MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by MSFT_Edging | 2025-10-21 14:44:33+00:00
This conversation is silly. The lovely Haiti watchers who ignore historical contexts and the effects of a couple centuries of foreign involvement in their sovereignty has no effect in regards to modern material circumstances.

The only things that matter, according to those who love to shit on Haiti, is their apparent inability to self govern. This inability must have come from nowhere, or is genetically innate to the people.

It's crazy how every country who has had it's sovereign legs kicked out from under them multiple times just ends up being a failed state. Total mystery!
by e40 | 2025-10-21 14:44:42+00:00
For now. I'm not being snarky or hyperbolic. Today's Daily pod is related. I'm half way through and no mention of voting yet, but it takes no imagination to see where this is going. Remember the whole "Obama wasn't a citizen" thing? Remember the "illegal aliens elected Joe Biden?" The best way to disenfranchise a segment of the population is to give them difficulty proving they are citizens, so they cannot vote.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/21/podcasts/trump-civil-righ...

The guest of this pod is the creator of the 1619 project and she is against DEI.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_1619_Project
by Cthulhu_ | 2025-10-21 14:45:21+00:00
Well that's just the empty booster; what they plan to do next with v3 is refueling in space, but what I haven't heard anything about yet is landing on the moon, crew compartiments, cargo, and launching again. Any one of those is years of development and testing.

I mean don't get me wrong, it's exciting and I'm grateful to be alive for these developments along with all access insight in the process and high definition video of the tests and I really hope they make it. But it won't be fast or cheap.
by rorylaitila | 2025-10-21 14:45:37+00:00
Yeah, the output is json structured, but I mean the entity value that is returned. A simple case is classifying the Brand of the ad. It might return any of "Ford", "Ford Motor Company", "Ford Trucks", "The Ford Motor Company", "Lincoln Ford" even on very similar ads. Rather than try to enhance the prompt like "always use 'Ford Motor Company' for every kind of Ford" I just accept whatever the value is. I have a dictionary that maps all brands back to a canonical brand on my end.
by project2501 | 2025-10-21 14:45:52+00:00
> Everything in the VB UI editor was based on a fixed layout. There was a fixed font size, fixed DPI-density display expectation, and fixed button sizes. Every dialog assumed fixed sizes and was non-resizable

Yes, everything in the layout was fixed, unless you chose to resize it through code

I've developed many applications in VB that dynamically resized every control to maintain a consistent UI regardless of the window size

I mean, simple things like this

textarea.width = form.width - ( textarea.left * 2 )

to keep it centered and preserved the margins

Granted, for complex layouts, it quickly evolved into a dedicated procedure to resize all controls in the correct order and handle edge cases. But it was absolutely doable, even by an amateur teenage programmer

I think other IDEs (Delphi maybe?) had anchors and other helpful features to assist with resizing
by dangus | 2025-10-21 14:45:54+00:00
The richest man in the world, a proven liar and baseless accuser of others, runs a social media platform he uses specifically to alter the political views of others for his financial benefit, doesn't deserve any level of benefit of the doubt or gracious fact-checking as he does not hold himself to that standard.

No one with his level of wealth should exist as a basic concept.

I submit the policy proposal that anyone who over $1 billion in net worth should lose all constitutional rights. If you are willing to hoard that much wealth for yourself without using it to help others you deserve nothing. You don't even need rights at that point.

Elon Musk's current net worth is about $500 billion. It only costs $40 billion/year to end world hunger. For the entire world. [1]

That's only 8% of his net worth.

He paid more to buy Twitter as a hobby than it would have cost him to end world hunger for a year.

In other words, Elon Musk could single-handedly end world hunger by liquidating his assets and it would be probably not even empty his portfolio, possibly ever if it were well-managed.

You only need $10 million to never work again and live a very generous lifestyle withdrawing at least 5x the US median income for yourself forever until you die, and Elon has hoarded that amount of wealth FIFTY THOUSAND TIMES.

