MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ActorNightly | 2025-05-15 17:16:39+00:00
You need to flush the addresses out of the cache in order for the branch predictor to speculatively execute and load the address back into the cache. This is where things get very tricky, because lets say you have some other process that accesses that address on a regular basis - it will get reloaded into the cache so your timing attacks have a lower chance of success.

So overall, putting together an exploit with this through JS becomes a matter of lots and lots of research and testing, for a specific target - i.e not worth the effort for anyone but a state sponsored agency.
by perihelions | 2025-05-15 17:16:41+00:00
I think publicly leveling accusations against other commenters downgrades the quality of the conversation—and it's against the forum rules too.

You can email the mods if it's something that can be moderated, but please keep it private! It makes things worse if this kind of accusation happens to be wrong. (Also makes things worse if it's right). Often it's singling out an actual, real person for unpleasant scrutiny they didn't expect or want.

"Remember the human."
by kragen | 2025-05-15 17:18:00+00:00
ChatGPT is probably the majority of LLM use today, so this is not the equivalent of claiming that neither your car nor mine nor anybody else's uses more than 3GWh per day and therefore cars don't use a significant amount of energy collectively.

Also, though this is not really relevant to your major incorrect point, airlines aren't part of civil aviation.
by bluedino | 2025-05-15 17:18:04+00:00
I agree that these are very simple cases, and it's like benchmarking compiliation or execution of helloworld.cpp

It would be interesting to see something like:

- cold boot

- load Windows

- load Office

- open a 200 page document

- create pdf from said document

- open 5000 row spreadsheet

- do a mail merge

- open 150,000 record database

- generate some goofy report

Do people still do mail merge? Not sure.
by ebiester | 2025-05-15 17:18:41+00:00
There are multiple parts of the job.

Can you work with your team? Can you get management what they need to do their job effectively? Can you get what other teams need from you effectively? Can you do the technical work?

All of them are part of the job. If you're great at working with your team but management hates working with you, that means you're only doing part of the job.

(And sometimes, that's management's fault too, don't get me wrong!)
by echelon | 2025-05-15 17:18:43+00:00
These two companies are putting a ceiling on you and everyone else. You can choose to accept that, perhaps even benefit from their stock or employment, but the fact is that they are invasive species that are trophically malinvesting and snuffing out the most salient gradients of innovation and competition because we haven't policed them.

If you're pro-consumer, you want an end to this. If you're pro-business, pro-entrepreneur, pro-innovation capital seeing upside of labor and invention, then you also want an end to this.

These two companies would be worth more as separate entities than the sum of their parts. Their value is being squandered as gigantic conglomerate platform plays. They piss away so many resources and grow fat on the areas they've lodged themselves into and peerlessly destroyed any competition.

I've consistently echoed this sentiment for years. Now lots of people are saying the same thing.

Break them up, and competition will become relentlessly breakneck to fill out the new, healthier ecosystem. It would be a forest fire yielding to new growth.
by RetroTechie | 2025-05-15 17:18:49+00:00
Hydrogen production as replacement fuel for some niche markets, for one. But it has other uses:

-Greening up steel mills.

-Local nitrogen fertilizer production. As in: on-farm (not @ scale atm, but it's been demonstrated).

-Overlapping: ammonia production (more centralized in big chemical plants). For fertilizer production as well, but also feedstock in a # of chemical processes (and probably other uses).

-H2 itself likely has uses as feedstock in chemical processes.

These are mostly large-scale uses, so just moving the needle involves a big investment in electrolyzers.
by roywiggins | 2025-05-15 17:19:09+00:00
I guess I'd frame it another way: how many LLM conversations a month would you have to have to increase your energy consumption by 1% vs how many more hot showers

if you are actually worried about your ChatGPT energy usage, skip a hot shower or spend a few hours less playing Cyberpunk 2077 and a few more hours reading an old book.
by zellyn | 2025-05-15 17:19:38+00:00
I definitely think breaking out ChatGPT on its own is too fine-grained. At the very least, one should lump all LLM training and use, or perhaps all deep learning training and use together.

