MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by hinkley | 2025-06-30 17:30:36+00:00
I became the SME for batch processing on this project. The whole project was a read heavy workflow that should have had all decisions made at write time but was so far in the weeds when I got there that I couldn’t pull it out. And everyone I convinced of this fact decided to work somewhere else instead of stay and help fix it.

But there were parts we could sort out at build or deploy time, and I was able to fix a number of those.

One guy was tasked with a project I got turned into an epic: build fallback error pages at deploy time and push them into CDN. I told him not to build it the way he was, copy the one I had been working on. I got busy and he left, and we discovered that they hadn’t been updating when a customer changed their contact info and noticed months later that we still had the old info.

The build trigger had no downstream dependencies and there was no alert being sent for failure. The job was timing out for reasons similar to the ones I’d fixed. I tried to bandaid it still errored out an hour into what looked like at least a 100-120 minute workload.

I discovered the main problem was that our customers could have multiple domain names and he was frobbing through three or four service calls trying to find the canonical one, and making one call per customer to see if they were still customers (we had an endpoint that would paginate all active customers, so ~400x more efficient and rising due to turnover).

The main table I had been using had one column I didn’t use, which had a url in it. I confirmed with our SME that this was in fact the canonical domain name, I just had to add the field to the QL and do a `new URL(url).hostname`. At the end of the day I ended up extracting about half the code from my tool, deleting over half of his code and replacing it with calls into mine (do it like I did it, but literally).

Four and a half minutes, and no more intermittent failures, because my version was built on back pressure to throttle requests under high server load, and total outbound requests around 1/8 of the original.
by tech_ken | 2025-06-30 17:30:41+00:00
“Layoffs for layoffs’ sake” is cargo cult economics. DOGE is not “tightening the belt” it’s a slash and burn intended to bring the federal administration to heel for the current sitting executive. Tech layoffs yeah maybe a market correction to a tightening money supply, but higher ed is a very different world than consumer technology. It seems extremely myopic to compare them like you’re doing.
by OkayPhysicist | 2025-06-30 17:31:19+00:00
Why shouldn't they be? It's not the 00's anymore, Unicode support is universal. You'd have to dust off some truly ancient tech to find something incapable of rendering it.

Source code is for humans, and thus should be written in whatever way makes it easiest to read, write, and understand for humans. If your language doesn't map onto ASCII, then Unicode support improves that goal. If your code is meant to directly implement some physics formula, then using the appropriate unicode characters might make it easier to read (and thus spot transcription errors, something I find far too often in physics simulations).
by alexey-salmin | 2025-06-30 17:31:22+00:00
No, not really. There's an established correlation between glycemic spikes and health risks which the papers you reference confirm. But correlation is not causation, and I haven't seen any evidence that reducing spikes have positive long-term consequences for general population (not diabetics). Would be interesting to see a controlled test if it ever happened.

In the absence of data my guess is that glycemic spikes simply share common root causes with health risks: overeating, junk food etc.

I say this because there's plenty of meals like white rice that cause glycemic spikes but not the health issues. And at the same time e.g fructose has low GI but seems to be linked to obesity and type 2 diabetes.

In the same way sunglasses correlate with sweating but removing the sunglasses won't make you sweat any less.
by adwn | 2025-06-30 17:32:27+00:00
> Are you saying that Java doesn't do what the article describes?

That's right, Java doesn't do what the NativeJIT library does: Hotspot starts in an interpreted mode and only later JIT-compiles frequently executed code; NativeJIT, in contrast, immediately compiles the generated code, at least according to this description:

Bing formulates a custom expression for each query and then uses NativeJIT to compile the expression into x64 code that will be run on a large set of candidate documents spread across a cluster of machines.

I don't know the specifics, but my guess is that by the time Hotspot would even start compiling, the user has already received the results for their query. Ergo, Java – at least with the Hotspot VM – wouldn't be suitable for this task.
by jfengel | 2025-06-30 17:32:52+00:00
I don't think it was for the money. I think it was for the ego. The money exists so that he can do things that make him feel good about himself.

