MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by thewebguyd | 2025-11-04 20:09:33+00:00
> Most of the time it's just individual employees downloading supposedly "free" software without reading the license and realizing it's not free for commercial use.

And chances are, that company's IT department would love to know when that's happening so they can put a stop to it.

I work in ops, that's called "shadow IT" and it's a huge problem. It's really prevalent now because most SaaS is marketed toward individuals/small teams rather than marketing toward the business itself, so you get people within an org spinning up trials and free versions, putting company data into it with zero oversight, and often IT doesn't know about it until the quarterly budget review when they find out from accounting that it's been blown on software purchased outside of the IT org, now it's "critical" to operations and we're forced to onboard/support it.

Obviously these code snippets won't work for SaaS, but a notification pop-up along the lines of "We see you're on a company device. Please contact your IT administrator to proceed with your free trial" would be great, but would kill a big sales avenue.
by edserr1122 | 2025-11-04 20:09:39+00:00
Location: San Antonio, Texas, USA

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: AI, ML, MLOps, AWS, RAG pipeline, Agentic AI, Python, Javascript, Typescript, Django, FastAPI, Kubernets,

Résumé/CV: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1bffZ_JU1hlmwaXzMykU-bo2ioGO...

Email: edserr1122@hotmail.com

I am a senior AI/ML Engineer with 8 years of experience spanning full-stack development, Agentic AI, and large-scale MLOps.
by kevin_thibedeau | 2025-11-04 20:10:02+00:00
There are preexisting narrow symbols that were given a new emoji presentation in later standards rather than assigning a new codepoint. Text rendering engines vary on which form is the default. VTE had an option to set the preference. This can be very annoying when some arrows get the new emoji form but others in their cohort stay as narrow glyphs.
by gruez | 2025-11-04 20:10:12+00:00
From wikipedia:

>A gold standard is a monetary system in which the standard economic unit of account is based on a fixed quantity of gold.

and

>The Zimbabwe Gold (ZiG; code: ZWG)[3] is the official currency of Zimbabwe since 8 April 2024,[2] backed by US$900 million worth of hard assets: foreign currencies, gold, and other precious metals.

>...

>Although the rate of devaluation of the ZiG may vary,[13] the ZiG has consistently lost value since its introduction, and its long-term prospects are dim so long as large grain imports continue and the government continues to overspend.

sounds like it's not "fixed" at all, and "backed by ... hard assets" just means it has central bank reserves, which most fiat currencies have.
by Nevermark | 2025-11-04 20:10:46+00:00
> I'm very happy to this day I've asked for that screwdriver and I fixed that seatbelt.

That was a great move!

I guess in a thread on an article which mixes a little bit of mysticism into medicine, a little science philosophy fits. I take the plain reading of quantum field equations at face value. I.e. that superposition is real in the normal sense, and that quantum "collapse" is a perceived effect, not actually the superposition reducing to one history, but just the effect of a history becoming entangled with enough particles to be robustly statistically separated from other histories.

(I have never understood why even some scientists can't take the equations at face value, when they already explain why large things don't act like individual particles, despite following the same rules. Without any "observer" voodoo. It as if those scientists agreed the equations say the Earth orbits the sun, and that calculating that way is the right way. But still propose there is some as yet gap in our understanding, that we need to resolve to make that consistent with our perception that the Sun goes around us - despite no actual gap that needs explaining.)

So given that interpretation, we are likely to always (to a high statistical degree) survive scary situations. We may not make it through a high percentage of histories, a high percentage of others' histories may experience us dying, but we of course, are only aware of the histories in which we make it. This also creates an explanation for why we, as a particularly constructed human, exist. We are simply aware of the history in which we are. Not any of the overwhelming number of histories of our universe in which we are not.

Among all the histories of the universe, given that they include every possible (consistent) history, and given that we are just normal chemistry despite our complex construction of statistically unlikely survivals, some have to include us.

