MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jimmar | 2025-05-09 14:12:49+00:00
In 2023, the NSF said it gave 9,400 research awards at an average of $239,700 each [1]. That's $2.25 billion. That year, the NSF has a budget of $10.5 billion [2]. Can somebody with more insight into the NSF explain where the NSF money goes?

My PhD was largely funded through government grants, though not the NSF. To put it mildly, our government contacts were not the most competent people and were frequently roadblocks rather than enablers. There were many opportunities to streamline processes that would help researchers spend more time researching and less time on bureaucratic overhead.

[1] https://nsf-gov-resources.nsf.gov/files/04_fy2025.pdf?Versio...

[2] https://www.nsf.gov/about/budget/fy2023/appropriations
by stabbles | 2025-05-09 14:14:50+00:00
Instead of doing 4 comparisons against each character `\n`, `\r`, `;` and `"` followed by 3 or operations, a common trick is to do 1 shuffle, 1 comparison and 0 or operations. I blogged about this trick: https://stoppels.ch/2022/11/30/io-is-no-longer-the-bottlenec... (Trick 2)

Edit: they do make use of ternary logic to avoid one or operation, which is nice. Basically (a | b | c) | d is computed using `vpternlogd` and `vpor` resp.
by damnitbuilds | 2025-05-09 14:15:56+00:00
We have two crazy policies:

- Forcing this irrelevant nonsense into maths grant applications.

- Cancelling the grant applications because they contain this nonsense.

And science is the loser.

.

One example:

This grant was for $500,000:

" Elliptic and Parabolic Partial Differential Equations

ABSTRACT Partial differential equations (PDE) are mathematical tools that are used to model natural phenomena like electromagnetism, astronomy, and fluid dynamics, for example. This project is concerned with understanding how the solutions to such equations behave. The Laplace equation

[...] Motivated by the goal of increasing participation from underrepresented groups [...]

The Laplace equation is a PDE that models steady-state phenomena in a truly uniform environment. Since the world that we live in is not an isotropic vacuum, the mathematical equations that govern many natural phenomena are often more complicated than Laplace’s equation. For example, the Schrodinger equation [...] "

https://www.nicheoverview.com/grant/?grant_id=nsf_2236491
by anonymars | 2025-05-09 14:15:58+00:00
Yes but that's basically the prisoner's dilemma in a nutshell. Who's going to to take the leap of faith and put their neck on the chopping block?

Liz Cheney? Adam Kitzinger? Mitt Romney?

> In an interview with The Atlantic published earlier this week, Romney fretted over his ability to keep his entire family safe from Trump’s ire, should he be reelected in November. (Trump has made it clear that his plans for a second term include seeking revenge on those who’ve wronged him.)

“How am I going to protect 25 grandkids, two great-grandkids?” Romney told The Atlantic. “I’ve got five sons, five daughters-in-law—it’s like, we’re a big group.”
by jbverschoor | 2025-05-09 14:16:35+00:00
They also included 0.9.0 vs 0.10.0. on the new hardware. (21385 vs 18203), so the jump because of software is 17%.

Then if we take 0.9.0 on previous hardware (13088) and add the 17%, it's 15375. Version 0.1.0 was 7335.

So... 15375/7335 -> a staggering 2.1x improvement in just under 2 years
by DangitBobby | 2025-05-09 14:17:04+00:00
I think the madness is on the geniuses that voted for Trump and continue to cheer on the insanity every day, and the "moderates" who somehow thought he was the "economy" pick. Less so on Trump himself because he's pretty much just being himself.

The Democrats chose Harris as their candidate because they thought she had the best chance of winning. They might have been right.
by sumtechguy | 2025-05-09 14:17:20+00:00
LP is a shockingly good way to optimize a system. If you can put inputs/outputs into the correct form. Had an econ prof that loved these things for doing supply/demand maxima and minimum finding. He didnt outright say it but I think it was his current line of study when I was taking classes from him the 90s. I thought that, as he managed to bring it up in every class he taught.
by kmoser | 2025-05-09 14:17:48+00:00
> This error occurred after the film's title was changed from its original moniker Night of the Flesh Eaters. Prints with that title contained the copyright notice, but when new prints were created using the title Night of the Living Dead, the copyright notice was forgotten.

