MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by solardev | 2025-04-16 14:13:40+00:00
I hope this doesn't sound rude, but I'm trying to understand the model here.

Does this mean that instead of incentivizing new utility-scale buildouts, you've now created a credits marketplace where no new solar is added but existing small rooftop installations are suddenly eligible, flooding the market with an artificially increased supply?

So companies can buy RECs that don't actually increase the installed solar base, claim that it offsets their pollution, but in reality it's just some accounting trickery that's newly counting solar that's already built?

That's what it sounds like at first glance, but maybe I'm misunderstanding?

Maybe in the long run, if the automation itself drives further adoption and increases solar uptake, it's a net positive..?
by DavidPiper | 2025-04-16 14:13:41+00:00
> make up your mind / ... mind is aware of

These are not at all the same as "express their truth accurately".

> I don't care

An interesting assertion, given the length of this thread. But I do agree it's possible to go through life only believing what others tell you. We all live in a world discovered and created by those who came before us.
by atonse | 2025-04-16 14:14:22+00:00
This is so interesting. How does one go about setting the constraints you see here? Like how do you decide right in the beginning to limit the number of parameters? Or that it's going to run well on smartphone devices? Or that it's going to hallucinate less?

Are these all covered in Karpathy's LLM videos? I haven't seen them, but am growing more curious by the day of how these models are actually built (and seeing that it may not be that inaccessible given there are so many out there now)
by mickael-kerjean | 2025-04-16 14:14:35+00:00
A dirty secret I recently learned about: look for public contracts in your area, to find some of those, google "contract register filetype:pdf".

Tons of crazy shit in there waiting to be disrupted. The tricky part is to get the right financials to bid on the interesting stuff, a good pathway there is to combine multiple companies together and make a shared bid, reach out to me if you're interested.
by insane_dreamer | 2025-04-16 14:14:45+00:00
What's with the incessant flagging these days? It's getting annoying.

Not sure I agree with the post, but the effects of growing up with ubiquitous AI on our children will be profound and worth pondering and discussion. Just like the effect of growing up with smartphones has been profound (and, as a father of such children, the effect is on balance more detrimental than useful).
by SkyPuncher | 2025-04-16 14:15:28+00:00
The definition of code quality is irrelevant to my argument as both human and AI written code are held to the same standard by the same measure (however arbitrary that measure is). 100 units of something vs 99 units of something is a 1 unit difference regardless of what the unit is.

By the time the AI is actually writing code, I've already had it do a robust architecture evaluation and review which it documents in a development plan. I review that development plan just like I'd review another engineers dev plan. It's pretty hard for it to write objectively bad code after that step.

Also, my day to day work is in an existing code base. Nearly every feature I build has existing patterns or reference code. LLMs do extremely well when you tell them "Build X feature. [some class] provides a similar implementation. Review that before starting." If I think something needs to be DRY'd up or refactored, I ask it to do that.
by tlogan | 2025-04-16 14:15:37+00:00
Project 2025 lays out a clear vision for the privatization and decentralization of federal functions. It’s not subtle—it explicitly calls for it.

Separate from whether we support this or not:

Trump is doing—or promising to do—exactly what he said he would. We can disagree with the policies, but it’s not accurate to say he or his team are directionless or incompetent. They have a coherent (if controversial) agenda.

So rather than dismissing them as clueless or idiots, it’s more productive to debate this:

- Why is outsourcing CVE program to private consortia a bad idea?

- Could a model exist where a private consortium is supported by federal grants, but maintains accountability and public interest safeguards?
by Ray20 | 2025-04-16 14:15:51+00:00
That's exactly my point: all three articles says nothing about any doctor's responsibility for abortion with the goal to prevent harm to pregnant woman. No arrests, no charges, no fines, nothing, not even single case (as far as I know; your links also describes zero such cases).

