MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by dang | 2025-09-05 20:35:25+00:00
Could you please stop posting flamebait, ideological battle comments, etc? You've unfortunately been doing it repeatedly. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.

If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
by nithish95 | 2025-09-05 20:35:34+00:00
Location: Seattle, WA

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by Hizonner | 2025-09-05 20:35:38+00:00
Well, OK, that's true. I was wrong with "always".

It's only been the norm since we've had effective birth control, decent pregnancy and early-life health care, cures for most serious STDs, the notion that neither women nor children are property, what would nowadays seem like a reasonable amount of individual physical and social mobility and independence, certain knowledge of paternity, a less inheritance-based economic system where certainty of paternity isn't as overwhelmingly important anyway, and whatever else I'm forgetting.

But those are the new normal. Or at least one may hope they'll stay normal. And they've definitely been more or less normal throughout the lifetimes of anybody who's in this forum.
by ratmice | 2025-09-05 20:36:16+00:00
Another thing about bytestream oriented interfaces like pipes is they tend to turn every program into a parser in order to reject invalid input. Eventually someone is just going to put a type system on top of that parser to reject more than just syntactically valid programs, but also semantically invalid ones.

As such this notion that "we don't need types, we can have parsers." kind of argument doesn't feel very inspiring.
by Xenoamorphous | 2025-09-05 20:36:44+00:00
Question for the experts: a few years back (even before covid times?) I was tasked with building a news aggregator. Universal Sentence Encoder was new, and we didn’t even have BERT back then. It felt magical (at least as a regular software dev) seeing how the cosine similarity score was heavily correlated with how similar (from a semantic standpoint) two given pieces of text were. That plus some clustering algorithm got the job done.

A few months ago I happened to play with OpenAI’s embeddings model (can’t remember which ones) and I was shocked to see that the cosine similarity of most texts was super close, even if the texts had nothing in common. It’s like the wide 0-1 range that USE (and later BERT) were giving me was compressed to perhaps a 0.2 one. Why is that? Does it mean those embeddings are not great for semantic similarity?
by gamblor956 | 2025-09-05 20:37:24+00:00
This.

Customer support is the "big" thing for AI replacement but it's also the worst role to replace with an AI, since customer frustration can (and usually does) lead to spurned customers switching to competitors.

Salesforce fired 4000 humans and replaced them with a dumb chatbot that couldn't answer many questions beyond the very basic. Customers absolutely hated the chatbot and started rethinking their Salesforce spend, resulting in a number of customers reducing their spend or switching to another CRM provider entirely.
by spicyusername | 2025-09-05 20:37:58+00:00
Using a container image as your "artifact" is often a good approach to distributing your software.

zips the local copy of the branch and rsyncs it to the environment, and some other stuff

This would happen in your Dockerfile, and then the process of actually "installing" your application is just docker run (or kubectl apply, etc), which is an industry standard requiring no specialized knowledge about your application (since that is abstracted away in your Dockerfile).

You're basically splitting the process of building and distributed your application into: write the software, build the image, deploy the image.

Everyone who uses these tools, which is most people by this point, will understand these steps. Additionally, any framework, cloud provider, etc that speaks container images, like ECS, Kubernetes, Docker Desktop, etc can manage your deployments for you, since they speak container images. Also, the API of your container image (e.g. the environment variables, entrypoint flags, and mounted volumes it expects) communicate to those deploying your application what things you expect for them to provide during deployment.

Without all this, whoever or whatever is deploying your application has to know every little detail and you're going to spend a lot of time writing custom workflows to hook into every different kind of infrastructure you want to deploy to.
by eth0up | 2025-09-05 20:38:47+00:00
I fully expect and won't blame the form of archery that will pursue this comment, but... Impulse must have its way once in a while.

With the unprecedented extrajudicial approach the US has recently taken against certain recreational boaters in the Caribbean, perhaps they will realize Google is far worse and apply similar tactics.

Lawsuits will never amount to anything. And they are taking over the world. And in my opinion, they're verifiably more hostile than any boater I've ever been made aware of, including people on jet skis.

With the very substance of reality dissolving before our eyes, and considering we may be but a twitch of a jingo fingertip away from nuking the homeless, why not?
by PhantomHour | 2025-09-05 20:39:15+00:00
> There are no major tech companies in Europe, which is so insane it's comical. Let that sink in...a continent full of intelligent tech workers has never been able to get a major tech company off the ground.

This is plainly untrue if you're talking about tech beyond the mag-7 sized supergiants.

> Regulation may be good, but understand, actually, recognize, that it is also suffocating. People bragging that they have no weeds in their fields, when they have no fresh crops either....

And yet it is the tech giants in the US, oh so praised for their size, that are the "weeds" in many regards.

