MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by zorgmonkey | 2025-06-04 16:44:08+00:00
The price of that system is unfortunately going to end up being a lot more than 4k, you'd need a CPU that has at least 64 lanes of PCIe. That's going to be either a Xeon W or a Threadripper CPU, with the motherboard RAM, etc you're probably looking at least another 2k.

Also kind of a nitpick, but I'd call that 8 GPU system, each BMG-G21 die has 20 Xe2 cores. Also even though it would be 4 PCIe cards it is probably best to think of it as 8 GPUs (that's how it will show up in stuff like pytorch), especially because their is no high-speed interconnect between the GPU dies colocated on the card. Also if you're going to do this make sure you get a motherboard with good PCIe bifurcation support.
by bastawhiz | 2025-06-04 16:44:16+00:00
If you visit the ffmpeg.wasm documentation, the first example on the Usage page does almost exactly this:

https://ffmpegwasm.netlify.app/docs/getting-started/usage

It transcodes a webm file to MP4, but making it speed up the video is trivial: just add arguments to `ffmpeg.exec()`. Your lack of success in this task is trusting an LLM to know about cutting-edge libraries and how to use them, not a lack of progress in the area.
by bigstrat2003 | 2025-06-04 16:44:30+00:00
> Can you?

Yes, I can. In fact, the entire reason I think AI is not a useful tool (contrary to the hype) is that it can't do many things I find easy to do. I'm certainly not going to trust it with the things I find hard to do (and therefore can't check it effectively) in that case!

For example, a month or two ago I was trying to determine if there's a way to control the order in which CloudFormation creates+deletes objects when a replacement is needed. AI (including both ChatGPT and AWS' own purpose built AI) insisted yes, hallucinating configuration options that straight up don't exist if you try to use them. The ability to produce syntactically valid configuration files (not even necessarily correctly doing what you want them to) should be table stakes here, but I find that AI routinely can't do it.
by jader201 | 2025-06-04 16:45:18+00:00
Yeah, my point wasn't that learning ASM isn't valuable, or that we don't use the constructs in higher level languages.

My point is that the analogy with arithmetic vs. calculus doesn't hold.

Nearly everyone uses basic arithmetic in everyday life, and a tiny fraction of those use calculus.

No programmer needs to learn ASM to be able to know how to use higher level languages. And a tiny fraction of them are using actual ASM in their everyday jobs.

Also, I think you can still learn the basic constructs of how languages work at a lower level without every learning actual ASM. There's no way you can learn calculus without an understanding of arithmetic.
by hwillis | 2025-06-04 16:45:31+00:00
Even with Gleason score 10 (<1% of cases) most patients will survive more than 3 years. Median survival for score 9 (~10% of cases) is ~10 years. Unfortunately your father was an exception. Cancer is an awful, crippling disease and I'm sorry it took your father.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29976500/
by eranation | 2025-06-04 16:46:10+00:00
When backlogs run dry and users don’t come up with feature requests / bugs faster than humans + AI can tackle. Yes.

Until then, adding one more engineer (with AI) will have a better ROI than firing one.

Engineers who are purist and refuse to use AI, might end up with a wake up call. But they are smart, they’ll adapt too.
by aaronbaugher | 2025-06-04 16:46:16+00:00
You can see it if you watch any US documentary filmed before the late 70s that shows ordinary people in the street. They're much fitter, and exercise for weight loss wasn't really a thing yet; people didn't jog. That's not far enough back that everyone was a farmer or laborer; there were plenty of fairly sedentary office workers. They also weren't starving; it was a prosperous time. They were generally eating meat-and-potatoes diets with plenty of animals fats (I have a 1960s barbeque cookbook that tells you to put a pat of butter on pretty much everything). And obesity wasn't a problem.

