MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by rrrrrrrrrrrryan | 2025-07-18 20:21:23+00:00
Eh there's more nuance.

When people outside of LA say "Los Angeles", they're almost always referring to the county. The city of LA is actually quite small.

For "San Diego", it's precisely the opposite - a giant portion of San Diego County is comprised of the city of San Diego, and they're almost always just referring to the city.

And for "San Francisco," the city and the county are basically the same entity and thus have the same borders.
by greiskul | 2025-07-18 20:21:29+00:00
It's the main reason Brazil has invested so much in trying to use open source software for goverment institutions. There is a number of reasons, but digital sovereignty is probably the argument that actually convinced our politicians that it is important. Even Lula visited the international free software forum back in 2009: https://www.linux.com/training-tutorials/brazilian-president...
by jay_kyburz | 2025-07-18 20:21:29+00:00
I have this image in my head that R&D is some boffins in the back room inventing a something new, and then expanding on that idea is execution.

But "and development" covers everything we do in software development. Whether you fix a bug or write some documentation you are developing the product in some small way.

I imagine some business will need to restructure so the US arm is paying a service contract to use the software, and the foreign arm will own and develop the software.
by niteshpant | 2025-07-18 20:21:41+00:00
One of the qualifications is "Evidence that the beneficiary has either commanded a high salary or will command a high salary or other remuneration for services as evidenced by contracts or other reliable evidence" How does a startup founder go about proving this? They don't have quite the "high salary" and get paid in equity. What have you seen here? How do founders quialify for this part?
by DerArzt | 2025-07-18 20:21:50+00:00
This looks like it's a website without an app, so a few questions for you:

1. How does the site perform on mobile? If it doesn't that's a non starter for a large audience segment.

2. What's the pricing? There are several free options out there for managing your book collection, so unless there's a fremium tier (which there's no concrete language about pricing on the pricing page around subscription cost or subscription tiers) less people will want to try this out.

3. Why should someone use a web based library management tool over one that's hosted locally (either as a phone app, or as a site local to your network)?

4. What problems does this solve that others have missed? I would love for that to be front and center on the landing page.
by canucker2016 | 2025-07-18 20:21:58+00:00
Both of them screwed over early employees wrt company shares.

Jobs and Apple board didn't give stock options/shares to some early employees, Woz stepped in to make up for some of the shortfall. see https://apple.fandom.com/wiki/Woz_Plan

Gates argued with Paul Allen about the percentage of company ownership. IMHO, Allen didn't like confrontation so Allen acquiesced to Gates benefit.
by clipsy | 2025-07-18 20:22:43+00:00
> We're unfortunately waiting for one of those ICE agents, on camera, to pull the trigger and kill or brutally maim someone doing nothing other than filming, or worse an innocent bystander. It doesn't seem like our political system or even high court currently have the coherence to deal with evil in less-stark terms.

They won't deal with it then, either.
by qsort | 2025-07-18 20:22:54+00:00
I'm not talking about tools in particular, I completely agree that they're basically fungible, and for "serious" stuff it's probably still better to use the web interface directly as you have more control over the context.

The problem I see is that a lot of people are grossly misaligned with the state of the art, and it does take a bit of experimentation to understand how to work with an LLM. Even basic stuff like how to work with context isn't immediately obvious.
by ninetyninenine | 2025-07-18 20:23:11+00:00
Obviously AI is different. While LLMs are more of a power tool now, the future trendline points towards something that (possibly) replaces us. That's the entire concern right? I mean everyone knows this.

Is this not obvious?

Why do people hide behind this ridiculous analogy: "That's right, there are no carpenters or lumberjacks anymore because power tools were invented"

???

