MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by 9rx | 2025-07-15 14:16:36+00:00
It is not that strange when you consider the history. You see, as we started to move away from generated HTML into rich browser applications, we started to need minimal direct DBMS features to serve the rich application. At first, few functions were exposed as "REST APIs". But soon enough those few featured turned into full-on DBMSes, resulting in a DMBS in front of a DBMS. But then people, rightfully, started asking: "Why are we putting a DBMS in front of a DBMS?"

The trouble is that nobody took a step back and asked: "Can we simply use the backing DBMS?" Instead, they trudged forward with "Let's get rid of the backing DBMS and embed the database engine into our own DBMS!" And since SQLite is a convenient database engine...
by AnimalMuppet | 2025-07-15 14:16:52+00:00
If I understand movie theater economics correctly, the studio gets 80 to 95% of the ticket sales, depending on how "first run" the movie is. The theaters actually make their money on selling concessions.

Well, the longer the movie, the more people feel the need of snacks to get through it. So maybe the theaters are pushing longer movies rather than shorter, because they make more money that way.

Just an off-the-cuff hypothesis...
by bretpiatt | 2025-07-15 14:17:11+00:00
English football, unlike tic-tac-toe, can be thrilling and end in a draw. Possession mix, shots on goal, and more stats are useful to determine how exciting a match was from a box score.

Frankly, for me the most boring is a 2-0 win where the team scores those 2 in the first 20 to 30 minutes, swaps to a 5-4-1, and plays tiki-taka passing possession control without trying hard to advance the ball for the remaining hour of the match.
by hexomancer | 2025-07-15 14:17:19+00:00
> If you need complex file manipulation, all of that can be achieved by writing a shell script. That's what I've been doing. You also automatically get access to flow control statements and tools like sed/awk/find.

Well yes, of course they all "can" be done by writing a shell script, the same way any text editing with vim "can" also be done using ed.

> VSCode is a very primitive text editor compared to vim, emacs or helix. You don't need to edit the command line right there in the shell prompt, nor do you need to create any files — press Ctrl+X + Ctrl+E and hack away. Save and close the file (ZZ in vim, for example), and it gets executed by the shell.

I actually use vscode with the vim extension. You seem to be assuming I am unfamiliar with vim and emacs, I can assure you I know them well enough (at least vim, I also am familiar with the overall features of emacs, though I lack the muscle memory to use it efficiently).

Here is an example: Let's say you have a file named `feature_experimental.cpp` now you want to remove the `_experimental.cpp` from all the files in the current directory which have `_experimental`. I assure you that I can do it faster using voil than you can with vanilla vscode.
by vuggamie | 2025-07-15 14:17:38+00:00
It's a good point. Any business can get revenue by selling Twenty dollar bills for $19. But in the history of tech, many winners have been dismissed for lack of an apparent business model. Amazon went years losing money, and when the business stabilized, went years re-investing and never showed a profit. Analysts complained as Amazon expanded into non-retail activities. And then there's Uber.

The money is there. Investors believe this is the next big thing, and is a once in a lifetime opportunity. Bigger than the social media boom which made a bunch of billionaires, bigger than the dot com boom, bigger maybe than the invention of the microchip itself.

It's going to be years before any of these companies care about profit. Ad revenue is unlikely to fund the engineering and research they need. So the only question is, does the investor money dry up? I don't think so. Investor money will be chasing AGI until we get it or there's another AI winter.
by chrisxlucas | 2025-07-15 14:18:12+00:00
this is so real. anytime im running, it seems the only thing i can think about is the fact that im running and i ask myself why im running. ive found segmneting my time on the treadmill (like in barry's classes) + long live EDM youtube shows has been the best combo. The EDM shows are nice (as opposed to just music) since the artists tend to mix up their sounds a bit so the risk of getting sick of their music goes down a bit. extra points for b2b sets so they're more unique
by nonameiguess | 2025-07-15 14:18:47+00:00
It actually seems more to me like dialectical materialism, which started centuries ago and was already secular. It bears more in character to the differences that other commenters have already voiced, in that human actors not only believed in its inevitability, but attempted to bring it about themselves. Multiple global superpowers implemented forced industrialization, cultural reformation, and command economies to bring it about.

