MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by raxxorraxor | 2025-05-15 18:05:53+00:00
Of course, I didn't want to say it is entirely wrong. But not every project will be some foundational core project and you won't have one without the other. Neglecting such contributions because the authors might not do it for a marketable product is likely a sub optimal HR policy which leads to sub optimal business decisions and results.

We compare the usual corporate grind or corporate experience with these contributions. It is not the whole of problems in engineering hiring, but at least something to consider. The requirement of a product is an economic necessity but not something intrinsic to good engineering. And yet I think hiring decisions would strongly benefit to have further understanding of this particular value of problem solving, even if that alone doesn't meet the requirements of a successful business.
by juhrjuhr | 2025-05-15 18:06:23+00:00
Hello!

I'm the developer of this game. Thanks very much for your interest and discussion here :)

I'm starting to feel like I didn't go into enough detail with my post, since there's a lot I could talk about and also a lot I could benchmark to give you some actual numbers on performance. But maybe I'll leave that for a different post in the future.

The game I'm developing is a commercial project, so it would be silly to be on the front page of HN and not try to direct people towards the commercial side of things. Here is the link to the game's steam page, you can wishlist and maybe buy the game when it's released so I can afford living expenses and expensive coffee beans: https://store.steampowered.com/app/3656660/Deep_Space_Exploi...

Thank you! :)
by sh34r | 2025-05-15 18:06:48+00:00
And that's definitely an inclusive-or, too.

On the other hand, managers are usually hiring because they failed to do their job competently with the last person in this role.

Brand-new positions are exceedingly rare these days. The market is worse than it's ever been for SWE. There was likely someone they laid off who could have filled it if management wasn't completely incompetent.

This isn't a growth market at the moment. It's a zero-sum game. Everyone's trying to screw each other over as much as possible, and they're lying through their teeth and pretending like it's not. Nobody on either side is sifting through this torrent of AI slop by choice.
by jmward01 | 2025-05-15 18:06:56+00:00
I think a better title is 'The world is not static'. I often point this out for gradient descent. We always think of the static world when envisioning gradient descent but the reality is the world is constantly changing and can often actually be adversarial. This means that in the long term gradient descent can actually select for stability and not optimality in a dynamic world (this is where ruts come from I believe). It would be interesting to publish an 'expected halflife' statistic for scientific knowledge, like biological knowledge, that will change over time.
by skybrian | 2025-05-15 18:07:11+00:00
Blog post is here:

https://www.coinbase.com/blog/protecting-our-customers-stand...

> We will reimburse customers who were tricked into sending funds to the attacker due to social engineering attacks. If your data was accessed, you have already received an email from no-reply@info.coinbase.com; all notifications went out at 7:20 a.m. ET on 5/15 to affected customers.
by tootie | 2025-05-15 18:07:17+00:00
The democratic way is we let our elected officials pass laws and that's what happened. You're ignoring the massive externalities that car owners impose on non-drivers. You're also (very Americanly) assuming car owners have special rights of any kind. We could vote to ban driving and parking and just turn all the paved roads into greenspaces. There's no Constitutional right to drive wherever you want.
by gpm | 2025-05-15 18:07:28+00:00
> * You are much safer being in a car when hit by another car than when not being in a car. This is something a lot of bike commute advocates sweep under the rug. They talk about how biking is overall safe, but then you ask them if they've ever had an accident and so many have been hit by cars and broken bones.

> (The reason I'm not a bike commuter right now is because I slipped in a puddle biking to work and destroyed my ankle. Non-fatal accident statistics for cycle are actually pretty scary when you dig into them. People always point out that overall mortality statistics are better for cyclists, but you can still have a really fucking bad time without dying.)

