MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by sillyfluke | 2025-07-31 14:15:52+00:00
>Do you think it likely Hamas support has declined since 2006?

Ah yes, why have any elections in any country for the next century when you can just have a couple of randos like you and I on the internet call those elections for the next 20 years for those hapless pesky fuckers based on our horseshit hunches and save everyone the trouble. What an elegant solution.

You'd think that autocratic Hamas government on the ground in Gaza would be as confident as you and have an election just for show if they thought they could break the 50% threshold they couldn't even manage to break in 2006. Who would give up free PR like that? Well I guess someone who couldn't guarentee that'd do better the next time, no?

64% of the current Gaza population wasn't even born at all or at most under the age of 5 in the last election (ages 0-24 now) . Of the remaining 36% of the current Gaza population at least half were under the age of 18 in 2006 (ie between the ages of 24-38). So less than 20% of the current population was eligible to vote in 2006. Of that 20%, only 44%% voted for Hamas, so like 10 percent of the current population of Gaza actually voted for Hamas in an election bygones ago. But hey, I guess you're saying it's obvious that any child who was subjected to two decades of occupation in an apartheid state would naturally vote for terrorists to free themselves from subjugation. So let's go with your gut cause fuck it, those people only live once.
by 0_____0 | 2025-07-31 14:16:01+00:00
PWM itself is fine!!! I have no idea why they set the PWM frequency so low. Even setting it to something like incredibly low like 1kHz would have solved the problem. In electronics land you almost have to try to get frequencies that low out of e.g. a microcontroller - you need a very high clock divide ratio to get a timer PWM period that long.

I think they have actually done so, because I am noticing fewer low-frequency taillights these days.
by johnisgood | 2025-07-31 14:16:14+00:00
And it is not limited to crypto at all.

> An advance-fee scam is a form of fraud and is a common scam. The scam works by promising the victim a large sum of money in return for a small upfront payment, which the fraudster claims will be used to obtain the large sum.

I have encountered it many times during my life, long before crypto was a thing.
by olddustytrail | 2025-07-31 14:16:17+00:00
I can't speak to a US perspective but in the UK and some EU countries I've experienced, firing someone is incredibly simple.

In fact every difficulty I've seen is simply that someone didn't follow the clearly defined procedure.

It's literally written out for you. You don't have to think or care how you feel, just follow the process and you're done. If the process says someone should stay then you got something wrong. Simple as that.
by mr_wiglaf | 2025-07-31 14:17:17+00:00
The tricky thing is you get to define the state. So if the "state" is the current word _and_ the previous 10 it is still "memoryless". So an LLM's context window is the state. It doesn't matter whether _we_ see parts of the state as called history, the markov chain doesn't care (they are all just different features).

Edit: I could be missing important nuance that other people are pointing out in this thread!
by dv_dt | 2025-07-31 14:17:43+00:00
I have been seeing a few DJ with livestreams composing with Strudel. It's a live web repl programming based approach. I don't think it necessarily scales to professional use, but it's a reasonable intro to the core concepts.

I've gone through the tutorial and it was honestly the most fun I've had on the web in a while.

https://strudel.cc/workshop/getting-started/
by Wilder7977 | 2025-07-31 14:17:52+00:00
I find this take overly optimistic. First, it's bases on the assumption that the training will stop, and that energy will be available for other, more useful, purposes. This is not guarantees. Besides this, it completely disregards the fact that today, tomorrow, energy will be utilized. We will keep emitting co2 for sure, and maybe, in the future, this will cause a surplus of energy? It's a bet I wouldn't take, even because LLMs need lots of energy to run as well as for training.

But in any case, I wouldn't want Microsoft, Google, Amazon and OpenAI to be the ones owning the energetic infrastructure in the future, and if we realize, collectively, that building renewable sources is what er need, we should simply tax them and use that wealth to build collective resources.
by dvrp | 2025-07-31 14:17:56+00:00
For Dang or HN-mods:

I noticed that the URL for this submission is wrong: I tried to submit the correct URL (https://www.krea.ai/blog/flux-krea-open-source-release) but, for some reason, the submission gets flagged as duplicated and then I can only find this item which has a URL to our old blog post.

