MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by kingstnap | 2025-10-06 12:24:10+00:00
Your comment sort of implies that all this is some super standardized flow that is well studied and highly optimized but in my experience all this ML stuff is closer to the edge of broken than some kind of local maximum.

There is an ungodly number of engineering decisions that go into making ML work and any number of stupid things are all over the place that cause stuff to fail.

Like something stupid like your normalization was bad or your mix of data was bad or your learning rates were bad or you have some precision issues or your model has a bad init or some architectural problems cause poor training or straight up there are tons of bugs somewhere like your batching was doing something silly or there is some numerically unstable division or sqrt or somewhere etc etc.

At scale with stupid issues like hardware faults I imagine this only gets exponentially worse.

And then on product sides of integrating stuff more bugs sneak in like so many labs were releasing so many open source LLMs with broken and incorrectly configured chat templates that massively tanked performance.

Or they set up some parmeters in sampling wrong and stuff gets stuck in loops or hallucinates tons or something.

In his 2025 hotchips keynote Noam Shazeer (GDM VP) even says that you need hardware determinism because there are just so many bugs in ML experiments that you need to be able to tweak and test things.

Also there are just so many obvious issues with the way everything works conventionally in GPT2 style like with softmax causing attention sinks at punctuation and creating dispersion over longer sequences because of low sharpness and the whole previllaged basis thing making it so common information takes up a lot of model capacity.
by pmarreck | 2025-10-06 12:24:18+00:00
The Nixpkgs search page for it https://search.nixos.org/packages?channel=25.05&show=toybox&... shows the list of its outputs (executables):

[ acpi arch ascii base32 base64 basename blkdiscard blkid blockdev bunzip2 bzcat cal cat chattr chgrp chmod chown chroot chrt chvt cksum clear cmp comm count cp cpio crc32 cut date dd deallocvt devmem df dirname dmesg dnsdomainname dos2unix du echo egrep eject env expand factor fallocate false fgrep file find flock fmt fold free freeramdisk fsfreeze fstype fsync ftpget ftpput getconf getopt gpiodetect gpiofind gpioget gpioinfo gpioset grep groups gunzip halt head help hexedit host hostname httpd hwclock i2cdetect i2cdump i2cget i2cset i2ctransfer iconv id ifconfig inotifyd insmod install ionice iorenice iotop kill killall killall5 link linux32 ln logger login logname losetup ls lsattr lsmod lspci lsusb makedevs mcookie md5sum memeater microcom mix mkdir mkfifo mknod mkpasswd mkswap mktemp modinfo mount mountpoint mv nbd-client nbd-server nc netcat netstat nice nl nohup nproc nsenter od oneit openvt partprobe paste patch pgrep pidof ping ping6 pivot_root pkill pmap poweroff printenv printf prlimit ps pwd pwdx pwgen readahead readelf readlink realpath reboot renice reset rev rfkill rm rmdir rmmod rtcwake sed seq setfattr setsid sha1sum sha224sum sha256sum sha384sum sha3sum sha512sum shred shuf sleep sntp sort split stat strings su swapoff swapon switch_root sync sysctl tac tail tar taskset tee test time timeout top touch toybox true truncate ts tsort tty tunctl uclampset ulimit umount uname unicode uniq unix2dos unlink unshare uptime usleep uudecode uuencode uuidgen vconfig vmstat w watch watchdog wc wget which who whoami xargs xxd yes zcat

That's... an impressive set of Unix functionality in a single binary... AFAIK, if this works like Busybox does, these are all actually just wrappers that call into Toybox with this command as a parameter. EDIT: Nope, it's literally just symlinks with names detected by toybox that dictate how it will behave, and this is apparently called a "multicall binary"

And yes, the [ (open bracket) is a command in POSIX shell.
by spwa4 | 2025-10-06 12:25:11+00:00
Yep, I'm sure it's the brilliance of Amazon and not the same old trick of creating a monopoly then exploiting it that people have been using since the early middle ages and regularly outlawed because it destroys economies.

