MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by neilv | 2025-08-16 22:02:35+00:00
> that really says more about them than it does about you and may not be a great place to work.

If a really good "tech" engineer ruled out all the places that are bad at interviewing, they would probably be unemployed.

You have to look past bad interviewing practice, to some degree.

> there's still quite a bit of calibration to make sure you land on the other person's side of the street so to speak.

Exactly. But if they try to Leetcode you, you have to decide whether you have any self-respect at all, or you're all just playing house together.
by ericmay | 2025-08-16 22:03:12+00:00
> It's a perfect argument. You declared that Spain (and Portugal) would likely not help in a NATO action. Yet, recent history proves you directly and unequivocally wrong. Spanish blood was spilled to prove that point, so maybe have some respect?

Not all wars are created equal. It’s not the same thing. You either are unrealistic about how the world works or you’re just arguing for the sake of arguing.

> Lastly, the linked article still doesn't say what you claimed it said. If you were responding to a falsehood, that doesn't excuse confidently posting another falsehood.

OP

> Portugal and Canada also both lost interest in American F-35s recently.

Canada’s military

> we Strongly recommend and encourage buying F-35s

But hey you know at least I provided a source… so I’ll just throw the OP’s claim away since they are unable to provide a source.

> You answered your own question. Well done.

Yes, and it demonstrated the point that I made. QED
by xena | 2025-08-16 22:05:16+00:00
Fwiw currently I make the equivalent of CAD$22,150 per month at my job doing marketing for an object storage company (where ironically enough I tell people how to use generative AI). US$5,000 is my goal because it means I can reach the point of indefinite sustainability (as in the money velocity in my checking account stays flat instead of trending downwards); however that leaves no room for things going wrong, life expenses, or the ability to purchase a house like I want to. My full goal is closer to USD$15,000 per month, which is probably achievable when including subscription sales with corporate customers, contract work to implement features in Anubis, and more.

However, not gonna lie, I feel a lot less risk tolerant given that my husband is currently unemployed and as much as this is the worst possible place to do this, I really would love if he got a job somewhere. It would make things so much logistically simpler.

Thank you for your kind words though! Really, it made my day better.

I've also set up LiberaPay after getting many complaints about my choice of funding platforms: https://liberapay.com/Xe/.

Generally I don't feel comfortable doing self-promotion for financial things on Hacker News. I don't want to piss in the pool that we all swim in. I've also been considering making a Y Combinator application, if only because money would let me afford to be able to take a risk.

Sorry if this is overly ranty, it's really annoying to be one of those load-bearing dependency pegs that everyone complains about but relatively few people contribute to financially. It's making me wonder if making this liberally open source was a mistake.
by kelseyfrog | 2025-08-16 22:07:27+00:00
Pretend I'm a farmer in 1850 and I have a belief that the current proportion of jobs in agriculture - 55% of jobs in 1850 would drop to 1.2% in 2022 due to automation and technological advances.

Why would hearing "work is central to identity," and "work is the primary social mechanism that distributes status amongst communities," change my mind?
by greyface- | 2025-08-16 22:07:50+00:00
An Intel signature does not guarantee that it came from the enclave. It guarantees that it came from something blessed by Intel. To conclude that it must have come from an unmodified enclave requires trust in Intel and the integrity of their signing process. This is inconsistent with "no trust required".

What if, for example, a three-letter agency seized keys from Intel, served them with a gag order to prohibit disclosure of the seizure, put themselves in the middle of the network path between you and the user, and modified the server software to send falsified signatures derived from those seized keys?
by foobarbecue | 2025-08-16 22:08:35+00:00
Recently I scanned thousands of family photos, but I didn't have a good way to get them oriented correctly before scanning. I figured I could "fix it in post" .

If you upload an incorrectly oriented image to google photos, it will automatically figure that out and suggest the right way up (no EXIF data). So I set about trying to find an open-source way to do that since I'm self-hosting the family photos server.

