MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Xenoamorphous | 2025-06-16 21:10:30+00:00
HN crowd has never been representative in this regard.

Sure, it’s easy to get some 20 or 30-something year old with a cushy 6 figure salary to pay 20 USD or similar per month for some digital service (esp. when they are building some digital service themselves, so they know what it entails). For someone strugling to make ends meet, there’s many higher priority things than some digital service when there’s free alternatives, let alone email.

And your privacy concerns? In my experience, absolutely non-existent in the real world. Actually I only ever hear about them in HN, not even my software development coworkers. Just the other day there was some raffle where there was some weekend trip to somewhere as a prize, but you had to give all your personal details, there was a big queue, they would’ve given their blood type details (if not literally a few ccs of their blood) and told them all about their kinkiest fantasy if they’d asked for it. Literally, I’m not joking.
by amdivia | 2025-06-16 21:10:55+00:00
My bad, you're right. This shows how bias can affect my readings, I'll work on that and I appreciate you pointing it out

But to stress again, even then this was assuming the war stopped back then, a year ago, and the public number also does not include the groups I mentioned earlier.

And this conflict is unique in how brutal it is for the civilians in Gaza. For instance the numbers used for the Russia-Ukrain war (500K-1M) are not those of civilian causalities. According to the latest UN numbers, it's around 13K for killed, and around 30K wounded [1]. Whereas in Gaza, the number of women and girls killed alone is more than double that (28K) [2]. The conflict is also unique in how many children have been killed, where it outnumbered the number of children killed in global conflicts in the last 4 years [3] (numbers from March, 2024)

What I'm trying to highlight is that when OP is attempting to undermine that conflict, they are not comparing the conflicts properly. Which leads to unjust assumptions, this does look like a genocide, and even if you want to fight this label. This conflict has been extremely devastating to civilians in Gaza, and perhaps is the number 1 most brutal conflict to civilians globally today.

[1]: https://ukraine.ohchr.org/sites/default/files/2025-05/Ukrain...

[2]: https://www.unwomen.org/en/news-stories/news/2025/05/un-wome...

[3]: https://news.un.org/en/story/2024/03/1147512
by sourcemap | 2025-06-16 21:11:50+00:00
This is true. Just a few days ago I had Claude one-shot some WebSocket utilities for reconnect and message queueing. It took 2 minutes.

I've written countless WebSocket wrappers in the past (similar aversion to socket.io as others in this thread). The one-shot output was perfect. Certainly better than my patience would've allowed.

Maybe socket.io is doing something fancy on the server side, but for clients, it's absolutely overkill.
by bigfatkitten | 2025-06-16 21:11:54+00:00
> Forget about LoRa, that is basically a toy. It is far more useful to have a functioning walkie talkie capable of talking with satellites and other stations at 50 kilometers of range.

You’re not going to reliably get that without terrestrial infrastructure, unless both you and your correspondent are conveniently standing on mountaintops.

5km in the suburbs, maybe. Closer to 500m at street level in an urban environment.
by hammyhavoc | 2025-06-16 21:12:01+00:00
What commands/progs on your local Linux box? Would love to be able to quantify how inaccurate the LLMs are compared to what people already use for their boilerplate stuff.

I've found the agents incredibly hit and miss. Mostly miss. The likes of Claude Code occasionally does something surprising and it actually works (usually there's a public example it's copied wholly when you research the code it gave you, especially for niche stuff), but then the rest of the time you spend hours wrestling it into submission over something you could do in minutes, all whilst it haemorrhages context sporadically. Even tried adding an additional vector database to the likes of Claude Code to try and get around this, but it's honestly a waste of time in my experiences.

Is it "useless"? For me, yes, probably. I can't find any valid use for an LLM so far in terms of creating new things. What's already been done before? Sure. But why an LLM in that case?

The strangest thing I've seen so far is Claude Code wanting a plugin to copy values from a metadata column in WordPress to then read, which is triggered by a watcher every five minutes—instead of just reading the value when relevant. It could not be wrangled into behaving over this and I gave up.

