MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by fc417fc802 | 2025-04-29 11:02:03+00:00
> run a shader over them, and ignore the values you don't want to operate on

Use a compute shader. Run only as many invocations as you care about. Use explicit indexing in the shader to fetch and store.

Obviously that doesn't make sense if you're targeting 90% of the slots in the array. But if you're only targeting 10% or if the offsets aren't a monotonic sequence it will probably be more efficient - and it involves explicit indexing.
by zero_k | 2025-04-29 11:02:22+00:00
Yes. Exactly. If you make it readable and understandable, somehow the reviewers think it's easy. NO! It's easy because I made it easy for you to understand, and that's a good thing! If you invented BDDs or Petri Nets today, and didn't explain it over 5 pages of unreadable Greek alphabet, it'd be rejected. It's hilarious and really sad. Both are extremely useful, and intuitively "easy" tools. But they are so incredibly good and useful.
by whstl | 2025-04-29 11:02:53+00:00
I agree with you.

For me Rust was amazing for writing things like concurrency code. But it slowed me down significantly in tasks I would do in, say, C# or even C++. It feels like the perfect language for game engines, compilers, low-level libraries... but I wasn't too happy writing more complex game code in it using Bevy.

And you make a good point, it's the same for OOP, which is amazing for e.g. writing plugins but when shoehorned into things it's not good at, it also kills my joy.
by arghwhat | 2025-04-29 11:03:04+00:00
No, private tutors are definitely better but they are no silver bullet. Having a great private tutors often and long enough to exercise sporadic conversation and gain confidence in language use - a class a few times a week at least - is also a prohibitively expensive solution suggestion for most people, making it a non-solution.

You also end in a false dichotomy.
by nuthje | 2025-04-29 11:03:52+00:00
This stuff is panel-tested out of the wazoo. There's a reason bitterness, hoppiness, alcohol levels, differ market by market, even on brands of the same brand/line extension.

Beer also does not require refrigeration throughout the entire supply chain, they happily sit in a warm warehouse waiting to be picked up by an unrefrigerated truck, only to be cooled at the outlet or consumer.
by bigbacaloa | 2025-04-29 11:03:53+00:00
I did not see much fear. I was at work and it took about two hours for us to realize the outage was not just local. The cafeteria had gas burners and served everything they could to empty the refrigerators. We all at lunch and discussed whether those who lived far away (train trip) would need to sleep at work (they might have, I don't know what happened to them). I made the relatively short 75 minute walk home across the city.

The atmosphere was quasi-festive and most people were quite relaxed, enjoying an unexpected afternoon off. Younger people filled the bars which were serving everything they could. There were long lines at supermarkets and an occasional fellow toting a box of supplies, but mostly there were just huge numbers of people in the street and completely collapsed traffic flow (the police were out in force almost immediately, directing traffic). In the part of Madrid I was in about 1/4-1/3 of the population is from South America and I suspect most of them have seen this all before anyway. The only real stress I saw was from people that need a train to get home (because the trains weren't running) and a had a walk of more than 2-3 hours.

I got cell phone signal when I was near two hospitals which were fully operational.

It was interesting that almost immediately, while I was still at work, everyone said power was out in Portugal and France too. After an hour or two some were claiming problems in Germany, but this seemed already to be unfounded rumors.

Some younger people couldn't walk home because they didn't have google maps ...
by immibis | 2025-04-29 11:04:10+00:00
Solar inverters could simulate inertia by not running at 100% most of the time, but you do want the free energy machines to run at 100% as much as they physically can, because it's free energy, which means there's no buffer for simulating inertia. It's been commented many times that batteries can be used to simulate inertia. You can also literally just add inertia, in heavy spinning lumps of metal that don't do anything.
by ghusto | 2025-04-29 11:05:11+00:00
On a related note, can we as a community start tarnishing Microsoft et al. for e-mail? Blog posts, about pages, documentation, anything and everything where it's appropriate, we should be stating it as a fact that Microsoft's e-mail solutions are sub-par. Off the top of my head;

"Please bear in mind that if you are using a non-standards compliant e-mail service provider such as Microsoft, e-mail delivery may be effected"

I wasn't even sure if the standard specified what to do with undeliverables, but it turns out that RFC 5321, RFC 3461, and RFC 3464 do. TIL :)
by disgruntledphd2 | 2025-04-29 11:05:58+00:00
> Approximately no one gave a flying fuck about “AI” at anything close to this scale and level of funding and hype before ChatGPT was released in Nov 2022.

