MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by lupusreal | 2025-06-07 11:20:41+00:00
> we generally don't have the "if they die it sucks for them" attitude with space anymore.

We kind of do though, although we strongly pretend we don't. Each time after Apollo 1, Challenger, and Columbia, NASA has made a show of reforming their safety culture but either not sticking to it ot not actually doing it beyond a superficial level. Most recently, there has been a developing issue with the Artemis program. The Artemis I mission, unmanned, was intended to validate all the design and modeling of the Orion spacecraft before people fly on it. It was subsequently discovered that the Orion heat shield suffered severe damage during reentry, partially falling apart in a way that wasn't expected.

At this point, a space program which actually takes the preservation of human life as seriously as NASA claims would postpone the manned Artemis II flight and fly more test missions until they get the Orion heat shield to perform as expected. But that's not what NASA is doing. They are instead proceeding with Artemis II, confident that this time their modeling is accurate. Instead of reentering with the trajectory they tested, they're going to send humans on a completely new reentry trajectory they have never tested before. Their modeling failed to predict the heat shield damage that occurred during Artemis I, but now they are trusting their modeling to keep people alive for Artemis II. It's totally wreckless.

And yeah yeah, it's mostly Congress's fault, NASA funding and all that, SLS costs too much and NASA doesn't have any more to spare for tests and they don't have time anyway with the politically imposed deadlines, etc etc.
by el_pollo_diablo | 2025-06-07 11:22:12+00:00
> In fact, even state-of-art compilers will break language specifications (Clang assumes that all loops without side effects will terminate).

I don't doubt that compilers occasionally break language specs, but in that case Clang is correct, at least for C11 and later. From C11:

> An iteration statement whose controlling expression is not a constant expression, that performs no input/output operations, does not access volatile objects, and performs no synchronization or atomic operations in its body, controlling expression, or (in the case of a for statement) its expression-3, may be assumed by the implementation to terminate.
by cheekyturtles | 2025-06-07 11:22:22+00:00
Yes, apologies, the centre circle colour scheme was a terrible choice. I've changed it to something more visible. It looked like network errors were blocking the main thread so to speak, that shouldn't be an issue anymore.

I'm glad it's only the worse you have seen since 2020 though, I take that a little as a compliment because frontend design is not my strong point. This is just a fun little thing I made to help me relax before meetings etc.
by dmos62 | 2025-06-07 11:22:40+00:00
> how to build systems where the whole is bigger than the sum of its parts

A bit tangential, but I look at programming as inherently being that. Every task I try to break down into some smaller tasks that together accomplish something more. That leads me to think that, if you structure the process of programming right, you will only end up solving small, minimally interwined problems. Might sound far-fetched, but I think it's doable to create such a workflow. And, even the dumber LLMs would slot in naturally into such a process, I imagine.
by Cloudef | 2025-06-07 11:23:03+00:00
To be honest your snippet isn't really C anymore by using a compiler builtin. I'm also annoyed by things like `foo(int N, const char x[N])` which compilation vary wildly between compilers (most ignore them, gcc will actually try to check if the invariants if they are compile time known)

> I haven't really understood the advantage compared to simply running a program at build time.

Since both comptime and runtime code can be mixed, this gives you a lot of safety and control. The comptime in zig emulates the target architecture, this makes things like cross-compilation simply work. For program that generates code, you have to run that generator on the system that's compiling and the generator program itself has to be aware the target it's generating code for.
by valyala | 2025-06-07 11:23:20+00:00
200GB of metrics and 1TB of logs can be efficiently processed by a single-node observability solution optimized for metrics/logs (for example, VictoriaMetrics/VictoriaLogs), which runs on a low-end computer such as Raspberry Pi. There is zero sense in complicating the system with clustering, micro-service architecture and object storage for such a small-scale workload :)
by kiitos | 2025-06-07 11:24:05+00:00
> if you can't look at a work week and spot huge fractions of work that you're doing that isn't fundamentally discerning or creative, but rather muscle-memory rote repetition of best practices you've honed over your career, you're not trying (or you haven't built that muscle memory yet). What's happening is skeptics can't believe that an LLM plus a couple hundred lines of Python agent code can capture and replicate most of the rote work, freeing all that time back up.