Took me 2 minutes to do the whole thing by hand, and it worked first try (of course—it's PHP—not complicated compared to Verilog and DSP, at which it is spectacularly bad in its output).

It does very odd things in terms of secrets and Cloudflare Workers too.

The solutions it gives are frequently nonsensical, incomplete, mixes syntax from various languages (which sometimes it catches itself on before giving you the artifact), and almost always wholly in how inefficient the pointless steps to a simple task are.

Giving Claude Code tutorials, docs, and repos of code is usually a shitshow too. I asked their customer support for a refund weeks ago and have heard nothing. All hype and no substance.

I can see how someone without much dev experience might be impressed by its output, especially if they're only asking it to do incredibly simplistic stuff, for which there's plenty of examples and public discourse on troubleshooting bad code, but once you get into wanting to do new things, I just don't see how anyone could think this is ever going to be viable.

I mucked around with autonomous infrastructure via Claude Code too, and just found that it did absolutely bizarre things that made no sense in terms of managing containers relative to logs, suggesting configurations et al. Better off with dumb scripts with your env vars, secrets et al.
by albertzeyer | 2025-06-16 21:12:06+00:00
"hundreds of thousands to potentially millions of tokens" - that's the same order as current commercial LLMs.

Also note, if the sequence length is not really much larger than the model dimension (at least two orders of magnitude more), the quadratic complexity of the self-attention is really not such a big issue - the matrix multiplication in the feed-forward layers will be usually 8x the model dimension squared, and thus that part will usually dominate.

Also note that there has been so much research on this already. While this particular approach might be novel, there has been attempts to avoid the O(n^2) complexity in self-attention basically almost since the original transformer paper came out in 2017. I wonder a bit that this paper does not cite xLSTM, or Block-Recurrent Transformers.

Also, this paper comes very short in experiments. There is basically only table 2. There is no study on length extrapolation (which is very relevant for the topic), or needle-in-haystack experiments, or scaling studies, any larger scale experiments, etc. Also, even in this main table 2, I see a couple of typos. And looking at the results in table 2, the improvements seems to be quite minor.

So I would conclude, this needs a lot more work.
by layer8 | 2025-06-16 21:12:20+00:00
Object personification is if you would feel that the knife itself is sad, is hurting, etc., and you’d feel for it. If, on the other hand, you’re just sad yourself that the knife is dull, because that’s not how a knife is supposed to be, then that’s not personifying the knife, it’s more an aesthetic judgement about a state of affairs. Similarly for the room example. You feel emotional about the state of affairs that other people haven’t respected it, but you don’t think the room itself is emotional about it.

Another example is if one is sad that a favorite software or service has become enshittified. One doesn’t attribute emotion to the software or service itself, rather one feels emotional about the state the software or service is in.

Those are completely neurotypical emotional reactions.
by zamadatix | 2025-06-16 21:12:29+00:00
In the "Cruise Only" section of https://www.gigsky.com/data-cruises it's $112 for 10 GB over 30 days. Per day that's certainly cheaper than $170 for 7 days but it's hard to say it's actually any cheaper per GB without knowing the other option's limit. Of course if 10 GB is enough for what you wanted to do in a week then it doesn't really matter but it might explain some of the pricing difference (ignoring bulk provider to provider pricing or other factors before we finally get to the "what do we think we can charge" pricing).
by halfcat | 2025-06-16 21:12:51+00:00
On the flip side, I’ll pay $10/month for 10 streaming services I never use (and have forgotten about), but on a Saturday night if a movie isn’t available and I have to pay $3.99 to rent it I never pay that. Instead I’ll drive to the corner store and spend $20 on snacks, and come home and watch YouTube with ads.

People are curious creatures indeed.
by stego-tech | 2025-06-16 21:12:56+00:00
> or they’re not talking about managed k8s

Bingo! Managed K8s on a hyperscaler is easy mode, and a godsend. I’m speaking from the cluster admin and bare metal perspectives, where it’s a frustrating exercise in micromanaging all these additional abstraction layers just to get the basic “managed” K8s functions in a reliable state.