The difference this time isn't sacred versus secular. It's public versus private. Whereas the purveyors of communism were governments, this is being done by corporations. Well-funded private organizations are led by decision makers who believe strongly this is the future, it is inevitable, and their only hope is to get there first. The actor didn't change from God to technology. It changed from labor to capital.

I make no comment on whether they will prove to be more correct than the believers in communism, but the analogy is obvious either way.
by anarazel | 2025-07-15 14:18:56+00:00
A connection definitely has overhead in PG, but "5000 concurrent connections will already start to deadlock your Postgres server" is bogus. People completely routinely run with more connections.

Check the throughput graphs from this blog post from 2020 (for improvements I made to connection scalability):

https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/blog/adforpostgresql/imp...

That's for read-mostly work. If you do write very intensely, you're going to see more contention earlier. But that's way way worse with sqlite, due to its single writer model.

EDIT: Corrected year.
by ViewTrick1002 | 2025-07-15 14:19:59+00:00
> a small amount of stable generation can mean much less storage

Which does not pencil out in the studies made on the topic. Which you keep ignoring. Because nuclear power itself needs loads of flexibility to meet a grid load over the course of days and seasons.

> There you go; for a small share of nuclear, you can just get the power later in the day for $100-250/MWh, versus paying $122-313/MWh. (And this is the intraday benefit, not counting the interday benefits).

Ahh sorry. I love how you pounced on a figure you would know to be erroneous if you had knowledge on the topic. But you desperately want to paint renewables as impossible.

The $122-313 figure is of course per kWh when installed. Leading to cycle costs in the cents. Not tens of cents like "$122 - 313/MWh storage" would have you believe.

Which in China today is down to $52/kWh. I see you didn't dare calculating the cycle cost for those batteries. I suppose because you that would invalidate your nuclear cultism.

> 24/7 loads than current demand (industrial, heating, charging of vehicle batteries, etc).

You truly don't comprehend how the grid works? Charging EVs is a 24/7 load when you need to paint nuclear power as the solution?

The people with EVs and hourly contracts are literally the ones watching the electricity prices like the weather and timing their charging to perfect.

It is by definition the perfect load to match a renewable grid.

And you still ignore the timescales involved. I suppose you don't have an answer.

Again: Do tell me what relevancy a new built nuclear plant will have when it comes online in 2045?

Will we just keep polluting for decades while waiting on this nuclear plant? Is that what you propose?
by alextingle | 2025-07-15 14:20:04+00:00
It was the BBC that linked me directly to Hans Blix's reports on the UN's search for WMD in Iraq. It was that that convinced me that it was all made up bullshit. It was much more convincing than the obvious wishful thinking that was coming out of the US and UK governments.

For sure social media is propagating conspiracy theories, some of which are the modern equivalent of "Saddam can deploy his WMD in 45 minutes", but I don't agree that old media was doing the same. Quite the opposite.
by vietthan | 2025-07-15 14:20:14+00:00
In a way, is the author advocating that the best way to get out of the rat race is to win at it?

Also, looks like the author is very different from the typical high school aged person. The author is clearly intelligent and highly motivated, they're also able to maintain good relationships with the people around them (teachers, internet friends, etc.), but if it was so easy, we would see more well-adjusted early graduates of the education system.
by mistrial9 | 2025-07-15 14:20:15+00:00
so cowboys meet Darwin and their population drops. An alternative is a "nanny state" where every personal choice must pass regulation. This is as old as the hills, but add new abilities to monitor for compliance at scale; new orders of magnitude advantages for certain high-tech; and new amounts of money in an active and massive economic system.

Without prescribing any solution here, is it that much of a stretch to think that the FDA in practice exhibited dysfunctional characteristics in markets? With the longevity of the players and the deep pockets associated with health care, is it a stretch to see large changes to the institution as constructive in the long-run?
by cbarrick | 2025-07-15 14:20:16+00:00
Point of sale systems, like Toast. Media systems on airplanes. Infotainment systems in cars.

