MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by terminalshort | 2025-08-14 15:28:53+00:00
> The concern here is that letting the government decide which books are kosher for its school libraries and which books aren't

But there isn't any other choice except to not have school libraries at all. The library is owned by the government and the books are paid for by government funds. Somebody has to decide what goes in the library and what doesn't. Who would that be other than the government?
by wat10000 | 2025-08-14 15:29:15+00:00
The experience in China is weird. My first reaction was, wow, this is so futuristic, everybody takes payment by code. Then after a while I’m thinking, hold on, this kind of sucks.

China’s implementation could be done a lot better. There’s no fundamental need for multiple incompatible systems like they have. But even improved, it wouldn’t be as good as NFC.
by doright | 2025-08-14 15:29:23+00:00
Yeah, I consider myself lucky I avoided drinking decades ago. I say "lucky" I because I was able to view alcohol consumption as a risk-reward tradeoff and guessed (correctly) that I was abnormally vulnerable to addiction due to upbringing. I sometimes feel smart for figuring it out, but honestly if I had just been invited to more parties early on I might still be going to AA meetings by now.

So I do not at all blame the newer generations for following in my footsteps, regardless of the reason. This stuff can be life-ruining with the correct combination of nature and nurture.

I think for some backgrounds like mine, the only way to avoid the worst outcomes of addiction is to declare that such a background precludes any consumption of [substance], full stop. It's not something people want to hear, but I believe there really was no other choice for me in hindsight.
by dmoy | 2025-08-14 15:30:06+00:00
> The top 5% of taxpayers in the USA pay 61% of the taxes.

Only if you ignore the payroll tax.

For the median US worker, they pay ~15% in payroll tax, and significantly less in income tax. The median US worker makes $40k year, paying like $6k in payroll tax and like $2.8k in federal income tax.

So yes, if you ignore the majority of tax that the average worker pays, then the top 5% pay the majority of tax.
by kstrauser | 2025-08-14 15:30:16+00:00
> Free speech absolutists are mostly principled people who want to defend civil liberties

I genuinely laughed out loud here. As a Mastodon operator, when I see another new instance describe itself as “free speech absolutists”, it means they’re about to fill up with 2 things: Nazis (as in, literally swastikas and “Jews are oppressing me!” memes) and drawings of Japanese 8 year olds in lingerie.

Every. Single. Time.
by avgDev | 2025-08-14 15:30:33+00:00
Tariffs need to be higher to bring back manufacturing back to the US.

Most companies are looking for countries other than China with no tariffs and bringing it back to US is not even a consideration.

Plus, by the time you can start manufacturing in the US it would take at least 1-3 years to get a factory ready. Then, you have a new president and these might go away. Too much risk to make rash decisions on moving manufacturing.
by btilly | 2025-08-14 15:30:51+00:00
We live in a democracy. In a democracy, you don't get to deny people the vote simply because you view them as children. And, sadly, these "children" have around half the votes.

If you are personally not capable of attempting empathy, that's fair. As I said, it is frustrating and hard. But a political culture where nobody attempts empathy is what has allowed grifters playing up the resulting culture war to gain political power, and put themselves in a position to aim for a dictatorship. If everyone keeps doing the same old, same old, the totalitarian outcome is guaranteed.

I'll make this concrete. Right now, many in Trump's base are dissatisfied with the handling of the Epstein affair. As much as you may disagree with a random Republican, the odds are that your differences are not as important right now than winding up united against the idea of an authoritarian pedophile running the country. But if the only emotion that they get is anger about all of the areas where there is disagreement, they won't have anywhere to go but back to Trump.

Is that outcome really what you think is best?
by jedimastert | 2025-08-14 15:30:55+00:00
> The first cars broke down all the time. They had a limited range. There wasn't a vast supply of parts for them. There wasn't a vast industry of experts who could work on them.

I mean, there was and then there wasn't. All of those things are shrinking fast because we handed over control to people who care more about profits than customers because we got too comfy and too cheap, and now right to repair is screwed.

