MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by bombela | 2025-09-02 18:55:50+00:00
As a senior (in age and experience), it is sometimes not pleasant.

The junior interviewer might be really smart and extremely motivated, but ready to argue about something very specific while missing the forest for the tree.

Years ago, I was interviewed by two young guys at meta. They asked me to solve on a white board a problem to which the obvious and expected solution was a binary search. Which I did.

I wrote a generic binary search function, and then used it in another function. I stepped through the code of each functions line by line as attempt to prove correctness.

They wouldn't have it. They argued I could only prove it was working by stepping through both functions together. While I argued the literal point of using (pure) functions was to simplify by composing and abstraction.

Things got quite heated up. Especially with one of dude. I just left right there and then.
by rendaw | 2025-09-02 18:55:59+00:00
Isn't being able to move to a new town and start again also a kind of new thing though too? Cars, moving companies, open borders, globalism, English as a standard language, no serfdom, etc.

I mean, I think you could pick up and move but it was much harder, and how far you could reasonably move when you did move was limited pre-modern era. If you can't move that far, the likelihood of someone knowing you or word spreading is probably higher.

Although I remember seeing an article here on movement of serfs a while back, I think the conclusion was that they were more mobile than one might think.
by idle_zealot | 2025-09-02 18:56:01+00:00
> As a species we are so not ready for this tech.

I basically agree, but not because of how individuals are reacting to it. On a societal level we're failing to stop megacorps from selling this thing as intelligent, a virtual assistant you can chat with. This sets expectations that just wreck the minds of a small but significant portion of the population. If we had developed LLMs in a lab and released them in the form of papers and Python projects with model weights with clear descriptions of what they're capable of, like a responsible scientific endeavor, then we'd not be seeing the problems we are, even with public access. What's killing us is MBAs and Salesmen. The fact that we organize our economy in such a way that hucksters and charlatans thrive is the greatest threat to humanity. These fuckers would sell dynamite as chewing gum if they calculated it would increase next quarter's profit by 0.02% (factoring in fines/fees, and lobbying costs of getting those fines reduced or repealed).
by lazide | 2025-09-02 18:56:08+00:00
Just what we need, the LLM ‘Reddit cares’. Notably, that is a mess too.

Also plenty of those hotlines are BS, or don’t work, or flat out don’t exist for given locales, etc.

The biggest issue is that LLM’s can act like a person, but aren’t a person, and fundamentally this causes problems. Especially for people that are already borderline or fully crazy.
by feoren | 2025-09-02 18:56:19+00:00
Yes, I work for a sense of value and worth to society, and I would accept being paid less if it meant a greater sense of worth. Think about it this way: I have about 40 productive hours per week (young kids, otherwise it'd be more). I could spend 30 hours at a worthless, pointless job that pays well, making enough money for my family, and then 10 hours volunteering on something I care about that makes a difference; or I could spend 40 hours at a job that pays only 3/4 of the former but also achieves my goal of producing valuable things for society. I get paid the same per productive hour, and the latter is much healthier for my psyche.

I currently make around the 20th percentile for my level of experience. I do look for higher paying jobs, but they're all at stupid boring companies doing fintech, adtech, or trying ineffectually to position themselves as middlemen in whatever the latest tech trends are. I don't love my job, but at least I'm making real things that actually help the world.
by gjsman-1000 | 2025-09-02 18:56:29+00:00
I might write a blog post on this, but I seriously believe we collectively need to rethink The Cathedral and the Bazaar.

The Cathedral won. Full stop. Everyone, more or less, is just a stonecutter, competing to sell the best stone (i.e. content, libraries, source code, tooling) for building the cathedrals with. If the world is a farmer's market, we're shocked that the farmer's market is not defeating Walmart, and never will.

People want Cathedrals; not Bazaars. Being a Bazaar vendor is a race to the bottom. This is not the Cathedral exploiting a "tragedy of the commons," it's intrinsic to decentralization as a whole. The Bazaar feeds the Cathedral, just as the farmers feed Walmart, just as independent websites feed Claude, a food chain and not an aberration.
by sagarkava | 2025-09-02 18:56:43+00:00
Hi HN — I’m launching an open-source WhatsApp AI Voice Agent for phone calls.