If you’re using managed K8s, then don’t @ me about “It’S nOt CoMpLeX” because we’re not even in the same book, let alone the same chapter. Hypervisors can deploy to bare metal and shared storage without much in the way of additional configuration, but K8s requires defining PVs, storage classes, network layers, local DNS, local firewalls and routers, etc, most of which it does not want to play nicely with pre-1.20 out of the box. It’s gotten better these past two years for sure, but it’s still not as plug-and-play as something like ESXi+vSphere/RHEL+Cockpit/PVE, and that’s a damn shame.

Hence why I’m always eager to drive something like Canine!

(EDIT: and unless you absolutely have a reason to do bare metal self-hosted K8s from binaries you should absolutely be on a managed K8s cluster provider of some sort. Seriously, the headaches aren’t worth the cost savings for any org of size)
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-06-16 21:13:26+00:00
> public has lost a lot of trust in Science because research papers have been used to push political agendas, which can then never be questioned because doing so means arguing with a supposed peer-reviewed scientific consensus

The public has lost trust in science because 10 to 30% of it is scientifically illiterate [1]. (Tens of millions of American adults are literally illiterate [2].)

That's what lets activists and politicians cherrypick bad science that supports their position or cast a scientific consensus as unquestionable.

[1] https://carsey.unh.edu/publication/conspiracy-vs-science-sur...

[2] https://nces.ed.gov/pubs2019/2019179/index.asp
by autoexec | 2025-06-16 21:13:34+00:00
> Hopefully in a few decades the last of the people who think that using respectful discourse means no fun can be had will be gone and we can stop rehashing these threads.

More likely, in a few decades what you consider today to be "respectful discourse" will be seen as extremely offensive and the latest generation of fearful moralistic pearl-clutchers will be hoping that in the near future it's people like you who will be soon be gone. As long as people keep looking for new ways to be offended and continue wanting to police the language of others these kinds of topics will continue.
by pmontra | 2025-06-16 21:14:15+00:00
This is the story from the point of view of a user:

One day the app asked me to pay. It was less than 1 Euro per year, I think. I never associated a credit card to the app store (Android) so I did not pay and waited to see what would happen.

It kept asking for money for a few days but it kept working, so I thought they were not serious about it. Then it stopped asking. It started asking for money again after a few months but I remembered what happened before so I waited again. It kept working and eventually stopped asking for money. This pattern repeated a few times until maybe the time FB bought it.

I believe that if it stopped working people would have switched en masse to another app, maybe Telegram? We also had Viber and probably FB messenger too.

Switches happened many times in the 90s and early 2000s. I remember AIM, ICQ, MSN, then Skype. Whole networks of people moved to the next one or used more than one to message different friends. WhatsApp never had a chance to earn money directly from its users IMHO.
by kiitos | 2025-06-16 21:15:03+00:00
> Tracing every http 200 at 10k req/sec is not something you should be doing

You don't know if a request is HTTP 200 or HTTP 500 until it ends, so you have to at least collect trace data for every request as it executes. You can decide whether or not to emit trace data for a request based on its ultimate response code, but emission is gonna be out-of-band of the request lifecycle, and (in any reasonable implementation) amortized such that you really shouldn't need to care about sampling based on outcome. That is, the cost of collection is >> the cost of emission.

If your tracing system can't handle 100% of your traffic, that's a problem in that system; it's definitely not any kind of universal truth... !
by lukev | 2025-06-16 21:15:30+00:00
Yeah this really hurts. If your goal is to precisely mark up a document with some structural elements, XML is strictly superior to Markdown.

The fact that someone would go to all the work to build a model to extract the structure of documents, then choose an output format strictly less expressive than XML, speaks poorly of the state of cross-generational knowledge sharing within the industry.
by yibg | 2025-06-16 21:15:39+00:00
Similar situation as flights. People complain about lack of space, misc fees etc. But when it comes down to it, people for the most part, still pick the cheapest flight.