I think he would love to be the guy who saved the planet. And if he's accomplished that by 2040, I'll be grateful to him for that. He'll have deserved it.

I think he'd also love to be the guy who colonized Mars. I believe that if you could ask him for one thing he wants, it's to be remembered in one breath with Christopher Columbus.

Of late, he seems to be distracted from both of those approaches. For a while, he thought he could be the guy who drowned the US government in the bathtub, enabling him to pursue his other feats in peace.

If that is ending, perhaps he'll return to being the great green visionary, electrifying the country despite the entrenched power structures working against him. It would take a lot to revise my extremely negative opinion, but if he really can be the guy who defeats global warming, I'll applaud him for it.
by _feus | 2025-06-30 17:33:06+00:00
I absolutely agree with you. In the right hands, LLM is a teaching tool, and the calls to resist it are as dumbfounded as the calls to resist the chalkboard would be.

One of my favourite uses of LLM is the reverse-dictionary, for example:

Give me one Saxon and one Romance word meaning "to write".

Saxon (Germanic origin): scratch — Old English scrætan, linked to marking or incising.

Romance (Latin origin): inscribe — from Latin inscribere, "to write on/in."

Genius!
by Imnimo | 2025-06-30 17:33:15+00:00
>Generative AI's main impact on higher education has been to cause panic about students cheating, a panic that diverts attention from the already immiserated experience of marketised studenthood. It's also caused increasing alarm about staff cheating, via AI marking and feedback, which again diverts attention from their experience of relentless and ongoing precaritisation.

>The hegemonic narrative calls for universities to embrace these tools as a way to revitalise pedagogy, and because students will need AI skills in the world of work. A major flaw with this story is that the tools don't actually work, or at least not as claimed.

>AI summarisation doesn't summarise; it simulates a summary based on the learned parameters of its model. AI research tools don't research; they shove a lot of searched-up docs into the chatbot context in the hope that will trigger relevancy. For their part, so-called reasoning models ramp up inference costs while confabulating a chain of thought to cover up their glaring limitations.

If AI tools do not actually work, how are students able to cheat with them? It seems like that would be a problem that would solve itself - a student would attempt to use AI to cheat, it would fail to complete the assignment, and the student would get a bad grade.
by searine | 2025-06-30 17:33:49+00:00
If the target of reform is admin and not researchers, then the "reforms" should target the admin and not the researchers.

What we see however is cancer research being cancelled and students careers being thrown in the dumpster. You've been fooled by right-wing propaganda that claims "reform", but it's not about reform for them, it is about crushing educated people so they cannot oppose their authoritarianism.
by tippytippytango | 2025-06-30 17:33:55+00:00
Sometimes we get confused by the difference between technological and scientific progress. When science makes progress it unlocks new S-curves that progress at an incredible pace until you get into the diminishing returns region. People complain of slowing progress but it was always slow, you just didn’t notice that nothing new was happening during the exponential take off of the S-curve, just furious optimization.
by SamDc73 | 2025-06-30 17:33:56+00:00
> everything is human-reviewed and open-sourced for community auditing

2 projects worth checking out here: https://github.com/kamranahmedse/developer-roadmap (open-sourced roadmaps, no course content) and also https://github.com/ossu for more college curricula level (with references to outside courses).

I've been personally working on AI generated courses for a couple of months (probably will open source it in 1–3 months). I think the trickiest part that I haven't figured out yet is how to kind of build a map of someone's knowledge so I can branch out of it, things like "have a CS degree" or "worked as a Frontend Dev" is a good starting point, but how to go from there?

