MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by minimaxir | 2025-09-05 20:47:26+00:00
It's likely because the definition of "similar" varies, and it doesn't necessarily mean semantic similarity. Depending on how the embedding model was trained, just texts with a similar format/syntax are indeed "similar" on that axis.

The absolute value of cosine similarity isn't critical (just the order when comparing multiple candidates), but if you finetune an embeddings model for a specific domain, the model will give a wider range of cosine similarity since it can learn which attributes specifically are similar/dissimilar.
by ToucanLoucan | 2025-09-05 20:47:39+00:00
> BART is unique and doesn't share much in the way of infrastructure with any other public transit system. You can't build a scalable startup targeting BART because you'd have a maximum of one customer.

The notion of a startup running BART is fucking horrifying.

I didn't read the comment criticizing VC's for not investing in BART or a company to make BART better, I read it as a criticism of the American system for letting things like VC's and other rich entities/people lock up unconscionable amounts of wealth for either hoarding or funding stupid shit as opposed to make sure our country still functions and people can eat.

And please just spare me the capitalist apologia. I get it, people wanna be rich. On balance I don't give a shit, get as rich as you can, just as long as it doesn't require millions of people to suffer so you can. If you having objectively, factually, more than anyone needs to be happy requires a ton of people to go without necessities, IMO, that is not a right you should have, and I don't care how communist that makes me.

You could take 90% of Bezos', Musk's, or Gates' wealth and they would still never have to work again and live in exceptional luxury. There is no goddamn reason in the world to let them keep it while we have people starving.
by mcdeltat | 2025-09-05 20:48:14+00:00
One thing that instantly ruins my day is animation where the element state is inconsistent during the animation.

For example - I think it's on Windows where I keep running into this - on notification popups from some apps, you can't click "X" to close until sufficient time has passed after the popup animation. If you try to close it in that time, it instead acts as if you clicked the notification to open it. Super annoying.

Another, on Mac, when switching desktops, sometimes an app will show on the screen briefly before flashing to another app. The animation is slow enough that it often tricks me into thinking it's ok to do stuff and then nope the app changes. Even worse, I think it occurs randomly.

Note to designers: if you do choose to include an animation, it better be the most rock solid implementation ever or I will immediately think you're a twat and your app is a buggy pile of crap.
by nerevarthelame | 2025-09-05 20:49:36+00:00
Anthropic certainly seems to be hoping that their competitors will have to face some consequences too:

>During a deposition, a founder of Anthropic, Ben Mann, testified that he also downloaded the Library Genesis data set when he was working for OpenAI in 2019 and assumed this was “fair use” of the material.

Per the NYT article, Anthropic started buying physical books in bulk and scanning them for their training data, and they assert that no pirated materials were ever used in public models. I wonder if OpenAI can say the same.
by saulpw | 2025-09-05 20:50:21+00:00
> a human-readable size—18k loc or so.

I agree in general with the principle that there is a 'human-readable' size, and that it's around some 10k-30k LOC, but I'm curious how you came up with that specific number. Has it been researched and measured? Does it vary significantly from person to person? I tend to think of 80kLOC as the upper limit, because that's the size of the DOOM engine, written by a single highly-capable programmer, who presumably had it all in his head at one point. But that is empirically way beyond what I'm capable of.
by LeifCarrotson | 2025-09-05 20:50:39+00:00
Get almost nothing back from your $12k used car? Nonsense, you get a larger fraction back, the annual depreciation continuously slows down.

If a 6-year-old Bolt is still worth $14.5k, then an 8- or, say, 12-year-old Bolt isn't worth $0. Most of that depreciation happened in the first year, it's still going to be worth $12k or $9k.

For example, Jeff's 2023 Leaf originally sold for about $30k. Now, just TWO YEARS later, he probably paid $15k to $19k for it. That's a steal! Given he drives his vehicles into the ground, it probably doesn't matter, but if he wanted to sell it in a few years he could still get $10 to $15k from it.
by alephnerd | 2025-09-05 20:51:01+00:00
> democratic country

Nepal is classified as a Hybrid Regime [0] in democracy rankings.