I mean sure the analogy is catchy and makes surface level sense, but can your brain do some analysis outside the context of an analogy??? It makes no sense that all of AI can be completely characterized by an analogy that isn't even accurate yet people delusionally just regurgitate the analogy most fitting with the fantasy reality they prefer.
by crystal_revenge | 2025-07-18 20:23:13+00:00
> I see a lot of people who aren't taking the time to actually understand how LLMs work

The trouble is that the advice in the post will have very little impact on "understanding how LLMs work". The number of people who talk about LLMs daily but have never run an LLM local, and certainly never "opened it up to mess around" is very large.

A fun weekend exercise that anyone can do is to implement speculative decoding[0] using local LLMs. You'll learn a lot more about how LLMs work than reading every blog/twitter stream mentioned there.

0. https://research.google/blog/looking-back-at-speculative-dec...
by Tharre | 2025-07-18 20:23:35+00:00
> To ensure reproducible / clean builds, I thought makepkg would always be run in a sandbox/chroot environment. The damage done would be localised to that sandbox.

makepkg runs in a fakeroot environment, but this is not a security barrier. There is also support for building inside systemd containers, offering at least limited security, but most AUR helpers don't use that yet.

> Ok. Devs could setup an option to pacman -U which allows it to bypass VT for privacy sensitive people. This just puts the onus on you to not ensure you aren't installing malware. The default Arch user should still be protected while allowing for your privacy needs.

You mistake the target group of Arch Linux. Users are expected to read the documentation and to know what they're doing. Protecting users from themselves at the expense of those who know what they're doing is not what Arch is about.

> Its too late then. People are already affected.

That doesn't make sense, it's too late for people if new malware isn't detected by VirusTotal as well.
by doctoring | 2025-07-18 20:23:41+00:00
The not so big secret is that we can detect cancer early in a lot of people, but we also would detect a lot of not-cancer. We don't currently know the cost/benefit of that tradeoff for all these new types of screening, and therefore insurers and health systems are reluctant to pay the cost of the both screening and the subsequent workup. This is not just a financial consideration, though the financial part is a big part -- the workup for those that end up as not-cancer has non-negligible risks for the patients as well (I have had patients of mine suffer severe injury and even die from otherwise routine biopsies), and on top of that, some actual cancers may not really benefit from early discovery in the first place.

This is not to downplay the potential benefit of early cancer detection... which is huge. And in the US/UK anyway, there are ongoing large trials to try to figure some of this stuff out in the space of blood-based cancer screening, as part of the path to convincing regulatory bodies and eventual reimbursement for certain tests. As mentioned, you can currently at least get the Galleri test out of pocket (<$1k, not cheap, but not exorbitant either), as well as whole body MRIs (a bit more expensive, ~$2-5k).
by sophia01 | 2025-07-18 20:24:14+00:00
Thank you!

I am wondering how narrow the focus has to be for an EB-1A. I have been involved in a wide variety of projects, some receiving a good amount of media publicity (100+ mentions across various media), others adding up to a good number of citations (100+ total citations), and I'm also involved in a startup venture that while not yet a breakaway success, is growing quickly (60k+ users, growing 50% yoy). I'm unsure if these can be molded into an appropriate form given they don't necessarily make a coherent story.

I'm also wondering what the bar is for "command a high salary or other significantly high remuneration in relation to others in the field". Is a solid salary within the usual bands at a big tech enough? Or does it have to somehow be significantly higher in relation to others in a similar job position at the company?
by madeofpalk | 2025-07-18 20:24:24+00:00
I don't think anyone is under the impression that Microsoft is integrating with projects like git or linux out of the goodness of their heart. They do it for the exact same reason anyone does - thats were users/customers are, and they want to make money from them. This isn't some evil conspiracy, it's just normal boring ways to build products for people.
by anigbrowl | 2025-07-18 20:24:43+00:00
Understandable preference, but it's hard to be blind to it to the point of never even seeing headlines on news or social media sites. It also seems foolish to completely ignore the media diet consumed by about 1/3 of the population.

I often hear complaints from centrists about 'liberal echo chambers' (eg a spate of recent articles about Bluesky), but few of them seem to appreciate the scope and scale of the conservative media ecosystem, or its sheer cynicism. Consider this example, from an interview conducted 20 years ago: https://zfacts.com/zfacts.com/metaPage/lib/Weekly_Standard_M...