This begs the question: if the original movie was copyrighted, how does releasing the same movie with a different title make the new re-release considered a new (not-yet-copyrighted) work? I thought the copyright protection of the original would extend to the renamed version, since they're 99.99% the same. Theoretically, does changing even one frame necessitate a new copyright?
by PaulDavisThe1st | 2025-05-09 14:17:58+00:00
There is no "human level" because we don't even understand what we mean by "human level". We don't know what metrics to use, we don't even know what to measure.

> Two different general intelligences built on different architectures should be able to converge on similar solutions (for example solutions based on lowest energy states) because they are operating in the same physical realm.

Lots of things connected to intelligence do not operate (much) in any physical realm.

Also, you've really missed the point of the analogy. It's not a question of whether AGI would pick the same solution for fast air travel as HGI. It is that there are least two solutions to the challenge of moving things through the air in a controlled way, and they don't really work in the same way at all. Consequently, we should be ready for the possibility that there is more than one way to do the things LLMs (and to some degree) humans do with text/language, and that they may not be related to each very much. This is a counter to the claim that "since LLMs get so close to human language behavior, it seems quite likely human language behavior arises from a system like an LLM".
by zahlman | 2025-05-09 14:18:28+00:00
This is not at all a reasonable characterization of my post. Crucially, I didn't say that a "practical" question is inherently acceptable, nor the reverse. Also crucially, the question was edited between being closed and being reopened, which is exactly why we close questions - so that they can be fixed before they are answered. (Though as I also noted, it's still less than ideal that Stack Overflow might bow to external pressure, even when those outside voices are correct.)

My statement that the site was intended to be this way is based on literally years spent trawling through old meta discussions and discussing how the site is supposed to work with other regulars who care(d) about figuring that out - a discussion informed both by statements made by Atwood and Spolsky themselves, as well as years of experience seeing what was and wasn't working. The fact that the site didn't actually initially work as intended, doesn't in any way negate that vision. Basically nothing works as intended out of the gate, especially not when the "thing" is an attempt to organize a community around a piece of software.
by alabastervlog | 2025-05-09 14:18:40+00:00
> And Trump 3 will follow unless the Dems move back to the sane center.

Great way to lose again. The "sane center" is 3rd-way '90s dems, and their shit only worked because Republicans agreed with them on unpopular neoliberal economic policy, so there was no way for voters to avoid it.
by schmidtleonard | 2025-05-09 14:19:12+00:00
Sure but don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good. "Big bucket of courses, bring your own plan" and "here's your mass produced course plan that may or may not be optimized for departmental needs rather than yours" are both pretty rough. A skill tree is a step up even if it needs a little (or a lot) of refinement.
by GuardianCaveman | 2025-05-09 14:20:34+00:00
Are you using it for other things? I think you can write code without it but it’s so good for research and stack overflow replacement.

Last night I used it to look through some project in an open source code base in a language I’m not familiar with to get a report on how that project works. I wanted to know what are its capabilities and integrations with these other specialized tools, because the documentation is so limited. It saved me time and didn’t help me write code. Beyond that it’s good for asking really stupid questions about complex topics that you’d get roasted on for stack overflow.
by duxup | 2025-05-09 14:21:56+00:00
I think for Trump hangers on bumbling around and acting like an idiot is thought to be a required social signal.

I suspect few have a relationship they trust with Trump, dude is erratic, prone to strange influences (twitter) and the only way hangers on can think to signal they are doing good work is effectively… act out in a way that gets attention.
by _fat_santa | 2025-05-09 14:22:02+00:00
> I don't want to use LLMs for writing code because it's one of the things I enjoy the most in life

I think LLM's are really good for the "drudge work" when you're coding. I always say it's excellent for things where the actual task is easy but the bottleneck is how fast you can type.

