MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mindslight | 2025-07-04 16:56:33+00:00
The points avoiding the elephant in the room are basically deliberate, in support of the elephant. They think the elephant is some good thing that is going to destroy the woke, or inflation, or the immigrants, or whatever the hypocritical bogeyman is next week. But it is certainly not poised to destroy them, because they are the true patriotic Americans, don't you know. It is only everything else about this country that is wrong. And as soon as the elephant is done wrecking everything that is bad, their own true brilliance will be allowed to blossom. Or at least so they seem to think.
by cracoucax | 2025-07-04 16:57:05+00:00
I've always found strange all the talk about using cannabis to manage pain. I've smoked alot of weed, well before all those talks promoting THC for this.

It was my experience, and common knowledge in my circles at the time that THC made pain way, way worse, at least in resin form.

Probably simply because you'll tend to isolate things and focus on them very strongly when under the influence, it makes you notice pain more. I remember toking some days after a knee surgery and regretting badly having done it. So much pain I hadn't noticed...
by dragontamer | 2025-07-04 16:57:09+00:00
> Thinking of it as adversarial implies thinking in terms of algorithms that dynamically produce the worst-case rather than trying to just identify a static worst-case that is specific to one solution.

I think your statement makes sense for say, Quicksort or simple Binary Trees. In this case, the worst-case scenario is a "simple" reversed list. (ex: sorting [5 4 3 2 1] into [1 2 3 4 5]).

The worst-case insertion into an AVL-balanced tree however is a "Fibonacci Tree". AVL trees have a strange property where sorted lists [1 2 3 4 5 6 7] or [7 6 5 4 3 2 1] actually leads to optimal balancing. The sequence for worst case insertion into AVL Tree is something like [1 2 3 4 5 1.5 6] (1.5 to prevent the far-left tree from being perfectly balanced, and then 6 further unbalances the far-right branches)

Some algorithms have very non-intuitive worst-case scenarios.
by spacemadness | 2025-07-04 16:57:11+00:00
What’s interesting about this take, and I don’t disagree with the sentiment, is watching Apple get skewered by fumbling AI integration on the iPhone. That’s obviously of their own doing since they turned on their marketing machine on full blast and made promises. But some users seemed really disappointed in their lack of AI features compared to Android. I don’t think anyone would be disappointed for removal of Clippy.
by Procrastes | 2025-07-04 16:57:11+00:00
This captures something I've been struggling to describe, and "Whatever" is the perfect term for this.

Private Equity & Financialization: Whatever for business Flood the Zone & Deadcatting: "Whatever" for politics

It's what I think about when I hear all of the "AI is going to eliminate all the jobs." That's just a convenient cover story for "Tax laws changed so R&D isn't free money anymore, and we need to fire everyone."

When almost every drop of wealth is in the control of a tiny number of people, it's not surprising that the world turns into one big competition for ways to convince those people that you have a way for them to sop up the remaining thimbleful too.
by xyst | 2025-07-04 16:57:52+00:00
Very odd pipeline from rank and file tech employee to wellness and alternative medicine "influencer".

Ticks all the boxes:

- not a doctor

- not a physical therapist

- offering tips to solve your pain that somehow nobody could

- emphasizing a single "landmark" study with no other context

- results based off of personal experience

Guy is trying to become the RFK Jr of Aussie land.
by freshtake | 2025-07-04 16:57:54+00:00
I don't know, I think the point of the example is one of transparent engineering. VHS players could break for any number of reasons but the manufacturers used to put in effort to make them repairable. Obviously a much simpler piece of hardware, but the relative effort felt much greater.

When I used to use Google Wifi, it regularly struggled to connect or establish/maintain connectivity to the outside world, even though my modem was successfully connected. Similar to nest devices, you often have to power cycle them several times to get them into a good state
by toast0 | 2025-07-04 16:58:04+00:00
For established companies, I've always had a written employment agreement which discussed some terms common to all employees, including anti-moonlighting, usually ip assignment, etc. But I don't think I've ever had a contract that described what I going to do... maybe when I worked for a school district, but there my position title didn't actually match the work anyway; the position title was about being a tech helper in the classroom, but my position was at the district office with field work that only rarely had interaction with students.
by gjm11 | 2025-07-04 16:59:03+00:00
(Not GP, but:)

LLMs' initial training is specifically for token-prediction.

