MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by gorpy7 | 2025-06-02 01:05:03+00:00
I always get a little triggered when i hear the phrase job creation. it’s like a solution in search of a problem. here idk if you’re using it in the way i usually hear it because i generally agree -productivity gains boost the economy. for me, i wish the focus was on value creation. i think of the economy like a bike, the slower it goes the harder it is to balance. i come from a biology background and there there is ‘boom bust’ as a widespread and normal process. if humans are clever enough, even when we run out of resources and are about to bust, we can just suddenly invent fertilizer or countless other things. we took natural gas and added value to it. humans have lots of tricks to keep the bicycle chooching along. Regarding ai, it’s a systemic change. most people aren’t great at systems thinking because most people are specialists. so it’s not too likely you’ll hear a salient take on what ai will do despite some rather smart people commenting. The one trend i like to look at is sort of a scale reset or, how do you say forest from the trees? what i mean is, one of corporate’s great advantages are their size and swath of roles and the coordination that allows them to have an outsized advantage-essentially leveraging the collection of specialist to gain a dominate effect in working ‘the system’(navigating government, economy or scale, overwhelming capital, etc). Enter AI, subsuming these roles into one thing and sort of resetting the required scale to have some of the corporate power/advantages. Of course these are some rosy shades but i often approach new things with “what’s the best that could happen” and it has served me well.
by lazystar | 2025-06-02 01:05:25+00:00
> Whenever I think of Tartakovsky I also think of his clone wars micro series he did for Cartoon Network.

the episode with mace windu taking on an entire droid army - by himself - is what opened my imagination to the true potential that a jedi master has. it's a shame that neither the movies, nor any other tv show, have come close to conveying "why" everyone fears and respects force users.
by joshwa | 2025-06-02 01:05:39+00:00
Likewise but for raccoons. Are you precision targeting or just broad sprinkler coverage? I need to make sure my cat doesn’t get hosed :-/

I got a cheap MLX90640 off aliexpress for target detection and a grove vision AI V2 module to use with IR cam for classification/object tracking. Esp32 for fusion and servo/solenoid actuation.

Collab?
by apothegm | 2025-06-02 01:05:46+00:00
A good dating app would be paradoxical. For a dating app to be appealing, it needs a big enough network. But if it’s effective it’s constantly shedding users and shrinking its network.

Even absent economic incentives to monetize users indefinitely with subscriptions, a good dating app almost by definition has awful retention. And that will quickly kill an app that relies on network effects.
by leoshimo | 2025-06-02 01:05:58+00:00
The project doesn't implement durable programs (yet!).

I've done some prototyping in the past, and came out of it feeling it wasn't quite the right thing to dive into yet. I mostly lacked clarity around what the concepts / syntax / ergonomics should be, because I didn't have specific use-cases in mind.

I don't see it as a "global" always-on feature, at the moment.

I'm intrigued by Membrane's approach (https://docs.membrane.io/concepts/programs/) - but I'm not sure if it's the right fit for this runtime. TBD!
by noduerme | 2025-06-02 01:10:44+00:00
If anything, the past several months have shown that the Ukrainians will keep fighting without American support, and want to keep fighting, because the only other choice would be surrender and enslavement. Having said that, America and the EU do get something out of supporting Ukrainian sovereignty. And it's not just damage to Russian military capacity, it's deterrence against Russian imperial expansion all along the frontier.
by neilv | 2025-06-02 01:11:30+00:00
Strong (not formal) honor codes are in the conversation because my intended arguments for solutions to the plagiarism problems are predicated on there being value to a culture of honorable conduct in a university. So I was looking for real world examples.

