MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by lhl | 2025-06-09 14:49:08+00:00
Rather than speculating another option is to just measure things. I churned through billions of tokens for evals and synthetic data earlier this year, so I did some of that. On an H100 node, a Llama3 70B FP8 at concurrency=128 generated at about 0.4 J/token (this was estimating node power consumption and multiplying by a generous PUE, 1.2X or something like that) - it was still 120X cheaper than the 48 J/token estimates of cost to run the 175B GPT-3 on 2021-era Microsoft DC1 hardware (Li et al. 2023) and 10X cheaper than the 3-4 J/token empirical measurements to run LLaMA-65B on V100/A100 HPC nodes (Samsi et al 2023).

Anyway, at 0.4 J/token, at a cost of 5 cents/kWh, is about 0.5 cents/million tokens. Even at 50% utilization you're only up to 1.1 cents/M tokens. Artificial Analysis reports the current average price of Llama3.3 70B to be about $0.65/M tokens. I'd assume most of the cost you're paying for is probably the depreciation schedule of the hardware.

Note that of course, modern-day 7B class models stomp on both those older models so you could throw in another 10X lower cost if you're going to quality adjust. Also, I did minimal perf tuning - I used FP8, and W8A8-INT8 both is faster and has slightly better quality (in my functional evals). I also used -tp 8 for my system. -tp 4 w/ model parallelism and cache-aware routing you should also be able to increase throughput a fair amount. Also, speculative decode w/ a basic draft model would give you another boost. And this was tested at the beginning of the year, so using vLLM 0.6.x or so - the vLLM 1.0 engine is faster (better graph building, compilation, scheduling). I'd guess that if you were conscientious about just optimizing you could probably get at least another 2X perf free with basically just "config".
by taeric | 2025-06-09 14:49:12+00:00
Oddly, I think how you track can matter here. If you do it as a lookup of "I am eating this, and it says it was this many calories" then you are not likely to remember and develop a sense of how many calories things have. However, if you do it as "I am eating this, I think it has X calories, but looking it up I found it was Y" that can help remember.

I can try to find the studies, but basically, "guess and check" is ridiculously powerful in learning. Is part of what makes flash cards so strong. Just "ask and answer", not so much.
by kergonath | 2025-06-09 14:49:18+00:00
Yes, it is right. The difference is that in the case of aluminium and titanium (but also stainless steel), the oxide grows in a uniform way, covering all the metal. These protective layers are very thin and act as barriers stopping oxygen from reaching the metal underneath.

In case of iron, oxidation occurs at different points on the surface and the oxide layer initially leaves most of the metal exposed. The oxide is also not effective at stopping oxygen, so the rust layers keeps growing until it forms flakes that fall, exposing more of the metal. The process repeats until all the metal is consumed.
by eggy | 2025-06-09 14:49:25+00:00
Article is three years old, and the fungi are not talking to us! I imagine the communication being a bit slow like the scene in the kids animated movie, Zootopia, where sloths work at the DMV..."P....L....E....A....S....E-------" don't tread on me! However, if like German 1 word can cover a whole concept, then 50 words may be sufficient to communicate in a reasonable time scale ;)
by sethammons | 2025-06-09 14:49:41+00:00
the solution is trivial. It is easy. We've whitnessed it several times. Illegal immigration follows jobs. When the economy does poorly, less people come across. I recall a few years ago, they said it was negative immigration! More people were leaving because jobs were hard to get.

Instead of letting the economy do the work, simply enforce the laws we already have on the books. Don't let employers employ non-verified citizens.

The problem is that a common sense solution solves the problem and removes a platform for politicians to yell about and continue to do nothing over.

Step one: enforce labor laws. Step two, watch the system drain itself. Step three, look to naturalize and or remove those left behind.
Ask HN: I Built a Extension, but I'm Struggling with Promotion – Any Advice?
by zy5a59 | 2025-06-09 14:50:03+00:00
I developed a browser extension, and the conversion rate is pretty good. However, I’m stuck on how to promote it further.

I believe this is a critical problem for many developers — building the product is relatively easy, but promoting it is the hard part.