Following the end of the civil war, power has largely consolidated amongst 3 players - KP Sharma Oli, Sher Bahadur Deuba, and Prachanda - who play a game of musical chairs.

Ofc, both China and India are constantly interfering in Nepali politics and building random coalitions with permutations of these three along with smaller parties.

Whenever India feels Nepal is leaning too pro-China, some crisis happens, and whenever China feels Nepal is leaning to pro-India, some crisis also happens.

Indian state politics also plays a role, because the states of Sikkim, Uttarakhand, Bihar, and Uttar Pradesh have significant ethnic ties in Nepal (eg. Bihar's CM Nitish Kumar's family are Maithili with family ties across the borders, and his opponent Lalu Prasad Yadav has backed Yadav political movements in Nepal as well; UP's CM Yogi Adityanath is a Garhwali Rajput who used to lead a Hindu sect that was patronized by the Nepali royal family and still has significant pull in Nepal; and Sikkim's former CM Pawan Kumar Chamling was part of a ethno-tribal movement amongst Janjatis/Tibeto-Burman tribals who were at the bottom rung of the Nepal during it's monarchical rule; KP Sharma Oli grew up in a village barely 20 miles from Naxalbari right when the Naxalite/Maoist insurgency began in West Bengal), which adds another layer of complexity, because state level politics often leaks across both Nepal and India.

[0] - https://www.eiu.com/n/campaigns/democracy-index-2024/
by Karrot_Kream | 2025-09-05 20:51:20+00:00
(Sometimes I forget that so many people joined this site so recently that this kind of knowledge is new so I apologize if I come off as snarky. I'm still very curious why this site suddenly hit popularity in the last few years but I suppose peering into the void of eternal september will yield nothing fruitful.)

HN doesn't have a concept of engagement really. It has a controversy downranking algorithm which downranks a story if it has a low vote:comment ratio, but this is what happens on Reddit as well (you can sort by Controversial on old Reddit to surface those threads.) There's no such downweighing to comments which is why the comments that float to the top are inevitably the ones that hit the site's common in-group ("circlejerk") opinion.

The downranking helps the front page to not be overwhelmed by flamebait but that's it really. As HN has gotten more popular, more and more of it gets dominated by its in-group opinion, and most of those opinions are all negative ones. Social networks are bad, crypto is bad, finance is evil, big tech is bad, enshittification, etc. It's almost impossible to have any conversation on those topics as you'll just get downvoted if you disagree and if you agree, even if your agreement is incoherent, you'll get upvotes.

The rest of the site's "algorithm" is usually through hand moderation by the professional mod team (dang, tomhow, et al, who get paid to moderate aka they are professionals) and that's a pretty big distinction from most of the other big social media sites which mostly rely on automated systems or volunteers.

So I mean "it's imperfect" is a stretch. HN is often just as bad as most of the other sites, if not worse. If you're going to advocate for banning social media if you end up using any rigorous definition of an "algorithm" HN will end up banned as well. In my experience though the people that want to ban other social media seem to resonate with HN and so they think that it's "better" along some axis that's not measurable. To me that smells of in-group bias.
by nomel | 2025-09-05 20:51:21+00:00
> I mean, I did say if you're listening to new music all the time then Spotify makes sense.

> It all comes down to one's listening habits.

Yes, I'm aware. I was clearly giving you a somewhat extreme example to support your statement. But, it appears it was interpreted as some sort of a personal attack for some reason. I can't comprehend the modern internet.
by lazide | 2025-09-05 20:52:06+00:00
Haha, no. The EU tech scene was dead (and has stayed dead) long before American megacorps even existed.

Why do you think Silicon Valley was in… Silicon Valley? It certainly isn’t because it monopolistically killed EU chip fabs!

