MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by kelnos | 2025-05-31 04:46:23+00:00
I am much more likely to buy something if I can pay with a credit card. Making a wire transfer is stressful; I'm worried that I got the wire instructions wrong, and my money will go to the wrong place and be gone forever. Paying with a cashier's check is stressful; I worry that I will get mugged between the bank and wherever I'm spending it, or that I'll just lose it on the way. Cash isn't quite as bad, and I almost always have some cash on me.

But given the choice of paying with cash or credit card, I will almost always choose the credit card. I like the idea that if I walk away from that transaction and then later realize that the merchant sold me something defective or outright fraudulent, I will have some recourse in getting that money back.

I get that a merchant will prefer an irreversible transaction, all else being equal. But I don't think all else is equal; I absolutely buy the GP's argument that purchasers will be more liberal with their spending if they don't have to worry so much about the merchant being a scammer. And regardless, there are many many more purchasers than merchants, and most (if not all) purchasers would at least have a slight preference toward a reversible transaction.
by 0xpgm | 2025-05-31 04:46:33+00:00
Isn't that every new employee? The first few months you are not expected to be firing on all cylinders as you catch up and adjust to company norms

An intern is much more valuable than AI in the sense that everyone makes micro decisions that contribute to the business. An Intern can remember what they heard in a meeting a month ago or some important water-cooler conversation and incorporate that in their work. AI cannot do that
by Maxatar | 2025-05-31 04:46:49+00:00
>The only way it's correct to say they are mutually exclusive is when you define "data race" as they did in the C++ standard, to imply a non-atomic access.

A data-race does not imply a non-atomic operation, it implies an unsynchronized operation. Different languages have different requirements for what constitutes a synchronized operation, for example in Python all reads and writes are synchronized, in Java synchronization is generally accomplished through the use of a monitor or a volatile operation, and in C++ synchronization is generally accomplished through the use of std::atomic operations.

The fact that in C++ atomic operations result in synchronization, while in Java atomic operations are not sufficient for synchronization is not some kind of language lawyering or pedantry, it's because Java makes stronger guarantees about the consequences of a data race versus C++ where a data race can result in any arbitrary behavior whatsoever. As such it should not come as a surprise that the cost of those stronger guarantees is that Java has stronger requirements for data race free programs.

But of course this is mostly a deflection, since the discussion was about the use of TSAN, which is a data race detector for C and C++, not for Java. Hence to the extent that TSAN detects data races, it detects them with respect to C and C++'s memory model, not Java's memory model or Python's memory model, or any other memory model.

The objection I originally laid out was your example of a race condition, an example which can happen even in the absence of parallelism (ie. a single-core CPU) and even in the absence of multithreaded code altogether (your example can happen in a single threaded application with the use of coroutines). TSAN makes no claim with regards to detecting race conditions in general, it only seeks to detect data races and data races as they pertain the C and C++ memory models.
by erkt | 2025-05-31 04:47:34+00:00
I will make stores price match anything and everything. I also look at every item on my grocery check out to make sure the price is exactly what the shelf said. I concede no ground to fine print sales expiration dates. However, I am a freak when it comes to remembering these things after a decade of business purchasing and I did my fair share of taking advantage of the consumer.

I frankly enjoy fighting stores on pricing and get dopamine from a good deal and it pains me to pay more than necessary even if I can afford it just fine. I understand not everyone is like this.

There was a period a year or two ago where if you leaked cookies and ad tracking to Amazon and deliberately clicked through to competing sites their algorithm would aggressively slash pricing far below MSRP. I admit I would use this technique in microcenter to get Amazon to give me ludicrously cheap pricing then turn around and make them price match for instant gratification.

Retail/amazon operate at a much higher margin than most people realize.
by adrian_b | 2025-05-31 04:48:23+00:00
I believe that these good results are explained at least in part by the fact that NVIDIA does not provide detailed enough documentation for their GPUs.

