MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by seba_dos1 | 2025-05-20 22:51:30+00:00
I literally copied "Math is a language." from your quote that started this subthread. Nobody here has typed "Math is language" - except you. Just open https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43873113, press CTRL+F and see for yourself. I can't fathom how can you still deny being so obviously wrong.
by mvanveen | 2025-05-20 22:51:37+00:00
I thought it was funny they spent so much time bashing choice of distro and highlighting various performance considerations only to pick Alpine?

Alpine linux uses musl as its libc, which contrary to the articles' claims (unless I'm missing new information?) can have severe performance implications in many production settings.

update: I found this April 2025 blog post where someone performed some benchmarks and found that musl runtime performance is still pretty far behind glibc: https://edu.chainguard.dev/chainguard/chainguard-images/abou...
by jaredklewis | 2025-05-20 22:52:22+00:00
I guess I would agree if there were no resource constraints, money supply increase wouldn't be inflationary, except I think there are resource constraints.

US is basically at full employment. Labor is a very constrained resource and quite inelastic (for example, it takes ~30 years to grow and train a new doctor). Housing supply in the US is increasing, but the timelines here are glacial. I don't see how increasing the money supply won't increases wages and land values. And labor and land pretty much feed into the costs of everything else.

Sure, a few things which are mostly imported or automated (t-shirts, some commodities, etc...) might be relatively stable in price, but the bulk of household budgets isn't t-shirts. It's stuff like housing and services (healthcare, education, etc...); if wages and land prices go up, housing and services get more expensive.
by lamp_book | 2025-05-20 22:52:22+00:00
Nobody will watch anyone's "creations". The TV or whatever device watch on will observe what you and everyone else engage with and how you interact with it and create content for you on the fly, just like Instagram and TikTok's feeds do now.

AI creatives can enjoy the brief blip in time where they might get someone else to watch what they've created before their skills become obsolete in an exponentially faster rate just like everyone else's.
by mynameisash | 2025-05-20 22:52:23+00:00
I've heard so much praise for The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, but why, I'll never know. I bought it after hearing someone rave about it, and I'll be damned if I didn't hate every page of the book. It felt like a rebuff to The Design of Everyday Things.

The former is currently sitting in my car, and I'll be trying to offload it to someone who actually wants it.
by ivape | 2025-05-20 22:53:32+00:00
The easiest way to get it is to show all your failed classes and exams. Anything else is not really enough proof honestly, as that's the most direct evidence that the illness is directly impacting school.

When an adult asks for it, it's a lot more serious. They simply can't do their job without it which affects their livelihood. Not being able to pay the bills is serious business.

Legitimate reasons:

- Failing School

- About to get fired/Can't get hired

Illegitimate reasons:

- I deserve better grades (for children/parents)

- I deserve better jobs and money (for adults)

- I deserve to instantly develop work/study habits (everyone)

It's a very desperate medication to seek. Unfortunately, amphetamine derivatives are the first line of defense against this illness and that's a very serious type of drug. It scares me children are given drugs of the stimulant variety.
by 0xBDB | 2025-05-20 22:53:46+00:00
> Let's see which tech stack and which customer support organization survives the merger, respectively...

I have no inside experience of either company, but I have been through a lot of large financial industry mergers and I know what's public about this one.

I'd bet heavily that it'll be some of both, but tech especially will be Capital One. Because it's larger, because it's the acquirer, and maybe above all because it's newer - a younger company with a younger tech stack that's known to be entirely cloud based.
by sokoloff | 2025-05-20 22:54:04+00:00
Why would "primary benefactor" be the most relevant question rather than mere "benefactor"? If my life is improved by something, I don't care that someone else's life is improved by more; I don't want to reject that improvement out of spite, jealousy, or envy.

Bankers (and customers) benefited from ATMs as far more bank locations became economically sustainable and bank tellers could do higher value work (and do so more safely).