In fact, NCR does sell an Android-based ATM solution. [1]

Android is actually used somewhat widely in embedded systems that need to provide a nice GUI to the user.

[1]: https://www.zdnet.com/article/ncr-launches-kalpana-an-androi...
by wat10000 | 2025-07-15 14:20:50+00:00
I think the concept of "functional illiteracy" is key. Almost everybody we interact with these days (aside from small children) is technically literate. That is, they can be given words on a page and read them aloud, or they can hear spoken words and write them down. This is especially true online, where this is still pretty much a basic requirement for participating in discussions.

Which it turns out is not the same thing as being given words on a page and understanding them, or turning thoughts into words which convey those thoughts to the reader. That is a substantially rarer skill, especially for anything with any complexity.
by castigatio | 2025-07-15 14:20:57+00:00
The argument doesn't work because whatever you think of where generative AI is taking us or not taking us - it is 100% demonstrably better at doing a wide range of tasks than other technologies we have available to us - even in its current exact form. Once computers started to be connected could we have stopped the development of the world wide web. If there's a way of getting humanity to collectively agree on things - please let's start by using it to stop climate change and create world peace before moving on to getting rid of LLM's.
by belter | 2025-07-15 14:21:08+00:00
> LLMs is changing our entire industry,

- So far, the only ones making real money are the "shovel sellers": Nvidia, AWS, and the GPU resale hustlers. Everyone else is still trying to figure out how to turn the parrots into profit.

- Probabilistic code generators are not the dawn of a new scientific era that will propel us to the Stars. Just autocomplete on steroids, impressive, but not what will launch humanity into post-scarcity.

- So far what you have is a glorified compression algorithm. A remix of Reddit, StackOverflow, and Wikipedia...With the confidence of a TED speaker and the understanding of a parrot.

- If LLMs are truly the road to AGI, try sending one to MIT. No internet, no textbook ingestion, no Leetcode prep. Just cold start intelligence. If it graduates...we might have something....

Right now, this is just confusing correlation for cognition. Compression for comprehension. And mimicry for mastery. The revolution may come, but not the next four quarters. What it is bad news if you are VC....or Mark Zuckerberg...
by businessmate | 2025-07-15 14:21:16+00:00
82% of new customers start with AI assistants like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude. But most companies are completely invisible in their responses.

This isn’t SEO. It’s a new discovery layer.

Large language models don’t crawl your site or care about backlinks. They rely on:

citations from trusted third-party sources structured data (Schema.org, Wikidata) conversational relevance in their training datasets If your company isn’t showing up in these contexts, it’s effectively invisible in 2025’s dominant customer journey.

We built IsMyCompanyOnAI.com as a free tool to test your AI visibility in seconds. No signup. No commitment. Just type your domain and see if you’re findable—or forgotten.

I’m curious: how are other founders and engineers here thinking about LLM search optimization? Is this a real moat for early adopters or just another hype cycle?
by ToucanLoucan | 2025-07-15 14:21:26+00:00
I mean what does vetting even mean anymore? Our President is a convicted felon, our head of HHS thinks bad humors cause illness and vaccines cause Autism, our head of Education is dismantling her own organization with the approved sign off of the Supreme Court, of whom a solid percentage are accused sex offenders, and I could keep going with the utter circus our Government is currently.

Not only are qualifications not required they are apparently actively discouraged in favor of nepotism and connections.
by conartist6 | 2025-07-15 14:21:39+00:00
It is probably both inevitable that the LLM technology we have now would be invented and inevitable that there would be a major pushback against it. In any world, this would be a technology that takes from some to give to others.

Given that, nothing about the future seems inevitable to me. The law isn't settled. Public opinion isn't settled. Even a great deal of the hype keeping the bubble from popping is still founded on talk of AGI that I now consider absurd...
by BrandoElFollito | 2025-07-15 14:21:56+00:00
> in German, many people call a regular cold a flu here.

Intersting, in France we have the "flu-ish state" (un état grippal) when you have a seriuos cold.