They just didn’t exist, and went out of their way to be a huge hassle to exist, and the EU still doesn’t have decent chip fabrication abilities.

It’s the same for software.
by teepo | 2025-09-05 20:52:16+00:00
I was reading somewhere that the BERT and USE style were "big-symantic space" designed to 0.0-1.0 so that things unrelated would be close to 0.0, and are classifiers.

But now, like the OpenAI embedding you're talking about the embedding are constrained, trained for retrieval in mind. The pairs are ordered closer, easier to search.
by kragen | 2025-09-05 20:52:25+00:00
Yes, I agree with you that a correct JVM can guarantee memory safety at the bytecode level, but what I meant to express was that many JVMs have had bugs that caused them to fail to do so, for essentially social reasons which I expect to cause problems with other PCC systems as well.

Maybe you're right, and those problems are not inevitable; for example, if you could reduce the proofs to a tiny MetaMath-like kernel that wouldn't need constant "maintenance". As you say, that could move the compiler's optimizer out of the TCB — at least for the security properties Fil-C is enforcing, though the optimizer could still cause code to compute the wrong answers.

That seems like something people would want if they were already living in a world where the state of computer security was much better than it is now.
by GhosT078 | 2025-09-05 20:52:37+00:00
Well, that will erroneously drop the ranking because NVIDIA themselves use the Ada programming language. Refer to:

https://nvidia.github.io/spark-process/

https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/on-demand/session/gtcsj20-s2112...

The term "Ada" appears in several contexts (sometimes for the same company) so keyword filters should not be used in such a simpleminded way.
by theamk | 2025-09-05 20:52:48+00:00
Counterproductive for what?

If I am writing for entertainment value, I see no problem with blocking all AI agents - the goal of text is to be read by humans after all.

For technical texts, one might want to block AI agents as well - they often omit critical parts and hallucinate. If you want your "DON'T DO THIS" sections to be read, better block them.
by Wowfunhappy | 2025-09-05 20:53:06+00:00
From the article:

> Although the payment is enormous, it is small compared with the amount of money that Anthropic has raised in recent years. This month, the start-up announced that it had agreed to a deal that brings an additional $13 billion into Anthropic’s coffers. The start-up has raised a total of more than $27 billion since its founding in 2021.
by sanswork | 2025-09-05 20:53:06+00:00
So your setup process is the same as wise or PayPal. You still had to do the process so crypto is best case harder since you also had to setup and manage a wallet unless you're just using the exchange one.

Go look at the subreddit of any of the major exchanges and they all regularly have stories of locked funds. Given the scales it would be far more likely there.

That's not a natural state of banking though that's a issue with your country. I have accounts at 4 different banks in Australia and regularly transfer funds between them without issue(I think my cap for instant transfer is around $5k though above that is usually only a few hours). Canada had a similar system(interac payments).
by estimator7292 | 2025-09-05 20:53:44+00:00
Developers would gain a lot more speed than what LLMs offer if Microsoft would just fucking stop using >50% of the CPU watching your compiler for... something?

Nobody wants to believe it, but just try compiling C++ on Windows and again in a Linux VM. Linux in a VM on the same host compiles at least twice as fast. It's insanity. I tried a script that rsync's the project files to my server from 2013, runs the build and rsync's the artifacts back. Running the build on a Xeon 2500 is still far faster with Linux than windows on my two year old i9. Even with the overhead of sending binaries over the internet. Absolutely disgusting.
by nomel | 2025-09-05 20:53:49+00:00
Or, the reality is that everyone in the chain of effort wants, and deserves, a bit of money in their pocket, for their efforts. If that chain means nothing comes out the other end, it doesn't mean there's a problem with society, it means that the tech isn't there yet to make the chain shorter/cheaper. I'll leave that advancement to you! You can do the right thing, the thing nobody else wants to do, and make the service that solves this issue. As others have said, distribution costs are near zero, so, it must be easy!
by SilverElfin | 2025-09-05 20:54:08+00:00
The entire healthcare industry is built on anti competitive practices like unnecessary gatekeeping (like needing to see a doctor repeatedly to renew prescriptions), stringent licensing that restricts the supply of people to treat you (each assistant role that reduces costs was fought against), lack of transparency (no explicit up front pricing to enable competition), unnecessary intermediaries (insurers, PBMs, etc), and a whole lot more.

