MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by reaperducer | 2025-09-24 18:39:26+00:00
They do quote anonymous sources all the time, and, more often than not, those anonymous sources are leaking to the media to push their narrative, ie propaganda.

Citation needed. The New York Times has very strict rules about using anonymous sources. It's not some scary, shadow journalism effort. They publish their rules for anonymous sources right on their web site. Google is your friend.

The “literal New York Times” doesn't exist anymore. This is not investigative journalism. This is just acting as the mouth piece for some anonymous government official.

Having been a reader of the New York Times for almost 50 years, I can say the New York Times hasn't changed that much. I can also say that I look at it with a much more critical eye than most because of my journalism degrees and decades of experience as a journalist.

A major problem with society is that some anonymous low-karma recent-joiner rando spews things on HN like "The NYT is very clearly the puppet of washington insiders" and people believe it for no reason other than it tickles the part of their brain that agrees with it. Not because of any kind of objectivity, analysis, proof, or thought.

To pick a nit, you are correct: This was no investigative journalism. This was a routine daily story covering an announcement by a government agency. If you don't know the difference between the two, then you lack the knowledge and understanding required to be critical of any sort of journalism.
by Retric | 2025-09-24 18:39:51+00:00
Cloud didn’t suddenly invent renting servers in a data center. More importantly capex vs opex is generally in favor of Capex for stable companies like Hospitals. Middlemen always want their cut so you pay the full lifetime cost, plus transaction costs, and on top of that profit for those companies.

> The hard truth is that self-hosting only brings in meaningful improvements in cost if your operation grows beyond a certain scale

What nonsense, I’ve seen many small projects with ~500/month in hosting costs including manpower lose tons of money by trying to go with cloud services. Self hosting scales down ridiculously far because you need talent but your server guy can do other things when they don’t need to mess with servers for months on end.
by dghlsakjg | 2025-09-24 18:39:53+00:00
Yes, But no one wants to have to go to court or arbitration to get a refund on a service that the service provider cancelled.

If AA cancels my flight, I want my money back without having to ask for it. I don't want to have to submit an application to receive AA credits that expire in 6 months, and then have to initiate legal action to get my actual cash back. Or having them say that they rebooked me on a flight three days later so they are off the hook.

The current rules make it so that the customer has the power. I can still give AA the option of rebooking me or refunding me, but it is MY choice.
by ecocentrik | 2025-09-24 18:39:55+00:00
These enterprises might not be setup by Russia directly but they might be setup by Russian criminal organizations which have been very active in the US over the last 20 years. That nobody in the current administration seem to be concerned with criminal organizations outside of some small or remnant groups from Latin America is very telling all on its own. This administration has never named any Russian gangs in official statements, even while they now dominate in some parts of the US.
by 999900000999 | 2025-09-24 18:39:56+00:00
Tribe is a fantastic book that goes into this, fundamentally most humans exist best when they have some form of status in their community.

This could be as simple as a small community club where your assigned a role like treasurer or something, my grandmother did this when she was young. People actually know you and care about your problems .

For various reasons, these groups just aren't as significant anymore.

There's not a really good solution to this. I'm lucky enough to be in a game dev group, and I do have my bar that I go to every now and then, but aside from that I'm not really a part of any small organizations.

I haven't been to church in decades, but arguably that's why most people actually go. It's not because you imagine God is taking attendance, but it's the joy of being around other people. Historically most people stayed in the same town from cradle to grave, maybe you would move for work, or marriage, but for the most part you just stayed put.
by mkipper | 2025-09-24 18:39:58+00:00
This isn't totally dead. I missed a flight last year and got bumped to a flight the next morning on some weird ticket class where I didn't get a seat assignment until the gate. The gate agent was able to give me a bulkhead seat with extra legroom at no cost. And this was with United, not some airline with a shining reputation for customer service.

