MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by wewewedxfgdf | 2025-04-29 20:03:50+00:00
Can someone explain to me please why Meta doesn't create subject specific versions of their LLMs such as one that knows only about computer programming, computers, hardware software.

I would have imagined such a thing would be smaller and thus run on smaller configurations.

But since I am only a layman maybe someone can tell me why this isn't the case?
by nostrademons | 2025-04-29 20:04:02+00:00
This is coming from the perspective of a performance engineer whose day job is squeezing every last bit of performance out of system libraries and low-level code. This is important work, and it can pay very well if you get one of the few positions in it. But for an application developer whose primary day job is cranking out features and then spending 10% of the time at the end optimizing them, the conclusion (and the headline) very much does not hold.

For them, the systematic way to optimize goes: profile your code, and then apply domain knowledge of the product to optimize the hotspots with these common techniques:

Don't do repeated work. (If you have an expensive invariant calculation in a loop or function call, move it out, to a higher level of the program where it can be done once.)

Save your work. (Caching and memoization.)

Do less work. (Alter the product requirements to use less computationally-intensive techniques in cases where users won't notice the difference.)

Do work when the user isn't looking. (Move computations to background tasks, apply concurrency, perform async requests.)

If all else fails, call in a performance engineer like the author to micro-optimize your building blocks.

You can often get speedups of 3-6 orders of magnitude by applying these techniques, simply because the original code is so brain-dead. Performance engineers like the author tend to work on code that has already been tightly optimized, and so there is less low-hanging fruit to pick.
by Lukas_Skywalker | 2025-04-29 20:04:02+00:00
I always thought it was funny that people criticize the "magic" of certain frameworks, when at its core, almost all programming is magic (since it is almost always an abstraction). And there is probably no clear distinction on where non-magic ends and magic starts.

But somehow, no one complains about having a GC instead of needing to use `malloc`/`free` or `fetch` doing the DNS query automatically.

And that's exactly _why_ I use frameworks and libraries. So I don't have to write low level code, or as one could call it, to use some magic.
by alwillis | 2025-04-29 20:04:03+00:00
but that's not really how the world works, and certainly not how Apple works. Executives make hard choices about what to prioritize. This will be one of them.

This is a fundamental misunderstanding of how Apple works. Nobody is debating whether they should keep working on Xcode or Safari; it’s both.

WebKit is one of the most important frameworks Apple makes; many of their own apps rely on it like Mail and the App Store.

And many thousands of 3rd party apps (Facebook, Twitter) rely on WebKit to render web content on macOS, iOS, iPadOS, visionOS and tvOS.

Does losing $18 billion mean some adjustments? Of course, but it’s probably something else that’s not mission critical, not something like Safari/WebKit that’s on over 2 billion devices.
by snickerbockers | 2025-04-29 20:04:04+00:00
I have definitely been in dozens upon dozens upon dozens of situations where a website or app struggled to do something that my dad's PC in the 90s could do fast enough for the modem to be the only bottleneck. And even then the P1 with the modem that ran into the phone line probably still wins out, which is disgusting given that its entire disk was smaller than the RAM on my phone.

ROPs vulernabilities and lack of linux compatibility notwithstanding, i swear flash wasn't even half as bad as modern web crap.
by nancyminusone | 2025-04-29 20:04:05+00:00
Going to ChatGPT to ask for a quick python script isn't quite the same as "AI Overview" being inserted into every search result page, a fake generated image at the top of every post, entire fake websites taking up SEO with whole articles devoid of information, people "writing" and "illustrating" generated books and trying to sell them for no effort put in...
by evolve2k | 2025-04-29 20:04:09+00:00
Fascinating article documenting a clear challenge over multiple versions of Rails. My read on the subtext of the article is that these issues of proper SQLite support within Active Record won’t fix with a clever gem or quick script but rather need dedicated effort in the rails core.

What surprises me a little is that the article is written just now in April 2025 but makes no mention of recent developments in rails.