So far, I haven't managed it. I found a project doing it using pytorch or something, but it didn't work well.
by borroka | 2025-08-16 22:11:39+00:00
It is wrong to assume that it was a man. Second, yes, in the vast majority of cases, it is a voluntary action that should be frowned upon when performed in public. At least that is the case for me and the people I am familiar with and respect. In the comfort of their own homes or the middle of the vast prairie, they can pass gas on their companions or poor herbaceous plants as much as they want.

I didn't expect such a strenuous defense of people who fart like cows on an airplane and make other people's lives significantly worse.
by cactacea | 2025-08-16 22:12:40+00:00
> Now it turns out that making 2 different engines is actually pretty wasteful, and it's way more efficient to make 1 engine

Generally speaking gas/diesel engines are used across several models, mass market manufacturers aren't making bespoke engines for one specific vehicle trim that isn't used elsewhere. The overall direction is further standardization of platforms (esp with electric vehicles) but large companies like Toyota, Ford, etc. are going to have a variety of engines available for engineers to slot into vehicles to handle different use cases. I'm not terribly interested in counting but here's some examples of the variety:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Toyota_engines

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Ford_engines

> I'm not in the automotive industry, so I don't know all the details, and I might be wrong on the above reasoning, but this is what I got from it.

I'm sorry but your speculation is pretty far off base and isn't based in fact.
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-08-16 22:13:38+00:00
The author sets the price. Specifically, the price the publisher -- any publisher -- pays the author to make a copy. Publishers can add a margin to this to cover distribution costs, but then they're in competition with other publishers and customers can buy from any of them.

No other contractual terms. The author only sets the price publishers pay and that price is the same for every publisher. Authors can sell directly to the public but still can't impose any additional license terms nor sell for a lower price than the one publishers pay. Individual members of the public can also make copies on their own as long as they pay the fee.

Then any publisher that wants to publish the work simply does so and pays the author the author's fee, which the author can only change once a year and only change uniformly for all publishers.
by netsharc | 2025-08-16 22:13:45+00:00
I guess grandfather isn't that accurate:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaeltaylor/2021/07/08/german...

https://www.theregister.com/2018/07/10/nissan_admits_falsify...

The difference is, some people say "VW, never again!", meanwhile they don't notice that all car manufacturers are probably guilty.

There is an old news article that said UK, French and German authorities argued to keep lax emissions testing (e.g. "they should be done while the car is going downhill!"), no doubt due to their car industry lobbyists, but since search engines suck now I can't find it anymore
by Animats | 2025-08-16 22:13:56+00:00
The USMC is set up to do that. There are seven Wasp-class amphibious assault ships. Each is a Marine ground-air task force in a can.[1] The concept is that the ships stand offshore and launch VTOL aircraft (F-35s and Harriers) from the top, and landing craft from the well deck.

This works great unless the onshore enemy has anti-ship missiles and drones.[2] Unlike fleet carriers, which can stand off from an enemy shore, amphibious assault ships have to operate in sight of shore, maybe a few kilometers, because their job is to launch boats. That's within small drone range.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wasp-class_amphibious_assault_...

[2] https://www.usmcu.edu/Outreach/Marine-Corps-University-Press...
by eatonphil | 2025-08-16 22:16:23+00:00
Could be, it was a little ambiguously worded. That said, single-decree Paxos is much simpler than Raft but I agree The Part-Time Parliament's analogy is a pain to read. But it's better if you just ignore the beginning chunk of the paper and read like the appendix; A1 The Basic Protocol being simpler to understand.
by mananaysiempre | 2025-08-16 22:16:27+00:00
Pwned Passwords[1] is just such a database (with passwords hashed using either SHA-1 or NTLM as an obfuscation measure, and without any emails). Hunt used to distribute versioned snapshots, but these days he directs you to an API scraper[2] in C# instead, so you can still get a list but it probably won’t exactly match anyone else’s.

[1] https://haveibeenpwned.com/passwords

[2] https://github.com/HaveIBeenPwned/PwnedPasswordsDownloader
by j45 | 2025-08-16 22:16:53+00:00
It’s not a personality. There is no concept of replicating a person, personality or behaviours because the software is not the simulation of a living being.