[1] https://www.wfpusa.org/news/how-much-would-it-cost-to-end-wo...
by cratermoon | 2025-10-21 14:46:14+00:00
> This is why data driven purchasing is key.

Many years ago I failed to convince my employer how buying their programmers less expensive computers with 5400rpm hard drives was an overall loss compared to 7200rpm disk drives. My argument was that any programming necessarily entailed reading and writing dozens to hundreds files all the time, especially during compile cycles. Maybe if I'd had data showing the actual time lost waiting? Or maybe I was a dumb kid trying to justify my desire to have a nicer computer for my daily driver.
by Culonavirus | 2025-10-21 14:47:26+00:00
To anyone not getting it still. SpaceX position in rocketry is comparable to that of Nvidia in AI GPUs. Thinking that Blue or anyone else will be beating them in anything any time soon is simply naive. Blue is the AMD here. The AMD that is today where Nvidia was 5 years ago. That's just the way it is. Also, like Nvidia, SpaceX has a massive budget for R&D. Just the revenue from Starlink is projected to eclipse the entire NASA budget within a couple of years, maybe sooner.
by PaulHoule | 2025-10-21 14:47:30+00:00
They benchmark two different feeds of dangerous tweets:

(1) a feed of the most popular tweets based on likes, retweets, and such (2) an algorithmic feed that looks for clickbait in the text

and blend these in different proportions to a feed of random tweets that are not popular nor clickbait and find that feed (1) has more of damaging effect on the performance of chatbots. That is, they feed that blend of tweets into the model and then they ask the models to do things and get worse outcomes.
by PaulDavisThe1st | 2025-10-21 14:48:35+00:00
The pthread API, defined by POSIX, and referred to in TFA's title as "linux threads", concerns kernel threads. Pthreads does not provide user-space threads in any implementation I am aware of, and is not intended to (though it likely could be done). The API is intended to allow a process to have multiple execution contexts that can be scheduled by the kernel independently.
by bluedino | 2025-10-21 14:48:46+00:00
> After I learned C and started using it, I noted that I experience five times more memory-related issues in C programs than in an equivalent Pascal code I was writing before.

I wasted so much productive time learning/writing C for the sake of learning/writing C instead of just doing the work in Pascal back then.

Later on I had the same problem, I already knew Rails but wanted to do Python/Django just becuase.
by chasd00 | 2025-10-21 14:48:56+00:00
There's some computer lore out there about someone tripping a fire alarm by accident or some other event that triggered a gas system used to put out fires without water but isn't exactly compatible with life. The story goes some poor sys admin had to stand there with their finger on like a pause button until the fire department showed up to disarm the system. If they released the button the gas would flood the whole DC.
by brazzy | 2025-10-21 14:48:57+00:00
> To their great dismay, the engineer in Australia could not open the safe because the combination was stored in the now-offline password manager.

Classic.

In my first job I worked on ATM software, and we had a big basement room full of ATMs for test purposes. The part the money is stored in is a modified safe, usually with a traditional dial lock. On the inside of one of them I saw the instructions on how to change the combination. The final instruction was: "Write down the combination and store it safely", then printed in bold: "Not inside the safe!"
by addaon | 2025-10-21 14:49:11+00:00
“Up to X” produces a relatively strong bias for producing X yesses. “For each of these possible labels, write a sentence describing whether it applies or not, then summarize with the word Yes or No” does a bounded amount of thinking per label and removes the bias, at the cost of using more tokens (in your pre-processing phase) and requiring a bit of post-processing.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-10-21 14:49:35+00:00
> let’s complete what we cede fuck-it-up worth to: Single-handedly secured the outcome of an election because he’s worth a lot, then, he’s allowed to be DOGE and fuck more shit up just because he’s worth a lot

This strikes me as more of an indictment of money in politics.

Musk didn't need half a trillion dollars to influence the election and trash our government. He needed a few hundred million. We should be able to create a system where a man, even a very rich man, cannot rent the most powerful position in the history of humanity with a few hundred million dollars.
by sofixa | 2025-10-21 14:49:47+00:00
It's not 5 years behind, engine tech is more on a ~15 year cycle, or even more.

