MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by tshaddox | 2025-04-29 21:02:39+00:00
> There's some level at which an AI 'player' goes from being competitive with a human player, matching better-trained human strategy against a more impressive memory, to just a cheaty computer with too much memorization. Finding that limit is the interesting thing about this analysis, IMO!

And a lot of human competitions aren't designed in such a way that the competition even makes sense with "AI." A lot of video games make this pretty obvious. It's relatively simple to build an aimbot in a first-person shooter that can outperform the most skilled humans. Even in ostensibly strategic games like Starcraft, bots can micro in ways that are blatantly impossible for humans and which don't really feel like an impressive display of Starcraft skill.

Another great example was IBM Watson playing Jeopardy! back in 2011. We were supposed to be impressed with Watson's natural language capabilities, but if you know anything about high-level Jeopardy! then you know that all you were really seeing is that robots have better reflexes than humans, which is hardly impressive.
by mtmail | 2025-04-29 21:03:12+00:00
The system to display a brand logo next to your email (e.g in Gmail) is based on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brand_Indicators_for_Message_I... Basically a company needs to purchase a certificate for 1000-2000 USD/year. Scammer don't do that. (Also me as a small non-ecommerce company doesn't do that). It's not ideal but some trust can be established by making it expensive.
by Alupis | 2025-04-29 21:03:15+00:00
This was never going to be feasible to display for several obvious reasons:

1. A tariff is part of the landed cost of a product - meaning it's a component of a businesses' Cost of Goods Sold (COGS). It is not an optional additional service, such as shipping, and is not something that can readily be broken out of product costings (which is used to determine markup and price).

2. Many, many businesses purchase goods for resale from other businesses which imported the goods. Sometimes a business may be two or three times removed from the actual importation of products. None of those businesses would have the capability to prove which component of their price is due to tariffs. This policy would only favor businesses which are importing direct and then reselling direct to consumer, ie. the very overseas Chinese businesses the tariffs are specifically targeting.

Amazon already has a Chinese problem in that it's being slowly converted into a higher-priced Temu - filled with junk and knock-offs everyone complains about. I do not see it being advantageous for Amazon to create such a policy that grossly favors overseas businesses over Amazon's domestic partners and 3rd party sellers.
by mac3n | 2025-04-29 21:03:26+00:00
You don't say what kind of software and for whom. One thing I suggest, if you haven't done it, is working on software, but for companies that don't ship software or software services. Stay away from the big tech companies, look for something small and somewhat local. You don't want to be the FAANG "cattle, not pets"

One of the most enjoyable jobs I had was working for a small company that made [digital] audio equipment (before that was possible on a PC) - we had sound systems in every office and a small recording studio in the basement. Most of the engineers were also musicians. We had software people, analog people, and music and radio production people.
by rapind | 2025-04-29 21:03:58+00:00
To give you an idea of how many models are being trained, and how the energy costs continue to increase. https://epoch.ai/data/notable-ai-models

I mean, I guess advances could plateau and we stop spending exponentially more energy year after year...

I'm not opining on whether it's a good idea (I doubt we ever voluntarily consume less as a species), but data centres use a lot of energy and billions are being spent building them. https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/09/26/1104516/three-mi...
by asoneth | 2025-04-29 21:04:14+00:00
> try driving in the left lane at the 55mph speed limit in NYS in areas around NYC

Why the left lane? I used to live in NYC and when traffic was light enough to actually drive the speed limit I generally stuck to the right lane to avoid inconveniencing other people who wanted to drive faster. Wouldn't people with court-mandated speed limiters simply stick to the right lane?

> Any attempt to force people to drive slower than the 85th percentile speed poses a danger to others on the road.

Perhaps they'd need the "ATTENTION: This vehicle's speed is monitored by GPS" stickers that I occasionally see on fleet trucks in the city.

Regardless, this seems to be an objection to selective enforcement methods, right? For example, if all drivers are subject to the same constraints (whether speed cameras, universal speed limiters, road diet, etc) then not only would this not increase discrepancies in speed, but it would likely decrease them. Does this mean you would support such measures?

> Doing draconian things that are ineffective has an opportunity cost

Agreed. But that applies to ineffective things whether or not they are draconian.

I do agree that stoplight cameras have mixed results -- typically reducing serious T-bone collisions while increasing rear-end collisions -- but to be clear, when I said "cameras" I was referring to speed cameras, not red-light cameras. On the topic of NYS, their school zone speed cameras seem to have been effective at reducing injuries caused by drivers in school zones.

