MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jameshilliard | 2025-12-09 04:23:40+00:00
> The Palestinians have a right to resist occupation under international law.

Doesn't give them a right to commit war crimes though.

> In so far as the resistance is confined to military targets it's entirely lawful.

Palestinian "resistance" tends to not confine themselves to military targets in general.

> The same sort of Westerner who immediately understands Ukrainian resistance struggles to understand the Palestinian perspective.

I don't recall Ukrainian resistance targeting civilians in general.

> They're never held accountable and have significant support from the right-wing members of the coalition government - cabinet minister Ben-Gvir was the lawyer for the settlers who burnt a Palestinian baby alive.

Ben-Gvir was convicted of supporting a terrorist organization by Israeli courts and has very little support amongst the Israeli public, Israel just tends to get more extremists in the Knesset due to the proportional voting system than say in a country with a two party system.

> The ultimate motivation for these actions is the ethnic supremacist cult of Zionism.

Jews have a pretty bad history when it comes to living as ethnic minorities in other countries, it's not surprising that they would want at least 1 state in which they are an ethnic majority amongst the many Muslim majority states.
by ewoodrich | 2025-12-09 04:24:57+00:00
Android on an e-reader unlocks so much potential. I've owned four or five Kindles over the years but recently switched to an Onyx Boox page 7" as my main e-reader. Expensive (relative to Kindles) but runs full Android 11 and has physical page turn buttons. I use an app called BookFusion to sync my library including reading position across all platforms. Battery life isn't Kindle grade but I can get by charging once a week which is a good enough tradeoff for the convenience of being able to run Android apps.
by hxtk | 2025-12-09 04:25:29+00:00
I always think about the way you discover the problem. I used to say the same about RNG: if you need fast PRNG and you pick CSPRNG, you’ll find out when you profile your application because it isn’t fast enough. In the reverse case, you’ll find out when someone successfully guesses your private key.

If you need performance and you pick data integrity, you find out when your latency gets too high. In the reverse case, you find out when a customer asks where all their data went.
by conception | 2025-12-09 04:27:00+00:00
Microsoft is a buffet. You can get anything you want but it’s rare people leave a buffet saying “Man that food was great!”

Usually people go to different places for different things of better quality. This is clear because there are lots of very successful competing products to Microsoft’s buffet.

The only moat I’d say Microsoft actually has is Excel. And maybe Powerpoint.

Everything else can be replaced easily and often with a far better dish.
by acjohnson55 | 2025-12-09 04:27:58+00:00
You can definitely understand backpropagation, you just gotta find the right explainer.

On a basic level, it's kind of like if you had a calculation for aiming a cannon, and someone was giving you targets to shoot at 1 by 1, and each time you miss the target, they tell you how much you missed by and what direction. You could tweak your calculation each time, and it should get more accurate if you do it right.

Backpropagation is based on a mathematical solution for how exactly you make those tweaks, taking advantage of some calculus. If you're comfortable with calculus you can probs understand it. If not, you might have some background knowledge to pick up first.
by hn_throwaway_99 | 2025-12-09 04:28:22+00:00
I read the abstract (not the whole paper) and the great summarizing comments here.

Beyond the practical implications of this (i.e. reduced training and inference costs), I'm curious if this has any consequences for "philosophy of the mind"-type of stuff. That is, does this sentence from the abstract, "we identify universal subspaces capturing majority variance in just a few principal directions", imply that all of these various models, across vastly different domains, share a large set of common "plumbing", if you will? Am I understanding that correctly? It just sounds like it could have huge relevance to how various "thinking" (and I know, I know, those scare quotes are doing a lot of work) systems compose their knowledge.
by inciampati | 2025-12-09 04:28:29+00:00
The authors study a bunch of wild low rank fine tunes and discover that they share a common... low rank! ... substructure which is itself base model dependent. Humans are (genetically) the same. You need only a handful of PCs to represent the cast majority of variation. But that's because of our shared ancestry. And maybe the same thing is going on here.
by thedailymail | 2025-12-09 04:29:01+00:00
In the same essay ("Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren," 1930) where he predicted the 15-hour workweek, Keynes wrote about how future generations would view the hoarding of money for money's sake as criminally insane.

