MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by graflig | 2025-04-25 15:02:53+00:00
Ok these were hilarious. I asked about the most embarrassing thing, and here was the response:

"Alright, {my name}, here goes:

The most embarrassing thing I know about you is that one time you confidently ssh’d into your home server… only to realize 10 minutes later you were actually just pinging your smart toaster. And you still tried to run htop on it, wondering why it wasn’t responding. Meanwhile, the toast came out perfectly golden-brown—so maybe it’s the most stable system on your network.

Let me know if you want me to turn that into a limerick."

This obviously never happened, but it was funny to read.

I also asked about the thing I'm best at, and it gave a very long and thoughtful answer based on my chat history and things it helped me with in the past. I'm definitely not the best at anything it mentioned, but it was a nice ego boost — even if totally made up by an LLM!
by reissbaker | 2025-04-25 15:02:56+00:00
Even if you allocate from a pool on the heap, the pool will reside in a different part of the heap than the elements that you're inserting into the linked list, meaning you have worse cache locality.

You could have an API that is aware of T, and allocates both Node<T> and T together, ensuring cache locality for both. Congratulations! You have rediscovered intrusive linked lists.
by sidkshatriya | 2025-04-25 15:03:02+00:00
Would you rather have a HFT trade go correctly and a few nanoseconds slower or a few nanoseconds faster but with some edge case bugs related to variable initialisation ?

You might claim that that you can have both but bugs are more inevitable in the uninitialised by default scenario. I doubt that variable initialisation is the thing that would slow down HFT. I would posit is it things like network latency that would dominate.
by ratedgene | 2025-04-25 15:03:26+00:00
It's a bit of both, in any technological shift, a particular set of skills simply becomes less relevant. Other skills are needed to be developed as the role shifts.

If we're talking about simply cutting costs, sure -- but those savings will typically be reinvested in more talent at a growing company. Then the bottleneck is how to scale managing all of it.
by prophesi | 2025-04-25 15:04:35+00:00
Some of the books that have stuck with me for the longest are the ones I listened to during the years I had a grueling 45+ minute commute. The only downside I've found is that it's a lot harder to find and reference passages you've found of interest. Otherwise I think it's a perfectly valid method of ingesting information. If you listen while doing something that really should require your undivided attention, then I'd agree that it falls short to reading the text.

They also state up front that they listened to the audiobook, so I'm not sure how much value there'd be in defining a term to differentiate reading versus listening to a book.
by Null-Set | 2025-04-25 15:04:38+00:00
This looks like it was caused by this update https://developers.cloudflare.com/waf/change-log/2025-04-22/ rule 100741.

It references this CVE https://github.com/tuo4n8/CVE-2023-22047 which allows the reading of system files. The example given shows them reading /etc/passwd
by smeej | 2025-04-25 15:04:39+00:00
It took me a second to realize "has the answer E" meant "as the answer" not "as an option," but I think that's a glitch in my brain, not the puzzle.

I did accidentally pull down too hard on my screen when I was trying to scroll up, which accidentally refreshed and deleted all my answers on all difficulties, not even just the one I was working on/hadn't solved yet, so that's less than ideal. I almost had level 4 done, but no way I wanted to go back and redo it all!

I'd also love an "answer lock" button, and/or floating undo/redo buttons, because sometimes to take the next step, I need to put in an answer and game out how the rest of the puzzle comes together with that answer, and it would help to be able to undo back to that point, not just try to count my steps and keep scrolling down to the undo button for more of them. I'm not likely to get out a piece of paper or pop open a notepad app to game it out that way.
by bjornstar | 2025-04-25 15:05:06+00:00
List 5 famous goblins with proper names, for each provide a quote either from them or about them.

Half the time they say Jareth from Labyrinth, The Great Goblin from The Hobbit, or the Green Goblin from Spiderman. Sometimes they answer Dobby the house elf from Harry Potter.

They also confabulate goblins out of thin air and create made up quotes. When pressed for links to support their answers they admit they made them up.