Specially I’m referring to the Rails 8 release. My take away from Rails 8 is that one of the biggest features is significant work towards making SQLite very much a first class citizen of rails, with significant focus on enhancin support for it across the stack.

The text below is from the announcement: “Rails 8 No PASS required”

“Getting SQLite ready for production

On top of the trifecta of Solid adapters that makes it possible for SQLite to power Action Cable, Rails.cache, and Active Job, a bunch of work has gone into making the SQLite adapter and Ruby driver suitable for real production use in Rails 8. At 37signals, we’re building a growing suite of apps that use SQLite in production with ONCE. There are now thousands of installations of both Campfire and Writebook running in the wild that all run SQLite. This has meant a lot of real-world pressure on ensuring that Rails (and Ruby) is working that wonderful file-based database as well as it can be.”

https://rubyonrails.org/2024/11/7/rails-8-no-paas-required

Surely this work bears fruit for the challenges the developer speaks of here. Curious as to if anyone has further insight into what extent Rails 8 addresses the highlighted shortcomings and further if there is a significant gap what would be needed to have this resolved for Rails 9 which I expect is underway.
by more-nitor | 2025-04-29 20:04:31+00:00
idk have you ever been stuck on some AI chatbot?

some credit card companies have botched chatbot process: "lost/forged credit card report" / "talk-to-person" are essential support process, but they require you to enter your PIN to get thru that process

(if the request for a new credit-card is faked, you're out of luck)
by parsimo2010 | 2025-04-29 20:04:37+00:00
My comment from the previous post:

> I’m sure there are areas where the location guessing can be scary accurate, like the article managed to guess the exact town as its backup guess. But seeing the chain of thought, I’m confident there are many areas that it will be far less precise. Show it a picture of a trailer park somewhere in Kansas (exclude any signs with the trailer park name and location) and I’ll bet the model only manages to guess the state correctly.

This post, while not a big sample size, reflects how I would expect these models to perform. The model managed to be reliable with guessing the right country, even in pictures without a lot of visual information (I'll claim that getting the country correct in Europe is roughly equivalent to guessing the right state in the USA). It does sometimes manage to get the correct town, but this is not a reliable level of accuracy. The previous article only tested on one picture and it happened to get the correct town as its second guess and the author called it "scary accurate." I suppose that's a judgement call. To me, I've grown to expect that people can identify what country I'm in from a variety of things (IP address, my manner of speech, name, etc.), so I don't think that is "scary."

I will acknowledge that o3 with web search enabled seems capable of playing GeoGuessr at a high level, because that is less of a judgement call. What I want to see now is an o3 GeoGuessr bot to play many matches and see what its ELO is.
by bcoates | 2025-04-29 20:04:48+00:00
All heat that is lost must be replaced (we must input enough heat that the device returns to T_initial)

Hotter objects lose heat faster, so the longer we delay restoring temperature (for a fixed resume time) the less heat is lost that will need replacement.

Hotter objects require more energy to add another unit of heat, so the cooler we allow the device to get before re-heating (again, resume time is fixed) the more efficient our heating can be.

There is no countervailing effect to balance, preemptive heating of a device before the last possible moment is pure waste no matter the conditions (although the amount of waste will vary a lot, it will always be a positive number)

Even turning the heater off for a millisecond is a net gain.
by moomin | 2025-04-29 20:05:05+00:00
More, the speed of light puts a hard cap on how simultaneous you can be. Wolfram Alpha reckons New York to London is 19ms in a vacuum, more using fibre.

Going off on a tangent: Back in the days of Live Aid, they tried doing a transatlantic duet. Turns out it’s literally physically impossible because if A songs when they hear B, then B hears A at least 38ms too late, which is too much for the human body to handle and still make music.
by ChuckMcM | 2025-04-29 20:05:06+00:00
I sort of did this with ssh where I figured out how to crash an ssh client that was trying to guess the root password. What I got for my trouble was a number of script kiddies ddosing my poor little server. I switched to just identifying 'bad actors' who are clearly trying to do bad things and just banning their IP with firewall rules. That's becoming more challenging with IPV6 though.

