MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by SchemaLoad | 2025-10-01 23:07:57+00:00
It's certainly something that has people worried. I suspect a population decline and unbalanced demographics with too many old people per working age person are pretty much guaranteed. But personally I don't think it will be catastrophic civilisation level collapse. But at some point things will rebalance and turn the other way as resources, housing and such become more abundant.

I'm also hopeful we sort out the problems with big tech eventually. I was initially against it, but I'm starting to think Australia's plan to ban under 16s from social media is actually a very good idea.
by andrewflnr | 2025-10-01 23:08:13+00:00
There's some interesting meta futility in that statement. It's true of course, as far as it goes. But no one avoids truth because they think it's a rational strategy. They do it because it avoids emotional pain[0].

This is a sort of hard truth about why people avoid hard truths. Telling a truth-avoidant person (which is most of us on at least a few topics) things like this will have very little impact. In fact they've probably already stopped listening.

[0] I was going to say "in the short term" but as someone suffering long-term emotional pain over facing relatively minor truths, well, I'm not sure that qualifier is appropriate.
by dingnuts | 2025-10-01 23:08:21+00:00
I mean you just can't take a comment seriously when it lists music class as a zero sum competition. About the only time that's true is if you're dead set on first chair in a specific orchestra, or think a career any less successful than Mick Jagger's would be a failure.

Frankly I think that indicates the grandparent just didn't think very hard before leaving their comment.
by vlovich123 | 2025-10-01 23:08:55+00:00
An alien given a copy of the constitution knows that the constitution is not an enumeration of rights that people have, but carve outs specifically where the federal government can supersede the power of the individual and more importantly local governments.

The right to bodily autonomy as such is implicitly protected by the 9th amendment which states the constitution is not a set of positive enumeration of rights granted but instead limits placed on the power of government to take away all rights which are inherently ours.

Whether you find those rights because you want to look for it in the 4th amendment limits on governments right to invade your privacy is largely irrelevant.

I’ll also point out that regardless of the arguments on the 2nd amendment, historically regulation of arms was completely allowed and even today that’s allowed (eg you can’t get a nuclear weapon). And ignoring that is very interesting considering the current SCOTUS’s random “historic tradition” argument from conservatives.
by simonw | 2025-10-01 23:09:01+00:00
The problem with hallucinations is that they really are an expected part of what LLMs are used for today.

"Write me a story about the first kangaroo on the moon" - that's a direct request for a hallucination, something that's never actually happened.

"Write me a story about the first man on the moon" - that could be interpreted as "a made-up children's story about Neil Armstrong".

"Tell me about the first man on the moon" - that's a request for factual information.

All of the above are reasonable requests of an LLM. Are we asking for a variant of an LLM that can flat refuse the first prompt because it's asking for non-real information?

Even summarizing an article could be considered a hallucination: there's a truth in the world, which is the exact text of that article. Then there's the made-up shortened version which omits certain details to act as a summary. What would a "hallucination free" LLM do with that?

I would argue that what we actually want here is for LLMs to get better over time at not presenting made-up information as fact in answer to clear requests for factual information. And that's what we've been getting - GPT-5 is far less likely to invent things in response to a factual question than GPT-4 was.
by karmakaze | 2025-10-01 23:09:51+00:00
I came to say the same. For the longest time I never realized that I was missing anything. Most of my dreams don't feature color unless its relevant to the story. This is the superpower, no distractions. It allows keeping a large amount of context of related things, even without physical form, abstract things, while working through them. It also explains why I discovered early on that I can't stand descriptive prose that paints with words for pages to set the scene before getting on with why any of it is relevant.

Reminds me of the quote "Mathematics is the art of giving the same name to different things." - Henri Poincaré. [As opposed to Poetry is the art of giving different names to the same thing]. If different things can be the same, then their physical form wasn't relevant and you can consider the abstract thing singular.