So you can roll the dice and try to get a premium seat at the gate, but that's not a risk I'm usually willing to take.
by dasil003 | 2025-09-24 18:40:29+00:00
> Things don't get more complicated the higher you go, they get easier, precisely because you're in the position of power and the influence, real or shadow, to actually have your words have meaning

Spoken like someone who's never been in a position of leading others. I'm not here to defend "leadership", there are good leaders and bad leaders, but scaling and influencing in a large organization is not a simple thing and if you don't acknowledge that then you're living in a fantasy world.
by kragen | 2025-09-24 18:40:48+00:00
(I guess I should have pointed out that forward-mode automatic differentiation was only about 100–150 lines of code when I implemented it in http://canonical.org/~kragen/sw/81hacks/autodiffgraph/, depending on where you draw the lines. But gradient descent isn't practical with forward-mode autodiff unless it's with a very small number of independent variables. Also even 100–150 lines of code is significantly bigger than a hash table and delimiter splitting.)
by throwaway0123_5 | 2025-09-24 18:41:25+00:00
In Firefox my tabs have text, and I frequently rearrange tabs with my cursor. I think this is a pretty common usage pattern (I do it on a daily basis). It would be an enormous pain if most of the area on the tab turned my arrow cursor into an I-beam cursor that I couldn't move the tab with. I checked Chrome and it looks like the tabs work the same way.

While having the text in the tabs is very useful to know what is under them, I don't think I've ever needed to actually copy the tab text. It would be a huge UX downgrade for me (and I think most people) if the tab text was selectable.

Some people might need it to be selectable for accessibility reasons and there should be a toggle for that, but I don't think "absolutely all text everywhere is selectable" is a good default.
by mariusor | 2025-09-24 18:41:25+00:00
I understand we're all old and cynical here, but one of the tenets of discussions on HN would be to take someone's arguments at face value, so I prefer to believe that the EU as an organization actually wants to diminish social exclusion and discrimination. I'm not sure if I'd give the same credit to any other capitalist entity, but the EU does not have the implicit goal of increasing revenue for its shareholders to subvert any of the others stated.
by habinero | 2025-09-24 18:41:30+00:00
"Anthropocentric cope >:(" is one of the funniest things I've read this week, so genuinely thank you for that.

"LLMs think like people do" is the equivalent of flat earth theory or UFO bros.

Flerfers run on ignorance, misunderstanding and oppositional defiant disorder. You can easily prove the earth is round in quite a lot of ways (the Greeks did it) but the flerfers either don't know them or refuse to apply them.

There are quite a lot of reasons to believe brains work differently than LLMs (and ways to prove it) you just don't know them or refuse to believe them.

It's neat tech, and I use them. They're just wayyyyyyyy overhyped and we don't need to anthropomorphize them lol
by glitchc | 2025-09-24 18:41:52+00:00
> * The Bell system was broken up, resulting in a geographically distributed telecom network: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakup_of_the_Bell_System : Your phone company was local.

It's worth noting that Bell's size and reach allowed it to create Bell Labs, and the subsequent breakup led to their eventual demise.
by psaccounts | 2025-09-24 18:42:18+00:00
This video tutorial provides an intuitive, in-depth breakdown of how an LLM learns language and uses that learning to generate text. Key concepts shown below are covered in a way that is both broad and deep, while still keeping the material accessible without losing technical rigor:

* Historical context for LLMs and GenAI

* Training an LLM -- 100K overview

* What does an LLM learn during training?