For a processor with well-documented microarchitecture, for which a programmer or a compiler can deterministically write an optimal program, it is much less likely that applying ML/AI can be successful, except as a substitute for searching already known solutions.

On the other hand, for less documented microarchitectures, like of the NVIDIA GPUs, finding an optimal program may be impossible other than by doing a random search guided by examples of previous optimized programs, and possibly doing some reverse-engineering work to determine the real behavior of the GPU in some circumstances.

Improving over something like this is likely to be feasible for ML/AI, where training over known good programs may be able to extract some of the undocumented behavior that may be non-obvious for humans reading those examples.
by neepi | 2025-05-31 04:49:37+00:00
Probably AWS issue. Our production RDS postgres cluster did that a few months back. Just stopped responding on the network. Health checks were fine. AWS support was mostly useless and couldn't work it out in an hour, despite having their top tier enterprise support, so with customers down we had to create a whole new cluster and do a restore from backup which took 4 hours.

RDS is now gone. It's on a couple of EC2 instances with replication, hourly EBS snapshots and daily shipping to S3.

I'm loathed to use AWS's "encapsulated" services for anything since.
by JSchneider321 | 2025-05-31 04:50:11+00:00
Ah, I've seen that part explained better elsewhere, I guess. The idea was first postulated by John Wheeler that black holes and big bangs are the same phenomenon from opposite sides, and that instead of a singularity the collapse causes a bounce that creates a disconnected spacetime. During that transition phase, when quantum forces are at play, the parameters of the child universe are set randomly to allow for variety in the offspring.

Smolin, a student of Wheeler's, took the idea and understood that the changes would have to be subtle instead of completely random. Within enough generations, more successfully reproducing universes would outnumber those that weren't exponentially, and assuming that we're a typical universe, our constants will be found to be tuned to produce black holes almost as efficiently as possible. His work is absolutely a real theory, is published, offers predictions, and is falsifiable. It's worth checking out, honestly, even if you just want to read about Einstein and Leibniz and all those guys for 300 pages or so.

Gough continues even further, suggesting SMBHs would have to be a trait found in the earliest universes even before they could form stars, which suggests that our universe should have extremely early forming SMBH and that these essentially create the structure we see in the universe. And so far it's looking like he's right. And if we determine concretely that SMBH form via direct-collapse in the early universe, I don't get how we don't just have to start over with a new model of cosmology.

Lastly, and I know this crowd hasn't really been down for natural philosophy sans-math, if black holes are the first thing to form in our universe and, based on what we know about them, they'll be the last thing around, too... Doesn't that make them seem pretty important to the function the universe seems to be performing?

And honestly, just think about how many questions it would answer. Is the universe infinite or finite? Well, it's finite but so massive and expanding at the speed of light so it might as well be? Well if it's finite, what's outside it? The parent universe! But you can't get out there, because the white hole that formed the Einstein-Rosen bridge connecting our spacetimes collapsed immediately. Well why are the constants these values in our universe? Because those values are REALLY good at making black holes so it's super trendy for universes to be more or less those numbers.

(I know I'm oversimplifying to anxiety-inducing levels and quite likely misappropriating terminology I should leave alone, but I'm just trying to illustrate possibilities. Thanks for reading!)
by seanmcdirmid | 2025-05-31 04:50:39+00:00
I wonder about really cold locales where ICE cars either need to be plugged into block warmers when not running (e.g. in Alaska/Northern Canada) or are kept on constantly and/or put into car blankets (Russia Far East). Heck, I guess in Yakutsk, the trouble of keeping your oil/petrol/engine from freezing (hence the car blankets and a system that turns them on when they get too cold), an EV might pay off big in terms of being able to plug in when parked (and...you just need to top off the charge your battery is losing), although I guess a heat pump wouldn't be very effective in -50C?
by ranger207 | 2025-05-31 04:51:26+00:00
I think the idea is that you mostly sample the decay products, which are either going to be descended from neutron-activated non-radioactive material from the surrounding area and can be filtered out in analysis, or are going to be more exotic decay products from the nuclear material, which will have isotopes in proportion to those in the original nuclear material. But yeah, IDK how feasible it would be to filter out the immense amount of fallout from the remnants of the bomb
by acyou | 2025-05-31 04:52:59+00:00
Ding ding ding! We have a winner!

