MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by athorax | 2025-04-21 21:04:31+00:00
The notion of stack vs heap allocation isn't something that even exists in the language. Users are expected to not worry about it... until, of course, until you're optimizing performance and you need to worry about it.

This is one of the best and worst aspects with Go. Anyone can write pretty performant code without having to understand the underlying memory model. If you get to the point where you are trying to optimize at this level, the benefits of using a more approachable language start to fall apart and you spend more time chasing implementation details.
by xur17 | 2025-04-21 21:04:36+00:00
Strongly agreed. I used Gemini 2.5 Pro over the weekend to build an entire website + backend system in 8 hours, and it would have taken me over a week to get to the same place myself. My total bill for the entire thing? $10.

I am using Gemini 2.5 Flash for analyzing screenshots of webpages as part of it. Total cost for that (assuming I did my math right) ? $0.00002 / image.
by teddarific | 2025-04-21 21:04:42+00:00
Definitely — we've seen some pretty crazy high fidelity mock ups from our customers who spend hours and hours prompting away, and they genuinely blow my mind. it's honestly why we spend so much time working on the application layer (e.g. making it easier to feed context into your prompt, referencing other designs, etc) since we know that the LLM is capable of these things, it just takes much more time than most people are willing to put in.

would love to hear what you think when you give it another try!
by robocat | 2025-04-21 21:05:15+00:00
Australia and New Zealand have 30% of population born in other countries. Housing growth seems to be keeping up in my city (Christchurch).

I'm unsure if immigration is a sustainable solution - immigrants also get old and retire. But perhaps it works out because immigrants have more kids than people that were born here?

I'd recommend Australia, for anyone considering moving, because it has better economics and a wider choice of locales and jobs.
by godelski | 2025-04-21 21:05:18+00:00
> old links break to my posts

Do they? I didn't observe any breaks when I did my DNS verification.

> People do not like changing their handles unless they want to

I don't see it that way. On both twitter and BlueSky there are two handles. I'm sure there's a better term, but let's say "display handle" and "address handle". (On HN they're the same) People are paying attention to the Display Handle and not the address one. Most of the time the address one is even cut off and is partially hidden anyways.[0]

> what happens if I want to be verified by more than one org at a time?

First off, it doesn't seem like Bluesky's implementation will do this so I'm not sure why it is being brought up into this conversation.

Second off, I agree that this is a desirable thing to have. It is why I was suggesting something similar to keybase (keyoxide?) or attribute keys. It definitely seems like Bluesky is intending to do something similar to the attribute keys but there's some details lacking and seems like an existing verified user needs to vet an entity prior to their ability to distribute keys. I'd also be quite happy if there was a publicly visible ledger so one could see former verifications (it's all visible via the firehose anyways, right?).

[0] And there's the classic problem on typing "@" and then the person's name and not actually finding them because the search system is fucked up and is looking for the address handle. I've seen this on both sites, more frequently twitter, and even when typing the address handle directly. Apparently this is a harder problem than I'd have thought (particularly replying to someone in the thread...)
by gerdesj | 2025-04-21 21:05:33+00:00
"How many newspaper stories from the 1700s have you read?"

Social history interests me. So does genealogy, although I am the apprentice. My family tree has over 150,000 records in it - thanks to my uncle's painstaking research.

I generally try to read summations by people who have read all those articles but I am happy to dive in myself if I have to.

Just off the top of my head: A great example of trying to get inside the thoughts and ideas of a long departed peoples - "Courtesans and Fishcakes". That book deals with the cultural mores of ordinary people not gods and kings and legends and stuff.
by Forgeties79 | 2025-04-21 21:06:08+00:00
>to protect a few dissidents

Your opinion seems to be to trivialize how important this can be, which fine you do you, but I think saying it only protects "a few dissidents" is a bit ridiculous.

Every protest I've filmed at I hit the lock button 5 times so it forces a passcode. I feel secure knowing the police can't just take it and start scrolling - they need a warrant or they're bust.

You don't have to be a dissident to need your privacy.
by tacker2000 | 2025-04-21 21:06:16+00:00
Why should Apple open this can of worms and give users access to locked out data. How would this process even work on a larger scale?

In the end if you dont backup your data locally, then its not your data and you risk losing it.

If your business shuts down because you lost your phone its your own fault for not mitigating this type of risk enough.
by crazygringo | 2025-04-21 21:06:17+00:00
That doesn't make sense. This isn't a technical hurdle, is it? Apple already can unlock your account "for the gestapo" if they choose to.

If the users have enabled Advanced Data Protection and don't have another Apple device, then I can understand why it would be lost for good. But that doesn't seem to be the case in these lawsuits. They make it clear that Apple has access to the data, and could transfer/restore it if they wanted to.
by albedoa | 2025-04-21 21:06:47+00:00
Yep, same with "journalists". Publication companies were given a fast-track process that basically allowed them to hand out verifications to anyone who ever had a byline with them. The most reliable way to get verified was to sell some words to an online news website. It didn't matter how notable you or the publication were.

