MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jitl | 2025-06-19 18:13:00+00:00
Linux is beautiful if you have time, energy, and inclination to make it beautiful. Otherwise, like macOS and Windows, it's just some defaults picked by the Adwaita team 2 years ago when the distro cut its stable release.

I used to use Openbox and compile my own freetype with patches but these days want to spend my time on other things, so I'm just using macOS which has the best out of the box experience with the lowest TODO list when setting up a new computer.
by nunez | 2025-06-19 18:13:18+00:00
I _still_ think Kubernetes is insanely complex, despite all that it does. It seems less complex these days because it's so pervasive, but complex it remains.

I'd like to see more emphasis on UX for v2 for the most common operations, like deploying an app and exposing it, then doing things like changing service accounts or images without having to drop into kubectl edit.

Given that LLMs are it right now, this probably won't happen, but no harm in dreaming, right?
by cubefox | 2025-06-19 18:13:20+00:00
Just because there is some weak relation to rationalism doesn't justify guilt-by-association. You could have pointed equally out that most of the Zizians identified as MtF transexuals and vegans, and then blamed the latter groups for being allegedly extreme. Which would be no less absurd.

> She may have done some awful shit

Murdering several people is slightly worse than "awful shit".
by alephnerd | 2025-06-19 18:13:29+00:00
It's basically a secular religion.

Substitute God with AI or the concept of rationality and use "first principles"/Bayesianism in an extremely dogmatic manner similar to Catechism and you have the Rationalist/AI Alignment/Effective Altruist movement.

Ironically, this is how plenty of religious movements started off - basically as formalizations of philosophy and ethics that fused with what is basically lore and worldbuilding.
by ammaramehdghani | 2025-06-19 18:13:44+00:00
I second you on that. Especially for the senior positions as they are looking for an exceptional candidate experience meaning they should be getting updates regarding the application and feedback upon rejection. When they don't receive such experience, they don't wanna do business with such companies anymore as they feel disrespected. But since I started working as a recruiter myself, I noticed that providing feedback manually is a lot of work and recruiter's can't manage to provide feedback to all the candidates except the generic feedback which is just a formality but don't help the candidates a lot. We figure out a solution for it later and noticed 95% candidate retention rate by providing specific feedback to all the rejected candidates. So yes feedback works for both sides.
by dekhn | 2025-06-19 18:13:48+00:00
The odyssey because it's the basis function for most of western thought (wily male human outsmarts gods, witches, and suitors on a long journey home). The best implementation of the monomyth, imho.

Moby Dick because it's not just a book about whaling, it's a book about world philosophy with crazy tangents.

Fire Upon the Deep because it is the best representation of post-singularity technological implications. Was a big inspiration for me going into machine learning and biology.
by AlotOfReading | 2025-06-19 18:13:55+00:00
There are large parts of this I really like, but it's hard to overstate just how much I disagree with the idea that "The only meaningful measure of productivity is impact to the business". The natural result of this view is a focus on quantifiable changes and short term thinking. The greatest value of experienced engineers is in avoiding landmines that will destroy a project or even a company. It's difficult to quantify things that never happen, or communicate the value in avoiding them in terms that don't sound wildly hyperbolic.
by Workaccount2 | 2025-06-19 18:13:57+00:00
The fundamental mistake I see is people applying LLMs to the current paradigm of software; enormous hulking codebases made to have as many features as possible to appeal to as many users as possible.

LLMs are excellent at helping non-programmers write narrow use case, bespoke programs. LLMs don't need to be able to one-shot excel.exe or Plantio.apk so that Christine can easily track when she watered and fed her plants nutrients.

The change that LLMs will bring to computing is much deeper than Garden Software trying to slot in some LLM workers to work on their sprawling feature-pack Plantio SaaS.

