MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by seguri | 2025-11-04 14:49:22+00:00
Location: Switzerland

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies:

- Backend: Java, Kotlin, Javascript, Typescript, Python, Spring Boot, Hibernate, Node.js, Django, Kafka, Postgres, Mongo, Redis, Kubernetes, Docker, AWS, Azure, GCP

- Frontend: Javascript, Typescript, React, Tailwind CSS, Biome

Résumé/CV: on request

Email: hn.9eqrl@simplelogin.com

Summary: Results-driven Senior Backend Engineer with 14 years of experience and a passion for developing robust and scalable software solutions. Proactive and resourceful, combines strong technical expertise with excellent problem-solving and verbal communication skills to drive project success and foster team collaboration. Adept at translating complex technical concepts to non-technical stakeholders and continuously learning new technologies.
by logicchains | 2025-11-04 14:49:36+00:00
>And Plato had no grounding in biology, and so his work here was quite interesting but also quite wrong.

Defining what a word should mean doesn't require any understanding of biology unless you make the assumption that it's a biology-related word. Why should the definition of "thinking" have any reference to biology? If you assume it does, then you're basically baking in the assumption that machines can't think.
by vel0city | 2025-11-04 14:50:42+00:00
> Steam engines get more coal-efficient and that means there are more of them burning more coal.

This misses the key part that actually makes it Jevons Paradox: the reduced cost of operating the machine opened up new industries and applications that massively grew which made overall usage increase.

Something could get more efficient and still have the same number of units in the end. Washing machines have gotten more efficient over time and yet it's not like we have tons more washing machines in the US.
by lightamulet | 2025-11-04 14:50:47+00:00
Trying to represent sudoku as an integer program leads to a natural way to represent the board: a 9x9x9 boolean grid where x and y are the board dimensions and z is the number in each square.

You end up with three symmetric constraints + the box constraint:

- The sum along any x, y, or z row is 1 (one of each number per row, one of each number per column, and one number per square)

- The sum of each 3x3x1 box slice is 1 (one of each number per box)

I really like the symmetry between the row sum constraints here. And it does pretty neatly align with the way many people solve Sudoku by writing little numbers in the squares to represent possible values before pruning impossible ones.
by slightwinder | 2025-11-04 14:51:05+00:00
Turtles are old-school, farming is the new cool. Is there a dating-option? Just asking as a Stardew Valley-friend..

OK, jokes aside. I've started playing this, when 1.0 was released some weeks ago, and this is quite good for what it is. It's doing many things the right way, like allowing coding with an external editor, having a proper coding-experience even with the built-in tools, and collectable hats.

Everyone should buy this and learn the basics. It's cheap enough for most people.
by epolanski | 2025-11-04 14:51:10+00:00
I wrote a longer post, but I'll keep it short: you can't compare 100 small res cameras + an inference engine that combines the samples together (our brain with low res foveal samples) on the same metrics you'd judge a single camera with 100x more res. They simply see, resolve and process things differently.

To stick with your example: the pilots that "see" aircraft at 4 nautical miles don't "see" them because their foveas have super human pixel density. But because high-contrast very low res foveal samples + contextual inference + motion + time, give more time to the brain to infer the presence of the aircraft. But if you had the ability to stop the motion and image the very same aircraft would "disappear".
by WBrentWilliams | 2025-11-04 14:51:26+00:00
I'm old.

My boss (and mentor) from 25 years ago told me to think of the problems I was solving with a 3-step path:

1. Get a solution working

2. Make the solution correct

3. Make the solution efficient

Most importantly, he emphasizes that the work must be done in that order. I've taken that everywhere with me.

I think one of the problems is that quite often, due to business pressure to ship, step 3 is simply skipped. Often, software is shipped half-way through step 2 -- software that is at best partially correct.

The pushes the problem down to the user, who might be building a system around the shipped code. This compounds the problem of software bloat, as all the gaps have to be bridged.
by adamzwasserman | 2025-11-04 14:51:46+00:00
TFA lists maintainability as a benefit of bloat ("modularity, extensibility, code patterns make it easier to maintain"). Completely ignores how bloat harms maintainability by making code unknowable.

