skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Presented as a literal thing, but is really figurative. What I mean is, often you don’t have the data to actually plot/PCA/whatever technique the seasonality, maybe you only have 2 years of data for example. But it dips in October and you have no idea why so you just say “Q4 tends to be a low season for this product” or something equally dubious, with no further analysis or hope of same
I think most people, me included, are more than happy with the trade-off. That doesn't mean that nothing of value was lost in each transition.
Show HN: App that simulates a software engineer's daily job
I built an app that lets users get on the job experience to better prepare them for dev roles by assigning them

- mock tickets on a large codebase
- reviewing their PR submissions
- giving them AI mentorship.

it's just the frontend for now and would really welcome feedback from you guys!!
This was very interesting info and the site design is awesome.

We always dream of going to distant planets and stars but Earth itself has so many weird, beautiful, and interesting places.

I’ve added “living for an extended period of time, eg a year on Devon Island” to my list of To Do Someday list! Sure, it drops to -50C, but living there alone would be closest to being The Martian.

Is there any way to live there self sufficiently you think? Assume you have money to buy latest tech and bring it there: a few m^2 of solar cells, battery, small hut made of highly insulating material. What else?
See also:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37998923 - Voronoi Diagram and Delaunay Triangulation in O(n log n) with Fortune's Algorithm (2020)

The previous article and discussion contain short summaries of other algorithms. My favorite is still the Jump Flooding Algorithm.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jump_flooding_algorithm
Previous: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42873289
Perhaps we're confusing intelligence with awareness.

What LLMs seem to emulate surprisingly well is something like a person's internal monologue, which is part of but not the whole of our mind.

It's as if it has the ability to talk to itself extremely quickly and while plugged directly into ~all of the written information humanity has ever produced, and what we see is the output of that hidden, verbally-reasoned conversation.

Something like that could be called intelligent, in terms of its ability to manipulate symbols and rearrange information, without having even a flicker of awareness, and entirely lacking the ability to synthesise new knowledge based on an intuitive or systemic understanding of a domain, as opposed to a complete verbal description of said domain.

Or to put it another way - it can be intelligent in terms of its utility, without possessing even an ounce of conscious awareness or understanding.
I feel that leaders in the past felt they had a moral obligation to take care of their employees. There were always exceptions of course among the wealthiest extortionists, but it seems like it has gotten worse.

A quick litmus test is to see whether they workers are called employees or resources
The Yocto Project (from the embedded space) has reproducibility as one of its goals. Since everything is built from source and from scratch, even the build toolchains, it is not too big of a step.

Seems like Yocto would make the base for a good general purpose desktop distro (if there is not one out there already.)
I don't know about you guys but I'm beginning to lose trust in Mark Zuckerberg.
This is a nice example of using maps to tell a kind of story. Many people try but over-complicate it.
> because everybody is using VSCode now, and, in particular, they’re using forks of VSCode that generate code with LLMs

:crylaugh: :crylaugh: :crylaugh:
Heritability doesn't mean "genetically determined". This is probably the most common message board misconceptions about IQ. The number of fingers on your hands has low heritability; whether or not you wear lipstick has high heritability.

You have to understand what the metric means in order to deploy it in an argument.
> No, including an interpreter like they did (Rosetta) was an alternative.

The downside of including an interpreter with no end of life expectations is that some companies get lazy and will never update their software to modern standards. Adobe is a prime example. They would have gladly stuck with Carbon forever if Apple hadn’t changed their minds about a 64 bit version of Carbon.

That was the sane reason that Jobs made it almost impossible to port legacy text based software to early Macs. Microsoft jumped onboard developing Mac software and Lotus and WordPerfect didn’t early on.

But today you would have to have emulation software for Apple //es, 68K, PPC and 32 bit and 64 bit x86 software and 32 bit and 64 bit ARM (iOS) software all vying for resources.

Today because of relentlessly getting rid of backwards compatibility, the same base OS can run on set top boxes, monitors (yeah the latest Apple displays have iPhone 14 level hardware in them and run a version of iOS), phones, tablets, watches and AR glasses.

Someone has to maintain the old compatibility layers and patch them for vulnerabilities. How many vulnerabilities have been found in some old compatible APIs on Windows?
I think in context the challenge here is to use remote editing to treat the container as a VSCode remote. As shown, that's not enough of a sandbox because the agent gives a route out.
I suppose the best way to host the actual firehouse rather than Jetstream would be to get a cheap bare metal or VPS with unlimited bandwidth? I’m going to go try it for a month, if anyone has any good suggestions for tutorials like this one that go further in depth on the gotchas.
You must be from that country where people famously do a lot of paperwork!
Awesome, hope you like it!
Profit margins are low because they need to pay $20M in opex for the CEO’s bonus.
This is fucked, TBH, i would be happier if Apple jus pulled every single aspect of their business out of the UK rather than comply with this, I don't want to get some shitty android phone, I don't care what anyone says, theu are just not as good.
I would use a checklist for that. Most wiki/notes/todo software supports checklists or checkboxes. It has the benefit that you can still see all steps at once, perform some steps out of order if the dependency isn’t linear, and it can be simply part of your process documentation instead of having to find and run a script. It’s also easier to edit.