And still women are bleeding out. What else could it be other than doctors' political stunts at the cost of women's lives?
by bluefirebrand | 2025-04-16 14:16:36+00:00
> You buy Nintendo for Nintendo games, as in first-party games

There are still Nintendo console exclusive third-party games, too. They often don't stay exclusive if they are successful enough, but they do happen

But largely you are correct

The truly impressive part is just how large the First Party Nintendo ecosystem is. They have a ton of IPs that you can only get on Nintendo systems. Pokemon alone is the most valuable franchise in the world
by jachriga | 2025-04-16 14:16:49+00:00
(Universal Summarizer by Kagi)

Title: How Long Can SSD Store Data Unpowered? Year 2 Update

- The video provides a two-year update on SSD data retention tests conducted by HT Wingnut, focusing on SSDs left unpowered.

- Four inexpensive 128 GB TLC SSDs were tested: two were heavily used (over 280 TB written), while two were kept fresh.

- A folder with over 100 GB of random data was created for testing, with hash values generated for validation.

- The testing timeline was extended, with the initial data written on September 2, 2022, and the follow-up conducted on November 23, 2024.

- The fresh SSD maintained its integrity, with 100% data retention and no performance degradation after two years.

- The heavily used SSD showed significant corruption, with four files unaccounted for and a performance drop during read tests.

- The audit time for the well-worn SSD increased from about 10 minutes to over 42 minutes, indicating severe performance degradation.

- The fresh SSD's read performance remained stable at approximately 470 MB/s, while the worn SSD's performance was inconsistent and slower.

- Both SSDs showed some error recovery, but the heavily used SSD had 12 uncorrectable sectors after testing.

- The fresh SSD will be re-evaluated in one year, while the worn SSD's corruption raises concerns about long-term data integrity.
by mort96 | 2025-04-16 14:16:54+00:00
Happy I never jumped on the JetBrains bandwagon...

I was curious about Z̶i̶g̶ Zed, until they too started adding AI garbage. Sad.

Luckily, I can be fairly confident that my trusty neovim will never add AI garbage unless I specifically go out of my way to install plug-ins.

EDIT: Zed, not Zig
by mjr00 | 2025-04-16 14:17:06+00:00
Yeah, this one is very interesting; the charge is for "intentionally caus[ing] damage without authorization to one or more protected computers, including the Ethereum Virual Machine (EVM), which was implemented through, among other nodes, a full Ethereum node running in the Eastern District of New York."

This seems ambitious. The implications seem quite dire; if I'm running a full Ethereum node do I have the ability to say which smart contracts are "authorized" to execute on my implementation of the EVM? If I see a smart contract do a trade I don't like, is someone committing a crime against me? I don't think this will stick if Medjedovic ever goes to court.
by WesolyKubeczek | 2025-04-16 14:17:23+00:00
What if the prompt to the “support assistant” postulates that 1) everything is a user error, 2) if it’s not, it’s a policy violation, 3) if it’s not, it may be our fuckup but we are allowed? This plus the question in the email leading to a particular answer.

Given that LLMs are trained on lots of stuff and not just the policy of this company, it’s not hard to imagine how it could conjure that the policy (plausibly) is “one session per user”, and blame them of violating it.
by jennyholzer | 2025-04-16 14:17:24+00:00
The typefaces we commonly see in print and advertising are among the greatest artistic achievements our species has produced.

Garamond was designed 475 years ago and yet it still thrives. All of us here read text set in Garamond every day of our lives. Helvetica was released in the late '50s and occupies a similar role in our culture.

In the case of both Garamond and Helvetica, a set of strict geometric constraints has been applied to the design of each letterform. The genius of the design is that these constraints are complete enough that it is exceptionally difficult to find a "flaw" in the visual logic of the letterforms.

Clearly, no one Microsoft has taken the time to appreciate this detail. Kermit lacks a consistent design logic and appears exceptionally sloppy as a result.

Kermit will not survive.
by dom96 | 2025-04-16 14:17:28+00:00
I agree. That’s why onlyhumanhub doesn’t expect you to share your name. The passport verification is there to ensure you are a unique human, but the name of that human is not stored.

