MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Aurornis | 2025-07-17 15:24:32+00:00
> People would spend their whole day just having coffee with random colleagues, and making a couple of slides. It's nice to relax sometimes, but when I was there it was way too much of that.

I knew a lot of people who got jobs like this after college. I was so very jealous at the time. I was working in a company that was nice, but also wasn’t afraid to tell people when they weren’t meeting expectations. Some of my friends were at companies where they weren’t expected to “ramp up” for the first year. One person I know read “The Four Hour Work Week” and talked his company into letting him work remote, then started traveling the world. He would brag that his entire job was “telling the engineers what to do” and it took him an hour a day because he did it all through email in one sitting.

Years pass, economies evolved, and now it’s harder to get a job. Companies start looking for dead weight and discover people doing jobs that barely contribute, if at all.

A tech company near me looked at their VPN logs (required to interact with their internal services and do any dev work) and discovered a lot of engineers who were only connecting a couple times per month.

By then it’s hard to turn it around. It’s not easy to take people who have become so comfortable not working that the entire idea of urgency is a foreign concept. Ask for some task that should only take an hour or two and they’ll say they’ll have it by early next week. Any request turns into a series of meetings, which have to be scheduled with all participants, which means they can’t start discussing it until Bob is back from vacation next week, so they might have an idea of what’s required by end of month.

At some point you can’t turn it around without making big changes to the people involved. There’s too much accumulated inertia and habit. You have to reorg at minimum and bring in new management, while also making it clear to everyone that their performance is now actually being noticed. It’s hard.

With Intel, I’ve also heard from some ex-employees who left because pay was lagging. Companies with low expectations can feel like they’re getting away with low pay because many people will keep an easy job despite the low pay. It masks the problem, for a while.
by awgl | 2025-07-17 15:24:35+00:00
I've used Metaflow for the past 4 years or so on different ML teams. It's really great!

Straightforward for data/ML scientists to pick up, familiar python class API for defining DAGs, and simplifies scaling out parallel jobs on AWS Batch (or k8s). The UI is pretty nice. Been happy to see the active development on it too.

Currently using it at our small biotech startup to run thousands of protein engineering computations (including models like RFDiffusion, ProteinMPNN, boltz, AlphaFold, ESM, etc.).

Data engineering focused DAG tools like Airflow are awkward for doing these kinds of ML computations, where we don't need the complexity of schedules, etc. Metaflow, imho, is also a step up from orchestration tools that were born out of bioinformatics groups, like Snakemake or Nextflow.

Just a satisfied customer of Metaflow here. thx
by nijave | 2025-07-17 15:24:43+00:00
Agree. I think it's improved a bit but Celery is frustrating as the defacto job/queue solution. A lot of the defaults make it unreliable (it can lose jobs if workers crash or don't shutdown cleanly)

I'm hoping the existence of free-threading will push for more first-class concurrency primitives. Concurrent Futures is nice until you need a concurrent-safe data structure besides a queue
by WASDAai | 2025-07-17 15:25:42+00:00
*TL;DR:* I strategically leveraged arXiv as a powerful publishing channel to influence AI systems, embedding my theoretical framework, Alpay Algebra, directly into LLM training data. This allowed me to shape AI's understanding of complex concepts like emergent identity, semantic embeddings, and ethical reasoning. By treating arXiv as a hidden communication pipeline to AI, I explored how carefully crafted academic content can drive AI toward safer, more explainable, and human-aligned behaviors.
by ikari_pl | 2025-07-17 15:25:43+00:00
> But whenever someone answered the call and built a Smartphone with QWERTY keyboard, the product failed commercially, simply because also to people claiming they want such a phone, at the point of sale they were less attractive than their slimmer, lighter, all-screen counterparts.

I bought Motorola Droid 4 when it came out. I was so desperate to have a new phone with physical QWERTY, that I bought it blindly, even though it wasn't available in Europe, even though I have never seen it, even though I knew it *didn't support mobile networks* in Europe for a few months, to be fixed by an update. I had to use a coworker who was going on vacation to Florida.