I can tell you first hand I have already done this numerous times as a non-programmer working a non-tech job.
Show HN: ZenQuery – Query your data files (CSV, parquet, etc.) in plain English
by freakynit | 2025-06-19 18:14:01+00:00
I built ZenQuery(https://zenquery.app), a Mac desktop app that lets you explore your data files — like CSV, Excel, JSON, and Parquet — by simply asking questions in plain English.

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Would love feedback from HN! Let me know what you think or how you'd use it.
by voidhorse | 2025-06-19 18:14:02+00:00
Here's a very simple explanation as to why it's helpful from a "first principles" style analogy.

Suppose a foot race. Choose two runners of equal aptitude and finite existence. Start one at mile 1 and one at mile 100. Who do you think will get farther?

Not to mention, engaging in human community and discourse is a big part of what it means to be human. Knowledge isn't personal or isolated, we build it together. The "first principles people" understand this to the extent that they have even built their own community of like minded explorers, problem is, a big part of this bond is their choice to be willfully ignorant of large swaths of human intellectual development. Not only is this stupid, it also is a great disservice to your forebears, who worked just as hard to come to their conclusions and who have been building up the edifice of science bit by bit. It's completely antithetical to the spirit of scientific endeavor.
by incomingpain | 2025-06-19 18:14:07+00:00
Many assumptions, like just assuming our electricity comes from a fossil fuel source. Mine does not. Nuclear and Hydro in majority. Therefore 0 emissions regardless of model.

I guess they only tested 70B or 8B? Nothing in between?

Who even runs 70B anyway? Your common option of 2 gpus of 16GB each slots you into 32B nicely.

Llama 3.3 70B is suspiciously low.
by jcranmer | 2025-06-19 18:14:19+00:00
The podcast Behind the Bastards described Rationalism not as a cult but as the fertile soil which is perfect for growing cults, leading to the development of cults like the Zizians (who both the Rationalists and Zizians are at pains to emphasize their mutual hostility to one another, but if you're not part of either movement, it's pretty clear how Rationalism can lead to something like the Zizians).
by whilenot-dev | 2025-06-19 18:14:34+00:00
Hardware always involves some level of non-determinism, because the physical world is messier than the virtual software world. Every hardware engineer accepts that and learns how to design solutions despite those constraints. But you're right, non-determinism is not the current problem in some fabs, because the whole process has been modeled with it in mind, and it's the yield ratio that needs to be deterministic enough to offer a service. Remember the struggles in Intels fabs? Revenue reflects that at fabs.

The software quality at companies like ASML seems to be in a bad shape already, and I remember ex-employees stating that there are some team leads higher up who can at least reason about existing software procedures, their implementation, side effects and their outcomes. Do you think this software is as thoroughly documented as some open source project? The purchase costs for those machines are in the mid-3-digit million range (operating costs excluded) and are expected to run 24/7 to be somewhat worthwhile. Operators can handle hardware issues on the spot and work around them, but what do you think happens with downtime due to non-deterministic software issues?
by immibis | 2025-06-19 18:15:12+00:00
We need a lot of things we don't have.

Note that without DNS security, whoever controls your DNS server, or is reliably in the path to your DNS server, can issue certificates for your domain. The only countermeasure against this is certificate transparency, which lets you yell loudly that someone's impersonating you but doesn't stop them from actually doing it.
by FeepingCreature | 2025-06-19 18:15:12+00:00
Sure! Rationality is what Eliezer called his project about teaching people to reason better (more empirically, more probabilistically) in the events I described over here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44320919 .

I don't know rationalism too well but I think it was a historical philosophical movement asserting you could derive knowledge by reasoning from axioms rather than observation.

The primary difference here is that rationality mostly teaches "use your reason to guide what to observe and how to react to observations" rather than doing away with observations altogether; it's basically an action loop alternating between observation and belief propagation.

A prototypical/mathematical example of a pure LessWrong-type "rational" reasoner is Hutter's AIXI (a definition of the "optimal" next step given an input tape and a goal), though it has certain known problems of self-referentiality. Though of course reasoning in this way does not work for humans; a large part of the Sequences is attempts to port mathematically correct reasoning to human cognition.