The article even mentions “just another checkbox checked”.
That is untrue for almost all software written outside of companies who's primary product is tech or software. I work for a publisher and while there's a ton of disposable microsites and project work (that nobody ever cleans up or documents, so you never know if it's okay to remove), there's also ancient monoliths written in forgotten programming languages that are so important for production and have so many hidden dependencies and unknown users ("random FTP server" being my favorite), that you can barely put on new paint.

I'm writing software with the assumption that it'll be used for at least 30 years there, with a lot of guard rails and transparency/observability mechanisms, because I know the next person working there will thank me.
Is adopting the manifesto a violation of the manifesto?
You can have small collaborative teams building cool impactful things inside a big company. It does take a particular set of conditions to pull off, a mix of vision and ambition by the engineers as well as agenda and trust by the management I'd say.

Niches can have some deeply interesting stuff too that can keep you busy and interested for a long time, but that's more up to personal tastes whether any given niche would be a match for someone or not.

I won't go into specifics, but I've seen first-hand the achievements of such a team in a particular niche I happen to find interesting. Unbelievably cool and unique tech just hidden in plain sight and a joy to work with under the hood. On the other hand, it can feel like being on the other side of a treasure hunt, where you secretly hope one day someone outside gets nerd-sniped inside your particular niche, follows the breadcrumbs out in the open and pieces it all together, just to see what madness they could pull off.
Does copilot not count?
Show HN: Super Bowl Terminal – Hack the Game with AI and Live Data
Need an edge for tomorrow’s game?

A retro hacker-style terminal for the Super Bowl, built to deliver real-time game insights, AI analysis, and predictions. Advanced live stats from Sportradar feed the system, while the Machina Sports SDK runs the full stack from vector DB, knowledge graphs, LLM reasoning, chat, and web search agents, to generate contextualized game intelligence in real time.

Our Agents process real-time structured data, pull in unstructured insights from the web, and create a Super Bowl Brain that breaks down the game as it happens. Deepseek R1 on Groq handles inference at speed, processing thousands of vectorized documents on demand.

No signups, no paywalls. Just open the terminal and explore.
Communications of the ACM has had unbelievably bad typography for code samples for decades (predating the web). No idea how this is allowed to continue.
From the perspective of the “engineer”’s responses, I’m guessing by this is a VERY senior engineer, maybe a technical fellow or whatever Facebook calls them.
Here's a question I have that maybe one of the random experts we have on HN can answer:

In Castaway, Tom Hanks estimates that for the searchers to find him, they'd have to be searching an area the size of Texas. I think later Helen Hunt says he was even farther out of their search zone than he thought.

But let's just say it's the size of Texas or even twice the size of Texas. Are there so many tiny islands in that part of the Pacific that you can't just do a quick fly-by of all of them to see if someone has written HELP on the beach?

Are there islands that size that we're on any maps in 2000? Seems unlikely with satellite imagery.
In what does that change my initial observation that the vast majority of companies don’t need more than the most basic cloud services?
Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42923409
> Don’t reinvent the wheel!” But reinventing the wheel is how you learn how things work, and is the first step to make new, different wheels.
>We are destroying software pushing for rewrites of things that work.

> We are destroying software by jumping on every new language, paradigm, and framework.

Whilst I largely agree with the premise of the post, some of these points feel a little bit dissonant and contradictory. We can have stability and engineering quality _and_ innovation. What I think the author is trying to target is unnecessary churn and replacements that are net-worse. Some churn is inevitable, as it’s part of learning and part of R&D.
> blog comments powered by Disqus

Isn't this kind of ironic?
The fact you reduce everything I say to absurdity or some complete falsehood is against HN rules too, if we're being pedantic. Maybe you could stop?

I don't think it's authoritarians "because Nazis are bad". I think it's authoritarians because it's a story about authoritarians having authoritarians do bad authoritarian things and there are a disproportionate ratio of authoritarians or authoritarian sympathizers on this forum (and our careers) and this action is blatantly inline with the behavior of the petty authoritarians who are trying to seize power and I'm not an idiot?

And, no, this isn't exclusive to this scenario. And, shockingly, there are more than two scenarios on this planet. You're not being clever, you're being dismissive and rude.
It does. They just usually don't have cash on hand to get out of the fuck ups from doing zero rational financial analysis and disappear in a puff of smoke 6 months down the line.
Probably more accurate to say "genetics, shared environment, and non-shared environment". Modern evidence heavily weights (favors? leans towards?) the environments.
> I don’t really understand what you’re testing for?

