MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by iainmerrick | 2025-07-07 09:33:04+00:00
I can't grasp your overall thesis here, except maybe some general notion that the world of software is one of class warfare?

That's definitely very arguable overall, but I don't think the specific points you make are correct.

Jim Carlton's book on Apple ("the inside story of intrigue, egomania and business blunders") is a great read. It feels a bit strange now as it was written in the period the OP talks about, when Apple was on death's door, rather than the world-striding colossus it is now. But I think it describes very vividly the environment where easter eggs like the OP describes were more common.

There were definitely plenty of bored, checked-out engineers -- often between projects with few responsibilities, or "on the beach" in Apple parlance. But those weren't the people shipping stuff. There were also engineers who loved Apple's products and culture (maybe to a dangerous, cult-like degree), who wanted to contribute and to add their personal stamp as a mark of pride.
by lelanthran | 2025-07-07 09:33:16+00:00
> Or there are some locations where markets just breakdown because the environmental factors overwhelm whatever salaries you offer.

There's literally no such thing - I wanna see an example!

The given scenario is not an example, because you can simply raise the offering until people take you up on it!

I mean, you can ask people to work in high-risk life-threatening environments and people will take you up on that offer IFFF the offer is high enough!

Want someone to work on a seabed? In an oil rig away from home for 9/12 months? In arctic conditions away from home for 3 years at a time? That's all happening right now.

Hell, you could put out an advertisement for volunteers on a one-way trip to Mars and you'll still get those positions filled!

If you cannot get teachers to move to a rural area, you are doing something wrong.[1]

[1] Where I am right now, I'll take that offer given a good enough salary and long enough contract. Many older teachers, maybe 10 years from retirement, will happily sell up and semi-retire to teach a few more years renting in a rural area before actual retirement. If they aren't doing it, it's because the offer is too low.
by pjmlp | 2025-07-07 09:34:25+00:00
When Cell came to be, heterogeneous computing was mostly a HPC thing, and having the compute units only programmable in Assembly (you could use C, but really not), didn't help.

Now every mobile device, meaning any form of computing on the go, has multiple performance/low power CPU cores, a GPU, programble audio, NUMA, and maybe even a NPU.
Show HN: Exploring emotional self-awareness via action-based journaling and AI
by vandana231990 | 2025-07-07 09:35:27+00:00
I've been thinking about ways to improve emotional self-awareness without relying on mood logs, which often feel forced or artificial. Instead of asking "how are you feeling?", what if we looked at what someone did during the day — and derived their emotional state from that?

I tried implementing this using a BERT-based model trained on Google’s GoEmotions dataset (which covers 28 nuanced emotions like remorse, joy, optimism, etc.). The idea is to let users reflect on their good or bad deeds, and then use NLP to classify the underlying emotions.

Some patterns I’ve noticed:

Visualizing daily dominant emotions on a color-coded calendar gives a quick emotional overview.

Comparing emotions across days offers insights into how our actions shape our emotional trends.

Action-first reflection seems to reduce the pressure to “perform” emotionally compared to mood logs.

This is all part of an Android experiment I’m working on. Curious if others here have explored similar approaches — using AI to model emotion based on actions rather than self-reporting. Would love to hear your thoughts or feedback.

If you're curious about the implementation or want to see what the Android experiment looks like in action, I wrote more about it here:

https://medium.com/@va6042/what-if-your-daily-actions-could-...

Feedback — technical, UX, or philosophical — is very welcome.
by BlackFly | 2025-07-07 09:35:36+00:00
When you eliminate problems in people's lives, they do not suddenly feel that they have no problems. Instead they lower the bar for what they consider a problem. If the bar gets lowered too far, suddenly the previously minute things are problematic and there may be many of them.

Stress is caused by our internal perspective of our problems, not by some external unchanging measure of it.
by t43562 | 2025-07-07 09:35:50+00:00
This is something I've wanted for ages. I go to some event with the family - in London for example or to an airshow - and there's a huge crowd for one reason or another which overloads the mobile network and makes your phone useless. You can lose people who are just a few metres away.

I am glad it's public domain - I don't think I really want to invest any effort in getting non-techy people to try and use something that might go away one day and be irreplacable. OTOH, I need Android as well so....
by SR2Z | 2025-07-07 09:35:52+00:00
So revoking a subsidy is forcing people to act a certain way?

Dude, we burned plenty of oil even when we had the subsides. Big automakers were on board with the idea, energy companies were pivoting to batteries and renewables - and the average person still cared more about their costs and standard of living than whether things were actually green or not.
by joncrocks | 2025-07-07 09:35:55+00:00
I think the SEC would say it's about intent. If your intent for buying/selling is to impact the price rather than buying/selling the asset in question, then you are trying to manipulate the market.