Strong honor codes aren't the norm, so I don't think you could say we wouldn't be having this conversation if they had any significant effect on plagiarism.
by stevefan1999 | 2025-06-02 01:13:58+00:00
Related Wikipedia entry: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logarithmic_number_system

Also related: https://blog.timhutt.co.uk/fast-inverse-square-root/

(I see that someone already mentioned fast inverse square root algorithm is related to this, which is famously used by John Carmack which is one of my hero who led me into tech industry, despite I didn't end up in gaming industry)
by potholereseller | 2025-06-02 01:14:50+00:00
I've asserted elsewhere that LLMs are glorified chatbots. One of the comments in TFA mentions the classic chatbot, ELIZA, so it's nice to see someone else come to a similar conclusion. Additionally, it is ironic that LLMs are often used as the backends for actual chatbots; chatbots making chatbots; the circle is complete.

But back on topic, notice that jcoglan is complaining that the LLM can't actually follow his instructions; the LLM is doing everything it can to appear like it is following instructions, but never actually following instructions; the LLM appears to be wasting jcoglan's time in order to get as much money out of him as possible.

How are LLMs supposed to replace employees, when they can't follow instructions? The entire point of the manager-employee arrangement is that the employee tries to understand and follow instructions. I still don't know why any manager would want to deal with chatbots that can't follow instructions, when almost all employees have at least a little capacity to follow instructions.

If I'm wrong, and LLMs do somehow replace all employees, then companies will consist of only managers writing document-length instructions for every trivial task (to paraphrase a commenter in TFA). I dislike managers as much as the next guy, but that sounds like a punishment you wouldn't wish upon your worst enemies.
by agentultra | 2025-06-02 01:16:04+00:00
I think the cost of some formal methods have long been over-stated.

Model checking, for example, is not as hard as it sounds and not nearly as expensive or time consuming as building the wrong thing. Most programmers I’ve taught don’t seem to have too much difficulty learning TLA+ or Alloy. The concepts themselves are fundamentally rather simple.

Theorem proving does take some expertise. But it’s also not an insurmountable obstacle.

However I agree that there’s a spectrum of cost and the higher you go down the assurance chain the effort and time it will take. Often we do price in the cost of errors into the holistic process of software (eg: SRE style error budgets, iterative development, etc).

One angle that works for me when deciding when to use a more substantial FM is the cost of getting it wrong (or conversely, how important is it that we get some key thing right)?

If I’m building a financial database can my business afford to lose customers’ money? Do we have that liability built into our insurance?

Sometimes you need to go slow at first in order to go fast later.

And some properties are simply too hard to trust to some boxes and arrows and a prayer.
by smeej | 2025-06-02 01:17:11+00:00
I got it all set up and tested out Gemma3 1B on a Pixel 8a. That only took a few minutes, which was nice.

But it was garbage. It barely parsed the question, didn't even attempt to answer it, and replied in what was barely serviceable English. All I asked was how it was small enough to run locally on my phone. It was bad enough for me to abandon the model entirely, which is saying a lot, because I feel like I have pretty low expectations for AI work in the first place.
by elliotec | 2025-06-02 01:18:08+00:00
Of course they do. I’ve been primarily a front end developer for 15 years. Working with designers. Shit takes so many iterations and so much time. Claude is faster but still “struggles” compared to basic rails work and API calls and test writing and whatnot.

I’m not sure how to answer the question on percentage of time coding. I quit my job as a director where coding wasn’t part of the job but have kept up on side stuff and architecture at work. Since the new year when I started this it’s been in bursts, some weeks or nights I’ll go super hard coding and others I’ll focus on other stuff. I go to conferences and study a lot on the subject of the industry so that’s what I do in bursts of the non-coding time.

I hired a virtual assistant to help with the non-coding things so lately it’s been a lot more.

In general I’d estimate at least 50% of my work on this thing since January has been coding but it’s really hard to gauge. Claude over the past 3 days has surpassed my personal coding productivity over the past 3 months though, if it wasn’t clear what I was saying.
by idiotsecant | 2025-06-02 01:19:39+00:00
The basic premise of nuclear safety is mutually assured destruction. If Russia believes that another superpower believes that Russia might be less capable of MAD due to losing a huge chunk of one leg of the nuclear trifecta they might be more likely to act premptively in launching a nuclear exchange.