For this hypothesis: The intelligence illusion is in the mind of the user and not in the LLM itself.

And yes, the notion was provided by the training data. It indeed had to learn that notion from the data, rather than parrot memorized lists or excerpts from the training set, because the problem space is too vast and the training set too small to brute force it.

The output lists were sorted in ascending order, the same way that I generated them for the training data. The sortedness is directly verifiable without me reading between the lines to infer something that isn't really there.
blackforestlabs: German AI startup to raise $200M from A16Z: report (2024)
i wonder.. what's the average fate/age of such abandoned mega-buildings? Does anyone care to blow them up, or just await them to fall? i guess it's depending on country, and tempora&mores..

There are quite a few (not that high but no-less-concrete-in-them) socialistic-unfinisheds still staying - 30years+ already - around here.. with various excuses for not demolishing, (like, it's expensive!). Some are in middle of nowhere - fine for them, but others are in the center of a city and still..
Does anyone recall an “intro to computing” style book that was available free online and starts with using the gas assembler and talked a lot about elf format executables? I lost the link a while ago and don’t recall the name.
Yeah I would strongly disagree it does happen just sometimes those senior engineers are not as enlightened as the executives think.
Sight, sound are quite obvious.

Taste and olfactory are matters of chemical compositions. It will take an incredible effort but something similar to a mass spectrometer can be used to detect every taste and smell we can think of and beyond. How fast and how efficient they can be is probably the main challenge.

Touch is difficult. We don't even know fully why or how does an itch "work". But force, temperature, atmospheric, humidity sensors, etc are widely available. They can provide a crude approximation, imo.

Just off the top of my head. I am sure smarter people can come up with much more suitable ways to "embody" a machine learning model.
OK, We've found out Apple, but not all the others? Has google and meta got the same but maintained silence?
>LLMs <snip> do not meaningfully share any of the mechanisms that animals or people use to reason or think.

This seems to be a hard assumption the entire post, and many other similar ones, rely upon. But how do you know how people think or reason? How do you know human intelligence is not an illusion? Decades of research were unable to answer this. Now when LLMs are everywhere, suddenly everybody is an expert in human thinking with extremely strong opinions. To my vague intuition (based on understanding of how LLMs work) it's absolutely obvious they do share at least some fundamental mechanisms, regardless of vast low-level architecture/training differences. The entire discussion on whether it's real intelligence or not is based on ill-defined terms like "intelligence", so we can keep going in circles with it.

By the way, OpenAI does nothing of this, see [1]:

>artificial general intelligence (AGI)—by which we mean highly autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work

Neither do others. So the author describes "tech industry" unknown to me.

[1] https://openai.com/charter/
Thanks for the historical context. It makes sense that they would prefer not to interact with outsiders.
I'm sure factory owners said the same thing in England in the early 1800s.

It needs to be noted that the average person's lot didn't improve until 150 years later. There's no reason why technology can't be decided by democratic means rather than shoved in our faces by people that just want to accumulate wealth and power.
Seems like Zuckerberg had already made up his mind and needed an engineer to positively confirm his desired path through a very power imbalanced chat...

No shade towards the engineer at all, but besides the very first "My instinct is” comment the engineer literally could have just been ChatGPT and Zuck would have gotten a similar convo.
What is meant is that instead of ~/.app/config, you are getting now ~/.config/app/config.

It’s much cleaner and it comes with a more logical and useful split of config and cache stuff, e.g. you can just skip .cache when rsync-ing to a remote storage instead of having a long list of per-app escapes…
Engineering is always about trade offs. Microsoft could never make the trade offs that Apple has made and while it has suffered because of it in new markets, it’s gained the trust of Big Enterprise. Microsoft should not be trying to act like Apple.

There is room for both. But if you are a gamer, the Mac isn’t where you want to be anyway. Computers have been cheap enough for decades to have both a Windows PC and a Mac. Usually a desktop and a laptop.
Sometimes there's no win-win-win solution.

I think people who write C should stop unless it's to fix security bugs and should do something else, anything else, maybe even learn about programming. But even with this mindset Linux is a C project and the R4L folks promised to thread the needle, if it cannot be done this time, then it cannot be done this time. They need to wait.
The article details the problems succinctly, and then finishes with a question about behavior. We as HN audience have the tendency to think about technical solutions to societal problems. Partly because that is what we are good at, partly because we have difficulty seeing the greater picture. We feel powerless as tech-ability is not a real currency in real life, like social skills. And so nihilism creeps in.

