MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by nurettin | 2025-05-31 03:25:14+00:00
What makes me confident is the fact that I've been using gcc since 2.95 (well redhat had its patched "2.96" but yeah) so I witnessed the evolution of these parameters.

What makes neural networks and learning irrelevant is because there aren't a billion parameters, most parameters don't depend on each other. It is not a search problem. You have the wrong domain.

This is like saying "hey let's crack that password using neural networks, stockfish is so advanced!"

And people have tried auto searching parameters, the results were as I described in my response. Moreover, imagine releasing code and having cluebies complain about trying to make it go faster with -fomit-frame-pointer. The whole idea is wasteful and cringe.
by theamk | 2025-05-31 03:25:21+00:00
I am curious - when I do my ESP32 projects, I often set up "start up Wifi AP when not configured that shows config page". This allows easy configuration via phone, and does not require any custom app development. The only downside is the requirement for the physical "setup" button (in case of bad wifi or something), but I don't think this would be a problem for your device?

Any reason to prefer bluetooth over local web server?
by ivape | 2025-05-31 03:25:44+00:00
Yes, that's quite easy. I say "Hey reorganize the tasks like-so, prioritize this, like so", and if I really need to, I can go ahead and hook up some function calls but I suspect this will be unnecessary with a few more LLM iterations (if even that). You can keep running from how powerful these LLMs are, but I'll just sit and wait for the business/startup apocalypse (which is coming). Jira will not be replaced by something better, it'll be replaced by some weekend project a high schooler makes. The very fact that it's valued at over a billion dollars in the market is just going to be a profound rug pull soon enough.

So let me keep it real, I am shorting Atlassian over the next 5 years. Asana is another, there's plenty of startup IPOs that need to be shorted to the ground basically.
by gostsamo | 2025-05-31 03:25:54+00:00
> Since that isn't happening I'd assume that doing so has been made illegal by the regulators for some reason.

the lack of antitrust action and the price of entry in the market are a market failure modes that could bring in the same final result. Especially, if the packagers are forming exclusive deals with the distributors to prevent new entrants from achieving market share.
by magicalhippo | 2025-05-31 03:25:58+00:00
Bit disappointed it wasn't a re-implementation of SmallPT[1].

Would have been interesting to see it deal with multiple different objects with different materials, the recursion and such.

Guess it shouldn't take that much to turn it into something like SmallPT.

[1]: https://kevinbeason.com/smallpt/
by theuppermiddle | 2025-05-31 03:27:56+00:00
Just because consultants are from India does not make them incompetent. Not to mention the attack vector was social engineering, which can happen to any person of any nationality. 70% of India's GDP is domestic consumption. 7% of the GDP is service export, of which only 3.5% is software services. While significant, it certainly is not "propping" up India's GDP.
by fernly | 2025-05-31 03:28:05+00:00
Based only on the headings and titles of the charts on the first few pages? I smell an AI writing. I mean, do these titles sound like an intelligent human wrote them?

"Charts paint thousands of words..."

"Leading USA-Based LLM User" -- what does that even mean? With a value of "800MM" where MM is what units?

"AI Usage + Cost + Loss Growth = Unprecedented" -- how can you add three things that don't appear to be commensurable? Also, what is "Loss Growth" and how does it add to "Usage"?

There are plenty more examples in the charts later. The Overview section, while not so obviously AI-written, has an over-the-top enthusiasm and loose structure that makes me squeamish. I don't trust it, but that's just me I guess.
by charleslmunger | 2025-05-31 03:29:00+00:00
>When a program contains two conflicting accesses (§17.4.1) that are not ordered by a happens-before relationship, it is said to contain a data race.

Yes, your program contains a data race, by the definition used in the JLS. The set of outcomes you may observe from a data race are specified. I'm not sure if this choice was intentional or not, but there is a guarantee that you will either print the argument or "uninitialized" and no other behavior, because String relies on final field semantics. This is would not be true in c/c++ where the equivalent code is undefined behavior and you could see any result.

In Java you can have a data race and use it productively for certain niche cases, like String.hashcode - I've also contributed some to the Guava concurrency library. This is not true in c/c++ where data races (by their definition) are undefined behavior. If you want to do the tricks you can in racy Java without UB, you have to declare your variables atomic and use relaxed memory order and possibly fences.
by bjt12345 | 2025-05-31 03:30:56+00:00
But this is often a mixture of these two things.

The tools are often cringe because the capex was laughable. E.g. one solution, the trial was done using public LLMs and then they switched over to an internally built LLM which is terrible.

Or, secondly, the process is often cringe because the corporate aims are laughable.

I've had an argument with a manager making a multi-million dollar investment in a zero coding solution that we ended up throwing in the bin years later.

They argued that they are going with this bad product because "they don't want to have to manage a team of developers".