That explains (1) our lucky survivals (of ourselves, others certainly experience us dying), (2) our initial personal existence, and (3) the existence of life on Earth. And if there are superpositioned variants of universe laws in a similar fashion (we don't know that yet, but it is a credible idea), (4) why there are histories of universes with laws consistent with us. If it's possible in terms of physical or the ultimate laws, and all consistent possibilities exist, then it is a certainty that there is a version of reality which includes us. And that is of course, where we find ourselves.
by theturtletalks | 2025-11-04 20:11:00+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 hyperhello | 2025-11-04 20:11:33+00:00
I don’t really get it, from a consumer perspective, unless the idea is mass education sales. They already sell enough Macs for economy of scale to kick in.

Calling it an iPhone processor doesn’t explain anything by itself, and wouldn’t save much money. Is the screen cheaper? The keyboard? The SSD?

I suppose the point would be to farm and beta test a base of new, cheaper, slower, less reliable components, and then find the path to making them acceptable for retail.
by daft_pink | 2025-11-04 20:12:05+00:00
You claim it’s a successor, but is everyone really on board with that? I love jupyter, but generally feel like having to run a server is the downside.

The nice thing about jupyter notebooks is that you can run them inside vscode without an explicit server, but I like to just use %% so that I can run it in zed and vs code and it’s just a python file that doesn’t need conversion.
by vacuity | 2025-11-04 20:12:16+00:00
> Instead they hear voices from the LGBT community

Oftentimes, the voices are outside.

I think you're somewhat optimistic, and "the middle ground" is not a magical place. It's easy to fall into a false sense of security that comes from making (likely valid) criticisms of caricatured groups. Middle ground should not be sought for its own sake, or else it becomes useless (akin to Goodhart's law; roughly "when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure"). People should embrace a diversity of values, but the burden is to stay true to a set of values and push for the truth.
by hugorsmith | 2025-11-04 20:12:16+00:00
janitorAI | San Francisco, CA | ONSITE | Full-time We're one of the largest consumer AI websites in the world, and are building the AI-native entertainment platform of the future.

We're hiring for a range of roles, especially for backend/infra (more details here: https://about.janitorai.com/backend-infrastructure-engineer/).

If you want to work on an incredibly fast-growing consumer product and help build for scale, shoot me an email at hugo at janitorai dot com
by BuildTheRobots | 2025-11-04 20:12:17+00:00
> I've often thought about that when there's a work crisis: If I'm the second on the scene, what can I do to support those fighting the fire right now, before jumping in.

A lot of it depends on the size and skill-set of your team and the escalation routes available to you, but in general (and off the top of my head):

- Get the first people on scene to give a summary of the problem as they know it. Make sure everyone actually agrees on what the problem is and what symptoms have been observed. Understand what areas people are currently investigating and make sure they aren't trampling over each other or actually making the situation worse [1]

- Make sure the situation hasn't evolved whilst the first on scene have been investigating the initial symptoms. It's easy to get lost in the weeds digging into a handful of monitoring alerts only to look up and realise there's now 300 and the original problem is only a small part of what's going on.

- If there isn't one already and you're not better doing something else, become incident commander. When done right it's an extremely important and useful role.

- Take over external communication and protect the team from distractions - Start assessing escalation options - Take copious notes and keep a timeline - Act as a shared memory and keep people honest - Have a less panicked, wider (non minutia) view of the problem - Start collating and pulling up documentation/schematics so the people at the coalface can quickly query it rather than getting distracted searching for it. - Be ready to jump, for when someone inevitably asks "can someone check..." or "does anyone know" - Keep track of the "shared truth" of the incident as it evolves. What have we witnessed, what do we believe is the cause, _why_ do we believe that? Have we invalidated anything, do we need to reassess, are we sure logical lynchpins aren't confirmation bias or dyslexia? - Onboard new people and hand over if appropriate.

Being at the coalface when it's on fire is a very different view of the world to watching other people panic and singe their fingers. It's also very easy to get lost in a chain of technical problems [2] when it's mostly irrelevant to the wider picture.