While true that injuries exist, halving your chance of early death is a pretty remarkable statistic, and would make me say that you are (if you are a statistically average person) much safer bike commuting than commuting by car: https://www.forbes.com/sites/carltonreid/2024/12/18/18-year-...
by genewitch | 2025-05-15 18:07:34+00:00
yes, the cutoff for "urban" to not is 2000 housing units in an area. I don't consider that urban, 2000 homes is a decent "town". This is just "othering" of people who live more than 25 minutes from a metro which is what i consider "urban". i am 25 minutes from my nearest metro, and the metro population is smaller than the city i grew up in in california, population-wise.

my point is, talking about Berlin and then carrying that thought over to "americans just love cars" is silly. Germany is smaller than CA, and double the population of california. Most people "in california" live in the "san angeles" range or in the "bay capital" area. a half hour outside of any of those areas and it's either sand or farms or mountains.

and i wish i was "rural", there's ~600 houses within 6mi radius, that's not very rural. It's rural compared to Manhattan, i guess.
by dinkblam | 2025-05-15 18:07:39+00:00
> These devices should be outright illegal

why should protecting my belongings from thieves be illegal?

> You shouldn't go get back your belongings from a thief anyways.

you can also send the police to the thieves if you know where they are

seriously, there are like 10 stalkers worldwide but 2 billion thieves. most likely any stalking story was made up by thieves because they hate if people get their stuff back...
by mindslight | 2025-05-15 18:08:40+00:00
Am I the only one completely uninspired by the use of Kubernetes in a homeprod context? I could see reaching for it if I were already familiar with it, but without that it seems like it's bringing in a whole bunch of new unknown unknown failure modes and debugging complexity, simply to compensate for possible hardware failures. I'd rather just be aware of my overall systems' dependency graph, fix the hardware problems, and if I really want a backup server then be content with failover times on the order of tens of minutes - thinking about redundancy in terms of "there is a problem but it is being automatically fixed for me" rather than "complete availability all the time".
by Larrikin | 2025-05-15 18:08:53+00:00
If you don't think it deserves a tip just click on No Tip. You feel weird once then it just becomes a habit and then freeing to not even have to think about giving money when people just randomly ask you for it. It is silly to pay in cash if you have a credit card with rewards because they are trying to guilt you in to giving them free money.
by FrasiertheLion | 2025-05-15 18:09:02+00:00
CPU-based TEEs (AWS Nitro Enclaves, AMD SEV, Intel TDX) have been around for a few years, but aren’t widely used because they are more akin to primitives than fully baked security solutions. We are trying to make this as user friendly and self serve as possible, with full verifiability by open sourcing the entire server that runs inside the enclave. So far we have not found any end to end verifiably private solution on the market that we could just sign up for to try, which was a big reason we started Tinfoil in the first place. We also strongly believe that verifiably private AI should be the norm, so the more players in the space, the better because a missing piece is market awareness and convincing folks this is actually possible and real.
by vector_spaces | 2025-05-15 18:09:54+00:00
I had a weird experience last week where across 3 conversations on a single day, ChatGPT made several product recommendations in-app, totally unprompted. Like, it was a stretch to think I would want product recs for the given conversations. The products were shown in an app-native carousel with product cards, prices, and photos linking to various online retailers. Did this happen to anyone else?

I haven't been able to reproduce this behavior, so it may have been either a bug or a short-lived A/B test, but it looks like this[1] page went up about a week earlier

Hopefully it's not going the way I'm cynically picturing, but with Fidji Simo taking over as "CEO of Applications", and the real need for these companies to start thinking about profitability, I am having trouble imagining that it won't go this way.

[1] https://openai.com/chatgpt/search-product-discovery/
by lbeckman314 | 2025-05-15 18:10:25+00:00
> "[His drawings] force us to see childhood not as something that takes place in an eternal present, but as something with as deep a history as anything else that is a central part of what it is to be human."

Absolutely love rediscovering Onfim's drawings thank you for submitting this.

Cool site from with more birchbark records: https://web.archive.org/web/20250114034538/https://gramoty.r...

Previous discussion (of Onfim's Wikipedia): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23089343
by perrygeo | 2025-05-15 18:10:26+00:00
Mid 6 figure DB bill, let's estimate $500k. Divided into 100 million rows (ignore the rest, because db provisioning is typically dominated by the needs of a few core tables). They get 200 rows per dollar.

