MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by eastbound | 2025-08-17 09:48:46+00:00
> because the language has such love for backwards compatibility

I still remember when Java 9 introduced modules. And I’m currently pulling my hair because Java 21 renamed all javax.* into jakarta.* because Javax was a trademark of Oracle, and all libs now require a “-jakartax” version for JDK 21.

But somehow I still have to deal with nulls everywhere and erased-at-runtime generics because Java loves backwards compatibility so much. The simple fact all libs released a “-jakartax” proves the entire ecosystem is fully maintained (plus CVEs means unmaintained libs aren’t allowed in production), so they could very well release a -jdk25 version with non-null types.
Maximize chances of getting into Big AI companies
by flu_bar | 2025-08-17 09:49:29+00:00
I was thinking about applying to Anthropic. I'm looking at some of the "representative projects" that they presumably expect strong candidates to have done.

https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/anthropic/jobs/4632830008

> Implement low-latency high-throughput sampling for large language models > Build quantitative models of system performance > Design and implement a fault-tolerant distributed system running with a complex network topology > Debug kernel-level network latency spikes in a containerized environment

I work at a FAANG and I have little to no experience with any of these. I've asked chatgpt and come up with a list of mini-projects. I plan to devote a few hours every day to build up the muscle.

Do most successful applicants typically have experience with these kinds of projects?

It feels like a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem to me, as the reason I'd like to work there is precisely to get experience in this domain.
by komali2 | 2025-08-17 09:50:57+00:00
1. I don't believe your framing

2. What's wrong with celebrating Diwali?

3. Why should anyone care? Did anyone stop you from celebrating Christmas with your friends and family?

P.s. according to your post history you have based anti capitalist positioning on the pointlessness of most white collar labor, what happened to make you participate on the wrong side in a meaningless culture war that's just a distraction from the reduction in material conditions of the working class?
by thrance | 2025-08-17 09:51:06+00:00
It's pretty clear what virtue meant to Aristotle: respect the place you were given in the natural order. So if you're, say, a slave, you should work for your master without rebellion, and if you're, say, an Athenian upperclassman, you should... uh... enjoy yourself?

If you ask me, that's a pretty convenient definition of morality for them.
by itsoktocry | 2025-08-17 09:51:43+00:00
Well, it's certainly going to be cheaper, but it's completely naive to believe it's simply "the cost today, less the cost of the driver". Driverless is a new paradigm.

For one single issue, look at the society we live in; who is going to clean the car when the inevitable happens? How will that even work? Or do you think people will happily jump in a dirty car?

So, while you do not pay the driver (who makes little anyway), there will be new costs.
by xbmcuser | 2025-08-17 09:51:46+00:00
There is also an adoption curve. The people that grew up without it wont use it as much as children that grew up with it and knowing how to use it. My sister is an admin in a private school (Not in USA) and the owner of the school is someone willing to adopt new tech very quickly. So he got all the school admin subscriptions for chatgpt. At the time my sister used to complain a lot about being over worked and having to bring work home everyday.

2 years later my sister uses it for almost everything and despite her duties increasing she says she gets a lot more done rarely has to bring work home. And in the past they had an English major specially to go over all correspondences to make sure there were no grammatical or language mistakes that person was assigned a different role as she was no longer needed. I think as newer generations used to using LLM for things start getting into the work force and higher roles the real effect of LLM will be felt more broadly as currently apart from early adopters the number of people that use LLM for all the things that they can be used for is still not that high.
by mcny | 2025-08-17 09:51:52+00:00
I think we are talking about two different things. The UBI I'm talking about won't allow you to have an enormous mansion, maybe just enough to avoid starving. The main plus point is it doesn't do means testing. The second plus point is if you really hate your job, you can quit without starving. This means we can avoid coworkers who really would like to not be there.

I think it is a solid idea. I don't know how it fits in the broader scheme of things though. If everyone in the US gets a UBI of the same amount, will people move somewhere rent is low?

