MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by nradov | 2025-05-15 16:44:42+00:00
That is misinformation. HIPAA covered healthcare providers are legally required to give you copies of your health information upon request, and can only charge a nominal fee for this service (in practice it's usually free). Any patient who is blocked from accessing their own medical records should file a formal complaint with HHS; they have fined multiple provider organizations for violations.

https://www.hhs.gov/hipaa/for-individuals/guidance-materials...

https://www.hhs.gov/hipaa/for-professionals/compliance-enfor...
by frereubu | 2025-05-15 16:44:57+00:00
Your argument seems to be flattening everything so it's just the same - "everything has an impact" - but different things have different impacts, and each needs to be measured against their utility. Me ordering a coffee at my local cafe has an impact, but it's a good deal less than me driving from London to Edinburgh. The author's argument, as I read it and generally agree, is that we don't really need LLMs to get things done, but their use comes with a large environmental cost. I don't think that will stop its use, unfortunately. There's just too much capital behind them at the moment.
by mplanchard | 2025-05-15 16:45:09+00:00
I think it’s telling that the comments here are full of people noting mistakes that you made in your interpretation and/or execution, and rather than trying to learn from the experience, you appear to just be doubling down on your insistence that you’re entirely in the right.

Yes, there were flaws in the assignment and communication with the company, but there were also flaws in your approach. You’d be better off to try to take away some lessons here rather than blaming everyone but yourself.

Frankly, if I were you I’d consider deleting both your comments here and the blog post. I don’t think they reflect well on you as a candidate for future roles.
by iLemming | 2025-05-15 16:45:19+00:00
> nothing about European or North American culture sounds remotely as bad

Setting aside the sweeping generalization you moved the point on, making it look like as if all Indians support or perpetuate the caste system (which by itself a preposterous thought), are you sure about what you said? Aren't you forgetting the colonialism, forced religios conversions, military interventions, scientific racism and eugenics theories?

"Our culture" and technology have a long history of systematically imposing bad shit in the region. Rohingya massacres made by western social media through algorithmic amplification of hate speech for the sake of user engagement is just one of the examples, and that happened like yesterday. So like, wtf are you even talking about?
by lordnacho | 2025-05-15 16:45:31+00:00
I think it's harsh to start the accounting so soon after the breakthrough.

Yes, of course AI uses a lot of energy. But we have to give it a bit of time to see if there are benefits that come with this cost. I think there will be. Whether the tradeoff was worthwhile, I think we are not even close to being able to conclude.

Something like social media, which has a good long while behind it, I could accept if you started to close the book on the plus-minus.
by insane_dreamer | 2025-05-15 16:45:56+00:00
> In an effort to impress the user and over-deliver, LLMs end up creating a rat’s nest of ultra-defensive code littered with debugging statementsIn an effort to impress the user and over-deliver, LLMs end up creating a rat’s nest of ultra-defensive code littered with debugging statements

This has been my experience as well. I have to continuously explicitly instruct Claude to be more concise (though that often leads to broken code ...). Gemini is even more verbose.

I'm not sure in the end how much time is saved over simple good auto-completes (for method syntax lookups), other than for rote tasks like "replicate this pattern across X" (and even then it doesn't get it 100% right), and for quick answers to specific questions usually in frameworks I'm not that well versed it that I would have searched SO for ("how do I do X in Qt?", "how do I do the equivalent of Y in Linux on Windows")--but even then I have to verify the answer, whereas if it's a highly voted answer on SO I'll know it works (or there will be helpful comments to the contrary under the reply).

Most of the "it can build X app for you automatically" comments I read remind me of "build a Rails app in 5 lines" (back in the day).
by ericmcer | 2025-05-15 16:46:09+00:00
I wonder if the heavy ageism was more a one time thing. The entire tech industry blew up in the late 90s early 2000s and all of a sudden 20 year olds were handed endless VC money, of course they biased towards people their age when hiring. That isn't going to happen again, the huge players are established and founders are generally older. I started in 2012 and the same people who hired me when I was 20 are still around and are going to naturally bias towards people in their own range.