I’m perfectly happy talking to someone without knowing their real name. I just want to be more confident that they’re a unique human, and not just another sock puppet account run by some Russian agent (or evil corporation) trying to change people’s beliefs at scale.
by jerf | 2025-04-16 14:17:50+00:00
In a way, the main problem with LLMs isn't that they are wrong sometimes. We humans are used to that. We encounter people who are professionally wrong all the time. Politicians, con-men, scammers, even people who are just honestly wrong. We have evaluation metrics for those things. Those metrics are flawed because there are humans on the other end intelligently gaming those too, but generally speaking we're all at least trying.

LLMs don't fit those signals properly. They always sound like an intelligent person who knows what they are talking about, even when spewing absolute garbage. Even very intelligent people, even very intelligent people in the field of AI research are routinely bamboozled by the sheer swaggering confidence these models convey in their own results.

My personal opinion is that any AI researcher who was shocked by the paper lynguist mentioned ought to be ashamed of themselves and their credulity. That was all obvious to me; I couldn't have told you the exact mechanism the arithmetic was being performed (though what is was doing was well in the realm of what I would have expected from a linguistic AI trying to do math), but the fact that its chain of reasoning bore no particular resemblance to how it drew its conclusions was always obvious. A neural net has no introspection on itself. It doesn't have any idea "why" it is doing what it is doing. It can't. There's no mechanism for that to even exist. We humans are not directly introspecting our own neural nets, we're building models of our own behavior and then consulting the models, and anyone with any practice doing that should be well aware of how those models can still completely fail to predict reality!

Does that mean the chain of reasoning is "false"? How do we account for it improving performance on certain tasks then? No. It means that it is occurring at a higher level and a different level. It is quite like humans imputing reasons to their gut impulses. With training, combining gut impulses with careful reasoning is actually a very, very potent way to solve problems. The reasoning system needs training or it flies around like an unconstrained fire hose uncontrollably spraying everything around, but brought under control it is the most powerful system we know. But the models should always have been read as providing a rationalization rather than an explanation of something they couldn't possibly have been explaining. I'm also not convinced the models have that "training" either, nor is it obvious to me how to give it to them.

(You can't just prompt it into a human, it's going to be more complicated than just telling a model to "be carefully rational". Intensive and careful RHLF is a bare minimum, but finding humans who can get it right will itself be a challenge, and it's possible that what we're looking for simply doesn't exist in the bias-set of the LLM technology, which is my base case at this point.)
by susisjzbsbs | 2025-04-16 14:18:21+00:00
> In fact enough shoes get made locally to export about 1$ billion worth of them

We have far more shoes than we need.

> the jobs that would create are not gonna be very desirable, they are gonna drive up costs all over

Only because our government is run by billionaires. Elect politicians that care about the median American and this problem can be resolved quickly.

> I also think it is extremely unhealthy to baby an industry long-term by isolating it from competition like this.

This “babying” you mention results in decent working conditions and guaranteed jobs for Americans. It’s a trade off I think is worth it, as your proposal disproportionately benefits the 1%.

> I know better than market economies what ought to be produced

Have you looked at the astronomical surplus of useless goods we have here? Those come at the cost of labor that could be put towards jobs that benefit all Americans (building more homes, cheaper childcare, cheaper food, etc). Again you’re arguing for a status quo that is designed to grow the wealth gap and make billionaires richer. Essentially trickle down economics.
by mrighele | 2025-04-16 14:18:39+00:00
The tokens are not unlimited though, Pro and Ultimate plan seems to differ essentially on the amount of tokens you get. [1]

Anyway I think that for the average developer (i.e. not enterprise customers) this is easier to reason about, so I am fine with that.

[1] https://www.jetbrains.com/ai-ides/buy/?section=personal&bill...
by giancarlostoro | 2025-04-16 14:18:40+00:00
I used JetBrains AI for about a year, it was pretty good to basically help me to scaffold things, it felt like instructing a Junior developer, which isn't bad, saved me time for side projects.

Some observations from the pricingpage:

https://www.jetbrains.com/ai-ides/buy/?section=personal&bill...

* They say free for all IDEs except the community version of PyCharm and IntelliJ.

* Looks like if you want to use your own LLM you need to be an enterprise user? None of the lower tiers allow for it, I find this really, really dumb, if I'm paying for compute, why can't I also run my own LLM? Am I misunderstanding this?