Honestly, I see llm-driven development as a threat to open source and right to repair, among the litany of other things
by SoftTalker | 2025-08-14 15:31:19+00:00
Yes. Obviously there are books that are inappropriate in elementary school libraries. Different criteria may apply to high-school libraries. But the point is these are curated collections no matter what. Nobody is prevented from reading what they want to read outside of that.

My high school library didn't offer much popular paperback fiction, but I could have found that at the county public library, or at any bookstore or most general retail stores.

School libraries have limited space, funds, and are constantly making decisions about what is age-appropriate and of educational value.
by gruez | 2025-08-14 15:31:20+00:00
>Facebook is guilty because they turned around and used the medical data themselves to advertise without checking if it was legal to do so.

What exactly did this entail? I haven't read all the court documents, but at least in the initial/amended complaint the plaintiffs didn't make this argument, probably because it's totally irrelevant to the charge of whether they "intentionally eavesdropped" or not. Either they were eavesdropping or not. Whether they were using it for advertising purposes might be relevant in armchair discussions about meta is evil or not, but shouldn't be relevant when it comes to the eavesdropping charge.

>They knew, or should have known, that they needed to check if it was legal to use it

What do you think this should look like?
by lordnacho | 2025-08-14 15:31:35+00:00
I think I agree with the idea that LLMs are good at the junior level stuff.

What's happened for me recently is I've started to revisit the idea that typing speed doesn't matter.

This is an age-old thing, most people don't think it really matters how fast you can type. I suppose the steelman is, most people think it doesn't really matters how fast you can get the edits to your code that you want. With modern tools, you're not typing out all the code anyway, and there's all sorts of non-AI ways to get your code looking the way you want. And that doesn't matter, the real work of the engineer is the architecture of how the whole program functions. Typing things faster doesn't make you get to the goal faster, since finding the overall design is the limiting thing.

But I've been using Claude for a while now, and I'm starting to see the real benefit: you no longer need to concentrate to rework the code.

It used to be burdensome to do certain things. For instance, I decided to add an enum value, and now I have to address all the places where it matches on that enum. This wasn't intellectually hard in the old world, you just got the compiler to tell you where the problems were, and you added a little section for your new value to do whatever it needed, in all the places it appeared.

But you had to do this carefully, otherwise you would just cause more compile/error cycles. Little things like forgetting a semicolon will eat a cycle, and old tools would just tell you the error was there, not fix it for you.

LLMs fix it for you. Now you can just tell Claude to change all the code in a loop until it compiles. You can have multiple agents working on your code, fixing little things in many places, while you sit on HN and muse about it. Or perhaps spend the time considering what direction the code needs to go.

The big thing however is that when you're no longer held up by little compile errors, you can do more things. I had a whole laundry list of things I wanted to change about my codebase, and Claude did them all. Nothing on the business level of "what does this system do" but plenty of little tasks that previously would take a junior guy all day to do. With the ability to change large amounts of code quickly, I'm able to develop the architecture a lot faster.

It's also a motivation thing: I feel bogged down when I'm just fixing compile errors, so I prioritize what to spend my time on if I am doing traditional programming. Now I can just do the whole laundry list, because I'm not the guy doing it.
by nine_zeros | 2025-08-14 15:31:42+00:00
>I'd take the people over the work anytime, the best places i've ever worked at are the places where the people are great to work with, even the slog/bureaucratic work is still good when you have people that are great at what they do and are fun to be around.

A variant of this that holds true for me is - less corporatized level-based ladder climbing 1:1, more just focus on work.
by troupo | 2025-08-14 15:32:06+00:00
> These LLM discussions really need everyone to mention what LLM they're actually using.

They need to mention significantly more than that: https://dmitriid.com/everything-around-llms-is-still-magical...

--- start quote ---

Do we know which projects people work on? No

Do we know which codebases (greenfield, mature, proprietary etc.) people work on? No

Do we know the level of expertise the people have? No.

Is the expertise in the same domain, codebase, language that they apply LLMs to? We don't know.