I think that google image search is a really good example of useful results from the overall AI boom.

I do remember talking to someone in 2016 about the possibility of an AI winter if the image stuff didn't work out, so clearly I'm not the right person to talk to about that.
by thatjoeoverthr | 2025-04-29 11:06:01+00:00
My primary worry since the start has been not that it would "replace workers", but that it can destroy value of entire sectors. Think of resume-sending. Once both sides are automated, the practice is actually superfluous. The concept of "posting" and "applying" to jobs has to go. So any infrastructure supporting it has to go. At no point did it successfully "do a job", but the injury to the signal to noise ratio wipes out the economic value a system.

This is what happened to Google Search. It, like cable news, does kinda plod along because some dwindling fraction of the audience still doesn't "get it", but decline is decline.
by mrweasel | 2025-04-29 11:06:17+00:00
> engineers conducting maintenance work mistakenly deleted critical storage connected to a key database

I'd say poor process management. Why is an engineer even deleting critical storage (I take that to mean that they are deleting something of a file-system). Perhaps they where dropping a database, but you wouldn't do it like that in a critical environment. You'd disable the database access first, and then after some time, weeks, you'd drop the database, after doing a final backup.

It could also be disconnecting a SAN, deleting a storage pool, something like that, but your process should say: Check of read activity, off-line the storage, anything non-destructive, and the only later, once you've verified that everything runs without this resource, do you delete.

At previous jobs I've worked with healthcare system. You have processes, you follow those proesses to the letter and you never delete anything as your first step. Deleting is almost always done by going into read-only mode and ageing out the data.

The fact that recovery time is four days tells me that no one followed a single procedure. Because there should be a written step by step plan, including recovery and risk assessment and when the change manager sees: "Recovery time five days" they will ask questions and stop you.

This is probably the only answer less sexy than technical debt.
by eadmund | 2025-04-29 11:06:41+00:00
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisbon_Strategy

Oh, that page is darkly funny itself. ‘[The Lisbon Strategy’s] aim was to make the EU “the most competitive and dynamic knowledge-based economy in the world capable of sustainable economic growth with more and better jobs and greater social cohesion,” by 2010.’ Yeah, that didn’t happen.

‘Spain's prime minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero pointed out that the non-binding character of the Lisbon Strategy contributed to the failure.’ Typical bureaucratic response: freedom is the problem.

There is definitely a role for government in fostering innovation and productivity, but it is very much a secondary role. Providing a predictable, stable, safe environment, and using government funds for things that the government actually needs to use seems to have worked for the U.S. for a long time, even before the two world wars.
by nicgrev103 | 2025-04-29 11:07:52+00:00
Awesome site. You've probably come across it, but just in case you haven't. In the UK we have trolley.co.uk (plus app) which is handy. The barcode scanner I use a lot when I want to check if the branded product is a good price in the shop i'm standing in or if i'm getting ripped off. They have all products (I assume because online grocery shopping is bigger here?). Personally, I'm looking to start online shopping (new dad so time poor), it'd be great if I could build a shopping list and a site tell me which online grocer to order from for the best value, with basket price breakdown for each.
by jofzar | 2025-04-29 11:08:36+00:00
Not replacing jobs yet.

Seen a whole lot of gen AI deflecting customer questions which would have been previously tickets. That is a reduced ticket volume that would have been taken by a junior support engineer.

We are a couple of years away from the death of the level 1 support engineer. I can't even imagine what's going to happen to the level 0 IT support.
by jpc0 | 2025-04-29 11:09:08+00:00
Where is the lack of showing courtesy?