I'm facing this challenge once again. In the past, whenever I ran into marketing difficulties with a product, I’d just set it aside and move on to building something new. But this time, I really want to solve the problem once and for all.

What are some effective ways to promote your own product?

I’ve already tried many approaches — launching on Product Hunt, building backlinks, creating videos on TikTok, and more — but none of them have brought significant results.

Are there any other proven or creative strategies I could try?
by kstrauser | 2025-06-09 14:50:16+00:00
Yes and no. I’m working hard to keep people who act horribly out of my corner of the fediverse. I’ve never blocked someone for having different political opinions from my own, for example, but I’ve blocked plenty of people, even those who mostly share my opinions, because they were behaving like jerks. I’m doing nothing whatsoever to keep you from talking to them.

Hang out with anyone you want to, and I’ll do the same. And yes, my users are specifically OK with it. Our moderation actions are public, we put them to a vote when there’s some question about the right thing to do, and I’ve blogged a lot about the details of it all. Users tend to join and stay with my instance because they agree with my moderation actions, not in spite of them.
by orwin | 2025-06-09 14:50:34+00:00
Yes. And it's dangerous presenting the joy of parenthood as universal, it put a lot of pressure.

One of my cousins had difficult pregnancies, and finally managed to have a kid around 10 years ago. Since basically COVID, when her child was around 6, she started fleeing her house, finding more and more stuff to do, quitting a balanced job to go into entrepreneurship that ate her days, and basically stopped interacting with her child. After a disaster (an ecological one), they had to come back last winter, and she finally broke down in front of her mother and aunts saying she doesn't love her child as much as she should, she doesn't feel any joy in parenting, that she is a bad mom and should have her child removed as she can't look at him without feeling guilty.

I'm pretty sure a honest description of what being a parent means, and people saying to her that you don't _have_ to feel the same as others before she hurt her relationship with her child would have been helpful (but well, spilled milk and all that).

My personal opinion is that people mostly lie to themselves then to others about what they really feel in general, so posts like this have no impact on my opinion (that said, children are great: the 4 month to 30month is a bit of a grind and difficult, but once they're past that its fun and games).
by raincole | 2025-06-09 14:50:49+00:00
> an API that is likely a loss-leader to grab market share (hosted LLM cloud models)

Everyone just repeats this but I never buy it.

There is literally a service that allows you to switch models and service providers seamlessly (openrouter). There is just no lock-in. It doesn't make any financial sense to "grab market share".

If you sell something with UI, like ChatGPT (the web interface) or Cursor, sure. But selling API at a loss is peak stupidity and even VCs can see that.
by devmor | 2025-06-09 14:50:57+00:00
The former - the ultimate goal was to get myself comfortable with eating in a way that would keep me at a stable weight and stick with it. I knew this was going to be the hardest part of the lifestyle change, so I opted for a more difficult up front program to ensure I could focus on that while I lost weight.

I think that's something that a lot of people fail to account for when trying to lose weight that ultimately ruins their goals - you have to build habits to sustain the lifestyle you want. Weight loss surgery, eating at a large deficit or working out hard alone are going to get rid of some weight, but most people will gain all of that back within a year's time.
by jplusequalt | 2025-06-09 14:50:57+00:00
Wholeheartedly agree. I can't help but think that proponents of LLMs are not seriously considering the impact it will have on our ability to communicate with each other, or to reason on our own accord without the assistance of an LLM.

It confounds me how these people would trust the same companies who fueled the decay of social discourse via the internet with the creation of AI models which aim to encroach on every aspect of our lives.
by dale_glass | 2025-06-09 14:51:02+00:00
They're not that literal anymore of course, but they still don't compare to an LLM. In the end it's still mostly searching for key words even if with a few tweaks here and there, and the ability to answer vague questions mostly works by finding forums and Reddit posts where people ask that specific question and hopefully get an answer.

When you're asking a standard question like the capital of whatever, that works great.

When you have one of those weird issues, it often lands you in a thread somewhere in the Ubuntu forums where people tried to help this person, nothing worked, and the thread died 3 years ago.

