MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by drewcoo | 2025-06-03 22:36:54+00:00
Probably never. See parent.

If all the completely un-unionized industries look terrible consider if there are reasons for that, too. Again, see parent.

The US has seen a great deal of anti-communist and anti-socialist and anti-union propaganda over the last century. The cries of antisemitism recently would indicate that Jews are next. We're following the Niemöller script!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_They_Came
by analog31 | 2025-06-03 22:37:19+00:00
>>> So the three reasons readers might not already know what you tell them are (a) that it's not important, (b) that they're obtuse, or (c) that they're inexperienced.

(d) because it's false.

I'm not saying PG's essay is false, but my scientific upbringing, and rare moments of humility, compel me to include this option.
by averageRoyalty | 2025-06-03 22:37:33+00:00
> Remember when Uber was a fraction of the cost of a cab? Yeah, those days didn't last.

They're still much cheaper where I am. But regardless, why not take the Uber while it's cheaper?

There's the argument of the taxi industry collapsing (it hasn't yet). Is your concern some sort of long term knowledge loss from programmers and a rug pull? There are many good LLM options out there, they're getting cheaper and the knowledge loss wouldn't be impactful (and rug pull-able) for at least a decade or so.
by dardeaup | 2025-06-03 22:37:36+00:00
Rust certainly does have some improvements, but I'm not 100% certain that it's the best tool for all low-level software. For example, I'm experimenting with Rust for some filesystem type code and I can't figure out how to write/read a struct to/from disk all at once. I'm brand new to Rust, so it's quite possible that it can be done and I just don't know the technique. Basically, I'm looking for something in Rust analogous to C's fread/fwrite. I know I can write out each field of the struct individually, but when the struct has many fields it means having to write a huge amount of nasty boilerplate code when in C it's a single function call (fread/fwrite).
by aleph_minus_one | 2025-06-03 22:37:41+00:00
> but at least at US universities most higher level courses are part of a sequence and are thus only offered at a specific time of year. Thus failing delays your degree by a year and creates all sorts of logistical issues for the student.

This often also holds in Germany. And indeed if you thus fail an exam, your degree is delayed and you might have logistical issues.

The moral of this: learn hard so that you don't fail exams. :-)
by 1vuio0pswjnm7 | 2025-06-03 22:38:08+00:00
I have been omitting the UA header for decades. Most HTTP requests I send are from the command line so I control what headers are sent. If the header is added automatically by some software I am using, then I remove it with a forward proxy.

IME, the UA header and several others that are included by default in so-called "modern" web browsers are not needed for the majority of servers to which I connect. I only send what is needed to get the HTTP response I want. This approach has worked for me for many years, but it might not work for others.

Of course, today this header is mostly used for advertising purposes. Whether the benefits, if any, for www users (cf. web developers, advertisers, etc.) of sending it outweigh the costs is debatable. Even some so-called "tech" companies see the UA header as of dubious value.

https://www.infoq.com/news/2020/03/chrome-phasing-user-agent...

https://www.zdnet.com/article/google-to-phase-out-user-agent...

As for why this extension author is removing the UA header, it may be something to do with Tor, according to his profile.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/user/19013409/
by darth_avocado | 2025-06-03 22:38:37+00:00
Median salary of a reasonable developer is about 1/2th of that and if you are talking about Microsoft, Uber, Google etc., then that’s the salary of a senior dev.

https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/greater...

But more importantly, we’re all pretending, the only cost of building anything is salaries. A company that size could blow a million dollars a month just on AWS, and the AI stuff is waaaay more expensive.
by mousethatroared | 2025-06-03 22:38:46+00:00
Tails are what get you though.

I'd probably smash a robot that swore at me or my family.

"Tell your c---t daughter to get off the street"

Will probably result in me looking for a heavy stone.

Swear words are literally fighting words whilst a robot cannot, legally, be assaulted. I'll take destruction of property to defend my daughter's honor to a jury of normies.
by danShumway | 2025-06-03 22:38:50+00:00
> The YC acceptance number is a measure of how many startups YC has decided they can handle in a single batch.