> As long as the distance between vehicles remains non-zero, collisions are avoided. Efforts really should be focused on maximizing the distance between vehicles, rather than on minimizing the speed at which they travel.

Due to human reaction times and the physical limitations of braking, maintaining a time between vehicles is more relevant than distance. That's why defensive driving courses teach you to keep about three seconds between your car and the car in front of you, more if you're hauling a trailer. If you're driving at 8mph that's only about 10ft, but at 80mph that's 100ft. So while I agree that increasing distance is useful, the distance necessary to ensure safe operation is a direct function of speed.

I heard of a few cases in which so many drivers were already breaking the speed limit on an overengineered highway that raising the speed limit did not increase collisions e.g. in Michigan, Texas, British Columbia. But otherwise the data is pretty clear that making people drive more slowly improves safety.
by hu3 | 2025-04-29 21:04:27+00:00
Here's some related challenge I'm facing. Maybe someone can help me:

I also managed to make AI critique itself and that improved code generation a ton.

For a TypeScript backend project that runs with Bun, I tell AI to also generate and run unit tests after every code change suggested by AI.

How do you solve the risk of AI writting and executing unit tests with something like `rm -rf /` and wiping your files?

Docker works but I like to keep things simple.

Deno supports revoking file access but I'd like to keep using Bun.
by reyqn | 2025-04-29 21:05:02+00:00
So all of the cheatsheet is basically "it's not bad because there are worse things"?

You can try explaining why it's not "that" bad for the environment, the planet is still worse off than when it didn't exist.

Let's carry on inventing new ways to spend energy, but it's ok because we still spend more energy for other stuff.

It's kinda sad how the world saw climate change, said it was bad, but in the end decided to do nothing about it.
by alabastervlog | 2025-04-29 21:05:39+00:00
The best semi-realistic chance for a quick end is for Trump to follow through on all his tariff threats (he's still not enacted most of it, even after his "no really guys, at midnight [by which I mean this coming weekend, through early next month] I'm actually doing it" announcement-event he made a big deal out of) and then stick with it, and maybe also do something crazy with the Fed. Though the tariffs alone might be enough, given a (very) few months of it.

Economic turmoil that affects lots of ordinary people is one of the quickest ways to end or effectively cripple a government.

Following through on any of his various threatened military actions against allies & neighbors might also do it, between extreme economic disruption and people being unwilling to e.g. kill or die over war with Canada or Mexico or Denmark.

Basically, escalation from him in ways that are so unacceptable & painful to voters that it gets lots of people not just upset, but angry, en masse and all at once. But also confining this to actions he's expressed intent to do (or even has said he is doing, but in fact has not yet). Doesn't necessarily have to manifest as outright civil unrest, exactly, could just mean such an overwhelming volume of pissed off phone calls and in-person confrontations with congresscritters that they finally get more afraid of voters than of Trump, and reign him in.
by leeab | 2025-04-29 21:05:50+00:00
We collect a handful of metrics, but coming from our previous lives in DevOps, we only collect just what's needed to avoid unnecessary metrics bloat.

The main 3 are:

- GPU runtime stats from NVIDIA smi

- Running pods from Kube state

- Node data & events from Kube state

We have several screens with similar information intended for different roles. For example, the Workloads screen is mainly for researchers to monitor their workloads from creation to completion. The Reports screen shows mainly cost data grouped by team/project, etc.
by cycomanic | 2025-04-29 21:06:00+00:00
Latest research does strongly suggest that introducing small amounts of common allergens (peanuts, shellfish,milk products...) as early as possible does significantly reduce risk for allergies later. Many early childhood organisations already recommend this. Official health recommendations are often slow to catch up (often for good reasons, but introducing peanuts etc. early is already officially recommended in quite a few countries (Australia, NZ, Sweden for example AFAIK). Not all health professionals are always up to date either though.
by int_19h | 2025-04-29 21:06:27+00:00
FWIW I think it captures the sentiment many users have towards software today fairly accurately, and every software engineer who has even a modicum of pride in their trade really ought to pay attention.

