MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by hansvm | 2025-06-01 14:27:41+00:00
It works for a lot of families but not all. You need a high enough degree of sharing of model weights between different queries for that to make sense (memory access being the usual bottleneck nowadays, though smaller models see something similar with matmul batch efficiencies for CPU related reasons).

Fully connected transformers trivially work (every weight for every query). MoE works beyond a certain size or with certain types of mixing (still using every weight, or using a high enough fraction that there's some sharing with batches of 20+ queries). As you push further that direction though (lots of techniques, but the key point being accessing less of the model at once and bypassing some of it for each query), you need larger and larger batches for those efficiency gains to materialize. At some point it becomes untenable because of latency waiting for batches of data, and past that it becomes untenable because of the volume of query data.
by ViewTrick1002 | 2025-06-01 14:28:16+00:00
The lifetime of nuclear power is a standard talking point that sounds good if you don't understand economics but doesn't make a significant difference. It's the latest attempt to avoid having to acknowledge the completely bizarre costs of new nuclear built power through bad math.

CSIRO with GenCost included it in this year's report.

Because capital loses so much value over 80 years (60 years + construction time) the only people who refer to the potential lifespan are people who don't understand economics. In this, we of course forget that the average nuclear power plant was in operation for 26 years before it closed.

Table 2.1:

https://www.csiro.au/-/media/Energy/GenCost/GenCost2024-25Co...

The difference a completely absurd lifespan makes is a 10% cost reduction. When each plant requires tens of billions in subsidies a 10% cost reduction is still... tens of billions in subsidies.

We can make it even clearer. Not having to the spend O&M costs from operating a nuclear plant for ~20 years and instead saving it is enough to rebuild the renewable plant with equivalent output in TWh of the nuclear plant.
by 8organicbits | 2025-06-01 14:28:24+00:00
I've always used SO as a source of code snippets, like when I forget how to check the length of an array in JavaScript (I change languages too often to keep it straight). So SO is still useful to me. I suppose I could use an LLM for that, but it's such a quick search, it doesn't seem worth changing my workflow.

I did encounter a math problem once that I asked on math overflow. No one answered it. But then a couple years later I faced the same math problem, so I spent a day to solve it. A couple years later, I ran into the question again, and math overflow helpfully still had my answer.
by nswizzle31 | 2025-06-01 14:28:33+00:00
A local hub to go get tools is the only way this works, in my opinion. Your current offering is obviously compelling from the renter’s perspective. I am renovating a cottage and would love to go pick up a chainsaw, brush cutter, etc for half the price of Home Depot (they have everything and great service).

But I just don’t see it from the tool owner’s perspective. My suburban aunt has two chainsaws sitting in the garage that she doesn’t use anymore. An extra $150 a month isn’t enough to deal with the hassle of coordinating meetings, dealing with damage, etc. And she definitely wouldn’t be giving a free tank of gas, PPE, etc like Home Depot does. She would gladly drop it off at a local spot, make passive income, maybe go grab it herself once a year when she needs it.

Ps - great website design. Looks beautiful on mobile and works really well. What are you using on the frontend?
by hnlmorg | 2025-06-01 14:29:09+00:00
To be fair, everything about PCs back then sucked.

DOS was crap, when you had tGEM and Amiga OS.

Windows 1 and 2 was beyond terrible.

They were shit for games

They were bulky

They were slow

They crashed all the time.

They were ugly

They were noisy.

They were hard to manage (autoexec.bat, no OS in ROM, stupidly tricky partitioning tools, incompatible drivers for the same hardware but in different applications, etc)

But IBM lost control of the hardware market so they became cheap, ubiquitous crap.

And that’s literally the only reason we got stuck with PCs.
by dangus | 2025-06-01 14:29:23+00:00
> But with plans to bring on more than 300 fellows this year, that approach quickly became unsustainable. At the same time, the rise of ChatGPT was diluting the value of written application materials. “They were all the same,” said Cheralyn Chok, Propel’s co-founder and executive director. “Same syntax, same patterns.”

