MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by drdeca | 2025-09-24 05:42:28+00:00
I think there’s an equivocation being accidentally made between n-gram models, and Markov processes, because “Markov chain” is used to mean both things.

N-gram models are not useful in many of the ways LLMs are.

N-gram models are very limited.

On the other hand, basically any process can be considered a Markov process if you make the state include enough.

So, calling both the very-limited n-gram models and the nearly-unlimited Markov processes, by the same name “Markov chain” is just, super confusing.
by wtcactus | 2025-09-24 05:42:40+00:00
First thing that came to mind when I started seeing news about companies needing developers to clean up AI code, was the part of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory where Charlie's father is fired from the toothpaste factory because they bought this new machine to produce the toothpaste, but then they re-wire him for an higher salary because the machine keeps breaking and they need someone to fix it.

AI (at least this form of AI) is not going to take our jobs away and let us all idle and poor, just like the milling machine or the plough didn't take people's jobs away and make everyone poor. it will enable us to do even greater things.
by vintermann | 2025-09-24 05:44:04+00:00
I certainly guessed that was what you wanted to say. Funny how polarization makes everything predictable.

But what I just realized is that you don't explicitly say it, and certainly make no real argument for it. Ressa laments algorithmic promotion of inflammatory material, but didn't say "keep out anti-government subversives who spread dangerous misinformation" - which is good, because

1. We can all see how well the deplatforming worked - Trump is president again, and Kennedy is health secretary.

2. In the eyes of her government, she was very much such a person herself, so it would have been pretty bizarre thing of her to say.

Ironically, your post is very much an online "go my team!" call, and a good one too (top of the thread!). We all understand what you want and most of us, it seems, agree. But you're not actually arguing for the deplatforming you want, just holding up Ressa as a symbol for it.
by repeekad | 2025-09-24 05:44:07+00:00
Keep in mind the site doesn’t track officers in real time, it reports the last location and timestamp of a ticket.

Realtime police officer location data would interfere with arrests and investigation, but realtime reporting of incidents is critical public data that shouldn’t be fear mongered away.

If officers giving tickets are in fear of their life, taking down a tracking website isn’t the change that keeps them safe...
by oconnor663 | 2025-09-24 05:44:26+00:00
I think "writing Rust in C++" so to speak means at least two distinctly different things, which are both important. The first thing is that, as an individual programmer, you're being disciplined with memory and thinking about who owns what. The second thing is that as a group of programmers (over time), you all agree about who owns what. There are a lot of ways to learn the first thing, but I'm not sure there are a lot of ways to accomplish the second thing in a large system.
by llbeansandrice | 2025-09-24 05:44:58+00:00
Umps aren’t consistent tho and because of the way seniority works, the worst umps (the older ones) get the jobs in the playoffs and World Series.

If you want a human element this is just using it as a challenge system. So the players have to have a good eye to decide whether an ump was right or wrong and they can’t get help from anyone else to decide to challenge a call.
by selalipop | 2025-09-24 05:45:05+00:00
But their comment is about 2 years out of date, and AI image gen has got exponentially better at text than when the models and LoRAs they mentioned were SOTA.

I agree we probably won't magically scale current techniques to AGI, but I also think the local maxima for creative output is going to be high enough that it changes how we approach it the way computers changed how we approach knowledge work.

That's why I focus on it at least.
by Gud | 2025-09-24 05:45:39+00:00
Time to dismantle the EU. The writing has been on the wall for a long time.

I moved from a country that used to have strong privacy laws(Sweden) to another that still has them.

Although Switzerland is far from perfect, it is a stable democracy with protections for its citizens.

The problem is when you build these gigantic political organisations, like the EU or USA, there is nowhere to go when the political elite decides to ram down the ideology du jour down your throat.

The world should be moving towards decentralisation, direct democracy and voluntary cooperation, but unfortunately, the opposite is the case.