No senior-level engineer worth their salt, and in any kind of minimally effective organization, is spending any meaningful amount of their time doing the rote repetition stuff you're describing here. If this is your experience of work then let me say to you very clearly: your experience is pathological and non-representative and you need to seek better employment :)
by lupusreal | 2025-06-07 11:24:52+00:00
That was their excuse. But they probably knew it already upfront, and of course Trump himself has done so and obviously knows that rich people donate to both parties just to cover their bases and that it means relatively little.

I think it's more likely that Jared was pulled at the suggestion of some staffers that never liked him or Musk in the first place but weren't able to get their way with Trump as long as Musk was still around.
by archerx | 2025-06-07 11:25:19+00:00
As someone who is an artist and also a programmer I find the differences between both very different. I never see programmers crying over A.I. chiming “they stole our code so it’s evil and I’ll never use it and neither should you!” Like the artist seem to do.

I don’t really care if the image gen models are trained on my renders or photos as long as they are open source.

Also I have been making the assets for my game which needs at least 2,000 sprites and honestly it’s very tedious and I’m looking to automate as much of the pipeline as I can so I welcome anything that removes the the tedium and pain from the process.
by thisisit | 2025-06-07 11:29:49+00:00
Spoken like a developer who doesn't understand how real world works.

> Using this as a tool to signal can be a huge time saver. But not taking the code output as "truth" is what the engineer meant.

Lavingia didn't provide any provable metric that this tool was going a "huge time saver". Additionally, if the output isn't the "truth", what can kind of time saving is expected? That a person needs to run the code, get result and then spend time analyzing results and cross verifying contracts again?

You know what will be a good time saver? Open the contracts and cross check it if it is valid. No AI slop required.

> This article, just like you, are taking all of these out of context.

Real people are impacted by VA contracts. If there is even 1 contract impacting even 100s of people that is enough damage. Saying that this is people taking things out of context shows your of empathy for other human beings, at least if they are not coders.

Because apparently Lavingia should get kudos for his transparency. But calling him an idiot for his lack of self-awareness that he had no clue about government contracts and should not be writing AI and creating this mess, all the while impacting people's life? Well we can't have that.

> He's using LLM's as a potential flag, then you go and human review those contracts with lawyers, supply chain, business specialists, nurses on the ground, etc. etc.

If human review is the point then start from there. Don't write AI slop, generate wrong result and then ask for human review.

To the larger point - Benjamin Franklin said - 'It is better 100 guilty Persons should escape than that one innocent Person should suffer'. In the same vein every well meaning contract/legislation which is helping 100s will have 10s exploiting the loophole. People like Lavingia and from DOGE seemed to have decided that rooting out those 10s is worth hurting the 100s. So, lets write an AI for that.
by banach_space | 2025-06-07 11:31:58+00:00
Dirac | Finance Director | London | Acton | £130k TC (base+equity)

We're building the next £100bn+ retailer, and hiring an FD to help us build our capital flywheel, sort inventory financing and negotiate credit terms, interact with our db + codebase to automate and build reporting.

Applicants should send me their favourite old annual report and what they learned from it, to ethan at dirac dot software

Looking forward to hearing from you!
by inglor_cz | 2025-06-07 11:32:00+00:00
I am just travelling around northern Italy (typing this from a Milano-Torino train), and there is a visible difference between people in the Po valley and people from Como, merely 50 km apart.

People from the Po valley, such as the Milanese, are mostly "lighter Mediterranean" types. People around Como Lake are visibly more blond and pale. The ethnic substrate is different, the ancient populations in southern Alps were more Celtic and Germanic, and even though the contemporary folk no longer speaks anything but Italian, the difference to much more mixed places such as Milano is still visible.