Welcome to the new cat and mouse game. Soon applicants will be beating these AI job interviews using their own AI-based virtual interview candidates delivering idealized automated answers. The candidate might not even be present but their AI video avatar will be providing perfect answers.

This article claims that processing interviews for 300 fellowship internships became “unsustainable,” but then I have to ask whether that organization is just understaffed and allocating resources poorly?

Either you are understaffed or you’re being far too selective. They are interns, throw all the applications in a lottery and pick 300 of them plus a few in a wait list to account for those who are hired that either ghost or turn out unqualified.
by danabramov | 2025-06-01 14:30:40+00:00
I think RSC itself is pretty solid by this point but frameworks around it (primarily Next.js) are still somewhat rough (and were much rougher during the initial App Router release). Hard to say more without knowing what kind of issues you were hitting.

I'm posting because I find the technology interesting. I don't have a goal of convincing you to use or adopt it. I sometimes write about specific aspects that I find appealing but YMMV.
by yawaramin | 2025-06-01 14:31:08+00:00
When you have an HTTP/2 connection already open a 'round-trip' is not really a gigantic concern performance-wise. And it gives the client application complete control and ver what nested parts it wants to get and in what order. Remember that the article said it's up to the server what order to stream the parts? That might not necessarily be a good idea on the client side though. It would probably be better for the client to decide what it wants and when. Eg, it can request the header and footer, then swap in a skeleton facade in the main content area, then load the body and swap it in when loaded.
by alexisread | 2025-06-01 14:31:17+00:00
On the right (ie. Mirror of the STE 15pin ports) would mean that they could keep the electrical layout ie. Connected to the keyboard, and hence a separate keyboard unit. For 2 player games you would be swapping it a lot- there were adapters just to help with this.

I agree it would be difficult to design a correct socket, but from interviews it was always the plan to have a blitter, and a socket as standard would have helped adoption.

The main thing is that the T212 is a great coprocessor, faster than the 68881 fpu and with a 2k cache. Introducing the transputer as a coprocessor would potentially have changed the computing landscape
by lotsofpulp | 2025-06-01 14:31:43+00:00
Mac and MacBooks were not wildly successful back then. iPods were, though. I can’t find a graph for 2000s, but Apple desktop and computers started being used more after iPhone came out (and after MacBook Air came out).

https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/united-st...
by CamperBob2 | 2025-06-01 14:32:24+00:00
OK, fine, when I'm introducing a new cell phone model to the public, I'll do it Jobs's way. But that's not optimal for an in-depth technical presentation with actual content behind it. It will annoy the present audience and frustrate future readers.

The idea that one presentation style fits every audience, every product, every scenario is just weird. Nothing else on the planet works that way, so why should slide decks?
by aspenmayer | 2025-06-01 14:32:27+00:00
Bots are bots.

Bots are an incarnation of coordinated unauthentic behavior. You could instead have meat puppets typing off a script that is auto-generated and known to be unique output to the best of anyone's or anything's ability, and that wouldn't make the output any more authentic.

The intent of your transmission matters, as well as the effects of it on the listener and the wider broadcast environment. Violate norms of airspace usage at your own discretion (and peril).
by atrettel | 2025-06-01 14:32:45+00:00
I worked at LANL until very recently, so yes, I was associated with the DOE.

I actually agree with your point that "the ability to determine novelty ... is a crapshoot". My point was that the AI system should at least try to provide some sense of how novel the content is (and what parts are more novel than others, etc.). This is important for other review processes like patent examination and is certainly very important for journal editors to determine whether a manuscript it "worthy" of publication. For these reasons, I personally have a low bar as to what qualifies as "novel" in my own reviews.

Most of my advisors in graduate school were also journal editors, and they instilled on me to focus on novelty during peer reviews because that is what they cared about most when making a decision about a manuscript. Editors focus on novelty because journal space is a scarce resource. You see the same issue in the news in general [1]. This is one of the reasons why I have a low bar to evaluate novelty, because a study can be well done and cover new ground without having an unambiguous conclusion or "story being told" (which is something editors might want).