Also, The Russian government relies on projection of an image of strength not just externally, but internally as well. If the Russian government is seen as weak internally they might be more likely to take drastic actions to stay in power.

Put all these together, and it seems like the world might just be a bit more dangerous today than it was yesterday. Maybe that is the Ukrainian strategy - make Russia do something monstrous to a western power to force western action.
by RossBencina | 2025-06-02 01:20:18+00:00
> Two things that should be available by now in conversations are branching and history editing.

Prapti can do editable history no problem, the entire history is just the markdown file. We experimented with branching using git to automatically switch branches based on how you edit the history.

I still use it frequently. I prefer keeping my chats in local markdown files.

https://github.com/prapti-ai/prapti/
by godelski | 2025-06-02 01:21:50+00:00
I think the concept of SEO is fine. But the problem comes down to metric hacking.

Certainly you want to make your page easier to index by Google and others, but that's not the only thing that matters. You should improve your content and provide a good product to users. That's what Google intends to measure, but such a thing is actually impossible to do so accurately. So the problem comes down to this stupid cat and mouse game where sites happily shill out links that are immediate turnarounds for users.

I think this is larger than just search. We seem to just be optimizing towards whatever metric we've decided should be used. We then fool ourselves into thinking this proxy actually measures the real thing.
by FridgeSeal | 2025-06-02 01:22:20+00:00
> speed up time to first input or time to interactive you need to actually build a working page using user data, and that's often fastest on the backend because you reduce network calls which are the slowest bit.

It’s only fastest to get the loading skeleton onto the page.

My personal experience with basically any site that has to go through this 2-stage loading exercise is that:

- content may or may not load properly.

- I will probably be waiting well over 30 seconds for the actually-useful-content.

- when it does all load, it _will_ be laggy and glitchy. Navigation won’t work properly. The site may self-initiate a reload, button clicks are…50/50 success rate for “did it register, or is it just heinously slow”.

I’d honestly give up a lot of fanciness just to have “sites that work _reasonably_” back.
by ckcheng | 2025-06-02 01:22:51+00:00
> After eight years, the people in the structured exercise program not only became more active than those in the control group but also had 28% fewer cancers and 37% fewer deaths from any cause. There were more muscle strains and other similar problems in the exercise group.

https://apnews.com/article/colon-cancer-exercise-study-recov...
by echelon | 2025-06-02 01:23:21+00:00
> You seem to be under the impression that film production is somehow more individually empowering or trusting than software development. It's not.

It's sad that tens of thousands of kids attend film school, yet there are too few roles of autonomy for them.

The "Hollywood" system only makes a few thousand film and tv productions of scale per year. There are way more people with visions and ideas and dreams, and they're all left to wither on the vine.

How many Chris Nolans, Stanley Kubricks, and Ridley Scotts have we lost to the rat race?

I think this is the biggest potential for AI. Suddenly all of those directors and dreamers who couldn't { hack, struggle, nepo } their way to the top of the pyramid can pursue their vision.

YouTube and TikTok have been huge enablers of creativity. They're a much fairer and wider platform for enablement and distribution, and already today's youth are setting this target as their new generational dream.

We're likely about to see a film industry that resembles the gaming, publishing, and music industries. Studios will exist for large scale "AAA" fare, but individual auteurs and small teams will be able to make their mark. Steam Greenlight, Bandcamp, Wattpad, and Medium for the director. It's like what the DAW did for music production - no more need to spend tens of thousands to book a studio - except even more orders of magnitude in cost reduction.

We've needed studios for two things historically: (1) distribution (2) financing. YouTube and streaming solved #1, and Gen AI puts film [1] squarely within the "ramen budget" of college students. So pillar #2 is about to fall.

[1] I don't mean low budget films. Gen AI will give directors the VFX to achieve expansive science fiction and fantasy visions, exotic locales, and a stunningly beautiful cast (that most audiences prefer to watch).
by bgwalter | 2025-06-02 01:23:51+00:00
What flavor? Keynesian, Chicago school, Marxist? They all say something different. The one I read called economics the "dismal science" on the first few pages.

