MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by UncleOxidant | 2025-08-12 20:50:58+00:00
> I have this belief that one of the reasons why inflation has been under control despite the QE experiments undertaken by the Federal Reserve, ECB, etc. is because of the impact of 600M Chinese workers

Definitely. The other way to look at it is that we were exporting our inflation to places like China. But that's (for various reasons political and otherwise) starting to change which means we can expect to have higher inflation than we had for the 30 years or so between 1990 and 2020.
by xg15 | 2025-08-12 20:51:03+00:00
This. Was also thinking "yes" first because of the glass of water, transparency, etc, but then got unsure: The objects might be spaced so widely that the milk or coke bottle would obscure the view due to perspective - or the peanut would simply end up outside the viewer's field of vision.

Shows that even if you have a world model, it might not be the right one.
by rowanG077 | 2025-08-12 20:51:25+00:00
Bad ergonomics, no integration and safety are all thinks that lead to complexity you need to manage were you to actually use this macro. The macros themselves are simple. But I don't think it's wrong to say using the macros does introduce insane complexity. Such things are often the case in C. The language is simple. To write anything of substance you have to introduce, often high amounts of, complexity.

1. Ergonomics: Forcing the null sanitizer is quite a sledgehammer you often cannot, or don't want, to pay, You are forcing global behavior for something you really only want locally for this construct. A misuse of maybe_value is a crash where in other languages you have case/match and compile time errors. There is no type inference so you have to be explicit at every, single, line, that you really mean a maybe(int) or whatever.

2. Integration: No libraries uses this, meaning any usage is limited to your own code only. Requiring manual and error prone translation at every interface.

3. Safety: No check the null sanitizer is actually on. This is a huge footgun where someone thinks "I know I use this neat macro I saw here". And then of course not enabling the null sanitizer and everything breaks. So now for this to be safe it's not enough to understand the code. You need to check if the compile options are just right. This is especially insidious since this cannot be hidden in some object file where you make damn sure the sanitizer is on. the CONSUMER of this API must enable the sanitizer

For these reason I would ban this macro in any code I have control over.
by mikewarot | 2025-08-12 20:51:29+00:00
The reason they need terabytes per second is they're constantly loading weights and data into and then back out of multiply accumulator chips.

If you program hardware to just do the multiply/accumulate with the weights built in, you can then reduce the bandwidth required to just putting data into a "layer" and getting the results out, a much, MUCH lower amount of data in most cases.
by ajd555 | 2025-08-12 20:51:34+00:00
> Postgres and Apache Iceberg are both mature systems

Apache Iceberg as mature? I mean, there's a lot of activity around it, but I remember a year ago the rust library didn't even have write capabilities. And it's not like the library is a client and there's an iceberg server - the library literally is the whole product, interacting with the files in s3
by insane_dreamer | 2025-08-12 20:51:45+00:00
> [Microsoft] applied for 9,491 H-1B visas during the last fiscal year, all of which were approved. The company has laid off nearly 16,000 people in total this year, out of a 228,000-strong global employee base.

It shouldn't be able to get new H-1B's if it's laying people off. Hard to believe that the new H-1B hires are more qualified than the people that were laid off.

At the same time we see articles about how after being told to get a STEM degree, new CS grads can't find jobs.[0]

I sympathize with those in India wanting to get a higher pay job in the US, but it does perpetuate abusive behavior by companies (who have that employee under their thumb because their visa is tied to their employment), and it makes things much harder for new grads in the US (especially given college tuition costs) to get jobs.

