MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by rtkwe | 2025-12-01 03:26:37+00:00
It's not surprising or new, the English articles are usually the most thoroughly vetted and watched because that's the majority of wikipedia editor's language so the other languages are more vulnerable to national tinging of the article.

It's still far better imo than Grok which is an explicitly biased project driven by Musk's personal issues with wikipedia and it's resistance in english to rightwing edit biasing. It's a suped up version of the old conservapedia project just with Grok driving the edits instead and it's being picked up in other LLMs as a citable source.
by grayhatter | 2025-12-01 03:26:53+00:00
> A friend of mine tells Claude to always address him as “Mr Tinkleberry”, he says he can tell Claude is not paying attention to the instructions on Claude.md, when Claude stops calling him “Mr Tinkleberry” consistently

this is a totally normal thing that everyone does, that no one should view as a signal of a psychotic break from reality...

is your friend in the room with us right now?

I doubt I'll ever understand the lengths AI enjoyers will go though just to avoid any amount of independent thought...
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-12-01 03:27:54+00:00
> here it's the peace prize, and over there it's their super mega unstoppable missiles

You're confusing motives and tactical reality. We're unsure about motives on both sides. We can, however, confidently speak to how weapons and tactics are facing off against each other, in large part due to the overwhelming amount of OSINT coming out of Ukraine.

Those data let us reject the hypothesis that the U.S. has any rational basis for being worried about Russian weapons or defences. (Which doesn't mean, of course, that they can't flip out. But again, motives versus tactical truth.)
by Waterluvian | 2025-12-01 03:28:39+00:00
> 1. Everyone jokes about death

I spent most of my life perceiving comedy to be one of the less serious art forms. “You can make a beloved film but won’t win a Best Picture award” kind of less serious.

But I read sections like this one, and I experience the use of comedy for community-building and healing and discussing politics safely. And I’m growing a belief that it’s the highest, purest, most honest form of communication we have as a species.

We want to make death less taboo, but what we really need is to make joking about death less taboo.
by markus_zhang | 2025-12-01 03:30:21+00:00
I agree with you, but I forgot to mention that in the original reply I meant to say that "After the economy turns around, there is no point to hire me, an older guy with maybe a couple of gap years, who worked as a Uber driver for the last two years and can't leetcode".

But yeah, new graduates is going to suffer anyway.

And I'm scared of the collapse of the existing world order. Maybe we won't see a turn around for many years if it does collapse -- and we are already seeing many cracks on it.
by bruce511 | 2025-12-01 03:30:33+00:00
Forgive me, but I don't understand. Perhaps you can elaborate a bit (I did read the web site. )

So, it seems to me like your primary target here is the suppliers marketing budget. The line of thought is that if marketing goes away, then stuff gets cheaper.

So your plan is to alert sellers directly when a product is for sale. So if 1 million products came up for sale today, I'd get a million emails? That doesn't seem workable, but maybe I've missed something?

No cost to buyers? Means that sellers will pay to support this service? Which presumably comes out of their marketing budget? But (I'm guessing) they only pay for goods actually sold (so should relist their entire inventory every day?)

Edit - I reread - no cost to sellers. So (small?) cost to buyers, like um, an auction premium. Which the buyer should factor in...? Seller still going to relist though...

If I have an innovative product, how will I reach new people? People like my mom who don't even know that an Automated Back Scratcher 2000 exists? Perhaps by Marketing it?

All of this is predicted on suppliers using a "cost plus" pricing approach? As distinct from a "market price" approach? If my competitors are selling at $100, including a $75 marketing cost, then I should sell "direct" (well, not really direct, but through your site with presumably lower charges) at $25? Why would I do that? Why wouldn't I sell at say $99?

How is your site not just eBay?

I'm sure you've thought this through, and can illuminate me. I suspect an FAQ on your web page might help answer this too...
by reactordev | 2025-12-01 03:34:06+00:00
I was going to say this. Money comes, money goes, that’s life. Ideally you’re smart enough to save and invest to weather these storms but for those (like myself) that are still working hard post 40, we know it’s all part of the game.