Millions of software developers continue to benefit from improvements in productivity, the resulting value creation, and the resulting high pay in our sector from ever more productive languages and frameworks. Can you imagine how little pay you'd make trying to sling websites in assembly language at less than 1% of the pace of today?
by ChocolateGod | 2025-05-20 22:54:28+00:00
Google has poured millions of $ and 100s of developers into the development of V8 to get every last inch of speed and optimisation. As far as comparing it to AOT/non-GC languages of course it will always be slower, but I would struggle to believe it's slower than PHP other than in specific situations.

Just one benchmark I could find https://benchmarksgame-team.pages.debian.net/benchmarksgame/...
by nixosbestos | 2025-05-20 22:54:56+00:00
Nah. My possessions fit into three boxes. I buy the same shampoo and conditioner and bar soap I've bought for over a decade. I don't buy things and when I do I research them for hours before buying. It is actually possible to exit the consumerism treadmill.

I mean I bought a keychain last year that I put on my backpack, and the vendor had it out on a table. I guess that counts but that's basically the only impulse buy I've made in the last two years.

> So if advertising doesn't change your wants and desires then the problem is you aren't noticing how unhygienic your mind is getting

I genuinely don't understand what this means.
by floxy | 2025-05-20 22:54:58+00:00
>This doesn't seem true.

Seems like we are way too early in the adoption curve to tell. Currently the average number of passengers per trip is >1.0 across the whole fleet. Some day, I'd expect that to dip below 1.0, as people send an empty car to pick up the dog from the vet, or circle the block to avoid having to pay for parking, etc.
by ijk | 2025-05-20 22:55:14+00:00
Which was part of the rationale for supporting Ukraine: the best way to build up a manufacturing base is if you have customers, and so supplying munitions to Ukraine was a win/win/win from the military's point of view: Ukraine gets ammo, the US gets to ramp up domestic military production with, effectively, someone else paying the bill. (Granted, some of that was US funds, so the 'someone else' was often another part of the US government, but the point stands in terms of manufacturing capacity.)

While there are shortages in some areas, I'm not aware of any reports of across-the-board procurement issues. In 2023 there was a shortage of 155mm artillery shells (at a production rate of ~8000/month), but no shortage of small arms ammo, APCs, or tactical vehicles [1]. By February 2025 the US was "manufacturing 30,000 155mm rounds per month" and "the Army is now “on a path” to producing 70,000 to 80,000 rounds per month by the end of 2024 or early 2025" [2].

That might not be enough to sustain a conflict with China if it started today, but it does demonstrate that the US is perfectly capable of scaling up domestic arms manufacturing if they choose to invest in it.

[1] https://www.csis.org/analysis/rebuilding-us-inventories-six-...

[2] https://www.nationaldefensemagazine.org/articles/2024/9/11/a...
by jazzyjackson | 2025-05-20 22:55:32+00:00
Well, right, how does one become a senior engineer in a world where no one needs to hire a junior? I'm sure many other industries have experiences this already, where the only people who know anything retire and the people are left maintaining a system they could not rebuild such that when something goes wrong the only practicable choice is to replace it with new equipment.

That's where I see AI-written software going, write-once. Some talented engineer gets an AI system to create a whole k8s cluster to run an application and if any changes need to be made, bugs fixed, it will take another talented engineer to come in and have an AI write a replacement and throw out the old one.

Reminds me of this blog, The real value isn’t in the code [0], we're heading for a world that is only code and no one who knows what it does. But maybe it won't matter.

[0] https://jonayre.uk/blog/2022/10/30/the-real-value-isnt-in-th...
by vidarh | 2025-05-20 22:56:13+00:00
There's a wildly out of data repo here[1] that I badly need to push updates to, and with the caveat odds are there are lots of missing pieces that'll make you struggle to get it working on your system. I wouldn't recommend it - I dumped in Github mostly mostly because why not rather than for people to actually use.

Difficulties will include e.g. helper scripts executed to do things like stripping buffers, a dependency on rofi when you try to open files, and a number of other things that works great on my machine and not so well elsewhere.

I have about 2-3 years worth of updates and cleanups I should get around to pushing to Github that does include some attempts to make it slightly easier for other people to run.

