MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Terr_ | 2025-05-15 17:29:00+00:00
It sounds to me like this is less about the math itself and more about the institutions that have to exist in order for that math to be useful.

Kind of like how even the magically un-counterfeitable and un-stealable cash is of limited use when the town is lawless, full of banks/vendors that are fraudulent impersonators or run by embezzlers.

You're safe from being mugged, but good luck getting your money back when you return the next day for a withdrawal/refund and the other side refuses or has fled town.
by ralferoo | 2025-05-15 17:29:40+00:00
We have those even at supermarkets in the UK. "Would you like to round up your £1.10 shop and donate 90p to our nominated charity?" and similar gets really irritating after a while.

I think the solution is to legislate that any tips solicited this way for third parties need to have the company match your tip.

For the US situation, it's totally down to the stupid way that minimum wage is defined, where tips are counted towards the minimum wage. In the UK, there's a reasonably generous minimum wage (£12.21 per hour for age 21+) from the employer, and tips would be on top of that minus appropriate taxes.
by soraminazuki | 2025-05-15 17:29:41+00:00
I'm speaking from direct experience over the past few years, from my home, work, and outside with a phone. Do you actually browse GitHub anonymously, or are you reflexively shifting blame?

If you need more proof, this is last year:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39322838

And this is another year before that:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36254129

Oh look, there's even visual proof in the discussion:

https://imgur.com/a/github-search-gated-behind-login-BT6uRIe
by yodsanklai | 2025-05-15 17:30:43+00:00
Cars are slow but you're less likely to get mugged (unlike pedestrians) or hit by cars (unlike cyclists). Also, bikes get stolen. These things happen rarely, but in the long run, the risk isn't negligible.

I avoid cars as much as I can and commute by bike in my European city. I used to live in NYC: I've been mugged there, and I've seen cyclists injured by cars. I don't want to cycle there and I do take cabs in the evenings or nights.

TLDR; speed isn't the only factor
by immibis | 2025-05-15 17:31:03+00:00
Incidentally, biometric scans can also go in password managers. Turns out it's all just bits. Who knew?

The best you can do is attestation. Embed a certificate and private key in the TPM that says it's a real genuine FooBarCorp TPM, and sign all responses with that private key. This is terrible for the open ecosystem. It's also the only way to do the thing everyone sells their product on being able to do, so if it's allowed, then it's inevitable.
by thenthenthen | 2025-05-15 17:31:06+00:00
I just got a second hand M1 Air, upgrading from 10 year old MacbookPro… wow. The animations on the new MacOS are slow as hell tho. Any way to speed them up? On iOS is it a breeze (no jailbreak): https://cowabun.ga/ (Choose: CowabungaLite)
by teruakohatu | 2025-05-15 17:31:13+00:00
> massive amounts of electricity and water ... we need to succeed on all fronts

Datacenters' used for training or batch jobs can be placed in places where water and power are plentiful, ambient temperature are relatively low and government/society are stable.

A datacenter is going to be built at the bottom of New Zealand where all these things are true. There must be plenty of places in the world where this holds true.

At least for training, I think it is possible to have our cake and eat it. For real-time inference, probably not.
by vlovich123 | 2025-05-15 17:31:30+00:00
> Obviously, this doesn't matter when you have 5 fans, but in general, you want to push your restrictions as deeply into the query as possible from an optimization standpoint.

Depends where the database lives. If it's an in-process SQLite DB instance, there's no difference & doing this in code is easier to understand than more complicated SQL queries (of course not necessarily in this case but in general). But in all other cases you are correct about efficiency in general (although again other effects can dominate & make it irrelevant).
by roywiggins | 2025-05-15 17:31:39+00:00
Okay, but there is some reason why you personally are still spending electrons posting on the internet and not, presumably, entertaining yourself by rolling coal, and it's probably because the amount of energy you're using to browse and post on HN seems trivial to you. Does the energy use differential between Python and C++ seem important enough to always pick C++ for everything?