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/10/technology/coding-ai-jobs...
by neaden | 2025-08-12 20:52:02+00:00
The story is pretty clearly meant to indicate that the Babylonians were worshiping an animal though. The theology of the book of Daniel emphasises that the Gods of the Babylonians don't exist, this story happens around the same time Daniel proves the priests had a secret passage they were using to get the food offered to Bel and eat it at night while pretending that Bel was eating it. Or when Daniel talks to King Belshazzar and says "You have praised the gods of silver and gold, of bronze, iron, wood, and stone, which do not see or hear or know, but the God in whose power is your very breath and to whom belong all your ways, you have not honored". This is not to argue for the historical accuracy of the stories, just that the point is that Daniel is acting as a debunker of the Babylonian beliefs in these stories while asserting the supremacy of the Israelite beliefs.
by Jtsummers | 2025-08-12 20:52:46+00:00
Yes, I removed a parenthetical "(or euphoria loop for the Rapture believers who know they'll be saved)". But I removed it because not all who believe in the Rapture believe they will be saved (or have such high confidence) and, for them, it is a doom loop.

Both communities, though, end up reinforcing the belief amongst their members and tend towards increasing isolation from the rest of the world (leading to cultish behavior, if not forming a cult in the conventional sense), and a disregard for the here and now in favor of focusing on this impending world changing (destroying or saving) event.
by DrillShopper | 2025-08-12 20:53:26+00:00
I've been a proponent of levying an excise tax on H1-B visas equal to the salary amount paid to the person on that visa (including benefits, if any).

If you really need the lower salary worker then sure, you can have them, but it will cost you.

I would also make the company sponsoring the H1-B visa responsible for all relocation costs when they fire someone on the visa.
by Qem | 2025-08-12 20:53:53+00:00
> Datalog/Prolog as a sub-language

> And I’d like to be able to call into this pure declarative logic from an imperative shell that handles all the messy stuff. Is that too much to ask?

There is at least one pure Python implementation of Datalog sitting on PIP, pyDatalog[1][2]. It's not part of the standard library, but it's one PIP install and one import away. So this item is one of the lowest hanging fruit in the wishlist, at least for Python.

[1] https://github.com/pcarbonn/pyDatalog

[2] https://pypi.org/project/pyDatalog
by onion2k | 2025-08-12 20:54:23+00:00
Large enough repos don't fit on a single machine.

I don't believe any human can understand a problem if they need to fit the entire problem blem domain in their head, and the scope of a domain that doesn't fit on a computer. You have to break it down into a manageable amount of information to tackle it in chunks.

If a person can do that, so can an LLM prompted to do that by a person.
by yoaviram | 2025-08-12 20:54:25+00:00
This is one of several deceptive design patterns used by data brokers. Last year, we (the nonprofit consciousdigital.org) published a guide titled "How Deceptive Design is Used to Compromise Your Privacy and How to Fight Back". It contains 10 data protection deceptive patterns and countermeasures:

https://consciousdigital.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/dece...
by maxglute | 2025-08-12 20:54:39+00:00
>missing some fundamental cause

The conventional reason is # of kids is depressed relative to female education levels, but my unsubstantiated pet theory is elimination of boredom - mobile penetration also seems to map well with TFR declines. I think the opportunity cost / effort if >1 kid is too much, and from what I hear about friends with 2 kids that overlap by a few years, having 2 kids is >2 times harder, and they're not shy about sharing it. Modern life has too many comforts/distractions, hence imo positive policies will have hard time making 2+ kids desirable vs also adding punitive making not having 2+ kids undesirable.
by mtrovo | 2025-08-12 20:54:43+00:00
I think the idea would be that you can train people to move up the ladder into more productive roles, think about how China grew by eating the supply chain of western companies upwards.

IMHO a bigger problem is the whole MBA mentality of stripping companies down to the bones, lots of huge companies are now just trademarks and vendors, to the point that's hard to prove what exactly is their advantage besides the brand.
by switz | 2025-08-12 20:55:12+00:00
Most people who desire to build a company alone are not in the pursuit of a billion dollar outcome. They’re pursuing a path of somewhat orthogonal incentives. That said, of course it’s possible - but it’s also not that interesting.

I say this as someone who spend the last decade building a business with zero employees. I’m nowhere near a billion: by design & the patent absurdity of that “goal”.
by sdesol | 2025-08-12 20:55:21+00:00
> But they have to get better at understanding the repo by asking the right questions.