However, this doesn't mean that what they end up doing is specifically token-prediction (except in the sense that anything that generates textual output can be described as doing token-prediction). Nor does it mean that the only things they can do are tasks most naturally described in terms of token-prediction.

For instance, suppose you successfully train something to predict the next token given input of the form "[lengthy number] x [lengthy number] = ", where "successfully" means that the system ends up able to predict correctly almost all the time even when the numbers are ones it hasn't seen before. How could it do that? Only by, in some sense, "learning to multiply". (I haven't checked but my hazy recollection is that somewhere around GPT-3.5 or GPT-4 LLMs went from not being able to do this at all to being able to do it fairly well on moderate-sized numbers.)

Or suppose you successfully train something to complete things of the form "The SHA256 hash of [lengthy string] is "; again, a system that could do that correctly would have to have, in some sense, "learned to implement SHA256". (I am pretty sure that today's LLMs cannot do this, though of course they might have learned to call out to a tool that can.)

If you successfully train something to complete things of the form "One grammatical English sentence whose SHA256 hash is [value] is " then that thing has to have "learned to break SHA256". (I am very sure that today's LLMs cannot do this and I think it enormously unlikely that any ever will be able to.)

If you successfully train something to complete things of the form "The complete source code for a program written in idiomatic Rust that does [difficult task] is " then that thing has to have "learned to write code in Rust". (Today's LLMs can kinda do some tasks like this, and there are a lot of people yelling at one another about just how much they can do.)

That is: some token-prediction tasks can only be accomplished by doing things that we would not normally think of as being about token prediction. This is essentially the point of the "Turing test".

For the avoidance of doubt, I am making no particular claims (beyond the illustrative ones explicitly made above) about what if anything today's LLMs, or plausible near-future LLMs, or other further-future AI systems, are able to do that goes beyond what we would normally think of as token prediction. The point is that whether or not today's LLMs are "just stochastic parrots" in some useful sense, it doesn't follow from the fact that they are trained on token-prediction that that's all they are.
by globnomulous | 2025-07-04 16:59:10+00:00
Just a sidenote: GERD can lead to Barrett's Esophagus (precancerous changes in tissue), and erosive damage to the esophagus can accumulate over time and abruptly become life threatening. After decades of terrible GERD, my father nearly died from exactly such an undetected gastric bleed, losing 11/12 of his blood (which doctors replaced as it coursed out) before an emergency-medicine team finally found and sealed the rupture.

He almost certainly suffered minor brain damage during this episode, and later, after about a decade of taking anti-protonic medications for reflux, developed exactly the abnormally rapidly growing abdominal cancer that patients who take anti-protonics apparently develop at a higher rate than similar GERD patients who don't.

I don't mean to give medical advice. I can only describe what happened in my family (which has a heritable deformation in the esophagus, leading to severe GERD). Take it with a grain of salt (and an antacid) as what it is: an anecdote from some anonymous nonexpert on the internet.

Anyhow, good luck. I'm glad to know you're working actively on the problem, not ignoring it as my father did, and I hope you find some long-term relief and peace.
by anonzzzies | 2025-07-04 16:59:27+00:00
It was not a great remark indeed, however, most modern devops we meet (all seniors, big corps) know nothing lower level, often not much about Linux or what the coding etc. And it is always terrible: like LLMs, they like adding complexity: just put a nlb with an alb and private link with a gateway with a nlb with an alb! These guys (sorry, it is generally guys) believe they are experts but they are terrible. Get paid as experts though.

You don't have to know everything but BASIC understanding about the what is underneath would be nice.
by hinkley | 2025-07-04 16:59:52+00:00
There is not. I worked on a code signing project, and there was this guy who I as already warned had a bit of Dunning Kruger going on, but would later discover was also a bit of an ineffectual bully as well, when he got into an argument with both me and a customer.