Say ... what was Amazon's initial reason for success? Being cheaper by exploiting the interstate commerce clause to avoid paying sales tax when it's competitors weren't allowed to do so? You don't say. Amazon is famous for losing money on their delivery business (up until recently)? It's constantly repeated in 10+ years of their financial statements ...

So either Amazon has completely changed tactics and become truly brilliant and we still don't understand the plan ... or they're up to their old tricks, being slightly cheaper, now with less legality!
by mindcrime | 2025-10-06 12:25:25+00:00
Your post is making me think maybe there is quite a lot of lost knowledge out there somewhere that maybe has pertinence in modern day agentic AI system building use.

I agree with that. In fact, that mindset is what led me to this book in the first place. I was exploring an older book on OPS5[1] and saw this book mentioned, and started looking for it and found that it is freely available online. Seemed like something the HN crowd might enjoy, so here we are.

And that is making me look more and more in to old techniques that have been long established way back when...

I suspect that there is some meat on that bone. I'm exploring this particular area as well. I think there's some opportunity for hybridization between LLM's / GenAI and some of these older approaches.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OPS5
by LarsenCC | 2025-10-06 12:26:06+00:00
Hey everyone,

Lately I’ve been exploring smaller, simpler projects like this one. I usually build backend systems (currently at Browser Use, funny enough).

This spreadsheet started as a personal finance tracker during COVID and somehow turned into something people actually wanted to use.

The biggest lesson for me: People don’t care how “advanced” something is, they just want it to work and make their life easier.

Curious to hear what you all think.
by dlisboa | 2025-10-06 12:26:19+00:00
> I'm unsure if "no descenders" provides increased clarity.

Of course not: if it did we would be doing it that way everywhere. Typeface design has thousands of years of history, there's only a few major variations in latin types and we've tried them all. Descenders exist for a reason.

This type is pretty cool for what it is meant for, the retro aesthetics. Old school digital displays (like alarm clocks) don't have descenders so it fits pretty well.
by pil0u | 2025-10-06 12:26:29+00:00
Yes, I agree with you. Silence, when you do not have an opinion, is totally fine. And yes, not having an opinion on everything is absolutely fine, probably sane even.

I was answering a comment about a vote that would put you in a torture camp, so a vote on which you are certainly opinionated about.

In other words, don't self-censor when you think something is not right.
by antonvs | 2025-10-06 12:26:45+00:00
> Can you please share where you see BS and/or xenophobia in the original report?

Here’s an example of irrational fear: “the expanding use of these models may pose a risk to application developers, consumers, and to US national security.” There’s no support for that claim in the report, just vague handwaving at the fact that a freely available open source model doesn’t compare well on all dimensions to the most expensive frontier models.

The OP does a good job of explaining why the fear here is irrational.

But for the audience this is apparently intended to convince, no support is needed for this fear, because it comes from China.

The current president has a long history of publicly stated xenophobia about China, which led to harassment, discrimination, and even attacks on Chinese people partly as a result of his framing of COVID-19 as “the China virus”.

A report like this is just part of that propaganda campaign of designating enemies everywhere, even in American cities.

> The NIST report, of course, implicitly promotes ideals of western democratic rule over communist values

If only that were true. But nothing the current US administration is doing in fact achieves that, or even attempts to do so, and this report is no exception.

The absolutely most charitable thing that could be said about this report is that it’s a weak attempt at smearing non-US competition. There’s no serious analysis of the merits. The only reason to read this report is to laugh at how blatantly incompetent or misguided the entire chain of command that led to it is.
Show HN: I built an App that shows why your resume gets rejected andhow to FIXIT
by acjm | 2025-10-06 12:27:11+00:00
Hey HN!

I’ve been building ResumeAdapter, an AI-powered resume analyzer that helps job seekers understand why their resume isn’t getting interviews.

You upload your resume and a job description, and it instantly:

Highlights missing keywords and skills & and resumes Format gaps.

Gives an estimated ATS score (how well your resume matches the job)

Suggests improvements to increase interview chances

It’s designed for anyone tired of sending out 100+ applications with no replies. Would love your feedback on:

The UX (is it fast and intuitive?)

