MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by dr_dshiv | 2025-05-21 11:57:54+00:00
Distillation seems like a pretty robust approach. There is no good reason to think that GPT5 or 6 won’t have massive rapid efficiency gains.

He’s one of the most knowledgeable persons in the world on the topic. It’s like saying that the ceo of BMW isn’t citable on conversations about expected cost decreases in electric cars.

Any environmental topic is susceptible to a huge amount of groupthink. The world isn’t so binary as people make it out to be. It is far from truth that LLMs=bad for environment, any more than computers=bad for the environment.
by AngryData | 2025-05-21 11:58:05+00:00
Ehh you can't really just put harder tires on a car and leave it at that. Harder tires means less grip, and that is a serious setback and much less safe in a car than the typical bus that runs city routes at lower speeds and less adverse road conditions.

Tire temperature also will play a big roll in tire wear, and I wouldn't expect bus tires to get very hot only rolling half the time and at a lower speed than the typical car.

And of course you also gotta factor in passenger count. Buses generally have more than just 1 or 2 people, while the vast majority of cars will have 1 or 2 people most of the time. And even if a bus tires were to wear out twice as fast as a car's tire, that is still less wear per person than a car.
by msond | 2025-05-21 11:59:44+00:00
Hey there!

Would love to connect and hear more about what you like about SCALE and where you'd like it to go.

AMD is a part of our strategy, but it's not the end-game - we envision SCALE to be vendor neutral and have plans to support all of the competitive GPUs that come out in the future, including AMD, NVIDIA, Intel and any newcomers.
by ninkendo | 2025-05-21 12:01:14+00:00
Why wouldn’t you accept a &mut [MaybeUninit<T>] and return a &mut [u8], hiding the unsafe bits that transmute the underlying reference?

Something like:

fn convert<'i, 'o>(inp: &'i [u8], buf: &'o mut MaybeUninit<u8>) -> &'o mut [u8]

(Honest question, actually… because the above may be impossible to write and I’m on my phone and can’t try it.)

Edit: it works: https://play.rust-lang.org/?version=stable&mode=debug&editio...
by fakedang | 2025-05-21 12:01:18+00:00
The US economy still hasn't "rebounded" from the effects of the 2008 recession, forget COVID, even after the bailouts and the offloading of the US debt onto Europe, Japan and China, even though that was in the order of single digit trillions. I don't know where people get the idea that adding a hundred trillion more is where you can cure the deficit. Especially when this time around, you're not going to have EU, China and Japan to baghold for you.

> when printing money you reset both the debt and the savings. If your debt is much bigger than savings it becomes a good deal.

Huh how? When printing money, you make your ability to pay further down the line even more tenuous. I don't know how people can't see the obvious parallels between money-printing and currency-debasing of the Roman times (which led to the economic downfall of that empire).

The only way to cure a deficit while retaining your trustworthiness is to pay it down one way or another.That requires intense taxation for a few years on the rich and corporations alike, and using those proceeds to pay it off. And if possible, to loot someone's gold reserves or something, although that would destroy your trustworthiness on all other fronts and equate you to Nazi Germany.
by joshstrange | 2025-05-21 12:01:44+00:00
As a counter point, a couple years ago wind storms knocked out power for close to a week where I live (KY, USA). I’ve had power outages before but this time, maybe because of how widespread it was, it made cellular service unusable. I could drive a block away and get a tiny bit of signal but nothing else would come through. No internet, no texts, no iMessage, no Discord.

Not only was it incredibly isolating but I never fully internalized how much I rely on the internet. Thinking back it had been well over a decade since I had been that disconnected. I’d been without power for 1-2 days but only truly without internet for a few hours total (often with a way to get online if I really wanted/needed to, like while flying).

I had plenty of entertainment (books and podcasts) on my phone but I kept trying to look up info on the web. I’d hear or read something, want to follow up on it, type in a google search then be brought crashing back down to the reality of no internet. “Phantom Internet Syndrome”? It really surprised me how much “background” Internet searching/etc I do which I don’t even think about.