If you get a moment, it can also be a good time to assess how useful your monitoring is during an actual event.

[1] "Hey, server x has flagged on monitoring and my ssh session is hung waiting for a login prompt!" I've been round the houses enough to know this is probably OOM and if I just wait, I'm likely to finally get in. I also know that saying this in a room of 20 technical people, means the server is now processing 22 new ssh sessions and now no one is getting anywhere.

[2] The famous Malcolm in the Middle intro where Hal is tasked with changing a lightbulb and ends up repairing the car. Except in my example the bulb is actually fine and there's a power cut we missed. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AbSehcT19u0
by slg | 2025-11-04 20:13:15+00:00
I don't know anything about you and I understand the desire to not dox yourself. However, just a friendly tip, the way you are talking about your identity and how it has led to persecution against you while simultaneously avoiding giving actual details about your identity or how you have been persecuted comes off as untrustworthy. People can tell you're hiding something and many will jump to the conclusion that is because the response here would be even worse if you were more transparent.
by telotortium | 2025-11-04 20:14:05+00:00
Not sure how bad it is these days, but Adobe Reader used to open pretty slowly (and if you had Adobe Acrobat open your PDFs by default, it was even slower), so an in-browser PDF viewer was appreciated for that purpose.

Also, it can be useful to keep the PDF in the context of the app you opened it in. Unfortunately, I'm not aware of a window manager that surfaces the fact that, for example, one macOS Preview window was opened from the browser, another from Slack, another from Finder, etc. Compare to iOS, where opening a PDF viewer from an app will result in a button at the top-left corner to go back to the app you opened it from.
by _fzslm | 2025-11-04 20:14:20+00:00
There is a gap in Apple's offerings. Casual computer users like students probably can't justify dropping nearly a K on a MacBook, so they go for these 400-600$ dell/hp laptops, or a Chromebook. This fits that hole.

iPhone processor is surely cheaper from an economies of scale perspective, they are likely way easier to produce en masse and they already produce bajillions of them for the iPhone.

Over time the price of even a high quality LCD like on the existing MacBook Air will have decreased enormously. Apple is setting up to move to OLED on the rest of the line, so using existing LCD tech is likely to save a lot too
by aaaashley | 2025-11-04 20:14:38+00:00
I don't think that fashion trends are comparable. I think that fashion trends are fine in concept–things get old and we switch things up. It's the way the human superorganism is able to evolve new ideas. Unfortunately, capitalism accelerates these changes to an unreasonable pace, but even in Star Trek communism, people get bored. The cultural energy that birthed one style is no longer present, we always need something new that appeals to the current time.

But clothes still have to look nice. Fashion designers have a motivation to make clothes that serve their purpose elegantly. Inelegance would be adding metal rails to a skirt so that you could extend its length at will. Sure, the new object has a new function, and its designer might feel clever, but it is uglier. But ugly software and beautiful software often look the same. So software trends end up being ugly, because no one involved had an eye for beauty.
by IanCal | 2025-11-04 20:14:48+00:00
> It does not imply it either.

Right, it's irrelevant to the question of whether they can reason.

> to claim reasoning you need evidence

Frankly I have no idea what most people are talking about when they use the term and say these models can't do it. It seems to be a similarly hand-wavey exercise as when people talk about thinking or understanding.

> it needs to reliably NOT hallucinate results for simple conversations for example (if it has basic reasoning).

That's not something I commonly see in frontier models.

Again this doesn't seem related to reasoning. What we call hallucinations would be seen in something that could reason but had a fallible memory. I remember things incorrectly and I can reason.

> it does not actually take your code and debug it

It talks through the code (which it has not seen) and process step by step, can choose to add logging, run it, go through the logs, change what it thinks is happening and repeat. It can do this until it explains what is happening, creates test cases to show the problem and what triggers it, fixes it and shows the tests pass.