I think the other factor is a bit of anchoring. I know this impacts me anyways. If there is a "free" alternative, then that's where I'm anchored at. I can watch youtube for free so paying for it seems like a bad deal. Where as there is no free alternative to Coke that still gets your Coke (as opposed to say water).
by ImageXav | 2025-06-16 21:15:53+00:00
I feel as though it also represents the fact that contributors are less invested in the project. There was a small study done a few years back hypothesizing that the number of swear words related somewhat to code quality [0] due to emotional involvement of the codebase authors. I can imagine this to be somewhat true. I would love to see this study redone now that LLMs are widespread on pre chatgpt repos (as I suspect that repos created using LLMs are going to be very sanitised).

[0] https://cme.h-its.org/exelixis/pubs/JanThesis.pdf
by wduquette | 2025-06-16 21:16:35+00:00
I was reminded of this by the recent post about "the Keyset". I read a review of one of these devices in a magazine ("Interface Age?" Byte?) back in the early days of microcomputers. It was a keyboard replacement that allowed the user to enter any ASCII code using binary chords. It had a button for each finger and eight for the thumb; if I remember correctly, the thumb buttons were effectively rocker switches. Set the four high bits with the thumb switches, enter characters via the four low bits entered with the finger buttons.

Somehow it didn't catch on.
by jeffhwang | 2025-06-16 21:16:49+00:00
Hope it’s ok to share my chemistry Instagram with a plastic model of Hexabenzocoronene (HBC) that was mentioned in the article.[1]

I posted similar photos of other polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAH) including napthalene, which are also mentioned in the article. [2]

In all, I had about 10 posts on PAH’s for laypeople and chemists who want to admire the structure of these fascinating saturated planar hydrocarbons.

[1] https://www.instagram.com/p/CxUs8YzO28Y/?igsh=NTc4MTIwNjQ2YQ...

[2] https://www.instagram.com/p/CxFCSueOrA2/?igsh=NTc4MTIwNjQ2YQ...
by cmckn | 2025-06-16 21:17:40+00:00
Another nit here: https://canine.gitbook.io/canine.sh/technical-details/kubern...

I know this is just a general description, but “10,000 servers” —> Kubernetes actually only claims support up to 5,000 nodes: https://kubernetes.io/docs/setup/best-practices/cluster-larg...

Plenty of larger clusters exist, but this usually requires extensive tuning (such as entirely replacing the API registry). And obviously the specific workload plays a large role. Kubernetes is actually quite far from supporting larger clusters out of the box, though most releases include some work in that direction.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-06-16 21:18:23+00:00
> It also seems like most publicly traded companies have instituted some form of RTO by now

So have plenty of private companies.

> It's not the most far-fetched conspiracy theory

It really is. (With unusual prevalence in the San Francisco Bay Area.) You're talking about some of the most powerful and notoriously-independent companies on the planet kowtowing to invisible shareholder pressure.
by VivaTechnics | 2025-06-16 21:18:26+00:00
Has anyone else tried this kind of setup?

Yes.

We don’t even have the budget to hire non-technical people for tech products. Everybody gotta code. We also avoid feature bloat.

We focus only on core features. If someone has an idea and can build it, they’re welcome to try. But most ideas won’t make it to production.
by bsoles | 2025-06-16 21:20:38+00:00
The problem with paying a small fee for a service is not the fee itself. It is the friction for paying for the service and the hassle that comes after the payment.

Now the credit card company knows what service I am buying; I would get endless marketing emails from the service for buying additional things; my info as a person willing to pay for such a service would get sold to other companies; my credit card info would get leaked/stolen, ...

If the whole experience was literally as simple as handing someone a $1 bill, I promise I would pay for many many internet services.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-06-16 21:21:54+00:00
> more reason to have LLMs do their work for them, not less

Nobody argued for or against LLMs. Just that IT isn't a major investment for any cruise line. And that fixing a problem like this isn't even rationally high on a cruise liner's list of priorities.