I lasted less than 6 waking hours (went out in the evening, in the morning I called it quits) before giving up and driving to my parent’s house (which I was already planning on doing later that week. I have a full office setup there as well).

That experience was eye-opening to me. If someone asked me how often I use the Internet and/or how I’d fare without it, I probably would’ve guessed very wrong.
by mooreds | 2025-05-21 12:01:53+00:00
I can see the value of both approaches. (And I work for an auth provider, FusionAuth.) It's the age-old conflict between "use the best tool for the job" and "YAGNI".

There's something so simple about having a single deployment of code and auth wrapped up together, which is what the library approach offers. You can use the database to maintain integrity between your app's domain objects and your users. Everything needed for your app is in one place. I've seen this succeed and been part of teams doing this myself.

But auth/user management is usually the first thing extracted when you start to grow for a reason. Otherwise you end up with your main application serving as both its main purpose and as a user data store for other apps, or worse, you have siloed user data, multiple profiles and credentials for customers, and a worse user experience because your users have to log in to each app separately.

The extraction of this functionality is not as simple as moving other services typically, because of availability reqs and password hashes (not every provider supports every kind of hash, though I will say I wish more folks implemented something like FusionAuth's approach[0]). So that's an argument to just start with a separate service.

And, as you say, a single source of truth of user data for multiple applications has surprising benefits in the long run which counteract the additional complexity. Offering single sign-on across multiple apps[1] is a great feature with user benefits, if you have or plan to have multiple applications. Outsourcing auth to a specialized piece of software lets you focus on your app (once you've integrated, of course, nothing is free) and offer relatively undifferentiated features like MFA, passkeys, or SAML integrations with configuration rather than coding.

I guess the answer is "it depends", as always. I'd consider future plans, number of apps expected, features needed, cost structure, and more when making this decision.

[0]: https://fusionauth.io/docs/extend/code/password-hashes/custo...

[1]: if you and they use a standard like SAML or OIDC, you can even offer single sign-on for commercial off the shelf tools
by Supernaut | 2025-05-21 12:02:22+00:00
> you can get extremely good (studio quality) sounds with a 200 Euro guitar and a 250 Euro amplifier

Yes, exactly. Does a guitar that costs €1200 sound and (equally importantly) feel even better? Yes, in my opinion - but with modern instruments, diminishing returns do set in quite quickly.

I noted this comment from the guy in the article: "All the guitars they made after [1964] were junk.” Utter nonsense. I can't stand that kind of boomer gatekeeping.
by actionfromafar | 2025-05-21 12:02:39+00:00
It's a borderline thing. The official Commodore REU only supported 8x the RAM. But you could modify it yourself to 32x. Creative Micro Design also had the third party 1750 REU which supported 32x RAM. (2 megabytes.)

So it is somewhat period accurate, albeit very expensive at the time.
by xnorswap | 2025-05-21 12:02:50+00:00
> Allegedly it's pretty terrible at C#

In my experience, LLMs in general are really, really bad at C# / .NET , and it worries me as a .NET developer.

With increased LLM usage, I think development in general is going to undergo a "great convergence".

There's a positive(1) feedback loop where LLM's are better at Blub, so people use them to write more Blub. With more Blub out there, LLMs get better at Blub.

The languages where LLMs struggle, with become more niche, leaving LLMs struggling even more.

C# / .NET is something LLMs seem particularly bad at, and I suspect that's partly caused by having multiple different things all called the same name. EF, ASP, even .NET itself are names that get slapped on a range of different technologies. The EF API has changed so much that they had to sort-of rename it to "EF Core". Core also gets used elsewhere such as ".NET core" and "ASP.NET Core". You (Or an LLM) might be forgiven for thinking that ASP.NET Core and EF Core are just those versions which work with .NET Core (now just .NET ) and the other versions are those that don't.

But that isn't even true. There are versions of ASP.NET Core for .NET Framework.

