MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by palmfacehn | 2025-06-04 13:43:36+00:00
Agreed.

Although I wouldn't attribute it to the right/left divide as much as the incentives baked into the structure of governance. There's very little benefit for a self-interested politician to make meaningful spending cuts. This leaves reallocations and spending increases on the table.

The Atlantic's editorial policy is somewhat illustrative of this uniparty phenomenon. The top editors have been foreign policy hawks advocating for increased military spending, while many of the lower tiered authors will appeal for increased social spending. There's something for everyone, as long as follows from the primacy of the state.

Another recent submission lamented the fall of Rome, offering predictable doom over token efforts at privatization. As mentioned previously, cuts are better understood as reallocations to other programs. Rome and Caeserism was celebrated. Decentralization was demonized. I found this a bit strange, because from the other corner of The Atlantic's mouth, I'm repeatedly warned about the dangerous rise of a new autocrat.
by myrmidon | 2025-06-04 13:44:03+00:00
I do absolutely agree that extrapolating population over more than a few decades is basically a cointoss, but I still thank that exponential growth is far from certain: Basically every industrialized nation has negative population growth when excluding immigrants right now, and this is very much a global trend.

I like your optimism and would love to see colonies in space, but I think it is overly tempting to consider settling space akin to European colonization of America, when it is more similar to settling on the high seas/Antarctica (right now)-- technically feasible for decades or even centuries, but not really happening simply because of lacking incentives (and the incentive structure looks sadly even worse for settling in space than either of those to me).
by aapoalas | 2025-06-04 13:44:21+00:00
I honestly think it'll rather be memory usage, rather than performance.

Building an engine that benchmarks better than V8, SpiderMonkey, or JSC is a multi-year effort with a very high chance of failure. Maybe Nova's data-oriented heap design will give us a leg up on that, but it's still a massively challenging endeavour.

Building an engine with good benchmarks, an amazingly small memory footprint, and great cache-friendliness: that is the kind of engine I'm seeing in Nova. As you say, most JS apps are not bottlenecked by performance. Memory and complexity are the more likely bottlenecks; I believe I can improve the former fairly radically, and hopefully drive JS developers such as myself towards reducing the latter through opinionated engine design.
by pxc | 2025-06-04 13:44:47+00:00
Yes, definitely. But I think reaching for an LLM can mean failing to build that reading muscle in the same way that leaning on teachers can. And I also think that many people never learn to read documentation not because they can't but because of a lack of willingness to try to learn to read specialized genres (of which technical documentation is just one).

A teacher can be a unique resource, but asking the teacher is often more of a reflexive shortcut than the thoughtful use of a unique resource.

I think use of LLMs (like StackOverflow before them) are more likely to discourage people from seriously or patiently reading documentation than they are to act as a stepping stone to a habit of more serious inquiry for most people.
by Telemakhos | 2025-06-04 13:44:48+00:00
This argument's been coming up every now and then since at least 2010, but it never goes anywhere. macOS has had tags in Finder for years, and few people actually use them; I like them and still fail to use them consistently.

I wonder if there's a counter-argument to be made that humans organize their knowledge of the world in ontological hierarchies, so a hierarchical file system is intuitive.
by eterm | 2025-06-04 13:45:09+00:00
I am the only person who browses https://github.com/getcord/cord and just doesn't get what it does?

Like, it's not clear to me what problem it solves.

It's described as "The complete SDK for Chat, Commenting, and Notifications" yet I've read the entire readme and it isn't clear which languages it has client-SDKs for, if any.

If my boss came to me and said, "Can you evaluate Cord for a chat and notification back-end" I'd return a quick message ruling it out on the basis of there being no documentation, no example integrations, no obvious client SDK packages, etc.

It's also hardly zero-friction just getting it running. It needs both Node/NPM and docker.

Why? Either ship me the NPM packages, or point me to a docker command I can run. If it's containerised, why does it need NPM? If it's shipped as NPM/source, why does it insist I deploy with docker?