If anything I predict the ageism will be against young people, where anyone who got significant experience from 2000-2020 will be desired because they worked through those foundational years and never leveraged AI. Meanwhile a 22 year old who scraped through a CS degree will be viewed a bit dubiously.
by asah | 2025-05-15 16:46:58+00:00
AFAICT it's impractical to keep residential addresses 100% private/secure - too many ways to get an address from any number of companies, organizations and governments that collect it for various reasons.

Plus numerous ways to infer your address from other data sources, including apps that grab GPS on friends' cellphones when they visit, etc.

Finally, shutting down paid data brokers seems virtually impossible in practice, which means anybody googling you can pay $20 and get everything.

Remember, the issue isn't lazy goodguys but even slightly motivated badguys, who then use third party scripts to do the data collection.
by ricardobeat | 2025-05-15 16:48:08+00:00
> But even that evaluation is hard. LLM could hallucinate. I would say most time it works, but there are always few runs that failed to deliver

You can use success rate % over N runs for a set of problems, which is something you can compare to other systems. A separate model does the evaluation. There are existing frameworks like DeepEval that facilitate this.
by kragen | 2025-05-15 16:48:23+00:00
It's really unfortunate that KYC regulations required Coinbase to have this information in the first place. We should be establishing strong social norms against sharing PII without a legitimate reason; this is not just an individual theft risk but a national security risk. Coinbase doesn't pay into your Social Security account, so they shouldn't have your Social Security number. They don't visit your house, so they shouldn't have your address. Etc.

Historically, although KYC regulations were widespread in Communist countries, they were unthinkable in most democratic countries until 9/11, which provided spy agencies with their golden chance to write their wishlist into law. But unfortunately that helps foreign spy agencies just as much as, maybe more than, it helps domestic ones.

In https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Know_your_customer#Laws_by_cou... you can see when they were introduced in different countries.
by FrasiertheLion | 2025-05-15 16:48:24+00:00
We actually run into the rate limit issue often particularly while spinning up new enclaves while debugging. We plan on moving to HPKE: https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc9180.html over the next couple months. This will let us generate keys inside the enclave and encrypt the payload with the enclave specific keys, while letting us terminate TLS in a proxy outside the enclave. All the data is still encrypted to the enclave using HPKE (and still verifiable).

This will let us fix the rate limit issue.
by neilv | 2025-05-15 16:49:02+00:00
So obviously he's not the bad guy here, since his hood is down. :)

Yet he's a bit urban edgy here, and the staging is like it's an impromptu social media reaction to some online slight. (though reading a script)

You don't want to go full South Park "We're sorry", but I'd feel better about a response in a business dress shirt, out of respect for wronged customers.

With a bit more humbled posture.

IMHO, you're answering to customers you've wronged, and you don't wear a hoodie to church nor court (nor do you play video games during a live TV interview), nor do you assert superiority over the people you let down.

You can convey respect and humility, while also conveying being capable of responsibly resolving the problem.

(Just one person's reaction. I see some things the video did right, IMHO, but some other things jump out as wondering why they did that.)
by danielthor | 2025-05-15 16:49:27+00:00
In the 1990s the RPA proposed reviving an abandoned rail line connecting Brooklyn, Queens and the Bronx into the Triboro X line as a supplementary arc. The truth is the boroughs were well connected. In the postwar era the many of light-rail lines connecting Brooklyn and Queens were demolished. As were three elevated lines in Brooklyn/Queens and four elevated lines in Manhattan.

The MTA still has a gap in the funding for the 2020-2024 capital plan due to Andrew Cuomo's raiding and Kathy Hochul's incompetence, so I wouldn't expect much from the 2025-2029 capital program! It is $48 billion short of maintaining existing levels of service, "with a focus on areas in need of urgent investment".
by naikrovek | 2025-05-15 16:49:29+00:00
… I… what has been embraced, extended and extinguished?

I see no MS or GitHub specific extension, here. Copilot exists, and so do many other tools. Copilot can use lots of non-Microsoft models, too, including models from non-Microsoft companies. You can also get git repository hosting from other companies. You can even do it yourself.