And since we started letting the government tell us how to eat healthy, not only has obesity skyrocketed, but so have diseases connected with it.
by jauntywundrkind | 2025-06-04 16:46:17+00:00
Not the SCTP parts! It's implementing WebRTC-HTTP Ingestion Protocol (WHIP), a commonly used low-latency HTTP protocol for talking to a gateway that talks actual WebRTC to peers over WebRTC's SCTP-based protocol. https://www.ietf.org/archive/id/draft-ietf-wish-whip-01.html

I hope some day we can switch to a QUIC or WebTransport based p2p protocol, rather than use SCTP. QUIC does the SCTP job very well atop existing UDP, rather than add such wild complexity & variance. One candidate, Media-over-Quic ?MoQ), but the browser doesn't have a p2p quic & progress on that stalled out years ago. https://quic.video/ https://datatracker.ietf.org/group/moq/about/
by b0a04gl | 2025-06-04 16:46:22+00:00
ok this part kinda blew my brain open. it’s literally like you’re watching code evolve like git history on steroids. archive not pruning anything? yes. finally someone gets that dead code ain’t always dead it’s just early.

letting weaker agents still contribute? feels illegal but also exactly how dumb breakthroughs happen. like half my best scripts started as broken junk. it just kept mutating till something clicked.

and self-editing agents??? not prompts, not finetunes, straight up source code rewrites with actual tooling upgrades. like this thing bootstraps its own dev env while solving tasks.

plus the tree structure, parallel forks, fallback paths basically says ditch hill climbing and just flood the search space with chaos. and chaos actually works. they show that dip around iteration 56 and boom 70 blows past all. that’s the part traditional stuff never survives. they optimise too early and stall out. this one’s messy by design. love it.
by colechristensen | 2025-06-04 16:46:24+00:00
Trying to do things off the beaten path with LLMs is rarely successful, especially if there's a related much more popular option.

I'm convinced that programmers' bias towards LLMs is strongly correlated with the weirdness of their work. Very often my strange ideas pushed to LLMs look like solutions but are rather broken and hallucinated attempts which only vaguely represent what needs to be done.
by physix | 2025-06-04 16:46:56+00:00
Just a thought: Maybe if they had some kind of opt-in insurance against overuse until the circuit breaker can kick in?

But, looking from the outside, the lack of protection is effectively a win for them. They don't need to invest in building that out, and their revenue is increased by not having it (if you ignore the effect of throttling adoption). So I have always assumed that there is simply no business case for that, so why bother?
by ivape | 2025-06-04 16:47:19+00:00
This gives very little credit to how the human mind is able to draw parallels and insights from seemingly unrelated perceptions. Newton observing an apple falling from a tree allowed cross-thinking. Watching someone juggle can help you understand a queue. Understanding a queue can help you understand juggling. Your typical soap opera can be distilled down to office dynamics. Scale is going to obliterate specialization in this regard.
by altruios | 2025-06-04 16:47:27+00:00
Does it need a 'full' understanding? smell and taste is useful for biological life... but we don't need that in our thinking machines, do we?

I agree AGI must be multimodal. I don't think that multimodal is 'set in place', nor must it be conveniently, human-centricly mapped from our senses.
by avg_dev | 2025-06-04 16:47:30+00:00
I’m both an amateur musician and a professional coder.

Definitely IMO code is a real physical thing that produces tangible results. (I personally think that code operationally is a physical thing, down to basics like logic gates and stuff. We abstract far away from that with high level languages but even making a pixel change colors is inherently, to me, altering physical reality)

But the experience of writing code and making music with your body is such a different one. You will feel and think about the code in a more imaginary and thoughtful way (you could write all your code in a notebook or a text editor and you would just be writing or typing on a keyboard) whereas the music (I play a wind instrument) is a tactile experience in the sense that it will physically be something you hear and you can actually feel the vibrations in your body; I might be wrong but I think that is what hearing is. And there is a real bio-feedback thing going on because you use your body to physically make it happen and you get immediate or very near immediate feedback (auditory, etc. You may even hear or see feedback from other musicians or even listeners). It’s just a viscerally different experience.

There’s nothing fake about seeing metrics on a dashboard or tests going from red to green or money or bits of data flowing around, at all. But it is experientially much different from the feeling of playing an instrument.

