MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by adastra22 | 2025-08-29 21:32:53+00:00
Unfortunately confidentiality prevents me from doing so—this was for work. I know it is something new that hasn’t been done before because we’re operating in a very niche scientific field where everyone knows everyone and one person (me, or the members of my team) can be up to speed on what everyone else is doing.

It’s happened now that a couple of times it pops out novel results. In computational chemistry, machine learned potentials trained with transformer models have already resulted in publishable new chemistry. Those papers are t out yet, but expect them within a year.
by jiggawatts | 2025-08-29 21:33:33+00:00
I know this sounds like a nitpick, but the first thing I noticed when opening the site is the use of gibberish date order where the day, month, and year parts are out of order.[1]

This doesn't just cause confusion, it's also hard to sort. To confirm my suspicion of sloppy coding, I tried to sort the date column and to my surprise I got this madness:

1/31/2025 2/29/2024 2/29/2024 4/28/2024 3/27/2024 9/27/2023

Which is sorting by the day column -- the bit in the middle -- instead of the year!

That's just... special.

[1] I hear some incredibly backwards places like Liberia that also haven't adopted metric insist on using it into the present day, but the rest of the civilised world has moved on.
by evo | 2025-08-29 21:33:58+00:00
Another way I like to think about this is finding 'closeable' contexts to work in; that is, abstractions that are compact and logically consistent enough that you can close them out and take them on their external interface without always knowing the inner details. Metaphorically, your system can be a bunch of closed boxes that you can then treat as boxes, rather than a bunch of open boxes whose contents are spilling out and into each other. Think 'shipping containers' instead of longshoremen throwing loose cargo into your boat.

If you can do this regularly, you can keep the _effective_ cognitive size of the system small even as each closed box might be quite complex internally.
by alphazard | 2025-08-29 21:33:58+00:00
Simplicity (meaning the inverse of complexity) is usually the most important factor when considering two possible ways of doing something with software. And this is because it has to be conceived of, pitched to, agreed upon, built, and maintained by humans.

Unfortunately, simplicity is complicated. The median engineer in industry is not a reliable judge of which of two designs is less complex.

Further, "simplicity" as an argument has become something people can parrot. So now it's a knee-jerk fallback when a coworker challenges them about the approach they are taking. They quickly say "This is simpler" in response to a much longer, more sincere, and more correct argument. Ideally the team leader would help suss out what's going on, but increasingly the team lead is a less than competent manager, and simplicity is too complicated a topic for them to give a reliable signal. They prefer not to ruffle feathers and let whoever is doing the work make the call; the team bears the complexity.
by malux85 | 2025-08-29 21:34:47+00:00
Demonstration of capability will get you hired, capability comes only through practice.

I built a hobby system for anonymously monitoring BitTorrent by scraping the DHT, in doing this, I learned how to build a little cluster, how to handle 30,000 writes a second (which I used Cassandra for - this was new to me at the time) then build simple analytics on it to measure demand for different media.

Then my interview was just talking about this system, how the data flowed, where it can be improved, how is redundancy handled, the system consisted of about 10 different microservices so I pulled the code up for each one and I showed them.

Interested in astronomy? Build a system to track every star/comet. Interested in weather? Do SOTA predictions, interested in geography? Process the open source global gravity maps, interested in trading? Build a data aggregator for a niche.

It doesn’t really matter that whatever you build “is the best in the world or not” - the fact that you build something, practiced scaling it with whatever limited resources you have, were disciplined to take it to completion, and didn’t get stuck down some rabbit hole endlessly re-architecting stuff that doesn’t matter, this is what they’re looking for - good judgement, discipline, experience.

Also attitude is important, like really, really important - some cynical ranter is not going to get hired over the “that’s cool I can do that!” person, even if the cynical ranter has greater engineering skills, genuine enthusiasm and genuine curiosity is infectious.
by jacquesm | 2025-08-29 21:34:49+00:00
I don't think that should be enough.