What I'm saying is that casual LLM use is also essentially trivial, and scolding people for using querying ChatGPT when you wouldn't scold people for, say, making a dozen Google searches or watching a Netflix show or taking a long shower or driving to the mall, is quite silly and a waste of time.

Similarly, there's a reason why doctors will tell you to worry more about your cigarette habit than almost any other bad habits you have, because it's so much more likely to kill you that it practically demands to be prioritized.
by BizarroLand | 2025-05-15 17:31:50+00:00
That's why the term "Garbage In, Garbage Out" exists.

In any non-edge case (that is, where the system is operating in ideal conditions and no flaw or bug, known or unknown, exists in the system), a verifiably functioning computer will produce the exact same results for any process every time.

If the computer does not do what you expected it to do and spits out garbage, then you gave it garbage data.
Show HN: Resursive URL/News site to learn the backstory on any article
by nextcept | 2025-05-15 17:31:54+00:00
Like most people I assume, I've been annoyed at news for a while. I really just want to learn about what's happening and then be able to easily go deeper down the rabbit hole if I want.

Boulder's startup week has a hackathon going on right now, so this is my entry to try and make it happen. I'd been wanting to build a purely AI app for awhile, that doesn't support free form inputs (yes, I know...), and this one seemed intriguing with it's recursive design. It took me a little longer than I thought to get the articles right, but I think it works pretty well.

The first two paragraphs offer just a quick summary of the article (a user could link back too). But then, the next paragraph will explain the background concept, then the next will be more of a historical/scientific origin, then finally a deeper foundational level. It seems like the assumption should be that for the initially scanned URL, the user has probably already read it so no real need to rehash the whole thing. Then, for each story/article, it will generate 3 "Backstories". These will then be full deep educational articles that explain a full concept. Each of these 3 backstories will have a level too. So the first will have some immediate context to its parent story. The next will have a foundational perspective. The final will be origins/next steps. Then each of these "stories" will be recursive and allow a user to drill as deep as they want to go.

Scrapping all different formats of sites was trickier than I'd thought - Jina, puppeteer, perplexity, playwright, all couldn't quite get there especially with more complex views. The methods I ended up using were more involved so now I've had to introduce a credit system - we'll see how that goes.

Anyway, if anyone wants to check it out - let me know what you think. In my own testing, it seems fairly solid, but this was built pretty quickly.
by beedeebeedee | 2025-05-15 17:31:55+00:00
That is not accurate. There were many strikes in the industrial part of the US during the 1800's. That's how working conditions were improved in the mills. The free market would have crushed the working people had they not banded together and revolted to improve safety, reduce working hours, and increase pay.

Wikipedia has articles on the larger actions like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1835_Philadelphia_general_stri...

The rest of the US was primarily agricultural, and did not have major strikes until later, but the improvement in the lives of those people who lived there was not because of free markets. Their lives improved because of the immense natural resources that were literally being given away free to people to cultivate and exploit, after the Native Americans were subjugated and removed.
by tonymet | 2025-05-15 17:32:13+00:00
I love this idea and any tool that reduces context switching out of the terminal (e.g. devdocs, fabric, tldr)

1. It may push the design boundaries, but a basic full text index with sqlite would be doable with the web interface. go-doc CLI does the same with the web UI. all indexing is client-side . The bug corpus is very small so indexing should be fast and consistent.

2. Tagging bugs with the observed and resolved git commit ID. that would improve bisect, merge, release management and changelog publication.
by munificent | 2025-05-15 17:32:13+00:00
"This kind of efficiency problem is something that looks ripe for multi-threading, but the main problem I had here is that all the world state of the game is held on the main thread and in complicated structures"

Crazy idea but I wonder if it would be worth it to have the pathfinding thread simply have its entire own copy of the mutable world state. Then when anything changes the world, both copies are updated roughly in parallel.

It would be a ton of duplicate work, but if you're on a machine with cores sitting there doing nothing... why not?
by burningChrome | 2025-05-15 17:32:26+00:00
This goes way back further then Musk. I remember working at a large corporation in early 2000 before the first dot com crash that had severe meeting issues. At one point, I was having two or three hour long meetings during the week on what another meeting later in the week was supposed to cover.

