skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Reading the news:

- https://eu.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2025/03/13/trump-c...

- https://eu.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2025/03/11/columbi...

- https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/mar/08/trump-univer...
> The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine.

Previus discusion of QM article https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43002511 (1304 points | 33 days ago | 589 comments)

Related to "Tiny Pointers" article https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43023634 (163 points | 32 days ago | 35 comments)
It would be fascinating if it could add LaTeX support!
I have read somewhere that FAANG hired just to talent-starve the other four, even if they don't have much to do day to day.

In their playbook, the cost of keeping a good talent in house is less costly than the damage done by 3-4 of these talents if they were in one of the other four companies.

This allowed "free" side projects and cool stuff, too.

But as always, it's time to face the music. Every sine wave has its descend and we're past the maxima.
Breaking Up with On-Call
Which social media companies have been removed? They still have large clear leaders at the moment.
In a lot of cases, the companies leverage a large chunk of their employees' time to make very hefty returns. It's the least they can do. As someone who runs a company now (having been an employee previously), it is obvious to me that the cost of providing food is a rounding error in the overall company budget, and is well worth it, if it keeps people happy.
They got free snacks in exchange for labor utilized to capture billions of dollars of market value, which will generate cash flows far into the future. You need to understand the game you are playing.
Line by line, don't overthink it.

Programmers have an unhealthy aversion to repetitive tasks. Sometimes you just have to do work-work. Happens all the time in other industries,

clock in at 9 do the same thing for 2 hours, take a break, do the same thing for 2 hours, lunch, 2 hours break, 2 hours, go home.

Repeat this for weeks if necessary, you can plan it out and predict when it will be done, if need be ask for more resources.
Analysis of birds who've eaten plastic reveals slow, insidious health impacts
just responding to the title for now: the divine comedy was the first autofiction. like straight up take 21st century autofiction about a fictionalized self. add crazy religious symbols/themes + some surrealism + florence political history
Yggdrasil Plug-and-Play Linux supported running off the CD as far back as 1993, but you needed a boot floppy because computers couldn't boot from CD at that point. When you installed it to your hard drive, most of the included software stayed on the CD, meaning that you had ~500 MB of software and source code permanently available without taking up hard drive space. This was useful in an era when 200 MB and smaller hard drives were common. After installing, you could pick and choose which system components you wanted to move from the CD to the hard drive.
> which is something that is in the interest of US government.

Do you think the soft power projection of AIDS prevention in Africa is not desirable? Do you think it’s bad to use resources to prevent TB outbreaks? Or do you think pushing an individual EV company’s tech is somehow the only viable use of government funds? Do you think USAID was primarily using funds for “news organizations”?

This is bad framing about issues you don’t actually seem to understand. It reads like it came straight from AM radio.
>Democracy has its flaws, but one of the features that most people prefer is that it can significantly change how it looks and operates to reflect the will of its people without violence.

Internally, maybe. But China becoming a de facto supowerpower doesn't mean everyone else becomes Chinese any more than America being a superpower means everyone else becomes American. The salient point for most people is how that superpower balances the carrot of trade and the stick of violence to maintain its hegemony. To that end the US has far worse of a track record than does China.

Unless the implication is that China intends to directly colonize Western countries, which is something only the US is currently threatening to do.
Honestly I'm more worried about the US backsliding to full authoritarianism with the usually "spicier" foreign policy. The more politically insular China from the current regime seems stable enough. Xi could have even 15 years left in the tank before succession shenanigans start. Obviously this from a LATAM perspective, I'm not in Taiwan or South Korea, I would be considerably more spooked then.
The Russo Brothers Upended Hollywood Once. Now They Aim to Do It Again
I mean it's fine to not like the Beatles but they weren't derivative (literally the opposite), and not liking the song that is considered by many to be their worst or most controversial isn't saying much (and actually it's a perfectly serviceable song really, it's just the mythology that has built up around it that has really caused it to take flak).
OP never said that the web was terminal based. He said it was text-based. Text should render fine either in a terminal or on a graphical canvas.
It’s funny how impressed people are by food and beverages. Let’s be super conservative and say it was only for a mere 20 people. What percentage of wages do you think is being spent on that stuff?

Let me give you a hint - if the existence of snacks made people work a mere 20 minutes more a week it would’ve already paid for itself. The calculus is a bit more complicated for full service lunch, but you get the idea.
"Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43378123.
As other have mentioned, this models just puts emphasis on pixels and compression artifacts, so it's of not much use for improving old or low quality images.

I tried doing some pixelart->HD conversion with Gemini2.0Flash instead and the results look quite promising:

* https://imgur.com/a/t9F94F1

The images are however all over the place, as it doesn't seem to stick very close to the prompt. Trying to fine tune the image with further chatting often leads to overexposed looking pictures.