The size question is important here due to the fact that large quantities are likely to influence price (and everyone knows this) so you might need an strong alternative explanation for your actions.
by DocTomoe | 2025-07-07 09:35:59+00:00
> A "relationship" with an LLM has an obvious, intrinsic, and fundamental problem.

What exactly do you mean? What do you think a therapist brings to the table an LLM cannot?

Empathy? I have been participating in exchanges with AI that felt a lot more empathetic than 90% of the people I interact with every day.

Let's be honest: a therapist is not a close friend - in fact, a good therapist knows how to keep a professional distance. Their performative friendliness is as fake as the AI's friendliness, and everyone recognises that when it's invoicing time.

To be blunt, AI never tells me that ‘our time is up for this week’ after an hour of me having an emotional breakdown on the couch. How’s that for empathy?
by Timwi | 2025-07-07 09:36:46+00:00
The real challenge is not to see it as a binary (the machine either has feelings or it has none). It's possible for the machine to have emergent processes or properties that resemble human feelings in their function and their complexity, but are otherwise nothing like them (structured very differently and work on completely different principles). It's possible to have a machine or algorithm so complex that the question of whether it has feelings is just a semantic debate on what you mean by “feelings” and where you draw the line.

A lot of the people who say “machines will never have feelings” are confident in that statement because they draw the line incredibly narrowly: if it ain't human, it ain't feeling. This seems to me putting the cart before the horse. It ain't feeling because you defined it so.
by concats | 2025-07-07 09:37:11+00:00
Perhaps. But I can't see a reason why they couldn't still write endless—and theoretically valuable—poems, dissertations, or blog posts, about all things red and the nature of redness itself. I imagine it would certainly take some studying for them, likely interviewing red-seers, or reading books about all things red. But I'm sure they could contribute to the larger red discourse eventually, their unique perspective might even help them draw conclusions the rest of us are blind to.

So perhaps the fact that they "cannot know red" is ultimately irrelevant for an LLM too?
by gwd | 2025-07-07 09:37:40+00:00
> What are you thinking of? There is no difference between those things.

I'm talking about pinyin here. In Mandarin, there are to distinct sounds, one represented in pinyin by 'q', and one by 'ch'. It took me months to hear the difference, and months more to be able to pronounce them properly. I think there are other romanizations where the 'q' sound is represented "tch".

(In fact, I'm inclined to think that there are actually two different sounds in English as well; "witch" and "Charlie" don't feel the same in my mouth.)

> Technically the only voiced consonants in pinyin are m / n / ng / l / r.

I think we're using different definitions of "voiced". Other voiced / unvoiced pairs in English include g/k, b/p, v/f, z/s. See [1] for an "official" example of "voiced" being used the way I'm using it.

How else would you describe the difference between "qu" and "ju", or "chou" and "zhou"? The only difference I can feel is when your vocal cords turn on.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plosive#Voice
by beAbU | 2025-07-07 09:37:51+00:00
Yes but the point of the poster is the framing of the conversation.

There is no labour shortage, there is a salary shortage. And we, as the collective global community of serfs and plebes must realize this, and call it for what it is.

There is currently a massive teacher shortage in Ireland, with something like >1800 unfilled posts and we're approaching the new school term. There is no teacher shortage, there is however an abundance of catholic-church-controlled schools with overly restrictive hiring policy, with many newly qualified teachers not really interested in becoming involved in religious things. Teachers are paid well here, but clearly not well enough for many of them to be willing to subject themselves to draconic requirements such as needing to provide catholic teachings to kids taking fucking math.
by _notreallyme_ | 2025-07-07 09:37:55+00:00
Optimizing code on MMU-less processor versus MMU and even NUMA capable processor is vastly different.

The fact that the author achieves only a 3 to 6 times speedup on a processor running at a frequency 857 faster should have led to the conclusion that old optimizations tricks are awfully slow on modern architecture.

To be fair, execution pipeline optimization still works the same, but not taking into account the different layers of cache, the way the memory management works and even how and when actual RAM is queried will only lead to suboptimal code.
by rkomorn | 2025-07-07 09:39:20+00:00
> I was astounded (speaking as a US kid here), to learn that French people born and raised in France didn't natively speak French, but instead learned their regional language.

As a French person born before 1982, I find this sentence questionable.

If you mean "there were some people who learned a local dialect", then sure, you could dig some up.

If you mean "many regions had dialects that were learned before French", then I believe you misunderstood (or were misled).

Finding anyone who even spoke a regional dialect would've been a novelty, let alone one who grew up speaking it before French.
by 9dev | 2025-07-07 09:40:17+00:00
In Germany, if you're not suicidal or in imminent danger, you'll have to wait anywhere from several months to several years for a longterm therapy slot*. There are lots of people that would benefit from having someone—something—to talk to right now instead of waiting.

