MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by tptacek | 2025-06-07 05:24:01+00:00
No, I'm a Gusev person (like, reading within-families papers grade Gusevian), and I'm deeply skeptical of psychometrics. I was radicalized by Shalizi. But lots of tools that don't produce coherent metrics or have valid axiomatic derivations are nonetheless useful in clinical settings, and by denying that you concede to your opponents --- the "race scientists" --- the idea that you're dismissive of science that serious practitioners still deem valid. Don't surrender that card so easily.

(btw: if you're not up with Sasha Gusev yet, run don't walk --- midwit race scientists are constantly bouncing off him and it drives people crazy. curtis yarvin threatened to have imprisoned. i love him so much.)
by BoorishBears | 2025-06-07 05:24:39+00:00
I think it's equally copium that people keep assuming we're just going to compound our way into intelligence that generalizes enough to stop us from handholding the AI, as much as I'd genuinely enjoy that future.

Lately I spend all day post-training models for my product, and I want to say 99% of the research specific to LLMs doesn't reproduce and/or matter once you actually dig in.

We're getting exponentially more papers on the topics and they're getting worse on average.

Every day there's a new paper claiming an X% gain by post-training some ancient 8B parameter model and comparing it to a bunch of other ancient models after they've overfitted on the public dataset of a given benchmark and given the model a best of 5.

And benchmarks won't ever show it, but even ChatGPT 3.5-Turbo has better general world knowledge than a lot models people consider "frontier" models today because post-training makes it easy to cover up those gaps with very impressive one-prompt outputs and strong benchmark scores.

-

It feels like things are getting stuck in a local maxima: we are making forward progress, the models are useful and getting more useful, but the future people are envisioning takes reaching a completely different goal post that I'm not at all convinced we're making exponential progress towards.

There maybe exponential number of techniques claiming to be ground breaking, but what has actually unlocked new capabilities that can't just as easily be attributed to how much more focused post-training has become on coding and math?

Test time compute feels like the only one and we're already seeing the cracks form in terms of its effect on hallucinations, and there's a clear ceiling for the performance the current iteration unlocks as all these models are converging on pretty similar performance after just a few model releases.
by delusional | 2025-06-07 05:26:26+00:00
All of modern Neural Network AI is based on GEMM which are O(n^2) algorithms. There are sub-cubic alternatives, but it's my understanding that the cache behavior of those variants mean they aren't practically faster when memory bound.

n is only rarely related to "customers". As long as n doesn't grow, the asymptotic complexity doesn't actually matter.
by eviks | 2025-06-07 05:26:36+00:00
You'll never understand why such questions are brought up because you're too deep into your own fiction. That's not what happened at all, and your primitive business rules aren't real either.

> if you don't get enough money, you need to cut your fixed costs.

No you don’t (in general), a common business model in tech is to spend investor’s money covering this deficit. Also another harder option is to get more money. Also, it wasn’t just fixed costs. And if you cut too deep and lose a lot of revenue as a result as with Twitter you’ll still not get enough money. "So he did"

Instead of all this "thinking hard about the stack" in reality here is how people got fired:

> it wasn't musk alone to decide

Unless it was, of course

- like Frohnhoefer without notice, without "brainstorming", by Musk alone, for daring to say the "technical stack" truth to ignorant power

- engineers were told today to print out their last 30 to 60 days of code, so they could show it to Elon Musk himself.

- or there was a guy who couldn’t even get info from the dedicated function for such stuff - HR - whether he was fired. That also had to be resolved by Musk in a Twitter exchange

> minimal viable tech-stack

How come you ignore that a huge portion of employees aren’t involved in any tech stack? Think 80% of employees were fired.

> After buying, a selection of highly competent individuals knowing their systems decided on

What’s your proof of competence? Like in this case: on paper, you could call this engineer competent "Lavingia has nearly 15 years of experience as a software engineer and entrepreneur", yet the work tells the opposite.

Or even if they were competent, if you give them just a week they’ll do the same happening in this story.