Show me some simple code examples so I can see how easy it is to get a chat client running, don't give "broken" links to docs and APIs that would only work if I'm already running your software, I'm unlikely to get that far without browsing the API and docs.
by the__alchemist | 2025-06-04 13:45:11+00:00
Same impression, after a skim of the Github. Looks like a net complexity add in most cases, if I understand its Readme correctly.

Due to the software culture I've been exposed to, especially in web-dev, I am cautious about any level of indirection added by third parties. They may seem like a value-add to first-order, but when managed in the context of a larger system, tend to make performance worse, debugging more difficult, and modifications high-inertia. Not as a principle, but based on observations.

For example, When I see text like this: > With pre-built components for chat, presence, and notifications, as well as fully customizable UI primitives, Cord enables rapid implementation of sophisticated, in-app collaboration tools.

my pattern-matching brain thinks This is probably going to be slow, require the user to download a large amount of data, and may or may not reduce code required to implement, and will make customization and modification tedius. Maybe this isn't true for this particular library, but it seems to be a good rule, currently.
by epiccoleman | 2025-06-04 13:45:44+00:00
That's not entirely true though, the "Attention is All You Need" paper that first came up with the transformer architecture that would go on to drive all the popular LLMs of today came out in 2017. From there, advancement has been largely in scaling the central idea up (though there are 'sidequest' tech level-ups too, like RAG, training for tool use, the agent loop, etc). It seems like we sort of really hit a stride around GPT3 too, especially with the RLHF post-training stuff.

So there was at least some technical advancement mixed in with all the VC money between 2011 and today - it's not all just tossing dollars around. (Though of course we can't ignore that all this scaling of transformers did cost a ton of money).
by hedora | 2025-06-04 13:46:04+00:00
Take a look a the kubernetes source code. It's millions of lines, and almost all of it is generated. In a language like C++ or Rust, the vast majority of it would be template or macro instantiations.

For an apples-to-apples comparison of compilation speed, you should either include the time it takes go generate to run, and the IDE to re-index all the crap it emits, or you should count the number of lines of code in the largest intermediate representation that C++ or Rust has.
by zamadatix | 2025-06-04 13:46:07+00:00
As already stated, fining a child or sending them to jail for viewing porn would be silly. The point was, lacking the willingness to do that, having commercially operated porn sites verify ages does not actually prevent or disincentivize children from accessing porn. A good intent does not itself make a law effective, it has to be something you're willing to incentivise compliance with from those who'd be breaking it and children are not going to stop viewing porn because pornhub.com (or any other website) won't let them without a verification check.

The comparison to social media is a bit rough because the laws and focus there are around preventing children from creating accounts where their data is mined to be sold, the feeds are tailored to them, and their identities are publicly shared. The same laws do not actually attempt to prevent children without an account from viewing vacation photos. What applies in preventing account creation for social media does not necessarily apply to preventing content consumption itself in other cases.
by jonasenordin | 2025-06-04 13:46:08+00:00
The simple English article seems to imply the True Justified Belief 'definition'. I don't think the TJB really gets us anything.

For instance: why is 'true' included in the TJB triad? 'Justified' should cover it, no? This gap seems to be the cause of the Gettier silliness.

To expand on each part: 'believe' is a rather tricky Theory-of-Mind concept in itself. Eg: how familiar with a scientific model like AGW do you need to be to be allowed to 'believe' it? 'True' is similarly difficult. 'Justified' is the most sensible part, but that is still very difficult. I think science is what it boils down to.

I think philosophers really badly want a concept of Knowledge that is a meaningful and 'hard'. For their own title to make sense, actually. They love it; shame if it was all sloppy thinking.
by thechao | 2025-06-04 13:46:28+00:00
When I read these papers I always wonder if the authors did any research into priors before doing their work. I usually see sus-af "redos" in low tier AI (the fad of the decade); so, CPU arch is original? Another commenter pointed out Mill is probably the closest one I can think of off the top of my head. I think the old rolling window Power stuff IBM published in the ... 90s? might be exactly this? I can't remember if that arch used an autowindow (STRAIGHT) or if it was more manual.