What good is Google when it's reliant on an advertising monopoly itself built entirely on monopolistic and fraudulent exploitation of the rest of the economy.

What good is Amazon when it's reliant on crushing all other retail and local manufacturing?
by lordofgibbons | 2025-09-05 20:40:15+00:00
I'm the primary target audiance for Mojo and was very interested in it, but I just wish they didn't keep Exceptions. This backwards compatibility with Python syntax is extremely overrated and not worth the cost of bringing language warts from the 90s.

God, I hate exceptions so much. I have never seen anyone use exceptions correctly in either Java (at FAANG) or in any regular Python application.

I'm much more in favor of explicit error handling like in Go, or the syntax sugar Rust provides.
by habinero | 2025-09-05 20:40:38+00:00
Experience. You learn to ignore what people _believe_ it does and what they _say_ does and look at what it _actually_ does.

It's fun to play with, but LLMs can't reason and are fundamentally unreliable. They cannot be made reliable.

The actual market uses for large quantities of human-like text is, like, autocomplete and spam.

I use copilot as fancy autocomplete and like it, but ~all claims that it will replace SWEs are by people selling AI or people who fundamentally do not understand what SWEs actually do.

It'll probably replace some offshoring, ironically lol
by const_cast | 2025-09-05 20:40:42+00:00
but there are other ways to express traits, preconditions, postconditions, etc. besides types

You can also put that in the type system, and expressive languages do. Its just a compiler limitations when we can't.

I mean, even in C++ with concepts we can do most of that. And C++ doesn't have the most expressive type system.
by Buuntu | 2025-09-05 20:40:50+00:00
I meant like as an individual do you have a sense? $320M in sales tax is not really very much. Because people are often upset we spend too much on transit but also upset that our transit isn't as good as, say, the Tube. Can't really have it both ways.

BART taxes are not even in the top 100 list of expenses I worry about personally.
by legitster | 2025-09-05 20:40:59+00:00
> If he doesn’t compete in AI or whatever, the world will still progress and achieve what it needs to.

I mean, kinda. There's bit of a market efficiency problem for human progress. If everybody assumes someone else will push the ball forward, that means nobody will. As much as you believe technology is part of progress, you have to expect really idiosyncratic people are going to be the ones taking the reins.

As much as we cringe at Zuck and his choices, he probably looks around his peers and sees himself as saving the rest of us from even worse like David Ellison.
by mallowdram | 2025-09-05 20:41:34+00:00
The implementation of fascism was both across the board (legislation, edict, mass-firings, academic overthrow, consolidation, regulation, financial, trade, etc) and highly coordinated in a radically sped-up timeframe that had been planned by hundreds of people carefully sequestered in secrecy that launched day-one. That's not reality TV in the slightest. It's revolution or counter-revolution. M Gessen in contrast states it took Putin 10 years to do what Trump did in 6 months.

Not only is there a carefully designed endgame, it's so well hidden in pretexts within pretexts, that journalists, opposition, even political theorists can't for certain declare it, except that it's overthrow.
by ajb | 2025-09-05 20:42:14+00:00
There's nothing wrong with the wire protocol, but T.38 was designed to work with faxes that don't know it exists. Given that VoIP doesn't provide the same highly-constant latency as the PSTN, T.38 gateways pull some dodgy stuff, such as (if I recall correctly - I no longer have access to this code) deliberately introducing HDLC CRC errors to give themselves time to wait for a packet to appear.
by kragen | 2025-09-05 20:42:38+00:00
Yes, that's true, but then possibly we are talking at cross-purposes; when I said "numerous holes discovered in various implementations of the basic JVM type checking", I didn't mean things that needed to be checked at runtime; I meant bugs that permitted violations of the JVM's security guarantees. However difficult it may be to avoid such things at a social level, certainly there is no mathematical reason that they must happen.
by thisisit | 2025-09-05 20:42:39+00:00
Apart from the infamous timing the market, there are two adages to keep in mind - the stock market is not the economy and markets can remain irrational for a long time.

The whole tariff cycle has been irrational move. The tariffs were supposedly "removed" even when it was not - there was always a 10% default tariff. Maybe everyone is expecting a rate cut due to this tariff madness.
by abeppu | 2025-09-05 20:42:54+00:00
I think that's a misleading statement:

- Prior to the pandemic, BART got >60% of its operating costs from riders (p9 in your linked doc)

- Ridership is still way down relative to 2019 even though costs are up in absolute terms

- Even from 2020 data, BART was hitting 50% https://lovetransit.substack.com/p/most-profitable-public-tr... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farebox_recovery_ratio#United_...