How much additional work did they have reviewing, fixing, deploying, finishing etc.? We don't know.

--- end quote ---

And that's just the tip of the iceberg. And that is an iceberg before we hit another one: that we're trying to blindly reverse engineer a non-deterministic blackbox inside a provider's blackbox
by antimoan | 2025-08-14 15:32:14+00:00
one thing that stands out to me is "Senior engineer" vs "Staff engineer" position. I was in the same boat 2 years ago and had to decide between a startup who hired me as "Senior" with a lower salary with the promise of exiting big where I loved the job and there were many smart people around me, but then I got an offer from a big tech as "Staff" level with almost double the offer and benefits. I had a really hard time to decide, but ended up going with the latter even though the startup job was my passion. However, to my surprise the big tech position helped me to grow in ways that I could not even imagine.

Because it was a higher level position I had to deal with larger scope problems, I started learning about strategic thinking and dealing with large number of teams and learned to lead and be a thought leader. The people are also smart and turned out to be super nice and helpful and used every opportunity to help me grow. Now when I look back, I don't think I would be happier in the position where I thought it matched my passion, as the other unlocked a new point of view and a different perspective and opportunities. So aside from the money and benefits, make sure you are choosing the one that benefits you the most from different angles, passion and salary is just one angle.
by benmmurphy | 2025-08-14 15:32:16+00:00
if the government is running a library it shouldn't be able to engage in view point discrimination. for example it shouldn't be able to remove all books by Democratic presidents while keeping books by Republican presidents or vice versa. the weird thing is the state via an accidental conspiracy between librarians has arguably been engaging in view point discrimination. even though this has not been legislated, or commanded by the executive and is probably in contradiction with what the current executive wants it should not be allowed either.
by snickerdoodle12 | 2025-08-14 15:32:17+00:00
In case it helps someone else, this is what I do:

FROM caddy:2-builder AS builder RUN xcaddy build \ --with github.com/caddy-dns/cloudflare \ --with github.com/greenpau/caddy-security FROM caddy:2 COPY --from=builder /usr/bin/caddy /usr/bin/caddy COPY Caddyfile /etc/caddy/Caddyfile

Then just build & run it via docker compose
by bilbo0s | 2025-08-14 15:32:31+00:00
which can be relatively easily implemented by competitors

Oh my.

Please people, try to think back to your engineering classes. Remember the project where you worked with a group to design a processor? I do. Worst semester of my life. (Screw whoever even came up with that damn real analysis math class.) And here's the kicker, I know I'll be dating myself here, but all I had to do for my part was tape it out. Still sucked.

Not sure I'd call the necessary processor design work here "relatively easy"? Even for highly experienced, extremely bright people, this is not "relatively easy".

Far more easy to make the software a commodity. Believe me.
by danaris | 2025-08-14 15:32:37+00:00
The useful statistic is not "what percentage of the taxes do each quintile/decile/etc pay?"

It's "What percentage of their disposable income (ie, net of housing, food, health care, and other necessary expenses) do each quintile/decile/etc pay in taxes?"

And the answer is going to be that the middle and working classes pay a huge percentage—close to 100% for many—while for the wealthy it's effectively nothing.
by dpoloncsak | 2025-08-14 15:32:54+00:00
Have a 16GB one, just setup ollama yesterday.

gpt-oss-20b eats too much ram to use for anything other than an overnight task. maybe 3tok/s.

Been playing around with the 8b versions of qwen and deepseek. Seems usable so far. YMMV, i'm just messing around in chat at the moment, haven't really had it do any tasks for me
by trod1234 | 2025-08-14 15:33:37+00:00
The problem with Nix is that its often claimed to be reproducible, but the proof isn't really there because of the existence of collisions. The definition of reproducible is taken in such an isolated context as to be almost absurd.

While a collision hasn't yet been found for a SHA256 package on Nix, by the pigeonhole principle they exist, and the computer will not be able to decide between the two packages in such a collision leading to system level failure, with errors that have no link to cause (due to the properties involved, and longstanding CS problems in computation).