How I am tackling this problem is making it dead simple for users to create analyzers that are designed to enriched text data. You can read more about how it would be used in a search at https://github.com/gitsense/chat/blob/main/packages/chat/wid...

The basic idea is, users would construct analyzers with the help of LLMs to extract the proper metadata that can be semantically searched. So when the user does an AI Assisted search with my tool, I would load all the analyzers (description and schema) into the system prompt and the LLM can determine which analyzers can be used to answer the question.

A very simplistic analyzer would be to make it easy to identify backend and frontend code so you can just use the command `!ask find all frontend files` and the LLM will construct a deterministic search that knows to match for frontend files.
by amluto | 2025-08-12 20:55:26+00:00
I don't really get it. If I'm understanding correctly, the goal of these CDC-to-Iceberg systems is to mirror, in near real-time, a Postgres table into an Iceberg database. The article states, repeatedly:

> In streaming CDC scenarios, however, you’d need to query Iceberg for the location on every delete: introducing random reads, latency, and drastically lowering throughput under high concurrency. On large tables, real-time performance is essentially impossible.

Let's consider the actual situation. There's a Postgres table that fits on whatever Postgres server is in use. It gets mirrored to Iceberg. Postgres is a full-fledged relational database and has indexes and such. Iceberg is not, although it can be scanned much faster than Postgres and queried by fancy Big Data tools (which, I agree, are really cool!). And, notably, there is no index mapping Postgres rows to Iceberg row positions.

But why isn't there? CDC is inherently stateful -- unless someone is going to build Merkle trees or similar to allow efficiently diffing table states (which would be awesome), the CDC process need to keep enough state to know where it is. Maybe this is O(1) in current implementations. But why not keep the entire mapping from Postgres rows to Iceberg positions? The Postgres database table is about N rows times however wide a row is, and it fits on a Postgres server. The mapping needed would be about the size of a single index on the table. Why not store it somewhere? Updates to it will be faster than updates to the source Postgres table, so it will keep up. Is the problem that this is awkward to do in a "serverless" manner?

For extra fun, someone could rig up Postgres (via an extension or just some clever tables) so that the mapping is stored in Postgres itself. It would be, roughly, one small table with CDC state and one moderate size table per mirrored table storing the row position mapping. It could be on the same server instance or a different one.
by pavlov | 2025-08-12 20:55:39+00:00
A very interesting read.

My idea of these self-proclaimed rationalists was fifteen years out of date. I thought they’re people who write wordy fan fiction, but turns out they’ve reached the point of having subgroups that kill people and exorcise demons.

This must be how people who had read one Hubbard pulp novel in the 1950s felt decades later when they find out he’s running a full-blown religion now.

The article seems to try very hard to find something positive to say about these groups, and comes up with:

“Rationalists came to correct views about the COVID-19 pandemic while many others were saying masks didn’t work and only hypochondriacs worried about covid; rationalists were some of the first people to warn about the threat of artificial intelligence.”

There’s nothing very unique about agreeing with the WHO, or thinking that building Skynet might be bad… (The rationalist Moses/Hubbard was 12 when that movie came out — the most impressionable age.) In the wider picture painted by the article, these presumed successes sound more like a case of a stopped clock being right twice a day.
Ask HN: Imposter Syndrome as Senior Engineer
by phdllm | 2025-08-12 20:56:18+00:00
I’ve been in the industry for around 8 years and technically senior for 3 of those but I don’t feel like it. I don’t feel like I am an authority on much of anything, I second guess myself on technical decisions I make all the time, and I’ve never really felt like I’ve had a mentor in my career that I’ve been able to learn the ropes for how to do this successfully, I just keep trying to learn and do my best.

I’m applying for jobs as a senior engineer and having people reach out to me for senior positions but in the back of my mind I am nervous to even apply for these because if I get through the interview and start working I just feel like I’m going to get in trouble for “faking it” or something. It doesn’t help that a lot of my career has been “full stack” work so I feel like my knowledge is an inch deep and an mile wide.