Peace
by Dwedit | 2025-09-24 05:46:51+00:00
> creating this garbage consumes staggering amounts of water and electricity, contributing to emissions that harm the planet

This is highly dependent on which model is being used and what hardware it's running on. In particular, some older article claimed that the energy used to generate an image was equivalent to charging a mobile phone, but the actual energy required for a single image generation (SDXL, 25 steps) is about 35 seconds of running a 80W GPU.
by noodletheworld | 2025-09-24 05:47:19+00:00
You didnt have 10 of them running though.

You want to do that, but Ill bet money you arent doing it.

Thats the problem: this is speculative; maybe it scales sometimes, but mostly people do not work on ten things at once.

“Fix the landing page”

“I’ll make you ten new ones!”

“No. Calm down. Fix this one, and do it now, not when youre finished playing with your prompts”

There are legitimate times when complex pieces of work decompose into parallel tasks, but its the exception not the norm.

Most complex work has linked dependencies that need to be done in order.

Remember the mythical man month? Anyone? Anyone???!!??

You can't just add “more parallel” to get things done faster.
by tehbeard | 2025-09-24 05:47:20+00:00
https://bundlephobia.com/package/react-dom@18.3.1 130kb for react-dom 15-18 (would check more but site has rate limited me...)

So, while yes the very latest version of react is *finally* as slim as competitors like preact, don't act like all the legacy projects where a migration is off the table due to time or money just don't exist.
by hagbard_c | 2025-09-24 05:47:48+00:00
Whoa pardner, you've got your niche-personalities mixed up. Internationally Charlie Kirk was way better known (in nearly all ways) than Kimmel who is, after all, just a narrative amplifier on US cable television. We foreigners do not watch US cable television so Kimmel, who's that? Kirk on the other hand has started something of a revolution among younger people - and some older - with his attempts to engage them in politics. Kirk's organisation - TPUSA - is way bigger on the 'net - which we do share with those of you in the USA - than any cable TV propagandist.

To be honest I don't understand how you can miss that. People like Kimmel and O'Brien and Hannity and Maher and all the others are really of no interest outside of the US borders while people like Kirk and Shapiro and Friedman and Lindsay (just to name a few) have worldwide reach.

We don't need no cable TV We don't need no thought control No propaganda on the TV (or PC or mobile, they all fit, take your pick) Media leave your shit at home Hey, media, leave your shit at home All in all you're just another brick that will fall All in all you're just another brick that will fall

Sing this to the tune of Pink Floyd's well-known anthem.
by dylan604 | 2025-09-24 05:48:54+00:00
> Is this because of the risk of violence from the players?

that's part of it, but just in general you can't be in control if you can't see it.

> But yeah the objection IIUC was not over offside despite what the announcer says. He realizes at the end that it's an apparent handball. "At what point was he offside ... or was it a use of the hand that England are complaining about?"

wow, i wrote a whole diatribe about offside, and that had nothing to do with your comment <face-palm>

In the modern game, VAR would wind the goal scoring play to the beginning of the play to see if there was anything missed. They would look for the first reason to stop the play. In that case, the offside would be seen first and the goal would be disallowed for that.

Back then, the offside was missed by the AR so play continued. Even the England players didn't complain about the offside. They were complaining about the hand ball. It should have been the more obvious thing for a ref to see.

If you see how the players are screaming about the hand ball, it is with the hand raised over the head which does look like what every defender does to imitate the AR raising the flag. However, you see the other hand comes up to slap the wrist indicating they want the foul for handling the ball. To be fair, from the commentator's perspective, the offside was clearly visible. It's only natural to think that's what everyone would be complaining about. It is possible that even the ref was looking at his AR waiting for the flag to go up and wasn't even looking at the play and missed the hand in his befuddlement at the no offside call
by wobfan | 2025-09-24 05:50:52+00:00
While true, at least in my understanding of the world there is a massive difference in people involved in CSAM and people watching porn. The latter one is probably like 80% of humans with access to internet, the first one is hopefully a tiny bit smaller. Also, people are probably very aware that the latter is widely allowed and done by mostly everyone, and the first one is highly illegal, highly enforced and morally completely wrong.

