MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by albertzeyer | 2025-09-05 11:59:44+00:00
It's funny: The article talks about GPT and diffusion in the context of technological innovations, and then getting to AI/LLMs. But "diffusion" and "GPT" have some very different meaning in the context of AI/LLMs, referring to specific kind of models.

That said, I don't really get the conclusion of the article. We should put more effort for productization of LLMs? But isn't that exactly what the big companies are trying to do already?
by ViewTrick1002 | 2025-09-05 12:00:26+00:00
This ignores that the French have massively underinvested in the replacement for the nuclear fleet, and the maintenance of the existing one.

Should we all pretend that half the French nuclear fleet was not offline at the height of the energy crisis? A large portion of the european energy crisis came from the French nuclear power not delivering.

A large renewable buildout should be ongoing in France but wasting money on dead-end subsidies for new built nuclear power seems to be what the French people and politicans wants.

We're seeing a huge number of closures coming in the next decades and the politicians can't even agree on the bonkers large subsidy program for the first 6 EPR2 reactors. Maybe targetting some new power on the grid by 2040? If we're lucky with the construction timeline, at a cool cost of ~20 cents per kWh excluding subsidies.
by rs186 | 2025-09-05 12:00:38+00:00
That's my concern for even adopting OCaml for my hobby projects. Poking around Jane Street's "alternative" standard library does not give me much confidence about its state. Just the fact that there are Core and Base isn't encouraging. If I ever use OCaml in a project, I want to spend time getting things done, not looking for implementations or writing code myself (unless I am really in a mood to do so).
by danaris | 2025-09-05 12:00:58+00:00
Best I can figure, they've decided that it's easier to set up their scrapers to simply scrape absolutely everything, all the time, forever than to more carefully select what's worth it to get.

Various LLM-training scrapers were absolutely crippling my tiny (~125 weekly unique users) browser game until I put its Wiki behind a login wall. There is no possible way they could see any meaningful return from doing so.
Relace (YC W23) Is Hiring for Code LLMs (SF)
by pfunctional | 2025-09-05 12:01:09+00:00
Hey, we're a highly technical team building code generation models, and growing fast. We're looking for people who are down to scrap and love to build -- on both technical and GTM/Devrel roles.

If you have a Physics, Math, CS degree; and training fast codegen models is something that piques your interest, please email me directly at pzhou@relace.ai.
by kragen | 2025-09-05 12:02:01+00:00
I have had better experiences with LLMs translating code from one language to another than writing code from scratch, but I don't think the current state of LLMs makes it "pretty damn easy" to rewrite code in Rust, especially starting from garbage-collected languages like Perl or Lua.

Certainly it's plausible that in the next few years it'll be pretty damn easy, but with the rapid and unpredictable development of AI, it's also plausible that humanity will be extinct or that all current programming languages will be abandoned.
by thinkharderdev | 2025-09-05 12:02:40+00:00
As far as I understand, the backing assets aren't on-chain. I give tether $100, they create and issue me 100 USDT on-chain. But they can take my $100 and lend it out. Now whoever Tether loaned the $100 to has $100 and I have 100 USDT so $100 has been added to the money supply, just like with a normal bank.
by HelloUsername | 2025-09-05 12:02:53+00:00
I never really understand all these very complex setups. I have a Music folder on my (Synology) NAS that I can browse and play with any mediaplayer (VLC, Foobar), without transcoding anything, with a Wireguard VPN connection to reach outside home network. I tag metadata with an editor, and construct subfolders within the parent directory itself. Or am I missing something?
by archesys | 2025-09-05 12:02:58+00:00
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by Bender | 2025-09-05 12:03:28+00:00
They are moving it back to it's original name [1] likely signalling a move to a world war footing.

The War Department existed for 158 years, from August 7, 1789, to September 18, 1947,[1] when it split into the Department of the Army and the Department of the Air Force under the National Security Act of 1947, joining the Department of the Navy to form the National Military Establishment (NME). In 1949, the NME was renamed the Department of Defense (DOD).