They responded "this product costs millions of dollars, how dare you?"

How dare me indeed...

They promptly left the company but it took 5 years before it was finally canned, and plenty of people wasted 5 years of their career on a dead-end product.
How much LLM scraping is being done from residential IPs?
by mkfs | 2025-05-31 03:31:24+00:00
It seems like I increasingly get treated as a potential bot, despite my traffic originating from a residential (cable modem) IP address, and one that seldom changes, at that. I do use Firefox on Linux, which yields a unicorn-tier user agent at this point. But I'm left wondering, are they just that bad at distinguish bot from non-bot traffic, or is bot traffic increasingly laundered through residential ASNs via user-installed apps?
by rtpg | 2025-05-31 03:31:39+00:00
A stack of symbol tables is more machinery. It might also be hard to prove that the stack of symbol tables strategy is actually correct!

A big part of the value in the lambda calculus is in its aggressive simplicity meaning that you can do a bunch of theoretical work with relatively few concepts.

The less concepts and moving parts, the less proving necessary. And then you can layer on things and prove that they can also fit into your calculus.

I think most LC work _isn't_ about implementing something based on LC so much as providing theoretical foundations for your work being sound. And in that model you are likely going to focus on theoretical ease.
by chriscbr | 2025-05-31 03:32:58+00:00
I liked how this piece cuts through nostalgia and maps out (or at least gives a sketch of) where the valley actually is today. A few highlights that stood out to me:

- The sharp contrast between the '90s "Jeffersonian", hacker-libertarian spirit and today's more "Hamiltonian", state-capacity mindset, and how they're tied to the geopolitical and technical shifts that nurtured each era.

- The clear taxonomy of the new "tribes" (EA, abundance, American dynamism, New Right, tech ethicists, network-staters) and the axes they vary across -- human nature, progress vs preservation, role of the state. Nadia did a similar breakdown of climate activist tribes in "Mapping out the tribes of climate" a few years ago that I thought was interesting as well.

- There are some data nuggets that upend cliches, e.g. nine VCs controlling ~50% of 2024 fundraising, and tech elites being less anti-government than either party’s base.

- The insight that valley thinking now shapes national politics (e.g. J.D. Vance), showing tech culture's reach beyond product launches.
by snowwrestler | 2025-05-31 03:35:53+00:00
We actually have many backup plans. The most effective ones will be the new business plans that unlock investment which is what creates new jobs. But behind that are a large set of government policies and services that help people who have lost work. And behind that are private resources like charities, nonprofits, even friends and family.

People don’t want society to collapse. So if you think it’s something that people can prevent, feel comforted that everyone is trying to prevent it.
by gogusrl | 2025-05-31 03:37:19+00:00
A friend of a friend (doctor as well) got taken for ~20.000 eur while being kept on the phone for over 6 hours using the "security breach at your bank" story. She said they got her so into the story that she really saw no issues going to the Crypto ATM at the local mall and doing 15 (FIFTEEN!) purchases there because a "police inspector" told her that's the only safe place for her money. They had a fake website where she could "see" her deposits but she was with the guy on the phone and was telling him "I made another deposit" ...
by manwe150 | 2025-05-31 03:37:35+00:00
TSAN observes the lack of an explicit order and warns about that, so it is better in some sense than just running normally in a loop and hoping to see the occurrence of a specific mis-ordering. But that part of it is a data race detector, so it cannot do anything for race conditions, and as soon as something is annotated as atomic, it cannot do anything to detect misuse. It can be better for lock evaluation, as it can check they are always acquired in the same order without needing to actually observe a conflicting deadlock occurring. But I agree you need more formal tooling to actually show the problem is eliminated and not just improbable
by kazinator | 2025-05-31 03:38:28+00:00
The sandboxing of eval is something that can be left to a layer on top. You certainly don't want eval itself to be gutted of functionality; nothing less than he full language, thank you.

eval can be sandboxed with a combination of multiple approaches, including validating the code, and evaluating it in a restricted environment in which only certain symbols exist. The full library package is not visible.
by koito17 | 2025-05-31 03:40:52+00:00
In Java, there are two kinds of Throwable instances[1]: Error and Exception. As the name suggests, OutOfMemoryError is a subclass of Error. In contrast to Exception, an Error "indicates serious problems that a reasonable application should not try to catch"[2]. For this reason, it's considered bad practice in Java to catch all Throwable instances (or catch Error instances explicitly).

> My instinct would be to catch OOM early

OutOfMemoryError subclasses VirtualMachineError, and when a VirtualMachineError is thrown, your program seems to be firmly in undefined behavior territory. Quoting the JVM specification [3]:

A Java Virtual Machine implementation throws an object that is an instance of a subclass of the class VirtualMachineError when an internal error or resource limitation prevents it from implementing the semantics described in this chapter. This specification cannot predict where internal errors or resource limitations may be encountered and does not mandate precisely when they can be reported.