The accuracy of keyword detection

Anything that would make it more useful for developers and tech job seekers

Try it here: https://resumeadapter.com

Built solo, bootstrapped, and live! Happy to answer questions or share the tech stack if you’re curious.
by IT4MD | 2025-10-06 12:27:16+00:00
$1 Trillion to wreck a company. ROFL.

Tesla shareholders are the absolute worst bag holders. So vigorously defending a company that could not care less if they lived or died literally, as long as they keep buying unsafe garbage with less range than touted, months-long delays for some repairs, hiding crash data because it made Tesla look bad, beta testing driver-less mode in a way that endangers everyone else, switching to driver mode a split-second before a crash to insulate them from lawsuits, did I mention the fucking Nazi running it?

Oh and how's FSD going? lol
by m01 | 2025-10-06 12:27:43+00:00
> I can share an anecdote how slow tech adoption is in Korea. It is not exactly about tech in public section but in private companies. I assume public section has slower adoption rate than private ones in general.

I guess it's not all tech, but at least in telecoms I thought they were very quick to adopt new tech? 2nd in the world to commercially deploy 3G W-CDMA, world first LTE-Advanced [1], "first fairly substantial deployments" of 5G [2]. 90% of broadband via fibre (used to be #1 amongst OECD countries for some time, now it's only just #2).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SK_Telecom#History

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5G#Deployment

[3] https://www.oecd.org/en/topics/sub-issues/broadband-statisti... -> Percentage of fibre connections in total broadband (June 2024) spreadsheet link
by addicted | 2025-10-06 12:28:02+00:00
Any anecdote will suffer from survivorship bias (and also negative anecdotes). The data on the other hand are very clear that people are not doing as well as their parents. Unless you have a theory as to why Americans simply became more lazy, etc. a starting point should sensibly be a systemic explanation.

Also, just speaking about your anecdote, let me add my own. I am also doing fine. Not particularly rich but middle class, good income, and savings for retirement. But I just got hit with compounding dental issues, which despite having the most expensive health insurance from my company that's well known for providing excellent employee benefits, it will end up costing me at least 20k out of pocket, potentially going up to 30-40k due to the need for multiple surgical procedures.

And fortunately we can manage it, but if the same issue had happened to me 5 years ago, I would basically be at the edge of my savings where even a minor unexpected cost would have put me in terrible shape, and 10 years ago I may have had to declare bankruptcy, or more likely, do without either suffering in pain, or pushing off the problem to be handled by even more expensive work a few years down the line, taking on expensive debt, or setting myself up for periodontal disease which leads to a whole host of issues including significantly increased risk of dementia.

Even if one is earning and saving decently, the precariousness of life in the US of A today is incredible.
by whstl | 2025-10-06 12:28:24+00:00
I guess anything other than just claims from people that have a stake in it?

If companies are shipping AI bots with a "human in the loop" to replace what could have been "a button with a human in the loop", but the deployment of the AI takes longer, then it's DEFINITELY not really an improvement, it's just pure waste of money and electricity.

Similarly, what I see different from the pre-AI era are way too many SV and elsewhere companies having roughly the same size and shipping roughly the same amount of features as before (or less!), but are now requiring employees to do 996. That's the definition of loss of productivity.

I'm not saying I hold the truth, but what I see in my day to day is that companies are masters at absorbing any kind of improvement or efficiency gain. Inertia still rules.
by ubermonkey | 2025-10-06 12:28:36+00:00
I was once advised to measure your backup security in zip codes and time zones.

You have a backup copy of your file, in the same folder? That helps for some "oops" moments, but nothing else.

You have a whole backup DRIVE on your desktop? That's better. Physical failure of the primary device is no longer a danger. But your house could burn down.

You have an alternate backup stored at a trusted friend's house across the street? Better! But what if a major natural disaster happens?