And the market dominant Teslas, among others, are primarily built on Chinese battery supply chains, the Scandinavian battery manufacturer having going out of business (Northvolt).

So extracting selling oil and natural gas and taking the proceeds to buy strip mined heavy metal ticking time bomb of environmental catastrophe SUVs, and this makes people feel good. As if it would cancel things out.

Turns out it's pretty good to live in a country with huge amounts of natural resources, small population, non-existent immigration, and flexible self serving morals.

If you can't tell, I'm jealous that I'm not Norwegian, who wouldn't be?
by psychoslave | 2025-05-31 04:53:54+00:00
> Less democratic countries will have an advantage over the democratic countries in terms of fast execution, unless the latter manage to integrate private-public operations effectively.

This argument is like a classic. But on which time frame is it supposed to be operative? Is that back with any empirical data to test the claim?

Less involvement of edge nodes in the decision process is also encouraging "don't give a shit to suggest improvements" and "utter whatever lie is expected by the system to avoid claims of dissidence".

There are actual pragmatic benefits in democratic systems, it's not only pure idealistic motivation at stake that can argue in their favor.
by sandeepkd | 2025-05-31 04:54:16+00:00
Thanks for the example, if I get the use case correctly then its about being able to exectue the operation on behalf of the user when the user is not around. This is what the OAuth2 (authorization) is designed for, the user consents giving the access token to the client app which can interact with the resource servers on behalf of the user. In this case the service running on your server would be the client app and the AI service has the burden to support OAuth2 functionality and API's. It does requires explicit user in the loop for the initial handshake.

However it seems like you are looking at the possibility of not even having the user in initial handshake to exchange/get the access token. Rather you are hoping that its a S2S call to get the token in the context of a user. I am treating this as more of an Assume user scenario and in my mind assuming the user context for debugging and service role is more day to day use case from what I have seen from security perspective. Or read only operations on behalf of user can be another bucket, mutations on behalf of user without users consent is something that sounds tricky for any external service
by ryao | 2025-05-31 04:55:53+00:00
Stores often refuse to stock products unless they are given a comfortable enough margin on them that can be as high as 25%. That is how they can afford to do deals on CPUs to draw people into the store. Amazon also has overhead in shipping costs to customers that the brick and mortar store does not, since they receive goods in bulk that amortizes costs. They both also want as much money as they can get out of the customer, so they have little reason to lower pricing upfront unless they think that it will help them get even more money (like how microcenter cuts prices on CPUs since they expect to make it up on everything else you need to build a PC).
by teruakohatu | 2025-05-31 04:58:10+00:00
I guess it depends if you want to restrict an agent to a set of protocols or let it go wild.

I think in most use cases and agent would need just https and dns, both which can be MiTM monitored. In other some cases maybe also one or more of SSH, redis, MySQL, Postgres etc.

But YOLOing and letting it to connect to anything is probably not needed.
by lotsofpulp | 2025-05-31 04:58:41+00:00
>Retail/amazon operate at a much higher margin than most people realize.

Then why don’t their 10-Ks and 10-Qs show it? There is a reason it has a reputation of being a cutthroat business. Out of all the big retail businesses, only Home Depot/Lowes has 8%+ profit margins, and Apple obviously.

https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/WMT/walmart/net-pr...

https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/BBY/best-buy/net-p...

https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/COST/costco/net-pr...

https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/KR/kroger/net-prof...

https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/ACI/albertsons/net...

https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/TGT/target/net-pro...

https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/JWN/nordstrom/net-...

https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/M/macys/net-profit...

https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/WBA/walgreens/net-...

https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/CVS/cvs-health/net...
by brucehoult | 2025-05-31 04:59:56+00:00
Yes, for cryptography you'd like to have constant time, but this has to be an awfully low bandwidth channel!