I'm happy when they include goblins from Magic the Gathering, World of Warcraft, or Warhammer. Occasionally you'll get a good answer like Blix from Legend, but more often than not if it's a goblin you don't recognize, they made it up.
by 68463645 | 2025-04-25 15:05:28+00:00
> LLM changed nothing though. It's just boosting people's intention. If your intention is to learn, you are in luck! It's never been easier to teach yourself some skill for free.

I wouldn't be so sure. Search engine quality has degraded significantly since the advent of LLMs. I've seen the first page of Google entirely taken up by AI slop when searching for some questions.
by mathgradthrow | 2025-04-25 15:05:35+00:00
Despite this being very obviously true to any mathematician or computer scientist, this idea is incredibly controversial among linguists and "educators".

The linguistic analogue, (although the exact example of notation does solidly fit into the domain of linguistics) is the so called sapir-whorf hypothesis, which asserts that what language you learn determines how you think.

Because natural languages are cultural objects, and mapping cultures into even a weak partial order (like how a person thinks) is simply verboten in academia.

This has profound consequences in education too, where students are disallowed from learning notation that would allow them to genuinely reason about the problems that they encounter. I admit to not understanding this one.
by singron | 2025-04-25 15:06:10+00:00
Check out the parallel consumer: https://github.com/confluentinc/parallel-consumer

It processes unrelated keys in parallel within a partition. It has to track what offsets have been processed between the last committed offset of the partition and the tip (i.e. only what's currently processed out of order). When it commits, it saves this state in the commit metadata highly compressed.

Most of the time, it was only processing a small number of records out of order so this bookkeeping was insignificant, but if one key gets stuck, it would scale to at least 100,000 offsets ahead, at which point enough alarms would go off that we would do something. That's definitely a huge improvement to head of line blocking.
Show HN: Dia-Jax – A Jax port of the Dia text-to-speech dialogue model
by jaco-bro | 2025-04-25 15:06:11+00:00
I've created a JAX port of Dia, the 1.6B parameter text-to-speech model that generates realistic dialogue from transcripts. This experimental port explores running Dia with JAX's functional paradigm and hardware flexibility potential.

Key features: - Command-line interface for generating audio - Support for multi-speaker dialogue with [S1]/[S2] tags - Non-verbal sounds like (laughs), (coughs), etc. - Plans for voice cloning capability

Current status: Functional but with memory optimization challenges. The PyTorch version can generate minutes of audio in <10GB VRAM, while this port currently has higher memory usage. Contributions from JAX optimization experts welcome!

GitHub: [https://github.com/jaco-bro/diajax]
by apognwsi | 2025-04-25 15:06:38+00:00
that's not right. if photons were truly spin 1, there would be 3 spin eigenstates available, but in fact there are only 2 (Sz=0 is unavailable). the pithy argument invokes the absence of a stationary frame of reference. for all practical purposes, photons are behave like spin 1/2 particles (despite being bosons). see, for example, the jones algebra / calculus.
by ChrisMarshallNY | 2025-04-25 15:06:53+00:00
> And it says a lot about the company culture that I never felt I was risking being fired.

Yes. I feel that insecure upper managers are a pox on the tech industry (probably other industries, as well). They create a really toxic culture.

I used to work for a Japanese company. My manager didn't speak English, and was 7,000 miles away, but was willing to listen to me. However, I had to deal with the way my interaction developed. Sometimes, the Japanese can be quite ... strident ... when they feel as if they are not being approached with respect.

They had a consensus-based style, which welcomed input from all levels, but would also be pretty brutal, to bad input.

Helped me to develop a habit of making sure all my ducks were in a row, before opening my mouth.
by haswell | 2025-04-25 15:07:01+00:00
I agree with this comment. If I’d started from a position where I had a better relationship with work, maybe the whiplash wouldn’t have been so severe and I could have transitioned to something better before getting stuck.

My worry is that so many people around me - from all walks of life and across a wide range of pay scales - have a similarly unhealthy relationship with their work and would experience the same whiplash.