I really like how Squirrel AI (EdTech Company) breaks things down — they split subjects into thousands of tiny “knowledge points.” Each one is basically a simple yes/no check: Do I know this or not? The idea makes sense, but actually pulling it off is tough. Mapping out all those knowledge points is a huge task. I’m working on it now, but this part MUST be open source

btw, feel free to email me to bounce ideas or such (it's in my bio)
Ask HN: Is "ethical AI" possible, or is there a catch?
by mrdependable | 2025-06-30 17:34:43+00:00
I have been reading about companies like Asteria that say they only train their model on licensed work. Is it actually possible that they would license enough content to train their own model to compete with something like Veo, or am I misunderstanding what they mean? Are they just fine-tuning another model on their own dataset?
by scarface_74 | 2025-06-30 17:35:01+00:00
I am a 51 year old Black male who has been in tech professionally since 1996 and I’ve worked at 10 jobs and those have been everything to boring old enterprise companies, startups to BigTech.

If you said that corporate America is no place for DEI and everyone should be hired based on merits alone, I would agree.

I don’t think the reason for the lack of US citizen minorities being underrepresented in tech is because of systemic racism and when I did do my stint at Amazon post 2020, I found the performative “allyship, DEI initiatives moan worthy at best and considering that Amazon is the shittyist employer in BigTech, I found it laughable”. Yes I knew that going in and it was a remote position. I went in with my eyes wide open.

But on the other hand, if it is a pipeline problem, where should initiatives happen to give opportunities in tech if not in academia and who should do it if not the government?

That being said, it would be a lot more palatable to voters if it was based on economic background than race. I can’t say with a straight face that had less opportunities as a minority when I went to private school from k-8th and came from an upper middle class background and had up to date computers where I taught myself how to program ever since the mid 80s.

And the sane party that decries putting people in positions they aren’t qualified for nominated RFK to head the DHHS and other unqualified people to be heads of other agencies.

Not to mention the shit show of DOGE.
by jonah | 2025-06-30 17:35:40+00:00
I got a chance to look up some links[1]. The older iPods - through version 5.5 - have Wolfson DACs which have a "warm sound signature" that a lot of people like.

[1] e.g. https://www.macintoshhowto.com/ipod/which-ipod-has-the-best-...
by tzs | 2025-06-30 17:36:28+00:00
> It is shockingly unpopular, and the more voters learn about it, the more they dislike it

An example from a KFF tracking poll [1]:

> The “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” that was passed by House Republicans and is currently being discussed by the U.S. Senate is viewed unfavorably by a majority of adults (64%), including large majorities of independents and Democrats. Six in ten Republicans have a favorable opinion of the bill, but this support is largely driven by supporters of the Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement, while two-thirds of non-MAGA Republicans view the bill unfavorably. Among both Republicans and MAGA supporters, support drops at least 20 percentage points, with less than half of each group viewing the law favorably after hearing it would increase the country’s uninsured rate and decrease funding for local hospitals.

Here's an article summarizing a whole bunch of polls [2]. It contains some good examples of how when people learn more about the bill support falls, such as

> The Post-Ipsos poll found that 52% of Americans supported work requirements for able-bodied adults to receive Medicaid, while 33% opposed them. But that policy became unpopular when voters were told that the CBO estimates 8 million people would lose health coverage as a result of the bill: 63% said that is unacceptable, while 18% said that’s acceptable. (The latest version of the bill is projected to result in more than 10 million losing their coverage, according to the CBO.)

[1] https://www.kff.org/medicaid/poll-finding/kff-health-trackin...

[2] https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/polls-trump-bill-u...
by LarsDu88 | 2025-06-30 17:36:38+00:00
> Mostly developed to the same extent

This is mostly a software engineering forum, but no... most actually important industries and scientific work, unlike building webapps or video games, work the same way as software.

John Doe straight of high school can go and make a photo sharing app with his laptop, but he is not going to be getting the same type of experience with non-trival research in his garage as at a research university.

To actually get to the point where people had laptops required years of largely academic research and creating markets which were almost entirely academic. Just like with vaccination, people forget the time when a young person (who wasn't named Bill Gates) could get experience on an actual computer was at a university.
by pier25 | 2025-06-30 17:36:52+00:00
I was born in a trilingual home and couldn't agree more.

