MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by _swfb | 2025-08-17 17:08:39+00:00
To paraphrase Hunter Thompson: we will never know for sure if there's a heaven or hell, but I do know for sure that if there is a hell then it's being stuck having to read through LinkedIn for eternity.

LinkedIn is easily the worst "social media" on the internet that I've been on. So much shit is "inspiration porn" for anecdotes that clearly never actually happened so that the person can try and brand themselves as some kind "corporate influencer". By itself this wouldn't bother me, except you pretty much have to have a LinkedIn now.

I generally think it's actually really important to call out bullshit, even stuff that's seemingly harmless (for reasons that are probably far beyond the scope of this post), but I don't respond to comments on LinkedIn anymore, because it's effectively a resume and I don't want these kind of opinions to influence hiring decisions.

And this makes me feel a bit conflicted, and it has led to a direct resentment of the entire platform. I kind of wish Microsoft would limit LinkedIn to purely resume stuff.
by blooda | 2025-08-17 17:08:58+00:00
Hey folks, I just open-sourced a small project I’ve been hacking on:

https://dele.to

It’s a self-hosted tool for sharing sensitive text or links that automatically self-destruct (configurable) after being viewed or after a set time. Think “Pastebin for secrets"

Repo: https://github.com/dele-to/dele-to
by nickpsecurity | 2025-08-17 17:09:05+00:00
It's very, interesting work. People keep wondering about production use. What they don't realize (or maybe do) is that going from high-level descriptions to efficient execution on imperative GPU's is solving a series of NP-hard problems, like ASIC synthesis. A few tools, like Cray's Chapel, do a pretty good job when given more specific information, though.

My background was high-assurance systems that are provably correct. The field found that designing something for easy analysis and verification was the opposite of for efficiency. So, the solution became to verify the high-level description (formal specifications) first. Then, verify equivalence to a lower-level, efficient form which was probably designed side by side with the other one to make that easier.

Having only read the abstract and example code, I see your work being most valuable as what we called an "executable, spefication language." Those were specs or models close to original, mathematical description that could actually run for exploration and testing. They were also, in theory, easy to modify by the researcher who could focus on intended behavior rather than low-level code.

You are already using transformations to produce low-level implementation. My brainstorm would be to do a bottom-up approach of making common operations on GPU's, in libraries like Jax, and rules about how to integrate them. Then, synethesize combinations of them with constraints on combinations with the system further specializing the components as it went on. (It will be interesting to see what you did.)

I think HLS on ASIC's, Cray's Chapel, and high-level libraries in machine learning show such an approach could make implementations fast enough to test theories on small models. I think someone should build on these concepts trying to connect them to primitives in Chapel or Jax or something already designed to itself synthesize or abstract away many low-level details. Then, implement pieces of common, useful models in it with pre-synthesized implementations.

Shorter version: I think it's neat work.worth further exploration which might accelerate development and validation of ML algorithms even with sub-optimal, runtime performance.

(And I still haven't read the papers. This is just independent brainstorming I do first to see if our ideas are converging any which has its own value.)
by 0_____0 | 2025-08-17 17:10:08+00:00
It's unlikely that the current LLMs are conscious, but where the boundary of conscious lies for these machines is a slippery problem. Can a machine have experiences with qualia? How will we know if one does?

So we have a few things happening: a poor ability to understand the machines we're building, the potential for future consciousness, and no way to detect it, and the knowledge that subjecting a consciousness to the torrent of would-be psychological tortures that people subject LLMs to represent immense harm if the machines are, in fact, conscious.

If you wait for real evidence of harm to conscious entities before acting, you will be too late. I think it's actually a great time to think about this type of harm, for two reasons: there is little chance that LLMs are conscious, so the fix got made early enough, and second, it will train users out of practising and honing psychological torture methods, which probably good for the world generally.