In the mean time, I'll setup a server-side redirect from the old blog post to our new one, but it would be nice to fix the link and I don't think I can do it on my side.
by JoeDaDude | 2025-07-31 14:18:14+00:00
"Computer Music" is a very broad term (no surprises here) so, like many here, I can point out topics that are not covered. In particular, computer music (aka algorithmic) composition [1], or very recent AI techniques like the Google seq2seq example at [2], or the (unpublished, but probably a form of generative adversarial networks) techniques used by SunoAI and Udio.

[1]. https://ccrma.stanford.edu/~blackrse/algorithm.html

[2]. https://arxiv.org/pdf/2301.11325
by ashutosh-mishra | 2025-07-31 14:18:18+00:00
The real mindfuck is that everything that made you successful as an IC - being the person with answers, moving fast, shipping stuff - can actually make you a worse manager if you're not careful.

Your new job is to make other people successful, which sometimes means slowing down, asking questions instead of giving answers, and being okay with solutions that aren't exactly what you would have built.
by throwaway3646 | 2025-07-31 14:19:07+00:00
Can confirm, this is exactly what happened. They demand ridiculous back payments unless you buy multiple-year licenses. It would be trivial for them to require an account to use the main channel, but they deliberately make it easy to accidentally use it. If you have to use it, make sure to DNS block anaconda.com (.org seems to be fine), but even better, just avoid them like the plague.
by appreciatorBus | 2025-07-31 14:19:11+00:00
It’s funny that this is being portrayed as example of abundance being stymied.

This is more about abundance of cars, or abundance of car subsidy in the form of free land and infra. Deregulation of cars and car infra while maintaining the stranglehold on non vehicle land uses.

In a Seattle where land use had actually been reformed, no landowner, public or private, would choose a glorified parking lot as a good use of land. They would build something more important to the public - as evidenced by prices - such as housing or office or some other structure.
by Workaccount2 | 2025-07-31 14:19:28+00:00
I just want to point something out that has irked me since it happened, and continues to fuel a mythos to this day.

Nancy Pelosi and the infamous insider trading of Nvidia.

A few weeks before the CHIPS act passed congress in July 2022, Nancy Pelosi made a large purchase of Nvidia shares. This made headlines everywhere as obviously she was going to pass the CHIPS act, obviously Nvidia stands to benefit, so of course she loaded up knowing these things.

But the media, who will readily obscure any nuance that can kill a story, only mentioned that she executed call options to purchase nvidia shares. Which to 99% of the public is technical babble that is ignored.

But what actually happened? Well Pelosi, looking at her trading history, likes to buy deep ITM LEAP calls and hold them to expiry. This means in the simplest terms, that she signs a contract 1yr+ before a date, where she gives herself the option (hence the name) to purchase a set number of shares at a set price. So when Nancy purchased Nvidia shares in June 2022, she had set the contract in motion to do that at least a year prior.

But even worse for the inflammatory story, because she purchased that option over a year prior, and Nvidia was down ~15% in the last year (remember 2022 was a bad year for stocks), she actually would have lost money on the trade.

So here we have the foundational story that set this whole thing is motion, which is based on public ignorance of how stocks and options work, where Pelosi was vilified for a trade she lost money on, because the execution date of a contract she signed at least a year prior happened to be within a few weeks of the CHIPS act.
by jodrellblank | 2025-07-31 14:19:31+00:00
I sighed when I read your comment, a comment which is exemplary of what Casey Muratori was ranting against - casual lazy dismissal of the idea that software can be faster, based on misunderstanding and lack of knowledge and/or interest, and throwing out the first objection that comes to mind as if it's an impassable obstacle. There were no bazillion features that made WinTerm slow over the years because Windows Terminal was a new product for Windows 10, released in 2019.[1]. There were piles of problems in Windows Terminal, Casey calls out that it didn't render Right-to-Left Arabic combining glyphs and it wasn't a perfect highly polished program from the outset. And it was an optional download, Fortune 500s wouldn't run it if they didn't want to.