You can kind of read it as a continuation of early-2000s internet atheism: instead of defining correct reasoning by enumerating incorrect logic, ie. "fallacies", it attempts to construct it positively, by describing what to do rather than just what not to do.
by iscoelho | 2025-06-19 18:15:36+00:00
It is important. This is unfortunate rhetoric that is harming the safety of the internet.

"For instance, in April 2018, a Russian provider announced a number of IP prefixes (groups of IP addresses) that actually belong to Route53 Amazon DNS servers."

By BGP hijacking Route53, attackers were not only able to redirect a website to different IPs, globally, but also generate SSL certificates for that website. They used this to steal $152,000 in cryptocurrency. (I know I know, "crypto", but this can happen to any site: banking, medical, infrastructure)

Also, before you say, RPKI doesn't solve this either, although a step in the right direction. DNSSEC is a step in the right direction as well.

[1] https://www.cloudflare.com/learning/security/glossary/bgp-hi...
by natebc | 2025-06-19 18:16:17+00:00
I'm with you. I give several of 'em a shot a few times a week (thanks Kagi for the fantastic menu of choices!). Over the last quarter or so I've found that the bullshit:useful ratio is creeping to the useful side. They still answer like a high school junior writing a 5 paragraph essay but a decade of sifting through blogspam has honed my own ability to cut through that.
by WorldPeas | 2025-06-19 18:16:35+00:00
this. This fracture also causes issues due to configuration differences between distros and DEs(for example with a screen capture utility I could download from apt registries, it wouldn't work on kde, only gnome, and it's hard to explain that to a parent). The current skirmishes with packaging mechanisms apt/snap/flatpak and Wayland V. X11 only make this more challenging.
by scoofy | 2025-06-19 18:18:05+00:00
It's weird that "being interested in philosophy" is like... a movement. My background is in philosophy, but the rationalist vs nonrationalist debate seems like an undergraduate class dispute.

My old roommate worked for Open Phil, and was obsessed with AI Safety and really into Bitcoin. I never was. We still had interesting arguments about it all the time. Most of the time we just argued until we got to the axioms we disagreed on, and that was that.

You don't have to agree with the Rationalist™ perspective to apply philosophically rigorous thinking. You can be friends and allies with them without agreeing with all their views. There are strong arguments for why frequentism may be more applicable than bayesianism in different domains. Or why transhumanism is a pipe dream. They are still conversations that are worthwhile as long as you're not so confident in your position that you think you might learn something.
by Leftium | 2025-06-19 18:18:41+00:00
https://www.recurse.com/hire

I haven't used them, but read the testimonials:

> ...sent us two profiles of solid candidates, one of which we hired!

> ...other recruiters sent like 50 CVs and we couldn't find anyone, and then RC sends a single candidate and we hired him.

How they do it: the Recurse Center puts more thought into collecting a small set of excellent candidates, then puts even more thought into matching them with employers.
by alganet | 2025-06-19 18:18:49+00:00
I can see it just fine, it just doesn't appeal to me.

I want to build things, not "launch startups". If someone asks me about a minimal thing of what I build, I want to be able to speak for hours about it, in detail. I want to completely understand it. I'm an engineer, not an enterpreneur.

This whole concept of Software 3.0 takes away all the craft from the thing. It's souless.

- "How did you do it?"

- "Dunno, just prompted it LOL."

Sounds very dumb to me. Even if you make loads of money off of it.

That's why I also believe it will not be a "gateway drug to software development". That's just a profound misconception of what makes good software developers tick.

They are now trying to sell the idea of control. You can "put it in a leash". It's pathetic. I don't want control, I want to understand it. Internalize it.

One thing that never changed in software development is that _you get the payoff_ for the hard work. You solve the mystery. You figure out how it works, by yourself.