What is really amazing is that even knowing - as a species - all of our history we manage to commit the same faults over and over again.

There are always going to be people waiting in the wings that can't wait to become the next installment of campguards, gas chamber operators and gestapo. It is unbelievable to me, and have a hard time coming to terms with it because we should be better than this by now. But no, we'll just bang our heads against the rock one more time see if the outcome is different this time around. It's collective insanity on a massive scale.
by howdyhowdy123 | 2025-08-29 21:35:35+00:00
Hehehe. I have talked to John Carmack a few times. He's super harsh and has zero filter or social niceties (Azperger's level, not that he is, but just sayin'). If you are not used to it or understand where it's coming from, it can be quite a shock. Or at least he was, many years ago. Maybe he's changed.
by int_19h | 2025-08-29 21:35:53+00:00
Indeed, and if you ask the sergeants they can tell plenty of modern horror stories.

If anything, what the military needs is a hammer-fired DA handgun with a manual safety. Just so that discharging it would take considerable and intentional effort. If I remember correctly, FN FNX was in the running in that competition, and would probably be just the perfect gun for this (it has a combination safety/decocker, and unlike many other similar arrangements you can put it on safe after decocking).
by 1718627440 | 2025-08-29 21:36:35+00:00
Sadly I agree with you. But I think society can't work if this is accepted. I think you need some amount of intrinsic orientation, because if this is forced then it leads to even more evil.

My mother tongue (German) has a term (Herzensbildung) that I would like to use here, but I don't know a good english translation. The dictionary gives me "nobleness of heart", but I don't think this captures it, because it is about the education to lead to this, not a final state. Literally it means "education of heart". But this is not about morale, good and evil (that's Gewissensbildung). It's about being educated to want things and to care about them.

When looking at past times, it is often assumed that they were as focused on advantage as much as we are, but I don't think that's true, and I think loosing this is also part of the sickness of "the West".
by danudey | 2025-08-29 21:36:46+00:00
OpenAI hitting your static, cached pages too hard and costing you terabytes of extra bandwidth that you have to pay for (both in bandwidth itself and data transfer fees) isn't solved by caching.

The post you're replying to points out that, at a certain scale, even caching things in-memory can cause your system to fall over when a user agent (e.g. AI scraper bots) are behaving like bad actors, ignoring robots.txt, and fetching every URL twenty times a day while completely ignoring cache headers/last modified/etc.

Your points were all valid when we were dealing with either "legitimate users", "legitimate good-faith bots", and "bad actors", but now the AI companies' need for massive amounts of up-to-the-minute content at all costs means that we have to add "legitimate bad-faith bots" to the mix.

> Agent attestation doesn't solve volumetric attacks (those need the DDoS protection they already sell, no new proposal required!) They're creating an allowlist where they decide who's "legitimate."

Agent attestation solves overzealous AI scraping which looks like a volumetric attack, because if you refuse to provide the content to the bots then the bots will leave you alone (or at least, they won't chew up your bandwidth by re-fetching the same content over and over all day).
by ChrisMarshallNY | 2025-08-29 21:36:54+00:00
I can say that in some of the rejections that I got, it was quite personal.

I was old (55, at the time), and that seemed to actually upset the interviewers.

I had all the right buzzwords, but as soon as they saw my grey coiffure, the process started going sideways. Somehow, they seemed to think that a 30-year-old could have 30 years of experience.

I was treated pretty shabbily, a couple of times. It was clear that I was considered a waste of time.

I only made it to a test a few times. I failed the BTree part of one test (of course), and they didn't seem to like what I returned in a take-home, once. I also once failed a Swift test (I had just started programming in Swift), when I applied for an ObjC job. Otherwise, I did passably (but probably not outstanding) on the tests.
by kiitos | 2025-08-29 21:38:16+00:00
using unicorn as a positive example is, well, a pretty negative signal

unicorn, i.e. CGI, i.e. process-per-request, became anachronistic, gosh, more than 20 years ago at this point!

at least, if you're serving any kind of meaningful load -- a bash script in a while loop can serve 100RPS on an ec2.micro, that's (hopefully) not what anyone is talking about
by Wytwwww | 2025-08-29 21:38:24+00:00
> a representative of Jews

So if a Trump made a Twitter post "exonerating" someone who said something awful about America that would be the same? Because he represents 100% of the country.