The CEO of the company got caught fooling around with a co-worker and abruptly resigned. The new CEO came in and found out what a mess meetings had become and issued the same proclamation - if a meeting isn't productive and produce some actionable items, then it shouldn't be scheduled. If you're not 100% required in a meeting, don't go. If you're in a meeting and feel its a waste of time, then leave.

Just those simple rules got rid of half of my meetings and the several teams I was on suddenly were cranking through sprints, building some amazing apps and products and killing our delivery times. The entire company suddenly was cooking along. It was a real eye opener how you can really bog a Fortune 500 company down just by clogging people's time up with useless meetings.
by ToValueFunfetti | 2025-05-15 17:32:34+00:00
Funnily enough, that's the line that made me suspicious it was AI. I've seen that structure and that sort of metaphor many times from ChatGPT. And it's not like GPT shies away from criticizing Altman (https://chatgpt.com/share/682623aa-eac0-8000-9fa3-d039580a01...). The rest of the comment doesn't set off any alarm bells for me.
by Maxatar | 2025-05-15 17:32:35+00:00
Bank tellers do steal money from the banks they work for though and banks invest a significant amount of resources and have a lot of policies to prevent it.

For example at many banks the teller might need to get manager approval for some cash withdrawals, even for seemingly smaller amounts of money. Despite what it may seem, it's not because of some distrust towards the client but a safeguard against internal fraud.
by oldandboring | 2025-05-15 17:32:39+00:00
It's because the experience of so many parents these days is exhaustion. There just aren't enough hours in the day. In my experience it often turns out that if a fellow parent has significantly more personal time than me (for side projects, exercise, whatever) it turns out there is an unequal distribution of labor in the household. For example, a spouse who doesn't work who handles all the domestic stuff could allow the other spouse more free time. That same stay-at-home-spouse could find themselves with a lot of free time as the kids get older and require less hands-on parenting. That sort of thing.
by Tade0 | 2025-05-15 17:32:40+00:00
Nope. More like commie blocks as far as the eye can see, as it's in eastern EU.

I moved out BTW, because I figured that being able to afford at most a 1-bedroom, 55m2 apartment as a software engineer is a deal I'm not willing to take.

Real estate has been going up in price all over the world in the past decade and it doesn't matter if it's apartment blocks or detached homes.

My new place is a city 40% the size and far from there, but my friends by and large drove until they qualified. Typically less than 30km, but that's already a 1h commute by car.
by timhigins | 2025-05-15 17:32:52+00:00
> LLM could hallucinate

The job of any context retrieval system is to retrieve the relevant info for the task so the LLM doesn't hallucinate. Maybe build a benchmark based on less-known external libraries with test cases that can check the output is correct (or with a mocking layer to know that the LLM-generated code calls roughly the correct functions).
by volkk | 2025-05-15 17:33:00+00:00
correct, but what's the alternative? they're paid peanuts because it's not exactly the kind of job you ever pay out the wazoo for. the only thing that comes to mind if I'm Brian Armstrong is going all in on AI bots that can get to 90% of the way there (maybe 95%) and then have domestic based humans that are paid more with (presumably) a less probability of being bribed. but realistically, the only way to stop something like this is going 100% AI bots but then that comes at the expense of customer satisfaction, and also bots that are exploitable through prompt manipulation.

alternatively limit the roles and what the offshore people are able to do, but then any escalation means domestic people, which brings us back to "well at that point just use AI to automate easy tasks"
by natesales | 2025-05-15 17:33:35+00:00
The keys are generated on the CPU and never leave the enclave, but the data is decrypted on the CPU so it hits the registers in plaintext.

When the enclave starts, the CPU does a few things:

1. The CPU does a key exchange with the GPU (in confidential compute mode [1]) to derive a key to encrypt data over PCIe

2. The CPU verifies the integrity of the GPU against NVIDIA's root of trust [2]

[1] https://developer.nvidia.com/blog/confidential-computing-on-...