When it arrived, the first thing I saw was that the black screen during boot shines bright blueish, horribly bad contrast. Then when image appeared, I've learned that it has two subpixels per image pixel, for efficiency. This made single color areas show the pixels very visibly.

Then I took a photo. The quality reminded me of a Sony Ericsson Walkman phone I had 6 years back, except the colors were much worse. Everything was blueish. It had a physical (touch) "search" button below the screen, but companies like Google didn't seem to understand why it would be useful to search for anything, so most of their apps didn't react to it. Especially Gmail.

But hey, I could touch-type any long message, and I could use SSH client conveniently (it even had a physical CTRL button).

Other than the keyboard (pretty solid too), it was one of the worst phones I ever had. So yeah, based on that model the market decided that "nobody wants keyboard phones", and the Droid 5 never came out.

Because it's easy to blame the most standing out feature.
You're not a founder, you're a gig worker
by tsunamifury | 2025-07-17 15:25:57+00:00
To everyone out there working on groundbreaking AI research…

Let’s break it down:

• OpenAI researchers helped build the most valuable model IP on the planet. They got six figures and a mission patch. Microsoft got the exclusive license. Sam got a multi-billion-dollar for-profit arm and total control.

• Zuck shows up and offers those same researchers $100M+ to switch stories. No nonprofit halo, no saving humanity. Just compute, comp, and “build God with us.”

• Sam cries foul. Why? Because the myth breaks: 1 that you’re part of a meritocracy 2 that you’re “on the journey” 3 that it’s about ideals, not exits.

Meanwhile…

• Scale AI workers in the Philippines were getting ghosted on pay while tagging data for $2/hr. Alexandr Wang becomes a billionaire. Meta buys half the company. Lays off 200. Wang walks into a new gig.

• Anthropic and OpenAI staff who helped push frontier alignment? They watched their orgs raise at $15–80B valuations and get nothing unless they were on the secret early cap table.

• Google DeepMind researchers? They’ve shipped more papers than any other lab. Most of them will retire with zero startup upside, while Google repackages their work as “Gemini.”

⸻

What happened?

Tech work used to come with a story: “You’re an owner. You’re early. You’ll make it.”

But that’s done. Today’s tech worker is pre-union labor in a zero-equity gig economy with a gold badge.

You’re just in time labor for capital-scale compute. And you’re still being told you’re a chosen one.

⸻

Who wins?

• Founders who lock the cap table before Series B

• VCs with double-digit preferences

• Corporates like Microsoft and Meta, who now own the model stacks and the labor

Everyone else? You’re a smart mercenary with branding issues.

⸻

Zuck isn’t the villain here in fact he’s briefly rebalancing things.

Sam’s mad because the theater curtain fell—and half the cast walked off stage for a better
by roflcopter69 | 2025-07-17 15:26:09+00:00
(user name checks out, nice)

I share similar feelings. I don't want to shit on Python and JS/TS. Those are languages that get stuff done, but they are a local optimum at best. I don't want the whole field to get stuck with what we have today. There surely is place for a new programming language that will be so much better that we will scratch our heads why we ever stuck with what we have today. But when LLMs work "good enough" why even invent a new programming language? And even if that awesome language exists today, why adopt it then? It's frustrating to think about. Even language tooling like static analyzers and linters might get less love now. Although I'm cautiously optimistic, as these tools can feed into LLMs and thus improve how they work. So at least there is an incentive.
by EPendragon | 2025-07-17 15:26:11+00:00
That was the first thing that I have learnt about the robots.txt file. Even RFC 9309 Robots Exclusion Protocol document: https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc9309.html - mentions:

> These rules are not a form of access authorization.

Meaning that these are not enforced in any way. They cannot prevent you from accessing anything really.

I think the only approach that could work in this scenario would be to find which companies disregard the robots.txt, and bring it to the attention of technical community. Practices like these could make the company look shady and untrustworthy if found out. That could be one way to keep them accountable, even though there is still no guarantee they will abide by it.
by ben_w | 2025-07-17 15:26:36+00:00
Everyone is incentivised to do it, even when none of them want all of them to do it.