All the results are done with prompts along the lines of "here is a pixelart image convert it into a photo" or some variation there of. No img2img, LoRA or anything here, all plain Gemini chat.
I've come to believe this is just a legitimate personality difference. I really struggle to find joy when I'm working on something that I question the usefulness of. But I've worked with many people who find the work itself joyful and don't mind that at all.
You forgot to mention outsourcing. Everyone always forgets massive outsourcing post-Covid.

Go to any tech company job site and youll see many of the engineering jobs are non US.
This is very impressive, amazing work!

One question: how do you manage large code bases in scratch? Is it easy to find a piece of code? Something like grepping for specific things seems difficult.

I've recently been really warming up to Scratch since one of my kids picked it up and really enjoys it. I love the built-in concurrency model - it's a bit like CSP. Gets kids to think concurrently from day 1.
Trump can pretty much reduce Sam Altman's talent pool, his voter base seems to have an appetite for that.
Also let's not pretend like private sector R&D has not been built over public sector research since forever. Seems like Trump wants to make public science more "efficient". Results still to be seen, but the perspective is not encouraging given the common wisdom on how basic science grows.
People who don't listen to the Beatles usually don't even realise it when they're listening to the Beatles anyway, the younger you are the truer it is.
I'd say the good times have just moved around a bit, there's always demand for smart/experienced STEM folk. What's happened is that the adtech and blitzscaling business models have taken a beating (a specialty of the bay area). But there's other sectors, and other markets that are still growing just fine.

A lesson to be adaptable, and always be learning/hungry.
Show HN: SpaceWord – word game, build crosswords while minimizing space
The tech CEOs have been supporting wokeness throughout the Obama, first Trump and Biden administrations.

They started pledging loyalty to Trump just 2 months ago. 2 months do not erase 12 years.
Hello HN!

Over the past few weeks I created a new word game, https://spaceword.org. Every day, you are given a set of 21 letters that need to be arranged in a crossword (all directions forming valid words), while taking as little space as possible. There is also a weekly puzzle with 63 letters. You can see how you compare to others in real time, and there is a global leaderboard as well.

I've found it to be a fun puzzle game. I can usually form a crossword with 21 tiles pretty quickly, but optimizing to place them in a small bounding box is a challenging exercise. Today, the best result uses only 24 spaces (so either 83 or 46 tiles), meaning only 3 places are left empty!

Anyway, enjoy, and let me know if you have any feedback! :)
You're making it sound like plumbers are a lesser thing. You sound like you're one of those people who compare what AI does to what human junior engineers do or should be treated like (which is surprisingly a lot of people here on HN)
You can't "give up bias". You can choose what you prefer, but an "unbiased" model doesn't exist. If you put in information, you're adding bias.
Scorpi – A Modern Hypervisor (For macOS)
Alternative programming languages are all about DX. PL/pgsql is turing complete after all.
I am almost a month into having a Perplexity subscription and I am not sure I can not have a deep research subscription at this point.

I have found youtube videos this month that I don't know how I would have found otherwise that were just part of the sources for what deep research came back with.

It has really created the opposite problem for me is I have so much good information I don't even know what to do with it right now. I am probably taking a month off to just sort through what I found this past month.
Practical Process Control: Methods and Best Practices for Automatic PID Control
Kelly Starrett on CrossFit (2018) [pdf]
The story: https://x.com/sama/status/1899535387435086115
Often password rules make slight variations of the passwords so that the damage is limited.

Furthermore, attackers don't try all accounts since they don't know which ones exist (unless they have email access).
I assume you have Tesla center screen and CarPlay/Android Auto in mind, but those aren't that highly regarded outside the US...
insert I'm The Captain Now meme

My hot take is that we're in a forced reset period for employers to "re-assert" their control over the labor market. The macroeconomic factors frequently mentioned plus COVID-era policies of remote work/etc are over and the execs, corporations and broader financial markets are letting us know.

This stuff runs in cycles. Nearly everything does. Your guess is as good as mine when we've reached any top or bottom of the bear market. We'll see good times again in the future. Just stick with it.

Cling to yesteryear all you want. Just remember the ship has a new captain.
Notice how all the coasters at big tech companies are now being called in and with RTO policies? This is what we have here.

The "good times" where the era of coasting and doing zero work for a month with a >$300k+ a year SWE web developer job is over.

Now (unsurprisingly) your startup HAS to be profitable and cannot afford to lose money for years with the over-reliance on cheap VC money. For big tech it is not a playground or a day care.

These AI companies are the last reminants of the hype in 2021 and if one of those overvalued companies closes down, then it will cause a 2000 level crash.

There is still room for the tech industry to go down and it requires the AI hype to deflate.
none of the newer kids or managment now care about actual software engineering, unit testing or any such stuff.
> but they've been working around that anyway in practice

Working around how?
The closest we get is something like USDS, which then gets hijacked in to DOGE.