Although I don't feel like I'm missing out, I read that Nikola Tesla was able to work out how to construct the first A/C motor by constructing it in his mind's eye. That's pretty cool, I'd never have to draw any system diagram again except to transcribe for communication.
by Zigurd | 2025-10-01 23:10:33+00:00
We heard you like programmable things so we put programmable things in your programmable things, along with all the attack surfaces that programmable things bring with them: Modem baseband, which a mobile network operator might have access to; DSP; GPU; Image processor; AI inference processor; plus how many peripherals have programmable cores?

I would be despondent within a week trying to keep all that secure.
by btilly | 2025-10-01 23:11:31+00:00
The fact that you think I'm talking about the axiom of choice, demonstrates that you didn't understand what I'm talking about. I would also be willing to bet a reasonable sum of money that this topic did not come up in your Linear 2 course in physics undergrad.

The arguments between the different schools of philosophy in math are something that most professional mathematicians are unaware of. Those who know about them, generally learned them while learning about either the history of math, or the philosophy of math. I personally only became aware of them while reading https://www.amazon.com/Mathematical-Experience-Phillip-J-Dav.... I didn't learn more about the topic until I was in grad school, and that was from personal conversations. It was never covered in any course that I took on, either in undergraduate or graduate schools.

Now I'm curious. Was there anything that I said that should have been said more clearly? Or was it hard to understand because you were trying to fit what I said into what you know about an entirely unrelated debate about the axiom of choice?
by janalsncm | 2025-10-01 23:12:05+00:00
In practice a lot of heavy lifting performance-dependent code is cython. For example numpy and PyTorch. So Python will definitely be faster than js if you use proper vectorized ops.

The vast majority of my Python code is for data exploration and preprocessing which are usually one-offs or need to be run only a couple of times. Or maybe it’s a nightly job that takes 5 minutes instead of 30 seconds in another language, but it doesn’t matter because it’s not user facing.

Actual Python execution time very rarely comes into play. If it does and it’s a problem, I will create a pyo3 rust binding.
by ArtificeSW | 2025-10-01 23:12:35+00:00
I'm a construction worker turned programmer doing data analysis for a few PhDs at a start up company. Recently got into machine learning and have been really going hard on it. In total I've been doing Python for about a decade.

Any advice for someone like me? I like my current job, but want to know where to go from here. Thanks for any advice.
by BLKNSLVR | 2025-10-01 23:14:23+00:00
Australia's reticence in embracing renewables has always seemed obviously corrupt to me given the abundant natural sunlight resources Australia is blessed with, combined with the 100% reliance on importing of oil-based fossil fuels.

Australia is self-sufficient in keeping the lights on, due to large coal reserves, but wouldn't be able to transport anything if petrol dried up (and I think Australia only has twelve days of petrol reserve storage). Just imagine the chaos... To the point I would think it would be a National Security priority to electrify transport and build whatever is needed to support that electrification.
by thomascountz | 2025-10-01 23:15:28+00:00
I think I understand where there was confusion. I only commented because, as of my reading of the comments, OP clarified they were looking for a date, and your reply repeated version numbers. Perhaps they were originally asking for clarification of the version number (though I don't believe they were, based on the original comment, as written now), but their reply specifically referenced there being no dates. Perhaps they do not know that Alpine does not provide dates? Your reply suggests you might have misinterpreted that.

To OP: this announcement from Alpine doesn't contain dates, like you've mentioned. This is apparently not an accident.
by Havoc | 2025-10-01 23:16:22+00:00
The no mass layoffs strikes me as incorrect. As fashionable as it currently is to claim zero impact, there are enough signs that there will be impact. e.g.

* Translators & transcription

* Waymo doing real world shuttling of people (not strictly genAI I guess)

* AI art being used in places where it's "good enough" - blogs, powerpoint etc

* Call centers

* Boilerplate coding

* Beginnings of robots "understanding" their surroundings for trivial warehouse tasks

...a job apocalypse that does not make, but to me that is sufficient evidence that replacement is feasible in principle for some things and combined with trajectory we'll see *some* displacement and societal impact. Whether that constitutes "mass" layoffs remains to be seen, but I feel a surprisingly low % number will already rattle societies foundations. Just because my job might be safe doesn't mean a sudden +5% in unemployment doesn't affect my community.
by cthalupa | 2025-10-01 23:16:23+00:00
Experts can be wrong, even in mass consensus.