Microsoft bundle a lot of good stuff into the ecosystem, but their attitude when they hit performance or other issues is generally to completely rewrite how something works, but then release the new thing under the old name but with a major version change.

They'll make the new API different enough to not work without work porting, but similar enough to confuse the hell out of anyone trying to maintain both.

They've made things like authentication, which actually has generally worked fine out-of-the-box for a decade or more, so confusing in the documentation that people mostly tended to run for a third party solution just because at least with IdentityServer there was just one documented way to do it.

I know it's a bit of a cliche to be an "AI-doomer", and I'm not really suggesting all development work will go the way of the dinosaur, but there are specific ecosystem concerns with regard to .NET and AI assistance.

(1) Positive in the sense of feedback that increased output increases output. It's not positive in the sense of "good thing".
by smartmic | 2025-05-21 12:03:04+00:00
reddit may not have the best reputation, but the comments there are on point! So far much better than what has been posted here by HN users on this topic/thread. Anyway, I hope this is good fodder to show the limits (and they are much narrower than hype-driven AI enthusiasts like to pretend) of AI coding and to be more honest with yourself and others about it.
by pornel | 2025-05-21 12:03:11+00:00
Couple of things that are commonly misunderstood/unappreciated about this:

• Uninitialized bytes are not just some garbage random values, they're a safety risk. Heartbleed merely exposed unitialized buffers. Uninit buffers can contain secrets, keys, and pointers that help defeat ASLR and other mitigations. As usual, Rust sets the bar higher than "just be careful not to have this bug", and therefore the safe Rust subset requires making uninit impossible to read.

• Rust-the-language can already use uninitialized buffers efficiently. The main issue here is that the Rust standard library doesn't have APIs for I/O using custom uninitialized buffers (only for the built-in Vec, in a limited way). These are just musings how to design APIs for custom buffers to make them the most useful, ergonomic, and interoperable. It's a debate, because it could be done in several ways, with or without additions to the language.
by bmqpo | 2025-05-21 12:03:14+00:00
With power issues in Nigeria (basically no power from my perspective), I have been building my home solar system. Currently at 9kw solar panels, 10kva inverter with 30kwh Chinese LFP. Spent about $7,000 so far. Looking to eventually get to 60kwh and at least 20kw in panels because of air conditioning needs.

Waiting for government, my kids currently in primary school would probably have graduated from college before they fix the power situation (they are currently fixated on building roads to nowhere).
by sgarland | 2025-05-21 12:05:01+00:00
Sure, but if the product in question is at best tangential to your core products, it sucks, and makes your work flow slow to a crawl, I don’t blame employees for not wanting to use it.

For example, if tomorrow my company announced that everyone was being switched to Windows, I would simply quit. I don’t care that WSL exists, overall it would be detrimental to my workday, and I have other options.
by bayindirh | 2025-05-21 12:05:14+00:00
You're welcome. I have moved to Source Hut three years ago [0]. My page is https://sr.ht/~bayindirh/

You can also self-host a Forgejo instance on a €3/mo Hetzner instance (or a free Oracle Cloud server) if you want. I prefer Hetzner for their service quality and server performance.

[0]: https://blog.bayindirh.io/blog/moving-to-source-hut/
by kookamamie | 2025-05-21 12:05:49+00:00
Many here don't seem to get it.

The AI agent/programmer corpo push is not about the capabilities and whether they match human or not. It's about being able to externalize a majority of one's workforce without having a lot of people on permanent payroll.

Think in terms of an infinitely scalable bunch of consultants you can hire and dismiss at your will - they never argue against your "vision", either.
by mjburgess | 2025-05-21 12:06:06+00:00
The relevant scale is the number of hard constraints on the solution code, not the size of task as measured by "hours it would take the median programmer to write".

So eg., one line of code which needed to handle dozens of hard-constraints on the system (eg., using a specific class, method, with a specific device, specific memory management, etc.) will very rarely be output correctly by an LLM.

Likewise "blank-page, vibe coding" can be very fast if "make me X" has only functional/soft-constraints on the code itself.