Stack enough layers - framework on library on abstraction on dependency - and nobody understands what the system does anymore. Can't hold it in your head. Debugging becomes archaeology through 17 layers of indirection. Features work. Nobody knows why. Nobody dares touch them.

TFA touches this when discussing complexity ("people don't understand how the entire system works"). But treats it as a separate issue. It's not. Bloat creates unknowable systems. Unknowable systems are unmaintainable by definition.

The "developer time is more valuable than CPU cycles" argument falls apart here. You're not saving time. You're moving the cost. The hours you "saved" pulling in that framework? You pay them back with interest every time someone debugs a problem spanning six layers of abstraction they don't understand
by grayhatter | 2025-11-04 14:52:22+00:00
The contrast between your first and last paragraph is... unexpected

> It may be that this tech produces clear, rational, chain of logic writeups, but it's not clear that just because we also do that after thinking that it is only thinking that produces writeups.

I appreciate the way you describe this idea, I find it likely I'll start describing it the same way. But then you go on to write:

> Regardless, I submit that we should always treat human thought/spirit as unknowable and divine and sacred, and that anything that mimics it is a tool, a machine, a deletable and malleable experiment. If we attempt to equivocate human minds and machines there are other problems that arise, and none of them good - either the elevation of computers as some kind of "super", or the degredation of humans as just meat matrix multipliers.

Which I find to be the exact argument that you started by discarding.

It's not clear that equating organic, and synthetic thought will have any meaningful outcome at all, let alone worthy of baseless anxiety that it must be bad. Equally it seems absolutely insane to claim that anything is unknowable, and that because humanity doesn't have a clear foundational understanding that we should pretend that it's either devine, or sacred. Having spent any time watching the outcome of the thoughts of people, neither devine nor sacred are reasonable attributes to apply, but more importantly, I'd submit that you shouldn't be afraid to explore things you don't know, and you shouldn't advocate for others to adopt your anxieties.
by looobay | 2025-11-04 14:52:38+00:00
There was research on LLMs training and distillation that if two models have a similar architecture (probably the case for Xai) the "master" model will distill knowledge to the model even if its not in the distillation data. So they probably need to train a new model from scratch.

(sorry i don't remember the name but there was an example with a model liking howl to showcase this)
by logicchains | 2025-11-04 14:52:40+00:00
>I don't get why you would say that. it's just auto-completing. It cannot reason. It won't solve an original problem for which it has no prior context to "complete" an approximated solution with. you can give it more context and more data,but you're just helping it complete better. it does not derive an original state machine or algorithm to solve problems for which there are no obvious solutions. it instead approximates a guess (hallucination).

I bet you can't give an example such written problem that a human can easily solve but no LLM can.
by JohnFen | 2025-11-04 14:52:49+00:00
> I usually just go with the most popular, but I'm not sure this a good proxy for quality

Popularity is a poor proxy for quality.

I often start with Wikipedia, just to get a feel for the topic. Then I try to identify those people and works that are widely considered fundamental to the field and focus on those. For the most part, I ignore YouTube and documentaries. The signal/noise ratio in them is too low to be worthwhile.

I also avoid using genAI, because you have to have some level of expertise in the subject in order to be able to spot when genAI is misleading you, and if I'm just learning, I lack that expertise.
by pi_22by7 | 2025-11-04 14:53:21+00:00
You do use AI! And I do too, I started my work with AI about 2 years after you did, and the experience and opinions I have match yours to a T. However, I have tried AI to do things from scratch multiple times, and the fact still remains that you have to gently nudge it like you would a junior dev. This is not a new discussion but its still worth mentioning. About music generation, I feel nervous when AI and art intersect, might be because of my background and art hobbies. Finally, boring AI is probably the best AI out there. Silently ironing out the issues and friction we face in our day-to-day without really being very flashy and glam. Also worries me that we are calling everything AI lately even if its ML or just a smart algorithm. Good for marketing, I guess.
by dspillett | 2025-11-04 14:54:43+00:00
A big complaint with Electron that Tauri does avoid is that you package a specific browser with your app, ballooning the installer for every Electron app by the size of Chromium. The same with bundling NodeJS (or the equivalent backend for Tauri), but that isn't quite as weighty and the difference is which backend not whether it is there at all or not.

