MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by tossandthrow | 2025-08-07 06:48:20+00:00
Chatgpt introduces a new vector of being a bad collaborator.

Previously you could write a lot of text that was wrong, but claim that you at least tried.

Now, we need to get used to putting it in the same category that a peer did not contribute anything and that they contributed ai slop.

This is one of the reasons why juniors will vanish - there is no room for "I tried my best".

Edit: clarity
by ZeroGravitas | 2025-08-07 06:48:35+00:00
Here's a summary of similar moves in Florida:

https://medium.com/@edmondthorne/floridas-big-utilities-quie...

> Florida’s Big Utilities Quiet & Strategic Campaign to Limit Consumer Rooftop Solar

> Investor-owned utilities in Florida have quietly waged a multi-pronged campaign to limit rooftop solar adoption, using legislation, lobbying, and public messaging to preserve their market dominance, as well as a few untruths here and there.

Interestingly, after they got legislation passed the Governor there veto'd it due to popular support for home solar.

America generally has much higher costs for home solar which is likely in part due to lobbying like this makeing it hard to streamline the industry by removing red tape.
by Ekaros | 2025-08-07 06:48:45+00:00
Slightly less chance of dying in very tiny solar system destroying effect. Traded to much higher risk of dying for some other risk or system failure. Anything affecting solar system likely affects also any ark on the way... And well inside solar system you might be able to get some support. Where as outside none...

Just what sort of population would enter that risk profile? Especially when there is little to gain for themselves.
by Frieren | 2025-08-07 06:49:06+00:00
> ChatGPT didn't ruin anything. Lazy students did.

That's a very unuseful way of looking at it. It solves nothing.

ChatGPT has created a problem, we need to look ways of solving it. Unregulated technology is harmful, we need regulations that limit the bad use cases.

To just blame people so, lets be real, your shares on bit tech corporations go up is destructive for society. This tools, like social media, are harming people and should be regulated to work for us. If they cannot then shut them off.
by jillesvangurp | 2025-08-07 06:49:28+00:00
I'm aware; I have a Google Pixel phone. Real-time translations are still fairly useless for business meetings. I've also been experimenting with various AI transcription tools in online meetings, live subtitles, etc. They all suffer from the same problem: you need a lot of context to translate spoken language and that context is simply not there in a fragments of a conversation. It's in the category of better than nothing. But when you need to respond to somebody it's very distracting to be dealing with bad translations.

You get mis-understood and weirdly translated names, acronyms, jargon, etc. And that's on top of people with bad accents, microphones, etc. It's getting better but right now it's more of a LOL whut?! than that it's actually useful.

But it's clearly on a path to crossing into useful and from there to indispensable territory. Hopefully soon. Because I need this stuff in a hurry.
by sanxiyn | 2025-08-07 06:49:36+00:00
Yes, models give likelihoods you can compare against. No, you can't do that without drafting, because likelihood of token N+2 depends on token N+1. That is, you get P(is, The capital of France) and P(Berlin, The capital of France is), but for the later you need to give "is" as input, you can't do P(Berlin, The Capital of France _).
by almost | 2025-08-07 06:49:47+00:00
360 degrees in a circle predates Plato by quite a lot (2000 years I think!). It comes from the Summarians more than 4000 years ago. They used a method of counting on fingers that goes up to 12 on one hand and 60 using both hands, so their numbering system was based on 60. 360 is 6 * 60 and also roughly how many days in a year.

Later societies inherited that from them along with 60 minutes in and hour.
by shikon7 | 2025-08-07 06:50:12+00:00
Yes, the forward pass does a next token prediction on all input tokens (so we know exactly how many tokens from the small model matched). The expensive thing is not the computation, but the memory bandwidth, as each pass needs to load the model from memory.

If the small model predicts some tokens correctly, you save some passes, at the expense of doing some extra computations when the tokens were not correct.

In any case, each forward pass will give at least one new token.
by weinzierl | 2025-08-07 06:50:44+00:00
I have no problems with Mixxx in that regard. I run it on Linux and for me it is rock solid. It can't help if your computer crashes though.