When GP says "that’s not true though" I can't even tell which part he is talking about. This is fairly recent and well-documented stuff.
by yellowapple | 2025-04-21 21:06:56+00:00
I wish it'd work like labelers and other moderation features: with users able to choose which verifiers to use. I trust the NYT as far as I can throw them when it comes to verification, for example, whereas I'd be interested in something flagging Bluesky employees or contributors to a given GitHub repository or whatever other bizarre things people would use this for like they already use labels.
by janpaul123 | 2025-04-21 21:07:25+00:00
Yeah, my colleague just wrote about this exact problem of incentive misalignment with Cursor and Windsurf https://blog.kilocode.ai/p/why-cursors-flat-fee-pricing-will

The economist in me is says "just show the prices", though the psychologist in me says "that's hella stressful". ;)
by IshKebab | 2025-04-21 21:07:43+00:00
No, this article makes the case for 0-based indexing. Let's ignore the reality that computer fundamentally use 0-based indexes... The article says 1 is not prime because maths gets more awkward if it is.

In the same way we index from 0 because indexing gets way more awkward if we index from 1.

In-band sentinels are both quite rare, and also equally convenient with -1 or 0. In fact I would say -1 is a bit more elegant because sometimes you need multiple sentinel values and then you can easily use -2 (what are you going to use 0 and 1 and then index from 2?).

The more common operations are things like indexing into flattened multidimensional arrays, or dealing with intervals, which are both way more elegant with 0-based indexing.

0 is a valid index into an array. It's even a valid index into global memory in some environments. Not mapping memory to address 0 is completely trivial. I'm not sure what non-trivial complications you're thinking of.
by mschuster91 | 2025-04-21 21:07:50+00:00
> Coming in, ruining a country, and then bailing is exactly what they take issue with.

I proposed doing exactly the counter: coming in and staying until the situation is tenable.

> Anti-colonial people will typically ask for reparations to solve exactly this problem.

Money isn't everything. When the judiciary is compromised and/or incompetent, no amount of money can prevent a situation like the one described here.
by hnuser123456 | 2025-04-21 21:09:13+00:00
I spend hours prompting to refine my projects. The LLM is not smart enough to prompt itself into building exactly what I wanted. I made it and the LLM just helped me aggregate and access and organize knowledge faster than individual web searches ever could. Do you make sure to credit Google every time you share or use information you learned by Googling, even if you ended up reading research papers by actual people at actual universities?

I have my own automated LLM developer system. You simply give it a project description and it will iterate until it thinks it perfectly implemented the project description. I still take credit for what this system produces because I made the automated developer system in the first place and gave it the project ideas.

LLMs do not have autonomy. If you setup a self-prompting script with internet access and it figures out how to post something to social media, that still isn't the LLM's own inherent curiosity. That's a person who intentionally put together a script that gives an LLM access to tools and poorly defined instructions.

The instruction tuning that makes LLMs reply like they're a person you're talking to, rather than acting like autocomplete, is doing a lot of heavy lifting into personifying a pile of matrices.
by mschuster91 | 2025-04-21 21:09:21+00:00
> Africa - an enormous place that can't be described in one way, has many countries doing very well.

And a shitload of countries in the hold of some warlord or other despot, or like Libya or Sudan on the verge of collapse. Something needs to be done about these countries and their resources - they deserve to be utilized in a way benefitting all citizens, not just the junta in power.

> That should be up to the people in those countries, not you or me or some powerful Westerner.

That assumes a democratic structure and the ability of the people in those countries to have a voice in said democracy. Both are far from given. Unfortunately, democracy doesn't come on its own, particularly not if the elites are the ones holding all the guns, so there needs to be a system in place to support actual democracy and getting rid of kleptocrats, autocrats and similar powers.
by skydhash | 2025-04-21 21:09:24+00:00
> It’s fascinating (and honestly a little tragic) that a lot of the cookie chaos comes down to basic unsolved problems like "how do you remember privacy without remembering identity?"

That's an easy answer: Do not store anything that will infringe on people's privacy for anything that's not the intended feature people use. If I' visiting an ecommerce site, there's nothing that warrants Google being aware of which product I'm clicking on.
by larodi | 2025-04-21 21:09:36+00:00
Having done my masters on the topic of grammar-assisted text2sql let me add some additional context here:

- first of all local inference can never beat cloud inference for the very simple reason that costs go down with batching. it took me two years to actually understand what batching is - the LLM tensors flowing through transformer layers has a dimension designed specifically for processing data in parallel. so no matter if you process a 1 sequence or 128 sequences the costs are the same. i've read very few articles overstating this, so bear in mind - this is the primary stopper for competing local inference with cloud inference.