In either case you end up with a fresh instance of the browser (unless things have changed in Tauri since last time I looked), distinct from the one serving you generally as an actual browser, so both do have the same memory footprint in that respect. So you are right, that is an issue for both options, but IME people away from development seem more troubled by the package size than interactive RAM use. Tauri apps are likely to start faster from cold as it is loading a complete new browser for which every last byte used needs to be rad from disk, I think the average non-dev user will be more concerned about that than memory use.

There have been a couple of projects trying to be Electron, complete with NodeJS, but using the user's currently installed & default browser like Tauri, and some other that replace the back-end with something lighter-weight, even more like Tauri, but most of them are currently unmaintained, still officially alpha, or otherwise incomplete/unstable/both. Electron has the properties of being here, being stable/maintained, and being good enough until it isn't (and once it isn't, those moving off it tend to go for something else completely rather than another system very like it) - it is difficult for a newer similar projects to compete with the momentum it has when the “escape route” from it is generally to something more completely different.
by runjake | 2025-11-04 14:54:48+00:00
Former “scummy contractor” here. So, a “contractor” being in the office is considered a mortal sin.

I don’t know why this is, but it’s always been this way. Workers don’t go into the building.

The office staff don’t want you there and if you stay too long, your fellow workers will rib you for hours about going to “the dark side”.

In my few years at the job, I had only been in the office area for 5 minutes to fill out some sort of paperwork. Most of that from when I was hired.

Seeing as he was in there on multiple occasions, he probably did establish rapport with the office staff, but left that out because it messed with the flow of the story.
by mceachen | 2025-11-04 14:55:00+00:00
I paid for college in part by doing digital prepress. We had CMYK and 8 and 12 color separations.

CMYK always has a dramatic color shift from any on-screen colorspace. Vivid green is really hard to get. Neons are (kinda obviously) impossible. And, hilariously/ironically (given how prevalent they are), all manor of skin tones are tough too.

Photoshop and Illustrator let you work in CMYK, and is directionally correct. Ask your printer if they accept those natively.
by mk89 | 2025-11-04 14:55:09+00:00
Ok then how about we stay all in topic and focus on the "links will now be open in background when tweets are shown"? Instead of focusing on the rich billionaire who wants to conquer the world....

BTW: it's normal to diverge or even say "also xyz does that s*". The issue is bigger than X, and more related to social media itself. As long as there is some respect or some argument...
by bayindirh | 2025-11-04 14:55:14+00:00
The appeal is the ability to make decent labels which can withstand almost all indoor use and abuse for a reasonable amount of time.

I generally hand-label my boxes and things with specialized ink, and they hold very well even after a decade.

But if I'm going to label a spice jar or something gonna handled a lot, I use the printer. It's legible, resistant/resilient enough and reprinting things is easy.
by shawndoherty | 2025-11-04 14:55:21+00:00
Location: 72 PLYMOUTH AVE BRAINTREE, MA 02184

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: Yes

Technologies: DevOps, Kubernetes, Terraform, Terragrunt, Ansible, Jenkins, AWS, GCP, Azure, GPU Infra(Coreweave, Runpod, LambdaLabs), AI/ML, Python, Serverless Framework

Resume/CV: https://shawn-doherty.vercel.app/cv

Email: shawndoherty24238@gmail.com

Summary: DevOps Engineer with 11 years of experience designing, automating, and optimizing infrastructure for AI-driven and SaaS platforms. Proficient in cloud architecture (AWS, Azure), containerization (Docker, Kubernetes), and CI/CD automation using Jenkins and GitHub Actions. Highly skilled in Infrastructure as Code (Terraform) and the deployment of large-scale AI/LLM workloads leveraging NVIDIA GPUs, CUDA, and Triton Inference Server. Recognized for delivering high-availability, scalable, and secure platforms that accelerate innovation and bridge the gap between development and operations.
by fainpul | 2025-11-04 14:55:30+00:00
But it doesn't. You can talk about micro-motors, implemented on a PCB, like [1] and get a number in the same ballpark. That's the whole point – it's a ratio, it tells you nothing about the absolute size of the motor.