I used to use mpd for a while which automatically continues playing where it left off after a reboot.

What I learned from that phase is that the music I enjoy in the evening is rarely the same I like blasted in my ears mid-song at full volume in the morning. Terribly annoying feature, will not use again.
by ChadNauseam | 2025-08-07 06:51:29+00:00
I have a question about Automerge that maybe someone here can answer. I have a lot of code written for some custom CRDTs I've made. (This handles syncing them with my server and between devices and so on.) My data model is that each device gets a unique ID, and then can share "events" which must be sequential for a given ID. The events from all the different devices are then collected and replayed. I'm curious if it would be possible to fit automerge to this framework? All I would need is an `apply` function that takes an event and a document and produces a new document. (I assume I would miss out on the super-efficient compressed representation described in this article, but I'm curious)
by eric-burel | 2025-08-07 06:52:03+00:00
"Encourage Open-Source and Open-Weight AI" is the part just after "Ensure that Frontier AI Protects Free Speech and American Values" in America's AI Action Plan. I know this is not rational but OpenAI OSS models kinda give me chills as I am reading the Plan in parallel. Anyway I like seeing oss model providers talking about hardware, because that's a limiting point for most developers that are not familiar with this layer.
Ask HN: How do/did you use PostgreSQL's LISTEN/NOTIFY in production?
by JoelJacobson | 2025-08-07 06:52:06+00:00
Recently there was an HN thread: "Postgres LISTEN/NOTIFY does not scale", https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44490510

We're now working on improving the scalability of LISTEN/NOTIFY in PostgreSQL, and to guide that work, I'd like to better understand how it's used (or was used) in real-world systems. What works well? What doesn't?

The current implementation has some known scalability bottlenecks:

1. Thundering Herd Problem: A NOTIFY wakes up all listening backends in the current database, even those not listening on the notified channel. This is inefficient when many listeners are each listening to their own channels (e.g. in job queues).

2. Commit Lock Contention: NOTIFY operations are serialized behind a heavyweight lock at transaction commit. This can become a bottleneck when many transactions send notifications in parallel.

If you've used LISTEN/NOTIFY in production, I'd love to hear:

- What is/was your use case?

- Does each client listen on its own channel, or do they share channels?

- How many listening backend processes?

- How many NOTIFYs in parallel?

- Are you sending payloads? If so, how large?

- What worked well for you? What didn't?

- Did you hit any scalability limits?

Feedback much appreciated, thanks!

/Joel
by seirus | 2025-08-07 06:52:32+00:00
You can get by with just Swedish if you live in a city or town where a large percentage of the population are native Swedish speakers. In Ekenäs, for example, around 80% of the population have Swedish as their native language.

Along the coast of southern and western Finland there are many bilingual Swedish/Finnish municipalities where most of the native Swedish speaking population lives. And on the island of Åland the overwhelming majority of the population are native Swedish speakers.

On the other hand in Central and Eastern Finland you aren’t going to get by with just Swedish.
by baobun | 2025-08-07 06:52:42+00:00
In order to make progress, you need to synchronize with the agent in order to bring it onto frequency. Only then can your minds meet. In your situation, you probably want to interject with some pure vibe (no code!) where you get to know each other non-judgementally. Then continue. You will recognize you are on the right track by experiencing a flow state combined with improved/desired results. The closer you connect with your agent, the better your outcomes will be. If you need further guidance or faster results, my LLM-alignment course is currently open for applicants.

/s
by elric | 2025-08-07 06:53:34+00:00
Would they? Their products depends on the work of thousands of FOSS contributions. And historically, the vast majority of companies haven't contributed or paid. All they've done is take. There have been numerous cases of GPL violations and other misappropriations of licenses. I don't see why a "Pay me $1000"-clause would be any different.

Was at a talk by the curl maintainer a while back, he has a stack of emails from entitled companies that expect him to work for free. It's mind boggling.
by ajuc | 2025-08-07 06:54:33+00:00
10 bit is even better according to all these criteria AND it fits 0-1000 into one byte which meshes really well with metric system (0 to 1 km in meters, 0 to 1 liter in ml, etc.)