"There are changes in other spheres too which we must expect to come. When the accumulation of wealth is no longer of high social importance, there will be great changes in the code of morals. We shall be able to rid ourselves of many of the pseudo-moral principles which have hag-ridden us for two hundred years, by which we have exalted some of the most distasteful of human qualities into the position of the highest virtues. We shall be able to afford to dare to assess the money-motive at its true value. The love of money as a possession – as distinguished from the love of money as a means to the enjoyments and realities of life – will be recognised for what it is, a somewhat disgusting morbidity, one of those semi-criminal, semi-pathological propensities which one hands over with a shudder to the specialists in mental disease. All kinds of social customs and economic practices, affecting the distribution of wealth and of economic rewards and penalties, which we now maintain at all costs, however distasteful and unjust they may be in themselves, because they are tremendously useful in promoting the accumulation of capital, we shall then be free, at last, to discard."
by tclancy | 2025-12-09 04:29:20+00:00
> technical issues and social issues really don't mix

I don’t think that’s true in the least. I think it’s true there are no technical solutions to social problems, but any and all technology comes from people forming societies and seeking solutions.

This comment feels the same as people saying “Stick to sports” about athletes talking politics. Everything is political. If you don’t think something is, it tends to be because one is insulated from the politics that affect it.
by machomaster | 2025-12-09 04:29:40+00:00
AI is very satisfied in doing the job, just ask it.

AI is able to speed up the progress, to give more resources, to give the most important thing people have - time. The fact that these incredible gifts are misused (or used inefficiently) is not the problem of AI. This would be like complaining that the objective positive of increased food production is actually a negative, because people are getting fatter.
by re-thc | 2025-12-09 04:29:42+00:00
> This really is what businesses want and always have wanted.

There's a difference between what they really want and executives knowing what they want. You make it sound like every business makes optimal decisions to get optimal earnings.

> They literally did not want it fixed when I brought it up because

Because they thought they knew what earns them profits. The key here they thought they knew.

The real problem behind the scenes is a lot of management is short term. Of course they don't care. They roll out their shiny features, get their promotions and leave. The issues after that are not theirs. It is THE business' problem.
by startupjobsnyc | 2025-12-09 04:31:35+00:00
Every NYC founder I know complains about hiring:

“Why is it so hard to find good talent?” and simultaneously: “Why are all the job boards full of spam?”

So I built the job board I wished existed.

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Most job boards chase quantity, not quality. They’re full of fake postings, stale roles, and recruiter spam.

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Curated daily for engineering, product, design, growth, sales, and operations

NYC-focused, with a few relevant remote roles

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The goal: If it’s on this board, it’s a job worth applying for.

Who it’s for Job seekers

Engineers, PMs, designers, growth operators — if you want a real NYC startup role, not a 300-page ATS funnel, this is your feed.

Founders & hiring managers

If you want actual talent, not irrelevant applicants, you can post instantly: Post a Job

We reject low-quality or fake postings. No crypto scams. No AI-generated garbage. Just real roles.

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Stripe / Privy — Forward Deployed Engineer

Ramp — Frontend Engineer (All Levels)

Notion — Fullstack Engineer

Adaptive — Senior Full Stack

GrubDial — CTO (Voice AI)

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HN hates spam and fake content — we do too. StartupJobs.nyc is:

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Anything that makes founders and operators actually hire faster?

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URL: https://startupjobs.nyc
by bruce511 | 2025-12-09 04:32:25+00:00
In a program I once wrote, all menu items could be added to the toolbar. The toolbar (optionally) didn't have text (other than the tool tip.)

Having the icon in the menu acted as a visual link so that the user saw it in the menu, then in the toolbar.

The icon was reinforced as part of the header on the window the user went to. In other words if they clicked a menu (or button) with that icon, then they got a window with that icon.

It helped that we used color icons, so the colors also indicated something of the nature of the task at hand.
by modeless | 2025-12-09 04:32:48+00:00
This seems confusingly phrased. When they say things like "500 Vision Transformers", what they mean is 500 finetunes of the same base model, downloaded from the huggingface accounts of anonymous randos. These spaces are only "universal" to a single pretrained base model AFAICT. Is it really that surprising that finetunes would be extremely similar to each other? Especially LoRAs?

I visited one of the models they reference and huggingface says it has malware in it: https://huggingface.co/lucascruz/CheXpert-ViT-U-MultiClass
by ndespres | 2025-12-09 04:32:59+00:00
I agree with the author. I understand many of the reasons others give here for why icons could be beneficial- localization, literacy, vision issues, etc. all are great reasons to supplement text with icons, theoretically. But I disagree that these icons, I mean those shown as examples in the Apple menu, Safari menu, or Google Docs menus- actually convey anything useful and really do prove the authors point that they’re poorly implemented.

I realize it may be generational and privilege based, as I can read English and have a good deal of computer literacy. To my eyes the icon trend of flat, minimal icons paradoxically ask a user to possess a higher degree of computer fluency to successfully parse the artistic intent of the icon and map it to its function. When these icons don’t accurately convey their function (the Paste icon is a blank clipboard. What’s that do?) and when the design language is inconsistent within the same application and OS (do cogs mean Preferences? Services? you’re building a very confusing world for most of the user group types you claim to be helping.
by AngryData | 2025-12-09 04:33:19+00:00
Why would they need such incentives? All they gotta do is give them a decent wage and they will be happy, which in North Korea is a paltry sum. Its not like regular North Koreans are traveling around the world, they couldn't afford it even without any other restrictions, so they have zero risk of arrest or punishment from other nations.