The HN angst here seems sort of reflexive. Company limits product so it can't be used in a sort of fucked up way, folks get their hackles up because they think company might limit other functionality that they actually use (I suspect most HNers aren't attempting to psychologically break their LLMs). The LLM vendors have a lot of different ways to put guardrails up, ideological or not (see Deepseek), they don't need to use this specific method to get their LLMs to "rightthink."
by lisbbb | 2025-08-17 17:10:23+00:00
I think you just explained why my software engineering career was always so disappointing. I was not getting my "product" to the right eyeballs. I also think maybe I just wasn't cut out for the work in certain ways. I'm a fantastic coder, but so little of the work these days depends on fantastic coding skills! In fact, it's not even that important to companies. What top devs do is manage complexity, but I've always hated corporate complexity because most of it seems contrived.
by motorest | 2025-08-17 17:10:29+00:00
> You probably need to have a bit of understanding of what you are writing ragebaits about, but not necessarily be an expert - returning to the author's point about rewarding mediocrity

I'm sorry, this is simply not true. You can rage all you want about the nuances of a linked list vs array, but that does not make you a better developer, or even a competent one.

I lost count of the number of times a inane infographics on Python's primitive data structures pops up on my feed. I even stumble upon posts of people who scanned hand written notes of basic features of a programming language. Do you think this sort of self-promotion noise makes you sound like a competent developer?
by diggan | 2025-08-17 17:10:46+00:00
> Not to mention, industry consensus is that the "smallest good" models start out at 70-120 billion parameters. At a 64k token window, that easily gets into the 80+ gigabyte of video memory range, which is completely unsustainable for individuals to host themselves.

Worth a tiny addendum, GPT-OSS-120b (at mxfp4 with 131,072 context size) lands at about ~65GB of VRAM, which is still large but at least less than 80GB. With 2x 32GB GPUs (like R9700, ~1300USD each) and slightly smaller context (or KV cache quantization), I feel like you could fit it, and becomes a bit more obtainable for individuals. 120b with reasoning_effort set to high is quite good as far as I've tested it, and blazing fast too.
by Broken_Hippo | 2025-08-17 17:10:59+00:00
If someone is having to choose between power and medication, how could they get the money to move to this place?? They won't. Most folks aren't really that mobile and being poor makes this more likely.

I'll also note that I live in such a place. Heck, I don't have air conditioning at all. But if I don't have heat in the winter, I'll die. It's cold out. Not many place have the luxury of not needing heating nor cooling - and even when some folks can go without, not all buildings are fit for that purpose. 2 windows on one side of an apartment doesn't make for good ventilation.
Show HN: LimeLink Update – Added API Support, Custom Subdomains, Link Parameters
by vgb3766 | 2025-08-17 17:12:07+00:00
Quick update: We've added the most requested features to LimeLink (Firebase Dynamic Links alternative) - full API support for programmatic link generation, custom subdomain support for branded links, and complete link parameter passthrough including UTM tracking.

Free tier still includes 50K conversions/month, Pro at $10/month unlocks all API features and custom subdomains.

API docs: https://limelink.org/guide/api-spec

Would love your feedback on the implementation!
Show HN: Detecting hallucinations in LLM function calling with entropy
by honorable_coder | 2025-08-17 17:12:25+00:00
We use this for tool calling in https://github.com/katanemo/archgw, that uses a 3b function-calling LLM to map a user's ask to one of many tools for routine agentic operations in an application.

Why we do this: latency. A 3b parameter model, especially when quantized, can deliver sub-100ms time-to-first-token and generate a complete function call in under 100ms. That makes the LLM “disappear” as a bottleneck, so the only real waiting time is in the external tool or API being called + the time it takes to synthesize a human readable response.
by zem | 2025-08-17 17:12:42+00:00
I think the key point is this one

8<------- What is frustrating though is that unless you’re being hired by someone else who posts this way I am strongly convinced this behavior doesn’t work in your favor. 8<-------

in other words, linked in the resume hosting and career networking site doesn't reward the behaviour, linked in the random social network that happens to be hosted on the same site does. just ignore the latter.
by throwaway284927 | 2025-08-17 17:12:56+00:00
You seem to be arguing that talking about races within humans may be useful even if the reality only approximates the definition of race (similarly to the idea of a "circle", which even though it does not apply in all it's precision to any real object it may still be a useful concept as an approximation nonetheless). However, I don't think that comparison is particularly insightful, and it may even be a bit misleading in my opinion because of the important differences in how those two things are defined (circle and race).

