MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mpeg | 2025-08-17 17:29:52+00:00
I have a bunch of LinkedIn connections claiming they get those fabled six and seven figure client engagements where the client “doesn’t care about the code, they just care about business results” and a lot of other buzzwords.

I do data consulting part time, I do very much provide business centric solutions and measurable results (alongside code that your tech team won’t hate) and am an expert in marketing technology, applied AI and a bunch of other “hot” subjects like that.

In my work with huge, billion dollar companies, the consulting dream that LI influencers sell feels like a fantasy world. I have to provide and justify a day rate, and when my clients do have a big CAPEX project I’m bidding against Accenture, Palantir, etc. and I don’t expect to win it.

If anyone really consistently lands these amazing, big pocket clients, please let me be your intern.
by 3eb7988a1663 | 2025-08-17 17:30:58+00:00
The mental image I like: imagine you are lost in a hilly region with incredibly dense fog such that you can only see one foot directly in front of you. How do you find the base of the valley?

Gradient descent: take a step in the steepest downward direction. Look around and repeat. When you reach a level area, how do you know you are at the lowest point?
by YeGoblynQueenne | 2025-08-17 17:31:12+00:00
Thanks! Honesty: I don't know if I have the time to read a dissertation (or two, or three, judging from the references on the article above). I will try to make some time because Dyna looks interesting.

Regarding 'max=' I guess then phrase/3 is calculating... the string of words I with maximum probability? Which IIUC is bound to Y? If so, that's cool. I've done that with DCGs in the past, but the functional syntax makes it ... look more like a function :)

>> E.g. the Prolog expression `foo(X, bar(Y))` would be equivalent to the dyna `foo(X, bar[Y])`.

I'm guessing that's for convenience? I think it's not rare for functional languages to have a "quoting" (?) mechanism like that?

Edit: Might be a good idea to add an example that also shows a program's output, alongside its source code.
by nobodyandproud | 2025-08-17 17:31:18+00:00
Steelman—you know, as the forum rules insist—and ask yourself if there are other reasons.

My rationale: First we bring the children; then we appeal to humanitarian grounds and allow then to stay; then we lobby to allow in their parents or relatives.

Hamas+Israel are 100% at fault here; and Palestians are not innocent of this. The last time (twenty years ago) when they last had elections, they allowed and enabled this.

I’m sorry it’s a shitty situation, but that’s a slippery slope few countries have allowed or want.
by somenameforme | 2025-08-17 17:31:26+00:00
You're ignoring inflation. Real (inflation adjusted) median earnings are up 12%, in total, over the past 45 years. [1] That also understates the problem because many things (education, healthcare, debt costs, etc) are understated or not even considered in inflation measurements. There's also been a substantial increase in baseline necessities for the average person (internet, computing device, etc). Factor these in and it's fairly safe to say that real incomes have declined for the majority of people.

Similarly a lot of our wealth is just a facade. Most of it derives from the stock market, yet the market cap of the stock market is now dramatically larger than all of the money in existence. Consider that the system that created this mess only started in 1971 (the end of Bretton Woods) and it already only being propped up by ever more extravagant financial games. The house of cards is likely to come down without our lifetimes, which will make this one of the shortest lived economic experiments, and failures, ever. 'Doomerism' isn't a response to the growth, but to the increasingly unstable fundamentals underpinning everything, let alone in an era that's also an obvious geopolitical inflection point as well.

[1] - https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881600Q
by samiv | 2025-08-17 17:31:51+00:00
"When an incompetent developer stumbles onto a successful idea an infinity of shit is created."

I agree with you. Sometimes simply being the first mover businesses/solutions/software get name recognition and an unfair(?) advantage that greatly diminishes overall value by blocking better products from emerging.

To put if fairly, some things are so bad it'd be an improvement NOT to have them, so someone else could do a better job and everyone would be better off. Examples.. Emscripten, Python, Bluetooth, Chromecast, any IoT device so far created..
by nickfromseattle | 2025-08-17 17:32:06+00:00
I don't have any info on your product, product category or skillset / interests to give you actionable advice.