* Inferencing an LLM -- 100K overview

* 3 steps in the LLM journey from pre-training to serving

* Word Embeddings -- representing text in numeric format

* RMS Normalization -- the sound engineer of the Transformer

* Benefits of RMS Normalization over Layer Normalization

* Rotary Position Encoding (RoPE) -- making the Transformer aware of token position

* Masked Self-Attention -- making the Transformer understand context

* How RoPE generalizes well making long-context LLMs possible

* Understanding what Causal Masking is (intuition and benefit)

* Multi-Head Attention -- improving stability of Self Attention

* Residual Connections -- improving stability of learning

* Feed Forward Network

* SwiGLU Activation Function

* Stacking

* Projection Layer -- Next Token Prediction

* Inferencing a Large Language Model

* Step by Step next token generation to form sentences

* Perplexity Score -- how well did the model does

* Next Token Selector -- Greedy Sampling

* Next Token Selector -- Top-k Sampling

* Next Token Selector -- Top-p/Nucleus Sampling

* Temperature -- making an LLM's generation more creative

* Instruction finetuning -- aligning an LLM's response

* Learning going forward
by svobodovic | 2025-09-24 18:43:22+00:00
Yes, I just wanted to reply the same thing. It's a great feature for these use cases (albeit, I too would like to see more universal or friendlier approach to text-selectability in apps).

Additionally, the text copied in this manner can be instantly opened in Clipboard editor (at least on Google Pixel), and when selected again there, it offers even more contextual options, such as translate in one of your installed apps (like Deepl).

That way, you can translate the "non-selectable" text in a very few short taps.
by serial_dev | 2025-09-24 18:43:42+00:00
On the other hand, I do not expect middle managers to talk negatively about a policy that they do not have influence over and they did not initiate because in the end they cannot change it and I don’t want them to get into trouble for validating my feelings.

Middle managers will say that it is only raining and I will nod along even if we both know that they are pissing on my shoes.

I might start looking for another job, but as long as I’m there, I will smile and play along if I know that my resistance will not change the decision. Even in my exit interview, I’ll say everything was great.

This is probably not what I would have done at the beginning of my career but now I have a family so I don’t mind pretending.
by ceejayoz | 2025-09-24 18:44:03+00:00
> I was roughly 12 years old when Iraq was invaded. I was sitting in class staring at the clock and waiting for recess. It was a different political era from my perspective, and it feels a little disingenuous that you keep harping on it.

It's a little disingenuous to go "I only have the vaguest memories of cancel culture around 9/11" and "I have very vivid memories of progressive cancel culture during the late Obama administration", in that case. I, similarly, have few memories of paying for health insurance when I was in middle school.

> They're applying the exact standard that progressives requested.

Maybe! But describing him as a "white man" is accurate, as describing Obama as a "black man" would be uncontroversial. If you start talking about white/black men as monolithic groups, you start getting into trouble.

> I think you're a little fixated on the government thing, as cancel culture is generally speaking a non-governmental phenomenon…

I am, because the people who whined incessantly about that phenomenon are now weilding governmental power to do the same thing, in a way that is clearly far less acceptable legally.
by hunterpayne | 2025-09-24 18:44:18+00:00
The last couple of companies I worked for were only still in business because they avoided the cloud completely, and their competitors didn't. Paying 4x the cost for something isn't a competitive advantage unless the capabilities the cloud provides are significant. While they are nice, unless you are a very specific type of business, they aren't going to make up for the increased costs.

In fact, the last company I worked for closed due to a disastrous switch to the cloud. Track record matters...
by MPSimmons | 2025-09-24 18:44:24+00:00
Doesn't the click cause the browser to "go" on mouseUp? Selecting is clicking then dragging - this seems like a clear enough difference to me that I've never had problems. In fact, sometimes I will click, and think, "oh I actually don't want to go there" and will drag off the link and release the mouse button and it doesn't take me there.
by jancsika | 2025-09-24 18:44:27+00:00
Let's give it a shot.

The year is 2003. Svn and cvs are proving to be way too clunky and slow for booming open source development.

As an ethical accelerationist, you gain commit access to the repos for svn and cvs and make them slower and less reliable to accelerate progress toward better version control.

Lo and behold, you still have to wait until 2025 for git to be released. Because git wasn't written to replace svn or cvs-- it was written as the result of internal kernel politics wrt access to a closed-source source management program Bitkeeper. And since svn and cvs were already bad enough that kernel devs didn't choose them, you making them worse wouldn't have affected their choice.