A `cmov` will have the same serialisation problem as `adc` but on machines without carry it might still leave you better off than the obvious `add s,a,b; sltu co,s,a; add s,s,ci; sltu t,s,ci; or co,co,t`.
by bruce511 | 2025-05-31 05:01:08+00:00
This is of course true is some cases and less true in others.

I consider myself an expert in one tiny niche field (computer generated code), and when that field comes up (on HN and elsewhere) over the last 30 years the general mood (from people who don't do it) is that it's poor quality code.

Pre-AI this was demonstrably untrue, but meh, I don't need to convince you, so I accept your point of view, and continue doing my thing. Our company revenue is important to me, not the opinion of done guy on the internet.

(AI has freshened the conversation, and it is currently giving mixed results, which is to be expected since it is non-deterministic. But I've been doing deterministic generation for 35 years.)

So yeah. Lots of comments from people who don't fo something, and I'm really not interested in taking the time to "prove" them wrong.

But equally I think the general level of discussion in areas where I'm not an expert (but experienced) is high. And around a lot of topics experience can be highly different.

For example companies, employees and employers come in all sorts of ways. Some folk have been burned and see (all) management through a certain light. Whereas of course, some are good, some are bad.

Yes, most people still use voting as a measure of "I agree with this", rather than the quality of the discussion, but that's just people, and I'm not gonna die on that hill.

And yeah, I'm not above joining in on a topic I don't technically use or know much about. I'll happily say that the main use for crypto (as a currency) is for illegal activity. Or that crypto in general is a ponzi scheme. Maybe I'm wrong, maybe it really is the future. But for now, it walks like a duck.

So I both agree, and disagree, with you. But I'm still happy to hang out here and get into (hopefully) illuminating discussions.
by unscaled | 2025-05-31 05:01:20+00:00
This article focuses about memory, but even if memory wasn't an immediate issue (e.g. if you had smaller pages and didn't restrict the heap size to 1GB), you still want backpressure in this case.

What really happens here is that we've got two operations:

1. An I/O-bound operation (downloading URLs). 2. A CPU-bound operation (processing downloaded URLs).

Memory is a limited resource that requires you to introduce backpressure into the system, but so is the CPU. If downloads were fast and memory usage was relatively low (compared to the heap size), this program would have run into another issue: Thousands of lightweight threads all competing for the same small number of CPU cores when processing their downloaded data.

In practice, in most cases CPU-bound code in virtual threads would just introduce a new bottleneck, without proper back pressure. If the processing doesn't have any further I/O operations involved, the virtual threads will keep queuing up until the physical threads will finish processing everything (Java virtual threads, unlike goroutines in Go, cannot be preempted by the scheduler). This will just create more opportunities for an OOM, with virtual threads that keep piling up and waiting to be processed.

But even if you introduce a backpressure mechanism like a semaphore or BlockingQueue when queuing up the URLs, things can go bad for you here if your app has to do other things besdies processing URLs.

For instance, assume you've got a batch of 3000 URLs to process and each of these URLs takes 10 seconds to process. Let's say you're running everything on a CPU with 8 logical cores. Even if fully utilizing all of your CPU cores, you'll need about an hour to process everything. During that time any other I/O bound task that you do may be starved, because each time a URL processing task gets a hang of a carrier thread (the actual OS thread running virtual threads), it blocks it until processing is finished, and no other virtual threads can be scheduled on it! So in the scenario described here, you might quickly run out of carrier threads and all other I/O-bound operations would starve out waiting for available carrier threads.