Same in northern Spain. Galicia and Asturias have a lot of pale, blue-eyed people who would stand out in an Andalusian crowd. Galicia has Celtic ancestry (they even preserved bagpipes as a folk instrument), and Asturias was the last refuge of the Visigoths when they were crushed by the Arabs in the 8th century.

You can also easily distinguish some other European subpopulations. For example, I met a lot of Lithuanians built as a, uh, brick shithouse. Neighbouring Poles tend to be somewhat less bulky. Many Russians have a visible Tatar admixture, with broad and flat faces. Ukrainians much less so.

And you can usually tell a Greek before they open their mouths. Some of them, especially in their older age, still resemble the old beardy statues from way-before-1-AD.
by uxp100 | 2025-06-07 11:32:34+00:00
That’s not really casinos in the same way as apps. Casinos find the other side of the bet for you and take a cut. They make money in transaction costs. They profit either way, but don’t cut you off for winning (at the sportsbook, other games may be different). Apps sometimes are taking the other side of the bet themselves, and thus will cut you off for winning.
by K0balt | 2025-06-07 11:35:46+00:00
The goal posts on AGI would be superluminal and somewhere back in the 1400s if they were physical objects. I’ve never seen or heard of a field so deeply in denial about its progress.

For every major trouncing of criterion we somehow invent 4 or 5 new requirements for it to be “real” AGI. Now , it seems, AGI must display human level intelligence at superhuman speed (servicing thousands of conversations at once), be as knowledgeable as the most knowledgeable 0.1% of humans across every facet of human knowledge, be superhumanly accurate, perfectly honest, and not make anything up.

I remember when AGI meant being able to generalize knowledge over problems not specifically accounted for in the algorithm… the ability to exhibit the “generalization” of knowledge, in contrast to algorithmic knowledge or expert systems. It was often referred to as “mouse level” or sometimes “dog-level” intelligence. Now we expect something vastly more capable than any being that has ever existed or it’s not “AGI” lmfao. “ASI” will probably have to solve all of the world’s problems and bring us all to the promised land before it will merit that moniker lol.
by matthewdgreen | 2025-06-07 11:39:45+00:00
I think it’s partly that and partly the fact that tax bills tend to be scored on a ten year time window. Note that this law doesn’t actually change the amount of tax that software companies can deduct, it just requires them to spread the deduction over several years. So if you’re scoring your new tax bill on a ten year window and five years into the bill this thing kicks in, then it looks like more tax is being collected in years 5-10. But that’s just an illusion because all the deductions are still there, they’re just being pushed out beyond the end of the window where they don’t “count”. At least this is my understanding.
by mechagodzilla | 2025-06-07 11:40:34+00:00
Buy a used workstation with 512GB of DDR4 RAM. It will probably cost like $1-1.5k, and be able to run a Q4 version of the full deepseek 671B models. I have a similar setup with dual-socket 18 core Xeons (and 768GB of RAM, so it cost about $2k), and can get about 1.5 tokens/sec on those models. Being able to see the full thinking trace on the R1 models is awesome compared to the OpenAI models.
by gjm11 | 2025-06-07 11:40:54+00:00
It is possible for something to be important to talk about, and for the way it's talked about to be stupid. In fact, I think it's quite common. I agree with paganel that a lot of US race discourse is stupid. I agree with you that sometimes it's important to talk about race. There's no contradiction between those.

(But I don't think "white supremacy" is a good way to think about the Nazis' hatred of Jewish people. They were white supremacists, but they hated the Jews for other reasons and if by some miracle they had abruptly stopped being white supremacists I think they would have gone right on persecuting Jewish people.)
by jackdoe | 2025-06-07 11:41:57+00:00
You know the meme "seems like will have AGI before we can reliably parse PDFs" :)

So if you are building a system, lets say you ask it to parse a pdf, and you put a judge to evaluate the quality of the output, and then you create a meta judge to improve the prompts of the parser and the pdf judge. The question is, is this going to get better as it is running, and even more, is it going to get better as the models are getting better?

