MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by tombert | 2025-07-05 14:58:07+00:00
I am arguing that even if the language of the license is perfect by any criteria we define, enforcing them is unrealistic, especially for smaller projects.

I know there's been cases of big projects successfully suing companies that break the license (e.g. BusyBox), but if I just make some small utility on Github, even if it's licensed with AGPL, I don't have a ton of recourse. I don't have the ability to audit every project that might be violating it, and even if I did I don't have the capital to pay an attorney to sue for every possible violation.

If you're working for a company and that company is paying you to work on a project that they decide to FOSS later, great, you're being compensated for your work and I have no objection to that. Hobby projects are generally not compensated and as such I think it's better to keep them closed source.
by taormina | 2025-07-05 14:58:23+00:00
""" I’m basically calling the AI industry dishonest, but I want to qualify by saying they are unnecessarily dishonest. Because they don’t need to be! They should just not make abstract claims about how much the world will change due to AI in no time, and they will be fine. They undermine the real effort they put into their work—which is genuine!

Charitably, they may not even be dishonest at all, but carelessly unintrospective. Maybe they think they’re being truthful when they make claims that AGI is near, but then they fail to examine dispassionately the inconsistency of their actions.

When your identity is tied to the future, you don’t state beliefs but wishes. And we, the rest of the world, intuitively know. """

He's not saying either way, just pointing out that they could just be honest, but that might hamper their ability to beg for more money.
by sfn42 | 2025-07-05 14:59:49+00:00
I think it's pretty clear that I'm not referring to Palestinians, Ukrainians or Syrians etc here. I support refugee programs but I also acknowledge that we have limited resources. We can't help everyone. We can't just open the borders and let everyone in.

I hadn't heard about alligator Alcatraz until now, I'm not American so I don't keep up with all of Trump's shenanigans. I feel compelled to make it clear that I in no way support Trump. The fact that the US has elected that clown not once but twice is frankly embarrassing.
by exDM69 | 2025-07-05 15:00:05+00:00
It's actually Rust that is setting the 64 wide limit (see SupportedLaneCount), not LLVM.

I agree, f64x64 is probably a very bad idea.

But something like f32x8 would probably still be "fast enough" on old/mobile CPUs without 256 wide vectors (but good 128 bit SIMD ALU).

I did something like this when using a u16x16 bitmask fit the problem domain. Most of my target CPUs have 256 wide registers but on mobile ARM land they don't. This wasn't particularly performance sensitive code so I just used 256 bit wide vectors anyway. It wasn't worth it trying to optimize for the old CPUs separately.
by matthewdgreen | 2025-07-05 15:00:11+00:00
And this is why it's very important, in the case of a junior engineer, to use your "I'm just starting here" privilege to ask those stupid questions. Or you can be a very senior engineer who has an established reputation, and can get away with asking what sound like "stupid" questions just because people assume you know what you're doing.

We have an expectation that "smart people" should be able to quickly fill in gaps in lightly-explained systems. Sometimes this is good: when you're teaching people a new concept it's great if they can grasp it quickly and approximately. When you're describing the design of a complex system, you absolutely do not want people to make incorrect assumptions about the parts you're skipping over.

The worst example I've seen was learning that the security of an industrial control platform came down to the fact that the management software wasn't installed by default. The designers had assumed that "knowledge of a software library" was a valid access control mechanism. As the cherry on top, another engineer chimed in that the software was actually installed on the system anyway, just in a different location. It took a pile of incredibly "stupid" questions to surface this knowledge.
by diggan | 2025-07-05 15:00:21+00:00
Obviously subjective, but I had seen The Martian before I read the book (many years after seeing the movie), and liked the book way better than the movie. Read Project Hail Mary right after finishing The Martian, and enjoyed that one even more. I guess the writing is a bit dry, but it kind of makes sense and I quite like it. I'm cautiously optimistic about the new movie.
by linsomniac | 2025-07-05 15:02:42+00:00
Search youtube for "crawl space underpinning" for some videos of a residential process.