CFM LEAP, latest short-to-medium-haul airliner engine from CFM (GE+Safran) is from 2013 (first run). Its predecessor, CFM56, is from 1974 (first run) and saw a few evolutions, including as late as 2009.
by JustExAWS | 2025-10-21 14:50:10+00:00
I call it a “gravity problem”. I might not like or completely understand gravity. But it makes no sense to complain about it. I’m not going to jump out of a window on the 30th floor.

If you want to make $150K+ straight out of college and $259K+ a year three years into your career, you play the game. If you don’t want to play the game, accept the reduced amount of money from staying in enterprise dev.

At 51, I would rather get a daily anal probe with a cactus than deal with any lathe company especially BigTech again and I’m definitely not going to chase after a job where I have to work in an office. But I know what I’ve been giving up for the last 2+ years by ignoring recruiters from GCP’s internal consulting division based on my stances.

But again, I’m also 51, I’ve done the build the big house in the burbs thing twice and I have grown (step)children that I’ve raised since they were 9 and 14 who don’t live with us
by duxup | 2025-10-21 14:50:18+00:00
>"Some content can make you feel good and help you to lean into your work," Greenbaum said.

To riff off this a bit ... this is also the content I WANT.

I want to know what other users like, are doing, enjoying.

I have very little interest in what thing or trend or person people hate / don't like and so on. Now it is their account to share what they want with, but it's also what I do not want to consume.

I gave up on Twitter when some folks I followed for programming content started going off on rants and arguments about some stuff and went from people whose skills I admire to looking like unusually immature jr high students :(. I just didn't want to spend that much time curating my feed when I often never saw much of what I wanted.
by duped | 2025-10-21 14:50:24+00:00
> the key question is how to convert an inherently continuous signal (speech/audio) into a discrete set of tokens

Did Claude Shannon not answer this question in 1948? You need at least 1 bit per 6dB of dynamic range for each symbol and 2B symbols per second where B is the bandwidth of the signal.

Compression techniques are all about getting below that fundamental limit but it's not like this is an unsolved problem. Or is 1kbaud too much for LLMs?
by jjkaczor | 2025-10-21 14:50:49+00:00
Ah - true true - OTOH, many of my artist (and former) friends absolutely hate AI prompted "art" and post much commentary to that effect.

Myself I find it very useful because I have no ability to create art/images on my own - never could.

(And the irony of those "feelings" are that this is probably how many managers / BA's/non-technical people feel about prompted "vibe coding")
by blackcatsec | 2025-10-21 14:51:02+00:00
I guess it depends on the objective of the relative programs. SpaceX made for an ambitious project, that to date, appears to have bitten off more than it can chew:

A full-flow staged combustion engine, which proven works (yay) most of the time (not yay). If you follow the Starship launches, look at the random engines that go out on the Super Heavy every time it launches. The engines going out during ascent aren't planned outages.

A rapidly re-usable second stage. This is by far the most challenging part of the program. It turns out, returning things from space is mad difficult. And while I think it's great that we are investigating ways to make this happen, I'm a bit bearish on whether Starship itself will be the vehicle and team that ultimately figures this out. However, at the very least, there's a ton of science being done here that will ultimately help making this a reality.

Starship isn't returning in any meaningfully reusable form just yet. And while they've figured out how to get the thing up suborbital, there's yet no guarantee on the survivability of the vehicle itself. I am for sure certain that Elon is very likely unhappy with having to use heat shield tiles because they are not reusable. We don't yet know the stresses on the vehicle itself when returning from space and just how reusable the second stage actually is. Nor, for that matter, just how usable the second stage is.

Do I think they'll figure out how to get it to orbit? Of course. Do I think they'll figure out how to make it rapidly reusable? I'm not sure. And we won't yet know for a couple of years.