Your table on a small VPS (which I concur is totally reasonable, am running something similar myself): Let's say your VPS costs $40/mo x 12 = $480/yr. Divide into 150 million. You get 312,500 rows per dollar.

I'd wager you server was faster under normal load too. But is it webscale? /s

There's waste, then there's "3 orders of magnitude" waste. The pain is self-inflicted. Unless you have actual requirements that warrant a complex distributed database, you should "just use postgres".

And just to calibrate everyone's expectations, I've seen a standard prod setup using open source postgres on AWS EC2s (1 primary, 2 replicas, 1 haproxy+pgbouncer box to load balance queries) that cost ~ $700k annually. This system was capable of handling 1.2 million rows inserted per second, while simultaneously serving thousands of read queries/s from hundreds of internal apps across the enterprise. The cost effectiveness in their case came out to ~ 20k rows per dollar, lower than your VPS since the replicas and connection pooling eat into the budget. But still: 2 orders of magnitude more cost effective than the hosted distributed hotness.
by roywiggins | 2025-05-15 18:10:34+00:00
Water use can have big, localized problems, but that's mostly solvable by just putting the datacenters somewhere else.

Some places rely on deep aquifers that don't refill on human lifetimes, essentially fossil water. But that's mostly a local problem and we should just stop building water-hungry industry and agriculture in those places because it's stupid.
by infogulch | 2025-05-15 18:11:16+00:00
I wonder how this compares to KBLaM [1], which also has a preprocessing step to prepare a large amount of reference material for direct access by LLMs. One obvious difference is that it has a modified attention mechanism they call "rectangular attention". The paper was posted on HN a few times, but it hasn't generated any discussion yet.

[1]: Introducing KBLaM: Bringing plug-and-play external knowledge to LLMs | https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/blog/introducing-kb...
by trod1234 | 2025-05-15 18:11:41+00:00
How would any insurance company even begin to control costs on this? It seems like a fast-track to insolvency.

AI models hallucinate, and by their blackbox nature can't have any kind of safeguards put in, as has been evidenced by the large number of paths in research to prompt jailbreaking.

Inherently also, AI is operating on a non-deterministic environment, but its architecture for computation is constrained by determinism and decide-ability. The two are foundationally incompatible for reliable operations.

Language is also one of those trouble areas since the meaning is floating. It seems quite likely that a chatbot will get stuck in a infinite loop (halting problem) with the paying customer failing to be served, and worse the company involved imposes personal cost on them in the process (in frustration and lack of resolution). If the company involved eliminates all but that as a single point of contact, either in structure or informal process; I don't see any way you can actually control costs sufficiently when the lawsuits start piling up.
by aerostable_slug | 2025-05-15 18:11:50+00:00
I would.

Me: "Chuck and Lisa are coming over tonight with the kids. Find me a recipe for dinner they'll all like and have the ingredients delivered in time for me to make it. Remind me to turn on the pellet grill if we're using it."

It: "It looks like it's going to be a beautiful afternoon. How about reverse seared tri-tip? There's a sale at FoodMerchant..."
by Retric | 2025-05-15 18:11:50+00:00
There’s plenty to learn from using LLM’s including how to interact with an LLM.

However, even outside of using a LLM the temptation is always to keep the blinders on do a deep dive for a very specific bug and repeat as needed. It’s the local minima of effort and very slowly you do improve as those deep dives occasionally come up again, but what keeps it from being a global minimum is these systems aren’t suddenly going away. It’s not a friend’s expresso machine, it’s now sitting in your metaphorical kitchen.

As soon as you’re dealt with say a CSS bug the odds of seeing another in the future are dramatically higher. Thus optimizing for diminishing returns means spending a few hours learning the basics of any system or protocol you encounter is just a useful strategy. If you spend 1% of your time on a strategy that makes you 2% more efficient that’s a net win.
by jaimebuelta | 2025-05-15 18:11:53+00:00
On one end, I can see that AI assistants can be useful to solve questions like “Get me a flashlight, enough alkaline batteries for one year of usage, and a waterproof cover that matches. All should fit the toolbox that I bought last month”.