I'm sure they're doing something more elaborate there, but in residential you do this underpinning technique if you want to replace or extend your foundation (in my case, putting a basement where there is a crawl space), where you mark the foundation into 2' segments and label them A, B, C. Then you go through and dig/cut out all the "A"s, and pour footings and foundations in place, then repeat for the Bs and Cs. I'm thinking about doing this for my crawl space just to have some more space for storage.
Tell HN: You owe it to yourself to understand nutrition
by prmph | 2025-07-05 15:02:44+00:00
Just did some really eye-opening research about the effects of macro-nutrients on the body and fat storage [1].

Guys, there are a lot on misconceptions most of us have about nutrition, even those of us who think we are better informed. Here are some points I gleaned from my conversation:

- Dietary fat is most easily stored as fat in the body. Frequently you hear the current understanding is that dietary fat is not the devil, but carbs are. But now I know it it more complex: carbs are converted into glycogen, but they are NOT easily converted into fat (through a rare process called de novo lipogenesis, only if glycogen stores are full, AND there is still excess calories to store). The reason it appears carbs make you fat is that carbs have what is termed a fat- and protein- sparing effect: by freeing up dietary fat to be stored as body fat, because the fat now no longer needed for energy in place of the carbs.

- There is also a thermic effect of various macro-nutrients, which is the energy required to digest them. Again, it takes very little energy to digest fat, a moderate amount for carbs, and a high amount for protein. This should be taken into account when evaluating how each affects the body in a caloric surplus situation.

- Even healthy oils/fats, like olive oil and Omega-3 fats, are still basically fat easily stored as such in the body as described above, if there is a caloric excess. But they are used in cell membranes, brain tissue, and anti-inflammatory signaling before being stored, so they are less likely to go directly to "storage" as it were.

- It gets more complex: Carbs spike insulin, which promotes fat storage and inhibits fat burning. BUT, the fat must be there to store in the first place, and this only happens in a calorie surplus. AND, even without carbs spiking insulin, having a lot fat tissue reduces insulin sensitivity, a driver of diabetes. Also, some carbs, like sugar/fructose, have bad effects other than simply contributing to fat storage: insulin resistance due to frequent spikes, liver fat accumulation, systemic inflammation, gut microbiome disruption, dental decay, etc.

So, major devil is a caloric surplus or excess. If eating some high quality fat helps you to maintain a caloric balance, then fine. But this devil is horrible in fat form, less bad in carb form, and almost redeemable in protein form.

But generally, everybody is different. You need to read up more on these to understand your body + diet as an entire system, and you will be in a better position to care for your nutritive health. I notice HN'ers are quick to express all kinds of strong opinions on nutrition, drowning out those with actual expertise.

[1] Starting with ChatGPT, and cross-checking with actual research, since I know there might be some inaccuracies in it output.
by ThatMedicIsASpy | 2025-07-05 15:02:49+00:00
Low power, low noise, low profile system, LOW ENTRY COST. I can easily get a beelink me mini or two and build a NAS + offsite storage. Two 1TB SSDs for a mirror are around 100€, two new 1TB HDDs are around 80€.

You are thinking in dimensions normal people have no need for. Just the numbers alone speaks volumes, 12TB, 6 hdds, 8TB NVMes, 2.5GB LAN.
by icedchai | 2025-07-05 15:03:19+00:00
I remember hearing this rumor back in the day (early 1990's.) I also owned an A3000 at the time. It never seemed believable since Sun already had 680x0 systems and they were clearly moving to Sparc.

680x0 was long in the tooth by the early 90's. All Unix vendors (other than NeXT, which eventually gave up on hardware) had moved to RISC.
by ninetyninenine | 2025-07-05 15:03:48+00:00
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qrvK_KuIeJk&t=284s

For context, George Hinton is basically the Father of AI. He's responsible for the current resurgence of machine learning and utilizing GPUs for ML.

The video puts it plainly. You can get pedantic and try to build scaffolding around your old opinion in attempt to fit it into a different paradigm but that's just self justification and an attempt to avoid realizing or admitting that you held a strong belief that was utterly incorrect. The overall point is:

We have never understood how LLMs work.

