skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Does anyone know if tokenizers are pruned? That is, if a token doesn't appear in the corpus is it removed from the model? That would imply a process that leaks information about the dataset.
Wrong kind of plant. See sibling comment.
Fair criticism, but saying "we are destroying software" is not actionable. I want us to do better, but I also want to be effective, and not just sit around impotently wringing our hands about how bad everything is.
My previous approach was:

1) Capture the process as is

2) make the process pass a giggle test

3) make the process automatable

Concurrent with 3 and 4:

- use the process repeatedly and by as many people as possible

- adapt the process to any misuse seen in the wild

4) automate the process

Everybody will buy into steps 1&2, and most people will come around to 4, but doing step 3 usually will get you more people pushing for and understanding 4

The limitation of your approach I will say is that if you can automate the beginning of a process or the end it’s fine, but if you have two islands in the middle it doesn’t work better than a CLI tool with prompts.
It runs fine on my 7 year old Mac Mini, which is running the newest OS version that came out least week. It won’t run on a PPC Mac, I guess.
There are many large companies running Cobol programs in production that wished software didn't last 30 years.
> How does that give you the right to train an LLM on it?

Fair use gives me that right, not a contract or license.
What do you need power for? Bidets are relatively popular in Poland and they are just taps for warm water that you can direct wherever with a convenient basin. Not sure what you need the gadgetry for. And yes, bidet is an absolutely essential thing to have in a bathroom.
The xz backdoor was news because they went to a lot of effort to try to hide a backdoor in the source (actually a binary file in the source) and still failed. In contrast, without reproducible builds it is trivial for a maintainer with upload rights (or somebody who managed to get the credentials from a maintainer) to insert a backdoor into a binary. And it is then virtually impossible to detect.
Speaking of which, if you were born with a golden spoon, would you be eating Zoodles? Dumbest classic commercial ever.
These posts about X task LLMs fails at when you give it Y prompt are getting more and more silly.

If you ask an AI to analyze some data, should the default behavior be to use that data to make various types of graphs, export said graphs, feed them back in to itself, then analyze the shapes of those graphs to see if they resemble an animal?

Personally I would be very annoyed if I actually wanted a statistical analysis, and it spent a bajillion tokens following the process above in order to tell me my data looks like a chicken when you tip it sideways.

> However, this same trait makes them potentially problematic for exploratory data analysis. The core value of EDA lies in its ability to generate novel hypotheses through pattern recognition. The fact that both Sonnet and 4o required explicit prompting to notice even dramatic visual patterns suggests they may miss crucial insights during open-ended exploration.

It requires prompting for x if you want it to do x... That's a feature, not a bug. Note that no mention of open-ended exploration or approaching the data from alternate perspectives was made in the original prompt.
I would call that wanting plausible deniability (in a different sense than how the phrase is normally used). "Yes we may have a done a bad thing but we believed it was allowed."
1/ What?

If this kind of insane dependencies for such a simple thing is common practice in the Rust ecosystem then the language is in a lot worse place than I imagined it to be.
He's not trying to stop a war, he's trying to continue one by overtly engaging in ethnic cleansing, and is threatening to start a couple of others with allies. That's the charitable explanation for his actions, anyway. The uncharitable explanation is that he's an idiot.
Interesting, I use stuff I learned from my computer science frequently, especially regarding algorithms, data structures, and OS fundamentals. Granted I'm much more on the backend/infra side, but those things still come up regularly. Just yesterday I faced an issue regarding the way threads operate that a basic understanding of processes and threads in the OS made a lot easier.

It's nothing that a person can't learn outside of a CS degree of course, but most people won't spend the time to dig into the formal and often abstract principles to really understand how different algorithms perform and how choice of data structure impacts performance. I've reviewed code many times that really should be using a linked list or tree but ends up thrown into a hash because that's basically the only data structure the person knows. Not uncommon is a reply "Premature optimization is the root of all evil" which drives me crazy. It doesn't take much effort to just use the right data structure in the first place if you understand their pros and cons.
> What changed in software in the last 20 years

Backends handling tens / hundreds of thousands or more of concurrent users rather than locally deployed software on a single machine or a small server with a few 10s of users?

Mobile?

Integration with other software / ecosystems?

Real time colaboration amoung users rather than single user document based models?

Security?

Cryptography?

Constant upgrades over the web rather than shipping CDs once a year?

I'll pass on AI for the moment as it's probably a bit too recent.
AFAIK, these models can't "look" at the plots they build. So it is necessary to send the screenshots, otherwise they will never notice the gorilla.
I think the idea of "when incompatible changes must me made" has caused much harm and damage to various language projects. I'm specifically thinking of the damage done as part of the python 2->3 changes and to a lesser extent the damage done with the original conception of what was called perl6.