* ReSharper and Android Studio don't fall under the credit system? I really would like to know what that means.
by throwway120385 | 2025-04-16 14:19:05+00:00
Yeah it finishes my sentences and goes back and replaces entire words with other words that are not even in the same category of noun, then replaces pronouns and conjunctions to completely make up a new sentence for me in something I've already typed. I'm not stupid and I meant what I typed. If I didn't mean what I typed I would have typed something else. Which I didn't.
by forgetfreeman | 2025-04-16 14:19:19+00:00
Oh I have no doubt it's an excellent tool for knowledge sharing. So are mailing lists (nobody reads email) and internal wikis (evergreen fist fight to get someone, anyone, to update). Despite best intentions knowledge sharing regimes are little more than well-intentioned pestering with irrelevant information that is absolutely purged from headspace during any number of daily/weekly/quarterly context switches. As I said, mediocre results.
by underlines | 2025-04-16 14:19:20+00:00
That's the normal way at least where I live (Switzerland) and I am shocked people are being disposed off like that in the states. Is this even legal there? We usually get 1-3 months notice period, then continue to work for these 3 months to teach the new hire or finish our open tasks. If we won't find another job in time, we would get 70-80% of the previous salary until we find another job.
by tanjtanjtanj | 2025-04-16 14:19:26+00:00
> If the point you're trying to make is that Google needs to bring every service they offer up to a billion users within five years of launching it

Well I didn’t say anything like this or anything that implied anything close to this so I suppose you’d have to engage with what I actually said.

Photos existed and was available to the public before it was “released” in 2015. Even then, 10 years is certainly not recent for a company of Google’s age. I don’t think even IBM would consider a 10 year old product a recent release.
by intercalaris | 2025-04-16 14:19:36+00:00
This is what I'm currently doing, and can confirm it helps quite a bit with learning the necessary skills. I did a full-time full-stack development apprenticeship program alongside it (yes, 80 hours a week of work) for 7 months and came out with tons of knowledge and projects I didn't do before.

And now I'm doing a Master's in CS and focusing on courses that are relevant to the career I envision for myself.

Is it work immediately? No, I can ignored in most applications. But does it give me the confidence that I eventually will get the regular software engineering job I'm searching for? Yes.
by iLemming | 2025-04-16 14:19:38+00:00
Yes, afaik there is meaningful relevance between logic programming and type systems - Curry-Howard; Dependent types; SMT solvers (related to SAT solvers mentioned in this discussion). However, constraint problems discussed (scheduling, travel planning, puzzles) would require quite verbose and complex encoding to solve with a type system and significant sophistication - Idris or Coq aren't for the faint-hearted.

Type systems would absolutely choke on trying to solve things like: Knowlege representation and querying - imagine medical diagnosis systems with thousands symptoms and conditions; Dynamic constraint solving - where constraints emerge at runtime; Exploratory search problems requiring bfs/dfs of large solution spaces - e.g., route finding with changing conditions; NLP tasks - grammar parsing and understanding; etc.
by AlexandrB | 2025-04-16 14:20:01+00:00
Yes, but the Republicans literally want to kill some minority groups. /s

Do you know how crazy this all sounds once you're outside of a specific left echo chamber? How is the hyperbole I employed any more unbelievable than that of the poster I was replying to? Another sibling comment to yours says that Trump is rounding up political opponents for a gulag. Nevermind that he has only rounded up non-citizen (most of them in the US illegally) because that's all he can do.

If you look at my posting history, it's wildly left-wing as little as 2 years ago. I've become completely disillusioned with the left after noticing how self-contradictory some of those ideas are and how the language of crisis is deployed to constantly smear their political opponents. Everyone the left doesn't like is Hitler and every policy they don't like is fascism. Give me break.

Edit:

For a little more elaboration, look at the speech codes and compelled "DEI pledges" that American universities have employed in the last few years[1]. How is this not speech policing? You might argue that these are private institutions, and maybe that's fair enough, but when the government pulls funding for crap like this the hyperbole and outrage persist.