EDIT: Derp! RIP-relative x64? I've not coded x64 in 15 years, so I don't remember how pervasive the addressing mode is.

I guess the author's are trying to explore a ground-up implementation? Maybe the uarch is really exotic?
by gruez | 2025-06-04 13:46:28+00:00
>That's far less than the 40,000 Americans killed per year in auto crashes. So that's good, right? No. Of course not.

>We want these systems to not make the same mistakes humans make and to not make mistakes humans wouldn't make. Do that, and your fatalities will decrease in an acceptable manner.

I don't think anyone is going to claim 1000 kids getting mowed down by automated cars is "good", but it's far preferable to 40k people getting mowed down normally. They are however, willing to accept the deaths of 1k kids if it meant saving the lives of 40k people.
by abxyz | 2025-06-04 13:46:33+00:00
Most employees are unmotivated and mediocre-at-best, across every role and industry because most people are (rightly) just showing up to get paid. Engineers are no different, we are not special. Most engineers do not have the incentive to go out of their way to improve their product when keeping this as-is is easier for them. Regardless of whether the OPs product is good, almost all of the engineer opposition would come from engineers not wanting to deal with integrating some new thing that non-engineers want because it’s more work.

If you think most engineers are evaluating things based on the value it’ll drive for their product, you’ve lived a lucky career (and long may it continue).
by kstrauser | 2025-06-04 13:46:41+00:00
(HFS here means “hierarchical file system”, i.e. one with nested folders.)

I tire of the either-or dichotomy. Yes, search is great. But a couple years ago, I adopted Johnny Decimal[0] for storing my archive files and I couldn’t be happier. Our 2023 tax filings are in 22.23. Physics articles are in 34.04. Her CME records are in 43.03. Go into one of those and you’ll find every file I have related to those things.

And they’re still searchable. You can still do tag-based queries, indexed text searches, and all that, but you don’t have to. When I want all my 2025 tax deduction receipts come tax filing time next year, I’ll send the contents of 22.25 to my accountant and be done with it, confident we found 100% of the related files.

I don’t do those for everything. Music files are in their own directories. Movies live with movies. I don’t try to shoehorn Obsidian into it. But all my long-term storage files go straight to their home in JD.

This has the huge benefit that I can instantly locate them when I’m accessing the archive from my phone, my wife can find things without learning special tooling or the vagaries of search, and there’s zero need for any additional apps or software beyond Finder.

I love using great search software. I used Devonthink daily for years. But I also adore not having to.

[0] https://johnnydecimal.com/
by blueflow | 2025-06-04 13:47:55+00:00
Using docker does not help in this specific case - if the attackers came via ssh, they will have root access as before, and if they come in through the application, they still control your application inside the container and can make it serve what they want.

For ssh, the problem does not lie within password auth itself, but with weak passwords. A good password is more secure than a keypair on a machine whose files you can't keep private.
by seanlaplante | 2025-06-04 13:48:31+00:00
You could run it on the firewall if you wanted. This was designed to work in either case. If you have access to the firewall and want to deploy it there you can. If you don't have access to the firewall, but you do have access to the system running the service you'd like to protect, you can deploy it there, and the key is: you don't need to update or change the firewall for it to "just work" for both TCP and UDP ports.
by anton-c | 2025-06-04 13:48:36+00:00
Things like 'the cost of doing business' didn't make full sense to me until I was running a small one. I agree some lessons aren't easily taught unless you have skin in the game or some kind of first hand experience.