C++ is definitely in a tough spot on the evolutionary trail. But the idea that the only path ahead is through incompatible changes seems likely to produce the same harmful effects.
> It costs a lot of money to deliver power to rural customers

Utilities (generally) have a universal service obligation.

If someone can cherry-pick just the denser areas with lower distribution costs, of course they could "undercut" the utility with the requirement to serve everyone.

(I'm not saying that PG&E couldn't be better managed. I'm saying that there's a much, much deeper policy issue at stake here.)
It's a good message with poor framing. If anything we're not destroying software, we're making much more than ever, of reduced quality and scope. Could be adjusted to destroying software quality.
The island of Socotra in Yemen is also a unique island with endemic species.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socotra
The Illustrated Guide to Breaking Your Computer (1998)
Thanks for the clarification. This is why I love browsing and reading HN - insightful comments that provide context, clarification as well as back them up with sources.
If you want a raise or promotion, you should talk to your boss or otherwise figure out how to remind them regularly of your value. Ask them for a quarterly or monthly one-on-one, and take an interest in what they do and what the team priorities are. I don’t know about your boss, they’re not all the same, but managers tend to like see initiative, engineers who make other engineers more productive, and engineers who have and spread an optimistic attitude. Promotions are about taking greater responsibility.

An alternative but dangerous approach is to make it known you’re looking elsewhere for work. Don’t do that if it’s relatively easy to replace you, and definitely assume the management thinks it’s easy to replace you, especialy if you haven’t been talking to your boss. ;) But there is the chance that they know you’re valuable and haven’t given you a raise because you seem content and they believe they have the upper hand - which may or may not be true.
This sounds like OCD
Started to create a easier Shortlink and QR Code tool
What is PG&Es generation cost vs administrative and legal overhead? The 11% margin isn't a good basis number. How is other states like Texas or Colorado are delivering at 10-12c/kwh ?

I do agree with your sentiment that city bureaucrats may be tempted to raid the energy business to pay for pet projects and other things. This can be protected against by segmenting the energy business into its own protected organization.
> keep telling me about

You may have something misconfigured. I have gotten exactly one feature notice that I forgot about until this moment.
> Remember what we all see now is the worst LLMs will ever be

This is exactly right. I could imagine a bunch of horse trainers looking at early gas-powered automobiles in the late 1800's and thinking, "This 'automobile' thing isn't going to change much. Sure it's interesting, but they're so much slower and less reliable than a horse".
One of the things we find with cost-plus contracting is that the team providing the service somehow has a great deal of costs. Ironically, abandoning this approach leads to hiring higher margin businesses which nonetheless cost less. A confusing phenomenon when one doesn't account for the fact that people optimize to get more money ceteris paribus.
Millions of people have a box in their home that they talk to and have for a decade.

Imagine if that box were able to (somewhat) intelligently answer questions.

I'm sure everyone here has asked Alexa some random type of questions .. sometimes you can get an answer from wikipedia, but mostly it's just "sorry i don't know that", and people settle for a subset of standard voice commands to play music or dim the lights.

Amazon had 10,000 people working on this product for a very long time, and had the lead in market share of a device that people talk to regularly.

It's one of the biggest technology balls to ever be dropped.
Pure revisionism. Obama did not run on that promise, but he shut down the email metadata collection program before it was even leaked and limited and then shut down the phone metadata program after it had leaked. Snowden leaked details of compromised computer systems to China. That's not whistleblowing.
I agree with everything you said, but I do think there is a difference betwee "required" and "optimal." I worked with a guy who went to boot camp after switching career fields and had absolutely no CS background. After starting the job (and excelling), he started reading text books from a CS degree plan. He learned more about CS in a year than many people with 4-year degrees, and he became a formidable dev. However, most people aren't that dedicated/willing to learn.
I'm not misrepresenting anything and R4L is not dead. In fact, two ways forward where suggested right in the LKLM email thread:

- Send the series directly to Linus since there is no code that Hellwig is maintainer of is actually being changed by it and let Linus decide whether to ignore Hellwig's nack. Linus may have done so before, but likely not after marcan's public meltdown.

- Copy/paste the code to every driver that will be using it. If it becomes useful, it will cause more pressure on Hellwig down the road because people will question why every change in code that is being wrapped by this is causing a fix in 10 different copies.