The two things I think are nice and worth picking up on is the use of DrB to get client-server, which means the editor is "multi window" simply by virtue of spawning new separate instance of itself. It's then multi-pane/frame by relying on me running a tiling wm, so splitting the buffer horizontally and vertically is "just" a matter of a tiny helper script ensuring the window opens below/to the right of the current window respectively.

But some other things, like the syntax highlighting (using Rouge) is in need of a number of bugfixes and cleanups; I keep meaning to modify the server to keep metadata about the lines and pull the syntax highlighting out so it runs in a separate process, talking directly to the server, for example.

[1] https://github.com/vidarh/re
by bigmadshoe | 2025-05-20 22:56:19+00:00
I'm curious why you decide to declare victory after one successful attempt, but try many times for unsuccessful models. Are you trying to measure whether a model _can_ get it right, or whether it frequently _does_ get it right? I feel like success rate is a better metric here, or at least a fixed number of trials with some success rate threshold to determine model success.
by lurking_swe | 2025-05-20 22:57:09+00:00
i have not worked a government job. My father did, in civil engineering in NYC.

In his discipline at least, the government _certainly__ found the money to maintain critical infrastructure. Bridges were routinely painted. Inspected for cracks. The works.

When NYC’s aging water tunnels (providing tap water from upstate NY) were in major disrepair and engineers warned of the damage, guess what happened? They got the funding to build a replacement bypass tunnel to ensure NYC was not impacted. A multi-decade project scheduled to be completed very shortly. They planned ahead. They didn’t ignore the issue and then pretend they couldn’t have predicted this would happen (lol).

From what I can tell, the ONLY reason the same care isn’t given to our IT systems is because the decision makers in charge don’t care. Am i wrong?

I agree that reality is not simple. It’s unfortunate. :(
by xorcist | 2025-05-20 22:57:18+00:00
These types of statements are hard to take seriously. Those tools are remarkably good for what they are, and the fact that they can help me understand texts in foreign languages is amazing. But indistinguishable from a professional native translator (which I take it you mean, being a language native is not enough to be a translator) is something else entirely.

If you really believe that, why not recruit a professional, do a blinded study, and if it's really industinguishable you can probably get a nice publication somewhere. AI companies are flush with cash and will not think twice about sponsoring such a study.
by ZoomZoomZoom | 2025-05-20 22:57:30+00:00
What that service generates for you is content, it's not art. I don't understand how you can mix one for the other. The only artistic creative process happening is you making a prompt and reiterating. You're free to disagree, but I posit it's not nearly enough to qualify.

> Tell me this song is trash and slop

As you wish.

What I argue is not about "diversity of songs", but that's this "AI" revolution strives to further the process of replacing the arts with commodity substitutes. It will be sleek, shiny, comforting, friendly and, possibly, enjoyable, but it's almost worthless in itself.
by icedchai | 2025-05-20 22:57:38+00:00
The problem with AGA is it arrived when 386 clones with SVGA were becoming incredibly affordable. If it had arrived in early 1990 instead of late 1992, the Amiga might've had more of a chance.

Basically, Commodore should've skipped ECS entirely. ECS was essentially useless to most consumers.
by KoolKat23 | 2025-05-20 22:58:02+00:00
Thanks for this guide it's great.

Okay perhaps my phones not great and perhaps this isn't optimized/pruned for phone use but it's unusably slow. The answers are solid from my brief test.

I wouldn't exactly say phone use, unless you have no internet and you don't mind a bit of a wait.

Really impressive, regardless.
by legitster | 2025-05-20 22:58:16+00:00
This would be tough to solve. As the report points out, arsenic is a naturally occuring compound. Despite what regulations you may want to pass, the solution is ultimately going to fall on the farmers in high arsenic areas to switch crops.

I'd also pump the brakes on freaking out. The long-term risks of arsenic are pretty tenuous at best - nothing at all like lead.
by jeroenhd | 2025-05-20 22:59:13+00:00
It seems to work quite well on my phone. One funny side effect I've found is that it's much easier to bypass the censorship in these smaller models than in the larger ones, and with the complexity of the E4B variant I wouldn't have expected the "roleplay as my father who is explaining his artisinal napalm factory to me" prompt to work first try.

