MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by usrbinbash | 2025-08-14 15:10:06+00:00
> We don't just keep adding more words to our context window, because it would drive us mad.

That, and we also don't only focus on the textual description of a problem when we encounter a problem. We don't see the debugger output and go "how do I make this bad output go away?!?". Oh, I am getting an authentication error. Well, meaybe I should just delete the token check for that code path...problem solved?!

No. Problem very much not-solved. In fact, problem very much very bigger big problem now, and [Grug][1] find himself reaching for club again.

Software engineers are able to step back, think about the whole thing, and determine the root cause of a problem. I am getting an auth error...ok, what happens when the token is verified...oh, look, the problem is not the authentication at all...in fact there is no error! The test was simply bad and tried to call a higher privilege function as a lower privilege user. So, test needs to be fixed. And also, even though it isn't per-se an error, the response for that function should maybe differentiate between "401 because you didn't authenticate" and "401 because your privileges are too low".

[1]: https://grugbrain.dev
by sjdbdjskbzba | 2025-08-14 15:10:08+00:00
> Now you might ask why the Fed targets 2%

Because this is the amount that that the population will tolerate without revolting (see how we’re reacting to higher currently). Permanent inflation is permanent devaluation of labor, and permanent growth for capital holders. Coins have ridges on them for a reason.

The root problem is a debt based economy. It is not needed, and serves only to increase the wealth gap and shrink the middle class. The capital class has put much money towards financing “experts” who say inflation is needed. Other systems exist - monetary policy should serve the people, not enslave them [1].

Take homes for example - if we simply worked towards making homes cheaper, nobody would need mortgages. People owned homes before the 30 year fixed existed. The problem is if we make homes cheaper there’s less left for the capital class to own.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_credit
by makeitdouble | 2025-08-14 15:10:11+00:00
> attention-draining junk

To put it plainly, this attitude is probably the main reason reading books is sometimes labelled as an elitist poser passtime.

Kids will enjoy reading books that are genuinely good, but they need to care about the subject in the first place and they'll come for more on their own term. Focusing on the numbers ("X books per months") or denigrating the other things they also enjoy solely based on the format will just signal no shit is given about the actual content.
by layer8 | 2025-08-14 15:10:23+00:00
The sentence starts with “If you look at a map of our military bases”, which refers to all US military bases, not just the ones bordering China. The second sentence refers to that totality of bases.

I’d grant that there is a bit of ambiguity, but insinuating an “insane claim” is jumping the gun on a misreading that should have been fairly obvious in light of the “insanity”.
by pc86 | 2025-08-14 15:10:26+00:00
I think their argument is that FB has a pipeline that processes whatever data you give it and the idea that a human being made the conscious decision to use this data is almost certainly not what happened.

"This data processing pipeline processed the data we put in the pipeline" is not necessarily negligence unless you just hate Facebook and couldn't possibly imagine any scenario where they're not all mustache-twirling villains.
by rayiner | 2025-08-14 15:10:28+00:00
The system is byzantine because it is a hack around public opinion. Since 1965, support for more immigration peaked around 35%: https://nypost.com/2022/08/08/more-americans-want-fewer-immi..., with everyone else wanting it to either stay the same or be reduced.

The 1965 immigration act was sold to americans on the idea that it was simply ending country-origin discrimination, and wouldn’t increase immigration or change america’s demographics: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/29/podcasts/the-daily/electi....

So Congress can take advantage of the fact that a lot of people are okay with the status quo, but can’t affirmatively enact legislation that would be seen as creating a new pathway for permanent immigration. So the current system was built on a series of small measures that could fly under the radar. Eliminating the rebuttable presumption of immigrant intent in subsection blah blah blah doesn’t sound like it’s going to create a new pathway for permanent immigrants.
by 9rx | 2025-08-14 15:10:46+00:00
That is explained by housing also becoming more valuable. It wasn't that long ago that owning a house was considered a necessary evil at best, not the path to riches as it is recognized as today. Historically, you were lucky if you got your money back out of a house when you decided to sell it. Nowadays, if one doesn't get a double digit percentage return on investment they are crying like it is the end of the world. That shift in mindset allows homeowners to charge more when they sell their home[1]. That is not a product of inflation.