You can build the same system in completely different way, more like 'program synthesis' imagine you dont use llms to parse, but you use them to write parser code, and tests, and then judge to judge the tests, or even escalate to human to verify, then you train your classifier that picks the parser. Now this system is much more likely to improve itself as it is running, and as the models are getting better.

Few months ago Yannic Kilcher gave this example as that it seems that current language models are very constrained mid-sentence, because they most importantly want produce semantically consistent and grammatically correct text, so the entropy mid sentence is very different than the entropy after punctuation. The . dot "frees" the distribution. What does that mean for "generalists" or "specialists" approach when sampling the wrong token can completely derail everything?

If you believe that the models will "think" then you should bet on the prompt and meta prompt approach, if you believe they will always be limited then you should build with program synthesis.

And, honestly, I am totally confused :) So this kind of research is incredibly useful to clear the mist. Also things like https://www.neuronpedia.org/

E.G. Why compliment (you can do this task), guilt (i will be fired if you don't do this task), and threatening (i will harm you if you don't do this task) work with different success rate? Sergey Brin said recently that threatening works best, I cant get my self to do it, so I take his word for it.
by jbellis | 2025-06-07 11:44:53+00:00
This is a useful analysis, but only as a first cut and sometimes not even that -- Grok 3 mini and DeepSeek V3 are by far the least expensive coding models that are worth trying for scenarios where you do and don't care about the vendor training on your requests, respectively. One of those is "open source" (by which he seems to mean "open weights") but far too large to run locally.

[I guess that must be a useful market niche though, apparently this is by a company selling batch compute on exactly those small open weights models.]

The problem is the author is evaluating by dividing the Artificial Analysis score by a blended cost per token, but most tasks have an intelligence "floor" below which it doesn't matter how cheap something is, it will never succeed. And when you strip out the very high results from super cheap 4B OSS models the rest are significantly outclassed by Flash 2.0 (not on his chart but still worth considering) and 2.5, not to mention other models that might be better in domain specific tasks like grok-3 mini for code.

(Nobody should be using Haiku in 2025. The OpenAI mini models are not as bad as Haiku in p/p and maybe there is a use case for prefering one over Flash but if so I don't know what it is.)
by constantcrying | 2025-06-07 11:48:18+00:00
It is the classic scenario of confusing the map with the territory.

In the map everything is clear. It is clear what a "plane" is what "airports" are and what their relationship is. And transferring that into a computer program is straight forward.

In the territory everything is fuzzy. None of the definitions are without edge cases and the expected relationships are often violated in surprising ways.

Aviation isn't unique here, every system suffers from the distinction between its actual function and the abstract description of that system.
by heldrida | 2025-06-07 11:48:36+00:00
Because people like to hide behind curtains. You’re using a throwaway account for expressing a common concern. That’s the problem!

Myself, I try my best to provide feedback to candidates, help others write the job spec, etc. I find that a big percentage of people who are involved in the interview process have no empathy towards others and no interest whatsoever in respecting people’s time.

This can only change if we use our humanity when interacting with each other’s.
by FirmwareBurner | 2025-06-07 11:48:36+00:00
>Like Franklin said, he'd rather 100 guilty people go free rather than a single innocent person jailed.

What does this have to do with anything? All jails now have innocent people in them due to process failures. How does quoting Franklin make them feel better?

>He was definitely willing to not hold some people accountable for their crimes because that was a requirement for a free state.

If by "free sate" you mean a high crime rate state where toothpaste needs to be locked up in CVS due to criminals being let free, then yeah.
by hiAndrewQuinn | 2025-06-07 11:48:58+00:00
Existential risk from superintelligent AI, naturally. Even if it turns out to not be a risk I'd sleep a lot easier at night with an ironclad mathematical proof of why exactly it isn't on the presses. And if it is a risk, it's almost certainly the most important thing anyone could work on right now.

I'm interpreting "can't fail" as "guaranteed to succeed one way or another", here.
by bell-cot | 2025-06-07 11:50:28+00:00
That depends on the definition of "properly" - which is mostly a social thing.