Tech stack: It runs on VideoSDK for the SIP gateway, bridging WebRTC ↔ SIP under the hood. For the AI side you can plug in whatever stack you prefer (LLM + STT + TTS). The repo includes example configs.

Why open-source? Most WhatsApp/voice AI projects out there are closed or tied to a single vendor. I wanted something people can actually hack on, fork, and extend — whether that’s experimenting with different voices, building domain-specific agents, or integrating with CRMs.

Performance: End-to-end round-trip latency is ~400–600ms in typical setups. With faster STT/TTS backends there’s headroom to improve this.

I’d love feedback on use cases you’d actually want to build with this: customer support lines, personal AI assistants, language tutors, appointment scheduling, etc. Curious what directions the HN crowd would push this in.

GitHub Repo: https://github.com/videosdk-community/videosdk-whatsapp-ai-c...

Video demo: https://youtu.be/KWfCWE8S_4U?si=yb5WWr4J4n2dgBm8

I’d love feedback: what use cases would you build with this? Customer support, personal AI assistants, language tutors… or something else?
by languagehacker | 2025-09-02 18:57:01+00:00
Wow, didn't even see much about how miserable using the sync_to_async and async_to_sync transformers are.

In general, the architectures developed because of the GIL, like Celery and gunicorn and stuff like that, handles most of the problems we run into that async/await solves with slightly better horizontal scaling IMO. The problem with a lot of async code is that it tends not to think beyond the single machine that's running it, and by the time you do, you need to rearchitect things to scale better horizontally anyway.

For most Python applications, especially with web development, just start with something like Celery and you're probably fine.
by veqq | 2025-09-02 18:57:16+00:00
Iverson's Calculus course (using J) does this: http://www.jsoftware.com/books/pdf/calculus.pdf

Also College Math with APL: https://archive.org/details/APL_books/Introduction%20to%20Co...

Actually, Iverson et al. wrote dozens of math textbooks using array languages!
by thorn | 2025-09-02 18:57:27+00:00
I remember reading about Ada when I was young in 90s. I programmed in Pascal at that time, but was intrigued by Ada’s syntax. I had no book for it sadly and internet was out of reach for me too. Modern Ada looks a bit different too, they definitely added new features into the language. I quite like the syntax.

I never heard about Spark/Ada before. I wonder if anyone uses Spark for real world tasks, and if yes, what for?
by nozzlegear | 2025-09-02 18:57:47+00:00
I've been using template elements a lot recently to render products on my wife's photography blog. The product data gets loaded from a headless MedusaJS instance, plugged into a template that matches her blog's theme, and then dropped into the page. I specifically wanted to avoid reaching for something like React since the page load is already pretty heavy with the size of her images. Template's been pretty easy to use in that respect.
by dlivingston | 2025-09-02 18:57:53+00:00
My BlueSky account has long been deleted, so I don't have any links. But as a frame of reference, my "hot takes" were very much in the Ezra Klein / Derek Thompson opinion space - something you may disagree with, but 600 miles away from fascism etc.

> Also are these official lists

No, user-created & shareable block lists. IIRC this one had a few thousand "followers".

Some tweets that sort of reflect my experience:

- https://x.com/lxeagle17/status/1962675736780906900

- https://x.com/dhaaruni/status/1962680043005690165
by andrewla | 2025-09-02 18:58:16+00:00
To a degree I think this is true, but it requires (at least in my experience) that you have an intrinsic grasp of trigonometry for it to make sense. If you have some complex function analysis and e^itheta then you can skirt the problem for a bit, but if you're like me and have to break out soh-cah-toa whenever you break down a triangle then this method ends up being pretty tedious too.
by ashf023 | 2025-09-02 18:58:20+00:00
Interesting that very few people in that thread seem to understand Go's model, especially the author of this proposal. If you don't allow preemption, you still have a sort of coloring because most non async functions aren't safe to call in a virtual thread - they may block the executor. If you call C code, you need to swap out stacks and deal with blocking by potentially spawning more OS threads - that's what CGo does. Maybe preemption is harder in Python, but that's not clearly expressed - it's just rejected as obviously unwanted.

