MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mothballed | 2025-08-29 18:43:52+00:00
Fair enough, I can respect the difference in opinion. A couple notes though on the military or hunters ed training safety that might influence their training

1) The safety mechanisms on say a glock are different than on a lot of military rifles soldiers are trained on. An Ar-15/M16 can go off without pulling the trigger if the firing pin gets stuck in the channel. That won't happen with a glock because the safety physically blocks the primer from being struck. Also in theory a free-floating firing pin could maybe somehow get slammed hard enough or slam an abused primer enough to set off some military rifles.

2) Some hunting shotguns or military rifles aren't drop safe. Modern handguns are.

3) A military rifle or hunting rifle generally has the trigger exposed at all times you are carrying it. A CCW handgun, you are not exposing the gun and trigger unless you are about to shoot someone.

Now I've never served in the military, other than a rag-tag Kurdish militia. What I would imagine the boot sergeant or whatever they are called do, is tells the soldier they will keep the manual safety on or the weapon unchambered and leave it at that, because explaining the intricacies of a striker-fired pistol vs an M16 to a bunch of barely out of highschoolers from Guam who are already exhausted from sleep deprivation and jarring work-outs would not be terribly productive.
by mordechai9000 | 2025-08-29 18:43:54+00:00
A couple years ago I was turned down for a position after an initial screening interview because they said my writing sample didn't meet certain criteria. I felt it arguably did, but I just said "thank you for your time and consideration", and moved on. I was just glad to get a clear "no" at an early stage.

They've probably revised their policy by now, I suspect, but I appreciated that they made the effort.
by Jcampuzano2 | 2025-08-29 18:44:01+00:00
This is exactly what I use it for. It's my go-to "dumb tedious things" model. And it fills that role very well.

You don't need the smartest slow model for every task. I've used it all week for tedious things nobody wants to do and gotten a ton done in less time.

The only thing I've had issues with is if you're not a level more specific than you might be with smarter models it can go off the rails.

But give it a tedious task and a very clear example and it'll happily get the job done.
by ACCount37 | 2025-08-29 18:44:02+00:00
I'm not sure if there will be exponential growth, but I also don't believe that it's entirely necessary. Some automation-relevant performance metrics, like "task-completion time horizon", appear to increase exponentially - but do they have to?

All you really need is for performance to keep increasing steadily at a good rate.

If the exponential growth tops out, and AI only gains a linear two days per year of "task-completion time horizon" once it does? It'll be able to complete a small scrum sprint autonomously by year 2035. Edging more and more into the "seasoned professional developer" territory with each passing year, little by little.
by eszed | 2025-08-29 18:44:33+00:00
This. I've hired in a number of roles, in several industries, and what they've all had in common is that rejection is never personal.

My first career was in theatre, which a) is (or at least was, back in the day?) much more competitive than tech - par was one callback (ie, second screening) per 100 auditions, and one casting per 10 callbacks; and b) is genuinely, deeply vulnerable - you have to bring your whole self into your work, in a way that you don't in any other field.

It's still never personal, and actors who don't develop thick skins wash out quickly.

I once auditioned three rounds for Romeo, at a company I really liked, and thought I'd killed it. I didn't get the role, and was pretty bummed (particularly since - actors are nothing but petty - I didn't much like the performance by the guy who did). Six months later the casting director button-holed me after seeing another show I was in, and told me I'd been their first choice, and he was sorry they'd not been able to cast me. The trouble was, he said, their only good choice for Juliette was at least a foot shorter than I am, and there was no way that wouldn't have looked awkward.

It's never personal.