From wikipedia:

> a social welfare proposal in which all citizens of a given population regularly receive a minimum income in the form of an unconditional transfer payment, i.e., without a means test or need to perform work.

It doesn't say you aren't allowed to work for more money. My understanding is you can still work as much as you want. You don't have to to get this payment. And you won't be penalized for making too much money.
by lucumo | 2025-08-17 09:52:40+00:00
The first three questions I got were:

- Wishing a colleague a Eid Mubarak, at which the colleague mentions that she's no longer of the faith.

- It's Odd Socks day for Alzheimer awareness. Will you take off a sock? (No -> Linda disapproves.)

- Bring your dog to work day, will you bring treats to work? (No -> it got canceled anyway because of complaints.)

This just sounds like an exhausting attitude to go through life.
by Telemakhos | 2025-08-17 09:53:13+00:00
I see this argument fairly often, but rarely do I see the premises questioned. Why do the elderly need to be supported? Wealth is concentrated in their hands (especially in the UK), while younger generations are struggling to be able to afford housing let alone build wealth. Perhaps society should focus less on supporting the generations who have already accumulated wealth and instead focus on supporting the generations who are starting families.
by bananaboy | 2025-08-17 09:53:20+00:00
Right. Sure I agree with that. You have to do a lot more yourself. I just don't think it's that big a deal though but that's probably just me. Someone running Perforce has probably set that up themselves, and so they vaguely know what they're doing. So if they care about CI/CD they probably have the ability to set it up themselves. Personally I've used CruiseControl.NET, Jenkins, Buildbot, and custom in-house software and the first three support Perforce out of the box. I also don't mind the classic Swarm UI (I don't like the new UI) although I admit I do prefer the GitHub and GitLab UI!
by testdelacc1 | 2025-08-17 09:54:21+00:00
They’re definitely going to overfit on this, but this will be much better from a marketing perspective. Normies don’t know wtf an MMLU is, but they do know what IQ is and that 140 is a big number.

Can’t wait for CEOs to start saying “why would we hire a 120 IQ person who works 9-5 with a lunch break when we can hire a 170 IQ worker who works 24x7 for half the cost??”
by pembrook | 2025-08-17 09:54:27+00:00
Obviously you haven’t either, because GDPR says nothing about cookie banners.

Cookie banners are the result of a different piece of legislation, the ePrivacy directive. Have you read that one too?

What about all the latest judicial actions regarding data transfers to 3rd parties that have gone back and forth due to ongoing legal cases? Legislation is totally irrelevant without the context of the latest judicial precedent.

Did you read the entirely of the schrems decisions and the analysis of what that means for using or offering any technology services? Having read GDPR is irrelevant when one day Google analytics is okay to use and the next day it's not due to one court case.

What about the latest data transfer agreements between the US and EU that invalidated the use of standard contractual clauses, and the above prior Schrems decisions? You've had years at this point.

Do you think it’s good to insult and assume bad faith from your fellow internet commenters about a topic you actually don't understand yourself?
by churchill | 2025-08-17 09:55:22+00:00
Charity? I mean, it's an open secret that both sides understand that the bulk of the money sent to African countries isn't supposed to be spent on the people. It's a subsidy/bribe to their developing-world elites to keep them pliable and obedient to basically everything they're told.

It's almost immediately laundered back into London & Paris real estate and Swiss bank accounts.

Wait, you thought Western countries were handing out gibs/NEETbux to African countries just because they feel bad for them?
by lproven | 2025-08-17 09:55:50+00:00
Interesting. It could be -- he maintains a Github gist:

"Think twice before abandoning X11. Wayland breaks everything!"

https://gist.github.com/probonopd/9feb7c20257af5dd915e3a9f2d...

This could be a web-ified version.

I have emailed with ProbonoPD, AKA Simon Peter. He is smart, motivated, and knows his stuff. He is the man behind Appimage (which I personally prefer to either Snap or Flatpak) as well as the "Hello System" FreeBSD distro.
by gpt5 | 2025-08-17 09:56:48+00:00
The way human IQ testing developed is that researchers noticed people who excel in one cognitive task tend to do well in others - the “positive manifold.”