The subsidy in BART is higher than anyone would like it now, but I do think that's still a transient response to the pandemic; either more people will have to eventually go back to riding public transit, or we'll need to drop the emergency funding it's been receiving.
by vannevar | 2025-09-05 20:44:01+00:00
You are 100% right. In nature, the fitness landscape is not fixed, it is dependent on the co-evolution of other organisms at every scale. So the computational model is too simple to be a reliable guide. But in this case, if you assume constant fitness over some delta-t (kind of like calculus), I think it's still a plausible explanation for the divergence phenomenon in particular. Just a hypothesis, though, for sure.
by Kirby64 | 2025-09-05 20:44:46+00:00
Yup, basically the only chance for you to get zapped by a charger is either ripping the whole thing out so you make contact with the input AC, or cutting the wire while it’s actively charging a car. And even then, chargers have ground fault protection for L2, and L3 chargers have high voltage isolation monitoring. They’re remarkably safe even against blatant tampering.
by gucci-on-fleek | 2025-09-05 20:44:56+00:00
> Then you could generate Metafont fonts from that, and from that you could get ttf, otf

It's unfortunately not very easy to generate modern TTF/OTF fonts from Metafont sources. If you're careful to not use any crazy pens, you can compile with Metapost and then import the outlines into FontForge, but it's still fairly tricky to make everything work properly.
by gamblor956 | 2025-09-05 20:44:57+00:00
Yeah, I work closely with people in this space (on the in-house side). You're going to find very quickly that the LLM "analysis" isn't worth much more than the paper its printed on. Due to management directives they have been testing AI tools for financial analysis for 2ish years now and the output is still about what you would expect from an intern who just started working in finance a few weeks before.

Gemini "analysis" looks superficially detailed but if you actually do any deep dive (or even a shallow dive) you're going to start finding all the things its wrong about because it's not actually analyzing anything; its just connecting most likely words together. Very crucial, because of the ways LLMs work, they can't generate any conclusion that isn't already in its data set. But it's exactly those sorts of non-obvious conclusions that are the reason you hire people to do Finance.

Will AI eventually take over these kinds of jobs? Sure, in 10 to 20 years when actual AI exists. But LLMs aren't AI. They're just brute-force black box machine learning algorithms.
by IshKebab | 2025-09-05 20:45:09+00:00
Why did you laugh out loud? It's clear that it doesn't have large impacts on children - otherwise no research would be needed to know this, in the same way we don't really need research to know that over-use of alcohol fuels violence. If there's a small effect then we do need research to show it and that's extremely difficult to do and as far as I know nobody has.

Same deal as violent video games. What's your view on those?
by tree_enjoyer | 2025-09-05 20:45:15+00:00
I know it's a bit of trope to say this on HN... but why not Lisp?

If I make the assumption that future ML code will be written by ML algorithms (or at least 'transpiled' from natural language), and Lisp S-Expressions are basically the AST, it would make sense that it would be the most natural language for a machine to write in. As a side benefit, it's already the standard to have a very feature complete REPL, so as a replacement for Python it seems it would fit well
by taminka | 2025-09-05 20:45:27+00:00
sounds like they made a stupid decision and had to pay for it w/ technical overhead?

chrome already has ui rendering set up on windows, all they had to was not reinvent the wheel and just make tweaks to the ui and some server side magick on their end, but that would reveal the fact that they're an half a billion dollar 100 person chrome fork for nerds with no way to generate profit lol
by baranul | 2025-09-05 20:45:35+00:00
> "competing language"

Just a consumer. Hope that it is ok to choose or like something else. Please don't be angry. If it counts for anything, fine with things going well for you.

> "Baseless accusation"

No sir, not baseless. At one time, the pocket watching of competitors was real and they getting just $927/month (figure from your .me site and many other places) from their happy fans and loyal supporters seemed too much to bear.

Now that one's personal pocket is fat with $12,500/month, perhaps we can hope to see good will and grace extended to others besides one's self. The world is big enough for creators to be professionally respectful of each other and to allow consumers to choose what they like.
by kjkjadksj | 2025-09-05 20:45:53+00:00
Seems expensive but in the grand scheme of a road trip that is only like a 33% increase in price when you factor in a motel room for $100 a night, maybe $100 spend on gas a day filling up twice, $100 on three meals coffee and snacks for one. Give or take of course.

That is probably why the american road trip is a dying animal. Past a days drive you are coming way behind just flying straight there.
by _moof | 2025-09-05 20:45:58+00:00
> Type checking, in other words, is not a solution to complexity—it’s a confession that we’ve created unnecessary complexity in the first place.

I'm sorry, but this is ridiculous. Yes, type checking is a tool for managing complexity (among other things). But to make the leap from there to "this complexity is unnecessary" has absolutely no basis. This is like saying EDA tools shouldn't have design rule checks because it means we're making our circuit boards too complex. These tools are there to enable you to be more efficient: to write code or lay down traces without having to manage all the constraints yourself.