That's really all that needs to be said here.
by JunkDNA | 2025-07-05 15:03:55+00:00
This article isn’t particularly helpful. It focuses on a ton of specific OpenAI business decisions that aren’t necessarily generalizable to the rest of the industry. OpenAI itself might be out over its skis, but what I’m asking about is the meta-accusation that AI in general is heavily subsidized. When the music stops, what does the price of AI look like? The going rate for chat bots like ChatGPT is $20/month. Does that go to $40 a month? $400? $4,000?
by cbarrick | 2025-07-05 15:05:11+00:00
I said what I said above not as a genuinely held belief (I doubt Nvidia had any involvement in this editorialization), but as a rhetorical effect.

There are many reasons why the editorialized-title rule exists. One of the most important reasons is so that we can trust HN as an unbiased news aggregator. Given the content of the article, this particular instance of editorialization is pretty egregious and trust breaking.

And to be clear, those questions I asked are not outlandish to ask, even if we do trust HN enough to dismiss them.

The title should not have been changed.
by worldsayshi | 2025-07-05 15:05:25+00:00
Another important skill in this area, or maybe it's a personality trait: Being able to tell yourself that taste is actually really important. You have to kind of double down on following ideas to their extreme, or something like that. Or maybe taking very subtle emotions very seriously.

Most of the time when you chase taste you are working on splitting hairs. Or it will look like that to an outside observer.
by imiric | 2025-07-05 15:06:21+00:00
Related to your point: if these tools are close to having super-human intelligence, and they make humans so much more productive, why aren't we seeing improvements at a much faster rate than we are now? Why aren't inherent problems like hallucination already solved, or at least less of an issue? Surely the smartest researchers and engineers money can buy would be dogfooding, no?

This is the main point that proves to me that these companies are mostly selling us snake oil. Yes, there is a great deal of utility from even the current technology. It can detect patterns in data that no human could; that alone can be revolutionary in some fields. It can generate data that mimics anything humans have produced, and certain permutations of that can be insightful. It can produce fascinating images, audio, and video. Some of these capabilities raise safety concerns, particularly in the wrong hands, and important questions that society needs to address. These hurdles are surmountable, but they require focusing on the reality of what these tools can do, instead of on whatever a group of serial tech entrepreneurs looking for the next cashout opportunity tell us they can do.

The constant anthropomorphization of this technology is dishonest at best, and harmful and dangerous at worst.
Blufire, Quantum Partner Planning "Quantum Interconnected Singularity" Project
by Needleworker333 | 2025-07-05 15:07:04+00:00
I came across something interesting and wanted to see if anyone else has heard about it.

Apparently, Blufire Capital (they’re an investment firm out of Abu Dhabi) is working with a quantum computing company on what they’re calling the Quantum Interconnected Singularity (QIS). From what I’ve read, the idea is to combine quantum processors and AI to tackle big problems in energy, sustainability, and cybersecurity.

The one thing that stood out is that they’re supposedly deciding between Abu Dhabi and Singapore as the base for developing the first ecosystem.

Some of the stuff mentioned includes: • Using quantum-enhanced predictive analytics to optimise energy grids • Speeding up sustainable materials discovery • Building quantum-resistant AI cybersecurity protocols

I agree this sounds pretty ambitious, and also a bit vague at this stage. But I’m curious whether this is actually close to becoming real or still early talk.

If it does move forward, I wonder what kind of impact it could have on real-world applications, especially in energy and security.

Has anyone here seen more details about this or have thoughts on whether this kind of all-in-one quantum AI framework is feasible? Would love to hear different perspectives.
by nkrisc | 2025-07-05 15:07:22+00:00
Coyotes seem remarkably adaptable to urban environments. The coyotes I’ve seen in Chicago are something else. I’ve seen them trotting down the sidewalk of four-lane roads in broad daylight (they were quite fat too). Even had one run right past me as I was waking down the sidewalk, I thought it was a dog at first.

One of the best Chicago coyote incidents was one around Lincoln Park (I think it was) that walked into a Quizno’s or something on a hot summer day and hopped into the drink cooler.