Not long after the first milestone of a project with lots of milestones he announced he intended to have me to generate ‘real’ keys for the project and send him the key pairs over Outlook Encryption. For a project with public safety concerns written all over it, and would later have me pick multiple Hardware Security Modules for different steps of a multi-signature chaining process.

He tried to get me into trouble for telling him, politely, that he could fuck right off. And then had to talk to everyone he tried to tattle to about why he was a dumbass and that we were at least a year (turned out to be three) before we needed “real” keys - we were actually about four months from even needing fake keys for integration testing, let alone real keys. And I was be writing up runbooks for doing that rather than doing it for people.

The thing I would soon discover about signing keys is that everyone thinks they are a magic incantation of math. They’re just math. The magic is not inside the box, the magic is the box. It’s like a clean room: It’s a room full of nothing. What makes it special is all the work you do trying to prevent something from happening to it.

I stayed on that project almost a year past where there was any code they needed me to write (except for one bad bug I would find in my code a few months later), but they still needed me to teach them behavior, to lock in that clean room mindset.
by ineedasername | 2025-07-04 17:00:36+00:00
To the extent this argument holds, it then fails for something like writing code, as well as any visual art style when works are created on a computer if their original aesthetic derived from the material-world limitations of tools and materials under which it arose: no human skill, no countless hours of labor has gone in to producing digital works in styles or colors where their perceived beauty was rooted to the rarity of seeing, ever in one’s life, something like the shade of blue derived from lapis lazuli. Now? Any child with a screen can produce it.
by kmstout | 2025-07-04 17:00:56+00:00
Data point: A few weeks ago, I spent some time shuttling text between one of the Llama models (have to check which one) and Dunnet, the text adventure packaged with Emacs. Over several trials, the Llama never realized that it needed to dig where the ground "seems very soft." It never got the CPU card, then it became confused looking around the building for clues about how to start the VAX. At one point it lost track of the building layout and got stuck oscillating between the mail room and the computer room.
Show HN: ClassroomFeed – Weekly AI Summaries of Your Google Classroom
by xvpdev | 2025-07-04 17:01:10+00:00
What it does: ClassroomFeed connects to your Google Classroom and sends you an AI-generated weekly email summarizing:

upcoming assignments

completed work

productivity patterns and streaks

motivational prompts to reflect and plan ahead

It’s like a weekly “check-in” powered by GPT, tailored to your school data.

Who it’s for: Students (especially high school / IB / AP) who use Google Classroom and feel overwhelmed by scattered due dates. Also potentially useful for parents, counselors, or teachers who want passive insight into student progress.

Why I built it: As an IB student, I constantly missed due dates because Google Classroom has no unified weekly view. I built this to make my academic life less chaotic and realized it could help others too.

Link: https://classroomfeed.com

Tech stack:

Frontend: Next.js, Tailwind

Backend: Node.js, Firebase, GPT-4 API

Auth: Google OAuth (Classroom API)

Emails: Resend

Hosting: Vercel, Render

Payments: Stripe (free for now, monetization later)

Looking for:

Feedback on messaging + onboarding

Bugs, UI/UX critiques

Beta testers (it’s working in production now)

Suggestions on what else students/teachers would want from a weekly school summary

Thanks in advance, I'm happy to answer any questions in the comments.
by jokethrowaway | 2025-07-04 17:01:34+00:00
That's what happens when you hire bad contractors. There are so many bad contractors and selection bar for contractors is much lower compared to employees.

If you keep your standards high when hiring contractors you'll get the same level of quality you have with employees. Contractor agencies are also pretty happy to have long lasting clients (I have been with my current clients respectively for: 4 years, 3 years, 1 years and 1 month).
by cherryteastain | 2025-07-04 17:02:08+00:00
> THE GREATEST IMPROVEMENTS in the productive powers of labour, and the greater part of the skill, dexterity, and judgment, with which it is anywhere directed, or applied, seem to have been the effects of the division of labour.

> To take an example, therefore, from a very trifling manufacture, but one in which the division of labour has been very often taken notice of, the trade of a pin-maker...a workman not educated to this business...could scarce, perhaps..make one pin in a day, and certainly could not make twenty. I have seen a small manufactory...where ten men only were employed...Those ten persons, therefore, could make among them upwards of forty-eight thousand pins in a day.