I tell the younger generation the same thing. Save, invest, max 401k, before you go off and party. Your older self will thank you.
by amypetrik8 | 2025-12-01 03:34:24+00:00
>Everything comes down to the implementation at the end of the day.

To convert this context from medicalese to technese - when a hospital (system) buys an EMR (medical record system), it's like purchasing a very fancy version of "vim" or "emacs"

As all of you know, vanilla vim or emacs can be a very different experience from a polished and tuned up config file version.

So doctors are at the whims of their hospitals high (or often low) quality vim/emacs config, or .rc file of your choice - that's what "implementation" means

Some systems like Kaiser are famous for having super duper special high quality epic configuration, making epic famous for quality, though implementations (vimrc) in other hospitals, most other hospitals, is shite
by pavel_lishin | 2025-12-01 03:34:57+00:00
A long time ago, my friends and I found a "scary"-looking image, written in a mixture of English and Arabic, warning the viewer that they'd come afoul of ... I forget, some Iranian government department of censorship?

Naturally, we made it so that 1% of the requests to a forum we ran at the time displayed it to the viewer. :)
Python terminal app as Android Phone app
by dharmatech | 2025-12-01 03:35:19+00:00
I put together a small water consumption app (how much water you drink in a day) in SQLite and Python.

Then I wanted to use it on my phone so I made a Kotlin app as a UI for the simple database.

Then I wondered, how far could I get if I just ran a Python terminal app on my phone?

Well, I got surprisingly far...

https://youtu.be/sTj1FalZMVw?si=yZShqGdDBewV8dob

Happy to release the code at some point. Just need to organize the repo a bit.

I'm surprised I haven't seen more terminal apps intended to be run as phone apps like this. Let's me know if you know of any others.
by sheepscreek | 2025-12-01 03:35:28+00:00
It’s crazy that the empathetic AI I sometimes share my life’s mundane problems with wrote this. It understands such high level maths and speaks in a lexicon with words I can’t even pronounce. Incredible versatility. If this isn’t AGI (or even super intelligence) then what is?

Sure it suffers from amnesia and cannot get basic things right sometimes, but one is a design limitation that can be overcome and the other a possible problem caused by training (we’re discovering that overt focus during training on adherence to prompt somewhat lobotomizes their general competence).
by rtkwe | 2025-12-01 03:36:40+00:00
Musks own tweets and words should be more than enough:

Wokipedia: https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1972991279706636437

Cleaning up a "mountain of woke bullshit" models are trained on: https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1972991279706636437

He hasn't been subtle in the goal of this rewriting of wikipedia.
by ghewgill | 2025-12-01 03:36:49+00:00
I've done AoC on what I call "hard mode", where I do the solutions in a language I designed and implemented myself. It's not because the language is particularly suited to AoC in any particular way, but it gives me confidence that my language can be used to solve real problems.

Neon Language: https://neon-lang.dev/ Some previous AoC solutions: https://github.com/ghewgill/adventofcode
by tomhow | 2025-12-01 03:37:41+00:00
Please don't sneer at the community. The HN audience disproportionately includes experienced programmers, data scientists, machine learning experts, sysadmins, other advanced tech professionals, power users and hacker types who like to be able to control and customize their tools. It's not surprising that Linux and macOS are more popular here than in mainstream society. However it's not the HN way to be arrogant or elitist against the broader population. Sure, it happens but it's against the guidelines and we penalize accounts that act that way. So we just don't want any of this kind of rhetoric here, whether it's "pro" or "anti" the HN community and its ways.

If you'd take a moment to read the guidelines and make an effort to observe them in future we'd be grateful. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
by travisgriggs | 2025-12-01 03:37:46+00:00
My interest has been piqued of late. I've been a Linux enthusiast since the late 90's. I don't think it's a sense of contrarianism that motivates my interest anew.