Just the fact that LLMs can translate between languages already adds an amazing amount of usefulness that search engines can't have. There seems to be a fair amount of obscure technical info that's only available in Russian for some reason.
by petesergeant | 2025-06-09 14:52:01+00:00
> What? If someone builds something on top of your API, they're tying themselves to it, and you can slowly raise prices while keeping each increase well below the switching cost.

Have you used any of these APIs? There's very little lock-in for inference. This isn't like setting up all your automation on S3, if you use the right library it's changing a config file.
by gspencley | 2025-06-09 14:52:35+00:00
> So then, your actual opinion is Yes a "content neutral hosting platform." does exist?

No. Common carrier and "hosting platform" are not the same thing. If someone wanted to apply common carrier status to broadband infrastructure, it might make sense. Applying common carrier to knitting forum does not. They are two very different things. One facilitates discrete communication between two distinct parties while the other publishes and distributes content to a wide audience. Conflating the two is an exercise in mental gymnastics that only makes sense if you have a political agenda and don't care about being intellectually honest.
by Malipeddi | 2025-06-09 14:52:35+00:00
This is a neat and accessible introduction to the topic. Nice work! I want to mention nesting quadratures like Gauss-Kronod like Clenshaw-Curtis/Fejér. The nesting means that the quadrature points for lower order are included in the points required for higher orders. This allows you to increase your order of accuracy if required with fewer total evaluations.
by rainworld | 2025-06-09 14:53:05+00:00
>Haven't they considered just stopping?

We don’t have to speculate. They’ve just presented to Ukraine and published their conditions for ceasefire or settlement.

The reaction suggests Ukraine/the West would rather continue. Of course, demands will only increase.

> Really the war started with Euromaidan

Sure it wasn’t when Ukrainian nationalists burned 42 people to death in Odessa?

>regime, pull out

Ah, but Ukraine/the West were given so many opportunities to settle this peacefully. Even the March 2023 settlement (which has been published) was dangerously generous, for said regime. But peace was not on Western leaders’ mind. They wanted something else.

(Preposterous to compare Ukraine/Russia with Afghanistan/US.)
by jjfoooo4 | 2025-06-09 14:53:59+00:00
I think more specifically, if you don't have strong guidance to the LLM on how a project is organized and where things should go, things go pretty far off the rails.

I tried to have an LLM fully write a Python library for me. I wrote an extensive, detailed requirements doc, and it looked close enough that I accepted the code. But as I read through it more closely, I realized it was duplicating code in confusing ways, and overall it took longer than just getting the bones down myself, first.

Some coding agents are now more actively indexing code, I think that should help with this problem
by falcor84 | 2025-06-09 14:54:01+00:00
> Others probably asked where they left their sandals.

This to me is massive. The Oracle of Delphi would have no idea where you left your sandals, but present day AIs increasingly do. This (emergent?) capability of combining information retrieval with flexible language is amazing, and its utility to me cannot be overstated, when I ask a vague question, and then I check the place where the AI led me to, and the sandals are indeed there.

P.S. Thank you for introducing me to the word "querent"
by lesuorac | 2025-06-09 14:54:13+00:00
One item over the course of 12 years is uh lip service at best.

The lesser of two evils is still an evil.

--

Somebody will certainly bring up the filibuster at some point. Thats not in the constitution and can be removed at any point by 51 senators. As a whole democrats are not united on what to do hence why they never remove it. Which then lets them point to it as a scape-goat as to why they can't fix any problems.
by mattlondon | 2025-06-09 14:54:13+00:00
I think I'd prefer that they just say "deal with it - this is real". How many different sets of beliefs do we need to accommodate? How many "mediations" do we need to do to use fire sprinklers?! What if they are incompatible? Whose religion "wins" if one stays one thing but one says the other?

The solution is obvious: religion and beliefs should not be a factor in these sort of things. We in the UK are a secular society with strong separations between state and religion, so this sort of behaviour should be treated for what it is.
by dmos62 | 2025-06-09 14:55:35+00:00
Would it be thinking if the brain was modeled in a more "accurate" way? Does this set of criteria for thinkingness come from whether or not the underlying machinery resembles what the corresponding machinery in humans looks like under the hood?