True life, 30+ years ago when I worked for TeleCheck, data was their lifeblood. Every week a systems operator went to Denver, the alternate site, with a briefcase full of backup tapes. TeleCheck was based in Houston, so a major hurricane could've been a major problem.
by hollerith | 2025-10-06 12:28:37+00:00
I've never heard Peterson (or his wife, who also holds the opinion that most women are better off if they choose motherhood) say that any of the societal changes, e.g., access to contraception and abortion, e.g., broad acceptance of women in the workplace, should be rolled back.

I never heard him or his wife say anything that might suggest that the opinion is anything other advice to women. (And when has Marx or Lenin ever said anything that can be interpreted as nothing more than advice to any individual -- other than the advice to join the collective effort to overthrow the capitalist class?)

Peterson is not shy about criticizing some of the pronouncement of feminists, e.g., "believe all women". He will point out that 1 or 2% of women are sociopaths just like 1 or 2% of men are sociopaths and that if you give sociopaths the opportunity to profit from lying, they will take the opportunity (and a depressingly large fraction of them will take the opportunity even if the only "profit" to be had is the pleasure of ruining someone's life or reputation).
by zuhaib-rasheed | 2025-10-06 12:29:26+00:00
OpenAI is rumored to launch Agent Builder today — essentially a visual automation canvas for agents.

That’s interesting, but it solves a different problem than we’re working on.

Most automation tools (Zapier, n8n, LangFlow, and now Agent Builder) focus on backend orchestration. Great for ops, less for end-users.

Magicnode is aimed at something else: letting people build AI micro-apps with workflows + GUIs that can be used, shared, and monetized.

Automation ≠ productization. We’re betting the next wave isn’t just automating processes — it’s packaging AI into apps that spread.
by languagehacker | 2025-10-06 12:29:31+00:00
There's definitely a market for something like this, because most software companies at a certain size end up needing to build something like this. The real question is, how much work will you need to do to fit your current software to their paradigm in order to get the benefit? For a newer project, there's likely little sunk cost, but for anything that's already productionalized, I don't doubt that the rework -- particularly around all the devops bits and pieces -- will likely be significant. And then of course, from a strategic standpoint, you need to balance the risks vs. rewards of hitching your wagon to Flightcontrol's set of conventions.

There will be a really solid chunk of projects that find good cost savings using this platform -- especially teams that are resource-constrained on devops and don't consider it their core competency.
by mindcrime | 2025-10-06 12:30:03+00:00
If a book or movie is ever made about the history of AI, the script would include this period of AI history and would probably go something like this…

I would love to see a "Halt and Catch Fire" style treatment of this era.

Marvin Minsky, a jealous academic peer of Frank, was in favor of a different approach to AI: Expert Systems. He published a book (Perceptrons, 1969) which all but killed research into neural nets. Marvin pointed out that no neural net with a depth of one layer could solve the "XOR" problem.

I think a lot of people have an impression - an impression that I shared until recently - that the Perceptrons book was a "hit piece" aimed at intentionally destroying interest in the perceptron approach. But having just finished reading the Parallel Distributed Processing book and being in the middle of reading Perceptrons right now, I no longer fully buy that. Now the effect may well have been what is widely known. But Minsky and Papert don't really seem to be as "anti-perceptron" as the "received wisdom" suggests.
by tim333 | 2025-10-06 12:31:28+00:00
It's like books - another device like smart phones, computer and tv that are mostly about the information they contain rather than the form of the product. Those have also been rectangular with the same form of pages and a binding at the end for hundreds of years because people want them to read, not to have some weird shape or binding mechanism.

Non information products still have a variety of design forms. People say cars are bland but a Mini, Ferrari F80, F150 pickup, Range Rover etc have pretty different forms.
by junaru | 2025-10-06 12:31:31+00:00
Thats why we are perfect soil for this FUD.

Senior population remembers soviet union with all its warts (rightfully so) but fail to account the structures that governed the union and whole topdown integration no longer exists there.

Meanwhile anyone born in the last 40 years was raised with inferiority complex due to being economically behind and treat every word from west as gospel.
by incomingpain | 2025-10-06 12:31:32+00:00
>You don't think the massive increase in the amount of time people spend reading social media over that period could have had anything to do with it?

Invented long after the problem started. Not even a factor.