One thing that shocked me is my local university hospital network refusing to tell me what data of mine was stolen in a breach of their systems. They said they do not answer questions about individual patients and just have a generic notice to share. These organizations really think they are untouchable and have no regard for anything except money. Given the kind of culture that is prevalent in American healthcare, I am not at all surprised that the entire industry has dragged its feet on letting patients control their own data. I hope this HHS starts making examples of companies and their executives. But I don’t hold much hope either - in the end, these industry is too entrenched in politics to suffer any consequences.
by impossiblefork | 2025-09-05 20:54:22+00:00
That's fine. They aren't politically appointed and in the end their decisions are checked by the courts.

The EU commission on the other hand actually has power.

As one other example, consider the Swedish terrorism law. There's no such thing as designating something a terrorist organization-- that's constitutionally impossible, instead it's determined by the courts. Meanwhile the EU commission can actually designate a group as a terrorist organization, no court case necessary.
by tptacek | 2025-09-05 20:54:26+00:00
Weird! Sorry to hear that commenting (including on HN) didn't make this person any friends. It has made me a bunch of friends, including some very close in-person ones. I don't think I'm an oddball in that regard!

Of particular note: comment culture is how I managed to engage with local politics here in Chicagoland, through which I met a ton of my neighbors and got actively involved with campaigns and the local government itself. Those are all in-person relationships that were (and remain) heavily mediated by comments.
by marcosdumay | 2025-09-05 20:54:38+00:00
If your relational algebra comes with normative opinions about data normalization, there's something really strange with the entire way you think about mathematics.

Usually, relational algebra doesn't have many restrictions about the type of the atomic values it deals with, what makes sequences and relations perfectly valid candidates.

But yeah, there are many reasons for you to normalize your data at rest.
by throwaway0236 | 2025-09-05 20:54:47+00:00
I think you are underestimating the salaries in other "developed" countries, but you are right that US salaries are much higher than any other country (especially in Silicon Valley)

You have a valid point in that many HN commentators seem to live in a bubble where spending thousands of dollars on a developer for "convenience" is seen as a no-brainer. They often work in companies that don't make a profit, but are funded by huge VC investments. I don't blame them, as it is a valid choice given the circumstances. If you have the money, why not? But they may start thinking differently if the flow of VC money slows down.

It's similar to how some wealthy people buy a private jet. Their time is valuable, and the cost seems justified (at least if you don’t care about the environmental impact).

I believe that frugality is actually the default mode of business, but many companies in SV are protected from the consequences by the VCs.
by kelnos | 2025-09-05 20:55:01+00:00
I don't really get what the author is trying to say here; it sounds like they don't really know what they're talking about.

They talk about how electronics engineers use "isolation, explicit interfaces, and time-aware design" to solve these problems as if that's somehow different than current software development practices. Isolation and explicit interfaces are types. There's no strict analogue to "time-aware design" because software depends on timing in very different ways than hardware does.

Electronics engineers use a raft of verification tools that rely on what in software we'd call "types". EEs would actually love it if the various HDLs they use had stronger typing.

Where they really lost me is in the idea that UNIX pipelines and Docker are examples of their concept done right. UNIX pipelines are brittle! One small change in the text output of a program will completely break any pipelines using it. And for the person developing the tool, testing that the output format hasn't changed is a tedious job that requires writing lots of string-parsing code. Typed program output would make this a lot easier.