* unless you're able to cover for it yourself, which is prohibitively expensive for most of the population.
by quonn | 2025-07-07 09:40:18+00:00
> LLMs are not conscious because unlike human brains they don't learn or adapt (yet).

That's neither a necessary nor sufficient condition.

In order to be conscious, learning may not be needed, but a perception of the passing of time may be needed which may require some short-term memory. People with severe dementia often can't even remember the start of a sentence they are reading, they can't learn, but they are certainly conscious because they have just enough short-term memory.

And learning is not sufficient either. Consciousness is about being a subject, about having a subjective experience of "being there" and just learning by itself does not create this experience. There is plenty of software that can do some form of real-time learning but it doesn't have a subjective experience.
by Luker88 | 2025-07-07 09:40:26+00:00
Yes, surprisingly few Italian dialects are actually Italian derivatives (maybe only a couple?)

But there are differences between a dialect and a language, we can't say all of those are languages even if most come from Latin.

Italian wikipedia says that officially in Italy there are about 13 recognized languages (not counting Italian, plus French and Slovenian in some parts), and about a dozen main dialects.

In wikipedia you will notice 3 big dialect groups that are just that, groups of many, many dialects that do not qualify as languages.

It's more a difference of how recognized by the community those are, and how unified by grammar, locality and uniqueness. Kind of a gray area for many.
by ARKHAN1039 | 2025-07-07 09:40:40+00:00
As a freelance developer, I realized I was doing everything — writing code, deploying servers, handling auth — but completely ignoring security.

It wasn’t until a close call with an API key leak that I went all in.

So I built a practical cybersecurity stack just for solo devs in 2025:

Static code analysis with Semgrep

Secret detection with GitGuardian

Endpoint protection via CrowdStrike Falcon

Server vuln scans using OpenVAS

Python project security with Bandit

SaaS login/auth hardening using Okta CIAM
by bdelmas | 2025-07-07 09:40:58+00:00
The percentage is irrelevant without knowing how they really work and how much profit they make. They could be at 95% with 0.1% of margin it wouldn’t mean much for the market.

At the end of the day talking about HFT this way is to not know what they do and what service they offer to the market. Overall they are not trending makers but trend followers.
by energy123 | 2025-07-07 09:41:10+00:00
I think there are big differences, such as whether or not you go to prison. Those differences are obfuscated when we use language like "megacorporate monopolist" or "scifi dystopia". Instead of using these abstract labels that attempt to categorize different things into homogeneous buckets that have preexisting moral valence, which is a good rhetorical strategy but a poor strategy for understanding, simply describe what is actually happening at a sufficient level of detail without judgement. We would gain a clearer understanding, which is needed to identify the real problems, such as what Meta is doing to our civic fabric, not some unimportant thing that Apple is doing to its nascent LLM that has 0% market share.
by ben_w | 2025-07-07 09:41:27+00:00
While it's conceivable (consider phrases such as "speak of the devil and he shall appear" and similar phrases in other languages), I would also say the etymology of names for things are often at the same level as "brown one":

• Horse, ultimately from Proto-Indo-European *ḱers-, “to run” • Planet, from Ancient Greek πλανήτης (planḗtēs), “wanderer” • Lots of Latin-derived words, companion (bread together), conspire (breathe together), transgression (step across), etc. • Hamburger the food named after the city of Hamburg, where "burg" means "castle", because it had a castle • My forename means "son of the right/south" or "son of days", my family name means "wheat field/clearing" (in a different language); where "wheat" itself comes from Proto-Germanic, from *hwītaz (“white”) and the "ley" part from Proto-Indo-European *lówkos (“clearing”), derived from *lewk- (“bright”), and *lewk- also gives all these derived terms even just in English:

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Category:English_terms_derive...
by viccy-kobuletti | 2025-07-07 09:43:29+00:00
How does one begin to educate oneself on the way LLMs work beyond layman understanding of it being a "word predictor"? I use LLMs very heavily and do not perceive any differences between models. My math background is very weak and full of gaps, which i'm currently working on through khan academy, so it feels very daunting to approach this subject for a deeper dive. I try to read some of the more technical discussions (e.g waluigi effect on lesswrong), however it feels like I lack the needed knowledge to not have it completely go over my head, not taking into account some of the surface-level insights.
by flohofwoe | 2025-07-07 09:43:58+00:00
> Software working poorly in such setup means no effort was made to actually make it perform well in first place.

How do you optimize for a system architecture that doesn't exist yet?

