skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Good vibes, I mean yeah, we need more breakthroughs and AI isn't here to take our jobs if WE can own the AI too and not just a super-corperation.

I think what we are all really excited about having finally AI at home and being unchained and freed from a central SaaS controlling all the AI is ever going to tell you.

So, 6-7y ago google had these AI Chats internally and never intended to release it, a friendly googler told me.

Then ChatGPT came along and locked you into their SaaS. That was fantastic in the beginning, but the more you used the AI, the more you felt helpless, swound by anyone who may have access to an AI at OpenAI that is unfiltered and uses the full power of the model. Then came the jailbreak and accounts being banned for using it.

Then came the freedom by LLAMA and DeepSeek and waves of otheres. It rolled into your laptop real quick and this freedom is priceless! Something we should be really thankful for that it happened and support more OSS.

Google and Facebook would never share their trove of data with us ever and very few people have enough storage and compute to even attempt to replicate them. But their Data Dominance doesn't protect them anymore. Once the models became intelligent enough to slurp up large chunks of the web, they became a better search, a better teacher and a better experience than sponsored ads, with ads with internal google/bing products listed up, then SEO websites and somewhere hidden what we really were looking for. Or often.. just being deleted for copyright and other reasons.
Why not two birds with one stone: do the same in tokio + hyper, and disprove the ridiculous claim!
Long overdue, but attempted a few times.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_(debit_card)

There were other attempts.

There is no reason to outsource our entire payment infrastructure to foreign rent seeking entities.
> every solution would be equally discoverable via search

I hate ads but there would be no search engines without ads unless they were backed by governments
“NSA Wiretap Reveals Subject May Be Paying Too Much For Long-Distance” [2006]

https://theonion.com/nsa-wiretap-reveals-subject-may-be-payi...
vastly simpler to build the road up on pylons for a few miles.
1, build new road on pylons beside the old road for a few miles.
2 ,switch traffic to new road on pylons.
3 , rip up old road
4 , build some fences ,plant some grass and shrubs
5 ' repeat in each eco zone and local water shed and other areas where there are lots of critters....too chicken to cross the road
Economist here. My biggest issue is with the “news” industry.

Companies provide what the customer wants. And, as the adage goes, if you’re not paying, you’re not the customer, you’re the product.
Advertisement-funded “news” isn’t meant to enrich the reader/viewer — it is meant to attract the reader/viewer.

I think that perverted incentive has always existed with it, but the internet ad technology has really killed the information content. And now we’re have society-scale problems with misinformed citizens.

I don’t think industry will solve the problem. If a company allowed users to opt out and pay, their richest customers would do that and those were the ones most valuable to advertise to. So, offering an opt-out probably loses them money (and increases costs).

I think the news industry should be advertising free. I’d have to think on if it should also have govt funding, but that often gets co-opted.
"I turned off Dark Reader and uBlock"

When you get older, not only do parts of your body head south and start to refuse to co-operate with the rest of you, your eyesight goes badly off track. Its all a bit disconcerting.

I have never been a fan of "dark mode", even when the www didn't exist. Sometimes magazines would go weird and print an article in reverse - white on black. Dramatic effect or some such bollocks. When the fount (a specific instantiation of a typeface) was small enough and the print blead too badly in the specific copy you are reading it became very tricky to read.

Nowadays we have pixels small enough to be much better than ye olde skoole CRT scan lines and a LED screen has a refresh rate that, even in my florescent tube lit lair (not really), is rock solid.

I can read the site but it is not as easy as possible for me and let's face it: a book with a well chosen typeface and fount is a fair standard of readability and legibility. Why not replicate that in a web page?

Why on earth is the text occupying only 1/3 of my screen widthways? When have you seen a book or mag with 1/3 margins?

The fount is a sans job but it is small and white on black which is hard for me. At least it is very thin so that the glare from the white text doesn't go too fuzzy.

Have a look at Wikipedia. There's a good reason for their design choices - they have to worry about everyone and not just their mates.
lol you think its not hard being an ugly bald man? The amount of misogyny and resentment from men towards women would go down quite a lot if baldness had a cure...
That makes even less sense than I thought. So things that "are not made out of matter" can be advertised. Like I can advertise YouTube, AWS, Netflix, pretty much 99% of online services, movies, a doctor practice as long as I just do diagnostics, landscaping as long as I just cut and clean. I just can't advertise anything where I'd hand you something "made out of matter". What kind of sense does that make?
One of the sentences at the very start caught my eye:

> I thought to myself: why is there so little actionable advice out there about negotiation?

There's a wealth of actionable negotiation advice if you know where to look, like Harvard Business Review and Harvard Law, First Round Review, among others.