But you have to separate the fallacy from it being supportive evidence of other data.

There is a difference from saying X must be true because Y person said it and they're an expert on Z. But when there is consensus between appropriate experts - such as researchers that specialize in this field - and it is in support of other specific evidence it is supporting evidence that the other specific evidence is compelling.

If I have 10 CPAs explaining a specific bit of the tax code to me and they are pointing out the specifics of the tax code, it is not fallacious to note that these people are experts and are pointing to specific evidence that supports their point.
by derefr | 2025-10-01 23:17:44+00:00
Running “the” existing configured linter (or what-have-you) is the easy problem. The interesting question is whether the LLM would decide of its own volition to add a linter to a project that doesn’t have one; and where the invoking user potentially doesn’t even know that linting is a thing, and certainly didn’t ask the LLM to do anything to the project workflow, only to solve the immediate problem of proving that a certain code file is syntactically valid / “not broken” / etc.

After all, solving an immediate problem that seems like it could come up again, by “taking the opportunity” to solve the problem from now on by introducing workflow automation to solve the problem, is what an experienced human engineer would likely do in such a situation (if they aren’t pressed for time.)
by muwtyhg | 2025-10-01 23:17:44+00:00
Yeah, just live in a cave in the middle of nowhere. A sure-fire solution for everyone!

You expect SO MUCH diligence from individuals while removing any responsibility for the situation from the companies perpetrating it. I now have to make my choice of phone based on the ability to remove the battery so that I cannot be tracked by my own government? That is insane.
by alyxya | 2025-10-01 23:17:51+00:00
The thing about this that’s interesting to me is that it can be used as a foundation for products they or other people make that combine real time RL rewards and fine tuning to improve the model. I see a lot of potential here compared to the standard paradigm of ChatGPT wrappers that involve tweaking the prompt or harness to improve it, which is a lot more constrained.
by jchw | 2025-10-01 23:18:44+00:00
To be honest I don't buy it. The biggest problem with translating programs to Rust, IMO anyway, isn't actually dealing with the chasm between mentalities regarding programming language design. I don't disagree that Rust intentionally goes a different way in many regards; obviously it focuses on composition over inheritance, and takes more inspiration from ML. But still, that isn't really the problem. It really does come down to the fact that appeasing the borrow checker is hard. It only accepts valid, well-formed programs according to its rules, but it rejects a ton of completely safe things in the process. It's a tradeoff.

Literally just not being able to easily and efficiently express interior mutability completely changes how you design both code and APIs. Unsurprisingly, since they evolved in parallel, C++ is pretty well-suited for old-school widget toolkits like Qt, but Rust is not. It's not just a matter of having to retool things for composition... The entire view and data model just doesn't work very well. Instead with Rust you wind up seeing the vast majority of toolkits go for immediate mode or functional reactive flow designs that look like React.

I'm not Rust expert but this is basically my opinion on what's really going on. I don't think it's a hatred of C/C++, especially since I think C especially translates to Rust perfectly well ignoring the borrow checker. Rust found one way to do safety and it does reject some valid code and make some patterns awkward or necessarily inefficient... There are others but it is clearly an area of open research.
by vkou | 2025-10-01 23:18:49+00:00
> We have improved a lot on eliminating wars front.

Have we? After the nightmare of The War to End All Wars, did anyone in the mainstream honestly expect Europe to turn into an even bigger charnel house (~30-50 million dead) two decades later?

It's been 80 years since then, and we've not had a 'large' industrialized war since then. But we have all been living under an atomic sword of Damocles.

Do you think we're going to get to 200 years without that sword falling? What odds do you give on that (We've had many close calls since then)? How many people would die if it does fall? If in 2145, half a billion[1] people will die in nuclear fire, will we retroactively consider the brief stretch of history we live in to just be a brief ceasefire?