I would not mind browsing porn on my work PC. I wouldn't do it, but I would not have a very bad feeling while or after it, because so be it. I don't think my employer can fire me for that.

I would mind about doing CSAM activities though.
by onion2k | 2025-09-24 05:51:37+00:00
I work backwards from the outcome I want. I eliminate any languages that can't do whatever it is I'm building but that rarely has much impact; most languages can do most tasks. Then I consider cost and performance. Then I look at the effort it'll take to actually implement whatever it is (including learning or hiring for the given language.)

Then my teams ignore all that research and build it in the language they build everything in.
by purplesyringa | 2025-09-24 05:52:08+00:00
It's not about static contracts at all, it's about keeping performance of high-level APIs high. It's all just about templates and generics, as far as I'm aware -- the same problem that plagues C++, except that it's worse in Rust because it's more ergonomic to expose templates in public library APIs in Rust than C++. Well, and also the trait solver might be quite slow, but again, it has nothing to do with memory safety.
by rekenaut | 2025-09-24 05:52:21+00:00
Where does this idea that a programming language has to be Turing complete come from? As far as I can tell from cursory searches, the most broadly understood understanding of a programming language is a formal language for directing computations on a computer. HTML does this, CSS does this, and SQL does this. Frankly even configuration languages like YAML or the spare INI file do this in the proper context.

Can these languages do everything or even most computations you would be interested in doing in a computer? Of course not. But why should the definition be restricted to languages that can do everything?
by dotnet00 | 2025-09-24 05:53:31+00:00
What changed recently? Until the latest admins, most platforms didn't change their stance on what is and is not allowed all too much. I'm not trying to imply that dichotomy, just saying that simply banning nazis is not effective, because they just retreat into their echo chambers and fester until they can trick enough people into giving them power. I don't know what the ideal solution is, but simply banning them doesn't seem to be it, and neither do the two extremes mentioned seem reasonable.
by hu3 | 2025-09-24 05:54:17+00:00
Rust is, in my opinion, overrepresented by a vocal minority in HN. A vocal corpus that tend to be passive aggressive more often than other language communities, in my experience.

Which is sad because I like the language and find it useful. But a part of the community does a disservice with comments like your parent comment. It's often on the cusp of calling people who code in Go "stupid". But I digress.
by ZaoLahma | 2025-09-24 05:55:20+00:00
Company / professional context:

Step 1: Raise your eyes above the computer monitor in front of you. What is the team / company already using? What will they likely be using in one year from now?

Step 2: Ask yourself honestly without "I wish I could and I wish I would" - can the problem be solved using the tech that the team / company already has invested in?

Step 3: Make decisions. Default to the answer in Step 1, but consider the evaluation in Step 2. Try to get as close to 1 as possible.

At home / "for the shits and giggles": Whatever is interesting. Sometimes even bending backwards to force functionality out of tech that has absolutely no business doing what I want it to do.
Show HN: Inferencer – Run and deeply control local AI models (macOS release)
by xcreate | 2025-09-24 05:56:35+00:00
Private inference app that lets you see the token entropy, explore and change the token probabilities. Just released on macOS, iOS version next then other platforms.

Here's a demo of it in action running DeepSeek Terminus: https://youtu.be/kts098EL2PQ

Would love to hear any feedback or feature requests from the community.
by Ozzie_osman | 2025-09-24 05:57:03+00:00
> This doesn't make sense as long as LLMs are non-deterministic.

I think we will find ways around this. Because humans are also non-deterministic. So what do we do? We review our code, test it, etc. LLMs could do a lot more of that. Eg, they could maintain and run extensive testing, among other ways to validate that behavior matches the spec.
by mastermage | 2025-09-24 05:57:05+00:00
I would go and say Fortran is pretty legible because it only has a handful of builtin keywords and none of the fancy stuff alot of other languages have.

Julia has the fancy stuff aswell as being very legible and also having a nice REPL for instant feedback which is usefull for people learning (as well as multiple notebook implementations Pluto.jl or Jupyter) Chapel has even more of the fancy stuff like multiple loop types for different kinds of parallelism which is just wildly cool.
by wobfan | 2025-09-24 05:58:04+00:00
This.