Getting a payload to LEO as far as rocket launches are concerned is "easy" relative to the loftier goals of the Moon, and by much further extension, Mars. The Moon is significantly harder to pull off and that's why the Saturn V was a 3-stage rocket.

In order to make all of this worth it, Starship and Super Heavy must be rapidly reusable--with a turnaround measured in hours/days, not weeks and months. And I'm just not sure it's there yet. Which really sucks, because getting mass to orbit is critically important for us to dominate our solar system.

I think the research is important, personally. And I'm glad we're investing at least some money into these projects. But there's no way Starship and Super Heavy meet the timelines allocated. But I'm wishing the best for the team to figure out something. And if not them, then some future generation that piggybacks off of the work they did to do it better.
by CaptainOfCoit | 2025-10-21 14:51:23+00:00
> I'd rather use a collapsible UI for that, if you prefer to have hundreds of scripts in folders that's fine too.

No, I don't (what a shitty strawman), I create abstractions then, like any other project. Surely you don't have hundreds of completely original and bespoke requests? Previously I've handled thousands of requests by having a .csv to load from.
by ajkjk | 2025-10-21 14:51:34+00:00
Feel this strongly. That all of the "autocomplete"-style improvements that LLMs to programming are indications of massive deficiencies in programming: we're in many ways stuck in a ~2010-era model of what programming is, which is actually quite medieval and useless.

Probably programs as "text that you run on a computer" is, long-term, not how anything is going to be done. After all, what is a prompt but a (lossy, error-prone, inexact) specification for a program, or at least part of a program, before you go in and modify it by hand? The code itself is just an interchange format, no different than JSON. Can we formalize that abstraction such that the prompt is an exact specification, just, at a super high level? AI-text generation makes it faster to write text, but no amount of text-generation gets around the fact that maybe text generation is... not... what we should be doing, actually. And the LLMs are going to be better working at that level also.

I really wish the people geeking out over LLMs would be geeking out over radical new foundational ideas instead. Picture Bret Victor-style re-imaginings of the whole programming experience. (I have loads of ideas myself which I've been trying to find some angle of attack for.) Hard work at improving the world looks like finding radically new approaches to problems, and there are loads of ways to make the world a better place that are being distracted from by the short-term view of working entirely in the existing paradigm.
by _fat_santa | 2025-10-21 14:52:20+00:00
Last year I purchased a Lenovo P15 Gen 1 used, originally it came with a sticker price of $5700 but I managed to get it used for ~$500. All these hyper expensive laptops fall into one of two buckets, either they are top end gaming rigs or they are like my Lenovo and designed for large engineering companies that will just lease them and not give a crap how much they cost.

For the average consumer though I highly recommend going on Ebay and finding these hyper expensive laptops used from a few years ago. Mine came with an i9 processor, an RTX 5000 and can support up to 128GB of RAM and even 5 years on those are still wild numbers except that same computer can be found for maybe 10-15% of the original price.

Though I will say one downside of buying one of these is they are customizable to an insane degree so finding the "right" one might take you a while (took me around a month to find mine).
by bilekas | 2025-10-21 14:52:30+00:00
Robots can't unionize so of course they hope to replace everyone in the US.

None of it will matter anyway, they're shoveling enough money to the right people to have any regulations or oversight squashed, nevermind the sheer number of jobs that will be lost, I might be wrong but it would be a dent in the national unemployment numbers ?

But who cares, they're paying the right people.
by mariusor | 2025-10-21 14:52:50+00:00
I think it's one thing to "know" in a cynical way what the world around you is, and another to have it confirmed by being immersed in it for any prolonged period of time.

Assumedly Ai Wei Wei would have established himself in a different location if he "knew" exactly how the attitudes he mentions are manifested in the German culture.
by ACCount37 | 2025-10-21 14:52:55+00:00
I do think that Blue Origin HLS is less complex overall, but I agree that they aren't dealing with the same kind of complexity. Both companies are playing to their strengths there.