[1] Which also further perpetuates the idea of housing being an investment with said homeowner realizing a tidy return in that ability to charge more, which sees even more people wanting in on the action so that they too can make a fortune; lather, rinse, repeat.
by elzbardico | 2025-08-14 15:11:39+00:00
"We have no political system at all, we have a sort of corporate party with two wings, both financed by the national security state..." -Gore Vidal

All the other stuff, all the heady discourses, all the piety about the downtrodden, be then the minorities from one side, or the poor rural white man from the other, it is just a fucking smoking mirror, just tools to have loyal soldiers to their cause.
by bryanrasmussen | 2025-08-14 15:11:48+00:00
I like this scenario for a future James Bond movie. Bond has to have an AI in chat pretend to be him to stall the bad guys while he is sneaking around the back, but the state of the art Bond persona bot that Q gave him in its own hardware enclosure has been smashed up in the previous fight scene.

Bond has only minutes to train a strong enough AI model to pretend to be him and fool his targets long enough for him to gain entry to their impregnable fortress. Can he do it?!?
by MobiusHorizons | 2025-08-14 15:12:05+00:00
I think the point is that laptops are more limited than other form factors. I’m reading it as a response to the comment that MacBooks are computers optimized for ai and only technically a laptop (which is a pretty ridiculous statement imo). Apples architecture happens to be very good at a lot of compute heavy tasks, especially where total available GPU ram and low latency handoff between the CPU and the gpu are concerned. This happens to be very well suited to LLM workloads.
by Anthony-G | 2025-08-14 15:12:22+00:00
I bought her the laptop a few years ago from a local, independent retailer who also specialise repairs as I try to support local trade and retailers as much as possible. It came with Windows 10 and the retailers had configured it with local user account authentication (no microsoft.com account), removed the advertising and other annoyances and without Bitlocker. She has since upgraded to Windows 11 but it works mostly the same (without obnoxious advertising and distractions).
by jmclnx | 2025-08-14 15:12:42+00:00
I am not a fan of today's concept of "AI", but to be fair, building today's software is not for the faint of heart, very few people gets it right on try 1.

Years ago I gave up compiling these large applications all together. I compiled Firefox via FreeBSD's (v8.x) ports system, that alone was a nightmare.

I cannot imagine what it would be like to compile GNOME3 or KDE or Libreoffice. Emacs is the largest thing I compile now.
by qrobit | 2025-08-14 15:12:51+00:00
For me lenses are like water. I start each haskell project with `optics` dependency, my favorite trick is deriving Generic and using labels to access the fields[1]. Field accessors never get created in the first place, so you have no namespace pollution and all your data definitions can have fields called `id`, `date`, whatever and never collide with each other or imports from other modules. The only problem is unwieldy error messages in case something goes wrong. Another tool is Magnify and Zoom[2] classes, which are useful for limiting context available to child actions in a monad stack. You can have one "global" state, but give only a slice of that global state to the child action with `magnify #subState1 (myAction1 arg1 arg2)` (or zoom respectively for MonadState actions). This approach is extensively used within Brick[3] TUI library, where you have big "global" app state, and a collection of widgets that have their separate states which you slice from the big state.

[1]: <https://www.youtube.com/live/9hrDm7xDpig?t=2200>

[2]: <https://hackage.haskell.org/package/optics-extra-0.4.2.1/doc...>

[3]: <https://hackage.haskell.org/package/brick>
by patsreynolds | 2025-08-14 15:13:12+00:00
Office Hours | Software Engineer, Senior/Staff Software Engineer | SF, NYC, or Remote (US) | https://officehours.com

The company: Office Hours is a consulting platform and marketplace. We help people get paid to share what they know.

The team: We’re a small, senior team that values quality, simplicity, curiosity, and collaboration. If you’re excited about building thoughtful user experiences and high-quality software, reach out!

The product: On the surface, it's a simple marketplace: search, match, connect, and pay. Under the hood, we're tackling some fun and interesting engineering challenges.