My deeper worry is that the rate of technological progress is far outpacing any efforts to implement a less toxic economy and culture, and that such changes to economy and culture must necessarily be gradual to avoid massive societal upheaval and chaos.

Ultimately I want to work on big world-impacting problems whether I’m getting paid for it or not. I know this is possible, but spent most of my early life training for the toxic work culture that burned me out.

I think we need off-ramps and on-ramps, not cliff dives.
by RobKohr | 2025-04-25 15:07:35+00:00
Probably some super fuzzy thesaurus that will take your words, and create a weighted list of words that are similar to them and so some search matching going down the weighted lists.

Maybe also, they take those queries that needed lots of fuzziness to get to the answer, and track what people click to relate the fuzzy searches to actual results. Keep in mind, what you might think is a super unique "tip of tongue" question, across billions of searches, might not be that unique.

Building a search system to find things can be much more optimized than making an AI to return an answer, especially when you have humans in the loop that can tweak things based on analytics data.
by HenryAllen | 2025-04-25 15:07:38+00:00
Yes, this happens way more often than you think these AI cold callers work at scale and can go through a lead list at 100x the speed of a normal team. But they are being put together often by non-technical lowcode devs in ways which often leave exploits open.

Now I don't think it is a problem for these SMB's but for larger corporates looking to leverage this technology, the industry needs to have more heuristics / evals in place to measure deceptiveness and again how well it sticks to its system prompt lol!

In regards to the FTC, theres policy coming all the time. But it's still so fresh honestly its probably got to go viral with the general public before people start caring enough to enforce policy like that. I also imagined if you went to small claims court it would of been a weird experience due to the nature of the subject and lack of similar cases to look at?
by IAmBroom | 2025-04-25 15:07:38+00:00
You are wildly incorrect.

The largest deer population in the 50 US states is in Pennsylvania, home of the Appalachian forests. If I wanted to hunt deer, I could easily live off venison. Shooting them is only tricky during legal hunting season, when they quickly become very wary.

There's 12-20 that live within a mile of me. My dogs and I regularly surprise them sleeping, and I live within 10 minutes of the heart of a large US city.
by sickofparadox | 2025-04-25 15:07:45+00:00
The inflection point for the extreme rise in costs of US higher education is the Federal government making it so that students can take out loans that are not dischargeable through bankruptcy. This is a massive subsidy to the entire education system because students will always be able to find someone to loan them more money, because they HAVE to pay it back. Cutting the tap off by removing this exemption would likely see a lot of belt tightening and tuition reduction in the world of higher ed.
by npteljes | 2025-04-25 15:08:38+00:00
I'm at that tired stage right now as well. The way I read the title: "Company did company thing". Absolutely no surprise. The question is always a when, and similarly, I don't expect this current thing to last forever either: maybe they rethink their decision.

Also, very often, the feelings don't correspond to the reality or the aftermath of the decision-making at all. For example, X seems to be hugely upsetting, but life generally moves on, and people are not that touched actually, as much as they protest to the opposite. This happens pro and contra issues as well; for example, people might hate Windows' latest X bullshit, but they won't change their OS in the end, or, pro example, people might feel like that stand by local production, but they won't actually buy local, because it costs more.

What we are very blind to are problems that don't have immediate negative feedback. Comfort and security are huge motivators, especially when people have to let go of them. PR and propaganda (same thing really) uses this, among others, very effectively.
by hombre_fatal | 2025-04-25 15:09:18+00:00
I would have expected an API like:

let imageId = api.generateImage(prompt) let {url, isFinished} = api.imageInfo(id)

But instead it's:

let bytes = api.generateImage(prompt)

It's interesting to me how AI APIs let you hold such a persistent, active connection. I'm so used to anything that takes more than a second becoming an async background process where you notify the recipient when it's ready.

With Netflix, it makes sense that you can open a connection to some static content and receive gigabytes over it.