> - they were accompanied by qualified stuff from tesla to uncover blind spots in the design and to bring fresh ideas / integration-knowledge / synergies & work-force

These are just empty words, care to give specific examples of what fresh ideas/synergies and other work-force positive things this great process resulted in? Doge was also accompanied by "qualified stuff from tesla/twitter/etc", but instead of uncovering blind spots they were mostly acting blind.

> The -SANE- economical and technical mindset craves for Optimization of tech and fin. > So why was it bad exactly?

Because you’re supposed to maximize revenue and profits, not minimize them?

> What is it that is strong enough to let one show absolute lack of either economical or technical thinking publicly?

You tell me, why do you do this?
by anArbitraryOne | 2025-06-07 05:27:00+00:00
I love bio-inspired stuff, but can we (collectively) temper our usage of it? A better name for this would probably be something like distributed storage and computing architecture (or someone who really understands what this thing is please come up with a better name). If they want to say that part of the architecture is bio-inspired, or mammalian brain inspired, than fine, but let's be parsimonious
AImmerse Web App
by yiyih | 2025-06-07 05:27:17+00:00
I made a web app where user's can "jump" into different worlds and play as any type of character they want, through a text-based experience.

There are basically three parts to this. 1. Users can create a world. 2. Users can answer questions to create a character profile (with game character stats and description) for a chosen world. 3. Users can play through generated text-based gameplay for each character. Through text, users can explore the world and/or complete any action.

I've also been playing around with stats that update through the completion of actions, and a personalized mission that adjusts based on the character and storyline. Another feature is the "immersive UI" where the story page's components will change appearance based on the setting of the current story.

Try here: https://www.aimmerse.app/

Any thoughts are appreciated.
by mescudi | 2025-06-07 05:27:32+00:00
Part-time | Full-time | Contract

Location: Astana, Kazakhstan

Remote: Yes, English

Willing to relocate: Maybe

Technologies: Kubernetes (k8s), Docker, Go (Golang), Python, PostgreSQL, CockroachDB, AWS, GCP, Linux, Terraform, Ansible, Clickhouse, ELK stack, ArgoCD, Grafana, GitLab CI.

Resume/CV: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nurtas-abdreimov/

Email: nurtas977@gmail.com

I used to wear many hats, including Infrastructure/DevOps/Software Engineer. I also partially took responsibility for SRE.
by Boltgolt | 2025-06-07 05:27:54+00:00
The fact that _you_ have not heard of it does not mean that it does not exist. The Austrian ÖBB has created a massive network over the last few years, including some innovative new rolling stock with sleeping cap capsules. Many classic routes within larger countries still exist, like the multiple routes in the UK, France and Sweden. There are new private startups like European Sleeper that operate an Antwerp - Prague sleeper
by travisjungroth | 2025-06-07 05:29:34+00:00
The way the Aircraft of Theseus is generally resolved is there’s a piece of metal called the “data plate”. This is the airplane as far as the FAA is concerned. I’ve been in a vintage biplane that was completely rebuilt from the data plate up. I think they got it for $40k.

It was worth it because without that, a home built airplane would have an experimental certificate and you couldn’t sell rides in it.
by KingOfCoders | 2025-06-07 05:30:10+00:00
The difficulty is in the details. Small differences lead to bigger differences, like in chaos theory [0] What if the model says this coil needs to be 23.1212722 centimeter? Or two coils need to be 37.1441129 centimeters apart? How do you build that? Mathematics is always much more precise than engineering.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Norton_Lorenz#Chaos_the...
by bruce511 | 2025-06-07 05:31:09+00:00
And this is why I much prefer Suurogate values for primary keys over natural values. And why I've gravitated to using UUID values for surrogates, not integer identities.

A theme running through the article is "this value is unique " and "this value does not change". And of course those are both wrong.

So when designing databases now I assume "everything changes, nothing is unique " (even when the domain "expert" professes it is.)