As an example I had a project where I was previously extracting all strings in the UI into an object. For a number of reasons I wanted to move away from this but this codebase is well over 50k LOC and I have probably 5k lines of strings. Doing this manually would have been very tedious and would have taken me quite some time so I leveraged AI to help me and managed to refactor all the strings in my app in a little over an hour.
by gxt | 2025-05-09 14:22:12+00:00
You can audit your dependencies for crates with security vulnerabilities reported to the RustSec Advisory Database, also block unmaintained crates, and enforce your license requirements using SPDX expressions with cargo-audit and cargo-deny.

You can ensure that third-party Rust dependencies have been audited by a trusted entity with cargo-vet.

And you should have taken a look at where those 3M locs come from, it's usually from Microsoft's windows-rs crates that are transitively included in your dependencies through default features and build targets of crates built to run on windows.
by davepeck | 2025-05-09 14:22:29+00:00
Do you use compilers? Linker loaders? Web bundlers? Linters and formatters? Code gen for or from schema? Image editors? Memory safe or garbage collected languages?

Then you already use levers to build code.

LLMs are a new kind of tool. They’re weird and probabilistic and only sometimes useful. We don’t yet know quite how and when to use them. But they seem like one more lever for us to wield.
by ekidd | 2025-05-09 14:23:15+00:00
Claude Code will happily and enthusiastically do horrible things to your code. But it always asks first. So you can tell it "NO!" and suggest a better approach.

Imagine having a college sophmore CS major who types really quickly and who is up-to-date on lots of new technologies. But they're prone to cutting corners when they get stuck, and they have never worked on anything larger than a group project. Now imagine watching them as they work (really quickly) and correcting them when they mess up.

This is... tolerable for small apps. If you have problems that could be solved by a team of very junior programmers, and if you're willing to provide close supervision, then it might even make sense for some real code. Or if you kind of know how to code, and you just need little 1,000 line throwaway tools (like a lot of other STEM fields), eh, it's probably OK.

But your mentoring effort will never result in the model actually learning anything, so it's more like you get a new very junior programmer for each PR.

I don't want to completely badmouth this. For very early stage startups where you need to throw 50 things at the wall, most of them glorified CRUD apps, and see what sticks with the customers, then a senior engineer could make it work. But if you have a half dozen people who only sort of know how to write code all "mentoring" Claude, then your code base will become complete trash within two weeks. In practice, I see significant degradation above 1,000 lines for "hands off" operation, and around 5,000 lines if I'm watching it intensely and carefully reading all code.
by Dlemo | 2025-05-09 14:23:28+00:00
Right now we have not enough software developers at least based on surveys.

So now LLM helps us with that.

In parallel all the changes due to AI also need more effort for now. That's what I called golden age.

After that, I can imagine fundamental change for us developers.

And at least we're I live, a lot of small companies never got the chance to properly become modern due to the good developers earning very good money somewhere else.
by burnte | 2025-05-09 14:23:53+00:00
> Does anyone feel like the biggest selling point of LLMs so far is basically for programmers? Feels like most of the products that look like could generate revenue are for programmers.

No, you're in a tech bubble. I'm in healthcare, and you'd think that AI note takers and summary generators were the reason LLMs were invented and the lion's share of use. I get a new pitch every day, "this product will save your providers hours every day!" They're great products, and our providers love ours, but it's not saving hours.

There's also a huge push for LLMs to work in search and data-retrieval chatbots. The push there is huge, and now Mistal just released Le Chat Enterprise for that exact market.

LLMs for code are so common because they're really easy to create. It's notepad plus chatGPT. Sure, it's actually VS Code and CoPilot, but you get the idea, it's actually not more complicated than regular chatbots.
by echelon | 2025-05-09 14:24:04+00:00
> Python's standard library is a strength, not a weakness. Rust should be so lucky.