One of the big pieces on negotiation I got from Harvard[0], from their Program on Negotiation. I did not attend Harvard, but reading two or three of their articles a week goes a long way.

--

[0]: https://www.pon.harvard.edu/uncategorized/what-is-anchoring-...
So is the issue that the uk National Grid hasn’t really had software updated to make the most of grid battery storage.

I follow the grid several times a day, and whilst I can clearly see the power drain and support for pumped hydro; there’s no equivalent for grid battery storage.

How long before all the grid battery storage that has been built is actually being used?

Or is it being used in a different manner.
I wasn't saying we shouldn't have such laws. I was saying that we should consider the possible enactment of such laws in the light of the knowledge that people will try to circumvent them and will sometimes succeed, rather than assuming that, if advertising is prohibited, there will be no advertising. You seem to agree with this, which means you disagree with the original article, which does make that assumption.

Separately, I was saying that we can't usefully debate the pros and cons of such a vague proposal. You can postulate that some sort of vaguely defined prohibition would have no drawbacks, but any concrete policy proposal will in fact have drawbacks, and in some cases those will outweigh their advantages.
Bring back Yellow Pages.
From a forum with technical people (that build stuff) I would have hoped to see more ideas that would propose replacing advertising with something better (sorry, if I missed any replies, but did not see that).

Advertising can be useful (to find out about stuff) but very disingenuous (because people can lie). What I would very much like is to be able to assess the trustworthiness and similarity of people advertising me stuff. If someone likes same things as me and I never find him to "lie" (whatever my personal interpretation of that is) I should give him more trust. If someone picks things that I am not interested in and I think he favors stuff (because he is paid, for example) I should give him less trust. Then when I look for a product/video/restaurant I should see things recommended by people I trust more.

I know this kind of happens with "stars", "vloggers" and so on but lacking a system where you track it, means that it is easier to get complex to separate who is just "fun" and you watch but you know he lies and who is also "trustworthy" and you know you can also take his recommendations into account.

But that's just one idea, maybe there are others out there...
> The letter, signed by the CEOs of Zenobe, Eel Power, Field Energy and Harmony Energy, stated: “Our own data – verified by the ESO – shows that batteries are being skipped over 90% of the time during constraint periods for some sites … The cost of these constraints to consumers could exceed £2 billion a year by 2030.

If it is a software issue making the grid operator unable to effectively signal for battery storage, perhaps this refactor and enhancement should be prioritized considering the cost involved?

More info at https://www.current-news.co.uk/battery-storage-developers-sa...

> Notably, the letter focuses on the potential for private investment that government legislation could open up. Zenobē founder James Basden said: “Solving this issue does not require major new investment or infrastructure. With more transparency and engagement with industry, we can fix this quickly. The Government has an opportunity to cut bills and emissions by ensuring that grid-scale batteries are being properly utilised and that the market is fit for purpose.

Hard to project scope without any info, but I’d be optimistic based on what I’ve read so far. Extend logic to tell grid batteries to charge when grid criteria is met vs telling wind turbines to curtail immediately.
You also don’t know much about them if you rely on online leetcode quizzes, even without AI. That’s the problem. That candidates are using AI is the expected outcome of the enshitification of the interview process.
> I am convinced that outlawing advertising is the best thing we can do for our world now. More than gun control. More than tackling climate change.

i would rather live in a world of public transportation, with less children and vegan oriented (climate change == enviroment) without people with guns and only at the hands of an effective police; 100x times than an ad. free world...

wrote this at my Android without a single ad. notification, via Firefox along ublock. been a while i watch an ad.
Not sure if you're aware or not but .NET these days can (officially) target pretty much anything - not just Windows. Usage on Linux definitely picked up vs. Windows because Linux servers are cheaper. Android/iOS is there. WebAssembly is also there.
The article mentions the struggle to speed up expression computation on MySQL due to its dynamic typing. I wonder if Postgres' more static type system works better in that regard.
It makes no sense at all, which was my point. I've criticized it at greater length in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43596993.
Great comment. This mentality is what makes great engineers and thinkers.
I’ve always thought that the key place to build grid battery storage is at the intersection between power lines.

Power can be moved there off peak ready for usage; I’m guessing that at peak times there’s not much additional capacity for power to be delivered.
This type of disparaging should happen more.
I agree, if you extract the "timeless fundamentals" from each one of these paragraphs, it will remain relevant anytime, anywhere.

As long as human nature remains, the advice will still be valid.
I have been recommending this post over and over - in a blog post from 2016 on going from academia to data science (https://p.migdal.pl/blog/2016/03/data-science-intro-for-math...), via email, in person.