[1] https://tymagnets.com/pcb-motors-and-wedge-magnets/
by quitspamming | 2025-11-04 14:55:53+00:00
We're not talking about starting wars versus getting involved in existing conflicts, we're not even talking about right versus wrong, we're talking about Pentagon spending and who benefits. The U.S. giving Ukraine our older weapons stockpiles so we can create NEW stockpiles doesn't speak to who started what, but that Democrats were sure in favor of increased spending while Republicans weren't. The assertion was one party always wants more spending on "defense" while one party doesn't. It simply isn't true, both parties are happy to find justifications to increase the Pentagon's budget.
by as1mov | 2025-11-04 14:56:01+00:00
Here's me complaining[1] about the login walls way back in 2021, this was before the Elon takeover.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28268365

Edit: Some more posts -

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28289263

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28281472
by amy_petrik | 2025-11-04 14:56:35+00:00
> but every second you waste thinking about revenge is a second the bully won another time. It's also another second you are not dedicating for the people you love and care.

I agree with this and this is why I'm an advocate of fighting back on the spot, yelling, etc, if it's someone crossing a boundary such that it'll bother you forever. Because if you hold you ground, it's over and you held your ground, nothing to be upset about again.
by donromano | 2025-11-04 14:57:00+00:00
Location: Paris, France

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: Yes

Technologies: C, C++, Python, Go, Lua, x86 assembly

Résumé/CV: https://romainaugier.com

Email: contact@romainaugier.com

I am a self-taught software engineer, focusing on low-level, high-performance software development, with experience in production environment delivering stable, fast and reliable software. I am interested in maths, computer graphics, compilers, programming in general, and I can get my hands on anything new language/tech very quickly and can adapt easily. Feel free to reach out!
by dredmorbius | 2025-11-04 14:57:03+00:00
There are numerous "atypical" piston engine layouts, though I cannot recall precisely where I'd seen a reference, probably on YouTube ~10 years ago.

The basics are a single piston, dual (often opposed at an angle or flat-head design as on older BMW motorcycles), in-line (usually 4-cylinder), or V (as in V-6, V-8, V-12, etc.)

Then there are radial engines used in piston-driven aircraft. These virtually always have an odd cylinder count, to prevent locking (there's always an unbalanced force in the direction of intended rotation, or so one hopes).

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radial_engine>

There are various rotary engines, with the Wankel design best known. Very high power-to-weight ratios as a result of having three combustion chambers per rotor, but a relative short lifecycle due to wear, and some compromises in efficiency. "Flying car" company Moller International, out of Davis, CA (and apparently inactive since 2015) had at its core a Wankel-based powerplant, with four pairs of counter-rotating engines powering four ducted fans. It sounds like all the angry hornets in operation.

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moller_M400_Skycar>

Wikipedia lists some other unusual designs as well: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reciprocating_engine#Miscellan...>.

I believe that the axial engine may have been featured in that video mentioned in 'graph 1:

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axial_engine>
by Workaccount2 | 2025-11-04 14:57:04+00:00
"To escape the paradox, we invoke what we call the “Homunculus Defense”: inside every human is a tiny non-stochastic homunculus that provides true understanding. This homunculus is definitionally not a stochastic parrot because:

1. It has subjective experience (unprovable but assumed)

2. It possesses free will (compatibilist definitions need not apply)

3. It has attended at least one philosophy seminar"[1]

[1]https://ai.vixra.org/pdf/2506.0065v1.pdf
by Retric | 2025-11-04 14:57:14+00:00
Screens and radios do a lot to limit battery life on most modern devices even if the energy use running the OS and user software was free.

