MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by flowerthoughts | 2025-06-02 11:15:03+00:00
Assuming with GDM, you mean Google-Deep Mind. They pioneered RL with deep nets as policy function estimator. The deep nets being a result of CNNs and massive improvements in hardware parallelization at the time.

RL was established, at the latest, with Q-learning in 1989: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Q-learning
by ramesh31 | 2025-06-02 11:15:21+00:00
Thank you for saying this because it feels like these people entering the industry in such numbers over the 2010s completely killed what made this job fun in the first place. I call them "ticket completers". Sure they can mechanically perform the minimum requirements of the job, but there is zero interest at all in what is actually being done; just following PM directions to the letter with no further thought. The whole spirit of innovation and curiosity and discovery has been lost, replaced by lifestyle seekers who look at you like an insane person when trying to talk about software in the abstract (ha!).

The hackers and nerds will be just fine. They are like gold when we find them now. But if this makes CS "uncool" again, I am all for it.
by palata | 2025-06-02 11:15:25+00:00
They do it for free. They do whatever they want. If you want more, you can contribute for free (or can't you be bothered to do it?). If you don't like it, don't use it.

> Man, nobody at LibriVox can be bothered to

Did you ever bother to provide something useful for free? I mean other than your complaints (in case you consider them useful).

I built a few open source projects. And too many users are like you. They don't contribute shit but they come with their complaints because it's not enough to give it for free, they want it tailored for themselves. Because of users like you, I stopped caring entirely. My new personal projects are not open source, so that I don't get the complaints.
by grumpymuppet | 2025-06-02 11:15:40+00:00
Sort of both. I believe there are massive polarized forces that invest heavily in understanding and gaming the system. Sort of like a big multi-player game of tug of war .

The system must be understandable or people wouldn't incorporate and collaborate on extracting an edge. Slack in the system represents a lower price point, which will be corrected by a corresponding purchase order.

An individual has an effect, but it's miniscule compared to the massive forces in play. Unless you have a TRULY novel analysis of a situation, you are going to have a very low probability, success rate and out competing the market.
by benlivengood | 2025-06-02 11:15:52+00:00
There is insufficient information in the market by design as evidenced by the existence of material nonpublic information.

Anyone who knows MNPI can make quite a lot of money which is why the SEC exists to regulate how that information can be used in the broader market.

To the extent that sufficient intelligence can reverse engineer or infer the private books and planning of public companies and the likely outcomes it can outperform other investors and make the market even more efficient.

Modeling global economies is hard; even regional models are hard and a large part why 20th century communism performed poorly compared to open markets (the others being internal corruption and external interference). Therefore I think individual humans have neither the capital reserves (bigger risks can be taken ~safely with more capital) nor the intelligence to beat the current markets. But it's not a zero-sum game and the global economy is still growing so if one's net outcome over several years is negative then it's probably due to bad strategy (e.g. picking stocks by hand, not diversifying) as opposed to bad luck.
by rednafi | 2025-06-02 11:15:58+00:00
I've been maintaining my tiny corner[^1] of the internet for around six years and the lack of readers never bothered me that much; nor did the influx of LLMs. I write when I feel like it, when I have something to say, or when I think it's something my past self would read. Sure, there have been times when some of the articles hit the front page of Hacker News but most of what I write gets little attention and that's perfectly okay.

Some of my least favourite write-ups on my blog have thousands of views, and conversely many of my most favourite ones rarely got any. Chasing views and writing stuff that has any substance beyond HN rage bait are completely two different things.

[^1]: https://rednafi.com
by manbitesdog | 2025-06-02 11:16:22+00:00
That's the issue with any abstraction I'd say. I know English, but I can't properly give legal advice based on regulations written in English. There is one more layer of human conventions besides the "English language" convention that I'd need to learn.

I'd say the point to be made is that debugging a library is way simpler than debugging a framework like React (even though they insist on calling it a library) because your code is no longer the entrypoint but some intermediate step in the logic.
by dirkc | 2025-06-02 11:16:55+00:00
> There's a weird 'blogging is good' mentality around here but the truth is writing a decent blog post takes a lot of time and gives very little return.

I think the argument is 'writing is good'. But writing in isolation provides little feedback or upside, so there is some desire / pressure to publish what you write.

As to why - writing forces you to formulate thoughts in a linear fashion to communicate them with an audience you might not know. I personally want to better develop that skill!
by prmph | 2025-06-02 11:16:56+00:00
What the heck, the code generation _is_ absolutely still a bottle-neck.

I dare anyone who making these arguments that LLMs have removed the need for actual programming skill, for example, to share in a virtual pair programming session with me, and I will demonstrate their basic inability to do _any_ moderately complex coding in short order. Yes, I think that's the only way to resolve this controversy. If they have some magic sauce for prompting, they should post a session or chat that can be verified by other (even if not exactly repeatable).