Confidence is something that has been hard to come by in my career and I think that’s a big part of where this issue comes from for me but it’s also only when I’ve been confident that I’ve gotten burned big time on a decision I made or something else. What can I do to convince myself that I’m someone that deserves the title?
by diputsmonro | 2025-08-12 20:56:40+00:00
Which is exactly why strategies like UBI are so important. Eventually the average American with no specialized skill will find that they cannot produce value when competing on a global scale.

Our strategy so far has been to let them starve and tell them to "learn to code" or "become a machine operator/technician", but that strategy can only help so many people. We do not need as many technicians as laborers that the machine replaced.

And when you have a mass of people who see that the future globalist economy is moving in a way that has no place for them, or plan to make sure they don't starve, you get the globalism backlash like what's happening in the US and UK over the last decade, and nationalistic pandering politicians taking advantage.

The only solution is to tax the billionare owners of the job-displacing machines to provide basic living UBI to the people they replaced.
by kmoser | 2025-08-12 20:56:49+00:00
This could be even easier to implement than the author suggests, at least for the cited use case of when a new web page is published (e.g. Part 2 of an article). The simplest solution--assuming you know what the URL will be--is to have your agent of choice periodically check whether that URL returns 200. That greatly simplifies the protocol since it piggy-backs off the existing HTTP protocol, and makes it easy to write your agent (or use an existing one). All that's left would be for authors to publish what the next URL will be; nothing else on the back end is needed.
by wnissen | 2025-08-12 20:57:09+00:00
It's not clear what LLMs are good at, and there's great interest in finding out. This is made harder by the frenetic pace of development (GPT 2 came out in 2019). Not surprising at all that there's research into how LLMs fail and why.

Even for someone who kinda understands how the models are trained, it's surprising to me that they struggle when the symbols change. One thing computers are traditionally very good at is symbolic logic. Graph bijection. Stuff like that. So it's worrisome when they fail at it. Even in this research model which is much, much smaller than current or even older models.
by jpau | 2025-08-12 20:57:32+00:00
Google[1] also has a "long context" pricing structure. OpenAI may be considering offering similar since they do not offer their priority processing SLAs[2] for context >128K.

[1] https://cloud.google.com/vertex-ai/generative-ai/pricing

[2] https://openai.com/api-priority-processing/
by geraneum | 2025-08-12 20:57:48+00:00
> it wrote by itself as part of a larger task I had given it, so it certainly understands transparency

Or it’s a common step or a known pattern or combination of steps that is prevalent in its training data for certain input. I’m guessing you don’t know what’s exactly in the training sets. I don’t know either. They don’t tell ;)

> but it adapts and combines them well to suit my particular requirements. So they seem to handle "novel" pretty well too.

We tend to overestimate the novelty of our own work and our methods and at the same time, underestimate the vastness of the data and information available online for machines to train on. LLMs are very sophisticated pattern recognizers. It doesn’t mean what you are doing specifically is done in this exact way before, rather the patterns adapted and the approach may not be one of their kind.

> is a purely philosophical question

It is indeed. A question we need to ask ourselves.
by EcommerceFlow | 2025-08-12 20:58:49+00:00
I created a script that outputs the entire codebase to a text file (also allows me to exclude files/folders/node_modules), separating and labeling each file in the program folder.

I then structure my prompts around like so:

<project_code> ``` ``` </project_code>

<heroku_errors> " " </heroku_errors>

<task> " " </task>

I've been using this with Google Ai studio and it's worked phenomenally. 1 million tokens is A LOT of code, so I'd imagine this would work for lots n lots of project type programs.
by bcrosby95 | 2025-08-12 20:59:01+00:00
Claude will point you in the right neighborhood but to the wrong house. So if you're completely ignorant that's cool. But recognize that its probably wrong and only a starting point.

Hell, I spent 3 hours "arguing" with Claude the other day in a new domain because my intuition told me something was true. I brought out all the technical reason why it was fine but Claude kept skirting around it saying the code change was wrong.