But streaming tokens from a GPU is a much more active process. Especially in this case where you're waiting tens of seconds for an image to generate.
by genjo | 2025-04-25 15:09:28+00:00
> Which is really bad compared to both the market expectations, the pre-orders, Musk's expectations

Hopes and expectations, black holes and revelations (-Muse). Another take: The stock price is still on the uptake, which leads me to believe that the expectations, projections and Musk's personal comments were merely, as they so often are, for the broader public.

The data you linked to shows a long term trend upwards, which, as a lot of people would expect, isn't going to continue because the competition has not only caught up and outpaced Tesla in many ways but the market for EV's diversified and now serves many more tastes than before.

Tesla was a bit "Vanilla" and their Banana Split 'Cybertruck' is a pretty cool addition that will always stand out and be a pretty investment for fanboys of "the man who's gonna bring us to Mars, what did you do?", as a commenter on reddit put it once (I'm probably paraphrasing).

Musk owns 13% of all Tesla shares, and no other investor owns entire chunks so the amount of shareholders is pretty damn high, with lots of people who are not in tech or big on investments in general, which makes a continued rise of the stock price despite missing "market expectations" quite a bit more interesting.

People understand that Tesla became a company that will deliver even in uncertain times. And their Gigafactories and the entire tech approach behind it, as much marketing hype as it was, is crazy competent.

They have a different tech approach to Waymo and their software needs a lot more honing than Google's little moonwalker, who probably had early access to the Ingress and Pokemon Go Dataset and have a shitload of time series data on where pedestrians and dirty scooter drivers are more likely to be expected, and who are thus 'safer' than other self-driving systems and even humans.

Even if Tesla won't spice up their line up, AI, especially GenAI will give a not-yet-liquid-enough Vanilla target group the financial means to buy into the green revolution with what is still, despite the hate, a status symbol of people who are not poor anymore but more importantly, who are progressive.

And as soon as their tech stack 'can see properly', and we know that will happen, they will make headlines, get good PR and get back right to the edge of all the expectations, don't you think? It's just a matter of time.

I was never a fan of tech demos and never believed a CEOs audience who claps like it's going to make good money from all that marketing hype no matter how shitty the sales are going to be or how scripted the demo actually was, revealed by thousands of bloggers and vloggers and traditional journalists, all of which drives exposure and peeks the interest of newcomers and long time lurkers who due to long enough exposure, suddenly start to like and wield the techy and marketing lingo.
by krferriter | 2025-04-25 15:09:53+00:00
I don't get why you'd have SQL injection filtering of input fields at the CDN level. Or any validation of input fields aside from length or maybe some simple type validation (number, date, etc). Your backend should be able to handle arbitrary byte content in input fields. Your backend shouldn't be vulnerable to SQL injection if not for a CDN layer that's doing pre-filtering.
by jcranmer | 2025-04-25 15:10:12+00:00
Footnote 107 in C23, on page 75 in §6.5.2.3:

> If the member used to read the contents of a union object is not the same as the member last used to store a value in the object the appropriate part of the object representation of the value is reinterpreted as an object representation in the new type as described in 6.2.6 (a process sometimes called type punning). This might be a non-value representation.

(though this footnote has been present as far back as C99, albeit with different numbers as the standard has added more text in the intervening 24 years).
by vunderba | 2025-04-25 15:10:19+00:00
> It feels socially safe, easy, and destructive to be a critic. I'd rather be a fan.

Trotting out absolute statements does no one any good. I could just as easily spin this on its head and say that it feels socially safe to always show blind enthusiasm for the latest trend lest you be labelled a "hater".

It feels like we're just redefining critic to be synonymous with cynic. There's no reason that you can't simultaneously be both fan and a critic of X.
by azinman2 | 2025-04-25 15:10:40+00:00
You have to start somewhere. Even a not great solution can set the president, with goals to gradually increase the efficiency. Mandates can do a lot — just look at the catalytic converter. Put it on all HVAC systems and _something_ will happen even if a small effect given the HVAC itself is contributing way more CO2.