Furthermore, that "failed" audition directly led to two later jobs, and I think indirectly to a third. Having a good interview, even in a situation where you don't achieve the immediate goal, can only be good for you - both by developing your own skills, and for creating a reputation for competence within your industry.
by lucb1e | 2025-08-29 18:44:35+00:00
It's called an IP address. Since some ISPs don't assign a fixed IP to a subscriber, a timestamp is nowadays necessary. The combination is traceable to a subscriber who is responsible for the line, either to work with law enforcement if subpoenaed or to not send abusive traffic via the line themselves

Why law enforcement doesn't do their job, resulting in people not bothering to report things anymore, is imo the real issue here. Third party identification services to replace a failing government branch is pretty ugly as a workaround, but perhaps less ugly than the commercial gatekeepers popping up today
by randomsofr | 2025-08-29 18:44:51+00:00
Congrats on the success! I’ve had a similar experience since I started moving more money around. My local branch started calling me too. I live in a busy area where lines at the bank can take hours, but now they told me I can just message someone whenever I go and they’ll move me to the front.

The other day I was just poking around the investment section of the app to see what kind of rates they offered, and almost immediately I got a call from my personal banker, haha. I actually ended up trying the investment since the returns looked good.
by mitthrowaway2 | 2025-08-29 18:45:05+00:00
But you won't feel the same way about a pickpocket who borrows the source code to the software you derive your livelihood from, your sales team's customer list, your would-be-bestselling novel manuscript, your company's secret formula for a rust-proof coating, or that scientific paper that you and your grad students have spent all summer getting ready to submit for publication?

Thank you for your generosity!
by infecto | 2025-08-29 18:45:12+00:00
I don’t disagree that people don’t get into HFT because they’re trying to save the world. It is mercenary in the sense that the rewards attract talent. But calling the work itself valueless misses the point, liquidity and price discovery are public goods. You notice them most when they don’t exist, and the cost of capital spikes for everyone.

As for the “bucketloads of cash,” that’s just how competitive advantage in markets gets priced. If firms didn’t deliver something real, the money would dry up quickly. Markets are brutally efficient at punishing dead weight.

Philanthropy is great, give to causes you care about. But it’s worth recognizing that the system enabling those donations in the first place is the same one that relies on liquidity, efficient spreads, and functioning markets.
by chatmasta | 2025-08-29 18:45:19+00:00
This is my #1 annoyance when reading HN on my iPhone. I scrolled the comments here looking for this complaint.

Any time I click a GitHub link, if I navigate beyond the readme, then my history is completely borked. Going “back” one page might go to the readme, might go back to HN, or might even go back to the readme and then back to the page I was trying to leave!

It’s infuriating and I always figured it was a bug they’d fix eventually but it’s been at least two years of this crap.
by nkohari | 2025-08-29 18:45:31+00:00
I like weird people. I think most creative people like weird people. If "weird" means you have idiosyncrasies, then yeah, all of us do. In my experience, once you get to know a person, you realize there is no such thing as "normal".

Now if "weird" in this case actually means "kind of an asshole" then that's a different thing, and yeah, that's definitely worth working on.
by M95D | 2025-08-29 18:45:39+00:00
> Why? There is no evidence that ARM is the only power efficient CPU. i5, i3 and n100 are all power efficient.

They are, but the motherboard is not, or at least not as much as an ARM board.

> Why? Disable onboard video if you care that much.

And it would boot... how? AFAIK, no UEFI system is capable of booting headless and very very few BIOS systems were.

> No, that's not what you do for a power efficient NAS. You build an i3, i5 or n100, turn off all unneeded peripherals, and configure bios as needed to your level of desired power consumption. under 10W is achievable.

I very much doubt that. N100 maybe, just maybe, could go lower than 20W if the power source is very very efficient, but I haven't seen any system with 10+ SATA ports. The commonly suggested solution here, to add a server SAS/SATA controller, would double or triple the idle power.
by tonetegeatinst | 2025-08-29 18:45:47+00:00
Onion sites have bots and scrapers.

They don't use cloudlfare AFAIK.