Yesterday almost my whole day was wasted because I chose to attack a problem primarily by using Claude 4 Sonnet. Having to hand hold it every step of the way, continually keep correcting basic type and logic errors (even ones I had corrected previously in the same session), and in the end it just could solve the challenge I gave it.

I have to be cynical and believe those shouting about LLMs taking over technical skill must have lots of stock in the AI companies.
by dpflan | 2025-06-02 11:17:27+00:00
Thanks for sharing. Is this similar to what was attracting students to medicine/doctor (guaranteed position with high salary)? But the med-school-to-full-time-physician pipeline is long and can weed out. CS is a difficult subject, certain ways of thinking are difficult but certainly can be learned, like recursive thinking.

Did colleges expand their computer science departments or even just create them to meet the demand for the degree? The pipeline to possible employment with a CS degree is quite short, doesn't require residency and board-certification so it's a quicker route to employment, but then you are competing with peers with stronger backgrounds and educations and seasoned professionals for the same positions.
by valenterry | 2025-06-02 11:18:03+00:00
> you no longer know when code is executed - it's magic

Kind of. That is what makes react a framework and not a library in my opinion. That being said, it's still learnable and managable (in pure react).

> state can be managed in ~5 different ways, with a lot of ceremony and idiosyncrasies

Not a valid argument. Just use react state and be done with it. If you go for anything on top, well yeah. But to be honest, other frameworks have the same problem, even in the backend.

> It is, absolutely, an eDSL (`useState` & `useEffect` introduce new semantics using JS syntax), and a proper DSL would be a lot easier to learn.

That is absolutely true and a valid point. It's mostly a shortcoming of javascript/typescript where it would be too annoying to pass down dependencies/props in a long chain of elements. So in an insufficient programming language you have the choice between typesafety+verbosity (react without hooks) or conciseness+unsafety (hooks are not typesafe, they are not regular functions and hence can't be refactored like them etc.). Basically, they break composibility.

Honestly, the frontend world circles around that problem and every blue moon something things they found the enlightenment and then they give up the previous benefits for new benefits. And the circle repeats.

I wonder if maybe effect.website might be able to change that in the future. It has the potential.
by physicsguy | 2025-06-02 11:18:08+00:00
> You cant learn on nothing, something will be used for it, that something forms the hard knowledge eventually. Typically broad set but shallow hard knowledge.

As a counterpoint though, the way things have gone in the U.K. is to go deep on niche topics without building up appreciation of the broad strokes. To give an example, there’s a GCSE History course for 14-16 year olds where the syllabus is effectively “medicine through time” and “the American West” without ever going near the British Empire, colonialism, the Tudor or Elizabethan periods, the reformation, the Industrial Revolution, Irish home rule and independence, etc. etc. any one of which gives much more insight into the formation of the state and cultural affairs as it stands today.

To my mind it’s too narrow a focus at too young an age when teaching a subject that a lot of children take. It also means there are constantly “we don’t even teach that at school” debates.
by CharlieDigital | 2025-06-02 11:18:55+00:00
People who think JavaScript is easy have made a big mistake.

There are multiple build chains to pick from. Multiple package managers each with nuances. Every need (e.g. ORM, logging) has multiple options to choose from each with some shortcoming you won't discover until you are deep into it. It has vulnerability types that do not exist on other platforms.

The language is easy and flexible, but the platform as a whole and ecosystem is a mess if you want to ship enterprise grade software. The moment you realize the need to define meta types on the BE (Zod, class-validator, etc) is the moment you should just start transitioning to a runtime typed language because you've realized "Actually, runtime types are kinda nice".

Many teams realize this too late and are stuck in JS hell which infects everything the team does and creates drag at scale. It creates drag in the CI because you need more checks and the tooling itself is slow. It creates drag in the DX because I have to restart the TS language server multiple times a day. It creates drag in the platform config because it's spaghetti to get things working and it's slow to build at scale.

For FE, it's hard to avoid. For BE...why do it to yourself if you know you're not building a toy?

Yes, I build JS backend, but it's fine for my side projects. Great even! For real, high value work? It is a mistake every time because it requires much more babysitting than almost anything else.
by TFYS | 2025-06-02 11:19:15+00:00
If online discourse is not shaped by the EU or European governments, it will be shaped by even less trustworthy entities. It will be shaped by US, China and Russia based organizations, and they will tear the EU apart from multiple directions. The EU needs this if it's to stay alive, even with the risks involved. We just need to be extremely careful that we don't let undemocratic parties get control of this system. That will be easier if we have better control over how much disinformation other powers are able to feed us.
by jumploops | 2025-06-02 11:20:41+00:00
What’s the benefit of `jsonriver` over one of the myriad of “best effort” parsers[0][1][2] in a try/catch loop while streaming?

