MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by tigydavid | 2025-11-05 00:04:30+00:00
I would say institutionalized but created with input from the community to guard against bias. Preferably, the system would reach “competence” and the virtue index would be sufficiently successful in predicting future outcomes, as well as current moral position. I have some docs that lay out principles if you want to see them. The main challenge is the accuracy and repeatability of virtue authentication, as this would enable a new paradigm of consciousness.
by b_e_n_t_o_n | 2025-11-05 00:05:06+00:00
45% slower seems pretty decent considering they use a wasm kernel they developed to mimic the unix kernel so they can run non-modified unix programs inside the browser. It's actually pretty impressive that they did this, and even more impressive that it works and like another commentator said, is not even an order of magnitude slower.

I'm more interested in 1) usages of wasm in the browser that don't involve running unmodified unix programs and 2) wasm outside the browser for compile-once-run-anywhere usecases with sandboxing / security guarantees. Could it be the future for writing native applications?

Languages like Kotlin, C#, Rust, as well as C/C++ etc support wasm quite well. Could we see that be a legitimate target for applications in the future, if the performance gap was closer to 10%-ish? I would personally prefer running wasm binaries with guaranteed (as much as possible ofc) sandboxing compared to raw binaries.

edit: it's from 2019, there have been significant improvements made to wasm since then.
by slg | 2025-11-05 00:06:11+00:00
It's weird how many people's perception of this type of behavior is shaped by the person sitting in the White House.

EDIT: It's also weird how my comment is being perceived exclusively as criticizing the critics of this administration rather than criticizing the supporters of this overreach. My comment was intentional phrased very generally, if you think it is specifically about you, that reveals something about you.
by potato3732842 | 2025-11-05 00:06:23+00:00
>His own buddies were clowning on him.

They're clowning on him for it being poor taste to push the issue, like a beat cop who hits his quota by nailing an old lady for 5-over on the way back to the station on his last shift of the month. C'mon man let it go.

They're not clowning on him for lying about it to make it seem serious in court. They all play crap like that up when it suites them.
by cattown | 2025-11-05 00:06:46+00:00
Use cash. Get cash out at the ATM, keep it in your wallet. Spend it at local businesses. Even if you can’t do it all the time do it as much as you can. Start today and stick with it.

Otherwise this is what we’ll be stuck with everywhere all the time. There won’t be a choice anymore if you don’t exercise that right. We’re already far down this slippery slope.
by dragonwriter | 2025-11-05 00:06:48+00:00
> Basically, it’s an open question that courts have yet to decide.

While it hasn't either been ruled on or turned away at the Supreme Court yet, a number of federal trial courts have found training AI models from legally-acquired materials to be fair use (even while finding, in some of those and other cases, that pirating to get copies to then use in training is not and using models as a tool to produce verbatim and modified similar-medium copies of works from the training material is also not.)

I’m not aware of any US case going the other way, so, while the cases may not strictly be precedential (I think they are all trial court decisions so far), they are something of a consistent indicator.
by tomhow | 2025-11-05 00:08:27+00:00
Please don't sermonize to distract from your own disrespectfulness towards HN and its guidelines.

> usually post racism

If there's evidence of this you should include links in your comment or email us so we can investigate and take action. Rayiner is of South Asian heritage and was born in Asia, which – of course – doesn't preclude racism, but it does at least require us to think twice before presuming his views to come from a place of Western-born white privilege.

> corporate bootlicking

This is an ideologically-charged epithet that’s invoked specifically to be profoundly demeaning. The comment you replied to was simply sharing of his personal experience as a customer of a health insurer. Anyone should be able to do this without being belittled in this way. (Besides that it’s inaccurate; I see Rayiner criticizing corporations often.)

As we've said before, Rayiner takes a lot of arrows on HN because he's about the only well-known participant we have who is notable for regularly espousing conservative/libertarian positions. He also contributes plenty of valuable perspectives from his personal experience as an immigrant, a lawyer, and a compiler-hacker. He's subject to the guidelines like anyone else, and his positions are frequently debated, refuted and flagged by other community members, which is fine. But HN would be the poorer without him.