Anyone that looked a little close to AI knows that it doesn't work that way. It's a black box thing. You will never fully get the knowledge payoff.
by mountainriver | 2025-06-19 18:20:09+00:00
We have started working on a sort of Kubernetes 2.0 with https://github.com/agentsea/nebulous -- still pre-alpha

Things we are aiming to improve:

* Globally distributed * Lightweight, can easily run as a single binary on your laptop while still scaling to thousands of nodes in the cloud. * Tailnet as the default network stack * Bittorrent as the default storage stack * Multi-tenant from the ground up * Live migration as a first class citizen

Most of these needs were born out of building modern machine learning products, and the subsequent GPU scarcity. With ML taking over the world though this may be the norm soon.
by ivape | 2025-06-19 18:20:16+00:00
I’ve thought a lot about this my whole life. How do you build a good team? People simply don’t like each other so the natural sorting that happens is that teams hire for who they like and likes them in return (or at least in mating terms, will certainly appear as likable as can be). By definition, this can never be the most optimal team.

There may have to be a different way to think about this. How can you have things that hate each other but still run an amazing operation? The best operation I can think of is a zoo. You have your tigers over here, and your penguins over there. The operation as a whole is amazing.

A company of just tigers will destroy everything and a company of just penguins need too much caretaking.

Most armed forces are not a “team”, they are an operation. If you constantly try to fit an operation into a team framework, that’s when you’ll try to turn penguins into tigers (how do you turn someone into a 100x engineer?). Or worse, you tell a tiger to chill out and relax with the penguins (you’re asking for trouble). If you need a 100x engineer, make sure the engineer is a thousand miles away and gets paid like it and far away from the normal engineers lest they start believing the tiger cage is suitable for penguins or vice versa. It’s a big operation, no teams.

If you MUST build a team, then just be yourself. You probably are building something small dogs like, so hire a few street dogs and you won’t even need to worry about zoo-scale decisions and operations. You won’t need to go through the mistake of jamming 4 different species into the same enclosure to finally learn how things live separately but together.
by Dedime | 2025-06-19 18:20:18+00:00
From someone who was recently tasked with "add service mesh" - make service mesh obsolete. I don't want to install a service mesh. mTLS or some other from of encryption between pods should just happen automatically. I don't want some janky ass sidecar being injected into my pod definition ala linkerd, and now I've got people complaining that cilium's god mode is too permissive. Just have something built-in, please.
by tikhonj | 2025-06-19 18:20:31+00:00
I definitely agree that the best teams have cultures that make even normal engineers incredibly effective compared to the status quo. Managers definitely put too much stock in hiring and "engineering quality" compared to culture, trust, systems and processes.

> Any asshole can build an org where the most experienced, brilliant engineers in the world can build product and make progress.

But I have to wonder: if "any asshole" can build orgs like that, why don't they? I know of only a handful of orgs that actually manage to build strong teams of really strong engineers, and they're almost exclusively either trading firms or specialized/research-oriented teams. What's stopping everyone else?

I guess this comes down to the initial point in the article: what do we even mean by "productivity"? (Or, the word I'd prefer: "effectiveness"?) There are lots of orgs where only experienced folks can succeed because they're the best at working around and tolerating disfunction. I've seen performance review processes that—intentionally or unintentionally—selected not for some general technical strength/taste/etc, but for the willingness, ability and stamina to put up with management dysfunction. But, to me, that is very much not what I have in mind when I think "top engineer".
by jitl | 2025-06-19 18:21:00+00:00
pgroll seems neat but I ended up writing my own tools for this one because I need to do somewhat unique shenanigans like testing different sharding and resource allocation schemes in Materialize.com (self hosted). I have 480 source input schemas (postgres input schemas described here if you're curious, the materialize stuff is brand new https://www.notion.com/blog/the-great-re-shard) and manage a bunch of different views & indexes built on top of those; create a bunch of different copies of the views/indexes striped across compute nodes, like right now I'm testing 20 schemas per whole-aws-instance node, versus 4 schemas per quarter-aws-node, M/N*Y with different permutations of N and Y. With the plan/apply model I just need to change a few lines in TypeScript and get the minimal changes to all downstream dependencies needed to roll it out.
by ammaramehdghani | 2025-06-19 18:21:55+00:00
Job Seekers, eager to get a job somehow, add the keywords in their resume to get shortlisted, without realizing that they might not go past the first interview. They don't realize that it's a waste of their time and the employer's time.