---

[1] That would be a best case outcome for a nuclear war - a limited one, that wouldn't rise to the level of a global catastrophe.
by ajross | 2025-10-01 23:19:17+00:00
Oh, come on. Laptops are mobile devices that live in bags and backpacks and they break all the time. I've had more laptop failures than cracked phones, even. You absolutely need an answer for "what happens if my screen gets cracked", just ask any college student. Windows junk is cheaper, it just is.

In pre-college education, the answer is often "use any other junky Chromebook from anywhere in the world", which is cheaper still.
by amplify-backup | 2025-10-01 23:20:40+00:00
Based on this simulator, I have concluded that most of "autism" is just a pathologization of normal human personality characteristics which are simply not well aligned with the expectations of the culture which presently dominates.

For example, sensitivity to background noise is an extremely normal thing which is strongly correlated with intelligence.

Similarly, the tendency to get caught up in learning about interesting things instead of paying attention to boring things. This is just another sign of intelligence.

Another example: I also have to "mask" in social situations, and I find it exhausting. But it is only exhausting in the presence of alien people who expect alien behavior. If I am around my own people, or if I have enough power to simply defy expectations and behave normally, then there is no exhaustion. If people like me were in control, then "normal" people would have to mask, and they would find it exhausting.

So, there is no "disorder" here. You are just an intelligent person who lives in enemy territory, and who struggles to conform to their expectations, which are completely alien to your nature.

Conclusion. If you are struggling with "autism", the solution is to band together and seek power.
by AlotOfReading | 2025-10-01 23:21:43+00:00
It's on my free-time backlog to spend more time with Fil-C, so I'm not disagreeing from lack of interest.

Most of annex-J is unrelated to memory safety. No, C has explicit UB because there wasn't a defined behavior that made sense to codify in the standards process. Signed overflow, invalid printf specifiers, and order of evaluation for example. I assume Fil-C doesn't fix things like uninitialized memory or division by zero either.

Wasn't really getting into the GC because that's "just" an engineering issue, rather than a structural issue with the approach.

It'd be great to not only terminate on detecting these issues as Fil-C does, but prevent them from happening entirely.
Ask HN: How do you handle application spam via Who's Hiring?
by lumens | 2025-10-01 23:22:04+00:00
I'm asking specifically for people who post in the Hacker News "Who's Hiring" thread. But anyone who is a hiring manager dealing with this problem, I'm very curious about your answer as well.

I'm sure most of you have seen, as I have, spam applications skyrocket over the last few years with aid of LLMs.

High-intent people applying to your company should be a great pool and incredible signal. But the low signal-to-noise ratio, given the amount of spam, makes the juice almost not worth the squeeze.

Do you have any mechanisms in place to handle this? If so, what are they?
by VHRanger | 2025-10-01 23:22:22+00:00
I don't disagree with you and I agree that the stereotype of autistic people as lacking empathy is harmful and generally untrue.

HOWEVER - the person I was replying to was mentioning them being hurt by the behaviors, and that signals a lack of empathy from the individual doing thise actions.

Even apart from behavioral disorders, there's comorbidities -- autism is comorbid with ADHD and ADHD is highly comorbid with a lot of conduct disorders and personality disorders.

So it could be any of that. But my basic point is that for the person I'm replying to all of this complexity simplifies if you instead focus on the effect of the other person's behaviors on you. That's what you have control over.
by smcin | 2025-10-01 23:23:17+00:00
The obvious problem quadrant is if you work on something that has huge meaning to you personally, but no or negative use to most people. Meaning can have both intrinsic and extrinsic components.