One thing I'd like to point out, though, is that this kind of stuff isn't really about micro-optimizations. Most software in the "good old days" wasn't really micro-optimized either. No, what this is about is bloat. Layers upon layers of abstractions that, in most cases, amount to rearranging the pieces in the way the author deemed most aesthetically pleasing. When I look at call stacks while debugging most modern software, I can't help but feel that it spends most of its time calling functions that call functions etc, 20-30 levels deep. Most data flow isn't from component to component, but within the component between those layers. And it all adds up.
by Etheryte | 2025-04-29 21:06:47+00:00
To an extent, I think this is still on the dev. Don't declare your feature done when the bare minimum of works on my machine when I squint is done. One of my first managers taught me this lesson, the feature isn't done when you're done coding, it's done when you've jumped through all the other hoops too, and it's actually live and ready to use. That includes stuff like tests, review, qa, and in this context, making sure it's performant. Agreeing to cut corners to meet an unrealistic deadline very much is on the dev.
by hn_throwaway_99 | 2025-04-29 21:07:35+00:00
Some resources:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/jul/14/globalisation-...

https://business.columbia.edu/sites/default/files-efs/imce-u...

But in my own words, while I think economists have always acknowledged there would be some "winners" and "losers" from globalization, I think there is widespread belief now that early globalization boosters misjudged how bad it would be for the "losers", they underestimated how much it would contribute to inequality, and they underestimated the destabilizing effect this would have on social and political systems.

At the end of the day, it doesn't really matter what the reality is for globalization's benefits if so many people are turned off by it that they want to "burn the whole thing down", as that's basically what's happening now.
by scarface_74 | 2025-04-29 21:07:48+00:00
How is ARM proliferation being slowed down? Amazon, Microsoft, Meta and Google are all designing their own ARM based server chips.

Apple has been making money hand over fist designing ARM based hardware since 2010 with the A4.

Amazon is saving billions using its own custom chips for both servers and specialized networking chips.

But the fact is that Intel has to figure out something. Right now x86 may not be dead. But it is smelling funny. They are selling fewer desktops, servers and are non existent in mobile.
by charonn0 | 2025-04-29 21:07:50+00:00
For HTTP/1.1 you could send a "chunked" response. Chunked responses are intended to allow the server to start sending dynamically generated content immediately instead of waiting for the generation process to finish before sending. You could just continue to send chunks until the client gives up or crashes.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chunked_transfer_encoding
by SamPatt | 2025-04-29 21:08:23+00:00
Done. Here's o3's reply:

>That’s not Earth at all—this is the floor of Jezero Crater on Mars, the dusty plain and low ridge captured by NASA’s Perseverance rover (the Mastcam-Z color cameras give away the muted tan-pink sky and the uniform basaltic rubble strewn across the regolith).
by Validark | 2025-04-29 21:08:56+00:00
"Register pressure is even worse because that is only a problem because of the ISA, not the microarchitecture."

I'm not so sure. How many cycles would you expect this code to take?

mov dword [rsi], eax add dword [rsi], 5 mov ebx, dword [rsi]

According to Agner Fog, these 3 instructions have a latency of 15 cycles on an AMD Zen 1 processor. On Zen 2, its latency is 2 cycles. This is because the CPU was given the ability to assign a register to `dword [rsi]`, overcoming the limit of 16 registers.

This optimization is subject to problems, obviously pointer aliasing will enable the CPU to make the wrong assumption at times, and cause a situation not entirely unlike a branch mispredict.

There are constraints imposed by the micro-architecture for this feature. For you and I, a big one is it only works with general purpose registers. But is there a reason it couldn't or shouldn't be done for vectors? It seems like a micro-arch issue to me. Perhaps in a few years or in a lot of years, we'll have a CPU that can do this optimization for vectors.
by hugmynutus | 2025-04-29 21:09:08+00:00
I find this unconvincing. The actual discussion of LLM generation is very lacking.

The original link [1] cites a discussion of the cost per query of GPT-4o at 0.3whr [2]. When you read the document [2] itself you see 0.3whr is a lower bound & 40whr is the upper bound. The paper [2] is actually pretty solid, I recommend it. It uses the public metrics from other LLM APIs to derive a likely distribution of the context size of the average query for GPT-4o which is a reasonable approach given that data isn't public. Then factoring in GPU power per FLOP, average utilization during, and cloud/renting overhead. It admits this likely has non-trivial error bars, concluding the average is between 1-4whr per query.

This is disappointing to me as the original link [1] attempts to bring in this source [2] to disprove the 3whr "myth" created by another paper [3], yet this 3whr figure lies directly in the error bars their new source [2] arrives at.

Links:

1. https://simonwillison.net/2025/Apr/29/chatgpt-is-not-bad-for...

2. https://epoch.ai/gradient-updates/how-much-energy-does-chatg...

3. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S254243512...