As I've aged, what I've come to value most in software stacks is composability. I do not know if [Free]BSD restores that, but Linux feels like it has grown more complicated and less composable. I'm using this term loosely, but I'm mostly thinking of how one reasons and cognates about the way the system work in this instance. I want to work in a world where each tool on the OS's bench has a single straightforward man page, not swiss army knives where the authors/maintainers just kept throwing more "it can do this too" in to attract community.
by bediger4000 | 2025-12-01 03:38:47+00:00
Why should we believe NYT? They've been very soft on Trump the last 10 years, why wouldn't the slant reporting on Trump's enemies or potential rivals?

Also, it's possible they're running the Hillary Clinton playbook on Walz. Endless accusations and investigations that somehow never quite make it to the level of credible, but also never got away.
by echelon | 2025-12-01 03:39:05+00:00
New folks will never be hired. RIP to the CS degree.

Old staff will be exited. Especially senior and mid level management.

If you lose your job, you won't get the same comp again. The days of $500K TC are long behind us.

It's the era of downsizing and outsourcing while blaming AI.

None of this has anything to do with AI. That's just a scapegoat.

Google and Amazon are culling entire US teams and rebuilding them in Asia where the cost of labor is significantly lower.

The best thing ICs can do is fight for big tech monopolies to be broken up. (Call your reps leading up to the midterms.) If several members of the Mag 7 are broken up into smaller companies, that'll inject tons of energy back into the ecosystem and enable the wheels of competition and employment.

Bonus - if big conglomerates are fighting to pick up the pieces of a Ma Bell style dismantlement, they won't have time to manage teams 12 hours away.

Nothing against our colleagues in Asia. They're brilliant. But American companies built with American labor shouldn't shut us out in the cold while they reach record profits and continue to hollow out entirely new industries simply by outstretching their arms.
by gruez | 2025-12-01 03:39:20+00:00
>Reality is not particularly rosy for new graduates AFAIK

I looked at the statistics[1], and while you could argue new graduates have seen worse (recent grad unemployment is actually lower than much of the 2010s), you can also see that in contrast to previous periods where new grad unemployment is lower than all worker unemployment, this time around new grad unemployment is actually slightly higher. However if you look at the chart this wasn't a post pandemic phenomena. The gap has been closing since the back half of the 2010s, and doesn't show much of a spike after the release of chatgpt, so "AI" isn't a good explanation either.

[1] https://www.newyorkfed.org/research/college-labor-market
by magicalist | 2025-12-01 03:40:02+00:00
The overhyped tweet from the robinhood guy raising money for his AI startup is nicely brought into better perspective by Thomas Bloom (including that #124 is not from the cited paper, "Complete sequences of sets of integer powers "/BEGL96):

> This is a nice solution, and impressive to be found by AI, although the proof is (in hindsight) very simple, and the surprising thing is that Erdos missed it. But there is definitely precedent for Erdos missing easy solutions!

> Also this is not the problem as posed in that paper

> That paper asks a harder version of this problem. The problem which has been solved was asked by Erdos in a couple of later papers.

> One also needs to be careful about saying things like 'open for 30 years'. This does not mean it has resisted 30 years of efforts to solve it! Many Erdos problems (including this one) have just been forgotten about it, and nobody has seriously tried to solve it.[1]

And, indeed, Boris Alexeev (who ran the problem) agrees:

> My summary is that Aristotle solved "a" version of this problem (indeed, with an olympiad-style proof), but not "the" version.

> I agree that the [BEGL96] problem is still open (for now!), and your plan to keep this problem open by changing the statement is reasonable. Alternatively, one could add another problem and link them. I have no preference.[2]

Not to rain on the parade out of spite, it's just that this is neat, but not like, unusually neat compared to the last few months.

[1] https://twitter.com/thomasfbloom/status/1995083348201586965

[2] https://www.erdosproblems.com/forum/thread/124#post-1899
by mholm | 2025-12-01 03:40:31+00:00
I bought a ReMarkable 2 a couple of years ago with far higher hopes of hackability than it ultimately ended up supporting. Ended up selling it a few months ago after it just couldn't fit into any of my usecases.