You do not need a textbook to see that all income of the middle classes goes to rent, health care and education, whereas 40 years ago the middle class could afford genuine Persian rugs. It will get worse.
by therealpygon | 2025-06-02 01:24:07+00:00
Sorry… I’m not sure that math is mathing for me. How do you get that 122 TB of flash is 3.5x more expensive that 12TB of SAS? Aren’t you a full order of magnitude in the wrong direction or did I miss something? Or I guess to say, 12TB would be $1,200 for flash, comparably, making it 3x cheaper, no?
by MyPasswordSucks | 2025-06-02 01:25:25+00:00
> I mean with the amount of stolen card details routinely traded and used successfully (at least for a while) and with how little crime like that is investigated or punished in some jurisdictions, I dunno...

There's a huge difference between me using your credit card to buy stuff off Amazon (chance of success: somewhere between "doubtful" and "near-definite" depending mostly on geographical factors and your particular bank), and me walking around with a hacked card reader and stealing money out of your account by dialing in phony transactions directed to my account (chance of success: somewhere between "zero" and "also zero, but with a decimal point followed by more zeroes").
by catlifeonmars | 2025-06-02 01:26:08+00:00
Oh I agree about filling out entire lines. I use copilot to write boilerplate based on a template pattern I provide all the time.

It’s not very precise though. Autocomplete will give me a list of valid APIs for current given version of any library sorted by most recently used with a locality bonus. Copilot on the other hand does not have that level of precision. Two different tools that I use for slightly different things.
by kevin_thibedeau | 2025-06-02 01:28:03+00:00
Bombers require unpressurized bomb bays. The B-52 is built completely unlike any Boeing airliner. The fuselage is significantly different than an airliner and the structural changes would not be trivial to implement. They also need to have control surfaces designed to take off with a full load and land empty. Airliners don't have to take that into consideration.
by o11c | 2025-06-02 01:28:21+00:00
There is an important distinction between "one address space" and "one set of memory permissions". The former is usually a good idea (for debuggability if nothing else!) if you don't need to support `fork`; the latter is the problem.

On modern Linux systems you can even do separate sets of memory permissions within a single process (and single address space), with system calls needed only at startup; see `pkeys(7)`.

https://www.man7.org/linux/man-pages/man7/pkeys.7.html

(note however that there aren't enough pkeys available to avoid the performance problem every microkernel has run into)
by talkingtab | 2025-06-02 01:28:21+00:00
In my humble, and probably wrong opinion, the war in the Ukraine is about two different systems. You could call one system of human interaction the Putin-model. This is the one we in the US have recently adopted. Another model is a collaborative one. The models are not sharply delineated, but the differences are essential. Do we act with collaborative intelligence or do we follow orders? Most US corporations and individuals now rely on the Putin model. In this model, some (possibly incompetent and possibly insane) individual decides what we do, and we do it. I have seen revered corporate leader choose the dumbest choice possible over and over. The other model requires that the individual members can collaboratively understand a problem and respond to it. Unfortunately our "follow the leader" educational system has insured that we have few thinkers who are able to actually assess and solve problems.

I apologize because my experience with corporate culture has resulted in a strong and decisive conclusion that corporate leaders such as Musk and Cook, et al., could not fight their way out of a paper bag. Really. What they can do is order other people to fight their way out of paper bags. If I were somehow ever in an overloaded life boat, the first people I would push over the side would be the Musks and Cooks. Musk's "send me an email" just does not work in a life boat in a storm. sigh.

I realize that in our cultist society this is blasphemy, but really - if you are able to think any original thought, go for it. And for those of you who do not get it. Well, the best I can say is good luck.
by pmfgpmfg | 2025-06-02 01:30:30+00:00
Of course they will. russia, and russians disparage Ukrainians as a default. A success such as this will absolutely be blamed on “Western puppentmasters” rather than absolute mastery by Ukrainians. After all, the alcoholic descendants of a subservient Mongol enforcers couldn’t possibly have had their ass handed to them by Ukrainians. This is standard russian racism, beaten into them throughout the generations.
by MatthiasWandel | 2025-06-02 01:33:16+00:00
The bottleneck with the pointer table may be the summation. While the fetches of elements can be parallelized, the summation can not, as the addition depends on the result of the previous addition being available.