I'm putting the word accurate in quotes, because we'd have to understand how the brain in humans works, to have a measure for accuracy, which is very much not the case, in my humble opinion, contrary to what many of the commenters here imply.
by ceejayoz | 2025-06-09 14:55:41+00:00
> Most people don’t use an ad blocker.

I mean, they should. Anyone on this site most certainly should.

The LLM UX is going to rapidly converge with the search UX as soon as these companies run out of investor funds to burn. It's already starting; https://www.axios.com/2024/12/03/openai-ads-chatgpt.

What then?
by AymenAzoui | 2025-06-09 14:55:41+00:00
I made a Rick & Morty–style Insta page called AWS Rick to explain AWS, DevOps, and cloud chaos with short, funny skits.

Hit 2M+ views organically Topics like: EC2 vs Fargate, RDS cost traps, Cloudflare myths Now turning this into Infratory — a tool to explore your infra via AI chat

Page: instagram.com/awsrick Curious what HN thinks!
by 1vuio0pswjnm7 | 2025-06-09 14:56:37+00:00
Maybe it (BYD Auto Co., Ltd.) is not s so-called "tech" company. Maybe it is a an auto manufacturer that was aquired by a battery manufacturer (BYD Company).

What does "tech company" even mean. Honest question. Perhaps it means different things to different people. Perhaps it is highly ambiguous. Perhaps it is associated with internet hype.

BYD Auto's history seems to originate with a defense contractor, Norinco Group. It does not appear to have relied on internet hype. No connection to Silicon Valley. Unlike Tesla.
by unhappy_meaning | 2025-06-09 14:56:42+00:00
Slightly off topic but as someone who was in the "no-code" or "low-code" bubble some time ago as a "consultant", the sale tactics of these companies are slimy, cutthroat, and lots of fluff.

Client will go around saying they need an app or a thing and they reach a no-code company who promise they can deliver a working MVP at sprint 0 (~2 weeks). They charge a lot of $$$ and promises what would be construed at 24/7 support. If they get the contract, the "consultants" are worked to the bone in the beginning because managers need to hit their marks, make their C-suite happy, and ultimately try and keep the client as a long term paying customer.

This isn't anything out of the ordinary but I just had to rant that no-code is BS but it's still a flourishing market.
by gen220 | 2025-06-09 14:56:47+00:00
I don't think that's the main takeaway. IMO, the main takeaway is there are, in the best case (exit for >100% of latest 409a), ~three classes of shareholder in a startup: those with preferred shares (investors, occasionally founders if they have a lot of leverage), those with >=1% fully diluted common shares, and everyone else.

In the most common positive case (i.e. sale price is <100% of invested capital), or negative cases, the three collapses into into preferred holders vs common holders.

If you're in the lower class, you should assume your equity is worth zero. No matter what startup you're joining. You're here for the cash comp and to be surrounded by a growing cast of ambitious, upwardly-mobile people.

If you're in the "middle" class and highly value future wealth over present matters, you should act "like a founder" (sacrificing your life to, one day, make 1s or 10s of millions) if the company is on the ups, and you should act "like a mercenary" (leaving to some place where you can resume acting "like a founder") if the company is permanently plateauing or on the downs.

If you're in the "upper" class it's a different game entirely. That's not really the subject of this thread (valuing equity from a typical prospective employee's POV), so I won't go there.

Whether a "good startup" (great founders, great business, great investors) results in "a meaningful outcome for holders of <1% of common shares" involves so much luck and non-determinism that's beyond your influence as a <1% employee that you would be foolish to write it off to anything other than zero. The same is not true for >=1% and founders, of course, so they should value their equity differently.

Edit: the "magic" that many startups try to get away with is convincing people in class X that they're actually in class X+1 (even X+2!) and that, you should therefore act like it!! Be wary.
by renewiltord | 2025-06-09 14:57:48+00:00
A recent car crash in San Francisco killed a man and his dog and many people on Reddit reacted with a comment like “Nooo! Not the dog!”