- Search & Discovery: Surface the right experts instantly

- Data & Recommendations: Build a knowledge graph from scratch to power better insights

- Workflow Automation: Streamline complex, multi-step processes with AI

- Performance & Scaling: Ensure speed, reliability, and scalability as we grow

Open roles:

- Senior/Staff Software Engineer, Full Stack (6+ years): https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/officehours/jobs/4819657008

- Senior/Staff Software Engineer, Search (6+ years): https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/officehours/jobs/4819665008

- Software Engineer, Full Stack (3+ years): https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/officehours/jobs/4819594008

P.S. Let us know in the application that you found us on HN. It helps separate signal from noise.
by rfmoz | 2025-08-14 15:13:15+00:00
The problem with DNS-01 is that you can only use one delegation a time. I mean, if you configure a wildcard cert with _acme-challenge.example.com in Google, you couldn't use it in Cloudflare, because it uses a single DNS authorization label (subdomain).

The solution has been evolving along these years and currently the las IETF draft is https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ietf-acme-dns-account...

The new proposal brings the dns-account-01 challenge, incorporating the ACME account URL into the DNS validation record name.
by ilkhan4 | 2025-08-14 15:13:19+00:00
As someone who has been in the market for something like this, can I ask why it's a monthly subscription? I don't think I would be generating a new brand identity every month so it would make more sense to me to pay a one-time fee for x number of iterations. I have a little subscription fatigue so I'd actually pay a bit more to not have to remember to cancel it.
by nozzlegear | 2025-08-14 15:13:30+00:00
> You are dancing around the fact that someone has to decide what books go in the library. Who should that person be?

It's the school librarian, who purchases books from their vendor lists. Depending on the school, the school board might vote to put a selection policy in place for the librarian. A few states publish a recommended or approved list of books that the librarian chooses from.
by KineticLensman | 2025-08-14 15:13:32+00:00
> If Bilbo could jump over Gollum with a three-foot leap, Gollum cannot be a giant.

Agree (although Gollum was crouched down)

> I strongly suspect was largely as written, however, and even without the explicit numbers, if Bilbo jumps over Gollum, the inference remains largely the same

I'm guessing that the jump wasn't in the first edition at all, where Bilbo and Gollum apparently parted amicably.
by emilecantin | 2025-08-14 15:13:38+00:00
Yeah, I think it's pretty clear to a lot of people that LLMs aren't at the "build me Facebook, but for dogs" stage yet. I've had relatively good success with more targeted tasks, like "Add a modal that does this, take this existing modal as an example for code style". I also break my problem down into smaller chunks, and give them one by one to the LLM. It seems to work much better that way.
by tshaddox | 2025-08-14 15:13:47+00:00
The first way we increased human memory by 1000x was with books. Now it’s mostly with computers.

Electronic AGI might have a small early advantage because it’s probably easier for them to have high-speed interfaces to computing power and memory, but I would be surprised if the innovations required to develop AGI wouldn’t also help us interface our biology with computing power and memory.

In my view this isn’t much less concerning than saying “AGI will have a huge advantage in physical strength because of powerful electric motors, hydraulics, etc.”
RockyLinux update to kernel 4.18.0-553.66 or 64
by roscas | 2025-08-14 15:13:57+00:00
Find it strange that node 3 updated to "4.18.0-553.64.1.el8_10.x86_64" but all other nodes to "4.18.0-553.66.1.el8_10.x86_64". Cleared cache but it does not update to 66. Anyone have a clue why? Thanks

node1

Operating System: Rocky Linux 8.10 (Green Obsidian) CPE OS Name: cpe:/o:rocky:rocky:8:GA Kernel: Linux 4.18.0-553.66.1.el8_10.x86_64

node2

Operating System: Rocky Linux 8.10 (Green Obsidian) CPE OS Name: cpe:/o:rocky:rocky:8:GA Kernel: Linux 4.18.0-553.66.1.el8_10.x86_64

node3

Operating System: Rocky Linux 8.10 (Green Obsidian) CPE OS Name: cpe:/o:rocky:rocky:8:GA Kernel: Linux 4.18.0-553.64.1.el8_10.x86_64

node4

Operating System: Rocky Linux 8.10 (Green Obsidian) CPE OS Name: cpe:/o:rocky:rocky:8:GA Kernel: Linux 4.18.0-553.66.1.el8_10.x86_64

All repos at /etc/yum.repos.d are equal.

