MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by noduerme | 2025-08-02 01:27:45+00:00
Hah. Neat. I love projects like this just for fun.

For my old (2010-era) Bitcoin casino, I wrote a slot machine based on a Rubik's cube. When you would "spin" the slot, the cube would reset to a perfect position and then scramble itself randomly 4-6 times. You had 60 seconds (with max 3 moves) to solve as many lines as possible. Payout was based on how many triplets you had.

I never wrote a solver for it. But the goal was for it to be skill-based. Determining the payout odds involved a LOT of monte carlo solving. I wanted the expected value for a perfect player to be 100%.

Very few people ever actually played it. And those who did mostly played the "dumb" version where the payouts were higher per line, but you didn't get the 3 manipulations after the spin. That version was calibrated to about 92% EV, if I remember right.

Diving into the math of it was one of the most entertaining things I've ever done as a programmer. A universal poker hand evaluator (from 3 card to 5 to 7 Holdem and Omaha) in 200 lines of PHP, was the second.
by zahlman | 2025-08-02 01:28:20+00:00
> the idea that e.g. a graph class would be defined with a node interface and you would pass it a concrete class when constructing it

Right, but that's still just a generic instance of "plan ahead to use a parameter (possibly with a default value) instead of grabbing something hard-coded". I don't see a proposed fix for a class that was already designed to expect its own inner node implementation instead of an abstraction, except to rewrite it. Which is why it confused me, because the rewrite would just involve adding a parameter, so that you could pass an argument to it, and making the implementation use that parameter. I suppose in statically typed languages you might have to actually define an interface type for that parameter, whatever. None of that explained to me why the Java guys were talking about needing a "framework" to accomplish this, that apparently somehow involved a ton of XML.

> the issue was not that ruby didn't need dependency injection the concept, it's that it didn't need the sort of dependency injection frameworks that more rigid languages like java needed, you could use ruby's built in features to do the same thing.

Yes, it's much the same in Python. (And yes, I have for example used `print` as an argument to a higher-order function before.)
by shakna | 2025-08-02 01:29:51+00:00
That doesn't seem like a reasonable response to me.

An employee was caught criminally stalking their family, and using the force of the government to do so.

Rather than being prosecuted, like happens outside the force, they were fired and let go to continue living their life - likely to be rehired in another police force if the pattern plays out as it regularly does.

That this can happen without large alarm bells, means that the checks on access are not effective - because it is not a once in a lifetime event.

I do see your trust. But I also see you yourself producing evidence suggesting such trust is unfounded.
by Jotalea | 2025-08-02 01:34:14+00:00
I have a friend who bought Minecraft for the full price of 30 USD, and one day microshit decided "hey you know what? fuck you, we're deleting your account". so he went to a 3rd party site and bought a 2nd hand account, sketchy as fuck but it worked and this time he didn't have to pay full price again; but the fact that he had to pay *again* is simply outrageous.

On the other hand, last time I got actually hacked was in 2015, when I intentionally shared the password for a popular kids game that I used to play back then. And I'm not a cybersecurity expert at all, I don't follow the best security protocols, heck I don't even have good passwords, but I have never been hacked in 9 years.
by hinkley | 2025-08-02 01:35:15+00:00
In theory, I as the service provider know when my key database has been compromised. In theory. In practice, I will never know if a customer has been compromised, however up to a point a compromised user box can forward tokens to an attacker. So pending on whether you ever rotat the private keys, it’s a matter of ho long an attacker can retreat to a server they own to continue the attack.

In a way this reminds me a bit of SRP, which was an attempt to handle login without the server ever having your password. Which makes me think this is something to be integrated with password managers.
by sokoloff | 2025-08-02 01:38:06+00:00
At a consulting company I worked at, we were told on Wednesday that layoffs affecting around 1/3 of the company would happen on Thursday and Friday and that the company was paying for an all-company event at a nearby pub-restaurant where the execs and senior managers did not attend, but most of the company did.