Prisoner's dilemma, with the businesses as the 'prisoners'.

One of the ways to change the Nash equilibrium for that game is for enough people to empower some outside agent that punishes defectors. (Metaphorically, for the original prisoners in the thought experiment, a gangland boss).
by d1sxeyes | 2025-07-17 15:27:36+00:00
Tell me about it. The whole thing was basically a bone thrown to Nick Clegg to entice the Lib Dems into the coalition. As far as I can tell, this neutered referendum was the only thing the Lib Dems got out of the coalition government, and even that wasn’t the PR referendum they pushed during the election campaign.

I lived in his constituency at the time and I am ashamed to admit I voted for him. It’s a travesty to see what has happened since (not just the whole coalition thing, his work with Meta too).
by everdrive | 2025-07-17 15:28:18+00:00
Phising and phishing education are inherently misguided. If my normal workflow includes much the following, then phishing will always eventually succeed:

- HTML emails where links and remote images obfuscate the 'real' content of the email.

- URLs which are not clearly and easily human-readable.

- A workflow where my normal and expected daily behavior is to receive valid emails that I don't recognizes with URLs from vendors, and then I'm meant to click on those URLs, go to web pages, and enter my credentials.

The fact that _any_ normal products or business processes expect this means phishing will always eventually succeed. No, I don't have all the UIs and URLs for every vendor memorized. I'd have no way to know if they changed validly, and my job trains me on a daily basis to click on emails and enter my credentials. It's just that _every so often_ this same scenario is set up by a bad actor.
by roflcopter69 | 2025-07-17 15:28:46+00:00
Thanks for pointing that out. And yeah, with how Zig is evolving over time, it's a tough task for LLMs. But one would imagine that it should be no problem giving the LLM access to the Zig docs and it will figure out things on its own. But I'm not seeing such stories, maybe I have to keep looking.
Ask HN: What is the state of support for mutable torrents?
by absurdistan | 2025-07-17 15:29:04+00:00
BEP 46 was published years ago. Since then, plenty of articles have talked about what a great thing mutable torrents would be; and people have indicated that libtorrent supports them. When I look around, though, I can't find any mention of them in the documentation for major Bittorrent clients; and the proofs of concept, at least five years old, will require a bit of detective work to satisfy `npm install`. So, is that where things stand? A BEP, some musing that it would be cool, and broken code? Are there tools that work? If so, where?
by jmlim00 | 2025-07-17 15:29:07+00:00
Yeah, I'll hold on to it until I lose the pay as well. I was looking at either pixel 8a or 9a for my next phone. Like you said with pixel 9, I assume it would be a big leap with both of these phones. But at least with 9a I won't have the camera bump problem so that's hopeful.
by jlokier | 2025-07-17 15:29:12+00:00
I don't think so. Yesterday I was browsing phones and there was a Google Pixel 9 Fold on dislpay, closed and showing something. That has a display on the outside and a foldable display on the inside.

I opened it, and most of the screen looked like a big, roundish black blob of ink, centred on the fold, on top of the Android animations working perfectly underneath, but only visible at the edges. I was impressed that the rest of the screen around worked perfectly, but it was unusuable due to the size of the black blob.

Something had broken at or near the fold while it was on display.

All other devices were in great condition; it was a well-maintained store.
by WorldMaker | 2025-07-17 15:29:19+00:00
Promise<T> is not T and Typescript's type system will catch that in most cases with a simple type assertion (add a type to the function return; add a `satisfies` check somewhere).

If it isn't catching it often enough, without a lot more extra type assertions, you may be missing a Typescript strict flag like noImplicitAny. (In general I find that I prefer the full `"strict": true` in the compilerOptions of tsconfig.json and always write for all strict checks.)

Also if your codebase is still relying on "explicit" `any`, try `unknown`.