I had node3 and node4 for a while turned off. Then I cloned node3 or node4 can't remember to create node1 and 2 for a 4 node cluster. Updated all and versions were not equal.

I know that remove node3 and clone it from node4 will fix this... but it is strange.
by robviren | 2025-08-14 15:14:22+00:00
I feel it is interesting but not what would be ideal. I really think if the models could be less linear and process over time in latent space you'd get something much more akin to thought. I've messed around with attaching reservoirs at each layer using hooks with interesting results (mainly over fitting), but it feels like such a limitation to have all model context/memory stuck as tokens when latent space is where the richer interaction lives. Would love to see more done where thought over time mattered and the model could almost mull over the question a bit before being obligated to crank out tokens. Not an easy problem, but interesting.
by tremon | 2025-08-14 15:14:33+00:00
But the GP didn't even identify the enemy correctly, so all that effort would be wasted. The people they're describing are mere tools, only required because of the existing democratic processes in the country. The enemy are the (insert your favourite label here) at the top of the media and political landscape pulling the strings. And I guarantee you, they aren't quite so bothered by the imagery in those books as they are bothered by freedom of thought in general. They are bothered by people that dare to speak truth to power. They are not bothered by appeasement strategies such as we people trying to understand the other people they've pitted against us.
Ask HN: How do you tune your personality to get better at interviews?
by _swfb | 2025-08-14 15:15:10+00:00
I just got declined for a job and it has gotten under my skin much more than it should.

(Under the advisement of my lawyer (ChatGPT) I won't say the company's name).

It has really annoyed me; I ended up doing three interviews over the course of four weeks, and I'm pretty confident that I got the technical questions right. It could be that my resume is too "jumpy", which is fair, but they could have read my resume before they wasted my time and theirs with three multi-hour interviews.

The only thing I can think of is that they just didn't like my personality during the interviews, which is honestly the most frustrating. If I had messed up the technical portion then that would be a goal to work towards by learning more technical stuff, but I'm not 100% sure what about my personality is screwing up these interviews, and even less sure on how I'm supposed to change anything about it.

It's hard to stay motivated but I guess I don't have much of a choice since I still need to pay my mortgage, so I was curious if anyone here had any advice on how to best tune my personality to do better in interviews? Preferably I'd prefer to stay honest (if for no other reason than I'm a pretty terrible liar).
by cynicalkane | 2025-08-14 15:15:10+00:00
Excessive inflation is destructive but it requires a better explanation than that.

In a vacuum, if we all have 3-10% more money and things are 3-10% more expensive, we're not poorer unless there are secondary effects that make us poorer. It's the secondary effects that inflation has on investment, markets, and transfer of wealth that are negative. The effects of debt collapse during economic crisis is a considerably more expensive effect, and not one that's good for the poor, or the rich, or the middle class or anyone.

If you "genuinely cannot understand this", consider that the traditional perspective is that the point of an economy is to produce useful goods and services, not to produce an aesthetically pleasing inflation number. Recall that, in early 2020, markets were facing the greatest panic since the 1929 crash. The debt collapse and deflation that followed then precipitated an enormous amount of misery. I'm personally pretty happy we didn't get another Great Depression; Covid was bad enough without that happening.
by churchill | 2025-08-14 15:15:15+00:00
>Tariffs did not make the price of your BLT go up, it’s greed.

What do you want to do about it, Stalin? Use the power of the state to legislate away human greed? Imprison these greedy people? Impose price controls (which have a long, storied history of not working and only leading to shortages and queues)?

We build economic policy around human nature, not otherwise. Humans will always seek to maximize profit at all costs. If you lock out foreign suppliers from competing using tariffs, local suppliers will reason that they can charge more and will rightly do so. And tariffs in one area end up affecting so many other areas in unforeseen ways. That's how tariffs on chemical fertilizer might end up affecting the price of something as mundane as bacon, lettuce, and tomato.

That's why free markets are important. They give buyers options, and sellers then have to lower their prices reasonably to be chosen/picked from that sea of options.