They normally use a puzzle that the website generates, or the use a proof of work based capcha. I've found proof of work good enough out of these two, and it also means that the site owner can run it themselves instead of being reliant on cloudflare and third parties.
by throwaway81523 | 2025-08-29 18:45:52+00:00
Yes, Whitaker & Watson (analysis), Hardy and Wright (number theory), Dieudonne (analysis and he was literally a Bourbaki member), heck, Euclid's Elements; Gauss Disquisitiones, etc. Bourbaki is more of a monument. Writing it was necessary, but for readers it suffices to know that it is there ;).
by margalabargala | 2025-08-29 18:46:29+00:00
> Also, none of these companies will actually give you your purpose in life, your dream job will not make you whole:-)

Some people really do find a whole lot of personal meaning from their work. And that's okay. It's their life.

If someone is the sort of person who might find meaning working for Anthropic, they would find that meaning at a lot of other jobs as well. I think that's a better emssage; not that "you shall not find purpose in your work", but "the purpose you may find from work is not limited to a single or even small number of AI companies".
by some_random | 2025-08-29 18:46:30+00:00
Eh, the reality is that the consumer market never trended off government models all that tightly. What you're seeing is the evolution of duty handguns; metal framed hammer fired wonder nines to polymer framed striker fired handguns. When consumers buy the latter they typically buy Glock 19, 17, 20, etc and there's an argument that they're influenced by government procurement decisions but even still the P320 never sold as well as Glock. As for the P365, it's a different category of handgun, a small-ish concealed carry handgun with way better capacity than the previous generation. Springfield Hellcat and Glock 43x are some of the competitors, not the P229. It's also worth mentioning that when the military or cops need a concealed handgun, they very frequently opt for the P365.

As for the P365 having maintenance/reliability/duty cycle issues, beyond the typical SIG beta testing on consumers shit I really haven't seen people having issues with it.
by madrox | 2025-08-29 18:46:50+00:00
The web doesn't need gatekeepers the way you don't need a bank account, driver's license, or a credit card. You can do without it, but it sure makes it harder to interact with modern society. The days of the mainstream internet being a libertarian frontier are more or less over. The capitalist internet is firmly in charge.

The real question is whether there is more business opportunity in supporting "unsigned" agents than signed ones. My hope is that the industry rejects this because there's more money to be made in catering to agents than blocking them. This move is mostly to create a moat for legacy business.

Also, if agents do become the de-facto way of browsing the internet, I'm not a fan of more ways of being tracked for ads and more ways for censorship groups to have leverage.

But the author is making a strawman argument over a "steelman" argument against signed agents. The strongest argument I can see is not that we don't need gatekeepers, but that regulation is anti-business.
by lbhdc | 2025-08-29 18:46:50+00:00
If you are willing to spread your workload out over a few regions getting that many GPUs on demand can be doable. You can use something like compute classes on gcp to fallback to different machine types if you do hit stockouts. That doesn't make you impervious from stock outs, but makes it a lot more resilient.

You can also use duty cycle metrics to scale down your gpu workloads to get rid of some of the slack.
by roxolotl | 2025-08-29 18:46:53+00:00
That quote really perfectly encapsulates the challenge with these tools. There is an assumption that inherently code is hard to write and so if you could code in natural language it would save time. But code isn’t actually that hard to write. Sure some people are genuinely bad at it just like I’m genuinely bad at drawing but a bit of practice and most people can be perfectly competent at it.

The hard part is the engineering. Understanding and breaking down the problem, and then actually solving it. If all we gain out of these tools is that we don’t have to write code by hand anymore they are moderately useful but they won’t really be a step change in software development speed.
by tialaramex | 2025-08-29 18:47:40+00:00
There's also some "infant mortality" stuff, the EMUs (Electric Multiple Units, which I suppose is roughly what this is?) in my country have not good failure rates in their first weeks and months but they get much better (typically best in class due to fewer moving parts than say a diesel) in mid-life.