Flu (grippe) is a real sickness, determined by the doctor or extrapolated from the context (everything around your head it, now it's your turn).

They are very distinct, though.
by the_plus_one | 2025-07-15 14:22:23+00:00
It's been several years at this point, but I used to be a cloud support engineer for AWS (i.e. the first line of defense against support tickets). We were trained to always be kind to the customer, even if we're frustrated with them, so a response like "please read how the lambda works" probably would've gotten me reprimanded. Customers can rate your response from one to five stars, and if I remember correctly, anything less than four required a written explanation to your manager as to what went wrong.

That job was a glorified call center; I didn't last very long.
by waldopat | 2025-07-15 14:22:54+00:00
Totally hear you. This is what I often say: There's more to e-sign than just the signature part.

What needs disrupting is everything before, during and after signature.

Before: Endless drafting, negotiation, copy/paste aka redundant data entry, templates (or more often lack of templates) During: Weak identity verification, lack of mobile friendliness, little summarization or help with contracts After: Little visibility, poor version control, brittle integrations, compliance gaps and massive data protection issues

I also think it's important to look beyond legal contracts like NDAs or SOWs.

Take healthcare: one of the top reasons for denied claims is errors on patient registration forms. Miss a field like "employer"? Instant denial. That’s not a signature problem. It’s a data problem.

For example, we worked on a benefits project that 5x'd the number of families who received government benefits. The core problem wasn't getting the signatures. It was streamlining the data and making it easier to complete on mobile. These are very real problems and the e-sign industry isn't bringing any innovation.

But my company is!
by arp242 | 2025-07-15 14:23:27+00:00
WebP got added about 15 years ago or so. Chrome (and Firefox) learned the lessons from the problems that caused.

And "push WebP" for that purpose? Google as a whole benefits hugely from reduced image sizes.

Firefox also doesn't implement JXL as I mentioned. Are they trying to "push WebP" too now? This is such conspiratorial nonsense. No evidence for it at all. Doesn't even make any logical sense. Google literally worked (and continues to work) on JXL.
by komali2 | 2025-07-15 14:23:43+00:00
A lot of people are responding with "But it is inevitable." So far as I can tell they're pointing at the normal capitalistic measures to indicate this - OpenAI has a katrillion dollar MMR and investors are throwing money everywhere and thus this will happen. Or, LLMs generate a lot of value, or make labor more efficient, so therefore it must start replacing workers one way or another.

Well, great, then I will add another capitalistic inevitability: the waters will rise because there's no profit incentive to prevent this and governments are at worst captured by profit motive and at worse gridlocked by profit motive (e.g. funding oppositional parties so that nothing gets done).

The waters will rise and thus there will be refugee crises and thus there will be famine and destabilization, and thus AI will not happen because these things will happen and make AI moot as, one way or another, people become more concerned with food distribution than distribution of labor in the IT field.
by Applejinx | 2025-07-15 14:24:19+00:00
Volume.

It's like spam. Something like art used to have a value, like a message, because someone had to go to the trouble of making it. Now, nothing matters or has value because it's a flood of meaninglessness, like spam, so it stops mattering whether you can tell if it's a scam or whether maybe some random person DOES have a neat idea for stopping my back from hurting.

That person, and any artist, is now out of luck, because of volume. There are too many cheap reasons to pretend to be them, and like spam it's just unmanageable.
by motorest | 2025-07-15 14:24:42+00:00
> But the real word the IT crowd needs to learn is "denialism" - if you still don't see how LLMs is changing our entire industry, you haven't been paying attention.

The best part about this issue is that it's a self correcting problem. Those who don't are risking being pushed out of the job market, whereas those who do will fare better odds.

I'm sure luddites also argued no one needed a damn machine to weave a rug, and machine-weaved rugs didn't had any soul.
by SirMaster | 2025-07-15 14:25:05+00:00
When did the discussion turn into climate crisis? I thought this was about quality of life. That's all I am talking about here.

Quality of life is determined by how well off the poor or average people can live. How "easy" their life is and what luxuries they can afford, how long they now can live etc.