Edit: And for folks who write their own web pages, you can always create zip bombs that are links on a web page that don't show up for humans (white text on white background with no highlight on hover/click anchors). Bots download those things to have a look (so do crawlers and AI scrapers)
by serial_dev | 2025-04-29 20:05:27+00:00
Others already linked the original vibe coding tweet https://x.com/karpathy/status/1886192184808149383

To me, vibe coding means you don't get bogged down by the code, you just say your requirements and complain about end result until it works.

Heavily using AI, in comparison could mean 1. ask for small code snippets, 2. ask it to explain concepts, 3. ask which APIs to use and how, 4. ask it to rephrase your strings, ..., but you still "care" about the code and understand what's going on.
by queenkjuul | 2025-04-29 20:05:38+00:00
My company puts the cookie banner everywhere and follows the "hiding the banner is not consent" pattern.

Not because we're required, but because that's how the off the shelf cookie banner thing we use works, and better safe than sorry should a European access our US marketing site, i suppose.

I always figured most of the popups would reject cookies if hidden, if for no other reason that everyone is too lazy to modify the default behavior (and the default behavior is designed for EU regulations)
by AIPedant | 2025-04-29 20:05:39+00:00
Beyond codegen, it seems to me that the resolution to this paradox is that ChatGPT is a very popular toy in peoples' home life, but a lot of those very same people are wise enough to not use it for enterprise applications. Or, if they foolishly trusted Satya Nadella, LLM-assisted work eventually blew up in their face and they stopped using it. So gen AI is quite popular, but badly falls short of tech's aspirations.

I hate generative AI and refuse to use it, but I hear of people using it all the time in low-stakes contexts:

1) recipes (the cookies might suck but they won't be poisonous)

2) low-quality infotainment (NotebookLM)

3) OpenAI proudly celebrating that horrible Studio Ghibli crap - unlike dishonest math benchmark scores, garish slop on demand actually brings in customers!

4) ChatGPT boyfriend scams :( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42710976

And I've also heard of people using it at work and being severely criticized:

1) ChatGPT-drafted license agreements that the executives would never agree to

2) summarizing documents you were too lazy to read and missing crucial context

3) coworkers being personally offended (or superiors being angry) about a ChatGPT email

Programmers and bottom-barrel creatives have the only reliable success with LLMs if there's real money at stake. Then there are notably but low-margin use cases like dyslexia assistance, Be My Eyes, etc. For everyone else, it's just a nifty doo-dad.
by caseyy | 2025-04-29 20:05:46+00:00
This comment is proudly and innovatively AI-first.

It was written with 10% higher expectations, 10% higher bar (it was raised in a transformative way) and 10% fewer sloppy thoughts, by a rockstar 100x commenter who uses enterprise AI to blast their KPIs through the pipeline each day.

Sometimes they even circle back to blast their pipeline several times in the same day, all thanks to AI.

Venture capital accepted by Venmo and Apple Cash. Past performance is not indicative of financial statements. GAAP statements may be disrupted and revolutionized at the sole discretion of the company. T’s and C’s apply.

Have wonderful AI day! :)
by joshstrange | 2025-04-29 20:05:57+00:00
It's kind of funny because I'm not 100% sure which one you are talking about. I assume it's the time, storage be damned. I agree that's probably what users will say but in that world (picking speed over storage) we will see this exact same article posted with a stronger focus on the app size (the post does make at least 1 mention of app size).
by ACS_Solver | 2025-04-29 20:05:59+00:00
I just tried (o4-mini-high) and had it come to the wrong conclusion when I asked about the location and date, because it didn't search the web. I have a photo of a bench with a sign mentioning the cancellation of an event due to the Pope's death. It impressively figured out the location but then decided that Pope Francis is alive and the sign is likely a prank, so the photo is from April Fools day.