So, explain yourself. What has been embraced, extended, and extinguished? Be specific. No “vibes”. Cite your sources or admit you have none. I see no extending unique to MS and I see no extinguishing. So explain yourself.
by mezentius | 2025-05-15 16:49:37+00:00
You’re describing something real; I’m a screenwriter and have worked on studio films where this kind of character arc was encouraged. (I wouldn’t call it a distinct structure because it can be mapped onto a very similar, traditional three-part framework.) It is, however, very much not an artistic decision. The reason for the prevalence of this arc in expensive, family-oriented movies is because studio executives (or worse, the CEs at production companies) are uncomfortable with characters who make bad choices, and think audiences will reject them. Maybe they’re not wrong— but this is a relatively recent development and one of the thousand reasons why movies have become so boring.

More satisfying (in my opinion) arcs tend to follow a psychoanalytic path: a character with some unaddressed pathological issue ends up in a serious crisis. The crisis forces them to acknowledge the issue and change slightly. The difference between a comedy and a tragedy is that in a tragedy, the change happens too late. (An interesting variant in tragedy is that the change happens in time, but unexpectedly turns out for the worse—think of the end of The Godfather.)
by wanderingbort | 2025-05-15 16:50:10+00:00
> You make it sound like the solution is obvious. It isn't.

I explicitly state there are a "myriad of possible reasons" and chose to focus on a sub-set of them (again explicitly). What I did not explicitly state was that given the wealth of possible reasons that the reality is nuanced and non-obvious. So, I guess I agree with you? There is a lot of other discussions to be had.

> Maintaining a successful (GitHub) project means dealing with community feedback, triaging and fixing bugs, writing documentation, popularizing/marketing and managing code contributions, at the very least.

Ok, How about:

"I have all the skills to be a good team member with an unfortunate tendency to only consider my own opinion of what is valuable is when looking at work."

Looking at the author's profile at the year the author indicated, I see a monero (alt-tier cryptocurrency that was very popular at the time) tip bot and a runescape emulation server. These are both projects that would be exemplary of all those skills you and I mentioned and yet they show an affinity to working on "things I like" rather than things that have real world value. Later in their history we find other projects like emulating popular websites but those are not the "successful (GitHub) projects" they lean on.

As a hiring manager, I'd stand by my read.

Great coder... we need to interview and prepare for a lot of work on the soft skills of being a software developer.

Hiring is a crap shoot. I am very likely wrong about this instance BUT I still have to make a call looking at all the factors and I would be more comfortable with someone who seems less likely to need supervision even if they are less skilled at the "craft".
by khazhoux | 2025-05-15 16:50:17+00:00
For many CS/math people, this is what Godel Escher Bach was. Read it at age 15 and it opens your mind to this alternate higher universe of amazing ideas.

I don't think most people who own it have actually read more than a chapter or two, but that's ok. Its essential function turned out to be to inspire and unlock a part of the young intellectual mind.
by bityard | 2025-05-15 16:50:30+00:00
If you're a botnet operator of a botnet that normally scraped a few dozen pages per second and then noticed a site suddenly taking multiple seconds per page, that's at least an order of magnitude (or two) decrease in performance. If you care at all about your efficiency, you step in and put that site on your blacklist.

Even if the bot owner doesn't watch (or care) about about their crawling metrics, at least the botnot is not DDoSing the site in the meantime.

This is essentially a client-side tarpit, which are actually pretty effective against all forms of bot traffic while not impacting legitimate users very much if at all.
MLX EXtended, Array Supercharged
by flreifying | 2025-05-15 16:50:39+00:00
I wrote a small Python library `mlxx` that monkey patches MLX, so we can conveniently use more array methods like `array.allclose(another)` or `vec1.inner(vec2)` without boilerplates.

Checkout github.com/ifsheldon/mlxx

Cheers!
by sreekanth850 | 2025-05-15 16:51:10+00:00
>Startups do need high availability.

HA is important. But Postgres and MySQL both support HA and replication setups without needing to jump straight into a distributed SQL (In this context of using cockroach). We use MySQL Innodb cluster + MySQL router with auto failover on single primary mode.