If with a reasonable battery standby mode can only last a few weeks and active use is at best a few days then you might as well add a fairly beefy CPU and with a beefy CPU OS optimizations only go so far. This is why eInk devices can end up with such a noticeably longer lifespan, they now have a reason to put in a weak CPU and do some optimization because the possibility of a long lifespan is a huge potential selling point.
by danielscrubs | 2025-11-04 14:57:27+00:00
In theory everything will work fine, with models being sent to Apple as weights. In practice, Gemini will probably be a huge service with a lot of Google consultants doing remote work in Apples cloud… with debug info being sent directly to Google… all with contracts saying it is not allowed to use the data for anything else than “improving their services“.

If Google only gets money from this, Id be happily surprised, but this is an ad company with sharp finance sharks…
by andreareina | 2025-11-04 14:57:37+00:00
This is a meme that fails to understand the actual, in practice limitations of BMI. The problem is that it underdiagnoses obesity, not that it overdiagnoses it. The problem isn't the nonexistent horde of lean muscular people with BMI > 25, it's all the clinically obese people with BMI < 30 thinking that yeah they're overweight but it's not that bad, they're not obese.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2877506/#:~:text=BM...
by nickledave | 2025-11-04 14:58:05+00:00
I'm not going to read this -- I don't need to. The replies here are embarrassing enough.

This is what happens when our entire culture revolves around the idea that computer programmers are the most special smartest boys.

If you even entertain even for a second the idea that a computer program that a human wrote is "thinking", then you don't understand basic facts about: (1) computers, (2) humans, and (3) thinking. Our educational system has failed to inoculate you against this laughable idea.

A statistical model of language will always be a statistical model of language, and nothing more.

A computer will never think, because thinking is something that humans do, because it helps them stay alive. Computers will never be alive. Unplug your computer, walk away for ten years, plug it back in. It's fine--the only reason it won't work is planned obsolescence.

No, I don't want to read your reply that one time you wrote a prompt that got ChatGPT to whisper the secrets of the universe into your ear. We've known at least since Joseph Weizenbaum coded up Eliza that humans will think a computer is alive if it talks to them. You are hard-wired to believe that anything that produces language is a human just like you. Seems like it's a bug, not a feature.

Stop commenting on Hacker News, turn off your phone, read this book, and tell all the other sicko freaks in your LessWrong cult to read it too: https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262551328/a-drive-to-survive/ Then join a Buddhist monastery and spend a lifetime pondering how deeply wrong you were.
by dahart | 2025-11-04 14:58:08+00:00
Have you looked at the actual ink colors? Printing is a very different story. They’re not using 12 primaries, they’re using multiple gradations of the same primary. I don’t know which ink set you used, but 5 different grayscale values is common in a 12-ink set. Here’s an example of a 12 ink set:

https://www.amazon.com/Xeepton-Cartridge-Replacement-PFI4100...

There’s only 1 extra color there: red. There are multiple blacks, multiple cyans, multiple yellows, and multiple magentas. The reason printers use more than 3 inks is for better tone in gradations, better gloss and consistency. It’s not because there’s anything wrong with 3D color models. It’s because they’re a different medium than TVs. Note that most color printers take 3D color models as input, even when they use more than 3 inks.
by everdrive | 2025-11-04 14:58:08+00:00
Because until recently (I'm talking last 150-40 years here depending on how we want to define thinking) the only things that could think were various animals. And so 100% of their systems for thinking were rooted in biology. If an LLM can think (and I'm partial to thinking that it can) it's going to different in a number of ways from how a person would think. They may be some overlap, but there will be all these human / biology / evolutionary psychology things which are really person-specific. Even just basic stuff such as seeing faces in the clouds, or falling prey to appeals of emotion. (ie, because our thinking is wrapped up in other processes such as status / ego / survival / etc.) Thinking has only been biological for a long, long time. Non-biological thinking is pretty new, even if you extend it back to the early days of computing.
by lossyalgo | 2025-11-04 14:58:17+00:00
haha that's a great analogy!

How about non-determinism (i.e. hallucinations)? Ask a human ANY question 3 times and they will give you the same answer, every time, unless you prod them or rephrase the question. Sure the answer might be wrong 3 times, but at least you have consistency. Then again, maybe that's a disadvantage for humans!