People here and on Reddit who are unfamiliar with the Linux development process but are attracted to the "drama" because it involves Rust somehow keep missing it.
I actually don’t agree. Maintaining or not maintaining backwards compatibility is often a decision made on the technical level, e.g. by a tech lead, or at least heavily based on the advice from technical people, who tend to prefer not being restricted by backwards compatibility over not breaking things for relying parties.
looking at [1][2] are the slides available online? i am on chrome, getting just static html

[1] https://salsa.debian.org/reproducible-builds/reproducible-pr...
[2]
https://fosdem.org/2025/schedule/event/fosdem-2025-6479-a-ta...
It sounds like you should start your own company.
I re-encoded all of my webm's to mp4's back then on my "gif blog", thanks to Safari and all my mac-using friends saying "I can't see it". Now look who started to support it eh.
I'm less interested in the ads being private as I am in there being no ads at all. Ads are a deal breaker. Maybe they have a paid ad-free tier? I don't want to have to install it to find out.
For those like me who were wondering what "murid" was referring to and had never heard of RAT, it stands for Remote Access Trojan.
To the contrary, i find the ssh keypair authentication (and certificates) the best kind of authentication i know. And it integrates with FIDO2 without prior set up.

I wish web logins would be more like what SSH does.
These stories used to be so cool to read because they were so different from reality. But now reality is stranger than fiction.
There's no reason to think that anything you've said here is true. Some sort of actual evidence would go a long way, but nobody's been giving any.
As soon as I finished reading the article, the very first thing that came in my mind is Dieter Rams' "10 Principles of Good Design"; I have been following his principles as much as I can, as they match, more or less, those of UNIX's philosophy:

1. Good design is innovative
2. Good design makes a product useful
3. Good design is aesthetic
4. Good design makes a product understandable
5. Good design is unobtrusive
6. Good design is honest
7. Good design is long-lasting
8. Good design is thorough down to the last detail
9. Good design is environmentally-friendly
10. Good design is as little design as possible
I've never had a Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Myspace whatevertheF account and I've never felt like I was missing out. Social media can be great, if by social media you mean: something like IRC/Discord, or something ultra-simplistic like HN. Anything else and you're making a bad trade.

People keep trying to find a way to have their cake and eat it too, despite decades of clearly seeing that you can't. I'm starting to become very tired of this victim-mentality that demands the convenience of highly centralized, moderated, and connected algorithmic social media, but ALSO want it to be run the way they think it should be.

You want out of the "cage"? Log off.
It may be technically insufficient, if the RfL folks can't integrate Rust without C changes. And if that's true, (and it seems to be true) then it's time for an architectural discussion to come to an agreement on if Rust for Linux should be pursued or if C code flexibility and readability is more important.
> We are living in a 4 (typical) income economy.

You've made this claim multiple times recently. What do you consider a "typical" income to base this on?
> The document, which looks like a lump of charcoal, was charred by the volcanic eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79AD and is too fragile to ever be physically opened.

> But now scientists have used a combination of X-ray imaging and artificial intelligence to virtually unfurl it, revealing rows and columns of text.

"scientists"

They talked to the head of the vesuvius challenge, which is the actual project that figured out how to read the scrolls, the head of the library that holds the scrolls, and the guy who runs the xray machine. But the people who solved this weren't scientists. They were largely college kids.

This has a lot more interesting detail. https://scrollprize.org/
Related: "We are not dying. That's how we live."

Or others may say: "There are software, and there are things remind people of software".
Or just throw modern web app development with its insane ways of trying to work around the fast that JS is a broken paradigm and start over.

Develop a good vm that can either be part of the browser or can be easily launched from it and get all of the browser/OS makers on the same page.

We only have what we have because of a lack of real leadership.
Amazon Lab126's Alexa team had following cross-related issues:

1. terrible tech stack. Absolutely poorly maintained pipeline

2. generally unenthused employees

3. office politicking and broken culture

4. unbelievable amount of penny-pinching and poor budgeting

I had a colleague within the Alexa team calling the place some sort of purgatory for people who couldn't join elsewhere. Another colleague went to Google Brain (when it was not as prestigious) and told me it was not the money that made him leave. Individually, they may have been good engineers and researchers, but the team was broken.

What is surprising is not that Alexa failed. What is surprising is that it managed to even build a half-decent product that was, at a point, a leading AI product and platform.
Why use eminent domain to seize their garbage, crumbling infrastructure?

Instead, slowly build out, in parallel, the upgraded – which is to say, underground – infrastructure that PG&E refuses to build.

A community could do this opportunistically on a schedule that tracks the normal repaving of roads.
Is this compatible with Amethyst? I want tiling windows but without the delay in switching spaces.
Fair point. I agree with you. Some times it just takes one person to say whats wrong with the world, to make people realize something can/has to be changed.
Every browser on iOS is WebKit unless you're from EU.
Absolutely especially when rail was the method of travel. They weren’t flying in on jets and sleeping in nice hotels as a rule!
They already did that: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42753635
I know this goes against your deeply held beliefs but race is socially constructed. I've heard Americans refer to Italians, Turks and Slavic - and even Roma people - as "white" but tell a German that and they'll look at you with confusion. Tell them that Hispanics are more foreign to you, a white American, than Spaniards are to them, a white German and they'll just think you've lost the plot. Heck, go and tell a Japanese person they're interchangeable with Malaysians and Indians and see how they feel about it. Even throwing Indians and East Asians in one racial category seems frankly insane to me as a European for reasons that should be obvious if you've ever seen them let alone talked to them (and even superficial racism you can use to group all "black" people together doesn't explain it as a Punjab Indian person and a Han Chinese person share no obvious visual features).