- second, and this is not a light one to take - LLM-assisted text2sql is not trivial, not at all. you may think it is, you may expect cutting-edge models to do it right, but there are ...plenty of reasons models fail so badly at this seemingly trivial task. you may start with arbitrary article such as https://arxiv.org/pdf/2408.14717 and dig the references, sooner or later you will stumble on one of dozens overview papers by mostly Chinese researchers (such as https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.10956) where overview of approaches is summarized. Caution: you may feel both inspired AI will not take over your job, or you may feel miserable how much effort is spent on this task and how badly everything fails in real-world scenarios

- finally, something we agreed with a professor advising a doctorate candidate whose thesis surprisingly was on the same topic. basically given GraphQL and other structured formats such as JSON, which LLMs are much better leaned on than the complex grammar of SQL which is not a regular grammar, but context-free one, which takes more complex machines to parse it and also very often recursion.

- which brings us to the most important question - why commercial GPTs fare so much better on it than local models. well, it is presumed top players, not only use MoEs but they also employ beam search, perhaps speculative inference and all sorts of optimizations on the hardware level. while this all is not beyond comprehension for a casual researcher at a casual university (like myself) you don't get to easily run this all locally. I have not written an inference engine myself, but I imagine MoE and beam search is super compled, as beam search basically means - you fork the whole LLM execution state and go back and forth. Not sure how this even works together with batching.

So basically - this is too expensive. Besides atm (to my knowledge) only vllm (the engine) has some sort of reasonably working local beam search. I would've loved to see llama.cpp's beam search get a rewrite, but it stalled. Trying to get beamsearch working with current python libs is nearly impossible for commodity hardware, even if you have 48gigs of ram, which already means a very powerful GPU.
by manmal | 2025-04-21 21:09:53+00:00
Personally, I only use locally run models when I absolutely can’t have the prompt/context uploaded to a cloud. For anything else, I just use one of the commercial cloud hosted models. The ones I‘m using are way faster and better in _every_ way except privacy. Eg if you are ok to spend more, you can get blazing fast DeepSeek v3 or R1 via OpenRouter. Or, rather cheap Claude Sonnet via Copilot (pre-release also has Gemini 2.5 Pro btw).

I’ve gotten carried away - I meant to express that using cloud as a fallback for local models is something I absolutely don’t want or need, because privacy is the whole and only point to local models.
by senordevnyc | 2025-04-21 21:09:54+00:00
Honestly, I’d say that’s true only for the author. Anyone else is just going to be interpreting the words to understand how to best convey the character / emotion / situation / etc., just like an AI will have to do. If an AI can do that more effectively than a human, why not?

The author could be better, because they at least have other info beyond the text to rely on, they can go off-script or add little details, etc.
by moate | 2025-04-21 21:10:07+00:00
>>That is not showing us the market is not rational, it is showing us that Texas politics is corrupt.

Dear capitalists, this is not a bar:

The first thing proves the second. The market is a real thing that exists in the universe we live in, not just in academic research. The markets are never "rational", because they're just people. They may be "predictable" or even "stable" but humans are not rational. The fact that the market can be manipulated, means that it is manipulated.
by astura | 2025-04-21 21:10:29+00:00
I certainly don't think creating unwanted babies to be "raised as an orphan or whatever" is preferable to abortion, or even good at all. Certainly something I'd never personally do. That sounds absolutely horrific.

I grew up unwanted, that shit stays with you forever. It's a lifetime of torture.

This comment is seriously disturbing, holy shit.
by tmnvix | 2025-04-21 21:10:32+00:00
> cars are more fuel efficient

This is true when comparing the same class of car to previous models, but is it still true overall when we consider the shift to larger vehicles? The Toyota Camry from 1994 is still more efficient than the current 2024 top selling Ford F150.

Jevons paradox is worth considering when reading these stories of increased renewable energy generation and falling prices.
by marcusb | 2025-04-21 21:10:59+00:00
I agree - I'm not endorsing this broad usage of the term, just noting how I see it used in practice. This seems to be half driven by grifters on social media promoting their AI coding course du jour and half by people who just discovered Cursor, Windsurf, etc., and think any use of those tools counts.)

Another commenter said these people only read half of Karpathy's tweet - I disagree. I don't think they read it at all, have heard the phrase, and are using it with reckless abandon.
by amiantos | 2025-04-21 21:11:12+00:00
I had to do a little digging to respond to this properly.

I was on the "Pro Trial" where you get 150 premium requests and I had very quickly used 34 for them, which admittedly is 22% and not 30%. Their pricing page says that the Free plan includes "Pro two-week trial", but they do not explain that on the pro trial you only get 150 premium requests and that on the real Pro plan you get 500 premium requests. So you're correct to be skeptical, I did not use 30% of 500 requests on the Pro plan. I used 22% of the 150 requests you get on the Trial Pro plan.