If you've got many long-running CPU-bound tasks, it's often better to keep a traditional dedicated thread pool (ExecutorService.newFixedThreadPool()) just for these tasks.
by ghm2180 | 2025-05-31 05:04:57+00:00
I wonder when the investors and investors in the early printing press or steam engine or excel spreadsheet was invented did they think of the ways — soul crushing homework(books), rapid and cruel colonization(steam engines and trains), innovative project management(excel) — there tech would be used?

The demand for these products was not where it was intended at the time probably. Perhaps the answer to its biggest effect lies in how it will free up human potential and time.

If AI can do that — and that is a big if — then how and what would you do with that time? Well ofc, more activity, different ways to spend time, implying new kinds of jobs.
by leoshimo | 2025-05-31 05:05:16+00:00
I loved my time there - I attended batch in-person in NYC.

Specifically:

- I enjoyed how passionate everybody was about something - and how deep they pursued their interests. Everybody was generous with their time and knowledge, and it helped me connect new concepts together in ways I couldn't have alone.

- I loved having dedicated time and space to focus on this passion project, full time. I joined with the specific goal of building a "livable" MVP during the 3 months I was at Recurse.

- It was great to be in an environment where people were performing computer stats + shenanigans purely for fun.

It was the perfect setup for me!
by Retric | 2025-05-31 05:06:50+00:00
> Historically, humans are interested in exploring abandoned and forbidden sites and go out of their way to do so.

The waste is still going to be around in some form, just not in a huge lump someone can walk up to.

> zero concrete plans or funding

3,000 people where working on site, so they had funding for the process and while slow quite a bit of visible progress had occurred. “The cranes have so far removed the roof of the reactor's engine room.” https://www.rferl.org/a/inside-chernobyl-nuclear-power-plant... The final storage of all of Ukraine’s high level nuclear waste is unclear, but that’s a common issue in the industry. Getting this high level waste safely offsite and in dry cask storage is a reasonable goal at this point.

The drone strike has been repaired, but ultimately wars don’t last forever. On the scale of a 100+ year projects it’s a temporary issue. https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/articles/chernobyl-emerge...
by NitpickLawyer | 2025-05-31 05:06:59+00:00
> “A recent study in Frontiers in Psychology monitored brain activity in students taking notes and found that those writing by hand had higher levels of electrical activity across a wide range of interconnected brain regions responsible for movement, vision, sensory processing and memory. The findings add to a growing body of evidence that has many experts speaking up about the importance of teaching children to handwrite words and draw pictures.”

If this "recent study" is the one posted a few weeks ago here, then the methodology was shoddy at best. They compared handwriting to typing but constrained to "one finger typing". Monitoring brain activity on that task is surely flawed. No idea why they did it like that, but I'd wait till better tests are done.
by sky2224 | 2025-05-31 05:07:35+00:00
I didn't read the research paper, so maybe they do this, but I think an emphasis needs to be placed on the specific subject having notes taken on.

I think hand written notes for math is just a no-brainer situation. Math formulas do not translate well to typing. Programming courses though? Probably a bit of a different story.

Additionally, I'd be interested to know if the learning is improved when talking about how much info is retained from that lecture period versus after studying the material noted down. I've been experimenting with taking typed notes and using an AI model to generate anki cards for me from those notes. So far it has been quite useful.
by ryao | 2025-05-31 05:09:13+00:00
Unfortunately, Microcenter’s selection often leaves me disappointed. In particular, they stock almost no ECC RAM for AM5 machines. They do not stock many graphics cards that have ECC VRAM either. Their best card in stock that has ECC VRAM is this nearly obsolete ampere card:

https://www.microcenter.com/product/652517/pny-nvidia-rtx-a4...
by strangattractor | 2025-05-31 05:09:19+00:00
Most significant technology takes almost a generation to be fully adopted. I think it is unlikely we are seeing the full effect of LLM's at the moment.

Content producers are blocking scrapers of their sites to prevent AI companies from using their content. I would not assume that AI is either inevitable or on a easy path to adoption. AI certainly isn't very useful if what it "knows" is out of date.