You could even do binary-encoded-metric-numbers that you can decode as needed one byte at a time - the first byte is tonnes, the second is kilograms, the third is grams, the 4th is milligrams, and you only lose 23 out of 1024 values at each level.

Same (but without loses) with data sizes. 1st bit is gigabytes, 2nd is megabytes, 3rd is kilobytes, 4th is bytes.

And of course at one point many computers used 40-bit floating point format which would fit nicely into our 4 bytes.

10-bit bytes would consist of two 5-bit nibbles, which you could use for two case-insensitive letters (for example Baudot Code was 5-bit). So you could still do hex-like 2-letter representation. Or you could send case-insensitive letters at 2 letters per byte.

40 bit could address 1 TB of memory (of 10-bit values - so much more than 1TB of 8-bit values). We could still be on 4-byte memory addressing to this day which would make all pointers 4-byte which would save us memory.

And so on.

But ultimately it always had to be power-of-two for cheaper hardware.
by rTX5CMRXIfFG | 2025-08-07 06:54:59+00:00
> Any amount of returning manufacturing here, returning power to the middle class by increasing the demand for labor and stopping the exploitation of foreign workers is a good thing.

I don’t think Americans realize that we haven’t suffered a global war since 1945 precisely because global trade took over and nations’ economies became more interdependent than isolated.

These trade wars are signalling pretty much all countries in the world to become more self-sustaining and less dependent on each other. Countries who succeed will be more confident to enter armed conflict because they’ll have less to lose, and those with lots to gain will have every incentive to start or join a war against those who have resources.
by veonik | 2025-08-07 06:55:24+00:00
To add to the confusion, you can also just use Gemini via API (without Vertex AI). It shows up as a separate item in billing.

In the (latest, of three different) Go SDK, you can use either Vertex AI or Gemini. But not all features exist in either. Gemini can use uploaded files as attachments, and Vertex AI can use RAG stores, for example. Gemini uses API key based authentication, while Vertex AI uses the traditional credentials. All in the same SDK.

It's a mess.
by whoopdedo | 2025-08-07 06:55:49+00:00
I'd say no. We would have had the Itanium drama 10 years earlier. The i860 had some flashy features in it (integrated graphics, SIMD) but also the same Achilles' heel as Itanium of compiler-directed pipeline ordering. That made it much slower than other processors and any analyst of the time would have recommended staying on x86 for the performance and not having to change all your software. So AMD and Cyrix sell more chips and Intel has to backpedal to avoid completely losing the PC market.
by brettkromkamp | 2025-08-07 06:55:55+00:00
He says that this is not 10,000 lines of bug-filled crap… but, unless you are explicitly verifying and testing the code, how would you know? And, what kind of solution needs 10,000 lines of code added to it daily? Then again, these could be separate solutions. but, still… this 10,000-lines-of-code-a-day thing seems strange.
by h0p3 | 2025-08-07 06:56:03+00:00
I can appreciate your defending yourself here, and you should. You're obviously suitable for the role, and I think folks will be incredibly lucky to learn from you. I'm not saying your criticisms are that bad (far from it), but I can't say I think you're always as careful as you should be in that role (which I also suggest you're sometimes too quick to assign yourself) either, sir. If you're asking for bug reports, this is one.
by pharrington | 2025-08-07 06:56:36+00:00
When you navigate to the Clinical Trials section[1], the "View Clinical Trials Guidance Document" link[2] currently stalls, and then gives a 403 error page that says "Page Not Found". All of the information is not there on fda.gov, and whoever's in charge is doing a very sloppy job.

[1]https://www.fda.gov/science-research/science-and-research-sp...

[2]https://www.fda.gov/node/358362
by DrPhish | 2025-08-07 06:58:12+00:00
Its also easy to do 120b on CPU if you have the resources. I had 120b running on my home LLM CPU inference box in just as long as it took to download the GGUFs, git pull and rebuild llama-server. I had it running at 40t/s with zero effort and 50t/s with a brief tweaking. Its just too bad that even the 120b isn't really worth running compared to the other models that are out there.