I think ReMarkable is wasting a TON of potential at their price/form factor/ux. A device can be powerful without sacrificing simplicity and singularity of purpose.
by kragen | 2025-12-01 03:40:35+00:00
This is a 521-page CC-licensed book on optimization which looks absolutely fantastic. It starts out with modern gradient-based algorithms rooted in automatic differentiation, including recent things like Adam, rather than the historically more important linear optimization algorithms like the simplex method (the 24-page chapter 12 covers linear optimization). There are a number of chapters on things I haven't even heard of, and, best of all, there are exercises.

I've been wanting something like this for a long time, and I regret not knowing about the first edition.

If you are wondering why this is a more interesting problem than, say, sorting a list, the answer is that optimization algorithms are attempts at the ideal of a fully general problem solver. Instead of writing a program to solve the problem, you write a program to recognize what a solution would look like, which is often much easier, for example with a labeled dataset. Then you apply the optimization algorithm on your program. And that is how current AI is being done, with automatic differentiation and variants of Adam, but there are many other algorithms for optimization which may be better alternatives in some circumstances.
by Matzalar | 2025-12-01 03:40:43+00:00
Chat is OK at making anything sound promising, but it will not talk to real people and give you the real market signals. We do both, we do the “synthetic” data analysis, but more importantly we talk to real people and ask them what they think. Depending on the product (or project), we’ll usually get few hundred real interactions. The goal is to get enough real, unfiltered feedback to see whether there’s a consistent signal to make a decision.
by jasonjayr | 2025-12-01 03:42:09+00:00
I've worked with a vendor listing products in their IDM (Item Data Management) System. IIRC, it's from https://www.stibosystems.com/ . From a SMB vendor supplying one type of product it's frustrating to work with, with a lot of back and forth and workflows for verifying all manner of compliance with data quality, global regulations, and laws. From their internal perspective, it's probably the bee's knees, supporting a wide variety of taxonomies, considering the variety of products they sell & support, some rather dangerous and hazardous.

From looking over the shoulders of the staff, some aspects of the system that I've seen as a supplier are directly visible to them too.
by threethirtytwo | 2025-12-01 03:42:18+00:00
You lack imagination. When ChatGPT just came out people were saying it can never code. Now if you aren’t using ai in your coding you’re biting the dust.

Stop talking about the status quo… we are talking about the projected trendline. What will AI be when it matures?

Second you’re just another demographic. Smaller than fans of Coldplay but equally generic and thus an equal target for generated art.

Here’s a prompt that will one day target you: “ChatGPT, create musical art that will target counter culture posers who think they’re better than everyone just because they like something that isn’t mainstream. Make it so different they will worship that garbage like they worship Pearl Jam. Pretend that the art is by a human so what when they finally figure out they fell for it hook line and sinker they’ll realize their counter culture tendencies are just another form of generic trash fandom no different than people who love cold play or, dare I say it, Taylor swift.”

What do you do then when this future comes to pass and all content even for posers is replicated in ways that are superior?
by shagie | 2025-12-01 03:42:34+00:00
> ... at pay far lower than they're used to ...

Is this saying something more about the relative expectation of compensation bands?

New grads are unlikely to have a comparable benchmark.

People who've worked in Big Tech and finding themselves applying to regular companies where the revenue per employee is in the $200k range are likely going to have difficulty adjusting to such.

I work in the public sector and make very low six digits. Others I know have compensation that is 3x or 4x what I make while working in technology industries.

If both I and the people I chat with were to find themselves suddenly out of a job, I suspect I'd find an acceptable job elsewhere more easily than they would because anything I did would be a pay raise while anything they took would be a pay cut. This in turn translates to that I would be the less risky candidate (that I wouldn't be looking for a new position that would pay more within the year)... and thus I believe not only would I be more likely to accept the job I would also be more likely to be extended the position.