I thought that was ridiculous because these are just animals. It sucks when they die but it’s not the end of the world.

Another car nearby killed a little child and her father and that one was much more horrific to me.

But now it makes sense: to these people the two incidents were equivalent. I suppose that is normal, what with all the stories of animals caring for the young of other animals. Neotenic characteristics seem to have cross-species impact.

Very cool. Thank you for sharing this.
by rsynnott | 2025-06-09 14:57:48+00:00
This misses one obvious possibility; that it just happened before Okinawa was returned to Japan.

(Granted, that was a while ago, and he looks young-ish, but I don't really know anything about Shawn Mendes, so am entirely open to the possibility that he's in his 70s and doing that blood boy thing from Silicon Valley.)
by tmountain | 2025-06-09 14:58:25+00:00
Personal opinion, it's for fun with some internal narrative of justification. It doesn't seem like it would be cost effective or provide better results, as all the major LLM vendors benefit tremendously from economies of scale, and the monthly fees for these services are extremely reasonable for what you are getting. Going further, the cloud based LLM receive upgrades constantly while static hardware will likely lock you out of future models at some time horizon.
by username223 | 2025-06-09 14:58:42+00:00
It's not that consumers don't care -- it's that "they" (i.e. "we") have been beaten down.

Connect an image labeling API to the USDA's database of nutrients, make a slick-looking app, and you have a product. Pay for some marketing, offer a three-day trial after which you auto-bill for a year, make refunds as difficult as possible, and you have a business. At $30/yr, 10k subscriptions (deliberate or accidental) gets you $210k after app store commission. If you're lucky, you get bought out for even more. If not, you still made good money for not much work.
by throwawaybob420 | 2025-06-09 14:58:44+00:00
It’s not angst to see the people who run the companies we work for “encourage” us to use Claude to write our code knowing full well it’s their attempt to see if they really can fire us without a hit in “productivity”.

It’s not angst to see students throughout the entire spectrum end up using ChatGPT to write their papers, summarize 3 paragraphs, and use it to bypass any learning.

It’s not angst to see people ask a question to an LLM and talk what it says as gospel.

It’s not angst to understand the environmental impact of all this stupid fucking shit.

It’s not angst to see the danger in generative AI not only just creating slop, but further blurring the lines of real and fake.

It’s not angst to see the vast amount of non-consensual porn being generated of people without their knowledge.

Feel like I’m going fucking crazy here, just day after day of people bowing down at the altar and legit not giving a single fuck about what happens after rofl
by Magmalgebra | 2025-06-09 14:58:54+00:00
Something that can be hard to appreciate if you haven't managed this sort of project is that it can be surprisingly hard to throw money at the problem.

If you try to hire at your regular "bar" for skill for boring work like this - people will often quit. This is one of the reasons many company's integrations are lacking despite it being a strategic interest - integration work is miserable and doesn't help your career.

Hiring below the skillbar at the same pay, is dangerous and often doesn't actually work out - if it was that easy someone more skilled probably would have fixed this a while ago.

So you try to pay more for the miserable work - but hold on, now you have to pay out of band salaries, and legal tells you that opens you to massive liabilities.

Ok - maybe you can just level them differently? No, HR will tell you that will mess with all your internal level processes - which are key to running the company. They're going to add a lot of additional overhead tracking these "fake" leveling bands and dealing with the consequences.

None of this means the problem is literally unsolvable, but it now requires a huge amount of time and effort from people near the top of the company who everyone would much rather spend their time on making the company better.

All of this to say - sure you could solve this problem, but it's actually much more complex than adding some line items to a budget.

Source: have watched many big companies try and fail for years to staff unsexy work like this.
by anonfordays | 2025-06-09 14:59:04+00:00
>Modern conservatism grew out of authoritarian monarchist philosophers

Not in the US. Modern conservatism in the US is tied to the individualistic self-reliance movement that rejects the concept of rulers at the top in favor of States' rights and local governance. It is classically liberal with special emphasis on individual autonomy, limited government, economic freedom, political freedom and freedom of speech.

You may be confusing it with conservativism in the UK/EU.