After all, the reason why no real object is an actual circle is because the definition of circle is so to say an "ideal" definition that no real object can fit in all it's precision. It's natural to assume that no real object will have all of it's "points" perfectly distributed according to a circle's equation (without even getting philosophical as to how these mathematical definitions relate to the real world, or if they do at all). If one rejects any "approximate", non exact application of the concept, then it will be mostly useless when it comes to describing or understanding the real world (because you won't be able to use it for anything).

On the other hand, the concept of "race" is quite the opposite to ideal: it's not "ideal" as the circle is, in fact it's more of a pragmatic/working definition. It's more like the definition of "chair": many things may or may not be considered a chair, but usually people don't feel that there's "no such thing as a chair" in the real world. On the contrary, it's more common to feel that anything "could" be a chair because it has a malleable definition based on the context, instead of nothing being "precisely" a chair because there are some rigid constraints to the definition that no real object can actually fit.

When the idea of races within the human species is pushed against, it's not because "race" is an ideal concept that no real thing may implement in all it's precision (as would be the case with the circle). I won't present these actual reasons (which could get quite political) here, but I will say that I definitely wouldn't consider those two claims to be in the same category:

- Saying that X real object is not a circle, or that no real object can be (exactly) a circle has to do with the fact that the concept of circle is ideal and by definition nothing "real" will fit it perfectly.

- Saying that (in the human species) there are no races is, however, not based on a quality of the definition of the concept of "race" (specifically, it's not ideal), but on some quantitative judgements about what kind of thing qualifies as a race an what doesn't (pretty much like the concept of "chair", "food", etc. which are not ideal and there's some room for discussion based on context when it comes to whether some specific object fits the category or not).
by Imustaskforhelp | 2025-08-17 17:12:59+00:00
I didn't want it to sound intelligent but I mean I was mentioning a quote so we do need to place a quote inside quotes afterall lol.

I was just sharing something that I felt relevant to the discussion in the sense that greed is one of the most major causes of suffering, and it is our greed that we are ready to write linkedin mediocrity slop.
by emporas | 2025-08-17 17:12:59+00:00
Measurements are printed and given usually to construction workers, usually along some axis. People who lay the bricks take a top view from a house with the dimensions along the y axis. People who build the doors and windows take a side view of the dimensions along the x axis. And so on.

Blender cannot do that as far as I understand.

Something like that for example: [1]

[1] https://all3dp.com/2/freecad-2d-tutorial/
by slowhadoken | 2025-08-17 17:13:02+00:00
The burden of leadership has always existed. Biden shutdown the US during COVID. Some people argue the lockdowns were unconstitutional and abuse of power. Maybe. But it’s beside the point. Right or wrong, the US public VOTED for Republicans to take the House and Senate, that means US citizens wanted to see radical conservative reform. That’s what we’re witnessing. And I wish liberals would realize that, adjust their game accordingly and realign but they’re currently failing to do that with this kind of talk. Trump ran on Democrat hypocrisy and won twice. Think about it.
by hyperman1 | 2025-08-17 17:13:18+00:00
I've got a nice one recently: A pipeline has bytes being transformed to chars by a user selectable encoding, then the chars go to a next step.

In an AOT language, this must be dynamic dispatch, as there are multiple algorithms. The JDK, however, notices how the encoding is basically always UTF-8 and does an 'if utf8 then do utf8code else do dynamic dispatch'. Then the inliner comes along, pushes that if outside a loop, and merges the byte reading, encoding and char processing to 1 big code block, all optimized together.
by MrJohz | 2025-08-17 17:13:37+00:00
It's useful as a tool for communication and simplification. Ignoring those features, typescript is just javascript with type annotations, which makes understanding how something works easier. I've worked with a number of developers who have been confused about what's a typescript feature, and what's a javascript feature, because this boundary feels blurred (particularly when working with modern ESNext syntax that might not be implemented in browsers but is understood by typescript). Being able to say clearly: everything after a colon (and some other places) is typescript, everything else is javascript is a great way of helping people understand what's going on.