Edit: whr not w/hr
by thayne | 2025-04-29 21:09:13+00:00
Disclosure: IANAL

The CFAA[1] prohibits:

> knowingly causes the transmission of a program, information, code, or command, and as a result of such conduct, intentionally causes damage without authorization, to a protected computer;

As far as I can tell (again, IANAL) there isn't an exception if you believe said computer is actively attempting to abuse your system[2]. I'm not sure if a zip bomb would constitute intentional damage, but it is at least close enough to the line that I wouldn't feel comfortable risking it.

[1]: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1030

[2]: And of course, you might make a mistake and incorrectly serve this to legitimate traffic.
by superkuh | 2025-04-29 21:09:25+00:00
I paid for 3 months. Kagi was okay, but it's not really a search engine like I use search engines. They only ever returned <200 results per search query. So you had to depend on their system to magically know what results you wanted out of everything in existence. There was no way to look through the actual search results returned deeply.

This "We know what you want, you don't get lists of stuff." is their core ideology. So I stopped paying them and use lots of other search engines.
by mmooss | 2025-04-29 21:09:39+00:00
Competing with it is a problem for conservativism. Some admittedly loose reasoning:

Conservativism preserves currently widely accepted structures, including ideas, by ridiculing and excluding new ones; social structures, by outlawing / persecuting / demonizing new ones as a threat to 'our traditions' and 'way of life'; businesses, through tariffs and other anti-competitive measures - the House GOP is considering a bill that reduces antitrust powers, for example; existing economic sectors, by government picking winners and funding them, limiting the economy to what is popular and that the government already understands, such as manufacturing; etc.

Remember the land of the individual, of personal freedom, of opportunity, that by its culture generated invention and innovation that other places, without that culture, couldn't match. What China, which is limited by central control, is doing is copying well-established innovations - a biotech industry that relies on clinical trials. Cutting edge stuff - decades ago.

What has made the US successful is creating, innovating, and moving on to the next thing - things the government and most of the public are far behind on. Look at the boom in the IT industry over the last several decades (also no longer cutting edge except in limited ways).

How can that happen now? The US has currently embraced relatively extreme conservatism. People are afraid to offer challenging ideas, and make their money from rent and from squeezing revenue from old ideas (the stereotypical private equity model). They can't go anywhere except by pleasing the oligarchy, now including the government.
by dingnuts | 2025-04-29 21:09:47+00:00
your comment would have a lot more weight if the grandparent hadn't been flagged and removed by people who don't like to read things they disagree with!

How am I supposed to know what arguments to expect from MAGA if you people censor what they have to say?

Censorship isn't helping your cause! It just makes your side look weak and scared.
by rebelpixel | 2025-04-29 21:09:49+00:00
Google Chrome had this on Android several years ago, but it was quickly yanked out—probably because people hated it as it felt like ti bogged down the OS with it. Personally, it felt like information overload forced into a limited UX context.

But now with advancements like tab unloading/discarding and faster CPUs, it might work for some people om mobile devices. Desktop browsers though might still be hampered by limited task/context-switching options.
by Animats | 2025-04-29 21:09:59+00:00
> Let's wait for the investigation to complete before we opine on what is or isn't a "disaster waiting to happen."

Yes. The info still isn't that good.

That said, allowing helicopter operations underneath a final approach path is iffy. Ops.group has a discussion.[1]

[1] https://ops.group/blog/the-dangers-of-mixed-traffic/
by kube-system | 2025-04-29 21:10:10+00:00
This accident didn't involve the main runway, but runway 33. Although -- look at a map -- runway 33 points across the river to a military base with a heliport. It seems obvious as to why military helicopters would have to be there.

Now, this particular flight wasn't landing there, but I don't think it is in any way confusing as to why military helicopters are in this area or taking these routes.

This is inherently very complicated and high volume airspace, and there is a lot of helicopters because there are important leaders who use military helicopter transport, not commercial airports, but many of the places they might be landing are all around DCA.
by dkokelley | 2025-04-29 21:10:36+00:00
Not sure what the next best option here is. There was a thought experiment once where it would require the president to kill the key holder in order to launch a nuclear attack (the launch codes would be embedded in the designated key holder's heart). In theory this would make sure the president knew the seriousness of his or her actions, but it was never seriously considered as a protocol.
by acdha | 2025-04-29 21:10:57+00:00
> The problem is that you are invoking a crude theory in a simplistic fashion that has with very little predictive power over the real world.

I appreciate the mix of unwarranted condescension with the assertion that the theory that sudden tariffs cause sudden price increases doesn’t have predictive value, when basically every sober analyst predicted what we are seeing now.

It’s not exactly a secret that prices fluctuate seasonally but what we’re seeing now is spread across the entire economy, suddenly, and in sectors which do not normally experience that seasonal volatility.