They then hypothesized a general factor, “g,” to explain this pattern. Early tests (e.g., Binet–Simon; later Stanford–Binet and Wechsler) sampled a wide range of tasks, and researchers used correlations and factor analysis to extract the common component, then norm it around 100 with a SD of 15 and call it IQ.

IQ tend to meaningfully predicts performance across some domains especially education and work, and shows high test–retest stability from late adolescence through adulthood. It is also tend to be consistent between high quality tests, despite a wide variety of testing methods.

It looks like this site just uses human rated public IQ tests. But it would have been more interesting if an IQ test was developed specifically for AI. I.e. a test that would aim to Factor out the strength of a model general cognitive ability across a wide variety of tasks. It is probably doable by doing principal component analysis on a large set of benchmarks available today.
by commandersaki | 2025-08-17 09:57:41+00:00
He was my manager/mentor when I interned at Cisco. Very smart and humble guy and was always helpful. I tried though to stay mostly self directed and self reliant when solving the problem or task the group had given me. I eventually got stuck trying to figure out how to reassemble IP fragments into a whole packet. I probably spent a week or so, laying my concerns in group meetings, and trying to find the right data structure to do it.

Then one day, he gives me freestanding C code that was superbly written, with some macros for benchmarking, etc. For the most part it worked but needed some massaging for edge cases and such, but it was so beautiful and solved my immediate needs. I was unblocked but the whole ordeal has since been imprinted in my mind. He didn't give any context when handing the code, but I later figured out he implemented the algorithm as described in RFC 815. Deep in the annals of history and literature in networking that isn't really covered by any contemporary networking text books or sources.

Anyways now that I'm a mentor/tech lead these days, I'm always looking for my opportunity to help unblock someone by writing some very specific hard to implement code.
by Ziomislaw | 2025-08-17 09:58:20+00:00
Basically it means that when you are born you pick a random amound of traits (with different intensity each) at random from a big bag of autistic traits. Of which the most common are the ones you mentioned. Special interests and different body language are guaranteed.

For example I don't have a very strong preference for routine (but it wasn't nice when my parents rearanged furniture in the kids room), I only am overwhelmed by wearing socks a little and sound a lot, like when I was at a hospital and 3 people started playing music from their phones at the same time I had to run away from the room and

I have a wierd body language but I'm very social, though have trouble keeping in touch with people (can be managed using a calendar reminders but it still feels like a chore).

With age you learn to cope with them (some don't do it), like I learned to compensate for my death stare (consiously managing where I look), it is still wierd but less intense. This causes anxiety.
by userbinator | 2025-08-17 10:00:29+00:00
You focus on efficiency and performance. You like to work close to the metal, optimize for speed and memory usage, and prefer direct control over system resources.

Seems about right, although I only won "computer friendly" by +1, and I suspect that's because I think "computer friendly" and "human friendly" are very close to the same thing. Code that's short and simple is as easy for computers to execute as it is for humans to read and understand. Although +10 on concrete shows just how much I hate (usually superfluous) abstraction.
by monstertank | 2025-08-17 10:02:05+00:00
This post got me wondering, so I asked chatgpt for jokes about hackernews as if made by various comedians...I laughed at one or two /shrug

Bill Hicks (angry truth-telling prophet)

"Hacker News is where ideas go to die. Not because they’re bad — but because 400 anonymous software prophets decided they’re God. And God doesn’t code, man."

---

Bill Burr (ranty everyman, annoyed at everything)

"I went on Hacker News once. Jesus. It’s like walking into a bar where everyone’s smarter than you, but still somehow an idiot. ‘Actually, you should’ve used Rust.’ Actually, you should shut the hell up, Todd."

---

Louis C.K. (brutal honesty, self-deprecation)

"I asked Hacker News if my startup idea was good. And they said, ‘No, because you’re an idiot.’ And I was like… yeah, that’s fair. My idea was basically Tinder but for people who hate me. Which is… everyone."