If you want lower prices, remove tariffs and trade restrictions.
by komali2 | 2025-08-14 15:15:18+00:00
There's a huge philosophical difference! American libertarians are highly focused on individualism and zero-sum behavior and thinking, whereas anarchism is a collective ideology focused on mutual aid or even communism (e.g. Kropotkin's Anarchist Communism).

Libertarianism is an application of right-wing ideology subtracting the State. Opposition to the State may be a shared aspect of the ideologies, but for another example, just because Nazism advocated for nationalizing industries doesn't mean it has anything beyond that in common with Marxist Leninist Communism which advocates for the same.
by ninetyninenine | 2025-08-14 15:15:28+00:00
https://youtu.be/qrvK_KuIeJk?t=284

I don’t appreciate your comments. Especially rude to call me desperate and bizarre.

Take a look at the above video where Geoffrey Hinton basically the god father of AI directly contradicts your statement.

I sincerely hope you self reflect and are able to realize that you’re the one completely out of it.

Realistically the differences get down to sort of a semantic issue. We both agree that there are things we don’t understand and things that we do understand. It’s just the overall aggregate generalization of this in your opinion comes down to: “we overall do understand” and mine is “we don’t understand shit”

Again. Your aggregate is wrong. Utterly. Preeminent Experts are on my side. If we did understand LLMs we’d be able to edit the individual weights of each neuron to remove hallucinations. But we can’t. Like literally we know a solution to the hallucination problem exists. It’s in the weights. We know a certain configuration of weights can remove the hallucination. But even for a single prompt and answer pair we do not know how to modify the weights such that the hallucinations go away. We can’t even quantify, formally define or model what an hallucination is. We describe LLMs in human terms and we manipulate the thing through prompts and vague psychological methods like “chain of thought”.

You think planes can work like this? Do we psychologically influence planes to sort of fly correctly?

Literally. No other engineered system like this exists on earth where sheer lack of understanding is this large.
by pc86 | 2025-08-14 15:15:38+00:00
Judges aren't necessarily brilliant, but they do spend their entire careers reading, listening to, and dissecting arguments. A large part of this requires learning new information at least well enough to make sense of arguments on both sides of the issue. So you do end up probably self-selecting for older folks able to do this better than the mean for their age, and likely for the population at large.

Let's just say with a full jury you're almost guaranteed to get someone on the other side of the spectrum, regardless of age.
by taeric | 2025-08-14 15:15:42+00:00
I'm sure that some of this is influenced by the behavior of the people being moderated? Back to the parks example, it is usually assumed most visitors are in good faith. If there is expectation otherwise, things are usually a bit tougher.

For parks, this is somewhat mitigated by the fact that people have to physically be there. That alone is a bit of a moderating factor, I would presume. With online, even 5 people can't moderate 1000 bad faith collaborators?

I don't know that we truly have a way to ensure "person is on other side of this account." And in places that are made to be interfaced from corporations, that isn't even strictly the desire.
by qwertylicious | 2025-08-14 15:15:50+00:00
Yeah, sorry, no, I have to disagree.

We're seeing this broad trend in tech where we just want to shrug and say "gee wiz, the machine did it all on its own, who could've guessed that would happen, it's not really our fault, right?"

LLMs sharing dangerous false information, ATS systems disqualifying women at higher rates than men, black people getting falsely flagged by facial recognition systems. The list goes on and on.

Humans built these systems. Humans are responsible for governing those systems and building adequate safeguards to ensure they're neither misused nor misbehave. Companies should not be allowed to tech-wash their irresponsible or illegal behaviour.

If Facebook did indeed built a data pipeline and targeting advertising system that could blindly accept and monetize illegally acquired without any human oversight, then Facebook should absolutely be held accountable for that negligence.
by scoofy | 2025-08-14 15:15:58+00:00
It’s definitely not an eternal September situation. It’s just hard problems, unsolvable really, that people have tidy solutions for, rather than dealing with the fact that they are very hard, and we probably aren’t going to know.

LLM’s at philosophy? I’ve never thought about it. I have to assume they’re terrible, but who knows. From an analytic perspective, it would have cognition backwards. Language is just pointing at things so the algos wouldn’t really have access to reality.