A major weakness of SpaceX's HLS approach is that it requires them to launch a lot of the same vehicle in a fairly short succession. But SpaceX are the kings of high volume aerospace manufacturing, and they are the driving force behind US launch cadence going up. Even if Starship reusability isn't truly perfected in time for Artemis HLS, they are already building those Starships pretty fast, and can eat some refueling vehicle losses.

Blue Origin doesn't have the raw performance figures of Starship, or SpaceX's unmatched manufacturing and launch cadence. So their HLS architecture is lighter and less launch hungry. That comes at an engineering cost of having to use more specialized vehicles. And they are using LH2 fuel - which delivers more of a punch per weight, but is even harder to stay on top of than CH4. More engineering effort would be required to store and transfer that in orbit, dealing with boil-off and all - but Blue Origin has used liquid hydrogen extensively already, so they have experience with it.
by 6r17 | 2025-10-21 14:54:24+00:00
There are use-cases outside of "crypto" for blockchain - notably for security related use-cases such as historization ; tough I concede that use-case can be handled with more standard technologies it is very fun to get into it and study such use as it may have properties that could be interesting. One has to have some time for this but to be frank it's not really something super hard to pull-off (Bc itself conceptually)
Show HN: Docker/Model-Runner – Join Us in Revitalizing the DMR Community
by ericcurtin | 2025-10-21 14:54:25+00:00
Hey Hacker News,

We're the maintainers of docker/model-runner and wanted to share some major updates we're excited about.

Link: https://github.com/docker/model-runner

We are revitalizing the community:

https://www.docker.com/blog/revitalizing-model-runner-commun...

At its core, model-runner is a simple, backend-agnostic tool for downloading and running local large language models. Think of it as a consistent interface to interact with different model backends. One of our main backends is llama.cpp, and we make it a point to contribute any improvements we make back upstream to their project. It also allows people to transport models via OCI registries like Docker Hub. Docker Hub hosts our curated local AI model collection, packaged as OCI Artifacts and ready to run. You can easily download, share, and upload models on Docker Hub, making it a central hub for both containerized applications and the next wave of generative AI.

We've been working hard on a few things recently:

- Vulkan and AMD Support: We've just merged support for Vulkan, which opens up local inference to a much wider range of GPUs, especially from AMD.

- Contributor Experience: We refactored the project into a monorepo. The main goal was to make the architecture clearer and dramatically lower the barrier for new contributors to get involved and understand the codebase.

- It's Fully Open Source: We know that a project from Docker might raise questions about its openness. To be clear, this is a 100% open-source, Apache 2.0 licensed project. We want to build a community around it and welcome all contributions, from documentation fixes to new model backends.

- DGX Spark day-0 support, we've got it!

Our goal is to grow the community. We'll be here all day to answer any questions you have. We'd love for you to check it out, give us a star if you like it, and let us know what you think.

Thanks!
by verzali | 2025-10-21 14:54:32+00:00
Yes, but in the original schedule on HLS Starship was supposed to have done the prop transfer in Q4 2022, an uncrewed lunar landing in Q1 2024, and the actual thing in Q1 2025.

Of course that was always wishful thinking. I'm sure SpaceX has their "real" schedule somewhere, and maybe NASA has one too (at least from what I've heard, it is likely they have an unofficial idea of it somewhere).
by JohnFen | 2025-10-21 14:54:54+00:00
> These days, you can’t afford to wait any more than 24 hours to iterate your designs and try out changes to your software with real customers.

Software that does this to me is one of my pet peeves. It's a terrible practice for the end user, and is the main reason why I no longer use SaaS or allow installed software to update itself automatically.
by NoMoreNicksLeft | 2025-10-21 14:55:17+00:00
>I don't believe they can keep this up forever. Take Google which is dependent on Google Search. That their search is becoming actively worse is common knowledge, reason being more searches equates to more ads shown. If a company which respects you as a user comes around people will jump the boat.

I think their strategy is to poison the internet so thoroughly that no better search becomes possible. The costs alone to spin up a new search company are an enormous barrier to entry, they'd only need to erect a few more to make it impossible.