I suspect at a "sensible" breakdown (trying to avoid the "How long is my coastline?" problem), which is presumably something akin to Zipfian, the main uses will actually account for most energy usage.

If anyone can find a breakdown at the level of granularity that "all deep learning" would make sense, let me know: so far my Googling has led primarily to either detailed breakdowns of energy _sources_, or high-level breakdowns of use at the level of "industry", "agriculture", or "residential use".
by test098 | 2025-05-15 17:20:35+00:00
> People advocating for their interests isn't warfare.

When those interests come at the expense/lives of other people, it is [1] [2].

> I assure you there are virtually no rich people cackling, monocles and cigars in place, over the fate of the poor.

Correct, their theatrics are even dumber than that [3].

---

[1] "House Republicans Push Forward Plan to Cut Taxes, Medicaid and Food Aid" - https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/14/us/politics/congress-tax-...

[2] "Sanders on GOP Medicaid cuts: ‘Thousands and thousands of low-income and working people will die’" - https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/5302085-bernie-sanders-r...

[3] "Musk waves a chainsaw and charms conservatives talking up Trump’s cost-cutting efforts" - https://apnews.com/article/musk-chainsaw-trump-doge-6568e9e0...
by neilv | 2025-05-15 17:20:35+00:00
For the last week, LinkedIn kept showing me ads for some specific dental procedure, near the top of my feed.

It's an optional follow-on procedure for the dental surgery procedure I had scheduled for this week.

I'm much more careful than most people about keeping Web search and browsing history private. But there's a chance that last week I browsed some question about the scheduled procedure, from my less-private Web browser, rather than from the Tor Browser that I usually use for anything sensitive that doesn't require identifying myself.

If I didn't make a Web OPSEC oops, it looks like maybe someone effectively gave private medical information to LinkedIn, of all places (an employment-matchmaking service, where employers are supposed to be conscientious of EEOC and similar concerns).
by etchalon | 2025-05-15 17:20:44+00:00
This is so important for people to understand, and its why I give people feedback.

People, being humans and prone to pattern seeking, assume that if they didn't get the job, it's something specific they did, or failed to do.

And sometimes, that's true. But for a lot of candidates, it just came down to another candidate being slightly better, or slightly cheaper, or some combination of value markers.

A lot of my interview feedback comes down to "I don't see any reason you wouldn't be a good fit, but we have other interviews and it's going to come down to value."

Some people will take this as me saying "Don't ask for what you're worth," or "we're gonna low-ball your salary." The reality is, we're a business, and if I can produce the same widget with person X or person Y and person X costs 10K less a year, I'm going with person X. Every time.
by FredPret | 2025-05-15 17:22:00+00:00
Unionizing and voting for Saturdays off and the politics of the underdog hardly counts as "warfare".

It's when we regard one another as evil that we start to pursue ideology over pragmatism and end up cutting off our noses to spite our faces.

I object to my original parent comment's characterizing of everyone with any form of wealth and power as being a sociopath. It's not only untrue (which is disqualification enough), but this kind of attitude doesn't serve anyone.
by wkat4242 | 2025-05-15 17:22:05+00:00
Well they had a little revival every few years. Like during the 320M macs, they paid a few developers to make Mac versions of eg call of duty. Also during the powerpc era they had such a phase. Always short-lived though.

They do have a sizable part of the mobile gaming market though it's not what serious gamers are looking for. But we're not a massive group either compared to the consumer that just wants to shoot a chicken at pigs once in a while.
by teruakohatu | 2025-05-15 17:22:30+00:00
I feel the points made in this article have been debated many times on HN.

The argument about power usage for developers, as opposed to consumers, is probably insignificant compared to the inefficient use of compute resources for deployed software today.

Arguably LLMs are probably enabling some web developers to create native applications rather than Electron monstrosities saving many P-core CPU cycles multiplied by the number of their users.

Optimising server applications with an LLM could eliminate unnecessary cloud servers.

