MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by threeseed | 2025-05-31 11:08:28+00:00
Cost is irrelevant when compared to the salaries of the people using them so they will do basic cost controls but nothing too onerous. And cost is never a reason to prevent solutions being built and deployed.

And most enterprises aren't even doing anything advanced with AI. Just doing POCs with chat bots (again) which will likely fail (again). Or trying to do enterprise search engines which are pointless because most content is isolated per team. Or a few OCR projects which is pretty boring and underwhelming.
by skrishnamurthi | 2025-05-31 11:09:37+00:00
There are two DIFFERENT gaps here. You're talking about the gap where what you have verified is a model, and the actual code and the model may diverge. But there is another, subtler gap: how good are you at coming up with properties? Because your verification is only as good as the properties you come up with, and the average programmer is not great at coming up with properties. (Before people attack me, I should make clear I've been working in formal methods for 3 decades now.)
by ignoramous | 2025-05-31 11:09:44+00:00
> Nuance

Not any random ensemble of "Valkey contributors" that did async IO but AWS: One of those cloud providers Redis moved away from FOSS for.

One year later, Valkey hasn't just survived – it's thriving! The Async I/O Threading model contribution from AWS unlocked 3x+ throughput by fundamentally changing how I/O threads work inside Redis.

Bryan Cantrill on this:

... those open source companies that still harbor magical beliefs ... cloud services providers are emphatically not going to license your proprietary software. I mean, you knew that, right? ... The cloud services providers are currently re-proprietarizing all of computing – they are making their own CPUs for crying out loud! – reimplementing the bits of your software that they need in the name of the service that their customers want (and will pay for!) won't even move the needle in terms of their effort.

https://bcantrill.dtrace.org/2018/12/14/open-source-confront...
by mathgeek | 2025-05-31 11:11:20+00:00
> I'd be prepared to argue that most humans aren't guessing most of the time.

Almost everything we do is just an educated guess. The probability of it being correct is a function of our education (for whatever kind of education is applicable).

For example: I guess that when I get out of bed in the morning, my ankles will support my weight. They might not, but for most people, the answer is probably going to be their best guess.

It's easy to see this process in action among young children as another example. They're not born knowing that they won't fall over when they run, then they start assuming they can run safely, then they discovered skinned knees and hands.
by ColinWright | 2025-05-31 11:12:17+00:00
Quoting:

"In 2021, Gaprindashvili filed a defamation lawsuit against Netflix after it erroneously described her in The Queen's Gambit as never having competed against men; Netflix settled in 2022."

You see "The Queen's Gambit" advertised everywhere, yet you never hear about Netflix's "error".
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-05-31 11:12:19+00:00
> Is this really relevant?

Yes. The question isn’t which team is better. The question is how fast they can grow. Similar companies in Pakistan and America will grow disparately. Same for companies on the Internet in 1998 versus, practically, 2022. That isn't fair. But nobody cares about fair, we’re measuring what’s true. It’s fair, from those data, to conclude that the latter should beat the former's record, whether separated by space or time.

(You correctly conclude, from that slide, that Google grew in a less favourable environment than OpenAI et al. You just need to take it one step further into the potential rate for growth and disruption today versus in the past. Put another way, Google could be disrupted quicker than it could disrupt.)
by netcraft | 2025-05-31 11:13:57+00:00
I've always thought as a layman that the weakest link in all of this is our cosmic distance ladder, seems like the most likely place that errors would stack up and lead us to some wrong conclusions. So may places for things to go wrong, we make a lot of assumptions about type 1a supernovas actually being a constant brightness, dust obscuring our view of them, plus all of the assumptions we've made about even measuring the distance between the ones we've measured. And its not like cosmologists havent acknowledged this, but I think a lot of the hubble tension might be solved once we figure out how to measure these distances more accurately.
by Vegenoid | 2025-05-31 11:14:06+00:00
As a student, you can make "getting the diploma" the only goal, and so it rests entirely on the educators and the institution to ensure that the only way you can do that is by learning the material and becoming competent in its applications.

However, you can instead recognize the difficulty and time that this would require on the part of the educator, and therefore expense to the student, and you can recognize that you have the goal of not just obtaining a piece of paper but actually learning a skill. With this mindset, it makes sense to take the initiative to treat the homework as an opportunity to learn and practice. It's is one of those things that's worth as much as you put into it. Of course, one can use their judgement to decide which homework is worth spending time on to learn the material, and which can be safely sailed through with minimum effort.