For context: "this chapter" refers to the whole chapter describing the behavior of each JVM instruction. The specification seems to suggest that all bets are off on any guarantees the JVM makes by the time a VirtualMachineError is thrown.

[1] https://docs.oracle.com/en/java/javase/21/docs/api/java.base...

[2] https://docs.oracle.com/en/java/javase/21/docs/api/java.base...

[3] https://docs.oracle.com/javase/specs/jvms/se21/html/jvms-6.h...
by adjfasn47573 | 2025-05-31 03:41:17+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.”

Absolutely but this is not “recent” knowledge. This is known in neuro sciences for at least a decade.

My biggest hope is many western countries that see a decline in education results since the 90s/00s will finally start to reform education and use scienctific knowledge as a bases for how to structure it.

If you can - it’s German, maybe there’s some Auto translation available these days - watch Manfred Spitzer’s talk about “Digitale Demenz” (digital dementia). It’s eye opening!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E5EKy0x55L4 Actual talk starts at 14:53.
by rtpg | 2025-05-31 03:42:06+00:00
In most domains you're always going to have the possibility of a gap.

The real thing though, is that if you have a verified formal model and a buggy implementation, then _you know_ your problem is at that model <-> implementation level.

Could be the implementation is wrong. Could be that the "bug" is in fact not a bug according to your model. But your model isn't "wrong". If your model says that A happens in condition B, then that is what should happen!

You can avoid second guessing a lot of design patterns with models, and focus on this transitional layer.

If someone came up to you and said "I built a calculator and with this calculator 1/0 becomes 0" you don't say "oh... maybe my model of division is wrong". You think the calculator is wrong in one way or another.

Maybe the calculator's universe is consistent in some way but in that case its model is likely not the same model of division you're thinking of. This eliminates entire classes of doubt.
by Spivak | 2025-05-31 03:42:50+00:00
I don't think there's a dichotomy anymore, every car manufacturer is a tech company now. Tesla is a car company run like a tech company and I'll take Honda or Toyota over them every time. And it's not like the tech chops are lacking among traditional automakers, Mercedes launched (albeit limited) actually full self driving where you're not expected to take over and they take liability.

"Tech" isn't that generic. There's no reason to believe that a company that makes a search engine will do any better at self driving. I mean they bought Waymo after they were already promising.
by manwe150 | 2025-05-31 03:43:52+00:00
> we are guaranteed that when we don't need this Goat the clean-up-unused-goat code we wrote will run now

Not to put too fine a point on things, but rust (and c++) very explicitly don’t guarantee this. They are both quite explicit about being allowed to leak memory and never free it (due to reference cycles), something a GC is not typically allowed to do. So yes it usually happens, it just is not guaranteed.
by kazinator | 2025-05-31 03:46:26+00:00
It depends on the dialect. If we consider Common Lisp, it's a piece of data that doesn't constitute a valid form; it is calling 1 as a function. Some Lisp dialects off the mainstream path handle it. One that comes to mind is PicoLisp which admits (1 2 3) as an expression producing (1 2 3) (that object itself, essentially "auto-quoted", I think).
by grigri907 | 2025-05-31 03:47:55+00:00
In my experience, the processor is actually the one who owns the chickens (broilers). The farmer is essentially a baby-sitter for 6-7 weeks. The processor also owns the feed and the farmer gets paid on a feed-to-poultry conversion efficiency.

Variables like temperatures, lighting, ventilation rates, chicken house construction, and access/ density have well-established bounds to maximize pounds of poultry. The farmers have leeway to deviate from the recommendations, but they take on all of the risk in doing so. From the outside, it looks like a pretty oppressive relationship.
by quantadev | 2025-05-31 03:48:15+00:00
When it comes to zero ambiguity and perfect specificity here's how I define it: If I gave the same exact prompt wording to a human would there be any questions they'd need to ask me before starting the work? If they need to ask a clarifying question before starting then I wasn't clear, otherwise I was clear. If you want to balk at phrases like "perfectly clear" you're just nit picking at semantics.
by mattnewton | 2025-05-31 03:51:51+00:00
I think it's different from improving the model weights themselves, like the distillation examples you are mentioning. It's that changes to the "harness" or code running around the llm calls (which is what this is editing), persist or generalize to wrapping more powerful llms. That means they aren't all wasted when a more powerful llm comes along that the harness wasn't tuned to use.
by grues-dinner | 2025-05-31 03:52:51+00:00
And you need a process to follow. You can't just have nearly 4000 supermarkets ringing up HQ at random and reading out lists of 1000 items each. Then what? Back when a supermarket chain did operate like that, the processes like "fill in form ABC in triplicate, forward two to department DEF for batching and then the forward one to department GHI for supplier orders and they produce forms XYZ to send to department JKL for turning into orders for dispatch from warehouses". And so on and so on. You can't just magic up that entire infrastructure and knowledge even if you could get the warm bodies to implement it. Everyone who remembers how to operate a system like that is retired or has forgotten the details, all the forms were destroyed years ago and even the buildings with the phones and vacuum tubes and mail rooms don't exist.

