MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by dathinab | 2025-05-07 21:30:08+00:00
through algorithmic improvements can also go a long way and if you are one of the first type checker which have to figure out the mess the python type annotation system is you will vast a lot of time on figuring that out instead of refactoring it's architecture to allow for algorithmic improvements

which brings us to another python issue, python is quite bad at such huge refactoring even with type checkers

but yeah python is by far the slowest widely used language, and for some use cases you can side step it by placing most hot code in C++/Rust extension modules, (or don't care because you are much much more network latency bound) but a type checker probably doesn't belong into that category
by blt | 2025-05-07 21:30:09+00:00
I agree with this part of your response: If we were to require that distributed training generates the exact same sequence of weight updates as serial SGD on a single machine, then we would need a barrier like that. However, there is a lot of research on distributed optimization that addresses this issue by relaxing the "exactly equivalent to serial SGD" requirement, including classic papers [1] and more recent ones [2].

Basically, there are two properties of ML optimization that save us: 1) the objective is a huge summation over many small objectives (the losses for each training data point), and 2) the same noise-robustness that makes SGD work in the first place can give us robustness against further noise caused by out-of-order updates.

So I think this issue can be overcome fairly easily. Does anyone know if the big LLM-training companies use asynchronous updates like [1,2]? Or do they still use a big barrier?

[1] https://proceedings.neurips.cc/paper_files/paper/2011/hash/2...

[2] https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.09135
What got lost in translation from Lean Manufacturing into Agile?
by solomonb | 2025-05-07 21:30:12+00:00
The Toyota System (Lean Manufacturing) is largely considered a fundamental revolution in manufacturing. Systems like 5S, continuous improvement, just in time production, Kanban (which is way more sophisticated in Lean then in software project management) etc have been demonstrated over and over again to be highly effective at improving factory production, employee satisfaction, and product quality.

As I understand it, Agile was an attempt to translate Lean Manufacturing from physical production to software development. I've seen some pretty incredible presentations on the benefits of Agile, particularly out of Spotify.

Yet I've never personally worked somewhere that I felt adopted Agile in a way that delivered on the promises and I've heard similar sentiments from many other people.

I have personally experienced the benefits of Lean methods even outside of a factory setting when organizing my home and workshop.

Is there something fundamentally different about physical production processes versus software development?
by airbreather | 2025-05-07 21:30:14+00:00
Yeah I said it was dhit when my ex-wife said she was going to do it, but it definitely did something.

And I am well aware of the placebo effect.

But just because something is not provable or falsifiable under current scientific knowledge, it does not mean it is neccesarily quackery, there's a Venn diagram there where some things may be effective.

Automatically discarding something that even occasionally gets results, because it doesn't fit current "knowledge" is the height of arrogance.
by goda90 | 2025-05-07 21:30:25+00:00
> I don’t think there is clinical level evidence for it

Even if it's 100% placebo, if it's not harmful, and it works for a person, then it works. But, determining if it's not harmful should be a priority. I found this person saying it made their life worse, for example: https://www.reddit.com/r/CPTSD_NSCommunity/comments/ungaew/t...
by Lerc | 2025-05-07 21:31:11+00:00
>Third — I’m left wondering if a true “Deep Research” like tool would be able to provide the same analysis. I find that Deep Research is fine for secondary sources, but not for Deep Analysis of primary source data.

In the searches I have done Google's "Deep Research" has been better at providing primary data (or very convincingly fabricating).

OpenAI's version seems to more likely to give the answer that everybody thinks is true. For the blood example I could see it finding many sources that repeat the 2% claim, and accept that because everyone seems to agree, then it must be right. That's a mixed blessing in that maybe most casual users might want the commonly accepted answer, but when I have used the deep research tools, it has almost always because I know the answer everybody gives for a particular question, but I suspect it might not be based in reality. This makes my reason for wanting an automated deep research tool coinciding with the weakest area of the tool itself.