That’s my take anyway.
by garbagecoder | 2025-06-04 16:47:44+00:00
I had a similar take after my first experience using AI to help me code. I put it aside as a curiosity. But when I went back recently, it's not that it's perfect, but the improvement in that time was massive. Does that mean it will continue to improve at that pace? Not necessarily, but we haven't seen the end state yet, so anything we say is just a judgment on what we have at the moment.
by AstroBen | 2025-06-04 16:47:51+00:00
> unrealistic to say that AI will never take over our jobs

That's not my position. I'm agnostic. I have no idea where it'll end up but there's no reason to have a strong belief either way

The comment you originally replied to is I think the sanest thing in here. You can't just project out endlessly unless you have a technological basis for it. The current methodologies are getting into diminishing returns and we'll need another breakthrough to push it much further

This is turning into religious debate
by toast0 | 2025-06-04 16:47:55+00:00
Nuked; it's the only way to be sure. It's not that we didn't care about the messages in the queue, it's just there's too many of them, they can't be processed, and so into the bin they go. This strategy is more viable for reads and less viable for writes, and you shouldn't nuke the mnesia processes's queues, even when they're very backlogged ... you've got to find a way to put backpressure on those things --- maybe a flag to error out on writes before they're sent into the overlarge queue.

Mostly this is happening in the context of request/response. If you're a client and connect to the frontend you send a auth blob, and the frontend sends it to the auth daemon to check it out. If the auth daemon can't respond to the frontend in a reasonable time, the frontend will drop the client; so there's no point in the auth daemon looking at old messages. If it's developed a backlog so high it can't get it back, we failed and clients are having trouble connecting, but the fastest path to recovery is dropping all the current requests in progress and starting fresh.

In some scenarios even if the process knew it was backlogged and wanted to just accept messages one at a time and drop them, that's not fast enough to catch up to the backlog. The longer you're in unrecoverable backlog, the worse the backlog gets, because in addition to the regular load from clients waking up, you've also got all those clients that tried and failed going to retry. If the outage is long enough, you do get a bit of a drop off, because clients that can't connect don't send messages that require waking up other clients, but that effect isn't so big when you've only got a large backlog a few shards.
by Sean-Der | 2025-06-04 16:48:09+00:00
I am so incredibly excited for WebRTC broadcasting. I wrote up some reasons in the Broadcast Box[0] README and the OBS PR [1]

Now that GStreamer, OBS and FFmpeg all have WHIP support we finally have a ubiquitous protocol for video broadcasting for all platforms (Mobile, Web, Embedded, Broadcasting Software etc...)

I have been working on Open Source + WebRTC Broadcasting for years now. This is a huge milestone :)

[0] https://github.com/Glimesh/broadcast-box?tab=readme-ov-file#...

[1] https://github.com/obsproject/obs-studio/pull/7926
by Supermancho | 2025-06-04 16:48:09+00:00
Trump plainly believes that the entirety of government (domestic and foreign), education, industry and media should all support the executive power as he wields it. Not the structure of law in place, nor the cultural norms. Not even the predecessor that wielded less power is spared, despite hypocritical acts. There's nothing more transparently fascist than this administration.

The primary bulwark has been the socialization of the populace to oppose this behavior. The courts are viewed as a shelter, as feckless as they have been over the last 6 months. When moves are made over the next few years, that are more desperate and heavy handed, I would hope for conciliation.
by daft_pink | 2025-06-04 16:49:19+00:00
It’s really obvious that AI is something that is very rough around the edges and companies known for delivering polished projects are having a lot of trouble delivering. For example, Google should have been the leader in AI, but I think OpenAI got first mover advantage, because they didn’t want to ship a product that hallucinates. If you look at the pre-ChatGPT days, all the news stories were what happens when AI goes wrong not forgiving the failures and accepting that in some areas it can get things really right in a more efficient way.
by Spivak | 2025-06-04 16:49:19+00:00
I go further and say that you should be able to buy any drug from the pharmacy without a prescription*. As well as testing kits. Having to have an ongoing relationship with a doctor just to refill your medication or get antibiotics when you get strep is a huge waste of everyone's time and money. And there are countries where you can already do this and they haven't collapsed. It makes the job of pharmacist actually matter as someone other than a pill counter.