Browsing reddit there are a lot of people on cscareerquestions (and similar) who have the mindset of FAANG or bust as a new grad. That they wouldn't even consider working at a company like Little Cesar's or Home Depot despite those companies having open positions.

---

Furthermore, this gets into a lemon market situation ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons ). Where it becomes harder to distinguish a good candidate for a poor one and that can only be found out after someone is hired, the companies that have people are more afraid of hiring a lemon than so don't hire anyone. This further depresses the market for the highly skilled candidates. Additionally, people who are skilled are less likely to look for a new job because the market is depressed and they're not as likely to get a good position afterwards.
by WhyOhWhyQ | 2025-12-01 03:44:57+00:00
I predict the way AI will be useful in science from the perspective of mathematics is by figuring out combinatorially complex solutions to problems that would otherwise not be interesting to (or far too complex to be comprehended by) humans. With such capabilities it could be imagined then that the AI will be useful for designing super materials, or doing fancy things with biology / medicine, and generally finding useful patterns in complex systems.
by crystal_revenge | 2025-12-01 03:46:21+00:00
I suspect you’re misjudging the friend here. This sounds more like the famous “no brown m&ms” clause in the Van Halen performance contract. As ridiculous as the request is, it being followed provides strong evidence that the rest (and more meaningful) of the requests are.

Sounds like the friend understands quite well how LLMs actually work and has found a clever way to be signaled when it’s starting to go off the rails.
by programjames | 2025-12-01 03:48:35+00:00
What do you mean by "a healthy mindset"? It isn't healthy for society. It isn't healthy in the world where everyone has this mindset. It isn't healthy to treat your life as a lottery, hoping for a winning ticket instead of creating that ticket yourself. The fact that you consider applications to be uncertainties in life is very telling. You can make them much less uncertain, if you stop thinking of them like a lottery and start doing the things that prove you are valuable to others.

Did you know that USAMO qualifiers have >50% rate of admission to MIT? IMO gold medalists have >80% acceptance rate, and it's only so low because international admissions is limited to 10% of the student body. Life is only a lottery if you have an unhealthy mindset holding you back from improving yourself. Just because university admissions involve a lot of luck at the bottom does not mean you have to limit yourself to a bottom feeder spraying and praying to get in.
by tomhow | 2025-12-01 03:48:39+00:00
Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.

Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.

When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."

Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
by aorloff | 2025-12-01 03:49:27+00:00
I am at 10 different supply stores too, Lowes, Ashby, Truitt and I get a shit ton of stuff delivered.

Everyone competes on price, so when I see everyone at Home Depot with their thumbs up their asses because the computers are down, I know that Ashby is eating their lunch on the margin. I'm sure Home Depot has enormous economies of scale that make up for it, but this is a current issue.
by viccis | 2025-12-01 03:49:37+00:00
>I didn't see anything in that story that suggests he was responsible for capacity management.

I'm referring to this:

"The week before launch, the capacity planning project was shifted to Rich and I."

>His argument in favor of the changes was that Digg was at risk of going out of business and needed to take big swings to try and turn things around.

At the end, yeah. But this statement earlier was fairly uncritical:

"promised to move us from a monolithic community-driven news aggregator to an infinitely personalized aggregator driven by blending your social graph, top influencers, and the global zeitgeist of news"

It sounds like he thinks more that it was a failure to execute than that it was a complete bastardization of the core purpose of Digg that brought people to it. Digg v4 was doing algorithm slop far too early and crudely and overtly. It was enshittification without all the lubrication to get users to accept it like Facebook and others did.
by whynotmaybe | 2025-12-01 03:49:51+00:00
I guess that if you GET https://somedomain.com/boobs.jpg you get a 404 (not found) from a web server hosted outside of Iran but if the server for the domain is hosted in Iran, you get a 403 (forbidden) because the request is intercepted by a firewall that detect the word "boobs" and reject it with a 403 without forwarding it to the webserver that would usually return the 404.