It's also been a bit eye opening how often commonly repeated but poorly founded claims, seem to turn up the same names of individuals, (or organisations, or individuals pretending to be organisations) as you trace them back.
by isaacremuant | 2025-05-07 21:31:57+00:00
That's just bullshit. You don't know how far away the restaurants are and how many people don't own cars or if they do, the traffic back and forth and wait time would be more than a guy on a motorbike.

People want to insert morality and virtue in every stupid thing. Cold showers, delivery or not, wake up times. Get a grip and sort your own shit while other people decide to use and pay for other services that you might not.

It's fine to criticize cost or experience but to pretend you're superior for your choices... Ridiculous.
by neonsunset | 2025-05-07 21:32:04+00:00
There are fundamental restrictions where NativeAOT will never work or be desirable. For example, runtime-compiled regex patterns or any other feature which relies on emitting IL at runtime and creating new members or even assembles and then loading them. Similar applies to compiled expression trees - they are supported in NativeAOT but in the form of falling back onto interpreting them, which has worse performance. Or unbound reflection with patterns that cannot be statically proven and/or analyzed.

Reflection analysis can (and will) be improved but there are hard constraints - a correctly working expression like 'someAssembly.GetType(Console.ReadLine())' by definition would have to root (and force compilation for) every type in the assembly, which is highly undesirable or even sometimes unfeasible for AOT compilation. And there is a lot of code which does exactly this.

The main challenge are packages and frameworks. ASP.NET Core is largely compatible (via minimal API) and so is AvaloniaUI, EF Core has some compatibility assurances and DapperAOT is tailor-made as the name implies, serialization is also a solved problem although you may need to use a different API.

At the end of the day, NativeAOT is not something "to be fully migrated to" because it has fundamental restrictions (some of which also affect other languages like Rust or Go) and having JIT around is a feature for patterns which specifically exploit it but is also a performance optimization (DynamicPGO, better instruction selection especially around SIMD paths, turning static readonly's into JIT constants and apply subsequent optimizations on top of that, this is what makes C# port of Mimalloc so good as it elides dead code with assertions impossible to remove dynamically in C/C++). NativeAOT has its own optimizations, and it will continue to diverge with JIT (e.g. there's a toggle in .NET compiler to repeat some optimization phases, usually it's too expensive for JIT but for AOT it's a good fit, AFAIK there is work to productize this).

The wide perception that JIT-compiled code has to be slower stems from other sources of performance overhead that are typical to languages which happen to use JIT (many of which have "weaker" compilers too), not from the JIT compilation itself. There are technicalities like certain calls have to be indirect in order to support patching the callee address, or inter-procedural analysis which is trivial to prove under AOT may not be so under JIT where new callers/callees may be constructed dynamically or a reJIT invoked which would invalidate the analysis results. JIT also costs additional memory. But it's not a source of worse performance.
by simonw | 2025-05-07 21:33:10+00:00
Right, but are there any restrictions on what I can do with them?

Google Gemini has some: https://ai.google.dev/gemini-api/docs/grounding/search-sugge...

OpenAI has some rules too: https://platform.openai.com/docs/guides/tools-web-search#out...

> "When displaying web results or information contained in web results to end users, inline citations must be made clearly visible and clickable in your user interface."

I'm used to search APIs coming with BIG sets of rules on how you can use the results. I'd be surprised but happy if Anthropic didn't have any.

The Brave Search API is a great example of this: https://brave.com/search/api/

They have a special, much more expensive tier called "Data w/ storage rights" which is $45 CPM, compared to $5 CPM for the tier that doesn't include those storage rights.
by const_cast | 2025-05-07 21:33:13+00:00
I don't think it's a requirement and it does actually come with it's own set of foot guns. The problem is that these design decisions impact culture, which is why JS has a culture of importing far too many third-party packages. Which comes with it's own set of risks.

I agree overall that the C or C++ way of doing things is more cumbersome, but I don't think that's enough to write off those languages as a whole.
by kerkeslager | 2025-05-07 21:33:29+00:00
> I think its budget is not balanced and its funding has strings attached that undermines the sovereignty of independent institutions.