In this case you're the one who has been escalatory and hostile, and you need to take responsibility for your own conduct before pointing the finger at others.
by Boltresz | 2025-11-05 00:09:18+00:00
Compass IoT | https://www.compassiot.com.au | ONSITE with Flex (Sydney, AU) | $130-180k AUD

Compass is hiring a full-time front-end developer.

I'm Emily, one of the founders. We are a multi-award-winning start-up that uses connected vehicle data to help transport professionals build better, safer, cities across ANZ, the UK, and USA. This includes B2B and B2G (gov). Notably, our dev team consists of ex-Canva, ex-Huawei, and ex-Agoda. We're bootstrapped, financially stable, and in our 7th year of operations.

The company is employee-owned and has a generous performance-based equity scheme. We value our company culture and work hard to provide meaningful career experiences for all staff, including projects that have changed the transport policy landscape in at least 3 different countries. We care about your experience at work and provide opportunities to grow and learn cool stuff. Our goal is to have a relatively small, motivated team of highly-paid, nice people who feel they are working on projects with tangible impact.

Requirements: - At least 3 years of experience. Ideally, your experience would be in front-end, but back-end development experience is also valuable. - Ideally, you would have some knowledge and/or experience in Typescript, React, State management (Jotai and MobX highly regarded), CSS Modules, Mapbox or similar. - Nice-to-haves include Async generators and promises, Protobuf, and GCP.

The role is onsite with flex; we ask new staff to come into the office during their first few months so that they get to know the team and the tech, but are open to more hybrid after the initial onboarding period.

We're a relatively small (25 people) team. We value people who are collaborative, problem solvers, flexible thinkers, take ownership over problems, and are do-ers who leave their ego at the door.

Other cool stuff: - Almost all Australian state govs use our software to improve roads and safety - We helped change the law in NZ around digital road pricing - We've won +7 different awards, including one from Google - We keep a well-stocked snack fridge and keep you caffeinated

Chuck us an email at directors@compassiot.com.au with a CV and github/project portfolio.
by OkayPhysicist | 2025-11-05 00:09:21+00:00
Singapore is an odd country. The only country, to my knowledge, that had independence thrust upon it without its consent. Extremely prosperous compared to its neighbors. An autocratic, single party state where the government is so popular that they need to rig their elections against themselves to get dissenting voices. One of the most militarized countries (#3 by military spending per capita) in the world, yet their military has barely been used.

What would you even call their socioeconomic system? They're not exactly doing neoliberal capitalism, their government is far too involved for that. They're not socialist, they've got free enterprise galore. The autocracy+militarization+heavily meddled with big business thing most resembles fascist states, but without the typical racist scapegoating (on the contrary, they've put a frankly inordinate amount of effort into preventing racial infighting).

In most countries "The country also passed a new law earlier this year that would allow the police to control the bank accounts of individuals who they suspect to be scam targets and limit what transactions they can do." would probably set off alarm bells, but it does seem like business as usual in Singapore.
by vincenthwt | 2025-11-05 00:09:27+00:00
It really depends on the application. If the illumination is consistent, such as in many machine vision tasks, traditional thresholding is often the better choice. It’s straightforward, debuggable, and produces consistent, predictable results. On the other hand, in more complex and unpredictable scenes with variable lighting, textures, or object sizes, AI-based thresholding can perform better.

That said, I still prefer traditional thresholding in controlled environments because the algorithm is understandable and transparent.

Debugging issues in AI systems can be challenging due to their "black box" nature. If the AI fails, you might need to analyze the model, adjust training data, or retrain, a process that is neither simple nor guaranteed to succeed. Traditional methods, however, allow for more direct tuning and certainty in their behavior. For consistent, explainable results in controlled settings, they are often the better option.
by defrost | 2025-11-05 00:10:23+00:00
I'm an antipodean world away and have still noticed Sheridan's name as an actor or director or writer or producer on seemingly damn near every major US TV and movie production in the past five to ten years.