RefTerm was explicitly not a production quality terminal and was not intended to be a replacement for Windows Terminal. RefTerm was a lower bound for performance of an untuned single-thread terminal. RefTerm was a proof of concept that if Microsoft had spent money and engineering skill on performance they could have profiled and used fancy algorithms and shortcuts and reimplemented slow Windows APIs with faster local ones, used threading, and improved on RefTerm's performance. A proof that "significantly faster terminals are unrealistic" is not true, that all the casual dismissals of why it's impossible are not the reasons for slowness, and that 10x better is an easily achievable floor, not a distant unreachable ceiling.

As a result of Casey's public shaming, Windows Terminal developers did improve performance.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Terminal
by gonzalohm | 2025-07-31 14:19:39+00:00
For people asking who uses Anaconda nowadays.

I work with less technical users and the problem with UV is that the installation instructions are slightly more complicated.

For users that just want conda to download python + a bunch of packages and won't ever bother to create environments, anaconda will always be superior.

Now, if UV bundles with a "default python version" with an installer, that may change things.
Ask HN: State of the art with local LLMs and agents
by prmph | 2025-07-31 14:19:43+00:00
I like Claude Code for what it is, but I want an agentic coding setup that provides much stronger security and privacy guarantees.

What is the state of the art right now regarding running local LLMS and connecting local agents to them?

Which models are suitable and good, what hardware (at a minimum) and software are required, and which open source agents are good to drive those models?
by pansa2 | 2025-07-31 14:20:04+00:00
PyPy deserves much more credit (and much wider use) than it gets. The underperformance of the Faster CPython project [0] shows how difficult it is to optimize a Python implementation, and highlights just how impressive PyPy really is.

[0] The article says "Python has gotten nearly 50% faster in less than four years", but the original goal was a 5x speedup in the same timeframe [https://github.com/markshannon/faster-cpython/blob/master/pl...].
by 999900000999 | 2025-07-31 14:20:10+00:00
I absolutely love this.

I installed this last night on one of my cheaper computers. Ran gemma3:4b on a 16GB Ram laptop, I know HN loves specifics, so it's this exact computer ( with an upgraded 2 TB SSD).

ASUS - Vivobook S 14 - 14" OLED Laptop - Copilot+ PC - Intel Core Ultra 5 - 16GB Memory - 512GB SSD - Neutral Black

It's a bit slower than o4-mini and probably not as smart, but I feel more secure in asking for a resume review. The GUI really makes pasting in text significantly easier. Yeah I know I could just use the cli app and postman previously, but I didn't want to set that up.
by throwaway91743 | 2025-07-31 14:20:12+00:00
This was a great read! Saving this to re-read in the future.

One question I have though is what are you supposed to do if as a new manager you aren't allowed to... well, do your job? I haven't been able to find a lot of resources on what to do in such a situation.

I'm a new engineering manager (~8 months in) and my boss isn't letting me hire full-time devs to replace consultants whenever they leave or their contracts are up and I am not allowed to replace any developers who leave either due to a company-wide hiring freeze. I have lost 4 of my most senior engineers in the last 6 months since I can't replace the consultants or hire anyone new. I'm down to 2 senior devs on my team when we used to have 6, with the same amount of work. They have also implemented mandatory return to office clearly frustrating my team. In addition, I am not allowed to promote any of my team members to try and encourage them to stay.

The heck am I even supposed to do? What is the point of being an EM if you quite literally are not allowed to do your job? I can't hire, I can't promote people, and I need to continue delivering at the same capacity with a significantly scaled-down team. My boss just tells me to try my best to encourage the team through this tough time.

I haven't found any resources on how to handle this kind of situation as a new EM. If I knew this is what was in store for me I would have never taken the job.
by thesuperbigfrog | 2025-07-31 14:20:33+00:00
This is a poor analogy.