"Gigawatt LLMs" have brute-forced there way to having a statistical system capable of usefully, if not universally, adhreading to one or two hard constraints. I'd imagine the dozen or so common in any existing application is well beyond a Terawatt range of training and inference cost.
by appreciatorBus | 2025-05-21 12:06:45+00:00
How do you get rid of a human emotion?

You can get rid of money and have communism if you want and guarantee that all have what they need. But somewhere beyond need there is want, and the line is awfully fuzzy.

You can have a barter society if you want, where people trade pineapples for shoes, but you are always going to have people who want more shoes or more pineapples than what others have.
by 90s_dev | 2025-05-21 12:07:50+00:00
Hi, I'm the guy who wrote this proposal.

tl;dr:

My proposal transforms <foo bar={qux}>bla</foo> into { [Symbol.for('jsx')]: 'foo', bar: qux, children: "bla" }

It's self-contained, generic, doesn't rely on imports or globals, and avoids tag key collisions. It's the only way I can imagine it ever being standardized.

I currently use JSX for:

* Creating custom GUI view objects in https://90s.dev/os/

* Using JSX as a convenient & composable string-builder in Node.js via https://immaculata.dev/ when generating all my sites at build-time e.g. https://github.com/sdegutis/immaculata.dev/blob/main/site/te...

* Using JSX to generate plain DOM objects in the browser in some of my sites like https://github.com/sdegutis/minigamemaker.com/blob/main/site...
by fakedang | 2025-05-21 12:09:01+00:00
Command economies hell-bent on economic dominance are not going to engage. The only way to limit Chinese super production is to either block their goods outright or to subsidize your own to out-price theirs locally.

A lot of people don't understand the CCP mentality clearly. China was once the epicenter of human production, making things the rest of the world desired, from Chinaware to silk to tea. The rest of the world fought wars and crossed oceans to obtain exclusive rights to those goods, while the Chinese dynasties simply sat on their thrones and levied tributes from every farflung nation. The CCP wants to return China to THAT level of dominance, this time with tech, electronics and an addiction to rare raw materials.
by southernplaces7 | 2025-05-21 12:09:24+00:00
>we haven't really begun to explore optimisation possibilities.

So you're questioning the above comment's argument based on a hand-wavy claim about completely speculative future possibilities?

As it stands, there's no disagreeing with the human brain's energy efficiency for all the computing it does in so many ways that AI can't even begin to match. This to not even speak of the whole unknown territory of whatever it is that gives us consciousness.
by softwaredoug | 2025-05-21 12:09:51+00:00
I’m all for AI “writing” large swaths of code, vibe coding, etc.

But I think it’s better for everyone if human ownership is central to the process. Like I vibe coded it. I will fix it if it breaks. I am on call for it at 3AM.

And don’t even get started on the safety issues if you don’t have clear human responsibility. The history of engineering disasters is riddled with unclear lines of responsibility.
by turtleyacht | 2025-05-21 12:10:11+00:00
> finest keyboard in the world, ever, is the IBM Model M

> modern equivalent to the buckling-spring genius of the Model M may be the Cherry Blue

Unicomp manufactures buckling spring keyboards; their latest is the Mini M:

https://www.pckeyboard.com/page/product/MINI_M

Home page: https://www.pckeyboard.com/page/category/UKBD
by intothemild | 2025-05-21 12:10:15+00:00
Aussie in Norway, and have been part of a founding team here, as well as lead teams in companies you've definitely heard of.

I think the OP on X gets it right. It for sure is a marketing problem. The media machine in Europe is most likely fractured by languages. So take Norway. Sure we have our fair share of tech blogs/news/etc. but all are in Norwegian. Which cool for the local market, but outside that it's not the language that others are speaking. Where as the US publish in their native language, which so happens to be something most people speak globally.

I'm not suggesting that the local tech journalism is doing it wrong. But what is lacking is some kind of large European tech journalism, or heck even all the smaller ones writing about each other's cool new startups.
by Cthulhu_ | 2025-05-21 12:10:19+00:00
It's a waste of time tbh; fixing the checks may require the author to rethink or rewrite their entire solution, which means your review no longer applies.