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Department_of_Wa...
by mrkeen | 2025-09-05 12:03:41+00:00
The author didn't see fit to mention that you just flip the arrows.

Classes/Structs know about their children.

Relations know about their parents. If you want crazier m*n relationships you use an association table.

Did the author just not know? Or he didn't see it worthy of dismissal?

> Doing this transformation by hand is tedious and error-prone. We call this tedium "the object-relational mismatch" but it isn't really about objects or relations.

It really is.

> The fundamental problem is that fitting complex relationships to human vision usually requires constructing some visual hierarchy, but different tasks require different hierarchies.

Yes. Different tasks require different hierarchies. One particular way of doing things should not baked into your 1970s relational model.
by al_caan | 2025-09-05 12:03:53+00:00
as someone running HireParalegals.com (largest platform for hiring law talent), i can tell you we’re not seeing any slowdown in demand.

Firms are still hiring paralegals in big numbers, even with all the new AI tools around. the reality is ai can draft or summarize, but it doesn’t replace someone who understands procedure, catches nuance, and keeps a case on track. in practice, lawyers lean on paralegals more than ever.
by alchemist1e9 | 2025-09-05 12:05:21+00:00
Ignoring any PR or political motivations, I’d argue the Leaf is a better choice for many people. I’m biased as I have one, quite similar, but let me give a pros from my perspective:

- a traditional car feeling, knobs, buttons, the way cars have been for decades prior

- very very reliable. basically never needs anything except wiper fluid. no software updates or crashing. I don’t have stats but might be one of most reliable cars

- compact and easy to park

- compatible with comma.ai

- LeafSpy diagnostics to monitor it

- nice hatchback format with fold down rear seats

- ~220 mile range is plenty for around town use and trickle charge overnight

Overall I’m very happy with it and while constantly tempted by Teslas I think I wouldn’t like them as much.
by Hammershaft | 2025-09-05 12:05:23+00:00
Sounds like completely self serving BS. I don't understand what possible definition of 'service to humanity' that could be true under.

EA charities estimate that the cost of malaria prevention that will save a person's life for 1 year is ~$150. So what is a 'better service for humanity'? Buying yourself one night of sushi & wine or donating one year of life to somebody who wouldn't have it otherwise?
by mdorazio | 2025-09-05 12:05:29+00:00
You’re conveniently ignoring what “reserves” means in the GENIUS act. Unlike regular banks, Circle can use US Treasuries instead of cash so that they earn interest and prop up US government debt at the same time. It’s a clever scheme, but not the same as being forced to hold fiat reserves.

Many other banking regulations also don’t apply. No FDIC insurance and most importantly none of the regulations that apply to true fiduciaries since they are only “custodians”.
by thyristan | 2025-09-05 12:06:10+00:00
For a stream, you use a sliding window to compute the FFT. The size of the window of course limits the lowest frequency range that you can 'see', same for the highest frequency through the time quantization that digital data usually has. So there will be an upper and lower frequency limit, beyond those limits the results are meaningless.

And the window of course creates a latency, which is sometimes relevant for realtime audio filtering by FFT.
by CuriouslyC | 2025-09-05 12:07:05+00:00
In the last day I've rewritten two service hot cores in rust using agents, and gotten speedups from 4x to >400x (simd+precise memory management) and gotten full equivalent test coverage basically out of the gates from agent rewrites. So I'd say my experience has been overwhelmingly positive, and while I might be ahead of the curve in terms of AI engineering ability, this capability will come to everyone soon with better models/tools.
by cauliflower99 | 2025-09-05 12:07:24+00:00
The examples used in this student's classes demonstrate how inept the teacher is at designing a classroom promoted for learning rather than performance. If I were a teacher and I send around sheets of paper of exercises, my first directive is "Close all laptops" (or never have them there in the first place) followed by "If I see any use of technology to cheat, you have failed the exam." This is EXACTLY what is was like when I was in school only a few years ago.