It is a query/input and response format. Which can be modeled to simulate a conversation.

It can be a search engine that responds on the inputs provided, plus the system, account, project, user prompts (as constraints/filters) before the current turn being input.

The result can sure look like magic.

It’s still a statistically present response format based on the average of its training corpus.

Take that average and then add a user to it with their varying range and then the beauty varies.

LLMs can have many ways to explain the same thing more than 1 can be valid sometimes; other times not.
by DoctorOetker | 2025-08-16 22:18:18+00:00
During the prompt embedding optimization, the embeddings are allowed to take on any vector in embedding space, instead one could use a continuous penalty for superposing tokens:

Consider one of the embedding vectors in the input tensor: nothing guarantees its exactly on, or close to a specific token. Hence the probabilities with respect to each token form a distribution, ideally that distribution should be one-hot (lowest entropy) and worst case all equal probability (highest entropy), so just add a loss term penalizing the entropy on the quasitokens, to promote them to take on actual token values.
by softilium | 2025-08-16 22:18:47+00:00
ELORM implements a set of ideas from my business application engineering experience: - Globally unique, human-readable sequential ID for records/entities. - Define all entities declaratively using a JSON entity declaration. - Shared parts of entities: fragments. - Handle migrations automatically. - Lazy-load navigation properties. - Global entity cache to track all loaded/created entities. - Using the standard database/sql to work with data. - Generate a standard REST API for each entity type. (filtering, paging, sorting). - Soft delete mode for entities.

Optimistic locks out-of-the box.

Would love to hear your feedback and ideas!
by reactordev | 2025-08-16 22:18:51+00:00
No, digital payments didn’t do it, lack of laws did. Courts can’t keep up with the pace of innovation to protect us from greed.

I’m ok with an app charging an install fee if it’s worth it. I’m ok with games selling micro transaction cosmetics. I’m not ok with features being behind yet another paywall or subscription.

It’s plain old false advertising. If I buy a car and it has a turbo, I expect it to go turbo. If I buy an app and it’s supposed to make things pretty, it better make things pretty. If I buy a cheeseburger, I don’t want to be charged extra for the condiments put on it or the onions, pickles, lettuce. I expected that comes included as part of Cogs.
by liamdgray | 2025-08-16 22:19:52+00:00
Abstract: "Contemporary large models often exhibit behaviors suggesting the presence of low-level primitives that compose into modules with richer functionality, but these fundamental building blocks remain poorly understood. We investigate this compositional structure in linear layers by asking: can we identify/synthesize linear transformations from a minimal set of geometric primitives? Using Clifford algebra, we show that linear layers can be expressed as compositions of bivectors -- geometric objects encoding oriented planes -- and introduce a differentiable algorithm that decomposes them into products of rotors. This construction uses only O(log^2 d) parameters, versus O(d^2) required by dense matrices. Applied to the key, query, and value projections in LLM attention layers, our rotor-based layers match the performance of strong baselines such as block-Hadamard and low-rank approximations. Our findings provide an algebraic perspective on how these geometric primitives can compose into higher-level functions within deep models."
by Lammy | 2025-08-16 22:19:56+00:00
> In 1989, Island Graphics released a "low-end" X11 office suite for Apollo workstations, called iWrite, iDraw, iPaint

I have used Ami Pro and CorelDRAW! on OS/2 but had never heard of this Island suite before, and it made me curious if these were why Apple's Pages and Numbers have such awkward terrible names:

- Island iWrite: https://tsdr.uspto.gov/#caseNumber=74013904&caseSearchType=U...

- Island iDraw: https://tsdr.uspto.gov/#caseNumber=74013951&caseSearchType=U...

It looks like Apple did attempt to file a US trademark for “iWrite” in 2003 which was tentatively assigned but then canceled in 2005 shortly before Pages 1.0's release:

- Apple iWrite: https://tsdr.uspto.gov/#caseNumber=78299734&caseSearchType=U...

…but Apple's USA trademark issue seems to be failure to submit documentation about a “foreign application” they filed for the same “iWrite” in Hong Kong.