These things generally speaking contain properties of mathematical chaos which is a state that is inherently unknowable/unpredictable that no admin would ever approach or touch because its unmaintainable. The normally tightly coupled error handling code is no longer tightly coupled because it requires matching a determinable state (CS computation problems, halting/decidability).

Non-deterministic failure domains are the most costly problems to solve because troubleshooting which leverages properties of determinism, won't work.

This leaves you only a strategy of guess and check; which requires intimate knowledge of the entire system stack without abstractions present.
by mtts | 2025-08-14 15:33:38+00:00
Yeah, that’s my thinking now as well. It’s going to take an incredibly long time but truly understanding each problem is probably the only way to go.

Which is where this beats self study using books, I think. With a book, I can sort of wing it and think I understand something when I only do so very superficially whereas when you do the problems you truly learn what you understand and what you do not. And MathAcademy is only problems, so …
by tomrod | 2025-08-14 15:33:39+00:00
> The bible is a crucial piece of literature reference.

We no longer live in the middle of the 20th century. Based on your bandwagon logic, we should also require the Quran, Torah, Shruti, Smriti, The Book of Mormon and associated volumes, the apocrypha, Watchhouse volumes from JWs, NIV, NRSV-CE, The Good Book [0], Buddhist texts, Holy Piby.

No. We don't need that. This is a misapplication of Chesteron's Fence to the late 18th century US culture. We all survived the 1950s to now and culture has, dramatically and mostly for the better, evolved.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Good_Book_(book)
by dylan604 | 2025-08-14 15:33:49+00:00
These are okay, because it's not explicit and in your face. "unto her" is such outdated language that it is rather tame by modern standards. Actual reasoning I've been told by people that support banning of books.

Also, anytime you are to the point of asking if the words from the bible are 'ok', you've already lost the argument with the person you are talking to. The bible is infallible, so of course it is okay. You cannot use it as evidence against their point. Ever. It is a waste of breath on your part.
by chollida1 | 2025-08-14 15:33:51+00:00
Most of this might be true for LLM's but years of investing experience has created a mental model of looking for the tech or company that sucks and yet keeps growing.

People complained endlessly about the internet in the early to mid 90s, its slow, static, most sites had under construction signs on them, your phone modem would just randomly disconnect. The internet did suck in alot of ways and yet people kept using it.

Twitter sucked in the mid 2000s, we saw the fail whale weekly and yet people continued to use it for breaking news.

Electric cars sucked, no charging, low distance, expensive and yet no matter how much people complain about them they kept getting better.

Phones sucked, pre 3G was slow, there wasn't much you could use them for before app stores and the cameras were potato quality and yet people kept using them while they improved.

Always look for the technology that sucks and yet people keep using it because it provides value. LLM's aren't great at alot of tasks and yet no matter how much people complain about them, they keep getting used and keep improving through constant iteration.

LLM"s amy not be able to build software today, but they are 10x better than where they were in 2022 when we first started using chatgpt. Its pretty reasonable to assume in 5 years they will be able to do these types of development tasks.
by btilly | 2025-08-14 15:33:58+00:00
No, I've identified the enemy perfectly well.

The actual enemy only has power because useful fools are willing to follow them. Treating those useful fools as enemies is a key part of the dynamic that grants the actual enemy power.