But I have put together a list of marketing communities, blogs, and people that have a high signal / noise ratio for my coworkers and friends, perhaps it could be useful for you. [0]

[0] https://contentdistribution.slite.page/p/BFMS0Lg1Yz/Our-Favo...
by catlifeonmars | 2025-08-17 17:32:21+00:00
> These models will soon generate entire worlds. They will eventually surpass human modeller capabilities and they'll deliver stunning results in 1/100,000th the time. From an idea, photo, or video. And easy to mold, like clay. With just a few words, a click, or a tap.

This is a pretty sweeping and unqualified claim. Are you sure you’re not just trying to sell snake oil?
by nobodyandproud | 2025-08-17 17:33:45+00:00
Plurality, not majority. The conservatives lie by saying majority.

Liberals lie by saying that it wasn’t a majority; yet omitting a key detail: Yes Hamas won, with 44%.

And if you’re gonna quote wikipedia: “ Tensions between Fatah and Hamas began to rise in 2005 after the death of Yasser Arafat in November 2004. After the legislative election on 25 January 2006, which resulted in a Hamas victory, relations were marked by sporadic factional fighting. This became more intense after the two parties repeatedly failed to reach a deal to share government power, escalating in June 2007 and resulting in Hamas' takeover of Gaza.[35]”
by secabeen | 2025-08-17 17:34:11+00:00
This. 100%. The ability to draw 200Amps from the grid at no notice, 24x7 has real value, and costs real money to provide. If you want that ability, you should pay for it.

We really need to separate the reliability and grid maintenance costs from the usage costs. Bundling them together worked when electricity was a true monopoly, but it isn't that anymore.
by ChrisArchitect | 2025-08-17 17:34:29+00:00
Related:

Big Tech's A.I. Data Centers Are Driving Up Electricity Bills for Everyone

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44905595

The U.S. grid is so weak, the AI race may be over

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44910562
by brookst | 2025-08-17 17:34:38+00:00
> I mean, when I sit in a train I don’t spend half the ride saying “oh my god this is incredible, big thanks to whoever invented the wheel. So smooth!”

Two thoughts:

- In that context, neither do you expect people to be invested in why the train is nothing special, it’s basically a horse cart, etc, etc

- And maybe here’s where I’m weird: I often am overcome by the miracle of thousands of tons of metal hurtling along at 50 - 200mph, reliably, smoothly enough to work or eat, many thousands of times a day, for pennies per person per mile. I mean, I’ll get sucked in to how the latches to release the emergency windows were designed and manufactured at scale despite almost none of them ever being used. But maybe that’s just me.
by righthand | 2025-08-17 17:34:51+00:00
> But the DNC is focused on having equal representation of males and females and making sure the right pronouns are on a committee

No they did not. DEI was one policy out of many that went through with Dems during the last admin if you think that’s all Democrats are focusing on you have drunk the Trump-brand-koolaid and have no good faith arguments here.

As for BLM it changed a A LOT. Again you are demonstrating lack of evidence and understanding of those events. I’m sure you stayed inside and criticized the people protesting. I marched during that time in Nyc. And we accomplished the following:

- Repeal 50A - a law that protected police officers at the state level from taking any legal repercussions for their actions

- Forced NYPD to stop using stop and frisk plain clothes units

- made police choking and strangleholds illegal

- force Nypd to stop using kettle tactics

- Removed the NYPD from school security duty

- spread awareness and helped change the narrative about violent police corruption

BLM was such a big deal that people like you scramble to list any benefits. This is your lack of knowledge and understanding of people that keeps you pushing for more violence. The type of cognitive dissonance that makes you say “BLM was nothing, I hated it” when that couldn’t be farther from the truth.