As a loose analogy paper trading can work great as practice(and if done right is supposed to help with this). Yet when u apply your system and stuff goes sideways, you're sweating and emotionally(as well as financially) impacted for real now, not just on paper. Those losses are real and paper trading would never 'hurt' like that.
by steveBK123 | 2025-06-04 13:48:51+00:00
And none of these changes are permanent!

Look at the cultural attitudes towards smoking pot. Often the same cities/governments/people what were fining cigarette smoking out of existence suddenly have a hands-off attitude towards pot.

In NYC its illegal to smoke or drink in parks, but you can walk through a park reeking of pot and see cops writing tickets to the 2 kids who hid their beer too poorly.
by msgodel | 2025-06-04 13:50:05+00:00
The technical aspects of training and tuning are trivial. GP is pointing out that you might not be able to get the model to succeed at the task as often for any number of reasons that you won't know before you actually train one.

Although I guess your point is that it's also cheap to train them, probably cheaper than doing this. But startups are started by social people, not technical people. Stuff like this will always be expensive for social people since they have to pay one of us to do it. YC interviews their CEOs from time to time, it's really clear that's how that works.
by AnimalMuppet | 2025-06-04 13:50:06+00:00
Part of the deal was how fast things were moving. We actually looked at the ads. They were amazing, not because they were so well done, but because every month there was something that I never even imagined being done. And there it was, for sale. And next month there would be another one or three.

That gave some glamour to the magazines - not because the covers or the writing or the production were so great, but because they had amazing things, month after month.
by kmacdough | 2025-06-04 13:50:15+00:00
With "AI can code", though, we can get pretty far by working around the problem. Use it to augment the workflow of a real SWE and supply it with guardrails like linters, tests, etc. It doesn't do the hard bits like architecture, design and review, but it can take huge amounts of the repetitive "solved" bits that dominate most SWEs time. Very possible to 2-5x productivity without quality loss (because the human does all work to guarantee quality).

But yes, unmanaged and unchecked it absolutely cannot to the full job of really any human. It's not close.
by gruez | 2025-06-04 13:50:18+00:00
Yeah wtf? I skimmed the first three entries and so far as I can't tell how FSD was involved, or even why Tesla (the company) was at fault. I guess technically those were deaths, and they were caused by a Tesla, so "telsadeaths.com" isn't inaccurate, but you'd be laughed at if you started a site called "toyotadeaths.com" with all the fatalities toyota cars were involved in.
by jcalvinowens | 2025-06-04 13:50:55+00:00
> The approximate aggregate risk-cost of major (top 10) stablecoins is somewhere south of .001% per day, and is better than the aggregate risk-cost of national fiat currencies

This thinking is dangerous and stupid. Learn from history: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Wednesday

This "stablecoin" garbage needs to die yesterday: a lot of people are going to lose their shirt when the first one blows up. Fixing exchange rates is folly, yet here we go again...
by tsimionescu | 2025-06-04 13:50:56+00:00
Sure, but learning an old ISA can leave you with a very very wrong idea about how modern processors work. Even x86 assembly paints a very misleading image of how modern processors actually work. For example, someone learning x86-64 assembly will likely believe all of the following:

- assembly instructions are executed in the order they appear in in the source code

- an x86 processor only has a handful of registers

- writing to a register is an instruction like any other and will take roughly the same time

- the largest registers on an x86 processor are 64-bit
by Rooster61 | 2025-06-04 13:51:44+00:00
IIRC, this concept is where the idea of dark matter came from. Given the mass of a galaxy, they have more angular kinetic energy (or rather they spin faster) than they should given detectable mass alone. Gotta be something making galaxies spin faster than they should, and that something is what was labeled dark matter.

Dark matter is just a placeholder until we find whatever that "something" is, or a better model of why this is happening arises. All of that is predicated on the estimate of kinetic energy you inquired about
by flowerthoughts | 2025-06-04 13:52:09+00:00
> This is a misunderstanding of VC investment. Any competent VC expects most of their investments to go to zero.