Similarly for the debate club - why are teams allowed to have any technology in the hall in the first place?

Education is supposed to be difficult - that's how we learn!! Teachers seem to pander more and more to students who complain that "This is too difficult". As if easy learning was ever a thing!
by nulbyte | 2025-09-05 12:07:49+00:00
> That depend on how you view money. Lending does increase the volume of money in circulation, in that sense it creates money. But that view is too simple to be useful.

Far from being too simple, it is the primary method of money creation in modern economies.

> The regulators that regulate, and in particular control reserve ratios (complex calculations that banks have to make about the relationships between their various assets) and base interest rates are the real creators of money.

Simply setting rates does not create money. It can influence it, but it is not the ultimate cause. Lending is. Reserve banks can and do lend, but commercial banks are responsible for the majority of money creation.
by Saline9515 | 2025-09-05 12:08:33+00:00
Problem with KYC and AML is that if you listen to the regulators, there is no end to it, the requirements only increase. I was once asked to provide 20 years of banking receipts for a small savings account that my grandmother had opened for me when I was 5. In the EU at least, it's common for banks to block transfers between countries, even if the transaction is well-documented. The most infuriating thing is that there's no real proof that AML works. It's just excellent at false positives, ending in account freezes for innocent people.

Stablecoins' success is also a reaction to the ever-increasing friction created by overreaching regulation. If you have a supplier in China, and need to buy some in-demand goods, you can sign the contract and send the money now, whereas with the classic banking system, you'd have to wait for two weeks to clear everything. This alone is brilliant and should be welcomed for its usefulness.
by pdpi | 2025-09-05 12:08:33+00:00
A bit of a Baader–Meinhof moment for me.

Adam Savage discussed on Youtube earlier this week[0] the Chinese water torture episode of Myth Busters, and mentioned an email he got some time after, from somebody who had apparently actually used that torture technique in practice, and this person stated that what really made it effective was tuning the drip so the drops were completely unpredictable.

So, with Vetinari's Clock, Pratchett once again managed to, as was his wont, humorously but accurately nail a pretty damn grim bit of real-world trivia.

0. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0y2fDrv47U4
Show HN: Google Penalty Checker
by namegator | 2025-09-05 12:08:54+00:00
This is probably the most stressful story I'll ever share on here. Last year my main income source (an affiliate site I'd been growing for 3 years) just... disappeared from Google. Like, literally went from page 1 for my main keywords to nowhere. I was freaking out. Spent two weeks checking everything - server logs, analytics, search console. Nothing obvious. The traffic drop graphs looked like a cliff. 80% gone in 48 hours. The worst part? I had no clue if it was a penalty or just an algorithm update. Google's documentation is... let's say "not super helpful" when you're panicking at 2 AM wondering if your business just died. I remember calling my developer friend Mike (poor guy, I probably woke him up) asking "how do I even know if Google hates my site now?" He was like "dude, there's gotta be tools for this." Turns out there were some tools, but they were either crazy expensive (like $300/month expensive) or gave me reports I couldn't understand. I needed something that would just tell me "yes, you're penalized" or "no, this is probably an algorithm thing." So I started digging into Google's penalty patterns. Learned way more about manual actions, algorithmic penalties, and ranking fluctuations than I ever wanted to know. Took me about 3 months of research and another 2 months of coding to build what became ContentAnalyzerPro. The ironic part? My original site actually wasn't penalized - it was just hit by a core update. But by then I'd already built this penalty checker that actually worked better than the expensive tools I'd tried. Now it helps other people avoid those 2 AM panic sessions I went through. Still gives me anxiety thinking about that traffic drop though Has anyone else been through a sudden ranking drop like this? How did you figure out what happened? I swear Google keeps us all guessing sometimes.
by AIPedant | 2025-09-05 12:10:17+00:00
On the simplest end of that spectrum, Taylor series are useful because many real-world dynamics can be approximated as a "primarily linear behavior" + "nonlinear effects."