And since your entire argument is based around some generalization and inability to separate Potus admin from a political party. And political party from voters, I do not see any reason to continue this discussion based on false bad faith generalized premises.
by nperez | 2025-08-17 17:34:57+00:00
I'm not a modeler but I've tried it a few times. For me, modeling is a pain that I need to deal with to solo-dev a 3d game project. I would think about using something like this for small indie projects to output super low-poly base models, which I could then essentially use as a scaffold for my own finer adjustments. Saving time is better than generating high-poly masterpieces, for me at least.
by ants_everywhere | 2025-08-17 17:35:05+00:00
> Anyone who wants to learn about IQ should Google it

This is bad advice because Google returns poor results for most medical questions, including ones about controversial topics like IQ.

IQ was adopted as a pet cause by hard right wing political theorists, for example one of the authors of the Bell Curve.

When I was in grad school for psych, nobody serious studied it. Occasionally one person was still working on it, and everybody in the department whispered about them being a kook. This was at an elite psych department, it may have been different in smaller departments.

Often times if you see someone posting information about IQ it's either (1) they're selling IQ tests, (2) they're selling services that administer IQ tests, or (3) they align with a political faction that politicizes IQ.

If you want to learn about IQ, the best thing is probably to find a recent review article published by a top tier journal that does not specialize in IQ research.

My take the last time I looked into it was that it helps locate people who have learning disabilities, but it's not great at predicting individual outcomes.

The measure most people intuitively think of is correlation of IQ with success, keeping SES constant and throwing out the lowest range of IQ. That is, you want to know the incremental benefit of having a higher IQ given that you're not suffering from a learning disability. And you also don't want to accidentally measure the obvious impact that having more money gives you more opportunities.

When you make these adjustments it quickly becomes clear that IQ is much messier than people in this thread are claiming. For example, heritability varies by SES. And heritability is generally not what people think it is naively.
by michaelmarkell | 2025-08-17 17:35:06+00:00
The way my company uses Clickhouse is basically that we have one giant flat table, and have written our own abstraction layer on top of it based around "entities" which are functions of data in the underlying table, potentially adding in some window functions or joins. Pretty much every query we write with Clickhouse tacks on a big "Group By All" at the end of it, because we are always trying to squash down the number of rows and aggregate as aggressively as possible.

I imagine we're not alone in this type of abstraction layer, and some type-safety would be very welcome there. I tried to build our system on top of Kysely (https://kysely.dev/) but the Clickhouse extension was not far along enough to make sense for our use-case. As such, we basically had to build our own parser that compiles down to sql, but there are many type-error edge cases, especially when we're joining in against data from S3 that could be CSV, Parquet, etc.

Side note: One of the things I love most about Clickhouse is how easy it is to combine data from multiple sources other than just the source database at query time. I imagine this makes the problem of building an ORM much harder as well, since you could need to build type-checking / ORM against sql queries to external databases, rather than to the source table itself
by mgerdts | 2025-08-17 17:35:32+00:00
> Modern enterprise NVMe SSDs are very fast…. This is a simple benchmark on a Samsung PM9A1 on a with a theoretical maximum transfer rate of 3.5 GB/s. … It should be noted that this is a sub-optimal setup that is less powerful than what the PM9A1 is capable of due to running on a downgraded PCIe link.

Samsung has client, datacenter, and enterprise lines. The PM9A1 is part of the OEM client segment and is about the same as a 980 Pro. Its top speeds (about 7GB/s read, 5GB/s write) are better than the comparable datacenter class drive, PM9A3. This top speeds comes with less consistent performance than you get with a PM9A3 or an enterprise drive like a PM1733 from the same era (early PCIe Gen 4 drives).
by timgdelisle | 2025-08-17 17:36:09+00:00
I'm one of the Moose maintainers, and yes, most OLAP use cases fall into data warehousing categories where exposing the database to analysts and letting them run loose with SQL is viable. We're seeing more and more that OLAP is becoming a core part of the application stack, for user and agent-facing analytics. There, we see a lot more appetite for building on the analytical stack the way we build on the transactional one.
by isaacewing | 2025-08-17 17:36:10+00:00
Hey HN!

I'm building Spoofproof, a zero-knowledge proof AI authentication platform that completely obliterates passwords, passkeys, and those annoying 2FA codes. One platform for all: cloud, legacy systems, LLMs... even future-proofed for quantum threats.

