see the appeal. Architectures are fun, and I remember myself designing ones all the time in childhood during summer vacation. (Yes, I know I'm autistic.) Seeing tradeoffs between variable-length and fixed-length, short and long instructions, how register count affects code simplicity and the available opcode space, etc. kind of gives you an intuitive understanding of why real-world architectures look the way they do.
by littlestymaar | 2025-06-07 07:39:45+00:00
Singular "Plastic" doesn't exist, we use several hundreds of different plastics for many purpose, each of which having its own requirement (sometimes it's its lack of biodegradability, but sometimes it's its transparency, or its light weight, or its elasticity, etc.), each use case would need a totally different substitute.

In all cases, though, a key feature is that it can be synthesized at massive scale for cheap, and it's the hardest part when looking for substitutes.
by godelski | 2025-06-07 07:41:15+00:00
Johnson Smith

The son of John who is a smith

I'm only joking a little. Funny thing, surnames aren't actually that old for Europeans. Most of history there'd be maybe two people with the same name. They solved it back then very much the same way we solve it now.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Occupational_surnames

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patronymic
by jillesvangurp | 2025-06-07 07:41:59+00:00
Actually, if the company isn't selling the software they build, what their software devs do is closer to building a factory rather than working in it.

Mostly developing software is about automating things that are expensive and slow to do manually. So, to stick with the factory analogy, it makes the factory a bit better and more efficient. If you stop doing that because it is too expensive, you fall behind with your factory.

Of course the whole issue in the US is that it outsourced much of what happens in factories to China and software has become one of the main things the country runs on.
by thomasahle | 2025-06-07 07:42:55+00:00
All the environments the test (Tower of Hanoi, Checkers Jumping, River Crossing, Block World) could easily be solved perfectly by any of the LLMs if the authors had allowed it to write code.

I don't really see how this is different from "LLMs can't multiply 20 digit numbers"--which btw, most humans can't either. I tried it once (using pen and paper) and consistently made errors somewhere.
by Brybry | 2025-06-07 07:42:57+00:00
Gerrymandering can affect voter sentiment and trigger polling location changes during redistricting, both of which can affect voter turnout[1][2][3] (though the research doesn't seem conclusive on the effect).

And thinking about it more, though I haven't seen if there are studies on it: there are probably manpower/fundraising effects from gerrymandering.

If you're able to protect your political power in one area that probably better enables you to amass resources to use in the area you can't gerrymander.

But all that said, both parties practice gerrymandering and I don't think there's strong evidence of a significant advantage over a major party from current gerrymandering at the national level.

[1] https://da.lib.kobe-u.ac.jp/da/kernel/90008864/90008864.pdf

[2] https://electionlab.mit.edu/articles/gerrymandering-turnout-...

[3] https://stateline.org/2022/05/20/check-your-polling-place-re...