It ends so many stupid discussions we have in the US. Can this medication be prescribed for an off-label use? Who cares because you can just buy it. Do you meet some arbitrary federal weight guideline for Ozempic? Who cares you can just buy it.

* every rule has exceptions, don't get bogged down with them.
by fnordpiglet | 2025-06-04 16:49:41+00:00
In your comment you noted (and they note in their post) their work spins off other innovators and it sounds like in a way they represent a movement and an inspiration. They may very well be performative - maybe you might even call them artists rather than engineers or business people. But it sounds like their art creates awareness and inspires a lot of other, as you say, less visible and less performative people and organizations. Why isn’t this alone worth something? Their burn rate seems very small and their performative contribution seems in excess of the capital they detract from others ventures and maybe even creates a certain amount of awareness of the effort broadly?

Note I have no knowledge this is the first I’ve heard of them. The questions above are truly meant as such.
by flohofwoe | 2025-06-04 16:49:56+00:00
Well, Z80 has DJNZ which is specifically designed for loops ;)

I think there's value in understanding how high level language constructs like if-else and loops can all be constructed from simple conditional jumps, and that a function call is just a CALL/RET pair with the return address being stored on the stack.

Also, structured programming had to be invented, and working in assembly code makes it clearer why.

It's also food for thought why CPU ISAs never made the leap to structured programming.
by ofjcihen | 2025-06-04 16:50:11+00:00
I appreciate the insights here.

The author grazes something I’ve been thinking about for a while while watching LLMs evolve along with their uses: will this tool result in more significant work being accomplished or just more…work in general.

By that I mean it accommodates completing small well documented projects well but seems to flounder on larger more meaningful work.

We already have a problem with junior/mid tier knowledge workers not scoping their efforts effectively and just doing work for works sake. Will the ease of completing small but ultimately useless work result in more of this?

Not a jab at LLMs really. More our propensity to miss the forest in our rush to view a tree.
Ask HN: Is anyone doing Product Engineering?
by GarethX | 2025-06-04 16:51:08+00:00
I see folks talking about the theory of it [1, 2]. Some folks seem to refer to it in place of full-stack development, while others mean an amalgam of product management and software engineering. It's the latter I'm wondering about. The theory sounds great, especially as AI copilots change what it means to be a developer, but I hear few examples of people actually doing the non-coding work of digging into user feedback and usage data, getting PM-like responsibilities to own the outcome of features (not just its technical execution), influencing roadmap, researching competitors, etc.

If it's happening, which devs and orgs are doing it well? are you?

1 - https://randsinrepose.com/archives/the-product-engineer/ 2 - https://leerob.com/n/product-engineers
by vkou | 2025-06-04 16:51:10+00:00
The purpose of peer review is to check for methodological errors, not to replicate the experiment. With a few exceptions, it can't catch many categories of serious errors.

> higher retraction/unverified

Scientific consensus doesn't advance because a single new ground-breaking claim is made in a prestigious journal. It advances when enough other scientists have built on top of that work.

The current state of science is not 'bleeding edge stuff published in a journal last week'. That bleeding edge stuff might become part of scientific consensus in a month, or year or three, or five - when enough other people build on that work.

Anybody who actually does science understands this.

Unfortunately, people with poor media literacy who only read the headlines don't understand this, and assume that the whole process is all a crock.
by eranation | 2025-06-04 16:51:21+00:00
It’s all supply and demand.

When the market pool of seniors will run dry, and as long as hiring a junior + AI is better than a random person + AI, it will balance itself.

I do believe the “we have a tech talent shortage” was and is a lie, the shortage is tech talent that is willing to work for less. Everyone was told to just learn to code and make 6 figures out do college. This drove over-supply.