If that's not debugging the code I really don't know what to call it.
by mindcrime | 2025-11-04 20:14:57+00:00
It's in Katie Hafner and John Markoff's book!

Not sure if that was supposed to be sarcasm[1] or was intended seriously, but for what it's worth Hafner & Markoff have frequently received a lot of criticism for playing fast and loose with the truth in that book. Now most of that is specifically in regards to their treatment of Mitnick, and I'm not making any particular accusation here. Just sharing a thought that "it's in Katie Hafner and John Markoff's book" might not be terribly strong evidence of $WHATEVER.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe%27s_law
by mncharity | 2025-11-04 20:15:03+00:00
Cooling area seems similar to generation area, so maybe less than a key challenge?

GPT says 1000 W at 50 C takes about 3 m^2 to radiate (edge on to Earth and Sun), and generating that 1000 W takes about... 3 m^2 of solar panel. The panel needs its backside radiator clear to keep itself coolish (~100 C), so it does need to be a separate surface. Spreading a 1000 W point source across a 3 m^2 tile (or half that if two-sided?) is perhaps not scary, even with weight constraints?

Hmm, from an order-of-magnitude perspective, it looks like an (L shaped) Starlink v2 sat has 100 m^2 of panel, low 10 kW draw, and a low 100 m^2 body area. And there are 10 k of them. So want something bigger. A 100 x 100 m sheet might get you 10 sats per 100,000 GPU data center.

Regards ISS, ISS has its big self, basking in the sunlight, needing to be cooled. Versus "the only thing sun-lit is panel".
by bitwize | 2025-11-04 20:15:09+00:00
Game carts also have much faster access times than just about anything else contemporary because they're just ROM. If Linux, OpenGL, Vulkan, etc. were in the ROM of your Steam Deck, and your games were on ROM (not flash) carts, that'd boot up instantly too.

Windows 2000 boots up fast on modern hardware. You're looking through rose-colored-ass glasses if you think it booted up that quick on the hardware available at the time of release. Windows NT was a pig in its day, but at least it was a clean pig, free of spyware and other unnecessary crapware (unless you were like a client site I visited, and just let Bonzi Buddy, Comet Cursor, and such run rampant across your sensitive corporate workstations).
by TeMPOraL | 2025-11-04 20:15:11+00:00
They literally have a solution, it's a trivial one and described in the paper. I'll try to paraphrase the whole thing, because apparently no one read it.

1. Take existing satellite designs like Starlink, which obviously manage to utilize certain amount of power successfully, meaning they solved both collection and heat rejection.

2. Pick one, swap out its payload for however many TPUs it can power instead. Since TPUs aren't an energy source, the solar/thermal calculation does not change. Let X be the compute this gives you.

3. Observe that thermal design of a satellite is independent from whether you launch 1 or 10000 of them. Per point 2, thermals for one satellite are already solved, therefore this problem is boring and not worth further mention. Instead, go find some X that's enough to give a useful unit of scaling for compute.

4. Play with some wacky ideas about formations to improve parameters like bandwidth, while considering payload-specific issues like radiation hardening, NONE OF WHICH HAVE ANY IMPACT ON THERMALS[0]. This is the interesting part. Publish it as a paper.

5. Have someone make a press release about the paper. A common mistake.

6. Watch everyone get hung up on the press release and not bother clicking through to the actual paper.

--

[0] - Well, some do. Note that fact in the paper.
by mindcrime | 2025-11-04 20:16:31+00:00
Thanks for the answer, I'll check out the book.

It's a great read, but to echo what I said above: there have been a lot of questions over the years about the veracity of some of the details of their book. Take that for what it's worth. I enjoyed it enough that I've read it 3 or 4 times, but I do also suggest consulting other books on the same stories - particularly the stuff around K. Mitnick.
by aw1621107 | 2025-11-04 20:16:33+00:00
> As an example, I still do not understand why simple HTTP crates require more than 50 to 70 dependencies to execute a simple GET call...