It really is amazing what ggerganov and the llama.cpp team have done to democratize LLMs for individuals that can't afford a massive GPU farm worth more than the average annual salary.
by ajanuary | 2025-08-07 06:58:16+00:00
Two problems I’ve encountered with magic links:

* Mobile email clients that open links in an embedded browser. This confuses some people. From their perspective they never stay logged in, because every time they open their regular browser they don’t have a session (because it was created in the embedded browser) and have to request a login link again.

* Some people don’t have their email on the device they want to log in on.

Sending codes solves both of these problems (but then has the issues described in the article, and both share all the problems with sending emails)
by WesolyKubeczek | 2025-08-07 06:58:29+00:00
I guess this flow is even worse for authenticators like Duo or even Apple’s own iCloud logins with 2fa. You log on to a phishing site mimicking the real one, and your phone asks if it is you trying to log in. Yes of course it’s you logging in, but you don’t realize you’re logging in bad guys by proxy.

The prompts that show where the login is coming from are useless, too, because mapping from IP addresses to geographical locations is far from perfect. For example, my legit login attempts showed me all over my country map. If I’m in a corporate VPN already, its exit nodes may also be all over the map, and your legitimate login from, say, Germany may present itself as coming from Cyprus, which is shady as fuck.

If I seek to implement 2fa for my own service and have it be not theater and resistant to such phishing attacks, it gets difficult real fast.
by dmurray | 2025-08-07 06:59:08+00:00
The conclusion looks correct for the wrong question: isn't this the formula for the number of queues?

The first car starts a queue with probability 1, the second car starts a queue if and only if it is slower (probability 1/2), the third car starts a queue if and only if it is the slowest so far (probability 1/3), and so on. Total is 1 + 1/2 + 1/3... which is the formula at the end of the blog post, with an off-by-one error.

The average queue length should be the number of cars divided by this harmonic sum. Which also diverges to infinity.
by Ekaros | 2025-08-07 06:59:13+00:00
Energy is the limit. If used Wolfram Alpha right for reasonable comparison that is largest cruise ship with mass of 248663000 kg to speed up to 0.01c mentioned the kinetic energy would be 2.9 times the worlds fossil fuel reserves...

Then double that to slow down. And remember efficiency and that well you need to spend some to keep people alive...

Seems like energy in general is one of the true problems.
by drdaeman | 2025-08-07 06:59:59+00:00
At the very least the spec should be painstakingly insistent on not requiring attestation unless implementors have really thought and understood the reasons why they need the security properties provided by attestation in their particular use case. And that it has to be something more meaningful than “be more secure this way” as security is not a rating (even though security ratings exist) but a set of properties, and not every possible security guarantee is universally desirable (please correct me if I’m wrong here, of course), and at least some are not without downsides. Maybe even strongly recommend library authors to pass the message on.
by mahirsaid | 2025-08-07 07:01:14+00:00
This has been driving me nuts. Ever since implementation. This method has been the biggest disappointment of login procedures and quickness. I dont want to go through, three to five steps just to login and in the meantime I forget what I came to the service for in the first place. There's gotta be a better method for security and streamlining sign in's. I should not have to do the work of security for the service and every other week I hear about the same service being hacked and millions of accounts are now affected.
Show HN: Digilabs Grown Since Launch in 2023 more over 200 colleges
by thillainathan | 2025-08-07 07:02:31+00:00
DigiLabs, a virtual IT training lab platform powered by IBM, has expanded rapidly across Tamil Nadu.

Since its start in 2023, it’s now live in 200+ schools and colleges, offering cloud-based virtual lab solutions. With a vision for nationwide impact, that the planning of sivakumar kuppannan they are already conducted a hackathon on August 20 with 20+ colleges and giving awards for students. Now major hackathon by 2028 and aim to deliver virtual IT training across India.
by com2kid | 2025-08-07 07:03:27+00:00
> JS/TS/npm is just as bad with probably more build tools/frameworks.