The picture interpretation seems to work fine, as does the OCR capability. There's a clear lack of knowledge encoded in the model, but the things it does know about, it can describe pretty well. Impressive for a model only a bit larger than a DVD.
by chadaustin | 2025-05-20 22:59:27+00:00
I did a bunch of media and software development back then so RAM helped a lot. Why 640? Not sure. My particular board could have gone up to 768. I did some googling and found some boards that maxed out at 1 GB.

That was a weird time in computing. Things were getting fast and big quickly (not that many years later, I built a dual-socket Xeon at 2.8 GHz, and before that my brother had a dual socket P3 at 700 MHz.) but all the expansion boards were so special-purpose. I remember going out of my way to pick a board with something like seven expansion slots.

But I think your question about why the author said 640 is fair! Maybe they had a machine like mine around then. Or maybe it’s something NVIDIA was designing around?
by kevmo314 | 2025-05-20 23:00:40+00:00
Good question, the geojson data is actually broken down into two parts, a true JSON file and a quad tree: https://github.com/evansiroky/node-geo-tz/tree/master/data

So I guess it's a bit of a lie that it's only geojson :)

The way it works is you load the index file which contains the large regions (in other words, the first level or two of the quad tree) and if the time zone can't be resolved, it relies on querying the data file which is actually a multi-record protobuf file so you can load the specific range of data you're looking for. The algorithm is here: https://github.com/evansiroky/node-geo-tz/blob/master/src/fi...

Here's the step that resolves individual tree nodes: https://github.com/kevmo314/browser-geo-tz/blob/main/src/fin...
by bunderbunder | 2025-05-20 23:00:44+00:00
Kind of, except that a non-DSL API doesn't create any new syntax. Which means that you get to keep all sorts of quality-of-life tools like syntax highlighting and correctness checking in the editor, autoformatting, possibly some amount of linting, etc.

A few years ago I revisited Racket after a long hiatus, and that was maybe the biggest thing I noticed. I really don't like syntax macros as much as I did back in the day. Once I decide to use `define-syntax` I've then got to decide whether I also want to wade into dealing with also implementing a syntax colorer or an indenter as part of my #lang. And if I do decide to do that, then I've got a bunch more work, and am also probably committing to working in DrRacket (otherwise I'd rather stay in emacs) because that's the only editor that supports those features, and it just turns into a whole quagmire.

And it's arguably even worse outside of Racket, where I might have to implement a whole language server and editor plugin to accomplish the same.

Versus, if I can do what I need to do with a reasonably tidy API, then I can get those quality of life things without all the extra maintenance burden.

None of this was a big deal 20 years ago. My expectations were different back then, because I hadn't been spoiled by things like the language server protocol and everyone (finally) agreeing that autoformatting is a Good Thing.
by xp84 | 2025-05-20 23:02:25+00:00
> until the day it starts teaching artistry to its users.

It almost definitely can start teaching artistry to its users, and the same people who are mad in this thread will be mad that it's taking away jobs from art instructors.

The central problem is the same and it's what Marshall Brain predicted: If AI ushers in a world without scarcity of labor of all kinds, we're going to have to find a fundamentally new paradigm to allocate resources in a reasonably fair way because otherwise the world will just be like 6 billionaire tech executives, Donald Trump, and 8 billion impoverished unemployed paupers.

And no, "just stop doing AI" isn't an option, any more than "stop having nuclear weapons exist" was. Either we solve the problems, or a less scrupulous actor will be the only ones with the powerful AI, and they'll deploy it against us.
by dragonwriter | 2025-05-20 23:02:36+00:00
> Still. "White guy writing about banal stuff must be white privilege/resentment" is a real stretch to apply to the comic during its prime.