> If you start having replicas you are already in distributed territory.

But it’s not the same as a distributed database with quorum writes, global consensus, and cross-region latencies. Those systems are built for horizontal write scaling, that come with added complexity and cost, which most apps don’t need.
by ardit33 | 2025-05-15 16:51:22+00:00
Not true. E25st by Baruch college has turned into a plaza. There are some more, that I can think off. (8th/St Marks by A Ave, is a park) etc.

This used to be a regular street at some point https://maps.app.goo.gl/ZivSNhiEnn2Q4pjr6

There are plenty of other examples, just now they look more like plazas, and not streets.
by rurp | 2025-05-15 16:51:36+00:00
I found myself more on the side of the meeting crashers, even though the article paints them as the villains. I've been in vastly more hour long meetings that were longer than necessary than ones that were too short.

In meeting-heavy orgs it is really annoying to have meetings led by people who regularly run up to or beyond the final minute of the time slot. Those extra few minutes practically never produce anything worthwhile enough to compensate for the rushing between meetings and having to choose between being more late to the next one or taking care of a quick bathroom/water/snack break.
by prophesi | 2025-05-15 16:52:01+00:00
I would also personally prefer Elixir to Lua, but this would be great for allowing isolated/sandboxed BEAM processes to execute Lua code from your end users whom are likely unfamiliar with Elixir. As mentioned in the article, this is precisely what TV Labs uses it for to allow smart tv app developers to write and run tests for their apps.

https://docs.tvlabs.ai/scripting/introduction/getting-starte...
by slow_typist | 2025-05-15 16:52:02+00:00
η = 1 - ( T_c / T_h )

Carnot-Efficiency is the theoretical limit of the cycle’s ability to get work out of the thermal energy where T_c is the exhaust (coldest) temperature after expansion and T_h the hottest temperature (before expansion). Temperatures given in K (Kelvin), so 100% if you manage to get T_c to absolute zero temperature.
by cogman10 | 2025-05-15 16:52:09+00:00
> and as soon as you start moving memory around the gap jumps to orders of magnitude.

Depends on what you mean by "moving memory". In terms of heap allocation performance, the JVM and I suspect the JS engine will end up trouncing C/C++. Why? Because a GC allocator will outperform manual memory management in terms of absolute allocation rate. Because memory for a C++ allocator is pinned, unless you do a bunch of work utilizing things like bump allocators you'll simply flounder in terms of what the JVM does by default.

All(?) of the JVM GCs are moving collectors. That means new allocation ends being a simple pointer bump with a bounds check. Really hard to beat in terms of perf.

But it doesn't stop there. If we are talking real applications, then one real thing the JVM does better than C++ is concurrent programming. A GC works far better for managing concurrent data. So much so that when you look at high performance multithreaded C++ code you'll often find a garbage collector implementation. Something that Java gets by default. If you aren't google writing chrome, you are either aggressively copying memory or you are using something like atomic reference counters. Both of which will absolutely nuke performance.

But that's not all. One other thing the JVM does better than C++ can generally hope to do is devirtualization. In real applications, you are likely either in template hell for C++ to get performance or you are dealing with some form of interfaces and inheritance which ultimately creates code that the compiler will struggle to optimize without going to an extreme like PGO. The JVM gets PGO for free because it doesn't have to blindly optimize methods.

These simple microbenchmarks are a gift to C/C++, not the JVM.
by dheera | 2025-05-15 16:52:44+00:00
> shutting down paid data brokers seems virtually impossible in practice

Just jail them. Make it a felony to release someone's PII without their written consent, and make data brokers illegal to begin with.

> numerous ways to infer your address from other data sources, including apps that grab GPS on friends' cellphones when they visit

These are not the main vector of transmission of personal information. Yes, Meta could probably do some graph analysis and infer this, but it's a lot of work, and their data leaks are rare in comparison to all the other companies, financial institutions, and governmental organizations, that freely post residential addresses on the internet and to data brokers for the world to Google.

> companies, organizations and governments that collect it for various reasons

KYC requiring addresses should be banned. Companies should not collect a residential address.
by roywiggins | 2025-05-15 16:53:02+00:00
> Models require massive amounts of electricity and water (to cool servers).