Let them finish a pull request before spending time reviewing it. That said, a merge request needs to have an issue written before it's picked up, so that the author does not spend time on a solution before the problem is understood. That's idealism though.
by gambiting | 2025-05-21 12:11:05+00:00
So I've been trying to think of a reply to you that isn't personal.....so I'll use my own son as an example.

If I used this project to tell my son stories, I would be worried that all of it is ultimately disposable. He might remember a story he liked years later but it won't exist unless I saved the PDF. It doesn't have an author that you might look up and see their other works There's no one behind it. You might think this is worthless, especially for a child as young as 3, but I assure you it's not.

It is, like someone else called it - ghastly. It's an echo of what actual kids stories are.
by philjohn | 2025-05-21 12:11:09+00:00
I mean, it's a bit more than a contactor and an RCD, it also has PEN fault detection because TN-C-S is how most of us are wired up to the grid.

Then for use with smart tariffs like IOG there's a microcontroller, cloud gateway for them to hook into for OCCP to turn on and off the charger when the grid is cheapest/greenest etc.

So £600 is about right, once you add in R&D, certification, profit margin, warranty claim % etc.
by strogonoff | 2025-05-21 12:11:13+00:00
> Your claim that a hammer manufacturer's "pay us for every nail" model is not a suitable metaphor for the apple's "pay us for every dollar" payment

Great job at goalpost moving (and putting words in my mouth).

No amount of mental gymnastics will turn your hammer into a sophisticated device that gains new features after you buy it, so powerful that it can be used by ill-intentioned people to compromise entire livelihoods of hundreds of thousands of customers if it’s not patched in a timely manner after they bought it. All of them expect this ongoing service, and many of them do not pay a cent for it, never using any paid apps or in-app purchases.

However, I’m repeating myself.

TL;DR: The reason your business model works for a hammer is because it is a damn hammer. Come back with a better analogy, reply to my points in the comment upthread, and start finally making sense—or, to quote the comment whom you are so hell-bent on defending, “get outta here”. The overhwelming majority of people worldwide use Android; go join their ranks and be happy.
by fabian2k | 2025-05-21 12:11:17+00:00
My impression is also that they are worse at C# than some other languages. In autocomplete mode in particular it is very easy to cause the AI tools to write terrible async code. If you start some autocomplete but didn't put an await in front, it will always do something stupid as it can't add the await itself at that position. But also in other cases I've seen Copilot write just terrible async code.
by Quarrelsome | 2025-05-21 12:11:32+00:00
rah, we might be in trouble here. The primary issue at play is that we don't have a reliable means of measuring developer performance, outside of subjective judgement like end of year reviews.

This means its probably quite hard to measure the gain or the drag of using these agents. On one side, its a lot cheaper than a junior, but on the other side it pulls time from seniors and doesn't necessarily follow instruction well (i.e. "errr your new tests are failing").

This combined with the "cult of the CEO" sets the stage for organisational dissonance where developer complaints can be dismissed as "not wanting to be replaced" and the benefits can be overstated. There will be ways of measuring this, to project it as huge net benefit (which the cult of the CEO will leap upon) and there will be ways of measuring this to project it as a net loss (rabble rousing developers). All because there is no industry standard measure accepted by both parts of the org that can be pointed at which yields the actual truth (whatever that may be).

If I might add absurd conjecture: We might see interesting knock-on effects like orgs demanding a lowering of review standards in order to get more AI PRs into the source.
by sgarland | 2025-05-21 12:12:02+00:00
> I've seen plenty of works rejected because "why train a small model when you can just tune a large one?" or "does this scale?" I'd also argue that this is important because there's not infinite data nor compute.

Welcome to cloud world, where devs believe that compute is in fact infinite, so why bother profiling and improving your code? You can just request more cores and memory, and the magic K8s box will dutifully spawn more instances for you.