Almost half of the countries hates Netanyahu and he's only in charge because of the support from far-right.

Regardless of this you think that a certain limited subsection of Israeli population who share Netanyahu and not the millions of Israeli's who don't let alone all the people who are Jewish are not allowed to have an opinion about his actions? Rather a silly thing to say.
by goda90 | 2025-08-29 21:38:57+00:00
Maybe this should make us question why ICE would even need to operate the way they do. Why raids and detention even for people with no history of violent crimes? Why does detention involve so much cruelty? Why is it so easy for legal residents, visa holders, and even citizens to get detained? Why is there a pattern of racial profiling in ICE's actions? Maybe if we can come up with something better then there'd be fewer angry people to threaten them.
by bayindirh | 2025-08-29 21:40:17+00:00
Because they also have a tech where AI-Agents can add product and service advertisements into these summaries [0].

They won an award for the paper, and the example they given was a "holiday" search, where a hotel inserted their name, and an airline company wedged themselves as the best way to go there.

If I can find it again, I'll print and stick its link all over walls to make sure everybody knows what Google is up to.

Edit: Found it!

[0]: https://research.google/blog/mechanism-design-for-large-lang...
by int_19h | 2025-08-29 21:40:30+00:00
Yes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stechkin_automatic_pistol. AFAIK only still used as a PDW by combat pilots, everybody else switched to AKS74U. Based on what I heard from people who had a chance to fire it, the full auto mode is basically pointless, so it just ends up being a larger and heavier PM (ironically, it found some use in that latter role because it also means less recoil).
by dang | 2025-08-29 21:41:24+00:00
The key word in your post is "seem". Not possible to argue against that! But we can look at data here, at least:

> "No one is talking about" is an idiom you allow onto the front page relatively frequently

I just went through all cases of this since April 2014, when we started logging these things. During that time, only two such titles spent more than an hour on HN's front page.

In one of those two cases, we edited the title to make it less baity: A tech antitrust problem no one is talking about: US broadband providers - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24967472 - Nov 2020. (Submitted title was "The tech antitrust problem no one is talking about".)

You have to go back to June 2015 to find a "no one is talking about" which spent more than an hour on HN's frontpage without getting mod-edited: How for-profit prisons have become the biggest lobby no one is talking about - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9749393 - June 2015. (Still not sure how I would edit that one.)

In all other cases, mods either edited out "no one is talking about", or users flagged it off the front page so quickly that mods probably never saw it. That happened 3 times, btw; here they are if anyone is curious:

The Internet's Time Is Flawed–Why No One Is Talking About It - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43054616 - Feb 2025 (23 minutes on the frontpage)

Browser Permissions on Android: What No One Is Talking About - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23556055 - June 2020 (38 minutes on the frontpage)

The Crisis No One Is Talking About - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17175969 - May 2018 (14 minutes on the frontpage)

Over this time period (i.e. since April 2014), users submitted 4.3M articles to HN. Of those, 392k appeared on the front page. Everyone can decide for themselves what counts as "relatively frequent", but to my mind, 1 or 2 cases (or 5 if you really want to stretch it) out of 392k titles over 11 years doesn't clear that bar.
by danudey | 2025-08-29 21:42:42+00:00
> public files should not require authorization nor authentication for accessing it

Define "public files" in this case?

If I have a server with files, those are my private files. If I choose to make them accessible to the world then that's fine, but they're still private files and no one else has a right to access them except under the conditions that I set.

What Cloudflare is suggesting is that content owners (such as myself, HN, the New York Times, etc.) should be provided with the tools to restrict access to their content if unfettered access to all people is burdensome to them. For example, if AI scraper bots are running up your bandwidth bill or server load, shouldn't you be able to stop them? I would argue yes.