Of course you could stand up a whole new system like that eventually, but you could also use the time to fix the computers and get back to business probably sooner.

But I imagine during those 3 weeks, there were a lot of phone calls, ad-hoc processes being invented and general chaos to get some minimal level of service limping along.
by topspin | 2025-05-31 03:52:56+00:00
"shouldn't it be painfully obvious in companies' output?"

No.

The bottleneck isn't intellectual productivity. The bottleneck is a legion of other things; regulation, IP law, marketing, etc. The executive email writers and meeting attenders have a swarm of business considerations ricocheting around in their heads in eternal battle with each other. It takes a lot of supposedly brilliant thinking to safely monetize all the things, and many of the factors involved are not manifest in written form anywhere, often for legal reasons.

One place where AI is being disruptive is research: where researchers are applying models in novel ways and making legitimate advances in math, medicine and other fields. Another is art "creatives": graphic artists in particular. They're early victims and likely to be fully supplanted in the near future. A little further on and it'll be writers, actors, etc.
by godelski | 2025-05-31 03:53:20+00:00
> shipping features and fixes faster than ever before

Meanwhile Apple duplicated my gf's contract, creating duplicate birthdays on my calendar. It couldn't find duplicates despite matching name, nickname, phone number, birthdays, and that both contacts were associated with her Apple account. I manually merged and ended up with 3 copies of her birthday in my calendar...

Seriously, this shit can be solved with a regex...

The number of issues like these I see is growing exponentially, not decreasing. I don't think it's AI though, because it started before that. I think these companies are just overfitting whatever silly metrics they have decided are best
by batchfy | 2025-05-31 03:53:45+00:00
Next.js claims to be a versatile React framework, yet it doesn’t support something as fundamental as dynamic routing in a single-page app. The issue was raised by one of their own developers—two years ago—and it's still unresolved. I genuinely don’t understand the hype. Everyone seems to be using Next.js, and the internet is flooded with tutorials like it’s the holy grail of React frameworks.
by unscaled | 2025-05-31 03:54:52+00:00
You can catch OutOfMemoryErrors in Java, but it wouldn't be as simple as you describe. In a real-world program, you may be doing other things besides downloading URLs and feeding the URLs to the download scheduler. Even though the URL downloader is what's causing the memory pressure, an OutOfMemoryError may very well be thrown by an allocation anywhere else. _You only have one shared heap_, so unless there is only one single thing that is being allocated on the heap you cannot use it as.

Coming from C, you might think you can just avoid heap allocations for anything that you don't manage with backpressure, but that doesn't work in Java, since Java can only store primitives and references on the stack (at least until project Valhalla is delivered[1]). Almost everything you do triggers a heap allocation.

Virtual Threads make this even worse, since their "stack" is also stored on the heap and it can grow dynamically and require more heap allocations even if you just add a primitive object on the stack!

tl;dr: No, you cannot rely on catching OutOfMemoryError in Java in anything but the simplest scenarios and things break down when you have multiple threads and especially virtual threads.

[1] https://openjdk.org/projects/valhalla/
by drillsteps5 | 2025-05-31 03:56:27+00:00
llamacpp can set up REST server with OpenAI API so you can get many front-end LLM apps to talk to it the same way they talk to ChatGPT, Claude, etc. And you can connect to that machine from another one on the same network through whatever port you set it to. See llamacpp-server.

When you get Ollama to "switch seamlessly" between models it still simply reloads a different model with llamacpp which is what it's based on.

I prefer llamacpp because doing things "seamlessly" obscures the way things work behind the scenes, which is what I want to learn and play with.

Also, and I'm not sure if it's the case anymore but it used to be, when llamacpp gets adjusted to work with the latest model, sometimes it takes them a bit to update the Python API which is what Ollama is using. It was the case with one of the LlaMas, forget which one, where people said "oh yeah don't try this model with Ollama, they're waiting on llamacpp folks to update llama-cpp-python to bring the latest changes from llamacpp, and once they do, Ollama will bring the latest into their app and we'll be up and running. Be patient."
by DangitBobby | 2025-05-31 03:57:01+00:00
"Writing down everything that goes on the board" only works if you can write and listen at the same time. I cannot. I had to balance having the lesson from class available in my notes and actively hearing and digesting what they were saying. It was not easy. But ultimately having notes was a better strategy for getting homework done, so that's what I prioritized.