1. The budget of most Red states is not balanced.

2. States aren't sovereign institutions.

3. Funding being provided without strings attached is practically nonexistent. Money is allocated for a purpose. Allocating money with no string attached is simply not a thing that state or local governments do, so it's bizarre that you'd think states do this any differently from the federal government.

4. If you want the federal budget to be balanced, definitely you should vote for Democrats, because Republican presidents have increased the national debt more than Democratic ones consistently. Republican austerity is a total lie not borne out by any facts.

Frankly, this is a blatant distraction. I don't give a shit whether it's states or the federal government that feeds kids, I just want a government to feed all the kids in my country.

The only reason conservatives give a shit about state's rights is because being in favor of state's rights sounds a lot better than being against feeding children. But the fact is, when states do things like pass gun regulation or refuse to bypass due process to arrest immigrants, suddenly conservatives are against state's rights. And make no mistake, whenever there is any major movement for states to individually provide school lunches, it's conservatives that oppose it.
by Zenbit_UX | 2025-05-07 21:33:31+00:00
> I've found that the problem is mostly rooted in a culture obsessed with novelty. And not novelty with a point (a truly better solution comes out), but novelty for novelty's sake (something new to talk about that's "popular" in dev circles, even if it's junk).

Ah yes, seems like you’ve discovered Clojure, and it’s bastard child ClojureScript.
by dn3500 | 2025-05-07 21:33:51+00:00
It's not just the headline. "... a single electrode that looks just like a strand of hair and is more reliable than the standard, multi-electrode version." "The researchers tested the device’s long-term adhesion and electrical performance and compared it to the current, standard EEG using multiple electrodes."

I read the story three times and I'm still confused. But I'm sure you're right, and I think it's the author who's confused.
by plutoh28 | 2025-05-07 21:34:07+00:00
My take as a current uni student.

This is all absolutely true. I have yet to meet anyone who doesn’t use chat. Some people use it as a personal tutor, most use it as a shortcut to finish assignments. Regardless, everyone is using it. LLM’s are great when used as a tool. Bouncing ideas and asking conceptual questions is a great way to learn (it really is as valuable as talking to a professor for a lot of questions). But how do you convince students to use LLMs as a learning tool instead of a cheating tool?

I think the solution is simple. Most people are short cutting with LLMs because they want a good grade, and they want it easy. So, stop with grading. The primary incentive for going to a class should be to pickup some new knowledge and skills, not to pickup a good grade.
by RetroTechie | 2025-05-07 21:35:15+00:00
> (..) there is no meaningful user discernible performance differences between a 500Mb OS and a 30GB OS.

I call BS. A small single board computer I have, came with 8 GB of RAM. Not esoecially big or small. 500 MB would fit into this, comfortably. Leaving ~7.5GB for apps. Load everything into RAM once, run from there. RAM bandwith is ~8.5GB/s.

30 GB wouldn't fit. So: swap everything in & out using a (cheapish) SSD over a x1 PCIe lane. Or (more common) from an SD card / eMMC module. Think ~100 MB/s on a good day. That's with apps competing for the memory crumbs left.

That's a ~85x factor difference. 2 orders of magnitude. Yes users would notice.

Sure, developer with fully decked out system doesn't see this. Or even understand it. But:

Size matters.

Note: smartphones, tablets etc are not unlike that SBC. And flash storage tends to be on the low-end side where speed is concerned. Desktop you say? Nope, smartphones & tablets are where it's at these days.
by exiguus | 2025-05-07 21:36:06+00:00
Over the past few months, I have migrated numerous projects to Biome and Dprint, and in some cases, back to ESLint and/or Prettier. Projects in plain TypeScript/JavaScript have worked out quite well. However, as soon as JSX/TSX with React or Angular came into play, we encountered lagging issues with popular plugins and configurations. The number of bugs increased, prompting us to revert to ESLint.

I recall that migrating an entire company style guide from ESLint to Biome was nearly impossible because it relied on many rules from other ESLint plugins. Writing these rules / plugins ourselves was too much effort. Perhaps someone else has experience with this and can share their insights?