We need all across the board solutions, and if you start requiring small scrubbers to function that can start to provide scale effects that can translate for bigger systems.
by reaperducer | 2025-04-25 15:10:59+00:00
the CIO is securing his job.

Every CIO I have worked for (where n=3) has gotten where they are because they're a good manager, even though they have near-zero current technical knowledge.

The fetishizing of "business," in part through MBAs, has been detrimental to actually getting things done.

A century ago, if someone asked you what you do and you replied, "I'm a businessman. I have a degree in business," you'd get a response somewhere between "Yeah, but what to you actually do" and outright laughter.
by stevenAthompson | 2025-04-25 15:11:20+00:00
Thanks for sharing that.

The section on conspiracy thinking was interesting to me. I've been trying to understand the ever increasing amount of it in our society, and my thoughts keep going back to the rise in marijuana legalization. I can't help but feel that there is a link.

Like ketamine, other psychedelics can trigger mild psychosis and with it conspiratorial thinking, grandiosity, and all of the other symptoms described here.

The rise in legalization seems, anecdotally, to match the "normalization" of tin-foil hat thinking in society. Years ago Dan Quayle was essentially disqualified from office for misspelling potato, now Marjorie Taylor Greene publicly decries the Jewish Space Lasers and nobody blinks. I feel like there has to be more to societies changes over the last ~25 years than "the internet".
by ActivePattern | 2025-04-25 15:11:39+00:00
I am quite confident that an LLM will never beat a top chess engine like Stockfish. An LLM is a generalist -- it contains a lot of world knowledge, and nearly all of it is completely irrelevant to chess. Stockfish is a specialist tuned specifically to chess, and hence able to spend its FLOPs much more efficiently towards finding the best move.

The most promising approach would be tune a reasoning LLM on chess via reinforcement learning, but fundamentally, the way an LLM reasons (i.e. outputting a stream of language tokens) is so much more inefficient than the way a chess engine reasons (direct search of the game tree).
by dingnuts | 2025-04-25 15:11:41+00:00
I disagree, I played a lot of Elite: Dangerous with a VR headset and while I completely agree about the scale, it was so much hassle to get in and out of the goggles and get everything set up and then to be totally cut off from the real world for any extended period that I stopped using it.

It's been in the closet for a few years. Beat Saber is fun too, but.. I guess if you're the kind of person who has a sim setup in a dedicated room in your house it's still appealing but for anyone remotely casual it's just not worth it
by haswell | 2025-04-25 15:11:42+00:00
I do think people will learn/adapt. I’m in the middle of that now. The question/concern is more about what happens during that learning process, and whether or not society has structures in place to facilitate it at scale.

e.g. my journey involved quite a bit of professional psychological help, and I feel lucky that I found good care given the shortage of good care in this category.
by swiftcoder | 2025-04-25 15:12:01+00:00
Not just economics, audit processes also really encourage adopting large rulesets wholesale.

We're SOC2 + HIPAA compliant, which either means convincing the auditor that our in-house security rules cover 100% of the cases they care about... or we buy an off-the-shelf WAF that has already completed the compliance process, and call it a day. The CTO is going to pick the second option every time.
by bombcar | 2025-04-25 15:12:10+00:00
They're referring to "anti fans". You see it with online personalities especially; the most rabid fans (often parasocial, think online streaming) are the ones who will become the biggest detractors or anti fans.

Most people are "oh that's fun to watch ok" and then when they don't like it anymore, they get bored and forget about it entirely.

The anti-fans continue to follow it, but rabidly hate it.

Think Syndrome from Incredibles. He's always been the biggest fan.
by Workaccount2 | 2025-04-25 15:12:18+00:00
I felt this way until 3.7 and then 2.5 came out, and O3 now too. Those models are clear step-ups from the models of mid-late 2024 when all the talk of stalling was coming out.

None of this includes hardware optimizations either, which lags software advances by years.

We need 2-3 years of plateauing to really say intelligence growth is exhausted, we have just been so inundated with rapid advance that small gaps seem like the party ending.