Edit: here’s a picture of it https://www.reddit.com/r/chicago/comments/tv8y26/today_is_th...
by ogora | 2025-07-05 15:08:53+00:00
Those who need it will recognise its value. It appears that many today have abandoned personal restraint, mistaking obscenity for trend or entitlement.

Even traditionally professional spaces, such as news outlets and heads of state, now use language unfit for civil discourse. This tool enables continued internet use without compromising the quality of the experience.

Only the weak would agree with a statement like "perhaps the internet is not for you".

I'm not of that breed. I intend to stamp my brand on the internet, just like those who use such language, even if I end up being the only PureWord user.
by KernalSanders | 2025-07-05 15:09:08+00:00
Ya, I custom coded our startups entire bespoke sensor array and smart systems. No AI. It was build before LLMs gains the traction that we see now. I tested several models to see if they could build the same. They can't yet.

My code will never be publicly available. That's a key trade secret of our business. When investors and others tell us that someone else could build it, I let them know that they could build their own, similar version, but it wouldn't be what we have.

We've verified that by having friends and family, some of the best coders that we know - Stanford, MIT, and other CS alum, as well as top FAANG programmers - try to reproduce it. It's always something done in their own style that doesn't do the job as it needs to be done (they work ok, but they all miss some key crucial parts of why our system succeeds at what it does).

GitHub is good for those looking for a job or to share their projects openly. I wouldn't even trust a private repo. Everything is either on systems and servers that we have control over or in my head. As we grow and scale, we have a roadmap for how to keep control over those trade secrets until it's time to pass off the company (if we do). At that point, I'm confident that whoever takes over will realize that this will be like the Coca Cola recipe, or any other trade secret which could be reproduced but not necessarily in the same way. (Knowing the history of that recipe and what others have created that tastes identical, it's more apocryphal and maybe not a perfect example, but you get the idea).

Anything controlled by another company is something out of your hands. Pick and choose wisely where you keep your stuff.
by rekabis | 2025-07-05 15:10:53+00:00
This is a very smh facepalm bridgepinch sigh moment, where Microsoft could have taken the high road and gently educated users by restricting insecure passwords instead of blocking their use entirely. A simple bit complexity algorithm like what KeePass uses could determine a threshold beneath which restrictions on adding/using passwords could start to bite.

I only use their app for Microsoft resources, as the 2FA and other security features are stronger through the app than through other 2FA channels. The 2FA itself, for example, is plumped up from 6 to 8 digits. And there is a challenge/response code you can use as well.

But still, IMO this was a massive missed opportunity.
by trey-jones | 2025-07-05 15:11:13+00:00
It's funny, I would not put this or the Martian into made-to-be-movie category, mainly featuring a single protagonist alone with his thoughts of how best to effect survival. I haven't (and probably won't) see the movies. I preferred the Martian very much compared to PHM, but I did enjoy it. Just had a problem with suspension of disbelief to do trivialization of language learning and communication (especially alien).
by satyrun | 2025-07-05 15:12:00+00:00
Rubin was also in the right place at the right time.

Putting out Run-DMC – Raising Hell, Slayer – Reign in Blood and Beastie Boys – Licensed to Ill in the same year is completely insane but things are probably much different if he is 20 years older or 20 years younger. '

He was in the perfect place as hip hop and metal were taking off.
by koverstreet | 2025-07-05 15:12:18+00:00
Patreon has never been my main source of funding. (It has been a very helpful backstop though!)

But I do badly need more funding, this would go better with a real team behind it. Right now I'm trying to find the money to bring Alan Huang on full time; he's fresh out of school but very sharp and motivated, and he's already been doing excellent work.

If anyone can help with that, hit me up :)
by bitwize | 2025-07-05 15:12:31+00:00
I think this is becoming more common.