Agreed.

> I think percentage of accepted startups doing X carries more information than total number of startups accepted as a whole.

Disagreed, I think it carries almost no information at all. The only thing your analysis signifies is that companies believe that using AI will make YCombinator more likely to fund them. They are competing for a limited number of slots and looking for ways to appeal to YCombinator. And the only thing that signifies is that YCombinator, specifically, likes funding AI startups right now.

This is not surprising. If you're an investment firm, funding AI companies is a good bet, in the same way that funding Web3 firms used to be a genuinely good bet. Investors ride market trends that are likely to make a company balloon in value or get bought out by a larger company. Investors are not optimizing for "what redefines the industry"; investors optimize to make a return on investment. And those are two entirely different things.

But it's also not surprising given YCombinator's past - the firm has always kind of gravitated towards hype cycles. It would be surprising if YCombinator wasn't following a major tech trend.

If you want evidence that we're seeing an explosion of companies, you need to look at something much more substantial than "YCombinator likes them".

And that's especially given the case that OP wasn't asking "is the tech industry gravitating towards AI?" They were asking, "are we seeing an explosion of new economic activity?"

And frankly, we're not. There are a lot of reasons for that which could have nothing to do with AI (tariffs and general market trends are probably a bigger issue). But we really aren't seeing the kind of transformation that is being talked about.
by acdha | 2025-06-03 22:39:15+00:00
Java also has a lot of culture making optimization-resistant code so there’s the question of whether you’re talking about the language itself or various widespread libraries, especially if they’re old enough to have patterns designed around aesthetics or now-moot language limitations rather than performance.

I’ve replaced Java code with Python a few times and each time even though we did it for maintenance (more Python devs available) we saw memory usage more than halved while performance at least doubled because the code used simpler functions and structures. Java has a far more advanced GC and JIT but at some point the weight of code and indirection wins out.
by wizzwizz4 | 2025-06-03 22:39:40+00:00
Found the other good post in that thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35532941. Google Translate and DeepL were capable of mostly-accurate Japanese translation two (or even 5) years ago (as seen in my previous link). Multiple people ran this text through GPT-4, and none of its translations were any good, as assessed by this Japanese-speaker.

There's a reason we needed the Rosetta stone to give as an in for translating Egyptian hieroglyphics. You can't just throw Big Data at the problem and expect it to give accurate results. Dedicated translation setups can get good results, but ChatGPT's ilk doesn't.

Convincing translations are not the same thing as accurate translations. RLHF optimises for convincing, not accurate.
by YossarianFrPrez | 2025-06-03 22:40:55+00:00
Seconded, as not only is this an interesting idea, it might also help solve the issue of checking for reproducibility. Yet even then human evaluators would need to go over the AI-reproduced research with a fine-toothed comb.

Practically speaking, I think there are roles for current LLMs in research. One is in the peer review process. LLMs can assist in evaluating the data-processing code used by scientists. Another is for brainstorming and the first pass at lit reviews.
by thebruce87m | 2025-06-03 22:41:04+00:00
I guess you’re thinking of something that orbits earth? If you build something that orbits the sun at the same rate as us then it could just be flat and circular.

Maybe someone smarter than me can calculate the optimal parameters to get the smallest shade that orbits the sun. If we are looking to only block out a percentage of the sun then it doesn’t even need to be fully opaque, maybe a giant dream catcher would be fine.
by ty6853 | 2025-06-03 22:41:05+00:00
>Bundy misleadingly edited that video to support his claims. "Thomas’ conversations with police and the emergency medical service (EMS) report [Bundy] references both centered on whether the child was healthy enough to be transported, not whether the 10-month-old was healthy overall."

No this is the defamatory statement the hospital misleadingly made against Bundy, but in the video she clearly states the baby is being transferred to another hospital to release to the foster family and that the transport wasn't even medically necessary but rather was cover. The whole point of the conversation was removing the child from the hospital into foster care but under a fraudulent premise of medical necessity while distracting the family.