Then after I explicitly instructed it to search the web to confirm whether the Pope is alive, it found news of his death and corrected its answer, but it was interesting to see how the LLM makes a mistake due to a major recent event being after its cutoff.
by DesiLurker | 2025-04-29 20:06:11+00:00
people will get stuck on 'good govt china..' but I get what you mean. moving on to core message. Indian courts are some of the dumbest, red-tape laden, corrupt entities out there. for westerners, its common for basic things like property disputes or even divorces to run for decades (yes -s plural). In India the legal process is itself a punishment. plus there is no consistency in case law or precedent. people often perjure themselves and walk around like its nothing. it really is free for all with Indian judiciary so I am not surprised at-all that they will do something stupid like this.
Ask HN: Good AI tool for UI mockups without code?
by ctxc | 2025-04-29 20:06:42+00:00
What tool have you found to be useful to generate screens/components for an app? Basically a UX design tool rather than a dev tool.

The problem with most code generation tools is that they're limited by their ability to provide working code. ie., there could be a great screen concept, but the visualisation doesn't reach me (the user) because it just isn't able to generate code for it.

What I want is for it to focus on the best UX design and just spit out images so I can then go about with development.
by thehappyfellow | 2025-04-29 20:07:28+00:00
Author here. I did not expect to see my post on HN!

It was a rant, I was venting, it’s not supposed to be an objective statement about the state of tech. It’s shouting into the void about the things I find unfair and unbearable, I don’t think it’s a great HN material.

I made up parts of the story because it didn’t happen to me and I didn’t want to share details of somebody else’s situation.
by johnnyanmac | 2025-04-29 20:07:33+00:00
If we ever got HSR I'm not saying the is unviable. People commuting from suburbs to downtown LA have a 60-79 minute commute, a commute they can't sleep or be productive through. That's no issue.

I'm just saying the hubs are completely incompatible in both culture and market. Bakersfield is an energy/agriculture hub and LA is an entertainment hub. The utility here isn't exactly efficient if people are traveling that far every day to work as a cashier. Probably wouldn't stimulate much in that regsrd

Likewise, there's not going to be a lot of people in LA who willingly want to go to Bakersfield if given an option. At worst they are forced there as another suburban option if the city prices them out.
by dangus | 2025-04-29 20:07:33+00:00
> It likely didn't have enough RAM for it to work. How is 2GB not enough to send a few numbers describing the payment through the network?

OP is using a potato with the same amount of RAM as a smartphone from 2012 and is complaining about performance issues.

You pay your rent. Send a check. Pay it when the call center is open and don’t wait until the last minute.

Don’t blame your phone or the technological progress of modern software.
by mrweasel | 2025-04-29 20:08:05+00:00
About once a year my bank full fills they legal obligations and asks me a bunch of questions, mostly revolving about my need for cash. One of the final questions is "Why do you need to withdraw cash?" There's a bunch of reasons listed, guesses of some lawyer or banker as to why a person might need cash, e.g. "give to my kids", "pay my friend back a loan" and then there is the "Other, please fill in the text box". That is the one I use, every time, because they do not expect my answer, even if they blood well should. Every time I answer: "Because I do not trust you to keep the payment system running 24/7/365, and again this year you have prove my scepticism correct".

We keep pushing for more and more digital, always online solutions, but I'm an SRE. I know that we can not have 100% uptime, not for anything. Yet more and more solutions are designed without that in mind. There are no backups. When the digital solution fail we are screwed, because the systems are designed backwards. The digital, online version is the add-on, not your only option.

I don't blame the developers. I blame business people, politicians and managers for releasing ill conceived systems who's flaws are obvious to any technical minded person. I blame developers for a host of different problems, mostly related to not being able to code.
by cormorant | 2025-04-29 20:08:15+00:00
Not quite. According to a quick search [1]: "Under California law, it's illegal for a landlord to require cash and/or electronic deposits as the sole methods to pay rent.1 Landlords must allow a tenant to pay rent using at least one of these other options as well: check, cashier's check, or money order."