---

George Carlin (sharp language, hypocrisy calling)

"Hacker News. Don’t you love that name? Hacker. News. Two lies in two words. Nobody’s hacking, and it sure as hell ain’t news. It’s just nerds arguing over tabs and spaces like it’s the f*ing Middle East."

---

Tom Segura (laid-back storyteller, dry punch)

"So my buddy posts his app on Hacker News, right? He’s all excited, like, ‘Dude, we’re gonna blow up.’ By comment three: ‘This is trash, here’s a 40-page essay why you should quit.’ He calls me crying. I’m like, yeah man, that’s the feature, not the bug."

---

Jimmy Carr (short, brutal, wicked flip)

"I posted on Hacker News for feedback. They gave it to me. Turns out suicide is an option."
by phatfish | 2025-08-17 10:02:52+00:00
It's "viral" marketing for progress-party.uk, if you play to the end there is a link to a Google doc to register your interest.

The veiled racism and bigotry in the "sim" is cheap. The current housing situation may be made worse by migration, but the majority of it is legal so hardly the migrants fault if we are inviting them.

So blame the government (predominantly Conservative over the last 20 years) and all the NIMBYs and hypocrites that stop anything changing in this glorious country.
by stared | 2025-08-17 10:02:57+00:00
My take is that it’s easier to train a model to ace short, low-context tasks like IQ tests. That doesn’t necessarily transfer to more complex reasoning. While on the Mensa Norway test GPT-5 gets over 140, on an offline test it goes down to ~120.

It is interesting to look at the political spectrum as well (https://www.trackingai.org/political-test) - ar are liberals, even Grok 4. The political leaning isn’t surprising either. Mainstream models need to be broadly acceptable, which in practice means being respectful of all groups. An authoritarian right-wing model might work for one country, group, or religion, but would almost certainly be offensive elsewhere.
by mike_hearn | 2025-08-17 10:03:36+00:00
This is a great way to express it. In the past I tried to express the same idea to non-techies by saying models generate an average of their inputs, which is totally wrong. But this way to explain it is much better.

In fact the training process is all about minimizing "perplexity", where perplexity is a measure of how surprised (perplexed) the model is by its training data. It's some exponential inverse of the loss function, I always forget the exact definition.

With enough parameters the models are able to mix and match things pretty well, so the examples of them generating funny jokes aren't necessarily a great rebuttal as there are so many jokes on the web and to find them requires nearly exact keyword matching. A better observation is that we haven't heard many stories of LLMs inventing things. I feel I read about AI a lot and yet the best example I can come up with was some Wordle-like game someone got GPT4 to invent and that was a couple of years ago.

I've found this to be consistently true in my own work. Any time I come up with an algorithm or product idea I think might be novel, I've asked a model to suggest solutions to the same problem. They never can do it. With some leading questions the smartest models will understand the proposal and agree it could work, but they never come up with such ideas cold. What they think of is always the most obvious, straight line, least common denominator kind of suggestions. It makes sense that this is because they're trained to be unsurprising.

Fixing this is probably the best definition of AGI we're going to get. Being surprising at the right time and unsurprising at others is one of the hardest things to do well even for people. We've all known the awkward guy who's learning how to be funny by just saying as much weird stuff as possible and seeing what gets a reaction. And in the corporate environment, my experience has been that innovative people are lauded and praised when they're inventing a golden goose, but shortly after are often demonized or kicked out. The problem being that they keep saying surprising things but people don't like being surprised, especially if it's an unpleasant surprise of the form "saying something true but unsayable", e.g. I don't want to work on product X because nobody is using it. What most people want is a machine that consistently generates pleasant surprises and is a personality-free cog otherwise, but that's hard for even very intelligent humans. It's often hard even to want to do that, because personality isn't something you can flick on and off like a lightswitch. A good example is how Mark Zuckerberg, one of the most successful executives of our era, would have been fired from his own company several times already if he didn't control the voting shares.
by NitpickLawyer | 2025-08-17 10:04:33+00:00
> I doubt i could do better than just compressing the dataset and extracting it on the fly.