(And cases where that isn't true can still be instructive - a Taylor series expansion for air resistance gives a linear term representing the viscosity of the air and a quadratic term representing displacement of volumes of air. For ordinary air the linear component will have a small coefficient compared to the quadratic component.)
by XorNot | 2025-09-05 12:11:54+00:00
That's not the point: the point is "how do you buy the coin in the first place?"

If you live in a place then you have to trade in whatever the local currency is. You didn't "opt in" to a particular stable coin: someone has to be willing to accept that specific coin as payment.

And they can't just exchange it to another: the exchange has to want to sell that coin in exchange for the coin you transact with.

And to interact locally with the government, you need someone who is willing to sell coins in exchange for the currency you don't want.

In practical alternate market economies, the only currency which trades tends to be USD and the exchange rate will be bad because it's a grey market. I would go further and posit that where crypto has any impact, it's people because it's a window into being able to hold USD.

Certainly the only question anyone asks about Tether is whether they actually have the USD to cover their position: no one wants a Yuan based see stable coin.
Ask HN: How long do people spend on coding assignments?
by bryanrasmussen | 2025-09-05 12:12:09+00:00
I'm just wondering - if you are applying to jobs and get coding assignments - how long do you spend?

I have a pretty hard and fast 4 hour rule. If the assignment works at 4 hours that's it for me. If it doesn't work but I can make it work in a short bit of time I continue, if it doesn't work but I don't know how long it will take to make it work or it will take a significant amount of time I stop (this happened one time, there were environment problems and bugs with the libraries I was supposed to use on my system, I swear it took exactly 4 hours to fix these)

I'm asking because I just got turned down because me task was not good enough, which OK, some of the feedback is also correct because I did 4 hours and could have improved things (some of the feedback was crazy enough that I thought maybe they didn't look at my project)

I could definitely have improved it significantly with 6 hours. But I don't believe anyone, applying for an e-commerce programming job at a major online retailer, would have done significantly better with 4 hours, this leads me to conclude that people are maybe doing 6 hours or more.

So how much time do you spend on a programming assignment?

Has this amount of time gone up in recent years? Or in the last few months due to the economy.

Do you spend more time when unemployed or employed.

Do you vary it significantly between types of jobs you are applying for?

What is the field you generally apply in? (just want to see if people spend more backend then frontend or other areas)

I'm also wondering, and here it may you want to just send me messages privately on this, but are you married and has marriage/kids affected your time on programming assignments (as I am thinking about particular legal challenges, in an EU context, to the legality of programming assignments - if it turns out I have to spend 8 hours per assignment nowadays I'd rather mount a legal challenge)
by johannes1234321 | 2025-09-05 12:12:33+00:00
It follows the relational algebra model. Relations (aka Tables) go in, relations (aka Tables) come out. This makes some things really nice.

However I proposed a hierarchical result for such cases a long time to our database, but couldn't convince enough people. json_agg came later at there all the machinery is there, it would "just" require exposing this to the protocol and adapting all clients to understand that data format ...
by andyferris | 2025-09-05 12:13:00+00:00
Yes - I have to agree.

Codd was right in that if you want transactional semantics that are both quick and flexible, you'll need to _store_ your data in normalized relations. The system of record is unwieldly otherwise.

The article is right that this idea was taken too far - queries do not need to be restricted to flat relations. In fact the application, for any given view, loves heirarchical orginization. It's my opinion that application views have more in common with analytics (OLAP) except perhaps latency requirements - they need internally consistent snapshots (and ideally the corresponding trx id) but it's the "command" in CQRS that demands the normalized OLTP database (and so long as the view can pass along the trx id as a kind of "lease" version for any causally connected user command, as in git push --force-with-lease, the two together work quite well).

This issue is of course that SQL eshews hierarchical data even in ephemeral queries. It's really unfortuante that we generate jsonb aggregates to do this instead of first-class nested relations a la Dee [1] / "third manifesto" [2]. Jamie Brandon has clearly been thinking about this a long time and I generally find myself nodding along with the conclusions, but IMO the issue is that SQL poorly expresses nested relations and this has been the root cause of object-relation impedence since (AFAICT) before either of us were born.