Of course all the above could be done without LLMs, but LLMs can empower people to do this kind of work when they were not able before.
by stereolambda | 2025-05-15 17:22:46+00:00
How paradoxical. Man rejects books about rebelliousness because of negative social proof. Over time has increasingly sophisticated collectively-held ideology about why they are bad. Initially, it apparently was about pure artistic merit, a notion since more or less purged. No matter, the justification meanwhile morphed into something else. One might start to think there was actually something to these "forbidden" tomes, now that they are actually (again?) frowned upon by your Lit professors.

Not saying these are universal masterpieces. To every reader slightly different books will be the most enriching. It's true that at a certain age, there is often a transformation from the young adult interest in self to interest in the wider world. But the self is still what humans have, so it's not like it ever ceases to be relevant for one's experience.

While there is something romantic in finding a subculture, even one just slightly adjacent to the mainstream, [being] more chancy, on reflection I'm glad we no longer have it like that. (In fact, we probably regressed a little bit because of the decline of open internet and Google, and the move to group chats.) But today's youth can find and pirate whatever they want. The establishment is founded more on pure concentration of money and financing for legacy institutions, not actual technological hurdles like it used to be.
by pier25 | 2025-05-15 17:22:50+00:00
By far my biggest issue with Node is the dependency on the fragile NPM ecosystem. I could be wrong but I think if Deno had tackled this problem head-on it would have become more popular.

Provide a framework or built-in libs which allow you to build a number of use cases (JSON API, etc) with as little dependencies as possible. That would be something much more valuable than becoming a Node replacement for the NPM ecosystem.

Deno seems to be spending a lot of time and money into Node compat which so far (afaik) hasn't produced results.
by observationist | 2025-05-15 17:23:28+00:00
After google started spamming us with pinterest and cheap stackoverflow copied forum slop, the internet was pretty much saturated with garbage. Google and Facebook and SEO are to blame - they wanted to squeeze every last drop they could, and they did, and here we are.

AI might make things 1-2% worse, but we weren't suffering from a lack of legitimate content or media. We were suffering from centralized control and walled gardens force feeding us slop in the name of profit, the total enshittification of the internet without regard for the damage done - tragedy of the commons, maybe.

AI could also make things better, because it's no longer worth slogging through the bullshit with search - I'll have AI do my searching for me, or follow its recommendation directly, and never interact with any of the monetized bullshit the search engine tries to pawn off.

SEO content will have to get through ever more competent and discerning AI in order to get eyeballs. That eliminates a broad class of low effort trash, directly demonetizing bad faith actors.

So now you have content creators producing more plausible, but mediocre content, but OAI and other AI providers will have direct access to their logs - if they register someone as having had produced bulk trash content, they can shut down the account, report to authorities or other companies if there's some sort of fraud or illicit behavior going on.

There are competing pressures, and with Google also losing its monopoly on adtech, maybe we'll see companies forced to compete on quality products instead of exploitation of user data, all the while seeing the general quality of the internet improve.

Or maybe AI will just accelerate the race to the bottom and the internet's dead already.
by lwo32k | 2025-05-15 17:24:16+00:00
The prediction - software jobs will be the first to go has a very similar feel to the Hillary will win prediction.

The pool of people who want to believe this has grown so much larger than the pool Qualified to even talk about this subject, that the prediction has become self reinforcing and worthless.

People are acting as if all problems are automation/optimization problems.

Look at HN. If you ask 10 different people, what the purpose of this site is you will get 10 different answers. There are lots of problems like that in the real world which are is not well defined and no one can agree about what it is they are trying to do.

If magic god AI tells Microsoft to use Apple's stack and Oracle to use Google Cloud and Amazon to shift to HarmonyOS who believes thats going to happen? When people say things are going to accelerate just haven't worked in large orgs long enough.
by Borg3 | 2025-05-15 17:24:20+00:00
Of course water is not destroyed. It gets contaminated. And to clean it up, you need energy. Basically, we can simplify those equation to pretty much single argument: energy. Whatever you do, it needs energy. And people really really comes very lighty to that problem and waste management. If we would really like to recycle everything property I suspect global energy usage 10x fold at least. For now, its just better (I mean more economical) to just "store" that waste somewhere.
by BeetleB | 2025-05-15 17:24:35+00:00
The environmental cost can't be overstated.