Back then, conservative media played the role of an upstart alternative to the staid and often smug mainstream establishment. 2 decades later, what used to be a cottage industry has become dominant in its sector. Media Matters is a left-leaning outlet, but this recent report of theirs is largely quantitive and its claims seem well-founded in empirical research: https://www.mediamatters.org/google/right-dominates-online-m...
by scellus | 2025-07-18 20:24:54+00:00
If one wants to follow AI development mostly in the sense of LLMs and associated frontier models, that's an excellent list with over half of the names familiar, to whom I have converged independently.

I have a list in X for AI; it's the best source of information overall on the subject, although some podcasts or RSS feeds directly from the long-form writers would be quite close. (If one is a researcher themselves, then of course it's a must to follow the paper feeds, not commentary or secondary references.)

I'd add https://epoch.ai to the list, on podcasts at least Dwarkesh Patel; on blogs Peter Wildeford (a superforecaster), @omarsar0 aka elvis from DAIR in X, also many researchers directly although some of them like roon or @tszzl are more entertaining than informative.

The point about polluted information environment resonates on me; in general but especially with AI. You get a very incomplete and strange understanding by following something like NYT who seem to concentrate more on politics than technology itself.

Of course there are adjacent areas of ML or AI where the sources would be completely different, say protein or genomics models, or weather models, or research on diffusion, image generation etc. The field is nowadays so large and active that it's hard to grasp everything that is happening on the surface level.

Do you _have_ to follow? Of course not, people over here are just typically curious and willing to follow groundbreaking technological advancements. In some cases like in software development I'd also say just skipping AI is destructive to the career in the long term, although there one can take a tools approach instead of trying to keep track of every announcement. (My work is such that I'm expected to keep track of the whole thing on a general level.)
by giraffe_lady | 2025-07-18 20:25:10+00:00
Well, are people with medically arrested development given the franchise under this system? Developmental delays and learning disorders? At what age, how severe, who decides, etc. Is the franchise removed from people with dementia? Traumatic brain injury? Who pays the doctor that decides? There is so much to figure out & manage here with very high stakes.

We've landed at universal suffrage for a whole host of historical reasons, yes including past atrocities but also just as a way to avoid all those questions above. I didn't "throw race into" this; when discussing who may be permitted to vote it is already there whether you want to acknowledge it or not. Defining "universal" remains fraught significantly but not only because of that, and age remains the only exclusion. Maybe with good reason, maybe not.
by EGreg | 2025-07-18 20:25:52+00:00
I remember seeing Fox News segments about how Israeli spies probably knew something like 9/11 was going to happen, but didn't inform the Americans.

There was a 4-part series, here are all the parts I think: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=euoHYWD5C_U

Direct quote around 4:30 but it's all interesting.

===================

Actually, I will add a few more mainstream sources (no conspiracies, only official published results from the official commissions and mainstream news) with head-scratchers about what happened on 9/11...

1) Leading up to the attacks, the CIA at the time specifically acted to block some people in the FBI from sending cables that would have alerted the FBI to the presence of the terrorists in the country:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/9/11_Commission#CIA_withheld_i...

2) The 9/11 Commission found that ""At some level of the government, at some point in time, a decision was made not to tell the truth about the national response to the attacks on the morning of 9/11 ... The [NORAD] tapes told a radically different story from what had been told to us and the public."[19] Thomas Kean, the head of the 9/11 Commission, concurred, saying, "We to this day don't know why NORAD told us what they told us, it was just so far from the truth."[20]"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/9/11_Commission#NORAD_falsehoo...