Ultimately Python already has function coloring, and libraries are forced into that. This proposal seems poorly thought out, and also too little too late.
by willio58 | 2025-09-02 18:58:48+00:00
I recently hired a senior who left their previous company in large part due to them not hiring juniors. A huge part of being a senior is supporting the growth of junior/mid-level engineers.

I agree, I think any company that stops hiring juniors is shortsighted and it will bite them in the ass soon.

Those company execs that do think all hiring of juniors should stop are showing how little they understand the current landscape of AI and it makes you wonder what else they are so wrong about.
by dpe82 | 2025-09-02 18:58:54+00:00
In a previous generation, the enabler of all our computer tech innovation was the incredible pace of compute growth due to Moore's Law, which was also "top-down" from very well-funded companies since designing and building cutting edge chips was (and still is) very, very expensive. The hype was insane, and decisions about what chip features to build were made largely on the basis of existing vendor relationships. Those companies benefited, but so did the rest of us. History rhymes.
by loeg | 2025-09-02 18:58:54+00:00
What a condescending viewpoint, that imagines I wholly lack agency, and you somehow have it and are above influence. And that seemingly lumps in any perspective right of center with fascism. This is excessively reductive, and this simplistic worldview isn't doing you any favors.

You can curate the content you see on Twitter, and I'm not interested in fascist content. It's as easy as that. A certain population of Blueskyers like yourself are extremely over-dramatic about the political content of Twitter, which hasn't changed all that much from five years ago.
by hnuser123456 | 2025-09-02 18:59:15+00:00
Lots of people already have RTX 3090/4090/5090 for gaming and they can run 30b-class models at 40+ tok/sec. There is a huge field of models and finetunes of this size on huggingface. They are a little bit dumber than the big cloud models but not by much. And being able to run them 24/7 for just the price of electricity (and the privacy) is a big pull.
by al_borland | 2025-09-02 18:59:22+00:00
There were a couple occasions on Reddit where someone replied to me in seemingly bad faith. I looked and they had negative karma. As a result, I didn’t engage.

But I will agree that it’s far from perfect. It’s also similar to the bar example. A reputation is built one person at a time. It takes a while, with repeated bad behavior, to build a bad reputation with the entire staff or regulars.
by LeifCarrotson | 2025-09-02 18:59:28+00:00
Maybe it should have?

It's probably too late now - Pandora's box has been opened - but just in the US, about one school shooting or mass shooting every two days proves that at least one member of the species isn't uniformly ready to have firearms.

Assuming for a moment that sanctioned warfare is justifiable, in peacetime we have at least managed to build a political and military apparatus that has generally kept nuclear, conventional explosive, and chemical/biological weapons out of the control of the subset of the species who are vulnerable to this sort of psychotic breakdown.

Syncophantic AI chat bots are already making this weakness worse.
by Animats | 2025-09-02 18:59:46+00:00
Overview from 2022. One city really did set up a full social credit system, but that was a pilot project and didn't work out.[1] There are some private "social credit" systems, like the one from Ant, but that's more like a rewards program - buy stuff, get points.

China has had a lot of official social control for centuries, but it was local and managed by local cops.[2] As the population became more mobile, that wasn't enough. But a single national system never emerged.

There was a work record history, the Dang'an, created by the Party but to some extent pre-dating communism. This, again, was handled locally, by Party officials. This system didn't cope well with employee mobility. But it didn't get built into a comprehensive national system, either.

China is authoritarian, but most of the mechanisms of coercion are local. Local political bullies are a constant low-level problem.

Kind of like rural Alabama.

[1] https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/11/22/1063605/china-an...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hukou

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dang%27an
by carlosjobim | 2025-09-02 18:59:50+00:00
I've met several people in my life that are like you, at least from what it sounds like in the description you give. Constantly anger and bitter. Probably for good reason, at least initially. And these people were smart people, hard working, honest.