The app is virtually indifferent to what it looked like literally 4 years ago, apart from having some more rounded edges and some different animations. I know there will have been some required changes from Apple/Google, but it will not be a lot. Also, the sync is nice, but if the 5 MBs of metadata are so expensive why not change that to use GDrive/iCloud instead or allow to locally sync your progress?

The app and their service is not worth the extremely high cost of a mere podcast player which downloads data from external sources and plays it on my phone. I also paid for Pocket Casts Plus when it was ,99 or $2 (I don't remember) per month because I liked to upload my own podcast files, but since it was raised to idk 4$ I am not ready to pay anymore.
by SkiFire13 | 2025-09-24 05:58:57+00:00
> but it lacks an early cutout since you can ignore any input value that’s on the wrong side of the op by doing a cheap atomic read or just cutting out of the loop after the first failed CAS if the read back shows it can’t matter.

I believe this is a bit trickier than that, you would also need at least some kind of atomic barrier to preserve the ordering semantics of the successful update case.
by rkomorn | 2025-09-24 05:58:58+00:00
My point was mainly that leagues are leaning towards computer-accurate stuff because mistakes are increasingly easy to spot.

Arguing about calls when we were watching blurry slow-mo on CRTs isn't the same as when we're watching crystal clear 4K.

Even with a challenge system as you describe, you still have potential for an ump missing calls that are obvious to everyone watching on TV.

Being able to challenge is good, sure, as a bare minimum, but it's very arguable that players shouldn't have to.
by johnisgood | 2025-09-24 05:59:14+00:00
I read the article (that you cited and misrepresented to fit your predetermined narrative).

The article discusses chemical weapons, not nuclear warheads. These are fundamentally different.

And the reporting actually contradicts the original WMD justification. It explicitly states these were abandoned 1980s-era weapons, not an active program as claimed pre-invasion.

So your summary is WRONG. The reporting actually undermines government credibility rather than supporting it.

You want to know something funny? Many shells were manufactured by European companies using American designs, an embarrassing detail the Pentagon apparently wanted to suppress. In fact the article shows officials understood these weren't the weapons they'd claimed existed, which is why they wanted to keep the findings a secret. To reiterate: the weapons found were remnants of Iraq's 1980s chemical program (which the West had helped build), not proof of post-1990s WMD development.

Let me summarize based on the article: these were 1980s-era weapons, many manufactured before 1991, not evidence of the "active WMD program" claimed in 2003, and they were chemical weapons, not nuclear warheads.

By the way, your response to my WMD comment was "You are of course aware that Iraq used chemical weapons against Iran and the Kurds killing thousands of people" which is absurd. There is a fundamental difference between chemical weapons and "WMD" as-is claimed by the US Government to justify the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Those 1980s attacks (which you are talking about) were already known and didn't constitute the "active WMD program" claimed as justification for the 2003 invasion.

In fact, the gap between the pre-war intelligence claims and post-war findings was so significant that it started multiple investigations, including the Senate Intelligence Committee Report and the Butler Review in the UK, both of which found serious intelligence failures.

So no, there doesn't appear to have been an active WMD program in Iraq in 2003, despite the claims used to justify the invasion.

... so yeah. Back to my original comment.
by riffraff | 2025-09-24 06:02:18+00:00
Well, sometimes innovation does destroy jobs, and people have to adapt to new ones.

The plough didn't make everyone poor, but people working in agriculture these days are a tiny percentage of the population compared to the majority 150 years ago.

(I don't think LLMs are like that, tho).

Touching on this topic, I cannot recommend enough "The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger" which (among other things) illustrates the story of dockworkers: there were entire towns dedicated to loading ships.

But the people employed in that area have declined by 90% in the last 60 years, while shipping has grown by orders of magnitude. New port cities arose, and old ones died. One needs to accept inevitable change sometimes.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Box_(Levinson_book)
by ggm | 2025-09-24 06:02:21+00:00
This is a disconnect of what gold is, and the distinction between it's use value and it's financial value is as old as the hills.