If the payment portal is bugging out and the engineer tasked to fixing it is off vibe coding on the off chance that a high schooler is using too much internet (versus trying to steal mom and dad's drinks), I'm not sure I'm unsympathetic to the manager's very predictable reaction.
by kimixa | 2025-06-16 21:22:20+00:00
Don't forget how much of a "high-performance" implementation is due to the physical implementation, a lot of engineering effort is put into that post-HDL. And much below HDL is hard to share, as it relies too much on (closed) fab IP libraries and PDK specifics. And then the verification of that result.

Which might discourage an Open Source hardware project with shared ownership as large as a high performance implementation would require - as each cooperating company would end up using rather different products anyway.

I fear it'll become just an "Dump Over The Wall An Old Snapshot" of a few different companies work at best, rather than true cooperation.
by bravesoul2 | 2025-06-16 21:24:10+00:00
But the thing LLMs have in common with brains is they process data and produce data that with additional processing a subset of which can be interpreted as words. It is a pretty loose link.

Like saying an aeroplane is like a squirrel because they both perform aerobic respiration.

Original comment that I agree with, for reference:

> As far as anyone can tell, there is virtually no similarity between brains and LLMs. Neural nets were named such because they have connected nodes. And that’s it.
by rybosome | 2025-06-16 21:24:20+00:00
Adding to that excellent high level explanation of what the attention mechanism is, I’d add (from my reading of the abstract of this paper);

This work builds a model that has the ability to “remember” parts of its previous input when generating and processing new input, and has part of its intelligence devoted to determining what is relevant to remember.

This is in lieu of kind of saying “I need to keep re-reading what I’ve already read and said to keep going”.

I’d welcome better explanations. :)
by elmerfud | 2025-06-16 21:25:36+00:00
There's bad employers but, I'm sorry to have to say this, reading the article it seems like they went along with this stuff. What is wrong with people when they willfully, or with little protest, go along with the bizarre behavior that is being requested of them?

Sure the boss needs to be held accountable for what they're doing but the blame is not entirely upon them. There is no indentured servitude, there is no slavery, you are not property, you have free will and hopefully some sort of moral inclination as to what is right and wrong, at least for you personally, and the backbone to stand behind it. If you don't have that you cannot blame an asshole boss as if you don't take any responsibility at all.

It looks like there's plenty of wrong to go around here. No one is claiming the moral high ground in this.
by nsagent | 2025-06-16 21:27:19+00:00
I have Signal on my phone and laptop. For some reason my laptop desynced from the phone, so my chat history now has a missing block of message history (that exists on the phone). I did nothing obvious to cause that desync. My guess is that my phone updated the Signal app, and I didn't update it on the laptop in lockstep. That's not a great UX, especially since there is no notification that this might happen.
by IshKebab | 2025-06-16 21:27:38+00:00
This is true, but unless great care is taken to generate nice Verilog you're going to run into issues when you try to integrate standard tools like functional coverage, formal SVA, etc.

I haven't looked at the Chisel SVA but I do recall another HDL touting readable Verilog generation as a feature in response to Chisel's being bad (can't remember which one) so I guess it can't be great.

I think Veryl stands a decent chance of success precisely because it hews so closely to SystemVerilog - you don't lose access to all the feature industry uses. It's kind of the Typescript of SystemVerilog.

https://veryl-lang.org/
by schroeding | 2025-06-16 21:28:16+00:00
Interestingly, the pendulum at least in my friend group starts to kinda swing in the other direction, i.e. non-technical friends start to indirectly ask (me as the tech guy) about blatant piracy for (visual, Spotify is still very much accepted) media and (TOS-violating[1]) ad blockers for ad-supported streaming.

I cannot overstate how unexpected this was and is to me, we talk about people in their mid-twenties with jobs - maybe (video) streaming / subscriptions services actually overplayed their hand in the current economic climate.

Doesn't make me super optimistic in this regard.

[1] even if most of it is void in my jurisdiction anyway