I originally discussed this briefly in my post but edited it out immediately after posting this. I'll post it again but add more detail. I think that a lot of peer review as practiced today is theater. It doesn't really serve any purpose other than providing some semblance of oversight and review. I agree with your point about the journal/conference being the wrong place to do peer review. It is too late to change things by then. The right time is "in the lab", as you say.

I wholeheartedly agree that reproduction/replication is the standard that we should seek to achieve but rarely ever do. Perhaps the only "original" ideas that I have had in my career came from trying to replicate what other people did and finding out something during that process.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/News_values
by 0xfffafaCrash | 2025-06-01 14:33:25+00:00
I wouldn’t say signals is coming from React. If anything React is the latest to the party and being dragged there reluctantly by where the tech community is going. They’ve mostly been resisting the movement towards signals because it undermines a lot of the arguments they have made for their virtual dom, synthetic event system, and rerender all the things dogma. Solidjs is much much more in the signals camp. Angular, Vue, Svelte, etc also recognize the need for this sort of reactivity.

React could be argued to have abandoned the fight for being the best client side framework technically (though they have dominance pragmatically). They are really all focused on Vercel’s Nextjs/SSR/SSG/RSC stuff in recent years
by photonthug | 2025-06-01 14:33:51+00:00
Compute providers are gonna get paid, yeah. We can hope though that there’s something asymmetric in the required expense for good guys va bad guys though. For example “subtly embed an ad for X while you pretend to reply to Y” does seem like a harder problem you need a cloud model for. TFA mentioned crypto blog spam, which could easily be detected with keywords and local LLM, or no LLM at all
by emporas | 2025-06-01 14:35:04+00:00
Python's startup cost is terrible. Same with Node. Go is very good, but Rust is excellent.

Even if a GC'ed language like Go is very fast at allocating/deallocating memory, Rust has no need to allocate/deallocate some amount of memory in the first place. The programmer gives the compiler the tools to optimize memory management, and machines are better at optimizing memory than humans. (Some kinds of optimizations anyway.)
by beeflet | 2025-06-01 14:35:39+00:00
Perhaps land ownership could be renewed on different time bases, where the longer deeds have higher taxes? For example, you could own a property for 1 year at a lower rate or 10 years at a slightly higher rate, and 20 years at an even higher rate.

This would allow you to pay a premium for a more stable tax rate. Perhaps you could accomplish this in the private sector through some type of "property tax insurance"?
by zeta0134 | 2025-06-01 14:35:55+00:00
GPL makes sense in a context where that sort of vendor compatibility creates existential conflicts for the product. For an operating system and associated toolset, it is clearly an excellent license and does great work encouraging the necessary cooperation from otherwise unwilling partners.

Games are a different beast. For one, the dominant revenue model for videogames continues to be to sell copies of the software, and most digital platforms want (understandably) to apply some sort of DRM to those purchases. If I license my game library for GPL it means that, among other things, users are not free to use it in their iOS, Android, Nintendo, PS4, Xbox, or Steam* releases. That makes the library dead on arrival for almost all of the compelling distribution channels. As a result, all of my game libraries are MIT. I want users to be able to sell software that is built using my library, and that means I want to use the most permissive library possible.

There is a place to fight philosophical grounds, and then separately there is wanting to make sure that my actual users (game developers) aren't restricted by my personal philosophies. Thankfully, MIT is itself perfectly copyleft compatible. You can very well include it in your GPL games, and I'd love to hear if you do! But if you are the much more typical developer trying to make a living with your craft, then I want to support the practical realities of your available storefront options, and let you get on with that.

(*Someone much better versed in license legalese informed me that Steam games can be released under GPL so long as they avoid the Steam SDK. I am not lawyer-y enough to confirm this or speak to the details.)
by riehwvfbk | 2025-06-01 14:36:26+00:00
It's most likely not C/C++ per se, but rather the eleventy billion ways different projects build these libraries.