Much emotion, team reminiscing, and a fair amount of drinking happened and it was an interesting but honestly pretty decent way to handle it I thought. I was largely indifferent to whether I was in the 2/3 or 1/3 and ended up quitting on my own a couple months later.
by stockresearcher | 2025-08-02 01:38:52+00:00
> moved between countries or first/second gen immigrant?

“Cairo grew up in Nassau, the Bahamas, where her parents had moved so that her dad could take a job as a software developer”

“Travel restrictions stranded her family at her grandparents’ house in Chicago. While they were there, she joined the Math Circles of Chicago”

This doesn’t read like an immigrant. It kind of reads like her dad is a fully American finance dev.
by _benj | 2025-08-02 01:40:22+00:00
Maybe hot take…

I can see the point of sameness in homeschooling, but compared to traditional education? I’m not sure how much flexibility one would have to teach oneself calculus by 11 or the equivalent of an undergrad in math by 14!

That flexibility must be found in something non-traditional!

I’m no prodigy at all whatsoever but school was mostly dull and filled with teenager drama! Nobody knew what Linux was, cared about music production or anything interesting! The talk was which boy/girl whatever
by mcphage | 2025-08-02 01:44:12+00:00
> Unless you believe operating like this what makes Russia or North Korea poorer than the USA, which I think is very dubious.

Rejecting people who look at reality with people who tell the leader what they want to hear is a big part of why Russia and North Korea are so less successful than the US, yeah. I don’t think that’s dubious, or even uncertain.
by graycat | 2025-08-02 01:44:21+00:00
Cairo may have a way out: Commonly the main criteria for a Ph.D. is: (1) Pass qualifying exams in several important topics in the field. (2) Do some research that is an "original contribution to knowledge worthy of publication" where the main criteria for publication is "new, correct, and significant".

No professor or university Dean can keep her from doing well on both (1) and (2). It looks like (1) would be easy enough for her. The work she has already done may satisfy (2). Once she has done well on (1) and (2), tough not to award her a Ph.D.
by Aurornis | 2025-08-02 01:45:16+00:00
> That is the same thing, though! ... very quickly escalating a probable mundane situation to very serious accusations!

I agree. If you think the child is in danger and you’re unable to find their parents after looking around then do what you need to do for the child.

But the other parent’s reaction shouldn’t be a factor. There’s no reason to call 911 and tell them you’re getting a “hostile reaction” from someone who isn’t involved.

This isn’t how serious people operate in the real world. It’s keyboard warrior talk and it’s very unhelpful.
by sokoloff | 2025-08-02 01:45:17+00:00
Pretty much this. I have a great relationship with my boss. If the time comes where he needs to let me go, I need 2 words from him [which could be in email] and then the only things I care about that day are the details of the severance.

No disrespect given nor received, but this is all business at that point. Some other day, we can work out any transition plan we need to work through and I'll happily hang out with him socially afterwards, but the things I need from the company at that moment are the severance details, nothing else. Emailed attachments are perfect.
by ranger207 | 2025-08-02 01:46:28+00:00
Nu-MicroProse has been seeking out games similar in spirit to those published by old MicroProse trying to become the continuation of what it used to be. It might have been luck that there was a guy developing that kind of game at the time, or it might have been that there's a growing desire for that sort of game that MicroProse is coming along at the right time to pick up
by bombcar | 2025-08-02 01:46:37+00:00
Story is one of the easiest ways to add progression, but it's not the only way.

That's not to say story is bad but you can have quite good games without it, and any "long lasting/replayable" game has to have gameplay that stands alone.

People will put up with crappy gameplay for an amazing story, but they're not going to replay it much.
by rockskon | 2025-08-02 01:47:00+00:00
I don't quite understand your position. The intelligence community has shown time and again that they are happy to be innovative (and secretive) with interpretations of the law that enable them access to vast swaths of U.S. persons data without a warrant.

This is recent history, too. With the NSA interpreting the addition of the word "relevant" in Section 215 of the Patriot Act to mean "indefinite bulk collection of records on every U.S. citizen".