I started programming when I was five years old, so I kind of fit the "whiz kid" profile that everybody thought all programmers would be back in the 80s. But one of the things I've noticed, is that unlike the situation, say, in Boston, where it was easy to find other former "whiz kids", when I attend tech meetups near my current city what I find is that almost all of them started programming in mid-adulthood, say mid-thirties to forties. Many of them even went to the same boot camp. But the joy and wonder they experience mirrors what I experienced at age five, poking at my Crazy Eddie's-issued VIC-20. I am utterly delighted by this discovery, as it lends further credence to the idea in my head that programming is something deeply satisfying to the human soul.
by HerrMonnezza | 2025-07-05 15:12:47+00:00
Interesting remarks, thanks!

When discussing remote vs non-remote with a colleague some time ago over lunch, he mentioned that "remote is an extreme version of yourself", so those inclined to slack off will slack off way more to the point of being unproductive, and those inclined to work longer hours will eventually just spend all their time working... Maybe over-simplified but I think he was onto something.
Which Lisp? Beginner
by willschetelich | 2025-07-05 15:13:53+00:00
Hi All! This likely doesn't matter much, but I'm curious on which lisp dialect would be best for somebody new to lisp? Currently I'm comfortable in C, Python, Java, SQL stuff, and web dev stuff, but I've never touched Lisp. I don't have a 'project' with Lisp yet, but my goal is to 'get the lisp mindset' of why this language is so special. 'Think like a lisper.' Open to any and all thoughts!
by furyofantares | 2025-07-05 15:14:28+00:00
After sleeping on it and reading some replies I think I worked out what they were saying. Take drawing - your skill at producing an image is raised to a professional aesthetic (what I was saying) but your skill at drawing is unchanged (what they are saying).

But they're saying your taste, in the context of self-judgment at attempting to learn to draw, might also be raised to a professional aesthetic, because you can already produce images of that level by typing words.

I guess I will add that a difference here is we are talking about taste somewhat differently. To me, genai has been a demonstration that taste and skill are not two points on the same dimension.
by globnomulous | 2025-07-05 15:15:03+00:00
I don't mean to be a jerk, but I'm having trouble figuring out what the point of the post or of posting the post here is. Are you asking for advice? Feedback? Suggestions? Criticism? Support? The only question your post asks is "but who am I really?"

To be honest, what I hear in the paragraphs that follow is less a description of yourself than the pronouncement that you are capable, curious, and driven to learn more, that you're excited and motivated by the breadth and depth of tech -- that there's so much to learn and so much to study and you want to know all of it. That's a wonderful starting point, but it also sounds as though you are or will be prone to a kind of paralysis.

You have a list of projects you want to work on. This is good. Study will give you a foundation (personally, I found DS&A, once I approached it methodically and patiently, by far the funnest part of learning programming and CS, so projects aren't the only way), but building will give you something to put on top of it, figuratively speaking.

Just keep on mind that you're probably not going to build these things from first principles, so you're probably not going to learn operating systems, networking, or programming languages. Rather, your going to develop skill in specific tools rely onthose technologies. That's fine. But if you really do want to dig very specifically into the subjects and technologies themselves, then you needto be aware that building the products or projects you've described isn't going to give you the progress you seem to want.

If you really do want to know networking, don't build a website; implement, I don't know, telnet or tcp/ip from scratch after reading the spec. If you really want to know operating systems, build one. If you want to understand programming languages, DS&A, and algorithmic analysis, familiarize yourself with some instruction sets; learn discrete math; learn what lambda calcus is and how it's used.

> Adult ADHD

I have severe ADHD. I could not survive in the tech world without treatment and medication. YMMV, but you should get treatment if you haven't already. Last time I checked, there was essentially no empirical evidence supporting the coping strategies so many people advocate. Medication is the one, and the only, proven treatment for the condition.
by Jtsummers | 2025-07-05 15:15:13+00:00
Worth a read, and it's had some very active discussions in the past:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19804478 - May 2019, 191 comments

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21581444 - Nov 2019, 241 comments

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23985816 - Jul 2020, 9 comments

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24027663 - Aug 2020, 134 comments

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26266881 - Feb 2021, 90 comments

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31594613 - Jun 2022, 30 comments

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37743517 - Oct 2023, 50 comments