Bazel for example builds everything in a well-contained sandbox and it all works, but only for the C/C++ libraries it builds natively. The magic ingredient is RPATH, but most Makefiles do not set it. However, one can add an extra build step with patchelf and inject an RPATH.
by isaacremuant | 2025-06-01 14:36:33+00:00
No we won't. Just build your web of trust and leave the rest of us anonymous and alone.

You're just doing the bidding of corporations who want to sell ID online systems for a more authoritarian world.

Those systems also use astroturfing. It was not invented with LLMs.

See my other comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44130743#44150878 for how this is "bleak" mostly if you were comfortable with your Overton window and censorship.
by k310 | 2025-06-01 14:36:57+00:00
But we would just be speculating, since that info would be highly classified.

I worked a bit on SDI, "Starwars" and here it is, back on the table. An article about it felt like a memoir. (U) So in this regard, the future is the past. Drones are another matter, of course.

So is cyberwar. I worry about the internet going dark, but not enough to get an amateur radio license to stay in touch with family and friends, who would also have to do so, and under war or warlike conditions, the amateur bands could be silenced administratively.
by dayjah | 2025-06-01 14:37:23+00:00
I know far too much about python packaging while only knowing a little about it.

I agree it’s hell. But I’ve not found many comprehensive packaging solutions that aren’t gnarly in some way.

IMHO the Python Packaging community have done an excellent job of producing tools to make packaging easy for folks, especially if you’re using GitHub actions. Check out: https://github.com/pypa/cibuildwheel

Pypa have an extensive list of GitHub actions for various use cases.

I think most of us end up in the “pure hell” because we read the docs on how to build a package instead of using the tools the experts created to hide the chaos. A bit like building a deb by hand is a lot harder than using the tools which do it for you.
by wrsh07 | 2025-06-01 14:38:33+00:00
If you're parsing JSON or other serialization formats, I expect that can be nontrivial. Yes, it's dominated by the llm call, but serializing is pure CPU.

Also, ideally your lightweight client logic can run on a small device/server with bounded memory usage. If OpenAI spins up a server for each codex query, the size of that server matters (at scale/cost) so shaving off mb of overhead is worthwhile.
by mentalpiracy | 2025-06-01 14:38:45+00:00
>>> This is not quite the same situation as the end of Rogue One and A New Hope, where some people make the argument that Rogue One ends just a few minutes before ANH begins; I am not convinced by that argument, although the cinematography certain seems to be leading us there.

The ending scene of RO is the data handoff and narrow escape of the Tantive IV with Leia, R2-D2, and C-3PO on it.

How is that not a direct continuity into the opening scene of A New Hope?
by johnmaguire | 2025-06-01 14:38:47+00:00
> After defecating, the anus must be washed with water using the left hand, or an odd number of smooth stones or pebbles called jamrah or hijaarah (Sahih Al-Bukhari 161, Book 4, Hadith 27).

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamic_toilet_etiquette
by waldothedog | 2025-06-01 14:40:19+00:00
I’d suggest cafe seating as a positive externality. The people eating are paying for the food, and table. But passersby and neighbors are gaining eyes on the street, the prospective social interactions, etc. The foot traffic might also be enough for another small business to consider open, and thus begin maintaining the store front and street. These things have utility to people who are not paying to eat or drink at the cafe.
by 0xCE0 | 2025-06-01 14:40:23+00:00
Yes, modern internet stack is a cesspool, and it cannot be saved.

- Specs (be it for hardware or software) are too complicated. The complexity can be controlled only by large companies (e.g. HTML5 == Chrome == new IE). And software/hardware companies fail to implement specs securely.

- "Self-hosting" is becoming harder. Microsoft & Google controls (blocks) the email traffic for own gains. Public static IP address from ISP costs more than the whole thing (IP, virtual machine/hardware, electricity, etc.) from cloud. Additionally, Cloudflare etc. can take control of internet traffic.