3) On the day, NORAD was inexplicably ineffective at scrambling jets to intercept the hijacked aircraft, leading passengers of the fourth one to take matters into their own hands. Efforts to find out why this happened, even at the highest levels, have been frustrated. This is similar to the numerous questions about what happened with Israeli Defense Forces on October 7th and why it took them so long to come, when their own spotters whose only job it was to watch for these attacks, were calling in the attack for multiple hours before they were overrun and murdered... and the explanations are just as head-scratching: https://www.timesofisrael.com/surveillance-soldiers-say-oct-...

4) CNN Video soon after 9/11: Hijacker's passport found blocks from the World Trade Center crash site, completely intact, and given to a police officer by an unidentified man who "ran away": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V-QycTzwV7c

5) CBS Morning "Exclusive": Videos from 2000 surfaced of two 9/11 hijackers being seen at parties hosted by people on the payroll of Saudi intelligence... declassified in 2017: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q2UahouPSiA

6) Vanity Fair: just days after 9/11, members of the Bin Laden family were whisked out of the US on private jets: https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2003/10/saving-the-saudis-20...

7) Declassified documents (still heavily redacted) about the 9/11 materials released in response to Biden's executive order: https://vault.fbi.gov/9-11-attacks-investigation-and-related...
by archagon | 2025-07-18 20:25:53+00:00
There is certainly a large pro-fascist contingent, though they probably don't see themselves as such. The fact that support for Musk[1] or Thiel's political ideologies is not verboten (or at least a massive faux pas) should be massively telling. The unpleasant truth: fascism is fun if you're winning and happen to lack empathy or a moral compass.

EDIT: Not sure how one can read some of the comments in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44605618 and not conclude that sizable portions of the userbase are disturbingly racist and fashy. But I suppose it's a nice opportunity to use the "Comments Owl for Hacker News" plugin to tag particularly deplorable users for easier flagging in the future.

[1]: As a reminder, this man supports far-right parties like the AfD and called people on government benefits "parasites." Plus a million other things. And his "wood chipper" megalomania has already lead to dozens of documented deaths in impoverished countries.
by threatofrain | 2025-07-18 20:26:03+00:00
Concurrency is the property of a program to be divided into partially ordered or completely unordered units of execution. It does not describe how you actually end up executing the program in the end, such as if you wish to exploit these properties for parallel execution or task switching. Or maybe you're running on a single thread and not doing any task switching or parallelism.

For more I'd look up Rob Pike's discussions for Go concurrency.
by periodjet | 2025-07-18 20:26:14+00:00
> Collapse won't be addressed by buying a Prius, signing a treaty, or turning off the air-conditioning. The biggest problem we face is a philosophical one: understanding that this civilization is already dead. The sooner we confront this problem, and the sooner we realize there's nothing we can do to save ourselves, the sooner we can get down to the hard work of adapting, with mortal humility, to our new reality.

> This is why we are committed to fighting normative violence, fascism, colonialism, and white supremacy in all of its forms. To undermine the capitalist structure and its abusive scripts about human worth in relation to work, productivity, and ownership. To subvert oppressive gender norms and put in question the binary. To actively unlearn biased and colonial thinking. To look inside and face these parts of our darkness, personal and collective, and come out of it with more kindness and compassion.
by perihelions | 2025-07-18 20:26:19+00:00
Also Derek Lowe's previous ones as context (subset I could quickly find),

https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/sarepta-s-approval... ("Sarepta's Approval Woes" (2013))

https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/sarepta-s-duchenne... ("Sarepta's Duchenne Therapy Is A Lot Further Away" (2014))

https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/sarepta-s-day-fda ("Sarepta's Day at the FDA " (2016))

https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/sarepta-gets-appro... ("Sarepta Gets An Approval - Unfortunately" (2016))

https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/gene-therapy-duche... ("Gene Therapy for Duchenne" (2018))

https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/opening-lid-sarept... ("Opening the Lid on Sarepta's Drug Approvals" (2020))

https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/sarepta-tries-agai... ("Sarepta Tries Again" (2023))

https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/sarepta-why ("Sarepta. Why?" (2024))
by reverendsteveii | 2025-07-18 20:26:21+00:00
It's really fortunate that no one is arguing that because you're right, it would be a pretty absurd stance to take. What we're saying is that not doing anything wrong entitles you to privacy and until you're tried and convicted you didn't do anything wrong. I dare say the fact that the case was dismissed with prejudice goes pretty strongly in our favor on this one.
by muzani | 2025-07-18 20:26:55+00:00
Yes, and senior is supposed to be the highest rank of IC. But at some point, people gave this advice to call yourself a consultant instead of a freelancer... and it worked. So we have to live with this new term, and so do actual consultants.