But here's the secret: If you behave like this, then people will only interact with you when they want something from you, leading to an even more bitterness and unfriendly demeanor, leading to even worse interactions with other people.

Instead fake being nice and friendly and people will be nice and friendly with you and after what might feel like forever you will become genuinely nice and friendly. Giving you the possibility to enjoy better people and the better side of people.
by jdthedisciple | 2025-09-02 19:00:01+00:00
If you are trying to share context between middleware (backend) and rendering (frontend) literally rather than logically (via request-id only) then that seems to stem from a fundamental misconception of the distinction between backend and frontend to me ...

I suspect all these "all-in-one" JS frameworks out there unfortunately made people think that web apps are made of "one big happy javascript application, yay!" while it's really two (or even three) entirely decoupled runtimes (backend & frontend) instead.
by primitivesuave | 2025-09-02 19:00:22+00:00
IMO it is a smart decision to implement this as a self-hosted system, and have the AI make PRs against the IaC configuration - for devops matters, human-in-the-loop is a high priority. I'm curious how well this would work if I'm using Pulumi or the AWS CDK (both are well-known to LLMs).

I consulted for an early stage company that was trying to do this during the GPT-3 era. Despite the founders' stellar reputation and impressive startup pedigree, it was exceedingly difficult to get customers to provide meaningful read access to their AWS infrastructure, let alone the ability to make changes.
by ChrisMarshallNY | 2025-09-02 19:01:07+00:00
Well, as someone with a person suffering from pretty severe (like cops and hospitals severe) schizoaffective disorder in my immediate family, I can say that story scared the bejeezus out of me.

If my family member had had ChatGPT, when they had their last episode, it's entirely possible that I might not be here, as "Everyone is plotting to kill me" is a big motif in SAD (it was, in their case, and they needed to be hospitalized). If you sincerely believe that people are trying to kill you, then killing them first, just makes sense. Looks a lot like that's what happened, here.

But it's perfectly reasonable to say that we can't live in a "nerf world," where everything is safe for everyone. Life is Risk and living out of our comfort zone.

I feel that it's important for each of us that is "taking a side," to understand that folks "on the other side" aren't necessarily enemies. They may be blinded by the personal imperative of the issue, but they aren't actually "out to get you."

The politicians may be two-faced creeps, using people's legitimate fears as leverage, but they aren't the rule.

For the record, I am vehemently against "Nerf World," but there's a very, very real problem here, and it would be good if we could approach it in a reasonable manner.
Ask HN: How do you protect against malicious links in user-generated content?
by TimLeland | 2025-09-02 19:01:19+00:00
If your app allows users to post or share content, chances are they’ll eventually try to drop in links. Some of those may be spammy, others outright malicious (phishing, malware redirects, throwaway domains, etc.)

I’m curious how companies handle this in practice. Do you:

Block certain TLDs or domains?

Use external reputation or threat-intel APIs?

Follow redirects and scan the final destination?

Sanitize or nofollow everything?

Rely on user reports + moderation queues?

Something else entirely?

It seems like a constant balancing act between safety, performance, and not frustrating legitimate users.

What’s worked well (or failed) for you? Any battle-tested approaches you’d recommend?
by idle_zealot | 2025-09-02 19:01:33+00:00
I bet you could train a supervisor classifier to run on chats and once it reaches a certainty threshold that the users is spiraling it could intervene and have the interface respond with a canned message directing the user to a help line. Of course, OpenAI wouldn't do this, because that would involve admitting that its bot can exacerbate mental health issues, and that LLM therapy is more harmful than helpful, which cuts against their AGI/replace human workers sales pitch. Their product isn't the LLM, it's trust in the LLM.
by Quarrelsome | 2025-09-02 19:02:21+00:00
> he does not have much ability to direct it.

This is like saying Steve Jobs didn't have much ability in making Apple devices so small you could fit them between your buttcheeks.

Compared to anyone else in the entire world: Elon Musk has the most agency in cultivating what people see on twitter because he owns it.