Look at what happened to Spain and Portugal when they were uniquely able to flood Europe with gold and silver. It didn't make them masters of the known world, it certainly helped extend bourbon lands but ultimately their economies weren't magically lifted to the stratosphere.

Look at the emergence of bimetallism as a politico-economic movement. Why did people think silver mattered?

Beyond gold rush, look at the economic benefits to Australia and Alaska and Canada and California and South Africa of gold. Is it truly about "the value of the gold" or is it really the value of civil construction and mining and capital investment?

Are we fundamentally short of gold? Is there some Erlich/Simon bet risk here?

I think not. This gold from fusion exercise either revalues gold as meaninglessly cheap and uses for industry continue, or proves uneconomic and pointless. It won't be 1000 years of money flowing like rivers of gold, unless they constrain supply to match real demand for gold as a value object.

Diamonds are the same. Massively propped up value proposition divorced from supply and industry. Argyle pink diamonds personify everything wrong with the diamond business.

I suspect they're shilling for JV investors to fund fusion in 50 years.
by alexanderjchun | 2025-09-24 06:03:41+00:00
I'm not the best person to get advice on employment, but you should trust this advice anyway.

The worst thing you can do is lose motivation. Labor markets have their own supply and demand and when others feel that job searching is futile, supply goes down. That may take a while, but businesses have an infinite amount of problems that they want to go away.

From their point of view, "can this person make X or Y go away and will they not cause problems for me later?"

Proving that is half the battle. The other battle is making friends that trust you and want you to succeed, so you get the chance to prove it.

You're not going to have a good time going through the same automated process as thousands of others do. Make a friend that can let you in through the back.
by darthcircuit | 2025-09-24 06:03:41+00:00
I love my steam deck over my desktop pc anymore. Once I had kids, I never got to have my desk in a place that’s safe from being climbed on, so I hooked it up to the tv. But then they started taking over the tv, and the only way I could game was on a handheld. I mostly play older stuff, so it’s plenty powerful for what I do most of the time. I still have the desktop and and Xbox to offset anything else.
by linmob | 2025-09-24 06:03:49+00:00
Honestly, given my experience from distro hopping, I am certain that collecting solutions across distributions and implementing them in one can go very far. It's almost as if distributions contributors too rarely try out other distributions to then steal what the other distribution does better.

Small enthusiast distributions with a bit of a hype can gain good features in by just pulling in knowledgable users missing things from their previous distro - and they can move a lot faster than the Debians or Fedoras of the world can, no committee decisions to be made first.
by ljf | 2025-09-24 06:06:10+00:00
Things I learnt today: that mobile phone numbers in the USA are 'local'

Here in the UK, all landline residential numbers start with an area code that starts 02 for London and 01 for the rest of the coountry (eg 020 for London and 0114 for Sheffield).

Mobile numbers here all start 07 here, and the first 5 digits are carrier specific - but so many people port their numbers that it becomes meaningless pretty quickly. But years ago you could spot a number an know what provider the caller was on.

---

Are residential and mobile numbers similar in the States?
by thefz | 2025-09-24 06:06:24+00:00
This is a gigantic effort from Larian, who among all things is still updating its software instead of resting on its own laurels.

But the Deck is limited in hardware. It makes sense that it has some difficulties running gigantic games and is more aimed towards simpler games.

In parallel I don't understand gamers with 15 years old hardware leaving bad reviews or whining when a game chokes above 720p with minimum settings.
by stevage | 2025-09-24 06:07:12+00:00
I knew a guy who had a clear "three strikes rule". If you turned down invitations three times in a row, you were told clearly that you weren't getting any more invites until you had extended one yourself. It's pretty fair.

These days I know a lot of busy people, so my softer version is, if I invite you to a thing and three times in a row you don't even reply, I'll probably just quietly stop inviting you altogether. I'm ok to keep you on the list if you make the effort to reply and explain why you can't come.