Having a skilled teacher that you can really collaborate with and who can spend the time to evaluate your skills in a personal way is of course going to lead to better learning outcomes than the traditional education system. It will also be far more expensive. Although, AI is offering something somewhat akin to this experience at a much lower price, to those who are able to moderate their usage so that they are learning from the AI instead of just offloading tasks to it.
by AYBABTME | 2025-05-31 11:16:12+00:00
That's why it's what I define as immediate value. It's undeniably incredibly amplifying to me, whether you or others agree or not. No network effect required. It doesn't matter whether I convince anyone else of the value, I can capture it all on my own. Unlike ponzi-schemes like web3 or VR experiences that require an entire shift in everyday life and an ecology of supporting software.

I don't need to convince anyone that LLMs are enabling me to do a lot more. This is what makes this hype different. It has bones. Once you've found a way to leverage it, it's undeniably helpful regardless of your prior disposition. Everyone else can say they're not useful and it rings hollow because it obviously is to me. And thus probably useful to everyone else too.
by hoseyor | 2025-05-31 11:17:13+00:00
Because their friends and family are part of the NGO complex. Usually the directors and board members. I know this from personal experience and knowledge.

If they did not know each other from college or growing up, the NGO associated people seek out journalists for that kind of reason and journalists are often flattered by the attention, aka lobbying, and drawn in. It’s a really corrupted system that only further encourages that kind of behavior because it is the very nature of that system today that any new entrants come into.

Basically none of the transparency efforts of the mid aughts seem to have really made any kind of real impact on the corruption of the system either. I’m not sure if it’s just correlation, but it almost feels like the transparency efforts only gave false senses of confidence, not to mention that many of the transparency initiatives are also corrupted, receiving their funding also from the NGO complex and also being drawn into the complex itself. It’s an inherently incestuous system like the MIC or the judicial system.
by mritchie712 | 2025-05-31 11:17:55+00:00
I don't want to sound like the infamous dropbox comment, but isn't Reducto just an LLM function call?

This was trickier 18 months ago, but every major LLM provider has solid support for this now. You can just drop an API call to Google, OpenAI, etc. your existing pipeline. What am I missing? Maybe the selling point was batch, but all LLM providers have a batch product now too.

classification_response = requests.post( "https://platform.reducto.ai/extract", json={ "document_url": f"jobid://{job_id}", "schema": { "type": "object", "properties": { "document_type": {"type": "string", "enum": ["W2", "Passport", "Other"]} }, "required": ["document_type"], }, }, headers=headers, )
by amai | 2025-05-31 11:18:23+00:00
Adam Riess might be right, but for reasons he won‘t like. Much of his measurements (and also his Noble prize) depend on the supernovae 1a, which according to the standard model are standard candles. That means it is assumed they always reach the same luminosity, so they can be used to measure distances in the universe (the fainter they are, the farther away they are).

However what if supernovae 1a are not standard candles and their luminosity varies over a much greater range? Then a lot of distance measurements from Riess et. al. are wrong. I belief that scenario to have higher probability than many of the proposed alternatives. But Riess cannot see that, because it would put into question his lifes work.
by mjlee | 2025-05-31 11:18:44+00:00
> For a processor with well-documented microarchitecture, for which a programmer or a compiler can deterministically write an optimal program

We don't even know the optimal algorithms! AlphaEvolve recently found "an algorithm to multiply 4x4 complex-valued matrices using 48 scalar multiplications, improving upon Strassen’s 1969 algorithm that was previously known as the best in this setting." - https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-05172-4
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-05-31 11:19:16+00:00
> lmao why do restaurants need AI

This strikes so close to the infamous Dropbox comment [1].

The common interactions restaurants have with technology is in bookings and online menu presentation. The latter historically required hiring a lightweight web dev. That’s now irrelevant.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224
by oezi | 2025-05-31 11:21:32+00:00
> The researchers compiled data on 662 energy infrastructure projects covering a diverse spectrum of technology classes and capacities, built between 1936 and 2024 across 83 countries, representing $1.358 trillion in investment.

This is quite a lot if we consider that net zero expenditures until 2050 only are expected to amount to 100 trillion.

World GDP was 105 trillion USD in 2024.
by slumberlust | 2025-05-31 11:21:47+00:00
Tax free weekends exist in MA as well, yet a lot of people still travel across the state line to buy tax free items like booze.

It's not always logical, but sometimes you find yourself outside of the city or heading north to be wilderness and the value prop changes if you're already heading that way.

I agree that MC won't open one here, as we can't even get an IKEA closer than Stoughton.
by marginalia_nu | 2025-05-31 11:22:27+00:00
I think it's a mistake to think of virtual threads as "threads, but magically better". They have real drawbacks, and aren't suitable in every scenario.

A crawler is a textbook case where you get more out of a bounded (but large) threadpool than virtual threads, because the boundedness is a feature. Even with infinite RAM, crawling from as many connections as possible leads to a ton of network congestion, and ironically, will slow down your crawling speed.
by fuddy | 2025-05-31 11:23:24+00:00
There are plenty of options in bank settlement protocols. I think the point under discussion is not banking improvement but bankless user sovereignty via technical means.