Orchestras play music that was written and arranged by a composer. The musicians in the orchestra do not generate music solely based on the pieces they have studied and direction from the conductor. They play the music written by the composer with the conductor acting as a leader to synchronize and "flavor" the performance.

There is no equivalent to a musical score in prompting an LLM to generate something. The musical score is exactly what music should be played with the specific how it should be played being left to the style and taste of the musicians and conductor. It is "execution" or "exercise" of the musical score. Two different orchestras can play "Eine kleine Nachtmusik" and the results will be similar enough for listeners to recognize that it is the same music. The musical score guides the execution so that the resulting performance is mostly deterministic.

Prompt engineering and LLM generation are an imprecise approximation of what is wanted. Results from similar or even identical prompts will vary considerably depending on the LLM doing the generation, each LLM's respective training dataset, and what probability wickets are hit during the generation process. The generated results lack the determinism that the musical score provides an orchestra.
by bombcar | 2025-07-31 14:21:00+00:00
A very large subset of the population bases their commute and travel path based on best time. If using the stop sign once in 1995 was faster than the stoplight then they will always use the stop sign even if it’s almost always slower. These are the groups of people who always seem to be late.

Other groups of people are incredibly pessimistic and always take the least bad route.
by ACCount36 | 2025-07-31 14:21:15+00:00
No, training a smaller model off a more capable larger model (or an ensemble of models) is the "usual" distillation.

"Self-distillation" refers to distilling from a model into a copy of itself. Which is of limited use - unless you can steer the teacher, and want the student to internalize that steering.

The reason for doing self-distillation here is that we have both access to a richer representation (logit stream), and want to capture a richer behavior - not the answers themselves, but better reasoning techniques that are downstream from better prompts.
by afarah1 | 2025-07-31 14:21:28+00:00
Same for any legislation piece.

A law that costs 100M people $1 and benefits 100 people with $1M.

Would be, as you noted, costly to oppose, not worth the $1 nor the time.

And at the same time, very profitable for the 100 to spend hundreds of thousands and great effort lobbying for.

It's just the power structure of any representative legislature.

"In vain do we fly to the many"...
by chimeracoder | 2025-07-31 14:21:29+00:00
> Strange. I remember reading nothing but complaints about Pocket when they bought and integrated it. I guess it grew on people.

They bought Pocket to assuage complaints from people that they were "selling out" by including an optional button in Firefox (which never even loaded any code until it was clicked) that allowed you to set up an integration with your Pocket account and send articles there. They were clear that no data was sent to a third party unless you explicitly clicked it and went through the steps to set it up.

Despite that, purists were unhappy that Firefox was doing literally anything at all with a third party, so Mozilla decided to buy Firefox in an attempt to put those complaints to rest, since it would no longer be a third party.

In the end, those purists didn't stop complaining - they just moved on to different complaints. If you're curious to see for yourself, you can look up the conversations on HN and cross-reference the usernames against other topics involving OSS purism and Firefox.

In the end, everyone lost: longtime Pocket users lost a product that they had enjoyed because it got acquired by a company that never really had an active interest in the product itself, Firefox lost because of the negative PR which contributes to their declining market share, and Mozilla lost because of the massive waste of money this was.
by iberator | 2025-07-31 14:22:11+00:00
Back in 2022 it worked fine with literally all modules except some ssh, ssl and C based modules.

With a little bit of tinkering (multiprocessing, choosing the right libraries written strictly in python, PyPy plus a lot of memory) I was able to optimize some workflows going from 24h to just 17 minutes :) Good times...

It felt like magic.
by IncreasePosts | 2025-07-31 14:22:14+00:00
Getting a partner and splitting many responsibilities with them at the "cost" of spending time with them is probably a net gain of free time. Kids are nothing like that.

At least, if you want to be present in your kids lives. If you want to have kids and just see them develop around you and attend a soccer game or recital every now and then, kids aren't a big time sink either.
by TheDong | 2025-07-31 14:22:24+00:00
From the golang github org in non-toy code:

1. https://github.com/golang/tools/blob/f7d99c1a286d6ec8bd4516a...