Looking at ureq [0], for example, its direct non-build/non-dev dependencies are (counting duplicates):

- base64

- flate2 (4 transitive dependencies)

- log

- percent-encoding

- rustls (26 transitive dependencies)

- rustls-pki-types (1 transitive dependency)

- ureq-proto (7 transitive dependencies)

- utf-8

- webpki-roots (2 transitive dependencies)

The vast majority of the raw dependency count comes from Rustls and related crates, and I'd imagine reimplementing a TLS stack would be somewhat out of scope for an HTTP crate. I'm not sure there's much room for substantial reductions in dependency count otherwise.

[0]: https://github.com/algesten/ureq
by edserr1122 | 2025-11-04 20:17:31+00:00
Location: San Antonio, Texas, USA

Technologies: AI, ML, MLOps, AWS, RAG pipeline, Agentic AI, Python, Javascript, Typescript, Django, FastAPI, Kubernets,

Résumé/CV: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1bffZ_JU1hlmwaXzMykU-bo2ioGO...

Email: edserr1122@hotmail.com

I am a senior AI/ML Engineer with 8 years of experience spanning full-stack development, Agentic AI, and large-scale MLOps.
by escobar_west | 2025-11-04 20:17:39+00:00
So let me get this straight. You want the benefit of being able to re-use other peoples' codebase by using an HTTP crate you didn't write. But you don't want those people to also use that benefit of depending on other crates.

Insisting that you should depend on code which itself has no dependencies is a bit hypocritical if you ask me. If you want a simple HTTP crate that doesn't have dependencies, you should follow your own philosophy of not using other crates and write it yourself.
by riskable | 2025-11-04 20:18:29+00:00
My take:

Large: Requires >128GB VRAM

Medium: 32-128GB VRAM

Small: 16GB VRAM

Micro: Runs on a microcontroller or GPUs with just 4GB of VRAM

There's really nothing worthwhile for general use cases that runs in under 16GB (from my testing) except a grammar-checking model that I can't remember the name of at the moment.

gpt-oss:20b runs on 16GB of VRAM and it's actually quite good (for coding, at least)! Especially with Python.

Prediction: The day that your average gaming PC comes with 128GB of VRAM is the day developers will stop bothering with cloud-based AI services. gpt-oss:120b is nearly as good as gpt5 and we're still at the beginning of the AI revolution.
by bluebarbet | 2025-11-04 20:19:00+00:00
Correct, and not just Germany. I have travelled all over Europe by bus and train. In recent years borders have been making a comeback, despite Schengen. Buses are target number 1 for border police.

Last year my bus took nearly an hour to get across the Serbia-Croatia border, which is technically a Schengen border, but Serbia is surrounded by Europe so security is usually lax. We all had to get off and go through passport control while the police combed the bus. Meanwhile, car traffic was being waved through without the slightest formality. Infuriating.
by gilbetron | 2025-11-04 20:19:06+00:00
The paper is yet another in a long line of, "humans are special, computers can't replicate them". Such thinking has been a part of the fields for decades and decades, I had arguments about them when I was in college with my professors (such as John Holland, "creator" of genetic algorithms). That's the whole reason LLMs are so interesting, they are the first time we've captured something very much like thinking and reasoning. It can do many of the things long thought to be the sole purview of humans. That's why anyone that knows anything about the field of AI is astonished by them.

The "intellectual e-waste from Silicon Valley" has produced something amazing, the likes of which we've never seen. (Built on decades of curious people in the AI, neuroscience, computer science, and other fields, of course).
by accrual | 2025-11-04 20:20:29+00:00
In this case I feel it's like six of one and a half-dozen of the other.

Delta definition 4: (mathematics, physics, engineering) The symbol Δ; A change in a quantity, likely from "d" for "difference"

Offset definition 7: The distance by which one thing is out of alignment with another.

Got these from Wiktionary:

* https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/delta

* https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/offset