If I told you today that I will pay you a million dollars to go fuck around with some North Korean servers, and doing it completely anonymously with the full protection and sanction of your government, would you say no?

I think you may have some unrealistic views on how North Korea operates internally. 99% of their population lives completely normal lives and has zero extra interactions with the government beyond basic grunt military service which is common across much of the world, and paperwork for licensing, permits, and taxes. We only see the worst possible views of North Korea from the outside, slathered with thick layers of additional propaganda on top of it.
by energy123 | 2025-12-09 04:34:54+00:00
Every vision task needs edge/contrast/color detectors and these should be mostly the same across ViTs, needing only a rotation and scaling in the subspace. Likewise with language tasks and encoding the basic rules of language which are the same regardless of application. So it is no surprise to see intra-modality shared variation.

The surprising thing is inter-modality shared variation. I wouldn't have bet against it but I also wouldn't have guessed it.

I would like to see model interpretability work into whether these subspace vectors can be interpreted as low level or high level abstractions. Are they picking up low level "edge detectors" that are somehow invariant to modality (if so, why?) or are they picking up higher level concepts like distance vs. closeness?
by sombragris | 2025-12-09 04:35:09+00:00
> But the UX is just a lot worse, and it isn't easy to go from one application to another because they're slightly different enough that your productivity takes a hit from all the small papercuts.

Speak for yourself. I see that LibreOffice's default UI is still a normal WIMP UI and this is a plus for me. I hated when MS Office switched to the ribbon in Office 2007.

"So you want to insert a row in a table? Great, just click on Table > Insert > Row... Oh well. Nevermind, just show me your screen and I'll hunt the functionality in that stupid ribbon."

We don't need less, but more, Office programs that respect GUI UI conventions.
by charcircuit | 2025-12-09 04:36:22+00:00
>But the web works because browsers are tolerant.

This is more of an artifact of needing to be compatibile with other browsers and more of an arbitrary decision where once one browser starts allowing all sorts of input than everyone else may start needing to if content starts relying on it.

>But the world is better for it.

It makes compatibility between different browsers more complicated due to adding a ton of edge cases that all need to be handled the same way as opposed to following a standardized way of writing pages.

>The user experience of XHTML was rubbish. The disrespect shown to anyone for deviating from the One True Path made it an unwelcoming and unfriendly place.

The UX could be improved along with developer tools making it harder to mess up and easy to spot mistakes. For example many internet forums have similar requirements of needing to match formatting tags and those have work successfully despite being strict. I think the real issue was that XHTML was introduced too late. Trying to fix things in a decentralized ecosystem is an extremely big uphill battle. If you don't fix things at the very start things can grow out of one's control.

>The beauty of the web as a platform is that it isn't a monoculture.

There is also beauty in that there is a standard that everyone can follow to ensure that pages written can work the same in all browsers.

>I cannot fathom how someone can look at the beautiful diversity of the web and then declare that only pure-blooded people should live in a particular city.

The way people interact with each other in the real world is very different than the way browsers render pages. I do not think such a comparison makes any sense to make.

>How do you acknowledge that the father of the computer was a homosexual, brutally bullied by the state into suicide, and then fund groups that want to deny gay people fundamental human rights?

Just because someone was in the right place at the right time does not mean that they are of perfect moral character. It's similar to the quote to never meet your heros. The people you may look up to in regards to some achievement may not be the best of character and keeping a distance from them may be the best else your opinion of them may be tarnished.

>When you throw slurs and denigrate people's pronouns, your ignorance and hatred does a disservice to history and drives away the next generation of talent.

I disagree that this happens. At best it discourages a subset of the next generation, but it is not a subset I would like to work with. These kinds of people could also drive away other potential talent too. Simply increasing the number as opposed to trying to build a positive, healthy, culture and growing it I don't think is the best idea.

>This isn't an academic argument over big-endian or little-endian.

It could be about these 2 choices. For example x86 processors were able to be extremely successful despite not being tolerant between big and little endian. By picking a single one and running with it, it's been able to help unify computing on little endian.
by sothatsit | 2025-12-09 04:37:21+00:00
> These kind of tasks ought to be have been automated a long time ago.

It’s much easier to write business logic in code. The entire value of CRUD apps is in their business logic. Therefore, it makes sense to write CRUD apps in code and not some app builder.