This approach solves so many problems and saves something time later on when it turns out that that "absolutely, positively, unique for ever" natural key, isn't.
by toofy | 2025-06-07 05:32:47+00:00
for anyone curious, this wasn’t specifically trump, but it was indeed a republican congress bill. texas republican was the initial sponsor and then republicans lined up to cosponsor.

this was done to fuel their tax cuts to a small group of a certain people.

you can see all of the sponsors here: https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/house-bill/1/co...
by BoorishBears | 2025-06-07 05:32:52+00:00
The benchmarks also claim random 32B parameter models beat Claude 4 at coding, so we know just how much they matter.

It should be obvious to anyone who with a cursory interest in model training, you can't trust benchmarks unless they're fully private black-boxes.

If you can get even a hint of the shape of the questions on a benchmark, it's trivial to synthesize massive amounts of data that help you beat the benchmark. And given the nature of funding right now, you're almost silly not to do it: it's not cheating, it's "demonstrably improving your performance at the downstream task"
by viraptor | 2025-06-07 05:33:12+00:00
> weapons that can destroy and cause untold amount of damage on personnel and property and nobody has complained about that.

Yeah... No.

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

"Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?" was about teens being sent out as well.
by karlperera | 2025-06-07 05:35:20+00:00
You are completely right mcdeltat. The problem with writing content is that without feedback it is easy to forget or miss something, even if it appears to be very obvious to you sometimes it is just too easy to miss. A webpage needs to be constantly updated.

I am very happy with your comments and will use them to update and improve the page. On the website as a whole I have all the things you talk about including an exposure calculator: https://astroimagery.com/techniques/imaging/astrophotography...

Of course, it is not perfect. Nothing can be but it is a good starting point and I tried to base it on real experience and some research.

The wrong words yes for RAW files: they appear black and lifeless but contain a rich amount of detail which requires stretching and the rest.
by 1659447091 | 2025-06-07 05:35:52+00:00
TL;DR: You may be interested in - https://www.nature.com/articles/nature15393

Bottlenecks, small population inbreeding, genetic drift, founder effect, etc

Basically what happened was, an alt-group of African humans decided earth was not safe anymore and its collapse was imminent -- they need to get to Mars. But since they don't have a way to get a spaceship in Africa, they will need to leave Africa and do whatever is necessary to build one, including throwing the people who helped them under the mammoth if need be.

At this point they have a pretty diverse gene pool and represent the humans well. They walk for a bit but came upon some steam vents and decided take a break and steam some food and enjoy the ocean view in the distance. The leader is not happy they stopped for food or rest. Later they are shooketh awake just before fire rains down on them. 3/4th of them make it safely to the ocean, and what luck the water is receding it'll be easier to cross, for the first 2/3rds at least. The tsunami gods demanded a toll and claimed the back 1/3. Not happy with the direction of leadership, half the group decided they could establish a better foundation away from these clowns and forked themselves.

Meanwhile, back in Africa and finally having got rid of that crazy mars dude and his cult followers, they decide to invite all the neighbors to an epoch swinging dance party to celebrate -- complete with the best plant-based party favours they could dig up/gather. Thus, ensuring the larger African population and their descendant would end up with an abundant supply of pokemon variants to swap between'em.

Though, you may want to take a look at the linked paper above for a more precise explanation. I may have paraphrased a bit.
by kiitos | 2025-06-07 05:37:15+00:00
I've read that paper, and all of the papers that TigerBeetle mentions in any and all of its docs/blog posts/etc. Stable storage doesn't matter to the points I'm trying to shine a light on here. It's not "diskless" that I'm talking about, in fact I'm not talking about "crash recovery" at all -- !
by cperciva | 2025-06-07 05:39:04+00:00
I can't remember exactly but it was a few hours. I already knew which week the issue arose (from comparing weekly snapshots) so that gave me a head start.

But yes, I built a lot of AMIs. And launched new EC2 instances for each of them -- it wasn't just a matter of rebooting since the first time an AMI launches there's different behaviour (both from FreeBSD, e.g. growing the root disk, and from EC2, e.g. disk caching).
by armchairhacker | 2025-06-07 05:41:39+00:00
Polymarket seems OK (or at least unethical for a different reason): the prize pool is entirely from the gamblers’ money, and evenly distributed to the winners.