Instead of grasping to technological changes, ask yourself what basic limits should serve as guard rail for the application of tech. If social media are a net loss to mental health, if they pump around unprecedented amounts of fake information, if they replace real, livid interactions with real and diverse people, if they destroy the fabric of society and thus increase misery, if they fill your living years with fake emotions, all those things just to give some more advertisement dollars to some nihilists that are bored to death will all that money and now want to own all of you, will you still say: ah, I cannot do anything about it?

My 2ct: present the bill to the oligarchs. A public space is property of the public, not some billionaires. Outlaw all the negatives consequences. You will keep some fora for wood working enthusiast, some communities for hardware tinkerers, some sites about knitting, the good old internet. That's it.
> I don't know about you guys but I'm beginning to lose trust in Mark Zuckerberg.

ROTFL.
How do you think Meta makes money ? /s
Yeah, like just below the CTO or whoever probably. Even then they just quickly switch to just kinda bouncing the whatever Zuck comes up with back at them.
The suggestion was telnet+TLS, right? I'd not come across it before but it's apparently a thing: https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/i/7.5?topic=tls-configuration-de...
I’ve just switched to using just https://github.com/casey/just for my makefiles that were really just a collection of small snippets and it’s worked wonderfully
I was just looking at modern Thinkpad T14 offerings (Gen6). They offer ARM snapdragon and AMD. No Intel. https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/c/laptops/thinkpad/thinkpadt/

Times are changing
How is that evidence?

The expectations, regulations, and imposed demands, are not 100% identical across all utilities. So any combination of factors could lead to higher prices.
Evaluating Arguments About GenAI
Or through buying your candidate's rug pull coins.
Don't you think that it is much much simpler than, for example, any of the meta-programming stuff in Python?
You don't think "Examine the data" and "Which other conclusions can you draw from the data?" are open-ended?

And even when explicitly prompted to look at the plot, they only brush up against the data anomalies rather than properly analyzing the plot.
Wouldn’t a better regulation be that pharmacists can dispense cheaper generics with patient consent? If the doctor really wants something specific they can state no substitutes on the script.

Here in New Zealand I am pretty sure that’s the case.
I did acknowledge it would go against housing bubble culture. It certainly wouldn't be a financially prudent way of obtaining primary shelter, but rather for vacation homes or whatnot. We're mostly talking about rural properties in the woods, right?
You can also reproduce it within a week without hosted cloud services. What matters is that you don't have to develop custom software and instead spend that week writing config files and orchestration scripts, be it cloud stuff, docker containers or whatever.
> Lack of maintenance and it’s a generally corrupt country. Stealing is not a crime (especially from public funds) but an act of bravery. There are no consequences.

Welcome to EU. Is there any EU country where this is not a fact ?
If you're hoping to fill the open position vacated by bible-thumping Jesus I'm sorry to inform you that the position will apparently remain open for the forseeable future.

Perhaps your skills are more useful in Texas or in the southern US where I understand that problems like you describe are trending up.
Back in the day (this century) I was an under the table laborer for someone building their own house. He said it costs less than half as much and takes 4x as long.

I.e. the majority of that 70% savings is not from labor.
As of 1/1/2025 the residential average rate paid for the municipal utility of Santa Clara, CA is $0.175/kWh vs a residential average of $0.425/kWh for PG&E

https://www.siliconvalleypower.com/residents/rates-and-fees

PG&E has an 11% margin on those rates because they keep burning the state down and having to pay for it. Municipal utilities don't have to worry about that.

The only thing that could be seriously considered a downside is that Santa Clara, CA is now absolutely jam-packed with data centers that have low employment per sqft.
Why are you asking me when their financial statements are available online for you to read?

I don’t have some special insider scoop to know whether the numbers listed in the statements are real or fake.
Show HN: Minimalist LLM Commandline Tool
I'm as capitalist as they come, but I think privatizing natural monopolies makes no sense.

In our area, they handed over all school bus services to a private firm. The number of drivers, buses, and routes do not change. How was it supposed to save costs without degrading the service? The answer is, it did not. But administrations were diluted that they could take it off their liabilities.
Now I'm wondering if you could inject an emacs lisp interpreter onto the remote machine. There are exploit frameworks that do something similar.

Whether such a thing should ever be written is a completely different question, of course.
if this cartoon [1] is a reliable source, then maybe it's not (or possibly didn't used to be) such a strange thing at facebook

[1] https://bonkersworld.net/organizational-charts
I don’t mind this philosophy, but in aggregate I think very slow applications that are cumbersome and widely deployed have cost humanity many human lifetimes because a handful of developers were not able (or not given the opportunity) to optimise them even a little.

I am aware that capitalism essentially dictates externalising cost as much as possible, but with software- much for the same reason capitalism loves it (a copy is cheap and can be sold at full price despite being constructed just once) means that these externalities can scale exponentially.

Teams in particular is an outlier as in most cases it is essentially forced on people.