- An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith, 1776
by hnlmorg | 2025-07-04 17:02:34+00:00
I’m not going to deny that memory safety bugs are completely avoidable in C. However if the best example in tmux you can find is a bug that was patched promptly 5 years ago. That that’s does also say something favourable about tmux as well.

As I said elsewhere, if memory safety is a major concern then there are Rust multiplexers too. But there’s plenty more lower hanging fruit to worry about before tmux.
by al_borland | 2025-07-04 17:03:41+00:00
I’ve been thinking about moving from SSDs for my NAS to solid state. The drive are so loud, all the time, it’s very annoying.

My first experience with these cheap mini PCs was with a Beelink and it was very positive and makes me question the longevity of the hardware. For a NAS, that’s important to me.
by jacob2161 | 2025-07-04 17:04:04+00:00
In the post I also showed results for a little `gohttpd` program running the CGI program:

https://github.com/Jacob2161/cgi-bin/blob/main/gohttpd/main....

See as "Benchmarking (writes|reads) using Go net/http"

It was faster but not by very much. Running CGI programs is just forking processes, so Apache's forking model works just about as well as anything else.
by bee_rider | 2025-07-04 17:04:13+00:00
I think designing the EE and computer engineering curriculum is pretty tough. Because:

* the EE’s need to learn matlab or numpy, to use as a tool

* so do the computer engineering students, probably

* the computer engineering students also need to learn low level stuff, because they might reasonably end up writing drivers or embedded code

* separating out what should be in which classes is kind of tricky; keeping in mind that the students don’t necessarily know anything about programming at all, you probably need some kind of “intro to the general idea of programming” class

* realistically when they start the program they don’t know much about what the jobs look like, so it is good if they are able to switch paths, for the first couple years

* realistically a lot of people just want to get a stem degree and then go be a programmer anyway
by christopher8827 | 2025-07-04 17:04:26+00:00
SEEKING WORK | REMOTE | Worldwide timezones - Currently in Sydney but also EU-based | Willing to travel in Australia / EU

Hi, I am Chris. I am an Australia but I have an EU work visa. I have 6+ years as a Full Stack Software Developer. I am experienced in the ReactJS and React Native tech Stack, and have developed API endpoints in Ruby on Rails. I have worked with companies such as Sportsbet, AIA Australia and Optus.

I have experience with AI / Machine Learning, where in my most recent project I was collaborating with the Queensland Cancer Council to produce a research paper (still in peer review) on breast cancer and Interpretable Machine Learning.

Tech Stack: Python (Pandas, Pytorch, Matplotlib), Typescript/Javascript, OpenAi / Antropic / Openrouter APIs, ReactJS/React Native, Redux, Ruby on Rails, NodeJS, Elixir/Phoenix, Coolify, AWS/Google Cloud.

Available: Immediate

Website: https://www.christopheragnus.com

I can be contacted via email at infinitycoin9 [at] gmail.com
by chasd00 | 2025-07-04 17:04:50+00:00
man, i couldn't hit the upvote button hard enough. That is a very cool breakout, thank you for the link. I'm already thinkking about that breakout connected to the 16 channel PWM breakout I already have. Now i can play around with servos, and many other things, right from my laptop with all my usual build tools instead of having to power up my pi zero and connect over ssh first. I love Adafruit, they do so many cool things.
by throw0101d | 2025-07-04 17:05:12+00:00
> Coyotes are tiny critters. Surely they don’t attack humans?

Perhaps adult humans are less likely, but child humans the risk could be higher as a coyote may think they can 'take' them; from a few days ago:

* https://globalnews.ca/news/11267424/nobelton-coyote-attack/
by nsingh2 | 2025-07-04 17:05:20+00:00
> If this was such an obvious slam dunk on how to win the presidency, why didn't the Dems come up with such a candidate?

The Democratic party in it's current state is ineffective & incompetent in many ways.

> Managing to become president twice is insufficient evidence?