That your statement is so far divorced from reality as is possible, makes me think you are not taking this conversation seriously.
by remixff2400 | 2025-09-02 19:02:21+00:00
From the guidelines:

> Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something.

because... they don't have as many examples, documentation, textbooks, or public example projects to base generation off of, perhaps. There may be a future where documentation/servers are more formally integrated with LLMs/AI systems in a way that makes up for the relative lack of literature by plugging into a source of information that can be used to generate code/projects.
by marcosdumay | 2025-09-02 19:02:34+00:00
They shouldn't have put it there to start with. Now unhealthy people are complaining about an environment change. Anyway, that one complaint doesn't mean they did the wrong thing.

And also, there are unrelated complaints of "GPT-5 can't solve the same problems 4 did". Those were very real too, and meant OpenAI did a wrong thing.
by arp242 | 2025-09-02 19:02:39+00:00
TOTP should just be a (typically base32) secret string; I don't know if Authy allows exporting that though (and if not, that only underscores the point of this article).

I just use a simple shell script with dmenu/xclip/oathtool:

#!/bin/zsh typeset -A opt=( Docker ABC GitHub DEF # ... ) k=$(print -l ${(ko)opt} | dmenu -i) [[ $k != "" ]] && oathtool --totp --base32 $opt[$k] | xclip -rmlastnl
by jjtheblunt | 2025-09-02 19:03:31+00:00
there were 20 to 30 people in a team, but all knew their areas and the nature of the hardware and regulatory and industry standards were such that people could self organize and work away in mass parallel fashion just fine like that.

could be a case of fitting the problem domain really more than fitting human psychologies. early on there was one dude from India (brahmin) who kept complaining that he needed people to be reporting to him, rather than him being one of the workers, and that stuck out like a sore thumb, even with multiple brahmin indians in the group, and more americans, australians, brits, african etc...truly diverse by hiring for specialized talents.
by prerok | 2025-09-02 19:03:33+00:00
There's an important difference as to what is omitted.

An encyclopedia could say "general relativity is how the universe works" or it could say "general relativity and quantum mechanics describe how we understand the universe today and scientists are still searching for universal theory".

Both are short but the first statement is omitting important facts. Lossy in the sense of not explaining details is ok, but omitting swathes of information would be wrong.
Show HN: ChatGPT's interface sucks. So I built a branchable canvas for LLMs
by max-lee-dev | 2025-09-02 19:03:37+00:00
hi im max and i hate current chat interfaces! im 18 and have worked at 2 vc backed startups as a swe (max-lee.dev). now looking for more opportunities! maxplee8@gmail.com if you wanna chat :)
by polivier | 2025-09-02 19:04:17+00:00
SEEKING WORK | Canada | Remote | Operations Research

I'm Phil and I have a PhD in computer engineering, specializing in operations research (mathematical optimization, constraint programming, mixed-integer programming, etc). For the past several years I've implemented custom, production-ready solutions for a variety of problems (scheduling, routing, etc). Recent work includes a constraint programming solution for goal-based selection of indexes in Postgres, a heuristics-based scheduling tool used in hundreds of vehicle workshops around the world, and an optimization model used for scheduling autoclave cycles in a drug manufacturing facility.

Résumé/CV: https://github.com/PhilippeOlivier/curriculum-vitae/blob/mai...

Website: https://www.pedtsr.ca
by eig | 2025-09-02 19:04:18+00:00
It's possible to simultaneously believe that private companies should have control over what messages are shown on their own platform while also believing that exerting such control can be negative to the world.

It's the same reason libel and defamation laws exist: someone realized that countries operate better when spreading falsehoods to tarnish a party is illegal, and so laws exist to influence public discourse.
by throw-qqqqq | 2025-09-02 19:04:54+00:00
> Why do you say it's less

Let me try to clarify my point of view:

I don’t mean that async/await is more or less explicit than goroutines. I mean regular threaded code is more explicit than async/await code, and I prefer that.

I see colleagues struggle to correctly analyze resource usage for instance. Someone tries to parallelize some code (perhaps naiively) by converting it to async/await and then run out of memory.

Again, I don’t mean to judge anyone. I just observe that the async/await-flavor has more bugs in the code bases I work on.