[1] https://github.com/ggaughan/dee [2] https://www.dcs.warwick.ac.uk/~hugh/TTM/DTATRM.pdf
by xboxnolifes | 2025-09-05 12:13:44+00:00
If you mean a paid, consumer OS, you've got to keep in mind that they're essentially tied to a hardware product. The vast majority of your target market is not installing an alternative OS manually. You would need to either sell hardware with your OS or get hardware companies to package your OS over the existing options.

With how mature the personal computer market is, this is a very big hurdle.
by Kbelicius | 2025-09-05 12:13:44+00:00
> The ECB also had one of those CBDC built much earlier than people have been told. They already had something quite advanced around 2020, with a optimist launch date in 2022 I believe.

> It obviously failed miserably

They had a CBDC but hid it from everyone... but then somehow it failed miserably. If it wasn't released, how? They even had it before they decided to have it (2021). This seems just like a load of bullshit.
by thaumasiotes | 2025-09-05 12:14:44+00:00
> Coming from a data engineering and business analytics background, the terms "structured" and "unstructured" seem to be swapped in meaning here.

Mark Rosewater likes to write about his personal concept of "linear" Magic: the Gathering decks, which are decks in which the cards tend to pick up synergy bonuses from each other, so that having two of them together is considerably more powerful than you'd expect from the strength of those two cards individually.

This always bothers me because it is the opposite of the more normal use of "linear" relationships, in which everything contributes exactly as much to an aggregate as it's worth individually.
by jeffhuys | 2025-09-05 12:14:52+00:00
For a while we used it for scalable preview environments: specify the branch, hit deploy, and have a QA-able environment, with full database (anonymized) ready to go in 15 minutes (DB was time bottleneck).

We ditched it for EC2s which were faster and more reliable while being cheaper, but that's beside the point.

Locally I use OrbStack by the way, much less intrusive than Docker Desktop.
by AgentOrange1234 | 2025-09-05 12:15:32+00:00
When I ran the numbers, I realized commuting for RTO was going to cost the equivalent of 6 full time weeks of work. My whole team is at a different location. So I am driving in to be on Zoom calls. It is deeply pointless and frustrating.

I mentioned all of this to my boss, who is great btw, and was told there is just no fighting this. After several months of trying to make the best of it, I’m done. I’m planning to leave after my next vest.

It’s really a shame. I liked a lot about the job. So many good people have been forced out.
by kragen | 2025-09-05 12:15:37+00:00
An interesting thing about "A Relational Model of Data for Large Shared Data Banks" (the stone tablets handed down from Codd https://www.seas.upenn.edu/~zives/03f/cis550/codd.pdf) is that it starts out by considering N-ary relations whose values may themselves be relations, and only then switches to considering "normalized" relations whose values are not relations:

> A relation [table] whose domains [column types] are all simple [not relations] can be represented in storage by a two-dimensional column-homogeneous array of the kind discussed above. Some more complicated data structure is necessary for a relation with one or more nonsimple domains. For this reason (and others to be cited below) the possibility of eliminating nonsimple domains appears worth investigating.⁴ There is, in fact, a very simple elimination procedure, which we shall call normalization.

But non-normalized relations support the kind of nested structure the eminent Dr. Brandon wants, without resorting to JSON or abandoning the strong uniform typing we have with SQL. Darwen & Date's The Third Manifesto https://www.dcs.warwick.ac.uk/~hugh/TTM/DTATRM.pdf includes group and ungroup operations which translate back and forth between normalized and non-normalized relations.

I've been playing around with some of these ideas using some rather horrific atrocities perpetuated against Lua operator overloading in http://canonical.org/~kragen/sw/dev3/cripes.lua. I haven't added joins or ungrouping to it yet, but I think it might be a prototype of something promising for this kind of use case.