It helped quite a lot of people - especially women, who had a mindset that they should accept they should accept the offer. A thought that one can (and should) negotiate was a game-changer. Sometimes they were shocked that an ask for 25% more was accepted with no questions.
Discussion (238 points, 11 days ago, 147 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43411725
The best advice I found was in 'Never Split the Difference'. The rest is me being honest and direct.
Who is that theater for? Coulnd't he have been deliberately included in a chat?
Something like the dearly departed Equal Time Doctrine, but more expansive across all politocal comms might be a sufficient detergent.
I've negotiated hundreds of salaries for developers and tech people.

The key to negotiating is to get to a deal that both parties feel happy with - if you “win” a negotiation through power then you will likely find later you lost when you get paid back for winning through strength.

Here is what I know about negotiating:

1: know in advance the salary that you want

2: aim for a salary that is not at the high end, not at the low end

3: your target salary should be one that you will feel satisfied with if you get the job - you do not want to get the job and then be unhappy and feeling like you undersold yourself an looking over your shoulder for the next job.

4: it is a good idea to ask for a salary range - typically $5K to $10K. you can say "I'm looking for $150K to $160K but it depends on what the role is" - this gives you some room to negotiate and helps avoid overpricing yourself.

5: if you feel that your salary target is fair, then stick to that - when the time comes that they ask you how much you want - state what you want and explain why you think it is fair.

6: if you get negotiated down, explain again that you think your target number is fair and explain why. explain that given that the number is a fair market rate then you're not moving down.

7: be willing to accept that you do not get the job as an outcome of asking for a fair salary - at that point shrug and move on.

8: if you are the start of your career then money should not matter at all - find a job that will allow you to hone your craft and learn key skills - this is the attitude you should have for your first five years. After that, you will be able to negotiate on the strength of your skills and experience.

Remember negotiation of salary should not be about a win/lose attitude - if either party feels that someone won and someone lost, then that will be a bad start to the relationship. Negotiating salary is about finding a salary that both employer and employee feel happy at.

If you are an employer, remember that every dollar you pay ABOVE the requested salary buys you good will and enthusiasm. Every dollar you offer BELOW the requested salary does the inverse. Also avoid the "If you do well we will pay you more in 3 months" - just pay straight up front that amount.
The source file I linked in my initial comment is honestly the most succinct way to understand how this works, but the TL;DR is that there is a NoPE layer interval parameter passed to the transformer block implementation. That defines how frequent a "no positional encoding" layer is used. The NoPE layers use the global attention mask, which is a traditional application of attention (attends to all tokens in the context window). The other layers use RoPE (rotary positional encodings) and a chunked local attention mask, which only attends to a fixed set of tokens in each chunk.

There is a wealth of literature to catch up on to understand the performance motivations behind those choices, but you can think of it as essentially a balancing act. They want to extend the context length, which is limited by conventional attention compute scaling. RoPE on the other hand is a trick that helps you to scale attention to longer context, but at the cost of poor retrieval across the entire context window. This approach is a hybrid of those two things. The recent Cohere models employ a similar methodology.
How to take yourself less seriously
No, I don't think there is any exception. If you intend to maintain a piece of software for any length of time (i.e. it's not just a throwaway demo), you should write tests for it.

Over time you realize that testing truly does not slow down development as much as many people think it does. Maybe devs who just aren't used to testing find it difficult, but after a while it becomes second nature.

The best thing an early startup CTO can do is enforce testing across the board, so people don't just test when they feel like it.
As far as I can tell the GOP doesn’t have a platform as far as individual politicians go. It’s loyalty to Trump first and whatever he says… even if it is the opposite of last week.
It's called "male pattern baldness" and is caused by androgens, counteracting it would be 'less male'. And that's without mentioning the social aspect of focus on appearance, which is generally feminine-coded.
So you put American companies at a disadvantage and that means companies could just advertise on foreign websites. Are you going to block those websites? Again we see it happening today, the American porn websites are losing money to foreign websites owned by MindGeek.

Why wouldn’t the same happen to more mainstream sites.

Do we also ban Netflix and other streaming services from having an ad tier? Do we make all search engines and other content providers for pay?

How do broadcast companies make money without advertising? Do we want the government funding and controlling content?
Brilliant! Incredibly fast.
I did not talk to my wife for 3 months...I did not want to interrupt her...
That is requiring advertisers to set the HTTP evil bit. If advertising is fine, they're happy to make it obvious that something is an ad. If you ban that, suddenly it'll all be astroturf campaigns and product placement. I'd be surprised if banning billboards caused advertising budgets to drop.
> How big is N today? The simplest assumption is that it is infinity. Any build timestamp embedded into binary packages will change on every iteration. This will cause the process to never terminate. Fixing embedded timestamps is something that the Reproduce.Debian.Net effort will also run into, and will have to resolve.