Inevitably you have to compromise on what is the most meaningful thing to achieve some reasonably happy balance. How much compromise, how you internalize it to yourself, etc. you have to figure out.
by quechimba | 2025-10-01 23:24:06+00:00
Location: Colombia Remote: Yes, or in Medellín Willing to relocate: No Technologies: Ruby, Rails, Node, React, TypeScript, CSS, Next.js, Postgres, and more! Résumé/CV: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1u8lj0Hes9jugQt2l7_ZrMxgPVkk7zJU1/view?usp=drivesdk Email: it's in my CV
by singlepaynews | 2025-10-01 23:24:20+00:00
Location: Washington State, USA Remote: on-site, hybrid, remote Willing to relocate: Yes Technologies:

- Programming Languages: Python, C/C++, JavaScript (Node.js, React), SQL, Bash, HTML/CSS

- Frameworks & Libraries: Selenium, BeautifulSoup, Flask, Express.js, React, SemanticUI, MUI

- AI & Data Tools: PyTorch, llama.cpp, LoRA fine-tuning, Pandas, NumPy, Matplotlib

- Cloud & DevOps: AWS (EC2, RDS, SES, S3, Route 53), Docker, Kubernetes, Git, GitHub Actions, Tailscale, NixOS (yes, flake.nix is a DevOps tool.)

- Databases: PostgreSQL, MySQL, SQLite, MongoDB, DuckDB, RocksDB

- Automation & Scripting: RPA tools, PDF form automation, Web scraping, CLI utilities

- Systems & Platforms: NixOS, Linux, Windows, macOS, VirtualBox, FFmpeg

- Networking & Protocols: TCP/IP, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth/BLE, REST APIs, WebSockets

- Other Tools: PyInstaller, NSIS, Chrome WebDriver, PLC, FANUC, HMI, Oscilloscope, Function Generator

Résumé/CV: douglasmckinley.com Email: mail@cadocary.com
by HiyaRecruiting | 2025-10-01 23:24:51+00:00
Hiya Is HIYAring an AI Engineer in Seattle!

https://www.hiya.com/company/careers?ashby_jid=5d361735-05a7...

AI Engineers are responsible for developing and integrating AI solutions into Hiya’s products, focusing on rapid iteration, prompt engineering, and practical application. You'll fine-tune and optimize foundation models, craft sophisticated multi-agent systems, and invent novel solutions to power the next generation of voice intelligence.
by g413n | 2025-10-01 23:25:43+00:00
def agree on the setup fees, that was just a price crunch to get it done within the weekend. (too short-notice for professional services, too sensitive for craigslist, so basically just paying a bunch of folks we already knew and trusted)

for IPXE do you have any reference material you'd recommend? we had 3 people each with reasonably substantial server experience try for like 6 hours each and for whatever reason it turned out to be too difficult.
by SchemaLoad | 2025-10-01 23:25:48+00:00
For me masking at work is more boring than it is effort. Most coworkers i've encountered are so plain that the moment you start discussing something personal that isn't the most sanitised hobby ever they get funny. Tell them you spent the weekend at an illegal rave or getting drunk at a furry convention and they start to freak out. It's no effort to not talk about this but it also means there's basically nothing to discuss.
by derefr | 2025-10-01 23:26:31+00:00
C++ is used in many non-low-level domains simply because of performance, due to the many kinds of zero-runtime-overhead abstractions it offers. There are e.g. popular game engines written in C++. LLVM is written in C++. Some DBMSes are written in C++. Etc.

C# overlaps C++ in all these “performance-sensitive high-level code” domains.
by johnnyanmac | 2025-10-01 23:27:06+00:00
Our estimates are not keeping up with modern trends.

for example: you hear a new business forms. You know from historic data that a new business adds an average of 6 new jobs. So you estimate 6 and later on you get on the ground for proper counting.

In reality, this "business" is a single person doordash/uber gig worker. So you need to revise down 5 of those jobs. Maybe even 6, because maybe you counted the fact that there are X doordashers and Y uber drivers, but did not account for overlap. So you revise from 7 jobs added, to 1. Maybe 0 if that gig worker was laid off recently.

If this happens en masse, you get drastic revisions across the board. But this is usually desired by any president because fewer people look at revised numbers . Because revisions are usually small adjustments and normal. That good faith has clearly ended.