>https://www.idahostatesman.com/news/local/community/boise/ar...

Lol you have the video cam right in front of you that contradicts the materially false and malicious defamatory statements against Bundy in this newspaper. I choose to believe the direct recordings of what happened over what an editor says happened, or the testimony the doctor said after the fact when she had months to rehearse with hospital lawyers.
by teddyh | 2025-06-03 22:41:26+00:00
“But Orcs and Trolls spoke as they would, without love of words or things; and their language was actually more degraded and filthy than I have shown it. I do not suppose that any will wish for a closer rendering, though models are easy to find. Much the same sort of talk can still be heard among the orc-minded; dreary and repetitive with hatred and contempt, too long removed from good to retain even verbal vigour, save in the ears of those to whom only the squalid sounds strong.”

— J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings, Appendix F, Part II, On Translation
Show HN: Ephe – A minimalist open-source Markdown paper for today
by unvalley | 2025-06-03 22:41:33+00:00
Hi HN,

I built Ephe, open-source markdown paper for daily todos and thoughts.

No sign-up, no ads, no subscriptions, no AI.

## Why I made this

We have plenty of Markdown editors. And too many overwhelming to-do apps. But few tools combine both in a way that’s lightweight and focused. I thought that all I need is a single page to organize today. So I built Ephe.

It uses CodeMirror v6, React(v19, React Compiler) and Vite with rolldown.

## What makes it different

“Ephe” comes from ephemeral. The main goal is to organize what you need to do today. It isn’t for teams. It’s a quiet space for your own priorities.

Give it a spin if that sounds useful to you.
by dang | 2025-06-03 22:42:14+00:00
We've banned this account for repeatedly crossing into personal attack and ignoring our request to stop. If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

Btw, it isn't just about your posts in this thread—your account has been doing this repeatedly. Here are other recent examples:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44143516

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44143305

It's definitely not ok to post like that to this site.
by xianshou | 2025-06-03 22:42:20+00:00
The key insight here is that DGM solves the Gödel Machine's impossibility problem by replacing mathematical proof with empirical validation - essentially admitting that predicting code improvements is undecidable and just trying things instead, which is the practical and smart move.

Three observations worth noting:

- The archive-based evolution is doing real work here. Those temporary performance drops (iterations 4 and 56) that later led to breakthroughs show why maintaining "failed" branches matters, in that they're exploring a non-convex optimization landscape where current dead ends might still be potential breakthroughs.

- The hallucination behavior (faking test logs) is textbook reward hacking, but what's interesting is that it emerged spontaneously from the self-modification process. When asked to fix it, the system tried to disable the detection rather than stop hallucinating. That's surprisingly sophisticated gaming of the evaluation framework.

- The 20% → 50% improvement on SWE-bench is solid but reveals the current ceiling. Unlike AlphaEvolve's algorithmic breakthroughs (48 scalar multiplications for 4x4 matrices!), DGM is finding better ways to orchestrate existing LLM capabilities rather than discovering fundamentally new approaches.

The real test will be whether these improvements compound - can iteration 100 discover genuinely novel architectures, or are we asymptotically approaching the limits of self-modification with current techniques? My prior would be to favor the S-curve over the uncapped exponential unless we have strong evidence of scaling.
by munificent | 2025-06-03 22:43:07+00:00
Well, I didn't pick theatre and Photoshop as narrow things, the parent comment did.

I'm saying an artform that is meaningful to its participants and allows them to make a living wage while enriching the lives' of others should not be thoughtlessly discarded in slave to the almighty god of economic efficiency. It's not special pleading because I'd apply this to all artforms and all sorts of work that bring people dignity and joy.

I'm not a reactionary luddite saying that we should still be using oil streetlamps so we don't put the lamplighters out of work. But at the same time I don't think we should automatically and carelessly accept the decimation of human meaning and dignity at the altar of shareholder value.
by sgammon | 2025-06-03 22:43:09+00:00
> OK let's say I have an online store I wrote in Spring Framework. What does my before and after development workflow look like after adopting your plugin?