I'm thinking Taylor Sheridan is a virtual Nicolas Bourbaki of clones laser focused on saccharin Americana mythology.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taylor_Sheridan
by polymath88 | 2025-11-05 00:11:27+00:00
You know the answer. You have the data. But when it's time to speak up, you freeze.

That's the Comparison Trap—and here's the framework to interrupt it.

You're not comparing apples to apples. You're comparing your internal chaos to everyone else's polished performance. You see their production mode while running in debug mode. Every error visible to you, invisible to them.
by roommin | 2025-11-05 00:11:41+00:00
So you can see why they put it in scare quotes. Just above your reply another says it's politically neutral to adopt whatever pronouns the speaker feels is valid, and not punish them for it. This is "neutral" in that it sides with the speaker regardless of who they are, but is clearly designed to allow bigots to misgender freely. That is the point, "neutral" is not so trivially defined, and often falls on the side of more conservative societal trends.
by wkat4242 | 2025-11-05 00:11:47+00:00
Yeah and a 'host' back then wasn't a cheap PC or something, they tended to be $30000 workstations or $300000 servers. At tech companies and Universities only, and mostly in the US. 60k sounds like a lot for those days. It grew massively from the early 90s.

Even UUCP was still really fringe and those weren't actually connected hosts on tcp/ip. They had their own dialup mail exchange protocol similar to fidonet.
by fennecbutt | 2025-11-05 00:12:28+00:00
Lmao no it's not "relatively easy"

Funnily enough Asianometry just did a video on tsmcs new masks and how the machines involved WERE particularly hard to develop, "Multi-Beam Mask Writer" that uses hundreds of thousands of electron beams (after splitting) to accomplish its task.

Nothing about that industry is easy.
by JuniperMesos | 2025-11-05 00:12:47+00:00
The Visual Studio code user experience is bad - in part because it is an electron app that is not as snappy as native GUI frameworks, but also for a variety of other reasons. I do not use it voluntarily and resent that many coding tools I would like to use deliberately architect themselves as VSCode plugins rather than more general tools applicable to any editor.

I have definitely run into issues with the UI not visually keeping up with keystrokes in VSCode (occasionally), and also other Electron apps (more often - perhaps they haven't had as much attention to optimization as VSCode has). For this reason alone, I dislike the Electron ecosystem and I am extremely interested in projects to develop alternative cross platform renderers.

Ultimately I would like to see Electron become a dead project so I never have to run into some interesting or useful or mandatory piece of software I need to use that was written using Electron because it was the most obvious choice for the developer.
by georgehopkin | 2025-11-05 00:12:57+00:00
More than 90 per cent of Japanese citizens expressed serious hesitation or outright refusal to donate cells for human brain organoid research under current consent systems, citing concerns that the lab-grown structures could develop the capacity to think and have consciousness in the future.

The study, published in Frontiers in Genetics, found that only 15 per cent of respondents were willing to give broad consent for their cells to be used in brain organoid research after learning about the technology. Some 36 per cent outright refused to donate their cells under broad consent, whilst another 37 per cent said their willingness would depend on specific conditions, such as the purpose and ethical use of the cells.
by theturtletalks | 2025-11-05 00:13:27+00:00
The reason Amazon doesn’t want AI involved is because then AI could skip Amazon altogether in the future and checkout directly on seller’s websites.

It’s actually the idea behind the decentralized marketplace I’m building. It uses MCP-UI to bring the whole storefront and checkout into the chat.

I’m keeping a close eye on e-commerce and AI and the recent deal Paypal made with OpenAI and Amazon getting aggressive, it’s clear they want to make AI powered commerce a walled garden.
by o11c | 2025-11-05 00:13:33+00:00
This blog post has a few inaccuracies, so the situation isn't as bad as it seems. (It is still annoying and requires thought though).