(e.g. CoD could probably be fixed quite easily, but you can't do that before the hardware where that problem manifests even exists - I'd say it's much more likely that the problem is in the Windows scheduler though)

> Games requiring desktop cases looking like a rainbow aquarium with top everything will become a niche

PC gaming has been declared dead ever since the late 90s ;)
by thephyber | 2025-07-07 09:45:51+00:00
Some were using it in the traditional unironic (and IMHO cringe) way, similar to anyone who used the phrase “Let’s go, Brandon!” Before that NASCAR race when MAGAs adopted it as ironic + coded vice signaling.

Quit being overly pedantic. We all knew there was an unironic purpose for the gesture before it became ironic.
by barrkel | 2025-07-07 09:46:04+00:00
Sure it's state. It logically evolves stepwise per token generation. It encapsulates the LLM's understanding of the text so far so it can predict the next token. That it is merely a fixed function of other data isn't interesting or useful to say.

All deterministic programs are fixed functions of program code, inputs and computation steps, but we don't say that they don't have state. It's not a useful distinction for communicating among humans.
by whstl | 2025-07-07 09:46:16+00:00
This is also a much better way of handling the problem than OP's blunder on the article.

Berating in an office might teach one person. Not berating and admitting process failure in public can be educational for the whole company.

Reminds me of Gitlab's database deletion thing a few years ago. Not only they spent money educating the one engineer, by making the story public they also educated their other employees, and dare I say the whole industry. I still hear people referring to that story from time to time.
by gwd | 2025-07-07 09:46:55+00:00
I've been using VSCode with aider, but with auto-committing turned off. VSCode has a thing where changes not yet checked into the tree are highlighted in the scrollbars -- blue for modified, green for added, red for removed. You can then click the colored part of the sidebar to see a diff.

Just for fun I typically also have an emacs window open; "git diff > working.diff" lets you see the diff, then "C-c C-c" on a diff hunk will take you the place in the file where that change was made.
by latexr | 2025-07-07 09:48:28+00:00
> how do we know that this is not similar to how human brains work.

Do you forget every conversation as soon as you have them? When speaking to another person, do they need to repeat literally everything they said and that you said, in order, for you to retain context?

If not, your brain does not work like an LLM. If yes, please stop what you’re doing right now and call a doctor with this knowledge. I hope Memento (2000) was part of your training data, you’re going to need it.
by dzonga | 2025-07-07 09:49:18+00:00
the worse thing about 'AI' is seeing 'competent' people such as Software Engineers putting their brains to the side and believing AI is the all and be all.

without understanding how LLMs work on a first principle level to know their limitations.

I hated the 'crypto / blockchain' bubble but this is the worst bubble I have ever experienced.

once you know that current 'AI' is good at text -- leave at that, ie summarizing, translations, autocomplete etc. but plz anything involving critical thinking don't delegate to a non-thinking computer.
by mandarwagh | 2025-07-07 09:49:49+00:00
The link originally pointed to the GitHub repository, but I've made it private for obvious reasons.

The purpose of this file is to help AI scrapers index your website more effectively. OpenAI and other platforms are planning to prioritize these files, which can reduce scraping costs and improve the quality of indexed content.

This also gives your site an advantage in AI-powered search engines like Perplexity and ChatGPT Search.

For anyone in the emerging tech space, adding this file is a no-brainer — it can significantly improve your site's visibility compared to others.
by kzrdude | 2025-07-07 09:49:53+00:00
> As a result of these circumstances, things like spelling practices varied from one place to another, and one scribe to another. The same word could even be written on the same page in multiple ways.

I believe we can all still be confident scribes and maybe even have our own preferred way of writing words, where we within reason push the boundaries or push our own viewpoints through self expression :D
by rbanffy | 2025-07-07 09:49:58+00:00
In many ways, the Lisa is more sophisticated than our current GUIs. In particular, I liked the way applications meshed into the system and disappeared into stationery - if you want to create a document, double click on its corresponding stationery stack and a new document is created. No need to find open Excel (or LisaCalc).

IIRC, Windows 95 briefly had this in the form of a Templates folder. You added files to that folder and then you could create new copies of those files from the context menu. I don't remember it persisting into other versions of Windows.
by mark_undoio | 2025-07-07 09:51:47+00:00
Process recording by time travel debug seems like a good fit for this problem - then you can capture 100% of process execution and then go back and investigate further.

We (Undo.io) came up with a technique for following a tree of processes and initiating process recording based on a glob of program name. It's the `--record-on` flag in https://docs.undo.io/UsingTheLiveRecorderTool.html. You can grab a free trial from our website.

For open source, with rr (https://rr-project.org/) I think you'd just `rr record` the initial process and you'll end up capturing the whole process tree - then you can look at the one you're interested in.

As others have said you could also do some smart things with GDB's follow-fork settings but I think process recording is ideal for capturing complicated situations like this as you can go and review what happened later on.