This was addressed by the Debian reproducible build project years ago. We’re down to 2.2% of packages that are not reproducible. Even if this uses a different definition, it certainly means that the majority of packages do not have a build timestamp problem.

I’m struggling to make sense of this article and I’m a Debian Developer. I think part of the problem might be that the author isn’t aware of the huge progress Debian has already made in this area over many years.
You have to pick some language and some amount of students are likely to be new to it, so you might as well pick one that excels at the task of writing compilers as ML-family languages are.
Interestingly, American express hired my uncle to help them integrate smart chips into credit card in the late 90s. He took the Concord twice a month on a Paris-NY. It was hell, a lot of different banks and a love of magnetic stripe despite the fraud being easier with those prevented any mass adoption. I think that while he was successful technologically (American express credit card had a chip i think? But honestly i'm not sure, don't take my word for it _at all_), but politically it was a sysiphian effort and they scraped the project. For him the reason was that the cost of fraud was lower than in France, and also pushed into users, and unless you made bank liable (i think that's the word) in case of fraud, so a more secure method of payment wasn't interesting for the banks (in that case why american express?).

Anyway, all that to say that from what i've heard from him, AmEx, Visa and masterCard had to be from the US because the banking sector was so fragmented, in so many ways (different actors, different regulations, different fraud tolerance), it was sorely needed.
Are breast cancer treatments considered gender affirming care in your mind? Do you feel the current (or any) administration is against that?
That's an issue I have with this article. We can avoid advertisements, it really isn't that difficult. It can be inconvenient but that's better than slowly eroding your sense of normalcy.
Good call. That said, it was only on a second reading of each, a few years after the first, that those two books clicked for me.
If ads are ok, how do you feel about this one https://i.imgur.com/599PMEl.jpeg
You can have 100% fact based propaganda by cherry picking. This is not dissimilar to coming with a theory just based on your selected subset of preferred observations. This is the fuel of conspiracy theories.

I completely agree with you. Necessary but insufficient. One needs to approach your view of reality like the scientific process, looking to disprove your theories, not looking for facts that reinforce them.
lol, that's what I was thinking.

That and how buttons from 30 years ago work with 4k monitors.
This is all very interesting, but is complete fiction for most readers. 99% of job seekers aren’t going to receive competing offers from multiple companies conveniently at the same time.
Strangely I’ve found myself to be something like 400% more productive when pair programming.

I’ve not heard anyone mention this aspect of paired programming for people with ADHD, although as a colleague once mentioned I jump from one thing to another, but in the end I’ve done the loop.
I've never heard anyone argue that men with no hair loss are less manly so no I don't think it counts as gender affirming care.

I have man boobs, I guess fixing that would technically be gender affirming care because I'm embarrassed of having female features, but balding is really a stretch.
The information landscape has changed a bit - several large states now require posting clear salary bands, which many companies comply with in good faith. Some like Netflix post something useless (eg: "The range for this role is $100,000 - $720,000").
If I publish a website of my views, do I have to publish opposing views? Do religious channels and sites have to publish pro choice opinions? Do you have to publish opposing views about vaccines that they cause autism? Do you also have to give equal time to people who believe the “election was stolen”?
Steve Miller song at the speed of continental drift.
Tried to look at one of my open source repos and kept getting the error “Failed to process codebase. Please try again later or try adding your own Gemini API key.”

Edit: fwiw I am an “engineering leader,” and I do think it would be nice to have a model that could answer questions about our codebase at work, but we’d need some guarantees that the data would not be used for training, stored inappropriately, etc.
One of the greatest gems I got from a blog post once posted back in HN (I can't find it anymore, unfortunately) was about a guy getting a job at Google (or ex-Googler), and he dropped the following (I'm paraphrasing, of course):

> Treat yourself as a business and every job offer as a business deal. Every job offer is a deal, a business deal that must remain carefully balanced win-win. If you let it slip, by getting too much work and not the required promotion or salary bump, it will become a win-lose deal (you on the losing end).

It was a short post, but that piece of advice has been with me for more than 10 years now.
No excuses. I've done this like 12 times as startup CTO.

The habit is important. If you don't start, after three pivots you'll have a huge mountain of tests for a system nobody understands. Plus all the wasted time manually "testing".

Tests are so critical for the success of the business. It's fiscally irresponsible to skip.
Will be super cool to see SlateDB instead RocksDB
Yes it's called YouTube Premium and its not free but also not expensive. It's possible that the cost would go up without ad revenue from "free" YouTube.
Reminds me of Thumb-Key: https://github.com/dessalines/thumb-key

I'd be interested to try a full-featured Android keyboard like this.