The meta in that field is to extract "rules" (i.e. for hashcat) from datasets. Then you run the rules over the encrypted dumps. Rules can be word^number^number, word^number^word^number, or letter^upper^number^lower... etc. Then you build a dictionary and dict + rules = passwords.

Pretty sure you can extract some nice signals nowadays with embeddings and what not.
by t_mann | 2025-08-17 10:04:34+00:00
Small nitpick, it's not just the variation in area that you'd care about, but the variation in shape. Two pieces of the same area/volume can cook very differently depending on the shape. The thing is, there isn't a single canonical metric for measuring shape similarity afaik, but you could pick something e.g. based on Hausdorff distance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hausdorff_distance#Definition A quick search leads to some cool papers https://webspace.science.uu.nl/~veltk101/publications/art/sm...
by lgrebe | 2025-08-17 10:05:03+00:00
Looking to create something just like this for chores at home.

Inspired by https://www.laurieherault.com/articles/a-thermal-receipt-pri...

And

https://youtu.be/xg45b8UXoZI

Hoping it will make chores more visible and fun to complete for the whole family.

I picked up a used star tsp100 printer and usb 2d barcode scanner.

Still looking for a backend though. Idealy with Homeassistant integration for automating todos that already have sensors and data such as taking out the trash.

https://www.donetick.com looks promising.

Could you share some more technicalities on your setup?
by 2b3a51 | 2025-08-17 10:05:38+00:00
Thank you for taking the time to write this detailed description of your methodology for reading and interacting with Web sites. I found it interesting and I'm going to look a little more closely at what actually happens when I type a Web address into a browser address bar!

I don't spend that much time on HN hence the delay in replying.

> "I'm not inclined to answer because I think it distracts from the point I am trying to make; it's a tangent, a red herring"

I sort of guessed that you were not using a 'standard' Web browser (tui or gui) which is why I became interested. At least you now have a text that you can post a link to next time someone becomes insistent about this.
by mrkeen | 2025-08-17 10:05:44+00:00
> Selecting a sync engine is a lot about knowing the constraints of your application.

Not so sure about this. These seem more like fundamentals than sliding scales.

> How many people will concurrently edit the same resources?

More than 1.

> How write-heavy is it?

Write-heavy enough that you'll encounter an unexpected write between two reads.

> Can you expect unreliable connections or offline usage?

Yes.

CAP with Electron and SQLite is no different from CAP with Tauri and MySQL.
by lukan | 2025-08-17 10:06:05+00:00
Missundertanding (hopefully).

Saying other people may not interfer uninvited in my life is not the same as saying people may not care about me.

I care about other people and interfer in their life, because in the case of my kids, they cannot sustain on their own and they want me as their parent. So there is consent in general about it.

But I am not telling my neibghors that they must wear a warm jacket when it is cold.

(Or that they may not consume porn, to not go to hell)

There is a slight difference between offering help for example and forcing someone to do things in a different way, no matter how well intentioned.
by anonymoushn | 2025-08-17 10:07:11+00:00
> You focus on efficiency and performance. You like to work close to the metal, optimize for speed and memory usage, and prefer direct control over system resources.

well, it's not wrong, but i feel like a lot of these questions are "too normative" in their framing. there is some stuff that i do because of the nature of my work, and some other stuff that other people should be enabled to do because of the nature of their work, and some other stuff that really sucks that nobody should be doing and is nonetheless quite popular
by Dylan16807 | 2025-08-17 10:07:18+00:00
We're sending it to be gotten rid of. But that could and should be into a landfill after optional sorting and extraction, not a river.

When we outsource manufacturing, the carbon and a lot of the pollution is our fault, as an inevitable part of it. When we outsource plastic handling, tossing it in the river is not the same. It's really easy to not toss it in the river. We're turning a blind eye to it, but it's not because we actually want it. We want them to stop and they could stop.