I'm just going to ignore the part where Clang apparently sabotages itself by requiring `-include-pch`. You really shouldn't be using Clang in production because it has all sorts of hard limitations so I am not at all surprised at hitting another one; even if this particular one gets fixed, you'll still run into several others, whether you realize it or not (since usually it silently does the wrong thing). Your `./configure` should already be detecting "is this an actually-working GCC" anyway, so you can use that as the condition before you enable the PCH logic at all.

The "can only use one PCH per compilation" limitation also exists in GCC and is well-documented there since I started using it (maybe in 2010?), but as noted it is not a major limitation. Assuming you're practicing sufficient rigor for your build process, you basically have 3 options: only one PCH for the whole project, one PCH per directory-ish (assuming each directory is a semi-independent part of the project; this is probably sanest), or try to precompile all headers (this has performance implications for whenever you edit a header).

The "build vs src" purity problem has a simple solution - just use `-I` to specify an "overlay" include directory that is in the build directory, and have your PCH-making rule specify that in the first place. That's it.
by muzani | 2025-11-05 00:14:22+00:00
Out of full time jobs (not including the freelance work):

4 jobs via Facebook (notably a top 50 YC backed unicorn). One direct referral. One from a job board. One from a university alumni group where I was the committee. One from LinkedIn.

I "blog" a lot on social media, so most of the FB jobs "found me". But for my first job, I went through my friend list one by one and asked for jobs because 3 months on job sites weren't turning up anything. In the recent 5 years, LinkedIn has far surpassed FB for leads.

Job boards are terrible. One rejected me while I was interviewing (got the interview via HN). One rejected me while I was in the office.

Recruiters bring in a lot of high quality leads (highest being TikTok). But 0% success rate for me. One told me that I was ghosted for a role, but when I applied directly for that exact role later, I got it within 2 weeks of application.

Sending out emails/DMs to C-levels and asking for a job actually has a good interview rate, but for startups. Most couldn't afford the usual rate, but if I were desperate, I'd do this.
by chipsrafferty | 2025-11-05 00:14:45+00:00
You're comparing the hyper specific evolution of 1 individual (an AI system) to the more general evolution of the entire human species (billions of individuals). It's as if you're forgetting how evolution actually works - natural selection - and forgetting that when you have hundreds of billions of individuals over thousands of years that even small insights gained from "running around in the jungle" can compound in ways that are hard to conceptualize.

I'm saying that LLM training is not equivalent to billions of years of evolution because LLMs aren't trained using evolutionary algorithms; there will always be fundamental differences. However, it seems reasonable to think that the effect of that "training" might be more or less around the same level.
by ggregoire | 2025-11-05 00:15:18+00:00
> Maybe an example of a problem this solves.

Some service writes a lot of data in parquet files stored on S3 (e.g. logs), and now you want that data to be queryable from your application as if it was in postgres (e.g. near real-time analytics dashboard). pg_lake allows you to load these parquet files into postgres and query the data. You can also join that data with existing tables in postgres.
by doctoboggan | 2025-11-05 00:15:29+00:00
I see it as a blessing: privacy advocates have previously argued that yes these invasive tools might currently help an honest government do its job to stop bad guys, but the tools could eventually fall into the hands of a not so honest government. Now, you don't really need much of an imagination to see what happens when the tools fall into the wrong hands, and hopefully more of the citizenry can get behind the idea of privacy as a fundamental right, and not just something for those who have something to hide.
by justsid | 2025-11-05 00:17:51+00:00
Yes, planes are designed to be able to take off with a lost engine. Usually this will extend the roll a bit because the speeds are different for engine out operations. This isn't the first MD-11 with an engine out take off, 5 years ago a FedEx MD-11 took off with a failure in the left engine[1]. Slightly different case, obviously, but it's certainly something that is accounted for when designing planes.