Brake performance is a thing you can simulate and measure on a test track, which presumably happened at least months ago. However loss of adhesion, the reason braking stops working on contaminated railheads is also impacted by moisture, a bunch of dry leaves won't make anywhere close to the same problem as the same leaf material after a nice gentle drizzle, not really rain per se, not enough to actually wash the rails clean, but ensuring the leaves turn into a thin mush that makes braking next to impossible.

RAIB report 12/2023 about an incident near me talks about that, the driver maybe makes some dubious decisions, but ultimately he brakes, and it does nothing, so he brakes harder, still nothing, maximum braking, still nothing, select emergency braking (same effect but hey, it's there to be used right), still nothing - oh shit, we've passed the danger signal and I see another train, time to leave. He actually spent ages in hospital because he tripped trying to flee and was trapped in the wreckage, but on the other hand if he'd just sat there frozen he might well be dead 'cos his train did indeed smash into the other one so the side where the driver is sat smashed into another train at like 50+mph.
by nielsbot | 2025-08-29 18:47:47+00:00
> I expect companies to reject candidates who make honest mistakes during interviews.

I mean--maybe their interview process is overly harsh? They could miss out some good candidates that way.

> I don't need (or deserve) your sympathy.

Hey person, don't be so hard on yourself. The world is already hard enough to just live in. Hoping you find an alternate and maybe more enjoyable career path :)
by infecto | 2025-08-29 18:47:47+00:00
Returns-chasing isn’t some moral failure, it’s the mechanism by which capital gets allocated. If you strip that out, you don’t get fewer “bad” companies, you just get less disciplined pricing of risk and more capital scarcity overall.

On farming: margins aren’t simply “a choice.” Prices are set in global commodity markets, not by a farmer unilaterally. Thin margins are structural, and access to capital or insurance is exactly what helps them survive volatility rather than get wiped out.

I am not sure why you think farmers get to set price on a commodity item. They don’t and because of that will often leverage future contracts or other hedges to bake in prices early.
by jitl | 2025-08-29 18:48:54+00:00
I've been a bit put off by rxdb's lack of transactions (see https://rxdb.info/transactions-conflicts-revisions.html) and the sometimes self-congratulatory tone in their docs.

Notion is a very async collaborative application and we rely on a form of transactions. When you make a change in Notion like moving a bunch of blocks from one page to another, we compose the transaction client-side given the client's in-memory snapshot view of the universe, and send the transaction to the server. If the transaction turns out to violate some server-side validation (like a permissions issue), we reject the change as a unit and roll back the client.

I'm not sure how we'd do this kind of thing with RxDb. If we model it as a delete in one document and an insert into another document, we'd get data loss. Maybe they'd tell us our app shouldn't have that feature.
by bpavuk | 2025-08-29 18:48:57+00:00
I'd argue that even GPT-5 and Sonnet 4 at their highest reasoning budgets are not enough for "real coding work" because you still have to think about how an LLM should do it instead of what, and put it into a prompt. some harnesses, such as JetBrains Junie or Gemini CLI, make a good job of letting me drift into declarative prompts, but that's still not enough.
by Nevermark | 2025-08-29 18:48:59+00:00
Integers are reals. But you can't claim something about reals because integers have that property.

Constructible reals are also a subclass of reals, but you can't claim anything about the class of reals, which are vastly dominated by un-constructible reals, because constructible reals have a property.

There are many reasons to doubt un-constructible numbers exist in nature.

Just for starters, you can never actually define a specific un-constructible real. If you did, you would have defined it, making it constructible.

An un-constructible real requires infinite information to define. Not infinite digits (pi is constructible, e is constructible), but an infinite list of uncompressible digits, or some other expression with infinite numbers of symbols!

The name "reals" is highly deceptive/unfortunate. (What could be more reasonable than a "real" number?)

We need a pithier name for constructible numbers, and that is what should be introduced along with algebra, calculus, trig, diff eq, etc.