Where do you get your confidence from? The confidence that there will be robust public debate before an encroachment on the exploitation of data already collected on a country's citizens?

Do you believe this sort of bulk seizure and screening of the data of a country's citizens to be limited to the U.S.?
by rhelz | 2025-08-02 01:47:19+00:00
hmmm... did it get harder to estimate, or was the estimator just not up to the task? It certainly is different after COVID--did they keep updating their methodologies, or were they just relying on the same-old same-old?

sigh What do I know. My point is that probably any president would be displeased if the numbers they had been bragging about for a few quarters came in orders of magnitude worse. And any president would probably ask the question of whether the right person had the job.

Trump massively politicized the issue, in his typical very nasty and mean-spirited way. Shockingly indecorous. But we can't just reflexively attribute malice to every thing Trump does. We will lose all credibility of we overreach and overstate our case.
by Aurornis | 2025-08-02 01:48:42+00:00
> I don't think we can chalk these up to "it's just Reddit, amiright?"

That’s not what I was saying. I admitted that these things must happen somewhere.

The Reddit issue is that those isolated incidents were presented as common occurrences. It was talked about like any dad going to any park was going to attract dirty looks.

Instead, it’s a rare thing that happens when you come across someone problematic who sees problems where they don’t exist.
by ethbr1 | 2025-08-02 01:49:36+00:00
It doesn’t help that many of even those rose-colored startups created 15 years ago have since crossed the rubicon.

It’s solid PR to mumble something about effective altruism being the justification for predatory capitalist behavior.

It just becomes hard to believe after the company was sold and the employees screwed over and the customers screwed over and the founders used their gains to financially support whatever authoritarian fantasies they had all along.

Turns out, people who are good at being ruthless aren’t doing so for a secret ethical reason: they’re just ruthless people.

Yeah... I have no idea why HNers seem more negative these days?
by pstuart | 2025-08-02 01:52:00+00:00
A lack of awareness does not determine whether something is true or not.

While Linux, like everything else, is not perfect, it is technically just the kernel, and the version of linux you installed was called a "distribution", and they normally package one or more varieties of GUIs (Graphical User Interface), commonly known as a "Desktop Environment".

Here is a list for your edification: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desktop_environment

You may want to file a bug report for their respective project, or if you're up to it, fix the problem yourself instead of just complaining about it.
by worik | 2025-08-02 01:52:06+00:00
43% of American workers have used AI at work, they are mostly doing it in informal ways, solving their own work problems. Scaling AI across the enterprise is hard

A lot of firms starting into this business are "betting the farm" on "scaling AI across the enterprise"

In my experience LLMs are incredibly useful from a simple text interface (I only work with text, mainly computer code). I am still reeling from how disruptive they are, in that context.

But IMO there is not a lot of money to be made for start ups in that context (I expect there is not enough to justify the high valuations of outfits like Open AI). There should be a name for the curse - revolutionary technology that makes many people vastly more productive, but there is no real way to capture that value. Unless "Scaling AI across the enterprise" can succeed.

I have my doubts. I am sure there will be niches, and in a decade or so, with hindsight, it will be clear what they are. But there is no reliable way to tell now

The "Bitter Lesson" seems like a distraction to me. The fundamental problem is related: this technology is generally useful, much more than it is specifically useful.

The "killer app" is a browser window open to https://chat.deepseek.com. There is not much beyond that. Not nothing, just not much.

But so long as you have not bet your farm on "scaling AI across the enterprise" nor been fired by someone else who is trying, we should be very happy. We are in a "steam engine" moment. Nothing will ever be the same.

And if Open AI and the like all go belly up and demote a swathe of billionaires to be normally rich, that is the cherry on the top
by 827a | 2025-08-02 01:52:54+00:00
Even better: Imagine a world where you could just host your public keys on e.g. mydomain.com/.well-known/jwks.json, you register with a service provider with me@mydomain.com, then the service automatically pulls public keys from that. Then, all you have to do is sign new keys with an appropriate audience like aud:"serviceprovider.com".