Yes. You are ignoring the damage he is doing now, which is direct evidence against him being a good “systems thinker”
by norir | 2025-07-04 17:05:30+00:00
It deeply bothers me that the zig team/community has been aggressively marketing this language while constantly making breaking changes without even providing migration tools. This is user hostile behavior. They are creating extra work for downstream users with minimal gain.

Let's take this change as an example. If I already wrote a program that used the old apis and meets my needs what is the benefit of this change for me? Now I have to go back and rewrite my old code and I might introduce a new bug in the migration, especially if I don't understand all of the nuance in the difference between the apis. Even if I agree that the new apis are better, the cost of migration might outweigh the benefits, but I am forced in to the migration or forking the compiler, which both might be bad choices for me.

It is not necessary to do this. They could, for example, have versioned stdlib and then maybe all I need to is pin my stdlib version. One complaint is that having multiple standard libraries causes more maintenance burden, but why should that be the primary concern? What is the cost to the maintainer vs. the cost to the community. If you make 1000 users spend an hour migrating their code, are you really going to save 1000 hours of maintenance burden?

Moreover, if the zig team wrote code with the assumption that they can never get rid of it, perhaps they wouldn't make so many design mistakes that all of these breaking changes become inevitable.

If I wrote a program in zig, I would feel obligated to also learn how to bootstrap it so that I wouldn't be subject to unwanted breaking changes. But then I see that bootstrapping involves some bizarre wasm hack instead of the tried and true bootstrapping approach of writing a simple first pass compiler in c (or some other language) and I am reminded again why I would never choose this language.
by ck2 | 2025-07-04 17:05:53+00:00
All the so-called "guardrails" are long gone now

It's just down to a handful of people able to get the Tyrant King to sign off on anything they put in front of him

The scariest perspective is this is only 150 days in.

So imagine what happens 150 weeks later when all bets are off and "sure why not who would stop us" kicks in.

I am truly morbidly curious what happens to a country when 15+ million people disappear in just four years though.
by jauntywundrkind | 2025-07-04 17:06:03+00:00
Very much agreed. WASI feels like such a code concern, but there's so much more to manage. K8s is such an excellent extensible management layer, that I fully expect to endure & power Wasm.

Wasmcloud for example already does this very well.

Had some similar comments in my inordinately long post in this submission, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44460641
by dwood_dev | 2025-07-04 17:06:42+00:00
The CPU bottleneck would be resolved by the Pentium Gold 8505, but it still has the same 9 lanes of PCIe 3.0.

I only came across the existence of this CPU a few months ago, it is Nearly the same price class as a N100, but has a full Alder Lake P-Core in addition. It is a shame it seems to only be available in six port routers, then again, that is probably a pretty optimal application for it.
by wk_end | 2025-07-04 17:07:05+00:00
Can you expand on what makes SML better, in your eyes, than OCaml?

IMO: it's certainly "simpler" and "cleaner" (although it's been a while but IIRC the treatment of things like equality and arithmetic is hacky in its own way), which I think causes some people to prefer SML over aesthetics, but TBH I feel like many of OCaml's features missing in SML are quite useful. You mentioned applicative functors, but there's also things like labelled arguments, polymorphic variants, GADTs, even the much-maligned object system that have their place. Is there anything SML really brings to the table besides the omission of features like this?
by ferguess_k | 2025-07-04 17:07:40+00:00
I think it's more of picking the right problem than getting the right skills. If you have to write a lot of business logic in the code, as a FE or BE or DE or whatever, I believe you will never acquire "good taste" in programming because you are fighting against the culture of "ASAP", "Fast iteration", etc.

You should pick system programming jobs, preferably in a good team with a good manager.
by kibwen | 2025-07-04 17:07:48+00:00
It sounds like you're on the west coast, where coyotes are tiny. East coast coyotes are much larger, on the order of a good-sized dog.

That said, I welcome coyotes in urban spaces, and have admired from afar the few bold urban coyotes I've come across. Humans need reminders that they're a part of nature and not apart from nature, especially in the city. In terms of actual danger, coyotes kill approximately infinity times fewer people than cars do, so let's focus infinity times more energy on solving that problem first.