Also, keep in mind that popularity of git was spurred by tools that converted from svn to git. So by making svn worse, you'd have made adoption of git harder by making it harder on open source devs to write reliable conversion tools.

To me, this philosophy looks worse than simply doing nothing at all. And this is in a specific domain where you could at least make a plausible, constrained argument for accelerationism. Your comment instead seems to apply to accelerationism applied to software in general-- there, the odds of you being right are so infinitesimal as to be fatuous.

In short, you'd do better playing the lottery because at least nothing bad happens to anyone else when you lose.
by jauntywundrkind | 2025-09-24 18:44:27+00:00
I never got around to part 2, but I made a git-auto-commit program (using Watchman), with one of my use cases being capturing the history of my logseq markdown notes.

I never did the next part but yeah, I was hoping to write some agents running remotely to actively follow the repo & then rewrite history with better commit names. It was pre AI boom, but auto-summarizers & taggers running as their own agents were a fantasy ask, something that felt like the architecture would have been condusive for if/when the disaggregated work became possible.

Git as eventsourcing is kind of a ground floor. Being able to decoupled the processing is the loftier hope for centralizing around git imo.

There's a lot of people yelling pretty loudly 'git would never work' 'the performance wouldn't be enough' 'write your own app specific version control if you need it', but being in the world's best ecosystem with the world's best tools for version controlled things feels like a no brainer. Theres so many fun distributed computing tasks folks get up to, so many ways of doing sync, but we developers already know a really good standard option and the world of tools around it is enviable beyond imagining.

Performance might also have some big upsides, by virtue of processing being so seamlessly decentealizable here too. I do think that the giant "huge tables of all intermixed customer data" monoliths / dataliths that most apps use is not a good fit, won't scale nicely. But if you can give up some coherency, and take advantage of the scale out ability, it lets any machine any process loosely couple it's way into the transaction processing or analysis pipelines: it becomes more interesting and compelling. I've worked at a place where each customer had their own data tables, and BlueSky/atproto'a Personal Data Store'a one-sqlite-per-user also rather mirrors this architecture, of having lots of data stores, then separate systems doing any necessary aggregation with more typical big table architectures): scaling a lot of gits feels like the place where git would win.

Wandering off possible core architectural upsides briefly: biggest likely challenge I see is figuring out how to save state nicely into files. To really take advantage of diffs and merges, we need to walk away from treating git like a blob store, and imo likely walk away from JSON stores too. Finer grained updates, having the file system exposes the structure of the data feels quasi-mamdatory, if you want to really let git help you store data: you have to come down to its level, leverage the filesystem to file your data.

Json2dir for example nicely expands a single JSON into a directory tree of simple files, which git would be far more able to mall and track. https://github.com/alurm/json2dir https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44840307
by quitit | 2025-09-24 18:44:36+00:00
For websites there are extensions specifically to address this and other terrible behaviours, one such example is Stop The Madness. https://underpassapp.com/StopTheMadness/

It includes a webpage demonstrating the typical behaviours you can correct:

https://underpassapp.com/StopTheMadness/test.html

(The screen capture function also does auto OCR for those pesky apps, even lets you translate it right then and there - no need to go into the photos app as mentioned by the author.)
by ZeroCool2u | 2025-09-24 18:45:00+00:00
Everyone asking why this exists when DuckDB or PostGIS or the JVM based Sedona already exists, clearly has not run into the painful experience of working on these large geospatial workloads when the legacy options are either not viable or not an option for other reasons, which happens more often than you might expect! And the CRS awareness!!! Incredible! This is such a huge source of error when you throw folks that are doing their best, but don't have a lot of experience with GIS workloads. Very expensive queries have had to be rerun with drastic changes to the results, because someone got their CRS mixed up.