[0]https://github.com/beenotung/best-effort-json-parser

[1]https://github.com/unjs/destr

[2]https://www.npmjs.com/package/json-parse-even-better-errors
by dpflan | 2025-06-02 11:21:40+00:00
> The hackers and nerds will be just fine. They are like gold when we find them now. But if this makes CS "uncool" again, I am all for it.

Think about how AI can help students cheat nowadays. You could still cheat previously, but now a CS-degree seeker can have an AI do the entirety of school work for them (with exception of say pen-and-paper tests). Imagine how the quality of new graduates drops with regard to the understanding and abilities you highlight as crucial to being effective in software, and how those that do understand are even more valuable relatively, but perhaps harder to find in the noise.
by artemonster | 2025-06-02 11:22:32+00:00
I have used the same LFSR-PC trick for my relay CPU:

https://github.com/artemonster/relay-cpu

Instead of having 24 relays to have a 12bit incrementer (a full adder requires 4 DPDT relays per bit or 2 quad relays) I only have 3 relays for 3 XORs :)
by throw0101b | 2025-06-02 11:23:17+00:00
> I was curious what it was for so I YouTube'd and searched for instructions on what the soap dispenser was for and (kind-of) to my surprise it was soap to lather and clean your anus with your other free hand. After you lather and clean, you basically rinse your hand with the hose as well.

There seems to be two kinds of cultures in the world: those that use water / their hands for post-business cleansing, and those that use paper or some other medium.

* https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20191004-the-peculiar-bat...

* https://www.sterillium.info/en/stories-hub/hygiene-customs-a...

For the hands folks, you then need to clean one's hands:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lota_(vessel)#Cleansing

* https://www.pocketbidet.com/blogs/our-blog/what-is-a-lota-a-...

* https://hellotushy.com/blogs/bidets/what-is-a-lota-muslim-hy...
by jimmySixDOF | 2025-06-02 11:23:25+00:00
RL is proving to be a weird science lately :

>Spurious Rewards: Rethinking Training Signals in RLVR ### *TL;DR* We show that you can do RLVR on Qwen2.5-Math models with *completely random or incorrect rewards*, and still get massive math benchmark gains.

All of the following spurious rewards give 15-20+ points on MATH-500 when RLVR training Qwen2.5-Math-7B:

- RLVR + format reward (reward responses with `\boxed{}`): *+16.4%* - RLVR + incorrect reward (only incorrect answers rewarded): *+24.6%* - RLVR + random reward: *+21.4%* - (as a reference) RLVR + ground-truth reward: + 28.8%

How can these spurious rewards possibly work? Can we get similar gains on other models with broken rewards?

>Learning to Reason without External Rewards Training large language models (LLMs) for complex reasoning via Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) is effective but limited by reliance on costly, domain-specific supervision. We explore Reinforcement Learning from Internal Feedback (RLIF), a framework that enables LLMs to learn from intrinsic signals without external rewards or labeled data. We propose Intuitor, an RLIF method that uses a model's own confidence, termed self-certainty, as its sole reward signal. Intuitor replaces external rewards in Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) with self-certainty scores, enabling fully unsupervised learning. Experiments demonstrate that Intuitor matches GRPO's performance on mathematical benchmarks while achieving superior generalization to out-of-domain tasks like code generation, without requiring gold solutions or test cases. Our findings show that intrinsic model signals can drive effective learning across domains, offering a scalable alternative to RLVR for autonomous AI systems where verifiable rewards are unavailable. [2]

[1] https://rethink-rlvr.notion.site/Spurious-Rewards-Rethinking... [2] https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.19590
by wildlogic | 2025-06-02 11:23:29+00:00
Not doing so well lately, but I managed to hack out this little puzzle game. I've spent a lot of time thinking about simple games appealing to a wide audience that can be played with no more than paper and pencil, and haven't come up with that many great ideas, but I think this one checks out. Feedback welcome! Not that I think I can sell this to the NYT for their puzzle section, but interested in ideas monetizing this outside of adwords. Thanks for looking.
by vertnerd | 2025-06-02 11:23:40+00:00
I left the software engineering field about 17 years ago to become a high school teacher. One of the things I taught was computer science (to high schoolers) and I recall sitting in many meetings of HS CS educators discussing the upcoming critical shortage of workers with CS degrees. I would tell them I left the field because there wasn't much work, and they would look at me like I was crazy. "Something wrong with that guy... He can't find work when there's a CRITICAL SHORTAGE of workers!!"
by ghaff | 2025-06-02 11:24:04+00:00
Anecdotally, but talking to a lot of people who really have their ears to the ground, the junior roles thing seems to be very real. It probably isn't just AI--with more senior folks probably more available, why hire juniors--but seems to be pretty pronounced (with probably the corollary that bootcamps are probably a bad idea these days). Which isn't a great trend if real.
by dagw | 2025-06-02 11:25:31+00:00
“Learn to code” ceases to be good advice if too many people do.