When I AI code, it's more convenient for me to type in a prompt to change the name of a variable. This involves sending a request to the LLM provider, doing very expensive computations, and then doing a buggy job at it. Even though my IDE can do it for what 0.1% of the energy usage? Or even less? Try running an LLM locally on a CPU and you'll get a glimpse of how much energy it is using to do this simple task.

But coding with AI isn't that huge. What will become huge this year or next is MCP. It will bring "programming" to the masses, all of whom will do stupid queries like the above.

Consider this: I wrote an MCP server to fetch the weather forecast, and have separate tools to get a broad forecast, an hourly forecast, etc. I often want to check things like "I'm thinking of going to X tomorrow. It will be a bummer if it's cloudy. Which hours tomorrow have less than 50% cloud cover?" I could go to a weather web site, but that's more effort (lots of clicks to get to this detail). Way easier if I have a prompt ready.

OK - that doesn't sound too bad. Now let's say I want to do this check daily. What you have to realize is that with MCP the prompt above is as good as a program! It's trivial for an average non-programmer to write that prompt and put it as part of a cron job, and have the LLM email/text you when the weather hits a predefined criteria.

Consider emails. I sign up for deals from a retailer.[1] Now deals from them are a dime a dozen so I've been programmed to ignore those emails. But now with MCP, I can set a simple rule: Any email from that retailer goes to the LLM, and I've written a "program" that loosely describes what I think is a great deal, and let the LLM decide if it should notify me.

Everyone will do this - no programming required! That prompt + cron is the program.

Compared to traditional programming, this produces 100-1000x more CO2 emissions. And because there is no barrier to entry, easily 1000x more people will be doing programming than are doing now. So it's almost a millionfold in CO2 emissions for tasks like these.

[1] OK, I don't do it, but most people do.
by btilly | 2025-05-15 17:24:59+00:00
According to https://www.theverge.com/24066646/ai-electricity-energy-watt... a reasonable estimate is half a percent of global energy usage by 2027. On the one hand, this is a lot of energy. On the other, that's in the same general neighborhood as what we could save by maintaining proper tire pressure on our cars. (See https://www.factcheck.org/2008/08/the-truth-about-tire-press... for more about that.)
by jghn | 2025-05-15 17:25:06+00:00
Yes. And even as someone who tries to live by the ethos "if you're on time, you're late", I wind up late sometimes. It stresses me out, but hey sometimes shit happens.

But there are people where shit seems to happen more than for others. Late once in a blue moon? No worries. Repeat offender? That's a you problem.
by skort | 2025-05-15 17:25:18+00:00
What exactly is the superpower here? Having a large chunk of steel you need to micro manage the location of, or pay up the nose to have a dedicated space for?

Have you ever ridden a bike? Taken the subway? Heck, you can just use a taxi to get around. Why would you want to deal with having a car in somewhere like Manhattan? Do you hate your fellow citizens so much you need to be constantly insulated from society?
by kspacewalk2 | 2025-05-15 17:25:21+00:00
When comparing the 1930s and today, I'm not talking about tech or flying, of course. I'm talking about health and longevity, economic opportunities for the bottom 80%, political and personal freedom, social progress on most fronts, that sort of thing.

Perhaps you're right in saying that the vibes are off, and in any individual country that could be a very valid point - pressures imposed on young people in South Korea, for example. Killer argument - except the same thing is happening in Sweden where these pressures are almost absent by comparison. And in North Korea, would you believe it? Birthrates falling. I somewhat doubt their "happiness with life" has dropped in concert with that in the West, on account of them having a life and a culture that's almost orthogonal to ours in every way.
by zck | 2025-05-15 17:25:36+00:00
Writing a Forth myself, I find it somewhat frustrating that I have relatively different design restrictions than these guides. I don't need to be incredibly low-power, so I'm using C, not assembly. I'm not a great C coder, and I've never done assembly, so I find it hard (but not impossible) to learn from assembly. Also, because it's not assembly, I can't just JUMP to code the same way assembly can.