I am advocating learning how to talk with those useful fools, and assist them in finding paths away from being the power base for the actual enemy.
by decisionsmatter | 2025-08-14 15:34:11+00:00
It's difficult for me to parse what exactly your argument is. Facebook built a system to ingest third party data. Whether you feel that such technology should exist to ingest data and serve ads is, respectfully, completely irrelevant. Facebook requires any entity (e.g. the Flo app) to gather consent from their users to send user data into the ingestion pipeline per the terms of their SDK. The Flo app, in a phenomenally incompetent and negligent manner, not only sent unconsented data to Facebook, but sent -sensitive health data-. Facebook they did what Facebook does best, which is ingest this data _that Flo attested was not sensitive and collected with consent_ into their ads systems.
by 542354234235 | 2025-08-14 15:34:16+00:00
Anyone who remembers the 90s and 2000s, where your computer hardware was out of date within months, might disagree. If you want to do bleeding edge things like running 70b+ LLMs locally or doing training, you need bleeding edge hardware. No different than if you want to play the newest AAA games. There are plenty of games you can play with old hardware, and plenty of small LLMs. When you can use ChatGPT or a bunch of other services, it isn’t a trick that some people want to host their own or do training, but you need a system that can do that.
by ninetyninenine | 2025-08-14 15:34:39+00:00
Apology not accepted. Your initial take was to cast me as out of touch. With my appeal to authority you now realize that my stance occupies a very valid place even though you disagreed. Like it wasn’t just rude, statements like “bizarre” are inaccurate given that Geoffrey agrees with me. So even if I’m not offended by your rudeness it’s not a bizarre take at all. It’s a valid take.

That being said. Yan Lecunn is not in agreement with you either. His only claim is that LLMs are not agi and that hallucinations on LLMs can never be removed.

The debate here isn’t even about that. The debate here is that we don’t understand LLMs. Whether the LLM is agi or whether we can remove or never remove the hallucinations is COMPLETELY orthogonal.

So you actually can’t counter with another appeal to authority. Either way I didn’t “just” appeal to authority. I literally logically countered every single one of your statements as well.
Show HN: I built a free alternative to Adobe Acrobat PDF viewer
by bobsingor | 2025-08-14 15:34:46+00:00
I built EmbedPDF: an MIT-licensed, open-source PDF viewer that aims to match all of Adobe Acrobat’s paid features… for free.

Already working:

- Annotations (highlight, sticky notes, free text, ink)

- True redaction (content actually removed)

- Search, text selection, zoom, rotation

- Runs fully in the browser, no server needed

- Drop-in SDK for React, Vue, Preact, vanilla JS

Why? Acrobat is heavy, closed, and pricey. I wanted something lightweight, hackable, and embeddable anywhere.

Demo: https://app.embedpdf.com/ Website: https://www.embedpdf.com/ GitHub: https://github.com/embedpdf/embed-pdf-viewer

Feedback, bug reports, and feature requests welcome!
by _swfb | 2025-08-14 15:34:58+00:00
> don't act on wild conjectures.

The issue is not just this one company. I have been at this for months with similar stories for a lot of them.

Sometimes I get the technical questions wrong, so that's fair enough, I understand why they'd decline me for that and as I said that's something that I can at least work on for myself by reading through textbooks and/or building sample projects to understand a concept a bit better.

A lot of the time, though, I won't get the technical questions wrong, and it's this recurring thing of "I really don't know why I'm constantly being declined".

Mock interviews are a pretty good idea though.
by mucho_mojo | 2025-08-14 15:35:00+00:00
This paper I read from here has an interesting mathematical model for reasoning based on cognitive science. https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.21734 (there is also code here https://github.com/sapientinc/HRM) I think we will see dramatic performance increases on "reasoning" problems when this is worked into existing AI architectures.
by terminalshort | 2025-08-14 15:35:00+00:00
What you are saying makes sense, but I am only commenting on this in relation to freedom of speech. The government is the government whether it is local or state. So in terms of freedom of speech this is the same thing. In terms of the constitution, local governments are completely subject to the authority of the state government. There is no sharing of power like at the federal/state level.
by lesuorac | 2025-08-14 15:35:02+00:00
To piggy-back, the economy runs on the re-circulation of money and the reluctant to spend/lend money in 1929 contributed to why it was so bad (This is what Bernake got a nobel prize for showing [1]).

So you really want the government to synthetically make the money supply larger so that the lower velocity of money ends up being the "correct" velocity. Its like ordering 2 sides of fries at a restaurant so when somebody takes one of your sides you still end up with the desired amount.

However, since the government doesn't turn off the money printing when the shock is over there really is strong argument that they shouldn't turn it on during the shock because it just makes the next shock even worse.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_Bernanke#Nobel_Prize