And yet you can't. These AI bots will ignore your robots.txt, they'll change user agents if you start to block their user agents, they'll use different IP subnets if you start to block IP subnets. They behave like extremely bad actors and ignore every single way you can tell them that they're not welcome. They take and take and provide nothing in return, and they'll do so until your website collapses under the weight and your readers or users leave to go somewhere else.
by Viliam1234 | 2025-08-29 21:43:02+00:00
I agree. It is better to finish a small project than start a big one and never finish it. I have seen a few people, and a few groups of people, who had big impressive plans... and never delivered. It is easy to imagine big: this game should be 3D, full of action, but also logical puzzles, and strategy, with an AI opponent, and also multiplayer; perfect graphics and a great storyline, but also allow complete freedom of movement... and then, five years later, you have five characters made in Blender, a map of the world where the story is supposed to happen, a list of fifty magic spells divided into multiple categories, and a tech demo where one of those characters is walking across an endless green plane.

If you can't make a small game, you can't make a big game. So make the small game first; it should take much less time than the big game, so if you are afraid that doing the small game would waste too much of your time, you are definitely not ready for the big game.

Even the small game requires a lot of work to make it look nice. Consider minesweeper: after implementing the minimum mechanism (click on a field to expose it, you either die or not, the number of adjacent mines is displayed), you are not even half done. You need the recursive exposure for fields with zero adjacent mines, editing the flags, showing the unflagged adjacent fields. Preventing the first click from being a mine. A hi-score table, where you can write your name, and it gets automatically saved, and loaded at start of the game. A menu to choose between simple, medium, and hard version of the game, maybe also custom dimensions. Should the game pause when minimized? All these details matter for user experience. Maybe also an installer?

On the other hand, if you can do the minesweeper right, you can easily create a new interesting game by tweaking some details. Maybe, play on a hexagonal map? Or play on an infinite map that scrolls to the right when you completely clear the leftmost column (except for the fields containing mines)? Add some bonuses (that you can collect by clearing a certain area) that allow you special moves, such as eliminating a mine, or reshuffling the existing mines? Would it be possible to create a version where you can have more then one mine per field? (Just a quick idea I had now, I don't even know whether that makes sense.) Maybe add some time pressure, like you need to make a click before the timer runs out, or maybe every twenty seconds a new mine is added to the plan (make sure it is not right under the user's cursor)? Or just make some non-functional feature, such as displaying a pretty picture in the background, and you get a new pretty picture when you complete the level.
by crote | 2025-08-29 21:43:05+00:00
You've got to remember that context is critical with stuff like this.

There's nothing wrong with well-founded and thoughtful criticism. On the other hand, it is very easy for this to turn into personal attacks or bullying - even if it wasn't intended to be.

If you're not careful you'll end up with juniors copying the style and phrasing of less-carefully-worded messages of their tech demigod, and you end up with a huge hostile workplace behaviour cesspit.

It's the same reason why Linus Torvalds took a break to reflect on his communication style: no matter how strongly you feel about a topic, you can't let your emotions end up harming the community.

So yes, I can totally see poorly-worded critiques leading to HR complaints. Having to think twice about the impact of the things you write is an essential part of being at a high level in a company, you simply can't afford to be careless anymore.

It's of course impossible to conclude that this is what happened in this specific case without further details, but it definitely wouldn't be the first time something like this happened with a tech legend.
by ribelo | 2025-08-29 21:43:31+00:00
Everyone should be free to have whatever opinion they like, or at least, they ought to be. The difference is this, some try to impose their opinions on society, while the rest couldn’t care less and refuse to lose sleep over it. The ability to mind our own business is a virtue, a real one. The world went downhill the moment people started obsessing over others instead of focusing on themselves. And anyone who truly cares about society’s well-being should stop meddling.
by Wytwwww | 2025-08-29 21:44:11+00:00
> The elected representative of the country made

Elected by 23.41%? What about the remaining 76.50%? Also 30% didn't even vote.