If we were pragmatic and competent enough to send cleanly-burnable household waste to (say) power plants designed for that, there wouldn't be much of an issue. It's the stupid litterbugs and performative-virtue "recycling" lobby who really drive up the disposal cost.
by xoa | 2025-06-07 11:50:34+00:00
>It seems likely that the Pentagon will soon force SpaceX to merge into another contractor

I'm sorry but what? SpaceX is private, not public, and regardless the Pentagon has zero power to force any such thing. It's making gobs of money and growing pretty fast (around $12 billion revenue this year, prediction is/was ~$15.5 billion so something like a 30% YoY increase) with most of that from Starlink, then commercial launch and gov launch. It launches more mass to LEO then everyone else on the planet combined by a long shot, for far far less $/kg. And it doesn't seem to be slowing down at all. There would be zero interest on either side in a merger, nor is there any particularly good national security argument for it.

The real plan is the same as it's always been: have a reasonably vibrant set of multiple motivated, competitive commercial launch providers. That'll take years more but is by far the better long term solution, and there are plenty of promising options, like Rocket Lab (their Neutron medium lift rocket is apparently close to maiden flight) and Blue Origin (who finally at last seem to have been shaken up and are actually launching rockets and making engines). Old Space wants out of the launch business, which is why ULA came to be at all.

People are also tossing around "nationalization" as if it's some quick fix too all of a sudden, but nationalization doesn't nullify the 5th Amendment (or 1st). The US government would have to come up with the arguably hundreds of billions of dollars present value of SpaceX, at a time of deep budget cuts, debt worries, and high interest rates. It would also have to win a set of massive lawsuits by an extremely well funded opposition about all aspects of the mess that would drag on for years. And a lot of the value of SpaceX is in its institutional knowledge, culture, key people etc etc. Nationalization could not prevent key people all bailing and destroying much of the capability. This would all be hugely disruptive, at a critical juncture, and a big political mess too. It's concerning how blasé folks can get about expensive, complicated big deal gordian knots.
by fuzzfactor | 2025-06-07 11:50:55+00:00
When I was growing up, advertising tobacco was still widespread, I remember quite well watching Fred & Barney smoke Winstons during the Flintstones first TV season.

But for things like legal services, medical procedures, and pharmaceuticals which were fundamentally unethical to advertise to the public, they were still forbidden for that reason.

That surely changed one day. Bless their hearts, they just wanted the kind of love that people have given to tobacco since they got a hold of it.

Or it got a hold of them :\
by lmeyerov | 2025-06-07 11:51:09+00:00
If/when to commit prompts has been fascinating as we have been doing similarly to build Louie.ai. I now have several categories with different handling:

- Human reviewed: Code guidelines and prompt templates are essentially dev tool infra-as-code and need review

- Discarded: Individual prompt commands I write, and implementation plan progress files the AI write, both get trashed, and are even part of my .gitignore . They were kept by Cloudflare, but we don't keep these.

- Unreviewed: Claude Code does not do RAG in the usual sense, so it is on us to create guides for how we do things like use big frameworks. They are basically indexes for speeding up AI with less grepping + hallucinating across memory compactions. The AI reads and writes these, and we largely stay out of it.

There are weird cases I am still trying to figure out. Ex:

- feature impl might start with an AI coming up with the product spec, so having that maintained as the AI progresses and committed in is a potentially useful artifact

- how prompt templates get used is helpful for their automated maintenance.
by uecker | 2025-06-07 11:51:23+00:00
It also works with memcpy from the library: https://godbolt.org/z/Mc6M9dK4M I just didn't feel like burdening godbolt with an inlclude.

I do not understand your criticism of [N]. This gives compiler more information and catches errors. This is a good thing! Who could be annoyed by this: https://godbolt.org/z/EeadKhrE8 (of course, nowadays you could also define a descent span type in C)

The cross-compilation argument has some merit, but not enough to warrant the additional complexity IMHO. Compile-time computation will also have annoying limitations and makes programs more difficult to understand. I feel sorry for everybody who needs to maintain complex compile time code generation. Zig certainly does it better than C++ but still..