And for the public email providers, a service like Gravatar could exist to host them for you.

Wouldn't that be nice.
by ramoz | 2025-08-02 01:53:36+00:00
Because they don't blatantly read people's prompts. They have a confidential inference architecture.

They don't target and analyze specific user or organizations - that would be fairly nefarious.

The only exception would be if there are flags for trust and safety. https://support.anthropic.com/en/articles/8325621-i-would-li...
by ptero | 2025-08-02 01:53:43+00:00
I don't think this is correct. The majority of people prefers states to have more influence on school curriculum and federal government to have less. Yes, there are downsides to that, but it generally means that hours on STEM will increase and hours on ideology will decrease.

Removing federal influence in setting agenda while sending federal funding directly to states without federal oversight of programs would not be a bad thing. My 2c.
by dekhn | 2025-08-02 01:54:29+00:00
The basis would be getting a dean's approval (or lack of a denial). That is the level at which "Exception Handling" is normally done at a university (above professor, below vice president), and it would normally be the dean of the department that housed the graduate program (some grad programs span multiple departments, which makes it more complicated).

Likely, there are also rule systems that would need to be circumvented; for example, while the admissions program for a graduate program would accept the student, the registrar or other entity might then negate that acceptance due to standing policy. At that point, I wouldn't be surprised if it reached the vice president level of the university (VP of the School that housed the department).

Every university handles this slightly differently. Exceptions can often be made.

To qualify you would normally have to do something truly exceptional or show a pattern of continuously excellent (grad student level). From what I can tell (I am not a math expert) she is considered a 'prodigy' and the problem she solved would require considerable skill, in a way that predicts continued successful performance at the university professor. The history of prodigies who skipped various steps of the normal schooling path is mixed- personally, I think people undervalue the importance of spending time with people in your age group during the 15-25 range, but honestly, without knowing more detail, it's hard to say.
by toomanyrichies | 2025-08-02 01:55:11+00:00
If New Mexicans were truly going to turn en masse to PBS Passport streaming, why haven't they done so already?

– Nearly one in five households lacks any fixed home internet connection. Many of those rely on cellular data that’s unreliable or capped, i.e. not viable for high‑quality streaming. [1]

– Over 20% of residents, especially in rural and tribal areas, live in broadband deserts where wired speeds of 25/3 Mbps simply aren’t available. [2]

– Among tribal communities, up to 80% of individuals may lack internet access altogether. [3]

– Even for those who can stream, broadband plans often cost around $69/month, and Passport itself requires a donation of at least $60/year or $5/month. [1][4] That may not sound like a lot to us, but it’s a non-trivial monthly expense for a family living in the 6th-poorest state in the US. [5]

Public broadcasting remains vital for people without digital access, whether due to infrastructure shortages, affordability, or demographic factors like age and tech comfort. Streaming can complement, but cannot replace, over‑the‑air reach in New Mexico. The same is likely true for overlapping reasons in the other states that OP mentioned.

1. Benton Institute for Broadband & Society. Affordable Broadband for Every Household in New Mexico. https://www.benton.org/blog/affordable-broadband-every-house...

2. Viante New Mexico. Broadband Internet in New Mexico. https://viantenm.org/broadband-internet-in-new-mexico

3. Native American Budget and Policy Institute / UNM. Broadband Access on Tribal Lands in New Mexico. https://nabpi.unm.edu/assets/documents/covid-19-research/nab...

4. PBS Digital Support. What is PBS Passport? https://pbsdigital.freshdesk.com/support/solutions/folders/5...

5. https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/poorest-sta...
by RickJWagner | 2025-08-02 01:57:27+00:00
I loved many NPR / PBS creations, like “Car Talk”. What a great show.

But I was dismayed to see how NPR turned a blind eye to stories like the Hunter Biden bombshell. NPRs CEO started wearing a Biden hat, and openly criticizing Trump. A former NPR employee wrote a well publicized substack article (irony!) that claimed deep, systemic political bias. It’s hard not to agree.