Open source software built and supported by a national government is inspiring. Are there more examples of this I'm not aware of? I hope so.
they could probably make more angel investing.
Ask HN: Which AI voiceover is Lex Fridman using in his Modi Interview?
I was wondering if anyone knows which AI voiceover translator tech Lex Fridman uses for his podcasts. The recent Modi interview for example is pretty good. Its managed to get Modi's typical diction and way of speaking well.
"If there are regulatory requirements for account lockouts"

Then the vendor can impmenent those? The need for control might be a source for greater risk.
This probably means there's a competitive advantage to tackle non short term ambitious innovations which everyone else is cutting away as fat.
What's the point of approaching questions like this in a forum? Your effort is better spent on the phone with your Congress Critter or on the street protesting. Keyboard warror'ing is a waste of your time.

> You seemed to say (implicitly) that this isn't too dire because the judiciary stopped it.

Do not /ass/ume what other's mean, and don't put words in my mouth.
> Having had to deal many EU regulations and see their negative impact on small businesses for no sizeable beneficial outcome to the average EU citizen

Because you didn't give any concrete examples the fact you couldn't see any "sizeable beneficial outcome to the average EU citizen" could easily be because of your own ignorance as far as I'm concerned.
> is struggling to find a job

It's always a struggle to land leadership or niche top-seniority gigs. It doesn't matter how awesome you are. They're not commodified swap-in staff roles, and there are not a lot of them, and your friend is probably looking for a quality organization too (or leaders in shabby ones won't touch this resume).

Your friend is just encountering the reality that there will be a search phase after the end of any high-seniority professional job, plan for it.
It's a good backup in case you forget your wallet.
This matches my experiences. I see a lot of side projects being dropped. I’ve been hired (as an external consultant / developer) to maintain some of these side projects while their core developers are either fired, let go, left or are put on their main projects.

It resulted in a surprising boom of jobs for us hah
What's happening to DRAM and NAND?
I overwrite with the last one.

Strictly not a parser problem.

Csv is also available.

And binary protocols, with index based implicit keys are and byte length prepended to variable length fields. Those are the gold standard (see ip and tcp headers.)
Last time I did this, someone who knew the language described the attemped Chinese in dispagaging terms:

在中文和任何拉丁-德语语言之间进行转换是机器翻译仍然难以完成的任务；我不知道为什么，但它比英语-西班牙语或英语-C 等语言的转换要困难得多。
The BRI is just the Temu version of the IMF with Chinese industry upsell.
hundreds of millions of dollars in research funding has been cut across numerous sectors
> Otherwise find a bunch of Lego fan gamers and hire them to make experimental games for half a decade.

Find some Lego-loving indie devs and let them go wild. Fund the development of some prototypes, and let them build something that actually encapsulates the creative aspects of Lego, not just a generic action game in a Lego skin.
The tech industry is based on copying the cool kids. Once Google and Meta started laying off, startups started laying off random people because it was cool. When Apple created the worst keyboard on earth (the arrow buttons squished together in a square) all other brands followed. Apple stopped squishing the arrow keys together but the rest still didn't notice. If someone "cool" thinks AI will replace engineers, all companies will follow blindly.
I would suggest rethinking that.

Google makes that money because they steal data from their "customers". It isn't due to the "brilliance" of their engineers.
Lack of copper, reliance on imports more critical to US than "rare earth" metals
Here’s a true story I find funny about scaling laws at Baidu.

From 2016-17 I did a projection using our scaling law equation with my coauthors about how many GPUs it would take to train an LLM with a step function in capability. Joel Hestness in particular did excellent experimental work to enable this.

I came out with a projection of about a $1 Billion GPU budget.

Baidu was in the middle of downsizing the US research center (SVAIL) in favor of AI in China and I was participating in the layoff of many of my colleagues while trying to keep the lights on long enough to finish our scaling law experiments, which I personally thought would change the world.

I actually wrote a report to Robin explaining the implications of scaling laws and asking for a $1 billion budget to train a Baidu LLM in 2016 and sat on it through 2017.

But I never sent it because I thought it would never have been supported in that environment. I sometimes wonder what Robin would have thought about it and how the world may have been different if Baidu had released ChatGPT.

We may be about to find out because the AI moat filled with simple algorithms and scale seems to be much more shallow than the processor and systems moat.

I have a huge amount of respect for Dario and Ilya for carrying on scaling laws at OpenAI or it may have never seen the light of day.

If there is one problem for the AI community to solve by 2030 I think it is the moat problem.
>I have read somewhere that FAANG hired just to talent-starve

Is there an actual reputable source that says this? For me I've only seen it asserted without evidence in comment sections.
Their special skill is being in the place where all the ad money goes.
> He didn't say "easy", he said "far from impossible".

That's still overly optimistic when you're talking about something that no-one's ever done.