This is flat out wrong. NPM packages by default are local to a directory. And I haven't seen a package rely on a specific minor version of node in literally years. Node's back compat is also great, there was one hiccup 5 or 6 years ago where a super popular native package was deprecated ago but that's been about it.

I can take current LTS node and run just about any package from the NPM repo written within the last 4 or 5 years and it will just work. Meanwhile plenty of python packages somehow need specific point releases. What the unholy hell.

Node version manager does exist, and it can be setup to work per directory, which is super cool, but I haven't needed NVM in literal years.
by toast0 | 2025-08-07 07:03:42+00:00
John Carmack is highly successful in software and has a poor work-life balance. Doesn't mean there's causation between the two.

If there's an emergency, sure, work 12 hour days until it's fixed. Maybe if you're really in the zone, go ahead and keep working for 12 hours once in a while.

But, being behind schedule is not an emergency. And if the emergency continues for more than a couple days, it's a situation, not an emergency. 12 hours of focused work is hard to do. And if it's not focused, might as well punch out at 5, live your life outside of work, get some rest, maybe let problems marinate, and come back tomorrow.
by cyberax | 2025-08-07 07:04:10+00:00
> They why dont we build as much housing as possible?

Because it's not possible. Large cities can't sustainably grow at more than single digit percentage per year speed.

And at that speed, the density/price death spiral easily consumes all the housing.

Seattle was mentioned here, and it grew its number of housing units by 25% over 12 years. Oftentimes leading the country in the number of active cranes.

Can you guess what happened with housing costs? I give you three guesses.

> Since if prices never fall or never even rise slower we clearly can make infinite wealth?

No. You get the fall of democracy, demographic collapse, and in general other nasty consequences when the bill comes due.

Because it's essentially a zero-sum game now. The population growth has mostly ended, so every new dense housing unit in NYC means a new abandoned house in rural Ohio.

Want a stat that will blow your mind? The US has 1.1 housing units per family. We literally have more houses than families in the country. Yet somehow it's a "housing crisis".
by myaccountonhn | 2025-08-07 07:04:48+00:00
Well Slack may have a few more features over IRC but none of them should cause my laptop fans to start spinning. Many of the slowdowns in modern web are because of trackers. Software may be more efficient but all that is neglected by software trying to do more. But so much of that "more" isn't resulting in more features for the user.

And yes convenience, social adoption and flashy modern appearance are major factors in the decision making. Whether it contributes to obsolescence or is fast isn't a factor at all.
by teiferer | 2025-08-07 07:06:10+00:00
Are you opining from the outside or did you live here during the pandemic?

If you entered a bus or any public space during that time, most people were wearing masks. And bus schedules were heavily adjusted to decrease density of people. Society did a lot to fight the virus, just not based on mandates but based on getting people to voluntarily do what was necessary because they in majority used common sense and an undertanding of what's the danger and what is needed. Similar to what an intergenerational space ship would need.

So, if your argument is "you can solve big problems without coersion" then I'm with you. You need a high trust society.

Though if your argument is "the mask stuff was just BS, just look at Sweden, they didn't use any and turned out well" then you just don't have a clue what you are talking about.
by jlebar | 2025-08-07 07:06:59+00:00
Just want to suggest: Ask an LLM about it! If you have access to a reasoning model like o3, I've found it to be very helpful.

I think this answer is as good as any of the human-generated ones in the thread so far, but the real power is that you can ask it follow-up questions. https://chatgpt.com/share/6894504f-4458-8008-a8c9-f371588259...
by nelox | 2025-08-07 07:07:18+00:00
Finally, a diversity strategy that pleases HR and slashes payroll, what’s not to love?

Why invest in hiring and promoting real women when you can roll out a thousand polite assistants named “Sophie” who never ask for parental leave or equity? Add a gendered voice, update the dashboard, and voilà: gender parity, disruption-style.

This is the kind of innovation that turns DEI into an API call. Efficient, scalable and completely empty.

Can’t wait for the next step—closing the gender pay gap by not paying anyone at all.