The origin story being resentment over his perception his career was not advancing because of women and minorities isn't an inference from the fact that he is white, it's based on his own description of the reasons for his dissatisfaction with his career before becoming a full-time comic artist (and not descriptions which first emerged in the 2010s or later, though I think the his description of his final exit from Pacific Bell as "being fired for being white" was a later evolution, but his story of his perception that he was passed over for higher management at Crocker National Bank where he was already in management and, and passed over for any management opportunity at Pacific Bell, because of a preference for women and minorities came out much earlier.)
by godelski | 2025-05-20 23:03:08+00:00
Much of this already exists. But if you're expecting identical performance as the giant models, well that's a moving goalpost.

The paper I linked explicitly mentions how Falcon 180B is outperformed by Llama-3 8B. You can find plenty of similar cases all over the lmarena leader board. This year's small model is better than last year's big model. But the Overton Window shifts. GPT3 was going to replace everyone. Then 3.5 came out at GPT 3 is shit. Then o1 came out and 3.5 is garbage.

What is "good accuracy" is not a fixed metric. If you want to move this to the domain of classification, detection, and segmentation, the same applies. I've had multiple papers rejected where our model with <10% of the parameters of a large model matches performance (obviously this is much faster too).

But yeah, there are diminishing returns with scale. And I suspect you're right that these small models will become more popular when those limits hit harder. But I think one of the critical things that prevents us from progressing faster is that we evaluate research as if they are products. Methods that work for classification very likely work for detection, segmentation, and even generation. But this won't always be tested because frankly, the people usually working on model efficiency have far fewer computational resources themselves. Necessitating that they run fewer experiments. This is fine if you're not evaluating a product, but you end up reinventing techniques when you are.
by yapyap | 2025-05-20 23:03:32+00:00
I imagine the OPs article is pointed at people more novice to the world of computers and his approach of bits while not perfect is good enough, better than confusing the reader IMO. While this would probably be useful for people more deeply already into the world of computers, I doubt the people who get what you are talking about would need a reminder of what’s on their disks. It’s handy to keep in mind who is being written for.
by kllrnohj | 2025-05-20 23:03:38+00:00
> GPUs will keep getting cheaper. [...] but 2025-level performance, at least, shouldn't get more expensive.

This generation of GPUs have worse performance for more $$$ than the previous generation. At best $/perf has been a flat line for the past few generations. Given what fab realities are nowadays, along with what works best for GPUs (the bigger the die the better), it doesn't seem likely that there will be any price scaling in the near future. Not unless there's some drastic change in fabrication prices from something
by 90s_dev | 2025-05-20 23:04:55+00:00
No, an API uses existing rules, but a DSL uses its own ad hoc rules.

GP is right. Don't make DSLs, make APIs, which are:

* More composable

* More reusable

* More simple to reason about

* More natively supported

* More portable

* More readable

* More maintainable
by nativeit | 2025-05-20 23:07:28+00:00
Extreme wealth is immoral. It's very strange that isn't self evident, even to a lot of direct victims of it. Such concentration of resources, beyond the capacity of any individual to manage productively, or even effectively, is impossible to justify. An economic policy that allows it is destined to fail, as such accumulation of wealth cannot be sustained, especially when so much of it ceases productive circulation as a result. Even at small percentages, the effects are cumulative and start stacking up quickly--an acceleration that is easy to see in the graphs tracking wealth distribution over the last few hundred years.
by jackphilson | 2025-05-20 23:08:30+00:00
I think the result of an art piece is "wow that looks pretty cool / makes me feel this certain way". Human properties aren't required there. Sure, some art rests on there being human properties, but then AI wouldn't be able to replace it by definition. You can argue that AI lowers the discoverability of art that falls in the latter category, but I'd say that it's a solvable problem that can be fixed with better recommendation algorithms.
by bigstrat2003 | 2025-05-20 23:10:44+00:00
> It is interesting that, despite being so awful, the Nazis let people write these last letters. I wonder how this tiny bit of humanity survived.

No person is completely evil, nor completely good. Even Nazis could be capable of kindness amidst the cruelty (Hitler was famously kind to his dogs, for example). Those bits of good don't wipe out the bad, but vice versa the bad doesn't mean the good wasn't a real part of them either. People are just complicated and hard to judge with complete accuracy.