Completely disagree. No matter what job you end up with, you will almost certainly be able to do it a bit better if you know how to code. Knowing how to code is basically always a plus when applying for a job. However "just learn to code a little bit, and nothing else" is probably bad advice.
by rvz | 2025-06-02 11:25:44+00:00
> 1. Overproduction. Even liberal arts colleges have 15-20% of students majoring in computer science. “Learn to code” ceases to be good advice if too many people do.

"Learn to code" was the scam to address the so-called "skills shortage" BS in programming. Even worse, the skills that was pushed were also the most automatable: HTML, CSS and especially Javascript just to get $250k roles which was the most unsustainable ZIRP era to happen.

Now you won't see the influencers screaming about web developer roles given the current massive flush in those who joined because of the $$$ just to rearrange a <div> or adding accessiblity styling for 6 figures.
by ludicity | 2025-06-02 11:25:46+00:00
Every single reader on my blog that has sent me high-quality written material of their own has independently gone viral without any signal boosting from me. Off the top of my head, Iris Meredith, Mira Welner, Scott Smitelli, Daniel Sidhion. Usually within a few days of writing whatever the piece was, but sometimes months later.

Some of the posts weren't even remotely optimized for it. Daniel wrote about very nerdy NixOS optimization, Scott wrote a 20K story about the horror of bullshit jobs, etc.

Survivor bias is a real thing, but there's also a real dearth of quality writers out there. I'd encourage anyone who enjoys writing to do it for the love of the game, and as long as you occasionally show it to someone or post it on HN, good things will come.

My life was totally changed around the time I had 100 readers, and that number is extremely achievable. Going beyond that hasn't really helped me that much, as you quickly lose the ability to form deep connections with people.

(However, if you're frustrated by blogging then by all means, give up. I do think that what carries the writers above is that they're in it for the love of the crafts they're writing about in addition to being talented writers. Trying to grind out success sounds dreadful and I feel like it scarcely works.)
by TeMPOraL | 2025-06-02 11:25:57+00:00
What conventions?

It's pretty clear to me. The authors of books "plagiarized" into the training corpus are at best entitled to one-time payment equivalent to the company buying those books. They're not entitled to percentage of profits generated by the model. Can't think of any convention that would even remotely imply that.

(I suppose it depends on whether you see the training process more like model learning, vs. more like model being a derived work. The latter feels absurd to me.)

As for OpenAI, et al. - they're selling a service that provides value to people. That's pretty much the most basic business scenario, far more honest than most of the tech industry. And they did create the thing providing value. The training data may be a critical ingredient, but only when collected and aggregated at scale, thoroughly blended, distilled down to explicit and implicit semantics, and solidified into a model than then gets served via complex piece of computational infrastructure - all of that is what the companies are doing, all of that is what's critical to providing this fundamentally new kind of value. It's only fair they should be compensated for that.

And to be clear - despite their occasional protestations to the contrary, I don't believe OpenAI, Microsoft, Google and other LLM vendors to be working for the "benefit of society" or "good of humanity". I claim that LLMs as models and as a technology are a huge value to humanity. Companies come and go, business models change, but inventions remain. Even today, between DeepSeek-R1, newest LLama models and countless of their derivatives, society can enjoy the benefits of near-SOTA LLMs without being beholden to a few large tech companies. The models and means to run them are out there, and are not going away.
by lotsofpulp | 2025-06-02 11:26:40+00:00
As is expelling someone from a school (at least a college). It is not a legal right to be able to attend a school.

Also, cheating in a personal card game might not result in consequences, but in a casino it could result in prosecution:

https://www.8newsnow.com/investigators/group-accused-in-225k...

Same with cheating in a spouse, you won’t go to jail, but it will adversely affect you in divorce proceedings. Point being that society has some expectations of people knowing what the rules are without people signing a pledge.
by bloop0 | 2025-06-02 11:26:43+00:00
Ah yes, the eternal quest for "feeling valued" at work — as if we're all in a corporate therapy session instead of just here to solve problems, get paid, and go home. American companies love inventing emotional debt as a substitute for job security. Maybe next time I get laid off, they’ll throw in a heartfelt Slack emoji to ease the blow.
by paxys | 2025-06-02 11:26:45+00:00
Even 20 years ago back when I was in college you had a sizable portion of kids who came in to study computer science thinking it would be fun and games. They were then made to study formal logic in their first semester and debug segfaults in gdb in the next, and by the end of the first year pretty much all of them had switched majors.

Anecdotally I've heard that very few CS programs even use C++ anymore, and schools now favor Python because students find it more accessible.