[2] https://github.com/tinfoilsh/cvmimage/blob/b65ced8796e8a8687...

edit: formatting
by nlh | 2025-05-15 17:33:39+00:00
Great question - similarly, I've seen posts recently (Fly.io's comes to mind) where people are talking about how "swarms of AI agents are using our service".

I'd love to learn more about what that actually means - does that mean tool usage from LLMs? Cursor agentic mode? Command-line hints for how to do a deploy?

We're entering an era where PR/the press is talking a lot about "AI agents" and I'm not sure that fully matches with the reality of what's going on out there en masse (at the moment).
by cgriswald | 2025-05-15 17:33:41+00:00
There are opportunity costs to consider along with relevance. Suppose you are staying at my place. Are you going to read the manual for my espresso machine in total or are you going to ask me to show you how to use it or make one for you?

In any case, LLMs are not magical forgetfulness machines.

You can use a calculator to avoid learning arithmetic but using a calculator doesn’t necessitate failing to learn arithmetic.

You can ask a question of a professor or fellow student, but failing to read the textbook to answer that question doesn’t necessitate failing to develop a mental model or incorporate the answer into an existing one.

You can ask an LLM a question and blindly use its answer but using an LLM doesn’t necessitate failing to learn.
by vidarh | 2025-05-15 17:34:05+00:00
My view of vegan food has been shaped by occasionally suffering it (ok, so I' exaggerating with the "suffering")

Heck, my breakfeast at the moment is vegan, because I'm on a diet and cutting real milk out of it let me drop a few more calories, not because I find it more enjoyable, because I very much detest the milk substitute. But cutting a few more calories makes it easier to add plenty of meat to my other meals.

It's not even that it's always bad. It's again that cost isn't going to get me to consider the vegan options unless the cost difference is absolutely brutal. Other factors might on occasion, such as diet.
by zdragnar | 2025-05-15 17:34:10+00:00
Yes, that's the challenge of centralizing economies. You aren't going to be able to do so efficiently because you don't have every person's preferences.

If by "we're going to do anything" you mean presumably fiat power to ban LLMs, then you're better off using that fiat power to just put a sin tax on carbon emissions and letting people decide where they want to cut back.
by ActorNightly | 2025-05-15 17:34:47+00:00
Long way to go Singularity. We don't even know if its possible.

Basically, singularity assumes that you can take the information about the real world "state", and compress it into some form, and predict the state change faster than reality happens. For a subset of the world, this is definitely possible. But for entire reality, it seems that there is a whole bunch of processes that are computationally irreducible, so an AI would never be able to "stay ahead" or so to to speak. There is also the thing about computational ir-reversibility - for example observing a human behavior is seeing the output of a one way hashing function of neural process in our brain that hides a lot of detail and doesn't let you predict it accurately in all cases.

Also, optimization algorithms are nothing new. Even before AI, you could run genetic algorithm or PSO on code, and given enough compute it would optimize the algorithm, including itself. The hard part that nobody has solved this is abstracting this to a low enough level to where its applicable across multiple layers that correspond to any task.

For example, let say you have a model (or rather an algorithm) that has only a single interface, and that is the ability to send ethernet packets, and it hasn't been trained on any real world data at all. If you task it with building you a website that makes money, the same algorithm that iterates over figuring out how to send IP packets then TCP packets then HTTP packets should also be able to figure out what the modern world wide web looks like and what concepts like website and money is, building its knowledge graph and searching on it and interpolating on it to figure out how to solve the problem.
by 542354234235 | 2025-05-15 17:35:05+00:00
But you have to remember every time to flip it before a meeting starts and after it ends. If you don’t then it will start being ignored because its never accurate. It also doesn’t work if you get an impromptu call or meeting you weren’t planning for. If you have a simple, predictable meeting schedule, a sign could be fine, but an automatic solution can work a lot better in other situations.
by Suppafly | 2025-05-15 17:35:17+00:00
>The article is full of special pleading for the Celts being capable of making good copies, but refraining from doing so because they didn't ever feel like it and were permanently swept up by the abstract muse.