I asked a question in response to them asking me to download and use their app. Have we reached a point in this world where simply asking a question is offensive? They had every right to choose not to respond just like I can choose not to use their app if they don’t. How you respond is your choice, if you chose to take offence to a question about the long term sustainability of a project that’s on you, for me I don’t want to use software that has no intention of existing long term. If we have different values that’s fine, I don’t care.
by stephen_g | 2025-04-29 11:09:34+00:00
I'd say a little harder to negligible now, but potentially way easier in the future.

The main difficulty is that the software of grid-following inverters tend to make them trip out very suddenly if the grid parameters get too far out of spec (they will only follow the grid so far), but once the grid is good they basically instantly synchronise.

But all large solar farms are likely to be mandated to switch from grid following to grid forming inverters eventually which will make them beneficial for grid security because they will help provide 'virtual intertia' that looks exactly the same to the rest of the grid as spinning mass does.
by urbantrout | 2025-04-29 11:09:59+00:00
I just went with a Tonie Box and hacked it with the help of [teddycloud](https://github.com/toniebox-reverse-engineering/teddycloud/)

So there is no more need to buy expensive Tonie figurines. Instead I can use cheap RFID chips and pair them with any content.

This project is very impressive though!
by sph | 2025-04-29 11:10:07+00:00
I have survived until today using the shibboleth "let me speak to a human" [1] The day this doesn't work any more, is the day I stop paying for that service. We should make a list of companies that still have actual customer service.

1: https://xkcd.com/806/ - from an era when the worst that could happen was having to speak with incompetent, but still human, tech support.
by andriesm | 2025-04-29 11:10:10+00:00
Many like to say that LLM's cannot do ANY reasoning or "theory building".

However, is it really true that LLM's cannot reason AT ALL or cannot do theory construction AT ALL?

Maybe they are just pretty bad at it. Say 2 out 10. But almost certainly not 0 out of 10.

They used to be at 0, and now they're at 2.

Systematically breaking down problems and Systematically reasononing through parts, as we can see with chain-of-thought hints that further improvements may come.

What most people however now agree is that LLMs can learn and apply existing theories.

So if you teach an LLM enough theories iy can still be VERY useful and solve many coding problems, because an LLM can memorise more theories than any human can. Big chunks of computer software still keeps reinventing wheels.

The other objection from the article, that without theory building an AI cannot make additions or changes to a large code base very effectively - this suggests an idea to try - before promting the AI for a change on a large code base, prepend it with a big description of the entire program, the main ideas and how they map yo certain files, classes, modules etc, and see if this doesn't improve your results?

And in case you are concerned that. documenting and typing out entire system theories for every new prompt, keep in mind that this is something you can write once and keep reusing (and adding to over time incrementally).

Of course context limits may still be a constraint.

Of course I am not saying "definitely AI will make all human programmers jobless".

I'm merely saying, these things are already a massive productivity boost, if used correctly.

I've been programming for 30 years, started using cursor last year, and you would need to fight me to take it away from me.

I'm happy to press ESC to cancel all the bad code suggestions, to still have all thr good tab-completes, prompts, better than stack-overflow question answering etc.
by dbbk | 2025-04-29 11:10:29+00:00
They even explicitly admit to this. In the recent Decoder podcast the CEO said they will always choose engagement and gamification over teaching you the 'best' way.

Which is not a terrible strategy. Most people learning languages are doing it for fun or a new years resolution or whatever. If you're serious about learning a language for real (ie you've moved country) then of course you're gonna go to a more serious platform.
by mg | 2025-04-29 11:11:31+00:00
One thing nobody seems to discuss is:

In the future, we will do a lot more.

In other terms: There will be a lot more work. So even if robots do 80% of it, if we do 10x more - the amount of work we need humans to do will double.

We will write more software, build more houses, build more cars, planes and everything down the supply chain to make these things.

When you look at planet earth, it is basically empty. While rent in big cities is high. But nobody needs to sleep in a big city. We just do so because getting in and out of it is cumbersome and building houses outside the city is expensive.