(I then added English)

Languages are (metaphorically) the key to a culture which can configure your thinking. Some words that are obscure or technical in one language are used more commonly in others. A little example is that in Spain it's common to use the jugular vein for a number of idioms. I know for a fact most French speakers have never heard of it and I think it's also not that common for English speakers.
by toephu2 | 2025-06-30 17:36:56+00:00
OT: Why is 2 minutes still the recommended time to brush your teeth for (by the ADA)? Lets say the baseline is 100 vibrations or brushes (or swipes) per minute for a manual toothbrush.

If an electric toothbrush vibrates 8000 times per minute (or any other measurable metric), then shouldn't the amount of time you need to brush for be lowered?

Seems like the whole brush your teeth for 2 minutes was just a very general guideline but was never updated to be very scientific since the introduction of electric toothbrushes.

Also, can we have electric toothbrushes advertise vibrations per minute? or some other metric like that?

It seems like over the years they get weaker and weaker.
by ninetyninenine | 2025-06-30 17:37:02+00:00
It looks as if the problem for this one was a game design issue. They had the LLM be sarcastic and ignore well known adventure game prompts on purpose. It's an easy fix to make the LLM more obedient and polite.

The biggest issue is attempts to hack the LLM, to get at hidden gamestate. But I feel this can be easily remedied by just not providing the LLM with hidden game state.
by adolph | 2025-06-30 17:37:22+00:00
> The study you link states that 'To prevent vitamin D deficiency, one should spend 15 to 20 minutes daily in the sunshine with 40% of the skin surface exposed.'. The screenshot on lume health shows a goal of 120 minutes.

Linearly it follows that if one wears clothes that cover more than 40% of lit skin, then the duration would be adjusted to match the total skin-area/time.

If one start with 1.85 m^2 body surface area, 40% of that is .72 m^2. If clothing covers 50% of a human and the human's shape and hair occludes half of that remaining, you have .46 m^2 available for sunlight. .72 m^2 * 20 is 14.4 m^2/min. divided by .46 m^2 it seems that 31.3 min would be the daily amount.

This seems much less than lume health's goal of 120 min. Otoh, given there is less opportunity for get to 14.4 m^2/min daily (I'm looking outside at a nice rainstorm), maybe the 120 min has some catchup factor?
by OkayPhysicist | 2025-06-30 17:37:41+00:00
> Little to no source code is written for single (human) language development teams.

This is blatantly false. I'd posit that a solid 90% of all source code written is done so by single, co-located teams (a substantial portion of which are teams of 1). That certainly fits the bill for most companies I've worked at.
by BugsJustFindMe | 2025-06-30 17:37:48+00:00
> According to TFA, the main culprit for disrupting "the human oxidation field" from the skin care products are the alcohols contained therein.

Phenoxyethanol is a phenol ether, not an alcohol. Olive oil contains a collection of phenolic acids, which are considered to be more toxic than phenol ethers, not less. We intentionally replace the acid hydrogen with an alkyl group specifically to lower toxicity. We do this because we actually study things like toxicity now, which the ancient Greeks did not.

> but they contained only ... oily extracts from aromatic plants.

Phenoxyethanol is an oily substance also sometimes found in aromatic plants! Green tea and chicory both contain it! People across the planet have been consuming chicory and green tea for thousands of years! (Oh no!)
by enragedcacti | 2025-06-30 17:37:55+00:00
> I don’t think that’s true, and am asking for a nuanced breakdown.

In my experience this kind of nuanced info is unfortunately pretty hard to come by. MFGs know it but have no interest in sharing it. Same for taxi operators (though the number of hybrids in taxi fleets is pretty staggering). Fleet operators usually only look at the first 5 years so longer term maintenance and repairs aren't studied all that rigorously. That said, here's a 5-year fleet TCO analysis where HEVs on average were 6k cheaper than ICE: https://www.afla.org/news/692431/The-Hybrid-Value-Propositio...