And Docker... ugh, Docker. Docker has increasingly been used for isolation and "security", but the original purpose of Docker was reproducible environments, because developers were having trouble getting code to run the same way between their development machines and production (and between variations of environments in production). The isolation/security properties of Docker are bolted on, and it shows.
by lewdwig | 2025-09-05 20:55:14+00:00
I’m sure this’ll be misreported and wilfully misinterpreted because of the current fractious state of the AI discourse, but given the lawsuit was to do with piracy, not the copyright-compliance of LLMs, and in any case, given they settled out of court, thus presumably admit no wrongdoing, conveniently no legal precedent is established either way.

I would not be surprised if investors made their last round of funding contingent on settling this matter out of court precisely to ensure no precedents are set.
by rkomorn | 2025-09-05 20:55:37+00:00
> 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

Unless all the competitors are also going the AI route for support, because they're all equally greedy.

That's basically what happened with the path from humans answering the phone to "press 1 to..." to "say 1 to...", or website chat support being replaced by non-AI bots.

I really can't see an argument against the notion that customer service has been steadily worsening as a result of companies preferring to invest less on labor.
by Karrot_Kream | 2025-09-05 20:55:37+00:00
Thanks. I try really hard. Wait was that supposed to be a backhanded compliment? No way, can't be, HN is above that kind of behavior (:

My point, overall, is that there is all the criticism of social media that excludes HN is based on vibes. And if we're about to ban social media for the EU then hopefully we have more than vibes to go off of.
by nomel | 2025-09-05 20:56:04+00:00
The US has no authority for any operations there, and no way to pressure the governments (what are we going to do, put a tariff on drugs?!). The local government is run by the cartels, and the larger government actively supports them. HOW is that a false dichotomy, when this IS the normal state? Please be specific, and describe your point of view.
by throw0101c | 2025-09-05 20:56:20+00:00
> Looks like they've been doing a bad job.

Historically the last few decades have been the most stable in recorded history:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Moderation

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recession#United_States

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_recessions_in_the_Unit...

> They've created a pretty massive destabilization bust of the dollar, with a massive unrecovered crash since the inception of the fed [0].

The "bust of the dollar" is a valid critique if you keep your dollars literally under your mattress or literally buried in the ground. As Nick Maggiulli observed in 2022:

> Hot take: This is a good thing.

> No currency should be able to buy the same basket of goods over very long timespans through hoarding. If you want to retain the purchasing power of your money, it should participate in society via investment.

* https://twitter.com/dollarsanddata/status/159265180975079833...

A follow-on from Barry Ritzholtz:

> Nick is right: Cash is a medium of exchange, not a store of value.

> Leave assets in dollars since 1913, your investing incompetency cost your estate/foundation a 99% loss. Invest cash in stocks, real estate, or other risk assets + your returns are up more than 10,000%.

* https://twitter.com/Ritholtz/status/1593227389156622336#m

Just putting your money into T-Bills would have kept up with inflation.
by aucisson_masque | 2025-09-05 20:56:47+00:00
> And before we "Just don't break the laws" take note of the fact the the EU has a dead tech scene. I don't know how they expect competition to grow when they block all the sunlight in their tech fields.

Google is abusing his position to prevent other companies to compete, hence decreasing the likelihood of European tech companies emerging.

Beside, I don't see how having strong monopolistic companies is beneficial to Americans citizens beside the tech bros working in Silicon Valley ? American companies are being ripped off on advertising just as bad as european companies used to be, and obviously they were following google rip off on goods price and customer had to pay more.
by opello | 2025-09-05 20:56:54+00:00
The original claim was essentially that humans drive solely based on visual input. That perspective ignores how much past experience and expectation affect perception and decision making.

I think I would concede the argument that it's "just processing" once someone has recreated the processing in an automation system. That seems unlikely. Or when an automation system outperforms a human in every situation one might encounter in a chaotic driving environment.