Rust is luckier. It has the correct approach. You can find every battery you need in crates.io.

Python has had monstrosities like urllib, urllib2, http, etc. All pretty much ignored in favor of the external requests library and its kin. The standard library also has inconsistencies in calling conventions and naming conventions and it has to support those *FOREVER*.

The core language should be pristine. Rust is doing it right. Everything else you need is within grasp.
by arrosenberg | 2025-05-09 14:24:10+00:00
If their concern was actually DEI (instead of destroying the federal governments power) they would change the grant process going forward and maybe cut funding selectively. That they aren’t doing that, but cutting funding wholesale, is a clear indication of their real intent. Blaming Biden for their destructive ideology is a bad argument. They're breaking it, they get to own the outcome.

FWIW, I agree with you other than placing the blame. It was a ridiculous policy, it cost the Democrats the election, but they don’t get blamed for the further poor choices Trumps regime is making.
by surfaceofthesun | 2025-05-09 14:24:15+00:00
I'm not sure if that applies to Fiber connections. I had my own fun with a firmware update causing latency issues with ATT Fiber's gateways that was fixed several months later [1]. I was using the combo ONT + Router originally and had to switch to dedicated ONT.

I ended up extracting 802.1x certificates with this[2] or a similar tool and interfacing directly with the ONT using OPNSense [3]. I was so angry I filed an FTC complaint because I had to do this bypass to do my job (the latency was so bad).

---

[1] -- Linking to Reddit due to DSLReports going Down. https://www.reddit.com/r/ATTFiber/comments/1dwwh61/comment/l...

[2] -- https://github.com/0x888e/certs

[3] -- https://forum.opnsense.org/index.php?PHPSESSID=t6vvukft2ahga...
by tialaramex | 2025-05-09 14:24:34+00:00
This is the reflection operator. The committee† spent some time bikeshedding different squiggles for this operator, but eventually it looks like ^^ won because it was least awful.

† WG21 of SC22 of JTC1 between ISO and the IEC, "the C++ committee".

See P2996R11 for the latest draft of the work - https://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/docs/papers/2025/p29...
by cogman10 | 2025-05-09 14:25:07+00:00
The rust RFC process has, frankly, become somewhat of a CF.

There's literally 1000s of RFCs for rust with only a small handful that are integrated. Having this forest, IMO, makes it hard for any given proposal to really stand out. Further, it makes duplicate effort almost inevitable.

Rust's RFC process is effectively a dead letter box for most.
by floundy | 2025-05-09 14:25:18+00:00
Urbanists are amusing. Ignoring the obvious criticism that they presume to think everyone else wants to (or should want to) live in a heckin' cool city, or their entitlement to attempt to overrule democratic majority decisions by suburban towns on the direction of planning and development.

"benefit through asset appreciation resulting from the new infrastructure"... ah yes, the asset appreciation every homeowner dreams of that comes from living directly next to a highway.

More often than not, urbanists seem to be Reddit-types who own no property, that presume to tell everyone else what they should do with their property. You cannot reason with zealots who are unable to accept that some people cannot tolerate sharing walls or not having a paltry quarter acre of green space around their property rather than a cemented wasteland.
by vanviegen | 2025-05-09 14:26:10+00:00
I had similar concerns when I made the jump from a custom data class (with methods like `set`, `get`, `increment`, `push`, etc) to a transparent `Proxy` around native JavaScript objects. I did some quick benchmarks back then, and concluded that it was actually not meaningfully slower. Modern JavaScript engines are awesome! :-)

Aberdeen is not in js-framework-benchmark yet, but I've done a pull request https://github.com/krausest/js-framework-benchmark/pull/1877 -- By my own testing, performance is similar to something like react (while of course destroying React on time-to-first-paint, bytes transferred, etc). However, this test is not a particular good fit for Aberdeen, as lists in Aberdeen are always sorted by a given key (it maintains an ordered skiplist for the data). The test only requires the easy case: sort by creation time. So Aberdeen is doing some extra work here.