In terms of the tradeoff, I rarely, if ever, use those features in the first place. For enums, I'd rather just use string literal types, which are slightly easier to write and compose, potentially assigning them to variable names if I think that's clearer for a given use-case. For constructor properties, they don't work for private properties which is the most common property I'm writing, so I don't really see the value.

The two other features that are disabled are namespaces and modules that contain code, and `import ... =`, both of which have clearer JS alternatives.

FWIW, you can enable those features in node, although that's still behind an experimental flag. It's marginally slower (because the translation is slightly more complex than replacing types with whitespace) and it requires sourcemaps under the hood, but if you really want those features you can have them. Or you can use an alternate runtime that supports them out of the box (Deno, Bun). But even then, I think they make teaching and understanding the language more complicated and I wouldn't personally recommend them. (Assuming someone might listen to the personal recommendation of a random HN comment!)
by alephnerd | 2025-08-17 17:13:49+00:00
This framing is an American culture war topic that has morphed into a global culture war.

In most Western countries (except France), the Jewish community is overwhelmingly Ashkenazi in origin, and that is what sets the tone for how these countries view the conflict.

Mizrahi Jews have significantly different practices, and Israel is fundamentally their state, as Mizrahi culture has become the default culture in Israel. Even pop Hebrew music is overwhelmingly Arab in musical style now (eg. Daniel Saadon) and Arabic, Farsi, and other Mizrahi languages terms have become a major part of colloquial Hebrew now (יאללה anyone).

IMO, I think Israel becoming culturally Mizrahi is what is causing Israel to lose it's clout. Israeli and (non-religious) American Jews are increasingly separated from each other as they consume different media, speak different languages, and don't even go to the same Synagogues (or Temples as Ashkenazim call them). Israel has become much more insular as it has also become a richer country (it's not like 30 years ago when Israelis had to immigrate to the US to get paid a real salary).
by ninkendo | 2025-08-17 17:14:03+00:00
> While Swift has some support for stack allocation, most types are heap-allocated, and I think that reduces the extent to which the rest of the language has to be warped to accommodate the stable ABI.

Stack vs heap in swift is simple: structs are stack, classes are heap.

This is what makes Swift’s effort so impressive: it works with stack data just as well as heap. Stack allocated types being used across library boundaries has a ton of plumbing to make it work, there’s the concept of a value witness table (like a vtable but for size/stride information) that can allow looking up sizes at runtime. Stack allocation makes heavy use of alloca(), which most languages shy away from (since it means stack frames aren’t of a static size.) It was difficult but swift managed to do it.

For rust to do something similar it would have to fix a lot of cases where object safety is broken, and yeah, this may require changing the language, particularly to support dynamic/runtime size information. (It would also make the dyn keyword effectively obsolete, because to make generics work across library boundaries, any type has to be able to “become” dynamic if the linker needs it to be.)

It would definitely require changes to the language, but Swift provides some inspiring prior art here.

This article goes into the details: https://faultlore.com/blah/swift-abi/
by breakyerself | 2025-08-17 17:15:27+00:00
When it comes to energy the efficiency of a generation system is pretty much meaningless metric. Price per kilowatt hour is what rules the roost. Renewables particularly solar have become the cheapest form of electricity in history. This is driving demand for storage which is driving exponential cost reductions in that field as well.

