MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by nkmnz | 2025-11-28 01:32:55+00:00
Actually, that 0.7 intergenerational correlation only tracks surnames—i.e., the male line. It completely ignores the fact that ~50% of the population changes status by marriage, which is invisible in surname analysis. Think about it: when a blacksmith’s daughter marries a baron, her social mobility doesn’t show up anywhere in the data. She just becomes part of the baron’s lineage going forward. So Clark has discovered that patrilineal dynasties persist with 0.7 correlation, and then presented this as if it were a measure of social mobility. It’s not. It’s a measure of surname mobility. If assortative mating across 500 years averaged something like 0.5 (plausible—people married outside their exact status all the time), the actual population-wide status persistence might be closer to 0.4 than 0.7. That’s… a completely different story about how stratified society actually was. But sure, “elites persist for centuries” makes for better book sales than “we measured half the mobility and ignored the other half.”
by Nextgrid | 2025-11-28 01:35:17+00:00
Sorry, I didn’t mean to imply retiring (in the normal sense of the word) at 30 is normal or expected.

However I am close to 30 and I am considering “retiring” from a tech career and moving onto something else. That’s why I put “retired” in quotes. I will still work, just not in this increasingly-bullshit industry, and I’ve already reduced my usage/reliance on technology as much as possible in my personal life (I’m still rocking an iPhone SE3 on an outdated iOS version for example, as nothing since then fits my requirements. Similarly my Mac OS is also outdated).

I assumed people can decide to “retire” from a job regardless of age (and move onto something else if their finances demand to).

> how do you spend your young retirement days, does it ever feel like you have too much time but no reason to work towards anything since you have the money or are you still in the fight working towards some purpose

I’m nowhere near retirement in the common meaning of the word but I have some money saved up which allows me to spend a year or so away from the increasingly-bullshit technology industry in which I started my career. Besides the day-to-day necessities and entertainment the only way I’ve found to “fight towards some purpose” at the moment is to argue with techbros on HN because I see nothing on the tech market that would allow me to put my skills to good use, and unfortunately short selling is unavailable to me since I’m not in the US and can’t trivially “just buy puts on the companies you believe will fail”, so yelling at the cloud and hoping something will change is the best bet I have right now tech-wise.

I don’t even see open-source/altruism as a way to achieve what I want; the blocker preventing what I want in tech isn’t code, it’s monopolies that have the law (or at least the lawyers) on their side. No amount of code is going to change that, and I don’t have the resources to set a legal precedent confirming adversarial interoperability as legal and take on the worldwide tech industry who will no doubt put their entire war chests towards litigating against such a precedent.
by coolsunglasses | 2025-11-28 01:36:13+00:00
I'd love for someone to give me an alternative to CUDA but I don't primarily use GPUs for inference, I do 64-bit unsigned integer workloads and the only people who seem to care even a little about this currently are NVidia, if imperfectly.

I _really_ want an alternative but the architecture churn imposed by targeting ROCm for say an MI350X is brutal. The way their wavefronts and everything work is significantly different enough that if you're trying to get last-mile perf (which for GPUs unfortunately yawns back into the 2-5x stretch) you're eating a lot of pain to get the same cost-efficiency out of AMD hardware.

FPGAs aren't really any more cost effective unless the $/kwh goes into the stratosphere which is a hypothetical I don't care to contemplate.
by pandaman | 2025-11-28 01:36:24+00:00
A rational relief for being in the country illegally is a removal of such an individual from the country. Same as if somebody enters your house and you don't want them there, you don't ask for a dollar a day or to clean up the dishes, do you? You ask them to leave and call police if they refuse. This is where detention comes into play: people who don't want to leave the country need to be detained before forcibly transported outside the country's border, maybe in the future, when we invent instant teleportation, we will be able to just send them home without detention but the current realities do not allow for that.
by embedding-shape | 2025-11-28 01:36:44+00:00
A lot of the replacements are just a "services.grafana.enable = true;" or similar away. Of course, won't have fancy GUIs like in TrueNAS, but honestly, being able to keep it as source code feels better long-term. Otherwise it's all just configuration, like background scrubbing, backups and all that. The biggest reason I initially went with TrueNAS was because it used ZFS and could easily run services I wanna host at home, and NixOS ended up much better at both of those things, but definitively has less hand-holding.
by gilgoomesh | 2025-11-28 01:37:07+00:00
> Charlie Brown may have been as popular as any character in all of literature

Was he? Maybe this is true inside the US but from outside the US, I've always viewed the character as a peculiarly American artefact – something I was aware of but never really read or watched. This seemed to be reinforced by most major Charlie Brown titles seemingly tied to other American customs like Halloween and baseball.
by NoraCodes | 2025-11-28 01:40:45+00:00
How come ActivityPub gets shit for making people pick a server, but nobody complains about the mythical "average user" who is supposedly incapable of figuring anything out on their own when ATProto services ask them to understand DNS?