Also what about the president of Poland and other victims of the nazis? Did they "exonerate" him?

Of course to be fair its hard to blame a drug addict who seemingly lacks self control for his erratic public behavior.

> seems performative

If those people stop buying Tesla's cars and that hurts its share price its not performative anymore.
by elcritch | 2025-08-29 21:44:15+00:00
It's not too different in my opinion from the skills need to build complicated machinery like Boeing 747s despite how much Wallstreet and PHBs want to believe it's fungible. Having competent experienced engineers on the ground level watching these processes and constantly revising and adapting to everything from personnel, material, or vendor changes is so far irreplaceable.

Maybe if we get super AGI one day. Even then I suspect that from a thermodynamics perspective that might not be cost effective as you often need localized on site intelligence.

It's an interesting question but I bet humans combined with AI tooling will remain cost competitive for a long time barring leaps in say quantum compute. After all organic brains operate at the atomic level already and were honed in an extremely competitive environment for billions of years. The calories and resources required to create highly efficient massively powerful neural compute had incredibly thin resource "margins" with huge advantages for species to utilize.
Ask HN: What are some interesting travel blogs?
by rishikeshs | 2025-08-29 21:44:26+00:00
I really enjoy reading some personal blogs with travel info(not the SEO crap) especially the, Notes on [X] by Matt Lakeman. I’m planning to go to Jordan in couple of weeks and wanted to read a bit of info.

Matt Lakeman: https://mattlakeman.org/2024/01/01/notes-on-the-ivory-coast/
by dasil003 | 2025-08-29 21:44:37+00:00
I don't think this is particular to cloud infrastructure. Even on a single server you could make the same argument about using flat file vs sqlite vs postgres for storage. Yes, there is a lot of powerful and reusable software, both managed and unmanaged, with good abstractions and great power to weight ratios where you pay a very small complexity cost for an incredible amount of capability. Such is the nature of software.

But all of it comes with tradeoffs and you have to apply judgement. Just as it would be foolish to write almost anything these days in assembly, I think it would be almost as foolish to just default to a managed Amazon service because it scales without considering whether A) you actually need that scale and B) there are other concerns considerations as to why that service might not be the best technical fit (in particular, I've heard regrets due to overzealous adoption of DynamoDB on more than one occasion).
by sebastiennight | 2025-08-29 21:44:45+00:00
I tried the same roleplaying prompt shared by GP in another (now deleted) comment and got a very similar completion from gpt-3.5-turbo.

(While GPT-5 politely declined to play along and politely asked if I actually needed help with anything.)

So, based on GP's own example I'd say the model is GPT-3.5 level?
by hebejebelus | 2025-08-29 21:45:24+00:00
In my opinion this type of blogging - writing about genuine personal experience, ideals, feelings - is a positive.

At the end of the day the grandfather comment is more or less correct, the internet is a cold unfeeling whatever. But the act of writing from the heart is deeply, genuinely human and in this day and age I feel that the more human things I do, the better. And perhaps by being more obviously human will inspiring others to be more obviously human, and eventually making the internet (and perhaps the world) less of a cold and unfeeling whatever.
by BenoitEssiambre | 2025-08-29 21:45:47+00:00
This is good advice but it can be difficult to define what simple means. The only technical way I was able to make sense of it is by targeting reducing code entropy and scopes (Inspired by how language models try to minimize Solomonoff/Kolmogorov entropy).

https://benoitessiambre.com/entropy.html https://benoitessiambre.com/integration.html
by whymauri | 2025-08-29 21:45:50+00:00
The most direct, non-marketing, non-aesthetic summary is that this model trades off a few points on 'fundamental benchmarks' (GPQA, MATH/AIME, MMLU) in exchange for being a 'more steerable' (less refusals) scaffold for downstream tuning.

Within that framing, I think it's easier to see where and how the model fits into the larger ecosystem. But, of course, the best benchmark will always be just using the model.