China, Malaysia and India are culturally and ethnically extremely different. Heck, India and China alone span enough area to cover extremely distinct ethnic and cultural groups themselves. The reason "white" Americans think they're a distinct unified group from "Africans", "Hispanics", "Asians" and so on is that the US largely eroded the cultural differences over the centuries to the point "cultural origin" has become more of a costume than a meaningful identity - if you're an American descendent of German settlers, you're an American, not a German and Germans (except for the most ideologically driven völkisch nationalists) will humor you but never see you as "one of them" more than any other foreigner.

You know what Africans call a black American? American. You know what Asians call an Asian American? American. The US is a melting pot, alright, but it is a racially segregated one and that's what makes you think the races matter. The US dragged itself kicking and streaming to the point where it even acknowledged black people as actual people and abolished all the mandatory racial seggregation laws that were put in place by white Americans who felt icky about having to share space with former Untermenschen slaves. The Chinese specifically were the first group of people the US actively tried to prevent from immigrating (which was later expanded to all people from East Asia).

You're also ignoring that Singapore is only half the size of Texas while having a similar number of people living in it. The US has had a wide range of immigrants but they tended to cluster in different places. Comparing Singapore and the US is apples to oranges but not because you think Asian people are a coherent group outside of racial shenanigans. I know this isn't very "politically correct" for me to say but: Yes, your racism is intellectually insulting but it has also successfully impaired your comprehension of demographics, sociology and ethnic groups to that point that you're not even wrong[0].

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Not_even_wrong
We used to get bothered by calling something AI when it was really just hard-coded rules, and then statistical prediction. Now I can't see it being accurately called anything but AI since it exhibits human-level capabilities in many areas, and it certainly doesn't achieve this by natural/human means of intelligence.
That's my issue! <3

EDIT: It's gotten even worse in the last 6 years!
One of my favourites is missing from the list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deception_Island
The current favourite frustration of reddit seems to be that in the past you could cancel requests, by saying "Never mind".

Apparently now saying "Never mind" gets you an in-depth speech about Nirvana's album, or it playing.
> I think the main innovation was the use of valves (similar to tube logic), while other machines of the day used relay logic.

Vacuum tubes and Thermionic Valves are the same thing. "Tubes" is the name that stuck in the states. "Valves" in the UK.

> This thing wasn’t really a computer though, in that it was not turing complete,

Turing completeness isn't a requisit to compute. Tommy Flower's big step was taking the electronic switching technology used in telephone exchanges and applying it the computation. Others said that they would be unreliable with the switching speeds involved and mechanical switches were the only way to do it. Flower's knew the key to reliability was thermal stability and designed his machine.

>
> These first turing complete machine that “worked” was probably the Z3 from 1941.

No, it didn't have a condition branch. Z4 had that, but after ENIAC did.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_completeness
Caspar David Friedrich: A Solitary Wanderer Finding His Way in the Fog
> You can effectively run whole development (LSP, docker, compiler, files) on remote like it is on your local machine.

This has always been possible with ssh+tmux. And before tmux was popular, people used gnu screen.
The one that had the gaffe about surreptitiously providing employee access to customer data? Yeah, yikes.
I wouldn't expect the remote daemon to have full access. Should be running under the associated user account. However, if installed with privileges (via sudo, etc) to persist long-term, well you get what you asked for.
Why do we call it “near miss” when it’s more like a “near hit”?
Rust derive-based argument parsing optimized for code size
Do Polish bathrooms tend to have an instant water heater installed in the bathroom like much of Europe? American homes have one main heater, often far from the bathroom. I have to run my shower for nearly a full minute before I get any hot water. A warm water tap that isn’t in constant use won’t get warm using the amounts of water a bidet requires. We need a power supply that can heat the water either a tank in the bidet or on demand. That power supply is uncommon here.
<video> and mp4 can also work well. As a GIF replacement, the initial differences are minor because you can easily add loop and autoplay to the video’s attributes, and both work with most browsers’ reader modes. From my tests, though, video-as-GIFs isn't a feature supported by the major RSS readers, while WebP works without any issues.

Anyways, the real insurmountable problem is animations with transparent backgrounds. There’s no good way to do this in mp4, and WebP seems to be the only format that does it well. But because of all the little pains, headaches, and surprises that can arise due to subtly different use cases, I still think WebP is the format that will give you the most benefit with the least drawbacks for silent animated images. Even without having transparent backgrounds as a requirement.