(It's because ATProto services targeted at average users are effectively centralized, which means everyone else has to put up with whatever Bluesky says or lose their access to the bulk of the network.)
by Mawr | 2025-11-28 01:40:53+00:00
> If there is ample memory available, why waste energy on that?

Cute argument, but there's no way for a program to know how much memory is available. And there is such a thing as "appropriate amount of memory for this task". Hint: "4GB+" / "unbounded" is not the right answer for an LSP on a <10k line project.

> Nonetheless, it's absolutely trivial to set a single parameter to limit memory usage and Java's GCs being absolute beasts, they will have no problem operating more often.

Cool, then the issues I mentioned should never have existed in the first place. But they did, and probably still do today, I can't test easily. So clearly, they're not so easy to fix for some reason.

Also, this is such programmer-speak. It's trivial to set a single parameter? Absolutely, you just need to know that's what's needed, what the parameter is, how to set it, and what to set it to. Trivial! And how exactly would I, as a user, know any of this?

I'm a decent example here, since I could tell the software is written in Java (guess how), I know about its GC tuning parameters and I could probably figure out what parameters to set. So what exact value should I set? 500MB? 1GB? 2GB? How long should I spend doing trial-and-error?

Now consider you'd be burdening every single user of the program with the above. How about we, as engineers, choose the right program parameters, so that the user doesn't have to do or worry about anything? How about that.

> a classic space vs time tradeoff again

Most of the time, just like here, "it's a tradeoff" is a weasel phrase used to excuse poor engineering. Everything is a tradeoff, so pointing that out says nothing. Tradeoffs have to be chosen wisely too, you know.
by karmakaze | 2025-11-28 01:43:25+00:00
The winner if there is one will be clear. Making a machine that's as good or better than human at most tasks is the turning point but doesn't demonstrate the win. Applying it for self-improvement making superintelligence which is when the winner will be racing with rockets vs bicycles. I don't know how this will play out--will the second one to achieve it always be behind? It probably depends on the difference in timing and other factors.
by DrierCycle | 2025-11-28 01:44:14+00:00
The contraction of events and the semantic residue, into tokens, symbols, metaphors, sentences, images, segments, parameterized in any way shape/form, is irrelevant next to the semantic load the event contains in a variety of analog states.

No creativity emerges from this, just the mimicry of the tokens, symbols in their reduced, modeled parameters.

That's the problem with LLMs and frontiers, RL. It's all subject to the bottlenecks of math and symbols.

The analog load of semantic (use tasks, actions, variance, scales), the immensity of the nested forms these take between brain, body, screen, canvas, aren't replicable as creation.

It's not information or stimuli we engage with, these are convenient false reductions we're realizing are inconvenient. There's much more the brain, eye detect in reflection. The words and symbols are an aftereffect the computer detects on its way to disregarding the events.

We see this aftereffect as creativity, thinking, etc only as a clever illusion the words, tokens hand us. Nothing more.
by a_bonobo | 2025-11-28 01:45:32+00:00
In my niche, bioinformatics, linkedin has become somewhat of a force ever since many people left Twitter/X during the 'rebranding'? It's quite weird.

They're mostly posts announcing new packages etc. but there seems to be more bioinformatics-y activity than, say, mastodon or bluesky. The posts definitely have a different tone than what OP decries.
by jauntywundrkind | 2025-11-28 01:45:54+00:00
I'd be shocked if 10% of users only use EC2. And as you say, for the most part I expect these to be pretty small fry users.

I've used dozens of VPS providers in my life, and a sizable majority had not advertised any load balancing offerings. I can open tickets to move IP addresses around. But that takes time. And these environments almost always require static configuration of your IP address, which you need some way to do effectively during your outage.

Anyone who declares managing their own stuff to be easy is, to me, highly suspect. Day 0 setting stuff up isn't so bad, day 1 running will show you some new things, but as time goes on there's always new and surprising ways for things to break or not scale or not be resilient or for backups to not be quite right. You talk about employing people to manage for you, but one to three persons salary will buy you a lot of elasticache and rds. As a business, it's hard to trust your DBA's and other folks, to believe the half dozen people really have done a great job. Where-as you know there have been many people-decades of work out into resiliency at AWS or others, you know what you are getting, and it's probably cheaper than having your own team for many many people.

I want to be clear that I am 100% for folks buying hardware and hosting themselves. I think it's awesome and wild how good hardware is. But what we run atop is way way way too often more an afterthought than a well planned cohesive system that's going to work well over time. Thats why I am hats off to the open source platform engineering works out there. I think we're getting closer to some very interesting spaces where doing for ourselves starts to be viable, in a way that's legitimate & runnable in ways that everyone-figuring-it-out-for-themselved of the past was always quite risky and where the business as a whole or external systems reviewers rarely had a good ability to evaluate what was really going on or how trustworthy it was.