In my experience of placing software engineers in tech startups, the only way to find the best talent is to talk to them. If we give them coding test, they get done with it somehow but when we talk to them in the interview, that's when we get the real sense of their skillset. I know it's time consuming, but it saves you a lot of time and money in the long run.
by zahllos | 2025-06-19 18:22:22+00:00
The argument counter dnssec is that if you are trying to find some random A record for a server, to know if it is the right one, TLS does that fine provided you reasonably trust domain control validation works i.e. CAs see authentic DNS.

An argument for DNSSEC is any service configured by SRV records. It might be totally legitimate for the srv record of some thing or other to point to an A record in a totally different zone. From a TLS perspective you can't tell, because the delegation happened by SRV records and you only know if that is authentic if you either have a signed record, or a direct encrypted connection to the authoritative server (the TLS connection to evil.service.example would be valid).

So it depends what you expect out of DNS.
by qualeed | 2025-06-19 18:22:24+00:00
>Still great for tracking people though.

No, no it isn't.

Cameras, license plate readers, air tags, phones, literally just stalking someone, and that sort of thing is great for tracking people.

They are easier, vastly less prone to false positives, etc. Your wife/husband isn't going to use a DNA air sniffer to figure out if you were at the strippers. They'll just follow you from a few car lengths back, or ask one of your friends, etc.

And if your concern is government, there are way easier, scalable, way more accurate ways to invade your privacy that are already proven to work and have the infrastructure already setup.
by lelanthran | 2025-06-19 18:22:26+00:00
> You're missing a huge part of the ecosystem, ML is so much more than just "generative AI", which seems to be the extent of your experience so far.

I'm not missing anything; I'm saying the current boom is being fueled by claims of "replacing workers", but the only class of AI being funded to do that are LLMs, and the only class of worker that might get replaced are programmers and artists.

Karpathy's video, and this thread, are not about the un-hyped ML stuff that has been employed in various disciplines since 2010 and has not been proposed as a replacement for workers.
by Certhas | 2025-06-19 18:22:28+00:00
It really depends on why you are having a philosophical discussion. If you are talking among friends, or just because you want to throw interesting ideas around, sure! Be free, have fun.

I come from a physics background. We used to (and still) have a ton of physicists who decide to dable in a new field, secure in their knowledge that they are smarter than the people doing it, and that anything worthwhile that has already been thought of they can just rederive ad hoc when needed (economists are the only other group that seems to have this tendency...) [1]. It turned out every time that the people who had spent decades working on, studying, discussing and debating the field in question had actually figured important shit out along the way. They might not have come with the mathematical toolbox that physicists had, and outside perspectives that challenge established thinking to prove itself again can be valuable, but when your goal is to actually understand what's happening in the real world, you can't ignore what's been done.

[1] There even is an xkcd about this:

https://xkcd.com/793/
by ToucanLoucan | 2025-06-19 18:22:36+00:00
For one: terminating execution

More importantly: why is having more than one account an "exception" at all? That's not an error or fail condition, at least in my mind. I wouldn't call our use of the framework an edge case by any means, it opens a web form in which one puts authentication details, passes through the flow, and then we are given authentication tokens and the user data we need. It's not unheard of for more than one account to be returned (especially on our test devices which have many) and I get the one-account function not being suitable for handling that, my question is... why even have it then, when the multi-account one performs the exact same function, better, without an extra error condition that might arise?