The smart contract writers sometimes fool themselves when working on the problem full time.. That's a bigger problem if the code is the contract instead of code attempts to honor the contract and a system with judgement can undo things that obviously fall bellow our ethical expectations like account ID swaps, supply chain attacks, kidnapping/intimidation and so on.
by cube2222 | 2025-05-31 11:23:52+00:00
As a sibling commenter mentioned, the article seems to be more of an AI-generated outline.

That said, it mostly mirrors my (very subjective) experience, and the observations in it also mirror my experience with Gemini 2.5 Pro. Overall, Sonnet (whether 3.7 or 4) is much better at understanding exactly what my incomplete prompt means and doing what I want it to do.

Sonnet 4 is also a meaningful improvement with Claude Code. Faster, and gets good results quicker, than 3.7.

Overall, I'm currently primarily using Sonnet/Opus 4 for anything complicated, while using Gemini 2.5 Flash for mechanical refactors of many files that I can't easily and quickly do in a mechanical way (like regex search+replace), because it's just so ridiculously fast.
by Vegenoid | 2025-05-31 11:24:25+00:00
The way this worked in my mathematical education is that you can't have a computer solve the equations at the level of the thing you are learning, but you can let the computer do all the stuff that's a level below what you're learning. This way, you first learn it at a fundamental level, and then with that foundation you are permitted to use computers to do that stuff as you learn something new.
by cycomanic | 2025-05-31 11:24:37+00:00
I think this article overstates the importance of the problems even for scientific software. In the scientific code I've written, noise processes are often orders of magnitude larger than what what is discussed here and I believe this applies to many (most?) simulations modelling the real world (i.e. Physics chemistry,..). At the same time enabling fast-math has often yielded a very significant (>10%) performance boost.

I particularly find the discussion of - fassociative-math because I assume that most writers of some code that translates a mathetical formula to into simulations will not know which would be the most accurate order of operations and will simply codify their derivation of the equation to be simulated (which could have operations in any order). So if this switch changes your results it probably means that you should have a long hard look at the equations you're simulating and which ordering will give you the most correct results.

That said I appreciate that the considerations might be quite different for libraries and in particular simulations for mathematics.
by transpute | 2025-05-31 11:25:54+00:00
> hardware virtualization controlled by the local kernel

In some architectures, kernel LPE does not break platform (L0/EL2) virtualization, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44141164

L0/EL2 L1/EL1 pKVM KVM AX Hyper-V / Xen / ESX
by prmoustache | 2025-05-31 11:27:02+00:00
Your point is a bit moot if you consider that elasticsearch is built on top of an opensource project (lucene) for which they never gave any money. Also Antirez wasn't part of Redis for a significant amount of time.

Bottom line: the company that own the brand of any open source project and receive money from support or features may not be constituted of the original authors nor is necessarily comprised of all the dev who have put a significant amount of work into it.
by skrishnamurthi | 2025-05-31 11:28:52+00:00
It's definitely written from the perspective of someone who "knows C++". But I put that in quotes because there are (at least) two interpretations of that phrase. There's the person who doesn't know any C++ at all, and for that person, this is useless. But there's the person who knows a baseline of C++ but doesn't know modern C++, and they can use this as a way to modernize their C++ code while ignoring the Rust bits. But either way, yes, it doesn't warn you about C++ footguns (other than pointing you towards Rust <-;).
by damnesian | 2025-05-31 11:30:58+00:00
>Streaming piracy is “almost a crisis for the sports rights industry"

They need to look at their unbridled greed for a moment. Doubt if they ever will, though.

My elderly parents are sports fans, and the job of finding their teams' games has fallen to me, because it is too complicated for them.

They are too old to play the game of subscriber roulette- sub to a network's free trial just to watch one game this week, another service the next.

They are alienating fans by doing this. I suspect they vastly underestimate how many. But the deals are too lucrative for them to resist. So they just let the rot persist.

The easiest solution by far for someone in my situation- the only person in the family comfortable with tech- is set them up with some popular piracy sites.

This is a problem of their own invention.
by timacles | 2025-05-31 11:31:18+00:00
What percentage of people would you say like working for fun? Would you really claim they make up a significant portion of society?

Even myself, work a job that I enjoy building things that I’m good at, that is almost stress free, and after 10-15 years find that I would much rather spend time with my family or even spend a day doing nothing rather than spend another hour doing work for other people. the work never stops coming and the meaninglessness is stronger than ever.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-05-31 11:32:02+00:00
> like to hear more discussion of AI being applied in a ways that are “good enough”

Search. AI works about as well as a clueless first-year analyst. You need to double check its work. But there is still value added in its compiling together sources and providing a reasonably-accurate summary of, at the very least, some of their arguments.