But, at the same time, automating purchases to a GenAI sounds risky, and with “purchase the same thing every month” you have most of it covered. And I remember both the ideas of purchase through Alexa or “push button to order again” that never lived up to their own hype…
by amanda99 | 2025-05-15 18:12:16+00:00
Does this not require one to trust the hardware? I'm not an expert in hardware root of trust, etc, but if Intel (or whatever chip maker) decides to just sign code that doesn't do what they say it does (coerced or otherwise) or someone finds a vuln; would that not defeat the whole purpose?

I'm not entirely sure this is different than "security by contract", except the contracts get bigger and have more technology around them?
by juhrjuhr | 2025-05-15 18:12:27+00:00
This definitely happens! Mostly it's from the NPC taking a corner a little too quickly when there's obstacles around. I've added data to the resulting path so that the NPC can know how far each path step is from an obstacle so that it can slow itself down first.

Like you said, it adds a lot to the fun so I'm only trying to smooth out those cases that look stupid.
by thomastjeffery | 2025-05-15 18:12:42+00:00
Sorta, but the only part of this system that really has an equivalence to computing written instructions is DNA.

I think the more interesting thing about humans as systems is the set of environmental contexts each system is subjected to. Each cell implements a relatively simple system, but a collection of cells can implement a more abstract system. When I reach out my hand and grab something, that action is accomplished by a complicated collection of systems. It's easier to talk about the abstract application of that system than it is to explain the system itself.

But what if I wanted to change it? I can't just give my organs new instructions that change their behavior. I can't cut them into pieces, shuffle them around, and put them back together, and end up with a functional system in the end. A surgeon can make specific changes, but only because they understand the implications of each change.

The same goes for computational instructions. I can't just link an OpenGL program to Vulkan and expect it to work. In order to refactor software, we must accommodate the change in subjective context.

We usually accomplish this by establishing shared context, but that just moves the problem. What if we could solve it directly? That's what I'm working on.
by gopher_space | 2025-05-15 18:13:24+00:00
> Even so, the two cannot be connected without adding the human-centric context node to the graph.

The entire graph is human-centric context. It doesn't exist outside of our PoV. If you have an undergraduate degree (or a high school diploma from last century) you've taken classes on this specific subject and forgotten what you've learned.

> This stands in contrast to (physics/chemistry/maths), which can be derived outside of the human experience.

Think about this statement. How would you possibly know if something can be derived from outside of the human experience? We only have the human experience as a base. Your claim requires access to a peer-level-or-greater intelligence that we have not met.
by reverendsteveii | 2025-05-15 18:13:40+00:00
This is yet another knock-on effect of congress essentially handcuffing itself to the radiator. Nothing can get done without 60 senators to force cloture, but the country still needs governing, so over time the courts have stepped in with rulings that essentially bend the law to what it needs to be and POTUS power has expanded everywhere possible. Congress had adopted the idea that its primary role is not to govern, but to put a stop to governing.
by simlevesque | 2025-05-15 18:13:43+00:00
JSDOM works on Deno. Here's a script:

// from https://gist.github.com/kt3k/6123515ff5d1e167f82dfe4aa12ee5d9 import { JSDOM } from "https://jspm.dev/jsdom"; const doc = new JSDOM(`<!DOCTYPE html><p>Hello world</p>`); console.log(doc.window.document.querySelector("p").textContent);

Run it like this:

deno run 'https://gist.githubusercontent.com/kt3k/6123515ff5d1e167f82dfe4aa12ee5d9/raw/f27520c629e56ab6e53e411c455ecc289300bb28/jsdom-in-deno.ts'

This returns "Hello world" on my machine, deno 2.3.1

I'd need more info about your problem but I'm not convinced that Deno's the problem and if there is one.
by pas | 2025-05-15 18:14:53+00:00
Like I said, it's okay to reject the candidate for submitting something that's implies they are not a good fit.