I don’t think Polymarket does this, but I also think it would be OK if the casino takes a cut of the prize pool, as long as it ensures that winners never receive less than they bet. For example, the casino may receive $losers/n (they pick n, $losers = total bets of losers), and winners receive $bet($losers(n - 1)/n + $winners)/$winners, $winners = total bets of winners, $bet = their bet).

Then it’s “tails = I win you lose, heads = we both win someone else loses, except nobody wins if everyone gets heads but that’s extremely unlikely (especially with more than 2 options)”.
by csomar | 2025-06-07 05:42:21+00:00
This hides one major caveat in AI which is, contrasting to "old" tech, your OpEx on compute doesn't scale the same way your engineered app traditionally did.

In other terms, as your revenue scales, your OpEx scales too. This breaks the idea that you need to grow revenue to "break off" as your margin as set due to compute.

The other issue is, I've been burning compute between Perplexity, Grok, Gemini, Claude and Deepseek. I pay nothing for these and they are good enough. It is easy to grow revenue to $1m when you are burning $2m of compute.
by Imustaskforhelp | 2025-06-07 05:44:33+00:00
For what its worth, I always feel as if we could provide a binary and then let the binary run on things like aws/gcloud/ preferably cloudflare workers as cf workers feels genuinely good if you focus on typescript/imo sveltekit as well

Please, can anybody enlighten me I suppose? I build a lot of side projects, some of which are genuinely cool and I can genuinely see it being a "saas" but like you, I hate saas from a consumer perspective and I love saas as a guy wanting to earn money so my ethics are definitely questionable at the moment.

Also, let's say I want somebody to buy my software. How does that make sense? What if they just redistribute that software without my permission. Doesn't that just eat into the profits when Saas couldn't.

And also I personally am a foss advocate and as you said its economically bad.

I am kind of thinking of creating software which is just source available and that you need a permission / license which you can get by github sponsoring me but I saw this one project doing it and the people in hackernews were pitch forking the poor guy. Its so crazy and bizarre that once you actually try to provide "some" value. You are automatically the bad guy for not using MIT.

I am also thinking of such a license where its SSPL if you don't have a license or BSD/MIT if you have a license (sort of like redis-ish)

But I am not sure if people would buy them. Maybe I can support both I suppose? I am not sure lol, which is why I wanted to get enlightened

PS: I built a way to create your own cryptocurrencies for genuinely free (no jokes)(not sure how to monetize and if, If anybody can help, that would be great!) and a way to get blogs from youtube posts and a way to youtube community post and videos as an alternative to google photos for unlimited storage (though the privacy aspect for community post is a little bad but I guess I can fix that as well)
by spaceman_2020 | 2025-06-07 05:44:35+00:00
The argument is that this stuff will so radically improve senior engineer productivity that the demand for junior engineers will crater. And without a pipeline of junior engineers, the junior-to-senior trajectory will radically atrophy

Essentially, the field will get frozen where existing senior engineers will be able to utilize AI to outship traditional senior-junior teams, even as junior engineers fail to secure employment

I don’t think anything in this article counters this argument
by rTX5CMRXIfFG | 2025-06-07 05:45:15+00:00
> We like it because it lasts thousands of years.

Wrong. People only care for packaging to last before the contents expire, but beyond the expiry date nobody cares about the next thousand years that the packaging will last. And they will very much care when they start suffering the health consequences of garbage and microplastics leaking into their drinking water.
by bruce511 | 2025-06-07 05:46:19+00:00
At a general level I think these lists make developers more aware of uniqueness and constraints.

When designing data I think these questions (skepticisms) should be front of mind;

1) natural values are not unique.

2) things identified by number are best stored as a string. If you're not going to do math on it, it's not a number. That "customer number" should be treated as "customer id" and as a string.

3) be careful constraining data. Those "helpful checks" to make sure the "zip code is valid" are harmful not helpful.

4) those tiny edge cases may "almost never happen" but they will end up consuming your support department. Challenge your own assumptions at every possible opportunity. Never assume anything you "know" is true.

It's hard to measure time saved, and problems avoided, with good design. But it's easy to see bad design as it plays out over decades.