Does it?

https://prospect.org/environment/2024-09-27-water-not-the-pr...

> training GPT-3 used as much water as just under twice what is required for the average American’s beef consumption. In other words, just two people swearing off beef would more than compensate.

https://andymasley.substack.com/p/a-cheat-sheet-for-conversa...

> It would be a sad meaningless distraction for people who care about the climate to freak out about how often they use Google search. Imagine what your reaction would be to someone telling you they did ten Google searches. You should have the same reaction to someone telling you they prompted ChatGPT.
by natesales | 2025-05-15 16:53:49+00:00
The verified trust boundary extends from the CPU to GPU [1], and TLS encrypts all data to/from the enclave and client so we can't see anything in the clear.

HTTP parsing and application logic happens on the CPU like normal. The GPU runs CUDA just like any other app, after it's integrity is verified by the CPU. Data on the PCIe bus is encrypted between the CPU and GPU too.

[1] https://github.com/NVIDIA/nvtrust/blob/main/guest_tools/atte...
by wanderingbort | 2025-05-15 16:53:56+00:00
What I meant was "the result has marginal value". What I allowed for was a "myriad of possible reasons" of which this was a subset (and not even qualified as a large subset).

I agree, there is another valid subset in those possibilities that can be described as "result is marginally monetized" but in this instance, with the projects shown in the article, I don't think we are looking at core software libraries that everyone uses and nobody pays for.
by touisteur | 2025-05-15 16:54:20+00:00
For an ESL reader who'd gone through hundreds of 'best-seller modern English-speaking' novels and a high technical English fluency, fresh out of To Kill a Mockingbird (which was a shock, I had such a hard time at first) then Salinger and Hemingway, Gatsby was such a wonderful experience - I really didn't care for any character, plot, content... but the way FSF wrote was so compact and different. I can still remember the joy I felt, surprised that 'you can do that in English?'.
by Maxatar | 2025-05-15 16:54:32+00:00
For most real time systems, including many games, it doesn't matter if one is more efficient than another because what matters is the predictability that comes from always rendering a complete frame in 1/60th of a second.

In many cases checking if absolutely nothing changed in a system isn't trivial either. You either have very fine grained tracking which involves a great deal of complexity and increased memory cost, or very broad tracking which results in a lot of false positives.
by bpev | 2025-05-15 16:54:33+00:00
Haven't really been using Fresh; I feel like whenever I get into the blending of client/server with these ecosystems, things get real muddy real fast. Mostly been doing either sites (mostly fully ssr with Hono + very light vanilla), or fully client-rendered web pwas (solid or mithril).

Deno itself, though, is still a very comfy js environment. I pretty much use it for all js/ts that doesn't run in the browser (I also use it for build steps of said browser code). It just kinda has everything I need/want, so I don't have to add too many dependencies, and don't have to muck around in build/env stuff. Just feels kinda easy.
by kabdib | 2025-05-15 16:54:51+00:00
i was at a startup where meetings were stifling. i had code to write, but i was stuck in HOURS long meetings half the week while marketing and sales types droned on and on about stuff that was meaningless unless we had a product to sell. uh, guys? we have code to write

walking back from lunch with my cow-orkers one day, i realized we were passing a clock store. i went inside and bought a not-too-expensive cuckoo clock and installed it on the wall of our single large conference room

it would make whirring noises every 15 minutes. a few clicking sounds before the hour, and then CUCKOO, CUCKOO as many times as necessary. the marketing and sales folks did NOT like it, but:

- meetings got shorter and there were fewer of them

- the CEO of the company loved that clock. if i forgot to wind it, he or our admin did :-)
by BeFlatXIII | 2025-05-15 16:55:12+00:00
> probably gonna be waiting for the glut of new CS grads, bootcampers, etc to give up and move on to other things.

If we’re lucky, an Open AI collapse will have Lehman Brothers like ripple effects throughout the rest of the industry. Not only will that flush out the chaff, it’ll also burn out genuine talent, so competition in the aftermath will be easier.