> You would then address this just as you would any other compiler error - by remediating the failures one by one.

And what do you do in the meantime? Or when you can't see how to fix one of the cases? When a new feature introduces an error, you don't push out the new feature until you can fix the error, possibly never. When a compiler upgrade introduces an error all over your codebase (that you can't fix with something like a one-liner regex), you turn it off (in the best case you turn it into a warning that you then maybe gradually fix), and if you can't turn it off you don't do the compiler upgrade.
Can I offer a contrarian point of view? Tech is still a great place to work.

Pay is still excellent in comparison to most professions.

We have exciting and innovative new technology with AI which still offer all sorts of opportunities for disruption.

The tooling we have now is amazing, a lot of the drudgery of writing boilerplate code can be delegated to LLMs.

The hardware platforms we're coding for continue to improve at an amazing pace.

I also recognise that being laid off really sucks and that recent job losses are definitely not a good time. I'm not arguing otherwise. I just think that being a software engineer with a job is still pretty good.
Europe 2.0
For those that need a translation....

1. For front end people, its code and design both...i.e. two jobs combining.

2. For backend, its again combining two jobs dev and server engineer...

In short words look to what two jobs will combine that you can leverage with tools that allow you to combine those two jobs in the first place. For example, front end frameworks generally allow us to combine front end dev with designer.
My argument goes deeper actually. Every form of smartphone and smartwatch payment or wallet usually boils down to some form Visa/Mastercard card incorporated in it. I simply don't feel like feeding this duopoly with my personal habits. It has some use cases at times, I don't deny.
> Google agrees with OpenAI that copyright has no place in AI development

Come on MPAA, RIAA. You can do better. /s
Ok but do another DC Super Villians first.
This is a really great project from both the French and German governments.

I think state-funded open source solutions to digital platforms is a fantastic opportunity to get away from the big tech walled gardens. Of course, there is always the risk that this becomes unmaintained in the future, but the community at least can take over. But until then, it's a nice platform and a nice contribution to the community.
Or maybe not exploiting society/privacy/attention to make that much.
It may be possible. It may also be that the regolith is too fluffy in that area to support such a large structure without a pad. I don't believe we know.

Athena had multiple laser altimeters on board: they failed to get a fix, perhaps because of the weird surface.

It's my opinion that this isn't something that's easy to do, even for a company that has landed on Earth.
They mean it as an analogy in the sense of digital plumbing.
Surprised nobody has pointed this out yet — this is not a GPT 4.5 level model.

The source for this claim is apparently a chart in the second tweet in the thread, which compares ERNIE-4.5 to GPT-4.5 across 15 benchmarks and shows that ERNIE-4.5 scores an average of 79.6 vs 79.14 for GPT-4.5.

The problem is that the benchmarks they included in the average are cherry-picked.

They included benchmarks on 6 Chinese language datasets (C-Eval, CMMLU, Chinese SimpleQA, CNMO2024, CMath, and CLUEWSC) along with many of the standard datasets that all of the labs report results for. On 4 of these Chinese benchmarks, ERNIE-4.5 outperforms GPT-4.5 by a big margin, which skews the whole average.

This is not how results are normally reported and (together with the name) seems like a deliberate attempt to misrepresent how strong the model is.

Bottom line, ERNIE-4.5 is substantially worse than GPT-4.5 on most of the difficult benchmarks, matches GPT-4.5 and other top models on saturated benchmarks, and is better only on (some) Chinese datasets.
I feel the same way about people who post a link to/paragraph from Wikipedia, but people don't reflexively downvote those.
The German BND's analysis depends largely on classified documents from China. I wish we could get more information on those documents and their contents.
Why? People are people.

People have been people for 200k years. There’s a built in assumption in these sorts of stories that before the pyramids or whatever, everyone was running around like apes. Pounding their chests and each other.

I’d say of course people communicated and helped each other out. There were far fewer of us, and for the most part they lived in a world of great abundance.
I think the good times are still on for anyone who continues to focus on the customer and their experience.

From the perspective of the typical software engineer's salary, there are largely two sources of money in a technology startup - the investors (i.e., ZIRP) and the customers. Perhaps it is time to start leveraging the 2nd category of cash cow.

I realize the customer is far more demanding, but in my experience they are also significantly more rewarding to work with.
It's the economy, stupid.

The good times will continue as soon as money does the same.
You're right of course, but nobody ever gave me a free VR headset or a few thousand dollars of Monero. OpenAI and Google will both give you, for free, access to an LLM whenever you want. I can do a Google search and help with LLM adoption right now, it will be at the top of the page.
No from the 2010-2022 period, this wasnt the case. You could find a ton of very high paying roles, or atleast get interviews for them. There is a serious vibe shift. Also, 500k isnt that senior
At least the hungry part will be easy after everyone is out of their jobs.