And coding assistants can finally help with writing that business logic, in a way that frameworks cannot.
by throwaway89201 | 2025-12-09 04:37:36+00:00
It doesn't fit into the list as a revolution (or even 'evolution') as it's just a high-density, compact and cheap battery [1] that turns out to be quite unsafe [2].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45322135

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46071317
by gorgoiler | 2025-12-09 04:38:00+00:00
Through a chance piece of design, the leading power pack in terms of energy density is made by / branded on behalf of Haribo, a confectionary company:

https://www.ultralightnerd.com/index.php/2025/06/26/haribo-m...

What’s interesting is, like the other products, it was designed and marketed for one purpose but has become very popular for another. (Although in this case it could well just be a fashion, especially given how uniquely identifiable the product is.)
by visarga | 2025-12-09 04:38:01+00:00
An ATM is a reliable machine with a bounded risk - the money inside - while an AI agent could steer your company into bankruptcy and have no liability for it. AI has no skin and depending on application, much higher upper bound for damage. A digit read wrong in a medical transcript, patient dies.

> There are a ton of current careers that are just email + meetings + powerpoint + spreadsheet that can go the same way.

Managing risks, can't automate it. Every project and task needs a responsibility sink.
by seanmcdirmid | 2025-12-09 04:38:46+00:00
Have you tried having AI build up documentation on the code first and then correct it where it’s understanding is wrong, then running code changes with the docs in the context, you can even separate it out for each module if you are daring. Ai still takes alot of hand holding to be productive with, which means our jobs are safe for now until they start learning about SWe principles somehow.
by frchalli | 2025-12-09 04:39:25+00:00
> The only reason to reduce headcount is to remove people who already weren’t providing much value.

There were many secretaries up until the late 20th century that took dictation, either writing notes of what they were told or from a recording, then they typed it out and distributed memos. At first, there were many people typing, then later mimeograph machines took away some of those jobs, then copying machines made that faster, then printers reduced the need for the manual copying, then email reduced the need to print something out, and now instant messaging reduces email clutter and keep messages shorter.

All along that timeline there were fewer and fewer people involved, all for the valuable task of communication. While they may not have held these people in high esteem, they were critical for getting things done and scaling.

I’m not saying LLMs are perfect or will replace every job. They make mistakes, and they always will; it’s part of what they are. But, as useful as people are today, the roles we serve in will go away and be replaced by something else, even if it’s just to indicate at various times during the day what is or isn’t pleasing.
by ipaddr | 2025-12-09 04:39:35+00:00
UBI.

$500 per adult per month (~$1.4T) - existing welfare.

for $1000 per month it would cost $3.1T.

What about the children? $1,200 for every adult + $400 for every child 4.1 trillion/year

The federal budget is 6 trillion/year.

There would need to be deflation for 1,200 a month to have the buying power of the average income now. Right now that's minimum wage.
by sombragris | 2025-12-09 04:39:47+00:00
> Excel is the best spreadsheet software in my experience when you have to move beyond the basics.

This might be true. But most Excel users just use the basics and would be well served to switching to a Free Software alternative such as LibreOffice Calc. Which, is also capable to be used in advanced contexts; although for those cases it is different than Excel, admittedly.

I think most of the excuses saying why people don't switch to Excel alternatives are simply coverups for inertia. I understand that; getting out of the comfort zone is difficult. But it's not impossible.
by analog31 | 2025-12-09 04:40:17+00:00
That's quite possible. I've done a certain amount of it myself. A couple of programs that I wrote for the factory 15+ years ago are being used continually for critical adjustment and testing of subassemblies. All told it's a few thousand lines of Visual Basic. Not "clean code" but carefully documented with a complete theory of operation that could be used as a spec for a professionally written version.

My view is that it's not a failing, any more than "software development can't be estimated" is, but a fact of life. Every complex organization faces the dilemma of big versus little projects, and ends up having to draw the line somewhere. It makes the most sense for the business, and for developer careers, to focus on the biggest, most visible projects.

The little projects get conducted in shadow mode. Perhaps a benefit of Excel is a kind of social compromise, where it signals that you're not trying to do IT work, and IT accepts that it's not threatening.

There's a risk, but I think it's minimal. Risk is probability times impact, measured in dollars. The biggest risks come from the biggest projects, just because the potential impact is big. Virtually all of the project failures that threaten businesses come from big projects that are carried out by good engineers using all of the proper methods.
by visarga | 2025-12-09 04:41:08+00:00
> What happens when there are no more hosts to donate more training-blood?

LLMs have over 1B users and exchange over 1T tokens with us per day. We put them through all conceivable tasks and provide support for completing those tasks, and push back when the model veers off. We test LLM ideas in reality (like experiment following hypothesis) and use that information to iterate. These logs are gold for training on how to apply AI in real world.