There is still shortage of very good software engineers, just not shortage of people with a computer science degree.
by nexttk | 2025-06-04 16:51:22+00:00
I haven't read it all and must admit that I'm not sure I really understood the parts that I did read. Reading the part under the headline "Why We Need the World, and How LLMs Pretend to Understand It" and the focus on 'next-token-prediction' makes me wonder how seriously to take it. It just seems like another "LLM's are not intelligent, they are merely next token predictors". An argument which in my view is completely invalid and based on a misunderstanding.

The fact that they predict next token is just the "interface" i.e. an LLM has the interface "predictNextToken(String prefix)". It doesn't say how it is implemented. One implementation could be a human brain. Another could be a simple lookup table that looks at the last word and then selects the next from that. Or anything in between. The point is that 'next-token-prediction' does not say anything about implementation and so does not reduce the capabilities even though it is often invoked like that. Just because it is only required to emit the next token (or rather, a probability distribution thereof) it is permitted to think far ahead, and indeed has to if it is to make a good prediction of just the next token. As interpretability research (and common sense) shows, LLM's have a fairly good idea what they are going to say in the many, many next tokens ahead in order that it can make a good prediction for the next immediate tokens. That's why you can have nice, coherent, well-structured, long responses from LLM's. And have probably never seen it get stuck in a dead end where it can't generate a meaningful continuation.

If you are to reason about LLM capabilities never think in terms of "stochastic parrot", "it's just a next token predictor" because it contains exactly zero useful information and will just confuse you.
by owebmaster | 2025-06-04 16:51:53+00:00
I think you might not have the best definition of what's happiness. If you go to some Amazon/brazilian indigenous tribe today, you will see happier people than the modern human. That is how many people lived in 1025. Even the people living from the land, they could not work the whole day all day, there was not enough things to do.

Nothing knowing that they could have an easier life also probably played a big role on their happiness. Unhappiness (and depression), I would argue, is probably a modern disease.
by whytevuhuni | 2025-06-04 16:52:09+00:00
This is generally unsafe, so to make it safe there needs to be something that restricts what kind of things you can read and write.

For example, if your structure contains a reference, and you read an instance of that from disk, then you now have a potentially invalid reference, bypassing Rust's guarantees. Reading a structure of i32 numbers is safe, but it also has endianness footguns.

The zerocopy crate implements traits and gives you a derive macro to mark types as being safe to serialize/deserialize in a safe way.
by sherdil2022 | 2025-06-04 16:53:00+00:00
Enough! Stop pushing AI every time you get the chance.. It is here to stay. We get that. No one is asking us to Google or search the web now right? Same with AI. It is here to stay and we will use it when we use it. Stop making stuff up like 'AI will make humans less selfish' and such gobbledygook.
by genovalente | 2025-06-04 16:53:11+00:00
The blog for Observers : https://liquidmetal.ai/casesAndBlogs/observers/

The Reactive Programming Problem Difficulty in building reactive applications with traditional serverless functions Most applications need to respond to events: files uploaded to storage, messages arriving in queues, data changes triggering downstream processing. Traditional serverless platforms leave you with limited options—polling APIs on timers, setting up complex webhook systems, or building custom event routing infrastructure.

Polling wastes resources and creates delays. Webhooks require managing external endpoints and handling failures. Custom event systems add operational complexity that defeats the purpose of going serverless in the first place.

Introducing Raindrop Observers Observers in Raindrop are powerful components that let you execute code in response to changes in your resources automatically. Think of them as event listeners that trigger when specific conditions are met in your application—no polling, no complex setup, just clean reactive code.

Raindrop Observers event listening reactive capabilites with clean code Observers are the second pillar in Raindrop’s approach to modern serverless development:

Services (Part 1): Efficient serverless functions with built-in communication Observers (this post): React to changes and events automatically Actors (Part 3): Maintain state and coordinate complex workflows Let’s dive into how Observers can be used to make your life easier.