I think the advent of technology and mass commercial farming food production and all that allows the general population to live easier lives than what you had to do to survive hundreds and thousands of years ago in like medieval times or ancient Egyptian times etc.

I think any little regression in quality of life in these last few decades is but a small downward blip in the greater and steady rise during all of human history.
by roxolotl | 2025-07-15 14:25:10+00:00
Timelines are relevant though. Inevitability is only a useful proposition if the timeline is constrained. It is inevitable that the earth will be swallowed by the sun but rightfully no one gives a shit. I think most people, even the author of this piece, aside from those who believe there's something fundamental about human intelligence that isn't reproducible, would say AI is inevitable on a long enough timeline. The arguments being made though are that AI is inevitable in the short term. Is 12 years short term? Maybe?

Regardless though when we break down the timelines we start to enable useful conversations. It's one thing to argue with a frame of "over X period of time Y will happen". It's another to say "it's inevitable so get on board". This piece, myself, and many others are frustrated by the latter.
Ask HN: Why is LLM training still GPU-hungry despite DeepSeek?
by takinola | 2025-07-15 14:25:19+00:00
When DeepSeek released R-1 everyone thought that signaled the end of the GPU-intensive LLM training approach. It does not appear to have worked out that way as GPU demand continues to grow unabated. What happened? Is the DeepSeek training method unreproducible or impractical in some way?
by SpicyLemonZest | 2025-07-15 14:25:23+00:00
The best they've come up with is the LLM chatbot, which both OpenAI and Anthropic have as their flagship product because many people find it extremely valuable. Many people I know routinely use ChatGPT to help them write things, even those who were already good at writing, and if you don't think that's true at your workplace I strongly suspect it's because people aren't telling you about it.
by gpavanb | 2025-07-15 14:25:28+00:00
The fundamental problem is that a synchronous, lock-based approach is being used in an asynchronous, event-driven context (logical replication).

The Postgres team needs to go back to the drawing board and avoid polling altogether and more importantly have event-listener based approaches for primary and replicas separately

It's great to see ClickHouse contributing to Postgres though. Cross-pollination between two large database communities can have a multiplying effect.
by n00bskoolbus | 2025-07-15 14:25:30+00:00
Although they don't explicitly mention it much I it doesn't seem like they missed out on socializing.

> barring one final class I took online the following summer while I was couch-surfing in San Francisco with random internet friends.

> I soon moved to Cambridge in a group house I started with some friends from the Bay

Some people do seem to have the capacity to take on class loads like this person described while still managing a social life. The university I went to essentially requires engineering students to take more than 5 classes a semester and some of them were incredibly social.

While I agree this person frames it like they've hacked the system by doing something they're not the first to do it's definitely uncommon to have a masters degree by 21.
by dmix | 2025-07-15 14:25:46+00:00
"AI layoffs" is mostly just media spin + a useful excuse by execs when the company isn't performing well. Looking through the list few mention anything about laying off engineers because of AI https://www.forbes.com/sites/martineparis/2025/07/09/sweepin...

> IBM CEO Says AI Has Replaced Hundreds of Workers but Created New Programming, Sales Jobs

(laying off mostly administrative/HR people)

https://www.wsj.com/articles/ibm-ceo-says-ai-has-replaced-hu...

> Intel plans to lay off up to a fifth of its factory workers, an enormous cutback that will have a profound effect on one of the chipmaker’s core businesses.

https://www.oregonlive.com/silicon-forest/2025/06/intel-will...

Microsoft laid off mostly gaming from failed acquisitions + sales/marketing (one of which I know personally)
by otabdeveloper4 | 2025-07-15 14:25:55+00:00
The big unspoken deal is local, offline LLMs, especially if (when) easy plug-and-play finetuning becomes the norm.

Suddenly the pendulum swings back the personal computing and you can have your own offline, curated mini-google.

Imagine when a thousand purpose-trained open-weight LLMs appear, for everything imaginable. (E.g., if you want your own private Magic the Gathering robot you now can.)