I'll be doing a linguistic nit pick now, as I felt it was a bit harsh to label my statement as a misunderstanding.

The bet is still on each investment to have a good exit. With the implied assumption that betting is a probabilistic game.
Unit Economics: Not just numbers, but the key to good decisions
by daniilkhanin | 2025-06-04 13:52:18+00:00
Many people mistakenly believe that unit economics in business is about calculations, math and numbers. Of course, you can't go anywhere without it, but the main thing is to make managerial decisions based on these numbers. This tool allows you to justify the choice of a decision.

Unit economics allows you to find processes that it makes sense to improve right now, thus realizing focus in business and thus reducing risks in business. Use the tool wisely and the result will not keep you waiting.

https://khanin.info/en/blog/241
by theamk | 2025-06-04 13:52:27+00:00
Yeah, the open-sourcing process seemed to have destroyed all documentation.

There are still 3-rd party sites with copy of the docs, like https://docs.comment.workcanvas.com/ (full of dead links), but it seems the main site used to be "cord.com" and this is already sold to some job search site.

I am surprised they did not open source the doc... or maybe no one has bothered to bring up the server?
by cyco130 | 2025-06-04 13:52:31+00:00
I believe at least the Vitest project considered using node:module hooks for live reloading but rejected it in the past. The reason given to me was that, there is no way to garbage-collect a real EcmaScript module since they're always reachable by the module ID string as per the specification.

This kind of leak was deemed acceptable in a browser tab (which we tend to close or reload often) but unacceptable for a long-running server process.

Pseudo-modules based on node:vm, on the other hand, will be collected normally when they become unreachable.
by nosianu | 2025-06-04 13:52:37+00:00
Yes, and so was OS and office suite.

Nobody says it is going to happen next year, or even within five years.

But eventually, as the technology matures and gets more and more integrated in businesses' IT, they will have ever more dependencies around the AI. Glue code on several levels (from dev-ops to user level code), 3rd party, training. There is no technical reason for React to dominate Javascript GUI dev either, and plenty of alternatives - and that is a far milder amount of external dependencies than you have with fundamental tech like AI, since it is far down towards the leave nodes of business dependencies.

If people start adding a lot of code around a solution, training, and include third party apps, libs or tools they have to choose one.

Unless you think that the interfaces for all basic AI interfaces and APIs will be standardized, and you will be able to exchange them while keeping everything you yourself added around that AI?

Or, do you think those AIs will be used as-is, no additional dependencies will be added on the business side? And that being trained for one - as average person, not the leading-edge people interested enough to teach themselves as they do now - means you can use them all?
by kgilpin | 2025-06-04 13:52:42+00:00
I feel the same way about code generation vs code review. Everyone knows there are deep problems with LLM generated code (primarily, lack of repo understanding, and proper use of library functions).

Deep, accurate, real-time code review could be of huge assistance in improving quality of both human- and AI-generated code. But all the hype is focused on LLMs spewing out more and more code.
by Orygin | 2025-06-04 13:53:46+00:00
I like it but it's not really a comparable/usable result. My IDE auto suggests a lot of things and a lot of "words" could be reduced to a single tab key press.

For example, in golang, I have not typed a full if err != nil {} in years. "err.nn"+tab auto completes to the if, and "err.re" auto completes to the if + return err. To be able to compare what speed I really code at, I should be able to use these to speed things up.

Same as calling functions, I rarely type the full name and instead use tab auto complete. Same for for ranges, "nums.forr" autocompletes to the for i,n := range nums {} form.
by ednite | 2025-06-04 13:54:00+00:00
From what I understand, the author's proposal for a tag-based file system reminds me of how Microsoft Azure Blob Storage works.

Azure blobs support multiple queryable tags per file, which aligns with the idea of organizing by metadata instead of folders.

It’s not as deeply integrated or user-centric as the article suggests, but it offers a practical usage, especially for large-scale, developer-driven storage.