Also basic web development. Most restauranteurs I know no longer deem it necessary to hire a web developer. (Happy side effect: more PDF menus instead of over-engineered nonsense.)
by Almondsetat | 2025-05-31 11:32:34+00:00
Dismissing my observation with 'then don't read it' sidesteps the core issue. My point isn't about my personal reading habits, but about the low signal-to-noise ratio of this content genre. While you argue these stories are 'needed' because people blindly trust LLMs, especially with integrations like Gemini in search, these posts rarely offer more than the simplistic, already widely understood caution: 'don't blindly trust LLMs.' This is precisely the 'usual adage' I mentioned. The genre often lacks depth, failing to provide nuanced understanding or genuinely new information about why these systems fail in specific ways or how users can develop better critical assessment skills beyond mere distrust. If the goal is genuine education due to increased LLM exposure, the content needs to evolve beyond just showcasing errors.
by fossfighter2342 | 2025-05-31 11:33:04+00:00
We recently discovered license changes for code that Evolved Binary derived from eXist-db in Elemental, its fork of eXist-db. The changes were published on GitHub. Furthermore the Elemental website states that it is distributed under a different license than LGPL 2.1.

This constitutes a clear violation of the LGPL license. We consulted with one of Europe’s most renowned experts on Open Source Software licenses: Dr. Till Jaeger confirmed that LGPL-2.1 does not permit relicensing, except to GPL, according to Sec. 3 of the LGPL-2.1. Any other relicensing under different license terms without the consent of all copyright owners of the respective code constitutes copyright infringement.

eXist-db will and must stay under LGPL 2.1. We stand by open source software and our license. We have neither consented nor been approached about relicensing our contributions.

We therefore ask Evolved Binary to remedy the license violation immediately.

See also: https://github.com/evolvedbinary/elemental/issues/3
by tialaramex | 2025-05-31 11:33:21+00:00
Plenty of C++ practitioners who still intend to mostly write C++ after learning some Rust said it actually gave them useful insights they'll be applying in future C++

We can also see in the committee proposal papers "Rust does X" has for years now been a good comeback when you need to show that X is a realistic choice not just for languages like Python which may be less concerned about performance and incur a heavy runtime, a garbage collector, etc., but also a "real" language like C++. The paper which landed code.contains("FOO") in the C++ string handling code is an example, there's a long list of languages which do this but they made sure to mention Rust.
by constantcrying | 2025-05-31 11:34:07+00:00
>Why are journos so dishonest?

No. The whole complex is to blame here, the scientists didn't do some rigorous open ended work. All of the scientists of course already believed that foreign aid is effective and beneficial (it is generally neither, especially not in the way it is actually practiced, where you dump random things into some poor place of the world and then leave) and are now gathering evidence to support that position so that articles like this can be written.

It is of course somewhat hilarious to claim 300k deaths without being able to point to a single actual death. All of this pseudo debate exists to mask the actual question under contention. Given the enormous amounts of resources the west has poured into the poorest places on earth, when do we see the positive results? The only measurable result is that over time only more and more is needed, which of course simultaneously undermines the premise of foreign aid and paradoxically makes it more important.
by dagw | 2025-05-31 11:34:16+00:00
Now it comes down to how you define 'for a living'. You still need to differentiate between people who work to survive, people who work to finance their aspirational lifestyle, and people who have all the money they could possibly need and still work because they either see it as a calling or they just seem to like working. Considering all these people in the same 'class' is far too simplistic.
by hobs | 2025-05-31 11:34:44+00:00
It doesn't - its a battle cry for the working classes (ie anyone who actually works) to realize they are being exploited by those that simply do not.

If you have an actual job and an income constrained by your work output, you could be middle class, but you could also recognize that you are getting absolutely ruined by the billionaire class (no matter what your level of working wealth)
by Almondsetat | 2025-05-31 11:35:29+00:00
While you argue that showcasing a 'faulty assistant' like Google's is 'informative', particularly for those tracking AI progress, the typical LLM-got-it-wrong post often doesn't provide that deeper insight. It usually presents an isolated error without context or analysis of the system's architecture, training data limitations, or the specific type of reasoning failure. This makes its informative value quite shallow, quickly becoming repetitive rather than truly enlightening about 'progresses in the area' beyond the surface-level observation that LLMs are imperfect.

Regarding the 'constructive' aspect and the 'damaging replacement of experts,' I agree this is a critical concern. However, the genre of simply posting screenshots of LLM errors is rarely constructive in addressing this complex socio-technical issue. It highlights a symptom (LLMs making mistakes) but typically fails to constructively engage with the causes or potential solutions for deskilling, corporate responsibility in AI deployment, or the nuances of human-AI collaboration. True constructive engagement would require more than just pointing out a wrong answer; it would demand analysis, discussion of best practices, or calls for better system design and oversight, which this genre seldom provides.