Grid scale renewable + storage installations are now becoming competitive with natural gas. Coal is an obsolete energy source. That people in this administration are trying to weelend at Bernie's this corpse of an industry gives me serious doubts about the praise you lap on them.
by mindslight | 2025-08-17 17:15:59+00:00
What's the target market of your business? I'm doing a DIY solar setup, plus a bunch of liberty-respecting automation, and often lament that there aren't better ways to make such things serviceable by contractors (when I'm gone, etc). It feels like every commercial offering I've seen is for extremely rich people's "dream houses", deploying expensive niche-commercial solutions in a very top-down manner (lots of homeruns of narrow-purpose cables to multiple racks in a centralized control room, etc).
by DaveZale | 2025-08-17 17:16:11+00:00
This story really captures the zeitgeist and media circus of the early 00s!

Would an updated sociological/media critique include the current tendency of Americans to get caught up in the echo chambers of their own political sentiments?

Would it be worth mentioning Laura Loomer as a megaphone that gets results, even getting senior national security staff, fired by the top executive, simply by questioning their loyalty? That she is a career assassination megaphone relying solely on her socia media followers?

Would it be worth mentioning how the front pages and content of newspapers now are increasing clickbait resembling tiktock, facebook, and instagram?

Would it be worth mentioning that the best news media is still alive and well outside the US, though often slanted by the source nation?

And of course, would it be worth mentioning that current AI can summarize complex issues, but that the response obtained will depend upon the query and follow up queries?
Show HN: DNC – A Decentralized Economic Protocol (No Blockchain)
by KaoruAK | 2025-08-17 17:16:25+00:00
I just released the open-source beta of DNC (DIAC NET CHAIN), a decentralized Python-based economic system with no global blockchain. Each peer acts as a wallet, miner, and validator, with LAN and WAN discovery, mining metrics, a basic GUI, reputation scoring, guardian-based recovery, and a working Proof-of-Storage demo. There’s also a compiled .exe for Windows. The repo is fully open—please fork it, test it, break it, and suggest or build improvements to the UI, peer protocol, recovery logic, or new features. Contributions to help stabilize and extend the core protocol are especially appreciated. GitHub: https://github.com/POlLLOGAMER/DNC-DIAC-NET-CHAIN
by bluedino | 2025-08-17 17:16:32+00:00
LinkedIn is decent for jobs/searching/applying. That's all I really find it useful for.

Things I don't find it useful for:

Salespeople trying to sell me some enterprise product when I don't have anything to do with selection/purchasing those items. Everything from IP phones to enterprise storage to whatever SaSS is hot

Low-effort recruiter spam. Jobs I'm not interested in, qualified for, over-qualified for, want me to go into the office but it's 2 hours away, "I am impressed by your profile...."

Former co-workers posting about how much they learned at some conference or seminar or the pizza part for Jerry who finally retired

Cheatsheet/tutorial spam since my job is developer/linux adjacent.

"Freshers" not in my network, spamming looking for jobs.

Typical motivational/marketing stuff from Seth Godin and wannabe influencers.

Awww cute videos with a baby or small animal.
by _swfb | 2025-08-17 17:16:45+00:00
I suppose what you're saying isn't "wrong" but can we agree that this sucks?

Now every asshole has to try and co-opt "influencer" tactics and if you're not constantly writing bullshit that talks about how hard of a worker you are and ever push back on any corporate lies, now you have that attached to your resume.

I wouldn't write "Told someone that they probably didn't actually create ten billion dollars of value in a Fortune 10 company by age three" directly on my resume, but that's what happens on LinkedIn. It's terrible, and no one should defend it.
by alex_young | 2025-08-17 17:17:02+00:00
In case anyone else is wondering - Robin is the ex-wife of another prominent linguist, George Lakoff.

Somehow GPT-5 got this badly wrong when I first asked:

Yes — George Lakoff and Robin Lakoff are related. They are siblings.

Er, no. They were married once and divorced 50 years ago according to their Wikipedia pages.
by ignoramous | 2025-08-17 17:18:54+00:00
They publish weekly reports now on the work they're doing: https://f-droid.org/en/news

For example, here's a recent NLNet sponsorship that helped reproducible builds ship (an effort that began in 2023): https://f-droid.org/en/2025/05/21/making-reproducible-builds...

Their 2025 year in review: https://f-droid.org/en/2025/01/21/a-look-back-at-2024-f-droi...