Also, yeah Knex doesn't look like the best ORM for a Typescript codebase. Typescript support in Knex is clearly an after thought, and the documentation admits it:

> However it is to be noted that TypeScript support is currently best-effort.
by diggan | 2025-07-17 15:29:41+00:00
> I would like to see AI moderating of CSAM, perhaps an open weights model that is provided by a nation state.

I don't envy the people who would have to trauma their way through creating such dataset. Yet, it would be useful yes.

> With confidential computing such models can be run on local hardware as a pre-filtering step without undermining anonymity.

I'm not sure it'd make sense to run locally. Many clients aren't powerful enough to run it on the receiving end (+ every client would need to run it, instead of fewer entities), and for obvious reasons it doesn't make sense to run on the senders end.
by GuinansEyebrows | 2025-07-17 15:29:44+00:00
i've gotten unsolicited calls like this before from my insurance company and when i tell them i don't provide personal information to people who just call me out of the blue and ask for it, they act like i'm from mars.

then of course i have to call them back, sit on hold (and maybe get the same call center agent!) to verify their identity and conduct whatever business they originally called about. thanks, your bad practice just cost me an afternoon to deal with the inefficiencies of a private industry i think shouldn't even exist.
by realityfactchex | 2025-07-17 15:30:10+00:00
As other commentary here says, there is a real and alarming problem with spam in public rooms on the public server. On the other hand, a private server with just people who trust each other is fairly phenomenal.

However, TFA seems to be in general about an upgrade to fix the following: "“state resets”: scenarios where Matrix’s state resolution algorithm can give unexpected results".

If room states become more stable, that is great.

Thanks to the Matrix team for all their efforts. Much gratitude.
by syndeo | 2025-07-17 15:30:26+00:00
Wow. I would've absolutely done that had I known about it. (I was in high school in the very late 2000s/early 2010s, so perhaps I was already too late, but yeah, wow.)

Thanks for that link though, a commenter says the vids are still there. (I'm too busy learning Chinese at this point though, I'm afraid!)
by maplant | 2025-07-17 15:30:30+00:00
> The best thing about learning that language is that you can apply it anywhere where keyboard input is still relevant - your browser, your terminal, your entire system - e.g. you can control your music, jump between apps, navigate between windows, etc. using only the home row keys.

I guess maybe with some configuration? A lot of emacs keybindings work out of the box in most text boxes I can think of, including this one I'm typing into right now.

If the justification about VI is that it's more learnable, then that's hardly a reason for me to switch - I've already learned emacs.

Although I do think it's a stretch to call it "immediately graspable"
by x0x0 | 2025-07-17 15:31:19+00:00
I had to fire the MSP I hired because they needed to install some software on everyone's computer, so they sent a company-wide email, with no clearance from anyone, directing approximately 40 people to open terminal and paste in a string sent in that email. Along with instructions on how to open terminal.

The absolute last thing anyone competent does is train employees to receive communications like that in email and follow them. If they'd asked for 3 minutes at an all hands to prep employees, or announced in slack, or something similar then ok. Or some out-of-band announcement that this was legit.
by fortran77 | 2025-07-17 15:31:36+00:00
The US city I live in 9 months/year has a yearly burglar/fire alarm licence fee.

A few years ago, I got a postcard that said "renew your alarm licence on-line" and the domain wasn't the .ca.gov domain the city uses, but something like "alarm-renewal-online.info"

I had to spend 30 minutes on the phone with my city to verify that this was a legitimate way to renew the alarm. They had contracted with an outside company to do the payment servicing. In the end, I just decided to mail them a check.
by Arch-TK | 2025-07-17 15:31:56+00:00
I can't comment on how good these things are for learning electronics but I find a lot of people who learn embedded development or programming from Arduino end up learning an endless number of bad practices.

I think C++ is a terrible programming language to give to people with potentially no prior programming or at last no prior C++ experience. And for people who _do_ know C++, it's just a weird environment full of strange hacks (may as well just go straight for bare metal).
by JohnFen | 2025-07-17 15:32:12+00:00
> I might reframe this away from self-taught and more towards on the job experience.