Some of the copies require as much effort as the originals though.

>This would also explain how Apollo was mostly hair - start engraving hair, get carried away, now coin is full of hair, cram a face in the remaining space.

That's silly, you could easily start over if ran out of space.
by burningion | 2025-05-15 17:35:53+00:00
I know everyone likes to abstract away the costs associated with AI data centers.

But let's look at what has happened with Grok, for example:

From May 6, 2025

https://www.yahoo.com/news/elon-musk-xai-memphis-35-14321739...

>The company has no Clean Air Act permits.

> In just 11 months since the company arrived in Memphis, xAI has become one of Shelby County's largest emitters of smog-producing nitrogen oxides, according to calculations by environmental groups whose data has been reviewed by POLITICO's E&E News. The plant is in an area whose air is already considered unhealthy due to smog.

> The turbines spew nitrogen oxides, also known as NOx, at an estimated rate of 1,200 to 2,000 tons a year — far more than the gas-fired power plant across the street or the oil refinery down the road.

The details are in the specifics here. People are _already_ feeling the effects of the AI race, the consequences just aren't evenly distributed.

And if we look at the "clean" nuclear deals to power these data centers:

https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/us-regulators-reject...

> The Talen agreement, however, would divert large amounts of power currently supplying the regional grid, which FERC said raised concerns about how that loss of supply would affect power bills and reliability. It was also unclear how transmission and distribution upgrades would be paid for.

The scale of environmental / social impacts comes down to how aggressive the AI race gets.
by proc0 | 2025-05-15 17:36:06+00:00
Gaming is in a weird spot. I used to think everyone would be gaming by now but it seems we're still in this place where gaming is about shooting or playing arcade games with the occasional story driven AAA title.

I'm guessing despite technological advancements it's still much more difficult to make a good game than to make a good movie. Even VR did not result in wide adoption.

I'm still betting games will become the default way for consuming entertainment and a wide variety of experiences. AI does throw a wrench in this but it's only likely to accelerate this.
by electroly | 2025-05-15 17:36:10+00:00
From the point of view of an SQL engine in 2025, 100 million rows is a tiny table. You can add a surprising number of zeroes onto that figure and a single modest SQL node will handle it with no special effort. 100 billion, with a B, is not difficult on a single beefy node today. I think your points all still stand but consider refreshing the actual numbers. I personally start getting "the itch" around 10 billion (or if it looks like it's going to become 10 billion) these days. If a table gets there, I better have a plan to do something else.

I had a 200 billion row table that was operationally still manageable but, IMO, I had allowed to grow out of control. The enterprise storage costs a fortune. Should have nipped that in the bud by 20 billion at the latest.
by taurath | 2025-05-15 17:36:17+00:00
The following is less mask-on comment directed at neurodivergent people, as I'm neurodivergent and have people as a special interest, and often am in the position of helping people with social skills. I'm code switching, which is why my pattern of speech might not match other times I've commented.

In my experience, any direct help or advice on improving relationships doesn't work. Building relationships first requires one to value people and relationships, which when you're the type of person to take to computers over people, its usually for a reason: people can be jerks, they're unpredictable, and in a lot of nerds and neurodivergent people's formative years they're both wildly immature and often cruel. This can turn people off of other people as an interest for a long time, even a lifetime. Some find good outlets or the right group, and develop a sense that people are valuable, but often people are not seen as a reliable way to get needs met, or they find themselves in a very insular group that devalues other groups.

Most of the business world is run by not-nerds, by neurotypical people, who found that developing relationships would be the key to their success. This is inherently a foreign language, it has a lot of well-known downsides (hype-trains, incentives for agreeableness over depth or correctness to name a few), but like, if you can't appreciate what the role is and how its valuable, you may not be able to interface with it well. Thankfully most tech/engineering management is a hybrid of nerd and people persons - if one is so deep into their exclusive interests that they can't interface with a hybrid engineering+people specced person, its a warning sign for their ability to maintain work!