After spending extra time researching it I found out there was a technical term for it and when I brought that up Claude finally admitted defeat. It was being a persistent little fucker before then.

My current hobby is writing concurrent/parallel systems. Oh god AI agents are terrible. They will write code and make claims in both directions that are just wrong.
by mapontosevenths | 2025-08-12 20:59:46+00:00
> It also entirely subjugates the economic realities that we...

To play devils advocate, you could be seen as trying to subjugate the worlds health to your own economic well-being, and far fewer people are concerned with your tax bracket than there are people on earth. In a pure democracy, I'm fairly certain the planets well being would be deemed more important than the economy of whatever nation you live in.

> advocating for focusing on one... is primarily following a religion

Maybe, but they could also just be doing the risk calculus a bit differently. If you are a many step thinker the long term fecundity of our species might feel more important than any level of short term financial motivation.
by breachcoll | 2025-08-12 21:00:15+00:00
BreachCollection.com is much more than a website where you can check if your credentials are exposed in Data Breaches. It allows companies to integrate with their API to prevent users from using passwords previously leaked on data breaches, and security researchers to find credentials to help secure their clients. In the near future, BreachCollection will introduce a Machine Learning based detection system for password protection. BreachCollection is revolutionising web security.
by netsharc | 2025-08-12 21:00:22+00:00
It really is a pathetic "hacker" move if the plan was "Let's just flaunt the rules, land in 'hostile' territory and hope the punishment isn't so severe.". So far his talent is operating a plane, lots of people can do that.

An actual hacker would figure out something clever to not be caught, be arrested/detained for several weeks (de facto if not de jure), and relying on daddy's dollars to bail him out...
by ants_everywhere | 2025-08-12 21:00:29+00:00
I exhaust the 1 million context windows on multiple models multiple times per day.

I haven't used the Llama 4 10 million context window so I don't know how it performs in practice compared to the major non-open-source offerings that have smaller context windows.

But there is an induced demand effect where as the context window increases it opens up more possibilities, and those possibilities can get bottlenecked on requiring an even bigger context window size.

For example, consider the idea of storing all Hollywood films on your computer. In the 1980s this was impossible. If you store them in DVD or Bluray quality you could probably do it in a few terabytes. If you store them in full quality you may be talking about petabytes.

We recently struggled to get a full file into a context window. Now a lot of people feel a bit like "just take the whole repo, it's only a few MB".
by gwd | 2025-08-12 21:00:36+00:00
> How do we reconcile these two comments? I think that's a core question of the industry right now.

The question is, for those people who feel like things are going faster, what's the actual velocity?

A month ago I showed it a basic query of one resource I'd rewritten to use a "query builder" API. Then I showed it the "legacy" query of another resource, and asked it to do something similar. It managed to get very close on the first try, and with only a few more hours of tweaking and testing managed to get a reasonably thorough test suite to pass. I'm sure that took half the time it would have taken me to do it by hand.

Fast forward to this week, when I ran across some strange bugs, and had to spend a day or two digging into the code again, and do some major revision. Pretty sure those bugs wouldn't have happened if I'd written the code myself; but even though I reviewed the code, they went under the radar, because I hadn't really understood the code as well as I thought I had.

So was I faster overall? Or did I just offload some of the work to myself at an unpredictable point in the future? I don't "vibe code": I keep tight reign on the tool and review everything it's doing.
by simpaticoder | 2025-08-12 21:00:47+00:00
Those of us who accept this limitation can often fail to grasp how much others perceive it as a profound attack on the self. To me, it is a basic humility - that no matter how much I learn, I cannot really transcend the time and place of my birth, the biology of my body, the quirks of my culture. Rationality, though, promises that transcendence, at least to some people. And look at all the trouble such delusion has caused, for example "presentism". Science fiction often introduces a hidden coordinate system, one of language and predicate, upon which reason can operate, but system itself did not come from reason, but rather a storyteller's aesthetic.