[1] https://www.avherald.com/h?article=4dfd50b9&opt=0%20
by chipsrafferty | 2025-11-05 00:18:17+00:00
I don't think it's actually true that someone with:

1. A desire to learn calculus 2. A good teacher 3. No mental impairments such as dementia or other major brain drainers

could not learn calculus. Most people don't really care to try or don't get good resources. What you see as an intelligent mathematician is almost always someone born with better resources that was also encouraged to pursue math.
by vharith_16 | 2025-11-05 00:18:42+00:00
Location: Chicago, IL Remote: Preferred Willing to Relocate: Yes Technologies: C/C++, MATLAB, MS Excel, MyJupyter, NumPy, Python, Wolfram Resume/CV: https://www.linkedin.com/in/vittalmharith/ Email: harithvittal@gmail.com Degree: Bachelor's of Science in Physics Summary: Results-oriented Engineering Student with a proven track record of optimizing project outcomes. Skilled in strategic research projects and team leadership. Seeking a challenging role to leverage technical expertise
by dragonwriter | 2025-11-05 00:18:43+00:00
They’ve always been anti-expansive-copyright, which has historically aligned with much (but not all) of big tech, and against big content/media.

A lot of the people that were anti-expansive-copyright only because it was anti-big-media have shifted to being pro-expansive-copyright because it is perceived as being anti-big-tech (and specifically anti-AI).
by hansvm | 2025-11-05 00:19:19+00:00
Those are less problematic than you might imagine.

- For language, individual words might be discrete, but concepts being communicated have more nuance and fill in the gaps.

- For language, even to the extent that discreteness applies, you can treat the data as being sampled from a coarser manifold and still extract a lot of meaningful structure.

- Images of cars are more continuous than you might imagine because of hue differences induced by time of day, camera lens, shadows, etc.

- Images of cars are potentially smooth even when considering shape and color discontinuities. Manifolds don't have to be globally connected. Local differentiability is usually the thing people are looking for in practical applications.
by eYrKEC2 | 2025-11-05 00:20:06+00:00
Much as Lisp'ers say,

Any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of Common Lisp.

If one says, "we don't use an ORM", you will incrementally create helper functions for pulling the data into your language to tweak the data or to build optional filters and thus will have an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of an ORM.

There is a time and place for direct SQL code and there is a time and place for an ORM. Normally I use an ORM that has a great escape hatch for raw SQL as needed.
by theturtletalks | 2025-11-05 00:20:09+00:00
The difference is stores own everything. When someone buys, payment goes straight to the store's account. Customer data goes to their system. The marketplace just queries their existing API and renders it conversationally. Orders show up directly in the store's platform. They don't have to log into anything new or manage multiple dashboards. We never touch the money or data.
by jedberg | 2025-11-05 00:20:09+00:00
I think your complaint is about CEO comp, not CEO pay. CEOs generally don't make a ton of cash (for example the CEOs of Netflix get $3M a year, which is just a bit more than the VPs get). However, they get a bonus based on company performance and a ton of stock.

CEO comp is so high because of the stock, and the fact that stock buybacks are legal. They were illegal until the 1980s.

A quick fix would be to outlaw stock buy backs. The problem with buybacks is that the people who control when they happen are also the ones who benefit when they happen.
by petralithic | 2025-11-05 00:20:24+00:00
Sounds good, doesn't work. How would I sell a major version on a store like the Apple or Google app stores [0]? How will I fund my salary as well as my employees' salaries from only major versions, what if people buy now but not later on, do I lay them off? For what it's worth I do offer lifetime plans that are basically 2 to 3 years of the annual plan, as that's the expected lifetime value (LTV) of some of my apps.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45810856#45815972 (this comment gets it right on why you can't do this on said app stores)
by dabockster | 2025-11-05 00:20:37+00:00
> But maybe things have changed in ways that meaningfully changes the calculus?

I'd argue that Docker has done that in a LOT of ways. The huge draw to AWS, from what I recall with my own experiences, was that it was cheaper than on-prem VMware licenses and hardware. So instead of virtualizing on proprietary hypervisors, firms outsourced their various technical and legal responsibilities to AWS. Now that Docker is more mature, largely open source, way less resource intensive, and can run on almost any compute hardware made in the last 15 years (or longer), the cost/benefit analysis starts to favor moving off AWS.

Also AWS used to give out free credits like free candy. I bet most of this is vendor lock in and a lot of institutional brain drain.