With regard to reactive data transforms: Aberdeen provides some (reactively 'streaming') helper functions for that (`map`, `multiMap`, `partition`, `count`). But these are mostly based on the `onEach` primitive, for reactive iteration. Take a look at the `map` implementation, for instance: https://github.com/vanviegen/aberdeen/blob/a390ce952686da875...

Is past projects, we've been using things like this a lot. Pretty easy and fast!
by harperhuang | 2025-05-09 14:26:24+00:00
Thank you danso and other users for your valuable feedback. I have immediately taken action:

1. Changed the website icon, removing elements that might cause association 2. Modified inappropriate descriptions on the website

Regarding the domain name choice, I admit that when selecting "ghiblio.net," I considered the popularity of related keywords and AI's ability to generate this style, but didn't fully consider the potential brand confusion issues. This was an oversight on my part. Going forward, I will be more mindful of these matters, avoid potential infringement issues, and develop my own brand.
by tacitusarc | 2025-05-09 14:26:39+00:00
Congrats! Building something like this is not trivial. You should be proud.

I think it would be useful to have an example of how to make “widgets”, larger components with more complex behaviors that could be reused across many applications.

I recommend making the HTML boxes scrollable, and allowing the code to scroll x. Reading wrapped code on a small screen is difficult.
by owebmaster | 2025-05-09 14:26:42+00:00
> Does anyone have advice for maintaining this feeling but also going with the flow and using LLMs to be more productive

Coding with LLMs brought me so much more joy coding. Not always, but it is getting better. Sometimes is quite frustrating, but when you have some good idea, explain it well and get the model to generate the code the way you would code or even better and you can use it to build new things faster, that's magical. Many devs are having this experience, some earlier, some now, some later. But for sure I would not say that using LLMs to code made it less enjoyable.
by pyrophane | 2025-05-09 14:26:43+00:00
I'm an American. I struggle almost every day with what feels like a betrayal of our republic by so many voters and leaders, and none of the explanations for why it has happened, even when taken together, are wholly satisfying.

It has shaken my faith in democracy, but at the same time, there's nothing else, so I have no choice but to try to fight for it in what ways I can.
by wofo | 2025-05-09 14:26:44+00:00
I faced a related dilemma when I finished my CS degree: to work as a full-stack dev or to work on more foundational technology (and actually use what I learned in my degree). My experience is that the "foundational technology" area is more "research-oriented", which means you get to work on projects where LLM's don't help that much: writing code in languages that have little data in the LLM's training corpus, coming up with performance benchmarking approaches unique for your application, improving a workload's throughput with insights derived from your benchmarking results and your ingenuity, etc. Had I gone down the full-stack path, I think I'd be worried now.
by AlotOfReading | 2025-05-09 14:27:04+00:00
I haven't looked at the contract in detail, but no, $3B over 5 years for 3000 people including construction costs sounds reasonably in line with prison costs (the closest comparison). Certainly not the order of magnitude too high like you're suggesting, which surely someone would have undercut on the bid if it were easy.

You can look at the bid requirements yourself and determine whether you think it's reasonable for the scope of the facility: https://sam.gov/opp/3726d9e2246c47e197396e805ce6bb33/view
by Arubis | 2025-05-09 14:27:39+00:00
Been on this about a week at the $100/mo mark. I’m not hitting quota limits (I’d swap to the $200/mo in a heartbeat if I were), using Claude Code on multiple tasks simultaneously without abandon. Prior to the flat plan I was spending nearly $1k/mo on tokens. That figure was justifiable but painful. Paying a tenth of it is lovely.
by searine | 2025-05-09 14:27:48+00:00
> To put it mildly, our government contacts were not the most competent people and were frequently roadblocks rather than enablers.

PhD students aren't usually the ones interacting with program officers or grant institutions so I'm not sure you had the most accurate view...

Every grant official I've ever worked with has been a peer scientis who is professional and competent. They've always been focused on getting return on investment and keeping projects on track.