And (especially today) never optimize design for "size". Y2K showed that folly once and for all.
by nivertech | 2025-06-07 05:46:30+00:00
Nothin' New Under the Moon:

AWS Lambda ≈ CGI-BIN [1] ≈ FastCGI [2] Cloudflare Worker ≈ EJB Session Bean [3] Durable Object ≈ EJB Entity Bean [4] Durable Objects ≈ Distributed Virtual Actors (MS Orleans) [5,6] Serverless ≈ Middleware-as-a-Service

;)

---

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Gateway_Interface

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FastCGI

3. https://docs.oracle.com/javaee/6/tutorial/doc/gipjg.html

4. https://docs.oracle.com/cd/E16439_01/doc.1013/e13981/undejbs...

5. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/...

6. Cloudflare Durable Objects are Virtual Objects

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44005900
by xp84 | 2025-06-07 05:48:24+00:00
That's what happens when parties govern by executive fiat instead of relying on legislation for things like that. Things rammed through by flimsy executive action are fragile and easy for the next administration to cancel.

We could have higher taxes on the wealthy and good healthcare. But to do that, the side that claims they want that and that they believe in "democracy" would have to not only post on Bluesky about it, they'd have to (A) vote, and (B) convince (rather than demonize) the moderates who are skeptical of them. We'll see in a while if they learned that lesson from 2024.
by hbbio | 2025-06-07 05:49:13+00:00
I would say in 2025, it has become exponentially more complex, not simpler:

1. The ecosystem has fragmented further. Every app uses even more tools and frameworks, each with its own quirks and version incompatibilities

2. With E2EE and blockchain-based apps becoming mainstream, the frontend now handles complex cryptographic operations, key management, and secure data handling entirely client-side. Mistakes here are security vulnerabilities

3. Advanced interactions, personalization, and real-time updates require sophisticated client-side computation. We're beyond "thin clients"

4. The Big 4 invest $millions in each interface and users expect the same level of UX/UI from anyone. Let's talk about simplicity on the surface :)
by BoorishBears | 2025-06-07 05:49:15+00:00
This is just people talking past each other.

If you want a model that's getting better at helping you as a tool (which for the record, I do), then you'd say in the last 3 months things got better between Gemini's long context performance, the return of Claude Opus, etc.

But if your goal post is replacing SWEs entirely... then it's not hard to argue we definitely didn't overcome any new foundational issues in the last 3 months, and not too many were solved in the last 3 years even.

In the last year the only real foundational breakthrough would be RL-based reasoning w/ test time compute delivering real results, but what that does to hallucinations + even Deepseek catching up with just a few months of post-training shows in its current form, the technique doesn't completely blow up any barriers that were standing the way people were originally touting it.

Overall models are getting better at things we can trivially post-train and synthesize examples for, but it doesn't feel like we're breaking unsolved problems at a substantially accelerated rate (yet.)
by jorangreef | 2025-06-07 05:49:57+00:00
> I’ve read that paper

To be clear, “Durability and the Art of Consensus” is not a paper.

> tl;dr: nodes don't necessarily persist state to local disk

In the consensus literature, this is sometimes referred to as “diskless crash recovery”. For example, see work by Dan Ports.

> Local recovery actions, or any other kinds of node-specific details, have no relevance or influence on the information communicated thru the the global consensus protocol.

This goes directly against the central finding of PAR, which gives counter-examples where your statement does not universally hold true.

Again, it’s not intuitive. And that’s why it won FAST18—because it says “everything we know is wrong”. Complete red pill and mindbender.
by doix | 2025-06-07 05:50:10+00:00
There is also the "backend of frontend", for a lack of a better term. When you've got a complex webapp, you start managing a lot of state on the frontend. You basically end up with a second database that you keep in sync, possibly two.

I think it's pretty common nowadays to have indexdb to cache data, but also your state management framework (ngrx,redux,mobx,etc) which sits between indexdb and your rendering framework.

I am (unfortunately) a FE engineer nowadays but I write very little HTML/CSS. It's mostly wrangling FE state and making it "efficient", cache invalidation, optimistic updates that mimic BE operations, etc.