None of those subjects, or any practical math, ever needed the class of real numbers. The early misleading unnecessary and half-assed introduction of "reals" is an historical educational terminological aberration.

(It would be nice to rename "real" numbers, to mean actually real numbers that we could actually use. But given the generations of confusion that would incur, I propose "actual numbers", to be all constructible numbers. Nobody but mathematicians, who play abstract games with higher order infinities, need "real" numbers.)
by maratc | 2025-08-29 18:49:39+00:00
The problem with that is, of course, that "significant" is subjective.

The modern Western society is very occupied with the questions of racial and gender identity, and it is generally accepted in that society that this topic is "significant". And since it's that society that the Unicode Consortium is working within, this explains how you get six different colors of "man-pregnant" emoji in the world where there possibly haven't been six different-colored pregnant men.
by otterley | 2025-08-29 18:49:58+00:00
It's not just the model, it's Elon Musk's view of the world and business in general. Neither Microsoft nor Google nor their leadership--though admittedly imperfect--make it a habit of trolling people, openly embroiling themselves in politics, and committing blatant legal and societal transgressions. You reap what you sow; and if you live for controversy, you can't expect people not to want to do business with you.
by topspin | 2025-08-29 18:50:10+00:00
> Whether the docs are out of sync?

Were this a one off, you would have a point. It isn't, however. My experience over many years has been that you can't ever be certain about what is actually going on, based on the documentation alone, and that you wind up in Reddit and Stack Overflow and a plethora of blog posts attempting to figure it out. With LLMs, we have only more sources of contradictory and chronically obsolescent input.

There is an actual problem here. However I can see that, based on the contributions from the SQLite downmod mafia, this talk isn't welcome, so I'm off to some other thing. Have a nice weekend, I suppose.
by EthanHeilman | 2025-08-29 18:50:14+00:00
Most mathematicians, but not all, take a philosophical position of platonic idealism [0] in which numbers and other mathematical entities have an independent reality and are not invented but discovered.

> All abstract concepts brought about solely by humans.

That is a defendable philosophical position to hold but many thinkers disagree with it or at least admit there is more nuance [1]. People have been debating the question of the independent reality of mathematical concepts for thousands of years.

If abstract concepts are brought about solely by humans, does that mean the first human to invent a proof of some property actually decides the reality of that property? If Godel hadn't proved incompleteness, could another mathematician created a completeness proof instead? On the hand, if that isn't the case and the truth or falsity of a math statement exists prior a human thinking it, doesn't it have some reality beyond human thought? What about mathematical statements which are true which can't be proven?

[0]: Platonism in the Philosophy of Mathematics https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/platonism-mathematics/

[1]: Mathematics: Discovery or Invention? https://royalinstitutephilosophy.org/article/mathematics-dis...
by reactordev | 2025-08-29 18:50:29+00:00
I get it, we all want to be somebody, but is the juice worth the squeeze?

They may find a candidate that succeeds, they may not. In the end, it’s up to you to decide whether that kind of environment is for you. I also interviewed at a few AI startups and while difficult, I wasn’t impressed with them. They seem to be too high maintenance with little to no experience.
by Szpadel | 2025-08-29 18:51:42+00:00
I had that issue with gpt-5 that when it wanted to do something in one way that was just plain wrong in this project, and no matter what I said it just kept doing the same action.

it was completely unsterable. I get why people are often upset by "you're right" of Claude models, but that's what I usually want from model.

I guess there is different in expectations depending on experience level of developer, but I want to have final saying what is the right way
by bawolff | 2025-08-29 18:52:07+00:00
Well you said, "The author has a hypothesis and it's looking for evidence" - that's usually the definition of the scientific method - you form some hypoothesis and then try and find evidence to test it.

So as far as I can tell, you're describing the scientific method as "bad thinking" and criticizing the author for using it. Which is certainly quite a take.