And yes, I think the agent mode can burn through credits pretty quickly.
by robben1234 | 2025-04-21 21:11:41+00:00
>It only becomes a crime when you're absurdly over the limit.

I vividly remember my confusion learning about how many states in the US use an absolute value to turn speeding violation into a criminal charge, and namely Virginia which just a few years ago had that value set to 80mph (~130kmh) - a state with lots of interstate traffic and I-95 speed limit set to 70 mph (~115kmh).

And I could understand a predatory scheme set up by the government to generate revenue - set speed limit low, make fines really high. But in this case it's not clear to me what the state is gaining - throwing someone in jail for a weekend and labeling that person a criminal ruins their life for good but there's almost no profit for the treasury.
by bigstrat2003 | 2025-04-21 21:11:48+00:00
I have tried zed, and promptly uninstalled once I saw it was automatically downloading and running nodejs. I want an editor that is lightweight, not one that starts running extra crap I neither need nor want in the background. That was on top of the big focus on LLM integration (itself already a significant negative for me), but which I was willing to overlook to try out the rest.

I don't think Zed is very good in its current state. Too much extra cruft out of the box which you need to disable.
by anyonecancode | 2025-04-21 21:12:06+00:00
> It’s just a lot smaller geographically.

That's actually a fairly important detail. I live in the NYC metro (lived in the city itself for many years) and have visited SF several times. The "city" part of SF is just much, much smaller, and the suburban parts are much less dense.

NYC and its metro are still quite expensive and we have our own problems with NIMBYism driving housing costs up, but I'm always rather shocked at how much more expensive the SF metro is and how under-developed it is.
by cmgriffing | 2025-04-21 21:12:20+00:00
I think this is a good case for applying Hanlon's Razor. The person that did the forking and removal of copyright text may simply not know that it needed to stay there.

I would love to know what processes MS is considering to prevent this in the future as well as what kind of auditing might be done to look at other projects that started as forks.
by mdp2021 | 2025-04-21 21:12:52+00:00
> Previous stretchable batteries have proven sturdy, surviving twisting and even strikes from a hammer. The new battery displays another level of durability, not only enduring stretching, twisting, and folding, but continuously powering a yellow light even while being repeatedly punctured with needles. In addition, “the battery can be cut in half, put together, and self-heal to still maintain more than 90 percent of its capacity”

So (apologies) it can be said that it can resist to battery. Let us note it so this temptation is dealt with. The writer resisted the pun, but indulged in noting that it could power a /yellow/ light - and I am not sure why.

The other big question is: it is obviously good to have a resilient battery as opposed to a fragile one, but where would the resilience of a battery be important or critical, also to justify potential increased costs?
by mike_hearn | 2025-04-21 21:12:59+00:00
Pluggable file systems work OK (and are supported by every OS already) because the interface is standardized and clients can't modify the internals of the FS or vice-versa. So the interface is enforced. In highly dynamic operating systems like Squeak VMs everything is up for grabs, so you can't evolve such a system because you can't reason about the state it's in.

The point about LLMs is that in reality you can't say "software should work like this". Maybe that was viable in 1990, but so much software has been written since that the designs, toolkits, paradigms: done. Nothing can be changed due to the massive weight of pre-existing software that will never be rewritten. I'm middle aged, and the only new OS designs in my entire lifetime have been iOS/Android where the immaturity of the mobile space allowed a clean slate start. But that was a one-off.

AI lets us imagine new things again because it's getting close to enabling something like "rewrite this giant codebase to use a new UI toolkit for me", or "take this web app, reverse engineer its backing REST API, combine it with that other web app and combine it into a new UI personalized just for me". And that then enables experimentation again: you don't have to wait for third party devs to support your cool new OS if you can get an LLM to hack in and crowbar a form of support via brute force.

Other thoughts: do files even matter anymore if you interact primarily via a chat box? Or is the only thing that matters recorded notes by/for the LLM which can then render whatever view of the user's knowledge base is appropriate? Do apps even matter anymore, or can good enough logic be assembled and written on the fly to suit any request? A lot of reasons why various ideas did or didn't work were to do with business models, but the low cost of inferencing fundamentally changes what works there.
by GodelNumbering | 2025-04-21 21:13:08+00:00
This is awesome! Thanks for making this.

One feature that would make it super useful is to have 30-60 seconds of audio (AI generated) that tells me enough high level info about the paper to know whether I want to go deeper (and 'save for later' button to go with). That way a user can use it while commuting or driving.

Again, really cool idea that helps people learn things instead of wasting time on same old tiktoks/reels. Nicely done, OP!