When I lived in CA I had a landlord that demanded cashier's check. Do you know how annoying those are to get?

I could have also paid cash but then I'd take the risk that the cash, dropped in a mailbox, would "go missing".

[1] https://caretaker.com/learn/rent/rent-payment-laws-in-califo...
by dainesy | 2025-04-29 20:08:20+00:00
Different set up but same physics apply. I was called out to a cold forming press which basically was hammering an enormous load onto billets of steel to form panels for the automotive industry.

The problem on inspection: The drop press was producing inconsistent strikes, especially noticeable when working with thicker steel billets. The machine seemed to struggle during the initial drop phase, and there was an unusual amount of sparking observed near the motor’s commutator. This problem was consistent with poor commutator maintenance and misalignment or excessive vary to the variable angle brush set up.

Whilst the motor was spinning the commutator was cleaned, after shut down the brushes were replaced and adjustaded to the optimal position ensuring they’re neither advanced nor retarded. By correctly adjusting the brush angle, it restored the proper phase relationship between the armature current and the stator’s magnetic field. This adjustment improved torque production during the drop phase, reduced electrical arcing, and enhanced overall motor efficiency.

In brushed DC motors, the brush angle determines the timing of current delivery to the armature windings. An advanced brush angle means that current is supplied earlier in the rotation cycle, which can increase torque at higher speeds but may cause excessive current draw and heating at lower speeds.

Conversely, a retarded brush angle delays current delivery, potentially reducing torque and efficiency under load.
by SpaceManNabs | 2025-04-29 20:08:36+00:00
Why is it not a fair assessment to say it is comparing two "clients" with different resources if one can do a web lookup and the other cannot?

You note yourself that it was meaningful in another round.

> Also, the web search was only meaningful in the Austria round. It did use it in the Ireland round too, but as you can see by the search terms it used, it already knew the road solely from image recognition.
by slibhb | 2025-04-29 20:09:15+00:00
> Mainstream economists also widely agree corporate taxes and capital gains taxes are bad: https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2012/07/19/157047211/six-.... Should we eliminate those taxes and have everyone pay a large VAT?

You don't have to go all the way. Just experiment with a VAT and lowering corporate taxes.

> I don’t have confidence that economists have fully figured out how economies work or what the relevant trade offs are. Economics is somewhere between the social “sciences” and real science in terms of methodological reliability.

What economists have is better than vague feelings about the dignity of working in a factory as opposed to a service job.

> The whole point of government is so people can vote to override anti-social individual behavior like this.

Is that the point of the government? Not in the American tradition. Americans are remarkably invididualistic. If that's anti-social, well, the experiment has been running for a few hundred years and it's worked pretty well. I don't believe the past 20 years have been so bad that the US should start acting like a third world country.
by coder543 | 2025-04-29 20:09:33+00:00
ChatGPT is the number one free iPhone app on the US App Store, and I'm pretty sure it has been the number one app for a long time. I googled to see if I could find an App Store ranking chart over time... this one[0] shows that it has been in the top 2 on the US iPhone App Store every month for the past year, and it has been number one for 10 of the past 12 months. I also checked, and ChatGPT is still the number one app on the Google Play Store too.

Unless both the App Store and Google Play Store rankings are somehow determined primarily by HN users, then it seems like AI isn't only a thing on HN.

[0]: https://app.sensortower.com/overview/6448311069?tab=category...
by turboladen | 2025-04-29 20:09:35+00:00
Each to their own of course, and not arguing that the Ruby ecosystem is amazing (although I thought so in 2008), with Python’s eleventy different package managers, I wouldn’t call the ecosystem great. It’s one of the main reasons I get bummed out having to use the language. Sure there’s lots of work going on to improve that, but it’s still smattered all over the place.