I aspire for us to outdo the perception that other people managing for us is a great freedom. I really long for that. But the kind of "meh it's not that hard" attitude I see here, to me, dissuades from the point: it undermines how hard and what a travail it is to run systems. It is a travail. But it's one that open source platform engineering is advancing mightily to meet, in exciting & clear ways, that the just throwing some shit up there past always made murky.
by kmacdough | 2025-11-28 01:49:10+00:00
> A typical pumped storage facility uses 100m of delta

Most projects seek 200-600m. This map doesn't even consider pumped hydro <200m: https://maps.nrel.gov/psh

> And pumped storage is significantly cheaper for seasonal storage than any proposed alternatives.

Based on what? Cost is particularly variable for pumped hydro. It can be one of the cheaper options when stars align. But you need 1) a suitable geography that minimizes the cost of damming or digging a resivoir with sufficient head 2) available for development without too much backlash 3) Near enough grid resources to minimize infrastructure and line losses. I'm surely leaving pieces out.

It can be cheap, but it has far more hoops to jump than alternatives like batteries, hot sand and other "storage-in-a-building" designs which can be built where needed and using fairly standard industrial construction.
by somat | 2025-11-28 01:49:43+00:00
Every couple of years I look around to see if anyone is selling sterling cycle engines in the 5-10 hp range, I always find a couple neat projects but nowhere can you just buy an engine.

I assume that because there is no current market for small sterling generators nobody wants invest in tooling to make one and because there are no small sterling generators there is no market for them.
by wisty | 2025-11-28 01:51:46+00:00
Teacher here. Best Principal I had would gatecrash your class once a year, then have a chat giving feedback. Kind of stressful (it could happen with little warning) but whatever.

They knew everyone in the school (ebery teacher and about 500+ student names), and what happened in every class. It took time and talent to do it, but it made them a lot less insulated.

Claiming you can't know 100-200 people - your high school teacher wrote 100 reports. Now obviously they aren't 100% on the ball, but they have some idea (I hope).

There's an old story about how Bill Gates once took a call in tech support. A far larger organisation, and he still was willing to dive deep and see what was going on at the least glamorous part of the coalface.

There's a difference between trying to micromanage everything, and micromanaging enough that you're not out of touch.

Feedback is a two way street. It both let's you know what is happening, and let's the people below know that you actually care. Even if you can't (and arguably shouldn't) be everywhere at once, it has its place.

Now yes, it's drive by management and isn't the main tool that a manager should use, but being overly scared that your trusted expert juniors will be destroyed by a senior checking up on them is maybe a bit silly, and if a senior manager is such a tool that they do cause havoc just by looking over someone's shoulder and giving them a bit of feedback you're already in trouble.

Inulation isn't the answer IMO, just accepting that yes you don't need to know everyone and everything to the same level as if it was a small team.
by tiagorosadacost | 2025-11-28 01:51:51+00:00
Hi everyone!

I’m excited to share the improvements I recently introduced to the project mini-n8n: https://github.com/tiago123456789/mini-n8n

New Improvements: • You can now test workflows while building them, allowing you to verify each step in real time. • Each workflow includes detailed execution logs for easier debugging and auditing. • A new section is available for registering key–value pairs of sensitive data. When a workflow is saved, this data is encrypted before being stored. During execution, the system decrypts it securely and uses it as needed. • You can create your own custom nodes, similar to n8n. This is powered by a plugin architecture that enables clean and safe extensibility. • A new page is available to install and manage custom nodes, just like in n8n.

What is the plugin architecture? Imagine a core application that can be extended with additional functionality, all without modifying the original codebase. Applications like WordPress follow this model. Another way to visualize it is to think of a Lego set: you have a solid base, and you can attach or remove pieces easily to add new capabilities with minimal effort.
by K0balt | 2025-11-28 01:52:00+00:00
I think I read things into your comment you did not intend, and for that I apologize. I confess I have been pretty sensitized from the barrage of accusations I recieve—mostly from em dashes and using “ai words” whatever that means lol. It wouldn’t be so bad if AI wrote better prose, but I really hope that my own writing doesn’t come off with that singularly droll countenance that AI tends to present.
by gruez | 2025-11-28 01:52:06+00:00
>If you think there is a threshold for when a company should cover the costs of negligent loss versus not covering those costs, what is it? Why is the cost of shipping a replacement cost of a physical media above that cost, and the cost of hosting a server in perpetuity below that cost?