I hope NPR and PBS take a hard look at themselves and come up with some ways to assure political neutrality. Absent that, I have to agree that tax dollars should not be spent here.
by xpe | 2025-08-02 01:58:13+00:00
Obligatory mention of SubEthaEdit: "General purpose plain-text editor for macOS. Widely known for its live collaboration feature."

And, as of 2018, is now open source. Looks like it has had commits as recently as 2022: https://github.com/subethaedit/SubEthaEdit

See also a previous HN discussion at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18550649
by deepline | 2025-08-02 01:59:02+00:00
Deepline (fmr. Aero) | NYC (ONSITE) | Founding Full-stack Engineers | $160k-$220k + meaningful equity

SaaS is dead. We're building the generative platform that enables enterprises create perfectly personalized software on-demand instead of struggling with expensive tools and months of failed onboardings. Imagine Lovable for Operators -with perfect internal context - every datapoint, every system, every process.

Just raised $3.3M from Lerer Hippeau + Looker founding team. Technical founding team from Uber, Lyft, Capchase, MIT Lincoln Lab.

https://www.getaero.io/careers#open-roles
by gnat | 2025-08-02 02:01:07+00:00
From the excellent "Why Nations Fail" by Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson:

> An example of what could happen if you took your job too seriously, rather than successfully second-guessing what the Communist Party wanted, is provided by the Soviet census of 1937. As the returns came in, it became clear that they would show a population of about 162 million, far less than the 180 million Stalin had anticipated and indeed below the figure of 168 million that Stalin himself announced in 1934. The 1937 census was the first conducted since 1926, and therefore the first one that followed the mass famines and purges of the early 1930s. The accurate population numbers reflected this. Stalin's response was to have those who organized the census arrested and sent to Siberia or shot. He ordered another census, which took place in 1939. This time the organizers got it right; they found that the population was actually 171 million.
by softwaredoug | 2025-08-02 02:01:42+00:00
In my experience, there's an opposing "bitter lesson" when trying to make incremental, tactical progress in user-facing AI / ML applications: _you're not a researcher_. Stay to tried-and-true, boring ML methods that have been proven at scale and then add human knowledge and rules to make it all work.

Then, as the article mentions, some new fundamental shift happens, and practitioners need to jump over to a completely new way of working. Monkeypatching to make it all work. Rinse repeat.
by gsf_emergency_2 | 2025-08-02 02:03:35+00:00
There are additional nihilist options

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TheAntiNihilist

But tvtropes seem to think that they are equally absurd

>It's important to note that, despite the trope's name, the Anti-Nihilist is still a nihilist. A character who is optimistic and life affirming and isn't a nihilist would likely be listed under Silly Rabbit, Cynicism Is for Losers!

Fwiw, Terry Pratchett and the recs from this thread

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44736668

often manage to be fun and funny without being (explicitly?) nihilist. Suggestions for other role models? Especially appreciated would be political writers.. (in the above thread, they came close with "sex similes")
by sjayasinghe | 2025-08-02 02:04:07+00:00
The reliability of the information depends on two factors:

* The quality of project resources that you're working with. You use your actual textbooks from class, the quality would be higher. Some random articles online, the quality would be worse. You have complete control over the source material that the LLM uses as context.

* The specific model that you're working with. The system is model-agnostic, you can bring your favorite model.

On privacy, I plan to make this a local-first application where you can bring your own LLM API key from any provider, and the API calls are made from your own machine to your LLM provider. In addition to a 3rd party LLM provider, you can use a local model running on your machine for maximum privacy. This is also the easiest way to ensure user ownership of their educational material.
by noosphr | 2025-08-02 02:05:34+00:00
Deep seek papers are a must to read for anyone who wants to understand how to make LLMs operate at hyper scale. All western labs hide their best results, or at most release summaries that are about as meaningful as the answers Cleo used to give on stack exchange: https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/562694/integral-int...

I have a suspicion with how quiet all the major players got after the two weeks after deepseek R1 was released that they were reading and implementing everything in the papers that came with it as fast as humanly possible.