When robots build those houses and drive us into town in the morning (while we work in the car) that will change. I have done a few calculations, how much more mobility we could achieve with the existing road infrastructure if we use electric autonomous buses, and it is staggering.

Another way to look at it: Currently, most matter of planet earth has not been transformed to infrastructure used by humans. As work becomes cheaper, more and more of it will. There is almost infinitely much to do.
by joaopbnogueira | 2025-04-29 11:15:40+00:00
Well, it works fine for every single recipient unless it's a Microsoft one.

If the recipient is using a personal microsoft / outlook / hotmail account the email gets delivered with a spam score of 9.

If the recipient is a MS 365 account, blackhole it is.

We even set up our own MS 365 to prove this.
by zyklu5 | 2025-04-29 11:15:52+00:00
Indeed. In fact, it is one of the most amusing aspect of the anglophone west (at least for the last few decades). Despite public perception (by public I mean those who have been to university since the 90s), Western historians of science and mathematics in general have never not acknowledged the previous works of the Persianate civilizations commensurate to their knowledge of them in their time. But somehow in the last few decades professional historians have had to waste time figuratively looking over their shoulders lest they be percieved as being Eurocentric. And, if they were to somehow find a way to show -- requiring whatever hermeneutical gymnastics -- that a prominent scientist was influenced (or even better, had stolen) from some other "cultures" than nothing better! (ex: Copernicus from the Maragha school as an example of interpretive gymnastics)

But, of course, this is one of the symptoms of the degeneration that now afflicts your particular civilization and is bringing about it's inevitable transformation to something else -- but better this than the fate of the Abassids or the Sung.
by disgruntledphd2 | 2025-04-29 11:16:07+00:00
Honestly, it's the training costs that will kill them. AFAIK, training costs have not come down anywhere near as much as inference costs.

And the models don't last long. So you have a rapidly depreciating capital asset that you need to provide your services, not really a recipe for a sustainable business (certainly not with the fat software margins tech companies are used to).
by hombre_fatal | 2025-04-29 11:16:39+00:00
Man, they seems kinda cracked. He migrated each of the subsystem experiments in about one day each having never used Unity before?

I've ported code between engines, and that makes my productivity feel very... leisurely.

Also, it's endearing that he builds things with his brother including that TF2 map that he linked from years ago.
by AlienRobot | 2025-04-29 11:17:19+00:00
I had someone argue that Wordpress had terrible security.

The only CVE's it had for 2 years only happened if you allowed random users to sign up.

There is a firewall plugin and basically the only thing it does is check if you have outdated plugins and log all the times a bot tried to log in by going posting user:admin password:admin to /wp-login.php. It's rare but a few of them tried my domain name as username instead. It sends me e-mails about new vulnerabilities found, and it's always some plugin. Sure, some of them are "installed" in thousands or millions of websites, but it's never anything in the Wordpress core itself.

If you hide /wp-login.php and avoid dependencies, it's practically impenetrable since it has to be the most battle-tested CMS out in the wild, and yet people swear it's Swiss cheese of security holes.
by fhd2 | 2025-04-29 11:17:20+00:00
That's probably true as long as the workers generally cooperate.

But there's also adversarial situations. Hiring would be one example: Companies use automated CV triaging tools that make it harder to get through to a human, and candidates auto generate CVs and cover letters and even auto apply to increase their chance to get to a human. Everybody would probably be better off if neither side attempted to automate. Yet for the individuals involved, it saves them time, so they do it.
by piva00 | 2025-04-29 11:18:26+00:00
I was discussing with a colleague the past months, my view on how and why all these AI tools are being shoved down our throats (just look at Google's Gemini push into all enterprise tools, it's like Google+ for B2B) before there are clear cut use-cases you can point to and say "yes, this would have been much harder to do without LLM/AI" is because... Training data is the most valuable asset, all these tools are just data collection machines with some bonus features that make them look somewhat useful.

I'm not saying that I think LLMs are useless, far from it, I use them when I think it's a good fit for the research I'm doing, the code I need to generate, etc., but the way it's being pushed from a marketing perspective tells me that companies making these tools need people to use them to create a data moat.