Also, here is an analysis from 2016 showing that the 2005 Prius had the lowest 10 year maintenance cost of any model. Toyota had only been making hybrids for 7 years at that point. That level of reliability for a new technology is pretty impressive: https://www.greencarreports.com/news/1104478_toyota-prius-hy...

> (and specific to the original claim about cost of ownership, equal in cost).

speaking to this piece, it can be hard to gauge because its not all that common for companies to sell very similar trims in hybrid and non-hybrid. The two PSD hybrid examples off the dome are the corolla which is +$1500 for hybrid and the first-gen maverick which was -$1100 for the hybrid (before Ford knew the hybrid would sell like hotcakes, then they cranked the price up).

Perhaps Ford just wanted to burn cash but imo PSD hybrids are likely very competitive in terms of per unit cost, which would hopefully translate into lower repair costs. Toyota has also just switched to hybrid only for the Rav4, which is one of the best selling models on the planet. That would be a pretty bold move if they weren't very confident about the reliability and TCO (basically their entire brand value) or their ability to make money selling them (cost vs consumer value prop).
by adrian_b | 2025-06-30 17:38:07+00:00
There must have been computers with 6502 and DRAM.

For higher memory capacities, e.g. 32 kB, 48 kB or 64 kB, static RAM would have been too expensive and too big, even if 6502 did not have an integrated DRAM controller, like Zilog Z80.

Using SRAM instead of DRAM meant using 4 times more IC packages, e.g, 32 packages instead of 8. The additional DRAM controller required by DRAM would have needed only 1 to 4 additional IC packages. Frequently the display controller could be used to also ensure DRAM refresh.
by wheybags | 2025-06-30 17:38:20+00:00
Hot take, but I've always felt the world would be better served if mathematicians and physicists would stop using terrible short variable names and use longCamelCaseDescriptiveNames like the rest of us, because paper is cheap, and abbreviations are confusing. I know it's nicer when you're writing by hand, but when you clean up a proof or formula for publishing, would it really be so hard to switch to descriptive names?

I'm a practitioner of neither though, so I can't condemn the practice wholeheartedly as an outsider, but it does make me groan.
by lotsofpulp | 2025-06-30 17:38:48+00:00
A model Y is not anywhere near an SUV, regardless of classification for tax purposes. It's also not comparable because it is all electric.

The form factor of a typical SUV, such as an X7 or Land Cruiser or Explorer or Suburban, is inherently more wasteful than a minivan. The only thing those offer 99% of people is that they allow the driver to sit higher up, and be able to say they are not driving a minivan. Otherwise, the minivan provides more utility in every way.

>summer roadtrips, ski vacations, visiting family, moving stuff.

All of this stuff (in the manner 99% of people use their vehicle, i.e. not climbing rocky terrain like in the commercials) is easier to do in a minivan than an SUV. And I'm sure an electric minivan would be better than an electric SUV, except at signaling you can afford to forego the extra utility.
by nickpinkston | 2025-06-30 17:39:04+00:00
Yea, agreed it's pretty hard, though with some tradeoffs it could be done pragmatically.

I would probably slightly overbuild the plastic and then use a heated tool to form the smoother surfaces the wire/foil would go in/on.

I've also seen laser sputtering of copper, etc. which could be the another approach, something similar is used for metalizing plastic already, though contamination would need to be controlled to maintain low resistivity.
by trollbridge | 2025-06-30 17:39:05+00:00
"CarFax for used PCs" is a silly analogy; a used machine can quickly be assessed for its current condition, and a log of past repairs isn't really relevant, particularly when most repairs these days are just replacing the entire motherboard.

Old laptops are not particularly valuable because (a) they might be a lot slower than a new, base-model laptop at a quite affordable price, and (b) much of modern electronics has a design life of 3-5 years, and a used laptop will generally be at the end of that design life. Nobody really likes laptops which have random components fail and need replaced.

With that said, we happily use used laptops, some much older than 5 years. HP supplying a "Carfax" would have zero utility to us.