“This is in response to the Examining Attorney's September 12, 2005 Suspension Inquiry. The Examining Attorney requested that Applicant indicate the status of the foreign application. The Application had previously been suspended pending receipt of a copy of the foreign registration certificate under 44(e). The foreign application has been advertised but has not yet matured to registration. Applicant therefore requests that the Application be put back into suspension pending the registration of the foreign application.”

“Section 44(e) Based on Foreign Registration: Applicant has a bona fide intention to use the mark in commerce on or in connection with the identified goods and /or services, and submits a copy of [ Hong Kong registration number B1127/2005 registered 03/13/2003 ]”.

I looked that up (HK 2005B01127) and it is an active HK trademark filed by Apple which is valid through 2030: https://esearch.ipd.gov.hk/nis-pos-view/#/tm/details/view/78...

So nothing to do with Island's iWrite at all and sorry that this comment is now mildly off-topic. My complete speculation is that Apple didn't want to wait for this to get sorted out and delay the release of Pages any longer w/r/t Microsoft's Office 2004 being one of last remaining elements of control MS could exert on 2000s Apple v(._. )v

Cool history; thanks for posting!
by viccis | 2025-08-16 22:20:20+00:00
>FYI this posts comes off as incredibly pretentious. You think we haven’t read the same philosophy?

Rigorous language often comes across as pretentious to any layperson, especially when it concerns subjects like philosophy. I don't know what philosophy you've read, but, based on my experience, it's a pretty safe assumption that most AI practitioners do not own a well creased copy of Critique of Pure Reason.

>This isn’t about epistemology. We are talking about psychology. What does your brain do when we “reason things out”?

The only way to compare what our brain does (psychologically or neurologically) to what LLMs or other models do when we "reason things out" is via epistemology, which is to say "how is it possible to reason that out". Asking how our brains do it psychologically or neurologically is really not relevant, as LLMs are not designed the same as our brains.

>Philosophy doesn’t have answers for questions of applied psychology.

I think that expecting philosophy to have any "answers" for topics that include metaphysical questions is unreasonable, yes. But to even bring up "psychology" when discussing generative probability models is unhelpful anthropomorphization.
by elliotto | 2025-08-16 22:20:58+00:00
OP has stated that the system design interview exists as a way to performatively answer a set of questions that don't relate to actually being a good system designer. In your response, you have claimed that their proposed truthful answers don't give a lot of 'signal' and that you would prefer candidates to engage with the performative nature of the process. This is true - but is not an argument against the OP's claim, which is that reciting a set of facts about system design in an interview != being a good system designer.
by synarchefriend | 2025-08-16 22:21:17+00:00
What I think is happening here based on the few details: Facebook regularly suspends accounts for posting pictures of naked kids, particularly in countries which do not have strong taboos against that. These get reported and sit in a government database with little more information than "Maria Santos from the Philippines posted CP." Then any time a Maria Santos from the Philippines arrives, they get flagged. If it's a common name, lots of people get flagged. This incompetence is the only way I can explain 10% of crew members getting flagged without intentional fraud by the government.
by Garlef | 2025-08-16 22:21:30+00:00
I remember from the early days of midjourney (and SD,etc) that there was a point in time where midjourney had created more images than the whole of humanity had created in its entire existence up to that point (or something along the lines) ...

But volume is just not the same as impact.

I guess the share of code that gets actually used and was written by AI is still tiny.
by Blake_Welsh | 2025-08-16 22:21:45+00:00
I recently ran Memtest Vulkan v0.5.0 on an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 Laptop GPU to check memory stability and performance. The standard 5-minute test completed successfully without errors, confirming stable VRAM under Vulkan workloads.