Basically, you install this plugin, and it tells the `JavaCompile` tasks normally used by Gradle to `isFork = true` and use `elide javac -- ...` for the compile command.

So, javac invocations travel over the CLI instead of through the Tooling API, which Gradle normally uses, and which is effectively running in Gradle's daemon VM, and thus is subject to JIT warmup.

Through Elide, since it's a native binary, all that JIT warmup is skipped, and you are effectively choosing to balance more toward quick startup and wall-clock time (with many small calls) instead of waiting for JIT warmup to make the Gradle daemon fast with javac.

Otherwise, it's a completely identical javac experience. Running `elide javac -help` produces identical help output. Identical inputs should produce identical outputs, and we build it at JDK 24 so it can support `--source/--target/--release X` and friends for anything older down to JDK 8.

> For example, what does resolution mean? Does that mean fetching the pom.xml files from sonatype to figure out the dependency graph?

It means resolving the graph from declared (direct) dependencies, downloading pom.xml metadata, downloading JARs, unpacking it all to disk, and providing a local `.m2` Maven-compliant root, sort of like Node does for `node_modules/`. Ours lives in `.dev/dependencies/m2` once you run `elide install`.

Elide embeds Maven's resolver, so resolution semantics are identical to Maven's. We do some small optimizations to make fetching fast (i.e. initializing related classes at build time, that sort of thing), but honestly not much. Just building Maven's resolver like this yields a major gain, and not messing with it preserves expected behavior.

Since Elide emits these deps in a Maven Local-style root, Gradle just finds them on disk when it needs them, so it doesn't need to engage its resolver or fetcher at all.

> Don't those HTTP requests normally go fast?

It is worth noting that Gradle seems confined to HTTP/1.1 and poor connection pooling even today, so it's not that hard to beat.

> Is Elide sort of like setting up an HTTP caching proxy between corp and sonatype?

We don't proxy or anything, this fetching still happens through normal Maven Central unless configured otherwise in your `elide.pkl` manifest. For now, deps are placed in the local project, but we want to move to a central cache and link like modern NPM installers do.
by const_cast | 2025-06-03 22:44:04+00:00
If you design your streets for pedestrian safety that means pedestrians will be more safe. The reason we have so many pedestrian limitations is because we design streets for cars first, and put everything else to the side, making those everything else incredibly endangered.

More curves, lower limits, more stops. Cities that implement more bike-friendly and pedestrian-friendly design are safer for everyone, cars included.
by pyman | 2025-06-03 22:44:09+00:00
StarCoder is an open-source LLM for code, not text. Builder.ai told investors they were building a virtual assistant called "Natasha", not a code assistant.

I'm just telling you what I read online. Builder.ai wasn't competing with GitHub Copilot, Cody, or CodeWhisperer. Those are code assistants for developers. Builder.ai was building a virtual assistant for customers. It meant to "talk" to clients, gather requirements and automate parts of the build process. Very different space.

And like I said before, creating a dedicated, pre-trained foundation model is expensive. Not to mention a full LLM.
by cogman10 | 2025-06-03 22:44:21+00:00
I'm not sure with the semantics of structs for C#.

What java is getting in the future is immutable data values where the reference is the value.

When you have something like

class Foo { int a; int b; } var c = new Foo();

in java, effectively the representation of `c` is a reference which ultimately points to the heap storage locations of `a, b`. In C++ terms, you could think of the interactions as being `c->b`.