Or look at Canada's bill C-63[2]. This bill aims to allow the possibility of life sentences for "hate speech"[3]. To me this is authoritarian. To many left wing commentators, it's another day at the office, I guess - meanwhile the Canadian right wing party is regularly called fascist[4][5] despite being basically in line with US Democrats on many issues.

[1] https://unsafescience.substack.com/p/the-last-four-years-wer...

[2] https://www.parl.ca/DocumentViewer/en/44-1/bill/C-63/first-r...

[3] https://bccla.org/2024/09/whats-in-bill-c-63-why-are-we-alar...

[4] https://medium.com/pigeons-peculiarities/pierre-poilievres-p...

[5] https://cultmtl.com/2025/02/pierre-poilievre-has-racked-up-e...
by josephg | 2025-04-16 14:20:11+00:00
Yeah; I used to enjoy poking through C code in well written programs. It’s amazing what gems you can find by people who really know their stuff.

I saw a string library once which took advantage of this. The library passed around classic C style char* pointers. They work in printf, and basically all C code that expects a string. But the strings had extra metadata stored before the string content. That metadata contained the string’s current length and the total allocation size. As a result, you could efficiently get a string length without scanning, append to a string, and do all sorts of other useful things that are tricky to do with bare allocations. All while maintaining support for the rest of the C ecosystem. It’s a very cool trick!
by vladvasiliu | 2025-04-16 14:20:52+00:00
Don't know what YT documents are, but FWIW my experience with Firefox on Linux is much better when using Google's products than Edge on Windows. Maps, in particular, is an unbelievable dumpster fire. It lags like crazy and has extremely weird behavior. Think the map's labels showing up in the search box for a second. When panning, it seems to reload pretty much everything byte by byte.

The only thing which works on Edge but doesn't on Firefox is casting from YouTube to my TV, but since this ignores my adblocker I never use it anyway.

The comparison is done on the same physical machine, with the default Edge config (I don't use windows that often, so don't bother to change settings).
by libertine | 2025-04-16 14:20:53+00:00
> Tax wealth somehow, not just income.

This is a critical point - in my opinion, wealth can't be at the same time a collateral to acquire more assets or to buy cheap money, and something that can't be taxed.

Either tax it or make credit/debt to be considered income after a certain net worth value, like 100 million would be more than enough.
by dullcrisp | 2025-04-16 14:21:33+00:00
But you’d have to draw a distinction between “I have to sell my company to Microsoft because they’re the only ones with the expertise to run it,” and “Microsoft sent someone to hold a gun to my head until I signed this paper even though I actually have other options.”

In this case it seems more like the former since no one is really actively combing the woods for hermits and forcibly integrating them into society. I guess it’s not unimaginable for something like that to happen, but I don’t think you could say that that’s reason that most of us are part of society. I do guess you could argue that point, but the argument would have to be that society is actively taking away viable alternatives to force people who otherwise would not have to have to join it, not that such alternatives never existed in the first place.
by dimitrios1 | 2025-04-16 14:22:30+00:00
For every example of privatization going wrong, there's least one example (if not two) of it going right.

But serious question -- what is the difference these days anyways? Our entire government is effectively privatized anyways from the local level up to the federal. We rely on contractors for almost everything that matters. We just maintain this facade that they are not privatized.
by shadowgovt | 2025-04-16 14:23:12+00:00
Nintendo (and Apple, and Microsoft) are the counterpoint story to the story that I think a lot of hackers (especially of the open-source and DIY variety) tell themselves about the way the world works:

There are benefits to both open and closed approaches, and people that really prefer each.

Nintendo succeeded in contrast to Atari because they clamped their jaws as tightly onto the supply chain as they could. In doing so, they created for their users a minimum quality standard expectation that could be relied upon: if it ran on Nintendo at all, it was a good game. That was the goal.

There's value and comfort in predictability and expectation satisfaction. While we shouldn't let the scales tip too far and give the exclusive platforms full control, it's possible for them to tip the other way too... A world where one can't create and protect a Nintendo is a worse world for end-users.