I agree that performance is valuable, especially in token-based development where you push directly to the main branch. Having hooks and builds run on your local machine and experiencing a 30-second speed improvement is nice. However, in the case of migrating an entire company style guide, it might be more cost-effective to simply buy new laptops that can run everything faster.

Nevertheless, I have had very positive experiences with plain TypeScript projects. In such cases, I would do it again. Especially when you have to update from ESLint Version 8 to 9, taking a look at Biome might be a good investment of time.
by globular-toast | 2025-05-07 21:36:23+00:00
When I was into road cycling I find having a banana sticking out my rear jersey pocket would make drivers treat me better. I later saw a study that drivers think cyclists are less human, so my theory is it reminded them that I am, in fact, just a person using the road.

Alas, even the banana stopped working, though. Road cycling is horrible now. Too many cars.
by dathinab | 2025-05-07 21:36:40+00:00
the thing is most (all) of the type checkers including e.g. mypy _do not_ support most crazy python ...

not because they don't want to or because it's to slow

but because it's not really viable without fully executing module loading in a sandbox, which might seem viable until you realize that you still need to type check `__main__` modules etc. and that its a common trend in python to do configs by loading python modules and grabbing the module locals as keys of the config or loading some things might actually idk. initialize a GPU driver :sob: So it's kinda 100% guaranteed not possible to do fully correct type checking for all project :smh:

But also python is one of the slowest popular languages (and with a large margin to any not also "one of slowest" languages). Only by moving hot code into C++/Rust is it fast, which often is good enough, but a type checker is exactly this kind of software where this approach stops working.
by ben_w | 2025-05-07 21:36:43+00:00
If you're as muscular as Schwarzenegger, some people will fancy you, others will say you're ugly and unnatural because you're taking steroids.

On weight, France (amongst others) had to ban extremely low BMI models*, which implies that people are very happy to look at — and desire to have — dangerous body forms.

* https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-32174364
by geoka9 | 2025-05-07 21:36:53+00:00
Have you tried replacing by volume? E.g. fill your stomach with a large salad (which can include some meat if necessary). And if you get hungry in 45 minutes, just eat more salad? You may also find that cutting out carby/starchy food will make you less hungry (once you get past the initial withdrawal symptoms), as long as you keep your stomach "satiated by volume" with low calorie/high nutrient food.

Another trick is to try splitting that sandwich in two and eating the second half after 45 minutes (when you get hungry again).
by autoexec | 2025-05-07 21:37:05+00:00
That seems to be the hangup. I have to use a definition that would put it on equal footing to what we do as humans since that's the comparison being made.

Computers and software can be said to "understand", "think", and "reason" in their own way and informally people have always used those words in that context. Recently, software which has been trained on human-reasoned output is producing text that mimics reasoning well enough that it can be confused for the real thing, but nobody has been able to show that any reasoning (as a human reasons) is what's occurring.
by _QrE | 2025-05-07 21:37:17+00:00
>scratch-built in Rust _all the way down to handcrafted GPU shaders and OS graphics API calls_

Is this what happens to people who choose to learn Rust?

Joking aside, this is interesting, but I'm not sure what the selling point is versus most other AI IDEs out there? While it's great that you support ollama, practically speaking, approximately nobody is getting much mileage out of local models for complex coding tasks, and the privacy issues for most come from the LLM provider rather than the IDE provider.
by prmoustache | 2025-05-07 21:38:01+00:00
When I don't want to make my own pizza dough and order it, I just call from the google maps link. It doesn't take longer than finding any delivery app in my smarthone.

And I will just wait 10 minutes, hop on my bicycle and 2 minutes later I get my pizza right out of the oven and head home directly much faster than any delivery rider would because they mutualize orders and let the first pizzas lose most of their heat while waiting to have sufficient orders.
by Defletter | 2025-05-07 21:38:14+00:00
> The Community Editions are more limited, but don't restrict commercial use.

I've always wondered about this. I have the All-Products Pack subscription, don't get me wrong, but I used to have the Educational licence when I was in university. What was there to stop me from using it for commercial purposes? I get that the licence restrictions are likely more targeted towards medium to large businesses than little ol' me, but to what extent is it just an honour system? Just don't commit your .idea/ folder and basically no one would have any the wiser?
by flancian | 2025-05-07 21:39:07+00:00
Pretty weird article. Just on the title alone:

- 'Mysterious': there's very little of substance in the article to advance the position that it is mysterious at all.