To paraphrase your words, "I would argue that refusing to offer 0.09 cents[1] (that's right, less than 1 cent) worth of bandwidth for legacy downloads not in any way comparable to spending $5 (at least) of postage to mail a book"

[1] 9 cents/GB charged by AWS for egress. Actual cost is likely far lower.
by sfink | 2025-11-28 01:53:04+00:00
Not the way I see it.

The argument that GPL code is a tiny minority of what's in the model makes no sense to me. (To be clear, you're not making this argument.) One book is a tiny minority of an entire library, but that doesn't mean it's fine to copy that book word for word simply because you can point to a Large Library Model that contains it.

LLMs definitely store pretty high-fidelity representations of specific facts and procedures, so for me it makes more sense to start from the gzip end of the slope and slide the other way. If you took some GPL code and renamed all the variables, is that suddenly ok? What if you mapped the code to an AST and then stored a representation of that AST? What if it was a "fuzzy" or "probabilistic" AST that enabled the regeneration of a functionally equivalent program but the specific control flow and variable names and comments are different? It would be the analogue of (lossy) perceptual coding for audio compression, only instead of "perceptual" it's "functional".

This is starting to look more and more like what LLMs store, though they're actually dumber and closer to the literal text than something that maintains function.

It also feels a lot closer to 'gzip' than 'wc', imho.
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-11-28 01:54:53+00:00
> On Android, each of those three apps would ask you for file system permissions on first launch. Your choices are "full access to user files", "limited access" (usually one directory and all its sub-directories), "full access, but only this time", and "no access".

Which isn't completely useless, but in most cases the only thing you really want is "full access" or "I don't actually trust this thing" -- and most users aren't going to comprehend the difference between more fine-grained alternatives anyway -- and then you're basically looking at the distinction between normal trusted apps and something you run in a container.

> Also, apps can pretty much never access each others config/keys/etc files - which they never should.

And that's the problem, because the backup app is supposed to be able to back up everything, a malware scanner can't have potentially malicious apps hiding something from it, etc.
by marcus_holmes | 2025-11-28 01:55:46+00:00
Riffing on this:

If the LLM can reproduce the entire GPL'd code, with licence and attribution intact, then that would satisfy the GPL, correct?

If the LLM can invent new code, inspired by but not copied from the GPL'd code, that new code does not require a GPL licence.

This is essentially the same as we humans do: I read some GPL code and go "huh, neat architecture!" and then a year later solve a similar problem using an architecture inspired by that code. This is not copying, and does not require me to GPL the code I'm producing. But if I copy-paste a function from the GPL code into my code base, I need to respect the licence conditions and GPL at least part of my code base.

I think the argument that the author is talking about is if the model itself should be GPL'd because it contains copies of GPL'd code that can be reproduced. I don't buy this because that GPL code is not being run as part of the model's functioning. To use an analogy: if I create a code storage system, and then use it to store some GPL code, I don't have to GPL the code storage system itself. As long as it can reproduce the GPL code together with its licence and attribution, then the GPL is not being infringed at any point. The system is not using or running the GPL code itself, it is just storing the GPL code. This is what the LLM is doing.
by triceratops | 2025-11-28 01:56:57+00:00
> OP blamed women for supposedly complaining that men dont open up

Correct. And often accurate.

> it is women fault men do not open up

I don't think OP said that.

> Por op, women are at wrong when they want men to talk

Nor that.

> Which includes men not talking to other men, which is also fault of women

Nor that.
by kukkeliskuu | 2025-11-28 01:57:12+00:00
"... with your reasoning no complex system is ever consistent with ongoing changes. From the perspective of one of many concurrent writers outside of the database there’s no consistency they observe."

That was kind of my point. We should stop callings such systems consistent.

It is possible, however, to build a complex system, even with "event sourcing", that has consistency guarantees.

Of course your comment has the key term "outside of the database". You will need to either use a database or built a homegrown system that has similar features as databases do.

One way is to pipe everything through a database that enforces the consistency. I have actually built such an event sourcing platform.

Second way is to have a reconciliation process that guarantees consistency at certain point of time. For example, bank payments systems use reconciliation to achieve end-of-day consistency. Even those are not really "guaranteed" to be consistent, just that inconsistencies are sufficiently improbable, so that they can be handled manually and with agreed on timeouts.
by s1mplicissimus | 2025-11-28 01:57:16+00:00
Air currents are highly complex and almost impossible to model in detail, that does not mean that they are not the outcome of conditions that preceded them (regardless of whether we know the formula).

So why were the air currents slightly different? Oh I guess because the surrounding weather must have been slightly different. And how did that happen? Because the surrounding climate was different. And how that? Because earths development facilitated that different climate. Maybe the moon was bigger? Earths mass smaller? Well that's a big ask for a historical event we know happened on our known earth surrounded by our known moon.