Some experiments I have done with something that does summation showed a considerable speedup by summing odd and even values into separate bins. Although this applies only to doing something not too closely resembling signal processing algorithms, as the compiler can otherwise optimize out for that.

Part of my video titled "new computers don't speed up old code"
by ericmay | 2025-06-02 01:33:21+00:00
Escalation from picking on Ukraine to using nuclear weapons is an escalator ladder that doesn’t make sense with respect to projecting strength - because utilization means direct war with the United States, which Russia will decisively lose. Once they use a nuclear weapon there is nothing else left to escalate. All the cards have been played.

Their only action would then be to use more nuclear weapons and they just aren’t going to do that because they don’t want to end the world.
by godelski | 2025-06-02 01:35:26+00:00
4) Tailscale can benefit from innovations that Headscale finds.

Competition can be beneficial for all parties involved. If the Headscale devs make novel contributions and solve problems Tailscale didn't think of or figure out themselves, Tailscale can copy Headscale just as Headscale copies Tailscale. Competition has this benefit of distributing research expenditures.

I think it is easy to forget that even monopolies are bad for monopolies. They can benefit by being fat and lazy, but this is at the cost of larger future profits. It's "safer", but there's plenty of competitive markets where there is little risk of failure. At least compared to the risk that naturally exists.

5) Headscale users may convert to Tailscale users.

That can happen if Headscale was implemented by a enthusiastic employee who later leaves. Company learned to like the benefits but no longer has the support. This makes a natural conversion. The same thing happens if Headscale fizzles out.

I really just don't see how Tailscale really has much, if anything, to lose from Headscale. It definitely has things to gain! The only reason to go after Headscale would be if they are greedy and irrationally fearful. Which the action itself would scare a lot of its users. Tailscale really is in touch with its users and honestly, I'm not sure there's anything negative I have to say about them. They're not creating enemies, they're paying attention to users, and they're just focusing on making a great product. Seems like the ideal strategy that we'd want all businesses to follow.
by ericmay | 2025-06-02 01:37:34+00:00
One small nitpick - nobody who matters will or is blaming Ukraine for the war except far left and far right factions.

It is advantageous for the US to keep the war going to a point, but the real focus for the US is the Pacific and the US would prefer to not have to worry about Europe and Russia and instead focus on China. But the US isn’t able to end this war one way or another. Only Russia can end the war (aside from Ukraine no longer willingly defending their country) either willingly or by some sort of internal event, barring some miscalculation where they attack NATO forces. Some theorize Putin will do that to get defeated so he can save face but I don’t think that is likely.
by RossBencina | 2025-06-02 01:37:36+00:00
Something I've been trying for the past year or so is adopting the following mindset: "I'm going to stay on this direction until I prove to myself that it's going to work or I prove that it's not going to work." By "prove" here I mean semi-formal things like characterising the problem and the chosen direction well enough to say with high certainty whether or not it's going to work or is futile.

One upshot of this is that it forces me to be clear about the definitions of "going to work" and "not going to work." It's related to definition-of-done in some agile methods, and also to "imagine the problem as solved and work back from there," which is one of the heuristics Polya talks about in "How to Solve It".
by CMCDragonkai | 2025-06-02 01:37:44+00:00
I believe that borders in the past existed mostly due to the ruling class that asserts control over resources. The peasant class are actually serfs to the land they are cattle to be corralled as you say. But ever since the development of nationalism and the nation state, borders are supposedly now useful to the the nation - tied to an ethnic group. But this might all just be in the mind regardless of biological affinity. Some people might feel more interconnected, others feel more egoistic.