- 'Sacred': OK, I guess!

- 'Pyramid': "A fourth explanation — one for which there is no evidence — is that Cerro El Cono sits on the ruins of a pyramid built by ancient Indigenous tribes". So... no evidence then :)

- 'Hidden': "It rises steeply from the relatively flat jungle landscape of eastern Peru, making it visible from as far west as the Andes — 250 miles (400 kilometers) away — on a clear day."
by omneity | 2025-05-07 21:39:11+00:00
Related: For those who want to build their own AI search for free and connect it to any model they want, I created a browser MCP that interfaces with major public search engines [0], a SERP MCP if you want, with support for multiple pages of results.

The rate limits of the upstream engines are fine for personal use, and the benefit is it uses the same browser you do, so results are customized to your search habits out-of-the-box (or you could use a blank browser profile).

0: https://herd.garden/trails/@omneity/serp
by spaceywilly | 2025-05-07 21:40:00+00:00
Yeah it’s kind of like we have invented a car that drives around wildly in any direction, and we are trying to steer it by putting up guard rails to get it to go where we want. What we need is to invent the steering wheel and brake pedals, which I’m sure smart people are working on. We’re just at a very early point with this technology, which I think people tend to forget.
by patrick451 | 2025-05-07 21:40:24+00:00
> What if you really do need "unsafe" division? Well, that is possible, with unchecked_div. Most people do not need unchecked_div. If you think you do but you haven't benchmarked yet, you do not. It doesn't get any simpler than that.

This attitude is why modern software is dogshit slow. People make this "if you haven't benchmarked, it doesn't matter" argument thousands of times and the result is that every program I run is slower than molasses in Siberia. I don't care about "safety" at the expense of performance.
by pinkmuffinere | 2025-05-07 21:41:12+00:00
Emotionally I agree — what could these people be doing to uniquely add millions of dollars of value? However, the fact that they aren’t replaced with cheaper options is (imo) pretty good evidence that they are uniquely worth that pay. If there was a cheaper option, the board of directors would replace the CEO, and enrich themselves and other shareholders with the saved money.

Either way, that’s kindof disconnected for the CEO of this bloodbank. Their opportunity cost is quite high. They choose to work for comparatively low pay, but have a positive impact on the world.
by dylan604 | 2025-05-07 21:41:44+00:00
What's the minimum size of an operation before the GDPR kicks in? In other words, are all sites governed by GDPR, or are some companies considered too small to be under the GDPR regulations? I know that there are some regulations that get a pass for smaller outfits. I know nothing about GDPR as a European audience is not my target and not kowtowing for them.
by ben_w | 2025-05-07 21:42:02+00:00
LLMs are currently at the level of a fresh graduate, not even someone with 2 years of real-world experience.

While I expect this to change, I don't know how fast, nor where the ceiling is — always the trouble with S-curves, you can never tell how close you are to the mid-point, and with even a tiny bit of noise you can't even tell which side of the mid-point you are.
by skywhopper | 2025-05-07 21:42:52+00:00
Yes, this is how they work. All the LLM can do is take text and generate the text that’s likely to follow. So for a chatbot, the system “prompt” is really just an introduction explaining how the chat works and what delimiters to use and the user’s “chat” is just appended to that, and then the code asks the LLM what’s next after the system prompt plus the user’s chat.
by simonw | 2025-05-07 21:42:54+00:00
That's pretty tough - the problem is that you need to have RAM left over to run actual applications!

Qwen 3 8B on MLX runs in just 5GB of RAM and can write basic code but I don't know if it would be good enough for anything interesting: https://simonwillison.net/2025/May/2/qwen3-8b/

Honestly though with that little memory I'd stick to running against hosted LLMs - Claude 3.7 Sonnet, Gemini 2.5 Pro, o4-mini are all cheap enough that it's hard to spend much money with them for most coding workflows.