I prefer contractor because it doesn't have the same stigma as freelancer, and is still accurate about their relationship.

My wife is from civil/construction engineering and she thinks terms like developer, engineer, and architect are all BS when software people use them. But idk, eventually we need terms for what we do.
by PaulHoule | 2025-07-18 20:27:05+00:00
Rewritten in response to quality complaint.

A lot of people are feeling HN is saturated with AI posts whether it is how MCP is like USB-C (repeated so much you know it is NPCs) or how outraged people are that their sh1t fanfics are being hoovered up to train AI.

This piece is not “news”, it’s a summary which is tepid at best, I wish people had some better judgement about what they vote up.
by throwawayQuwcy | 2025-07-18 20:27:43+00:00
"Why the Israeli government decided not to share with us all the critical information they had, and the extent of that information, is a subject for the public inquiry. They may have thought some sort of warning prudent in the event their surveillance activities later became a matter of public knowledge. But any energetic Israeli effort to assist the United States in preventing the attacks would not have served their strategic interest, in view of the disastrous effect those attacks were likely to have on the relationships between the United States and the Arab world."
by kvemkon | 2025-07-18 20:27:52+00:00
> Getting off US tech

"tech" meaning software, software as a service and hardware or actually only SaS and proprietary software?

> ..., Mailbox, Wire, Threema,....

Is it known they don't use (proprietary) US software on their servers and their non-US software don't run inside VMs on proprietary VM supervisor/OS?
by ktallett | 2025-07-18 20:28:21+00:00
I would agree in general for the base model macbook airs, as you go up the range the value just isn't there anymore when in comparison. I still do not see the battery life for my use case. There are too many other flaws for me (repairibility, quality of software decreasing massively, issues with screen quality in everyway bar colour/vibrancy) though that means I won't choose them anymore as much as I adored Apple for many years and am still a fan boy over classic macs.
by snitty | 2025-07-18 20:28:48+00:00
This gene therapy involves a gene called dystrophin, which is one of if not the largest gene in the human genome. Sarepta is actually using a version called microdystrophin, which is a truncated version. It still barely fits into AAV.

Reasons to use AAV: they're going for sustained production of the therapeutic gene, and AAVs are better at doing that than LNPs. LNPs were used in the mRNA COVID vaccine, because they're great at transient production.

To get stable production from an LNP you'd likely have to integrate into the genome, which risks cancer from disrupting oncogenes. You'd also need to package the therapeutic gene with a mechanism of integrating into the genome, like recombinase.
by tomgag | 2025-07-18 20:28:53+00:00
I beg you to read the full story and to not extrapolate from the quote.

Also, in the world of QC, right from its very roots, the ability of QC improved in mind boggling large steps every year. It's only that you cannot see it if you only look at the wrong metric, i.e., factorization records.

It's a bit like saying "classical computing technology has not improved for 50 years, it's only recently that we finally start to have programs that are able to write other programs".
by ranger_danger | 2025-07-18 20:29:40+00:00
No, but I think the people most likely to be oblivious to all this, will be the ones using Microsoft programs that write in proprietary formats by default... and I would say they're not even wrong if that's what most other people use too.

People send me Outlook messages all the time that I can't read at all, and many Excel spreadsheets and Powerpoint presentations with features that aren't supported in anything on Linux. I literally have to use a Windows VM with proper Office to read this stuff. And not only work documents, but documents from my children's school/teachers as well.