We're validating: "Would you actually want this?" If yes, join our beta list. If not, we might just cry a little. Comments appreciated.

Love, The Spoofproof team
by actuallyalys | 2025-08-17 17:37:14+00:00
As far as I can tell, coal is middle of the pack in terms of energy efficiency [0] and less than half of the energy is captured as electricity, which doesn’t seem particularly incredible in relative or absolute terms.

Although comparing fossil fuel efficiency to renewable energy efficiency is a bit odd in one sense because while you’re technically wasting energy with renewables, there will always be more tomorrow, at least on human time scales.

[0]: https://www.pcienergysolutions.com/2023/04/17/power-plant-ef...
by Spooky23 | 2025-08-17 17:37:15+00:00
That's why engineers are engineers. As a profession, they are trained to find the optimal answer to the questions they are asked.

The problem is, people are independent agents and generally prioritize their own outcome. If "being humbled" by some nonsense on LinkedIn gets you a high paying job that you perform poorly at, that's a win -- for you. Even if you get fired, you just roll with it and move to bigger and better things to fail up with.

Is it the best way to solve the problem the company has? No. But linkedin guy dngaf and is not asking that question!
by exasperaited | 2025-08-17 17:37:20+00:00
... is like...

What if I don't want to learn guitar? What if I just want to spend a couple of hours and get something that sounds like guitar?

I tend to say in this situation: you can do that. Nobody's stopping you. But you shouldn't expect wider culture to treat you like you've done the work. So what new creative work are you seeking to do with the time you've saved?
by crazygringo | 2025-08-17 17:37:46+00:00
Sounds like it's just a question of insufficient training material or training material that is insufficiently annotated.

There's no reason an LLM shouldn't be able to produce such poetry. Remember that extensive "thinking" occurs before producing the first output token -- LLM's aren't blindly outputting tokens without first knowing where they are going. But it would make sense that this is an area current companies have not prioritized for training. Not that many people need new poetry in a dead language...
by appease7727 | 2025-08-17 17:38:42+00:00
IF (and ONLY if) you are fully cognizant and aware of what you're doing and what you're talking to, an LLM can be a great help. I've been using a local model to help me work through some trauma that I've never felt comfortable telling a human therapist about.

But for the majortiy of people who haven't seriously studied psychology, I can very easily see this becoming extremely dangerous and harmful.

Really, that's LLMs in general. If you already know what you're doing and have enough experience to tell good output from bad, an LLM can be stupendously powerful and useful. But if you don't, you get output anywhere from useless to outright dangerous.

I have no idea what, if anything, can or should be done about this. I'm not sure if LLMs are really fit for public consumption. The dangers of the average person blindly trusting the hallucinatory oracle in their pocket are really too much to think about.
by scythmic_waves | 2025-08-17 17:38:57+00:00
Hey it'd be great if you could rank the choices individually rather ranked-choice-style than picking just one first-past-the-post-style. I'm sure you could still compute a score, but it'd lead to less frustration from the quiz taker.

E.g. the debugging question: I use all of those methods to some degree. But I "think logically about the code" (or whatever that choice was) nearly 100% of the time, so I felt compelled to pick that one even though I didn't feel like it represented me all that well.
by ElatedOwl | 2025-08-17 17:39:01+00:00
I agree with that being fastest, but not cheapest.

In my experience these one off reports are very brittle. The app ends up making schema changes that are breaking to these one off reports, and you usually don’t find out until it goes to production.

I’ve dealt with the maintenance nightmare before. At current gig we’re exploring solutions, curious what a robust pipeline looks like in 2025.

The ORM piece is interesting — we use ActiveRecord and Ruby, and accidentally breaking schema changes within app will get caught by the unit test suite. I would love for a way to bring OLAP reports in similarly to test at CI time.
by h4ch1 | 2025-08-17 17:39:53+00:00
I don't know if this works but I've been using local, abliterated LLMs as pseudo therapists in a very specific way that seems to work alright for very specific issues I have.