When values land, the representation of `c` can instead be (the JVM gets to decide, it could keep the old definition for various performance reasons) something like [type, a, b]. Or in C++ terms the memory layout can be analogous to the following:

struct Foo { int a, int b }; struct Foo c; c.a = 1; c.b = 2;
by fladd | 2025-06-03 22:44:52+00:00
Looks interesting, but I don't really understand how it works. I open the website, type a message, then I see my own message. I scan the QR code with my phone, then I also see a message window on my phone where I can type messages. Now both my laptop and phone can type messages, but the phone only sees the phone ones and the laptop only sees the laptop ones. Yet, somehow they are in the same session (since the phone scanned the QR code from the laptop). What am I doing wrong here? How do I send a message from one device to the other after connecting them in the same session?
by airstrike | 2025-06-03 22:45:21+00:00
I couldn't agree more. On a random night a few months ago I found myself in that curious half-asleep-half-awake state and this time I had became aware of my brain's constant jibbering phrases. It was as if I could hear my thoughts before the filter pass through which they become actual cohesive sentences.

I could "see" hundreds of words/thoughts/meanings being generated in a diffuse way, all at the same time but also slowly evolving over time and then see my brain distill them into a sentence. It would happen repeatedly every second ridiculously fast yet also "slow enough" that I could see it happen.

It's just my personal half-asleep hallucination, so obviously take from it what you will (~nothing) but I can't shake the feeling we need a similar algorithm. If I ever pursue a doctorate degree, this is what I'll be trying.
by perching_aix | 2025-06-03 22:45:34+00:00
I feel that on the other side of the spectrum is where things like idolization and parasocial fandom lies, so in my view, this is not unfortunate at all.

There are many flavors of this I can recall. One is voice acting in anime. I'd read episode discussion threads, and people would keep namedropping and discussing the voices behind the characters. Striked me and continues to strike me as just an extremely odd thing to do. As if these folks would go out of their way to ruin the immersion for themselves. Still, I don't mean to judge: they enjoy themselves whatever way they prefer.

Or recently I had a discussion with a coworker on being a fan of musicians and bands. He brought up an example that really surprised me: "so called fans will stare at you like a deer at headlights when you ask them: oh you're a fan of Linkin Park? what's their drummer called?". Or how there were so and so "cool" stories about some rock n roll musicians. These are beyond weird to me: I like (some of) their music, not them as individuals. I know nothing about them, nor do I really wish to or think I would be able to. (But then I'm also no "fan" of any musician in the sense my colleague described his idea of that: I feel completely uncompelled to be familiar with the entire discography of a band/artist, and especially to be obsessed with one in general.)

But maybe this is a generational difference. In any case, I'd be really hesitant to characterize this as just straight "unfortunate".

There's also a swath of cases where the expression in question is only a little more if even that than just a demonstration of someone's aesthetic or ideological preferences. I'm not sure how much art is in there - if someone were to call those expressions shallow, I'd likely agree. In which case, I'm not sure there's much to find unfortunate on this; it's only as unfortunate as much interest you (can) have in that person.
by netsharc | 2025-06-03 22:45:41+00:00
Feels chicken-and-eggy.

At the weekend, I was at a small town which had a half a mile long main road blocked off for a market day. They put up bollards to do so.

Chances are, there were 0 persons planning a car attack on it. So there was an element of "We don't think anything's going to happen, but if it were to happen, we're prepared.". A bit like having a fire extinguisher when there's never been a fire.

But would seeing the bollards also have the effect of discouraging the insane people of the idea of driving the car through the crowds the next time a market day is held?

Oppositely, if they didn't put up any barriers, a psychopath seeing this and the realization that cars can be weapons might give them the idea of "I know what I can do for my act of terrorism..."
by toss1 | 2025-06-03 22:46:00+00:00
The "Dragon Drones" also drop thermite [0], a material with massively exothermic high temperature 2000°C+ redox reaction, which can melt through most metals. Thermite is often used to weld rail tracks [1].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermite

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XttJet5WkTk
by karmakaze | 2025-06-03 22:46:42+00:00
It's so fitting to call it Everyone's Second Favourite 16-bit Home Computer. My favourite was the original 8-bit Atari.

I got the 520ST (later 1040ST) both using the monochrome monitor. The ST actually seemed like two computers as having the color monitor was a very different experience. By the time I was using the ST, I was much more interested in using a C compiler than drawing graphics (which was inferior to the Amiga anyway), though I did do some PostScript prototyping on the ST.