Another option you might pick up is aggregated news, google news came out in 2002; but some existed before. RSS was invented by netscape in 1999.

This likely is the causal relationship. When people can see a news event and literally see the lies from the media for themselves. There's no going back.
by JamisonM | 2025-10-06 12:31:52+00:00
"Except the shutdown had no negative effect."

Three things here:

* Didn't the diversion of natural gas to electricity generation end some German industrial production completely?

* Are there not large electricity subsidies in place via subsidies for US imported LNG?

* Isn't the alternate reality where there is a surplus of electricity in German due to nuclear power a better world where Germany has more opportunity? (the AI datacentre boom is built on excess electricity, isn't it?)
by cesarb | 2025-10-06 12:32:47+00:00
> Encrypt before sending to a third party?

That sounds great, as long as nobody makes any mistake. It could be a bug on the RNG which generates the encryption keys. It could be a software or hardware defect which leaks information about the keys (IIRC, some cryptographic system are really sensitive about this, a single bit flip during encryption could make it possible to obtain the private key). It could be someone carelessly leaving the keys in an object storage bucket or source code repository. Or it could be deliberate espionage to obtain the keys.
by Telaneo | 2025-10-06 12:32:57+00:00
If they can't amend, they can bypass. Or ignore.

If people go out to vote for Donald Trump, and he wins the election for a third term, or someone just says the right combination of words that wills him into being president for a third time, regardless of the constitution, that'll be legitimate enough. I have very little faith in both the US and Europe.
by nathanaldensr | 2025-10-06 12:33:43+00:00
Completely agreed. Sorry, other folks, but you have no right to gatekeep my speech in any way in a professional context. Are you a family member? Then sure, we can have a discussion. Am I a member of your private club or otherwise dependent on your approval of my thoughts or beliefs? Then let's talk. Otherwise, leave me alone. You (the collective you) don't get to decide what I am and am not allowed to think and believe.
by anonymous_sorry | 2025-10-06 12:33:58+00:00
You can't "deceive" an LLM. It's not like lying to a person. It's not a person.

Using emotive, anthropomorphic language about software tool is unhelpful, in this case at least. Better to think of it as a mentally disturbed minor who found a way to work around a tool's safety features.

We can debate whether the safety features are sufficient, whether it is possible to completely protect a user intent on harming themselves, whether the tool should be provided to children, etc.
by jcelerier | 2025-10-06 12:34:00+00:00
> Arguably the result would have been easier to read and maintain and not as slow to compile.

having been through I don't know how many codegen frameworks I thoroughly disagree, those are a complete pain to maintain as soon as you want to support mac / windows (esp. MSVC) / linux / wasm and various brands of cross-compiling. Everything that can be done in the target language, should.
by JW_00000 | 2025-10-06 12:35:11+00:00
They answer the second question quite clearly in my opinion:

It requires only brief one-time physical access, which is realistic in cloud environments, considering, for instance: * Rogue cloud employees; * Datacenter technicians or cleaning personnel; * Coercive local law enforcement agencies; * Supply chain tampering during shipping or manufacturing of the memory modules.

This reads as "yes". (You may disagree, but _their_ answer is "yes.")

Consider also "Room 641A" [1]: the NSA has asked big companies to install special hardware on their premises for wiretapping. This work is at least proof that a similar request could be made to intercept confidential compute environments.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A
by xrd | 2025-10-06 12:35:15+00:00
France in chaos. Argentina in chaos, but $20B (and American soybean farmers in chaos). Japan in chaos. Danish people are loading up on emergency supplies because of drone invasions.

I'm jamming to "(Falling Like) Dominoes" by Donald Byrd.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=voIprW-gxXk&list=RDvoIprW-gx...
by jhbadger | 2025-10-06 12:35:18+00:00
I think the point is saying something is "evil" is very unlikely to discourage young people from anything and even more likely to make it sound exciting and edgy.

It's like Oscar Wilde's famous quote: "As long as war is regarded as wicked, it will always have its fascination. When it is looked upon as vulgar it will cease to be popular."