First of all I make myself truly believe that LLMs are NOT humans nor have any sort of emotional understanding. This allows me to take whatever it spouts out as just another perspective rather than actionable advice like what comes from a therapist and also allows me to be emotionally detached from the whole conversation which adds another dimension to the conversation for me.

Second I will make sure to talk to it negatively about myself ie: I won't say " I have issue xyz but I am a good abc"; Allow me to explain through an example.

Example prompt:

I have a tendency to become an architectural astronaut, running after the perfect specification, the perfect data model, bulletproof types rather than settling for good enough for now and working on the crux of the problem I am trying to solve. Give me a detailed list of scientifically proven methods I can employ in order to change my mindset regarding my work.

It then proceeds to spout a large paragraph, praising me with fluff which attempts to "appease" me, and I simply ignore it, but along with that it'll give me actual good advice that's commonly employed by people who do suffer these sort of issues. I read it with the same emotional attachment as I have when reading a Reddit post and see if there's something useful and move on.

The only metric I have for the efficacy of this method is me actually moving forward with a few projects I just kept rewriting the design document for and I would end this comment by just saying LLMs will never replace real therapy; just use them as a glorified search engine, cross check the information using an actual search engine and other peoples' perspective, and move on.
by pvaldes | 2025-08-17 17:40:40+00:00
Just for context, because sometimes we need to remind basic facts.

The Geneva Conventions are international laws that establish international legal standards for humanitarian treatment in war since 1864. They extensively define the basic rights of wartime prisoners, civilians and military personnel.

A war crime is a violation of the laws of war. War crimes include shooting on disarmed civilians, denying medical treatment, food or water to captive wounded soldiers from the enemy, or deliberately starving people to death.

Israel MUST provide reasonable medical care to civilians wounded by its army, because this is required by the international laws and treaties signed previously by Israel.
by StillBored | 2025-08-17 17:41:22+00:00
Batteries are just an extension of the thinking that PV or Wind are 'cheap'. There is slight U shape in the price where an initial fraction lowers the cost, but then it just additional cost overhead. Cost shifting some of the excess solar into the evening to reduce the peak load there is fine, but then your still paying for a pile of excess backup capacity to sit around idle for those days when the sun doesn't shine, and adding more batteries beyond a certain point is the same. They just sit around idle most of the time adding to the cost. I've posted here napkin math for how much a W of solar or reliable PV actually costs and been down voted but the math is easy when you stop believing that a W from PV/Wind is the same as a W from your local Gas/Coal/Hydro/Nuke plant.

All those gas plants and batteries sitting around idle soon start dominating the cost structure because the price of their produced watts starts to go exponential.
by shagie | 2025-08-17 17:41:30+00:00
https://everything2.com/title/Sir+Sufud+and+the+bear

Ages ago, there was a land that was plagued by a terrible bear with a perchance for beating up various small animals that happened to be in the area. This wouldn't be too bad, except that this was in the area with lots of sheep. Now, the sheep themselves weren't in danger, it was the sheep dogs that were threatened.

... (several paragraphs later)

The shepherds, upon hearing the great roar and crash from the cave quickly ran to the place to see a knight sprawled against a tree and a bear underneath it. The dog the bear had been bringing back, however, was alive and well and quite happy to see people again. And so, feeling quite bad for the family of the knight, the shepherds went to the king and offered family of Sir Sufud the dog he had saved from the bear.

Nothing helps the mourning after a terrible knight like the dog of a bear that hit you.
by rectang | 2025-08-17 17:41:54+00:00
Is wonder if there's a strong correlation between whether you experience static zaps in your daily life and your propensity to fry chips with ESD.

When you fry a chip is it obvious because you experience a zap?

If so, then that would make all this "make sure you're grounded" ceremony less mysterious — because unless you feel a zap (even a tiny one) you probably haven't fried a chip, and it doesn't generally happen in environments where you don't feel zaps.

Obvious caveat: "feeling" a zap is not a precise measurement. But perhaps "zaps fry chips" is a lie which reveals a greater truth.