I don't get to do geospatial work as much anymore, but I would have killed for this just a year ago.
by jjice | 2025-09-24 18:45:06+00:00
Jesus Christ, I had thought Hinge was still independent from Match Group. Guess I'll uninstall and start talking to people in person...

What they do is literally like P&G in the laundry isle or Unilever in soap. Have the illusion of choice while it's really all the same thing with a UI change and maybe a unique feature or three.

The incentive dating apps has is built to be completely opposite of what (at least many of) their users are trying to use it for.
by travisgriggs | 2025-09-24 18:45:36+00:00
I love this for Zed. I hate that I’m going to have deal with the model providers more directly. Because I don’t know what tokens are.

It’s like if McDonalds changed their pricing model to be some complex formula involving nutrition properties (calories, carbs, etc) plus some other things (carbon tax, local state taxes, whatever) and moved to a pay as you bite model. You start eating a Big Mac, but every bite has different content proportions, so every bite is changing in price as you go. Only through trial and error would you figure out how to eat. And the fact that the “complex formula” is prone to real time change at any point, makes it impossible to get excited about eating.
by simne | 2025-09-24 18:45:39+00:00
For about, what could be good machine for hacking, I have ideas.

First, probably, 8-bitness is unavoidable, because all those current Raspberries, are relatively powerful computers, even usually could install Android there, so you understand what I want to say :)

- Machine for hackers should be limited, on RAM, on CPU speed, sure, with limited screen resolution, and limited sound, because otherwise, on some point, will become race of wallets, as high quality picture and sound are usually expensive.

From other side, graphics should not be too primitive, looks like good compromise are C64 or Atari-65 (not many static objects on background, but with hardware accelerated sprites).

Some time before, I thought, the best balance for hackers machine is C64, until I read some details about Enterprise-128 (or 64).

What differs E128(64) - their absolute unique video-adapter, capable to show few resolutions on one screen. Imagine classic arcade game - for them very usual to have on top part of screen some static background and some indicators of achievements, and whole game process running on lower part of screen. So in good design, we should somehow make top part with minimal possible efforts, but focus on lower part; and E128/64 is most close hardware to this.

For about real implementations, I'm impressed with esp-32 rainbow, but unfortunately, it is ZX Spectrum simulator, and I think it is impossible to do on those hardware C64 or E128. When time will accept, I'll try other cheap hardware platforms, as I hear, RP2040 could run separate C64 chips (but nobody have done whole C64 on multiple RP2040s), so will be multicore machine, but it's ok.
by brap | 2025-09-24 18:45:57+00:00
Large organizations provide economical value.

Small organizations provide a sense of belonging.

Both can and do exist at the same time. We don’t need to compare them using the same scales and we don’t need to sacrifice one for the other.

You can shop at Amazon but go to the local bar. Work at Google and attend church. Vote for The Party and start a garage band. Now more than ever we have the time and resources to do both.

Although I agree this is easy to forget.
by frfl | 2025-09-24 18:45:58+00:00
As I understand it, it's not a technical problem, rather a social one first off: you can build it but it'll be "empty" compared to all other options out there, even if it's technically superior to them. Network effect and all that.

There's also a technical problem you'll have to contend with: bots and scammers... so many bots and so many scammers.
by moffkalast | 2025-09-24 18:46:39+00:00
There's a lot of ignorance in yours as well, because the actual point of cloud isn't to be cheaper (and it's not), it's to be standardized in terms of workflows. AWS or Azure or whoever will cost more in the long run, their entire business model is built on top of making it impossible to migrate and then jacking up prices. Of course OAI and Anthropic will become more expensive once enough people get locked into their API, it's how it works.

The more practical day to day reason for the top management to do it is that they manage to remove a significant amount of the specific knowhow their team has and replaces it with a more general skillset which they can hire from at any point and fire any of their team without a second thought if they idk, dare to ask for a raise or something.

It's about fucking over the workers and having all the power, as always. The cost doesn't even matter.