It's also frustrating trying to understand some of the lowest-level information. For example, a few systems have a very fundamental `w` variable -- but what is is used for? You can't search for it. Or just using registers and having to remember that %esi is the program counter (aka instruction pointer).

I keep wanting to make a series of diagrams to really understand Forth's program flow. It makes sense in concept, but when I go to program it, there are a lot of nuances I keep missing.
by PaulHoule | 2025-05-15 17:26:20+00:00
Funny how AMD missed AI and was always #2 in the game industry but kept alive because being in both the Playstation, XBOX and Steam Deck meant that games would be developed for AMD GPUs, good drivers would exist, etc. Meanwhile NVIDIA really fell down with there being basically no games for the Shield (Does Pac-Man 256 count? Or the withdrawn Record of Agarest War port that Idea Factory did because Idea Factory will port or remake anything for cash? [1]) though I guess the design win with Nintendo was enough for them.

[1] made one of just 15 PS5 exclusives!
by zackmorris | 2025-05-15 17:26:20+00:00
For context, the subject-predicate-object pattern is known as a semantic triple or Resource Description Framework (RDF) triple:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_triple

They're useful for storing social network graph data, for example, and can be expressed using standards like Open Graph and JSONAPI:

https://ogp.me

https://jsonapi.org

I've stored RDF triples in database tables and experimented with query concepts from neo4j:

https://neo4j.com/docs/getting-started/data-modeling/tutoria...

These are straightforward to translate to SQL but the syntax can get messy due to not always having foreign keys available and hitting limitations with polymorphic relationships. Some object-relational mapping (ORM) frameworks help with this:

https://laravel.com/docs/12.x/eloquent-relationships#polymor...

I feel that document-oriented databases like MongoDB jumped the gun a bit, and would have preferred to have had graph-oriented or key-value-oriented databases providing row/column/document oriented queries and views. Going the other way feels a bit kludgy to me:

https://www.mongodb.com/resources/basics/databases/mongodb-g...

Basically Set Theory internally with multiple query languages externally and indexed by default.

Oh and have all writes generate an event stream like Firebase does so we can easily build reactive apps.
by Uehreka | 2025-05-15 17:26:56+00:00
> The web has been contaminated ever since SEO. Maybe AI will kill the web. So it goes.

This statement kinda blows my mind. You contemplate the destruction of the web, the single most world-changing invention of the last century, possibly the last millennium, a force that has democratized access to information, accelerated scientific progress and connected people around the world, the technology that one way or another played a huge role in the lives of every person on this site, and you shrug?

I see your Kurt Vonnegut and raise you Dylan Thomas: Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
by zhousun | 2025-05-15 17:27:47+00:00
DataFile(parquet) is not enough for table with update/delete, (they are part of iceberg "metadata"). for CDC from OLTP use-cases, the pattern involves rapidly marking rows as deleted/ insert new rows and optimizing small files. This is required for minutes-latency replication.

And for second latency replication, it is more involving, you actually need to build layer on top of iceberg to track pk/ apply deletion.
by hahnbee | 2025-05-15 17:28:39+00:00
Love it - I'm one of the cofounders of Mintlify and I love the thoughtfulness and intentionality you put here. We've found the navigation and hierarchy to mean a lot.

I also love your future docs roadmap - it aligns with our roadmap and some things are already there! - API keys are locally cached across the API reference. Let me know if there are more fields you think would be convenient to cache and we can investigate. - Whichever programming language you choose for a code block should also sync across pages. - We also launched AI translations so you can support docs in any language! - We also have AI Chat and are planning on devoting more resources to it so that it's best in class.
by FrasiertheLion | 2025-05-15 17:28:54+00:00
>You're not terminating the TLS connection from the client anywhere besides the enclave?

Yes.

>How do you load balance or front end all of this effectively?

We don't, atleast not yet. That's why all our model endpoints have different subdomains. In the next couple months, we're planning to generate a keypair inside the enclave using HPKE that will be used to encrypt the data, as I described in this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43996849