And speaking of design rule checks:

> Consider this: electronics engineers routinely design systems with millions of components, intricate timing relationships, and complex interactions between subsystems. Yet they don't rely on anything analogous to our type checkers.

The author has clearly never done any professional electrical engineering because this could not be further from the truth. Every EDA package has a design rules system that includes a design rule checker. You cannot spin a board without passing these checks, and if you try to work without them, not only is the board you get from the assembly house not going to work, you're also going to get fired.

The suggestion in the concluding section that we should merely design every software component as a black box with explicit input and output ports is already how we build software. It's how we've been building software for decades. What do you think function arguments and return values are? What do you think APIs are? And how do engineers whose components interface with yours know how to interface with your components, if they don't have at least some type information? Even in a JavaScript application you need to know something about the layout of the objects that are expected and returned. That information is a type!

Quit trying to outsmart decades of real-world experience and accept help from the tools that make this job easier.
by aeon_ai | 2025-09-05 20:46:01+00:00
To be very clear on this point - this is not related to model training.

It’s important in the fair use assessment to understand that the training itself is fair use, but the pirating of the books is the issue at hand here, and is what Anthropic “whoopsied” into in acquiring the training data.

Buying used copies of books, scanning them, and training on it is fine.

Rainbows End was prescient in many ways.
by const_cast | 2025-09-05 20:46:07+00:00
Yes and it sucked, and those companies who relied on that largely got conned into it and then saw their tooling slowly decay and their application becomes legacy garbage.

Its not just that OS tooling is "free", it's also better and works for way longer. If you relied on proprietary Delphi-compatible tooling, well... you fucked up!
by PhantomHour | 2025-09-05 20:46:09+00:00
"Dumping" in the context of international trade; Predatory pricing.

The standard model for tech firms has been to run at enormous losses to push competition into bankruptcy or steal their users through subsidized service.

No European social media company could compete with e.g. Twitter, running at a loss for TWELVE years.

In more recent years, it's things like Uber. Subsidizing ride costs to crush existing taxi services & European taxi startups.

This is all, ostensibly, illegal under international law. You can't do it for cars or commodity goods. It's just not been enforced on the tech industry.
by j4hdufd8 | 2025-09-05 20:46:22+00:00
> For what it’s worth, I ran your comment—over drinks—past a professor of philosophy who has published peer-reviewed research out of Columbia. He said I was too gentle. It’s gibberish of a form that wouldn’t make it past undergrad formal logic.

Man I'm legit super interested in this. Roast me a bit more please. Why is it such an amateur line of thinking? The OP's argument is f*cking circular, you should discard the argument completely if you care about logic, no? I don't see it, please help me see it. TEACH ME.

> Also, you didn’t suspect anything. A language model thought for you. Your role was in copying and pasting. Not understanding or commanding.

No, you are assuming, why are you assuming I can't think? Notice, once more, the use of the basic ad hominem (how can I not mention this?). Why do you bring up your peer-reviewed friend? This is the appeal to authority fallacy again, are you freaking kidding me? Why don't you share with us why my line of reasoning is childish or whatever, instead of "my PhD friend said no"?

I smelled circular logic and decided to check with Claude - that's it buddy! It should NOT be relevant whether or not I copied bits from AI, because it is another fallacy. Would you pick on me if I had consulted a dictionary or used Wikipedia to double check fallacies?

> It’s in no philosophy text, either. Because it is, in itself, an appeal to authority. (Incorporation isn’t a logical primitive. It is a social construct.)

100% I will eat shit on this one detail only, of course the LLM went off the rails a little bit here, but why did everyone get so stuck on a silly rephrasing/aliasing of canonical-form fallacies, when everyone can clearly sense the canonical-form that it points to.
by teamonkey | 2025-09-05 20:46:23+00:00
To clarify, the issue with the X4 is that it essentially is no different than having a Pi Pico attached via USB.

This means that your x86 program doesn’t directly control the GPIOs, it must communicate with the RP2040 over USB serial. The RP2040 must be flashed with a firmware that knows how to handle these serial commands.

It works, but it’s an extra step and timing may be an issue.

On the other hand, a Raspberry Pi Linux program can toggle GPIO pins natively simply by using the official libraries.

I mentioned the RP1 in another comment.
by addaon | 2025-09-05 20:46:54+00:00
> "making invalid states unrepresentable," a trick that is harder than it should be (though not impossible) in "less functional" languages

The flip side of this is to "make representable states valid." If you have an enum that doesn't fill a bitfield, values of the bitfield outside the enum are representable -- and the behavior of the system must be defined in that case. (Most often, this is done by mapping the behavior of undefined states to a chosen defined state, or using it to trigger an abort -- the key is that it must be an explicit choice.)