Extremely annoying to be getting these pop-ups to "use our incredible Intelligence™" at every turn, it's grating on me so much that I've actively started to use them less, and try to disable every new "Intelligence™" feature that shows up in a tool I use.
by 6510 | 2025-04-29 11:19:13+00:00
It was on fox news but I think he really said those things.

https://www.foxnews.com/media/ex-facebook-honcho-says-big-te...

> Encourage online tribalism that exacerbates the societal division....creating exploitative products that drive conflict over conversation, division over unity, and misinformation over truth

Highest engagement and ragebait are apparently the same thing.
by sgarland | 2025-04-29 11:19:14+00:00
I’m not saying it’s not an undertaking if you’ve never done it, but there are plenty of tools for MySQL and Postgres (I assume others as well) to do zero-downtime online schema changes like that. If you’ve backed yourself into a corner by also nearly running out of disk space, then yes, you’ll have a large headache on your hands.

Also, protip for anyone using MySQL, you should take advantage of its UNSIGNED INT types. 2^32-1 is quite a bit; it’s also very handy for smaller lookup tables where you need a bit more than 2^7 (TINYINT).

> but it's also a bad assumption that one user row perfectly corresponds to one registered user. Assumptions like that can and do change.

There can be dupes and the like, yes, but if at some point the Customer table morphed into a Customer+CustomerAttribute table, for example, I’d argue you have a data modeling problem.
by ManBeardPc | 2025-04-29 11:19:29+00:00
I made a similar experience. The database just stopped working one day, triggered by a normal restart without any updates or patches. Fixed the configuration, tested it, restarted multiple times, everything works. After a week it was not working again, without me being able to fix it except doing a fresh reinstall on a clean VM.

Luckily more and more customers switched to Postgres and I no longer have to deal with it.
by tenthirtyam | 2025-04-29 11:19:46+00:00
I've always wondered why we can't just have a "master" power station transmit a 50Hz signal modulated at, say, 50MHz. Then all the other station simply sync to that, including small scale such as domestic PV etc.

Then depending on how out-of-sync a given station is with the signal, they ramp production up or down accordingly.

Is the problem here that there is inadequate or slow feedback to the supply side regarding load and therefore you'd end up with under-voltage?
by bawana | 2025-04-29 11:19:53+00:00
How much of this account is realistic? If this is the writing of an educated young person. Imagine how despondent must the average young person be? And are we to presume this is the material that will help Ukraine?

It seems the pendulum of the world has reached its opposite climax. There was a time when young students fought communism, sacrificed theiir lives for ideals (egged on by unfullfilled promises from the west - remember Hungary and Czechoslovakia in the 50s?). Now the enemy is not ideological but generational. The old guard seeing the base of the pyramid's numbers eroded, realize they dont have enough meat to do the work. So the old prey on the young - even making them dance for entertainment.

But do not despair my Romanian friend, you are not alone. Millions of PhDs in America and the west are also in your shoes. Spending the best years of our lives in the service of our masters, publishing papers and writing grants, we were hoping for a 'career' of even a job. But now we see the world turned inside out. The budgets of the NSF and the NIH are being sacrificed and burned on the altar of a new 'reich'.

There is a saying - 'idle hands are the devil's workshop'. Payback is a bitch.
by lazide | 2025-04-29 11:20:09+00:00
Compressor pistons/screws that ingest grit/dirt, or aren’t run often enough to boil the water out of them, also tend to not last long. I used to help run a volunteer workshop with an Atlas Copco screw compressor, and it died in a few years because it wasn’t being run hard enough and the screws rusted (doh!).
by WhereIsTheTruth | 2025-04-29 11:20:33+00:00
> I can also say confidently that the #1 method to combat memory safety errors is array bounds checking. The #2 method is guaranteed initialization of variables. The #3 is stop doing pointer arithmetic (use arrays and ref's instead).

#4 safer union/enum, I do hope D gets tagged-union/pattern-matching sometimes in the future, I know about std.sumtype, but that's nowhere close to what Rust offer