- "Cloud-hosting" has uncontrollable pricing. DDOS attack can make $100k bill in a few hours.

- There only couple of "OKish" non-scamming/no-dark-patterns domain name registrars.

- Google Search is dead (results are only AI-generated stuff + ads + scams). LLMs are the greatest manipulation machine ever invented.
by upghost | 2025-06-01 14:40:37+00:00
It's actually more like "just use Haskell".

Having written one of these[1] a decade ago and inflicting it (with the best of intentions) upon production code in anger, I can tell you this often leads to completely unmaintainable code. It is impossible to predict the effect of changing a method, tracing a method, debugging a method (where do I put the breakpoint??).

The code reads beautifully though. Pray you never have to change it.

The reason I say "just use haskell" instead of lisp is bc lisp generics suffer from this same problem.

Btw if anyone has a solution to this "generic/multidispatch maintainability in a dynamically typed language" problem I would love to hear it.

[1]: https://github.com/jjtolton/naga/blob/master/naga/tools.py
by erkt | 2025-06-01 14:40:53+00:00
Because net profit margin is different from gross margin. The products are still marked up way higher than that bottom line number. PMn is the margin after you add in all the over head costs and those really have little to do with whether they are loosing money by selling a product under their target mark up.

Best Buy making a gross $250 on a $1000 priced TV or $50 when discounted to $800 still isn’t loosing any money unless they are at their credit ceiling and cannot replace the good sold. They make zero if A customer standing in their store deciding not to even give them $50 and giving it a to a competitor on their cellphone. Tho is absolutely profit opportunity lost, even if it is small.
by perlgeek | 2025-06-01 14:41:08+00:00
A use case is when a sub or method needs to do different things based on the data type of the argument.

Example: turning a data structure into a JSON string, solved with multi dispatch: https://github.com/moritz/json/blob/master/lib/JSON/Tiny.pm#...

Another common useful example is constructors. A Date class might have constructors that accept

Date(Int, Int where 1..12, Int where 1..31) # Y, M, D Date(Str where /^\d4-\d2-\d2$/) # YYYY-MM-DD Date(DateTime) # extract the date of a DateTime object

etc. to make it very intuitive to use.
by twodave | 2025-06-01 14:42:06+00:00
I agree. Especially in the originals, everything just sort of “works out” for the protagonist(s). The bad guys don’t aim well, fly well or really do anything great. And that’s fine because that is era of cinema Star Wars came from. In Andor the empire is smart, calculated, deadly and just plain scary—nearly to a visceral degree, if you allow yourself to be absorbed into the story.

And despite how good Andor (and Rogue One fits here as well) was, I think there’s some merit to wanting to go see a film that makes you feel good. There are certain films and books I won’t put myself through (especially fiction) more than once because I don’t want something ultimately meaningless adding stress to my life. It’s supposed to be an enjoyable escape. So Andor/Rogue One come pretty close to that point for me.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-06-01 14:42:50+00:00
> obvious to me that this vulnerability exists everywhere

“Everywhere” meaning undefended airspace into which one masses a significant fraction of one type of strategic armament.

This was the savvy exploitation by Kyiv, once again, of Russian operational incompetence.

> there isn't anyone who will stop you from pre-positioning weapons adjacent to American strategic assets

You want to try driving a truck up to a USAF base? (EDIT: Where strategic arms, e.g. B-2s, live.)

This is a novel threat vector. It needs to be protected against with vigilance. That to requires active effort to counter doesn’t mean it’s OP. Just that defensive perimeters need to be expanded, units not needlessly amassed, air defences kept in check and those perimeters constantly (and completely) monitored.
by empiko | 2025-06-01 14:42:52+00:00
Completely agree. Ironically, by focusing on Jobs' presentations, people are admiring the type of presentation that they will probably never do, and they do not consider that it probably cost 100s of man-hours to prepare it. I think it is more important to develop more practical skills to communicate effectively whatever you need, while not spending too much time on the deck preparation.