In my interpretation the "righteous indignation" part is that the candidate tried to make sure that they are not ending up wasting their time and not chasing some pipe-dream (which is bad for both parties after all, leaves a sour taste in the candidate's mouth, and ... apparently does not further the good reputation of Kagi), yet ... that is exactly what ended up happening, because the fucking ~~money lenders in the temple~~ hiring mangers in the corposphere are not just useless individually, but are actively harmful as a cohort.

(Of course, the people deciding to hire hiring managers usually have good reasons to do so. And companies are not expected to babysit every candidate, but since almost always the power dynamics favors them they ought to be the more generous and proactive in the transaction. But at this point in the analysis we are just a few steps from declaring that it's cough late-stage capitalism's cough fault.)
by joshjob42 | 2025-05-15 18:16:08+00:00
We have a constraint, say keeping warming below 1.5 or 2C, and we want to achieve it with as little pain as possible.

You use a laptop, you probably play some video games, you see movies, you probably eat meat, you probably drive a car around town instead of a velomobile.

So the question is, how much energy is used by AI and what does it get us? Google's latest TPUs consume ~250W per fp8-petaflop at the data-center level (ie including cooling etc, according to their recent presentations). Even assuming 50% utilization which is a bit poor, that's say 0.5kW per fp8-petaflop, or ~1kW per 10^15 dense-parameter-equivalent tokens per second. So using a huge model, say 10T dense-equivalent parameters, and doing inference at the rate of o3-mini or Gemini 2.5 Pro (around 150 tokens a second) consumes 1.5kW during generation time. But maybe a better way to think about it is just that you'd be using 10J of energy per token, or ~15J of energy per word.

In that context then, generating a book the length of Fellowship of the Ring (~180k words) would consume ~0.75kWh of energy. That's about like playing a video game on a PS5 for ~3 hours. In the US, that's on average ~270g of CO2, like driving ~1.5 miles or so in a Prius. It'd be about like riding ~30 miles on an e-bike.

Another way to think of it might be that if you are texting with a friend, wherein lets say you both aggressively type at ~120wpm, you'd be using ~15W of power to chat with an AI at a similar pace, about the power draw of your friend's Macbook Air he would be typing on. That's around 0.5-0.7 miles on an ebike per hour of chatting.

So even compared to your typical leisure activities, chatting with an AI is comparable in resource use to whatever else you'd be doing in that time most likely. And of course, a human in the US on average generates ~1.5kg of CO2 per hour they're alive in the US. In Bolivia, it's ~150g/hr, and in Sudan it's ~50g/hr or so. So if you're a company and you want to be climate conscious merely hiring someone who is a ~ subsistence farmer to do a job such that their standard of living rises enough to roughly emit the CO2 of the average Bolivian would mean they emit more carbon in a typical day than running an AI to produce as many words as are in the entire Game of Thrones book series to date. And if you were going to help someone immigrate from Bolivia to the US, you could have the AI write ~10 Songs of Ice and Fire a day for the same net CO2 output.

Not to say that we shouldn't do those things because of climate or whatever, but I'm just saying that the objective energy and climate impact of using these models for things is small compared to basically any alternative for completing a task and most entertainment activities people do (movie theaters for instance use ~7kW or so while running, so in the time you spend watching the Fellowship of the Ring in a theater, an AI could write a text as long as FOTR 28 times).
by abdullahkhalids | 2025-05-15 18:16:12+00:00
Indeed safety is a very important consideration. But safety in different types of vehicles is determined by which type of infrastructure is emphasized.

If you design your city to be more pedestrian and biking friendly, there are more people walking and biking compared to cars, which naturally reduces the amount of mugging and car-bike accidents. For example, as number of cars on the road go down, police can invest resources into stopping muggings, instead of investing resources into catching car traffic violations.
by chaps | 2025-05-15 18:16:37+00:00
Yeah. The "extremely unreliable" part of that is the stinker. Some of the exports I get through FOIA are thousands and thousands of pages, so the unreliability really compounds really quickly. It's frustrating, because there are many things Microsoft could do with PDFs to make that a non-problem. But it's consistently been a naive implementation that doesn't consider newlines.