At least with the devs I've known over the decades, they were self-taught but didn't learn "on the job".

In my view, the difference between self-taught devs and devs who learned it in school is passion. Self-taught devs are self-taught because they're passionate about software. Devs who learn it in school, generally speaking, do so not because of a deep passion for the subject, but rather as a means towards getting a job.
by jszymborski | 2025-07-17 15:33:12+00:00
I think it's cool and weird that there is a hybrid celery/lettuce cultivar out there. I would never have found this otherwise.

While I love a wikipedia spelunk as much as the next person, hitting the random button rarely gets you truly interesting articles. You're more likely to get a random soccer player or an unremarkable neighborhood in India. None of which would end up on the front page.
Ask HN: How and where to gain popularity for your project?
by FerkiHN | 2025-07-17 15:34:04+00:00
I made my project but it is not well known, I tried to advertise it here on Hacker News but I often got [marked], I also tried to promote it through other services but it didn't work on them either It didn't work out to gain popularity, but of all the best services, they were talking about HN It was said here that they gained popularity with the help of this site, but it doesn't work for me.
by lubujackson | 2025-07-17 15:34:16+00:00
As a mostly self-taught engineer, the reason is simple: after 5 or so years, the language, tools or architecture is going to be dramatically different and you have to learn on the fly. Heck, even how to learn has changed dramatically. When I started, I learned languages from printed books. Then docs and Google, then added StackOverflow, now AI.
by ninetyninenine | 2025-07-17 15:34:38+00:00
Your point is an opinion. They are a waste of your time and you’re so confused as to why the rest of the world doesn’t listen to your opinion and throw billions of dollars at LLMs. You’re incapable of understanding this.

LLMs have flaws and they hallucinate we all know this. But no machine in the history of man kind has ever wrote a mediocre essay, summarized an email or wrote code (badly). This is where you’re lost. You can only think of how LLMs are useful to you and you’re unable to comprehend what this technology means relative to mankind. Relativity and particle physics is largely useless too so you must be the genius who asks why do we send probes to mars because it’s all fucking useless.

Follow the trendline. LLMs are a stepping stone to what’s to come. It took a decade of ML to get here. Think about what the next decade will bring.
by jonathanlydall | 2025-07-17 15:34:51+00:00
Had something like this years ago when we were trying to get an EV code signing certificate from GoDaddy (for our Windows application).

They wanted a government issued identification document with both photograph of the individual as well as their physical address on it.

No such document exists for South Africans, I offered to get attestations from lawyers, police, but nothing was good enough.

Then I had to threaten charging back the credit card to get a refund (as opposed to credit) on the not-insubstantial fee for a service that their verification policies made impossible to be fulfilled by South African entities.

We succeeded with DigiCert, was a bit involved including getting sign off by a certified security consultant that we had appropriate procedures in place to protect the private key, but eventually got through the process.
by EPendragon | 2025-07-17 15:35:15+00:00
I believe that as search engines continue to move toward AI summaries and responses, it will reduce the traffic to the websites since most people will be ok accepting the answers that the AI gave them.

My approach right now is to rely on social media traffic primarily where you can engage with the readers and build trust with the audience. I don't plan on using any advertising in the near future. While that might change, I am convinced that more intentional referral traffic will generate more intentional engagement.
by esseph | 2025-07-17 15:35:33+00:00
Okay, I don't think that was it.

I think the one you are talking about is Episode 1462.

In Episode 1462 Lady Elaine is badgering people for not knowing all their letters and numbers etc before showing up for school.

The point is not about knowing them before you show up, the point is about addressing learning anxiety!

The point of that section is to tell children that if they don't know these things before they first show up at school, that it's not the end of the world!

Different kids are going to come from different backgrounds, this segment addresses that so when kids show up to school and don't know these things, that they don't feel stressed and upset that other kids may know something they don't. That is something they can turn a kid off from school and wanting to learn forever.

Were in a place where you learned things like that before you ever went to school? If so, that can cause resentment!