2. https://github.com/golang/sync/blob/7fad2c9213e0821bd78435a9...

There are dozens and dozens throughout the stdlib and other popular go code.

The singleflight case is quite common, if you have:

mu.Lock() if something() { mu.Unlock() moreWorkThatDoesntWantMutex() return } mu.Unlock()

most gophers use manual lock/unlocks to be able to unlock early in an 'if' before a 'return', and that comes up often enough that it really does happen.

I see manual lock/unlock all the time, and semi-regularly run into deadlocks caused by it. Maybe you don't use any third-party open source libraries, in which case, good for you congrats.
by rdm_blackhole | 2025-07-31 14:22:34+00:00
Let's put it this way, if the Russians get my ID and a picture of my face and know my kinks and my religious preferences what is the worst that can happen?

Now, if my government knows everything there is about me and one day decides to crack down on dissidents or hand them out to another foreign power as it was done in WW2 with the Jews in the Netherlands? Well, that is on another level.

We have be down this road before. It never ends well.

Maybe it's been too long and people forget. My grandparents lived through WW2, from what they told me, the capacity for humans to inflict pain and suffering on other humans knows no bounds.
by dmesg | 2025-07-31 14:22:36+00:00
Right sorry the topic is very exhausting and I extrapolated my frustration, assuming you are interested, it came back in 2015 and was canned again in 2019: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vorratsdatenspeicherung_in_Deu...

I am tired of Germany needing constant chemos because unconstitutional laws grow back. They pass faster into action, than you can excise them in Karlsruhe. The mechanism for Germany to self-heal is very very slow. This is an imbalance that makes it hard to fight such laws. They change a miniscule detail and it can pass a 3rd and 4th time.
by fuzzfactor | 2025-07-31 14:22:42+00:00
Well written and it's more than just the author's point of view being emphasized.

It's normal for someone who's taken a position fully in favor of "science" to show their bias against what they see as the most eminent threats. There's no attempt here to hide the bias, in fact there's a fairly respectable attempt to explain the reason for the bias which you don't always get.

Any anti-science crusaders from their point of view are not as sensible when they don't explain their bias either. Nobody expects it to be zero bias so when an opinionated person owns up to it this is just a little something that could lead back to better understanding.

You want to be able to compromise on the roots of disagreement, rather than mindless name-calling if you want to recover one of the most sorely-missed elements of greatness.

Naturally what brought this to mind is that the whole time almost nobody is paying any attention to the little detail where sliced bread has never been the best bread anyway :\
Ask HN: Who is building the best "AI agent" user experiences?
by jmdelatorre | 2025-07-31 14:22:53+00:00
I'm building a product that needs an AI agent to do work for the user, not just chat with them. I'm looking for the best examples of startups or companies that are getting the agentic UX right.

For example the Agent will: Proactively do text recommendations, alert me when a certain threshold meets, help finish small tedious tasks (that could involve calling other services) etc.

What are the best examples (B2B or B2C) you've seen? What specifically makes their UI/UX for delegation and trust work so well?

Any good YC Startup out there getting this right that I can use as an inspiration?
by Wiretrip | 2025-07-31 14:23:19+00:00
Yes but the main thrust of his criticism is the fragility of the whole 'AI' stack, where every part of the stack is unprofitable, unstable and inter-reliant - if any one of those parts goes tits up - everybody else goes with them.

Also, a lot of AI 'users' arrive, search for an actual use case, find none, and then move on.
by reactordev | 2025-07-31 14:23:22+00:00
What was once science fiction is bound to become science fact (or at least proven it can never be done).

Hollywood has gotten hate mail since the 70s for their lack of science research in movies and shows. The big blockbuster hits actually spent money to get the science “plausible”.

Sidney Perkowitz has a book called Hollywood Science [0] that goes into detail into more than 100 movies, worth a read.

[0] https://cup.columbia.edu/book/hollywood-science/978023114280...