The test setup:

Platform: Windows 11 Laptop CPU: AMD Ryzen 9 5900HX with Radeon Graphics Base speed: 3.30 GHz Sockets: 1 Cores: 8 Logical processors: 16 Virtualization: Enabled L1 cache: 512 KB L2 cache: 4.0 MB L3 cache: 16.0 MB

GPU: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 Laptop GPU

Tool: Memtest Vulkan v0.5.0

Test Duration: 5 minutes (default run)

Would be interested to hear if anyone else here has used Memtest Vulkan and can share their experiences with this open-source tool on different GPUs.
by antonvs | 2025-08-16 22:22:35+00:00
Not all human hallucinations are lies, though. I really think you’re not fully thinking this through. People have beliefs because of, essentially, their training data.

A good example of this is religious belief. All the evidence suggests that religious belief is essentially 100% hallucination. It may be a little different from the nature of LLM hallucinations, but in terms of quality or quantity regarding reliability of what these entities say, I don’t see much difference. Although I will say, LLMs are better at acknowledging errors than humans tend to be, although that may largely be due to training to be sycophantic.

The bottom line, though, is I don’t agree that humans are less subject to hallucinations than LLMs are. As long as a significant number of humans rabbit on about “higher powers”, afterlives, “angels”, “destiny”, etc., that’s a ridiculously difficult position to defend.
by mananaysiempre | 2025-08-16 22:22:40+00:00
There’s also the side-by-side Paxos/Raft comparison in Howard & Mortier’s “Consensus on consensus”[1] paper, which is not enough to understand either by itself, but a great help if have a longer explanation you’re going through.

[1] https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3380787.3393681
by 0xbadcafebee | 2025-08-16 22:23:31+00:00
It's not about protection as much as finding ways to cope with things you don't like. People fart. It smells for a bit, but the smell (being a gas) will diffuse eventually. You can do other things to cope, like bring things to mask the smell, but you can also just... accept it. It's just a smell.

You could get all in your head, getting angry at the person who farted, why they farted, why they shouldn't have, how could they, how dare they, etc. But that's not reducing the discomfort. It's just adding anger, which creates stress, which doesn't feel good. You have the power to use tools or thoughts to control your own psychic discomfort. Identify the discomfort, cope with it, let it pass. This enables you to turn an otherwise miserable trip into a temporary inconvenience, less stress, and generally happier life.
by ColinWright | 2025-08-16 22:24:58+00:00
The title given on the page itself doesn't reflect why I'm submitting this.

Taken from TFA:

> At 404 Media, Matthew Gault was first to spot a press release from the UK’s National Drought Group offering a list of things we can do to save water. The meeting makes sense: people think of the UK as a rainy country, but an increasing number of parts of the UK are experiencing extraordinarily dry weather. This “green and pleasant England” is brown.

> Last on the Group’s list of things we can do to save water at home: “Delete old emails and pictures as data centres require vast amounts of water to cool their systems.”
by IanCal | 2025-08-16 22:25:30+00:00
Imagine being asked to draw what the op said, but you couldn’t see what you’d drawn - only a description that said “a man and a woman in a Honda “

Asked to draw a new picture with the history of :

Draw a picture of a man in the driver seat and a woman in the passenger seat.

(Picture of a man and a woman in a car)

No, the man in the drivers seat!

——

How well do you think a very intelligent model could draw the next picture? It failed the first time and the descriptions mean it has no idea what it even drew before.
by FirmwareBurner | 2025-08-16 22:25:45+00:00
>I’m not sure this is true. I know plenty of miserable rich people.

Because those rich people are only driven by greed and don't know when to stop. They don't see money and and means to and end, but their life purpose is just being richer than the other rich people which is an exercise in futility, leading to misery. Kind of like the men who's life purpose is being an "alpha male".

Having more money doesn't make you more happy, but having a lack of money can definitely make you more unhappy.
by ya1sec | 2025-08-16 22:26:42+00:00
I use are.na to store links in appropriate channels. I have their chrome extension mapped to a keyboard shortcut on my desktop. On mobile I use a separate shortcut. I save links many times throughout the day, trying to curate content that I think is useful or interesting. I’m building several tools derived from this practice.

My are.na bookmarks: https://www.are.na/ya-1sec/bookmarks-1ntdk32bur0

An app i made that surfaces a random page harvested from a few interesting channels: https://moonjump.app/